#personally i think alewyn is a lesbian

[hellish-riddles]

actually fuck u all i’m taking my anger out of the tags.

can riz be aroace? yes. could riz also just be ace? literally yes.

Can alewyn be lesbian? yes. can aelwyn be bi or pan/queer. literally yes.

When it’s not only implied but out right SAID it’s okay to canonize, even if later on it may not be true or retconned. YES it’s possible he’s not! YES it’s possible that he is. That’s all there is to it. Both answers can be correct.

the problem with hard marking a character or even a person as 1 thing and only 1 things is insufferable. Sometimes, oh my god hear me out. people will identify with things and sometimes, those things don’t mean the same to others. Is riz aroace? it’s implied and said directly by Murph and Brennan. Could that also change? Literally yes.

The people playing them are not aspec themselves and i encourage to extend leniency of their knowledge or interpretation of it within their characters. Was Ace the only one thing directly said? I believe so. Is Murph also implicating that he may also have the traits or feelings of being Aro? yes. Awesome! It doesn’t need to be said outright, maybe to Riz being Ace also means being Aro. Maybe it doesn’t.

This is DnD, this is fiction, all answers are correct. You think Aelwyn is just lesbian and Riz is just Ace? Cool! You think Aelwyn is bi and Riz is AroAce! Cool! guess what weirdos you’re both right.

all answers are correct. and even then, you can interpret a character any way you please. just don’t act like you are absolute in the characters/players thoughts wants and feelings.

“Riz isn’t canonically aro, no one has said it yet!” Do you need everything spelled out for you like a baby? Ya’ll can take anything a character does to argue they’re canon gay but suddenly not wanting to make out is too hard to think about?

ya’ll have literally decided Aelwyn is canon lesbian because of one line of dialogue but Riz saying several times how much he doesn’t want to have sex or kiss people and having a romance partner be his literal living nightmare doesn’t mean anything?!

-Mod Fig

[aydascomprehendsubtext]

The sirens grow and grow

About a month into her stay at Mordred Mansion in Solace, Aelwyn Abernant bursts into the Seacaster Manor late at night (after Adaine has gone to bed), climbs the stairs to Fabian’s room, and kisses him full on the mouth.

“You owe me something”, she says as soon as they separate. By something, she thinks they both understand, she means sex.

They don’t do anything close to sex.

-

The first time she comes over, Fabian looks supremely confident and is incredibly nervous.  She clocks this and ignores it, because this is why she likes him. Adaine and most of her friends are honest. They lie, yes, but they mostly don’t lie about themselves. And they don’t lie about themselves to their friends.

Fabian does. Fabian is made of lies stacked on top of each other. So is Aelwyn.

-

“It’s three cowards stacked on top of each other in a trench coat” he slurs at her, the third time they meet. “That’s what I am. It’s the animals that puff out their fur to make themselves look more intimidating.” He’s incredibly drunk. It’s become obvious that his reaction to the possibility of sex with her is to get very drunk. She would take it personally, but at this point it’s become clear to her at least they’re definitely not having sex and she feels much the same way about him. She is also incredibly drunk, but she has worked very hard to be drunk and maintain strict impulse control. It’s an incredibly useful skill that was probably the only way she survived her small rebellions against the Abernant regime. Watching Fabian, she wonders if that sort of defeats the purpose. If maybe the point is to let some of the control slip. What it would feel like to make that choice for herself.

-

She’s accepted that their relationship is one of getting drunk and being harassed by his friends and her sister about their life choices. She doesn’t expect things to change. She has no interest in bringing up the fact that he doesn’t want to sleep with her, and he has a teenage boy’s interest in not bringing it up.

So when he does, it’s the first sign she should have caught that this isn’t exactly what she expected.

“I feel like it is only my duty, which I take very seriously, as a man, you know, to… ensure I am not leading you on, so to speak.” He tells her this turned away, opening a bottle of something she recognizes more from her father’s stores than a Hudol party mix.

He’s turned away, but she doesn’t let herself show her surprise. There’s only harm in it. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Her voice is dry and she doesn’t elaborate, hoping that’s enough to tell him he can drop it.

He doesn’t. “Well, I’m not -ah- surprised per say, I know you’re an incredibly, and I mean incredibly. intelligent woman and I hadn’t exactly been keeping it a secret but I just felt, as a matter of honor, and duty, as I said, as a man, that I should offer you the chance to leave, if you so choose to find another partner, so to speak.” He’s looking at her now, as if he has summoned his courage. He looks confident. His words flow in the kind of run-on sentences that punctuation would diminish the elegance of. He’s nervous, and they both know it, and she’s got the sneaking suspicion that he’s stopped thinking he can hide things from her.

“That’s alright. You have a caliber of alcohol I’d become accustomed to, and the Hudol boys are dreadfully stingy these days”. She leaves it at that and they both start to work at getting drunk.

She can still hide things from him, because the Seacaster Manor was a crucible in the right kind of delicate conversation and the Abernant House was a cup in hell itself.

-

She thinks that she might respond to emotional turmoil in a similar way to Bill Seacaster, or possibly Fabian’s mother. Quiet, detached, willing to ignore it as long as he let her. It must be comforting, in a way she realizes is probably not incredibly healthy and he definitely doesn’t recognize himself. She could tell him to stop. But that would probably require ending the only activity she can call friendship now, and some part of her tells her that she can call it friendship if she’s selfish enough to hold onto it.

