#that was the only thing i really contributed to the fight

[jaxthedragon]

My favorite moment in a DnD session was when a Minotaur was murdering me and I just yelled at it, "Your mother was a dairy cow and your father a drunkard!" before immediately dying

[acrobattack]

i think it’s fun that blossom and buttercup butt heads the most vs brick who targets boomer and more or less gets along swell with butch

[anarchywoofwoof]

the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

war on drugs: reagan's aggressive escalation of the war on drugs was a catastrophic policy, primarily targeting minority communities and fueling mass incarceration. the crusade against drugs was more about controlling the Black, Latino and Native communities than addressing the actual problems of drug abuse, leading to a legacy of broken families and systemic racism within the criminal justice system.

deregulation and economic policies: reaganomics was an absolute disaster for the working class. reagan's policies of aggressive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and slashing social programs were nothing less than class warfare, deepening income inequality and entrenching corporate greed. these types of policies were a clear message that reagan's america was only for the wealthy elite and a loud "fuck you" to working americans.

environmental policies: despite his reputation being whitewashed thanks to the recovery of the ozone layer, reagan's environmental record was an unmitigated disaster. his administration gutted critical environmental protections and institutions like the EPA, turning a blind eye to pollution and corporate exploitation of natural resources. this blatant disregard for the planet was a clear sign of prioritizing short-term corporate profits over the future of the environment.

AIDS crisis: reagan's gross neglect of the aids crisis was nothing short of criminal and this doesn't even begin to touch on his wife's involvement. his administration's indifference to the plight of the lgbtq+ community during this devastating epidemic revealed a deep-seated bigotry and a complete failure of moral leadership.

mental health: reagan's dismantling of mental health institutions under the guise of 'reform' led directly to a surge in homelessness and a lack of support for those with mental health issues. his policies were cruel and inhumane and showed a personality-defining callous disregard for the most vulnerable in society.

labor and unions: reagan's attack on labor unions, exemplified by his handling of the patco strike, was a blatant assault on workers' rights. his actions emboldened corporations to suppress union activities, leading to a significant erosion of workers' power and rights in the workplace. he was colloquially known as "Ronnie the Union Buster Reagan"

foreign policy and military interventions: reagan's foreign policy, particularly in latin america, was imperialist and ruthless. his administration's support for dictatorships and right-wing death squads under the guise of fighting "communism" showed a complete disregard for human rights and self-determination of other nations.

public health: yes, reagan's agricultural policies actually facilitated the rise of high fructose corn syrup, once again prioritizing corporate profits over public health. this shift in the food industry has had lasting negative impacts on health, contributing to the obesity epidemic and other health issues.

privatization: reagan's push for privatization was a systematic dismantling of public services, transferring wealth and power to private corporations and further eroding the public's access to essential services.

education policies: his approach to education was more of an attack on public education than anything else, gutting funding and promoting policies that undermined equal access to quality education. this was, again, part of a broader agenda to maintain a status quo where the privileged remain in power.

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

[mithrun-house-of-kerensil]

Lately, I've been thinking about Mithrun and the ways he is dehumanized in canon.

Before I get started, we know that elven society is incredibly afraid of death and illness. This is obvious in how they look down on the short lived races and see them as weak and childlike. We also know that Mithrun himself had ableist views toward his brother and these values did not leave him once he, himself, became disabled. He is a product of the society that raised him, but I also think how Mithrun is currently being treated contributes to his view of himself.

Mithrun has had three different caretaking groups over the years. The first are the ones his brother hired for him. From what we can see, they did the job, but we can understand that they did not know what to do with him. No one had ever recovered from having their desires eaten so the focus was less on rehabilitation and more on keeping him alive.

Later we see Milsiril take an interest in him because of his desire to return to the dungeon. Since she did not bother to visit him for decades after finding him, we can assume that there is an ulterior motive here. Timeline-wise, this was when the majority of the canaries had just been wiped out. They needed more men, and Mithrun is set up to be the perfect single-focused soldier.

Honestly, we can assume that Milsiril doesn't really care about him or see him as a person. Mithrun is just a new project for her to play with. We can see this in how she's focused on superficial level concerns like the fact that he doesn't look nice and wanting him to be overly grateful toward her. She also talks about him like he's not in the room and can't hear her. This is a dehumanizing trait shared by many characters when talking about Mithrun.

When he finally does recover enough to return to the canaries, the military does not make any effort to accommodate his needs. We know the canaries are understaffed and the ethics are already bad, but they really did not even try to care about Mithrun's safety at all.

Entrusting a criminal with his care was questionable at best, especially when Cithis immediately took the opportunity to abuse her power over him and no one stopped her.

While acknowledging the light-hearted nature of the manga, it's uncomfortable that Mithrun was treated like a child and an animal by Cithis for her amusement. Regardless of her 'learning to respect him' later, the point is that Mithrun was taken advantage of and degraded because she believed he couldn't say no. No one bothered to do anything about this until Pattadol yelled at her.

Truly his treatment is summarized well by Milsiril here. Mithrun is extremely vulnerable to being abused by those taking care of him because he won't advocate for himself. He has one desire so he won't fight for himself in any other way.

It is obvious that Mithrun was not treated well by his caretakers and this has resulted in him identifying his needs through a disconnected and frankly, infantilizing lens.

I understand that it may have been a translator's decision, but I always thought it was interesting that Mithrun says that he's "not sleepy" which is a childish term. Otherwise, he speaks like everyone else, if not rather posh.

This, followed by the fact that he is responsive to Kabru treating him like a literal infant to get him to eat, paints a clear picture of the fact that Mithrun is not unfamiliar with being treated like this. He responds to it because he's used to it and has no desire to argue with being treated this way. When we consider the fact that the chapter started with Milsiril treating an older child Kabru in the same way, it is likely that she also did the same thing to Mithrun when he was under her care.

In these panels, we see that Mithrun does not believe that he can sleep without magical assistance, even though it is immediately refuted when Kabru takes the time to bundle him up and help him relax. Not only does he fully believe he can't sleep without external assistance, but he states directly that there is no point in him getting comfortable.

As Kabru observes, Mithrun's inability to recognize his needs applies to needs such as hunger and exhaustion, but it obviously also applies to emotional needs. Kabru just wanting to feed him something delicious and not wanting him to give up on life is the most consideration someone has given Mithrun in years.

The relationship they form over the course of a single week is enough to shape Mithrun's behaviour completely. Mithrun ignores Cithis's demand in favour of asking Kabru's opinion. It is Kabru's hand Mithrun takes to pull him out of his defeated state. It is Kabru Mithrun confessed his true desire to.

Do you realize how depressing that is? All it took was the new perspectives from Kabru and Senshi to make him consider the fact that he should keep living despite no longer needing to fulfill his duty. Being treated well could have helped Mithrun much sooner and this shift in the way he sees himself contributes to his recovery going forward.

TLDR: Mithrun has no desire to be respected, but why does that make people feel comfortable acting like he doesn't deserve it? Someone not caring about being treated well doesn't give you permission to treat them poorly. This feels like a playschool-level consent lesson: just because he's not saying no to a humiliating or degrading act doesn't mean it's a yes and therefore okay to do. Acknowledging this is the bare minimum of treating him as a person.

[unequivocallyreid]

Why Didn’t You Tell Me?

it has been SO long... i was suffering from serious writers block but it think i'm finally out of it :)

pairing: spencer reid x fem!reader

summary: Spencer Reid used to be your best friend, but things changed. How long can you pretend that you don't love him before it ruins you?

warnings: angst! (with a happy ending), smut (unprotected piv), character loss, mention of Maeve, very sad Spencer, mental health struggles, drinking/bar scene, light choking, fighting, slight praise kink

wc: 8.8k 🤗

i’m very proud of this one! i hope you love it!

Every morning when you wake up, you feel a familiar and creeping sort of dread in the pit of your stomach.

Don’t get the wrong idea; you love your job. You love helping people and stopping horrible people from ruining any more lives, but the creeping feeling and desire to get out is always in the corner of your mind. Anyone working in this field would tell you that. There’s no absolute separation between you and the victims and their families. You take all of them home with you, and you just have to learn how to deal with that and not let it eat at you.

It doesn’t help that it’s an isolating job as well. The last time you were in a serious relationship was in college. Now, every date you have ends in disappointment. Not only do you lack interest in most of the men and women, but it couldn’t go anywhere even if you did. 75% of your time is spent in the office, on a jet, or hundreds of miles away from your home.

All of this contributes to the feeling, but the worst part of your job is Dr. Spencer Reid.

He’s secretive and dismissive and just about the most attractive person you’d ever seen. You honestly don’t know what is worse: his constant physical presence in your life or the fact that you can’t stop thinking about him no matter what you do. You’ve tried to get over it; you’ve buried yourself in work, lamented to your friends, and gone out on dates (all with guys that looked vaguely similar), but nothing has worked. All his worst traits grate your nerves and light you up at the same time.

The worst part of it all is that it wasn’t always like this. When you first joined the BAU nearly two years ago, you and Spencer got along well. You were friends, he talked to you about his life, he understood you, and you really severely fell for him. He became your best friend.

Everything changed around six months ago. Spencer started to develop migraines, and as those developed, he started distancing himself from you. He became snippy and closed off, he started hiding things from you, and he stopped talking to you about life outside of Quantico. It was like overnight, you became nothing to him, and you really didn’t understand. Everyone else on the team got the same old Spencer, but you went from his right-hand man to someone he only spoke to when it was necessary.

Maybe he didn’t deserve to be vilified. You know, realistically, he can and should be able to decide who he wants to be close to, but working with a man who unknowingly broke your heart was close to the hardest thing you’d ever done. So, you decided hating him was easier. The real emotions you feel toward him sit somewhere inside you, but they have been covered by manufactured distaste. Addressing the actual feeling would hurt too bad, so you pretend to hate the things you used to love.

Nothing, however, could have prepared you for the last case you worked on: helping Spencer save a girl he met about six months ago, a girl he loved. You tried to stay collected, you said nothing when Spencer assisted when he shouldn’t have, and goddamn, did you do everything in your power to find that girl. Maeve. She was perfect for Spencer, and you saw that immediately. Everyone did. The sight of him sobbing in front of her body is one that will never leave your mind.

Now, two weeks later, no one has heard from Reid. The only indication that he hasn’t abandoned his life altogether is the absence of the gift baskets on his doorstep that Pen leaves daily.

Nearly everyone has been to his apartment, but they are met with a closed door and have yet to receive a response. Everyone but you.

Penelope is the first to bring up your lack of appearance at the end of a long day of paperwork.

“Y/n, please, you just have to try. No one is getting anything from him.”

“I really don’t think my presence would do any good,” you pause for a moment, trying to collect the thoughts running through your head like a freight train. “Me and him haven’t been close in a long time, Pen.”

Before you can continue, she cuts in, “Everyone has tried, Y/n. Hell, I’ve even considered tracking down Gideon, and I really, really do not want to do that.”

She pauses for a moment before looking up at you with a pout on her face, “Please, Y/n, for me. I can’t bear the thought of him in there all alone, just wasting away in grief.”

For someone who claims not to be a profiler, Penelope knew exactly what to say to get you to agree. She’s the only person in your life who you told about how you felt, though you’re sure everyone else (aside from Spencer) knew: you’re shit at keeping secrets.

“Okay, okay, I’ll try.”

She nearly bursts with excitement, “Thank God-“

You cut her off before she can finish, “But I’m telling you, I’m not the person he wants to hear from right now. Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Yes, yes. I just want him to know we all want him to be okay.”

Before you can hurry out of the office to follow Pen’s instructions, she stops you and hands you a basket full of assorted snacks and fruits.

“Make sure he eats!”

The walk up to Spencer’s apartment is a hard one to take. The smell of his building hits you as soon as you step into the lobby. From there, everything rushes back at once. Memories of nights you spent watching reruns of Doctor Who or listening to him prattle off about whatever he last read assault you with every step. As you slowly make your way up, you start to question why you agreed to do this in the first place.

You feel a lot toward Reid. More than you should and less than you could. But all that care and feelings that are so close to love aren’t enough to make you forget why you’ve been trying to hate him for so long. He deserted you without an explanation and cut you off without a warning. You spent weeks (three months) crying over him like a love-struck teen. So, as much as you want to hold him and comfort him, you know it’ll hurt you to do so. Penelope sent you, with the whole team’s approval, you’re sure, to try to patch up a broken heart he got loving someone else. There’s a sickness in your gut, but it’s not enough to stop you from rapping your knuckles against his door.

“Spencer? It’s Y/n.”

There’s no response.

“I know you probably don’t want to hear from me right now, but I want to make sure you’re alright. Can you tell me you’re alright?”

Again, nothing.

You know he’s there. Despite your lack of communication, you know Spencer well enough to know that he would never leave his life behind entirely. That being said, your next few attempts at garnering a response are unsuccessful.

You decide to try one final time before just leaving the basket alone on his doorstep and texting Pen it was a bust.

“There’s a lot I don’t know about you now, and I won’t pretend to know what you’re feeling.”

You don’t exactly know where this is headed, but you continue on regardless.

“I know you’re in there, and I know you can hear me, and I know you’re hurting. You shouldn’t- I don’t want you to be alone right now, Spence. You can either unlock your door, or I can pick it, but I’m coming in one way or the other. You know I will.”

You wouldn’t, actually. It’s a last-ditch effort, and it’s met with the same silence you’ve heard on the other side for the past ten minutes. You’re about to turn to head back down the stairs when you hear the very faint sound of a deadbolt turning.

There’s no other sound or movement, and for a moment, you think you might’ve imagined the sound, but you try the handle anyway. It turns, and the door slides open. You take a step in.

“Spencer,” you call out to him.

You don’t see him at first in the mess of his apartment, but when you do, you feel a crack form in your heart.

Beyond the clutter of his entryway, you see his back on the couch. His frame looks smaller than you’ve ever seen it, and you can see his legs curled into his chest. You set down the gift basket by a collection of others on the entry table and walk over to him. Slowly, like you’re trying not to spook a lost dog, you creep in front of him.

His head is down, and his gaze stays trained on his knees.

You reach out your hand and lay it over his. He flinches but doesn’t pull away.

“Spence, I’m so glad you opened the door.”

You didn’t plan out what you would say, but ‘sorry’ feels redundant and useless.

You go on, “I’m here. I- I don’t know what to do or say, and I’m sorry that I don’t. I can get someone else for you. Just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.”

You wait for him to say he wants Penelope or JJ, but it doesn’t come. Nothing comes. You start to move to get up, figuring you could clean up a bit and try to make him something to eat, then go, but he grasps your arm before you can.

He looks up at you, and his eyes hit you right in the gut. They’re bloodshot and sunken but still beautiful.

“Stay. Please. I just- I need to know I’m not dreaming. I keep thinking I’m dreaming.”

His voice is croaky from disuse and breaks at the end, but it’s so heartbreakingly earnest that you feel your breath catch. You move from your crouch and sit beside him on the couch; your hand is still in his.

You stay like that for a long time. His breathing is shakey and uneven, and every so often, his body shakes with what you can only assume are sobs. You stay pressed to his side the whole time, thumb rubbing back and forth over his hand.

Eventually, you speak again, “I’m gonna get you some food, Spence. You should eat.”

He says nothing back, but he does loosen his grip. You push yourself up from the coach with a promise you’ll be as fast as possible.

His kitchen is nearly empty, and you hope he’s been eating from the baskets. Still, you find enough to make noodles and butter, and you figure the carbs should help his energy some.

You return with the bowl. Spencer hasn’t moved, but his head follows you as you walk back over to him.

“It’s not fine dining.”

He studied you for a second, and you catch a glimpse of the old him in his eye.

“You did the same thing when I was sick on a case a year ago.”

You smile at his recollection.

“It helped you then.”

The rest of the night is spent mostly in silence. Occasionally, you tell him something to try to remind him that you’re there and that you won’t leave as long as he wants you there. Eventually, you get up from the couch again.

“Spencer, it’s too late to still be awake.”

He nods and still says nothing, but he is far more receptive than before. You reach your hand out to him to help him up from the couch, and he takes it.

He leads you to his room at a slow pace. His head stays down as you both take a seat on his bed, hands still interlocked. Being in his bedroom is odd for you. You’ve been to his apartment quite a few times before he disappeared from your life, but you never breached this space. It’s all very him. Almost surprisingly cozy, with books scattered around nearly everywhere there’s space.

You take in the moment for a beat before saying, “I’m gonna head home, Spencer, but please call me if you need anything at all. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

This makes his head snap up, and his eyes lock with yours.

“Please stay.”

That’s all he says, but every part of him is pleading with you. It’s not a good idea, and you know it. You’re the only person he’s seen in days, you aren’t close anymore, and you don’t particularly want to sleep on a couch tonight.

“Spencer, I don’t want to sleep in your living room tonight. I’ll come back.”

He pauses for a moment, “You can stay here with me. I don’t want to be alone.”

Your heart cracks again. There was a time when this was all you wanted. It’s still, deep down, all you want, just not like this. You know he doesn’t really want you there and he’s not himself. But you aren’t strong enough to say no, so you don’t.

He gets you clothes to wear, and you change in his bathroom. You come out and find him in his bed, laying with his back to you. You have no fucking idea what you’re doing, but you get into bed next to him anyways. There are a thousand thoughts racing through your head, but the prevailing one is how badly you want to touch him, to hold him, to make him forget, just for the night. You stay still, though, confined to the edge of the bed and start to count to drown out the noise.

Though, you can’t drown out his voice, saying, “Can- Could you hold me? I think that everything feels better when you touch me.”

Another crack. By the end of this, you know Spencer Reid is going to break your heart all over again.

~

When you wake up the next morning, Spencer is still asleep. You sneak out of his room and call Hotch. When he answers, you tell him Spencer has let you in, and you ask for time off to try to help. You can tell from his voice that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, but he grants you it anyway.

Much of your day is spent like the night before. You stay next to Spencer, and you cook for him after leaving to pick up clothes and groceries. Then, you get him to shower and wash his hair. He sleeps with his head in your lap, and you feel like a fucking idiot at first, but as long as it’s helping him in some way, you let it happen.

