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harmless-variety-of-garden-snake · 2 days ago

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So this is 5k words. Didn't mean for that to happen. This is for BuckTommy Fluffebruary Day Sixteen: Didn't Know They Were Dating AU. This is the one fill that doesn't take place in the same timeline as my other fills and is set in some nebulous period between 405 and 409. So Buck knows about Daniel. Jes-Yun isn't born yet. You can also read this on AO3 here. Tagging @bucktommyfluffebruary

They meet one night when Maddie is asked to cover a shift at the last minute and Chimney begs Buck to step in for a karaoke trivia thing he'd been invited to. When he arrives at the bar, Chimney is sitting with two big guys at a table. One of the guys introduces himself as Sal, and he seems cool enough. The other guy is Tommy, and he's definitely really cool.

“My girlfriend's brother is stepping in for her,” Chimney explains.

“H-hey,” Buck says, waving awkwardly. “I'm Evan. Buck. Evan Buckley.”

It's the least smooth way he's ever introduced himself in his adult life, but he keeps wondering what the hell Tommy's diet and exercise routine is. The guy is massive. He's so warm, though, when he shakes Buck's hand. Literally, because his hands are radiating heat, but he also smiles with his whole face instead of just a polite tilt of his mouth. Buck finds himself smiling back and ducking his head when Tommy lets his hand go.

“Wasn't your girlfriend the secret karaoke weapon?” Sal asks.

“Yeah, but this guy's the secret trivia weapon,” Chimney says, clapping Buck on the shoulder. “You said science and history always gets you, right? Here's your solution.”

Buck flushes and shrugs when Tommy's eyes sweep over him. “I hope I can help.”

He settles in for a night of karaoke trivia, and he's not much help on the pop culture stuff. But there's an entire series of questions themed around popular animals at the LA Zoo, and Buck gets all of them. As he answers, Tommy's blue eyes stay on him, and Buck finds himself answering with more and more confidence. When Celestial Bodies turns out to be the next category, he's quick to answer everything he knows instead of waiting politely for everyone else in the group.

By the end, the Worst Responders (Sal’s idea) win the night, and they sit with a pitcher of beer, their pride, and a Visa gift card each. When Chimney goes to take a call from Maddie and Sal gets up to use the bathroom, Buck suddenly doesn't know what to say to Tommy.

“That was pretty amazing, Evan,” Timmy says, raising his glass.

Buck opens his mouth to correct him, but instead he clinks their glasses and says, “Not so bad yourself, Tommy.”

Tommy's eyes dip as they both take long drinks of their beer, and Buck hopes he doesn't have something on his chin. He wipes it with the back of his hand just to be on the safe side.

“Man, I can't believe you can fly,” Buck says, settling back into his chair. “That's so cool.”

“Well,” Tommy says, the corner of his mouth lifting in a half-smile, “I need the aircraft to fly.”

Buck makes a face at him. “Yeah, I know, but it's amazing. I always wanted to learn. When I was traveling, I'd end up on these tiny planes sometimes and always thought it would be fun.”

“I could maybe show you a few things,” Tommy says, resting his elbows on the table. “My rates are pretty competitive.”

Buck’s reply is cut off by Chimney plopping down next to him.

“Heard a girl talking about you,” Chimney says, nudging Buck and nodding back toward the bar.

He glances but doesn’t really see anyone specifically looking at him. He figures she’ll find him if she’s really interested. His focus goes back to Tommy, who is sliding a coaster around under his finger and smiling to himself a bit, but he doesn’t look all that happy. Instead, he’s just sort of…resigned.

“How competitive?” Buck asks, and Tommy blinks at him.

Tommy looks between Chimney, Buck, and something behind Buck before his eyes settle back on him. “We can figure something out. Honestly, I don’t usually charge friends. Except Sal.”

“For what?” Chimney asks, frowning at his phone screen.

“Thought I might take up flying,” Buck says, shrugging.

Chimney snorts. “Yeah. That’ll last. This kid’s got more hobbies than anyone I’ve ever met. Dude, I think someone stole my credit card number again. Hold up, I gotta call my bank.”

He disappears again, and Buck looks over his shoulder to see Sal is talking to a pretty girl at the bar, and she glances at Buck. When she sees him looking, she smiles shyly before looking back at Sal. If she’s the girl Chimney was talking about, she is pretty cute.

“I don’t have a lot of hobbies,” Buck says, turning his attention back to Tommy. “Well, kind of. I have a lot of interests, I guess. Which, yeah, is kinda weird, but I like the idea of flying. So I would absolutely be down to learn, and I’d be happy to pay for the fuel or your time or whatever. It’s like learning a superpower.”

Tommy smiles and slides his phone over. “Go ahead and put your number in.”

Buck does, noticing that the contact name is already filled in as ‘Evan,’ and he doesn’t bother correcting that either.

By the time they all leave, Buck has Tommy’s number in his own phone and realizes he forgot to get the girl’s number.

–

Flying is so cool, but Buck thinks Tommy might be a maniac. He’ll do maneuvers that don’t feel like they should be physically possible, and then he laughs over the headset. It’s terrifying and amazing, and Buck is flushed and breathless by the time they land on the tarmac at Harbor Station.

“That was awesome!” he says. “Okay, yeah, I owe you a beer. A dozen beers.”

Tommy takes off the headset and smiles. “How about dinner?”

Buck smiles back, though he feels like he’s still trying to catch his breath. “Yeah, okay. I could do dinner.”

–

Micelli’s is nice, and they’ve apparently got good beer and good food. Buck finds out that Tommy’s half Italian on his mom’s side, which explains a lot about his looks. His nose is so regal from the side, and Buck’s found his eyes tracing its shape more than once. His mom was first generation, so Tommy was practically raised by a bunch of older Italian women and his grandfather until he was in high school.

“So when you say the food here is good, you know what you’re talking about,” Buck concludes, and Tommy nods. “Alright, I believe you.”

“What about your family?” Tommy asks, and Buck shrugs. “You don’t have to answer that.”

“No, they’re…fine,” Buck says, shrugging again. He still feels raw when he thinks about his parents. “They’re, uh, back in Pennsylvania. Except Maddie. I think we’re British? Just sort of, uh, WASP-y? But I don’t really know a lot about my family.”

Hell, he knew even less than he ever realized.

“I don’t know a lot about my dad’s family,” Tommy says, and it feels like he understands based on the way he says it. It loosens some of the anxiety that had been building in Buck’s chest. “Scottish, Irish? Something like that. But I never looked too hard. Italians, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find a family that doesn’t want every generation to know every story and legend and the name of every town everyone was ever born in.”

“Family recipes?”

Tommy snorts. “I have a box of them. I’ve been trying to transcribe them just in case something ever happens to them, but there’s so many.”

Buck shrugs. “I could help.”

“Yeah?” Tommy looks surprised at his offer.

“Yeah, I’m kinda good at that kind of stuff,” he admits. “Plus, hey, I wouldn’t say no to learning some new recipes. I feel like I’m finally really getting the hang of cooking. Maybe I can even teach Bobby a thing or two.”

They start talking about the 118, and Buck is surprised at just how different it used to be. From the sound of it, Tommy was really different. Sal, too. And then Tommy felt like he was able to get a new start at Harbor.

“I just didn’t want to die in a closet, you know?” he says, and Buck tries to parse what that could mean. “I wasn’t out at the 118. Everyone thought I was straight until, I don’t know, my last month there? I finally told them right after my transfer went through.”

Buck blinks, realizing he’d somehow totally missed that Tommy’s gay. He realizes his silence could be taken for discomfort and panics. “Th-that’s great! I’m glad you were able to do that. It’s hard. It’s a hard thing to go through.”

“Yeah,” Tommy agrees, smiling softly. “Well, it’s actually just…freeing. Once you get past actually saying the words.”

“That sounds amazing,” Buck says, sighing. It does. The idea of feeling free has always felt like something he’s been looking for. Being at the 118 is the closest thing he’s ever found to that, but he wonders if it feels the same.

Tommy hesitates and starts to say something, but then their server arrives to take their food orders. Buck forgets to ask him what he was going to say, because he starts second-guessing what he was going to order and leans across to ask Tommy about one of the dishes. When Tommy leans in to look at where Buck’s pointing on the menu, his forearm presses against Buck’s and radiates heat the same way his hand did when they met, the same way his whole body did when he'd hugged Buck after their flight and when they met outside the restaurant. He wonders if it's a natural thing for him or if it's his muscle mass that does it.

“So you do like mushrooms?” Tommy asks, and Buck nods. “Yeah, you'll love that, then. But save room for dessert.”

“Okay,” Buck says, unable to keep himself from ducking his head and smiling as Tommy confirms with the server that Buck is getting whatever the hell it was Tommy had pointed to. He hadn't been paying attention.

–

He loves Tommy’s house. It’s got books and movies and records crammed into every available shelf in the living room, and there are cool old tiles in the kitchen and bathrooms that Tommy’s never going to touch even when he updates the rooms.

“Kitchen’s next, but I did a lot of the hard work with the electrical and plumbing already,” Tommy explains. He goes to a cabinet above his fridge and reaches in for an old cigar box. When he stretches for it, his shirt rides up and Buck blinks at the strip of skin that’s exposed. He suddenly feels guilty for staring and forces himself to look at the view of Tommy’s backyard from the window above the sink. “Here they are.”

Tommy sets the box on the counter and flips it open. Inside are old recipe cards, torn out recipes from magazines and ads, swooping writing on yellowed paper, and what looks to be more than one recipe torn out of cookbooks.

They’re killing time before a movie that’s playing at the theater by Tommy’s place, but Buck wants to dive into the recipes and figure out what it was that his family liked or what was important to them, what they held onto across generations, and which ones made little Tommy love desserts so much.

“Can you tell who wrote them?” he asks, carefully turning over a recipe card for some kind of soup made with lentils and sausage.

“Some of them,” Tommy says, leaning over and looking at the card he’s holding. “That was Prozia Camilla, I think. She always wrote her Bs really weird.”

“What’s that?” Buck asks, looking over at Tommy. He realizes he’s close, but it’s not making him uncomfortable. He feels a little warm, but it’s not from discomfort or embarrassment. The heat might be on in the house, or it's just Tommy being a human space heater. “Aunt?”

“Great-aunt,” Tommy clarifies. “Aunt is zia, uncle is zio—pretty easy. Nonna, Nonno–grandma, grandpa. Cugina, cugino–cousin, female or male. You add pro for great-aunts and -uncles, bis for great-grandparents. There’s one that’s in a baggy from Bisnonna Valia, I think she wrote it down when Mussolini was in power.”

Buck carefully picks through the box until he finds it, and he doesn’t take it out. He does inspect it, though. The paper is translucent and faded, the ink a brown-ish color. “What’s it for?”

“Canestrelli. It’s kind of like a shortbread cookie.”

He likes how Tommy says the words in Italian, the way his mouth shapes the vowels and kind of rolls the Rs but not really, the syllables he emphasizes a little differently than the way Buck probably would if he read the word from a page. He’d asked Tommy if he spoke Italian, and he sort of did. He mostly just understood it, but he sounded like he knew it whenever he said any of the words.

“These are amazing,” Buck says softly, rubbing his thumb along the edge of the paper inside its protective plastic. “Is it weird that I wish I knew them? All the people who wrote these down.”

When he glances at Tommy, Tommy’s looking at him and not at the recipe anymore. “No,” Tommy replies softly. “I don’t think that’s weird at all. They would’ve loved you.”

Buck grins. “Really?”

“Definitely.”

He flushes happily at the thought, even if Tommy’s just being nice. When he sets the recipe back in the box, the alarm on Tommy’s phone goes off.

“I kind of want to just look at these,” Buck admits. “But you said the movie’s really good.”

“Evan, it’s Casablanca,” Tommy says dryly. “It’s literally one of the greatest movies ever made.”

“Well, then I guess we have to go,” Buck teases, closing the box and handing it over to him.

When Tommy puts the box back, Buck’s eyes dip to his ass this time. It’s really a work of art. He wonders what kind of squats he does.

–

Buck’s a mess.

“You didn’t tell me it would be sad,” he moans as he snacks on the last of his popcorn on the way to Tommy’s truck. He’d driven, because it was easier than trying to find parking for two cars near the theater.

“A lot of the best romance movies are,” Tommy says. “But I don’t think it’s that sad. He loves her, and he knows she’s going to be happy. It’s not like Ghost or Moulin Rouge or Brokeback Mountain or anything.”

“I’ve never seen those,” Buck admits. “How can it get any sadder?”

“I mean, one of them could’ve died.”

Buck sighs. “Yeah, I guess. But—can you imagine finding the person who makes you feel like that and having to watch them walk away with someone else? People don’t realize how awful it feels to just be left behind.”

He realizes he’s projecting a lot onto a movie that’s eighty years old, but it does suck. Buck would know.

“Sometimes you just want to be the one people will stick around for,” he mumbles.

Tommy bumps their shoulders together gently as they walk. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Buck smiles and bumps his shoulder back. “You say that now.”

“I can’t imagine wanting to leave you behind if I could help it, Evan.”

The way he says it makes Buck’s heart thud in his chest, and for a moment he’s worried about another blood clot. He looks over at Tommy, who’s looking at him, and he smiles.

“Thanks,” he says softly.

Tommy puts an arm around his shoulder and squeezes him close for a moment before they get to the truck. Buck gets into the passenger seat and considers the few kernels of popcorn left. He wonders what Tommy’s favorite happy romance movie is and what it’s like, what he likes about it and the characters, if he identifies more with one than the other.

“So that’s the best romance movie?” he asks instead.

“I mean, that’s subjective, right?” Tommy says, turning on the truck and pulling away from the curb. “I think it’s pretty close to being the most objectively perfect one, yeah.”

“Is it your favorite?”

Tommy considers the question for a moment. “It's up there. It changes, honestly. I really like Love, Actually, but Princess Bride and Moonstruck are amazing, too. Casablanca is pretty perfect, though.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” Buck says, smiling. “I did like it. It just, y’know, made me a little sad. Also, I didn’t realize that whole ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ thing was a reference. I’ve heard so many people say that and thought it was some idiom I never learned.”

Tommy snorts and shakes his head. “I swear, I will expand your knowledge of movies.”

Buck normally doesn’t really care. He doesn’t have the same attachment to movies that a lot of his friends have, but he likes Tommy showing him things. The flying, the restaurant, the recipe box, the movie—maybe Muay Thai? He knows Eddie does it. Buck’s never really had an interest in it, but Tommy had offered to teach him and Buck had twirled his pasta around his fork and said he’d be interested because nothing sounded cooler. Now that he’s seen the set-up in Tommy’s garage, it would be kind of awesome to have one-on-one lessons and then go inside to make old family recipes.

He looks over at Tommy as he drives, and he notes that Tommy seems as at ease behind a wheel as he is doing anything else. He had also seen the car lift in Tommy’s garage, currently empty but awaiting a Chevelle he’d had his eye on that needed work, and he wonders if he’s always liked cars.

As he watches, he also realizes that Tommy’s side profile is pretty perfect. It’s not just the nose, it’s his entire face. Tommy’s a really handsome guy.

“Evan?” Tommy asks, sounding amused.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

Buck slides down in his seat a little, feeling caught out for some reason. “Yeah. Sorry.”

Tommy slows to a stop at the light and looks over at Buck. He smiles and squeezes Buck’s wrist briefly, his huge hand almost engulfing it. He doesn’t understand how someone his height can be so big. With his free hand, he reaches over and picks up Tommy’s hand, manipulating the digits until they’re flat, and he presses their hands together to compare the size. Buck’s never met someone with bigger hands than his who wasn’t at least six and a half feet tall, but Tommy’s fingers stretch a little further, his palm is a little broader.

Then Tommy turns his palm just a little and curls his fingers until they’re between Buck’s, and Buck curls his fingers, too. He smiles and looks up at Tommy, who’s looking at him intently. It makes Buck’s heart pound again.

A car honks, and Tommy startles a little. He laughs to himself as he continues driving toward his house, both hands back on the wheel, and Buck feels his hand close around nothing, feeling empty.

–

Tommy is walking him to his car, even though it’s parked right in front of his house. They’re talking about the next series of movies the theater is showing—old noir stuff, some of which Tommy’s never even seen.

“That could be cool,” Buck says, putting his hands in his jacket pocket so he won’t reach for Tommy’s hand again. It would be weird. “We can see when our shifts line up.”

“They do them all in two month blocks,” Tommy explains wryly. “So that’s going to be a lot of calendar checking.”

“We can always share them to each other,” Buck points out. “Figure out other days we can do stuff.”

Tommy’s eyes look between Buck’s, down to his chin, and back at his eyes again. “Like what?”

Buck smiles and shrugs. “Anything. I mean, we’re kind of the perfect bar trivia partners. We can go around town and hustle all of them out of their gift cards and small cash prizes. But I really do want to help you with the recipe thing. You really think your family would’ve liked me?”

“Evan, do you have any idea how likeable you are?” Tommy asks, leaning his shoulder against Buck’s door.

“Hey, you’re pretty likeable yourself,” Buck says shyly. “You’re kind of the coolest person I’ve ever—”

He doesn’t get to finish, because there are two fingers under his chin and a pair of lips on his. For a moment, he freezes, because Tommy is kissing him. That should be weird. He’s never had a male friend kiss him on the lips unless it was during Spin the Bottle or under mistletoe, and those were always pecks or done with some reluctance on their part. But he can feel Tommy start to pull away and wants anything but that, so he brings his hand up to Tommy’s shoulder and keeps him there while Buck kisses back.

Tommy’s lips are soft, though his stubble is a little scratchy, but Buck doesn’t mind it. He really doesn’t mind it.

“Was that okay?” Tommy whispers when he does finally pull back.

Buck nods and his eyes drop to Tommy’s lips, which don’t look any different than they did a minute ago, but now he knows how they feel against his. He still has a hand on Tommy’s shoulder and brings his other one up to cup his jaw to keep him still when Buck goes in for another kiss.

It feels better than okay. It feels like a real first—well, second now—kiss. He feels like an alarm bell should be going off somewhere in his head, but all he’s getting is a need to feel more of him, to taste more of him.

They’re kind of making out against Buck’s Jeep, and Buck is definitely going to need to talk to Hen about this. If he likes kissing a guy just as much as he’s liked kissing a girl—hell, more than he’s liked kissing some girls—what does that mean?

Tommy pulls away again and presses their foreheads together. They’re both breathing hard, and Buck wonders if Tommy will ask him to come inside.

“I meant to take this a lot slower,” Tommy says. “You seemed…new. I know Howie doesn’t know, but does anyone?”

Buck wonders if he’d missed something in their conversation. “Know what?”

“That you’re—” he gestures between them. Then he pulls back more and searches Buck’s face. “You are, aren’t you?”

“What?” he asks again, feeling very slow. He doesn’t love the feeling, but he's also still really stuck on the feeling of Tommy's lips.

“Wait, are you?”

“Oh, my god, Tommy, am I what?” he asks, laughing.

“Into guys?”

Buck blinks. “I don’t—I’ve never really thought about it?”

Except for that one time in Texas, but he knew that he came off as flirty sometimes when he didn’t mean to. That hadn’t been TK’s fault. Hell, TK was gorgeous and a really good firefighter, and—oh.

“Oh,” Buck says, raising his eyebrows. “Huh.”

“Are you okay?” Tommy asks, searching Buck’s face for something. He’s not touching Buck anymore, which kind of sucks.

“Yeah.” He looks at Tommy and smiles. “Yeah, I’m great.”

He is. He really is. It’s a little bit of a shock, but he’s pretty sure he’ll be fine. Well, he might need to talk to Hen and Maddie and Bobby.

Then it hits him—Tommy walked him to his car. While the sun was up. In a good neighborhood. After the movies. He’d done the same thing after Micelli’s, after they’d flown, and he’d hugged Buck every time. It had felt good and warm and safe. But Tommy always walked him to his car.

“We were just on a date, weren’t we?” Buck says slowly, then counts. “Like, our third one. Wait, did you take me flying for our first date?”

“I thought I did,” Tommy says, his brows raised. “Did you really have no idea that I was asking you out?”

Okay, yeah, Tommy had said they should go out sometime before they’d left the bar the night they’d met, and Buck had agreed and Tommy had grinned. It had been really distracting.

“Huh,” he says again. “Wait, you waited until our third date to kiss me?”

“I thought you needed me to take it slow,” Tommy says, leaning his elbows on the hood and burying his face in his hands. “I thought you were new to this.”

“I mean, I am,” Buck points out. The way Tommy’s leaning makes his ass pop out a little, and his jeans are tight enough that they definitely qualify as date jeans. “Maybe not that new, actually. It’s normal to check out a hot guy’s ass, right?”

Tommy looks at him incredulously. “Evan, how would I know what straight guys do? I’m a Kinsey six.”

“Right,” Buck realizes, though he’s still not clear on the second part. “What’s a Kinsey six?”

“It’s a scale for sexuality. I’ve never actually been attracted to any women.”

Buck frowns. “Really?”

He’s found a lot of guys attractive, because that was just a thing Buck could see as a person with eyes. Hell, one of the first things he thought about Connor was that he had a killer smile. Then he had followed him to Los Angeles. From Peru.

“Oh,” he realizes, pulling out his phone and looking up ‘Kinsey.’ “Two? I don’t know, actually. I’ll have to think about it.”

Tommy huffs out a laugh. “You’re not, I don’t know, mad?”

Buck frowns and puts his phone back in his pocket. “Why would I be mad?”

“A lot of guys get mad when another guy kisses them if they weren’t really expecting it.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You can just tell someone you’re not interested.” His eyes flick down to Tommy’s mouth. “Or figure out that you are.”

“Are you sure—”

“You should come over so I can cook you dinner,” Buck says, suddenly wanting nothing more than to see Tommy in his loft and at his table. In his bed? Yeah, probably. “Saturday?”

Tommy smiles. “You mean tomorrow?”

Buck thinks about it. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

When Tommy kisses him again, Buck wraps his arm around his shoulders and spreads his hand over Tommy’s side. Tommy moans softly against his mouth, and Buck’s lips part further so he can tease his tongue against Tommy’s lips.

