#i hate that the fear is still hardwired into me

[amethystsoda]

my parents are talking about “prophecies are being fulfilled” and it’s giving me so much end times prepper anxiety 😭

[lassieposting]

Chinhands

Okay so like, long post incoming, but here me out:

This isn’t my first post on Astarion & CPTSD – there’s this one here, about some of the more obvious symptoms he might end up dealing with during his healing journey; there’s also this one, about some ways his lover might use magic to help support him in a world without therapy; and then there’s this one, which is headcanons rather than meta, but has my thoughts on vampires as camouflage predators, and how Astarion might change physically as he goes from starving to well-fed. Those kinda tie into this so, linked for easy context.

But those posts all focus on the visible aspects of CPTSD – the symptoms everyone around you can pick up on. And. The thing is. A lot of the longterm effects of extensive trauma are actually not outwardly obvious. They're quiet. Insidious. Fundamental facets of your worldview become warped and twisted by your traumatic experiences. You look at the world - or at least, the parts of the world affectd by your trauma - through a goddamn funhouse mirror, and that's your normal. And part of the healing process - I'll pause here for us all to share a collective bitter laugh - is realising just how broken your idea of How The World Works is, and having to relearn from the ground up how things actually function outside of your trauma bubble.

So, y’all know what I think Astarion would struggle with without even realising it?

Disordered eating. A messy, complicated, love-hate relationship with food and how feeding makes him feel about himself.

Like. Most living things are hardwired to avoid certain negative experiences. A creature that has starved will often hoard food to ensure they won’t starve again. A creature that has fallen from a great height and experienced physical pain will be more careful to avoid other falls in future. A social creature that has experienced humiliation or disgrace will be distressed by those feelings, and adjust their behaviour to try and avoid feeling them again. The more bad experiences we have with a specific stimulus – drinking blood, in Astarion's case - the more we associate that stimulus with the negative physical or emotional consequences we will suffer, and the more avoidant we are likely to become.

As a real life example: an autistic child who talks enthusiastically about her special interest and is met with mockery and social rejection by her classmates will learn to hide her authentic self from the world to try and fit in: the pain of the bullying motivates her to distance herself from her own autistic tendencies, which are an essential component of how her brain works. She ends up trapped between her deep desire to engage with her special interest, and the training she has received from her peers that to do so is bad, unacceptable, social suicide. She learns to hate her autistic behaviours for causing her to be bullied, but she still feels the need to engage in them.

Astarion is in the same boat. He craves blood anyway as a vampire, and the hunger is made all the more intense because he is starving. But for the first 200-ish years of his undeath, we know that feeding has been a deeply unpleasant experience for him, and that will have left a deep imprint on how he sees the act of feeding, how it makes him feel. To eat is one of the most basic instincts of every single living (and, in this case, undead) creature, a fundamental source of positive emotions (satisfaction, fullness, satiety, enjoyment, happy taste buds etc) with a massive impact on a creature's quality of life - and Cazador has gleefully warped and twisted the very concept into an attack on his spawns' personhood. He uses it to dehumanize and humiliate them, and that's all they've ever known. So they will have learned to associate feeding with deeply negative emotions - humiliation, shame, disgust, fear and pain. For example:

STARVATION

Astarion tells us that Cazador fed him just barely enough to keep him functioning. Starvation is a trauma that, on its own, is likely to cause disordered coping behaviours in the victim. We actually see some of these in-game:

Astarion keeps a sizeable stash of bottled blood in his tent. This is an example of resource hoarding – he’s afraid of starving again, and he’s stockpiling food as a safeguard.

Individuals who have suffered starvation (or who have been forced to follow a restrictive diet by a parent as adolescents) often find that they struggle to impose healthy limits on their own food intake once food is plentiful lor they age out of the parent’s dietary control). We see this in Astarion during the bite scene: he can kill the player character if they fail a roll to convince or force him to stop feeding before he drains them dry.

We know that Astarion's feeding time is late at night – he tells the player that he’ll come to them for a meal once they’re in their bedroll and everyone is asleep. This seems like a strange choice, considering Astarion's tenuous self-control, but my personal headcanon is that he feeds so late because, like many starved creatures, he’s food-aggressive. Cazador absolutely seems the type to throw an insufficient number of rats to his starving spawn for them to fight over: Astarion is likely used to having to viciously defend his paltry meal, or one of his siblings will take it from him. So the player starts out offering him breakfast along with everyone else – but they’re interrupted, Gale nearly loses a hand when Astarion snaps at him, and the decision is made to feed him separately, so he doesn’t feel threatened.

SENSORY DISTRESS

Astarion talks about being compelled to choke down the blood of bugs and putrid rat corpses - at one point idly remarking that, "I've eaten things that would disgust most vultures." - so we know that a lot of what Cazador was feeding him was a) already dead and b) actively going off, and that offers up so many potential sensory triggers.

After death, blood begins to coagulate, clotting and curdling into a semisolid - that could be a texture issue.

Rotting corpses smell vile - that could be a scent issue.

We know putrid corpse blood doesn't taste good to vampires - iirc he calls it sewer water or dirty ditch-water, in comparison to "plonk" (woodland animal blood) and "fine wine" (the player character's blood).

Corpses often also come with the lovely bonus of maggots, which are a hardcoded signal to humans (and presumably elves) that food is no longer fit for consumption. The disgust response is instinctive, to make us avoid eating the rotten item. But Astarion would’ve had to choke it down anyway – probably wanting to hurl all the while.

NEGATIVE ASSOCIATIONS

Astarion tells us at one point that if he refused the disgusting carcasses Cazador gave him, his alternative was being flayed alive. That makes the disgusting food a choice, and one he doesn't really have any choice but to make. He would also need to be fed after his torture sessions in the kennels, to give him enough blood to heal himself before being sent out after more victims. This would eventually build a link in his mind between being fed and being hurt.  

There's also a dialogue where Astarion explicitly tells us that Cazador would suggest they dine together after Astarion brought someone home for his master to feed on. The alternative, as above, is getting flayed. So that makes a horrible three-way feedback loop of negative emotions: being forced to prostitute himself -> being forced to feed -> being tortured -> being forced to feed again -> and round and round again.

BODY IMAGE

This one is more headcanon than theory and ties into my other post about vampire biology, but it's still a point worth mentioning imo. Astarion's life has essentially revolved around sex, however unwilling, for 200 years, and that's become intrinsically linked with his identity - the way he sees himself, the way he interacts with the world. He makes several comments that all but explicitly state that he views himself as a prostitute, and his entire survival strategy in the outside world hinges on his ability to essentially leverage his attractiveness and his bedroom skills to snag himself a smitten protector. Iirc, there's a point in one of the breakup dialogue trees where he'll bitterly refer to sex as his only talent and say that he knows what people think he's good for. He is putting on an act almost constantly, always thinking about how best to portray himself to get the outcome he wants, how to make use of his target's desire for him.

And? This man has, for 200 years, been taught that people like him starving. He knows that the dehydrated-muscle, prominent-collarbone, deathly-pale hungry-eyed vampire look works for him. He's been found consistently desirable even though he doesn't look anything like a healthy, well-fed vampire should, and for someone who's so reliant on being hot, that's going to be hard to let go of. At this point, it may well make him anxious to be so well-fed that his body functions start coming back online, that he can fill out a little to how he looked when Cazador first turned him, that his unshakeable seducer act can be disrupted by things like blushing for flattery. After 200 years of seeing your body starving and thinking that that is how you are at your most attractive, being able to far better imitate a living elf could well be quite distressing for him.

So. At this point, as the game begins, Astarion most likely mostly hates feeding. It makes him feel terrible – degraded, humiliated, disgusted – and has almost no redeeming features. The blood he’s getting doesn’t even taste good, let alone sate his hunger. Feeding him is, essentially, just another torture technique of Cazador's. And yet, he still craves it desperately – debases himself begging for it, feels pathetically grateful for the tiniest scrap he’s given, finds his mouth watering at the sight of vermin. That’s already a horrible, mixed-up place to be emotionally.

And now it's going to get more confusing for him. Enter the player character.

Astarion gets to feed on a thinking creature for the first time, and with it, an array of positive emotions and sensations he's never gotten to experience before, in all the time he’s been a vampire. For example:

SOCIAL SUPPORT

When the PC calls Astarion out for trying to sneakily bite them in their sleep, he explains that he usually feeds on animals, but he's currently too weak and slow to bring any down. This is interesting, because in his Origin, it's a nightmare about Cazador that prompts him to bite a companion. But...I don't think it's a lie. We see multiple times throughout the game that Astarion doesn't cope well with being put on the spot - he gets flustered and kind of starts rambling - but this line comes off without hesitation. It is, if not the truth, still a truth. And the PC doesn't take advantage of that admission - he's vulnerable, but the PC doesn't hurt him or try to make him pay them with sex. Instead they just...feed him.

PHYSICAL STRENGTH & MENTAL CLARITY

He explicitly tells you that he feels strong after drinking from you – and he goes straight out hunting, backing that up – and he has a surprised exclamation that his mind is “finally clear”. He’s been living with hunger-induced brain fog for centuries. He must feel like you’ve given him his brain back.

JOY

He’s sated. He just had a meal that tasted good. He's getting all those positive food feelings for the first time - a massive rush of endorphins to a brain starved of happy chemicals for two hundred years. How many things have made this man happy since he died? It would be overwhelming.

CONNECTION

Held up against how Astarion is used to being treated, this gesture from the PC is an overwhelming show of kindness and generosity. They choose to trust him - even though, as he'll admit in the graveyard, that's an objectively stupid thing to do - and they offer freely something that makes him feel good. Him, a man who's usually forced to degrade himself for "rewards" that make him feel terrible. And as if that's not enough, they accept him for what he is, continue to give him the protection of a group, and they defend him to the others in the morning. He's feeling grateful and giddy and warm for the first time in centuries, and he knows it's all thanks to you.

But

That's going to give him a lot of complicated feelings, because he still has all those negative emotions related to feeding too. And they're not going to go away just because he's found out thinking creature blood is actually nice. They're going to clash against that new enjoyment and make him feel all confused and weird and mixed up. He might still feel shame, even though he enjoyed the meal. He might still find himself wrestling with pointless dread, because he associates feeding with torture and abuse, even though he knows Cazador is miles and miles away. It's a small step towards seeing feeding in a less negative light, but that’s all. And like, up to this point he hasn’t even realised that he might be able to enjoy drinking blood, because to him, Cazador's horrors are normal. That’s all he’s ever known – the only experience of food he’s ever had as a vampire. Feeding Is Horrible And Degrading is a fundamental fact of life that he’s just starting to realise...may not actually be true. That’s like...having a rug yanked out from under his feet. Scary. Distressing. Out of control. Which could make him lean more towards avoiding feeding for a while, to get that control back.

So how do the scales start to tip more towards really enjoying feeding?

I think it would be the introduction of the social aspect. As just this once becomes regular feeding arrangement, he's going to realise that he gets the high of all those positive emotions every time he feeds from the PC, and he's going to start associating that giddy, happy feeling with them specifically. Because we know that while animal blood is Fine He Guesses, and he does get merry on bear blood at one point, it's nothing remotely close to person blood. Woodland creatures still make up a decent chunk of his diet, but he doesn't get the same emotional kick out of them.

And like. He likes feeling good like that. It's addictive. So he'll keep wanting to go back for more – making excuses to spend more time with them, with feeding being a very convenient excuse. He's creating a positive feedback loop for himself of happy chemicals and like, crush feelings, and every time he indulges, he’s unwittingly handing over tiny little fragments of trust and affection in exchange. It's difficult not to start liking someone who makes you feel good, especially if you're so unfamiliar with the feeling. He finds himself that little bit less tense around his willing midnight snack. He laughs more easily around them, finds he's more inclined to indulge do-gooder tendencies, realises he's starting to enjoy spending time with them. He doesn't necessarily realise it, but feeding is no longer just about quenching his blood thirst. It's become a bonding activity. He’s like a semiferal rescue animal, building an emotional connection with you as protector and provider. He’s learning that you’re trustworthy.

And then, as your relationship with him develops and deepens, sex gets involved, and he plays himself.

In one of the dialogues where Astarion offers the PC sex, he explicitly calls it a reward for feeding him, and flirtatiously brings up PC's biting kink - that he can tell they enjoy it when he drinks their blood. This always lowkey makes me laugh because like. Up to this point, Astarion has had no reason to ever connect feeding with sex. Cazador doesn't let him drink from thinking creatures, and since Astarion talks about his prey being "dragged away" to be fed on, it seems like Cazador generally took his meals privately, so mixing the two isn't something Astarion got from watching him. This is something he's picked up from you.

Anyway. I'm not sure which way around they happen, but during his first sex scene, Tav gets the option to encourage him to bite them again, and he will. Obviously, he's not going to turn down "vintage wine", but this also makes strategic sense from the perspective of his plan to get Tav to protect him - he's probably thinking that he's locked them down because they can't scratch this particular itch elsewhere. They now need him. Except - whoops, he actually likes sleeping with them, and he's starting to catch feelings. And because he's come to associate biting Tav with all those good feelings anyway, making it A Sex Thing just shifts his perspective a little, makes him realise that he’s getting something out of these interactions that he gets hooked on.

Feeding has become a source of emotional intimacy. He's beginning to feel loved, cared for, valued. Close to the PC. And that, to someone so utterly love-deprived, is potentially enough to make it feel more positive than negative over time.

(As a side note, I quite like the idea that it'll become a sort of self-soothing strategy for him for a while. If he's stressed or afraid or hurting, he'll nibble on the PC to remind and reassure himself that he can - that he's safe and loved and no longer starving. He'll nip at them to deliberately induce those positive feelings of emotional closeness in himself, if he thinks they'll outweigh the bad ones that come with.)

But even so, those bad associations will probably never fully go away or stop affecting him. He’ll probably still always hear Cazador's belittling laughter if someone walks in on him feeding – look at you, boy, not so proud now, are you? Crawling on the floor for vermin, how utterly pathetic. He’ll probably always wrestle with feelings of stress and anxiety after feeding for no obvious reason, because his primitive lizard brain still treats it like a traumatic experience sometimes even when he's feeding on his living, trusted lover. It’s going to take him such a long time to wrap his head around just how fucked up all the reactions Cazador trained into him are, how different from his new experiences as a free vampire.

Anyway. Idk how well I explained all these thoughts but. Yeah. Astarion + disordered eating issues.

[hellsbroadcaster]

What kind of characteristics do you think Alastor would need in someone for a successful relationship (platonic or not)? Does that match what he THINKS he needs?

So personally, a successful relationship with Alastor doesn’t exist. And the one exception I’ll make is Rosie.

But I think someone could be the absolutely perfect and still not be enough for him. And the reason is primarily Alastor himself.

The way I see him is very having a deep avoidant attachment style. He has it in him to care, but it’s never fulfilling for him. I think it’s because he’s also had to live a life where he grew up in survival mode. And it’s hardwired in him to be smart about his choices and his decisions. He’s had to work harder than everyone, especially when you consider him as a black man growing up in a white world. You think he didn’t get spat on? Called all the names in the book? He didn’t face struggles and challenges to be as successful as he did? He learned quickly that in order to get by you have to break rules, you have to play dirty.

He looks at encounters with others through a new kind of lens. How can this person assist me? What can I use from this person? What benefits me with creating a friendship with them? He doesn’t know how to frame a relationship where he isn’t getting something out of it. And it’s not totally wrong, relationships are a give and take but Alastor is mostly take.

His main interest is himself, and he will never see someone as just them. Even with Rosie. There’s benefits to befriending her.

Someone who is deeply devoted, who makes him their whole world would make him run for the hills. When someone starts to get too close where it makes him question, make a conscious thought of ‘is there another way?’ He’s pulling away. Because Alastor can love, he can feel. He is capable of expressing and experiencing human emotion but he chooses to separate himself from them. And I think knowing and understanding those emotions also makes him quite well at manipulating. And this is what I think in a shipping sense happened with Vox.

Alastor is likable, he’s charming, he’s charismatic, he knows what to say and how to act. He plays a role, a part so well. He can change up to anything if it means getting what he wants in the end. He doesn’t mind it one bit. But he loves that ppl fear him. He loves creating fear. Being isolated doesn’t really bother him. He enjoys his own solitude. He doesn’t want to be tied down. Him being in a deal is killing him bro. Playing someone else’s rules and not his own? He hates it.

To be in a successful relationship you have to be selfless. You have to be considerate of the other person. You can’t just only think of yourself and Alastor isn’t willing to do that, not unless there’s something he’s getting out of it.

You’d pretty much have to be Nifty!! Complete compliance, she loves him, doesn’t ask anything of him. Shes insanely herself and she loves how he is. It doesn’t bother her one bit. She’s happily at his side for whatever. She’s probably the most loyal.

[mollrat101]

Symbols Analysis: Red Hair

Part of the Ava and Deborah Could Be Endgame series where I talk about the evidence of Ava and Deborah’s romantic love story. This is part of my Symbols series where I talk about the various elements that serve their love story. You can read the whole series here on Tumblr or on A03. 

What’s this? An essay that I didn’t promise before season 2 and yet the muses forced me to spit this baby out? What can I say, I am Botticelli so taken in by the beauty and mystery of red hair that instead of painting I screeched about gay subtext via my keyboard. 

But yes, here’s where I talk about red hair symbolism and I promise to you all I am still working on the symbolism of Deborah’s flannel shirts and the other two last romantic parallels. If how easy it was to write this essay is any indication, hopefully those will come out soon. 

Enjoy! 

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Because red hair is the rarest hair color in the world (1-2% of the world population), red hair can be quite powerful symbols in art and media. 

Artists have used red hair for centuries in their works to “suggest promiscuity, sensuality, deviousness, and—above all—otherness”. 

Cultural attitudes towards red hair throughout history have been, to put it mildly, mixed. 

“Throughout history, redheads have been feared and revered, loathed and adored, degraded and exalted. No other single human trait has provoked such a dichotomy of emotions in such a large number of fellow humans. It is as boiling is to freezing or despair is to hope. It is as hate is to love.” 

Redheads have been associated with witchcraft, sorcery and vampires which lead to a lot of persecution. Plus, there is some mix of other prejudices such as anti-Irish sentiment and anti-Semitism as red hair can be found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations (of which I believe Hannah is a part of). 

But on the other hand there’s also a long history of cultural attitudes where red hair is depicted as beautiful and erotic, as exemplified by the famous Birth of Venus by Botticelli where the goddess of love and beauty is depicted with red hair. 

