#that if its not her than everyone is fucked. that if its not her its normal.

[clockwayswrites]

Dead on MAYn '25 Day 2: Bonus Day: "When were you going to tell me that we were married?"

It was crowded. Which, as annoying as it was, made sense. The King of the Infinite Realms and a selection of his cabinet were arriving today. Apparently, the king was finally ready to talk about that whole fuck up with the GIW, the government, and the war that had nearly happened.

Apparently, the King also saw it as a good time for the two sides to mingle and get to know each other. The thought of a multidimensional party did pretty good at drawing a crowd. Hal couldn’t talk, he was there for the free booze.

Well, and because Barry made him come.

On the damn dot, a tear in the air appeared: a diagonal purple splash. It split and tore into a glowing green portal. King Phantom and his ranks stood just on the other side. It wasn’t everyone who stepped through.

King Phantom led the procession, of course. His crown of swirling galaxies barely cleared the edge of the portal. His cloak of stars just brushed the ground. He was flanked by another ghost, one who looked remarkably like him, though the hair was bluer and a red-headed woman who looked remarkable human, other than the green glow to her eyes. A multi-armed giantress, furry being Hal could only think to call a yeti, and a hooded figure followed.

Once the group was through the portal, it snapped closed. The tear remained. A quick out if it was needed, Hal figured.

“Greetings, King Phantom and friends,” Wounder Woman called boisterously, “to Mount Justice! The Justice League and its allies are honored to welcome you all here today.”

The king inclined his head. “And we are humbled to be welcomed. I am sure that you all have questions? Maybe we could get a few of the big ones out of the way instead of having to spend all night answering the same queries.”

“Yeah, I have a question.” The gruff, modulated voice spoke up from further back in the crowd.

People parted like the sea under Aquaman’s command. One of the Bat brood stepped forward. A black and red leather coat with the hood up, mostly shadowing the red mask and respirator.

“The Red Hood,” Barry leaned over and murmured.

“I knew that,” Hal hissed back.

The Red Hood stopped and crossed his arms, making his stupidly broad shoulders look all the wider. Something about the way that he just subtly leaned back seemed threatening.

It was a sharp contrast to the way that Phantom basically perked up like some ill mannered puppy. “Robin!”

“Yeah, not so much anymore, your highness,” the Red Hood grumbled.

Phantom deflated like a balloon with a leak. Really. Hall thought that Phantom might have actually gotten smaller somehow. “Oh, well, right. Um, what was your question?”

“My question,” The Red Hood’s voice through that respirator really was menacing. “is when the fuck were you going to tell me that we were married?”

Phantom blinked his luminescent green eyes. “Married?”

“Ghost married.”

“Holy fuck, you’re ghost married?!” Phantom’s look-alike companion asked gleefully and with a fanged grin.

“I—ghost married?” Phantom squeaked.

“Yep,” the Red Hood said. “'parently we’re soul bonded. Magically fuckery. Ghost fuckery. Both.”

Phantom rubbed at the back of his neck. “We’re, oh… shit, the Cascades?”

The Red Hood just shrugged. “Likely.”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know,” Phantom pleaded.

The rest of the Batfamily were watching the exchange like it was a tennis match: heads swinging back and forth.

The Red Hood snorted. “No excuse.”

“No excuse?!” Phantom repeated. “All the excuse! I couldn’t tell you if I didn’t know! Look, I’ll talk to CW as soon as I’m back about getting the ghost equivalent of a divorce—”

“Who said I wanted a divorce?”

Phantom froze—like actually froze perfectly still, swirling cap and all, for a moment before he shook himself out of it. “I—you don’t?”

The Red Hood shrugged again. “Haven’t seen you since you were a tiny teenager twink. Figured I should get to know you again at least. You could be a good husband.”

A grin spread over Phantom’s face. “Did you alliterate that on purpose?”

Okay, now the shrugging was just getting repetitive.

Phantom moved forward but didn’t at the same time. It wasn’t as much that he was stretching as that the world seemed to compact around Phantom for a moment, almost like a wormhole. Then the world snapped back into place and Phantom was standing right in front of the Red Hood, leaning close to his face. He was still grinning toothily.

It was vicious looking smile.

Maybe Phantom and the Red Hood were meant for each other after all.

“Oh,” Phantom purred. “You might not be Robin any more, but I don’t think you’re that different. What do I call you now?”

“I’m the Red Hood, but I guess you can call me husband.”

[mindmelter]

Reshaping Minds

It was a calm afternoon at the coffee lounge of a high-end hotel in Miami. The kind of place with overpriced lattes, but money was never a problem for me. I had my sunglasses on, my iced coffee in hand, and my radar fully tuned for potential fun. That’s when I saw him.

A goddamn tank of a man.

He stood near the espresso bar, stretching his thick arms in a tight navy-blue tee, making his muscles bulge like he was carved from marble, and his tribal tattoo wrapped around his huge bicep, making him hotter and manlier than everyone at the lounge. His beard was neatly trimmed, baseball cap turned backward, and he had that smug alpha energy straight dudes ooze when they think the world owes them a trophy.

He wasn't alone—They never are—His girlfriend was clinging to him like a purse, giggling at something he said. But I wasn’t looking at her. Heck no. I was focused on the fine piece of muscles that was her boyfriend.

I slid off my lounge chair, walked right up to them, and smiled. "Hey, you two look like you could use some fun."

The woman blinked at me confused. The man raised an eyebrow. "Uh, we’re good, man."

I tilted my head. "You sure? I mean, you’ve got all that meat on you, big guy. Seems like a waste if you’re not being properly used."

He turned to face me fully, clearly annoyed. "The hell is that supposed to mean?"

I leaned in just slightly, grinning. "It means you're the kind of thick-brained, thick-bodied beefcake that's good for one thing. Being used. Bent. Owned."

His girlfriend gasped, pulling his arm. "Honey, let’s go. He’s a creep."

But something was happening already inside the man's brain. He didn’t move. Just stared at me.

"What... what the fuck did you say?" he muttered again, but his voice cracked. There it was! His eyes were getting heavier. I stepped closer, like a snake charming its prey. My fingers barely brushed his chest.

"I said you were made to be used. That mind of yours? Serves for nothing but to control your sexy body. No thoughts, just instinct. Grunt when told. Flex when needed. Obey when commanded."

My words pierced his brain. His eyes twitched. His thick chest rose with a heavy breath. I could see his pupils dilating, his mouth parting just a little. "You don’t need to think, big guy. Thinking is for people with something between their ears. Not you."

His girlfriend kept tugging at his arm, but he just stood there. "Honey? Hello? Babe!"

He slowly turned to her, blinked dumbly, then looked back at me. His brows relaxed. His lips parted more. A little line of drool started collecting at the corner of his mouth.

I let out a low chuckle and stepped even closer, almost whispering now. "That's it... Let my words sink in. Let them take root. You're just a toy now. A dumb, hot, perfect toy." His head tilted slightly, eyes half-closed, mouth wide open, and his tongue was hanging loose. Drool dripping down his beard.

The transformation was delicious. My words did far more than just implant commands, they literally reshaped my prey's brain. If you listen carefully, you will hear the wet sounds of his brain moving, shrinking, and molding to my liking. As if his brain were clay, and my words a sculptor's skilled hands.

His girlfriend panicked, backing away. "What the hell are you doing to him!?"

I looked at her calmly. "Relax. He’s finally where he belongs." And then I snapped my fingers in front of her face. Her eyes blinked rapidly. Her mouth opened slightly, then shut. She shivered, then slowly nodded, expression blanking into stunned acceptance.

"He belongs to you now," she said softly. Like she was reading from a script etched into her mind.

I smiled. "You're smarter than him, I see." I turned to the hunk, grabbed his chin and turned his head. "Say you're mine.'"

A moment of silence. Then, in a slow, slurred drawl, he mumbled, "Uhhhm yuhhhrs... suhh..."

Perfect. I gave his cheek a playful pat. "Now listen to me, big guy. That face right there? Dumb. Mindless. Empty. That's your natural expression from now on, you will always look like this. With your eyes heavy and tongue hanging out, blank, docile, and stupid. Got it?"

He gave a soft grunt, lips still parted. His eyes stayed glazed and dull. Good. I turned back to his girlfriend. "You see him now, don’t you? He’s not boyfriend material anymore. He’s too far gone. Too dumb."

She stared at him in silence, then at me. "Yeah... he’s not really... boyfriend material anymore."

"Nope. He’s just a gay sex slave now. A muscle puppet with no brain. Not something you want to bring home to mom or build a family with."

She exhaled sharply. "He’s all yours. I can't date someone that... vacant."

I chuckled, stepping between them and placing a possessive hand on his chest, rubbing his pecs slowly through the thin fabric of his shirt. He didn’t flinch. Just stared into the distance, drool rolling steadily down his tongue. "Smart choice," I said to her. "He’s better off this way. Obedient. Mindless. Always ready. I will take good care of him, don't worry."

She gave a nod and walked away without another word. I turned my full attention to the hunk, both palms now pressed against his chest, playing with his nipples through his shirt, gently twisting them.

He didn’t resist. Didn’t blink. "Good boy," I whispered. "You’re going to make me very happy aren't you?" And he just stood there, blank face locked in, waiting to serve. "Flex for me, boy."

Like a well-oiled machine, the hunk obeyed. His thick, tattooed biceps rose in a slow, powerful curl, veins bulging beneath the ink as his massive arm tightened. He grunted softly, not out of effort—he was too strong for that—but from instinct, like a beast performing on command. I stepped in and ran my hand over his flexed arm, squeezing the hardness of his muscle. My thumb pressed into the peak of his bicep.

"Come, Daddy. Let’s go upstairs."

When we entered my suite, I turned and commanded, "Strip. Now."

He tore off his clothes with urgent clumsiness, revealing every inch of that sculpted Daddy body. His pecs were massive and his thighs were like tree trunks. And between them—his cock. 9 Inches, Thick. Veiny. Fully erect and already leaking.

"On your knees, boy."

The mindless beast dropped instantly, muscles flexing as he settled in front of me. I sat on the edge of the bed, spread my legs wide, and yanked his head toward my crotch. I made him sniff my bulge, and while he took in my musk, I touched his forehead and implanted into his ruined brain everything he needed to know about being a good cock sucking whore.

"Use that whore mouth. Now."

He pulled my cock out and sucked. Greedy. Needy. His lips stretched over my shaft as I gripped his head and rammed myself into his throat. No rhythm. No gentleness. Just ownership.

I used his mouth like a hole. Like a toy. Like he was nothing more than a slab of muscle with a wet hole attached to it. I fucked this handsome Daddy's face, hard and deep, my cock slamming the back of his throat again and again until he gagged. Spit and precum drooled from his lips as I held his head down against my pubes.

"That’s it, Daddy. Choke on your Master's cock. You love being used, don’t you? Just a stupid muscle toy." He moaned through the assault, drool bubbling at the corners of his slack mouth. I slapped his cheek with one hand as I thrust harder, relentlessly.

"You're nothing now. Just a dumb, cock-hungry fuckdoll. Your brain’s gone. Your girl’s gone. All you are is a hole for me to use."

I could hear the wet sloopy sounds—not from the blowjob—but from inside his skull. His brain was being reshaped nonstop with each word that came out of my mouth.

The pressure built. I snarled, shoved his face against my pubes, and came—thick, violent spurts blasting down his throat and spilling out of his mouth. I pulled out mid-release, resting my cock against his panting face, painting his cheeks with cum and spit on the process.

"Good boy, I'm very pleased with your service," I growled, slapping my wet cock against his tongue, "Now your brain will shrink to the size of a grape." The sound his brain made this time was louder as it shrunk to the size of a grape. If I thought his face couldn't get any dumber, the face he made now surpassed that.

He fell to the floor like a limp doll, his thick cock still thobbing hard and leaking. I would make his brain go back to its normal size later, but for now, I will enjoy my new brainless toy.

[limerlove]

romantic devil.

eighteen+ plus, minors dni. content warning: wc 1.6k, a silly trope my brain loves right now — hockeyplayer!vi x tennisplayer!reader. light teasing, smut, enemies to lovers trope, competitive athletes, slight degradation, dubcon (both reader nd vi are slightly drunk), thigh-riding, oral, fingering, praise kink.

hi my violet lovin gays! i am back on the arcane grind. a (maybe) series and the first part is linked below. honestly, this can be read on its own. but this is progress in my eyes and i hope you enjoy. been struggling with completion but we fuckin’ did it. hell the fuck yeah. plus, our fav hockeybutch ♡

hockeyplayer!vi can’t let you live down the undeniable squirting in the locker room in-between your training matches. it’s not like it’s all she can think about. no — it could never be the reason she can’t focus in her own practice. you’re the bane of her existence, the competition for the hottest headlines, and she would love nothing more than to squash like a bug. but for reasons she won’t admit, vi can’t.

even if it’s your off-season, your name sells enough and she sees you everywhere.

it’s not a secret how much you’re adored by the media, the public, and even by everyone vying for a single ounce of your attention. seen and always heard. vi can’t stand it and you do nothing to hide your pure-shot of joy running rancid in your pearly-white grin.

it’s surprising, how much vi lets it dig underneath her skin. the most shocking things of all if vi’s being honest with herself. a pesky thought lingers, one warning caution, especially when vi was fucking someone else but thinking of you.

when the blade of skates glide across the ice, another body checks her into the glass, a lot easier than she should have allowed. her concentration can’t help but fade away into the sunshine of your brightest smile.

she needs to do something about it.

hockeyplayer!vi sneaks up on you when she spots you in the library. alone. in one of your short tennis skirt and vi wonders if it’s your own to torture her. nose buried in your book, headphones over your head, and you’re so lost in your work you don’t even notice her sneak up on you.

“don’t you have somewhere to be?” violet churns out, the instigation prophecy she hopes to fulfill is more than evident. “you always practice on wednesdays.”

the smirk you wear is evil, some would even say malicious. “some would say keeping tabs on me would be stalker-like. oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

“you’re being ridiculous.” vi knows she’s been caught but she won’t be handcuffed into your narrative — however true it may ring she won’t give you the satisfaction of hiding the key. burying her pride along with it.

“it’s nothing — but i’ve just been…hearing some things.”

“so, you’ve actually been listening to something other than the sound of your own voice?”

an immediate eye roll is granted as you slam your book shut, eyes squinting tightly and you’ve got this smile. a dead-ringer for the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. it’s dangerous and even scathing to be around let alone witness.

“yeah, i have.”

she hates this. when you have the upper hand and there’s little to nothing she can do about it. even if vi knows how you taste, or the face you make when you’re brought over the edge, you have a godly control over her as if you’re the messiah she needs forgiveness from.

vi feels the need to repent when you’re stroking the inside of her exposed thigh, the shorts not doing much to conceal her skin. you’ve cornered her with a faulting need to have your greedy split her open like she’s the pomegranate — a beady and bloody vessel you desperately need to rip apart.

the idea of your affection truly aimed at her is nauseating. something you would never allow to be true.

plausible deniability, it’s what every atom in your body is made of.

“stephanie is quite the jealous woman. seems she wasn’t a fan of hearing me scream your name.”

“yeah princess, i know you’re just really torn up about it. it’s not like you’ve been wanting to stick it to her since freshman year.” like the fuckgirl she is, the vying-violet leans forward with your fingers sliding further into your shorts, daring you to inch forward.

“see! this is why we would never work. you’re so goddamn—”

“so, you have been thinking about us.” vi’s cocky grin will haunt you for the next week, letting her have a small fraction of satisfaction.

hockeyplayer!vi who does her best not to sweat it when you show up to one of her games with your best friend. it’s the best game she’s played all season. your presence warrants nothing but success. there’s not a moment she allowed herself to be off. you’ll give her absolute shit for it. especially after all the game she’s fucking talked to you all week.

you leave by the time she’s showered and walking through the arena and back to her car. to her surprise, she receives a dm through her instagram.

10:39 pm. ace_princess: nice game, violet.

simple. barely even noticeable to the naked eye, but that’s as nice a compliment vi would receive from you. violet tries not to smile too wide but the muscles in her cheeks have other plans.

10:43 pm. violet_vanderson: did you actually just compliment me?

vi thinks to herself — she’ll just leave me on read.

10:55 pm. ace_princess: don’t get used to it.

hockeyplayer!vi happens to be at a party with you, how convenient. the first thing she notices is how different you are tonight. you’re usually so disciplined, so perfectly-polished, the perfect picture princess — the one your father created. molding a star takes more work than one would think but if anyone understands, it’s vi. laying before her is nothing you’ve achieved to be. actually, you’re the embodiment of quite the opposite.

cheap red solo cups, the wave of cannabis infiltrating your system, and in the most pompous brit of them all, caitlyn kiramman. ideally, this wouldn’t have been your night. before your father had berated you, telling you to ice her out.

mija, no distractions. this is your chance, what you’ve been working for your entire life.

not the words you’ve been wanting to hear. no, not at all.

you couldn’t tell violet anything, because if you did, it would somehow make it true. you’d have to look her in the eyes again, knowing you’d have to deny her of whatever wishes she tried to press.

hockeyplayer!vi who can practically sniff the fear off of you. like a bloodhound, she sought you out when she pressed forward into her ex-girlfriend’s home. some might say tasteless but you forced her to be an opportunist. violet refused to leave your side, until half of the party had been abandoned and it was just the two of you in the basement — the both of you tremendously tipsy.

maroon-hued silk, a fabric tailored so short it could hardly be called a dress kisses your thighs as violet threatens to push the material upwards. pointed canines nibble on the skin of your neck, lacing the most refined poetry as she etches each letter with a richly-velvet tongue.

“this— violet…” it’s supposed to be solidified, a warning to heed her aggression, but it only gives her lips more incentive to explore new terrain.

“you can ride my thigh, princess. i know you’re dying for something.” violet’s hot breath is torture; practically branding you with unequivocal remorse.

someone who wasn’t inebriated would force her to at least take you back to her place or kick someone up stairs. not in a temporarily vacant basement where anyone could descend at any moment.

her python fingers might as well have pierced you, fingers gliding over a thin layer of lace but she wastes no time, not like before. this is different.