That’s the thing: you don’t really know how to help him. You know he isn’t the type to talk about something until he is entirely ready, so all you can do is add something domestic and bright to his life while he grieves. It’s all you can think about in the moments of silence. Hell, you even read to him to try and get your mind off of it, but it barely helps.

The night is the same. You change in different rooms and slip into his bed at different times. You feel dirty for imagining what it would be like if the circumstances were different: if he wanted you like you have wanted him for the past two years. You hold him against you, and you pray for sign that you should be there.

The sign comes the following morning when Derek calls you.

“Y/n…”

You can hear his teasing tone over the phone.

“Hi, Derek.”

“What are you doing, mamas?”

You sigh, “What do you mean?”

You’re playing coy. You know he’s wondering why you’re at Spencer’s house, picking up the pieces, but you won’t be the one to bring it up.

“Why’d you ask Hotch for the week off, Y/n?”

Another sigh, “You know why, Derek. I just, I want to help him.”

“I know you do, Y/n, I know.”

He pauses for a moment, and you let the moment fill with silence.

“I know you care about him. We all care about him. But who is taking care of you?”

“I am. I can take care of him, and I can take care of me.”

“I know you can, but I don’t want you to get hurt, Y/n. Don’t let this be something that hurts you.”

“It won’t. I- You have to- Fuck, I’ll be fine. He’s not fine. I don’t care about me or any feelings that may get hurt right now. I’ll be fine.”

There’s another bear of silence, “Okay, Y/n. Just know you’re allowed to tap out.”

You try to think of anything else to say, but nothing comes, so you say your goodbyes.

You won’t need to tap out. You can take care of him and be good to him and ignore the other feelings you have. You can be good.

The call does make you think it’s time to push, to try harder, to help him get better. So, you approach him that day before bed, before he tucks himself into your arms and falls into a fretful sleep.

“Spencer?”

He takes a moment and then responds, “Yes?”

“You have to talk about it. I think that you need to talk about it. It doesn’t have to be to me but to someone.”

He’s quiet for a long time, and your breath is caught in your throat, waiting for him to say anything.

“I- I don’t want to,” his voice cracks while he says it.

“Spence, you can’t come back if you don’t. You can’t move forward if you don’t.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

A ringing echos in your ears.

“You don’t mean that. She- she would want you to keep going.”

Wrong thing to say.

“You don’t know anything about what she would want.”

He’s seething now, below the surface, but smoke has started to plume from his ears. Still, you don’t stop.

“Spencer, everyone knows that. No one would want you to put your life on hold.”

He speaks his next line through his teeth, “You don’t know anything, Y/n.”

You’ve never heard him sound so angry.

“Spencer-“

“No, just stop. You don’t know her. You don’t know me half as well as you think you do. You don’t know anything. I don’t even know why you’re here. I don’t want you here. You can't be what I need.”

The ringing in your ears is louder.

“Spencer, please. Just-“

“No!” His voice is raised now, bordering on a yell, “I don’t want you here. I want you out, Y/n.”

This has to be what shell shock feels like. The ringing, the tingle in your limbs, and the heat in your face. You don’t know how you are moving, but you are.

His voice is echoing in your head, or maybe he’s still talking, but you can’t tell either way. The only thing you can focus on is how Spencer sounded like he hates you and that Morgan was right about the hurt.

~

You spend the next day trying desperately to shut down the noise in your head. It doesn’t work. The day after is the same. And the days following that. You ignore calls when they come, you ignore the texts, but you can’t stop looking at your phone for a message from the man who fills your thoughts.

Spencer doesn’t call, obviously, and you have to sit with a pit in your stomach while you beg yourself to just get the fuck over it. Two years of reckoning with the severity of your love, months of watching him live happily without you, and it’s the three days you spent trying to help him feel incrementally better that floor you.

You feel like a dumb teenage girl with so much love and nothing to do with it. On top of everything, you feel selfish. Spencer lost the love of his life forever, and you’re nursing the worst heartbreak of your life because a boy will never want you and never has. Still, you send out prayers for him over and over. You hope you’ll see him in the BAU again, even if his eyes glaze over you. Hell, even if they look at you with hate the way they did two days ago. You just want him to function. You want him to be good and eventually be happy. You try to go to bed with soothing thoughts, but you end up with a mantra of his name.

You wake to your alarm and dress for work before you realize you aren’t actually supposed to go back yet. You never set a date to return. You wanted to be open as long as Spencer needed you. You’re supposed to be with him. You’re supposed to be helping and not tapping out. But you aren’t.

You have no reason not to return to the bullpen, so you do. You walk in and feel eyes on you. You wait for Morgan to call out to you, but he doesn’t, so you follow the feeling.

Your breath catches in your throat; it’s Spencer. He’s sitting at his desk, paperwork spread out, and he doesn’t look away from your gaze; he just holds it. His face is unreadable, and yours is definitely not, so you look away first. You don’t look up again until you reach Hotch’s office. You knock and hear him call out to come in.

“I’m back if that’s okay.”

He looks up at you, and you want to cry. You know he can read you. He has always been the best at it.

“Are you okay with that, Y/l/n?”

You lock eyes with him, “Yes, sir.”

It’s no use; he knows your tells and you aren’t being honest.

“Alright, conference room in five.”

Whatever he sees in your face, he ignores and takes you at your word, but there’s a warning in his tone. He knows when to let things go and when to push. More than that, though, he knows you’d never let something like this affect your work.

~

The first case back is in Maryland, and the one after is in Austin, and the next is in Philadelphia with The Replicator. The job takes you all over the country, and the cases blend together. You don’t speak to Spencer through all of it. You’re never partnered, never work together, you sit on opposite ends of the jet. You don’t even speak at Strauss’ funeral. It’s radio silent, and everyone notices it, but no one brings it up.

In that time, you allow yourself to slip away slightly. You don’t go out with the team, you see Pen at nearly half frequency, and basically, the only time you speak is on cases. It’s stupid and melodramatic, but you call it healing. Derek tries to reason with you, JJ sticks to you a bit more than usual, and Penelope calls you virtually whenever she can, but their efforts are mostly in vain. This is your way of protecting yourself. You feel like you have to isolate in order to improve, and you know, given time, you will come back to yourself.

Penelope’s insistence that you go to her Day of the Dead celebration breaks your distance.

“Y/n, please come. I know you aren’t going out, but you have to. I know you have people to honor, and I need you there.”

You sigh, “Whose going, Pen?”

“The team, which you are a part of, so you must be there.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I promise you I will celebrate with you. I’ll help you set up, just please don’t make me go.”

Penelope pauses, but the glint in her eye keys you into the fact that she is not interested in giving up.

“We miss you, Y/n. Everyone loves you and misses you. You’ve been living this stupid, isolated life, and it’s time for you to come back. You are not this person. I refuse to believe it. You’re coming, and that’s final.”

Maybe you don’t have the energy to argue, or maybe you know she’s right, but you agree to go.

~

The thought of seeing him makes your heart race, and the clock you keep glancing at makes it worse. Just a few more hours before you're trapped in a confined space (Pen’s beautiful home) with a man you haven’t spoken to in weeks.

You busy yourself with preparing. Lights are hung, food is made, and you make a trip to the store while Pen sets up her remembrance table. When everything is said and done, you can’t help but feel this is the most beautiful thing you’ve been a part of in a long time.

The first knock comes at 7:30 exactly, and it’s Hotch and Rossi. They are followed closely by Blake, then Derek and JJ. By 7:00, the atmosphere is light and loving, and you feel a bit of your anxiety let up as the minutes go by without Reid. But, eventually, the knock comes, of course it does, and you move into a corner as Spencer walks in. You feel a shift in energy, though you doubt it’s palpable for anyone else. Rossi is the first to make his way over to you, and his presence comforts you nearly immediately.

“How you doing, kid?” His voice is soft like he’s speaking to a scared rabbit.

“I’m better,” you say, and it’s about as honest as you can get. As much as you’d like to think he knows nothing about what’s gone on, you’re smarter than that. He’s the best profiler on the team, and he’s always known when someone was off with you. Even so, you are better than you were, even if you aren’t quite good, and you know he believes you.

There’s some idle conversation between you before he asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not tonight. I don’t know when, but I will. Eventually, I will.”

It’s good enough for him, and you move on easily, which surprises you.

Right before Pen gathers you all to present your photos, he says, “Sometimes we think we’ve seen the whole picture, but we miss a big part. People do things because they don’t want to be hurt, but those things hurt them more. Just, be open.”

You don’t quite understand what he means, but you hope you will.

Penelope presents the first picture, which shows her parents. JJ honors her sister, Derek, his dad, Hotch Haley, and Rossi, Hernandez; then it’s your turn. You place down a photo of your best friend. You hadn’t talked much about her, but you think of her daily. She passed a few years before you joined the BAU.

“I was lucky to have someone that hurt that much to lose.”

That’s all you say, but it’s enough for you, and it would be enough for her.

Spencer is last. He places down a picture of Tesla and a picture of Maeve. Your heart is heavy for everyone.

The night dwindles from there. Hotch and Rossi say their goodbyes, and Rossi gives you a knowing look as he leaves. You just smile. You stay for a few minutes after, but eventually, you move to leave as well.

You make it down Garcia’s porch before you feel a hand grab your arm. You turn, and it’s Spencer’s face you see.

“Would you- Do you think you could come over? Do you think we could talk?”

~

The feeling you have walking up to Spencer's apartment is similar to what you felt the last time. You’re incredibly anxious, but at least you know you’ll be let in this time.

The drive over was silent. Spencer had taken the metro to Penelope’s, so he rode with you. It wasn’t necessarily awkward. There was just an understanding that the car wasn’t the place to begin your conversation.

Now, as Spencer unlocked his door, it’s one of those rare moments you felt starved for words, and you know it’s because you’re scared you’ll say the wrong thing and face the same reaction that you did the last time you were in his home.

He leads you to his living room and motions for you to sit, and you do. The two of you are on opposite ends of his couch while you wait for him to say something.

His first words are airy and light, “Thank you for letting me talk to you.”

You look at him but remain silent, waiting for him to go on. All you can think about is why he wants to speak to you at all. The last time you spoke, he made it incredibly clear he did not want you in his life or around him at all.

Before you can think about it more and let your anger and sadness build, he speaks again, “I feel really stupid right now. I kind of feel stupid whenever I’m around you recently.”

He pauses momentarily before going on, “I’m so, so sorry, Y/n. About the last time we spoke. I’ve been thinking about it pretty constantly for the past few weeks.”

You open your mouth, unsure of what exactly to say, but you can’t get there before he’s off again.

“I’m not sure how to talk to you anymore. I don’t think I’ve known how to for a long time. I just, I need you to know how sorry I am for speaking to you like that.”

He takes a shakey breath but keeps going, “That wasn’t me, and that isn’t how I feel. I’m just unbelievably sorry, Y/n.”

He stops there, and you work to collect your thoughts.

“I know. A part of me knows, at least, that you didn’t mean it. I just wanted to be there for you, and hearing that made me- I just- I think it made me hate myself for wanting to be there.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m unbelievably sorry.”

“You didn’t talk to me for months, Spencer. I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why you let me in in the first place. I thought you hated me.”

He’s silent for a long minute.

“I never hated you, Y/n. I just stopped knowing how to act around you, and then I met Maeve. I fell so deep into it that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I- And I just started to feel like you didn’t want me to speak to you, so I didn’t. But, when you came here, after everything, I guess I just felt like you were the only person who would get it. You never, no one on the team ever treated me or talked to me how you did. I just wanted that.”

Tears had begun to well in your eyes now. A part of you gets what he means, at least about letting you in, but the other part is so confused as to why he stopped being comfortable around you.

“I don’t understand, Spencer. Why did you stop knowing how to be around me?”

There’s desperation in your voice that makes you sound like a stranger to yourself. Maybe you’re a stranger to everyone right now.

“I uh, I don’t really know.”

“That's not fair, Spence.”

You’re crying now. Just a little bit, but you can feel the wetness on your cheeks. You can see that you are by the look on his face. He looks broken, and you know it's a reflection of your own image.

You wipe your face, “Thank you for apologizing, Spencer. I just, there are parts of this all that I don’t understand, and if you can't explain them to me, I don’t think I ever will.”

“Y/n-,” he calls out your name like a prayer.

“It’s okay, Spence. You don’t have to say anything more. We talked, and things will go back to how they were eventually.”

“I’m so sorry, Y/n.”

You smile sadly as you get up to leave.

“I am, too, for what it's worth. For whatever I did to make things change in the first place.”

You leave it at that, and it takes everything in you not to look back as you leave his apartment.

~

Things do get easier after that. Not completely. You still love him, and it hurts, but it helps to know he doesn’t hate you. He talks to you some, cordial things, and you do the same. You're sure your teammates still sense something is off, but this works for you. Right now, it works. Getting over him, not loving him anymore, is going to take work, but eventually, you know that you won’t hurt anymore.

Shortly after you and him talked, you started going back out with your friends. Spencer joined periodically, but that was normal. Bars were never really his scene.

Tonight, everyone gathers at your local pub. Your last case was particularly grueling, and you all need a way to blow off some steam. It's fun, and you feel good, even with Spencer sitting across from you. You feel proud of yourself for getting to this point.

JJ and Penelope feed you drinks to try and get you to dance, and you let them. Tonight feels as good of a night as any to ‘get back out there’ as Pen says. So, you do. You dance with them, and you ward off the other cops and agents around you who try to pull you away from your group. You aren’t interested in that. Right now, you're just having an appropriate amount of fun for a woman 15 feet from her boss.

Time goes by quickly, and by the time you get back to the table, you, Derek, Penelope, and JJ remain. He tells you that Hotch, Rossi, Reid, and Alex left a few minutes before. The conversation between you flows for a while, up until the drinks loosen Penelope up enough to bring up what you were pretty sure the team designated a no-no topic.

“Y/n, you have to talk about it.”

You’re still laughing as something Derek said when you reply, “What?”

“You know what. You and Boy-Genius. What on Earth happened? You went from ice-cold to semi-friendly. None of us saw it coming.”

“Babygirl-,” Derek tries to stop her, but you cut him off.

“No, it’s okay. I have to talk about it at some point, and I think right now is the only time I’ll be tipsy enough to let you get it out of me.”

You're still laughing slightly, but the pit that's lived in your stomach for the past few months starts to rear its head.

“After your Day of the Dead party, he asked to talk to me. I went to his place, and he apologized. I don’t really understand what he said or what he meant, but I can’t be sad about him forever.”

Pen perks up a bit at that, “I knew that party would bring good things!”

You giggle a bit at her outburst, but then JJ asks, “What did he say?”

The faces around you all tune in at that. You know they don’t see this as gossip. They care about you both too much to trivialize it like that.

“He just said that he stopped knowing how to act around me, and he didn’t know why, but then he met Maeve, and I guess it didn’t matter so much after that. He was my best friend, and then he was nothing.”

JJ shares a glance with Derek and then speaks, “Oh, Y/n.”

“What?”

After a beat, Derek says, “He didn’t just not know how to act around you.”

Now you're confused, “What do you mean? I talked to him, that's what he said. He didn’t know why. I mean, he knows everything and didn’t know why he didn’t want to be around me anymore. How fucking stupid is that.”

You laugh again, but it does come off as genuine in the slightest.

“Y/n, he probably doesn’t really know why. At least not fully. For someone as smart as he is, the kid can be really stupid.”

“Stop being cryptic.”

Derek sighs but goes on, “Pretty girl, pretty boy was in love with you. Probably still is. He just didn’t think you’d ever feel the same.”

“No. That's not true.”

You look at the others around you, but their faces are serious.

“He loved Maeve. He loves Maeve. That, that doesn’t make any sense.”

It's JJ’s turn to talk now.

“He definitely did love Maeve, no one is denying that, but we all saw how he was around you. His whole relationship with her was safe. He couldn’t be hurt by her rejection every day because he had no way of seeing her. With you, he could.”

Your mind is moving a mile a minute, “Did he tell you guys this?”

Penelope puts her hand over yours and says, “He didn’t have to, love. We all say the way he looked at you and acted around you. The way he talked about you. That boy was head over heels.”

“Guys, I appreciate whatever you’re trying to do, but this isn’t real. Spencer doesn’t- this is not real.”

“Y/n, pause. Think about the way he acted around you, the things he said. Think about how Reid is.”

You hear what Derek said, but it all sounds faint like someone stuffed your ears with cotton while you weren't paying attention. All you can focus on are the different scenes running through your head, the scenes of your life with Spencer in it. How he memorized your coffee order and brought it for you every day, how he never shied away from your touch despite his aversion to contact, how he consistently went out of his way to protect you on the field. At his house after everything, the way he clung to you and wanted to be held. How he said in his own words, “You can't be what I need”; not “you aren’t,” but “you can’t.”

Your whole world is crashing down in this bar, and you can’t do anything to stop it.

“Y/n?”

JJ’s voice snaps you out of your spiral.

“Just go talk to him.”

You nod mutely, and you get up.

~

Everything in the last ten months of your life has led you to the exact spot you were when everything blew up in the first place: Spencer’s door.

This time, you aren't too worried about him not letting you in. If anything, it's the opposite. Him opening this door could open a hundred others, and you don’t quite know if you are ready for any of them. You sit there and sit there and sit there, trying to work up the courage to knock, though you aren’t sure it's there to begin with. Right as you're about to walk away and decide you’ll come back another day, his door swings open.

“Y/n?”

His face is lit up with shock, and you notice his hand that is not on the door is holding his pistol.

“What are you doing here?”

You don’t answer, “Why did you open the door?”

He sets his piece down on the entry table before responding, “I heard footsteps in the hall and saw they stopped here. I was anxious. 50.3% of home invasions happen between 8:00 pm and 7:00 am.” He cuts himself off there, “Y/n, why are you here?”

You didn’t pay attention to anything he said. All you could think about was the way his lips were moving and the way his eyes locked onto yours as he talked.