“This business of being attracted to the color red is very hardwired into us,” Harvey said. Early humans developed the ability to differentiate between reds, greens, and blues as an evolutionary mechanism to help them (among other things) better forage for ripe, brightly colored fruits in overwhelmingly green forests. “And that’s even before all of the associations with fire, and warmth, and sun, and blood,” Harvey continued. Red is thus a highly visceral color associated with survival, sex, and strong emotion.

On its own Ava having red hair doesn’t have to be significant, but there are 4 key instances in the first season that suggest red hair is significant to the love story between Deborah and Ava. 

While the red hair symbolism is more relevant to Deborah’s desires, let’s talk briefly about the symbolism of red hair means for Ava herself. 

Ava, Red Hair and Differentness

Ava is a complex character and so in many ways she both lives up to and subverts stereotypes of a red-haired character. 

She can be temperamental, passionate, impulsive and a bit wild. Red hair tends to be associated with fire which I’ve mentioned before I see Ava as strongly connected to that element. 

The deviousness, while not true of Ava’s character as a whole as she’s not good at lying, is relevant considering the betrayal of Ava sending that email about Deborah. But that has less to do with following stereotypes so much as demonstrating that Ava is a human who is capable of both good and bad actions. 

Most redheads are portrayed as either nerdy (mostly men) or hypersexual (mostly women). Ava is both and neither at the same time, subverting the stereotype. She’s not exoticized or hypersexualized. She is a very sexually active and open person, yes, but it never feels fetishistic or like we are meant to view her as a sexual object. Ava’s sexuality exists as one important part of her, but certainly not her only or even her most important trait. Ava is portrayed as pretty uncool, which she admits herself. She’s socially awkward and a little inept, unfashionable and socially isolated. But she’s not nerdy in a traditional sense either. She’s not portrayed as academically gifted, in fact she drops out of college, but she is certainly intelligent. She doesn’t have stereotypical nerdy passions as she’s a comedy writer and she likes to use drugs and party. 

As I’ve said before, red hair historically has been associated with witchcraft and sorcery. While there’s no magic portrayed in the show, I have compared Ava to an angel before and that Ava does seem to have magically shown up in Deborah’s life just when she needed her. Ava is also incredibly intuitive and perceptive, which while not magical is certainly deemed a type of feminine knowledge similar to witchcraft. Also, a couple of times we see Ava somewhat predicting events such as Ruby’s breakup with Kelly and even her father’s death. Not a significant correlation, but one that I still thought was interesting. 

Ava can also be associated with some of red hair’s positive connotations like passion, fierceness, courage, determination, independence, love, sensuality, and vivaciousness. “Natural red hair is perceived as striking, unusual, and uncommon.” While that idea could be viewed negatively, it also seems to fit Ava in a nutshell. She is the different element coming into Deborah’s life and it’s hard not to be charmed by her (as Deborah is).  

I’m not sure if this is intentional, but one comparison you could make in terms of red-haired funny women is, of course, the most iconic of them all: Lucille Ball. 

Deborah is more of an analogy for Ball than Ava seeing as how she was a classic TV actress who created and starred in a sitcom with her husband. If you want more information about that comparison I’d recommend checking out @jj-lockd​’s video series about Frank and Deborah and Lucy and Desi over on Tik Tok (1, 2, 3). But nevertheless, the red hair certainly gives at least a brief comparison to Ava. 

One of the more significant negative associations Ava’s red hair could symbolize is further emphasizing how socially isolated Ava feels. 

“The popular stereotypes negatively affect the lives of people with red hair. They often have low self-esteem, experience insecurity, and feel a profound sense of being not only different from other people but also inferior. As implied by the phrase “red-headed stepchild,” people with red hair often feel neglected, mistreated, or unwanted.” 

Ava doesn’t feel like she belongs much anywhere: not in Waltham, not in Los Angeles and (as of right now) not in Las Vegas. While her hair is not attributed as the cause of this, it’s still a common trope in stories to have the red-haired person feel out of place. 

In modern times there has been a movement to push back against red-haired children being bullied by their peers. It’s not clear that Ava was bullied, but she does say she was “uncool” and clearly friendless in school. 

We also just see how desperately Ava wishes someone to take her pain seriously and seems to get rebuffed at every turn, most notably by Kayla and Jimmy. With her bad tweet, Ava gets orchestrated by her professional circle. In episode 3, we also learn that she was dumped by her ex-girlfriend Ruby three months ago. When we meet her mother, Nina, we also see how much her mother dismisses her and her ambitions. The one exception in terms of support is her father who seems quite proud of her, but unfortunately he passes away leaving her without that. I partially read Ava’s entitlement as stemming from her desperate desire to fill the void left behind by anyone really believing in her and her dreams. If no one was going to believe in her, she was going to believe in herself the logic goes. 

It’s a basic human need to be loved and appreciated and this is exactly what Deborah offers for Ava. Deborah doesn’t needlessly flatter her (like the British writers do) and she holds her accountable for her bad behavior, but she also listens to her and slowly starts to see and value Ava’s unique perspective and her gifts and show as much belief in her talent as Ava has for her. 

One part I see of Ava’s arc is to let go of this desire to be “cool” and to instead follow her genuine desires and values regardless of whether or not it receives external validation. For her to value herself and what she can uniquely contribute and to not see her differentness as negative which could all be encapsulated in her red hair. 

And part of why she can do that is because she’s received the love and acceptance she’s been looking for from Deborah. 

Many people don’t like red hair and will harshly judge those who have it, but it’s important for her to find someone who loves and admires this trait of hers. Maybe the same person who also seems to admire other “strange” parts of her appearance (*cough* hands *cough*). 

Which speaking of…

Deborah’s Desires

Despite Ava being the character with red hair, the symbolism of red hair shows up mostly prominently around Deborah. 

Earlier when I referenced the historical mixed cultural feelings of love and hate of red hair, of attraction and repulsion also perfectly encapsulates Deborah’s feelings towards Ava. Throughout much of season 1, Deborah is torn between letting Ava get closer and pushing her away. In one instance she will be turned off by some of Ava’s more abrasive sides but then Ava will surprise her in another, endearing Ava to her. 

When we meet Deborah she seems to be trapped in a life that doesn’t seem to quite make sense to her anymore, unable to figure out how to move out of the rut she’s found herself in. She seems to be sleepwalking through her life. 

Ava crashes into Deborah’s life and brings back classic things associated with fire and the color red: passion, creativity, determination, sensuality, courage, love and vitality. 

But as Ava is paralleled with Frank, we also see that Ava has the potential to also destroy Deborah. To be a wildfire due to her self-destructive habits that could burn Deborah’s life down. She won’t as the point is that Ava will right the wrongs committed by Frank, but the association with red and fire suggests it is possible though. After all, the most powerful and strongest loves need to exist with the possibility of great pain. Deborah will never find a perfect partner who will never hurt her, but needs to find a person who would make the possibility of pain worth it. To realize that the price you pay for walling yourself off from hurt is also to keep yourself from joy and love. 

There are 4 key instances of red hair in Deborah’s story that both reflect Deborah’s hidden desires both romantic and sexual, her desire for love and freedom but also how she can combine those desires with a real lasting love and a feeling of home. 

We’re going to go in chronological order. 

Josefina’s Introduction to Ava

Before Deborah even lays eyes on Ava, Josefina lets Deborah know she has a visitor. 

“Deborah, a girl is here from Jimmy, a redhead.” 

Now this is the only time I can recall where Ava’s red hair is actually mentioned by anyone. Like a lot of people with red hair, that’s often the first thing people notice about them so it makes sense that to make it clear who she’s talking about, Josefina mentions her hair. 

Josefina mentions the redhead part once she sees Deborah’s look of confusion, possibly thinking she needs to jog Deborah’s memory. Of course, she doesn’t know Deborah isn’t aware Jimmy sent Ava against her wishes yet. 

Okay great, so what? 

Well, this makes me think of another time in which Josefina says something that seems to reflect more on Deborah than what Josefina actually means. 

Josefina talking about her niece: “She has plans with her roommate. I don’t think it’s her roommate. I think it’s a girlfriend, but--”

I’ve mentioned before on my Tumblr how this is an interesting thing for Josefina to say in this moment because Ava has been Deborah’s roommate for the past 2 weeks. This conversation holds no relevance later, so you have to wonder why the writers kept this bit in unless the writers are trying to tell us something. Like that there is a possibility that Deborah and Ava being roommates and getting closer isn’t just platonic, there’s a potential for romance there. 

So back to the redhead comment. Is Josefina trying to suggest anything here? Like “hey, Deborah, there’s a red-haired girl here. I know how you like those, so brace yourself.” I mean I would love that, but I’m not sure it’s super conscious on Josefina’s part. 

Consider the fact that Josefina is Deboah’s house manager which means Josefina knows intimately every part of Deborah’s house which, as talked about by many people before in the fandom including myself, gives you a deep insight into Deborah’s unguarded self. 

Which means that Josefina has seen the Plum Brandy painting that sits in between Deborah’s bathroom and bedroom. A painting of a young red-haired woman. A painting of a person that Deborah keeps privately in her bedroom and not advertising to the world. A figure Deborah can see as she goes to sleep. 

Let’s talk about her next. 

The Plum Brandy painting

This painting is the inspiration for this essay. If you haven’t yet, please go read @lush-retina​’s beautiful analysis about this painting. 

Edouard Manet - Plum Brandy - 1877

“Plum Brandy is an image Deborah has woken up to for possibly many years, it is an image she walks towards every single morning. It is an image of Ava painted long ago on canvas, and on Deborah's inner eye.

Whether or not she fully grasps the profundity of it, Ava is depicted as an icon of hope, creativity, and intimacy in Deborah's life. Just as Ellen Andrée [the model] was a muse to Manet and many others.” 

Plum Brandy follows in the tradition of artists finding inspiration and beauty in women with red hair. As her analysis talks about, the painting can represent many of the associations of red hair with passion, creativity, inspiration and beauty. 

While the painting itself doesn’t sexualize the red haired woman (although there have been some interpretations), one could interpret her place in Deborah’s house to have sexual connotations as she lives in between Deborah’s bedroom and bathroom. Two places associated with vulnerability, nakedness and sometimes sexual intimacy. Places that many of us might share with only our lovers.

The Plum Brandy girl is seen as an object of beauty and comfort to Deborah as she is the first thing she sees when she wakes up and the last thing she sees before she goes to sleep, almost like a lover. She gently watches over Deborah. Considering she is buried deep in Deborah’s house where few will get to see her suggests she has a private meaning to Deborah, not one which Deborah would like to advertise to the rest of the world. 

As lush-retina nicely put it, if Deborah's house (according to the set designer) is symbolic of Deborah herself like a rose (there’s layers)-a red rose, if you will, furthering the romantic connotations- then that location in her house could be considered the pistil of the rose, the female reproductive part of the flower. And again the fact that it’s associated with the painting of a woman heavily suggests Deborah’s queer sexual desires and that Ava is Deborah’s romantic and sexual fantasy come to life. 

The real-life doppelganger of the Plum Brandy girl, Deborah has barred from entering her bedroom. A possible reading could be that Deborah isn’t quite ready for her private fantasy and the reality of getting what she secretly desires to collide quite yet. The possibility of humiliation, pain and confronting her long-repressed desires is too much for her to handle at this moment. For now, Deborah is comfortable with her painted doppelganger and letting her voice in via calling her, but likely soon she will crave more closeness and letting Ava cross more intimate boundaries. 

To sum up: the Plum Brandy girl represents Deborah’s romantic and sexual desires that she hides deep within her heart. Her red hair is meant to represent what Deborah most wants in her life: passion, creativity, love, courage and warmth, like a nice fire or the warmth of the sun. Ava is the person who brings all of this into her life and the painting represents how long Deborah has been yearning for Ava to find her. 

In the Waves painting

While having the time of her life blackmailing Marty, Deborah lays down in a bed that features a painting of a naked red-haired woman on it. 

This painting is called In the Waves. It was created by Paul Gauguin. 

From what I can gather from interpretations I’ve watched, the painting is meant to represent a desire to leave civilization in order to enter a more primitive, instinctual existence. The woman is throwing herself into the sea and therefore embracing nature instead of societal expectations. 

The painting can be interpreted in a couple of different ways. She could be throwing herself into the sea in despair and muffling her mouth in anguish. That’s a very sad interpretation considering there’s a connection between Ava and death and suicide. 

But the painting is placed in a bedroom, so let’s just assume there’s a sexier interpretation of it. 

Ivy, Ava’s parallel, is the one who bought this painting and put it in this bedroom. This is likely a spare bedroom considering how minimally it’s decorated, so in a way distancing from Marty’s bedroom and Deborah being associated with Marty’s private space in this moment. Even then, still bedrooms are associated with intimate and vulnerable acts like sleeping and sex. You could interpret the woman in the painting muffling her mouth as trying to stifle her cries of pleasure. 

Water is a widely used symbol for the subconscious which houses our deepest desires. Deborah being near the painting symbolizes Deb choosing to forget societal expectations and enter into an existence where she follows her natural desires. Following her very gay desires with Ava. 

However, one problem is that we later learn at the end of the episode that Ava can’t swim. One way to read this is that Ava can’t survive for long just being a desire in Deborah’s subconscious mind. She has to bring her to the surface in order for any of this to be realized.

In this scene, Deborah is getting her revenge on Marty screwing her out of her dates. She’s hitting him hard in a couple of ways and one way that’s more speculation based on this painting. 

She’s taking advantage of his young and naive partner by persuading her to go against Marty’s wishes and show her the house. In a way, this is payback for Marty constantly dismissing her as a potential partner he’ll show off in public because of her age. She takes advantage of Ivy’s naivety, desire for recognition, her and Marty’s weak bond and being easily impressionable. But more importantly, Deborah uses this to potentially screw over Marty financially (what he cares about most, let’s be real) by blackmailing him about his alimony payments. 

But of course, we know none of these schemes end up making a lasting impression on Marty. In their toxic relationship of one upping each other, Marty more or less comes out unscathed. Deborah is the one who suffers the most. She gets humiliated, harassed, assaulted, her career taken out of her control, belittled and left alone as Marty has no trouble finding another partner while Deborah struggles to find romantic and sexual fulfillment. 

But there is one potential way Deborah can finally break free of this toxic dynamic and get her revenge in the best possible way for her. 

The sweetest revenge Deborah could ever get on Marty is to enter into a happy romantic relationship with Ava. One where, unlike with him, she is supported and loved unconditionally, and she is sexually satisfied. And whether or not he’s pissed about it hardly matters, as Deborah is too happy to care. 

So in this scene Deborah uses the parallel!Ava (Ivy) to take pictures of her enjoying being in bed with painted!Ava and that’s just absolutely delightful. It’s as if Deb is preemptively rubbing it in Marty’s face and I believe we should support that journey for her. 

Marty is the kind of man Deborah thinks she should be with. If the painting is talking about bucking societal expectations, then Marty represents the toxic heteronormativity that has made Deborah so miserable. 

Ava represents freedom from those expectations. She represents Deborah following what she truly wants both as an artist and in her personal life. Following the idea of what red hair represents, Deborah is embracing more wildness, embracing differentness, and diving into a love so powerful and passionate it’s like a wave. 

Aidan

Wait, wouldn’t this say more about DJ because he is her partner? 

Well, remember that everything in this show is about Ava and Deborah (at least to some extent) so even this really says more about Deborah. 

First of all, I see DJ and Aidan as actually a romantic parallel to Deborah and Ava. Same first initials (DJ’s full name is even Deborah Junior) and same hair colors. 

But the other thing I find interesting is the idea that DJ and Deborah aren’t nearly as different as they think they are and how DJ’s choice of partner of Aidan could reflect that. 

Despite seeming to struggle to understand each other, DJ and Deborah actually have a quite a lot in common. They’re both creative, passionate, aggressive, fierce, they share a love of the dramatic and being the center of attention, and despite what Deborah says they share some taste in style (e.g. DJ desiring Deborah’s tennis bracelet). 

They also, I would argue, have a similar taste in the type of partner they would like. 

Aidan and Ava are both comfortable with letting their partners be more of the center of attention and they are unconditionally loving and supportive. 

And, of course, they both have red hair. Which I feel like isn’t an accident considering they are the only two red-haired people in the cast. 

We don’t know a ton about Aidan but a few things we do know is how much he means to DJ (“Ava, this is the love of my life”), how much he loves DJ, we know he’s a boxer so association with blood and vitality and we know has some history of not taking care of himself and/or self-destructive habits, similar to Ava and like a fire burning out of control (“Before you, I didn’t care what happened to me in the cage. But now, I gotta be careful. Because I can’t risk anything that would ruin the life we’re gonna build together.”). 

We don’t know if DJ has always had a thing for red-haired men, but let’s just imagine that’s true. 

I have no idea whether sexual attraction is genetic or not. Could relatives find the same traits in partners attractive? Honestly, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. But luckily, this isn’t about science but a story and stories can create these parallels to signal something to the audience. 

If we take it true that the Plum Brandy girl represents Deborah’s romantic and sexual fantasy, then Deborah shares DJ’s love of red hair except for the opposite gender and she desires the same person who will be comforting, reliable and the love of her life in the same way Aidan is for DJ. 

Conclusion

While looking at all of these instances of red hair, overwhelmingly the evidence is about how Deborah doesn’t just see Ava as inspirational and a source of courage for her, but also that she is an object of beauty and desire for her. 

While red hair can symbolize how Ava might feel othered, same with how Deborah feels about Ava’s hands, what makes Ava different is desirable to Deborah. Not only does she accept it, but she is turned on by it. 

Deborah makes fun of many parts of Ava’s body, but all the parts she makes fun of are also traits that people tend to list as what they find most attractive: hands, lips, legs, breasts and, of course, hair. And you’ll notice that Deborah only makes fun of the cut of her hair, not the color of it. The Plum Brandy reveals that Deborah loves red hair. 

I feel just like how cultural attitudes reveal both adulation and repulsion for red hair, Deborah struggles with fighting between her private desires for a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman and the social stigma she’ll face to those who are disgusted by that choice and dislike it for being outside of what they consider normal. 

(Disclaimer: Just want to be clear here I’m not saying being discriminated based on red hair is the same thing as being discriminated for being queer. I’m just making an analogy.)

But for both of their characters, part of their story is about embracing their desires and values even if they aren’t understood, as it’s enough that they accept, love and see each other. 

What I hope for Deborah, as this symbol is most attached to her, is that she embraces its call for passion, love, courage, non-conformity and vitality and to let her desire and love for that finally be allowed into the light.

[kstewdeux]

@inukagfluffweek

August 14, 2021 - Family

Sure

Summary: Inuyasha & Kagome discuss starting a family

“Knee,” Kagome whined softly as her foot prodded her husband’s leg so it would go where she wanted, “Knee Inuyasha.”

