#bc otherwise we're just stuck with the worst of him who acts kinda younger and it would make layla's choices a bit ???

[yellowocaballero]

Love this new chapter i can't wait to read the epilogue!! *Distant sounds of wailing and glass breaking* (⁠つ⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)⁠つ🌻🌻🌻💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

THANK YOU it's one of those weird chapters where you've been looking forward to writing it the entire story but once you get there you're big ???. Part of the reason the last two chapters had so many rewrites is because I had so much "Layla says X happened, which the reader didn't know about", and I decided that it would be stronger if I went back and just included those things. The deeply unreliable narrators didn't give you much of a signpost for what was really going on (they didn't even remember three days!), so the 'debrief' was necessary.

As a result, I hope the explicit statement of Frenchie's guilt/the resolution of the guilt didn't come out of left field. You get the first few lines of a lot of arguments lol. But that feeling of powerlessness and failure impacts a lot of his behavior this story. Couldn't fix it last time, so he HAS to fix it this time. What do you mean it's unfixable.

Didn't expect this going on, but once I made the final scene include Khonshu then I realized I had to wrap up the Khonshu thread. In a way it's a strong parallel of Marc/Steven's unreliable narrator-ness causing a blindness to the actual problem (Marc didn't realize he was being hypervigilant from fear; Steven didn't realize he was obsessively engaging in escapism to avoid uncomfortable confrontations) - Jake's variant of that is denial, where he uses his unreliable narrator-ness to gloss over the truth of his relationship with Khonshu. Jake's lost a lot of his walls and we see the truth of it now. It's disturbing. It's also unfixed (Jake's still can't leave situation and can't afford to be pushed rn), but many many things in this story are unfixed. Just acknowledged.

And obviously I loved finishing it on the parallelism note of Marc falling in love with Layla and asking her out. Dude's come SO far to come back to the beginning lol. It felt wonderful for his arc with Layla to show Layla becoming a safe and trusted person to him - when Marc's trusted VERY few people. It feels good to see Marc feel safe. But it feels like a promise that things will move forward again, that Marc will get back to where he's meant to be with Layla, and maybe even better. And cuz he's so unrepressed and open and SO socially awkward he's a giant awkward goofball about it lmfao. Meanwhile Steven. lmfao. Thanks for reading!