#hes gonna fucking reject redemption so hard

[no1whippedcreamenjoyer]

We got Shadow Milk Crash Out Tomorrow how we feelin?

[writers-hes]

i need you (2 of 2) | c. berzatto x reader

It was good when you started but Carmen Berzatto had the ability to make anyone fall in love with him no matter how much you tried not to...maybe this time he feels the same? (friends with benefits!carmen, smut, mndi!!!, unprotected p in v, smut! smut!, angst!! fluff, maybe some bad words, canon typical themes, unedited)

PART ONE / navigation

Sorry for the things I said. 

I appreciate you. 

He erases the messages that he wanted to send. It was tempting…

The flowers he let die mocks him by the stove. It was a fire hazard he knew; but if this room burned down, would you come over to check if he was doing well? 

His eyes look ahead, empty. Ever since that incident in the kitchen weeks ago, the Chefs have been on edge. Who wouldn’t be? He was cutting away those vegetables like he just didn’t cut his hand. He decided to forget about you…for now. But it was hard, considering the fact that your artwork hung in The Bear like a mantlepiece. A mantlepiece for others but he sees it like a crufix and he, a sinner with no redemption. It mocks him of his mistakes…of what he said. Everything seemd to mock him. 

Ever since that bloody incident in the kitchen a few days ago, Carmy made sure to never commit a mistake again. Every second counts, every second counts…every second he counted was spent on you. 

Were you alright? Were you in Chicago? Did you still need him? Or were you alright since he's finally out of your life?

You’re so fucking miserable. 

It rang in his head because he knew that it was true. He was—is miserable. He made everyone around him just as miserable as he was. He could never grasp the intensity of his feelings; could never seem to grasp anything. He thinks to himself to just fuck it all and go to you and grovel…but he just couldn’t. He knew he wanted more. He was well aware of his feelings for you but to think that he made a mess of everything that he could ever have was hard to swallow. 

Carmy has the habit of hiding from his allies. He can’t control his emotions but sometimes, he bides his time hoping to fix it. He tries to wait for the perfect time to fix what he burned but…it’s been too long since you last saw each other. It’s been too long since he sent you a message.

Would you still love me? 

You weren’t doing any better. Carmen, despite his refusal to love, was warm. He’s the sun shining on a cold winter day; the warmth that spreads all over your body from the kiss that he leaves on your shoulder. You missed him dearly, but you couldn’t have it in you to reach out first when it was him who didn’t love you. 

The realization of Carmen not loving you back was bearable at first but to see it right in front of your eyes…to be on the receiving end of his rejection was more than what you could comprehend. 

In a span of those months without Carmen, you felt…like there was a gaping Carmen Berzatto-shaped hole inside your heart that only he could fix. You’ve been in and out of Chicago to forget about him, but you couldn’t. At the end of the day, you were just as miserable as when you first realized that you'd fallen for him. Was it asking for too much when you asked him to still be your friend? The more he pushed you away, the more you were convinced that you didn’t matter to him at all. 

Is it too late for me to love you? 

You’ve been surrounding yourself with work; painting in your studio for what felt like years until you were sure that your fingers were gonna fall off.

If walls could talk, they’d tell the world of Carmen Berzatto. 

You’ve been purging yourself of anything Carmy and you found yourself painting every single food he’s ever made for you. It was all that you could do to relieve yourself of the sobs that choked you at night; when you didn’t want to acknowledge that the man you loved didn’t love you back. You should have been fine—you were expecting this. You were anticipating this but you still wondered what it would be like to be loved by him. You still wondered what it would feel like to hold his hand in the streets of Chicago. You wondered how his hand would feel on your knee while he drives back home. You wondered what it felt like to be loved by him. 

-

You were meeting some art collector today—he seems to be keen on commissioning you for your work and you accepted. He was supposed to arrive in Chicago to meet you and to try a new restaurant that everyone’s been raving about. He said that he already had a reservation for three but he couldn’t go and told you to meet with his art consultant, Isaac on his stead.  

You should’ve known from the context clues that you’ll be landing in a place you didn’t want to go to. You should’ve been smarter because maybe, if you did, you wouldn’t be sitting at The Bear, waiting for your frozen grapes and bone broth. Surprise was one word to describe Natalie’s face when she saw you. 

“So, how did you realize you wanted to pursue art?” 

“Oh,” you licked your lips. “I guess, I wanted to pursue it all my life. It was something that I was good at and…and I can’t really cook well. I liked how food was presented and how empty dinner plates look sometimes, you know. It didn’t take long for me to collaborate with chefs and restaurants and…”

“Is that your piece?” Isaac asked. “I’m sorry, I just—wow. Do you think the manager will let me come nearer to inspect it?”

You smiled at him. 

“Um, yeah.” you nod. Richie comes by and stops by your table.

“Good evening, guys,” he greets. “Y/N, it’s been a while.”

“Hey, Rich,” you waved.

“We’ll get you started with frozen grapes in a minute,” he says. “How’s your night? Didn’t know I’d find you here.”

“Oh, this is Isaac. Isaac, Richie.”

Isaac stands up to shake Richie’s hand.

“Do you want to go see the painting? It’s even more detailed up close,” Richie said, ushering Isaac to the painting. He throws you a look as if to ask for your permission but you just smiled at him. Your knee was bouncing under the table, trying to calm yourself down. Richie walks back to your table. 

“You know he’s not going to like that,”

“I’m in a business meeting,” you shrugged. “Isaac is an art consultant and his boss told us he couldn’t come. Do you need to see my text messages?”

“I know, I’m not fucking accusing you of anything. Don’t be defensive,” Richie says, putting his hands up in surrender.

“Sorry,” you mumbled. “But had I known that we were going here, I would’ve suggested another place. I don’t want to be here either.” Richie looks for the object of your focus, seeing your eyes zero in on the painting you gave to Carmen.

“We all love the painting. Carmy loves it. He looks at it every day before opening,” he offers but you only shrug. If he loved the painting so much, why didn’t he text you? “You should’ve thrown it at me instead of throwing it at the back. Could’ve earned thousands on that one,” you chuckled, telling him that it probably would. He sees Isaac come back to the table after marvelling at your painting. Richie smiles tightly and tells him that starters will be served shortly. 

-

“Yo, Y/N’s outside. We have to bring our A game!” Richie shouts in the kitchen. “Make her first time here an experience. Fak, make sure that the lamp over Y/N and Isaac isn’t too hot and then, ask if you could serve them some drinks.”

“Okay,” Fak nods, fixing his hair to make sure that he was presentable. It takes a bit for Carmy to register what Richie was saying and he blinks. 

“Wait, hold up. Cousin. Who’s here? Y/N…she’s here?” Carmy asked, taking the teapot of bone broth. “With…with who?”

“Isaac,” Richie replied, he was watching Carmy fix his hair and his uniform. What an asshole. 

“Carmy! Don’t fucking—go,” Sydney whispers the last part, looking pointedly at Richie once Carmy leaves with the fucking teapot. “Really, Richie? Tonight? You want to play fucking games tonight?” she asked. “Need I remind you of the bloody chopping board? Sweeps hasn’t removed the stains out yet,”

“What?” he shrugs. “Everyone’s been on edge since they stopped talking. It’s nice to take a breather,” Richie saw the realization dawn on Sydney’s face and he smirks. “Right, chefs! It will take Carmy two minutes to go do his alpha whatever fucking bullshit outside. That’s two minutes of easy time. I’ll need focaccia for Y/N’s table after the fucking grapes. Make sure that the dishes are warm, chefs! Every second counts,”

-

“Good evening,” he greets, a tight smile on his face. He catches the way your smile falls slowly into a frown. 

“Carmen,” you replied. 

“Finally had the time to visit,” he says. “With a date?”

“Ah, no,” you replied. “Isaac is my customer’s art consultant and he’s uh,”

“Here to make a deal,” Isaac replied. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Berzatto.”

“Here’s your broth with the-the grapes,” he says, shakily pouring it over the frozen grapes. “Hope you, uh, enjoy the evening, Y/N. Isaac,”

He turns to leave but pauses.

“Um, sorry, Y/N can I have a word with you?” he asked. “Please,”

You swallowed. “Um—“ 

Isaac saw your apprehension. “It’s okay. You’re friends…right? I’ll stay here,”

“Sure. I’ll take two minutes. I’m so sorry,” you apologized before letting him lead you to the kitchen. “Hi, guys. Sorry for interrupting,”

“It’s fine,” Richie says, smiling at you sweetly. 

“Carmy, we can talk later, okay? Your kitchen needs you,” you tried. You’ve been saying that to him even before your entrance to the kitchen, but he only shakes his head. 

“Just…two minutes,” he says. “Please,”

“Carmen…”

“Please,” he tried. He didn’t really want his staff to see him grovel even though he knew that this was bringing them some sort of a sadistic joy. 

“Sorry, everyone,” you forced out, but Sydney was actually thankful to get Carmen out of the kitchen for a few minutes. If it was possible, Carmy was even more unreasonable. His standards were tip top. A second too long was a second too much. He and Sydney have been screaming at each other every night; the volume of their voices louder by the second. 

You followed him into the office, being reminded of the hurtful words you’ve said to each other. He locks the door, and runs a hand over his face.

“What…what are you doing here?” he scowls. 

“I’m a paying customer. I can go wherever I want,”

“With him? What are you doing here with him?” he asked, hands on his waist to show his impatience. You decided to make him wait and he does, urging you to answer by raising his eyebrows. 

“I don’t think it matters to you,” you replied. “I can go eat wherever I want. I can afford it,”

“I’m-I’m not saying that you can’t. Just-just tell me why here?”

“Why are you so bothered? You can’t question every guy you see me with, Carm,” you reasoned out. “You told me you didn’t love me. I don’t think it’s necessary for you to still know where I go and who I spend time with.” He flinches at your tone. You’ve never talked to him like that before. You were always so gentle. So, for you to disregard him and not even give a reason why, an icy glare thrown his way…was mean.

“I can kick you out,” he spits. You scowl at him; he’s never been the subject of your anger and right now, you were seething. 

“So, kick me out,” you challenged him, meeting his eyes with the dort of ferocity that he never expected from you. He stays silent, looking at the floor. He didn’t want you to hate him more than you already do. “I thought so,”

-

Urgent and demanding raps on your door broke you from your reviere. You liked painting in silence; it soothes you from the loudness of the world outside. You sighed, knowing immediately who was on the other side. Your breath was shaky, and you tried to walk slowly towards the door. What would you even say to him? 

Carmy was a jittering mess on the other side. He couldn’t get you out of his head ever since you visited The Bear a few days ago. He was watching from the other side after service, seeing you laugh at whatever Isaac said. He was making you laugh when that was reserved to Carmen alone…months ago before he ruined everything he ever wanted. He waits with bated breath as you open the door. He used to be able to just come inside your house whenever he wanted. You used to wait for him with a small smile on your face. It is all gone now. You looked tired; like you didn’t want him there at all. 

“Can I come in?” he asked but he didn’t miss the way you shielded your body with the door. He didn’t miss the way your eyebrows furrowed slightly. 

“Sure.” Sure. Like you didn’t have any other choice but to deal with him right now. Sure. 

“Thanks,” he licks his lips, putting his shoes on the side like he used to. Your home was clean but it was devoid of anything. The lights were barely on and the music that used to play from your vinyl was nowhere to be heard. Carmy used to tease you for being pretentious. It’s too quiet inside your house right now.

“Do you want anything? Water?”

“No, thanks,” he says, and you nod. “I’m…I just—I don’t know why I’m here,”

“I see,” you replied, looking anywhere but at him. “Can I help you?”

“Um—who-who were you with the other day?”

“You can’t just…question or decide to drop by when you see me with someone else, Carm,” you said, voice low and careful. “He was an art consultant,”

“Why?” he asked, his eyes inviting you to look at him but you wouldn’t budge. He knew why. He knew that he was an art consultant but something inside Carmy was telling him that the planning had been deliberate and that you went there with malice. To spite him…make him jealous…it was narcissistic but what if?

“Because…because you don’t love me,” you chuckled. There was something funny about not being loved back by a person who used to come to you at the smallest inconvenience. “You don’t love me but the first thing you do is to freak out. It was a work meeting and you freaked out. You don’t love me, Carmy,”

“How many times will-will you hold that over me?” he asked, frowning. “Why are you acting like-like I did something wrong? You can’t control how I feel, Y/N! Give it up!” 

“Because I can and I want to, Carmen!” you exclaimed, chest heaving. Your throat constricted at his rejection. This was the second time. “I can and I want to hold that over you because I’m hurt. I am hurt. You hurt me. You toss me away to the side and-and you expect me to be forgiving. You expect me to just understand,” 

“You have to accept that I…don’t—that I don’t love you that way,” he whispers, and it just breaks your heart because he still couldn’t get it. 

“I’m not asking you to love me back,” you croak, your eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to tell you how to feel—or what to feel but you didn’t even text me. You didn’t ask me how I was doing…or -or said hi to me. You—you…I don’t know. You just stopped.”

“Why didn’t you text me first?”

“Because I told you how much you mattered to me. I told you that I love you. I thought that if I didn’t text you, you'd miss me and…God, Carmen. I would have been fine if you didn’t love me back. It would have been fucking dandy. It would have been great if you could have just…treated me like a—like a friend, you know? I still would’ve been there for you…but you shut me out! You showed me just how little I mattered to you, Carm. Did you know that…? You—you treat me like how you treat everyone else when you’re the one who needs me. ”

“You do—you matter to me…”

“Actions speak louder than words,” you spat, your arms crossed over your chest. “You only text me first when you want a quick fuck. I’m free tonight? Want to go? You can’t even say that you want to have sex with me,”

Carmen was at a loss for words. He was hurt that you’d think that way of him when he thought the world of you. Did you really think that you’d matter to Carmen just because he wanted to fuck you?

“Hey, don’t-don’t do that. That isn’t fair to me. You know that-that you mean more to me than that. You’re being unfair,”

“Unfair,” you chuckled, shaking your head. “I’m being unfair when you’re the one inside my home after seeing me with a guy that I am working with.”

“It’s my fucking restaurant! It’s my goddamn restaurant,” he exclaimed, running his hand over his golden hair that you loved so much. “It’s my fucking goddamn restaurant!”

“And I’m fucking telling you that I can do whatever I want!” you retorted, matching the intensity of his voice. “Why do you care, Carmen?” you spit.

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“Like what? Carm? Carmy? Bear? Carmen…Anthony…Berzatto?” you taunt, the same venom dripping from your voice. He just never heard it from you before and it was an unpleasant feeling. “I’m not…I’m not going to let you push me around just because I love you, Carmy,” you shook your head. 

Carmy stares at you, his face pinched in frustration and in sadness. He looks away, swallowing. He presses his hand over his chest to ground him. He didn’t know if he should be mad at you for making him feel this way. Like he needs you all the time to be alright. He didn’t know if he should be angry at himself for letting you lure him into your trap and your promises of warmth and love and…contentment. All this time, he tried to convince himself that he didn’t need anyone much less you for that matter. 

“Say something,” you urged, looking at him desperately but he just shakes his head. You could feel it—feel him detach himself from you. You could feel him cower, hide his feelings…the real reason why he was knocking on your door in the first place.  “Fucking say something, Carm! Tell me why you’re here,” 

He just stands there unmoving, blinking back any emotion. He wanted to store everything in his brain. He didn’t want to feel anymore…he didn’t… 

“Fucking hell,” you whispered shakily. “I don’t know what you want from me…but I can’t go on like-like this! I can’t open the door for you every time you knock. I can’t answer every time you call…just…please, Carmy. Fucking say something.” 

Still, he stays silent. 

A sardonic chuckle escapes your lips. 

“Leave when you want to, I don’t give a shit. Just…just don’t come inside my fucking studio, Carmen. I was expecting you to apologize to tell me that you still want to be friends…I guess I thought I mattered to you more than that,” you told him, walking away. He just watches you go to your studio, hearing the sounds of your materials being thrown in different directions. It doesn’t make him flinch; he just watches the fire burn.

It’s time to go. 

-

Carmen has been living in autopilot since his last visit. It was probably jealousy that prompted him to act like a jagoff but he wasn’t ready to admit that. Instead, he was harder on himself, beating himself up over the smallest things—if a dice wasn’t precise, it wasn’t good enough. Food out for a second too long was cold. It was like reliving New York but he was the perpetrator. He was the one pushing his boundaries until he hated what he was doing and Carmy admits, it was not healthy. 

But what else could he do? Cooking was the only thing he was good at and there was nothing else to do other than work. 

That was a lie. 

He sometimes spent hours rereading the messages you sent him. You’d always text him to have a good day…a funny photo that reminded you of him…

He smiles at some of them, but it’s quickly replaced by the frown that etches on his face because he will never receive these messages from you. Isaac probably fucking does though. He grips his phone tightly in his hands; he hates that thought. He looks at his phone blankly, the message from you illuminating his face blue. 

parm4carm? carmyggiano reggiano? carmensan hahahahahaha i’m at a meeting and i want to laugh because i’m thinking of things to add to your name

He didn’t remember replying but he did remember the small satisfaction that the message brought him all day. You were thinking of him and you were trying to make him laugh; he tried his best to stop himself from smiling but Richie noticed it immediately. 

“What the fuck are you smiling about?” he asked him but Carmy only flipped him off, turning around to stop Richie from seeing him. 

He sighs. It’s not like what you had wasn’t fun. In fact, he was quite sure that it was the somewhat-only healthy relationship that he has. You both gave wach other space, you talked things through. When he started dating Claire, he went to your apartment first to tell you about her. You shrugged it off, not really minding who Carmy dated back then. When he apologized for not inviting you to the opening despite multiple protests from Richie and Sydney, you understood. When he stopped responding for a week, you showed up to his door with a pack of his favorite cigarettes and a box of doughnuts. 

Looking back, did he ever do anything for you?

“Carmy, you good?” Sugar asked. He was more standoffish; he smokes more, and he doesn’t speak much. It’s always only a grunt or a “yeah yeah.”

“Oh,” Carmy says, blinking. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“Carmy…” Sugar tries. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” he nods. “I…I’m just thinking, you know? Like-like, I fuck everything up and-and I’m aware of it,” he says. “I know that what I’m doing isn’t right but…you know, I-I always have this dream of a fire…and I just watch it burn…” 

Sugar nods, trying to coax out the lump in Carmy’s throat.

