#at this point i am also just saying words recreationally but like...... i AM convinced that this is a viable (if wildly inarticulate) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

amorremanet · 7 years ago

Note

for the character meme: sebastian aka ur oc 😊

oh man, this made me so happy, because I can seriously talk about this loser all day and ahh, thank you for this!

sexuality headcanon: In the words of Rick Riordan… (read, “I just wanted to use this picture, because I’m being obnoxious”)

otp: Seb/Stephen — which is like… Look, I know love triangles are regarded as boring and tired and overdone, and I did not intend to end up there because the original endgame plan was actually going to be Seb/Todd. But… things happened.

Characters developed and got other ideas.

I started going, “I mean, it could work out but these two (especially Todd) are not cooperating with how it would need to go in order to not be a complete shit-show, and also, I feel like it would kinda betray some of the themes going on in the story, like how siding with Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas is a thing you can do if you don’t mind all of their crucifixion and post-apocalyptic pseudo-imperialist bullshit, but it undermines the games’ discussion of how being stuck in the past is a bad thing” at Seb/Todd, and really liking Seb/Stephen a lot more.

That said, I’m still trying to stay cognizant of some of the issues that they have to work through together — like how, on one hand, Stephen says that he understands things like, “You can’t cure someone’s depression by loving them” and, “You do not need to make yourself a Manic Pixie Dream Boy in order to be desirable,” and to be fair, he mostly does understand that…… but on another level, he doesn’t completely get these things

And on the other hand, you have Seb and…… I mean, pretty much everything about him is constantly a work in progress (not like it isn’t for other people, but Seb is viscerally aware of this and rarely at peace with it), but his biggest problems for the relationship include (but are by no means limited to):

his habit of making assumptions about what people want, or worse what they “deserve,” doing none of his due diligence on reality-checking these assumptions, and proceeding as if everyone is on the same page when they are not (and not only are these assumptions usually wrong but they often involve him not telling people about something going on for him that they should probably know about);

his habit of (mostly) unintentionally closing people off or locking them out of things that they want to be involved in because he wants to make them happy and give them what they want, and assumes that they probably wouldn’t be happy if they knew about;

his trouble with knowing what his feelings are doing, let alone deciding what to do about that or communicating them to anyone else (which maybe isn’t a problem for Margot and Pete, who’ve known him for 12 years and 16 years respectively, and know their way around reading his behaviors and patterns…… but Stephen’s known him for, like, 14 months before their first date, and nowhere near as intimately as Pete or Margot, and like, the Saturday after said first date, Sebastian’s going to be uncommonly aware of what he’s feeling and open about it, and Stephen is still going to be kind of lost about what it all means and if there isn’t something else going on);

—What’s going on is that Seb did not plan on having near-death experience #17 and turning into a mutant superpowered werewolf on the night before his and Stephen’s date. He also didn’t plan on NDE17 giving him a weird moment of clarity about the state of his relationship with and feelings for Todd. He further did not plan on his date with Stephen actually going well (due to him feeling pretty certain that Stephen wasn’t really interested in him and would probably realize that he deserved better and go, “Okay, I’m out”).

And Seb really didn’t plan on all of this dropping into his life all at once, so now, due to his own failure to account for the unexpected or do a reality-check any of his assumptions, he has dug himself into a hole of conflicted desires and about the only things keeping him from burying his face in the sofa and listening to his ipod full of mopey sad music until the problems that he created either go away or eat him, are:

1. he doesn’t want to be the kind of guy who does that, because he’s been that guy before and he really doesn’t like it (—it’s just hard because that’s still one of his first impulses); 2. he has to deal with other shit right now, too, and since he’s going to be out of the sofa anyway, he might as well try to handle the mess he just made all over his love life; and 3. he can hear you judging him, Pete, and while he can admit that he deserves it, he’d also like it if you’d stop.

So, Seb’s first approach to dealing with this is to just be honest with Stephen about everything (i.e., that he and Todd aren’t together, but they were [which Stephen knows] and they’ve been having a “friends with benefits” arrangement [which Stephen kind of knew], and Seb thought it wasn’t anything more than that when he asked Stephen out but now he feels like he was wrong, except he really likes Stephen too and he had such a great time on Thursday night and he doesn’t want to hurt Stephen, but he just… wants to please beg for some time to figure out what he wants to do)

and agree to any conditions Stephen wants to ask for if he’s okay with giving Seb that time (which are pretty much, “be honest with me,” “be honest with yourself,” “be honest with Todd,” and Seb’s addition of, “okay, you didn’t ask for this, even though you had every right to, but for the record, I’m also not going to have sex with Todd until I figure this out”)

Which is legitimately a big deal for him because, like I said, one of his first approaches to problem-solving is to bury his face in the sofa and do not thing, but… Work in progress. He is one. Yep—

and how easily Seb makes himself get nervous about trying to make people like him — like, they don’t need to be impressed with him or anything (and he assumes that no one ever will be, even though this isn’t accurate), but he wants so much to be liked, especially with Stephen, who he really likes…… and this is just making recovering addict Seb crash headlong into one of the reasons why he started recreationally drinking in the first place, which he hasn’t really dealt with at all beyond acknowledging that it exists

To explain: at a cast party in high school, Seb learned that people other than Pete, Damien, and Allison found him a lot more tolerable when he was drunk. He also fell off the back deck at the hosts’ house while singing along to “I Touch Myself,” which was the point at which Pete went, “Okay, we’re out. Come on, time for you to go home.”

Instead of connecting the dots in a way like, “Being drunk lowers your inhibitions, can make you feel more relaxed, and maybe people seemed to like me more while I was drunk because I wasn’t so high-strung or trying so hard to be whoever I thought they might like more as a person, and maybe, I am wrong in my basic assumption that they probably wouldn’t like me as a person if they knew me for real,” he was 14 and desperate and pretty convinced that he had no real value as a person and there was no way that people could actually like him unless they were, like, really special and unique (for all he did try his best to ignore and repress these feelings)

So, his conclusion was more like, “Wow, alcohol is a happy shiny magical potion that makes people like me”

(—which he now realizes was exceptionally bad judgment on his part for several reasons, with his two big ones being, “All that shit eventually evolved into things like, ‘Alcohol is a happy shiny magical potion that makes your problems go away’”

and, “My parents very specifically told me and all of my siblings that drinking because we thought it would make people like us did not fall under the heading of, ‘drinking responsibly,’ and fuck the whole, ‘My family’s business has been wine allegedly since the tenth century, so I should know better’ thing, what matters more is that I should’ve honored how much my Mom and Dad love me by listening to them instead of by being a desperate teenage idiot”)

(Not that anyone asked, but Pete’s personal beef with how he and Seb both did this, “Wow, alcohol makes people like me, I’ll take five” shit in high school is, “I want to reach back in time and slap my past self for even caring about being liked by most of the people we went to high school with because most of them were assholes and utter pieces of shit and I deserved better. Aside from Princess, Brittany, and Brittany’s brother Matt, all of my so-called friends from high school disavowed me for just being gay, and the only reason why Matt didn’t is because he just up and disappeared before I could come out to him, and he’s been legally dead for four years.”)

