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kaleido-write · 7 months ago

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New leasebound update :3

OK so sheesh a lot to unpack here ok ? Bear with me pookies

First meriam clearly favorise women wich in her case trauma n all is comprehensible , if it was right after or some years after . But now we are well 10+ years after the events , it's sad to see that rusty is twisting once again a good story line that could work in so many ways if she wasn't desperate to make meriam seem like the perfect mother that dared to make the mistake of loving a man .

Now onto "you don't need to date a man" Rissa is right , neither does shez . By that logic nobody "need" dating (wich is untrue , humans are a very social kind and being blocked from accessing our social needs is actually traumatizing , hence why homophobia is such a traumatizing thing , as well as transphobia , being denied your identity and made to believe you're someone you're not is also very harmful , I invite everyone to do their own researches on humans social needs it's truly interesting) so here not only does meriam keep her daughter from her validation wich is something very important for her she ask her to not meet her social needs because 1 (2 men if we count the first husband) hurt her ??? It's incredible hypocritical and mean but still it could've been such an interesting plot to explore but rusty keep twisting it as "meriam can do no wrong"

Aaah there it is , rusty believe that pregnancy should no longer exist (she's a very vocal anti natalist( because it feed into women needing men wich is fucking stupid , as a society we need each other we are social being we need diversity at the point where we are in our evolution .

Erm what the flip rusty ??? Do you not know that abortion and contraceptives exist ??? My theory from what we know about rusty is that she might believe contraceptives are women ways to keep sleeping with men without feeling bad about it ? And to feel powerful by giving into patriarchy ? But it's only my opinion take this lightly

Meriam you are exactly saying this , you are praising your lesbian daughter over you straight ones , you keep denying them of the support they need while feeding into shez an overwhelming amount . Plus you ask your daughter to be celibate to avoid any pain , that's not how it works . The more you will deny someone of something they need the more they will grow for it.

Urgh please end me atp it's just fucking reverse homophobia 😭😭 like we get it rusty you hate the straighties that aren't celibate or don't fuck girls .

Ffs not meriam guiltripping Rissa as well "you'll always have a home" a home where only shez has the spotlight ??? A home where rocky can feed into that light because she's celibate ??? A house so toxic and competitive to get their mothers attention they can't even compare to the all mighty shez ? A home where they're treated like dumb girls not listening to their mother??? It's giving rapunzel af

How HOW why is it turned onto meriam ??? Can they understand not everything has to be about HER ?? Her experience isn't an universal one , none is , everyone is so fucking different. No meriam wasn't too stupid , she was scared left alone and needed support and affection , so does Rissa, she need her social needs met .

Ffs , how is dating risking ones life ?? We get it meriam you're traumatized , but if you're so worried warn your daughter and help them notice the red flags if they appear . Your experience shouldn't conditionate your daughters lives

OH MY GOSH YES SLAY RISSA she finally fucking said it 😭😭 They all need therapy asap fr

Urgh more guiltripping , it's honestly very sad to see yet again how meriam , the mother , wasn't ready to die for her daughters but instead parentified her eldest to the point she was on thr verge of making the ultimate sacrifice because of meriam unwillingness to take on her role as a parent and instead acted as the one needing to be saved . It's sickening and yet if it was well written to show meriams flaw God it would be an insane plot line to demonstrate how complex relationships can become under abuse . But no , yet again it's made to romanticize, play in power fantasy and glorify the lesbian daughter and the bi mother she saved (maybe to demonstrate that lesbian need to save bisexuals from their attraction to men ?..)

She keep making shez the only priority. She parentifies shez to the prize of being her most important daughter/person as a whole . It's gross and disgusting because here it's glamorized to further the fantasy of saving someone and then being seen as their most important person as a reward . It's to the point where I'm wondering , did rusty dreamed of saving her mother ? Did she have a similar conversation and wished she was the one being important. I somewhat can relate to the deep desire of finally being seen and loved as equally as their sibling as you've been parentified . Even tho for me it happened under real trauma and not that disgusting excuse of a trauma depiction. Because rusty did admit to incorporate real stuff that happened to her in her life so I'm truly curious about it all .

As a whole this page was a gross excuse of either making meriam the hero into finally recognizing her daughter shez as the hero she is , the growth of the power fantasy rusty wrote for the other radfems/terfs that most likely want to romanticize others trauma as a power fantasy to enhance "women power n strength" , or this panel is a representation of something that happened to rusty at some point and wanted to express but twisted so this time she was the hero .

#leasebound #leasebound critique #rusty leasebound

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petalsmooth · 9 months ago

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I understand Portia.

I even think she is probably, in many ways, good representation for the life of a women in her position in regency England. Often you see mothers portrayed as empty headed, uneducated you wonder how they manage a household. Kind of like in Sense and Sensibility. Which I am not saying is untrue representation particularly as written in the era but I don't think all women were like that. They couldn't afford to be. They were few avenues for survival for women in their position and I absolutely can understand a woman like Portia being singularly focused less on their feelings and more on trying to provide them the security she did not have by any means necessary.

It doesn't change that she never even treated Penelope as she did the other two. They completely wrote Penelope off as a prospect. It's not like her two other daughters were amazing prospects themselves. They did not pay any attention to her, obviously. How else would Pen be able to sneak off to the printer's so often? She told her she is basically a fool for hoping for a match. Then when Pen scraps one up that's in wealth and title higher than anything the other two did, only then is she proud of her. Up until he doesn't propose. She's going to say some pretty ugly things when learns of the engagement too and just simply put...she's abusive to Penelope.

She says she's doing it to give her daughters a better life than she had but that is true of two daughters. At best maybe she feels she has done right by her in sense Pen won't starve from lack of food but she's clearly starving for approval, affection, attention...a big reason why she wouldn't want to give up W.D in fact.

Which is another big reason why I am not entirely on board with how they have presented the w.d issue up to this point because it's been so one sided in how people react with assumptions being made about her that just aren't true. And why I still am mad at Eloise because not ONCE has she taken a moment to think her conclusions may not have been accurate as to reasons for the column. She simply does not care to listen to Penelope. But she'll listen to Cressida...Pen's bully.

And even there by ep 4 you can see how alone Eloise actually is because Cressida doesn't listen to her, the way she never listened to Pen. Although to be fair, in upcoming ep Eloise isn't listening to Cressida either so neither are particularly good at listening. When Cressida abandons Eloise mid sentence on one of her rants (one of the few times Eloise looks like her old animated self)...you can feel the absence of where Pen used to be. You can also see still not really aware of anything but her own world, because your new best "friend" is clearly worried will be married to an old lecher and focused on trying to prevent it. Eloise doesn't have that fear because privileged with her family. But also apparently her brother causing a scandal interrupting a courting couple still doesn't make her think...uh...wait...are there romantic feelings here?

I'm sure I'm not going to like everything said in the Pen and Colin argument because I clearly disagree with the writers on their slant of the column, but at least with Colin this is his best friend, fiancé and lover...they have a very intimate relationship, he gave her chances to open up to him and he really hadn't done wrong by her outside of the one time at a ball. He wasn't Eloise running through London unchaperoned with young single men and in my view should consider if Pen really wanted to ruin her would have said that. He also does not have all the details. Eloise had details and decided to take no ownership for her own actions. But however he moves past it, we know won't cut off contact for 6-8 months because she is too important to him to completely walk away.. She's important to Eloise too, but not more than Eloise's pride is important to her.

On one hand I want that friendship repaired because I miss their chemistry onscreen, I hate her with Cressida. I watched the whole show but I mostly fw through their scenes now because there is NO chemistry there. On other hand I don't want them as friends if Eloise remains the same self centered person using Pen as a sounding board but not accepting Pen if she deviates at all from her opinion. I mean Eloise actually said they used to plot to be spinsters together and thought that was what Pen wanted. I know it's taken from the book and I like that detail but it just shows how little attention paid to Pen. Did Pen really talk excitedly about that prospect Eloise, or did she merely go along with it because though no one would ever want her? Because I would guess the latter. Or did she merely not contest the idea with Eloise would suggest and presume Pen was onboard? I could see that too...

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internalsealpanic · 4 years ago

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All That Glitters

Summary: Pandora’s box is a black box covered in silk and embossed with the initials R.S.

a/n: So uh this work is a follow up to my fic Better Die than Doubt but it can be read as a stand alone. This thing resulted from the combined might of @knightfall05x, @lucy-roo, and my thirst. I said the follow up to that fic would be fluffy. The chronological follow up will come out at some point. I just have a single braincell and it decided it wanted to write more Black Mask being an absolute bastard. Thanks to those two hoes for enabling and proof reading. See you both in hell

warnings: This is smut. I was being haunted. This work contains noncon, past noncon, violence, Roman being an asshole, daddy kink, size kink, strength kink (if you squint ), yandere themes, stalking, exhibitionism, a dude who cannot take no for an answer and choking.

masterlist

“Hey Jay,” You chirp into the phone, maneuvering it over your shoulder carefully so you wouldn't drop it while you held your soda can at an arm's length away from you hoping it wouldn’t explode on you when you attempt to open it.

“Hey, sweet-” You blow out a raspberry halting the correction in its tracks. You can practically picture Jason’s mouth swerve into an odd shape caught between proceeding with his correction or backtracking. He chose neither. You hear him swear viciously. You snort making him huff.

“What’s up, asshat?” He asks, endearingly. You can pretty much hear him rolling his eyes from this side of the world. You frown hearing how winded he sounded.

“Jay, if this is a bad time, I can-”

“You’re fine it’s just a little-”

“JAYBIRD, A LITTLE HELP WOULD BE NICE”

“Roy sounds like he needs help. I can call back later.”

“Roy can handle himself.”

“Thanks for the confidence, Jaybird, but I think I’d prefer if you kept shooting straight.”

You snort feeling warmth build up in your chest despite the chilly weather. You chirp delighted when you open the can and it doesn’t explode. You hear Jason chuckle. The smart remark he had on the edge of his tongue dies on his lips when your breath hitches audibly at the sound of his gun firing. Jason makes a noise, the kind you use to prompt someone to tell you if they’re ok without having to ask. You swallow and nod and curse remembering he can’t see you. You blow out a breath, making sure it comes out steady.

“Y/n...”

“I’m-” You wanted to say fine but you knew the word fine was wholly inappropriate and untrue for this situation. “I’m gonna survive. I promise.”

Jason doesn’t make a sound of agreement or disagreement. He simply acknowledges it. You silently thank him for the neutrality.

“JAYBIRD”

“SHUT UP, HARPER”

You hear Kory sigh in exasperation somewhere in the distance. In the background, you hear a shriek which you assume is from Jason. Then the line cuts out.

You try to redial.

Nothing.

You try again.

Nothing.

A laugh rips out of your chest. You cry out in pain, the fizzy drink rushing up your nose. You wince and curse and settle on blaming Jason. You suspect they somehow broke the phone. You wouldn’t be too surprised by that outcome. You sigh but there was no point in complaining about it. You might as well finish your lunch in peace.

You chew on your cheek as you walk back to your cubicle, everyone’s eyes are on you. You feel your breathing pick up a fraction of a second faster.

One

Two

Fuck

You dig your nails into your palm. Your footfalls become heavier and a little louder even against the white noise around you. You slowdown and shake your head. You haven’t had an attack at work so far and you aren’t about to start now. You inhale deeply, letting your chest expand as you run through the things Dinah taught you.

Take stock of the situation around you.

The world around you was buzzing with life-shuffling papers, ringing phones, humming of machines, and blips of voices here and there. The room is bright and clean under the light of sterile fluorescent lights. You take in all the voices around you. You’re not alone. The knot building in your shoulders loosens. You continue.

Take stock of your body.

Your body is trembling, the beginnings of a panic attack looming over you. Instead of cursing it, you let it. It was only natural to relapse once in a while. The trauma wasn’t fresh. Not in your opinion, at least. Dinah and, apparently, everyone else had a different opinion. You’re good at being ok but you were human. You let out a long breath, half-tempted to let your eyes slide shut but you’re afraid of finding yourself in that room again, of seeing him, of feeling him on you. Revulsion spasmed in your body in powerful waves. Sure, you’re a showboat, Jay had said as much, but showing off and causing a scene were two entirely different things and you weren’t entirely sure you could endure the looks of pity from your coworkers every time you came through those doors.

Stiffly, you walk towards your cubicle. Your neighbor, Chelsea, smiling conspiratorially at you while your manager glares daggers at you. You raise an eyebrow at Chelsea who waggles her eyebrows in return.

“This is how you tell me I got fired?” You sigh, a smile twitching at the corners of your mouth.

Chelsea rolls her eyes at you. “Nope, but the boss man did want me to tell you to tell your boyfriend that he really shouldn’t be sending you gifts at work but honestly, I …...” Your brows knit in confusion, cold dread licking at the pit of your stomach.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.” You say slowly trying to keep the mounting panic out of your voice. You could hear your blood pulsating in your ears, heart threatening to jump out of your chest. Your feet are itching for you to run outside and call Jason or Dinah or anyone but the stupider part of you- the curious part of you was clawing at your mind to proceed.

“Y/n, are- are you ok?” You blink and look at the clock. Two minutes. You blacked out for two minutes which, if you were being totally honest, was a huge improvement.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“If you say so” She shrugs, her eyes still not pulling away from you.

Mechanically, you turn to your desk. Your entire being freezes when your eyes land on the black box sitting on the desk and the large bouquet of red roses sitting next to it. The box was rectangular, black with silver trimmings embossed on it. Large ‘R.S.’ written in fancy lettering at the bottom right corner of the lid. You wanted to vomit.

You draw a breath and flex your fingers. You can feel your teeth digging into your cheeks.

“Hey, Chel?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I borrow some tissues?” You ask your voice barely above a whisper but still miraculously steady. She frowns at your handing you a couple of tissues. Normally, you keep your vigilante habits out of your civilian life but considering the initials embossed on this obnoxiously expensive-looking box sitting on your desk, you think this level of paranoia is justified.

You stop to calculate the odds that the box contained explosives which turns up zero. You sigh but a shiver climbs up your spine when you run through the possibilities of what Roman could have thought of as a gift.

“Y/n, what the fuck?” If Chelsea wasn’t watching you before, she was now. You glance at her quickly and give her a weak smile. You swallow the lump forming in your throat. Cautiously, you lift the lid quietly regretting not calculating the possibility of anything toxic being in it. You’re honestly surprised nothing happened. You roll your eyes upon seeing the expensive-looking black silk covering the inside.

