#but also saw how deeply compassionate she can be even if she gets hurt for it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sepublic · 2 months ago

Text

Overlord the Dark Wyvern is the ultimate empath; She’s made of the same stuff that all minds and emotions are, called Dark/Yin energy. That makes her naturally attuned to everyone else’s feelings, and she can’t turn it off. As a result, she’s susceptible to not the good feelings, but the bad ones… Pain, sorrow, hatred, etc.

And it’s utter agony for her, the presence of the good will always be drowned out by the presence of even one speck of the pain; Overlord fixates deeply on these negative feelings, and it’s difficult to just ignore the way anger and self-loathing are addictive, it’s how psychology works, it’s why ragebait garners more views.

The darkness completely sours and overtake Overlord’s attention, and she grows to see the worst in people. It doesn’t help that she has a strong sense of morality, which isn’t necessarily the same as being moral, either; It just means Overlord subscribes strictly to a set of rules, and takes any violation of them severely, wanting to see any ‘resolution’ all the way through. And boy can she feel more knee-jerk indignant, and immediately assume those feelings as correct, than she should.

Combine this with the fact that all three Tao Wyverns have god complexes ranging from low-key to high-key; Being born as direct children of the Great Entity, and their most powerful ones, representing the three energies that make up the universe, will do that to you. There’s this sense that they all have an innate responsibility/authority due to their lineage and vast power.

So while Titan insists on being as passive as possible, not intervening in mortal affairs unless the larger existence of all mortals is threatened, Overlord has decided that the mortals need a ruler. A savior, a leader to guide them into a proper age. This isn’t just her having greater pride, it’s also motivated by the fact that she’s constantly prone to the suffering of mortals; Ignoring it isn’t working, so the only solution is to remove suffering through her own hands, rather than waiting for unreliable mortals to figure it out for her.

This might seem more compassionate at first glance, but to be honest… Overlord’s ‘plan’ to make people get along, to eliminate or at least minimize suffering, has ethical issues. The way she sees it, the overwhelming majority of suffering comes from the shortcomings of others; People aren’t able to pick up on others’ suffering, they don’t address them, they do things that hurt people without caring. People simply don’t care enough, is what Overlord has decided.

How do you make them care? Give them a reason to care, because mortals are inherently selfish; There is no such thing as truly unconditional love, everyone devotes themselves to others because seeing others thrive makes them happy. It all comes back to one’s own happiness, doesn’t it? And it’s hard to be happy if you’re miserable…

Overlord didn’t immediately go through with her plan, she observed and experimented for centuries. She saw how mortals were frighteningly dull in their senses; They could not hear or feel what others felt, which made it easy to disregard them as separate entities, when the truth was what they were all the same, coming from the same being and comprising that same Great Entity. But many could be compelled to feel compassion, or change their actions, upon feeling empathy; Upon realizing the true scope of what they’d done, upon understanding what it was like to be on the other end of cruelty, and not being able to live with propagating that cruelty.

The ultimate nature of compassion proved too elusive for Overlord, or anyone really, to truly comprehend; To keep things simple, it seemed the most reliable and easiest method was to just make people empathize. Empathy was a way to establish consequences; Children are naturally low in empathy, but when they understand consequences, especially in regards to things they feel attachment towards, then they learn and appreciate morality. The mortals are all children, with their pitiful lifespans compared to Overlord’s.

How do you get them to understand? To feel? Overlord meditated; The Great Entity’s three energies were still largely concentrated in the three ‘realms’ of this universe, and their Yin became the Dream Aether. It embodied not just the collective dreams of all, but the Great Entity’s dreams, and their knowledge was hidden deep below… Due to her nature, Overlord was the best out of all her siblings at connecting to this vast well of knowledge to glean inspiration in the mind of god.

That’s when she knew her answer; Each Tao Wyvern had blood, blood they could use to imbue their own essence and properties into other beings. Overlord’s was Dark Matter, and she would infect all mortals with it. They would partake in her natural empathy, a collective hivemind; Except not for thoughts, but for emotions, for feelings. If one felt grief, all would feel grief. If one felt rage, all would feel rage. And the only way to end that agony was to resolve it.

Overlord predicted that the mortals’ first instinct would just be to silence the source of their agony entirely, but that’s where she stepped in to dictate and lead them, to threaten them into doing otherwise; They would work out their differences. And as she reasoned, even without Overlord’s guidance, the mortals would inevitably realize the problem with just snuffing out an individual source of suffering; Because that would create a butterfly effect, as those who cared for that person would also suffer. That would create even more suffering, as would the feelings the source would have over being murdered; So the inevitable choice would be to address the source’s suffering in a healthy manner that avoided their death.

It was not a perfect system, Overlord knew; Animals still needed to die, and animals were often too stupid to listen. And she admittedly felt some moral reluctance on making others suffer… But it was the best solution she could come up with, she rationalized it was for the Greater Good, and would minimize the agony she had to deal with; Maybe then she could finally find peace…Was it secretly okay with Overlord to want things for herself and others, or did she feel shame in these impure intentions and insist there was no other motive? Thus deluding her to her own issues?

Now, it did occur to Overlord, an ultimate solution; Wiping out all mortals, ending their entire existence, snuffing out all feelings and emotions and especially suffering. That might displease Titan and Preeminent…

(Either, each Wyvern has all three energies, but is just so dominated by one… Or they only consist of that one energy. The latter option might make her siblings the only beings in the universe that Overlord could feel at peace around, but it also meant she was naturally doomed to miscommunicate with them, just as mortals were with each other; Not so different after all, were they?)

But Overlord felt an obligation to the Great Entity, to cultivate their generations, to be a dutiful child. She would not go that far, and maybe she feared being forever haunted by the collective agony of every mortal upon their demise anyway. Likewise, she felt morally obligated to let mortals live, because these other priorities were an extension of Overlord’s rigid sense of morality.

Titan obviously objected to Overlord’s plan; This was too far, this was messing with the very nature of the mortals, and unbalancing them! Overlord accused Titan of having it easy, her sister could afford to ignore the suffering of mortals; She was able to ignore it at all! It did not come so easy to Overlord, every mortal’s pain, was HER pain, if a mortal bled, so did she. Overlord was the only one who understood the mortals, far more than her other siblings; They were selfish and closed-off, she decided.

Overlord came to conflict with Titan, who had the help of two mortals; One of them was able to act as a host, amplifying Titan’s power to tip the balance in her favor. Overlord was defeated, but simply destroying her would not work out; She was intertwined with the Great Entity, an immortal being. And one death had already proven to Overlord that she could still feel as she waited to eventually reform… So destroying herself routinely was no option for her peace of mind.

Instead, she was trapped, sealed away; It felt no different to Overlord than being temporarily destroyed, except after destruction, she could reform to change the world around her. Sealed away, Overlord could do nothing; All she could do was hope someone else would release her, but with Titan and her mortal champion burying that knowledge, she was doomed.

Did Overlord feel Titan’s grief at having to do this to her sister, to spare the mortals and the greater wellbeing of everyone else? Did it just add to her own misery, enrage her; How dare her sister add to her already unimaginable agony?! Overlord was left no choice but to seethe and simmer in pain for millennia, building even greater resentment towards the mortals, and becoming all the more convinced and stubborn of her cause. She would eventually be freed by a child of Titan’s champion, as well as a delusional mortal with a similar desire for control named Charren…

Overlord’s character is a tragic one, in many ways; She didn’t ask to be made like this. Her existence is one so particular and unique, as an empath with no control over her receptiveness to others’ feelings. It’s the curse of her nature, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out…

Except, maybe there is; Titan felt grief for her sister, and actually meditated on, and considered, a way to separate a Tao Wyvern from most of their power, reducing them to a shadow of their former self; Existing on the same scale as mere mortals, even if still immortal themselves. She hoped finding a way to split Overlord from her own Dark energy could make her far less receptive, maybe even immune like mortals are, to the Dark energy of others.

But this would reduce Overlord to a mere nobody, it would deprive her of the sacred duty she felt towards the Great Entity; It was still her task to oversee the universe, and losing so much agency and control that came with that power was unimaginable to her. Overlord still felt pride, and maybe Titan DID bring up the option to her beforehand; Maybe Overlord turned it down. Maybe she did trap herself in this dilemma, because she’d have been given an out.

Overlord is kind of a commentary, I suppose, on empathy; Namely deconstructing the idea that empathy necessarily makes you a good person, because there are plenty of people with low empathy who can be kind. And there are many with high empathy, whose reaction to feeling others’ suffering is to only be angry at them for being exposed to it. There are many people who feel empathy for others, they just choose not to feel it for others; Like it’s something they can turn on and off at will, which I’m sure Overlord would be jealous of.

Overlord is those high-empathy people, the ones I’ve mentioned who feel enraged at being made to partake in the suffering of others. Maybe she did feel some compassion, at some point; But as someone, probably Trexdis, angrily calls out; She doesn’t actually care about others for their sake, Overlord just cares about her own peace and quiet. And that does raise the question, of whether caring for others and yourself are necessarily mutually exclusive, if they can go hand in hand together and don’t have to be separate…

And yet, Overlord’s plan is juxtaposed with the intentions of the protagonists of the GEverse’s third arc; I want to explore the idea of people who have suffered themselves, but then choose to be kinder, so as to spare others that pain. They’d rather not have others suffer like they do, just to be understood; Pain is not good, it just tears down. A better world comes in minimizing that. There’s a difference between not wanting people to go through the same things you did, and not communicating to them how much it’s sucked, either; You’re still allowed to bring up your own issues to call people out, get them to stop.

One of the protagonists for this arc is Sally the Slicer, a former serial killer who is devoid of empathy; Yet she’s able to care. She found a way to, on some level she became dissatisfied with her current existence, recognized it was going nowhere, and wanted something more meaningful. And by befriending others, she’s begun to adopt their morals for their own sake, because she cares about them; Even if in the end, Sally feels nothing if she murders a child. But that doesn’t mean she can’t understand that it’s wrong and should be avoided.

Sally can’t feel; Not just emotions, but she also can’t feel most physical sensations. Her sense of touch is mostly numb, and this is due to evil experiments by a group later revealed to have been founded by Preeminent, of all people; Haha, what a way for one sibling to mess with the other, so indirectly but inevitably! But yeah, Sally is a being cursed with numbness, and she was reprogrammed to find only delight in murdering, that’s why she was a serial killer at all.

So it kind of is a sacrifice on her part not to indulge in that as much; And I say as much, because Sally still believes that sometimes, you gotta kill some people. She considers herself a moral pragmatist, and after having an existential crisis over being only good for destruction and tearing down, she opted to repurpose that into something productive because destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin. This helps goes with the Yin-Yang symbolism with this arc.

Again, that’s why Sally began allying with others, to help them and feel constructive as a way to assuage her emptiness. One could say she only did it to add to her satisfaction from killing, knowing it was doing something; Except she also toned down the killing a lot, only doing it as necessary per her first friend Talikal’s instructions. Talikal’s a big douche, more on him later, but he’s still got some morals, and is also being practical regarding his goals; Sally’s moral pragmatism was influenced by him.

The third arc is discussing the idea of… What is Good and Evil? How do we define it? How do we define morals? What makes someone Good, what makes someone Evil? Is it dis/regard for others? Does goodness come from empathy, is compassion rooted in empathy and nothing without it? Or do people like Sally put a hole in that theory? What is justice, should it be punitive, or restorative? Is it harm reduction we’re going for, and that’s why someone like Sally is allowed to go free and become better?

Yin-Yang’s aesthetics make it easy to sort into the binaries of Good and Evil, but that’s a Western misunderstanding; Its binaries are morally neutral. So there’s potential in deconstructing Good and Evil within Yin and Yang, because Overlord has high empathy but isn’t really a ‘good’ person, in layman’s terms… Titan elects for total passivity, but is that necessarily right? After all, should we not feel obligated to do something about the world around us, as Overlord does?

Anyhow, the ethical problem with Overlord’s plan is that she thinks increasing the suffering in this world, making everyone share it, will necessarily be a good thing in the long run; But sometimes, trauma doesn’t make you better or stronger, it just breaks you down. People can find ways to be better, or encourage others to be, without making them suffer, just understand. Maybe that’s the real solution; Understanding. But how can you make people understand?! That’s why Overlord opts for making all of society into one collective empath, plus that solution is easier and more accessible with her own abilities and nature.

If we define things by the Greater Good, then does that mean Overlord’s suffering is a Necessary Evil, a sacrifice? Or is it just a sacrifice for the comfort of everyone else? Some believe that if even one suffers, then the rest do, on a more abstract level; How can you turn your eye away from that? I like to imagine an exchange between Overlord and Trexdis, who claims that Trex and everyone else is using her as their martyr, their sacrificial lamb, in exchange for their own convenience; Because they will not partake in Overlord’s suffering for the greater good.

Trexdis, who can be quite blunt when she puts her mind to things, asks So what? Aren’t mortals your priority, Overlord? Or are you angry that we might matter more than you, who is allegedly of greater authority because you said so? Because yeah, this arc also questions the inherent authority of the Tao Wyverns, if it really truly matters that they were born directly from the Great Entity and are stronger than everyone else, etc.

The Wyverns aren’t Gods, which is also part of Lloyd’s arc and how they grapple with feel obligated to a greater destiny as Titan’s new champion; Not unlike Overlord… Except Trexdis calls that out as bullshit, Lloyd is just a kid, and she’s not going to let Titan groom this child like Arkley already did. But shouldn’t the Greater Good be prioritized over one child’s life? What’s different between Lloyd and Overlord? Are they sacrificial lambs, meant to bear all of the world’s agony for them like Jesus, whether they actually want to or not?

