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novelconcepts · 11 months

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There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

#yellowjackets #yellowjackets spoilers #yj meta #long post #shauna shipman #lottie matthews #taissa turner #van palmer #misty quigley #natalie scatorccio #the question not being how do you survive the wilderness. the question being how do you come BACK.#the way each of them tries so hard to keep moving forward #unable to untangle the girl in the woods from the adult suffering in polite society #how the world doesn’t want to hear about the pain or the night terrors or the sleepwalking or the addiction #the world wants the bright colors and the flash-bang headlines #the world doesn’t want who they are. who they had to be. it wants pretty perfect tragedy #that specialized environment lives on in each one of them every day #but it’s not a place anyone else can ever go #how do you feed that for so long and then just…stop?#constantly thinking about nat saying we didn’t make it out. none of us.#because no. no they didn’t. the girls died the minute that rescue chance did. what came back was risen from those ashes

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bluerthanvelvet444 · 25 days

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⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚𝙿𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚢 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

Frat boy Kyle Spencer x fem!reader

tags: slight angst, fluffy smut!

warnings: swearing, public sex, mentions of Kyle's abuse (poor baby), handjob, p in v.

summary: frat boy kyle being a sweetheart. that's all i have to say.

character count: 11k.

full fic under the cut ↓

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“I'm not going.” You replied, your voice firm and your eyes fixated on the math book that sat on the library's desk, trying to avoid the gaze-that you knew you couldn't resist-of the boy sitting in front of you. You heard him sigh as his doe eyes desperately tried to meet yours.

“But everyone is going…you can't miss it.” Kyle replied with his soft voice.

“I've never gone to any of those parties…why do you want me to go to this one so badly?” You spoke, with a noticeable hint of frustration in your voice.

“Because it's the end of the semester…something to celebrate. Plus, it's gonna be epic.” He said with a toothy smile plastered on his face.

“No, thanks. You know I don't roll with those frat boys.” You rolled your eyes, your words coming out harsh and spiteful.

“I'm a frat boy.” He said, raising an eyebrow, clearly confused by your statement.

“Yea- but you're…different.” You sighed.

It was true. He was indeed different from the frat boys he was friends with. You and Kyle met in Junior year of high school. You were paired up by your physics teacher, who suggested you could tutor Kyle, that at the time had terrible grades. You two clicked instantly, he was fun and outgoing, and you enjoyed spending time with him. Kyle had grown to be incredibly thankful for your help, in fact, he insisted that you were the one who made him passionate about physics, the subject that he used to despise and that now was his main department in college. Although he could seem like the usual asshole frat boy, Kyle was sweet and caring. You knew it, and no one could’ve made you change your mind on that. He was simply a sweetheart.

“Listen, I know my mates may seem rude or not well-behaved…but trust me, as a leader, I established some rules for them. They won’t act crazy, I promise.” His kind voice brought you back from your thoughts. You sighed, thinking about it.

“Brennan’s hosting the party in his summer mansion…it’s next to the beach- it’s so cool, I swear. I-I’ll take you there! I can pick you up and take you home…” He added, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Please?” He said in an adorable voice, his puppy eyes looking hopeful into yours.

You sighed, you didn’t wanna go, but it was utterly impossible to say no to him.

“Fine.”

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You were touching up your makeup. You were ready for the “big night” Kyle was so excited about. You decided to wear something a bit more revealing, a black minidress, because-okay, you didn’t wanna go- but you couldn’t be annoyed and unfashionable all at once.

While taking a final look in the mirror, you heard a knock on your door. You grabbed your bag and opened the door to see Kyle-in his usual frat sweater-smiling at you. He looked at you up and down, scaring you slightly. What if he didn’t like the dress or how it looked on you?

Fortunately, all your concerns faded once you saw his smile widening.

“Woah…you look beautiful. Seriously…you’re stunning.” He said, he couldn’t keep his eyes off you, he wasn’t used to seeing you like this.