Yes, rub your money in my face while you scare me shitless why don’t you, you fucking asshole, you think grumpily peeling the fabric away.

Your heart comes to a full stop when you’re met with a pair of lacy lingerie. Your lacy lingerie. Your USED lacy lingerie. You blink trying not to focus on the white stains. You sincerely did not want to think about that. Moving them aside you find a bloody shirt, the sound of its shifting fabric making gooseflesh spread all over your body.

You recognize it. You didn’t want to, but here it was. The bloodstains were dry but they were still visible even against the dark fabric of the shirt. Your skin prickles where the scars on your body sit. The knife wounds sting and throb as if freshly cut. It takes everything in you not to vomit.

It was probably the single-minded curiosity that kept you going. You maneuver the shirt carefully making sure it makes as little sound as possible. Underneath it is a collar, simple but clearly expensive leather with the tag R.S. glittering under the sterile lights. Your throat constricts. You tear your gaze away. Your eyes sting. Next to it was a stack of photos. The top photo showed you with your, shirt torn exposing your breasts. Someone was inside you, gripping your hips. You gag. You reign your mind in. You flip the stack over and gather your breath. Your heart stops again when you see Roman’s familiar handwriting on the back of a photo.

“Miss me?”

The drive back to your apartment was a blur consisting of what was most likely several severe traffic violations but you needed- you need to get out of town as quickly as possible. The odds of Roman himself showing up to your little town was low, very low. Not that you’ve actually calculated it. You don’t need to. The man walks around like his feet bless every surface they touch. The man has a loaded god complex the size of Russia to put it generously. Fetching you was simply beneath him. He had henchmen for a reason after all.

You wave to your landlady and her husband amiably as you walk past them keeping the nervous thrum out of your movement. Your landlady returns the gesture, elbowing her sneering husband. You know what he thinks of you and your habits. Take a few guys home with you and suddenly you’re a slut. Your promiscuity was none of his fucking business. Your body was yours to do with, to give, and to take back. It was yours. It’s yours, you assure yourself but the feeling of your body and mind hanging loosely off of each other feels painfully vivid at the moment.

You shake your head. This wasn’t the best time to sort out your hang-ups.

You press your ear to your apartment door then remembered just how thick it was and remembered that you didn’t exactly have super hearing. You sigh. What you would give to be Supes right about now. You enter the apartment careful not to make your steps audible. That, however, was rendered moot by the two very large and blocky men standing in your living room. You exhale both in frustration and relief. If Roman Fucking Sionis thinks he can scare you with two meatheads, he was clearly insulting you. Well, at least, he didn’t hire anyone actually competent considering all your gear was in a duffle bag tucked neatly away under your bed. Yanno, just for this sort of eventuality. Now that you think about it. You really should have just kept it in your car but small-town crime seems to have softened you.

You smile letting the irritation mold you into something sharp and venomous. You throw the box at one of the henchmen goading them to attack you. Its contents scattering all over the floor. You can’t bring yourself to care that some of the photos land right side up.

“Tell your chicken shit of a boss to come scare me himself,” You laugh, manic relief flooding through you. You feel like you’re going mad but you don’t care. It’s so much more feasible to deal with these men than it is to have to even think about Roman. “He doesn’t even have the balls to-”

“Well, it’s nice to see you too, Sweetheart.” comes a gravelly voice from the bedroom. Your stomach drops. Roman strides out of your bedroom adjusting the cuff link of his obnoxiously expensive suit. He looks down to the photos and gifts scattered on the ground, frowning he bends down to pick up the collar, dusting it off and stuffing it in his pocket.

Your fight or flight response freezes. You back into the door, the material feeling too solid for the moment. You inhale sharply, only managing short shallow breaths as Roman slowly closes the distance between you. His footfalls loud, heavy, and deliberately casual making your blood thrum.

No. No. No.

Your eyes flicker wildly around the room looking for any weapon within reach, your mind running through the numbers, the probabilities melding together into incoherent blotches of red in the back of your skull. Roman slams his large hands on either side of your head. The impact makes the door creak. You can’t stop yourself from flinching visibly, surprise and fear carving themselves on to your face. Roman barks out a derisive laugh as he trails a leather-clad finger down your chin, your throat, then to your cleavage. The contact against your bare skin makes you bristle.

“This here?” He emphasizes, his fingers playing with the top button of your shirt popping it carelessly revealing your baby pink, lace bra hidden beneath. “This is a little low cut for the office, isn’t it, princess?”

Annoyance overwhelms your sense of self-preservation. “I’m not about to take fashion advice from a guy who looks like he watches Scar Face daily.” You snipe, teeth bared. Roman hums the undercurrent of rage filling the air. Your ribs ache, remembering an old injury. Your mouth slams shut cutting off any other snide remarks.

“You wear these clothes to wind me up, don’t you?” Roman drawls, his leather-clad fingers tracing up the expanse of your thigh exposed by the slit of your skirt, bunching up the skirt and playing with the waistband of your thong as he does so. His thumbs pressing circles against your inner thigh, you can’t help but quiver under his touch. “Oh the fun hasn’t even started yet...just wait”, he bites your ear lobe and tugs it between his teeth. He pulls back and glares at you. “Do you want to know how I found you in this dead-end town, princess?” He asks tilting your chin with his gloved hand. You shake your head not really interested at the moment. You’re too distracted by how flush your body was getting as he presses you further into the door with his bulk. You note with disgust the arousal suffusing through your limbs.

“You were all over the news, sweetheart,” You’re trying to remember what he could possibly be talking about. He leans in closer, leather-clad hand brushing against his thumb against your bottom lip, your lips parting automatically for him. He places his gloved thumb between your parted lips. “Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize that goofy smile of yours?” You shiver lips wrapping around the intruding digit. Your tongue flicks and swirls around it in a practiced gesture. “Good girl.” Roman hums, a grin spreading across his face while thick shame blankets you. You frown at how familiar the taste of the glove is against your tongue. You push your thoughts away wishing your mind would fall away.

“Baby,” He draws his hand away from your lips, wiping the thin string of saliva on your face. His hands glide down the sides of your body. “Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize these hips?” His hands grab at your hips roughly, lifting you and pulling them flush against his own. “Baby. I know what’s mine and this time I won’t let you get away from me.” He whispers against your neck, voice husky and rough. You swallow feeling his lips brush against your pulse.

Roughly, he wedges a thigh between your legs, the friction against your core making you keen. The friction woke something in you and loosened a few other things. Your hips roll desperately against the thick muscle of his thighs. Roman grins against your neck, loosening his grip on your hips and letting you fuck yourself on his thigh. You will yourself to stop but the heat twisting in your gut is too much. You hate yourself. You well and truly hate yourself. Your cheeks warm, breath coming out in pants.

Roman places a kiss on your collarbone, teeth grazing your sensitive flesh. Your tongue is caught between your teeth to hold back a moan but the shiver spreading throughout your body says it too loudly. Roman chuckles, vibrations deep within his chest making you weak. Roman licks a stripe up your neck, planting kisses and hickeys along your jaw. “God, you taste sweet, princess.” He murmurs hot against your neck, the smirk dripping from his voice. It feels like acid against your skin.

He guides your pliant arms to loop around his shoulders. You obey soundlessly, tipping your head back giving him room to ravish your neck. He does with unbridled enthusiasm. You feel trapped in your own body. You don’t want this. You want to push him away but the fear coursing through you leaves you a passenger in your own body. Your breath hitches with each bite and kiss.

“Mine.” He rumbles resolutely, sliding the cloth of your top placing a bite on your shoulder. It stings without even looking, you know it’s deep.

“No” You whisper, low and unsure.

“No?” He challenges pulling away from your shoulder.

“No” You echo voice frustratingly unsteady. He sneers down at you, smile condescending. A biting rebellious part of you demands that you snarl and spit something brisque and witty at him but it’s pushed down by something viscous filling your chest. How are you drowning and why are you not dead yet?

Just let it pass, your mind whispers to itself. Just let him get his fill and he’ll be on his way. You don’t even have to get hurt. You sincerely want to believe this. You just want this to not happen. The thought of it summons a wave of nausea deep within you. Tears well up in the corner of your eyes. You blink rapidly chasing them away. He likes it when you cry.

“Baby, you can’t tell me you don’t want this,” He emphasizes, pressing his thigh against your sopping pussy. The pressure makes you whine. “Not when you’re being all cute and fucking yourself on my thigh like the dirty slut you are.”

No. No. No.

Rat-tat.

You will your hips to stop their movement but they’re too lost in their momentum. Your eyes flicker to Roman’s men, large eyes pleading. They stand stiffly doing their best to ignore you. They’re doing a damn fine job of it.

“Oh they won’t do anything, they’re here to watch,” Roman whispers hotly against your ear. Your eyes flicker to them again. Your breath catching when your eyes meet one of theirs, seeing not an ounce of pity. You shove the bile rising in your throat and the quirk on their lips deep somewhere else, somewhere away from you.

You try to squirm away but Roman’s arm presses into your windpipe pinning you in place. You thrash and kick and hiss but your head feels light. You hear fabric shift and you still. The sound of the zipper is too loud and too real.

Roman takes your lips in a forceful kiss making you gasp. His tongue forces its way into your mouth. He releases your neck. You feel his fingers trail up the slits of your skirt. You try to focus on them rather than what’s pressing stiffly against your inner thigh. The fabric of your skirt bunch up by your hips. You feel your panties getting pushed aside by large fingers. You whimper again, clawing at the expensive fabric of Roman’s suit. “Please don’t do this.” You plead breathily against his ear.

He laughs, voice gravelly and harsh. Without further warning or preparation or ceremony, Roman shoves himself inside your warmth, pushing you further into the door. You gasp, the burning stretch making your body tremble all over. He bottomed out with a loud groan. You wanted to cover your ears or have your mind fall out of your reach but here it was painfully present along with your frozen body. He’s loud, groaning and panting as he fucks into you. He thrusts into you with wild abandon, hips clashing against each other with bruising intensity. You can feel his cock dragging in and out of you, hitting every spot violently. He wants this to hurt. You hope it would too.

Your cheeks burn with how your walls spasm around his cock. You want to push him away, to take him out of you but it feels so good. You try to smother the lewd sounds you make into his shirt. Roman’s hands squeeze tightly around your waist in warning. “Yeah, that's it, baby. Let daddy know how much you want this.” You don’t protest. Instead, you let your mouth hang open and let the lewd mewls and keens tumble out. He drills into you more violently seemingly spurred on by your sounds.

You come with a whimper. You want to bury yourself in a hole. He comes not long after still fucking into you as he does, making sure your pussy takes all of his cum.

He pulls out of you, the slick sound of it absolutely sinful. Your body is slack against the door, too drained to hold itself up. Roman pulls back, grinning down at you and whistling appreciatively as he admires his work. “Let’s dress you back up, sweetheart.” Roman coos locking something around your neck. You don’t need to look down to know what he’s put there. The cool metal of the R.S. hanging off the collar presses stark against your hot sensitive skin.

“You look sooo much better like this,” Blearily you look past him. Your duffle bag is already in the arms of one of his men. He grabs your face roughly making you look him in the eyes. “All mine- just as you should be.”

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Thanks for reading! I swear I will do more fluff in the near future. I just needed this out of my system.

Tag list: @batarella, @anothertimdrakestan, @lucy-roo, @multifandomgirl-us, @idkmanicantenglish,@birdy-bat-writes, @boosyboo9206, @americasmarauders , @l-horizon11, @arestorationofbalance , @cloudie-skay, @wunderstell

#yandere blackmask #yandere dc #yandere roman sionis #reader insert #dc reader insert #warning: smut #dc smut #black mask x reader #roman sionis x reader #yandere roman sionis x reader #my writing

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comingoutofthecauldron · 4 years ago

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on malyen oretsev as a character and a love interest

this might be slightly rambly and incoherent but i need to say it. malyen oretsev has been the underdog in this fandom for as long as i can remember. a little while ago it was the “malaria” jokes (very classy, folks), and then waves upon waves of mal antis and darkling stans/apologists, and even now a decent majority of the fandom is convinced he’s just boring or an asshole. and fair enough on that last account, if you genuinely don’t like him as a character, that’s fine. but there are a lot of accusations people throw mal’s way that i am really sick and tired of hearing, and hopefully this will help put a stop to them.

mal is not boring. mal is witty and charismatic and an easy friend, and he is also incredibly brave. when he thought alina was being tortured and brutalised by the darkling, he volunteered for a suicide mission to track the stag—which he didn’t even know existed—into fjerda because it was the only way he thought he could help her. that mission killed two of his best friends. people say mal is an asshole because of the way he treated alina when he saw her (months after she’d been dragged away from him against her will) happy and healthy in amongst the people who had looked down on the both of them their whole lives, after having just lost his best friends for her. i say his being upset was pretty understandable. and yes, he was a bit of asshole in siege & storm, but he’s a teenage boy and you cannot hold him to all these ridiculously high moral and behavioural standards (especially when you don’t hold other characters like nikolai or the darkling to those standards). everyone has their asshole moments. nikolai’s is ongoing. holding mal’s against him just because he’s not all-powerful like the darkling or royal like nikolai is bullshit, plain and simple.

as for malina, i have a lot to say on that front. a lot of people say that mal was only interested in alina after she got her powers, but that is blatantly untrue. the quote, “just you and me. it’s always just you and me, alina” literally happens in the first chapter of shadow & bone. mal himself said that he always loved alina, and her being taken away was the wakeup call he needed. if anything, alina’s powers only complicated their relationship—mal didn’t know how to deal with her becoming the very thing they’d both grown to resent after being treated like shit in the first army while the grisha were treated like royalty, which explains a lot of the tension in their relationship surrounding alina’s abilities.

people tend to say that mal didn’t like it when alina became powerful and less dependent on him, but that’s not right. mal never wanted alina to be less. he was afraid of what would happen to her if she became more. from his point of view, all that alina’s powers brought them was trouble; the darkling’s grooming of alina and his subsequent manhunt for them, nikolai’s proposal to alina (when he was an adult and alina was a minor), the apparat’s cult and imprisonment of them, the death of the only mother figure they’d ever known. in his mind, alina’s powers only ever brought them misery, and mal was scared of losing her to that misery. we saw how they were torn apart throughout the books, because mal was otkazat’sya, and he was not the only one who felt that that might never be good enough for alina. neither of them ever wanted the power that alina was given. that’s why it was so hard for mal to accept that alina wanted to keep it—he was scared it would corrupt her the way it had the darkling. he was scared of losing her.

