#this entire series is about how adults have failed their children again and again and again

[heretherebedork]

These twins! The push and the pull of their constant fighting and the way you can see their parents in every twisted word and every fist, every angry outburst powered by the people who couldn't love them or let them love each other. Mek and Mork could easily love each other but have always been told otherwise, have been told that a competition is needed for every single choice they make, that for every success there is an equal failure and that they both cannot do one with the other on the other side. A seesaw, where neither one can ever truly win or truly come out on top.

[chidoroki]

182 Days of TPN - Day 177

Chapter 177: "Mother"

This chapter.. this damn chapter never fails at getting me emotional. I'm still so very upset that Isabella dies this way too when we had other characters such as Emma and Barbara also get impaled by fierce demons and survive with their scars, so why not my queen huh?? I know there's that whole neverland fairy tale idea where adults aren't allowed there, which would've been an interesting concept for our series given the several adult deaths we had already, but that would've cancelled out some of the oldest Goldy Pond kids who are already older than 18 at this point. However, with how Emma phrased the new promise to allow all humans raised as food to cross over into the human world, there wouldn't have been any issue. Isabella could've easily joined them then, like c'mon Shirai, couldn't ya at least let these kids have one parent join them, please? They already lost Yuugo and Lucas, we didn't need to add another!

As if stabbing this woman wasn't enough, this bastard goes on to taunt her, saying that she'll never make up for her past mistakes no matter how hard she tries. First off, to hell with this guy. Secondly, that's such nonsense. I know this moment is supposed to be seen as "Isabella's big redemption moment," but it totally didn't need to happen this way. I'm gonna sound like a broken record when I say this, but this woman's redemption arc started way back when she first admitted defeat on the wall while watching her precious children escape GF. From gathering the ropes they used so the demons wouldn't know which direction they ran, to secretly planning an entire uprising within the farm system in hopes to one day assist her children when they returned. She even used her newfound power as Grandma to help spare the lives of other children at GF by lowering the amount of harvests that took place. Granted, walking the children to their deaths as caretaker and her treatment of Ray are certainly her biggest flaws that can definitely outweigh all the good she's done during those several years as a mother, but again, it's not like she truly wanted to act that way! It was her job; a job she only took because she valued her own life so much (& honestly, I would too), but she excelled at it for their sake. She's renowned for being the best for providing such high quality meat to the farm (which sounds bad when ya think of them as food, I know), but it means her children were raised with such rich emotions and were able to reach a reasonable decent age because they knew what happiness and love felt like and she did everything within her power to keep them alive as long as they possibly could. So to hear this demon make a statement like this just irks me because while it's true this one mama bear moment may not be enough for Isabella to be redeemed fully, it completely disregards every other motherly act she's done for her children over the years.

Literally the only positive I can take away from this highly unfortunate demon encounter is how damn strong and determined Isabella is. The fire in her eyes and the intense grip she has on this demon that straight up prevents it from moving to hurt Emma or the other girl.. aahh it's such a badass moment! What a queen!

Every single time I come across these panels, all I hear in my head is that Mushu quote: "You missed! How could you miss? He was three feet in front of you!" Seriously though, I can understand with how quick everything happened and the intense new threat could've caused Ray's aim to be off a little, but my boy, this could not have been a more worse occasion to miss. I don't wanna say it because it'll be so mean but s2!Ray could've done better.

Bro I remember so very clearly when a couple panels of this chapters were first teased before the official release (& yeah I was a complete mess back then too), but when this panel was going around, it was cropped short to where Ray wasn't seen at all, so people were going nuts about where he was, why wasn't he also surrounding Isabella, if his hatred for her really went so deep to not wanna be near her while she's at death's door, etc. It was kinda wild and absolutely made me anxious, but thankfully the panic was short lived when the full page was available. Sorta. I mean, it's still not a pretty panel, seeing my favorite villain minutes away from losing her life, but at least Ray is present along with all the other GF kids.

Seeing Isabella being more concerned about everyone else aside from herself after a serious stab wound.. what a bittersweet "like mother, like daughter" parallel.

Crazy how Krone's actions and words lead the kids to believe Isabella's intentions were just as heartless. Yeah both ladies wanted to survive and would choose to achieve that by any means necessary, but at least Isabella cared for the well-being of her children. That's already a whole lot more than what your typical mom or sister is capable of.

Having this panel placed in the middle of all the heartbreak is very much appreciated because I definitely need some adorable flashbacks to make me feel a little better before diving right back into my puddle of tears. Seeing her smile and laugh alongside the trio is the most adorable thing, especially that head pat she gives Emma. Also love that reference to ch95's extra page where Gilda was working so hard at the shelter that a sleepy Chris mistakenly called her "mom." Oh, my poor boy Chris.. he's gonna have so many things to catch up on once he wakes up and learning about Isabella's death ain't gonna be easy.

Say it louder, sweetie!!! And most definitely repeating myself once more by saying that I'm so glad the second season animated that panel of Isabella hugging the trio despite this chapter's events not happening.

I love this idea of Isabella & Yuugo being the "what if" versions of the kids. Isabella's situation could easily be applied to any of the girls, though most people associate it with Emma which is fair, just as we usually make the connection of Yuugo to Ray due to them both witnessing their family getting killed and all that time they spent alone, whether it be physically, mentally or emotionally. All three honestly.

Seeing all the children beg Isabella to hold on, along with them confessing how much they love her.. oh my goodness, I think so often how thankful I am that this scene wasn't included in the anime because seeing the pain on their faces is hard enough already, imagine how loudly I would sob if I heard the emotion in all their voices.

Oh, if any version of her lullaby played here, my heart would shatter. I already feel close to tears. She probably dreamed of hugging all her precious children and openly declaring her love for them once more without any fear of what the farm system might do to her and/or them, and now that Isabella finally gets that chance, she has such a thankful smile on her face and I'm happy she gets to experience these warm feelings one last time.

I dunno about anyone else, but this chapter always feels like a "try not to cry challenge, level: impossible" for me. Doesn't matter if they added in this cute scene of her hugging the trio with such a beautiful smile, my heart is still in pieces on the ground. I'm the one who needs the hug!

Favorite panel/moment:

If you haven't learned how much I love Isabella, Ray and their complicated mother-son relationship yet, then I haven't rambled on long enough. But yes, as much as her death absolutely wrecks me, I'm relieved it allows us to get one final interaction between her and Ray. By now we have a pretty good grasp about Ray's feelings towards Isabella, so the fact he kept his distance this entire time until she called out for him is so sad. We can't really tell if he rushes to her side or if he takes slow steps, but what matters is that he didn't deny her request.

It means so much that this moment is just between the two of them too. Sure it was undeniable sweet to see all the children cry and huddle around Isabella, but she and Ray have such a deep history so they deserve one last scene together. Although it's a very fragile relationship, that doesn't prevent her from giving him a personal apology with the very last bit of strength she has. Aahh, how terrible she must be feeling right now, thinking back on all the times she wasn't allowed to show him the same level of affection as a mother would normally show her son or for making his life such a living hell. She could've very well chosen to be angry at herself here or let the pain show on her face, and yet she chooses to smile instead. Not a smug or confident one Ray's probably used to seeing her use, but a gentle one that really conveys how strong her regrets are.

Having her last wish being for Ray to protect everyone is so perfect with how it shows that right til the very end, Isabella's children have always been her top priority and she'll always think of them first. It's also sweet that she wants Ray to hold onto this promise because us readers already know how committed Ray is to providing for his family and keeping them safe. Hell, his compassion and protective instincts were on full display last chapter when he jumped in to shoot at that demon bastard and when he accepted all the moms and sisters to join the kids in the human world back during ch164. Those were such great opportunities for Isabella to witness just how caring her son really is and how much he's grown. I'm certain she's so proud of him. To this day I still wish Isabella had actually spoke that "I love you so much" to him, but I know she was steadily growing weaker by the minute that even speaking or seeing clearly was becoming a challenge for her. The nice thing with Isabella though, is that she doesn't really need to say such words out loud for Ray or any other child to know how true her feelings are, as Emma confirmed earlier during her moment of reflection, that Isabella's actions speak far louder to the point where everyone was able to recognize how strongly she loved them all. What completely breaks me about this entire chapter though is seeing Ray finally breakout into tears as he holds onto his mother's hand. This boy just found out his mother was alive, along with becoming their enemy once more, saw her betray their common enemy in order to assist the children, which sparks his discussion to forgive her and wish for her to join him in the human world, only to realize that won't happen as she jumps in to protect one of his best friends and ends up critically injured all because he failed to killing a demon. That is so much to experience all in one day. It's a miracle he kept his emotions in check to begin with, but now he's hit with the realization that he's losing his mother for good and.. damn it 'yall. Can we please give my boy a break?? And my queen too while we're at it?? Both of them seriously had two of the worst experiences in this world and instead of having them reconcile and build a better mother-son relationship in the human world together, we gotta make them suffer once last time, huh?? Fucking hell man.. I said it way more than once and I'll say it a million more times up until I'm on my own death bed, but the decision of having Isabella stay alive is by far the absolute best thing to come out of season two.

I want to wish their moment was lasted longer than a page and a third, but I'd probably never recover from all the emotional damage if their tearful goodbye had more focus. AAhhh.. seems like I should've wrote out a lot more considering the amount of time I spent on this chapter and how passionate I get about my favorites, but ya know, the emotions are hella strong today.

[silvfyre-writings]

When was the last time you were alright? (BSD Fanfic)

Hello~ I return after idk how long with a new fukudad fic. I like to think this one is the "finale" of this little series I have (at least for now) but I hope to bring more Fukudad to the table in the future!!!

This is another quite dark fic, so please pay attention to the tags, because what is tagged is exactly what happens in the fic. So please, be mindful when reading.

Also, Ranpo uses they/them pronouns in this fic, but there are times where I may have accidentally misused pronouns. I think I caught them all, but idk.

For over a year, an entire year, Fukuzawa had been a parent.

It certainly wasn’t the direction he’d expected his life to take, and if he’d had any choice in the matter, he probably wouldn’t have ever gone down that route. Children and family just wasn’t something he felt like he needed or deserved, especially given the amount of blood on his hands. It had simply been easier to forfeit those ideas the moment he’d first killed someone and lock them away so that they never saw the light of day again. And it was safer too, because having people to care about meant that they could become a target, and that just wasn’t fair. So, for fifteen years, since that day he first left home, he had been alone, with nothing but himself and stray cats for company.

Until Ranpo.

He still found it hard to believe that he’d managed to raise Ranpo for an entire year, and that he’d actually managed to do a good job. The kid was still alive and breathing, they both had a place to call home, and if everything went ahead as schedule, Ranpo would have a job that would allow them to show off their talents without fear or repercussions. And better yet, Fukuzawa would be able to watch it happen; a feeling of pride welled within him as he imagined Ranpo unleashing their powers of deduction upon Yokohama, because there’d been a time—a long time—that he’d feared such a day would never come.

Because as Fukuzawa had had to quickly learn, Ranpo was not simply a child of genius calibre; in fact, they had many issues that had been ignored and left to run wild until Fukuzawa had come along to pick up the pieces. Now, Fukuzawa wasn’t blaming Ranpo for all these problems, because it was not the kids fault at all, but rather the fault of all the adults that had failed them—even their parents. He was reluctant to put any blame on Ranpo’s parents, considering that Ranpo still loved and missed them very much, but he also couldn’t ignore how they had sometimes brushed off their child’s concerns and tried to mould them into something they weren’t. Ranpo had told him once when they’d travelled to visit their parents grave, that while they couldn’t agree with some of the things their parents had done, that they also understood the reasoning behind it.

Because society simply wasn’t kind to those that were different, and Ranpo was as different as they came.

Ranpo’s sensory issues were one of the biggest obstacles that Fukuzawa faced, but it thankfully didn’t take too long for him to figure out the best way to handle them. Trips to buy groceries were done alone, or on particularly bad days where he was needed at home, delivered. On days where the slightest noise would set Ranpo off, the headphones he’d bought were brought out and used, with Ranpo often curling up on the couch under a blanket until the world was a little less noisy. Clothing was an easy problem to deal with, and was the only time that Ranpo ever braved the shopping centres with him, so at least the innocent pieces of fabric didn’t cause too much of a problem. Food on the other hand… was painful. There were days where Ranpo could eat without a problem, but then there were days where they couldn’t even stomach their much loved snacks. Not to mention, that there were foods that Fukuzawa loved to eat, but Ranpo couldn’t stomach in the slightest, either because they smelt weird or the texture was all wrong.

Fukuzawa’s solution to that was to simply stick a whiteboard onto the fridge that Ranpo could use to tell him how they felt about food each day, and so far, it had worked splendidly.

Which left him to deal with everything else that came packaged within Ranpo’s tiny form.

Trauma was something that Fukuzawa had seen many times over his thirty-three years of living, in various kinds of people, that also presented itself in wildly different forms, so he liked to think that he was adept in handling it. But apparently all the knowledge, tips, and tricks, he’d picked up from others was only useful in handling his own problems, because whenever Ranpo was reminded of something from their past, there were wildly different reactions depending on what exactly it was that they remembered. Sometimes it was panic that rushed through like a typhoon, leaving behind chaos and destruction that Fukuzawa had to fight to put back together. He disliked the panic response the most, because Ranpo couldn’t handle being touched when they were panicking, and any attempt to do so would result in fists colliding with whatever Ranpo could reach, so all Fukuzawa could do was sit close by and wait for it to pass. Most of the time though, Ranpo would just shut down and retreat from the world whenever an unpleasant memory came along, falling into a pit of silence and stillness that would cause Fukuzawa endless worry until it passed.

The shut downs were relatively easy to handle, since Ranpo’s need for physical contact jumped to the extreme when they occurred. During these episodes, Fukuzawa wasn’t allowed to leave, not unless he wanted to cause Ranpo more distress than they were already in. Most of the time, Fukuzawa would sit on the couch and have Ranpo practically curled in his lap while they watched a movie, and other times, Ranpo would just want to sleep, so Fukuzawa would sit and keep him company while he did so.

But while the shut downs were easy to handle, they were also dangerous, because there was no telling just how long they would last for, and when they came about, Ranpo simply existed, unable to take care of himself properly when they were so lost within their own head, so it was up to Fukuzawa to take care of them instead. Meals became whatever he could get Ranpo to eat, whether it be a piece of fruit or some kind of smoothie, and showers were spent with him in the room providing encouragement and support as Ranpo mechanically went through the motions of washing themselves. Other than that, Ranpo would either sleep, or stare into nothing.

Fukuzawa was always grateful when the shut downs ended.

So yes, Ranpo wasn’t the easiest child to handle, but Fukuzawa wouldn’t have it any other way honestly. Because despite all the bad times the two of them tackled together, there were far more good times to look back on, and it was those memories that brought a smile to Fukuzawa’s face. Like the first time Ranpo had attempted to cook dinner; it hadn’t been the best attempt, but considering it was the first time the two of them had done something together that had had them both smiling by the end of it, it’d easily become one of Fukuzawa’s fondest memories. And then there was the time where, when the power had gone out in a storm, Ranpo had been spooked by the sudden darkness, so Fukuzawa had, in a desperate attempt to stop the panic before it could begin, suggested that they build a blanket fort together.

If only the people that knew him as an assassin could see him now.

It’d helped though, and he and Ranpo had spent the blackout underneath their little fort together with plenty of torches to chase away the dark. And once the power had come back on, Ranpo had spent the day in the fort, watching movies and eating snacks whilst Fukuzawa worked from the couch. That too, was a memory that Fukuzawa looked back on fondly, and he was pretty sure that it was one that Ranpo also looked back on fondly. One of his favourite memories though, was when the flu had run rampant around Yokohama during winter, and while Ranpo hadn’t contracted it, Fukuzawa had, and it’d been the worst time of his life. Sure, he hadn’t died, nor had he wound up in hospital like other people had, but he also hadn’t been sick since he was twenty-one and living on his own, so he’d been hit pretty hard by the illness.

But this time he hadn’t been alone.

Ranpo had been there, and unexpectedly, they’d stepped up to take care of him, making sure that he had plenty of water, lots of soup—premade by their next door neighbour because Ranpo wasn’t trusted by themselves in the kitchen—and more than enough blankets to sink a ship. Fukuzawa appreciated the gestures, especially when it allowed him to curl up and rest in bed and be miserable about his situation. Eventually, Fukuzawa had recovered, and he’d thanked Ranpo for taking care of him, only to have Ranpo brush off his thanks with puffed out cheeks that were tinted pink. Yet, despite the clear dismissal, there was no denying that Ranpo had looked happy at the praise they’d been given.

And those were just some of the good memories.

But with good memories, came bad ones, but there was one memory that Fukuzawa held that was easily the worst memory he had, and what made it even worse was that it involved Ranpo.

“Fukuzawa-san, I’m hungry!” Ranpo whined for what had to be the fifth time in the past hour, clinging to Fukuzawa’s sleeve to get his attention.

Fukuzawa couldn’t help but sigh as he looked over his shoulder with the most patient look he could muster, which he was pretty sure was beginning to fray at the edges because even he had a limit on patience. And Ranpo was very good at hitting that limit and barrelling straight past it until Fukuzawa wound up caving to whatever demand they were making at the time. “I know, Ranpo, and we’ll eat soon, I—”

“But I’m hungry now!” Ranpo tugged on his sleeve hard, and Fukuzawa spun around to pull it free.

“Patience, Ranpo! We cannot eat right this second!” His words were a little snapped out, and regret filled him as Ranpo fell silent. But before he could apologize, Ranpo beamed at him, which honestly just left him feeling more confused since that wasn’t what Ranpo usually did when he lost his patience at the kid. Usually he fell quiet, and became sullen. He never did like snapping at Ranpo, because Ranpo was still a child and still learning how to be respectful, and if he snapped, then all he was teaching Ranpo was how to be even more impatient than they currently were.

“Can we get a snack then?” The kid asked instead, hope brimming in their eyes as they opened them, unleashing the full extent of the ‘puppy eye effect’ as Fukuzawa liked to call it.

Don’t give in. Fukuzawa told himself, and he quickly turned away from Ranpo to avoid those eyes that he found himself saying yes to more often than he would’ve liked. But… Ranpo suggesting a snack instead of continuing to beg for food was Ranpo’s attempt at coming to a compromise, and Fukuzawa was trying to encourage such behaviour…

“Okay, there’s a convenience store up ahead. You can grab something, but be quick otherwise we’ll be late.” Fukuzawa said, and smiled when Ranpo let out a cheer and dashed off ahead to the convenience store in question. He knew that by the time he arrived at the store, that Ranpo would have an armful of snacks that he expected Fukuzawa to buy and carry—because Ranpo carrying their own snacks was a farfetched dream—and he would have to coax Ranpo into putting at least half the snacks back onto the shelves before they went to the register.

And just as he’d expected, he entered the store to find Ranpo with as many snacks as they could carry.

“Just three.” Fukuzawa levelled Ranpo with a look, and continued to stare, even as Ranpo begged him to buy more than three, claiming that they’d die if they had to choose just three. But Fukuzawa refused to cave this time, and continued to stare Ranpo down.

“Ugh, fine.” Ranpo sighed and began to return the snacks until there was just three items in his hands that Fukuzawa quickly paid for before the kid could sneak anything onto the counter—something he’d had to deal with before… several times over.

The two of them thanked the cashier and left the store behind. Ranpo immediately tore open a packet of pocky and munched on three sticks at the same time, chattering away through a mouthful of food about how good pocky was and that Fukuzawa should absolutely buy more of it the next time he went grocery shopping. Because, according to Ranpo, pocky was an essential food necessary to kickstart their ability into working—it was just an excuse to eat more sweets, and they both knew it—and apparently, Fukuzawa was just being mean from not allowing him to eat more.

