I think not nearly enough people comprehend just how messed up Rika's and V's relationships truly was, actually. It is so easy to get hyperfocused on the big climax of their toxic obsession: the cult, the physical violence, and the secrets. But, like... You ever actually sit down and think about the sheer fact that V looked at Rika: a hurt, traumatized girl, terrified of being her true self, desperate for love she didn't even have a clear idea of in her own mind, safe for some very vague feeling she deemed to be 'love', and... He saw beauty in it. He was never malicious about it, nor did he even realize it fully, not until MC came into his life and pushed him into reevaluating his own worth as well as his views on what love truly is. But, at the time, he saw all that hidden pain and trauma in her, and he saw beauty in it. He was intrigued by it. It fascinated him. He desired to transform it into something even more stunning with his own two hands, analogous to an artist fixing his next big masterpiece. And she was his masterpiece. One he would paint and bend and mold into something he knew he wanted to achieve. It wasn't even a want, it was a craving. Not really knowing that he was just so racked with guilt and self-hatred after his mother's death, that he was merely trying to prove himself to no one but his own troubled and scared mind. To prove to himself that he could be an artist, and that he really could love like the sun. That he could save someone this time around, instead of losing them. Because, truth is, he could never be an artist, not in the way his soul truly longed for.
Rika was both his muse and his creation at the same time.
That's why he never encouraged her to get the help she desperately needed if she didn't want to do it herself. That's why he never got involved in any extreme ways until it became far too difficult for him to handle. That's why he told her time and time again that she was beautiful and perfect just the way she is, even when she herself would doubt and be deeply disturbed by his eager willingness to sink into the deepest of lows for her.
In a way, neither of them truly knew each other. It's a fact that they cared for each other at one point in time. But they didn't see each other as equal individuals to grow and change alongside. For Rika, V was her sun she adored and loathed all the same. He was not a person, he was just an anchor that kept her steady and a cruel reminder of all she could never be. For V, Rika was his canvas to pour his locked away feelings onto. She was not a person, she was a living proof of his ability to create and love in a way he desperately craved.
And in the end, that destroyed and scarred both of them. Not only them, but also many completely innocent individuals who were caught in the crossfire.
What a big, complicated, and horrible mess these two are.
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Zosan headcanon (set either after Whole Cake Island or during one of the pre-timeskip arcs)
One night Sanji has a bad dream (about his childhood, his trauma, his fears...) and suddenly wakes up gasping and heavy breathing.
He doesn't want to wake up his crewmates, so he just gets up from the floor where he usually sleeps and leaves the room. But Zoro is on lookout that night and sees Sanji running into the kitchen (his comfort place). He knows that something isn't right by how panicked his breathing sounded and how confused he looked around, so he decides to check on him.
He finds Sanji in the darkness, sitting on the floor, with his back leaning on the counter, covering his head with his arms and sobbing like he never heard him do. (In his own mind, it that moment Sanji is still a child, left alone crying in the darkness by his father).
Sanji sees Zoro on the doorsteps, lit by the moonlight. Because of his pride and his rivalry with the swordsman, he doesn't want Zoro to see him while he is so vulnerable and tells him to go away, but of course Zoro is way too stubborn to do what he tells him to and wants to know why he's crying.
Sanji thinks that he wants to make fun of him, so he just stays silent, suffocating his sobs, waiting for an insult or a joke. But instead Zoro sits next to him and tells him that he envies him, because he's able to let all his emotions out and to cry freely without feeling judged (by his own self) or "less masculine".
Sanji is obviously surprised by that glimpse of Zoro's sincerity, but doesn't want to tell him why he's crying. He doesn't want to burden him with his story. In that moment, he just knows that Zoro's company is comforting. Their shoulders slightly brushing while sitting next to each other in the darkness, Zoro's slow breathing, the warmth of his body... Everything about that makes Sanji cry even more. He isn't alone anymore. He doesn't have to bear all his sufferings by himself in a loop of poisonous thoughts.
Without even realising it, he finds himself leaning his head on Zoro's shoulder, feeling the tears running down his cheeks and soaking Zoro's shirt. He quickly starts sobbing again, covering his face with his hand. Zoro wraps his arm around him and pulls him closer, letting Sanji bury his head on his chest.
Zoro patiently waits, while Sanji cries until he's too tired to even let out a single hiccup and they both fall asleep holding each other.
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A sapphic detective who gets too close to the truth of a case and gets confronted by her girlfriend for being too obsessed?
“You need to stop.”
The detective didn’t jerk up at the sound of her voice—just quietly stirred, rustling papers as she shifted upright to meet her eyes.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” the detective said slowly, eyes scanning over her. She watched her gaze catch on the water dripping from the ends of her hair, the mascara smudging itself down her cheeks.
“It’s date night,” she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded tired. Dead. Rotting roses and dirty dishes in the sink.
The detective blinked once, then shifted through her papers until she found a scribbled in calendar. It was stuck on the wrong month.
“I forgot,” the detective murmured. It wasn’t an apology, and neither of them were pretending that it was. She could tell, even now, with her girlfriend pathetic and dripping water onto the hardwood floor in front of her, that the detective wanted nothing more than to go back to her evidence.
“Yeah,” she croaked. “Funny how it’s never the case you forget.”
The detective jerked, slightly, like she hadn’t expected the barbs in her girlfriend’s voice.
In the hallway, there was a drooping bouquet of flowers she hadn’t been able to bear bringing into the apartment.
“You know how important this is,” the detective implored, and it made her want to break things. Burn the papers, shatter the fancy glasses in the cabinet, spill wine across the carpets.
What about me, she wanted to scream. Am I not important to you anymore?
Instead, she said again, “You need to stop.”
“Stop?”