the argument that really frustrates me is when people call malina abusive. say it with me, folks: malina is not an abusive ship. mal and alina loved each other unconditionally. even if he wasn’t happy about alina’s powers, he knew that it was important to alina that she use them to save ravka, and so he helped her. he owed ravka nothing. this was the country whose monarchy had essentially taken his life from him to force him into being little more than a foot soldier in their army; the country his friends had died for thanks to the darkling being placed in such a position of power; the country whose king let the people starve whilst he sat in his golden palace and wasted more money. mal helped alina save ravka not because he loved his country, but because he loved her. hell, he literally died for her.

whilst we’re on the subject, let’s talk about that quote that people like to say is abusive: “i love you, alina, even the part of you that loved him.” do you understand how monumental that quote is? mal found out that the darkling is the same darkling who made the shadow fold, the shadow fold that had taken numerous lives and that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. he was beginning to realise the extent of the manipulation alina had undergone at the hands of the darkling, the grooming and abuse. they both knew the atrocities that the darkling had committed, and yet mal has it in himself to tell alina that not only does he not care that alina ever thought she loved the darkling, he loves her all the same anyway? how is that abusive?

lastly, i want to talk about his most infamous quote: “i am become a blade.” this is one of my favourite quotes in the entire grishaverse, and i’m going to explain why. a lot of people think that it’s grammatically incorrect, but as your local grammar nerd, i’m here to tell you that it’s not! as alina notices, the actual tattoo is written in ancient ravkan: e’ya sta rezku. because of that, the quote translates with slightly strange phrasing, but that phrasing still makes grammatical sense. it’s sort of like how shakespearean english is still english, it just sounds different.

now, grammar aside, i want to talk about why the quote is so beautiful (to me, anyway). mal has been used all his life. when they were at keramzin, he tracked and hunted animals for them to eat. in the first army, he was used as a foot soldier and a tracker, and the darkling (and nikolai, to an extent) used him to track the amplifiers. he’d always had his agency taken away from him by those with more power, and he’d been used and mistreated almost every time. then he turns around and offers himself and his agency up to alina without a second thought. because he loves and trusts her that much. at this point, it doesn’t seem to him as though there’s any chance of him and alina ever being together or getting a happy ending. he’s not doing it for that. he’s doing it because alina wants to save ravka, and he loves alina, so he wants to help her do that. in all of his indecision about his life and what he is and who he is for alina, he is able to decide that to live in service of her, to live for her, is exactly what he needs to do. he is essentially saying, “i recognise your power and though i am afraid for you, i won’t hold it against you now. instead i’ll help you wield it and fulfil your destiny, even if that isn’t what i want/what i want for you and even if it gets me killed.”

mal is a teenage boy who had to mature very quickly under terrible circumstances. of course he’s not perfect and he makes mistakes, but i cannot for the life of me understand why he is hated on such a large scale. he was an asshole to alina at some points, yes, but alina was usually an asshole right back, and it was only because they were both pining and angry at their situation. if you still don’t like him, fine, but for the love of god, stop calling him abusive/toxic. he’s a good character and a healthy love interest (a rare sight in ya) and malina is a healthy romance. it’s that simple.

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locke-writes · 4 years ago

Text

Cut Me Loose

Author: locke-writes

Title: Cut Me Loose

Song: Good For You - Dear Evan Hansen OBC, Erik Lehnsherr For: Anon

Rating: T

Word Count: 1,206

Tag List: @moonlit-imagines / ask to be added

At one point in time you could have seen yourself spending the rest of your life with Erik. At one point in time all you needed was for him to be happy and to be happy with him. At one point in time you had believed it was to be you and he for the rest of time, or as long as your life would allow it. At one point in time you would have loved him forever. Yet no longer could you claim to feel that way. Love had existed in your life, love towards Erik, now all you felt when you thought of him was anger and resentment.

You knew you could have gone with him that day, knew you could have abandoned everything and everyone to leave with him. What would have happened after that you couldn't have imagined? Would you really had been happy or would there be guilt lingering? Questions that often lingered in your mind surrounded by the idea that you could have been with him, could have potentially been happy. All you had to do was suspend your beliefs for a moment, or many moments.

Suspension of belief wasn't worth happiness in your mind. You knew you would be with him through all of time and be witness to his plans, all plans you did not want to come to fruition. While you understood where he was coming from, while you understood what he had in mind for the future of mutants, you couldn't abide by it. You couldn't stand by simply because he wanted a mutant only world, you couldn't imagine how that would come about with any sort of peace. Maybe the beliefs held by Charles were no better but surely there was a middle ground between them.

Erik knew that day on the beach that you wouldn't go with him. He'd known you wouldn't be leaving with him before your decision was even made. You knew yourself better than he knew you but he knew your ideals well enough to be prepared for an inevitable end. He'd always love you, he knew that there was no ridding you from his heart, that he couldn't ever rid you from his heart no matter how hard he tried and he wouldn't want to try in the first place. You had given him a sense of hope and comfort that he would always carry with him even if he no longer could count on you at his side.

In one instant he was gone, never to be seen again. At least you'd thought you'd never see him again, you thought as the months passed, as the years passed that he would be gone from your life forever. Occasionally there he was on the news but that didn't count as seeing him again, he wasn't there in person, he wasn't intent on having a conversation with you. Erik hadn't reached out, hadn't called or written a letter, you thought the split was a permanent one, thought that time and beliefs would keep you apart.

You'd thought all of these things only for him to appear on your doorstep in the middle of the night asking for a place to stay.

Erik only asked for a place to stay, a bed or a couch to sleep in, and that was the only conversation that you'd had with him that night. There was so much that you wanted to say, so much that could have been brought forth and laid to rest but it was late and it wasn't the time to dig deep into the past. You'd wondered how he knew where you lived as you were no longer keeping a room at the school and instead owned a small house outside the nearest major city, it was quiet and people didn't ask too many questions about your being a mutant.

He was there, he was there in your home and sleeping in your guest bed and everything that you had been holding on to was coming to a boil. Night passed into dawn and you couldn't sleep but apparently neither could he as you made your way to the living room finding Erik flipping through a book he'd grabbed from your shelves.

"Thank you for letting me stay" Erik spoke, shutting the book to turn to you.

"You're welcome. Although I wonder what you would have done had I refused."

"I know you well enough that I knew what your answer would be. That's why I came here instead of visiting Charles"

"I think you knew me once, I think it's been enough time that you don't know me any more."

He laughed at your response, "I could say the same about myself but I'm sure you would prove that untrue. I know that you want to believe you've changed but there's been no change with you other than your address"

"Why did you even come here in the first place, what trouble did you find yourself in?"

"What makes you think I'm in trouble"

"It's you Erik. Nothing you've ever done hasn't gotten you in trouble"

"There's nothing you need to worry about."

You were becoming upset at his avoidance, "You've brought whatever trouble it is here to me, I think that I need to worry about it! This is my home and I had peace here once but if some agency is going to knock that door down in five minutes I think I should know!"

"And I'm telling you that it's nothing you need to worry about, let's leave it be"

"Fine. How long are you thinking of staying?"

"You're acting like I'm intruding on your life"

"You're acting like nothing's changed between us"

"Has something?"

"Yes! Time has passed Erik, you and I aren't the same people we were back then, I'm not the same person I was back then!"

"Are you saying that you'd join me now?"

"Are you so full of yourself that you think that's what I meant? My thought on that subject haven't changed, nor have my feelings for you before you even ask. But I've grown to learn that you won't change, that you'll do whatever it takes to get your way and that's something I can't give into."

"And it's something I gave into? I never gave into anything, this is how it should be, how it needs to be! Of all people you should know what it's like, you should understand what I'm, what we, are trying to do. I want what is best for all mutants not only myself."

"What's best for mutants doesn't mean starting some war against the humans"

"And does it entail some sort of laws, some sort of registry? What would your solution be because as far as I'm concerned there isn't a way other than war."

"I'm glad you have people that feel the same as you do." You stated, leaving it simply and not wanting to carry the argument out any longer knowing you'd keep running around in circles.

He nodded, "I'll be out of here in an hour."

"I hope you know that I'll care about you Erik, that's not going to change, but what we had can't ever happen again."

#locke writes #x men #erik lehnsherr #x men fic #erik lehnsherr fic #x men fanfic #erik lehnsherr fanfic #x men oneshot #erik lehnsherr oneshot #x men imagine #erik lehnsherr imagine

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terrainofheartfelt · 4 years ago

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Do you blame Serena for fighting for Dan? It is plausible that she thought Blair was never serious about Dan right? And honestly the way Nate was written, he didn’t have much of a personality and seemed lost about his path for most of the show.

Anon, if you were searching for a succinct answer, I am sorry, you came to the wrong nerd’s inbox...

I mean, if anything I blame the writers.

It depends on where you’re asking—if I blame Serena for turning to Dan as a source of comfort when she’s vulnerable (I’m thinking of s3 & s4 specifically) then like, no, that’s a very human thing to do.

And it’s not like Dan didn’t do that either, he gravitated to Serena in s4 largely, in my unsolicited unprofessional opinion, because of his grief over losing Milo.

If you’re talking about the s5 finale though, and the severely OOC behavior involving emotional manipulation and revenge porn...then it’s a no from me dawg. That’s not okay.

Nads (mysteriesofloves) has written about this more eloquently than I’m about to, but here goes: in s5, at the wedding, when Serena confesses that she loves Dan, she echoes the same words Blair tells Nate way back in the pilot: “Always have, always will.” Which is, on the surface, a nice sentiment, but there’s such an underlying cynicism to it in the context of the show, because...it’s untrue. And both women communicate it at moments to save something that is in many ways already gone.

(Dan, I do believe, had already let Serena go a long time ago, as I say here).

As for your second question, it is plausible. It’s obvious to us, as the audience, the depth of Blair’s feelings (Ms Meester truly did The Most), but Dair’s relationship as it’s displayed on the show exists mostly in its own bubble, and is insulated from all the batshit 5b plots swirling around it. Serena is not omniscient like the audience is, so she probably doesn’t see their connection, and, given her response to the Pink Party Debacle, she probably isn’t looking to. And I think that “Always have, always will” brand of cynicism comes into play again here, with a “you don’t know her like I know her / you don’t know him like I know him.” and it's technically true, Dan knows Blair the way only he knows her, and Blair knows Dan the way only she knows him

Largely, I think the main tension Serena feels is that: these two people, who always seemed at odds, connected through one shared interest: her, but now they’re connected by a myriad of different things, so Serena doesn’t know how she fits into that anymore. Which, again, is a very natural and human way to feel, but the writers took it in a direction that makes me Very Sad.

I do resent the Nate remark a little bit, bc I am very fond of him, my dear Pure of Heart, Dumb of Ass, Bi of Sexual. I do agree that the writers were not good to him, but in the beginning seasons gave a lot to explore. If you’re meaning is that he wasn’t a viable option as Serena’s potential partner during s5, well, neither was Dan, imo. I think Nate as a character of depth doesn’t get enough credit sometimes, he’s highly observant of other people, naturally kind and empathetic, and has a sense of ethics that is interesting to explore, at least until it hits a wall when it comes to his friendship with Chuck. Like, why Nate put up with him after season 3 is beyond me, but that is when the writers kind of...stopped believing in him as a character, and he really did become “the handsome vacant one” as Georgina puts it. But, as S (strideofpride) says, that’s #NotmyNate.

I mean that’s the real tragedy of the OG GG, for each character (except chip wiskers tbh) at one point the writers decided to lean in to the most cynical version of said character, and retconned any shred of humanity.

#asks #anon #long post #contrary to the above I really do love serena i promise!!#the writers just did her so dirty #gg meta #every ask i answer always comes back to #anti chuck bass #which i think is very sexy of me tbh

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phykios · 4 years ago

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honesty and promise me, part 3 [read on ao3] [co-written with @darkmagyk]

Several more weeks and hookups later, Annabeth thinks she should probably come clean. Some people might bury it deep, and for sure, Annabeth’s considered it, but, well. It is kind of embarrassing that she didn’t know Percy’s name at first. Stuff like that doesn’t usually bother her--she’s had nameless one night stands in the past, and despite Thalia’s ribbing, she knows that Thalia doesn’t really care either. It’s just that, you know, he’s Thalia’s family, and they’ve seen each other a few more times, and they are planning to continue to see each other a few more times in the future. Or more than a few times.

Anyway, she kind of feels like she owes it to him. Like he deserves this small nugget of truth, payment for all the times he’s fucked her blind. It’s nagging at her, and she hates feeling like she owes anyone anything.

Piper certainly seemed to think so, when Annabeth had told her over their monthly brunch date.

“It’s just common courtesy at this point,” she said. “Like, what if you guys end up married and then sell your story to Hollywood, they cast my dad as the male lead, and it comes out in interviews that you didn’t know his name for like a month? He’s gonna get the wrong idea.”

Annabeth wasn’t sure which part was more ridiculous: the movie, Piper’s dad being involved, or them being married.

Anyway, sharing some of her avocado fries, Piper had reminded her that being mean wasn't very punk rock, shutting her up effectively.

She’s out on site in the Lower East Side, taking measurements for plots of land, writing down sun angles and measuring the wind velocity between the brick buildings, when she gets a text from him.

I’m on a break and I’m starving 😩 Want to grab something to eat?

It’s 2pm on a Thursday and he wants to grab something to eat. If Annabeth didn’t know any better, she’d say that that sounds like a real, honest-to-goodness, bona fide date. (Meeting up at and subsequently leaving bars together does not count as a date, she’s pretty sure. Neither do the booty calls.) He’s been getting a little free with his texts, that boy, sending her selfies and memes and questions about her day, and now this? An invitation to their first, actual date? She should block him on principle, just for the sheer audacity.

sure, wya

520 8th, text me when you get here 😁

That’s another thing: Percy loves his emojis. If this is going to continue, they’re going to need to have a serious talk about that.

She doesn’t need to text him when she gets there; he’s already outside, leaning on the stone edifice of the building like a particularly jacked rent boy in his tight t-shirt and broody look, cigarette between his fingers. The sweatpants sort of ruin the image, though. He looks particularly comfortable in a way that warms Annabeth right from the inside out. “You know, when Nico said you smoked, I honestly didn’t believe it.” she says, not even bothering to say hi.