I’d like to avoid taking you to the dentist... Fukuzawa wound up just nodding; he’d continue to buy the same amount that he always did and just tell Ranpo he bought more.

“Say, Fukuzawa-san, why are you even trying to get me back into school?” Ranpo asked when their destination appeared in the distance.

“Because it would be beneficial for you to be among people your own age.” Fukuzawa explained and quickly continued when Ranpo opened their mouth to argue. “Just because you may be smarter than everyone else in the building, doesn’t mean that you won’t learn anything at all. School teaches you life skills, and social skills, both of which you need.”

For a moment, Ranpo was silent, their brow furrowed. And then they whined and stopped dead in their tracks. “Why can’t you teach me those things? I don’t want to go to a school where a bunch of adults won’t understand me! I’ve already done that and it sucked!”

Ah, that’s right, the Academy. Ranpo had told him a little about that time of their life, mostly about how they’d been thrown out of the Academy and left to fend for themselves, so Fukuzawa understood where Ranpo was coming from and why they were reluctant to return to school. He only hoped that this meeting he’d arranged with the school principal would be enough to convince Ranpo into actually wanting to go.

“This won’t be like the police academy.” Fukuzawa reassured. “The principal was nice when I spoke with her, and—”

“No! I refuse!” Ranpo snapped, looking genuinely upset now as they stepped back.

“Ranpo—”

“No!”

Fukuzawa felt the oncoming sigh, and forced it back down. He looked over Ranpo, taking note of the tension within that small teenage frame that continued to build, along with the growing tears, and he knew that if he didn’t do something fast, they would be heading home instead of going to this meeting. But if this meeting will cause Ranpo more harm than good, then who is it for really? The thought was sudden, but welcome, because it reminded him that he was supposed to be keeping Ranpo’s best interests in mind, and while he knew that school would be beneficial to the kid in order to teach them what Fukuzawa could not, he also knew that Ranpo wasn’t just your typical kid; they were special.

He crouched before Ranpo and reached out to grab Ranpo’s hands with his own. “Is it just the adults that make you not want to go back to school, or is there another reason?”

Ranpo shrugged and ducked their head. “I just don’t want to.”

Fukuzawa knew that there was more than what Ranpo was saying, but it didn’t seem like he was going to get an answer anytime soon, not without causing the kid even more stress. Emotional conversations were best had at home, where there were plenty of blankets and hot chocolates, and not in the middle of a random street. “Okay. I’ll postpone the meeting—”

Hope brimmed in Ranpo’s eyes as they lifted their head.

“—but you need to tell me why the idea of school makes you so upset when we get home, alright?”

Ranpo looked reluctant, but nodded anyway. “Okay…”

“Come on then.” Fukuzawa placed a guiding hand on Ranpo’s shoulder. “If we’re not going to this meeting, that means we now have time to get something for lunch.”

And just like that, Ranpo brightened in an instant, grabbing Fukuzawa’s hand and pulling him away from the school. He listened as Ranpo chattered about all the restaurants and cafes they’d walked past on their way here, telling him which ones sounded interesting and which ones weren’t even worth visiting; it soon became clear that the chattering was just an attempt at distraction, and that Ranpo had already decided where they wanted to eat, because Fukuzawa was definitely hearing more negatives than positives for most of these places that he was hearing about. But still, he nodded and listened, using his free hand in the mean time to send a text to the school principal, apologizing for the last minute message, and asking to reschedule the meeting.

The principal responded almost instantly, telling him it was fine and that she was more than willing to wait until Ranpo was ready for the meeting.

How she knew that Ranpo wasn’t ready, he didn’t know, but it further solidified the idea that Ranpo attending the school—if he could convince Ranpo to at least look at it—wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“Ranpo.” Fukuzawa said now that they had more than enough free time. Ranpo paused in their rambling and looked up at him. “Why don’t we go eat at that new café that opened up a few streets over?”

“Do they have what I can eat?” Ranpo asked. “Cause I’m hungry, and I don’t want to starve.

“You won’t starve.” Fukuzawa rolled his eyes. “We’ll check the menu when we get there, and if they don’t, there’s the cafe that does have what you can eat at the other end of the street. Is that sufficient enough for you?”

“Yep! Now come on, hurry up, before I wither away into nothingness.”

“You are not going to disappear into thin air, Ranpo.” Fukuzawa sighed, although he was smiling at seeing Ranpo so energetic and happy.

“That’s what you think, Fukuzawa-san.”

As it turned out, the café did indeed have food that Ranpo ate—a lot of it in fact—and it became a mission to get Ranpo to agree to eating one or two things instead of the entire menu. Part of Fukuzawa was inclined to just let Ranpo eat everything in sight, because it wasn’t often that the kid actually had such a good day with food, and he wanted to treasure it while it lasted. But he pushed that side of him away; he was smart enough to know that allowing Ranpo to eat and eat was a recipe for disaster, that Ranpo would no doubt become ill from eating so much, and that wasn’t a battle Fukuzawa was willing to experience today.

Eventually, he managed to get Ranpo to choose an actual meal, and a sweet for afterwards—they both knew that he would eat the sweet first, but so long as he ate everything, Fukuzawa wasn’t going to complain. Too much. For himself, Fukuzawa chose a croissant and ordered a coffee—black—to go with it. And for Ranpo, they ordered a hot chocolate—with extra chocolate—along with some sort of pastry that Fukuzawa didn’t know, but Ranpo seemed ecstatic about, and katsudon, because apparently this café was a little fancier than most that just sold coffee and baked goods. Fukuzawa knew that he’d most likely be finishing the meal, but he would make sure Ranpo ate at least half of it.

And the entire time between arriving at the café, until now, Ranpo had not stopped talking.

Honestly, Fukuzawa was always impressed when Ranpo talked for hours on end, and he did try his best to listen and understand what it was that Ranpo was telling him about. Which wasn’t helped when Ranpo would jump and change topics like nothing else; he wasn’t kidding either, there’d been one day where he and Ranpo had travelled to the kids hometown, and one moment he’d been listening to Ranpo tell him about the town and everyone that lived there, and the next, they were talking about cats and how Fukuzawa should totally let them have a cat. Apparently, Ranpo had spotted a cat through the train window which was what prompted the topic change, but it had still been so sudden that Fukuzawa hadn’t known how to react, and had just stared until Ranpo got upset at thinking they weren’t being listened to.

So yes, Fukuzawa listened, but sometimes he did miss things.

At some point while Ranpo was talking, a waitress brought their food and drinks to them, and without missing a beat, Ranpo shoved food into their mouth and kept talking.

“Ranpo, don’t talk with food in your mouth.” Fukuzawa scolded gently, interrupting Ranpo’s tangent about some comic book series—one that Fukuzawa had picked up from a second hand store when Ranpo’s last shut down episode had resulted in them not leaving the bed, or their room, for three weeks straight—that they’d become obsessed with.

Ranpo pouted, but did as asked, and finished chewing before they spoke again. “I don’t get why people kick up such a fuss about eating and talking at the same time. As long as I’m not spitting food everywhere, why does it matter?”

“It’s just the polite thing to do. And it’s also a health hazard.” Fukuzawa explained as he sipped at his coffee. “If you talk and chew at the same time, you risk choking.”

“Oh.” Ranpo paused. “That’s stupid. Just don’t choke on your food.”

Fukuzawa chuckled. Of course Ranpo would come to such a conclusion. “It’s not as simple as that, but no mind. Just eat your food, and drink your drink.”

“Why?” Ranpo asked as they shoved another piece of meat into their mouth, chewing slowly. “Are we doing something else today?”

“I have a job to do this after—”

“Do I get to come?” Ranpo interrupted, mouth bulging with rice, and looking excited as they leaned over the table and invaded his personal space. Fukuzawa raised a hand and placed two fingers against Ranpo’s forehead, applying just enough pressure for Ranpo to get the hint. The kid looked sheepish then, and sat back in their seat. “Do I get to come?”

Fukuzawa made a show of looking thoughtful, bringing his coffee to his lips, and taking the longest sip he could get away with. He smiled behind the cup as Ranpo shifted in their seat, and tapped their fingers against the table. Three… two… one—

“Come on, Fukuzawa-san! Do I get to come or not?” Ranpo whined, throwing themselves against the table. “Don’t make me use my ability!”

“Yes, you are coming, Ranpo. They asked for you specifically, in fact.”

Ranpo’s eyes flicked open. “Really?”

Fukuzawa nodded. “Really. It’s not until this afternoon that we have to meet with the client, so we don’t have to rush.”

“We aren’t going shopping are we?” Ranpo asked, eyes narrowing; the reaction didn’t surprise Fukuzawa in the slightest, and he was quick to shake his head.

“No. But I did hear that the next book in that series you love so much dropped, but if you don’t want the copy that I had put aside for you, then we can just go home.”

“No, no, I want that book.” Ranpo grinned. Fukuzawa raised an eyebrow, and Ranpo sighed. “Please.”

Fukuzawa leaned back in his chair and placed his arms into his sleeves, letting his eyes slip shut for a few seconds before he opened them again, a small smile on his face. “With manners like that, how can I say no?”

“What is this? ‘Pick on Ranpo day’ or something?”

“It is actually, did you miss the memo?”

“Fukuzawa-san!”

“I need to pee; I’ll be right back!”

Those were the words Ranpo had left with him as they’d dashed from the table in the direction of the bathroom, and he’d watched the kid carefully until the door was safely shut behind them. And once it was, he leaned back in his seat and waited, mentally plotting out the rest of the day. First, they would stop by the bookstore and get the book, and then perhaps he would take Ranpo to a nearby park and let the kid run wild for a bit. Because as smart and intelligent as Ranpo was, they were still a child. And children—in his experience—loved parks. Besides, it would be good for Ranpo to have some time outside in the fresh air.

And after that, it should be time to go meet with—

“Is that you, Ranpo? Oh my, you certainly look better than the last time I saw you. Last time you were just a scrawny boy.” A voice made its way towards Fukuzawa’s ears, a voice that he definitely did not recognize, and he quickly looked for the source. He found it in the form of a man that looked to be a few years older than himself, sitting alone at one of the tables with a smile on his face. Ranpo stood next to the table, looking at the man, but everything from the way they held themselves to the polite smile on their face told Fukuzawa all he needed to know; that this interaction wasn’t welcome in the slightest.

Fukuzawa stood and approached quickly, and Ranpo was quick to look at him, relief in their eyes, and Fukuzawa was quick to give the kid an out. “Are you ready to go?”

Ranpo nodded, and grabbed onto his hand, and together they went up to the counter to pay and then left; the entire time, Ranpo clutched his hand with a death grip, silent as they stared at the ground. Fukuzawa swiped his thumb soothingly across white knuckles but didn’t say anything. He just continued to hold Ranpo’s hand and walk down the street. He didn’t know who that stranger was, but it was clear that Ranpo did, and that was enough for him to be cautious. There weren’t a lot of adults that Ranpo held in positive light—if there were any to begin with in the first place, and while he wanted to ask who that was, he knew better.

Ranpo’s hand disappeared from his own, and Fukuzawa reacted; spinning around to simultaneously grab at Ranpo and shove the man that had dared to grab at Ranpo in the first place. He tugged Ranpo behind him, taking a stance that placed him between Ranpo and the stranger, and he felt Ranpo’s hands clutch at his yukata, and their head press itself into his back.

“Woah, I don’t want trouble.” The man said, holding his hands up.

“Then leave.” Fukuzawa narrowed his eyes, wishing for once that he had his sword, because there was no way that this man would even dare to talk to them if he had his trusty old friend attached to his hip. But he didn’t, so he’d have to go with intimidating this man instead.

“I just want to talk to Ranpo. I helped him out once, so I wanted to see how he’s doing.”

It’s a lie, he’s after something else. Fukuzawa stood tall as Ranpo’s grip tightened even more. He studied the stranger in front of him closely. There was a smile on the man’s face, but there was something in his eyes that Fukuzawa didn’t trust, something… cruel, waiting to be unleashed. But short of incapacitating the man, he couldn’t think of a way to get him and Ranpo away with the man just straight up following them.

“Ranpo is fine. Now if that’s all, we have errands to run.”

“Oh, come on, why are you speaking for him? I know the boy can talk. He has quite the mouth on him after all.”

Before Fukuzawa can say anything, Ranpo poked his head around. “We have errands to run, we’re busy.” The words are quick and short, filled with nothing but apathy.

“Excuse us.” Fukuzawa bowed a little to feign politeness even though he’d much rather launch the man through the nearest wall, and turned on his heel, keeping Ranpo in front of him as he encouraged them to start walking.

They managed not even seven steps before the man called out. “I get it now. This old guy’s your newest play thing, isn’t he?”

Three things happened in that moment.

Ranpo froze, that haunted look that Fukuzawa hadn’t seen in months returning like it had never even left.

Fukuzawa immediately turned around, understanding immediately who this person was to Ranpo, and more than ready to murder him—sword or no sword.

And the man just grinned triumphantly, like he’d won the jackpot at the casino after cheating his way to the top.

“What did you just say?” Fukuzawa spat, worlds filled with a venomous anger he hadn’t felt in a long time, not since his assassin days. Who would’ve thought that all it took to bring that feeling back, was to meet the man that had dared to lay his hands on a child.

“I said, that you’re the boy’s newest play thing.” The man shrugged. “It’s okay if you didn’t know, after all, the boy’s quite smart, so there’s no shame if you did. But if you think he cares about you, he doesn’t; it’s just a ploy to take your money and get in your—”

“You watch your tongue.” Fukuzawa took a step forward, encroaching on the man’s personal space, and felt rather pleased with himself when the man took a step backward. His anger grew with every word that the man spoke, especially when he basically confirmed that he was the one that took advantage of Ranpo before he’d met them. “I know who you are, and you are lucky, that we are in public and that I don’t have my sword, otherwise I would kill you where you stand.”

“It’s hardly my fault when he—”

“Ranpo is not to blame for the actions that you took.” Fukuzawa reached out and snagged the collar of the man’s shirt, pulling him closer until he was right in his face. “At no point, was it okay to take advantage of—”

“Hey! Hey! It was consensual—”

“It doesn’t matter if it was! You are an adult! Ranpo is a child! The only correct answer here is that you should never have agreed in the first place!” Fukuzawa let go of the man’s collar and shoved him away before turning towards Ranpo, who had remained silent the entire time. He paused and looked over his shoulder, glaring. “Dare to approach Ranpo again, and you’ll regret it.”

He didn’t wait for a response; he’d already wasted enough time on this man, more than he deserved, and Fukuzawa was done. He was angry, and upset, and worried, because Ranpo was just standing there like their world had come crashing down before them. Fukuzawa reached out, and gently touched Ranpo’s shoulder, which seemed to spur the kid into moving, and they continued down the path, leaving behind the man.

Ranpo moved fast, faster than they’d ever moved before, and Fukuzawa could see the way that their limbs were starting to shake, the way their breathing was starting to tremble and seesaw, and he knew that panic was well on the way. As they passed an alleyway, Ranpo turned and walked ten steps before they fell to their knees and retched, everything they’d eaten for lunch coming back up. Fukuzawa hovered uneasily, unsure of whether Ranpo wanted to be touched or not right now, but when they gagged and threw up again, Fukuzawa moved, placing a hand on Ranpo’s back and moving it up and down their spine in a soothing manner.

“Just breathe.” Fukuzawa murmured as Ranpo choked and sobbed, tears running down their face to join the mess at their feet. He continued to murmur the words over and over again, hoping to calm Ranpo even just a little. He didn’t dare do more than what he was currently doing, in fear of making Ranpo’s panic worse, but then they did something that Fukuzawa didn’t expect.

They latched onto him.

Ranpo threw their arms around him, and buried their face into the crook of Fukuzawa’s neck, and although the sobs had quietened down, he could still feel the tears as they began to dampen his shirt collar. I have to get them home, now. Fukuzawa dropped down and lifted Ranpo into his arms, holding them like the child that they were, and began to walk. He sped down the streets, expertly dodging passerby’s as he focused on getting both him and Ranpo home. It was close to midday, so the streets were crowded, yet somehow, Fukuzawa managed to get through the worst of it.

Should he have called for a taxi to take them home? Probably. But he didn’t, and he blamed it on the fact that he was worried. This was the first time he’d seen Ranpo react in such a way, and with how tight the kid was clinging to him, he didn’t believe he would’ve been able to convince them to let go long enough for the car ride. It would be fine though, because Fukuzawa was moving fast, and he could already see the street they lived on in the distance, and he picked up his pace just a little so that he was almost jogging.

Ranpo had quietened by the time Fukuzawa was throwing his keys into the door, and at first, he’d thought that Ranpo had passed out from the intensity of their emotions, but the moment they crossed into the apartment, Ranpo shoved themselves away from Fukuzawa, falling to the floor as Fukuzawa lost his grip, and took off down the hall. He called out to Ranpo, but the bathroom door slammed shut a moment later, drowning out his words. Carefully, whilst also making his footsteps audible, he approached the door. He could hear Ranpo breaking down within, along with even more retching, and he felt his heart shatter just a little bit, along with the strong desire to go back and hunt that man down just to eviscerate him.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he focused on trying to think about how to help Ranpo in their current state. The bathroom was Ranpo’s safe place—for some unknown reason—and it was where they usually went when they wanted to be alone. But considering this was the worst case of panic that Fukuzawa had witnessed, he was reluctant to let Ranpo try and deal with it alone. He paced the hall, even raised his hand to knock on the door before forcing himself to abort that course of action. Wait… Fukuzawa paused and thought for a moment before he turned and entered his room, heading towards his closet. It didn’t take long to find that hoodie that Ranpo always stole when they weren’t having a good day, and he pulled it out of the closet before he went and entered Ranpo’s room, finding a pair of sweatpants that would hopefully be comfortable enough. It was a little too warm for the clothing in his arms, but Fukuzawa was more than willing to turn the air-conditioning on if it would help.

“Ranpo? I have a change of clothes for you.” Fukuzawa called out quietly as he knocked on the door. He waited patiently for a response, knowing that it could take a moment for Ranpo to figure out whether or not he wanted to open the door, and sure enough, the door cracked open. A single green eye peeked through the crack, before it withdrew and the door opened wider. An invitation, one that left Fukuzawa blinking because it wasn’t the norm. But he tried not to think too much about it as he placed the clothes on the floor by Ranpo’s feet. And then he looked over Ranpo.

Ranpo’s entire face was puffed and splotched with red, and still, they were crying, with visible tear tracks staining their cheeks. The shaking that Fukuzawa had felt the entire walk had eased off, but Ranpo’s hands were still trembling as they clutched at his knees, knuckles as pale as the rest of them. But the worst of it was the look in Ranpo’s eyes; a haunted look that almost made Ranpo appear dead from how unfocused their eyes were.

It made Fukuzawa want to wrap his arms around Ranpo and never let go.

“Do you need anything?” Fukuzawa asked, kneeling on the floor in front of Ranpo.

Ranpo shook their head.

“Water? Something to nibble on?”

Still, Ranpo shook their head.

“Would you like me to stay?”

Another shake.

“Alright.” Fukuzawa stood, slowly. “I’ll leave the door cracked. If you do need me, just shut it, and I’ll come, alright?”

A nod this time.

“And Ranpo?” He waited until Ranpo lifted their head. “My door will be open.”

Ranpo threw him an appreciative smile and another nod before they turned away and curled into a ball. Fukuzawa had force himself into moving, because every instinct of his was telling him to stay by Ranpo’s side to help them through whatever emotions they was feeling. But he knew it wasn’t as easy as that, and that Ranpo needed their own space at times. So, he left the bathroom, cracking the door as he said he would and went to his own room. He would pass the time with some reading.

