#re:to!read

[piratemadi]

Re:to make a life; how did jack and anne meet/become friends/become whatever they are

they were babies...anne grew up w an abusive father and jack’s family was. hm. well he had a mom and a dad and they lived together and they gave him food and clothing but they were also very much like. they were only together bc of him and they didnt even seem to like him all that much ykwim? theyre both little oddballs when they go to school for the first time at like 5 or 6 neither of them fit in w their assigned gender which people side eye anne for but r actively violent towards jack for. he likes pink stuff and princess stories and braiding the little lanyards that kids make ykwim? and once he decides to make a lanyard for everyone in his class to try and make more friends. it doesnt work mostly but anne has never been gifted anything in her life and for that reason jack becomes remarkable to her. so they become friends as early as they possibly could have and stayed together for the rest of their lives. she defends him on the school playground. he does her homework. she never tells him, exactly, what’s going on in her life, but he’s smart enough to figure it out within a couple years. he teaches her to fish. she teaches him how to land a good punch. when she can get away from her dad for the night, she’ll lie on his bedroom floor and he reads to her or braids her hair. when she’s sixteen, she finally runs away for good, setting up a permanent bedroll on jack’s floor. a couple years after that, they start renting a tiny little one floor house, all to themselves

for jack, it felt natural when they started sleeping together. (he’s honestly a little relieved he’s not gay.) but for anne, it was..well, it wasnt wrong, because she’d always kind of assumed this was coming, but still it felt wrong. it felt ungrateful to say that to jack, and strange to interrupt the narrative that everyone seemed to be building (a couple of the only two gnc people in town? people were relieved that they’d paired off w each other). she’d liked all the old stuff, she just wasnt thrilled about the sex. and eventually she told him, and he blinked and opened and closed his mouth a few times and tried four different ways to start a sentence and finally just said “i just want you to be happy.”

their story has very little drama to it, bc jack and anne understand each other better than anyone in the world, and have grown up around each other like two trees twining together. they just exist like that, twined together and unable to be separated. she still defends him when she needs to. he still reads to her. like twins in the mythological sense