There’s a lot of stuff going on here that Seb has only vaguely begun dealing with in the almost-two years since he went to rehab, and he’s going to careen into a lot of it while things get going with Stephen

Anyway. As I was saying.

In addition to their own personal baggage, you also have Seb and Stephen both going, independently of each other, “Oh my god, he’s so far out of my league, this is going so well and I’m trying to enjoy it in the moment and even succeeding in doing that sometimes, but oh my god, what’s going to happen when he realizes just how far out of my league he is, ahhhhh”

—which is the biggest reason (out of several) why one set of their AU counterparts (of the many running around the canonical multiverse) ultimately broke up instead of getting engaged, even though both of them wanted to, because they kept doing this thing and not talking about it, and…… yup.

Fortunately for Seb and Stephen in the prime timeline, they’re going to learn better. They just have to work on it.

Also, for whatever it’s worth? The love triangle isn’t even going to be dragged out through the first half of the first book before Seb decides to let Todd go romantically, go back to being friends who are really close and mean a lot to each other and love each other but don’t have sex, and really get serious with Stephen.

I mean, Stephen is still going to get anxious and impatient and translate that into putting together an act for one of his shows that doesn’t quite mashup Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex,” but splices them together, and involves Stephen’s look mashing up Madge’s “Into the Groove” look with hair that’s a bit more like “Material Girl” and St. George’s Iconic™ leather jacket and dangly cross earring (which he actually wore in the video for “Faith,” rather than, “I Want Your Sex,” but they’re on the same album, and it’s his most Iconic™ look, so)

To quote Pete: “It’s like somebody combined Madonna and George Michael into a beautiful, fat, Puerto Rican drag queen. This deserves to be on display at MoMA.”

—and then making someone at the show record it so he can put it on youtube and give Seb the link because Seb would like to be there but, at present, doesn’t trust himself at bars (more so since getting mutant werewolf superpowers, actually, since now, Seb can’t get drunk but still wants to, and it’s complicated and messy, and he currently really hates it because it’s keeping him from being at Stephen’s shows — they’re going to figure out an arrangement eventually, but in the meantime)

Either way, this approach actually works out and Seb gets the message of, “I’m trying to be patient but we’re almost to six weeks of you figuring things out now and I’d really like to move conclusively in one direction or another,” and figures things out

(—and Pete is just going to commend Stephen for this because okay, granted, Pete is not a drag queen himself, but he’s also had 16 years of friendship with his Princess and he has never considered using a performance at a drag show to get some message across to Seb instead of trying to tell him something in any other way and sometimes having to gamble on whether or not he’s going to get the right message out of it)

brotp: boring answer is boring, but Margot and Pete are tied here, and easily two of the most important relationships in Seb’s life. He’s also going to add Josie to this list eventually, as they slowly progress from being paired up without much say in the matter to being work friends to being actual friends.

Then there are the friendships he gets to develop with Lucy and Sara Grace.

Todd is here too, but he’s also going to strain things and will need to do some growing up after Seb/Stephen becomes an official couple — because unfortunately, Todd has been aware that he’s still In Love with Seb, but he hasn’t wanted to act on it because of a similar-to-them assumption that he isn’t good enough for Seb yet coupled with a different assumption that he will be good enough for Seb eventually, and that they’re totally going to be endgame because Todd feels like they should be… as soon as he gets his act together in some unspecified way

(Like, I mean that it’s unspecified in-character, and that’s a huge part of the problem. It’s a lot like how Seb has a long history of going, “I’m gonna get my shit figured out and get my life together for real this time”…… and then falling apart on that because he doesn’t have any concrete ideas about how to do that, just the vague impulse to do some kind of A Thing.

Like, Todd doesn’t know why he’s not good enough for Seb; he just accepts his feeling that he isn’t as Truth. And he doesn’t know how he’s going to change himself and his behaviors so that he gets to be good enough for Seb; he just accepts his idea that he’s going to get there and he will know it when he does because of reasons.

And, in all of this, he completely fails to notice that he will literally never feel, “good enough” like this because he will keep moving his internal goalposts on that definition, to the point that he could somehow throw together a movie that sweeps all the big five categories at the Oscars while still being an indie flick, and get all kinds of accolades and go down in film history… and he still wouldn’t feel like he is “good enough” for Seb because it’s not actually about Seb or their relationship; it’s fundamentally about Todd and his relationship with himself, and if he weren’t pinning it on, “being good enough for Seb,” he would just pin it on something else.

……He is really good at not noticing things like this.

Like how, despite being aware of how he’s In Love with Seb, Todd has never actually dealt with how he’s been jealous of Seb’s other exes because in fairness, Todd had some very good reasons not to like most of them

— e.g., Byron was a supervillain henchman for hire;

Francis was the world’s worst ecoterrorist (“What the Hell kind of actual ecoterrorist tells someone that he’s an ecoterrorist on the first date” — Seb);

Josh and Matt (no relation to Brittany’s brother) were abusive, and Josh in particular did not draw a clear distinction between, “rough sex” and, “domestic violence”;

Harry was cheating on Seb with like five other guys and found a way to blame that on Seb;

Rémy liked slipping his partners roofies without their consent, and choking them, and is currently in Sing-Sing on multiple counts of assault and rape in the second (and frankly, he should be doing more time than he is but Seb’s memories of their time together are unreliable for more reasons than roofies and gaslighting, so he wasn’t one of Rémy’s partners who came forward);

and Julian was mostly just annoying and fat-shaming when he and Seb were together (despite the fact that he wasn’t exactly skinny or fit himself at the time) — and like, okay, he was oddly (in Seb’s experience) not jealous of Seb being so close to Pete and Todd, which was great when his reasoning was, “You and Pete are like brothers, and not in the West Virginian or backwoods Minnesotan sense of the term”

[context: Julian is originally from a small town in Middle of Nowhere, Minnesota, and he thinks — without anything in the way of legit evidence — that a lot of his childhood neighbors were, “a bunch of inbred, cousin-kissing hillbillies”]

……but was so much less great when his reasoning was, “lmao please, Todd’s fat, he is no threat to me” (which Pete handled calling him on) — but either way, for all Julian was mostly just annoying and fat-shaming and obnoxious when he and Seb actually dated, he has since been seduced into working with a bunch of supervillains, which is a pretty fair reason to dislike him in addition to the, “He was annoying, obnoxious, and fat-shaming” ones