It was well into the night when Ranpo finally emerged from the bathroom, and it certainly wasn’t a surprise when he heard the footsteps approach his own room instead. In fact, he’d been expecting it, which was why he’d left his door open and the light on. He looked up from his book to see Ranpo with a clean face and in the clothes he’d given them. He couldn’t see Ranpo’s face underneath the hood, but he had some idea of what kind of expression was on it. Placing the book he’d been reading down next to his futon, Fukuzawa shuffled over, and lifted the blanket. In an instant, Ranpo was there, curling up as close as he could, and Fukuzawa lay on his side so that he could draw Ranpo closer and provide a comforting presence for the kid. Once Ranpo was still, Fukuzawa asked. “How are you feeling?”

Ranpo’s head pressed against his chest, and their shoulders rise in a shrug. “I’m not okay.” They croak.

“I would be surprised if you were. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Ranpo shook their head vehemently, and Fukuzawa quickly rubbed at their back to soothe them.

“Alright. Get some rest. And remember, you’re safe. He can’t hurt you again.”

He listened as Ranpo sniffled and comforted the kid when he began to cry again, just holding them gently, until they drifted off to sleep with tears leaking from closed eyes.

For the next three days, Ranpo refused to leave Fukuzawa’s futon, no matter how much he tried to coax them into getting up and sitting on the couch. Every time he asked, Ranpo didn’t respond, just stared into the floor with blank eyes. He couldn’t even get Ranpo to eat; fruits were left untouched and snacks were ignored, and no amount of pleading could convince the kid to take just one bite. Water was quickly taking the same path, but Fukuzawa refused to let Ranpo dehydrate himself, so he put on that stern persona of his and nagged until Ranpo had drunk an entire glass of water.

Had Ranpo cried and lashed out when Fukuzawa had dragged them upright? Yes, yes they had; his cheek was still smarting from where Ranpo’s fist had caught him.

But the next time that Fukuzawa asked Ranpo to drink something, they sat up themselves and drank the glass before turning away from him and going back to sleep.

On day nine, Ranpo finally moved from the futon, sitting at the kitchen table, and nibbling on an apple that Fukuzawa had sliced up. Fukuzawa watched, relieved because for the past nine days, Ranpo hadn’t eaten anything—not even the shake that Fukuzawa had tried to get them to drink—and although Ranpo had certainly gone through longer periods without food, they’d been eating regular meals for months now, and the healthy weight that Ranpo had put on after many months of battling with food, was disappearing.

Fukuzawa’s relief didn’t last long though, because not even ten minutes after eating the apple, Ranpo was hunched over the toilet, throwing it back up. He tried not to let his worry overcome him then, because this was something that he could handle. After nine days without food, Ranpo’s stomach would be sensitive, so next time, he’d give Ranpo one or two slices, and just work his way up from there.

It wasn’t time to worry yet.

It was time to worry when he realized that Ranpo hadn’t been sleeping properly.

He didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed until ten days had passed, but somehow Ranpo had pulled the wool over his eyes and kept that knowledge from him. The only reason he’d discovered that Ranpo had been struggling with his sleep, was when, on the tenth night of this… shut down—or whatever it actually was—Ranpo woke up screaming. Literally.

Fukuzawa had managed to convince Ranpo to sleep in his own bed that night, mostly because he needed to wash the futon, and he’d made a makeshift bed for himself on the floor of Ranpo’s room because their own bed was far too small for the both of them. It was just one night, so he’d thought it would be fine.

It wasn’t.

The scream was loud and terrified, and Fukuzawa flew to his feet the instant it happened, ready to attack and defend his child. Only, there was no one in the room, and Ranpo was stuck in the midst of a dream. He’d shaken Ranpo’s shoulder’s until they’d woken, and the fear on their face, tore his heart into pieces. He’d gone to place a hand on Ranpo’s shoulder, to calm and soothe them, but Ranpo had taken one look at him in his half-asleep state and panicked, kicking out as they shoved themselves into the corner of the bed, begging for Fukuzawa to stay away in between the sobs.

“Stay away from me! Don’t touch me!” Ranpo cried, hands flailing as they tried to find something to grab onto and ground themselves with.

Fukuzawa grabbed a plush toy from the floor and offered it to Ranpo. “Okay, okay, I won’t come unless you want me to. But let me get you a glass of water?”

Ranpo snatched the toy and nodded, burying his face into the soft material of the plush.

A glass of water later, and Ranpo was tucked back under their blankets, clearly not sleeping, but at least resting. Meanwhile, Fukuzawa was on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed as he ran his hands through his hair, wondering what he was doing wrong. It’d been ten days of Ranpo suffering and not talking to him, and he wasn’t sure what else he could do to help. It was the most severe shut down he’d witnessed.

But he wasn’t going to give up.

Because Ranpo was worth the effort.

The sixteenth day was when the last of Fukuzawa’s sanity cracked and crumbled.

After sixteen days of not leaving the house, they’d begun to run low on food and other things, and so he’d left the house to go grab what he urgently needed from the convenience store just around the corner. Why he hadn’t just arranged for the items to be delivered like he usually did, he didn’t know—when he asked himself later, he told himself it was because he needed air to clear his head—but he’d left the house after waking Ranpo and explaining that he was just going to the store to grab some things.

Waking Ranpo was his first mistake. Leaving the house was his second.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone—he swore it wasn’t even fifteen minutes—but it’d been far too long for Ranpo apparently. Fukuzawa had returned from the convenience store to the distinct smell of blood, a smell that he was well attuned to because it had once been his job to spill the precious liquid. And considering that the only other occupant in the house was Ranpo, Fukuzawa panicked. He threw the bag from the convenience store onto the kitchen counter as he ran past it, following the smell to the bathroom.

And for the first time in his life, Fukuzawa froze.

He didn’t freeze for long, but it was long enough for Ranpo to notice his presence, and immediately, the tears that were already falling, began to fall even faster, and apologies began to spew from their lips. Fukuzawa grabbed one of the towels from the rack and fell to his knees, putting pressure on the wounds on Ranpo’s thighs.

“It’s okay.” Fukuzawa soothed. It’s not fine, this is not fine at all.

“I’m sorry!” Ranpo wailed, bringing their bloodied hands up to their face. Fukuzawa reached out with one hand to stop Ranpo, gently prying the blade from his hand first.

Fukuzawa’s hands shook as he grabbed a second towel. There was so much blood, so, so much blood, and he didn’t know what to do other than put pressure on the wounds and hope that he didn’t need to call an ambulance. Should I take them anyway? He asked himself, because this, this, wasn’t something he was equipped to deal with. And after sixteen days, he was only just realizing this. Should he have done something sooner? Should he have forced Ranpo into talking rather than waiting like he usually did? Questions like those swirled around his mind as Ranpo continued to cry and wail and apologize in front of him.

He continued to sooth Ranpo as the minutes ticked by, and after two had passed, he lifted the bloodied towels to see the damage underneath them, because in his haste to stop the bleeding, he’d neglected to look in the first place. Stupid, you know better. His movements were almost mechanical as he grabbed a cloth and wet it, using it to wipe up the blood that smeared Ranpo’s legs. How could he have missed this? Why hadn’t Ranpo come to him when they’d started feeling this way? He could feel tears forming in his own eyes as he asked. “Why, Ranpo? Why?”

“I don’t know!” Ranpo wailed, reaching out to grab at the sleeves of his shirt, spreading more blood around. “I’m sorry!”

“I know you are; I know.” Fukuzawa soothed as he gently cleaned around the wounds. Most of the cuts were shallow, and had stopped bleeding, but there were several deeper ones that were still bleeding, and it was those ones that Fukuzawa was worried about the most. “Ranpo, you need help—”

“No, no, no, please, I’m sorry!” Ranpo shook their head. “I’m sorry!”

“Ranpo, I can’t help you.” Fukuzawa could feel his own tears falling now. “I don’t know how to help you through this. I want to, I do, but I don’t know how to.”

“Please, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Ranpo continued to say, and at this point, Fukuzawa didn’t know what it was they were even apologizing for in the first place; it could’ve been for the past sixteen days, or it could’ve been for the bloody mess they’d created, but either way, the apologies hurt, because it wasn’t Ranpo’s fault to begin with.

It was Fukuzawa’s for failing to take care of them properly.

And now he had to fix it.

He picked Ranpo up, apologizing when the motion pulled on their injuries, and sat them on top of the counter so that he had hands free to grab the first-aid kit from under the sink. He continued to speak soothingly to Ranpo, telling them that he’d get them help, and that they’d be okay, and all the while, Ranpo continued to cry and apologize.

Fukuzawa began to hush Ranpo as he bandaged the wounds, telling Ranpo that it wasn’t their fault and that it was okay, and his words seemed to soothe them, because finally, they stopped apologizing. Tears still fell down their cheeks, but they were quiet now, chest hitching occasionally as they tried to stifle their crying. Once the wounds were bandaged, Fukuzawa put away the kit and cupped Ranpo’s cheeks in his hand, swiping his thumbs underneath their eyes to brush away the tears. He pressed a tender kiss to Ranpo’s forehead, and they let out another sob, and a quiet apology, before wrapping their arms around his waist.

Fukuzawa returned the embrace, and rested his head on top of Ranpo’s own. “We’re going to the doctor—” He wanted to take Ranpo to the hospital really, but he didn’t know how that would go; at least Ranpo’s doctor knew them— “and we’re going to get you help, okay?”

Ranpo started to shake their head, and Fukuzawa held them just that little bit tighter.

“I know you don’t want to, but this is the one time where I’m not giving you a choice.”

Fukuzawa considered it a blessing, that when he walked into the doctors clinic, completely forgetting that he needed to actually make an appointment in the first place, that Ranpo’s regular doctor had had a cancellation and agreed to see them. In just four minutes, he’d poured out to her everything that had happened over the past sixteen days, and she had listened carefully, nodding occasionally while Fukuzawa rambled.

She was gentle, as she encouraged Ranpo to sit on the bed, and unwrapped Fukuzawa’s harried bandage work, and she didn’t react when she saw the wounds; all she did was pull on some gloves, grab some supplies, and set about cleaning the wounds. Fukuzawa stood beside Ranpo, holding their hand firmly, whilst the doctor cleaned the smaller wounds and stitched up the larger ones before replacing the bandages and giving Ranpo a lollipop.

The entire time, Ranpo didn’t say a word, didn’t even move. It was like they’d retreated in on themselves entirely, doing as they were told, but not actually aware of the world around them.

“We have a psychologist at the clinic that I’d like Ranpo to talk to before you take them home today.” The doctor said as she typed out something on her computer. She paused for a moment to look up at Fukuzawa. “Based upon what you’ve told me today, and taking in Ranpo’s usual methods of coping, I believe it’ll be beneficial for him, and she can help develop a strategy so that what happened today, doesn’t happen again.”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” Fukuzawa asked, glancing over to where Ranpo still sat on the bed, sucking on the lollipop, and keeping occupied with one of the plushies that lived in the office.

“You’re their guardian, Fukuzawa-san, and Ranpo is still a minor, so really, it’s up to you to make that decision.”

“Okay…” Fukuzawa took a breath and returned his attention to the doctor, nodding once. He’d promised Ranpo that he’d get him the help he needed, so that was what he was going to do. “Arrange the appointment… please.”

-----

“Whatcha thinking about, old man?” Ranpo’s voice drew Fukuzawa from the memory, and he looked up to see them standing in front of him, hands on their hips. “Wait, let me deduce it—oh, you were remembering last year.”

“I was.” Fukuzawa nodded and stood from his seat, forcing Ranpo into taking a few steps back. “I was looking back on how far we’ve both come since that time. When did you get back?”

“Just now. Saeseki-san dropped me off because I was her last appointment. Said to send her regards, blah blah, the usual.” Ranpo said, as they followed him to the kitchen, bouncing ahead to raid the fridge for snacks. “She wanted to know where I got this dress as well, so I told her. I didn’t want to, but I did, but if I see her wear it at my next appointment, I won’t be happy. It’s mine.”

“I doubt that she will, so you don’t need to worry.” Fukuzawa nudged Ranpo out of the way, passing them the plate of watermelon that he’d cut up just before when Ranpo had been at his weekly appointment with the psychologist. He’d figured on a day like today, where humidity made one’s clothes stick to their skin—or in Ranpo’s case since he was just wearing one of his summer dresses, just gain a sheen of sweat across his skin—that Ranpo would appreciate the gesture. And if the way that they immediately began to munch on a slice was anything to go be, it was appreciated. “How did your appointment go?”

Ranpo hopped up onto the kitchen counter and shrugged around a mouthful of watermelon before they swallowed and spoke. “Same as usual. Asked me how I’ve been feeling, asked me if I’ve had any trauma responses, asked me if I’d left the house—which obviously I had because I was there…”

Fukuzawa listened as Ranpo continued to chatter, nodding, and adding his own comments when Ranpo gave him the opportunity to actually speak. As Ranpo continued to talk, Fukuzawa continued to move, grabbing out all the ingredients he needed for dinner that night and setting about preparing them. Ranpo made no effort to get off the counter, although they did move over a few inches, so, that was something.

He was cutting up the chicken when Ranpo suddenly changed the topic. “Saeseki-san wants you to come along to next week’s appointment as well.”

“Why?” Fukuzawa paused in his cutting and glanced over. Usually, Ranpo’s therapist would call him to give him updates on Ranpo’s progress; the only times he’d ever met the women had been at Ranpo’s first appointment just over a year ago, and two months ago, when Ranpo had nearly relapsed—nearly, because Fukuzawa’s gut instinct had kicked in and he’d run off the job early to get back home, only to find Ranpo in the bathroom, unharmed, but nearly not unharmed—so he was a little concerned as to why she would want to see him again.

“She wants to do twice weekly sessions for a bit, and she needs your permission.” Ranpo admitted quietly, after hesitating for several minutes.

Alarm shot through Fukuzawa, and Ranpo was quick to notice, raising their hands to try and calm him before he could start to panic.

“You don’t need to worry! We’re just about to start… working through, that part of my life… you know, the one you were remembering just before.” Ranpo dropped their head to stare at the floor. “She’s worried I might react badly since it’s taken us so long to get there, so she said it’s just a precaution.”

Fukuzawa remained silent for a moment, seemingly frozen in time before he nodded. “Alright then. I’ll clear my schedule.” He paused for a moment before dropping the knife and stepping over to draw Ranpo into a one armed hug.

Ranpo blinked before they returned the gesture. “Why are we hugging?”

“It’s my way of saying that I’m here if you need. Since you got tired of me saying it.”

“Well, yeah, you’ve said it a hundred and twenty-four times in the past year, of course I got tired of it.” Ranpo rolled their eyes and suddenly hopped off the bench. “Do you need help with dinner?”

“And have you burn our house down? No thank you. But there’s a present on the table for you.” Fukuzawa said as he went back to slicing up the chicken.

Ranpo gave him a dubious look. “I don’t like presents.”

“You’ll like this one.”

He listened as Ranpo shuffled over to the table, and had to stop himself from turning to stare as he heard Ranpo open the envelope he’d left there. He could tell that Ranpo was reading it, and he knew the moment that Ranpo finished reading it, because he had exactly three seconds to drop the knife before Ranpo threw themselves at him. Fukuzawa managed to shuffle them over to the sink so that he could wash his hands and dry them before he ran one through Ranpo’s hair. “I told you you’d like it.”

“He’s really gone?” Came the muffled question.

Fukuzawa nodded. “He’ll be going to prison for life. With no chance of getting out. Personally, I would’ve rather seen him killed—”

“You wouldn’t want his blood on your hands.” Ranpo interrupted and then looked up at him with tear filled eyes.

Fukuzawa’s eyes softened and he held Ranpo closer. “You’re right, I wouldn’t.”

“How did you and the police catch him?”

“We staked out the streets that had… children who would be of interest to him, and one of the officers caught him as he was trying to lure a child. I identified him, and he was pretty quick to spill everything once he recognized me, and they arrested him.” Fukuzawa explained, running a hand through Ranpo’s hair again when they shuddered in his arms. And then his voice turned soft, softer than he’d ever spoken to someone before. “You won’t ever have to see him again.”

He heard a sniff, and held Ranpo for a while longer, until they moved to pull away. Despite their red eyes, there was a smile on their face, one of pure joy and relief that brought a smile to Fukuzawa’s own face. To him, it finally felt like the last piece of the puzzle that was Ranpo’s life had fallen into place, and despite how devastating the kid’s past may be, Fukuzawa wouldn’t have them any other way.

Because Ranpo was his child and it was as simple as that.

[oddygaul]

The Hunger Games Cinematic Universe

To preface, it does feel a little weird to critique these movies as if they sprung from nowhere. They’re all pretty faithful adaptations, which is relevant because many of my problems with this series are structural / worldbuilding issues, and so aren’t necessarily the fault of the adaptation as much as the source material itself. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to rattle off some adaptations that took risks and made something fairly transformative - Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, or anything Masaaki Yuasa has adapted come to mind  - so fuck em, they’re fair game.

(I’d seen the first two movies a decade ago, and read the trilogy after that. Ballad and the Mockingjay films were new to me.)

The Hunger Games

Okay, so the original holds up as far as I’m concerned. What sets it apart from much of the post-apocalyptic or action YA that I’ve seen is ultimately how grounded it manages to keep its portrayal of all the kids. I think a lot of fiction with a similar premise tend to falls prey to Anime Syndrome: yes, all the characters are 16 or 17 or whatever, and the authors will make them do some classic teen angst things like get into stupid arguments and be deeply hormonal, but they fail to have the kids react to the horrifying situations they find themselves in convincingly. This is the plight of any battle shounen: the characters are literally fighting to the death against some manner of horrible supernatural monster, or even other human beings, yet will be written like a little devil-may-care badass, or even be stoked about getting to tEsT tHEiR LiMitS! If you’re going for a fun action show, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to sell it as a drama, you’ve already lost your biggest chip.

The Hunger Games (the first one, mind) never forgets that all its characters are young as hell. The absolute shaking terror of the cornucopia, the wide eyed panic as Katniss and Foxface come face-to-face and realize that neither of them wants to do harm, even Cato’s eleventh hour realization that his entire life and persona are ultimately meaningless*, all fill the story with a pathos that makes the movie work, despite some inherent YA cheese.

*Probably my favorite addition to the movie.

I really love the stupid-ass beard they gave this guy

Catching Fire

Yeah, this is where it starts to fall apart for me. The first act prior to the Games is pretty compelling; our look into Katniss’ PTSD, her and Peeta’s inability to reintegrate into society as if nothing happened, and the acute, sudden horror they’re slammed with upon realizing they’re being forced back into the games are all handled incredibly well. The first half hour of this movie feels like slowly waking up from a bad dream, only to realize you’re still asleep.

After that, though… eh.

I think what bothers me about the Games themselves in this one is that everyone taking part is an adult now. Part of what makes the concept of the Hunger Games so brutal is the age of the contestants - and not merely in a pearl-clutching, oh-jeez-it’s-so-horrible-to-see-this-violence-done-upon-the-youth sort of way. There’s just a special abhorrence tied to watching a bunch of children, who ought to have their whole lives ahead of them, slowly have the dawning realization that their whole world is now this mere microcosm, in which their only options are murder or death. Watching this emotional turmoil play out differently for each character is what makes the setup compelling; horrible, wrenching, but compelling.

So, having the idea for this one be that these grown-ass adults, each of whom has (by definition of being a victor) gone through this incredible trauma before, is willing to go back again and fight like it was the first time? I dunno, it feels goofy to me. And I’m not saying they have a choice to participate - I know it’s mandated - I mean that once they’re in the arena, half of them seem to go “oh well, here I go killin’ again!” like they’re clocking in for a job. It’s not like they’re sliding back into their old psychology by force once they’re in the arena, either - even in the training center, the careers are doing their usual sneering badass routine. You could make the argument that successful careers are the most likely to have child actor syndrome - that they stopped emotionally maturing after the Games and are stoked to be back in their element, Football Player That Peaked in High School style - but that feels so reductive.

