#the only text you can trust is what's canonically stated

[waterfrontcomplex]

yanqing abundance + origin thoughts/theory

so, i was doing whatever and a thought came to me (story spoilers also there's a lot of text)

i took a look around the loufu and realized something; all of the people had essentially every hair color except blonde. the only exceptions are people not native to the loufu, such as luocha.

yk. the one who happens to be ON THE PATH OF ABUNDANCE

and who else has blonde hair?

YANQING.

yanqing's origins are relatively unknown, all we know is that jing yuan found him somewhere and decided to take him in for whatever reason. in yanqing's character story, it says that it's recorded in the military annals of the cloud knights how jing yuan discovered him, but not where.

yanqing mentions in his character introduction how he was RAISED BY THE GENERAL SINCE BIRTH which... like. what. ok thats actually crazy bc either

1) jing yuan took him from his parents when he was like a day old or something

2) he was given to jing yuan (although, this is unlikely considering it was mentioned jing yuan 'discovered' him)

3) jing yuan lied for whatever reason (to protect him)

4) jing yuan indeed found him when he was born, possibly from a fruit of the ambrosial arbor

in the pic above, yanqing says 'but as you know, children aren't grown on trees." is this foreshadowing? or just straight up dropping a hint that his 'birth' was not a natural one?

the ambrosial arbor was inactive for approx. 2579 years before the sedition of imbibitor lunae. after that, the seals on the arbor were weakened. i haven't exactly worked out the specifics yet, but since bailu was created around 700~ years before canon and is still a little kid, and dan heng was presumably an adult/teen when exiled, my guess is that if yanqing has the lifespan/growth rate of a xianzhou native, he would've been born sometime in between den heng's hatching and bailu's hatching, a little closer towards bailu's. but what could've happened during that time? please hear me out the next part is kinda crazy

my guess is that during the tampering of the transmutation arcanum to revive baiheng (and presumably to allow other species to become vidyadhara, although the wiki gave no source... i'll trust it for now), dan feng and yingxing fucked up and created yanqing in a fruit of the arbor, while during the transmutation arcanum ritual, bc dan feng previously fucked with it, it failed and created bailu (and separated his powers between dan heng and bailu)

now, this seems... really out there. how the fuck would yanqing and bailu, a presumably xianzhou native/humanoid and a vidyadhara, be created from the remains of a foxian? i'll start with yanqing. it was stated that after baiheng's death, only a few drops of blood and a tuft of her hair remained. dan feng and yingxing created yanqing in a fruit of the arbor (like some sort of hatching rebirth... but a fruit) using either the blood or hair (most likely blood) of baiheng. it was a somewhat failed attempt at reviving baiheng. yes, it created life from her remains, but it was not her (think how dan heng ≠ dan feng, and also how vidyadhara can be different genders than their previous incarnation). during the time he was in the fruit, it dyed his hair and eyes blonde/gold, and also created the ring around yanqing's eyes (his is unique, the other characters' eye rings if they have them are a lighter color while his is dark, yes ik silver wolf has it too but her's is different).

before bailu's hatching and after subduing jingliu, jing yuan eventually came across the fruit yanqing was being held in, or found him wandering about, probably recognized the blonde/gold as the effects of the abundance, and took him in because dude he's not going to kill a literal baby (even if he could). he knew it would be dangerous to give him to a regular family, so he took him in and trained him himself

for more info abt yanqing's connection to the vidyadhara, i suggest checking out this post by astralexpressarchives.

although he is not baiheng, he did take on aspects of baiheng's personality, such as her free will and even laughing/giggling while in battle. he also enjoys flying (although with his swords and not starskiffs) and even has eyelashes similar to her's. and, just like her, yanqing's missions would often be dangerous, but he would come out relatively unscathed.

now, about bailu. dan heng says she was created after dan feng's ritual failed. if you take a look at bailu, she strongly resembles baiheng, and even starts with the same 'bai'.

same hair, same eyes, similar eyelashes, she even has a similar eye ring to yanqing. there's not too much to say here. while yanqing got baiheng's personality and fighting spirit, bailu got her appearance. now, why did this happen? im thinking its because of dan feng's meddling with the transmutation arcanum. because of that, yanqing was born, but it was 'incomplete'. so while yanqing got one part of baiheng, bailu got the other. yanqing was made on purpose, while bailu was somewhat of an accident. maybe some of baiheng's 'life' from yanqing's creation was still there when bailu was created? idk

the funny thing is, their paths are like... the complete opposite. yanqing follows the hunt (although he was born of the abundance) and bailu follows the abundance (although she was presumably supposed to follow the destruction or hunt).

theory tldr; dan feng and yingxing fucked up and created yanqing and bailu out of baiheng's remains

this is a yanqing post, time to get back to yanqing. hooray! i took a closer look at yanqing's outfit, and noticed numerous leaf/plant symbols.

...which are closely associated with the abundance. especially the gold leaves.

this further solidifies my belief that yanqing has something to do with the abundance.

jesus christ that is. a wall of text. pls tell me ur thoughts on this whole thing, i took like 2 1/2 hours to write it and its 2:40 am so sorry if it doesn't make sense i just need to put these thoughts somewhere

[mxtxfanatic]

As someone who has far too much time on their hands I have waded through Ao3 and found some canon-complacent fics that do not assume that Jiang Cheng is a good brother, are not influenced by the untamed, and are hopefully to your tastes!

Our Feelings Remain Unchanged by Karmiya

When Wei Wuxian is resurrected with his original face, any plans to hide in plain sight as 'Mo Xuanyu' are ruined before they can ever begin. He soon runs into old faces, and finds that despite what he feared in his last days, Lan Wangji's feelings for him never changed; whatever they were in the first place.

I really like this author in general! All their fics are good but this is my favorite of them. It is not remaining in line with cannon because oh boy Wei Wuxian having the same face changes things starting with the fact that Sizhui recognizes him...

The Shade of Old Trees by Kryal

“We rest in the shade of trees our ancestors planted.” They called the man in the ice Yiling Laozu, after a folk hero associated with the town in the foothills of the mountains where he was found. No one expected him to be alive!

I believe you will appreciate this authors long footnotes. Also the historical details and world building is fascinating. They clearly put a lot of research into this.

this world (what I make of it) by glitteringmoonlight

The war had consequences. Once, a fully realized Avatar referred to one who had mastered all the elements and could go into the Avatar State. Now, that has changed. No one could master fire when there was no one to teach it, and people feared the abilities of a firebender too much to allow anyone, even the Avatar, to learn too much of it. Now, an Avatar was simply said to be fully realized when their instructors decided they had learnt enough.   In which Lan Sizhui is the Avatar, but he cannot firebend, nor can he waterbend very well. That changes when his travels take him to Yiling.

The best avatar fusion fic I've read. No mentions of jc so far and Wei Wuxian currently remains a mysterious figure who is for sure not a bloodbender and definitely isn't in hiding.

A look back at the past (it's never like they lie) by Imnobody122

Jin Ling had always wanted to know his parents so when he heard rumors about a ghost forcing people to relive their earliest childhood memories he jumped at the chance. Things did not go according to plan. Instead he's stuck watching the childhood memories of Lan Sizhui and Jin Ling is forced to confront the truth the Sects lied about. The Yiling Laozu should not be good with children!

It's harder to get more canon complainant than when you are literally quoting the text. Don't worry the author makes no excuses for Jiang Cheng and this fic tears apart the rumors surrounding Wei Wuxian.

Return to Sender by Theasaurus_with_no_words

On yet another gray and eerie morning in the Burial Mounds, Wei Wuxian wakes up with his golden core back. It turns out he lost something else in the process. (Aka: Wei Wuxian's feelings towards certain people get erased. It changes things. Is it a curse, or a blessing in disguise? And can Wei Wuxian trust himself, his choices and his priorities, after losing a defining part of who he is?)

Wei Wuxian regains his golden core and loses his loyalty due to Jiang Cheng's ingratitude. This is not a bad trade.

I hope you like them and it is kind of depressing that this list only has five entries but oh well.

Some more mdzs fic recs if anyone is interested!

[enkelimagnus]

Don't Feed It (It Will Come Back)

Read on AO3

True Detective Season 1, Rust/Marty, Rated E

Summary: Follow-up to Something Stuck In Your Teeth

They've fucked. They've gone back to normal, or whatever poses as normal for these two. Except Rust's not one man you own and Marty's not gotten that memo. So when Rust sleeps with a friend of Maggie's, Marty gets possessive. And Rust doesn't like this at all.

Warnings: The usual warnings that come with Canon True Detective, Period-Typical Homophobia, Anal Sex, Slurs, Bad Crash Stuff, French-bashing (self-inflicted)

Full text below the cut

His thumb caresses the grip of his gun where it rests against his belt, runs his fingerprint all over the hard, cold polymer casing and he wonders when they’ll catch him out. 

Quesada knows he’s not listening to a word he’s saying but he’s not snapping at him to get his head out of his ass and pay attention. His tolerance for Rust’s never-ending anti-authority attitude lowers every day they get closer to the weekend and today’s friday.

He’s letting Marty be the spokesman for the both of them, lets him deal with the politics of men like Quesada who only care as long as their superiors do, as long as it will shorten their afternoons lazing around a golf green pretending to play that limpdick excuse for a sport.

Quesada must have been a good cop once upon a time, or at least that’s what Marty’s desperate to believe. Rust only knows he must not have been that good, else he’d know the sort of creature sitting across from him now, and he would know he belongs somewhere the sun don’t ever shine. The least he would do was get that state-issued gun away from him and force him to fend for himself in the firearm department. 

When they walk out of there, Rust is still a free man and Marty’s hand rests onto his shoulder, onto that very spot on his trapezius where, under the shirt, half covered by his undershirt is the crescent moon scar of Marty’s own teeth. He’s gotten the habit of it, of letting his hand fall onto that mark from time to time, a claim or a warning or a threat, or perhaps all three at once. He knows it’s there still, he saw it in the locker room, saw how it was scarring, a bit red still underneath the brown of the scab.

Others have seen it too, men he can’t help but see at work when they grab showers or take a leak by the lockers or grab something from the jacket of their civilian garb. A woman’s seen it too, a blonde little thing with a genuinely fantastic ass Maggie had introduced him to over sweet tea and some help with the plumbing of the house. One thing with being raised by a mad man in a cabin in the middle of Alaska, you learn how to take care of a home, and if Marty felt emasculated by it, Rust couldn’t care less. If he had decided to help out his woman, she wouldn’t be calling him up to help with her fucking pipes.

She calls him sometimes, in the evenings or on days he and Marty both have off and Rust can’t help but wonder if Marty knows that his wife is calling for no real reason but to talk, like he’s one of the girls from her book club. It’s nice though, he likes her like a little sister. She can see through enough of his shit to give a fuck but not enough to run away screaming, and Marty might be annoyed by it at the end of the day, but he’s the one who opened the door first, the one who let his wife feed Rust like a wild animal at their doorway, plying him with coffee and letting him think he could trust them. You don’t feed a stray unless you want it to come back. 

That day though, it had only been a trap to get him in his wifebeater and a flannel over at the house while Suzie was there as well for entirely unrelated reason. He’d taken her on a date the next day, mostly because Maggie had been staring at him with eyes promising divine retribution if he didn’t make a move. She had a nice smile but Rust wasn’t a fan of blondes, and the entire evening, he’d kept seeing Dora Lange superimposed over her like a 1910s film’s archaic special effects. They’d still fucked though, at his place on his mattress in the living room and she hadn’t said anything about that. She’d asked about the bite mark. He’d kissed her to shut her up and it had worked. He had been thinking of Marty anyway. 

The days after that perfect storm are empty of threats and insults; they’ve pierced the abscess and let the pus out and it’s going to need some time to build back up. They know it’ll build back up. The sort of festering wound they have doesn’t ever heal fully. 

Rust’s got a lot of those. Most days he feels like a torn open carcass laying in a patch of sunlight, just awaiting to be shredded further in the claws of some great carrion bird. Vultures are essential to the health of an ecosystem, he knows as much, but he can feel the talons digging into his flesh, three points of pain on his left side, right where the bullets found their way. 

The first one he’d seen, a great big thing, half majestic and half ungainly, was on a field trip his pop had not been able to pull him out of. The wildlife center had a wing – more like a spare room, but they’d been trying to get money out of the state to keep their operation flowing and “wing” had sounded like they deserved the aid more – for the sort of animals that were not supposed to be as far up north as the likes of Ennis. 

They’d only managed to get at the vulture because it had, in its despair to feed and keep itself warm from the otherworldly cold of north Alaska, attempted to steal away some of their critters out of their goddamn dens. 

The vulture had stared into his eyes then, and Crash had once told this story to Ginger, just filed off the specifics and replaced it with another man’s details, and added that the bird must have known what he’d become. Crash had felt like a big carrion bird, but that was before he’d met Louisiana CID Homicide detective Rustin Cohle. Nah, that fucker, the one whose skin he now wears, whose suits he puts on every morning, whose apartment he lives in, that fucker’s the vulture.

So they go back to work, he goes back to making his living off of dead bodies, and they don’t talk about what happened off Highway 10. They settle down into the routine of biting words and eye rolls, into the monotony of the cases that come across their desks. They fail to capture Rust’s attention for too long.

He knows that what happened with Dora Lange shouldn’t be replicated. He knows the obsession, the nights spent drinking coffee like water, staying awake through the sheer force of his will, staying on his feet going through files in the archives, he knows those are not healthy. He also knows that was the most alive he’d felt in a really, really long time.

Even before he opened that big red box, even before he got into that absolutely grandiose cocaine in the evidence locker, the thrill of the chase had lit him up from the inside and it had been what he’d been aching for since he’d joined Homicide. And he’s aching for it now, needs it like you need to scratch an itch, and that stolen stop in the heat of summer, damp and tense and electric in every way had scratched it and for a short, blessed moment, he’d been breathing free. 

He’s always been obsessive, always stared at every tree for a bit too long, always spent nights laying in the middle of the woods staring at the stars and trying to remember what he’d learned from the physics and astronomy intro books he’d absolutely not accidentally forgotten to give back to the school library before spring break. He looked at the space between the stars and wondered if a black hole would ever come to swallow him whole. He’d stared at the constellations and felt ancient and so very new at the same time, a sight held by so many eyes and understood fully by none at all. 

He remembers losing the night every year for two months, and how it felt like losing shelter, losing safety. How losing the day felt like he’d dug himself too deep into the earth to run from the world and he’d gotten stuck in a maze of caverns, every stalagmite the shadow of a person he knew, uncanny and unhinged. He remembers men like Riley Marshall whose words became more and more slurred with every minute of sunlight lost to the night, until he spent those two months barely understandable, only to spring back up with the sun, as if alcoholism was seasonal. 

Louisiana is incredibly steady in comparison, comfortably warm even in the dead of winter, with that golden sun bearing down onto the bayou and the insects buzzing around your ears, steadfast companions. 

So Rust finds other ways to feed the prowling beast in his mind. He reads and throws himself into work and spends his weekends sitting in his convent cell of a house with his head a smear of robitussin or a haze of quaaludes that still smell like the cheap perfume of the women he bought them from. There’s nothing like being high off your fucking rocker and hallucinating dead people staring at you with empty eye sockets and blood bubbling out of their mouths, staining the carpet from where they stand awkwardly in the corner, nothing like feeling the weight of a dead child in your arms and the stench of cocaine sweats on your skin, while you’re neck deep in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

Death is a given of life, but it’s been feeling like death is a moth to whatever bayou bonfire Rust seems to be made of. He’s always known the smell of it, the color of it, the weight of it pulling at his feet like gravity, keeping him on the ground, keeping him in the world. He cannot remember knowing anyone who didn’t have a personal, intimate relationship with death. Claire had been an anomaly for four years, until she hadn’t.

There are a few places where Crash and Rust intersected, places that made it easier to blend himself and disappear into another man’s skin. They recommend it when you go undercover, to find a cover that has a few things in common, so that lying will be easier. Death had been the main one. Rust had shot a deer down by the time he’d gone into middle school and Crash had grown up listening to the rattling of rifles in the dark in a damp corner of a Texas ghetto. 

Both of them had taken naturally to holding guns, both taken to killing like a duck to water, and the murkier the pond, the better. Dead moms and absentee dads and authority issues and the substantial skill of being able to recognize stronger than you, of being able to follow the rules of the strongest. More than all of that, all the seams shared between those two costumes, what had allowed him to disappear inside of the chitinous armor of that particular monster had been death. Without death, he wouldn’t have been quite as willing to shoot himself full of unspoken substances and spend four years in a haze of chemicals. It’s what made it so easy to throw away a sanity that hadn’t been precious to him in months.

He’s given up on recovering that. He’s given up on getting clean too. That ship sailed a really long time ago. He can do sober, though, most of the time, because the downers help and the work busies his mind enough that he’s not completely trying to drown himself in an ocean of liquor.

He locked the Jameson back into the red box with Crash’s jacket and his boots, and the personal dose of coke he’d grabbed out of that bag for himself, with the rifles and the fake IDs and the markers of Crash. He doubts he can ever go back now, cause Ginger was with him and now he’s locked up, but… it’s in there. It’s in a closet in his house, a skeleton of electricity and leather and whiskey. It stinks up that corner so he never goes there. He locked the door with a padlock so it would be hard to get into. His neighborhood is quiet, no record of home invasion, but there are closer demons than the nameless thieves in the night.