He looks up from his phone and smiles, the sun behind his teeth. “Hey!”

“Hey, yourself.” She doesn’t even hesitate--she plucks the cigarette out of his hand, taking a drag off it herself. “You been smoking for a long time?”

“Who do you think taught Thalia how?” He raises an eyebrow, bemused. “Is that a problem?”

It is, but it’s not like she can tell him that without losing some of her credibility. “Wouldn’t smoking fuck with your cardio?”

Percy shrugs, conceding. “A little. I used to be a lot worse, but I just can’t quite kick the habit. It’s mostly a stress thing, anyway.”

“Rough practice?” she asks, putting just enough effort into her lip wobble to make it abundantly clear that she’s making fun of him. “Were the other boys being mean to you because of your tights?”

He grins at her, saucy. “Annabeth Chase, do you really think that NYCB rehearses here? In the Garment District?” But he laughs before she can stammer out an answer (and thank God, she’s lived here three years and can barely keep the boroughs straight, let alone the neighborhoods). “I just wrapped up teaching a class. I don’t have to be at rehearsal until 5, I was thinking we could hang out? Bryant Park?”

A first date at the New York Public Library. She almost hates to admit it, but Percy Jackson might be kind of her dream man. “I believe I was promised food,” she sniffs, but she does hold out her hand, and when he takes it, lacing his fingers through hers, she’s sure that he can feel her heart beating, palm to palm.

Twenty minutes later they’re settled on a bench in the corner of the green, Annabeth halfway into a ham sandwich and Percy juggling a salad and an iced coffee. He’s been regaling her with tales from the more exciting side of ballet, a side she hadn’t even imagined could actually exist. “So by the time I land in Paris,” he says, taking a sip of coffee, “the guy’s foot has swollen up to, like, twice its original size, and when I finally managed to find some wifi to check my phone, there’s, like, eight missed calls from my mom and my agent, and an email from her that just says ‘READ THIS,’ in all caps, and of course the article is in French, which I didn’t really speak at the time, and I was so stressed that my ADHD made it so I couldn’t even read the Google translation, and I had to ask someone to translate it for me.”

“Oh my god,” she says, struggling to keep it in.

“And that’s how I found out that I’d been moved up to first cast in Le Corsaire, from the poor barista at a coffee shop in Charles de Gaule!” He laughs.

“That’s insane,” Annabeth says. “And the show was the next day?”

“It was that night! I had to haul ass to the opera house and get warmed up, because I was going on in about four hours. You should have seen the looks on everyone’s faces when I stumbled in, I’m sure that they all wanted to kill me.” Percy chuckles, taking a bite of leafy greens. “Now I wasn’t just the twenty-year-old upstart American, I was the twenty-year-old upstart American who skipped town when I wasn’t supposed to.”

“How did it go?”

“Killed it, of course,” he says, deservedly smug.

Despite her best efforts, she’s absolutely entranced; he’s a great storyteller. “I bet you break that story out at parties all the time, don’t you.”

He laughs. “Whatever gets the donors to open their checkbooks, right?”

“I can’t believe you lived in Paris. I’ve always wanted to see it.” She’d had a few chances to when she was in college, the semester she’d studied abroad in Rome, but she just never got around to it. Just another item on her long, long list of regrets, placed somewhere between the sketchy burrito from last week and not telling her mom to fuck off earlier when she’d had the chance. “If I were you, I’d never leave.”

Percy shrugs. “It was amazing, I won’t lie. But towards the end I just really, really missed it here. All my family is in NYC, you know? My mom, step-dad, and my sister live here, and Thalia and Nico and Hazel, too. I tried to come back and visit whenever I could, but being away from them was really hard.” There’s something soft and inviting in his expression when he says, “I’m really happy to be back home.”

“What are they like?” Annabeth asks. “Your family. Your non-mob family, I mean.”

He rolls his eyes, but he grins another one of those blinding grins, too. “My mom is the most amazing person you will ever meet. Not only did she support my dance habit, she did it as a single working mother who had to raise an angry, ADHD asshole of a son who didn’t always appreciate her. I don’t even want to know how many hours she had to work or how many scholarships and grants she had to track down in order to pay for me to go to SAB, but somehow she made it work, and managed to write her novel at the same time. She married my step-dad the summer I turned sixteen, and my baby sister was born the next year.”

Even Annabeth, cynical and black-hearted as she is, has to smile back. The love he has for his mom is so palpable, so tangible, she can practically see him glowing. “And the…” What had Thalia called them? “The ‘Cousin Consortium’?”

At that, Percy laughs, full-bellied, unrestrained. “The name was Nico’s idea. I didn’t really have many close friends when I was a kid, apart from my buddy Grover--he had to wear this really gnarly leg brace and I liked to dance, so you can imagine how much we got picked on--but we were all really close growing up, since our dads were all assholes. They may have left us emotionally scarred, but at least we had each other’s backs the whole time.”

This is a very Percy thing, she’s starting to realize: he can not and will not hold back on his feelings. He simply refuses to. Where most guys might try to hide or downplay their affection for their friends, Percy’s is written all over his face. Maybe it’s a byproduct of doing ballet, but he’s so unashamed of his love for his friends and his family and his art, that maybe Annabeth kind of wishes she could be included in that love too, if it always feels this warm and joyful.

“I think it’s amazing that you guys are so close. I only had the one cousin when I was growing up, and we didn’t really talk all that much,” Annabeth says, almost without her permission. Something about him, it’s just so easy to talk to him. He makes it safe to open up.

“The med school guy, right?”

Annabeth nods. “Magnus. Fifth generation Harvard student. We’re all very proud.”

Ugh. Even she has to wince at the false cheer in her voice. Percy gives her a half-smile, sympathetic and soft. “Harvard not really for you, then?” he asks, picking up the threads of a long and complicated story, and one that she absolutely does not want to get into right now. Or ever, if she can help it.

“More like I wasn’t really for Harvard.” Which wasn’t entirely untrue. She had been good enough for the university in Cambridge, Mass--good enough for two degrees and graduation with honors--but she had never been good enough for her mother’s capital-H Harvard. Never good enough for her mother at all, really.

Percy takes her hand. His fingers are cold from his iced coffee. “Hey. It’s their loss,” he says, with a sincerity and an intensity that makes her blush.

Every part of her wants to pull away. His thumb is rubbing against the joint of her finger, soothing and sweet, and she thinks she may break out in hives from it. “Damn right it is,” she mumbles.

He is so nice. So nice and hot and sweet. Objectively, what she’s about to do is a terrible idea, and might torpedo a really good thing that they have, but if she doesn’t come clean now her own guilt is going to drive her insane.

“Okay, I have a confession to make.” Percy raises his eyebrows, slurping the last dregs of his drink. “When we met… and then when we hooked up the first time… I may have… thoughtyouwereJason.”

He blinks. “Pardon?” he asks, mumbled around the straw.

Annabeth buries her head in her hands. “Please don’t make me say it again.”

“You… thought I was Jason?”

“Well,” she sputters, glaring at him through her fingers, “you were being all bro-y with Thalia!”

He is valiantly trying to hold in a smile. “You know, I distinctly remember telling you my name that morning.”

“I was really hungover,” she whines, “and you were shirtless and making breakfast so I wasn’t really… paying attention.”

“For a whole week?”

This is so embarrassing, why couldn’t she just keep her stupid mouth shut? “Yeah.” She slumps her shoulders, stuffing her hands into her jacket pocket. “Sorry.”

She’s not entirely sure what she expected: at best a couple of weird looks and a tentative promise to meet up later that would end up not working out, at worst she thinks he’ll just get up and leave her here at Bryant Park. Either way, they’d be doomed to months of awkward interactions, until eventually they wouldn’t be able to be around each other, and Thalia would have to pick a side--and Annabeth’s seen what Thalia does to people who cross her family. She’s seen Thalia beat a dude to pulp for calling Nico the f-slur. Picking Percy over Annabeth? That’s nothing.

So when he starts laughing, Annabeth is completely at a loss. Slowly, at first, then all at once, he’s laughing so hard his shoulders are shaking, and he has to put down his salad so it doesn’t topple over onto the grass. His head is tilted back in joy, the grey, late afternoon light adamant that Annabeth can see all of his features clearly, from his screwed up eyes to his bright, white teeth to the single dimple in his cheek.

Of course, even his laughter is hot. Asshole.

“You thought I was Jason!” He shrieks.

Annabeth crosses her arms, scowling.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I really don’t mean to laugh,” he giggles. Annabeth can feel her own giggle rising in response, and she ruthlessly quashes it. “I can definitely say I’ve never heard that one before. You do know Jason is blond, right?”

“As a matter of fact, I did not. Besides, you and Thalia look exactly alike.”

He scoffs. “No we don’t.”

“Uh, yeah you do. You, Thalia, and Nico are all basically clones of each other.”

“Okay, Captain Glasses, whatever you say.” He rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat behind it.

“I’m sorry,” Annabeth feels like she has to say again.

He cocks his head. “For what? For thinking I was Jason? He’s a pretty cool guy.”

“No, for,” she blushes again. All this blood rushing to her head can’t be good for her. “For sleeping with you when I still thought you were Jason.”

Percy scoots closer to her, throwing her a grin and slinging his arm over her shoulders. Without even realizing that she’s doing it, she settles in beside him like she’s been doing it her whole life, slotted up against his torso, tucking her booted feet beneath her legs. “I am choosing to take that as a compliment,” he says, smirking. “You couldn’t resist my charms, even when you thought I was a brogrammer.”

Annabeth can’t help herself. She kisses him, wiping that smug grin right off his face, and when she finally retreats, after what feels like hours, he looks so dazed she could probably keep calling him by any name she wanted and he wouldn’t even realize it.

After their lunch, they meander for hours, headed in a vaguely southerly direction, holding hands the whole time, a steady, uninterrupted flow that took them all the way from Midtown to Greenwich Village. He tells her about his first day at ballet school; she tells him about her favorite monuments. “There are two architectural environments in America,” she says, ranting, speaking with enough force that she might forget the feeling of his hand in hers, “endless dead suburbia, or cities where every single building is either a concrete or a glass block--and not even Brutalist concrete, just shitty, poorly designed, paint-by-numbers concrete. It is an absolute travesty of modern government that they don’t fund any public works projects anymore.”

“That’s why all the gardens and stuff?” he asks.

“Nowadays everything is built by the lowest bidder. At least I get to add some beauty back into the city.”

“I know what you mean,” Percy says. “Paris is practically overflowing with public works, you almost forget about it sometimes.”

She sighs. “You’re so fucking lucky. Paris is so beautiful and everything in New York is just hideous.”

“Aw, come on,” he says. “Not everything. What about the Empire State Building, or Central Park?”

“Well, obviously, those,” she says, just a teensy bit flustered, but she’s not about to give up the argument without a fight. “I just mean like, normal, every day buildings: offices and apartments and stuff. It’s all so samey and boring.”

He looks to her right, pointing at the building they are passing. “What about this one?”

She turns.

If she had known they were headed this way, she never would have taken them past here.

“It’s… okay, I guess,” she mumbles, staring up at the arched windows, pedimented doors, and Rococo details of Miss Minerva’s Private Pre-College Prep School. A shudder goes down her spine, like someone walking over her grave. “There are better Beaux-Arts buildings.”

Sensing her discomfort, he picks up the pace, and changes the subject.

Finally, he stops outside a nondescript building, turning to face her. “This is me,” he says, a little bit mournfully, squeezing her hand. “Are you okay to get home safely?”

This man is ridiculous; it’s not even dark out. “I think I can manage a few blocks,” she says, lightly swatting him. “Isn’t it kind of early for you, though? It’s only four o’clock.”

He flushes faintly, one hand coming up to rub at his neck. “Uh, well, I always give myself a little extra time--you know, time blindness and everything.”

“You baked in extra time in case I wanted you to walk me home, didn’t you?” She mock-gasps, secretly delighted. “Scandal!”

“Guilty,” he grins. “You’ve been to mine so many times, I was curious.”

She just barely stops herself from laughing out loud at the very idea of Percy coming to her apartment--as if. Thalia hasn’t even been to her apartment. Nobody knows where she lives, none of her neighbors know who she is, and this is entirely by design. “Cut me some slack; a girl’s gotta have some mystery. Can’t make it too easy for you, can I?”

“I have a feeling you’ll never make things easy for me,” he says, white teeth gleaming.

“You better believe it,” she smiles back. “Now that I’ve foiled your plans, are you going to be too bored?”

“Oh, I’ll think of something,” he shrugs. “I’m very resourceful when it comes to boredom.”

Inspiration strikes, and she grasps his hand, pulling him down the alleyway. She almost hates to admit it, but she has something of a Pavlovian response when it comes to hanging out with Percy. Annabeth has come to expect some really excellent sex whenever the two of them meet up, and maybe spending all afternoon with him has made her a little bit horny.

She presses him up against the brick wall, hidden from the street by the long afternoon shadows, and kisses him. His hands flounder for a second, before coming up to rest on her shoulders, this thumbs tapping against the base of her neck, fingers fluttering on her jacket. It’s an intimate touch, kind of chaste and very respectful, and he holds her with precision and grace. He wouldn’t do anything she wouldn’t want to. This is a date with no expectation of sex on his part. But Annabeth does not want grace right now, spooked by the ghost of her old school. She does not want precision. She just wants him. She just wants to keep him on his toes, keep him interested, blow his mind a little.

She just wants to blow him, to be honest.

He squeaks into her mouth as her hands fly to his belt, deft fingers practically ripping it off of him in an increasingly familiar motion. “H-hey,” he says, squeezing her shoulders, “this is--”

“Do you not want me to?” she asks, one hand playing at the top line of his underwear.

“No--I mean, are you sure? I’m-I’m okay with this, I just want to--”

“I know.” She kisses his cheek, then drops to her knees. “But we’ve got some time to kill, don’t we.”

Afterwards, when she’s finished with him, Annabeth wipes her mouth, and he whimpers.

“Ho… holy shit,” he pants, flushed and trembling.

She tucks him back into his boxers, doing up his fly. “There we go. That was better than being bored, right?”

He nods wordlessly, swallowing, shaking. His eyes are glassy and glazed, stupid like he’s just shot out his brain through his dick.