“Do you love me?”

That is not what you wanted to say.

His lips fall open as he takes in a sharp breath, “What?”

“Or I guess did you love me? Before everything? Because Derek and JJ and Pen, they all said that you loved me, and now I can’t think about anything else, Spencer.”

He doesn’t speak, but you don't really give him a chance to.

“I just, I know I sound crazy right now, but I feel fucking crazy. I keep going over everything in my head, and I have been, for the past year I have been, but now it’s all different. It's all different because they said that you loved me, but you didn’t think I’d feel the same way.”

Here, you do pause, but he still doesn’t say anything, so you go on before you can stop yourself.

“Because if that's true, Spencer, it's just- I did. I do. And if it's not, then please just tell me so I can stop feeling this way.”

He sounds resigned when he says, “Y/n,” and you feel like you know what that means.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I'm doing this. You don’t have to say anything. Actually, please don’t say anything. I don't think I can hear it. Just pretend I never-”

He cuts off your ramble, “Y/n, stop.”

You draw your eyes from the floor, look up at him, and find something in his gaze you have never seen before. He doesn’t say anything, just stares at you, and it takes everything you have not to look away. His hand raises to cup your jaw, and your skin lights on fire. Before you can process what he’s doing, you feel his lips press against yours, and something clicks. At first, his touch is light, like he’s giving you the chance to pull away. But, when he grasps that you won’t, he presses himself to you harder, and all you can think about is how nothing has ever felt so right.

His lips move against yours, and you don’t know how you're managing to reciprocate because it feels like everything in your body has gone fuzzy. The kiss is by no means long, but it feels like it lasts forever, and by the time he pulls away, you’re breathless.

His forehead stays connected to yours, and he whispers, “I do, Y/n, love you. I have.”

You don’t feel the tears on your cheeks until he’s wiping them away.

“Oh, Y/n.”

“Did you know? That you did? Is that why…”

You trail off, hoping he’ll pick up on what you're asking, and he does.

“I didn’t at first, or I didn’t realize I was falling in love with you until it happened. I got scared, so I ran. I just never thought that you could feel the same or that I was hurting you. I didn’t realize that. I just thought I was doing what was best for us. I felt guilty for being in love with my best friend.”

“And Maeve?”

“I loved Maeve. I’ll always have love for her. I was trying to move on, and I thought I could eventually be with her and be around you without it hurting. I wish I would have told you this before.”

“You’re telling me now. That's enough.”

This time, it's you who pushes your lips to meet his. Your arms snake around his neck, and his fall to your waist. You follow when he pulls you into his apartment and closes the door. There is still pain on both sides, but you can feel it dissipating as you cling to each other. You’re just two broken people who have finally found a way to each other.

This kiss is different, hungrier. Neither of you pulls away for longer than a few seconds as you navigate your way from his entryway to his couch. Every touch is desperate like you're searching for something you never knew existed until now. His hands pull you closer and closer until he's pulling you on top of him, and each of your legs rests on opposite sides of his hips.

Your lips break from his for a moment, “What do you want, Spence?”

His reply is instant, “You.”

From there, things move faster. Your hands unbutton his shirt and push it from his shoulders while he undoes your pants. There are moments of awkwardness that come with exploring another for the first time, but it feels good. His hands trace over your hips and push further until you're left on top of him in only your underwear and bra. He takes you in like you are something to be marveled at, and you know your eyes reflect the same adoration.

You raise yourself off of him and work to get him in the same state of undress as you, and when you position yourself on top of him, you feel his length press against your center. The two thin layers of fabric do little to hinder the intensity as you rock into him. He lets out quiet moans at the action as his lips trace down your neck and over your collarbone.

His breath ghosts over you and makes you shiver when he asks, “Can I touch you?”

“Please.”

His hand moves between the two of you, and his fingers find your clit easily, rubbing circles over the fabric of your panties. You pant his name against his lips at the action. You feel like your whole body is lit up, and under any other circumstance, you'd feel embarrassed at how worked up you are, but you can’t seem to care.

After a few moments, he lifts you up and carries you to his bedroom. From there, he positions you below him on the bed, removing your remaining clothes in the same motion. The new setup lets you grip him, and he feels big in your hand. His fingers resume their previous assault before dipping down into you. You cry out at the feeling of him inside you, slowly pushing in and out, finding a spot that makes your legs start to shake. He’s relentless in his pursuit and all you can muster up the energy to say is his name.

“You’re so beautiful, Y/n.”

It's somewhere between a whimper and a whisper, but the sound of his voice causes you to clench around his fingers.

He picks up on this, of course he does, and quickens his pace as he coos at you.

“So pretty like this. I’m so lucky.”

You’re embarrassingly close already, so when he moves his thumb over your clit to rub circles as he fucks into you with his fingers, you come undone almost instantly with a warning and cry of his name. He works you through your orgasm, all while whispering praise in your ear. Once you come down from your high, you start to push his boxers down his legs, but he stops you before you can fully.

“We don’t have to do anything more, Y/n. I liked just making you feel good.”

“I want more. I want to feel you if you want that too.”

“Of course I do. I just don’t want you to regret anything.”

“I couldn’t regret this, Spencer. I love you. I want all of you.”

It's the first time you’ve actually said those three words to him, and it feels so fucking good to say.

“I love you, too. God, so much.”

With that, he positions himself back on top of you, running his fingers over your slit gently before gripping himself.

“Do you have a condom?”

“I might somewhere, but I have an IUD, and I’m clean. I can try to find one if you’re more comfortable with that?”

“IUDs have a failure rate of around .05% and are largely considered the most effective form of birth control, so uh, as long as you're okay with it, I am.”

You smile to yourself at his statistic but nod, “I want to feel you, Spencer.”

He returns your smile before rubbing his length over your entrance a few times and slowly pushing himself into you just slightly. He teases you, or maybe himself, for a moment before fully entering you. You push your hips up to meet his, and feeling him in his entirety makes your jaw fall open. He’s big, and you feel unbelievably full.

He waits a moment for you to adjust before he starts to develop a rhythm. His hands are everywhere, but his eyes are focused solely on your face like he doesn’t want to miss a moment of your reaction to him inside of you. To be fair, you are probably putting on a good show. Every movement he makes hits you in exactly the right spot, and you don’t think you could be louder if you tried. You can feel the leg he’s not holding up against his shoulder shake against the bed. Your first orgasm has made way for your second to be incredibly close.

“Spencer, please.”

You’re crying out, desperate for a little more to push you over the edge.

“What do you need, baby?” His voice is tight like he’s not far himself, and it sounds better than anything you’ve ever heard.

“Harder. Please, harder.”

He takes your direction immediately, rubbing circles on your clit with one hand while he thrusts into you with a bruising force. He’s fucking you like he wants you to remember the feeling long after he stops, and you know that you will. Everything about it is overwhelming: his smell, his pace, his eyes. You are covered in him, and he is covered in you.

After a moment, the hand he had on your stomach trails up to grasp lightly at your throat, and you fall into feeling. You can’t warn him that you're about to come before you do. The feeling is white hot. Bigger than your first, and the fact that you're coming on him sends you into overdrive. You can feel his hips falter for a moment, but you're lost in a daze, crying out his name.

He pumps into you a few more times before he follows suit. He pulls out, and you feel stripes of his come paint your cunt and lower stomach as he finishes with a moan of your name.

He falls next to you on the bed, and it takes you both a few moments to collect yourselves and catch your breath.

Once you do, the only thing you can think to say is, “I love you.”

It feels like those are the only words circling around in your head at the moment. Some mixture of his name and that declaration. While you know you each said it before, that your profession was the exigence of the sex you just had, it feels uniquely vulnerable to say now. It’s like the moment you just had together could have changed things or made him realize that he doesn’t actually love you after all.

That shoe doesn’t drop, though. Instead, you hear the three words echoed back to you by a man who, 6 hours ago, you thought would never, ever say them.

You turn to face him, and the love on his face feels like it could knock you out. He’s looking at you and smiling in a way you haven't seen in a long time.

“Will you let me clean you up?”

You know that part of the reason he’s asking has something to do with the likelihood of bacteria growth or something like that, but you think it's mainly that he wants to take care of you. Him wetting a rag and running it over you feels intimate in a different way, in an excruciatingly gentle way. Personal in a way that makes you feel like nothing between you could ever be wrong again, and maybe that's naive to think, but you feel hopeful regardless.

Once he finishes, he takes his space back next to you in the bed. This time, he pulls you into his arms, and it's different than it was all those months ago. This time, you know that he won’t push you away and that you won't hurt yourself by being next to him. This time, you just tuck yourself into him, and you let him whisper sweet nothings into your ear as you begin to drift off. This time, it feels like peace.

~

The following day, you wake up to Spencer still next to you, looking incredibly soft in the early morning light. You search for a moment to find your phone in the piles of clothes and are greeted with a text from Pen.

How did it go????

You smile before turning your phone off and climbing back into bed next to the man you love. It couldn’t have gone better.

-

all done! yay!!!

i hope you guys love it!! i’m not 100% happy with the ending but i’ve been writing this for so long and just needed to be done.

this is my first time writing angst on here and my longest fic, so PLEASE tell me what you think! all (nice) feedback is welcome and i love to hear from you guys!! :)

[artbyblastweave]

A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.

[lowkeyerror]

Talk it Out

Agatha Harkness x Rio Vidal x Reader

Word count: 1.5k

Notes: Agatha All Along Finale Spoilers, Angst, I guess it's hurt/comfort, happy ending

Summary: The confrontation between Agatha and Rio goes differently with you there to mediate.

An: I've been itching to write for Agatha. I check the tags everyday for new fics, so I thought maybe I should contribute. Hope you like it

Masterlist

“Are you guys really going to do this? There has to be another way?”

Dark skies with ominous clouds loomed over Agatha's backyard. Rio was perched on the rooftop magic buzzing in her hands. Agatha stood on the ground exhausted from the trials of the road.

You found yourself standing in between the two.

“Darling, there is no other way. I don’t want to hurt you, don’t make me hurt you,” the rage dims in Rio's eyes as she looks at you.

You turn to the other woman. She’s trying to activate her powers, to no avail. You see a panic rise across her features. It's then that Rio begins her attack. When Agatha is flung back, you can’t help but scream her name.

“AGATHA!”

You attempt to run to her side, but vines snake their way up your legs keeping you in place.

“Rio please,” you plead with her.

Agatha answers, “She’s not going to listen to you sweetheart. Death is unkind, cruel even, and she cares for no one.”

Tears brim at your eyes hearing those words. Your whisper doesn’t get lost in the chaos, “That’s not true.”

“You can lie to yourself all you want Agatha, but she knows you’re full of shit,”  Rio hurls a vine at the witch leaving a nasty cut on her ankle.

“Look around Y/n, does this look like love,” Agatha spits out before her back connects with a tree.

Wires and vines alike start to wrap around Agatha, keeping her in place. Rio stalks towards her in a predatory fashion.

“End of the road Agatha, and you know where all roads lead.”

Agatha starts to beg for her life. This whole scene pulls your heart in two different directions.

Your magic was weak in comparison to most, but in this moment that didn’t matter. It was enough to escape the hold from the vines.

Just as Rio was going to blast Agatha out of existence you step between the two. Your hands outstretched to shield Agatha.

“Take me instead,” your gaze is soft when you meet Death’s stare.

“No,” Agatha and Rio speak in unison.

You shake your head, “You don’t get to say no. You need a soul and I’m offering mine.”

“It- it’s not your time,” Rio's excuse is flimsy.

“I’ve been around just as long as she has. I’ve sat by and watched her do the things that she did. I am your lover, just like she is. So you’re taking my soul.”

Agatha protests again, “She can’t have you.”

You turn to face her, “She already does, my love. I do not fear her as you do. I do not resent her. Spending eternity with her does not scorn me. I love her just as I love you.”

A scowl grows on Agatha’s face, “How can you forgive her?”

Rio wants to speak, but you place your hand on her chest, causing her to hold her tongue.

You squat down to Agatha’s level. Your hands caress her face, “I am grateful for what she gave us Agatha. Are you not? We’ve been alive for centuries, yet nothing has ever come close to those 6 years.”

“She took him from us.”

You shook your head, your voice was delicate, “He wasn’t even meant to take his first breath. We might’ve made him from scratch, but there’s only one person that gave him life, and you hate her for it.”

“He was my son too,” Rio speaks, no longer in her fighting stance.

Her eyes boring into Agatha, with a sorrow only death could convey.

Angry tears welled in Agatha’s eyes, “In the middle of the night. When we couldn’t even say goodbye. I was going to- I was going to do better for him, Rio.”

“I had to take him, and if either or you asked me not to… I don’t think I would’ve been able to do it. Don’t you think I would’ve loved to see him grow, Agatha? He was so much of all of us even at that age.”

“He was smart and cunning like you,  Agatha. He had your affinity for nature and balance, Rio. And he.. .”

“Was kind, just like you sweetheart,” Agatha finished your sentence.

Rio frowns, “I took no joy in taking him. In fact, taking a soul has never hurt so much. I didn’t just lose Nicky, I lost you too.”

“Tell her the truth,” you say to Agatha, who shifts a bit under your gaze.

“There’s nothing to tell,” her sentence falls flat at the end, in the way it does when she's lying.

Your tired eyes look at her, “Agatha, please.”

“I ran because I’m scared. Not of you, but of facing Nicky. If he saw who I am, what I’ve become he would-"

“Love you anyway,” Rio spoke with certainty.

It’s then that Agatha fully drops her mask, vulnerability on full display, “How are you sure?”

“You never hid yourself from him. He knows what kind of person you are, he always did. Maybe he wanted you to change, but he still loved you the way you were,” Rio spoke it like a fact.

It broke Agatha. She began to sob, “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I’m sorry.”

You began to free Agatha from her spot against the tree. Rio instantly broke the binds after watching you struggle. She was cautious in her approach, of the two of you.

Rio wraps her arms around Agatha. Agatha melts into the embrace, the warmth comforting her. Rio begins to wipe away the woman’s tears.

You watch with a tender gaze and relief flooding through your features.

“No more fighting,” you look between the two of them.

“What about Billy?” Agatha clears her throat, trying to regain her composure.

Rio deflates, taking a step back from Agatha, “I still-”

“I told you to take mine,” you speak up.

Rio’s eyes darken, “I won’t.”

You invade the woman’s personal space. Your arms settle around the back of her neck. You lean into her, forehead resting against hers.

She breathes you in calmly. Eyes fluttering close. You kiss her, deeply. You don’t focus on the pain coursing through you, but rather the softness of her lips, the eagerness of her hands, the warmth of her body.

You can feel yourself slipping, but it doesn’t go too far as you are roughly shoved away from Rio.

“ARE YOU CRAZY!” Agatha yells.

Your breath is ragged as your life force slowly returns to you, “Maybe.”

You don’t think as you shoot your magic at Agatha. You know her instincts, you’ve seen them in action. Without thought she begins draining you of your powers. As you crumble, she rises.

“AGATHA!” Rio’s voice echoes something deadly.

It knocks Agatha out of her trance and she quickly cuts the line between your power and hers. You lay flat on the ground with your eyes open towards the sky. You’re breathing is minimal but present.

Rio looks at Agatha, “You need to give her some back or she won't make it.”

Agatha’s hands are trembling and she tries to out the power back, but nothing is happening.

“She’s- she’s not taking it,” Agatha begins to mumble.

“Y/n you have to receive the power, you have to do it or you’ll die,” Rio says sternly.

“The soul,”  you mumble.

Rio growls, “Forget about the soul, I’ll figure it out, just please.”

Before Agatha can put the magic, back into you again, you’re hit with a bright blue ray of energy. The force with which it hits you makes you jolt into an upright position.

“Is she going to be alright?” Billy jogs over to the scene in front of him.

It’s not what he thought it was going to be originally and for that he’s grateful. Fighting Death was not anywhere near his bucket list.

“Did you-”

“I-I came to fight and then I saw… everything. It just made sense to help,” Billy’s eyes search all 3 women.

You answer him first, “I’m alright, everything is fine.”

“A-are you sure?”

You look to Rio, who is already looking at you, she tells the teen “You are free to go.”

He looks at Agatha first and then you.

“We will around if you need us, don’t fret. This is not a journey, you have to walk alone,” you tell him.

The boy is quick to wrap his arms around you in a hug. You squeeze him back and whisper in his ear, “We will help you find him.”

He nods at your words. He takes one more glance at Agatha and Rio before leaving the yard.

“When are you going to tell him about the road?” Agatha questions you.

“Later, after I’ve spent some time with the women that I love. Both of them,” you say hopefully.

Rio looks at Agatha, you both knew it was her call.

The woman let out a dramatic sigh, “Nothing too strenuous I'm exhausted from all of that hard work.”

“A bath would do you well,” Rio bites back.

Agatha rolls her eyes, “You just want to see me naked.”

Rio chuckles, “Well, it has been quite some time. I’m sure Y/n wouldn't mind an intimate moment with both of us either.”

You shook your head, “Not one complaint.”

“You’re both ridiculous,” Agatha speaks.

“You love it,” Rio counters.

Agatha looks at you and then Rio before letting out a sigh, “I love you both.”

[gothwineaunts]

Wow, hello!

So, I was actually feeling pretty motivated to write this post yesterday. But things have gotten exponentially worse, and I admit the pressure is getting to me. There seem to be a ton of expectations surrounding what I should be saying here, in order to… I guess, absolve myself? As if there’s a checklist people want me to go through to perform the “perfect” creator apology. But, I don’t see the point. I care a lot about this community and I think you deserve something a lot more sincere than some hollow chat-gpt apology. I understand that that’s foolish, on my part. Things are done that way so often because they work. But what you’ll find throughout this post, is that I’m kind of an idiot about some things. I’m stubborn and hard-headed and a little bit pretentious. And so, what I’m planning to do here is to simply tell you the truth about what happened. No cherry picking. All my mistakes, but also the context that goes with them. And at the end, my formal apology. This is a long and winding tale with a lot of characters. I’m going to be sharing some usernames as we go, in the interest of clarity and transparency. You’ll understand why with the context. But please do not seek these people out. Don’t pick fights with them. It will only make everything worse, for all involved.