“Jesus, kid,” Tommy breathes when the kiss breaks, and it sends a bolt of heat through Buck’s belly. So, yeah, definitely guys. Guys are good. At least one is.

Buck’s phone goes off, and he reluctantly checks it. Maddie’s due pretty soon, so he can’t ignore his phone just in case it’s her.

It is, and Buck answers quickly.

“Maddie?” he says before mouthing an apology to Tommy. “Are you okay? Is the baby—”

“Buck,” she says. “Are you still coming over for dinner?”

Oh, right. The reason they’d done the matinee show for the movie. Buck’s supposed to be having a sibling dinner with his sister. He’s now late for it and feels like a dick.

“I am so sorry, I forgot. I’ll be there in twenty, twenty-five minutes? Do you need me to get anything on the way?”

“If you could get me enough garlic bread to fill your car, I’d be so happy.”

Buck snorts. “I can get some. Maybe not that much. But I’ll stop, just turn the oven on. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay!” she says brightly. “Bye.”

“Bye,” he says, hanging up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what time it was, and I did actually forget. I got, uh, distracted.”

Tommy smirks. “‘Distracted’?”

Buck swallows and nods, his eyes going to Tommy’s lips again. “Yeah.”

“God, you’re adorable.”

He’s never had a guy call him that before. He likes it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tommy says. “When do you want me over?”

“S-six?” Buck says, feeling himself sway toward Tommy like they’ve got magnets in their mouths. “Five. You start early on Sunday, right?”

“So do you,” Tommy points out.

“Oh, yeah,” Buck says dumbly. He goes in for another kiss, but it’s quick. Tommy pushes him back gently with a hand to his chest and nudges their noses together briefly before stepping away. “Bye.”

“Bye, Evan,” Tommy says, smiling and going toward his house.

Buck fumbles with his keys before he finally unlocks the Jeep, and he watches Tommy until he goes inside. It’s a thing he’s always done on dates. When Tommy waves before heading inside, Buck waves for a long time until the door is closed.

“Fuck, okay, garlic bread,” he says, turning the Jeep on. He grins the entire way to the store.

While he walks through Ralph’s, he also looks for stuff to use for the dinner he’s going to make for Tommy. On their date. Their fourth date.

Buck knows he’s standing in the middle of the baking ingredients aisle and smiling at his phone like an idiot. He knows that he’s going to spend half of his Saturday trying to perfect some kind of dessert. He knows he can’t wait to see Tommy and that he’s felt that way every time he’s seen him since they met.

#bucktommy #bucktommy fluffebruary #my fic #didn't know they were dating

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captain-bubble-wrap · 2 days ago

Note

Taking Quinn home to meet your parents for the first time? Could the reader have a little brother who knows who Quinn is? Pretty please? 🎀

"Oh, be warned, mom is probably going to give you a kiss."

From the driver's seat, Quinn gave you a peculiar look as he rounded the last corner before finally arriving at your parent's house. He didn't know what to do with the tidbit of information you had given him, which prompted you to elaborate. You knew you should have probably declared that a lot earlier, but it had simply slipped your mind. It had been quite sometime since you had brought anyone home since moving away.

"Just on the cheek! She's...just really affectionate!"

Returning his eyes to the road, Quinn's tone dropped, "Is there anything else I need to know?"

"Daddy will look at you like he wants to shoot you...but only for a few minutes."

It was a nervous laugh that came out of Quinn's mouth. "Yeah, that's uh-- that's good to know. Thanks-- babe."

"Oh, stop! You'll be fine!"

It was obvious Quinn was nervous, and while you tried to reassure him that everything was okay, he still looked at you with unease after parking the car. This was supposed to be a fun day, and you felt responsible for the sudden shift in the overall mood.

"I promise they'll love you!" You reached over and touched his hand. "I promise."

Quinn gave you the softest smile before following you out of the car. He shuffled silently behind you, up the sidewalk and to the front door where after a short moment, your mother answered your knocking.

"Oh, you finally made it!" She hugged you first before zeroing in on Quinn, who still was lingering on the porch. "You too, Quinn! Come on!"

While he got the mother treatment, you made your way over to your dad, who was getting up from his chair.

"So this is the guy, huh?" He wasn't the most affectionate man, nor the most chipper when it came to who his daughter was involved with, so you didn't take his lack of warmth too personally.

"Be nice! He's sweet, you'll like him. And I'm happy to see you, too!"

His grumble was to be expected. He had yet to "like" any of your boyfriends; his standards just seemed too high. "Mhm, you've said that before."

You'd roll your eyes before leaving him to go rescue Quinn. "Mom! Let him breathe!"

"Oh, he's fine! It's good to finally meet you! Y|N has told us quite a bit about you, but I'm sure she's been holding back!"

Yours and Quinn's cheeks flushed with pink; yours because your mom had just revealed how often you talked about him, and Quinn's because he was being talked about... Before either of you could open your mouths to say anything in objection, your little brother came running from his room upstairs. The sounds of his rapid footfalls made everyone turn towards the thuds. He had just turned fourteen and was loving being the only child in the house since you had moved out.

"Whoa, what is Quinn Hughes doing in our living room?" He had come to a stop in the middle of the staircase, and was staring at Quinn, mouth slightly open at the sight of the hockey player standing there.

"How do you know who he is?" Questioned your mother, confused by the sudden change of events. She looked from your brother, to you, and then finally at Quinn. He was smiling, hands in his pockets as he hated being the center of attention for anything.

"He's the captain for the Vancouver Canucks, mom!"

"The who?"

Your brother threw his head back as he sighed, still the drama queen you realized. "Hockey, mom! C'mon!"

"Attitude," barked your dad, growing more annoyed with the back-and-forth. Now was about the time that he took his afternoon nap, and like a toddler, he was getting grumpy. Your brother, ignored the fact that he was being reprimanded, an made short work of the rest of the stairs to stop right in front of Quinn. He had yet to even acknowledge you were standing there!

"You're like the best defenseman in the league! I can't believe you're in my house!"

"Meet your biggest fan, Quinn," you teased as your brother eyed you like he had caught you in the act of theft.

"You're dating my sister? What the heck?"

Quinn smirked despite the family dynamic being a little chaotic at the moment, "Yeah, for about a year now."

Your brother didn't know how to respond to what Quinn had said, and opted to give you another judgmental stare instead. He had been around ten when you moved out, and neither of you had been real close whenever you had lived together. Now, however, you felt like complete strangers; he only seemed interested that you were home because of who you had brought along.

"Gross! You could do better!"

"Parker!" Hissed both of your parents in unison. You stifled a snort at him getting double-teamed; poor Quinn, however, looked lost at sea.

"What? It's true!" He snickered, looking back at Quinn like he was going to somehow agree with the childish statement. "Hey, do you think you could sign one of my sticks?"

Breaking up your brother trying to be the center of attention, she turned back to Quinn, "Y|N said you played hockey, but we didn't realize you played professionally! You're so young! And Parker, leave him be, alright? There will be plenty of time for all of that later. They've not even taken their coats off! Come on, you two. Let me make you both something to eat. I'm sure you're hungry."

Parker couldn't get over the fact that he had just met his sports idol, your boyfriend no less. He couldn't wait to tell the team at practice. They weren't going to believe him!

#🗣 hockey mom daydreams #quinn hughes #vancouver canucks #quinn hughes x y/n #quinn hughes imagine #quinn hughes fanfiction #quinn hughes fic

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yey56 · 3 days ago

Text

HARLEY SAWYER X PSYCHOLOGIST READER Pt4

From:

You eyes opened and before you could even muster a work, the monitor said with the velvet voice you recognised so well.- Welcome back, my germ. I'm so glad you're finally awake. We have matters to discuss- Sawyer finished touching your face with his screen.

Your eyes closed halfway due to the light of the screen. A big eye observed you and a soft voice with a mechanic filter talked to you.

You still hadn't processed all of this information, being just woken up and basically blinded by a bright light was not exactly enlightening.

Harley?- You asked, still waking up- Harley is that you?- You looked confused and shocked. You didn't expect... This.- Is this what Leith did to you?.

Your hands started exploring his robotic body: inspecting the wires, twisting your fingers in them; the metallic articulations, bending the ones in his fingers as testing for movement; and his TV head, taking a closer look to the pixels that conformed it

He looked at you in silence while you analysed his whole self -... Yes. But that's not relevant now. I've been trying to reach you. And you've been squirming by sheer luck from my grip.- He still held you face with his cold metal hands. You found it comforting. A cold, dry feeling. It fitted him well.

So... You know what I did?- You already knew the extent of his control on the factory but you wanted to hear it from him- Yes, I do. I must say, excellent job. Liberating 1006... It was excellent- He laughed quietly.-

His hand on your cheek moved to your collarbone and while you were incorporating he put your arms against the wires that resembled his neck and shoulders in a way that you were now supporting yourself solely on him.

You cannot believe the progress the experiments have made...- He was talking very quietly, almost whispering- They had made hell real.- He seemed somewhat fascinated by his own words and you were listening to him very closely, wanting to know more information of the experiments

Some of them are nothing more than violents and hungry beasts.- The fascination was replaced by contempt- But others, the ones who you concluded that showed intelligence... They are taking control of little areas of the factory..

I've always knew that their resentment would make something great- You said, somewhat glad that some toys were showing dominance over others. You could already image who...- Horrible, but great after all.- The way you were saying it was almost mischievous with a hint of satisfaction.

And what about you?- You asked, your tone becoming softer this time- I've been searching for you. What have you been up to Dr?.

There is not much to do here but establishing our chances of survival and my dominance over this factory- You were confused by his words, tightening your grip on his shoulders-

What do you mean by insuring OUR survival?- The question came of a little bit more aggressively than intented.

The prototype... He was the one commanding the toys to end with anyone in their way. When you opened the cages most of them tried toe scale the factory but he blocked the way. He's searching for that clay doll.- You interrupted- The prototype is searching for Poppy? Why?- He continued- She wants to finish him. To destroy him. She disappeared after the hour of joy. That sneaky liar has managed to hide herself very well...

So... What does that have to do with you? With us?- You asked with precaution-

I've made a deal with the prototype... I will improve the toys we have to go against Poppy. He won't kill me since I'm useful. Whether he likes to admit it or not, he needs me for this. I'm his best shot. I'm not worried about the prototype right now.- Harley seemed confident in his statement, and probably he was right.

You remembered the Prototype... Before Doey, he and Mommy long legs were your favourites out of all the experiments. They both showed high levels of intelligence and you often turned you interviews with them into something more like a conversation.

Mommy was always willing to talk. Often with a sweet voice but sometimes a more terrifying one would overcome the conversation trying to intimidate you.

But the Prototype was not always willing to talk. Mostly at the start, he just stared at you, twitching his metallic hand.

He was the first successful experiment of the company and though he was far from perfect he was one of the most intelligent living beings you ever had the pleasure to converse with.

He was your first job with a non-human patient, it wasn't something you could forget. His hate for the company was never hidden, he had a deep hunger for violence and as new experiments started to come in he would often encourage them to violent acts, this led to him being isolated.

1006 became more erratic, violent and unwilling to collaborate. Other psychologist started to quit and refusing to work with him because of this same reason. They feigned pity for him, compassion and empathy, they tried to hide the instinctive fear they had for him so the prototype acted in response driving them away.

You on the contrary never gave up on him. You didn't offer kind words or condolences for his situation. You acknowledged him as the challenge he was for the stability for the company and talked to him out of pure interest. You own curiosity hungry for understanding what was going inside his mind. He was unique.

It was like the first toy you ever give to a kid. You can break it, hide it or give more toys to the child but the first one will always remain in their minds.

With time, the prototype started adopting some of your behaviours. He started imitating you tone of voice when asking, trying to seem more familiar to you by coping your corporal expression .

You knew what he was doing, you did something similar in your first years of career and even used that method with some people.

So tell me, Prototype- You adjusted the comments of the experiment in the table nearby- Why did you intimidate the last professional- and please do not insult my intelligence by trying to lie to me- You sigh sounded more like a laugh- either tell me the truth or don't talk, let's not lose time.

What time- Do I HaVe To- LOSE??..- His voice changed from yours to a distorted one and then to mommy's.- YoUr FRIEND the D0c-t0r does Not- L3t M3 leave.

You know full well why. You are hyper aware of everything around you so don't feign innocence on why you are here- You knew Harley was watching through the one way glass on the wall and you knew the prototype knew as well.

Once you and Harley started becoming closer he started insisting on supervising you whenever you had interviews with the most dangerous experiments.

He understood you fascination with them. Their broken minds and the challenge they supposed were a fitting challenge for you, he felt the same with the experiments the company made him run.

Though he has never managed to comprehend your need to maintain direct contact with them. He always insisted on you staying on the observation room and talking with them through it but you always denied it, claiming it killed the fun.

Harley always saw them as nothing more than beasts, he didn't want to see you teared apart by them, that would be such a waste of potential, but he couldn't do anything to stop you.

You lived for the risk and for reconstructing the puzzle that composed the minds of the Playtime experiments.

Even though you were fascinated by the experiments you couldn't help but enjoying your superior positions in comparison to them.

You couldn't see yourself subjecting to your own protects, as selfish as that may sound.

Y/N?- Sawyer's metallic voice woke you up from your memories- Your heart rate has decrease, you have spaced out. Something's bothering you- He started with the same neutral voice he had for everything.

So basically, 1006 is the one in control here- You mumbled, still looking directly to only one place.

Harley, I'm not willing to subject myself to one of our projects.- Your tone was dead serious- I understand that the factory right now is the closest thing on earth to hell but I'm not willing to play apart on my projects game

No.- Voice dry, he responded- You don't seem to grasp what the factory is now.- He looked at you.

You weren't there to see it like he did. What the Prototype did on the hour of joy, how he seemed to have it already planed. The speed he had to take control of everything. It impressed him, and impressing Harley Sawyer wasn't something easy

Again, he wasn't scared of his own survival and control within the factory. He was the only thing 1006 had, therefore, he wouldn't be discarded and if you could just listen to him, you wouldn't either.

The Prototype is searching for Poppy. Right now I don't know why, not yet.- He said with that calculated tone of voice he always carried- I cannot get to wherever she is, wherever Ludwig hid her, he make sure to make her unfindable.

But you can- Both of his hands on your shoulders now.- Understand your position in this factory, you are the only human here, pure flesh and bones. You are vulnerable.-He highlighted each word as he spoke the last part- Don't be prideful, it will get you killed.- He said severely and with harshness in his voice.

You took his hands away from you and started to stand up- No Harley, I have no interest in finding Poppy and neither in letting the Prototype dictate if I die or not. -You quickly changed topic trying to avoid talking about 1006-You have control over the systems of the factory don't you? Maybe you might be able to get me high enough to search for a wrap pack... And you have an Omni hand as far as I'm aware. You should have executive privileges- You started standing up, with Harley making some resistance.

You started walking as if you were in your house and went to the room with all of the monitors, Harley closely following you.

You started touching some buttons and all of the factory became on sight for you through the cameras. You stayed observant of everything. Analysing every room, watching the changes made by the months of chaos.

At some point, Harley restricted you with another one of his bodies while the main one looked at you.

-You've always been stubborn but the circumstances are not on your favour and since you refuse to listen then I cannot let you go.- His metallic hand grabbing your chin so you would look at him.- Don't fight it. It will make it worse.

Harley knew that, when very deep in though, you would just not listen or not pay attention to your surroundings, so he made sure your attention was on him.

Harley, what are you doing?- Your voice was steady and neutral- I sense anger in your voice. Believe me, this was my last resort.- His hand left your face.

He though he heard something from you but the moment he gave his back to you, he heard the sound of metal hitting the floor.

One of The Doctors robotic bodies, the one holding you to be precise, had dropped to the floor after you unplugged a certain wire that connected to his body. You supposed that was the one that permitted the hive mind effect.

He quickly looked at you again. You were running toward the exit door. He could easily outrun you, but now you knew how to unplug him from his body.

However he ignored that fact and went for you either way. His screen glitching and all of the nearby monitors turning on while you were passing running through them.

Now he could understood what you were whispering a few seconds ago "Mine as well". The same way his first option wasn't to restrict you; your first option wasn't to escape.

You knew you were in a huge disadvantage but just thinking about living with the constant paranoia of your live depending on the Prototype made you feel nauseous. 1006 was unstable and chaotic, basically, your worst and last option.

You knew his potential, that's why a very deep part of you feared him just as much as admired him. But after all, you should look out for yourself even if that means going against Harley.

You still don't know how you managed to get out of "The land of none" and get back to the main corridors that led to the construction area.

That was a safe place, at least save from Sawyer.

Your first option was not available but your second best was still there. The safe haven seemed like a resemblance of normalcy in this hellhole.

Doey looked relieved upon your return, and he looked even more glad when you said you were staying. You didn't specify the reasons why but at leat you had a generator completely independent from the main system and therefore, from Harley.

You were... a little hurt from your re-encounter with Harley... Just a little...

You sat on a improvised bed on the floor of the Haven and started processing what had just happened.

You didn't expected him to give control so easily, again, he could still have way more control than others could but being at mercy of others wasn't really your style and you weren't willing to go through that.

You spent so much time searching for him. And for what? For a half ass conversation without any closure. You didn't need any feelings that could make you dependent on Harley. You shouldn't let yourself get carried away only because you have feelings for someone...

Therefore, you just toned it down. You will do as you always do with every feeling that gets more complicated than curiosity, you will ignore it and then bury it.

You were able to ignore your fascination for the prototype because, rationally ,he was dangerous; you could ignore your affection for Doey or Mommy because you still were curious to see where the limits were. So you should be able to bury your feelings for Harley because it puts your life in danger and your autonomy.

Harley was not very happy either. He wanted you back, he just needed you to see reason. Eventually you will encounter a big danger such as Catnap or someone big and you will understand that you can't do this alone.

You will realise sooner or later, but in the meantime he would keep a close eye on you and, if the opportunity ever arises, he will just accelerate the process and take you himself to his area.

He could still feel your touch on his wires. His body long gone was substituted by this machine. Though he couldn't eat, he could feel. A very weak stimulation but it was the nearest thing he had that resembled the reaction to touch.

It was a matter of time, its not like you will last long. No wrap pack, no weapons thousands of resentful creatures inpatient to eat you...

You will come back. You must.

When the prototype asked him where you were, he answered that there has been a problem but that they only needed time.

1006 was not happy. Even thought there was an argument Harley, always the calm doctor knew his experiments so he was able to deal with the prototype effortlessly.

His germ could not hide forever, it was not in your nature. Germs evolve, they expand and sooner or later, a doctor finds them and neutralises them.

He just needs to wait until you expand to catch you. You wont be still for long. You never are.

The doctor can only hope that you won't be late to your appointment

#dr harley sawyer #harley sawyer x reader #harley sawyer #poppy playtime the doctor #poppy playtime chapter 4 #the prototype #poppy poppy playtime #poppy playtime #poppy playtime chapter four #the doctor x reader #the doctor #poppy playtime doey #doey the doughman #x reader #reader

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sunarots · 1 day ago

Text

taste ━━━ suna rintarou & miya osamu

28. who looks bad now? ♡

"It doesn't look broken. I'd go to the dentist after the game's finished, though. Make sure your teeth are still intact." The doctor hands over the ice pack to Suna before removing his gloves. "Any reason for the attack?"

You sigh, leaning back against the chair. "Yeah, me."

The doctor raises an eyebrow, eyeing the damage done to Suna before looking back at you. "I've not seen that before."

Suna starts laughing, raising a hand. "No, no. She didn't hit me. Her boyfriend hit me. I kissed her."

The doctor nods slowly, clearly still confused. "Was it... Did you..."

"It wasn't assault, we were both drunk. I kissed him back. He's my ex-boyfriend," you explain, watching as the doctor slowly pieces everything together. "God, this is complicated. I wish I was five again. Life was easy."

"It was much easier," the doctor agrees. "I'll leave you both alone for a few minutes and come back to check on the swelling."

You thank the doctor on his way past, waiting for him to leave before turning back to Suna. "What the fuck am I supposed to do?"

"At least I never punched anyone. Or called you a slut in front of thousands of people." Suna shrugs his shoulders and smiles at you. "Just saying, I don't look so bad now, do I?"

"No, you just decided to stop calling." You flash him a smile before pulling your phone from your pocket to try and find the scores somewhere. "Is it still sore?"

"Yeah, it's fucking throbbing. Now I know how Atsumu feels." Suna sighs and leans back against the bed. "I think he's in the wrong sport."

You crack a smile, glancing up from your phone. "I'll suggest that to him. Well, that's if he ever talks to me again." You turn your attention back onto your phone, noticing that your team is trending. "Oh my god, are we winning?"

You jump from your seat and rush to Suna's side, clicking on the hashtag. You move your phone so he can see it, instantly regretting the decision. "Oh my god."

Suna takes your phone, clicking on the video of Osamu hitting him. "Are you fucking kidding me? That's great, that's just perfect. Now everyone's gonna know me as the guy who got punched."

"Yeah, and I'm forever known as the slut. This is great. There goes my career." You take the phone back and shut it off, stuffing it in your pocket.

"At least we go down together, right?" Suna smiles at you as you retreat back to your chair. "Look, when we go out there, I'll do my best to block. Hopefully not with my face, but I'll try."

"Is this you admitting that you don't usually try?"

"This is me admitting that I want to win our first match with only two sets." Suna shrugs his shoulders.

You sit back on the chair and sigh, looking around the room. "I was going to tell him after this. Like, when we're done so it wouldn't... So what happened wouldn't happen."

"Eh, it probably would've still happened," Suna points out with a smile. When you don't smile back at him, he rolls his eyes. "Don't beat yourself up. I'm more at fault. I didn't really ask first, did I?" Again, no response. He lets out a sigh, glancing at the clock before looking back at you. "If I asked, what would you have said?"

You turn to face him, furrowing your eyebrows to think. You go to speak, cut off by the doctor re-entering the room.

