#like. i'm glad you got jumped for that bullshit because you 100% deserved it. fuck. you.

[estrogenism]

"safequeers" dni btw, you actively make queer spaces unsafe for other queer people. you have no right to claim that you're "safe."

[faebriel]

ok ok I'm insane and couldn't pick one so have two (no need to answer both if you don't want to)

“You talk to him.” Not kindly, but he does.

“I’m used to him,” he shoots back. “I’m the only person who is.”

That makes Niki feel something, some uncomfortable tug in her chest. She mentally kicks herself. It’s not jealousy, she reminds herself, because despite the near-cliff jumping and the long nights without food and the nuclear fallout that has punctuated her last few months, being jealous of Tommy would be the least reasonable thing she’s allowed herself to be, maybe ever.

“You don’t believe me,” Tommy says flatly. “You never - eugh.” He cuts himself off with another ragged sigh, running a hand down his face. “Look, Niki, it’s - we were all together in Pogtopia, right? But I was there first. With him. And you didn’t see the start of it, it was horrible, and I’m glad no one else saw the beginning of it either but it was still just so shit and he kept saying all these terrible things about Tubbo and Fundy and you and,” he takes a shaky breath, “then, when I died, I saw him.”

Her breath catches in her throat.

Well, the voice in the back of her head whistles. If you were still wondering about all this afterlife bullshit, if you want to know where you’re going after your third life, here you go.

and

“You didn’t even - this isn’t about L’Manberg, Wilbur!” Niki shouts.

And then he stops, breathing hard, and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say.

“What else is there?” he asks.

Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut, her chest, her shoulders, chilled down to the bone. With slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes, sitting in her throat, threatening to spill over into a sob. She swallows - to keep her cool, to stay calm, to keep it together -

And then, something in her chest just snaps.

“You said you’d come back for me!” she cries, and her voice hitches on the lump of tears at the back of her throat and god, she sounds absolutely pathetic. Wilbur’s face softens immediately, which somehow just makes her feel even worse. “In Manberg. When Schlatt put me in prison, and you and Tommy were in Pogtopia, you said you’d break me out when it was safe. I waited for weeks , Wilbur. It was… it was horrible.”

“Niki…” a kaleidoscope of emotions flicker across his face, and he seems unsure which to settle on. “We got you out though, right? After the festival.”

“You looked for the button first,” she says quietly, and he stills.

Her sniffling sounds embarrassingly loud against the quiet background of night.

thank you sm!!! i’m gonna put these under the cut because they got a little long sorry (tw for discussion of suicidal ideation)

to preface: tommy is kind of the accidental but incredibly necessary invisible support beam for niki and wilbur’s making amends in bitter. niki cannot accept wilbur’s actions and apology without first acknowledging her own actions and making steps towards an apology, because otherwise it kind of falls flat? in that ending scene niki finally gets what wilbur is feeling and wilbur finally gets that someone else knows how he feels (it’s not perfect 100% yet, but…. that’ll get explored later)

onto the actual snippet! “tommy talks to wilbur - not kindly, but he does” was very important to me! tommy has stuck by wilbur ever since pogtopia, but the tragedy is that he is not equipped to deal with wilbur’s issues, and it shows. wilbur’s first stream after revival depicts this really clearly, where tommy tails wilbur around the whole time but insults him, is still stuck on calling him the villain, physically fights him at some point, etc. on one hand this isn’t healthy but on the other hand tommy is actually around, which is more than can be said for basically any other ally wilbur has had on the dsmp, maybe excluding his dad, who literally killed him lmfao.

this whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that tommy believes that he is the only person who properly understands wilbur, the only person who gets what happened to him, and feels like wilbur is generally his burden to bear. he failed to stop wilbur from both 1. hurting other people and 2. killing himself after the pogtopia-manberg war - and he doesn’t trust wilbur not to do either of those things again, so he’s stuck hovering around wilbur while wilbur is inadvertently setting off his own trauma and feeling responsible for any way he might fuck up and hating that but not wanting to leave. tommy’s memory isn’t perfect and he isn’t a perfect narrator, what he remembers from pogtopia the most were the scariest parts and that’s understandable but it means he’s holding wilbur to the worst expectations of behaviour (and he does so very vocally). the others showed up later, sure, but in tommy’s eyes he’s the only one who saw wilbur’s descent, and by the time they showed up wilbur had already changed irreversably. tommy tries to rationalise this by splitting the ‘different wilburs’ apart from each other in his head (he does this in canon too - there’s one quote from like late 2020 where he says he and tubbo need to keep on going for who wilbur used to be, not who he became, even though they’re,, the same person), and no one challenges that perspective, so he just keeps doing it even though it’s not healthy for him or wilbur.