I guess the fact that half of the tributes get in on the Secret Rebellion Plan kind of addresses this - they are working toward a goal in the background - but it still feels off. I wish the movie spent more time exploring the mindset of all the contestants before the games started to flesh out their motivations. As is, the Games here no longer feel like blood sport exploring the psychological response to trauma - they’re just blood sport.

Also, the violence feels very sanitized. Say what you will about the shakycam used in the first movie (it is undoubtedly excessive at times), but the confusion it provides combined with the blood makes the 74th Games feel absolutely terrifying. It gives the sense that no one is prepared for how primal things are becoming as the situation descends into a barbaric haze of violence. In Catching Fire, meanwhile, the bloodbath feels like it’s by-the-numbers for everybody - Katniss and friends group up and just start killin’ Bad Guys** right off the bat like it’s nothing, barely even watching their backs as they talk to each other. I read that the director of #2 and on made an intentional decision not to show blood, because he doesn’t like ‘glorifying violence’... I truly don’t understand how showing a bunch of characters cleanly and effortlessly killing other people like they’re in a Marvel movie is any better.

**This is just a symptom of my larger issues with the worldbuilding, but I really think the careers and their motivation get such short shrift in these movies. They explore it a bit in the first movie, but in Catching Fire they’re fully content to have the careers be easy Evil Bad Guys that the viewer isn’t supposed to feel bad for when they die. It’s another touch that betrays its YA roots, and reminds me of Harry Potter - “Welcome to Hogwarts! We’ve sorted you into the evil house for evil, no-good children, which exists because we need to have antagonists.”

This is also where the rebellion bits start popping up, but I’ll talk about those in a moment because…

Mockingjay I & II

…that’s what these entire movies are about and it’s so, so dicey.

Honestly, to me it feels like Collins had a great idea for a standalone book, but then, by dint of it being YA, was obligated to have the characters eventually band together to take down the big bad Capitol, and just didn’t have a great grasp on how the wider world worked or what a strong revolution story looks like. I think this story worked the best when it was only a small snapshot of the world, with all the periphery implied; the more it’s forced to get into the real nitty gritty of how the setting works, the more ramshackle and unbelievable everything feels, and Mockingjay is where it hits a breaking point. It’s not that there are plot holes, exactly, it’s that we see so little of the wider world that everything feels grossly oversimplified.

I think this is where these films’ dogged adherence to the source material really screws them over. While the books are also lacking in worldbuilding and context from the perspective of other characters, it makes sense there because the books are all first-person POV. Of course we don’t get cutaways to citizens in the Capitol ruminating on their role in all this, or seeing the inner workings of the Peacekeepers to give them any characterization whatsoever outside of being blank plastic suits, because Katniss doesn’t see that. Since the movies have fully done away with this conceit, though, the omission of these supporting scenes feels glaring - especially when the movies are trying so hard to push this theme that everyone has their own fight, and both sides have a reason for their actions.

So, on that note, thematically it’s a fucking mess. It dips its toes into a dozen different themes without really firmly exploring any of them, leaving it feeling indecisive and tonally inconsistent. For example, Mockingjay I spends its intro showing the effect Katniss’ PTSD is having on her, and challenging the idea that just because someone has gone through trauma, they’re a hero and ought to be set up as the mouthpiece of the revolution - how can you ethically put the responsibility of leadership on someone who gets the shakes every time they hear a bang? …but then, not to worry, show her a cool superhero outfit and she’s out there shooting down gunships with fuckin Hawkeye arrows by dinnertime.

And the wider revolution story has many similar issues. What’s your message? Dictators are bad? Wow, what a take. Both sides committed atrocities, so they’re both bad? Politics are hard and messy, and you just gotta keep your head down and hope you can retire to the country? Yeah, way to really take a hard stance on that one.

If I put all that aside, it generally works as a character piece - Katniss and Peeta’s development over the course of the story, in particular, is well done through and through, and it feels rare to see a broad appeal series like have the nerve to take its leads to such dark places. There’s also a lot of surprisingly great character acting throughout; my personal standouts are Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci, and (surprisingly) Woody Harrelson, but there’s honestly not a bad actor in the bunch, which is impressive. Still, with the subject material being so heavy, it’s hard for me just to take it at face value like that, and I wish they shored up the weaker elements a bit.

I’m just saying, if you spend that much of your screentime showing crowds of children being murdered by IEDs, I think you ought to be building towards a strong statement. 

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Yeah, this one felt like a waste of a movie in a really weird way. The execution was incredibly well done - lots of solid acting, production design, etc, which is a huge waste because the basic premise of the movie is fucking worthless.

So, the whole point, I would say, of doing a prequel is to flesh out interesting parts of your universe that you didn’t have time for in the original work. Unanswered questions, a character’s past that you want to learn more about, a deeper dive into parts of the world or lore that weren’t touched on but caught people’s imagination. The Hunger Games series has plenty of gaps that need to be filled: I said above how incredibly small the world seems due to barely exploring any of the capitol, other districts, etc., so it was ripe for a prequel or spinoff! Let us spend some time in other districts, see how other people live and feel about the whole thing. Even if we’re not going post-war, and are going back to the era of the Games (which of course we would), there’s 75 years worth of questions to explore.

Instead of focusing on any of that, the premise of this movie (/book) is “Hey, you know the villain from the original story that seemed like a huge, irredeemable piece of shit? Let’s spend a two and a half hour runtime telling you his backstory, which will show you that actually… he’s always been a piece of shit”. Wow. Spellbinding.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a main character being a bad person. Particularly, if your character is charismatic, they don’t necessarily have to be right or good to be interesting to watch; there’s a certain magnetism to watching that for a lot of people. It’s never been my cup of tea, to be honest; whether pegged as comedy (Always Sunny) or drama (Breaking Bad), I get fed up really quickly when I hate everyone in a piece of fiction. But done correctly, it can still be interesting - showing how a character ended up where they are, showing you a rare good side of them you’d never seen, or showing that they used to be moral, but just happened to be tested one too many times and fell off the deep end.

Snow is none of these. He’s a piece of shit from the first time we see him, he consistently acts like a piece of shit to everyone around him, and then he ends up, in fact, being a piece of shit***. What’s interesting about that?

***I think the most generous interpretation I could give of his character is a piece of shit who briefly dabbles in transactional friendship after Lucy Gray saves him from the rubble, then shortly thereafter returns to being a piece of shit. Which I still do not find especially compelling.

Even outside of that, it’s one of those prequels that does nothing but make the world feel smaller - rather than expanding on any of the dozens of untouched ideas in the series, we spend a bunch more time in District 12, and show that, actually, it turns out Snow and his hangups are the only reason anything happened in this universe for nearly 100 years. From Katniss’ name to the Hanging Tree song she sings, turns out half the things we learned in The Hunger Games resulted from this one particular guy’s life story. In a series that already felt like the world was too small and was in desperate need of expansion, further narrowing the scope feels like such a misstep.

Why yes, I did need to know exactly what the Kessel Run was!

Odds & Ends

I mostly blocked out my memories of Mockingjay the book from the single time I read it back in the day, because I thought it was booty, but the one thing I remembered liking that they changed up was Finnick’s death. In the book, he’s just there one moment and gone the next, without any fanfare or time to grieve, which serves to make his death feel especially cruel. I suppose it was inevitable, but counter-intuitively, the Big Hollywood Death Scene they gave him here felt a lot less impactful.

-------

A point about the series in general: boy did the costume design bother me. It’s interesting, because all I remembered about it from when this series blew up was the gaudy Capitol style and how crazy the internet was about it. Watching these movies again, I feel like that success was a total fluke, because everything else is goofy as hell. The way that every district has their own bespoke fucking Civil War re-enactment outfits is wild - look, the ‘District 11 is just one big Southern plantation’ thing was always really obvious, but seeing each district dressed up like they're from competing historical re-enactment groups was wild.

The prequel turns this up to 11. I feel like someone on the team though they were real clever - this one’s set 60 years earlier, so let’s make all the outfits and design retro! What? People in flapper clothes, the lake scene with their 1940s swimsuits, even the logo and graphic design in the Hunger Games broadcasting room looking like it’s from the 50s - it doesn’t make any fucking sense. Yeah, they’re set decades before the original books - in the year, like, 2300. What, everyone just forgot how to do graphic design again after the war? Fashion is cyclical, but not like this…

--------

Also, movies 1 and 2 in particular definitely have some uncomfortable racial dynamics going on. I was already weirded out that a lot of the districts seem to be separated by ethnicity, but as you go on, it’s hard to ignore how nearly every Black person seems to exist solely to help Katniss along in her quest before dying horribly and usually on-camera. Rue, Thresh, Cinna, even that old man that flashes the salute in District 11… it’s remarkably consistent.

[comic-bastards]

Review: Strange Planet – S1E01 – The Flying Machine

By Dustin Cabeal

If you've been on any kind of social media or meme factory, then you've likely seen Nathan Pyle's relatable webcomic featuring blue Allenesque beings that overly explain and yet simplify all the same things we humans do.

The first episode's title and storyline highlight this contradiction: "The Flying Machine." Of course, it's an airplane, but that is Pyle's brilliance – he takes something like alcohol and refers to it as a "Mild Poison." He's factually correct, but does anyone want to call it that while consuming it? No, but it's hilarious in this setting. And I don't really know what to call that overly complicated explanation that's somehow more direct and simplified than the word itself. I'm sure there's a simpler term for it, but I'm going to have to stick with the longer explanation that my rambling self has created.

Back to the episode itself, it's a layered episode. It's about planes/flying but also about overcoming changes and adapting. The plane is our plot device that guides our story from point A to B, but the "being" connections are what's relatable and keep the animated series connected to Pyle's comic strips. The A storyline follows a Comfort Supervisor who's really good at their job (I'm assuming a gender-neutral perspective here since they all look like blue/gray alien blobs) and is suddenly promoted to Supervising Comfort Supervisor or something similar to that. They're dealing with the new responsibilities and how their co-workers treat them now that they're the ones in charge.

Finish reading on Comic Bastards

[intrepidradish]

Media: Dragon Ball Z

Year/my age: 2002/12

What drew me to the media:

I came home from highschool everyday and had a small tv with a built in vhs in my closet. It was 4:30pm and toonami was on Cartoon Network. I watched the entire Cell Saga and Majin Boo like a fiend. It was a shitton of episodes! Ugh. It's almost impossible to watch all the way through now, but maybe because as an adult I want like...more plot motivated writing. One of the best fanfic foder aspects of DBZ is that so much is left open to interpretation. I didn't question the filler episodes as a kid. I just liked all the muscles and screaming. The animation/manga style remains super duper fun. But mostly I found DBZ memorable because of Vegeta. I got truly invested in him as a character, because for most of DBZ, he really lets you down. I think TV shows love to harp on tropes for children, ie the bad man becomes a good man and all his values change to match the good characters *sparkles*, because they think morally those are the stories that should be told to children. Which is sad, honestly. Vegeta doesn't fall into that arc. He remains...kind of a bitch... and his character arch is fantastic and long and hard and he fucks up a lot and he doesn't really apologize for any of it. This was amazing to see as a preteen. Teaching failure to a child is really hard, and I think that America's school system is really bad at even attempting to. But failure is super important. Because all of life that child cum adult is going to fail, and its going to suck.

What made me a fan:

In college, I did another pass of DBZ, and whoa, developing adult horny brain really went into spiral knots wondering...so what the fuck... Bulma and Vegeta... had sex? They made a child. They made Trunks. So they had sex, right? I think this is pretty common a reaction. And as soon as you think that, well... the next step is... 'wait wait wait, how did they have sex? why did they have sex? what did that even look like?' And that's what sends you scouring the internet at 1am in your underwear (covertly, because you're in a dormitory with three other roommates).

I wish I could put to language what is it about romance that sends people into fandom holes. Romance is really important to fandom. I think it has something to do with how regimented relationships are in mass media. They aren't diverse. Most main stream romance is very streamlined and never gets into the messy odd bits without being labeled as some kind of edgy cusp drama. I don't know. But relationships seem to be the spring board for fandom hijinks. I'm all about it. I'd rather have fake blorbo relationships in my brain to obsess over than the real world. That shit gets you into trouble.

Oh god, and what an indicator of future dispositions. If you get into the Vegebul fandom, a lot of them are rape stories (because god forbid, a woman could want a shitty asshole alien man to bone at night. Bulma has her own set of problems, specifically with vanity being high up there). But yeah they were hot and I was pretty ashamed about the whole thing.

I was such a baby then.

Have I written fanfiction for it?

YES. One winter vacation, I wrote a 40 page fanfiction. This was probably in 2010? It was UNFINISHED, but I was incredibly sweaty the entire time, trying to build up to a spanking scene. (Yes, 40 pages of build up for spanking. I'm embarrassed for myself.) My computer crashed and the entire document was corrupted. My first fanfic was lost. RIP

Opinion on the fandom:

Pretty chill. I didn't interact with it much besides reading secretly. Originally, I was reading on fanfiction.net. When I came back to it years later (once again after college, I got my husband into it) I was reading fanfic for it on Ao3. I run into other Vegebul's periodically. They are all in their late twenties, early-late thirties. I follow someone here on tumblr that wrote this fantastic long series (100+ chapters) called Pillow Talk which is on Ao3. It's fucking incredible about showing the ups and downs, ins and outs of their relationship, because they do wind up together in canon (which is wild).

The most recent interaction I had was in the kink community, which was like *sigh* 'god, we are so fucking predictable, aren't we?' We had a good laugh! But he was trans masc too, chilling in a femme body, so we clicked right away about it.

I also remember I had an annoying conversation with my stepbrother once about tattoos. I don't have any, so they were asking why I don't. I said "If I started to get tattoos it would be a slipper slop before I start making bad decisions like getting a full Vegeta arm sleeve." Their mouths twisted in that judging you face and said "yeah don't do that." Like...ahem. My point exactly.

I think people get pretty judgy in general about Vegebuls because its a 90s kid's show, and its not a very good one. But being a Vegebul is kind of like... realizing your parents have sex. It's part of 'coming of age'.

Would I participate again:

Hell yeah, I would. Once a Vegebul always a Vegebul. The biggest hurdle for me would be catching up on all the new material. I watched Dragon Ball Super and found it lackluster. GT was so bad, I cannot. Something that's commonly an issue for me is the amount of subject material required to understand a story in fanfiction. I'll get into it later with other fandoms, but if the lore gets too big, I suddenly don't know how to participate.

Master post

[cambion-companion]

I am so tired of the "who's fault it is" for the events of Driftmark. Did everyone forget that these children were trained by Criston Cole? Who, as we just saw in the episode before, was all about winning, who didn't care for the 'weaker opponent' or 'fairness'? Criston, like all the other adults in this series, was training them for war. To win. The point of the squabble in Driftmark was to show that its already too late. The trauma from the adults has already passed to their children. Aemond, who hours before tries (and fails) to console his nephews, declares they will "die screaming just like their father did". Are those his own words? Or did he learn them from Alicent/Otto/Criston etc. The events of Driftmark are supposed to be deeply flawed on both sides. They are just doing as they have been taught. Aemond lost his eye, but he also claimed a dragon that was not 'meant' (intended) to be his, just after the death of Laena. Of course its bad and insensitive. But so was the teasing he received from his brother and nephews. It was a desperate move by a hurt individual. So was Rhaena confronting him, who, no doubt, feels a similar shame for being dragonless. People pointing fingers at Aemond or Lucerys or Jace etc, and ignoring the fact it's their parents and role models that are entirely guilty for inflicting their trauma and prejudices upon their children. Aemond takes Vhagar, but Luke takes his eye. Aemond takes Luke's life and Rhaenyra retaliates. And so the cycle continues.

Agreed, they were all kids. People condemned Aemond for punching a girl but again they're kids (and she hit first). People condemn Aemond for raising the rock but again...they're kids. And I fully believe he had no intention of using it. People condemn Aemond for "stealing" Vhagar when an unclaimed dragon belongs to no one nor is it inherited. People condemn Aemond for just about everything and ignore how hypocritical they sound insodoing...I'm on a tangent now 😒

Yes, blame the parents. Luc got zero discipline for cutting out another child's eye (as far as we know). Thus of course he feels like it's nbd, and Aemond deserved it.

[queenshelby]

My Friend’s Father (Part Three)

Pairing: Cillian Murphy x Reader

Warning: Smut

Words: 2,947

Notes:

I have decided to make this into a series.

Alright, no judgment. This was a dream of mine and I felt like I had to write it down. Everyone in this Fic is over the age of 18 and this Fic is in no way based on Cillian’s real family life. It’s pure filth.

 *************************

Cillian’s POV

Shortly after Denise got home from her rather miserable date with Jeremy, Cillian went to bed. It was only 9 o’clock but he thought that he would spend some time finishing reading the book he had started to read two nights ago.

The problem was that, even when he tried hard to focus on the content of the book, he couldn’t.

His mind was overrun with guilt about what had happened between you all so suddenly and unexpectedly and he still wasn’t so sure why he had given into you so easily. It was almost like he had lost all of his self-control in that moment.

This kind of behaviour was unusual for him. Usually, he would have been more sensible than this. After all, he was 45 and never had a one-night stand in his entire life.

Would you share this with anyone?

Probably not, he thought. He had known you for a while and you weren’t the type of woman who was actively seeking attention. You were always somewhat nerdy and a bit of loner. For years, he had known you to be sensible and he always liked that you were looking out for his daughter Denise. You were more mature than her and were always somewhat shy and reserved.

With this in mind, he was even more surprised by your actions. You seducing him the way you did seemed out of character for you which made him nervous.

Did you have feelings for him?

He certainly hoped that you didn’t. For him, this was nothing but sex and he would hate to give you the feeling that it was something more. He didn’t want to hurt you.

He should never have given into you. He knew that it was wrong and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he acted so selfishly because, in his mind, this was exactly what it was. An act of selfishness.

You were young and clearly inexperienced which made this whole thing even worse. It was obvious to Cillian that you hadn’t been with many men before and he felt as though he took advantage of you even despite the fact that you were the one who made a move on him. He should have stopped you.

The fact that he is seeing someone else in Manchester didn’t help either and, whilst it wasn’t anything serious or exclusive, it felt wrong to him to be intimate with you which, in his own mind, brought him to another dilemma all together.

Why didn’t he use protection when he slept with you?

He knew that he could have simply walked into his son’s bedroom and find what he needed. But he didn’t. Instead, he was so consumed by lust that he forgot all about the need to be play it safe. Of course, he always reminded his adult children about the importance of protection and yet, he failed to adhere to his own rules.

Whilst he knew that you didn’t have many sexual partners and any risk associated with contracting STDs was somewhat low, he worried that you weren’t on birth control.

Why on earth didn’t he at least ask you about it? Was it too late to ask you now? Why did you make him pull out?

WHAT THE FUCK HAD HE DONE???

He panicked and he knew he had to talk to you in order to ease his mind.

YOUR POV

After you listened to Denise about her date gone wrong and what an asshole Jeremy actually was, you also made your way to bed. You felt terrible for her but knew that she would meet someone else who would make her happy and treat her well.

But her date with Jeremy wasn’t the only thing you felt terrible about. Even more so, you felt terrible about sleeping with her father which you knew was wrong and yet, you tried to justify it in your head.

Why did you act so selfishly and gave into your sexual needs?

This was something you had never done before. You were rather careful when it came to getting yourself involved with guys.

You had taken a liking in your friend’s father several years ago when you were 19. But then, it was just a silly crush you thought.