"Okay, how are we doing here? Has the pain gone down?" He approaches Suna and asks a few more questions before confirming he can return to the court.

You're out of your chair faster than he is, but he's at the door before you. You both call a thanks to the doctor before running down the corridor. You practically throw the door open, racing around the few people standing around the barriers to make it to your team.

You spot Sakusa preparing to serve, trying to get the ball from Bokuto. When Bokuto turns around and sees you, he immediately drops the ball. His hair perks up as waves at you, excitedly grabbing the ball and passing it to Sakusa.

You skid to a stop behind Iwa, grabbing onto his shoulder so you don't slip on your bag. "How are we doing?"

"We're down by six," he answers, lips pressed into a firm line. "Three service aces, two received and lost, another service ace. We needed both managers to sign off on Osamu going on the court."

"I sign off on it, we put Suna in first, then Osamu." You grab the sign with Suga's number, about to hand it over to Suna.

"Doesn't matter. I didn't sign off on it." Kuroo leans forward, watching the game intensely.

You feel your jaw dropping at his statement. "What? Why not? Kuroo, we're losing."

"And? He punched a teammate, he needed to be punished. Go tell the refs Suna's fit to be put in the game." He gestures for you to approach the man, not sparing you a glance.

You shrug him off, waving Suna to follow you. "We want to put him back in. The doctor signed him off and he's not in pain. If he looks like he's struggling, we'll take him out again. Is that okay?"

The ref nods and gestures for you to wait at the side of the court for the match to end. As your team scores a point, you turn back to Suna. You hold out the sign for him to take, hesitating to let go when his fingers brush yours.

"Wish me luck." He goes to raise it, stopping when you say his name. "What?"

"Yes." You take a step back as the ref blows the whistle. "I would have said yes."

# fun fact !

kuroo knew you’d put osamu back in the game because you’d feel bad, so he said no to be the bad guy

masterlist. previous | next

summary. when your ex starts dating your least favourite person on campus, your ex-best friend from high school, you can’t help but feel a little betrayed. you quickly realise a way to get back at him: his best friend.

taglist (open!). @v3nusplanetofluv @mdmraz @thoughtswithbbg @fireinyoureye @wakashudou @jisookdays @tespho @frootloopscos @gigiiiiislife @walllflowerrrsss @tangerinelovr @datonegaybestfriend @sturnprincess @jpegarchives @justanotherweeb666 @1yeah1 @rrosiitas @yuu-via @zazathezaer @softpia @animenaces-world @loveelylani @punkhazardlaw @to-dino @nanamis-right-tiddie @aboutkiyoomi @arusio @aloore @dailyakira @alexithemiyatic @chemiru @p1nktulip @writing-for-the-hell-of-it @taefanclub @h3xi2g0n3 @rikidaze @mncxbe @luvelyjjk @iluv-ace @arwawawa2 @aldebrana @nanasrkives @passionfruitenthusiast @surfeitstar @dndjxkskcn @jiminscarmex @hermaeusmorax @ohgodthevoices

#taste #haikyuu smau #hq smau #suna rintarou #suna rintarou smau #suna rintarou x fem!reader #suna rintarou x female reader #suna rintarou x f!reader #suna rintarou x y/n #suna rintarou x you #suna rintarou x reader #miya osamu x f!reader #miya osamu x female reader #miya osamu x fem!reader #miya osamu x you #miya osamu x y/n #miya osamu x reader #miya osamu #miya osamu smau

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ozwriterchick · 3 days ago

Text

Anaesthetic..

Summary: A bit of fun when you come out of anaesthesia after an operation.

Characters: Bucky Barnes, Reader

No warnings

Word count: approx 1400

A/N: I'm heading to hospital tomorrow for my 2nd cancer surgery - a liver resection - and I have been wathcing alot of Tiktoks about anaesthesia and came across the funny ones when people are coming out of it, and it inspired this in my brain.

I hope you enjoy!

I appreciate each and every one of you.

Not Beta'd so any mistakes are my own.

Dividers by @firefly-graphics

Masterlist

It had been a long day for Bucky so far. You’d had a 4am wake up call to be at the hospital by 6am. He dropped you off like you asked and pretended to leave. You had told him that you couldn’t see the need for him to hang around and suggested he go home and get some sleep while you were in surgery.

Bucky couldn’t imagine heboth you and’d be able to have any kind of restful sleep while you weren’t right next to him, so he bought a newspaper and sat in the hospital coffee shop reading and trying to concentrate on the crossword puzzle.

Crosswords weren’t something he normally enjoyed but having sat beside you and helped you out with your daily “brain exercise” as you loved to call it, he found it now gave him some comfort.

You had listed him on your hospital admissions paperwork as next of kin so he knew they would call you as soon as the operation was done to let him know how you were. He wanted to be close by, not because he could be of assistance if, god forbid, anything went wrong. More so that he could see you as soon as you were able to have visitors.

Bucky had decided to take a walk, the crossword had frustrated him to no end because he didn’t have you beside him to answer the questions he always had when you both were trying to complete the puzzle.

There wasn’t much around this hospital but he found a couple of local shops where he picked up some things for you and then stumbled upon a park with a coffee cart, so he took the opportunity to relax with some nature and have a decent cup of coffee, not the stuff you normally get out of hospital vending machines.

He felt like he wasn’t there more than 15 minutes however, when his phone rang. Looking down he saw it was a private number so he figured it was more than likely the hospital It couldn’t have been anyone from the Avengers because he had their numbers saved, and he knew it wouldn’t be anyone calling from a landline at the tower because they all knew he was off today at the least for your surgery.

Picking up the phone and hitting the answer button, he braced himself for whatever was about to come next, good or bad. “Hello?”

“Uh, good afternoon am I speaking to James Barnes?” the voice enquired.

“Yes, this is he, I mean that’s me, I mean yes, I’m James Barnes” he could hear the girl giggle quietly through the phone at his seeming inability to put together a coherent sentence.

“Well, I’m Sasha a nurse in the recover suite, we just wanted to let you know that Yn has come through the surgery perfectly, she is in recovery and you can come sit with her whenever you get here.”

“Oh that’s such a relief, thank you Sasha, I’m just down the street in a little park so I’ll be there in like 10 minutes or so” he confirmed for her.

“Oh, are you in Ventnor Park? I love that place, sometimes if I can swing it I go there to eat my lunch. Well, we’ll see you soon Mr Barnes” to which she hung up the phone before he could say any more.

He ditched his almost empty coffee cup in the nearby bin and started walking back to the hospital, eager to see you again, even though it had only been a few hours since he dropped you off.

As Bucky approached the recovery suite, he had to admit to himself that he was getting a little anxious about how you’d be after the anaesthesia and all, but he was very excited to see you again.

He pressed the button on the door to gain access and the nurse who came to open the door asked who he was here to see.

“I’m James Barnes, I’m here for Yn Yln” he informed her quietly.

“Oh yes, Mr Barnes, come through, she’s in bed 7. She’s still quite groggy but that’s totally normal. I’ll grab a chair for beside her bed so you can sit there.”

“Thank you ma’am. I appreciate that” he replied.

Moving down the row of beds he rounded the curtain towards you and stood at the end of your bed. The nurse approached and quietly placed the chair beside your bed. Bucky gave her a quick nod and sat himself down, reaching for your hand.

At the feeling of his hand in yours, you stirred. Unfocused eyes roaming around the room, landing on him and widening dramatically in reaction.

“Oh, hi” you said to him.

“Hi Yn, how are you feeling?”

“Umm, ok.. I think, I’m not sure my brain is working properly yet.”

“No, you’ve only just woken up, it will take a while before you’re completely with it again. They said the surgery went well so that’s a bonus”

“Oh, yeah, but you might have to tell me again later” she slurred a little when speaking but, again, it was totally understandable.

You drifted off again for a few minutes, opening your eyes and looking around again. You noticed a handsome man sitting at your bedside.

“Oh my god! You are gorgeous” you say to him.

Bucky looks around, not realising you are talking to him at first. “Umm, ok, well thanks, I’m glad you think so” he replied to you.

“No, I mean look at you, you look like a god” you exclaimed.

“Well, again, thank you, umm…” he stammered, blushing. He looked for your nurse who just smiled and nodded that this was another normal thing for some people.

“I mean damn boy” you began. “If I didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d wife you up so quickly”

Bucky laughed “Well, that’s a shame that you have a boyfriend because I’d love to wife you up”

“Oh no, you can’t say those kind of things to me, I have a boyfriend!” you whisper yell the last part at him.

“Yes, I know you do, you told me that. But can’t we have something as well?” he chucked again to himself, enjoying this side of you.

“Hmmm, I don’t think so. You see, my boyfriend is very tall and muscly and very, very strong and I’d hate to see him mess up your pretty face.” You sighed.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that now, would we” he smiled.

“Nurse” you raised your voice. Seeing her round the end of the curtain you asked “Did you call my boyfriend. Do you know when he’ll be here?”

“Yes, I called him, in fact, he’s here already” the nurse replied.

You turn to Bucky “Oh no, you better go, he’s gonna get real mad if he comes in here and sees you holding my hand like this.”

Bucky just chuckled, this was hilarious and he knew if Sam were here he’d be filming this but he didn’t want you to be embarrassed later on if anyone saw it other than the 2 of you.

“Don't laugh, I mean it” you start crying.

“Oh baby” he said, concerned. “What’s wrong, why are you crying?” he couldn’t bear to see you upset and wanted to be able to fix it for you.

“No, it’s just my boyfriend is here and you’re here and I love him so much but you’re just so beautiful and I don’t want him to punch your face off.”

“Babe” Bucky began.

“No, you can’t call me babe, that’s what he calls me” you cry even harder.

“Yn, listen to me. I am your boyfriend. I’m James.”

“My boyfriends name is Bucky, you can’t be him because he’s coming here and you’re already here.”

“Trust me, my love, I am Bucky, I am also James, I am also your boyfriend and I think after this I have no choice but to wife you up like you said you’d do to me” he leaned forward and kissed your lips lightly and tenderly.

“Oh dear, now you’ve kissed me and… Wait, did you say you are my boyfriend? How did I get so lucky to land someone like you?”

“Yes sugar, I am and we have forever to work out how I was so lucky to land you, not the other way around. Now you lay your head back and relax so we can get the rest of this anaesthesia out of your system and back to reality.”

#ozwriterchick #james bucky barnes #bucky barnes #marvel #fluff #sebastian stan #bucky barnes x reader

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jadastarkey · 1 day ago

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I could be

celebritycrush!drew x sweetheart!actress!reader

warnings: flirting? idk if that's a warning tho

genre: fluff

sypnosis: an interviewer let's actress!reader choose someone to be interviewed with her and she chooses drew, who happens to be her celebrity crush

~°•☆•°~

"y/n over here!" an interviewer called, holding out a microphone for you.

you smiled and walked over grabbing the mic.

"Hey, how are you today?"

"oh my god, hi, I'm so great, thank you. how're you?"

"I'm alright, thanks for asking. if you dont mind, we're gonna do things a little differently today," the interviewer said as you nodded "we want you to choose anyone on the carpet right now to be interviewed with you"

"really?" you asked, looking over your shoulder

"yeah, choose anyone" she replied with a chuckle.

you smirked and put your finger up to your lip, your eyes hunting for the man they'd been set on all night, the man you could recognise from a mile away, the man whose movies you'd binged most nights when you were bored and it didn't take long at all to find that familiar face.

you passed the microphone back to the interviewer and walked over to him, your footsteps small as your dress was tight.

your courage slowly dropped. there were people already talking to him, the cameras were flashing, more than likely to catch any embarrassment and post it everywhere and suddenly any courage you once held was gone.

you took a deep breath and tapped on his shoulder. "uh, drew?" you asked politely like a child telling her mom she dropped the ice cream she just got from the ice cream man.

there was barely any time to run away and die as he turned around the second your fingers touched his shoulder "hey.. you're y/n y/l/n? I didn't know you were here"

you let out a nervous giggle "y-yeah, I am."

he grinned

"I was just at an interview and she said I could choose someone to be interviewed with me and I was wondering if you'd wanna do it with me?" you asked, hope glimmering in your eyes

"yeah of course I will" he answered almost too quick but a yes is a yes and you let out a sigh of relief

"Okay, uh follow me, I guess"

you led him back to the interviewer and tool your mic back. you put it between the two of you, as you thought you were sharing one but you didn't see the interviewer holding another one out for you. drew thought you were handing it to him and wrapped his hand around it, his fingers brushing yours.

you were yet again embarrassing yourself infront of the drew starkey, the man who gave you a reason to start acting.

you let him take it and awkwardly took the other one.

"quite the partner, y/n. drew, how's your night going"

"It's going... okay. I'm just a little nervous. im sure I'll be fine, though. "

"let's hope so." she said before looking down at a list of questions in her hand "y/n, drew, your movies are going up against eachother, and you yourselves are nominated in the same categories multiple times. do you think either of your wins or losses could affect a future friendship?"

"no, It's a competition and not everyone can win. there's 7 people that'll lose and that's okay. we just have to support whoever does win" drew answered

"yeah, there's a possibility neither of us will win and its okay" you said, looking up at him again.

"that's good. we don't need anymore drama in this world. y/n, a lot of your fans have noticed you've been a little happier recently. is there anyone behind that, maybe a special someone?"

yu giggled, biting down on your bottom lip slightly "Well, no but I'm open to it" you smiled, taking a small glance toward drew to meet his eyes for a second. you quickly turned away and tried to hide the pink dusting your cheeks.

the interviewer saw the tension and used it to her advantage "do you think drew could be that special someone?"

the air got caught in your throat, not expecting such a blunt question but before you could answer or even regain some confidence drew chimed in with a smooth "I could be"

the interviewers eyebrows raised and drew continued "how about if I win, I can get your number and take you out on a date somewhere?"

your mouth opened but no words came out. you just nodded.

"but what if she wins?" She asked

"we'll have to see" he replied before waving goodbye to the camera and skimming his hand over your waist to get past you and back onto the carpet.

your eyes followed him hut you were frozen in place out of shock for a while.

when you'd come to your senses, you thanked the interviewer for her time and continued on your night, though the interaction never left your mind

~°•☆•°~

a/n sorry if this is bad I'm still getting used to writing

I might make a pt 2 to this

#drew starkey #actress #drew starkey x reader #actor #celebrity interviews #couple #sweetheart reader #sweetheart #drew starkey fanfiction #fanfic #red carpet #famous actress #famous au

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caligvlasaqvarivm · 1 day ago

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Original Sin: The Failure of the Dancestors

Establishing an Eden-like paradise from which there is some departure through sin is sort of the boilerplate basis for religious lore. [...] The failed players from peaceful Alternia made a classic "deal with the devil" move by causing the scratch after being given a choice by the mother of all monsters. (Echidna. Hey, she's a big snake!) By doing so they brought Scratch into their universe, and therefore all the things you'd expect that comes with summoning the devil.

Andrew Hussie, Formspring, Aug. 12, 2011.

Warnings for: Mostly? I'm going to be really mean to the dancestors, so if you aren't here for a thorough (and I mean thorough) dancestor takedown, please do not read this. Ableism, questionable consent and outright non-consent, horrific interpersonal relationships, and Cronus ahead.

Overview

I hesitated to write this because I know there will be some really controversial interpretations in here. Many of the circumstances I bring up as failures on the Dancestors' part are interpreted by the fandom as positive things. A common one I've run into before is Latula x Mituna, where I maintain it's bad, but the fandom often sees them as cute. I'll also be condemning things like Horuss's plurality, or Cronus's kinning, not because I have any beef towards this stuff IRL, but because they're framed as failings on the characters' part within the context of the comic, and I'm analyzing the characters within the context of the comic. I'm not asking anyone to agree with me, but I am asking that you approach this essay with an open mind, and not send death threats over a silly webcomic from the early 2010's. I would not be asking for this if it hadn't already happened, which was embarrassing for all of us TBH.

The Dancestors, as made clear from the Hussie quote, are the story's original sin - the initial failure point from which all the comic's problems stem. Their role in the story is antagonistic - with very little exception, the Dancestors are not meant to be sympathetic, and/or their flaws outweigh their sympathetic qualities. Every single one of them succumbed to some major failure (some their own fault, some brought on by others on the team), and practically only Porrim showed any improvement after death.

There's another really important thematic shadow hanging over them: if Homestuck is a coming-of-age, then the Dancestors represent a prior generation that reached physical maturity, but failed to grow up.

[The dancestors' choices] resulted not only turning Alternia into a planet full of violent murderers, but it only technically granted them what they wanted with a huge caveat, as is the case with such ill-advised bargains. The players were strong enough to win, but made a terminal universe, were barred from entry, hunted by a demon, and then started killing each other.

They're an older generation defined by how entitled and immature they are, who invited terrible forces into society and allowed the perpetuation of cruelty to continue after them. In other words, theyre boomers. It's important to note that they literally had the choice, before their Scratch, to prevent the birth of LE by simply choosing to let their species die with them - but they made the selfish choice of what was, functionally, having kids:

The heroes could either accept their defeat along with the extinction of their race, and put no others at risk. Or, [Echidna] could show them a path to a second chance, to a reality in which the chosen heroes of their race would be strong enough to succeed with ease, and claim the reward.

For more on Homestuck's coming-of-age, anti-fascist, and feminist themes, please see my essay on the Alpha Timeline. Note that I have an updated opinion: the ending was, in fact, bad on purpose, because it was a continuation of the theme of narration needing to be refuted - "who's telling the story, and why are we listening to them?" You can read more about that here. Sorry to have to link two long essays at the beginning of a really long essay, but these are the backing arguments to many of the claims I'm about to make.

I also want to refute a common fandom belief. A take I commonly see is "the dancestors are one-dimensional assholes as a snub to the fandom" - this is not true, at least to any extent moreso than the Alternian trolls.

Yes, the dancestors are riffs of Common Fandom Types of Guy, especially Types of Guy on Tumblr while the comic was being written. However, the beta trolls/kids are ALSO Internet Types of Guy - the reason the trolls are named "trolls" is because part of their original conception was that they each represented a common type of forum troll. The dancestors aren't making fun of the audience any more than the Alternian trolls are, since Hussie got his start on fora.

Moreover, they aren't actually one-dimensional, or at least not in a way meant to be a snub to people. In fact, I find the entire attitude people have that they're somehow owed the dancestors being "good" or "likable" weird. The dancestors, as I said before, are antagonistic - if not at times outright villainous. They're the story's cautionary tale, a look at what happens when a session fails and the kids in it don't grow up.

On the whole, they simply don't need a bigger role in the story than just existing, as their past actions are what spurred the plot into action, and their narrative utility now is as a window into those. Moreover, if you read between the lines and analyze them a little beyond the surface, there's actually a lot going on, which I hope to uncover in this essay.

On the Topic of Kid-Kissing

It needs to be addressed now and needs to be addressed early. The dancestors are physically 19, and the beta/alpha kids are 16 at the oldest and 13 at the youngest. Lots of the dancestors are uncomfortably okay with pursuing romantic relationships or performing romantic acts with these actual children. Cronus gets the most flak for it, but the list includes:

Cronus, who asks Eridan on a date,

Meenah, who has a "manic obsession" with Karkat, and later dates Vriska,

Meulin, who eagerly offers to ship Meenah with Karkat in red, and gets really excited about shipping the children in general, calling them her "gay babies",

Aranea, who's willing to smooch Jake in a sexy way as part of healing his brain because she thinks he's attracted to her.

Now, as gross as this all is, I do think it serves a narrative purpose. One can debate whether that narrative purpose was worth its inclusion at all, but I'm personally going to bypass this discussion since this damn essay is long enough. At least I'll clarify what I believe the narrative purpose is:

It was an extant trope at the time of the comic's writing (which has thankfully fallen out of favor) that an adult character would date a highschooler in order to show how immature, and not suited for adulthood, the adult was. One of the most famous examples of this is Scott Pilgrim's relationship with a high schooler in Scott Pilgrim, something other characters call him out on constantly.

Given that basically none of these dancestor/child relationships are intended to be read as comfortable, pleasant, or even good (I'll get more into this later), I fully believe that this is the reason for their inclusion in the story: a demonstration of the dancestors' immaturity and failure to grow up, such to the point that they see actual children as viable dating partners.

Finally, while most of the dancestors have very limited screentime, one thing we DO have is all their classpects. I'll be using my definitions, which you can find here. Please note that, while that essay does not have any textual evidence (as it was already 10k words long without any), I'm willing to back up every claim in there with textual evidence upon request.

The TL;DR is that class is correlated with character arc and starting circumstances, while aspect is correlated with base personality traits, and what qualities would make the character a successful (and unsuccessful) hero of said aspect.

I firmly believe that, given what's in the comic, it's entirely possible to deduce what each class and aspect actually do, so being provided with every Dancestor's classpect means that we have a very powerful vector by which we can understand how their tragedy unfurled.

So please join me as we turn over this big rock and take a peek at all the skeletons living in the dancestors' closets. There are a lot of them, and they are rancid, but the complex ways they interlock are endlessly fascinating, and I hope you walk away from this with some new insight, or at least a new perspective.

Establishing a Baseline

First and foremost, let's factually review the events leading up to the dancestors' Scratch, organized in the way that makes the most sense to me. Many of these events don't have any set timelines, and aren't even described in relation to each other, but by going over them in general, we can get a big picture overview of the tragedies, and it helps to make sense of the interlocking nature of their failure.

Pre-Game

The dancestors grow up in a version of troll society as designed by Feferi Peixes, where the main difference between the two is that "culling" means "coddling excessively" rather than killing. Therefore, casteism still exists, but usually does not have as life-threatening effects. Characters who would've been culled on Alternia are likewise targets for culling on Beforus - this is most relevant to Mituna and Kankri.

Meenah finds the idea of becoming the next empress so distasteful that she flees to the pink moon, where she finds and transcribes the code for SGRUB and bothers her friends into playing it with her, in large part because it promises an escape from her responsibilities.

Cronus believes he's a chosen one destined to defeat an evil wizard, who tried to kill him when he was a wiggler. The story is one part Harry Potter and Voldemort, and one part Definitely About Lord English.