Cool? Cool. But first I need to address the elephant in the room. This will probably seem like irrelevant drama at first, but this is the nuance and background that I wasn’t adequately able to articulate the night before last. In more ways than one, this is a story told in twos. The first set of twos is you, the readers. Who you are, and what you’re hoping to find out in this post.

1.      The overwhelming majority of you, are earnestly wanting to understand what has happened in the Nevermore Discord. You are concerned that I am not who you hoped I was. You are disappointed, and I understand why. To you, I am so sorry. I want to say that things are not as bad as they seem, but that is not for me to decide. You will need to draw your own conclusions from the words I write. And I understand, whatever you choose to do next.

2.      And there is a small, but incredibly vocal minority of people who are absolutely living for this. They are spreading complete fabrications with no screenshots to speak of. Horrible, horrible accusations. People who are more excited about watching a dumpsterfire than they are about the series that brought them here in the first place. I’m not going to attempt to cater to those people in this post. Because nothing will ever be good enough. Everything that can be taken in bad faith will be taken in bad faith. It would be pointless. But you’ll see them in the comments and reblogs. This is a known group to not only myself, but many others. I will share some of their names in a later section so you know who to watch for. They will make a lot of noise around this post because they’ve been trying to make something like this happen for actual years. And now that I had a genuinely concerning response that good people reasonably want me to explain, they’re lunging at the chance to throw absolutely anything at the wall. It’s parasocial levels of hatred. This is some deep and horrible lore.

The next set of twos is how two things can be true at the same time. And that is exactly what is going on here, in this situation. Let me be really clear, because I don’t want either truth to be lost in my explanation as they are intrinsically linked to one another.

1.      I did a downright terrible job explaining myself in the Discord when people started asking about crimson. I can give you all kinds of contributing factors for this, and I might later. But none of them really matter. It was incredibly careless of me to use “egging them on” and “cried wolf”  to describe what I understood. At the time I was really laser-focused on expressing what happened as simply and quickly as possible because the channel replies were paused and I felt like everyone was just waiting for me to be finished with my message. But after stepping back, I immediately understood how badly I messed up, because of course these idioms are routinely weaponized against survivors of SA and CSA. That is not how I intended to use them. It was an unfortunate case of one thing looking and sounding like another thing. Incredibly ham-fisted and irresponsible on my part. To the survivors who read my words and felt that it echoed their past experiences, I’m heartbroken that I did that to you. That lapse of judgement was a betrayal to both you and me. I don’t know where my head went, and I’m just blown away by my own lack of awareness in that message. So for that I am and will continue to be sorry.

2.      The second thing that can be true is that, while you are all absolutely owed an explanation and an apology, there are also some people amongst you who are using this fuck-up on my part as a springboard to take me down.  These people have been trying to get a call out post to pop off about me for at least a year, and they have been very quick to jump into the reblogs and comments about this very serious topic with complete lies and slander. Just, anything that might stick to the wall. We’ll address this later on as well. But please understand that me discussing the harassment I’ve faced from these groups is not at the expense of me also owning up to my faults and taking the proper accountability.

And the last set of twos is one I’ve alluded to in the first sets, concerning a pair of toxic side-servers that ran adjacent to the main Nevermore Discord. Completely unofficial cliques. And invisible to myself and Flynn and our mod team. We were eventually made aware that both of them were breaking laws and Discord ToS in ways that leaked into our server and affected our members negatively. As such, both groups were mass-banned. And the cliques are the ones running a majority of the discourse you’ve been seeing here, because while they are formally banned from the discord, we have absolutely no say in their participation on Tumblr. Now, keep in mind. Both of these groups were uncovered after crimson was banned the first time. That’s important later.

Clique #1

My understanding of the first group is that it started as a gaming server for people who met one another through the Nevermore Discord. I don’t know when or why it started being used to talk shit about other readers, but I do know that it got really vicious. And it was sort of an open secret for long before I knew anything about it. I found out after that there were a lot of people passively in this server, just observing. It was that much of a spectacle.

Now, this clique had been pretty rude. Like they’d try to start fights with me in the discord fairly often, both in the Patreon and free spaces. But it wasn’t grounds for dismissal until we found out about the baiting and the alts.  These people had a lot of grievances, but one really united them: they were extremely upset about anyone who would ship Prospero.

Many of you know, that Prospero is an aromantic character, canonically. And you may notice that canonically, he has no apparent love interest. But this group wanted to make sure other readers were not thinking about Prospero in relationships, or creating ship content of him for any reason on the grounds that it would be considered a “proship.” I told them (and I stand on this) that it’s not up to them to police the thoughts of other readers, and that aromantic people have widely varying lifestyles and experiences and do not need to be infantilized that way.

This turned out to be a bad move on my part, because it brought with it an onslaught of alt accounts coming in and "innocently" kicking up what I now refer to as the “prosp-aro” debate every time they had the chance. But because of this and what a common occurrence it was, we started being able to pick out the alts. And we realized that this group of people had been using the same alt accounts with different names to antagonize certain readers they’d decided they hated, and it had gone on for a long time.

I did a lot of investigative work in dms trying to figure out who all was responsible for the harassment, and settled on a list that was vetted by three different people who knew about the clique. And all three of these people insisted that, while Laci was in the group and in a lot of the screencaps saying pretty dubious things, that she was good people. So I believe them, and let Laci stay. This group was banned on April 3, 2024, and contained the following users:

-          lilnatx (nat)

-          suitino (sushi)

-          jj_the_jet_plane (layden)

-          rivsticks (jasper)

-          atheimee (athena)

-          jinxs.com (lanx/jinx)

-          smartestginger (nico)

-          thereallandofbugs (bugs)

-          rosienemui (rosie)

These were the names they were known by on the Discord. I don’t have the Tumblr accounts tied to these identities. But some might be the same. I know a lot of them are here.  It should be noted that jinx was later unbanned due to pressure from Laci that they had been banned in error, after the fact. We allowed them back in after a few days as a favor to Laci since the situation seemed like it was very stressful for her. This would prove to be yet another a mistake since, as you have probably seen in the screenshots from the night before last, jinx rapidly escalated things to another level while I was trying to figure out how to handle crimson’s unbanning and subsequent rebanning an hour later.

Clique #2

Phew. Still with me? Great. The second group we needed to ban was one that actually started long before the first one, but was a lot smaller and comparatively more subtle. This group, to my knowledge, cropped up around the time that ep. 39 of Nevermore was released. (11/10/22) We knew about this group but not who all was involved in it or in what capacity for a very long time. They would consistently post things on Tumblr trying to start a scandal. I recall posts alleging that we were racists, or SA apologists, or that we were sending death threats to a random confessions account.

To be clear, these allegations are completely false. This clique will say anything. Like a recent post one of them put up during this discourse said that hiwi (our mod) is both a r*pe apologist and a childhood friend of mine and that’s the only reason she hasn’t been banned. Hiwi is absolutely nothing of the sort, and I have never met her in person. In fact, she lives on the other side of the continent.

Now, this clique is a little different than the first. The first, to my knowledge, was a group of friends that got toxic and felt morally superior about their opinions and it all kind of got away from them. The vibe was a little catty, I guess. Gossipy. But this clique has more of a stalker vibe. It’s dark.

They’ve had it out specifically for me for as long as I can remember. And some of them (at least one, at all times) would subscribe to our patreon, both to sow dissent in our stream chats and also to leak literally all the content back to the others, including me talking about random shit like what I ate for lunch. Just so they could like. Laugh about it, I guess. I’ll never understand why. [Editing note: because in the final moments of proofreading this post I see one of these people has made some master post about what a terrible person I am? A lot of those screenshots are from Patreon channels and the guy STILL has them laying around. I’m telling you, they stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.] 

The biggest grievance this clique had is that any ship with Montresor is an “SA fetish ship” because to them he is a r*pist because of how he made Ada bark (?) and since Montrada is canon, that means we are supporters of SA, and that Morella and Ada should be together instead. Listen, I’ll level with you, this one baffles me. I don’t even know how to begin to untangle it. But if you see a lot of vitriol about us being SA apologists from these users, it’s because Montresor exists. That’s pretty much it.

You can ask them for screencaps ‘til you’re blue in the face, but unless they build fake ones from the ground up, they’re never going to be able to back up their wild claims. Simply put, they’re provocateurs, and they use the scariest words they can to whip people up into a panic.

We became aware that they were leaking patreon content when one of them was caught publicly referring to things that were being said behind a paywall when we knew they weren’t a patron. It unraveled from there.  People who knew about their antics shared screenshots and information with us, and we finally realized the scope of the clique’s hatred and banned whoever was even left in the Nevermore Discord. But they continue to be active in the community on tumblr. You’ll have seen them around. They were banned on 5/11/2024 and the names involved are as follows (again, a mishmash of discord names, nicknames, and tumblr accounts):

- percy (gremlinguy145 on tumblr)

- queenmorningrose (annabel-lee-nevermore on tumblr)

- spoopycactus630 (spoopy-nevermore-dump on tumblr)

- grif/horrorshow (conscience-grim on tumblr)

- unreqiknizd

- duke aralt (westofthestyx)

- eden (sapphic-mad-scientist on tumblr)

- priemium

Again I’d like to reiterate. The point in sharing these names is not to incite any sort of response against these people. But they are folding themselves into the fray and doing what they can to whip everyone else up into a mob, and all as we’re talking about a discord server that they have been banned from for months now. The above context is also relevant for the next section, which is why you’re all here in the first place.

What the hell happened with Crimson?

I hope it’s not confusing, but now we’re going back to 3/14/2024, before anything I just outlined above had come to light. The cliques were quietly doing their harassment and baiting and raiding and whatever-the-hell behind the scenes, but Flynn and I and the mods were blissfully unaware of how bad it was getting. We get a dm from Laci. The same Laci who was part of Clique #1 and was rescued from being banned with the others by her friends outside the group. Jinx’s friend, who managed to get them unbanned as well. You have probably seen these screencaps already, but I will show them to you again, just in case.

Sufficed to say, we were immediately alarmed by the information Laci shared in her DM with us. Now, I want to be very clear about this because it’s been lost in the game of telephone. What Laci outlines in her dm to me, were the events that occurred between six users (including crimson) in a group chat with minors. Everyone in the evidence was censored (pfp and username), as was the image that crimson showed them. When I asked, Laci agreed to give me one name of one of the minors in the dm. I’ll call them Alice, but that is not their real name. I asked if I could talk to Alice about this, I was told by Laci, no. Alice doesn’t want to talk. I was like, ok I understand, that’s fine. 

I hope it makes sense when I say that it is not feasible for us to moderate the things that happen in peoples’ dms. As you’ve seen above, the mod team doesn’t usually get involved with drama unless whatever is happening is directly affecting the experience people are having in the Nevermore Discord because that is all we can see and the only place we have any real authority.  But this was obviously a special case. We banned crimson very quickly without asking any follow-up questions, because of course we did!? I’ve seen people say I’m harboring or defending crimson or that we’re buddies but we barely spoke, ever. They were a stranger to me then, and they still are now.

But something about the entire situation wasn’t adding up to me. And I want to be clear that none of this is in any way meant to discredit csa survivors, I’m really just trying to put you in my headspace and walk you through my thought process. But I found that the evidence was just, sort of strange. Laci started her dm explaining that she found this information out because she and a group of people were investigating crimson for ‘art tracing’ which felt, to me, like a bizarre non-sequitur and totally irrelevant next to the evidence of them showing nsfw content to minors. Petty, kind of. Like I wanted to ask – why were you doing that in the first place? People trace Flynn’s art all the time. As long as they’re not selling it, it’s not a big deal.

Most of the crops are from a PC but the windows are oddly small, and only contain a couple messages at a time. Some have American formatted time and some have European formatted time. So different users, I assume? The names were blotted out, which I would understand for a public call-out but not for a private report to the mod team. Laci was not in this gc at any point in time, despite being the one to report. 

One of the users was apparently 12, to which I ask – what is a 12-year-old doing on discord at all? If we knew who they were, we would have reported the account. Discord is not a safe place for a child that age, let alone a small group chat. Along with 18-year-old Crimson, there was also a 22- and 17-year-old in the chat, which left us wondering – why hadn’t anything been done?

I had no evidence that anyone ever told crimson they were minors, and I feel if it existed, it would have been in the screencap dump (I find that sometimes a noticeable lack of key evidence is evidence in itself). No one seems to have tried to kick crimson from the group chat or report their account for inappropriate behavior. Then there’s the fact that this is a group chat. Anyone in it can leave at any time. 

Then I came across the messages that started this whole gc, and it only got stranger when I realized Alice started it, called it “Women Lovers” and created it “so we can talk about Nevermore women without having to filter ourselves” after they all reacted to a sultry but sfw drawing of Lenore that crimson had made and posted in our hideout channel. And all that made me wonder why Alice didn’t just kick crimson, if she had admin power?  Do you see what I mean? It’s just all a bit head tilty. I noticed it at the time. But I said nothing. Because it didn’t matter. Crimson, no matter what happened, exposed minors to nsfw content. And that’s on them. And I’ve never in my life defended it. We banned them.

Crimson was beside herself. She came off humiliated and apologetic, and insisted she had no idea and begged to come back to a community she said she loved. But we told her no, there’s no coming back from doing what she did.

Time passes and we uncover Clique #1. And while we figured out who the main players were, I dmed with Laci. And it was Laci herself, who tells me that it was Alice who made most of Clique #1’s alt accounts, and that it was Alice who used those alt accounts to harass people and try to get them to start fights or say something that might get them in trouble. 

And I’ll be honest with you, the mod team still didn’t think much of it, outside of – we need to figure out which accounts were the alts. So we did. We had several confirmed to us.  And those accounts were zeroing in on certain users that the clique didn’t like. At the time we noticed two notable targets in addition to the mod team. I won’t name them, it’s their business if they want to weigh in about all that. But in screencaps, they’ll be labeled Target #1 and Target #2.

More time passes and Clique #2 comes to light. As you can imagine, by now we’re feeling disillusioned, and very tired of trying to moderate shit we cannot see for ourselves. And that’s when crimson comes back to very hesitantly ask if they might be able to appeal their ban. It wasn’t until then that it occurred to us that Laci (on behalf of Alice) was the only one who ever reported anything to us about Crimson. 

And I want to just say that again. Because it’s gotten lost too. Laci was the only person who ever reported Crimson. There was not one single other person who ever sent a modmail or a dm or even a ping to anybody on the mod team. I have since (only yesterday) seen some screencaps that are rather skin crawly, but even those happened in yet another side server. Thinking on this, the mods went back through the known alt accounts Alice had used. And they found that Alice harassed crimson both on her main account and on the same alt accounts that she used to harass the other targets.

By now, Alice is banned for completely unrelated reasons. Not because of what happened with Crimson. I’ve seen that one flying around and I’m sorry it’s just not true. It’s because she was relentlessly harassing and cyberbullying people in the discord we moderate. Laci is still there, but had lost my trust, for being involved with both the drama I’ve mentioned here and more that I don’t care to dip into. It’s ultimately irrelevant. But what am I going to say to Laci? “Hey, did you and Alice, by any chance, coordinate some kind of bizarre trap together to get crimson banned from the discord because you suspected them of tracing their art?” And once again. Because I want to keep this top of mind. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t make what Crimson did alright, and it never will. Sharing nsfw content in front of minors is a disgusting thing to do. And one that we frankly are really irritating about in the moderation of the discord. I’ve heard people say that we over-moderate when it comes to art. 

But all this stuff about a “known pedophile?” If it was known, then we were on the outs. And to even this minute right now, I don’t have any conclusive evidence that Crimson is a pedophile. The evidence I have is that Crimson shared nsfw with a group of people whose ages they did not know. Which is fucking gross. It’s an adult’s responsibility to make sure they’re speaking with other adults before posting things of that nature. 

But at the time, the way I read the situation is that Crimson had only just stopped being a minor and was egregiously negligent in how they were speaking and what they were posting, likely in part due to them not being aware enough of their adult responsibilities.  And hey. I know some of you are chomping at the bit. You can call me naïve for this! This is what I’m referring to when I say that I can be a real idiot. But I feel everyone has been very quick to call Crimson a pedophile. I know this is pedantic to say, but the prerequisite for being a pedophile is “being attracted to minors.” Based on the information I had at my fingertips, I did not think Crimson sought out these minors. Crimson was invited to the gc, they did not ask to join. 

I have seen discussions about all the things crimson did to their victims since we unbanned them but I have not seen screencaps to support that whole ‘marriage proposal’ thing, and again I think it sounds a bit odd coming as a pedophilia accusation from someone only one year younger than crimson.  

But you know what? I don’t know crimson. Maybe we were wrong. But even if we weren’t, I realize in hindsight that it was a stupid decision for the mod team to give them a second chance. We didn’t have anyone to consult about what happened because all the other people in the chat had been obscured from me and I didn’t feel like Laci would give me a straight answer. 

The mods and I felt at the time that crimson, like the other targets of Clique #1, had been singled out and that they deserved another very closely monitored chance in the discord, which they said they still missed dearly. I’m a bleeding heart, alright? A total sap. I know that. But being honest with you, I felt bad. It feels horrible to be singled out and targeted. And I was probably too close to that feeling at the time, seeing as we were on the tail end of finding out the Clique #2 had pursued me so relentlessly for so long. 

So for my part, I’m sorry. I made a rash decision that was influenced by some very personal circumstances. And we should have left it alone. Based on the evidence I've seen, I don’t know if I personally would call crimson a pedophile and certainly I wouldn't call them a known pedophile, but I am regretful that we risked it either way.

When I was trying to explain all of this in the west common room channel two nights back, things had boiled over and were already getting out of hand very quickly. A lot of brand new accounts were joining the discord with one word intros just to start conflicts in the public server with crimson. Alts. Either from banned users or burner accounts. And I got panicky. One of the mods paused the messages in west common room but no one besides me was available to handle the situation at that moment. Reacts about being silenced were pouring in and I felt pressured to quickly take over and try to explain. 