In the short time they’ve been together (though, honestly, this might be the longest relationship she’s ever been in before… and they haven’t even broached the “dating” conversation yet) Annabeth has been on the receiving end of several different Percy looks. His face will light up with joy when he first lays his eyes on her, so happy to see her (though she can’t really fathom why), glinting like the sun on the water. His eyes will narrow, glaring, even as he furiously tamps down on his growing smile when they start arguing over something stupid, like Annabeth’s affinity for olives. He’ll grin at her, knife sharp and slanted, licking his lips and looming over her after she comes down from yet another orgasm via his mouth or his hands.

Percy looks at her now like someone took a bat to his head, and instead of seeing stars, he sees little miniature Annabeths flying around.

He pulls her to him and kisses her, entirely too sweet for what she’s just done to him, but that is also a very Percy thing. And when she leaves him with a final kiss on his cheek and squeeze of his ass, she can feel that look burning a hole through her jacket, following her down the alley and around the corner, and she finds that she doesn’t mind the weight of it at all.

#my fic #percabeth #pjo #the rivalry ends here #ballet au #darkmagyk #woot!!!!

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beewitch4 · 4 years ago

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How TMA (and its fandom) helped me realize I’m ace

So, I’ve never done a long post on here, or a post talking about my life, but since it’s asexual awareness week, I thought I’d talk about how Jon being canonically asexual in The Magnus Archives helped me figure out my own sexual orientation.

(I don’t want to put in too many details about my personal life, so I’m going to keep it a vague as possible on specifics, you guys get it.)

I’d heard of the term “asexual” as an orientation someone could have before TMA, but it didn’t connect with me personally in any way. As far as I understood it, asexual meant that you hate all sex all the time and that you don’t enjoy any kind of sexual acts, like kissing, for example, and that if you even considered enjoying sex - even once - then you can’t be asexual. That’s obviously a very constricting (and incorrect) definition to put on a very broad orientation, but I had no reason to believe anything different. Not many people know or understand asexuality, and I had no reason to go looking for information on a label that neither I nor anyone I knew used.

I can’t remember exactly when I started questioning, or why, but it was probably because I found I just... wasn’t interested in sex. My friends and people around me and stories I watched or read all had people who actively enjoyed the thought of sex, and having sex, and I just, didn’t. Hypothetically, I GUESS it sounded nice, but thinking about actually doing that with someone grossed me out a little, and that was when I thought about it at all. I never felt “broken” in the way I’ve heard other ace people describe, but I wondered when I would start liking the idea of sex too. I had sort of assumed that it was something that happened “later”, but based on the people around me, “later” was NOW, and it just wasn’t interesting to me. I thought “maybe I’m asexual”, but at that point I’d made out with someone before, and I’d enjoyed it, so I thought “there’s no way”, and moved on, dismissing the notion.

When I listened to The Magnus Archives and got to MAG 106 and it was revealed that Jon is ace, my first thought was “oh, cool”, because I thought it was nice that people who DID identify as ace could have some representation, especially since I’d never seen ace representation at all before. By that point, I’d also (unfortunately) seen some spoilers that Jon and Martin got together later in the show, so I was happy for some bi (or pan) rep as well, and then I moved on, not really thinking about it again. Once I caught up with the show, I looked through tumblr to see what people were saying about it, and I saw some people talking about how glad they were that Jon is ace, and I once again thought “good for them”. There were a handful of posts talking about how to respectfully write an ace character, and though I don’t remember exactly what they said, I remember understanding the main point as “don’t write an ace character in a sexual situation because that’s disrespectful to ace people”. Which this isn’t UNtrue, but it’s not the whole story, and it didn’t make me think anything other than what I already believed: All ace people hate sex. However, when I started reading fanfiction for TMA, things changed. I read a fanfictions where, in the author’s notes, writers would say that they wrote asexuality based off of their experience or friends of theirs who were ace. I don’t really read smut fics (just a personal preference - they usually gross me out), but I don’t mind reading fics with other things, like making out, and the idea that fanfictions like that were written BY ace people ABOUT an ace person changed my perspective a little bit. I thought, “If asexual people CAN enjoy making out, what else don’t I know?” And I did some research.

A few months and some self doubt, self discovery, and self acceptance later, and I know that I’ve never felt sexual attraction for anyone in my life. I’m asexual. (A sex-indifferent asexual, if you want to get specific.)

I never knew before that the simple act of making a character canonically a sexuality other than straight could help someone that much. Remember: Jon’s asexuality is never brought up again in series. And yet. It has helped me realize who I am.

However, this is just my experience. There are SO MANY different ways that people can identify with asexuality. There are ace people who don’t like sex in any way, like I thought, and there are also ace people who enjoy sex in some ways but not others, like me, and there are ace people who fully enjoy sex, and all of these people are valid. I don’t want anyone walking away from this post thinking “That’s the universal ace experience! If you don’t hit all those points, you can’t be ace.” because it is such a wide and underdiscussed spectrum.

Okay, this is probably the longest post I’ve ever done, so now I’m tired. I probably won’t do anything else for ace week (maybe a drawing), but I hope you all have a wonderful day.

#asexuality #ace #asexual awareness week #ace week #my story #my experience #the magnus archives #tma #jonathan sims #fanfiction #halloween #i tagged this halloween bc the aces legally own halloween this year

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forestdivinity · 4 years ago

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there’s nothing for me but the dying

You make mountains from molehills, Reginald had always been fond of telling him, you let your fear control you, instead of controlling it. You crave attention; you leave yourself deranged for want of it- The thing was, he wasn’t exactly wrong. Something inside of him was an ache, a great yawning mouth that throbbed like it was teething at all times. It was hungry and all it wanted was to feed, to consume, to fill that emptiness with the tender meat of the world around him. Maybe it was the death of small things inside of him, he was rotting in all the places people couldn’t see. All his life, Klaus had flirted with dangerous situations in an attempt to fill that void. Around him was reality, always twisting. It was a volatile thing, split across two realms. Or he was the distortion, body snapped around an emptiness, trying to exist in life and death at once. Humans weren’t meant for such things, and it terrified him. He had to choose one or the other.

And so the danger-

It was fights with his father that would end with a crack around the ear that always left his head spinning. There wasn’t pain, or there was pain, but it simply melded with the ache of his being, that rot beneath his skin. More impactful than the pain was the touch, the blood beneath Reginald’s fingers, the heat of his hand. Life. And then it was the mausoleum, the cold that seeped into his bones, the hollowness of his body mirroring the emptiness of the room; at least until it was full of spectres, visages of the undead, drawn like moths to a flame. Or one of those sparkling, electric lights, the same blue as the glow of his powers, the cracked lava lamp of his body. Some metaphor, some dream. They flocked to him, all ice and incorporeality. That was Death.

Somewhere between the two, Klaus began to know other dangers. The heat of MDMA and the cold of a comedown (life, death, repeat, start again. It was all cyclical; he was the cycle, something never ending) the touch of a body, the concrete of an alley. He flirted with men and women alike, anyone who caught his eye. Anyone who offered a bump or a hit.

Danger successfully courted and all that.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” Ben moaned at him. It was a familiar complaint, barely a question at the point they were at now.

“Don’t kid yourself into thinking I have an answer.” Klaus told him, waving his GOODBYE hand in his brother’s direction. Something in his soul ached. Maybe not his soul - did he even have one of those? Was he alive enough? Was he human enough? Maybe it was just his body that ached, that old familiar thing. Rot split open his veins, it flooded through him with every beat of his heart.

What was even the point of that thing? It worked overtime and Klaus didn’t even want it.

“You must have a reason-”

“Oh, you know darling Benny. Benerino. Ghost of my life-” people were looking at him funny now, it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time and all that.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Klaus.”

“Drop dead, Benzo. Oh, wait-” He was tetchy, somewhere between the high and the comedown. Ben had been tetchy since he’d died and realised he was stuck with the one brother he’d never been closest to.

Screw him. Screw all the ghosts. Klaus had better things to focus on, even if Ben was the only thing haunting him now, it didn’t mean he wanted to stay sober. Addictive personality, he’d been told once, no drive to help himself. Then again, that doctor had also thought him schizophrenic.

Klaus couldn’t really prove him wrong. Maybe his father had listened to the ramblings of a psychotic child and decided he must be seeing ghosts. Who knew what he should believe anymore, all Klaus wanted was the high. It was the floating that he craved, that heat that flooded his body, the freedom from the expectations of his own mind. Maybe he’d been fucked up since birth, always pushing for more, always looking for danger.

Trauma response, CPTSD, suicidal ideation, another rehab center had written on a chart after three mandatory weeks of group therapy. His fingers had itched then, even though it had been a relatively nice place. Clean, smelling faintly of antiseptic - one Allison had clearly paid for.

He’d only seen two ghosts in his time there, neither one of them screamers. They terrified him nonetheless. Klaus was always terrified: of himself, of the world, of the living and the dead. When sober he remembered his father’s hand, the sound of it cracking against his head. Ouch, what a bastard he’d been. Thinking about Reginald always made his cravings worse. It was hard not to think about Reginald when he was sober. The man lingered in his mind like a bad smell. Klaus wanted to claw at the soft underside of his belly, imagined opening up the fragile skin there and letting all his rotten organs spill out onto the dirt. The thought gave him nightmares for weeks. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill again, a voice echoed in his mind., somehow he couldn’t tell if it was his father’s or his own. “I really think you can do it this time.” Ben told him on the day before they were let out of rehab. His support was nice, if obviously fake, they’d been through this dance enough times. They both knew Klaus wasn’t the type to get better.

Addictive personality. Attention seeker.

“Nah.” He said. Ben sighed, a low, haunted sound. Like a ghost!

“You’re gonna kill yourself one of these days!” Diego seethes from across the hospital room, it’s a wonder the nice nurse from before hadn’t kicked him out yet. She’d been blonde, like their mother, and brought him jello with a wink like she wasn’t meant to be spoiling him.

Klaus had liked her.

“Pish.” He waved his hands at his brother - brothers, Ben was standing there too with a frown. “Lighten up, it was only one measly overdose.”

“Fuck you, Klaus! Your h-heart stopped, it took two minutes to revive you-”

“Impressive timing. Down to the wire there. Gotta admire our healthcare system- oh wait.” Klaus rolled his eyes. Diego’s teeth were grit, above his scar Klaus could see the little vein on his forehead threatening to pop like bubblegum. Inside of him, something ached and snapped. The emptiness was brittle, stale, like it had been left for too long.

“I can’t keep fucking doing this.” Diego sounded angry, but that wasn’t unusual. Strangely, there was a pleading to his face, like if he gave Klaus big enough puppy dog eyes then Klaus would get down on his knees and promise to never do drugs again.

Yeah, right.

“Then don’t, I’m not keeping you here Diego-”

“You’re such an ass! You really don’t care about anything other than your habit-” Also untrue. Harder to say though, Klaus thought of street corners and vomit and club lights. Danger, flirted with.

Couldn’t Diego see he was already dead, dying, dried out in the worst of ways? Existing in two places was exhausting. Sometimes all he wanted to do was sleep.

Klaus closed his eyes.

Danger, danger, danger, it rang like a klaxon in his head. His ears rang like someone had smacked him. He could practically hear his father’s disappointment - or maybe that was just Diego scoffing.

“Don’t contact me again unless you’re clean, Klaus. I’m not gonna sit here and watch you die.”

“Sure, whatever. I’ll see you at the funeral then, hm?” There was a crash and a stomp and a few hissed swear words. Klaus didn’t bother to open his eyes - it was easier to hide his tears that way. Not to mention he didn’t have to see Ben’s disappointed look or the otherwise empty room.

Another month of rehab was ordered by the court, probably only because his daddy was rich and Klaus was still somewhat famous, despite the homelessness and the drug addiction. Childhood fame had its perks, as did the lawyer kept on standby for their family. Reginald wouldn’t rent him an apartment, but so far he’d kept Klaus out of jail - he wasn’t sure whether to be happy about that or not.

Eventually he settled on not.

It wasn’t as nice as his last one. Klaus saw a ghost with her wrists split, thought of the danger of a knife, and then thought of his brother.

His stay got extended another month. The lack of drugs was disappointing, but the attention was fun - in the same way that bee stings and casts were fun for about five minutes until the novelty wore off. God, was he bored.

-drive yourself deranged for want of it, echoes, echoes. Klaus thought of his father often and wished he had a drink or a pill to drown them out. At night they locked him into his room, restraints and all due to the word suicidal in his file, and he had screaming nightmares of the mausoleum, that cool, deadly place.

He needed to get out; he realised. Before, rehab had just been a pain. Something to endure between bouts of danger and death. Klaus bounced between his highs and lows and occasionally thought of killing himself in how most people thought of buying coffee when they were broke. It was hard to take the impulse seriously when he knew (had always known) that he was born halfway to his grave already.

You couldn’t kill something that was already alive.

Now, though, something had snapped. Maybe it was the loss of his brother. Maybe it was the soft leather restraints that they’d clasped around his wrists (as if he hadn’t been trained to escape cuffs when he was eight, as if he wasn’t a child soldier superhero).

“You’re okay, Klaus. You’re not there, you need to calm down-” Ben was telling him. Klaus realised he was crying - screaming again, maybe. Something was cracking, and the sound echoed around the room, like it wasn’t just inside him this time. And then he had a dull realisation that it might be his wrist. That was fine, fun even.

More danger. More pain. God, was he acquainted with it by now, the rot inside of him was going to slip out if he wasn’t careful. Klaus was going to slip out too, right out of this godawful place and out of reality too if he was lucky. He needed a hit.

He’d do just about anything for it.

Surprisingly, no-one had noticed his yelling. Then again, this rehab facility wasn’t as nice as the last one. The one before that? They had all begun to blur together, Klaus didn’t remember what number he was on now. Addictive personality, he remembered, letting your fear control you.

Fuck it, maybe they were right about him - who even cared any longer.

“Klaus, come on, don’t do this- at least get some shoes, Klaus-” Ben was talking, his voice felt very far away. Klaus removed the bars on his window without really knowing how - training had made escaping places instinctive at this point. Klaus hadn’t used the skills since he was fourteen and had gotten kidnapped on a mission but, well, it was like riding a bike! That was how the saying went, wasn’t it?

He didn’t know. He’d never leant to ride a bike.

And then he was outside in the snow, and it was still so, so cold. He realised he wasn’t wearing shoes, socks. Not even a coat. Still, he’d gotten by on worse before, hadn’t he? Another danger to dance around. Only. this time, there was no Diego to fetch him. Fine. It was fine.