“take them off.” not before violet makes you whimper, pressing your slick against the fabric. the torture seems to be never ending, making an absolute mess of you, fingers rooted in her devilishly-pink roots.

sliding the panties off, you shove them in her back pocket, “this is the last time you’ll be getting them.”

“we’ll see about that.”

hockeyplayer!vi can't seem to be done with you. first, it was letting you get off on her thigh, bare fucking pussy exposed as glid against her exposed skin. your swollen lips puff even more for her. spreading your cum on twitching, sun-kissed thighs.

the second time, all it takes is your ass up high, your body bent over the couch, hem scrunched up at your stomach. it’s inhumane how you don’t have control when it comes to vi and her hypnotic tongue.

every bit of this is so unlike you. you don’t do this. and you tell yourself this has nothing to do with violet vanderson. it doesn’t mean anything how jealous her little groupies were earlier in the night when she ushered you to take a seat in her lap.

“pretty girl, fuck you can take it so well baby.” violet slurps every drop and if anyone asks — she swears you taste of sweet, homegrown-raspberries kissed by the most golden-hued honey. “can’t stop thinking about taking you to my bed and fucking you either my strap.”

in truthfully pathetic fashion, you cum the moment she says it. the tease of her tongue and the power of her brutally curved fingers sends you over the edge for the second time tonight. while you don’t squirt like the first night, there’s a thorough soak to her black-polished fingers.

“vi, baby—”

the pet name causes vi’s clit to throb viciously. “i know, princess. you did such a good job for me tonight. my perfect girl.”

you moan. the people’s princess moans as you push yourself against her fingers that are keeping a slow rhythm, her sensitivity be damned. god did you fucking love it.

“mhm, did you like that? like when i tell you how precious and good you are for me. letting me take care of this pretty pussy for you.”

“vi, fuck, keep going—” the arc to your back is downright sinful and violet wants to push your limit. just a hair.

gripping onto your luscious curls, she pulls, bending you to her will, her skilled fingers stretching you to the best of her abilities. vi wonders if it’s the alcohol or if she’s finally cracked you, but she decides whatever the reason is — violet’s not letting go of you anytime soon.

[damneddamsy]

falling | joel miller x fem!oc (part xiii)

HEURISTIC BLOOM—Intuition blossoms where logic fails.

summary: What is a chore chart but structure in the Miller family that was falling out of line?

a/n: this turned into such a Daddy Joel chapter, so much fluff and angst, I think I just miss my dad so much these days, and this new episode was so difficult to watch. also, this is the daddiest that Joel has dad-ied in this entire series. I love every second of it; Maya and Joel just wreck my sanity. I hope you love it, too :)

word count: 13,000+

Time was the one thing Joel always hoped he’d have more of.

Not in the poetic sense, or to chase silly dreams or put things right. Back then, it was time he’d wanted only so he could spend it hating himself a little longer—then die. Quick, quiet, out of the way, forgotten. That was all he figured he deserved. One more day to survive. One more step closer to nothing.

Only now did time reveal its discretions. Each ageing moment handed to him like a sovereign of gold—finite, dear, and impossible to reclaim once lost.

Mornings came with the sweet dread of culminating, that soon waned by the closure of evenings, and so the circuit went. When everything felt too still, too good to be real. It was as if he’d wandered into someone else’s dream by mistake—some softer version of the world where the coffee stayed warm and the silence wasn’t empty. And he'd be jolted awake to cold floors and open doors any second now.

But the days kept coming. They folded into months, and somehow, a whole year had passed.

A year of birthdays, of sprinting forward, and arguments and mended fences. Of holidays cobbled together with whatever they could find—new twinkling lights held up by fishing wire, cakes made from rationed sugar and fruits born in their backyard. A year of reasons to celebrate. A year of dinners that rarely started on time because Maya needed to show everyone around the table her crayon-covered invention.

A whole year of learning what a family can be—awkward, noisy, unfinished—even when it was messy.

It was a lopsided tapestry that you stitched together with mismatched thread and too-thin patience, patched over with stubborn love and quiet apologies that never quite reached the lips. But it held, even when it creaked under the grief, betrayal, or someone slamming the door too hard.

One thread on that tapestry spiralled forward.

His baby girl, Maya, had turned two over the winter, all curls and wild energy, her tiny voice echoing through the house like birdsong—bright, persistent, impossible to overlook. She ran now—fucking bolted, really—zigzagging through the halls with the chaos of a wind-up toy, often with a sock missing, making him exhausted in ways he never wanted to recover from.

Leela cycled little chores for her on that chore chart that was pinned on the refrigerator, with pretty butterflies and yellow-red-green boxes, all of which were mostly ceremonial, but Maya took to them with solemn, almost comical seriousness. Joel had rolled his eyes then at how excessive it seemed, but these days? He saw what it did and meant.

Structure. Ownership. A sense that Maya belonged here and that this home worked because she helped it.

Setting the table for dinner became a ritual: “One for Daddy, one for me,” she’d whisper in account, carefully placing each plate and all the cutlery with two hands, and god help you if you moved one out of place. She watered a particular rosemary bush in the garden more than the rest, peering into its green leaves like it might talk back. She’d pluck weeds with exaggerated grunts of “Gotcha,” and announced with great urgency to him when the firewood pile looked “low-ish. You gotta make more.”

He’d smile and roll up his sleeves. “Yes, ma’am.”

And when he'd come down right after his shower—steam still curling in the upstairs hallway, wood floors cool under his bare feet, shirt sticking to his back as he came down the stairs, fingers combing through hair that was still wet at the nape—and there she’d be, every damn time.

On the little step-stool in front of the fridge, staring solemnly at her chore chart like it might change if she concentrated hard enough. Her brows were furrowed, sleep-crushed and intent. One hand clutching her stuffed horse, the other hovering near the velcro stars like she was solving a military strategy.

She tapped a box with her finger. “Gaw-den day.”

“Gaw-den. Close enough,” Joel murmured, halfway to the counter.

Maya whipped her head around.

He turned just in time to catch the full force of her grin. Just joy in its rawest, brightest form.

Still in that too-small pyjama set with the little stitched deer on the knees, one sleeve riding up her forearm and the other twisted under her arm where she’d probably slept on it. Her hair hung wild and crooked around her face, half-out of the two ponytails he’d wrestled in the night before, looking like she’d fought a windstorm in her dreams and won.

“Mornin’, daddy,” she chirped, teeth flashing, brown eyes scrunching into perfect little half-moons.

Joel quirked up a smile, like he always did. Like her voice stunned something in him still—every single morning.

Still not rolling her Rs properly, and goddamn if that Texas drawl didn’t hit him straight in the heart every time. That was him in there, bleeding out in the twang of her vowels. She was picking it all up—his dumb phrases, his slow way of leaning against a wall when he got tired, his dry little “hmm”s when he didn’t feel like answering a question. She was mirroring it all, not on purpose—just by being around him too often.

Joel was rubbing off on her. And it was cute as hell. Terrifying, too, in the way love always was when you had something to lose.

“Hi, darlin’,” he triumphed. “Workin’ hard or hardly working’?”

She focused back on her chart again. “Mhm.”

“Hey, where's your mama?”

“Mmmm-downstairs.”

He sighed. “As usual.”

She nodded seriously. “Okay. I gotta count firepile, too. 'Cause I didn’t yestah-day. Was busy.”

“Oh yeah?” He leaned on the counter beside her, letting one hand drop down to rub her back. “Real busy yestah-day, huh?”

Maya nodded again. “Uh-huh. I was eatin’ jam-toast. I coloured.”

Joel chuckled low in his throat. “Well. That’s mighty important.”

“Hmph. I know,” she whispered, already hopping down from the stool. “Shoes, shoes, shoes...”

“Alright, busybee, you come right back and wash your stinky tush,” Joel informed, watching her leave with her horse bouncing under one arm and determination in every stomp of her feet.

Her giggles faded out the door. “Ee, daddy, not my toosh!”

And it was the same way when she fought with Tommy. Even now.

Not the kicking, screaming kind anymore—those had been toddler tantrums. These were verbal scraps now. Loud as hell, sure, but laced with theatricality and the kind of absurd logic that only a two-year-old could weaponise. Always over something stupid, too. A missing biscuit. A cheating accusation in Go Fish. Once, Tommy bragged he’d launched a rock clean over the river, claiming it had “cleared the bend, swear to God.” Maya narrowed her eyes, tiny fists balled on her hips.

“Uncle, you liar,” she declared at the table.

Tommy, ever the instigator, leaned into it with the earnest of a man falsely accused. “Now hold up. Who you callin’ a liar?”

“’S too far... throw.”

“Maybe you just got short arms, squirt.”

Her eyes went wide, affronted. “Not squirt!” she yelped. “Ma-ya. Maa-yaa.”

“Whatever, squirt.”

Then came the stomp—always the stomp—little boot heels pounding off to file a formal complaint with Maria, who didn’t intervene unless something got broken, or someone cried.

Joel just watched it all unfold with quiet amusement, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning. That was his kid, through and through. Fire in her chest, loyalty to a fault, bullshit radar honed to lethal precision. He couldn’t decide if he was proud or worried. Probably both.

Maria handled it better than he did. She had a knack for plucking Maya up mid-meltdown, nestling her against a hip, and talking her down with soft logic and firm affection. No nonsense. No coddling.

Maya, all indignant, fists balled at her sides, came up to her. “He did it again! You gotta beat him, auntie—just pow, pow. Go.”

“Strong-armed by a munchkin,” Tommy mumbled to Joel.

Maria crouched, scooping Maya into her arms with a practised sigh. “Even wild things gotta learn when to walk away, baby.”

There was this maternal gravity there that Maya orbited around without quite realising it. Joel watched the way Maya always crept to Maria’s side when they walked together, or how she listened to her in that unusually still, owl-eyed way she reserved for her mother.

Ellie, on the other hand, was chaos incarnate.

Despite all her grumbling—I’m not babysitting, Joel, I got shit to do—she’d somehow slipped into the role of older sister with barely a stutter. Maya idolised her. Trailed after her like a shadow. Happily took to her when she gave her piggybacks every other evening. Ellie taught her how to whistle through her fingers, and how to spit (which Joel outlawed immediately), and how to sneak treats from the back of the pantry without anyone knowing, especially as Joel, the sucker he was, always fell for those delighting Bambi-eyes routine of hers.

“You distract Joel,” Ellie would whisper, squatted low like they were plotting a heist. “I’ll go for the loot.”

Sometimes Maya clung to her like ivy, curling up beside her on the porch while Ellie fiddled with her switchblade, asking questions about patrol, or hummed tunelessly on her guitar. Other times, she’d give Ellie the boot with all the ceremony of a royal dismissal.

“You go home now,” she’d say, small hand making a shooing gesture toward the door. “You go. Go back.”

Ellie never took it personally. Just smirked and ruffled her curls. “Fine, little shit. I’ll tell Dina you said no to those crayons you wanted so bad.”

Maya would hesitate. Glare. Cross her arms. “Fine.”

It was all ridiculous. It was all perfect. She was perfect.

And Joel couldn’t help but marvel at how she navigated them all—Tommy’s loudmouth energy, Maria’s constant warmth, Ellie’s storm-bright orbit. She was learning how to hold her own. How to give and take. How to love.

And through it all, Joel was utterly wrapped around her finger, watching his little girl fold herself into the arms of a world he used to think was too broken to offer her anything good. She could get away with just about anything if she smiled at him just right, even now.

He pretended to be stern, sure—“Put that back, trouble,” he’d grumble, trying not to grin his face off as she paraded around the house in his muddy boots, dragging his big-ass guitar behind her by the tuning pegs, impersonating him—“That ain’t a toy.”

“My guitar!” she’d giggle, shooting off.

And that would be that. Even Maya knew the truth: she had him beat.

Nowadays, he never really played that damn guitar for himself anymore. Not in the way he once had, back when music was the only place he could put his grief without it looking him in the face. These days, the strings still held sorrow, sure, but it wasn’t a wound he was nursing in secret. It was a tether.

These days, the strings answered to her. To Maya.

And most evenings, without fail, she’d find him out on the porch. Joel would settle there with a quiet grunt, sinking into the porch swing, guitar propped across his knee.

And she’d come, right on schedule—like a moth to the low twang of a G chord.

He’d barely get through tuning when he’d hear the soft little thump-thump-thump of bare feet coming up behind him.

And there she’d be. All two-foot-nothing of her. Wearing that flannel dress that was cut from his old shirts, a nappy that probably needed changing, curls stuck to her forehead, big, brown eyes shining, and she’d let out a huffy sigh, like she was bone-tired from a long day of being two years old.

“Play f’me,” she’d demand simply, climbing onto the swing with zero grace and a lot of conviction.

Joel would glance down at her. One of the shoulder-bows to the dress undone, one sock rolled halfway off, fingers idly picking at a tear on his jeans.

“Am I your jukebox now?” he’d ask, squinting at her with mock suspicion.

She’d giggle a 'hee-hee' sound, not even looking at him. She tapped her chest twice with a little closed fist. “Daddy, my song. Sing Maya song.”

“You ain’t got no song,” he said—always said, every time, even though he already knew what was coming.

“Comma comma song,” she insisted, nodding so hard her curls bounced. “My song.”

The same fucking Handyman song.

He'd lost count of how many times he’d played it—possibly near a thousand by now, judging by the muscle memory in his fingers. But it never got old, not once, not even when he was tired. Not even when his hands ached. Not even on days when he’d spent the morning scrubbing infected blood from under his nails or patching up a busted wall in the town’s greenhouse.

He exhaled, long-suffering, and booped her nose. “Fine. Only ‘cause you’re so damn cute.”

“Cute,” she echoed with a proud little nod, like it was her idea.

Sometimes, on good days—on golden ones like this—he’d plop her into his lap, seating the big, old guitar across both of them. She’d giggle every time like it was a surprise that it was so heavy, the guitar’s body practically swallowed her, tiny legs kicking out with the effort of balancing it. Joel would guide her tiny hand to the strings, his own fingers still holding the chords steady on the frets.

“Easy, baby girl,” he’d murmur, soft at her ear. “Right there. Ready?”

She bounced a little on his leg. “Th-wee-too-one,” she whispered.

And then she’d strum with those baby fingertips, turning red. A phantom pain radiated from his own at the sight.

The tune was always offbeat, too hard or too soft, a mess of squeaky rhythm and muddled chords—but she sang. Loud and proud. Off-key. Adorable. It didn’t matter if she got the words wrong; if she forgot them halfway through, then she made up new ones.

He'd sing with her, a smile in his voice. “Here is the main thing that I wanna say, I'm busy 24 hours a day—”

“Come-a, come-a, come-a, come-a, come, come!” she squealed, kicking her heels.

“Goin’ way too fast,” Joel laughed under his breath, trying not to lose rhythm. “You’re worse than your uncle.”

“I good,” she insisted, pushing her little hands against the strings with all the wrong pressure.

“You loud.”

“Comma, me-hee-ee!” she shouted.

Joel looked down at her—at that messy head, those little shoulders leaning back against the chest she’d lived all her life—this was the same girl who, not that long ago, couldn’t even sit up on her own. The wobbly little thing who used to clap wildly just because he’d hit a clean chord, laughing like it was magic. Now she wanted to sing with him. Be part of his music, even if her sweet songbird voice cracked mid-line because she got distracted by the callouses on his knuckles or the breeze.

His baby was growing up. Too soon for his liking, but so beautifully, too.

Although Joel thought he knew her. He knew everything about his little girl. Knew how she liked her toast slathered with jam, which socks were the “slide-y” ones, the exact pitch her voice hit when she was about to cry, or lie. He knew her world like a worn trail—knew how to keep her on her feet, fed, clean, and loved.

But some things she did still knocked the wind out of him.

It was late one evening, the fire burning low on the hearth, dinner cleaned up, when Joel had settled into the armchair with Maya curled up in his lap, the way she always did, back pressed to his chest, her fingers idly tracing that old scar on his forearm. He picked up the same book they’d been reading for weeks—The Three Pigs—half asleep himself, his voice a gravelly drone more than anything else.

But Maya pushed it aside.

“No,” she declared, already sliding off his lap. She padded across the rug, tugged at the bookshelf with both hands, and wrestled out a hardcover that had seen better days—corners frayed, spine puffed out from water damage.

She carried it over like it weighed five pounds and dropped it with a proud thud in his lap.

“This one,” she huffed.

Joel managed a quiet laugh. “Feelin’ turtles tonight, huh?” he muttered, shifting as she climbed back up his lap, settling in between like a cat.

He reached for the book—One Tiny Turtle—but she didn’t hand it over.

Instead, she squinted at the cover, nose scrunching in that comically serious toddler way. Then she looked up at him, one hand on the book, the other already halfway to his face.

“Daddy, glasses,” she said, tapping his neck like she was reminding him of something important. “I need ‘em. Gimme.”

Joel blinked, caught off guard—and then smiled. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. Ever since he’d started needing the damn things—fixing small screws had turned into a guessing match more than a skill—Ellie and Dina had teased him mercilessly. Maya, on the other hand, had become fascinated. She treated the glasses like mystical antiques, often pulling them from his shirt pocket with the solemnity of a librarian.

“You wanna wear ‘em?” he asked, playing along. “Ain’t gonna help you. Your pretty eyes are fine.”

“Gimme ‘em,” she insisted, already snatching them up and jamming them on her tiny face, where they slipped halfway down her nose, looking exactly like an overworked professor three grades deep into bedtime.

“Wow,” she gasped. “I see you. I see turtles now!”

Joel bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. Goddamn if she wasn’t the most adorable thing he’d ever seen. “Alright, careful with those,” he warned, settling his hands around her middle again to keep her from toppling off his leg.

She cracked the book open herself. Thumbed through a few pages with the consideration of someone handling sacred text. Then stopped. Planted a tiny finger on the first line.