But maybe there’s always been another way; Which for Overlord, could just be eradicating everyone… Or it could just involve letting go of her pride and control, because a lot of her obsession with sticking to her power is because just the thought of these unresolved injustices bothers her; She can’t let it go like she does the anger she feels. I think Overlord does care on some level, but that care has warped into a self-destructive need for control. And she can’t have that without power.

There’s lot of stuff about feeling, emotional and physical, and how they can be tied together; Body and Mind are intertwined, Yin and Yang, and fittingly the Mind is Yin, and the Body is Yang, which is Titan’s domain. That plays into the Techna League wanting to put everyone’s brains into machines for their good, deciding a loss of feeling is a necessary evil, and also wanting to do away with that necessary evil by figuring out how to perfect the interface; Thereby making their solution morally perfect! The numbness of Technas parallels Sally’s…

And then we have the Ensemble, who is a reverse Techna, a computer brain within an organic shell, and a hive mind at that, hearkening to Overlord’s plans. They’re a hedonist, they love the physical pleasure that comes from their organic bodies, and it creates a juxtaposition with Sally; Yin and Yang. They’re also a mercenary who cares mostly for themselves, so there’s potential in the whole ‘Selfish/Selfless’ motives, how the Ensemble isn’t necessarily bad. What are Moral Obligations? I think those definitely exist because on some level, we gotta cut out the overthinking and adhere to common sense.

But yeah, that’s Overlord the Dark Wyvern; Her personality and motives, her issues, what she represents, etc. She’s a deeply frustrated, stressed-out, and seething entity; Maybe she isn’t just making everyone feel each other’s pain for the greater good, maybe there’s some genuine spite and resentment towards the world, and so she wants them to feel her anger, and take it out on everyone else; Make them suffer as she did, make them suffer period. That hearkens back to the Retributive VS Restorative justice thing, because it seems Overlord may also believe in punishment as a part of morality…?

She is NOT happy when Wayvren and Charren release her; She’s just less agonized, that’s all she really is. Never quite happy, and at some point I think she’s chosen to ignore happiness to just fixate on her frustrations, because there’s something addicting about that, it feels cathartic and good in a way that makes no damn sense. It’s like self-harm, and in the end it leads Overlord to harm a lot of other people; It’s like how she believes that if one suffers, all suffer. Is this appropriate or ironic? For a Literature major like Trexdis, it’s just confusing.

Overlord can’t read thoughts, not exactly; Her main domain is on emotions, intent, feelings. She can feel the deepest, darkest secrets within one’s heart, and it provokes a moral outrage and disgust in her, which is the reason why she can’t just let go of her power to be at peace; It’s her own sense of justice that compels her to keep it, to ‘fix’ people.

Again, the Good/Evil dichotomy, because if you have Bad feelings and thoughts, but keep them in control like Sally the Slicer and her love of murder does… Does it really matter? As long as you do no harm, it might make no difference on whether you’re a Good or Bad person… But it CAN mean something regarding your own personal suffering, if it’s difficult to handle these feelings and keep them in check, if you’re disturbed by your thoughts. And that can be grounds for people to understand and support you, without having to participate in those same feelings.

Not only is Overlord desperately trying to keep her peace and quiet, but she’s also a deeply righteous being who believes that intrusive thoughts make you evil and prove it. That moral code is why she can’t just kill everyone because she believes in Good and Evil, or her definition of it which shares some very basic tenets with the common understanding. But that righteous crusader vibe is juxtaposed with her looking conventionally ‘evil’ and ‘dark’ compared to Titan.

And ironically, it’s that obsession with defining morality, and being far too strict with it, that makes Overlord so destructive; Especially compared to Titan’s passivity, with Sally’s moral pragmatism, because Overlord believes in the principle of things, in Purity, because she sees emotions and feelings and they’re a lot harder to ignore when it comes to deciding Good and Evil. Conversely, characters like Sally can’t, Sally can’t even empathize…

So again; Are the protagonists just lucky, and Overlord unlucky? Do they have any right to judge? Do they need to have personally gone through the same to condemn, because again, do we really want people to feel and experience exactly as we have?

Are feelings necessarily good; Overlord’s knee jerk ‘moral’ reactions make her assume she’s right, but not always. Meanwhile Sally doesn’t feel anything, and is a moral pragmatist. Are feelings necessary to be happy, or can they be more pain than they’re worth? How would the Ensemble feel, would this be what Charren needs to hear to justify her violation of others’ bodies?

Is compassion a feeling, or is just pragmatic logic; Is logic really so objective, or is there a base subjective goal of builds itself around? Hence Overlord representing the Mind, which isn’t necessarily Emotions. Hence her being able to access calculations within the Great Entity, while an AI like the Ensemble has a very personal, feelings goal that their logic revolves around.

And in essence, the paradox of Overlord is that she’s a rigidly righteous crusader, and those feelings are at odds with… SO many feelings she wants to be rid of; She wants to care for herself. She wants to care about others, but is that righteousness just selfish and coming from a sense of pride and control? Being pulled in two directions cancels out, Overlord can only stay in one place, she can’t go anywhere; She is trapped, hence her agonizing dilemma.

She believes in her authority, both moral and in general. She’s disgusted at evil and seeks to eradicate it, especially because of how it leads to suffering, and she is disturbed by both cruel thoughts and actual suffering. And if she just killed everyone, the silence would only be replaced by her own guilt over her hypocrisy; She’s not heartless, but it’s hard to tell where the line is between her compassion and selfishness, and it’s possibly a very thin one.

In the end, I wonder if maybe her indignation towards cruelty and the suffering it causes may have been sparked by seeing mortals she cared for also get hurt; Overlord was made to feel their pain, she saw the direct connection between injustice and suffering, and ill intentions. It awakened her eyes, more than they’d already been, and what had once been something she could overlook, was now something Overlord had to obsess over and could not just let go of. Moral indignation fuels the resentment Overlord feels over her own suffering, inherent or related to those she cared about.

There were other options; Just letting go, focusing on the good, resolving the bad as much as you have to and moving on. Letting go of that power entirely, letting go of that obligation that is making you both miserable, and a tyrant in trying to fulfill it. Maybe Overlord should look into Buddhism, we’ve already discussed Daoism (Maybe Western conceptions of Good and Evil are the problem haha, hence why it doesn't fit within Yin and Yang and leads to Overlord's mandess).

In the meantime, maybe our protagonists are just gonna have to make Overlord let go, because this cycle can’t keep going, and there’s no real difference between destroying Overlord and waiting for her to reform, or sealing her away knowing eventually, she’ll get out. It could be right away, too; Destroying Overlord guarantees a consistent temporality, trapping her means it’s very flexible which could be in their favor or not.

#Overlord the Dark Wyvern #Sally the Slicer #The Ensemble #Titan the Golden Wyvern #Tao Wyverns #OC #OCs #My OCs #GEverse

0 notes

famousaft3rdeath · 7 months ago

Text

this is bad. this is really bad.

i wish i could control this heart of mine. it pulls me in every direction without considering consequences. it feels so truly and deeply about everything one can imagine. the obvious things, obviously, but also the subtle things. the light coming through the window shades in just the right way to project little shapes on the floor. the peaceful stillness of a living space that, although shared, although dirty, although terrible, is mine. the rumbling of a past aching to be forgotten, yet quiet hope for the future. looking outside my door and being greeted with swaths of green.

my heart always looks for new things to love. it tends to find that love in places it shouldn't. it trusts too easily. it loves too fully. it gives itself up to men who ignore it. it doesn't forget, though. that's the worst part. i can forgive, but i can never forget.

maybe that's why i am where i am. my heart, no matter how much my mind wants to, just can't forget. it still has imprints from every wound i've gotten, every betrayal, every hurt. and he has left a large one. my brain tells me i'm okay and that he promised not to hurt me anymore, but my heart is still reeling from the blow. my heart, although it looks for things to fall in love with every day, cannot stay in love with him. he does little things that make me reconsider sometimes. but most of the time it's all the same. i humor him. i laugh at his jokes, i don't talk too much, i listen to his rants and rambles. but my heart isn't there. my heart is off searching for another little thing to love, and is completely unattached to him.

my heart, however, has gone too far. it has found a huge thing to love. i don't blame it. it just needs to feel wanted and safe. what better way to find that than with someone just like him, except different? the closeness he and i have has started to fade. i feel as though we're growing in opposite directions. but the other man and i are growing rapidly together. he knows how to dance. he's tall and handsome. he's got this voice that can make kings kneel and seas rise. he seems to care. maybe that's what i crave most of all. ever since he slept with her, i haven't been convinced that he truly cares. if he betrayed me once, he'll betray me again. but the other man. the other man is different. at least, that's what my heart wants to believe. my mind is more wary of him. he's had a lot of trouble follow him. he's dangerous. but he's kind-hearted and compassionate. and he hasn't hurt me. my heart pulls on its reigns for him. i'm drawn to him in a way that i can't quite describe. but it's strong. simultaneously i grow away from the man i have spent the last year and a half building a life with. he thinks we're going to get married. i feel terrible crushing that for him: i don't honestly know if he would recover. he has so much life in front of him, though. he would eventually get over it, i hope. i would feel responsible for his mental state afterward. i don't want that. part of me wants to avoid breaking his heart just to avoid being responsible for his actions.

i know its the trauma talking. it's everything that's happened with my friends who have died. but once you go through that, you are changed forever. i saw a photo of myself recently from two weeks before she died, and i did not recognize myself. i looked so young. part of the reason is because i was quite young. but there's another layer to it, i think. a lot of the worst things that have ever happened to me happened after that photo. turning sixteen was the worst decision i've ever made, and it wasn't even my choice to begin with. that's the thing with time. it keeps going, whether or not it's convenient.

i've been thinking about them both a lot recently. i miss them more than i can say. it feels almost disingenuous, though. like if they were still alive, i wouldn't be thinking about them as much as i do. it's almost embarrassing to admit how much i still grieve for them. if the roles were reversed, i don't know that they would grieve for me. it's a strange feeling, almost like survivor's guilt. maybe a bit of jealousy. they don't have to endure any of this any longer.

i still don't know if he actually died by suicide. i think it was, knowing what i know about him and his death. but i don't know much. there's very little record of his death online. most of the time you can at least find an obituary. but not with him. just an article behind a paywall. there will always be so much uncertainty regarding him. i hate it. i wish i could know what his last moments were like. how he died. what caused it. what the tipping point was. but i will never know, because he's not here to tell me.

its a depressing thing to have to accept after someone dies. you'll never know all the details. no matter how close you are to the person, you'll never know all the details.

their deaths are still so deeply intwined in my life, in why i am the way that i am. i don't know if that's normal. then again, it isn't normal to have lost two friends at nineteen. i try to give myself grace with it, but it's hard. there's always something in the back of my mind that tells me i'm feeling wrong about everything. and maybe i am. but that doesn't change that i still do feel. i feel everything, all the time, and it's exhausting. i can't lose anyone else. i just can't.

0 notes

shrimpmandan · 2 years ago

Text

I’m getting to a point where I genuinely do not trust people who blindly defend Steven Universe Future’s portrayal of mental health, particularly PTSD, barring the fact that a person I knew who did so ended up being a raging ableist about PTSD triggers.

Outside of SU:F itself, a lot of the characters in the show with PTSD were just... raging assholes for no reason? And I think the only time they did this right was with Pearl. Pearl was deeply insecure, traumatized, and angry, and she ended up taking it out on Amethyst throughout season 1. For starters, the buildup to her and Amethyst actually fighting isn’t sprung about in a single episode (cough cough Lapis and Peridot, but I’ll get to them later), and Pearl actually apologizes! She comforts Amethyst and apologizes for hurting her, and begins to treat her better, and I really like that. It portrays how PTSD may induce behavioral issues without excusing those behavioral issues or refusing to acknowledge them.

And then the crewniverse completely fucking forgot this by season 2.

I love most of seasons 1-3 of SU but good god they did not handle Lapis well in season 2, at all. Lapis is similar to Pearl in some ways -- insecure, angry. Except Lapis doesn’t have anything where she apologizes and tries to do better. She just saves Peridot for a reason that... isn’t really explained. We don’t see her have some sort of realization about how Peridot is really trying and that maybe she should be a little nicer or something like that, she just. Does. And then they act like best buds after that. I think they end up having a cute dynamic and all, but the set up to it is extremely confusing and half-baked. You can’t even make the “oh it had to be rushed” argument like for season 5 and Future either, this was season 2.

You could make the argument that Lapis didn’t trust Peridot because of her time spent on the ship, which would be fair... if we actually saw how Peridot treated Lapis. Peridot was not the one threatening and manipulating Lapis. Jasper was. Alllll throughout Barn Mates, Peridot was doing nothing but trying to make Lapis feel welcome, and Lapis responded with nothing but scorn beyond a level that was reasonable. And Peridot gets no apology or explanation for this whatsoever.

Additionally, when it’s revealed that Lapis was also abusive/toxic in the Malachite fusion, there’s this very, very heavy bias towards her that doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not saying Jasper WASN’T abusive, she was, but it feels like Jasper wasn’t even given a chance to get better or to have possible healthier relationships expanded upon. Was it because she’s more butch than Lapis..? I dunno. It really doesn’t sit right with me, but I’ll avoid rambling about it for too long. TL;DR, Lapis just kinda did what Pearl did but worse. Moving on.