When you heard about his divorce however, you began to fantasise about him in your sleep and this was simply a fantasy you had finally acted upon.

This, however, didn’t change the fact that he was your friend’s father.

Would she mind if she knew?

Maybe she wouldn’t. She might just think that you are disgusting for sleeping with her dad but, in the end of the day, you are two consenting adults.

Why couldn’t you stop even when you realised that what you were doing was wrong?

When you made the first move it was almost like you were in a trance. You were overwhelmed. You wanted every bit of it but you never experienced sex quite like this. It was intense and he certainly knew what he was doing.

Whilst Cillian was much older than you, you were extremely attracted to him. Everything about him was perfect in your mind and he felt incredible when he was inside you.

You wanted so much more and thought that, perhaps, if it was just sex, it wasn’t wrong after all.

Together Again

Just as those thoughts raced through your mind, you heard a quite knock on the door.

Thinking that it was Denise, you didn’t bother to cover up as you were sitting on the guest bed in black cotton panties and a tight cotton singlet.

To your surprise, however, it wasn’t Denise who walked into the guestroom when you called out ‘come in’. It was Cillian.

His chin dropped as soon as he saw you. For some reason, he took a liking in your rather simple but yet revealing outfit, your messy hair and your black framed reading glasses.

‘Hey’ you simply said shyly as he was standing there speechless.

‘Hey’ he responded, swallowing harshly before telling you that he needed to talk to you.

‘Sure’ you said, putting the magazine down which you were reading along with your reading glasses. Then, you scooted over on the bed and indicated to him to sit down next to you.

His scent was intoxicating. He was freshly showered and his hair was still wet but you could still smell a hint of his aftershave on him.

‘So, what do you want to talk about?’ you asked without bothering to cover up your naked skin and you could see Cillian’s mind working overtime while the tension was building.

‘About what happened between us’ he then stammered while he observed your eyes wandering towards where they shouldn’t. But, you couldn’t help it and, when you noticed that he was reacting to your presence, you bit your lips seductively.

‘What happened between us was just sex. It’s not a big deal. People have sex all the time and you can trust me Cillian. It will remain our little secret’ you said in a seductive voice while moving your hand over Cillian’s upper thigh, through the hairs on his exposed skin and then all the way towards the rim of his boxers.

‘Y/N’ he barely managed to stammer, swallowing harshly.

‘Yes Cillian?’ you then smirked, noticing the effect you were having on him and moving your hand farther up his legs and beneath his boxers where you began to stroke his cock.

‘You are so hard’ you then whispered as you received no response from him other than a groan and, just as you did, Cillian took hold of you and pushed you beneath him in one swift movement.

Without words, Cillian’s warm lips met yours in a passionate kiss. The kiss was more urgent than before and you loved the way he asserted his dominance as his tongue circled around yours.

He felt such desire for you that he thought he would explode and, whilst he was normally quite vocal, every word he tried to say and every question he was going to ask you, were caught in his throat.

Wrapping your arms round him you ran your hands up and down his firm back as your mouths ground together. Sucking on each other's lips and plunging your tongues into each other’s mouth.

You couldn’t believe how wonderful it was to be kissed in such an experienced, almost sophisticated way and Cillian was marvelling at how someone so young could have learned to kiss so well.

Within split seconds and in between heated kisses, Cillian’s t-shirt and your singlet landed on the floor.

It wasn’t long until Cillian’s mouth left yours and began to wander over your firm breasts and then all the way down to your stomach which is where they came to a halt.

He interlocked his fingers with your panties and pulled them down, letting them join the other clothes on the floor before his head gracefully disappeared in between your legs.

‘It goes without saying, but you need to be quiet’ Cillian chuckled and you barely managed to nod before you covered your own mouth with the palm of your hand as Cillian dipped his tongue straight into your wetness.

‘Oh god yes’ you whimpered quietly as the rasping roughness of his tongue slid along your velvety wetness and sent enormous tremors through you.

You had little experience of either, receiving or, giving oral sex. In your world of mainly inexperienced boys, it was hardly on the agenda as they were generally too keen to get their rocks off to worry overly about your pleasure. In any case in the usually rushed episodes in the back of cars or downstairs with parents in bed there was hardly the time let alone the opportunity for languid pussy licking or sensual cock sucking. In the world of the forty-five year-old man lying between your opened legs, however, it very much was on the agenda and he seemed to enjoy it just as much as you did.

You moaned loudly as you were holding Cillian’s head in both hands as he licked the length of your pussy. He did it slowly with just the right amount of pressure making sure that the tip of his tongue fully anointed both lips and licked just inside them on that especially sensitive area.

When you moaned a little too loudly again, he reminded you to be quiet just before he sucked and kissed you again, covering every inch of the outside of your pussy before pushing the straightened tip of his tongue inside and probing upwards licking the insides as he started to tongue fuck you.

‘This feels so fucking good’ you stammered, legs shaking and quivering while Cillian held you tightly and it wasn’t long until you reached an orgasm which sent convulsions through your body.

You moaned a little too loud again as your whole body tingled and felt tender to the touch and tears of pleasure and relief, with a tinge of guilt, poured down your cheeks.

‘That was amazing’ you eventually huffed out as you slowly came down from your high and Cillian kissed his way back up your body until his lips reached yours.

‘You taste so fucking good’ he then whispered into your ear after your lips drifted apart and, just as he did, you reached in between his legs and began stroking his cock which was still rock hard.

‘I want to feel you inside me again…please…just once more’ you begged and the sound of you begging alone made Cillian groan.

‘Fuck Y/N…I want you so much’ he whispered as he pulled down his boxers and his wiggling body urged your legs to open so that his cock lay between your thighs with the bulbous end of it pressed against your lips.

‘Then take me’ you groaned marvelling at the fact your friend's dad was about to fuck you.

With the tip of his cock just slightly parting the lips of your pussy and his arms round your body with his hands gripping your taught bum he muttered something you couldn’t understand. It was obvious to you that his mind was hardly able to accept what was happening. Nonetheless, he wanted it so badly and, with a shrug of his hips, he sank his cock deep into your gorgeously tight and wonderfully welcoming pussy.

‘Oh god yes, Cillian’ you groaned as your fingernails were digging into his back.

He pushed himself in as far as it would go, eliciting more groans from you which he had to quickly silence with his lips.

You felt light-headed and deliriously happy. You also felt very filled. Cillian was bigger than the other guys you had been with and you loved the feeling of being stretched. The folds of skin that guard your clit seemed to be open and that so sensitive place felt to be exposed, so as Cillian started moving slowly up and down it was as though his cock was rubbing on it. You had never felt anything like it before. Just as you had never felt like cumming when a man's cock had only been inside you for a few moments.

Somehow, however, you managed to delay your release just a little bit longer, enjoying as Cillian thrusted into you hard and deep until, eventually, the inevitable happened.

‘Let go, there is no need to hold back’ Cillian reassured you and, just as he did, you allowed your orgasm to wash over you.

‘Oh god Cillian, fuck’ you shouted out and he quickly covered your mouth with his hand as he continued to thrust into and watched you lose control.

Your legs were shaking once again as you gave in and, when you finally came down, Cillian pulled out of you.

Thinking that he was done and that he wanted you to proceed as before, you scooted up but, to your surprise, Cillian pulled you on top of him instead.

‘Your turn to take what you need Y/N’ Cillian whispered and you couldn’t help but shiver at his words. He wanted you on top and that was yet another first for you.

‘You can cum again’ he then said but you couldn’t help but shake your head.

‘I don’t think I can, but I am willing to try’ you smirked. He had already given you four orgasms that day which were four more orgasms than anyone else before him had given you.

‘I bet you can’ he then winked and you nodded shyly before taking his hard cock into your hand and lining it up with your entrance.

‘I will be sore tomorrow I think’ you whispered as, with a moan, you sank down on his hard cock.

‘Yes, you will be’ Cillian chuckled as, all of a sudden, he thrusted upwards and deep into your mound, causing you to cry out in pleasure.

Once again, he covered your mouth with his hand as you began to ride him.

‘You feel so fucking good, you know that?’ Cillian groaned as you began to move up and down on his hard shaft. He certainly had become vocal now and you loved it.

‘So tight around my cock’ he then groaned as he met your thrusts and he could hear you starting to whimper.

‘Oh god…yes, fuck my pussy’ you moaned quietly, holding his hand and keeping it near your mouth while sucking on his fingers.

‘Cum inside me Cillian. I want to feel it. Fill me with your cum’ you then demanded as you began to ride his cock harder and faster and, by this point, Cillian had lost all self-control.

The dirty talk, the tightness of your pussy and the way your lips played with his fingers was too much for him.

‘Cum with me Cillian’ you then moaned as you let go and so did he.

‘Oh god Cillian, yes…fuck’ you groaned as such amazing feelings flooded your body and you felt him push into you as far as he could go.

‘Fuck Y/N’ grunted as you both climaxed simultaneously and you soared to a height of pleasure you had never previously experienced when Cillian’s cock exploded sending streams of his cum into you.

‘Oh god that was amazing’ you eventually huffed out when you both stopped moving.

‘Jesus Y/N’ Cillian grunted almost at the same time before his eyes shot open and he saw your satisfied smile.

Carefully, you climbed off him, releasing his cock from your tight pussy before you sat down on the bed next to him.

You spread your legs and, with curious eyes, you looked down on yourself and watched some of Cillian’s cum leak from your core.

‘That feels so fucking good…so warm and wet’ you observed as you collected some of his cum with your finger and brought it to your mouth while Cillian cocked an eyebrow, wondering what you were doing.

‘Uhm…?’ Cillian chuckled, watching you almost speechlessly but yet somewhat turned on.

‘I never had a guy cum inside me but this is so fucking sexy’ you observed with a laugh before reshuffling yourself and collapsing into his arms.

‘Yeah, about that…’ Cillian went on to say…

 Tag List:

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@peaky-cillian​

@severewobblerlightdragon​  @ysmmsy​  

[rrickgrrimes8]

hi! i was thinking if you could write an imagine of reader being rick and lori's daughter and sister to carl, rj and judith. i don't have a specific idea in mind, but just her before and after the time jump, struggling with being there when lori and carl died, and looking for rick with daryl, her relationship with her siblings and michonne, maybe maggie and hershel too (i was thinking since carl was 10 when it all started, she was 7 so now she's 17) thank you so much, and btw i loved your imagines i've read so far 💞

Being a Grimes ~ Rick Grimes x Grimes!reader

thank you so much for requesting i really enjoyed making this one. i also have a series kinda like this about Jacey Grimes which i’m currently making a book two for.

warnings: alluding to sexual assault or rape, suicide, death, gore (lemme know if i’ve missed anything off here)

sorry if there is any mistakes please tell if there is and give me feedback i’d love to here back from yall

masterlist

request guidelines

request are open

It was strange for y/n. This world would be strange for anyone really. But she was different. At only a mere 7 years old when the world went to shit she struggled as did many others. With the recent loss of her father - one she didn't entirely understand - still protruding through her heart, it was hard - so hard. 

When it happened she was at daycare. The teaching assistant tried and successfully ate the teacher in front of her. She was next and was so close to being eaten until Shane rushed in. He kicked Ms Twune and grabbed y/n. Her mom sobbed at the sight of her, covered in blood and the tears smothering her daughters face. Carl was shocked too. He wanted nothing more than to protect his little sister. His dad always used to tell him that that was his duty - his job. And he hated how he had failed in this moment. 

They made it to the quarry soon after. Y/n thought the group was nice - well mostly. The Dixon brothers scared her was what she told her brother or any of the children she had befriended. But she was lying. Yes, she was scared but only of Merle. He was creepy and mean to anyone he saw. Daryl was somewhat the same but he always found himself being nicer to the young child. And often kept her company when Lori and Shane went for a ‘walk’ in the woods. Glenn was another she found herself drawn to. He unlike Daryl happily invited her company. Glenn was sweet and funny. He never failed at making her laugh till she felt like she was going to pee. They were good friends which came to a fault when he had to go on runs. She’d scream and cry and refuse to let go of him because she was afraid that what happened to her father would happen to him. 

That’s what happened earlier that morning. Glenn and a few others were going into Atlanta, despite her dismay. Glenn assured her he’d be fine, which she didn't believe and continued her tantrum. 

“Can yer’ shut that damn baby up?” Merle spat covering his ears. 

Shane shot him a threatening glare while Glenn stayed preoccupied with the distraught girl. “Hey, it's okay. I’m coming back,” He insisted holding her tightly at his hip, “I promise you, sweet girl.” 

“No, b-b-but dada promise too a-a-and h-he,” She stopped herself, sobs erupting from her small body. 

“I know sweet girl, I know. But I’ll be back I know I will.” Glenn placed her on the back of the RV, “I tell you what I’ll bring you back some of your favourite sweeties, huh? Would you like that?” 

Giddily she nodded at his proposition, “Yes! Yes!” 

“Alright, then I’ll bring back some for you, okay?” She nodded smiling cheerfully, “I love you, kid.” 

“I luv you too, dumbass,” y/n giggled. 

Glenn looked around cautiously hoping no one heard that “Hey sweet girl you can't say that.” 

“W-what? Why?” the child began to cry again, “Y-y-you say it.” 

“I know b-but its adult words okay? Not y/n words. When you're older, alright?” She nodded her head again kissing his cheeks softly and hugging him. “Thank you, sweet girl. I’ll see you soon,” He kissed the top of her head and started towards the car smiling as she shouted, “With sweeties!”

The group returned hours later bearing a new man instead of Merle. Y/n waited patiently for Glenn and the aforementioned sweets. "Gen!" She screamed happily still unable to say his name fully. The man sprinted over to her, pulling her into a much-needed cuddle after the day he had. 

"It's Glenn, sweetheart," He chuckled while correcting. 

"Oh sorry Gen," She wrapped her dainty arms around his neck. 

"That's okay, sweet girl. I missed you." 

"I missed you too," She whispered before letting out a longwinded 'ew', "You stinky, Gen." 

The man smelt his shirt and nodded as the potent smell of walkers reached his nose. "I know yucky right?" 

"Yucky!" Y/n buried her face in Glenn's shirt ignoring the stench and just enjoying his company. She always became clingy like this after coming home from a run. He loved it. On runs, if he ever encountered a life-threatening situation - like the one today - he always finds himself realising how much she means to him. Glenn saw her as a little sister - one almost replacing the ones that were cruely ripped from him when this began. 

"How was it?" She inquired. 

"Not fun, sweet girl. But I got your sweeties and a nice man helped us out. Saved us," She beamed. 

"I like the good man. I'll give him two kisses when I see him. Maybe even one of my sweeties," Glenn chuckled. 

"Why two kisses, y/n?" 

"One for saving you. Two for bringing you hom," Glenn grinned contently and kissed her forehead. 

"Its home bubs with an e on the end." 

"Oh," She mumbled burying herself again. 

"Oh my God," Someone muttered as they exited the van. 

"Dad! Dad!" Carl screamed causing Glenn to snap his head in their direction. Carl came running towards the man, Rick, who had saved them in Atlanta. Y/n hadn't moved yet as she feared it was only a dream. That her dada wasn't really here. 

"Sweet girl," He pulled her out of his neck, "Look it's your dad." The child gazed over to where her brother had run to. Sure enough, it was her dad. He held Carl as he cried, looking to Y/n wanting to hold her too. 

"Dada!" She screamed jumping out of Glenn's arms dangerously. The girl scraped her knee on the way down but continued throwing herself into the hug. 

"Oh, Carl! Y/n!" She kissed all over his face childishly, "I luv you, dada." 

"I love you too, baby girl."

~

The years hadn't been kind to Y/n. She lost so much. Too much in fact that it had driven her to the depts of insanity and made her do things to herself, to others that she more than resented. The first loss was her mothers. She wasn't there like Carl was but the grief burned through her still. Y/n was too young to understand it really. Just how she was when Rick supposedly died. Y/n couldn't understand where her mom had gone she just knew she had a little sister now. One she swore to protect. 

She thought she had failed that when the prison fell. The young child was on her own. Injured and lost. She wandered through the woods for days until she stumbled across a group. The group were mean and despite her resistance wouldn't let her go. They hurt her in ways she didn't and wouldn't speak of it even now. But that all changed when Daryl showed up. He protected her - stopped them from hurting her. And eventually led her back to her family. Where for the first time she began to fear her father. 

Terminus was next. The people there snatched her from her family. She was forced to watch from afar as they were guided into the crate. Rick fought against them, Carl too but it was to no use. They had sectioned her off in a playroom. Every once in a while an older woman came in to fed and played with her. She hated it. Being in this world for more than a year now she knew that people like them didn't just want to play even if she did. She learnt that from the Claimers. 

Carol found her. Although having never have been all that close to the older woman - the only relation being the closeness between y/n and Sophia - seeing her after so long made her cry out of joy. Carol was happy too as she rushed out of that place to take her to safety. The pair ended up in the woods. Carol had stopped a moment ago to clean the dirt from her face, "lemme help." 

The girl sat up from where she was put down and cupped some water splashing it on Carol's face. Carol flinched as the water hit her, "Uh thank you." 

"Welcome," She looked away getting distracted by the nearing sound of footsteps. 

"Get behind me, y/n," Carol ordered to which she shook her head. 

"No it dada," She ran away from the woman and towards the group. 

"Y/n come back here!" Y/n continued ignoring Carols pleas and crashed herself into the back of Rick's legs. 

The father shot around and began to cry as he saw the child he thought he lost at his feet. "Oh, baby!" He collected the girl in his arms. Carl rushed to them too happy to see her alive after Gareth claimed he killed her. "Oh y/n, never leave me again, okay?" He looked directly into her matching blue eyes, "Promise me." 

"I promise, dada." 

Later Carol led them to Judith. Y/n was over the moon and refused to let her out of her sight, which was exactly what Rick was doing too. They found the church a while after. There they had some semblance of peace. She was glad to have Glenn back - Maggie too. Along with the new people although Eugene was a bit weird. 

At the church was also when the questions started. Daryl had told Rick about the group they were with and regretfully had to inform the father how she was there before him. Rick asked y/n - begged her - to tell her what happened. But she refused. She couldn't say what happened. What they did, which just made Rick fear more. Eventually, she spoke a little about it. She was vague and could barely string two words together without crying. He hated it. He hated how this was a reality for his daughter. He saw the bruises they left. And he couldn't understand how someone could touch his child. Or how he could be so powerless to stop it. 

Bob died. She didn't really know the man but it still upset her. Beth too. Although she was a lot closer to her. Beth was one of her only friends and was someone who would look after her when her father couldn't. They bonded and now she was gone. 

After Beth's demise, they spent lots of time on the road. They suffered, almost died countless times but they prevailed. They got stronger - she got stronger. And they eventually found Alexandria. There everything was good again like how it was at the prison or even before this hell. She liked it there and didn't understand why the others were so sceptical. 

Though that didn't last for long. Y/n began to hate the place when Carl got shot. Alexandria almost stole her brother from her. So she despised it. She refused to leave her brother's side as he adjusted to his injury. Yes, he found it annoying how she wouldn't leave him be and he often snapped at her. But she was there when he needed her. Despite the age difference and the many years of memories they had lost to this fight, she understood his pain. When he saw himself as ugly, a monster even, she made him think otherwise. She kept him afloat, which he was eternally thankful for. 

Glenn was next. 

She didn't believe it even after she was forced to see it with her own two eyes. She was next to Glenn in the lineup. She had to watch up close. Y/n had to be mocked by that man. She had to stay the whole night with her best friends brains on her face. After that night she blamed herself. She told herself that if Negan was just one person off she would be dead and he would live. He would get to see his child born and grow old with Maggie like they had spoken about. She wholeheartedly believed he deserved to live over her. 