And she started reading. Not guessing. Not parroting back his voice.

Maya was reading out loud.

“The moon was hi-guh... and the... wa-wa-ter was cold. But the ly-tuh-lee... little... tur-tuh-le... turtle... swam fah-st. Fast... lick-ee the ti-dee.”

Her voice was light, soft and lilting—like the story was a secret she was sharing with herself first, him second.

Joel stared at her, heart thudding like someone had snuck up on him.

Maya turned the page, tracing the next words carefully. Eyes squinting. “...pa-st the fish. And fa-w, fa-w aw-ay.”

Then she looked up, glasses sliding down, all earnest pride, like she expected to be graded. “I read’d it, Daddy.”

And for a second, Joel couldn’t find his breath because all he could think was: what in the everloving fuck?

He’d thought she was just memorizing the damn thing—he’d read it enough times to her, he’d been the one to guide Maya’s little finger across sentences these past months after all. But this wasn’t that. She was making sense of letters. Decoding. Connecting shapes to sound, sound to story. Stringing together syllables. Her lips moved just slightly before each word, like she was solving a fucking puzzle on the fly.

She wasn’t even three. And somehow—she was reading.

He didn’t show it. His face didn’t know how to do that kind of surprise anymore, not without breaking something open. Instead, he cleared his throat and gave her a quiet nod.

“You sure as hell did, sweetheart,” he said, low, a little hoarse. “You’re my little miracle, aren’t you?”

Maya lit up, her whole body beaming, and turned back to the book with purpose, flipping the page with the flourish of a person on a mission.

“Yeah. I read more for you. See. I named this turtle Marco, Marco Turtle...”

He only watched her, one arm wrapped loosely around her, the other hand resting at the edge of the paper, not quite knowing what to do with it. Her teeny heartbeat raced against his ribs.

And his mind was rushing ahead.

He should’ve been overjoyed. And in some ways, he was. But beneath the pride—deep in the gut, where old instincts still lived—a darker, ancient feeling bloomed. Fear. The same kind that gripped him when Leela stayed up too late with equations in the margins of tear-stained notebooks.

Because Maya was clever. Leela-clever. That quiet, effortless sort of brilliance that didn’t ask permission to exist.

And he knew what being brilliant cost. He’d seen it grind Leela down, chewed through her sleep, her peace, her joy. Seen how the world didn’t know what the hell to do with someone like her. How it tried to shrink her, dull her, use her up.

His Maya... she was still so little. She was supposed to have more time. She was supposed to play in the dirt, throw tantrums, and mispronounce things until she was five or six. Not sit here with a picture book and read like the words had always belonged in her little mouth.

A new grief in him began, a grief for a childhood barely started, already being outpaced by her mind.

And that was when the other things—the more obvious things, the ones he’d been too honeyed by daily bliss to see clearly—began to needle at him.

The future was closing in faster than he thought it would.

Their non-literal home was beautiful. A little too beautiful. Big, white, built from the creation of what once had been someone’s dream—stained glass in the sidelites and transom, a clawfoot tub in their oceanic bedroom, floorboards worn soft in the middle. It had charm. Soul.

But to Joel, nowadays, it had also started to feel like a keep.

Because Leela didn’t leave it until absolutely necessary. She stepped out onto the porch now and then, took Maya to the berry brambles, and walked to Tommy's occasionally. But she never involved herself. Not in the way Maria did, with her council meetings and community firepit nights. Not like Ellie, loud and cursing with her mess of teenage friends at the bar counter.

No 'friends.' No card games. No loitering on porches just to gossip. She was polite, moved through the town like a ghost too gentle to haunt, present when she had to be—but Jackson never really got to know her beyond her genius.

And in the beginning, Joel hadn’t pushed it. He’d respect that, protect her space with the quiet, dogged devotion he always had.

Trauma didn’t heal like a cut for his girl. It festered. Seeped into the walls. Made a home in the bones. He, of all people, knew what it was to be gutted by life and left walking around in your own ruin. Leela needed the quiet, needed to rebuild the walls around herself brick by careful brick, and if she’d found peace inside the four corners of their home, who was he to challenge that?

But then came Maya. Changing everything by just growing.

And with it came the slow, unsettling realisation that Leela’s fear was becoming an inheritance.

It hit him hardest one bright afternoon when Maya, who tagged along with him to run a quick errand—sticking to his leg like a barnacle—flat-out shrieked at the entrance of the general store.

“No, no. We go back, Daddy,” she'd begun from the street.

She’d been unusually clingy that day, and instead of nudging her to stay behind with Leela, he’d bundled her up and brought her along. Figured it’d be like before, when she used to ride tucked under his arm or babble at him from his hip. These days, she was brave. Intelligent. She liked counting fruit, pointing out colours, proudly telling him which apples were “juicy.”

But the second they stepped inside, she broke down. She wanted the fuck out of there.

She’d sobbed it over and over, tears wetting her little dungarees and boots, fists balled to her face, breath hitching, while Joel knelt beside her, stunned. His girl never reacted like this. Not to stores. Not to anything. So why now?

“Maya, hey, hey—look at me,” he’d tried to talk her down softly, rubbing her tiny arms, “we’re just getting fruit. Then we’ll go back, baby girl. You like apples, don’t you?”

But she’d kept wailing. Deep, frantic. Panicked. Like something invisible had reached into her and flipped a switch labelled hazard.

Joel could feel the eyes now. People watching from behind shelves and crates, faces folding into awkward sympathy, some barely disguising the discomfort. He barely registered any of it.

All he could think was—Goddamn, my baby's scared. Not because the prospect of the store was frightening, but because home was all she knew. Because her world had been drawn in close, little, familiar, tight, and any step outside of it was an immediate danger.

Still in a daze, he took Maya home soon enough. Held her, fed her favourite berries while she calmed down. Didn't say anything to a blank-faced Leela, not then. Just watched the way Maya wrapped herself around her mother’s neck and didn’t let go. Like they were still one body, one breath.

“I like here, Mama,” Maya had whispered to her.

“Then we stay here, okay? As long as you want,” Leela had assured, stroking Maya's hair.

And Joel lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling with a bitter pill stuck in his throat. A knot he couldn’t swallow down.

It wasn’t Leela’s fault. It wasn’t. But it wasn’t fair either—not to Maya. She deserved to hear laughter from kids near her age, sing rhymes with her friends, and go on playdates.

Because he’d seen these kids now. The world had made a lot of them—survivors, ghosts, raised in silence and scarcity, oriented by conditions that safety meant solitude. That hiding meant living.

He didn’t want that for his little girl. Didn’t want Maya to inherit the isolation. The fear. The belief that outside meant trouble and inside meant control.

So Joel started trying. Small things. Subtle at first.

Long, frequent walks to the grocery store with Maya. More dinners at the barbecue restaurant with Tommy and Maria. He’d sidle up to the couples gathered near the café, folks trading gossip and laughter, and being the stone-faced bastard he was, he would grumble something half-funny, trying to wedge himself—and by extension, Leela—into the rhythm of the town. It wasn’t natural for him—this mingling shit, but he he did it for his family.

And Leela came, most times, only for Maya.

At the playground, where the older kids laughed too loudly in a game of tag, he would squat beside Maya, pointing out. “You wanna play with them? Go on, baby girl. Say hi. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with trying.”

But every time, he’d see the same thing.

The exact moment Leela would freeze beside him, hands tightening around the strap of the canvas grocery bag she carried like armour. The subtle tension in her jaw, her mouth a thin line, standing there in hurt.

And Maya, watching her mama, would duck behind Leela’s legs like clockwork. Her caution. Her withdrawal. A mimicry that cut Joel deeper than any outburst could.

“I want home,” she’d parrot, deadpan, robotic. Already backing up.

Joel felt it like a slap.

And later, in the kitchen, he’d let it out. Not yelling, he didn’t yell much anymore, but his voice would scrape low, pressure building in the seams. Snaps over nothing. A dish not rinsed. A cabinet left open. Laundry left out on the clothesline. The wrong kind of silence. Long nights standing in their bedroom corridor, arguing too quietly for Maya to overhear.

“She’s starting to copy you,” he’d say, jaw working.

“She’s two,” Leela would shoot back.

“Exactly, darlin’. She needs to know the world ain’t all gonna hurt her.”

“The hell it isn’t. She’s with her mother. She feels safe. What’s wrong with that?”

He’d go still. Always did, at that line. Because he understood it, on a level few others would. But that didn’t make it right.

He’d exhale through his nose, run a hand through his hair like it could scrub the ache out of his scalp, fighting the impulse to strike the wall. He fucking hated this.

“She’s brave because her mother is braver,” Joel would mutter finally, eyes on the floor. “She’s gotta know there’s more than just closed doors—”

“How do you know, Joel!” she interrupted with a hiss.

He shut his eyes on instinct, “—and being safe. There’s living, Leela. Not just staying alive.”

Leela would go quiet then, in sorrow. Quiet, aching sorrow leaking shame, and didn’t ask for forgiveness because it didn’t believe it deserved it.

And sometimes—rarely—Leela would cry, just a little. He’d see it in the shimmer at the edge of her lashes, the way she turned away to hide her face in the crook of her arm. And he would stand there, fists clenched uselessly at his sides, hating the way his love kept crashing into her fear. Hated himself for adding to it, even as he knew he had to.

Joel knew it wouldn’t be quick or easy. Fear never lets go without a fight. But he also knew this: he loved Leela and Maya too much to let them stay inside forever.

In that quiet, stubborn tapestry Joel kept tucked away in the back of his mind—the one stitched from all the things he didn’t say aloud—plenty of threads held it together.

Two stretched, bounding forward: Maya, Ellie, both new, young and wide-eyed, full of questions and sunlight, weaving joy into every corner of the future he still dared to imagine.

The other ran deeper, coloured red as blood: Leela—tired, brilliant, proud. Fraying at the edges, pulled too tight in places, but still threaded through every part of him. She was the pattern he couldn’t unpick, no matter how much it hurt. Woven into the very fabric of him, even as she came undone.

But things between Joel and Leela lately have been... rocky. Worse than that.

And if you’ve followed it this far, you probably know by now—Leela was never really around to know what was happening, and she never really forgave Joel. Not for that.

Even though he told himself he did it for her—for them—the price he paid was her trust, and once broken, it didn’t come back easily. He couldn't even blame her.

Because he’d done this. He’d done the one thing she couldn’t forgive—not yet.

Took her work, the mammoth of a legacy she built with trembling hands, in the dark, decimal by decimal, proof by proof, pouring herself into it like it was the only piece of hers that mattered. And he took it, slipped out in the middle of the night like a goddamn thief with her notebook stuffed into his pack and headed south without a word.

Caltech. The Fireflies. Fucking death of good.

He went thinking he was doing it for her, for all of them, trying to scrape some meaning out of this wreck of a world, trying to give her back the future that had been stolen. But in the end, what he gave her was another theft.

He hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her. Hadn’t believed she could survive the heartbreak of hope, not after everything.

But she’d survived worse, hadn’t she?

And now—she was surviving him.

She didn’t scream or accuse him. No, that wasn’t her way. Just looked at him afterwards like he was a stranger with her blood on his hands. And in some way, he was.

She withdrew, inch by silent inch, until the space between them felt like a raging ocean. Her life shrank down to two absolutes: the work and Maya. And Joel went past it, a bad, breathing memory.

At first, it was small. She missed family dinners to entertain her workshop, tolerated his touches, his little kisses, his stupid jokes, his try-hard conversations at night before they fell asleep. She still kissed him goodnight—light brushes of the mouth, like habit, like politeness. He tried to meet her there, tried harder than he had in months.

But something in her had already begun to turn inward. Soon, she stopped laughing. Stopped touching back. And the kisses stopped, too. Not abruptly—just faded, like colour bleeding from cloth.

She began to stay up late, diving headfirst into that goddamned hard drive, pouring over its files until her eyes were red and raw from the blue light.

One night, after he had put Maya to bed and the house fell into its accustomed hush, Joel found Leela in the kitchen, hunched over her notebook at the island, bathed in the amber lights above the stove. Her pencil moved in relentless bursts—fast, jittery, like it was chasing her thoughts before they escaped.

Joel lingered at the doorway for a second, cracking his knuckles nervously, just watching her. Then he padded in quietly and slid behind her chair. He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders, thumbs pressing into the knots he knew so well.

She stiffened for half a second worth of instinct—then relaxed, but only just. Her pen didn’t stop. Her eyes didn’t leave the page.

“You eat anything yet?” he asked, his voice barely more than a murmur against the crown of her head.

“Mhm,” she hummed, not really answering.

“What was it?”

“Um. Bread.” A shrug. A scratch at her nape. “Leftovers, I think. Bread.”

He didn't know whether to laugh or yell at her.

He dipped lower, pressing a kiss to her temple. Another at the corner of her jaw. “Been thinkin’,” he murmured, “tomorrow, maybe we take a walk. Just us. Creek trail’s thawed out. Might even find some of those frogs Maya keeps talkin’ about.”

She nodded absently, shifting forward so his lips barely brushed her skin. “Mhm. We’ll see.”

Joel lingered. He let his hand trail from her shoulder down her arm, fingers curling around her wrist. Then, almost shyly, he leaned in again, tried for her mouth, the edge then the soft bow of it—a gentle, building kiss, just enough to say I miss you. Come upstairs with me.

But she barely turned her head when his fingers traced down her chin and throat. Her lips caught the edge of his, then returned to her notes like nothing had happened.

“Joel,” she refused quietly, nearly apologetic. “I’m... I need to get this down before I lose my train of thought.”

Joel pulled back. Swallowed. “Got it,” he said.

His hand drifted off her wrist.

Sooner than later, the bed went cold. Her pillow stayed smooth. Her scent disappeared from the sheets. No creak of the mattress at midnight. No rustle of her turning toward him, murmuring, half-asleep. He waited a week. Then three months. Told himself she was just tired. Overworked. He even left the light on for her on most nights. But her side stayed untouched for weeks. And then it wasn’t her side anymore. Just empty space.

She made no scenes, but she made no room either. Joel became a fixture—like the porch railing, the boots by the door. Something that used to belong but now just takes up space. Just empty space.

Because he knew he deserved it. Knew it wasn’t just one thing, or one mistake. It was the thousand small betrayals: the silences, the avoidance, the cowardice of a man who thought keeping the truth buried would keep the peace. And now there was this quiet, unbearable nothing between them. A stillness too loud to ignore.

Back to square one, he guessed. Back to being the man who didn’t know how to fix a goddamn thing he loved without wrecking it first.

Even Maria had started to notice, asking questions with too-soft eyes when Leela's silence crossed into the summer. The quiet between them was too loud not to.

“She’s not talking to you,” she had stated to him earlier, before he left for patrol, her tone too casual on the surface.

Joel shook his head. “Ain’t her fault. Just let her be.”

“You’re not talkin’ either.”

He gave a humourless exhale, more through his nose than his mouth. “Not much left to say.”

Maria was quiet for a beat, then added, softer, “That’s not true. You just think it’ll hurt more if you say it.”

Joel finally looked at her, eyes shadowed under the brim of his hat. “What do you want to hear, Maria? That I fucked up? That I’d give my goddamn right hand to take it back?”

Maria didn’t blink. “I want you to stop pretending everything’s fine.”

He looked away again, the line of his shoulders rigid, like holding back a landslide. That one landed hard.

“I just… I don't know how to fix it without breakin’ more of her. Or losin’ what I have.”

Maria sighed. “You lived too long, Joel,” she said. “You think that makes you harder, but really… it just made you scared.”

Yes, she was right, but damn if he knew what else to do when every word he spoke just seemed to push her further away.

So, Joel didn’t bother explaining. How could he? How could he put into words the way he'd tried to buy redemption with silence? How could he justify betraying the one woman who had ever truly seen him—not just the survivor, not the killer—but the father, the man?

So he didn’t. He just tried like a goddamn fool, and wedge himself back into the corners of her world.

He started learning to cook on his own, fumbling through her spice rack like a man disarming a bomb, holding tiny jars of sumac, baharat and saffron. He burned rice more than he cared to admit, sliced his knuckle on a dull knife trying to dice onions the way she did, and measured out cumin in those labelled spoons. All of it for the smallest chance that maybe—she’d sit beside him again. That she’d taste what he made and remember the man she used to love.

Most nights, he got nothing more than a nod. Other nights, not even that.

He started taking early patrols, slipping out before the sun had even begun to crack over the mountains—just so he could be back in time for dinner, hoping that his presence might feel less like a shadow. He tried being quieter, helpful than usual, and patient. Cleaned up after Maya’s tantrums without a word, patched the leaky faucet no one had asked him to touch, restocked the pantry with the dried apricots that Leela loved. He’d traded two .44s and a good knife for them. Worth every bullet.

One long, back-breaking afternoon, he planted sunflowers beneath the kitchen window—tall, defiant things, yellow like August heat—so they’d be the first thing she saw when she came down for her morning coffee.

The next day, he stood leaning against the counter when she ambled in, silent as always. She poured her tea like it was a chore, staring out the window.

He tried again. “Sunflowers’re yours,” he said, voice quiet, encouraging. “Figured they’d like it there. Morning light looks good on them, right?”

She didn’t look at him or say a thing. Just took her cup and left.

He stayed where he was for a while, jaw working, hand flexing against the edge of the counter like he could squeeze the silence into something that didn’t feel like regret.

Still, it wasn’t enough. And he blamed every bit of himself. He did this, now he had to face the music.

Another promising evening, he stood by the stove with his heart in his throat, ladling out bowls of a chickpea stew he knew she couldn't go a week without. It smelled right—he was sure of it. That same sweet earthiness she used to hum over. He had Maya set a plate for her and sat her on his hip, fresh out of a nap and giggling, pointing at the pot and declaring it “orange soup.”

When Leela emerged from the hallway, hair hanging in knots, picking dirt off her fingernails, he looked up too quickly. Hope gave him away every time.