—And then, Todd is forced to deal with his jealousy when Seb/Stephen happens because Stephen is none of those things, and he and Todd would actually probably be great friends right off the bat if not for Todd being jealous as shit because Stephen is with Seb (never mind the part where a big contributing factor in Seb’s decision was how Todd blew off all his attempts to talk openly about the state of their feelings and their relationship, only to eventually give him an, “It’s not you, it’s me” line)

(never mind it because Pete is going to call Todd on this and tell him to get over himself)

And when Todd finds absolutely nothing wrong with Stephen, outside of things that fall under the heading of, “Pretty typical human variation and average levels of human flawedness,” he’s going to have to deal with the fact that he is jealous (in addition to dealing with the fact that his actions and inaction led to his current situation of having to watch the friend he’s In Love with be happy with someone else)

……Either way. Todd has to do some growing to do, and he’s going to be kind of a pain in the ass for a while before he gets it done, but he’ll get it together eventually. Because yeah, he’s hipster garbage, but he loves Seb enough to get over himself, and they love each other enough to work on things, even if they have, in the past, done a bad job of working on things between them for several reasons

He’ll eventually even get over himself enough to apologize to Stephen and work on being friends with him

……There’s really a lot of friendship going on between my characters because I’m a loser and I love friendship

*nina bo’nina brown voice* sue me :) :) :)

notp: Seb and Conrad — there are so many reasons why they have a bad relationship, like the fact that Conrad is heterosexual fascist supervillain garbage is just the beginning of why they are in notp land for me. Unfortunately for me, I find their relationship interesting while still wanting them not to be together — like, I wish I had a better point of reference than Snape and Dumbledore because Seb and Conrad’s relationship is nothing like theirs, apart from, “I find it interesting but would never want them to be together romantically or sexually for a cornucopia of reasons, and I definitely do not think it’s a healthy relationship, actually there’s a lot about it that is blatantly *UN*healthy if not outright abusive”

But, like…… If Conrad knew the MCU (he doesn’t), he would want to think that he and Seb have a relationship like Thor and Loki in the first Thor movie, or maybe Tony Stank and Obadiah Stane in the first Iron Man movie — and he genuinely does not understand why neither of these is a GOOD thing

(……he also would not get the whole thing about, “No, Conrad, seriously, Stane tried to have Mr. Stank murdered by terrorists, all so that he, Stane, could take over Stank Industries and manufacture even more war and military fuckery in the Middle East, so that he could continue to profit off of illegally selling weapons to both the United States’ military and to pretty much everyone else under the sun”

Conrad would focus on how Stane was a paternal figure and mentor to Tony, and would interpret their relationship as Stane making Tony into a hero, rather than a dissolute alcoholic man-child with no direction in life who had all of this potential to do good in the world and kept wasting it all on sex and booze and self-indulgent bullshit — which.

I mean.

I would quibble on whether or not Stank is a hero in the first place, but okay, the MCU’s narrative expects me to take it on faith that he totally is.

And yes, Stane was a big reason why Stank became a hero — on one hand, taking him down was Tony’s first big act as Iron Man that didn’t violate several international borders and arguably count as its own form of terrorism (to say nothing of all the other reasons why MCU!Iron Man is completely illegal, oops); on the other, Tony wouldn’t have made the Mark 1 armor at all if he hadn’t gotten held captive and blah blah all that jazz, and Stane organized that whole thing

—but reading their relationship as, “Stane made Tony a hero on purpose because he knew deep down that Tony had all of this potential and he was wasting it as a wastrel and a dissolute man-child and a hard-drinking party boy, and he just wanted to make Tony a hero” is…… wrong.

Like, let’s not mince words: that reading of things is just plain wrong.

There is absolutely no way in which that reading is right.

It starts off with a decent enough basis in fact, and then it just takes a big nosedive into the Lovecraftian tentacle-beast-infested waters of being wrong as shit.

Which, frankly, is a lot like Conrad’s interpretation of what his and Seb’s relationship is like.

Granted, Conrad tries to present himself as a fraternal figure, rather than a paternal one (largely because he’s 45 vs. Seb’s 30, and would rather be a brother because, in his ideal vision of things, they are essentially equals), and he has this whole convoluted series of rationalizations for why the world should work like a Silver Age comic book (or should at least appear to work like a Silver Age comic book, except to a special select few who know otherwise, and play the roles of superheroes and villains), why being the villain is actually in service of The Greater Good and kind of makes you a hero if you’re willing to do it, and why Seb should totally get in on this with him and be the Superman to his Lex Luthor, but they’re secretly working together and are still good friends

—but the gist of how Conrad understands his and Seb’s relationship as it currently stands is, um. Well.

It starts off with a basis in fact (Seb is the younger brother of Conrad’s actual brother-in-law. They first dealt with each other at Max and Linda’s wedding reception, where Seb was drinking despite not being 21 — he was still a few weeks off from turning 20 — and despite the fact that he’d just survived his first [totally intentional, but no one knew that at the time] overdose about six weeks before. Conrad’s ‘I sense a fellow mutant’ meter started dinging… but Seb got him very confused because he hadn’t fully manifested his powers yet*, and Conrad kept feeding him drinks, trying to poke him into manifesting or not…

[*: Incidentally, Seb’s sobriety at the time when his mutant superpowers do finally manifest is a big reason why they’re able to do so, and oh man, Conrad is going to be so annoyed that he has spent ten years trying to trigger Seb into fully manifesting so they could have a perfect ~villain creates his own hero~ setup, only for one of his underlings to finally succeed where Conrad has failed so many times

……all because Conrad did not properly account for the fact that he was trying to trigger a manifestation in someone who was regularly so fucked up on his drugs of choice that having a healing factor — even one that hadn’t fully manifested yet — is pretty much the only reason why Seb isn’t dead and hasn’t suffered nearly as much damage from everything he’s lived through as most medical professionals would expect him to have sustained]

Then, he slipped Seb a dose of rohypnol and he got further confused because it affected Seb when Conrad mistakenly thought that all mutants have the toxin-filtering advantage, but it didn’t affect him nearly as much as it should have… and then Seb interpreted all of Conrad’s behavior as, “He is hitting on me because being pretty and fuckable is the only thing I’m good for” and offered Conrad a blow-job, and despite the fact that he isn’t attracted to other men, Conrad accepted because, more than literally anything else, he gets off on dominating people.

Either way, they got caught — by Max, and his and Seb’s cousin Jeremy, who both got Concerned when he seemingly disappeared, not least because of the OD that Seb had survived six weeks previously and certain other worrisome behaviors on his part — and Conrad didn’t get busted for drugging Seb because he’s a telepath and screwed with Seb’s memories of the event even more than the rohypnol could’ve done on its own.