Steven. Good fucking christ on a pike Steven. Where to begin. I’m gonna preface this by saying that I have PTSD, and violent ideations, and anger issues, and all that. On some fronts, I can understand and relate to Steven. What I hate is how he was written. You seriously expect me to believe that the staunch pacifist and diplomat, would attempt to murder his father, White Diamond, and Jasper? The same Steven that tried to talk things out with genocidal dictators? THAT Steven? If the only reason you have is “oh he’s traumatized”, then that’s a fucking disgusting and ableist sentiment that is derived solely from mental health stigma. I GET having homicidal ideations. I GET having low impulse control. But when you set up a character as being nothing but compassionate and diplomatic throughout an entire 5 seasons and a movie, and then you suddenly have him become a murderer because “oh he’s mentally ill now”, you can see why that might rub some people the wrong way! People don’t just become murderers due to mental illness! It’s usually a combination of factors, such as environment and personality and social influence. If you think being mentally ill makes someone automatically become violent and dangerous, you are actively contributing to negative stigma about mental health. And the fact that Steven’s actual recovery is skipped over like it isn’t important is not helping.

Look, I know the show had to be rushed towards the end due to CN cancelling it, but there’s quite a line between “we couldn’t tie up all the loose ends”, and “let’s make our pacifistic protag out to be a literal fucking monster just because he’s mentally ill now!”

I know hating on SU is/was this ~edgy thing~ or whatever, but I genuinely loved the show throughout its main run even with all the writing flaws. But this awful portrayal of mental illness just makes me feel genuinely upset, especially with the amount of people defending it or otherwise acting like there’s absolutely no issues with how the show handles mental health at all.

#personal #steven universe critical #steven universe #steven universe future #side note unrelated to the PTSD:#they infantilized the fuck out of Peridot which is really gross when she's implied to be autistic #like she just gets reduced to haha funny comedy and her intelligence becomes nothing but a gimmick #it really upsets me because I related to her a lot and seeing her be flanderized and infantilized is just. mmm

80 notes · View notes

tobe-sogolden · 2 years ago

Note

I just want to share my personal experience as a reformed hater of this relationship 😂 Okay so when the wedding pictures came out, I had stopped being a larrie about 3 months before? I still kind of believed some parts of it, but I made the choice to step back because I realised it wasn’t healthy or normal to be so invested in H & L being together, always worrying about it, etc (lol). I was still friends with and followed larries. So of course it was kind of a shock to see Harry holding hands with Olivia 😭 I felt upset and jealous, and for the next couple of months I bitched with a friend privately every time we got new pictures. Now, she’s been in the fandom a lot longer than I have and so I felt valid in my reactions. But also deep down I didn’t want to be like that. Whenever she said something misogynistic about Olivia’s age or her having kids, or went as far as to make fun of Harry for cuddling with her in a shop, I felt disgusted and angry. But I didn’t call her out on it. I wanted them to break up too, oh but I didn’t want him to be sad. We both said the most stupid stuff like “he can do better” while being aware he can decide that himself. Anyway the thing is, I didn’t have an issue with Olivia specifically. I actually liked her and thought she seemed like a cool person. It was 100% about realising that I had no say in Harry’s life and never would. My friend used to make excuses about how it wasn’t even Olivia that annoyed her, it was the fandom’s reaction to finding them cute. Which??? Bullshit lmao. She always has said that “gf stans” and people who discuss things on their blog are just as harmful as haters. No they’re not. There are people out there who stalk and contact neighbours and invade privacy in order to prove Harry/Olivia and this isn’t something I think anyone who cares about them agrees with. That IS harmful behaviour. But those who simply are positive about her and call out others? There’s nothing wrong with that but obviously to her, god forbid anyone actually goes against the nastiness. She even said it was better when he was dating Camille because we hardly saw her and everyone hated her. Isn’t that lovely? It was surprisingly easy once I made the choice to accept that my feelings came from my own issues and I needed to work on that. This all came down to being a larrie and/or being dangerously attached to Harry to the point that seeing someone else close to him hurt me deeply, the realisation that I had no control over it and wasn’t part of it. This hurt manifests in being nasty and sexist to his new gf, and bitter and miserable about him at times as well. Now his friends that he’s had for years? They’re fine because they’re not as “intimate” with Harry, they’re not a threat, they don’t reflect us (those who identify as women) so there’s no jealousy. You don’t need to want Harry romantically or sexually for you to feel this!!! It’s about not being close to him and Olivia ruining projections you’re free to have when he’s by himself. I just wanted to say all this because those who are still horrible, like my ex friend, actively choose to be. Despite claiming to love Harry and that they don’t care about his girlfriend. They have a lot of internalised shit to work through. If you actually care to do it everything is so much nicer. I actually feel like I’m being true to myself (because I’m naturally a sensitive and compassionate person) as opposed to this nasty jealous obsessive fan. I get happy seeing Harry happy. I love Olivia!! I’m so glad I got past it a year ago. anybody can, it’s just harder the longer you leave it. I’m prepared for him to be engaged or married whenever that might happen, and a lot of people are not. Yikes!!!

Omg I loved this, thank you so much for sharing!!! I know it has to be hard to disentangle yourself from that conspiracy and the whole community involved with it but I'm so glad you did!! It's so interesting to get that insight into how your feelings about them progressed and hearing how you came to the realization that the issues you were having with their relationship came from your own issues and not anything to do with them.

I cannot even explain how much that false dichotomy annoys me. I hear that A LOT. Claiming that the people who support them are just as bad as the people who obsessively hate them?? Like are you hearing yourself???? Like you said, there's definitely some obsessive behavior on the "gf stan" side that I do not condone at all, but that's a veryyyyyy small number of people. I've only heard of two accounts doing that. There are dozens of accounts solely created for the purpose of trashing her & their relationship and they literally host some of the most vile, invasive discourse I've ever seen and straight up fabricate stuff out of thin air and spread it shamelessly. They harass her constantly and try to impact her projects and her credibility and spread lies about her family like it's all so disgusting.

And I've heard that from some people too! The whole "it was better with xyz because everyone hated her" or "i preferred xyz because she never spoke" like???? That's so fucked up 😭😭😭 his girlfriends don't exist to just shut up and look pretty like they are actual human beings with thoughts and opinions!

#ask #i literally love everything you said thank you so much!!!!!!#it's so good to hear from a perspective like yours!!!!!

27 notes · View notes

ashintheairlikesnow · 3 years ago

Note

OH ANTONI 🥺🥺🥺 my poor baby. I hope he will find it within himself to come clean to Jake or SOMEONE about this :((((

(((ALSO CANT WAIT FOR MORR))))

One Two Three Four Five Six

CW: Wound cleaning, burns, touch aversion, aftermath of torture, BBU, conditioned fucky headspace

"Lift your chin for me," she commands, and he doesn't really remember that he could choose not to obey.

Antoni dutifully shifts, his eyes moving to roam over a line of framed photographs along the wall behind her. A wedding photo, faded with time, a much, much younger version of the woman currently dabbing a cotton ball dipped in something cold and stinging to the fresh burn on his throat with a man he's never seen. The two of them are smiling, holding hands, looking right into the camera.

Bright white wedding dress turned cream with yellowing paper, with time, covered in lace. Powder-blue tuxedo. Brilliant smiles.

She touches the cotton ball to his skin and he hisses, hands tightening where they grip the edges of the chair he's sitting on. The sting rockets through him, only a pale echo of the original pain, but it's enough.

It's enough.

Fuck, that's hot.

He catches the sob before it can leave his throat, forces the burn behind his eyes to stay there and not turn into tears. He will not cry over this again.

Not now.

"There we go, just a bit more," She says, her voice gruffly compassionate. She presses a small rounded bandage against his throat, her fingertips are warm against his neck.

His skin crawls at even this slight, indirect touch, but he doesn't protest.

He wouldn't dare.

"All done. That's not s'bad, I think with a good bandaging it won't scar half so bad as all its little friends down south," She mutters, more to herself than him, really.

Where her fingers touch, he feels the echoes of other hands around his throat. Thicker fingers, heavy with rings. Smiling down at him.

Beg for me, love.

"Please-" It's automatic. He's drifting, in and out of this old kitchen that still looks like it must have looked thirty years ago, when the man in the wedding photo would still be here maybe cooking or cleaning or chatting up a storm to anyone who popped by for a visit.

"Hm? You say something, sweetheart?" Miss Ruth looks at him, and those dark eyes are shrewd. They know more than anyone is supposed to, they know things Nat hasn't told her. Hasn't had to.

"Ah, no," He whispers. "Just. I am very tired."

"No doubt. I'll finish these up and you can get back to your own bed and no doubt you'll be glad to get there." She looks him over, and his eyes dance to hers and away again. Back to the photos.

He sees a family photo, the two people from before and a daughter and son. Everyone is smiling, looking carefully just off to the side. They wear matching outfits.

"Get a look at 'em?"

There's a 35th wedding anniversary picture with a big banner behind the happy couple. The two people, much older, stand in front a cake nearly as tall as they are, surrounded by others. Everyone in the photo smiles in sort of the same way.

The next photo is a birthday, he thinks. There's a boy and a young baby in the photo, and the man from wedding and anniversary photo isn't there. Miss Ruth, holding her grandbaby he thinks, is wearing all black. The photo was taken in a church, and there's a spray of white lilies just visible at the edge of the picture.

Another, with Jaden, who Chris plays basketball with. The kid who more or less effortlessly opened his life for Chris when Chris badly needed a friend his own age, or closer to it, to remember what being a kid was like.

He is reading, in images, the story of this woman's adult life. Marriage, and death, and birth. Children. Life going on.

A life he won't have, that he gave up every possibility of having, because of... of whatever is inside him that Mr. Davies knew about, that the people who just hurt him could see in him even though he cannot see it himself.

He must look like someone who deserves to be hurt.

"Young man." She taps on the back of his hand and he flinches, blinking at her, struggling to pull himself out of his reverie. Her words filter through his mind, shift into the language all his thoughts are moving in, come back out in hers. He swallows, feeling a lump in his throat that refuses to move.

"I'm... sorry," He says softly, with difficulty. "I did not hear."

"I can tell. I asked did you get a good look at whoever did this to you." Her eyes roam over his chest, his stomach. The circle of new burns, placed so carefully compared to the haphazard placement Mr. Davies had favored, no pattern at all. "Looks like they took their damn time, anyway, to get you so much."

"N-... no." Antoni's eyebrows furrow, and he tries to think, but all he can remember is their hands holding the lit cigarettes, the quiet one touching his face, ruffling his hair. He can't... he can't remember their faces at all. "I am sorry."

You're fucking gorgeous, buddy, you know that?

"Hm." If she's disappointed in him, nothing changes about her expression, still held in a kind of skeptical compassion as she wets a new cotton ball in liquid from a small frosted plastic bottle and touches it to each burn, one by one, in the circle. It's like a ritual, the sting, washing away a bit of sin with each hint of pain. He clothes his eyes and breathes carefully through it.

When he is done, each circle covered with a bandage that is shades darker than his skin, she steps back to look him over, critically. She steps away and he takes in deep breaths free of her air, the powdery scent of her. He breathes in her absence, no one nearby.

She returns with a washcloth and he takes it, scrubs at his face until his cheeks are red but clean, until you can't tell anymore that he cried while they burned him.

Good boy.

"You can stay here," She says, voice low now. "Sleep it off for a while. I've got a guest room."

"No. No, I will go home. Thank you. I will... I want to go home." He looks out the kitchen window right at Nat's house next door. No lights are on... yet. But there isn't much time before they will be.

"Fair enough. You plan to tell 'em what happened to you?"

He looks back at her, searches for the judgement, finds none.

"No," He says. Confesses, really, his sin. "I will not."

I will lie to them.

"That's your choice to make, I suppose." She lays a hand on his arm. He doesn't pull away from her. He wants to unzip himself from his skin and step out of it, let them all have what they seem to want to touch so much.

Instead, he holds himself perfectly still, until she pats him a few times and steps away again.

"I've done what I can do. You come back over here tomorrow or the day after and we'll look 'em over again and make sure they're healing up nice, you got me?"

"Yes," He says. He is good. He can be good.

"Right. Off you go, then, before your people wake up and you get to come up with a story about why you're in an old widow's house at 4:30 in the morning, hm? You're pretty enough, but you're no Wilbur." She laughs to herself, a dry and crackly sound, and he thinks that her laugh was the sort that could set a whole crowd to laughing, when she was young.

It still is.

The corners of his mouth twitch in an answering smile.

"Yes, ma'am," he says, and pushes himself off the edge, standing up again. No one has seen his scars, no one but this old neighbor woman who looks at them like they are simply part of living, not something to be pitied. "I go. S-... thank you."

"Paugh." She scoffs, waves a hand in dismissal. "Go on, now. You've thrown off my morning coffee time. Tell your young man that Jaden will be over this afternoon."

She all but shoos him out the door, and the air is clear and clean and quiet. The only dirty thing is Antoni himself, smudged and mussed, still feeling in his scalp the prickles of Quiet One's hands, still feeling on his arms the sharp pressure of the shirt tied around his wrists.

Still aware of every single burn under the slight pull of the bandages pressed over them, the gentle sting that feels like a return to how he was always meant to be.

Even the walk from one yard to another feels like too much. Antoni's eyes move over the empty darkened windows of the houses all around him. How obvious he must be, if three people saw him in the darkness and knew him for a pet pretending to be human.

He shouldn't have left, shouldn't have gone on those walks. He'd left himself open and vulnerable, hadn't he? His scars are deeper than skin, and they must shine like the streetlights to anyone who knows what to look for.

