carterkyleblog

[reineydraws]

Twist villain!Shanks

Think about it.

hellooo i have thought about it 'cuz ive seen the idea floating around and sorry, i dont like it. 😭🙏 or rather, the idea of a villain shanks is fun in theory but if it's actually canon then i dont think it will pay off very well lol especially 'cuz he's the very first pirate we meet and it's been over twenty years. i would certainly be tilted.

idk how oda could write it in such a way that i wouldn't be mad aha, tho i'm sure if anyone could pull it off it'd be him. (and i mean villain!shanks as in "was always a villain", not "has to do antagonistic things but his heart is in the right place".)

i will say, however, that there is something delicious about possessive shanks, especially if it leans a little dark. like, he's a smiley pacifist right up until you harm someone that's his, and then it's game over for you and your friends and your livelihood. he's already like that in canon, but i mean like, it's to the point where his revenge gets a little cruel and he enjoys paying you back for the harm you caused.

i like attributing this to him 'cuz if he's dating mihawk, known serial murderer (of marines, if not also underwhelming challengers and entire crews of people that annoy him), then his "let's not kill people if we don't have to" thing could be more of an intellectual ethical choice for him rather than an emotional one. and once you've crossed that line for him by grievously harming or maybe even somehow killing mihawk, then it's over for you and you bet he'll enjoy it. (tho nine out of ten times i write him as a bleeding heart and mihawk is fond and exasperated by it haha.)

but yeah. i digress. 😅 it's a fun concept and i'll probably read the fic if it's mishanks and mihawk isn't his victim in a way that ends unhappily, but ultimately, the most i prefer is shanks with a dark streak.

if anyone's gotten to the end of this ask and adores twist villain shanks, feel free to try and convince me in the replies. maybe i'm just thinking about it the wrong way, and i'm open to ideas. ;P

[illusianation]

Carol: Love, Loss, + Survivor’s Guilt

-Inspired by listening to I’ve Never Been to Me and Crazy by Patsy Cline on repeat

Shared from a recent post I made on Twitter

It’s not news in the TWD fandom how Melissa McBride’s insight into Carol’s journey has always been spot-on, especially when it comes to the deeper emotional layers that drive her.

Carol lives and breathes inside Melissa and Melissa LOVES and KNOWS Carol better than anyone. Period. As we keep hearing, the way she describes Carol’s current headspace seems to be centered in unresolved trauma, PTSD, and confronting her survivor's guilt. Like so many of us here who love her, I AM HERE FOR IT. It literally brought me back to this fandom after years away because the promise of Carol Peletier is unlike any character from any medium, and Melissa McBride is just as rare and special. She and Carol have more story to tell and after episode 1 of The Book of Carol, it is BEAUTIFUL already.

For so long, Carol’s very identity has been shaped by loss—both the loss of others and the parts of herself she’s had to compartmentalize to survive. This compartmentalization was initially a survival mechanism, a way to navigate both the horrors of her pre-apocalypse life and the new terrors of the ZA. But then, she was so good at it, it became her superpower.

She became a master at putting up emotional walls, donning her many masks to navigate her compounded grief, loss, and trauma. But over time, what began as a means of survival and a means to find peace, has left her fragmented, and the only two people to have ever been able to see inside those walls are Sophia and Daryl.

Carol’s journey, especially in connection to Daryl, has always been about finding that elusive peace. Her origin story of connection with him is intimately tied to the search and consequent loss of her daughter, and he is literally the only one left in her life who was there. The fact that their bond was forged out of that loss is such a crucial element. Her struggle with survivor’s guilt now with Daryl being gone, links directly back to that time and feels like the ultimate test of her emotional endurance. Like she needs another test?!?! 🙄 But, I digress.

One of the problems now is Daryl’s situationship in France. Carol has always been so attuned to the needs of others, especially Daryl, but often at the cost of her own needs and her own healing. The way Carol perceives his survival without her now, and how it will reinforce her own insecurities, is fucking heartbreaking— because it’s not a reflection of her worth but of the trauma she’s carried for so long. She’s also constantly torn between protecting others and protecting herself, and her methods of self-preservation often come at the cost of personal connection, believing she doesn’t deserve the happiness and wholeness she craves.

Integrating all her masks, not dropping them completely, but integrating them and the pieces of her fragmented self, is key; to accepting that all these parts—her resilience, her vulnerability, her love for those around her—are not mutually exclusive, but rather, all facets of the same powerful survivor. And again, Daryl is the one person left who has seen her in her truest form, which makes his absence (and her perception of his ability to survive without her) even more painful. But with or without him, for Carol, this next step seems to be about reconciling her sense of worth, and realizing she deserves to heal and feel whole.

The hope for her in reuniting with Daryl, her soulmate, is not just about a physical reunion—it’s about the emotional closure she deserves. It’s about Carol finally allowing herself to not only protect those she loves but to be loved, fully and without condition. She’s fought for everyone else’s survival, and now it’s time for her to fight for her own peace and happiness. The question now is will Daryl fully understand that quest despite whatever the fuck he is doing. Oops, I mean despite the separate connections he is making and the emotional regression, confusion, guilt, and projection that seems to be happening. It’s going to be a bumpy road ahead in France, but then again, Spain is still out there.

Melissa’s love letter to Carol - Paraphrased from I’ve Never Been to Me by Charlene

Hey lady (Carol), you’re cursing at your life. Y

ou’re a discontented mother and regimented wife,

With a weary heart who’s lived a million lives.

I've no doubt you dreamed about

the things you'll never do, you’ve ran out of places and friendly faces

Because you had to be free

You’ve spent your life exploring

The subtle whoring

That costs too much to be free

You’ve been to paradise, but you’ve never been to YOU.

[atinylittlepain]

joel miller x f!oc

story playlist

monsters are made of myths. in this story, two myths become one. two myths are in love. they are in wretched love.

warnings | 18+ this is a work of contemporary horror | literally cannibalism, and the trappings of it - love as consumption, non-graphic death, murder, grotesque depictions of food (normal food) and eating (normal eating), non-graphic references to unhealthy parental relationship (abuse and neglect), descriptions of dissociation, smut, strange neurotic processes in general

word count | 17K (yes, really)

a/n | this fic is partially inspired by the movie Bones and All, and it is my attempt to get Bones and All right (read: better) - i cannot stress enough that this is a work of horror, and as such, deals with unsettling imagery, subject matter, and emotions. read with care. special thanks must be given to @pr0ximamidnight and @wannab-urs who loved these two characters enough to keep me writing them, thank you, my darling friends, i hope i've done them justice. and thank you, dear reader, for coming along on something of an odyssey.

Monsters, she thinks, are hewn from guilt and shame. She is trying very hard not to feel either of those things about what she must do. But some slippery part of her still supposes that she has been a monster for a very long time, maybe even from the beginning. When did it change? When are monsters made? Like everyone else, she drank from her mother’s breast. Some time after that then.

What she does remember is not regretting it, any of it, until her mother taught her it was something to regret. Shame in the whites of her eyes, the dark ring of her open mouth, stricken in a scream. She has only ever met one other person like her in all her time skipping from town to town, a few years younger than her, but older in her confidence, her certainty in who she was. And like her, the first time, a babysitter, blood in the bathtub. She took her ear clean off, and the girl’s father found the scene when he got home from work, babysitter having fled, baby still in the tub, gumming on something pink and soft in her mouth. He had been afraid, she told her, that she could have drowned. Never mind the ear. Monsters are loved too, after all, a wretched thing of love. 

For her it had been a finger. At least that’s what her mother told her, easy to wrap her small mouth around. She believed her, vaguely remembering the flicker of red nail polish, bitter amidst the rest of sense and sate. What she does remember, the feeling of fullness. What she does remember, her mother making a myth out of her, conjuring up some way to explain this condition of hers. Condition, what she decided to call it. An affliction of appetites, something to be controlled, to be smothered under the thick swaths of what her mother taught her. How to be normal is really just another way of saying how to hide. And she hid for a very long time, weak and wan and wanting things she knew she shouldn’t be wanting. Until, eighteen, and their tenth packed car and dark house and her mother telling her that she was no longer interested in this myth, this unmaking of a monster. You are what you are and I have tried, I have tried, I have tried, but you are what you are. 

Not just guilt and shame, monsters are made in the breadth of a back turning, in eyes settling somewhere up and away. Monsters are made in a leaving. Everyone has already left. So what else is there to do but eat?

She likes the song that’s playing in the convenience store, the light haze of it, staticking from somewhere overhead. Hazy in the afternoon slump, everyone making minced conversation about setting the clocks back last weekend. Her watch still reads an hour ahead. 

I feel the earth move– she needs toothpaste.

I feel the sky tumbling down– and soap.

I feel my heart start to tremble– but there’s an empty promise left in her wallet.

Whenever you’re around– soon, she will have to stay.

I just got to have you– soon, she will have to pretend.

Baby– make-believing normal.

I just lose control– make a little more money.

I get hot and cold, all over, all over– before another leaving.

Tumbling down, tumbling down– before another fullness. 

“Excuse me.” A man, somewhere in her periphery, and the quick realization that she’s been standing in front of bars of soap, considering what it would feel like to slip one or two into the pocket of her coat, standing there for a bit too long. Shrug and shuffle to the side, a quiet sorry, keeping her eyes down, but in a quick flicker, she sees his face. Fang recognizes fang, always. 

He looks tired, like if not for whatever weight is pulling at his shoulders, he would be much bigger, much badder. Worn thin at the edges, wings darkening beneath his eyes, he spares her a single glance, disinterested, picking up two bars of soap, the kind that smells clean and young and kind. As he leans down, she sees the glint and flirt of gold dangling from his neck, a cross. But she knows, she thinks she knows. When you are rare like this, it isn’t difficult to know another myth when you see one. 

She watches the heels of his boots clip down the aisle toward the checkout, there and gone, and she does not follow. This is not something that should be followed. She knows, she knows. She tried once, with that girl. That girl who had different ideas about what their myth meant, their mouths, who decided that cruelty felt good, who decided to play the part of the monster with a terrible flair. No, this is something best done alone, and worst when it is shared. 

A single bar of soap sits heavy in her pocket while she pays for a tube of toothpaste, the man already gone, mercy. And the evening unfolds like it usually does during these times of motion. Still enough gas in her car that she can crawl a few miles down the interstate and find a quiet place to pull off for the night, somewhere green, somewhere with trees. Summer, the heat turning cool and sticky as it starts to darken, and a routine that is familiar to her by now. Windows cracked just enough to let a thin stream of fresh air in without threatening danger. And she folds the fact of her body in the backseat, tucking all her angles beneath a worn blanket that she keeps folded in the trunk during the day. Always memory before sleep, though her mind has made motheaten, misshapen murmuring out of the most of it. The fullness is always what remains. And that thick curl of shame. 

Here is how her mother made her. She broke skin and pulled out a rib of her own, made flesh of her flesh, tended to the wound until it was something else. There was no father, and there was certainly no god. At least that’s how her mother told it. You came from me, mine, this is mine, me and you and your mouth that must stay closed because I love you even though you are like this, awful, you are like this and I love you. But that love stretched thin, snapped, bleeding gums and broken teeth and never again. A goodbye that she is still saying, that she curls herself around in the backseat of her car in the summer when it’s warm enough for leaving. 

…

Maybe a foolish thing to spend what’s left of her money on. The waitress is very pretty though, a flush of red curls piled on her head, red lipstick too, crackling with her smile and bleeding into the lines around her mouth. Pours her a dark cup of coffee and leaves the steaming pot of it at her table. She pours three plastic thimbles of cream into it, two packets of sugar that she doesn’t stir in, lets it settle, biting down on the grit when she tips the last of her cup back into her mouth, and repeats. And the pretty waitress brings her two plates, so hot that they leave red welts on her forearms when she sets them down on her table, pinkened pain. Scrambled eggs, grease and sweat pooling beneath their lingering heat, bleeding over into two pieces of bacon, blistered crisp. A stack of pancakes, the sheen of butter seeping down, she pours enough syrup over them to pool thin and flooded on the plate. Collects a little of everything on her fork, the soft give of protein and matter, everything sagging in the sweet stick. Hand to mouth, but she stops, stuck, seeing him sitting alone at a booth across the diner. And he sees her too. A meal much like her own, enough to give someone a stomach ache. His eyes fall away from hers just as soon, and she watches him pass a knife through a piece of meat, flesh on his fork that he pockets into his cheek, jawing it down. She works her mouth around her own bite, teeth hurting with the snap down onto metal, the scrape of the fork. The food turns to sweet, soft mush, rolling around on her tongue, swallowed hard. 

He’s watching her again, working his jaw in a slow shift, and this time, his eyes don’t leave hers. She plucks a piece of bacon off her plate, pinched between thumb and forefinger, bites down again and sucks the salt from the dried flesh. He finishes a piece of toast in two bites, mouth screwing to the side, the dip and bob of his throat when he swallows, muscle moving muscle. Sweat is starting to prickle her scalp, the soft stretch of her stomach with her meal, warm and sick and sloshing. She doesn’t chew her eggs, swallows them, slipping down her throat with the rest of the salt and sate. His eyes fall to her hands, the smooth procession of fork and knife making mince out of her pancakes. She sucks the syrup out of each bite, works the sugar down first before swallowing the rest. His meal, almost completely gone, dragging a finger through a smear of ketchup he had been steeping his hashbrowns in, sucks the remnant red into his mouth. She can almost hear the hum that bobs in his throat, even through the murmurings of the diner. And he is very beautiful, beneath it all. The crooked strength of his nose, his brow, the drop of his lashes over the tops of his cheeks when he takes a pull of coffee. Unabashed, she stares, and he stares back, a darkened dare, watching the movements of each other’s mouths.

And just like that, she’s still chewing when he gets up to leave, not sparing another glance her way as he shoulders out the door. Her chin tilts, neck stretched to see him get into a blue pickup truck with a slam of the car door. He’s gone like a thin flame of lightning. She feels like she’s going to throw up. But she doesn’t, pays her check and stumbles out into the starkness of the morning. It’s a Saturday, and families are congregating for breakfast. She watches, slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, a sliver of a little girl and a little boy crossing her rearview mirror, holding onto hands attached to bodies that are cut off from view. She sighs, sits up straight and turns the key in the ignition. 

…

It’s a half-hour worth of driving later when she sees that blue pick-up truck again. Midwest, middle of nowhere, fields of ruin, and that truck, still and silent next to an abandoned barn made of rot. Middle of the day, the sun a flirting threat high in the middle of blue shock, but there are very few people out here, no one around to see her pull off the side of the road, get out of her car, and start swaying through the tall grass toward that truck and the barn. 

He is beautiful like this too. Slinking out from behind the barn, his eyes flickered low like he knew, he knew. His shirt is ruined, dark, damp. White t-shirt bled red, and the strange starkness of that gold cross glinting around his neck. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and makes the mess worse, smears it up to the height of his cheeks, across his forearm. And his eyes, his eyes, swimming, darkness starting to drip down his face, starting to meld and mix with the rest. Beautiful, and so very sad. 

“There’s nothing for you here.” Low, the shivering thrum of it murmuring from somewhere between his ribs. Some kind of twang that sharps in her ears. She can’t find words of her own, still where she stands, beneath his hunkered gaze. When nothing comes, he sighs, shakes his head, walks right past her to his truck, keeping a wide breadth of distance between them as he does. 

“How did you know?” The question tries up her throat once, twice, before it finally jerks out into sound, stopping him before he opens the door to his truck, squinting at her over his shoulder. 

“It’s not hard to tell.” And in the space that follows, something is understood, confirmed. It’s starting to dry on his skin, in the scruff along his jaw, dark. The strangest hunger, the sharpest, an awful ache just looking at him. But he’s already leaving, not another word when he gets into his car, and the silence is a command in and of itself. I am and you are, and it will be a blessing if we never cross paths again. Again, gone, parting the sea of withering  grass with the slow trundling beast of his truck. 

She does not look, does not see for herself what lies behind the barn. She already knows. 

…

Like a child, her cheeks flamed with tears, scrubbing at the salt as soon as it falls. To put it simply, her car stopped, a few last wheezing rolls, and it will not start again. And there is no one to call, not out here, between states, between time itself. Eventually, the panic gives way to a dull surrender. She leans against the side of her car, tips her head back to let her face flush in the last slip of light, the sun fretting at the edge of the horizon. Memory is never far when she lets her eyes close. Something normal, driving down the street outside of house number five, her mother letting her, teaching her. She had laughed, giddy, running her palms along the wheel. Back then, flight had felt more like option, and less like routine. Those last few years, and the quick succession of escapes. 

She was out of control, her mother’s words, and she felt it too. Felt like a fine thread of hunger had been stitched through her spine and was pulling painful, the sharp tug toward destruction. And when the thread snapped, it was all she could do to find something to close her mouth around. Those last few years, they moved more than they ever had, every couple of months when she would inevitably mess up, making a mess of everything. Much easier now to always be leaving, because staying was never really an option. 

It’s heard before it’s seen, the crackling of gravel, of tires and brakes slowing down. She lets one eye slip open in a thin slit, squinting in the final slip of sun. That blue pick-up truck, sidling up behind her car along the shoulder of the road. He makes no move to get out, but he does roll his window down, and that’s enough for her to walk over to the side of his car, smalling beneath his steady eyes. He’s clean now, she thinks she can even smell the soap on him, that same soap that she stole a bar of and has been holding under her nose in the nights, something of comfort before she sleeps.

“You’re like me.” The words come from somewhere unnamed inside her, what might be called courage in someone else, and it seems to surprise him too, his brow jumping before furrowing back down. 

“I am.” 

“Where are you from?” A stupid question to ask someone like her. She doesn’t blame him for remaining silent, lips pressed in a thin line. So, she tries again.

“Where are you going?” 

“West.”

“Where west?”

“Just west.” Silence again, a single car hums by them. He clears his throat.

“Is your car broke down?” 

“I think it’s dead.”

“Is it worth fixing?”

“No, probably not. And I don’t have any money left.” 

“Do you want a ride?” Myths are made in the fine split of choice. She is walking into a new one. 

“Okay.” 

There is very little of herself to collect. A bag in the trunk of her car with a few spare clothes, her blanket, a bar of soap. The rest can be left behind. 

“I’m Joel.” All that he offers her when she slides into the passenger seat, a glance that falls on the curl of her hands in her lap. 

“I’m Maeve.” 

It has been a very long time since she has been a passenger in someone else’s car. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, leaving always looming, but she had been doing well for her mother. Well enough to get a date with a shy boy who sat behind her in seventh period math. He took her out in his car, fall and dark and dim and something light threatening in her chest, stealing glances at each other as he drove them out to that spot that everyone parked at. Lovers, lovers, lovers, young limbs tangling in the backseats of cars, damp windows and fog twirling up skirts in the wash of headlights. And they had parked, and shy boy had stuck his shy tongue in her mouth, and she had liked it, she had liked it. And of course, it went wrong, blood and body and blood and she ran home with salt stinging down her cheeks. She didn’t mean to hurt him. She never meant to hurt anyone. This isn’t a hurting thing, at least she didn’t want it to be. Her mother had slapped her, hard, sending her neck turning to one side before collecting her up in her arms and making it all better, making a leaving for both of them.

Now, with her temple pressed against the window of the passenger side door, silence save for the thin voices on the radio, she thinks of that boy, and how carefully he had cupped her cheek in his palm. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to love him. But she didn’t know how to without biting down.

For as long as she can remember, alone has meant monstrous. Evidence of defect, deformity, the delineation between others, normal, the world, and her, somewhere on the periphery, always. But she wasn’t always alone, and for a while, that was enough to convince her that normal was possible, that, no, not a monster. She had her mother, not alone, not a monster. Clinging to not alone so hard, and in turn clinging to her  mother so hard, that often her fear, or love, or the product of the two, would get her hurt. 

She was hungry for touch as a child, and her mother was unwilling to give it to her in the amounts she wanted for. Her mother, her mother, locking her bedroom door from the inside so she couldn’t turn the handle and slip inside and ask for a palm on her back to calm her nightmares. She would curl up on the pilled carpet of whatever house they were in at the time, back pressed to the door like maybe she could feel her mother’s respiration through the wood, something to soothe down her spine, thumb tucked into her mouth. And in the mornings, bleary, jostled awake by the slow fall backward when her mother would inevitably open the door to her room. Lying on her back in the doorway, blinking up at her mother, grave and grim, who was always frowning, always sighing. Not again, not this again, not you, doing this again. Her mother would step right over her, the hem of her dressing robe brushing against her body as she did, and even that was a relief to her, touch of some kind.

And her mother did love her, in some way. Loved her the way one loves a monster. At arm’s length. That doesn’t mean much to monsters, though. They want, they hunger, just the same. She has wondered, from time to time, if it was the way her mother loved her that made her worse. To go hungry like that for so long, no great working of the imagination to consider how a body might solve that problem in another way. But no, she knows, this is something essential, something curled close inside her. This hunger has been there from the beginning. After all, the finger, the red nail polish, she was just a baby then. She likes to imagine how her mother loved her before that happened. There was a whole year of life before she became a monster. What is love like when people will actually look you in the eye, when every touch does not come tentative as if through the bars of a cage? Sometimes at night, she will wrap her arms around herself and trace her palm along the span of her back that she can reach. Something like that, she imagines, it would feel something like that. 

