#before anyone reblogs this stating the elephant in the room I choose to pretend that didn't happen

[wyfy-meltdown]

I think the reason that HIC is my favourite Homestuck villains is because of how understandable and real her motivation is. Of course she's definitely not a sympathetic villain (she's literally space fish hitler) but her reasons for doing what she's doing are understandable.

She wants her species and her people back. She didn't get back to her homeworld in time to save her race and now she's all alone in the universe as the last of her kind. She doesn't WANT to help Lord English (she's actively doing everything she can to go against him) she just wants to turn Earth into the empire she once had. Her desperation to do so is honestly very tragic despite screwing over the entire human race: I still can't help but feel bad for her. And yeah Alternia was a pretty shit society especially under her rulership but wouldn't you try to do the same for humanity if you were the only one left?

This also applies to HIC's dancestor counterpart, Meenah. Even though Meenah fled to the moon to avoid ruling Beforus she still did everything she could to save her friends and give the post-scratch trolls a chance. Hell, she practically begs John not to let her steal the ring because she's enjoying spending eternity with her friends and doesn't want to leave them. She's the one who tries to talk down Aranea, she vocally expresses how she loves Feferi (her dancestor) and feels bad that her royal blood makes her want to kill her.

I really do feel that HIC/Meenah is a lot kinder than people give her credit for.

[wordsablaze]

(2) Nostalgia Makes You Fragile

Stubbornly In Love Magnus and Alec are two beautiful souls that both happen to be in love, heartbroken, and painfully stubborn. An angsty malec fic prompted by this lovely soul! Enjoy!

A/N: So I tend to ramble when writing angst, my apologies! Feel free to point out mistakes and I hope you like it anyway...

Alec Lightwood was not coping.

If he had been coping, he hadn't been coping well. At this point, he'd even given up pretending to be coping. His lack of a healthy coping mechanism was far too obvious, even to those who didn't know him at all.

It's odd how quickly he'd become attached to his warlock - the warlock - and how quickly he'd forgotten how to exist without magic and glitter in his life.

What's worse is that everyone can sense it. Pain, he thinks, is bearable only until it's repeatedly pointed out to you, day after day, like a million little needles pressed into your skin, within plain sight.

He hates being viewed as incomplete, as weakened, as lonely. He wants to shout at the world for assuming he isn't self-sufficient and making him out to be something akin to a symbiote for Magnus. He wants to scream until his voice runs out, he wants to run until his legs can't hold his weight, and he wants to punch people until the skin on his hands peels off.

But he can't.

He yearns to sink under his blankets and stare at the messages he'd received from Magnus but he ends up almost buried under paperwork and files to check over. He wishes he could ignore the world, run to a remote forest, and think about the times he's spent with a certain warlock- or forget them, he doesn't care either way - but he's always drowning in the questions of everyone else walking through the institute. He needs his sense of normality back but, since meeting Magnus, his normal had changed and he can't figure out how to undo everything they'd created, partly because he can't tell which parts of him were unlocked by Magnus and which parts he'd always had.

"Alec?" He hears a voice asks and, strangely but not at all surprisingly, it takes him far too long to recognise it's Izzy.

"Iz, yeah, you okay?"

She chuckles - but it's a sad chuckle - then nods. "I'm good. Raphael was looking for you."

"Why?" Alec asks before promptly shaking his head. "Wait, Never mind. Thanks for telling me."

He shakes his head, trying to physically expel the fog of guilt taking over his intellect, as he walks to where he guesses he could find Raphael. Not wrong in his guess, he greets the vampire without thinking about it and the two of them settle around the circular table, one that he'd totally not modelled around King Arthur's table because he's a nerd, definitely not.

"We have a problem," Raphael states.

Alec nods; he'd been expecting that. "How can I help?"

"We'd had a few clashes with the warlocks-"

He doesn't get to finish his concern because Alec's brain, against his best wishes, decides to stop paying attention. His brain, his stupid, stupid brain, chooses to spiral into nostalgia and he can't think because he can feel the ghost of Magnus' magic in his soul and he can see those beautiful, kaleidoscopic eyes every time he blinks to try and clear his vision - a counter-intuitive habit, really. Somehow, he's at the door before he registers standing up, his feet propelling him anywhere away from the mention of warlocks. He thought he was better than this but, as it turns out, he's not good at suppressing memories that want to float at the front of his mind like hot air balloons powered by helium and gasoline and the agony of caged birds.