In my rush, I stupidly didn’t backread more than a quick skim. And I ate shit, y’all. You saw. One thing I want to state outright. I’m talking a lot about my thoughts and my feelings and it’s because I don’t wanna speak for Flynn or for the mods. But I didn’t make this decision alone. In fact, I was dragging my feet and being really lazy about okaying the whole thing. Just because I was busy, not because I was fretting over it or anything. But I had to be pinged and then literally tapped on the shoulder by Flynn, asking me to respond to mod chat when this was being discussed earlier that day. That doesn’t change the fact that I was part of the decision. I agreed to unban crimson. Foolishly. I understand that, now. 

I hope that now it makes some more sense though, how it came to happen. I never meant to hurt anyone. My own past and present feelings got in the way, and I own that. But in the moment, my personal intention was to give crimson a second chance because I felt that they’d been targeted by Clique #1. Not to ignore anyone’s concerns or make them feel unsafe, even if those were the ultimate outcome.  

So, completely underprepared and defensive, I jumped into west common room and I just. Blew it. Totally fucking blew it. I knew it instantly but it’s hard to stay logical when people are telling you you’re vile and evil and they’re sick that they ever thought you were a good person and that they’ll never see you the same way again. My mind went blank and I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I said what I said, and I should have done better. 

I wish there was a word bigger than sorry. I’m beside myself. I know there was probably a way to make everyone happy. To make everything okay. But I wasn't clever enough to figure it out in the moment, and it eats at me. So it’s like I’m sorry for my poor judgment and my terrible choice of words, but there’s another layer where I’m also sorry for not matching how wonderful this community is with how wonderful (or well, unwonderful) I was two nights ago. I promise I am going to work harder to be better for you all.

Again, to every victim of SA and CSA, my heart is with you, more personally than you might realize. I don’t think I could have handled my explanation in a worse way. And I’m so so sorry.

Moving forward, I am also going to take an enormous step back from moderating and participating in the discord in general. I feel like a lot of this happened because I was still treating it like it belonged to a smaller fandom, like Shiloh’s. But realistically, I don’t have time to both moderate and make the series itself, and I really dragged my feet on being honest with myself about that. And for that too, I apologize. We’re going to get more mods, they’re going to have full control of the moderation, and Flynn and I are going to do what we love more than anything in the world and just make Nevermore.

I understand if you won’t be there for it. This is not a flattering picture I’ve painted for you. And you’d be well within your rights, to decide not to give us another chance. But it's been a pleasure to lurk here in this wildly talented corner of tumblr. And I’ll never forget it. <3 Yours truly, -Kit Trace

[comicaurora]

hi red!! i'm doing an analysis of sun wukong's (and journey to the west in general's) impact on modern culture for my world mythology final, and for some reason i'm having a hard time finding sources. is there anything you can recommend?

The fact that Journey to the West has contributed an enormous number of tropes to modern media is very clear when the media in question is examined, but I don't know of a specific secondary source that's already done that analysis for you. However, this IS a very good excuse for you to plow through a metric buttload of shonen manga, since the lineage is basically Sun Wukong -> Son Goku -> like a solid third of all shonen action heroes written in the last forty years.

Dragon Ball kicks things off:

Started in 1984 and almost unquestionably the most influential manga ever made. Its first arc features the weird super-strong monkey-kid Son Goku - which is just the japanese pronunciation of the characters of Sun Wukong's name - meeting up with a wacky crew of thinly-veiled expys of the Journey to the West crew, with teen inventor Bulma filling the role of Tripitaka, Oolong the pig-man filling Zhu Bajie's role and Yamcha the desert-based bandit as Sha Wujing.

Hijinks ensue, and while the story drifts pretty far from Journey to the West's original plot, it actually stays pretty solidly referential in weirdly unexpected ways. Several the villains of the week are JttW references, and even the later appearance of three more Saiyans lines up with the surprise reveal of three more Wukong-like mystical apes in the original story.

The connection between Dragon Ball and JttW is very unsubtle and a frequent reference in the chapter covers and supplemental art.

Not every subsequent JttW reference is the result of Dragon Ball popularizing it or anything, since it was already enormously popular, but I think it's pretty hard to extricate Dragon Ball's influence on anime and manga from the original influence of Journey to the West itself.

One way that a distinction can be drawn is in the differences in characterization between Goku and Sun Wukong himself. A lot of the next generation of shonen protagonists were kind of Goku-alikes - pure-hearted dumbasses who only care for the three Fs: Food, Fighting and Friendship.

But the original characterization of Sun Wukong is not really all that similar. He's a trickster, sure, but he's far from a young, friendship-motivated goober. He's profoundly intelligent, pretty much the most well-educated entity on the planet, and routinely brings up that he's centuries older than most of his peers. The Goku-alikes from the later decades of shonen anime are tellingly far-removed from that original characterization. So you get characters based on Goku's cheerful idiocy, but it's just a small subset of the broader influence of Journey to the West on the space of literature.

In general, Journey to the West frequently shows up in very small, bite-sized tropes in other stories. It's less "this is wholly based on Journey to the West" and more "oh, I know where they maybe got this idea/aesthetic/power/weapon/villain of the week from." There are way too many to list, but some of the ones that tend to jump out at me are-

Sneaky characters with monkey motifs:

Tricksy, highly mobile characters who fight with a staff:

Characters afflicted with a magical restraint artifact that allows a much weaker character to stop them from misbehaving:

Specific esoteric weapons, eg. magical fans, rakes, gourds, namedropping The Sword of Seven Stars, etc.

Villains with prominent ox or pig design motifs:

Characters whose primary combat strat is just making Shitloads Of Disposable Copies Of Themselves:

Honestly it just keeps going like this. It's kinda everywhere. Finding the JttW in things is my favorite conspiracy theory rabbit hole because it's 100% harmless and more often than not completely correct.

[starvail]

wdym i have a head dent?!

narumi gen / gn!spouse!reader

synopsis : "narumi gen is highly respected in his own division, with every officer following him with determination and every platoon leader dyeing their hair like him as a sign of respect."

content : only crack, fluff, gender neutral reader, reader works in jakdf, a few flashbacks, a little bit more on the lore side, the word beautiful is used to describe the reader, shinonome's age is just a guess, mostly shinonome pov, narumi should have his own warning fr, vice captain and platoon leaders are tired.

words : 1.7k

a/n : you can’t convince me that this man hasn’t went out on a mission with a head dent at least once-

part two of 'a cheers to our youth'

She remembers years ago, newly turned twenty, and nervously standing in front of your desk, arms crossed behind her back, posture rigid.

This would be the first time she will be meeting you in person, rather than listening to your demands through a communicator.

Now is the time to make the best lasting first impression. To prove that she is capable of handling things much bigger than an ordinary officer.

"Thank you very much for deeming me worthy of a rank review! I will not let you down!"

"Don't thank me for something as trivial as just a chance of a promotion. I know you'll do well in the future, Shinonome. The person you really need to impress is the First Captain."

You do not look up from your paperwork, and though many will see this as quite cold and rude, she's heard from numerous people that you simply do not have the time to entertain anything or anyone else within working hours.

The fact that you even spared a one-on-one meeting with her was an honour, and Shinonome will forever respect your dedication. Unfortunately, her lips move to articulate her thoughts before she could stop herself.

"I aspire to contribute to the Defence Force as much as you and Captain Narumi, Head! Please wait for me!" She slaps a hand over her mouth.

Stopping your editing to the paper before you, you look up at her in surprise at her outburst. Shinonome is swift in attempting to correct her statement.

"Uhm...! I did not mean it in that way, Head. A-Apologies for speaking out of line. I'll commence however many push ups-"

"Hahaha!" You made no move to hide your mirth and Shinonome does not know whether to be concerned or relieved at your reaction.

She curses at herself. Dammit, well done, Rin. You definitely made a lasting first impression alright. Great, now Head is gonna see you as a clown vying for their hand.

"No need for the push ups. I appreciate your passion, Shinonome. However, I am already married, so I will have to decline." It seems that you will not let her forget this. How cruel...

Wiping a forming tear at the edge of your eye, you sigh lightheartedly. "It's a good thing that you didn't say that to your Captain or else his head would blow up bigger than it already is!"

By now, the officer is bright red at her blunder before your words catch up to her. Wait, married...? Weren't you only a year or two older than her? Is she already falling behind her peers in yet another department?!

And though she does not say her thoughts aloud this time, you seem to be able to read her befuddled face too well. You hold up your hand and lift two fingers up like a peace sign, a soft smile adorning your own face.

At that moment, Shinonome realises that you are much friendlier in person compared to when you are communicating with Captain Narumi.

During missions, it was like listening to dogs fighting.

"I am two or three years older than you, I think, If I remember reading your files correctly. I just got married really young so don't worry too much about finding love or whatnot for now. Live in the present and all that." You wave off casually.

"If I may be so bold to ask..." Shinonome only now notices the metal band that you adorn around your fourth finger and shyly looks at her own twiddling bare fingers.

"Hm? Go ahead." Your focus is still on her.

"What age did you get married?"

"Eighteen."

"?!"

You burst back into laughter when Shinonome's composed and seemingly nonchalant persona crumbles and she is left there dumbfounded.

A feint 'don't mind' playfully slips out as you excuse yourself to deliver your now finished papers and pat her shoulder on your way to the door.

Shinonome finds that you will truly not let her live down her moment in your office.

Even months later, after she was proven competent and promoted to Platoon Leader. Be it during a mission, passing each other in the corridor, or in a meeting.

("Platoon Leader Shinonome, please wait for me in my office after this." / "Shinonome, please wait for the arrival of new equipment sent over by...." / "Ah, Rin. Thanks for waiting for me, traffic was atrocious today!" All of those interactions being followed by a knowing smirk.)

Despite this, the two of you have grown closer, more casual. Dare she say that the two of you were even friends.

She learnt that you are married to the Narumi Gen and that you have known him since you were children (she had always assumed those endearments he torments you with during missions were a joke).

Learns you prefer drinking iced coffee rather than hot.

You only wear shoes you can very easily slip on.

You like to make edits to documents using a purple pen rather than the standard red.

You personalise your lab coats by stitching your initials and operator number to the cuffs (swearing her to secrecy, you tell her that you also stitch Captain Narumi's initials, but instead at the cuffs, it's hidden inside the pocket over where your heart is).

In spite of your seemingly intimidating work front, you are still very much human.

(Years down the line, Shinonome has well learnt that you were never scary, or aloof, or anything of the sort. She guesses your role in the Defence Force just forces you to seem like it, given your importance.)

Shinonome also learns that you and Narumi dye each other's hair.

"Oh, this?" You motion to the groupings of fresh silver highlights in your hair. The Platoon Leader had to deliver some documents and noticed the change and decided to compliment you on it, it fits you. She asks if you had it done professionally.

It looks really nice... maybe she would suit something similar?

"No, I didn't go to a salon. You think I have the money for that sort of thing?" Yes, yes you do, Head.

"I've been dyeing Captain Loser's hair since we were teenagers, and he decided while we were touching up his roots that it's been a while since we were matching and wouldn't leave me alone otherwise. I didn't get to sleep until two last night!"

You say it with such disdain that if she were a new recruit, she would think that you meant it.

But Shinonome knew you better than that, because you could never hide the adoration that shone through your irises, or the fondness in your smile.

Perhaps, one day, she will meet someone that would elicit the same reaction when talking about her...

"He wanted to do my hair without my help so now there's a chunk of under layer hair that's all silver instead of just highlights. If you look even closer, you might see just bleached bits that he forgot to colour! He botched it!"

She would be lying if she were to say she wasn’t jealous.

You are beautiful and intelligent and considerate and sincere. And though you are not physically strong, you show your strength in a plethora of other ways, your contributions named on newspapers displayed along your office walls are evident of that. Your strategies and tactics have led many to victory and the Eastern Defence Force is as strong as ever.

Truly, you and Narumi Gen are forces to be reckoned with and Shinonome could not be more thankful to be so in reach.

She does not realise she was staring at you for so long until you speak up.

"Ah! Would you like me to do your hair sometime?"

"Oi, Dumbass. Stop trying to act cool in front of the newbies."

Narumi, dramatically posing solemnly atop a fresh kaiju corpse, tilts his head back to face the flying drone's camera and shows off a smirk at the sound of your voice.

"Well, if it isn't my darling dearest, everything okay at Comms?" He waves lazily, but this seems to irk you more.

"You were playing Underwatch, when I told you not to, weren't you." You frame it as a statement, rather than a question.

Everyone in Operations and Officers around Narumi watches as their Captain's jaw drops to the floor, eyes bulging out of his skull.

He is quick to grab at the drone and shakes it wildly, as if it was a person he was trying to gouge information out of. The propellers are swift to turn off, you knew this kind of reaction was coming from miles away.

"Who snitched?!" His face is all up on the camera.

At this point, Narumi knew that it was of his best interest to admit the truth rather than make up excuses on the spot, especially if you used that tone.

But how could you have possibly found out? He even made sure to download a special VPN so you couldn't track his gameplay! Was it Hasegawa? It had to have been Hasegawa. Damn you, Hasegawa-

"Your galactic-sized head dent gave it away. Do you not have enough sense to at least fix it before you leave for duty?" You sigh on the other end of the mic, disappointment evident in your admonishment.

"Huh?"

The drone starts up again and Narumi is forced to let go as it turns to face ninety degrees away from him and projects a hologram of himself, but from his side.

Lo and behold, all of the Captain's hair is sticking straight up, as per usual when he is in combat, except for the areas at the centre of his skull, a clear band of hair matted down with a sheen of presumably sweat.

"Pfft, I hope the news articles capture this very flattering side of you! 'What a loser,' they'll all say." You do your best to cover up a snicker. The drone is now happily emoting like an actual person, tilting side to side as if it were someone's head, taunting him.

"NO!!" Narumi is on his knees, frantically trying to fix his hair while maniacal laughter resonates from the floating device.

From a distance, a certain Platoon Leader watches on, irked. Out of all of the people to admire for the power they bring to the Defence Force, out of all the people to strive to be like, why did it have to be these two?

[p0orbaby]

Could you do a blurb for alexia and reader and their daughters first bday? so fluffy it rottens my teeth

-

You’re standing in the kitchen, staring at the cake. It’s a two-tier monstrosity with pink icing and miniature elephants, because apparently, your daughter loves elephants. This is an assumption since she’s only one and her favourite activity seems to be slamming her tiny fists against the table and screaming at the Peppa Pig theme song. You glance over at Alexia, who’s meticulously arranging balloons into some sort of Pinterest-inspired arch. It’s tragic, really, because the balloons are deflating faster than her patience.

“You know she won’t remember any of this, right?” you say, leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching her struggle with a particularly rebellious balloon.

Alexia doesn’t look up. “It’s not for her,” she mutters, teeth gritted, “it’s for us. And the photos. For the grandparents. You know”

You do know. The grandparents, who’ll scrutinise every detail, subtly implying that the cake should’ve been homemade and the balloons should’ve been organic or something. You glance at the clock. Two hours until the guests arrive. Two hours until you’re knee-deep in small talk with people you barely tolerate, discussing the milestones of babies that are all the same. They roll over, they laugh, they scream, and then they eat something they shouldn’t.

Speaking of, the baby—your baby—is currently sitting in her high chair, aggressively smearing mashed banana across her face like it’s avant-garde war paint. You sigh. At least she’s quiet for once. There’s a moment of eerie calm, like you’re in the eye of a storm. It won’t last. You sip your coffee, which is lukewarm and bitter, and stare at the pile of gifts in the corner of the room.

“Why do people insist on wrapping things for a one-year-old?” you ask, more to yourself than Alexia. “She’s going to eat the paper. And cry. In that order”

Alexia finally gives up on the balloon arch. “You’re right,” she says, walking over and inspecting the cake like it might explode. “But they want to feel like they contributed something. Everyone’s desperate to be relevant in a baby’s life”

You nod, because that’s exactly it. The party isn’t for the baby, or for you, or even Alexia. It’s for all these people who want to feel like they’ve done something. Like attending a one-year-old’s birthday party is some kind of moral achievement. A gold star for being a functional human.

The doorbell rings, far too early for guests, which means it’s probably your neighbour, Carol, who always shows up with unsolicited advice on baby care, as though she invented parenting. You open the door, and sure enough, it’s Carol, holding a gift bag that screams I bought this on sale at El Corte Inglés.

“Thought I’d come early to help,” she says, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation. Her eyes scan the room, resting on the cake. “Oh, you didn’t make it yourself?”

“Bought it,” you say, deadpan. “From the shop. With money”

Carol doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even blink. “Ah, well, the important thing is she’ll enjoy it. At this age, it’s all about the memories”

You glance at your daughter, now vigorously attempting to fling the banana off her high chair.

“She won’t remember this,” you say, but Carol’s already unpacking her baby advice, Alexia’s gone back to fighting with the balloons, and you’re suddenly wondering why you didn’t just fake an illness and cancel the entire thing.

“Happy birthday,” you mutter, to no one in particular.

[lactoseintolerentswag]

Rise Characterizations Pt. 4!!!!

Nearing an end with writing notes for turtles. Thinking of posting about April and Splinter separately, and then a big post for side characters.

Raph, Leo, and Donnie here. Now let's start with

Mikey Character Notes

Language Habits:

Catchphrase: "razzmatazz"

Tendency to "hoo-ha!"

