#girl who has to control everything all of the time (trauma response) and girl who thinks she should be able to do whatever she wants

[cream-and-tea]

the thing about danny and apollinaire’s relationship that is vital to understanding burn the stars is that making those two fall in love was the worst thing i could’ve done to either of them

[cambion-companion]

Here’s ya girl who has gone completely feral over astarion. He’s the babiest baby. Okay, here’s the prompt. My characterisation could be a bit (or a lot lol) off bc I haven’t played the game Y E T so feel free to change the things that seem OOC.

Established relationship, but the beginnings of it, on a mission to find a way for astarion to be in the sun again. Reader has given astarion time to work on his sexual trauma so they haven’t been having sex for some time. Reader is 100% ok w that. But they have a big argument over something (not related to sex) and astarion doesn’t know how to resolve the situation other than reverting back to his seductive artifice and using sex as a way to ensure his safety (in this case, emotional safety). Reader figures it out because they (or she) are not dumb. They reassure astarion and he lets himself be vulnerable but also, it turns out that astarion wants that sexual intimacy. But reader decides this will be all about astarion and making him feel good and loved. Body worship, astarion’s praise kink, just everything focused on astarion’s pleasure in a way he has never experienced and that makes him completely unravel once he comes. Not a subby reader, tho. You know me, I don’t do subby.

If this is too long of a prompt, just the sexy part will be ok. Thank you so much, i have such astarion brainrot DDDD:

I Want to Live

word count: 1700

gn!reader x Astarion | Baldur's Gate 3 fanfic | 18+ only

"I don't think we should use the tadpoles for anything, Astarion." You put your hands on your hips, glaring at the sulky Elf in front of you.

This tense conversation between the two of you had gone on far longer than you'd have liked. Astarion seemed insistent on using whatever advantage the Illithids had unintentionally given your party. Despite not yet knowing the implications of doing so.

Astarion's silver hair glinted in the firelight that warmed your back, his eyes shone like droplets of blood. "You might as well leave me alone, spoilsport." He waved an imperious hand in your direction, sneering at you in the way he knew would hurt you most. "Since you insist on being boring and unimaginative."

You ground your teeth. "I'm trying to keep us safe."

"And a fine job you're doing, my sweet." His lilting voice was dripping with sarcasm. "Why don't you ask Arabella how her parents are doing?" He paused, then feigned surprise. "Oh wait..."

Your eyes widened as a jolt of genuine pain lanced through your heart at his callous words. Astarion was aiming to do damage and, like always, he knew how to push your buttons.

Magic sparked at the end of your fingertips as you fought to control your rage. It was the lack of verbal response that alerted Astarion to the fact he might have pushed a little too far with you. His face almost looked regretful for a moment, or perhaps it was a trick of the firelight casting shadows across his features. You didn't gain much insight because of the tears blurring your vision as you quickly turned away and strode as far away from the vampire spawn as you could.

Shadowheart, who always seemed to overhear everything, cast a worried glance your direction before leveling a glare on Astarion who still watched after you with a blank look.

You sat yourself upon your bedroll before the campfire and listened to Volo squeakily tune his lute. Wyll and Gale were over by their tents chatting and Lae'zel sat on a boulder by the river sharpening her sword.

You had thought Astarion would understand and perhaps even agree with you, and the rest of the camp for that matter, that the parasites should not be utilized to gain control of other beings. It was convenient and downright useful, yes...but not worth an unknown cost.

You had thought...since that night when the two of you had become intimate...that he'd maybe come to care for you. But that jab about Arabella's parents, who you'd failed to save, only confirmed that the vampire did not have your best interests at heart.

Sighing, you moved your bedroll away from its usual place beside Astarion's and arranged it next to where Karlach slept. You could feel multiple pairs of eyes watching you move about but you didn't much care at the moment.

Karlach gave you a curious and concerned look as she came over and got comfortable for the night. "Are you alright? I could hear you and Astarion going at it...and not in the fun way."

You grunted and moved your body to the side so you could scrape out a rock that had been digging into your back. "It's fine. He's just an ass." You said these words loud enough for him to hear.

Karlach shrugged and nodded as if this were common knowledge. She gave you a jolting pat on the back before getting comfortable in her own bedroll.

As the breathing patterns of your companions slowly deepened in slumber, you could not find any rest. You tossed and turned as best you could in such primitive sleeping arrangements. You missed your bed back in Baldur's Gate above the taproom of the Shadowcat Claw, the familiar bustle of voices and a mug of ale in your belly lulling you to sleep. Out in this wilderness, with the thought of your argument with Astarion tugging at your thoughts...you had to get up.

As quietly as you could, you slid out of your bedroll and got to your feet. A quick observation of your companions told you they were all in a deep sleep. All except Lae'zel who sat on the boulder still, keeping silent watch. She nodded at you curtly as you passed and didn't ask any questions, for which you were grateful.

You crept through the foliage down to the place in the forest by the river where you and Astarion had had your midnight tryst. You could still feel his moonlight hair running through your fingers, his fangs on your neck as you arched it just for him. The trust...you thought you had at least earned a little bit of his trust.

"I thought I'd find you here." His voice was velvet, it shivered straight through your defenses to your heart.

"I wanted to be alone, Astarion." You tried to keep your own voice cool and collected, but you ached to hold him in your arms again.

Astarion had followed you from the campsite into the woods. He'd been fully aware of your restlessness, of course he had. He entered your line of sight now, looking very much like a cat stalking its prey. His ruby eyes were dark and trained on your face. "Come now, you're far too obvious for all this bluster. Do you not want to feel me again?" He gave you a crooked smile, showing his teeth. "A second taste, perhaps?"

You felt the hollowness of his words and saw the carefully arranged expression he wore like a mask. Beneath the facade you could make out the telltale twitch of a facial muscle, the tenseness of his eyes, indicating anxiety.

You sighed. "I thought we were passed these games."

"Games?" Astarion's tongue flicked out to wet his lips. "Games are all part of the fun, my dear. So good at getting the blood pumping."

You folded your arms. "I want an apology."

This tripped him up. For a moment the facade slipped, and he seemed genuinely taken aback. "Apologize?" Then he was back to his usual bluster. "Me? Apologize for what?"

"For having a go at me today. Bringing up Arabella's parents when you know how upset I am about it." Astarion made a noise as if to speak but you cut across him. "That was cruel, Astarion, and I deserve better from you."

"I didn't..." Astarion sighs heavily, his eyes glancing down to the ground then back at your face. "I apologize." The words seemed to pain him in some way. "I wanted to get a rise out of you, that's all. Now let's forget about that and have some fun."

You raised an unimpressed eyebrow, saying nothing, simply watching his face lit in the silver moonlight. His unconvincing grin slowly slipped off his face, a troubled frown replacing it. The two of you looked at each other for a long moment. Finally, you spoke.

"You're testing how much I care for you, aren't you?" Your voice was soft, almost inaudible over the rippling stream.

Astarion seemed momentarily taken aback, he seemed to consider taking shelter once more behind his mask of pompous indifference. But then his shoulder's slumped slightly, the fists at his sides loosened. That was all the answer you needed.

You stepped forward and placed your hands around his, tugging him closer. He did not resist, his footfalls light as ever as he drew near. Close enough to feel his breath warm your lips.

"I care about you, Astarion." Your voice was still soft amidst the rustling leaves and sparkling water. "I discourage you from using the tadpole's powers because I couldn't bear to see your will overtaken by yet another monster."

Astarion was silent for a long time, his scarlet eyes turned silver as a moonbeam fell across his pallid face. When he spoke, his voice sounded strained. "What if it's too late for me? To be anything other than a monster? My only choice is which one." He laughs forcefully, bitterness twisting his mouth.

"I won't let that happen." You encircled him tenderly in a hug, pulling him to rest flush against your body. "We're in this...together."

"Together." The word was echoed back to you, his voice framing the syllables as if it were a foreign tongue.

You turned your face into him and kissed his neck softly, feeling his body tense in your arms and then slowly relax. You kept your lips against his skin, over where Cazador had sunk his fangs all those centuries ago.

Astarion's hands slowly slid up your hips to rest against your lower back as he held you close. Your lips caressed his neck, throat and trailed up to his jaw until you pressed a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. "I love you." You murmured.

You felt him tense again, not pushing you away, but his hands tightened on your back. "I..." Astarion hesitated. "I'm not quite ready to say those words back to you, my dear."

"I know." You felt no anger, no hurt. You accepted him however he wished to come to you, grateful for this rare moment of vulnerability beneath the stars.

You pushed him back gently until his back made contact with the base of a large sycamore tree. A huff of air left his lungs, quickly claimed by your mouth as you kissed him hungrily this time. Your hands made quick work of his clothing and Astarion became eager to help the process along.

"Vixen." He murmured and you laughed against his lips, your tongues teasing each other.

"You're beautiful, Astarion." You held his face in your hands and kissed his mouth lightly, not allowing him to turn away even as the compliment made his eyes search yours for hints of disingenuity. "I want nothing from you in return." You said firmly, reading his emotional turmoil through your shared Illithid connection. "This is just for you." You kissed his mouth, his cheek, his forehead. "To keep."

Astarion's head fell back to rest against the tree trunk as you continued lavishing affection upon him. He moaned your name softly to the night sky as you slowly sunk to your knees before him, the dirt and rocks digging unheeded against your knees. His fingers twisted in your hair and guided you to where he wanted you most.

"Good, my love." You praised him, your words causing his body to shake with increasing pleasure. "Show me."

The night was long and full of bliss. A genuine exchange of pleasure, without the previous facades and plays at affection. You felt the change as surely as he did, and when the others awoke in the morning it was to find your bedroll pulled back right next to where Astarion lay curled against you.

~

"You owe me five gold, Shadowheart." Gale mumbled.

[extremely-judgemental]

[Really, really long post.]

Every time I see ‘let my girl be happy’ tag and the post is about canon Nessian, it infuriates me as much as breaks my heart. Sometimes I wonder those who romanticise Cassian’s behaviour are speaking from a place of privilege or ignorance because admitting that calls for addressing real life abuse that misogyny forces them to endure.

I’m an Indian living in a highly patriarchal, misogynistic society where women are still required to marry someone out of convenience for the sake of their families. This is not the cute arranged marriages you read in books or watch in movies. Most women have to sacrifice everything they are and they stand for to ease the family’s burden. Let’s not start with dowry or DV. Sure our society has progressed in many ways, this is still reality of most women when it comes to marriages and having a family. No matter how well off you are, no matter how successful you are in your career. It’s more nuanced than you can imagine where the parents meddle with children’s life at every step and our lives are more intertwined with our families than in western society. So I simply can’t read Nesta’s story and delude myself that she got a happy ending with Cassian or the IC. I try to keep my emotions out of most of the criticisms to help people see the situation objectively. That’s hard to do in this case but I’ll try.

Nesta is the eldest child who ‘fails’ her sisters when it is her father’s responsibility to take care of three young girls. Being groomed to be a housewife all her life, Nesta contributes as much as she can by doing the chores and nurturing her family the only way she knows how. She seeks help from relatives and friends while the ones in position to do so ignore her. And when the time comes, she finds the way to be of useful to her family by marrying Tomas. Despite all this, Nesta is a failure of a sister simply because Feyre made a choice. These only come to light in Nesta’s book and even the few instances where Feyre realises this, there’s no real appreciation for her efforts. They are dismissed and only mentioned to highlight Feyre’s empathic tendencies and her general awareness of her sisters’ plights rather than uplifting Nesta’s character itself. None of these are acknowledged as these aren’t the typical masculine ways that’s glorified throughout the series.

As Nesta navigates her life as a recently transformed fae, she partakes in a war she has no part in. She has no obligation or need to risk her life for Night Court, or any other court, or even the mortals. These are the same acts that make Feyre a hero in the first book. But when it comes to Nesta and she rises up to the occasion, it’s downplayed as she deals with PTSD from her death, the Cauldron, the toll of war, and her father’s death. None of her sacrifices or her attempts to protect her sisters are given an ounce of importance or due respect that it deserves. It’s turned into Nesta’s duty as the eldest sister or the sister of Night Court’s High Lady instead.

When Nesta deals with her trauma, everyone takes great pleasure in controlling how the situation pans out. She goes as far as to live alone to spare her sisters, yet Feyre and Elain who have the choice of when and how to regulate their emotions, don’t grasp the concept of personal space. Her actions are self-sabotaging at best and have no real consequence on any of the other characters. Still, they are amplified to an extent that it’s made into a court affair. And the reason for this is Nesta isn’t coping in the right way. Gambling, drinking and sex which are common activities for the IC become a question of their reputation the moment she does it in her pain, emphasising that these are only acceptable when she does it with them. Spending Feyre’s money on gambling may seem like a reasonable cause for the IC to interfere but if we factor in how Nesta’s rightful wealth from Tamlin or her father was lost because of the direct consequence of IC’s actions, along with the fact that she’s still owed money for her contribution in the war, Nesta is deliberately stripped off any monetary agency to trap her.

If this isn’t punishment enough, Nesta is locked in an inescapable tower with a man she wants no part with. And when she fights, she is lied to about laws and threatened to be thrown among people who consider her a threat. She has no interest in training to fight or work for the Night Court but she’s forced to. She’s not compensated for any of this labour either. Nesta is known to starve herself after the war to the point that she’s all ‘skin and bones’. Cassian, an established gym bro in the series, weaponises food against her when she doesn’t eat what is offered and when. The moment she shows any interest in eating, he judges her for being picky and brings up her latent guilt that leads her down that path in the first place. And later on, knowing she’s not fit enough IC insists on training her right away and in freezing conditions without proper clothing. Nesta soon learns that she has no choice but to comply, goes on to train with Cassian, work in the library, and accept the food the house gives her. This is the first step in breaking her.

Nesta has no one to rely on or even talk to in the house except for Cassian. The relationship that develops between them is not circumstantial but a well orchestrated one. Even for small talk, her only choice is Cassian. After finding out Nesta was SA’d by the kelpie and was on the verge of death, no one (including her sisters) cares for her as much as they should. The one person who checks on her is Cassian and even he’s so overcome with his desire and lust that he has sex with her instead of comforting her. It’s a common knowledge that sex is a coping mechanism for her, and has been SA’d twice which something only Cassian knows. This perpetuates the idea that even when a woman is hurting and in pain, she has to be appealing, her trauma should be sexually gratifying and desirable for the man. A woman can walk back from the doors of death but she has to look pretty while doing it. There’s nothing empowering about that.