Antoni stops at the porch, where he carefully lifts a loose bit of board from the porch railing, finds the small box hidden inside. The slightest scrape of metal on metal as he pulls off the lid makes him freeze, but no one is awake to hear it. He takes the contents of the box, moves it quickly back to its hiding place, replaces the board.

Like nothing ever happened.

Everything can be made as good as new, as long as it isn't him.

He slips inside the safehouse, where everything is still quiet, in the silent inhale that comes before the exhalation of morning. The clock in the kitchen reads 4:45, fifteen minutes until Jake's alarm will go off, until he - and likely Chris - will stir.

Fifteen minutes for Antoni get upstairs and look so deeply asleep that no one will realize he was ever gone.

No time to shower.

He will have to sleep with the grime of their hands still ground deep into every single pore. He will sleep with Deep Voice's we know what you are in his ears, with Quiet One's fingers tangled in his hair, running over his skin. He will sleep with Lookout's eyes locked on his chest as he presses the cigarette in.

Antoni hasn't worn a collar in years now, but he buckles it on, just one notch too tight like Mr. Davies would have, and climbs under the covers, pulling them over his head.

He breathes in as deep as he can, to feel the constriction. Breathes out, and runs his hand up over his chest, over the bandages that cover his burns.

They knew what he was.

Everyone always will.

Good boy.

The ashtray falls asleep humming a lullaby, afraid that if he pulls the blankets back down he will see bars on the windows.

#antoni sings lullabies #aftermath of injury #caretaker and whumpee #fucky headspace #bbu #box boy #box boy universe #pet whump #internal dehumanization #(a little bit)#touch aversion #touch averse #recovering whumpee #wound cleaning #hurt/comfort #angst #angst angst angst #come get y'all angst #whump

118 notes · View notes

ramblingguy54 · 3 years ago

Text

“Everything’s changed, since you came here...Being around you makes me do stupid things and I wish it didn’t!”

This moment really surprised me in showing not just Amity Blight’s vulnerability, but especially Luz’s emotional sensitivity, too. Amity has a lot on her plate, in terms of baggage, from many regretful acts growing up underneath the abusive environment of her parents. However, that isn’t to say Luz isn’t without any kind of grief either, considering this kid is going through quite a lot currently, as well. Luz isn’t sure when she’ll see her mother again, felt seriously guilty at first about Eda’s curse overtaking her at Season 1′s end, and still doesn’t know how to exactly go about confessing the truth of her real whereabouts, which was the entire conflict of Grom Night’s plot surrounding Luz’s dramatic internal conflict. Luz’s greatest fear was her mother not understanding and being greatly hurt by her lying about summer camp, where she stayed in a more dangerous reality.

What seriously crushed me about this line of dialogue above from Amity is how she wishes Luz didn’t bring out this kind of inspiration to do super impulsive things from herself. This obviously isn’t so much a matter of Amity saying, “I hate you, Luz.”, rather I took it as Amity inflicting loathing sentiment upon her own self esteem. Amity has done a lot of things she’s not proud of whatsoever, which can definitely be seen through her treatment of Willow and how it was ripped to shreds by her parents demands for a great period of time, until Luz came along. Amity isn’t used to feeling so free to have a sense of self, let alone having some definition of happiness. Before Luz appeared, a good chunk of Amity’s life was ruled by manipulative, uncaring, and toxic parenting on how she should live. She was never allowed to have an actual carefree childhood, due to her being born a Blight getting saddled with unfairly high expectations of deemed “perfection”.

Luz is the complete polar opposite of how she has lived in contrast to Amity’s lifestyle. Luz wasn’t expected to become anything spectacular by any means necessary. Granted, her mother was gonna send her away to a summer camp as an attempt to try getting Luz’s more wackier nature under control, but to be fair it was also another way for her to try getting the kid to make actual friends. Regardless, my point is, Luz was able to live an all around normal life, whereas Amity had to immediately follow shallow standards set from the get go in a society full of unfair ideologies surrounding magical abilities. Amity meeting Luz, this kid who was so optimistic, endearing, and Hell bent on becoming a Witch, was such an alien concept to her, overall. Amity has been so used to living a life of obedience where, like her parents constantly beat into her mind, that a Blight must never show weakness to anyone on the Boiling Isles, so for awhile this was the mantra this kid followed at the expense of having genuine friends.

Every time Amity saw Luz in public it reminded her of the person she truly is buried underneath all the bullshit her parents threw onto her. A kid who simply wanted to become a Witch through hard work, determination, and have loving companionship, too. It’s why Amity was so terrified of Luz rejecting her in Grom Night because after everything that has happened she feels, “Do I deserve to be happy or loved? I’ve hurt people in the past and brutally cut off my best friend, Willow. Who would ever want to be with a person like me?”, which was plaguing her thinking throughout that entire day, until Luz helped pick her back up to take on the dark shape shifting blob of nightmares turned real.

“It’s okay I-I-I do stupid things around you too, Amity...”

There’s a lot of poetic truth to Luz’s statement here on her connection to Amity. After all, in Grom Night she willingly took on the ceremony upon herself in Amity’s place because she wanted to help her out that badly, despite having next to zero knowledge about how dangerous this tradition actually is in their world. Even after being filled in on the deadly details of how important it is to defeat the creature, Luz still didn’t waver in her determination to combat the nasty creature. Luz has unintentionally caused Amity so much trouble in the past, where she wanted to help with something very serious for a change because she knows there’s real compassionate kindness inside of her. Luz may have started to run away when her worst fears became manifested from the creature about her mother, but Amity rushing to help her out made them both inspired to defeat it together. It was the best way to explore their blossoming respect and love.

Luz did all that for Amity because she wanted to and not outta some obligation from an unfair code of Blight honor. Amity isn’t used to seeing someone go this far out of their way to help her this passionately, given she’s most likely accustomed to other peers at Hexside either fearing her, or outright being bitter about that ranking as a top student. Amity didn’t know what to make of Luz’s intentions for awhile in Season 1, due to this super self conscious behavior of conflicted inadequacy. She had a set path on her way to becoming a Witch suddenly interrupted by someone who reminded her of something Amity thought was out of reach, her happiness. While Amity felt so oddly happy about someone wanting to be there for her, it also tore the kid up inside emotionally because those regrets gnawed away at her. One could say Amity was “content” in living life of solitude away from those, like Willow, who actually care for her well being.

Luz, however, completely threw a wrench into those plans for Amity breaking her free of the mental shackles set by undermining parents. It drove Amity up a wall in the best and worst ways. On one hand, she’s deeply thankful for what Luz has helped her through in confronting bigger emotional issues, yet is still greatly confused on what it all means in the long run. Does she get a second shot at having real friends through her own decisions? Is she worthy of being loved? Is it not too late to change for the better at last? Can Amity live a life that isn’t ruled by her parents? Yes, of course she can. It just boggles Amity’s mind still that there’s someone who’s willing to go so far for her happiness this drudges up insecurities of guilt for past mistakes. Some part of Amity still thinks those moments define her, so to see Luz try to apologize wanting to make amends for the library incident in this episode’s story makes her feel, “Why are you apologizing to me? I’m not worth giving the time of day to, Luz.”. All of that gets undermined with an act of love by Luz to help get Amity her job back, by taking on deadly trials to accomplish this goal.

This moment between them carries so much layered weight.

#toh season 2 spoilers #toh spoilers #toh season 2 #through the looking glass ruins #the owl house #amity blight #luz noceda

74 notes · View notes

pleasantwizardphilosopher · 3 years ago

Text

Just you and me

So, I finally gathered the courage to write something and went for a SuperCorp fanfic, because clearly I am supercorp trash. I haven’t decided whether to post it in AO3 or not but if I do I’ll let you know. English is not my first language so if you get any mistakes or some parts lack cohesion please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. This fic goes by the idea that Kara is a very good scientist, she deserves that much, Lena’s background is canon-like. There are no dialogs, only feelings and senses, hope you like it.

*********

Finding yourself stuck in time is hard, at least that’s what most people would feel like under such circumstances, but not for Lena, not right now, where every single piece of “normalcy” her life had is just beginning to crumble, like a piece of sun-dried bread, or the way eggshells crack after someone steps on them, painfully, noisily, in a million pieces, most of all and beyond everything, they shatter unrecognizably and irreparably. Maybe the cold that such pain leaves behind is what led her to run, maybe it was the sudden fear and tiredness that was left in her, like cold steel in her bones, maybe it was the emptiness that started consuming every truth she thought she knew. It did not matter, she fled, running as fast as she could in those 7-inch Louboutins. She never looked back, not even after her flight landed in National City, not even after setting foot for the first time in her new penthouse in the middle of the city. She never regretted it, at first it was rough, sure, like every bumpy road is, yet, after the first glance she ever took at that blonde hair that day in the park, all doubts were erased off her mind.

*********

It was the end of August, the chilly air that announced a cold winter ahead blew her hair, ruffling it in her face; filling the streets, waking scattered orange and brown-ish leaves that had fallen from nearby trees, whistling on its way through the now almost-bare branches. The wind left behind the soft aroma of wet dirt, freshly baked bread and upcoming rain, heartwarmingly, filling her lungs easily with every breath, puffing visible clouds when exhaling. It was certainly nostalgic, the kind that makes you feel warm and cozy and at the same time makes your eyes prickle with unshed tears. Kara felt that pull, as usual, for everything good her life has had, and everything it had taken from her. She stood on the sidewalk, towards National’s City Central Park, glancing around her, taking in her surroundings when her gaze landed on a particular someone, dragged to her as if her eyes were mere pieces of steel and that woman were a huge neodymium magnet; She found herself staring at a sight she’ll always remember, because at that moment, when she first saw her, she felt a different kind of pull at her heart, the kind that screamed “caution!”, but in the good way, hopefully.

Long before she knew her name, what made her laugh, what made fer fidget with her fingers nervously, but above all, long before she had met that woman with dark long silky hair, forest-green eyes and pearly skin. Long before that gorgeous human being, with such power emanating from her, yet such caring, hopeful eyes, crossed her path, long before she made her feel like flying without actually leaving the ground, mostly, who she would grow to love, maybe, maybe she was fantasizing too much, who could blame her, it surely was a sight to remember.

*********

When the double doors slide open, she’s expecting a no-nonsense, powerful, cold-blooded, cocky-demeanor CEO, what she’s definitely not expecting is for such CEO to be almost precisely all that shaped and carefully placed in a stunning, raven-haired woman, whose green eyes could pierce through your soul and would probably make you spill your darkest and deepest secrets, those that also hide so much fear, making her want to walk over there and pour all her support into a hug. Kara swallows. Nevertheless, there is also something else to this woman’s aura, her posture is perfect, clearly carved into her from a very young age, and her smile is polite but stiff, almost practiced, and still, Kara can feel kindness emanating from her, true deep kindness and care. Something brings her to the present again, her breath hitches, those beautiful eyes are staring intently into hers with curiosity and a hint of amusement. The woman in front of her has managed to steal her breath twice now, which is not something she, the founder and co-owner of a start-up company. Harvard graduate and Kryptonian, finds happening often, she has faced great threats, from grumpy bankers to out-of-space threats as Supergirl, yet, Lena Luthor has managed to make her heartbeat go erratic with a simple gaze.

The soft scent of an expensive perfume fills the office, something akin cinnamon, vanilla and a little scotch (?). It is dizzying and a little distracting. She somehow manages to go through her proposal for the CEO without stumbling too much and, fortunately, without rambling. Lena seems fascinated by the proposal and agrees to the terms without major modifications to the contract. After both signing, they shake hands, and maybe, just maybe, they linger a little more than needed, both enraptured by the softness of the other’s hand. Lena pulls away first, fingers tingling, feeling the tips of her fingers warm and a lingering scent of something floral, it is electrifying, like a low current cursing through her veins, making her get goosebumps all over her arms, but she doesn’t mind, as her attention is captured by those ocean blue eyes that seemingly hold the weight of the world. She certainly is nowhere close to getting tired of them.

*********

When they signed this partnership, they did not expect it to turn this way, at least Kara didn't, or so she muses while sitting on the ledge of her rooftop. She truly just meant to get funding and maybe get to work a little up-close with the brilliant, certified genius of a woman. Sure, she is gorgeous and incredibly sharp-minded, as proven by so many magazines’ articles having bothered to analyze both qualities deeply and thoroughly; but after that first sight of her, with such strength and determination to her pose, with each powerful step, with every sway of her hips, albeit hiding so much hurt, sadness, and a great burden, brought to her by her last name; a burden that Kara has somehow come know so well, such need to be understood, because, the truth was, that no one had ever lived through loss the way they did. One lost her world, her culture and way of life, but found love and compassion, whereas Lena was denied both from a very short age, living a life without love, compassion, and affection, in a household where the outside cold wouldn’t enter, as the inside was icier.

The cold nighty wind startles her, it brings to her mind memories of bight smiles, so hard that certain dimples showed, laughs so hard that some wine would be spat on a very white leader couch, sunny days filled with an assortment of foods and a wonderful voice, filling every corner of the room with its melody and a slight accent, becoming more evident when emotion takes a rightful place in her voice, one that comes from a very pale yet very compassionate woman. She has to tell her, it's been just over a year since they first met, but she knows it is time, with them growing closer, she has to tell her she is Supergirl. And yeah, she definitely did NOT expect things to turn this way. (Maybe she kinda did).