Uses aave/bae

Like Raph and Leo, he will verbalize his attacks, but notably less than the aforementioned two. His most common phrases: "power whip jitsu" (chain moves), and "power fun jitsu" (use of his fire)

Shortens words/phrases in his excitement (i.e. the famous omigosh), but lengthens words in his wonder/amazement like drawing out wow into wooooooow

Uses a lot of idioms, i.e. "give us the 911", "hit the bricks", "you've been workin' a nerve"

Uses a lot of alliterations, especially when describing something

Refers to splinter as "pop" or "dad", with the rare "father" (usually for dramatics)

Will refer to others using "chico", "dude", or "man"

Answers the phone with "shell-o"

Personality:

Oblivious. A lot of stuff goes over his head, or he'll pick on the wrong thing to focus on. Like thinking they're part imitation crab men

Passionate. He throws himself into everything, whether that be cooking, fighting, or art. Sometimes this focus comes at his own detriment (i.e. forgetting to tell his brothers that Meatsweats mutated on t.v. bc he was cooking his pork risotto)

Optimistic, a dreamer. Not one to back down from doom and gloom, and is often among the first of the brothers to take action. Has a lot of perseverance

Believes the best in everyone. He can easily connect and empathize with others, most notably Draxum

Blunt, he doesn't hide his opinions and can accidentally be a little too harsh. On the other hand, he uses his persona of "Doctor Delicate Touch" to purposefully use his bluntness. He doesn't really much to hide on what he thinks about people

Sensitive, he's easily swayed by the emotion or pathos of others (read: gullible). This also mean his ego is easily damaged, which can contribute to his competitiveness with Leo at times and his inferiority complex with Raph babying him

The emotional heart of the team, he keeps the brothers grounded in empathizing with others

Energetic. Mikey's the wildcard. No one can guess what's coming out of his mouth next, and his fighting style is very innovative. All his energy gives him a charming amount of "razzmatazz"

Firey. Mikey's a pretty expressionate guy. He doesn't hide his emotions, and he doesn't really hide his anger. Sometimes this comes out in his bluntness, and sometimes this comes out in strained rage that has a boiling point

Looks up to his brothers. He has a lot of admiration for his older brothers. Whenever he's put in a corner he thinks what would Raph do, he's grateful for Leo's advocacy, and likes spending a lot of time with Donnie and his inventions. He also has a need to prove himself to his older brothers due to his admiration

Miscellaneous:

First to unlock mystic powers

Nicknames/code names: "Doctor Delicate Touch" and "Doctor Feelings" are self-proclaimed titles, "orange pawn" code name by Donnie, "Michael" nickname by Donnie, and "Flavortown" is his video game handle

Named his piggy bank "Mrs. Porky Coin"

Only chooses scissors in rock, paper, scissors

Has the top score in "Pance Pance Revolution" (rise's equivalent of DDR)

Well that's all the turtles for reference notes. I think I'll post Splinter next :)

[canmom]

So a little over a month ago I was reached out to by @peterkats, a gay refugee currently living in a camp with a small group of other gay and trans refugees.

Peter has, to put it mildly, had a fucking time of it. In his home country, Uganda, his partner was murdered for being trans. He stayed for some time in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya with a group of gay and trans people (pictured above), but violence from police forced them to move, and they're currently in a refugee camp run by the UNHCR. (I've been asked not to explicitly name the country but you can probably figure it out.)

Unfortunately this has not in any way been a reprieve. They've managed to flee right into an impending famine, and if that's not enough, they're still facing violence from police and other refugees, and general indifference from the UNHCR medical staff - who are also facing supply shortages. But it's not completely hopeless. When Peter contacted me, he needed money for food - I sent him some via an intermediary and he was able to get quite a bit (the exchange rate seems to be favourable). With help, things can be quite different.

We've stayed in touch since then, talking about our respective lives, the lgbtq situation in different countries, even videogames and music. He's a really sweet guy, despite it all still trying to find a place he can live free. For real, I would not survive any of this shit.

Recently a couple of people in Peter's group have caught malaria. They are currently sleeping on bare mats without mosquito nets. There seems to be some confusion about the exchange rates but as far as I have been able to gather, about €150 (~20,000ssp) gets a mattress and €10(~1000ssp) a malaria net. The UNHCR have not been able to provide any medication except paracetamol, and it's raining which promotes mosquito activity, so this is kind of an emergency.

I would very much prefer if the new friend I've made doesn't die of starvation or malaria. Unfortunately, I do not have the money to support Peter and his group alone. I've sent him money for one mattress (via PayPal for expediency, it won't show up on GFM), and I would be immensely grateful if you would be able to contribute a bit to getting them another (which would be just about enough to keep six people safe from mosquitoes if sleeping three to a mattress).

Beyond that, these guys are prohibited from working so they would definitely benefit from food money. And if anyone has an idea for a long term plan to get them somewhere safer where they're less likely to get bashed, I am sure Peter would appreciate hearing about it. We talked a bit about the UK asylum process but getting everyone here would be very difficult (passports, flights etc.).

But still like, I can only do so much on my own, and I want to give these guys a fighting chance. So if you could pass this around and donate if you can spare a bit? I'd be insanely grateful.

[somerandomdudelmao]

Ok, so, some marble sky thoughts? Character analysis? Whatever this is! 

I think the only reason that both Oscar and Ward are still alive is because Oscar was left to his own devices with the marmors. 

There are several contributing factors to this thought, but I think it boils down to two main factors: friendliness (towards the marmors), and morality.

First point: as far as i can tell, Oscar genuinely cares about Ecliptica to some extent. My example is when he clubbed that teegardian–the look on his face, and how fast he reacted, suggest that he reacted on gut instinct because Ecliptica was in danger, not that he had a cunning plan to make himself look better. As well as the fact that he genuinely seems to enjoy being around her, and voluntarily spends time with her–I think that this has convinced (some) of the marmors that Oscar is trustworthy, or at the very least not a threat.

On the other hand, Ward has shown that so far at least, he does not like or trust any of the marmors. Now I certainly can’t blame him for that, but it doesn’t do much towards gaining him any favor in the marmor’s eyes (or, sensor things).

My next point is that Ward seems to have a very strong moral code, and acts according to that code regardless of consequences, which restricts him in a way that Oscar doesn’t seem to be restricted. With the teegardian situation, I think Ward would either have straight up refused to be a hunting dog, or tried to help the teegardians, resulting in getting himself killed. 

On the other hand, Oscar, by playing along with the marmors and siding against the teegardians, managed to get into good enough graces with Ecliptica to be able to help Ward (and Holly). Now, I don't think Oscar lacks a moral code, or is trying to be evil or anything–I think he is doing everything he can to protect the people he cares about, and to stay alive. So far, he’s been pretty darn effective too. I also can’t blame him for prioritizing his life, and the life of his friend, over those of complete strangers, especially in such a morally gray area of how intelligent of a species is it ok to eat, and how to define intelligence at all. 

Oscar seems to be doing whatever he feels he needs to in order to keep himself and the people he cares about alive, regardless of “right” and “wrong”. 

Ward also seems to want to keep them both alive, but in contrast he is very attached to his idea of morality, defending what he believes to be right, and fighting against what he believes is wrong.

Because of this, I think Ward and Oscar would have (and probably will in the future) come into conflict because of their different ways of doing things, potentially really messing up each other’s various plans and ideas, in ways that are not conducive towards staying alive and/or friends. 

Also, unrelated theory, Ward is absolutely about to polymorph into an alien cyborg bc of whatever it was that Sculptor did to him

OH THIS

THIS IS SOME REALLY INTERESTING THOUGHTS RIGHT HERE >:D

[baby-yongbok]

Sex Concept

Yang Jeongin x afab!Reader

✦Genre: smut [MDNI] - sub!Jeongin x dom!Reader ✦ WC: 1.8k ✦ Summary: You got your hands on the cute church boy. ✦ CW: Blasphemy, corruption kink, oral sex (f & m rec.), knife play [blood], edging, reader is wearing a scream mask, name used: baby, my dear, sweetie ✦A/N: I'm nervous asf to post this. I suppose that this will be my small contribution to kinktober. This is pure blasphemy, you have been warned. I love scream mask fics but I haven't come across one where reader wears the mask so I did this :)) I listened to Sex Concept by Sofia Isella while writing this. Enjoy!+ reader is depicted as chubby/plus size and is a POC ♡ Happy Halloween♡ ✦Masterlist✦

“Stop teasing, baby, c’mon” Jeongin sat in the front row of the messy pews. The muted sound of rain outside dripping through the cracked ceiling of the church only accentuated the tension pulsing in his veins.  

“Teasin’? Me?” You smile, one hand pressed firm against the soaked fabric of his shirt. “You want it that badly?” His eyes find yours but they lack control. His pupils shake with submission while his mouth waters with the remnant taste of your tongue.

“You know I do.” He smiles in a futile attempt to prompt you to take action. You climb into his lap, your fishnets stretching over the thick of your thighs. There’s a sinister grin tugging at the corner of your lips that the mask shields from Jeongin’s view. It was his idea for you to wear it. It was his idea for you to play the villain that his family paints you as while you drain his sanity from him. 

“Beg.” You tilt your head, leaning in so close that he can nearly kiss the mask.

“You really want me to beg?” He teases, trying to bite back at you with a smile that you swiftly swipe away when your fingers lock in his damp black strands. “Please.” He moans, falling into your desire. 

“Ah, Innie, you can do better than that.” You shift in his lap, your fingers tighten around the hilt of the knife in your hand. A dainty little thing, sharper than your tongue.

“Baby, please, do it. I wan’ you to.” You pull his head back further, exposing his neck to you. His adam’s apple bobs, spit pools in his mouth and he swallows it quickly, smoothly. “Use it.”

“Here? In front of all of them?” You point the knife behind you and Jeongin’s eyes follow, landing on the dimly lit statues of figures who would surely judge him for this. The saints watch him, judge him. “You wanna sin, sweetie?” You whisper and he whimpers, a fair exchange.

You run the tip of the knife up his arm oh so softly, he’d miss it if he didn’t want it so badly. His stomach does cartwheels while his fingers claw at the distressed wood beneath him in a desperate attempt to get a grip on something. Anything but himself, he’s a goner.

You bring the point to his shoulder and press in just a bit, just enough to nick that pretty skin you littered with deep purple a few hours ago. “Shit.” He hisses, groaning at the pinch of pain.

“You like this shit, don’t you?” He fights with himself, his fucked up dreams conflicting with his squeaky clean image. He’s a good boy, a man of God and moral actions and blah blah blah. “Tell me.”

“I like it.” He groans, his heavy lids fluttering shut with a trust he should not let you have. 

“Thought you were a good boy?” You laugh, the sound muffles behind the mask just a bit but echoes in the empty church. You grind into him ever so slightly, milking an unbecoming sound from his swollen lips. They’re stained red like yours, covered in the color of sin and it matches his skin better than that holy glow ever could. 

“I’m not.” He whimpers, trying to convince himself more than you. You let his hair go, allowing him lift his head but he keeps it tilted back, looking up at you like the angel you aren’t. “Please, one more time. Harder, deeper, something.”

“God, you’re pretty when you beg.” You scratch him with the knife, creating a crimson line from the curve of his shoulder down to his bicep. He shivers and groans, the tips of his fingers find your waist and dig in. 

“Ah, fuck, b-baby.” He’s putty, melting and stretching before your eyes. The blood starts running down his skin and you watch it. You admire it. So pretty, so pure and all fucking yours. You bring the knife up and catch the droplets and smear it over the silver, watching how it thins and collects. 

“This.” You point the knife to him. “Is a sacrifice, my dear.” You feel Jeongin shift under you as he watches you play with the blade. His breath hitches for just a second, one sweet second when you point the knife at him. “You’re mine, aren’t you?”

He nods, hypnotized by the forbidden nature of your actions. Entranced by the girl that his parents warned him about. “Yes... yours.” He breathes with a shake that you don’t miss. Your eyes run over his face, committing his pathetic blush to memory. 

You slip the mask up, revealing your pretty face decorated with running mascara and red stained lips. “I am the only God that you will ever believe in.” The look in your eyes could control a crowd but the hopeless wreck of a man beneath you will have to do for now. “Say it.”

You slither down and off of his lap, sinking onto your knees and into a puddle of rainwater that welcomes you with a stinging chill. Jeongin watches you with a reverence that he’s borrowed from every Saturday he sat in bible study worshiping gods who could never excite him how you do. 

His inhale is shaky, his exhale is heavy but every word that leaves his mouth is as light as a feather. “You are the only god that I will ever believe in.” His voice trembles with a guilt that’ll have him clutching those pretty blessed beads his momma gave him for a week. 

“Again” His belt is already undone for you, his button popped and his cock aching and waiting for your touch. The feeling of your palm massaging his pulsing length has him gasping before he can speak again. “Again, c’mon.”

“You are the only god I’ll ever believe in.” It’s a moan, a profession of his fucked up devotion. His chest is heaving with anticipation as your fingers sneak into his pants like a spider and wrap around his drooling length. “What do we say to that, baby?”

The squeak of the pews as he moves to the edge, holding onto the wood for dear life punctuates each whimpering moan that he lets pass his chapped lips. “H-hallelujah.” That’s it, you lean forward rewarding him for his manners. Your tongue runs up his cock, base to tip and his eyes go white as they roll back. A classic case of possession. 

“Again” Your tongue swirls around his drooling tip and he moans, louder this time, “Hallelujah.” You take more of him with each moan, rewarding him for letting you bend his morals into pretty origami animals you’ll rip apart in a week or two.

“God, look at you.” The laugh that vibrates through the air is sinister enough to make Jeongin blush. His weak knees shake and his spine shivers as you jerk his reddened cock. You turn around, smiling at the statues, “Look at him.” 

Jeongin, whines, digging the toe of his sneakers into the worn floor as his orgasm climbs up his spine. “You are so fucking…” You stop, taking your hands off of him and making the poor boy cry in protest. “Easy.” It’s quick but you swear that you see a tear fall. He wipes it away, pulling himself together only to fall apart as soon as his gaze meets yours. 

“This is a church.” You scoff, feigning disgust. “You’re supposed to be worshiping.” He watches as you rise to your feet before him, his core trembles, his cock jumps. He’s hooked. “Well? Go on.”

Water sloshes beneath your feet, Jeongin barely breathes and you look at him expectantly. There’s not a single word that leaves your mouth but the order is loud and clear. He pushes himself forward. His knees meet the floor and he sinks. Those pretty brown eyes are begging for validation in a den of a dragon. His hands ball in his lap as he fights the urge to wrap his long fingers around his drooling length. The kiss of the cold air makes it jump until you step forward and assume responsibility.

The pew squeaks when you prop your sneaker clad foot up on it. Your soiled panties are on full display under your skirt, peaking through your fishnets and Jeongin swears for a second that you really are God. The brittle beseech of ‘can I’ that he musters up makes you smile fondly. He repeats it when you don’t answer, begging into the damp air. 

“Go ahead.” You nudge, handing him the dainty blade. He takes it with trembling hands and cuts the strings to your tights in a messy pattern that grants him access to where you're dripping. He’s entranced by the slick that connects your cunt to the soaked gusset of your panties when he pulls them to the side but he only admires it for a second before his tongue is moving through your folds like a snake in water.

He traces prayers and memorized verses onto your clit, tangling his tongue in spit and arousal so fervently that he almost makes you chant to him. “Right there, right there.” Your fingers grab and tighten in his hair, pushing his firm against you. Your eyes roll back, the demon of desire climbs up your spine and you’re reeling; holding onto the whimpering mess below you to keep your balance. 

The taste of you is throwing Jeongin closer to the finish line with each messy swipe of his tongue over your cunt. His grip on the handle of that dainty blade tightens, the tip piercing his thigh with a bite that makes him keen.

“Innie.” The grind of your hips against his tongue makes him drool, it’s a sight to see. You run your hand through your hair and that long forgotten mask falls into a puddle behind you. 

Your orgasm shows itself to you in the stars of your pleasure and you welcome it, trembling and moaning loud and wild as you cum all over Jeongin’s tongue. He moans, pressing the tip of the knife just a smidge harder against his skin. He plants sloppy kisses against your clit, helping you ride out your high while his own climax rushes over him. His cock jumps, red and weeping with thick ropes of cum. You pull back, detaching him from your core to watch him wreath against the cold floor; coming undone on his knees in front of the angels while you stand and watch. 

“Look at me.” His eyes blink open, his pupils glazed over and glassy. He’s a vision - Lips swollen and slick with your cum, cock twitching and dripping onto the floor. “What do we say?”

He swallows hard, moving his tongue over his lips to collect your taste before he whispers. 

“Hallelujah”  

Divider made by @rookthornesartistry

Thank You For Reading! Please Reblog or Comment to let me know how you liked it! It makes my day! 💕

ALSO, please follow my back-up acct. @minniee-verse 💕

Perm. Tag List:

@dreamingaboutjisung @nxtt2-u @kayleefriedchicken

@compersian @kibs-and-bits @lixiluvs @armystay89 @lghtdarling

@teddy-stay , @baconcupcakes123, @moonchild9350 ,

@krayzieestay, @soulsbbg , @stay-bi , @yzsqu , @gho-ster , @lghtdarling

[howlett-n-morgan]

More Than Words

2. Questions

Logan Howlett x OC!Reader

Series Summary: Having lived for over two hundred years and never having the privilege of human touch is the biggest burden imaginable... until someone comes along with the healing ability to withstand the touch of death.

Chapter Warnings: still a lot for now but: mild language, canon typical violence, mention of murder, death, mutant experimentation, and a depressive episode briefly described. Logan is a warning, especially here

Chapter Summary: The bad dreams have ceased, but many questions lurk in their place, and the meaning behind those dreams is still one of them. In the middle of all the chaos, a few things will come to light.

Word Count: 8.4k

“Of everyone here, I didn’t expect you to be keeping a stash,” he sat down on the edge of your bed, facing your back as you were hunched over the desk, writing sloppily a few notes for tomorrow morning. “I asked Scott and Storm, they had nothin…”

You put your headset on this morning. You usually only used it to drown out everything else when you really needed to. Everyone has noticed except those who don’t know what it means. Those who do, remember the times in which you were at your lowest. Back then you were practically unable to function without the damn headphones over your ears. The last time you even remember wearing them was when you first started teaching here, all the noise and rapid energy being quieted by the music in your head.

 After last night, and the confessions made to Logan, he seemed to be open to hearing more from you then… but he kept you at arm’s reach now, and you couldn’t say you didn’t understand why. He’s not just been thrust into the middle of an age-old fight between friends, but he also is struggling with his identity. 