Kurloz and Meulin are probably dating in red, and Kurloz and Mituna are probably dating in pale.

Latula suffers an injury that leaves her unable to smell, something she remains insecure about for the rest of her existence. Communing with her lusus à la Terezi teaches her "new ways to smell".

Damara and Rufioh are dating in red.

Kankri was likely culled on sight, while Mituna was destined for one of the highest/"cushiest'" degrees of culling possible, echoing Karkat's and Sollux's relationships with culling.

Porrim is being trained for the breeding caverns as a jade-blood, and is not happy about it. It's likely that jades are the caste with the least privileges and freedoms, given the culling system (yes, I know culling is still a form of oppression, but it's still a cushy position to be in, compared to jades being forced to work breeding duties by birth).

During the Game

All of this happens over the course of six years.

Mituna spends the whole game attempting to warn his team to stop being such assholes or else something really bad is going to happen to them, using the prophetic insight he has as a Doom player.

Meenah starts cruelly bullying Damara, under the supposed motivation of "trying to galvanize the team into action".

Porrim outright ignores frog breeding, opting instead to go on a bra-burning rampage across her session.

Meulin is shipping her friends. Due to her Mage powers and predilections, not only do these ships come true, but they're really unhealthy and toxic as a rule.

Horuss begins an affair with Rufioh.

Kankri argues with himself nonstop, rendering most memos pointless.

Kurloz has a terrible nightmare and accidentally deafens Meulin, an act he finds so shameful that he stitches his own mouth shut. The two break up, but are still "very close friends"/in a situationship.

Someone talks Cronus out of his wizard beliefs, likely Kankri, and Cronus completely loses faith in magic, as well as a sense of identity. This is really bad, given what Hope does.

Meenah finds out about Rufioh and Horuss's affair and uses it as bullying fodder.

Damara snaps, kills Meenah, renders Rufioh a quadruplegic, and begins to perform acts of "timeline sabotage," which are even more impactful given her Witch class. It's heavily implied that Damara is the cause of the dancestors not performing their own ectobiology, the glitch that rendered their game unwinnable and serves as a "calling card" for LE.

Mituna tries to divert a terrible tragedy, something "only Kurloz was witness to". Said tragedy is implied to be Kurloz's Prince meltdown, and Mituna fails, rendering him brain damaged to the extent that he can no longer think or speak coherently. The team does NOT heal him or even reference TRYING to heal him, as it's implied they're more comfortable with him like this than they were with him telling them they were all doomed assholes.

Kurloz fully commits to his doomsday clown religion and begins using Meulin and Mituna as hynopuppets/conduits to bring about the end. It's likely that they rope Damara into their religion at this time.

Latula and Mituna start dating in red. For various reasons I'll get into later, this relationship seems to have started AFTER Mituna's injury.

Meenah bakes a cake. Isn't that nice.

It's never made very clear how long it took for all of this to go down, but the way it's framed is that everything major happened fairly early on, before the Reckoning, and they spent the rest of their session faffing around. While the beta kids have a nonstandard-ly short session, the beta trolls have what seems to be a more standard timeframe of about 612 hours, or several weeks. Again... SIX YEARS elapse. The dancestors reach the age of physical adulthood within the game.

Finally, seeing no way out, Aranea goes to Echidna for her quills in order to initiate the Scratch. The Choice that she's given is to immediately stymie the harm the dancestors' actions will bring (LE) by letting their species die with them, or to try again by passing the buck onto the next generation of heroes. The pick is obvious.

Damara, who's been uncooperative since she snapped, chooses to help out with the Scratch, muttering that everyone will "get what they deserve".

Meenah uses a tumor-like bomb to kill them all just before the Scratch goes off, in the window where god tier immortality pauses before bringing them back. This allows them to exist in the afterlife with memories fully intact. It's not fully clear how many of them achieved god tier before dying.

Afterlife

Meenah stays in her castle, echoing the way she fled responsibility to the pink moon, for the millenia that her friends have been mingling in the afterlife. Her descent from her castle after LE starts popping bubbles is the first time she's interacted with her team since she died.

Porrim is the ONLY dancestor that shows improvement or reflection, coming to view her frog breeding duties as something she probably should have paid more attention to, and toning down her feminism to thoughtful, reasonable critiques. This still doesn't excuse her total bystander nature while everything else was happening, which continues into the afterlife, but it's nice to see that she's doing better, since that's so rare in this team.

Kurloz starts readying for Lord English's birth, building labyrinths in the afterlife and using Meulin and Mituna as mind-controlled helpers (and possibly Damara as well).

Meulin and Horuss start dating in pale after Horuss is inspired by the meowrails. Despite Horuss's internal anguish and anger, he's been told by Meulin to cover it up with forced positivity no matter what.

Cronus is kinning a 1950's human greaser, an act which he himself admits is probably just a cry for attention, and a greater symptom of his struggles with personal identity in the wake of losing interest in magic and wizardry.

Rufioh wants to break up with Horuss, but doesn't have the backbone to to get pushy with these requests. Horuss has difficulty hearing what he doesn't want to hear, so Rufioh winds up wilting and agreeing to continue dating him every time he tries breaking up with him.

Aranea... does all that, spurred on by a desire to be important.

Meenah decides to encourage Vriska to shirk responsibility, running off with her and starting a romantic relationship with her.

Woof, that's a lot! So, now that we've established an overview of what went wrong, something I should probably note:

It's not JUST that Damara caused the timeline glitch that retroactively summoned LE, or JUST that Meenah bullied her. When I say that the dancestors' failure is multivalent and interlocking, I mean it - especially once you get into the implications of their classpects. Cronus being a Bard of Hope - Hope being the aspect of making fake things real - losing faith in his own destiny of defeating an evil wizard likely had some karmic contribution to the first half of that destiny - the existence of the evil wizard in the first place - coming true. So on and so on. So the rest of this essay will be a deeper look into each individual dancestor, and the contributions they made towards the ultimate blowout.

Porrim Maryam: The Ultimate Bystander

Porrim's drama is the least connected to the various conflicts suffered by everyone else, though it's one of the most consequential.

The Maid of Space was of course our all-important Space player and Stoker of the Forge, 8ut as you know, we never made much progress on the frog 8reeding front, or really any aspect of the game 8efore the reckoning. [...] She challenged these roles wherever they existed in 8eforan society, as well as where she found them woven into our session, in kingdoms, class assignments, consort culture and the like.

While she is pretty much the only dancestor that reflected on her failures - having come to a realization after her game's Reckoning that she probably should've paid attention to frog breeding - the fact remains that she totally ignored this duty in favor of going on a feminist rampage.

I do actually believe there is merit to her viewpoint, something Hussie appears to agree with:

HUSSIE: Porrim is better at social justice than Kankri because she isn't a boring asshole. [...] Porrim wants there to be equality for ladies. Not everybody cares about that though, which makes it hard for people like Porrim. That's the way it is in the real world. CHALLENGES.

Note that while Hussie is a deeply unreliable narrator (he describes his own self-insert as "oafish" and "buffoonish" in the book commentary, and his narration being biased and full of holes is a very deliberate choice), there is still meaning to be gleaned from his words, especially once you identify what biases he's performing. In this case, I think he's being genuine, as Homestuck has a deeply feminist and anti-patriarchy message overall, which I touch on in my essay about the Alpha Timeline.

However, Porrim's failure is that, as correctly as she identified sexism as being an issue, she became tunnel-visioned on it to the point that she failed to do anything useful at all. Frog breeding, AKA creating a new universe, is practically the entire point of SGRUB, and though her energies could've been focused on creating a new world free of sexism, she prioritized nitpicking it in session constructs.

Her other big failure is that of being a total bystander. In her conversations with Latula and Meenah, Porrim doesn't make any references at all to the bullying Meenah perpetrated, and otherwise seems surprised at the Redglare/Mindfang situation. She's also known as promiscuous, willing to sleep around with nearly anyone, tacitly approving of her teams' actions. Much of her feminist rhetoric is undercut by the fact that she has no comment to make on the way Meenah - the team's rich fuchsia - was primarily targetting a rustblood immigrant. It's implied her constant bickering with Kankri was in part due to her complete lack of intersectionality (with the other, more major part being Kankri's misogyny, but we'll get to that).

Interestingly enough, these three failures - poor prioritization, tunnel vision, and bystanderism - are failures of Space. There are two ways for an aspect (which is associated with base personality) to fail - the first is a toxic overabundance of the aspect's natural worst traits, and the second is a dearth of its positive qualities, to the point of resembling its counterpart. Space is associated with cycles and interconnectivity, patience and passivity. Its players are distractible and frivolous, but kind and permissive. However, it's easy for Space players to become so distracted that they lose sight of the bigger picture - we see this in Porrim's poor prioritization, and the tunnel vision she incurs in pursuit. It's also easy for them to become so passive that bad actors take advantage, and this, too, is present in Porrim's complete failure to grasp her team's cruelties.

Maids, meanwhile, are victims of oppression, and start the game under some form of control. Jane's been bombarded with hypnotic subliminals her entire life, and is ultimately directly controlled hy the Condesce; Aradia is killed so as to be Doc Scratch's servant via the Handmaid, and Hussie even outright calls her a slave in his book commentary. Porrim is not an exception to this:

On 8eforus, well 8efore her drinker a8ilities had awakened, she grew up in the caste almost solely devoted to tending to the mother gru8, hatching the young and proliferating the 8rood. The jade 8loods were also an almost exclusively female caste, and she 8egan to resent the roles she was hatched into, designated for 8oth her class and gender.

Ultimately, Maids can't shake off their oppressors alone, and outside intervention is needed to rid them of their shackles. Nobody on Porrim's team seemed to give a shit about what she had to say, however, nor did they attempt to relieve her of frog breeding or attempt to alleviate her workload - leaving her ultimately shackled to frog breeding, which, aside from the final frog (usually implied to be long in the Space player's past), did not HAVE to be conducted by her. In fact, Echidna being Aranea's denizen, when she's normally associated with the frog-breeding Space player, further implies that it didn't necessarily need to be up to Porrim - perhaps the team could've come together to take up frog breeding, splitting the duties equally, freeing Porrim from oppression.

But that didn't happen, and thus, our Maid of Space is disconnected from everything but the breeding duties that bound her so.

Kankri Vantas: The Hemocaste's Number One Fan

Kankri is a casteist, ableist, slut-shaming misogynistic bootlicker.

I'm going to go a bit lighter on the citations, because he uses a hundred words where ten will do, but if you actually bother to read his diatribes, he's all-in on perpetuating oppression. Here's a quick rundown of some of the awful shit he's said:

He tells Mituna that Mituna is bad representation for disabled people, and basically tells him to his face that he wishes everything about him was different, likely as displaced jealousy that Mituna is dating Latula. This shows that his rhetoric is actually just a mask, a tool he uses to disguise his actual intentions.

He complains about how burgundies have to "check their privilege" because they don't know how good they have it compared to off-spectrums, showing that he resents it when others attempt to address their oppression.

He tells Porrim that he thinks misogyny isn't real, and then slut shames her by insinuating that she's even willing to go for the Mayor. Once more, a display of how he resents when others challenge his points, or try to take away attention from his causes.

He calls Horuss and Cronus's beliefs fake even as he's defending their right to believe in them, revealing that it's not about justice for him, but about whatever puts him in a position of power over the situation, as the quote-unquote "spiritual leader".

Kankri was very likely culled on sight for his mutant blood color, mirroring how Karkat would've been. He clearly has complicated feelings about this, as he reacts very poorly to Porrim's mothering, but it's also the source of his deep-seated casteism, and the favor he shows towards the two sea dwellers on the team. While it IS a form of oppression, those culled on Beforus ARE provided extremely comfortable lifestyles, and Kankri would've been subjected to an intense amount of pampering, being a mutant.

In other words, he's been taught his whole life that he's a very special little boy, and he both feels entitled to the emotional energies of others, and gets upset when he isn't the center of attention. In contrast to Porrim, who had valid points but prioritized poorly, for Kankri, "social justice" is just a smokescreen he uses as he verbally browbeats his team into falling into line. Any valid points he makes are twisted to suit his personal agenda of being the loudest voice in the room, and he hides behind them so nobody can properly challenge his position. The actual oppression he did face, and a genuine desire buried deep down to make the world a better place (which I do believe exists), are ultimately undercut by his willingness to play victim in order to sate his own desire for attention and control.

Kankri himself didn't contribute as directly to the team's failure, but he was, overall, a binding force of stasis - perpetuating societal prejudices, fixing them in place. It should be no surprise that the two who find Kankri the most tolerable - Horuss and Cronus - are the two biggest casteists on the team.

Blood is about bonds - familial, platonic, romantic, and societal. It governs oaths, promises, compatability, and all interpersonal relationships. Its players, in contrast to Breath's free-spirited youthfulness, tend to be neurotic and controlling. At their best, they're mature, empathetic, and responsible, and indeed Karkat is one of the most level-headed and generally correct members of his team when he's not flying off the handle, but at toxic overabundance, they become iron-fisted dictators, "my way or the highway" types - to the point of shirking their innate sense of empathy and natural compulsion to be helpful to others.

Seers, meanwhile, struggle with blindness - either by hubris and ego, or else by shame-induced self-infliction. Rose's ego prevented her from bonding with her mother, and her need to be the smartest person in the room let Doc Scratch manipulate her; she later copes with her grief by drinking herself stupid, opposite Light's association with knowledge and insight. Terezi boldly painted herself into a corner where the only option left was killing Vriska, and coped with the guilt by throwing herself into a toxic relationship with Gamzee, a Gamzee victory that triumphed over Mind's sense of justice and karma.

Kankri is so moved by ego - his selfish desires for a society that works best for him personally, and his confidence that he knows better than the rest of his team - that he's blind to how harmful his rhetoric is. He damages their ability to move forward by chaining them in place, an ultimate failure of Blood.

Moreover, he's also inflicted a "blindness" upon himself - due to his staunch celibacy, he doesn't seem to notice that he has clear red feelings for Latula and pale feelings for Cronus - and this is to disastrous effect. The motivator behind his cruelty to Mituna appears to be jealousy, and he interrupts a conversation Cronus is having with Meenah, where she's about to make him reflect on choices that are harming him, just in time to prevent Cronus from reaching his epiphany. In fact, it's implied that Kankri is the one who talked Cronus out of his wizard faith in the first place, which we'll get into later (this is the most direct contribution Kankri made to the dancestor's failure).

As such, our Seer of Blood is sightless, and through blindness both based in ego and self-inflicted, he can't see the damage he's dealing.

Cronus Ampora: Hopeless - And That's Everyone's Problem Now

Cronus is a nasty casteist fuckboy who's greatly disliked by his team, and also everyone else, for good reason. He's mostly irrelevant to everyone and failed to do anything of worth. The problem is, he's a Bard of Hope, and thus, was one of the greatest contributors to the creation of LE.

Cronus as we see him is easy to explain. He's fundamentally a directionless, shitty rich kid, who's never had real problems before, and thus, never had the kinds of formative experiences that would've built him a personal identity. In an effort to find something to give his directionless (after)life some meaning, he's decided that he's humankin, specifically a 1950's greaser. He's also trying to get laid for similar reasons. What else is there to do when you don't feel like you have a real personality, and thus, don't really know how to open up to others or connect on a deeper level, but still crave an intimate relationship of some sort?

The thing is, Cronus wasn't always this way, and in fact, started out his game quite different:

[H]e once had a deeply a8iding faith in magic, and dedicated himself to 8ecoming a great wizard. He 8ecame convinced he was hatched to defeat an extraordinarily evil magician, one he swore the angels foretold of. Though when pressed for the name of the man, he would not say it, claiming it was too dangerous to even enunciate. Part of his self-aggrandizing mythos was that this magician once somehow from afar tried to strike him down at a young age, so he would never have to face him. 8ut the evil spell was deflected, sealing the magician's spirit away in a series of unassuming vessels until he could find some other cunning way to enter our universe. The attack supposedly left him with his distinctive scar, which he was not reluctant to point out when trying to hit on me.

Now, while this is definitely Harry Potter, it's also worded so as to resemble Lord English, and this is not a coincidence. You see, Hope is a power that makes fake things real.

Believing in things reduces their fakeness attribute. It's the force that shapes your reality, used to snatch personal meaning from the jaws of a cynical and nihilistic environment. Could this be why Hope is framed as the most fundamentally powerful aspect?

Ultimately, it didn't matter if Cronus's stupid wizard faith (and it is framed as a faith, a religious belief - put a pin in this) was real or not. In fact, the more credible journey for a Hope player would be if his personal mythos were fake - because Hope would've made it real.

However...

8ut at some point he 8ecame disillusioned with magic. [...] Perhaps someone talked him out of his 8eliefs. May8e a friend close to him. Or, if one is to 8elieve his fantasy held any water, perhaps someone who was in league with the evil magician.

As all Bards do, he suffered a crisis of faith, and he was never able to recover. Now, the identity of the person who talked him out of his religion is never made explicit, but I'm firmly convinced it was Kankri. First of all, who else on the team would qualify as a "friend close to him"? While "someone in league with the evil magician" might refer to Kurloz, Meulin, or Damara, Cronus seems wholly unrelated to the latter two, never mentioning them once, and while he's "scared" by Kurloz, it's not enough to not hit on him.

However, "in league with the evil magician" can also be interpreted metaphorically - someone who represents the same values as Lord English does, especially those of misogyny, fascism, and oppression. Which, again, points to Kankri. In fact, the main interaction Cronus has with Kankri illustrates the harm Kankri is doing to him: right as Cronus is about to have a personal epiphany that his humankin schtick is doing him more harm than good, Kankri jumps in to guilt-trip him until he continues with the act.

CRONUS: to be honest, she might be right. sometimes i think i might only be saying im a human to get attention. maybe i should givwe it up. KANKRI: I'd 6e extremely disapp9inted t9 hear that, if it were true. That w9uld 6e such a slap in the face t9 all th9se wh9 kn9w themselves t9 6e an alien while trapped in the pedestrian 69dy 9f their 9wn race. It w9uld 6e unspeaka6ly invalidating 9f their struggles and massively triggering t9 their em9ti9ns. #TW #invalidated struggles #triggered em9ti9ns KANKRI: 6ut f9rtunately, I kn9w y9u w9uld never st99p as l9w as that. Y9u understanda6ly have d9u6ts a69ut y9ur feelings and pr96a6ly d9wnplay them as a defense mechanism, since s9 few are prepared t9 rec9gnize the legitimacy 9f y9ur plight. 6ut I am, and I just wanted y9u t9 kn9w that I'm here f9r y9u, and am prepared t9 lecture t9 y9u extensively, I mean, listen t9 y9u extensively, a69ut y9ur ultra-imp9rtant pr96lem.

Fucking Kankri! He doesn't even believe in Cronus's act himself (calling it a "fantasy versi9n 9f [him]self"), but Cronus's conversation with Meenah is pale-coded, with Cronus being the only person on the team able to make Meenah have doubts about how awesome the Condesce (and by extension, her own worst qualities) are, with her able to pierce through Cronus's bullshit and make him rethink his choices. But Kankri has a palecrush on Cronus, so he cannot abide by Cronus having a pale interaction with anyone else.

KANKRI: Listen, I was d9ing y9u a fav9r. Y9u d9n't need t9 6e dating any9ne wh9 can't appreciate y9u f9r wh9 y9u really are[.]

But his interruption of Cronus's character development, and also his breaking of Cronus's faith, aren't just disastrous for Cronus's ability to self-actualize - remember, Cronus is a Bard of Hope.

UU: while the more passive bard coUld be seen as "one who allows x to be destroyed, or invites destrUction throUgh x," as if by the will of the aspect. TT: I'm obviously no expert, but that sounds like a pretty odd thing for a Bard to do. UU: maybe! it's a qUirky class. UU: somewhat like a wildcard role for a hero. very Unpredictable. UU: they are typically known for their spontaneoUs and dramatic story-altering inflUence on the fate of a party. UU: some of the more remarkable tales involve sUch parties, where the bard is single handedly responsible for their spectacUlar downfall or improbable victory. or both!

Bards act as a conduit by which their Aspect dramatically alters fate, for better or for worse, and Hope is a power that makes fake things real. Cronus had a Bard crisis of faith, never recovered, and, in his failure to do so, began to exhibit his aspect at its nadir - where Hope players should be idealists, dreaming up better futures with a naive and shameless sincerity, Cronus has become self-conscious, frustrated with himself and magic, and utterly materialistic, seeking only immediate physical gratification. Hope, at its worst, picks out such bleak possibilities to invest its incredible, reality-altering power into, that it actually serves to close possibilities and ruin everything - mirroring Rage's ability to tear down false truths.

It is, therefore, incredibly likely that the direct manifestation of his Bard of Hope abilities is the materialization of the first half of Cronus's faith - the existence of the evil wizard - and not the second - that he would become a wizard to defeat him. This is one of the single greatest karmic contributions to LE's improbable existence. Perhaps this is the source of Kurloz's pivotal nightmare, which would've sprung out of nowhere, given LE doesn't exist until after the Scratch? We can only speculate, but this seems to me the most likely source of Lord English worship within the dancestors - Hope made him real.

And so, our Bard of Hope is faithless, and by extension, hopeless - in such a way that he breathes active calamity into existence.

Mituna Captor: Tried to Warn Them, but Nobody Wanted to Listen

I'm going to preface this section with a small list of what we will NOT be discussing, not because the conversations aren't important to have, but because they are not relevant to his essay. First of all, I will not be litigating the issue of whether or not Mituna's portrayal of TBIs/neurodivergence/etc. is problematic. I will also not be discussing the greater conversation surrounding those with such conditions to consent romantically or sexually. These are important topics to talk about, but they're just not in the scope of this essay (it's long enough as it is!).

As a break from form, I'm going to discuss his classpect first. This is because the implications of his classpect provide vital context for how we are meant to interpret and understand Mituna's arc.