The war with Negan shook her to the core. At the time his face filled her nightmares. He just looked so normal. He looked nice even. Yet he hurt and he hurt and he hurt. 

He killed her Glenn. And then Carl. It wasn't Negans fault although she did blame him. Carl had gotten bit. Y/n held his hand as he died in that tunnel as the home they had built above them fell. She got a letter too - even though she would rather have preferred to have her brother back. In the letter, Carl told her how proud he was of her - how thankful he was to have her as a sister. He told her to protect Judith, their dad and Michonne, who she had recently begun to call momma. 

After Carl's death, y/n shut herself from the world well everyone except her father. For days she would cry until she couldn't anymore. She would scream and scream until her voice was gone. She just didn't understand why it had to be Carl? Why mom? Why Glenn? Why Beth? Why was it never her? The following weeks she found herself wishing it would be her next. She could never bring herself to say it out loud but with any battle, any fight, anything, she wished it would be her. 

So when she lost her father her whole world fell apart. He was her consistent so why did he leave her? She was at the bridge that day. Daryl held her crying frame as Rick set off that final shot blowing him and the walkers off the bridge. Y/n Grimes' father was dead. 

She stayed in Alexandria for a while afterwards. For the sole reason to protect her siblings. Yes, siblings - plural. Somehow through all the bad some good came from it. She just wished her father and Carl could've seen it. RJ Grimes came into this world 9 months later. And he was perfect. For months she would assist in taking care of him as Michonne wasn't doing the greatest without the love of her life. Truth be told neither was y/n she was just better at hiding it. 

Until one night it all became too much. Y/n didn't know how it happened but she found herself balancing on the edge of her window. She wanted to jump - to end it. But she just couldn't will herself to do it. And when Daryl showed up she knew she couldn't. "Hey step away from ta window, alrigh'," The man ordered as he saw her shaking frame rocking back and forth. 

"I-i can't," She sobbed. 

"Ye' ya can. Jus' step back I'll catch ya," Daryl moved closer but paused when she shouted to stop. 

"I can't, Daryl. They're all gone. They're all dead," The tears clouded her eyes. She shut them tightly picturing her families faces wanting so badly to join them. 

"Please jus' step back, y/n. Yer' not alone. I'm here," He croaked the tears floating down his cheeks, "Don't jump." 

"I love you, Daryl." 

"I love ya too, okay? So step away from the window," He watched as she turned her head slightly catching his eyes. 

"I love you but I can't. Tell mom, RJ and Judy I love them as well." 

Suddenly she went to fall forward but Daryl reacted quicker. He gripped her waist pulling her into the room unwilling to release his grasp. "Yer' not leaving me," He told her as she cried into his shoulder, "Yer' cant leave me." Overhearing the chaos, Michonne entered her daughter's room to see the window wide open and the two of them crying. Daryl looked at her. The look telling her all she needed to know. Michonne began to cry herself and joined them on the ground. 

"Y/n?" A small voice called from the door frame. 

"Judith go back to bed, okay?" Michonne told her but Judith continued towards her sister. The girl said nothing as she wiped her sister's tears and held her hand.

It was 5 years later now. After her attempt, she left Alexandria with Daryl in search of her father. She didn't believe he was alive despite everything inside her wanting to. But Daryl did and after what happened they became a lot closer. He was happy she joined him. Even though the act of being out there was gruelling at times he was glad he could look after her. And if something would've happened to her while he was gone he could never have forgiven himself. Understandably Michonne was angry that y/n decided to leave. Y/n was her daughter and Michone her mother. They needed each other but she was willing to let Y/n leave to figure that out. It brought her peace looking for her father. 

The silence was her favourite and as Daryl wasn't much of a talker she got lots of it. They got a dog too, which Daryl cleverly named Dog. Everything was a messed up version of okay but it was still good. Being out there made her find her purpose. She went home a lot more than Daryl did, which pleased her siblings and mother. It was always for a few days never longer as she feared she'd stay forever and she couldn't. As much as Alexandria is good it also drives y/n to a dark place. One she was in that night. She lost so much there. And staring at those four walls drove her insane. It didn't help how Negan was imprisoned there. Just thinking how close he was made her skin crawl. She knew how Rick visited him when he was alive that he believed Carl was right about the killing. That it had to stop. Y/n knew he was right too but she could never bring herself to one admit or two face Negan. 

It felt like a story she read as a child when the Whisperers showed up. Like Negan, they scared her. So when she was told about his escape she only assumed the worst. The Whisperers took so many from them. Like Enid for example. Her story was cut short because of them. The two never really spoke but she understood how she and Carl felt for each other at a time. So ultimately it felt like she lost her final piece of Carl when she died. Y/n wished she had spoken to her when she could've. She wished she could've heard the untold stories they shared. She needed to know about Carl's final years with her. But now she's gone too along with those memories. 

The war with the Whisperers took everything from them. The Kingdom. Hilltop. Alexandria. Along with the lives they lost in the process. With the group separated she found herself protecting Judy and RJ. Michonne had gone. Where she had gone to, y/n had no idea. For a messed up reason, she began to prepare herself for her mother's death before it was even announced. That was until she got the call. She was okay and... apparently so was Rick. 

Disbelief was what hit her first. She couldn't hear his voice nor see his face so how could she know it was true. Michonne didn't know either she couldn't if he was really there, still alive. That night of the call she left. Without hesitation, she kissed RJ and Judith's heads, told them she loved them and told them to tell everyone else that and left. She left in the direction Michonne had told her. 

She left to find her father. And she knew she wouldn't return until she did. "I'm coming, dad."

[hell-heron]

Day 26 - Parallels with Other Characters, also Names, Self-Actualization and Revenge, part 1 - Theon and Arianne

I want to say this started as an entirely different meta but I got distracted midway by the fact there are THREE characters besides Theon, actually, that seem to pass from being referred to in chapter titles by aliases to being referred by their name. Victarion in ADWD, Arianne and Barristan in TWOW. Obviously, GRRM might still have to pick chapter titles for TWOW, but given that the Forsaken, Mercy etc had their own titles, I think it works.

This strikes me bc Arianne and Victarion are characters with MASSIVE ACOK Theon energy in such a way that I think this says something about the way Theon's self actualization and finding his name again came to be.

Theon and Arianne occupy, alas, very similar spaces in the heart and spleen of the fandom as two ambitious very young adults who don't trascend past the inexperience and immaturity that could be expected even a little, in a series where half the major povs are extremely gifted children. Arianne's mistakes are obviously not as destructive as Theon's but there's a racist and sexist bias against her making it so they're pretty much equally hated. They're both extroverted and snarky and overtly sexual in a way that hides some pretty massive trust issues, struggling with rivarly towards a sibling they have very good reasons to feel is favored by their fathers over them despite being officially the heir, and they lash out against this in a very similar way

The queenmaker plot and the taking of Winterfell are similarly feverish, desperate, euphorically exciting-until-they're-not endeavors in which both Arianne and Theon endanger and hurt children they massively project on (the actual child murder on Theon's part nonwitstanding). Theon seeks to avenge his inner child reenacting his own hostage situation from a position of control, Arianne to heal her inner child realizing her fantasy of a disinherited daughter crowned over her younger brother. This is literally how she presents the plan to Arys:

“Will not? Cannot! Myrcella is more fit for rule …”

“A son comes before a daughter.”

“Why? What god has made it so? I am my father’s heir. Should I give up my rights to my brothers?”

At this point, needless to say, Arianne knows exactly nothing about Tommen to justify this. Obviously her fantasy is doomed even before her plan itself fails- Myrcella is younger than Arianne was when she found her father's letter and never had any desire for the Iron Throne, she doesn't quite comprehend the situation, her first reaction when she's called queen is fear that something happened to Tommen, where Arianne blindly embraces the idea Quentyn plotted against her. An absolutely unsatisfying projection vehicle, just as Bran, Rickon and Beth are for Theon - the Stark boys are helped escape, the whole household covering for them, when he tries to use Beth against her father as he was used, ser Rodrik begs to take him in her place. Theon's misery of being held hostage long term, completely alone and unsupported, only to realize his family had given up on him from the start remains his and his alone.

The motive also feels to me the same - grab for power that's actually a grab for agency lashing out at a situation of forced stasis they spent 10 years in, that's actually a desperate appeal for their fathers' love and trust. Theon's time in Winterfell is obviously horribly traumatic but it also represents a forced stasis, it's extremely damaging for him to have an illusion of physical freedom to do what he pleases vis-a-vis training, hunting, whoring etc. while actually he's prevented by adult responsibilities even as his fifteen year old foster brothers lead armies. The attainment of manhood on the Iron Islands for noble boys seems to coincide with becoming a captain. Theon is taken when he was just beginning to learn:

Ugly as it was, that smile brought back a hundred memories. Theon had seen it often as a boy, when he’d jumped a horse over a mossy wall, or flung an axe and split a target square. He’d seen it when he blocked a blow from Dagmer’s sword, when he put an arrow through a seagull on the wing, when he took the tiller in hand and guided a longship safely through a snarl of foaming rocks.

then never sets foot on a boat again for the next ten years and seemingly is put to train on equal footing with Robb and Jon who are four years younger. The fandom generally assumes Ned's plan for Theon is to wait until Balon dies to then have Theon as a lord friendly to the mainland interests: this makes perfect sense but we never know about it. We never find anything about what future Theon expects, he's not betrothed, obviously we find out when he returns that Balon is actively praying for him to die rather than awaiting the return of his heir for him to finally have a true place etc. but Theon has no way to know the situation at home either because he's only getting letters about the good news. Theon is pretty adaptable - he has some characteristics that make him slightly weird in the islands (preferrence for riding, fancy bitch taste, not used to the different power dynamics, uninterested in religion) and in the North (some romanticization of the Old Way, dark humor) but he does decently in both until he explodes in Winterfell, he's at ease in the Riverlands in the Blackfish' forces, he considers the Night's Watch as an option where he might be decently happy etc. The problem is he's never allowed to hope or prepare for any future, the war of the Five Kings is literally the first time he has any direction in life.

As for Arianne:

The freedom that Prince Oberyn allowed his bastard daughters had never been shared by Prince Doran’s lawful heir. Arianne must wed; she had accepted that. Drey had wanted her, she knew; so had his brother Deziel, the Knight of Lemonwood. Daemon Sand had gone so far as to ask for her hand. Daemon was bastard-born, however, and Prince Doran did not mean for her to wed a Dornishman. Arianne had accepted that as well. One year King Robert’s brother came to visit and she did her best to seduce him, but she was half a girl and Lord Renly seemed more bemused than inflamed by her overtures. Later, when Hoster Tully asked her to come to Riverrun and meet his heir, she lit candles to the Maid in thanks, but Prince Doran had declined the invitation. The princess might even have considered Willas Tyrell, crippled leg and all, but her father refused to send her to Highgarden to meet him. She tried to go despite him, with Tyene’s help... but Prince Oberyn caught them at Vaith and brought them back. That same year, Prince Doran tried to betroth her to Ben Beesbury, a minor lordling who was eighty if he was a day, and as blind as he was toothless.

What we get here is: Arianne has arguably more freedom than any young lady of her rank in the rest of Westeros, but she doesn't perceive it as freedom because while she can make more independent choices for the present about sex, friendships with people of all social ranks, parties etc, the future is both outside her agency AND unknown to her, which are both factors to her dissatisfaction with it. We know Doran means for Arianne to be Viserys' queen consort, Arianne only knows he doesn't mean for her to be princess of Dorne, but she deduces that he must want her to be someone's consort, and she doesn't outright reject this. She courts several heirs, not second sons of rich families willing to back her claim up to expand their influence in Dorne or something. She's willing to work with her father's plan and have her future partially dictated as long as she knows enough to make the best of it. Arianne is a huge people's person, very charming and able to manipulate, does well in her role "in charge of feasts and frolics" etc. and we have absolutely no reason to think she'd be either incapable or miserable as a consort. So the problem here is that Doran, through ridiculous matches he knows she won't accept, is essentially forcing her into a suspended childhood where she can neither plan for a future as princess of Dorne nor for one as consort. And she must lash out against it to have any feeling of agency in her life.

So she does, like Theon, recklessly and daringly and with an initial success that speaks of her cunning and boldness, like Theon, she claims a vengeful motivation towards external forces when really it's to vindicate her place within her own family she wants, like Theon

Asha shook her head. “How could you be such a bloody fool? Children . . .” “They defied me!” he shouted in her face. “And it was blood for blood besides, two sons of Eddard Stark to pay for Rodrik and Maron.” The words tumbled out heedlessly, but Theon knew at once that his father would approve. “I’ve laid my brothers’ ghosts to rest.”

“And what is it I want, ser?”

“The Sand Snakes freed. Vengeance for Oberyn and Elia. Do I know the song? You want a little taste of lion blood.” That, and my birthright. I want Sunspear, and my father’s seat. I want Dorne. “I want justice.”

She fails miserably, like Theon, but how does it end?

On the morning that she left the Water Gardens, her father rose from his chair to kiss her on both cheeks. "The fate of Dorne goes with you, daughter," he said, as he pressed the parchment into her hand. "Go swiftly, go safely, be my eyes and ears and voice... but most of all, take care."

"I will, Father." She did not shed a tear. Arianne Martell was a princess of Dorne, and Dornishmen did not waste water lightly. It was a near thing, though. It was not her father's kisses nor his hoarse words that made her eyes glisten, but the effort that brought him to his feet, his legs trembling under him, his joints swollen and inflamed with gout. Standing was an act of love. Standing was an act of faith.

He believes in me. I will not fail him.

Doran and Arianne's dialogue in The Princess in the Tower is one of the highlights of AFFC for me, it's so heartbreaking. Arianne is able to confront her father about the baggage of the last ten years, which Theon does in the show but not truly in the books. While Doran is understandably disappointed and upset with her, they are able to come to a reconciliation, he slowly comes to admit he wronged her, he admits to her his most fallible, uncautious human feelings, his "heart's desire". He breaks down thinking nostalgically of Arianne as a little girl. More in ADWD: he sees her loyal nature and good intentions in the bad choices she made and defends her:

Obara laughed. “Aye, our sweet Arianne has seen to that.”

The princess flushed, and Hotah saw a spasm of anger pass across her father’s face. “What she did, she did as much for you as for herself. I would not be so quick to mock.”

He even enacts the #1 Theon love language of laughing at her bad jokes :(

The little princess smiled. “Three Oberyns, with teats.”

Prince Doran laughed. It had been so long since Hotah last heard him laugh, he had almost forgotten what it sounded like

VS

“There’s my lord husband.” His sister reached down inside her gown and drew a dirk from between her breasts. “And here’s my sweet suckling babe.”

He could not imagine how he looked at that moment, but suddenly Theon Greyjoy realized that the Great Hall was ringing with laughter, all of it at him. Even his father was smiling, gods be damned, and his uncle Victarion chuckled aloud.

And of course, in TWOW we see Arianne no longer as a presence in someone else's chapter nor referred to by an alias but only by her name, on a mission on her father's behalf that's the utmost sign of his trust in her, given for the first time the agency to act on his behalf and find power and direction for herself, empowered by her rightful place in the family - a family that was hurt and humiliated (obviously for the Greyjoys this was a bit more self inflicted, but you know, in Theon's perception) but that is now plotting to rise again in vengeance and managing, mostly thanks to Arianne's own efforts, to find unity in that plotting after being fractured and conflicted. Essentially, the taking of Casterly Rock Theon plans in ACOK before his dreams are quickly shattered.

Arianne represents the self actualization that Theon desires but could not have, not by through any fault of his own but by a series of circumstances - the way Arianne has a support system he doesn't, the way his first tragic mistake happens in a much more high stakes environment, and simply the fact Balon is a very different person from Doran. He cannot have his self actualization through power, only through looking in the mouth of hell and deciding to come out of it through the moment of pure desperate human connection of rescuing Jeyne. But the existence of Arianne's chapters affirms that it didn't have to be like that, that suffering and sacrifice shouldn't have been his only opportunity for self actualization, and that a reading that it was purely and simply his fault that things turned in that direction is just dismissive.

[alwaysabeautifullife]

Hello!

First off, thank you for your posts, they're usually very helpful!

Secondly, if it isn't too much, what do you mean about being in a constant state of fear for survival? I'm only asking because this is something we're considering, and it's hard to find any viewpoints that aren't about how off-grid living is perfect and will make your rustic dreams come true

Thanks, and happy holy Lent!

I grew up in the mountains of Idaho (off the grid) in a setting that could be considered ideal (mountain valley, perfect weather, lush and beautiful against a river). We did not have a toilet, but we did get water hosed from the mountain. In some years we had electricity, but not tv/internet. The last years I lived there we had a tv. My dad hunted regularly, and was absolutely excellent at it, eventually we all hunted and fished.

The mountains are not a place to grow food, winters are like 9 months, we had snow in august in most corners of our yard. We spent many summers picking berries for food/alcohol, and for selling. I know literally every single edible plant in Idaho. I don’t know that information because I was well fed and safe, it’s because I was surviving and in constant fear of what could come next. There were very few enjoyable moments because you must work 24/7 to survive. The moments you are eating are typically the moments that everyone can rest but is too exhausted to say anything.

There is always something broken to be fixed, something that must be done and your survival depends on it. As a child it’s a constant state of fear and uncertainty.

There’s a reason why human beings live in communities, it’s because they are necessary.

Also any small medical issue will bring you to a state of poverty beyond what you could ever imagine. Especially if it’s your children. In the event you are caring for chronically children, or are sick yourself, no one can preform the duties for survival, or someone gets all the duties. Often it’s the children. Children do not have time for play. They work. Work is the only play you know because it makes time pass until you eat again.

Living off the grid is a state of survival. It is not living. You are constantly preparing for the next disaster, or even just the disaster that is winter. You work because you starve in winter, and any minor inconvenience of weather effects your entire year and therefore several years. Life off the grid is just a series of domino effects you are preparing for before the next on.

Things in the modern world are necessary for living, like dental (majority of people have hereditary dental defects), mental and physical health. These things are not available in this lifestyle. Everyone believes when you’re off the grid you’ll be treating colds with bone broth, but in reality cancer and other life threatening illnesses are at random but more likely the more people you have in your home. I have watched my dad cut away gangrene with a knife, and pull his own teeth out. I watched my little brother suffer a medical condition that went untreated (it involved leaking fecal matter constantly), and instead feel shame because of the additional work it caused for everyone.

I think off the grid (or close to) is great, if you are single or a married couple with no children who has the luxury of a fall back plan if it fails or luxury of parents who would be there to help you when you change your mind. A lot of the people who make YouTube videos and stuff on living off the grid have financial fallbacks, and make income from YouTube so can commit to it full time with a steady stream of income on the side so both adults can work 24/7 at home (it’s too much for one adult so the children will begin to do majority of work in these cases). Other people that do it (outside the US) are living in actual communities, with greater support than even the common American.

[oneoftheprettynerds]

Welcome To The Darkside: Dark!Steve x Reader (Mob AU)

Chapter 1 in the Lipstick and Crayons Series

A/N: I just posted a story I know but I’m in love with this idea right now and this is my favourite fic right now. It’s going to be a three or four part fic I think and your support in any form: like, comment or reblog is appreciated greatly. Here is a piece of my heart right here.

Warning: Eventual Non-Con, Sickening Threats, Mob Themes, Violence, Death, Manipulation, sort of Blood Kink I think, Cheap Tricks later.

Genres + Characters: Mob AU, Single Parents AU, Steve Rogers x Reader.

Summary: Steve can't ever repay you for what you did. After meeting you, Steve believes his broken family is the missing piece in the puzzle of your own wrecked one. Indebting the crime lord to you has been the biggest mistake of your life, cause now you can't get rid of him, no matter what. Loyalty and favours go a long way in the mob.