Feyre looks down on Nesta for contemplating selling her body to take care of her sisters. But the same is expected from her when she serves Night Court and seduces Eris. It’s almost glorified and revered by Cassian himself. During their conversation in River House, he lets Nesta believe that she has to earn his love and her sisters’. Not once does he contradict any of her fears or insecurities. For the first time, Nesta has sex with him without it being an escape and the next morning Cassian abandons her enforcing the idea that she indeed earned the sex and love for what she did in CoN.

When Nesta reveals the truth about Feyre’s pregnancy, her true feelings are swept under the rug with how she ‘failed’ her sister again. Nesta has the right to out Rhysand and his plans. And even if the situation isn’t the most appropriate, Nesta is locked in a tower and only ever talks to anyone when IC choose which limits her options. Besides, when will the timing be perfect for such conversation? Nesta is again vilified for being the only one honest to her sister and punished. Her intentions are warped to cover up others’ mistakes. Cassian is again the one who punishes her for it. Nesta is suicidal and Cassian recognises the signs. He insists on taking the hike, also using silent treatment to enforce the idea that Nesta is the one on the wrong. His interactions with Feyre proves none of them dwell on Nesta’s actions as much as she believes. While Nesta is having a guilt trip edging her closer to suicide, Cassian is laughing behind her back with Feyre, almost enjoying her fears. At the end of this trip, Nesta talks about her trauma for the first time, Cassian swoops in with his own sorrows and how he overcame them. Instead of making Nesta feel seen and heard, she’s again lectured on what she should do and how.

Lastly, Cassian and Morrigan have a mildly, if not completely, inappropriate relationship which Nesta is expected to accept. If she expresses jealousy or anger, it’s not because of the bond or their relationship but will be seen as an inherent quality of Nesta. She can’t fight it as everyone else has accepted it as a normal relationship. If Nesta shows any displeasure, her past of sleeping with other men will be brought into the conversation and she will be scrutinised. This is very similar to the ‘men will be men’ narrative where the man can flirt with whoever he wants and it’s harmless but the woman has to behave.

Throughout the series, everyone is against Nesta. Her family is her responsibility. She has duty to protect them and serve them no matter the circumstances, no matter how it costs her or how much pain she is in. Her own sisters will side with her in-laws saying it’s how things are and she ‘doesn’t have to be so miserable’. Her life is forever bound to a man she initially wanted nothing to do with and her everyday life is dependent on him. She is trapped with him until she learns to accept her fate. He doesn’t lay a hand on her but he psychologically and emotionally abuses her until she complies with his family and behaves to fit their image. He even gives her silent treatment, withdraws sex/intimacy from her, leaves her alone in the tower, cuts her off from everyone she loves and cares about if she misbehaves. She has no financial independence leaving her at the mercy of her sister and her family. Even when she’s hurting, she has no choice but to risk her life for them or go to wars when they demand. She goes as far as to change her body for her future child. Her life is threatened by her in-laws but no one bats an eye at that forever leaving her fearing for her safety.

If you believe it’s just fiction and all this is exaggeration of something in a fantasy book, you really need to look around you. This is a real nightmare for most women all over the world. Your girl Nesta isn’t happy. She settled. She has accepted a life where she’s treated less than a dog and is used as a weapon. She’s been beaten down until she learnt not to step out of line if she wants to live. She is still with Cassian because she doesn’t see a life other than that as an option and has come to accept whatever scraps her sister and her family have decided to throw her way. And I sincerely hope if you ever come across a real life Rhysand or Cassian, you have the wits to protect yourself and run the other way.

[im-a-hoping-beetch]

Many people genuinely get confused when we, native people, get uncomfortable when Katara, a native character, is reduced to a mom and her canon relationships with characters are put down in favour for a boy who lived in a society that benefitted from her oppression, antagonised her and her friends for most of the series and was even racist at times. But because he's hot and had an episode with katara, everything should be forgiven, because god forbid a native girl gets with anyone who isn't from a group of people who aided the genocide of her people. God forbid two characters who experienced genocide have a relationship and connect over this shared trauma, in favour for boy who also has mom trauma

Look, while I can understand your feelings of discomfort towards the ship, I’d still like to put certain things into perspective.

Now, I don’t really know what you meant by her being “reduced” to a mom. Do you mean that her relationship with Zuko would confine her to such a role? Which, by the way, is absolutely laughable, since one of the main reasons why so many ppl ship these two is bcz unlike every member of the gaang (aside from Suki), Zuko is the only one with who she doesn’t have to act like a surrogate mother. Katara is allowed to be angry and be vulnerable with him. All things that we rarely see her be able to do with the rest of the bunch, let alone her own brother.

Actually, one of the main appeal of the two is bcz, both have the same level of of maturity and similar way of interacting with the members of the gaang. Which is why so many ppl label the two as “parents of the group”.

But, if you’re talking about how, we zutarians usually talk abt the intricacies that come with her being a motherly person, I’ve got some news for ya. Most of us, usually, never fail to highlight how much of a tragedy, her being pushed into a role of adulthood at such a young age is. Also, on how, ironically, her canonical partner (Aang) has never really helped with that phenomenon, actually he perpetuated it even further.

Besides, wanna talk abt canon relationships being put down for a boy, well, look no further than canon itself, anon. I’m guessing that you’ve probably read this post, due to the phrasing at the beginning of your ask. One thing I specifically touched on, was how much of Katara’s existence seems to revolve around Aang, the biggest example being, the comics. In them, we do see the creators ready to strain Katara’s established relationships with the gaang (aside from her brother) in order to shove kataang down our throats. Cuz if you think abt it, Toph and Katara’s interactions are heavily reduced, let alone meaningful ones and do not even get me started on Zuko or Suki.

Yes, Zuko lived in a society that benefited from her oppression. He has antagonized her and her friends. But Zuko is also made to recognize the harm his actions have caused. Additionally, at no point is he not faced with the consequences of what he has done towards the gaang. Every single member gets to express anger or/and resentment over what he’s done in the past, Katara is no exception. Actually, she’s the one who’s given the most leeway in terms of doing so. Even for things he had no control over such as her mother’s death and the fire nation raids. However, instead of whining about how he’s not responsible for all of this taking place, something he could’ve easily done, he makes it up to her. He helps her seek justice for her mother while her canonical future boyfriend is out here reducing her righteous anger to blindsided revenge.

I don’t know what you mean by “Because He’s hot and had an episode with her, everything should be forgiven.” To me, that last part owed to make me scratch all the dandruff off my braids. Language is a powerful tool, but often than not, people don’t really know how to use it nor seem to understand the ramifications of their use. When you say “everything should be forgiven”, you are framing forgiveness as something passive, when, here, it is active. Someone does the action of forgiving Zuko, Katara does. Katara forgives him, because he earned it.

Right now, I’m assuming that you thought you were in defence of Katara, but the truth is that you are actually perpetuating an habit that many have had when it comes to the Southern Raiders. Which is to perpetually strip any agency Katara has in an episode literally centered around her character!?!

Nobody forbid anyone from anything. If people don’t feel comfortable shipping these two, so be it. However, to act as if Zuko hasn’t actively fought against the system that has led to those atrocities being done or like he hasn’t used his position of power in order to make actual change or/and retributions, is simply disingenuous.

Aang and Katara did have a relationship, but have never connected over their shared trauma. More specifically, Aang failed to connect over their shared trauma, when he should have and instead used as a way to silence hers. @sokkastyles makes a very good point about it in this post.

[kaybreezy3000]

Bad Things (Five Hargreeves/Reader)

~Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, the inability to distinguish between right and wrong, poor behavioral controls, and behaviors that contradict social norms which then commonly result in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.

Enter, Five Hargreeves, everyone's favorite little psycho.

(Chapter Three Post)

---If you need to go back to read the summary and the first two chapters first, hit the link below. Chapter 4 through seven will be added soon...

Link to Chapters 1-2

Warnings and tags: Mental disintegration, psychological trauma, effects of isolation, masturbation, non-consensual voyeurism, explicit sexual content, bondage, POV altering, touch starved, obsessive behavior, inanimate object love, and many other sexually deviant themes all mixed with a lovely twist that you will hopefully enjoy...

---In this chapter, we start the POV switches, and they will be made clearer by large page breaks in-between.

Chapter Three: Creep

Running through his options, Five makes the quick determination that after what he just did, he can’t stay here. He needs to get the girl back inside her apartment, then he will get Dolores and together they will run.

Thanks to his fake ID, nobody knows who he really is, but as soon as the girl can, she’s going to call the police and have them search the apartments across from hers. His family will figure out what he’s been doing, and Five can already hear them going on and on about how disgusting he is.

Everyone already thinks he is a psycho, and this further proves it. His siblings may not throw him under the bus because doing so would obviously tie him to them, but it’s still possible that someone could figure out that the once famous missing boy Number Five Hargreeves is not dead like the world thought and he is not at all the person he was before he disappeared.

The possibility of the whole world knowing about the monster he has become is only adding to the heartbreak that the people he has cared about and fought for his entire life will hate him more than they already do. All this has Five questioning everything. 

They were all he lived for, and he lost them, and now this.

“You really screwed yourself this time you sick asshole,” Five angrily curses as he starts hauling the unconscious girl across the parking lot towards her building.

As if all that isn’t bad enough, Five realizes that he just ensured himself a lifetime of running from the law. This means no more trying to pretend to be a part of something he’s not, but it also means that he will have no other option but to resort to other, much less legal means of surviving.

He failed at life again and there’s a big part of him that just wants to throw in the towel and let them lock him away. But the same part of him that wouldn’t give up for the last sixty years is still there in the back of his mind screaming at him to keep fighting.

Committed to his plan, Five is about to start crossing the short distance to the girl’s building when a man in a janitorial uniform comes out the back door. Being taken off guard by his sudden appearance, Five inelegantly drops to his knees behind a parked car with the girl folding down with him on the dirty cement.

As the man crosses the lot, Five does his best to calm his heavy breaths to a more manageable level. He hasn’t had the chance to let his racing heart slow down since his extremely drunk sprint down the stairs.

Not being his usual stealthy, in control self and not being able to easily blink himself out of this situation is enough to make Five’s mounting panic much worse. The fact that he just heard the door electronically lock after the guy closed it isn’t helping either. It didn’t even occur to him that her building might need an entrance code.

“God, damnit!” he quietly hisses.

He could slip in behind someone, but that’s not likely at this hour, and not with the girl passed out in his arms. Hitting random buttons in the hopes that someone will buzz him in will get the police called or it will wake the whole building, so that’s a big fat no.

As the other man pulls out of the lot, Five makes a split-second decision based on his most recent plan being blown all to hell. He does not want to leave the girl outside lying on the ground, especially in this neighborhood. He’ll have to leave her in his apartment. He’s screwed one way or the other. It really doesn’t matter where he puts her as long as it is safe. He’ll grab only what he has to, and he’ll be gone before she fully comes to.

Five pushes his back against the car, using it to help balance him as he gets them both upright again. Then swooping the girl up in his arms, the alcohol gets the best of him and Five accidentally stumbles backwards into the car before moving forward towards his own building.

“I am never drinking again,” he declares, weaving with each step he takes. Five is trying so hard to push past how dizzy he feels, but drunk is drunk and it’s getting worse.

After the girl blew him off tonight, Five had the grand plan of passing out in a super sloshed stupor. The whiskey he tried to drown his sorrows in is catching up with him by this point and he’s realizing that finishing the whole bottle was just one more bad decision to add to the many others he’s made tonight.

When Five opens the lower-level door to his complex, he can see that no one is in the shabby hallway that leads to the elevator, and it seems like his shitty luck is changing because the thing is working, and it’s already on the ground floor. 

There’s no way he would have made it up the stairs at this point. Heavy feet scuffing along across the worn tiles, Five moves inside, throwing his elbow against the button for the seventh floor.

As soon as the doors close, he woozily drops his weight back on the wall, and sets the girl down, keeping one arm around the girl’s waist to hold her upright and the other angled across her chest to keep her from tipping forward.

Five can hardly grasp how quickly he just fucked everything up. A few minutes ago, he was in the throes of personal passion, about to blow his load all over his costly dress pants, and the next he sealed the deal that he was completely ruining his already ruined life.

Five is being consumed by his deeply depressing thoughts about himself as the old elevator doors close and it groans to life. The girl’s flowery smelling hair is rubbing up against the side of his cheek, and he can feel the heat of her body pressing back against him in a very tormenting way considering his self-self-absorbed cock brain hasn’t caught up to speed yet that he is not sitting there in his kitchen with his hand on his dick about to destroy his own lap with jizz.

His partial erection from that sad whack fest is wedged right between this girl’s warm cheeks, and it’s just like he was imagining positioning himself on her Monday night. 

Now that Five has the girl’s body pressed up next to his while he’s holding her in what many would think looks like it’s a very loving embrace, the truth that he has actually been violating her by watching her and getting his rocks off is impossible to ignore. 

You can’t imagine something if it’s right in front of you physically touching you. The entire fantasy he’s been creating in his head just completely disintegrated.

Now things just got very real and it’s not in a good way.

“I am so sorry I am doing this to you,” he hotly breathes, his forehead falling even more against the girl’s shoulder as he forces down the growing sickness in his stomach.

With extreme sadness, Five thinks about the trauma he just inflicted on this girl. Five knows trauma and his own experiences with it is what resulted in him being unable to put himself out there to have anything worthwhile in his life. 

He had wanted nothing more than to know what it was like to passionately hold someone he cared about and who also cared about him, but the horror of how it’s happening right now is unbelievable. It seems like this must be happening to someone else. 

Five is so tormented by all this, and intoxicated, that he doesn’t realize he hasn’t been holding any pressure on the girls’ neck since he carried her inside. Her knuckles make unexpected contact, hitting the bridge of his nose. Five eyes instantaneously pinch shut to the intense sensation of shooting pain that makes everything in his face burn and his eyes flood with tears.

The girl’s furious screech reverberates inside the elevator. “Get off me!”

Taking Five’s momentary inability to function, her other arm wiggles free from the arm he has around her waist. She pulls away, maneuvering her fist back and down at the same time, nailing him right between the legs.

“Ff-ah-ckkk!” 

Five’s sudden high pitch yelp comes out just as loud as the girl’s cry, but unlike her, his verbal alarm ends in a very hushed groan followed by a whisper of a wheeze as he frantically fights not to double over and also maintain his hold on the back of her sweater.

Five gags down his vomit that is threatening to make this even worse, and while he is immersed in the sensations of pure agony, she comes at him again. 

Somehow, Five manages to move his head back just in time, narrowly avoiding another jab to the face. Her hand hits his upper sternum instead and just as fast, her fingers find their way around his silk tie, yanking his head forward with it.