Something like what she is seeing now, sitting in the pew ahead of her. Husband and wife, and they are very old, the fine threads of age mottled on the back of husband’s hand, spread between his wife’s slight shoulder blades, her pale blue sweater, gold band glinting. His thumb moving back and forth, a smoothing thing, smoothing and steadying thing. The sermon, the prayers, the withering coughs of the staggered crowd all fall away. Small salvation in the steady rhythm of touch, it mesmerizes her. Things like these are always over before she’d like them to be, the husband’s hand falling away as he and his wife both rise from their seats, the sudden shuffle making her blink back into place and space. Plenty of people are getting up, sliding out of the pews to line up down the aisle. Joel, one of them, a gasp of cool air in the empty space he leaves beside her. 

She doesn't know what they are doing in a place like this. She doesn’t think, up until recently, that she had ever been in a place like this, if she’s being honest. Her mother wasn’t religious, and it always seemed to her like churches were somewhere good people went. So no, she had never been in a church before. Not until she started traveling with Joel. 

He tries to find one every Sunday if he can, in between towns and states and strips of road. Usually, he will manage to, he doesn’t seem to care what kind. Last week, Presbyterian, and the week before that, Baptist. This week, Catholic. They all seem the same to her. But then again, she doesn’t listen closely to the sermons, focuses instead on the movement, and making her own like theirs. Here is what she has learned, when you talk to God, look up, and look sad. What else she has learned, at the end, there is always an eating. Bread and wine placed on soft, trying tongues, and some kind of prayer draped over the entire thing. She watches Joel, every week, take communion until she doesn’t even have to watch. Keeps her eyes closed and pictures the drop of his jaw, the slow pull of his throat. She knows it, she knows it. What she doesn’t know is why. Not much room for a God like this one in their particular myth. Though Joel seems intent on it, and she is in no position to challenge this routine. A month traveling together, and still such strange silence between them. But on church days, he is always more likely to speak. 

There’s only a few other people who don’t get in line to receive communion, and all them, herself included, are met with the heavy sweep of eyes, soft shakes of heads that tells them no, should not be here, no, not for you. A childish thought that she keeps to herself, not for Joel either, no matter how he plays pretend at it, gold cross glinting like a rotten tooth rendered good at his neck. A thin flare of jealousy, maybe, that he can believe in good so easily. 

But maybe Joel is good, she thinks, in spite of what they both do. He certainly seems good walking down the aisle, polite words soft in his throat and a nod for her to follow on his heels and out to the parking lot. These people, church people, will never see them again, and that is a mercy. 

“Where are we?” 

“We’ll be in Kansas soon.” He always answers that question with the future rather than where they are in the present, always forward motion. All that he offers her, folding his worn map back up before he pulls the truck onto the road. 

Joel has some money saved from a past staying. And she told him that wherever he decided to stay next, she would stay too, paying him back for what he has already spent on her. He seemed neither moved nor impressed by her affirmation, eyes slipping down somewhere to the side, a sigh. At the very least, it’s a comfort to her, the promise of somewhere for her, for a little while.  

“Should we try to today?” 

“We don’t have to do it together. If you want to, today, that’s fine. I don’t mind.” The words feel stupid in her mouth, and the sharp look Joel gives her before his eyes return to the road tells her as much. 

“It’s safer if we do it together. Less of a mess.” It doesn’t feel that way to her. She knows what he means, but still. Not to her. Shameful to her, that someone else sees her like that. Shameful back when she had been traveling with that girl, that girl who would grin through it, teeth stained and tarred and making her sick up in her throat with shame, with cruel terror turned inside herself. But Joel isn’t like that. No, there is something different to how Joel tends to this. 

Now, alone means go, green light, good for taking. They watch for alone, parked in rest stops, gas station parking lots, all the in between places, places where the loneliest people tend to linger. They’ll spend whole afternoons in some various slump in or against his truck, squinting down in the sun at bodies moving around them, moving through. Today, they pull off at one of those long haul trucker stops, a gravel lot full of slumbering beasts of cars, cargo, men mincing around, stretching length back into their tired bodies. And they watch. And they wait. Teeth aching.

Joel distracts her, sometimes. Her watching him watching the world. It seems like he moves and something pressed beneath the thin crust of the ground moves too. Big man, silent as a fist man. But he is nice and gentle and kind. Small words for a big man. A kind of manners she has never seen before. She watches him now, the soft squint of his eyes under the sun’s cool heat, leaning against the side of his truck with his hands tucked into his pockets, ankles crossed. He looks so casual, but she knows that there’s a wire strung taut in his spine, quick flickers of want, of hunger. She feels it too. 

“Joel?”

“Hmm.”

“Can I ask you something?” He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either, ducking his head down in a way that shows her he’s listening. 

“How many others have you met?” Like us, the implicit understanding of like us. Something strange passes across his face, quick pinch, smoothing itself out. 

“A few.” 

“How many is a few?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, how many do you think there are in the country?”

“I think that’s a useless question.” He doesn’t say it mean, more matter of fact than anything, though it still feels like a swift loss of breath in her lungs. She pinches her mouth shut, a flume of embarrassment warming beneath her skin. But Joel pays her no mind, his gaze has settled on someone. 

They’ve only done this together two other times, but it’s been enough to know there’s a particular way Joel goes about this. Always alone, always men, trying for the bad ones. And how they decide who is bad is, at best, a childish logic. Alone, for one thing, both of them understanding how that can translate into bad. The loud ones, the brassy, blundering ones, ones that bodies move like they know violence intimately. It is all a game of chance, though Joel seems so methodical. Regardless, it makes her feel messy, smeared and stupid for the way she used to go about this, which is to say, with little thought for anything save the ache in her gut. Yes, she had rules of her own. Never children. Rarely women. As alone as she could find them. It was in the mechanics of it that she always failed, and this failure curdled into something close to cruelty, something she had a hard time stomaching. 

But not Joel. Joel is painfully careful in how this is done. The first step is always the waiting, seeing if a body will stick around in this in-between place. And in that waiting their hunger grows teeth of its own, hunkering their shoulders, making them as small as the curl of their guts. And when a body stays in that in-between place, a trucker who seems to be resting for the night, wandering idly around the lot with a cigarette held loose like a prayer between his lips, that’s when Joel moves. This part is not difficult for Joel, because he is kind and gentle and nice. Quiet, he smalls himself, makes himself anyone that could be anyone else. 

And when he does it, he does it in the night, pale slants of the moon’s watchful gaze washing down on him. And when he does it, he does it with his hands. Not a word, not a whimper or whine, just a final puff of breath when he is done, something absent floating up in his eyes. In the close brush of trees a few yards away from the rest stop, there will be nothing left to find when they are done. Down to the ankles, and then some. 

She hates doing this with him, to have him see her in it, and in the after of it. The sate feels good, but the shame fans a perfect flame up her neck. And she cries, she always cries, and he refuses to look at her when she does. They stumble into the rest stop bathrooms and wipe away what they can from their skin. This is no clean thing. She will feel the stick of it on her for days afterward, she always does. But she will feel good too, full too, and it will only make the shame worse. 

“Why do you cry like that?” It startles her, stops another sniff from hiccuping up her throat. He doesn’t look at her, keeps his eyes focused out on the flare of their headlights eating away at the road, driving back into the night. It’s difficult to look at him, the pearling stains of it that he missed down the line of his throat, the darkening of the front of his shirt, pink-tinged skin, hard to scrub off. Not difficult in that she wants to look away, but difficult in knowing that she should want to look away, though she doesn’t. Beautiful, eyes blown into a sad melt from beneath his brow, his jaw working at some phantom feeling. No, she shouldn’t, but she does. 

“It feels like I should.”

“Well, you don’t have to.” A little sharp, still quiet, but enough to make her heart twist. The rest of their drive is silent, eventually, pulling into the vacant yawn of a motel parking lot. 

Joel goes into the motel office after hastily changing into a new shirt, her eyes slipping somewhere else, but not without a glimpse of bare skin. He’s better with people than she is, and she is still inconsolable, shaking in the passenger seat and trying not to look at her hands, the thin curl of red under her fingernails. She lets her gaze unfocus on the blinking neon sign, vacancy becoming less of a word and more of a throb in her skull. 

“Come on.” He opens her door for her, snapping her back into awareness, and he’s not mean about it, but he is exasperated, dragging his palm down his jaw, already rounding the car to pull their bags out of the bed of the truck. She wishes she could be like him about this, so matter of fact, so mundane. Where did he learn that from? Who taught him to be like that? Who loved him like that? He is far more free than she is, she thinks. She wishes he would show her how. 

This is part of the routine too. They stand, hip to hip, at the cracked sink in the bathroom of their room and they brush their teeth. Their work is meticulous, rounding every canine, making gums bleed with too much pressure. She flosses twice, then brushes again, spitting pink into the porcelain. Joel prefers mouthwash, swallows two stinging gulps of it, trying to kill something from the inside out. It makes her stomach hurt to watch the dip and bob of his throat. 

He lets her take a shower first, the faint sound of late night news filtering in through the cracked bathroom door. She scrapes at her skin with her fingernails, scrubbing down until it stings, until she’s certain that a layer has been sloughed off. She uses the soap that he uses. She smells like him. Clean and good when she looks in the bathroom mirror again. 

Cheaper to get one room with two beds, she never sleeps under the covers. If she thinks too hard about what other lives have breathed on this bed, what cellular remains cling to these sheets, she will make herself sick. So she curls close to one edge of the bed, letting the light from the television blur into meaningless shapes. Joel comes out of the bathroom clean as well, the soft ruff of his hair, the stretch of muscle in his back beneath the thinness of his t-shirt. She watches him sit down on the edge of his bed, elbows resting on his knees, the glinting dare of his cross hanging from his neck. 

“Can I ask you something else?” She regrets the words instantly with the sigh that slumps down through his shoulders. Not supposed to speak, not after. Though he still turns his face over his shoulder to look at her, eyebrows jumped in something like assent. 

“Why do you wear that?” Nod of her head that she hopes he understands, and he seems to, pinching the teardrop of gold between thumb and forefinger.

“Because I believe in it.”

“Why do you believe in it?” 

“I’d like to think there’s something that will forgive me when I say that I’m sorry.” And she can understand that, though she gave up on sorry a long time ago. Her mother used to be the one to receive her sorry. Her sorry, met with scorn, with a scoff, the whites of her mother’s eyes rolling with her sorry, the flat of her mother’s palm making contact with her sorry. Much easier, she thinks, to offer sorry to something that will never actually answer. You can believe anything you want that way. 

“I wish I wasn’t like this.” She’s never said that out loud, sighed out loud, her chin propped in her palm where she’s laying on her side. But it is the crux of all her wanting, and there is a sorry threaded through it. Wanting for something else, to be anything else other than this. 

“It’s not your fault, being like this.”

“I should be able to control it.”

“You can’t, Maeve, you can’t.” She knows that, nods her knowing to him before sitting up and curling her chest over her knees. There’s comfort, at least, in sharing this understanding, in finding control in other ways. 

“Why did you let me come with you?” 

“That’s another question.” His words curl with the smallest smile, a rare thing as he turns to fully look at her, something softening, something slipping. 

“Did you follow me, Joel?” She ruined it with that, she knows, his face falling into something darker, shadows dipping and bending around his eyes, something dark swimming in his lashes. But some part of her already knew. There are no coincidences in a myth like this, everything must be chosen. 

“I did, I’m sorry.” 

“Why did you follow me?”

“I was confused by you.” He speaks so quietly that she keeps her body perfectly still so she can collect what little sound there is, the low thrum of it, something cracking in his voice. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I knew you were like me, but I didn’t understand how that could be possible.” She knows that he doesn’t mean the possibility of others, he has met others before her. Her confusion must be evident on her face, because he offers her a weak smile, his hands in an anxious clasp in his lap, working a steady rhythm into his knuckles. 

“I didn’t think people like us could be good like you are.” These words, what finally shocks her, a surprised yelp of a laugh frightening up her throat, though he is serious, unwavering, and she finds herself becoming angry. How dare he tell her what she is. How dare he hope like that, amidst all this rot. The most they have spoken in their month together, and this is what he says? How dare he say good with so much certainty, and lay it at her feet like it is hers for the taking. A sick joke, more cruel than anything else. 

“I’m not good, Joel.” 

“You are, I see it.” She feels tears starting to ache behind her eyes again, and she is too tired for another flood. All she offers in response to him, a quiet I don’t think so, leaving no room for argument when she lays back down and turns out the lamp on her nightstand. With her eyes closed, she can hear his quiet sigh, the slow shuffle of his body laying down, the softening of his breath. 

She hates that she liked the way good sounded coming from his mouth. 

“Alright?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Are you getting that?”

“No, no.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s not practical.”

“You can get it, if you want.” She considers it, letting the fabric fall between her fingers, a brief wanting that she lets dissolve with a shake of her head, the small pang of it settling in her stomach. There’s no point in getting something nice like this dress, light blue with buttons down the front. It’ll just get ruined anyways. No, instead she sticks to the sensible stack of t-shirts and jeans, some sort of dollar deal at the Salvation store on denim today. Joel takes the bundle of clothes from her, his palm cupping her elbow for a moment, and she thinks he might ask her again if she wants the dress. She’s grateful that he doesn’t, that he takes his hand away, because if not, she might have said yes, might have given into that want, and that would be something she simply could not do. 

They move strangely around each other. Days bleeding weeks bleeding months. Very little progress made in the push west, following a coiled snake of a path, zagging from state to state. Pieces of each other, collected slowly, carefully. Joel is from Texas, and, like her, Joel tried at normal for a very long time. He got further in normal than she ever did. Had a daughter, had a family. Held on long enough to see her into adulthood. He writes letters to her now, though Maeve tries not to watch him working. The shake of his hand, his shoulders, not for her to see. Sometimes the letters get sent, if they are in the right place at the right time to make that happen. Sometimes the letters are left behind in their wake, a prayer to something much larger. 

She tells him a clean version of her own myth, leaving out what she can, leaving out the mother when she can. She is learning the power of deciding for herself where she comes from. She is learning the power of looking someone in the eye, and of them looking back. 

Joel pays for their new clothes, and she sulks, lingering amongst the racks like a despondent ghost. In part, his money comes from the wallets of the people they find in the in-between. It had upset her when she discovered this, and while he had been apologetic, always quick to soften when she prickles, he was still firm about it. She couldn’t exactly argue with his logic, doing far worse things, after all, but she still tends toward steel when money leaves or enters his hands. It makes her nervous, and it makes her sad. Because she knows with no uncertainty that Joel is good, she knows that now. A shame, that all his goodness must get confused in what they must do.

“How much longer do you think?”

“Maybe twenty minutes, we’re close now.” Something that she knows he is doing for her, and only for her, which makes it lovely, and dangerous, and a little dizzying. It had been an idle, errant thing on a morning a few weeks ago, looking at the creased map over the dash of the truck and trying to make sense of what should come next. Arizona had seemed like a tenable answer, and a memory had floated up, something she had seen on the television as a child, something she couldn’t quite believe on a hazy afternoon, turned upside down on a couch they’d be leaving behind soon. A chasm in the earth, somewhere split open, somewhere to look inside of and see whether all wounded things bleed the same way. Sheepish, she had mentioned it to Joel between the cracks of her fingers held over her mouth, hiding the want that was curling at the corners of her lips. And he had said okay, as if it were as easy as that, as if want could ever be as easy as that, asking and receiving. A silly thought, she wondered if he wouldn’t say the same thing if she had pointed up to the moon instead. She thinks that he would. 

The truth, she likes Joel, in a way that makes her nervous. Likes the quiet hum in his throat while he drives, likes his palm between her shoulder blades, an absent-minded touch that she tries hard not to lean into, likes the steadiness of his breath in the middle of the night. Above all, she likes him looking at her, and she likes giving that back to him, looking right back at him with only kindness, a foreign mercy.

“Have you been before?”

“No, never even been in Arizona before.”

“Thank you, Joel, for doing this. I know it’s silly.” His hands flex along the wheel, a light jump in the tendons of his fingers, a glance her way in the passenger seat before his eyes settle back on the road.

“It’s not silly. We needed somewhere to go.” Always needing somewhere to go, the in-between of the in-betweens. But here in the cab of his truck, it seems like time might forgive them, might let them slip by. She’s worked up something that kicks like courage over the months, enough that now, she will often reach across to him and take one of his hands in both of hers. And he will let her. Always that first tensing, touch still tentative, though the lines of his palms will smooth out eventually, pressed close and tight with hers. She likes to hold the pads of her fingers over the soft inside of his wrist, let the beat there lull her into line with the murmuring engine. And he lets her. 

It’s a perfectly normal scene when they get there. Tourists, teeming, tired parents and kids tugging at pants, at hands, at each other. And Joel, clearing his throat a few times, a shake in his hand that she knows well as they walk out to the edge. She hooks her arms over the railing, leans over until her stomach starts to lurch, eyes dizzy from the vast swaths of red and orange grit, crags and peaks and dry brush all around, down into the canyon. 

Because she is so good at leaving, she can do it without even having to move muscle. A little leaving, she watches herself from somewhere suspended, and in her leaving eyes, she watches the small mechanics of her body climb over the rail and leap out into the sinking blankness. But a hand on her shoulder draws her back. She finds Joel looking at her with a cloudy focus, a soft frown that she watches pinch and pull into a thin line. He clears his throat again. 

“Is it what you imagined?” 

“It’s in color.”

“What?”

“When I saw it on the TV it was in black and white. This is better.” Relief, she thinks, something that smooths his brow and the wings of his shoulders. Maybe even a smile. She offers him one of her own, slight slippage when her gaze wanders over his shoulder. Hand in hand, a halo of golden hair like corn silk, a daughter at her mother’s hip, both of them walking away from the edge. Probably back to their car, probably back to their home, to dinner, to bedtime, to mother brushing her daughters corn silk hair with hands that could not even imagine violence. Saying I love you with mouths that could not even imagine violence. 

And Joel turns around to see what she is staring at, and she sees in the planes of his back the same tensing she feels, the same tensing that comes with knowing that something has been lost, and that it can never be retrieved, returned to. When he turns back around to her, steel has resettled in his jaw, but something is swimming hazy in his eyes. 

“We should go.” 

“Okay.” She takes one more look at the open wound, one more imagining of slipping into it, letting it swallow her whole. And then, well, they do what they always do. They leave. Somewhere inside of her, she is telling her mother that she finally got to see the Grand Canyon. 

…

She thinks she might be hurting Joel. Not directly, not intentionally. She’s been trying to wait out her hunger, staving it off, and he in turn has been doing the same. Testing and trying the boundaries of how long she can hold onto normal, and it hurts, and she can see that it hurts Joel too. Waiting like this, going without like this, strings him by a livewire of his want, makes him jumpy, slow to soothe, to sleep. She can hear him shifting around in the night in the close quiet of their motel rooms, restless, wanting. Sometimes, he will sigh, get up, moving quiet in the dark, the thin slice of sound when he opens the door and steps outside. He goes and sits in the truck. She knows, she has stepped into the corner of the motel room window and seen him with his temple propped in his palm, made small in the cab of the truck. This waiting is tiring. This waiting has teeth and claws and growls. This waiting, this hunger, is enough to make an animal stupid, shivering like static. 

And he has done this nice thing for her, taken her to see the black and white wound in color, and so, she decides that the waiting is done, for now. So they do the thing that they do. They find a place that is in-between, and they begin a different kind of waiting. 

“I want to see this time.”

“No, Maeve, it’s not something you should be seeing.”

“It’s nothing new to me, Joel.” She needs to see, she thinks, needs an accounting of every part of him. In the past, it has always been an unspoken routine. She would catch glimpses of it, of him, of his hands closing around something fragile,  but he wanted her to have nothing to do with it. It’s not like she hasn’t done it herself. The whites of the eyes, and the collapse of the lungs one final time, wretched things she understands.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” His voice borders on the edge of pain, the tendons in his neck playing a hurt tune, and for a moment, she thinks about backing down, letting this go. But she can’t. To do what she wants to do, she must know every part of him, this too. 

“Please.” And he’s not going to say no, she knows that. He has turned her into a terrible king in some ways with how little he says no to her. She grows greedy with it. A child growing up with so much no will hoard whatever yes they can find. 

He doesn’t say anything else, returns to his waiting in the gas station parking lot, with perhaps an edge less patience, shifting in his boots and squinting into the dry shock of the afternoon. She presses her lips together to keep any more from coming out, turns back to the strange landscape surrounding them, the desert, the resilient death of it. And as always, if you wait long enough, someone else will come staggering into the in between. 

It begins like it always begins. They wait until the bruising pall of night washes the cracked earth purple, all the other nighttime creatures starting to yip and titter, working themselves up into their usual routine. But this time, she is there when Joel approaches the man, there to watch something else slide into the place where he is kind and gentle and nice, there to watch him, with the calm strength of a storm, take the man out into the quiet judgment of the desert. 