“I wonder if I just don’t speak…will they understand me? I can’t fuck things up again just because I have no cell reception. What if that happens again?” he asked, frowning. “Fuck,”

“Do you think she’s distracting? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,”

“But I…I want to,” he says, his hand pressed on his chest. “I want to, Nat but I can’t,”

“You’re a pain in the ass, Carmy. Go talk to the girl,” she smiles and Carmy could only nod because maybe Nat was right. If he could just…talk to you without jumping on your throat and without blinking, there like a fucking idiot. 

That’s an easy job, right? 

-

“I’ve been thinking about-about us, and I just want to say that I’m sorry and that I…Fuck!” 

He was walking like a madman inside his apartment, on the verge of texting you about how Isaac chewed with his mouth open. You told him you hated people who chewed with their mouths open—loud and wet. He saw your favorite cereal on sale the other day. He almost wanted to ask you if you were aware that it was marked down. Should he get you a few boxes? What about three? He just wanted to know. Would you…would you come over if he let his kitchen burn? Would you come over if you saw the dead flowers that dried up because he couldn’t find it in himself to throw them away. It was the last piece of evidence that he wanted to go. Would you even accept his dead flowers now that your name was on every art forum? You probably like cereal and milk with fucking gold leaves and fig.

He knows that you didn’t like it when he looked sad but when he visited you, did you notice the way his shoulders slumped? Because he noticed the shallowness of your breathing, the taps on the floor, the pause before you opened the door for him. He noticed the way you blinked back the tears that he threatened to spill because he was cruel. He knew…he knew that he was cruel but would you still forgive him if he ran up to you now?

The cereal you like is marked down at the store. Do you want some? 

The vibration in your pocket stops you from talking to the guy who just offered to buy you your coffee. 

“Sorry,” you smiled sheepishly. “Let me just…get this,” 

Your hands slightly trembled when you saw the message that Carmy just sent. It was an odd olive branch but what if you were looking into things again? What if he was just trying to have sex again? 

I’m sorry for the things that I said. 

Can we talk? 

“Hey, hey,” the guy says. You didn’t even know his name. “Are you alright?”

“Uh? Yeah, no-yeah, I am. Sorry,” you replied, locking your phone and putting it in the back pocket. “What was it?”

“Oh, I was wondering if-if you want coffee?”

“I…already ordered, though,” you replied. “Advanced order and I’m just waiting…”

The guy’s face falls, and you smile timidly. 

“Sorry,” you offered. 

“No, that's fine,” he shrugs. “I should’ve known or something,”

“No, thanks. Um, yeah…”

The barista calls for your name on the counter and you smile at him before leaving. You rushed out of the café without another word, coffee in your hand and Carmen’s message in your backpocket. 

The Read label was putting Carmen in a spiral. You read the message twelve fucking minutes ago, why weren’t you replying? He was popping the joints on his knuckles, watching the phone closely until you replied. 

what time do you close? 

can we go to your apartment instead?

He lets go of a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He texts you to just enter the apartment since you still have the keys, completely forgetting about the flowers near his stove.

-

When you entered his apartment, you were greeted with the bareness of it all, save for the dried flowers on the stove. You frowned, walking towards it. Carmy didn’t need flowers… Besides, this was a fire hazard. Was he okay?

You turned over the card attached and took a sharp breath. 

Let it rip. I’m so proud of you. 

Love, Carm

Was this deliberate? Did he plan this all out to get you to forgive him? You turned away, trying to forget the note that he was meant to give you. You sat on his couch instead, settling on the corner and flipping through the channels on his cable. You wanted something to fill the silence so that when he comes, you wouldn’t have to try to make up for it by saying something stupid like the weather in Chicago. 

You settled on some reality show, looking at the screen with your eyes glazed over when you heard someone mess with the lock. You looked over, watching Carmy in his grey sweater. He tossed the backpack to the side and his shoes were laying somewhere. You saw this scene before—multiple times but the undertone was different. 

“Hi,”

“Hey,”

“Um—“

“I hope you…you don’t mind me watching—“

Carmy’s eyes flicks to the stove and realization dawns on his face. 

“Fuck, fuck. Sorry—you, ah, weren’t supposed to…” he puts the flowers in the cupboard hastily, some leaves falling. “See that,”

“Yeah—“

“Um, I’ll just…”

“Yeah,”

He nods, blinking, before stalking to his bedroom. He locks the door behind him and heaves. Fuck. He shakes his head entering the bathroom to wash the day away. 

You couldn't focus anymore. Why was he so ashamed of the flowers he got you? You swallow the thickness down your throat. Were you intruding if you got yourself a glass of water? Carmy goes out of the bedroom a few minutes later, fresh and clean. He looks at you and heads to the kitchen. You don’t move.

He comes back with a glass of water for you, laying it down on the coffee table and then sitting beside you—as far as he could because he didn’t know where you stood right now. What boundaries can he cross?

“Thanks,” you smiled at him, taking a huge gulp of the cold water. “Um…”

“Shit—I don't know what to say,” he says, folding his hands on his lap.

“We can…we can start with what we said,” you replied slowly. “I…”

“I’m sorry,”

“Carm—“

“I’m sorry. I didn’t take-I didn’t take your feelings into consideration and I…I hurt you,” he says, looking down. You were both sitting straight ahead, the TV illuminating your faces. It felt like a thick wall was between you two and that it was up to you to break it. “I just…I don’t know. I can’t keep on doing shitty things and then-then, feeling bad about myself but I…I spent my life trying to-to understand mom and Mi—key,” he chokes. “I guess I don’t want to understand anyone else anymore because I wouldn’t be able to but I—but you’re not anyone else.” 

“I fucked up,” he says. “When I was with Claire…I was locked in the fucking freezer because I had no cell reception. I don’t want that…but I don’t—“

“What do you want, Carm?” you asked. 

“I want to—I want…I,”

“I’m sorry for calling you miserable and unreliable,” you told him. “I was hurt and I’m sorry for uh, holding things over you. It’s not your fault that I caught feelings. It wasn’t fair to just…expect you to…love me, you know? Wasn’t fair,”

“No, I was a shitty friend. I shouldn’t have let you go like that,”

“Yeah,” you nod. You heard him shift in his seat, legs crossed over each other and facing you. You glanced and did the same. 

“I got you your cereal,” A small smile. 

��Yeah?” A beat.

“Like four boxes.” 

“I’ll be sick of them,” you teased.

“I know but maybe you’d hate that instead,” A confession. 

“I don’t hate you…” 

“You don’t?” he asked. “Why…I’m really sorry. I don’t want to…I’m really fucking sorry,”

“What do you want, Carm?” you asked, a brave hand on his knee. “Tell me what you want,”

“Please,”

“And we’ll make it work,”

“I want everything. But I…I don’t…It’s funny. A fridge started Claire and I’s relationship. A fridge ended it too. I’m sorry for bringing her up…but I never felt like I was deserving of…of happiness and I,” he blinks, eyes pinching at the bitterness of every word that rolled off his tongue. “Who the fuck said I could be in a relationship? I am the best because I was focused and I…I had cell reception and I didn’t have the bullshit of understanding feelings. I don’t need amusement or enjoyment…I…no amount of good was worth it, you know? I thought-thought that it was a complete waste of my fucking time but I crave for it,”

“And…I don’t know. I failed them and I…I don’t—“ he heaves. He has to let it all out if he wanted to make things right. “I’m scared that if I…jump in, you know? I fuck everything up again. My staff hates me, I hate me, and you…you hate me too. I don’t want to lose cell reception and I…I don’t need enjoyment but I need you. I need you with me all the time but what if you get—sick of me and push me away like Mikey did? What if…what if you learn to hate me? I need you and I don’t know if I can handle it if we—if we just stopped talking and I did. I stopped talking to you because it would have hurt me more if you decided to end things like that…I’m sorry,”

“I’m just…I fuck up everything that I touch, and I know that I’m miserable and I’m so fucking sorry that I hurt you. I’ll take that with me to the grave. I’m so fucking sorry,” he says, a hand pressed on his chest, like he was protecting it. The barrier that you had to strike down. A gentle hand takes his, interlacing your fingers with his calloused ones. It makes him flinch, but he accepts the gesture. 

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” you smiled and Carmy could just cry because it was the same thing that Claire had told him. What was the guarantee that it was different this time? “But Carmy, you have to understand that I…I don’t want to hurt you or-or distract you from being the best. I want you to be the best…”

“Is the best…enough?” he asks. “If I lose you?” 

“That’s a question you have to answer for yourself, Carm,” you offered. “I’m selfish. I can’t—I don’t want to be the reason why you learn to hate me just because I told you to choose me and I don’t want you to choose. I want you to…be the best and be—be…”

“I need you,”

“I know but I…” I want you to love me. 

“I touch everything and I burn everything…Richie and I…I feel so bad about the things I said to him and I fucking hate that I can’t control anything. My life is so fucked up and I—“ he stops, looking at you for the first time that night. “I just wish to just let the everything burn and then it will all go away but I need you to watch it burn with me,”

He still hasn’t said what you wanted to hear from him. He still hasn’t said anything. 

“I love you,”

You stop your breathing. 

“Carm—don’t say that just for the sake of saying it,” you begged, pulling him away from him and standing up. “Don’t say that if you don’t-don’t mean it…you're just being mean,”

“I do,”

“Carmy,” you whispered. “You didn’t love me months ago. What made you love me now?” you asked. “I’m not invalidating your feelings or-or whatever but I need you to understand that I’ve been loving you for months. I loved you after you broke up with Claire and we drank wine many months ago, but you didn’t…do you love me because you need me?”

“No!” he says. “I love you and I need you. I’ve been—harboring these feelings but I can’t…I can’t say anything and I’m so, so scared that if I don’t say anything now, then everything will just be a big fucking shit show and then, I’ll lose you forever. I’m so scared because what if we don’t work and-and you decide that I do make you miserable? What then?”

“What if we work out?” 

“That’s worse because then I’d know that I’ve been holding myself back for nothing,”

“I’m confused, Carm. What do you want?” you asked, shaking your head.

“You and I…together,” he replied. “Only if you want to. I don’t want to make you feel like-like I’m,”

“Can you say that again?”

“What?”

“What do you feel for me,” you begged. “I’ve been…I’ve been waiting months for you to tell me those words and I just have to make sure that I—that I’m hearing you correctly,”

“I love you,” he says. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he repeats the same words over and over again and you feel your eyes brim with tears because this is what you wanted—this is what you’ve always wanted to hear. He stands up and walks over to you, covering his arms around your frame. “I’m sorry for making you feel like I didn’t,”

“Carmy…” you trailed off. “I’m sorry for the things that I said,”

“I’m sorry too,” he says. “But it’s okay…consider everything forgotten,” he kisses your temple and checks on you. “We’re okay, baby. We’re okay,”

“I missed you,”

“I missed you too,” he says, ducking his head so his lips could meet yours. “I miss you,” he mumbles, cradling your head with his two hands. He kisses you fervently, like he was thirsty and you were the fountain of life. “Mm,”

“Carm…” you whine when he lets you go. You push him to the couch, his legs open wide as he watches you. “I want to show you how much I missed you,”

“Yeah?” he rasps, tapping his lap. “Come here, baby,”

You nod, watching his chest rise and fall in anticipation. You settle yourself on his lap, legs on either side. His hands immediately find your waist, clutching your body through the soft material of your shirt. You tug on his shirt to bring him closer to you, kissing him slowly. Your hands find themselves tugging on his hair, your hips rocking softly against his clothed crotch. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, hips meeting your subconsciously and you giggle at his anticipation. 

“Carm!” you chuckled, lips trailing down to his jaw. He likes that you never fail to leave love bites where everyone can see. He sighs deeply when you suck on the spot he liked so much. You could feel him harden under his joggers, itching for release. When you are done, you smile at him, pecking him on the lips before removing his shirt completely. He sucks in a breath when your soft hands run over his chest. “I missed you,”

“I missed you too,” he rasps, tugging on your shirt. You oblige, removing the piece of clothing entirely. His mouth waters at the sight of your naked torso. You rub your heat against his cock, the both of you moaning because of the pleasurable friction. It was slow and deliberate at first but you were soon mewling, his mouth on yours. His tongue pushes past against your lips, swirling with one another. “Remove everything, please—“

You nod, standing in front of him to strip yourselves of what remained between the two of you. Carmy, runs his hand on your waist, looking up at you with need. You run your hands through his hair while you let him kiss every part of your body that he could kiss. You sigh at the contact of his warm lips against your body, settling yourself back on his lap but this time, with less restraint. His hand immediately finds your cunt, fingers working to flick your clit. You whimpered when you felt his fingers prod your entrance.

“Yeah,” he nods. “Fuck yourself with my hand,”

“Carm,” you whine, bouncing slightly. Your hand finds the tip of his cock and his hips jerks, at the contact. 

“You’re so fucking perfect,” he says, looking up at you with his eyes half-lidded. He removes his fingers inside you and sucks on them. “You always taste so sweet,”

You couldn’t choke out any reply. So instead, you put your hands on either of his shoulders, slowly sinking on his cock. 

“Fuuuuck,” he says, his head falling on the sofa. “Fuck,”

“Carmy,” you said, rolling your hips against his own slowly. “You’re so—“

“Good,” he says, watching his member disappear inside you completely. He could feel your wetness on his thighs, and it kills him. “I’m gonna make you mine,” he says, pinching your nipple.

“Carmy!”

“You like it?” he asked, his head inching closer. He flicks his tongue over the sensitive bud while you ride him. He bites on it and you flinch. He feels your walls clench around him when he does that, so he tries it on your other nipple. 

“Carm,” you whined, “Fuck—“

The moans that emitted from his mouth vibrated on your chest. He was continuously sucking and licking your nipple, pinching and twisting it with his rough hands while you gyrated against him. His cock fills you up differently and you let his hips thrust upwards, hitting a certain soot inside of you. 

He gives up the need to control, letting you part away from him. You stand up, repositioning yourself to finally—

“Fuck!” he groans, not expecting the sudden feeling of your tight, wet walls wrapping his girth. The tip was just teasing your wntrance a few second ago. His head falls back, arms wrapped around your waist while you bounce on his cock. “Fuck, fuck,”

“Carmy…” you moan. “Kiss me,”

He does what was told, capturing your lips with his. His tongue parts your already open mouth, his arms snaking around gour waist to keep you closer. You whimper, hands holding either side of his neck and you grip slightly.

“Mm,” he groans, breaking away from you. Your pace was speeding up, the sound of skin slapping against skin filling his apartment. “Fuck,”

You smiled at him, constricting his airways a little tighter. 

“I’m so—fuck—oh,” he chokes out. His hips stutter against you, cock filling you up completely and he feels your walls clench around him. “close.”

“Baby, baby, baby…” he sighs, the pressure too much for him. “I’ll make you mine. I’ll make you mine,” 

“I love you,” you mewled, head falling when he plays with your sensitive buds again. “I want to be yours, Carm,”

He meets your wet pussy with his cock in sloppy thrusts. Your bodies were moving in motion, desperate for that release—that closeness after months of being away from each other. Carmy was holding you so close, grunting and groaning under you. 

“Fuck, I fucking love—oh,” his voice breaks and he comes undone. Your walls clench around his gushing member, thrusting inside to chase your high. Your movements slow down, his head on your shoulder. A beat passes with heavy breathing. He peeks. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” you nod, removing yourself from him. “Are you?”

He nods, pushing your hair away from your face. 

“I love you, you know that?”

“Yeah,”

“Let’s get you cleaned up. What do you want for breakfast tomorrow?”

“I think cereal’s good.”

-

A/N: First and foremost, I’d like to thank you guys for the overwhelming love and support that you showed in chapter one. Your comments and reblogs all motivated me to write chapter 2 the best that I can and I hope that you love this chapter as much as the previous one. As always, don’t forget to comment or reblog your thoughts! I’d love to know what you thought about this one.

TAGLIST: @kpopgirlbtssvt@morgthemagpie@hal3ynicol3@1800-queen-trash @ummvengers @thottywizard

TELL ME YOU NEED ME TAGLIST: @hanula18 @globetrotter28 @trashcanfullofdork @carmens-berzattos @se0kie @saturnheart @akila-twt @mashadanki @ayoedibiris-letterboxd @quicksilversg1rl @docmerlock @notalxx

[dinsbeskar]

*HIGH PITCHED DOLPHIN NOISES*

*KLAXONS AND SIEGE HORNS*

*HORNY EDM PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND*

Babe. I have so many feelings. I copy-pasted so many lines, holy shit. This was just gorgeous, just insanely beautiful, I can't, it's so good. I'm gonna try though.

You watched Varda situate the stars in the heavens above Arda as if they were jewels and you were the one setting them alight with the fire burning within you for they could lighten up the firmament. You were responsible for the treacherous element that the fire was – useful in many ways but also dangerous if not used correctly or with malicious intent.

GORGEOUS

I absolutely love her being the Mother of Flames, oh it's perfect!!! Bc of course Aulë would be drawn to her, and Mairon as a result. Morgoth doesn't know he's got a good thing there smh

Aulë The Smith began to court you as he watched you set the stars on fire. He was dreaming of how perfectly you two would go together if you were to fuel the fire inside his forge – the source of all his creation would come from you.

The source of his creation, fucking hell I love this concept!! Perfect

What a source of inspiration you were for Mairon, though. The same way others worshipped Varda, Mairon worshipped you. Everytime he stared at the fire inside the forge, your image was all he could think of as the thought of you lingered in his mind constantly. You were long gone from Arda after eloping with Melkor but he hoped it was not yet over, that he would see you again. In the early days, when his spirit was still pure, he often fantasised about you being taken back by the Valar and forgiven by them, so he could build altars for you amongst the kins that would yet awake to inhabit Arda.

Oh god this is gorgeous

The yearning???? The devotion???? Building altars for his goddess??? Give me everything!!!

Some of his bolder daydreams were about another form of punishment for you – he would have you humbled in the name of redemption, bound to a lowly Maia. He meant himself, of course. He imagined the Mother of Flames becoming the source of his creation, fueling the fire within his forge and watching over his craft as his very own wife. He wondered how jealous Aulë would be then and how humiliated you would be, yet he was certain he could make you happy and fix the malice of your spirit with his undying love and endless devotion.

Oooooooooh I love this though!! Even as a pure uncorrupted spirit, he's still coveting the woman who was supposed to be his master's wife, ooof I love it!!