With a tired sigh, Inuyasha slid his foot up until it rested comfortably against his thigh and adjusted his hips so falling asleep in that position wouldn’t make him lock up. It was a tried and true ritual. One that he didn’t mean to perpetuate but Kagome was always the last one to go to bed. Always. So by the time she changed and brushed her hair and washed her face and did whatever else she felt inclined to do, he was typically asleep in a position he found comfortable. Kagome told him he slept like a vampire but having met and fought vampires Inuyasha had no idea what she was talking about. Besides, he didn’t know why it had always seemed to matter how he slept. Sitting up had just been how he’d done it for over a hundred years and even though three years had gone by, he still wasn’t used to those while laying down business. Having a body trained not to move wasn’t ideal for laying down and he usually woke up stiff. His muscles locking up for absolutely no reason out of habit. Sitting up, having muscles that locked was useful. Not so for how the rest of the world went down for the night.

Still, Kagome slept laying down. Always had. Always would. And he planned on sleeping next to her for the rest of her hopefully long life. Which killed the monk. Even occasional overnight exorcisms were out of the question. Sunup to sundown only.

“That better?” he yawned and Kagome nodded against the arm she was using as a pillow while Inuyasha’s hand absently played with tendrils of her hair.

One of the things he liked best was that in this position he could feel her ribs expand with each breath and the steady rhythm was soothing. Every couple found a sleeping position that worked for them it would seem and with his primary issue being hardwired survival anxiety, a cuddling position where no backs were being exposed worked best.

Problem with this position was that it’d make co-sleeping with an infant dangerous. Not that…that they were trying or even planning on having brats. Hell, they’d never spoken about it but by some unspoken understanding, they’d been careful. Kinda. Sometimes. Okay, fine, mainly they’d been whinging it and been lucky as hell.

But…you know…maybe one day…

Lips twitching upward, Inuyasha allowed himself to imagine what their own puffy blob of flesh would look like. Newborn babies…well they weren’t exactly the cutest things in the planet. More they looked like boiled prunes - both in color and looks. And the screams. But once they hit a few months old they definitely started looking more like tiny people and you could start seeing the parents. From a strangers perspective anyway. Miroku’s twins had always looked identical but they went through phases and who they favored depended on which parent was standing closest….

God he hoped whatever they had one day - not that he was even sure they’d have babies - was a girl. He’d make a decent looking boy or girl. After all, minus the coloring, he looked just like his mother who had been very pretty. Kagome…Kagome would only make a pretty girl. Sota sure as hell didn’t look like her though so maybe there were some okay looking boy genes in there but Inuyasha for the life of him could not imagine what a Kagome-looking boy would even be.

Nah. If they did one day have a…

“Why you purring?” Kagome hummed bemusedly in such a way that left him powerless to stop said noise. A noise that he’d only discovered he made since she fell back into his life. At first it bothered him that she called the chest growl thing a ‘purr’ but seeing as how he didn’t have a better name, he just rolled with it.

“Dunno,” he laughed softly.

“What were you thinking about?” Kagome hummed as she slowly and awkwardly began trying to roll towards him - something which had the purring noise stop immediately. It didn’t matter that his brain knew they were safe and there was no need to worry about being exposed. His body though….was hard wired to worry.

She froze.

“I didn’t…”

“S’not the question. It’s the stupid back thing,” Inuyasha reassured her wearily before running one hand over his face, “Look, I was thinking about us having kids, alright?”

The slow smile that bloomed on her lips as she sat up brought the soft purring sound back.

“And what were your initial thoughts?” Kagome asked curiously and the purring sound intensified.

“How newborns look like meat sacks,” he offered as he stretched his legs out and yawned, “And how they’re loud. And obnoxious. And how they shit everywhere…”

“Ah but said things made you happy,” Kagome observed and shrugging, Inuyasha didn’t deny it. Couldn’t anyway given the vibrations rumbling from his chest. Well, that was what they assumed it meant anyway. Could be he was dying or something. Wouldn’t that be the final kick in the balls.

“Thinking about it and living it are two different things. Reality is I’d fuck them up,” Inuyasha countered with an ill-checked half-grin, “You’d have to go around fixing them all the time.”

“You’d be a good daddy,” Kagome soothed as she lay back down and stared up at the ceiling - allowing Inuyasha to fully relax by covering her back. She never really thought of Inuyasha as the anxious type but apparently that was his secret to surviving so long and once they’d figured it out and pinned down his triggers to better avoid them, he’d actually been significantly less…grumpy. In fact, he could be downright pleasant most of the time.

Miroku and Sango had told her on more than one occasion that Inuyasha seemed, at times, like a completely new person. In public, he was still by and large snippy and obstinate but among friends and in private, his natural state of being sans anxiety was much more Kagome-like than any of them previously believed. Looking back, he had always seemed to find comfort in being around others but he was never what anyone would call sensitive or attune to emotional needs of others. In recent months, however, he’d been surprisingly observant, kind and gentle.

Well, actually it wasn’t all that surprising. The gentleness yes but the rest of it? No. Every time one of them lost it during the quest, Inuyasha was always the one who stepped up and did exactly the right thing to bring his friends’ minds back to center. In fact, his brand of abrasive encouragement was what saved their souls from being devoured by the moth demon’s trap. Whenever any of them felt like giving up, Inuyasha had been the one to encourage them to keep going. In some ways Inuyasha was so forgiving it was beyond understanding. For all his insults and for all his aggression, Inuyasha could be…damningly gracious. Kikyo being, well, Kikyo. Sango stealing his sword. Miroku trying to kill him. Shippo pulling trick after trick. None of those things ever drove him away.

That wasn’t to say Inuyasha didn’t get irritable or react poorly when said things happened but he did tend to let things go eventually and truly act like nothing happened. And his brand of love was protection and providing so there was that too.

So maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that being kind and gentle was his calm state of being. Now that he was more comfortable and no one was in imminent danger of dying a horrible, painful death; now that Kagome had been returned to him and everything worked out, how his natural being manifested was different was all.

But his anxiety still did rear it’s ugly head on occasion. New things. Unexpected things. Any slightly uncomfortable thing and he’d instantly snap his abrasive behavior back into place. There were also his triggers of course but those could be negated.

For example, he never slept with his back exposed and now that Kagome was, sorta, an extension of himself, his body decided to make him skittish at night if she too was left ‘open to attack.’ Not fun for anyone involved - the amount of twitching alone had kept them both awake until they figured out the issue.

“Don’t know how to be a father,” he sighed sadly - the purring sound grounding to halt, “So maybe…maybe kids isn’t something we should do. What…what if I hurt them? They won’t be like me. They’ll be mostly human. I’ll be too rough.”

“No because of that fear, I imagine you’d treat them like they might shatter,” Kagome pointed out and with that, Inuyasha reached over to intertwine their fingers.

“I could turn one day. You…or they might get hurt and I’ll make it worse,” he offered in a small voice, “I’m dangerous. I shouldn’t…and what if they can’t control what I give them? What if they’re born and…and they’re just like that all the time?”

Turning her head to look at his defeated face, Kagome sighed and waited for him to look at her. When he did, the worry mixed with longing made her heart ache. He wanted kids. That much was clear from his expression as was the fact that he didn’t trust himself.

“Inuyasha, I always bring you back, don’t I?” she pointed out and with a faint nod of acknowledgment, her statement seemed to soothe some of the anxiety that needed checking, “And our baby will be part me too. So it’ll have both….”

“It could purify itself. Hurt itself,” he countered shakily, “And we’re happy just the two of us. What if I’m a bad father and you end up hating me? What if it ends up being a mistake? Ruins everything?”

“I will never abandon you,” Kagome promised as she brought his hand up to her lips and gave his thumb a quick kiss, “Never.”

A nod and a relieved sigh. Like he knew that to be the case but wanted to hear it anyway. There was still some tension though which meant his fears hadn’t been addressed completely and so Kagome waited for him to continue. It had taken a few months but anymore he discussed everything with her. From feelings to fears to his past. The only thing off the table was Kikyo but that was more her hang up than his.

From his perspective, he found himself much lighter when he heard her opinion rather than just imaging what she was thinking. His inner monologue was usually depressing and rather cruel. Always assuming everyone hated him or was upset with him in some way. That everyone thought the worst. How he needed to receive love was verbal affirmations. Kagome would’ve thought it was touch but she discovered words were much more effective. What would’ve happened if she just told him back then how deeply he was loved? But, alas, she didn’t and it didn’t matter. In fact, that would’ve been worse. What if he achieved this and then had her taken away?

“I mean, do you want kids? You’ve never really said…” Inuyasha asked wearily and Kagome knew if she said yes, he’d do whatever she wanted. Even if it terrified him.

No. This needed to be his choice. His decision.

“What do you want?”

For a long moment, he was quiet before he swallowed and closed his eyes.

“I think you want them,” he answered evasively before pulling up one knee and fidgeting slightly, “And I don’t know. I want…I want, you know, the type of things Sango and Miroku have with their brats. And what I had with my mother before she got sick. I want someone to…to…you know, there’s just some type of connection. I…I wouldn’t mind being a brat’s person.”

“Their person?” Kagome asked curiously and Inuyasha let out a long sigh as he swayed his knee.

“Like…like you know they’ll take care of you. You scrape your knee. They fix it. You get hungry, they give you snacks. You get sad and just…just they….,” Inuyasha floundered before seemingly choosing a word to describe what he meant, “A helper. I wouldn’t mind being their helper.”

“You’d be the best helper,” Kagome sighed affectionately and Inuyasha eyes fluttered open.

“You really think so? I don’t have the…the warm thing going…”

Nodding, Kagome gently rolled onto her side and scooted her back against his torso. Like clockwork, he assumed their former position and sighed contentedly.

“You…” she belatedly started to address his comment but he was already off to the races.

“I could work on that though. You know, with the twins,” Inuyasha opined hopefully - like he was trying to convince her that he could be a good father and encourage her to say yes, “See…see if I could get better at the whole…whole warm thing. I bet I could get the hang of it in a month or two. I mean look at how fast I mastered Tessaiga. You wouldn’t have to worry about…about me scarring the kid.”

“That has never been a concern,” Kagome chided affectionately earning a frustrated grunt. Oh yeah, he was trying to get her to just make the decision or convince her to just agree with his decision. A decision he’d clearly already made.

“Inuyasha, I know you’d be a great daddy,” Kagome finally yawned - earning a faint blush, “But don’t push yourself just because you think I want this. I only want babies if you do too. I’m honestly okay either way.”

She felt him inhale deeply.

“I think…I think I’ll see if…if I can do the warm thing then we can decide,” Inuyasha hummed before adding hesistantly, “I think I can do it but I wanna be sure.”

“I…”

“I mean, I’m pretty sure I could do it,” Inuyasha continued to think out loud, “But I just want to be sure, ya know? And I want you to be sure I’m good for it.”

At this, Kagome laughed softly despite herself - the hand by her head sliding up to cup his. Curling her fingers between his fingers, she pressed her fingertips against his palm.

“I know you can do…”

“J-just think about it,” Inuyasha interrupted shakily as he gave her hand a light squeeze “A-and I’ll think about it. And we can…talk about it when we’re sure.”

The miko grinned and replied with a soft laugh, “Sure.”

“Will you be mad if I…I think about it and say no?” he asked hesitantly and Kagome shook her head - making some of the tension seep out of him. For a long time, he was quiet and Kagome was just about to pass out when she heard his voice - small and timid - whisper those three little words he didn’t say that often.

“I love you. You know that, right?”

“I know. You show me all the time,” she affirmed and with a timid half-smile, Inuyasha flexed his hand ever so.

“Just want to make sure you know…”

“I do.”

“And you still love me, right?”

“Always.”

“Okay. Just want to make sure…”

[adhdeancas]

wait so fellow adhder I'm I think that actually all of the TFW are actually ND. Cas has autism, dean has adhd, and hear me out, Sam has ocd. the intrusive thoughts? obsessive behavior? eating and acting clean literally to a point where it is inconvenient for everyone involved? I think he is obsessing over being clean and fresh (compared to demon blood and souless Sam, sleazy and nasty Sam) also I have a few reasons for thinking dean us adhd but y do u think so sorry I'm rambling

let’i’ve been waiting all my life for you to come into my inbox and talk to me about this

of COURSE TFW are ND!!! of course!! and yes, yes, we all know Cas has autism I love my autistic angel and i love the hc that Sam has ocd because it does fit really well!

(sectioned all of this out because it’s better for adhders to read, you get it)

his ocd directly bleeds into his poor self-esteem like you said with the demon blood! he feels the need to be pure and even though he canonically knows that these things (like eating clean, running, etc) can’t help his problem, he still tries because he kind of... has to. 

also OCD is often connected to a need for control, and the physical state of sam’s body is the one thing he has control over (which is also where we get into eating disorder territory). Sam has had so little control over his life, especially growing up, and for most his childhood, he didn’t even control what he ate (with Dean making/buying his meals). SO once he gets out of that environment, he hyperfixates on this new freedom!

we can also go to the hand pressing with this. a literal compulsion that even after the effect of the pain wears off once the hand heals, he still does it as a grounding method. nonsensical compulsion to calm anxiety? yes OCD 

can also be linked to childhood trauma but what ND can’t be amirite

emotional regulation once again - remember Angry Boy King Sammy? So angry he doesn’t know what to do and can’t control it and feels like he’s gonna explode with the rage?

intrusive (sometimes violent) thoughts are a huge marker for OCD and Sam’s obviously sometimes come from Unnatural means but they are also a part of him and kind of always have been

religious themes are also huge in OCD which Fits and makes me EMOTIONAL Sam I’m so sorry he spent his whole childhood feeling unclean and unholy and Fixated on that to the point of praying to a God his family didn’t believe in just so he could be Clean fuck

also i think it’s really interesting and cool that of the two brothers, Sam shows the most obvious signs of OCD even though he is canonically the messier brother and the brother not worried about IRL germs (i know the writers didn’t try to do this but i don’t care they didn’t play into the OCD means i must germex! trope)

AND ADHD DEAN!!! 

let’s first look at the obvious: Dean is highly skilled in combat, even though he hates physical exercise. Why? ADHD brain tied up with anxiety is hardwired into flight or fight, not sit and focus on one thing. it’s constantly picking up on threats and peripheral vision and all that shit 

he also has a spotty history with books! like i’ve said before, not shit writing, this is Dean’s ADHD. Dean as a kid read some high-brow books and he still does occasionally but he doesn’t nearly as much as an adult because it became much harder!! and because he just couldn’t devote that much attention, even as a kid, to things that he wasn’t really interested in! This is why he hates research

he’s known far and wide for his impulsiveness, his knee jerk decisions. it’s part of what makes him a good hunter and part of what makes him human disorder incarnate - It’s ADHD

Low frustration tolerance and rejection-sensitive dysphoria! Dean has a really hard time regulating his emotions and especially anger - especially especially especially when he feels like he’s being rejected or abandoned. it’s literally his worst fear 

^^^^ rejection-sensitive dysphoria also plays into his low self-esteem (god poor kid to have RSD in an environment growing up where Everyone Was Constantly Busting Each Other’s Balls and couldn’t be emotionally available to also tell you they actually love you), high self standards, and social anxiety (he’s a bullshitter, his chameleon charm is also a symptom of his social anxiety and RSD) 

also Dean has lots of sleep problems both ways and complicated relationships with motivation and inner restlessness versus a yearning for stability 

comfort items / food!! now i can’t find the research on this so forgive me because i know i’ve read it somewhere that ADHDers tend to gravitate toward familiar things or foods! (like Dean’s burgers and his car / motels that are all basically the same) it is a very ND thing in general as well

along that line, ADHDers tend to have sensory processing issues - it’s why Dean has an Outfit Recipe of the same types of clothes that he sticks to - also why he delights so much in sensory stuff like magic fingers and the Dead Guy Robe

(((jfc i thought of this point while writing out the last one and then forgot it and had to stare at the screen for a minute, now I’ve forgotten it again while writing this thank you adhd))) AH YES! auditory processing! Remember how we make fun of Dean for his lame comebacks? Remember how we make fun of him for his buffer speed in The Scene? baby that’s because it takes him five extra seconds to translate those words let alone RESPOND

not to mention people with ADHD often have much higher rates of anxiety/depression (duh) and substance abuse (yes)

lmao in researching this the article I was looking at says that lead exposure as a child can lead to ADHD and jfc you KNOW those shitty motels had Exclusively Lead Paint smh

BUT ONE OF MY FAVORITES of course has to be that Dean gets along so well with autistic Cas!! as an adhd dude with an autistic best friend, WE DIG! adhd and autism go so well together because we can get each other in ways that others just Can’t. adhd and autism have a lot of overlap/similarities in brain function and shit. 

tend to eschew social conventions and be much more straightforward/want that in others

they can both have the tendency to fidget and depending on upbringing mask that for some people - which also leads to being social chameleons

they both have comfort items / foods that NT find really strange or childish in my experience

sensory disorders!!! cas with his ONE OUTFIT and Dean with his different colored ONE OUTFIT 

Anyway i’m in love with this and i have so many thoughts but here are a few of them thank you very much for this ask i love that you came to me 

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

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That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

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It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

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For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

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No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

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Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

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A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

.

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

.

[alecmagnuslwb]

You’ve Changed Man - @doubleredweek Day 4

Read on AO3

Jason doesn’t mind stakeouts generally. He likes the peace and quiet of being alone, of stalking his prey and figuring out their ins and outs so he can take them out. It’s probably a bit of the Selina Kyle training he got in his youth slipping in and he absolutely loves it.

A stakeout with Roy isn’t even too bad, because he loves Roy and even though Roy loves to talk sometimes, he gets the need for quiet when on a stakeout. He understands Jason’s desire for silence, for focus. Plus if things get really boring they can just make out. It’s a win-win situation no matter what really.

Jason however decidedly hates stakeouts with his brothers, except for maybe Duke who at least knows the value of silence even if he thinks quote on quote ‘stakeouts are stupid, that’s what the internet is for’. Damian’s impulse control makes Jason look like a patient saint, Dick treats it like he’s a still a cop and Tim might be worst of all.

Tim Drake is incredibly smart, though Jason doesn’t like to tell him that. He’s hardwired like a better detective than Batman himself, which he also doesn’t like to tell him. He’s focused, determined and sharp as a tack at most times. Except evidently on a stakeout when he’s on his tenth black eye with three extra shots of the night. Jason has no idea when Tim last slept, but he’s starting to feel like it was a worrying amount of time ago.

Tim’s gone from focusing his attention solely on the target across the street to looking in the living rooms of any place he can find and seeing what’s on tv. He’s quoted a range of television shows and movies verbatim and he’s spouted out so many facts about things only barely related to what he’s catching on people’s televisions that Jason can’t keep track.