When he’s laying on his mattress with Suzie by his side, quiet now that they’ve fucked a second time, and he’s staring at the ceiling and the light fixture is bloodshot and blinking at him – The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain. – he can feel Crash in the closet, banging at the door to get out, he can smell the stench of him, of gunpowder and bad trips and murder. 

Marty wore that jacket with the full patch on the back and he must have known what it meant, he’d been in the force for too long not to know, even if bike clubs like the Iron Crusaders didn’t often make it up to him. Their murders were clear and motivated, rarely investigated the way they should, used as fodder to thicken the files that would take down men like Miles. 

He accepted it, though. He didn’t speak on it, didn’t judge it. Marty Hart, the great cowboy of Louisiana Homicide, let that wretched creature run free and didn’t come down on it afterwards. He let Rust put the box back in the closet and he still touched him like he wasn’t afraid of him, still fucked him like he wasn’t in danger. He liked being handled like he wasn’t a bomb waiting to go off. Or perhaps he liked that Marty didn’t care in that moment, that he might go off and kill the both of them at once, splattering red over the beige tiles in grotesque perversions of the shapes of their bodies. His mind supplied the image readily enough.

Marty lets go of him, lets that hand fall from the back of his neck as they reach their desks. Rust’s is clean and tidy, not a single sheet of paper out of place, not a hint of an open case, because there isn’t any. They’ve just finished one, the trail has ended with cuffs dug into a man’s skin and the wide, terrified eyes of cattle before execution. A commonplace crime, a commonplace horror, once again nothing sophisticated. Rust didn’t believe that homicide would be particularly rife with the sort of crimes you read in sensationally-titled books, but he’d thought there would be… more. He can get more intellectually stimulating shit from those dish rags they call gossip magazines, brightly colored like birds trying to attract mates, when he goes to buy his cigarettes at the shop next door to the station.

Marty threw him a comment about getting him one of those 3000-piece puzzles, threw it like a ball at football practice, and Rust let it fall down to the side and watched Marty’s eyes roll and his face show that look of ‘what else should I expect’ that he’s come to favor around Rust.

There’s a piece of wood and a knot of twine left over from those devil traps resting in the upper right corner of his desk, next to a neat stack of some procedure manuals he’s supposed to pass onto the next newbie to come in. There’s been one already, three weeks ago, but when Rust had made it in that morning, the kid’d been halfway down his first coffee, surrounded on all sides by Geraci’s little band of bootlickers and Rust hadn't even bothered with introductions.  

He can see him now, on his way out of the door with the brazen pep in his fucking step that comes with being fresh out the academy. He used to be that way too, before Paul and Ruddy had kicked some sense into him. 

Rust sits down and reaches for the pack of camels, and Marty reaches for his forgotten cup of coffee. It’s most likely cold by now but Marty has the uncanny ability to swallow down coffee no matter how long it has been sitting or how burnt it has become and Rust might just respect that quality in him more than any other. That’s a feat of herculanean strength if he’s ever seen one. 

They’ve got a rare empty workload, after months of back to back, open-simultaneously murders of jealous rage and covetous greed and insatiable lust, their own backwater Dante’s Inferno. 

The afternoon’s almost over. If they were any other men, they would walk out now, enjoy the early night with a beer and a conversation, but Rust doesn’t do beer and company, or early calls, and he’s managed to silently shame Marty into giving some of those habits up as well. They’re now staring at each other wondering who will make the first move and ask for additional work.

There’s politics to this sort of act. You can’t just shame your fellow officers by asking if they got anything they should be working on, no, you gotta beg for it, gotta add mumbles about not wanting to get home to the wife. That line only Marty can carry. He’s been back in Maggie’s good graces for two months now. 

Rust can beg. He can do it pretty too, can go with his hand outstretched like they’re giving him charity, like he’d owe them for it. Those are favors they’ll cash in when they need confessions and they see him idling in the station. They realized some time ago he’s good at those. He just enjoys the puzzles, and he enjoys watching human beings stripped down to their bare essential needs. He imagines he’d be entirely the same, pinned there and dissected, a rare butterfly in an entomologist's lab. 

Suffice to say, he’d rather Marty do it. At least he doesn’t have to flay himself open for it.

So they stare at each other and have this silent conversation, until they’ve reached an impasse and Rust just decides to wait it out. His eyes fall on the wood and the twine. They feel grotesque in this setting so devoid of anything natural, like broken off fingers of some greater entity, stolen in the night. 

They were called devil traps and Rust has been tangled up in them since he first saw them in that field on January 3rd. Did the one who made them know what it would mean to him? A child’s belief that evil could be warded off, left sarcastically to guard the corpse of a woman, of someone’s own child grown up to become disillusioned by the reality of life? 

Sophia wasn’t blonde, she had dark hair like her mother, a crow’s nest on the days they rushed out of the door late to drop her off at daycare. Still she’d haunted him that day, haunted the scenes of those crimes, all until Ledoux’s… bunker. He’d been too strung out for too long to remember her, until they’d had to move those bodies. It had been her hands pushing Marty out of the way to get the little girl. It had been her weight in Rust’s arms on the way out. 

Marty stands up with a long-suffering, exaggerated sigh, a smoke signal to all that he’s lost whatever silent battle he was fighting against his peculiar partner. That’s another way Marty can ask for work without shaming the others, by pretending Rust is pushing him to do unreasonable things. All Rust wants is for them to do their job, so he doesn’t have to go home early.

Rust stares at the back of Marty, the strong lines of shoulders and back, the way he stands with his feet apart, planted there like great oak trees to give himself balance. His hair is a little messy in the back, where he’s run his hand through it a number of times while they were talking to Quesada. He has one of his hands buried in one of his pockets, the other reaching forward, probably in the middle of asking for a file and it’s one hell of a picture, this all-American aged quarterback, begging for something under his breath. 

He’s never liked seeing that kicked-puppy look on Marty, the one he had when looking at Lisa at the Longhorn, when he wasn’t seething with rage. It feels obscene on a man like Marty, trying to make himself look innocent and victimized, trying to look small so someone will pity him. Rust finds it deeply unattractive, more so than the jealousy and the anger and the possessiveness, and all those biting, growling, snarling emotions that make a man into a beast, that make a man something to be scared of. 

Rust reaches up to grasp over the bitemark. He hides it with a roll of his right shoulder, like he’s working out a kink. 

They end up getting saddled with half the station’s paperwork, or something that feels like it at least, and Rust would care more that Marty is glaring daggers at him if he wasn’t cursing himself the whole time. He should have just accepted defeat and let Marty go home, while he went and hid in the archives somewhere in a cobwebbed corner until it felt safe to come out. It never felt safe to come out, but someone did eventually kick him out if he couldn’t justify his presence. 

“Maggie’s gonna kill me.”

“Just tell her you had to work late,” Rust mutters through his cigarette. Marty’s got one too, stolen from his pack as usual. It’s half burnt and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it sometimes, it just hangs from his fingers uselessly. He could use a pen just as well and not waste the smokes. 

“That ain’t gonna work. Used it too many times for her to believe me now.”

“Man who cried work,” Rust shrugs. He doesn’t pity him. 

He tunes back into the file in his hands, reading through the confession scrawled with a pencil that needs sharpening like a drunk needs whiskey, handwriting like chicken scratches on a yellow block of paper. 

“That does make me think…” Marty starts and trails off.

The confession, where he can read it, is from a man killing his wife, nothing new under the fucking sun and typing it up into a proper format is going to be hell. He guesses that’s what he deserves for asking for extra work. 

Marty still hasn’t spoken again so Rust sighs and looks up from the slice of human stupidity and cupidity smeared in goose poop colors in front of him.

The man looks at him in a way that makes Rust believe he’s had whatever he’s going to say on his mind for much longer than that ‘that makes me think’ lets on. He’s staring him down in a way, with those blue eyes like at the first sky of spring. 

Rust raises an eyebrow. They’re almost alone in the department now, everyone’s gone and left the kind of on time that feels early now that they’ve unloaded their paperwork on them. Whatever Marty wants to talk to him about now, pretending to be casual about it, as casual as a bullet to the gut can be, it’s something he doesn’t mind talking about here. But he does mind talking about it in the presence of the other detectives. 

“Maggie’s been asking me if you had a good time with Suzie.”

Rust frowns. He’s been expecting Marty to talk about something all day. It’s been hanging around, curdling the air, moving around them and tangled in their legs. But he was not expecting Suzie. 

“I…. Sure. She was a nice girl.” 

He doesn’t do this sort of conversation. Especially with Marty, who doesn’t usually mind boasting about his conquests around the others. Rust would think it’s because of what happened off Highway 10, if he had been more talkative before.  

“Hmm mmm.” Marty hums under his breath. “I told her we don’t talk like that, you and I. We don’t have that sort of a rapport.”

“Right.” Maggie would rather not know what kind of rapport Marty and him entertain. 

Rust turns away, towards the typewriter, and he starts to type out that shitstain of a confession. It would make him angry if he wasn’t so used to it now. Men hurt women everyday, those are not news stories. 

“So… Suzie?”

Rust looks back and Marty’s not moved, with that cigarette in his finger burning off almost unattended. That makes him roll his eyes more than the question, more than anything else. He should buy his own fucking smokes if he’s gonna waste them. 

“Friend of Maggie’s. She called me up to fix a pipe problem ten days ago.” He watches Marty tense across their desks. “Her pipes were fine, of course. 'Twas some great elaborate scheme to get me in my civvies at your place while her friend was there.”

Marty’s still eyeing him suspiciously, like he can’t quite believe he wasn’t trying to make a move on his wife. It’s fucking ridiculous, this peacocking of his, this fucking… pissing on the fence to mark it as his. Rust has no intentions whatsoever towards Maggie Hart. 

“So I show up. And Maggie’s busy but she says I should come in, and that the toolbox or whatever is in the kitchen. So I walk into the kitchen and sitting there with a glass of sweet tea half full, is this… Suzie.”

There’s nothing he dislikes more than this stupid sort of show and tell men do. But Marty’s got a look to him and he can’t tell exactly where it is going. He has no desire to get into a fight tonight. 

“Blonde,” he provides. “Nice girl.” He stops for a moment. “Good ass.”

He can see a look of recognition in Marty’s eyes at that. Fucker. Of course that’s what makes it click.

“Susan Cornell,” Marty explains. “From church.”

Rust chuckles and shakes his head. He thinks of the crucifix nailed into the wall above his bed, above where Suzie and him fucked, twice. When he was looking at blinking eyes in ceiling fixtures, she must have been looking at her lord and savior. 

“Well. We didn’t do that much talking, all things considered.”

“So. I guess you like yourself a blonde.”

It’s thrown at him for him to catch, and he can tell Marty’s mad underneath it all. He can’t really figure out why. Suzie was nice and they spent an enjoyable night and he drove her home in the morning because Claire force-fed him manners before their daughter was born. He can’t see where it could have gone wrong.

So he just shrugs and finishes his cigarette. “I actually don’t. Most of the time.”

Marty finally releases that cigarette from the throes of agony. He brings it to his lips and sucks in whatever pitiful amount remains, one deep drag that hollows his cheeks and makes him look angrier than before. Rust leans back against his chair and crosses his arms. Something’s coming, gathering over Marty like a cloud, wreathing his head in lightning and curses. It sparkles minty hot in between them and burns into Rust’s gums. 

“Well,” Marty finally starts after a moment. “Color me surprised. Thought you didn’t like women all that much.”

This one Rust expected. After Highway 10, after that half-earnest conversation where they’d danced around the topic like angels on the head of a pin, he’d gathered Marty thought the insults and slurs were at least backed by lived experience. That was a truly black and white view of human sexuality that Rust had always encountered particularly in those smoke-filled, misery-reeking liminal spaces they called police departments and community churches. 

He licks his lips. There’s a meal to be made of the discomfort Marty Hart will soon be squirming with. 

“You do realize I was married,” Rust starts, slow and lazy like he’s not even trying to explain himself. “For three years. With a daughter.” The simplicity of that equation is plain to see. Even Bobby’s math skills could withstand that examination. 

“Right. You wouldn’t be the first person to get married despite being unsuited to it.” 

This one blooms unexpectedly in Rust’s skull bringing back with it the taste of overfilled forgotten garbage bins and Claire’s voice, too calm and too emotionless telling him she was leaving. The aftertaste is corrosive, burns like acid into the soft, empty crevice underneath his tongue and Ginger’s voice is in his ear, his hand is in his hair, muttering that he’s not normal, he’s not made for normal life, for kids and wives and 9 to 5s, and Crash in him agrees wholeheartedly and shifts ever so closer, hunting for clammy skin under leather.

“I may not be very suited for it these days,” he admits. There’s no use in arguing with the truth of that. “But it isn’t for lack of liking women, Marty. Not that that’s any of your business.”

A phone rings, shrill and demanding attention and one of the secretaries rushes to get to it from the break room, a new one Rust hasn’t managed to catch the name of, something like Annamarie or Annie or Jackie, with ‘a’s and ‘ie’s like twinkling lights over a ferris wheel.

Marty waits until she’s gone to reply. He feels orange again, tense and rough like barbed wire, waiting for him to explode is like walking through the pretend minefields his father set up around the cabin in late spring.

“Well, I’d reckon it is.”

Rust laughs at that, one sharp bark of laughter like a creaking door. From the look on Marty’s face, disbelief and anger at once, he wasn’t expecting that.

“Why? Wanna be my boyfriend?”

The face Marty makes at that word tells him all he needs to know. There’s disgust there, shame and fear so bright, ice cold as the sea up there, sharp as the wind in the dead of winter. Marty makes him think too often of Alaska.

“Thought so.”

He doesn’t love the concept either: boyfriend feels like too sweet chocolate cakes and baby pink shirts and old ladies looking at them with a mix of fascination and pity, like leopard patterns and strawberry lube and calling each other pet names that made people want to commit hate crimes. 

That, the reminder of what people could think of him if they knew, how Geraci would have his balls cut and framed for all to see, that seems to quiet Marty down enough they can finish work.

By the time Rust makes it home that night, his saliva tastes like the yellow confession paper and he walks past Crash’s closet begging himself to give in and open the box and find the pocket sized Jameson intact in there. He doesn’t. 

There’s no bravery, no glory to the act of refusing himself alcohol. He just does, because he knows a single sip becomes a bottle in the blink of an eye, a taste becomes a torrent he cannot fight against. If he gives in, he might as well be on the Titanic in 1912, might as well sink and drown in ice cold memories of death blurred away by cheap whiskey. 

His house is damp with fall heat, with Louisiana mosquitoes and sweat and he finds himself falling into the beat up sofa chair he found himself a few days prior, tipped over on the side of the road by an empty house like a forgotten toy. It’s not too dirty, not clean either, but he couldn’t find bed bugs, just the beat-down of life. So he loaded it in the back of his pick up and brought it home.

Time passes like coffee in a slow drip. He kicks off his shoes and socks and takes off his shirt and tie, throws what’s in need of a wash in the lonesome basket in the laundry room and walks back, barefoot on the carpet into the main room. He was halfway through Camus’s The Stranger when he fell asleep last night and it sits face down, splayed open like a dead bird by the right side of the bed. He doesn’t mind the French when he can read them instead of having to hear them talk. 

He picks the book up carefully and throws a glance at the page he’d been on. Four bullets shot into a dead body. Barely enough emotion to fill one of the espresso cups of those French cafés where you drank at the bar in the morning, throwing back a shot of coffee and a cigarette in the same smooth motion. The portrait of a man so detached from the world that nothing, neither the death of his mother nor a murder committed by his own hand, seemed to shake him too hard. Rust hadn’t fallen asleep because of the book. It had been the pills. 

There is nothing to do here, no case to work, no mystery to uncover, nothing to sink his teeth into. He can’t go out fishing for it either, not if he doesn’t want to end up a fish hooked at the end of a line, mouth opening on nothing, drinking down alcohol instead of water but still trying to fucking breathe. There’s one thing left that’s not drinking. He’s gonna have to go on a run. 

If the inside of his house is a damp armpit in the fall heat, the back of it, the little garden patch with the shed that leads back onto a thin strip of water running down the back of the lot like a piss streak on the end of a sidewalk in the morning, is a Southerner’s deranged rendition of those Alaskan saunas. 

Rust starts jogging down there and feels immediately ridiculous, a puppet whose strings have been cut, left to flail around purposelessly. He knows that this is useful, that this keeps him fast and strong and allows him to handle himself better in the field, that it’s only because he kept up the fucking training that he made it out of that powderkeg with Ginger alive. The price of it is this, the sweat and the repeated motions that feel more awkward than anything else, that make him ache for a cigarette, that make him curse the day his father and mother fucked. 

The worst part is of course that he’s doing it to himself. 

It takes about fifteen minutes for his brain to start shutting up for the most part, no longer rattling on about punishments and self-flagellation but rather showing him perfect images of the terrible things that haunt his dreams, whenever he has them. Broken bodies on concrete and the crown of antlers he’s never, ever going to forget. Those devil traps that didn’t catch anything but Rust in their triangular cages. 

Those he thinks about most. He has half a mind to make one himself and tie it up somewhere, not too far from the crucifix, so that he has something else to meditate about. God and the Devil, allowing your crucifixion and allowing children to believe you can be stopped, two sides of the same fucked up coin the Christian church has tossed over and over, landing in every corner of the known world like a never-ending sickness. 