She stands and she watches a scared animal whimper and wriggle in a merciless trap. Joel’s hands are around the man’s neck, hunched over the strange slump of his body, a thin frown on his face and the slightest pinch between his brows. She can’t look away, her eyes stinging, unblinking, wide and receiving this part of him. And Joel is looking right back at her with the same intensity, eyes lit up in a slash of moonlight. And the man refuses to die. Still struggling, clutching at air and hoping for a savior. And the errant realization that she is someone people need saving from, a quick flash of lightning in her mind. Her stomach starts to churn. 

“Please, please.” It isn’t the man that’s saying it, she realizes. It’s Joel. Quiet and broken murmurings, pleas, prayers, for this to be over. This time is different. Joel, usually so clean and quick and quiet, is struggling. And it isn’t because the man is big or battering, actually quite slight, actually still slumped, but wheezing lost breaths, heart still beating blood and body. Broken cries like an animal caught in a trap. She covers her ears with her hands, but the sounds echo, and the sounds  will echo for a long time. But she can’t look away, not even when thin beads of silver start to fall down Joel’s face, crying, and still pleading for the man to die. And when nothing else works, Joel does turn violent, a quick shock of it in the way he makes simple work of the man’s neck in his hands. She lets out a shriek that she cannot hold back, hot shame following close on its heels. 

Joel is pale, face flushed wan and weary. He swallows hard a few times as he straightens his spine, letting the body curl limp on the ground. Hot salt starts to skate down her face, both of them crying now, shivering with it. 

“I can’t, not this one.” His face crumples at her words, something close to agony that makes her stomach swoop and curdle. She has seen every part of him now. There will be no returning from this.

“Maeve, please, I–” 

“I’m going to wait in the truck.” Already turning her back to him and stumbling toward the faint, fluorescent pulse of the gas station in the distance. He does not stop her, and she is grateful for it. 

The worst part, she is still very hungry. Her shame growing wings that batter against her ribs, because beneath the horror and the guilt, there is still that hunger, made worse now by how close she came to sating it. Like a petulant child, frustrated, and on the brink of going full-tilt. She sits in the passenger seat of the truck and presses her forehead against the window, cool glass providing the smallest comfort. 

And when Joel eventually returns to the truck, he is not covered in it. She knows he is still hungry like her. She does not want to know what was done with the curled body, and he does not tell her. 

They are silent, small, slow moves. She keeps her temple pressed to the passenger-side window, shoulders shaking with the smallest sobs. And she isn’t sure if it’s the hunger, or the shame that is making her cry, and not knowing only makes her cry harder. 

She doesn’t know how long they drive for, but eventually there is a motel, and eventually she is standing in the bathroom of a motel room, and he is standing next to her, and they are moving like they had not failed. She brushes her teeth twice, until it hurts, and like always, he lets her have the shower first. She wants it to burn, and so it burns, coming out from under the water with skin welted and washed thin. And when they pass each other in the doorway to the bathroom, their eyes still don’t quite meet, nothing is said. 

Something strange is settling inside her. She doesn’t lay down, runs her palm across the static fuzz of the television, over the pixel-pocked face of the person delivering the evening news. And when that isn’t enough, she presses her cheek to the low-humming screen, curls her arms around the back of the television, and holds herself there. And for a moment, it’s as easy and as simple as how good that warmth feels, the mumbling drone of sound in her ear. She pulls herself away from it when she hears the water shut off, and there is a moment of reckoning, recognizing, when he comes to stand in the doorway to the bathroom. Hair dark and dripping darker onto his t-shirt. He looks at her, and she looks back, her hands fisted in the fabric of her sweatshirt. He looks small, he looks sad, he looks like he’s about to ask her for something. She would give him anything he could ask for, she would try, the realization as clear and clean as the blade of a knife. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I couldn’t. Not with you there like that.” 

“It’s okay.”

“I wanted to keep good for you.”

“You are good, Joel.”

“Please, don’t.” A monster, broken, a monster, bending, a monster, brought to the ground. A monster in tears. Something seems to split inside him, the fragile threads of his strength flailing and failing. And she surprises herself when she goes to him before the first shaking crack of a sob can rack his chest, curls arm around shoulders like she knows what to do. He’s saying something that sounds like sorry and she’s saying something that sounds like forgiveness, managing enough movement to get them to the edge of one of the beds, to sit down still holding him. 

That cross hangs from his neck like a wretched joke, the small shiver of it. He cries, big man, big strong man. And she holds him, lets him shake with sorry and promises him that he doesn’t have to, that he is okay, that he is good, and in turn, it feels good to give these things to him. 

Eventually, the shake starts to smooth, and when she takes his face in both her hands, he leans into it, eyes heavy and worn weary, but something bright still when he looks at her. 

The thing is, Maeve knows very little about what care looks like. Most of what she learned came from the same black and white fuzz of a television. Beautiful women and beautiful men and their beautiful lives. In the movies, care is a delicate hand at the cheek. In the movies, care is a complete embrace, arms in arms and faces tucked into necks. In the movies, care is having someone to come home to, someone to love. When her hunger was at its worst as a child, she would sit as close to the television as she could get, unblinking, should she miss the moment that the beautiful woman and the beautiful man would kiss. 

And when she got older, she learned a little more about what care is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. There were boys whose violence shocked her, and in turn were shocked by her own violence. There were men that made her feel foolish for expecting care, and there were others who were just plainly mean. One comes to mind, a man whom she got on her knees for. Strange, how women are made gods on their knees, fleeting, foolish gods. And she felt wanted, looking up at him and him looking down at her. And she was wanting too, the thick curl of it in her stomach that was different from any other want. But that had changed very quickly. She didn’t like the way his hand gripped the back of her skull and she didn’t like the crude words he dribbled over her and she didn’t like that it didn’t feel like care, knew that it wasn’t care, it was a cage, and it was too much, and it was all she could think to do because she was afraid, she was afraid, and wanting, and afraid of her wanting, and she was young. So she let a different kind of wanting, different kind of hunger take over. And instead of a god on her knees she became a monster all over again.  

She has not tried for care since then, not for a very long time. But she thinks that she would like to now, with Joel. And so she does, tentative at first, the soft presence of her mouth at his temple, the round of his cheek, the drop of his lashes brushing against her skin, something shy about it. She lays another at the corner of his mouth, and it is an asking, it is a choice, it is a new myth made possible, one in which they can both be good, one that is constructed out of care. An answer in the tilt of his head, in the aligning of mouths, in his palm spanning her jaw, holding her now, holding her still in a kiss that teaches her a new kind of hunger. 

They move like they have both been wanting for a very long time, and they have, after all. The act of give and take, and she wants to take so much, give so much, perfect, pooling pangs of want when she lets his tongue into her mouth, a sharp sigh in her nose. Both turn pliant for the other, his hands at her hips, coaxing and curling her into his lap, and her hands in his hair, tilting his head back how she would like it so she can taste the sharp of his jaw and the soft hollow of his neck. For a moment she pauses, mouth pressed to the jump of his pulse, and she breathes because he smells like him, like that soap he buys wherever they go, like something else human and pleasant and real. And he lets her, runs his palms up the track of her spine, a soothing, steadying thing, only stilling when she lifts her face from the crook of his neck. Breath and beat stop briefly when she looks at him, the dark awe rounding his eyes, cheeks flushed down devastating and lips parted. She has never been looked at like this before. She likes being looked at like this. 

“I think that you’re beautiful, Joel.” It makes him shy, and awful, it makes her smile. She keeps him from dropping his gaze in denial with her hand at his jaw, holding him there and pressing a small thing of a kiss to his lips. And what unfolds afterward happens slowly, something on the verge of timid in how they move, like at any moment, flight, fleeting and fled and gone. But that does not happen, but they both stay, and they both grow more confident every time touch is answered with more touch until they are both bare, and they are curled around each other on the bed, the closest to holy she thinks she could ever get in the sense and sate of skin pressed to skin, a warmth that is so new it stings salt behind her eyes in overwhelm.  His brow pinches at the sight of her first tears, showing her how gentle he can be for her with the fragile presence of his thumb gathering the salt before it can fall. 

“I’ve never met someone good like you.” Awful, she believes him when he tells her this, hope unfurling in her chest and flushing up under her skin, a terrible heat that flickers and flumes when he begins to shift down her body, moving muscle how he would like it to move until she is splayed for him, her knees falling to the sides to allow the breadth of his shoulders to settle between them. He rests his open mouth over the soft inside of her thigh, his eyes flaring up to hers beneath the dark fan of his lashes. And this is care, she thinks, soft jaw and soft teeth where they could turn so violent. Soft only for her. He holds her in the soft bleed of his mouth, dragging heat to her cunt. He takes from her, eats at her pleasure, pulling muscle and bone into a taut line of want, her whole body strung in a snarl as he takes and takes and takes, his mouth, and his fingers, and yes, she thinks, anything else she could ask him for. He would give it to her. Gives and gives and gives until it’s his name in the back of her throat, something that borders on pain with the way he continues to mouth at her through it. She tugs at his hair, begging mercy that he finally allows, up and up and up until she’s tasting herself on his mouth and the solid weight of him is smoothing the kick of her pulse, her chest. 

The roll film starts to melt and pop at that point. Not like the movies, some myth of their own, making myth out of their want. She opens for him, a high, animal keening in her chest when his hips settle against hers. And it is not grace, it is not beautiful or merciful. It’s want distilled, and it makes them move ugly, animal, accepting and open to each other, a little bit frantic, frenetic and fizzing. Skin slicks with salt, turning everything hazy, everything close and cloistering and she likes it, the feeling of overwhelm, blatant and battering and him, all she can think about is him saying her name, saying his want and calling his want by her name. And in the aftermath, they barely move, remain pressed close like stained glass starting to melt into syrup. 

He holds her in a way she didn’t think she’d ever be able to ask for, tucked close to the steadiness of his heart, a sound that soothes and reassures her that yes, this is real, yes, this is shared. 

“This is a good thing.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Want is whispered on broken exhales, and accepted into willing mouths. Monsters that are no longer monsters in each other’s company. 

Some things make the hunger easier to stomach. This is one of those things. This is care. She is learning how to receive it, and she is learning how to give it. She is learning that she might like giving it more than she could’ve ever imagined. She didn’t know how to for such a long time, after all, that it is something entirely new, something that feels good. 

And in that care there has been a staying. Small, but still, she can’t remember the last time she spent a week, let alone two,  in a single place. They get a motel room with a kitchenette, and she knows that money is starting to become more of a question than an expectation, because neither of them are doing the thing that makes them monsters. Playing chicken with each other’s hunger, but filling in the ache with other things.

Joel buys her that dress, light blue with buttons down the front, watches her put it on for the first time in the peeling mirror next to the bed, sheepish and smiling, rubbing his palms down his thighs. She flushes, and any hunger is smothered beneath a fine flume of want, and of something else. Something like power, being seen like this, and seeing him like this, his eyes heavy and lingering. And how easy want like this becomes, him reaching out and her responding with two steps into his arms. He drops to his knees before her, sweet in his supplication, bunches the fabric up at her hips, and gives a little more to her from the soft hinge of his mouth. A fine fissure splits and snarls in the mirror that day from the way her skull makes contact with it, perfect arc of pleasure and she doesn’t even mind the pain. 

They go to the grocery store that’s ten minutes away and pretend at normal. They buy white bread that’s so soft, she watches the easy give of it with the press of her thumb, how it reforms itself around the indent through the crinkling plastic. Tomatoes, and mayonnaise, and salt, and they sit in the back of his truck, and she watches him slice into the perfect, red skin, juice dribbling from the clean break. The end of summer, sun flirting and flaring on their curled backs in the motel parking lot. He makes them sandwiches, and she sighs at the taste, golden and the grit of salt, and the soft stick of bread to the roof of her mouth. A hum in her throat when the sense of it all slips down. She watches his jaw work. 

How nice, to let days go by in something close to stillness. She learns his body, lays him out on the coarse sheets and puts her mouth wherever she would like to. Because she gets to have him, however she would like to have him. And so she does. Lips to the center of his chest where she can feel the kick of his heart, to the soft catch of his stomach where he holds his breath, watching her beneath the shy fan of his lashes, light and shadow flickering with the trying twirl of the fan. And she’s so soft for him, only for him, soft jaw and teeth and tongue, taking him into her mouth and humming at the salt and sense of it. That gold cross glints above her with the rise and fall of his chest. And she could, and he could. As easy as exhaling, as easy as the hinge of the jaw. Though they don’t, though they don’t. They sate each other in different ways. 

He coaxes her up and up and up, squeezing at the soft of her hips, a preening laugh getting stuck in her chest when he pulls her down onto the open heat of his mouth. Sweat beads and bends in all the soft places in the close swelter of the afternoon and she exults in it, watches her hips move in the sliver of mirror caught in the corner of her eye. His hands splayed against her ass, making flesh give, animal mouthings that make her shiver. She feels beautiful. Looks back at the woman in the mirror and the woman looks back at her and she feels beautiful. 

And when they settle down around each other, when his hips press close to hers and she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her, she can begin to believe that they aren’t monsters at all. Monsters couldn’t love like this, at least she doesn’t think so. 

“Can I have one of those?”

“Mmm.” This is the way most afternoons go. Bare, they don’t leave bed again, making a game out of reaching whatever they could possibly need. She stretches one leg out, toeing at a carton of cigarettes strewn on the floor until it’s within arm’s reach, Joel’s hand held steady on her hip to keep her from slipping. Smoking, she has found, is an excellent way to press the hunger down and away, tendriled tempering. She curls back into his side, plucks the lighter from where it was tucked in the carton and settles a cigarette between his lips. The pull he takes once it’s lit jumps and jags the tendons of his throat. She lays her mouth there, feels the thrum it drags from him, and like divine machinery, it makes a smile start to curl and round her cheeks. 

He offers her a drag, and she takes one that is a little too much, makes her eyes water while he rubs his palm up and down the bare breadth of her back, soothing, all easy, easy, Maeve. Sheepish, she tucks her face down along the line of his clavicle, a small sound of protest in the back of her throat before she can stop it when his palm stills, though he’s quick to pick up the smooth circuit. She flushes, because he has made her greedy with all this touch, all this give and take, ask and receive. A different kind of monstrous, what he has made her with want made real. 

“Maeve?” She already knows that tilt to his words because he has tried this a few times now, that little edge of pain that comes with hunger. She sighs, but she does lift her head so she can look at him, the slight pull of his frown, waiting for the question that’s coming. 

“Will you eat?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Maeve.”

“I don’t, Joel.”

“I know you do.” And the unsaid of it, because I do too, because I am in pain too, because we are the same, and we must not forget that. Yes, she can set the hunger down, but there is always the picking it up, always the remembering. It turns her quiet, turns her stomach too, making her sit up, Joel’s hand falling from her spine. He sits up with her, ducking his head to catch the slant of her gaze, eyes rounding and wet. 

“Baby, all you gotta do is eat. I’ll take care of the rest.” She sighs, letting her cheek fall into the cup of his palm, fighting a question that is threatening in her throat, and that has been for a while now. She wants to know how long, just how. He held onto normal for a very long time, and if he could, maybe she could as well. Maybe this could be enough, her cheek in his palm. But, at least for now, she will not ask that, will not try that, because she can see that she is hurting him again, dark wings beneath his eyes, jolting with unanswered want. She knows that hurt, and was fine with hurting herself for a very long time, so long as it meant a gentle hand from her mother, a promise of staying. But this is different, because even when she isn’t hurting, even when she isn’t hungry, Joel doesn’t look away from her, doesn’t leave, doesn’t punish or preach. Relief, she thinks, is all he feels when she’s full. And that’s a kind of care that is new to her as well. 

She lays her hand over his, turns her face into his palm to the fated lines there. 

“Okay, we’ll eat.” 

Eating means leaving, and they both know that, but just the promise that this hurting will soon be over is enough to ward off any worry with skittering fingers. They slink out of bed, get dressed in the wavering light of the single lamp in their room. By now, night, dark and close when they step outside, that late summer cooling that comes when the sun slips down beyond the horizon. 

They haven’t, not since she refused to, not since Joel wept. And she feels a fine thread of worry tugging in her stomach, trying not to look at him too hard as they drive through the night toward some in-between place. But there is nothing to worry about, because Joel takes care of it. And so they are full again, and so they aren’t hurting any more, stumbling through the desert brush beneath the merciful glow of the moon, dark, dark, dark. 

It is amazing how little time something so monstrous takes when it is done so carefully like this. In the passenger seat, she presses her palm over her mouth, feeling the dried stick there. And in turn she reaches over to him, lays her hand over his mouth in the same place, feels the same tack there. Like her, like her, like her. He kisses the cup of her palm without ever taking his eyes off the road, the jump of muscle in his forearms, in his knuckles curled around the steering wheel. 

They are quiet when they get back to the motel, curling around themselves to conceal the truth of the stain, of the darkening damp smeared down their fronts. And this routine starts the same. At the sink, the toothpaste and the floss and the mouthwash. But there is no separation when the steam of the shower starts to seep. They both strip down and step in together. Before he can, she is already pressing her palms against his chest, holding him in the stream of the shower. She cleans what remains from his skin, water pinkening in the drain. And when she’s satisfied with that, she takes his skull in her hands and tips his head back so she can thread her fingers through his hair. He hums, eyes slipping shut in pleasure made pure. And she is so gentle for him that even now, so dizzyingly full, she has a hard time convincing herself of her own monstrosity. 

He surprises her when he takes over, beginning his ministrations with his hand holding her chin, fingers tucked at the hinge of her jaw to hold her steady, hold her mouth open so he can run the pad of his thumb over her teeth, pressing at the sharp of her canines, something dark laying heavy over his eyes. She tries for a grin, though it is only a crook of the corners of her lips with the way he is holding her face. And when she bites, just a little, holding his thumb in the merciful pressure of her teeth, he laughs, a quiet murmuring sound as he watches her from beneath his lashes. 

“Be good, please.” And she is good for him. Good means not biting down. Love means not biting down, at least not too hard. Instead, taking his thumb into her mouth and curling her tongue around it. She sucks, and he groans, and it sends a new want stuttering up her spine. Close to frightening to want and be wanted so regularly like this. The cool tile is holy against her spine, shivering down a perfect prayer. He holds her there, and she lets him, and they do something about the hunger that remains. 

When the water runs cold and clean, they get out, continue a routine that looks normal, settle down around each other in bed. Joel puts on the evening news and she keeps her ear pressed over his heart, lets the flooding beat of it drown at that slick slither of shame, still there, always there. But then, but then.

There is a woman on the news. A woman who is crying. A woman who is surrounded by the small flicker of candles held in hands, held in vigil. And the woman is crying because her husband never came home. Three weeks ago, and her husband didn’t come home, and her husband isn’t, wasn’t, the type of man who would just leave because they had children. They had children, and their father never came home. And Maeve sits up because when they show a photo of the husband, the father, she recognizes him. That night when she refused and Joel wept. She recognizes him, and her stomach starts to curdle. And Joel recognizes him too, sits up too, a careful, quiet call of her name, low, so as to not scare her into flight. But she is already shaking her head no, no, no, no, shirking and shrinking away from his touch, curling up on the end of the bed, all her angles tucked up close as panic turns into sickening white noise in her mind. 

They had been careful, hadn’t they? Always careful, always the in-between, always people that couldn’t possibly have someone waiting at home for them. After all, it isn’t hard for like to recognize like. And they were careful, and they were kind, and they always tried very hard to be gentle when they had to do what they always have to do. Not enough though, none of it, enough, and it was never going to be. 

Joel turns off the television, his movement fragmented in the melt of her tears, catching stained-glass glimpses of him kneeling in front of her, pleading, or praying, or something in between the two. Please, baby, please will you look at me? It’s not your fault, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine. You’re good, you’re so good, please, I’m sorry, please. And it’s please over and over again, and she’s shaking her head no over and over again, trying to wrench away from his hands holding her face steady. 

In the perfect cradle of a pain like this, there is a regression, something childlike in the logic of making it better. Something young in the way he unclasps his cross from around his neck and tries to give it to her, tries to lay it against her sternum. And something young in her too, throwing a perfect fit when he tries to make this right the only way he knows how. She shows him her snarl, thrashes and tears the chain away from her skin, throws it across the room. Terrible, she regrets it immediately, regrets the way his face falls, the way he sinks back into himself. She has hurt him, and this time, on purpose. 

He gets up with a sigh that sounds very tired, doesn’t say another word as he crosses toward the bathroom. She can’t look at his face right now because it will make her cry even harder, so instead she lets her vision blur and unfocus around his form, a silhouette with his forehead resting against the bathroom door frame. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.” All that he offers, slipping away, slipping out of sight and into the bathroom, and that young part of her panics. No, needs him to be where she can see him, where he can see her, needs to fix this. She gets down on her hands and knees in a blind stutter, runs her fingers along the grimey baseboard trying to find where she threw that wretched chain. And it’s no use because when she does find it she sees that the clasp is broken clean off, golden bones in pieces, glinting in the faded carpet. She picks up what she can find of it, feeling small, shivering small when she pads into the bathroom. 