“Hey. I made us an early dinner,” he said, soft, stupid and hopeful. “Figured you'd get hungry soon. Come, sit.”

She paused, eyes drifting from the table to his hand, then to him.

“Thank you,” she said, and took the bowl from his hands without sitting down. Bent over and kissed Maya’s temple, her voice dipping into a gentle whisper for their daughter. “Maybe give her a bath tonight. Wash her hair, too.”

“Yeah, thought as much,” he hummed.

Maya was the only glue, a scared hope that all wasn't lost, and the one place Leela hadn’t drawn a line in the sand. She didn’t keep Maya from him or poison her against him. The one harness in this well-oiled rope he balanced on.

Then Leela turned, bowl still in hand, and headed straight for the basement door.

Joel stood there, hand still hovering over the back of her empty chair, feeling like he’d just been left out in the cold.

“Leela,” he tried, just once, not loud. “You don’t have to eat down there.”

She didn’t look back, just kept walking. And the door closed behind her.

He sank into the chair anyway, across from the spot she'd left bare, with all that love bottled inside him, rattling like a storm in a glass jar, praying for a crack. A fissure. Anything.

He hadn’t expected a goddamn earthquake to bring it all down.

Not a fight. Not another bout of silence. Not even the slow, invisible corrosion that had been eating away at their days, their hours, the quiet spaces between words.

It happened deep into August, nearly three months since they last spoke to each other past monosyllables, on a night so thick with heat it felt like the world itself was holding its breath. No wind, no clouds, no moon. Just stillness. Then, from beneath the floorboards, a low, aching groan—ancient, half-buried stirring in its grave.

Joel heard the first crash a moment later—metallic, jagged, unnerving. Then another. And then a sound he felt in his spine more than his ears: a raw, feral wail echoing up from the workshop. Hers.

He stilled where he sat, his back against the headboard, Maya's small body rising and falling steadily on his chest. She didn’t wake. Just sighed in her sleep, lips parted, her tiny fist knotted in his shirt.

He held still, listening, hoping it would pass. He lay perfectly still, willing it to be nothing. He definitely imagined it. Maybe a cabinet door slamming in the draft. But he knew better; the house didn’t make sounds like that on its own.

The noise came again—sharper this time, something being slammed into oblivion, beaten past recognition.

Joel exhaled and moved gently, untangling himself from Maya’s grip. He laid her into the centre of the bed and ringed her with pillows, a soft, uneven wall meant to keep her safe in the night.

Maya stirred, a little sigh hitching, eyes fluttering open with a blink.

He rubbed her back gently, managing a smile for her. “Hi. Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

But she didn’t. Instead, she looked up at him, her lashes damp, her voice tiny and confused. “Mama’s mad ‛gain.”

Joel couldn't even hide his dejection anymore, he simply let it run rampant on his face as she watched. He soothed a hand over her curls, pressing a kiss to her crown. “Mama doesn’t mean to be. Her heart’s real loud sometimes, that’s all.”

Maya flinched when another crash echoed. Joel felt it through her whole little body.

“Scary mama,” she whispered.

“Oh, baby girl,” he sighed, stroking her tiny cheek, swallowing hard. “Just close your eyes, okay? Daddy’s gonna help her out, and I'll be right back.”

She reached out to him blearily, tiny palm patting at the slope of his nose before she returned the fist beneath her head. Her eyes drooped shut, and she was snoring away in moments.

For a moment, he just stood there, watching her, making sure. Listening.

Another crash came from below.

What the fuck was this twisted part of his good life? He rubbed a hand over his face and turned toward the door, limbs heavy with sleep—or maybe it was dread. Probably both. He moved barefoot down the stairs, each step dragging him toward something he already knew he couldn’t fix.

The basement light glared beneath the doorframe, a thin blade of gold effusing onto the floor from a room already burning. He opened the door with a huff and descended the stairs, the wood creaking beneath.

The stale air hit him first—dense, electric, scorched, metallic. Burned circuits, hot solder, and beneath all that: the sour, unmistakable scent of grief when it’s been left to smoulder too long.

And then he saw her.

Leela was surrounded by wreckage—tools flung wide, cracked motherboards strewn across the concrete like broken bones. He counted at least three, maybe more. One was still beneath her boot, the delicate circuitry crunching under the force of her heel. Her hands were trembling. Her cheeks streaked with silent, unrelenting tears she hadn’t wiped away—like her body was crying without permission, leaking sorrow that had nowhere else to go.

She didn’t look at him. Didn’t even acknowledge the sound of the door or his footfalls.

Joel stood there, rooted. For a moment, he didn’t know whether to speak or retreat. His mind scrambled for anything useful to say, but everything in him stilled as he watched her unravel.

It wasn’t the outburst that gutted him. It was the restraint.

This wasn’t rage. Deeper. Exhausted. A woman clawing at the walls of her own brilliance, trying to outrun the weight of everything she knew and everything she couldn’t fix. Trying to make sense of a world that refused to make sense back then. Performing an autopsy on their own dreams.

She brought her boot down again. Another snap. Another grunt. Another piece of her pursuit fractured beyond repair.

He had come down here expecting a storm. But what he found was the wreckage left in its wake.

Joel cleared his throat softly, the sound awkward in the charged silence. “Leela, honey.”

She didn’t look up. Just stood there, staring at the crushed remnants of the board beneath her foot. Her shoulders were tight, her breathing uneven—quiet, little gasps like someone trying to stay underwater.

Then finally—she grunted. “What do you want?”

It wasn’t a challenge. Or even anger.

Just... hollow.

Joel stood there, caught on the threshold, hands clenched at his sides like restraint might anchor him. The question hit harder than any destruction. He hated how she said it—like he was an interruption. A ghost. A reminder.

“What do I want?” he echoed. He stepped inside the room fully. “I want you to be done with this shit. Christ, baby. Look at yourself.”

She didn’t answer. Just swiped the back of her wrist across her face. The tears smeared into skin already marked by sleeplessness, a black bruise of exhaustion under each eye. Her lip trembled—not rage, but from how close she was to shattering. She was holding herself together with splinters.

“This ain’t just about bein’ tired. Or obsessed,” he said, low and hoarse. “This is—you’re gone. I don’t know where you went.”

The silence after that was like stepping into a vacuum. Thick, suffocating, vast. She didn’t argue. Just turned to a statue mid-collapse, crumbling from the inside out.

Joel scanned the room—the half-burned schematics, the warped breadboards, the soldering station with a fresh burn mark across its edge. This wasn’t tinkering anymore. This wasn’t research. This was a crash-out. A gradual collapse with no bottom.

And then he said it. The thing he’d been building toward for days.

“You’re gonna pack all this up,” he gestured at the blown circuits, the melted boards, the scribbled chalk math on the blackboards and ruin, “and give it to the folks at the dam who know what the hell to do with it. Then you’re comin’ home. You’re gonna focus on—us. On our family.”

Her head turned, slowly, like rusted hinges catching. That word—family—cracked her open. Her eyes, rimmed in red, shadowed and hollow, fixed on him like a dagger pressed to skin.

“And that’s all I am to you now?” she asked, brittle. “Maya’s mom?”

Joel’s jaw clenched. “Don’t be twistin’ what I said.”

She let out a sound—a laugh, but it bent at the edges, twisted bitter, hollow.

“I’m a dead loss with what I want, so now I've got to be your pretty little wife?” Her voice sharpened, cracked. “Raise a kid, cook dinner, smile at the table, be grateful you stayed?”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Joel’s voice rose before he could stop it. “I’ve been patient with you. You won’t talk to me. You won’t let me close. And every day I keep thinking—maybe today’s the day she comes back to me. And every day, I get a little more scared that you won’t. Because I've been holdin’ this goddamn house together with sweat and prayer for months, Leela. It’s almost a year, know that? A whole fuckin’—and I’ve been raising your daughter—”

“Oh, she’s mine now?” she snapped, hot and fast.

Joel put his hands on his hips, defeated. “Look, I ain’t doin’ this with you. Let’s go.”

“Then what are we doing? What is this?”

“Just come upstairs,” he pleaded. “You need sleep. You need a bath. You need somethin’ besides this... fuckin’ hole.”

That should’ve been the simplest thing. An ask. A mercy.

But her stare didn’t budge. She looked at him like she didn’t recognise him anymore. And then, breathing hard from exertion, she lashed out:

“She is mine, Joel. You’re not even her dad. So, stop trying.”

It hit like a punch. No—worse. Like a betrayal he hadn’t earned but somehow always feared. He stood there, breath gone, the echo of her words stretching long and cruel between them. Because she’d reached for the thing that would cut deepest, and used it.

He swallowed. His jaw clenched. Leela didn’t push, and good call on her part.

So he stepped forward, one step, daring. “Say it again.”

She looked at him, eyes wet but infuriated. “Why? So you can tell me how much you’ve lost? How you stayed? How you tried? How my daughter loves some bitter, traitorous nobody more than she loves her own mother?”

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t rise to the bait, however painful it seemed. “This is where you apologise.”

Leela scoffed, a sharp, bitter sound scraping from the back of her throat. “Go to hell.”

Joel didn’t budge. “I’m still here, Leela. Enough.”

Her head jerked up, eyes flashing. “For what!” Her voice splintered and rebounded off the walls.

Joel ran a hand down his face. He didn’t even know where to put the pain anymore, even his heart began to hurt from pounding for him.

He sighed, and the words slipped out, even if he didn't mean a word. “I can't fuckin’ stand you sometimes, you know that? Because you're so hung up on this idea of some crazy mended future, and you can't even see what it's becoming anymore.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “My crazy future. So why are you still here?”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. I still love you. Hurt me, and I still love you so much.

She sniffled. “I don't have to need you either. Get out.”

Joel’s eyes flicked to the floor, the ruined circuit boards, the mess of her mind made physical. Her body, thin and drawn, stood there like she was being held together by stubbornness and string.

“No,” he stated. “I’ll do whatever the hell I want.”

Her face twisted like that hurt more than anything he’d said.

“What do you want from me, Joel?” she asked again, quieter this time. But it wasn’t resignation—it was panic. Like she’d realised she didn’t have anything left to give. Her voice frayed at the edges, folding in on itself.

“I can’t even breathe in here. You do everything. You try for me. You wait outside the basement like that’s gonna fix something. But it won’t. None of this will.”

Joel took a step forward. Hands half-raised, like he wanted to touch her but didn’t know how. Didn’t know if he was allowed anymore.

“I don’t know what else to do, Leela,” he said. His voice cracked, thick with helplessness. “I feel like I’m losing you every goddamn day.”

She sobbed—sharp and sudden—and turned away like the sound embarrassed her. Her head dipped, and she laughed. Or maybe cried. It came out strangled, twisted. Like both, like neither.

“I look at you,” Joel said, quieter now, like the words had been sitting in his chest too long, wearing grooves in his ribs, “and I see everything I failed. And everything I want back.”

For a moment, nothing moved. And then a sound cracked from her—ugly, half-choked, something between a laugh and a sob that scraped up from too deep to name. She shook her head with a sharp, miserable little twist, like she already knew how this ended. It had ended before it began.

“This ain’t home without you, Leela.”

Her hands clawed into her hair, fingers curling tight like she wanted to rip it out by the roots. Like she could shed the skin of who she’d become—strip it away until there was nothing left but bone and breath and silence. Something that didn’t feel like a complete failure.

He watched her like a man witnessing an earthquake from the inside out.

“I’ll keep sayin’ sorry, or whatever you want to hear,” Joel said, thick-voiced. “I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll say it quiet, I’ll say it loud. You don’t owe me a damn thing, baby. But I’m still here.”

He didn't want to, but he did. He saw her fall.

Her knees buckled. No grace in it, no dignity. She just crumpled like her body finally gave up the lie of holding it all together. Her spine curved, arms wrapped around her stomach like she was trying to hold in everything that had been spilling out for months—grief, frustration, exhaustion. Rage she never let herself feel because there wasn’t time. Because someone had to keep going.

Joel crouched but didn’t reach for her. He knew better. Knew how to read this language. Knew what pain looked like when it didn’t want an audience. He simply knelt there, watching. Helpless. Waiting. The woman he loved, the mother of his child, was falling apart, and all he could do was bear witness. He hated every nerve in his body that stayed up.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, barely more than a breath. “I’m sorry, Joel. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

He shifted, careful not to crowd her, just enough so his knee brushed against hers—a tether, a promise. He didn’t dare reach out. Not yet.

Her face was a mess—blotched, red, tears carving lines through grime and sweat, her hair damp with sweat or maybe the shower, maybe the storm inside her. His girl looked like she’d fought through hell and come out burned.

“I’m not like this,” she rasped. “I’m not. I’m good. I didn’t mean it—I didn’t—”

He shook his head. “I know, baby. It’s okay.”

She made a noise, somewhere between disbelief and pain. Her hands lifted again, trembling, gesturing weakly at the walls around them. At the chaos. The notes, the sketches, the scrawled equations bleeding across paper like veins, all bent and burned and ruined. Months of work, ruined in a flash of fury. Her own hand, the one that had once traced formulas, had torn it down.

“I just—” Her voice cracked again. “It’s so loud. I don’t know where to start. Every time I try, something else falls apart. I can’t get one thing right. There’s so much... I can’t do it.”

Joel’s eyes followed hers. The room was wrecked. But more than that—she was. She had been holding too much for too long, and he hadn’t seen it. Not the way he should’ve.

And now he saw it all.

She wasn’t just trying to solve some goddamn problem.

She was trying to stitch back a world that didn’t exist anymore. Trying to take her guilt and her grief and her brilliance and turn it into salvation. Trying to prove she was still worth something. That what she carried still mattered.

Alone.

And he'd let her.

He’d been here in body, sure. Since Jackson. Since he crawled back into her life with guilt in his throat and calloused hands holding sorry after sorry. But he hadn’t been here. Not the way she’d needed. Not in the way a man shows up for someone he calls his wife. The kind of presence that steadies and shoulders some of the burden without being asked.

Penitent rather than a partner.

Joel looked around the room. At the wreckage. At the math and madness scribbled across the boards and torn pages like she’d tried to write her way out of grief.

Honestly, what had this world ever done for her? Fuck all. So, why was she killing herself to save it anyway?

And suddenly, he hated every second he hadn’t noticed. Hated how long she must’ve been screaming in silence while he’d been too careful, too sceptical, too wrapped up in his own guilt to see hers unravelling.

Trying to hold up the whole damn sky on her own—had been doing it so long, so quietly, he’d convinced himself she could. And she was failing. Of course, she was failing. Because no one could do what she was trying to do, not alone.

She needed help, and she didn’t know how to ask for it. And he—a goddamn idiot—had waited for her to say it instead of just stepping in.

Joel reached, then, slowly, intentionally, and touched her hand. Just enough to let her feel him—his warmth, his presence, the endurance in his callused palm.

She didn’t flinch.

He didn’t move for a beat and let the moment breathe.

Soon, gently—like easing a spooked animal out of hiding—he curled his hand around hers, not rushing to fix anything. Her skin was cold, fingers limp and damp with tears, and trembling just beneath the surface.

He eventually moved, pulling—guiding. “C’mon. I got you.”

One hand to her elbow, the other soft against her back, bracing her like a beam might brace a house half-fallen in. She didn’t resist. Her body rose with his, hesitantly, hovering, breathing as if testing the air after too long underground.

She stood as if she were shaking off rubble.

Joel balanced her the whole way. No words, only the grounding pressure of touch.

“There you go, you’re okay,” he murmured.

He led her carefully out of the wreckage—out of the tangle of torn-up notes and shredded pages, burnt edges curling like dead leaves, formulas smeared with ash and ink and tears. The broken pieces of her mind lay bare.

He brushed her hair behind her ears and eased her down onto the bench, where the tubelight came through, flickering, pale and overcast, gentle on her skin. She looked so little there. Infinitesimal enough to vanish with the atoms.

Joel crouched back down again, joints complaining. He was too old for this shit, but he wasn’t leaving the floor until she could sit still without falling apart.

He reached for the circuit board—the one she’d spent so many nights with. It was cracked down the centre, the soldering that had once been meticulous now dangled loose and broken, thin as veins, blackened at the ends.

He turned it over in his hands. Felt the story in it—weeks of effort, nights of silence, calculations done under flickering lamplight while the world slept around her. And still, she kept chasing the answer, even when it broke her.

His thumb ran along the fracture like he was tracing a scar.

Then he looked at her.

Her cheeks were blotched, streaked with tears. Her lip was trembling, bitten raw. Her dark eyes met his—wide, watery, tired—and she didn’t look through him.

“You don’t need to prove anything,” he said quietly. His voice was low, rasping from disuse. “Not to me. Not to the goddamn world.”

She turned her face away, jaw clenched. But she didn’t stop crying.

Good. Let her cry. Let it out, all of it. He’d take it if she couldn’t anymore.

He gathered another piece of the circuit board. Laid it next to the first.

“You’re not a machine,” he murmured. “You ain’t some miracle factory. You’re a human being. And I’ve been sittin’ back… watchin’ you wear yourself raw, tryin’ to fix what the whole world broke. And I let you.”

His voice cracked, rough at the edges. He swallowed it down.

“I should’ve seen it. I should’ve known. Done something.”

He picked up a scorched page of calculations, the edges curling inward like a dying leaf. Rubbed a thumb over a still-visible string of symbols. Her handwriting. Her mind.

“You wanna know the truth, Leela?” he said. “I didn’t leave you back then ‘cause I didn’t care about what you thought. I left ‘cause I couldn’t stand the way you looked at me. Like I was supposed to be strong enough to carry what you were carrying. I wanted to prove I was.”

He placed the page gently beside the board.

“That ain’t your fault. That’s mine, I was a fuckin’ idiot. I should’ve stayed anyway.”

He looked at her again, this time not hiding the hurt in his eyes. When the silence stretched, there was a shift—pain passing between bodies like breath.

“I don’t know the first thing about this stuff. These numbers. Science. But I know what it’s doin’ to you.”

