#this is kind of a long post sorry but i felt like i needed to make it clear that it's not like.

[aziraphales-library]

Y’all are awesome and I appreciate the hell out of this account! Any fics that are an attempt at a season 3? Preferably comedic ones! Thank you so much and keep up the amazing work! ❤️

Hello. We have a #good omens s3 speculation tag, so check that out. Here are more to add that have some kind of humour tag...

a place to be by kaiyen (NR)

In which Crowley moves back into his flat, Aziraphale has problems at work, and the Second Coming of Christ is but a stone's throw away. In the end, Crowley makes it to rolling green hills, leant against a stubbornly yellow Bentley. He remembers the first morning. He had slithered out of the ground not long before dawn, the dirt damp even before the first rain, the grass cool and crisp against his scales. And the sun had risen, jewels spilling across the great blue sky, warm and golden from the East. Crowley – Crawly, then – had wanted to follow it, had felt a great pull Eastwards. He went, too, until he found the ripe red fruit nestled amongst the lush green leaves and knew what they were for. It was luck, then, that the humans had left in the direction of the sunrise. Luck, or– ineffable. The sun rises over the South Downs, and Crowley finally wants to stay.

The Ineffable Shades of Gray (Good Omens Season 3) by altsernative (T)

After returning to Heaven, Aziraphale learns the Metatron's true intentions, finds himself disillusioned, and regrets his choice to leave Crowley, who has been working in the Temptations department. They reunite, and find themselves stopping the final war between Heaven and Hell and learning God and Satan's true intentions for the world and each other.

Demons are Forever by in_a_pickle (T)

After finallly finding the courage to tell his best friend his feelings, Crowley's dreams are shattered when Aziraphale once again chooses Heaven over happiness together. With ‘Great Plans’ afoot upstairs, Aziraphale discovers that the starring role he accepted comes with some unforeseen duties and that Crowley’s kiss has become something of a distraction. Crowley meanwhile is trying to come to terms with a broken heart and is trying to fathom why Heaven is so keen to have Aziraphale back in the fold. A mini adventure with our favourite group of two, written in case I get hit by a bus and never get to find out what happened next.

The Intended Effect by Esme_Abner (E)

A post-S2 fic that begins with a very sad Crowley and a conflicted Aziraphale and a surprisingly not-awful Jesus. It's all building toward our boys reconciling, because like everyone else, my heart is broken and I need to pick up the pieces somehow. And they might try to like save the world again, too.

(I just can't wait for) Season 3 Good Omens! by RCReveal (T)

After Season 2, I really needed to find out how Aziraphale and Crowley could get their reunion: a real reunion & not 'pretendy real'. They both have so much growing to do with neither of them, yet, being able to even say 'I love you' clearly to each other. Angel, what's going on? What kind of doublethink are you doing to still think that Heaven is the Good side & that you can't even admit to being friends? But you'll do anything to protect the World. Crowley, always planning on running. Sorry, but that won't work. If you had run at Armageddon there'd be no here to be in. But somehow, still a little seed of optimism. And wow! what you two can do together! Especially with a little help from old and new friends. So here's a story about averting the Second Coming with that great ensemble cast of characters in Heaven, Hell, and Whickber ST. Long set up, but then starts to speed up, kinda a wild ride from chapter 42 onto the end. This story is at about the same level of cursing, violence (well, maybe a little more Gaiman-esque), humor (definitely much more Terry Pratchett-esque) and romance as that of the second season.

There's a Special Place on Earth for Beings Like You by Kipje (T)

Set two years after Aziraphale leaves to become Supreme Archangel. It’s the Second Coming. Aziraphale is tasked with finding parents for the new Christ and returns to earth. He needs Crowley’s help, but the two haven’t spoken since the break-up. Crowley doesn’t want to forgive the angel, nor does he want to help out with the baby, but he finds it incredibly hard not to get involved. OR Aziraphale and Crowley raise the new Christ together; a girl named Eden. While they try to sort out their feelings and avert the apocalypse. Excerpt: Crowley had always assumed Aziraphale would want to run away with him in order to be together. He had never bothered to ask if there was a version where they would be an ‘us’ on earth. What was Aziraphale supposed to do once they arrived in the Alpha Centauri system. How would that even work with his book collection? Sure, Aziraphale had fallen in love with the demon – and it had taken him a while to be able to admit that – but he had also fallen in love with humanity, with earth. He had never planned on leaving. He knew earth would be no fun without his favourite wily serpent, but that did not mean he would be fine anywhere as long as Crowley was there. He had standards.

- Mod D

[justxtalking]

all the times gon showed affection, interest, care and basically relied on killua

Did I search all the times Gon explicitively expressed his affection to Killua? Yes, yes I did. Do I regret it? No, no I don't.

I decided to choose the manga since it's what Togashi wrote. However, it is important to note that there are a lot of more times if we add both versions of the anime and the movies. In addition to this, I chose the most explicit times in which Gon expressed himself so there is no misunderstanding. (Though I do think it's basically the whole manga.)

This post is hella long and had to be divided into parts, so bear with me. This is just the beginning. (Edit: Here's the link of the full post.)

Hunter Exam arc

When they first met and Gon was impressed by Killua's trick.

2. Gon happy to be with Killua and to explore with him.

3. Gon's interest in Killua's family, and surprising Killua in the process.

4. Gon being impressed by Killua's technique, curious about it and expressing "Killua is an amazing guy."

5. Gon defending Killua against Illumi and seeing right through the situation.

6. Gon swearing to take Killua away from Illumi.

Zoldyck Family arc

7. Gon's refusal for the Zoldyck's intent on separating themselves from the rest of the world and more than ready to climb the wall if it is to reach Killua.

8. Gon's phonecall with Gotoh.

9. Gon's intent on climbing up the wall to reach Killua.

10. Gon accepts to train if it means he will reach Killua.

11. Gon getting hit over and over again if it means he will reach Killua.

12. Gon playing against Gotoh while waiting for Killua.

13. Gon happy to see Killua again.

14. Gon impressed by Killua's ability to know other's strenghts, and embarrassing Killua in the process.

Heavens Arena arc

15. Gon relying on Killua's advice to win.

16. Gon happy because Killua wanted to go to his house.

(+)

Click here for the full post.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The whole discourse about the privacy/secrecy/support thing has been sitting with me for a few days (I mean other than it always does to a certain degree) thanks to all the excellent discussion happening and I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but I think what we're seeing and what we're going to learn (e.g. from TTPD) is that it wasn't just the support issue, but how it was shown/handled.

We've all gone out of our way to show that introversion =/= lack of support. Someone can be shy, reserved, etc. and still show up for their partner, whether in public or at home. To chalk any of the differences up to the clash between introversion and extroversion is unfair to folks who count themselves among either tbh.

@thisisctrying said something the other day that hit the nail on the head about how if that support had been offered in private, there very well may not have been a Joever to begin with, or at least not at this point in time. (Sorry for loosely paraphrasing, and for namedropping you! Long time listener, first time poster.)

If this were a case where the "shy" partner said, "I am really uncomfortable with the spotlight personally and do not want to court it, but I will support you in your ambitions and offer you whatever you need to make them happen and make the glare bearable," I suspect that would have gone a long way to making Taylor feel seen and comfortable in pursuing her goals in the way that she now has. Again, that might have been more akin to the balance that seemed to have been struck around 2019 from what we can see, but even speaking in a general sense, there are lots of couples out there, celebrity or not, that have similar approaches where there are highly driven people and busy careers involved.

(A famous example being Dolly Parton's marriage. Tbh I know next to nothing about her and Carl, but she's always heralded as an example in this regard, because her husband is famously uncomfortable with the spotlight and hasn't accompanied her to public events in decades, but she's said that she never minded that because that was always work to her, and what was important was that he supported her in pursuing all her career goals and basically ensured she had a place to call home to return to at the end of the day.)

We're kind of in a brave new world with her current relationship because it felt like, at least at the start, we were maybe watching her figure out her boundaries in real time as to what she was comfortable with or not and adjust accordingly. Like so many have said, I fully believe the extreme privacy thing was initially driven by herself and her experiences in 2016, and she needed that quiet time to recover from all of the things and figure out how to exist in the world again.

Stating the obvious, it seemed like eventually privacy was equated with secrecy, turning the relationship and the celebrity into the elephant in the room and something to never be spoken of to the outside world. People are free to choose whatever works best for themselves and their relationships, and for some the separate public lives might work, but the “kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath” theme is all over her work and it’s clear that it’s a sore spot for her, because she’s been made to feel shame just for the life she leads so many times in the past.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s pretty obvious something Not Great was happening behind the scenes, which didn’t just amount to “she wanted to be a public celebrity and he wanted to be a private hermit.” (Also, in case anyone forgot, this is a person who also chose a public-facing career who also has to engage in press for it, but I digress.) As her career reached new heights post-folklore, if she had the support at home to do all the things without judgment and with encouragement, and in turn offer the same support to her partner, she may have very well lived just fine with that, not unlike Dolly Parton’s case.

By reading between the lines in all the press since, as well as comments on tour and general ~vibes~ with TTPD teasers, it seems like one of the issues was that that was likely not the case. There was all the stuff that we saw — the reticence to acknowledge each other in the media (particularly on one side), the lack of public support even at events at which they were both in attendance for their respective jobs, the great lengths they went to not to be photographed together at events they attended yet no problem taking pictures with other friends and coworkers, the jobs that separated them, the withdrawing from the public even for work accomplishments, etc. Which could all be manageable if a couple chooses to do so together and are not inherently a sign of trouble in themselves.

But what we’re seeing now I think is a reflection of the things we weren’t seeing then, and it seems to indicate some very deep hurt. (I know, call me Captain Obvious.) And like so many have been saying, it feels likely that that part of that hurt is rooted in that very lack of private support where a person would expect it from their partner. Obviously as a Taylor fan blog I’m going to be more inclined to understand her side of a story, but tbh, it’s also because… this is sooooooo common, and something I’ve experienced in my friend group. (@taylortruther is right when she says most breakups are the same one way or another lol.)

One partner is resentful of the other’s success, or resentful that the other’s priorities begin to evolve as new experiences unlock new goals, or feels the other’s ambitions are not worthy of pursuit, and coupled with perhaps their own struggles in the same domain, it’s easy to see where that can chip away at the other partner’s morale and faith in the relationship. I know I’m just speculating here, but I also don’t think it’s totally unfounded. (Again, because a) I’m picking up what she’s putting down and b) it happens to sooooooo many women even among us dull normals.)

With all the pointed mentions about how much Taylor feels supported in her current relationship and how she in turn loves to offer the same show of support to not only her partner but other loved ones, how she’s stepped out more in the last year to a whole host of events, how she’s mentioned feeling like she locked herself away for years and she’s just proud of her partner and happy she can show up for him even if the chaos around it is unsettling, it paints a picture of what perhaps was happening before last year.

To feel like you’re all alone in carrying the weight of the relationship (or burden of it), of twisting yourself into knots to accommodate the other person’s boundaries (or insecurities) but not feeling reciprocity for your own has to be so painful. (The idea that it may have been even darker and to have a partner not only be unreceptive to your own needs but even perhaps resentful/dismissive/belittling of them is even more painful to think of. I guess we’ll find out when TTPD comes out if that was the case, too.)

At a certain point, that lack of acknowledgement will force your hand to be able to reclaim yourself. And it feels like the further removed Taylor in particular is from it, the more she moves from being sad about the life she felt she gave up by leaving, to angry at the life she felt she was giving up by staying. Especially being in a relationship now where it seems like everything comes much easier, where she can be open about the person she’s with and show up for them, all the stuff that seemed as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in her past is nothing more than a molehill at best in her current life.

TL;DR: I don’t think it’s privacy that inherently spells doom for a celebrity relationship like this; it’s the mutual support and respect that does. If Taylor had felt that in the later years of her previous relationship, I think we could be seeing a different, though not necessarily unfulfilled, person right now in 2024, who’d be happy on tour but whose personal life would look a little different. But it seems like by losing that support she lost parts of herself, and we’ve seen her reclaim that in spades in the last year, and perhaps to degrees she didn’t even realize she could from before all the Bad Stuff started happening in her young adulthood.

I know this was extremely long-winded and unnecessary, especially about total strangers we only know through scraps fed through the media, but I just always bristle at this idea that issues like these boil down to “personality differences,” as though one person wants to live in a city and the other on a remote island, or some shit like that. The whole support (and gender tbh) issue is one that’s just very close to my heart because again, I have seen it play out with so many of my friends in long term relationships and marriages and I just think people in relationships (and women in particular in some circles) deserve better than to feel like they’re being, well, tolerated.

[kunikidas-lost-glasses]

Headcanons and short drabbles for my BSD Fix-it AU

!Contains Spoilers for the whole DoA arc!

TWs: Mentions of OCD, mentions of panic attacks, mentions of crying, mentions of slight gun violence, mentions of screaming, mentions of heavy injuries, mentions of medical related stuff (p.ex.infirmaries), mentions of chronic pain 

All characters might be ooc.

Pairings: Shin Soukoku, Bramcraft, at first Ranpoe and implied developing Mushiranpoe,later mentioned Mushiranpoe, Chuusigzai, lightly implied past!Fyozai (it’s up to interpretation if romantically or platonically but it’s written more in a platonic way), implied Tachihigugin, Fyolai, engaged!Suegiku, Montcott

The ADA managed to defeat Fukuchi and obtained the page

Fyodor and Nikolai got away though.

The moment Sigma wanted to shoot Fyodor, Nikolai appeared next to Fyodor through one of his overcoat portals and pulled the other with him through it. 

It did send Sigma into a panic attack and Dazai too got nervous because of this but as soon as the ADA managed to obtain the page, he got a lot calmer and told Atsushi to write that Fyodor loses his ability on the page, knowing that it not only would send the russian into several existence crises but also knowing that the chance that he would try to erase all ability users would become much lower then. 

Dazai knew Fyodor for years and he knew how much his ability tortured him since his early childhood. He knew that Punishment plagued him and took over a lot. 

Fyodor’s ability was strong and was just as intelligent as the one who wielded it so that his ability slowly but surely started to affect his mind a lot wasn’t unexpected. 

When Dazai touched Fyodor for the first time years ago, the other basically melted into his touch after Dazai touched him despite his threats that he would kill the other if he would dare to touch him. 

The heavy weight of Punishment, the sharp and piercing feeling of the powerful ability raging inside of him whenever he felt threatened as well as its influence on his mind faded to nothing for the first time in his life.

When they met again, Dazai was almost sure that Punishment affected the other’s mind completely since he had gotten more cruel and heartless but also because he worked so tirelessly on his goal to erase all ability users so now he was almost completely sure that erasing only Fyodor’s ability would stop the other.

He was right. Upon feeling his ability fading away until it was completely gone, Fyodor went, just like Dazai expected, through a whole existence crises

With his ability fading, Fyodor also slowly gained full consciousness over his mind again and fully realized what had happened, even though he couldn’t remember events where Punishment had taken over his consciousness nearly completely.

After everything, the russian spent weeks in his bed, not only recovering from his physical injuries he had from their prison escape game but also because his mind struggled to process the fact that Punishment was gone and that he was only Fyodor now. No Crime. No Punishment. No vessel for Punishment. Just Fyodor. 

He also had to process the fact that he gained full consciousness again and had to deal with all the guilt because of what happened which was eating him up alive for quite some time.

The one who took care of him the whole time was no other than Nikolai. 

Nikolai who had put his clown attire away by now. Nikolai, who violently shook Fyodor after saving him, screaming at him for not getting out of his mind and for stopping him from being free, screaming that he hated him so much. Nikolai who had held a gun to Fyodor’s head, hand shaking before dropping the gun, letting his friend go and kneeling in front of him, sobbing. Nikolai who slowly learned to accept that he loved Fyodor and who slowly tried to believe that he could be free together with Fyodor.

He knew that Fyodor returned his feelings but he also knew that Fyodor waited until Nikolai had everything sorted out.

And Fyodor did wait. He waited patiently and eventually, when Nikolai was ready and both got more stable as well as used to their new quiet life, living undercover and when Fyodor was physically fully and mentally partly recovered, they got together in one cold winter night.

Their relationship was beautiful actually and it was based on mutual deep understanding and a bond which already started to form when they both met while living on the streets in the Ukraine as young teens.

Dazai was still secretly searching for the whereabouts of Fyodor and Nikolai for nearly two years, despite knowing that it was nearly impossible to find the russian if he didn’t wanted to be found, scared that his plan didn’t carry out exactly as he hoped that it would but after nearly four years passed, he was almost completely sure that the rat and his clown wouldn’t try to start a war again. 

Sigma and Bram joined the ADA

Sigma’s entrance actually started with the elevator crashing down and he passed it by staying on Dazai’s and the ADA’s side, nearly managing to shoot Fyodor, instead of running away or going back to the Decay of Angels. 

Bram on the other hand, kind of had to stay with the ADA but he actually didn’t  mind.

Aya begged the agency not to kill Bram and eventually they gave in and gave Bram an entrance exam for multiple reasons, one of them being that he can’t be on his own, slashed in half like this but also that if they would pull out the sword, he would have no control over his ability, just like he told Aya so they somehow needed to keep his ability at bay.

After Bram passed the entrance exam and managed to prove his good motives, which wasn’t that hard for him since he never wanted to cause a vampire outbreak to happen and got forced into biting people/since he joined the DoA against his own will,  Dazai touched the sword, nullifying it, so that they could pull out the sword without hurting Bram any further. 

With the sword out of him, he was able to regenerate his body in a matter of a few days.

At first he even refused to Dazai touching it, scared that his ability might lash out completely like he had told Aya but Fukuzawa’s ability kept his vampirism at bay and allowed him to control it much better

By now he has a full body again and can make his own decisions again without being bound to anyone but he still has to use a cane since after not walking/not even having a full body for literal centuries he still struggles with walking and kind of has to relearn it.

He also has to relearn how to use his hands for the exact same reasons. 

However, he can also transform into a large bat again so he usually chills, hanging upside down from the ceiling or hanging upside down on the side of Sigma’s desk, sleeping in his bat form. (Sigma put a little metal bar on the side of his desk specifically for Bram.)

Sigma and Bram kind of get along pretty well. They already got along back when they were both in the DoA but could barely talk/get to know each other since they barely saw each other outside of the meetings of the organization. 

Besides this, Sigma was nearly always busy in his casino and Bram was very well hidden and most of the time guarded by Fukuchi in some way. 

Fukuchi got defeated completely.

The Hunting Dogs had to go under police investigation but after they were proven to be innocent and to be not involved with the DoA, they got a new leader. They couldn’t split the Hunting Dogs up since they would die without the operations.

Jounou and Tecchou got engaged a few months after the war against the DoA.

Atsushi brought Bram and Aya to Dazai where he could touch the vampire, nullifying his ability and turning the people who had been turned into vampires back into humans. 

Yosano saved multiple lives that day since the injuries which some people had before they got turned into a vampire returned shortly after they were fully human again. 

Upon seeing Akutagawa again, alive, healthy and fully human again, Atsushi thought he wouldn’t believe his eyes at first but only a couple of seconds later after standing there like frozen, staring at the other, Atsushi dashed forwards, tackle-hugging Akutagawa with such a strength and with such a speed that he knocked both of them over so that they both fell on the floor. 

Atsushi hugged Akutagaw so tightly that the other heard he would hear his ribs crack before Atsushi sat up a bit, yelling at Akutagawa for being so stupid for sacrificing himself for Atsushi and asking if if he could imagine how it felt to fight against him as a mindless vampire.

He really tried not to cry but he failed. Miserably.

When he tackle-hugged Akutagawa for the first time, tears where already in the corner of his eyes and upon feeling the other again, hearing him breathe and smelling the familiar faint smell of tea like which the other nearly always smelled, he couldn’t stop the tears from falling and it got worse when he was yelling at Akutagawa but that didn’t stop him from doing so.

Akutagawa just listened to him quietly (it drove Atsushi a bit crazy to be completely honest)

Eventually Atsushi actually talked himself that much in rage, that he ended up confessing accidentally to Akutagawa which caused him to shut up immediately staring shocked at Akutagawa who looked at him with wide eyes too, before hectically trying to scramble away and get up to give Akutagawa space since he was nearly completely sure that the other was disgusted now but Akutagawa actually grabbed him before he could get up fully and pulled him back so that he lied on top of him again before hugging him, telling him that he felt the same causing Atsushi to start to sob all over again. 

Akutagawa lied there with a faint smile, slowly rubbing the bag of the other and he would never admit it but he too, had watery eyes

Normally he would have never reacted like this or would have shown such a soft side of him but after what happened, even he couldn’t stay as cold as usual

Soukoku watched them with little smiles on their faces, how they continued to lie on the floor curled up together in a tight hug, talking quietly about everything.

Fyodor’s downfall actually started with underestimating Soukoku’s bond and with sending Chuuya to Dazai in order to kill the latter without realizing that Chuuya was already long out of his vampire state. 

Chuuya was the one who carried Dazai out of the hallway to a safe place, who did first aid on Dazai who was heavily injured from the elevator crash and who guarded him until everything was over.

Dazai managed to snap Chuuya out of the vampire state by nearly making him and Fyodor drown (it was actually part of a big plan c of Dazai which was the plan he would have to use in the worst case. That Chuuya got turned into a vampire wasn’t his first plan but it was included in one of his “worst case” plans.)

Chuuya punched him hard later for nearly drowning him and saying such things before he “drowned” but upon noticing that Dazai was sticking extremely close to him and refused to leave his side the whole time and also upon seeing that he was truly shaken up too (no matter how hard he tried to mask it), he just sighed and hugged his partner. 

They stayed like that, quietly hugging each other and Dazai basically clinging to Chuuya, holding onto him and hugging him so tightly that Chuuya struggled to breathe for a moment and he buried his face in the redheads crook of the neck for a long time

Later, they would never talk about the fact that Dazai was shaking like crazy during the first time of their embrace but when Chuuya realized it he just slowly started to rub the younger's back and buried his face in the others brown messy locks. They didn’t need any words at that moment.

Dazai became even clingier to Chuuya than he was before.

Ranpo and Yosano would stick close together and also stick close to Fukuzawa for the next months, not wanting to get separated for longer than a day.

Yosano would never forget the sight of seeing Fukuzawa and Ranpo lying unconsciously on the ground, bleeding out from stab wounds. 

She stayed at their side until they woke up again after she had healed them.

After they woke up again, she tried to appear put together and greeted them with a relieved smile which quickly turned into a wobbly smile after she heard Ranpo complaining about his head hurting and about starting to complain about the fact that they didn’t listen to him in the first place. 

He quickly stopped complaining after he noticed that Yosano had gone quiet and after Fukuzawa noticed her teary eyes, he asked her to come to him. Of course she did so and he pulled her into a tight hug. 

It was the first time in years that Yosano cried. 

Ranpo started to complain about getting left out so Yosano huffed out a laugh and pulled him into a bone crushing hug too.

While Fukuzawa and Ranpo were allowed to leave her infirmary the same day, the people who had been turned into vampires had to stay for a bit longer. Some of them only woke up days later.

The reason why they had to stay a bit longer was because despite Yosano successfully healing them and despite vampirism getting nullified, they felt worn out and exhausted and seemed to recover much slower. Even after a month the most still had to take things slow since their bodies quickly started to feel worn out and they often felt exhausted from doing the smallest things. After some months went by, the symptoms got lesser and lesser though. 

Yosano had asked Bram if they could turn into vampires again but Bram told her that this was impossible.

As soon as Yosano allowed people to visit people in the infirmary again, Poe and Mushitarou were next to Ranpo’s bed.

Poe basically refused to leave Ranpo’s side and held his hand tightly. 

Mushitarou stood next to Poe with a little smile on his face. 

Mushitarou had started to slowly get along a bit more with the detective but they couldn’t really hang out since Ranpo had been in fighting against the DoA with the others while Poe acted as a supporter from the back rows. 

However, he got a lot closer with the writer, after all, he lived with him. 

As soon as they’ve gotten the information that Ranpo had gotten injured by Fukuchi and was now being healed by Yosano, Poe nearly fell into a panic hole and it was Mushitarou who carefully took the phone out of Poe’s hand, saying that they would come over in a minute, before he hung up and started to calm the writer down who already struggled to breathe evenly and had shaking hands. 

He wasn’t as good at it as Ranpo was but surprisingly he was able to calm the other down in no time.

Now, standing next to Poe, next to Ranpo’s bed, he did felt strangely relieved that the detective was fine and seeing Poe babbling about how scared he was as well as scolding Ranpo for being so reckless while Ranpo patted the others head and squeezed his hand, telling him to calm down, his heart felt weirdly warm upon seeing them like that.

The ADA actually threw a huge celebration party over two whole days to celebrate their victory over Fukuchi and the DoA. It was an even greater celebration than when they won against the guild

When Lucy finally saw her girlfriend Louisa at that party again, she basically dropped everything she was holding and ran to her, pulling her in a bone crushing hug.

Louisa was a bit startled at first but then giggled and hugged Lucy back, burying her face in the crook of the other woman's neck.

Lucy would never admit it but she did in fact cry a little bit upon finally being able to hold Louisa again and upon seeing that she was healthy and alive. 

The two would stick close together for the rest of the evening. 

Lucy also proceeded to kiss Louisa’s scar which she had from Nathaniel’s attack, telling her that she still looked beautiful with it.

Bram was able to reunite with Lovecraft. 