Chapter 1 : Welcome to The Darkside

The gunshots around you frightened you more than anything in your life ever had. The merry, joyful ambience of the carnival was ruined in an instant. Screams around you provoked your panic-stricken form to gather your wits and run or hide. It wasn’t just you caught up in this dreadful situation, there was also someone you’d protect at any cost.

Picking your daughter up and setting her on your hip, you looked around for the way out. Who would have thought that open grounds were hard to get out of? Another wave of terror ran through you when the gunshots audibly neared and the crowd ran in random directions.

You decided to go along the way you recognised the games and shops at. You ran as fast as you could, checking on Grace in between to find her looking curiously all around but still more intent on eating her cotton candy than inspecting. You couldn’t be more thankful for kids' oblivion than at that moment in time.

A bomb explosion up ahead in your path made you halt in your tracks because you knew some of the attackers were scouting there. Turning back wasn’t an option, neither was crying and you were sure you closer to the exit this way. Another blast behind you took away the option of you retracing your path. You weren’t considering it but it gave you little comfort to have your options open.

As the shrieks and screeches grew tenfold, your best bet was to hide, the assaulters had already surrounded the field, the chaos around you informed you. Jumping through innumerable dead bodies, of kids and adults that ached your heart, and dodging bullets while laying low, you went inside a photo booth to hide.

This will not be in vain; you’d protect Grace no matter what.

The curtain to the photo booth provided cover from predatory eyes while the rest of the metal booth was quite safe against bullets you concluded hopefully.

You were just looking for a weapon to prepare for any adversity that might come your way, when the sound of crunching of pebbles made their way to your ears.

Failing to find a weapon in few seconds you opted to attack the intruder yourself when a voice reached your ears, “Mama?”

You puzzled your eyebrows and lowered your defences by just a bit when a toddler stumbled inside the booth, blonde haired and blue eyed. You were definitely not this girl’s mama but you grabbed the kid’s forearm and pulled her inside, shushing her gently and seating her beside Grace on the sitting bench inside. You were thankful Grace entertained her by offering her the pink cloud of sweetness.

You peeked outside but failed to find anyone else in 20 metre radii of you, nobody resembling the wandering kid nor looking for one. You did not know what you would do with another kid in your hands in this dire situation nor was it a wise decision to bring her inside and take her under your wing but you did not have it in you to leave an unsuspecting child, a mere four or three-year-old at that, during a calamity so extreme.

Your maternal instincts governed your thought process, imagining Grace to be in her shoes, all alone and discarded while a possible terrorist attack was happening. The kids’ corpses lying outside gave you no doubt that these children’s fate would be the same if found by the attackers.

A small tug in your dress made you look back and you found the azure eyed kid at your feet, offering you the street food you bought earlier while hugging your leg and observing you. Grace munched in the back silently, still happily eating and unaware.

You kneeled and whispered, “What’s your name, honey?” Maybe the girl understood the urgency, maybe she was just mimicking you but even she murmured in a low voice, “Sarah.”

You nodded, “Sweetie, I need you to sit there quietly and make no sounds, okay? We are playing a staying quiet game.” That was a stupid thing to ask of a kid but you hoped, you really, really hoped she would comply.

Her eyes widened in recognition of something as she eagerly asked, still in a hushed mumble, “Like I does for Dada in meekings?”

“Yes, you smart kiddo. Exactly that.” You replied with what you hoped was a convincing smile and ruffled her hair while nudging her towards her former seat. With kids, you knew a little encouragement went a long way to get them to do things. She whispered an ‘okay Mama’ and went about and sat.

You didn’t get to enjoy her obedience as the thud of pebbles crunching met your ears again. Your breath hitched; your intuition told you that this was not another kid confusing you for its parent.

Your eyes found a discarded piece of metal rod from the booth’s wrecked framework. You grabbed and hoped for the best, to save both the kids at your ability’s mercy.

Steve only saw red. The moment the first shot sounded in the air, he knew whom the assailants were, whom they were coming for. Going out tonight was a bad idea, a really reckless one indeed but when his daughter started bawling seeing the carnival’s lights from the car and wanted to get up and close, he couldn’t say no. He really tried to though, he really did.

It hadn’t been even a year since his wife died, but the father-daughter duo was getting by. He knew his wife took his daughter to the carnival and bought her things, toys and teddies, on every birthday of her own. It was a ritual his wife started, spending her birthday with her little offspring during the daylight and going out for a romantic dinner at the end of the day with her dear spouse. If only things could still be that way, could still stay the same.

When his wife turned out to be an elaborate spy all along, he was baffled. His professional side was, dare he say, impressed by the commitment to character but his personal side was beyond disappointed, disheartened in the worst way because his daughter was his most precious asset in this cruel world and that gift was given by such a treacherous person.

She begged and pled for mercy, to let Sarah have her mother and swore on her life that she quit her espionage journey when she actually fell in love but Steve didn’t trust a single syllable out of her filthy, deceiving mouth, not anymore.

He didn’t kill her though, because Sarah was his first priority no matter what. Her assassination was the work of his rival mob, ‘The Vice Kings’ led by the bastard Rumlow. It was an open invitation for war in the city, for them money came first and useless people had to die. They killed two birds with a single stone, git rid of a useless former member and successfully made a statement.

Then began the still happening rivalry between those Vices and his mob, ‘The Avenging Cartel’. The wound from his wife’s assassination was still fresh, he didn’t miss her as much as he had taken the hit to his pride. There had been a peaceful agreement until the brutal maiming of his spouse and now he was working more than ever, barely able to make time for his princess and that was his only regret, missing her childhood.

And now he felt more futile, his palette of emotions ranging from hues of ire to shades of dread. He couldn’t believe his entourage of trained professionals failed to monitor a two-year-old. He had just stepped aside to take a call, leaving her with his latest driver and three bodyguards. How could he be that clueless to not realise the imposters infiltrating his ranks, standing right there and selling away his location?

As soon as the sound of the first firearm shooting reached his ears, he leapt towards his daughter only to find her missing. His little minx thankfully escaped for one of her little adventures and successfully evaded these cheats, whom he shot right in the middle of the eyes when he glanced at the grenades packing in the coats’ undersides.

His moment of gratitude evaporated in mere seconds as he realised that the Vices now surrounded the entire area, their mission being his daughter’s abduction. If they wanted to kill both of them, they would have already, considering Steve’s distraction gave them quite too many openings. They wanted him to surrender, because mobs worked that way; only when one leader signed off his territories did it become the other party’s possession. If they just cut one head, another would grow in its place, a new leader would succeed the predecessor.

He sent emergency signals to both Barnes and Wilson, the only ones he could trust right now, summoning them with back-ups. The screams of the crowd did not ease him at all, piling on his burden and stress as he prayed for the first time ever, that by some miracle he would reach his daughter first in this field and she would safely be in his arms by the end of the night, not become a victim to what his enemies were planning.

He did have a tracker in her pendant but this realisation hit him later than he’d like to admit, the frustration clawing away his wits. The ground was now quite empty, piles of bodies scattered across the field abruptly where people became victims to the grenades, any person who failed to protect themselves, died. As he was pulling his phone out again, his eyes caught sight a flower bead. The same bead he and his daughter used to make a bracelet a month ago. She wore that everywhere, to day-care, while bathing, to birthdays.

The bracelet was obviously broken now but it was almost like a trail that led to his treasure, like in the Hansel and Gretel’s fairy-tale that Sarah loved. He followed with quiet steps, the beads far apart and some resting under the debris but they sure did lead him somewhere, and when he found the even the pendant in his path, he knew he had only the few beads to rely on.

Some thumps and crashes made him alert, his pistol ready, and when he neared carefully to a distorted metal framework of sorts, his eyes widened.

A young woman had a body in front of her lying on the ground. In a pool of scarlet it rested, still and unmoving while her breathing quickened, her eyes shining with tears that she tried too damn hard to confine to her eyes. He knew how hard the first kill always was, but one grows numb with increase in body count.

Brave women were his type and he would have been turned on by her courage, her hands stained red with whatever weapon she attacked with. Her soft facial features and her curves in the dress she wore were a show stopper for sure, and he would’ve been flirting with her if it was not for the brutal severity of the situation, his daughter missing and in possible danger.

His vigilant senses, courtesy of the epinephrin, picked up two things; the butterfly bead that rested in the door of the booth the woman stood at and the creep shadowing her from behind, ready to attack with a baseball bat he might have found in one of the other game shops.

Steve used his position behind the neighbouring booth to make a bull’s eye shot, the bullet going just an inch above the female’s shoulder and going across the creep’s head. The logo on the corpse’s leather jacket showed Steve he picked the right side to defend.

The sheer suddenness of the move caught the woman off guard as she dropped her weapon and twisted back to find the soulless eyes of her possible attacker staring at her. She quickly armed herself with her attacking rod once again and tried to trace the bullet back from its shooter, her eyes wide and calculating.

Steve decided it was time to interrogate, to find Sarah.

The graze of the bullet above your shoulder alarmed you and you stood dumbfounded only for an instant though. You were sure the bullet was meant for you but the thud of a body behind you, seemingly preparing to attack you proved you wrong.

Calming yourself, you still stood on the ball, because someone killing your attacker didn’t necessarily mean you were safe. With just a pull of the trigger, your fate could very easily be the same. You had to play this smart.

“Lower your weapon. I won’t repeat myself.” A husky voice called out, laced with seriousness which left no room for argument.

You did as he said, knowing that shabby rod was no match against the gun. He stepped out from his hiding position and gave away his location, steps slightly treading towards you. Your hands trembled, heart thumping a bit too loud while blood and sweat coated your frame.

When moonlight lightened his face, you saw his blonde luscious locks, slightly overgrown, a neatly trimmed beard darker than his hair and the cerulean blue eyes that were clear as crystal but shadowed with proficiency.

“Good, now did you see a kid around here? Blonde and blue eyes?”

His question didn’t surprise you, the gun barrel trained on you did. The previous man you had killed, that laid dead ahead of you had asked the same question. You did not know why they were after the toddler nor did you have the time to dwell on it. Time was of the essence now and he was expecting an answer.

The fact that he saved an unsuspecting lady was a plus point, but you also had to consider that he was threatening you all the same. But if that was his kid, it was understood, the resemblance between them was uncanny but that wasn’t enough proof. However, as your flickered to the man you killed, you noticed the logo on his jacket was the same as the one on your possible murderer’s jacket. It still wasn’t enough evidence but you had no choice, the man had a gun and you had two kids relying on you. At least he wasn’t on the bombing side.

“Yes, what is she to you?” You tried to be brave but you were sure he saw right through you.

“You don’t ask the questions here but this one I’ll answer. She is my daughter. Now, where is she?”  

“How do I know you’re not lying? I can’t just and her over to you!”

“Her name is Sarah; she is my carbon copy. She is wearing a pink dress with white flowers; pink crocs and her hair is in a ponytail with a white scrunchy. She had two white clips in her hair beside the ponytail. Enough proof?”

No, you could be a creepy paedophile for all I know.

You were still contemplating when he spoke again, “She’s my daughter and I know she’s in that booth beside you. I appreciate you trying to protect her I think but she’ll respond to me calling her. Sarah?”

The little toddler poked her head out, her eyes brightening in recognition and you heaved a sigh of relief involuntarily. Your maternal instinct made you anxious for kids you barely even knew. She ran towards her father shouting ‘Dada’ and jumped into his arms while he hid his gun. You almost snorted at that, tons of dead bodies surrounding you and he was worried about the gun?

He propped her up, hugging her tightly, and with what you knew now, he was scared to death and rightfully so.

Grace poked her head out and ran towards you now, hugging you from behind your legs and silently peeking at the mysterious human. You held Grace’s hand now, intertwining your fingers and felt relief after long. Even though there was no knowing that the man would help you two but you gave yourself comfort you weren’t alone here, not anymore.

Sarah turned and met your eyes again and whispered lowly, “Oops Mama, I think the games over! Sowwy!”

Steve’s eyes widened at that and you laughed at her innocence, feeling light. You played along with the kid, “It’s alright.” You didn’t want to play ‘Mommy’ anymore after that thinking it would offend her father but even, he chuckled, his laugh beautiful and boisterous.

Suddenly men dressed in black and armed with weapons ran about, skidding and crossing you to survey the area out. You shielded Grace once again but the father ahead of you didn’t even flinch. Noticing your unease, he came closer and put a hand on you arm, “I’m Steve and don’t worry, these are my men, the good guys.”

You nodded, not agreeing with his idea of good and bad but since you hoped he did acknowledge that he owed you one, you hoped none of these men would attack you. You introduced yourself and he nodded.

With Sarah on his hip, he started following one of his men and you followed along hoping to get to the exit. He even asked to drop you home but you refused, just wanting to get to the parking and put all these guns out of your kid’s sight. He tsked over his shoulder and you knew he would insist again later but for now he listened intently to the man he addressed as Buck.  

This Buck eyed you several times, not so discreetly, while Steve renounced the whole incident of some spies and whatnot. You closed your eyes, not wanting to eavesdrop and just wanting to relax but you could do neither right now. They were after Sarah; you had presumed right.

Sarah made grabby hands from over Steve’s shoulder while Grace slept soundly in your arms, maybe jealous of her. She pouted and then slowly began her lower lip began to tremble. A whine escaped her mouth as she started bawling. Steve stopped to shush her but she continued screeching, “I miss Mama!” and tried to get away from Steve and jump into your arms. Buck looked surprised while Steve’s eyes pleaded yours and you nodded and gave Grace to her and took Sarah in your arms, gently shushing her and patting her back. She drooled in the crook of your neck but that was nothing new and quietened down. You didn’t want to give Grace away but you couldn’t see another child so miserable, not when you had one of your own.

Steve and ‘Buck’ observed you, not saying anything so you broke the silence. “I’m sorry she confuses me with her mother, I hope she doesn’t get offended by this.”

“She’s no more.” Steve looked down and you cursed yourself for breaking the silence, make the situation more awkward and unbearable.

“I’m sorry.” Well that was better than joking about how Grace didn’t have a father either.

“Don’t be, she deserved what she got.” Steve mumbled and continued walking with ‘Buck’, lightly patting Grace and kissing her forehead.

The peck should have bothered you but you were too engrossed by his words to eavesdrop further or check on Grace. What did he mean she deserved it? You didn’t even want to think of the probability of him killing her. With all the soldiers that surrounded you, you suddenly realised he was capable of more than you thought and you felt stupid for feeling safe with him when you did. He was a leader of sorts, a person with unimaginable power and you had dived headfirst in the kind of things you should avoid at all costs. Even though you hadn't crossed him or weren't on his bad side, getting involved was a mistake.

You learnt this lesson the hard way soon enough.

[greensaplinggrace]

honestly THANK YOU for saying all that abt baghra bc i thought i was going crazy from not liking her??? bc i haven't read the books and only summaries of them on wiki and like. i dunno why ppl like her actually even in the show bc this guy, her son, is like "i wanna make the world better for us grisha" and she's just like "no." even tho he sees that she's MAKING HERSELF SICK from suppressing her powers! she's literally like in bed coughing in the flashback yet seem much healthier at the little palace. also like after everything, after her disapproval, after the fold, after centuries of waiting for the sun summoner.. he never abandons her. he makes sure she's cares for. he doesn't harm her. and i have to wonder if baghra has ever thanks him for that, for just not leaving her alone. like i dunno how im suppose ro believe aleks is a heartless villain when he still cares for his abusive mom like this. like has baghra even told her she loved him (honestly she reminds me of a classic emotionally unavailable asian parent but maybe that's just me). also im wondering if baghra ever told aleks that he had an aunt.. bc like.. now that u bring up her isolating him it's like hmmmm...

not at me being like alina... why do u trust the bitter old woman who literally beats u with a stick and verbally abuses u every chance she gets.. just bc she showed a bad painting... like.. pls use two braincells to see that who u figured out as his mother... is also using his protection..

like baghra could've upped and left with alina. but no. she stayed bc she knew she was safe under aleks's protection.

alsoim just impressed that after his first friend tried to drown him and harvest his bones... he didn't go into hiding???? he still wanted to make a safe heaven for grisha!!! HE STILL WANTED TO PROTECT GRISHA EVEN AFTER HIS GRISHA FRIEND TRIED TO KILL HIM FOR HIS FUCKEN BONES. like... this is the guy im suppose to believe is the villain???

honestly i feel like part of the reason why LB's plotlines seem so bad and disconnected (and sometimes outright racist but that's another rant) and why darkles is disproportionately more violent and villainous in the later books is bc she didn't expect the darkling to be so popular and wanted to stick with her guns of making him the villain. but also wanted the money from aleks's popularity. but like you can't have ur cake and eat it too.

Well thank you for sending this ask! It's very sweet and very passionate. I'm glad you liked my post! I didn't put as much thought into it as some of my others lol. I kind of just talked. But it was nice to be able to finally talk about some of the problems I have with both her character and the fandom/author's perception of her.

HERE is the post this is referring to, in case anyone's wondering.

👀👀 You've hit the nail on the head for so many things, here!

Baghra is extremely emotionally unavailable, basically to the point of neglect. She's also verbally and physically abusive, traits which I doubt were only reserved for her students and not her son. Baghra claims she would do anything to protect him, but I've known a lot of parents who have that mindset and yet still harm their children because they think it's "good for them".

Aleksander stays at Baghra's side for years, and even when they're opposing each other she's never too far away from him. Idk if you've read the books but he does eventually hurt her. And as much as I don't like Baghra, I think his actions were horrid. But I'm also honestly kind of surprised it took him so long lmao.

Yeah I mean, in terms of isolation, let's not forget that she never wanted to introduce him to his father, either. Baghra's sense of eternity clouds a lot of her judgments on relationships, which means she views most people as dust and therefore teaches her son to as well. The problem with that is that he's a growing child, and he needs those social and emotional attachments for healthy development.

I would bet quite a bit of money that Baghra has either never told him she loves him or she has told him so few times it's practically forgettable.

And everything becomes more complicated because so many of Baghra's actions are understandable because of her life and her history, but the impacts they have on the people around her, especially Aleksander, are permanently damaging. And the fact that that's never gone over in critical depth in the books or how it's glossed over in fandom is just very disconcerting. Like, acknowledging Baghra's failings doesn't mean we're excusing Aleksander's actions, it just means we're holding Baghra liable for her own. Which the fandom should be doing, considering she's the epitome of an abusive parental figure.

And Alina trusting Baghra over Aleksander is even more confusing! Especially in the show!! This is the woman who beat her and abused her and tortured her friends when they tiny little children (and who probably still does so now that they're adults). This is the woman who mocks you and harasses you and insults you on a regular basis. Why does Baghra revealing she's Aleksander's mother make Alina change her mind?! Like fuck, I'd just feel bad for Aleksander. No wonder he kept it a secret, I would too! And that painting is enough evidence?! Really?! A random painting shown to you by this abusive mentor that's been making your life hell. That's what you're going to betray your new lover over?

The friends trying to harvest his bones thing is a good point, too. I think Aleksander, especially show Aleksander, is incredibly idealistic. I think he cares too much for others - those he's deemed worth his care (a sentiment given to him by Baghra). Despite everything she's tried to teach him about hiding and abandoning others and never caring and never doing anything to help or reach out or connect with people, Aleksander still continues to do so. It's likely because he never got it from Baghra growing up, and so is desperate for those emotional needs to be fulfilled elsewhere.