You did however learn something interesting after hearing chatter when you woke up. Logan and Scott aren't getting along. Why? Because Logan has been relentlessly flirting with Jean. You’d scoffed when you found out. Not because you don’t think Jean is worthy of such advances, but because he was basically shooting himself in the foot by even trying to take her from Scott. 

Jean is a rare bird, and a special person. Charles argues the same thing about everyone who sets foot on the property, but with her, it’s especially true. She’s smarter than most people you know, having gone to a college outside of the education given by Charles and the others. She even attended school alongside you for a while, although it only took you a few semesters to realize you weren’t cut out for the medical field like she was. You have to be able to touch your patients, after all.

She had a lot to offer, and anyone could see that. Even excluding her powers, which were enough to level a city on their own. She was kind, nurturing, and very strategic. All of those things combined with the looks of a super model made her one of the most desirable people in the entire mansion, so even though you and Logan made a connection, you don’t find it hard to see why he’s taken with her. 

It may bother you just a little, but you would never admit it to anyone who asked, not even Charles. 

All of this is not why you put on your headset, but it could be a contributing factor. 

You’ve just met Logan, or at least officially. It stands to reason that you shouldn’t have an inkling of feelings yet. You can’t imagine that would be how it goes. In any rational situation, you have to get to know him. That’s how relationships work.

You remember how it was with Charlie, how it took more than one night of talking late when everyone else was asleep. You got to know him, and got to see his kindness and compassionate heart. You’d seen who he truly was, and it warmed your heart and soul, despite not being able to touch him. You don’t know Logan yet, but you imagine he’s not as soft and kind, nor gentle or compassionate. He seems like sort of a lone wolf, and the type to push away everything except for what he’s got his eyes set on. You don’t even know if the connection you made was real, or if he was just looking for company…

He has nightmares, but you don’t know why. It’s only one relation, that’s all. Maybe he’d only asked you to stay because he was frightened of them, just like you are of yours.

You’d gone back to your room near the hours of sunrise, and fell back asleep before your alarm woke you, but you were still exhausted, and wondered if he was facing the same conundrum. It was only when you went to ask him about it that he became colder to you than the night before. He’d given a stiff answer and gone about his morning, which you were confused by, since he wasn’t a student, nor a teacher.

You passed him in the halls throughout the day, and nodded to him with a sweet smile. He doesn’t really return it, just kept walking. You think that maybe he just didn’t see you, or was on his way to do something else and couldn’t pay attention, but then at dinner he refuses to look at you, and you can’t for the life of you understand why. 

You decide to block him out, to deal with the more pressing matters. The school, the mutant rebellion, and Rogue, the newest recruit. 

She’s like you in a few ways, and you feel sorry for her. You hope that by passing on some stories that maybe she can find hope in her powers. They are a gift and a curse, but she holds them wonderfully well already.

You found her on the back balcony, overlooking the gardens. She’d been sitting alone for about an hour, but didn’t seem to be bothered, just enjoying the peace. You debated whether or not you should disrupt it, but the second she heard you behind her, she turned. 

You had been organizing things back where they go, following the mess of mutant children to try and keep the house in good shape, and now that you’d found yourself with her, you wanted to say a few things. You peeled your headset off and sat beside her, offering a smile first. Her energy felt stiff, like she’d been unwelcome where she was. 

“You settled in yet?” 

She shrugged, unsure of what to say. Even in a place full of people like her, she was an outsider. “I guess I’m getting there.”

It was silent for a moment, and you sensed her energy was low and draining. She must have been sad, or angry, or even flat our forlorn about her powers and the danger they hold. 

“Y’know, when I first found out about my powers, it was the worst day of my life,” you started, but quickly followed up, knowing the words were not inspiring. “They are a blessing and a curse, but for most of my life they were a curse… until the Professor found me. Now, I’ve learned to use them to help people. You can, too.”

It should have helped, but her feelings on the power she held didn’t waver, she just wanted to know what she was in for, and you knew better than anyone what she would face.

“Did you ever… hurt anyone?” she asked sincerely, turning to face you but managing the distance. Both your touches were lethal and dangerous.

“Yeah,” you sighed, looking out to the gardens and hoping that the serene ambience would keep you in a good state of mind. “Most of them were the people closest to me. Always an accident, but still a deadly one.”

“I’m sorry,” she dropped her head, unsure of herself now, too. She didn’t know how to control it, or even subdue it. It may not even be possible. 

“Don’t be sorry, it was a long time ago… I’m a lot more careful now.”

“They told me how old you were, how long you’ve been around…” she trailed, looking for a good way to ask such a terrible question. “How have you lived that long without being able to touch the people you love?” 

You understood why she was asking. Of course, she was concerned about her future, but also her present. She’s a runaway, who’s left her entire family because of her ability. She must be feeling the lonesomeness that all mutants inevitably face at one point in their lives.

“I don’t know,” you shrugged, trying not to become emotional. You’ve loved many people in your lifetime, many people you’ve lost early, or at the right time, but you could never go with them. You can’t seem to die, but everyone else does when you need them the most. “I think that being here is really what saved me. Not only knowing there are others like me, but knowing I can have a family who doesn’t fear me, doesn’t judge me. Even knowing all the things I’ve done.”

“You didn’t do them on purpose, did you?” 

“No,” you shook your head. “But I’m still responsible for them, for the people I’ve killed.”

You’ve killed people. How many, she doesn’t know, but she feels as though you’re the only person that can understand her. That can understand being afraid of herself and what she can do to others. She knows that you’ve probably gone decades and decades just trying to learn how to be more careful, and that she’ll have to learn, too. 

“You said you’d hurt people you love… what happened?” 

This was a very soft spot for you. Even after a century, it was still an open wound. Something that would never fully heal, because there was no way to achieve closure over it. What’s lost is gone, and your powers were the cause.

“I was engaged once,” you dropped your gaze to your lap, looking at your hands and the way they were so well fitted with the green gloves. You practically never took them off. 

“Engaged?” 

“Yeah, engaged. I’d somehow managed to find the single man in the entire universe that didn’t require me to touch him to achieve his affection…” You trailed, trying not to go into detail. Searching for a small distraction, you fiddled with the hem of your sweater, pulling loose threads to ignore the sad memories. “I touched him by accident.”

“And he died?” She widened her eyes, both upset for you and becoming more afraid of herself. She doesn’t want to fall in love, not if she’s going to hurt that person eventually. 

“He did,” you wiped your hand over your eyes before any tears could even fall, and then let it rest back in your lap. “But you’re not gonna make the same mistake that I did, I promise. I’ll help you.”

“You will?” Her eagerness to accept the assistance was clear. “Thank you.”

“Of course… and don’t give up hope. There could be someone out there that can withstand your powers just as they are.” 

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to offer such things to her, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Her brow furrowed, unsure if what you were saying was true. From your earlier words, you’ve been around a long time and it’s never happened for you. “Sounds impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” you told her, standing up from beside her on the bench. “Nothing is impossible.”

You left her on that note, and went back inside. 

-

On your way up to bed, you caught Logan in the hallway. You gave a tight lipped smile on the way to your door, expecting him to be cold like he was throughout the day… but he fell into stride next to you, walking to his own door. 

“You guys got anything good to drink around here?” he asked, partially as a joke, but usually never going without a drink for more than a day was catching up to him. 

“This is a school, Logan,” you turned to him with a laugh and a light smile. Maybe he’d struck out with Jean and was off her coattails now. 

“Well I can see that, but I figured with a limited number of adults chasing after a million kids, someone’s gotta be drinking at the end of the day,” he leaned against his door frame, and you had completely turned to face him, neglecting your door knob which you had reached for originally. 

You huffed a sigh, shaking your head at him. You may or may not have a bottle of Jack hidden where no one can find it. If anyone in this hell hole had a reason to drink it was you, but you never did it in front of the kids, or nearly anyone else. You reckon Charles or Ororo would march up to you if they found out, voicing their concern. 

“Stay quiet, and don’t say a word about this to anyone…” You opened the door, letting him follow you in before closing it and locking the knob. “Under the bed, back right corner.”

You allowed him to go fishing for it himself, going to your desk in the corner to make sure you were caught up on everything and prepared for tomorrow’s history quiz before you settled in for the night. He’d already been ready for bed, seemingly just roaming the halls and looking for alcohol at this late hour. 

“Of everyone here, I didn’t expect you to be keeping a stash,” he sat down on the edge of your bed, facing your back as you were hunched over the desk, writing sloppily a few notes for tomorrow morning. “I asked Scott and Storm, they had nothin…”

“I surprised you, huh?” you ask, not even throwing a look over your shoulder. You may have an interest in this man, but since you started teaching here you were always efficient, and that wasn’t going to stop now. 

“Yeah, a little,” he chuckled, taking swigs straight from the bottle. It had been more than half full the last time you drank from it, so there was a decent amount. “You just seem like the innocent one.”

This made you drop what you were doing and spin your chair around. “Innocent?” 

He smirked at your furrowed brows, but having known of your mutation, he was willing to guess everything and even bet on it. “I believe that’s what I said.”

You tilted your head at him, the look on your face making him grin even more. 

“I don’t think I like that word,” you leaned back in your seat, crossing your arms over your chest and thinking of all the reasons why. “I’ve done and seen things that would be considered unfathomable to other people.”

“I don’t mean how dangerous you are, I mean how corrupted you are,” he kept on, another swig taken from the bottle. “And I think you’re innocent.”

“I still don’t like it,” you shook your head, laughing a little and reaching for the bottle, which he was all too happy to hand over, fingers brushing your gloved hands. “I prefer inexperienced.”

“Does it matter? It means the same thing,” he argued, watching you take a nice lengthy drink of the whiskey in your hand. 

“It does matter, actually,” you were all too happy to correct him. “Innocence implies that my mind is pure of corruption, but really, I’ve just never been able to do the things I’ve thought about.”

He rolled his eyes, taking back the bottle and trying to keep up with you. He pointed to your head with a swirling finger. “Yeah right, I’m sure you’re just all kinds of perverted up there.”

You just giggled and looked at him for a moment. He was funny, he was handsome, and he was clearly interested in your favorite choice of alcohol. Just more things to connect on, you supposed. Maybe feelings weren’t so far down the road, after all. 

You blinked out of it when you realized you’d been looking at his bare arms for too long, the beater he wore left little to the imagination as to how fit he was, and it was a nice view to take in, but not this late, and certainly not with a bottle of Jack. 

“I should be getting to bed soon, big test tomorrow…” you trailed, standing up and going to the door. It was late, no one else should be awake, but you still wanted to make sure. “You can take the whiskey for the road, if you want.”

“I’ll get you another one,” he returned, knowing that by the end of the night, the bottle was likely to be empty. He’d not had Jack Daniel’s in a while, so he was grateful for the favor. 

“No need,” you shook your head as he met you in the doorway, peering down and clearly shadowing you under his tall form. You had to take a breath and smile to break the tension you felt, as it was thick and heated. “I really should stop drinking here, anyway.”

“I’m happy to pick it up in your place,” he smirked, still standing right in front of you. If anyone had stepped out of their room, they’d see how close he was looming. 

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” You asked hopefully, knowing full well that he could respond with an empty promise, and still be cold to you as he was today. 

“Yeah, I’ll see you.” 

And he left without another word.

-

You awoke in the middle of the night to chaos in the hallway. You were surprised not to be plagued with nightmares for once, but the screams of your next door neighbor didn’t exactly settle you back into your pillows. You heard footsteps outside your door, and when you sat up, Ororo opened the door without knocking, the urgency of whatever situation that had happened started to set in. 

“There’s been an accident,” she looked to you with an expression of fear and shock, leaving the doorway as soon as she could see you were scrambling to your feet.

You could feel the energy, it was all over the place. Kids were scared, and so were some of the adults, Ororo being one of them. You ran into the room, avoiding the touch of everyone you passed by, and stared at the scene playing out. 

“What happened?” you rushed over to where Jean and Scott were hovering over Logan, his unconscious body thrown over the bed and seemingly in a state of paralysis. 

“Rogue, she touched him,” Jean was working the best she could to try and keep him from death’s door, but even with her skilled hands, she looked afraid. “He’s fading quickly, she may have drained too much of his regeneration.”

You tried to think quickly on your feet. She drained his regenerative energy, but you could restore it. The manipulation of energy was clearly something you were all too familiar with, but you were afraid if his regeneration was too low that he might die from your mutation. 

If he’s already going to die, you’re going to do the only thing you know how to try and save him. 

“Jean, move,” you reach for him, and she practically dives out of the way of your bare hands. 

“You’ll kill him!”

“Just trust me,” you said, your hands finding his shoulders. You heard gasps behind you when your skin met his, and they all started whispering, assuming that if he wasn’t dead before, he definitely was now. 

You focused your energy on him, using what was inside of you and around you to build back up what had been inside of him. His mutation, his strength and endurance, and most of all, his healing capability. 

“Alice, he’s dead,” Scott nearly scolded you, shaking his head. He wasn’t fond of the man, but that didn’t mean he wished him to die… and now he had, by your hand or Rogue he wasn’t sure. “What did you do?” 

You ignored him, and all the ones whispering behind you. You could feel his life force, like a branch in the air around you, reaching out just the smallest bit, but not strong enough to hold growth yet. You were slowly building it, letting it stretch out until his own body could take it from there. 

When he took a sharp inhale of breath and his chest started to rise and fall again, everyone nearly fell over out of shock. No one said a word yet, because they were too stunned to speak. 

Logan was still in bad condition, but you trusted that his healing could help him out from here. You pulled him onto your lap, head resting against your body as you felt for a steady pulse, and saw the color returning to his hands and arms. 

“I got you,” you whispered, holding him close. This was the first person that you’d ever been able to save with your touch, as before, it killed everyone who came across it.

“Alice?” Jean called from behind your shoulder, her mouth still agape and her eyes wide. “Alice!”

You looked to her, only slightly fearful that she may tell Charles about this, and then you’ll be in for an earful. He was the hand that guided you along the terrible pathways of your life, but he was also the one who reprimanded you when need be. 

“He’s alright,” you promised her, but she still didn’t come closer. Scott however, was completely baffled and had a million questions. 

“How did you do that? You can’t touch anyone-”

“I can touch him,” you answered shortly, your arms still wrapped tight around his limp form. “Just him.”

Jean shook her head and snapped out of her train of thought. There was too much to be asked, but this was not the time for it. Logan still needed more treatment, despite the help you gave. You stood up to accommodate her, keeping your eyes on Logan and making sure he was still okay. You could feel his energy restacking, like building blocks in the air around you. 

“Start talking,” Scott pressed, the urgent situation now overshadowed by a need for answers. Ororo joined Scott in front of you, her expression holding more than just shock at this point. She looked nearly excited, but you couldn’t say why. 

“I know him,” you said, trying to start slowly, but knowing the two of them, it wouldn;t be good enough. “When Striker had us, he got Logan, too. He doesn’t remember it, but he saved my life… yours too, Scott.”

“That…” he trailed, shaking his head. He’d done the same thing that you’d done. He blocked it out of his memory. That didn’t mean that it didn’t happen. You just had a better reason to remember it. “That can’t be possible… he’s touched you before?” 

“He practically dragged me out of that cell,” you told him, and he recalled the day of the mutant prison break. He remembers a man helping them, but never imagined it could have been Logan. 

“How is it possible? I’ve seen you drop some of the most powerful mutants where they stand, no one survives being touched by you,” Ororo was the one to pitch in this time, her question not so much one of what, but how?

“His regenerative ability. The way Charles used to explain my powers to me, he said to think of my skin like a radioactive energy poison. When such a poison is absorbed into one’s body it can cause it to shut down. My powers work the same way, just a thousand times stronger and faster. The thing is,” you pointed behind you, where Logan was slowly gaining small bits of health. “His regen mutation never allows my energy to be absorbed… I can’t kill him.”

“Scott?” Jean called from the ground, trying and failing to lift Logan on her own. “Gonna need a little help here. I need him in the med bay.”

Scott shook off the conversation, focusing on the matter at hand. 

When Jean and Scott got Logan through the crowd of kids, they all dispersed back to their rooms. The only two remaining were you and Ororo. 

She stared at you for a moment, wondering if you were going to leave, but then watched as you shuffled around in Logan’s things, looking for what you leant to him. You were hoping by some miracle that there would be some left. 

“Aha,” you let out, grabbing the bottle from inside the dresser drawer, unscrewing the cap and taking a swig. There wasn’t much, but there was enough to ease your mind at this late hour. “Want some?” 

“You really think this is a good time to be drinking?” she scoffed, crossing her arms and watching you fall back onto the foot of his bed. 

“I think it’s the perfect time to be drinking,” you held it out to her, wondering if she’d actually take it. 

She tried to keep her adult habits outside of the school, but these were tumultuous times, and she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to allow it under the circumstances. 

Out of the silence, she turned to you, right as you took your next slow gulp of the smooth liquor. 

“So,” her pause and sigh were unneeded. You knew what she was about to be getting on about. “You can touch him…”

“Yep,” you looked at her, a thin lipped smile on your face. You really didn’t have much else to say, but she did. 

“I know you never got over Charlie,” she spoke gently, not wanting to pinch a nerve, or bring up bitterness in a moment like this. The calm after the storm, no pun intended. “But maybe this is your chance…”

“A chance to what?” 

“You know what I’m talking about,” she leaned into your eyeline, still careful to stray from any of your exposed skin. 

“Yeah,” you muttered, “I know.” And then with the last swig in the bottle, you felt the warmth of the drink, and the tiniest bit of a buzz. “I don’t think Logan’s that kinda guy.”

“You don’t think he’d commit to a relationship?” 

“I don’t think he’d commit to me,” you corrected, shrugging your shoulders. You wished you had more to drink after that revelation, but unfortunately, this empty bottle contained the only bit of alcohol on the entire property. 

“He seems loyal, maybe you just need to know him better,” she encouraged, bumping her clothed shoulder with yours. Always a kind gesture, one of friendship and to show she held no fear of you like others did. 

