#mun: couldn’t figure out how to answer this in a sane way so you get Drunk History of the 501st with Strike yw

[lieutenant-25-of-the-501st]

How did you become a Lieutenant of the 501st?

dude im like. half drunk rn so like. dont expect this ti be a polisjied answer or anythunv.

me babie -> join 501 -> squad gone -> be only one left -> automaticakly make sergent -> arc trainibg after k*mino battle-> be traumatosed on Umb*ra -> make lieutenabt wheeee

[noonmutter]

Why do you think you connect to your muse? What aspect of your muse’s personality is most important to you? What aspect of your muse’s personality do you think is most important to them? Is it the same? Why or why not? (For either of the boys)

(You had to know this was gonna get long.)

(Answers Beneath the Cut Pt. 65: The Cuttening)

Connection with the muse(s):

Leon is textbook clinical depression with a strong inferiority complex/impostor syndrome blend, and these are all things I bang my head against on a daily basis, with the exception of depression. I was diagnosed, but the same people who gave me that diagnosis also, after a startlingly brief and purely medical interview, gave me enough medication that people thought I was tweaking, so I don’t necessarily trust that diagnosis. His fears are my fears, amplified by about a thousand and gnawing their own wounds open over and over so they never get to scar and fade away. 

He has the benefit of being almost paradoxically easygoing most of the time and absolutely surrounded by good-natured busybodies who adore him on a personal level. This gives him ample opportunity and a stronger ability to talk to people about things that hurt him a great deal more often than I am about mine. Even if it does take a lot of prying and pressing to get him to do it.

Terry, on the other hand... god, he’s catharsis and a half. Leon is wonderful but his boundless enthusiasm and determined pleasantness is exhausting and Terry feels just a touch more real to me, if only because he’s such a tired little pessimist. The reasons for his general flatness--relatively speaking--are of course pretty extreme because WoW is a shithole of a place to grow up, but his outlook and demeanor align to mine a lot more often than Leon’s will.

Personality Importance to Me:

Leon needs to be able to help someone in some form or fashion at all times. This is why he does everything from feeding people out of pocket rather than let them be hungry even if they just stole from him (especially if they just stole from him), to copping to his own problems because he sees them manifesting in somebody else and knows firsthand how horrible it is to endure them alone. 

He is a fundamentally good man, and even without an ever-present sadness to his thinking, he would be inclined to be helpful rather than let somebody else take care of things. That sadness simply pushes it harder to come out (Robin Williams is a pretty good point of reference). If he ever lost that desire to help--or felt he couldn’t help anyone at all--he wouldn’t be Leon anymore.

Terry is also a fundamentally good man, but he was never (and probably will never be) quite as gung-ho about extending that goodness to people he didn’t personally know. For those people he knows, however, he would do just about anything. Breaking into that circle is a long, nervous process, full of snaps and backsteps and sidesteps, but once in, you’d have to do something serious to get pushed back out. He hesitates to extend too much out of his comfort zone because he has so much trouble trusting people now, where he used to be almost as outgoing as Leon is today. Thinking about it, they basically swapped social roles from when they were kids.

His core value as a person is his loyalty. It’s what motivated the most significant events in his life every single time. If he wasn’t loyal to a fault, he would likewise not be Terry, both because he’d behave entirely differently and because his life would have gone in a totally different direction by now.

Importance to them:

Terry would answer the same way I did, although in maybe four words max. He values loyalty and subscribes to loyalty; it’s the closest he gets to a religious faith. Leon is more likely to deflect the question, but would probably say loyalty too; he does mean it with everything in him, but it’s a lot more malleable and permeable a thing than Terry.

Why:

With Terry, he’s extremely self-aware in a lot of ways, but most of them focus on what he’s good at--which, admittedly, is kind of a lot. He knows how important being loyal and earning loyalty is to him, to the point that he refers to a note from his parents, “We don’t always like the ones we love, but we love them because they’re ours,” as the unofficial family motto.

When he missteps, he doesn’t quite understand why, or even has a blind spot. The elder Ambroce has failed in such spectacular ways that he’s sort of overcompensating and trying to protect himself from even knowing what those failures are after they’ve happened a few times, and his brain being a little patchwork-y doesn’t help matters. He refers to Leon as the smart one in part because he’s convinced himself of his own “country bumpkin with no formal education” lie a little bit.

Leon is...complex. In the same way that I know intellectually what a foot is but can’t eyeball distances in terms of numerical value to save my life, Leon is both aware and unaware just what sort and how many things are roiling around in his head. It’s been difficult for me as the mun to avoid turning him into a mouthpiece and just make him explain the exact extent of his issues; he just doesn’t have the ability. He can’t see it and he can’t stop it, though he’s trying to learn how to identify it and fight it when it gets loose.

Having people around them to be an outside voice of reason or support or clarification or even just record keeping keeps them both sane, literally and figuratively.