The two of them had been in a relationship back in the medieval era but after Bram got sliced in half and got taken away like a trophy, Lovecraft had been unable to find him again for centuries and when he found him again, he had already been in the hands of Fukuchi. 

All that Lovecraft wanted, was to free Bram from Fukuchi but he knew that Fukuchi would use Bram against Lovecraft, hurting Bram even more in the process and the last thing Lovecraft wanted, was to make Bram suffer even more than he already had to so he couldn’t do anything beside staying close to the vampire and following them wherever Fukuchi took him. 

The time where Bram had been on the ship had been hell for Lovecraft. He stayed underwater, underneath the ship where he was forced to listen to how Fukuchi treated Bram, how Bram tried to refuse biting people and how tired, hollow and exhausted the voice of his partner sounded. 

Lovecraft wanted to sink the ship oh 8so bad, dragging Fukuchi down with it and killing him underwater and taking Bram with him, since Fukuchi was defenseless against him there. The world underwater was Lovecraft’s world, his element and a mere human was defenseless against him there but he knew that there was a risk that Bram got injured if he really did so and he didn’t wanted to risk that so he was forced to stay underneath the ship, hoping that one day he was able to get Bram back. 

When Bram saw Lovecraft again, he froze and stared at the black haired man with wide eyes. 

He was sure that he would never see Lovecraft again, that he had lost him forever. 

Bram had never stopped thinking and dreaming about the other but he didn’t even dare to hope that he would see him again. 

Lovecraft didn’t look any different than he remembered him. He wore different and more modern clothes and he looked more tired and worn out than before but beside that he still looked exactly how he remembered it.

It didn’t took long until Lovecraft noticed that someone stared at him and when he spotted Bram, he too froze for a moment.

He only managed to say the other’s name before ran towards him, using a bit of his vampire abilities to move faster. However, he tripped shortly before he reached Lovecraft due to his legs giving out but Lovecraft quickly catched him and hugged him.

He held him so carefully as if he would hurt him if he hugged him any tighter.

He had always been careful with Bram since the vampire always nearly felt as fragile as a human in Lovecraft’s arms, despite being an immortal being and since Lovecraft was well aware of his strength he was always careful when touching Bram but now he seemed to touch him even more careful than before. 

Bram however, hugged him as tight as he could, burning his face in the other’s shirt and closing his eyes. 

Nobody saw the tears which escaped his eyes. Only Lovecraft could feel them and only he felt that Bram was shaking slightly. 

Lovecraft on the other hand, was still trying to process that he finally was able to hold Bram again and that Bram was okay. 

After a couple of moments he buried his face in the others long gray hair and closed his eyes as well. They didn’t need any words. It has always been like this. 

They stood like this, hugging each other for a long time and even afterwards, they would stick together. 

Lovecraft would always visit Bram whenever he could and they also started to meet up at night again. Usually Bram would fly down to the harbor where he met Lovecraft. Then they would talk for hours again, like they did back when they first met. They would talk and sleep, holding each other. They would dance and sometimes they would just sit somewhere, watching the night sky and remiscene about the old times. 

Bram often thinks about his kins and his family. After all, he is the only vampire who survived and who is now walking freely around on earth again. He misses them greatly and often he blames himself for not being able to defend them. 

Lovecraft is always there for him when the thoughts get too dark.

Sigma is allowed to carry a gun with him constantly.

He is also practicing to use his ability more precisely and is training to use his ability in order to overwhelm enemies through flooding their mind with so much information that they pass out.

He often gets paired with Atsushi when they go on missions.

They both spend a lot of time together and they became best friends. 

 When Atsushi saw that Sigma was alive, he nearly cried. The “death” of Sigma would leave his mind and he mourned about the death of the other, despite not really knowing him so when he saw him again, he couldn’t believe his eyes before he ran over to him, telling him how relieved he was to see him alive and well. 

Sigma was completely caught off guard at first. Nobody ever was so glad about seeing that he was fine. In all his years with the DoA he was merely a replaceable tool and this boy was nearly crying out of relief and happiness upon seeing him again despite not really knowing anything about him.

It made Sigma feel warm inside and his heart felt like it got squished but in a good way. It was the first time he wondered if this is what “home” felt like. 

Later he asked how he could ever thank Atsushi for his kindness. He showed him back at the sky casino but to his surprise, the other didn’t want anything and told him that he’s just happy that Sigma is fine. 

By now, Sigma, Atsushi, Lucy and Kyouka often spend time together. Sometimes they visit Lucy at the Café, sometimes they go shopping together, sometimes they go and get Crépes together and sometimes they just talk for a while at the office of the ADA.

Sigma and Atsushi both judge Dazai’s shinegans.

Sigma got together with Chuuya and Dazai some time after the war against the DoA.

Chuuya and Dazai were already a couple for years but after the events in Meursault, they also got together with Sigma. 

Dazai already started falling for Sigma early into the events of Meursault while Sigma slowly started falling for Dazai after the latter saved them from drowning. 

Chuuya already started to admire Sigma when he saw Sigma aiming the gun at Fyodor’s head, showing true strength and bravery and it didn’t take long until they both fell for each other after meeting too. 

However Sigma was a bit intimidated by Chuuya at first so it took him a bit longer to warm up to Chuuya. 

They love each other deeply and while Sigma and Chuuya would die for Dazai even though they would never admit it, Dazai would live for them.

However, Dazai is also still getting used to receiving this much genuine love and affection from two people. 

Sigma is also still slowly getting used to being treated like a human being instead of a tool/ is still getting used to not getting used the whole time and also to finally having not one but two places he can call home (the ADA and Dazai and Chuuya). 

During the first time after the war against the DoA, Dazai had to use a wheelchair for a long time after crashing down with the elevator, breaking his legs in several places and breaking other bones as well.

After months, he could walk a bit again and started to use forearm crutches as soon as he could walk for longer periods of time again. 

Eventually he only used one forearm crutch.

He had to keep using a forearm crutch for years.

After a long time, he used a cane instead.

He already struggled with chronic back pain from a failed suicide attempt where he fell on his back, injuring his spine and since he didn’t seeked help from Yosano until months later, the spine healed more badly than anything which is why it now often hurts and cracks, making sitting straight hurt like hell after some time and the serval injuries he had after falling down with the elevator added more chronic pain and his legs couldn’t support his weight fully anymore without hurting like crazy until years later. The pain never fully faded though.

He hated needing the help of others but slowly he started to allow it. 

Kunikida has to practice things like tying his hair into a ponytail, braiding his hair, tying his shoes and writing again because his new hands are still weak and very shaky. 

It caused him multiple breakdowns already due to feeling utterly useless, especially now that he can neither do a lot of paperwork or use his ability as fast and often as before.

Dazai and Ranpo are the only ones who know about Kunikida struggling. 

Dazai actually helps Kunikida when his mental health is particularly bad again and helps him to calm down when he finds him locked in one of the toilet stalls in the bathroom of the ADA again, breaking down on particularly bad days when his hands were shaking so much again that he couldn’t do anything which required precise hand movements. 

Previously, Kuniikida would check on Dazai every evening to see if the other was fine and if he had eaten anything. Now it’s Dazai’s turn to check on his partner regularly. 

At first Kunikida hated it, but slowly he started to accept the support and help from Dazai.

Dazai, Kunikida, Chuuya and Sigma regularly meet up somewhere during weekends to spend some time together. Most of the time, they just talk about work and about life but sometimes they watch movies together at Chuuya’s apartment which he shares with Dazai and Sigma. 

 After Sigma and Kunikida got to know each other through their work at the ADA, they started to get along pretty well and Chuuya and Kunikida got along well anyway. They love to rant about work and about Dazai’s bs while drinking expensive wine. 

Sigma sometimes bakes cookies for the whole ADA.

Fukuzawa refused to exchange any of the ADA members with Mori after he found out about the lie he told Yosano. 

He was furious. 

He knew that it would have consequences but for now he didn’t worry about it. 

Sigma’s OCD and his panic disorder which he developed during his time with the DoA got even worse after the war against the DoA. 

He never told anyone about it and normally he was able to hide his compulsions, his panic and the distress which came from not performing compulsions very well but during the first time after the DoA was defeated, everything got even harder to hide. 

Dazai noticed him writing a word on a word document over and over again, deleting it before writing it again and noticed how Sigma grew more and more distressed. He didn’t confront him about it right then at the crowded office of the ADA but he instead asked him if he could help him with something to snap him out of the thought spiral. 

At home, he confronted Sigma about it, and while Sigma at first panicked, eventually he told Dazai about it.

By now, both Chuuya and Dazai support and help Sigma whenever his fear and his OCD get too much for him. 

The Hunting Dogs came personally to the ADA to apologize for everything they did as well as for believing that they were guilty. 

Tecchou also apologized less formally and more emotionally to Yosano and thanked her again for saving Jounou’s life. After all, they had wanted to execute her so he would have understood it, if she would have refused to help them.

Kenji was thrilled to finally meet this friend Tecchou talked about and he cheerfully greeted Jounou, telling him that he was happy that Jounou was okay and also telling him that Tecchou had been worried sick about him and that he was even willing to place Jounou above justice which was obviously so dear to him. (You must be really good friends then! :D)

Upon hearing this, Jounou just smiled at Tecchou who looked away,  a tiny bit embarrassed. 

Of course Jounou already knew about what happened and he had already scolded Tecchou for nearly 15 minutes for placing him above justice and his mission and for also nearly killing a whole child in his blind rage. 

He can’t deny that his cheeks had been a dark red shade upon hearing this though.

Teruko and Sigma stay far away from each other though and Tachihara keeps a respectful distance to the former casino manager too, knowing that Sigma probably never forgives them for making his casino fall from the sky, killing everyone in it but he understands it.

 That Sigma doesn’t even want to look at Teruko, whether it’s because of the guilt he feels or because of the fact that they killed the people he viewed as his family, is fully justified. At least in Tachihara’s eyes.

The Hunting Dogs now are always there to help the ADA if they would ever need more help with a case or with fighting against an enemy. 

Tachihara stayed with the Hunting Dogs but he still meets up with the Black Lizard regularly and he actually lives with Gin and Higuchi.  

Sometimes he meets up with the Black Lizard and with Chuuya at the bar to which they always went to drink and chat for the whole night like in the old times. 

There is no bad blood at all and all enjoy their meetings greatly. 

He sometimes misses his time at the Port Mafia but as long as he can meet up with them, it's alright. 

He couldn’t leave the Hunting Dogs either. 

Both, Port Mafia and Hunting Dogs are like a family to him so he tries his best, to connect both worlds as best as he can. 

At Home, with Higuchi and Gin, they don’t talk about their jobs anyways. There it is just them. No Port Mafia and no Hunting Dogs unless there is really something someone needs to talk about with their partners/unless there is something someone wants to get off their chest.

Dazai still has awful nightmares about the events at the Meursault Prison. 

Sigma also suffers from night terrors about the same events.

When Dazai wakes up from one of those nightmares again, he usually directly checks if Chuuya and Sigma are still there with him, listens to their breathing and to Chuuya’s little snores as he calms down. 

Sometimes he gets out of their bed and goes into the kitchen or the living room where he sits on the couch, staring holes in the air or staring at the ceiling while he tries to calm his racing mind down. 

Most of the time, Chuuya and Sigma wake up shortly after Dazai left the bed though and grow alarmed immediately, causing them to get out of bed in no time and to search for their boyfriend.

After they found him, Chuuya usually can tell directly what is going on and they comfort him and gently urge him to come back to bed with them.

Sigma reacts much differently than Dazai. 

He often dreams about the DoA, about Fyodor, about his casino or about falling down from the casino but most of the time, he dreams about the elevator which is crashing down with a rapid speed, with Dazai still in it. 

Those dreams are often bloody and horrifying and Sigma often wakes up screaming for Dazai, hyperventilating and crying. 

Chuuya and Dazai always calm him down and are there for him. All three of them are awful at comforting but it works for them.

Most of the time, Dazai hugs Sigma, rubs his back or gently saws back and forth while Chuuya is verbally trying to comfort him and holds his hands, caressing the back of them and assures Sigma that he’s safe here with them and that they are okay. 

They also help Sigma to calm his breathing again and gently prevent him from tugging at his hair/pulling at his hair since it’s something Sigma does when he is stressed, scared or panicking. 

They also always let Sigma talk about his nightmare and look out that his panic won’t get worse again. 

Dazai also always lets Sigma feel his pulse, knowing that this can calm Sigma down more than anything. 

He always regulates his heart beat to a calming, slow one too to calm Sigma down more when he feels his pulse.

When Sigma feels better again and Chuuya gently urges him to try to sleep again, knowing how exhausted Sigma is after the panic attack and assuring him that they won’t leave his side. 

They often lie curled up together in one big cuddle pile then, Sigma lying between them and both hugging him. 

Chuuya and Dazai often quietly talk about everything when Sigma fell asleep again. 

Dazai always stops Sigma and Chuuya from overworking themselves since both tend to do so due to Chuuya’s workaholic tendencies and due to Sigma’s anxiety and perfectionism.

Ranpo scolds the whole ADA for multiple hours that they didn’t listen to him in regards to the DoA case and brings it up over and over again.

He basically won’t let anyone forget that he warned them and that they wouldn’t listen to him.

The agency is now much more careful with accepting cases and Fukuzawa wouldn’t let anyone who was still recovering, no matter if mentally or physically, go on any more dangerous/more shady cases for the first time until they were fully recovered again. 

Ranpo moved into Poe’s mansion as well and now lives with Poe and Mushitarou. 

Mushitarou actually got together with Poe and Ranpoe after a while. 

He’s the happiest he’s been since quite a while. 

Aya often visits the ADA after school.

Fukuzawa thanked her and Lucy for their support and their selfless actions to support the ADA during the vampirism outbreak.

Bram only rarely has to go to investigate a case with others. Most of the time he is sleeping somewhere in the office. 

Now Kunikida has to scold two for sleeping/lazing around at the office during working hours.

Dazai is again trying to get Atsushi to do his paperwork, driving Kunikida crazy. 

However, when Dazai sees that Kunikida is struggling again, he sometimes snatches some papers from the stack on Kunikida’s desk and actually does a bit of Kunikida’s paperwork for him. 

At first Kunikida told him to stop but eventually he just let Dazai help him. He couldn’t stop him from doing so in any way since if Dazai really wanted to do something, there was no way of stopping him and deep inside he was thankful for Dazai’s help. 

Dazai shows Bram the most weird songs to exist.

Surprisingly, the truce between the ADA and the PM is still on going but Dazai and Chuuya already agreed to not moving into separated apartments if the truce gets broken, not wanting to give up their life living together and living together with Sigma so soon again. 

All three agreed that if the truce should get broken, they would move into an apartment which is neither close to the ADA or the PM and which belongs to neither of the organizations. 

Lovecraft sometimes comes over to meet Bram at his dorm or at the office of the ADA. Especially when it’s bad weather outside since Bram dislikes going out so Lovecraft comes to him instead of Bram meeting him at the harbor. 

The first few times he came to the ADA, everyone was very weary around him and not even Dazai made any comments. 

The very first time, even Fukuzawa came out of his office to talk with the guest, ready to fight if needed. 

By now, they are still weary about him but have gotten used to him just randomly appearing at the office or in the house where their apartments are, especially when it’s raining or storming outside.

It became a normal thing.

Kenji even sometimes offers Lovecraft some tea or snacks and greets him happily upon seeing him, asking him how he’s doing.

During the first time he visited, Lovecraft also told Kunikida that if they should ever hurt Bram or just try to do so, he would destroy the whole agency.

Bram was asleep at that moment. After he found out, he scolded Lovecraft a bit. 

Bram and Lovecraft love to complain about everything to each other. 

Lovecraft sometimes brings Bram fruits. 

Bram loves fruits. It probably has to do with him being able to transform into a bat. 

After Kenji found out about this too, he often brings Bram fresh fruits, especially when Bram has a bad day, in order to cheer him up.

Sigma teaches others how to play different card games.

Chuuya sometimes comes over to pick his partner up from work when he can leave his work early for once.

He also is always willing to pick one of them up from work if one of them isn't feeling well but the other one is stuck in a meeting. 

When Atsushi first saw Dazai again, after the latter finally was allowed to leave the infirmary again, he tackled hugged him and hugged him so tightly that Yosano had to remind him to be a bit more careful.

Atsushi refused to let Dazai go for quite a while and cried his eyes out.

Dazai was sitting there like frozen for a moment before awkwardly patting Atsushi on the back, laughing and telling him that he is happy to see him too while trying to ignore the fact that his eyes got a bit teary too. 

Kunikida and Dazai’s reunion was much quieter but also very emotional. 

They were finally able to hug it out too. 

The whole reunion of the ADA was very emotional.

The ADA  isn’t framed anymore and went back to their normal routine, even though there are a few changes and even though the war changed everyone a bit. 

They do take cases again however and even though Dazai warned them that there might be another war against another ability user, they are enjoying their time now and they are prepared a lot better for new battles than previously.

[derpinette]

i have a weird relationship with weight because i hated eating more than anything the moment i was ready for solids ( i hate chewing with my entire life always have & will ) which made me underweight for most of my life ( to this day ) & during late primary-middle school this made me actively suicidal because i felt like something was wrong with my sex because i just was not developing whatsoever prompting me to have a years long phase of trying to gain weight in any way i could ( #EPICFAIL by the way ) & i was already insecure but i felt seriously so unforgivably ugly after bullying not just at school but by adults of my entourage. but then i did in my late 15s which prompted the pendulum to swing in the other direction & suddenly i FREAKED OUT & thought well being skinny is pretty much all i have & know myself to be & clearly it is not going to last forever so i Better preserve it i was delusional about how skinny i thought i was actually i look stumpy & weird i have to prove myself. But now i am normal again kind of

[theinfinitedivides]

Gil Chae: i will become a good wife. please trust me

Mr. General: *does not in fact trust her*

[shoechoe]

Battle Tendency

If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably know that I’ve complained about Battle Tendency before and stated that it is one of my least favorite parts in Jojo. I’ve never really gone in-depth with it besides minor tangents and side comments; a little while ago, though, I decided to rewatch Battle Tendency to freshen my memory on it, and... well, I have a lot to say. I thought it would be interesting to talk about this part and explain exactly what my thoughts are regarding it. Consider this a sort of overview of Battle Tendency; I’ll talk about what it was trying to do with its story and where I think it went wrong. (I have not read the manga for this part, so keep in mind these criticisms will be anime-centric.)

 Content warning for mentions of sexual assault and harassment, a brief mention of incest, and a pretty thorough discussion of fictional Nazis.

Plot/General

In a lot of ways, Battle Tendency directed the course of the series even more than part one did. At the end of Phantom Blood, Jonathan Joestar, our previous protagonist, dies. If the series wanted to continue, it could not be Jonathan’s story anymore- so instead, part two begins fifty years later with an almost entirely different cast of characters and setting. This is the first time the series does this, and if I am correct, this was not something heard of much when Jojo was written. Dividing the series up into different parts not only helped make it popular, but also allowed it to avoid issues such as seasonal rot, excessive power scaling, and running out of things to do, as it can just move on to another story once the previous one is finished.

 Though, while the direction Battle Tendency takes is interesting, I find the plot itself to be lacking. Battle Tendency is very short compared to other parts, and I think this ended up being its biggest flaw. For example, take when Joseph is in a race against the clock due to rings placed in his body set to release poison in thirty-three days, with the antidote only found in rings possessed by Wamuu and Esidisi. After multiple episodes of foreshadowing that Joseph will have to get stronger, now he has to train his Hamon in just a month to get strong enough to defeat them. It’s intended to be tense, set stakes for the story, and force Joseph to train and improve under grueling conditions.

 However, this character-crucial training takes up a total of a single episode’s worth of time. The only moment given any focus is the oil-covered pillar test in the beginning. This period is supposed to focus on Joseph’s improvement in Hamon training, which most take years to learn, and his and Caesar��s bonding as they go through life-and-death situations together and learn humility from their trainers- something that would require more than a ten-second montage of the days going by and vague gestures at hardcore training practices improving their Hamon skills.

 Instead of serving as an extra layer of interest to the story, this entire plot point just feels like a lazy cop-out to develop Joseph’s Hamon skills off-screen. This denies us the ability to feel Joseph’s improvement like we’re supposed to and ruins the tension by speeding the one-month deadline way too fast.

 At multiple points in the story, not just here, it feels as though there are gaping holes in the plot where there should just be more. I expected this training to at least take another few episodes. Not only that, but this training session introduces characters that we are supposed to treat as important but then gives them no focus at all. Loggins and Messina were such laughably forgettable characters that I did not feel a scrap of emotion at Loggins’ death nor was I interested in Joseph’s tedious emotional reaction to it. (In fact, I just had to web search which one it was that died. I did not remember which one was which.)

 What is especially odd is that this extra set of stakes with the death timer does... not actually end up amounting to anything. Joseph defeats both Esidisi and Wamuu days before the rings dissolve. The deadline stops being mentioned entirely at the five-day point or so. It starts off seeming important, but the stakes just fizzle out; it ends up being so inconsequential that it makes you wonder what the point of adding the rings even was. You could say that it motivated Joseph to train and improve quickly, but that motivation was already there in the first place with the Pillar Men actively hunting them down for the Red Stone. The best answer I can think of is the symbolism of Caesar stealing Wamuu’s ring before his death, but that alone is not a very strong reason to portray it as a major, high-stakes factor in the story.

 Unfortunately, the actual major plot device of the story is lacking as well. The Red Stone of Aja is the object of desire for the Pillar Men, the antagonists, who want to use it to become all-powerful immortals, and Joseph has to protect it while defeating them one by one. Compared to the plots of other parts, I find this turned out sort of dull. Would you believe me if I said that I genuinely forgot the Red Stone of Aja existed before I started my rewatch of part two? It’s the main plot device of the part and it’s given almost nothing interesting that you can latch onto. It’s given a semi-promising ability outside of being able to transform the Pillar Men (being able to amplify the power of sunlight), but the protagonists just don’t use it until the very end. It’s pretty to look at but utterly failed to capture my interest.

 Not only that, but the writing here has some noticeable problems. Remember, the stone is only desired by the Pillar Men, who require it to transform into the ultimate beings. In the beginning, it is in the hands of the protagonists, who have no use for it whatsoever. The explanation given as to why they don’t just destroy the stone so the Pillar Men can’t transform is because of a vague “prophecy” mentioned by Lisa Lisa where the stone is involved in the Pillar Men’s defeat- however, this prophecy is never expanded upon nor shown beyond this single line. It’s painfully obvious that it’s less of a “prophecy” and more of a method of lazily dismissing an easy solution to the main conflict.

 The prophecy does technically come true later in the story, where Kars is launched into space due to his Hamon being reflected at him when it hits the stone- however, the only reason why Kars even needed to be thrown into space in the first place is because he got ahold of the stone and successfully used it to transform into a god. The protagonists still could have just smashed the stone and defeated regular Kars much more easily with Hamon, just as they did with Esidisi and Wamuu- the canonical reasoning as to why they didn’t just destroy it doesn’t even end up working in the end.

 (The especially frustrating thing about this is that the fix for this issue, to me, seems simple. Instead of making up some “prophecy” that wasn’t even given more than a brief mention, just make the stone indestructible. It’s incredibly powerful, after all. Why couldn’t it have just been made impossible or unsafe to break instead of all of this prophecy nonsense that didn’t even end up making sense?)

 In terms of plot, Battle Tendency is dry and littered with obvious plot conveniences and structure problems. The Red Stone of Aja was not given enough intrigue to be investing, a lot of the tension just fizzles out due to poor handling of plot points, and there were easy solutions to the main conflict that were explained away nonsensically. (The part’s final fight and the way that it ended were also pretty flawed, which I will get into.) Despite being such a major aspect of the series, it’s often largely forgotten by a lot of fans, and I think that this is why. The story needed more thought and was overall just too short for its own good.

Characters

 When I see people talking about Battle Tendency, the plot is rarely mentioned. Instead, the focus is all on the cast and the potential that they had. I do like a lot of Battle Tendency’s characters, but I also think that a lot of them could’ve been better.

Joseph

 I think Joseph’s introduction is the moment that piqued the interest of a lot of people reading or watching the series. To sell the idea of killing off the previous main character and replacing him, I think that extra effort was put into making Joseph stand out (especially to contrast Jonathan, who was... well, as lovable as he is, he’s undeniably a very cookie-cutter protagonist, as admitted even by Araki himself). And, with that goal, this part certainly succeeded.

 The core of Joseph’s personality is built around performance. He’s designed to be unpredictable and wild to keep you guessing what he will do next. In a lot of ways, Joseph plays as the comic relief just as much as he does the protagonist- the entertaining, charming nature of his character ends up diffusing a lot of tense moments and adding a layer of humor to the situations he gets into. Contrasted to the frankly dark and disturbing tone of everything else in Battle Tendency, his ridiculous antics lighten the mood and provide contrast to the bleak seriousness of everything around him.

 The thing I find the most interesting about Joseph is that he simultaneously manages to seem clever yet brainless. He’s excellent at predicting motives, strategizing, and observing, letting him excel at the mind games that fights in the series like to do so much. Once he’s in a fight, you know he’ll find a way to predict and outsmart his enemy. At the same time, though, he’s impulsive, hot-headed, competitive, and somewhat bad at meeting new people, which makes him a lot of enemies he could’ve gone without. He’s in that in-between state where you’re not quite sure if he’s a strategic genius or an idiot with ungodly luck and improv skills. The way that Joseph battles, predicts, and outsmarts his enemies’ moves makes the fights in part two’s battles very fun to watch, which is one of its main highlights.