The ghosts were somewhat easier to deal with for once, while he slowly froze under the foundations of some cracking bridge. It was winter again, like it was every year. Weirdly, Klaus always felt more alive as everything around him rotten and died.

Well, usually he did. Now he just felt cold and exhausted and on the brink of death. Ben had convinced him to find clothes. He had a pair of boots two sizes too big and a thick fur coat on over his blue gown. Inside of his shoes, his toes curled and went numb - Klaus hoped they didn’t fall off. Sure, he was rotten inside, but he’d rather not be rotting outside too.

If he went to the hospital, they’d just send him back to rehab (or worse).

Everything hurt from the inside out. The cold made his vision swim. Around him was the familiar stench of mildew and wet earth, like he’d been born and crafted from mud. Sure, it was probably the sludge that had once been a river, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

Maybe it was Christmas already? Klaus hoped it was, he hadn’t been very good but hopefully Santa didn’t mind - the bastard had a few decades worth of presents to make up.

“I’ll take a bottle of vodka and a bag of cocaine, if you’re out there fat man.” He muttered, hands shoved up under his armpits. It did little to warm them up - for as long as he could remember his hands had been cold.

Poor circulation, dear, don’t forget your gloves, his mother had told him, but Klaus knew better. He was dead and rotten on the inside, and corpses didn’t get to be warm.

“I can’t believe you’re still thinking about drugs-” Ben hissed, as if he had to be quiet. It was ridiculous, Ben was a ghost, and he still insisted on whispering at times, as if anyone but Klaus could hear him.

“Drowns out the ghosties, Benny boy!” Usually, Klaus would throw his arms out to emphasise his point, but he’s a little focused on making sure his fingers don’t fall off.

Useful things, fingers.

“I’m the only one here!” Ben huffs and looks around pointedly.

“Exactly.”

“God, you need serious help. The drugs aren’t some magic medicine, Klaus, you’re just an addict.” Ben’s voice was a sneer. It’s funny, they’d had never gotten along in life and they’re only doing a fraction better in death.

Death, because they’re both dead. Klaus is just a bit alive too. Maybe. Some days it’s hard to tell.

He shoots a glare at Ben. It does very little. Inside him the void aches, it wants to take and take and fill itself up on anything it can get. Ben should understand that better than anyone else but Ben is dead and Ben was always too similar to him and Klaus understands, he’s always been too much-

-mountain out of a molehill the voice inside of him reminds and Klaus snaps again.

He’s lost count of how many times he’s snapped in his life. Sometimes it feels like all he ever does is break.

“An addict who’s tired of hearing your voice!” He hisses. Ben recoils back and stomps off to the other side of the river where he sits and ignores Klaus for the rest of the night.

Well, Klaus assumes it’s the rest of the night.

He passes out after their fight and can’t remember if it was minutes or hours between the silence and the darkness. There’s a blissfulness to being unconscious, but when he wakes up the void is hungry as ever.

That’s the cycle, after all. He fucks up; he does something dangerous, skirts between life and death, has a fun time of it all and then fucks up again. Life, death. Living, dying.

Klaus is an addictive personality stuck somewhere between worlds. Sometimes he wants to blame the cycle for his problems, but he thinks the addiction is just what he’s like on the inside. Nature versus nurture and all that shit.

Maybe its nature versus nature. Himself against his powers. Life against death. God, he hates the contrariness of it all; it makes him want to vomit. Klaus picks himself up, wraps his coat around himself, and wanders towards a shelter he knows gives out free clothes.

In his body there is a beat playing out, it sings drugs drugs drugs, it sings attention seeker, it sings addict, it sings deranged with want, it sings complex post traumatic stress disorder, it sings mountains and molehills and suicidal tendencies.

Through it all there is the ringing of a hand against his ear and the chill of old stones against his back. Klaus whistles a tune as he goes.

Everything is absolutely fine.

#klaus hargreeves #tua #ua #The Umbrella Academy #Umbrella Academy #drug use tw #suicide attempt tw #self harm tw #abuse tw #addiction tw #ben hargreeves #diego hargreeves #Reginald Hargreeves #fic #character study #writing #my writing #klaus tua #klaus hargreeves character study

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xenoredux · 4 years ago

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can you please go into the big sibling pony lore?? im very interested

Damn I am so ready for this, I’ve written down too much about these guys at this point lmao. You asked for it anon, here comes a text dump.

(There’s also a smidge of Twinkle-Eye lore in here, but I promise it’s relevant. Btw, there’s some body horror and familial abandonment in the mix, so tread lightly if you don’t like those things okay thanks)

Big Siblings (a very old nickname given to them by ancient pony communities for their almost familial dedication to the vulnerable) are a subspecies of Earth pony defined by their shared ancestry, an ancestry other pony species are aware of but don't always grasp the depths of. All Big Siblings are descendants of one Bonnie the Great, a Clydesdale-esque miniature horse who is a part of many different cultures' legends. In the lore of some animals she's a bothersome, self-righteous stuck-up, but in the mythology of the ponies she's a bastion of wisdom, strength, and kindness.

Bonnie would go on to have children with an Earth pony, and their children would go on to form their own families, and so on and so forth. In this way Tex is maybe like 1/32nd related to Bonnie, but that's plenty to define him as a member of her bloodline.

This genetic throughline has lead to the frustrating habit of other ponies to assume anyone especially tall is a Big Sibling, or that if you have recent miniature horse ancestry then you MUST have descended from Bonnie. These statements are untrue, of course. Some Big Siblings are actually pretty short and lithe, and there's plenty of equine species outside of ponykind who can and do intermingle with ponyfolk.

Bonnie's bloodline has always held her heroism in high esteem, and so it's a part of their culture to pursue the same values as she did. We're talking about a culture that takes generosity and philanthropy very seriously. This means that every Big Sibling decides upon a mission to dedicate their lives to until they've either completed it or passed away. This mission may be passed down from one nuclear family's generation to the next, or it might be decided upon by the pony themself, or it might be related to a subculture they're familiar with. Doesn't matter how they come to discover their mission, all that matters is that they have one before they turn 18.

e.g. Tagalong Tex's mission is to protect Paradise Estates from The Gloom Witches, a grody little family line that goes back as far as his own. He initially picked them out because he was terrified that they were ruining the lives of the Estates' populace, but he quickly came to realize they suck too hard at what they do to make much of an impact. But alas, a mission cannot be abandoned, so he's stuck biding his time and gently snuffing out their efforts to wreak havoc with his friends.

Something else to keep in mind about these personal mission statements is that once a mission is complete, another one has to be selected. A Big Sibling is a protector from the beginning to the very end of their adult life, and they MUST choose another mission to undergo if/when they complete their first.

This cycle continues until the pony passes. It's a part of their moral code and is so ingrained in their culture that those who retire after a completed mission, even if it took them their whole lives to get through and they just wanna chill out in an easy chair and watch their stories, are shunned by not just their immediate families but every other one of Bonnie's descendants. This means that if ever the Gloom Witches are defeated, Tex will be forced to pack up and move elsewhere to help a different herd with their problems if he doesn't wanna be dead to everyone he's related to.

Another big part of the Big Sibling history is their alliance with Twinkle-Eyed ponies (I promise this is relevant lol). They've got the opposite of a blood feud going; even if two individuals from these subspecies don't like each other, they will respect each other.

See, generations back there was a Big Sibling named Applejack. Nobody can recall whether they were a boy, a girl, or neither, but they remember the pony's exploits. Applejack was even more nomadic then most Big Sibs, and they were very prolific. On a blizzardy February night where the moon was full, Applejack wandered into what the nearby pony populace called "The Haunted Mineshaft" as laying the townsfolks' fears about it to rest was their mission at the time. When they'd entered and followed whispery voices into its depths, they found a true horror.

Tens of ponies of all creeds, ones Applejack recognized from missing posters and newspaper stories, where chained up and being forced to mine gemstones from the cave walls. The slavedriver behind all of this was a Weremole named Pilferpaw. The hulking, ugly creature had used dark magic (from a stolen tome, of course) to remove the kidnapped ponies' eyes. He told them he'd return their sight to them if they "earned it back" with manual labor, but in truth he never had any way of restoring their sight and had planned to kill them when they'd outlived their usefulness.

Obviously Applejack was piiissed. The horse's great size made short work of the Weremole, and he was shoved into the deepest bowels of the cave, forever to be trapped in the dark. With the evil defeated, Applejack lead the prisoners into the sunrise, and each of them rejoiced. The only problem was that many of them desperately missed their vision, and so Applejack's next mission began.

Applejack spent months researching magical medical intervention before settling on a solution: they'd use a magical conduit to grant the ponies back their sight. The conduit they chose was something the survivors found both plentiful and ironically empowering. That conduit was, as you've probably guessed, the gemstones from Pilferpaw's mines.

The gems were placed painlessly into the ponies' sockets and each pony was enchanted during the next solar eclipse so that the spell would last forever and their vision would never be harmed again. Given the enchantment was backed by a celestial event, all descendants of Twinkle-Eyes have those same characteristic gemstone eyeballs, and they annually honor Applejack's memory in a celebration where all Big Sibs and Twinkle-Eyes are invited.

This is also part of why Trinkette has a thing for Tex. In fairness she mostly likes him because he's a gentle soul who is unconditionally supportive, but she also sees a lot of Applejack's legacy in him. Plus he's got, like, HUGE muscles and she's into that. It hurts her to know that if ever the witches are put away for good, he'll be forced to move away or risk being ostracized by his entire culture.

#asks #my little pony #mlp #pony words #g1 was the best gen so thats why i take so much insp from it #dont @ me

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ajokeformur-ray · 5 years ago

Text

Lilac is the best shade of purple, don't'cha think? // J x Lilith // a renewal of love, soft comfort.

A/N: @jokershyena I’ve spent all of the last two days writing this for you because I am livid that someone dared to invalidate the love that you share in such a cruel way. Because your love is important. Because your love is real and valid and safe and good and wholesome. Because I love you and I love J and I adore the relationship you have together. And, also, a chance to spoil you? Hell yeah! <3 Personal details within; all things which I’ve written about before so I hope it’s okay to put them here, too.

Summary: Cruel, close-minded remarks make you feel like J is mad at you; you should be stronger than to be hurt by such comments, your mind tells you. It’s untrue; J watches you crumble, but he doesn't let you wholly break. He catches your fall effortlessly and he reminds you of all the reasons why, of all the reasons you have what you do together. J breaks your fall with his own self and he meets you halfway. It's the loudest "I love you" and you hear him as clear as day.

TW; allusions to sex, emotional heaviness. Largely soft + fluffy but starts angsty. J refers to himself as Daddy (the things I do for you).

Word count: 4, 373. (A-ta-ta, no telling me off - you said you’d hold back! 😂)

HE’S SO CUTE IN THIS GIF OMG I WANNA SQUISH AND KISS AND PROTECC

You had been shaken to the very core of your soul by the cruel and careless comments about J, your J, which had been thrown at you. You had been deeply and personally invalidated, almost to the point of a vicious attack for no other reason than ignorance. Oh, how you wished that people were more aware of themselves and their words. How you wished that you had never even tried to reach out to someone new, to give someone else a chance at who you were. With the emotional depth of a teaspoon had someone so horrifically ripped into you. Their words had been callously loaded arrows with sharpened tips laced with poison. Once fired had they not missed the bullseye which may as well have been stamped upon your heart.

Various sentences and strings of words stood out and reverberated inside your skull. They attached to your sense of logic and weighed it down with thick, black tar. There was so much blackness within you this night that logic had ceased to have all meaning now and your mind had thus corrupted your spirits, which had been broken so easily. You knew that if J had been home right now, he would have been livid at what you perceived to be a state of weakness. How could you allow one person to split a crack into your soul so easily, someone you had barely known? So angry were you, so full of rage were you from all the harsh untruths and cold lies which had been tossed at you that your entire body was shaking and tears of hate and of sorrow poured down your cheeks, hot and fast. Oh, but you felt so sick. You were crying so hard that you almost couldn’t breathe, your lungs aching so desperately as your body yearned for oxygen.

But more than that... oh, more than that, you craved for J to come home, you hungered for your chaotic life partner, for your clown prince of crime, to be here with you. You wanted for him to reach within your mind and to extract the words from your head, to remove all traces of that person. You wish you had never taken that step forward. You hadn’t thought it through, but then... but then you shouldn’t have had to. You had done nothing wrong. You had only opened up and bared yourself to the world once more, and just like last time had you been shown all the reasons why you shouldn’t. There was a war waging within you; one half of you was stuck on what had happened and the other half of you was focused on the comforting and familiar weight of the ring on your finger, of the green and the purple side by side which so perfectly captured the way that you and J belonged together.

You could feel the branded ‘J’ on your shoulder and as your hand came up to feel the raised scar even through your shirt did the memory of the pain and of the gushing of the hot blood as it had poured down your skin fill your senses. You remembered the way J had straddled you, the way the switchblade he favoured had glinted silver in the natural sunlight of the room. You remembered the intense look of concentration in his whirlpools of a chocolate galaxy as he had bent over your torso. He had been quick overall, surprised had he been by your wishes. J had initially thought that you had been joking, but you hadn’t. You had genuinely and truly wanted for your J - yours - to brand you and to forevermore mark you as his and J had acquiesced. Though he enjoyed inflicting pain on occasions, he never gave you more than you could take and he had been quick by way of expressing his emotions, namely gratitude and love to you; for in actions did J communicate most loudly, most clearly.

Thoughts and memories of your life and your love with J filled your mind; the first time you had met on a darkened street and he had followed you home, safe in the shadows of yesterday, your first hug, the first kiss... the first shower together so that you could get used to being so naked and exposed in front of him before the first time you had sex... the first time you had shared the same bed, the first time you had come home to find J waiting for you because he didn’t know how else to show you that he had missed you. All of your first times were quickly followed by darker times; your arguments, all the times that J had been gone for days at a time without so much as a message or anything which let you know when he was coming home. All the times that you had cried for him, because of him, all the times that you had been wrenched from sleep because J was bleeding all over the sheets, unbothered was he by his own injuries. Both of you cared little for your own selves and you lived and you loved for the other person; in taking care of one another were your own selves taken care of and oh, how keenly the both of you felt any kind of separation, any kind of distance between the two of you. Physical or emotional did it matter not, for neither of you could or would survive long without the other.