He’s basically driving Jason insane as he tries to keep his own focus on Sophia Falcone in her luxury penthouse apartment that she’s rumored to have not left in pushing three months now. She’s up to no good, that much they know, just what kind of family business no good they’re not sure. Which is why they’re staked out on a rooftop in 70-degree nighttime heat in form fitting leather. Not to watch people’s tv’s.

Tim’s leg is bouncing up and down the jitters of the coffees keeping him in constant motion. Frankly between the heat, the deeply uneven ratio of coffee to water and the constant movement Jason’s not quite sure how Tim hasn’t passed out from dehydration yet.

Scientists should probably study Tim for inhuman ability related to coffee which is coming from a guy who should probably be studied for the whole coming back from the dead thing.

Tim’s been quite for a while now, finally, but the silence is broken when he starts muttering under his breath. Jason looks over from where Sofia has been barking orders at a maid to see Tim swaying back and forth and gives him a judgmental look.

Soon enough the muttering gets a little louder and Jason can clearly tell he’s singing, poorly so but singing nonetheless.

“And the line where sky beats the sea, it calls me!” he sings a little too loud for their position. Jason smacks him on the shoulder gaining his attention.

“Keep it down,” he says before turning his attention back to Sofia, but he can only see the poor haggard maid now. “Also, that’s not the lyrics.”

Tim doesn’t say a thing which he knows he should be grateful for, but he really needs to know if Tim’s coffee addled brain understands that he has to keep it down so he pulls his focus back to Tim.

He expects him to be once again watching Moana through some poor person’s window, but instead Tim is looking directly at him eyes bright, wide and positively delighted under his domino mask sporting the dorkiest fucking smile Jason has ever seen on a human being.

“What?” he asks confused, feeling like he’s clearly missing something.

“You know the lyrics to Moana,” Tim says with absolute glee.

Jason just shrugs. “So? Lian loves it and Roy does this whole thing where he sings it to her when she’s in the tub. There’s a whole production with plastic boats and a water-logged Barbie involved and everything,” he says trying to play it off as nothing to think about, but knowing he sounds exceedingly fond. It’s one of the cutest things he’s ever seen and Roy’s voice is actually pretty nice, in another life he might have been a low rent rockstar. He has the hair for it.

“You’re so domestic now,” Tim giggles taking another sip of his latest cold brew. Jason thinks Alfred and magic must be involved in how he fit so many into his little cooler. “It’s adorable.”

“I’m not domestic now,” Jason balks at Tim his gut instinct to instantly deny. He’s the Red Hood, the nightmare that criminals tell their lackeys about. He’s a badass raised on the streets who’s spent time in the tutelage of some of the greatest criminal masterminds alive. He can take any gun you sit in front of him apart and put it back together in under fifteen seconds. He was raised on the streets dammit, he’s the broken son of the Bat. He’s not domestic, he’s a badass.

“I’m the fucking Red Hood,” he says instead of all that, it seems like he’d be reaching too far and being a bit too defensive if he went on the rant he just had in his head.

“Yeah you are,” Tim says with that goofy smile just getting goofier. “And the fucking Red Hood is a big ol’ domestic softie now who’s in love,” Tim singsongs the word love. “And makes casseroles and knows all the words to Moana,” he finishes off in explanation with playful poke to Jason’s shoulder

Jason shoves his hand away and bristles at the implication he’s gone soft. So what if he spends more time at home than he ever has before and he puts a little more effort into his cooking now that he’s cooking for three instead of quick meals for one in empty safehouses. So what if he makes his choices based entirely on whether it will cut into his time with Roy and Lian. And yeah, maybe he knows more about Disney animation now than he ever did even when he was a child himself, but he’s a sort of stepfather and sort of husband these days and it all comes with the territory.

It doesn’t mean he can’t still kick ass and demolish the criminal underbelly of Gotham.

“Am not,” he replies like the mature adult he is. “You are.”

Tim just scoffs at him, actually says the word scoff. The coffee has to be making him delusional by now.

“Don’t live in denial brother o’ mine, you’ve changed man,” Tim giggles again swirling his coffee around the ice clinking loudly in the rare quiet of a Gotham city night.

“No I haven’t,” Jason says even though he knows that’s not true. He’s better than he used to be. It’s not a thing to get defensive about, but he feels like his brother’s should still think of him as tough for some reason. His sister never has, so he’s not too worried that Cassandra has definitely caught him making unicorn shaped pancakes in the kitchen one morning and caught him obsessing over rings in a jewelry store window for a reason he hasn’t quite admitted to yet that one time. She’s a great secret keeper too, since Tim definitely would be bringing up those events right now if she had blabbed.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Tim says between big slurps of his coffee. “You’re still the spooky boogeyman that criminals fear, but you’re also the guy whose ringtone is from the Little Mermaid. It’s a cool balance, pretty sure it’s the balance we’re all trying find.”

“Lian changed my ringtone and every time I switch it back she just does it again, so I left it,” Jason says feeling a little less defensive now. Maybe Tim’s right, maybe it’s not necessarily a bad thing. He is the happiest he’s been since he crawled out of his own grave, happier than he was even in those vague rare memories of joy he has from his own childhood.

“Sweet,” Tim says warmly picking his binoculars back up and going back to the house where the movie is playing instead of the criminal kingpin’s daughter. Jason just rolls his eyes focusing his own attention back on the task at hand.

They sit quietly after that Jason watching as Falcone Jr. paces in front of her fireplace clearly agitated about something while Tim quietly enjoys his movie.

“So what are the lyrics?” Tim asks breaking the quiet. It seems he’s run out of coffee now and has resorted to just chewing on the straw.

“It’s where the sky meets the sea not beats,” he emphasizes.

“Cool,” Tim says finally shifting his binoculars back to the same place Jason has been looking for the past four hours. Another few beats of quiet pass and Jason thinks maybe finally they’re back in business, until Tim ruins it.

“Will you sing it for me? You know to make sure I get it right?” he asks and Jason looks over at him his eyes still trained on the penthouse, but with that goofy smile on his lips again.

Why did Bruce have to adopt so many damn kids? Jason could have been an only child, that would have been nice.

Jason squares his shoulders and puts on his best Red Hood voice. “Absolutely fucking not.”

He only sings for Lian dammit.

[shih-coulda-had-it]

35. “Why are you looking at me like that” i want to see what you do with this one

Anon, give me free reign, and I will return with some of the nichest interests to fandom. Another sourdough starter! This is for a time-travel AU with Yoichi/Sorahiko (Yoihiko) for end-game. Sorahiko's canon is set after Nana dies, and before Toshinori heads to the States.

//

So Sorahiko got punched some thirty-plus years into the past.

Fine. Typical One for All bullshit.

(He is going to punch Toshinori so hard if he ever gets back to the present. Regardless of how much Gran Torino deserved a humbling, Sorahiko did not sign up for this.)

It’s a nightmare of a time period, especially because pro-heroes aren’t exactly a concept yet. Sorahiko is unlucky enough to be picked up by some kind of guerrilla faction, and even more unlucky when he finds out they are connected to All for One. Not in a friendly way, mind.

The leader of the resistance and his right-hand man interfered before Sorahiko could be summarily interrogated and killed. To be fair to the guerrilla faction, Sorahiko had been shooting his mouth off left and right, because this whole situation was awful, and he wasn’t shy about taking his frustration out on assholes.

Things that alarmed them: his gear, his hair, and his unheard-of Quirk.

“Are you related to Shigaraki?” the leader had asked, suspicion written all over his face.

“Who the hell is Shigaraki,” Sorahiko had answered, eyeing the leader’s gauntlets.

Talks are, believe it or not, uphill from there. Once Sorahiko is confirmed to be thoroughly, passionately agreeable to using violence against All for One, he is more or less folded into the resistance. And before long, the resistance launches an all-out assault on All for One’s base.

Gran Torino is mercilessly placed on the front lines, nearly shoulder to shoulder with the leader (determinedly nameless) and his right-hand man (Sanjuro Yojimbo).

“Easier ways to take me out of the game,” says Sorahiko, checking the suction seals of his gloves. He grimaces at the loosening fit; although his time hadn’t been the best with the daily grind of patrol - villain - paperwork, its miserable characteristics did not hold a candle to the present.

These are lean times.

“Gran Torino, you’re the one who wanted to wear your shining beacon of a costume,” says Sanjuro. The man adjusts his bandana, fussing with fraying seams.

“I wasn’t going to repaint my gloves and boots.”

“And now you’ll attract all sorts of attention,” sighs the leader. The three of them are sharing one last quiet moment, staring at the hastily-scrawled map Sorahiko managed to draw up. Honestly, he has no idea if the resistance would have managed this fight without his help.

They certainly aren’t in any records.

“Sure you won’t tell me your name?” Sorahiko needles. “Dead man’s request.”

“As you like to remind us, it’s hard to kill you,” the leader says. He folds the map into squares, slides it into his jacket, and cracks his neck from side to side. “Send the signal.”

A red flare shoots up into the sky.

Gran Torino, as the fastest, hurtles himself over the gates and dodges the first slew of projectile Quirks. Nothing particularly dangerous, nothing tricky. However much All for One is in his prime, the Quirks of this era are… lacking in potency.

That, or All for One has already snatched the strongest of them up.

He supposes the real nightmare is that All for One’s followers are simply that. Followers, willing to do what the man wants, in broad daylight. Vicious, vindictive, villainous. The civilians can’t fight back, because the ban on public Quirk usage affects them the hardest. The government flounders, still is floundering by the time Gran Torino had hit the streets, so… it makes sense that this resistance appeared to fill the gap.

His entrance into the building is preceded by an unconscious woman’s body, thrown through a window. Presumably, the leader’s gauntlets will blow open the front doors, but once Gran Torino is on the move, he tries not to stop.

“Get him!”

“What the hell is he wearing?”

Gran Torino kicks that commenter in the face. He moves on. One, two, five, ten--there are more guards than he anticipated. Further down: a stairway, a hallway, a large heavy door with a spinning handle attached.

Despite knowing of the smart thing to do (wait for reinforcements), Gran Torino sets on to open this door.

It does not turn easy. But it does turn, and the door does open.

He shoves it, steadies his footing, and braces himself for a surprise attack. The light from the hallway floods into a dark room, and Sorahiko can barely discern a cowering figure on the floor, pale-haired and green-eyed.

“N-nii-san?”

Sorahiko blanches as the sound of an explosion shakes the floor above. He knows of very few people with hair like theirs, and this trembling voice does not sound like All for One. Stumbling back so his shadow doesn’t fall over the other man’s, Sorahiko has a crazy thought: whoever this relative of All for One is, he looks--kind.

“You’re not my brother,” says the man, green eyes going wide. “You--”

“Do you want out?” Gran Torino demands.

“I…”

“This estate is being attacked,” he says, trying to pick his words carefully. Shimura was always better at reassuring terrified civilians, or de-escalating emotional spirals on the verge of a panic attack. “If you need help, then… the people I’m with can provide it.”

“You don’t know who I am.”

Gran Torino exhales, sharp, and stalks into the vault. The man stays on the floor, staring up and up, except his eyes hold less fear and more fascination. They follow Gran Torino as he crouches, and then they skitter to gaze at the outstretched hand.

“I don’t need to know who you are,” Sorahiko says. “I wasn’t sent here to find you. All I know is that you’ve been trapped in this room, guarded by more goons than feasible for a hallway patrol.” He tilts his head. “Makes for easy lines of attack, I gotta say.”

“... Your Quirk?”

“Trade secret,” says Sorahiko simply. He wiggles his fingers. “This is an offer. Get out of jail free card, you could say.”

The man hesitates, but he reaches back, thin fingers ever smaller against the size of Gran Torino’s glove. They curl into a surprisingly strong grip as Gran Torino levers them back up.

“Can you run?”

“I’m not in the best of shape,” says the man, sheepish.

He considers his options. Escorting a malnourished unarmed civilian will turn them both into sitting ducks. Carrying him? That’s doable. It may also deter Sanjuro and the leader from automatically killing the man.

“Ever get motion sickness?”

“Never had the opportunity.”

Gran Torino nods and says, “I can carry you. In my arms or over my shoulder, pick your poison.” Upon seeing the flustered expression bloom, Sorahiko rolls his eyes. The man won’t see; the lenses are opaque. “If it helps, it will be faster if you’re in my arms. I can compensate for the extra weight easier.”

Not that you look like you weigh much, Sorahiko adds silently.

“Whatever works,” says the man, faint, and Gran Torino hooks one twiggy arm around his much broader shoulders and scoops him up off the floor by the knees. He’s right. The man doesn’t weigh much at all. Fingers curl in, grabbing a handful of his cape.

“This’ll work,” he confirms, and turns smartly on his heel to exit the vault. Before Gran Torino reenters the hallway, he stops and warns, “Bodies up ahead.”

The fingers tighten. “You killed them?” the man asks woodenly.

“Mine will wake up with a severe migraine.”

“Ah.”

That’s about as much as Gran Torino’s willing to throw his comrades under the bus. He forges on into the light, picking his way past the fallen unconscious bodies. Being in the past has turned him more cutthroat, but… he’s been hardwired to perform swift knock-outs. For most wannabe villains, getting kicked unconscious once is embarrassing enough to turn them onto milder paths.

Better a shoplifter than a mugger, in Gran Torino’s eyes.

These ‘guards’ had been pretty pathetic. Supposing the resistance doesn’t send a ‘clean-up’ squad, the idiots might be able to turn over a new leaf.

He would use Jet, but the hallway is kind of tight. So Gran Torino is stuck walking until he reaches the stairs, and he tries not to jostle his passenger. This effort does not go unrecognized, a fact Sorahiko realizes when he glances down to check in.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks, unsettled by the shining green irises.

It looks uncannily like when Toshinori actually respected Gran Torino, instead of hating him to the point of sending him far into the past.

“You’re a hero,” the man whispers, almost giddy with the naming. “You’ve got to be.”

Sorahiko bites the inside of his cheek. His face feels too warm, a fact that he will have to blame on the floor being heavily insulated. Slowly, to better communicate a disbelief that he doesn’t actually feel, Sorahiko says, “And what makes you think that?”

“Your suit. The cape. A refraining from meting out ‘righteous justice.’” The man layers the sarcasm thick on the last two words, like he’s quoting some egotistical asshole.

“Some villains make the cut,” mutters Gran Torino.

“Exceptions to the rule?”

They’re at the bottom of the staircase. Sorahiko can hear the resistance wrecking shop upstairs, and he is keenly aware that he will be entering the fray with another man in his arms, in a one-person lift more commonly associated with bridal carries.

“When a villain promises to destroy your whole world,” he says, “when they already have destroyed a crucial part of it, with no remorse, no intention to atone... I think…”

This is hardly the time to indulge his grieving heart.

Nevertheless, the man presses his hand against Sorahiko’s chest. Sorahiko, startled, meets those fascinated, fascinating green eyes.

“I hear you,” he says, quiet in his empathy. A quick breath. “My name is Shigaraki Yoichi. It’s nice to meet you…?”

Sorahiko swallows past his trepidation.

“Call me Gran Torino, Yoichi-san,” he says.

[hiriajuu-suffering]

Reasons I believe in Polyamory

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not attractive enough to be able to have more than a single partner at once, but there is a reason for that, and really, the thesis of this wall of text below: heteronormative relationship standards in every culture have always been, and will continue to always be, more about possession than love in a post-imperialistic world.

Personally, I’m a huge proponent of engendered sexuality variance to the tone of males have a constant slow drip of libido and a female’s sex drive hits them like a freight train once a month (in mammalian bioepigenetics, this makes sense). I’m inclined to infer, because I’m not idyllically normatively attractive, only a fraction of a percentage of women will be attracted to me 24-27 days of any given month. As a cisgendered man who is regrettably straight, having the least attractive genoethnic identity intersection (South Asian Muslim) in Western culture, I’m never actually presented with the choices to act on a poly mindset (in fact, I would be ridiculed for it because people think it aligns with some other gross tribal stereotype when it couldn’t be further from the truth). In retrospect, I have everything to gain from interpreting the main benefit of an intimate relationship as ownership like heteronormative culture generally does yet I still think disavowing poly as a legitimate personal choice is immoral.

I know saying monogamous relationships are more about possession than love will offend lots of people, so before you throw hate at me for your emotionally defensive skepticism, hear me out. An unflinching, unyielding love is seen as the highest parameter in any type of romance. So why is it cheating is so much of a bigger problem than a dry spell specifically? Is it because it’s legitimately a breach of trust, or is it more about “if I can’t have you, no one can”? More importantly, does it go a step further and say “if I don’t want you, no one should”? To me, any sort of dry spell (whether physically, emotionally, mentally) signifies a much larger breach of trust than simply having been shared because it shows said commitment in the relationship was not unflinching, not unyielding. The monogamous lens looks at others like: I want to have the best partner, not just so that I’m happy, but no one else can receive the specific happiness I get. Doesn’t that whole mindset come off as brutish? Just me? Well, maybe your pitchforks will start coming down when you realize monogamy is a function of toxic patriarchy on both feminine and masculine ends.

There are bioevolutionary reasons for toxic femininity to value the possession aspect of a relationship over its substantive “quality of life” components, the birth-giving gender in any animalistic specie always had to be beheld to a provider they reproduce with. Does it not then represent a sense of feminine fragility when a single mother immediately demands a long-term relationship and nothing else? If I’m to believe said woman is capable of genuine lust in her system, having a child shouldn’t evaporate all carnal desires completely and, therefore, should leave room for compromise. Said stance also indicates she made some sort of error in judgment of her chosen reproductive mate and feels entitled another man ought remedy her strife even though, evolutionarily speaking, he has nothing to gain from helping to rear offspring not of his kin. Harsh, to be sure, but it does show in the obnoxiousness of the connotation of becoming a stepdad being a positive one and becoming a stepmom assumes the motivation of some gain in status (wealth, fame, power, etc.) which I would argue is negative. Where does toxic masculinity come into play? Desire for possession on the part of a male promotes the viability and exclusivity of his own children with his most desirable partner. While that’s damn near nowhere as compelling, it has to be stated because there are always two benefactors to patriarchy. Patriarchy is not a zero sum game, patriarchy seeks to concentrate all familial social benefits in the monogamously-driven, heteronormative genus, away from those who deviate from the ideal picture of stereotypical gender roles. The ill effects of patriarchal standards exist in every human civilization, but the ontological root to the specific brand of patriarchy that oppresses all genders today was spread by a culture that uniquely preached monogamy.