**********

When she asked Kara if she understood the quantum mechanics behind the surface plasmon resonance their platinum nanoparticles showed, she wanted to be shaken, mad even, because why wouldn't she, the to-be youngest member of the Science Guild on Krypton? Of course, they didn't have the same metals as they did on Earth, but they understood the physics behind the phenomena. Okay, Lena did do not know her identity, yet, hopefully, but she did have a Bachelor in Mechatronic Engineering and a Master Degree in Advanced Materials, she definitely may have crossed paths with the concept. But hell, how can she be mad when those bright, summer-trees green eyes look at her with such glint of excitement, with a twinkling sparkle or curiosity? Those eyes that were looking at her with a look you give someone you know gets you, beyond understanding your words, those who truly get a grasp of your language, of who you are, what makes you shake with the excitement of a new discovery, a greater challenge. It was then that Kara knew that she could read Lena the way no one had ever done for her, she could grasp what she needed in every moment, what she was thinking, but she also got her sciency stuff, the theoretical jargon, upcoming theories, the physics behind phenomena and she shared her love for technology that could make humans' lives better, longer, healthier. They shared, compassion, vision, passion and... Kara was now almost certain, love.

At least she thinks so, what else could those stolen glances be? She looks up, just to find those forest-green eyes glinting with determination and concentration while those agile slender fingers handle tools and twinkle their way around the solar panel’s circuitry. She is so enraptured by her skills that she mistakenly adds way too much platinum sulfide to the solution, turning it suddenly black and bringing her out of her stupor as the contents boil, violently spilling all over the place, filling the air with a slight scent of iron, evaporated water and burnt plastic. Green eyes break contact with the panel to look towards where strong hands work frantically to turn off the hot plate she was working on, dropping her tools she reaches a hand to help Kara, concerned green eyes looking for any kind of burn injury or spill that may need to be taken care of. After making sure everything is (mostly) okay and that it was just a failed reaction, Kara is suddenly aware of a soft hand pulling her away from the table, vanilla and cinnamon fill the air around her, like a soft embrace, that turns real when Lena pulls her into her arms, a soft bubble surrounding Kara, making her a little giddy and peaceful at the same time. Flowers, fresh-cut flowers is what Lena smells, while she hugs Kara tightly, it is normal to get worried for your best friend after a lab incident, no matter how small, she tells herself, and while it maybe is, it is definitely not normal the way her heart felt like stopping the moment she saw the hot contents of the Erlenmeyer flask spill all over the place, fearing for Kara, feeling it creep up her spine and settle like cold ice on her stomach and lungs, making it hard to breathe.

When strong arms surround her and pull her in tighter, she realizes she has started shaking and hyperventilating, embarrassed she hides her face in the crook of Kara’s neck, and everything fades outside this moment. It is just them, vanilla, and flowers, Kara murmuring sweet nothings into Lena’s ear, hearing her heartbeat even out, and her breathing become normal; and Lena trusting that this person, whose arms seem to be able to lift a bus, whose laugh makes her heart warm and fuzzy, whose smile lights her world and makes her feel safe, cared for and understood; will never let her fall. And perhaps she is right.

**********

Yup, it is definitely love. What else could it be? That snowy January, between hot cocoa and soft muffins, she knew. She is hovering outside her lab, on the outskirts of town, where it was less likely that someone caught her both personas; peeking through the windows, she sees her, Lena is coding the interface that would allow them to take the most efficiency and durability out of the technology they had designed, the mechanical and chemical part was almost done already. She is typing, eyes narrowed in concentration behind thick rimmed glasses, the tip of her tongue poking from a corner of her mouth. And Kara knows, she wants to caress those hands when they were trembling from the winter cold, but also kiss them after a long day working with her computer, she wants to rub her feet after a day filled with meetings and kiss her every time her brilliant mind comes up with a solution for an impossible problem. But above all that, she wants to hold her and whisper into her ear comforting and loving words when she has a nightmare regarding Lex, she knows it’s a common occurrence. She wants to see her crumble knowing that Kara would always hold her and support her, kissing her lovingly every time her insecurities get the best of her. She wants her to feel safe, protected and loved in a way she always deserved but never got.

She sighs, this is it and she knows it, there is not moving forward without coming clean about Supergirl, because, staring at Lena, she knows there is no going back either, looking the way her agile fingers dance around the keyboard as if she were writing a letter to a friend instead of a state-of-the-art software to power and control their recently developed solar panels. She thinks of how beautiful of a soul Lena is, she has such a big heart, she has a huge weight on her shoulders for being a Luthor, a burden which Kara would love to lift from her since it is not hers to carry, it shouldn’t be. Furthermore, she cares so much for the world and the people in it, even for the ones that are not human, unlike her family she is truly kind and compassionate.

Here goes nothing. Kara flies through the lab floor-to-ceiling windows towards the desk where Lena is working, placing beside her the paper bag containing hot cocoa and muffins for her. Due to the cold, the soft warm homey smell soon starts filling the room. Lena looks up smiling, expecting to find Kara behind the treats, but instead, bright green eyes lock with glassy baby blue eyes, trembling lips and fingers fidgeting. Lena stands. She is instantly shaking, whatever it is that could possibly turn the unyielding hero into a crying mess must be of great concern. She steadies herself by grabbing the edge of the table to keep her knees from buckling, knuckles turn white. Green never leaves blue. And just when she is about to ask the hero what brings her here, a strong hand comes to the small of her back to steady her and keep her upright. She has never been this close to Supergirl and at that moment when every sound seems to shut and the air stills, she knows.

She knows why those sky-blue eyes always inspired her such calm and confidence, why she always felt safe in those arms that could bend steel as butter. Because in that moment, when the warmth emanating from that hand starts filtering through her clothes, warming her, her senses are also filled with a smell of flowers, mixed with chocolate and bread, and a hint of mint; when a single tear escapes those ocean blue eyes, she crumbles. She crumbles under that gaze filled with pain and sorrow, filled with such regret that she could feel it creeping through herself, nestling in every corner of her body, making her feel slump and heavy. She also sees intelligence, compassion and strength, qualities she has come to be very familiar with under a blue setting. And so, she grabs the hero’s suit in her fist and buries her face in her chest, a single heart-wreaking cry filling the air. Kara shatters then, knowing how much pain this is causing to a soul that has been betrayed over and over again, who has been abused and pushed to her limits. She knows she is picking an open wound with a stick, and she hates herself for it, for using the same trust Lena gave her against her. They slide to the floor, never letting go of each other, tears falling freely through both their cheeks. Lena breaks into heartbreaking sobs and Kara holds her tighter, as if trying to keep her from falling into pieces, from breaking apart, rocking them both back and forth softly. Lena just cries, screaming from time to time, gripping the fabric so tightly that if it were regular fabric, it would be tearing down by now, but it isn’t, just as the woman holding her, the woman she most certainly is NOT in love with, is not a regular human. They stay there, holding onto each other, never breaking eye contact, the hot cocoa and muffins long forgotten.

**********

She really isn’t mad. She isn’t. So maybe she has been slightly avoiding Kara, but she isn’t mad. Despite her first-instance outburst of emotions, she realized she really isn’t angry at Kara from keeping the Supergirl thing a secret from her, yes, she was deeply hurt and upset but she understands the reasoning behind it, albeit she wishes Kara had told her earlier in their relationship it also makes perfect sense for her to hide it until making sure their relationship was well-founded and strong.

She is quite lost though, there is a small hint of emptiness inside her chest from that day which smelled like chocolate and bread, at first Lena thought she might actually and finally be broken, her heart having taken so many hits already. But the pain eventually faded, and that emptiness never left, on the contrary, it became more present, so much that she was now almost used to it. Like a lingering rock in the bottom of her stomach, or a ball of cotton in her throat, constant, bearable but persistent. And now, as the snow starts melting outside her office she wonders why. She knows why though; she just likes to pretend like she can fool herself.

The morning sun is hitting her office’s windows, warmer than it has been for the past few months and as the first drops of melted snow start to fall from the rooftop to her balcony, the pretense falls to pieces, and she falls along with it. She fumbles with her balcony door and stumbles outside, not even bothering to grab her coat, as soon as she steps outside, she is hit with cold, humid air and slippery floors. Taking huge gasps of cold air to fill lungs that seemingly do not want to be filled.

Maybe this is all she needed, standing on her balcony and glancing at the city, the morning sun casting a bright yellow light over her face, warming her skin softly, while her side in the shadows gets colder every passing second. It is enough, hot and cold, day and night, light and darkness, she always wondered to which side of the scale she tipped the most, she used to believe she was all shadows, a Luthor, and Kara was light, all goodness, she smiles at the irony, a Super. However, while she is taking in the city, calm and almost quiet since it is so early, bright light hitting the buildings and cold, contrasting shadows hiding smaller streets, cars, and people, she gets it. Kara was never all light, and will never be, she has on her shoulders an unbearable pain that will never go away and with her powers come hard choices that no one should ever have to make. And she, she is not darkness, she is both, and she can choose which side to feed, and she wants to choose light, just not any light, one that is personified by blonde hair and ocean-deep blue eyes that she could, and does, get lost into. Maybe, she can bring a certain light to Kara as well, maybe they both deserve it, they deserve each other. Letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding she turned on her heels towards her office and out of it, directly to a certain warehouse on the outskirts of town. The balcony door left open, melted snow glowing gold from the morning sun, dripping into Lena’s office.

**********

Disappointment is that what she feels, no, sadness, for sure, she knew things could go sideways with the whole reveal show and yet, the clench in her heart won’t go away easily, and she knows she absolutely has no right to feel that way, she made that choice, just as she has made every other choice before it. She is tempering with her suit, waiting for her cell culture to finish growing so she can properly test their absorption properties. Soft pop music plays in the background, filling the warehouse with soft notes with a cheesy vibe, the mid-morning sun streams from the windows, lighting the space with an orange-ish golden glow. She finishes her upgrades with a tired huff, never one to hate working on something she surprises herself with such reaction. Groaning with frustration that has nothing to do with her projects and a lot to do with a certain pale powerful, wonderful, CEO.

She walks towards the windows, letting herself bask in the mid-morning light, feeling her powers recharge and her body start buzzing with energy. She clenches her fists, as the warmth caress of the sun on her skin makes her heart ache, missing another entirely different kind of warmth. She leans against a wall and lets her body slide to the ground, bringing her knees to her chest, she closes her eyes, letting herself get lost in the feeling of the sun kissing her skin, softly, almost hesitantly, she can almost picture a certain brunette, softly stroking her cheek, a sweet lovingly caress. A single tear rolls down her cheek from her closed eyes, knowing that such caresses may never be from her, a faith written by her own hand, resulting from her choices, as hard as it is. Letting her straining superhearing and expanding its reach she hears the hustle and bustle from downtown a few kilometers away, she hears the honks of the cars and the heavy panting from people running late for their work, such mundane thing that she may never truly get to live and experience. As her hearing expands, she finds herself focusing in a very well-known heartbeat, one she can distinguish above the sea of heartbeats that flood the city; it is beating absurdly fast, and her first reaction is to focus on her surroundings to find out whether she is in danger or not.

She hears heavy puffs of air, heels clicking steadily and determinately on the pavement, closer with every step, and is she running? Her breath hitches when realization dawns on her, she IS running, towards her. While her mind screams for her to move, to do something, her body is frozen, unresponsive, breath caught in her throat, she absolutely does not understand what is happening and doesn’t know what to expect from the woman that is now reaching her. Before she can dwell on it further, a feminine soft hand with slender cold fingers is touching her knee softly. She is panting from the effort, her breath smells like back coffee and mint, hitting Kara’s face warmly, making her head spin; a slight scent of grounded coffee beams mixed with Lena’s favorite scotch emanates from her clothes, she smells strangely like home; her red lipstick matching her flushed cheeks from running, and Kara cannot help but let her jaw fall open in awe at the sight.

She grabs Lena’s wrists softly and stands up bringing her along. Kara finally gathers her courage and looks at her eyes. She feels like sinking under her gaze, not out of fear, it’s nothing but love and warmth what she sees in those jade-green eyes, feelings she doesn’t feel worthy of, specially not when coming from the Irish goddess. Just when she’s about to close her eyes again, uncapable of keeping her gaze, Lena hooks a finger under her chin and makes her raise her eyes up to hers again. Insecure, scared-like blue puppy eyes find soft-looking bright emerald eyes. It’s understanding what she sees now in those deep green eyes, the same ones that seem capable of reading her like an open book. She lets out a sob, and Lena lets go of her chin, going to grab her hand, bringing it to her lips and kissing her palm tenderly.

The breeze brings to Kara’s nose the scent of Lena’s shampoo, smells like rainy days and autumn leaves, and, as usual, no words are needed when Kara moves her hand from Lena’s lips to cup her cheeks, bringing her other hand up. And, what else can she do other than lean forward? So, she does, she leans forward and kisses her forehead, its soft, tender, like a butterflies’ kiss, just barely brushing her skin, trying to convey her love for her beautiful Genius™ mind, for her brilliance, stubbornness and compassionate selfless soul. She then brushes her lips softly on both her eyelids, trying to convey all the love and regret she feels regarding the way she did Supergirl secret-related things. She parts slowly and watches as Lena opens her eyes fluttering open slowly, bringing her hands up to grab the wrists of the Kara’s hands that are still cupping her face, thumbs softly stroking the inside of the kryptonian’s wrists, she lets out a shaky breath, blue eyes looking at her so lovingly tenderly, with such determination and strength, unyielding as sapphires, she feels no questioning in her heart, this is where she is meant to be, she turns into a mushy puddle and lets herself be drawn into the Girl of Steel.