This was not the sole factor in the breakup of Conrad’s then-marriage — not least since Seb was not the only barely legal person who Conrad had raped, though his ex-wife didn’t know that he’d committed rape and instead thought that he had just cheated on her with consenting barely legal partners (all of whom were girls, except for Seb) — but said marriage did break up. Seb is pretty sure that this is more than enough reason for him and Conrad not to be friends with each other (because he feels like Conrad should blame him for the divorce, and Seb is perpetually confused by the fact that Conrad doesn’t blame him or seem to care)

……but Conrad thinks that they should be friends, and he’s taken several opportunities in the past ten years to try and convince Seb that they would be A+ friends and Seb should totally trust him. He’s aware of the fact that Seb really only tolerates him because they are their niece, Marie’s, favorite uncles…… but he still thinks that they could do some really great things together)

—and then, from that more or less sold basis in fact, Conrad’s understanding of the situation just goes into a tailspin and careens into a gorge filled with very spiky rocks, and all the spiky rocks are how utterly wrong all of his conclusions about the nature of this relationship are

(e.g., Seb is not “playing hard to get” with you, Conrad. He may not know, at the moment, that you have been telepathically fucking with him on and off for ten years, and you may currently be off the hook for raping him because he doesn’t know that you roofied him or remember that he tried to turn down your offers of drinks, but he knows that you make him feel very uncomfortable and he doesn’t want to be around you any more than he has to be.

Or, on another hand…… no, Conrad, you are not the big brother who Seb has always wanted Max to be. Max is the big brother who Seb has always wanted him to be, and the state of their relationship is just a mess because the two of them love each other, suck at communicating it in ways that the other one has an easy time of understanding, have a metric fuck-ton of baggage built up between them, and feel like the other one hates them for various reasons.

But the thing is? They’re actually working on all of that, Conrad. It’s a process, yeah, and it’s going kind of slowly but they’re working on it and trying to do a better job of understanding each other and repairing some of the ripped up places in their relationship.

And, see, Seb actually did have someone else in his family who was kind of a big brother figure to him and often played middle-man to him and Max when they were having a worse time of dealing with each other than usual. That person was cousin Jeremy, and no, Conrad, killing him does not mean that you get to replace Jeremy in Seb’s life.

This is not a Klingon battle-cruiser, Conrad, and frankly, when Seb learns that you were responsible for Jeremy’s death [—because Conrad telepathically possessed a guy who was driving a moving truck, made him run a stop sign, and had him crash into Jeremy’s car while he was going over to Seb’s place, and Jeremy died, and Conrad did it on purpose, thinking that maybe, Seb’s mutant superpowers would get triggered by losing a person he loved, but that he would probably turn into a non-functional mess if he lost Margot, Pete, Todd, Max, Adelaide, Ambrose, their parents, or Marie], then Seb is going to have even more reason to hate you.)

Thor and Loki get a little bit closer than Stane and Stank to being kind of like Seb and Conard’s relationship is like, but not for the reasons that Conrad thinks.

Like…… they are more like Thor and Loki because Loki spends all of the first movie screwing with Thor, lying to his face about all of the things (even things that he knew damn well that his brother would not take well, like the, “Father is dead” lie when Loki comes to see Thor in Coulson’s holding cell thingy), manipulating him and everyone else, and by the end of the first movie, Thor has learned that Loki was full of shit and playing him for a sap — but still cares enough about him to spend all of his Loki-related screen-time in The Avengers trying to save the little shit from his own terrible bullshit ideas (and, y’know, being a tool for Thanos, which is a REALLY bad thing to be, even though Thor didn’t quite know that part at the time).

Granted, Seb cares less about Conrad and more about the sanctity of human life in general — and he will admit that he has very conflicted feelings about letting Conrad live because after all that Conrad’s put him through, a part of Seb really does want him to die, even though there are other parts of Seb making arguments like, “Don’t kill him, you don’t want to be a killer,” and, “You’re angry and you have a right to be, but you don’t actually want him to die; you just want him not to have hurt you,” and, “Keeping him alive is better because he’s part of a bigger threat and we need all the information that we can get in order to fight them,” and, “You can’t actually get any closure from him if he’s dead”

—but the general idea of, “Villain treats hero like shit, manipulates him, hurts the people he loves, fucks with him six ways from Sunday, and so on, and in a twisted way, Villain sees all of this as coming from a place of love, while the hero progressively learns that Villain is full of shit and hurting him, then still treats Villain with more basic decency and compassion than the Villain has ever shown him” is still the same

(mind you, I’m saying all of this as not as a stan for Thor or as a Loki-hater or as someone who is more or less neutral, but as someone who loves the shit out of Loki because I’m terrible and I love garbage, and in loving him, recognize that he has pulled some truly fucked up shit)

(Granted, I do still sympathize more with Loki than Tony Stank — though frankly, a lot of that comes out of the fact that Loki gets called out on his shit and is reliably treated as a villain, but Tony gets a pass on a lot of shit that he pulls in the movies because of reasons or something, because apparently, being Iron Man means that he has a “get out of jail free” card for almost all semblance of anything vaguely resembling a sense of accountability [and any time he DOES flirt with accountability, he manages to make it all about himself, rather than the people who’ve actually been hurt here]

—and either way, both of them are infinitely more sympathetic to me than Conrad, because Conrad is just…… he is terrible. I designed him that way, I am writing him that way, but the fact that I’m doing it on purpose does not make him any less terrible.

Conrad is the sort of person who would say that he is totally just like Magneto because he’s a mutant supremacist, which…… okay, some incarnations of Magneto have been like that… but a lot of others haven’t, and far, far more importantly, Magneto’s politics are directly shaped by his experiences as a Holocaust survivor and his desire to protect mutantkind from extinction at the hands of humans.

Aside from the fact that my mutants are really not in the same position as Marvel’s — like, for my mutants, “registration” is like going to the DMV, and the whole licensing thing is flawed in a lot of ways because it’s designed by humans and the system of specific narrative interest is one being run by the US government, but it’s treated more like gun control than anything else because we are talking about people who have the ability to shoot frickin’ laser beams out of their eyes, among other potential powers, and it’s fair for people to want to be sure that these people have gotten some kind of training in how to control their abilities, know what they are and aren’t allowed to do with them under the law, and so on

—uh, yeah. Aside from that, Conrad is a non-disabled, neurotypical, straight white man from an old money WASP family (i.e., he’s not even remotely Jewish, much less an actual facts Holocaust survivor, and he is privileged in pretty much every way it is possible for a person in the U.S. to be privileged), and he only really cares about himself and his own ideals — so yeah, no, Conrad. You are nothing like Magneto.