 Joseph is a fun, personality-filled, and important character, which is why he’s a big fan favorite. However, in this effort to make Joseph funny and memorable, I think a lot of his actions delve into being less entertainingly stupid and more just uncomfortable. For example, take this scene where he... threatens to forcefully kiss a stranger for screaming too loudly after he seemingly just murdered a man.

 He keeps this womanizing and uncomfortable attitude toward female characters throughout. When Straizo captures a female journalist and tries to use her life to lure Joseph closer, he dismisses the importance of her life as he thinks that she’s “ugly”. He only steps in once he watches her begin to get brutalized.

 The biggest example of this is when he makes multiple sexual comments and advances toward his trainer, Lisa Lisa, spying on her when she’s in her room naked and constantly trying to flirt with her. Even without the twist revealing that Lisa Lisa was Joseph’s mother the whole time (do you guys think Sigmund Freud would be a Jojo fan?), that was gross and unnecessary and I did not find it funny. I suppose this kind of humor is no surprise considering… Well, it’s an anime, but it does still bother me how this behavior is so frequent and it’s always played off as a joke where he often faces little to no consequence for it.

 My feelings about Joseph are overall complicated due to both this and one bigger reason that I’ll get into near the end. His problems also get worse in future parts, which I may talk about in a different post. Overall, though, I do not think he is a bad character, and I understand his appeal and how important he was for the rest of the series. For people who like part two, I think Joseph is the main appeal for them.

Speedwagon, Erina, and Smokey (AKA: part two’s problem with handling its characters)

 The reason why I’m lumping these three together is that they all represent a chronic issue that this part has with establishing characters that have important or interesting relationships with Joseph, then promptly forgetting that they exist. Most of the characters are affected by this, but these three are the worst victims.

 Speedwagon and Erina are the two major characters that are brought over from part one after the fifty-year time gap. Erina is Joseph’s main caretaker, acting as the only firm counter to his destructive tendencies for the first few episodes. She’s the only one who can keep Joseph’s temper under control and reacts calmly while other characters are left in shock at his antics. (You can feel how used to him she is.) Though, after Joseph leaves New York to go chase the Pillar Men without telling her, she just... completely stops being relevant. I can’t think of a time where she’s brought up after the beginning until the ending footnotes where it’s said that she dies of old age after the story ended.

 Speedwagon is essentially Joseph’s father figure, taking the place of the late Jonathan Joestar. He gets more importance than Erina as he’s kidnapped to lure Joseph to Mexico and discover the looming threat of the Pillar Men, but after that, he also gets largely pushed out of the story until the end, where he shows up with Speedwagon Foundation agents to help Joseph fight the vampire army. He’s important largely just because of the establishment of the Speedwagon Foundation, but he doesn’t do much else.

 Smokey, a new character, is a boy that befriends Joseph at the very beginning and functions as a narrator-type character for the first couple of episodes, several moments even taking place in his point of view, until he also just... kind of leaves until the final fight with Kars. There, he just stays close to Speedwagon while commenting on what’s happening, functioning like a callback to the beginning more than anything else.

 I don’t have much to say about them beyond this because the story doesn’t do anything meaningful with them after the first few episodes. It’s especially annoying because of the interesting dynamic these three introduce. Joseph is strange with people due to his inner desire for justice being concealed by his airheaded and impulsive nature, and he will often disregard strangers’ safety entirely but be extremely protective of his friends and loved ones. Erina and Speedwagon are his surrogate parents, so he respects them in a way unlike anybody else and is enraged when they come to harm. Smokey is a person Joseph meets and befriends, and we see him start to give him a similar treatment as he beats up several people who try to abuse him in very cheesy little anti-racism PSAs. However, due to this sudden shelving of all three of them, none of this goes anywhere. It’s disappointing.

Straizo

 Straizo is another character brought over from part one, but instead of remaining an ally, he returns as an enemy. His main role in the story is to give a sense of escalated stakes compared to part one; he improves on Dio’s use of his vampire powers by utilizing his abilities more effectively, having the expertise and lower ego to do so. One of his first attacks was the blow that defeated Jonathan, the laser eye attack that Dio only used once. He is the first major struggle that Joseph faces in the story, and it’s the moment that makes you go “Oh, shit. This is real now.”

 I like the angle that Battle Tendency went with Straizo. His fear of aging led him to lose his sanity and become a vampire; Hamon can prolong youth, but it doesn’t work forever. Vampires stay eternally youthful but lose their humanity in their lust for blood. Straizo tried to slow his aging by becoming a Hamon master, but when that stopped working, his terror drove him to forgo his morals and humanity in exchange for reclaiming his youth. This is especially effective because Straizo is a character we’re already familiar with and how it echoes some of the goals of the Pillar Men and their quest for ultimate power and eternal life.

 Once he’s defeated, something interesting happens when Joseph saves him from falling off a bridge. Straizo inquires as to why Joseph would save him, then warns him of his future destiny. Sad music plays as he laments on his victory over his aging body and he bursts into pure Hamon light. While his flaws took over him in his last few days, you still kind of appreciate his strength and reflect on the time we saw him on-screen even if he turned evil in the end. This goes well with a recurring theme we’ll see pop up in Battle Tendency.

 Straizo is essentially story foreshadowing, both for the story’s themes and to make you think “If skilled vampires are no big deal for Joseph, what will be the real challenge?” I think he works better here than in part one; it took what would have been a character that nobody would have remembered and made him a bit more worthwhile.

Caesar

 I have to admit that Caesar is a character that I initially hated. It’s nothing deep; his rampant womanizing played off as a character quirk and his irritatingly condescending attitude just ticked me off. However, my feelings have softened towards him and my opinions are now mostly neutral. I think the fan perception and complaints about Caesar’s character are interesting, so I want to talk about what I think of him.

 Caesar’s main purpose is to be Joseph’s foil and main companion. He’s a significantly more trained Hamon user that also possesses the charm and social skills that Joseph lacks. Caesar is sophisticated and focused, contrasting Joseph’s much wilder nature, but they share a tendency to be short-tempered and arrogant. Caesar also has a predisposed dislike of the Joestars due to his pride in his family- he blames Jonathan for the death of Will Zeppeli, so his dislike of Joseph naturally follows. This all seeds an initial hostility that results in them fighting while Speedwagon can only watch helplessly.

 After their quarrel with Wamuu, though, Caesar begins to respect Joseph and their contempt fades after they train and go through multiple life-and-death scenarios together. Eventually, they become affectionate with each other, and they work together when they fight, using two kinds of Hamon at once to expel Esidisi from Suzi Q. Their mutual desire to defeat the Pillar Men led them to understand and respect each other in a way that almost makes you forget the rocky terms they were once on.

 We see in his backstory that Caesar had once resented his father for abandoning him as a child, leading to him severing all ties with his family and becoming a feared criminal as a teenager. In a way, his fierce pride in his family was the cause of him going down the wrong path; his hatred of his father was because he disrespected his family, after all. However, his life is ultimately saved by his father, causing him to regain his respect and embrace his family once more. This backstory is intended to make Caesar feel less of a simple foil for Joseph and more of his own character- fittingly, it’s shown to us right after he and Joseph have a falling out, resulting in Caesar leaving the group and attempting to face Wamuu on his own.

 I have seen complaints about the choice to kill off Caesar after he faces Wamuu. Some people say it was a cop-out, or that killing off Caesar was entirely a bad choice. Personally, though, I didn’t have a problem with this part of the story. While I do agree that Caesar being used more would’ve been nice, I think that’s more a symptom of Battle Tendency’s short length than the choice to kill him off here. I like how he puts up a genuine fight against Wamuu, severely damaging him and even having Wamuu say that Caesar was the toughest opponent he’s ever faced. We’re given hope that he might even win... until he takes a fatal hit.

 After Joseph and Lisa Lisa find Caesar’s body, we get one of part two’s most iconic scenes and most powerful testament to Caesar and Joseph’s relationship: when they see Caesar’s blood seep out from under the rock that crushed him, Joseph screams his name and wails in grief. He’d only known Caesar for a few weeks, but they had grown so close that his death was that impactful for him.

 Overall, I think Caesar is a decent deuteragonist. His relationship with Joseph is very satisfying to see develop and it’s arguably the most believable relationship that Battle Tendency has. He works well as a foil while also feeling like his own character, and I like the way his death played out writing-wise despite it not emotionally impacting me very much personally. He’s a victim of Battle Tendency’s stunted length, yes, but I could also say that for almost every character. Though I’m not personally enthusiastic about Caesar, I don’t think I could find many things to complain about (besides the fact that his misogyny gets annoying).

Lisa Lisa

 I find Lisa Lisa’s writing interesting just as much as I do irritating. Unlike Joseph and Caesar’s blunt expressions of their emotions, Lisa Lisa masks her true feelings under a layer of coolness and apathy to be a strong mentor. On the surface, this makes her seem harsh and even cruel at times. She seemingly leaves Joseph and Caesar to die if they could not find a way to climb the oil-covered pillar by themselves. You see her as this tough, distanced teacher that puts them through grueling training out of necessity to beat the Pillar Men; for a while, you aren’t quite sure if she cares about them as individuals or if she just sees them as things to harden into proper weaponry against the enemy.

 When Caesar dies, she attempts to appear level-headed and unfazed, even taking out a cigarette as she calmly orders Joseph to head out. Joseph is first enraged at her seeming disrespect and lack of care- only to realize that in reality, she was struggling to hold back her tears, her cigarette held backward in her hand. All this time, she had distanced herself to appear strong and composed, to the point where it appeared like she didn’t even care about her students or their lives. But in reality, she cared very much, and the loss of Caesar was just as emotionally devastating for her as it was for Joseph.

 Though the uncomfortable incest jokes somewhat taint her relationship with Joseph, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on with them, too. She’s secretly Joseph’s mother, forced to abandon him as an infant for their safety after she murdered a vampire disguised as a military officer for killing her husband. She had to erase all traces of her identity and start a new life in Venice, with Joseph retaining no memory of her. (Fittingly, she was also adopted by Straizo as a child, which makes you view him in a different retrospective light as well.) With this extra context, it’s no wonder why she masks her true self so well; she’s been doing it constantly for years. Joseph’s complete lack of knowledge of their familial ties and anger at her coldness must’ve been incredibly painful for her, not only because she does care about her students, but because she and Joseph are family, something incredibly important and precious in Jojo.

 While I think Lisa Lisa is a good character, a lot of the way that she’s handled annoys me. Her character is intended to be pro-female empowerment, with her skills being impressive and even sometimes surpassing the male characters. With the only women thus far in the series just functioning as minor love interests like Erina and Suzi Q, she breaks the standard for the first time by being not only an incredibly powerful Hamon user but a mentor figure that commands respect from the male characters. Even Caesar, the chronic womanizer, respects her and treats her like his superior. Having a woman be involved in the story instead of being relegated to a minor love interest character is a breath of fresh air for Jojo at this point in the series, so I can appreciate Lisa Lisa just on that end.

 However, this message ultimately ends up falling flat. She’s mostly relegated to the “teacher” role and never actually gets to do any fighting herself. Curiously, she only gets to demonstrate her skills through enemies that exist purely to be defeated by her.

 Remember this guy? (I didn’t.) He shows up, brags about how strong he is, and Lisa Lisa takes him out all in about three minutes. He’s a one-off goon that serves no purpose in the story other than showing off how “cool” and “badass” Lisa Lisa is.

 Later, Lisa Lisa almost gets to fight Kars, a much more important and plot-relevant character, but this doesn’t end up happening. Kars simply cheats, uses a decoy, and stabs her in the back... and immediately, she becomes a defenseless, unconscious woman that Joseph needs to save.

 We get all of this talk of Lisa Lisa having Hamon skills that make everyone else look like an amateur only for her to never be allowed to get involved in the fighting in any meaningful way. That goon that she killed, the only moment where she gets to fight, was a way of cheating us out of her skills being important to the story. She’s painted as a “strong” female character, but she is still functionally the damsel in distress.

 I suppose you could view the damsel-ing as trying to subvert your expectations by building her up as strong only to have her become helpless, but doing that while trying to convey a message of female empowerment is just kind of insulting. It also disappointed me how she had no after-conversation with Joseph after he learned about their familial connection. Lisa Lisa was interesting, but ultimately badly used. (Also, the incest jokes were weird.)

The Pillar Men

 I’ll be blunt: the Pillar Men are the best aspect of part two. They build upon the vampire and stone mask lore from part one in an extremely interesting way while still leaving room for mystery, contrast well with Joseph’s character, and suit the themes of the story very well.

 There’s this David and Goliath dynamic set up between them and Joseph. It’s established that the Pillar Men like to eat vampires, the previously daunting threat of part one; it’s a superhuman food chain where humans are even less than prey. Even with intense Hamon training, the odds of a human winning against them are slim- Kars, Esidisi, and Wamuu alone drove the Hamon users to near-extinction years ago to the point where Lisa Lisa’s small group is all that’s left. So, then, if Jonathan, a natural Hamon user, struggled (and ultimately did not succeed) to defeat Dio, a measly vampire, how is Joseph supposed to defeat the Pillar Men and curb their plans for achieving ultimate power?

 Though Kars is technically the main villain, I most often think of the Pillar Men altogether as the main antagonists of Battle Tendency. It’s partly because of this that my main gripe with the Pillar Men is that, beyond their premises, they feel kind of bare minimum. Most of their interactions with each other are just them standing menacingly and discussing their plans of getting the Red Stone. They would have benefited from expanding their backstories of traveling the world for the Stone together, having them interact and giving them clearer dynamics with each other, and exploring their personalities more. It sets up something interesting to think about but doesn’t use that setup to its fullest potential.

Santana

 Santana is meant to be our introduction to the Pillar Men. He demonstrates their base abilities and gives Joseph a sample of the kind of enemy he’ll have to face. He’s the weakest of the four we meet alongside being less “sophisticated” than the others, not seeming to share their goals or knowledge. Despite this relative weakness, though, you note that he’s still extremely powerful. He’s hyper-intelligent and possesses a scary level of strength, two traits that were enough to immediately escape his containment and brutally slaughter an entire crew of soldiers like it was nothing.

 Not only is he threatening, but he’s also very horror-esque. He reminded me a lot of John Carpenter’s The Thing with the way he contorts his body in disturbing ways, melting into his victim’s flesh and absorbing them. He gives off an almost otherworldly feeling with his alien biology combined with his stoic yet wild attitude as he digs into the human guards and kills them all in an instant. I think the tone here is executed wonderfully; for a minute, the upbeat and goofy tone due to Joseph’s antics takes a backseat to the dark, macabre reality of the part’s threat.

 I also love the way he and Joseph interact with each other, with Joseph taking the situation with zero care and goofing around with Santana only to immediately go into a state of pure rage once he realizes Speedwagon is in danger. I enjoy the fight between them very much- Joseph, possessing but being critically untrained in the one thing keeping Santana from instantly killing him, needs to scramble together all of his luck and what little Hamon skill he has just to stave off instant death. It’s tenser than any fight we’ve had before and I was into it.

 Though, while his fight is good, the way Santana’s character gets capped off is somewhat confusing. The way his body wasn’t fully destroyed and was instead preserved in UV light leads you to think that he was going to come back at some point, but this never happens. He doesn’t even get mentioned afterward besides the one off-hand comment from Kars. If there was no plan to bring Santana back, I don’t see why he couldn’t have just been killed off instead of being left in stasis like that. For the role he plays in the story, he works well, but he kind of leaves you hanging.

Esidisi

 Esidisi is the general least favorite among the three major Pillar Men, and it’s fairly easy to see why. He’s a bit of an awkward middleman between the younger subordinate Wamuu and the dominant leader Kars. I always felt like out of the three, he was treated the least like a character and more just like a first boss fight. Though, even with the limited attention that he gets, I found his time in the spotlight still entertaining.

 Esidisi shakes up your expectations on how the story structure will play out. He’s Wamuu’s higher-up, giving his poison ring second, yet he ends up confronting Joseph first. Most majorly, he shakes our confidence in Joseph for the first time. With the fights before, even when the odds get stacked against him, we’re always reassured by the idea that Joseph can predict his enemies’ moves and have a counter ready. With Esidisi, however, he’s so good at concealing his thought process that Joseph finds him utterly unreadable. Esidisi even once turns Joseph’s “next, you’ll say ____!” catchphrase on his head, predicting his thoughts first. For a while, our confidence that Joseph will win the fight alone is endangered.

 Esidisi has a lot of interesting character traits, but they get frustratingly unexplored. It’s shown that he’s not afraid to show extreme displays of emotion if it’ll clear his head; when his arm is cut off, he suddenly starts bawling in grief for his lost limb, throwing Joseph off his game when he thought he managed to get the upper hand. However, this is the only scene we get showing this character trait. It’s also revealed in Kars’ backstory that Esidisi was the only Pillar Man who sided with Kars, and not only helped him genocide his people but raised two babies alongside him. This implies a very close and interesting relationship with Kars that is... not elaborated on in their actual interactions very much at all. Beyond his fight, it seems like the story wanted nothing to do with him.

 When Esidisi is killed, something similar to what happened with Straizo occurs again, only more overtly. Joseph, feeling strangely bonded to him after their fight, honors his life and respects his drive to defend his comrades, setting aside good and evil just for a moment. Esidisi might’ve been a force for bad that needed to be stopped, but he lived for thousands of years and fought earnestly for what he believed in, and to Joseph, that’s something he can’t help but revere. This attitude of “you were evil, but I honor you after taking your life in battle” pops up once again in a surprisingly somber sendoff for a villain character.

 Esidisi is my least favorite Pillar Man, but that’s not because I dislike him. He’s just the least important of the four and his most interesting traits were not focused on as much as the others.

Wamuu

Wamuu is my favorite character in Battle Tendency. Kars is the main villain, but I think Wamuu is more important than him for most of the story. He gets the most fights out of any of the Pillar Men, having three instead of just one. He’s the most developed and explored out of all the Pillar Men and ends up being the most well-written by far. He’s the only one I feel was used to his full potential and I ended up enjoying any time he was on screen. 

 Nowhere is the recurring theme of honoring courage and power regardless of alliance stronger than with Wamuu. Unlike Esidisi, he did not join Kars freely as an adult, instead being taken as a baby and raised to be loyal to him. Despite being on Kars’ side, he does not seem very interested in the Red Stone as much as he has the desire to be an honorable warrior and wants a fair, good battle for all that wish to challenge him. He often refuses to kill his opponents, requesting they get stronger and come back later to fight him again. We get a scene where Wamuu refuses to harm a little boy, believing it wouldn’t be fair for him, which makes Kars kill the child himself. When Caesar was about to die, he stole Wamuu’s poison ring to give to Joseph, which he allowed simply out of respect. While Wamuu is still an antagonist, you get the impression that he’s not quite as evil as the others.

 The final fight with Wamuu in the arena is my favorite arc in part two. It’s tense, creative, and incredibly investing. The fight being in horse-drawn carriages reminiscent of Roman gladiator shows with a crowd judging Joseph’s every move shook up the typical fight structure and fits both Joseph and Wamuu’s characters incredibly well. Wamuu loves fighting and expressing his strength, and Joseph is such an entertaining and performance-based character, why not turn their final battle into a show? Both Wamuu and Joseph dangle on the brink of death at several points throughout and have to make serious shifts in mental states to give themselves the strength to keep going. I don’t know how to elaborate on how much I like this fight in any better way than “it’s so cool, holy shit”.

(Side note: In the fight, Joseph calls on Caesar’s spirit to help him, burning his headband as a symbol that he was with him the entire time. Usually, in Jojo, death is a very final sendoff for a character; when someone is dead, they’re rarely mentioned again. I found it surprising that such a major symbolic move in Caesar’s name would be used so far after he died. It’s an additional testament to how strong Joseph and Caesar’s bond became.)

 When Wamuu takes a fatal hit, instead of celebrating or finishing him off, Joseph eases his pain in his final moments by giving him his blood and they share a surprisingly tender final conversation about respecting each other and the honor of battle. Wamuu even flat-out says that immortality means nothing to him- all he was seeking was a true warrior to challenge, and he finally found that with Joseph.

 Even though they just tried to murder each other, there’s no animosity between them in this last scene. As Joseph salutes Wammu’s passing, the narration even states that, in a complex way, they were friends.

 I always thought this theme of honor was the most fascinating thing about Battle Tendency, and it’s done in such a believable, earnest way with Wamuu. He’s what I look back upon most positively when I think about part two. I wish the rest of the part was as good as this, but frustratingly, it just isn’t.

Kars

I have mixed feelings about Kars. Though the Pillar Men as a whole are good villains, Kars himself falls short as the main antagonist. There are a lot of things that I like about him as a character, but he’s not a great main villain.

 Most of the issue comes from the fact that he stays out of the conflict for most of the story to build suspense only to have an underwhelming final fight that doesn’t keep him in your memory very well. He doesn’t give Joseph a poison ring and largely keeps to the shadows as a calm, mysterious leader figure. He gives hints of an interesting character throughout- we know he’s the mastermind behind the Red Stone plot, meaning he’s incredibly intelligent and has a strong desire for power, but outwardly, he seems very quiet and composed aside from short bursts of maniacal laughter or bloodlust.

 Kars’ morality and respect for life are complex. He has an appreciation for nature, actively avoiding causing harm to plant life and saving animals on multiple occasions. Compare the scene of Kars slicing a car in half to save a dog to Dio burning Danny alive in part one- Araki loves dogs and uses their murder to symbolize pure evil in a character, and Kars actively contrasts this. And, while he goes against his comrades’ wishes from time to time, killing a boy that Wamuu wanted to let live, there’s no sign that he doesn’t care about his allies, with him mourning their deaths and swearing to avenge both of them after they’re gone.

 However, not only does he slaughter hordes of humans in his way, but in his past, he genocided his people for not aiding him in his quest to gain immortality. He is perfectly willing to be heartless if it means getting what he wants. While he may have some humanizing traits, his ambition turned him into a monster regardless.

 Once Wamuu and Esidisi are dead, he betrays his agreement to a fair battle and stabs Lisa Lisa in the back. His stoic exterior falls as his true deceitful nature is revealed and he disrespects everything his recently-deceased comrade valued. For the final fight against Kars, the morality and respect dynamic built up throughout the story is thrown in the garbage. Not only is he evil, but he’s also a dishonest piece of shit. Unlike Esidisi and Wamuu, no respect is afforded to him.

 I like this personality twist for Kars in theory, but in terms of a climax and conclusion, the final fight wasn’t very good. Once Kars gets the Red Stone and becomes an unkillable superbeing, the fight essentially becomes Joseph being chased by Kars as he desperately thinks of ways to hold him off. In some way, my issue with this final fight is something inherent to having an unkillable, all-powerful villain like this- virtually the only way they’re going to be physically defeated is through some serious plot contrivances that instantly break story immersion. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens, as Joseph suddenly holds up the Red Stone as Kars attempts the killing blow, leading to a volcanic eruption, which... launches Kars into space, somehow.

 Symbolically, I like this fate for Kars. He committed atrocities all in the name of his obsession with immortality, and eventually, he got it- however, this turns into his curse as he’s doomed to float in space for eternity, causing his formerly genius mind to stop functioning as he wishes for death only to never receive it. However, as an end to the final battle, I did not find this well-written, sensical, or satisfying. This felt like a sudden jolt to the finish line using stretches of logic far further than even acceptable for Jojo. The only word I can think of to describe it is “lazy”.

_

 As you’ve probably noticed, there’s one big aspect of part two that I have neglected to mention so far. This is, of course, Stroheim and the major plot point of the Nazis. I felt this needed to be discussed in its own section, so now, I will do that.

Rudol von Stroheim (and the inclusion of Nazi Germany)

 The inclusion of Nazi Germany along with prominent Nazi characters is arguably Battle Tendency’s most infamous feature, and it’s easy to see why. The Nazis have a big impact on part two and make several recurrences throughout it. When it comes to including Nazis in a story, it is important to take care in the way you portray them; bad handling of any sensitive subject can lead to your work sending unintended messaging to the viewer that might not be ideal. Unfortunately, this is where we run into some issues when it comes to Battle Tendency.

 The first Nazi appearance in the story is when Joseph arrives in Mexico to find Santana. The Nazis, stationed there with the Pillar Man in his dormant state, want to utilize him as a weapon for their plan of world domination. Battle Tendency takes place in 1938; while the Nazis were in control of Germany at this time, this is before World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and a few years before the Holocaust in 1941, the Nazis’ worst atrocity.

 Despite this, though, the Nazis’ brutality and fascism are made very clear in the beginning. Not only do they explicitly desire world domination, but it’s also revealed that they’re holding an entire Mexican village prisoner, packing them into cages, experimenting on them, forcing the women into sexual acts, and using them as servants. In one scene, they promise to let the innocent people go free if they choose one person to sacrifice for an experiment- only to then reveal they intend to have them all executed except for the sacrifice instead in a cruel twist of extra psychological torture. This is not far off from real tactics Nazis used in their brutal treatment of minorities; inhumane experiments on prisoners were frequently done by Nazi scientists and Jewish prisoners were often tricked by being told that they were being given a shower before being gassed to death.

 Rudol von Stroheim, a Nazi officer in charge of facilitating the experiments on Santana, kidnapped Speedwagon to get information on the Pillar Men, forcibly extracting information from him with a truth serum. He sexually harasses prisoners on-screen and was the one who personally decided to execute the villagers being held captive.

 He, a high-ranking Nazi, commits an explicit act of genocide on a group of innocent people. Keep this in mind.