He held up one of the broken pieces. The metal glinted faintly in the light.

“I know the woman who built this. And I know she doesn’t deserve to be carrying this weight with no one in her corner.”

He looked at her again. Straight on.

“I’m here now. I ain’t goin’ anywhere. And I don’t give a fuck if all I can do is sweep up the mess and sit there while you do your thinkin’. If that’s what help looks like—I’ll do it.” His voice dropped, full of quiet conviction. “Every damn day.”

Again, Leela stayed quiet, but her breath caught—just once—like something had snagged inside her chest, when the ache had gone too deep to speak.

Her shoulders eased, fraction by fraction, like a muscle learning it didn’t have to brace anymore.

And in her eyes, there was an immense fragility—believing and flickering and terribly human. An apostate remembering the taste of faith.

Instead of reaching back for her, Joel kept gathering her work, careful as a man piecing back the bones of something once living and sacred. As if, by putting it all back together, he could stitch her back together too.

He finished stacking the last of her notebooks, aligning the bent corners, smoothing the wrinkled pages. He reached for a pencil that had rolled to the floor—held it in his palm like it was something precious.

Leela moved, quiet as a mouse, stepped forward and folded herself into him—arms around his shoulders, forehead tucked into the crook of his neck as if she were collapsing into the only shelter left in the world.

Joel let it happen, felt her chest heave once, twice—then the sobs came. Raw, desperate things that shattered out of her like she'd been holding her breath for months and finally let go.

“I'm failing everyone,” she cried, “I can't do it.”

Her fingers fisted in the back of his shirt, pulling him closer. She clung to him, trembling, too small, as if the second she let go, she’d come apart entirely.

Joel gathered her in because he really was made to do it.

“Shh,” he whispered, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other rubbing slow circles along her spine. “No, you're not. I got you, baby. You’re good.”

And Joel finally made up his mind: he'd hate every unreliable finer feeling of his that had prompted him to wait for her to speak first, to break, and to ask for help. When all she needed was to hold the line when she could not, to stay and witness her break without turning away.

Because if she was going to fall again, then he’d be the one beneath her.

X

“Wait, what the heck am I looking at?”

Leela’s voice cut through the quiet like a scalpel—sharp, precise, more bewildered than anything. Tired, wary, somewhere between mildly offended and uncertain if this was a joke she was supposed to laugh at.

Joel didn’t answer right away. Just kept blowing on his coffee, like it might scald him if he tried too hard to drink it.

He had learned quickly how to deal with Leela, a long time ago: don’t rush her, don’t explain too much, and definitely don’t pretend you had it all figured out. She hated that most of all—when people acted like her confusion was an inconvenience. When they filled the silence with noise instead of letting her sit with the unknown.

She moved across the kitchen—slow, stiff—and stopped short in front of the fridge. He didn’t have to look. He knew what she was staring at. Had stood there late last night, hunched over the table with a ruler and a stub of pencil, scratching things out and rewriting them again, until it looked more like a high school science project than an act of love.

Under Maya's bright little chore chart, there, crooked, solemn and idiotic, pinned under two rusty Eiffel Tower magnets, was another chore chart. Handwritten. Across the top in Joel’s blunt, slanted handwriting: “LEELA’S WEEKLY—” something; it was smudged. He’d started with “Schedule,” crossed it out, and written “Plan.” And added in block letters, “/BATTLE STRATEGY.” The paper hung a little too long at the bottom—he’d used lined notebook paper and scotch tape to extend the grid—and one corner curled like it was already losing patience with the idea.

And under “Wednesday,” in Joel’s square, uneven handwriting again, the words: “Eat lunch (real food). Take a nap. Go outside. No work after 10pm.” Under that, in tiny script: “NON-NEGOTIABLE.”

Joel sipped his coffee.

Leela squinted. “Are these colour-coded?”

He shrugged. “Tried to make it easy to read.”

She pointed at a particularly crowded column. “You wrote ‘Eat lunch’ three times.”

“One’s for emphasis.”

She kept scanning, her movements more cautious now, like this whole thing might be a trap.

“‘No work after 10pm,’” she read aloud. She turned toward him, arms folding across her chest with that trademark expression he’d come to know: equal parts disbelief and interrogation.

“You seriously put that under the ‘Basic Humaning’ column?”

He met her gaze square-on. “Sure did.”

Her eyebrows twitched upward. She looked back at the paper. “‘Sanity hygiene’? ‘Minimum viable joy’? What does that even mean?”

Joel cleared his throat. “That’s the Maria column. Kicked me for calling it ‘mental maintenance.’”

Leela’s brows knit. “This one says ‘fun thing on purpose.’ As an actual task.”

“People do that,” Joel said. “Fun. For fun. Apparently.”

She didn’t reply right away. Only kept reading. Slower now. Her voice dipped, softer, touched with suspicion—less ‘you idiot’ and more ‘what are you doing? What the hell are you up to?’

Then her finger slid to the bottom row. “‘Sleep with Joel’, ‘hug Joel’, incentive column,” she read aloud.

There was a pause. She turned to him again, arms still folded, head tilted—not quite menacing, but enough to imply a threat. “Open to debate.”

“Open and shut.”

She shook her head, amused. “I don’t see your name anywhere in these boxes.”

“Wasn’t writin’ it for me.”

Her lips twitched. Just a flicker of a smile in incredulity, like something forgotten trying to remember itself. “You made me a sticker chart.”

Joel took another slow sip, felt the heat on his tongue. “Sticker chart’s comin’ next week. Gold stars for consistent dinner and makin’ it to bed before midnight.”

Leela stared at the sheet like it was an alien relic. An artefact dug up from some long-dead civilisation. Structure. Routine. Care. Absurd.

“Joel…” Her voice was quieter. Not mocking now—dampened, like she was trying not to wring it out too fast. She looked at the chart again. The attempt. “Do you really think this is gonna work?”

Instead, he set the mug down gently, both palms pressing flat against the counter. His back ached. His knees popped when he shifted. His jaw felt raw from a night of clenching—his whole body a roadmap of sleepless desperation, of wanting to fix something with his hands when it had never been about his hands at all.

“I think you’ll ignore half of it,” he said quietly. “And I’ll spend every day reminding you not to.”

He paused. Swallowed. “I think I should've done this months ago. Shoulda pushed harder. Or softer. I dunno. But I sat on my ass for too long waiting for things to fix themselves.”

A silence fell, full of old grief and new beginnings.

He scratched his jaw. “So I’m tryin’ different.”

Leela stood still. Her arms had dropped. Her posture wasn’t so tight now, her shoulders less guarded. She was staring at the chart like it might disappear if she blinked. Or like it had teeth and she couldn’t decide whether to pet it or run.

Joel followed her gaze. The damn thing was crooked. One of the magnets had slipped. The ink was too dark in some places, almost illegible in others. He’d written “Tuesday” twice.

But it was tangible. A stupid little map of care and the system. His way of saying I see you without breaking open and bleeding all over the floor.

The truth was, he hadn’t made it just for her.

He’d made it for them. For mornings that felt too long and nights that never really ended. A shape to help her stay upright when the days got too abstract to touch.

Because Joel didn’t have the words for what he wanted to say—but he knew how to build things. Structure was the only language he trusted when words didn’t cut it.

And sometimes, Joel's love looked like a dumb, dorky timetable on printer paper.

She reached up slowly, fingers brushing the paper, and tapped the Wednesday box. “Guess I'd better find some real lunch.”

Joel nodded, watching her. Heart caught somewhere between relief and disbelief. “And sleep with Joel.”

She turned to him, that crooked smile threatening again. “You know if you wanted to get me into bed, you could’ve just said so. This is a lot of paperwork.”

Joel snorted. “Shit. All this trouble for nothin’.”

Her lips finally gave in, curling into something half-amused, half-amazed, like she couldn’t quite believe he’d done this. That he’d thought this far ahead.

“I mean, you wrote ‘kiss Daddy’ in two places, every day. Were you hoping I’d never kiss you past twice a day?”

He clucked his tongue. “Daddy ain’t above beggin’ if it gets him lucky.”

Leela let out a breath—almost a laugh. Joel didn’t say anything, just reached for his mug again like it was the only way to keep from doing something dumb, like touching her.

Instead, she leaned in. Just enough for her lips to brush the curve of his shoulder. “Sticker chart seduction,” she murmured. “Real subtle.”

Then, softly: “Even cowboys need structure now, hm?”

Joel exhaled, half-laugh, half-sigh. “Damn right.”

The sight of her up close was too much and not enough at once, especially after all this time. And when he finally did move, it wasn’t rushed—it was devout. One hand rising to her face, the rough pad of his thumb brushing the hollow beneath her eye.

“You don’t have to fix anything for me,” she told him, certain. Her eyes were on the chart still. Like she couldn’t look at him. “I know that’s what this is. You see a loose hinge, you grab a hammer.”

“It’s not a hammer,” he said. “It’s a piece of paper and a few dumb rules.”

Her hand brushed his chest, then stilled, curled into the fabric of his shirt. “So,” she sighed, barely above a whisper, “nothing has changed, right?”

A second passed. Maybe two.

He leaned in, dipped his head, and caught her lips between his. No warning, no easing. There was nothing neat left to care about.

It was a low, breaking thing—his mouth against hers with months of silence behind it. Months of sleeping back-to-back. Of not reaching. Of pretending not to care when he was drowning. Of hurtful words, hissed arguments. Enough of all that.

And he needed her now—hungry, desperate, clumsy. Been too fucking long.

His palm slid to her soft nape, drawing her in, anchoring her there like he’d never let her drift again. His other hand found her hip, then her waist, then lower still, grabbing a fistful of her ass to pull her flush against him. He groaned into her mouth when she didn't resist, when she pressed back with the same aching urgency, and it was as if she’d been drowning in the same quiet.

She tasted like sleep-deprived mornings and bitter coffee, and made a soft sound—half-shocked, half-something deeper—as Joel swallowed it down.

His kiss deepened, jaw flexing, tongue brushing hers. He wasn’t thinking anymore. It was instinct, need, hers. All of it. The years in his hands, the apology in his grip. The want.

And it would’ve gone further. Would’ve tipped into something messier, deeper—right there in the kitchen, barefoot and half-dressed—if not for—

Smack.

A tiny palm struck the back of Joel’s knee. Right below the old joint that always stiffened in the mornings.

“Ha!” Maya squealed, triumphant. “Too slow!”

He jerked ike he’d been hit with a cattle prod, buckled, slammed his hand against the counter for balance, breaking the kiss with a grunt. Leela let out a startled breath, stumbled back, eyes wide, lips kiss-bitten.

Joel spun around, dazed and blinking, to face the pint-sized homewrecker now grinning up at him. She’d just won a game of ambush tag today, a stupid fucking idea he knew would bite him in the ass eventually.

“Maya—Jesus, baby girl—terrible timing—”

“Eee, you’re kissin’ Mama!” she announced, gleeful and scandalised, jabbing a finger toward him. “Onna mouf!”

Leela moaned, buried her face in her hands, looking like a teenager caught necking behind the school gym, red-eared and stupid with guilt.

Joel, though, had it in himself to roll up his sleeves with exaggerated slowness, already grinning down at the little terror despite himself. “That’s it, trouble. You’re gonna get it now. C'mere.”

Leela had just enough sense to step aside as Joel lunged, catching nothing but Maya’s gleeful squeal as she darted around the kitchen island. He made a slow, clumsy swipe—missed her on purpose.

“Missed me!”

Joel leaned back against the counter with a sigh of theatrical defeat. “To fast for your old man.”

Unfazed, Maya rounded back and dragged the wooden stool across the kitchen with the stubborn determination of a forklift.

“Y'all wee-d,” she declared, puffing as she pushed.

“You're wee-d,” Joel grumbled.

“I check my chores now.”

Maya climbed up like she was scaling Everest, grunted once with effort, and slapped her chubby hand against the chart taped to the fridge. She studied it with a serious frown before she noticed the bigger, uglier chart that hung above hers.

“This one,” she muttered, pointing to the new addition.

Joel nodded, still trying to calm the leftover heat pounding in his chest. “Mama's chart. You like it?”

Maya’s eyes widened, scandalised all over again. “Mama has chores?”

Leela exhaled, shoulders slowly dropping from her ears. “Apparently.”

Maya tilted her head, squinting at the columns as if trying to decode their secret adult language. Then, thoughtfully, she asked, “Do I get stahs for kissin’ Mama, too?”

Leela made a choking sound—not quite a laugh, not quite a protest. Joel grinned, crooked, and shot her a look over Maya’s head.

“Y’know,” he drawled, “that depends.”

Leela narrowed her eyes. “On what?”

Joel leaned a hand on the counter, going all casual. “On whether the kiss has a happy ending.”

Leela made a strangled noise, and with the stiff dignity of someone backing away from a live grenade, she turned to the sink and pretended to be very invested in rinsing out a clean mug.

“Oh, Joel,” she murmured under her breath, restraining laughter, without looking at him.

But he just picked his coffee back up for a sip, smug as shit.

Maya, meanwhile, was undeterred. “I can do a big kiss with a happy end,” she announced. “I can kiss Mama wight onna mouf!”

Joel coughed a laugh.

Leela gave him a warning glare, but it was ruined by the way she was biting her lip to keep from smiling.

“I think Mama’s gonna need a new reward system,” Joel murmured for her ears only. “Stahs, kisses onna mouf, maybe somethin’ extra for makin’ Daddy real happy.”

Leela turned just enough to look at him sidelong. Her mouth twitched. “Careful,” she said softly, “Daddy’s dangerously close to incarceration.”

Joel leaned in until his lips brushed the shell of Leela’s ear, his breath warm and ragged.

“Kinky,” he said.

And just like that, they were toeing the line again—right there in the kitchen, and before Leela could answer—before she could react to the slow-burn hellfire that was Joel’s mouth near her ear—there was a clatter behind them.

Maya had knocked over the stool.

She stood it, blinking innocently, hands still mid-air like she hadn’t decided whether to be surprised or proud. Then she calmly declared—

“Shit.”

X

Safe to say, the shitty chore chart actually worked.

Joel wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe another few weeks of silence. A slow thaw, if they were lucky. A note left somewhere in her tight, efficient handwriting, letting him know Leela was still breathing, still eating, still surviving—but nothing more. He wasn’t prepared for this.

He closed Maya’s bedroom door quietly behind him, catching the latch with his thumb so it wouldn’t click, walking out of there more like a man escaping a sweltering sauna—shirt damp at the collar, temples sweating, back sore from leaning over her crib for too long. Her little body was finally limp with sleep after a thirty-minute campaign of bribery, back rubs, and whispered negotiations that made hostage diplomacy look easy.

Earlier, she’d kicked the blanket off for the third time and rolled over with a defiant grunt. “Not sleepy. Turtle time. Westin’ my eyes.”

Joel had sighed, rubbing her back in slow circles. “Westin’ them? That’s what people say before they start sno-win’.”

She giggled, a hand over her eye. “You snore, Daddy.”

Joel paused. “No comment.”

That earned him another sleepy giggle. She yawned right after, one of those full-body ones that made her fists curl and her toes point, and he knew he had her.

“Westin’,” she sniffed, “my...”

He kept patting, kissing her palms, both her eyes, her tummy, humming nonsense—old country songs, half-remembered ballads—until her breathing evened out and her fist crept toward her mouth, an old habit she pretended she’d outgrown.

Now, on the other side of the door, he stood in the hallway and let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. His knees cracked when he straightened fully. Christ. The things he did for that kid.

But when he stepped into the bedroom, every quiet ache evaporated.

Leela was there.

Not just drifting in and out to grab fresh clothes or the bathroom. She was in bed. Seeing her there, in their bed, the bed that had been so empty without her, it knocked a gear loose in his chest.

Her back rested against the headboard, duvet tucked around her like a neat envelope, knees tented, lamp casting a warm golden pool across her lap. Her long, thick braid was falling apart, little wisps of hair framing her face, and she was bent forward over a small embroidery hoop, working her needle through one of Maya’s little shirts—some new animal she had taken a shine to, if he had to guess. Turtles, definitely turtles.

Her nightstand—the one he still stocked with water every evening out of sheer habit—held her voice recorder and a few stray hair ribbons. For a moment, he just stood there like a dumb fuck who had forgotten how doors worked, caught somewhere between stunned and stunned stupid.

Then she looked up.

And smiled. “Hi, Joel.”

That single smile cracked across her face like sunlight breaking through the overcast sky, and he felt the ridiculous urge to cover his face just to keep from weeping like some idiot.

His peace and home had staggered back to him in that stretch. It wasn’t fair, the way he obsequiously ached for her even now. After all they’d been through. After the walls, the silence, the weeks she’d spent sleeping in the guest room, or nodding off at her desk, avoiding the bed like it burned.

He’d lived with the distance for a vicious while—so, the sight of her again, curled into the space they used to share, made him want to drop to his knees and thank whatever cruel world they lived in for giving her back.

“Huh?” she said, holding up the little alarm clock on her nightstand. “No work after ten?” Her voice had a tease to it. “Check.”

Joel blinked, then scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah.”

“Chore chart actually works,” she murmured his exact thoughts, almost to herself, with a half-smile.

He huffed a breath through his nose and stepped inside slowly, the way you would approach a miracle. If he moved too fast, it might vanish.

Something about the way she said it—it should’ve felt easy, but it landed heavy in his chest. She hadn’t slept next to him in months, and the few times she did, she stayed curled on the far edge, as if gravity pulled her toward the wall instead of him.

And now here she was—like this wasn’t strange at all. Like she didn’t feel the difference in his bones.

He sat on the edge of the bed, hands resting on his knees, wooden. “Good to know it helps.”

She must’ve sensed it, too, because her hands slowed. She held the shirt loosely, the thread caught mid-pull. She finished her stitch eventually, snipped the thread, and set the shirt and hoop aside on the nightstand.

“I’ve been a difficult mess,” she said. Quiet. Unapologetic. Not defensive, not dramatic—just… true. “I haven’t been fair to you either.”

