#and me and my family are alive and safe!

[lassieposting]

Concept:

Post-tadpole, Tav offers to help Astarion find a way to walk in the sun again, and she starts by going to different libraries and repositories and archives around the city to look for books that might be relevant. Astarion, obviously, has to stay in the rental room with the shutters closed during the daytime, so he can't come with her.

At some point, this takes her up to the posh part of the city, where the fancy ✨ scholarly ✨ archive is. She remembers most of the walk - it's not too far from the graveyard Astarion took her to, in the neighbourhood where he once used to live.

And like, it's never actually occurred to her that he could still have Actual Blood Relatives still living? It's not a topic she's ever thought to raise with him. But she has to sign in and out of the archive, and she just happens to notice the name three or four lines above hers: an initial and a surname she recognises.

Ancunín.

The same name from Astarion's gravestone.

A parent? A sibling?

A niece or nephew Astarion has never even met?

Thus begins a secondary quest of trying to reunite a broken family. Astarion is willing enough to talk about the few memories he still has of the thirty-nine years he had with his family before turning - a drop in the ocean compared to the 200 years spent suffering under Cazador - but he shuts down when she nudges him towards the likelihood that Mr & Mrs Ancunín are still alive. He retreats back behind the selfish, catty survivalist he was when she first met him and claims he has no interest in ever reconnecting. The pain in every clipped syllable says drop it, so she does.

But then he asks her, very quietly, several days later, what the initial was. He doesn't really react when she tells him - there's no obvious recognition, and he doesn't ask any follow-up questions or try to discuss it further. He just goes back to his book. She watches him out of the corner of her eye though, as she skim-reads her own giant tome of magical artifacts. A very long time goes by before she sees him turn a page.

For a good long while, the family issue gets put firmly on the back burner. They have other shit going on. Sometimes, it's following promising leads on a possible workaround for Astarion's sunlight allergy. Other times, it's the kind of ugly, ragged-edged breakdown that so often follows a period of relative safety and stability after a major trauma. He's been running in survival mode for two centuries, and now he's finally starting to feel secure enough for the rest of his mind to come back online, and all the trauma he couldn't handle at the time, all the pain and fear and tangled emotions survival mode was protecting him from, is catching up to him. During those sporadic episodes, trying to keep him from falling apart is her top priority and, well, time gets away from them and by the time he brings up his parents again, months or more have gone by, and they have a fairly good idea of what artifact of daywalking they need to find.

By the time it comes to actually meeting with them, still more months have passed, and they have already found it.

It's horrible, and heartwarming, and heartbreaking, and healing, and hurting, and so many other conflicting things that for a while - a long while - Tav doesn't know whether she actually did the right thing encouraging him to reach out to long-lost loved ones. It's a mess of moments that makes her heart ache for a dozen reasons. She finds out that Astarion looks most like his mother, but has his father's nose. She holds him for hours while he shakes and sobs into her shoulder because they never even left the city, they were here the whole time, and they never found him - and he's so angry and full of grief he doesn't know what to do with himself. She accompanies him to the home he was raised in, and the once-familiar surroundings jog memories he thought lost for good - he's glassy-eyed, recounting them to her, but she's fairly sure it's the good kind of glassy-eyed, so she doesn't mention it. She tries to make conversation at family dinner while he stares at his hands in his lap, dissociated, looking even more uncomfortable than she feels, utterly lost in a world that once fit him like a glove. There are a lot of feelings to try and mediate. They are all hurt, all damaged, all afraid, all looking for the ghost of a loved one in the face of a stranger.

But, eventually, there is a day where she overhears Astarion having a conversation with his father, and he sounds like himself - not the persona he puts on in public - and his father laughs at something he says in a way that's entertained rather than awkward. There is a day where his mother reaches out and he doesn't shake his head or step away - he lets her hug him goodbye. They have not slipped back into the graves they crawled out of in each other's lives - they are all very different people now - but they are learning new ways to fit together, and he seems to be pleased about it.

So she thinks, yeah, it was worth it.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

one thing i really wish people wouldn’t forget when it comes to suguru’s character is that his core desire is just to have a family. not in a nuclear family way, but in a “i want a place where i belong / i want to protect the ones i love” way…… literally everything else is just an extension of that desire. a means to meet that end. he broke down after being forced to realize that staying with his family meant having to watch them die, so he left and made a new one. and he got stronger. and his core wish was always, always always to create a world where he’d finally be able to protect them :(((((((((

[skibasyndrome]

.