In his greatness, he dwelt in solitude and his mind remained ungraspable for you. He would rarely let you inside to allow you to see the world the way he perceived it. Though he desired you, it was not as an equal, neither as companion nor as lover. And even in his desire, there was contempt, too, because as Varda’s sister you were a reminder of her rejection, which still lingered within your husband as a wound unhealed. And your beauty, your power, your holiness… They were nothing but pale echoes of your sister’s qualities; faint reflections of her no matter how hard you tried. And each one of your failures to meet Melkor’s towering expectations was met with your husband’s wrath.

Fuck this guy!!! Morgoth is the worst!!!!! Lmfao nothing like being in your sister's shadow, especially in the eyes of your evil husband

Alone in his presence you felt belittled and humbled. But by his side before others, you were exalted and invincible – cloaked in the might of his dominion – and that illusion of power became intoxicating. For allowing you to get sedated with such greatness was enough to worship him like he was Eru himself and out of all your offerings, he loved that devotion the most about you.

"Cloaked in the might of his domination"

This is poetry!!! Absolutely amazing turn of phrase

When Mairon came to your husband’s service, you sensed immediately the amount of his worship and devotion towards you. You sometimes wondered if the Maia joined Melkor for him and his power or were you the real reason for his spirit’s betrayal. His devotion amused you but you offered him no kindness as his yearning for your favour was met with cold indifference. Even though he was desperate for more of it, he should know better and be grateful for your rejection. Because if Melkor would realise the true nature of Mairon’s feelings, he would not go easy on him and his wrath would be merciless. 

Ooooooh it's so juicy!!! So she's sparing him Morgoth's wrath, but she also won't sink to his level, but she is amused by him, I just love the layers 🤌

Sometimes you wondered how it was possible that Melkor could not sense Mairon’s admiration for you. Perhaps he thought of it as something innocent – something expected from his servants to feel towards his Queen. Perhaps he thought of it as silly and pathetic, unworthy of his attention, because he knew you would never humiliate yourself to betray him for a servant.

Or perhaps your husband cared about you even less than you suspected.

Ooof the last sentence!! Ouch!!!

I do think it's more like, these two would never betray me bc they know what would happen, I have no need to worry

But ouch

Mairon was the one who took all the responsibilities upon his shoulders and while committing to his duties, he would always emphasise he was fulfilling them in your name. Forever a servant he would remain. 

God we love a dutiful husband (I know they're not married but uhhhhh it's my fave Sauron lmfao)

Your wish, however, was to go much further away and Mairon knew about it, which was worrying him. He was trying his best – nearly desperately – to reunite your husband’s armies and dark creatures of the shadows, to become their leader and build a realm for you to rule over. To become worthy of you.

Oh godddddddd "to become worthy of you" it's giving dutiful husband!!! (Dutiful wanted to autocorrect to pitiful, which is an amusing Freudian slip, bc he is both and we love him for it)

He swallowed thickly out of fear but his eyes remained soft, filled with nothing but pure admiration. In Melkor’s eyes you had been Varda’s unworthy shadow. Perhaps no one had ever perceived you with such devotion as Mairon.

I started not breathing here, goddddd I love this

“I shall build you altars in my realm; in every village, every town, every city. And in the capital of my kingdom where I will reside, I shall build a temple where you can find your peace,” he breathed out. “Just, please, do not abandon me.”

DO NOT ABANDON ME

NEVER, KING, NEVER

Holy shit this whole bit was gorgeous

“Come to me,” you ordered, harshly. You watched him trying to stand up slowly but you quickly stopped him. “On your hands and knees,” you explained.

THE WAY I GASPED

OKAY GO OFF QUEEN

Domming the hell out of him, we are here for it!!!

He cursed Eru himself for creating him as such a low spirit because this way he could never be worthy of you and to be able to walk by your side as your equal was all he had ever wanted.

Oh ouch oh no

Just wanna kiss him better lmfao, a hug would fix him!!

“Let it be then… Anything to be close to you, my Lady,” he cooed. “Please, allow me to touch you,” he begged as he moved even closer to your legs.

THE BEGGING, HOLY SHIT YES

However, he had never been so close to them. To you. He crawled up even closer as he planted soft and devoted kisses to your exposed skin. You had never known kisses like these because Melkor had been mostly devouring you, tormenting you, using you. 

Oh goddddddd

He's the first to show her that soft devoted affection, my heart hurts!!! The trauma!!!

Wicked thought it was for you were the most corrupted and fallen out of the female Valar and yet you doubted any of them were worshipped with such eagerness as you were now.

I fucking love this, she's still thinking of the other Valar and comparing herself 😂🤭

Pleasure without pain was an experience brand new for your flesh and you had to steady yourself as he watched in awe.

"He watched in awe" I am dying

"Pleasure without pain" Oh god she has suffered!!! He can fix her!!! Or make her 10 times worse!!! Let's find out!!!

Your body of a goddess allowed you to go on without breaks; a peak after peak as you shivered and trembled, caressing his head and meeting his hazy, devoted gaze once in a while to let him know he was doing good. Your praise meant everything to him for all he had always known was your husband’s reprimands. 

That's so sweet though???? It's the encouragement for me, bless his tiny black heart

“Do not fear me, sweet Mairon. I only want to see for myself if it is true that you have fallen and corrupted yourself so much with your devotion towards me that you have been gifted with desires of the flesh,” you smirked. “Or cursed with them,” you pointed out as your hands worked on his robes and the trousers underneath them swiftly and quickly.

A gift or a curse?? Let's find out!!!

I stopped copying after that, I was overwhelmed by the writing. holy shit that was so hot??? And beautifully written??? So gorgeous???

Sub!Sauron, my beloved, you wrote him so well, and her cruelty is perfect oh my lord

I can't wait to read part 2!!!

— HUMBLED (I)

PART TWO

PAIRING — Sauron x fem!Vala!Reader // Morgoth x fem!Vala!Reader

SUMMARY — Grown tired of living in your sister's shadow, you offered yourself to the one whom she had rejected once – Melkor. You regretted it quickly as he turned out to be a cruel lover and you became the very first subject of his twisted tortures meant to reshape one's spirit. In his eyes you were nothing by Varda's shadow but in the eyes of Mairon the Maia you have always been the only and the most holy goddess. When his master is gone, he can finally get close to you.

AUTHOR’S NOTE — I had two ideas for Sauron with Morgoth's ex and honestly? I will probably write one more because I like the other idea a lot, too. This fic is quite dark because of the nature of Reader's relationship with Morgoth. Not gonna lie, it was a challenge to write a Reader who is a literal Goddess but Sauron himself inspired me to explore this dynamic when he seemed to be so proud of the fact that it was a God himself torturing him... 👀 The Reader in this fic is a Vala (and Varda's sister but she remains undescribed as well), so she changes her appearance like Sauron does but I am not describing any of her forms in any details. In the next part there will be some goo/blob!Sauron + Halbrand and in this part our favourite ginger loser makes his comeback! 🦊 Apparently, I can't write him as a dom... 😂 Well, surely not with someone who is so much above him. Huge thanks to @dinsbeskar once more because we were brainstorming about this idea together. ⭐ Special thanks to @olchr-1 as well! 💚 PS – I haven't described how Morgoth looks like either but I imagine him as a tall, black haired hottie like on the fanarts. 💀😂 There is also a slight mention of the Reader being originally promised to Aulë, which was inspired by the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite.

WARNINGS — Reader is evil (reshaped by Morgoth but not completely evil), domestic abuse (with Morgoth), mentions of Sauron and Reader being tortured by Morgoth, SMUT, sub!Sauron

WORD COUNT — 4,330

🔞 THIS FIC IS 18+ 🔞

ENGLISH IS MY SECOND LANGUAGE.

HUMBLED (I)

The very first thing you remembered was beholding your sister Varda being crowned one of the mightiest of the Valier and Queen of the Valar, Queen of the Stars, a beauty beyond the description of Men and Elves. So pure to reject Melkor and marry his brother Manwë instead – King of the Valar.

You followed your sister nearly everywhere, hoping to bask in her light but it never seemed to be enough to make you feel warm. You were greedy – at first, you were jealous of her husband and insisted on her spending more time with you than with him, striving for all of her affection. Once you realised that it was a lost cause, you began to detest Manwë.

You watched Varda situate the stars in the heavens above Arda as if they were jewels and you were the one setting them alight with the fire burning within you for they could lighten up the firmament. You were responsible for the treacherous element that the fire was – useful in many ways but also dangerous if not used correctly or with malicious intent.

Aulë The Smith began to court you as he watched you set the stars on fire. He was dreaming of how perfectly you two would go together if you were to fuel the fire inside his forge – the source of all his creation would come from you.

Everyone, including your sister, was encouraging you to become his wife for his heart was of a noble kind. Your own heart remained unsure but you wished to marry as well instead of only watching Varda and Manwë sharing a bond you could only dream of. Aulë, however, was not who you were dreaming about.

It was Melkor that you were drawn to; Manwë’s powerful brother, the very same whom your sister had rejected once and he had grown to resent her. You were observing him often because he fascinated you and you probably were the only one amongst the Valar who understood him. You were outcasts, both of you, but you were better at hiding it.

He was sometimes observing you as well, from the corner of his eye. You could feel his gaze on you and you knew that he had to feel the same way you did – he could see the malice inside of your heart for his was the same.

Whenever you would spend time with Varda dancing in the flower fields, you could feel Melkor creeping in the shadows and watching. Of course, he was there for your sister but still, some of his gazes were reserved for you only.

Therefore, on the eve of your wedding to Aulë, you forsake the light and seeked the shadow as you sneaked out of the palace you lived in and you found yourself knocking upon Melkor’s doors. There was no fear inside of you, only pure determination.

And you knew you could never replace your sister; your power was a mere shadow of hers. Yet, you offered yourself to Melkor on that night and he took you in, claimed you as his own and made you his bride. Before dawn, together, you fled from Arda for some time, leaving behind sorrow and dismay.

Your sister was most grieved by your betrayal. Alongside her, Aulë descended into a state of melancholy until Manwë mentioned to him the possibility of courting Yavanna instead and The Fruit-Giver became his wife – that union became one of harmony and love unlike the one you would have with The Smith.

You always fascinated Mairon the most – (Y/N), Mother of Flames, Aulë’s lost love. As his disciple, Mairon observed you humbly before and he knew his master’s heart enough to know that Aulë would always feel bitter towards you. Yavanna was his love match but she could not fuel the fire inside his forge and become the source of his creation.

What a source of inspiration you were for Mairon, though. The same way others worshipped Varda, Mairon worshipped you. Everytime he stared at the fire inside the forge, your image was all he could think of as the thought of you lingered in his mind constantly. You were long gone from Arda after eloping with Melkor but he hoped it was not yet over, that he would see you again. In the early days, when his spirit was still pure, he often fantasised about you being taken back by the Valar and forgiven by them, so he could build altars for you amongst the kins that would yet awake to inhabit Arda.

Some of his bolder daydreams were about another form of punishment for you – he would have you humbled in the name of redemption, bound to a lowly Maia. He meant himself, of course. He imagined the Mother of Flames becoming the source of his creation, fueling the fire within his forge and watching over his craft as his very own wife. He wondered how jealous Aulë would be then and how humiliated you would be, yet he was certain he could make you happy and fix the malice of your spirit with his undying love and endless devotion.

And perhaps that blasphemous dreams of Mairon the Maia, bold in their insolence, would be a kinder fate for both of you and the whole Arda. Because, in the meantime, you were starting to realise with bitter clarity why you should have stayed away from Melkor, the Dark Lord, in the first place.

In his greatness, he dwelt in solitude and his mind remained ungraspable for you. He would rarely let you inside to allow you to see the world the way he perceived it. Though he desired you, it was not as an equal, neither as companion nor as lover. And even in his desire, there was contempt, too, because as Varda’s sister you were a reminder of her rejection, which still lingered within your husband as a wound unhealed. And your beauty, your power, your holiness… They were nothing but pale echoes of your sister’s qualities; faint reflections of her no matter how hard you tried. And each one of your failures to meet Melkor’s towering expectations was met with your husband’s wrath.

None among his servants who would later know him as a cruel master ever dared to complain about his punishments in your presence because you were his first subject of torment, his earliest experiment in reshaping the will of another and they knew that you survived things they could barely think of. You were a Vala and you could endure the worst treatment, therefore in your suffering he reshaped you in ways that would shatter even the mighty Maiar. Melkor forged you anew and twisted your already spoiled essence to his dark design.

Alone in his presence you felt belittled and humbled. But by his side before others, you were exalted and invincible – cloaked in the might of his dominion – and that illusion of power became intoxicating. For allowing you to get sedated with such greatness was enough to worship him like he was Eru himself and out of all your offerings, he loved that devotion the most about you.

To be his wife was not easy – it was a torment and perhaps you were burdened with the most difficult fate out of all the Valar. Yet, it was what you had chosen willingly for yourself and you carried this responsibility with pride, trying not to think too much of the life you could have lived instead. You were made for much bigger things than spending your whole lifetime resting in the sunlight and being followed by the forest animals like some of the Valar ladies were. No, you were aiming for greatness and the price for it was pain.

When Mairon came to your husband’s service, you sensed immediately the amount of his worship and devotion towards you. You sometimes wondered if the Maia joined Melkor for him and his power or were you the real reason for his spirit’s betrayal. His devotion amused you but you offered him no kindness as his yearning for your favour was met with cold indifference. Even though he was desperate for more of it, he should know better and be grateful for your rejection. Because if Melkor would realise the true nature of Mairon’s feelings, he would not go easy on him and his wrath would be merciless. 

Sometimes you wondered how it was possible that Melkor could not sense Mairon’s admiration for you. Perhaps he thought of it as something innocent – something expected from his servants to feel towards his Queen. Perhaps he thought of it as silly and pathetic, unworthy of his attention, because he knew you would never humiliate yourself to betray him for a servant.

Or perhaps your husband cared about you even less than you suspected.

After Melkor’s defeat, you were hiding inside your fortress in the North from the wrath of the Valar. Your husband’s absence was welcomed by you with relief but also a huge emptiness within your soul. You had been his companion for ages and to be left alone now felt oddly wrong. Many of the creatures of darkness expected you to take the leadership but you stepped away instead, wishing for a calmer and more peaceful time at least. 

The power you had once craved now was something you dreaded. Your husband’s ways had drained you nearly completely, you were a shell of your old self. You wanted nothing but to crawl inside a hole and spend another eternity there, resting as a person unknown to the outside world. 

Mairon was the one who took all the responsibilities upon his shoulders and while committing to his duties, he would always emphasise he was fulfilling them in your name. Forever a servant he would remain. 

Now, without Melkor’s eyes observing him constantly, he gained more courage to bask in the remains of your corrupted light. You sensed his gaze on you wherever you would go.

Your wish, however, was to go much further away and Mairon knew about it, which was worrying him. He was trying his best – nearly desperately – to reunite your husband’s armies and dark creatures of the shadows, to become their leader and build a realm for you to rule over. To become worthy of you.

“My Lady,” he kneeled as he approached you and he kept his eyes low although you knew he dared to look up here and there, too tempted not to lay his gaze on you. “Please, grant me an audience,” he pleaded.

“You wish for an audience, Mairon? But is it not you preparing to get crowned very soon, my cunning spirit? Soon it shall be me asking for your audience,” you teased him and he looked up, his eyes filled with panic. Melkor would punish him for such schemes but you were not him and his influence was upon you no more. 

“I might crown myself the new Dark Lord, my Lady, but I would never consider myself to be above my Goddess,” he confessed and you smiled sadly as you approached him to grab him by his chin.

He swallowed thickly out of fear but his eyes remained soft, filled with nothing but pure admiration. In Melkor’s eyes you had been Varda’s unworthy shadow. Perhaps no one had ever perceived you with such devotion as Mairon.

“I shall build you altars in my realm; in every village, every town, every city. And in the capital of my kingdom where I will reside, I shall build a temple where you can find your peace,” he breathed out. “Just, please, do not abandon me.”

Your soft smile turned into a smirk when you let go of his chin and moved your hand to his ginger hair to caress it softly like he was your pet.

“I must, Mairon. When you build your temple for me, though, then I might come back to reside there. But until then, we must part,” you insisted and walked away at the sight of his eyes getting wet.

“Will they ever follow me without you by my side?” He asked, unsurely.

“They will not. Not all of them. Can you not see that it is a cursed path, destined to become a failure, to follow Melkor’s steps?” You turned around to look at his face once more. “Run away with me, Mairon. Forsake this realm, forsake your schemes,” you proposed and he gasped, visibly contemplating his answer. But the sparkles faded away from his eyes very quickly.

“No,” he shook his head. “I must stay and heal Middle-earth. I cannot abandon its people because of my own selfish desire,” he resisted you as you chuckled at that.

“You are no god, then, Mairon. Gods do whatever they wish. Spirits like you were created to serve,” you teased, cruelly as you sat on your armchair and he moved uncomfortably, looking away, but he remained kneeling and humbled.

“Allow me to serve you then, Mother of Flames,” he dared to whisper, nearly inaudibly, his breath shaky and lips trembling.

You tilted your head, thinking about his words. You would leave this realm soon, perhaps forever. He surely deserved a little treat before your departure for all the worship and devotion he had been gifting you with. And you deserved to give in to desires of your flesh as well after all the treatment your husband had given you.

“Come to me,” you ordered, harshly. You watched him trying to stand up slowly but you quickly stopped him. “On your hands and knees,” you explained.

Mairon glanced up at you as if he could not believe the amount of humiliation you would put him through now. It was true that back in the day you had often contrasted with Melkor’s cruelty but now Melkor was no more and you had been taught the craft by the very master of it.

Perhaps his influence was still upon you and it would remain there forever. 

You waited with an eyebrow raised and Marion gave up eventually, crawling on the floor towards you. He might have been humiliated and embarrassed but his eagerness was obvious in the way his eyes sparkled at the sight of your legs getting closer and closer to him. And when he was nearly in front of them, you opened them slightly as he gasped and looked up at you with admiration. He could not believe the access you had just given him while you smirked at his obedience.

“Serve me, Mairon,” you requested, wickedly. “Let my taste remain on your lips and might you never forget it while you build your kingdom in my name. I will come back to you then, my sweet, unless the Valar find and imprison me before,” you leaned in to caress his cheek with your finger gently.

“I shall fight them then. No matter how much it takes, I will release you and bind you to me instead,” he whispered.

“Bold of you, mighty Maia, to speak of such matters,” you let out a laugh. “Even as the greatest of your kind, you would still only be gifted with a mere shadow of my powers. We will never be equal, Mairon,” you reminded him and his eyes welled with even more tears at such a harsh reminder.