He rubbed at his jaw. His default. That old, worn-out gesture for when he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t good at this kind of talk. Not the naming of feelings. Not the raw stuff. He could fight for her, kill for her, track every goddamn change in her breathing—but when it came to this kind of truth, he always faltered.

So instead, he shrugged. “Nah. You were gettin’ through it. However you had to.”

Her eyes flickered, her gaze drifting sideways. “I wasn’t with you,” she said. “I was in the same house, and it might as well have been a whole other continent.”

Joel breathed in through his nose, slow, as if that might anchor something inside him. He wasn’t angry. God, how could he be? He was just tired. Tired of the ache that came from not being able to fix it. From hearing her cry and standing on the other side of the door with his fists clenched and heart breaking.

“Look,” he mumbled. “I ain’t interested in tallyin’ up who gave what when. You needed space. I gave it. It happened, we move on.”

“I know,” she said, so painfully soft. Almost shy. “Sorry, Joel.”

“Don't have to say it,” he sighed.

“Alright. Sorry.”

“Jesus.”

Leela’s lips suddenly curled as her eyes slid back to him, and there it was—that spark. Mischief, restrained and warm. The part of her that used to tease him in the mornings just to see if she could make him smile before coffee. The part he hadn’t seen in weeks.

“I believe one of the incentives,” she began lightly, “was... ‘sleep with Joel’ today.”

He stared.

Not out of lust—though his body certainly answered with a long, slow, hardening ache—but out of disbelief. Wonder. The cautious kind. Like seeing a wild animal approach the palm of your hand. She hadn’t touched him in weeks. Months. He’d gone to sleep with a ghost every night. And now she was here, playful and real and warm.

Still her. Still bruised around the edges. But her.

“You keepin' track of that bullshit?”

She tilted her head, braid sliding off her shoulder. “Maybe?”

“And you checkin’ it off?” he asked, rougher than he meant to.

She leaned in slightly, voice a little huskier now. “Depends. Are you still available for incentive-based tasks?”

His heart gave a full, aching thump. He let a slow grin tug at the corners of his mouth. “Hell,” he said, “I’ll fill out the whole damn chart if it gets you in this bed again.”

She huffed a laugh. “I starve you too much. Never realised how important... it is.”

He turned toward her, one knee pressing deeper into the mattress. She smelled like soap, clean cotton, hot showers, and something that might’ve been bergamot. Just all woman. She slid her legs toward him, tentative, and he leaned in, bringing his hand up to fold the hair from her face.

“Beautiful girl,” he muttered.

She leaned into his palm, kissing it, hand finding his wrist, slender, sure. She touched him like she remembered everything about him—like she hadn’t forgotten a single inch. The way his pulse jumped when she got too close. The way his mouth parted slightly when she brushed the base of his hand.

“I missed this. You, all of you. Even when I couldn’t say it,” she confessed.

Joel felt a crack, right there in the middle of his chest. Like someone had reached in and twisted the muscle until it remembered how to hurt.

He bent forward, careful, his forehead touched hers, and he closed his eyes.

“I’m right here,” he murmured. “Ain’t going anywhere.”

Her breath caught faintly—and then she leaned in, nose stroking his, dark eyes fluttering shut. The distance between them collapsed without ceremony. A quiet fall back into place.

“Do you wanna sleep with me?”

Joel leaned back half an inch, eyes finding hers in the low light. “Gonna have to be more specific, darlin’.”

Leela huffed softly through her nose, and her eyes—God, her eyes—held that glimmer of mischief again. “Just lie down, Joel.”

He let out a breath that was half a laugh, half surrender. He eased back into the bed, boots off, shirt shed, the mattress dipping under his weight as he slid beside her.

“Alright, get in here,” he grunted, opening his arms for her. “Mother and daughter, all the same. Y’all only want Daddy when the night comes creepin’.”

Her snicker was muffled into him. “Would be wrong if she weren't.”

His arm curled around her waist, pulling her in until she was well-accommodated against him, her back to his chest, his large hand splayed against her belly, thumb sweeping slow arcs under the hem of her shirt.

Later, much later, the house lay in silence, only the soft ticking of the old clock in the hall marked time, and moonlight filtered through the bedroom window in silver strokes.

Joel stayed awake long after her breathing softened. Her body stayed in his warmth, bare skin wrapped in linen and Joel, and her cheek pressed into his bicep like she’d always belonged there.

“Beautiful girl,” he whispered again. She really was, he really meant it. She was the prettiest girl out there, someone who definitely would have hung off a billionaire's arm on the cover of gossip mags had it not been for the hand of fate.

He hadn’t learned how much he missed Leela until she was this close, and still not close enough.

His hand drifted slowly, tucking a loose strand of hair back into her braid. Then the tip of his finger traced the soft line of her nose, down to the curve of her lips. They parted with her breath, unguarded in sleep.

He swallowed down a laugh when he realised that someday, Maya would grow into this face. He saw it now—the angular set of her dusky jaw when she got adamant, the exact shape of her scowl, the way her lashes swept her cheek when she napped against his chest. It was all Leela. She’d been stamped onto their girl like an echo.

He touched her hand next—her pretty hand, bare on the pillow beside her, half-curled in sleep, how it looked so much smaller when she wasn’t holding a pen.

Long, lonely fingers. Wide, neat nails. The faintest veins surfacing under honey-brown skin. He counted the lean tendons, the way they ridged delicately over the bones. And there—a small scar just above her knuckle, the origin of which she’d never explained. He ran his thumb over it, like smoothing an old memory.

How they were always doing—fussing with Maya’s collar, knotting her own braid, attempting to patch up his worn boots again—and yet, they slept empty now.

His eyes caught on the curve of her ring finger. Bare. Waiting.

He imagined it full. A gold band resting, maybe a tiny diamond tucked into the metal like a secret, a ring that maybe had his name engraved on the inside, hidden against her skin, a ring she never had to take off, even to shower. And when they walked through town together, it would glint in the sun, and people would know.

That was Joel Miller’s wife.

That was Joel—with his home, his someplace where a warm hand waited for his.

He kissed that very knuckle, then laid their joined hands between them on the sheets, her fingers still lax in sleep, but his closed tight, as if to hold what he'd almost let slip away.

Not again. Not ever.

X

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[brawltogethernow]

Lol sure.

Peter isn't a character with an innate heroic sense of right and wrong and drive to do good. I got into this a bit in the enormous Marvel vs. DC post—like, his inarguable and voluminous heroism is conditional on specific circumstances he ended up in that caused him to rethink his life philosophy.

This is packaged very concisely in his origin story, but his origin story has been deemed by public opinion to have hit a saturation point of "so iconic that everyone has already seen it", ironically causing it to sort of fade from perceived importance in pop culture analysis of the character to the point where it just didn't happen in any form in the MCU, which. That's just a different guy at that point. That's Preston Pilmer, I don't know him. Beyond that, as time passes, retellings of the origin (in comic flashbacks as well, not just adaptations) are increasingly likely to reframe events so Peter looks more like an innocent victim of the situation and less like an active participant.

Which undercuts the entire point of that story.

In his introduction, Peter is spiraling down the drain of being a nasty little baby Objectivist. He's caught in a destructive loop where people have been dismissive of him, so he's decided to be dismissive of other people. There's been endless relitigation of how in his origin story Peter is bullied, but pop culture essentially never notes that his response to this is a supervillain-style vow of revenge.

(Amazing Fantasy #15, published 1962)

Like come on. It's the same row of panels.

After getting superpowers, he develops an "only looking out for me and mine" philosophy—and "mine" is literally two people wide.

If this story were being told for the first time today, first-issue Peter would just be an incel.

(For the record: In the 80's and 90's comic writers started massaging down Peter's age in his intro to claim he was bitten at 15, but all the high school issues that mention it refer to his class as seniors, so he was written to be about 17 here.)

So the point of this origin, which was penned as a one-off Aesop-tragedy, is Peter experiences the consequences of this mindset and is reminded that you can't fucking do that because we live in a society. He actively ignores a burglar less than a foot away from him because fuck 'em all, burglar wanders off and kills One Of The Only Two People In The World Peter Parker Cares About, Peter discovers that him and his immediate family are part of "'em all." Oops!

So after this Peter has learned his lesson extremely thoroughly, and decides to do better. But it is a decision—he has not magically become a different person with better instincts. His initial motivation for sticking with the Spider-Man thing is gunning for using it to pay the bills—which is perfectly reasonable, especially since the key driver behind that is wanting his aunt to live comfortably now that her husband is dead. But it's not exactly an altruistic love of all humankind, or even trauma-informed conviction that all of humankind is his responsibility. Also his first instinct for how to do it is "robbery".

(Amazing Spider-Man #1, published 1962)

And yes, his second idea is "super show business". The Bugle was like Plan F.

The rent-covering, aunt-supporting scheme of selling photos of his own exploits as a masked adventurer to his biggest hater carries Peter through his next handful of adventures before he falls into the habit of doing it for its own sake. By this point the first few ASM issues have also established that Peter gives as good as he gets at school.

(Amazing Spider-Man #2, #8, published 1963)

It's a nasty environment, but in the way of high school where it's a big ugly morass everyone is participating in that's easy to perpetuate but has enormous inertia against being fixed. Nobody's shoving poor wibbling Peter into lockers—though Flash Thompson regularly challenges him to duels, which is a lot more interesting and gayer.

The single digit issues also set up a pattern that's going to define Peter's social life—where his peers do attempt to connect to him, he rebuffs them because he sees whatever's going on in his double life as more important, and they conclude he's stuck up.

And he is. He fucking is. It's a core character trait that Peter Parker thinks he's better than everyone else, which is why, from a narrative perspective, he gets his ass beat so often and is constantly beset by down-on-his-luck happenstances. When MJ is introduced it takes ages for their relationship to meaningfully get off the ground because he literally just assumes she's stupid.

(Amazing Spider-Man #45, #50, published 1967)

He's just not written as a character the reader will want to see have an easy win. He is SO convinced he's God's gift to mankind—for it to land when he gets a win, you want to see him cry a little bit first.

Once he starts heroing for its own sake, it takes a while before he gets properly good at it. He's strong and tough and good at puzzles from go, yes, but he's abrasive and has little ability to talk people down and, more importantly, usually no inclination. His policy of smacking back twice as hard at anybody who steps to him perpetuates or escalates the careers of the villains he's trying to deal with. Famously, he considers quitting a lot. The most famous incident with the panel of him walking away from his costume in a garbage can is ASM number fifty, but the first one is number three. Every time he doubles down on staying in the game, he's refined the idea of his hero career a little closer to how a reader would summarize it...

(Amazing Spider-Man #18, published 1964)

...but not all the way there. It takes quite a few passes to work the last of the pettiness out.

In his personal life, it's a gradual process for him to start caring about anybody other than May—and a positively glacial one for him to actually figure out how to be a good friend to those people once he has them. It's a skill he's left completely atrophied, so he finds himself scrambling as his double life picks up and his high school tenure draws to a close and he realizes that he actually wants to act like a person. He fumbles a lot of critical social exchanges and goes, "Oh, I'm so unlucky! If only I weren't Spider-Man!" And you look at it and it's like, okay this situation was a little unlucky, but also you just handled it really badly.

(Amazing Spider-Man #30, published 1965)

He's basically going in with a -20 modifier to socializing with anybody who isn't elderly. It's bizarrely satisfying watching him spend most of an in-world decade dragging that number like a millstone up to a niiice round...zero. Maybe like a +3 eventually.

Bringing it back to parksborn, one of their keystone scenes is Peter abandoning Harry in the immediate aftermath of Gwen's death because, down to the absolute wire, he prioritizes getting revenge for his dead girlfriend over helping the very same woman's best friend, even though he should be perfectly capable of concluding that if she could express an opinion on that decision she would smack him. It's an ugly scene, too.

(Amazing Spider-Man #122, published 1973)

Peter is dogged by a lifetime problem with anger issues. They're present from the earliest high school scenes, to introduce the dramatic concept that if he ever lost his grip on them the fallout would be disproportionate because of his powers,

(Amazing Spider-Man #4, #20, published 1963/1964)

but they follow him well into his adult life, long after he's put the work in towards being an overall more pleasant person.

(Spectacular Spider-Man #173, published 1991)

The violent cussedness is a personality trait that predates taking up the habit of putting on a mask and fighting people.

(Spectacular Spider-Man #172, published 1991)

And that's civilians! The number of fellow heroes Peter has defenestrated... Well, it's higher than one. No mind control on anybody's part or anything, sometimes you'll just be in a teamup with him and he'll decide he isn't feeling you.

(Spectacular Spider-Man #110, published 1986)

Peter. Matt doesn't have enhanced durability. Peter.

You can read being Spider-Man as having worsened him in this respect via enabling that habit, but I mostly see it as an outlet that lets him work out the berserker rage tendencies somewhere constructive.

Case in point—the Spider-Verse gimmick comic event resulting in a fantastic film and, resultingly, way more similar comics, has elevated the idea that Peter is destined to be Spider-Man in every universe to a meme—

(Across the Spider-Verse, 2023)

—but while that IS fun, I'm much more compelled by an earlier trend in comics where a lot of Peters who don't end up as superheroes... They tend to be jackasses, or dead, or dead jackasses.

Peter also lacks a firm no killing policy. He doesn't kill people!

(Amazing Spider-Man vol. 2 #42, published 2002)

...He doesn't premeditatively kill people in cold blood!

BUT not because he has a hard and fast internal rule against it. He makes case by case judgements. It's just that on the rare occasions when he's like "Murder IS justified right now actually," the narrative kind of...doesn't let him do it.

"Brawl, what? What does that mean?"

Like, the guy who killed Ben—

(Amazing Spider-Man #200, published 1979)

Peter got delayed long enough to change his mind about revenge murdering him (while under the impression he had also killed May), then accidentally scared him to death anyway. Norman accidentally stabbed himself after Peter didn't revenge murder him fast enough. Etcetera.

Also there are so many elseworld issues where the entire premise is "What if Spider-Man DID snap and kill somebody, and then the entire timeline went off the rails because he just kept killing people?" that at this point, I kind of unironically see him as having a strong propensity for murder addiction that 1. he doesn't know about because 2. the prime timeline itself is cushioning him against ever finding out about it. I sort of say this as a bit because it's funny but it's also textually supported. (What If? Grim Hunt; What If? Peter Parker Became the Punisher; What If? Spider-Man Back In Black; What If? Spider-Man vs. Wolverine; etc., I literally don't know how many examples of this there are because I keep finding new ones. I found a new one today while pulling up a different one for reference.)

If you're beginning to question why so many beautiful women desire Peter Parker carnally, well, he does grow as a person. Also he canonically eats pussy like a champ. What were we talking about?

IN CONCLUSION okay, this is a collection of some of Peter's greatest flops—early days, relapses, and high stress incidents. He is not, in aggregate, a terrible person. It would be just as easy to cherry pick panels that showcase his fierce empathy and principles, and the payoff he gets from fanning those traits while banking others until helping becomes grooved-in instinct.

(Amazing Spider-Man #50, published 1967)

(Plumb forgor he wasn't wearing his suit..)

Peter honestly spends way more energy fighting the worse parts of his own personality than he does supervillains, which is where he gets a reputation among impatient fans for being "whiny"—he's constantly engaged in knock-'em-down philosophical brawls with himself, relitigating and cross-examining what he's already done and trying to arrive at the golden answer for what he's supposed to do next, the ephemeral right path where nothing has to be sacrificed. He's even less charitable towards himself than I've been in this breakdown.

And he's compelling because it pays off. From any given comic (up until the quality pitched off the rails in 2007) you can skip ahead five publishing years and get a snapshot of a guy who's measurably less of a piece of shit than he was at your last check-in.

He works things out with Liz, the blonde who recurs in the excerpted high school bullying panels. His mutual vitriol with Flash matures into comfortable banter. He works himself into a proper wife guy for MJ. He shifts from being dismissive of Harry to overprotective. Gradually, he gets a firm enough grip on the berserker rages that they transition from "Ha, what a cunt!" to "Mm, kind of cunty."

All this is loadbearing to this franchise, and I'm not even a little surprised you haven't culturally osmosed it. It is, essentially, being phased out. The origin has been dismissed as overplayed, but, really, it's incompatible with the Peter Parker who's proven to test best with audiences—the perpetually-fifteen moppet who's in over his head and can't be held culpable for anything because he doesn't understand what's going on. This floppy homunculus has no need to improve itself, because that would imply he possesses agency in the first place. There are no stressors pulling him in different directions because he isn't poor, and his aunt is young and healthy—and too hip to ever react negatively to him being Spider-Man, so his secret identity is more of an idle lark than anything. His life is straightforward. Why wouldn't he be a fundamentally heroic person? Huh? What? "Dramatic tension"? What's that? Never heard of that before, sorry.

Possibly even worse than the adaptational Peter who becomes more amoebic with every iteration is the mediocre Modern Age comic writer's bland everyman, the undertoasted manchild who is, similarly, a universal victim, because having traits would detract from his ability to represent and uplift the platonic ideal of the mediocre asshole. This Peter can never seriously interrogate a bad impulse of any weight, because that would by implication task the industry blandasses projecting on him to work on themselves, and they don't want to. They can't write about getting over being an incel because... Nay. I shan't say it.

Uh. Concluding statement. I dunno, man, I miss Peter Parker being a studiously contained ball of rage. Nowadays writers barely even let him punch people unless he's supposed to be possessed.

Annnnd thank you for saying you're enjoying my meta! That's all, folks, good night!

i LOVED your spideytorch post, and youve opened my eyes, Johnny Storm is asexual you are so right. what are your thoughts on parksborn?

Wah, thank you. God, maybe if I just keep alluding to it I can sway people without ever actually compiling my case....

Parksborn's here! But you're the third person to request it, so whatever, I'll elaborate. Let's talk about parksborn. This is gonna be entirely stream of consciousness.