Doom is the aspect presiding death, sleep, the future, and endings. It sits opposite Life, as Life's equal-and-opposite, which helps shed some light on Doom-specific qualities, as we have little exploration into Doom itself. Most notably, our three Life players are stubborn optimists, and our two Doom players are mutable pessimists. Sollux is literally introduced by changing his mind about being introduced, before changing his mind a second time, while Cronus notes that Mituna has a long-running schtick of being wildly offensive, and then pathetically contrite. Mituna is stated to have visions of the future even without being one of the two future-sighted classes (Mage and Seer), making some degree of prophetic insight a part of Doom.

I'm also firmly convinced that it's Doom, and not being a Captor, that makes both Sollux and Mituna dual-dreamers. Most non-Seer/non-Mage players' main interaction with prophecy will be the clouds of Skaia or the whispers of the Horrorterrors while they're asleep, and being a dual-dreamer gives Doom access to both, as well as an extra "death" to spare - which Sollux makes great use of, as he arrives to his session dead. Moreover, being a dual dreamer allowed Sollux to be "half-dead" in the afterlife, granting him the special ability to leave - and navigate - the dream bubbles. This influence over the realm of the dead is notable, so please put a pin in it.

Heirs, meanwhile, bear a character arc of defecting from decadence. They're born into positions of wealth and comfort relative to their societies - John enjoys an upper-middle class lifestyle, with a supportive and loving father, and Equius enjoys being high enough nobility not to worry about culling, but low enough not to bear any pressing responsibilities, and has a supportive and loving lusus. Mituna, similarly, was born to a supportive and caring bicyclopsdad (as opposed to Sollux's, who was a big terrible idiot), with an eventual fate of being culled for his powerful psionic brain.

Before anyone protests that culling on Beforus is still a form of oppression - it's "a position of wealth and comfort relative to their society." Ultimately, being a stuffy capitalist isn't exactly a great destiny, and being a noble on Alternia still means being subject to a horrific system of murdering and being murdered. In a similar vein, Mituna's inheritance is a wolf in sheep's clothing. In fact, this exact wolf-in-sheep's-clothing nature of inheritance factors into the Heir's arc.

Heirs are on a ticking clock. Their aspects are powerful, but they struggle to control them. After all, they're a passive class:

He is the Heir of Breath after all. It's a passive class, and he's a passive guy. An heir, literally speaking, is one who inherits stuff.

And passive classes work best when they're allowing their aspect to be used for others:

UU: the +/- distinction can mean many things, bUt coUld be qUite roUghly sUmmed Up in this way: active classes exploit their aspect to benefit themselves, while passive classes allow their aspect to benefit others.

We see this with John, who gains the incredible power to retcon the story, unsticking it from the alpha timeline, but doesn't know how to effect useful change without guidance from others. Even Equius's first chronological expression of Void is his mere presence providing a shield for Vriska from Doc Scratch's omniscience.

But because of their privileged upbringings, it's difficult for them to know how to help others, or even that they should. John is goofy and friendly, but doesn't seem to notice that Dave is being constantly abused, and doesn't question the horrific violence of troll culture when Vriska tells him about it (something which Hussie chastises him for in the book commentary), while Equius's blind spots are even more glaring, given his casteism and complete obliviousness regarding his own fetishes.

Thus, like wealthy inheritors in real life, an Heir that fails to interrogate the systemic injustices of the system they were born into becomes swallowed up by their inheritance, another brick in the wall, rendering their aspect out of reach. John's retcon powers, before he gains control over them, nearly take him out of the story entirely (Breath and its associations with freedom and independence), while Equius succumbs to his fetish for submission and allows Gamzee to strangle him to death (Void and its associations with vice and sexual pleasure - Hussie notes on multiple fronts that Equius could've escaped at any point just by flexing his neck muscles, but chose not to because horny).

While we don't have very much information about Mituna before his injury, the dancestors' failure is a foregone conclusion; therefore, we can conclude that Mituna's current state is a reflection of his failure as an Heir, and subsequently being "swallowing up" by Doom. Mituna's injury is, within the context of the story, therefore a bad thing that happened to him, and thus, it reflects poorly on every other player who not only didn't heal him, but never mentions ever trying to.

It's here that I want to point out something odd about the dancestors as a group. Isn't it strange that they retained many of their injuries even into death?

Injuries don't need to carry into the afterlife - here Tavros is with his legs fully intact. Even if you assume that characters who consider their injury to be part of their identity, like Terezi and her blindness, therefore get to keep their body in that state after death, Latula clearly has insecurities about her sense of smell, Meulin was so disheartened by her deafness that she broke up with Kurloz over it, and there's no way that Mituna is happy about the fact that he can hardly string together a coherent thought anymore.

But remember, Heirs are experts at leveraging their aspects on others' behalf, and Doom has influence and sway over death and the dead. And so, on that note, let's actually begin analyzing Mituna himself.

The primary description we have of Mituna before his injury is this:

The Heir of Doom was once a powerful psionic. He was gifted with vision twofold, and had strong prophetic insights wherever a 8leak future was concerned. He had much to say when it came to warning us a8out the path of doom and destruction we were all headed for, 8ut no one took him very seriously. 8ut one day he lost all those a8ilities when he 8adly overexerted himself. It's hard to get any specifics from him, 8ut indications are that he applied every last 8it of energy he had toward some great act of heroism, saving us all from some looming threat. Not only did his exertion permanently 8urn out his psychic a8ilities, 8ut it left him somewhat... er. Incoherent.

Doom players tend to stagnate and stay in place. Their mutability, ironically, means they have a tendency to go nowhere. However, their pessimism can cause them to become fixated on these nowheres - to become so certain of an unhappy ending that they can become energized by the notion, steamrolling over others, which can resemble Life's stubborn optimism. It seems this may have been what happened with Mituna - though it appears to be far and away aggravated by his injury, there's an implication when he's talking with Meenah and Cronus that he was already prone to being wildly offensive and aggressive even before it:

CRONUS: your vwhole bifurcated demeanor is such an act. half the time you are noxious and incomprehensible, and the other half you are mild and contrite? sure, "PAL." CRONUS: as if im not SO on to you. you only pretend to say youre sorry to get girls to like you more. sure seems like pyropes a sucker for the ruse. like im not familiar vwith THOSE tactics. vwho do you think vwrote the book on that??

MITUNA: 817H1CH WH4Y D0N7 Y0U 5H00V3 M0Y R4D 1NJURJY P4N3L 1N7H0 URR N457H7Y 53XXXU4L3 PR1V457 P4R7H 0RF P3R3RF3R3R4NC3 MEENAH: thank fuck you were never a major playa at least from my personal vantage over the course a this ridicu huge narrative #way minor character yo MEENAH: probably woulda offed my shellf even schooner if i had to hear you talk much #really too bad since you got the bestest fishiest name of anyone #38( MITUNA: ..,.,..,,...,..,.,. MITUNA: 50RRY

What's worse, remember how I said earlier that it's implied that all the major problems occurred before their reckoning (which was likely on a timeframe of weeks or months), and then they spent six years faffing around in their session besides? This means that Mituna was left injured for six years, and not a single time does anyone mention even attempting to heal him. Even if you subscribe to the idea that their Life player's class precluded her from healing people (and it doesn't; the Helmsman's lifespan is explicitly extended by the Condesce's powers), Aranea's powerset is explicitly geared toward healing injuries of the mind:

ARANEA: I can see every fault and fissure in your mind. My vision 8-fold sheds light on every injury you have ever suffered, whether emotional or physical. ARANEA: I can repair it all for you, Jake. JAKE: (Oh no...) ARANEA: I can heal your mind. JAKE: (Oh n-n-n-) ARANEA: I can heal your soul. JAKE: N-n-n-n-n-n-n-nooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

... So why doesn't she? Why doesn't anyone? Well, the implication is... that he was annoying! He was the only member of the team who was trying to tell them to stop being such assholes, or else they would be hurtling themselves face-first into a catastrophe, and this was such a bummer and so unpleasant to hear (likely not helped by his aggressive and offensive way of wording things) that his team actually prefers him injured. At least this way, he isn't constantly calling them out for the horrible shit that they do to each other on a regular basis. Doom players are commiserators, not a healers, and their power lies in their ability to empathize and relate, opposite Life's tendency to charge forward, not caring who they trample on the way. Mituna was never able to tap into these powers of empathy enough to get people to listen to him, and he paid for this with his injury - the version of him his teammates prefer, because now they can take advantage of him.

Cronus does so most obviously, with his unwanted advances that Mituna sits there and takes because he can't reason well enough to escape of his own volition, but I posit - and will stand by this claim - that Latula and Kurloz, his two romantic partners, are taking advantage of him, too. Kurloz is implied to be directly puppeting him the way he puppets Meulin, the source of the "rumor" Cronus heard that Mituna is "lucid" when he's around Kurloz - in fact, it's implied that Mituna's injury was directly caused by Kurloz, as part of his Prince meltdown, something we'll get into more when we discuss Kurloz. I believe this is why several of the dancestors retain major injuries into the afterlife - in a dark reflection of how an Heir is supposed to operate, Kurloz is using Mituna as a conduit to exert influence over the afterlife, rendering Doom and death an oppressive force rather than peaceful resting place. I think there's a reason that Meenah questions the fact that some people have stayed injured when talking to Mituna. It should be his area of expertise, after all!

Now, while we are sidestepping the greater discussion overall of the consent of those with TBIs, I want to state that Mituna specifically, post-injury, cannot be considered fully consenting.

Cronus says the quiet part out loud:

CRONUS: i really feel like youre one of the only people i can open up to about my feelings. i guess it really does help to confide in someone vwho basically lacks the ability to repeat vwhat you say vwith any clarity or coherence, or evwen understand vwhat you said in the first place.

And unfortunately, this is pretty true: Mituna is impaired to the point where he:

Can't answer yes or no to whether he's god tier, because he doesn't know/can't remember/doesn't fully seem to understand the question.

Can't seem to understand that Meenah's asking him to strip because she's trying to check if he has god tier wings, instead enthusiastically assuming that she's asking to have sex with him.

Forgets how to take his own shirt off.

Doesn't understand that Cronus is touching him as a prelude to sexual intentions, just that he doesn't like it.

As is often the case with TBIs, he does have glimpses of clarity, but - whether this portrayal is offensive or not - the clear indication to me is that, within the context of the comic, we should come away with the understanding that Mituna can barely register what's going on, can barely understand what others are trying to communicate to him, and can barely voice what few thoughts he is able to string together. And I think it would also be one thing if he was simply born this way, but again, this is the result of an injury that is portrayed as a terrible thing that happened to him, and his injured state is not a reflection of who he was, and what decisions he would've made, before it happened.

And thus the Heir of Doom has inherited Doom in the worst way, becoming Doom as a force of oppression, bereft of empathy, understanding, or peace.

Latula Pyrope: Insecure Poser, Derelict Duty

Latula is a rad gamer girl... not! This is an act, and she even admits that it's an act.

PORRIM: I just think yo+u sho+uld be yo+urself mo+re o+ften. We already kno+w yo+u are stro+ng and go+o+d at games and all that. Yo+u have no+thing to+ pro+ve. LATULA: y34h. your3 prob4bly r1ght. LATULA: 1ts k1nd of str3ssful som3t1m3s, k33p1ng 1t up! som3t1m3s 1 forg3t to put z33s on th3 3nd of words, 4nd 1 r34lly str3ss out 4bout 1t. #sp3c14lly wh3n 1m off my m3ds

So what's Latula's actual deal? Well, we get a really good glimpse of it here:

LATULA: for most of th3 t1m3 w3 kn3w 34ch oth3r, 1 w4s 4ll l1k3, WHY SHOULD TH3R3 B3 TWO B4D4SS, 1N-YOUR-F4C3 GRLZ 1N TH3 GROUP??? LATULA: sort of ov3rk1ll, r1ght? MEENAH: mehhh #u searious? LATULA: 1 w4s k1nd of v13w1ng you 4s 4 comp3t1tor, 1n l1k3 4 two grl RAD-OFF. 1 w4s w1nn1ng 1n my m1nd, of cours3. but s33, 1 h4d 1t 4ll wrong!!!! MEENAH: did you LATULA: Y3AH! s33, 1m th3 t34mz R4D GRL, wh3r34s YOUR3 th3 t34mz B4D GRL!!!! 1t 4ll m4k3s p3rf3ct s3ns3! do3snt th4t m4k3 SO MUCH S3NS3??? MEENAH: that MEENAH: is the stupidest glubbin thing to require any sorta rationalization i ever heard #p lame tules LATULA: s33 p4ych3ck? 1 kn3w 1 could count on you to b3 just1f14bly cyn1c4l 4bout my n3urot1c bullsh1t. you RUL3!!!

Latula is another character we get little direct development of, so I'll head into classpect analysis early, as she's much easier to understand once we have the context of Knights and Mind players.

Mind governs logic, rationality, justice, karma, behaviors, and consequences. The justice and karma associations are explained as a Mindy Thing by Latula herself:

PORRIM: Did yo+u no+t kno+w that? #Mindfang gave yo+u five #Then left yo+u hanging LATULA: n3v3r r34lly thought 4bout 1t. but now th4t you m3nt1on 1t, th4t outcom3 m4k3s 4ll sorts of s3ns3 to m3. PORRIM: It do+es? Ho+w? LATULA: just do3s, b4b3z. PORRIM: I do+n't really understand karma. LATULA: th4ts c4us3 your3 not 4 m1nd pl4y3r.

Mind players tend to be cunning and manipulative. As the aspect presiding over the "effect" of cause-and-effect, they're finely attuned to the various webs of actions and consequences, but not so much to the inner workings of emotions and identity, which are Heart's domain, Mind's equal-and-opposite. As such, Mind players have a tendency to deemphasize their own emotions, substituting systems of karma, justice, societal attitudes, etc. to make decisions instead. We see this in Terezi's primary character struggle, the way she painted herself into a corner where the only viable outcome was killing Vriska, which happened because she consistently prioritized what Vriska karmically deserved over her own desire to maintain their friendship. In the worst case, their own identity and sense of self can become so confused that they seek out unhealthy relationships with others, in an attempt to supplement their poor sense of personal identity with some sort of external validation - you can see this in Terezi's toxic relationship with Gamzee, or, indeed, with Latula's relationship with Mituna (more on this later).

Knights, meanwhile, struggle with great insecurity. Often provided a significant role by the forces of fate and prophecy, they suffer deeply from imposter syndrome and/or self-loathing, and to help them cope with these feelings, they effect a facade that distances them from their aspect. Karkat, whose aspect presides over bonds and relationships, insists he's a big bad leader who doesn't give a shit about other people, and this breakdown of Blood's bonds culminated in Murderstuck. Dave, whose aspect presides over minutiae, goal-orientedness, and struggle, pretends to be a disaffected cool guy. In the worst case, their insecurity can become so intense that they invest completely into their facades, laying down their weapons and refusing the call entirely. Dave, at the belly of his whale, declares that he won't fight LE, as he "doesn't even think he did anything directly bad to them" - despite Dave literally being haunted by LE for his entire childhood under the guise of Lil' Cal, a detail he'd normally notice, given how often he secretly pays attention (which is a Timey Thing).

Latula struggles greatly with her own personal identity, her anxiety surrounding not having anything unique or standout about her in her friend group. To cope with this, she projects a facade that practically screams its "personality" from the rooftops - she's a dumb but radical "gamer girl". In doing so, she distances herself from her actual aspect - gone are Mind's cunning and intellect, which even Porrim calls her out on:

PORRIM: Yo+u can pretend to+ misunderstand all yo+u want, but we've talked abo+ut this befo+re and I kno+w yo+u're smarter abo+ut this than yo+u let o+n.

But, crucially, it also distances her from Mind's ties with karma and justice. Latula states that, not only does she dislike Aranea, but she can also absolutely understand the chains of karma and destiny that would've led to Mindfang and Redglare having such a contentious relationship that it led to them killing each other.

What else is Latula aware of, that she's completely chosen to ignore, out of desperate fear that it wouldn't suit her image, would make her seem less "r4d"?

Well... let's talk about Mituna. As we've already covered in his section, his ability to consent to this relationship is dubious, and the fact that it's dubious at all is already not a great sign. But I also want to bring up a couple other things. Did you know that, throughout all of Mituna's dialogue - including when he's enthusiastically trying to strip to have sex with Meenah - he doesn't mention dating Latula even one time?

Other characters will bring it up, but Mituna himself doesn't say anything about it. And, again, given that he's enthusiastically ready to get nasty with Meenah... one wonders if he's even lucid enough to know that he and Latula are dating.

MEENAH: look take off your rad shirt deal and lemme see if you got wings MITUNA: 3H3HH3H7H37H37H3 YY35 MITUNA: 7H0NGH7 Y0DU N3V3R 45K MITUNA: 817HCH 4C4M3 4R0UN57 70 MY W1L135 MU7H4FUCK5! #W1L135 #MUH #FUX MITUNA: W417 H3LUP #!!!!!!!!!! MITUNA: H3LP H0W D01 74K3 0FF MY CL07H37H 4G41N? #8( MEENAH: yeah keep your shirt on you made that exchange beyond awful

Hey, maybe he does. He does get sad when Cronus tells him that Latula's only dating him out of pity. But still, the fact that it's in question at all - and also the fact that he's totally up for cheating with Meenah - are bad signs!

But even putting that to the side for a second... what does Latula even see in him? He's constantly saying slurs, he's down to cheat at the first opportunity, he's questionably capable of stringing a coherent thought together... well, good news! It comes up in conversation.

MEENAH: mother glubber MEENAH: seriously didnt think T)(ATD last LATULA: 1dk, th3r3z w4y mor3 to h1m th4n. w3ll, 4ll th3 t3rr1bl3 4nd stup1d sh1t h3 s4ys 4ll th3 t1m3. LATULA: 4nd 1ts 4lw4yz f3lt l1k3 h3 n33ds m3 1f th4t m4k3s s3ns3, 3v3n 4ft3r dy1ng. so th3r3z th4t!!!!

So, let's actually break down what she's saying here.

She feels the need to insult him while she's trying to come up with something nice to say.

She can't actually name anything specific that she likes about him...

Except that he's dependent on her. She likes him because he can't reliably function away from her. Woof.

But I also want to turn your attention to the phrase "way more to him". What does she mean by this, exactly? Does she mean some of the traits he had before his injury? If so, how come it never comes up that Latula wanted to heal him, or tried to heal him? In fact, Aranea - who, again, has a powerset specifically suited for healing minds - comes up in conversation between Porrim and Latula, and Latula doesn't mention ANYTHING about Mituna. She's even on friendly terms with Aranea.

PORRIM: Like, as far as I kno+w, yo+u and Aranea always go+t alo+ng. Didn't yo+u? #Radglare #Kindfang LATULA: 3h 1 gu3ss. n3v3r sp3nt much t1m3 th1nk1ng 4bout s3rk3t, tbh. LATULA: 4lw4ys thought sh3 w4s 4 s3lf 4bsorb3d snooz3, 1f you r34lly w4nt to know. #zzzz #not 3v3n th3 r4d k1nd of z33s

The only other possible indication that they might secretly have a good relationship is that she threatens that if Damara touches Mituna, she'll kill Damara. Now, we'll have to save a lot of this for the Damara part of the essay, but I'll note here that Damara is perfectly pleasant and kind to people she doesn't have any personal beef with, with the example being the human kids. However, since the bulk of her team were complicit bystanders (and even Meenah's friends) in her horrific bullying, she obviously has great anger at all of them. However... if there's any exception to the bystander disease that plagued her team, it would've been Mituna, the only one trying to warn them they were headed for a terrible, bleak ending. Wouldn't he, out of everyone on the team, be someone Damara is fond of?

So, there are several options here... but they ALL make Latula look bad to varying degrees.

Damara really IS a threat to Mituna.

This still makes Latula a bystander in Damara's abuse, and a terrible hypocrite, as Kankri says one of the things he likes about her is her egalitarian, non-casteist demeanor, but she totally let a fuchsia bullying a burgundy slide, but I suppose it's the option that makes her look the least bad otherwise. Again, it seems unlikely, given the way Damara operates, but it's technically possible.

Damara is on friendly terms with Mituna, but Latula doesn't know this, and thinks she's protecting him.

This means she's still a bystander, as described above, but ALSO seems unlikely given we know Latula has Mind insight into webs of karma, and is a lot smarter than she lets on, which brings us to:

Damara is on friendly terms with Mituna, and Latula is keeping them apart deliberately.

Unfortunately, it's possible... she's dating Mituna at all, meaning she's already taking advantage of him. Ultimately, we can't say for sure what's going on there, but I don't think it's as fully innocent as it seems, especially when so much of the rest of her and Mituna's relationship is cast in such a worrying light.

Knights are tasked with leadership positions, and their failures to live up to them result in the breakdowns of their teams. Karkat's failure to manage his team's interpersonal relationships blew up into Murderstuck, Dave's refusal to keep working towards their goals means the bad guys win, and Latula's refusal to engage with the lattices of karma within her team, or deal directly with her own insecurities, means that none of these injustices ever get addressed. Even though Latula isn't a casteists, casteists are allowed to continue on being castests; even though Latula has insecurities about her own disability, those who take advantage of disabilities proliferate; even though Latula commands great respect and admiration from her team, she never comes down with the hammer - and passively allowing evil to exist is the same as picking evil's side.

And so our Knight of Mind is too busy pretending to be something she's not, cutting off her intellect, cunning and acumen, rendering justice a non-entity.

Aranea Serket: Enabled Too Close to the Sun

Aranea's another one of those characters that doesn't really directly seem to contribute to the team's problems as much, and ironically, because we have so much more of her available to peruse, there's a lot less that I need to say. It's pretty obvious what happened - she was always secretly pretty selfish and cruel, and ended up desiring the spotlight so hard that she went power-mad, challenged the Condy, and GAME OVER'd herself.

As a result, I'm instead going to do a classpect read on her, so we can better understand what she contributed to her team before her death. Which was mostly nothing good!