 Though it’s fictionalized in the typical Jojo fashion, I feel as though at this point, the Nazis are very explicitly framed as evil. They murder innocents, they kidnap, they torture, and they want to take over the world; all things you are very clearly not supposed to like. There is the question of if this was an appropriate thing to bring into such a goofy story like Battle Tendency, but that is not my focus- if the story stayed like this, I would not have felt much of a need to write about it. However, when Santana breaches containment and slaughters Stroheim’s crew, something very odd begins to happen.

 During the fight with Santana, Stroheim ends up helping Joseph. After Santana grabs onto Stroheim’s leg, he demands that Joseph chop his leg off, claiming that he would gladly lose limbs if it were for the sake of Germany. Joseph, who previously did not care for the Nazis, makes this remark:

“I thought he was a coward, but when the going gets tough, his bravery shines through.”

 Stroheim then proceeds to sacrifice himself by using an explosive device to try and take both himself and Santana out at once, something that brings our protagonist to... tears.

 At this point, I was getting confused. Why is the Nazi who just massacred a village being mourned by our protagonist (who did not spare a second of thought for the slaughter of an entire group of Nazis a few minutes ago)? You could make the argument that Joseph didn’t see or know about anything Stroheim did, but the way this scene is framed makes it feel as though we are supposed to feel the same as Joseph here- we are supposed to feel bad about Stroheim’s death. I do not see how this was in any way earned or justified and it feels jarring and inappropriate.

 Later, after Joseph meets Caesar in Italy, it’s revealed that Caesar has a friend that’ll take them over to the site where the other Pillar Men are being held. He also just so happens to be a Nazi.

This character is portrayed as a good man with any rivalry explained away by the fact that Italy and Germany are allies. The fact that he’s a Nazi is nothing but a background detail, and Caesar’s friendship with him is treated as something harmless. When Joseph’s group arrives at the Pillar Men’s site, Caesar’s Nazi friend is killed by Wamuu and it’s treated as something tragic yet again as Caesar mourns his death. This is twice now that a Nazi character being killed is taken as some horrible casualty of the Pillar Men that we’re supposed to feel bad about. (The Nazi character didn’t even do anything particularly brave this time.)

 After this, the Nazis are out of the story until Joseph’s group travels to Switzerland to find the Red Stone. There, they are again encountered by the Nazis, revealing that they have been watching them this whole time. Joseph’s group and the Nazis then agree (though through pressure from the Nazis) to help each other, with Joseph’s group giving them information on the Red Stone and the Pillar Men and the Nazis letting them into their base for shelter and providing help with defeating them. (Interestingly, it is said yet again that the Nazis are seeking world domination, but this is pretty much ignored.)

 They are then all ambushed by Kars in search of the Red Stone, but as Kars tries to attack, a retaliation happens from none other than Stroheim. It turns out that, despite Stroheim’s body being blown to bits, he was rebuilt with the Nazi’s advanced technology and is now a kind of cyborg, allowing him to come back from the brink of death with an entire arsenal of weapons in his body. Joseph remarks on Stroheim’s return with this... interesting line of dialogue:

 Too… pompous. Stroheim is just too pompous. Yes. That’s the problem. (This is sarcasm.)

 After Stroheim fails to stop Kars, the Nazis are once again out of the story until Kars tricks Joseph and he’s swarmed with vampires, where the Nazis barge into the plot once again. They and the Speedwagon Foundation have developed anti-vampire technology and helped in the final fight by getting rid of the vampire army so Joseph can focus on Kars. Speedwagon makes a lighthearted comment about Stroheim:

You would think that he would have a significantly less friendly attitude toward the fascist that kidnapped him, forced information out of him, and was responsible for awakening the Pillar Men in the first place, but I guess not.

 Stroheim helps Joseph fight Kars and they both witness him getting launched into space. At the very end, Stroheim receives a mention in the summary of the character’s fates, where it’s stated that he... dies an “honorable” death fighting for the Nazi army in Stalingrad.

 “Honorable.” The Nazi general. The fascist. The character that sexually abused innocent prisoners he was using as slaves. The character that mercilessly slaughtered an entire village of innocent people to fuel his weapon of mass destruction. The character that does an explicit Hitler salute and is shown in nothing but Nazi attire throughout the story. “A proud German soldier.” “Honorable.”

Yeah, can you see why this is bad?

 The way that the Nazis are portrayed is, at best, a severe flaw in Battle Tendency’s writing. At worst, this is, intentionally or not, actual Nazi sympathizing. Regardless, this upsets the balance of the entire part and makes for some incredibly uncomfortable viewing, to the point where it supersedes every positive aspect of part two- in a lot of ways, it is the real rot underlying this part, tainting the entire story and making every character at least a little bit unlikeable. This is the reason why I can’t say that I fully like Joseph or Caesar as characters. It’s the reason why I avoid talking about this part in casual discussions, and when I do, I have to use such vague language and swerve around major plot points to not immediately escalate the conversation, as I have been doing throughout this analysis until now.

 Every attempt to defend this that I’ve seen has involved ignoring the obvious and pushing claims that are just not true about what Battle Tendency did here. You can’t call what happened to the Nazis a character redemption; no true change in belief occurs here. The Nazis never stop being Nazis, nor do they cease seeking world domination. Stroheim never faces consequences or is even criticized for slaughtering innocent people to use in his experiments. The only reason why he realizes that he was wrong for doing it was that Santana was too powerful to control. It’s not a “WWII hadn’t started, so the story operates like the Nazis aren’t bad because we didn’t know it yet” scenario, because we see the Nazis have explicitly fascist goals and commit atrocities before their rapid portrayal shift. It isn’t just a worst-case “teaming up with one enemy to defeat a larger one” scenario, either, because as we can see, Stroheim and other Nazi characters are actively praised and treated as good people after this point. No matter how I look at it, this is indefensible.

 If this wasn’t already bad enough, it also makes the whole story confusing and unfulfilling. Remember, the Pillar Men are supposed to be omnicidal tyrants, but the only hordes of people we see them kill are Nazis. This is intended to paint them as monsters who kill without a second thought, but it doesn’t register because the only people they’re killing are tyrants themselves. (If you ask me, it has the exact opposite effect of making them the most likable characters in the story.)

 Not only that, but aren’t the Nazis even more of a threat than the Pillar Men are? With their similar desire for world domination combined with highly advanced technology, exponentially greater numbers, and, thanks to Joseph, knowledge of Hamon and the Red Stone, they’d also pose (and obviously ended up being) a massive threat. Battle Tendency ended on a “happy” note due to Kars’ defeat with only a brief side mention that World War II began at the story’s conclusion. Joseph stops one disaster only to completely ignore, if not aid, another starting. (Hell, Jewish people are never even mentioned despite being the most major of the Nazis’ victims. What’s up with that?)

 What makes this whole thing especially angering and upsetting to me is that this series has quite a bit of messaging that’s very anti-Nazi, including in Battle Tendency. Let me put it this way: In terms of actions and desires, what makes the Pillar Men different from the Nazis? The Pillar Men wanted immortality; so did Nazi Germany. The Pillar Men wanted world domination; so did Nazi Germany. The Pillar Men slaughtered innocent people without care; so did Nazi Germany. Every single thing that the Pillar Men are treated as evil for, the Nazis explicitly wanted and did as well, if not even more and more successfully. If the Pillar Men are treated as evil tyrants who need to be stopped, why aren’t the Nazis acknowledged for attempting the same thing? Why is Kars’ slaughter of innocents and desire for immortality and world domination an inexcusable evil, but Stroheim is forgiven and gets to become a core ally despite trying to achieve the same thing and never realizing that his army is in the wrong?

 There are more examples of this, too. Do you remember Battle Tendency’s opening scene, where Joseph defends a black child from being brutalized by corrupt policemen in a cheesy but blatant anti-racism message? What about Lisa Lisa, the point of her character advocating for gender equality and the idea that women can be just as capable in battle as men? What about George Joestar II, who fought in World War I against Germany and was framed like a hero for it? All of this (attempted) messaging- gender equality, anti-racism, anti-genocide- are things that do not fall in line with a pro-Nazi line of thinking. Not only that, but remember, you also have the fact that in the beginning, Nazis were explicitly portrayed as bad. They were treated as evil for having the goals that they did. You saw the way that they brutalized minorities and viewed every other nation and people as inferior to them, and it was framed as harmful.

 This is where my opinions get more complicated. While the portrayal of Nazism in Battle Tendency is an unforgivable oversight regardless of its original intent, I do not believe that Battle Tendency was intending to send a pro-fascist message. I just do not think that a writer with a truly positive view of Nazis would put scenes like Stroheim’s sexual abuse, slaughtering of clearly innocent prisoners, and blatant irrational German ultranationalist beliefs into the story. So, then… How did this end up happening?

 I think that there are a couple of underlying problems that led to this. The first one is the broken way that Battle Tendency treats its antagonists. When Stroheim and the Nazis were being more appropriately portrayed as evil, it was before the Pillar Men were introduced into the story- Santana and the others were still in their “dormant” states, so they were not yet a threat. Stroheim was Joseph’s main priority in stopping as he was the biggest threat introduced so far, and so he was treated as a villain.

 The moment that Stroheim’s portrayal flips can be pinpointed to when he begins fighting the Pillar Men instead of aiding them. The characters, instead of objecting to his help, instead seem to completely forget what Stroheim was doing beforehand and accept his and the Nazi’s allyship with little to no fuss. Their attitudes become very lighthearted, with the most negative comments being light teasing about Stroheim’s obsession with German superiority. The Nazis suddenly start being portrayed in a disturbingly positive light as they become recurring characters due to proving useful allies against the Pillar Men; to rub it in, it’s even revealed that Caesar has a friend who’s a Nazi. The Nazis stopped allying with the Pillar Men, so in the eyes of the narrative, they have become the “good” guys.

 Another thing that I think contributed to this is the recurring theme that Battle Tendency has towards honoring power regardless of good or evil. The same thing happened to Straizo, Esidisi, and Wamuu; once they were defeated, the story tries to make you respect them for their fighting strength even though they were evil. It doesn’t matter if they were good or bad, the story says- they were strong, honorable fighters that committed to their beliefs with all of their hearts, which is worthy of respect regardless of morality. After the Nazis were shifted from their “antagonist” role, I think this theme might have been haphazardly applied. Stroheim was a prideful soldier committed to his cause, and so, according to the story, it doesn’t matter if he was an evil, genocidal tyrant hellbent on world domination… he was “honorable”.

 This is the only explanation I can think of; the story simply forgot what kind of character it created. Since Stroheim was not with the main bad guys anymore, and he was “honorable”, he became an ally, even if that means ignoring his vile actions and beliefs to paint him in that light. What was previously a genocidal fascist is suddenly now a goofy exaggerated nationalist who’s ultimately a brave soldier at heart. The fact that Stroheim is a totalitarian and a murderer with no difference in desire from the Pillar Men has to be greatly downplayed and eventually just forgotten about. 

 I don’t think I need to explain how this is bad writing. The story introduced a threat that is just as severe, if not more so than its main villains, but did not have the desire to deal with that conflict- so instead, it opts to make fascists the good guys out of the blue, which is monumentally thoughtless even in the most charitable lighting you could give it. While I believe that this messaging was likely accidental, that does not change what this botched writing ends up signaling to the viewer. When it comes to Nazis in fiction, you have to be careful with the way you portray them- something Battle Tendency did not do. Ultimately, nothing will excuse the fact that this part made a Nazi a good guy, and I wouldn’t blame anybody for skipping Battle Tendency or even dropping the series entirely for that.

---

 My issues with other parts are to do with typical writing flaws and maybe some mishandling of subjects that ultimately does not ruin the entire story. Battle Tendency, though, has flaws overpowering any of its strengths to the point where it’s nearly unwatchable for me. I have no desire to read the manga or rewatch the anime for this part and I’m honestly glad that it doesn’t get acknowledged very much going onward. What’s a shame is that there are a lot of good things about it- the antagonists were great, the protagonist was entertaining, and I like many of its themes and how it expands part one, but overall, it’s just not good.

[bright-and-burning]

im sorry, you are 22 and were already a phd candidate??

LOL this got long sorry!!! u get my evil academic origin story anon congrats

yeah! i wanted to be a professor for a while (like, most of high school, and then my freshman year of college i became disillusioned abt my original field choice but by junior year i had stumbled into a new field i was passionate abt and decided teaching was the dream again) so in my senior year of college i applied to a bunch of cs phd programs

idk how other fields/countries work but basically like if you apply and you dont have a masters already it just takes longer (5 years on average instead of ~4 or something)! and a lot of the programs i applied to preferred that you didnt have a masters already. so it's less impressive maybe than it sounds on paper?

i also wanna say i was one of three ppl from my friend group going straight into phds after graduating (not even counting my med school hopeful friends. or regular masters friends) so i also feel like it's not that uncommon?? maybe covid made it more common. i also went to a like ~high end~ research uni full of nerds. and was in with the nerd athletes (distance runners) so im like biased

i spent the fall semester of senior year applying to grad school, and the spring semester getting my heart broken by grad school decisions LOL

i got into one program but it was literally like. top 5 in the country for what i wanted to do. so i accepted, bc i made my undergrad decision based on prestige and that worked out like absurdly well for me lol. and then i had a mental breakdown the weekend of graduation and realized i didnt want to grind out a phd in a field that doesnt treat ppl like me (queer women w learning disabilities from lower class backgrounds... lmfao....) kindly for like no money in the middle of nowhere far from anyone i know + love when i could (in theory) get a well-paying job (or at least more survivable than 30k/year) and find satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from things like. spending time with my friends. traveling. having money for my hobbies. etc etc.

so i dropped out like right on the deadline for signing up for classes/seminar/research groups. and then they kept me on the email list anyways so i was tormented for a few months by what couldve been which was Great for feeling secure in this life changing choice i made more or less on an emotional whim that deviated from a life plan i had had since i was 15

and then i spent 6 months unemployed bc the tech world is imploding . LOL . but i have a job offer now for something that's really meaningful to me that'll allow me to use my skills to help people AND it'll pay me more than double what my phd stipend was. so alls well that ends well or something

[red-dyed-sarumane]

i have a new theory for aru sekai fans & by new i mean someone else might have caught on already but i havent seen it said SO. the rute furutewoa melody is in kyuuyaku, touhikou, & now kannagi (maybe elsewhere bc i havent been looking for this motif before i only realized it today really & i havent had time to go thru all the songs again yet) & we have kyuu (past), something in touhikou im too tired to remember currently but i remember calling something similar a while ago when someone asked if there was a timeline to this, and now kannagi that uses the older language so im willing to bet this motif is a way of saying the events in the song happened in the "past". whether thats actually Long Ago or just to say its not the current situation or just happened before the songs without it i cant say for sure but i think it makes sense given what we have now.

just like we have the nami no ne no motif that signals which characters still have their "self" if its in the song or lost it if its not.

i have to do some more digging of course but with what i know right now this makes the most sense to me

[k-centaurea]

In case you feel like reading about some not very pleasant experience of a mentally fucked person.

I’m still trying to remember the moment when my life went wrong, but I can’t. It couldn't have been so bad since childhood, could it? Wasn’t my childhood… happy?

It was, if you don’t think about this too much. If you do – well, when wasn’t it bad?

Maybe before I got into school.

School even started wrong.

I didn’t have a slightest idea what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to behave, and no one bothered to explain to me – as I should have already known. So I signed my notebooks with names of characters of my favourite films, I wrote in them with a red pen instead of blue one – I was shouted at for it, though nobody told me it was against the rules. I was shouted at when I didn’t take my dish from the table when I left the canteen, I was shouted at when I got up from the table to throw away the apple core. I was scolded for moving my pencil through the air over the notebook before we were given the command to start writing. For giving my notebooks to a stranger – which I actually didn’t do, but no one bothered to figure it out. And no one figured out that I failed a math test because I had poor eyesight and the teacher didn’t let me come closer to the chalk board with the exercises so I couldn’t see a single letter written on it.

At first I believed I was right, believed that all who shouted, scolded, punished and shamed did it all by mistake.

And then I stopped believing.

No one explained to me how to make friends – or at least communicate normally.

I don’t quite remember the nonsense that I told my classmates about dogs, magic, and the animated movie about chicken. I guess it was something really stupid if they disliked me that much.

I don’t have the guts to say there was no fault of mine. The victim is never to blame for the bullying, but I can’t help but doubt that their attitude was unfair. My grandmother said it all was because of my special interest in dogs – yeah, I talked about dogs, like, fifteen percent of time – and I don’t think she was completely wrong.

I was happy to call my classmate K. my friend, although she was actually no more than the only person in my class who never hurt me and the only one who listened to my endless confused monologues about the things that I was interested in – sometimes she even responded, indifferent to me the rest of the time. Her friend – real friend, I guess – was by her side every fucking second, which bothered me unbearably. I wasn’t jealous in the usual sense, like why do you talk to anyone else but me, it was the constant fear of being worse than this anyone else and be abandoned, be replaced by them; the fear that keeps following me my whole life; the fear that made me demand even more attention; the fear that gradually turned into bitter resignation with my uselessness. If your friends, or the ones you consider them, talk to anyone – then leave, don’t bother them, don’t even dare to be near them; give them a chance to normal relationships, which you will never have, and endure the loneliness you deserve.

I got my first mark on a school test at the end of the first year – I was the only one in class who got an A.

After that, I was made clear how critically important my grades were.

I was punished when I got a B for the first time. When I got a D, my mother kept silent condemningly when I called her to explain through tears that it wasn’t my fault. When I got my final grades for my first semester – six A, four B – I was told that “there is something to strive for”, so I must become an excellent student with no grades lower than A. About the only girl in the class actually studying like that they said that if she got a B, her mother would kill her. It was definitely a joke – a bad one though – but they said it like it was normal to study perfectly out of fear.

And then fear became my only motivation.

I guess my fear of being shamed – again – was the only reason why I became a straight-A student eventually.

When I did, it turned out that studying well – even excellent – is still not enough.

I had the impudence to say that I preferred not to take part in a school olympiad in mathematics (which has never been my forte, to be honest) and a new portion of condemnation fell upon me. How dared I refuse this opportunity, how dared I to say I didn’t need it – of course I did!

I finally agreed to take part in another olympiad and left the room in half an hour after completing some of the exercises since I had no idea how to complete the others– left happily because the results didn’t actually mean anything for me and because I knew that I did everything I could. Another half an hour later my parents blamed me for not staying there until the end.

I took second place. And I was close to tears from the surging memories of this conversation when the head teacher gave me the congratulatory letter.

The next discovery was that everything I do must be done perfectly, which I have never been capable of.

I signed my notebook in uneven handwriting, for which I was reprimanded. I made a stupid mistake in my homework and had to rewrite it all on a blank page – my mother tore out the first one – still shrinking from the echoes of her shouts ringing in my ears.

When my grandmother checked my homework, she shouted every time she saw a single mistake. I twitched every time I heard it. Later, I already started to tense up when she took the notebook in her hands.

Later, every mistake began to strain me even without these shouts.

One of the two straight-A students in my class, I enrolled in another school after finishing the fourth grade. A better school – one of the best in the whole city, actually.

See, I never wanted to be the best. Yeah, it would be nice, but definitely not necessary. It was enough for me to be just… good. Just not the worst.

In the new school I wasn’t even good.

I started to get C in my final grades. More B than C though, but my father kept saying that it was still bad.

In some classes I felt so helpless that I finally gave up trying to achieve something. I came to the computer class twice a week and tapped on the keyboard coming to terms with the fact that I’ll hardly get a higher grade than C. Lower, maybe.

At first I thought that it’s just too difficult and I’m not the only one who has problems. And then I got confidence that there is only one problem – and this is me.

There was no bullying in this school, but my classmates looked at me askance. Then my family told me – for the first time – that if I’m disliked here, too, I should think about the probability that it’s actually my fault.

I thought about it a lot, so when I went to a summer camp, I tried to be as quiet and inconspicuous as I could, which didn’t help for some reason – in fact, I was treated even worse than at school.

Ok, I thought, maybe it was just because we’re still stupid children – but it was the same next year. And a year later.

K. attended the school where I studied before, and in the new one I met A., who I also considered my friend. Nevertheless, this “friendship” was far more difficult. Painful, actually. We argued – we quarreled to the point that we did not speak to each other for several days and deleted each other's numbers from our phones (a significant gesture of resentment for a twelve year old) but I kept coming back to her side, because there was no one else but her.

One day she punched me in the face.

When I told my father about it, he blamed me, not her.

If I’m guilty even of being punched in the face – what am I not guilty of then?

I knew we would be in different classes after finishing the seventh grade, and I thought it would be painful. Unfortunately or fortunately, I was wrong. By this time she finally and forever stopped talking to me, gradually and quietly replacing me with more interesting people, reinforcing one of my biggest fears.

And then was the biology profile class.

That’s when things got really bad.

The first three months I barely get C for most classes, hearing from my mother: you’re taking the place of someone who is interested in biology much more than you and who would study much harder. Don’t you think you better leave this school? Shouldn’t I pick up your documents from there and find a school of a different level?

I should not be there, I’m much worse than everyone else here, I do not deserve to study among such smart and outstanding people as my classmates.

My classmates.

I buy them sweets and cookies in the grocery across the street from the school, because I’m sure it is the only thing they might need from me.

Later, it will turn out that it was true about one of them, pushing me one step closer to losing faith in people completely.

Later, my mother and grandmother will tell me it was my fault that someone used me for his own benefit, and then discussed with a friend his stupid naive classmate who bought him chocolate every week asking nothing in return.

Of course it was my fault.

What is not my fault, then?

I see every gesture of friendliness in my direction as a concession made out of pity. Oh, you’re coming to my house after school? Surely you don’t want to, I’m so sorry, I just really want to watch one more movie sitting on the couch by your side. I came to your house for a week, because your mom invited me, and you don’t even look annoyed – I guess you hide it skilfully. You keep chatting with me on Twitter and even send me supportive messages, but we have known each other for a month which is probably not enough to understand that I don’t deserve it. You look happy when you accidentally meet me in the park – you must be very polite, I know you can’t be happy to see me.

Every year the feeling that I am worse than everyone around me only intensifies. While everyone I know is doing something outstanding, I try to at least not get the lowest grade. A quarter of my classmates go to olympiads, even more go to good universities, my entire close circle of friends (can I even call them so?) create maybe the most wonderful art that I have ever seen.

It’s not that I really needed all these high grades, certificates, diplomas, but as the people I know with their achievements and successes are a level higher than me, I can’t help but wonder: how can I be worthy to even talk to each of them? Why does someone who enters a top educational institution, who achieves outstanding success in one area or another, who has graduated with honors – in general, how can they need me, who has never said anything smart, funny or interesting, who has achieved nothing, who knows nothing? Am I good enough to even stand next to them? At least that’s how I see myself – annoying and awkward, crawled from the lower level miserably.

I can’t believe that it is wrong, as much as I would like to. As I wouldn’t believe someone who told me my dog can speak. Sounds interesting, but too implausible, too far out of my picture of the world.

Losing touch with reality – too big words, but how else can you name being absolutely sure that all your loved ones hate you, so in your thoughts you already say goodbye to the one who will send you a supporting message in two hours, who will tell you how much they like your new drawing this evening, who will visit you tomorrow to spend time with you? And it all won’t teach you anything: two or three days later you will be sure again that you are disgusting to everyone and you just have to wait a bit until you are politely informed about it.

No one loves me, no one needs me, I'm only tolerated out of pity is written somewhere in the subcortex of my brain next to water is wet and twice two equals four. I can’t imagine anyone being happy to see me, anyone in need of anything but money or other material gain from me. And I can’t do anything with these thoughts, no matter how much I tell myself that this is far from truth: any objections seem to be a pathetic and deceitful attempt to calm myself.

I collect the evidence that I am not a burden, that I am more than an annoying guy that everyone wants to get rid of, that I can be important to those who are important to me, although I barely dare to even dream about it. I collect it all obsessively, in order to at least briefly dissuade myself of my uselessness. I look at all the gifts that I got from those who are dear to me for half an hour almost every day. I re-read their messages with kind words addressed to me hundreds of times. I memorize every conversation up to the word.

You know, I have friends now – much more reliable than everyone I called friends before them, at least I hope they are. A family, you can say. A person who I met on Twitter and who now calls me their sibling and talks to me every day. Her friend who I first met when he visited me in the coffee shop where I worked, and I made him coffee and we talked until the very end of my working shift (and maybe that evening I felt the warmest and the most comfortable for all the month). A guy from my school, a year younger than me – we met in extra classes but hardly knew each other for several years until we started chatting on social media and suddenly found out that we had more in common than we thought. Last but not least, my partner, who has seen more of all the shit done by my broken mind than anyone else and is still by my side, as close as I could never imagine anyone.

So I am surrounded by the best people in my life. Most of the time I feel that I am important to them as much as they are to me. Probably believe that my lack of outstanding achievements does not affect it. Sometimes I can even say that I feel loved.

And I try to focus on this feeling.

And I keep remembering all their kind words and saving screenshots of the chats and storing all their gifts on my bedside table.

And I take three pills a day that are supposed to put my fucking brain in place.

And still it all feels like the impossibly fragile glass, beautiful like a piece of stained window, and the smallest sign that I am not good enough for all these people will smash it to smithereens, leaving me to bleed among the shards of it, all alone.