Kara leans forward and kisses her nose, giggling quietly, Lena simply melts into it feeling a soft warm breath that smells like chocolate and honey, suddenly, the emptiness in her chest melts like ice cream on a hot summer day, leaving nothing but love and warmth, like the one from a fireplace on Christmas Eve. She lets out a shuddering breath, relieved. They lock eyes again, and finally all those unspoken questions find an answer. They lean forward at the same time, their lips meeting in the middle, fitting perfectly against each other. It is warm, tender, loving, and everything it should be, the way every cheesy romantic comedy says it’s like. They pour all their love into that moment, lips moving against each other, chocolate-honey and black coffee.

When they finally part, it’s like breathing for the first time, lungs grasping for oxygen, freshly cut grass, concrete and sun-provided warmth, and it is perfect. Like taking a breath after holding it underwater for a long time, except you never truly knew what breathing was like, until that life-altering breath. They breathe in sync, foreheads touching, Kara’s hands go down to wrap around Lena’s waist, pulling her closer, Lena rests her head softly on Kara’s chest, nuzzling into her neck and closing her eyes, letting herself fall into that fierce love, like an all-consuming fire, she’s been too afraid to open herself to, to be vulnerable. They stay there, enjoying each other’s embrace, the hustle and bustle of the city blind to a beautifully blooming love.

**********

Kara is very clumsy, it does help her keep up her façade, albeit it is also a personal trait of hers. And right now, as she trips on nothing, while standing nonetheless, she makes it extremely evident. Forest green eyes look at her amused from the other side of the door. How does Lena expect Kara not to fall face first to the ground when she is dressed looking like THAT. Wearing a deep red drees that falls softly just below her knees, strapless, leaving her back and cleavage on display, her hair up in a neat bun and her signature 7-inch black heels, Kara definitely stopped breathing, not that she needs to anyway. She stands up awkwardly, taking the dust off her khaki pants and dark blue blazer. Lena cannot hide a smirk after pulling such reaction from no other than Supergirl.

The CEO pulls Kara into her apartment, it smells like vanilla and apples, probably resulting from the many scented candles that Lena likes to light around her apartment. The only light comes from said candles and several Christmas-like light strings that are hanging from the ceiling, giving the place a warm cozy glow. Kara smiles lazily as she leans down to kiss Lena, catching a glimpse of bright emerald eyes melting glimmery before falling shut. She smiles into the kiss. She pulls apart slightly and kisses the tip of Lena’s nose, the raven-haired woman lets out a soft chuckle. Kara grabs her hand, intertwining their fingers, and leads her to the door. Today it’s dinner date day, they are celebrating the successful launch of their joint solar panels project, the best performance ever achieved thanks to a certain Kryptonian’s platinum oxide nanoparticles; and 10 months of full-on dating. As Kara closes the door of Lena’s apartment behind them, the warm smell of the candles fills the hallway and follows them into the elevator, a fluffy plush blanket, a protective mantle surrounding them.

**********

drip…drip… the constant crash of raindrops against the windows surrounding them, rain pouring heavily around them, drowning the usually loud noises of the city’s rush hour, washing away the strong smell of smog. They are tucked under a bus station stop, at least Lena is, Kara is already dripping, since she stubbornly stood outside the small protection the roof offers so Lena and other humas could take cover, she doesn’t get sick anyway. Lena is shivering, although it has been a remarkably hot summer, today was quite a cloudy day and it rained for the most part, resulting in a temperature drop of several degrees. The brunette leans into Kara seeking for her abnormally high body temperature to warm herself up, but the Girl of Steel has other plans, since she cannot fly Lena to their apartment, she might as well take the best out of the situation.

Just as Lena is dropping her full body weight into her, she slides away, pulling Lena’s hand with her, directly into the downpour. Lena gasps when the first heavy drops of the cold water hit her, feeling her clothes get soaked almost instantly, she feels the raindrops roll down her skin and further dampening her clothes, the smell of the rain fully hits her now and when she lifts her eyes from where they were looking at the floor not to trip, she sees Kara smiling her signature megawatt smile at her, completely soaked and intertwining their fingers playfully, so Lena smiles, smiles so hard her dimples show. She lets herself be dragged by Kara, running under the rain, feeling the cold sweeping into her bones, and feeling more whole and filled with happiness than she has in a very long time, if ever.

Kara jumps over a puddle with all the grace of a gazelle, letting go of the CEO’s hand, such displays of her true nature still wonder Lena, just when she is about to make the jump herself, Kara stops and abruptly turns towards her. The world stops. Or maybe she is the one that freezes, the only thing she can hear is the rain pouring heavily around them, and her heart beating erratically in her chest, ringing in her ears, the smell of rain mixes with Kara’s floral perfume, she is getting closer now. The brunette starts shaking, and it has nothing to do with the cold water still running down her body. Kara stands in front of her, soaking wet, dirt all over her jeans from playing in the rain, her hair falls in wet dirty blonde strands around her face, her eyes as baby blue as always are dim because of the raindrops that coat her glasses, and in her soaking hands she’s holding an astonishingly made silver ring, two intertwined silver strings hold one small bright emerald in the middle, the inside of one of the string, in almost unreadably tiny letters reads “You are my hero”. The simplicity of the stone in contrast with the intricate design of the ring.

Lena forgets how to breathe, but Kara understands, so she just waits there, with the most loving smile ever seen stamped on her face. When Lena’s out of body experience ends, she simply nods enthusiastically. And so, the world starts spinning again, the honks of the cars return, engines roaring and muffled conversations, all muted by the rain, washing over them as reality sinks in, they are choosing each other, even when the world has tried to pull them apart repeatedly, furthermore, against each other, for them, none of it matters, just them, here and now, kissing for the first time in hopefully many years to come. Lena lets her hands drape loosely around Kara’s neck, feeling the grounding weight of the ring on her left ring finger, hot against her cold skin, the same way Kara’s hands, which hold her together.

#supergirl #supercorp #fanfic #karlena #kryptonian #i wrote this on a whim #please give me feedback #this is my first fic #be kind

19 notes · View notes

treksickfic · 3 years ago

Text

The City on the Edge of Forever

I’m so excited to share this with you, anonymous requester! After you sent in your prompt, I had another anonymous reader get in touch with me to let me know they’d already written a story that matched your wishes exactly.

The author of this story is French, not a native English speaker, and they’ve written a beautifully touching story that expands on the TOS episode, City on the Edge of Forever. I am posting it here on my blog, with their permission, because they do not wish to have an account nor have their identity attached to the story. This writer has already become dear to me and I’m honored that they trusted me with their writing. I hope you enjoy it!

It’s a long story, nearly 3,000 words, so RIP to your dash if you’re on mobile. I didn’t want to post it on AO3 or anywhere else except my blog, which feels safer.

Trigger warning for panic attack and trigger warning for some mild emeto, if you’re sensitive to that. It’s not very graphic.

“James Kirk, I demand an explanation!”

Scotty, Uhura, the teleportation technicians, and the security guards were completely dumbfounded by the doctor's explosion. They watched the captain stagger off, livid, as if he had been punched in the stomach. He disappeared without a word, with long stiff steps, from the room.

“Jim!” yelled McCoy.

“Not now, doctor.” Spock's cold, dry voice stopped him.

Spock squeezed McCoy’s arm firmly and Scott was sure to read in his black eyes a burst of fury. McCoy noticed it too, because despite the storm of his own eyes, he remained silent.

“Everyone, at your posts,” declared the Vulcan. “Scott, you are in charge for now.”

“Yes, sir.” Scotty nodded, refraining from asking any questions.

As soon as they had come through the Time Gate, seconds after they left, it seemed, but many weeks later for them, he had seen that they were not fine at all. The captain was pale, deaf to their questions, obviously struggling with the tears that filled his eyes. The doctor was just as white, his face contracted with a terrible anger. As for Spock, he kept his eyes fixed on Jim, his usual indifference altered by deep and obvious concern.

What the hell had happened?

This is precisely the question McCoy yelled at Spock, pulling himself brutally out of his grip as they entered his office, safe from prying ears:

“Damn it, Spock!”

“If you calm down, doctor, maybe I could explain.”

“Calm down? CALM DOWN? Shit, Spock! How do you want me to calm down?”

“Breathing. Deep, and slowly. Start by sitting down.”

“Don't fuck with me!”

“The Vulcans don't fuck with people. Now, please calm down.”

Jim killed someone without thought. There's no way I can calm down. Shit!”

Spock gritted his teeth and an aura of icy disappointment emanated from him:

“Jim killed someone without thought...do you get along, doctor? You've been aboard this ship for over a year. You even pretend to be the captain's friend. How can you accuse him of this without thinking for two seconds?”

“I saw it ! He prevented me from—"

“--and your poor little mind preferred to give in to this abject emotion rather than try to find a logical explanation. Jim, the most compassionate man we know…would he have acted like this for no reason?”

These words had the effect of a cold shower on McCoy. He shook his head, gradually coming to himself. He hadn't actually thought for a single moment, mired in a nauseating fury that he hadn't even tried to control. Shame replaced anger and he sagged in his seat and closed his eyes for a moment.

The past few weeks had been a total blur. He had woken up in a room with antique furniture, with an adorable woman at his bedside: Edith Keeler. It had taken him some time to realize that she was neither a hallucination nor a very good actress, but that he was indeed in a different era. Back in the 1930s. And he had barely had time to figure it out and come out of the bedroom to find answers before Jim and Spock, overjoyed, fell on him.

The next second Edith was dead. And it was Kirk's fault., He had kept him from coming to her aid. It had been too much emotion, too quickly and too soon. He had not managed to digest it, even less to understand anything other than what he had seen:

Jim had killed Edith.

But now that Spock had brought him back to reality, it all seemed absurd. And he noticed certain details: His friend's trembling when he held him; the tears in his green eyes when he leaned against the wall; Spock's unusually soft words when he had defended Jim, "he knows doctor, he knows."

How could he have seen nothing? Holding back a moan, he confronted Spock's stern face again:

“Explain it to me.”

“I'll do it quickly. In the timeline of our current story, Edith Keeler dies in 1930. In the one you walked through, paranoid after the cordrazine syringe accident, her ideals of peace and openness reach Roosevelt's ears and America becomes a peaceful country. That prevents its involvement in the second world war. Germany wins and dominates the world. Our time, therefore, does not exist.”

“Oh.”

“By the time you got there, after roughly locating your destination, we got to know Edith. A very charming woman, particularly intelligent.”

“And, Jim—"

“Was deeply in love with her. But for the good of a whole world and not solely himself, he let her die and prevented you from committing irreparable damage.”

“My god.”

McCoy put his head in his hands, overcome with excruciating guilt. Spock watched him, suppressing the harsh words that itched on his lips. The man had realized his mistake. It was useless to add more in the current state. He sighed for a long time, feeling unpleasantly empathetic towards Jim. He admired the way the man had managed to silence all of his instincts to save everyone:

“You should go see him, doctor. I think leaving him alone right now is not the best solution. Especially since he slept and ate very little while we were on earth, and even less after he realized that Edith had to die. He was ill several times during the night. He needs help.”

“Perhaps it is better ... Chapel—”

“No, Leonard,” Spock said, as kindly as he could. “He needs you.”

McCoy let out a deep sigh. He felt silly, and unforgivable. But for the sake of his friend, and indirectly, the sake of the crew, he knew Spock was right. Grabbing his medical equipment, he left in the direction of the captain's quarters.

*****

Jim rested his forehead against the cool edge of the toilet. The doctor's words were circling in his mind, adding further weight to his overwhelming grief. He felt sick, his stomach as tight as his chest. A discomfort that had become familiar over the past few days. The intense nausea that rolled and rolled, threatening at every moment to overflow was a most unpleasant physical manifestation of his stress.

Despite his efforts to conserve food that was already scarce in their daily life in 1930, there were times when he couldn't do anything about it. Nightmares woke him in an agonizing sweat, on the verge of ruining the atrocious coarse cover of their flop.

He managed each time to sneak into the bathroom before returning the meager pittance with spasms he tried to silence. He also appreciated the discretion of Spock, who had the delicacy of pretending to sleep when Jim returned to his bed several minutes later, breathless and exhausted. But now that he was alone, aboard the Enterprise, he had no reason to contain himself, and did not fight the gagging that came out violently, like revenge for being held back so long. His stomach, however empty, kept revolting, replacing his sobs with endless contractions.

He had barely activated the door to his quarters when they had started, and he had yielded to the spasms with some relief. As unpleasant as vomiting was, his whole body tense and sore as he curled up over the toilet, at least it kept him from thinking about it. Being sick kept his mind on constant alert, focusing his attention on the spasms, gasps, bile, burning and kept the fear away. Unbearable, interminable, but ... secondary.

He coughed cautiously, catching his breath, feeling even sicker from the pungent smell that hung around him…the smell as horrible as the way he felt. This place of suffering and abandonment suited him.

He leaned over awkwardly when the bile passed his throat for the umpteenth time and spilled out in a long convulsion. He grabbed his stomach and closed his eyes so he couldn’t see the mess coloring the water again. The dizziness began to build, the light becoming unbearable as a migraine took hold of his temples, seeping through to his sinuses. He shivered, trying to reach for the chase to vent some of his weakness, when a hand rested on his forehead. Incredibly cool, it brought such comfort that he could not suppress a fragile sigh.

Tenderly the hand placed a damp cloth on the back of his neck and then finally came to cover his eyes. There was the terribly aggressive sound of the toilet flushing, then a voice whispering for the light to drop to 20%.

That voice ...

His comfort immediately ceased, replaced by anguish. He coughed sharply, spitting out more bile in an effort to shake off the impending grief. He could do nothing against the intense tremors that made him gasp, nor the panicked sob that burst through the vomiting.

“Shhh, Jim.” The voice was a broken whisper. “Shhh, everything is fine.”