“The case. You need to stop.”
“I can’t just stop,” the detective laughed slightly, as if she thought it would convey how inconceivable the idea of stopping was.
“Yes, you can. Give it to someone else. There’s a whole precinct just waiting for you to put this file into their hands.”
At the thought of it, the thought of giving up this case, the hunt, the chase, pain flashed across the detective’s face.
“You don’t understand.”
“I do,” she replied. She had to shift her gaze to the dead plant on the corner of her partner’s desk, dirt dry and leaves brittle. “How could I not?”
“So then how could you ask me to do that? To give it all up? Why now?”
She had so many answers to that. So many moments that cut into her hands like a mosaic of memories. The bed empty beside her through the entire night. Cancelled reservations, one seat alone at the dinner table, laughs that died in her ribs. Friends, well meaning, who asked where the detective was, and the painful smiles she forced through the explanations. Work, and work, and work. Crime scene photos on the coffee table. The loneliness that seemed to care about her more than her girlfriend did.
There were so many times when she almost said something. Almost said enough. But she hadn’t, and now they were here, as she dripped a puddle onto the floor, and the detective looked at her like she had never seen her before.
When she tried to say that, any of that, it caught in her throat.
The detective took her silence for an inability to answer. A lack of evidence. Like she was throwing this tantrum for no reason, a little kid in the toy aisle of the store.
The detective sighed, rubbing a hand over her forehead. The other was already fanning through the papers once more. Her voice turned into something that begged to be understood.
“I’m so close—“
“To losing me.” She swallowed, painfully. “You’re losing me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“This isn’t fair,” her voice broke as she gestured between the two of them. “What you’re doing to me isn’t fair.”
“I’m not doing anything—“
“Exactly.” It was louder than she meant it to be. They both flinched.
“I’ll have it solved in a week, I promise.” She wasn’t sure who the detective was promising to.
“No.”
The detective blinked.
“No?”
“You heard me the first time.”
“I heard you, but I’m not sure what you’re saying ‘no’ to.”
If she had the energy to be slightly meaner, she would have told her to figure it out. Told her that she was a detective, this should be easy for her.
“I’m not giving you a week.” She took a deep breath. “And you’re not going to solve it.”
The detective’s looked at her like she didn’t recognize the person on the other side of the desk.
Finally, she understood what it felt like to face her girlfriend from the other side of an interrogation table.
Her girlfriend’s face was cold, and closed off. Her jaw was grinding into itself. She was staring at her like she couldn’t decide whether or not to consider her a suspect. As if the only reason she could fathom her girlfriend saying something like that was if she was actively sabotaging her.
She was cold, and her coat was wet, and this place no longer felt like home.
“You won’t solve this case.”
She was pretty sure there wasn’t anything crueler she could have said.
“You don’t know anything.” It was dripping with venom, and fear, and frustration. The fear the detective really wouldn’t solve it. The frustration that it still wasn’t solved.
“Do you really think you’re that special?” By now, it was too far gone for her to stop. There was no pretty way out of this. “You aren’t. This isn’t a TV show. You aren’t the main character who swoops in where no one else has before. It’s been decades of the same bullshit—taunting and evidence trails, and nobody has solved it. Don’t you think if it was solvable, it would have been by now?”
“There’s new evidence, and I’m not them—“
“What part of ‘you aren’t special’ don’t you understand,” she hissed, and the detective shifted away from her. “You aren’t the miracle detective who solves this. They’re going to keep on killing, and driving the people who try and find them crazy, and you’re letting them do it to you.”
“I’m not letting them do anything.”
“But you are,” she countered. “You have been for months. They’re messing with you. They’re everything to you, and you’re a game to them, and I’m nothing on the sidelines.”
“Babe, that’s not true,” The detective tried, voice softening. As if she had just realized something between them was wrong. That her girlfriend was hurting—had been, for a while.
She swallowed the tears rising in her throat.
“Do I need to become a crime scene for you to finally care about me again?” She slammed her hand down on the papers. Pretended the wince on the detectives face was concern for her, and not the papers she crumpled. “Will you look at me, love me again, if I’m a bloody photograph in this folder?”
“I do love you.”
“When someone loves someone else, they don’t leave them alone in the rain, waiting to be picked up. They don’t cancel to go dig through old archives on their loved one’s birthday. They don’t leave them in the middle of the night and let the blankets beside them get cold. People who love someone don’t live their life without a concern for the person they’re putting below everything else.”
“You’re making this really hard.”
“Good,” she snapped. “Because you’ve been making it hard to love you for months, and I’m glad you finally know how it feels.”
The detective paused, at that. Swallowed, eyes flitting around the room as if she would find the perfect thing to say in the remnants of the life they had built together.
“I love you,” The detective managed. Somehow, it was the worst thing she could have said.
“Good. Prove it.” She thought maybe dying would have hurt less than this.
“Prove it?”
“Prove it. Me, or the case.”
The detective froze.
“You don’t mean that,” she said, and it sounded like a plea. Don’t make me choose.
“Look at me and try and tell me I’m joking.” When the detective said nothing, she pushed further. “Go on. Do it. Choose.”
“I can’t do that—“ the detective choked. “This isn’t fair, you know that. I’m so close.”
Somehow, she had expected it to hurt less.
“Don’t make me choose,” the detective, her girlfriend, the love of her life finally said, voice breaking.
She had thought it would feel like dying.
It felt like nothing.
“You just did,” she said. The tears refused to be held, this time. The pain ran rampant through every word.
She knew her girlfriend could hear it.
“I love you,” the detective whispered. A final, desperate prayer for her to stay. But she was no god, and her girlfriend was no believer. And it would never be enough.
She let the door slam on the way out.
The detective never did solve that case.
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