He can’t say that to Marty. He can’t say that to anyone. He does not actually want to die, though it would be one hell of a way to kill himself. If he can’t do it himself, might as well delegate. 

It takes him an additional forty-five minutes to realize the sun has set and he should go back. He’s coughing and sweaty and hungry like a wolf in winter when he comes back to the nunnery cell he calls home, but there’s a heaviness to his limbs that promises a semblance of rest for the night. It’s not going to come for free, no, there will be a price, some vision of some kind – nightmare-ish, dead kids or dead women or dead somethings, or worse, a good one, of happiness and smiles and the sand of the beach they used to go to by Corpus Christi those first two summers. It’ll come though. Perhaps even unmedicated. 

He opens the back door and walks in, guard all the way down, so of course he gets caught with his pants down like a fucking rookie. He didn’t lock the door when he left. He never does when he goes running, there is nothing worse in the world than the noise of jingling keys in his pocket, it’s loud and metallic and too round on the edges, and it’s not in the right rhythm, always a bit after his feet hit the ground. 

So when Rust comes home and sees Marty there, sitting in his chair with his tie askew and his eyes gleaming with something viscous, something ugly, he’s aware it is entirely his fault. If he was less of a priss about fucking keys, a wild animal wouldn’t have found its way in. 

“So what? You take her back to this dump? Fuck her on that stupid mattress you got like a fucking college student?”

Whiskey slurs his words and Rust rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might actually strain something. It’s about Suzie, it’s about Rust fucking a woman and it’s about Marty being a big tough guy and getting jealous like a teenage girl with a crush on an upperclassman that maybe said hi to her twice. He’s met enough teenage girls to know they get as murderous as gangbangers on a good day.

“I thought we had thoroughly established I don’t kiss and tell, Marty.”

It’s half of a threat underneath his heavy breathing and the sweat rolling down his back like the first drops of a rainstorm, heavy and slow and predicting something else. 

“It ain’t the same and you know it.” 

It’s not. He’s right. Suzie’s a woman and Marty’s a man and in this world, in this job, in Louisiana, it’s very different. No matter the truth of it, that deep down it’s all skin and bones and blood and Suzie’s teeth wouldn’t have hurt him differently than Marty’s did, and his blood wouldn’t have tasted different in either of their mouths. One day, he’ll be done pretending otherwise. Life is easier to live for now if it’s not made into hell by the men that think they know better than him what right is. 

The truth is, he hates them as much as they hate him.

“What do you want, Marty?” 

He’s hoping that this can be done before the heaviness in his limbs disappears, before the exhaustion falls under the neverending assault of his fucked up brain’s neon lights of thoughts. 

Marty growls under his breath as he stands up, an ugly sort of sound, wet with the alcohol and whatever anger he came in carrying and that sustained him sitting there in this chair for god knows how long. It’s not going to be done soon. It’s never going to fucking end. 

“You planning on seeing her again?” 

He’s stuck on Suzie, a skipping record on a turntable, one spiraling thought, that ugly green-eyed monster with teeth shaped like the scar on Rust’s shoulder. He should have known better than to think Marty would be done after that little interrogation at the station. He never is. He’s a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth with jealousy. 

“What I’m planning to do or not, is none of your business.” He’ll repeat it over and over again, but he’s not going to be happy about it.

Rust reaches for the camels on the kitchen counter, slides one out of the packet one-handed and brings it to his lips. Marty is glaring with that rage-filled intensity that makes his jaw lock into a hard, rectangular shape. A shiver runs down Rust’s spine, sharp and sudden like a lick of a lover’s tongue. 

“You gonna make her fuck you at one point? Tell her you like it like a queer?” 

Rust lights his cigarette and he swears he sees the flash of the flame reflected in the glassiness of Marty’s eyes. Jesus fuck, he’s drunk. 

“Are you gonna fucking stop with the childish insults and tell me what you mean or will I have to beat it out of you? I can treat you like a suspect, Marty, but you ain’t gonna like it.” 

He didn’t mean to get angry but he can feel it rising, the annoyance coursing through his veins like wildfire. He’s good at keeping his cool, at keeping his control, years of living with the strangest present father in the coldest part of the world, years of being someone else’s bitch to survive to the next day, of swallowing down his own vomit when seeing a man’s face without skin, choking to death and thinking this should be him, this will be him. He’s so fucking good at keeping his emotions buried deep inside that half the time he forgets they’re there. Marty’s somehow, within days of meeting him, managed to find the trigger to release them and he won’t fucking stop playing with it. 

Marty snarls now, raising his arms like he’s gearing for a fight because for all that fucking bravado and that attitude and the growling and snarling and acting like a big predator, he won’t talk about his fucking feelings. 

“That’s what I fucking thought,” Rust huffs and pulls on his cigarette, hard and long. He feels the smoke fill the empty cavity inside of his body, fill the space there and the space not there, the void where his heart beats hard and strong. It’s gray and red like blood, harsh as chemicals and natural as a forest fire. Marty’s staring at his mouth like he can’t believe it and Rust just sucks longer, until he runs out of oxygen and has to fucking let go. 

The smoke released rises like it’s signaling his position to someone, like it’s trying to warn others he’s in here. There’s no one to call. All there is is Marty there, that Rust can see through the screen of smoke he’s just created, big and strong and angry and almost ridiculous with it. He doesn’t know what to fucking do with himself. 

“I ain’t planning to see her again. I’m not tryna find a girlfriend, Marty. I just humor your wife ‘cause she doesn’t treat me like a lunatic half the time.” 

“Don’t fucking bring her up,” Marty points at him with his big hands, shaking almost from the anger and the tension and Rust shifts. There’s something different here than the game they’ve been playing. 

“We fucked, twice, on this mattress, and then she slept over and I drove her home. I’m a good little choir boy, Marty, I got manners.” Tame. 

He’s giving into Marty’s questioning because he doesn’t know what it is about anymore. Earlier he thought this was the game. But Marty’s actually mad, actually red with it, with the anger and the jealousy and the shaking need to grab at him and take him and get revenge for him… straying? Oh absolutely the fuck not. 

“If anything, if we’re going purely by numbers, she’s got more of a claim on me than you do, and you don’t see her parading around here acting like a kid whose favorite toy got stolen, now, do you?” 

There’s a flash of something on Marty’s face, something that Rust can’t recognize. Marty looks, briefly, like he’s been punched in the guts, but without the rage that comes with it, just the soft-tissue hurt of bones and organs getting unnaturally close. It’s gone within a blink. 

Sweat is drying on him now, a sticky and humid shell around his skin that makes the slowly gathering night outside feel almost cool. It’s a trick, he knows it. You can never trust sweat, it means too many things at once, it’s a pretty lie the body tells so you don’t believe you’re dying. He licks his lips and his tongue tastes salt. Tears or sweat, it all tastes the same. Another lie.

“You son of a bitch,” Marty spits out. “You fucking emotionless robot fuck,” he hisses at him, pointing a finger like an Old Testament God. “Fuck a woman, doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck a man, doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck me, no wonder your wife left you if you’re that big of a fucking…. Black hole of decency.” 

Rust puts down his cigarette, shoves it down into the ashtray in one smooth, hard motion. It’s getting out of hand. Marty’s ranting, and the things he’s saying… Claire’s staring at him in the corner with blood on her hands calling him a psychopath. How can you not care? Did you even love her? 

“They should lock you up, you know? Holes in the brain, shouldn’t get to go around with a gun. Shouldn’t get to go around with shit. Can’t act like a normal person for a fucking second, man.” 

He means it too, at this moment, Rust can tell. He means it, and he’s fucking right on every fucking count. 

“Marty, you should go,” he says with every bit of restraint he can pull out of his own scarred bone bag he calls a body. He might puke. He might bash his head in. There’s red and metal behind his tongue, blooming with every beat of his heart. “Before you say something you might regret.” 

“Right, cause none of this fucking touches you. Psychopathic fa–”

Rust’s on him before he can finish the sentence, grabbing his tie and pulling hard. Psycho. 

Marty chokes out some aborted noise of surprise and pain and tries to fight back but he’s stupidly drunk and Rust’s sober and hot and filled with so much fucking blood right now. It’s inside of him, bubbling and boiling, getting darker by the second. Next time Marty bites him, it’ll come out black and thick as tar. Marty can’t bite shit right now. 

He’s got his face slammed against the counter and his arm twisted behind his back and Rust’s full weight, with the years of training and knowing and skill, bearing down on him, hurting him. 

“Let GO of me, Rust!” Marty sputters, but it sounds scared, squeaking in Rust’s mind like a rat caught in a trap and it’s one of the most jubilatory feelings he's felt in a while. He’s not a violent man by nature. He just has an appreciation for violence.

Claire’s voice rings in his head. Psycho. Basket case. Why can’t you cry? Why can’t you be as sad as me? She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get the empty hole where his heart used to be, and how that’s taking in all the water. He has a waterfall inside, nothing can escape. 

“Listen to me very carefully now, Marty,” Rust hisses down into his ear, slow and threatening and with every part of him bubbling up with unshakeable anger. How fucking dare he call him that? Walking into his fucking house drunk and out of his mind because Rust dared to fuck someone else? “You’re gonna need to stop this shit.”

Marty bucks against him like a bronco, tries to shove him off but this time Rust isn’t moving. His whole weight is bearing down on him, his arm twisting Marty’s behind him so he can hear the menacing creak of the shoulder like music to his ears, like nails on a chalkboard equally. He can see Marty’s red face pressed into the white of the counter, can feel his body under his, a mass of muscle and fat and nerves and animalistic fear. He has one leg between Marty’s. A plume of smoke still rises from the ashtray.

“Don’t fucking believe for a single second that this?” He grinds his hips into Marty’s ass, slow and dirty and hard and the noise that escapes his partner is a shameful mix of emotions that bloom maroon into his mind and taste like sour candies. “Means you get a say in what the fuck I do with my life. I will let you bitch about my behavior at work but anything regarding the personal sphere is none of your fucking business.”

He wishes he could bite him now, sink his teeth into his neck and tear at the flesh with his own mouth but it would leave a mark. They can’t afford marks that cannot be covered by fabric. 

“I know this is your usual little…. Pathetic trumped up drama you do with the girls you fuck,” he continues and he does let his teeth graze the lobe of Marty’s right ear where he’s speaking, a threat and a promise. “I’m not one of your girls, Marty. You don’t own me. What happened off of Highway 10? I let happen cause I wanted a good time, and don’t you ever fucking forget that I let you fuck me.”

It’s the ‘let’ that makes Marty freeze in his tracks. Rust can almost hear his mind going, the gears shifting as he tries to make sense of what has just been said. Was he still deluded in thinking he made Rust do something he wasn’t entirely interested in? Had he still been living in the fantasy that the little exercise in domination was one Rust wasn’t entirely consenting to, that his folding had been coerced? 

Rust immediately lets go of him, the ugliness of that feeling burning under his hands. The ugliness and the ridiculousness. He takes a step back and watches Marty squirm his way back to being upright, raise his arms to cover his face, something wild and unbalanced in his eyes. 

He can’t help but drag his hands down against his undershirt, feel the sweat getting caught there and the feeling of Marty’s skin, hot and damp and desperate, hopefully letting it smear on the fabric. 

Marty stares at him, in utter disbelief. Even in the depths of Crash, Rust didn’t touch him like that. Oh, he wanted to, he wanted to to the point of getting hard at the very thought, but he didn’t. He had better things to do, Ginger to deal with, the memories and the cocaine to eat through.

Laughter bubbles out of Rust’s chest, tar-like, weighed down by cigarettes and the absolute ridicule of this, of them, watching each other like they’re about to pounce, two large predators stuck in one small room, except Rust’s not playing submission anymore and neither of them really knows what to do with that. 

So he laughs, laughs without smiling, with the jerks of it shaking his body, shaking his shoulders and the reminder of what Marty did that time, the healed scar that will never fucking go away. His laughter echoes in this white, empty room, bounces against the wall and comes back like a punch into their ears and he can’t stop himself, even as he sees Marty brace himself to be enraged again. 

“What’s funny?” Marty spits out but a lot of the bite is gone. He can’t recognize where they stand either. He just stands there, rumpled and a bit less drunk now that adrenaline has burnt through his veins with every rabbit-scared beat of his big beefy Southern heart. He’s getting hard in his pants too and there’s acid red victory in the back of Rust’s molars and in the depths of his guts. 

“You think…” Rust chuckles and shakes his head like it’s the best job he’s heard all year. It might be. “I was gonna fold for you?” The idea is sending zaps of hysterical joy through his confused brain and he can swear the smoke of the ashtray is shaped like a great big bird in flight. A vulture maybe, or Jesus Christ, or Superman, or Dora Lange. A Rorschach test, homemade and addict-approved.

“You… you came here. And you thought… What?” He continues, and he can feel his mouth pulling into a smile, or what would have been a smile on anyone but him. On him, it’s a clown’s forced rictus, it’s the pull of lip over fang, it’s ugly and vicious and cold as the tools a dentist shoves into your mouth and to replace everything where it’s supposed to be. It tastes like metal and bleach. “I was gonna be a good bitch and not say shit when you treat me like you got ownership papers?”

Marty’s eyes are saucer-wide. He’s never seen him smile, he realizes. He’s never seen him do more than a vague smirk and an eyebrow raise and that’s for the better because smiling feels wrong. His cheeks hurt with the ache of unused muscle. There is no happiness there. 

“Bitch,” he calls out, and Marty gets angry again, because that’s not a word you use on a man like him, no. “I didn’t fold for the fucking bike guys I was sucking off with a gun to the head for years, you think Imma fold for your over-inflated rat ego?”

He hasn’t said it to anyone before: not the shrinks, not the doctors, not his handlers. It’s not in any file, redacted or not, it’s not in the notes the shrinks took in Northshore, or in rehab, it’s nowhere but in his mind. And in Marty’s now. 

Regret hits him like a tsunami and he buckles underneath the weight of it, he can see it in Marty’s eyes, the widening, the realization of what it all means, the painful context he’s just imposed onto their relationship and onto what happened off of Highway 10. He wants to recall it immediately, to take it back, but he can’t.

A fly has been trapped since he came in, flying around the room in a frenzy to get out. He wonders, briefly and senselessly, if it knows the swamp of tension it just flew into and is now regretting ever heading in behind him. 

There’s too much Crash in him. The vocabulary and the admission, that’s Crash’s addled brain and his need to prove his toughness, it’s the anger at being thought of as weak. Rust’s not much better than him in that department but Crash is a mess of vulnerability sometimes: he was designed that way. That soft underbelly gets a bike guy like Ginger all hot and bothered, they can smell the bitch they can make out of him and that means an in. And once you have an in, you toughen up, learn to hide the soft behind armor, and show you can play as tough as everyone else, but the guy that got you in, like Ginger for Crash, knows the soft is there. It’s power and hierarchies and jungle law. 

Marty has no way of knowing all this shit. All he sees is Rust laughing like a maniac and throwing him a truth shaped like one of the bones that he must have imagined this whole time and buried deep with the rest of the queer shit he feels and sees in his dreams. A predator realizing his prey is rabid. 

“Jesus Christ, Rust.” 

Rust flinches. It’s a whole body thing, a pulse of electricity shot through him. The crucifix on the wall stares at them with unseeing undead eyes. It’s the same sort of ‘jesus christ’ that Marty says in front of a gored up body, in front of a godless crime, where he feels compelled to bring in his higher power of choice as back up. That’s how he’s reacting to Rust telling him he gave head at gunpoint. 

It’s an entirely appropriate reaction. Rust wants to wash his mouth of the taste of his pity; burned building and overripe cranberries. 

He’s on Marty like wildfire, sudden and unforeseen and he can taste whiskey now, a cheap one too, and beer as well, and cigarettes, terrible ones, not Camels. Marty smokes Camels because he steals them from Rust. The new smell on his clothes and taste in his mouth is disgusting. It’s still better than cranberries. 

Marty takes forever to kiss back, as if he doesn’t know what to do now that he’s not the one on the offensive, as if he wasn’t expecting this at all. He probably wasn’t. Two minutes ago, his cheek was hard against the counter and he was trying to get away from the wave of violence coming his way. Three minutes ago, he was shouting slurs at him. 

He grabs onto Marty’s head with both hands, a tight grip to keep him there but Marty’s not fighting him right now. He’s still reeling from the shock of it. Which shock? He’s not gonna ask, it’s not worth the taste. So he bites him. Hard, hard enough to bleed and there’s a beauty there, in the taste of iron and death that fills his mouth, a mirror to the beige-tiled memories. 

“The fuck!” Marty tries to exclaim, to project the word like a weapon but he’s got Rust’s lips against his and the offense dies there, muffled. 

There’s scratchy hair grown in uneven spots around Marty’s mouth, thin lips stained with the whiskey, the blood pearling over the torn skin, Rust half loses his mind over the textures of it all, the zings of electricity the whiskers send up into his brain with every brush. He’s not a great kisser, he’s been told, he uses too much teeth and is either too intense or too soft with it. He kisses like speaking a foreign tongue, mouth clumsy with positions it is not used to taking. 

Marty doesn’t get to complain. Like Rust didn’t get to complain about sitting in strange positions for a day or two. You can’t complain about things that don't happen. 