[bunnys-kisses]

I have a big order, I would like a peach cake, pancakes and add a lemon slice to that then I’d like a side of earl grey and chai served by Lando Norris xx

bakery menu

want to submit something to the bakery? then hit up the menu! there's tons of items to choose from! i hope you find something that you love and i'd love to hear from you! thank you! for this order, this was lovely to write after my little (two day) hiatus! i hope you love it, lovely anon!

peach cake ("if you spill a drop, we start all over.") + pancakes ("if you bite me. i'll bite you back.") + lemon slice ("i'm sorry, what was that? i can’t hear you over all that noise you’re making.") + early grey tea (big cock) + chai (biting/hickies) served by lando norris (formula one)!!

cw: smut/pwp, big cock!lando, biting/hickies, unprotected sex, (slight) breeding kink, (sort of) brat!reader, size kink, oral sex (lando receiving)

lando liked when you pouted. when he watched the bottom lip stick out and those sweet lashes fluttered at him. it was painfully cute in his honest opinion. when you'd pout over something sad, or when you wanted something really badly and would do anything to get your hands on it.

but while lando liked a better look at your soft bottom lip, he hated when you were a brat.

currently lando had you between his legs, with your throat gagging on his cock. your eyes closed and your hands gripping onto his thighs for some kind of leverage as he pushed his cock as deep as it would go.

fuck lando norris and his big cock.

he loved the sight of you though, a total mess after you meticulously put yourself together for the grand prix. reduced down to a lowly little slut for lando to use to his liking while riding the high of his win. earlier you wanted to go out after the race with some of the other girlfriends, but lando wanted you back at the hotel with him.

letting him indulge in his favourite post-race activity, making a mess of that sweet little cunt of yours. he loved your cunt, he was addicted to it in some ways. he wanted to be buried deep inside of you and kissing at your back until you were whining on the sheets.

"how does that feel? finally got some sense into you?" he asked.

you looked up at him and tried to form words, but it all came out a jumbled mess. you leaned into his touch as he ran his fingers through your hair with a hint of affection.

but his words were venomous, "i'm sorry, what was that? i can’t hear you over all that noise you’re making." and it made you stomach flip. he pulled your mouth off his cock and you looked at him with a hazy gaze.

your throat felt raw, but in a split second decision. you leaned in and bit a hickey into the inner part of lando's thigh to feel that thrum of pleasure in your body. but you didn't get it too dark before lando ripped your head away and you looked up at him once more.

he chuckled lowly, "silly, silly girl. is this your revenge for me suggesting that we stay in tonight. i haven't felt you in a long time. is that a bad thing to way? to feel you?"

you replied, "lando."

"remember, baby girl. if you bite me. i'll bite you back." and you knew that it wasn't some kinky talk. he meant it. you still remembered your trip to paris in summer, and you in high collared jackets and turtlenecks. lando liked your pretty neck and breasts all covered in his bites.

you were his to mark. to claim.

you whimpered and kept your eyes on his. you felt a twist in your belly and a surge of heat in your body. everything felt very hot and you rubbed your thighs together.

"fuck, you're beautiful. see, no need to be a brat. just let me have you, i promise i'm just as good as any club or bar. why have a few drinks when you can have a few of my loads in your mouth."

you pouted and he helped you onto the bed. his spit-slick cock twitched with excitement over how you looked at him. his heart leapt as he got you onto your back, he knew you were soaked. you needed this too.

he pressed his chest against yours and tapped your nose, "remember our rule? if you spill a drop, we start all over." then pulled you into a tight kiss, the taste of his cock lingered on your lips as he sank it inside of your sickeningly sweet hole.

you whined and gripped onto the covers under you for a moment before you wrapped your arms around him and held him close. your lips remained together as he got your legs around his waist.

you two rutted against one another, the feeling left you feeling excited. being so close to lando made you stomach twist and your heart hammer against your ribs.

"you're so pretty under me. who allowed you to be this beautiful." he groaned as he held your thighs to get a better angle of his cock inside of you. he loved when you went dumb for him after a few thrusts. your poor little cunt. the sweet drooling little thing that always enticed him. day in and day out.

"please, lando." you squirmed a little bit as you felt his cock nudge against some of the softest parts of you. your stomach curled and you held onto his shoulders tighter. your poor little cunt was going to be bruised by the end of this.

"i know, baby girl. let me have this, let me have your sweet little cunt. you drive me crazy." his thrusts were fast and erratic, there was little rhythm to them. only that he gets his pleasure in your brain.

he started to kiss at your neck, soon his teeth were grazing against the soft plains of your neck. he could feel your pulse under his teeth. he fit against you perfectly, even if his larger cock seemed to make your insides all messy.

the first time you got together, he actually didn't fit inside of you. he had to work you until he could at least get the tip in. when he did though, it felt like total euphoria.

he loved the feeling of you around him. you were a perfect fit for him. he couldn't get enough of your sweetness. letting it stain the base of his cock in a sick desire for more. no wonder he was so hesitant to let you go out and party.

he was your big strong man, your protector and lover. his blood boiled for you in a sexual way. he wanted hid sweet girl, and he wanted to be balls deep inside of her. blame him for being aroused by you.

he eyed are you as he moved against you, "you take me so well."

"lando."

he chuckled and kissed you once more. he could feel the heat in his gut as he moved against you. you felt like a sweet dream to him. his core burned for you as he moved. it felt so good to be balls deep inside of you, it was like where he belonged. he needed to be inside of his sweet girl.

"please, shit, lando. you feel so good. fuck." you whimpered as you tried to arch your back to get him deeper inside of you. but he had you pinned under him as he littered your neck with hot bites. you felt so good, maybe he was right. why get drunk when you could get cock drunk!

"i'm glad you like it. see isn't be with me much better. you get your pretty, puffy pussy all fucked out by me."

he didn't know how much longer it was going to take for him. he could feel the thump in his chest and his hot face. he continued to ram into you, making sure every centimeter of your pussy was touched by him.

"pretty thing." he purred with a chuckle as he continued to fuck you rapidly. it all flooded his head with heat.

with a few more heavy thrusts of his hips. he finished inside of you, but his cock was still hard as he hammered into you. which in turn pulled an orgasm out of you, you held onto him tightly and kissed him as you came. you clenched onto him and melted into the kiss. you soon relaxed out on the bed.

spread out for him, full of cum and feeling good all over. you shifted a little as lando put your legs down onto the bed. cum stuck to the side of your pussy and a little got onto the bed. he admired your for a moment and pulled your face in for a hot kiss.

you stayed curled up inside of him. but as he held you, his soft words came into your ear, "hmm. seems you spilled a drop, baby girl." then put you back onto your back, "guess we have to try again." <3

[morphids]

break up with your boyfriend, ellie williams

pairing: bestfriend!ellie x afab, curly haired,bi!reader (college au)

chapter: one shot (8k words whoops my finger slipped got my asd diagnosis today lol ig that explains that) proofread but if there's errors idk what to tell u

warnings: explicit sexual content, 18+ so minors dni, subish!ellie, loserlesbian ellie, poc friendly!! drug mentions, marijuana usage, friends to lovers, angst?? ellie gets her coochie ate, so does reader, fingering, ✂️✂️, all that good stuff, they essentially worship each other, cheating (not by reader but sus behaviours n thoughts fs) (tw::: men bf’s a dickspawn imsorry) homophobia.

summary: you have a horrible boyfriend, ellie’s always hated him. 

a/n: full word vomit im sorry if its ass but also i kinda lost my composure writing this 🤭🫣😵‍💫

AS ALWAYS FUCK DRUCKMANN AND ALL ZIONISTS, resources for Palestine and the daily click linked on my pinned post!

**

You were tired, drained. Hours had passed and you and your boyfriend were still at it. Angry words and misunderstood sentences all throughout the day had resulted in yet another fight between you.

"Dean, I've said it so many times, I can't go through it again,"

Dean, your boyfriend of a few months had a rocky track record, from keeping in close contact with his ex, to not telling interested girls that he's not single. The situation was always the same, you'd express your discomfort with something and he'd get angry, defensive. Then, eventually after so much arguing would get you to 'realise' that it's no big deal, that you shouldn't have reacted that way at all and in fact, you should apologise to him for making him feel like a cheater.

You had considered breaking up with him, so many times, in fact. Yet, you simply couldn't bring yourself to do it, still holding out with hope that things will improve.

"Baby, I swear nothing is going on, she's just my friend."

"Fine, okay." You ceased, feeling mentally drained by hours of conflict, "I have to go, need to meet Ellie, we have that test soon."

"You're leaving?" Dean said, clearly still agitated and pumping from the fight,

"Yes, Dean," you sighed, glancing in the mirror to double-check that your makeup hadn't been ruined from the previous crying, "I told you, this exam is really important," In other words, you have more things to be worrying about than your issues with him.

Gathering your books and piling them into your tote bag, you felt Dean's eyes on you, silently steaming as he saw you pick up your books.

"I'll see you later," Without looking back, you grabbed your keys from the side of the door and headed out.

He always had a problem with Ellie, which you couldn't understand, she was always supportive and kind to you. What reason would he have to dislike her?

You had been friends ever since that first physics class three years ago, you had sat in the row in front of her, over fifteen minutes into the lecture had passed until you felt a tap at your shoulder. Turning, you were greeted with green eyes and a smiling face adorned with light freckles.

"Hey, you got a spare pen?" She looked bashful, almost embarrassed that she hadn't been prepared even for the first class of the year. A half smile was placed on her lips. Amused, you gladly handed her a pen, pleased that you had an abundance of pens neglected at the bottom of your tote bag. You were always prepared, just not the most organised.

At the end of the lecture, she tried to hand you back the pen, but you refused and insisted she kept it, was she planning on asking someone for every class she had? That was just inefficient.

When you wouldn't accept the pen back, she ripped out a rough square from a page of her notebook, scribbling her number quickly so she could pay you back for the pen. 

You had been friends ever since, there was something that just worked. She had been there long before Dean and you would be damned if he was to get in the way of your friendship.

You had reached Dina and Ellie's place, they both shared the accommodation whilst you lived in a one-bed en-suite in a dorm. Dean lived at his fraternity, which you always hated going to meaning you spent most of the time at your place instead. 

Knocking, you only waited for a few seconds until the door swung open, revealing Ellie, clad in a white tank top and some grey sweatpants. The open door had caused a draught to haze through the air, the faint scent of smoke and music softly playing at a low volume.

"Hey, you." She spoke, smiling that usual smile that was seemingly tattooed on her lips. Ellie moved out of the doorway to let you in, closing the door behind you as you stepped into the familiar, comforting living room.

"Hey," your tone must have not been well received, as it prompted a,

"Well, what's gotten into you?"

"I've had the worst day, Dean-" you were interrupted by a slightly exaggerated groan, with an added,

"What has he done this time?"

"Ellie.." you sighed, dropping your tote from your shoulder and to the floor, kneeling down to pull out your books and pens.

"I'm serious," she threw her hands up, leaning against the edge of the desk where her work had been all set out already, "He's always up to some bullshit."

Ellie was confused, annoyed actually as you explained the situation to her. In her head, as a lesbian, the solution to these kinds of issues was so, so obvious to her; break up with him, he's not worth it. She had repeated this rhetoric to many of her men-loving friends, all of which refused to listen to her only to turn out heartbroken in the end, anyway.

"I wasn't exactly being rational either," you tried to explain, not that you were making excuses for him, but you felt a certain need to defend your relationship with Ellie. She was always so judgemental of the people you dated. You knew deep down that it was her way of looking out for you, she had consistently been the one to bring you comfort during your relationship breakdowns. And there had been a few of them.

"Don't do that, that's exactly what he wants," She spoke sympathetically, her words very soft considering that, mentally she was currently fighting Dean, and winning.

What was wrong with these guys? Ellie thought, you had dated some specimens before, but this new fraternity bro, Dean? She couldn't stand him.

Seemingly fuelled by his returned distaste towards her, but she knew the real reason why.

He was a pig. Flirting with any girl that'd give him attention, Ellie had caught him at parties with drunk girls hanging off his arms, inches away from their faces, centimetres away from cheating. Only for him to charm his way out of it when you confronted him. It pained her to see you go through this, especially when there were so many options out there. Like her, for example.

To be frank, Ellie's asking for that pen three years ago hadn't been entirely innocent. Whilst, it wasn't a lie per se, as she did, in fact, not have a pen on her first day, making her feel like the worst student on the planet.

She had taken notice of you when you first walked into that physics class. Eyeliner, framing the outer corners of your eyes and tight curly hair that lay perfectly around your face caught her attention. You were so beautiful, she knew she had to talk to you.

As you two had gotten to know each other over those first few months, her little crush had evolved from simple attraction to a full-blown, 'would rip the sun out of the sky if it meant seeing you smile', feelings situation. Whilst her initial intention had been to try and flirt a little bit, over time (really didn't take that long) Ellie realised that you were something special. The bond and groove you had as platonic friends was too great to risk ruining it all. So she decided, her feelings shouldn't be the thing to damage it. Ellie being Ellie, didn't know how to deal with said feelings, so she had made a pact with herself to never act on them, never expect anything other than platonic behaviour on your part, and never, ever let you find out. So whilst you dated, so did she.

"Anyways, can we talk about, literally anything else now? Like our exam that we have in a few days, perhaps?" You hummed, kicking your shoes off and sprawling on her couch, reaching down into your bag for something you had saved for this exact moment.

"Right, 'cos studying is the reason why you're laying dead on my couch right now." Ellie chuckled, joining you and holding your legs up to settle her body on the couch as well, before placing your legs on top of her lap.

"What are you even looking for?"

"Just wait, you'll see." You responded, still rooting through the bag, god where is it?

"Well, not if you can't find it in that damn bag, how do you even find anything in those?"

"Shut up," you chuckled, feeling better already. That's something you loved about Ellie, no matter what would happen to you, a few minutes with her and you'd feel like you had taken uppers.

"Ah, finally," you breathed out, fishing out a single joint that had become embarrassingly bent in the trauma that is, being an object lost inside the bottom of a tote bag.

Ellie laughed when her eyes caught sight of the bent joint, rubbing her eyes as they started to tear from the entertainment.

"You didn't have to go through that much effort to pull out that monster, plus you know I always have enough here, we don't need to smoke yours."

"It may look unfortunate, but this is the best shit in town right now." You tried to sell, "Got it from Xav,"

"Xav? How did you manage that?"

"One of Dean's frat brothers put in a huge order with him and sold me some, thought I'd save it so we could smoke it together." 

"You truly know the way to my heart," Ellie gushed, before leaning over your legs, to grab the closest ashtray and a lighter, passing it to you, roller's rights, after all.

"This doesn't look like studying, though," Ellie spoke, eyes falling to your lips as they wrapped over the end of the joint, sparking and taking a drag. She excused her thoughts.

"I just want some peace before I have to focus on work, you know?" You said, exhaling out the smoke.

Ellie sighed, knowing Dean was truly taking a toll on you, she watched as your face fell, obviously being reminded of the previous events. She wishes there was more she could do, how many times could she say leave him, before it sounded too obvious? Too pushy? Too out of line?

"Fuck him, don't worry about that for now. You're with me, this is a Dean-free zone." Ellie cheered, taking the lit joint as you passed it to her.

You felt her fingers trail random lines and shapes on your leg as she smoked, probably not even aware she was doing it. It was comfortable and set off a wave of sleepiness to hit you.

Ellie passed you the joint back,

"You going to that party tonight?" She asked,

"I don't know, I think Dean wants to go but I was planning on sitting this one out,"

"Why don't you come? Dina and Jesse will also be there, so you don't have to spend the whole party with him,"

"Fine, only because I haven't seen Dina and Jesse for a while,"

"I can live with that," she chuckled.

Deciding you were no longer comfy in that position, you lifted your legs up off Ellie, before manoeuvring your body so that you were sat side by side. Passing the joint back to her, you rested your head on her shoulder. What you didn't notice was Ellie's visible tensing the second you laid your head on her.

It wasn't like it was unusual behaviour from you, yet she reacted like this every time. 

"What do you think of it?"

"Fuck yeah, it's good," she swallowed, head turning to glance over at you resting your head comfortably on her shoulder, "You falling asleep down there?"

"No..." you mumbled, your voice visibly getting quieter as you were getting sleepier. You were just so tired. Constant arguing with Dean, working or studying. You needed a break, plus Ellie had a habit of being super comfortable to nap on.

"You sure?"

"No..."

"It's alright, have a nap, we’ll study later."

Ellie chuckled, she continued smoking the joint to its ends, relaxed by the sound of your breathing as you fell asleep. She took the opportunity to observe you for a minute, you looked peaceful, a hell of a lot more peaceful than you were when you first entered. She wished that you could always be that content, at peace. Ellie wanted you to be happy, whether with her or not, she just didn't want you so stressed and drained by yet another unhealthy relationship.  

It was then she took time to think, how messy the situation had truly become.

—

After your nap, you and Ellie actually did finally study, spending a few hours going over the course material and sharing notes. With a few distractions here and there, but successful nonetheless.

You were back at home, Dean seemingly long gone back to his own place, as you got yourself dressed for this party. Texting Ellie that you were ready, you awaited her knock on your door, as your place was a bit closer to the party you decided you'd make your way there together and you'd crash back at your house later.

Once she arrived, you two made your way to the party, it was in the next block of student accommodation, so it was only a quick walk.

Before long, you had reached the party, greeted by its loudness with thumping music and loud chatter.

"It's fucking packed," you complained, already nervous. The bass of the loud music echoing in your chest, exacerbating the anxiety you felt.  

"It will be okay, let's go find Dina and Jesse,"

It took a few glances to land on them but they had been settled in a corner with two other girls. One with short black hair and the other with long, blonde hair.

Making your way towards them, Dina spotted you and Ellie and eagerly waved you guys over to their spot.

"Bitch! Where have you been?" Dina questioned, and truly it had been an unreasonable amount of time since you'd seen her, which is weird considering how often you were at her and Ellie's place.

"Don't get me started," you sighed, whilst smiling at her and wrapping your arms around her.

"Well, it's good to see you, we missed you!" Gesturing towards herself and Jesse, who took his cue to also greet you.

Dina introduced you to her friends who were also sitting with them, the one with black hair was introduced as Cat, and the blonde was called Abby.

They were nice but you weren't too sure about the dark-haired one, she seemed a bit standoffish to you, only, but welcoming and friendly to everyone else in your group, and especially to Ellie. You noted it and placed the thought at the back of your head for dissection later.

In the ten minutes you had been there, Dean had spotted you and walked over. Causing an eye roll to come from Ellie,

"Hey, you're here!" He was drunk, words slurred and eyes heavily lidded. How much had he already had to drink?

Wrapping his arms around your waist, and nuzzling his face into your neck, the scent of alcohol lingered on him and you found that you didn't want him to be that close to you.

Your eyes met Ellie's briefly before she quickly looked away and took a long sip from her cup, which had been filled up with some vodka and whiskey mixed with some chaser by Dina. She turned her head away from you and began talking to Cat, faces a lot closer than most people. 

You tore your eyes away from their interaction, turning to face Dean.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Dean shrugged, too incapacitated to care too much before making his way back to some of his frat brothers. Yuck.

You were making your way to the bathroom, hoping to find the right door, but you weren't successful the first time, the second or the third. You were starting to wonder how many goddamn rooms were in this place until you finally reached it, and it was of course labelled with a stupid little diy frat sticker that said 'bathroom' featuring other, more immature graffiti. Apt, you thought.

The light was on but the door was slightly ajar, thinking nothing of it you walked in believing it to be empty. The room was also, of course, occupied. You mentally laughed at your own bad luck as you saw Abby sneaking a cigarette out the window. Her body perched up on the windowsill as she breathed the smoke out the open gap.

"Shit- oh it's just you," she chuckled, holding her hand on her heart indicating that you had slightly frightened her, clearly from her doing something she isn't supposed to be doing.

"Sorry, thought it was empty," you said, turning your body towards the door in an effort to leave her to it,

"You don't have to leave I'm just smoking this before any of my team sees me,"

That brought a smile to reach your lips,

"Why are you sneaking cigarettes like a 16 year old?"

"Athletes aren't really meant to smoke, but shit happens. I just don't want to hear it from coach." She mumbled taking her final drag, throwing the butt out the window.

"I'll take it to my grave," You promised, making a little zip motion on your lips.

"All yours," she smiled, making her way out of the bathroom.

"I won't take long, we can head down to the group together,"

So you did, exiting the bathroom, Abby smiling at you,

"Let's go?"

"Sure,"

You had travelled down the stairs, engaging in random, friendly small talk until you had reached everyone. Abby sat back down next to Dina and Jesse, who were ranting amongst themselves, whilst Cat and Ellie had been left to their own devices. Now, you and Ellie had been friends for a while, you kinda knew what she looked like when she was flirting with girls. And this was definitely that. 

Your thoughts were interrupted by Dean respawning in your face again,

"Wanna explain that?"

That completely broke you out of your little trance, explain what?

"What?"

"Why were you in the bathroom with her?"

"She was-" you remembered your promise to her, "We were just chatting, nothing weird happened, if that's what you're thinking."

He grabbed your wrist and walked with you to a quieter corner of the room,

"Why are you lying?"

"Dean, nothing happened we were chatting because she was in there when I walked in,"

"Do you know what she is?"

"I just met her today, Dean," You didn't want to deal with this right now, Ellie had said she was going to try and help you escape Dean tonight and instead she got annoyed by his presence and began flirting with Cat.

"What is with you and hanging out with all of those d-...", he trailed off,

"Those what, Dean?" You were beyond angry at this point, you didn't like what he was implying.

"You know, all those le-"

"Hey," your altercation was interrupted, "Everything cool?" Ellie was looking between you both, eyebrows furrowed as she looked you over, gauging the situation. She knew you could fight your own battles, but when a drunk man is getting too handsy on someone it's always good practice to remain vigilant.

"We're fine." He said, his words less slurred now, a bit more pissed off. Egged on by the fact that his very point had just interrupted him.

"Oh yeah?" She pressed, making sure to look at you when she asked, having watched the interaction since he dragged you away.

"Yeah, I'm okay," you added, trying to give her a grateful look with your eyes, whether she got the message or not wasn't confirmed. Ellie wasn't one to let things go, but then she asked you if you wanted to be left alone with him and when you simply said 'Yeah I can deal with this," there was nothing more she could do without being too out of line. 

Sighing to herself, she dragged her feet back to the group, silently warring with herself over her actions, wondering if she put her nose in someone else's business or whether she didn't act enough. She had decided that was enough for the night, she'd try and focus on something else.

Whilst you were frustrated; you didn't want to explain the situation to her yet, at this point.

"Dean I don't like what you're trying to say, I don't want to be near you right now, we can talk about this at home."

"Sure, whatever." He walked off. You exhaled a sigh that had been festering in your chest for a while.

Wandering back to Dina, Jesse and Abby, noticing a considerable lack of Ellie and Cat. But at least you could clear your mind, Dina offered you another drink- which you gladly took.

You were in conversations with your friends, a good amount of minutes had passed and you finally caught sight of Ellie. You felt your heart twitch, your stomach churning at the sight.

Ellie was engaged in some heated make-out with that Cat, her hands tightly wrapped around the back of the girl's neck. The lights of the room bounced off her skin, illuminating them in deep reds and blues, as their lips moved against each other. It was hot, you couldn't lie. Perhaps the alcohol had hit you a lot more than you thought. You had seen Ellie in action, but not in action.

You felt yourself start to stare, lost in the sight of Ellie until you felt your breathing start to quicken and your legs fidgeting. You had to pull your eyes away, shaming yourself in your head for even looking that long, like a damned pervert.

Taking another sip of your drink, your thoughts trailed, you wondered what it would feel like to be in Cat's position, to feel Ellie's passionate grasp and soft lips against yours. You wondered if her kisses would feel loving and warm, not cold like you were used to.

You quickly dismissed your thoughts, blaming it on the alcohol, wondering what was spurring this on, all of a sudden.

You soon decided it was probably time to head home, the party had lived its course and you were in a worse mood than when you first got there. Mission failed, indeed.

Saying your goodbyes to Dina, Jesse and Abby you made your way through the dance floor to Ellie.

"Hey, I'm gonna head out," You interrupted a conversation occurring between Ellie and Cat.

"Oh, you sure?" She glanced between you and Cat, "Will you be okay getting home?" She asked.

"Yeah, I'm gonna find Dean and we're gonna go,"

"Oh," her face soured, "You're really still going home with that guy?"

"Well..." you stilled, you didn't exactly want to, but you knew he wouldn't give up until he got to say his piece, regardless of where you were, "We have stuff to talk about, I guess." Your voice and tone sound beaten, tired.

"I see," She glanced you over, hesitant, as if she was about to say something but then changed her mind. You could almost see thoughts flying in her eyes. 

"See you later," Cat smiled at you, though it didn't quite reach the corners of her eyes, no crease of skin. Everything seemed polite on the surface, but there were weird undertones in her voice, indifference. The vibe of that was definitely weird, right?

"Yeah,"

With that, you found Dean and left to go home.

—

Panting, you were panting. Heavy breaths mixed with sloppy touches in the darkness of red and blue lights.

You pulled away, glancing at Ellie, the corners of her plump lips curling into a smirk as she caressed your thighs. Fingers teasing near your entrance, you were completely ready for her touch, dripping, waiting.

"I can't wait to taste you, baby." she spoke, her words soft but with a hint of a growl that excited you, eager for what was about to come.

Then your eyes split open, and you were lay on your bed, hours had passed and you had been fast asleep. Sleep came easy, induced by the alcohol you had consumed, as you realised you had just been dreaming.