He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, big man made small just like her, curled over himself with his head in his hands. And now would be a good time for her to leave, she thinks. Leave the cracked pieces of his faith on the counter and start walking in any direction away from here. She is familiar with this kind of leaving. All those years ago, and her mother in a similar posture of prostration, of surrender to this thing that she could not fix for her daughter. Her mother, asking her to leave. And Maeve, finally given an opportunity to succeed in what her mother asked of her. Yes, she is very good at leaving when people get tired of her, or frightened of her, or tired of being frightened of her. She has done it many times now. 

“I’m sorry, Joel.” And the rest is said too, in a sodden slur when she holds out her cupped palms to him and shows him the broken pieces, something about her fixing it, with money that doesn’t exist, and in a place she doesn’t know, and with hands that seem to only be good for greed. But he accepts her sorry, curls his palms around hers to close her fingers over the wreckage, a prayer that she is relieved to partake in. 

They are ruinous. But they are in love. 

A strange, slow slump over the lip of the tub, and he pulls her with him. The porcelain, or whatever it is, is still pearled damp from their shower earlier and the bare skin of her shins sticks and slips as she settles in his lap. She holds his face in her hands, thumbs stroking at the soft skin beneath his eyes. And he’s beautiful, and she’s already forgiven him, and she never wants to hear him say sorry again because she would continue to forgive him for any and all of it. She wants a world for them in which they never have to say sorry.

“Joel?” He is listening, though he doesn’t say anything, and she allows something like hope to lurch hot and hazed in her chest.

“Do you think we could be normal together?”

Silence, for a long time. The sink faucet drips.

“We could try.”

Two years pass. 

It is the longest she has ever managed normal.

The truth is there was money, because her mother did love her in her own strange way. She had never touched it before though, there never seemed a good enough reason for it. But this seemed good, like the best possible reason, really.

They get an apartment in a town in New Mexico with a name that doesn’t mean anything to either of them. Something they could both agree on, the hard bake of the sun and the dry air. 

They both get jobs in the first months. She works at a grocery store, smiles bright at the mothers that bring their daughters along on their weekly errands. He works with his hands, and comes home in the slow slump of the afternoon smelling like cedar and salt. She licks it off his skin and runs her fingers through his damp, darkened hair most nights. 

Those first few months, there is a mattress, and not much else. It is enough. They put it in the middle of the apartment. They eat and they sleep and they talk and they laugh and they fuck and they watch the sun rise and fall in the harsh way it does from that mattress. They are very happy. 

And then they get some more furniture, and then they start saying hello to their neighbors when they pass them in the hall, and their neighbors start saying hello back. Normal slips into the corners of their lives like the most gracious guest. 

At the end of that first year, when it seems like normal is going to stick, Joel sends a letter to his daughter with a phone number scribbled in hope at the bottom of the page. He waits by the phone the whole week after it’s sent like an anxious ghost, makes himself sick with waiting. And when she does call, Maeve catches glimpses of him from the end of the hall, a smile, and quiet wonder in his voice. He’s not interested in going to church any more because now his daughter calls every Sunday. He sits down on the floor with his chin tilted to the side to accommodate the stretch of the coiled phone cord and he talks all morning with her. 

In the second year, Maeve finds that she likes to paint. There’s an art supply store in town, so she quits her job at the grocery store and goes to work there, gets enough of an employee discount that she can buy paints and brushes and canvases and an easel over the span of a few months. She likes the desert, likes its colors and its quiet assertion of life, so that is what she often paints. And Joel likes to watch her in the evenings, she sets up her work in front of the crooked palm of windows in the living room, an errant hum in the back of her throat to whatever song is playing on the radio. Eventually, every night, when she is doing more swaying than painting and her eyes are starting to squint shut, he gets up off the couch and pads over to sway with her, her head falling back to rest against his shoulder as he coaxes her tired body into his arms. And from the faint glow of the windows stacked and ordered alongside a few dozen other glowing windows of the apartment complex, it looks like love, because it is. 

She finds that she likes routine, likes being bored and boring. She likes that the things she worries about now are small things, like what they're going to have for dinner, or whether they’ll go to the weekly tenant meeting on Thursday nights. She likes waking up in the same bed every morning, and she likes that he sleeps on his stomach when he’s actually comfortable in a space, splayed and cheek rumpled on his pillow, an arm always extended toward her, draped over her. She likes the weight, the reassurance of it. And in the mornings he is slow to wake, all soft murmurings and soft eyes, still shut even when she presses her lips to his temple, though a smile will usually start to curl smug when she does. Good morning, good morning. It is good, all of it, so good that it makes the dormant hunger hurt a little bit less.

They eat breakfast together, leaning against the kitchen counter. Eggs and their golden tears splitting and spilling on their plates, strong coffee that he takes black and she takes with cream. Their mouths work hard around normal. She packs lunches for them both, late summer again, tomatoes again, sandwiches again, the way that he made them. And on her break at work she does her best to get it down, pinching the crust off first before eating the rest. But no, that other hunger doesn’t go away. It makes sounds a little sharper, and lights achingly brighter, it makes the steady beat of the sun fierce. But she thinks she can manage it, because she wants all this normal so much more, hunger for hunger, and want for want, a careful game of tipping the scales. 

Joel’s birthday is in a few weeks. She’s been working on a painting for him, difficult to keep it a secret with the way he is always over or under her shoulder, a hum in his throat because that’s beautiful, baby, you work so beautiful. But somehow she’s managed to keep it hidden. And today she picks up two fresh tubes of paint, pigments that she needs to finish her work. She’s painting a sunset for him, a landscape that they both know, a wound in the earth, that canyon that they visited once. She hopes he’ll like it. She thinks he will. 

She always gets home later than he does these days because he got a promotion, baby, big man, good man who got a promotion, baby, who’s a boss now, baby, working with his hands, baby, good, honest work, baby. He's already showered, hair damp and dripping dark down the back of his t-shirt, the small slide of muscle as he stands over the stove and stirs something that smells good. That same hum in his throat when she twines her arms around his stomach and presses her face into the back of his neck, deep inhale because he smells like that good, clean soap he always uses. 

And it’s all the quiet, normal things, greetings, and how was your day, and it was good, baby, how was yours, and mmhmm, good, this looks good, you look good, good, good. He turns in her arms and smacks a kiss to her mouth that makes her laugh, makes her hungry. 

“I got some new paints.”

“Oh yeah?” Somehow, squirreling around each other, he tucks her into his side, arm easy and slung around her shoulders while he continues to stir pasta and sauce in simmering pots, steam and savor washing over their faces and turning skin tacky and flushed. 

“Mmhmm.”

“Gonna paint something beautiful, baby?” Baby, baby, baby, his cheeks round with the word every time. She especially likes it, usually late at night, or early in the morning, when he slurs and stumbles over Maevey baby, Maevey, Maevey, Maevey. Heavy and sweet like thick syrup in his throat and it nearly brings her to tears it’s so nice coming from his mouth. 

“I’m gonna try.” 

“Always beautiful, always make things so beautiful.” It’s almost absent-minded the way he says it, intent on getting food on plates with only one free hand, but it still makes her stomach swoop and buoy something awful. 

They eat dinner, and they sit on the couch, and he watches her work on a different painting until the sun slips under and washes everything down dark. And they get ready for bed, moving around each other in a routine they don’t even have to think about, settle down around each other and turn out the lights, quiet whisperings of love, touch that expects more of itself for a very long time, easy, patient, soft. When she feels and hears his breath slip into that slow resonance of sleep, she moves as quietly as she can in getting out of bed. She’s been hiding his painting in the hall closet where they keep their winter coats tucked. They have winter coats now. 

She works in the quiet clutch of the night, eyes squinting in the dim light she allows for herself, working partly from memory, and partly from  mythology of a place in their shared past. The painting will be finished soon. She thinks she’ll have to give it to him early if that’s the case, giddy with the idea of finally sharing it with him. 

When she’s satisfied with her progress, still night, still close and dark and quiet, she tucks the painting back into the closet, careful not to let anything brush against it while it dries. And when she returns to bed, Joel is still asleep, on his stomach now with his arm outstretched toward her side of the bed. Nothing is easy like it is to slip back under with him. 

She’s going to finish the painting tonight. The thought makes her rush a bit in closing the store. It takes her three tries to finally get the key to click into the lock. If she does finish it, she thinks she might have to wake him up right then and there to show it to him. And she floats home on the prospect of that, smiling, easy greetings to the people she passes on her way up to the apartment. 

“Joel?” A fine whisper of worry when she doesn’t find him in the kitchen making dinner. He must have had a longer day at work, she figures, just now getting home and getting cleaned up because she can see the light slipping down the hall from the bathroom. 

And the rest happens in a strange, slow unraveling. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that she screamed when she opened the bathroom door. She will not remember that. What she will remember, the awful resignation, that understanding like a small death, that she was never going to be able to walk out of her own myth. And the blood on clean, white tile that had never seen blood before. And blood on him, on his hands and on his face and down his shirt and all over and all over and all over. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that he thought he was going to die when she told him not to touch her, when she skittered back so hard she tripped and fell in the hallway when he reached for her. What she will never tell him, she sometimes wishes she died then and there.

From the glimpse she caught, there is very little left of what he has done, only remnant viscera in the bathtub. But she doesn’t see any more than that, because she is on the ground and she is pressing her back up close against the wall as far from him as she can get and she is sobbing and yes, she is screaming. Ruinous, wretched ribbons of sound ripping through her chest. It is a mourning sound. And he drops down to his knees, reaches in the space between them, but thinks better of it with the way she shrinks away from him. Pink streaks of tears down his face, he pulls at his hair in something that looks like agony. He cries with her, and he prays to her. Like a chant, like an invocation, like one last plea for salvation, I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I’m sorry, I was so tired, I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I’m sorry, I love you, please, I’m sorry, please. And she cries harder at the broken sound of his wails, fingernails clawing at her chest like she might be able to plunge through skin and muscle and find the sick, stuttered beat of her heart that is in such perfect pain. The horrible truth is she had already forgiven him the moment she opened the bathroom door. The horrible truth, they are in this myth together. 

Eventually, when there is little left for her to mourn, the cries stop, everything swollen and slumped and sodden. She doesn’t wince or recoil when he reaches for her now, crawling to her on his knees, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing the crown of his head into her stomach, still shivering in his sobs. And because she has already forgiven him, it is hardly difficult for her palms to find the shake in his spine. She doesn’t even have to think about it, holding him a little tighter when his hands grasp at the fabric of her shirt. 

Still, pain. Later, much later, she does not let herself think of that day too often. Of the painting that was never finished. That was left in the hall closet to dry with a sunset that wasn’t yet complete. Because if she does think of it for too long, that pain will tear open inside her all over again, and it will turn her hateful, and she doesn’t want that, not for him, not when he tries to show her how sorry he is every day. Sorry that normal ended like that. Sorry that there was always going to be another leaving. 

They leave, together, the next morning, silent as a grave. And in all the years of wandering that follow, they never return to New Mexico, a space sealed off like a tomb of the past, of a promise that could never have been kept. 

…

“Are you cold?” 

“A little, but it feels nice.” Still, he doesn’t think twice about offering his shirt to her from where it had stayed dry and folded at the edge of the lake, warmed by the sun and clinging to the pearling damp on her skin. It’s summer again, and they are in some in-between like they always are, and he is trying to find what joy he can for her like he always is. And it is a good day, one of their better ones, so she tries for what she can of a smile from behind the tuck of her knees up against her chest, squinting in the bright halo around him. He smiles too, a shy, small thing that looks like relief, and when he curls his arm around her shoulders, she lets him, tucks  into his side, and they sit at the edge of a lake in the in-between, soft grass and mud and the mild kippering of insects all around them, baking in the sun. When he holds her like this, when normal starts to creep in, so do the tears, but she tamps them down with a hum in her throat, some song that he sighs at, tucks his face into the hollow of her neck so he can feel the thrum of it from the source. He holds her like he is waiting for her to shatter, something desperate, but something fragile. And she drags her fingers through his hair, now drying in fine waves beneath the sun, and it is a moment that will have to be enough. She is learning what to hold onto, and what to let go.

“Joel?” He hums his listening, though he keeps his face ducked down to let her continue her ministrations. 

“We should probably leave soon.” 

“Yeah, we should.” And it is this string of words over and over again, the finely stitched pattern of their lives held in the cradle of these few words. She thinks that she has accepted this, settled around this, grown around the rot until it has become something else. Sometimes, she wonders if they are real, if she is real. Watch two myths walk away from the edge of a lake. It is summer, and  two myths are holding each other in their arms. It’s only real if you watch. The rest of the time, they define real for themselves. Real in touch, in sun on skin, in mouths and hands on skin. They make each other real within their own myth. All of the time, they are in love. Some of the time, they are happy. 

But before this, before now, before all the miles they have crawled in the time following that staying that turned into a leaving, she refused to eat for another two years, despite his coaxing and cajoling. And it weakened her, made her mean and sharp, and eventually withdrawn, curled like a corpse in the coarse sheets of motel beds, letting her eyes glaze and glass in the glow of the television. Lover turned patient, any care and keeping was done by his hands, moving her in a pleading pattern of preservation. Please, baby, I need you to eat, I love you I know you love me so eat, all you have to do for me is eat. All she offered in response when he would start to pray to her like that, her palm lifting in the air, and dropping back down as if judgment had been passed.  In the night, he curled his body around hers, and it was the strongest she got to feel, him weeping against her spine.  And in the waking day, death seemed inevitable, seemed like grace, and one day, she told him in what voice she had left that she would like him to, to her, of her, if the time came soon. And she hoped the time would come soon. And he got very angry, it shocked her how angry he got. Voice like thunder and lightning in his hands, shattering whatever would break against the walls of their motel room. The vision of a man who did not know what else to do. The vision of a man losing. And that broken, beating thing inside of her lurched because she loves him. Loves him, loves him, loves him. And so she eats with him. And so she lives with him. And so they walk through this myth together. Her in the passenger seat and she takes one of his hands in both of hers and keeps it for herself in her lap and he lets her. How could they be monsters? How can this be called monstrous? They are in love. They are in wretched love.

And before this, before now, when a new couple moved into that apartment in New Mexico, clean, white tile clean and white again, ready to fill the rooms with their own kind of love, full and good, they found a near-finished painting in the hall closet. A painting of a wound in the earth, and the flame of a sunset. They thought that it was beautiful. 

[theplotdemandsit]

were every hargreeves siblings lonely and lone? Were they all incapable of making friends truly?did they had any choice in the matter after they left the hargreeves mansion at 18,19?

Were the hargreeves lonely? Were they really incapable of making friends? Did they have any choice in the matter after they left the academy?

How I’m understanding this question is basically: Was the dominance and loneliness forced upon them growing up still chaining them down after they left?

The short answer? Yes. 

I’m a behavior therapist, and part of my work is looking at how individuals have been conditioned to behave in certain ways. Functional behavior and nonfunctional behavior all stem from consequences. If the consequences of a behavior increase the likelihood of you doing it again, your behavior has been reinforced. If the consequences decrease the likelihood of you doing it again, your behavior has been punished. Reginald Hargreeves uses these principles of behavior to essentially control his children.

Just to give an example of how this works: say you ask politely for a cookie and Mom gives you a cookie—you’ve now learned that asking politely gets you a cookie and are more likely to ask that way again. It can also go the other way where if you ask for a cookie by screaming and yelling, you don’t get a cookie. You are now less likely to scream and yell. Sound familiar?

But now think about this:

Say you ask Dad for a hug and he ignores you. Eventually you stop asking. Say you follow all his instructions and he praises you. You keep following his instructions. 

Say you ask Dad if you can go to the mall. He tells you no. Eventually you stop asking. Say you follow all his instructions and he praises you. You keep following his instructions.

Say you can’t do what Dad wants you to do so he locks you up and hurts you. You don’t want to suffer but you also can’t follow his instructions, so you do what you can to make it hurt less. He only tells you he’s disappointed but at least he can’t hurt you anymore.

Say you work really hard and outperform everyone else, and Dad praises you. He praises you for taking risks to be better. So you take more and more risks. Except one day he tells you to stop—that you can’t do it. The only problem with this is that experience has told you otherwise. You’ve been reinforced in the past for taking risks, so you take another. And another.

Say Dad tells you you’re nothing. You’re ordinary. You try to prove him wrong by doing well in other things, but instead of praising you, he ignores you or uses you as an example of what not to be. So you stop trying. 

The only reinforced behavior the Hargreeves had was following whatever Dad said. (Aside from Five’s case due to reasons 2 paragraphs ago). They couldn’t rely on each other because they were always competing against one another for Dad’s approval.

For more about the Hargreeves’ hierarchy, check out this entry which dives even deeper! https://www.tumblr.com/atalana/183592717183/five-and-the-effects-of-reginald-hargreeves?source=share

So, yes. They were lonely. And while they could make their own decisions after saying Bye, Felicia to dear old dad, their behavior had already been conditioned into living a certain way. For the numbers at the top, they had to keep doing and being the best. For the numbers on the bottom, they were already a disappointment so what was the point? (Unless, again, you're Number Five and just keep pushing to become better)

And while most behavior is conditioned, it can also be conditioned to change (literally my job) so they could all learn to not be so harmfully dependent and learn to believe in themselves had they positive role models in their lives. But they didn’t. From what I can tell, it seems like Diego is the only one who made any friends, but none of them were deep relationships. Him and Patch didn’t last, but maybe they eventually could have had he found more reasons to live than taking out bad guys. And even though Allison married and had a child, she still couldn’t find herself living without relying on her power, her need to control things. She was trying to rise to the top by any means necessary, but it wasn’t fulfilling which she later realized.

One of my favorite things about season 2 is that the siblings all getting sent in different times helps them to learn to rely on others and maybe heal a little. Although unfortunately Five just went from one Apocalypse to the other so he basically never heals. It’s fine. (It’s not and I’m still upset about that storyline they call season 4). 

But anyway. Changing behavior that has a long history of consistent conditioning is challenging and takes time. We see that throughout their stories and their laughable inability to communicate. But hopefully in some universe somewhere, they are learning to be happy. Thanks for the great questions! 

[fxckn-sxck-fr]

could we see some romantic yandere Scott summers x reader. I have been obsessed with the x-men lately and I need more content

𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂 𝐘𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐓𝐓 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐒…

!!! Controlling behaviors, mentions of PDA, slightest bit of possessiveness, Scott doesn’t believe in boundaries, scary Scott, manipulation, delusions, mentions of murder.

Oooooooh, this one got me to think a little. I honestly haven’t written a purely romantic yandere in a while, so let’s see what we’re dealing with.

First off, forget about personal space. That doesn’t exist when you’ve capture the affection of a man like Scott. Expect there to always be an arm around your shoulders or waste, a hand on your back or thigh, and a shit ton of kisses. He’s not afraid of PDA, so be prepared to be absolutely disgusting to everyone around you. It’s more cuz he can’t fight the urge to touch you than to show that you’re his, but he’d be lying if that last part wasn’t a bonus.

If it was up to him, you’d be wearing his clothes 24/7. You just look so cute in his shirts and jackets, not to mention your scent being left behind on everything, too. He absolutely steals your dirty clothes just to smell them. Especially on the off chance you’re on a mission without him. It’s like he has withdrawal symptoms when you’re away, so expect him to practically attack you as soon as you’re back. Will kiss and cuddle for hours on end, don’t you dare test him.

Absolutely controls everything about your life. What you eat, what you wear, who you hang out with, what you can and can’t do... if it’s within his power, he’s taking over. He sometimes acts more like your parole officer than your lover, literally acting like you broke the law if you cross him. And honestly, in his book, you have; what he wants is basically the law. How can you do this to him, huh?!

Oh my god, please don’t keep secrets from him. Not only does he always find out, but he is absolutely terrifying when he’s pissed. You may find yourself fearing for your personal safety when you get into fights, with how he yells or roughly grabs you by the arm. Don’t worry, though. The last thing Scott wants to do is hurt you… unless if it’s absolutely necessary, but you’d have to really fuck up for it to come to that. Once he’s calmed down, he’s back to the docile cuddly Scott that’s way less scary. He also has this weird “it’s my fault that it’s your fault mentality,” which basically means that every argument is your fault, but he blames himself for not properly conditioning you to follow his every command, so part of it is still his fault, too.

A big part of Scott’s delusions surrounding you is that you’re the picture perfect couple. He’s always wanted to live the picket fence life and is a big lover boy at heart, which is why he likes to do romantic gestures like buying you flowers, picnic dates, candlelit dinners, murder, leaving little notes around the mansion for you to find… wait a minute. One of those is not like the others. Oh, yeah! Scott would totally kill for you if needed. It runs counter to the morals of the X-Men, sure, and in any normal circumstance, killing is a no-go. But he prioritizes you over anything and everything else, so if there’s even an inkling of a threat to your safety, he’s going in with fists clenched and visor blazing.

Two of the biggest advantages of having yandere Scott as your lover is that he’ll do whatever you want (as long as it fits within the parameters of his rules) and you’ll forever have scary dog privileges. While you might not have a lot of personal freedom, there are some loopholes to getting your way. You just gotta shower him in your affection and talk sweetly enough. Compromises will probably have to be made, but it’s better than nothing.

[maryfailstowrite]

Do you want to know who one of my favorite DRA characters is???? do you??? no, you don’t, but I’m telling you either way: it’s Kinji Uehara. Here’s why.