Five instinctively retaliates by violently twisting his arm around her neck.

“St-ooo-ppp,” he splutters as they choke each other.

“Let go!” she piercingly shrieks before she’s completely deprived of the air to do so.

Dropping her weight as her fingers dig at Five’s arm doesn’t have the desired effect of getting him to let go, so she digs her heels into the floor plowing backwards instead. 

Her reverse attack makes Five’s dress shoes slip out from under him on the grimy floor. The impact of Five’s head as it swings back into the metal wall makes a cracking sound that leaves the wall vibrating.

Totally in shock and seeing the brilliant scattering of stars filling his vision, Five’s free arm swings out, searching for the railing behind him, but he misses. He starts to lose consciousness. All at once, his full body weight is hanging on the girl’s neck as darkness begins swallowing up his remaining vision.

The girl lets out a helpless sounding whimper as they start to fall. 

Beyond faint and feeling equally helpless, Five inadvertently squeezes his arm tighter, using the girl to pull himself upright again. To his relief, her fingers suddenly release the sleeve of his dress shirt and her arms flop down limply at her sides.

DING!

At the same time the doors rumble open, the girl’s legs give out and Five almost drops her.

Unable to think let alone function like he normally would, Five hoists her back up then unsteadily stumbles out of the elevator with the girl’s feet dragging between his legs.

Light-headedly glancing both ways, he is beyond grateful that no one is out there looking to see what all yelling was about. 

Beaten and bloodied, Five makes it inside his own door a few seconds later and his first move is getting them both over to the bed because he still feels like he may fall flat on his face.

Five hastily drops the girl down next to Dolores, then he moves towards his kitchen, swaying as he navigates the short distance. 

After getting the shit beat out of him, he is quickly processing the fact that he needs to adjust his original plan to drop her and go. He is going to need to shake at least some of his drunken and concussed brain fog before he can walk even remotely straight. If he doesn’t, he may pass out in the street or his own hallway with his face smacked down in a pile of his own puke.

The idea of the cops finding him like that, with the addition of Dolores lying next to him, is enough to push along Five’s new approach to make this all still work out in both their favor. The most important thing he figures right now is that he needs to keep this girl quiet for a little while before he is functioning enough to leave.

Five throws open the utility cabinet, his unfocused eyes landing on the hook with the wound-up nylon rope hanging on it. The apartment’s previous other weirdo occupant had left many things behind, but unlike the loads of old stuffed animals, this was one thing that Five didn’t throw away being it had many practical uses. In this case, tying someone up.

“They are right, you are a psycho,” Five mutters to himself as he digs around finding nothing else useful.

Next, opening the first drawer next to the refrigerator, he grabs his switchblade and his revolver. It had been Five’s norm to always carry both these weapons, but he stopped when he figured out that there were no field operatives from The Commission coming after him in this new world because there was no more Commission.

Klaus was right, he thinks. He was better when he had an evil taskmaster to keep him in line.

Staggering a little as he turns around, he sets the gun on the kitchen table and tucks the knife into the waistband of his pants. Next, making it back over to the bed with what he figures will be enough to keep the girl safely detained till he is more composed, Five is surprised to see that she isn’t waking up yet.

He says her name.

Nothing.

Five throws the rope on the bed, then picks up her wrist, checking her pulse. He doesn’t feel one, so his trembling fingers move to her neck, pressing against her throat instead. The girl doesn’t react to him touching her, and Five still can’t feel anything.

“Oh, no, no, NO, NO !” He says the girl’s name a few more times, and again he gets nothing. “Dolores, I didn’t mean to- Shit, shit, fucking SHIT!"

Feeling like he’s losing what’s left of his mind, Five doesn’t know what to say, and even though Dolores is right there, she doesn’t respond to his terrified ramblings.

Even though his mind is spinning out of control, Five’s years of training kick in. He jumps on the bed, rolling the girl on her side. Then he lifts her chin, putting her in the recovery position that you are supposed to do for someone when trying to revive them after being fully choked out. The maneuver makes the girl’s mouth fall open and Five checks to make sure that her airway is not blocked, or that her own tongue didn’t slip back in her throat.

Everything is normal. She should be able to breathe, but for some reason she is not, and she is not waking up.

Kneeling over her, one hand on her back, Five starts rubbing. “Come on, breathe! You’re strong, you just showed me how strong you are. Breathe damn it!”

He knows very well how this works, and giving her CPR will do nothing because this is not happening to her because of cardiac arrest.

Lifting her legs so that more blood moves to her brain is not that effective at helping to revive someone in this condition, and it’s sure as hell not going to work if she’s already gone. Five could stand her on her head and no amount of blood running to her brain will bring her back if she is dead.

“Come on! NO! You can’t die!” he angrily pleads, even as both his hands keep at it, one now methodically trying to massage life into her cold legs.

Counting the minutes in his head, Five can’t really say how long he would have been squeezing tight enough to fully deprive her of oxygen. He knows that all it takes is a matter of a minute like that and someone can face permanent brain damage or death. 

They were in the parking lot for only a minute or so after she swung the bat at him. He knows he let up on her throat enough during that time because she woke up a little when they were crouched behind that car. She was moving in his lap, and he heard soft moaning sounds coming out of her. Then as soon as the car pulled out of the lot, he carried her in, not choking her at all.

In the elevator, he fucked-up big time and he let her wake up completely. Five is sure that she was never completely out more than twice and for no more than about thirty seconds at a time. 

Right?

From where Five has himself positioned next to the girl, one of his knees is pressing against Dolores’s hip and with glistening eyes he looks from the girl to her. 

“I didn’t mean to do this,” he insists.

Again, Dolores says nothing to calm Five or reassure him like she normally would. His watery eyes plead with her, but he gets nothing.

“Oh my God, thank you,” Five cries, with his head swinging back to the girl. His hand on her back slowly begins to rise and fall as she comes back to life. “That’s it. Keep breathing, it’s going to be okay.”

The girl slowly begins to move her legs and Five puts his hands under her side, sliding her small body up closer to the headboard. She makes a small sound of complaint at being handled, but he still needs to restrain her hands, or she’ll be trying to fight him again the second she’s aware of what is happening.

Mechanically, Five flips open his long switchblade so he can quickly cut the correct lengths of rope with it. Then just as fast, he makes tight loops around both of her wrists. Seeing that he’s at least not totally fucking that up that lesson he learned over and over as a child, and that her arms are snuggly secured above her head to his headboard, he risks looking over at Dolores again.

“I think she’s okay. I know how this looks, but you know that I didn’t mean to do this. I was never going to go near her. It was only supposed to be just me waahh-"

Five can’t finish that one, and that is because saying that it was only supposed to be him watching the girl doesn’t make it okay. None of this is okay. His eyelids lower and he rubs the area between his eyes.

“Please talk to me, sweetheart. I don’t know what to do. I think something is very, very wrong with me. I need you,” he pleads, winching in pain as the trickle of blood from his nose continues to drip down over his upper lip.

Five gets nothing back, and right now, he needs his trusted voice of reason more than ever. In his head, he can only imagine that Dolores is not acknowledging him because she is questioning why he is tying this poor girl up like this if he supposedly didn’t mean to do this. 

To him, she is probably thinking that he is going to hurt her even more than he already has and that makes Five spiral even worse.

“Please don’t hate me. The only reason she’s tied up is because I need to stay here long enough to make sure she’s going to make it, and I can’t leave like this. I need time to clean up,” he tries to explain. “I will get us out of here. We can start over,” he promises. 

His blurring eyes dart from Dolores to the girl, then back again.

With tears starting to run down his face, Five gasps out a devastated sob, “Dolores, I need help. Please, talk to me!” Again, she doesn’t react, and his reddened eyes fearfully widen. “Dolores!” The quiver in his voice matches the quiver in his bloodied hands.

Nothing.

Five just drug in the near lifeless body of the very real girl from across the alley, placing her in the bed next to his beloved. Now, having them both laying there opposite each other, all he can see in the mannequin’s normally devoted expression of limitless acceptance is the actual lifeless object she is. 

Just like in the elevator with the girl right there with him, now Five is finding that he can’t pretend anymore.

Dolores’s face stares out blankly, the matte finished paint of her sky-blue eyes will not meet his. 

In Five’s entire time with her, this has never happened.

As Five moves himself down the girl’s legs, snaking the nylon around her ankles, he does so with the shock of knowing that Dolores finally left him.

Now he really has nothing to live for.

Feeling totally out of it, liquid dribbles from your slack mouth. You feel the softest tickle as the hair that’s stuck to your cheek pulls away.

“Wha thhh-ah," you start to mumble, but you are so groggy that at first you can’t even complete a thought let alone string two measly words together.

It feels like you are in bed, but you don’t remember going to bed.

In your jumbled thoughts, you recall going on a blind date with a guy from a stupid dating website. That obviously turned out to be a very bad decision. You should have known this guy was bad news when he showed up early and he somehow snuck inside your building instead waiting down in the parking lot. 

At the end of the night, the douche monger insisted on walking you to your door, and then he really upped his creep factor when he jumped on you.

You remember feeling extremely unhinged and completely repulsed by what he did. As such, you figured that it was a excellent idea to educate the prick on what would happen if he ever tried that date rape shit on anyone again.

As this all comes back to you, your eyes start to flutter open, but the room is dim, and your vision is badly distorted. 

More liquid slips inside your parted lips.

“Please, wake up,” the softest male voice worriedly whispers.

Hearing that, you immediately try to move, but like the voice, everything feels wrong. It feels like your arms and legs aren’t working right.

You feel a warm hand on your back slowly moving back and forth.

That’s when you remember that strange man in the parking lot.

“No,” you croak out, as you remember the unmistakable shape of his firm manhood pressing up against your ass as he cut off your air supply with the constriction of his arm around your already bruised throat.

It feels like something is still wrapped around your neck but whatever it is, it’s not painful and tight, it’s cold.

This doesn’t make sense.

Your mouth quickly shuts, your eyes flying open, as you try to sit up. Adding to your horror, you find that you can’t. Your arms flex and pull but they won’t give in to your request. Your chest and bottom rise off the bed only to immediately get pulled back down.

As your vision clears, you realize that someone is sitting next to you. 

Dark hair dangles over pale green colored eyes. 

The expression on his face is empty, not at all the way it was when you first laid eyes on it. Then, this lunatic appeared harmless. He even looked greatly concerned for your well-being. His eyes were conveying such open sorrow that it threw you off enough to let him approach.

He was acting like he knew you. He called you by name.

You open your mouth to scream but he quickly covers the sound with a thick fold of fabric that a second ago must have been around the cold pack that is now on his lap. His eyes narrow as his hand firmly presses the towel against your face.

As air wheezes through your partially blocked nose, he says, “Don’t. Do. That. Again.”

Every word out of his mouth is filled with warning.

Even if you weren’t already completely scared stiff, just the look in his eyes has the sound of your own blood thrumming in your ears and your heart feeling like it’s going to burst out of your chest.  

This can’t be the same voice you just heard speaking so compassionately.

Looking for help, your eyes try to take in the room behind him, but you don’t see anyone else.

Angling your chin backwards, you see someone illuminated by the small bedside lamp, but your own eyes grow even wider when you realize that the woman lying there next to you is not alive.

It’s an old, full body mannequin like you would normally see at a dump or in a second-hand clothing store.

You try to scream again but he pushes his hand down harder, completely muffling it.

“I said, DON’T!” he growls as you yank at the ropes binding your wrists. They won’t budge and that’s because you are tied to a very heavy-looking wooden headboard. 

Trying to move your legs again, you realize that each ankle is tied much like your hands, then fastened by extended lines of rope to opposite bed posts at the foot of the bed.

It dawns on you that this is his bed.

This perverted asshole saw what your douchebag date did to you. He has been watching you for who knows how long, and now he has abducted you. Your legs are spread wide, and your skirt is pushed up so high from your floundering that you know he can see right under it from where he’s sitting.

You can’t believe this is happening, but it is.

Again, you remember feeling this fucker pressing himself on you. He was hard.

This guy was turned on by squeezing the life out of you, and he has a plastic woman in his bed!

Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!

This is so bad.

As you mentally lose your shit, his eyes never leave yours. One of his thighs is pressing against your side and he’s still holding the bottle he must have been feeding you with, but from the way he is sitting at the edge of the bed, you can’t tell if he is still aroused.

You want to scream at him to let you go but you can do nothing. You are entirely at his mercy.

The only reasons you can come up with for why he is doing this aren’t good, but you force yourself not to go there. You have to focus.

Since he’s not actually touching, touching you yet, you try to concentrate on the rest of your surroundings, looking for some way out of this.

There is an old looking electric stove in a small kitchen area across the room, with an equally old looking refrigerator next to it. A small beat-up looking table sits under one of the only two windows and it has an empty liquor bottle on it and something black that looks like a revolver of some kind.

Great.

You remember smelling the strong scent of booze on his breath in the elevator. He is clearly shit faced. Your eyes flit back to his. He hasn’t moved at all.

Oh my God, you are going to die.

Looking out again, you see that in front of the bed, there’s a very battered looking recliner. Other than the basics, there is nothing someone would have that would give signs that they lived there. There are no pictures on the walls. No TV, no shelves full of personal belongings. Next to the recliner, on the floor, you can just make out that there is a stack of books, but that is it.

You see what must be the door to get out, and one that is narrower and has slatted vents in it, meaning it’s a closet. Behind you, when you tilted your head back to look at what was holding you from moving your arms, you saw what appeared to be a tiny bathroom.

At first glance, you see nothing that can help you. It’s just some psycho guy’s shitty shoe box sized apartment.

His indifferent reaction as you look around his home is jarring. The flawlessly smooth skin on his face gives the impression of youthful innocence, but what he’s doing proves he is far from it.

You’re betting this fancy dressing Ted Bundy has got piles of bodies under his bed and body parts galore in his freezer. Now you see it; he’s totally the type!

SHIT!

His expensive looking three-piece suit didn’t make sense in this neighborhood. Now splatters of blood stain the sleeves of his white dress shirt. He clearly used the cuffs to wipe his nose based on the numerous red smears. 

You wish so badly that you’d hit him hard enough to break his whole stupid face.

You risk looking at more of him, and you see that he is missing the tie he had on before, and you can only assume that is because the first chance you had, you latched on to it and tried to strangle him with it.

He is clearly not taking any chances of that happening again.

Uselessly trying to wriggle away from him, your arms pull down on the ropes and the heels of your bare feet slide across his rumpled bedding.

He took off your shoes!

Your stomach sickens with the realization that he has already been touching you when you were unconscious. 

Again, you notice how high your skirt is, but he isn’t looking there, his cold eyes remain fixed on yours.