Kirk wanted to yell at him to go away, to leave him, not to hurt him anymore. Irrationally afraid of the anger that had rained over him earlier at the prospect of having to face reality. Instead he could only moan, shaken by a horrible, nauseating cough.

Feeling Jim shake and panic under his fingers, McCoy was crushed by an intense wave of guilt. He had seen Jim gripped with grief, stress, drunkenness, anger... but never so completely. It was the first time he seemed ... broken ... and it was largely his fault.

The abnormal heat radiating from his skin indicated a high fever and explained his lack of self control. McCoy took a syringe out of his bag and spoke in a very soft voice so as not to hurt his friend's headaches.

“Jim, I'm going to inject you with a painkiller, it'll help you relax.”

He had no other answer than a small hiccup and a burst of bile.

Nervous vomiting, McCoy noticed. It was serious. He was going to have to play it safe to get the captain to calm down enough to free himself from his sadness and he hoped the hypo would act quickly. He thrust the syringe into his biceps and took advantage of the slight respite that followed to quickly run the medical tricorder over Jim’s upper body.

The latter told him what he already knew: extreme stress, high fever, deficiencies in iron and magnesium, low blood pressure...nothing to indicate a gastric bug apart from weakness due to deficiencies, which reinforced his theory of psychogenic nausea.

McCoy was relieved to find that the sedative had done its work: Jim was shaking less and seemed more lucid.

“Bones...what--?”

Bones. So he didn't blame him. This man's empathy would kill him eventually, the doctor thought. He put a protective arm around the Jim’s shoulders and another under his chest to support him. He could feel the angry stomach muscles that continued to struggle and tighten. He gave a sad little smile.

“We are going to talk about all this. But first, we are going to get out of this horrible room. You need to lie down.”

“Um, that's not safe,” Jim grimaced with a little hiccup.

“I'll take a bucket, but I want you to lie down. Doctor's orders.”

“If it's an o-order,” he stammered, in a slight attempt at humor.

Jim allowed himself to be helped without opening his eyes, too ill to protest, and too weak to fend for himself. Bones almost carried him to his bed.

Once lying down, McCoy carefully removed Jim’s boots and socks, pulled up a wonderfully warm blanket and put a cloth on his forehead. Then Jim heard the familiar whirr of the tricorder passing once more over his body and finally the sound of several mixes. Careful fingers rested on his right temple.

“Can you open your eyes?”

“Urgh, Bones, I'll throw up if I open them.”

“There is a bucket, don't hold back. I need you to look at me.”

Jim groaned but obeyed. The light, even though very dim, made him moan in pain. It penetrated his head like a blade and triggered, as announced, a violent nausea.

McCoy held him very gently as he threw up a thin trickle of bilious saliva. He fell completely exhausted on the pillow once the attack was over. The doctor muttered something unintelligible and wiped his face.

“I should send you to the infirmary, Jim. You have serious deficiencies and that added to the stress...this is a perfect combination for a migraine in due form. I'll put you on an IV to regulate your sugar levels and give you a strong pain reliever. It should help you feel better.”

Once everything was in place, a tactical, hesitant silence settled between them. Jim could feel his presence, sitting on the edge of the bed rather than a chair, and the warm, warm hand pressed to his shoulder. The exhaustion and sadness rose in power now that the disease could no longer build its walls around his mind. He saw Edith again. Edith and her sweetness, her love, her joy, her magnificent ideas.

"She's fair ... but not at the right time," Spock had said, trying to make her listen to reason when he...he told her that she had to...die. He had desperately looked for another way but...but—

He clenched his teeth, overtaken by the intensity of the pain. By the gesture. He had even been unable to look at her body. He had not turned around, refusing to see what he had just done, struck head-on by the horror and disgust emanating from the doctor.

He swallowed, feeling the tremors start again, the despair skyrocketing. McCoy, hearing the gasps in his friend's tight breath, tightened his grip on his shoulder.

“I ... I loved her...Bones—"

A tear gathered in the corner of his eye and he sniffled, trying to pull himself together:

“Jim,” McCoy whispered, his own emotions rising. “I ... I don't even know how to apologize.”

“You have nothing to excuse. You are right. I ... killed her.”

“No. You saved our world. You did what you had to.”

“Oh, you spoke to Spock,” Jim whispered with a bitter smile.

“Yes.”

Despite the darkness, McCoy could see the paleness growing and the captain's face tightening with the effort to hold back the sobs. He searched for a moment for words he could say to alleviate the pain. Not finding them, he shook his head.

Jim tried to speak, with difficulty. “I shouldn't—”

“You have the right to be sad. You just lost the one you love in an act of unimaginable courage. Jim, I'm an overly impulsive old fool, I can't even imagine what you've been through and I sincerely ask forgiveness for this unjustified anger.”

“Please, Bones—"

“No, let me finish. Thank you for your understanding, but you don't have to. I acted like an idiot.”

“You couldn't have known.”

“That's no excuse. I know you and should have taken a step back.”

“What is done is done.”

“Jim, what I'm trying to say is that you must not let my emotionally spoken words get to you. You didn't deserve it.”

“I...I searched and searched...and searched again. I couldn't get away from her even when I knew that—”

“You were in love.”

“No, Bones. I'm in love. A selfish person who regrets choices that he shouldn't regret.”

“You are human, and you are suffering. Let it go.”

Another tear rolled down, then another, and finally it was a torrent that poured into the pillow. The captain put a hand over his mouth to silence the gasps of despair and the overwhelming agony of loss. Bones gripped his shoulder, patting it in a comforting gesture. He watched Jim sob like a child, breathing laboriously through exhaustion and mourning. Then he gradually calmed down until he fell into a deep sleep.

The doctor sighed and wiped away his own tears that had started at the same time as his friend's, and that he had not tried to stop. He readjusted the IVs and scanned Jim’s body for the third time. His fever was still high from a mild viral infection after several weeks in the cold and fatigue undernourishment. Jim would be off for a few days and stay in bed.

When he left the room, the doctor was not surprised to find Spock standing and waiting with arched eyebrows.

“How is he?”

“Exhausted and cold, but fine.”

“Has he been able to express his sorrow?”

“I guess, yes.” McCoy smiled, thinking of his friend's relaxed face as he left the room.

“And were you able to express yours?”

The doctor jumped slightly, not at all prepared for this question, much less for Spock to say it. He was sometimes pleasantly surprised by the well-hidden sensitivity of his Vulcan friend. A lump formed in his throat and he swallowed it.

“You are about to cry.”

“Damned be your insight, Mister Spock,” the doctor growled, a little annoyed.

“Humans all must cry at one time or another to get better, doctor. I do not understand why you put a manly bulwark in front of this natural mechanism.”

Bones laughed. “Wouldn't you find it embarrassing for me to break down in tears right now in your arms?”

He expected Spock to answer him, "Vulcans don't know the gene, doctor." Instead he replied, in his usual relaxed and serene tone, “If that makes you feel better, no.”

Such compassion was so strange that it almost seemed out of place. Leonard burst out into a frank laugh that turned without realizing it into a flood of tears. Tears of his own sadness this time, not empathy or guilt. Sadness he didn't think he had. Maybe he was also a little in love with Edith after all. And that the Vulcan understood it well before him.

Spock, moreover, did not pretend to leave, contenting himself to stay by his side until McCoy’s tears turned back into laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” the first officer asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Well, Mister Spock, because I’m thinking of the absurd spectacle we would have made if someone had been there. The ship's doctor weeping like a baby in front of a motionless Vulcan and their captain's closed door.”

Spock coughed and McCoy would swear to anyone who wanted to hear it that he was blushing.

“Well, you're not a hopeless case,” he said with a smirk, patting him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Spock.”

Then he turned on his heel towards the infirmary without hearing the relieved sigh of his alien friend.

#star trek sickfic #sickfic #TOS sickfic #sick kirk #panicked kirk #emotional hurt/comfort #physical hurt/comfort #emeto #tw emeto #tw panic attack

11 notes · View notes

citrus-lady · 4 years ago

Text

Agni Headcanons That No One Asked For But Everyone Will Get Because This Man Needs More Love.

As usual 18+ with nsfw elements. Minors cover your pure eyes. No one asked for this but I just love this man so much I would risk it all for him.

Agni is so loyal and respectful and would rather claw his own eyes out than hurt/ upset or disrespect his s/o in any way.

Agni is the definition of devoted, caring, and passionate. All he wants to do is take care of his s/o and make them as happy as they make him.

He is a gentleman and proves that chivalry is not dead. He opens doors for you, helps you downstairs and out of carriages, carries you when your feet are tired. Part of this is because he spends so much time in butler mode it can be hard to come out of it sometimes but he also does it because he believes that is genuinely how you treat your s/o.

Agni is protective. Not in an overbearing sense or like he doesn’t believe that you can take care of yourself, but more like “ If you’re doing this dangerous thing then I will be with you the entire way”. If you work early in the morning or late at night he will walk you to and from work. If you are cooking and need something cut or something from the tall shelf he’ll help you. That sort of thing.

If you’re being attacked you can be damn sure that he is not going to stand by and let you be hurt. This man would literally die protecting you.

This protectiveness also extends to when you’re sick. As we see in Book of Circus both Agni and Soma take physical health very seriously and believe you should take care of/pamper those you care about when they fall ill. So you can expect curry and soup in bed, massages, couple baths, cuddling, and he’ll even tell you stories/ read to you in bed.

This man loves taking baths together. Not in a sexy way though. Don’t get me wrong, he finds you gorgeous, but in his mind bath time is a time to relax and be intimate. He likes to wash your hair and body and likes it when you do the same. He feels truly at peace when you are just relaxing between his legs with your back against his chest, just soaking in the warm water. That being said, if you did want to get a little frisky in the tub he wouldn’t be opposed.

This protectiveness would only double if you were to become pregnant with his child. BTW he would literally cry if he found out you were carying his child.

Soma absolutely adores you as well. Not only do you make Agni happy but he sees you in a motherly/sisterly way as well. I feel like in order for Agni to love someone Soma would also have to like them.

Soma knows that quality time is important in a relationship. After all, he and Agni spend every day together and look at how strong their relationship is. Because of this Soma tries to give Agni more time off to be with you. Soma might even invite you to work for him as a maid or tutor or something so that you and Agni can spend more time together. This also gives you a reason to move into Ciel’s townhouse with them and takes some of the workload off of Agni. If they were to go back to India then you bet your sweet ass you are going too.

Since Agni is one of Sebastian’s few ‘friends’ Sebastian is very happy that you make Agni happy. Sebastian respects you not only for who you are but because he respects Agni and obviously there is something special about you if you were able to capture his heart.

Ciel also respects you and is happy for Agni but less so than Sebastian. Ciel is just glad that Soma has someone else to pester now.

Agni would cook and clean for you gladly and he is an amazing cook, even up there with Sebastian. He would be really happy if you asked him to make curry for you, especially if you liked it a lot. Agni would also want to learn how to make dishes from your culture.

Agni learned how to dance for you. When you, Soma, and he were invited to one of the Phantomhive’s balls he asked Sebastian to teach him so that he could dance with you. He had noticed at prior parties how much you had wanted to dance and wanted to learn for you. It was actually really cute and funny because he had to use Mey-rin as a stand-in for you. At first, he was reluctant to do so because you’re his one and only of course, but Sebastian convinced him that A) a dance doesn’t really count as cheating and B) this was the only way he could learn as everyone else in the mansion was male ( I’m sorry if your a reader who identifies as male! Just ignore that part if you are). Later that night he surprised you by asking you to dance and proceeding to waltz you around the room!

Lizzie thinks you are a really cute couple and beforehand she was helping you get ready in a guest room. She positively squealed when she saw you two dancing and then proceeded to try and convince Ciel to dance with her, which he reluctantly did.

If you wanted to dance with Soma, Sebastian, or anyone else that he knows and trusts he would be fine with that but he would not like it if you danced with anyone he didn’t know. He doesn’t trust the person’s intentions. In his mind, almost everyone is after you because he just thinks you’re so great and anyone who doesn’t also think so must be a fool.

This man is a giver, not only in bed but in life too. His main goal in life is to take care of those he cares about and make them happy. He is so loyal and supportive. Honestly would be a great dad. I think as a dad he would be protective without being super strict. Also, he does not believe in spanking his children.

Like I said before, this man is a giver in bed. In his mind, your pleasure comes first and foremost and his pleasure is derived from yours.

He’s going to worship your body and he absolutely dies inside when you return even a fraction of the favor. His natural pace is a slower, deeper, gentler pace but honestly, he’s going to do whatever his partner wants. This man is just so passionate. Not to mention how strong he is and how much stamina he has. He will go as long as you want and as many times as you want. I would sell my soul to Sebastian to see this man in the nude.

This man will give you oral. He will literally spend so long doing it too. You’re going to have at least one orgasm before he even gets to the main course. The king of soft and loving caresses. Caresses your thighs, legs, shoulders, ( breasts if you have them). He also likes kissing your lips and neck while doing the deed.

Is so romantic. Will plan things like romantic picnics and dinners and will set the mood with flower petals and scented candles/incense. He just wants you to know how much he loves you.

Will also do small, casual dates as well. Cooking dates, grocery shopping dates, strolls through the garden, or around town.

I picture him with a kind and compassionate someone. I think his s/o is more down to earth and chill. I can’t really see him with someone particularly childish or hyperactive. I think he gets enough of that from Soma and although he cares deeply for Soma, it can be a bit draining at the end of the day. Plus if his s/o was closer to Soma’s age he might feel a little weird about the age difference. ( Agni is 31 and Soma is 17). Not to say that his s/o isn’t energetic or that he wouldn’t date a younger s/o, but I feel like they are more mature behavior-wise.