The tale of the Hyena and her clown was one which was known only to the two of you. Anything else would put you in danger and J couldn’t abide even the idea of that. He had many, many ideas, his mind always racing in search of the next thing to do, but he rarely, if ever, told you about them. Even lies had elements of truth to them and so he didn’t even fabricate any details. If ever you were arrested or captured or even suspected of being involved with him then you would be immediately incriminated and you could potentially be tortured for information, and so did J keep everything to himself so that he could keep you safe. You were always a matter of the greatest urgency to J, something which was rooted in life or death for him. You would forever be his his greatest priority, and any stories which he told you late at night or in the early hours of the morning after you had jolted awake from another nightmare or from a bout of sleep paralysis were once which had undoubtedly been in the media, so that while you were involved in J’s life, you were also on the outside and such events had already occurred; thus removing any sense of danger which could arise from your being told of his ideas.

All the good and the beautiful moments and all of the bad and the ugly moments flooded your mind and you sank onto your bed with a choked sob, your hands covering your face as you gave in to all that you were thinking, all that you were feeling. Beyond the sadness and the rage which had descended upon you like a cloak was love and a fierce instinct to protect J, to protect what was yours. J had always been yours and he would always be yours, no matter what; and nothing and no one could or would ever be able to take you away from him. Not even Death itself would try; It knew better than that. You were truly meant to be and you were made for each other. So much of who you were complemented who J was and there was so much of the both of you which echoed within the other. You both thrived on chaos, you both loved to laugh together, and oh, the love the two of you shared was so palpable, so raw and so real that anyone lucky enough to see it from an outsider’s perspective was left reeling by it. You so rarely shared this part of yourself with others and what had happened tonight was exactly why you weren’t more open about it. People just didn’t understand.

So lost were you within yourself, so confused and so hurt and so angry were you that you completely missed J coming in through the front door. He rushed through his usual routine of checking every room by leaning across the doorway, intense gaze scanning the space which was available there. There was something in the air of your shared home which was just... wrong and J’s sharp instincts had picked up on it the second he had stepped over the threshold of the front door. So emotionally connected were the two of you, so intertwined were your weary souls that J just knew that something had happened to you this day and he was determined to get to the bottom of it, and fast, for a Joker he may but nothing did he treat as seriously as he did the art of loving you, his Hyena. The sounds of your anguish, muffled were they by the closed door which separated the both of you, tugged at J’s heartstrings and caused a physical ache in his chest, which he alleviated psychosomatically by rubbing at the area with a gloved hand. His full lips were set in a line, his jaw muscles ticking even as he tongued at the scars on his inner cheek. He didn’t like this. Not. One. Bit.

Under any other circumstances, J would have opened your bedroom door with such force that the wooden frame would have bounced off the blue walls and made you jump. He would have said, “ta-da!!!” with a dramatic wave of his arms and J would have cackled at your reaction as you scolded him for making you jump. But as it was, this was serious. His Hyena was upset and J could tell from the way that you were crying - so well did he know you after twelve years of being in your life in one way or another, though that way had become more defined and more... intimate in recent years - that this wasn’t a time for joking. You didn’t need The Joker right now. You needed J, your J, and always was he there to catch your fall even before you knew that you were falling. All of this and several other thoughts, including the fact that J would murder whomever had made you cry, filled his mind within the few moments that he was stood there, and he pushed the door open with a hand, moving loud enough that his clothes rustled as he moved, thus alerting you to his presence, but quietly enough that he let you know without speaking that he understood the gravity of the situation and he was treating it and you with the care and respect which was deserved and needed.

Your breath was coming in panting gasps now and J clicked his tongue in disapproval, moving effortlessly through the space until he could get to your bed. His purple leather clad fingers wrapped cleanly around your wrists and J tugged them away from your face. “Shush, shush shush,” He used the same low and soothing tone which aided you in relaxing after a nightmare or a bout of sleep paralysis, and you found yourself taking a deep and natural breath which filled up your entire lungs before you exhaled and totally emptied them in a single rushed exhale of J’s name. “Daddy’s got’cha, babydoll.” J’s fingers slid easily in the spaces between your own and he tugged you up to standing with the grip which he had on both of your hands. His voice was quiet, his words practiced but sincere. He knew what to say to you, he knew how to say it to you. “What’s eatin’ at’cha, hm?” J suspected that something had been said to you and though you hesitated to tell him, scared were you that he would be angry with you or that he would think you weak for not being able to to withstand the cruel things which had been thrown your way. “Ya’ know ya’ can tell me anythin’, Lil.” The familiar encouragement, of words spoken often, was accompanied with a slightly impatient bite to the words. J wasn’t messing around, he needed to know who or what had hurt you. He cared little for the whys or the hows, you were the only thing which was truly important in his life.

You could think of no better way to explain the situation to J than to just... show him your phone. The harsh blue light from the small screen screen cast an eerie glow upon J’s starkly painted visage and you saw his jaw muscles bunching up as he tongued at the scars on the inside of his cheeks. Oh, but this... this was true anger. You shrunk away from him, expecting to be faced with his anger, but J wasn’t angry at you. You watched his face carefully as J hunched over your phone, his thumb scrolling rapidly and an occasional click coming from those talons as they met the screen; he was reading quickly and you realised that while J was reading all of it, he was only taking in the worst of what had been said to you. You knew what he was reading:

How can you love someone who’s so messed up?

He’s The Joker - he’s a bad person.You’re one too if you love him.

He’s ugly inside and out; such a horrible person.

He killed a boat full of people and who knows how many others - you can’t love him.

You’re crazy if you love him.

Minutes crawled by, marked only by your breathing, and you could see that J was thinking, analysing. It was only when he locked your phone and handed it back to you with a careless flick of his wrist that you knew that he was done. You took the phone from J, your fingers brushing against his, and then set your phone down on the bedside table. You stared at your phone, a hurricane of emotions swirling around in your mind, your perception of the situation skewed. You felt... heavy. Like you were unworthy of J, somehow, because you had gotten so upset about this, because you had allowed a stranger’s cruelty to so deeply affect you. J was watching you and he snorted quietly under his breath, drawing your attention towards him and away from the object which represented the day’s hurt. “That, ah - that look on ya’ face better be a bad joke.” His tone told you everything that you most desperately needed to know in that moment - that he wasn’t angry at you but rather at the person who had been on the other end of the screen. How could he ever be mad at you, the only person in Gotham who cared enough to see him, to really see him? You smiled without feeling, tears stinging at your sore eyes, rimmed with red were they, and J made a noise of something which only made those tears slip down your cheeks. He opened his arms to you, his fingers splayed out at his sides, and you choked on your next breath as you fell into your clown.

He caught you.

He always had and he always would.

J was warm, impossibly so, and you pushed yourself into the dark green fabric of his waistcoat. All of your anger and hurt was beginning to melt away, insignificant was it in the face of what truly mattered to you, and J made a noise of amusement and pulled the edges of his royal purple trench coat around you so that only the crown of your head and your legs were visible to the room. Then, with his arms solidly around you did he lean his weight into your body, which served to bring you even closer to him. J ducked his head and nuzzled his face into the top of your head, his hot breath tickling the surface of your scalp and making you smile into his body, though you resisted the urge to scratch the top of your head to relieve the itch which was now there. Your arms came around the back of J and you squeezed into him. J growled low in his throat, a tidal wave of protectiveness overcoming him as your need for him was more than apparent, and he stepped ever closer to you. If he moved away from you now, you would lose your balance. The thought made J’s lips quirk upwards in amusement; he wouldn’t do it, though. Not to you. And not when you were feeling like this.

Oh, shit, you loved him. This moment right here was what you lived for. It was what got you out of bed every day even feeling the way that you so often did; to the point where you said that you were okay because at least you didn’t feel worse. This moment right here was everything to you. It was medicine to your soul, oxygen to your heart, and exactly what you needed to begin to move on from the hurt which had been inflicted upon you this day. J was so solidly pressed against you, every plane of your bodies aligned. The scent of greasepaint, gasoline, gunpowder, with a slight undertone of sweat and then of something which was just J filled your senses and a serene, soft smile came to your face. As if he could sense the peace filling your weary and tormented soul did J hum quietly, low in his throat, and you felt it rumble through his chest. You turned your head so that you could press a kiss to the area there and J’s arms flexed around you. He was holding you carefully, knowing was he of the parts of your body which you didn’t want to be touched, but his grip was firm. J wanted you here in his arms.

J wanted to comfort you.

J wanted to be here for you, with you.

J wanted you.

Snippets of things he had said in the past, flashes of all those memories which had filled your mind only moments earlier, all filtered through in your mind and you felt your tears beginning to slow as you sunk into all that J was, all that he had ever been and all that he would ever be. You loved him for all of him; for all of the good and the bad, for all of the things which he kept hidden from you for various reasons including protection, for all of the things you knew he had done, for all of the things which you only suspected without knowing for sure... You loved J, you loved him and you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither of you were crazy. Neither of you were wrong, neither of you were any of the words which had been thrown at you. Neither of you were ever anything other than yourselves and though that opened you up to being misunderstood by those who didn’t even want to understand, it also meant that again and again and again did the two of you fall together. You knew J, you knew him, and he knew you, too. There was nothing that the two of you hadn’t already survived together and there was nothing which would ever tear you asunder.

Finally did your arms slide up, up J’s back, still underneath the trench coat, and they curved to the broad slope of his shoulders. J lifted his head from yours in response to the change in the situation which he knew was coming and the top of your head felt cold... empty, with only the ghost of his touch. It felt much like the way your heart did without him by your side, where he belonged. Even when he was right beside you did you miss him. You moved to cup J’s face in your hands but unlike other times, there was no warning which flashed in his dark eyes. No tilting backwards of his head, no grunting. J just... looked at you and saw you looking back. Such a raw connection was made when your matching sets of chocolate eyes met - a match made in Hell, were you - as soul gazed into soul. “You’re so handsome, J.” You expected for J to scoff, but he didn’t. He was quiet. He was letting you love on him in all the ways that you wanted to and with a twinge in your gut did you suspect that he had been at least slightly offended by the conversation thread, though that wasn’t your fault. J would have found it out, anyway, so determined was he when it came to soothing the tempestuous storms which so daily rained down hell upon his beautiful Lilith. “And you’re not a monster. You’re a human, just like me, and you’re beautiful,” Slowly, carefully, did your fingers move to trace along the jagged scars. Though J didn’t ever focus on the past and he preferred to leave it where it belonged, the story behind his scars always broke your heart and you wished that you had been there for him. You would have been there for him, protected him... loved him.

J echoed those sentiments, unexpressed such as they were. He occasionally entertained thoughts of what he would have done had he been there for you at key areas of your life, but in the end he knew that such thoughts could cause more pain than good. There was only the here and the now and right now, oh... right now, your lips were pressing so reverently against the worst of his scars. J’s eyes slipped closed and he hummed as he pressed himself into your slow and careful touches, so hesitant were you to hurt him. You knew not if the nerve endings were active and so you were as gentle as you could be with the man who held your entire heart in his hands. “You’re not,” another kiss, “A monster, J.” Your lips traced across the neater of the two scars and J’s breath hitched imperceptibly, his arms flexing from where they loosely rested around you, “You’re human.” J knew what you were saying; that you were sorry for those words, that you still thought that he was mad at you. Thoughts remained despite J’s best efforts and he huffed as he realised that he had to up his game.

J pulled away from you and left you with the ghostly imprint of himself against every part of you as he shed his trench coat. It dropped carelessly to the floor - a dangerous move considering how many weapons, grenades and the like resided in the many pockets - and he unlaced and then removed his steel toe capped boots with no care for where they landed. J threw back the corner of the duvet and got in easily before he reached across the space of the bed and peeled back your corner, too - get in. You did so and immediately were you tugged into J’s body. He made a show of wiggling around so that he could get comfortable for you and you ended up on your stomach laying atop J. Full, painted lips rained down kisses atop your head and each time J pulled off of you did he make an exaggerated mwah noise. He was doing what he could to cheer you up, sensing even without much confirmation from you that this had shaken you up more than you cared to admit to. You hated the way that this had made you feel and you wanted to erase the time of the experience, brief though it had been, from your mind. Such a thing was impossible, however, and so you contented yourself with allowing J to remind you of the things which really and truly mattered:

Not a stranger’s cold ignorance. Not rumours or heresay or lies. Not theories, rumours or untruths.

But this. Just... this.

You, in J’s arms, and he, pressed up against you so solidly that you could feel his heartbeat as well as yours. You, securely tucked in J’s embrace and he, doing his best to remove the world’s cruelties from the forefront of your mind even though he had been the indirect target. J’s lips in your hair and the echo of his scars against your lips, his scent in your nostrils and his hands upon your body. There was so much love between you in this moment, more obvious was in it times of great need, such as right now, that it had come together and formed a third entity in the bedroom, which shielded your minds as surely as the rapidly heating up duvet shielded your bodies from the room, like a radiator was J, and kept you safe, sane and honest from all those who sought to do you harm. For J wasn’t a monster, he was simply ahead of the curve and you... oh, and you were right there beside him, where you belonged. J’s hand crept across the space and picked up your own. His finger rubbed over the ring which you wore for him and you were just quick enough to see the smallest of smiles on his full lips as cool metal met his heated flesh.

You smiled to see evidence of J’s own happiness and as you nuzzled into your clown, feeling drowsy as the toll of tonight’s emotions, on top of what you had already been feeling, piled up on you, you whispered a very heartfelt and very sincere, “I love you, Jack.”

J’s fingers froze upon your ring and you held your breath, but as soon as he had reacted did he decide to not react and you released that same breath just as he said,

“I know, Lilith. I know.”

And he did.

Destructive raccoon boii(tm) @jokershyena @anyatheladyclown @joker-daddy @rinbyo @imightaswellnotexistatall @vladtoly @joker-is-my-hero @liz-rdwitch @enigmaticandunstable @ledgerskitten @tsukiakarinobara @germansarechill @ezziesworld @antonija89 @acw1 @sadjesterautumn @mermaleizroseglasses @justawriterinprogress @truthbehindthemysteries @hotpacino @call-me-harley-quinn

#ledger joker #ledger joker imagine #heath ledger #heath ledger joker #heath ledger joker imagine #heath ledger imagine #ledger!joker #ledger!joker imagine

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scandalsavagefanfic · 5 years ago

Note

did you see the tagging discourse yesterday? they really went after whumpbby

Hey there. I did see it. I wrote up a response to it but I wanted to sleep on it before I responded. I wanted to make sure I come across as informative and dispassionate as possible because emotions are already high and tempers are flaring and the last thing I want to do is fan the flames.