You can’t help it when you scream under his hand, but that only makes him even more scary looking. His features contort ominously.

“This is not what I wanted. I-” He suddenly pauses, a line forms between his eyes as they run over your face, down your body and back up again. “You never should have lifted that bat.”

You try to tell him that you don’t care what he wants or that he didn’t want his head bashed in, but your words are totally stifled by the persistent pressure of his hand.

“You kept fighting me. I had no choice but to do what I did,” he scolds, like this is your fault rather than his.

He reaches over to the bedside table, setting the bottle of water down, then he picks up another length of rope off of it. The moment he removes his hand from your mouth, he forces your lips apart, jabbing the cloth inside. His other hand is already behind your head, pushing it forward as he works the rope between your lips.

As he ties the ends at the nape of your neck you realize it’s to keep the gag in. Your mouth is so full of fabric that not even the roaring animalist growls coming out of you are even remotely loud enough to get anyone’s attention.

Your teeth bare down on the nylon fibers as you glare at him in blind hatred.

Eyes darting away from yours, he slowly starts to sit up, but he abruptly stops when you let out a pathetic mewing sound. Those green eyes of his give the faintest hint of something as he watches the burning hot tears rolling back into your hairline.

His hand comes up brushing his dark chocolate colored hair out of his eyes before tucking it behind his ears. His eyes close so sluggishly it is like it pains him to take in the very deep breaths he is all of a sudden taking. 

The heavy fringe of his lashes sweeps his cheeks covering the dark hued skin under his eyes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but the faint bruising that is starting to form is also from when you hit him, and it only seems to be showing at all because of how fair his skin is.

First, sexual assault and now you are finishing your fabulous Friday night off being this crazy prick’s new and improved sex doll. 

Is this really going to be your final fate? Live a subpar existence scratching to get by, working meaningless jobs to pay the rent, then die because some crazy asshole across the alley from you decided to remove you from the world for his own sick satisfaction?

You would laugh at your ridiculously bad luck if you weren’t crying and if you could actually laugh.

He’s going to kill you. There’s no other way out of this.

“Just let me go,” you beg him. It comes out of you, but with hardly any sound though saying it makes his eyes dart back to yours anyway.

His face is one of those that you’ve seen that can express the most heart wrenching emotion if he lets it. Right now, it seems it’s more of failing to hide it than intentionally showing that he’s not as cold as he is pretending to be. 

His prominent jaw line seems even more dramatic as you notice him clenching his teeth. It makes the dimple on his cheek stand out even more. He looks so sad, and that reaction is baffling because a moment before he looked like he felt nothing and didn’t even have the tiniest amount of remorse or humanity in him.

You swear you see his hand closest to you trembling.

That has to mean something.

You try to plead with him again, but hearing it, he steels his expression to nothingness again, he stands, preparing to walk away from you.

Christ! Even crazy vagrants on the street don’t have the gift to emotionally turn off and on as quickly as this guy can, and that’s no matter how long gone their minds are.

If you could just get through to him somehow, then maybe you’d have a chance, but how can you do that if he is mentally all over the place.

As he moves, you can see his entire body more clearly. He has straight shoulders, but he is hunching them forward in an odd way that doesn’t match his young age. His chin is angled down to the floor like he simply can’t stand looking at anything else.

His trim waist is defined even more by his tailored vest. He’s one of those guys who has that V-shaped torso that comes from having zero body fat. He’s all lean muscle and bone. Add the fitted black dress pants enhancing the slim look of him and you’d think he’s nobody to worry about, but you know already that he is not weak. Under this misleading appearance is hiding the very dangerous man that just took you.

Your eyes follow his every move as he travels over to the other side of the bed. Again, you swear you see the look of pure agony in his face as he lifts the mannequin and sets her down a few feet away over by the window on what has to be a stand because the thing is standing there dressed all pretty like she belongs in a 90's department store not this freak job’s apartment.

He goes ghostly still with one of his hands resting on the form of its narrow waist.

You hear him softly talking to it and it’s almost exactly the way you heard him speaking when you were coming to.

“Dolores, please… I love you,” he pleads. He is looking at the dummy like he is expecting it to answer him.

When you look to the window beyond him over there having this extremely bizarre moment with his plastic girlfriend, you see the flowers dangling from your own flower box blowing in the wind.

He was right across from you the whole time.

You look over again at the single chair pulled up at the small table next to the window. You can just imagine him sitting there in the dark, finishing off that bottle, watching you.

Being an opportunistic perv that gets turned on by peeping on others is one thing, but this guy was getting off by watching you get attacked and he was clearly also turned on by attacking you.

He’s a sexual sadist and while he rapes you, he is going to do his best to make you suffer even more!

Animalistic sounds of pure desperation erupt from your chest, and they get even louder when he abruptly turns away from his one-sided conversation with the mannequin and comes back towards the bed.

You see his expression change to something fierce and dangerous. His entire body seems to thrum like a bowstring drawn taut. You can almost feel the carefully restrained violence about to explode all over you.

His gaze is so intense that your whole body shudders and his voice comes out so achingly low that he sounds like a different person. “If you have already done the worst things a human could do, would it matter if you sealed it that the devil owns you?”

You do not like where this is going. You shake your head side to side, denying him. You refuse to draw the parallels he is trying to make in justifying what he’s going to do.

“I lost everything. There is no point in fighting anymore,” he whispers.

Even though you don’t want to give them to him, tears trickle down your cheeks again. Seeing them, the faintest trace of a sound comes from somewhere deep inside his chest.

There is something. Something inside all that coldness. He looks sad. You are the one tied to his bed, and he looks sad…

What?

After another minute of him seeming to consider something, he begins to hungrily study you, or at least it appears that way to you in that slow, languid way his eyes roamed over your body. When they hover over your chest, your breath hitches, and you think you hear his hitch too.

“Go fuck yourself, asshole!” you frantically cry, adding every curse word you know and even adding some new ones specially invented just for him. It comes out garbled, but you are sure he is getting the gist.

He reaches for the bottle of water on the nightstand, his eyes roll back in his head, and he almost falls down as he proceeds to pound it. 

After stumbling and then tossing the empty bottle on the floor, he moves across the bed, crawling on hands and knees towards you. The mattress sags beneath his weight as he bends down on top of you.

His weight hovers over you, and your fingers curl into fists. Your arms pulled down but to no avail. 

Reactively, when his hand comes towards your face, you pull back as much as you can. He stops for a second, dark brows furrowing like he doesn’t understand your reaction. 

“Sweetheart, no, please. You know I'd never hurt you,” he slurs, then his long fingers gently run across your skin to wipe your tears away. 

You shudder. 

He still has that look. You know it even though you don’t know him. It’s the look of misery.

He brushes your tangled hair back and the frown on his face deepens. Those pale cheeks of his suddenly flush with…

Arousal? Shame? Murderous rage? You have no idea until you look between your bodies, and you see that his crotch region is definitely tenting in a way it wasn't a few minutes ago. 

Very slowly, he traces the bruises your date left on your neck with a finger. The sensation makes you shiver in fear, and you see him shiver too. You are sure he’s about to lower himself on you but then he rolls off, staggers to the bathroom, and then slams the door behind him.

Entering his bathroom, Five’s body falls forward over the small counter. He clings to the edge holding himself steady, while hoping he will be able to think clearer now that he is away from the girl.

Five is completely overwhelmed with unimaginable levels of sorrow and gross intoxication, but the worst of it is the very demanding reaction his body is having over seeing the girl laying under him on his bed. As bad of shape as he is in, Five can’t even link together any coherent thoughts other than that when he looked at the girl, he was seeing Dolores.

“Dolores, no,” he breathlessly cries in pure unfiltered agony over the gut-wrenching loss he feels.

Wanting to stop the pain and unable to operate on anything but pure brainless need, rather than hurt the girl because he has completely lost his mind, Five desperately begins to hurt himself.

He lowers his head even more, panting out panicked gasps for air as one of his trembling hands starts to rub the front of his pants.

“Please. Fuck. Help me,” he moans, meaning much more than the words can convey as his other hand fumbles to get his zipper down. 

Once he has himself free, Five is quick to start jerking himself with an intensity and cruelty that only makes his head spin even more than it already is. 

“Nahhhh-nnnn-” His instant moans of pleasure are followed by the top of his head accidentally banging up against the oval mirror hanging above the sink.  

Pumping his hips, Five rams the hand he is using to grope his tight balls, jamming it abusively right up against the edge of the counter. His angry touches feel so damn good despite the punishment that the combination only makes him moan even louder.

His knees bang over and over against the cabinet as he finds every way possible to inflict pain on himself while also giving in to that heady desire trying to consume him.

Five winces as his knuckles begin to split after making contact too many times with the hard surface, but he doesn’t stop doing it. He wants this sweet torture to drown out the rest of his unbearable suffering. 

Hair falling in his eyes and his skin feeling like it’s on fire, Five’s other hand continues taking care of the rest of his shaft. His fingers are circled around the end of the hard length, and they are moving up and down so fast that when he peers down at himself, all he sees is a violent blur.

“Yessssssss!”

Mouth hanging open, Five’s come begins to spurt out of him. The near iridescence of his release is somewhere between a milky white and a purely clear watery fluid, allowing it to blend in almost seamlessly into the fake chalky colored marble of his chipped counter. With a dazed expression, Five’s body twitches repeatedly as he watches it drip down into the bowl of his sink. 

As the waves of ecstasy all too quickly abandon him, Five’s bloodshot eyes turn up to the monster in the mirror. 

All at once, his fist slams into the face staring back at him. The glass shatters, raining down sharp blades of Five’s reflection, scattering his hatred at his feet and all over the counter.

As if what just happened when he was suspending his body over you isn't appalling enough, the sounds coming from the bathroom are making you really lose your mind. You yank at your constraints hard enough to make your quickly abrading skin begin to bleed.

It's very clear what he is doing in there; you don't need to see him to know that he took your advice and is actively fucking himself. The only good thing about this is that he is not trying to fuck you and he is in there and you are out here.

When the sound of glass breaking and things hitting the floor abruptly comes after a another one of his guttural groans, you are pulling so hard on the headboard to break free that it's banging against the wall behind it.

Not more than a minute later, the bathroom door swings open and he's back at the side of the bed looking down at you with those empty eyes. 

“I need you to be quiet a little longer." His words don't sound mad or even scary even though he just busted you trying to break free. He sounds very meek but that makes sense considering what he did in there.

You can't help your eyes from moving right from his to his fly, and sure enough, Mr. Psycho's Mr. Happy seems to be momentarily tamed.

Just when you are thinking you might be safe, he shifts himself over on the mattress where the mannequin was.

Just the act of laying down looks like it hurts him. His moist looking eyes open and shut like he can hardly hold them open as he lets out a very pained moan that makes him sound like a child that needs his mommy very badly.

You can see his hand is freshly bleeding but not bad. He doesn't even seem to notice.

“I am going to let you go. I just need to clear my head for a few minutes, and I am cutting you loose and leaving. This will all be over soon,” he hushes when the bed moves from you trying to wriggle away from him.

As he settles into the blankets and his eyes droop closed, his black vest pulls up as he stretches out and you immediately notice that he has some kind of knife tucked under his waistband. 

After a minute or two of laying like that, eyes closed still, he rolls over and his arm flops down over your chest, his hand landing way to close to your neck again. You try to shake him off, but you have nowhere to go, and he remains as is. 

This guy can say what he wants about letting you go, but him lying next to you, hand on your throat, with this fuck mannequin watching him resting up enough so that he can brutally rape you doesn’t have you feeling any less terrified. 

The only reason you are not screaming anymore is because you don’t want to set him off now that he is this close.

Less than a minute later of you laying there thinking this is it, his chin slides down the arm he has folded under his head, and as it happens, the choppy looking fringe of his hair falls over his face.

Holy shit… You cannot believe it, but he just passed out. 

His heavy breathing immediately starts to relax.

Whether he was lying or not when he said he wasn’t going to hurt you and that he was also going to let you go, you have no idea, but it doesn’t matter. Seeing your chance, your arms begin pulling again. You twist and torque your wrists, working the ropes.

The sound of loud vibration startles you and you go stark still, your eyes darting to the kitchen table as your heartrate flies through the roof. 

You can’t be sure, because it’s so dark, but you think there is a cell phone lying there next to the gun. Just as you start to wriggle your wrists again, the phone vibrates again and at the same time, he lets out an annoyed sounding grumble. “Leave me alone, Klaus.”

Klaus?

The third time the phone buzzes, his upper leg moves over, locking down over one of yours.

You close your eyes, willing your mind to take you anywhere but here.

Stupid phone and fuck you Klaus person whoever you are.

“Don’t wake up the psycho, I am about to shiv his ass! ” your mind yells at the offending electronic device.

Not long later, the hand at your throat begins to move away, but as it retreats, your crazy cuddle buddy snuggles his body even closer to yours. This new intrusion on your personal space seems to make him happy enough at first, but then all of a sudden, he must decide that he is not warm enough. He reaches back and flips the bed spread over you both and in doing so, the cuff on his right arm pulls up and something catches your eye.

He has a tattoo on the underside of his wrist. It’s the silhouette of a black umbrella with a circle around it.

What the hell?

You’ve seen that symbol before. You were a little too young when the superhero kids that belonged to the infamous money mogul Sir Reginal Hargreeves were all the rage, but you have heard of them. They all supposedly disbanded when they came of age, and from what you remember hearing, one or two may have even died before that.

They all were born with different unimaginable powers and were often seen in public as children stepping in here or there during major emergencies to show off their extraordinary skills. 

You’ve seen old posters with them, but none of their faces are coming back to you except the girl named Allison, and that is because she has been in the news over the years for different movies that she has been in. 

They were all exactly the same age, and this guy looks like he could be ten years younger than her.

He can’t be one of them…

Can he?

Whether he’s one of them or not, just like with your date tonight, as soon as you get free, you are going to show this sorry sack that he may think he knows you and you are just going to lay here and let him treat you like his little play thing, but he got it all wrong. 

He picked the wrong girl to fuck with.

If this loser was one of the Umbrella Academy kids, you haven’t seen any signs of his powers, which might be because you recall hearing that they all lost them at some point. If he is one of them, it appears he lost even more than that, and he is in luck because you are about to help him lose even more.

The rope painfully digs into your skin. You are so close. A few more twists and the ligaments holding your thumb together will slide, letting your bones pop out of place. Then you can grab his knife and it’s go time fucker.

Someone is getting a knife through the dick and it’s one hundred percent Mr. Umbrella Academy Tattoo!