-

Well into the summer after their spring break adventure, she is perfectly comfortable with their relationship, even with the knowledge that he’s a little more open, a little less constrained than she is. She can predict him now, she knows. They meet, they both drink, she relaxes under the influence the increment that if she didn’t it would be noteworthy, he gets roaring drunk and emotional in the way that requires ignoring.

And then one night it goes disastrously wrong. He gives her something interesting and new from his father’s cupboard, something she hasn’t seen before and it…

Affects her. In a way nothing has for as long as she can remember.

It’s the only night she can remember snapping to, passed out on his floor, instead of drifting out of a trance of a light doze or just wakefulness. She wants to vomit, and isn’t sure if it’s the hangover or the knowledge of everything she let go like a moron. Like a drunk sorority girl. Like someone who didn’t have anything to hide. Like someone who hadn’t worked to build up everything she still had left from nothing, from the bombed-out landscape of what happens when she makes mistakes. She hurries out of his house and to Mordred Mansion. She makes a sound, and Adaine hears her and makes the first noise of a question she can’t answer, not right now and not ever, and she casts sleep on her own fucking little sister who she said she wouldn’t harm ever again, and curls up into the locked bathroom to sob.

-

The next night, when she hasn’t seen anyone from the Manor all day after she teleported out and left her crystal, she goes back to the Seacaster Manor. Any other time you asked her, she would be able to tell you why she went over there. Or, she would be able to lie. This time, she doesn’t even have the lie prepared. She doesn’t think. She’s spent the day wandering around downtown, casting protective wards to keep a sending or a scrying spell from getting through.

It’s not that she thinks there won’t be consequences for her actions. She’s not stupid or naive. If you asked her later, she would say she assumed that the difference between being missing 12 and 24 hours wasn’t that large, in the grand scheme of things. If you ask her later, Aelwyn has all sorts of lies she can tell you about why she does the things she does.

In the moment, she just doesn’t want to go home. So she goes to Seacaster Manor.

-

On the worst night of her life, she’s three cups deep into something that tastes like Penelope’s stolen stash and realizes she may be slightly tipsy. Not enough to worry about, just enough to notice. It’s not until her fourth cup that she realizes tipsy was a vast understatement, and it’s much too late for her to care the way she should.

It’s just… it’s hard. It’s work. Every day, all the time, trying to keep herself safe.

She confesses this, out loud, to Fabian, who agrees loudly. “I didn’t even realize I was exhausted until the moment after Kalvaxus was dead, and I went home to Cathilda and my mother, and there was no one to preform to. My father was dead. I could just be for the first time in as long as I could remember. I almost cried, but I didn’t, and instead I fell asleep. I woke up feeling relieved.”

“That’s the terrible thing when they died,” Aelwyn replies. “It was relief. Adaine was joyful, and she should be. They tortured her and she killed them. But I wasn’t sad for them, and I didn’t get her exuberance. It was just a weight lifted off, and it came right fucking back. I got one moment of trying to be a kid and a person, and then I made myself into what I hated, and it’ll be that way forever.”

Fabian shakes his head. “Come on, Aelwyn. You don’t have to be like this forever. It’s a choice you make every time you lie to someone else or yourself. You can just stop.”

-

When she shows up at Seacaster Manor, she doesn’t say anything, because she has no idea what to say. She thinks Cathilda is calling Sandra Lynn and Jawbone, and any second now they’ll all be here with Adaine and consequences will be meted out fairly or unfairly and it doesn’t even matter all that much because it’s all degrees of failure.

Fabian says “I said the wrong thing. It doesn’t have to be like this forever, but you can’t just stop because it’s not the thing you’re making yourself. It’s still them. It’s not like they disappeared from you when they died. They still live in your head, and the thing you can do is replace them bit by bit. And the thing you can do is try. Just try.”

She doesn’t know how. How could she know how? How could she even learn? What could she do? There’s not a step she takes that doesn’t have the Abernant strings pulling it forward, and there’s nothing else to her.

Her posture is stiff and fragile, and when he draws in close, she thinks he’s going to kiss her. She wants to recoil, and it takes everything she has not to, because Aelwyn fucking wouldn’t. It’s not what she wants or needs, but when has that ever mattered?

He doesn’t kiss her. He just moves a step closer and puts his hands on her shoulders, so gently they may not be there at all, and she realizes she’s shaking. She doesn’t melt into him. That’s what she’ll say, if you ask her. She doesn’t cry either, which is the truth. But she does shake apart in the comfort of a friend in the first time in as long as she can remember.

-

The first time she comes over, after he has drunk himself to sleep and she has sat in his room watching the dark turn to light thinking about nothing when she can, she steals out before he wakes up. The embarrassment when he wakes would be delicious, she thinks, but he might ask why I didn’t stop him from drinking so much.

So after most of the night sitting in the room of a boy she has not had sex with, she goes to leave and looks back, just for a second. He’s asleep.

She’s seen her mother and father asleep. They looked severe. Like the lines in their face had been carved there with age, and even when they relaxed the echoes remained. One night, on the cold hard ground of the nightmare forest, she had woken up and looked at them and thought her face must be the same. But she looks at Fabian now, and he looks young. He’s lost all the bravado. In a moment she thinks that they are both much much younger than their parents. They have time before they’re the worst versions of themselves.