He cursed Eru himself for creating him as such a low spirit because this way he could never be worthy of you and to be able to walk by your side as your equal was all he had ever wanted.

“Let it be then… Anything to be close to you, my Lady,” he cooed. “Please, allow me to touch you,” he begged as he moved even closer to your legs.

“Proceed,” you nodded and watched him closely, observing his every movement, every gaze, which probably intimidated him even further but you could sense his desire to please you becoming too grand to care about anything else.

His hands wrapped around your ankles and moved up slowly, brushing your skin as the skirts of your dress pulled up, revealing your calves for him to admire. He had never seen them.

Well, perhaps he had. He had often sneaked up on you here and there and you had known about it but welcomed it with nothing but a chuckle as you had been pretending to be oblivious.

However, he had never been so close to them. To you. He crawled up even closer as he planted soft and devoted kisses to your exposed skin. You had never known kisses like these because Melkor had been mostly devouring you, tormenting you, using you. 

Mairon sighed and you felt a shiver go down your spine at the feeling of his fingertips brushing the back of your knees. You slid lower on the armchair as your skirts pulled nearly all the way up, exposing your thighs to him. Your obedient servant gasped and looked up at you once more as if he was asking if that part of you was allowed for him, too.

“Have I told you to stop?” You challenged him and he nodded before burying his head between your soft thighs to kiss and lick them softly, breathing the sweet scent of your skin as if you were the holiness personified.

Wicked thought it was for you were the most corrupted and fallen out of the female Valar and yet you doubted any of them were worshipped with such eagerness as you were now.

“If we never left Valinor and I never followed Melkor,” you breathed out, caressing Mairon’s ginger hair and playing with the delicate strands of his hair between your fingers, “you would be my disciple and we would spend forever in the fields under the sun with you worshipping me, my sweet spirit,” you shared your fantasy with him and he whined at that as he moved his face further and deeper, his nose nudging your glistening cunt as he requested for your legs to open even wider.

“So impatient,” you pointed out and grabbed him by his throat to pull him away. You felt him swallow underneath your hand and then you forced him to look up by grabbing his chin. It was slightly wet already from your leaking cunt and you leaned in to give him a possessive, open-mouth kiss; to taste yourself on him as his eyes widened but he gave in immediately.

While granting him with a kiss he would never forget, you opened your legs further and further, giving him full access to the sweet nectar between your thighs and he whined into your mouth like a brat when he realised what you were doing. He laid his trembling hands on your thighs and moved the folds of your dress even further to the back, making sure your cunt was all exposed for him.

The cold air of the room caused your clit to twitch and swell before his thumb found it and brushed it. Now it was your time to moan into his mouth. You broke the kiss and pressed your forehead to his as you closed your eyes and took a few deep breaths in. Pleasure without pain was an experience brand new for your flesh and you had to steady yourself as he watched in awe.

“A-allow me…” Mairon pleaded and your eyes opened once more as you looked deep into his with a nod.

You laid back in the armchair and watched him with curiosity but also a hint of contempt to see a spirit so mighty humbled like this – perhaps you could understand Melkor more than you had ever expected to be able to but it was truly fascinating and pleasurable to humiliate other spirits. 

To be able to kiss and lick your cunt, to devour it – it was surely a life-changing experience for your sweet Mairon. His usually calm demeanour changed in an instant, reminding you of a hungry hound as he whined and whimpered, lapping on your juices as if it was the sweetest nectar granting him immortality. He was intoxicated as his hands squeezed your thighs to keep them open and allow him to feast eagerly. 

Your body of a goddess allowed you to go on without breaks; a peak after peak as you shivered and trembled, caressing his head and meeting his hazy, devoted gaze once in a while to let him know he was doing good. Your praise meant everything to him for all he had always known was your husband’s reprimands. 

Your flesh could go on and on but your mind of a goddess was a demanding one and soon you grew simply bored of his ministrations, therefore you pushed his head away and crossed your legs, taking away the access from him.

Mairon’s face was flushed, his eyes foggy and skin glistening from sweat and your juices dripping down his chin. He was kneeling and looking up at you mindlessly as if he would follow your every order now, no matter how self-destructive it would be.

“You’ve served me good, Mairon,” you grabbed his chin and smiled at him. “Good servant,” you emphasised.

“P-please,” he whimpered and you furrowed your brow before realising what he begged you for.

His own release.

“Was not your kin created to serve mine? I do not think our creator blessed you with such desires, Mairon. Do not be a dirty liar,” you teased him.

“Please, my Lady,” he whined, desperately.

You sighed and rolled your eyes.

“Alright, then, let me see for myself,” you smirked and pushed him down onto the floor before getting out of your armchair and straddling him like a predator would trap her prey before sinking her teeth into him.

He looked so pretty like this – both excited and turned on but also absolutely terrified of you. You could do everything to him and he had no other way but to accept it. And he knew – he knew very well – that you could be as cruel as Melkor if you only wanted to be.

Melkor’s brutality had been driven by his own whim. Yours would be driven by your revenge for all the centuries of being treated like his dog. Beaten dogs tended to bite deadly and Mairon knew.

“Do not fear me, sweet Mairon. I only want to see for myself if it is true that you have fallen and corrupted yourself so much with your devotion towards me that you have been gifted with desires of the flesh,” you smirked. “Or cursed with them,” you pointed out as your hands worked on his robes and the trousers underneath them swiftly and quickly.

You gasped and laughed when you saw how hard he was already after all those hours he had spent between your legs. He blushed even further and his cheeks were crimson red now like his clothes.

“This must hurt,” you pointed out with a sinister chuckle. “Is it the first time for you?” You asked, brushing his thighs with your fingernails, making him shiver under your touch but refusing to actually pay any attention to his hard and reddened cock with its tip swollen and twitching, leaking precum.

“No,” he confessed, nearly inaudibly.

“Interesting,” you hummed to yourself and leaned in, your face so close to his that your noses brushed. “And what were you doing usually when it happened?”

“Nothing,” Mairon confessed, his face wincing out of shame. “Nothing, my Lady. I would never… I would never dare to…” He gasped after every word, so sweetly desperate and frustrated but not brave enough to ask you to do anything in particular. He would never order you around.

“Oh, my sweet, poor Mairon… You should have come to me each time and I would have helped you,” you grinned at him although you both knew it was not true. None of you would have ever dared to commit such an act behind Melkor’s back. “Do you want me to ease you now?” You asked.

“P-please…”

You reached towards his twitching cock and grabbed his wet length as you watched with cold fascination while he struggled and writhed underneath you. A few pumps of your hand was enough to make him spill himself with a whine, bucking his hips into your hand as you kept jerking him off to make more and more of his seed spurt out. 

His body of a Maia did not need breaks but there was always a limit to how much seed any male flesh could produce. And when you felt he could absolutely do no more, you stopped and watched him catch his breath as you giggled, laying on top of him and intertwining your legs. One of your hands kept caressing his sore and softening cock gently as your other hand pulled his head closer to your chest, burying his face between your breasts and caressing his ginger hair strands.

“Please, do not go… I will be so lost without you,” Mairon looked up to meet your gaze and you smiled sadly at that.

“Do not start again,” you scolded him.

“Can you at least stay for the coronation?” He pleaded but you shook your head.

“No. I must leave tonight, as soon as possible,” you leaned in to kiss his forehead and a short while of silence occurred.

It surprised you greatly but some part of you began craving to take care of him now. As if the sinful act you had just performed with him, which stained you in a way – because what else would you call lowering yourself to pleasing a Maia? – as if it had forged an attachment between you two and bound you to him indeed like he had blasphemously suggested before.

You definitely had to leave and hide from the Valar, seek your own peace of mind. But you knew already that you would be back for your sweet Mairon sooner than both of you expected.

MASTERLIST

[yui-kuromori]

Okay, I’ve had this idea for a while, and I really wish I had the time to write a fic about it but I DON’T. So I’m gonna dump it here and yeah, if anyone feels like writing it, send me a message or ask or something.

(Also, this involves a Billy Hargrove redemption arc and I know the character can be really controversial/triggering, so uh, fair warning on that okay?)

So, yeah, Billy surprisingly survives getting tentacle stabbed in the chest and after a short stay in the hospital is discharged to go home. Thing is, Billy doesn’t feel safe at home, and if everyone’s being honest, Neil's probably gonna be relieved to have him out of his house. As he’s brainstorming somewhere to stay, Steve motherfucking Harrington pops up in his hospital room and offers the guest room in his own home, stating that “he talked to Max about it and they figured it was the best option”. And fuck, Billy really wants to refuse but he’s also in no position to reject help, so he swallows his pride and agrees.

The next few weeks pass by in bickering, yelling and reluctant acceptance. Billy makes a full recover from his wounds, and occupied the Harrington garage with working out gear and matted floors. The Byers move away, and the kids spend an increasing amount of time in the house with the both of them. Billy takes to watching the kids and Harrington for entertainment.

He notices Dustin, his annoying bright smile clearly Harrington’s favorite, Max, who finds in Harrington the tenderness and comfort Billy has never been capable of providing, Lucas, who sees a mentor, an idol, something to strive for as both of them spend hours under the boiling sun, dribbling a basketball in the backyard. Then, he notices little Wheeler, full of anger, alone, never seeming to fully fit in in their dynamic.

And fuck if that doesn’t hit Billy a little too close to home. Looking at Mike in those moments can almost make him forget about how much of a little shit Wheeler is. But Billy is no nanny McPhee, not like Harrington is, he’s not entirely sure on how to approach the kid.

But then a fight breaks out one day. Not a fistfight, the kids are too soft for that, but it leaves Dustin red faced, Lucas gritting his teeth, Max clenching her fists and Mike walking away, hissing like an angry cat, and suddenly, Billy lets out an “I got it”, avoiding Harrington’s confused, cautious stare, and goes after the kid.

Mike’s not easy to deal with, he spits a particular brand of poison that Billy knows someone only develops by being raised in a specific type of household, and snaps like a cornered animal, and Billy gets it, he understands what is like to be so angry that the air itself tastes like rage, heck, he feels like that most days. So, without thinking about it, he corners Mike and throws the first punch.

It’s more of a tap, really, he doesn’t want to bruise the kid too much. But then they are rolling on the floor, punching and snarling like wild animals. The kid hits hard, but focuses on the chest, shoulders, so Billy knows he doesn’t mean to hurt him. They continue at it for a while, before collapsing on the ground, panting, bruised messes. “Feel better?” Billy asks and Mike responds with a surprised “Yeah”, and Billy helps him up, pats his head like he would a large dog’s.

From then on it evolves naturally. Wheeler and him are made from the same stuff. They get each other, frustrated, with rage bubbling beneath their skin, and oh so painfully repressed. It’s easy in a way it never has been to tuck little Wheeler under his arm and drag him away for messes. To curl his long, frail looking fingers in a proper fist and coaching him into attacking his punching bag.

Suddenly, after a difficult conversation with Lucas and Max, followed by a hard, but sincere apology, Billy enters the pick up rotation, and Mike always rides shotgun. Suddenly, Billy’s chasing the kid around in the backyard, wrestling and screaming and getting him into shape because “fuck you Hargrove, I’m not joining a sports team” suddenly he’s teaching the kid how to fight dirty, because between the bullies, government agents and the quarry incident (that was told to him while he wiped the blood off the kid’s bruised nose) every fight is life or death and Billy’s telling him to “bite, tear off a chunk of flesh, go for the eyes or the crotch, it doesn’t need to look pretty, it needs to *work*”. He’s sharing the kid’s first drink with him, laughing as he sputters at the bitter taste. Billy’s taking care of his first hangover and teaching him how to do so in the future because Wheeler’s a goody two shoes and is probably gonna be the sober friend, but either way, Billy’s teaching him how to drink because there’s no way in hell his kid’s making a fool of himself once high school parties start.

Billy, who cusses out Mike when he learns that Mike flat irons his hair because “fuck you Wheeler, I had to perm mine”, and spends a night away teaching him how to wash and scrunch his curls back into existence. Billy, who bullies him into sending Will Byers his letters, that spent weeks rotting in a box under his bed. Billy, who works out while Mike writes, tucked in a corner in the garage. Billy, who kicks him in the sheens but then hugs him in barely contained worry when he does something stupid, who helps him get a part time job with Max so he can afford a ticket to California, who takes Mike to the Quarry and screams on the top of his lungs with him, letting out weeks of pent up rage, who picks him up at the police station when he’s accused of arson (a certain Ted Wheeler’s vacation boat that spends most of its months tucked away in a storage container) and gives him an alibi, only to pat Mike in the head in that way Mike has learned meant affection and congratulates him once they’re out of sight.

They’re not nice, not like Steve and the other kids are with each other. There’s too much teeth and sharp bone in them to do so. But they’re good, and fuck if it doesn’t feel cathartic to Billy to be able to fully care for, nurture, someone in the ways that he knows how and not be pushed away for it. To be able to ask Mike where he’s going, with who, at what time, why, with what clothes, in a way that had made every other person in his life cower away in discomfort only for little Wheeler to preen a little under the attention, never feeling suffocated.

He ends up working at the local gym, giving boxing lessons. Mike goes to school, befriends Eddie Munson, who Billy keeps a sharp eye on. Months pass. Billy drives Mike to the airport and gives him one last pat on the head when he goes to California.

He’ll never admit it, but remembering the little shit, among Harrington and his mom and his sister, is what gives him the strength to run when Vecna comes for him.

[showtoonzfan]

I don’t like Angel because he’s not funny, suave, sassy or smart like Viv wants him to be. He comes across as so try-hard funny to the point that it’s cringe. Him being a sexual abuse didn’t make me like him, I felt sympathetic of course, but it didn’t make me want to baby him or protect like some of the fans do with Angel. We have to wait and see how the show deals with serious topics and given helluva boss’s track record of tackling serious issues it’s can go both ways; being bastardized and treated as a joke or being taken seriously. Sexual abuse victims don’t have to sex-repulsed or have an aversion to touch, some people do become hyper sexual, but its an unhealthy coping mechanism, its not making le funny sex jokes/flirting 24/7, or just liking sex with hot people, it’s a compulsive disorder and it affects your day to day life and puts you in dangerous situations, whether it be self harming yourself or others. It fucks with you mentally and physically. It shouldnt be treated as joke or something to be used as defense against your favorite character if people don’t like him, than they don’t like him, don’t give him more trauma just to make people/guilt trip them into liking him.

I don’t hate Angel, he’s not even my least favorite character. I just want him to be cohesive and ironed out, because he’s so overdeveloped and just all over the place. He’s the famous sex worker in all of Hell working under a abusive overlord, and he’s wants to break free from that life or at least Valentino, but he’s addicted to drugs and has an explosive loose personality, he has little trust in people so pushes them away and hurts the people that care about him and he hides his true self, but he isn’t 100% sure he wants to get clean or believes in redemption and he wavers between staying in the spotlight getting the love and validation he never got when he was alive because he was rejected by his family for being gay. Oh btw angel was a mobster and a drag queen, and his whole family is in Hell and they’re in the mafia and hes got a twin sister that no one knows where she’s at, and he’s a drag queen and he’s gonna get a love interest in the show because why not. Plus whatever mental/sexual trauma he got from Valentino. This isn’t even him being written complex/nuanced, its a common mistake among young writers where they over complicate a story and characters and everything gets lost and messy. Not even Charlie and Alastor are this over complicated

These are my EXACT thoughts on him, I 100% agree. For starters yes, he’s definitely over-compensative and I hate it. He’s a sex worker, he’s a porn star, he’s a stripper, he’s a struggling addict, like Jesus Viv pick ONE. It’s all too overwhelming and it certainly doesn’t help that he’s way more developed than the fucking main character (and the show isn’t even out yet). There’s a difference between making your characters fleshed out and then there’s adding a shitload of things to them without learning how to balance it all. Anyways yes, this is one of the reasons why I don’t necessarily think Angel is good representation, not just for gay people, but for sexually abused victims as well. Of course we’ll have to wait until the show comes out, but like you said, it doesn’t help that he’s a character that’s overly flirty and makes unfunny sex jokes 24/7. His character is treated as a joke in the pilot, just something so Viv and her friends can laugh their immature asses off and go “LOL HE’S GAY”, and like others have said, that’s a “yikes” when you as the writer ALSO tries to establish that he constantly needs to use his body to maintain his position, a position he’s shown to struggle with. Yes, hyper sexuality is a thing, not everyone responds to sexual abuse trauma the same, some are repulsed, others aren’t, and don’t get me wrong, I’m all for exploring these themes, it’s just that the problem with Angel Dust is that even if he IS a person who is hyper sexual and uses his flirty behavior as a coping mechanism, it’s not treated seriously. Whenever he flirted in the pilot and acted overly sexual in the comic, it was all treated as a joke, it was simply done because we all know Angel is the eye candy for the fans of the show, so Viv can go “Lol he’s so hot, hot gay spider boi uwu”. And like you said, it also doesn’t help that Viv creates Val just so we can feel bad for him. I don’t know how y’all feel about Angel, but I personally don’t like him. He’s not funny, he’s an unlikable asshole and showing me that he’s a “sad uwu baby” isn’t going to get my sympathy. Don’t get me wrong, you feel bad for his SITUATION that he’s in, but at the end of the day I don’t care if bad stuff happens to him, he’s still a horrible person who’s in hell for a reason, and I wish Viv would stop treating him like a joke and babying him all the same time. Stop making him out to be a sex symbol for fans and start treating his character like the complex person Viv claims he is, without fucking around and making unfunny sex jokes. It’s just cringe and it ruins the serious side to him.

Again, we’re going to have to wait till the actual show comes out, but while we’re here I’m certainly not looking forward to his backstory or family. Don’t get me wrong, the concept of a gay man in the mafia from the 40’s is interesting as hell, but seeing how VIV is the one writing this, we all know it’s just going to be more sad uwu stuff to make us sympathize with him being from a disapproving society. I also have the theory that his sister Molly is in heaven, (since when asked during a livestream, Viv was vague but kept saying the words “she’s not in hell”) so yeah that’ll probably be even more sympathy manipulation to his character. I can’t….he’s just too over compensated as well as not good gay rep, and Viv once again, cannot handle serious subject matter so I’m terrified on what will happen during Hazbin and how she deals with all the abuse and trauma this character goes through. We’ll see, but I smell a bomb coming.

[land-of-brains-and-chocolate]

Rec list for Eddie and Symby being vaguely to very gay?