Polygamy, in a historical sense, was a testament to the more status a person of the provider gender could achieve, the more their genetics would proliferate. Many cultures globally practiced this, the issue is, the ones that didn’t were the ones who, often violently, “conquered” the ones that did. Christian fundamentalism is in every fiber of international morality, whether the nation in question believes in Christianity or not is often irrelevant. Monogamy is enforced, anything outside of that is deemed as necessarily being deviant (whether choosing to be alone or choosing more connections than a monocule). Fetishization of the step relation is eluding to this deviance in a not-so-subtle way because it’s something where its allure is derived from its forbiddenness moreso than its convenience, every one of these scenarios has a subtext of implicit gain, not loss, in engagement. Meaning, the idea is planted because a hot person is there not because a person in general is there and can satiate an urge. Tl;dr - we believe polyamory is a morally negative act because the Holy Roman Empire did and every nation that spawned from it spread, imparted, and coerced that ideal on every culture it came into contact with. Before the Holy Roman Empire, no historical documents made distinctions to behest multiple lovers as desanctifying of life itself, not even the coalescing of nations that made up the Holy Roman Empire before its inception.

We are now in an era when women have access to full reproductive control, yet we still see men lust more than women, e.g. archetypal lesbian tendencies versus archetypal gay male tendencies. Do we not question why this is the case? All lifeforms are hardwired with a desire to survive and reproduce, so why does that drive not reach equity when risk does? There are two answers, and it could even be both: women are only socially conditioned to have sex via patriarchal pressures and don’t have as much inherent desire to reproduce OR sex is a means-to-an-end to exclusively possess a desired provider, whatever said person provides. If said person has a trait valuable enough to want to possess, is it not self-contrived to keep that quality to oneself, not share it with the world where it can provide more utility? Heteronormative relationships, in a sense, are anti-altruistic at their very core. As facetious as this sounds, either of these trains of thought are validated by men being more willing to engage in polyamory than women, not because men are somehow any less loyal than women. On its own, I feel this line of reasoning is enough to justify a vehement disgust of polyamory as immoral, but I want to conclude on the most pivotal facet to this conversation and not just heavily imply monogamy encroachment on moral turpitude is problematic at best.

As I mentioned a few times, I am likely to be a spoke on a polycule, not a member with multiple connections. Exclusive possession is something I probably stand more to gain from than any woman, logically and realistically, given the current social climate and general global beauty standards. My advocacy of polyamory stems from me accepting I may not be enough to be the full extent of happiness my romantic interest desires. That doesn’t even come from a place of insecurity, it comes from a place knowing I could never be perfect even if its pursuit is a righteous cause. I see real insecurity as a fear of loss when the rules of engagement you put into place were exclusivity: you don’t want your partner looking at anyone else because it’s disadvantageous to you, meaning you’re not fixated on their best interest and looking at relationships in said manner is deliberately selfish. To me, the best frame of reference to morality in interpersonal social connections is altruism. Yeah, self-love is important and knowing your own boundaries is beneficial but everyone else’s boundaries don’t have to match yours. I’m not anti-monogamist, really. I’m more anti-polyamorist discontent.

Not having thought this deeply isn’t an excuse, either.

[luckystarchild]

I was discussing this with my writing group earlier and decided that I wanted to collect some more opinions on this, so what're your thoughts on reviews that start out with "I don't really like oc-driven/centric stories, but―" or reviews worded to a similar effect/to the same tune? Personally I just don't find them to be as much of a compliment as the reviewer thinks it is, and wish people wouldn't preface a review with such info.

Soooooo there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll do it in stages. Sorry if this is more than you wanted... I take asks too seriously sometimes. XD

Why do these types of reviews feel insulting?

The reason these kinds of reviews might not feel so great to the recipient is because they pair a compliment with a qualifier. And combining a compliment with a qualifier is how you structure a backhanded compliment.

Example of pairing a compliment with a qualifier, AKA a backhanded compliment: “Your old haircut was terrible, but your new one is much better.”

The “but” is key here. The compliment-giver said something nice about your appearance, yes, but now you’re walking around feeling badly about the last ten years of your old hairstyle, wondering if everyone who looked at you while you had that old haircut was calling you ugly behind your back.

When someone says, “Normally I hate stories like yours, BUT...” they’re using the structure of a backhanded compliment to pay you a (hopefully legit) compliment. They’re calling you an exception. You’re writing something that’s normally terrible, but you managed to squeak by with something acceptable (against all odds).

Even though you’re an exception, you’re left wondering if other people hate your story because of its sheer concept just like the reviewer initially did. And because they used the structure of a backhanded compliment to express their feelings, you’re left feeling like you did indeed receive a backhanded compliment, even if that wasn’t the reviewer’s intention.

After all, the recipient of a review can’t read a reviewer’s tone. All they can see is how the review was structured, and when the reviewer used the structure of a backhanded compliment, that’s what the recipient feels like they were given.

By pairing the positive with a negative, the reviewer has potentially cancelled out the good, leaving the recipient to focus on the bad. And since humans are hardwired for negative bias, it’s no wonder many people come away from a compliment + qualifier feeling like they’ve been insulted instead of complimented. They can’t help but focus on the bad more than the good, the insult more than the compliment.

What are reviewers REALLY trying to say?

Next we should discuss what reviewers are actually trying to say when they leave reviews of this kind. There are two possible scenarios to consider.

Possibility #1: They’re legitimately trying to pay you a compliment, but they aren’t thinking about how you’ll receive it or what they might be inadvertently implying by using the structure of a backhanded compliment. They actually, truly believe that you would want to know that you are an exception to their reading rules, and that this fact is a high honor. You’ve done something so well, they don’t even care what genre your story is! Your work is great, and the fact that they’d normally hate it due to its genre is AMAZING. You’ve changed their minds about a genre! You defied expectations! They were determined to not like your story, but it’s too good! You broke through their preconceived notions of what they like and MADE THEM LIKE SOMETHING with your writing skill. It’s not a feat all stories can achieve, so the reviewer thinks you should wear that as a badge of honor.

Possibility #2: They’re actually paying you a backhanded compliment and are hoping you’ll get upset. They want you to know they liked your work... but they secretly still think it’s silly, or stupid, or cringe. I won’t elaborate on this opinion because I think we’ll all fill in the blanks with our own worst fears, so there’s no need for me to do the heavy lifting when it comes to this kind of horror.

Which of these things do reviewers actually intend? I can’t say. This is obviously up to the receiver of a particular review to decide. I personally remind myself of Hanlon’s Razor whenever possible: “In misunderstandings, never assume malice where thoughtlessness will do.” It doesn’t necessarily amend the hurt I might feel, depending on how the review is worded and how severe the backhanded compliment structure is... but it does help me make peace with it.

What’s my personal opinion on the matter?

I’m of two minds.

Mind the First: It’s awesome to convert someone to a genre of story they previously hated. OC fics get a (frankly undeserved) bad rap, so I understand that an inevitable portion of readers will come into OC stories predisposed to disliking them. Knowing someone clicked on my story thinking they’d hate it, only to come to love it, is pretty great. It’s like you’ve given other OC fics a chance by being a good representative of that fanfic genre.

Mind the Second: In general, using the structure of a backhanded compliment to pay someone a genuine compliment is confusing and can be an example of poor communication if it’s not worded with enough clarity. Additionally, “I thought I’d hate your story” might be true for a reader, but it probably isn’t a necessary thing to tell an author. Just because you CAN say something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

Personal Anecdote: A reviewer once told me of my main work, Lucky Child: “I clicked on this story to laugh at it and mock the concept, because it’s sooooo cringey, buuuut... it’s actually pretty great and I grudgingly respect the work you’ve done on it.”

The rest of the review was lovely and very complimentary, but knowing they came to my story intending to make fun of it, being told I wrote for a cringe concept, that they only “grudgingly” respected me... wasn’t the best. Largely because I am secretly afraid that people feel that way, so their review was confirming something I secretly dread. “How many other people are think my concept is cringey?” I found myself worrying. And the word “grudging” made me feel like they resented me for converting them to OC stories, which made me feel... not the best.

I genuinely believe they were trying to be nice and pay me a compliment NOW, but I will admit that I was somewhat unsettled by the comment when it first came in. There were better ways they could have communicated with me, for sure. Again, Hanlon’s Razor came in handy in this instance, and now I look at that review (and reviews like it) positively. But it did take me a while to put aside the negative implications. It helps that Lucky Child gets a comment like this every few weeks, LOL. At some point I’ve gotten used to them. Now I wear them as badges of honor and love receiving them. AGAIN, THOUGH: I’ve had practice. Authors less used to that kind of comment would likely respond the way I did at the beginning.

In conclusion?

In the end, I think using the structure of a backhanded compliment is confusing as heck when what a reviewer INTENDS to do is pay a genuine compliment.

So to reviewers who want to leave remarks like these? I’d say try to structure your comment in a clear way, avoid structuring a compliment like an insult, and be sure you’re not leaving room for miscommunication. Writers are notoriously sensitive creatures (myself included), and their command of language means they’ll read VERY DEEPLY into things if you’re at all ambiguous. Clarity, in all things, is key.

Honestly? Times like these are why I wish we taught more rhetoric in schools. The MANNER in which you communicate a thought can completely negate the CONTENT of your thought if you don’t use the right rhetorical device to communicate it, and using the rhetoric of insults to convey compliments is bad use of language. Mind your rhetorical devices, people! They’re important, especially if you consider yourself a writer.

To writers who receive these comments? I’d say to write down a version of Hanlon’s Razor and to repeat it to yourself often: “In misunderstandings, never assume malice where thoughtlessness will do.” I’m not saying all reviewers who leave this kind of comment are thoughtless, of course. But I AM saying that most of the time during misunderstandings (especially ones that take place on the internet, where you can’t read tone, body language and facial expression), people just don’t realize that their words can be misconstrued for anything other than what they intended. Most of the time, they have the best intentions. But since outcome is more important than intention, that can be cold comfort for those on the receiving end of a badly communicated review.

TL;DR for Reviewers: Don’t leave comments like these if you don’t want to be misunderstood.

TL;DR for Writers: Don’t take comments like these personally, because most reviewers don’t mean them maliciously.

I hope this helps, OP. Sorry if it’s too much!!

[mamacleo]

"We don't want to be doing this either."

CW/TW: Frank talk about borderline personality disorder. Can be triggering.

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What did they give you?

Did they give you love? Did they give you respect? Did they give you support?

Did they give you abuse? Did they give you disrespect? Were you on your own?

If it's both? Unpredictable? Nearly random? And constant?

Imagine being in Marine boot camp. That for no reason you can grasp, either everyone hates you or you think they do. Imagine every expression of respect or support is suspect because you know it carries conditions that can cripple you. Because there is never any knowing if a good word hides a fist or a knife.

Imagine, too, that when you screw up, you will be physically hazed for you don't know how long, how hard, and it is random. What got praise yesterday can leave you bruised today. Or scarred. Heaven help you if they should get creative.

It comes with brainwashing. Always. Being told you deserve what you get. Your self-worth being dismantled with verbal violence. Always with the voice of rage. The sound of rage. You hear it coming before it arrives now. You are powerless to stop it.

There are no rules. There are no guidelines. There are no patterns. Any time, day or night. In your sleep. While you're eating. While you're resting.

Imagine being on guard for all of this all day, every day. Your amygdala, lighting up all day and feeding you nightmares at night. The constant short breath, the constant flow of adrenaline. Always assessing your surroundings in the vain hopes you might escape.

Now imagine that Marine boot camp lasting for twenty years.

How would you come out? What kind of a broken person would you be if you went into boot camp and it didn't end? Didn't stop? Worse than you imagined? You had no idea how long it would last? Every day, hoping it's the last, hoping there'll be a break, but there isn't and no one will tell you when it's gonna end.

Waking moment to sleep, then the nightmares. Lather, rinse, repeat. Twenty years. Maybe more.

Could you do it? Could you do it without committing suicide? Could you?

Would the Geneva Conventions allow us to do that to prisoners of war? Could we stand before The Hague and escape judgment?

What would you be like if you went into the Marines as a young adult and were trapped in it, no escape, no hope, and didn't come out until you were middle-aged? Two decades of this? Can you imagine this being done by the Marines and there not being a Congressional inquiry?

Could you do this to an adult human being?

It happens to children. Every day. Every, every day. By parents. Teachers. Relatives. Schoolmates. Clergy. Youth leaders.

The results of this are, for most victims, devastating. For most of us, we end up with this thing that psychologists tagged "Borderline Personality Disorder." That's what BPD is, not bipolar disorder, if you were wondering. The pathology of it is complex. It's brutally hard to cope with.

It's emotions ratcheted up way past 11. The best word I have for it is "operatic." Every cruelty is Carmen, every battle is Ride of the Valkyries, every terror is Don Giovanni. The pain, and it is an emotional pain so severe you feel it all over your body, is excruciating enough to make you scream. (At first.) I could tell you how it usually goes, but there is no usually goes. That's the horror of it. It's devious.

It knows you better than you do, because it's fueled by your subconscious and knows all the secrets you won't consciously admit to yourself. It will not hesitate for a heartbeat to use them to crush you, because believe me, BPD is all about destroying yourself. In your mind, you're just finishing the job the world started.

You're easily triggered. It can be anything. It can be nothing. You may not know what did it. It might hit like a shot. It might build up. It might come over you like a tsunami. Once it starts, you can't stop it. Not usually.

For instance: I have been showing borderline symptoms since I was about 11. I've been like this for 49 years. Only in the last two have I made the kind of progress to where I can now either divert or resolve the episode without the usual damage.

It wasn't easy. Though I didn't realize it until just this very moment, I used it against itself. I worked hard on this, obsessively, compulsively, for close to 40 years, and my progress is phenomenal.

All the fierce concentration, the operatic fears, the delusional thinking--I've gotten very, very good at it--and I still can't always stop it. I have strategies, but they don't always work. Every time is different.

Think about that. EVERY TIME IS DIFFERENT.

If you have not gone through it, you simply cannot imagine it. And the exhaustion. Oh, holy Hera, the exhaustion. You cannot imagine the crushing weight of a lifetime of this. It affects your physical health. People who don't have this don't understand, *it's cumulative.* And like arsenic, you can't flush it out.

The best you ever do is manage it. It's a life sentence. There's no escape. Your brain was hardwired to be like this. Like John Mulaney says, "We don't want to be doing this either." With work, and it takes a LOT of work, you can make it better.

But not everyone has it. Not everyone is strong. Not everyone is brave. Not everyone can make the right decisions. Not everyone can think clearly.

Most of us don't even realize it. I didn't until I was 58 years old and a shrink diagnosed me following a suicide attempt. How can you fix it when you don't know that it's there? Shrinks don't want to deal with us. We take work, exhausting work. We're hard to live with. They'd rather just medicate us, and not all of us respond to what few meds there are.

Now allow me to blow your mind.

THERE ARE TENS OF MILLIONS OF US.

We're "the weird kid." The dork. The manic pixie dream chick. The ones who hated ourselves so much it showed. That doesn't change. It never changes. There is no therapy, no counseling, no medicine that will ever get rid of that deep, tenacious rupture that is BPD self-loathing. The best you do is come to terms with it.

The stigma must end. It's difficult. We have a long road. It's only recently becoming known and there is a lot of fear of us. It's not unwarranted, either. People get caught up in our emotional storms and get hurt. Occasionally even physically. I will tell you hard things, but I will not lie to you: we have deeds to answer for.

Mine is managed, at last, but it still can't be controlled. I just spent a week in a particularly cruel one. And went into one last night. I got out, but the shadow of it will linger a day or two.

The best you can do is come up with strategies. That is something I can help others do now, and it is going to make everything that has gone before worth it.

[yukisohmasmokesweed]

heeey... so, might be still a bit early to ask, but: top 10 "things" about season 2? could be eps, moments, characters, things they did, whatever you feel like, literally ur top 10 favorites from it

i interpreted this to mean top 10 moments so....top 10 moments!

10. (from 2x4)

i love this whole fight so much. it’s kind of an unspoken thing after it’s first established that they have to hide a huge part of their lives from everyone around them since it’s a given, so i like this bottled-up frustration over having to live constantly walking on eggshells coming out. i also really really like that we get to see haru acting genuinely scary as dark haru; it’s introduced as a comedic thing and haru is a generally well-adjusted character compared to the rest of the zodiac, and so i like that we get to see just how destructive and chaotic his coping mechanism really is. filmmaking-wise it’s a little boring but i don’t really mind because it’s tense enough that i don’t really notice it.

9. (from 2x17)

this is the only funny one on my list because i live for the drama haha but i like this scene for more than its humor! this episode takes place at a point in the season where yuki has been able to accept that he is allowed to put himself and his recovery first, and has spent enough time with others and pushed himself out of his comfort zone enough to shake off the instantaneous automatic fear of rejection that his social anxiety manifests as. because of the slow undoing of this hardwired reaction and because he’s become very comfortable around kakeru, though, his real, unrestrained personality as well as his actual opinions start slipping out. i like that this scene shows us 1. that he cares for tohru so deeply that he would end a friendship over her getting hurt, even though he thinks it’s childish after he says it and 2. that not even yuki knows what his real personality is like because he’s kept it repressed for so long. and i think for people with social anxiety the reaction to this kind of thing is embarrassment, but despite his embarrassment kakeru accepts what he says at face value because he likes yuki for who he is, not who he pretends to be for other people’s comfort. this is a very sweet moment between the two of them even if it’s buried a bit underneath the humor and kakeru’s easy acceptance of yuki’s more dramatic and snarky side is one of the reasons yuki trusts him so much when it comes to heavy stuff. i don’t love the bg changes to this cartoony thing in fb but in comedic scenes like this one it didn’t bother me, and i thought all of the art in this episode was really nice. this was also one of my favorite voice acting moments from shimazaki, i looooved loved loved him stuttering as he turns around right after he has this revelation, i think it’s super funny and also very natural-sounding, plus it’s a different kind of delivery from yuki but it fits him so well.

8. (from 2x19)

i love this little moment between shigure and hatori. the way they talk about the curse in this scene is very indicative of their characters and how they feel about the curse: shigure is flippant and casual when he says rin visits him to see if he knows how to break it, and hatori is shocked at the idea of it, then instantly becomes resigned, claiming it’s not possible. but this moment right at the end is just *chefs kiss* the way shigure says hatori’s name so weighty, and the delivery of “...do you hear it?” is curious if not hesitantly hopeful, some of my fav line readings in the whole show. i also really love the pan up the stairs back up to the house when he says “the sound of breaking,” the implication of tohru’s involvement in this clear. this scene is also visually stunning and i like the track under it a lot.