Light is, fittingly, one of the most well-explored aspects in the story. Governing the realm of knowledge, fortune, and vision, its players are erudite, learned, and guiding stars. Light players tend to love the spotlight, to be important, to be acknowledged - this is the crux of both Vriska's and Aranea's respective arcs, but Rose also has a flair for the dramatic, and writes her long-winded Gamespot guide as a form of one-upsmanship to the other extant guides. This desire for external validation, however, means that they're always playing to an imaginary crowd, and they don't deal very well with having that attention taken away from them. Light players are volatile and complicated, attention hogs and drama queens, and they deal poorly with embarrassment, shame, and failure.

But we already know about Light. Light players won't shut up about Light. Let's talk about something a bit more enigmatic: Sylphs.

Aranea presents Sylphs as healers and nurturers, but she's hardly an unbiased source. In fact, bias happens to be a common thread linking Sylphs, and their active counterpart, Witches, together. The struggle at the core of being a Sylph is that Sylphs are enablers.

"Enabler" is the single most consistent word Hussie uses to describe Kanaya, and I don't think it's just her Space aspect at play. Even Kanaya herself discusses how one of her major personal problems is a fascination, an attraction, with "dangerous" people. We see this exact tendency mirrored in Aranea, who has a fascination with her team's resident Thief, too.

In fact, one of the most notable things about Aranea's little expositional blurbs is the way she downplays the cruelty of her teammates, especially Meenah. Meenah's bullying was horrific, constant, and had major undertones of racism/casteism, and here's how Aranea describes it:

ARANEA: So you did your 8est to rile up the crew any way you could. Appealing to peoples insecurities, 8uried hostilities, 8rewing rivalries... needling anyone you could into confrontation with others. Your theory was that increasing everyone's state of aggression would make them 8etter equipped to play the game. And you were sort of right a8out that! 8ut the Alternians would prove it. Not our group, sadly. ARANEA: The poor girl who took the 8runt of your 8ullying tactics was Damara Megido. You talked up her matesprit's 8etrayal making her feel even more dreadful, while pushing him further into the arms of her rival, until she simply snapped. She attacked him, paralyzing him from the neck down. You finally got the aggressive confrontation you were looking for. Unfortunately, you unleashed something even you weren't prepared for, and you had to deal with her yourself. After a long 8loody duel, she killed you. And you would have stayed dead if not for me! ARANEA: You never listened to me. You just kept needling and fussing and meddling until eventually you paid the price, and I had to 8ail you out.

Let's notice where Aranea chooses to put the focus: not on the cruelty of the bully's actions, not on the horrific pain and suffering that Damara must've endured, but on how ARANEA had to save poor Meenah.

In fact, this shocking callousness is a constant fixture of Aranea's exposition. It mirrors Kanaya at her worst, as they both pick and choose their favorites in the team to lavish with kindness and attention, and treat others like objects of ridicule - Kanaya mocks Eridan to his face, and Aranea:

Mocks Latula's inability to smell.

ARANEA: She was truly an inspiration, and proved 8eyond a shadow of a dou8t that any handicap can 8e overcome, and doesn't have to stop you from 8eing as rad as you can truly 8e. MEENAH: wuuut MEENAH: serket are you whistlin through my blowhole with his idiotic shit ARANEA: Yes, that last part was a joke. Lighten up, Peixes!

Mocks Cronus's wizard faith (his one redeeming quality).

ARANEA: Whatever the case, it was pro8a8ly for the 8est, since pretty much everyone who had half a think pan thought it was all a 8unch of ridiculous nonsense. MEENAH: serket why do you got to hate on other peoples religions MEENAH: dont you kno they just as much a load of crackpotty bunk as all your spiritual bullfuck ARANEA: 8ut I........ ARANEA: Yes, I guess I was out of line. ARANEA: Sorry, I was just trying to riff with you little on a mutually disliked acquaintance. Is that really so 8ad? Why do you have to take every opportunity to knock my personal 8eliefs? ARANEA: You can really 8e so mean sometimes.

And says this incredibly out-of-pocket thing:

And says this incredibly out-of-pocket thing: ARANEA: It was almost a little eerie how happily she complied with our plan. What did Rufioh say she said? Something a8out how we would all finally get what we deserved... ARANEA: Which at the time, I thought sounded chilling. 8ut there's really two ways of looking at it. One is how the Scratch re8ooted our world into a state of pure chaos, culminating in the annihilation of our universe. 8ut on the other hand, we all got the chance to live out our wildest fantasies as adults on Alternia! ARANEA: At least you and I sure did. And I wouldn't dou8t she feels the same way.

Yeah, it sure was Damara's wildest fantasy to be abused by Doc Scratch to the point of making actual suicide attempts to escape him... and Kankri's wildest fantasy to be troll crucified, and all his friends' wildest fantasies to be hunted down for their association with him and turned into slaves, exiles, or worse... or Porrim's wildest fantasy to be raped by Mindfang.

But apparently that's part of Aranea's wildest fantasies, huh?

We also see from the Terezi situation - where Aranea first frames her abilities as "healing" and "nurturing," and makes an offer to heal Terezi's eyes as an attempt to help her "heal" from her emotional wounds - that Aranea has no idea what healing is at all. Rather, she helps people avoid (Void) what they're hurting from, what they should confront, grapple with, and accept, in order to truly move on. Knowing that Void is associated with sexual pleasure and vice, and that an Aspect often resembles its counterpart when its player is at their worst, what does this say about Actual Rapist Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, or the Jake-kissing Aranea?

Light players have an innate sense of the spotlight, and an understanding that, for it to shine on one person, it must necessarily be taken from another. Aranea enabled the two Thieves in her (after)life until they chummed up so much that they didn't give a shit about her anymore, at which point she decided to enable the one bastard she could count on - herself. And in attempting to hog that spotlight all by herself, she cosigned the entire timeline to obscurity.

And so our Sylph of Light leaves a legacy of cruelty, toxicity, suffering, pain, and oblivion, her light a poison, not a salve.

Kurloz Makara: Gave Up On "Better"

I do want to go through some Kurloz stuff before I launch into the classpect things, most notably that he's really utterly vile by the time we see him. Before his Prince meltdown, which we'll get to, perhaps there was something redeeming about him, but by the time we get to see him in the comic, he's lost any respectable qualities.

Kurloz is an adherent of the same religion as Gamzee, although, somehow, he carries even less hope than Gamzee does. Let's note the basic tenents of their faith:

You belong to a RATHER OBSCURE CULT, which foretells of a BAND OF ROWDY AND CAPRICIOUS MINSTRELS which will rise one day on a MYTHICAL PARADISE PLANET that does not exist yet.

Now, exploring this faith, and the way its interpretation changes throughout the comic, could be an essay of its own, but what's important to note here is that Kurloz will never see its fruition. He's dead, and neither has the ability to revive himself, nor the desire to do so. Thus, it follows that his personal interpretation of their faith must be darker than Gamzee's - Kurloz has so utterly given up on himself and his team that being cosigned to utter oblivion, destined to double-die by their godhead's rainbow breath, seems like a totally great outcome that Kurloz both wants and is working toward. The paradise planet doesn't actually matter to him - the act of betraying his friends, and getting everyone killed (and double-killed), seems reward enough.

KURLOZ: WE SHALL NOW BUST OPEN THESE BITCHIN ELIXIR FORTIES KURLOZ: AND POUR SOME SWEET SWILL OUT FOR THE SOULS WHO SOON WONT BE NO MORE #:o)

To that end, he's willing to lie to his teammates, and use the two people closest to him - Mituna and Meulin - as literal slaves, furthering LE's goals and pushing for LE's existence, making him one of the most direct forces acting against the dancestors.

But, as I said earlier, he didn't start out this way - so how did he get to this point of utter clowny despair? Well, let's take a look at what it means to be a Prince of Rage.

Princes have a fairly simple arc to discuss, though actually dealing with a Prince is arduous and difficult. Princes are, in a very masculine way, driven by an anxious forward momentum, by feelings of duty, by a masculine need to appear strong and take on burdens. Dirk is the most anxious of his team about their fate to sit around and wait, and Eridan's entire character has been shaped by the duty he had to keep Feferi's lusus placated.

However, these driving forces tend to make Princes controlling, aggressive, volatile, and nasty, and it's difficult to even be near one, let alone help them deal with their emotional problems. Thus are princes on a marching path to self-destruction, overtaxing their engines, burning themselves out. And given that one's "self" is tied inextricably to their aspect, this means that they take their aspect with them.

Thus are Princes on a ticking timer, and left untreated, they'll suffer a spectacular meltdown, which removes from play themselves, their aspect, and whoever is unlucky enough to be in the same room. We see it with Murderstuck, where Eridan goes on a Hope-crushing murder spree, and we see it when Dirk's trickster tirade utterly shatters Jake's self-confidence and self-worth.

But before that meltdown occurs, Princes suffer from an overburdening of their aspect - Eridan is a hipster (Hope and conviction), and burdened by several layers of political beliefs and societally-imposed duties. Dirk is solipsistic (Heart and the self), and is burdened by self-loathing, amplified by all his splinters and Hal staring back at him.

Kurloz's aspect is Rage, one of the most enigmatic, but I'll do my best here. Hope is, after all, fairly well-defined - a transformative force that imposes a new reality onto the old. Rage, its equal and opposite, is similarly a force that defines reality - but it does so by striking things from the record (something both Gamzee and Kurloz are noted to do, the former removing references to himself from recountings of his team's story, the latter creating intricate labyrinths within the bubbles to hide their clowny conspiracy with). Rage encompasses anger, but also the emotions of fear and shame - transformative energies that are the core of great acts of revolution, but also volatile, and prone to great destructiveness. Rage players "tear down false truths" - meaning, they define reality by closing possibilities, crafting meaning from the past by the power of interpretation. Hope is fanfiction, and Rage is literary criticism. Hope pens in something new, and Rage strikes out what it deems unacceptible.

Kurloz, before his turn, is characterized primarily through a single major incident - having a dream so terrifying that he screamed loud enough to deafen his matesprit, and feeling so ashamed of himself (shame being a Rage-associated emotion) that he sewed his own mouth shut in penitance. Given the way Princes are overtaxed by their aspect, it's likely that this isn't the only great shame he was bearing.

He and Damara appear to be on secretly decent terms - she is, after all, a Lord English believer, and who else would she have gotten that religious leaning from? Moreover, Kurloz and Mituna were close, if not actively dating, and Mituna was the one member of the team who seemed to give a shit that they were hurtling themselves towards oblivion.

This means that Kurloz, in all likelihood, was actually on Damara's side, and aware that his team was being shitheads - but he never said anything, later because of his vow of silence, but earlier, because it was himself he was most ashamed of. It's unclear what the inciting incident of his final meltdown was, but given the far-reaching consequences when a Prince does have their meltdown, this is likely the "disaster" that Mituna was attempting to stop - a situation that echoes how Feferi, Eridan's ex-moirail, turning on him to kill him was what finally pushed Eridan over the edge into full-blown murder. Kurloz is likely both the disaster Mituna was trying to avert and the source of Mituna's injury; subsequently, his team was dealing with a post-meltdown Prince and the destruction of Rage.

As I mentioned before, Rage is a revolutionary force, a force of upheaval and change. It's likely that the Mituna injury happened fairly late in the game, concurrent to or shortly following Damara's rampage, because the lack of Rage is starkly present in the six years following the Reckoning, where the dancestors did fuckall. But there's one other place where the dancestors' lack of Rage is present: ever notice how they don't have a single blackrom?

We'll get more into that when we talk about Meulin, but for now, I'll just say that this is directly Kurloz's fault. No blackroms, no conflicts, no change... Kurloz's meltdown was allowed to happen with no one the wiser. Rage, at its nadir, begins to resemble Hope - it gains a steadfast, religious conviction to the belief that nothing matters and everything must be torn down. We see this in Kurloz, whose spiritual belief is, functionally, that all that he and everyone else deserves is utter oblivion.

And so our Prince of Rage can no longer be swayed, a force of religious inertia, directing all beings headlong into oblivion.

Meulin Leijon: Healthy Relationship? IDK Her

Meulin Leijon's ships are all rancid. Unfortunately, they also all come true. This makes Meulin one of the most direct and overwhelming contributors to the dancestors' extant emotional problems, and why every single one of their established romances is a dumpster fire (and, conversely, why none of the healthy ships hinted at - pale Latula/Porrim, for example - are never established).

But to explain that, we have to back up and explain how Mages work. But I'm a bit tired of typing, so I'll just let Terezi and Sollux explain it instead:

TA: 2o yeah. TA: we wiill all diie but mo2t e2peciially me, end of 2tory. GC: BUT GC: DONT T4K3 TH1S TH3 WRONG W4Y BUT HOW C4N YOU B3 TOT4LLY SUR3 4BOUT 4LL TH4T? GC: HOW DO YOU KNOW SOM3 OF TH3 R34L V1S1ONS YOUR3 H4V1NG 4R3NT G3TT1NG K1ND OF T4NGL3D UP W1TH UHHH GC: SORT OF TH3 W4Y YOU 4R3 4BOUT YOURS3LF TA: what do you mean. GC: HOW YOU G3T MOP3Y 4ND YOUR3 4LW4YS TH3 V1CT1M OF SOM3TH1NG 4ND HOW SOM3T1M3S YOU TH1NK YOU SUCK WH3N YOU R34LLY DONT GC: M4YB3 TH4T 1S CLOUD1NG YOUR V1S1ON?

Mages are the active counterpart to Seers, as they're both classes concerned with glimpsing the future. Sollux is most obviously a prophet, gifted with vision twofold and Doom's natural prophetic insight, and at first this doesn't seem to suit Meulin... until you realize that matchmaking is commonly considered a form of divination, and "matchmaker" is Meulin's signature profession.

However, unlike a Seer, who's privy to all the myriad branching paths the future can take, Mages seem to know which of these futures will definitely happen for sure. This seems to be contradictory - how can multiple branching paths and set-in-stone futures coexist, when the comic - and Hussie - explicitly tend to frame even the Alpha Timeline as a result of player choices, and not predestination?

But it makes sense if you turn it around - it's not that Mages are privy to a set-in-stone future... it's that the Mage powerset allows the Mage to set a future in stone. They aren't PREDICTING the future, they're PREDETERMINING it.

This is an incredibly powerful ability, and to balance it out, Mages start out sad, and this sadness and pessimism colors their visions and causes the futures they pick out to be shitty. Terezi directly calls out Sollux's chosen future for being a reflection of his self-loathing and victimization, but wait, isn't Meulin super cheerful?

No. Actually, she's fucking miserable.

HORUSS: 8=D < She's taught me to get in touch with my anger. Through a moderately discernible series of enthusiastic mimes, she has made it clear that it is much healthier to crush all negative emotions beneath a stampede of positivity, and to always be cheerful and upbeat no matter what, even if projecting that facade is at times physically painful. #Such as #All times.

Vriska also later makes mention of how Meulin seems to have a "fascin8tingly dark history", further driving home the point that Meulin's hyperactive, friendly demeanor is a front for some really deep sadness on her part.

Heart is the aspect of the soul and the self. Its players are preoccupied with identity, and naturally talented at sussing out motivations, emotions, intentions, and desires. Nepeta's ships are usually wrong, but she clocks romantic interest correctly - she's able to pick up on Gamzee's palecrush toward Karkat, and Tavros's something-something towards Dave. Dirk, too, has an arc defined by romantic interest, feelings that ultimately don't pan out.

Moreover, Heart players are very vulnerable and sincere, and can't really help it. Divesting Dirk from Hal (whom I'm personally convinced is both his own separate entity and not even a Heart player), Dirk is incredibly straightforward. His idea of manipulating Jane is to directly tell her he's manipulating her. Nepeta's sincerity probably doesn't even need to be said.

But the flipside of this sensitivity towards the emotions of others is that Heart players are often doormats. They tend to prioritize the desires of others - Nepeta being bent to Equius's whims, and Dirk's neediness towards Jake manifesting as some embarrasing "forget how I feel, tell me what YOU want" texts. Their vulnerability also makes them easily hurt, and they tend to retreat into themselves out of fear of pain - Dirk outright states that his aloof demeanor hides the feelings his team has been trampling, while Nepeta expresses that she's afraid to engage too much with others because she's scared they'll mock her for being silly and stupid.

Thus, Meulin's situationship with Kurloz is cast into a much more uncomfortable light - and it was already pretty damn uncomfortable. Being deafened clearly hurt her emotionally, to the point she formally broke up with him, but he is still basically dating her, practically holding her hostage between her natural doormat tendencies and the actual mind control he's using on her. Her relationship with Horuss isn't much better, given the breathtakingly awful way he speaks about her:

HORUSS: 8=D < E%actly. Whoof would have thought? If you a%ed me before we all died whether I would consider romantically pairing with a r*d*culous midb100d, let alone Ms. Leijon of all people, I'd probably have died regardless, due to laughter-induced asphy%iation.

Yikes. Yikes all around. Welcome to yikes town.

Thus, Meulin is miserable, and has never been within ten miles of a healthy relationship - is it any surprise, then, that the ships she sets up for all her friends are similarly ill-fated? Let's not forget, the one ship she's actively seen making is Meenah and Karkat - an adult and an actual child.

MEULIN: (=^-ω-^=) < NOW, BEFORE I WORK MY MAGIC, WE SHOULD GET ONE THING CLEAR. IS YOUR YEARNING RED OR BLACK? MEULIN: (=ＴωＴ=) < I AM ONLY ASKING TO BE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN, BUT METHINKS THERE IS BARELY ANY DOUBT ABOUT IT. SOMMMEONE IS WAXING SCARLET FOR A LOUD, YOUNGER KANKRI, HMMMMMMMMM?

And it's after this that Meenah develops an "increasingly manic obsession" with Karkat.

You got a CLAWSICKLE! You absolutely love this due to its nautical nature. Also, hoarding items such as this will nicely complement your increasingly manic obsession with Karkat.

This is the secret behind Meulin's abilities as a "miracle worker when it comes to match making". As a Mage of Heart, she's directly picking out futures in which certain characters develop feelings for others - and, as a result, every single existing romance within the dancestors is highly suspect.

But what's also suspect is the lack of certain romances, namely the blackroms. What's going on there? Well, as Meulin herself says:

MEULIN: ~(=^‥^)ノ < GENERALLY I STICK TO THE RED MATCHUPS WHILE HE ADVISES ON BLACK. HE'S 33RILY TALENTED AT PICKING BLACKROM PAIRS! PROBABLY EVEN BETTER THAN ME...

Like how he's exerting control over the state of their death by using Mituna as a puppet, Kurloz is exerting control over their relationships via Meulin, killing their rage - their ability to effect change and grow - at the source.

And so our Mage of Heart has had hers trampled over so many times that she's unable to conceive of a future where lovers are supportive and kind, not destructive and cruel.

Horuss Zahhak: Albatross with the Gravitational Pull of a Black Hole

Finally, we're getting to the biggest Mess of all: the Damara situation. Horuss is our starting point here, as he's the eye of the storm - while he's the least directly culpable for Damara's rampage, he's the inciting incident, as Pages often are.

Horuss's flaws are glaringly obvious - he's a virulent casteist, he's an affair partner, he feels no guilt for the harm he caused Damara, he's really only looking to satisfy his own sexual desires, and he's too bullheaded to listen when people tell him things he doesn't want to hear.

He actually spends quite a bit of time talking about his aspect, and the journey he took to "understand" it. That saves me some time.

HORUSS: 8=D < My path was similarly governed by my aspect. For the longest time, I felt as if I was a blank sheet of paper. Like I had to make myself out of nothing. HORUSS: 8=D < And so I began to listen closely to the void within myself and corral the various personal attributes I herd calling to me. [...] HORUSS: 8=D < And in following sweeps I would keep turning my mechanically augmented, acute equine ear back to the abyss within, and continue to discover more about myself. I would learn that I was more complicated than I ever imagined. [...] HORUSS: 8=D < The second is how if you are faced with any crisis of identity whatsoever, it's really important to do your best to manufacture esoteric features of your personality and believe in them very STRONGLY and tell people about those things as frequently as possible.

Again, we aren't going to get into the plurality of real life people, this isn't the essay for that. In the context of the comic, because the failure of the dancestors is a foregone conclusion, and because Horuss is especially vile and clearly not aspirational, what he is describing is, in fact, an abject failure of Void, and a failing of his character.

To get into it, let's break down what a Page of Void is, and what arc they're "supposed" to undertake.

Pages are defined by their limitless potential.

TT: Pages have a lot of untapped potential. TT: That's practically all there is to the class, actually. TT: But when they eventually find it, look out.

AA: y0u picked a t0ugh class tavr0s! AA: n0ne 0f the really useful c0mbat abilities c0me int0 play until y0u reach a very high level AA: but i supp0se it will be rewarding when y0u get there

They're magikarps - very strong at high levels, very weak at low ones. So weak, in fact, that they're defined by a lack of their aspect when they initially start the game. Tavros, the Page of Breath - Breath governing freedom and independence - is wheelchair-bound and under Vriska's thumb. Jake, the Page of Hope - Hope dealing in conviction and belief - is constantly called "wishy-washy," and has absolutely zero standards when it comes to his taste in media (contrast Eridan, who's functioning with too much Hope as per his Prince class, who's a hipster that castigates Kanaya for liking Troll Twilight).

And Void is simplicity - its two other heroes, much more representative of the aspect, embody this well. They are what they are, they like what they like. Roxy loves wizards and, as mom, loves her daughter; Equius loves horses and archery and being STRONG. Void is also associated with sexual pleasure, vice, and taboo, with Roxy's "sauciness" being something characters often comment on and her alcoholism being so foundational to her character, while you can't talk about Equius without talking about his BDSM fetish.

In fact, we can see this interplay between Void's simplicity against Light's penchant for complexity in the introduction of Rose's mother. Rose has concocted in her mind a grand, elaborate narrative where her and her mother are locked in a deady contest of one-upsmanship, that her mother's various gifts and wizards are part of some sort of ironic or passive-aggressive mind game. The truth is, Momlonde just loves wizards and dotes on her daughter. No mind games whatsoever.