So it's Spider-Man, and Peter Parker is the main character and ergo the center of the universe. Everybody else feels like a complete person with their own offscreen story, but they're in this story to orbit him and make him shine brighter and sharper and get lit up in return. Almost everybody is a warped mirror of him. Flash, JJJ, Harry, MJ, and to an extent May are some of his strongest foils because they're aware of this on a meta level and have intense love-hate relationships with it. And Harry is the least equipped to deal with it. Like, structurally.

The way Harry is crafted is that there's a pool with one copy of each character trait in it, and him and Peter have to split them up. So Peter has looks and brains and charisma and a loving home life, and Harry has money and an alive parent who resents him for lacking all those other things and wants to join a son-swapping program. Peter is an innately kind of lousy person with a lot of agency he focuses on trying extremely hard to do good, and Harry is a decent, reliable guy who gets systematically broken down by forces outside of his control until he feels cornered into supervillainy. Sometimes there's the impression that he has a choice in the matter, but when you consider tragedy as a genre and how it navigates people into bad outcomes using their own neutral traits, he really doesn't. He actually makes the choice, repeatedly, to do the best he can, and he always fails. There was only one "usually wins the day" in the bag of traits even though these characters want to be on the same side winning the same day.

Being Harry Osborn is an inescapable hell because Peter Parker exists - out of universe because that's how he's constructed, and in-universe because Harry can't escape the repercussions of his father's feud with Peter and the choices the two of them have made because of it, the way that Norman initiating conflict ropes Peter into perpetuating it. It would be incorrigible for Peter not to oppose Norman, but him doing so doesn't net Harry anything except to turn a pervasive, quiet unhappiness into an explosive one. The game is rigged so that Peter can never balance this harm out. Neither of them can. Nothing can.

This conflict makes Harry's life unbearable. It kills Harry's best friend and his dad and then it takes him down too before he's 30, and he sees it coming the entire time.

So anyway the triumph here is that Harry, with fierce deliberation, loves Peter anyway.

And nobody asked but in the linked response I was mostly thinking about this poem:

[cintasvel]

i've been thinking about the last shot of andor a lot and there's been a lot of debate about how it was handled, particularly within the constraints of bix and her role this season. regardless of personal opinion, gilroy has said the shot was supposed to be hopeful and i get it. you fight today for the children of tomorrow so they can live peacefully. i think, regardless of how i feel about bix's story as a whole, i can get behind that. as cliche as it may be.

what i can't really get behind is star war's commitment to signifying hope for its characters in the most heteronormative way imaginable. each and every single time. it is so incredibly boring and it's been done so many times. let's not insult one another by pretending star wars doesn't have mothers in it and that motherhood doesn't get addressed often. padme is a mother. mon is a mother. maarva is a mother. leia is a mother. hera is a mother. there are a lot of mothers in star wars. motherhood and its connection in signifying hope runs deep within star wars.

what makes it particularly awful this time around is there are actual, canonical, queer characters in andor and, as expected, they do not get even a minuscule amount of hope in comparison to the heterosexual characters around them. cinta's arc happens entirely off screen before she's killed off in the most insulting way you can imagine and vel is relegated to being a megaphone around yavin to encourage cassian and bix into their roles. that's not to say i don't love faye marsay and what she did with her limited screentime. she really fucking sold that vel's lost her will to live for anything but the rebellion. but if we're making an anti-fascist show, you can't just ignore how you handle your queer and poc characters. you just can't.

my point is, the traditional family has always been the pinnacle of hope for star wars. and it's fine. but it completely ignores that for many people -- queer or otherwise -- the traditional family isn't that. vel's entire character screams that isn't that for her by her two most important connections being cinta, her girlfriend and mon, her cousin. the finale does try and balance this with vel reaching out to kleya and her being a constant source of connection and family with mon. but let's be honest with one another, it doesn't hit as hard as it could have if cinta and vel had been alive and together. or, if we really needed to kill them both ('everyone dies in this show' comments truly have aged like milk lmao) if they had sacrificed themselves fighting for that tomorrow. not because romance is inherently 'more important' than platonic relationships, but because cinta is a HUGE part of vel's character and vice versa for vel. you truly cannot have one without the other because andor never tried to write either of them otherwise. vel gets away with a little more because she's mon mothma's cousin and her beef with kleya and luthen helps bring tension and resolve to that. but cinta? outside of her threadbare backstory, vel is all she has (which is tragic by itself).

i've gone off topic a little, but my point is, vel's ending in andor shows her as a rebel commander willing to fight for what she truly believes in. outside of the title, this is not a huge jump from the vel of s1 (arc-wise, personality and character is a whole other story). the major difference is that vel no longer has the hope of fighting for a better life with cinta like she had in s1. instead she is the sole queer person in the cast (i'm sorry kleya fans, i love our girl but headcanons do not count here) and has to live with this utterly senseless tragedy until she's dead. now, i love doomed yuri (and for the billionth time, i am not asking for velcinta to be treated with kids gloves) and i'm well aware cassian/bix also gets this ending, but the difference between how vel and cinta are treated and portrayed compared to their heterosexual counterparts is so staggeringly different. like, you need to be willingly obtuse not to see how.

as a white lady, i'm not going to too deeply into how misogyny and racism plays a key part here -- someone far more clever than i no doubt will -- but if you think cinta's arc was well-respected in compared to the white women of andor (her background literally parallels kleya's, but guess who gets that examined. not cinta!) then i just really don't know what to say to convince you otherwise. it's not even about her being a minor character (kleya was too in s1). it's about how qwoc are only used as tools to further their white counterparts because their stories aren't worth examining by themselves. as much as i tell myself i'd kill for a cinta novel/comic, i know it's not going to happen because that would require cinta to be considered worthy of exploring. and i don't know if lucasfilm publishing will ever think that. maybe i'm wrong! i'd like to be proven wrong!

and so, vel's arc (or lack of it) and the mishandling of cinta is ultimately, why that last shot just didn't land for me. even as i understand why it was there and what it signifies and can even get behind it... i just don't think hope = the children of tomorrow hits for me as much as it used to, even though it's still incredibly relevant.

this was a lot of rambling. maybe it doesn't make sense or maybe i'm entirely wrong. but i think yeah. it's an okay shot. it's probably not what i'd end my anti-fascist show on though when you've not taken the time to examine (or care) why queer characters are only allowed to be miserable. it's 2025, man.

[dippedinmelancholy]

Do you ever think how absolutely furious Rhysand had to have been when Amarantha tricked him and all the other High Lords save Tamlin, and Tamlin was the the only one given a path to freeing his court? Cause recently it’s all I’ve been thinking about.

Rhysand who has manipulated everything and everyone for most of his life, who undoubtedly could have easily seduced a mortal, even without mental powers, convincing her to say I love you within days, a month max. Yet it was Tamlin who was given the opportunity.

Good, honorable, brooding Tamlin who doesn’t bother to lie, who barely knows how to talk to anyone. Tamlin who is fury and passion and strength, who is exactly as he presents himself, who cares for nothing save for protecting his own people because they need them.

Rhysand is suave and sexy and shadow, he is manipulation and seductive whispers, he is dark power incarnate . . . and yet the vile, powerful general of Hybern wants Tamlin. She doesn’t even truly care for Rhysand in any capacity, Rhysand uses what is “left” of his powers to mind fuck her, literally, to make her believe she wants more of him, to make her think the sex is better than it was.

And yet even in being successful in doing that, no matter how good she falsely believes the sex is, she still only has eyes for Tamlin.

This isn’t me setting up Amarantha to be madly in love with Tamlin. She wanted him as a child, she’s gross and horrible. Brilliant and powerful, but utterly disgusting.

No, I just keep thinking about the insane amount of jealousy Rhysand must have felt, so many layers of it you can barely count them all. Rhysand could have broken the curse quickly enough, I truly believe that, but the reason isn’t because he’s more powerful than Tamlin. No, the reason is because he’s earnestly so much WORSE than Tamlin.

Rhysand will gladly break, torture, destroy and lie to any person to get what he wants, especially when he thinks its for the greater good. Their pain is nothing compared to what he thinks needs to be done.

But Tamlin is GOOD. He is honor bound. He is a man drowning in his own empathy, in his own duty. That is why it took him so long, and in truth, why he failed to break the curse on himself. He loved his court too much to allow so much pain, valued their lives so much they begged him to die for him. Everyone in his court is equal to him, every life deeply valuable.

Rhysand would have destroyed the Illyrians or the Hewn City whole cloth without flinching to protect Velaris.

Amarantha didn’t care about Rhysand beyond fleeting pleasure and maybe revenge if you believe Rhysand’s story. She wasn’t drawn to him because he was already dark and terrible. Already corrupted by power, with no lines he wouldn’t cross. He delighted in killing and torturing for her, again and again.

She was obsessed with Tamlin because he was good. Good and bright and handsome and honorable. Rhysand was little more than a mirror of cruelty.

[melrosing]

AFFC is where I believe the redemption thing loses a lot of people because Jaime is upholding the regime rather than dismantling it. But I always want to ask them dismantle it how? it's so stupid

okay but that's the thing because in a way: that is what Jaime is trying to do! pushing once again my unfinished Riverlands essay bc I am very interested in this part of his story, especially the role it plays within his redemption arc, but in wider fandom it often gets misinterpreted as a detour.... which has made for some really frustrating takes lmao.

if you will humour me for a second though I want to pose to ppl what the avenues available to Jaime actually are at this point in the story. Jaime is not Sandor Clegane: he cannot just leave everything behind and assume it'll all be fine without him.

the situation in fact: ur evil dad has just died, leaving House Lannister essentially irreconcilable with its enemies. the realm has been devastated by the war. who is in charge of it all? ur eight-year-old son, a sweet kid who could be a good king in the right hands.... but is ofc currently in the hands of Cersei, who is.... well. Stannis, the Riverlords, the vestiges of the Starks, and a bunch of forces you're not even aware of want and your family dead to a man. and you are the lord commander of the kingsguard, who would like to 1) fulfill ur oath to Catelyn, 2) protect your family, 3) not make anything worse than it already is and 4) ideally make things better! what do u fucking do?

OPTION 1: literally just leave this sucks so why not just leave! you are an eminently recognisable man and so is your son but what if you just walked out of there and let whatever forces move in in your wake. Stannis probably gets there first (you don't actually know about Dany or Aegon) and he wants you dead, but maybe if you shave ur head (wait that didn't work last time did it) and dye your son's then....??? ok sure. so now you're living in the woods, the realm may or may not fall back into chaos, ur days are pretty numbered, and this isn't even a good story, is it. cool !

OPTION 2: refuse to have anything to do with a continued war against Starks and Tullys and try and advocate for them at court oh god u really thought that would work. your dad murdered Robb and Cat Stark at a fucking wedding. they do not want to be ur friends, they want u dead. they will arm again in a heartbeat, and that's your family done for. also good luck talking Cersei round on this. or anyone really. edit bc oh and also! if you do just want to sit this one out and refuse to get involved with the siege at Riverrun - some other goon will jump in and end it violently for you. so you've basically done nothing but allow it to happen. good for you!

OPTION 3: mitigate and restore what u can your son is a nice boy who likes books and always does his best. you think that if you could surround him with the right people, he might rule well. you realise Cersei is a liability, and plan to have her removed from your son's counsel. you plan to rebuild it with better people. you realise that the realm is starved and in ruins: you want to prevent war, and you really don't want to break your oath. however, many of the riverlords and northerners are not ready to kneel. you treat with those you can, and wring a peace out of the Tullys by saying the right words in the right voice. your reputation takes a hit and readers cannot understand the chapter for shit, but Edmure Tully accepts terms of peace. you cannot restore the Starks, but you can try and save the last of them: you send your gf on a secret mission, and when she comes to tell you that you have a change to help (lol), you go with her.

THE CATCH: none of these fucking work because your dad fucked everything up so bad that everyone wants your family dead and noone wants to be your friend. even though you ended the siege at Riverrun on peaceful terms, that's only going to last about five minutes. you may be trying to save Sansa Stark right now, but god knows what's about to happen to your own kids while you're not there. you're fucked really. there's no single right thing you can do right now except follow what you believe is the best, most realistic thing to do in the moment and see where it leads. shit. that's how you ended up spending 14 years in the woods with brienne waiting to meet zombie Catelyn while Game of Thrones botches your ending and podcasters call your story the limits of redemption. fuck !

[rjalker]

And so many authors want you to think they're progressive for using this dehumanizing stereotype, when they wouldn't be caught dead including any actual human nonbinary characters outside of literal token characters that exist for 5 seconds and then get tossed offscreen, never to be seen again.

Never let anyone tell you The Murderbot Diaries is progressive about gender.

The only nonbinary characters who actually get to be characters are all robots or cyborgs who were neutered at birth to justify enslaving them. (And no. That's not actually examined or acknowledged at all.)

We have exactly two explicitly nonbinary human characters in the whole series, and they are the literal definition of token representation. One of them appears in book 2, for about two minutes, does nothing, and then is immediately shoved offscreen. The other appeared at the start of the newest book, book 7, and again, appeared for two minutes, did nothing, and then was shoved offscreen.

And towards the end of book 7, a whole entire seven books into this series, that has a nonbinary, it/its pronouns using protagonist, where literally no character has ever once told anyone their pronouns because the author is a bioessentialist bigot who thinks you can magically tell someone's gender at a glance, (despite being inspired to write this series by reading a book series that starts talking about gender and how you can't fucking tell from looking literally in the first few pages and then never stops), at the ending part of book 7, we get a scene where our protagonist shits on the concept of asking for someone's pronouns, where the author just flat out lies to us and pretends the protagonist "has never noticed or cared about human gender" despite.....

......Seven whole entire books now where it goes around telling us the gender of every human it interacts with almost immediately.

The author is such a bigot she literally saw her fans asking her to have Murderbot, the protagonist, actually tell someone its pronouns instead of just having everyone Magically Guess Right Because of Biological Essentialism, and literally wrote a scene where the protagonist shits on the concept of asking for or caring about other people's pronouns.

And people still want to lie and pretend this series is more than just the exorsexist nonbinary robot/alien stereotype. When the author is such a bigot she decides to have the protagonist shit on real fucking nonbinary people asking her to represent us properly instead of just. Throwing out her biological essentialism.

Do you ever notice how the majority of nonbinary characters are just straight up not human beings? The majority of our non-binary rep is inhuman, which shows how binary society still views us as a literal societal impossibility despite us being here, real people, on earth with them.

I feel like this feeds into the whole thing of enben being seen as like "eldritch horrors" or "other worldly." Even though it might be claimed to be only in jest, it still displays how we are implicitly seen as a human impossibility because of the pervasiveness of the gender binary in society. It's taught to us as "natural" and how "humans have always functioned" despite our modern bourgeois, patriarchal, white-supremacist gender binary originating as a tool of colonialism. That was very recent in anthropological history. (Also note how capitalism is intertwined with binary supremacy here.)

When you delve into this it's wild. It starts surface level but it reveals the core exorsexism and classism of the capitalist society for one, but how it permeates into jokes ("I can identify as an attack helicopter!" "Nonbinary people are little frogs/eldritch beings!"), representation (most nonbinary representation is of inhuman characters) and our legal status (inexistent, which means no civil rights or legal protection of any kind.)

[luli-lads]

My full thoughts and reactions as I read through it:

- EVIL LADY???? HOT VILLAIN LADY??? PERHAPDST??

- FRACTAL LIBRARY???!?!?!!?!!?! IM SO SICK HOLD ON

- WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING. IS THIS CHILD THE ACTUAL ADMIN???????? ....jas?

- I KNEW IT. I FUCKING KNEW IT. MY THEORY WAS CORRECT, THE LIBRARY MOVES. IT MOVES. OH MY GOD

- Is this the Phantom Thief Pea?

- Ohohoho more Hades-Persephone references I see

- Maybe Dimitri is going to be Sylus' antagonist hmm...

- MY SON!! HI MEPHIE :D

- PFFTTT HAHAHAHAHAAHHA NOT SYLUS PLAYING VIDEOGAMES WITH HIS SONS

- Oh my god the NDZ outfit without the choker....

- "You can definitely afford it..." IM WEAK. IM ON MY KNEES. OOOOUGHHHHH. I'LL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING

- we got stabbed 💀💀💀 can mc get some rest from the horrors 💀💀💀💀

- hehehe sylus yapping about cars is so cute

- 10.5 GRAMS OF SOUL. OW OW OW OW. THAT'S SO ROMANTIC AND ALSO PAINFUL

- OOUGHHHH THE SCENEEEEE HE LOOKS SO GOODDDDD KABDJABSKSBDKWBSKSBSJWBSJA

- pretty boy is sulking because his wifey won't believe in him *ant with bindle*

- what a hot couple. truly

- can we take this as confirmation that sylus noms souls/protocores(?)

- the association watching as mc participates in a killing contest with sylus: 👁️👄👁️

- DIMITRI WAS A RESEARCHER? i wonder if he built the arena there on purpose to hide the lab...

- maybe Westley is that woman we encountered at the beginning?

- OH MY GOD XAVIER CRUMBS???

- AND ZAYNE'S??? EMISSARY???

- AND RAFAYEL'S FUCK

- ARE ALL OF THEM TEST SUBJECTS!?!?!?!?!? DID THEY KNOW EACH OTHER?????

- "our little bomb" i'm going to cave your skull in

- ...origo core?

- thank god she didn't lose her memories 😭

- WAIT SYLUS WAS THE ONE THAT GOT US OUTTA THERE IN THE PAST TOO OMGGGG

- WAS THAT YOUNG SYLUS. HOLD ME

- i'm going to kill a hostage. we're gonna get more info on zayne's relationship with the divine???? u promise???? AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

- higher beings. yes. yes. fuck. yes. please. give it to me. the caller. please. please. please. please.

- Neroooo hiii 🥰🥰🥰

- i'm guessing Zayne wants to join the project to take it down from the inside??

- HAHAHAHAHA HOW MANY SWEETS DOES THIS MAN EAT

- hehehe there's that DB nudge, let's see how it develops though...