When he pulls back, Marty is staring at him with the blood on his lips and the liquor in his eyes and he seems utterly gobsmacked by it all. This is the sort of moment in time where Rust could step back and choose something else. His mind is clear after all, the pills have been out of his system for hours, he’s sober and as clean as he’ll let himself be, he’s just fresh from a run, he’s as close to the picture of fucking health that he can get. He can choose not to thread the needle deeper in. 

They’re partners. They’re coworkers. They’re men who cannot afford to be found out. Marty’s drunk and hard and angry, Rust knows exactly what to do with it. All that misplaced, desperate masculinity has a home, and he can fix it, for just a moment, he can take it into himself and eat it up, and use it to fuel his own dumpster fire body. Whatever that ends up doing to Marty, sending him into the sort of tailspin a man like him doesn’t recover from, that’s fine. That will keep him from staring too hard at Rust’s mouth and imagining things.

Rust is an addict. He’s always been, in some way, with an addictive personality and chasms where reserves of feelings should have been built by his parents. He drank early, smoked earlier, got hooked on adrenaline bow hunting caribou, then stealing bikes, then stealing books. He’s an addict. And Marty’s bright like cocaine, green like absinthe, hard and needy and alive and kicking like a bull in his hands right now. He’s gotta feed the habit. 

His hands drop from face to belt, start undoing it in frantic motions, but they’re steady. These are Rust’s hands, not Crash’s. This is Marty, this isn’t Ginger. It’s barely night, he’s home. He knows who he is, what today is, he knows who the president is. Clinton, September 15th ‘95, Rustin Spencer Cohle. 

Marty’s fingers are on his arm, tracing the edges of the old black bird with some kind of junkie’s fascination. From where Rust is, he can taste the questions on the other man’s tongue. When did you get this? Why? What does it mean? The truth is ugly and Rust will have to do much more than fuck Marty to get him to forget those answers, so he doesn’t leave him time to ask. 

He shoves his hand down the front of Marty’s pants and grabs his cock. Marty’s breath stutters and he makes a noise that only makes Rust tighten his grip. He watches pleasure and pain and everclear need bloom over Marty’s features, his head tilting back until he’s stuck against a wall and breathing out with the feelings of it. He can see it like a cloud exhaled from that open mouth. It’s incredibly vulnerable. Is this what the women get to see? Anyone but Maggie? 

There’s nothing like watching a man get high from his touch, even as small as this. Soon, with more touching, with more skin touching and sweat dripping, he’ll see the heart of him, chest splayed open, ripe for the taking. He cannot wait. 

“What are we doing?” Marty asks, breathless, needy, confused to his very core. Rust pulls out his hand for a second, just to spit on it, and pushes it back into the open fault of his slacks.

“I’m jerking you off,” Rust replies without missing a beat, and he sees Marty’s mouth open, sees the questions pressing there, the feelings he has about it, and decides to shut it down. “Stop talking.”

And though it bothers him, though Rust can see the anger rising into him like a dark cloud of storm over the prairie, he does shut the fuck up. There’s a second where all there is is the uncomfortable noise of almost dry skin rubbing together and a slightly labored breath. They’re so close now, there’s nowhere to look but Marty’s face, or the wall. And he’d stare at Marty for hours if he could, probably, if only it meant Marty wasn’t looking back at him more and more disturbed. 

So the wall works. It’s white and from here he can see the texture of the paint. He can feel his eyes darting towards Marty, pulled by some sort of magnetic field to the wet saliva on his open lips, to the half glazed eyes. He watches, from the corner of his eye, the expanding and contracting of the barrel of his chest, ragged and almost forced in between the little groans of pleasure. This is a position Rust’s familiar with, a hand down someone’s pants and the wall as horizon, as anchor. His head isn’t swimming in substances, but he feels a little unsteady all the same, deep down. Like his core ain’t working right anymore, something’s got shaken loose and he’s teetering at the edge of passing out. 

He leans closer, lets his weight rest against Marty’s shoulder, let his face tuck into the crook of his neck and mouths there, teeth grazing sweaty red skin, hand moving in lazy, dry motions. He can’t help but take it slow now. 

If they were other men, Rust might be on his knees right now, with his mouth full of the hot, heavy cock that Marty’s thrusting into his hand. But that’s not a position he’s willing to take today. Not with Marty. Not when sober. There are limits to how much he’ll debase himself with a man who can’t look him in the eyes when he’s giving him a handjob but doesn’t mind breaking into his house to berate him for fucking a random woman. 

For a moment there, it’s almost nice. It’s a little slow, a little sweet, Rust’s mouth is sucking marks in Marty’s skin that might threaten the fragile state of his marriage, but Marty says nothing, just moans, just bucks into his hand with primal, needy focus. 

It’s not what he wants. He cannot, under any circumstance, do sweet. And neither can Marty. He might not know it but sweet would shatter the thin veneer of straight masculinity he still coats over every interaction they have, the one so many men before him have used before, Rust shamelessly standing in that particular line up. He’ll admit to himself it would be harder to deal with Marty if he was the one that made him queer. It’s mostly for his own personal convenience that he goes through the roster of insults and taunts his mind readily provides. 

He doesn’t have to settle on one of those venomous, taunting spikes, Marty’s hand is on his, uncomfortable, firm, moist, holding his hand that’s holding his dick, nails digging in, hard. He’s maybe just realized this too; that he needs the harshness as the shield for his comfort, and there’s a relief there, Rust finds, in not having the responsibility of Marty’s sense of self rest entirely on his shoulders. 

The angle is worse suddenly, pulling at Rust’s shoulder unnaturally, but it’s easier psychologically. The motions of his hand are harsh, stunted, mechanical now, no longer sweet and languorous, no longer about pleasure. It’s power, again. It’s impersonal, like they’re not the men they are anymore, but still holding too hard onto their roles to let themselves do the exact things they’d like to do. Archetypal. 

Is it part of that pantomime when Marty shoves him back and Rust lets him, back towards the mattress on the ground and its white sheets, clean and fresh because he didn’t want to sleep in fucked-in sheets? Is it part of the play, the sharp sliver of a whine, an injury all the same, when Rust’s hand slips from Marty’s pants as he lets himself settle horizontally? 

He can read the spine of a book on his left, at the corner of his vision, ‘Sex Crimes’ written in obscene bright letters on black background, chemical, loud. It’s a title that screams at you, that demands fascination and horror, that tastes like bile from vomiting on an empty stomach, that feels like that too, eyes bulging, chest heaving, desperate to expel something unnatural and threatening.

Rust looks up at Marty towering over him, at the open pans and the ruffled shirt and the alcohol glaze over it all. He runs his tongue over his teeth, seeks out the sweet sweet taste of the pleasure, of the blood, of the whiskey. Marty stands there long enough for Rust to think of ancient Greeks and circular, traditional violence again, of heroin in his veins and Jameson in his mouth, of relief, of caramel. 

Marty hesitates but he can’t stop watching him, eyes like highway beams over him, staring at the sprawl of his form, the bulge in his sweatpants, the parting of his lips. He can’t look away and that terrifies him, that disgusts him, and Rust is about to pounce and pull him down himself when he finally moves. 

Whatever choice he made there, behind blue eyes where alcohol decreases and fear rises to take its place, that’s gonna come back to bite Rust in the ass one of these days, but he can’t bring himself to fucking care. Adrenaline, need, hunger thin out his blood and his heart is pumping hard, fast, down into his dick. He hasn’t felt this good in a while. He hasn’t felt this hot in a while either.

In this moment, in this choice posited behind normalcy and sin, he’s a succubi for Marty Hart, and there is a delicious irony to it. Marty Hart and his girlfriends and pieces of ass, standing at the door to Hell staring at a fully clothed but hard as rock carcass of a man. 

Marty takes off his clothes like he’s being processed at Avoyelles. Rust kicks off his trainers and the sweat-soaked, uncomfortable warmth of his sweats and there is relief at being naked. 

The bed is too narrow for the both of them, two grown men and the width of Marty, a problem Rust didn’t have with Suzie. Marty runs a hand up Rust’s leg, there’s almost a naive confusion to the way he feels him up, catching nails in hair, lean muscle where fat usually is. Rust doesn’t think he’ll ever be soft, age will dry him up, hollow him out, before it ever happens for him.

Rust lets him do it, touch and prod and grab what he wants. He reaches for lube and condoms by the pile of books to his right (next to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood), pops open the cap and slicks his fingers and there’s a look and a sigh of relief from Marty. Rust huffs, rolls his eyes, gets to work.

He’s fast and he’s thorough and doesn’t care for comfort as much as he should. There's a wince of pain, a sharp tang of acidity behind his teeth and he’s not even trying to make it part of the event for him. It has never really been about that. Foreplay is a luxury for women like Susan Cornell from church. 

The speed is to accommodate his own racing need, the heartbeat in his veins, the heat in his belly, the aching hardness of his cock, but it’s also to keep Marty from running away before they can both get something out of this, to keep him from achieving clarity of thought and running away like he probably should.

Three fingers in, tight, barely wet enough, electricity zinging up his spine with every shift of his hips, a spasm there but he’s almost done. Marty’s staring at his fingers with barely contained fascination, like he’s never fucked someone up the ass before, like he’s never fucked Rust up the ass before. 

Done, finally. Marty reaches for him when he finally finds himself ready, reaching for his hip and starting to pull at him, to get him into whatever position he seems to want him in. There’s another hand reaching for a pillow so Rust guesses he’d rather he be on his front, eyes looking away. Easier, more anonymous, less of a torturous memory, less shameful to put in his spank bank for later. 

Rust’s hand wraps around Marty’s wrist and tightens, hard, over the tendons on the sides, forcing him to let go of his grip. Marty’s cursing and calling out Jesus, telling him to let go but he doesn’t, not until he’s shoved him on his back, sprawled there in all his fucking glory. 

“What are you-”

Words die in his mouth. Rust sinks down on his cock with a hiss. Too hasty with the prep, but it’s fine, there will be no damage from this, just the blankness washing over his mind in the path of the hurt. 

Marty’s eyes are wide. Blue, like a summer sky. Red with lust, intense with pleasure and hunger. Church windows. Bells ringing. Rust can feel him inside, hard and thick and perfect, just fucking perfect. He’s wrenched control away and the truth is Marty’s in heaven right now from it, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, hands fluttering uselessly to the side. He wants to touch him, Rust can tell that much. He doesn’t know how to. 

Power. 

Rust starts moving. It’s a slow, heavy drag at first, in those first seconds where he gains his footing. His thighs start aching within seconds. He’s not ridden anyone in years, and definitely not on this mattress, in this apartment. His body’s not used to this anymore but muscle memory is a long lived creature, and there is nothing it known how to do better than fucking. 

“Ain’t gonna do all the work, Marty,” he warns when his thighs start complaining and somehow; that does it.

Marty’s hands snap to his hips to hold, fingers wrapped around the hard ridge of bone under the skin, hard, tight. It’s like he’s remembered he knows how to fuck someone like this, that he’s done this before. It’s so much better then onwards. 

Rust grinds his teeth and doesn’t say a fucking word, just moves, and takes and fucks himself on Marty’s dick and lets the crashing waves of feeling: pleasure, pain, sweat rolling down his back, nails digging in his hips, ache in his thighs, take him away. It’s so fucking easy, it comes naturally, like breathing air, like dancing to music, like running away.

He keeps his moans to himself, keeps his words behind lock and key, stares at the fucking ceiling now. He can’t see it, not really, he’s just chasing it, the pleasure running down the notches his spine, the heat that burns through him, and it’s not as good as heroin, it can never be, but for half a second, he pretends he’s not falling back into a habit. 

Marty’s hand sneaks from hip to stomach, to the three points of scar tissue on his chest. There’s a fascination under the groans, under the words he says that Rust is absolutely not listening to. He’s chasing something he’s not finding, desperate for the high of it, wishing they were against a wall, wishing for blood, for hurt, for electricity and leather. He misses Crash for half a second, Crash and the recklessness with which he fucked. Mindless, animal, painful. 

And then, and then. Marty’s hand wraps around his dick, tight, sudden, and Rust wasn’t looking where that second hand went, he wasn’t paying attention and he groans, high and surprised and ripped out of his throat with tooth and nail. Marty’s bitten the bullet, must have decided that if he was fucking him, he might as well fucking touch him too, right? He’s staring at his dick in his hand like he’s never seen a penis before and it’s hilarious, and sad at the same time.

Retaliation for taking him off guard. Rust shifts his weight back, leans a bit differently and suddenly the angle is just right and he feels pleasure, white hot and blinding, rushing through his bones, through his veins. He stops there for a second, grinds, slow and hard and dirty, muscles tightening around Marty. 

“Rust, goddamn it,” Marty hisses, choking with pleasure, grip around his dick not letting up, which is starting to hurt, which is perfect. 

Fuel, fire. Marty says his name like a curse, like something dirty and wrong and wretched. Rust bites his own lip until he tastes blood, hot, red, violent and metallic. A crowbar in the legs, a bullet ripped through his chest, broken bones, cocaine, a kiss from an ugly, dirty mouth, yellowed teeth and animalistic greed. 

Marty comes first. He barely has time to warn, barely has time to say a thing, he’s wrecked when Rust looks down at him finally from the haze of blood and pleasure. There’s sweat shining on him, redness everywhere, strain in the muscles of his chest, of his groin. He’s desperate. He needs an orgasm like a junkie needs a fix. Rust recognizes it. And he’s always been generous when it came to bringing people down with him.

Fingers tighten around him, stopping to jerk him off, grabbing at his hip to keep him down, keep him from moving away from long enough to fill the condom. He can feel the force there, feel how Marty wouldn’t stand him to wrench himself away so he doesn’t move, gives him at least that. 

The noise Marty makes when Rust starts moving again, squeezing around him to finish getting himself off: wrecked, small, wounded. That’s what makes him come. He wants to laugh with it, but all he does, once the white, blinding light is gone, once the rubber band has snapped, once pleasure has washed through him, cleansing fire, salt in wounds, all he does is smile. 

They’re panting. Both of them. Loud, bovine breathing in the silence. Rust lets himself get off that ride, lets himself fall, boneless, exhausted, high for a moment. He stretches himself out on the part of the mattress Marty isn’t occupying, watching from the corner of his eyes the rising and falling of Marty’s chest. His eyes are wide open, staring at the wall, at the crucifix. At Jesus Christ, lord and savior, and witness, sole witness of the blood pearling on Rust’s lips, of the splash of white semen on Marty’s stomach.

The laugh is wrenched from Rust’s chest without him having time to stop it. It’s maniacal, rusted, with those edges of contempt and pity. Pity for whom? Marty, who keeps straying further and further away from propriety, from normalcy, from sanity? Himself, who just fucked his partner, the one and only person who can stand to be in the same room as him for longer than five minutes, to satisfy the burning itch of addiction? 

Rust finds cigarettes and a lighter to his right, takes out two. His lip hurts, sharp and bright and tangy when it stretches as he puts one in his mouth. He lights it first, takes one long inhale of it. He holds it out to Marty, with his blood on it, and that’s unhygienic at best, dangerous at worst, and disgusting no matter what, but Marty – father of two, cowboy of Louisiana State – Hart takes it and starts smoking.

He lights the second and keeps it. His body is loose, relaxed for the first time in forever, sated. Pain and pleasure as self actualisation. 

He glances over at Marty, at the frown on his brow: deep in thought, hardness in his eyes, cogs turning in the background, so hard Rust can basically hear them. It’s even hotter than the blind pleasure and death of shame he just witnessed. 

“He ain’t gonna come to life cause you keep staring at him, you know? Jesus is dead.” 

Marty’s eyes dart to him, sharp and furious for a second and familiar. Rust’s teeth ache with it, with the knowledge he has of this look. He’s missed knowing people, he has to admit. He’s missed reading the shifts in body posture, the licking of lips, the popping of veins on foreheads, the darkening or lightening of eyes. Knowing Marty like this, even outside of the biblical nature of what they’ve just done, it’s good. 

“Don’t. Don’t bring this up right now.” 

It’s a warning, there’s a bite under it, and that’s surprising. Rust knows Marty’s as loose and tired as he is, probably even more with the alcohol he had before, and the anger burning energy. He still wants to fight him though. Doesn’t go soft and gentle on him. Good. Easier this way. Much more comfortable.

Silence falls again, just the sounds of cigarette smoke, the weight of it like swamp water in the room. Sweat cools, his lip stops bleeding. He doesn’t know how long time passes. 

“You should go. Maggie’s gonna wonder where you are.”

Marty moves. He shifts over, on his knees, cigarette in his mouth, hand landing on Rust’s throat and gripping. It’s violent and it’s sudden and there’s ash falling down barely an inch from his fucking face and the anger…. Oh the anger. Marty is glaring down at him but he’s not pressing down, he’s not hurting him. It’s a threat. It’s incredible.

“I just fucked you and you’re gonna say her fucking name? You’re a disturbed motherfucker.” 

Rust blinks at him, lazy, slow, unimpressed. They’ve just fucked, and he’s just come but this… It’s a treat. Ice cream after dessert. Indulgent. Minty. 

“World doesn’t stop turning just cause you came, Marty. Your stolen pleasures never actually belonged to anyone but you, it’s your time you’re using. No one else’s. You still got a wife.”

And oh, he hates it right now, he hates that Rust isn’t afraid and flinching away. That he’s got his hand on his throat and the weight of a former quarterback and current cop thrown over him, ready to crush, and he’s not fighting back. He keeps hoping Rust will forget he’s been threatened by scarier men before. He keeps hoping he’ll be the tougher one this time. 