and then limbo happened and, oh geez, THAT didn’t help jhfaskjjfsa

tommy is on a bit of a knife edge with niki in this fic. niki’s in this state of “ok, he’s annoying whatever, i’m moving on”, but all tommy knows is that she tried to kill him that one time, disappeared off the face of the map, joined a book club with two people who definitely do not like him, and now is just acting weirdly mellow and polite. she is not someone he wants near wilbur bc what the fuck is she gonna do? what is he gonna do? who knows. he’s frustrated that niki doesn’t seem to acknowledge how he’s feeling (especially bc once upon a time she would have been someone he trusted to acknowledge them - they were friends, they fought together) and he’s taking a big step by telling someone about his concerns here, especially bc tommy doesn’t really like talking about them at all. he wouldn’t be saying absolutely anything to niki if he didn’t truly believe she should stay away from wilbur, even if he’s wrong about him. (sometimes i think i write tommy as a little too emotionally mature here but it all goes out the window when wilbur’s brought up. idk if that balances it out)

ok onto niki: this is the first she has actually heard of limbo! she’s only just come around to the fact that resurrection is possible at all. death is kind of a touchy subject for niki both in general and re: wilbur in the fic - she’s coming off of a period in her life where suicidal ideation was, uh, a big thing (whether you want to read that into canon or not is subjective, that’s just the angle i went with in this fic). the sudden existence of a life after death, miserable as it is - and whether she really believes in such a place, when it only exists in tommy and wilbur’s words - that is a lot of information for her to absorb all at once. death is a weird connection point for tommy and niki here, coming right off of the fact that they’ve just acknowledged each other having those problems - tommy, out of, yknow, altruism, would very much like to keep niki out of that place, and niki is quietly reckoning with the fact that that is where she would have sent him. the concept of limbo from the perspective of a character with no experience of it, even secondhand, is so interesting to me like what kind of eldritch location would you feel like you’re living in asghjkl

(also - i gotta be honest the jealousy angle here but mostly when she’s talking later about dream not deserving wilbur’s companionship kinda came out after this post came across my dash while writing. whoops /j)

-

fun fact, this is the very first snippet of bitter that i ever wrote! all the way back in may!! this is like the moment of the fic - it's where the miscommunication that niki and wilbur have been having is shattered entirely - and so sticking the landing was uhhh kinda important to me lol.

wilbur's entire being in this fic is basically consumed by L'Manberg - he equates his self worth to it entirely. in his eyes, everyone (rightfully) hates him because of what he did to L'Manberg, because L'Manberg was corrupted and he himself with it, etc. niki tries to tell herself this, and while it definitely does form part of her issues with him, it was the betrayal that causes her this much pain - that he seemingly brushed her and their friendship off entirely when he supposedly left her for dead in manberg. because here is what we as the audience know: wilbur couldn’t leave niki in trouble when he heard her life was in danger, even when he was trying to find the button (pretty much the only thing he sees himself as having left at this point) and so he returned. here is what it looks like from niki’s perspective: wilbur told her to wait in manberg until it was safe to come to pogtopia, laid the place with TNT, went to blow up the place, and only returned when he couldn’t find the detonator (and then the first thing she saw him do in pogtopia was encourage the pit behaviour but that’s not what we’re talking about asdfgh). that is massive miscommunication and it’s been brewing between them for months - to make a quirky little reference to the title, niki has been carrying that anger with her so long it's gone bitter. it was never just about l’manberg with niki - not that anger, not her and wilbur’s friendship (hence the little flashback earlier in the fic, bc niki’s relationship to anarchism and statehood or statelessness juxtaposed with her friendships with wilbur and eret - she loves l’manberg bc she loves wilbur, but she loves eret too and those national ties don’t undermine that - is Real Interesting to me) - so when wilbur asks what else there could possibly be (because in his mind, what else could she have bothered staying around for?), she just fucking breaks.

“Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut...with slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes” - prose discussion time! heat and cold are two big throughlines in this fic - particularly for niki, cold is what she is. admittedly when i started with it i mostly wanted to subvert hot = angry and cold = dead but i kinda ended up enjoying this take on it for what it is instead of just as a subversion (also i like the idea of revived people running hot, their bodies r working hard to keep em going). she’s holding onto her feelings and refusing to deal with them, she’s frozen over. descriptions of cold are key to niki’s mental state throughout the fic - cold weight on her chest, feelings of frostbite when she and wilbur hug the first time, ice cold water during the dinner scene, waking up in the cold flat, etc. this was an attempt at describing a more visceral feeling of like, when you’re really mad and you can just feel the adrenaline running through your veins. always felt more cold than hot to me. when she starts to cry, the facade she’s been putting on is finally thawing out and cracking the ice she’s buried her feelings under. (also gives an excuse to write warm comforting hugs towards the end /hj). it’s a loss, it’s catharsis, it’s a whole mess.

and ofc this is all news to wilbur and he feels terrible, because as unintentional as it was, he really really hurt her - because the destruction of l’manberg fucking sucked but above all else wilbur hurt the people he loved because they loved him so much and not in spite of it, because they cared about him so deeply and his death was a massive blow to them. this hasn’t even dawned on him, because how could it? he respects deeply niki (lowkey respects her opinion more than his own at this point) so he has to listen, because it’s niki (“and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say” - because he does), and what she says fucking floors him. in his eyes, he failed her by putting her in danger and then by destroying her home - the idea that she valued him and their friendship so much flies entirely over his head until this moment, and he is forced to re-evaluate the mindset that has motivated him since… basically since pogtopia! the way i write wilbur is like… yes, he’s one of niki’s closest friends and he’s more aware of her insecurities and issues than most (which is why he does always take the time to listen to her, etc) but he does over-idealise her a bit. tbf, i think he does to some extent with everyone (calling tubbo strong on the anniversary stream, for example). also the fact that he really wasn’t around for niki’s lowest moments as a character! he still thinks of her the way she was in l’manberg - confident, steadfast, respected - and this moment shatters that for him as he realises exactly what effect he and his death had on her and everyone else, not just by his actions, but because they loved him and cared for him so deeply.

sorry that this got horrifically long!! and thank you so much for sending snippets in <3333

[starbuck09256]

#14 from the "100 ways" prompts. I'm a sucker for a slow dance.

Save this dance for me

The radio is low, humming through the small computer speakers as they empty boxes in the basement, they have the x-files back, but it cost them more than they imagined.  She is thankful for the music, thankful for something to edge into their space and dissipate the tension between them. Diana and El Rico, words said that haven’t been forgiven or forgotten. Mulder trying to make some bullshit amends for wronging her. If she didn’t need a majority of this stuff she would go home. Leave him to rot in the basement like he deserves. Damn her, damn her heart for getting in the way of her brain. She loves him too much to leave him, has loved him for years. She wanted to move on with him. Asked him in Vegas if he would ever get out of the car. She is licking her wounds now, and as much as she hates, hates herself she knows she won’t leave. Not while her answers are still out there. Not while they still have breathe to fight.

He might think that she was making it personal, but not for the same reasons. She isn’t jealous of Diana, if he wants to fuck Diana and give up everything for the traitor fine. She can run the x-files herself. She’s angry he doubted her, angry that he thought she would make up something so incredibly important over personal feelings. So what if she loves him, it’s been irrelevant for so long she hardly thinks about it anymore. It’s just something that is at this point. He moves next to her and she almost jumps as he reaches into her box. His hand reaches up to brush her arm. “We have to talk,” he says looking down. She scoffs she’s had enough of talking she is so tired of talking and rationalizing, she wants to be mad and for him to realize that this was him fucking everything up not her.

“I’m tired of talking, let’s just get this stuff set up so I can go home”

His heavy sighs resonates over the music.

“What do I need to say or do to fix this Scully?”