I'm sorry for coming to you with my monsterfucker agenda 😔👊 (no I'm not)

i mean, i probably could’ve seen this coming.

venom is dominated by two opposing narratives. let’s call this the “relationship narrative” and the “control narrative”. they’re not perfectly separated, like, you’ll definitely get elements of one in the other, but generally one of them describes what the story, at its core, is using the symbiote for.

now comics are an endless tug-of-war at the best of times, much less the gayest and slimiest of times. there’s a neverending backlash and backbacklash going on between these two takes. what you want is the relationship narrative.

everything very much started out with that take. eddie and the symbiote are two characters who forge an evil alliance because it lets them do what they wanna do (kill spider-man, more or less) and they have the same kinds of neuroses and complexes and syndromes. lots of early comics are also very fun about the merged consciousness, merged identity deal. that’s kind of the textbook relationship stuff.

personally i absolutely think the original stories (venom was created by david michelinie) have romantic undertones, even starting in the villainy days. eddie describes their first meeting as “a shadow moved, caressed me.” he takes the rejection of the symbiote still being “in love with” spider-man really hard. he sobs his eyes out when he thinks it’s dead and promises to avenge it bare-handed. they totally expect to live happily ever after on a deserted island together.

then there’s venom: lethal protector, which is cute on its own, but if you’re reading for slime romance, i very specifically recommend the novelisation. i won’t even spoil it. and then, planet of the symbiotes is the first comic that i would say has outright queer themes, intentional or not.

so all those recs until now are collected in this post.

we're trucking along through the 90s, we explore elements of one take and then the other and sometimes we ignore the symbiote completely, but not too much changes, overall. the next BIG stop in Gay Venom is, of course, the hunger.

miniseries by len kaminski, just venom: the hunger. plenty of people have written their essays on it, but what’s always important to me is that it DID NOT come out of nowhere. as said above, it expanded on themes that were there, it references michelinie venom very explicitly, like you get your SECOND “tenderly touching the green glass tube” scene.

but yes this one is specifically about, like, stigmatisation, otherness, mental illness, meeting all those things with care and empathy and optimism, tentacle sex. again, many essays. a venom comic that can go “look at the twisted deviance of this relationship” and then turn it around into “but how are you looking at it” is good. god how good would it be if they also did that to eddie more. anyway.

a few years later you get the first MAJOR fucking backlash, culminating in the SECOND story titled the hunger. spectacular spider-man: the hunger, from 2003. completely reboots venom and retcons their motivations and backstories, makes very spiteful references to planet of the symbiotes and the hunger, like it is not also called that by sheer coincidence. literally starts out, in a comic that wants to tackle and redefine venom, with the line “the PROBLEM is that you guys are like an old married couple”. so the new status quo is that the symbiote only ever used eddie to be with spider-man, and eddie only ever used the symbiote to not die of cancer.

the “control narrative” that really kicks in here uses the symbiote as, you know, a thing to control, eddie’s demons personified or even a completely foreign force to torment him. if eddie is evil, it’s not because of what he thinks and believes and wants, it’s because he couldn’t control the symbiote and gave in to its inexplicable bloodlust.

this is an unambiguous downgrade in terms of complexity, in my humble opinion, completely fucks up eddie’s responsibility themes, and is also a pretty clearly petty reaction to venom’s absolute oversaturation in the nineties. the bitch was everywhere and most of it wasn’t good. so there was LOTS of “look at this creepy loser” content by writers cringing themselves into self-awareness at the time. the 00s were going to be GRITTY and MATURE.

this of course means that we get to see eddie slit his wrists and bleed to death on panel after selling the symbiote to supervillains as an attempted act of redemption???

wild fucking times! it’s not exactly worth recommending as ~shippy~, but the first real backbacklash to this first round of retcons comes from dan slott, who just kind of ignores it all in new ways to die. drags eddie back to the land of the living and relevant, makes the symbiote refuse to let its new host kill him, telling that host, and reestablishing, that it loves eddie. and then, to keep him living and relevant, slott makes eddie anti-venom.

don’t even worry about it. anti-venom is essentially eddie seeking redemption with symbiote powers, but without the symbiote, except he pretty much acts no fucking different at all, just keeps on being a murderous vigilante with cracked ideas about innocence and guilt. people still act like he’s better now because, in its metatextual ways, the hunger was right.

then fucking uuuuuuhhhhhhh. agent venom. symbiote goes to flash thompson and the us military, and the writer, rick remender, goes really, really, really hard on the control narrative. the symbiote becomes a substance flash is addicted to, gives a voice to his past abuse, it’s dark times all the times.

people very much do like that narrative for flash, like at least from that perspective it was worth it. i don’t like it much for the symbiote. for the symbiote, representing everything fucked up with flash and forcing him to murder kill bite all the time is resolved via the good guy avengers literally lobotomising it so flash can wear it without further resistance or input. imagine doing that to a human person. you’re uncooperative so we’re gonna turn off your higher cognitive functions and wear you like a meat suit. happy ending for everybody! truly we’ve conquered our demons this day.

then! at the same time, there’s a cartoon coming out, it’s called ultimate spider-man. THAT one does the control narrative take with harry osborn, but then does the relationship take with flash, making it the only cartoon to outright redeem the symbiote and let it find friendship and be valued as a person.

and people loved it! so brian michael bendis gets it in his head that he’s going to redeem the symbiote and make it partner up with flash. and he does redeem it by the highly fucking questionable means of having it be “cleansed”, aka brainwashed and relieved of its memories and personality. not that it matters for long. nothing fucking matters in comics. take this with you if it’s the only thing.

so then for fun friendship times you get venom: space knight, flash and the symbiote’s adventures in space! and then that gets cancelled. eddie is off somewhere being toxin and hunting carnage (2016). many good comics but you did not ask for them.

and THEN.

it is time for the next MOTHER of backlashes.

flash gets literally discarded at fucking roadside to put the symbiote back on eddie and turn back time on their relationship to RIGHT before the FIRST backlash happened. you know, all those 2003 retcons. gone. ignored. no more. venom’s themes are now those circa 1996 again. full fucking on relationship narrative. ROMANTIC relationship narrative, and that after the symbiote was turned into eddie’s evil shadow, after he hated it and spent a LONG time seeking to eradicate all symbiotes (and not even for the first time).

the COSTA run. venom (2016). reviled and beloved.

like this comic is fucking ANGRY about symbiote treatment. i HAD to tell you all of that so you’d understand ANYTHING it’s doing. the first thing it does is flip it completely around, puts the symbiote on a military guy who’s making IT do bad things, makes his ability to control it horrifying and abusive instead of heroic and admirable. one of the later things it does (in the follow-up venom: first host) is outright feature a villain who lobotomises symbiotes, ending on a symbiote serving him swift and sweet payback by doing the same thing TO HIM. it’s exactly as unsubtle as the hunger (2003) was about its hang-ups.

comics... are a conversation.

flash remains a symbiote friend but still got fucked over big time by it all, symbiote-focused writers slott and costa also kind of use him to literally, in case anybody hadn’t caught on, literally spell out the REAL story that’s been going on in the writer's room for the past THIRTY YEARS:

you’ll notice i didn’t actually list any of the Gay Shit for you, you’ve probably already seen it or you’ll get to see it for yourself. yes, they are deeply in love, yes, it’s fucked up and flawed, yes, it is real and taken seriously and has ultimately redeeming potential. yes the concept of that nearly knocked me off my feet and in front of the subway at one point. yes there’s mpreg

it’s also fucking riddled with events, which spin off into other comics, so either ignore those and rely on the recaps OR click yourself forward through the “next issue (story)” button on marvel wikia to know what to read.

and after that must of course come the backbackbacklash, as certain as death or taxes. in the next run, we retcon everything once more, eddie just needs to control his darkness, the symbiote was an evil abuser all along, nothing on earth is ever new.

i’m not gonna go through it, i’m just gonna point you to the backbackbackbacklash issue that came out during this time: venom annual volume 2 number 1 - it’s confusingly named, it’s the one that has a blue-skinned space lady on it. this one ignores the backbackbacklash going on very pointedly and goes “it’s not ABOUT control” again, it’s pretty explicitly romantic.

and then there’s also marvel comics presents (2019) #5, which, oddly enough, does not particularly feature the characterisation you’d typically see in the relationship narrative? but it does feature eddie and the symbiote literally fucking, so you’d want to know about it.

that’s the overall, like, frame of eddie and the symbiote being in a relationship (nuh uh) (yeah they are) (NUH UH) (YEAH THEY ARE)

some stuff that’s smaller but still notable, uh.

nova (1999) 6 - 7, that’s the “we’re space married”

venom: dark origin, that’s an ALTERNATE (!!!) take on the character, don’t expect a likeable eddie but it’s very darkly funny and gay so what can i say.

venom: the end, which i would absolutely fucking hate to be canon, i think its characterisation is quite regressive, but the symbiote sure is in love, i guess.

venom: separation anxiety, the dawn of the control narrative but eddie’s characterisation did not have to go so wrong from here, like if they’d just figured out AT THIS STAGE that he's STILL acting like venom without it... i digress. it has the symbiote going eddie eddie eddieee

venom: sinner takes all, this is the first she-venom comic so that’s. hm. interesting. healing symbiote blanket

don’t read venom: license to kill just look at this panel with me

if i think of more comics worth adding i’ll add them.

the subtext slash text is heavy enough to be present to some degree in literally every cartoon adaptation of eddie brock. spider-man: the animated series goes FULL control narrative, in fact it started the “the symbiote corrupted peter” take that we to this day cannot escape, but the first few venom episodes are VERY playful about their relationship.

in spectacular spider-man it’s canon, but horrible. eddie’s in love with it, but eddie's a good boy and the symbiote is played very, very, very abusively. i think this is an evil symbiote adaptation that works well enough, at least it’s an actual meaningful character instead of just a malevolent force to resist.

in marvel’s spider-man, the only venom episode worth watching is venom returns.

i’ve actually got every symbiote-relevant episode listed right here from when we did our communal watch-through.

also watch truth in journalism. idk if it’s exactly shippy just do it

[heartslobbf]

let’s talk about perfuma. imo, she’s one of the best characters in the show despite being underdeveloped, and i wanna explain why. she could’ve been extremely average, just some lanky flower girl that doesn’t believe in violence and loves everyone, but she is so much more than that (and it pisses me off that y’all reduce her to that).

in her introductory episode, perfuma is clearly in denial about the horde almost destroying plumeria. she doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, wants someone else to take care of it for her. she’s scared of change, and that is because change makes you vulnerable. if things always stay the same, there’s a whole lot less danger and uncertainty, and therefore you’re safe. secure. perfuma’s kingdom is dying and she can’t bear to accept it because it is unknown to her. it’s putting her in a position where she is no longer secure. this fear of vulnerability can also be seen at the beginning of 1x10 when the princess alliance falls apart and she literally says ‘being together makes us vulnerable.’

the thing is, perfuma isn’t wrong. look at her choice of words. she says that being together makes them vulnerable, not weak. here, she kind of has the words mixed up, but we see that by s5 she has come to understand the difference. that’s what’s so great about perfuma, her motivation to do better, her hunger for self-improvement. it’s why she’s such an important part of catra’s redemption, actually, because she embodies the kind person catra is or wants to be.

let me explain: perfuma is an angry, impatient, short-tempered character. we are shown this again and again with her passive aggression to others and how easily mermista can annoy her with trivial things (sitting in her seat in the war room, for example). catra is also an angry, impatient character, but perfuma works every day to manage those emotions. she knows she needs them, she uses them as a tool (calling catra out, for example, is a time they were practically pivotal for getting her point across) but she also acknowledges they can hurt the people she loves. we know she does a meditation ritual each morning and we see in 4x02 how quickly she can unravel without it. she wants to be better. she puts the work in. that is such a valuable lesson for a character like catra who has always felt she’s just not good enough, she’s always going to be this angry and unlovable and no one can do anything about it.

so, 4x02. it’s a brilliant episode for perfuma’s character, really, and the first proper development we’ve had since 1x04. we see her anger, her impatience, but we also see her self-doubt. her belief that she’s inadequate, ‘just a flower girl.’ this is also when we get introduced to her little mantra that becomes a bit of a motif later on, ‘i can do this.’ we know perfuma doesn’t wholeheartedly believe this, but she says it anyway because she wants to. perfuma wants to be better. she will do whatever she can to be her best self, whether that be actually conquering her gripes with cacti or realising there’s a loophole with the roots (love that conflict resolution by the way, another good deconstruction of hero bs by spop).

this episode is also significant because it comes back to perfuma’s fear of change, of vulnerability. she’s thrown into a situation she doesn’t want to be in, one she feels miserably unprepared for, and she hasn’t done the one thing that puts her at her best beforehand, but she pulls through in the end because she is surrounded by people that support her, that listened to her and consoled her when she was vulnerable. 4x02 teaches perfuma the power of self-worth and the power of true, mutual, unconditional love, which can only come with vulnerability.

and this is where her character gets really interesting, in my humble opinion. ngl, one of the reasons i love perfuma so much is because she’s a pisces and i am too. i’m not gonna go astrology hoe on you rn, i’m just using this to demonstrate the part of her character that teaches others. pisces, if you don’t know, love to play therapist. we like to help the people around us with whatever strifes they may have because we think we’re fucking great at it. perfuma actually is.

you know how i said perfuma learns the importance of self-belief and vulnerability? yeah, she teaches both of those lessons to other characters in s5. like i said, perfuma is a character who values self-betterment and also happens to be a pisces, so when she sees scorpia, riddled with so much self-doubt and such low self-esteem, her immediate response is just i’m gonna teach that bitch how to love herself. and she does!

i’ve seen some people say they don’t like scorfuma because it seemed as though the writers just decided to ‘fix’ all of scorpia’s problems by giving her a girlfriend. that’s very dumb, first of all because they aren’t even together by the end of the show, they’re just interested in one another. second, the whole point of she-ra is that we’re stronger together. scorpia doesn’t go through growth in s5 because a girl likes her, she goes through growth because someone is showing her support and love for the first time in her life and that empowers her. you know, the worth that scorpia finds in herself doesn’t hinge on perfuma, like it did with catra. it’s about her as an individual, and perfuma so clearly makes it about that when her big lesson revolves around singing. scorpia loves singing. perfuma tells her she should do it because she enjoys it, a sentiment you’d never hear in the horde, and when scorpia does sing, she is actively rejecting the people who did make all her self-worth hinge on them catra. she’s doing something for herself, because she enjoys it, because it makes her happy, because she can.

it’s that same mantra: i can do this, i can do this. i really love how this was brought back from 4x02, how perfuma repurposed something that taught her such a valuable lesson for someone else. perfuma and scorpia are great foil characters actually, both constantly underestimated and thought of as weak by their groups, but some of the strongest characters in the show due to their deep value of love and self. i can do this, and i know i can because you believe in me, because i believe in myself. it’s brought back again in 5x10, when the last thing perfuma says before scorpia breaks the beam is ‘i know you can [pull through]’. she tells catra she believes in scorpia. it’s that belief, that support from other people that empowers the self to believe it too. we are stronger together, you know??

anyways, onto vulnerability. return to the fright zone is in my top ten episodes of the whole fucking show and you might think that’s a bit weird but i don’t. 5x10 encompasses so many important themes of spop so well and tells them with scorfuma and spinnetossa, our two side lesbian couples. this is significant since perfuma literally draws a parallel between her and catra at the end of the episode, and catradora and spinnetossa have always been significant to one another. i’m gonna say it, perfuma is the reason catra is finally able to confess to adora in 5x13. i’ve already talked about how important perfuma is to catra’s motivation to improve, but she literally makes catra rethink everything about strength and vulnerability, two words catra has a lot of feelings about.

catra fears vulnerability. we know this. she has such a deep love for those important to her but is never able to articulate it because she worries she’ll be taken advantage of, shot down, laughed at, whatever. all of this stems from the abuse she suffered at shadow weaver’s hands and her attachment issues, and it’s also why catra pretends to hate scorpia’s very open displays of affection and love: she sees it as weak because she has been taught to, but it’s all she ever really wanted to be.

we also know perfuma used to fear vulnerability. she doesn’t any more. the entirety of the episode leading up to her and catra’s heart-to-heart is her being vulnerable, putting herself in a position where she’s in danger but believing it’s worth it. and it is. despite what everyone said to her, perfuma is right: it was worth it. she got through to scorpia, even if it was only for a moment. she literally spells it out to us and catra with one of the best lines in the whole show: it’s hard, keeping your heart open. it makes you vulnerable, but it doesn’t make you weak, and i have to believe it’s worth it.

back in 1x10, perfuma was right: being together makes you vulnerable. horde prime tries to use people’s relationships against them, that’s literally the plot of save the cat, the point of pitting catra and adora against one another. he sees them as weak, just like shadow weaver deems adora’s feelings for catra ‘confusing’, just like light hope insisted adora was a danger to her friends as long as she was around them. they were all wrong. yes, they’re vulnerable. perfuma acknowledges that vulnerability puts you in danger, that it’s difficult to do that, but she knows it doesn’t make you weak. weakness vs strength is a big conflict in 5x10 literally introduced to us with netossa’s theories on everyone’s weaknesses in the first few minutes.

like perfuma says, friendship isn’t a weakness. it’s her greatest strength. her belief in love is literally what saves her and adora’s lives, it’s what saves everyone who got chipped, glimmer, bow. belief in love, both of others and yourself, is what saves adora in her dying moments. perfuma summarises she-ra’s entire fucking message to us repeatedly in 5x10 and she tells it to catra because catra is the one who will do the most with it. that glance at adora, it’s obvious what it means. perfuma is telling catra she should be open with adora about her feelings because you have to believe it’s worth it.

you won’t get anywhere waiting for other people to make the move. she-ra couldn’t heal plumeria’s lands, so plumeria had to fight their own battle alongside her no matter how much they felt unable to. the rebellion couldn’t move mara’s ship, so perfuma had to despite thinking she wasn’t strong enough. the reason they always win in the end is because they have each other, they have love and support and people motivating them to do better. just like perfuma motivates herself to do better.

it’s the mantra. i can do this. i can be vulnerable and still win, because i have love. and it’s hard, it’s so fucking hard to be vulnerable when you’ve feared it all your life and you’re so angry, so hurt, but you have to believe it’s worth it. and it is. it is, it is, it is, love is stronger than anything and being vulnerable for the people you love is the only way you can ever get what you want from them. perfuma as a character embodies that, having learnt it herself, and teaches the lesson to one of the characters who needs it the most.

adora is dying, and catra loves her, and she knows she does, and she just has to believe. adora is dying, and she loves catra, and she knows she does, but she doesn’t believe. not until catra teaches her too, in that moment, to realise they were all wrong, light hope, shadow weaver, horde prime. adora doesn’t need to let go, she needs to hold on and believe she will be pulled back up by the girl she loves. she needs to believe she deserves it. that it’s worth it.

and it is.