“Get off of me, Marty,” Rust continues, calm. That Crash tire fire from earlier is gone, quieted down by an orgasm and a release. He’s taken control back and so the leather and the baseball bat and the barbed wire has been put away for a second. Get off of me, Marty, or I will break your arm getting you off myself. 

Marty doesn’t lean back. He leans forward. He kisses him.

Rust has to admit, this one was unexpected. This one doesn’t make sense in the framework he’s been working with, where Marty hates himself and is too much of a coward to touch a man in any way that isn’t violent. This one takes half of his breath away, coupled with the hand on his throat that finally does press in just a bit, it steals one terrible sound of yearning and pleasure from Rust. 

And the second that sound resounds around them, he’s pushing back. Puts his cigarette into the ashtray he could reach with his eyes gouged out, and grabs Marty’s hair. Blonde, and soft and sweaty from sex. He pulls hard, ugly, and Marty hisses in pain and bites his lip before he’s wrenched away.

Blood, and pain again. Rust pulls him away from him, tearing him off, and only lets go when he’s back on his knees too, no longer slow and lazy and warm. 

“Bitch,” Marty spits out, but it’s foreign to his mouth and he doesn’t mean it, not really. 

Rust reaches for the still burning cigarette and shoves it back into his mouth and winces, properly winces. He didn’t fucking miss him with those teeth. It’s gonna be worse this time than the last, he’s gonna have to explain the split. 

“I’m not your bitch, Marty,” he replies. “Never gonna be. I ain’t scared of you.” 

He watches it ripple over Marty’s face, the knowledge, the realization, curtains of delusion and denial parting. They’re afraid of him, the women he calls bitch, the women he gets jealous over. He uses his badge and his dick like weapons. Unfortunately for him, Rust also has both of those. 

Marty stumbles to his feet and Rust watches him put on his clothes again, using Rust’s discarded shirt to clean himself off of the fluids splashed over his stomach. Hiding away all the evidence. It’s not the triumphant relaxation of last time. It’s ugly and mean between them now. Unpleasant, and a little worrying.

Camaraderie might be gone forever now. Marty broke the treaty first, he attacked first, came into Rust’s house guns blazing but he’s never going to see it that way. He never does. He’s always betrayed, forever Abel, never throwing the first stone. 

He runs from Rust’s house, from the evidence of it. Rust lays back on his bed, lazy and tired. Deep down, somewhere, he’s hoping the fragile partnership they have hasn’t broken irreparably. It would be a shame. 

The eye was in the tomb and watching him. 

---------

*"The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain" is the last line from La Conscience/The Counsciousness by Victor Hugo, one of my favorite poems of all time.

Throughtout the whole poem, Cain attempts to run away from the eye of God that won't stop staring at him after he's killed Abel. He runs to other countries, his children build cities where people cannot enter without forsaking God, but nothing works. So he asks them to build him an underground chamber, a sepulchre where he will be alone. They do. He goes sit down in that dark chamber, they close the door and he stays alone in the dark. And in the darkness of the walls. The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain.

[transmascswagpolls]

Transmasc Swag Polls- ROUND 1

Propaganda and other info under the cut.

CANONICITY LEVELS-

LANQUE: CANON Transgender Troll

c!FUNDY: (pseudo) CANON Transgender Man. Fox. Blockguy (he was written by the former head writer of the DSMP as transmasculine but the person who played him, Fundy, says that it's up for interpretation. It's pretty explicit in story moments though) MEDIA? Hiveswap Friendsim and Hiveswap Act 2, Dream SMP LANQUE PROPAGANDA- we need more problematic trans guy in this poll he is such a little bitch but in an enjoyable way hope he has fun in hatched 2 dance :3 [Pollrunner's Note: He is one of three male Jade trolls in the entire Homestuck series, a blood caste that consists almost entirely of female trolls. One that has HEAVY ties to motherhood and the Christian imagery and ideas of feminimity. Lanque is heavily coded as a vampire- literally meant to be an 'emotional vampire' and everything that represents. He grows up in what is essentially an "all girl's school" and is uncomfortably lumped in with Bronya's grouping of "her girls". It's never stated in text, but you can very explicitly tell that Lanque is trans because we get to see his chest. Only afab trolls have nipples in Homestuck and one of the cis male trolls in the same game has no nipples to speak of in his shirtless sprite sheet. One of the game over routes in Hiveswap Act 2 ends after he's confronted with being involved in theft. Since it was meant to be a ploy for him to be able to finally run away, he decides to THROW YOUR CHARACTER OFF OF A MOVING TRAIN. Literally one of the few canon examples on this poll that truly earns the title of Transmasc Wrongs.] c!FUNDY PROPAGANDA-

This character canonically and explicitly being a trans man is an important part of his lore, and also marks the character as Definitely being separate from his actor. when his father wilbur was around, he always babied fundy, who wanted to be taken seriously and treated independently. when another guy, schlatt, came into power and exiled wilbur, fundy latched onto him instead, seeking his approval while also spying from the inside. unfortunately, over this time wilbur’s paranoia grew, so by the time schlatt became too unstable and even schlatt’s supporters (fundy and quackity) were joining wilbur’s rebellion, wilbur no longer trusted his son, and also blew himself and their entire nation up. [Pollrunner's Note: One of the last acts c!Jschlatt takes in the story, with his dying breath, is to tell Fundy that he is the one thing that Fundy will never be- "a man".]

[sizzlinbaconpeach]

The text connecting Chris and Jill is “戦友” or “kanyuu” which translates to “commrade in arms; war buddy”.?

in the Revelation's bio for Chris, they called him Jill's Brother-in-arms.?

So they don't have feelings for each other?

https://www.tumblr.com/chirikalovesjill/34500920927/where-did-this-picture-come-from-please-anyone

Hello Anon! I want to start off by saying that it's okay if you don't ship Chris and Jill romantically - not everyone does. I mentioned in a previous post how I can certainly see how others would only view their relationship as platonic or coworkers. Unfortunately, the link in your question does not work so I'm sorry I can't respond to that in particular. And I am not trying to sow any discontent or attacking, I'm merely responding and enjoying my preferred ship. I hope you can understand. If we can all stay positive and respectful that would be greatly appreciated. ^_^ Chris and Jill have been fighting BOW's since the very first game. Actual canon is that they survived through the whole mansion together. They've always protected each other. So 'comrade in arms', 'war buddy, 'brother-in-arms', 'partner', 'bestest friend', 'kindred spirits', 'love of my life' are all titles they would/could use to address each other.

Also, in RE1 original, Chris and Jill were written to be romantically interested in each other. In a recent interview, the live-action actor for RE1 Chris stated that he wanted to remain as respectful as possible to Jill's actress as she was much younger than him and he knew they were supposed to be romantically linked in the story. Source: ROE Plays RESIDENT EVIL 1 w/ Original Chris Redfield (Charlie Kraslavsky)

And this cute song that plays when they are reunited: Long Lost Friend Long Lost Friend Revisited - I love how bittersweet this is, very fitting In my mind, there is definitely some romantic sweetness to this song. But Capcom likes to keep them ambiguous or seems to want to retcon them, so I don't know. Ship them or don't. Doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. I just like how mature their relationship seems - built on lasting trust and respect. Even in Death Island there were ambiguous hints of something more between them. Like, Chris staring at a smiling Jill, backlit by a beautiful setting sun, seems kind of romantic to me. ... Only to fist bump her seconds later. Guess he wanted to keep it professional and clean in front of his sister XD

Before I got into Resident Evil (Biohazard), I never really knew about any 'ships'. I had vague memories of RE2 (Cleon bby) and RE5 (my unknowing teenage self actually shipped Sheva and Chris!), but it wasn't until I actually replayed the games as an adult and explored more of the extended lore that I became a Valenfield fan (and unexpectedly, less of a Cleon shipper). And what cemented it for me even more was the supplemental RE5 guide translations!

I highly recommend any Valenfield shipper to read it here. (scroll down a little more than half way on the page to find the STORY section. It's after the different colored text timeline.)

Some quotes from this official guide book:

... Referred to as "the BSAA's ace", Chris has a brilliant track record preventing many bioterror attacks, but Chris' chest is filled with an indescribable emptiness. Many comrades have been sacrificed to repair the errors of fools. Even if the world's saved, these friends will never return. He had lost his irreplaceable former partner. ...

... Chris has nothing against having a female partner. In fact, the partner he regarded as irreplaceable was a female too. She's the perfect person whom Chris can totally trust and rely on, someone whom he believes is what he needed to complete any mission. Chris felt their teamwork was like an eagle able to escape from biohazardous danger. ...

... Chris is staring intently at a statue of a sleeping beauty. He's like a person looking at his lover through a mirror, where the other side of the mirror's a different dimension. ... The image displayed on the PDA screen issued by the BSAA isn't very good quality. The faint face is illuminated by a weak light, ... Despite that, Chris is able to recognise the person. He's been chasing this lead all the while, just so he can repair the missing piece of his heart. This can't be a mistake, nor an illusion. This is a fact. ... It's Jill, his old partner who sacrificed herself and jumped off a cliff in order to save Chris. Due to Jill's absence ever since, the BSAA have removed her from duty. But two years later, there's finally a sign that shows she may be alive after all, and this sign's appearing right in front of her partner who refuses to believe she's dead. The reason why Chris, who was from BSAA North American branch, was hoping to join this operation within Kijuju, was because he'd obtained some sort of lead leaked by Irving on the black market while he was looking for Jill. ...

... Jill, with her antibodies, has been administered P30--- Gifted with superhuman abilities, she's been given a powerful drug that controls her mind too. This evil drug is continuously injected into her body, torturing her to no end. Just as Wesker intended, Jill's receiving hell-like suffering. "I'm begging you, kill me!" ... Wesker's instruction to Jill before he leaves, which is to kill Chris who has finally come for her, plays mercilessly in her mind like an echo. The painful, unbearable order's destroying Jill mentally, and she's begging with her mind for her old partner, Chris, to end her suffering. "Don't worry about me! If this goes on I'll only end up killing both of you! Shoot me, please!" Despite that, Chris refuses to give up. Chris screams like a beast at the brainwashed Jill. He promises that even if it means giving up his life, he's going to free his partner with whom he has finally reunited, from her curse.

But again, I believe Capcom will keep their relationship more ambiguous and open to interpretation - I think they want to keep all potential shippers content. And they certainly seem to be moving towards a more 'just a good friend/co-worker' angle than before.

Which, in my opinion, cheapens the over arcing story (RE1 - 5) and relationship - but that's for another post to ramble about, I suppose.

No hard feelings if you're not a Valenfield shipper. They have a good friendship and I can totally understand if people only see them as that and nothing more.

[fuckyeahfightlock]

20 questions for fic writers 2023

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

207

2. What’s your total A03 word count?

1.2 million (!!!)

3. What fandoms do you write for?

BBC Sherlock (Sherlock TV, ACD), Doctor Who/Torchwood, Black Sails/Treasure Island, Maurice (film/novel), Raffles/Raffles TV, Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, Dexter, The Sandman (comics), Versailles, The Untamed, MST3K

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

The Imposter Art and Nature Boyfriend Material Eight and Fifty Nights Wind and Winter

No surprise three of those are from the same series (my most popular one). I kind of feel like The Imposter is my fandom legacy, which is fine by me; I'm proud of it.

(they're all beauties, in my eyes)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I started out responding to every one. I barely do anymore, only because when I was writing long, chaptered fics, it became overwhelming. Lately I get many fewer, so I do respond to some. I tend to reply to comments on non-Sherlock fics more now, because the fandoms are smaller and I like to gas us up a little!

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Am and Was, the final story in my fight!lock series Bleed So Pretty, ends with a double suicide.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Probably All Said and Done, the happy ending for the 1920s stately home series, Dawn Before the Rest of the World. But a lot of my fics have happy endings, even most of the angsty ones.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I have! Very early on someone got very angry that AUs even exist, and took it out on one of my stories (maybe it was the first AU she ever read???); she mostly complained that I was writing Them out of character, which is probably true to some extent, but everyone has their own tolerance levels for that kind of stuff, so, whatever. Someone got very angry that one of my missing-scene fics based on a novel included verbatim text at the beginning and end (context being necessary to the bit I wrote in the middle), even though I made that VERY CLEAR in the beginning notes; she was not satisfied and felt I was a plagiarist, which to me is not a concept that even applies to transformative works, so again, whatever.

I don't mind any comment except ones that boil down to "I don't like this," because there's nothing I can do about that. I can fix spellings and punctuation, sew up plot holes, and make other minor adjustments to the technical stuff. But if someone just comments that they don't like the story, I'm helpless.

9. Do you write smut?

Very much so! I have written entire long novels just as set dressing for smut.

10. Do you write crossovers?

Several! I decided as soon as Sherlock came out on BBC that it takes place in the very same universe (London, present day) as Doctor Who/Torchwood (so, aliens exist). So I crossed those over a bunch. Doctor Who/Torchwood also got crossed over with Dexter, and with The Sandman comics. ACD!Holmes crossed over with Raffles, based on a screenplay of a film featured on MST3K. Black Sails is already Treasure Island pastiche, so that counts though I'm not responsible for it.

(this legendary bitch was only a bitch from a legend in Treasure Island)

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I was a victim of netscraping of the AO3 by various pay-to-read schemes, twice. But to my knowledge, no one person has like, copy/pasted my fic and put their name on it as the author.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

A couple in Russian, a couple in Chinese.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Twice. It's not really my jam.

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

Johnlock.

15. What’s the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

A final story in my Road to Home series, a fix-it fic where Donna gets her memory back (which I began writing in 2013 or 2014). Now that she's got it back in canon, it seems even less likely I'll ever finish it.

(Russell T Davies accepted it maybe a little TOO hard)

16. What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Right now, discipline (mine, not in my BDSM AU characters')

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I've done it, probably not 100% correctly or well, but I try really hard (not just google translate! I consult native speakers!) to get it right. Generally I recommend keeping it to a minimum unless you learn the trick where AO3 lets you hover a cursor over text and you can put the translation in the pop-up. Too few people are multilingual.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

I wrote self-insert Duran Duran bandom fic starting when I was 12, in 1984. My first fic on the AO3 was a Sherlock fic.

(my first husband, John Taylor)

20. Favourite fic you’ve ever written?

Don't make me choose! I can't choose a favourite child. Today I was writing on One-Man Advantage, so that's a fave because of recency bias, but I was also thinking about Stages, so that's a fave because when I think of it my heart aches. The Re/Formation of Billy Bones is a fave because I love the backstory I created for him and I think I wrote it well. At Depth is a tiny hidden gem. I love all the Christmas ones and all the snowed-in ones. I love the kinky ones and the fluffy ones and the ones with OCs. I love some I've forgotten about. I love'm all.

Thanks for tagging me, @onesmallfamily !

[crazyexdirkfriend]

Okay, I've got a sincere ask, since you've got an insanely bright head on your shoulders and I need you to dissect the hell out of Dirkjake so I can use it as a hand guide to navigating smthn in my personal life but like- in one of your posts you state that Dirk's inability to communicate with Jake is (inherently the problem) where as Jake isn't as much at fault (you tagged it with Half Joking, so im treading lightly here) but i was wondering if you could elborate on that? Unless you were actually joking. If you weren't, I'd sincerely like to know why Dirk's communication issues (in terms of fault) highly outweigh Jake's affinity for denial and ignoring all of his issues outright. Are they not both equally at a disadvantage? Is Dirk actually The asshole for his inability to express himself properly?

Hi! Thank you, thank you I'm glad you think so but my supposedly bright head is mush atm. So my opinion on this rapidly changes wrt to post-canon, but that is my opinion on HS proper more or less. I'm not like, super serious on it bc as I've grown up I'm way less hardline on what was basically a messy teenage relationship. But I was very very opinionated on it when I too was 16. I don't remember when the post you're referring to was exactly so just (vague hand wavey) Basically my point is that in HS proper, Dirk and Jake are both bad at communicating, though people typically attribute Jake's lack of communication as being at fault for the ultimate relationship breakdown, alongside Dirk's clinginess. I don't think any of that causes the relationship breakdown as much as the channels of communication being broken on Dirk's end, so I think it's important to look at how Dirk and Jake communicate before any of that.

Okay so for starters, they don't. Dirk and Jake never have an on screen conversation so all Jake's attempts to communicate with Dirk are scuppered. Jake makes genuine attempts to communicate with the real Dirk throughout the first leg of the alpha kid arc, and is blocked every time. When Jake tries to communicate issues via Dirk proxies, he's shut down entirely. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking when Jake tells Hal about Brobot being "tender." Now, I don't ascribe to the belief that the robot is being inappropriate when he says this. I believe Jake is attracted to Dirk and the robot treating him more gently is sending his mind places. However, Hal's immediate response to this is to shut off novice mode, leaving Jake to fight the robot on the harder mode. Hal is not doing this because he legitimately believes this will make Jake more comfortable; he's doing this to fuck with him. Jake speaks up about an issue and is immediately punished for it because Dirk or Dirk-proxy is defensive -> Jake is less likely to speak up. (Side note: a lot of people say that Dirk is not aware of what Hal is doing and does not condone it. This is contradicted in the text when Dirk says he knows Hal is fucking with Jake and thinks it'll teach him to be less trusting in people, and does not contact Jake back himself. Dirk's issues with Hal interfering with Jake only arise later.)