You are the sort of person who Magneto would relish punching in the face, and I would totally support him in that and be all, “You’re doing amazing, sweetie :)” because fuck off, Conrad, you more than deserve this.

But, as I was saying: in Conrad’s mind, his and Seb’s relationship should be like Thor and Loki’s because Loki was the (indirect) reason why Thor learned some humility and learned to be a hero and found a sense of direction in his life, and unlike Stane and Stank (where Conrad would possibly admit that Tony is better off without Obadiah in his life after the first Iron Man movie), the two of them are (to Conrad) stronger when they’re together (……there is a case to be made for that part of the reading, but I think, “debatable at best” is the politest thing I can say about it)

So, once again: Conrad starts with a basis in fact, and then does not saunter vaguely downwards into being wrong so much as he dives right in and yells, “COME ON AND GET ME YOU FUCKING COWARD ASS SHARKS”

—and on the other hand, Seb really doesn’t want to think of any fictional counterparts to his and Conrad’s relationship, because he doesn’t want to think about Conrad at all because he wants Conrad to leave him the Hell alone.

Unfortunately for him, Seb is not going to get what he wants on that count. But at the same time, there are some good things that will come out of this, in the end, so Seb not getting what he wants isn’t exactly a tragedy.

first headcanon that pops into my head: ��Oh, I don’t think I’ve listed his tattoos on here before — though I know for sure that I’ve mentioned his and Margot’s Tigger and Pooh Bear tattoos, and the lower back tattoo that he got while stone cold sober and just didn’t think that there was anything remotely questionable about putting a certain Oscar Wilde quote in that position. Anyway:

The quote in question is, “Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling” (from De Profundis), and as Pete put it, getting that — while knowing that it’s Oscar Wilde who wrote it — on the area whose tattoos are called something misogynistic that rhymes with damp scamp…… “It’s like getting, ‘nympho’ on the ass of your jeans, Princess”

(and that’s about the only thing he could say before just devolving into tickled laughter and begging Margot and Todd to please help Seb get this through his head because this was the funniest thing that had happened all week and Pete couldn’t)

Tigger is on his left bicep

There’s a rosary going down his right wrist and forearm (and strictly speaking, Seb would prefer to have an actual physical rosary because he gets a sense of comfort out of counting off the beads — but if he doesn’t happen to have one of those on-hand, at least he has the one permanently etched on his skin)

He has a chest-piece of his saintly namesake — because his parents named all of their kids after Catholic saints, except for Max, whose name was more for the sake of familial tradition (and even he didn’t completely escape because they gave him Baptiste as a middle name, from John the Baptist), and…

Look, if I name a character, “Sebastian,” then he is going to be gay as fuck and definitely named in honor of one of the unofficial (i.e., “not Vatican-sanctioned but lmao fuck that”) patron saints of the LGBTQ community (at least on a meta-level)

(also, seriously, I’m not linking to evidence of Saint Sebastian being a gay icon — partly because tumblr apparently now flags posts with more than one link as potentially spammy/nsfw or something, and partly because there is just too much stuff for me to pick one thing to link to. Google, “saint sebastian gay” if you don’t believe me.)

This Sebastian just happened to have Catholic parents who totally named him after a third-century martyr without really being aware of just how far the, “oh yeah, some gay people like St. Sebastian a lot, apparently” rabbit hole went

(Abe and Marceline middle-named their wayward youngest after St. Augustine “God, please grant me chastity and self-restraint, but not right now” of Hippo — who apparently shares a birthday with my sister, which is the funniest thing I’ve seen today — but…… well.

Given how Seb’s life has gone thus far, he can’t help but feel like that choice of middle name was sort of prescient.)

—So, yeah. He’s a devout gay Catholic (albeit one who is confusing for many of fellow LGBTQ people and many more fellow Catholics because he doesn’t see any kind of disconnect between these two things, or believe in any of the Church’s teachings about LGBTQ people or about homosexuality, and never even had a phase of wondering if God didn’t love him because he was gay, and actually, if sufficiently motivated, he could throw down a pretty solid scriptural argument for why using God to justify your homophobia is a load of bullshit and Jesus probably isn’t mad at you for doing it, but he sure is disappointed)

—anyway, Seb’s chest piece is from Gustave Moreau’s St. Sebastian and the Angel, which I would link to but tumblr might flag this as spam or something, so I’m gonna not

And on his right bicep, he has part of the crest that his family has just passed down as Their Crest (even though that’s not quite how it works) ever since their one ancestor sold the marquisate and came over from France — anyway, the part that Seb has is the wolf up on its hind legs, holding a thyrsus staff because seriously, his family’s business has been wine since before the term, “family business” even existed and long before any of them spoke English, and of course they had to commemorate that on a crest by dragging Dionysus imagery into things, because grapes or grapevines would have been too obvious and not nearly pretentious enough

If you ask him to do it, Seb can actually rattle off the full, proper heraldic terminology for the wolf and thyrsus, and explain what they mean…… but literally only because his paternal grandfather used to grill him and his siblings on it to make sure that they learned their family history

Grandpa Roland is the grandfather who has spent his retirement keeping up the family’s first property in the New World as a local museum, which would be a lot more admirable if he didn’t do things like whitewash the reality of slavery (and no, Roland, you do not get a pass here just because you don’t act like slavery was some mutually beneficial relationship in which everyone was friends; you are still whitewashing it, and it’s still gross) and keep several of the letters from his ancestor’s older brother who stayed back in France and took part in their Revolution (specifically, the ones that pretty conclusively prove that Severin was all but married to another man) under a pretty tight lock and key

Like, the sort of lock and key where you have to jump through a lot of hoops, fill out a ton of forms in triplicate, and prove that you’re doing ~legitimate~ research if you want a chance in Hell of seeing them

……or you have to be Max, aged 19, and steal your Grandfather’s keys when he’s not paying attention because it’s Christmas, so you can take your 12-year-old brother (who tried to come out to you a few weeks ago, but you were in the middle of finals and brushed him off and now you feel bad about that) over to the family museum

then, take him down to the archives, and go, “Look, see? I mean, Severin didn’t really say he was gay because I guess they just had different terms for it at the time, but… hey, look. The one family ancestor you’ve always looked up to? He was gay, too. There are even a few letters from his husband in the microfiches, if you want to see them” (—which totally made Seb’s Christmas, for all it also kind of got them in trouble with their Grandfather)

I forget how I was going to wrap this up, but…… Roland is a dick, and his grandchildren…… well. They love him, in varying ways and to different degrees? But none of them really like him very much (though, personally, Max would rather Sebastian didn’t do things like snip at Roland over holiday get-togethers about his beefs with the historical revisionism that goes on at the family museum)

favorite line from this character: ……Oh man, that’s hard, but okay, I narrowed it down to (at least out of what’s currently written):

Three short blocks later, a crosswalk stopped them. Glancing sidelong at Conrad, Seb said, “What do you think you’re doing.”