7. (from 2x18)

i’m obsessed with this scene and i’m obsessed with every line reading from nakamura, he is so incredible. i thought the art in this scene was gorgeous and every blocking choice was amazing, the body language and where they moved and when was perfect. also one of my favorite tracks off the ost plays under this scene, and i love that it ends just before shigure delivers his line, “i’m the worst.” and rin looks over her shoulder in silence other than the sound of the door(!) sliding closed as shigure exits. you can feel in this scene how desperate rin is and how frustrated shigure’s flippancy is making her. i also really like rin’s body language in general, she’s a good amount touchier than anyone else, and she’s all over shigure in this scene, both because she’s propositioning him but also because of her implied closeness (gure-nii) to him.

this is an excellent shigure scene, and i love these lines included in particular as well as the repeat of them in the finale. it’s a moment of actual self-awareness and self-reflection from shigure for sure, you can tell by his face, but in true shigure form he is not saying it because he’s trying to be emotionally open with rin; he’s saying it to get her off his back. he knows that the curse is weakening but he also knows that the harder he pushes people and the harder they struggle to get out, the more likely the curse is to break. it’s cruel and manipulative and the most painful way to go about things, but hey at least he knows it!

6. (from 2x25)

this whole scene between shigure and hatori in the finale is a super hard hitter; they both know everything about one another and have nothing to hide and they are also very desensitized to cruelty, and so their conversations are incredibly frank, and they don’t skirt around anything, either. i like that hatori doesn’t hesitate to put shigure in his place regarding akito’s status (a good example of hatori as akito’s enabler and the upkeeper of the status quo in order to keep everyone’s lives as calm as possible at the cost of his own happiness), and i like that shigure immediately gives it back by calling out hatori’s attachment to the bond—which is an interesting thing to bring up and speaks to the bond as not just a curse, but of how it is also their family and community. their lives do revolve around it, so the curse breaking would be an unthinkable change to something integral to their existence. 

i chose this moment in particular because it’s a great insight into shigure’s emotional state, one of deep jealousy and pain over akito’s rejection of him. i like that it’s a close-up of his eyes here; shigure’s eyes are important in the reboot, and seeing them here tells us that this is his emotional truth. when hatori calls him out, though, they are hidden again. these lines are also delivered so well, i love how low in his register he’s speaking, it’s not something we hear from shigure a lot. it’s very heavy and very indicative of his pain.

also, i like when they copy things exactly from the manga, so i liked this shot a lot as the closer of the scene:

5. (from 2x21)

ok obviously i had to put this because it’s my favorite scene in the manga...i thought this was very visually beautiful, loved that they had yuki standing in darkness (in front of a door!) and kyo illuminated by the light, but a light from a place he’s not allowed to enter. i think the lighting design speaks to how yuki views kyo, not only when he’s a little older as someone who is naturally charismatic and attractive, but in the moment, as a potential ray of light, a possible friend who could understand his situation through shared life experience. i just love the puff of breath yuki gives in reaction to kyo confirming what akito has been saying to him about how everyone hates him and everything is his fault, and i love yuki’s hands folded in front of his chest, protecting the most vulnerable part of his body as a reflex to words that deeply wounded him. 

i like this scene for its function of the root of yuki and kyo’s conflict: that kyo needs to hate yuki and scapegoat him for his own problems due to yuki’s status in the family, and yuki hates kyo back to protect himself. it’s a very nuanced and deep take on a fictional rivalry that comes from a very realistic place of maladaptive coping and morphs into something more habitual and every day over time. also big love the casting choices for these two as children. this scene was amazing, it’s super short but i like this specific moment in it because it does a great job visually showcasing yuki and kyo’s immediate reactions and emotions to meeting one another for the first time.

4. (from 2x25)

i thought this whole sequence was incredibly well-done, but specifically i loved this part where the music swells and the loom crashes down onto the floor over akito’s repeated lines. also one of my favorite voice acting moments of the season, i loved akito delivering these lines through hiccups and sobs and trailing off into childish crying, and the art and animation was very visceral. seeing akito this out of control was amazing and kureno’s reactions to akito hit very very hard; it’s easy to sympathize with him and see why he would agree to this, and it contextualizes his decision to do so when all we the audience has seen before this is akito’s terrible and abusive behavior. 

i also really liked kureno’s hands coming in towards akito to comfort, it reminded me of this

from 1x9 but flipped; instead of kureno’s hands coming forward to comfort akito but representing his choice to trap himself in the curse, it’s akito’s hands coming from behind to force yuki to stay with akito against his will. they also both cut off very suddenly, which i like a lot.

3. (from 2x8)

this transition makes me go absolutely ballistic. visually i love akito and tohru turning to look over their shoulders in opposite directions, i just think it looks very sexy and it was a cool way to transition out of one scene and into another. i also like the mirrored body language to set them up as each other’s foils in these two scenes. akito brings kureno, who is functionally their love interest, out for a walk and then proceeds to belittle him, his status, and his opinions. tohru goes out with kyo, her love interest, so they can have a nice time at the beach. they have a very open conversation about the “monstrous” aspect to kyo where tohru validates and appreciates his thoughts and emotions. having these two scenes back to back was a really smart move to contrast our protagonist and antagonist and set them up as each other’s foils, and it’s definitely my favorite scene transition in the season.

2. (from 2x10)

i loooove how insanely tense this scene is. i really like that shigure and akito are sitting in silence here until akito starts their monologue in full, and then the track is cut off at its crescendo by kureno’s knocking. the track being bookended by low ambient sound from outside makes it more impactful when it does start playing, and the track cutting off with the knocking makes the sound of akito’s clothes moving as they get up and the door sliding open while the camera is still trained on shigure’s expression deafening. i also like the shot choices in this scene, particularly the close-up of akito’s hands around shigure’s jaw and that we can only see their mouths, as well as the shot of shigure seething but partially blocked by akito’s torso. the voice acting in this scene is also bonkers good, particularly yuichi nakamura’s shigure.

this is the first time the audience has seen shigure mad, not just annoyed or frustrated, and that’s definitely a big part of why i love this scene. his conflict with akito adds a lot of depth to his character and i like seeing a different range of emotion from him than normal. i also just love the introduction of their whole relationship drama love triangle thing going on with the adults, i honestly think it’s hilarious that takaya baits the audience into thinking it’s going to be a love triangle between the teens and it just completely is not but is instead a deeply fucked up one between the older characters. truly a stroke of genius

1. (from 2x8)

i love this whole scene so much. i think cinematically it’s gorgeous, i love that they’re surrounded by greenery and i really like the leaves starting to fall around them and the beams of sunlight behind tohru. those choices could have come off flashy and overdone but i feel the way it was directed was subtle enough that it didn’t feel like ibata was holding my hand through my emotions, but impactful enough that it’s an emotional gut punch every time i watch it. the moment where the flute ends with tohru’s internal line and transitions into strings/chimes mixed with the sfx of the wind rustling through the leaves is beautiful and probably my favorite use of soundtrack this season. 

the reason i love this moment in particular so much is because it so encapsulates yuki and tohru’s relationship. she sees him so clearly and has been in his life long enough to tell that his reaction to rin is a marked change from who he was when they first met. she also knows that yuki working through his trauma over akito is something he needs to do on his own, and that the best thing she can do for him is to support him and show him that she loves him. on yuki’s end, he already knows tohru will support him unconditionally, but he’s now at a place where he’s able to accept it in stride and knows without a doubt that she’s there for him. this little moment really showcases what their whole relationship is about and was gorgeously done. this scene very quickly became one of my favorites when the episode came out and i’m pleasantly surprised that it’s stayed there; in fact, it was totally enhanced by the development of their relationship this season, which has undoubtedly become my favorite relationship in all of fruits basket. i think a friendship as deep as this one is a rare gem in fiction, let alone one between a man and a woman. this whole exchange is very beautiful and touching and a great summation of what they both mean to each other.

[therainroguefanfiction]

⁂ Breach in Trust (Sousuke Aizen)

Genre: Fluff, Angst, Romance ☁

Word Count: 2,126 ☁

Pairing: Reader x Aizen ☁

World: Anime, Bleach ☁

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In every relationship, there is doubt and jealousy. Even the strongest relationships encounter these problems. It doesn’t matter how much you trust and love your partner, the worry and the fear that they are cheating on you is still there.

You can lie and say that you’ve never, not once, felt jealous.

You can lie and say that you’ve never – not even once – worried that your significant other was seeing someone else behind your back.

It’s a side-effect of the drug called love. And the stronger the love, the deeper the worry. You love them so much that you fear the thought of losing them. The thought of losing them to someone else boils in the back of your mind like a hungry fly buzzing around food.

Most people ignore the feeling and have faith in their partner while others act on it and fly into a jealous rage of accusations. How could they not? Seeing someone flirting and touching their girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife. What if they see something in that person? What if they leave?

More often than not, the accusations are false.

If you ignore it, the relationship stays the same, but guilt still pools in your stomach.

If you act on it, the relationship will, nine times out of ten, end or, at the very least, become tense and awkward.

But what alerts us to an unfaithful partner?

Sneaking around and acting secretive?

Staying late at work when he/she doesn’t have to?

Mysterious phone calls, texts or letters?

Smelling of a scent not belonging to yourself?

Or is it something else? Maybe all of the above? What if it’s something innocent disguised as something bad, something treacherous?

What if he/she is planning something special?

What if he/she is just trying to get a raise or promotion?

What if he/she is arranging a surprise for you?

What if he/she was searching for a cologne or perfume for you?

The only proof that someone is cheating is to catch them in the act. You can’t believe an outside party. You can’t jump to conclusions and go around accusing your partner or stressing out over it. But, it’s impossible to do that. We say we can, but that’s a lie. It’s hardwired into our DNA to feel that way.

So, let me ask you this:

Do you trust him?

Our Trust has been breached.

You never agreed with the choices Aizen had made. You didn’t agree with what he was doing, either, but the love you felt for him was so deep that you went along with his plans. Even though he rarely said it, you knew that he loved you. At first, that made you happy, but… you couldn’t deny that you were jealous and often found yourself worrying about if Aizen would leave you for another. He could easily find better and had not a single reason to stay with a filthy, weak human like yourself.

The undying source of your jealousy? Hinamori Momo, Aizen’s ex-lieutenant. You never failed to notice the way he treated her when he was still a taichou, the way he looked at her and spoke to her and the way she literally kissed the ground he walked on. Right to the very end, she was treated like a special pet to Aizen. You hated it but you bit your tongue and believed that once you were safe in Hueco Mundo, Hinamori Momo would simply be a thing of the past.

But you had been wrong.

Aizen might not have known it, or maybe he did and just didn’t care, but you knew that he watched Momo in that damned monitoring room of his. You had walked in on him to see her on the screen and that damned smile reserved just for her. His brown eyes had followed every movement she made. Did he really love Momo and not you? Had you mistaken his actions for ones of love when they were really nothing more than friendly gestures? Were you just a toy for Aizen? A replacement? Was Momo his true love?

You felt yourself grow dizzy at the swirling questions in your brain. You wanted answers but you were too afraid to ask him. It wasn’t because he could, and probably would kill you – no, you were afraid that your worries would push him farther away. You were afraid of his answer.

If you didn’t have Aizen, who did you have? No one. No one welcomes back a traitor.

“Y/N-chan?” Gin cocked his head to the side, staring at you in question.

You snapped out of your thoughts, moving your gaze from the floor to the fox-like ex-captain. “Oh, Gin! Hi!”

He frowned. “Are ya okay? Ya look kinda out of it.”

“Oh, I’m fine.” You waved him off with a fake smile.

Gin could see through your act, though. For a while now, you had been acting strangely and he was beginning to get worried. You would never admit to anything being wrong, though, and you were a damn good actor, hiding what you felt behind a mask of fake smiles.

He knew what he had to do. If you wouldn’t respond to him, then maybe Aizen could do the trick.

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Aizen looked up from his cup of tea as Gin entered the meeting room, his usual smirk nowhere in sight. “Something I can help you with, Gin?”

“It’s ‘bout Y/N.”

No smirk. No honorific.

Aizen narrowed his eyes at the younger male. “What’s wrong with Y/N?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” He repeated, arching a brow.

“Been actin’ strange.” Gin furrowed his brows. “Zonin’ out a lot more than usual, forcin’ smiles. Seems worried ’bout somethin’.”

“Y/N hasn’t been eating or sleeping properly, either.”

The two men turned their attention to the blind man that had just entered the room.

“Ya noticed it, too?”

Tousen simply nodded in reply. He didn’t need eyes to see that you were distressed over something.

Aizen was not happy. He had been so busy with his plans that he hadn’t noticed a change in you. Normally when you had a problem, you’d always come and talk to him about it no matter what it was. What was different now?

Aizen stood up, walking past the two former captains and exiting the room. Right about now, you should be in the bedroom that you shared, reading one of the many manga books that you had brought with you to Hueco Mundo.

He was right, in a sense.

You were in the bedroom, but you weren’t reading. Instead, you were sitting on the side of the bed, leaning over so your arms were resting on your knees. You were staring blankly at the wall across from you, but it was obvious from the glazed over look in your eyes that you weren’t actually seeing it.

How could he have let you get this bad?

Aizen walked farther into the room but you didn’t notice him; at least not until he stopped in front of you. Your eyes widened as you were brought back from your thoughts, head snapping up. You swallowed nervously and put on a fake smile.

“Sousuke! Something wrong? You’re usually still working this time of day…”

Aizen’s stoic face did not change as he examined his love. You looked pale and thin like you hadn’t been eating enough. It was faint, but he could see the dark circles under your eyes, indicating that you hadn’t been sleeping properly.

He narrowed his eyes, racking his brain for a reason. Were the Espada giving you trouble? No, none of them were dumb enough to do that. Well, except for maybe Nnoitra and Grimmjow. Were you unhappy in Hueco Mundo? Did you want to return to the World of the Living? Or was it something else entirely?

You blinked up at him, confused by his actions. “Sousuk – ”

“What’s the matter?”

“Eh? Nothing’s wrong.”

Aizen reached out a hand, his fingertips brushing your cheek. “Don’t lie to me. You’re pale. Kaname and Gin have informed me that you have not been eating or sleeping like you should. Is that true?”

“I’ve always been pale.” You laughed, ignoring the nervous feeling swirling in the back of your mind. “No offense, but Gin isn’t exactly the best cook and I’m not too fond of the food here, you know how picky I am.” Not a complete lie. Gin couldn’t cook to save his life. “As for the sleep thing, I just haven’t really been tired.” You rubbed the back of your head sheepishly, gaze leaving his face and focusing on the white pants he wore.

There was no reason to be so nervous, you were an excellent liar, but would Aizen have the power to see through those lies?

“Are you unhappy here?” His voice softened and his eyes followed suit. “Do you want to return to the World of the Living?”

Your eyes widened and your hands clutched tightly onto the fabric of your pants. Is that what he thought? Would he send you back and be done with you?

You lowered your head, allowing a shadow to form over your eyes. When you finally found your voice, it was barely above a whisper. “No, I… I’m not unhappy being here. I do miss the world of the living, but… I want to stay here… with you…”

Aizen kneeled down, grabbing your chin between his thumb and index, forcing you to look at him. “What’s making you unhappy, Y/N?”

Your heart skipped a beat when that deep velvet voice formed your name. You didn’t want to lose him – you couldn’t! You shook your head, pulling away from him and closing your eyes.

Aizen was shocked; you had never pulled away from him before. “Y/N,”

You shook your head again, eyes shut tightly.

With a sigh, he pushed you back onto the bed, one hand beside your head while the other rested on your wrist. He leaned down, warm breath fanning over your neck as he spoke your name again.

Your eyes stared up at the ceiling as you felt yourself submitting to his will. You just couldn’t deny Aizen, no matter how hard you tried. “I… I’m afraid,” you whispered.

“Afraid? Of what, love?” Hearing that word used to make your heart soar, but now it just hurt.

“Of losing you…”

“Losing me?” He pulled back, his brown eyes staring down into your own.

You had to look away from his piercing gaze. “Can I ask you something, Sousuke?”

“Of course.”

“Do you love Hinamori?”

Aizen blinked down at you, brow furrowing in confusion. That was the last question he expected to hear. “Why would you think that?”

“Back in Soul Society, you’d always look at her so lovingly and send her such a loving smile that no one else ever received. You’ve never looked at me like that. I didn’t expect you to, but it hurt to see her get all of your attention and affection. I’m not clingy, and I’m usually not jealous, I just… I wish I knew what she has that I don’t…”

Aizen wasn’t expecting that, either. “Hinamori Momo is no longer in my life. You know I only acted that way to gain her trust.”

“I saw you in the monitoring room watching her the other day!” You snapped, finally meeting his gaze as you released the breath that you had been holding. “You were smiling that special smile!”

Realization flashed through his eyes and his lips twitched up into a smile. “And how long did you stay and watch me?”

“I saw her on the screen, I saw your smile and I booked it.”

“I see. If you had stayed a little bit longer, you would have seen me watching…” he paused, leaning down again so that his lips brushed against your ear, “…you.”

“What?”

“The footage I was watching at the time was when you and Momo spent the day together to give me, Gin, and Kaname some time alone. I was not watching her, I was watching you.”

“S-Seriously?” You whispered, feeling several different emotions sprouting within you.

His hand slid away from your wrist, moving up so he could gently trace your bottom lip with his thumb. “Fool,” he whispered, letting his lips brush yours. “I’m too intoxicated by you to want anyone else.” He slammed his lips against yours as his body pushed you into the bed.

You could feel it in the kiss.

It was so strong that he didn’t even need to voice it and you didn’t need to hear it.

Feeling overwhelmed, your arms wrapped tight around his neck as Aizen’s kiss slowly melted away all of your worries.

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[kstewdeux]

Tumblr Exclusive For No Raisins

Five Stages of Grief

Struggling to breathe, Inuyasha clutched Kagome’s battered body tightly against his chest - one hand pressing against the wound on her back while the other pressed her ever colder hand against his heart. This was his fault. Completely his fault. That attack had been thrown and he ducked without taking into account the miko’s position. By the time he realized where she was, there was no time to take the hit for her and...and...

“You’re okay” Inuyasha choked as tears streamed down his cheeks and he buried his face in Kagome’s blood soaked hair, “You’ll be fine. It’s just...it’s just a flesh wound. Nothing deep. Just...just stay with me, huh?”

A whine escaped him as the scent of death began creeping into her scent. With trembling hands, he had tended to her wounds as best as he could but it wasn’t enough. At a certain point, he could barely feel his own fingers and every clumsy attempt to stitch up the numerous wounds wound up hurting her more. It wasn’t like this was his first time tending an injury that way. He’d done it thousands of times on himself with even cruder implements than what his miko carried with her from the future but his hands wouldn’t cooperate just like everything else in his body. Amber eyes - usually able to see every blade of grass - could barely see what they were doing. His lungs were barely taking in air and it took everything he had left in him not to simply pass out.