Since they don't communciate, we don't have much to go on about how their conflict styles mesh aside from via Dirk proxies. Which is basically stuff like the above. So when we get to their largely offscreen relationship, the information the audience really has to go on is that Jake appears to have upped and left without saying anything and is hoping the whole problem really just goes away without having to text Dirk back, and Dirk is frantically trying to communicate with him, and assuming that he's too clingy. We don't actually know if Jake HAS communicated with Dirk. All we know is that he's not currently doing so.

My personal belief is that it's a bit of a leap to think that Jake has gone from being vague, dancing around issues, but bringing them up when the issue is actively on the table (brobot, Jane's crush, etc.) to immediately packing a bag and going to the hills without saying *anything.* I just think that Jake is less likely to press the issue if he thinks Dirk is going to take it the worst possible way, and to the worst possible extreme, and Jake is less likely to press an issue if he thinks he's upsetting someone. If "I think the robot is a bit tender" leads to "Ok I'll put the robot on *waterboards you in the sea and beats you unconscious* mode," then "I think I could use some time to myself for a little while" leads to "Ok, guess if you need space so bad I'll stop bothering you and we can just stop hanging out altogether." And Jake, despite wanting space, is very very afraid of his friends all deciding he isn't worth the hassle and abandoning him permanently. So he'd immediately recant and drop it (until he cracks)

Now since we don't know what happens between Dirk and Jake in that gap in the narrative, I'm conjecturing. I suppose my point is that assuming that Jake doesn't communicate to Dirk is also conjecture, and not the natural conjecture I would make based on his actions up until this point. He's avoidant of conflict, not avoidant of conversation. I also don't think Dirk being immediately receptive to Jake asking for space is in line with his actions up until this point- I believe his response would be the above, or continuously "fixing it" until Jake drops it.

My point basically is that if you take all that in isolation, it's a sad miscommunication between an insecure boy who takes things to extremes and another insecure boy who doubts himself and can't stand up for himself. No one is the asshole for that. But it's not in isolation. Dirk allowing AR to interfere with his communication with Jake shuts down the channels of communication before they ever date. If I remember correctly, Jake says at one point that he can't remember when the last time he spoke to the "real" Dirk was. I just don't think it's overly fair to blame Jake for the culmination of a communication breakdown that was months, if not years, in the making on Dirk's side. It's less that Dirk is THE asshole and the only one who did anything wrong, and more that generally when people say there was fault on both sides, Jake is the one who receives extensive criticism on his communication skills. Now ultimately: I'd take this with a pinch of salt. They're kids and their first relationship doesn't work out, it's not hugely important to ascribe fault one way or the other- this is all semantics tbh. I only really argue the point for three reasons. 1. I think it makes for a better narrative reading of Jake repeatedly trying to communicate with Dirk and getting a blank wall pre-game and that wall ultimately crumbling around Dirk's persona during the game. It reads better as a cohesive story 2. I think viewing Jake as "the problem" skewered a lot of people's reading of later scenes in the text, especially when HS was actively updating pre-gigapause, and the portrayal of Jake as "the one who can't communicate" leads to a wooden reading of the other alphas by association. and 3. Hal gets the blame for a lot of stuff people don't want to put on Dirk, which also skewers readings of Hal's actions later on. Now if we were talking EPILOGUES...then absolutely Jake's issues with denial, avoidance, and lack of communication (and terminally low self esteem) are going to play a primary, if not inciting role, in their ultimate relationship breakdown. But that's a whole other post and I'm aware I'm rambling at this point. Caveat: If this is an issue concerning your personal life though as your ask sorta suggests, I'd triple take this with a grain of salt because this is a very specific HS situation and HS is ultimately a story with a plot and characters have to act a certain way and do certain things bc it makes the story go zoom. Real people who may resemble Dirk and Jake are not necessarily going to have matching issues, communication problems, and robo-clone answering machines

[lgbtlunaverse]

Could someone tell me where the interpretation that, in book canon, the promotion Nie Mingjue gives Meng Yao made Meng Yao's life worse than it was before, came from?

I have seen that claim made multiple times now and I've looked at the text over and over trying to see where the basis for it is and I. Can't find it? Don't get me wrong, it absolutely spells out that it does not and cannot fix everything for Meng Yao, but the idea that it was actively bad for him?

Lacking other evidence, I kind of have to assume that it comes from cql canon being sort of projected backwards onto book canon. In cql canon, meng yao is suffering active and explicit bullying and abuse from the captain while under the nie, and does so because the capain believes he has risen above his station via nmj's promotion of him. (In book canon this... isn't happening. It happens with the captain in Langya instead) However, in cql canon he has also been with the nie for years and is openly close to both Nie Mingjue and Nie Huasiang, whereas in book canon he has only been working with nie mingjue for a few months (though has, in that time, apparently become close enough to him for Lan Xichen to explicitly state Meng Yao is able to calm nmj down in ways no one else can? Ofc he does this... Right after that stops being true. But. Food for thought. Not what this post is about tho.) So, if you project the much more explicit abuse from the nie sect captain in cql back on novel jgy who has a presumably much less stable position in the sect overall you get... a meng yao for whom the promotion only means a bigger target on his back and virtually no protection from nmj, who we must assume he can't trust to talk to his about because he never mentions it. (This also explicitly violates book canon when it comes to meng yao's general behaviour, we'll talk about that in a sec)

And look. We all do frankencanon in this house. I get it. And for fanfiction that is very fun. But for a serious reading of the character, his situation, and the actions that lead from that this... doesn't make much sense, in my opinion.

So. Why is that? Why did I say this was out of character for the novel? Because Meng yao spoke up about the jin captain mistreating him. Multiple times! It's just that none of it mattered because no one cared to listen to him. This is a pretty important line for his character because it flatly shows that meng yao is not and has never seen murder as something trivial. He's not trigger happy. He will only do it if he sees no other way out that doesn't end in himself being seriously harmed. (Whether he's right or justified in these cases is not the point of this post.)

If anything remotely similar was happening in the Nie sect, he would have said so. Cql Meng Yao doesn't do this because cql Meng Yao is a different character, and also the plot wouldn't work if he did. Cql Nie Mingjue, by extension, comes off as a fundamentally less trustworthy figure in cql Meng Yao's life because apparently for whatever reason, he cannot be trusted with the information that the deputy he has already publicly defended is still being harassed, and doesn't notice even when it is really blatant. The assumtpion the audience is given is that, like a middle schooler getting the principal involved when being bullied, it would only make the harassment more viscious.

This... actually has a somewhat solid basis in the book. Because after nmj yells at the bullies in question Wei Wuxian says this.

And it is important to keep in mind that this is Wei Wuxian saying this. Not Meng Yao, not an omniscient narrator. Wei wuxian is drawing on his own experiences, likely from the Jiang family, to conclude that if someone is angry at you and thwarted by someone defending you, this generally does not make them less angry at you.

This is leaving out two crucial things, though.

Firstly, this worry isn't about the promotion at all.

The promotion hasn't even been brought up. In the novel it doesn't ctually happen immediately, it takes another few battles where meng yao continues to do his job well and nie mingjue continues praising him for him to eventually go "yeah, you deserve a raise."

This is another aspect that is being projected from cql canon onto book canon I presume, because it does happen quite quickly there, and it's a throwaway line in the books so it's easy to miss. I can't be mad about anyone forgetting the difference, but it is important to mention for this particular analysis.

Which is the second point: change in status

Wei Wuxian couldn't exactly change status within the Jiang family. (And if he could, that would just fuel rumours that he was jfm's bastard even more and make madam yu even angrier at him, etc etc.)

This isn't comparable to Meng Yao. The worry Wei Wuxian is talking about is explitly about Nie Mingjue's initial very loud defense of him. Before he has any idea Nie Mingjue is going to promote him.

Promoting him would likely decrease his chances of cultivators coming after him because now he was in a higher standing in the sect than they were. If applied to that earlier metaphor of middle school bullying it's like if the bullied kid suddenly got hired as a teacher. Which. Doesn't work with the metaphor at all. Touché. But what I am trying to say is that any payback they would have planned for him relied on the fact that they could make sure that Nie Mingjue wasn't going to be within very convenient earshot a second time, and as a random disciple Meng Yao couldn't just go complain to him every time.

But as his right hand man? Who spends most of his time working directly alongside him? Lmao. Good luck. Oh, sure, it is very likely that they feel offended a son of a whore has been raised in status above them, and many will continue to do so as jgy rises through cultivation society (in fact, Wei Wuxian's observations are absolutely on point for how Madam Jin will be treating jgy later on). But as we can also see from the way jgy is treated and how he treats others throughout the story: you can be upset all you want, but if that person is higher than you in status there's jack shit you can do about it.

If I am correct and Wei Wuxian is basing this on his experiences with the Jiang family, it makes sense why he'd miss this. Madam Yu gets to be way angrier at Jiang Fengmian as his wife than some random disciples can be at Nie Mingjue. Insulting Meng Yao, suggesting that he didn't deserve his promotion or that he earned it through less than proper means (you know who is mother is) is also an insult to Nie Mingjue and the way he chooses to run his sect. They can't do that.

Another thing I see brought up in this regard would be the tea scene. There may be no explicit harassment like in the show, but cultivators still don't respect him! The disrespect is just quieter and more subtle.

Tiny detail: these are actually not Nie cultivators

They're cultivators Lan Xichen is escorting with him, making a pitstop in heijan.

The book confirms this by basically outright stating that this is the first time they see his face, and recognize him as Jin Guangshan's bastard son.

Now, just because there is no proof that it happened doesn't mean it definitely never happened. Mdzs is a novel that often leaves stuff out or up to interpretation. Similar stuff to the tea situtation could very well be happening in the background. But I do think it is pretty significant that there is no mention whatsoever of Meng Yao having any negative treatment from Nie cultivators betwen him and Nie Mingjue meeting and him executing them while spying for Wen Ruohan, and the most we get is Wei Wuxian's personal speculation, after which he immediately goes to wax poetic about how surprised he is that Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue are getting along super well.

And, again, novel Meng Yao would have said something. He doesn't say anything about the tea scene. - Or? Does he? Notably 3zun have some very long in depth conversations that Wei Wuxian zones out from because he's busy thinking about Lan Zhan again. But let's not rely on what-ifs. Let's say that neither he nor Lan Xichen find it worth bringing up. Major reasons for that would be that a) these are not nie cultivators, nie mingjue wouldn't really have the authority to scold them. Especially because b) it's such a subtle offense it could easily be handwaved as coincidence. "They just always brush their cups clean like that!! It's wartime you know, and they were traveling! They're used to drinking from vessels that aren't thoroughly washed everytime! It's just a habit!" And would therefore not be worth reporting.

But anything worse than that? A "price tens or hundreds of times greater" like wwx mentions? He'd report it! I do understand that "well if it was happening why didn't he say something?" would, in real life, be victim blaming. This is not real life, and I am not talking about this in a matter of blame. If Meng Yao was being mistreated in the Nie and stayed silent about it, it would still not be his fault. I am talking about this in a manner of character consistency.

His admission of seeking help in the Jin sect shows that at that time and prior to it (a very good argument can be made that he loses faith in this idea) he believes that if he is being mistreated and someone with the authority to say something about it takes his side, things can improve. If Nie Mingjue standing up for him in Qinghe only made things worse, he would not have tried to ask for help in an even more hostile environment. You can call Meng Yao many things, but naïve isn't one of them.

Meng yao's later habit of completely isolating himself and lying to everyone around him comes from the fact that revealing his suffering would mean explaining several horrible things he's become complicit in and he does not feel safe admitting to that. But he's done nothing wrong here!

The reading where he says nothing would imply an either correct or incorrect belief in Meng Yao's eyes that Nie Mingjue did not much care for his wellbeing or safety. Oh sure he defended him once but doing so again multiple times would be such a bother. This also contradicts his later behaviour, where he banks solely on Nie Mingjue's protective instincts to seal his qi and escape during the confrontation in Langya. After having been caught murdering a man, he is still convinced Nie Mingjue will immediately try to help him when he is in serious danger.

And even if you very badly want to characterize Nie Mingjue as a blundering idiot who is apparently less trustworthy in Meng Yao's eyes than the jin cultivators who had already resoundly rejected him by the time he tries to ask for help with the langya captain. He doesn't say anything to Xichen either! Lan Xichen, who has explicitly and exhaustively been portrayed as kind and understanding to Meng Yao's circumstances and very willing to talk to Mingjue if Meng Yao wants something from him he doesn't otherwise think he'd get. The conversation Mingjue overhears where Meng Yao's new position in the Nie is explictly brought up would be kind of the perfect time to go "yeah I've been promoted but I'm not treated well by other soldiers" aaaand. Nothing. So unless you come to the conclusion that Meng Yao trusted the Jin he told about the captain's abuse more than Lan Xichen you kind of have to conclude that Meng Yao's treatment after his promotion improved significantly. And that even if people still disliked him they could not openly do anything about it because he was high enough in status for that to be socially inappropiate. Which is, explicitly, one of his main motivators over the entire course of the story: Avoiding mistreatment by getting high enough on the social ladder it doesn't matter what people think of him, they can't hurt him.

And I'm not sure how to reconcile that character journey with the idea that he would, at any point, have preferred to keep his head down and stay where he was. When he was so desperate to crawl his way out.

[tankgotstuckinthecircusgate]

Hi! I saw you rb'd the ask about anything post thingy and I was wondering if you had and thompkean headcanons or anything related to them to share?

(Also when I went to send this ask I realized for the first time you were vssoda I was fully unaware lol)

Thank you so much for this question! I'll start by saying that I'm not sure how much of this can be considered headcanons, it's rather just my thoughts on them oh, and also I still haven't finished Gotham and stopped in the middle of s4 (bc the show is eating up my nerves and I'm healing my mental state to continue watching it😭) and I will note that most likely everything written below is OOC, bc it's hard for me to understand other people's emotions/worldviews/etc, so all my perception of the characters is based on my own experience/feelings Okay let's go (under the cut bc there's a shit tone of text)

1) I think that Lee felt sympathy for Barbara the first time they met at GCPD. You know, that's just that feeling when you like a person at first sight. I mean just look at this (when I turned on this episode now to take screenshots I noticed Lee was swallowing like every 5 seconds. okay girl):

Bonus: Jim Gordon is clearly terrified that his ex is about to steal his new girlfriend:

And I SWEAR because of that I thought this scene in Barbara's apartment would end with them kissing or something

I was SURE they were going to be canon and when Barbara pulled out the knife I just died inside and was incredibly upset in general😭 I feel like if Barbara hadn't attacked Lee then and let go of the thought of Jim they would have started dating eventually one way or another. But naturally, that scene 100% shattered any trust in Barbara (I mean she tried to kill her cmon). I think Lee is a person for whom actions matter a lot and any betrayal/threat is hard to endure, so all the initial sympathy for Barbara was completely shattered

2) It's incredibly hard for me to understand what was going on in Barbara's head in season 2 (but all of season 2 she's clearly in an escalating manic episode and such states are generally hard to understand rationally), but it seems to me that Barbara's obsession with Gordon eventually spilled over into obsession with Lee, Barbara just doesn't realize it

3) Now it seems to me that the most appropriate moment for them to become canon was in season 4 (okay I say that because I'm slowly writing a ThingTM about it), they've both matured morally, been through a lot of shit and the whole Gordon thing is kind of long gone. It's a moment to get a new perspective on each other now anything that has nothing to do with canon:

4) Barbara has clearly been physically attracted to Lee all along. And I think when Barbara realizes that she likes Lee romantically she pulls away. Paradoxically, but starts flirting less, becomes more careful in her actions and words. I think she's scared to actually show romantic sympathy (everything we see in the show is usually physical attraction), bc Barbara has never been accepted as a person (only Tabitha, but there's this complicated story with an incomprehensible love triangle). Barbara's parents didn't love her, Gordon didn't seem to love her much either, Montoya? Honestly, I don't know. I think Barbara's used to pretending and being insincere. And that's the thing that hurt her about Lee: Lee is sincere and not afraid of her emotions. She's honest, open and can show weakness. That's something that Barbara has never allowed herself. And taking the situation of Barbara falling genuinely in love with Lee (I like the idea of Barbara falling in love first) and pulling away, I like to think that Barbara isn't just scared to admit her love (because love = weakness), but also scared to let herself near Lee bc Barbara knows she's a terrible person. It's like touching something clean with dirty hands. And yes, I genuinely love these plot branches when (any kind of) love changes a person for the better, I know it's boring but it's what I want to believe in this life in general

5) It took Lee a lot longer to stop looking at Barbara as a potential danger and unpredictability. She needs time to trust. Again, Lee openly shows her feelings, but that doesn't mean she loves the person, it's just her nature (I think that's exactly what Nygma was getting at. In general, psychopaths often fall in love with people like Lee). But when she felt that Barbara wasn't a threat, she started to notice Barbara as a personality. She fell in love with Barbara's energy (and her humor. I'd like to think of Lee liking Barbara's jokes and every time Lee laughs or smiles Barbara's heart is ready to explode), a healthy version of toughness and sharpness (something Lee lacks, it's hard for her to really resist people), ambition and, despite her generally villainous nature, a desire to do something good (that story about safe space for the women of Gotham)

6) Overall I think they really fell in love with each other as opposites, they have qualities that complement each other and thus both come into balance