[its-kall-the-clown]

14 Fluff for Red Son realizing he's nursing a crush on MK

As some context this is post redemption for the demon bull family. So Mei, MK, and Red hang out a lot together now. Red Son is also an idiot. XD

Also this isn’t my most polished work so sorry if it feels rushed.

prompt list

Stop that!! (Don't stop)

Rating: PG-13 for implied sexual interactions

"I think I'm sick"

Red Son admits to the ceiling of Mei's room. They were hanging out like they normally did on days MK was training with monkey king. She was playing some sort of retro video game and he was watching till he got bored and lay on her bed thinking.

"You got a tummy ache?" Mei teased, pausing her game and he huffs rolling his eyes, and sits up.

"Don't be ridiculous" he huffs out and crosses his arms over his chest.

"Okayyyy so what're the symptoms." Mei crawls from her spot on the floor and joins him in bed, sitting crisscrossed with her hand in her lap, and leaning forward eagerly.

"It's hard to explain… sometimes when MK is gone my chest hurts " he places a hand over his heart that was beating normally at the moment.

"And sometimes, when he's around, my hands get sweaty and it feels like I'm gonna throw up and…." He watches a wide unlearning Cheshire grin grow across his friend's face. He continues on, albeit, a bit more hesitantly.

"And….sometimes I can't talk right, and sometimes when he IS around my chest hurts also?" Mei was grinning so wide she was more teeth than she was girl.

"Why are you smiling…."

"OMFG!!?? You have a crush on Mk?!!!" She squeaks excitedly and rolls around in her back as she descends into what Red can only describe as absolute madness.

"What are you talking about??!" He sputters, Mei giggles a bit longer before finally pulling together and greeting him with a wide grin.

"Dude. Your like SO gay for him. 'My HeARt hUrTs WhEn hE’s not arOuNdddd~ " she mocks him in a fake tone and he growls hitting her with a pillow..

"Stop that!" He growls.

"SToP ThAt~" she mocks back and they devolve into a pillow fight on her bed. He girns when he hits her smug face squarely with a dragon stuffie.

Soon they lay panting on her bed and the dragon girl rolls onto her stomach poking him in the face.

"So. Crushing in MK huh?"

He grows beat red again and pulls a pillow into his face and groans.

"You should tell him."

Red son sits up with a smile.

"I should!"

"Yes!!"

"So I can tell him to stop making me sick!"

"Say what now?"

He turns to Mei with a feral smile. This 'crush' or whatever she called it could be fixed. If MK was the one giving it to him. He just needed MK to stop doing...whatever he was doing to make him feel like this.

"Hold on I think you are conf-"

"Thanks Mei!" He gets up and is off to confront the noodle boy as he hears Mei shout at him from her room.

"You're a fucking idiot!!!"

-----------

He storms forward like a typhoon. Red son is a force of nature that can not be stopped, nothing could yield him in his goal or hinder him in his path. Wild horses pulling chariots could not stop him, celestials in heaven would not dare stand in his way, and even his parents (by far the scariest force of all) could not persuade him to rethink what he was doing.

He pushes past the doors to Pigsy's noodles, shoves past patrons and ignores the warning shouts from the pigman.

he had one goal on mind

"Nyyyooodle boy!!!!!!" He bellows grabbing the attention to his problem. Those perfect expression color eyes meet him and the disease in his chest grows. He's in his training clothes, clearly on his way up to his apartment over the shop so he can shower.

Why did the idea of MK showering make his heartbeat erratically? Soft shoulders and cascading water off them…

She shakes his head back and forth now back on track.

"Stop. That." He growls out grinding his teeth together as steam leaves his ears. MK tilts his head slightly. The disease grows more in his chest and he hates it.

"Stop that!!!!" He points directly at MK feeling his hair sputter and spark as his temperature rises. He thinks his face is growing red.

"I'm….not doing anything?" MK gives him a sheepish smile, the kind that quirks up on one side and absolutely obliterates Red Son on the spot.

Like a crunchy fall leaf under the heel of a boot he's crushed.

Whatever motivation he had before it evaporates quicker than a drop of water in the Sahara desert.

"Y-your haven't heard the last of me!!" He makes a quick retreat, stumbling over his own feet and taking out one of Pigsy's tables in the process.

He exits the shop faster than he entered. He needed to regroup and strategize.

-----------

"SoooOOOOOo How'd it go?" Mei asked her eyes not leaving the screen, she's playing a different video game now, and she didn't even spare him a glance when he came back as if she predicted he would fail.

"Horrible!!! All it did was make this sickness worse." He throws his arms up and paces back and forth biting his lip. Mei doesn't pause her game this time, only continuing to mash buttons as he grumbles under his breath.

She lets out A long-suffering sigh and finally pauses her game.

"Dude. I know you're behind on the lingo and stuff but a 'crush' isn't a sickness. It means you like MK. As in you want to kiss him and stuff." she explains with a shrug unpausing her game and the sound of power-ups and pixelated men punching each other continues.

Red Son halts in his tracks

He pictures kissing MK. pressing his lips to the boy's soft adorable lips. He can practically feel the warmth it would produce. He pictures MK smiling into the kiss as they awkwardly bump noses. He pictures holding MK’s hand, squeezing it gently as they walk hand and hand. He imagines the feeling of MK’s hair between his fingers as he runs his hands through it.

He sucks in a gasp, his heart beating out of time.

Of fuck.

“I’m so screwed…..”

He feels Mei patting his shoulder, she paused her game again when he was fantasizing

“Yeah, you are. But at least now you can DO something about it.” she nudges his side and he blushes a bright red and he can hear her chuckling at him

--------------

“Can we talk?”

MK blinks back at him looking back and forth for a moment as if he was confused by his precence. Which to be fair he DID just enter through MK’s window while he was showering and was now waiting for him on his bed.

“Uhhhhh sure?” they rub the last remaining moisture from his hair with a towel before tossing it to the floor to be added to piles of laundry they had yet to do. Red Son didn't even curl his lip up at the slob-like behavior because HOLY SHIT MK IS SHIRTLESS!!!

Of course, MK didn't even seem to care that he was only wearing grey sweatpants in his presence. Red Son guilty looked MK’s chest up and down while they searched for a sleep shirt. Working out with Monkey King has been paying off because MK was sporting some muscle. He also had a few scars from battles that only added to how attractive he was, and of course, there were the two faint top surgery scars under his pecks.

“Is this about your weird episode in the shop today?” they asked pulling him from his guilt ogling and MK pulled a shirt over his body. Damn what a shame.

“Mei says I have something called a ‘crush’ and I should ‘tell them how I feel’ in order to make the pain in my chest go away,” he explained using quotation marks with his fingers to punctuate himself. MK’s eyes widen slightly and then it's schooled quickly. They join Red Son on the bed.

“O-oh? Have you told them?” MK squirms in place and keeps his gaze cast down. He looks uncomfortable, no. he looks upset? Why would MK be upset? Was it because he broke into his room again without permission?

No not that. Although he will have to apologize later

“I’m working on that part,” he explains scooting closer to MK and he grabs one of their hands gently. This felt stupid, and he thinks his sickness will kill him with how quickly his heart is beating. He was terrified and all his symptoms were amplified by ten.

He looks into MK’s espresso-colored eyes looking for something. He loved those eyes. They showed so much in them and he SWORE they could change the whole lighting of a room.

He opens and closes his mouth like a fish out of water with his false starts. Eventually, he clears his throat and releases his confession.

“Umm well...MK. I h-have a crush on you.”

he shuts his eyes and waits for the rejection, waits to hear MK laugh with their head back and shove him away.

None of that comes.

He peaks an eye open to find MK’s face a bright scarlet red. Was that a good sign? Or was MK so angry at him that he was just building up anger inside of him like a volcano ready to blow.

“ I w-will leave now.” he pulls away ready to retreat with at least his dignity still in tack. He's pulled back violently and soft lips are smashed to his. He lets out a surprised whimper and absolutely melts into the feeling. His brain is electrified and static all at once.

He kisses back hungrily grabbing MK by the waist and pulls him closer. When they are running out of air only does MK pull away with a little breathless gasp.

“Stay the night?” They requested, placing a soft kiss to the juncture of his neck and he can’t find a single cell in his body that would possibly say no. He nods numbly and MK kisses him again a smile on his lips that he could taste.

----------

“MK GET UP! YOU ARE LATE AGAIN!!”

Pigsy burst down the door jolting the demon awake from his peaceful slumber, his arms that were previously wrapped around MK pull away quickly in the process. He thinks he could stick to the ceiling with his claws like a cat in a cartoon if he jolted just a little higher.

The covers are yanked off them both before Red Son even has time to protest. Thank gods they both put underwear back on when they finished satisfying each other. Red Son is completely and thoroughly exposed to MK’s boss, bitemarks, and hickes across his chest snitching on him.

Red Son and Pigsy meet eyes and he feels a sweat break out across his neck. Pigsy sighs and pinches his snout. He sucks in a deep breath and lets it out through his nose.

“I don't know what happened here... And I don't WANT to know. Tell MK he’s got ten minutes to get downstairs.” Pigsy turns on his heel and leaves slamming the door behind him. Red Son looks over to his now-boyfriend who’s mouth hangs open with drool dripping down his face.

MK slept through all of it.

He can’t help but chuckle and kiss their forehead gently.

[notyetbulletproof]

“A boy from the barrel who had become something worse”.

Before the end of the book and considering that it follows the line about Inej - “A Suli girl who had become a killer” (the juxtaposition of that!). I think we can all agree that it’s suppose to suggest that Kaz had become worse than a killer. Vengeance had made him a monster? A soul beyond redemption?

At the end of the duology though? What’s worse than a killer in a place like the barrel? What’s worse than a monster? A good man. A better man. Having a heart. Being in the barrel and of the barrel and choosing to be more than the debauchery? Could that be an alternative option for what constitutes as “worse”? Kaz still rejects the idea that he’s a hero. A good man. Inej reminds him that his insistence that he is a monster can do more good than even he believes. There is more. He can be more than the barrel. He’s not just any other barrel boss. He’s Kaz Brekker, he decides what he wants to be. Don’t go after working folks and fair pay. Go after the scum, the evil, the people that profit off the mindless suffering of others.

Become something worse — a different kind of vigilante. A different kind of “good”. Their kind.

As @murderbabies (who I thank again for talking about my random Crows/Grishaverse screamy times with me) was saying—- by the end of the series Kaz starts to strive to be something different, something more, a better man. The meaning changes.

And when we think about it, it changes for all the crows.

“A Gambler”, Jesper, starts to confront the issues that have fuelled his restless and occasionally reckless nature. He starts to find meaning in who he is and what he can do. Starts to explore what embracing that side of him might lead to. Starts cracking away at the misplaced shame that he placed on his identity and how it’s so painfully tied to the loss of his mother. His conversation with Inej always cuts so deep because it’s someone who loves you (and who you love) telling you to stop ignoring your pain. That it’s okay to hurt. That your hurt is just as important as everyone else’s. You don’t have to push it down anymore. To have Inej tell Jesper to not try and erase or make it disappear?? The beauty of that! What that means for them both. To have each Crow point something out to him in different ways and have Jesper start to accept that it’s not “part of his personality”, it’s a manifestation of ill coping mechanisms he’s developed to deal with the trauma he’s suffered. He also found love. Someone that sees him as he is and all that he could be if he sees what they saw. Protect Jesper Fahey.

“A Convict”, Matthias, raised to believe his enemies were inhuman and lived for the cause and revenge— changed. He kept his honour. He fought for a cause he believed in. A found family and the promise of a better world for his people and homeland. A world where they didn’t fear what they didn’t understand but lived up to the ideals of their religion. He literally died trying to help another person and FORGAVE the person for fearing what he didn’t understand. Matthias, a kid soldier who grew up and saw the world differently. Who questioned his own beliefs and would drink the poison no longer because he saw the truth for himself. “He’s like us Nina.” (😭😭). That battle between what he was taught to believe and what he actually knew to be true. Loving someone enough to not just see where you’ve both hurt each other but the error of your beliefs. To see the humanity in other people. Gosh. I cry for you Matthias.

“A wayward son”, Wylan, who for most of his life was made to feel he was less because of a learning disability. His strengths overlooked, played down. His learning differences treated like a death sentence. His father literally tried to get him killed because he couldn’t read?!?! He could learn better with music, setting things to rhythm. Excellent at math and science (You’re a fool Jan). Wayward because he was difficult to control? To mould into a corrupt mercher? Or because he was his own man even as a child? Even if he didn’t understand yet that family isn’t always found in the people that you’re related to. By the end, he found his family and reunited with his mother. Found love. His people. The ones he’d break rules for, risk it all for. More than that? He found himself. His purpose. Learned that the biggest thing holding him back was his own shame. That he wasn’t a wayward disappointing son. He had a disappointing (and evil) father. He’s not stupid (say it again and Jesper’s gonna deck ya!), he learns differently. You kick ass Wylan.

“A lost Grisha”, Nina, raised to be a soldier, a spy. Raised to defend her country at all costs. A country that within itself still has a tenuous relationship with her people. A country recovering from civil war. At the beginning she’s a grisha without a country. Staying to ensure she helps rectify what happened to Matthias. Beating herself up for who she had to become. She accepts the offer to join the Dregs, becomes besties with Inej. Makes a home. Her loyalty was to Ravka but by the end? It hasn’t changed per se, it’s grown. Her loyalty is to her home, to her found family. She risks EVERYTHING, to save her friends. To protect them. She can’t bring herself to do what a soldier would do and end Kuwei. She agrees, he’s like them. He’s a kid who had no say. Nina stepped into the person she was born to be— a protector. She wasn’t lost anymore and she wasn’t just Grisha, she is the Queen of Mourning. She’s a friend. She’s a Crow. She’s unstoppable. She survived what should have killed her. She fought so fucking hard to come back to herself, to embrace who she now was, who she had become. She found purpose again. Confronts the truth about her own country, the faults as well as the triumphs. She continues on. You’re unstoppable Nina.

“A Suli girl who became a killer”, Inej. The juxtaposition of those 2 identities. Who the Suli are, who they are understood to be, what they believe VS. What Inej had to become to survive. “Rather live free as a killer then die as a slave”. She’s a spy. She’s lethal and dangerous to those that cross her and hers. Still there is how Inej feels each time she has to make that decision. Why it’s done— to protect her found family, in self defence. Yet her reverence for life. The sins she atones for. The code she holds herself to. The Saints she seeks forgiveness from. Her unwavering faith. Her strength of character, the courage of her convictions. The purpose she finds. She isn’t going to let anything else be taken from her and on top of that?? She decides that she won’t let those wretched people take any more from any child or person. She decides her purpose is to save as many as she can and to take down as many of the bad guys as she can. All that trauma and it didn’t change her goodness. With Kaz and the Dregs, she had more agency than before but now she’s in-charge of her own destiny and she’s choosing to save others. She’s a killer, sure, if you’re a bad dude. In so many ways she’s a saviour too.

With all this is in mind, I really do think that “something worse” doesn’t mean monster. Well, to their enemies, maybe. I think it’s set up like that and just like all the Crows have, Kaz becomes something more. They always were, he always was but it took time for them to see it. It took time for Kaz to see it for himself too.

God bless The Crows.

[maymeteorite]

this is gonna sound weird considering cf already made me feel pretty bad (emotionally, for my own reasons), but i wish that it made me feel worse.

maybe it's just bc i'm overly familiar with am, but am didn't shy away from making u, the player, kind of......feel like crap. bc the situation u were in WAS crap!! dimitri was going through some serious shit, and had no qualms (at first) about outright rejecting u, as the player. u were very cruelly exposed to the horrors of war. and i think part of me was hoping for (expecting?) similar treatment of my own feelings as the player as well as ingame characters in cf. and i just.....didn't get that.

of course, edelgard is not put in the same situation with byleth as dimitri is. i don't at all mean to say that i wish edelgard rejected byleth like dimitri did. what i mean is, i wish the route went way more balls to the wall about the fact that u are invading territories and subsequently trampling other people; the fact that u are actively participating in (and in a lot of cases, spearheading) the violence that this war brings.

hell, a lot of the black eagles are WAY too gung ho about invading the alliance and potentially murdering their former golden deer classmates for me, with the glaring exception of dorothea.

(i love them. the eagles are some of my favorite characters. which is why this choice was frustrating to me.)

honestly, cf went in the opposite direction i wished for; it went so hard on the "feel-good" aspect that i was uncomfortable about THAT instead of the (questionable??) actions i was enabling ingame.

the lighter tone that vw took on made sense for the situation, at least; if any route is going to be a little more lighthearted out of what we're given, it's vw. i don't think that SHOULD be the case, mind u, but with what we have, it makes sense to me why that decision was landed upon.

and i understand the argument that the lords are supposed to be portrayed in a more positive light in their own routes, but......am directly contradicts that idea. sure, am is the route that allows dimitri his ultimate redemption, as well as the route that allows him to stay alive in the first place, but it certainly never veered away from highlighting the more fucked up things he did. dimitri's actions by no means went unaddressed on am. whereas cf didn't feel like it wanted to address at all what was being done or condoned.

basically, it feels strange to me that the route where u side with the person who started this war makes u feel less of the responsibility and strife that comes with war than the route where ur actively fighting against that person. maybe they were going for a "we believe our cause is just so it doesn't make us feel bad" vibe, but......if they were, i don't like that, either.

lmk if this doesn't make sense, or if i'm missing something massive, or if my interpretation was just my emotions being weird, but the fact that cf seemed to shy away from fully leaning into the situation it puts u and the other characters into made me more uncomfortable than the actual situation itself. and that feels......kind of backwards.

(disclaimer: i don't hate edelgard, or cf. the handling of it all just. bothers me.)

[davidmann95]

How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

*  Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

[roguestarsailor]

You know what since we’re still in quarantine and i have nothing else better to do, i need to obsess over ACOTAR. I don't like a court of frost and starlight. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why I didn't like it. I aggressively read the book in maybe a day and I closed it feeling frustrated and annoyed. My version had A Court of Silver Flames preview so that definitely contributed to my annoyance greatly.