So when Horuss talks about how "complicated" he's decided he is, this is a Page's penchant for regression, for aspect deficit. Horuss refuses to be honest with himself, to deal with his actual emotions of frustration, anger, and emptiness, and instead turns to complication to try to explain them. He complexifies everything he gets involved with - his affair with Rufioh is clearly a symptom of some fetish he has for dating down the hemospectrum, but he refuses to admit to it, instead claiming at first that it was simply a "fleeting dalliance" or "exploration," and then claiming it to be true love.

The one Void trait he does seem to have in excess, however, is its tendency to get so caught up in its own personal pleasures and desires that it becomes pushy to others, drowning them out, resembling Light's spotlight hogging. Equius did this to Nepeta, and Roxy would attempt it with Dirk sometimes, aggressively flirting with him despite his homosexuality. Horuss simply talks over Rufioh, not listening to a thing he says.

Also, another point to how interwoven everyone's issues are, Kankri shows up to enable Horuss and tell him to keep being complicated. Also, Kankri doesn't comment AT ALL on Horuss's constant use of slurs and casteist language. So thanks again Kankri. For nothing.

The problem with Pages is that their failures aren't contained to themselves - their weakness becomes like a black hole, an albatross about the party's neck, and they're often right at the center of major catastrophes - maybe not the direct cause, but often an inciting incident. Tavros was ultimately at the center of the Team Charge debacle, and the Jakestakes tore apart his entire team.

HORUSS: 8=D < It was only to be a very private, fleeting dalliance with a BUOY, but the whole thing became so quickly scandalized. #A spur of the moment affair, really. HORUSS: 8=D < And soon others were whisked into it such as you and the vengeful rust b100d, and... well, imagine my embarrassment. Trust me, the last thing I wanted was for royalty such as yourself to know I was pursuing forbidden b100d. To be caught with my hoof in the chocolate jar, so to nicker.

And so our Page of Void, by dint of the complicated web he's woven about himself, has ensnared others in his orbit of total irrelevance and inability to move forward.

Rufioh Nitram: Desperately Escaping Responsibility

Let me speak for everyone when I say, "Rufioh, you cheating piece of shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Rufioh, too, has his failures on brazen display. He's weak-willed and spineless, has been trying and failing to break up with Horuss for eons, and cheated on his girlfriend, but has the nerve to ask her for romantic advice.

However, what I want to really focus down on is that the specific flavor of his spinelessness is a refusal to take responsibility. He constantly claims that he "doesn't know" why Damara got more and more upset at him:

RUFIOH: and for some reason... st1ll don't know why... damara just started go1ng a l1ttle more nuts every day... gett1ng more and more jealous when she knew we were hang1ng out...

But clearly this isn't true, because he tells her to get over it.

RUFIOH: d*mn... so cold, g1rl. why can't you let the past go?

He also constantly calls her "crazy" and "jealous," framing the story as though she's the one who went totally nuts, and washing his hands of his involvement.

Remember how I mentioned that Blood tends to be overly responsible? All the way up there, when I was talking about Kankri. Well, meet Blood's counterpart. Breath is, at its best, a force of freedom and liberation - look no further than the Summoner, Rufioh's Alternian counterpart. But at its worst, it tends to be callous and immature, youthful but irresponsible. Rufioh does everything he can to avoid having to take responsibility, whether that's wilting from breaking up with Horuss, avoiding culpability for hurting his feelings, or downplaying what he did to Damara.

This youthfulness is the source of their charm, and all three Breath players share it - John loves his dumb cheesy movies well into his teens, Tavros loves Pupa Pan and Fiduspawn, and Rufioh loves kiddie anime. It's not harmful in and of itself that they like childish things, but it often goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to grow up.

Ironically, they can become so avoidant of responsibility that they wind up trapped, like Tavros was with Vriska, or Rufioh is with Horuss. If you never acknowledge that there is a problem, you can never begin to fix it. But where does being a Rogue come in?

Well, Rogues are natural-born rebels. Nepeta is the only Alternian troll to outright say that the hemocaste is stupid and casteism shouldn't exist:

AC: :33 < and i dont know anything about classes or bases or blood color, it doesn't matter! AC: :33 < what does gr33n blood even mean! it doesnt mean anything to me and it shouldnt mean anything to anyone else!

And Roxy is the most motivated in her friend group to stick it to the Batterwitch. The problem is, while they have unrest and rebellion deep in their souls, they're often at a loss as to how to address it, make it more than just a thought. This leads to them rebelling for the sake of rebelling, breaking taboos and defying commands. Nepeta refusing to listen to Equius telling her to hide and stay put directly leads to her death, and even Roxy nearly blew Jane up with a fake SBURB application in a misguided attempt to defy the Condesce.

And Rufioh? Well, Rufioh cheated. Hard as he could. For a long, long time. Started before he entered the session. Spent the whole time gaslighting Damara and calling her crazy and jealous. After all, if he actually came out and said that he wasn't happy with her and wanted out of the relationship, she'd be upset with him, and he'd have to be responsible for that. Can't have that!

And so our Rogue of Breath has been trapped in bondage, having gone willingly in chains, because the alternative - freedom and responsibility - were too difficult for him.

Damara Megido: Babe I'm So Sorry, You Didn't Deserve That

So I'm going to address a pretty common fandom take, by first divulging some personal information. I'm Chinese diaspora; my parents were both immigrants. Obviously, I can't speak for every Chinese person, and especially not every Asian, but at least from my perspective, Damara isn't racist. She's just actual representation.

Yes, Damara plays into several stereotypes, most notably the oversexed Asian schoolgirl - but that's part of the greater point that the comic is trying to make. Hussie has a long habit of putting the reader in the shoes of the characters who are wrong in a situation - for example, having the reader mock Eridan together with Rose, Kanaya, Jade, and Gamzee, or indeed, having the reader sympathize with Meenah Peixes, and hear the story from the point of view of Meenahs' biggest enabler.

Damara's google-translate quirk makes her text difficult to understand, to the point a lot of people won't even bother figuring out what she's saying, and her design makes her seem like a flat stereotype, because this is how her team sees her. And as I have extensively covered in this essay thus far, Damara's team were unbelievable assholes for doing so.

Let's look at her situation objectively for a second, and you'll see what I mean. Damara grew up with the Lost Weeaboos - she was already there when Rufioh ran into her, after he joined up after his wings came in. Yeah, Damara was the original Lost Weeaboo, not him. She was an immigrant from East Beforus, and couldn't speak English, and was seemingly only included in the friend group so long as Rufioh was translating for her - something he doesn't do when he deems it would cause problems (for him).

RUFIOH: 1f people knew some of the sh*t you sa1d... how you say crazy sh*t l1ke you want to serve h1m... f***! RUFIOH: 1t wouldn't be cool... people would fl1p... RUFIOH: h*ll, d1dn't you hear meenah was try1ng to ra1se an army to k1ll h1m? RUFIOH: 1f she could hear some of the th1ngs you told me... sh*t... 1 can't ever let her f1nd out... RUFIOH: 1f she knew, you'd both start f1ght1ng aga1n... #}:(

Not to mention, she's a burgundy, the bottom of the hemocaste, and implied to be pretty poor, too, given... she was living in the woods with the Lost Weeaboos.

Before the game even starts, Horuss starts visiting Rufioh in the woods, something that starts as an emotional affair, but quickly becomes more than that. Damara catches on pretty quickly, becoming more and more jealous and angry with him as the affair continues, but Rufioh gaslights her and lies to her about it until Meenah discovers the affair and blows it out into the open. Damara breaks up with Rufioh, but Meenah continues to use the affair to mock and degrade her.

ARANEA: The poor girl who took the 8runt of your 8ullying tactics was Damara Megido. You talked up her matesprit's 8etrayal making her feel even more dreadful, while pushing him further into the arms of her rival, until she simply snapped.

Can you even fucking imagine? Damara has nobody else to turn to. Not only are half the people on the team Meenah's friends, not only is Meenah the rich and powerful fuchsia-blooded heiress, while Damara's a poor, immigrant rustblood, but no one on the team besides her ex - who is running around slandering her for being "crazy" and "jealous" - can even be assed to learn her language. She can't defend herself, and even if she tried, nobody would listen. To them, Damara's just a flat stereotype - the meek and docile Asian waifu who speaks engrish and puts chopsticks in her hair.

This is like... actually just what a lot of poor immigrants, not even necessarily Asian ones, have to go through. Damara's struggles are incredibly relevant, and her reaction is very realistic, too. She snaps and decides that she hates everyone and outright wishes for their demise and double-demise. In this context, her hypersexual language is a form of reclaiming power - nobody cared about what she had to say, so now she doesn't care what they have to listen to. It's one of the only petty vengeances left to her, and notably, she doesn't do it towards people she doesn't have beef with - the human kids - and the fact that Rufioh can speak her language at all is why she's still willing to go so far as to call him a friend, even after all the horrible shit he did to her.

RUFIOH: um... you can keep a secret, r1ght? DAMARA: はい、もちろん。私はあなたの友達です。[Yes, of course. I am your friend.]

And death hasn't made anything let up for her. She tells Meenah to go double-fuck herself, and Meenah assumes that they're totally cool now, even though Meenah didn't even so much as say "sorry".

DAMARA: あなたのデュアルフォークを取る。二回自分自身をファック。 [Take your dual fork. Fuck yourself twice.] [...] DAMARA: 私は何も後悔はありません。[I do not regret anything.] MEENAH: apology accepted

Sorry for getting heated, but what happened to Damara - and the fact that the fandom often sides with her bullies in calling her a flat stereotype - is very near and dear to me. The Damara situation casts a pall across the entire rest of the dancestors. Despite how cruel the circumstances were, how objectively unjust they were, how obviously Meenah was the aggressor and Damara was a victim, how clearly delineated good and evil were in her situation, and how big of a problem this became, nobody intervened, nobody tried to stop it, nobody stood up for her. Every single member of the team is an irredeemable asshole by this simple fact alone, except maybe Mituna, and even then, that's a maybe and nothing more. All of them are complicit in abuse, complicit in oppression, and complicit in bullying - if not worse.

Witches are creatures of emotion. They grow up as "outsiders" to society, and as such, are very easy to sway - as they lack societal senses of right and wrong, good or evil, they tend to rely on their own emotions to navigate the world instead. This also means it's very easy to flatter the Witch into believing in something cruel. Feferi loves casteism because being a princess is awesome, and she loves feeling like she's better than other people. Jade constantly allows shitty boys to trample all over her, and the trolls consider her most culpable for Bec Noir's creation because she blindly follows the prophecies of her beloved future-telling clouds, taking direct action to doom them all.

Damara's still friends with Rufioh because he bothers to speak her language at all, even though he does nothing but gaslight her, badmouth her, and use her to his own convenience. She follows the teachings of Lord English because her feelings have been hurt to the point where oblivion sounds like a great idea.

Time is about persistence, goal-orientedness, details, and minutiae. However, its players can often become so tunnel-visioned, so frustrated, that they become destructive forces of anger and rage. In the worst case, this destructive frustration causes them to become overwhelmed with a sense of futility, something that superficially resembles Space's big-picture thinking, or its tendency for passivity. Time has ties to entropy and death, and unfortunately, Damara has come to embody that for her team.

But, most crucially, Witches cause change.

The dancestors' session is victim to a glitch that ultimately renders it unwinnable - they didn't perform their own ectobiology. Such glitches are described as the "calling cards" of Lord English, his way of reserving a universe to destroy. But, as discussed above, LE did not actually exist until the dancestors brought him into their session by scratching it.

It's stated that, after her initial rampage, Damara began performing acts of "timeline sa8otage" up and down their timeline. I believe that it's during this time that she wound up causing the ectobiology glitch - retroactively rendering their system unwinnable, forcing them into the Scratch. After all, Damara knew what would result from the Scratch - Kurloz had inducted her into his religion by that point, and she was heard muttering that the Scratch would deliver them all "what they deserve".

And so, our Witch of Time was tempted by the forces of evil, and ultimately led them down the path of destruction, closing down all options until they had no choice but to Scratch, and - of course - though the dancestors had one last chance to back out, choose the selfless option, and let no more harm come of their actions - they picked the selfish option, and passed their problems onto the next generation.

Meenah Peixes: Ultra-Bitch

Meenah is her team's leader, and she represents the worst aspects of her team - the casual cruelty, the lack of responsibility, the kid-kissing, the failure to grow up. In a way, there's no leader more fitting.

The greatest thing she contributed to her team was her ruthless bullying, which didn't do anything but make everyone feel worse about themselves. Of this bullying, Meenah's favorite target was Damara, but we already covered all that in Damara's section. I want to talk about some of Meenah's other failings here, because I think the comic did such a good job of unreliably narrating her escapades that even many in the fandom seem to think she's a much better person than she is.

In truth, Meenah is a toxic friend, a bad influence, and her "cool"ness serves as a smokescreen to cover the depravity and cruelty of her actions. She is consistently running away from responsibility, consistently taking advantage of weaker-willed individuals, consistently constructing a narrative around herself where her actions were justified and anyone who disagrees with her is just a lame loser. In reality, she's just a rich bitch mean girl. A bog-standard bully. Someone who thinks literal children are pursuable romantic targets. You can't lose sight of this.

MEENAH: i dont verbally torture my cray schemes like all the serket girls MEENAH: and that works ok for me MEENAH: guess i made some mistakes but who really gives a flip [...] MEENAH: i just MEENAH: did shit MEENAH: and the shit i did MEENAH: meant only the things the shit accomplished MEENAH: and if that shit accomplished a dumb thing that sucked MEENAH: then i guess thats what you call a mistake and oh fuckin well

Sure, Meenah. Your deliberate, constant, unrelenting bullying, the active choices you made over, and over, and over again, are completely excusable by just saying "they were some mistakes" and "oh well".

Meenah ran away from responsibility four times over the course of her story: the first time was running off to the moon because she didn't want to be heiress; the second was blowing up her home planet rather than dealing with succession; the third was cooping herself up in her moon palace until a bigger threat presented itself, and the fourth was encouraging Vriska to give up on struggling against Lord English and run away with her and the LE-killing treasure. Not only that, but she tries to convince Karkat to jump off the meteor with her to fight LE - something that's framed in that conversation as a literal act of suicide, as LE is still, as far as Karkat and Meenah know, invincible, immortal, and unbeatable.

Speaking of her conversation with Karkat, let's zoom out for a second and take it in objectively. I think many are tricked by Karkat's softness and vulnerability here into thinking that the conversation they have together is cute or wholesome, but that isn't the case. First of all, let's remember that Meulin has just implied that Meenah's got some romantic feelings for what is - again - an actual child (I think he's literally 14 here). So. Yeah. And then second, let's remember what Karkat's arc is.

Karkat is a mutant, and has lived his life alternately in fear that he'll be killed if anyone ever finds out, and filled with self-loathing, since he knows it means he'll never be accepted by society. Moreover, he's aware of the prophecy that he's supposed to be Troll Jesus's second coming, and he's deeply insecure about it.

MY BLOOD IS NOT FIT TO FLOW THROUGH A SEWER, AND MY SIGN IS A PICTOGRAPHIC SYMBOL THAT LOOSELY TRANSLATES AS "PLEASE HIKE THESE PANTS UP TO THIS GUY'S ARMPITS, CHAIN HIM TO A FLOGGING JUT, AND MAKE A FUCKING EXAMPLE OUT OF THIS SORRY SACK OF SHIT." WHEN I LOOK IN A MIRROR, MY REFLECTION SLOWLY SHAKES HIS HEAD WHILE I WET MYSELF IN SHAME.

The fact that he knows that his ancestor is the Signless puts his initial desire to join the Threshecutioners in a very sad light. As he tells Meenah, he harbored fantasies that he would fight so well that they'd let him join, in spite of his blood color, even knowing objectively that they'd probably just kill him on sight.

KARKAT: THEY WERE LIKE THE DEADLIEST SQUAD OF INTERSTELLAR FIGHTERS UNDER THE COMMAND OF THE EMPRESS. THEY HELPED CONQUER MORE PLANETS THAN ANY OTHER IMPERIAL FORCE. BUT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO MAKE THE CUT, BECAUSE OF MY BLOOD. SO I USED TO THINK OF ALL THESE ELABORATE SCENARIOS TO HIDE MY BLOOD COLOR. OR IN THE MORE RIDICULOUS FANTASIES, MAYBE I COULD EVEN PROVE MY WORTH AS A SOLDIER? LIKE JUST BE SO AWESOME WITH A SICKLE, THEY WOULD JUST HAVE TO MAKE AN EXCEPTION. MAYBE EVEN BE LIKE A FOLK HERO AND RISE THROUGH THE RANKS TO BECOME THE LEADER. HAHA.

He desires, so so so deeply, to be accepted. He hates himself - this is the first thing revealed to us in his introduction.

Your name is KARKAT VANTAS. As was previously mentioned, it is your WRIGGLING DAY, which is barely even worth mentioning. It is an anniversary, if anything, to lament the faults of your existence, of which there are assuredly plenty.

As a result, he's equated societal acceptance with self-worth - tricked himself into believing that if he can gain the approval of society, the approval of the Condesce, then he'll finally be able to feel less like a worthless, kill-on-sight miscreant.

This is the lens we must look through his conversations with Meenah through. These are not soft, tender exchanges where Meenah helps Karkat deal with his emotional issues. This is the young adult version of the Condesce trying to tempt a literal child into suicide, leveraging his desire to be accepted by her in order to stroke her own ego. When he says Alternia was great, that's a bad thing. Alternia sucked, and it sucked to him specifically, but he wants to be accepted by it so badly that he's willing to act like it was awesome. When he says he respects the Condesce, that's terrible. She's an evil monster who directly caused all his and his friend's problems, a monstrous, genocidal dictator who revels in bloodshed and misery. And when he says:

KARKAT: OH, BUT ON ONE CONDITION. AS THE NEW EMPRESS, YOU HAVE TO APPOINT ME AS GRAND THRESHECUTIONER OF YOUR ARMY. DO WE HAVE A DEAL? MEENAH: oh yes yes you got it yessss

This is sad, actually. This is just really sad. Karkat wants to be accepted so, so badly that he's willing to jump off the meteor on a suicide mission. He wants it so bad that he's willing to lie down and let the forces of fascism, oppression, cruelty, and evil win, just for a crumb of validation.

And, yeah, it's romantic to Meenah. Just to be clear with everyone.

MEENAH: i was standin around in shoutkats place when it all dream switched on me outta nowhere [...] MEENAH: and i think MEENAH: we might be goin on a date later?

Hey, remember how she's 19 and he's fourteen fucking years old?

So, yeah, later on, when she starts having little giggly fits with Vriska, rolling around in the fields with her? When she starts grooming Vriska to dress like her, get tattoos with her nautical themes? Yes, I'm going to use the word "grooming". That's what it is.

Vriska is a vulnerable child. She was raised by an abusive, demanding, narcissistic spider, and all her friends just abandoned her because of her resultant nasty personality. And remember how I pointed out that Meenah likes to run away from responsibility?

VRISKA: What if we just........ VRISKA: Gave up on the mission? MEENAH: gave up VRISKA: Yeah. VRISKA: What do you think. MEENAH: um MEENAH: sure VRISKA: Sure? VRISKA: You don't think that would 8e a wussy move? MEENAH: well yeah MEENAH: it would be MEENAH: if a couple of cowards did it MEENAH: but that aint us MEENAH: so we cool to do whatev VRISKA: That's a very good point. MEENAH: nofin wrong with stickin a fork in a shit idea that just makes you miserable MEENAH: hell the best choice i ever made involved givin up MEENAH: one day i said MEENAH: fuck da throne MEENAH: ran off to the moon MEENAH: thats how this whole crazy mess kicked off MEENAH: and if i didnt do that MEENAH: i wouldnt of met you 38) VRISKA: VRISKA: ::::)

I hope this conversation hits a little different.

Thieves are, as the name suggests, selfish and greedy - they harbor some deep emotional hole that they attempt to fill with "wealth". For Vriska, it was narrative importance, and for Meenah, it was forward motion, as that's what Life's all about. However, they do so at the expense of others, not realizing that harming their own group relations harms their own ability to self-actualize and attain true happiness. The one time something nice happened on Meenah's team, it was when Meenah wasn't taking, taking, taking, but when she baked a cake for everyone.

But Meenah wasn't content with that.

And so, our Thief of Life defeated her own agenda in an effort to move forward, her mistakes culminating in the doom of herself and all her friends, as her misguided grasping toward forward motion ultimately led to the ugly side of a tumor-bomb.

Final Thoughts

I know I've been really negative towards the dancestors for this entire essay. And I do think they deserve it. However, please don't confuse that with me saying I think they were "bad characters," or that I dislike their inclusion in the comic.

On the contrary, I think they're all very, very good characters. Their utilization in the narrative is excellent, and they perform their narrative function incredibly well. I think Hussie's a fantastic writer, and I find the dancestors fascinating - if you couldn't tell from the massive essay.

But they are shitty people - and that's the point. The role they serve to the kids is as evil mentors, bad influences, dark reflections. Maybe they were redeemable before they ruined everything, but they passed the point of no return. At every juncture, they chose the selfish option, the cruel option, the easy option, and in some ways subtle, some ways overt, they encourage their kids to do the same.

But - crucially - the ones to come after them can choose differently. And I believe in the version of Homestuck where they do.

Thanks for reading.

#homestuck #homestuck analysis #damara megido #rufioh nitram #mituna captor #kankri vantas #meulin leijon #latula pyrope #porrim maryam #aranea serket #horuss zahhak #kurloz makara #karkat vantas #cronus ampora #meenah peixes #classpect #classpects #classpecting

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shirotski · 2 days ago

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micheal kaiser x f!reader

tw- dub-con (reader ends up easing into it) possessive kaiser, dom kaiser, sub reader, pussy eating, slight overstim, name calling, no aftercare, dacryphilia, unfinished

micheal kaiser was high class man, he wouldnt let just anyone be his empress! your body: the way it swayed when you walked. your eyes: how it always looked up at him so lovingly and innocently. he was a bit reluctant to touch you, not wanting to break his doll, well, not yet at least.

you were supposed to come over today, but it was loooong past when you were supposed to be there. He texted you at first, very demanding but firm. They kept getting more angrier, his texts werent questions but threats. he tried calling you but it went straight to voicemail. hearing your stupid voice say the same thing over and over again on the phone. It irked him deeply.

while he was getting angrier by each second you missed; you were dead asleep in your bed having slept through your alarm. you didn't miss it on purpose! you were a heavy sleeper after all. why did you oversleep? it's not like you were doing something that kept you up. you were on your phone till you passed out. didnt even get to charge it! how irresponsible.