The phone lets out another long buzzing sound then stops. He doesn’t say anything this time, but the disturbance must have disturbed him again because you feel his hand slowly start surveying your upper leg, his fingers gently tracing a line northward.

You begin to struggle. Your nasally whines of protest have him swiftly changing course, instead clamping that same hand at your waist. He pulls you closer as he presses his face against your neck.

“I am sorry, Dolores…” he whispers.

He is so close. Everything suddenly feels very hot.

His lips part then they start feather lightly, sweep along the coating of moisture he’s creating on your skin. When the heat of his pelvis moves tight against your hip, you are shocked that he isn’t hard again over violating you. 

This guy doesn’t make any sense. You thought that was part of the whole thing he was into, but when he popped a woody from touching your face and neck, as soon as he noticed it was happening, he took off like he was scared shitless.

Maybe right now he is just not recovered enough from his last weirdo whack session or...

Is it possible that he really doesn't want to hurt you. Maybe he wasn’t planning on it when he reached out like he did in the parking lot? 

Maybe you had it all wrong in thinking that he was enjoying watching you nearly getting raped. He had clearly been doing something by way of enjoying himself prior to sprinting out into the parking lot, but…

All of a sudden, it dawns on you that he actually looked very upset by what he saw happen. He sounded very upset by it. It was like he was so distressed by it that he ran down there planning to do something about it. 

He looked like he wasn’t expecting you to be there. He actually seemed very confused by it.

Was he coming after your date?

At the moment, you didn’t see all that, but now…

Well…

What the fuck?

He is obviously very messed up, but maybe not in messed-up in the ‘I’m going to violently rape you and murder you’ kind of way.

He did abduct you, but he just said he was going to let you go. He said that he was going to leave.

For some bizarre reason, he seems to be very in love with his mannequin and you are almost certain that right now he thinks you are her. He is so delusional; he probably can’t even tell the difference.

Again, your feet dig down into his mattress as he nuzzles your neck and makes one of those super soft whimpering noises.

This does not feel like he’s trying to hurt you. It feels like he is trying to do something else entirely.

Something is not adding up other than he is most certainly off his rocker.

He said that he has done the worst things a human can do, and you have no idea what he meant by that, but when he could have raped you while you were out or even now, he didn’t. Besides tying you up, the things he was doing before taking off to take care of his boner problem were all in an effort to help you. 

Add all this up and what he said about letting the devil own him, may not have been implying what you originally thought. The more you think about it, it seems like he could have been talking about killing himself, not giving in to raping and killing you.

You can’t see his entire face, but you can tell that his eyes are still pinched shut and it’s in such a way that looks so miserable.

You have no idea what is going on with the guy but it’s clear that something is very wrong with him, and it’s not just that he is mega wasted.

As your mind is putting all this together, he lets out a throaty sound that almost sounds like a sob before he begins placing soft kisses along your bruised neck while vibrating his next words across your skin. “Please don’t leave me.”  

His hand at the narrowest part of your waist slips under you, tenderly massaging circles against your lower back. His warm fingers very subtly dig in as if he’s trying to comfort you.

You can’t help it when a similar sounding whine comes out of you as your heels dig in across the bedding again. 

He is all over you and not in the hurtful kind of way. 

This is not what you’d expect from a sexual sadist who gets their jollies off torturing people.

As he kisses just below your ear in that very sensitive space that makes your toes curl, he does so like he has done this maneuver about a million times, and he lets out the most contented sounding sigh when your body involuntarily shudders from it. This has got you starting to think that you may have read this crazy perv all wrong.

He’s a perv but maybe not the type you thought.

What he’s doing is so unbelievably tender and loving that it has you trembling from head to toe and incidentally not just from fear.

“Dolores, please forgive me.”

Again, he’s not talking to you, that much is very clear.

After saying that, he stops with the kisses, his body motionless as he clings to you like his life depends on it.

After a few minutes of nothing but the sound of his steady breathing, you know that he is fully out again. 

To the feel of his chest rising and falling against your side, you start to work your wrists free again.

-------------------------

Thanks for reading.

(Chapter four, coming soon...)

If you are hungry for more, faster than I post it here, find this and my other Five stories at the first link below or visit my Blog to see all my Tumblr posts:

Master List Post to my Five Centric Stories and Art

KayBreezy | Archive of Our Own

kaybreezy-on-a03 on Tumblr

[thebestofoneshots]

firstly, I absolutely adore your blog!! <3 ur so cool

secondly im curious to know- what marvel superhero would you assign to each of the marauders? I personally think sirius would love ironman, he’s so tony stark coded

AH, you're combining some of my favourite fandoms, babe! Which is why I might end up writing a way deeper analysis than I need to lol. But let's go through it one by one.

My darling James, the golden boy of his era, he is 100% Captain America. He is hell-bent on protecting those he loves, and he would do anything for them. Also, he's been in love with one girl for all of his life. It's just so fitting for him, I feel?

But also, I feel like James could also be a great Spiderman (and that is probably his favourite superhero), especially younger James, with his charm and charisma and how he is loved and cherished by his people. Also, he is totally in love with a redhead.

Remus Lupin is a complicated one. You know, I feel like Hulk is quite fitting, since you know he gets angry and turns into a green monster, which kind of relates to Rem in a deeper level. Having said that, I think his superhero would be Moon Knight and I'm ready to diе on this grave.

Hear me out, it's about the deep-held emotional trauma and the way Steven and Jake came into existence to protect Mark, he would absolutely love, love Moon Knight, especially the Disney+ version of him. There's also the lack of control the multiple personalities entail (which is very much like Remus' turning into Moony) and the moon theme. Besides, Rem would totally have a mini crush on Oscar Isaac.

And for Sirius, I agree, he is definitely Iron Man coded and would love Tony, I mean it's in the daddy issues they share with each other, the family background, the rich kid persona and all that. But I also think Sirius would love, and I mean LOVE Peter Quill (StarLord).

StarLord also has family issues, but he grew to become an absolutely charming character, sharing his love for beings with Sirius (aka they're both a little bit of heartbreakers) and he is super funny, which I feel Sirius would love. They both love music, and Sirius would praise Starlord's taste every single day of the week. Something else Siri would love about StarLord is his found family. He met the Guardians of the Galaxy and they all adopted each other, in the same way, Sirius adopted and was adopted by James and Remus.

Reggie is Bucky Barnes (and this is one of my favourite Marvel characters). Bucky was brainwashed and tortured by Hydra, in pretty much the same way Reggie was by his family. He shared that traumatic past and his absolute desire to be better, and to improve, he doesn't want to be a deatheater anymore and he fights for what's good. Also, if he is Bucky and James is Cap, we can have a bit of Starchaser hehe.

Lily loves Spiderman, and not because James does, nah, Lily has been a fan since she was a kid, she loves his sense of justice and how he fights for what's good. Spiderman's motto "With great power, comes great responsibility" is literally Lily's bible.

Marlene is into Black Window, and not only bc she has a massive crush on her, but because she thinks she is the most badass character in the entire fucking Marvel universe, no joke. She can stand against beasts three times her size, and fight alongside the most powerful superheroes on earth by being just a human woman? She is INCREDIBLE!

Mary gives me Vision vibes, I'm not sure why, but I totally see her reading Vision fanfiction and writing some too.

Barty is a Loki kid, you cannot change my mind. I mean, forgotten and neglected child who has to be exceptionally good at everything to get the attention from his dad? He becomes evil bc he thinks it's the only way he'll get Odin to see him? This to me screams Barty, and he would love Loki.

And lastly, I think Evan likes Quick Silver. Firstly, he thinks he's super hot, but he also loved his relationship with his sister, and he loves Pietro's charm. There's just something about him that he can't stop thinking about. I also feel he would like Mystique, but that's due to her complicated past, and her ability to become anything anyone she wants. He feels it would be so freeing to do that.

PS. Didn't I say I'd go crazy with this analysis? Aaaah I'm such a nerd...

[eyedoeluhn]

the portrayal of Aisha in BCF is, to say it concisely, awful. It’s not a surprise, BCF is (in my opinion) a terrible fic, but it manages to, at this point in the plot (108.1) managed to make every character it seems end up in a far worse position than where they normally would’ve been in canon. Which goes the same for Aisha, who is part of our main character’s, Joe’s, squad.

Before she’s folded into Joe’s team she’s a sexually aggressive ‘fast’ girl who harasses Joe by flirting with him and following him around the Laborn’s gym which he frequents.

Apparently her favorite hobby is this because it’s basically all we get about her from the other people at the gym too!

thanks Joe I really loved reading that. It’s my favorite part between the bits where the gym guys console poor baby you about how they’re so sympathetic about you being harassed by a child. This isn’t even my specific point I just wanted to mention this is how they meet. Anyways, after this Aisha triggers and having worked out Joe is a cape, follows him to his workshop. Through CF shit he makes a focus that boosts and allows her control of her power and makes a workaround for him, and she’s now ‘part of the team.’ Her welcoming ceremony is his sentient fashion thing dragging her away to dress her ‘properly’. Don’t worry, she dresses modestly and tastefully with Joe’s guidance!

now as a member of his team Joe does not treat Aisha like the child she is. Not in a ‘you can do work’ way, he speaks to her as if she was a fully emotionally mature and stable woman. This includes sharing his problems with her, all the time. Aisha admits to herself that as the team takes form shes been shoehorned into becoming the emotional cornerstone as the only ‘normal’ human. The fact that she is 13 years old and is explicitly shown to have not aged during time dilation and only ‘matured’ nebulously and experienced most of her time within the workshop makes it worse. She’s also too mature to date a boy her age by word of god apparently.

Why is this guy in his 20s going to a 13 year old about his problems? In her interlude she even directly states she’s using skills she used to deal with her mothers abusive boyfriends to handle Joe.

this is just like, actually sad. Why is the 13 year old the one in charge of managing this adult man who has a licensed therapist’s mental health. Joe does not find this concerning or does not enough to take any measures to stop Aisha from feeling responsible for him or attempting to administer care. When Joe is having a difficult (for him) call with his family who he is estranged from due to his trigger event and traumas involving them, Aisha is the person to check in on him

Naturally Joe’s first and really only concern about this is that Aisha is annoying him by prying. There’s really no attempt from Joe to do anything but occasionally shield her from physical harm. He constantly discusses his issues with her and leans on her emotionally while only really gifting her items. Which is where most BCF fans cry, but she’s getting all that cool tinkertech and personal teaching! I don’t think this terrible relationship should be tolerated just because she’s managed to get some fun stuff. Joe shouldn’t be bribing a child to give him reassurance. This is frankly exacerbated by the giant, insurmountable power gap between them which goes beyond an age difference. Joe is perfectly capable of constantly surveilling Aisha, seriously harming her, altering her mental state (arguably he’s done this before) and a myriad of awful things that Aisha just has to take on his word that he would do. It’s less funny when he jokes about putting nano machines in her to keep her from doing things he doesn’t want her to do when he could at any time.

It’s not a parental relationship, it’s not a mentor mentee, at best it’s a toxic codependency where Aisha is not treated her age and really any positives to this are because the author wants Joe to seem sympathetic despite everything. for Aisha, honestly, this is extremely fucked up

why are you like this, BCF.

[lesbianfakir]

I could write a three hour video essay on tutu and gender but I really love how a show in a genre that’s primarily targeted towards girls explores how expectations of masculinity can traumatize young boys.

This is shown with Fakir especially. While the text never explicitly attributes his behavior to his gender, his arc over the course of the show is quintessentially informed by toxic gender roles. This got long and I have a lot of thoughts so I'm gonna put it under a readmore:

Fakir has one unchanging goal for the duration of the show: he wants to keep the people he loves safe. But outside elements twist this motivation into an identity. He is suffocating under the weight of a person he has never been and can never be no matter how hard he tries to mold himself.

Much of his personality is likely a direct result of circumstance. We are shown multiple times that when he feels in his element he’s inclined to a gentle disposition (ie how he acts with Duck as a duck or with Raetsel). As a young child especially he appears earnest and naive, his already innate desire to protect blinding him to the cruelty of the world. However, this sweeter side is near overwritten by the cold, domineering personality that characterizes his early appearances in the show.

We can infer that without the trauma inflicted on him by the story Fakir would have retained much more of this gentler personality as he grew up. Instead, his desire to protect others is twisted and warped by fear, becoming a desire to control.

Even before having his life upended, Fakir wanted to to take the weight of protecting the entire town all upon himself. He sees a true hero as someone who stands on his own without help.

So how does this tie into gender? Fakir deliberately crushes his "weaker" side--the earnest, sensitive young boy in the favor of a tough persona. He particularly views emotions as a weakness. It's notable that in one of the most iconic scenes in the show, Fakir has a breakdown over someone seeing him crying. This simple display of human emotion is enough to completely shatter the image he has constructed for himself. Fakir's harsh, impossible standards for himself are rooted in toxic masculinity, in the idea that men--real men--are never visibly sad or scared.

Immediately after losing everything as a child, Fakir was given a new source of hope and pride: the role of the Knight. He, of course, built his whole identity around this role. The Knight, like the Prince is expected to protect others without fear. This can be read as analogous to how men struggle under the expectation to be the protectors and the breadwinners, expected to take pain and hardship upon themselves so those under their care may live a comfortable life. However, the story's knight is doomed from the start: a failed protector. Fakir is growing up under literal impossible standards. He's meant to give everything and crumble under that weight without achieving anything.

It's worth noting that the Princesses' roles are meant to revolve seeking affection from men while the men's roles are colored by violence. Contrast the Knight and Princess Tutu who are both destined to accomplish nothing and be forgotten: while Tutu gracefully dissolves into a speck of light, the Knight is gruesomely torn apart. Here, masculinity becomes inextricably linked to violence in Drosselmeyer's world.

For as long as Fakir tries to be a knight worthy of the story he is confined by a toxic gender role. A protector relies on the idea of a weaker subset of person--the protected. Even without malicious intent, this strips agency. Fakir ignores Mytho's wishes all for the sake of "keeping him safe." Likewise Duck doesn't' want Fakir's protection. In several episodes she begs him to give up on fighting and search for peaceable solutions.

Even though neither Duck nor Mytho ask for Fakir to fight for them he feels personally responsible for their safety to the point his entire self esteem rests on his ability to protect them. Despite his guarded exterior, two of the three times he breaks down crying are because Duck got hurt --due to his own incompetence in his eyes.

Fakir can only grow as a person when he stops placing everything on his own shoulders. For all he clings to the sword his real strengths are found outside of battle. He only saves Duck by opening up to her in his first display of willing vulnerability.