You felt your cheeks heat up at the compliments.

“Thank you…” You gave him an awkward smile and bit your lip.

“Shall we get going?” You suggested, to which he nodded. He took your hand and helped you step down the porch. Kyle led you to his car, and opened the door for you with a cute grin.

The ride was calm, you chit-chatted here and there about random stuff, and you swore you saw him staring at your body a few times. After 15 minutes or so, you eventually arrived at the party. Kyle was right, the mansion was beautiful and it faced the sea. You could see lights and music blasting out of the house. He gave you an excited grin and helped you out of the car, walking with you inside the house. It was overflowing with people laughing, playing games and having fun. As much as it seems hard to believe, you didn’t know anyone of those many people. They had familiar faces, sure, but you couldn’t consider them your actual friends. You sighed and nervously looked at Kyle who, on the other side, was flashing smiles to all his fellow frat brothers and friends. You noticed how comfortable he was in his habitat, and how you envied him for that. He introduced you to many people-whom you couldn’t even remember the names of-that obviously didn’t care much about getting to know you, since they even could’ve sworn you did not go to that college. You were invisible even when the attention was on you, and Kyle clearly didn’t catch that. So when he was dragged by his mates to some kind of game, he told you with a chuckle and a rushed tone

“I-I’ll be right back! Chat with the girls, they’re fun!”

Fun. Right. You didn't mean to sound like an antisocial bitch, but they were everything but fun. You saw them from afar just taking pictures of each other-to show on Instagram how much fun they were pretending to have having-or teasing each other about their crushes. You felt bored, so you sat on a chair, sipping a cup of-what you hoped was-punch and waited for Kyle. Time passed, and he didn’t show up, so you got up and started searching for him. It didn’t take you much to find him. Kyle was on the karaoke stage, singing “Rosanna” by Toto.

“Meetcha all the way! Nananaaaaah…” He “singed” while laughing with his mates.

You were conflicted on what to do now. You didn’t want to be a bummer by clinging to him all night, but you were truly bored and felt lonely. So, you did what you believed was best for everyone, you grabbed your stuff and left. The moment you stepped outside, you were met by an unfamiliar feeling of peace, the view surprising you for its beauty and for being so…empty. It was quiet, the only sound that could be heard were the waves splashing against the sand, no people around. You smiled and made your way to the pier nearby. You sat on it and took your shoes off, allowing your feet to sink in the water.

You didn’t know how much time had passed, but you were brought back to reality when you felt Kyle's voice behind you.

“Here you are! I searched for you everywhere!” He was breathing fast, you believed he had been running while seeking for you.

“I thought I left you a message?” You tilted your head.

“Oh… Sorry. I can’t find my phone. Why are you all alone here? The whole fun is inside!” He replied with a giant boyish smile.

“I like it better here. It’s boring inside.” You turned your face to look at the sea again.

“What? How can you call it boring? There are plenty of games! And people inside-” you cut him off before he could finish his sentence.

“Kyle, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not popular like you. The people inside couldn’t care less about me. I feel less lonely here than in that crowded house.”

He looked at you confused.

“Aw, c’mon…don’t be like this. They’re nice people, you just have to make an effort to try to meet them, and I’m sure you’ll have fun.” You didn’t know why those words started a fire in you.

“They’re not my friends, Kyle. I can’t stand those people, I don’t get along with them. And trust me, I’ve tried to be social and friendly, but you may have to consider the idea that not everyone is like you. You’re easygoing and social, you're a freaking frat boy for fuck’s sake. It’s easy for you to say those things.”

He looked at you, mouth agape at your sudden outburst.

“…why didn’t you just tell me?” He looked at you like a sad puppy for bringing you somewhere that made you uncomfortable.

“And be more of a bummer? No, thanks. They already hate me, I don't wanna be a party pooper as well.” You crossed your arms.