It's because it felt too perfect. Everything that had happened -- after the entire war was fought and won, they just go back to their normal lives? Yes there were hiccups and yes there were still aspects that made every IC character feel like their problems aren’t solved yet...but it didnt feel right. yes i enjoyed the snowball fight between the bat boys, feyre + rhys sexy time, and those little comfort moments too, the slice of life type things and seeing feyre accomplishing her goals and how hopeful the future seems BUT its too fast. the good parts of the book did not offset the bad parts of it.

Feyre literally accomplished pretty much every single goal she made back in ACOMAF just like that?? within a span of what a few months? a year?? She really came back from an entire war -- probably the first war of many since she's immortal and just like that, after her 21st birthday: she gets a whole entire estate, wants to start poppin babies, opens her art studio and starts teaching kids and then acting like she can rule an entire court?? the timeline is sooo short esp since its been brought up over and over again how everyone is literally 500 years old and have a super “messy” history and their changes seems to come super dupe slowly. but feyre, who has only lived 0.000000002% of her fae life, is out here thriving just fine???

the war devastated thousands of illyrian soldiers where its changing the politics of the illyrains and the faes, all of whom feyre has responsibilities over too as high lady. the mortal queens are still at large who left the humans on prythian to die which is why feyre was willing to go to war in the first place! what about the rest of hybern and their land and residents?? they wanted to enslave humans for social and economical reasons! then what about integrating humans w deep hatred and fear with deeply prejudice fae??? there’s also spring and summer court who are literally in ruins. thats literally so much. so idk how feyre is just chillin???? she gonna let rhys do all the hard work???

like feyre sit down. u should not be having a baby. esp since it took u literally a 700 pages to heal from those 3 months UTM. ur telling me shes gonna whole heartedly bring in a newborn in a war devastated world, with civil unrest (illyrains, other courts), with the messiness of human and fae integration, with trauma u and rhys will have to continue to overcome esp after THIS war??? even helping ur sisters w their traumas??

this is a personal opinion on this subject (and maybe my thoughts will change on this later on; opened to other thoughts) but when i read the part about how that weaver/seamstress artist who made that dark quilt that feyre loved talked about how her mate of 300 years didn’t come back from the war and her biggest regret was that she didnt have a kid to remember him by i just thought ur kid isn’t some sort of memorabilia. don’t have a kid to keep the memory of ur mate alive; have a kid cuz u want a kid purely for the sake of having a kid. ur memories and photos and shit will keep their memory alive but its not having a kid. some primitive need to keep the genes alive maybe?? but the way it was phrased and then in turn how feyre was like oh i need  a baby pronto cuz rhys might die in the next war and regret not having a kid with him didn’t sit right with me. also the other couple were together for +300 years and have a rich life together, while shes been with rhys for literally two years THATS NOTHING IN FAE YEARS. thats still the honeymoon phase and also ur problems arent even close to being over!!!

everyone was shitty to nesta. in ACOMAF, we saw how much the IC went through and still did all they could to help feyre. what made them not think nesta deserve the same welcome? nesta is mean as a defense but did no one try to figure out what would help (amren got close but shes so under developed)??? feyre knows nesta feels too much and yet she continued to be shitty. continued to flaunt her wealth, her status, her familiarity/borderline know-it-all attitude about fae/night court, her ~estate~. forcing nest to the solstice party when nesta was literally like i dont belong, im looking at everyone through a window type of thing; the fire cracking triggering her, etc. what kind of power play was that when she made nesta come to her estate, where nesta could SEE how ~homey~ and how suscessful feyre is and fully see all the lovely paintings of everyone feyre loves that explicitly exclude her to tell her to fuck off to a war camp?? bro???? cas was a dick too and elaine was rude. i think a lot of his actions were meant to make her angry since anger keeps u fighting (as was the method of rhys for feyre in ACOMAF) but what he said was stupidly shitty and i demand that he apologize properly. elaine could have done more to help her sister but whatever. mor was definitely an ass too (and im upset for how little her character growth is). 

Lucein. that man can’t catch a break tbh. im happy that hes w the band of exiles cuz he is whole heartedly accepted there. feyre was definitely an asshole to him even tho he helped as much as he could throughout the books. he tries so hard w elaine as well and it did hit my heart a bit when she was like gloves to work in my garden?? no ?? i use my bare hands see oNly aZiReL sEeS mE fOr WhO i Am. and at the same feyre is like flaunting her mate status to lucein which is mean as shit. its like this man can’t find love in prythain. then tamlin sending him his box of his things??? thats for sure brutral. tam was literally his partner through it all; savior of sorts even. no love from IC, no love from elaine, no love from feyre, no love from tamlin, no love from autumn court rejected everywhere! also HIS TRUE FATHER?? HEllo??? 

then on tamlin. i pity the guy! was i suppose to feel that way??? it felt like he is allowed to get a redemption arc and maybe i’ll even root for a redemption arc??? i was absolutely excited for freysand in ACOMAF but after ACOFAS, im like tamlin is....not completely bad??? his relationship w feyre was bad and the controlling parts were very much a no-no. i dont truly understand the dynamics of an abusive relationship but i can understand that it can be insidious and its the little things that hurt the victim. and i felt  feyre through ACOMAF and rooted for her to escape her abuser! but then it felt like i dont think he was doing any of those things out of malice. ill say tamlin is a bad leader and doesn’t know how to run a court outside of what he sees his father do. his understanding on everything is based on the traditions of the past which i think fueled most of the things he did i.e. not telling feyre she was in danger since maybe his mom didn’t do those war planning things. ACOTAR showed how he truly cared/loved and took good care of feyre and her family. he even talked about how he didn’t believe in the enslavement of humans! i think that tam wanted to preserve what he thought was the good (aka feyre + her love of painting) and get back a sense of control that he and his entire court lost while chained to amarantha. but at the same time, i think he truly thought feyre wasn’t safe. he knows rhys can crush minds and knows feyre can’t read/write so when he got that letter telling him shes safe of course hes gonna flip shit and made a deal w the devil (although those temper outbursts were DEFINITIVELY not ok!!!). he also didn’t listen and has sense of he knows best when feyre was not the type of person. but feyre destroyed his entire court. he lost all his sentries who literally went out to die for him during amarantha’s reign. he lost lucien too; his trusted right hand man. his people were cursed for 50 years and then continued to suffer UTM and was in the process of rebuilding too!  but just seeing spring court, WHO BORDERS THE HUMANS, be in ruins where his subjects left him, his people left him and hes all alone in the manson?? that was sooo sad. so im like why does what feyre did not feel satisfactory????? im mad that it didn’t feel right??? maybe there wasn’t a point where feyre talked to tamlin -- like really talked to him esp w her new found voice and power, etc. anyways, i dont hate tamlin and was like oh shit i think feyre fucked up a bit there.

rhys is a dick to nesta. which made me think, if feyre wasn’t his mate would he extend the same love and care to her???  i loved how he tried so hard to make sure feyre was ok. made sure she wasn’t breaking! all of it! but for nesta, he had the audacity to use his high lord voice and be an ass overall. even tho he can see how cas is fucken in love??? even just how he talks to cass feels off too. 

i’ll even go as far as to say because of how terrible ACOFAS was, it created this intense divide within the fandom. i remember reading the first three books and was absolutely 1) rooting for freysand  2) curious about the sister relationship and how it will be mended 3) i definitely didn’t hate nesta nor did i hate elaine either -- but i was adament about them talking it out with feyre for those tough times 4) saw a more realistic and charming healing arc 5) was rooting for feyre to be a stronger voice and grow into herself 6) love the dynamic of the inner circle + feyre

but after ACOFAS, I have this intense need to defend nesta and was super mad at how she was treated after the war and in turn a deep dislike for elaine for both her lack of agency, lack of grit that made all the other characters interesting, and lack of care for her sisters (who showed how much they would risk for her). i dont hate rhys but i was extremely not happy with him and his attitude and behavior. feyre became more arrogant and was acting like how asshole rhysand would act. like her life is perfect now and i was not rooting for her anymore. freysand didn’t feel like they have complimenting qualities that made them interesting in the first place but rather they are merging to become the same person but in a bad way. that mind reading thing was cute in the beginning but it became insufferable since all thoughts were shared so seamlessly it made reading feel weird. 

anyways those are my thoughts on ACOFAS. it was a 1/5 stars for me and im mad those events transpired. reading the other books made me excited to know what was gonna happen and i was truly ready to accept the characters as flawed and nuanced as they are. im not mad about character not liking each other but i am mad that everything felt off. ACOFAS just felt regressive in some parts and forced in other parts. i know not everything ends in a nice tied up bow but this book single handily ruined what i thought about these characters in the worse way possible. this book wasn’t suppose to wrap up all the problems that exists in the other books but it didn’t feel hopeful like i thought it would. it didn’t feel wrapped up and didn’t feel like i should be excited about the next books. theres so many missing pieces i feel that i think need explaining and at the same time, i think it introduced too many problems at once which made it feel like its jumping around everywhere. although im still excited for ACOSF because i love nesta, and nesta deserves so much better and i want to have hope that this bad ending will either make sense later on or it was just a blimp.

[ibelonginthepast]

yoo i really looooved your bucky headcanon thingy it made so much sense???

since you said you loved the marvel one: nat?

Thank you so much dem,, I needed the approval, its very close to me 🥰

AND AH NAT! MY LOVE!!

Sexuality Headcanon: I am gonna go for sex repulsive asexual, pan/bi romantic.

Its ironically funny she uses seduction and sex as a weapon ^_^

She doesn't realize her asexuality for a long long time, and thinks she hates sex because of her trauma and struggles with intimacy. Also cause she doesn't find romance with it ever. She doesn't get it, doesn't realizes its an option to not like sex.

Gender Headcanon: (non binary) she/her. Imma just through some random words. Grace. Feline. Beauty. Alluring. She's that gender that has short chin length curly hair, wears bright red lipsticks, high cheekbones, corsets, black, high heeled boots, knives. U get it.

A ship I have with said character: hmmm ngl I dont think anyone deserves the perfection that she is. Seriously. No one could ever deserve her. Not anyone in mcu yet. BUT, anyone she falls for, I dont mind banner... but I think he wont get her complexity very well. I wanna say valkyrie, but I ship them with cap marvel. Damn I just remembered they really killed nat didn't they? Fuck them. Fucking fuck them. Yeah I dont have a ship for her... no one deserves her yet.

A BROTP I have with said character: HAWKEYE AND NAT I love them so much???? Just so much?????? THEY ARE SO PERFECT, everything about them!!!!! I love how Clint is the soft side of her. I love how nat gets around clint's kids. I love how much nat loves him. How he's the only one who has ever treated her right. I'll actually start sobbing. They are so devoted to each other. I cant even. I love them so much.

A NOTP I have with said character: idk I cant ship her with Steve,, just like not for ever. I like what they had in the movies, how nat struggles with it, but I cant ship them as a legit couple for life nah.

A random headcanon: okay so bts,, nat has a horrible self esteem. she's ambidextrous. she loves dressing up. she prints out photos of rich old white neurotypical able cishet men in power, and practices shooting on them. When she's really mad at Tony or Steve or Banner, she adds them there on her target boards for practice, and it has horrified them to sometimes find their bigass postures punctured with bullet holes. Shes a fierce feminist and wears the label proud. She has had convos around this with every male on her team. She has hit them all in the head, rolled her eyes at their dumbfuck explanations of why they dont like the term feminist and helped them understand better what it is and make them know that they are in fact feminists too. she's an empath. I dont think that even hc, I think its very clearly shown just not acknowledged. Shes extremely forgiving, and believes in redemption of anyone. Shes for rehabilitation, anti-prison. She hates the concept of governments in general. She is nihilistic. She is a communist and passionate about it. She's secretly a philosophy simp, reads a lot about them when she treats herself.

Even though shes all for redemption, she struggles with forgiving herself and is very hard on herself. Her hypocrisy is really cringe and bothering here.

She has a thing for textures. She picks up stones, and cloth pieces and rubs her fingers on them sometimes.

she's an artist. She used to draw in red and black a lot, and has some ink sketches journals, where she has drawn random glimpses of her memories. She longs for a calm life by the sea where she can stargaze. The only time she actually did anything other than ink was, when she tried to pain open night skies and oceans. Cause pics like those make her heart ache. She tries painting them to capture the longing for freedom, otherworldliness, calmness, serenity they make her ache for. But she never captured them right and never was satisfied with them.

Something about her orientation? Because of the red room, she has a very complicated relationship with gender expression. The red room forced a form of femininity on her uk? she was forced to reject traditional soft expression of femininity. But forced the ballet kind of femininity, of using femininity as a weapon, or being powerful with feminine grace. She was forced to use her sexuality as a weapon. She thinks that her need to be voluptuous was something beaten into her in the red room. This all caused her a lot of problems with her identity. When she started recognizing what the red room did to her, she had the urge to be reject her sexual expression. This conflicts with her asexuality too. She tried changing a lot. A lot of internalized misogyny angst here. In her struggles to pursue a romantic relationship, she tried to fit in by being stereotypically feminine too, flowers, motherly devotion and care and all that. But she can't do it. She struggles with understanding want for kids. She struggles with gender roles and confuses them with gender too. She shifts a lot. She struggles with defining her own femininity for a long while. Cause she's naturally emotional, she hates herself for it for a long time cause she associates it with weak aspects of femininity. But eventually, she stops the what ifs, and tho it sounds fucked up, she accepts that the red room made her who she is and she doesn't need to fret over what could have become of her, cause after all our circumstances and environment do shape us. eventually she gets around rejecting gender as a concept, thinks it's fluid, and believes its boxing is a total social construct and fraud. She does what she likes. She goes with she/her pronouns cause she believes that they match with her expression and help people perceive her better and know what to expect.

Cause she ded, am sed. Cant hc her for old age, I wish I could. Really.

General Opinion over said character: what can I say, simp for the emotionally wrecked female power icon who hides all her emotions away and keeps the family together is so very fucking devoted,,, is my shit. I'll do anything for her, she can take me in and make me her slave.

I feel like I didn't do well with her. Idk its 2 am, my brain's not the best rn. Maybe ill add more later. Thanks dem <3 sry if this is disappointing 😔

[miss-choco-chips]

hey so I had a quick question about twisted soulmates! so tim knows who his soulmates are, jason knows tim is his soulmate, damian thinks tim is his nemesis, but does dick know? do they all know about each other? love the story!!!

 (2/2)  I also love how you call ra’s a cheap kazoo at the end it really fits him

---

Hey sweetie! I’m glad you liked it. Twisted Soulmates has a very special place in my heart, it’s the first long-ish fic I wrote for the fandom and it’s received so much love, it amazes me. And yesss Ra’s totally is. I read that in a post I saw in Pinterest about someone saying that to “play someone like a fiddle” isn’t a fitting insult cause fiddles are hard to play and should instead say a kazoo, and I thought Tim would think so too.

So to clear the soulmate mess a bit.

….This got really really long so I’m gonna put it under the cut. Also, beware of spoilers of the possible second part!

 Dick knows Tim is his soulmate, but it doesn’t get directly addressed in the fic by anyone else than Tim, and that was on purpose. Dick didn’t get his mark at the same time Tim did. Or rather he did, but he was in costume and didn’t see his own wrist, and then his parents died and the trauma kinda fucked things up and the name got erased. Like, he repressed the whole thing so hard he forcefully forgot about Tim and removed him from his own body. That is, until Tim went to ask him to be Robin again, and when Dick touched him he was bitchslapped by the feeling of the name appearing on him.

But the thing is, Dick is a young man, emphasis on the ‘man’. And this weird little kid is, soulmate or not, a *kid*. Dick is uncomfortable as fuck in this situation. He gets fond of Tim with time, they become friends and he mentors him to make sure what happened to Jason won’t happen to him, but he’s very carefully keeping him at arm’s length in anything soulmate related, because he won’t ever see a twelve year old as some romantic partner just because some cosmic force says he’s destined to be that. Maybe in the future, maybe not, but certainly not when there is this age difference that creeps him the hell out. He has his relationships with other people, which Tim respects because he doesn’t think he has any say on the matter, and they honestly love and care for each other (Tim is crushing hard but he’s a teen and Dick is his hero, that would be expected even without the soulmate thing), and everyone kinda turns a blind eye to the whole thing (except from some of the Young Justice gang, but that’s another thing entirely). Sure, Dick’s girlfriends (or at least the ones that are in the know) look a lil uncomfortable when Dick takes them home and they meet this tiny, starry eyed kid who does his best to be polite, but except for that it might as well be a taboo. The most Dick does is when any danger comes near Tim and he outright freaks out, like when he got Ra’s mark and he flew all the way from San Fran just to fret, but, again, the do love each other, so that might or might not be because of their bond.

Jason as explained gets the mark when he’s attacking Tim at Titan’s Tower. He already had the Joker on his other wrist, so there was no place for doubt. That’s why he left Tim alive, instead of finishing the job like he intended to. The second attempt on Tim’s life was made under Pit influence, because Tim rejected his offer to be his Robin, which Jason’s highly damaged mind translated to rejection to him as a soulmate, which in turn made him really mad, and… yeah. He *does* want to get to know Tim properly and apologize, he felt awful about it all once his mind got cleared up, but like… regret doesn’t just erase all the pain he brought his soulmate, a fact he’s perfectly aware of. So when shit hits the fan with Tim and Dick, Jason is away on a self-discovery trip with the outlaws where he works through his issues, hoping to get himself to a place from where he could start a new relationship with Tim (only if Tim is cool with giving him another shot; he’s hopeful but not going to press, the decision will be firmly in Tim’s hands). He doesn’t know about Dick and Damian, but he does know about Ra’s because he once heard Talia ranting about his father being too ‘soft to his nemesis’, which got him curious enough to investigate. It makes him feel even worse, because the poor kid’s nemesis AND soulmate actively tried to hurt him, which… is really fucked up. So Jason is a hot mess right now, but he’s on the path of redemption.