As far as I can tell there were three issues mentioned.

1) Explicit Content in Summaries

I think not putting explicit content in a summary is a valid suggestion. Frankly, it’s not an angle I’ve ever considered (even though I’m pretty sure none of my summaries are explicit. I’m not giving away the milk for for free. You have to click on the cow to get it 🤣).

But I do think it’s important to remember that asking the fanfiction community as a whole to embrace this as a community standard isn’t a miraculous fix it. For starters this is an additional courtesy and I’m not sure how much fic it will actually affect, particularly in this fandom (I pretty much only read explicit fic and while there’s definitely summaries that are explicit, it’s not a particularly common issue and the OP’s example is actually not explicit and is exactly the kind of thing that should be in the summary so that you know whether the fic beyond that will trigger you or not). I’m happy to pay a little extra attention and make an effort but that by no means ensures that you won’t see explicit content in the summary. I mean, tv shows give you the rating and tags in the beginning of the episode but you still might see something explicit if you’re flipping through the stations. It’s not possible for content providers to account for every person’s individual needs. The individual has to do some of the work. There’s not really any reason for someone to be reading an explicit summary if they’ve seen the fic is rated explicit and seen the ship is one they’re uninterested in and seen that the tags contain content they’d be uninterested in for that ship (if there are any, because people forget that further tagging is another courtesy that creators go out of their way to do to make life easier for readers - I don’t know a single writer who enjoys tagging) before they ever get to the summary at all. But still. Fine. I think that’s a good point and I’ll be going through my 80+ fics over the weekend to make sure. It’s just that readers should never expect things that are courtesies to be strictly adhered to by the entirety of the community.

2) Tagging All Batfamily Ships as “Incest”, Regardless of Actual Content

This seems to be predicated on the misconceptions that 1) the fan-dubbed Bat “Family” is an actual family by any metric that could be considered incestuous, and 2) that this is obvious and not up for discussion.

Both of those are untrue. The Batfamily are not canonically a family whose interpersonal relationships can be considered incestuous, by blood, law, or anything else.

If you want to interpret the text that way, there is certainly room to do so. But it is neither a fact, nor an obvious one.

The Pre-Flashpoint canon, especially for Batfam, exists in a nebulous state of “maybe applicable”. One of the few things we can be sure of, is that Dick and Tim at least, were never adopted. Tim’s parents are alive and well. Pre-Flashpoint, Dick was adopted as a gesture in his late 20′s. He’s early to mid 20′s in N52/Rebirth (for some reason people seem to think that N52 and Rebirth are different continuities. They’re not. Rebirth is a continuation of N52.)

Jason’s adoption is never explicitly addressed in current canon. So you can pick your poison.

None of them grew up together in either continuity so that argument is out.

You are welcome to read the Bats as this kind of family if you want.

But no one else has to, and there is very little evidence in current (or past) canon to suggest they are. What evidence there is, is vague and ambiguous. NOT obvious and damning. There are a million different ways to consider someone family, including both platonic and romantic.

Finally, since it was specifically pointed out, with the lack of blood ties, if I write an AU where they one or more of them has no ties to Bruce, that’s not incest and no one should be tagging it as such.

It’s pretty weird to ask someone to tag their fic as something it’s not. It’d be like asking me to tag my angst “fluff”. I might as well tag DickKory or SuperBat “incest” while I’m at it.

Hopefully this helps clear things up. Hopefully this will help people who are triggered by incest to be able to see batfam ship tags without being triggered. If the clarification that they are not a legal or blood family in canon does not help, I am truly very very sorry and I genuinely hope you can discover what it is about those ships that actually affects you so that you can better protect yourself. But I have to tag my ships. I can’t not tag a ship so that you don’t see it, because then you might accidentally stumble across it and get much further than the tag before you know what’s happening. And I can’t tag incest because it literally is not then readers will think that I’ve written a verse where the characters are blood/legal family in some way, where the fic treats them like they have familial bonds and sexual relationship, and some of them will likely avoid it.

Appropriate tagging is important so that people who don’t want to see things don’t AND so that people can find the content they’re looking for. It’s pretty unfair to expect people to use inappropriate tags and potentially harm more people by making tags meaningless and expecting readers to guess.

(small aside, “batcest” is not an ideal tag. From personal experience, coming here from comics and having no history with this kind of fandom, I avoided things tagged Batcest because I thought, with the combination of Bat + incest, it was the ship name for Bruce/Damian and I wasn’t interested in that.)

3) Inconsiderate Reader Comments

Inappropriate comments left on fics by readers, is also a valid issue. It is also an entirely separate issue that has nothing to do with the very clearly stated primary concerns. Inconsiderate comments are an unfortunate reality of creating and sharing those creations. Unfortunately there’s no, non-fascist way of forcing people to be considerate. We all have to live with that.

We can absolutely complain about publicly on our blogs. And if you’re a gen author, with no history of certain ships, I will defend that it’s rude to pop on your fic and ask if it’s going to be that ship. Just like I will defend that it’s rude to pop on my perfectly tagged Bruce/Duke fic and try to tell me that it’s incest because Duke lived at the Manor for two weeks before moving in with his uncle. I’m sorry you have to deal with it. I’m sorry I have to deal with it. I’m sorry we all have to deal with it. But it’s not something we can stop or the people who came before us would have. So it is something that you have to be able to cope with.

As for whump, I thought she handled it well, especially in her clarification posts. The OP was obviously very emotionally invested in the subject and came off very antagonistic. I know OP doesn’t consider their suggestions unreasonable but that’s because they’re based on a fundamental misconception of canon. If DC writes a continuity where the Bats are a family in any way that would make sexual relationships between them incestuous, and if I write something for that continuity, then of course I will tag it accordingly. Asking me to tag a fic as something it isn’t, is unreasonable. It instantly makes tagging in general completely useless. Asking people to apply a catchall tag or keep explicit content out of the summaries is not intrinsically unreasonable, but expecting the entire community, regardless of how immersed in fandom the creator is, to abide by that standard in a way that provides meaningful protection for you (in that you can lower your guard in any meaningful way when you have content you need to avoid) is..... well, it’s just impractical.

#Anonymous #discourse #cw: discussion of incest #my two cents #scandal's wild rambles

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warrioreowynofrohan · 4 years ago

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Stormlight Archive Epigraphs (1) - Letters

I’ve been going through the Stormlight Archive epigraphs to see if there are hints or foreshadowing or information that I’ve missed; before now, I hadn’t pulled together ones from different chapters, and it’s been very interesting to get a clearer picture of them.

These posts are as much for my own reference as anything else.

This one covers the letters between Wit and his, hm, associates, which are in TWOK Part 2, WOR Part 4, and OB Part 2.

Wit’s Letter

Old friend, I hope this missive finds you well. Though, as you are now essentially immortal, I would guess that wellness on your part is something of a given. I realize that you are probably still angry. That is pleasant to know. Much as your perpetual health, I have come to rely upon your dissatisfaction with me. It is one of the cosmere’s great constants, I should think.

Let me first assure you that the element is quite safe. I have found a good home for it. I protect its safety like I protect my own skin, you might say. You do not agree with my quest. I understand that, so much as it is possible to understand someone with whom I disagree so completely.

Might I be quite frank? Before, you asked why I was so concerned. It is for the following reason: Ati was once a kind and generous man, and you saw what became of him. Rayse, on the other hand, was among the most loathesome, crafty, and dangerous individuals I had ever met. He holds the most frightening and terrible of all of the Shards. Ponder on that for a time, you old reptile, and tell me if your insistence on nonintervention holds firm. Because I assure you, Rayse will not be similarly inhibited. One need only look at the aftermath of his brief visit to Sel to see proof of what I say. In case you have turned a blind eye to that disaster, know that Aona and Skai are both dead, and that which they held has been Splintered. Presumably to prevent anyone from rising up to challenge Rayse.

You have accused me of arrogance in my quest. You have accused me of perpetuating my grudge against Bavadin. Both accusations are true. Neither point makes the things I have written to you here untrue.

I am being chased. Your friends of the Seventeenth Shard, I suspect. I believe they’re still lost, following a false trail I left for them. They’ll be happier that way. I doubt they have any inkling what to do with me should they actually catch me. If anything I have said makes a glimmer of sense to you, I trust that you’ll call them off. Or maybe you could astound me and ask them to do something productive for once. For I have never been dedicated to a more important purpose, and the very pillars of the sky will shake with the results of our war here. I ask again. Support me. Do not stand aside and let disaster consume more lives. I’ve never begged you for something before, old friend.

I do so now.

Reply 1:

I’ll address this letter to my “old friend,” as I have no idea what name you’re using currently. Have you given up on the gemstone, now that it is dead? And do you no longer hide behind the name of your old master? I am told that in your current incarnation you’ve taken a name that references what you presume to be one of your virtues. This is, I suspect, a little like a skunk naming itself for its stench.

Now, look what you’ve made me say. You’ve always been able to bring out the extreme in me, old friend. And I do still name you a friend, for all that you weary me.

Yes, I’m disappointed. Perpetually, as you put it. Is not the destruction you have wrought enough? The worlds you now tread bear the touch and design of Adonalsium. Our interference so far has brought nothing but pain.

My path has been chosen very deliberately. Yes, I agree with everything you have said about Rayse, including the severe danger he presents. However, it seems to me that all things have been set up for a purpose, and if we - as infants - stumble through the workshop, we risk exacerbating, not preventing, a problem. Rayse is captive. He cannot leave the system he now inhabits. His destructive potential is, therefore, inhibited. Whether this was Tanavast’s design or not, millennia have passed without Rayse taking the life of another one of the sixteen. While I mourn for the great suffering Rayse has caused, I do not believe we could hope for a better outcome than this. He bears the weight of God’s own divine hatred, separated from the virtues that give it context. He is what we made him to be, old friend. And that is what he, unfortunately, wished to become. I suspect that he is more a force than an individual now, despite your insistence to the contrary. That force is contained, and an equilibrium reached.

You, however, have never been a force for equilibrium. You tow chaos behind you like a corpse dragged by one leg through the snow. Please, hearken to my plea. Leave that place and join me in my oath of nonintervention. The cosmere itself may depend upon our restraint.

Reply 2:

Dearest Cephandrius,

I recieved you communication, of course. I noticed its arrival immediately, just as I noticed your many intrusions into my land. You think yourself so clever, but my eyes are not those of some petty noble, to be clouded by a false nose and some dirt on the cheeks.

You mustn’t worry yourself about Rayse. It is a pity about Aona and Skai, but they were very foolish - violating our pact from the very beginning. Your skills are admirable, but you are merely a man. You had your chance to be more, and refused it. No good can come of two Shards settling in one location. It was agreed that we would not interfere with one another, and it disappoints me that so few of the Shards have kept to this original agreement. As for Uli Da, it was obvious from the outset that she was going to be a problem. Good riddance. Regardless, this is not your concern. If Rayse becomes an isdue, he will be dealt with.

And so will you.

Reply 3:

Cephandrius, bearer of the First Gem,

You must know better than to approach us by relying upon presumption of past relationship. You have spoken to one who cannot respond. We, instead, will take your communication to us - though we know not how you have located us upon this world. We are indeed intrigued, for we thought it well hidden. Insignificant among our many realms. As the waves of the sea must continue to surge, so must our will continue resolute.

Alone.

Did you expect anything else from us? We need not suffer the interference of another. Rayse is contained, and we care not for his prison. Indeed, we admire his initiative. Perhaps if you had approached the correct one of us with your plea, it would have found favourable audience. But we stand in the sea, pleased with our domains. Leave us alone.

We also instruct that you should not return to Obrodai. We have claimed that world, and a new avatar of our being is beginning to manifest there. She is young yet, and - as a precaution - she has been instilled with an intense and overpowering dislike of you. This is all we will say at this time. If you wish more, seek these waters in person and overcome the tests we have created. Only in this will you earn our respect.

Reply 4:

Friend,

Your letter is most intriguing, even revelatory. I would have thought, before attaining my current station, that a deity could not be surprised. Obviously, this is not true. I can be surprised. I can perhaps even be naive, I think.

I am the least equipped, of all, to aid you in this endeavour. I am finding that the powers I hold are in such conflict that the most simple of actions can be difficult. I am also made uncertain by your subterfuge. Why have you not made yourself known to me before this? How is it you can hide? Who are you, truly, and how do you know so much about Adonalsium? If you would speak to me farther, I request open honesty. Return to my lands, approach my servants, and I will see what I can do for your quest.

Basically everything that I know about Wit and the Cosmere beyond the events of The Stormlight Archive comes from the Stormlight Archive Rereads on Tor.com. Here’s my understanding of what is going on:

The God of Sanderson’s Cosmere, Adonalsium, was splintered into many different pieces (Shards - not to be confused with Shardblades and Shardplate), each consisting of a separate characteristic, and each characteristic was taken on by a different person. Up until I put these epigraphs together, I thought there were 16 shards, but from this, it sounds like there was a 17th that Wit was supposed to take on, and chose not to, and that his sixteen associates are displeased with him for that (and are trying to get that Shard back?).

The tone of the different replies is very interesting. The first one, I have some sympathy with, as one of many reasons why I tend to oppose military interventionism is that generally the intervenors have no idea what they are doing and risk making things worse; the author fo the first reply seems to have genuine affection for Wit despite his aggravation.

The second reply is very much the opposite, starting courteous but being the most clearly hostile of the four. The third reply indicates that Wit’s letter went to a Shard-holder other than the one he intended, and to someone who is broadly antagonistic (given that they “admire Odium’s initiative”). The fourth one, I’m gathering from bits of comments from other people on the broader Cosmere, is from the person currently holding the Shards of both Ruin and Preservation.

I’m not sure any of the material from the letters is essential, or if it’s just an addition for the enjoyment of Cosmere fans; the broad takeaway seems to be that Roshar is on its own and no one else is inclined to provide large-scale assistance against Odium.

I’m not sure whether I’m corrent in assuming that Tanavast is the original name of the person who took on the Shard of Honor, in the same way that Rayse is the original name of the person who took on the Shard of Odium?

#the stormlight archive #brandon sanderson #hoid #epigraphs

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