(obviously, spoilers for DRA ahead, so…. beware :))

So, to me, Uehara is an intriguing character from the start. When you hear the title “Ultimate Priest”, it makes you imagine a loud guy who is going to ramble on and on about God and religion and accepting Jesus Christ into your heart and all that… but you’re met with a quiet man that explicitly tells you that he doesn’t force his faith onto others. Even Yuki is a bit surprised, and this brief conversation leaves you wanting to find out more about him…

And oh man, do we find out more.

I think his first shining moment is in chapter two. When Kinjo is trying to start his dictatorship- I mean cult- Sorry, when Kinjo is trying to establish himself as leader of the group, and says that whoever doesn’t agree with his conditions must get out and will be seen as a preliminary criminal from now on. We see Mekaru get out and tell Kinjo he’s insane, which is a power move, by the way, but expected from her. This is Rei Mekaru we’re talking about, after all. She ain’t taking no one’s bullshit. Then Kizuna gets out (not without yelling and crying a bit before, of course), which was also expected given her mental state at the moment… And then there’s Uehara. He literally just gets up and leaves, and only explains himself because Inori asks him to.

So far, Uehara has been a pretty tame person. He got along with everyone, helped at the trial, and overall, he had never gone against anyone. But now he opposes himself (or, rather, Kinjo opposes the both groups against each other, but that’s another tale) against the main group of students, and decides, for some unknown reason to everyone, that being seen as a potential murderer is better than having to follow Kinjo’s rules.

His response to being asked why he’s leaving? This:

Then he walks out. Just like that.

Obviously, the Ultimate Priest would be a pretty moral-driven person, right? He’s supposed to be a spiritual leader, after all.

The first interpretation of this we make is that associating with Kinjo and following his orders would eventually make Uehara do something that goes against his moral compass. Even if Kinjo tries to make himself seem reasonable and reliable, it’s pretty damn obvious he’s not after the first trial. We know that he has a pretty black and white view on criminality, as far as thinking that all murderers (no matter their motive, circumstances, etc.) should die, a moral view that is a stark contrast to the Christian concepts of mercy and forgiveness. Concepts Uehara, as a priest, would base his world view on.

Kinjo and Uehara are basically opposites, morality wise. Kinjo would do anything (and in his case, it really is anything) to maintain the order he believes the world (in this context, the school and his classmates) should follow, and he’d go to any lengths to make sure justice finds every person he sees as ‘bad’, no matter how drastic or dark anyone else thinks his methods are. Uehara, on his end, doesn’t hold any grudges against any of the students that stopped talking to him after he left Kinjo’s group, and he doesn’t even hold a grudge against Kinjo, who is the whole reason why he’s been ostracized from his classmates. He still collaborates with the investigations and in the trials, and there’s nothing that points to him being mad at anyone for basically leaving him to his own luck in a killing game. He believes in and practices the mercy and forgiveness he’s been taught to have as a priest…

Or does he, though?

(Note: There is another interpretation to his response after being asked why he’s leaving. But we need to know what happens after chapter two to make it, so we’ll get to it later.)

Now, chapter three is his chapter. It’s his last chapter alive, and here’s where we get a more deep dive into him. But we can’t talk about any of this without talking about the murder itself, so… let’s get that out of the way.

The third murder case is incredibly gruesome (or at least it was for me), especially Inori’s death. You can hear her screaming for help inside the lab minutes before you open the door and find her tied up and burnt to death. It looks like an excessively cruel murder, especially considering there was no real reason to kill her in such a painful way. She was one of the weakest, if not the weakest character in the cast (physically speaking, of course), and she wouldn’t have shown much resistance if simply attacked (especially against someone like Uehara, who is double her size).

Plus, aside from Inori and Yamaguchi, two other people were attacked. Kinjo was left unconscious on the library floor, and Mekaru was taken out with chloroform and shoved into a locker. It feels unnecessary, and like attacking more people means the possibility of leaving more clues behind… but we’ll get to that later, so hang on for a moment.

Now, personally, after the victim reveals, I was conflicted. I had gotten spoiled, so I already knew who the killer was… and I was in denial about it. I wondered what could’ve driven Uehara to commit such a cruel and almost sadistic crime, and I was a bit scared they would pull the ‘oh my god, this character that seemed calm and collected up until this point is actually super insane and a cold-blooded murderer’ thing the original Danganronpa always does in chapter 3. In this aspect, I was pleasantly surprised.

Uehara being the traitor is a super surprising reveal. Even after ‘solving’ the murder case and voting correctly, it had never crossed anyone’s mind that Uehara was the traitor. Yet, that was exactly why the murders even happened in the first place. The motive video they had been given only existed to give Uehara instructions: If he killed now, the children Monokuma had kidnapped from Uehara’s cathedral would be freed, and if he didn’t get caught, he’d get to see them after getting out.

Of course, Uehara complied. Those kids were very dear to him. And we discover that originally, Uehara’s plan was far less gruesome: He kidnapped Inori from the infirmary and killed her with the spear while she was passed out (I assume he used the chloroform on her too, since she’s passed out when Yamaguchi finds her). But Yamaguchi’s appearance throws his whole plan away, and, as we see in the trial… Uehara breaks down easily under pressure. In other words, he panicked.

I think this is pretty important to understand why he did what he did. He never intended to kill anyone if it hadn’t been because Monokuma coerced him to, much less in such a horrible way. But after killing Yamaguchi “on accident” (wasn’t an accident, but it wasn’t his original plan), he probably started panicking and tried to bullshit his way out of it. He knew he couldn’t just let Inori go, because she’d immediately know he was the one that killed Yamaguchi. Even if she was passed out as he tried to save her, if a guy tried to kidnap you and someone else appeared dead a few hours later… it would be pretty suspicious. Plus, her coat was drenched in his blood, so… yeah, no way she wouldn’t put 2 and 2 together. So, Uehara started putting together a new plan with the first things he saw on the way. He had the phone on him, so his mind probably went there first, and then he started making up the rest of it from there.

Don’t take this as me trying to excuse his actions, though. Even if we think he didn’t realize just how painful his method was when he planned it, he still fucking electrocuted someone alive, which is horrible. He could’ve let Inori go and let her know he was the culprit, sacrificing himself, because the children would’ve still been released. He still had that selfishness in him to want to survive. But I think that imagining him making up a new plan on the way in a panicked state makes it easier to understand why he did things that seem completely unnecessary. And since we already know he’s not good under pressure because of the trial… I don’t think it’s hard to imagine him like that. He most likely acted on the first ideas he had using things he already had on him (the phone for Inori, the chloroform with Mekaru) or the first things he found, and that’s why his plan is so messy. Why did he drag Yamaguchi to the library when he could’ve just left him in the art room’s locker? To leave him next to Kinjo? He wanted to pin the murder on the guy that believes all murderers should die? While said guy was unconscious? Or was it just to confuse everyone and make them think the murders happened at the same time? And why did he shove Mekaru in the locker with the dried blood? That was basically leading the cast to an important clue. Why did he leave Inori’s coat in the art room’s trash? Knowing that they would investigate there, since that’s where they found Mekaru?

Like I said, the more murders/attacks, the more clues you potentially leave behind. And if we take into consideration that he was acting on the go, and that he didn’t have much time to cover up what he was doing (because he did a ton of shit)… It was impossible for him to get away with it. He probably knew this, but he held onto the hope that perhaps he’d be able to survive, and that’s why he breaks down when he realizes he’s cornered in the trial. But when he realizes that he’s been caught, he calms down because… at least the children are safe, right? Right?

One of the most heartbreaking moments in this chapter is the reveal that the children are, in fact, far from safe. Before killing Uehara, Monokuma shows him (and the whole cast) a video of the children’s dead, decomposing bodies, driving Uehara into a state of shock he dies in. I think this is a great way to make the cast’s fear and hate for the mastermind grow, but I feel like it’s also there to make a point. Uehara tried killing his classmates so that the kids could survive. He tried to choose by himself who lived and who died, and in the end, it only caused more deaths. This situation brings a pretty interesting debate to the table, and a pretty important one for the development of the game too.

And that’s what makes this case different from your usual chapter three double murder. The murders didn’t feel pointless. In the original Danganronpa series, it felt to me like some of the murders were just… there. Especially the third cases. They didn’t help develop anyone’s character, they didn’t help advance the overall plot, they just happened. For example, the third case of Trigger Happy Havoc. Celestia goes from being the “Queen of Liars”, a calm and collected woman that maintained her cool even when faced with the deaths of her classmates… to a horrible liar that was caught in, like, 5 seconds. Not to mention, her motive was money. Sure, I can perhaps sympathize with the fact that she wanted to make her dream come true with that money… but as the Ultimate Gambler, she could’ve won that money after getting out of the killing game. It isn’t a particularly strong motive, and it doesn’t make Celestia’s character better or more interesting. The reveal that Celestia was actually Taeko Yasuhiro is probably the most interesting part of this chapter, but we probably didn’t need two murders to happen to make that reveal, did we? Plus, she dies like, half an hour later, so it’s not like that reveal served for much. The deaths of Hifumi, Taka and Celestia don’t particularly develop anyone’s character, and they don’t push forward the overall plot either. They get rid of characters they didn’t want surviving, and that’s about it.

But DRA chapter three didn’t feel like that. And I think the main reason for this is, surprisingly enough, Kinjo.

The third trial is the start of Kinjo’s downfall. Like I’ve already stated before, Kinjo and Uehara are opposites when it comes to morality, so I believe it could only be him who pointed out Kinjo’s issues. And he does it in the only way Kinjo would listen to him: Using Kinjo’s arguments to support his own actions (and the murder he committed).

When Kinjo is going on and on about Uehara being a serial killer (which isn’t factually correct by the way, but sure, Mr. Cop), Uehara tells him that it’s strange Kinjo is showing such strong opposition to him and his actions when they were both using the same logic. Of course, Kinjo is a bit taken back by this, and asks Uehara to explain…

Uehara then responds with this:

He quotes Kinjo. He’s not only using the cop’s logic against him, no, he’s using the same phrase Kinjo used to defend himself and his actions to defend his crime.

After this, Uehara elaborates further: He explains that he sacrificed the lives of the fifteen students for the lives of 100 children. He just chose to save the most people, even if a few lives were lost in the way… Doesn’t that remind us of someone?

Kinjo deliberately chose to put a few people in danger for a chance at saving a higher number of them. He didn’t directly kill anyone, sure, but he wouldn’t have cared if they were killed. Kinjo protected everyone else and left the ones that didn’t agree with him to die, because he thought that was the way in which the most people would survive.

Uehara knows he wasn’t in the right. He knows murder is still an awful act, no matter what the reason was, and that he’ll have to pay for it in the afterlife. But Kinjo doesn’t. Kinjo thinks picking and choosing who survives and who doesn’t is the right thing to do. That’s what Uehara wants him to realize: That the reasoning that drove him to kill is the reasoning Kinjo was using as a leader, and that it would only drive Kinjo down the same path Uehara was dying in: a path of blood-stained hands, a path of guilt, and a path of death.

No one can play God. Not even the Ultimate Priest.

And Kinjo actually reconsiders his stance after the trial (and after everyone turns against him). Even if it was a dead end, because Kinjo ended up just standing stronger on what he believed in until the fourth trial, it makes him wonder about his actions, and it foreshadows what happens in chapter four. It lets us see that Kinjo doesn’t stand as strong and he seems, and that his views are bound to fall apart sooner or later.

Uehara and his murder case develop Kinjo’s character. He’s quiet after Uehara asks him to reconsider his stance so far (which is a lot, considering how much he bitched every time a murderer was found guilty), and he even asks Yuki if he’s wrong the next day. The trial, and especially the conversation with Yuki that it triggers later, helps us see Kinjo as a man who’s been put under too much pressure for too much time. A man that has been trying to protect everyone around him his whole life, but that had a completely wrong approach to it. Instead of the crazy bitch we see him as the whole time, we get closer to the actual person Kinjo is, not the leader he makes himself to be.

Of course, one could argue that having him just break down in chapter four would’ve led to the same series of events (aka him trying to kill himself, and therefore remembering everything and triggering the plot for the rest of the game), but… it wouldn’t have felt the same. If Kinjo had fainted in the fourth trial, then killed himself the next day, it would’ve just left us with a sense of helplessness. It would’ve felt like something that was bound to happen, because no one could’ve helped Kinjo… and that’s what case three brings to the table. Kinjo could’ve been helped. Uehara helps him question his actions, and if only Yuki had pushed Kinjo in the right direction when he opened up to him, perhaps we could’ve seen a much different Kinjo for the rest of the game. But that doesn’t happen. Case three makes us see Kinjo waver and falter, and it foreshadows what happens later on: it lets us know that Kinjo’s confidence wouldn’t last forever, and that he was going to break sooner or later. And it also adds to Yuki’s sense of despair when he sees Kinjo shoot himself in front of everyone: he knows it didn’t have to happen like that. He knows he could’ve helped, he knows he had the chance to, but he wasn’t capable to step up when Kinjo needed him. It makes the scene feel a lot different, and I really like what chapter three adds to the further development of the game.

But when has this turned to be about Kinjo, huh?! This post is about Uehara, so let me get back to him now. Remember the note I left after talking about chapter two? That there could be another interpretation to what he tells everyone when he leaves the group protected by Kinjo, but that we needed to know what happened in chapter three to talk about it? Yeah, let’s talk about it now.

“I always act in the way I believe is right”. We can still interpret this as him refusing to work under Kinjo’s leadership, since it would be a direct betrayal to his core values as a priest. But knowing now that he’s the traitor, it makes me think that perhaps it wasn’t so much about him not wanting to work with Kinjo as a leader, but rather about him wanting to distance himself from his classmates. I think that “doing what the believes is right” could mean causing the least harm he could to his classmates, and distancing himself from them was the only way he had to do that. Knowing he was the traitor would hurt much less if he didn’t get along with anyone in the first place, right?

We get to know the person Uehara is before the death game, even if briefly, from the flashbacks Yuki has in chapter six. We know he tried to think of the well-being of his classmates. We know he was the one that lead Inori and Yamaguchi to the warehouse while the Monokumas attacked the Kisaragi Laboratory in an attempt to protect them, and we know that even if he had a hard time adapting to a class environment when he first entered Hope’s Peak, he formed a bond with Yamaguchi because “he is a more warm-hearted man than any of them”. When one of the Monokumas enters the warehouse, and Yamaguchi holds him so that Inori and Uehara can escape, Uehara tells him that he’ll come back for him. And even in the killing game, we get to know him as a gentle-natured person, and we see just how deeply he cared about the kids he took care of at the cathedral (to the point of becoming completely numb when he finds out they’re dead). Even when he tried to kill, his original plan was to make the least harm possible… but that went horribly wrong, so not like it counts too much (again, I’m not trying to excuse his actions or take any responsibility from him, that murder was fucking awful). He was going to betray everyone sooner or later, sure, but I can imagine him trying to do it in the least harmful way he could. He was forced into a position where he had to do that to cause minimal damage, after all.

Uehara goes from being a quiet person that doesn’t seem like he’ll do much for the plot, to one of the most interesting (and important, in my opinion) characters in the narrative. DRA excels at creating characters with many layers, characters that feel human. There are few characters that can be considered a hundred percent good or bad, because… that’s not how humans work. It plays with the roles you expect the characters to have, it plays with your expectations, and it still allows room for a lot of interpretations of its characters and events (which is something I love in all pieces of media). And isn’t this the beauty of it? The humanity of media? Being able to see and reflect completely different ideas from the same content? In the end, all this doesn’t matter. I could write a whole book of interpretations and theories for the game, and it wouldn’t matter. What matters is that there is room for different interpretations, and that they all together build an independent and unrepeatable experience for the player. So, if there’s something you have to take from all this… enjoy your games. Write about them. Analyze them. Draw fanarts. Make AU’s. Cosplay. I don’t care how good or bad you’re at it, enjoy your favorite pieces of media to their fullest. Allow them to make you think. That’s the only thing that matters, after all. And that’s why I’m writing all this.

Oh, and also, love Kinji Uehara. That’s, like, super super important too. God bless you all, and see you next time.

[lararutherford]

I SAID I WOULD BE, SO I AM:

Seven nights she was, and one night she wasn't. Date: Various evenings post-shooting. Warnings: Emo shit.

ONE -

It'd always irritated her when she heard people say how much they hated hospitals.

So did everyone else?

Tonight's agonising wait was unlike the others, though, she supposed. St. Catherine's empty halls echoed only with the quiet voices of the night shift; not another visitor in sight so far as she could see. And Lara Rutherford shouldn't have been there, either. In more ways than one. But having friends within the hospital, acquaintances who would bend over backwards to appease her every want, meant that she didn't have to follow the rules this time. As if they could've stopped her.

They'd given her the go ahead after some stalling to suggest how much of a favour they were doing her, but she would've waited all night. It mattered little.

Given how long it'd taken her to make her way into the room, it probably irritated the staff immensely that she could barely stand to be there more than five minutes. How many times had she been at the bedside of somebody she cared about? Too many to count, and yet this felt more harrowing than all but one.

It was hard to say he looked peaceful because he didn't. He looked distant and lifeless and the sound of the machines working around him seemed louder than they should have been. Drowned out everything else, really. Was he hurting?

Lara fidgeted with her hands, rolling tangled fingers amongst themselves.

What had she thought to gain from coming here? Did she think it was going to make her feel better?

It didn't. And like a coward, as she stood in pathetic silence and aching misery, she resigned to looking anywhere but him.

The only words she spoke as she reached for the exit:

"I don't break my promises."

TWO -

"Rutherford perks? They don't check for contraband."

If only he knew how difficult it'd been to find a purse big enough to fit a bottle of alcohol that also matched her impeccable pantsuit...

Lara fished out two glasses she'd wrapped in Hermès handkerchiefs to stop them from breaking against each other, and placed them down quietly on his bedside table. All she could offer was a sideways glance, still finding taking in what he was instead of what he should have been too difficult to bear. But she compartmentalised, set it aside, and got to work filling them a few inches with the liquor she'd snuck into the room.

One for him, one for her.

Lightly she tapped hers against the other.

Then she polished it off in a desperate gulp.

"You look terrible, by the way," she eventually offered, hoping that humour would be the only avenue she could stomach taking to finally accept it. "Don't do this again."

THREE -

"I still can't believe I threatened him in his own office. I got back to the car and almost threw up. Literally gagged, right in the seat."

Though if she'd known that Konstantin's future plans would result in Laurent ending up in this condition, she might've considered doing more than threatening.

"You'd have probably enjoyed watching."

The Rutherford rolled the glass in her hand slightly, warming up the contents against her palm as she thought back to a moment that could've very easily spelt her end if she'd played it wrong. A split second later, though, her eyes quickly shot up and she raised a finger to point at him accusatorily:

"The threatening, not the gagging. Don't even go there," she interjected, as if cutting him off before he could make some dirty joke at her expense. Nothing I haven't already seen, he'd snicker, and she'd throw him a look like she despised him on a cellular level. But they both knew she didn't really. Not now.

As her hand hovered in the air stupidly, slowly lowering like she was a deflated fucking balloon, she was met with nothing but silence.

What she wouldn't have given to be the butt of one more joke...

FOUR -

It was hard to get comfortable in the awful hospital chairs, she'd learnt, but that didn't mean she couldn't find a way to enjoy a good book with her slightly less impressive glass of alcohol. She should have been checking the time—God forbid she stay past her welcome, and be greeted by a Commandant come morning—but she'd got lost somewhere near the middle and time had escaped her entirely. The Rutherford took one more sip of her drink, glancing toward her watch to check...

...thank God. It'd only been an hour.

Something drew her gaze from the gold face, though. Lara's eyesight had failed her entirely in one eye, and sometimes the light played tricks, but she was so damn sure... For a moment, she could've sworn she saw his hand move.

Symptom of semi-blindness or not, her stomach had flipped so intensely, she was glad she hadn't taken more than a few sips from the glass beside her.

It was hard to tell how long she'd watched after that. Waiting. Just in case. Do it again.

"If you're trying to get my attention, I'm not reading it to you. You have a startling lack of taste for a Parisian, and I shan't be taking belated book critiques from someone who considers Westminster Insider good literature."

Nothing.

If she'd been smiling at her own attack on him, it'd faded away shortly after, just like the brief glimmer of hope that she hadn't been seeing things.

Things were as they were before. Laurent was still.

Her eyes closed for a second.

She flipped back to page one.

This time, she read the words aloud.

FIVE -

"I didn't tell you about it yet, but my sister got married," she mused softly, the corner of her mouth lifting into a genuine smile. "She looked so happy."

The Rutherfords were a dysfunctional mess, and maybe had been for as long as she could remember. But that day was different. They'd set it all aside and come together to be there for her—it hurt to note, but she was to blame, some family's surprise that Lara was included in said support—and it'd felt like a massive weight lifted. This wonderful, good thing that they were so rarely able to celebrate together. And it'd been a hard day for her, much harder than any of them could've known, but she refused to let her life get in the way this time. It was Yvonne's day. Yvonne's future.