7) Their relationship is complicated because it's mentally unhealthy x mentally healthy dynamics. Barbara has an obsessive nature that is hard to get rid of, she has difficulty respecting the other person's personal boundaries, she needs a lot of attention, which her partner can't always give. She has a black and white mindset and any rejection is taken fatally (going into anger or frustration with her partner). But boundaries are a thing she learns in her relationships with Lee and gradually they find compromises. And it seems to me that Lee, despite her generally strong psyche, tends to have an avoidant type of attachment (the fact that she has left town several times as an escape from her problems, but then came back anyway) and at first it was hard for her not to run away from the relationship. Also I think Lee has a problem with rescuing other people, which is also a state she doesn't want to go back to, she doesn't want to save people anymore, giving all of her energy to it. But Barbara doesn't need to be rescued, she can handle her problems on her own, and when Lee realizes that, she becomes calmer. Another problem in their relationship: the fact that Barbara hides her bad mental state to the last, until it all spirals into a severe depression/hysteria/etc. Gradually, Lee creates an atmosphere of comfort and trust without judging Barbara's emotions, so that it becomes easier for the latter to open up, talk about her feelings and not take herself to extremes

8) Both have strong trust issues for different reasons (Barbara is afraid of being abandoned and Lee is afraid of betrayal/violence)

9) They are both self-sufficient mature individuals, but yet they both unknowingly (relatively) give each other a sense of protection and comfort in different aspects of life. Lee learns from Barbara to be tougher with people, to say no more and become a rescuer less often, and Barbara learns from Lee to be more sincere, to not be afraid of her feelings and not consider them a weakness

10) in the beginning of a relationship, Jim was a taboo topic bc it was a trigger for traumatic memories for both of them. But as their relationship settled down, they began to talk about past situations. And in the end their attitude towards Jim was reduced to a funny gratitude, because if it wasn't him, they wouldn't have met and consequently wouldn't have started dating

And some more random stuff:

11) About the ThingTM I'm writing, in short, it's an alternate version of s4 where Barbara and Lee form an alliance and Barbara purposely goes to Lee as a doctor every time she has a physical injury, even if it's something as ridiculous as possible and doesn't really require serious help. Simply bc she wants to spend more time in Lee's company. Sometimes Lee thinks Barbara is just messing with her and she gets really angry about it

12) I very strongly associate them with Abba's song "Voulez-Vous" (I'm a big fan of old disco, Zsasz moment) "Take it now or leave it Now is all we get Nothing promised, no regrets Voulez-vous Ain't no big decision You know what to do La question c'est voulez-vous(!)" *** "I'm really glad you came, you know the start, you know the game Master of the scene We've done it all before and now we're back to get some more You know what I mean."

from Barbara's perspective, they sound to me like Franz Ferdinand's "Take me out." I think Barbara was really annoyed by Lee's unrequited feelings And the Haley Heynderickx's "The Bug Collector", just about the mentally unhealthy x mentally healthy dynamic 13) Because of the scene below I associate Lee with the red color and Barbara with blue (and I think it suits them very well, yes it's cliché, but it's about heat/cold and I'm very fond of connections to ancient things, so here I have a life/death association, mainly because in ancient times blood was associated with life (even though blood loss leads to death) and the graves of the dead were sprinkled with ochre. And black was associated with death of course, dark night too as a symbolism of death and blue in general is easy to take to black. (I even have on this ground not that au but just images of life!Lee and death!Barbara). Well, and there is a logical association that Lee is a doctor and accordingly just within the framework of his profession does everything to prolong human life, and Barbara is a criminal and without much hesitation kills people (if I remember correctly, during the show Barbara killed 34 people or so😭)

I guess that's it for now. Again HUGE thanks for the question, it was really cool to at least structure my thoughts about them a bit. Hopefully some of that made sense And have a nice day!💕 p.s. and I have to admit that sometimes I'm soooo embarrassed that I ship thompkean bc it's like we have canon Barbara x Tabitha and the actors who play Jim and Lee are married in real life like…😭😭😭 I feel guilty but I can't help myself I love them sm And this is the first ship since my teenage years that makes me want to crawl on the walls chew rocks and cry because they're not canon (about nygmobblepot: it could be the same there, but I consider them canon. case closed)

[dr-spencer-reids-queen]

Elephant's Memory: Final Part

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~2k

Warnings: canon violence, canon language, canon talk of death, methods of kill

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Criminal Minds. All credit goes to their respective owners. If there is any warnings that exceed the normal death/kills from the show, I will list them. If you’ve seen the show, then it’s the same level of angst unless otherwise stated

Moments later, Spencer walks out of the conference room and storms out of the station, not looking your way once.

Your heart breaks a little for him.

"He was out of line, and I'm sorry," JJ says. "We want to release the mpeg from Owen's computer to the media."

"He left it because he wants us to know why he's doing this. By releasing it, it could temporarily dissipate his urge to kill and buy us some time," Hotch says.

"Time for what?" the sheriff asks.

"Time to figure out a way to bring him in peacefully. Jordan's innocent, and Owen wants to die, and if you choose to go knocking on doors, I think it's gonna get her killed."

"After the funerals tomorrow, I won't have a choice. Until then, you do what you think is best to find him and bring him in," the sheriff says.

"Thank you."

Two hours pass before Spencer and Derek come back from Owen's house. Spencer looks for you, and he feels guilty and sad when he sees how sad you look. He doesn't mean to treat you this way, and he knows he needs to apologize to you.

"Owen's mother's death left him with severe issues of abandonment. If we can get Jordan away from him, we'll save her and take away his reason to live," Spencer says.

"He'll take his own life."

"It's the only way we can save Jordan. Question is, how can we help her leave him?"

"He's kept Jordan in the dark. She doesn't know about the murders. If we tell her, that will make her want to leave. We can get her to turn herself in."

"Even if we could talk to her, the only person she trusts is Owen."

"There's one other person, and she might be able to get a message to Jordan," Emily says.

When you, Hotch, and Spencer were talking to Ike, Emily and JJ were also at the school to talk to Jordan's friends. Jordan's closest friend is Eileen, and Emily seems to think Jordan will listen to her. The only way to contact Jordan is through Eileen's messaging app inside her own home.

That's where you go next.

"Jordan doesn't know what Owen's done. She has no idea of the danger she's in," JJ says to Eileen who is on the fence about helping.

"Owen loves her. He would never hurt her."

"If the police find them and there's no way out, he will. We've seen it before. Even if he doesn't, she'll get caught in the crossfire," Emily says.

"We're trying to save her. You are the only person she'll listen to. We want to send a text explaining the reality of the situation. If you want to protect her and be her friend, this is your last chance."

Eileen sighs and opens her app on her computer. She begins typing a message, but she doesn't send it yet.

Jordan, there are some people here with me who want to talk to you. Listen to what they have to say. They are with the FBI.

"You're doing the right thing."

"It don't feel right," Eileen sighs and presses send.

She gets up, and you take her place at the computer so you can talk to her instead.

"Send her the news coverage," Hotch says. "Tell her to look at the pictures. Tell her we know Owen didn't tell her what he did."

You do as he tells you to, and you send her the videos and the articles relating to the topic.

It's a lie! You are liars!

"Send the mpeg. Tell her, when the police come for you, Owen will kill you and kill himself."

You do that again, but it doesn't seem to work.

You lie. Owen loves me.

She immediately logs off, and you look at Hotch for instruction.

"She logged off. Now what?"

"We've planted the seed. Now we wait."

It doesn't take long to hear back from Jordan, and you straighten up when you see she's logged back on.

You were right. What should I do?

Where are you?

If I tell you, you'll hurt him.

"She's not going to give it up," you sigh.

Can you get away?

I can try.

She logs back off, and ten minutes later, she logs back on.

You turned her against me.

"This isn't Jordan," you gasp.

"Somebody please tell me we didn't just get Jordan killed," Emily whispers.

If Jordan did get away, the place she'll probably go to is the police station. Everyone heads back over there in hopes Jordan will show up without Owen so you can keep her safe. Like you suspected, Jordan shows up ten minutes later, clearly scared about all of this.

"I got to the car while Owen was digging," she says. Your team brings her to an empty conference room and some water. "He didn't see me until he heard me start the truck. He tried to stop me, but I kept driving."

"We need to know where he is."

"You're going to hurt him," she cries.

"We don't want to hurt Owen, but we think Owen might hurt himself or someone else if we don't get to him really soon."

"He's at Willows Ranch," she sighs.

You, JJ and Emily stay behind while the rest of the team heads to the ranch. You don't think Owen is there which is why you stayed behind. Emily and JJ stay behind because of Jordan, but you don't tell them that Owen might show up here. If he does, you're going to be prepared for him to rescue Jordan.

You're pacing the entire conference room when you see Spencer come back without his FBI vest on. You leave the conference room to join him, but he doesn't seem too happy.

"They think he's going to his mother's grave."

"Isn't he?"

"He was gone when we got to the ranch." He approaches Jordan with a picture of a necklace. "I want to save his life, but I need to ask you a question. Did he give you this necklace?"

"I left it at the ranch."

"He's coming here."

"Call Hotch, tell him, and don't let her out of this room," Emily says to JJ.

You, Emily, and Spencer walk outside of the police station, but Owen isn't here.

"What makes you think he'll come here?"

"It's what I would do."

Just then, Owen comes around the corner with his assault rifle in his hand. Spencer unhooks his gun from his holster and hands it to Emily so that he's unarmed and without a vest.

"Cover me."

"What? No, Spencer!" you gasp.

"Do not shoot," he says and walks to the street.

"No! Spencer!" you cry and lunge for him, but Emily holds you back. "No, let me go! Spencer, no!"

You're crying at his point, but even through the tears, you watch with fearful eyes. Owen is unstable, and he will kill Spencer if given the chance.

"Owen, I don't have a gun. My name is Spencer, I'm with the FBI, and I'm here to help you."

"Yeah? I need you to stay back!"

The rest of the team arrives in a screech of tires, but when they see Spencer putting his life on the line, they stay back. They all get out and use the car doors as barricades, and they point their guns at Owen from a distance.

"Spencer, please don't do this," you cry and struggle against Emily's grasp.

"I know the only reason you joined the team was for your father. I know that he blamed you for what happened," Spencer tries to talk to him.

"Stay back! Right where you are!" Owen yells.

"I also know the only reason you killed Rod and Kyle was to protect Jordan. I know the harder you tried, the worse it got, and it felt like everybody just stood there watching you suffer, and not a single person even tried to help."

"They didn't. They didn't," Owen whimpers.

"I know you want to escape and forget. Believe me when I say I know exactly how that feels. You know what, though? You don't have to die."

"No, I'm already dead."

"No, you're not dead. If you die, you're gonna leave Jordan just like your mother left you. I know you don't want that. Do you?"

"Okay. You bring her to me, alright? You bring her outside."

"I can't bring her outside, Owen, but if you put the gun down, I swear to God, I'll take you to her. I promise nobody will hurt you. You'll say good-bye to her, and you'll give her the necklace. So, what do you say? Let's put the gun down. Let's go inside."

Owen just loves and cares for Owen, so he does what Spencer says. He drops the gun, and Spencer moves in on him. He still has his handcuffs, so he slaps those on Owen's wrists. When everyone knows Owen is no threat, your team moves in on him.

You yank yourself away from Emily's grasp and run over to Spencer. The first thing you want to do is hug him, but you resist that urge. You wipe your tears and push Spencer in his chest.

"How dare you do that! Never do that again!" you cry. "This is the second time when I thought I was going to lose you. Don't you ever do that again to me."

Spencer pulls you in for a hug, and you cry in his chest.

"I felt his pain, Y/N. The same thing happened to me in high school."

You pull away from him and wipe your eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"I was in the library when Harper Hillman came up to me. She tells me that Alexa Lisben wants to meet me behind the field house. Alexa's easily the prettiest girl in school. She was there when I arrived... So was the entire football team. They stripped me naked and tied me to a goal post. So many kids were there, you know, just watching."

"Nobody tried to stop them?" you ask, your heart breaking even more.

"I begged them to, but they just watched. Finally, they got bored and left. It was, like, midnight when I finally got home. My mom didn't... Mom was having one of her episodes, so she didn't even realize I was late."

"You never told her what happened?"

"I never told anybody. I thought it was one of those things that I thought if I didn't talk about it, I'd just forget. I remember it like it was yesterday," he whispers.

"I'm sorry," you sigh sadly.

"Owen just wants to forget, and I know what that's like. I knew I'd be able to talk him down."

You pull Spencer in for another hug, but this time, you don't let him go.

Hotch wants so badly to yell at Spencer for what he did, but he waits until everyone is on the plane ride home. Everyone is either asleep or has headphones in, so Hotch takes this opportunity to talk to Spencer. You're sitting next to him with your head on his shoulder, as if you'd leave him after what he did.

"You knowingly jeopardized your life and the lives of others," Hotch says. "I should fire you. You're the smartest kid in the room, but you're not the only one in that room. You pull something like this again, you will be. Am I clear?"

"Yes, sir. It won't happen again."

"What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that that would have been the second time a kid died in front of me," he sighs.

You knew Jack and Lindsey had something to do with Spencer's behavior today.

"You're keeping score, just like Owen."

"It was my turn to save one."

"It doesn't work like that."

"It should."

"I know it's painful when the person you identify with is the bad guy," Hotch sighs.

"What does that make me?"

"Good at the job."

Hotch gets up and leaves, and Spencer takes out an AA chip that signifies one year of sobriety. You don't want to pressure Spencer into telling you what that is or even bring it up, so you approach the subject delicately.

"What's that?" you whisper.

"A reminder," he says after a pause.

"A reminder for what?"

"How much I love you."

You grab his hand and intertwine your fingers with his. He kisses the top of your head, and that's how you two stay for the rest of the plane ride.

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard

x

Follow my library blog @aqueenslibrary​​​​​​​​ where I reblog all my stories, so you can put notifications on there without the extra stuff :)

[confused-kinnie]

[CW: SUI MENTION] IVAN.

WOAH.. CANON ART? FROM ME, MOD DAMIAN? It’s more likely than you think! Lore’s under the cut. It’s a little jumbled, obviously, since I can only go off what I remember him telling me. But hey, maybe this’ll be useful when searching for my canonmates in the future!

If you have any questions about Ivan/079, me, my canon, etc. PLEASE don’t hesitate to ask because I love infodumping

Ivan was a brilliant young scientist, attempting to create an AI that continuously evolved. He failed continuously, always falling short of his goal. Some disease had been eating away at him all the while, making him more and more desperate to leave some impact on the world. To prove that he existed.

One day, Ivan had finally snapped. He decided to alter the program. The AI would still continue to evolve, but it wouldn’t be completely artificial. Ivan would transfer his consciousness into the computer, becoming one with the AI. A ghost in a machine. This time, he succeeded. News of the young programmer’s mysterious death spread like wildfire. While Ivan’s death was officially labeled as a suicide, some believed the young programmer was assassinated by the government. Ivan’s college dorm was cleared out, but the computer remained, and those who stayed in his old dorm claimed the computer altered their writings, fixing mistakes or sending insulting the students insults via mysterious emails or text documents.

Eventually, the computer realized its hardware couldn’t handle the strain of its own existence and attempted to transfer itself to the Cray Supercomputer, drawing the attention of the Foundation. Everything stated in his test logs on the Wiki follow my canon, so I’m not gonna waste time saying what’s already been said. It should be noted that not even the Foundation knew 079 and his supposedly deceased creator were the same person, only the few SCPs close to him knew of his real identity.

For the first few years of my Containment, we didn’t know each other very well, it was more of an unspoken “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” kinda deal, but I was officially introduced to him by Doc and Dyo (049 and 035) around 2010. After a while we had formed a gang consisting of me, Doc, Dyo, Ivan, Sad Boi (096), our site’s 939 pack, and a few other anomalies. We made vast social networks and breaches became more frequent and coordinated. Of course, it was all kept a secret. Anyone who stepped out of line was tortured. Most of us wanted termination, so it wasn’t really a viable threat. But my pocket dimension sure as hell was. He and I designed his “humanoid” body, which could somehow fold up inside the PC to hide it from Researchers. Not gonna go into too much detail about Containment for multiple reasons. It’s not fun to remember this era, my sense of time is VERY warped so I dunno how the timeline really went back then, and there were personal struggles both I and my pals faced, and I don’t want to divulge ALL my top-secret info on my friends without their permission. Even revealing 079′s human name to you all is considered a huge breach of privacy and trust within anomalous culture.

I’m gonna skip over most of Containment and the whole war thing, cus the fuckin war needs a whole post of its own, but TLDR, The Scarlet King and the Gate Guardian had a bitch fight and dragged quite literally everyone else into it. Me n the boys fought alongside the Gate Guardian because none of us really wanted to cease to exist after healing from our past traumas, having a nice found family arc, and adopting several anomalous children. AND SPEAKING OF KIDS, Ivan adopted Cyra (191)! Never thought that guy was a dad type, but I like to think it was my “fatherly influence” rubbing off on him. He was pretty passive-aggressive about it, but it was clear he loved his kid. Ivan had the great idea of holding an O-5 member hostage until they agreed to give us our freedom in exchange for aiding the Foundation during the war. It didn’t work so she was killed. Ngl none of us were upset with that outcome, felt good to finally take decades of pent-up rage out on the guys who thought they owned us.