Breathing heavily, he shuts his eyes and lets himself sink to his knees, dimly registering that he's in Izzy's room as he cups his pounding head with his sweating hands. He can't open his eyes because he can't bring himself to face the reality of an unsupported reality and he can't move because he can't feel the love he never knew he needed until he lost it.

It doesn't occur to him that the earthquake he can feel is his own body shaking. At least, not until there's a hand on his knees and a soft, quiet voice humming from somewhere near him.

Beats of music fill his ears and he breathes in time to the tune changes, slowly but surely realising he'd barely been breathing and that his body was trying to stop him from shutting down entirely. An age and a half later, he manages to gingerly unclench his fingers and roll his shoulders back, wincing when bones crack and his muscles complain from being so tense for so long. It's even later when he finally blinks and lifts his head up, his gaze flickering between irrelevant objects until it lands on Izzy.

"Welcome back, big brother." Her voice, usually filled with confidence and an attitude to be reckoned with, is gentle, too gentle as if she thinks slightly raising the pitch of her words could shatter him.

"Izzy... I..."

"I know," she whispers, "I know, even if you don't know."

"What don't I know?" Alec asks desperately, his voice a pitiful reminder of his collapsing sense of control.

Izzy's smile is sad as she replies, "If it was my place to tell you that, you wouldn't even know that question exists."

Alec groans and stretches his legs out, wincing once more as his knees protest at the sudden movement. He rakes a hand through his hair, sighing when it falls back on his forehead before wiping his eyes for the sake of trying to hide his confused pain. He knows it won't work but he has to convince his heart that he's okay if he wants to try and function like any other person. Unfortunately, it turns out the heart is incredibly difficult and almost impossible to persuade.

"What were you humming?" Alec asks instead of addressing the elephant in the room.

"I don't know, something Simon was showing me while we waited for Raphael."

"You waited on a vampire?"

His inquiry is met with a frown. "No, we waited for a vampire. We waited for the head of the clan because rushing him meant making him wait for you."

Alec sighs in defeat. He feels the tears in his eyes and the horrible sparks of emotion rising in his nose that tell him he's about to cry. Shutting his eyes is a pointless decision but he chooses to make it anyway, squeezing his eyes shut so hard he can feel the tension in his temples. Izzy sucks in a breath as he starts to shudder but she knows better than to falsely convince him everything's alright so she quietly leaves, leaving Alec alone with his angry regret. His sobs are inaudible but they're the only thing he can hear, the rest of the world fading away as if it had never existed in the first place - as if he'd lost his world the moment he'd chosen to extend their trust outside their comfort zones, outside everything they'd agreed on.

Now his muscles are complaining for a different reason. They're complaining because holding in sobs that want to roar and echo throughout the world is not without consequence and Alec has chosen to take on every consequence as an alternative to the agony of unwanted nostalgia. He can't think beyond the dull throbbing in his head and the way his hands are shaking too violently for him to wipe his incessant tears.

He hates this.

There's nothing he despises more than to be helpless in the power of himself. He'd grown up believing that nobody could ever order him to do anything unless his heart was in agreement but now when he can't feel the strength of his heart and his worst enemy is his own mind, there's nobody to turn to for help. There's nobody who knows him better than he knows himself, as the much-loved saying goes, but who is he meant to ask when he doesn't know if he knows himself anymore?

It's a completely new feeling for him to feel lost in his own skin. 

His mind is a maze and he can't find the entry, never mind figure out how to navigate his way through. He's an open book but he's written in a language that belongs not to intellect, knowledge, and scholars, but to emotion and the parts of the heart nobody can decipher. His problem is a badly hidden secret but he can't bring himself to look at the clues and piece everything together so he can figure it all out. It should be obvious but, as much as Magnus drew strength from him, he'd drawn strength from Magnus and, without it, he's falling, falling into a mess.

The last thing anyone would normally call him is fragile but, right now, sat on his sister's floor with his knees pulled up and tears slipping out of his tired eyes, he can't help but admit the perfect summary of his current state is exactly that: fragile.

like/reblog but don’t repost, thanks!