It took you a few seconds to stir and become conscious of what you had been dreaming about. Then the shame hit. What the fuck was that?

It didn't last long though, before you heard Dean's voice,

"That was hot,"

You slightly jumped at the surprise of his voice, not expecting him to have been awake and especially aware that you were having a dream of such nature, about your best friend of all people.

"You got me all hard, babe." You suddenly felt too overwhelmed, flashes of Ellie's lips and fingers cursed your mind as Dean's voice was mixed into your thoughts.

Confusion and panic hit your senses, you didn't want to look at Dean's expecting face when your mind was still reeling with the faint remnants of being under Ellie's warm and comforting touch, even in the astral plane, your body still warm and wanting. But not for him. Disgust overwhelmed your veins, poisoning the air in your lungs as you realised you couldn't think of anything worse than him touching you. It was as if that dream had been a message, a sign that this wasn't what you wanted. Or deserved. A sudden unexpected epiphany.

You quickly shot up and ran to the bathroom, no words spoken between you as you closed the door. Ensuring space between you both.

You sighed and grabbed at the roots of your hair, thinking of how utterly fucked this is.

You thought back to Ellie, would she be disgusted at your thoughts? Would she feel weird and uncomfortable if she knew you had been thinking of her that way? Her best, and very platonic, friend. She definitely isn't interested, you thought, remembering the way she had grabbed Cat closer to her and embraced her in a kiss that could only enflame your very being. Jealous. You realised, that's what that feeling was. It seemed to occur a lot regarding Ellie, that feeling.

Dean's voice blared through the door, reverberating through the walls.

"It's about that blond bitch isn't it?" Your eyebrows pulled together, fucks sake.

"Dean, please." It was stupid o'clock in the morning, the last thing you wanted was yet another argument.

"I knew those fucking lesbians would fuck with your head, you've always been a stupid woman, following whoever gives you attention."

His words hurt, and doubly pissed you off. How dare he? Those were your friends he was talking about.

You opened the door, Dean all blotchy and red in the face, fuelled by the past months of his bullshit and borderline abuse, this was the final nail. He was not about to say disgusting things and expect no repercussions. Lifting your hand, you put your entire back into connecting your palm with his cheek, made real by the smacking sound of skin, loud as a gunshot in the dark hours of the night contrasting the silence of no other surrounding sound in the dorms.

"Fuck you, Dean. I'm over this, get out." You stared him right in the eye as he rubbed the throbbing skin of his cheek to alleviate some pain. You couldn't help but feel a hint of relief that it had actually hurt him, as horrid as that sounds. You weren't a violent person, by any means, yet the continuous accusations, the newly exposed homophobia, his vile behaviour - it had to be done. You were done letting him treat you like that.

"I don't need you anyway, can find ten other girls that'd give me what I want."

"Go do that, then." You huffed, wondering why you hadn't done this earlier.

"Already have, sweetheart." He smirked, eyes glinting as he finally lifted the shroud of lies he had been filling your head with. You always knew deep down, you just chose to ignore it. Worms in the brain feasting at any rational thought and your self-respect. You didn't find it in yourself to get angrier.

"Get out of my house, Dean." You finalised, arms crossed over your chest, you just hoped he'd go willingly.

"You're not worth it, anyway." He cements, body turning to put on his shoes, chuckling as his heavy presence finally leaves your door.

You let out a breath, relief, shame and anger seeping into the deepest part of your being.

You were glad he's gone, truly. You just wish you had killed it sooner. Ellie was right, he ain't shit.

You sat on the edge of your bed, suddenly finding that the dark, empty space in your room was doing you no favours.

Pulling out your phone, you drafted a text to Ellie,

3.47 a.m:  you awake?

It was a long shot, you almost gave up on a response for tonight until you felt your phone buzz.

3.49 a.m:  ..always

3.49 a.m:  whats up?

Your lips tilted into a weak smile, before responding,

3.50 a.m:  u should be sleeping rn!

3.50 a.m:  umm so should u

3.51 a.m:  whats wrong?

Sighing, you had to bite the bullet, already started it now.

3.52 a.m:  he's an asshole, i broke up with him

A few minutes passed, and you wondered what was taking so long even though in the grand scheme of time it was only a few seconds, really. It was just anticipation, time felt dragged out awaiting her response. You didn't know that Ellie was laying on her bed feverishly typing, deleting and re-typing, overthinking how to respond. She wanted to say, 'I knew this' and how she was happy he was gone because he was a loser who didn't deserve you anyway. How she never liked him. Ellie didn't want to be insensitive, though, lest she hurt your feelings further. 

3.57 a.m: how are you feeling?

3.58 a.m:  im just glad he's gone tbh

3.58 a.m: had to be done

Ellie couldn't help the hint of a smile that fought its way onto her features, she typed her response. Picking at the dry skin around her thumb with her teeth as she sent her next message, eyebrows slightly furrowed.

3.59 a.m: he didn't deserve you anyway, you're too good for that.

You felt a warmth rush through you, stomach tightening as you read into her words. You wished that she meant it, that her feelings matched yours. Your mind thinks back to Cat, instantly murdering any hope in your heart.

You don't remember when your feelings for Ellie began to change, but looking back on it, you had felt so unsatisfied, seldom comfortable with your past lovers. Ellie was the only person who knew you, truly. Who had loved you and made you feel so safe, her comforting presence always soothing you, you felt like a person around Ellie. Whole. It had just taken some time for life to knock some sense into you to realise. It has always been Ellie. 

4.01 a.m: want me to come to you or you wanna come here?

4.01 a.m: it's so late you don't have to! i'll be ok promise

4.02 a.m: hah good one.. gimme ten mins

Ellie was not messing, not much time passed before she was knocking on the front door of your dorm. 

"Hey," Her voice was soft, gentle, her eyes shining with such a tender glint. She's always had such pretty eyes, you thought. 

"Hi,"

You moved a few steps to give her space to enter,

"How you doing?" She wrapped her arms around you, holding you tighter than you expected,

"Honestly, I'm okay," Ellie took a look at you, gauging your overall mood and believed it, you already looked lighter, less weight (*Dean) holding down your shoulders. 

"Think I mentally checked out a long time ago," you added, sitting down on your bed and lifting your laptop screen to load a show, acting somewhat as a buffer amongst the silence.

"So what happened?"

You couldn't help the audible groan that escaped your lips, "He got pissy when he saw me leaving the bathroom with Abby and accused me of cheating,"

"Abby?" Ellie had taken off her coat and shoes, joining you on your spot on the bed.

"Yeah, she was smoking in the bathroom hiding from their coach, we walked down to the group together, it was only small talk. I was so confused, he started saying things about who I was hanging out with,".

"Meaning?"

"He's a fucking homophobic prick,"

"He said hanging out with 'all those lesbians was fucking with my head', said I follow whoever gives me attention," you sighed, "then I slapped him."

Ellie couldn’t help it, she felt a swell of pride that you slapped him, stood up for yourself. He deserved so much worse, she thought.

Ellie couldn't hide the smirk that reached her lips, as much as she tried to suppress it, it still came.

"That's my girl,"

You didn't expect your stomach to twist when those words left her mouth, opening something up deep inside.

"He finally admitted to cheating, and then it was over," You sighed.

"I'm proud of you," Ellie muttered, fidgeting with her nail-beds, failing to meet your eyes.

"You don't have to say that, I know how pathetic this is,"

Resting your head on the headboard, you brought your legs into a cross,

"Hey, I mean it, it must've been a lot," She paused, her hand coming to rest on your knee, rubbing her thumb over the skin absentmindedly, like it was second nature to her. Perhaps, it was.

You looked over at her, eyes trailing down her features, freckles and the green eyes that still weren't meeting yours, suddenly shy.

"You're amazing, you deserve to know that," she paused, eyes finally meeting your own, determined.

"So are you," Your voice lowered, trailing back to the pretty brunette from earlier.

“So what’s going on with you and that girl?” You shouldn’t have said anything, but it was out before you could stop it. Clearly, your brain kept thinking about it.

“It’s..” Ellie thought about what to say, it would sound extremely horrible to say Cat was mainly a distraction, unfair as she is a lovely person, but it’s true.

“Nothing more than what you saw,”

Vague, was that best response to that, Ellie thought.

“I saw quite a bit,”

“Honestly, she’s great, we get along and all but..’ She’s not you. “I don’t think it’ll go any further.”

“She seemed to really like you, why not?”

Ellie almost wanted to laugh, it was so painfully obvious to her, how could you not see it?

“I guess.. I want something different.”

Her eyes connected with yours, the contact between your eyes felt different now, charged. You caught yourself stealing a glance at her lips, which slightly parted as she spotted where your eyes had fallen.

“Like what?”

She had no response, it was either avoid the question, or firm it. Ellie didn’t know which was the right answer.

"Ellie.." You paused, words caught in your throat, as scenarios rushed through your head like a rolodex of different possible outcomes. Heart tugging at your brain to do something, anything.

"Yeah?" Her head leaned closer to yours, your breathing slowly becoming heavier, the room's environment growing thicker, harder to inhale. Her hand still on your knee, unmoving now, frozen in place.

You could almost make contact with her lips, if you moved just a tiny inch closer. Her hand trailed slightly further up your leg, just a little above your knee, almost as if to test the waters. You wondered if she felt like you did, if she could also feel her veins light up and her body inflamed. Were her lips just as eager to touch yours? Were her hands longing to feel you just as well?

Before you realised, it was out.

"Ellie, can I kiss you?"

A beat, and no response. You felt your heart start to panic, already thinking over how to pretend that had never happened. You almost regretted it, until her hand reached for the back of your neck, reducing the distance between your faces.

Lips meeting yours, shyly at first, hesitant. Ellie’s mind was whirling, feeling her heartbeat pump aggressively throughout her body, there was no way this was reality, she thought. No way that you were here in front of her, asking to kiss her, after all this time of her yearning, feeling like a useless lesbian who would never ever make a move on you.

She could almost feel herself kicking her feet in the air, as she decided to firm it. Scared if she waited any longer, the opportunity would cease to exist, pass her by and join one of those regrets she’d think about as an elder.

Your lips met hers back, eager to push for contact, eager to push closer. Your zeal spurring hers on, as her hands clasped the back of your neck, keeping you in place. Not like you wanted to be anywhere else.

This was it. This is what you should’ve been feeling in the past.

Ellie’s soft, plump lips melted over yours, taunting with a bite and pulling your bottom lip out before entering her tongue into your mouth.

Fuck. That was hot.

You felt yourself getting hotter, damper by the minute as the kiss continues, Ellie’s hand getting more comfortable and trailing down to your thighs.

You pulled apart for a second, taking the time to catch your breath as you looked into her eyes, usually green but now much darker, enhanced by enlarged pupils as she glazed her sights over you. An unreadable expression on her face,

“Are you okay?”

“You’re so hot, and amazing and I-I really want to keep going, I just- I don’t know, I don’t want this to be like a .. rebound thing. I really care about you but I just, don’t want to feel like that, you know?” She rambled on, her thoughts getting ahead of themselves as she was pondering if it happened, then if it was too late to return to what you had been, before things got all naked and messy.

You understood, of course you did. You had literally broken up with him just maybe two hours ago. But it didn’t matter, you had to say it. Let her know and reassure her that it was only her.

“Ellie.. you could never be a rebound to me,” You stammered a little before the next part, “You’re the one I’ve wanted this whole time. It’s always been you.” You pecked her lips, grabbing her face, looking into her eyes hoping she’d see the seriousness in yours.

“I’ve wanted you for a really long time,” she broke contact, “I just didn’t wanna fuck shit up,”

“I mean it, Ellie, I’ve never felt as certain about something as I do this,”

Her stature relaxed, you continued, “I love you, Ellie. I didn’t love anyone else,”

“I love you,” she answered, the corner of her lip tilting up, eyes brighter.

“I’ll just have to show you how much, if that’s okay with you.”

Her gaze turned curious, before nodding, watching as your hands danced down her sides and ever so slightly underneath the fabric of her shirt.

“You can do whatever you want with me, honestly,” she murmured. You caught her body tensing, almost shaky as you lifted her shirt. Warm hands covering the sides of her defined stomach, you squeezed a little, just enough to rile her up.

Which it did, Ellie’s eyebrows furrowed as she anticipated your next move. Losing control of her lungs, she was about to explode.

“This okay?” Your hand met the band of her sports bra, digging scarcely into her skin beneath it.

“Yeah,” she exhaled, stuck in place, watching, her cheeks becoming flushed, “Shit,”

You hands pressed over her breasts, tightening pressure around as she let out a content sigh. You dipped your head down to wrap your lips around her nipple, licking laps over the tip and softly blowing air over them when you decided you were done, chuckling to yourself at the goosebumps that now raised on her skin,

“Don’t tease,” She murmured, composure dwindling.

“Sorry, can’t help myself,”

You kissed down her stomach to her pelvis, feeling her restlessness grow as her body refused to stay still, itching for you to do more.

You leaned back up, placing either leg over her torso and looked her over, making sure she was okay as your hand moved lower down, seemingly in a mind of its own as it crept past the waistband, meeting her skin as you held eye contact.

Ellie folded, shutting her eyes as the waiting became too much, you tapped her leg with your free hand,

“Eyes on me,”

When she held your eye contact once again, you teased a finger past her folds, almost letting out a groan at how wet she was, at how easily you could feel her arousal.

“Fuck Els,” you sighed, struggling to contain yourself as your thoughts grew more indecent, slipping a finger in further as Ellie writhed underneath you, head hanging back.

“More fingers, please,” Her voice was strained, breathy as she closed her eyes, embarrassed to be feeling this undone already.

“Yeah?” The side of your mouth curled up, goaded by the sound of her voice. She nodded impishly, covering her eyes with her wrist, as her other hand reached to grip around your hip. A tight squeeze followed on your skin.

“I can do that, baby,” Following instructions, you slipped two more fingers into her, falling into a rhythm as you felt her clench around you. She glanced over your body, legs spread over her midsection as you leaned your arm back, hips gently grinding over hers- an attempt to alleviate some of the pressure building up.

Her hand grabbed at the hem of your shirt, pulling it slightly and groaning when the tight material pushed against your breasts, she always loved how you never wore bras, stiff nipples poking through the fabric.

“Fuck, clothes off, now,” she let out in soft grunts, as she broke your wrist from her to take off your shirt, rubbing her hands over your newly exposed skin “Always fucking wanted to see you like this,” She spoke, your fingers meeting her centre again, “So fucking pretty,”

“You feel so good, Ellie,” You gasped, your hips involuntarily grinding on top of her stomach, “So fucking good ‘n wet for me,”

“Fuck-“ Ellie’s voice cut off as she bit into the back of her hand, her own hips rolling your hand in deeper, hitting her walls more than before as she let out a mewl. “Feels so fuckin’ good, angel,” she whimpered, voice strained as she continued to ride into your hand.

It was the hottest noise you’d ever heard, and you wanted to keep drawing it out of her. To keep hearing her moan for you, and your actions only.

Suddenly, you had something you prove, both to her and to yourself. Flashes of Cat in your mind as you wanted her to forget other women existed.

You unwrapped yourself off her lap, removing your fingers, kissing her stomach as you pulled her pants and underwear down, grabbing her legs and holding them open, exposing her even further.

“Damn,” you said, glancing over her wet inner thighs as they glistened, all for you.

“Shut up,” she spoke, voice tight as a side smile swept over her features, as she grabbed the back of your head, pushing you closer to her pulsing core, throbbing and dripping waiting for you to make contact.

You licked a line up her heat, moaning to yourself at the taste of her. You grew light-headed, thinking you could die happily just between Ellie’s legs, becoming addicted to her moans as you ate her out, head in a daze as she squeezed her thighs tight around your head, almost cutting off your air supply- her moans growing more frequent, as she reached closer. Your free hand moving up to wrap itself around her breast, squeezing tighter around her nipple.

Deciding to have a little more fun, you slipped two fingers into her wetness as you continued to lap your tongue around her clit, pushing up into her as you sucked. Dragging her delicious sap on your tongue as it marred all over your face, cheeks glassy with her warm sleek.

Ellie had lost control over her vocal cords at this point, moans slipping out from between her sweet lips no matter how hard she tried to suppress them. Hell, you were moaning too, despite not even being touched yet, dripping all over yourself, ass up and needy as you rolled your hips over thin air as you continued to soak yourself into Ellie.

There could be no coming back from this, you thought, not now that you had been exposed to the delicacy that is Ellie Williams. You were holding on to her and not letting go.

You felt Ellie’s moans get shorter, cutting themselves off from its full power before the next one came, her hips moving more haphazardly up to meet your tongue, she was close.

You glanced at her, her eyes closed, brows pinched up and mouth agape, a slight sheen to her skin from sweat, she’s so attractive, you thought.

With your free hand, your fingers guided themselves onto your own folds, rolling over your own clit for some release, the lack of hand on her caused Ellie’s eyes to lull over at you, the sight of your arched back, wet cheeks from her slick, spread legs as you touched yourself all whilst still fucking her into oblivion.

The damned sight of you, just as undone as Ellie, without her even touching you, was enough to cause the coil in her abdomen to twist, before she came all over your face, breath slowing into heavy pants as her body twitched. You lapped her up her residue, finally removing your face from between her legs as she looked at you. Wordless.

“Wh-what the fuck..” Ellie’s weak voice trailed, before laughing and forcing a kiss on your lips, hands wrapped around your jaw as she tasted the remnants of herself on you.

There was no way you were about to give her the best orgasm of her life and expect her to not do anything back? Funny joke. Ellie was ravenous now.

She placed you underneath her, biting around your thighs before bending her head down, her tongue having been desperate for a taste since that first day she saw you. “I wanna fuck you so bad,” Your legs tightened around her as the air from her voice hit your centre, “Been dyin’ for a taste,” You looked at her, tip of your eyebrows raised up as you took in her words, how long had she wanted you back? Her words caused you to shudder, whimpering as she continued.

“Fuck,” You said, voice breaking as her tongue rippled over your pussy as your hips shook, slurping up the honey that had been left neglected. Long, slender fingers meeting your centre that had felt so, so desperate and needy for her to touch.

“G’na show what you’ve been missing,” She hummed, as her fingers picked up pace working harmoniously with her tongue as she fucked into you. Warm muscle rolling over your pulsing clit. Fingers rubbing over your velvet walls which sucked her further in, skin dragging out with her soaked fingers when they recoiled out, the image obscene. “What was waiting for you this whole time,”

“Els- shit, wanna feel you,”

“What you want, baby?” She gasped out, in between breaths as fingers toyed with your clit.

“Wanna feel you, y-your fucking pussy on mine-fuck,” you cut yourself off, embarrassed. The desire was simply too strong, you were dizzy just from the thought of it. Ellie seemed to share your enthusiasm, her heart skipping a beat, the thought kindling her veins with heat.

This was truly a gift from the heavens, she thought.

“Shit- yeah, okay.” Ellie exhaled out, as she got you into position, grabbing one of your smaller pillows to cushion underneath you as she placed her legs over yours, getting into place as she rubbed her clit over yours, hips lolling over your pelvis.

The sounds were debaucherous as they filled the room, hot and wet, as if the spirit of Dionysus, himself had possessed you. Invoking you with bacchanal, carnal desire as you could think of nothing else than the sublime vice that is Ellie Williams.

“Fuck, Els, I’m gonna come,”

Ellie groaned, rocking her hips over yours, her defined abs on show, breasts working with Earth’s gravity as they sprung up and down to match her movements, hair falling out of her half-bun, causing some strands to stick to her face, completely dishevelled. You looked at her, eyes attached to yours, lust ruling over them, then looked back down to where you were both intertwined. You trapped your bottom lip with your teeth at the sight before you.

Her sap mingling with yours, leaking out from her cunt as it folds over your own, Wrapping you with her warmth, pulsating around yours. Ellie’s body still trembling from before.

“Then come for me, baby,”

You were gone. With her words, you felt yourself spilling out against her, not being able to hold back the climax of your arousal spurting out from you, splashes reaching Ellie’s legs.

“Fuck, Ellie!” Your voice drawled out, as the wave ran through you,

“That’s it, angel, come all over me,” She smirked down at you, breath heavy as she watched your eyes glaze over, lips parted and chest heavy as you finally came down. A ardent glaze over her eyes.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” She gaped, eyes transfixed on your figure as her reeling mind came down from the high.

“Shit, neither did I,” you laughed, covering your mouth, suddenly shy. With your head still in the clouds, you weren’t feeling as overly self-aware.

“That was fucking hot, and I’m not done.”

—

leave a comment, reblog or like if ya enjoyed <3

[ceilidho]

sundog

prompt: Simon comes across a girl when she's recently been evicted and takes her back to his place, despite her reservations (nsfw, 8.5k) [based on this old post] [on ao3 here]

-

The circumstances of your life change so abruptly that you lose sight of it for a moment. 

Then, you’re out on the streets with the clothes on your back and a suitcase packed so full that a sweater sleeve sticks out where the zippers meet. The locks to your apartment have already been changed. You know because you tried them anyway, desperately hoping that the eviction notice taped to your door might have been misplaced.

Evidently not. The keys don’t work. You contemplate chucking them on the walk out, but instead you keep them close like a talisman of protection, though it’s failed to live up to its purpose so far. 

You’ve got it under control for a day. If by ‘under control’, you mean experiencing a full body panic attack in the locker room of the twenty-four hour gym down the street from your old apartment. The staff gives you uncomfortable looks when you come in on the verge of tears with your suitcase rolling behind you, but they let you in because your membership is up to date. If you can count on anything in life, it’s consumerism. 

That doesn’t last long though, mainly because a locker and a wood bench won’t cut it in the long term. You sleep in the back of the local library until a stern-faced, if pitying, librarian threatens to call the cops on you. Pity isn’t sympathy, evidently. 

Gym management threatens to cut the lock on the locker you’ve been using as temporary storage space. Matter of fact, they say, you can’t be using the locker room as your quasi apartment between the hours of nine P.M. and seven A.M. just because everything else in the city is closed. Go home, they say. 

What home, you don’t say, before packing up your things and heading out on your way. 

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s capitalism. 

You didn’t think this kind of thing could happen to someone like you. Someone like you being an ordinary person. Homelessness always felt like a far away concept. But the world is cruel and life is brutal. What you didn’t realize before was that, at any moment in time, you’ve been closer to poverty than wealth, and here you are now, sitting in the park with your suitcase between your legs, the sun rapidly setting behind you, your phone at ten percent battery, and nowhere to go because your family is, frankly, nonexistent, and your friends, for lack of a better word, have almost entirely washed their hands of you.

Sorry, they’d say, the frown emoji expressing something like pity at a distance. We don’t have a couch to spare. 

I can sleep on the floor, you’d texted back. They’d gotten cagey after that. People like to be wanted only to a certain extent.

You can feel the panic rise up in you, too big to contain. It comes out in the form of blubbering tears and snot running from your nose. Big, hiccuping sobs. It’s not pretty. Passersby avert their eyes for the most part, save for the ones that eye you with something bordering on perverse delight and that’s what finally makes you get up and speed walk away, lest they feel compelled to approach you. 

But even in the tailwinds of summer, it gets cold outside at night. Worst of all, as the evening grows dark, the streets empty out until you can’t help but feel like a beacon with your little rolling suitcase. It clatters against the sidewalk as you try to hoof it down the street, looking for any shop still open to loiter in. Most close after nine though. You’ve googled homeless shelters, but the sheer anxiety keeps you floundering around up and down the streets instead.

It feels beyond helpless. You’re in a state like you’ve never been before, crying under a streetlamp because you needed a moment just to get your bearings. 

What you know now is that this world is a house of false bottoms. You thought the circumstances of your life could never change. You were never well to do, but you were doing well. The sight of the unhoused sitting with their backs to the brick and mortar stores on your walk home or congregated in a park in the middle of the city with their tents and shopping carts used to fill you with immeasurable pity, maybe even a quiet moment’s reflection; now, you see them as kin. 

Easy, isn’t it? To slip between states. To go from solid to liquid to gaseous. Easier than you ever could have expected. 

When it starts to rain, you almost close your eyes in relief. Anyone could’ve predicted this. 

You almost don’t respond to him at first, keeping your eyes trained on the sidewalk to avoid any bumps. Also, it never pays to look up at a man barking at you, especially not when he’s barking something like, Girl or Bird, turn around. 

Then he says it again, closer this time, and you’re forced to look up, if only to see who’s approaching you. Your suspicion melts away to distrust at the sight of the man stalking towards you. Distrust with a touch of trepidation—maybe outright alarm. Surely no man his size wearing a balaclava tucked into a hoodie straining around his arms would have innocent designs on you. 

He’s one of the bigger men you’ve ever come across. You look across the street to see if there’s a bar missing its bouncer, but all the shop fronts are dark like the ones on your side. 

You don’t bolt at the sight of him, but it’s a near thing. He appears from nowhere, and yet there’s nowhere for him to hide. Not with the size and breadth of him damn near taking up the whole sidewalk. His demeanour and stride evoke such a sense of authority that at first you mistake him for a plainclothes man, and wouldn’t that be just the icing on the shit cake of a week you’ve been experiencing. But something about him says otherwise. 

“Plan on catchin’ your death out here?” he asks, and you shiver. Not from the cold, but from the sound of his voice. 

You’re not used to talking to strangers. A month ago, you would’ve ignored the man lambasting you for being out in the rain; maybe crossed the street and hailed a cab instead. You don’t have those kinds of options anymore. The only thing left in your repertoire is to shout back. 