- oh.

- is this gonna be a split personality situation...

- THE EPISODE NAME IS 'DAWNBREAKER' STRAIGHT UP. NOBODY MOVE

- IM GOING TO FUCKING CRY. THEY MENTION HIM BY NAME. MY BOY.

- i'm literally shaking i'm not joking

- i can't believe Zayne has officially reached serial killer status in the main story

- his voice 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

- IM??????????? LIKE I—??????

- HE'S OFFICIALLY DAWNBREAKER EVERYONE CHEERED 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

- oh my god...............

- he still hates carrots lmao

- he DOES have some kind of DID omg........

- BAI!!!!!!!!!!! IT'S BAI!!!! fucking hell all of Zayne's timelines are converging...

- oh Zayne knows the boy? interesting

- hold on hold on hold on. i think i get it. this lil dude is the same boy at the end of the fractal library story, and not its actual admin. that's why he knows so much about it still.

- WAIT. FUCK. NEVERMIND I GUESS???????

- ASTRA SKDBANSBQJSBAJSBAKSBQKSBS

- 7 years ago... I wonder why Zayne made that promise though. Maybe he thought by accepting the role he could save MC? Or something?

- i don't vibe with this child anymore

- my theories about the library were right 😋💅🏻✨ they hate to see a bad bitch predicting better than the Foreseer

- CARTER MENTION. CARTERRR. CARTER MENTION WOOOO

- YOU BELIEVED RIGHT CAUSE I WOULD DO ANYTHING YOU ASKED

- i've been shaking my hands so violently that my wrists hurt now

- feeding zayne cookies while he drives 🥰

- YOUNG ZAYNE

- i'll be your lab hamster mouse

- Carter reminds me of Carlton Drake from the first Venom movie

- ksbsjssbsjs Carter is practically drooling at the fact that he got Zayne to visit

- no, he doesn't need any more sugar, trust me Carter 😭

- rip Shiqi 🫡🍫 i would've done the same

- me when i accidentally predicted Zayne freezing Carter to a surface in my fic about them

- "I have a more trustworthy colleague to work with now." HOW IN THE HELL YOU'RE GONNA WRITE THAT AND NOT MAKE ME THINK CARTER AND ZAYNE HAD SOMETHING GOING ON BETWEEN THEM HELLO?????

- also predicted his mouth being frozen shut for being a yapper woah. my power............

- HOT COUPLE NUMBER TWO OOUGHHHH

- can benedict die already

- I KNEW IT. I KNEW IT. I PREDICTED IT. THE MT ETERNAL VICTIMS. I SAID IT. FUCK. I HATE MYSELF

- was that astra. did astra say that. i'm going to throw him off a cliff

- ON THAT NOTE, we have confirmation that dawnbreaker was also caused by astra........... this motherfucker can't give it a rest huh

- can the horrors leave Zayne alone pls. why is he living Silent Hill

- did he just

- dawnbreaker....... tried to......

- RESIGNATION!?

- :((((((((((((((((((

- the creator???????????? whomdst????

- AW THAT'S THE END OUGH

.....time to pull out the whiteboard and red string once more

[spidermansballs]

can i provide an odd and possibly controversial opinion on how jason should look in live action pjo?

i think that if jason were played by a white actor with blond hair and blue eyes it would only add to the divide between jason and thalia and their siblinghood

i mean we already have zues depicted as a black man, suppose thalia is biracial and barolle grace (idk how to spell her name) is white, add to this that jason could "look just like his mother" (having JUPITER be white, because although they are technically full siblings, jupiter and zues are technically two separate people part of the same being) which would only add to the gutwrenching feelings thalia has towards him.

as well as their physical differences add to their mental and societal differences. per the quote "jason looked like the all american boy, thalia looked like the girl who beat up all american boys in the back alley", thalia being a punk woman of color who gives 0 fucks, who has the world against her but makes a wonderful life for herself vs jason being a white man with blond hair and blue eyes, who has never been fully understood and died before getting a full life to live

i mean its a similar vibe towards the kane siblings, they couldnt be more different by society's stanpoints but they love each other all the same and they live fufilling lives, which then later becomes a foil to the grace siblings themselves

in the end i genuinely could not give a shit what the actor looks like as long as the actor does a good job portraying my favorite character, but people are going to complain about the actor no matter what

so we might as well analyze what it could do for the plot

but just as well, jason being a black man could add to his struggle as preator in a ROMAN camp, the struggle with being an "all american boy" and could help him bond with the 7 because everyone besides percy is a person of color

ALSO percy being a blonde white boy who (kinda) looks like jason would make thalia's rivalry w him even more intense

like this little 13 year old who looks just like her baby brothwr who was taken by WOLVES, omg shed go insane

AND if jason looked like barol and percy looked like jason, that would mean percy also kinda looks luke barol

at the end of the day, hc him however you want, i genuinely love jason more than any thing and in any way and its all up to rick and the actor.

[thedubiousdallon]

There are many incredible details from @tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons giant "worm as written by Alan Moore" post that delight me, but the one that I'm most enamored by is "Taylor arranges a threesome with Brian and Rachel". Because obviously this would never happen in Worm-as-written-by-Wildbow, right, but I'm really astonished by the clarity of this interpretation of Taylor's character, because it isn't hard to imagine a version of Taylor who decides that the best way to deal with her guilt about leaving Brian to turn herself in is to make sure he has someone else to rely on for the emotional support she's been trying to provide for him, and clearly that means he needs a new girlfriend, and clearly the best way to achieve this isn't to, like, talk to anyone about any of this, no no! It's to arrange a threesome so that he can develop a new bond of physical affection that he associates with Taylor to fall back on once Taylor's gone, like introducing a cat to its new owner's scent in a familiar context! And of course Taylor comes away from this patting herself on the back for a Situation Successfully Resolved while everyone else stares at her in abject astonishment.

I'm just blown away by how coherent this slightly alternative take on Taylor scans coherently both with itself and with the version of Taylor we get in canon. Normalest girl ever.

(The fact that her first choice for this scheme is Lisa rather than Rachel, but Lisa tells her Absolutely Fucking Not, is icing on the cake).

[goomyloid]

I think a lot about a version of the pacifist route Spamton fight where Kris goes down there with just Noelle instead and has the same post-battle freak out and Noelle being the one to notice/ask if they’re okay. And how she would react to the strained Yes vs yelled No. Especially knowing how she's so determined to figure out what's up with Kris in the weird route, I think it's interesting if she has the same attention to detail and desire to understand what's happening to Kris in the pacifist route.

ok my jaw kinda dropped open reading this. i have honestly never thought of this before and now im going Crazy. oh my gourd i reeeeeally hope someday in the future we get to face a secret boss with noelle…. it would be so awesomes

there is a real difference between how kris acts around noelle vs. how they act around ralsei and susie… because the latter two are ‘newer’ friends with less complicated history i feel as though they’re more straightforward and open around them in a sense. like theyre Able to bring themself to yell NO because they know in the back of their head that both susie and ralsei will try to comfort kris in their own ways. along with that, i guess it’s because of susie’s insistence on finding out if kris is okay or not that they managed to ask them if they were ok at all. basically, its multiple cases of less people holding back on various things…

i personally imagine it being kind of different for noelle. she Thinks a lot of things without actually saying them. she probably wouldn’t stop everything to question that just happened with spamton neo, and if she were to ask kris if they were ok, it would be more based on a gut feeling that something is really wrong more than anything else, if that makes sense… the way kris is friends with noelle is different than how they’re friends with susie. theyre almost less straightforward with noelle, with their idea of bonding being silly pranks and messing with her (stuff kris wouldnt do to susie lol). i wonder if they’d be able to be honest about how they felt like how they were with susie and ralsei, or if it’d turn into them hiding how they feel even more… (something something It’s hard for noelle to get a straightforward answer from kris in general)

noelle being concerned about what’s “happening” to kris in the main route feels difficult, maybe just because it’s so amplified negatively in the weird route, but at this point in time, most people seem to be interpreting kris’s more social behavior as a good thing… when something actually appears to be Wrong for the first time (kris freaking out after spamton neo), susie has no good benchmark of what kris was really like before, and ralsei is being Ralsei-ish about it… if kris were to have the same reaction in front of noelle after all, i think it would deeply disturb her way more than any other character. personally i just dont think kris is the Yelling Type, like at all, so for noelle to hear that from them for the first time (or maybe she’s heard kris yell before in a really bad situation, which then might let her know just how Bad this all is) it would probably really surprise her, and kris would probably regret shouting as a result… not a funny prank

just in general i think kris has a weird combination of like, wanting someone to Notice that something’s different, but also pushing people away out of fear and desire for solitude (and again this applies more so to noelle specifically). like in the main route, it might be easier to believe that things working out for everyone this way is just Better, no one else needs to worry about the Weird Fucking Thing controlling them, they can handle this on their own… until they cant. general desire to not burden others if at all possible. ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY noelle would Really have to lock in and pry at kris a little bit in order to find out that they are “not them” because in the main route where things Aren’t bad, that desperation from the soul doing fuck all in the weird route isnt there anymore

ok im gonna end the post here… your scenario activated a lot of neurons i never even knew i had

[wizardsgirl25]

Percy Jackson Headcanons

Any time swans, geese, or ducks land on the water near CHB, NO ONE goes near it until Mr. D either swears it's not a God in disguise (coughZeuscough) or until they fly away. During this time, Everyone travels in packs of at LEAST 4, and the girls are especially busy As Far Away from the water as possible

Demigod Genders are more highly reliant on their Godly Parents preferred Gender Presentation. It's not a guarantee, of course, but basically God's have Way More Boys and Goddesses have Way More Girls. The only exception is Athena, who specifically CHOOSES her kids genders so they're equally split. (This weirds several other people out but they don't say it to the Athena Kids or else they'd be subjected to a Lecture)

Ares has a soft spot for his Demigod Daughters which is why Clarisse is His Favorite and why his Godly Sons always give her shit.

Sally Jackson could pull any of the Gods/Goddesses, but Poseidon threatened to drown their kids and/or destroy their remaining temples if they Tried and it's just not worth THAT much hassle tbh. Otherwise Percy would potentially have So Many Maternal Half-Siblings.

Medusa's Statues are almost always dead in the stone, but some--the more annoying or persistent or most like her past lovers--remain completely aware of everything going on around them. Gabe is not only aware but completely Mortal and so is just going insane and screaming in the stone.

Aphrodite is SUPER petty about being called to Olympus for ridiculous reasons and is always blatant about it without having to outright say it. Example: Whenever it's something about the Demigods, she arrives dressed sexily but correctly. Zeus calling a meeting to threaten others/remind them of their "place"? She's either completely nude or almost completely nude, lounging on her throne in a deliberately distracting way, and flirting with everyone BUT him, Including Hera and Artemis.

Hermes loves Amazon but hates Jeffery Bezos in a very disgruntled, grumbly way.

Apollo tried to get with Taylor Swift but she decided they were bros instead so now he's just kinda besties. Hermes thinks it's fucking hilarious and brings it up to tease Apollo about it.

Hephaestus was never actually ugly. He just looks like the "perfect" mix of Hera and Zeus. Which means he looks TOO MUCH like Rhea and Kronos. Hera has PTSD she didn't even know about.

Hades tried to send Persephone back to her Mother when she started killing the world bc So Much Paperwork, but Persephone was kinda feral and ate the pomegranate seeds as a "fuck you, you're stuck with me, bitch"

Stay tuned for more Headcanons. I explore some (if not all YET) in my new pjato fic, The Lighthouse Keeper, 👇

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65222701

Its a Time Travel Don't Fix It where an Almost-40-Percy wakes up in his 9-year-old body and decides he'd rather be an Immortal Hermit than redo his life.

[imomnba-x07]

i hate the thunderbolts being the new avengers and i side with sam since i saw the post credit scene (i didn't even like the movie tbh) but i wanted to ask one thing.

when you said "Kamala isn’t assembling a team of child traffickers, murderers, and self centered people unlike a certain other team. Kamala is assembling people that Sam would also choose in a heart beat" are u talking about all the characters in the group? i agree the kamala team is going to be better than the "new avengers" cause they are not going to work with the gov. however, hating the thunderbolts doesn't mean (at least to me) that we have to pretend ppl like yelena and bucky weren't murderers because they had to. ava was a victim too suffering since she was a child.

my problem with the new avengers (other than they shouldn't be avengers) is that they are going to redeem characters like red guardian and walker. red guardian should have died imo and the thunderbolts should have stayed the thunderbolts and help sam's avengers in doomsday like the guardians did in infinity war.

I know you probably mean well but im sorry I can’t take anyone seriously who feels the need to be like “but you don’t mean Yelena Bucky and Ava, right🥺?” We shouldn’t have to constantly declare the recognized victimhood of these characters in order to hate on the team as a whole. Everyone knows they were brainwashed and exploited. Can we move on?

With that being said. “Murderers and child traffickers” mainly refers to Walker and Alexei sure, but when Yelena and Ava were free from their brainwashing, what did they do? They turned right around and continued to do acts of violence for a pay check. I get that it’s the only skill they know, but that doesn’t make it excusable.

“self centered people” refers to ALL of them.

Prior victims of human experimentation should know better than anyone why letting Val walk free was the absolute WORST thing they could have done. She faces no repercussions and got off scott free to continue heading the CIA. And every member of the thunderbolts team was complicit in that.

What makes that choice incredibly selfish and self serving is that they did not let Val walk free out of the goodness of their hearts. No, they let her walk because they wanted shiny tech toys and a cushy set up. “We own you” means nothing when Val can still easily do all the illegal shit she was doing behind closed doors, not when the thunderbolts are now under government control and have to do what they are ordered to. Their actions were selfish because it completely ignores any of Val’s victims in order to serve their own interests. Which they didn’t need by the way, a group of highly skilled assassins could have absolutely made do on their own if they truly cared about helping people, they did not need government support, they wanted it. And that makes them incredibly selfish when it goes against not only their own histories but completely ruins any relationships outside of the thunderbolts that these characters had.

Nat, Sam, and Steve fought against the government having any control over the avengers, and when Bucky and Yelena completely disregard everything their loved ones fought for in order to serve their own interests? That’s selfish.

When Bucky lets Val, the woman who targeted Wakanda and its vibranium (the very people that out of the kindness of their hearts helped free Bucky of his programming) walk free, he not only disrespects people he should be indebted to for life, but he also does it to benefit himself. That’s selfish.

When the thunderbolts demand that they be recognized as the new avengers for saving the day ONE time and believe they have the moral standing because they have government backing and show little to no regard for Sam Wilson (THE MAN WHO HELPED BUILD THE VERY LEGACY THEY FEEL DELUSIONALLY ENTITLED TO) they put their own interests first to feed their own need for desperate approval.

That’s. Fucking. Selfish.

[jaychrilo1144]

Update #3?

Wiress- Maya Hawke

I couldnt be fkn happier

Mags Flanagan- Lili Taylor

Loved her in The Conjuring, im excited to see how she does!

Wyatt Callow- Ben wang

I will be accepting criticism NEVER BECAUSE THIS MAN IS PERFECT!!!!! IM DYING ON THIS HILL!

Snow- Ralph Fiennes

And the marauders fandom is TWEAKING!!

Honestly, how fkn iconic suzanne, really like this is perfect.

Louella McCoy- Molly McCann

Okay, we gotta talk because I had to let this sit for a bit. I dont hate this. She looks like baby Jennifer Lawrence, which is great bc i know katniss reminded haymitch of Louella. I did, however, imagine her to be a dark skinned girl.

Im looking back, and I can't find where exactly i THOUGHT i read that, so maybe it really was just how I pictured her. However, I've seen the child get a lot of hate and that is NOT okay with me. Everyone is allowed an opinion but to tear down a new child actress is disgusting. If you're upset then we can put it on casting board, but never on a child. To that I say, in suzanne i trust, so im interested to see how shes gonna do. Also shes SO adorable im going to get my soul utterly CRUSHED again.

Lou Lou- Iona Bell

Again, new child actress, let's talk about it. Im excited for her. And its interesting because they chose different actresses for the characters, but they do look quite similar. That really adds to the full effect when capitol people can't tell the difference but distract people likely can. Really puts emphasis on how they are seen as less than people. Shes also got this haunted look in her eye, i think she will be great.... this is gonna destroy me

AND PEOPLE THE MOMENT WE HAVE ALL BEEN BEGGING FOR!!!!

EFFIE TRINKET- ELLE FANNING

WE HAVE WON!!!! WE. HAVE. FKN. WON.

My fellow marauders fans, ifykyk, in the club we all tweaking the FUCK OUT!!!! Im giggling and kicking my feet, throwing myself off the chair, WE WONNNNN 🥳🥳🥳🥳

THE CASTING IS OUT

THE CASTING IS OUT

THE CASTING IS OUT!!!!

LADIES, GENTLEMEN, AND FOLKS ALL AROUND! HEAR YEE, HEAR YEE!

I present to you-

Lenore Dove- Whitney Peak

And Haymitch Abernathy- Joseph Zada

FOLKS!!!! I WIL N O T ACCEPT A N Y SLANDER!!! I have full faith in Suzanne Collins' choice. These two are gonna be perfect. They are pretty book accurate, at least Lenore is and Haymitch is pretty damn close. I will happily accept this Im so fucking excited to see who else were gonna get. (My dream is for Elle Fanning to play Effie)

OKAY BUT THE FACT THAT CASTING WISE LENORE AND LUCY GRAY LOOK 100% RELATED I MEAN C O M E O N!!!! UGHHH im so excited

Update!

Maysilee Donner- Mckenna Grace

THIS!!!! IF U SAW HER IN HANDMAIDS TALE THEN U KNOW SHE IS GONNA E A T DRUSILLA U P!!!!

UPDATE #2

Plutarch Heavensbee- Jesse Plemons

FOLKS! WE ARE BEING F E D 😭🙏🙏🙏

Update #3

Beetee- Kelvin Harrison Jr HELLO?????