He sat next to you on the pier and his fingers gently grazed your jaw to make you look at him.

“You’re not a bummer to me…a-and I’m sorry about that… I shouldn’t have left you alone. Sorry.”

You wanted to be mad at him, truly, but those cute brown eyes melted your heart in every way possible. You bit your lip as you admired him lovingly. He was so caring and sweet, how did you manage to get this lucky?

“I didn’t wanna make you uncomfortable, I- that’s the last thing I’d ever want. You know I care about you… I can’t stand you being mad at me. Please, forgive me?”

You felt your heart tighten at those words. You gave him a slight nod as your eyes travelled down his lips. You wanted to kiss him so badly, and he probably caught onto that, since he slowly leaned in to meet your lips in a sweet kiss. He pulled away slightly, mumbling against your lips.

“Was that okay?” You nodded, and he leaned in again, kissing you once more. This time he deepened the kiss, letting his tongue slip in your mouth and softly swirling it around yours. You let out a breath at how right that felt and how sweet he was being. You pulled him slightly closer and moved your hand to rest on his neck and caress the skin of it. After a bit, you moved your lips to peck his jaw a few times before trailing them down on his neck. Your lips worked sweetly on his skin at first, earning a few sighs from him. As the tension grew, you started sucking his neck, leaving red marks. He groaned and grabbed your waist, you subtly moved your hand down to massage the bulge from his pants. He let out a tiny gasp, and you felt him stiffen, not in a good way. You looked up at him with a confused expression.

“I-I’m sorry…please keep going…” He said with a nervous smile.

“What’s wrong? Did you not like that? It’s okay if you don’t want to…” You gave him a comprehensive look.

“No! I like that… I swear. Just…bad memories.”

“Do you wanna talk about it…?”

“No, I just wanna feel good now.”

You nodded and gave him a gentle peck on his lips before gently undoing his zipper. You ran your fingers over the visible shape of his dick through his underwear, earning a groan from him. You looked at him for consent before gently pulling his boxers down. You blushed as you saw him so vulnerable for the first time. Your fingers wrapped around his shaft, stroking him slowly. He let out a breathy moan.

“G-god…don’t stop…”

You smiled and started progressively speeding up. After a few minutes, you heard his moans grow louder, and you felt his strong hand gripping your wrist.

“I…wanna do it. Is that okay?”

You nodded, and he sat up to gently remove your dress and everything underneath. He was stunned by your body, staring at you as if you were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He helped you lay down, with a massive gentleness, as if you were capable of breaking if handled too roughly. He hovered on top of you, caressing your face as he lined up your entrance with his dick.

“This okay?” He muttered under his breath, to which you answered with a nod. He gently pushed into you, allowing you to adjust to the new feeling. He groaned when he pushed himself all the way in. He held your hand sweetly.

“Can I start moving?”

“Mhm…”

He slowly started thrusting in you, earning moans from you both. He gripped your hand tighter as he felt how your walls clenched around him. When he felt like you were ready, he started going faster, gripping your hand tightly and kissing you repeatedly through the whole thing. You could've sworn you were seeing stars when he started hitting your G-spot with his tip. Soon enough, your moans got louder and you felt yourself coming on his dick. He tried his best to contain his moans and as soon as you finished he pulled out to come on your tummy. He collapsed onto you, pecking your face repeatedly.

“I love you…” He mumbled.

After some time had passed, he got up and cleaned you with the salty water, giggling like a teen boy receiving his first kiss. When he helped you gain your-and his-decency again, he got up, throwing an arm around you and walking happily towards his car.

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a/n: I love Kyle he's so babygirllll. also look at the cute picture i found on pinterest (the one under the title) that boy looks so much like kyle. got me screaming when I saw it. Anywaysssssss. I might post a part 2 of this with frankenkyle, but I gotta finish Peter fics first (spoiler). Let me know if you like it💕💕

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