“I’ve got mace!” you yell out, your voice a hoarse rattle carved out from hours spent crying. 

“That’ll do ya fuck all out here,” he says, a touch condescendingly. “You lost or somethin’?”

“I’m not lost,” you sniff, rubbing the snot away from your nose with the end of your sleeve.

“Then get home instead of roamin’ the streets. You’re askin’ to get snatched up, bird.”

The threat of that has been lingering in your head these past few days, even stretching back to the very first moment that you noticed the sign on your door, but now it has its intended effect. You shake. 

“I can’t,” you whisper.

“Bloody hell,” he sighs. “Why the fuck not? Need someone to call you a cab?”

“I got evicted. I don’t have a home,” you say, and sniffle when your nose leaks again. Saying it outloud brings tears to your eyes again, a pressure building behind your orbital sockets and down to the tip of your nose. 

You must look like the saddest thing in the world standing there in the rain under the dim light of the streetlamp, the pole looped with graffiti and old gum. When the man berating you for being out in it takes a step forward, coming into the light, you can finally make out the bored depths of his eyes. A deep brown. Entirely unimpressed with the picture in front of him, maybe even a bit peeved. 

Your socks are wet and your shoes squelch when you take a step back. You pull the sheer sweater tighter around your frame, but it does nothing to protect you from the damp, frigid air. 

“You been out here long?” he asks, taking another step closer. Not tentatively either. His gaze sweeps over you proprietarily, taking stock; his arrogance comes as an afterthought. He’s not rubbing it in your face that he can do whatever he likes—he just does. 

You wheel your suitcase around in front of you to put something between the two of you. “…Just today. The gym kicked me out.”

You sound petulant, words chewed between your lips and teeth; begrudgingly admitting to the various pitfalls of your existence. All the bad luck. It’s shameful to admit to losing complete control of your life. 

“Haven’t ya got any family, girl? Friends? What’re they letting a girl like you stay out on the streets for?”

You could be sick on the pavement. “…That’s none of your business.”

His eyes go flat at that, unimpressed. “You always this nasty to people tryin’ to help?”

And you’re not. That’s the part that grates the most. You’re all soft underbelly; no bark, no bite. It’s inconceivable that this could’ve happened to you—inconceivable because your head is filled with false promises and mythologies. The myth of exceptionalism. This happens to other people. Not good girls that go to college and get their degrees and find a stable job. 

They’ve pulled the rug out from under you so fast that you haven’t even toppled over yet. That’s how quick it all happened. 

“What help are you?” The bite comes out of nowhere, fueled by bitter humiliation and resentment for the predicament you’ve found yourself in. “Are you gonna put me up in a hotel?”

“Think I’m made of money, bird?” he asks rhetorically. 

“You’ve probably got more than I have.” 

Now you’re weepy again at the thought. Down to your last hundred dollars and you’re in between jobs at the moment. It might’ve been easier to haul yourself out of poverty if applying for jobs didn’t require a mailing address. That’ll be your first priority once you find a place to live. But conversely, how are you meant to find housing with no proof of income? Landlords laugh in your face before slamming the door shut. The conversations are circular, but they always come to a grinding halt; that’s the only thing you’ve learned to expect. 

The worst part of this whole conversation is that it doesn’t follow any of the scripts you’ve previously memorized. When have you ever had to deal with a man interrogating you about your place of residence? It makes no sense. 

It’s inconceivable to imagine that this is happening to you, but it is. Life comes at you hard, with a razor’s edge. Sharp enough to cut, to lacerate. 

“You need a place to stay,” he states bluntly. 

“It’s fine. I’ll—I’ll find something.” 

“You could come home with me.” He says it so bluntly that for a moment all you can do is blink. Surely you misheard him. Surely a man of his size and breadth, dark mask obscuring his face, wouldn’t be daft enough to ask a woman he found on the street to come home with him.

The offer, as well-intentioned as you hope it is, puts you on edge. “No, that’s…that’s alright. I don’t want to…put you out. I was going to look up nearby shelters.”

“Shelters’ll all be full this time of night,” he says. “Never been on the streets?”

You clenched your teeth, nerves starting to get the better of you. 

“I can go to a church,” you say, voice terse now, frayed with nerves. 

He snorts. “Haven’t been to one in a long time, but pretty sure those close too, pet. It’s late.”

You sway on your feet, the suitcase at your side the only thing keeping your knees from buckling. Dead ends everywhere you turn. You’ve always thought of yourself as resourceful; that if push came to shove, you’d figure your way out of any sticky situation. That smacks of arrogance now. All your suppositions are dissolving right in front of you, your own self-image along with it. 

A heavy foot stepping into a puddle brings you back to focus. The masked man is closer now, within arm’s reach. Your heart jumps into your throat. He towers over you, monolith man; big as a sequoia, or other deadland creatures that vanish out of sight when you catch a shadow out of the corner of your eye and whirl around to look it dead on. 

“I can’t go home with a stranger.”

You know you’re not supposed to put your faith in strange men. Bad things happen to girls that go around trusting any man that offers up their help. 

The fist in your chest loosens infinitesimally when the man reaches up to pull the mask off his head. He’s every inch the brute you imagined in your head—blunt chin and crooked nose, a nasty scar running up his lip. There are scars all over his face, in fact—bisecting his left eyebrow and down his cheek. The blond hair on his head is slightly grown out, like he’s used to keeping it neat and tight but it’s been awhile since his head has seen a razor. His beard grows in a bit patchy, the burnish gold of a five o’clock shadow.

You frown. “Is that supposed to make me trust you?”

“Well, now we’re not strangers, are we?”

“That doesn’t—that doesn’t change anything! I still don’t know you.”

He shrugs. Takes a step back. “Suit yourself then. No skin off my ass.”

Your stomach roils, anxiety coming back with a vengeance. You hadn’t noticed it recede since the man started talking to you, but you notice its return. When he makes a move to turn back around, you lurch forward, your hand extending out and fisting in the side of his shirt. He pauses, then looks down at you. 

“…Where else am I supposed to go?” you whisper.

He tilts his head. “Could sleep on a bench in the park.”

You glare at him through tear-soaked eyes. “That’s not funny.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. You’re shit out of other options at this time of night.”

“So, what? Now it’s-it’s my fault or something?”  

His eyes don’t exactly soften, but they lose their hard edge. 

“I’m not gonna ask twice,” he says. Not cautioning you, just stating a fact. “You coming or not?”

Disaster seems like a given at this point. At least you could pick your poison. 

Words are beyond you though, so you just bite your lip and nod, eyes downcast now. 

What else is there for you to do but follow him after that? You trail along after him like a sad, wet cat left out in the rain. 

He finds her wandering the streets with her pretty little suitcase rolling over every bump and crack in the sidewalk and there’s no fighting the urge to drag her home. 

She doesn’t look like a runaway. Just a poor thing down on her luck. Her cheeks practically glisten with her tears when she looks up at him with her big, pathetic eyes, and it makes his cock plump up against his thigh. 

That’s not what this is about though. Simon presses his hand against his dick to rub out some of the ache while she flutters around the bedroom and reminds himself of that again. He didn’t take her home to maul her like a dog. He dragged her back to his flat because she looked wounded and scared out of her wits. 

He can be good every now and then. 

“Sit down, will ya?” he grunts, tugging her down onto the couch when she flits across the room to grab more of her shit out of her suitcase, glancing down at him apprehensively on her way by. She yelps when he sends her sprawling onto the couch. 

His flat isn’t much. A one-bedroom above a laundromat; eggshell walls and torn up baseboards because he hasn’t gotten around to fixing the place up. It’s better than sleeping on the streets though, he knows that much. 

Simon’s no stranger to that; if being in the military taught him anything, it was how to survive regardless of circumstances. In the weeks after his medical discharge—his knees beyond busted, basically bone on bone, and even these days, though he works more to have something to do than to earn a living, they still scream at him when he puts too much weight on them—he wandered aimlessly for a bit, crashing on Gaz’s couch for a bit and sleeping on benches for a spell after that before finding his footing again. 

Simon ignores the way that she yaps at him though, used to tuning people out. He flicks on the television and flips to a show that looks vaguely entertaining before getting up and ambling over to the kitchen. 

“D-do you want me to help?” she asks from the kitchen, tripping over her words in her haste to get them out. 

She reeks of the need to please. Desperate; cloying, sickly sweet like flowering dracaena. It clings to her like a perfume, silk-wrapped and packaged just for him. It could give a man like him indecent thoughts. His thoughts already tend towards the impure. 

He must eye her like a ravenous animal because she flinches suddenly under his gaze, eyes flicking away nervously before meeting his again. Good girl, Simon wants to say. Eyes on me. 

“Sit down,” he barks instead, and relishes in the way she sits back down with her hands tucked under her thighs. 

She’s really a pretty little thing. A shame that he found her out wandering in the rain, out where any man with worse intentions could have stumbled across her. The thought alone could drive him to violence. Again he stares at the back of her head and the slope of her shoulders, evaluating. His bloodlust dulls to a simmer. It pounds in his ears like a dull drum, but at least now he can hear again. 

Anyone else could have found her first, but they didn’t. He did. That tempers the homicidal impulse thrumming in his blood. She’s in his flat now, freshly showered and skin still damp. When she looks over her shoulder, it’s him she sees. 

Poor bird with her clipped wings. She’s not in danger of flying off anytime soon. The thought placates him. Tucked away in his cage, he doesn’t have to rend anyone limb from limb.

It’s been years since he traded in his fatigues for a hi vis jumpsuit, but some days he misses it so acutely that his hands shake and his vision fades in and out. This is one of those days. He toys with the idea of reaching out to Price in the morning to learn more about her, but then discards the idea. Better if it comes straight from her.

Besides, he doesn’t like asking for favours anyway.

“Name’s Simon, by the way,” he grunts, nostrils flaring when he sees her flinch at the sound of his voice. “Riley.”

“Oh,” is all she says. He waits a beat.

“Gonna give me your name, bird?”

She does, voice squeaky like it’s said under duress. That pisses him off more. 

He's not much of a cook, but he can whip up something quick, so he tosses one of his frozen meals into the microwave and sits her in front of the TV while she shivers and shakes on the couch.

They eat in silence, the TV on in the background. It’s the only noise besides the soft sound of her chewing. Simon can tell she’s gone hungry in recent days by the voracious way she eats, unable to keep herself from shovelling the food into her mouth. She seems almost embarrassed by it after swallowing her last bite, looking over at him from the corner of her eye like a guilty dog. He ignores it, keeping his eyes on the TV instead.

He can tell she wants to say something. A shit childhood and two decades in the military have left him with the ability to sniff out tension, and it comes off her in waves. After putting her plate on the coffee table, she sits back against the couch and squeezes her fists over her lap. Gnaws her lip and casts furtive glances in his direction. When the tears build up on her waterline, his cock twitches. 

“What?” he barks after the umpteenth sniffle, twisting to face her. 

“I—um—I just wanted to say thank you,” she whispers, her head still tilted downward, trying to make herself small enough to go unnoticed. 

Simon stares down at her, unblinking. He half wishes she’d cry a little more, just a few tears to soothe the beast in his chest. It’s better for her that her eyes remain dry. He doesn’t think he could hold himself back if one slipped down her cheek right now. He’d have to grab her by the nape of her neck and twist her over the side of the couch, shove down both their drawers and feed his cock into the warm, wet slot between her legs. Pummel her little cunt until his spend leaks out in thick, viscous globs, until her thighs shake so violently that only his hands on her shoulders and his shaft shoved deep in her pussy keeps her upright. 

He can almost smell it from between her legs, throbbing with gratefulness. He stares down unabashedly at the spot between her legs. Let her say something about it. 

“Don’t mention it,” he says instead, tilting his head when her tongue peeks out to wet her lips. “‘Was nothing.”

“No, it was really nice of you,” she insists, speaking more forcefully after gathering up some of her courage. “What if I…—you took a stranger into your house.”

That gets the blood pumping. “Gonna gut me while I sleep, pet?”

It’s half deranged that his cock chubs up in his jeans at the thought of his little bird with a knife in her hands, hands dripping with wet, dark blood. He shifts, readjusting himself so the metal teeth of his zipper don’t bite into his dick. 

She frowns. Endearing. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Not really good at looking after yourself, are you?”

“I am—it’s just…” tears build up on her waterline again, “it was one thing after another. I couldn’t get it all together.”

Pity isn’t an emotion he’s accustomed to feeling. Simon’s not even sure if that’s what he’s feeling now. It’s more like the bastard child of pity. 

He lets her off to bed with a warning not to fuck with anything in his room. She skitters off quickly after that. Her cute little ass follows her into the room until she shuts the door behind her, hiding it from view. He huffs. Being good never gets him anywhere.

He lets her run away though because he can’t tarnish everything he touches. Some things deserve to stay polished. 

Instead, he brushes his teeth and washes the last of the dishes before turning in as well, getting a clean sheet out of the linen closet to drape over himself. The couch isn’t nearly long enough for him to stretch out on, not like the king sized bed in his room; there’s already a spring poking him right in the middle of his back.

Sleep won’t come easy tonight. 

Simon wakes up on the couch with a kink in his neck. He lays there for several minutes gritting his teeth until the worst of it passes. When he sits up, his back cracks and pops, joints loosening only reluctantly. His age is getting away from him again; the wear and tear on his body finally starting to catch up. There’s only so much abuse he can put himself through. 

The morning races on outside his front door and he has work to get to, but his body orients towards the closed door of his bedroom almost without his say. It creaks as it swings open. 

In the slowly dimming haze of sleep, he must have subconsciously thought he dreamt the night before because seeing the girl from yesterday curled up in his bed halts him in his tracks. Her suitcase is open on the floor beside the bed. She must have changed into her pyjamas after slinking away last night because he doesn’t recognize the little cotton shorts hugging the swell of her ass and the shirt riding up over her belly button. 

Despite the perfunctory morning jerk he gave himself just ten minutes prior, his cock twitches in his work pants, gaze locked on the underside of her ass, the flesh peeking out from beneath her sleep shorts. 

The hunger ebbs out of a deep, cavernous hole in him. A heavy, oppressive heat; lust so gnarled and twisted that he hardly recognizes it. He can see it play out in his mind—crawling over the bird’s prone form and turning her over onto her belly, his knees on either side of her legs, cloaking her. Tugging down the zipper of his pants and wrenching those slutty shorts down to mid-thigh before burying his shaft in her hole. Little bird that followed him home, sleeping in his bed. She should thank him for his help with a wet hole. 

Simon takes a step into the room and then stops. He won’t—can’t—

His teeth grind together from how hard he clenches his jaw. 

He stands in the doorway and watches her sleep in his bed for longer than he should. Only when he feels something ugly well up in his chest does he finally bark out her name, snorting softly when she jumps and nearly falls right off the side of the bed. 

“Get up,” Simon grunts. “And make yourself something to eat. I’ve gotta head out.”

He walks away before the befuddled look on her face makes him crack a smile. 

She tiptoes out a few minutes later, still in her PJs. Her wary glances tick him off. For the effort it’s taken him to keep his hands to himself, he deserves more than her shifty looks, scoring him like he split her little peach open in her sleep.  

Breakfast is an uncomfortable affair. It’s partly his fault, but he doesn’t apologize for it. They eat in tense silence until it’s time for him to head to work. 

“Don't think about leaving—any of my shit gets nicked and it's your ass.”

He leaves her with that warning, slamming the door behind him.

Your heart goes quiet at the dawning of your new life. 

Adjusting to your new reality takes a bit of effort. The first few days with Simon feel tenuous at best. You worry constantly about doing something wrong and finding yourself back out on the streets. You’re thankful to the point of pandering, apologizing for any sudden move or sound that you make. You can tell it annoys him. 

The real work is recontextualizing your perception of yourself. The world feels strange now that you’re outside of it; alien somehow. You used to think of yourself as somehow inextricably woven into the fabric of society. The thought of losing everything never even occurred to you. It never even presented itself as a possibility. You worried about homelessness the way people worry about quicksand—in some nebulous way touching on the real without being absorbed by it. 

And now you are cut from another cloth altogether; abruptly, without any warning. You used to feel like one with the rest of the world, a kind of kinship based less on parentage or ancestry and more on inner nature. Weren’t you the same as any of them? But now the drapery has been pulled down and you know—you are not the same. 

Your future used to shimmer under the surface like a bioluminescent fish, but now it’s just a ghost.

He tells you to stay put when he goes to work so you do, spending the days puttering around the apartment, watching TV, and cleaning. There’s not much else to do. It’s almost a relief, to be honest. You’ve spent so much time without a place to call home that the second someone offered you one, the outside world became anathema in your head. You couldn’t step foot out of the front door even if you wanted to. 

Tears well up at the smallest thing. You blubber over not being able to work the coffee machine in the kitchen. When the sound goes out on the TV, you cry so hard that it leaves you woozy. You’re lachrymose, downtrodden. Soul a startling verdigris; your waterlines might as well be white with encrustations of salt. 

He must notice the dark cloud following you from room to room, but he doesn’t bring it up. You’d find it tactful, but you know him a bit better than that. 

Then Simon brings home a cat after his shift one day and you don’t know what to say to that.

Thank you doesn’t seem to suffice. I love it doesn’t cut it close. The truth of the matter is that words only ever approximate the feeling; they can get close enough to give you a glimmer of what’s stashed inside, but you can’t pry them all the way open. So you take the off-white cat from him when he practically tosses the poor thing into your arms, and stare up at him wide-eyed, eyes already watering for reasons once again unbeknownst to you. 

“Thank you for taking him home,” you say, already on the verge of tears.

He stares down at you, unblinking. You’re learning to read into his silences though. 

“Don’t expect me to take care of it,” he says instead of accepting your thanks. “If you can’t handle it, it’s going back outside.” 

You hold the cat tight to your chest, staring up at him with horror until the little beast nearly scratches your eye out in an effort to squirm out of your arms. 

At first, you’re not sure what to make of it. It can’t be a peace offering because, apart from the rare occasions where you manage to get on his nerves (not wholly impossible, but you’re learning how to stay on his good side for the most part), you and Simon get along pretty well. You coexist, at least. He cooks, you clean. 

It’s likely a distraction, you finally realize, something to keep you from moping around the apartment all the time, listless and directionless. Despite the fact that you’re no longer in any immediate danger now that you have a roof over your head, misery still clings to you like a second skin. The relative safety of Simon’s flat has actually only given you a chance to really properly mourn the loss of your former life. 

Training the cat to wear a harness without tipping over (the little drama king) and taking him on his first walk outside (just a little turn around the block, though you half jump out of your skin whenever you cross paths with another person) gives you enough of a sense of purpose to propel you through the next week. 

You can tell that Simon thinks the cat is more trouble than it’s worth, especially when it decides to fixate on the one person in the flat that doesn’t pay it a lick of attention, but still it makes your heart melt to see it curled up by his side when you watch TV together at the end of the night. 

“Is this normal for you?” you ask, hands folded in your lap.

His gaze doesn’t move from the television screen. “Is what normal?”

“Taking in strays.”

He snorts, then takes a second to answer. “No.”

You wonder if he intends to sound as caustic as he comes across. The truth is self-evident though. Words only mask the real, and the real in this case is that Simon Riley is a man that feeds and takes home strays. He can grumble about it all he wants. It’s a bit demeaning to think of yourself that way, but once again, the truth is what it is. 

You study him from the corner of your eye until bedtime rolls around again. He’s become the most interesting thing in the world to you, through every fault of his own.

If he didn’t want you to fixate on him, he wouldn’t have left you home alone with nothing else to do. 

“Bird!” Simon roars from the other room. “The cat’s pissed on the floor again.”

You spring out of bed before Simon has a chance to toss it out onto the balcony. 

It feels temporary up until the first time you use Simon’s address on a job application. It stands out stark on your phone screen, black on glowing white. You’ve always preferred it to dark mode, though that preference has fluctuated in recent weeks as you’ve spent more and more time on your phone. 

This is the first time staring at the screen without blinking for a prolonged period of time that hasn’t left you with a throbbing migraine. 

He tells you to stop bothering him with stupid shit when you ask him if it’s alright to use his address. That answers that. Guilt lingers on the periphery of your mind the first time that you do, but then the application is submitted. An innocuous grey box that redefines your whole world in a way that [Thanks for applying!] doesn’t seem to encapsulate. 

Your old friends come next. They come back one by one, guilty, furtive looks aplenty. You Facetime the one who wouldn’t let you sleep on her couch while sitting on Simon’s bed. When she asks you about your living situation, all you tell her is that you found a roommate. It doesn’t feel right to give her more information than that. What has she done to deserve your honesty? 

You manage pleasantries and a half decent conversation, but truth again lingers at the back of your mind. The unspoken reality that this person—someone you trusted—could’ve been there for you in your time of need but chose to look the other way instead. Like taking you in would’ve been some big, terrible thing. 

The body forgets everything except what hurts it. The body remembers nothing except what helps it survive. 

Gratefulness lodges into your heart like an arrow shot from a castle’s ramparts intent on your demise. You could pull it out from the other side and succumb to blood loss, or you could push forward, lay siege to the man hidden inside its walls. 

And you do. You want to show him every grateful inch of you. Even when it only results in more upset. Simon comes home to the smoke alarm blaring and a small fire in the microwave before he bans you from the kitchen altogether. You only cry for an hour in the bedroom with the door shut before he drags you out to takeout on the table in the living room. It’s an improvement. 

“I’m sorry,” you sniffle into your veggie burger, on the verge of tears again when you glance into the kitchen to see most of the mess still there. 

“It’s fine.”

“I just want to—I wanted to make it up to you…for taking me in.”

“You don’t owe me shit,” he says brusquely, dismissing you. His tone tells you to drop it, but that seems as likely as you growing wings and flying away. 

“Yes, I do. You let me stay here when I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“If you want to make it up to me, take care of the cat and stop leaving your shit all over the bathroom. Found your knickers on the floor after you showered yesterday.”

Your face goes hot at that. You have nothing else to say. 

Your attraction is a banal consequence of living under the same roof as him. There are only so many times he can come up behind you while you’re making your morning cup of coffee and swipe your mug before taking a sip from over your shoulder, barricading you against the counter. Acutely aware of the size of him with the way he’s pressed up against you. 

You lose your train of thought whenever Simon wanders into a room. He lumbers in like a beast, steel-toed boots covered in mud and dust, ignoring the way you scold him for walking around the apartment in his shoes. Just cocks an eyebrow and stares down at you knowingly, like he can see right through you, knows that you’re only squawking and flitting around to hide the way your thighs rub together. 

“It’s my fuckin’ flat,” he says instead of pointing out that your pussy’s wet because she knows there’s a man in the house that could take care of her proper. You know it too. 

“I live here too, you know,” you huff. “I can’t wash the floors every time you come home.”

“Thought I was doing you a favour letting you live here.”

His words would fill you with righteous indignation, but they don’t because his actions don’t line up. You study him like a moth under glass, enthralled by the parts of him that used to frighten you. 

It’s more than that though. He’s wedged himself into the hurt place in your heart, holding it up like Atlas. 

You really do think that there’s something so special about him that you’ll never be able to articulate. Simon is everything you didn’t know you desperately wanted. The longer you live with him, the harder it is to deny how much you need him. 

You will show your gratitude though. Every tender, aching morsel of it. 

The little peach she grinds on his thigh is wet and ripe. Simon doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t need her gratitude; if he wanted it, he would’ve taken it already. But he doesn’t shove her out of his lap either. It’s not his problem if she thinks it’s necessary or not.

Maybe it’s not solely for his benefit, he concedes when she winds both arms around his neck and pushes her supple tits into his chest, climbing over his lap until her pussy is pressed right up against the cock fattening up in his jeans. She whimpers like she’s in pain. 

Must not come a lot; he knows she at least hasn’t in recent days. Simon’s always been a light sleeper—he’s sure he would’ve heard any desperate attempts to get herself off in his bed, the springs creaking under her weight, her hushed, bitten off moans leaking out from under the doorframe. The thought riles him up more than he thought it would. 

Still, Simon doesn’t lift a hand to help the poor bird in his lap as she grinds down on his length. His arms stay stretched across the back of the couch, hips canted just enough to give her a perch and nothing more. 

She gasps every word into his ear, voice all pitched and breathy. “Ah, ah, ah—thank you, thank you, I…—can I please have it? Please, please let me, Simon, pleasepleaseplease—”

It feels like everything they’ve been through so far has been leading to this. He’d smelt it coming like blood in the water. 

All week, his bird has been sitting on her hands and trying not to give herself away. Cloaked in a nervous, frenetic energy. Anticipatory. She’d doe-eyed him the night before and begged him to sleep in the bed with her instead of wrecking his back on the couch, but he’d ignored her in favour of watching Argentina decimate Croatia in the semi-finals. It must have not sat right with her though because she’d been broody from the moment he left for work until he got home, steering him into the kitchen and practically hand feeding him before coaxing him into the living room to watch a movie while she cuddled up beside him.

That hadn’t lasted long. 

“What’s gotten into you, pet?” Simon asks, hardly dissuading her when she presses petal soft lips to his jaw and nuzzles, breathing heavily. His heart swells. Desperate little slut. 

“Took care of me,” she mumbles, almost slurring her words. “Always taking care of me, Simon.”

There’s no denying how hard it makes him to think about being her protector. The littlest things make her smile. Even the bloody cat had her trailing after him for a week straight after the fact, eternally underfoot. Always trying to curry favour. Eager to please. 