[cartooncadet666]

"What did you want to be when you were small?"

"...?"

"Well, you didn't want to be this, I'm sure of that.

No child wants to become something like us..."

"..."

"... I wanted to be a father."

"... A father?"

"Yes. They retire young... Fathers."

A little backstory insert about Specter here..

He was friends with Aurora (Skeebo's biological mother) and Zac (Pac's dad) in high school, despite being in a privileged family, he always wished to be freed from it all and have the right to be his own person.

Before the war began, he ran away from home during a wedding that his parents forced him to have with a woman he despised, and seeking comfort, he stayed with Aurora for a while when Skeebo's younger sister was born.

During the war, and he had told the rest of the Resistance this as well, he wanted to be a father, but he felt like he was unworthy of having a child and he was scared of accidentally giving said child a terrible life. Zac hearing this showed him baby Pac and said that if he wasn't comfortable having a child with another person, he was always welcome to help raise his own. Aurora also agreed to that idea.

... He was killed around the day Zac had obtained the scar on his cheek.

If it weren't for his death, many things could have been prevented.

But as of right now, the Overlords refuse to give him mercy, so, the closest to being in a family is floating in the alleyway with a broken child he was meant to help raise and nurture. A boy that doesn't view him as something dangerous, but as a friend... A real one.

[transmechanicus]

I’m allowed one (1) vent of the colossal amounts of pressure my body and mind are under per month and i usually do my best to bury it in the early hours of the morning, so now that i’ve provided this valuable and important context:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[lunarharp]

light-hearted scribblings today

[krypt-kir]

Time to update my info I guess

[thatdemiboymess]

My mom called me when she found out about the Trump assassination attempt and before hanging up the call she asked me to just...please be more careful. Proposed that maybe I should chill out with the pride pins and all, considering the political environment at the moment, just with how things are, ya know? But I can't. Not now. Shit is so fucked.

[valeffelees]

only bad thing about being in a fandom where one of the characters canonically has wings is the painful lack of classic wingfic. where is my everything's the same but people have bird wings watford au where one day baz notices simon hasn't been grooming his wings bc of an injury to his ribs so he sits on his bed and makes a whole fuss about how "i'm not doing this to be nice, snow, your wings are just a travesty to look at" and then proceeds to carefully and lovingly tidy his feathers in drawn out silence while they both pretend grooming someone else's wings isn't one of the most intimate things you can do for another person. will this heartbreak never end

[lilaccatholic]

how do i do it though. how do i let go of the bitterness and the hardness when they kept me "okay" for so long? does it come when i finally leave? can it ever?

[oftincturedwords]

Low-key headcanon that once the Batch rescue Crosshair & Omega , Crosshair somehow sees the archived riot race footage of Tech racing & seeing Wrecker , Omega , & Tech ‘W I N N E R’ photos. It's likely the first time he smirks / grins after being rescued because his siblings are absolutely mad & he's proud of their delinquency when Hunter ( a.k.a 99.6% of the Batch’s impulse control ) & Echo essentially had their backs turned ahdkflglg

[davlucies]

taako rescuing lucretia frfom the depression nexus because otherwise there's no way he and lup can pull off this prank 🌶

[crowned-peony]

Tell me of a sentimental item(s) you have

I wanna listen to the story about who gave it to you or how you got it

Is it with you every day? Is it somewhere safe?

[angelstrawbabie420]

hmm i think i am not coping. very well

[as-warm-as-choco]

today i went out searchin Dragonball manga in english (couldnt find for the life of me) >_< instead got a buu figure (actually coin bank shhh xD) and a Shenron mug i just drank tea from watchin Dragonball :''')

also got the boy and the heron storyboard book at last!!!!!

[thepandalion]

and today in "why is fandom so antisemitic" just blocked two more followers in my sideblog, which makes it about 10 of what would have been almost 35 followers over a couple months. because the "all israelis are evil" bs is really big in mcyt circles.

also haven't watched the new season of hc because I don't want to touch the fandom anymore and enjoying things alone isn't as fun when you know there's a fandom. but also the fandom is full of people that wish I was dead so I dont want to be there either. which means right now the only things in my life are the jewish bloggers I follow (love yall) and doing daily challenges in microsoft solitaire. and university ig but it's the weekend and Im trying not to think about my homework rn

also gave up and made a "btw Im israeli plz stop following me if u want me dead" post on the sideblog. hope it works ig.