By the end of the series he has entered a genuine partnership with Duck. Rather than a one-sided relationship where he sees himself as her protector, he writes her story and trusts her to guide herself through it. This is in direct opposition to the masculine ideals he clung so hard to. The knight and the prince --his role models--are both meant to be self-sufficient in the original fairytale. Instead, Fakir is able to be a vulnerable boy who gets scared and hurt--and doesn't need to hide it--but has friends he can rely on when times are tough.

Fakir's arc doesn't involve him becoming more feminine, necessarily, but it does show him breaking free of the standards placed on his shoulders by toxic masculinity. He was never meant to be a fighter; that was an unfair role he was forced into. At the end of the show Fakir was achieved his freedom. He isn't a knight. He isn't a protector. He isn't personally responsible for the lives of those he loves. He's just Fakir.

[florvaine]

tbh im losing my will to write bc all the cc's that i used to watch/did watch have been revealed to be terrible people that no part of me can support.

this is gonna be a bit of a rant of everything i stand on during this

support, send love and stand with shelby, alice, caiti, lexie, em, andi, moonzy and others taking a stand and finally showing the true colours of these 'men'. at the same time support, send love and stand with others that came out/were forced to talk about their experiences with this topic before such as cellbit, jack and niki. also show love for those standing up with the victims and supporting them no matter what - aimsy, billzo, max, ranboo, harry, etc. etc.

NOBODY who supports people like wilbur, illumina, george, sapnap, dream, punz, draggie and other 'influencers' who use their platforms for these horrific actions is welcome on my blog. i do not care if youre 'waiting for a response' - you have picked a side by doing that, whether you'd like to hear that or not, and it is not the victims. these 'men' are R4PISTS, ENABLERS, ABUSERS, RACISTS.

THIS ISNT DRAMA. the things these 'men' are saying theyve been revealed of doing - not accused, accused means 'claiming someone has done something wrong' - in this situation it is FACTUAL. the experiences these women have gone through do not deserve to be watered down to just 'internet drama' or 'twitter drama'. these 'men' have done ILLEGAL ACTS and deserve to rot behind bars for getting off on the manipulation, abuse and exploitation of these women, and i hope they get the justice they deserve for their actions.

a common thread between the majority of these cases is the theme of consent and alcohol. seems like the british attackers werent there for the tea video. the moment someone has alcohol in their bloodstream, they cannot consent. whether they have had one drink or 20, or if both parties are drunk, there is not consent. if there is not a clear, uncoerced, uninfulenced and solid 'yes' then there is not consent and it is assault/r4pe. this is not my opinion, this is THE LAW.

it is not your fault if you 'couldnt tell'. with wilbur, yes, he frequently used the 'tragic artist' role in his songs, but at the time it was said BY HIM to be a character, this is supported by his e-girl trilogy and the fact he said himself he was PLAYING an incel character. he is a manipulator, and the rest of the 'men' are liars too. they all sat behind screens showing a version of themselves best suited to gathering fame, and didnt feel bad about flipping completely when the streams or cameras turned off. HOWEVER, it is YOUR FAULT if you still support the 'men'. people saying 'he saved me' or 'he wouldnt do this' - MOTHERFUCKER HE JUST DID?? HELLO?? yes, it can be hard letting go of someone/something you loved, but it has to be done. i didnt want to get rid of a barbie when i was younger because playing with it made me happy, but i did anyways and guess what? i got over it. you do not know these 'men'. YOU ARE NOT LOSING A REAL LIFE FRIEND, YOU ARE LOSING A TOXIC, PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP.

for the (few) people who might see this and go 'whyre you so pressed' - i have experienced my own trauma in the past and that is all i will say, i do not owe it to you to go into full miniscule detail about what happened. hearing all the people i grew up watching doing the same things that i have and still am effected by today makes me feel sick, that isnt a metaphor either, it brings up bad memories and makes it even harder to detatch yourself from these situations. these 'men' have done irreversible actions. whilst it may have given them a sick minute of pleasure, it has haunted and traumatised these women for the rest of their lives. they are only 'apologising' or 'addressing' their actions because they do not want to lose their platforms. since the start their fans have only been a number, and the second that number drops they get all panicky and try do all the damage control they can. DO NOT SUPPORT THESE 'MEN'. SUPPORT THE VICTIMS. caiti shelby alice lexie em andi moonzy

i think im done with my rant. more might have to be added idk tho. bye bye

[armentas]

Hey there, everyone! My name's Elliot. I've had a writing blog for a while, but I've never tagged a post to officially "join" writeblr before. My blog is more a place to store random photos and silly posts that remind me of my OCs, but I really would like to turn it into something more substantial!

Some stuff about me:

I'm 19.

I'm a trans man, bisexual, and physically disabled.

My favorite genres are contemporary, surrealist, horror, Southern gothic, and historical fiction/fantasy.

You will always find me writing about tragic siblings and religious trauma. If there's a will, there's a way...

I might not always see them or stay on top of them, but I'm fine with being tagged/ask games/stuff like that.

Now, for the wip intros!

Haven

Plot: When a teenage girl finds herself back in her child self's body after wishing for "the good old days", she attempts to use this chance to prevent her brother's suicide.

Genre: Contemporary coming of age, second person interactive fiction

Heather: The main character. An extremely shy, isolated, self-absorbed 17 year old who wants to be unconditionally loved above all. Endlessly curious, and longs for independence while fearful of it. Artistic and daydreams to cope.

Beau: Heather's older brother. Taking care of Heather was his responsibility as a child due to their father working, and their mother's depression confining her to her room. Well liked and deeply kind, but coddling and dishonest, Beau does everything he can to keep his struggles from himself and others. Suffered from a traumatic car accident at 19, and killed himself at 24.

Erin: Has known the two since she was 12, and dated Beau since his car accident. Good sense of humor and doesn't bullshit anyone. She thinks Beau's digging his own mental hole, and that Heather's burdened him too much. The siblings' parents don't approve of Erin's relationship with him because of her drug addiction. 24 years old.

Trigger warnings: Suicide/suicide ideation, death, self harm, neglect, intense portrayals of anxiety and panic attacks, car accidents, drug use

Prodigal

Plot: A priest decides to bring justice to the world by slaughtering those he deems morally reprehensible in the eyes of God.

Genre: Loosely Victorian inspired fantasy, in a setting controlled and dominated by Catholicism. Religious (trauma) fiction. Third person present tense

Celio: "The" main character. Keeping many secrets. Thoughtful and patient during his priestly duties, rigid and very bad-tempered otherwise. Well known for being one of the best speakers of his time. Selfish, arrogant, and extremely paranoid, especially of immorality and what others' intentions are, yet it does nothing to stop him sinking further and further into immoral and criminal behavior. 32-35 years old.

Finn: A main character. Celio's secret lover and pawn. Saved from prison time by Celio after Finn was falsely deemed responsible for his family's massacre. Looked down on and considered an outsider by all; pursuing becoming a doctor and surgeon with no license or ability to read. Coolheaded and humorous, but passive and stubborn. Just wants to do good for his poverty-stricken hometown, and to be respected. 32-35 years old.

Charity: Main antagonist. A mostly nonverbal, "orphaned" teen girl who Finn becomes a caretaker for. In actuality, she ran away from home after being ostracized by her church. She likes Finn, and gets along with Celio well enough, until she discovers his crimes and tries to separate Finn from the danger to no avail. Calm, sensible, and strongwilled, but with a bite to her. Has decided she's had enough of betrayal in her life, and that she'll take matters into her own hands, even if it means having to turn on those she once cared for. 16-17 years old.

Pearl: Antagonist. She first graduated from college with a degree in criminology at a mere 17 years old, making her a prime target for scouting by the police, but has remained an independent detective leading a relatively peaceful life. Charity hires Pearl to help catch Celio (and Finn as his accomplice), pulling her into a web of murders and lies even she hasn't yet seen outside of her textbooks. Goes from cherrypicking cases due to fear of failing the reputation of her genius (and therefore her people), to completely trusting her instincts, taking on any challenge ahead of her. Gentle and analytical, but sensitive and obsessive. 24-28 years old.

Trigger warnings: Religious trauma, homophobia, sexual content, death, murder, gore, suicide, gun and knife usage, abuse (physical, emotional, financial, domestic, spiritual), harm to animals, smoking and drinking

The Day You Left (TDYL)

Plot: A teenager travels back to his hometown and reunites with his childhood best friend, sparking a slow, difficult mending of happenings previous.

Genre: Romance novel taking place in the mid 2000s, third person present tense

Skip: The main character. A very monotone trans 19 year old with a photography hobby and history of homelessness. He used to have severe anger issues, and they still come to the surface sometimes when reminded of his trauma. Ex-Christian atheist, vehemently. Avoidant to a fault.

Milo: A boisterous, reckless, punk teenager who used to be friends with Skip. Current sufferer of anger issues and struggles to pay the bills, usually resorting to delinquency. They have a complicated history, so Milo feels very mixed about seeing him again. "In between" Christian and atheist. 19 years old.

Josie: Skip's older sister, who he no longer has contact with. Traditionally evangelical and defensive of authority to the end. 17-18 years old in flashbacks.

Trigger warnings: Religious trauma, familial abuse, sexual content, suicide/suicide ideation, self harm, mentions of homophobia, underage drinking and smoking, arson

Finally, I do have a wip called Kettle Creek, but it's...very much in an in between state, which is why I'm not introducing it here lol. But if you ever see me tagging something as Delora, Stasia, or Olive, that's where they come from!

[collapsedglasshouses]

An Angel for Noah || Noah Sebastian x OC [Part 6]

DIVIDER ART WORK BY @cafekitsune

PAIRING: Noah Sebastian x Jules [she/her]

MASTERPOST

SUMMARY: Both Noah and Jules get confronted with the consequences of Jules' interference and to make matters worse Noah believes that Nick doesn't believe him at all.

WARNINGS: themes of trauma and emotional distress, talks about bad mental health, talks about death, ...

A/N: Hello! ♡ I'm really sorry it's taking me so long to update atm. I'm struggling with a really bad writer's block. I hope you all are doing well... I actually don't know what else to say this time except: Thank you for the overwhelming responses to this series! It means a lot to me! So now, have fun while reading the next part! ♡

TAGLIST: @trvshdxddy @blackveilomens @crimson-calligraphyx @measuredingold @cncohshit @signs-of-ill-portent @hi-fancy-seeing-you-here @ada-clarence

If you wanna be added to the taglist of this story, please DM me or let me know in the comments!

Keep in mind, this takes place in an alternative universe. Even though I write about real people, the way I write them has nothing to do with how they are in real life.

When Noah woke up the next day his head was pounding. He regretted every bit of alcohol he had consumed last night. But right as he was about to let out a frustrated groan, his memories from his way to the hotel came back.

He had almost been hit by a car because he was too dumb to watch where he was going. There was this girl that had thrown herself onto him. She had cried while she asked him if he was okay. He still felt the pain, from hitting the concrete, in his back.

He remembered how he couldn't stop himself from getting lost in her eyes, even though he felt guilty for doing so, since she was crying. The comfort he felt when she touched him, still lingered on him. Her image occupied his thoughts, even now when he was awake again, and he couldn't shake the feeling that there was a deeper connection between them. He felt stupid thinking about how this encounter felt almost supernatural.

He didn't have the time to think about it any longer, because his phone started to ring again. Jules didn't even move a finger while standing at the corner of his room. She didn't move at all since Noah stumbled into the room. She couldn't believe what she had done. She shouldn't have done that.

She just stared at Noah as he moved into the small bathroom to shower. She felt like she couldn't move, her thoughts holding her back. If he would slip in the shower now, she would accept that he might break his neck but she just couldn't move. She had destroyed everything. She was sure that at any moment she would be snapped out of her skin and would have to listen to a lecture about how stupid she was for showing herself.

She let herself think about what might have happened if she didn't reach him in time on that street. He would have ended just like she did. He would have died in the cold with the downside of not having anybody around who could help him like she did. The tour would have ended before even starting. His friends would have lost such a beautiful soul. She felt how she started to shake, her trauma washing over her. When she was still living, she thought her death would take all her sorrows, but now she found herself in a whirlwind of emotions that she could not control.

She felt how she teared up again. As much as she wanted to swallow her tears, she couldn't fight it. So she stood there, as still as she could, shaking and crying from her emotions.

As the days went by, everything started to become grey to Noah. While he loved being on tour, he had this weight on his shoulders of not knowing how to go on from this. He couldn't stop thinking about her. Every little time he had was used to go through the past events over and over. He knew he needed to see Jules again. It was all he could think about.

It didn't go unnoticed by Jules that Noah was even deeper in his thoughts than he already had been. She knew it was her fault. She was sure it was the fact that she had disappeared into thin air after helping him to his feet. She was to blame for him loosing his sanity. She was to blame for him not performing as good as he wanted to. She was to blame for him being mad at himself for not doing great. She was to blame for everything that went wrong in Noah's life at the moment and she wanted nothing more but to change that.

"Are you alright, Noah?" Jolly asked his friend after their concert as they walked backstage. Noah just shrugged it off. "Yeah, just can't concentrate that well at the moment."

Jules observed the scene. She noticed how Jolly raised his right eyebrow for a second but when he sensed that Noah really didn't want to talk about it, he gave him a quick side hug. "You did good tonight. Don't worry." And with that he left.

In fact, Noah did worry. About everything. Every waking second was spent with worrying. He felt like her face was burned into his brain. He needed to see her again so bad, he began searching her face in every crowd they saw. He knew it was dumb, but it was his last hope. How else should he cope with his loss? He knew there was little to no chance he would ever see her again but this way he could at least talk himself into it for a few seconds longer.

It felt like the next few hours went by in slow motion for him, and when he was finally in his bunk on the tour bus, he couldn't help but take a sigh of relief. He just wanted to sleep, since this had been the only way to escape his thoughts of Jules for the last few days.

When he opened his eyes again, he almost fell off the chair he was seated at. Hectically he looked around himself. He was sitting in a café. It looked like a typical coffee shop in the Upper West Side of New York. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee beans wafted through the air, creating a warm and inviting atmosphere. When he watched closer, he noticed how a lot of the people around him looked like university attendees. He felt like he was living in an episode of Gossip Girl (ignoring the fact he definitely wasn't on the Upper East Side) with the people's clothes around him looking like they had a lot of money.

His eyes stopped at a table in the corner. Around the girl, whose back was turned to him, were a lot of plants. If he had to choose a place where he could sit, it would have been there. He instantly recognized her. It was Jules. Right when he noticed that it felt like he could read her like an open book.

He knew this must have been a place she frequently visited, considering the fact that he could see the signs of Juilliard school from the other side of the window.