Her worship leaves him unbalanced. Unstable even. A train careening off its track, the massive weight of catastrophe right behind it. The sense that life will never be the same after this. His surface level indifference is underscored by steeled self-control. He keeps his arms on the couch because he knows the second he puts them on her, it’s over. There’ll be no holding him back anymore, no possibility of him ever letting her go back out into the real world. Lock jawed, teeth sunk into her tender underbelly. 

“Told you, you don’t owe me nothing,” Simon murmurs, curling his hands under her ass. 

“Then—then…—I don’t know, pretend it’s just for me.” It’s a joke because they both know it’s not just for her. When her eyes sparkle with amusement, his cock throbs.

He lets her ruck the shirt over his head and struggle with his belt until she manages to unbuckle it like he has no say in the matter. She’s far less considerate with her own clothes, shucking them off and nearly ripping her knickers in the process, which almost prompts him to take her by the wrists and slow her down. He likes the lace and frills. 

It’s a fight to fit his cock into her hole, as slick as she is. Coin slot tight; he almost breaks and tells her to take it easy when she reaches behind her to line his shaft up with her entrance and sits down, just barely stretching around the mushroomed head of his dick before wincing, tears springing into her eyes. 

Simon does break when she tries to sink down another inch, thighs shaking violently. “Right, get off—you ain’t ready for this.”

“I am!” she insists, face screwed up in a scowl and a bead of sweat dripping down her temple. “Just—I can do it, Simon—”

“No, you can’t. You’re rushing and hurting yourself—”

“Wait, okay, wait, I can…just give me a minute, okay?” she begs, and he doesn’t tell her that he’d give her all the time in the world. Stay on this couch until the flesh fell off his bones. He’s waited so long; what’s a little longer? 

Besides, the sight of her stretching herself out with her fingers is reward enough. She whines into his shoulder and shudders when she has to force another finger in before she’s ready. Too eager. It could give a man a complex. His blood is already scorching him from the inside out, too hot for his veins.  

He considers helping her out, but watching her writhe and struggle in his lap is far more enjoyable. 

He stopped paying attention awhile back, too focused on cupping her tits and running his tongue around the budded areola, sucking her pert nipple into his mouth, but she couldn’t have gotten to more than three fingers before running out of patience and lining him up again. This time, she sinks a bit deeper on the first stroke, still choking on her breath but forcing herself to take a bit more. 

“You’re alright—you’re alright,” Simon murmurs, stroking a hand up and down her back while she impales herself on his length. She’s still too tight to take him comfortably, sweats and shakes over him. He pinches her nipple to distract her from the pain and smiles when she yelps. 

She melts all over him, slick drenching his shaft and lap, her tongue lapping at the sweaty skin of his neck. Honeysuckle fragrant; the sweetest thing he’s ever known. Silken, tight. Fits like a glove around him. 

He could lose himself in her. Piston into her until the thought of where he begins and where he ends dissolves into the tight warmth between her legs.

His bird is a greedy girl. She uses him like a toy to get herself off, bouncing in his lap and mewling into his ear everytime his cockhead nudges against her cervix. Too big to fit all the way in. 

“You do this a lot, pet? Fuck every man that lends you a hand?” he pants, taunting her.

“No!” she snarls in his ear, feisty and sharp-toothed. Her nails dig into his back, scoring white lines into his skin. The shiver that wracks him is so violent that his arms tighten around her waist reflexively, making her gasp. 

It doesn’t matter whether she does this often or not; the only thing that matters is that he’s the only man that gets to fuck her from here on out. Still, winding her up is half the fun. 

“Perfect girl,” Simon chuckles, breathless. “Made for me. Got m’self a pet right off the street.”

And he did, didn’t he? Went wandering out into the night and came home with a bird fluttering her wet little wings. 

His conscience is clean. He could’ve tied her down, kept her right where he wanted her (in his bed, his flat, the yawning cavity of his chest—) but his self-control remains unparalleled. Tough as nails. Strong as steel. And now look at what he has as a reward for his patience—a fever-hot cunt around his cock and delicate fingernails scratching the base of his skull. 

A pretty bird that’s made his chest a cage. 

The world goes vertical, horizontal. Fluid; sliding away from him. Something crashes in the background, so far off in the distance that he can hardly make out the sound. 

He opens his eyes to find the ceiling staring back down at him, and then her face, hovering over him on the carpeted floor, her hands kneading the muscle of his chest. Her brows are drawn tight now, pinched. She stares down at him, past him, gaze like a transparent veil. 

“Gi’me…gi’me…” she pants, barely able to pull herself off his cock. 

He has to dig his fingers into her ass and pull her off, ignoring the way she whines and begs him to fill her back up. Ignores it because he knows what’s best for her; knows how to take care of what he owns. 

When he bucks up into her, she chokes, fingers nearly yanking his chest hair out. 

“Fuckin’ hell, that’s pretty,” he breathes. Snaps his hips up into hers again, relishing in the way she squeezes tight around him, almost to the point of pain. 

His pleasure always comes jagged though. Whether the ache of his joints or nails tearing up the skin of his back and chest. Vicious and messy—how he likes it. She gives him everything he could want and more. The hand dug into his chest right above his heart could pierce right through the flesh and tear it out.

He pulls her all the way off his cock just for the pleasure of hearing her beg him again, then pulls her up his chest and eats her out until the beast in his belly calms down. 

He yields to her whining only after a good few minutes. Soft bastard. Drags her back down until her soaked hole mouths at the head of his cock and he thrusts back up inside. Home. It’s his now, whether she likes it or not. Simon guesses he’s lucky that she wants it too; if he had to convince her, he would, but her desperation is just another gift for him to savour. 

“Squeeze me good, bird. Say thank you—” thank you for taking me home, thank you for keeping me– almost spills off his tongue, but he reigns it in. She knows what to be thankful for. 

“Nngh, Simon,” she sings, fucking herself on his cock. The sweetest sound he’s ever heard. 

Simon’s never felt bigger than under his sweet bird. Thighs spread so wide around him that he knows she’ll ache in the morning. Brutish hands groping her thighs and waist and tits, rough against the softness of her skin. Stuffed full of a big cock, not even to the root; she bites right through her bottom lip when Simon pets at the thin skin stretched around his cock, her gaze wounded, overwhelmed. 

Nearly blacks out at the thought of cramming a finger up there too. Only faint concern for her well-being tamps down the urge. 

“Come on, fuck—that good, pet?”

“R-right there, oh god, ohgodohgod—”

He lets her ride him until she comes, until he comes, until his spend is blistering hot in her cunt, drooling down the length of his cock, frothy white with her cream and his come. 

It’s a sight to look at. Gets him right in the chest. Nothing like times of yore; this is something with meaning, with feeling. When he lifts her off, his seed trickles out of her soft hole in white globs and makes his chest ache. It doesn’t matter whether it takes root or not. All that he needs is already here. 

Beautiful and rare as a sundog; haloed by light. All this time, he dared not think this could be it. 

He thinks he’ll love her with the same ferocity Icarus had on his descent.

She shivers when he traces his fingers up her spine. “N’more. M’tired.”

“Wasn’t gonna, pet.”

The bedroom then. She twitches in his arms when Simon carries her to bed and pats his chest approvingly when he slides in beside her. 

He could’ve told her that it’d end up this way. He smiles indulgently when she shifts and splays over his chest, her nose nudging his nipple. Already fast asleep. 

In the morning, you sit across from him, half a grapefruit in a bowl in front of you and a mug of coffee, black. 

“I think I want to go back to school,” you say, apropos of nothing. The spoon clinks against the inside of the bowl. 

“Yeah?” he says, only half-listening. 

“I can always get a part time job on the days when I don’t have class. I never liked my old job anyway.”

“Do whatever you want,” Simon grunts. “Not my problem.”

Under the table, your cat’s tail curls around your ankle while he waits for you to sneak him the scraps. 

You smile.

[uzurakis]

can u do how jjk boys (include megumi PLEASE) would react to you getting all pretty and dolled up to go out (and u just look soooooooooo good)

TOO PRETTY TO BE TRUE!

featuring: fushiguro megumi. gojo satoru. geto suguru. nanami kento. itadori yuuji.

n. your wish is my command nonnie, and ya don’t need to say megs cause i’ll ALWAYS include him in every shit that i write (he comes in one package okay) and.. I WENT OVERBOARD WRITING THIS HELPLEP i usually limit to 4 charas every post but yours made my creative space going and I HAD TO DO 5.. so thank you for that. i looooveee the idea mwah mwah i hope the writing makes justice for your cute hc <3

FUSHIGURO MEGUMI. you were running late; a girl's usual problem before a date. your hands fumbled with the clasp of your earrings, and shit, you cursed softly under your breath. outside, you knew your boyfriend was waiting patiently, or so you hoped. the idea of keeping him waiting made you anxious, but you wanted everything to be perfect.

just as you finished adjusting your hair, you heard the front door creak open. fushiguro’s soft footsteps echoed through the hallway, and you felt a twinge of panic. he never liked to intrude, but his curiosity had gotten the best of him. "hey, what’s taking so long?" you heard him mutter.

you turned around just as he reached the doorway to your room. his eyes widened, and for a moment, time seemed to stand still. fushiguro's usual stoic expression melted into one of pure surprise. his cheeks turned a delicate shade of pink, and his mouth opened slightly, but no words came out.

"is everything okay?" you asked, trying to keep your voice steady despite the sudden flutter in your chest.

megumi blinked, finally finding his voice. "a-ah, yeah, everything’s fine," his eyes remained locked on the ground while he stammered. how in the hell did this place get so hot? he thought to himself as he fiddled with his shirt collar.

"you look… um, really pretty."

"no, i mean, don't get me wrong though! you're al-"

you blushed at his earnestness, but you also smiled. "you too, gumi."

the guy scratched the back of his neck awkwardly but managed a small smile in return. "sorry i kinda barged in,” gently, he reached his hand to you and said, “next time, take all the time you need. i’ll wait.”

GOJO SATORU. "well, well, look at you," someone called out, sauntering over with an exaggerated attitude. "you really went all out for our little date, huh?"

you couldn't help but smile as you rolled your eyes. "aand you didn't even bother to dress up," you teased back, gesturing to his usual attire. “so lame for the gojo satoru, boo-hoo.”

"why would i need to dress up when i have the most gorgeous person in the world right here?" the guy stepped closer, taking your hand and spinning you around playfully. "you look soo good, i kind of want to take you home right now. can’t have everyone else stealing glances at my date."

a giggle managed to escape your lips, feeling a blush creep up your cheeks. "you're ridiculous, toru," shaking your head at him.

then he leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, one that could captivate a soul. "but seriously, you look amazing. i'm the luckiest guy here."

you swatted at his arm playfully, but your heart swelled from his words. "alright, mr. smooth talker, where are we going?"

gojo straightened up, still holding your hand. "anywhere you want, as long as i get to show you off. but maybe we’ll head home a bit early, just in case," and of course, he didn’t forget to wink.

ITADORI YUUJI. a knock on your door sent a jolt of excitement through you. you had taken extra time to get ready for your date with itadori tonight in the hopes of surprising him. he was standing there with an enormous smile on his face as you opened the door.

“bless me!” his pink eyes widened with admiration. “you look beautiful as always, baby.”

your cheeks heated beneath his surprising compliment. "nah, baby, that’s too much."

his enthusiasm contagious, he practically bounced on his toes. “i’m serious! you’re soo pretty that i might die from your prettiness—is that an actual word—but look at me, i'm serious!”

as you stepped outside, itadori kept showering you with compliments. "that outfit is perfect on you. and your hair! you’re always cute, but.. you really shine tonight."

“you’re too sweet, yuu,”

"i mean it! you deserve to hear it every day baby!”

NANAMI KENTO. you were putting the finishing touches on your makeup when you heard a firm knock at the door. taking a deep breath, you walked over and opened it to find nanami standing there, his usual composed demeanor softened by a warm smile.

his eyes swept over you, taking in every detail. "you look beautiful, sweetheart." he said simply, sincere and direct. the compliment made your heart skip a beat.

"thank you, kento," goddamn, a gentleman is always a gentleman.

he stepped closer, his gaze never leaving yours. "i appreciate the effort you put into this. it means a lot to me." his smile widened just a fraction, but the warmth in his eyes spoke more than his words could.

you smiled back, touched by his straightforwardness. "it’s because i’m excited to spend time with you."

nanami nodded, offering his hand. "shall we go?"

you sensed serenity and joy as soon as you held his hand. "i’m glad you liked it," you said softly as you both made your way down the street.

GETO SUGURU. “fucking hell, you look so pretty,” he swore under his breath, emerald orbs wide as he took in your appearance. “too pretty to be true.”

“hmm, you think so, suguru?” a little teasing might not hurt, right? his usually calm and composed expression shifting to one of pure astonishment the moment he saw you. and there it is again, his usual up-to-no-good grin.

he stepped closer, his gaze intense and cocky with that smile of his. “oh, you’re mine,” he declared, voice firm yet filled with a protective tenderness. “definitely mine.”

your heart skipped a beat at his sudden possessiveness, yet you couldn't help but feel a rush of delight at his words. “i’m yours,” you confirmed softly, tippy toeing to peck his cheeks.

he pulled your waist gently into his hook, grip both protective and warm. “i just… i don’t want anyone else looking at you like this,” the words were murmured, his lips brushing against your hair. “you’re too beautiful.”

you leaned into him, feeling safe and cherished in his embrace. “i only want you to look at me like this, suguru.”

he smiled, a rare and genuine expression that lit up his face. “good. because i’m not letting you go.” he pulled back slightly to look into your eyes. “let’s go, princess."

@uzurakis

[bunnis-monsters]

OK SO- I fou d you from your werebunny post which-

BTW

Was really good?? I- it made me feel things- If possible, more werebunny crumbs please? It could go either sfw or nsfw, I don't mind! (Or both but its up to you!)

NSFW

It’s always fun watching his cotton tail wag with excitement when you’re near. He has the cutest pink nose, soft bunny ears and a fluffy tail that goes crazy with every kiss and touch.

Momo, your pretty bunny, really enjoyed having you near. His heart would explode with joy every time you kissed him, his bunny ears flicking as his nose twitched.

“Mmph… love~”

He couldn’t stand being apart from you, living in separate homes just wasn’t an option. He set up a nest in your room within weeks of your first meeting, unable to be away from you for more than a few minutes.

Lately, he had been extra clingy, and very possessive, which was uncharacteristic for him. Usually he was pretty submissive and sweet, almost like a lap pet that wanted all of your attention… but now he was more like a guard dog, constantly on alert, his body always subtly in front of yours.

It was only when you woke up to him humping your leg, his face buried in your neck that you realized what was going on.

He was in some kind of heat or rut… whatever it was, it was making him cling to you, desperate to mate and keep you safe.

All he wanted was to be close to you. The first stage of his rut had him making a cozy little nest in your bed, then spending all his his time snuggling you, his cute fluffy tail wagging furiously as he pulled you in for more kisses and nibbles.

The next stage… you weren’t ready for. You had sec with Momo before, but this was his rut. He was insatiable, fucking into your cunt fast and hard, unlike to gentle, sweet love making you usually experienced.

And his stamina was way too high, one breeding session lasting nearly 5 hours. Every time he came, he bit down on your shoulder or neck, his hips fitting against you as he begged for your forgiveness.

“Sorry, so sorry… just need it so bad, angel! Need to… g-give you my litter!”

After each session, he ignored his own exhaustion and pampered you, purring and bathing you, letting your head rest on his chest as his cotton tail wagged. Momo felt terrible, breeding you for so long… but he just couldn’t help it! His rut made him so horny, and he could only focus on filling you with cum and impregnating you!

But he adored you so, making sure you were treated like a princess once your baby bump began to show. Momo was so proud, not able to keep his hands off of your belly.

“My princess… gonna be a good mommy, the best…”

[thekeeperof-thefandoms]

My girlfriend requested this

Hazbin men trying the period simulator. Somewhat of a follow up to my period post so this is based on the reader having severe period pain due to PCOS/ENDO

Lucifer

The man is sweating before you even attach the simulator. He knows he fucked up. He only agreed to this because he loves you a lot.

He handles the first 3 levels ok. You tell him very few women experience that little pain and that usually 4-6 is the average.

Those levels make him tense. He's uncomfortable, but still pretty able to work and do normal things. 5 has him pausing to do deep breaths every now and then. (If this is the canon timeline where he birthed Charlie he compares it to bad kicks).

6-8 he's pretty much doubled over. If you tell him that's the level you experience, he will cry. Literally begs forgiveness since again, period and labor pain is technically his fault. He is so sorry. If he didn't have issues with his Dad before he does now because this is fucked up. God's fucked up for doing this.

He doesn't make it to 10, he's crying by level 9. This is labor levels of pain. He gets why all you do is sleep. Treats your period like a sacred ritual after that. Preps for weeks. He goes full Bible, sheltering you for the duration of it so you can have peace and quiet. Please never hook him up to this again.

If you wear it at anything from an 8-10 and tell him "It's close, but I've hurt worse" he's gonna sob and then try and fight his Old Man again. He'll settle for offering to have your bits removed for you.

Vox

Once again this man hates admitting he was wrong. And yeah he knows your periods are really bad, especially now he's witnessed it. But it's still a huge knowledge gap for him and he doesn’t really take the time to think about it.

He handles 1-5 well. He's mildly uncomfortable by 5, but thinks that if this is the average experience, then it's not such a big deal. Tell him the statistics on how many people with periods actually experience 6-8 because that's actually the majority, and he's just confused. How is the average pain level not the most common?

6-8 has him gritting his teeth and glitching, but he refuses to stop and keeps trying to work. Is starting to wonder how you went so long working with this level of pain without him noticing.

He makes it to 10, but by then, he's unable to move, clutching his abdomen and sparking and glitching. Tells you it feels like his entire insides are being squeezed. The fact that he can feel it in his groin. He's kind of afraid of period sex with you after that because of how much he felt it. And you said it's caused cramps from your ribs to your knees. He's like... genuinely scared of your period and pain tolerance.

He's going to snuggle the fuck out of you afterwards and apologize for not appreciating how much you still do for him when you're not feeling good. How he didn't see how hurt you were. He does a lot of research after that and not only does he spoil you by buying whatever you need for your periods and giving you time off, he looks into treatment options. Even if that means chopping the useless fucking things out. Sinners can't have kids anyway so who needs ovaries and a uterus?

He's more convinced you should just be rid of the damn things when you wear it and 8-10 is "Yeah, this is close, but it doesn't really cover how much of my body hurts".

Valentino

Is only doing this because he was dared to by Velvette. Or if this an au where he's trying to be a less toxic person. But really I think it's also to prove that you're all being dramatic. It's a perfectly normal body function and his employees are just trying to get out of work.

He gets all the way to 6 before he starts to realize he may have fucked up. Especially when it's explained that this is what most people experience.

By 10 he's gritting his teeth, chain smoking, clawing at things. He refuses to give in, but he can count on one hand the number of things in his entire life and death as a pimp and a whore that he's experienced that come close to this level of pain.

No one told him his dick was gonna hurt. Sitting hurts. Breathing hurts. He doesn't even try to eat. He won't ever admit to being wrong, but he does behave more leniently with his actors when they're on their periods.

If you put it on (and lets say he actually cares about you) and setting 8-10 is "Yeah, this an average day for my cramps. My bad days are like..5 or 6 levels worse" it's gonna rearrange his brain a little. He might be a little afraid of you and some of the other actors with periods because your pain tolerances are so high. It threatens his ability to control you and them. But on the other hand, that's kinda hot???

Alastor

Has never once doubted that people who experience periods undergo serious struggle and has nothing but respect for women (and trans people he just associates it with women more because of the time period and his mama) who work through it.

He is actually the one who heard about the simulator through Rosie and asks you to show him your experience. Just to better understand you. He knows you're the type to try and function through the pain (probably because society ingrained into you that your pain doesn't matter).

Initially, he wants to skip the lower levels and just have you set it to your pain level. You tell him that's a bad idea, and to be honest, you're not sure if this thing goes that high. He asks you to check and you set it to the highest setting and say, "It's pretty close. It's been worse, but this is a rough idea," he's a little frustrated but still tries it.

You agree to set it to 4 and tell him 4-6 is what most people report feeling. He acknowledges it, registers it as unpleasant, but otherwise is fully capable.

7-9 has his ears flat, his smile is more a snarl. This is uncomfortable. Not what he considers painful but certainly irritating. It makes sitting, stretching, and eating feel much more difficult.

10. There's static visble around him. His teeth grind. Actually painful. Not the worst pain he's experienced, but he hates it. He hates the way he feels it in his back and hips as he walks. He hates the way taking deep breaths (which for someone as dramatic as he is and with the transatlantic accent, breathing technique and posture is important) stings. He hates the way it causes his stomach to cramp and churn. He hates the ache in his thighs and groin that make sitting feel stiff and ackward. He can only picture how blood loss would make this worse. Tired, losing nutrients, the headaches, the increased moodiness. It's no wonder you sleep, so much, but he wonders how the Hell you sleep like this? He's snappy and short tempered because of the pain (and again he gets why you would be if you weren't sleeping so much).

How does this affect how he treats you?

Not much. He still expects you to know your body and your limits. He would never dare to presume otherwise. He still helps prepare whatever you need for your time of the month and still meal plans for you, though he perhaps finds ways to ensure you get all the iron and vitamins you need without cooking steak and other big, heavy meals, since he now understands how bad your stomach hurts.

The only really noticeable change is how much more protective of you he is. Your time of the month hits, and Alastor hates being more than a few moments from you. He growls, pins his ears, and his antlers grow when people get too close to you. He's more prone to letting you snuggle with him when you want, trying to comfort you.

Angel Dust

Another who volunteered. His girl besties insist he doesn't have to do this, he's got the pass. He still wants to do it though, for solidarity.

He also starts on 4 and handles it well. He handles all of the levels pretty well, even 10. By 7 it's obvious he's sore, maybe a bit more withdrawn, exhausted, trying not to move too much or eat too much. Just trying to find a comfortable way to exist. The sad problem is, Angel already has to do this after rough nights at Val's.

He's used to sitting being uncomfortable and aches in his groin and thighs, cramps in his stomach from muscles clenching constantly. 10 is the only level where he's visibly ill, hunched over, lower arms curled around his midsection protectively.

He and the girlies all curl up together and nap and chat and snack on easy to digest junk food and granola bars. He's the first one to say "I bet it's even worse for you gals, but I tried".

He gets it. He's one of the girls. Honestly, kind of becomes a favorite when the ladies have period problems. (If you're dating any of the others and Angel is openly your favorite after this it is gonna cause a lot of dramatic pouting, posturing, and tantrum throwing.)

Husk

I'm going full balls to the wall on Veteran Husk. This man has seen some shit and dealt with his fair share of pain. Like Angel he takes it the best, with very little outward reaction. He's used to stiffness and nausea. The pain in his crotch is a little off putting, but it could be worse.

He's more cautious how he moves, rests more, occasionally a cramp causes his ears to pin back or a small hiss. Overall he takes it like a champ.

Offers you endless amounts of supportive words for dealing with this as well as you do, for days on end. Also is deeply sorry you even have to put up with this shit. Offers all sorts of tips on how to do stretches that help with easing cramps and stiffness without pulling something. Tips of foods/protein drinks to keep on hand to make sure you're maximizing how much nutrition you get. Man's a whole ass survival guide.

He only offers advice if you ask, though. He's not mansplaining how to handle your own body. He genuinely wants to help you, and that's the best way he knows how.

When you're on your period and just want something soft and warm he doesn't even bitch about it, he just settles on top of you and purrs, offers a massage, maybe offers a sly grin and a "no man left behind" joke as he helps you through these dark times.

BONUS:

ADAM

Would only do this if you challenged him, he has to prove his masculinity. He is definitely nervous as fuck though because he's seen yours. You and Lute already forced him to sit through a whole PowerPoint on women's anatomy and shit. He remembers how shitty he was to Eve, even if hers were in comparison, not that bad, just scary and new.

You forcing him to learn about and acknowledge female health is making him scared of pussy. This isn't gonna help.

3 and 4 make him whiney. He's uncomfortable. His groin feels weird. This sucks. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS ISN'T EVEN THE AVERAGE?!"

By 5-7 he's actually on his knees, curled over his stomach. He tells you getting stabbed hurt less. This is making him re-evaluate his entire view on women (again he knows about trans people, but because of personal history equates periods to women. Wouldn't hate if a trans person had a period, it would just take his brain a second to process). He whines that you and Lute shouldn't be more badass than him.

"I thought men were supposed to be tougher and stronger. This pain tolerance horseshit is a lie. You guys suck."

He insists on going to 10 because quitting is for losers. He may actually throw up at 10 though. Every time the stupid simulators sends out a pulse and his stomach clenches, he groans. He's in the featal position, there are tears. One hand clenches his stomach the other is cupped around his groin. He's apologizing so much and he doesn't even remember what he's apologizing for. At one point its just "I'm sorry...oh fuck this...sorry about...ugh just...just men?! I guess. Fucking shit ass. Men suck. Women are...fucking great. Aces. You do this shit every month? For like 5 days....what the fuck. What the fuck what the fuck."

You feel a little bad, but Lute is definitely filming this. Afterwards, he tells you you're a badass and any person shit talking people for bitching about period pain (Not that a lot of Winners do, but ya know, obviously they let some questionable people into Heaven if Adam and Lute got by) he's gonna beat the shit out of them. Like "Do you even fucking know, bitch? They're literally so much fucking better than you. Absolute queens. You try doing literally anything when it feels like your dick is falling off and your insides are trying to claw outside your body!"