And she was glad she'd been allowed to be a part of it when she didn't deserve to be.

"I thought maybe something in me would feel bitter about it, but..."

Lara shook her head. No, it hadn't.

A chuckle left her lips at that because to be surprised by it should have seemed absurd. But for a relationship that'd been so tumultuous for so long, it meant something. It meant progress. For them, for herself... To find real happiness in knowing her sister felt exactly that was something she had to say out loud, and right now, she had so few important enough to share it with.

The chuckle died, then, even though the smile remained stubbornly behind. There was no humour left as her eyes welled with tears. As her chest tightened with the closest thing to physical agony she could imagine stemming from emotional turmoil. As her face slowly fell into hurt, and her lips pressed together into a thin line as though it might stop the words she was about to say for one more moment:

"And then three hours later, I sent Henry and his daughter back to Porto Velho for good, and I broke my own heart."

Again.

SIX -

It was hard to imagine somebody more averse to showing their feelings than herself, but Laurent St. Pierre hid behind anger like nobody else.

When they'd first seen each other after she'd been attacked at Fight Club, it seemed like anger on her behalf was all he could manage. Wasted, when she wanted absolutely nothing to do with it, the thinly veiled regret, or the man who offered both.

Lara hadn't understood why he'd not given up trying back then, but she learnt eventually. And the moment she finally gave him an inch, he unravelled in an instant; the first time, but certainly not the last, in which he had been honest about his feelings. 'I just wanted to be with you.' But the Rutherfords wouldn't let a Frenchman within a two mile radius after one of his own had tried to hack her face to pieces. It wasn't his fault, but he carried the weight of it as if he was solely responsible for abandoning her.

It'd hurt her to see him that way. It'd hurt her more to know that even if he had moved heaven and earth to find his way to her side, she probably would have turned him away again.

Would he feel that same way if he knew she was here with him now..?

'I wish I could have been there for you.' 'You're here for me now, Laurent.' 'It's not the same...'

Lara didn't often make promises. She got the idea that he didn't either. And yet both of them had made one that morning.

She finished what remained of the second glass.

And as if justifying her presence at his bedside, she spoke into the quiet void:

"I said I'd be here. So I am."

SEVEN -

The exchange with Odile in the hall had taken more out of her than she cared to admit.

'I can't do this. You're happy, and that's what matters to me. It matters.' Lara's mind drifted back to Launceston tonight. A time when everybody had thought her dead, utterly unreachable, and somehow, Amir had still found his way to her.

There was a brief moment that day where she'd thought that was it. It was finally time for her to fix her mistakes. To undo the worst thing she'd ever done. To him. To herself. But when he'd kissed her, he made himself into the same person she was. Amir was doing to Revati what she had long loathed herself for doing to him. And no matter how many sleepless nights she had spent wondering about this moment, about having him with her again, she just couldn't. Wouldn't let a good man do that to himself.

Because she loved him. More than her desperation to be happy. More than the pain her loneliness caused.

Being here tonight, watching the slow movement of Laurent's chest as he clung to life for somebody else, she realised she was hurting people. His happiness, if Leyla ever found out about it.

And in that moment, maybe she finally knew for sure. Because it mattered.

Lara reached out and took the first of the glasses, finishing it in one.

Then the second.

Fighting the war of emotion in her chest, she eventually got to her feet, and it felt like the most laborious thing she'd ever done. She adjusted her blazer. Tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear nonchalantly. Took one moment to look at him, really look, as she hovered near the edge of his bed. And then she did one thing she hadn't until tonight. It'd always seemed like a boundary not to be crossed, but given the spaces her mind wandered that evening, it seemed as though one more wouldn't hurt. Lara brushed her fingers gently against his wrist, and it felt so warm, so alive, it was hard to reconcile it with the man she'd spent so much time beside of late.

Eventually, she found his hand. Squeezed it gently. Longed for it to move in hers.

It didn't.

"This is the last time, okay?"

And so, it was.

EIGHT -

"Have you ever tried cognac?"

Ayaz stared back at her blankly. Of course he hadn't.

Tired eyes glanced down at the glass she cradled in her hands, contents untouched. Just to the right, the phone she had since muted. Half an hour before—maybe longer, it was hard to tell—the screen had sprung to life with the one message she had resigned to never receiving. One she didn't deserve to. He's awake.

Usually, he was good at masking his concern; Ayaz knew she hated nothing more than anything that could be perceived as pity. But as she threw back the two very full glasses, the last of what'd remained in the bottle, she could sense it.

He stayed silent. And she was glad.

"Well, you're not missing anything. It's awful."

[witchygfsgf]

everything i hate about the modern marauders fandom ✨✨

characters are stripped of all defining traits. example: In POA, Remus is overall, a kind person. He has faced huge adversity, and despite this, proves society wrong by being a good person, by helping, by listening, time and again. But in fanon, he is aggressive, rude to friends, believes himself superior to the dumb, weak Sirius, he hurts people physically and verbally, he sides with bigots, he is quick to anger etc. He is not allowed to be gentle, supportive, meek and kind.

by assigning a villain character an LGBTQ+ sexuality, they are protected by any criticism. It's seen as homophobic if you so much as point out canon actions, much less make theories/headcanons about them that aren't positive, or negative but "hot." Everyone's personality is either warped beyond recognition or sanitised to the point they did nothing wrong, or both. Creating a ship for them, especially a character who we've only seen do terrible, unjustifiable things, only romanticises them, watering down their personality to create an aspect of their life that isn't so terrible, all in the hope that this will "make up" for their actions. "Barty didn't torture Alice and Frank, silly. He was too busy getting railed by his hot crazy boyfriend." "What do you mean Regulus is a fascist? Tell that to his husband."

extreme misunderstanding of canon backstories. example: Fanon perpetuates the idea that Regulus betrayed Voldemort in the end, which must mean he held no bigotry to begin with, he hated his parents and his upbringing from birth, and his crimes weren't that bad because eventually he changed. In reality, he had clips of newspaper articles about Voldemort hung on his walls, a literal shrine. He did betray Voldemort, but there is no implication this is because his beliefs changed. The fact it was likely due to the fact Voldemort planned to leave his house elf to die is ignored every time people theorise. What was well-known information is know deliberately cast aside in favour of popular headcanon, even if it doesn't fit the character. Barty wasn't Imperiused when he first joined the Death Eaters! He did that by choice! But fans remembered his daddy issues and now that's all that matters. Your father being an asshole doesn't give you the right to join a supremecist cult.

women are neatly paired off in wlw ships to avoid them affecting plot. example: A Jegulus shipper feels bad that Lily has been sidelined. Instead of investigating why they never allow women to prosper with their canon love interests, they find out about Mary, and decide that she will do, so no one is lonely. In most cases, Mary and Lily's relationship is defined by a) being a softer, drama-free counterpart to Jegulus and b) that's it. But they will rarely further the narrative in fanfiction, let alone provide more than background diversity.

shipping is prioritised over all else. there is no headcanon, no fic, no piece of art, that depicts one character without making it extremely clear that they are soulmates with another, and any attempt to depict characters separately, to show their own traits and individual stories and familial/platonic relationships instead, is pushed to the side. similarly, any discourse is less important when not related to shipping. talk about how jegulus makes no sense and how jilys better and get 100 notes, but talk about the evans sisters and get none.

the ableism. example: Remus' condition is very similar to a disability or chronic illness. He is constantly exhausted, especially nearing full moons, appears prematurely aged from the stress on his body etc. And then there's the societal stigma. For example, he is unable to get a stable job because he will be fired for missing work for rest/a full moon (reminiscent of needing frequent days off for flare ups). It impacts him in every aspect of his life. Many fanon fans have decided to erase all of this in favour of creating the two symptoms that impact him at all. One being horniness, and the other being anger. He doesn't have extreme fatigue and even pain, he just wants to rail Sirius twice daily. He doesn't hate himself because he will never be viewed as more than a beast by society, he yells at his close friends, hurts people he loves, and is forgiven by those weaker than him, because he is first and foremost powerful and intimidating. Instead of allowing the reality of his condition to be portrayed, it must become sexualised in order to fit in with his fanon characterisation.

"there's no information about them in canon, we have to make it up." I guarantee you there is. You can gather a lot from a small piece of information while still having it be accurate, and then, you can expand on that and build on those ideas by creating headcanons. Headcanons should not contradict canon, that's an AU. But if you're talking about canon-compliant universes, and you claim there's no information on Sirius Black, who has a whole book named after him, I have to laugh. For rarer, smaller characters, it's more complicated, but she still exists, and you can still take certain things from her character. Take Mary MacDonald. She was assaulted with Dark Magic by Mulciber, a friend of Snape's who later became a Death Eater, and he was described as "creepy." Despite that being her only mention, you can infer plenty from it, and build your own ideas that could fit with her character given those roots. To say there is no information, you have to have tried to seek it out because I promise (without having to give money to the TERF) you will find more than you thought was out there. If you prefer to ignore it, be my guest, please don't let a stranger on the Internet tell you how to live your life. But that's a choice, not your only option.

the fatphobia. For a fandom that claims to be inclusive and diverse, their attitudes towards plus size people imply otherwise. Peter is canonically fat, and while in the original context of the books this is done for fatphobic reasons, erasing this representation lets plus size fans know that you don't think they should have a place in your world, that you'd rather they were skinny so that they match your standards of "hotness" that you change every character to fit in with. For example, since the 2010s, Dane DeHaan has been the primary fancast for him, despite being slim, and this detail is rarely looked upon as anything other than standard altering of characters' appearances - e.g. it's treated similarly to people who use Ben Barnes (an actor with brown eyes) to portray Sirius (a character with grey eyes), a minor mistake that can be excused based on preference. If Peter is allowed to remain fat, many fans treat him worse than those who make him thin. His only hobbies include eating excessively and baking/cooking. He priorities food over people, is lazy and greedy/selfish in regards to food, he is always seen eating something or thinking about food out loud. Any angst about him pre-betrayal is focused on the idea of giving him an eating disorder, which fans claim "makes so much sense." That reflects how you view real fat people, and it can make us feel uncomfortable to engage in content about an otherwise very interesting character, because this will almost always be coloured by society's negative perception of fat people. He is also held to a higher standard than other Death Eaters, such as Evan Rosier. I would say that this applies to all fan-favourite DEs but for sanctity's sake, I'm only using one example. Rosier is heavily romanticised, his actions are excused or diluted, and he is given a sob story and angst unrelated to his appearance. His canon friends (Snape's gang) are replaced and any attempt to remember his true affiliation is ignored. Peter is villainised from a young age, he is never shown to be more than a traitor, he never gets a backstory let alone one that attempts to explain his personality and choices, and all angst in related to his appearance and weight. His canon friends (The Marauders) do not care about him in fanon, as if they were gifted with the knowledge that he was always a traitor. The only difference between them is that one is viewed as conventionally attractive and the other isn't. Also, any attempt to imagine any of the characters as plus size, even those with no physical description, is shut down or ignored. Fans hate fat evil characters because it's "fatphobic" but hate fat, good characters more because it's ruining their idealised, perfect version of the series, in which everyone is thin and hot.

heteronormative ships. example: In canon, both Remus and Sirius are fairly masculine, for example in terms of the way they dress. However, Sirius has shoulder length hair, while Remus' is short. This is his only "feminine" trait, and is definitely part of why fanon later decides to feminise him. In fact, as Remus is gentler, more mild mannered and kind, you could argue that of the two of them, he is more stereotypically feminine. Fanon has latched onto the idea that Sirius is feminine, whether that be transfem or an identity under the non-binary umbrella, and therefore their personalities have been altered to fit this. Remus is no longer as described in the books, but aggressive, tough, rude, hot-headed and dominant. He has also changed physically. Whereas canonically his height was never mentioned, and he is described as having prematurely aged, and as thin and weak looking due to exhaustion and poverty, he is now muscular, tall and conventionally attractive. Sirius is no longer careless, mean, immature and selfish, he is weak, submissive, dramatic, stupid and obsessed with Remus, who seems in most cases to not care about him, or at least find his personality annoying and make it very clear. He is also short, his hair is even longer, he dresses in short skirts and low cut or cropped shirts with heels and jewellery, he wears makeup, and he is referred to with feminine terms. These are all stereotypes of women. Men can be feminine, and non binary/trans identities are of course valid, but by stripping him of all masculinity and increasing the stereotypical masculinity of his partner, fans effectively suggest that there should be "a man and a woman" in the relationship. Further, sexist ideas of what a man and woman should be like when dating are ingrained into the fandom version of the ship, for example Remus is almost always the aggressive dominant top, and Sirius is almost always the weak submissive bottom. This is true, though not to the same extent as Wolfstar, in every MLM ship in the fandom. I will say that it seems to be different for the WLW ships, but I'll elaborate on that later (see "the palatable kind of lesbian.")

shipping the oppressor with the opressed. example: At the point most fan works are set, Regulus is a Death Eater or close to becoming one. He shares their beliefs of Muggleborns and Muggles, and worships Voldemort. Lily is a Muggleborn girl. She has been called a slur for her background, and I'd say she likely faced similar if not worse oppression to Hermione. Shipping them together, despite the fact that Jegulily/Regulily isn't as popular as other ships, betrays their entire personalities. Would Regulus date someone he views as inherently inferior? No he wouldn't, but his character has been so butchered it becomes impossible for people to remember what would be realistic for him.

the palatable kind of lesbian. Marlene/Dorcas. Masc*/Femme. Typically 2 Cis girls. Skinny. Conventionally attractive. Relationship rarely interferes with the main plot. Lily/Mary. Femme/Femme. Typically 2 Cis girls. Skinny. Conventionally attractive. Relationship rarely interferes with the main plot. Pandora/Lily. Femme/Femme. Typically 2 Cis girls. Skinny. Conventionally attractive. Relationship rarely interferes with the main plot. Emmeline/Mary. Femme/Femme. Typically 2 Cis girls. Skinny. Conventionally attractive. Relationship rarely interferes with the main plot. Alice/Narcissa. Femme/Femme. Typically 2 Cis girls. Skinny. Conventionally attractive. Relationship rarely interferes with the main plot. Do you notice the theme?

*Marlene is often presented as "masc" but in a way that conveys that the fandom views her as the butchest they'll allow a character to be. She has long hair, wears skirts and dresses, wears elaborate makeup and excessive jewellery, and yet many people seem to claim her as representation that they don't view femme lesbians as the only "good" ones. These are all things that butch lesbians can do, but when a fandom that claims to be diverse doesn't allow their lesbian characters to stray outside of the acceptable standards for womanhood, when the most masculine female character there wears leather skirts, lipstick and has long hair...Their efforts to be inclusive aren't succeeding.

women are avoided at all costs to prevent them effecting gay ships. Now forgive me that this isn't 100% Marauders Era, but i like to rant so you're getting context, if anyone's reading this that is. Tonks. She is constantly treated as if she shouldn't exist by predominantly Wolfstar shippers who want to justify pushing her aside. "Well (insert TERF) made her up to stop people shipping Remus and Sirius." Not true. Wolfstar didn't become popular until after the release of the POA film, in around 2009, and even then it was around 2015 when the Marauders Era itself became less underground and 2020 when Wolfstar started getting all-colnsumingly popular. Before that, Snupin was more popular by a long shot. If she created a whole character to stop gay ships, it would have been that one. That being said, it's not. Tonks existed as her own person in OOTP onwards. When the TERF decided not to kill off Arthur in the Department of Mysteries she wanted to kill off Remus instead, and so he was not only a semi father figure to Harry, but a biological father to Teddy. It's likely that because this child and death were "needed" Tonks was put with Remus to fulfil those themes of loss. And yet, despite not existing to prevent them, many Wolfstar shippers treat her character as if she's in the way, as if she doesn't have a place in the story etc. She is treated like a child who can't make her own decisions, even at the big age of 24, and portrayed as a victim of Remus. In reality, she holds all the power in the relationship that an older man would. She has reputation, money and she's an Auror (Wizard cop). Remus however, has had any reputation he did have stripped in Book 3, he is poor and unable to get a job, and he's a werewolf, a minority that is heavily discriminated against. And yet the age gap is suggested to be the only thing that matters, and the primary reason their relationship shouldn't exist, and as a result, why Tonks shouldn't be acknowledged. According to fans, her relationship and very existence is problematic, and she destroyed Wolfstar. Two crimes that cannot be forgiven. She has to go. In fact, her own child isn't her's now. In fanon, Teddy is more of Sirius' son than he is her's. She is never even grieved.

basically, it's a beautiful fandom, and i love being in it, creating for it, discussing with people. sometimes people just need some critical thinking, but they refuse to do so because thinking deeper about canon characterisation apparently makes them a jkr supporter. it doesn't. don't give money to the bitch but enjoying characters as they are is not the same thing. not basing all headcanons off of stereotypes and instead caring about how they realistically would act based on their previous actions is not the same thing as hating on trans people. you can make up as many trans headcanons as you want while still appreciating the fact that lycanthropy shouldn't be sexualised, or more importantly, that plus size people shouldn't be mistreated.

anyways, do what you want im not your mum.

[l-in-the-light]

Hey 😊 I read your answer about Law wanting to help people because of his trauma. I know about his fear of touch but wouldn't it help him to overcome this when he realizes that his touch can bring other people immense pleasure (when he's giving oral or bringing his partner to orgasm while sex)? 🤔 Besides sex is very good for the health 😎.

Okay, I admit I didn't really know what to do with your ask at first. Are you serious when you're suggesting he can just overcome his PTSD because he wants to make someone happy or because sex should help him feel better and recover faster? Because if you do, we need to talk. Like, seriously talk about this.

First of all, yeah, sex can be good for you. Physical affection in many ways is neccessary for good well-being (that's why touch starvation and stuff like that became a popular discussed topic after pandemic's outbreak). But you know what else is healthy besides sex and physical affection? Good food. Taking a walk. Enjoying the sea breeze. And do you know what those things have all in common? They can't heal or cure anyone out of literally anything. The only thing they can do is to boost your mood and give you physical exercise, which is good for the body, but it's not a therapy and it's not a medicine. In other words, it will not cure you from PTSD, depression, anxiety or anything else besides a foul mood, perhaps. PTSD is not a matter of having a foul mood. Even if your mood is great, you will still have PTSD and you can still experience triggers no matter how happy you might have felt a moment ago. And also sometimes not every food you eat is gonna be good for you. Bread is tasty, right? But it's bad for celiacs. Sex is good, right? Unless it triggers you or you're sex-repulsed. Not everything is good for everyone, period. And you can live without bread and you can live without sex.

Secondly, Law has two triggers we know of: feeling helpless (for example: when he's pinned down or when people are dying and he can't do anything about it) and touch. He overcomes first one by saving lives, not by "helping people" in general. If you're referencing some post I wrote, I'm pretty certain by him swearing to help people I meant "saving their lives", not doing sexual favours for them ;) also saving lives has nothing to do with Law's fear of touch.

Third of all, please don't say stuff like this about PTSD. It's spreading misinformation. You can't recover from it just by wishing for it or pushing forcefully through. If you put Law in the scenario you just described, he would be terrified and then try to force the closeness (because if he truly wants someone to be happy he needs to ignore his own discomfort, right?) and in the end he will just escape, feeling pathetic and blaming himself. He would end up thinking that his love for people isn't strong enough to overcome his own trauma (and the sad part is: it will never be, that's why it's a trauma after all). In other words, putting a person with PTSD in this scenario you described, would do them more harm than good.

And yeah, Law is just a fictional character, you can imagine him in any scenario you want and write fics in which he never develops PTSD and is touchy-feely, and that's fine. But PTSD happens to be a very real condition, so please never say things like that to real people. It's giving a very harmful message - they can end up believing they are broken, because they can't spontanously or by sheer will overcome their own triggers to make someone else happy. Always be respectful towards people suffering from past traumas. No matter how well you mean it, don't tell them to just "get over it", saying it will be helpful for them if they just change their way of thinking about it and do it for someone else's sake. The best result you will achieve is them selfblaming themselves when they inevitably fail.

What you can do for them instead, to show your support, is to assure them they're fine no matter what, that they're good people even if there are things they can't handle, that every step in their healing process is important even if "the final goal" (never getting triggered again) will never get achieved. And always, always remember about their triggers and by all means avoid forcing a person with PTSD to face them head on. What you can do for someone who suffers from a trigger, is to make sure not to make it worse. Is the trigger a loud noise? Take them immediately to a quiet place instead. Is the trigger a touch? Definitely don't try to hug them to make it better, give them some space instead. After they manage to calm down, you can give them something they like that they find soothing and comforting (listen to a favourite song, offer a drink they like etc.) and ask if both of you should just go back home or do something else. This is something you can do for someone suffering from a PTSD. But it's only one possible, hypothetical example, there are other ways to show support and not leave the suffering person on their own.

There is a study proving that adults who were traumatized as children may be more likely to keep a greater physical distance between themselves and strangers, and may also find touch stimuli less comforting than people without a history of trauma. Apparently trauma alters the brain so it's possible the body also gives a traumatized person less gratification from physical affection. If you want to read more about how trauma alters the brain, I reccommend checking out this article: Traumatized Adults Might Find Touch Less Appealing. I didn't know about that before, but it makes sense, because trauma is just a natural response on it's most extreme. That's why I think Law's touch starvation is probably not such a big deal that people want it to be, in comparison to his PTSD. His brain would adapt, and he has Bepo for comfort, which is a safe, not triggering closeness and touch for him. Traumatized people might have bigger issues on their plate than your typical post-pandemic touch starvation, just saying.