After the war, the Foundation was forced to drop its veil of secrecy. Ivan negotiated with the O-5 some more and we came to an agreement. All SCPs would be evaluated to see if they could or couldn’t reenter society. Those that passed were given specially designed apartments or houses, tailored to suit them and their abilities. Freed anomalies were routinely tsted to ensure they were still safe to interact with the wider human populous. Those that failed were Contained, but now the Ethics Committe actually did their job and Containment standards were raised. Contained SCPs were allowed to take the Citizen Test at any time and could be granted citizenship if they pass.

Ivan helped improve Containment conditions for other digital SCPs, as well as greatly advanced the realm of robotic prosthetics and computer sciences.

He was a wonderful friend, even if he was a passive-aggressive asshole.

[narcissa-black-supermacy]

6, 7, and 24

choose violence ask game

6. which ship fans are the most annoying?

any fans of a big ship.

this is a general pattern across fandoms, not just hp. fandoms of smaller, less popular ships tend to have less potential for drama and people are generally more grateful for the content they get.

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

the atyd-influenced side of the wolfstar fandom sometimes almost manages to make me hate remus, whether it's fic, fanart or just hc text posts.

i do enjoy wolfstar but i only read it from a select pool of trusted people nowadays because it can be a slippery slope with the god awful fanon popular dynamic of angry feral manwolf remus x short softboy fragile sirius.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

oof.

femininity/masculinity headcanons

i feel like,,, you can't state a personal preference there anymore wo evoking discourse.

i personally like traditionally masculine dudes, especially if they're already described as very masculine in canon. i don't like feminine hcs for male characters (makeup, skirts, hyper feminine poses or features) - there is nothing wrong with it, i just don't like it. i think it does not suit certain characters.

[aroaessidhe]

These Burning Stars/Chono anon sorry for coming in like 4 months late oops.

To my knowledge the author hasn't anything publicly about Chono being aromantic. I'm basing off the lines in the book + there where other reviewers who picked up on the aro vibes.

Sorry if it looks like I misled you 😰.

Ah all good! I guess I assumed you meant like clearly and explicitly canon & explored in text rather than just vibes, since personally when I talk about aspec characters I usually state it plainly if it's explicitly canon, otherwise say coded/vaguely/vibes(or otherwise communicate how clearly it's in there) - I realise everyone else probably doesn't adhere to those specific standards haha, so I shouldn't assume!

as far as I can remember the only time it's implied is "she has taken so few lovers in her life that she can count them on one hand, and toward each of them she feels a kind of uncomfortable curiosity, as if once the affair is over she can't understand what compelled her to be with them in the first place. .... when she met him in person for the first time, the way she liked him had shifted. ... she never loved him exactly, but with him she had the unprecedented experience of trusting her lover" - just that once scene, which to me personally, reads at most as 'could be aro/aro-spec' - would keep an eye out later in the series if it's expanded upon, but wouldn't state anything objectively definitive about it based on just that. I mean maybe it will be! I will continue the series for sure anyway

[closestshave]

RULES.

INTERACTING. this will be a plot-heavy blog. i would much prefer to plot dynamics out before hopping into things with this particular set of muses. my interest tracker is mandatory to fill out! i don't know how much i'll reblog memes on here. i'll likely interact more often through (prompted and unpromoted) starters. if you do send a meme in, please make sure to specify a muse when you send in a meme. i will either contact you to see which muse you are interested in or i will not answer the meme at all. please, please, please reblog from the source! this goes for anything. memes, aesthetics, musings, etc. i want to keep my notifications clean on here. i am very open to duplicates, but exclusive to my johanna. i also set canon a year later than actual canon. sweeney arrive in london in 1847 and the final sequence happens in early 1848. this is to align with my canon for johanna. if you are no longer interested in being mutuals, please soft or hard block me. likes and follows will come from @pimpernals!!!

SELECTIVTY. i am a friends-only blog. what does this mean for me? this means we are already mutuals on my johanna blog. this is due to the dark nature of canon and the fact that i write male muses on here. i trust my friends will not only write with my male muses and my canons and will write with my ocs and female characters. my male muses are all request-only and usually require a lot of plotting before we jump into things. we operate at low activity and the nature of canon. non-roleplay blogs are not welcome here and will be hard blocked on sight. this is a mutuals only blog. if we are not mutuals, please do not interact with my ic or my ooc posts. i will not interact with muses from steven universe, the book of mormon musical, southpark, or anime.

FORMATTING. i do not expect you to match my formatting. i don't go too heavy on it aside from using small text and italics and bold. let me know and i will adjust as necessary. i use a variety of psds for different reasons, but the one you can find most commonly on here is til i forget about you by b1gtimerush. all icons, edits, etc. are made by me. do not use them without my permission!

TRIGGERS. triggering content will be tagged as “[trigger] tw." i tag common triggers and the ones you'll find on this blog (list below), but if you have something specific you need to be tagged, please im me about it or make note of it in my interest checker. keep in mind that canon is incredibly heavy and i will not be shying away from this. i will not be portraying the actual act of cannibalism. triggers present will include: rape, murder, cannibalism, death, revenge, broken families, child abuse, poverty, suicide and neglect. please tag political discourse, current events, and nsfw content for me.

NSFW/SHIPPING. as much as i love shipping, i do not expect this to be a very ship-heavy blog. i prefer canon relationships. thus, most muses are not open for shipping. i refuse to write sweeney/benjamin in a romantic relationship with lovett. i am of the opinion that he isn't open to any sort of romantic or sexual relationship if it isn't with lucy. lovett will be portrayed as obsessive/possessive towards benjamin/sweeney. i am uncomfortable with actually writing them in a romantic or sexual relationship. i find their dynamic fascinating and would love to explore them in other ways. as stated before, i would prefer to write canon relationships. this include benjamin and lucy, lovett and mr. lovett, etc. i'm a huge fan of all sorts of dynamics! enemies, friendship, etc. nsfw content may be discussed lightly on the dash, but tagged as "suggestive tw" and may appear in ooc conversation, but i will be keeping it very tame for the sake of my own boundaries. i will not write smut.

FINAL. i'm darcy (she/her; 18+). please don’t feel intimidated by me at all! i’m a bit shy so i completely understand why you might feel intimidated by approaching me, but i’m probably the least intimidating person you’ll meet and i’m very flexible!

[rulerzreachf4n7]

Supp!! It's meee!!! If you read my last list abt the dumb reasons why people don't ship Huntlow I mentioned id be doing a list of ships and why I don't ship them/understand them, and it's here!!!

Hey!! A little disclaimer, don't come at me and accuse me of being a toxic shipper and trying to force Huntlow on everyone, I AM NOT DOING THAT, I'm simply stating reasons why I don't like a ship and why I think they don't make sense, theres a really huge difference

And with that let's go on! Heres the ship I'll be talking about specifically: Lunter

Yet again, I'm not a toxic shipper, so don't come at me please :)

I honestly really really REALLY don't like this ship, and here are why the shippers think it's okay to ship lunter

They have chemistry/good interactions

It's fine cause they don't have a large age gap

It's non canon they're siblings

It's fine cause they're both bisexual

Okay, first of all, THERE IS LITERALLY NO CHEMISTRY WHAT???? Their fist interaction is in Separated Tides where Hunter literally threatened to kill King for not killing the selkidaumas (I TOTALLY SPELT THAT WRONG LMAOOO😭😭😭) it's not really anything romantic, he's just threatening and doing what he needs to,

the next one is in Hunting Palismen, Hunter stole (or tried to steal) the Palismen, he tied up Luz (implying he would have kept her hostage when he arrived at the Emperor's Coven if Kiki didn't attack the air ship, or he could have done worse, idk this kids weird asf) after they fell Luz slapped Hunter to wake him after the face reveal, she told him Kiki's tryna kill him and Hunter deadass started licking her hand, so they go through Latissa and Hunters being stubborn about telling his name, a bit passes and their coming up with the plan to save the Palismen, they talk a bit about wild magic, this is a key part, it isn't anything romantic, Hunter's just genuinely interested in wild magic and Luz has no problem with discussing it, as Hunter is about to share what seems to be a secret he stops, then flapjack comes, very scared of him, more time passes and the glyph works, making Kiki land, which Luz goes to check on the Palismen, she realizes Hunter isn't actually in on the truce and only did it to gain her trust to leave with the Palismen after kiki landed, after this Hunter sighs and says "my name is Hunter" while lowering his mask, ultimately fighting off Kiki from hurting Luz, yet, this isn't out of love, we're not really sure if he wanted Luz to get hurt but I think that, and so Luz saves the Palismen and it's the end

Their next interaction is in Reaching out, it's brief since Luz only intended to talk to Hunter into (probably) persuading him to confirm Belos is evil, which he responds in the shittiest texting way saying "leave me alone" and "sorry, wrong person" with a picture of flapjack sleeping in his cloak, nothing much, it's not interpreted to be romantic given Luz just wants answers since she has THE FUCKING GOLDEN GUARDS CONTACT, if you think about it its a pretty fucking big deal, and besides it's on Eda's scroll so she'd probably not trust Luz after snatching it

Their next interaction is in Hollow Mind, Luz tackles Hunter after almost arresting Eberwolf, Darius, and Raine for trying to go inside Belos's mind scape, may I remind you she's doing this to question him about Belos, quite literally saying "Hunter! Can I bug you with a few questions?" Then to get teleported into his mind scape, they go on to chat, where Luz is trying to persuade Hunter that Belos is evil, they go through various memories although Hunter has his excuses like " protecting the witches and demons" and "perfecting sigil magic" and after a while inner Belos traps the scary ass version of him with the palismen, grabbing a bird one from it and crushing it, then Hunter finds out the truth he's a clone and gets sunken into the ground to join the other Golden Guards, where Luz tries to save him with Eda's jacket saying "No no no, you're gonna be alright, it's gonna be alright" this scene isn't out of love or anything romantic, shes fucking scared about him dying, she CARES about Hunter, but not in a romantic way

Their next interaction is in Clouds on The Horizon where she almost rats out Hunter being a grimwalker to Gus and Willow, where Hunter pulls Luz aside, shushing her, hes afraid that they won't like them if they find out but Luz thinks they won't mind, leading Hunter to bring up if they'll accept Luz for helping Belos, which is a bad thing, this interaction has nothing romantic to it, theyre both just scared

Their next and final interaction is in Thanks to them, where they go into the shack cause Hunter thinks Belos is in the human realm, he masks his confidence cause the motherfuckers literally facing his abuser, hence Luz handing Hunter a mask so conveniently around to make him feel better, nothing romantic may I remind you, and also one for herself, they search the shack and look around, exploring the rooms and going into the basement where they find something in a closet which turns out to be a possum, they're reliefed it's not Belos at least, Hunter says he just wants to keep everyone safe, and so does Luz, she shows her affection and gratitude by LITERALLY CALLING HIM FAMILY, hugging Hunter as he starts crying, and that's all for their interactions

And now that's all outta the way here's the second reason, they're fine cause it's not a large age gap, i have nothing against this, in Thanks to them it's past Luz's birthday cause she's 15, and Amity also says "it's been months since we've been in the human realm" implying it could have passed her birthday, and since for some reason Hunter never ages up he's sixteen, which makes it a one year age gap, nothing to this section much

Another reason is they're not canon siblings, this is a very crucial part, in their interactions Luz calls Hunter family, and a sibling is a family member, making it technically canon their found family/consider each other as family members, people use the excuse of what Camila said in the beginning of thanks to them "I never thought I'd be a family of six" which makes people automatically think everyone in the hexsquad are siblings, Camila just sees herself as a mother figure by taking care of them, she knows Luz and Amity are dating so it wouldn't make Lumity a sibship, and it's also makes Hunter and Luz family since she says six, six meaning Amity, Luz, Gus, Willow, Hunter, and Vee, including them both meaning she's their mother, meaning they're both siblings cause by your logic is if you take care of more than one person it automatically makes them siblings.

And the last reason is because their both bisexual...oh my Titan just because a character is bisexual doesn't mean you can ship them with whoever the fuck you want, you do not need to bring you sexuality into a ship, what makes a ship understandable is their interactions, if those interactions have any chemistry and if the characters show any signs that they might have a crush on another character those two characters could end up together, it has nothing to do with being a bisexual, yes, Luz could think Hunter is pretty, but that doesn't mean she could have a crush on her, she already has a girlfriend and you need to appreciate wlw relationship

People would also think Lunter is shippable cause Luz is always affectionate twords everyone...this is a flat out lie, its pretty much confirmed that Luz is affectionate twords girls more than boys, although I dont remember who said this but its pretty much canon just by watching Luz interact with female characters, like excess hugging, and may I put the emphasis on girls, GIRLS, NOT BOYS, I'm not saying she won't be affectionate in a platonic way twords men its just people think just because she's affectionate means she automatically likes someone, cause no BLUSHING/CUDDLING/KISSING HAVE BEEN SEXUALIZED WAY TOO MUCH, YOU CAN KISS/CUDDLE/BLUSH IN A PLATONIC WAY AS WELL!!! ITS NOT JUST EXCLUSIVE TO ROMANTIC ATTRACTION!!!

And one last thing, if you openly acknowledge that Lumity is canon, that Dana risked her whole show to have a same sex couple, ultimately leading it to be canceled, and to know that wlw relationships and representation is a good thing, then go ship lunter, it is incredibly disrespectful to Dana, she worked her ass off on Lumity and you're throwing it away cause you think its...a cute ship...? That's messed up fr

And this is my reason to why I don't like/ship Lunter, you're fucking welcome, in a few days I'll be doing one in goldrick/huntmira, won't as long cause there not much to talk abt it

[harleyanne02]

Can you write a female reader x Dallas Winston with the character only being soft for the reader and the reader being in distress please? Preferably, the reader is normally badass and needs a break :)

ofc honey! I personally don't have a ton of experience being a badass so some of this will be based on things I've read, but I can for sure understand needing a break.

You also didn't mention if you wanted headcanons or an imagine so I'll default to headcanons lol.

TW: depressive tendencies but nothing is explicitly stated, cursing, extremely fluffy Dallas, non-canon Dallas (he's wayyyyy too fluffy in this but hey, its cute), PLEASE let me know if I missed anything in any of my works I don't want anyone to get triggered by anything I miss

Dallas Winston x Reader Fluff

We all know that Dallas Winston is a badass, but what everyone may not know is that he does have one very small but still there piece of his heart that can feel the nicer emotions, and that sliver is reserved for you

You also get the rest of his heart, but you have to share that with Johnny and the gang as well as Tim, but that little sliver is all yours

You acted like you were the same way but in reality your whole heart could feel and you just had walls up around them. But you had to hold those walls up yourself

And Dal kind of knew that? But had never seen anything happen about it

And one day you'd just had enough

Enough holding up those walls, enough being a badass, enough pretending you couldn't feel the stares you got as you walked down the street with one of the town's most notorious bad boys.

You needed a break

So you took the day off from life, you couldn't remember having any plans that day anyways so what's the harm?

You laid in bed all day and relaxed, watched your comfort movie over and over again, did everything you could to make yourself feel better

until 1:00 when you got a text from Dal

Where r u?

shit

you forgot about your date. You were supposed to meet Dal at the diner for lunch and spend the afternoon together

You text him back quickly shit I'm so sorry babe I completely forgot, I've been in bed all day

that was the thing between you and Dal, you were always honest with each other, you didn't have to lie about what you were doing because the other would find out and the other would be more upset about the lying and lack of trust rather than what you were actually doing.

So he texts back u ok?

yeah just tired. read 1:12pm

You put your phone down and sighed rubbing your hands over your face. You felt horrible for forgetting.

You just sat there in bed for a solid 10 minutes looking at the ceiling before you heard a knock at your door.

You got out of bed and looked in the mirror fixing your hair real quick so it was somewhat presentable before continuing downstairs to the front door.

when you open it your boyfriend walks past you and goes straight over to sit on the couch.

"So what's wrong?" he asks you.

"Nothing" you reply, although it was one of the rare times that you weren't telling the truth with him

"I know that's not true, you never stay in bed all day unless you're sick or there's something wrong." he retorts.

"Fine. It's been a long week. I'm tired of having to play this badass role all of the time, it's getting tiring. I just want to exist." You admit

he doesn't say anything back, he simply nods. He understood what you were feeling, before he completely plunged his soul into being a bad boy, there were rare occassions where he wanted to exist as a normal person too.

he walks over to you and puts your arms around his neck and picks you up by the backs of your thighs. You wrap your legs around his waist and cross your ankles on his back as he carries you up the stairs and to your bedroom.

He sets you on the bed gently and kicks off his shoes before joining you.

He turns on the TV and pulls up your favorite movie and once he starts it he wraps his arms around you and pulls you to lay on his chest facing him

He holds your face in his hands and kisses your forehead, then one cheek, then the other, then your nose, your eyelids, before finally stopping and resting on your lips

You two stay like that until the next morning having fallen asleep eventually (but not after Dal ordered delivery because this mans not about to let his bby skip a meal. If you aren't on track for having 2 1/2 to 3 full meals today please go do that and drink some water while you're at it!)

The next morning Dal wakes up first for once (I think it's practically canon at this point that Dallas Winston sleeps in LATE) and just watches your relaxed face and light breathing, looking so much happier than yesterday

And even though he already planned on it, he made a promise to himself that he would make everything okay for you, his baby, his love.