Than he noticed a person sitting with her at the table. She was rather short and had longer red and brown hair. He felt how much Jules trusted her. Her friend, who gave of vibrant and ever-enthusiastic vibes, had her own coffee cup cradled in her hands.

"So, spill the beans, Jules," Jules' friend said with a mischievous grin. "I saw you talking to that cute guy from our music theory class yesterday."

Noah felt how Jules was run over by a flush of embarrassment that crept up her cheeks, her heart racing at the mention of the boy. It made Noah feel weird when he was being honest. "Oh, him," she replied, attempting to sound nonchalant. "We were just discussing the upcoming composition assignment."

Her friend raised an eyebrow, a knowing glint in her eyes. "Come on, Jules. I've known you for too long. I can tell when you've got a crush."

Jules chuckled, unable to deny her friend's perceptive nature. "Okay, fine. Maybe I do find him interesting."

While her friend grinned wider, Noah's face twitched in frustration. He didn't even know why. He had no idea what the hell was going on.

When her friend started leaning in conspiratorially, Noah almost became mad. "Interesting? That's quite the understatement. You practically light up when he's around."

Jules sighed, unable to hide her affectionate smile. "He's just so talented, Meghan. And he's got this passion for music that's incredibly inspiring."

Her friend nudged her playfully. "And he's cute, right?"

Jules blushed again, her laughter tinkling like a melody in Noah's ears while the topic of conversation almost hurt him like a blade in the chest. "Yeah, he's cute. But it's more than that. He's… genuine. When he talks about music, it's like he's pouring his soul into every note."

He noticed how he furrowed his eyebrows. HE did that too. He wished someone would have talked about him like that.

Her friend, Meghan, reached across the table and squeezed Jules' hand. "I'm happy for you, Jules. You deserve someone who appreciates your passion for music just as much."

As Noah looked down at the table in front of him, his view became blurry again. The last thing he thought was, how he would loved to know Jules, but he just didn't know how to get to know her. If she even was real and his mind didn't just play a cruel joke on him.

When he opened his eyes again, he felt empty.

"Fuck." He whispered into the nothingness, hoping he hadn't disturbed his friends sleep. He quietly climbed out of his bed and went through the door to the front part of the bus. They would drive in the morning, so he had the chance to slip into a jacket and shoes to leave the bus and get some fresh air in his system. Jules quietly followed him.

She was still shaking but over the last few hours, she couldn't cry anymore. She felt empty. When she saw Ruffilo standing outside with a cigarette in his hand, she stayed back, but still lingered close enough to hear their conversation.

"Why are you still up?" Nick asked his best friend who leaned against the bus, shrugging his shoulders. "Could ask you the same thing." - "Fair."

It went quiet for a while, both of them seemingly deep in thoughts. Noah fought with himself. He literally felt like loosing his mind.

"I think I need to tell you something." Noah than breathed out and sparked Nick's interest. The latter put out his cigarette and turned his full attention to his best friend.

"I think I almost died last night." It bursted out of Noah and now it felt like he couldn't stop himself. He had to tell Nick everything.

"What?" - "I almost got run over by a car last night." Noah confessed and Nick's eyes widened as much as Jules'. Both of them couldn't believe what he just said but both for different reasons.

"Why didn't you tell me? Are you okay? What happened?" The questions bubbled out of Nick, while Jules stepped closer to them. She felt how she got angry. She already fucked up. Why did Noah have the need to tell the world about it? He might as well put a stamp of "worst guardian angel on earth" on her forehead.

"I'm fine. Someone saved me." Noah answered and his hands began to sweat. He didn't even know what exactly he was going to tell Nick, but he needed to get it out. "There was a girl. She came out of nowhere, really."

Nick nodded, gesturing him to continue talking. "She had really beautiful eyes. You won't believe me, she almost felt unreal."

"Did you catch her name? What did she look like?" Nick wanted to know, not really getting why Noah spoke of her as if he had just met the love of his life.

"Jules. I think that is her name." He than breathed out, causing Jules to flinch next to him. How the hell did he know her name? There were so many questions in her head.

"What do you mean, 'you think'? Are you sure you aren't imagining this accident? You were so wasted last night." - "I thought the same thing, but I still feel this pain on my lower back where my body hit the concrete. Also it felt so real. I saw her. I saw her face. It was like - I had seen her somewhere before..." Noah decided against telling him that he was sure the girl from his dreams had saved him, while Jules next to him internally begged for this conversation to be over.

Nick nodded but it was noticeable to everyone but Noah that he had doubts about Noah's story. It was also not noticeable to Noah that he had been the cause of Nick still being awake. His friend was worried about him and hearing him talk about a random girl like he had seen god himself, made it even worse.

"Noah?" - "Hmm." - "Please take care of yourself."

With that his friend stepped to the door of the bus and with a last "good night" he left Noah alone. Noah felt numb. He had noticed that Nick didn't believe him or at least thought something was wrong with him and it frustrated him. He decided that after the tour he should make another appointment with his therapist, because he was really afraid of suffering from psychosis.

Jules felt how uneasy Noah was. Even if she still was angry about being confronted with her mistakes, there was something else that crept up her skin again. Regret. Regret that she had shown herself unwillingly. Regret that she had touched him. Regret that she had apparently turned his life upside down by her interference.

But even though she hated seeing him like that, she also felt how her skin tingled when she thought about how she had swept him off his feet with just one look.

Either way, she knew she had to make a move. She needed to help him out of his misery as soon as possible.

PART SEVEN

[stranger-rants]

Re: Billy & Dissociation

One of Billy's main coping mechanisms is dissociation, which I think we can see some clear examples of throughout the series as well as in Runaway Max. Not much attention is drawn to it, though, so it might be less obvious. It's sometimes hard to capture what this explicitly looks like, but hopefully I can give some examples. I think that this coping mechanism helped him survive up until his death. That includes fighting the control of the Mindflayer when he could, and protecting himself as best as possible from the pain when he couldn't.

Billy is pretty isolated by his experiences with abuse, which would seemingly make him the perfect victim for the Mindflayer. However, it never accounted for the body and mind it was stepping into. That is that Billy is strong and capable of withstanding pain, and that Billy is defiant and capable of blocking out a lot of what is happening at any given moment. Picking Billy as its victim was its fatal flaw, because it didn't consider Billy as a survivor. It underestimated his resilience, and I think this could also be Vecna's fatal flaw when he really goes toe to toe with Eleven.

I've talked briefly about Billy's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses to abuse. Here, I am mostly going to talk about flight. Dissociation is a kind of mental flight. It's a way of pretending that what's happening is not really happening, and it's a very common coping mechanism in people with CPTSD (which I believe Billy has from chronic abuse). It can be a maladaptive coping mechanism, but it can also be a lifesaver to someone unable to physically leave an abusive situation. For Billy, I think it helped him survive Neil and end The Mindflayer.

Runaway Max has its issues; mainly, attempting to depict Billy as a "sociopath" despite glaring red flags throughout the book that Billy is being horrifically abused on a regular basis. Yet, it does give us some insight into his coping mechanism through the eyes of Max. As she is just a kid, Max doesn't really get it but she does notice that Billy seems distant or even sleepy quite often. It's hard for her to tell what he is thinking, and that may be because he's barely there at all. Billy is beaten very badly in that book, but he shuts down while it's happening.

All of these things indicate that Billy may be dissociating in order to take the abuse. Combine that with substance abuse, it's all a way to shut down the pain he is feeling in order to just survive. We can see this in the show itself, too. Billy does a lot to distract himself. He's surrounded by music. He will do multiple tasks at once - smoking, lifting, and blasting music, to seemingly drown out everything else around him. He is simultaneously loud and in your face while being locked up quietly inside his own head. His loudness, a distraction.

With Dacre already confirming that Billy has anxiety, it makes me think Billy has developed maladaptive daydreaming as a coping mechanism which is a form of dissociation. This involves hyperfixating on daydreaming to the point of blocking out reality. It differs from regular daydreaming because it is a maladaptive coping mechanism commonly associated with trauma. Things like listening to music excessively and withdrawing from one's relationships can be a clue. We see this with Billy and with Max, after Billy's death.

Billy gives this air of not giving a shit about anyone or anything. He even tells Max he "doesn't care" why she's late, but much of Billy's "I don't give a shit" attitude seems to stem from his inability to mentally focus on the world around him in any meaningful way. He is just surviving in it. We can see this by the way he's not much invested in the lives of his new "friends" or the girls he attracts. I don't think Billy's fully there most of the time, and from the way he just sits in the car with his head back looking into nothing, it appears he dissociates frequently.

One thing people who use dissociation to cope with abuse get really good at doing is just doing things on autopilot. You don't feel "present" in your body. It can feel like you are hiding within a shell of yourself and your outward self as presented to other people is just a performance. You can say and do things without much thought. This in my experience leads to depersonalization. Not being able to connect with your body or your mind, and it kind of feels like being possessed even when you're not. Coming back to yourself after can feel overwhelming.

I think of this in the context of Billy mentally escaping the Mindflayer by finding safety in the old memory of his mother, only to come back to his body full force with the realization that he had the power to end it all. He was able to protect that part of his mind just enough so that the Mindflayer could not maintain full control. He was already used to his body belonging to other people. The way his dad used it as a punching bag. The way people used him as their toy for other things. The Mindflayer taking it from him was a shock, but not exactly new.

To deal with the pain of being abused, Billy had to shut down all the feeling he could. We see this with the way he can just take hit after hit without slowing down. We see this with the tremendous amount of pain he withstands from the Mindflayer. Pain does not get any less painful with each additional hit, but it can feel less painful if he's able to separate his mind from his body which he does. He flies away from it, retreating into his memories. He's not being hurt. He is on the beach. His mother is smiling at him and he is happy.

The Mindflayer did not account for that. Yes, Eleven helped, but it did not consider that Billy already had years of experience surviving abuse behind him unlike the seemingly well adjusted victims it took when it had its claws in Billy. Billy could take the pain. Billy could keep a part of himself safe from the whirlwind of trauma within him. Billy could separate his mind and body so that when he was ready, he could come back to it and throw all of his remaining energy into destroying the very thing that tried to control him.

[dam-peace]

There's this thing that pops into my head from time to time

I'm curious, if the SPU members weren't trained super soldiers for the government and actually went to high-school, what would they be like? And would they fit into those high school stereotypes? (I.e. jock, nerd, prep)

These kids need their light-hearted AU's to balance out the pain and agony that would probably come later-

I love this question :) But, I will say that for near enough every member of the S.P.U, though them being experimented on and trained by the government has caused them a mountain load of trauma. It's also made them who they are in a way, so though their lives are closely monitored and controlled by some pretty heinous individuals.

Mr & Mrs Martin, as well as Lieutenant General Amelia Ono in particular, have given these children a semblance of freedom and power that was lost to them before the experiment. So, for this question, I'll be answering from the perspective of who each member is now, currently in the game as opposed to who they were before the experiment. Something that will be explored within the game as the story progresses.

One

Definitely head boy/head girl/class rep for SURE! Their sense of responsibility, need for perfection and diligence beyond their years would have them elected by both their teachers and peers alike. Though they would never campaign for the position themselves, they would certainly uphold the title and do it justice if elected.

One is a very interesting character because they're both a mixture of "preppy", "nerdy" whilst also being a "jock." They would be that near perfect student, top of their class, an overachiever who would be doing whatever they could to get into a good college when they finish high school.

Well put together, whilst also not being a complete snob. Well-spoken, well-mannered with a good temperament. Naturally athletic and without a doubt, captain of various sports teams. Including, being the team leader for various academic pursuits, e.g. the debate team. Yet, unfazed by it all, keeping up with every outside demand without breaking a sweat.

On top of being blessed with good looks, in addition to having a commanding and confident air about them. Naturally making One extremely popular without ever trying, even their "coldness" would be classed as an attractive trait as part of the whole package deal.

Though, I will say that despite One's achievements, having Zero as an older sibling who would have also attended the same high school would certainly set the bar very high...

Zero

Much like their younger sibling Zero would certainly be head boy/head girl/class representative for SURE! Certainly elected by both their teachers and peers alike. However, unlike One, Zero would have probably jokingly campaigned for the position if everyone was already thinking of electing them anyway, as a simple pretence. And boyyyy would they have done a stellar job.

Much like One, Zero is a very unique combination of a "nerd", "preppy" and "jock." Head of most if not all extra-curriculars, be it academically or physically. Though Zero does prefer the academic side of things. Top of their class, though unlike One, Zero isn't as obsessed with getting into the best college after high school because they already know that they will regardless.

As Zero isn't propelled by the anxiety of things going to all hell like One is. Zero has a hand in near enough every club in school, balancing everything without breaking a sweat, in fact he/she IS the perfect student. Sickeningly so, charming, eloquent, socialable, intelligent and drop dead gorgeous. Zero has it all, I can honestly say I don't think there's ever been a time where anyone has ever seen them break a sweat.

Resulting in Zero having an endless supply of admirers, both teachers and students alike, all attracted to the "perfect" traits that they possess. Everyone is sucked into who they think Zero is, believing that One is just a slightly colder and less charming version of their older sibling. No one would believe that One in actuality is everything that Zero isn't, not even One themself....

Viper

Captain of every freaking sporting team, Viper would lead her team to the finals every.damn.time. Like the girl is a beast, so much so that no boy in the school would dare run any sexist or misogynistic jokes her way, unless they want their jaw going left real quick. And despite being mostly recognised for her sporting achievements, being classed a "jock", Viper is no "dumb jock." Rather the opposite, she's smart and has no trouble getting full marks on every test.

Which allows her to participate in any extra-curriculars with no trouble, her coaches love her. Admiring how she juggles having good grades and leading her various sporting teams to victory without breaking a sweat. Diligent, driven, hard-working and displaying a sense of true leadership and sportsmanship, her coaches know that any team is in good hands when she's in charge of it. Resulting in Viper being poached for various prestigious sporting colleges before graduation.

She'd also be the girl that hangs out with mostly boys and any girls who participate in the sporting clubs that she's a part of. Popular, despite her aloof and intimidating nature, Viper is unintentionally quite the catch. A good-looking, stylish, athletic, cool tomboy with a quiet sense of justice that won't allow her to leave someone to perish on her watch, bullying within the school would decrease very quickly with her as a student.

And surprisingly, this girl whose as "tough as nails" would also bare quite the sensitive soul. As she would volunteer at animal shelters, or care for any animals on school grounds within her spare time. In addition to being a valuable member of her school's art club, as she's quite the artist. Resulting in her pieces winning various prizes for her school, as well as helping to fundraise a variety of charities. Many art colleges would also be contacting her prior to her high school graduation.