Agni would also be really great at handling an s/o with mental health issues or that has a traumatic past/ has been through something traumatic. His patience and understanding mixed with his compassion, caring, loyalty and love would make him an excellent listener and healer.

This man smells like spices and Indian tea. He would also let you braid his long section of hair. This man also radiates heat like a furnace.

#agni black butler #agni x reader #black butler #black butler headcanon #black butler headcanons #agni headcanons #kuroshitsuji #kuroshitsuji headcanons #agni x reader headcanons #black butler x reader #black butler x reader headcanons

218 notes · View notes

hysteriamodes · 3 years ago

Text

Alucard thoughts (spoilers for Castlevania S4)

So to preface, I have a sinking suspicion that Alucard was a very solitary little boy and that perhaps his parents kept him close and were very over-protective of him. To me, that would make sense if that were the case; a dhamphir/vampire hybrid would be a rare occurrence in this world and we do have unofficial confirmation of that when Carmilla brought up the fact that Dracula never turned Lisa and they had a son together.

I’m sure not even Dracula would know what they were getting into having Alucard and then Dracula had to teach his son how to hone in on his vampiric side to keep it stable. So, it’s not to say Alucard doesn’t have people skills, he clearly does. I’m only mentioning this because--

-- I’ve seen others make a comment how Taka and Sumi’s betrayal didn’t make much of an impact on Alucard’s development. And I strongly disagree -- it did.

Alucard does take after his father quite a bit.

- He’s analytical and meticulous, very thoughtful in what he does, like his father. - I’ve noticed that Alucard’s candor when he talks he’s exceptionally soft-spoken like him as well. But he’s not above swearing or making smarry comments. - He is also very dangerous like his father but that’s not a character trait. We’ve seen if he’s hurt enough, he’ll turn to what he knows scared people away (i.e. impaled corpses) but that also shows that, at one point, Dracula had to have discussed his human life with his son and what profound affect that had on him. No one’s going to know how that panned out, but this is in reference to “Lament of Innocence”. - Obviously Alucard is very intelligent, like his father, he’s very educated, so he has a passion to learn like his father. He even makes the comment to Sypha and Trevor how much his father enjoyed learning and lamented how much of a waste it was to see his father turn the way he did instead of using his knowledge to help people. But over all, I’d say Alucard strongly takes after his mother more than his father. He is another facet in Dracula’s long life to remind him of Lisa’s humanity, possibly to the point when his son tried to reason with him that he was so disgusted and hurt that he injured his son. Alucard has a strong sense of compassion and sympathy for others, so much like his mother, and he clearly tends to follow more in her footsteps than his father.

So, not only did he act out of loneliness when Taka and Sumi asked for his help, he was taking after his mother in doing so. The games go the same direction, Alucard does what he does because of his mother and how much of weight she has on him. But this is going back to how Alucard was brought up, that he was sheltered, in some sense, his parents very protective of him, so I think a lot of naiveté was involved when he crossed Taka and Sumi. They spoke to not only that depression and loneliness, but they also spoke to how his mother was a constant reminder of good in the world.

He did want company, but he also wanted to continue his mother’s good will and helping others. So, he didn’t understand the implications of their desperation and didn’t see their betrayal coming. In my opinion, not only did these two exploit that, but they also coerced him into sex. I though that not only Hector’s sexual intimacy with Lenore was uncomfortable, but I thought Alucard’s was especially so, like his heart wasn’t in it. It’s not to say that it was dubious consent, but they used it as means to break him down and killed them.

So, when they betrayed them, he is so devastated, he goes back to where his father died and curls up to the remainder of his father, because you know at one point, Dracula was always emphasizing caution, vigilance, and that not everyone can be trusted, the opposite of what his mother taught him. He went to the closest source to what he knew best as means of strength and how to handle with being betrayed. His mother likely never experienced as much betrayal and cruelty as much as his father did. And, well, he doesn’t have physical connections to his mother’s remains.

We see Alucard shift further into his depression as season 4 comes up. You see a few more bodies outside of the castle but I highly doubt that Alucard did this to random people without provocation. But more importantly, he just looks absolutely disheveled.

He’s unkempt, filthy, and looks worse for wear. We know he has guilt in doing what he’s done but also the affects of Taka and Sumi’s betrayal made him feel so awful that he let himself go to a complete, literal mess. Before then, Alucard was a clean, well-kempt man. Alucard stopped taking care of himself because what was the point if they were seeing him as someone to be used (not feared, even) for his knowledge and home. The bodies outside were used to ward people away, but even Dracula managed to stay clean and well-kempt, not like his son.

I think this touches the depths of Alucard’s shatter of self-confidence and how lowly he thought of himself after being used by Taki and Sumi. He would have shoved himself further into that pit, but the note and the man that died along the way was a nudge into the right direction. It spoke to his good nature and gave him purpose once more. Innocent people that were 20 miles away that desperately need his help.

Not like people approaching him in the one place he felt secure, a metaphorical invasion of his personal space. Again.

So it makes sense that he felt more secure going out to assist people and once how he saw families being tormented after losing his family, he couldn’t sulk in the castle. He wouldn’t sulk in the castle, because that’s not him. He’s not his father, he can’t do what he did, because ultimately, he’s more like his mother and his mother’s virtues are stronger in him. He is the literal antithesis of his father, he is his mother’s son.

I feel that Alucard always wanted an interaction with the outside world and he certainly had that with the refugees he helped. He played with the children, he happily gave them food, and he was doing what his mother did and you know that’s what he wanted to do in the end: Do what his mother did and used his father’s knowledge for good, like she did. I feel like in the end, Alucard’s quiet inner grief from season one where he shut down from the world (not only just to heal his wounds) after his mother’s awful death, he was coaxed to open up and find a sense of community and love that he wouldn’t have had and had to limited degree after his mother’s death.

He didn’t see himself worthy of it, not only on the account of his father’s blood, but what he did in reaction to being betrayed. I’m not going to say Alucard’s reaction was completely awful: what Taka and Sumi did was wrong and it hurt him more than he let on and more than what’s seen on a surface level. But not only that, Sypha and Trevor had such an impact on him as well, reminding him of his mother’s good deeds that was easy for him to feel comfortable in his skin again, or perhaps, the most he’s ever felt comfortable as his own person ever did.

From a man that was so deeply traumatized, hurt, alone, and exploited from the very first episode (you know Dracula would have used his son as a tool in his revenge if Taka and Sumi didn’t use him) to a man that’s finally found purpose and it’s the best way he can coumarate not only his father, but especially his mother.

And maybe that’s why he looks “weirdly happy”, the poor man has been limited so much in his life. So in retrospect, his development makes sense. He didn’t necessarily transform -- he found himself again and he found an even better part of himself he never knew he had. People like him for what he is: witty, compassionate, intelligent, and sympathetic.

#alucard #castlevania

26 notes · View notes

carllisle · 4 years ago

Note

How do you think Esme argued with Rosalie, Emmett or Edward? How is she dealing with their shenanigans? Could you imagine first argument between her and Edward?

sorry it’s taken so long for me to get to this ask! thank you for asking, it means a lot that you have asked my opinion! i hope you're having a lovely day/evening/night

so in midnight sun we get a glimpse of how understanding and patient Esme is on the day of the baseball game when Edward notes that Esme had been trying to talk to Rosalie all afternoon about Bella and the Bella/Edward situation and even that they were holding hands when they were talking abt it on the baseball field. Edward also notes earlier that when Rosalie was first turned, Esme had a great deal of patience with Rosalie. Now, let’s be real, no one has an endless amount of patience, not even a vampire and there must have been something that would make her crack. I think that Esme was a willing ear when Rosalie mourned the human life she lost and how much she hates immortality and resents Carlisle for giving it to her. She probably encouraged Rosalie to talk to Carlisle about it to get it all out in the open and move past it as best as she could, but after a few years of still being resentful to Carlisle and calling him all the names under the sun Esme probably snaps. This would probably be because she saw how much Carlisle was hurting from Rosalie’s words and how much that added to his self-loathing. I think she argued with Rosalie and pointed out as sensitively as she could that without Carlisle, Rosalie would be dead and wouldn’t have any kind of life, and isn’t this half-life better than nothing? Would she really prefer death over life with Emmett? And that Carlisle thought he was doing the right thing by saving her! he deserves forgiveness and understanding, just as she deserves patience and compassion. I think Rosalie scoffed and said she never asked to be saved but after Esme put it like that she perhaps did some reflection and came to forgive him somewhat because after all he did give her some kind of life, and he gave her Emmett.

Clearly Esme and Rosalie are very close but I think Rosalie’s stubbornness is perhaps a point of contention for them. Esme is also kind and compassionate and I think someone like Rosalie would find that annoying sometimes, because sometimes she just wants to rant and rave and be angry without someone trying to fix it, you know? Sometimes she just needs to have a good bitch about something and not have Esme try to fix it or ‘look on the bright side’.

As Emmett is fairly easy-going and so is Esme, I can’t think of anything specific that they would argue about. Probably just small little tiffs here and there that are to be expected between adults that live in the same household - dirty shoes in the house, being messy/not doing his share of the household chores, getting irritated at her nagging, just common stuff. Given her past, when Edward and Emmett were rough-housing after his transformation I’m not sure she would have the courage to ask them to be more careful right away and maybe Carlisle asked them on her behalf. Later on in their relationship, I’m sure it became more of a reminder than an argument. Maybe she found his cavalier attitude about slip-ups upsetting, as Emmett seems to find slip-ups as an unavoidable part of their nature, whereas I imagine Esme to be deeply affected by each life she takes. Perhaps when he is trying to comfort her after she kills someone he makes an off-hand remark about how these things happen, it’s alright, and she blows up at him because she is so upset and she drills into him how it’s not alright. I’m not sure it would be an argument, though, because Emmett would likely apologise and so would she for misdirecting her anger at him.

God with Edward it’s so hard to know because SMeyer is criminal in writing Esme’s devotion to her son. We’re supposed to believe that she was happy to leave Bella in New Moon, because of Edward’s remarks in Midnight Sun that Esme didn’t care about anything except his happiness, but I call bull. SMeyer writes her so 2-dimensionally. Esme is such a kind and loving person and over the summer between Twilight and New Moon we can only assume that Bella spent a huge amount of time with the Cullens and that her relationship with them all developed immensely. In my head, this means especially Alice, Emmett, and Esme. Look how devastated she was when they left, and in New Moon it’s explicitly clear that it’s not just because Edward left, but because they all did! Now would Esme be happy about Edward deciding to leave her instead of turn her? Absolutely not. Would she try to put her foot down and convince him to stay? Yes. When he argued back and refused to be swayed by her, would she ultimately follow his wishes? Unfortunately yes. I imagine there was still an argument between the two of them as Esme could easily put herself in Bella’s shoes and imagine what it would do to her.

Esme joined Carlisle and Edward during Edward’s early years as a vampire and perhaps there were remarks made when Edward accidentally heard her thoughts and she resented that (even though she knew it was not his fault). She likes Tanya a lot and probably tried to get Edward to reciprocate Tanya’s affections or at least give her a chance and Edward firmly answered why he didn’t want Tanya in that way. Similar to her arguments with Rosalie, I think Esme argued with Edward about their nature as vampires. In my head, Esme is in touch with her faith as a Christian, always working to make sure her faith evolves with the world and always working on her relationship with God, scripture, and those she loves. I think she fundamentally disagrees with Edward about their souls and argues that they are not damned, they are not soulless, and they are not evil. She argues that Edward is not evil despite his countless murders nor is he damned for them, at which point Edward replies that he doesn’t regret his murders and he is not sorry, therefore he cannot ask forgiveness and he cannot be absolved, and he is doomed to the fiery pits below. Esme huffs but can’t fault his logic. So I imagine they have theological debates that can stray into passionate arguments. Carlisle is left on the sidelines and once again is stuck between the beliefs of his son, and the beliefs of his wife, still not knowing which argument he agrees with more.

In terms of their first argument, I think it was about Charles. I’ve explored it in my long fic This New Life (ch 12 if ur interested teehee) where Edward is so enraged by the memories of him that Esme has that he wants to hunt him down. At this point in time Edward has never killed a person and despite the built up rage he had for Charles, Esme didn’t want him to go after him because she couldn’t bear for Edward to kill a person - even a person like that - in her name. I think she argued passionately for him to let Charles live because she couldn’t have lived with the guilt if Edward had killed him. She feared that it would be a mark on Edward’s soul and she would look at Edward and see the sin and see the man she hated. I think this argument was pretty passionate. Once Carlisle knew the extent of what Charles had done I believe he sided reluctantly with Edward for a while and agreed that Charles did not deserve to live, although deep down Carlisle wanted to exact revenge for the horrors committed against the woman he loved. After Esme pointed out (passionately, emotionally) that they were trying to control her and make decisions for her just like Charles had done, Carlisle backed off and allowed his mind to be changed and he joined Esme in asking Edward not to go against her wishes.

Once he got back from his travels as feminist vigilante legend, a trip during which Charles was his first ever victim, I think Esme was so overwhelmed to have him home that she didn’t even care about Charles. Edward justified himself pretty quickly by saying that he would have gone on this spree anyway and committed all these murders, so he was just one in many, and that was good enough for Esme tbf, and it allowed her to move on finally.

Sorry, this got really long and rambly but I hope it made sense! Thank you again for asking!

#anon #ask #this new life #headcanon #ellie writes

47 notes · View notes