She regards him with the distrustful eyes he gave her barely a week ago.

“I’m not sure it is fixable at this point Mulder, you disregarded my findings, you felt so sure in your previous relationship, that the relationship we have build over years and years meant nothing. You took my personal feelings which were not even part of the argument and threw them in my face. Feelings that you were wrong about to begin with, you know what I think I can do this all tomorrow alone. I’ll see you later.”

His strong hand clasps over hers, his fingers brushing the inside of her wrists in a way that makes her still tremble after all this time.  The door only a few feet away, she could escape this, let the anger burn through her soul a little longer, make him suffer like she has just to prove a point. But she isn’t that person, she isn’t vindictive or cold especially not with the ones she loves.

“Scully, I’m.. an asshole,” he mutters his eyes sheepishly reaching out to hers.

“Yea, well glad it finally dawned on you” she mutters pulling her hand away from his.

“Scully, can I have just one dance before you walk out that door?” Her shoulders roll back trying to put professional Scully to use, as Dana has proven weak at his advances.

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea agent Mulder,”

“Scully, please just one”

She licks her lips and chides herself again for being too easy on him. “Just one dance,” she says letting him reach out again and take her hand back in her, he starts slow. Not holding her close like he did when he pulled her into his arms and smiled at her. He pulls her just a little closer.

“I’m sorry Scully, I should of never assumed you .. loved me… like I love you.”

She stiffens at his words bites her lip as he draws her in even closer.

“Diana was probably leading me to my death, and you saved me, like you always do, you remind me that we can always fight, we always have a choice to be better. You always pick to be better and it scares me.”

She rests her head on his shoulder letting him softly sway them back and forth. A shaky breath escapes her.

“Diana always made things too easy, she always picked the easy road, and it was so enticing to finally give up and just survive. But I knew that I could never go, not if you weren’t with me, when you said no, it wasn’t a choice scully. I made it personal, because I am fully invested in us and I’m so sorry that I gave you reason to doubt us, me and my faith in you. Because Scully you are the only thing I have faith in and whatever I need to do to restore your faith in us. I’ll do it, or die trying.”

As the song ends she can’t look up. He lifts her chin, and she shakes her head. She swallows hard biting her lip and then finally Her voice quivers slightly,

 “I do… love you like you love me,” it’s almost as a breathe the way the truth rushes out of her, she continues “we’ve been together for too long to let doubt of loyalty pull us apart. I’m standing right where I always have Mulder, on your side. Always. This is my fight too, my answers that I’m seeking, it’s not about you all the time.”  

“I umm.. I got you something for us being back down here.” Her eyes sparkle because both professional Scully and Dana love gifts and surprises.

he rummages in the box and she waits barely being patient patiently. He pulls out a name plate with a little bow on it.

“I thought it was time we put your name on the door, I should of done it years ago when we first lost the x-files. I’m sorry that I made this about just me and my quest.”

She nods looking at the etched lettering as she traces her name with her finger.

“Thank you for this, and for the dance.”

He nods and she reaches up to the door. Sliding her name next to his. As she looks upon their names etched together he comes behind her once more wrapping his arms around her stomach resting his head on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry it took so long, the desk is coming too, they said early next week” he says and kisses her cheek. She turns and smiles.

“Using presents to get you out of trouble isn’t going to work everytime Mulder,”

“I just need it to work for me this time Scully, I don’t plan on fucking up so bad in the future.”

“Good because I don’t know how many more desks you can fit down here if you do.”

He laughs grabbing her coat.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“First dancing now drinks, wow you must be in deep,  if I didn’t know better I would think you were trying to make things personal.”

He laughs leans in close kissing her softly on the lips.

“Oh it’s very very personal, Scully.”

Her grin is all the forgiveness he needs as she leans up giving him a long kiss. “Flowers are also very nice, don’t forget chocolates, and cool keychains…” She walks out the door waiting for him to follow.

“Keychains, I’m good at those.” He pulls the door shut, turns to lock it. Looking at the names on the door right next to one another. Like they have always been, and hopefully always will be.

@peacenik0 @scully-eats-sushi @improlificinsarcasm @today-in-fic @marinafrenzy @country3living @lappina