Damian’s thing was another mess altogether. Damian hasn’t met his nemesis yet (I’m still not 100% sure who is gonna be for him), so when he gets to Wayne Manor and gets his mark as he’s hitting Tim… well, the kid’s been groomed to think of his Father’s other kids as enemies already, its not too much of a leap to consider Tim, his direct predecessor and the one he has to live up to, as his ultimate foe. He also knows about his Grandfather having Drake’s name, so his proud little head gets a high at the idea of having the same nemesis as Ra’s, like some kind of validation to him, like he could someday be equal to Ra’s if he has his same nemesis. Tim tries to correct him, but he’s also busy dealing with the fact that a ten year old is another one of his soulmates, and a murderous one at that, so he’s probably not explaining himself as well as he could, and Damian walks out of that encounter totally sure that Tim is his nemesis (he didn’t see Tim’s wrist, so as far as he’s aware, he’s on the same wrist as Ra’s and thus Drake’s nemesis). He doesn’t know about Jason, but he learns about Dick later on, after he becomes his Robin. They are bonding one night and Dick tells him about his soulmate and nemesis (he’s probably trying to explain something about morals and whatnot to him using that as an example), and Damian can’t even suspect of Dick having it wrong, because the one he claims as his nemesis is one of his worst foes, and no matter how bad, Tim couldn’t be worse than him, so, by elimination, Tim IS Dick’s soulmate. This freaks him out, badly, and he does his best to avoid telling Dick about his mark, because he is still sure about Tim being his nemesis, and that means he is destined to hate the one dick is fated to love; Dick would never choose him above Tim if he was aware of this. He’d never love Damian more than Tim, and that makes the child in him even MORE mad at Drake because jealousy.

So by the time Tim says ‘fuck it’ and basically elopes with Ra’s, Dick is unaware of Jason and Damian; Jason is also unaware of the other two; and Damian only has half the information.

They will find out about the others though (and in Damian’s case, about Tim being his soulmate instead of nemesis), when they find out about Tim’s disappearance (he’s with Ra’s but he’s not exactly advertising it so not a lot of people know where the fuck he is) and join forces to look for him. But that will happen in the second part, if I gather enough brain cells to write it lol

Also, a bit about Tim, if you’re interested!

Tim knows they are they soulmates- even when things get twisted when Ra’s, who is his nemesis, treats him better than the people supposedly destined to love him. Its very confusing, and while a part of him is sure of it, the other is like… maybe Ra’s is his destined one, after all. In the end, Tim decides it doesn’t really matter. Ra’s can be his nemesis, soulmate, whatever- he’s taking him down, hence the last scene where he smiles at having deceived him. And Dick, Jason and Damian might or might not be his soulmates- he doesn’t give a fuck either, he’s not gonna forgive them just because Fate winks at him and pushes him towards them. Oh no, hell no. He’s basically giving up on love, soulmates and all that jazz. He’s gonna use his unique position to do his best to take Ra’s down, even if that means he goes down with him, because he’s a very depressed boy who only feels something when in immediate danger, and sadly the most danger he can be in is inside the lion’s mouth- travelling around the world with Ra’s.

This got really long, anon, sorry! Hope you’re having an amazing day!

[kimikitty96]

Goodbye Letter to my Eating Disorder

It’s been hard. The past 3 years were so difficult, I’m surprised I haven’t completely lost myself. From having relationship problems, to deaths in my family (my brother and kitty died), to being sexually assaulted in the gym, to almost losing my mom this past year...suffice it to say, it’s been rather difficult. 

I turned to my old “friend”, Edward. We “met” when I was 8 years old, and lost touch when I started working at 21 years old. Or, at least I thought we lost touch; he just put on a mask. But here he was again. He was there for me when I was struggling the most. No one else understood my pain the way he did, and no one numbed me like he did. He gave me the drive and motivation to get out of bed and to go to the gym; he kept me from faltering on my diet and turn to comfort eating; he continued to cheer me on when I made mistakes and would tell me to keep going. When I have injuries, he’d tell me that my initial weight loss was not due to me exercising, but my eating habits and to not worry, I can still continue! When I got sexually assaulted at my gym, he said to me that I never have to go back to that gym, and that I can go anywhere else to get my “Brazilian Booty”. He suggested I take a trip to Vegas and just enjoy myself, then come back and get serious.

He comforted me when my fiance would reject me, saying if I listened to him, I won’t need my fiance because I’d be able to attract the guy I really wanted, that all I needed was a little push. When my kitty passed away, Edward allowed me to grieve and to celebrate her life by going to a buffet and enjoying seafood, on one condition: I had to make sure that I was right back on track by making sure that I would “let my body rest” from food for a couple of days.

Last July (2019), I went into PHP because I knew something was seriously wrong. Edward was no longer helping me. His voice grew louder in my head, and what used to be gentle nudging became more forceful, more frustrated. Here was his evolution:

-”Oh, you want carbs? Well, that’s okay! You can have carbs and use it as energy for the gym when doing cardio/lower body workout tomorrow! Just make sure you lower your fat intake, okay?”

-”Yes! There’s a food festival! Make sure you get your 10k steps before you go, okay? We’ll eat everything we want, just like those fitness people do on YouTube! You’ve earned it!”

-”Oh, you gained weight...again. I mean...maybe you should lower your calories again. You’re eating a bit more than you’re supposed to, so just make sure your weekly calories are where they’re supposed to be.”

-”Lord, you failed an exam??? Okay, you need to hit the gym harder so you can focus better.”

-”[Fiance] refused to touch you again? It’s been a month since the last time? Why do you even want him to touch you at this point? You should just think about that guy who molested you at the gym, since that’s all you can get at this point.”

“You failed another exam? Jesus christ, you need to focus harder. You’ll never finish community college and get into [#1 dream school] if you continue like this! But if you let your body rest from food, you’ll have mental clarity and will remember your course material better.”

-”Oh, fiance said no to you again. You really need to stop having these “cheat days” or “cheat meals”. He’s getting more and more grossed out by you every day.”

-“Why can’t you just stop eating the junk foods you’re eating? You were able to do it before. You’re so stupid, you can’t even get this right. You know what? I’m going to test your willpower. Go out and buy junk food, and stare at it and say no!”

-”See, he’s flirting with so many other women at his work. This is why he won’t touch you. You’re stupid and ugly; you’re worth nothing unless you are at the top of your class, and weigh less than [UGW]!”

-”Why can’t you stop eating?!?! Why do you have the willpower of a drug addict?! You’re nothing! Get rid of that! You don’t deserve your meal! GET RID OF IT NOW!”

-”JESUS CHRIST, YOU ARE FUCKING STUPID! IT’S YOUR FAULT YOUR FIANCE DON’T WANT YOU! YOU’RE WORTH LESS THAN NOTHING! YOU DESERVED BEING GROPED AT THE GYM BECAUSE THAT IS YOUR WORTH!”

-”See? You failed a class you already took! This is how stupid and [ableist expletive] you are. You can’t even do that shit right. YOU ARE NOTHING. YOU HAVE NEGATIVE WORTH.”

-”Your brother died because he had diabetes. Your mother almost died because of diabetes. They couldn’t control; the shit they put in their mouths, and you will end up with the same fate because your dumb ass can’t even say no to a chip.”

-”Oh, you lost another friend? That’s because you’re a piece of shit. You’ve always been a piece of shit. You deserve to be alone. No one should be subjected to the bullshit that is you. You should just KYS.”

-”No, you can’t have that! You can’t touch food unless I say so! I don’t care that it’s been a week!”

-”No don’t touch food! It’s all poison! It’s going to kill you! Look what it did to your mom and brother! You’re gonna lose your dad too because all food is poison! DON’T TOUCH ANY FOODSTUFFS!!!”

*Me, fainting, at home alone, because I haven’t eaten in a week and my heart rate is in the low 50′s*

-”Why are you being an attention whore? Stop your bitch ass whining and go pee.”

*My response* “Bitch, there’s no one here! Who am I being an attention whore to, my cats?!”

-”Yes! Now stop being a whiny bitch and go pee!”

-”Why are you still here? Why aren’t you doing everyone on this earth a favor and disappear. No one would miss you. They’re not even thinking of you right now. No one misses you now. Everyone is just pretending to like you because they feel sorry for you. They actually really hate you. Just disappear. They don’t want you around anyway.”

-”Leave. Disappear. No one wants you. Just take [redacted], and go to sleep.”

Edward was not helping me. He made it seem like he was, but he wasn’t. He entered my life during a time when I was vulnerable and made me believe he would be my redemption. He knew me; he knew what was best for me. He could make me better/stronger/more beautiful/more desirable/smarter; all I had to do was listen.

That’s not who he is. He is a monster. He’s worse than that; he is pure evil that nothing and no one should ever allowed in. He took what I give him, and it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Once I did what he told me to do, he tells me to go farther because while it’s good, I can do better; I can be better. He destroyed everything I touch and turned it against me so that I couldn’t rely on anyone but him. He isolated me and introduced me to his partner-in-crime, Shame. The more Edward spoke, the more Shame consumed. 

When I thought Edward was giving me drive and motivation to go workout so I could improve myself, in reality, he was telling me my body was grotesque and that I needed to punish myself because I mistreated my body. When he tried to keep me from faltering on my diet, he was telling me I shouldn’t eat [xyz] so I can be healthy, when in reality, he was encouraging me to binge/purge/restrict/fast, causing heart palpitations, unstable-low blood pressure, gastrointestinal distress, brain fog, increased bouts of depression, and severe low self esteem; instead of being healthy, he made me extremely unhealthy. When he continued to cheer me on whenever I injured myself due to too much physical exertion and would tell me to “reign my diet in”, the reality was that he caused these injuries by telling me that I had to keep going no matter how hard I trained, that I couldn’t eat enough calories so I could heal and recover, and that even though I was injured, I couldn’t rest and had to continue to exercise. When I got sexually assaulted at my gym, he graciously allowed me to transfer gyms and continue to workout and ignore my mental health when in reality...he wanted to keep me mentally weak so that I would continue to rely on him because he made clothes fit better.

He made it so clothes can fit better; clothes I bought, that I wasn’t allowed to wear, because my body wasn’t where he wanted it to be, therefore I didn’t deserve to wear them yet. 

The past few months have been the most difficult out of the 3 years I’d been struggling; COVID, finishing school and transferring to uni, cheating on my fiance, my mom almost dying (twice), and really delving deep inside me to come to terms with everything I went through and being completely honest with myself...I never want to go through that again. But I am extremely grateful I did, because I saw who Edward really was. I saw him for the toxic, vile, awful evil entity he always was, and now I get to say goodbye.

To Edward:

Thank you for who you were when you back into my life (again). Thank you for helping me cope with my issues, and for keeping my head afloat; you did the best you could, given the circumstances you had. I was broken, hurt, lost, and saw nothing good in me. You showed me that I can be better, and that I can do better. I just have to push a little harder, and I’ll eventually get what I want.

You gave me something to hold on to in the beginning, and thankfully, I figured out your toxicity before it was too late for me. This is me telling you that I want to part ways. I know you’ll still be around, because you are my oldest “friend”, and I know you will do your very best to get me to succumb to your ways. But like you taught me, if I just have a little bit of willpower and a little bit of strength and perseverance, I can achieve what I want; that the only person stopping me is myself. I can either move forward, or sabotage myself once more; it was, and is, completely up to me, isn’t that right?

Thank you for the lessons you taught me. I will utilize them to fight you every single day of my life. Yes, I will have setbacks. Yes, I will falter. But like you taught me; if I falter, I need to keep going. What was it you used to tell me? If I miss a workout, or eat something I wasn’t supposed to, that I needed to work twice as hard the next day? That’s exactly what I’m going to do. If I let you in, I will tell myself that it’s okay to make a mistake, and that I can always turn my back on you whenever you appear. The only difference between your lesson and my OWN words is that I will forgive myself for allowing you back in. 

I want to thank you for all the vitriolic words you’ve shouted at me. If it weren’t for that, I would’ve never seen the kindest words uttered to me by the ones who do love and care about me (yes, the people in my life love me despite your insistence that they don’t). I want to thank you for the discipline you’ve instilled upon me. If it weren’t for that, I would’ve never remembered the drive I have at succeeding at endeavors that mean a lot to me. And you know what means a lot to me? 

I MEAN A LOT TO ME!

So I will work my hardest to make sure I fight you every single god damn day of my life, and in doing so, empower me to be the best me I can. And you know what it means to be the best me? It’s to be my most authentic and honest and forgiving self. I means I can finally love and appreciate me the way I love and appreciate everyone in my life.

This is my goodbye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Kitty 

[andsmile]

I really wanna know if even a little part of you doesn’t feel like A doesn’t wanna lose V because he was already rejected by B? He was fully ready to risk it and didn’t even respond to “... and you love V right?” I know he loves V but that convo he had with B where she rejected him is the final thing that made me leave the V/A ship and want better for V. Or are you just looking at the silver lining. A just makes V doubt his feelings for her so much (with her “BFF” don’t even get me started on her) and I absolutely hate it so just broke away. She’s happy with him so if she ends up with him, good for her but how can she trust him fully again? I’ll just always feel like she deserves way better

Okay, time for an honest conversation about this, and I’m putting it under the cut because it’s gonna be long!

People cheat. Real people cheat everyday for a lot of reasons, and when someone cheats on someone else, it rarely is because “OMG I am so in love with this other person that isn’t my S/O that I cannot CONTROL myself anymore”, although fiction often justifies it like that. 95% of the times people cheating has to do with something going on inside themselves--sometimes it’s not even because their relationship sucks. Sometimes it’s because they’re seeking reassurance, sometimes it’s a matter of ego, and sometimes it’s a matter of confusion. Cheating isn’t a nice thing and it’s not something that needs to be forgiven so easily or at all, but it’s something that happens. Some people can forgive being cheated on; some people can’t.

Now, Archie Andrews isn’t a real person, and neither is Betty or Veronica or Jughead. They’re all written to act in a certain way, and sometimes the way they are written doesn’t make any sense. It makes zero sense to me for Betty to cheat on Jughead and Archie to cheat on Veronica when they did. Ok, they had their brief fake dating thing and possibly some feelings that were buried (don’t even get me started on how the narrative never showed this but anyway) but there’s absolutely nothing in the narrative that backs up their point of view with the cheating, that they’d gravitate towards each other and start this emotional affair out of nowhere because they were having problems with their S/O’s. So, why they cheated? Remains to be understood. My guess? Drama. Shock value.

The following episode was written to expose Betty’s reasons for the cheating--she was caught up in nostalgia and wanted to feel safe since everything was changing. Archie was not given the same chance of point of view exploration, so you just see him being confused and, well, willing.

The little POV we have from Archie is when he talks with Fred’s grave and says he doesn’t know where his heart is pointing. He says he doesn’t want to lose or hurt Veronica. He clearly just wanted to have a ~moment with Betty to be sure of whatever he was feeling for her--it’s even what his stupid song says, that they have to try to find out what’s up. Betty shuts him down and doesn’t let him try. I know he didn’t answer that he loved Veronica when Betty asked the second time, but his answer wasn’t “No, I don’t love her,” (love doesn’t work like this anyway). His answer was, “but then what is this all about?” referring to their emotional tryst. If they weren’t going anywhere with it and they loved their S/O’s, why were they even doing anything? Then, he admitted to his mom that he was being flaky and that he needed a fresh start.

Now, the season was interrupted and according to RAS, I think Archie possibly will be given a point of view about his confusion and why was he so willing to start something with Betty. We don’t know! It’s hard when we don’t know. But, honestly, as an Archie fan and especially as an Archie and Veronica fan, I think that Archie has never before made her doubt his feelings. Honestly, he’s always proven himself and his love for her, in numerous occasions, when the fandom was always expecting him to let the other shoe drop. Yes, this time he did act flaky and it might have something to do with Betty--of course with Betty whatever happened would be more significant than with any other girl, they do have history. When it comes to Archie’s character in the comics and in general, it’s always Veronica or Betty for him, normally B when Veronica isn’t there--but it’s definitely a lot more about himself and his own confusion, how lost he’s feeling with his future and his life since his dad died. A few times we saw Veronica and Archie saying they didn’t know where they were going in the future, and that might’ve contributed as well--the uncertainty of their own future. Not trying to justify that he cheated, but Betty did get an explanation, and I expect that we might still have one for Archie too, and that might be crucial with how I view this ship in canon.

It sucks that the writers didn’t write this better. It also sucks that they write Veronica as someone who’s confident in so many things but so insecure when it comes to Archie...but that’s because it’s Betty. And I don’t think it’s because of their shared history or anything, it’s because Veronica views these two kids as the second coming of Jesus, since she doesn’t think she’s a good person. Both her and Jughead have this tendency of seeing Archie and Betty as the purest, best thing that ever happened and they’re the evil that touched them and fucked it up, so why would Archie ever choose her instead of B, in her mind? And I absolutely hate that she tricks herself into being insecure about Betty but that’s how the writers write her, and that’s not on Archie or how he acts. Before the cheating plot he never gave her a reason to doubt his feelings for her, and she always does when is someone she feels inferior to.

(If we take into account that this is a latina character feeling inferior to two white characters so many things are wrong, but anyway)

If she’s written to forgive Archie and to trust Archie again, if Archie is written to love her more than anything again, she will forgive and trust Archie, Archie will love her, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. And I am pretty sure this is where this is heading, whether it’s satisfactory or not. Some ships I can forgive after the writing screws them up. I did it with Brucas. I did with Stelena. Some ships I cannot forgive because I am presented with a better option: I didn’t forgive Chair, and I started shipping Dair.

Now, does Veronica deserve better? I don’t think she deserves better than Archie himself. I think Archie is a good boyfriend for her despite his latest screw up. What I do think is that she deserves to be better written as a character and not to feel inferior to him or Betty, and not to always go back to her father regardless of their emotional abuse. I think she deserves to be strong in other points of her life and maybe holding her head up with Archie is one of those points, but we don’t know what’s coming, so I probably am looking at the silver lining. What’s better than Archie for her in canon so far? We don’t have it. The Riverdale girls don’t have a lot of options when it comes to love interests, do they? Especially the WOCs. Reggie, arguably, but he asked too much of her and dropped her too, and lowkey manipulated her into things. She was not in love with him as she was with Archie. We are not going to see her with a good new love interest, we are not going to get her around Jughead or Cheryl or other potential ships, so why not root for the redemption of the ship I already love?

So, yeah, as much as it’s hard to cheer for canon Varchie and being a Veronica fan in this moment given these writing choices, I choose to cheer for them knowing that there’s no character destruction without character redemption, and also looking at them through some other lenses. I have learned to separate fanon from canon from the comics from whatever. Ideally, Riverdale would be better written, but it’s not. That’s why we have fanfic and that’s why I don’t wanna watch the show anymore. But I’ll keep on supporting canon Varchie as long as I find that they can overcome the obstacles in their way--Archie’s confusion might be one of them, if it’s written to be.

Now, mwah! Hope you have a nice week.