Now let's talk more about triggers, because I feel like this needs to be elaborated on. A trigger is involuntary reaction (can be body reaction, can be emotional) you definitely can't control, that is caused by some outside source of stimuli. Those reactions alert us to perceived threats in our environment. Triggers can be anything that reminds someone of the traumatic event, it can be more obvious like revisiting the location where the trauma occurred, being alone, seeing the same breed of dog that bit you, or hearing loud voices, small touch, a grab, even a certain smell. For example, if the trauma is related to being stuck in a locked place, it doesn't matter what place it is or that it's different from the very first place you got accidentally locked in. Any place in which you're locked up will trigger you, like bathroom stalls in which the latch doesn't budge, broken elevators stuck between floors etc. Triggers are also often associated with (but not limited to) the time of day, season, holiday, or anniversary of the event.

When touch has been associated with fear, pain, or violation in the past, it can naturally become a trigger. Childhood trauma, especially sexual, physical or emotional abuse, can imprint deep-seated associations between touch and danger. The fear of being touched is so strong that it is often paralyzing. It can cause physical symptoms like hives, hyperventilation or even fainting. The fear of being touched becomes a phobia when symptoms develop nearly every time you are touched. It becomes a disorder when it lasts six months or longer.

To reduce the emotions caused by a trigger people can become avoidant (of anything even remotely reminding them of the trauma, for example: any touch in general), self-medication (like alcohol abuse, to numb yourself and not feel anything anymore), compulsive eating, self-injury. Sometimes people can even become aggressive or repeat the events of the trauma (for example, hypersexuality as the result of sexual assault, or becoming the violent oppressor themselves; they just repeat the traumatic event over and over again, it's not a healthy way of dealing with trauma).

Most important in recovery is learning to manage triggers, memories, and emotions without avoidance (avoidance is the initial response in PTSD). You can think of it as becoming desensitized to traumatic memories. There isn't really a “cure” for triggers. All we can do is identify when we're upset, try to understand why, and manage our emotional reactions. With practice and proper treatment, the reaction to your emotional triggers could dimnish and become manageable, but the triggers themselves might never go away. Thankfully, even the most intense trauma triggers can be managed.

At first a traumatic response can be hyperventilation to the point you almost suffocate, shivering that don't want to stop for hours and very high level emotional distress that makes you detached from the present and trapped in the past in your head. After therapy and learning how to manage your responses, you can instead apply breathing techniques to reduce hyperventilation, know what to do so that shivering doesn't go for hours but instead fades in the span of half an hour, and you ground yourself in the present (there are many methods for it, for example doing a soothing motion). So, after "getting healed" it doesn't mean the triggers magically don't happen anymore, you just manage them more effectively. And perhaps some of them can be reduced so much that instead of triggering one of the physical symptoms it only makes you very distressed. Who knows, it's a very individual thing, after all.

How to know if someone is suffering from PTSD? The DSM-5 (the official criteria for PTSD classification) identifies four symptom clusters for PTSD: presence of intrusion symptoms (like frequent, vivid flashbacks: sudden intrusive thoughts about the past events), persistent avoidance of stimuli (like avoiding closeness and touch), negative alterations in cognitions and mood (low self-esteem, self-blame etc.), and marked alterations in arousal and reactivity (like lashing out). Which is exactly what I wrote about in detail when answering to this ask.

Let's take a look at Law's trauma symptoms again: we see Law having tremors and quickened breath (sometimes to the point of wheezing), and freezing up when he's triggered (at least in the manga). Whenever someone is trying to touch him or comes really close, his response is to move away. He's also emotionally distant and avoidant. What are his triggers? We saw Doflamingo grabbing his wrist forcefully which caused a freezing reaction (Law couldn't even move to free himself). We saw him also freeze up when Mingo set up his birdcage. When Law was trapped with Luffy and Mingo's clone in the well, he was wheezing and shivering. There are few situations in which Luffy touches Law or Law touches Luffy, but even if those situations don't seem to overwhelm him, he still struggles in each and every single one of them. Which means they're kinda managable for Law, as long as he puts some time and effort into it (that's a sign that he is working through his trauma and knows quite a lot about managing his triggers already).

But how would he react if Luffy forcefully grabbed Law's wrist, for example, which is his confirmed trigger? Probably not too well. I can't imagine sex being comfortable in such conditions. Can you? Sex would feel very unnatural if Law had to brace himself to that extent every time he tries to touch someone and there's no guarantee that none of the touch he receives doesn't trigger him. And no, cuddling him won't help him get over it. If touch is triggering to you, more touch is not gonna solve the problem. Also hugging or other forms of physical affection aren't a magical solution to every emotional problem in the world.

There's also something called resilient responses to trauma, which are basically healthy ways of coping that some people naturally adapt. And I think Law slightly shows signs of it too. It can be things like:

increased time and bonding with family and friends (Law's commitment to his Hearts Pirates and also bonding with Penguin, Shachi and Bepo right after losing Cora-san; he spends time with them almost exclusively)

strong or increased sense of purpose and meaning (Law is always very goal-oriented)

commitment to a personal mission, revised priorities (Law trying to save people's lives no matter what)

charity work and volunteering to help other people (Law taking care of the Strawhats lol)

If anyone wants to know even more about PTSD, I reccommend this link, it really gives a good and detailed guide to all the basics and even includes notes about treatment.

Now I feel inclined to say this to everyone: sex is fine and can be good, but not having sex is also fine! Sex isn't the best thing in the world and no one is missing out if they're not having any, there are so many other nice things. And just because someone is attractive or handsome doesn't mean they absolutely have to have sex, like to prove that they're not wasting their body (whatever that would even mean) and not sharing with the world. It's your body and your choice, no one has any obligation to give sex to others, never ever, for any possible reason you can name. You don't have to have sex just to prove something to others, no matter what it would be (to be cool, to be accepted, to prove others you're a good person and a good lover or not a loser etc.). You're a worthy human being even if you don't have sex, no matter what's the reason for not having it. You're a good person even if you don't want to give someone else a sexual service, give them a blowjob or bring them to orgasm, or even touch them at all. You can show your love in different ways than by having sex. Not having sex with someone also doesn't mean you don't love them. Sex is just one part of life and it's optional. People can have good lives, have fun and be healthy without it. You can even have PTSD but choose not to have sex just because you don't like it.

Now, do I think Law will never have sex? I don't know, that depends on his healing process. For now, I'm not seeing it and he's also perfectly fine even if he will never have sex in his entire life. If one day he manages his triggers so well that he can even have sex, great for him! I still think he will be taking a risk at being triggered every single time he makes his decision to pursue partnered sexual adventures. Simply because touch can't be completely avoided when having sex. It can be worked around in quite a number of ways, but sex basically is about touching various body parts together, prove me wrong if that's not the case* ;) also we don't have to fear or try to erase the PTSD from the characters who can't deal well with touch as the result. That's kinda not exactly considerate or nice to them, won't you agree?

*disclaimer: yeah, I am aware there are other sexual actitivities that don't involve touch. Two people can just voyeuristically look at each other when they masturbate, for example :P why is this word so ugly btw. The stigma around sex-related words needs to finally die and we need more judgement-free words for sexual activities.

I hope this post helped you understand PTSD and triggers a bit better, anon!

[aquaquadrant]

Deciding to live write (react) (?) this as I'm reading this new chapter (two parts WOW, double the angst) (so part one out of two, hope that's cool). If something happens my therapist WILL be hearing about you.

The title already I'm sobbing /pos

I HATE THE WATCHERS SO MUCH OMMMGGGGG, leave them aLONE

It's very Jimmy to not like crying, I love to see it. I love when fanfic writers don't like him crying, ty.

Tango :( The RANCH, it was THEIRS, my HEART These Watchers ugghhHHHH Jimmy immediately defending Tango, please nothing else happen to them, PLEASE

Every time the watchers speak, my want to punch them grows The explanation paragraph, ugh something about it, how Jimmy doesn't immediately try to blame Tango, or just understands it well. Just bjhebwg

Bdubs being so worried for Tango, please, JUST LET THEM BE HAPPY

JIMMY DEFENDING TANGO NUMBER TWO, hate me them

Watchers ugghhe

HERMITCRAFTING BEING HIS HOME UGH IM JUST POINTING OUT EVERY LITTLE DETAIL BECAUSE THEY'RE ALL SO

DELIGHTFUL, I LOVE THE WAY YOU WRITE SO MUCH

Okay, therapy time <3 (yes I did actually read this before my therapy appointment, this was /srs and not /j)

Therapy break over, BACK TO ANGST

Awww, Jimmy not believing Tango is evil. Love to see it.

UH OH, NOT THE TIMMY ALLUSION

Nvm not alright, Watchers need to Watch their mouths

"Pity is a suitor that won’t take a hint, no matter how many times Jimmy turns it away." Is SO good???? Excuse me??? Pity x Jimmy real ship of the htp au?? /j

Maybe I hate the watchers more than I hate Atlas, hm.

I like that they all still keep an air of lighthearted-ness about, even with Tango in such critical condition, they still are friends :)

Jimmy being okay with a scar to the face if it means Tango doesn't have to unnecessarily respawn :( /pos

This description of Tango has me thinking about that kinda old drawing that lunarcrown did of Tango back when he was chained up. Like, it's literally the first post that shows up when clicking on the chronological timeline, yeah that one, it reminds me of that one.

UGGGHHHH THE HAND ON THE CHIN GETTING A RESPONSE, NO, BAD AQUA, BAD. SOMETHINGS ARE BETTER LEFT OFF IN THE ASKS RESPONSES

WATCHERS ARE NOT HELPING (x2)

Still love Jimmy calling for SOS, like yes, smart move. I wish we could've seen what it was like for the other DL to see chat and immediately go "oh shit ???" and then see the SOS and go "OH SHIT ???"

I love Impulse <3

Ooooo, getting some more cases of this fantasy (racism? Bigotry? Bad stuff) worldbuilding

"I don’t believe that just being from there would automatically make someone evil." Nature vs nurture <3 Maybe all Bravo needed was two minutes with Impulse god DAMN

Sleepy time <3

Okay, don't like the Watchers, but the "Round two!" was funny, I'll give em that

"(You cannot sleep, there are monsters nearby.)" I- I- STOP I CAN'T LAUGH BUT OMFG

Rancher :((((((

HIS RANCHER

Let me at these Watchers, LET ME AT EM

Ugh, disassociation. As someone who's dealt with this during panic attacks, it totally tracks and breaks my heart :(

These Watchers gotTA BACK OFF, LEAVE TANGO ALONE GOD DAMN

No way Tango is tryna pull the "I'm fine" card rn, AFTER ALL THAT LMAO

Jimmy is very pretty TO ME

The collar dampening Tango's fire, metaphorically and literally, is just ugh. What's more is Jimmy likes Tango's fire, he likes the warmth Tango produces physically, and he likes the sparks of creativity and burning passion of Tango's metaphorically. And they took it away! Both ways to Sunday!!!

Na because crying on someone is such an intimate gesture. To let your heart pour out of you, no one does that to just anyone. What makes this even more important is how Jimmy cried on Tango's shoulder last chapter, and now Tango's crying on Jimmy's shoulder this chapter. They are each other's soulmate, they are their each other's ranchers. They are so important to one another and soo ughguew

Not gonna cuss this Watcher out, I'll let this sweet dreams comment slide for now.

Oooo, a peak into how they reacted to everyone joining. AND we get a look at Atlas' full username <3 Love it.

Wait Tyrannicide and Phantonym joined too?? Huh, thought as scientists they would've stayed behind. Cool to know!

I can see now why you needed all those usernames lol.

JOEL THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO LAUGH DAMNIT

Hmmm, love Scar immediately jumping into action. Oop and ofc the two scientists head out first lmao

ATLAS, WHEN I CATCH YOU ATLAS, NOT BIGB NOOOO

ATLAS, WHEN I CATCH YOU ATLAS, NOT PEARL NOOOOO

Actually really funny that ATLAS got the most kills from the Hels cast. Like, damn, pop off???? Man did more work than the ppl hired to actually do the dirty work lmao.

Wonder how difficult it was to keep up with all the names, who died then got back in, who killed who, etc.

Oop, Jimmy also noting Atlas is smarter than the average bear.

This whole paragraph talking about Bravo, yes Jimmy, drag that man. Loving how he immediately is like "dude is just like a hels player" and scoffing at the nerve of Bravo to claim to be his actual soulmate. Yes.

Head in hands, Watchers about to catch these hands.

Tango immediately wanting to get this all over with hurts. Damn, wonder if he just wants to get it over with cause he thinks they all want him gone.

"I mean, everyone knows I’m a vicious monster but I don’t have to look it, right?" UGH, Aqua you're lucky I already did my therapy time BEFORE this part, UGGGHHHHHH. I need to go back rq just to tell her this god DAMN

Welp, on to act two! Thank you so much for the wonderful reading material :)

TLDR: I hate the Watchers with a burning passion.

-🍌

what’s this?? a DETAILED LIVE BLOG of my writing for ME to read??? don’t mind if i do…

ok first off, thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to write down ur thoughts and share them with me. it’s truly one of the greatest joys of being an author, and the closest i can get to experiencing my writing as if i wasn’t the one who wrote it. NOW let’s get into it…

the overarching watcher hate is so justified and hilarious, they really just exist to be the most obnoxious and toxic livestream chat ever. at least, the ones who hang around jimmy are LMAO

AHA i’m glad u liked the part abt jimmy not liking to cry, i’ve been told he’s got a bit of a prideful streak in other series that didn’t come thru as much in his double life run, so that was a little nod to it.

the ranch could not escape its destiny of being tragically burned down 🫡

(omg the therapy appointment interlude. i remember when i’ve had to pause while reading a fic to address real life business and now someone’s doing that for MY writing…. :’))) i hope the appt went well!)

this chapter was a lovely opportunity to really show jimmy stepping up for tango, with both verbal and physical reassurance. he may not know everything abt the hels situation but he knows he loves tango <3

AND YEAH YEAH THAT FIRST ART MEL DID. definitely throwing back to that w tango’s disassociated state and the collar. nice catch ;0

the chin-hand response was another throw back to old mel art, isn’t that fuuuun? ;000

IMPULSE WAS THE MVP OF THIS CHAPTER 💪😤👏

ok the watchers do get their funny moments in here and there HAH

phantonym and tyrannicide did come along! they might be scientists, but they’re as nasty as any hels player (dr l8r_h8r did, in fact, stay home to monitor the portal. he’s kinda over the whole ‘violence’ nonsense.) tango actually targeted them first bc of their lab coats.

and YUP i got a lotta good username ideas from those suggestions. and it WAS very difficult to keep track of them all thru the chat backlog. i don’t know how long i spent going thru each player’s sequence of events, one by one, JUST to make sure i hadn’t forgotten to have someone die for the last time, or show up again without a new join message.

and unfortunately for jimmy he made the classic error of “typo in the group chat.” joel did what he had to 🫡 (buuuut once he saw how serious the situation was, he decided not to push it anymore)

atlas is a clever bastard and i love that yall love to hate him 🙏 he saw a virtual ocean of wolves storming down the hill and was like “ok clearly i’m not dealing with that, so let’s see where my efforts can be better spent.” the hired grunts don’t possess that kind of critical thought 🎻

i’m SO glad you enjoyed it!! thank you again for this lovely feedback <3

[festivalofthe12]

just ahhhhhhh it's so INTERESTING when it comes to like Yuki and masking and external perceptions because like

He grows up thinking that his one value in life is being the Rat. It's what makes him useful to his parents, and what makes him Akito's golden child. That's all. Everything he has is conditional on that one specific thing.

And he internalises all of that. He has to act in ways befitting of the Rat, or his parents will reject him - just like he sees with Ayame. He does what Akito wants or Akito will get mad, and pleasing Akito is the best thing ever, right? Being close enough to feel Akito's love first-hand? To be special?

Of course he grows up to be cripplingly self-conscious. To be borderline obsessed with how other people expect him to act and how he can live up to those expectations. To bury any real feelings so deep down he doesn't even know how to admit them to himself, let alone express them outwardly. He has outlets - Kyou is a societally (and Sohma-ly!) acceptable subject of his anger. But he is his performance: underneath that, what is there?

And yet... what he gets from all this isn't even good. His parents suck and never really cared about him anyway. Akito, too, was far more harmful than helpful to him. And he doesn't like being who he acts like. He doesn't want the fangirls to coo over 'prince Yuki'.

He's trapped in this prison that feels like it's of his own making, because he's one acting like this, following this role, even long after it's stopped serving him. And he's in some ways aware of that. But he doesn't know how to stop.

Over and over, he internalises. He suffers in silence and tells himself he's not. He's stressed out all the time with the effort of keeping up the act and that leaves him irritable in the few situations he doesn't need to. He desperately wants to please people, but doesn't trust anybody.

He doesn't expect anyone to truly care about him, aside from what he Is or what expectations he's able to fulfil, because for years he begged for help and received none of it. He's long since stopped believing that things can really change for the better, even after he escapes to live with Shigure. Even at high school, he's still falling into the same patterns. The best he can hope for is that people are impressed with him and think he's really Special. The idea of people not thinking that way about him triggers that childhood anxiety of abandonment and worthlessness. But he also hates it.

He's so very, very lonely. He just wants to be like somebody else. To connect. But until Tohru, he never really properly got that. (Yes, Haru tried really hard, but he was still too tied up with the Juunishi and the Rat and the Cow to truly break through it all.) He literally never got to make friends and have healthy relationships modelled for him. The world, as far as he has experienced it, is transactional: he is Special, and thus he is kept.

Of course he's so distant and inscrutable and cold. Of course he acts 'like he's better than everyone else'. Of course he struggles to accept that Ayame really does sincerely care about him. (He sure didn't act like it for fifteen-odd years!!!!) He's been masking for so long he doesn't know where the pretending ends and where 'real Yuki' (whoever that even is) begins.

[likes-words-and-shrimp]

Colette loses her life at the Tower of Salvation.

I am just always thinking about Colette's psyche and how much she internalized her worth as only a commodity to save the world since she was a child, and how almost literally everyone enabled this thinking to such a damaging point, that she goes through with her sacrifice. Even Lloyd does this to some degree, that the Chosen will save the world, until he realizes what that actually means. (This got kinda long so the rest is under a cut).

Colette, at one point refers to herself as a creature, and that she wasn't even considered human. She's the offspring of an angel, and her role is to go save the world when she reaches a suitable age, to never be seen again. Almost everyone believed this, including herself.

She's been told time and time again that the world would be better once she's gone, and she believes that too. Because no one in her family, in her church, or in her village tells her otherwise. People cared about her, but for many, their belief in that she needed to fulfill the role she was born for superseded anything else.

Raine is her teacher and protects her, but she's essentially walking her to her death, and feels guilt as she does so. Genis accepts this too, and even tries to stop Lloyd from going to Colette, saying what else could they do? Lloyd is the only one to counter this, once he starts to understand just what being an angel does to her. And he tries so hard to, but he doesn't save her.

Maybe to some people it seems like she made the choice to go to the tower? But it's motivated by years of conditioning, of people telling her she's not human, that she has no other role than this. It’s not really a choice if you feel there isn’t any other choice at all.

Lloyd begging her to not go is him trying to break through over a decade of that conditioning, of that internalization that she’s not meant to keep living. He tries, and he fails. He may have rescued her body afterwards? But he failed in actually saving Colette herself.

Colette does want to save the world, but it's at the cost of losing herself. Selfish to think that, selfish to want there to be another way. Even when Lloyd is the only voice to tell her it's okay to want to live, it doesn't get through to her. The damage done to her is too much.

And even after she comes back, that decade of conditioning, of not seeing herself as human still shadows her. Her body gets covered in crystal, and she think it's a punishment, that it's a symbol of the weakness in her. She can't even say out loud yet that she wants to stay living.

Lloyd is the only voice, at least at the beginning, to tell her that it is okay for her to feel otherwise. It takes so long to break through her, she goes through so much struggle over it until the reveal of her shame and failure makes her collapse. She finally breaks down.

And Lloyd still going to her and saying that the crystal on her skin isn't ugly is what sends her into such disbelief. The only person to keep seeing her, to keep wanting her around. But that's the moment when it changes to how much she can say she wants to live.

Like when she's kidnapped by Zelos and calls out to Lloyd? She's finally letting herself do so, letting herself be selfish and call out to the one person who has been supporting her time and again. She no longer feels she has no choice but to die.

Her trauma is something that can be easily missed, because of her constant need to keep up a positive attitude, brushing off any hurt she sustains. But the people of Sylvarant called her a failure and blamed her for Palmacosta’s destruction, (even shown in Dawn of the New World). I really believe Colette is one of the most deeply traumatized characters in Symphonia, who loses her life at the tower, and Lloyd never gets to save her from that moment.