Conrad chuckled. “I could ask you the same question.”

“I’ve been sleeping with an up-and-coming new superhero,” Seb lied, hoping it might put Conrad off of dealing with him. “He really likes me, and now I guess he wants to meet my Mom. I dropped in so we could set it up.”

The stoplight changed, and Conrad nudged Seb’s shoulder. “Clever, as always. But even for you, that sounds horribly farfetched.”

He arched an eyebrow at Conrad and added, “More implausible than you spotting me by alleged accident, and following me like you have absolutely nothing better to do?”

“Perhaps I only wanted to enjoy your company,” Conrad pointed out. “Do I need a reason to spend time with my favorite brother-in-law?”

“Your sister marrying my brother doesn’t make us brothers-in-law any more than me putting your dick in my mouth at their wedding reception makes us friends.” Hearing himself, Seb blenched. He hadn’t meant to say that much. “Seriously. Why were you even in that neighborhood?”

“I had some business opposite Marceline’s building—”

“What, the DEA’s got you staking out the indie bookstore, the used record place, the Starbucks, and the flower shop?”

“I never said that my business this afternoon was for the DEA.”

Seriously, did Conrad need to waggle his thick, corpse-pale eyebrows at Seb like that? Did he need to smirk as if saying that both of them knew exactly what he was implying? It made Seb cringe and feel somewhat relieved that he hadn’t had much for lunch. If Conrad kept up like this, he’d end up on the fast-track to making Seb vomit, and in the event of that, the less he had to throw up, the better.

“As I said,” Conrad went on. “I thought that I saw you head into your Mother’s office. Once my business concluded, I decided to wait and see if I’d been right.”

“Wow, you can identify a recovering junky from across the street,” Seb deadpanned as they rounded a corner onto a relatively empty longer block. “Do you want a trophy?”

Conrad stopped, and called after Seb, “Why do you insist on ignoring me when I tell you that I only wish to enjoy your company, Sebastian?” He waited under an unlit lamppost, in the shadow of a looming office building. When he had Seb’s full attention back, he said, “Does that idea bother you?”

“Yes!” Seb snapped without thinking. “Look, I try to behave around Marie, because I’ve let her down enough already. But I’ve also tried to be unequivocally clear about how much the idea of the two of us spending any extra time together very deeply bothers me.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Advancing on Seb, Conrad said, “I asked if the idea that I might enjoy your company bothers you. One can spend time with someone and not enjoy their company — a fact with which I assume you are well acquainted.”

“With all due respect, please cram your petty semantics up your—”

This is from around the end of the first chapter, and…… uh, ngl, I love it because it’s a glimpse of Seb when he is distinctly not at his best — even less so than usual for the beginning of the story — and there’s a lot going on to set up some of the later plot-points, but even more going on to set it up so he can grow as a character. I also like it because it establishes some of the immediate differences between Seb and Conrad, and sets up their dynamic.

and……

A few months after that, he’d overdosed on purpose, but told Todd that, if anything happened to him, it was definitely an accident. Todd rightfully hadn’t believed him, and he’d told the truth to Pete and Margot. But he’d upheld the story with everyone else, and the party hadn’t been on campus. Come Tuesday morning, Seb made it the first final of his second-to-last semester as if nothing had happened.

“Okay, can you please explain for me,” Pete snapped. “How does factoring your exams into your suicide attempt and planning to take them not sound like you knowing that it wasn’t going to work?”

“I wasn’t planning anything; I was hedging my bets.” Seb said, “I’d already survived one OD, one round of self-induced alcohol poisoning, and getting shot. If that night didn’t pan out, then I didn’t want to tank my classes on top of everything else I was fucked up about. In retrospect, I guess I’m glad that I didn’t die. But if I’d flunked my whole semester because I’d been on a psych hold during finals?”

Pete only arched an eyebrow in his gooseflesh-raising way that almost always meant, “I’m not going to tell you how stupid what you just said is; I’m going to let you feel my silent judgment until you understand that on your own.” After a long moment, he waved a hand, bidding Seb to go on.

“So, the next was when I found out about how much Rémy liked erotic asphyxiation—”

“Ah, yes, and how little he liked consent or respecting his partners’ boundaries.”

Refusing to let Pete dwell on that, Seb went right to, “Number six was not long after he dumped me. It was the OD where had been feeling suicidal for a few weeks, but that night in particular, all that happened was that I couldn’t sleep and made stupid decisions because it felt like nothing was working. Time number seven, I learned Francis hadn’t been joking about being an ecoterrorist, and it was a good news, bad news thing? Good news, he had shitty handcuffs and I knew how to break out of them. Bad news, he shot me while I was getting out of that basement he and his friends put me in.”

“And yet,” Pete said, faux-wistfully, “you allegedly noticed absolutely nothing until you got to the street and that nice, older gentleman with the ponytail and the dog saw that you were bleeding.”

“Adrenaline causes crazy shit, mon cœur.” Or so Seb had kept telling himself. “But the next time after that was…” Trailing off, he pulled back a sleeve. The scar from that suicide attempt gleamed like full moon under the fluorescent lights. “I’m grateful Max interrupted it, but I’m more relieved that everyone believed it was because of some bad drugs. Explaining for you and Margot was hard enough.”

“Strictly speaking, I couldn’t hold it against anyone else for being confused. It’s not every day that someone you love gets all like, ‘I didn’t want to die; I wanted to feel something because I wasn’t sure I was real anymore.’” Pete said it without rancor, or judgment, or any bite at all. His voice was only slightly firmer as he added, “Does Max know you’re grateful that he found you?”

Rolling his sleeve back down, Seb shook his head. “What’s the point in telling him? He wouldn’t believe it. He’d probably use it as an excuse to go, ‘Why won’t you let me dictate the rest of your life for you, then? I’m only trying to help.’”

—Okay, there are a lot of reasons why I like this one, and one of the big ones is that I just love pretty much all of Seb and Pete’s dialogue, and their repartee is one of my most favorite things in the world to write. But I also love it (and the rest of the scene around it) for how totally blasé Seb is while talking about all the times that he has almost died (many of which were self-inflicted).

Like, you know how Mark Hamill deliberately played Luke as kind of annoying in the first Star Wars movie so he would have more to work with and more room to develop the character in case the movie succeeded and became a series? That’s basically where Seb is for the first three chapters, in varying capacities. He’s not at his best, even remotely, and a lot of his problems are being forced into full view, because hopefully (or so says a lot of what I’ve learned and believe about storytelling), that makes it more rewarding when he learns and grows and does better, down the road.

and…

With a sigh, Seb picked him up. He dropped into a seat at his table and set Achilles down next to his napkins and cellphone.