“He doesn’t even know himself,” you chuckled a little. It may have been a bit of a mean joke to make, because you can’t even imagine how hard it is for him, but still you laugh, because you know him better than he does. “I know who he was that day.”

“When he saved you?” 

“Yeah, saved everyone,” you dropped your head, focusing on your hands and trying to keep your mind from falling down any bunny trails. “He was a hero. I think he still might be.”

“You should tell him that.”

“I did,” you chuckled, tossing the whiskey bottle back into the soft pillows of the bed to rid your hands of it. “He didn’t believe a word I was telling him…”

She sighed, knowing that with your stubbornness, and your fear of hurting people, you may opt to keep him at arms length, regardless of his ability to touch you. She knew about Charlie, and what you did to him. She knew you’d sworn off love since that day, over a hundred years ago… but she still had hope that this could turn into a part of your happiness. 

“Don’t give up on him so fast, alright?” She asked, her eyes turning to that of a puppy dog, pulling at your heart and nearly making you comply. 

“I won’t.”

-

Rogue went missing the next day, and while you’d been chomping at the bit to find her, you were unfortunately called to the office of the professor. You wondered if you were in for a stern talking to after the previous night’s events. 

“Take a seat,” he began, staring out the open window at the setting sun, and the children on property who were playing in the grass before dark. 

You did as you were told, not because you wanted to, but because you respected Charles enough to listen to whatever diatribe he was about to drone on. 

“I’ve had quite a few people visit my office today on your account,” he turned his chair around, his face not one of disappointment like you thought it would be. He didn’t look upset at all, nor did he look like he was going to reprimand you for being careless with your abilities. “I must say, I was surprised to hear of what happened.”

“I know it was careless of me,” you defended, unknowing if it was even necessary, but wanting to cover your bases, anyways. “But I can explain.”

“There’s no need to put up an argument, my dear.”

“There’s not?” 

He chuckled and shook his head, a small smile spreading over his cheeks. “Not at all. In fact, I’m actually quite happy for you.”

“Happy for me?” you asked another question, the reasoning for your visit becoming more unclear. 

“I know how long you’ve suffered,” he sighed, his tone returning to something more serious. “I have felt your anger and bitterness towards your abilities. I’ve sensed your hatred of them for years.”

“That was before,” you tried to interject, to tell him how thankful you were for his training. “But you taught me they were not just a curse, but also a blessing.”

“And do you really think I believe you when you say it? Miss Beckett, I’ve known you more than half my life… I can read your mind without entering it by now.”

You knew that if anyone could understand you it was him. You could feel other’s energy, but when he entered someone’s mind he could feel that and so much more. He could feel emotions, think that person’s thoughts, and even see what they see. 

“You knew all this time, then?” 

“I did,” he nodded, but didn’t stop there. “I knew that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t change your burdens.”

You ducked your head, thinking back to the times you’d lied, telling everyone that things were better. Truthfully, as a person you felt less alone, less hated and less dangerous… but you never felt loved. You couldn’t. No one could, or wanted to touch you, knowing your mutation.

“Scott told me about Logan, how you’d all met once before,” he said, turning the conversation back around to that of a better note. “When you’d repressed the memories of what Agent Striker had done, you’d forgotten him… but you didn’t forget what he did for you, and you didn’t forget a special detail.”

“He touched me,” you filled in the blank, waiting for him to continue. 

“Precisely.”

“I think…” you trailed, unsure of where this chat was going to lead. If Ororo had come to him, you were sure the thoughts exchanged the night before had come up, even if it was just meant to help you. “I think he may have feelings for… someone else.”

Charles nodded, he’d not purposely looked into Logan’s mind, but when Jean was stirring restlessly in the late evening, he took a peek inside hers, seeing the struggle to combat Logan and his advances.

“I understand,” he responded, but thought it was worth mentioning what he knew. “But his advances are pointless.”

“I still don’t want to get my hopes up,” you reasoned, a good point to be made considering his behavior towards you. “I’m getting too old for shit like this, you know?”

His understanding went without saying, he remembers your past, and knows of the only person you ever truly loved. It was a story for the ages with a tragic ending that would even make the bravest of men shed a tear. 

“Of course.”

You waited for him to dismiss you, and when he nodded to you in finality, you stood up from your seat. 

“Stay open minded, my dear, you don’t know where your path may lead.”

You hummed in acknowledgement, giving him a smile as you left the room. 

“Thank you, Charles.”

First Ororo, and now Charles. Your biggest cheerleaders since they met you… you love them both, and want to listen to them, but you are older therefore wiser, and must protect yourself from things that aren’t good for you. Everyday you grow older but your face and body stay the same. Your mentality weakens when you realize you’ve still got so much life to live, and it burdens you more when you struggle to live it alone. Having someone by your side would be the answer to your every prayer, the reason you could keep going. But you know you can’t endure another heartbreak, you won’t survive it. 

-

It’s been days, nearly a week. Your mind is frazzled, and you think that maybe it’s time for a break. A quiet time to let your mind rest and restore itself. 

So much has happened, and you can’t put your finger on what was the most stressful part of it all. The quickness, the escalation, the chaos… or what it almost cost you. 

Erik is temporarily defeated, but you know he’ll keep at it in the future. There were several mutants in his gathering that were unapprehended after the final battle. It will make for an interesting hunt that the X-men get to pursue.

One of which you wouldn't mind letting go about her business for a while. You knew Mystique when she went by Raven. 

So much has changed since then, and you've changed with the time gone by.

There's still something on your mind after everything that's happened this week, and of course that something is Logan. His past, his present, and what he wants to do with his future. 

He’s an X-man now, a part of the team and a member of the mutant family… but he searches for who he is, and you can sympathize with that, especially because of what he did for you. He didn’t just do it for you, but with the state you were in, he could have passed your cell, given up on you. Instead, he practically carried you out of that prison, never knowing how lethal your touch was. He saved you and gave you the greatest gift you’d received. Hope. A fresh start. The thought that life didn’t have to be such a burden. 

The kids were settled in early this evening, after the late night that was pulled the day prior, they needed to catch up on their rest… but Logan was having a hard time sleeping. You were, too. 

It was about eleven when he came knocking on the door, softly so nobody else would hear him. Ororo was behind the door next over from yours, her light on beneath the slit in that door, and he mentally kicked himself for even doing this at all, so late at night. 

When you cracked open your own door, peeking through to see who it was, you were surprised at the man standing in the doorway. 

“Logan? What are you doing up? It’s late…”

“Yeah, I know,” he whispered, just above the level you were speaking at, voice barely audible. “I wanted to talk to you.”

You were unsure of what there was to talk about, really. It had been radio silence since the mission, and you figured he wanted some space after something like that… it wasn’t unusual for an X-man, but you didn’t know him as well, so you didn’t know what you were supposed to expect. 

“Can I come in?” he asked, and it was only now that you realized you’d been frozen in your spot, a furrowed brow worn on your face. 

“Yeah, sorry.”

You closed the door behind him when he passed through, going back to your bed to sit down. He followed suit, and it was nearly a reverse image of the first night he arrived. 

“I wanted to thank you,” he cleared his throat, trying to sound grateful. “For saving my life. Jean told me what you did.”

You smiled a little and scoffed, shaking your head and waving him off. “Don’t thank me… I actually endangered your life.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? Whatever you did, it saved me.”

“I had no idea that it would, it could have gone either way,” you argued, not for the sake of being right, but because you didn’t want him to think you’d done something extraordinary or heroic. You were actually being quite selfish in your actions. 

“You like to argue a lot, huh?” he teased, remembering the last one on one conversation you both had. You would admit, you didn’t like being wrong. You’d gotten it in your head that after being alive for so long, you ought to know more than everyone. 

“Well, I am a lawyer,” you shrugged, a slight smirk on your face. You’d never practiced in a firm, or even got a law related job, but you liked to remind people of it here and there, it was always entertaining. 

“I noticed that certificate on your wall the other night, noticed em’ all, actually…” he trailed, throwing a glance over his shoulder to check and make sure they were all still there. He’d come to the conclusion that you were intelligent the first time you met, your dialect being very formal for the age he thought you were… but above that, you carried yourself in a way that spoke to being knowledgeable. 

“Oh, those?” you laughed, tilting your head and making a silly face in their direction. “Those are nothing, just reminders of all the times I’ve been bored.”

“Bored? You’re kidding me,” he mused, crossing his arms and chuckling. 

“Maybe I also wanted to better myself a little,” you answered truthfully, rolling your eyes after getting it out. He didn’t seem like the scholarly type. Not a bad thing by any means, but you were sure his abilities far accelerated him in other occupations before he ended up here.

“Well whatever the reason, you’ve clearly done good,” he complimented, and you were certainly not complaining. Getting compliments from your friends, from your mutant family, it uplifted you… but getting a compliment from him? It felt different, more weighted. “And whatever you did to save me, that was good too.”

“I didn’t even know it would work,” you huffed, looking down at your hands. You hadn’t touched him since he came in, and you weren’t sure if it was because you were doing so purposely, or if you just hadn’t gotten the opportunity. “I honestly thought I might kill you faster…”

“Then why would you have tried it?” He couldn’t believe you. A smart girl like you, with the power you held? It seemed out of character to make a decision like that.

“Honestly?” you raised your brows, thinking of a sentence that didn’t sound weird, or selfish. “I was scared you were gonna die before I could know you.”

He tilted his head slightly in confusion. “You want to know me?” 

“I do,” you nodded with a sheepish smile. Thank God for the darkness in the room, because you’re sure your face is turning red. “I mean, it’s not everyday that I meet someone I can shake hands with, so…”

He laughed a little, reaching out playfully for a handshake. You smiled wide, taking his hand and giving it a nice firm shake. You’ve shaken hands when wearing gloves, but it’s just not the same. You’ve touched others while wearing them, too. But the skin contact you’ve always been deprived of, it’s something that sends chills down your spine, no matter how simple the gesture is. Even just a handshake. 

“I’d like you to know me too, but there’s just one problem with that,” he sighs, shaking his head in a bit of something akin to sadness. “I don’t know me.”

You can’t stand to see that look on his face. His hand was still wrapped around yours, now resting on his knee and near your lap. An idea springs to your mind, and though it’s a terrible one, you think about all the good it could produce in the long run. 

“What if I could help you remember?” You suggested, grabbing his attention almost immediately. “You’ve said you don’t remember anything past fifteen years ago… that’s when you saved me from Striker.”

“You think you could help me?” 

“I can try, I owe it to you.” Your reasoning made him turn the idea over in his head, but he wasn’t sure of how you planned to help him, exactly. “Something must have happened that day to make you forget… we can go back to the base, look for answers, see if anything triggers your memories?” 

It was a bold move, but you had to take it. No matter what happened the other night, you still owe him your life, and this could be a way to even the playing field. 

“You’d take me there?” he asked sincerely, a bit surprised that you would even offer, considering what he knew of your time in that prison. You shouldn’t want to return at all, but what’s worse is you want to do it for him. 

“I would… If you want me to.” 

He grinned, his look of bewilderment still laced in. “I would be grateful, if you could.”

“It’s settled then.”

He nodded to you, and you both gave a glance to the door. It was time to say goodnight, though you wanted him to stay and talk till sunrise. You had so many questions, about him, about his life since Striker, and even about his abilities… but it would have to wait till another time. 

He got up, and you followed, getting to the door before you heard voices outside of it. 

“It’s Ororo,” you sighed, turning to him and huffing. “I don’t know who she’s talking to…”

“I better not let her see me sneaking around this late,” he said, looking back at you with a comical expression. “I have a feeling that she’ll tattle on me.”

“You’re right, she would.” You stood with your ear to the door, hearing that the other voice in the hall was Jean. They were talking about you, and you figured it was not a good time to let the Wolverine go traipsing out of your room. “You know, you don’t have to go… if you don’t want to. You could just stay here tonight.”

His smirk held a bout of confidence before he spoke, “You sure I’m not crowding your space?” 

“I’ve got plenty of room,” You nodded to the queen bed you’d stood up from. In all truthfulness, it was a big bed to sleep in alone, and you’d been forced to for over a decade. “You also just happen to be the only person who wouldn’t die if I accidentally kicked you in the middle of the night.”

He laughed, nodding his head. He didn’t want to leave in the first place, he just felt like maybe he’d been imposing. Tough luck on that, because if you had your way, he’d stay longer than just the night. 

“With an argument like that, how can I say no?” 

“I might not sleep for a while, though… so if you wanna turn in, be my guest,” you sat back on the bed, shoving your walkman with the headphones to your side so he could settle in next to you. 

“Couldn’t really sleep already, that's why I came here in the first place.” He started eyeballing the walkman, scooting in closer to where you sat, legs crossed and back against your pillows and headboard. “You got music?” 

“Oh, uh… yeah, just a little mixtape I’ve been listening to.” 

You’d just rewound the tape earlier, and almost put it over your ears when you found you couldn’t sleep. Maybe it would have settled the noise in your brain… but Logan seemed to do a pretty good job of that, too.

“May I?” He gently reached for the set, and your heart stuttered in beat when you saw the sweet look in his eyes.

“Yeah, of course,” You handed it over with a smile, no hesitation, even though this new mixtape was built primarily on the feelings for him you’d been fighting. “It’s mostly just girl stuff…”

He put the headphones on and started listening, and you felt a bit awkward just watching him listen to the music, unsure if he would piece anything together or not. 

The first song played was Fields of Gold by Sting… just a soft ballad that made you think of what life might be like if things were different. 

By the second song, you pulled the plug of the headphones, letting the music play softly through the speaker instead so you could both hear it. It felt much better when you could listen to the music yourself. Music always calmed you down, made you feel more at ease.

You helped him fast forward through some of the songs he seemed bored during, but he stopped you on a few, nodding his head and smiling as the music filled his ears. 

“You like this one?” You asked, watching him start tapping his fingers to the song I Was Made For Lovin’ You by Kiss.

“This is my kinda music, right here,” he laughed, letting loose a little, breaking down his tough exterior just slightly so you could see the softness lurking behind. 

The noise from outside your door had long gone, but Logan didn’t seem eager to leave whatsoever… you did after all invite him to stay. 

When the song Wicked Game came on, you opted to skip it, and he grabbed the tips of your fingers to pull your hand away and ask why. The intro kept playing, the somber guitar filling the air between you. 

“It’s a sad song, kinda haunting,” you explained, but the real reason you were trying to skip it was because you’d rewound this one a bit too much when thinking about him, the lyrics seeming to match up to every time you looked at him the way you were now. “It’s not as fun as the others.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, taking the walkman and holding it so that you couldn’t skip the song yet. 

World was on fire, and no one could save me but you

Strange what desire will make foolish people do

You looked up at him and he seemed to really be into the music, but his brow was furrowed, like he was thinking about it in real time. 

I never dreamed that I’d meet somebody like you

You had to look away from him for a moment, your face turning red and your eyes falling to your lap.

And I never dreamed that I’d lose somebody like you

No, I don’t wanna fall in love

No, I don’t wanna fall in love… with you

You took a glance back up, seeing his face and the way it seemed to turn almost upset by the lyrics. You almost thought about reaching for the walkman, but his death grip on it looked too strong to break. 

“The next one is pretty good,” you smiled, trying to lighten the mood. He broke out of his trance and nodded, handing the device back to you. 

The smooth and laid back energy returned to the room, and you could feel the peace of it engulfing you as you absorbed the energy from the air. It fed you, made you stronger, happier. 

You couldn’t even help yourself by the time it got to the end of the playlist, the last song making you quietly sing aloud in front of someone you barely know… which was strange considering you wouldn’t even sing in front of your dearest and closest friends. 

The song just did that to you… it used to remind you of a love you once lost, but because of the lyrics, you were starting to associate the beautiful melody with another face. The one looking back at you with a small lip tug of a smile. 

The song in question? More Than Words by Extreme. 

You didn’t look at him when you sang it, because you were already falling too hard, too fast. You needed to slow down… but just thinking about the lyrics… 

More than words, is all you have to do to make it real

Touching someone for the first time is more than words can express… sitting side by side with someone without fear of hurting them means more than words could possibly say.

When the song ended you stopped the tape, setting it to rewind and putting it over on your bedside table. 

“Not bad… that last one, I’ve heard it a few times somewhere else. It’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, I like it better than the others,” you said jokingly, as if he couldn’t already tell by how easily the words came out of your mouth. “Saved the best for last, right?” 

“I’d say so,” he wouldn’t look anywhere else but you, and you felt so powerless under his stare. You were folding in record time, and honestly at this point, you’d count it as a miracle if you made it out of this night without ruining it all.

“You tired yet?” you asked, changing the subject and pulling back your sheets. 

“I’m getting there…” 

His soft and pretty hazel eyes were starting to make you wish you’d not invited him. He was making this difficult. You wanted to know him, and not just physically. There would be time for that, but you had to wait and make sure he was the one.  You weren’t willing to let yourself love him to the ends of the earth if you weren’t going to be able to keep him. It would just haunt you for the rest of your long and burdened life.

“Me too, but uh… I’m gonna try and finish my book,” you smiled, reaching for the novel on your bedside table. Fahrenheit 451. “So, just turn in whenever you’re tired.”

He debated asking you about the book, but ultimately decided that he’d bothered you enough for one night. It seemed like something he might research himself, if it was something you like. You obviously have good taste in music, maybe he ought to give reading the same books as you a try. 

He’d never admit it, because it wasn’t like him to do such a thing, but he liked being around you. Liked touching you. The energy you gave off was pleasant, and every time your skin connected, he absorbed a little bit of it from you. Something that would kill anyone else, he got to experience first hand. 

He smiled and lied down, giving a glance over his shoulder before he settled in. Your bed was warmer than his, more comfortable, too. “G’night, Alice.”

Your grin compared to his was like a young schoolgirl, completely and utterly lovestruck for the boy you met last week. 

“Night, Logan.”

Tags: @ayamenimthiriel @levislegislation @reidsworld @melsunshine @clairealeehelsing