So he stopped trying since all he was doing was making her worse. Oh, he applied bandages and ointments and forced her to swallow those fever pills but she was bleeding out before his very eyes. There was nothing he could do for her. He had failed her in every possible way and now all he could do was pray.

To add insult to injury, the smell of graveyard soil had been steadily growing stronger over the last agonizing hour. Kikyo knew. She knew Kagome was dying.

“You can’t have her,” Inuyasha spat hatefully as the last person he wanted to see came into view, “She’s going to be fine. You’ll see. So...so you can’t take her soul. I won’t...I won’t let you.”

Closing his eyes, Inuyasha tried to find the will to stand and fight but it simply wouldn’t come. With Kagome slipping through his fingers so too did his own desire to live to see another day. He didn’t want to go back to a world without his miko in it. He simply wouldn’t survive.

Squeezing Kagome’s hand as tightly as he dared, Inuyasha tried to muster up more strength from the simple touch to no avail. So he restorted to desperately clutching her to him with both hands like he could hold in her soul through that action alone. The motion aggravated her wounds but with as far gone as his miko was in that moment, she didn’t even react and that sent his panic to all new heights.

“How was she hurt?” came Kikyo’s softly spoken reply and Inuyasha shook his head - burying his nose into ebony locks as his own heart struggled to beat. The scent of Kagome’s impending death was suffocating.

“Inuyasha look at me,” the undead miko commanded in a gentler tone than he’d heard in quite some time. When he merely whined and more tears fell, Kikyo tried to cross the distance between them but stopped at the menacing growl he used to warn her.

“You can’t have her,” Inuyasha managed shakily as he clutched Kagome tighter still. Like the action itself would keep the soul inside its vessel, “She’s mine. She’s mine and I promised...I promised to protect her.”

His voice cracked on that last word and the undead miko felt her unbeating heart crack at the sound.

“She needs new bandages,” Kikyo sighed, “And you’re in no state to...”

“Don’t touch her!” Inuyasha barked as yet more tears fell - one clawed hand blindly swiping to maintain distance through intimidation, “Stay...stay back. I’m warning you!”

Kikyo took another step and Inuyasha’s face contorted in pure unbridled rage.

“Take one step closer and I’ll destroy you,” the hanyou snarled between clenched teeth as his eyes flashed red, “I said you can’t have her bitch so back the fuck up!”

Kikyo let out another sigh before glancing at her soul collectors who nodded subtly and began gliding towards the grieving half-demon who watched with somewhat panic stricken eyes as they moved closer.

“Get those things away from me!” Inuyasha snapped desperately as he tried to get to his feet but any strength he had had long since fled his body, “What...what about you can’t have her did you not understand?!”

“Inuyasha I’m not going to...”

It was becoming terrifyingly obvious that something was wrong with him. Despite his best efforts, his body wouldn’t cooperate and every attempt to scramble to his feet and run resulted in his crumpling to the ground. His worthless ass couldn’t protect her.

He already failed but....

“If...if you need to take someone take me,” Inuyasha bargained desperately as one soul collector gently wrapped around his elbow and his body suddenly wasn’t his own. His grip weakened and he watched with heartbroken eyes as another soul collector wrenched Kagome from his arms, “I’ll go with you. I swear I’ll go with you. You can kill me or...or do whatever. I don’t care. Just...just don’t...”

A soft cry escaped him as Kikyo knelt down beside the one person who made his life worth living and gently rested one hand on Kagome’s stomach.

“Kikyo please....please don’t hurt her,” Inuyasha begged miserably as the soul collector immobilizing him pinned both arms behind his back. Kikyo was going to make him watch?! Didn’t she see he was already broken enough already? Why...why destroy him completely? What would be the point?! Did she really hate him that much? He...he’d never done anything to her. Defended her even at the expense of his own happiness. Even though it killed him inside. Every time he returned he had to face the betrayal in Kagome’s eyes which was more painful than any injury he’d received. Ruined every chance he had to be loved for the sake of someone who wanted nothing more than to make him suffer. Hadn’t he done enough? Sacrificed enough?

Inuyasha closed his eyes and willed his heart to give out. He couldn’t watch this. Another tear slipped free.

“These wounds are deep,” he heard Kikyo hum in a worried voice, “The stitches are too loose. Do you have more thread?”

Letting out a shaky breath, watery amber eyes slowly opened to find Kikyo looking at him expectantly.

“I’m not going to hurt her. I want to help,” Kikyo informed him in a slightly chiding tone before adding quickly, “Kagome is essential to defeating Naraku.”

Exhaling slowly, Inuyasha bit back tears as he tried to find his voice but failed. Kikyo gave him a strangely sympathetic look before glancing at the yellow monstrosity Kagome called a backpack and nodding to one of her soul collectors who clumsily tugged it closer.

Inuyasha felt his soul curl up and die as Kikyo began rummaging through the bag. This was a trick. Make him think she was there to help and then do something awful when his guard was down. There would be no holding Kagome one last time. No ability to say goodbye. She’d leave this world never knowing....never knowing how much he loved her. Swallowing thickly, Inuyasha tried to find the courage to say what needed to say before it was too late but his fear that Kikyo would make Kagome’s death more painful stilled his tongue. Two more tears trailed down his cheeks as he tried to remember how to breathe. Kagome had made him believe, if only for a little while, that he could be something more. That he had worth in his ability to protect and care for others but everyone was right about him. He had failed the one person in the world who thought differently of him from the very start. He was every bit the worthless half-breed everyone had always told him he was. Maybe he should’ve been drowned at birth.

It didn’t even register with him that Kikyo was, in fact, helping. Years of sewn distrust blinded him to the possibility that things were not as dire as they appeared. Whether Kikyo was helping or not, though, the scent of death lingered.

Letting out a shuddering breath, Inuyasha tried to struggle against the invisible bonds as his hardwired instinct to protect Kagome finally kicked in. It had shriveled up and died for a brief moment out of a belief that it was too late to do anything but now that the world has shown him once and for all things could always be worse, the instinct came back full force.

“Stop moving so much,” Kikyo sighed as she continued stitching the unconscious miko’s wounds, “You’ll aggravate your wounds.”

Inuyasha, of course, didn’t even know he was injured so that comment went right over his head. It hadn’t even registered that he also had been the victim of a direct hit that had shredded his fire rat robes and that half the blood that drenched Kagome was his own. Inuyasha honestly placed absolutely no value on his own life and the undead miko sighed sadly at that realization as she finished her task before reaching for the bottle labeled disinfectant. Which by the smell of it would probably hurt quite a good bit once applied.

Kikyo flicked her gaze up at the utterly heartbroken and obviously struggling boy watching with agony riddled eyes for just a moment before deciding she could multi-task.

“Inuyasha fear not. I have no intention of letting her die,” the undead miko began softly before looking at the spray bottle with a confused, appraising eye, “You must calm yourself.”

Again, Kikyo underestimated how very far gone Inuyasha was in that moment. His mind filled with panic induced static that was only growing thicker by the moment. Inuyasha was incapable of hearing anything outside of his own heart pounding in his normally sensitive ears. Breathing had gone completely by the wayside for more reasons than one and kiss goodbye his sense of smell with how congested his nose had become. The slow trickle of blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth was flowing completely unnoticed as his vision blurred and his head lolled. The effort he was expending tried to break free was dimming and his body was refusing to cooperate.

“Set him down,” Kikyo ordered softly as she spritzed the sanitizer a few times and hummed in understanding, “But be careful. Don’t aggravate his wounds.”

Inuyasha felt his body being laid out as he continued watching Kikyo do whatever the hell she was doing. Kagome was so close. If he could move, he could almost reach out and touch her. The undead miko glanced up then followed his gaze with a sad little smile before reaching over, grasping his hand and pulling it a hair away from Kagome’s wrist. Taking the miko’s wrist then Kikyo placed it atop his palm before helping curl his fingers around the thin flesh so his thumb lay just over her vein.

“Can you feel her heartbeat?” Kikyo asked softly as Inuyasha looked up at her with unfocused amber eyes before those same eyes lowered to where his hand was curled around Kagome’s wrist. For a moment he didn’t react at all before a shuddering sigh of relief gave her the answer he couldn’t give out loud. The steady thrum under his fingertips brought him comfort that couldn’t be voiced with words. At least he’d be with her at the end. Small comfort though that was. Maybe he’d be lucky enough to die soon so they’d be born together in the next life. That would be alright. To find out that soul and him really did have a destiny. Just wrong time and place this go ‘round. Vision blurring Inuyasha closed his eyes and focused on Kagome’s weakening pulse.

“It’s okay ‘Gome,” Inuyasha mumbled tiredly as another tear snaked down his dirtied cheek, “Its okay...”

It had to be several hours later that Inuyasha slowly regained consciousness even though his eyes stubbornly refused to cooperate. He was cocooned in something warm and soft. There was a pleasant pressure running along the front of his body too that one arm seemed to be keeping in place. Kagome was nearby, though, which meant he was being protected and cared for. And...and...

Oh no. Ooooh no. Nope. Not good. Definitely bad.

With a painful sounding groan, Inuysha finally forced his eyes open and nearly died on the spot. A short distance away a calm, indifferent looking Kikyo sat petting her soul collector while her two weird child minions maintained a barrier that surrounded him. As for the pressure against his front, one glance down told him that it was a pajama clad Kagome spooned up against his bare chest while the warmth came from the sleeping bag they’d both been stuffed into.

The rest of that day crashed down onto him moments later.

“Shit,” Inuysha breathed as he suddenly buried his nose into Kagome’s hair and inhaled deeply before whining in relief when the scent of death couldn’t be found. A tear welled in the corner of his eye as he squeezed the miko to him as tightly as he dared. He could smell the somewhat fresh blood from her stomach wound even now and...and his own dried blood? Had he been hurt too? He hadn’t noticed...

“Once you were both stabilized, I had my soul collectors arrange you this way,” Kikyo explained impassively as she glanced over at him, “It seemed the logical thing to do.”

Inuyasha set his jaw - nose remaining in Kagome’s hair as amber eyes watched the undead miko wearily. Had Kikyo been trying to help him? That seemed so absurd he didn’t even know where to start.

For some reason, this was the moment he suddenly remembered that Kagome hadn’t been wearing pajamas. And it would appear his undergarments were gone. His eyes widened in horror for a moment before he pushed that thought as far back in his mind as it would go. W-who cared it Kikyo saw them both naked? That didn’t bother him. Nope. Didn’t bother him at all. It was...

This was fine. Fine. An absolutely fantastic turn of events that wouldn’t keep him awake at night due to the crushing awkwardness. The only solace he could find was that Kikyo may have done a mortifying thing but it was done in the course of a not shitty thing so...

The fact that she had done such a thing when both he and Kagome were unconscious did seem to be the thing that convinced him Kikyo didn’t actually mean them harm. She’d had ample opportunity to kill them. They’d both been so far gone the jostling that must have occurred didn’t even wake them.

That didn’t help the blush on his cheeks or the mortification he felt - although the utter relief he felt that Kagome was alive muted both negative emotions considerably.

���Why help her?” Inuyasha asked suspiciously as his hand slid up to pull Kagome’s torso more fully against him.

“Kagome is essential to defeating Naraku,” Kikyo explained before smiling faintly and running one hand across a nearby silver serpent, “And if something were to happen to her, someone I know would be very sad.”

“What?”

Kikyo subtly nodded to herself as she realized that statement went completely over his head. Of course he wouldn’t understand the significance of her repeating back those words Kagome had said to her. Her reincarnation sheltered him from the ugliness of the world and if he had known that he almost lost both of them....

It made all the sense in the world to keep what happened that day a secret. Inuyasha had always been an anxious creature and at that time, he was endlessly torn. Kikyo wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew Kagome hadn’t admitted what should have been obvious. That day that seemed so long ago, it had been Kikyo’s intention to kill the competition and yet her reincarnation refused to say as much. This strange girl made it her job to protect Inuyasha from threats real or imagined. To shelter him from ugly truths he was ill equipped to handle like how the woman he still adored was now a being of evil. Kagome loved him for the good man he was and made it her mission in life to convince him to love himself. A strange girl made for an equally strange boy.

“When I was dying, Kagome risked her life to save mine. On more than one occasion,” Kikyo interrupted vaguely as she looked up into the starry sky, “It seemed only right to repay the favor.”

Inuyasha considered this before relaxing somewhat and rearranging to rest his cheek on Kagome’s hair with his eyes partially closed. It was still insanely hard to focus and his head felt ridiculously heavy for no reason. Still, Kagome was alright and that’s really what mattered.

“I love her you know so...so thank you I guess,” Inuyasha mumbled cautiously as he inhaled deeply and relished in the knowledge that Kagome would live.

“I believe that has been made abundantly clear,” Kikyo admitted with a humorless laugh.

Inuyasha snorted softly but didn’t bother arguing. Whether or not Kagome loved him in return was a question he’d prefer to explore with literally anyone else. Hell, he’d even ask Naraku for his thoughts on the matter before he’d ever try to talk about that remote possibility with Kikyo.

“Thank you,” Inuyasha mumbled after a long period of awkward silence, “For saving her. I...I don’t know what I would’ve done if...if...”

The half-demon couldn’t even finish that statement as visions of him permanently turning into a full demon and wreaking havoc across the land entered his minds eye. In his heart of hearts, he knew what he would’ve done. He would’ve gone insane. Just would’ve lost his damn mind and ran around killing people for no...

“It was the least I could do,” Kikyo sighed as she glanced over at the injured pair, “I will protect you until dawn and then I must leave. I believe you will have healed enough by then to take Kagome to a second location.”

Inuyasha nodded against Kagome’s hair as he gave the living, breathing, not dying miko as light squeeze. Of all the things that had ever happened to him, not one had been as terrifying as that morning. He needed to be more careful in the future. Be more aware during battle. Or, alternatively, he could just throw Kagome down the well and destroy it so this would never happen again. That was definitely an attractive option.

“I know you are a man of few words,” Kikyo offered barely above a whisper, “But perhaps it is time you told her. I have no intention of dragging you away from her. You have done enough.”

Inuyasha wrinkled his nose at that comment but otherwise stayed silent and nodded. Truth be told, holding Kagome against him was rather nice even if his undead typically murderous ex-fiancé was watching. If he didn’t just say screw it and throw Kagome down the well, he might insist they do this more often. If, of course, Kagome woke up and discovered he was holding her. What he’d do if he managed to pull this off without her knowing was an issue for a different day.

“I love you,” Inuyasha whispered in Kagome’s ear as he settled into a somewhat more comfortable position and nuzzled the skin just above her jaw. The warmth and contentment flowing through his veins soon rocked him to sleep and for the first time in his life, Inuysha slept well.

Kikyo watched on with a melancholy sigh as Inuyasha subconsciously snuggled up against his miko in his sleep.Yes, she was a creature born of evil. Yes, she had made many, many mistakes since she’d been so rudely brought back to life. And yes, her feelings toward the injured half-demon consisted of a mixture of love and hate. But something about his scream this night had triggered something she didn’t know she still possessed. A part of herself all but forgotten. She’d literally flown most of the distance toward him and walked the rest. Cautiously, of course. There most certainly a risk he would strike her down and honestly, she wouldn’t blame him.

When she opened her eyes that fateful day, she’d been in denial over so many things. Mind bucking against his insistence that he had nothing to do with her demise. That she had been cursed into this half-life consisting of little more than pain and misery.

Naturally what followed was unbridled rage at the world. Of course, everyone with eyes knew where that path had led her. 

After the anger had subsided, more or less, she’d began to plead with any god who would listen. Obsessed with the desire to return to the ground from whence she came, defeating Naraku became her number one priority. She promised to kill the wicked Onigumo - not out a warped sense of duty but rather because she hoped and prayed that by doing so, she would be freed from this hell. Maybe even gain the affection she once had and even be accepted by the people who once loved her. Inuyasha was a lost cause by that point but Kaede...

Kaede may forgive her yet.

It was the realization that it would be impossible to defeat Naraku on her own and thus not win any favors from the powers that be or forgiveness from her sister that brought her crashing back down to earth. Numb to the world around her,  she no longer cared what happened to her or anyone else. No longer cared whether Naraku won or lost. Yes, she still wanted to be the one who killed that horrid beast but...but she knew...she knew that she would not be there to witness her former love’s victory of defeat. There would be no redemption for her. There was no point even trying to do more than just wander aimlessly and help on occasion if she was in the mood to do so. By and large, however, she didn’t do anything productive any longer.

That was, until today. Something about Inuyasha’s anguished cry made something in her snap. It was the sound of a heart breaking with such devastating force that the world itself stood still. Never, never should he be allowed to make such a sound. Bygones being bygones, Kikyo was determined to stop whatever was the source of his pain. It was unacceptable in her mind for whatever reason.

And with this action, she accepted that this was her fate. Such a bizarre thing to realize at the end of an era. There was no one still living who loved her any longer.

She was truly alone.

“Kikyo,” Inuyasha muttered in a concerned tone as his amber eyes blinked open, “I didn’t know you could cry anymore. What’s wrong?”

Or maybe not.

“You must be imagining things,” Kikyo lied smoothly as she stared into the distance, “Such a thing is impossible.”

“Yeah okay,” Inuyasha snorted softly as he settled back down. A few moments passed before he cleared his throat and offered something he hoped brought the undead miko some peace, “Kaede’s been asking about you.”

Kikyo subtly furrowed her brow and glanced in his direction.

“Why do you say such a thing?”

“There are people who still care about you,” he continued hesitantly, “Just because I don’t love you like that anymore doesn’t mean I still don’t love you as a friend. Kaede I know misses the hell outta ya. Go see her. Old bat’d love a visit.”

Kikyo’s lips twitched upwards as she nodded and sighed.

“That was unkind,” she chided gently, “You should not speak of your elders that way.”

“I knew her when she was a brat and I’m still older than her. I can call her whatever the hell I want,” Inuyasha laughed good-naturedly as he settled back down and gave Kagome’s still form a light squeeze before frowning suddenly and clearing his throat to make a peace offering, “Just...just so you know I’m sorry for what happened. Back then I mean. I should’ve known. I should’ve....”

“It was a very convincing plot,” Kikyo interrupted, “And exposed issues that were already present. I failed you more than you have ever failed me.”

“Is that why you helped Kagome?” Inuyasha asked hesitantly and the undead miko shrugged slightly.

“To be honest I do not know why I assisted,” she lied, “This existence is most strange.”

“I bet,” Inuyasha acknowledged wearily before furrowing his brow, “Does it hurt?”

“This form?”

Inuyasha nodded.

“Not any longer.”

[jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets]

Pas De Deux - Chapter 3 (End)

Title: Pas De Deux

Fandom: Supernatural

Pairing: Destiel 

Rating: not really needed for this fluff lol

Tags: fluff, pretty much just a whole lot of fluff XD

Summary: Dean is a closeted ballet dancer, and Cas is playing the Nutcracker Prince in the Kansas State Ballet. When the ballet loses their Clara and Cas confronts Dean about taking the part along side him, will he be able to put aside his fears and let everyone know who he really is? All to help the man of his dreams?

MASTERLIST

AO3

*** My works are not to be posted on any sites without my permission! But comments and reblogs are love! <3 Please and thanks!!

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Chapter Three

     He woke up to the sun blasting through a crack in his curtains, hitting him perfectly across the eyes. He rubbed his face as he slowly sat up in bed, feeling a bit better then he had when he first came home, and wondered how long he had slept. Looking at the clock and seeing it was now after nine, and he had managed to get a decent few hours sleep, he decided to head down to the kitchen and see who was up. Sam was usually an early bird and most times already had breakfast ready by the time Dean decided to roll down stairs. 

     When he got there Sam was in the kitchen, showered, dressed, and stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce he was making for dinner. And just as Dean had expected, there was a fresh pot of coffee made and a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast waiting for him on the counter. 

     He walked over and sat down on one of the stools at the island, watching Sam as he ate, "Where's Mom?"

     "Around somewhere," he answered, as he turned and placed a cup of coffee in front of Dean, "she was up before I was today."

     He nodded and focused on finishing his food, then thanked Sam before heading through the house to go find their mom. He walked down the hall and heard the slam of the dryer door in the laundry room, so he took a hard right and found her inside. Though his smile instantly dropped when he saw her, his entire body froze, and every limb hummed with anxiety while all he could do was stare at his mom, holding two things in her hands staring at them in confusion.

     The first was the tickets Dean had been given by the directors of the ballet, the ones that were meant for her and Sam. The second… was Dean's tights. 

     "Mom…" He finally managed to breathe out, and she turned to look at him. 

     "Dean, what… what is this? Are they yours?"

     "Why do you have those? Why were you in my bag?"

     "You were sleeping, and I saw your bag on the washing machine," she tried to speak calmly, not wanting Dean to freak out, seeing he was clearly on the brink of a meltdown, "I figured since you seemed so tired lately I would do your laundry for you. But what is this? Are you… are you in this show?"

     He was pretty much in tears now, he was so scared. He wanted to do this differently, he wanted to tell them on his own terms, when he felt ready, not have his mom find out on her own because he forgot he left his bag on the washing machine. "I forgot I left my bag here. I… I…"

     Mary just calmly reached out and took Dean by the shoulders, gently guiding him to the kitchen and sitting him at the table. She sat across from him, staring helplessly at him as he just placed his head on his hands, fingers wringing tightly in his hair, knuckles white.

     "Woah," Sam dropped the wooden spoon on the counter with a clatter and practically ran around the counter to sit beside Dean at the table, "what's going on?!"

     "Dean, talk to us, Honey," Mary tried to get him to look up but he wouldn't budge, "Were those tights yours?"

     "Tights?!" Sam looked between them. 

     "I… I couldn't tell you." He shook his head, hands still over his eyes, "I was afraid."

     "Tell us what, Dean,?" Sam tried this time, placing a hand on Dean's shaking shoulder. 

     "Why not, Honey?"

     "Dad…" He finally lifted his head slightly out of his hands, wiping the tears that had smudged all over his face now, though still not making eye contact with anyone. "Dad would never want me to be the person I am, he would be disappointed."

     "Disappointed about what, Dean?!" Sam moved to get into Dean's eye line but he quickly darted his eyes away. "You're a great person, why would anyone be disappointed in you? What could you have done that's so wrong?"

     Dean just shook his head and closed his eyes, the sobs coming back a little harder now. Mary reached over the table and managed to get ahold of one of his to squeeze it comfortingly. "Tell Sam, it's okay."

     "I…" He tried to look at Sam but he couldn't. He was afraid that just because his dad was gone and he couldn't see the look of disappointment on his face, he still might see it on Sam's. But he forced it out anyways, since there was no going back now, "I… dance."

     "Okay," Sam shrugged his bottom lip and shook his head, seemingly unfazed, "I still don't understand why you're crying though. Lots of people dance, many of them are amazingly talented, so why are you so upset?"

     "But I'm a ballet dancer, Sam! Not some crazy cool hip hop dancer that you're probably thinking of, no, I dance around the stage in girly tights!" He slammed a fist down on the table, making Sam jump a little. "And the tickets Mom found in my bag, along with my tights, were for the performance I am going to be in. I am part of the Kansas State Ballet's rendition of The Nutcracker."

     "You… you dance ballet?" Sam smiled a bit at the thought, "Dean Winchester, the manliest man of all men to ever man, dances ballet?"

     "This is exactly why I didn't say anything," Dean just shook his head and wiped away more stray tears, "Dad would have killed me if he ever found out that I loved ballet, let alone taught myself the skill. He wanted me to be the manly man that everyone knows and thinks I am, not some pansy dancing around the stage in tights."

     "But, Dean, that's awesome!" Dean turned to Sam, a little startled. "Ballet’s actually one of the most intense dance forms out there! It's so powerful, and moving. And the fact that you taught yourself the art, and are a part of a state ballet group, is something that a lot of classically trained dancers could never even come close to be able to do!"

     "But… Dad-"

     “Your father is gone now, Honey, has been for four years," she gave his hand a squeeze again, and this time she managed to catch his eye, "you have to stop looking over your shoulder and expecting him to be there. It's only holding you back. He would have been proud of you no matter what, he loved you."

     "Would he still be proud if he knew I wore tights and danced in pointe shoes?"

     Mary shrugged, "He might have been a little sad that you didn't want to follow in his footsteps and fall into sports, but he would have supported you regardless. I know he seemed like a hardened man, but he loved you boys. And now it's time for you to just let go of that past and be yourself, Dean.” 

     Dean shook his head vigorously, gasping out, "I can't,"

     “You can.” She assured him in her most firm mom voice she could muster.

     "You don't understand!" Dean nearly screamed, "It is hardwired into my brain that I shouldn't be this way! I should be covered in dirt sliding across a baseball diamond, or sweating through my gear on the ice, not dancing in skin tight outfits and sparkles. He would hate me, he would hate everything I am!"

     "No he wouldn't," she said softly and shook her head, "but that doesn't matter anymore, Dean, this is your time to be you, and I wish you would have told me sooner rather than suppressing this obvious passion. I want you to be happy, Dean, and if ballet is it for you then that is perfectly fine! Just be you, please, Honey.” 

     He didn't say anymore after that. Just sat at the table for most of the day, contemplating everything that his mom and brother had said, and what he was going to do about it. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

     It was their last rehearsal before they would open to the public. Opening night was right around the corner. Everyone was a cluster of excitement and nerves, buzzing around the theater, the knowledge that their tickets had sold out seconds after being released was making the atmosphere even more intense. The entire cast was reeling, well, everyone except Dean. He still hadn't shown up at the theater yet, he was almost an hour late for the rehearsal, and Cas was starting to get worried. Along with others. 

     "Have you heard from him, Castiel?" Cas just shook his head at a worried Chuck from center stage, "Has anyone heard from Dean?!"

     He ran through the theater, asking everyone about Dean as the rest of the cast waited patiently on stage. Cas just stood there alone, worried, waiting along with everyone else, his body tingling with fear that maybe Dean wasn't coming back. Maybe this was it, maybe he had decided he didn't want this anymore, or his family didn't want it. 

     He listened to the hushed conversations around him, trying to focus on that for a moment, but that didn't help. For the very first thing he heard was one of the female dancers saying to another, “I overheard him saying yesterday that he was going home to tell his family about the show, he was worried it wouldn’t go over well. I hope everything’s okay.”

     And if Castiel's heart wasn't already in his feet. But then suddenly pounding footsteps came from Castiel's right and he turned to see Dean bouncing across the stage to stand next to him. "I'm here, sorry I'm so late!"

     Both Chuck and Metatron breathed hard sighs of relief and said, “Oh thank heavens!”

     "I just had some things to clear up back home, I'm really sorry!" The directors both waved him off, just thankful their other star was still here. Then he turned his attention to Cas at his side and smiled, a little twinkle in his eye as he said only to him, "I'm ready for this, I'm ready to just be me."

     "Shall we get this final rehearsal on the road then?!" Metarton waved his hands in the air and everyone started running around them. "Places people, places!"

     Cas walked over with a matching smile to Dean’s and took both his hands in his own. He didn't say anything, he didn't need to, neither of them did. So instead he just lifted Dean's hands to his mouth, placed a gentle kiss on the knuckles of each hand, and then moved back to get in his place. The whole time the two of them never took their eyes off one another, even as the orchestra started playing their final dance.

~~~~~~~~~~~

     It was finally opening night and Dean had never been so god damn nervous in his entire life. He was currently standing backstage in full costume, peeking out the curtain at the completely full seats, people packing into the theater, and his heart was pounding out of his chest. Then he looked to the front row and saw his mom and Sam, sitting in the seats given to them by the directors, and then both Chuck and Metatron waltzed through the orchestra to introduce themselves to them. That made his nerves even worse, he was sure his heart was going to pop out of his chest and explode, and he had the sudden urge to whip off his pointe shoes and get the hell outta dodge. But then there were hands on his shoulders, rubbing up and down his arms, steadying and grounding. "Cas," he breathed and leaned back.

     "You're nervous," he whispered into Dean's ear as he leaned impossibly closer to Cas. 

     He nodded, "Sammy's here, and my mom, talking to Chuck and Metatron," he let out a long shuddering sigh, "what if they hate it? What if I mess up because they're watching?! What if everyone laughs at me?! Cas!"

     He turned Dean towards him and pulled him into a tight hug, Dean wrapping his arms around his neck and digging his face in, "You're spiraling, Dean," he rubbed his hands soothingly up and down his back, "you have nothing to worry about. I promise that not just your family, but everyone in the audience will love your performance. You will not fall, because I will always catch you. And no one will laugh at you, because if they do they will have to answer to me."

     Dean chuckled against Cas's neck as Cas continued, "You will be fine. You know the dances inside and out, you know every single move, every line." Cas kept going as he felt Dean relaxing, and started moving his hands up Dean's sides to his arms, then his hands, twisting him around and resting his head on his shoulder, wrapping their clasped hands around Dean and holding him tightly to his chest. "And you know me, and I know you. When we dance together our bodies are one and it is just you and I on the stage together, just us. That's all you need to remember, and if you feel like you are starting to slip, just reach out your hand and I will be there, I promise."

     Dean just nodded and inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself, and it definitely helped when Cas gently pressed his lips to Dean's neck. Not so much a kiss but it was oh so comforting. 

     They stayed like that for a while, as long as they could, Cas's lips still pressed to Dean's neck and rocking them softly back and forth. Until the lights started to flicker, the signal for everyone to take their seats and for the cast and crew to take their positions. 

     Cas gave Dean one last hug before pulling back and taking Dean's hands in his, lifting them to his mouth to do his new favourite thing, and placed a kiss on the knuckles of each hand. Then moved across the stage to stand on the other side facing Dean. 

     His nerves came back a bit now that Cas was gone, he could still see him but not having his hands on him was unsettling him again, and even more so when he heard Chuck and Metatron on the other side of the curtain, addressing the audience before the show would start. 

     "Welcome everyone to the Kansas State Ballet's rendition of The Nutcracker!" Metatron announced and claps and cheers filled the air. 

     "Though," Chuck stepped in, "we got off to a pretty rocky start, didn't we."

     Metatron chuckled, "That we did, but maybe for the better!"

     "Very true," Chuck nodded, then turned to the audience, "early on in rehearsals we had a small bump, that being that our original lead of Clara had to… unexpectedly leave us. But, in place of her, we were gifted an angel, your very own, champion of dance, hometown boy, Dean Winchester!"

     From backstage Dean could hear everyone cheering, clapping louder than before, and the undeniable Sam Winchester whistle and hollar combo, which he had to admit eased his nerves just a bit. And Chuck and Metatron went on. 

      "Well, look at us, gushing over our stars," Metatron laughed, "we should just let you see for yourselves the pure, raw chemistry and talent that we have discovered here. Allow us to let Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak steal your hearts as they have ours."

     "So, without further ado," Chuck said just before they backed away to duck backstage, "we give you, The Nutcracker!"

     They both backed away, tucked themselves backstage to watch their masterpiece unfold, as the curtain opened and the lights shone hot and bright on the stage. 

     Dean took a deep breath, the worst part of this ballet was that he had to do the first act without Cas, before the Nutcracker Prince came in to play. But he looked over at Cas, still standing directly across from him, and he gave him a reassuring smile and gestured to himself and Dean. Just you and I together, Dean thought, I'm dancing for Cas. And with a smile and a new found burst of energy he bounded across the stage to give the best performance he could.

~~~~~~~~~~~

     As the show went on and Dean was finally able to get to dance with Cas, his very own Nutcracker Prince, that chemistry that Chuck and Metatron had spoken of came in full force. 

     Sam watched in complete awe from the front row as his brother moved on stage before him. He had never seen Dean so happy, so powerful, so amazing! And the way he danced with the other lead, it was such an intense form of intimacy, of pure completeness, that Sam was sure the entire audience could feel it. The atmosphere around him was on fire, and everyone in the audience was on the edge of their seats through the entire performance. 

     The ballet had everything, Sam thought as his eyes opened impossibly wider with each passing act. Crazy fights, ups, downs, emotions, romance, devastation, and love. And all too soon for him, and everyone else watching, it was too quickly coming to an end. 

     He watched as the Nutcracker Prince and Charles came together for their final dance, and he had to admit that he was slightly jealous at the way Dean and the Nutcracker were looking at each other. But he was oh so happy for his brother, he was finally truly happy. 

     Sparks were clearly flying between them, and as the orchestra played the final notes of the song, Charles and his Nutcracker Prince held their ending poses and the entire audience rose to their feet. Not a single person wasn't standing, not a single eye was dry, and that included both Chuck and Metatron who walked slightly out on the stage, both cheering as loud as everyone else was. 

     And just before the other dancers joined them on stage for a bow, Cas couldn't resist doing what he had been wanting to do for so long. Both of them panting, gazing deeply at each other, Dean's pure blissful smile that he knew was only there for him, and Cas knew what would make the perfect ending to this night. So he pulled lightly on Dean's hand in his and he bounced forwards into Castiel's arms. And right there, in front of everyone in the audience, Cas dipped Dean backwards and finally, finally kissed Dean. 

     The audience erupted impossibly louder, but Dean and Cas didn't even hear it. It was just the two of them. Dean clutched tighter to Cas as he dipped him a little further back, and Dean ran his hands up to clutch Cas's face as the cast around them bowed, and the curtain closed in front of them. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

     Castiel's lips were on his for what felt like a blissful eternity, lips and tongue moving with Dean's as if they were built perfectly for each other. And Dean never wanted it to end, but eventually it had to. 

     One of their celebrating cast members bumped into them as they bounced by, excited over a perfect performance, and Cas gave Dean one last long kiss before they pulled apart and Cas stood them back up. 

     Dean was even more breathless now then he had been after the dance had ended. Kissing Cas was something he had wanted to do since the very first moment he saw him dancing in that studio, and all he could do was smile and even blush a little as he pulled Cas's forehead to rest on his, "It's about time."

     Cas chuckled, his chest vibrating against Dean's as he did, and pulled Dean in even closer, "Wanted to do that for a very long time now."

     "Me too, Cas."

     They stood together for a moment before Cas said, "You were amazing, Dean."

     "So were you," he nuzzled his nose against Cas's, leaning in a little closer for another kiss, "I wouldn't have been able to do all of this if it wasn't for you."

     Before they could kiss again, a screech was heard from off to the side, startling them both as well as silencing the entire cast and crew still backstage. Cas clutched a little tighter to Dean, but Dean just laughed and hid his face in Cas's shoulder before he turned slightly, still holding Cas.

     "Mom," he laughed as she came running through the parting crowd towards them, nearly crashing into them, "stop freaking out, it's embarrassing."

     She pulled him away from Cas and into the tightest bear hug he had ever been in, "You were amazing, Honey, so absolutely amazing!"

     "Mom's right, Dean," Sam came up behind them, taking his turn to hug Dean, "that was the best performance I have ever seen! It had everything! I was literally on the edge of my seat the entire time!"

     "Thanks, Sammy! And I’m glad you're here cuz there’s someone I want you to meet," Dean said as he backed up, rubbing the back of his neck. Then he turned back and took Castiel's hand, bringing him forwards a bit, "this is Cas, the other lead and… and…"

     Dean stuttered, not exactly sure what to say, especially while his mom and brother were staring at him so intensely. Not to mention the all too knowing matching Winchester smirks they were sending his way. So Cas stepped forward, hand outstretched towards them, "I'm Dean's boyfriend."

     Boyfriend, Dean thought, and his stomach had butterflies again, though this time the good kind. And he couldn't help but laugh as his boyfriend's hand was swatted away by Sam, and he was taken in a Winchester group hug, while Sam patted his back and said, "Welcome to the family, man!" Then backed away and held out two bouquets of flowers to the both of them, "And these are for you guys, congrats on an amazing first performance, and many more to come!"

     "Thanks, Sammy," Dean said as he took it, then settled himself against Cas's side again, "it means a lot that you guys liked the show."

     "We really did, Honey, and we’re so proud of you, both of you." She stood between them for one more hug and a kiss on each boy's cheek before backing away and saying, "alright, you two change and then I'm taking you both to dinner, on me. Sammy and I will wait for you by the car."

     Dean watched them go with a smile as Cas pulled him a little closer so he could kiss his cheek. "Your family is great, I am glad to be a part of it."

     "They're a little crazy but I love them," he said and turned a bit, smiling at Cas, "almost as much as I love you."

     "And I love you, Dean," he said as he leaned in, pressing his lips to Dean's in an almost kiss, "I am so very glad that you snuck into that dance studio and watched me dancing like a creeper."

     Dean couldn't help but laugh against Cas's lips and said, "Me too, Cas, me too," and closed the gap between them. Dean was pleased that everything had turned out better than he had ever thought it would, and that the ballet had been a winning performance, but of all of that the only thing that he really cared about was that the man in his arms, currently kissing him absolutely senseless, was finally all his. His very own Nutcracker Prince.

The end. 

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A/N: So that’s the end friends! My one shot turned three chapter fic lol 

I hope you guys enjoyed it, and as always I have plenty more fics on the horizon, so look forward to those! Love you guys! <3

I also wanted to send a huge shout out to my lovely friend @thebridgekid for always putting up with me, reading all my crazy ideas, and just being super awesome <3<3<3

@dean-humanity-winchester