Apparently, that was too much space between them. At least, that’s how Seb took it when Achilles trotted back over to him and sat down by his elbow.… [and] sat there, periodically rubbing his little head against his Person’s arm. Whether he’d been angling for a treat or not, he would’ve gotten one, had they not been on the other side of the kitchen, and had Seb’s phone not erupted into song—

“I don’t wanna know the reasons why love keeps…” it crooned, in the digitized voices of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, lamenting a relationship gone sour.

—Seb froze. Achilles ducked around his arm, toward his chest. All Seb could do was stare at the image of Max that popped up on the screen. It wasn’t recent. Not that Seb ever would have erased it, but about the only reason he hadn’t lost it was that Margot had taught him how to back up his photos. It wasn’t a threatening picture. He’d scored a lucky shot at Marie’s second birthday party, one of the dark-haired, wide-eyed little imp grinning as she shoved a handful of cake into her father’s face. Yet, Max was smiling too, and that was why Seb liked the picture. It was one of the only ones he had in which his big brother didn’t look like he’d swallowed garbage or gotten the world’s sharpest stick jammed up his ass.

As the Fleetwood Mac ringtone died down, Seb breathed easier. True, according to the rules that he had in place. he’d need to either send a text or preferably call Max back, and preferably sooner rather than later. There were worse fates.

One of them, for example, was slouching over and putting your head down, only to get glared at by nine-pound Yorkie who looked like he meant business. Granted, Achilles also tended to look like he meant business right before spooking at the sound of a thunderstorm, getting stuck in cardboard boxes, or scampering underneath Seb’s bed to hide from the big, bad vacuum cleaner. But this time, his stern expression wasn’t abated by getting scratched behind the ears.

When he yapped at Seb, he seemed to say, quite clearly, “Bad human. You know better than to let your brother go to voicemail.”

Which Seb deserved. He couldn’t argue with that point to save his life. “But it’s not as though Uncle Max isn’t used to your Daddy being a massive fuck-up, is it, mon petit?” he cooed, sitting up a bit, in the hopes that Achilles would stop judging him. Or at least judge him less harshly. Scratching the little guy’s back, Seb added on, “Anyway, Max has enough shit to keep him busy. Bet you anything he won’t even notice if I take a while getting back to him.”

As if on cue, Seb’s phone started up again, singing at him how Stevie and Lindsay didn’t want to stand between you and love, honey, but wanted you to feel fine.

Straight at Achilles, Seb admitted, “Okay, I walked right into that one.”

Although it was silly to think Achilles was gloating at him, Seb could’ve sworn that he was. Which was ridiculous to even think about. In the even that the little guy had completely understood what was going on, which seemed doubtful, it wasn’t as though he even knew how to gloat. It also wasn’t as though Achilles had a high-ground from which to do so, considering how many times Seb had ever had to pull him out of a box that he’d charged into headfirst without any kind of exit strategy in mind.

……This is a loser talking to one of his dogs. There’s more going on than that, yeah, but I primarily love it because Seb is a loser who talks to his dogs as though they speak the same language (—and while he won’t get to full-on talk to the animals after the sudden-onset superpowers, he will be able to better approximate communicating with them)

and

“Ooooh, crikey. Here we find a specimen of the mighty Sebastianus flagrándus, an’ he looks like a biggun, too. Now, this breed is known for both their mutually beneficial relationships with lesser beasts, like that little Canis familiaris right thar and for their ability to fall asleep in strange places. Oy, he may not look like much righ’ now, kids—”

“But he’s six-foot-three and can floor a Hell’s Angel in one-on-one, and might not be asleep?”

Seb rolled his eyes before lifting his head and arching an eyebrow across the table at Todd Burroughs. Or, more accurately, at Todd and the video camera he’d mounted on a small tripod in front of him. About halfway between them sat a black plastic box that Seb recognized as the portable digital audio recorder he’d gotten Todd for his birthday, back in January. Fussing with something or other on the camera, Todd said nothing and didn’t look up from the flip-out screen. His mess of loose, dark curls had been tamed back into a short ponytail, save one forelock that he left out to let everybody know how little he wanted them to think he cared.…

Under most circumstances, Todd would’ve distracted Seb from how heavy his shoulders felt and the dry, sticky feeling on the roof of his mouth. Tonight, however, he slouched over, propped himself up on his elbows, and couldn’t find the wherewithal to smile…. Not if Todd was going to play around with his camera instead of talking. Wrinkling his nose, Seb waited in vain for Todd to acknowledge him.

“You should’ve said, ‘flagrāns,’ by the way. If you were trying to call me, ‘flaming’?” Seb gave Todd a moment of silence, then added, “You used the gerundive of flagrō, flagrā́re. Your scientific name for me means, like, ‘Sebastian, who must be incinerated.’ You want the present active participle.”

Todd nodded, but said nothing. Pressing button after button, he frowned, but still said nothing. At the very least, he could’ve told Seb not to correct his grammar in Latin, and yet? He said nothing.

Seb sighed. “Strictly speaking, though, flagrā́re is for when something is literally on fire,” he said, dropping his cheek into his hand. “But there’s no good Latin for what you’re saying, because of the Romans’ cultural ideas about sex and gender? Cinaedus is usually read, ‘he who bottoms,’ but for every time Ganymede gets called, ‘Jupiter’s cinaedus,’ you’ve got five references to womanizing cinaedi. Pathicus always refers to guys who bottom, but can be complicated? Morbōsus technically means, ‘diseased,’ or, ‘pathological,’ but also referred to cinaedi who wanted to get fucked. Because you could be a cinaedus and want to top some other pretty boy into the klínen. You’d still be effeminate, but you wouldn’t get called, ‘sick.’ Galbinatus works for flamboyant effeminacy, but doesn’t have any sexuality-related connotations. Ēnervā́tum is good? It’s a perfect passive participle, so—”

“Hey, Pretty Boy?” Todd kept his eyes on the camera. “Can you sit up straight for me? Without any, ‘How dare you, I can’t do anything straight.’ I just need to get this shot right.”

“Whatever you say, Mister DeMille.”

Words aside, Seb acquiesced and forced a smile, while Todd licked his teeth and furrowed his brow.

……Author appeal time: I love this passage because it was a free excuse for me to break out my seven years of Latin classes and interest in the history of human sexuality, and combine them into one of the things that, in another context, Seb would probably say right after announcing that he is a complete idiot and his parents probably paid his professors at NYU not to fail him (they didn’t), and then Pete would look into the camera like he’s on The Office because yeah, he’s dealt with this for sixteen years, but at the same time, oh my god, Princess, stop it

and (last one, I swear)……

Pete stripped out of his top and his nice jeans, and threw on one of Seb’s old Depeche Mode t-shirts in lieu of pajamas. He lingered by Seb’s closet, scrutinizing his reflection in the full-length mirror until Seb asked if he was okay. Pete shrugged and flicked off the lights on his way to bed. Nestling next to Seb, he went quiet and stared at the ceiling like it owed him answers.