He comes racing to your apartment, not caring about any driving violation. he gets to your apartment and knocks vigorously at your door; hes making so much noise, the neighbors will start to get annoyed if you dont open that door!

your eyes flutter awake, a good stretch before you pick up your phone which is on 5%. you see all the missed calls and multiple messages that kept getting more aggressive and aggressive as you scrolled. you hear the door be berated with multiple instances of banging, you rush quickly to the door because whoever is knocking is being way too loud! You open the door slightly ajar and peek your head out and see kaiser standing at your doorstep

"Kaiser?... why-"

"Shut the hell up, why werent you there?"

He stepped through the small gap which made you back up a bit as he slammed the door behind him. His eyes were angry and vicious, they stared daggers into your doe eyes filled with fear

"I'm sorry! I know I was supposed to come over but.. I overslept...." you looked down at the ground like a child getting scolded for doing wrong. he gripped your wrist and with his other hand cupped your face and brought it dangerously close to his

"Dont EVER do that again. Get over here."

He yanked you to your own bedroom and threw you on the bed. he crawled on top of you and kissed you firmly, not letting you breathe for a good second. your hands push his chest at an attempt to get him off you, this seemed to piss him off even more.

"Stop resisting.Dont make this worse for yourself."

You finally got air to breathe to protest but were cut off as he kissed at your neck. It was unexpected. you were being punished for something that wasnt even your fault! he started rip the clothes off your body, his hands delicately but roughly exploring you as his kisses started wandering further down.

He got to your panties and pulled them down off you, forcing you to spread your legs. Embarrassed, you quickly try hiding it from his leering eyes and hands move quickly to hide yourself. he grips your wrists and pushes his own body deeper into you so you cant close your legs.

"What did I tell you? Stop hiding yourself from me, slut. you're getting wetter by the second. do you enjoy being manhandled you whore? "

You tear up as he starts to inch closer to your heat, wanting to just run away from him. He looks up at you and gives that cocky smirk he does while hes on the field.

"Crying for what? I didnt do anything yet. Stop being a crybaby."

you sniffle at his words as he dips in between your legs, letting go of your wrists and gripping onto your thighs, keeping you still. you let out a moan as his pink muscle starts to savor every part of you. the filthy sounds you make when he indulges you. his mouth working wonders to your core.

"you taste so good. all f'me..."

his words vibrate againts your cunt making you shutter, you make little weak attempts to push his head away but, to no avail, he doesn't budge a bit. you start to ease into it and you put his head deeper into you. you slowly start feel something churn inside you

"kaiser.. I'm close.. please..." you utter weakly

"please what, doll?" He pulls away and you whine quickly wanting him to taste you again.

"please.. I wanna cum..."

he was painfully hard by now, he eats you put as he palms the bulge in his pants. He wanted to fuck you so bad already, but you had to be punished. he tasted you so sensually, you were losing your mind. you let go and he drinks up every last drop of your sweet cunt, even after riding out your high he doesnt stop. It hurts. It hurts so good and he doesnt stop.

"kaiser.. stop.. please *hic* I dont.. ." you try to push him away again

poor you! you've been crying this entire time while feeling so good.

"Begging? After you were so rudely pushing me away.. Do I really make you feel that good angel?" He grins as he slowly starts to pull down his boxers

"Just in luck angel, I'm not done with you yet."

this is my first fic, I dont know if I wanna continue it because I think its kinda bad.. I'll finish it if there people who do want me to.

if I used any words wrong, let me know. english is not my first language :,)

#blue lock #michael kaiser #x reader #blue lock x reader #smut #bl smut #thissoass #possessive #idfk anymore

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sissylittlefeather · 2 days ago

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If You Talk In Your Sleep

Chapter 5

A/N: WHEW BUDDY. This shit is heating up. I'm really wanting to push out the rest of this one this week, so here's hoping I can get that done. ICYMI, this is 1969 Vegas Elvis x reader who is a casino boss's wife.

Need to catch up? Masterlist HERE.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, no smut this time but we're still talking about some pretty heavy themes with references to domestic violence, pregnancy, and abortion.

Word count: ~3.9k

“Did you know you're pregnant?”

******

It feels like the room suddenly gets smaller, the walls closing in as your head seems to fill with water. You hear the sounds of the nurse and Jerry both trying to talk to you and you don't even realize you're falling until you feel Jerry's arms around you.

They both continue to try to get your attention as he settles you on the gurney, but they might as well be on a different planet.

Pregnant.

And the baby has to be Elvis's. You knew you were playing with fire letting him finish inside you so often, but somehow this possibility just never felt real. And now here it is, a new life nestled deep in your body. Elvis's child.

What the hell are you going to do?

Finally, you look up at Jerry and the nurse and their voices come back into focus. He smiles a little and she visibly relaxes.

“There she is. You okay, honey?” Jerry’s voice is smooth and quiet. You nod and sigh deeply.

“Yeah. Fuck. Sorry.” You apologize to the nurse for your language, but there's not much else you can say.

“So I'm guessing you did not know?” She whispers softly.

“No. I didn't.” You swallow hard and look up at the ceiling, trying to keep the tears in your eyes. For a while there's nothing but the distant sound of beeps and talking outside in the hallway as they give you space to process the news.

“Is it–?”

“Yeah.” You answer the question you knew Jerry would ask.

“You sure it's not your husband's?” The nurse tries to hide her reaction, but she's unsuccessful. You sigh and look at Jerry, trying to make him see that you're positive.

“I know it's not. It's his. It has to be.” His face goes white as he realizes what this really means for Elvis and his reputation. You open your mouth to speak, but at that exact moment the doctor comes in and clears you to leave. Your bruises are superficial and will heal easily with time and you don't have a concussion. When he and the nurse leave, you hop off the gurney and look at Jerry to take you home.

“It's not bad. I'm fine. Let's go.” Jerry’s curls move as he shakes his head vehemently.

“Not a chance. You have to tell him.” You walk up to him and look him square in the eye.

“I. Can't. If I go to Elvis looking like this and tell him I'm carrying his baby, he will absolutely try something and end up dead. I know you don't want that and I sure as hell don't either. Take me home. Now.” His eyes burn a hole in you as he fights the urge to shake some sense into you. But you're right and he knows it.

“Fine.” He walks out of the hospital room, not even waiting for you to follow him.

Eventually, you make it back to the Flamingo and go to get out of the car. Jerry decides he has to try one last time or he won't forgive himself.

“He deserves to know. About you and the baby. He loves you more than he's ever loved anyone else. You can't just leave him like this.” His voice is soft, pleading. You wonder how he knows that Elvis loves you so much and then decide it doesn't matter.

“I love him with every single fiber of my being, Jerry. I won't let him die for me. I won't. I'm not worth it.” You open the door and get out of the car, shutting it behind you before he can say anything else. The tears sting your swollen eye as you hurry up to your suite, covering your bruises with your hand.

Carl will be home from work soon, so you pull on an old t-shirt and crawl into bed, holding yourself as you sob in the dark.

Pregnant. With Elvis's baby.

******

You stay home for two whole weeks, nursing your bruises and tip toeing around Carl. He's a nightmare of chaotic mood swings, in one second remorseful and almost sweet, brushing your hair back from where you have it covering the bruises on your face and clicking his tongue, speaking softly. “You know I didn't want to hurt you, baby. Why did you make me do it?”

The next second, he's cold and harsh, either ignoring you or sneering cruelly as you look at yourself in the mirror and wince. “Maybe next time you'll think twice before you let another man use you as a cock sleeve.”

The unpredictable nature of his outbursts keeps you on edge, your body slowly adjusting to the constant stress. You know it can't possibly be good for the baby, but you keep telling yourself that it doesn't matter. It's not like you can keep it anyway.

Eventually, the bruises fade enough to be mostly covered with thick makeup and a scarf around your neck. As soon as this happens, Carl demands that you dress up every night and accompany him to the casino. Obviously, he doesn't know about the baby or how exhausted you are, so you do your best to act like you normally would, despite the fatigue. Thankfully, you haven't had any morning sickness. It's like God knows you can't have it, so you don't.

The whole time you're in hiding, Elvis prowls around his suite like a caged animal. He's moody and temperamental and yells at anyone who he perceives as challenging him. He berates Jerry multiple times, convinced he's hiding something about you. But Jerry loves his boss more than he fears him, so he continues to deny any knowledge of what's going on with you. Priscilla calls incessantly, demanding that he come home and be the man he told her he would be when she moved from Germany. The Colonel actually comes to meet with him, sparking one of the most heated conversations Elvis has ever had with his manager. By the end of it, he fires the Colonel and threatens to shoot him if he comes back. He worries himself sick about you, stops eating, and spends hours in bed. At night, he swallows handfuls of pills and cries himself to sleep. The hollow weight of loneliness settles in his chest again and he almost can't even function with the crushing devastation of losing you. The terrifying reality that you might really be gone is overwhelming and his pain and fear move into anger. By the end of two weeks, he decides he doesn't have anything else to lose. He tells his men to get dressed.

He's going to the Flamingo.

******

You're sitting on a chair in the corner of Carl’s office, bored, when someone knocks on the door. He looks up from the papers on his desk and gruffly tells the person to enter. A pit boss opens the door nervously.

“Hey, uh, boss. There's some high roller here throwing money around like he owns the place.”

“And? Let him lose his money. That's not my problem.” Carl looks back down but the pit boss clears his throat.

“It's, uh, it's Elvis Presley.” You get that familiar feeling like someone has dumped ice water down your back. “And uh, he's winning. A lot.”

That catches Carl’s attention. He looks up again, thankfully not noticing the fact that you're not breathing.

“There's something else.” Carl snorts impatiently.

“Well? What is it?”

“He's asking for you.” You gasp a little, but it goes unnoticed by your husband.

“By name?”

“He asked for the boss.” Carl purses his lips and nods, standing up from his chair. You stand up too and he looks at you with one eyebrow raised.

“What? I like Elvis. Might be neat to see him.” You try to shrug it off and he seems to buy your story.

When Elvis walks into the casino in all black with silver sunglasses and his entourage, it seems like the whole place holds its breath. He’s used to moving around Vegas and the stares he gets when he does so, but it's like everyone around can sense his fury, simmering just under the surface of his perfectly curated facade. He moves to one of the private high-stakes poker rooms and takes a seat at a table, converting $25,000 into chips. Playing Elvis Presley is a role he's familiar with, so he does it well. He makes loud, reckless bets and flirts with the women the casino sends to keep him company. A few hands go by before he casually asks to see the boss. This is a fine establishment and he'd like to pay his respects. Internally, he's desperately hoping that you'll be there with him.

You follow behind Carl as he makes his way down the stairs to the private room Elvis is in. As you get closer, you notice he has his arm around a cocktail waitress and suddenly feel like you want to throw up. You stop just outside the room and make some excuse about not wanting to bother him. He's perfectly visible from your spot by the door. Carl ignores you and walks into the room.

Elvis is deadly calm as he shakes Carl’s hand. They chit chat for a bit before you see Elvis gesture to the chair next to him, inviting Carl to have a seat and play. There's a moment of hesitation before Carl feels the fact that this is more of a challenge than an invitation and he's not the kind of man to back down from that lightly. He nods curtly and sits down, getting some chips and allowing himself to be dealt in to the next hand.

Your stomach is in your throat as you watch the game progress from your spot in the doorway. Elvis hasn't noticed that you're there yet and you're perfectly happy to let that be the case. He continues to flirt with the women around him and part of you wants to walk straight up to him and ask him what the fuck he thinks he's doing, but then you remember that you can't. He doesn't belong to you. And you left him, so you have no room to be angry.

Elvis watches Carl with a kind of calculated coldness. So this is the man that you married. He fidgets with his chips, tapping his fingers on the green felt. His bets get bolder and more reckless as he baits Carl, but he’s an experienced poker player and he wins more often than he loses. Carl grits his teeth as they play in silence and there's a sense that Elvis is in charge of the room, despite Carl's position. But Carl has a trump card. He knows that you're the most beautiful woman in most rooms and you can be particularly disarming, especially to a notorious womanizer like Elvis. So he turns to the door and calls for you.

“Come here, baby.” You walk into the room and make eye contact with Elvis. There's a half second where time stands still, his blue eyes piercing you as everything around you freezes. In your imagination, you run to him and throw yourself into his lap. But this is reality and the only thing you can do is smile genially. He gives you a winning smile in return, but it doesn't reach his eyes. Instead, they burn with a kind of barely-contained rage that sets your insides on fire. You're pulled from the moment by Carl’s hand around your waist, dragging you roughly into his lap.

Elvis is assaulted by the image of you in your dress that looks like it's made of liquid silver, your hair in big waves like it was the night you met. You have a black scarf tied around your neck that feels out of place, but the rest of you is so intoxicating that he ignores it. When Carl yanks you onto him, Elvis’s jaw visibly tightens and his hands form fists. It takes everything inside of him not to grab you and take you away from your gilded prison. But maybe it's not a prison. It seems like you've chosen this.

“Pretty, isn't she?” Carl plays with a piece of your hair and presses his lips to your shoulder. He's taunting Elvis, but he thinks he's just showing off his wife. He has no idea what's bubbling just below the surface. Your heart races as you perch stiffly on Carl’s knee and Elvis grits his teeth, trying desperately to calm down. Carl clicks his tongue and you shiver in the worst way possible. “You seem nervous, baby. He's nothing special. Just relax and watch daddy win this game.”

Elvis bristles noticeably this time, slamming his cards on the table.

“I fold.” Carl cocks his head to the side, a little surprised.

“Already? And I heard you had a pair.” Elvis's eyes flash with white hot rage as the dealer sets out the next round of cards. Carl’s hands on your skin send bolts of seething fury through his veins. You belong to him. How dare he touch you. Then he remembers that you left him and he wants to flip the whole damn table over. How dare you. When he sees the ace of hearts in his hand, though, he cools down again, taking a deep breath to steady himself. Carl continues to play with you on his lap, raising bets and chuckling haughtily. You can see that he's bluffing, but he's betting like he's not. Elvis doesn't back down. He doubles, triples, quadruples bets until there's a good $50k in the pot. The dealer throws out the last card and you feel Carl subtly relax under you. He has a pair of queens. Elvis is showing a pair of 2s with his ace of hearts and you're pretty sure he's about to lose, but he calls Carl’s bet and waits for him to lay his cards on the table. When he does, Elvis smirks and drops his hand coolly.

“Aces over deuces.” And there it is. Elvis’s full house wins and you feel the unmitigated rage roll off of Carl. Elvis slowly pulls the pile of chips towards himself. Once he's got them gathered, one of his entourage picks them up as he stands from the table. You realize it's Jerry and your heart flips. Has he told Elvis? There's no time to think about it now, though. Elvis makes his way to the door of the private room, but before he leaves, he turns back and hands you a $100 chip. Your fingers touch briefly and the electricity there runs straight through you. This is a gesture to frustrate Carl, but more than that it's him telling you that he's still yours.

“Here, sweetheart. Buy yourself somethin’ pretty.” He winks and then turns, his men following close behind him. Carl damn near comes unglued, standing up so quickly that he almost throws you to the floor. He reaches for his gun, but one of his guys grabs his arm and shakes his head. You turn and lay your hand on him gently.

“I'll just go give it back. I don't need it.” He huffs and lets you walk from the room to catch up with Elvis outside the casino.

When you get to him, he pulls you over to a corner close to the wall, getting a cigar out of his pocket to light it. For a second, you just look at each other. Then you hold up the poker chip.

“What the hell was that?!” His lips curl into a sneer.

“What the hell was that? Where the fuck have you been?” His voice is quiet, but it's loaded with so much intense rage that you can practically feel the heat of it on your skin. Your eyes widen and your heart races like a rabbit’s. Something about his anger causes fear to bubble up inside you and you subconsciously recoil from him, your hand going to your throat protectively. He notices your reaction and softens, his eyes puzzled. “Sweetheart, what–?”

He raises his hand to touch your hair and you flinch, squeezing your eyes shut, your whole body trembling. That's when he catches the way you hold your throat. His fingers move to the scarf covering your neck and he hesitates for a second. You inhale shakily and he sighs.

“I'm not gonna hurt ya, doll.” You nod and he gently tugs the scarf down, revealing the bruises around your neck that are now a sickly shade of green. His eyes move up to the thick makeup on your face and he puts it together. You've been beaten, and recently. His whole body tenses with outrage and he barely keeps himself from losing it entirely. Every ounce of him wants to storm back into the casino and shoot Carl right in the face, make him pay for every bruise he's put on you. “He did this to you. Because of me.”

His voice shakes with fury and the white hot indignation rolls off of him in waves. You can tell where this is going and the terror explodes inside you. “Elvis, please!”

“I'll fucking kill him.” You shake your head vehemently and beg him to be reasonable, placing a trembling hand on his chest.

“No! Elvis, you can't. Not here. You'd be dead before you made it to the door.” The feeling of your hand over his heart makes it skip first with the overwhelming need for you to touch him more and then with the anguish of knowing you won't. He takes a deep breath and nods reluctantly. You're right. A showdown here like this would mean multiple people would die. Still, his eyes land on the bruises on your neck again and he grits his teeth.

“This ain't over.” He turns on his heel and walks directly to his car, disappearing into the back of it. Once he's sure Elvis is otherwise occupied, Jerry hurries over to you.

“Did you tell him?” You look at him and scoff.

“Of course I didn't. It doesn't matter anyway; I'm getting rid of it.” Jerry’s eyes widen in horror and he shakes his head again.

“No. You can't do that without telling him.”

“I don't have a choice. Besides, it's already scheduled with a clinic in Los Angeles. I'm leaving tomorrow.” You turn from him and head back into the casino before he has the opportunity to argue with you, hollering over your shoulder. “Goodbye, Jerry.”

******

Elvis's car leaves while Jerry is talking to you, so he's left to his own devices on how to get back to the International. He ends up taking a cab and arriving about twenty minutes after Elvis and his entourage get there. When he gets off the elevator, he finds a group of Elvis's closest friends huddled around the door, their faces contorted in concern. Jerry walks up cautiously and just as he opens his mouth to ask what's going on, he hears a loud crash inside the suite.

“He losin’ it?” He quietly asks the group. They all nod and make a path, expecting him to go in and try to sort Elvis out. “Why are you lookin’ at me?”

“He asked for you. Said you're the only one allowed in. He threw a vase at Sonny when he tried.” Red shrugs and looks at the floor, embarrassed that he can't handle his own boss, his own friend.

“Fine.” Jerry moves through them to the door and takes a steadying breath before opening it. Elvis is pacing around in the dark, having broken all but one lamp. His hair is wild from where he's been pulling on it and his eyes are red with the tears he's been trying to ignore. Jerry has seen his boss in bad shape before, but never like this. Just as he's thinking that it's heartbreaking to watch, Elvis rounds on him and grabs the front of his shirt.

“What the fuck, man?!” Jerry hollers. Elvis is beyond reason. The image of you first on Carl’s lap, then the bruises, and then sharing something with Jerry is too much. Something inside him is broken and it's released this wild thing that threatens to take over and burn his whole life to the ground. His hands shake and his breath comes out hot through his nose like a bull ready to charge.

“I saw you talking to her–”

“Aw, Jesus, man–” Jerry’s blood boils at the implication. He's done nothing but try to help this situation and now Elvis is going to come after him? Absolutely not. He grabs Elvis's hands and throws them off of him. “It's not what you think!”

Elvis has lost all control of himself. You're gone and he's convinced he has nothing left. Let Jerry hit him. Let Carl shoot him. Anything would be better than this feeling. He drops to his knees and a guttural sob escapes him as he buries his face in his hands. “I have nothing.”

Jerry breaks.

“Come on, E, don't do this.”

“Why not?! She chose him! She chose that motherfucker who put his hands on her! I should've killed him.” Elvis gets back to his feet and kicks the small table next to him.

“She didn't choose him! She's trying to protect you, dumbass!” Jerry’s patience is gone, his last ounce of ability to hold back lost with the heavy emotion in the room. “That's why she's still with him. That's why she's–” He gasps. It almost came flying out of his mouth, but he stopped it. Still, he's not quick enough. Elvis's eyes narrow, razor sharp.

“That's why she's what, Jerry?” His voice is quiet, too quiet. Jerry swallows hard. There's no getting out of this. And hell, maybe he needs to know.

“She's pregnant, Elvis. And she's getting rid of it. To protect you.”

Silence.

And then it's like the words finally sink into him. Elvis shakes his head, his eyes wide. For a moment, he just stands there trying to figure out if Jerry is telling the truth.

“No…” He whispers it the first time. And then the doubt turns to abject rage and he turns, grabbing the first thing he can get his hands on, a crystal ashtray, and hurling it at the wall. It hits the surface with a loud thud and then shatters into a thousand jagged little edges that clink onto the floor as Elvis screams. “NO!!!”

Jerry catches him as he collapses, the weight of reality causing him to literally crumble. Pregnant. With his baby. And getting rid of it to protect him.

“It's my fault. It's all my fault.” Elvis sobs into Jerry's shoulder. His body is numb, his mind an echo chamber of desperate rage. After all this, the only one he can blame is himself. He did this to you, hurt you so deeply, pushed you to the most extreme solution. He can't let you do this.

“Where?” His voice is quiet, muffled against Jerry’s jacket. He stands up and looks the other man in the eye. Jerry stands there with his mouth open, not sure what to say. “I asked where, Jerry.”

“Some clinic in LA.” Elvis sniffs and runs his hand through his hair, trying to smooth it. He's deadly calm now, his decision made.

“Get me a plane.”

******

Will he make it in time?

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

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