All in all Viper would be the secret lesbian fantasy for a vast majority of the girls within her school, whilst also sadly being the girl that many boys wished was a little less masculine so that they would stand a fighting chance at romancing her. There would also be a big rumour going around that she's a lesbian lol, a rumour she would give zero f*cks about.

Wolfe

Much like Viper, Wolfe would be a part of near enough every sporting team but unlike his sister, I'd say he'd lean more towards being a "co-captain" than anything else. He's not really keen on leading an entire team and all the responsibility that the role carries, but he's certainly the ace of his team that's for sure. And much like his sister, Wolfe is no "dumb jock", rather to the surprise of many who have deemed him the "class clown", he's a grade A student and prides himself as such.

Though, unlike his older sister, he's the socialable one. Everyone knows his name, and everyone wants the chance to speak to him. Which they most likely will because despite his popularity, Wolfe literally befriends EVERYONE. He doesn't have a set table and group of people that he eats with at lunch because every table is "his" table.

He sits with literally everyone from every clique, because life's too short to know the same set of people. He'll sit with the "losers" he doesn't give a f*ck, and anyone who has something to say about it can have his lunch tray shoved up their ass. And much to the surprise of many students and hell, even the teachers, Wolfe is no bully. Rather, he's a complete sweetheart.

Despite his quick temper, Wolfe is nothing but respectful and only flies off the handle when absolutely necessary. Which is why many students dare not cross him, and why some teachers, especially the principal cuts him some slack. Because, Wolfe isn't the type to tolerate any bullying or harassment of any kind, even with students thinking they can disrespect any genuinely good teachers. No sexist or misogynistic actions or remarks will be carried out on his watch, well, unless anyone wants their head slammed into a locker.

All in all, Wolfe would be a breath of fresh air for his school, because despite his good-looks, charming and jovial personality, stellar grades and natural athleticism, he's also a genuinely good person. Always volunteering for school fund raisers, which in turn propels many others to do the same. Always ready to help when he sees someone in need, be it a teacher struggling to carry any school supplies whilst his fellow classmates snicker.

Quick to call them out on their lack of manners and moral ethics, in turn causing a big shift within the school as "not being an asshole" becomes a popular trend when he's around. Wolfe would also be the first, if not the only one to put any teachers who bully their students in their place. Guiding any new students through the school, complimenting the openly gay boys in school on their new makeup look, as well as offering his jumper to any girl whose skirt is stained by the dreaded "time of the month."

Resulting in the boys jokingly hating on him if not completely hating on him, but knowing better than to start something with him. Girls and gays intensely crushing on him and every adult gushing about how "he was raised right" and that "he would be the son that any parent would be proud of."

Hex

Definitely the freshman that everyone loves and tries to protect no matter what. Though I've got to say that with both Viper AND Wolfe as older siblings, Hex really wouldn't have anything to worry about, unless of course someone has a death wish. Even though she's more than capable of holding her own, she rarely ever has to.

Hex would certainly be a part of both the cheerleading and gymnastics club, a natural born athlete, sweet and feminine with a level of charisma that shines through. Top that off with being as cute as a button, Hex charms anyone she comes across. Leading her sporting teams to victory, despite being a freshman, Hex is always a non-negotiable consideration for whatever plays the team makes. Her coaches adore her and there's always talk of her being the first ever freshman to become captain, after her upperclassmen graduate.

Innocent and upbeat, Hex brightens up anyone's day when she walks by. Making her the object of infatuation for many of the boys in her year, protected by her upperclassman and the girls in her year group. Helpful and kind, yet far from being a pushover, Hex doesn't tolerate any disrespect or mistreatment. Fully capable of taking care of herself despite her small stature. She won't tolerate any mistreatment of others, and much like her older brother, Hex is a social butterfly, interacting with anyone and everyone in school.

Be it the school "loser" or not, people are people and no one has the right to judge. And, whilst mostly recognised for her pleasant demeanour and athletic pursuits, Hex is no dummy, in fact she gets very good grades and has a penchant for learning languages and involving herself in many "unusual" extra-curricular activities, in addition to trying new things, e.g. the tarot club, because why not?

Hex also volunteers every time the opportunity presents itself, be it taking care of the school animals or switching desks with another pupil. And is always assigned as the class "buddy" for any new students or for any students who are struggling. Making her very popular despite her just starting high-school, though she never lets the attention get to her. Confident and down to earth, no one has anything bad to say about this little ball of sunshine. And anyone who does will quickly find themselves ostracized by the rest of the school because coming for the school's sweetheart is a big no, no.

Ghost

Definitely that freshman that everyone hates but has no choice but to respect, despite being in his first year of high school. Ghost would end up being the ace of every academically based club, and would naturally be considered as club leader for when the older members graduate, much to his annoyance.

Ghost would be the boy that took everyone by storm, if his school's chess club hasn't won a tournament in ten years, they certainly will now. Everyone would try to poach him for their own academic club, practically falling to their feet, bribing him by any means necessary to join as a club member. Teachers would dread having him in their lessons, yet joyfully glad to actually have a worthy student as part of their class.

Ghost would be the comical blend of "nerdy" and "preppy", he's certainly stuck up to say the least, judging everyone and being very clear where he stands on hating the general population. But unfortunately, he's a boy genius taking advanced AP classes, putting his school on the map. Feared by both teachers and students alike and naturally as cute as a button, despite his smart mouth and meticulous nature, so he'd be quite the popular boy, much to his disgust.

So naturally with all of that, he'd have some haters, as he would be the first year that everyone wants to stuff into a locker but would never get the chance to. Well, I mean they could always attempt it....Though chances are, they would lose their hand, whilst the school mysteriously loses any test scores, grades and college applications for any of the students involved in laying a hand on him. And honestly, he'd most likely come from a very rich and powerful family so he'd be petty and destroy the livelihoods of anyone who crosses him.

[mydysfunctionalvampirefamily]

Hi excuse me, but what happens at a new moon? 👀

"Don't make this sad" 😂

"hey you're full of shit" insults are Aviva's love language.

Lola makes me so sad "people who move fast towards me usually don't have good intentions, especially when I've been bad." you haven't been bad sweet baby girl. 😭

It's interesting though because she's sad and traumatised and a little pathetic like Neil but whereas with Neil I'm like 😈 yes hurt him more, make him sob plz. Here I am don't you dare hurt her! I will end you.

The thought of John all on his own in this house so close to where the Aviva's death happened that he feels responsible for makes me rally sad. I'm glad he ended up choosing staying with his uncle.

Whenever John explains what he is doing he never actually explains what it is he's doing.

I'm gonna be honest I cannot keep all the magic terms straight completely, but I'll get the hang of it.

For someone who wants to coddle Lola and protect her at all cost I do cheer on Aviva calling her on her bullshit and John reasoning with her.

Not me saying NO! Quite loudly outside walking my dog because Lola said I should have been smarter, good things don't happen to me. 😭😭 What the fuck???

I know I already commented on it, but Aviva's mean supportiveness is great.

Oh no it got even sadder, so much sadder.

Oh good they're hugging. 🥰🥰

You know, yes there is a lot of fuckedupness here, but also in general this group has a lot more emotional intelligence than our vampire family.

"Apparently I'm a really good kisser" 😂😂

I know they all try, but I feel like John's logic and rationality is the best suited to poke through Lola's self hating bullshit.

Omg all the roles fit so well. 😭😭

"I didnt really have comfort as a child" the casualness with which this is said is extra devastating omg

Okay I'm sorry he want them to hold him down drowning in the traincar where Aviva died??? What the fuck?!?

He comes there a lot?? One of the most traumatic moments of his life? That doesn't seem healthy.

Goddamnit if both Lola and John would internalise the speeches they give each other just for one second!!!!

John's mom is such a fucking dick!!

And now she is physically there???? We need to end this bitch. Every word out of her mouth is so toxic!

My favourite thing about this system is that it sounds like they get to roll so many dice at once all the time. As someone who only has played 2 ttrpg session face to face, I am so envious of irl dice rolling.

Yes Aviva! End her! Or at least hit her! Good girl. Just so snarky too with it.

Just the nervous giggles when Rob picks up all his dice. Oh no.

Uhmmmm what??. No no. This is not allowed! How dare you, John's mom! Leave Aviva alone. 😭

Abusive controlling mothers wo only think about themselves, I hate them, but oh do I love to hate them. Happy mothersday to those who celebrate I guess.

This episode had everything! Trauma! Some goofs! More trauma!

[dailysimoneashley]

Actress Simone Ashley, 27, grew up in Surrey before moving to Los Angeles alone at 17. She found fame starring in Netflix’s Sex Education, watched by 40 million in its first month. She starred in season two of Bridgerton, which became Netflix’s most watched show in English in its first week. She lives in London ~ Times UK

Teachers called me “the brown girl” at school. I remember if I ever failed a test or misbehaved, the teachers would say, “Which one? Oh, the brown girl.” My first kiss was with a really popular boy in primary school but he denied it to our friends and said, “I would never kiss the brown girl.” I don’t speak about it much because I don’t want it to sound like trauma porn, but it is very real.

I didn’t grow up in a world where people would say, “You’re brown and beautiful.” I have always loved the colour of my skin. But the more I work in this industry, I look back and think no young person should ever feel discriminated against like I was.

We had champagne after we finished the sex scenes in Bridgerton. It felt like we’d done the hardest bit of the whole 11-month shoot. We did all of our intimacy scenes in one week. It’s a lot, gearing up for that every day and making sure you have enough sleep, doing whatever you have to do to make you feel ready. I am confident in myself and my body.

Therapy helps me clear my head. It can be a bit of a circus in this industry. There have been times when it was overwhelming, lonely and all a little bit crazy. The worst thing to do is to feel like the world is against you. Therapy has helped me learn how to communicate better, control my emotions and find useful skills for when things feel overwhelming. It means I can not take life so seriously and just enjoy it. If you can afford therapy, it’s an interesting way to learn more about yourself. Taking responsibility for yourself and who you are as an adult is important.

Corsets push everything down to the bottom of your stomach. That means when you take them off, you’ve got a little bump. I hated wearing those corsets filming Bridgerton. They’re so beautiful, but I hate them – never again! Luckily, we’re allowed to wear bras now instead and that has changed everything for me. I can do a 12-hour day and feel comfortable.

Going to an all-girls’ school made me grow up late. I was late to the part where I was interested in boys, and other parts of being a teenage girl. I was very much still a child when I was 14 or 15.

My mum tried to teach us Hindi and Tamil, but we grew up watching Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. Growing up between England and California, it was hard for me to tap into that. My mum would speak on the phone in Hindi, or talk to us in it, and I understood it. That ability has gone now, but I feel at home when I hear other people speaking it. Because I left home so young, I didn’t have the means or freedom to spend much time with my family in India. My mum also made me play French video games, so I learnt bits of French.

I wasn’t happy in England as a teenager. All of us have had a bit of a rough time at school. But I felt happy in California, where I spent a lot of time as a kid.

I want to give more people tattoos. When I was bored in Los Angeles in lockdown, I did lots of stuff like tie-dying and learning a language. Then I realised how easy it was to get a rotary tattoo pen, found a nice design and gave myself a tattoo. On some sets that I work on, people are like, “Cool, when we wrap, give me a tattoo.”

My white male counterparts have had it very differently from me. They have more of a voice. I have had to work harder to have that kind of equality. I have learnt to have my own power. I might be different, but if I respect myself and use my voice, eventually the people around me will give me that same treatment.

Empowering a minority shouldn’t be taboo. Especially in the UK, we love Indian food, we watch so many movies inspired by Bollywood music. The people from that community deserve to be empowered and loved. It shouldn’t be a taboo thing to say, you’re brown and amazing.

Simone Ashley stars in a short film for Johnnie Walker’s Bold Steps campaign with Diet Paratha

[notafunkiller]

I've seen that they talk about some of Blake's problems but I haven't understood very well, can you tell me what happened?

She is using a DV film promotion tour to promote her brand, acting as the film is a romcom: “grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it!”, being dismissive of the actual subject aka DV, people who have been through this.

She thanked her husband (who seems VERY problematic and controlling in my pov; wanting the woman by his side in the shadow or connected to him so it's THEIR success all the time & she seems just as problematic... tbh even their acting range is the sane aka the play the same way every character) on the red carpet, not screenwriter Christy Hall or even CoHo — giving him credit for writing the movie’s “iconic” rooftop scene. Which based on the timeline... would have happened during the strike🤡.

She brought him and Hugh Jackman to promote IEWU and also Deadpool & Wolverine (she wants the Oppenheimer x Barbie effect so badly).

She dismissed a good opportunity to give resources for DV help in an interview in a horrible way and let's not forget how she said basically that you're more than a DV victim, minimalizing the impact and basically implying you're not enough if you let yourself being definied by a freaking trauma.

More and more people started to share how rude she was on sets, people remember how most of her costars did not get along with her etc.

She and Ryan got married on a plantation... and they 100% got together while he was still married based on the timeline and if I remember right, she was with someone.

In 2014, Blake created a digital lifestyle and e-commerce site: Preserve. One of the first spreads was titled The Allure of the Antebellum. The shoot was a romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South - should I even mention how those outfits were connected to the slavery time? (source)

Kjersti Flaa, a journalist, uploaded her 2016 clip with Lively on August 10, where Flaa congratulates Blake on her pregnancy and asked about wardrobe (which was an essential subject in the film) and she was offended (even though they have already made the info public), and was a mean girl in response: “congratulating” the woman (who was not pregnant) on her own bump. Which is so "funny" since she accused Justin that he fat-shamed her

The context: Justin has a history of back problems and before a scene involving him lifting Blake into the air: "he went to his on-set trainer and asked how much she weighed and how could he train to protect his back from injury."

(And she also said she “felt he lingered longer than he should have with the kiss” and made her “uncomfortable”, but they did not get along anyway)

Sources have told THR that there was a fracture between Baldoni and Lively in the postproduction stage, wherein two different cuts of the movie emerged. Lively commissioned a cut of the movie from editor Shane Reid, who was an editor on Deadpool & Wolverine, according to multiple sources. (source)

And let's not forget how she defended Woody All*n and acted in a film of his after everything... She said he is very empowering (source).

Lively criticized a host at the Cannes Film Festival last month for making a r*pe joke referring Allen as well as other comments about other attendees. She separately declined to comment about the allegations to the Los Angeles Times, saying, “It’s very dangerous to factor in things you don’t know anything about. I could [only] know my experience. And my experience with Woody is he’s empowering to women.” (source)

More info: here and here

Some videos: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here