After a few minutes, he asked, “You believe me about my eating disorder, right, Princess?”

Spluttering, Seb blurted out, “What the fuck kind of question is that?”

“An important one, okay?” Although Pete’s face was discernible in the low light, his grim expression was nevertheless inscrutable. “So, do you?”

“Of course I do.” He rolled to face Pete, and something in him shivered, rustled down the fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.

Thankfully, Pete didn’t notice. Seb pushed a stray, still-damp lock off of Pete’s forehead. “Jesus, I know you,” he said. “You’d never make up an eating disorder.”

“What if you didn’t know me?” Pete said, his voice barely above a whisper. “What if you got set up on a blind date with me, and Jimmy happens to be at the restaurant. And he spots me, invites himself over, starts laying into me. He starts talking around shit like, ‘How’s my recovering addict baby brother tonight? Still clean, I hope’ without saying it outright, while his wife stays at their table and waves, ‘Hi’ at me like we’re spotting each other at their kids’ peewee soccer game.”

As he listened to Pete go on, something roused in Seb’s chest. Slowly, at first, like it had to shake off a long sedation. But once it had, it growled, it lurched, it nudged Seb closer to Pete. He thought of trees again, and forests that he’d never seen in person, and running through them, as long as he had Pete with him. Getting away wasn’t worth shit if Pete got left behind. Seb rubbed a hand on Pete’s shoulder and his bicep. He had to make it clear that he was still here for Pete and he wasn’t going anywhere.

The only other idea he had, which he didn’t understand, was a compulsion scratching at the back of his neck, telling him to lick Pete’s face. Maybe if he’d been relapsing, Seb could’ve gotten away with that. It was a weird enough impulse to get chalked up to drugs. But sober, he had no excuse.

“And what if,” Pete said. “What if, when Jimmy finally leaves, you ask what that was about.” He didn’t take his eyes off Seb. Steadily, his voice grew faster, more intense, but not louder. “Pretend you’re some super clean-living weirdo with a Livestrong bracelet, who grilled the poor waitress about what on the menu was or wasn’t gluten-free. So, instead of admitting I’m an addict, I admit I’m a recovering anorexic and tell you my big brother’s a dick. Would you believe me, then? Or would you tell me it’s not funny to joke like that, because everybody knows that guys don’t get eating disorders?”

As much as Seb wished otherwise, hearing this story couched in a hypothetical situation, Pete had put in too many concrete details to be making it up. Worse, Seb could see his lower lip quivering, and he saw how the light glinted off something around Pete’s eyes, like he was tearing up. Asking if that had really happened might’ve made Pete feel like Seb was lying about believing him.

“I’d still believe you,” Seb told him. “Someone tells you something like that, you give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it — I wanted better for you, I wanted you happy — but…” He sighed, fixing Pete’s hair again. “You come home from rehab, tell me the shrinks said you have an eating disorder and you’re terrified? It wasn’t about what I wanted, none of it. All that mattered was what would help you best. That’s why I got serious about kicking the relapse I was on, then, too.”

Silently, Pete ducked his chin. He took a deep, shuddering breath. But before Seb could think of anything to say, Pete lunged into his chest, flinging his arms around Seb’s shoulders and burying his face in Seb’s neck. Reflexively, he hugged Pete around the waist. While he kept taking those deep breaths, rhythmically and trembling like he was trying not to cry, Seb rubbed his back and waited.

“Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Pete’s voice was conspicuously even. He hugged Seb so tightly, it almost hurt, and only pulled back so he could look up at Seb again. When Pete pushed their foreheads together, brushing his thumb down Seb’s cheek, his tears refused to be ignored. They glistened on Pete’s face. Seb couldn’t look away, nor did he want to.

“I want better for you, too, Princess,” he said. “I need you to know that, okay?”

Seb tried to nod, knocking his forehead into Pete’s again, which made Pete snort and made his face burst into a grin. Limply, he swatted Seb’s arm as if trying to discipline him. He huddled in so close that a breath couldn’t have passed between them and pressed his face back into Seb’s neck. Pete’s whole body trembled with laughter, but it didn’t last that long.

“Just wish I knew what to do for you,” he said, loosening his hold on Seb. He nudged Seb onto his back and draped himself across Seb’s chest, nuzzling into his collarbone, the way they always slept when they shared a bed. “Was bad enough, admitting I couldn’t help when you needed rehab. But now? There should be something I can do, right? Isn’t that what, ‘best friend’ even means?”

Squeezing Pete around the shoulders, Seb didn’t know what to say. He managed to mumble some half-baked reassurances, but it wasn’t enough. Like Pete had said, something bigger needed to change.

one way in which I relate to this character: probably a kind of obvious answer, but…… uh. The biggest place where I relate to Seb is that I, too, am a depressed gay loser with a heart full of love and little sense of direction in life

thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character: oh my god where do you want me to start, so many things he does are so cringe-worthy — but probably one of the biggest ones for me is when he just starts verbally digging himself a hole and trying to stop but keeps making things worse (like all of his scenes with Max thus far, and the one where Marie took her dad’s phone and called Seb because Max and Linda were talking in Max’s office and Marie knew it was about her — in a, “Marie is gifted and sensitive, and her parents are trying to do right by her but they are still concerned about what might happen when school gets back in session” sort of way, but Marie is seven so a lot of the nuances there aren’t entirely lost on her? but she still feels like, “oh no, Mom and Dad are talking seriously and sound kind of angry and it’s about me, I must be in trouble” — and Seb just…… hole. he dug one.)

cinnamon roll or problematic fave?: He would like you to think he is a sinnamon roll, he sees himself as a problematic non-fave, and I say that he is a burned cinnamon roll, has literally been to Hell and back, slightly charred

#scisaacs #oc questions #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #seb x stephen #pete x seb #margot & seb #seb x todd #julian x seb #conrad & seb #max & seb #mine: writing #mine: excerpts #ask box tag #memes for ts #oh shit now i have to cw tag #addiction cw// alcohol ref// drugs ref// mental health issues// depression//#suicide attempt ref// (mostly limited to 'seb has tried it before' but there's some discussion)#rape cw// (again mostly limited to 'this thing happened' but there's some discussion as well)#abuse cw// (this is pretty limited to 'this thing happened')#eating disorders ref// (pete has one. it is briefly discussed; mostly in the context of someone being a dick to him about it)#fkgdfhgf i'm sorry if i missed anything i've been writing this for 7 hours whoops #reaction gifs//

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