But the ending with her and Lloyd at the Tree, at the prospect of new life, and that she witnesses the birth of a name, really shows hope not only for the world, but for her as well. She’s seeing the growth of life before her, and she is able to do so without needing to die. Like the tree, she needed love and admiration from another to thrive.

[auromelt]

It's always Ryo breaking down Kohei’s walls and reestablishing their relationship - but what about the walls Ryo’s put up over the years????? It'd be impossible for Ryo to just let go of the emotionless mask he's had to protect himself and actually be vulnerable with anyone including Kohei :/

*acting normal* yes i’ve thought about this a normal amount of times.

i hate how the movie resolved szam’s conflict btw. like it legit provides almost no real acknowledgement of how damaged and hurt ryo has become over the years. i don’t like how kohei and ryo’s shit ass dad were instantly redeemed and thought it was lazy writing so i usually pretend it didn’t happen. i mean how old even was he when he essentially isolated himself from everyone around him and put on his emotionless façade? how old was he when his father (fuck that hoe btw) sold his services to his best friend (fuck him too but we love you kohei) who wouldn’t even look at him anymore? ryo was so alone for so long, he couldn’t rely on his only friend or his own parents because everyone in his life was unreliable and treated him so so poorly and he was just a teenager having the closest thing he had to friends talking behind his back and being diminished for his poverty. his walls are high and rightfully so.

it’s so, so hard for him to let anyone in and really be himself. the soda incident and the knife incident are the only real times he’s actually let this mask slip and it’s only because he was scared and heartbroken and confused. the only emotions he allowed himself to display in the movie pre shittily written reconciliation are negative. other than that, has ryo ever allowed himself to really just open up? he must be so sick and tired of hiding but when it’s the only thing he’s ever known how to do, when his front of stoicism is the only way he’s ever been received in years, how can he break it down without getting hurt and scarred all over again? he was just a child when everything went wrong and now, as a new adult, everything is still wrong even if he’s closer than ever to fixing it.

after the fight i see more people approaching ryo trying to acquaint themselves with him because his stunt in the gym impressed a lot of people and they Know he’s not a bad person but ryo has been conditioned for so long to shut people out and keep everything bottled inside that those acquaintances go nowhere and he still feels so alone. he believes nobody would be interested in him or keep him around if he doesn’t possess the skill set that makes him valuable and because of that he internally fights against people who try to get too close to his heart. his heart is, after all, the only thing he protects more than kohei.

and of course kohei with his people skills and his abilities to read others would notice and it would initially frustrate and annoy him because why? why are you shutting me out too? don’t you want to be my lover friends with me? completely missing the fact that he’s the biggest reason ryo is this way and that ryo is terrified he’ll be alone again and that nothing in his life will ever get better because good doesn’t happen to people like him. it would probably take someone else cough fujitsuka cough to smack that understanding completely into kohei’s head because as strong as his people skills are, ryo is different and has always been. ryo is important and special and kohei loves him even after doing everything to convince himself he doesn’t. kohei wants ryo to look at him eye to eye but ryo is so used to looking at him from below and honestly hasn’t gotten over kohei calling him a pawn lol.

tl;dr ryo is literally broken like his heart is behind so many walls and layers and even the person he loves most, the only person he loves, can’t get through them because ryo knows vulnerability to be nothing but a hindrance, especially when the only way people have ever cared about him was when he was useful and unfeeling

[apocalypticavolition]

Let's (re)Read The Great Hunt! Chapter 14: Wolfbrother

If Robert Jordan can reuse chapter titles, I can reuse post images even if they make absolutely no sense in this current context! Anyway. Yadda yadda yadda, spoilers for the entirety of the series, blah blah blah, do not continue if you don't want that, something something something, by clicking Keep Reading you agree to agree with everything I say, hmm hmm hmm, all very standard and completely enforceable not that anyone could possibly object to those terms, let's get started!

So since I'm not in the groove, last time I forgot to do the chapter icon. This time I won't do that: the icon is wolf. This is probably not a surprise considering the chapter title. It certainly won't surprise anyone to learn that this is a Perrin chapter about Perrin doing Wolfbrother things. Last chapter involves even less surprises! It had an all-new icon, the Portal Stone. I refuse to believe any of you need me to elaborate on what it stands for or why it was used last time. Thank you!

“Gone?” Ingtar demanded of the air. “And my guards saw nothing. Nothing! They cannot just be gone!”

Rand's channeler madness is infectious, what with Ingtar trying to have a conversation with the sky. Then again, I'd wonder if I was going mad under these conditions myself: three dudes all gone, two of them incredibly conspicuous, horses missing with them, not a single track.

Mat shrugged. “I don’t know. Rand was. . . .” Perrin wanted to throw something at him, hit him, anything to stop him, but Ingtar and Uno were watching.

Perrin doesn't often get to be a bro to Rand (and frankly even fewer chances to be one to Mat), so it's always very sweet to see that he actually is very much best friends with the guy, even if Rand's acting stupid.

“Why would Hurin leave like that, in the middle of the night, without a word? He knows what we’re about. How am I to track this Shadow-spawned filth without him? I would give a thousand gold crowns for a pack of trail hounds. If I did not know better, I would say the Darkfriends managed this so they can slip east or west without me knowing. Peace, I don’t know if I do know better.”

Ingtar is pretty sure he knows the capabilities of the Darkfriends they're chasing since he let them in, but after this it's not unreasonable to doubt. And frankly, with Fain being Fain, he does not know better at all.

Serves me right for what I told Rand. I wish I could run.

Another reason nobody talks to anybody else in this story is that every time they do, everyone takes each other's advice in the worst way possible. Rand has literally run away from the timeline, which is one step less reasonable than trying to launch himself into orbit. I wouldn't talk to him after that either, I'd be worried my suggestion he should eat something be followed up by finding him with half his horse in his stomach and the other half not having had time to die yet.

His thoughts drifted, feeling for what must be out there, what was always out there in country where men were few or far between, feeling for his brothers. He did not like to think of them that way, but they were.

Really another big problem Jordan had in his Perrin plotting is that he stopped forcing the kid to escalate his power use the way that Rand and the Wondergirls had to. Like, this book he willingly talks to the books, next book he'll willingly run through T'A'R, and by the end of book six he's commanding an army of wolves... and then he just stagnates. He does get to run away from being a werewolf for the rest of Jordan's books, so Sanderson has to do an absolute rush job to make Perrin able to play at everyone else's power level.

It was a faint picture of a man dressed in clothes made of hides, with a long knife in his hand, but overlaid on the image, more central, was a shaggy wolf with one tooth longer than the rest, a steel tooth gleaming in the sunlight as the wolf led the pack in a desperate charge through deep snow toward the deer that would mean life instead of slow death by starvation, and the deer thrashing to run in powder to their bellies, and the sun glinting on the white until it hurt the eyes, and the wind howling down the passes, swirling the fine snow like mist, and. . . .

Weirdly, the first time I tried to copy this segment my computer decided that I clearly instead wanted to copy-paste a screengrab of a Discord conversation that hadn't been in the clipboard for some time.

We should not let my computer's clinical insanity distract us from appreciating how awesome Elyas's wolf name is (though "long in the tooth" meaning what it does, it feels a bit inadvertently mean).

It was not the image he had made, a young man with heavy shoulders and shaggy, brown curls, a young man with an axe at his belt, who others thought moved and thought slowly. That man was there, somewhere in the mind picture that came from the wolves, but stronger by far was a massive, wild bull with curved horns of shining metal, running through the night with the speed and exuberance of youth, curly-haired coat gleaming in the moonlight, flinging himself in among Whitecloaks on their horses, with the air crisp and cold and dark, and blood so red on the horns, and. . . . Young Bull.

Perrin's wolf name is better though, which is 50% why he hates it. The other half is the way it immortalizes his trauma, but boo hoo Perrin learn to love killing Whitecloaks now, you'll be better off in two books if you do.

The one time he had gone to the dungeon, with Egwene, the smell of Fain had made his hair stand on end; not even Trollocs smelled so foul. He had wanted to rip through the bars of the cell and tear the man apart, and finding that inside himself had frightened him more than Fain did. To mask Fain’s smell in his own mind, he added the scent of Trollocs before he howled aloud.

It is a damn shame you didn't kill him while you had the chance, Perrin.

Howled aloud. Those poor Borderlanders, horses, and also Mat I guess. They're worried about three dudes disappearing without a trace, some of them are probably convinced channeling was involved, and now one of the foreign hangers-on is howling.

Their fury infected him. His lips peeled back in a snarl, and he took a step, to join them, run with them in the hunt, in the killing. With an effort he broke the contact except for a thin sense that the wolves were there. He could have pointed to them across the intervening distance. He felt cold inside. I’m a man, not a wolf. Light help me, I am a man!

Dude is going crazier than the male channeler in the party is. Kind of a shame he didn't have a real madness arc like Rand's; maybe Jordan kinda planned on it but ditched it for various reasons including redundancy?

“I have heard of things like this,” Ingtar said slowly, after a moment. “Rumors. There was a Warder, a man called Elyas Machera, who some said could talk to wolves. He disappeared years ago.”

That's hella convenient. You'd think they'd try to hush up Machera's disappearance as much as possible. Who told?

A few of them looked skeptical—Masema went so far as to spit—but Uno nodded thoughtfully, and that was enough for most. Mat was the hardest to convince. “A sniffer! You? You’re going to track murderers by smell? Perrin, you are as crazy as Rand. I am the only sane one left from Emond’s Field, with Egwene and Nynaeve trotting off to Tar Valon to become—”

I mean, Masema and Mat aren't technically wrong in that Perrin's feeding everyone some bullshit, but really I would like Mat to look at the man whose side he's sharing and pick literally any other side. Also don't be mean about the gals.

Vultures flapping, their white wings stained red; bloody, featherless heads tearing and gorging. He broke loose before his stomach emptied itself.

I always picture vultures as desert birds thanks to cartoons and stuff but I just looked it up and apparently they like used to be in France and whatnot. Never woulda guessed. Sadly their modern range in the Old World is a little diminished, but I guess they did pretty well for themselves between the nuclear apocalypse and the magical apocalypse. Good for them!

Mat turned his horse eagerly. “Maybe it’s Rand. I knew he wouldn’t run out on me.”

Cauthor shippers resurrected after their brutal demises last chapter. Also it's great that Mat knows that even after their pissy fights with each other they're still friends.

“Moiraine Sedai sent me, Lord Ingtar,” Verin announced with a satisfied smile. “She thought you might need me...”

Well obviously this statement is 100% true and certainly not a bald-faced lie. Even if we wanted to pretend that for some reason Moiraine didn't immediately induct Verin into her inner circle off-screen, Verin has every reason to think that Moiraine sent her. Remember this little bit from Chapter 7?

“Then we must find the dagger, Sister. Agelmar is sending men to hunt those who took the Horn and slew his oathmen, the same who took the dagger. If one is found, the other will be.”

We must find the dagger. By "we", it's obvious Moiraine meant the three women in the room at that moment and not the good guys as a general concept like most people would mean in casual conversation. Further, "must" was definitely being used in the sense of "this is an order that you must obey" and not just "it is imperative that this be done". Literally any other interpretation of this sentence is crazy talk, because Verin is obviously bound by the Three Oaths as a good guy and it's how she interpreted it, and definitely not to further her own ends by twisting someone else's words to the breaking point. Once she saw that neither Moiraine nor Siuan were in any hurry to recover the dagger and the horn, she was morally obligated to do so as the only other party of the "we" Moiraine so obviously meant.

Obviously. She is not suspicious at all, @checkoutmybookshelf.

“The Ogier, Lord Ingtar? And your sniffer went with him? What would those two have in common with . . . ?” Ingtar gaped at her, and she snorted. “Did you think you could keep something like that secret?” She snorted again. “Sniffers. Vanished, you say?”

“A new sniffer, just when you lose your old one. How . . . providential. You found no tracks? No, of course not. You said no trace. Odd. Last night.”

Verin is absolutely the best kind of Aes Sedai just for stuff like this, by the way. "Yes I know all about your dumb secrets and no obviously I'm not going to try and arrest the man, I'm not even going to try to arrest the Dragon Re-- I mean, tell me about Perrin. That's a crazy coincidence, isn't it?" Verin's not allowed to spend too much time onscreen because if she could she'd have had everything solved in three books.

They started off in a jingle of harness and armor, Verin riding close beside Ingtar and questioning him closely, but too low to be overheard. She gave Perrin a look when he tried to maintain his place, and he fell back. “It’s Rand she’s after,” Mat murmured, “not the Horn.”

Seriously, the only mistake she's made so far is letting Mat and Perrin get suspicious of her, but even then she's got them obeying her so she's doing just fine. They're not even the wrong kind of suspicious.

Perrin nodded. Wherever you’ve gotten to, Rand, stay there. It’s safer than here.

"Dramatic irony exploits the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of (at least consciously), thus placing the spectator a step ahead of at least one of the characters. Connop Thirlwall in his 1833 article On the Irony of Sophocles originally highlighted the role of irony in drama.[25][26] The Oxford English Dictionary defines dramatic irony as:[12]

the incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy."

I left the now-useless footnotes in so it would be very obvious who I was quoting, thus exempting me from having to source them properly. Alas, this has attracted the attention of the University of Chicago Press Enforcement Bureau, so I must bid you all adieu until the heat blows over.

[aegirine-purple]

I am deadset on finishing my long(ish) fic for Town of Salem. I need to finish it, I have so many WIPs in the graveyard already lol. That being said, the plot bunnies are hitting hard and I spat out the beginnings of a crackfic while getting stuck on dialogue. I refuse to post this on ao3 and make it yet another WIP that I will see sitting on my account so I shall put it here and free myself from this curse

"You’re joking," the Vampire Hunter said. "You’re all— this is some kind of elaborate prank or something. You can’t possibly look at him and tell me he’s not a vamp!"

The Doctor blinked at the Vampire Hunter, then at the supposed Bodyguard. It was clear that the Vampire Hunter was no more believed than before. 

"He's as confirmed as one can get," she said, kind but firm. "He protected the Mayor, remember? I had to rescue him the other night from drowning in a pool of his own blood after taking down that Serial Killer. He's sick, not undead. Lay off the poor man."

The Bodyguard in question was buried beneath several layers of jackets, face obscured by a scarf. "I’m fine," he said, voice dampened by the fabric. He shivered.

"You are wearing a parka in the middle of summer," the Vampire Hunter said flatly. "You look like a walking corpse. For god’s sake, your eyes are red."

"I've had worse," the Bodyguard insisted stubbornly. The Doctor patted his back. 

"Sleep early," she said crisply. "Don’t forget to drink plenty of water."

The Bodyguard nodded, rubbing at his temples. "Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that," he said. "I’ll be up and ready tomorrow, I swear." 

He sounded so earnest that the Vampire Hunter almost questioned for a moment if the ‘Bodyguard’ was truly unaware of his condition; but surely not. There was no way a newly converted vampire could miss such a life-changing event, right?

Right.

This particular vampire was a talented liar for the Vampire Hunter to even entertain the possibility— not that it mattered. The Vampire Hunter would stake him tonight, regardless of any pretty words.

It was just frustrating that nobody else believed him.

"You cannot be serious," the Vampire Hunter said, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking to the Doctor, the Bodyguard, or the rest of the townspeople in the square. All of them, probably. "I stake vampires for a living. I know what a vampire looks like when I see one. It’s my job."

The Doctor sighed.

"It's just the flu," the Bodyguard said, muffled beneath the mass of coats. "I'll get over it."

The Vampire Hunter threw his hands into the air. "You're literally undead!"

"I'll get over it!" 

"How do you get over being undead?!" the Vampire Hunter said exasperatedly, and turned towards the rest of the townspeople. "Look, we have vampires. You all know it, because a Framer died to one at the beginning of the week and I staked another in the heart last night. So believe me when I say that this man—" he pointed towards the human coat-rack that was the Bodyguard— "has been bitten!"

There was a brief silence. 

The Bodyguard sneezed.

The Lookout came forward and clapped the Bodyguard on the shoulder. "Get better soon," he said, heartfelt. A chorus of well-wishes followed.

The Vampire Hunter slapped a hand over his eyes.

Then Town lynched the Retributionist, because they could, and everyone went home for the night.

(Yes, the BG is that stupid, he fell asleep and missed out on his own conversion.)

[pikipekarmy]

How To Beat Giovanni

I'm just gonna go ahead and admit it: the secret to beating the Rocket Boss Giovanni, who I find much more palatable as the ringleader of a very eccentric LARP group rather than as any kind of plausibly genuine entity, stay tuned for more off-the-wall Rocket theories folks, is:

the power of friendship

I have an issue where I'm slightly worried I've leveled up in this game too fast. I really genuinely honestly love sending and getting the little postcard gifts, those are an obsession for me, and I put stickers on them and they're a lifeline when you're anywhere rural where there's no convenient pokestop walking trail etc (do you know how tedious it is to sit across from the only pokestop for miles with a five-minute timer on your watch spinning the damn thing every five minutes on the dot for hours?) But I have a suspicion those give you too much XP without corresponding game play. And so I hit the point where I'm expected to be able to defeat Giovanni, but I haven't caught that many Pokemon relative to my XP level. That's my suspicion, anyway, because-- well, to beat the Rocket Leaders, I'd already learned that I had to find a primer on what critters they had, and then figure out the type vulnerabilities and go through my deck and find critters with the correct attacks and make sure they were appropriately leveled, and I'd studied up on Giovanni, so the first time I encountered him I went out with my strongest quick-charging-charged-attack fighter, and then I had three possibles for his middle guy, each carefully chosen, and then I had my counter for his final guy, and I got out there and made it through his Persian and then-- whoever the second guy was would just chew up everything i had no matter what. And this was before I hit on my superstition about keeping no fewer than six guys defending gyms as lures to get revives (I genuinely think this is superstition on my part but I believe it super deeply, I'm very easy to condition) so I didn't have enough revives to just keep trying and trying it, I had to give up.

So I went to my various little Discord channels, and first I confirmed with my online friends who got me into this mess that I'd read the instructions right and had the correct guys loaded up to exploit his type vulnerabilities etc., and then I went to the local group and asked if anyone had any tips in the newbie-friendly-help channel, and both groups came back with

you need better pokemon

which is way harsh but was demonstrably true. Well, what pokemon do I need? Machamp, he's the best fighting type. Well, where do I get one?

mm. He doesn't seem to be currently widely available in the game. Everyone has like a dozen or two of them who's been playing more than a couple months, but. yeah there was maybe a community day? Nobody could remember where they'd gotten theirs. People checked. Oh yeah I've had all mine two years or more. Oh yeah hm. No, they're not spawning anywhere currently.

Well okay what else can I do? If I need a specific Pokemon--

well, I leveled up the guys I had, I spent a while reading up on how to use Technical Machines to change the attacks an individual creature has, and reluctantly realized that none of mine would really benefit that much from it.

"Literally any of us could trade you one," came the answer from the local board. Half a dozen people friended me, since there's a stardust discount if you exchange gifts for a while. (Now I send and receive even more gifts per day. now I am leveling up even more quickly. I crossed the Lvl 30 threshold, after which you get the same spawns as everyone else but, crucially, after which you also can get max revives, which, extra crucially, do not replace revives in the potential loot pool, and I think this is genuinely what did it for me, that you can accrue them and revives simultaneously from the same random distribution-- this gives you access to twice the number of revives even if you don't change your behavior otherwise. I still believe I have to constantly keep half a dozen guys in gyms though. I was raised Catholic, I'm really good at believing stuff.)

In the middle of this I got a Machoke as a research reward! I was very excited, I'd be able to field my own fighter after all! ... 100 candies to evolve. OR you can trade him and then it's free.

Oh. Oh. Well then!

Raid Night came, and everyone else does it remote (this was back in the halcyon days of late March), but I asked if anyone would be willing to physically come to the neighborhood where the gyms are. You don't have to like, go to someone's house to trade. I figure, I know from their postcards these people hang around in neighborhoods near that strip with all the gyms on it. And sometimes other people would come in person for the raids, so I figured that was the least weird thing to ask. Is anyone gonna come to do one or more of the raids in person? Can we trade then?

Sure enough, one guy was willing to do it, who I'd been exchanging interactions with so we were leveled up okayish, and so I betook myself down to the strip with the gyms. He was running late, this was fine, I ran out and did my two in-person raids for the evening, got snowed on etc. And then I retreated to a bar just off the main drag, as the Raid Train continued on the southerly route.

And Local Guy (who had driven in from about an hour away for this) rolled up outside in his car, and DM'd me to start the trade. I asked him if he wanted to come in for a beer and he said no. He just swapped me a Machoke for a trash mon he planned to transfer, waited for me to evolve it, and then swapped me a Machamp he'd already put a second charged attack onto and leveled up as far as it would go, and then drove off into the night, without my ever having seen him. See You Space Cowboy...

[trades of a creature you don't already have in your pokedex cost more in stardust. trading me a machoke since i already had one was cheap; machokes get free evolution after they're traded, so it cost me 0 candy to evolve him, and then once i had a machamp already in my pokedex, trading another was similarly cheap.]

I beat Giovanni... well, not the next time I saw him, I still had to tweak my approach, but the time after that.

So we'll call that good, anyway.