His turning point, when Baghra tells him it was understandable that those kids tried to kill him because the world is such a hard place for them - that's crucial. And the reason it's possible as a motivating factor is because of that idealism and that desire to help and that desire to be everything his mother isn't. Baghra tells him this trauma he just experienced was because of the oppression of his people, and instead of following her lead and accepting that, going into hiding and abandoning everybody to their misery, he goes I can do something about that. I can make it so this never happens again. Which is usually how trauma like that combines with one's core personality traits at a young age, especially when there's none of the essential support systems in place to aid in recovery (ie, the role Baghra should have been filling but wasn't, because she decided to exacerbate the problem instead).

And yeah, one of my biggest problems with the ham-fisted "beating you over the head with a sledgehammer of evil deeds" look-how-bad-this-character-is! portrayal of the Darkling in the later books comes from the impression I get that Bardugo doesn't trust her readers. She's so desperate to have us hate this character and think him an irredeemable villain, not trusting any of her readers to engage critically with a morally gray character, that it feels quite a bit like condescending fucking bullshit. Which ew, I know how to engage with literature, thanks.

She really does seem to look down on a large part of her fandom, and imo, the infantilization of the female characters in her books seems to carry over to her impression of most of her female readers as well. Which is why the Darkling's character arc gets fucking destroyed. But he's still a good cash grab, of course, so she'll shake his dead corpse in front of the fandom for money every time she wants something from it.

Also! Another reason I think her plotlines feel disconnected (I'm sorry Bardugo I respect you as a person, but shit-) is because the writing in SaB is just bad. I mean, nevermind the absolutely nauseating implications of the way she portrays the Grisha as a persecuted group who's situation is never actually fully addressed as it should be, considering Grisha rights is what her main villain is fighting for (imo for a series called the Grishaverse, LB seems to be pretty anti Grisha), but her characters and story alone are just wrong for each other. They don't fit together.

And the ending is one of the main pieces of evidence in that regard! You can’t say the ending where Alina isn’t Grisha anymore is her “going back to where she started” when she’s always been Grisha. She just didn’t know she was Grisha because she denied that part of herself that she was born with.

Alina is reluctant to move forward or change, she struggles with adapting, and she’s very set on the things she’s grown attached to throughout her life. She also has some latent prejudices against the Grisha, and so denies the possibility of being Grisha for those reasons as well.

Alina’s lack of powers in the beginning of her life because she willfully doesn’t learn about them to avoid change versus her lack of powers at the end of the book when she’s accepted them and then they’re stripped away from her by outer forces are two entirely separate circumstances. You can’t make a parallel about lost powers and lack of Grisha status bringing her back to the start when she was always Grisha and she always had powers and she simply refused to come to terms with it because of personal reasons.

The first situation is an internal conflict that indicates a story about growth and a journey of self acceptance. Denying herself the opportunity to learn about her heritage and to find acceptance with a group of people like her because she’s tied to the past and because of the way she was raised is the setup for a narrative that tackles unlearning prejudice and learning how to connect with a part of her identity that was denied her and learning how to grow independent and self assured. It’s the setup for a different story entirely. The second situation is an external conflict that centers around the ‘corrupting influence of power’... for some reason.

In a world where Grisha do not have social, political, or economic power and they are hunted, centering your heroine’s journey of self acceptance and growth around an external conflict about... the corrupting influence of power (in a group of people that don’t actually have any power?!) just doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to connect the two stories Bardugo is trying to push in Shadow and Bone without seriously damaging the main character’s developmental arc.

The only way a narrative like this would work, claiming that she has gone back to where she started, is either a) if the Grisha weren’t actually a persecuted group and instead were apart of the upper class, or b) if the one bad connection between the two instances is acknowledged - that Alina denied a part of herself crucial to self acceptance and growing up, and that losing her powers at the end has also denied her. It is a tragedy, not a happy ending.

Alina suffered because she didn’t use her powers. She grew sick. It was bad for her. This was not a resistance to 'the corruption of power and the burden of greed', it was her suffering because she couldn’t fully accept herself.

Framing the ending as a return to the beginning can’t be done if you don’t address how bad the beginning was for your main character. You brought her back to a bad point in her life. You regressed her. This should be a low point in her arc. It should be a problem that’s solved so she can finish developing organically or it should be something that is acknowledged as a tragedy in it’s own right, for the future the world (the writing) denied her.

This is a ramble and it makes no sense and I’m really sorry, but my point is that Bardugo put the wrong characters in the wrong story. The character arc required for organic development doesn’t match the story and intended message at all. The narrative doesn’t fit the cast. She's got two clashing stories attempting to work in tandem and she ends up with both conflicting messages that fans still can’t comprehend in her writing and an ending that doesn’t suit her main character to such an impossible degree that it’s almost laughable.

So yeah, there's a few reasons why I think the story and the plot feels so bad and disconnected. I hope you don't mind me making this answer so long! 😅 I was not expecting to write this much.

[chosonore]

part one | oblivion

oblivion [noun. the state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening around one]

pairing: kamo noritoshi/f!reader

summary: your relationship with noritoshi was like a game of cat and mouse; no matter how hard you tried to escape from him, he would always find his way back to you.

wordcount: 3.9k

content/warnings: friends to enemies to lovers, language, noritoshi is kind of a dick but i promise it gets better so please don’t lose faith in him, we’re not strictly following the manga timeline bc while i am reading it, i do have a goldfish brain, lowercase intended

a/n: hello, here’s the first installment of my sanguine series! it’s the prequel of this drabble (nsfw) i wrote the other week while i was working on the outline of the fic. it’s a little slow burn because i wanted to spend some more time exploring their relationship and the groundwork for it, so yeah. i’ll try to update it regularly, but since i’ve only planned five parts for sanguine, it might take a while bc i want to take my time with it. if you want to stay updated with the series, i’ll post the masterlist to it shortly! i do hope you enjoy it though :) and stay safe, everybody! [tagging @sukirichi​ the sukuna to my yuuji, who just gets spammed when i start rambling about my aus but always screams with me (´• ω •`)]

masterlist - next 

"y/n!" you look up to see miwa storming towards you, thrusting a book in your direction. "could you- could you please give this to noritoshi? i borrowed this book from him like a week ago and if i don't return this anytime soon, i think he's gonna kill me." 

scowling at her, you look at the book in disdain. you wanted to avoid crossing paths with noritoshi as much as possible and miwa was well aware that you didn't like hi- 

"please," miwa pleaded again, taking your hands and placing the book in it. "i'm really scared of him. he always looks like he's going to shoot me soon. even todo is pretty nice if you don't interrupt his takada-chan time!" 

you sighed in annoyance, you just couldn't say no. ever since coming to the kyoto metropolitan curse tech, miwa and you had been pretty close because you strongly disliked the other students. most of them were arrogant and stuck-up, thinking they were better than the other; the two that belonged to the three clans were even worse. on your first day here you'd promptly gotten into a fight with mai, disliking how haughty she was and trying to prove everyone that she was better than them. much to your chagrin, the fight ended in a tie.

"fine, but you owe me some mango," miwa's face lit up in relief and she gave you a thumbs up before dashing to her room, most likely to escape noritoshi's wrath. you inspected the book. was it even worth returning it? maybe you could just throw it in the trash. if noritoshi ever found out, he'd kill miwa first and then you. you let out another sigh before making your way towards the training grounds. he most likely was outside to practice, either with one of the guys or alone. as you were nearing the training grounds, you could already hear the sound of arrows whistling and the dull thuds of them hitting the target. it was hard to spot him through all the trees; you weren't entirely sure where he was. your ears perked up when you heard him release another arrow until you realized that it was heading your way. this bastard. fortunately, you were able to slash the arrow clean in the middle, angrily pointing your sword in his direction. you still couldn't see him anywhere.

"you fucking idiot! you could've killed me," you snarled, stomping deeper into the forest. an amused laugh echoed through the trees. 

"you're acting like i can't control my arrows. it's not my fault you let your guard down," noritoshi retorted smugly, lowering his bow as he saw you approaching. you were fuming, hurling the book at him. how dare he? you watched with satisfaction as it hit him square in the chest - who was caught off guard now, huh? he deserved it anyways. 

"miwa asked me to return your book," you curtly explained and turned back around to leave but apparently, noritoshi had other plans. instead of saying anything else, he just followed you which unsettled you even more. 

"stop following me." 

"who said i was following you? i'm just going back to the dorms. i'm sorry you can't handle me being near you."

you whirled around, sword pointing dangerously close to his neck. he smirked at you triumphantly, it was just too easy to get a rouse out of you. "another word and i'll cut you, seriously. you're pissing me off," you gritted your teeth, hating that you always fell for his stupid games. he knew you all to well, what made you angry, what made you happy, what motivated you. once upon a time, you'd thought the same about him; until he changed so rapidly, so unlike your expectations. you were worlds apart and yet you'd reserved an ounce of hope that he wouldn't turn out to be as arrogant as the clan heads. swift as the wind, noritoshi grabbed your wrist, dragging it upwards and towards him until he could lean down to you. your heartbeat sped up - holy shit why was he so close to you - and you froze in shock. 

"i'd like to see you try, princess," he whispered in your ear, the grip on your wrist tightening. "you wouldn't dare to."

the first time you met noritoshi, he was sitting outside in the garden with his mum. both seemed to have a good time. noritoshi's hair was tousled from the soft summer breeze and he had a soft smile on his face, happily munching away on the snacks that were displayed on the table. while he looked friendly enough, you were wary of meeting and talking to him because you felt kind of queasy around the kamo family. you couldn’t quite place a finger on the feeling, the older members of the family intimidating you to no end. much to your dismay, you felt like you had to be watchful - your parents worked for the kamo family, so naturally the apartment you lived in was close to the estate. you avoided any run ins with the adults, they weren’t exactly friendly to you. noritoshi’s mum had befriended your mum and they spent a lot of time together when possible. and yet you’d never met noritoshi before, seeing how busy he was with his various classes.

the fit that you threw, not wanting to tag along with your mum, was long forgotten when you’d spotted the jar of cookies on the table. before your mum could react, you pulled your hand away from hers and quickly ran towards it. “hello miss!” you greeted enthusiastically, your eyes shining at the sight of the sweets. “my name is y/n! i’m here with my mum and i uhm… could i have some of the cookies? please?” when your mum finally caught up to you, she scolded you quietly and greeted the other two, taking a seat beside noritoshi’s mum. you pouted, immediately climbing on her lap as you refused to sit next to the boy. his mum handed you a cookie which you happily took and thanked her politely. noritoshi was curiously eyeing you; it wasn’t often that he saw other children around his age and he didn’t have any friends to play with. his everyday life revolved around reading books, studying, taking archery classes and sometimes spending time with his mum. noritoshi barely even knew what fun was - he’d only ever felt at peace when he was around his mum.

“y/n, sweetie, why don’t you go and play with noritoshi?” your mum prompted but you immediately shook your head, hiding your face in her chest. she simply laughed and shook her head, brushing your hair back softly. “come on, noritoshi is really nice. you can be his friend one day, right? didn’t i tell you that friends are important?” 

you frowned. then huffed. when she worded it like this, there was no way you could refuse. the cartoon that you religiously watched featured a group of friends that went on adventures and helped each other out. you’d told your mum that you wanted to be like that too! begrudgingly, you slid off her lap and trudged towards noritoshi who looked at you with big eyes. you held your hand out, waiting for him to shake it. “my name is y/n. uhm… nice to meet you,” you shyly whispered, eyes darting away from him. 

it took a while until noritoshi reacted, shaking your hand gently and answering: “hello y/n, i’m noritoshi.”

much to your surprise, noritoshi was actually fun to be around with. he showed you his collection of books, the bow that he was practicing with and you often played the card game you’d received for your birthday together. he was smart and witty, often explaining you things that he’d read in a book but he was also attentive when he listened to you ramble about the other kids in school or when you told him about the cartoon that you were watching. for you, noritoshi was becoming your best friend - for noritoshi, you were his first friend. he cherished you and how unabashedly true to yourself you were. spending time with you was something he looked forward to; you always made him laugh and you didn’t care whether he lived up to the kamo family name or not. to you, he was simply noritoshi. you were like a fresh breeze of air in his life.

noritoshi didn't quite understand why the elders were always so hard on him, so strict and unrelenting. they expected only the best results from him and didn't show any understanding when he exhausted. he didn't enjoy practice anymore, the lessons becoming a chore and burden on his mind. but whenever he saw your face light up at his newly acquired skills, he thought it was worth the trouble. you came to visit him everyday after school, never skipping a day. sometimes he questioned why you weren't visiting your friends from school but you shook your head, poking his chest indignantly. "you're my best friend, 'toshi. of course i'd want to spend more time with you." noritoshi was glad you always chose him, without fail.

even though your parents had always warned you to be careful around noritoshi because his family was strict and didn't like outside influences distracting the heir, you never really strayed from his side. noritoshi didn't have any other friends, who would keep him company or listen to his troubles then? you didn't understand why your parents were suddenly going back on their word. they'd always told you that family and friends were important. you couldn't pinpoint your feelings for him - but your parents saw it. it was obvious; the stars in your eyes when you looked at him, the slight blush on your cheeks when he complimented you and how happy you were when you got to spend time with him. the more time you spent with him, the more they were worried for you. 

"'toshi!" you yelled in excitement as you ran towards him, waving wildly. he dropped his bow and turned to you, a soft smile gracing his lips as he opened his arms to hug you. you squeezed him tightly. two weeks you hadn't seen him due to a school trip after which you got sick and weren't able to leave the house. you'd missed him a lot and you were excited to show him the souvenirs you brought him. 

"look, i bought you an omamori!" you handed him the small object, then pointing on your bag to show him the one you'd bought for yourself. "i got myself a matching one too! my teacher said it wards off evil spirits and brings you luck." noritoshi's smile was bright, so bright. he was happy you thought of him and were always kind to him. your eyes widened as he leaned in to kiss your cheek before thanking you. the two of you were blushing, neither saying a word but not minding what had just happened.

the day noritoshi's mother left the estate was the day you were slowly starting to lose him. noritoshi grew more forlorn and didn't seem to easily find joy in anything anymore. the departure left a deep, deep gap in his heart. it had shocked him deep to the core when she left him. him. why couldn't she stay? why did she leave him when she was the only person who protected him, loved him? she did say that she was hindering his growth but who was she to decide that? he didn't want to become stronger, didn't want to protect other people like she'd told him to. he wanted to stay with her. "'toshi? 'toshi!" a concerned voice broke through his trance, pulling him back into reality. "i asked you a question! you weren't even listening to me." 

you were pouting at him, tugging at his sleeve impatiently. noritoshi apologized, patting your head to soothe your temper. "what do you want to do in the future? mum said it's important to work towards your dreams!" you asked him curiously, grasping his hand to hold it. the gesture filled him with indescribable warmth, drawing him in like a moth to the flames. "my mum said i have a special power, i can heal people! i want to become a doctor in the future, so i can help everyone that got hurt," you explained to him so earnestly that he felt bad for the lie he was about to tell. noritoshi didn't have big dreams or ambitions just yet. he didn't even know what would be suitable to him - he was strictly following orders, never allowed to think for himself. 

but when he looked at you, he only had one wish. "i think… i think i want to help people, protect them. especially those that i love."

with each year passing, you noticed that noritoshi was putting more and more distance between the two of you. at first you'd brushed it off as the stress of his training and number of classes he was attending. but as you spent less and less time together, the weight of the situation didn’t escape you. he was easily irritable, cold and arrogant, often rude towards employees of the kamo estate. every now and then when you’d scold him for being an asshole, he’d simply scoff at you and haughtily ask you how it was any of your business. you sighed, tossing and turning in your bed as you thought about how much noritoshi had changed. it kept you up at night, just thinking about how he wasn’t your ‘toshi anymore. you didn’t know this person. ‘toshi was always gentle and kind, he tended to overthink many things and sometimes he was a little bit of a crybaby but you still loved him regardless. you sneaked out of your room, finally mustering up enough courage to ask your mother for advice. the thought of her discovering your blooming crush on noritoshi was scaring you. your parents were wary around the kamos despite working from them - even more so ever since noritoshi’s mother left and the elders had free reign over her son.

“noritoshi! noritoshi, stop walking away from me! hey, i’m talking to you!” you yelled frustrated as you were trying to keep up with him. noritoshi was crossing the garden in long strides, it was nearly impossible to stop him as you couldn’t catch up to him. you lunged forward, getting hold of his sleeve and tugged him back harshly. noritoshi yanked his arm out of your grip, glaring at you annoyed. 

“what do you want from me? i have better things to do than to quibble with you,” he hissed irritated. you couldn’t believe him, he had the nerve to dismiss you like this when he was in the wrong? 

“you know exactly what i want from you! you can’t just go around and talk to people like you did before just because they’re not from a reputable family! noritoshi, you’re not any better than them just because your last name is kamo.”

as much as noritoshi scared you, you stood your ground. you knew he didn’t take you serious, not with the amused look he gave you. in the past month or two, noritoshi was suddenly hit by a growth spurt - you barely reached his shoulder now and he took advantage of that to mock you, often treating you like an armrest. he pat your head condescendingly, pouting at you in fake regret. “aw, did i hurt your feelings? did i make itty bitty little y/n sad?” he mocked you, before abruptly grabbing your cheeks to make you look at him. “i don’t care what you think of me, cry all you want. i strongly suggest you hold that sharp tongue of yours if you know what’s good. know your place.” 

tears filled your eyes; noritoshi had never talked to you this way. what has gotten into him? your heart broke in pieces, unable to take the pain any longer. you were no longer his equal but below him, much like everyone else.

“mum?” you cautiously knocked at the door of her study, waiting for her response. your mother was most likely still awake and dealing with paperwork like she usually did. upon hearing the affirmative noise she made, you flitted inside, closing the door behind you so your father didn’t catch any wind of this. it was already embarrassing enough and you were sure your mother could offer you better advice. you gingerly took a seat on the armchair, grabbing a pillow and hugging it close to your body. how were you going to approach this? hey mum, i have a crush on noritoshi and he’s weird to me now and i don’t know why? uh yeah mum, i caught feelings for the guy you warned me about and now i look like a fool crawling up to you like this? 

“it’s about noritoshi, isn’t it?” your mother interrupted your stream of thought, spinning her swivel chair towards you. 

“huh? oh no it isn’t, why would it be? i have-” 

“y/n.” 

“ugh okay fine, maybe it is about him,” you sighed defeated, of course she would look right through you. she always seemed to know what you were thinking, even when you hadn’t confided in her before. “but promise me you won’t judge me!” the look in your mother’s eyes told you that she was going to judge you regardless but you knew she meant well - she simply wanted the best for you.

“i- i just don’t understand why he’s been such a pain in the ass lately. and he’s been treating everyone like dirt too, including me! mum, he’s becoming someone else and i… i don’t know what to do,” you sniffled inconsolably, wiping at your eyes with the sleeves of your sweater. she wasn’t supposed to see you getting emotional. “he’s always busy and when we do get to see each other, he doesn’t want to spend time with me. what if he doesn’t like me anymore? and i don’t like how he’s treating you! it’s the same issue with the elders, they don’t know any human decency at all!” 

your mother motioned you to scoot over a little and sat next to you, wrapping her arms around you and patting your back to console you. while she meant well, it accomplished the opposite - you broke down in tears, unable to stop your sobs. “i just want my ‘toshi back,” you whimpered upset, burying your face in the pillow to muffle the sound of you crying. “i know you didn’t like that i became good friends with him but i couldn’t help it and i just really like him and- you weren’t supposed to find that out.”

“sweetheart, i know you love noritoshi,” she handed you a tissue. “you let a lot more on than you were aware of; dad and me always knew you were in love with him.” as if on cue, your sobbing stopped and you just looked at her in disbelief. she knew. she knew. you wanted the earth to swallow you whole. “i think it was always pretty obvious, to be honest. you always looked at him as if he was your entire world and no matter what happened, you were always by his side. i know it’s hard to accept when a dear friend is changing but sometimes you just have to, right? both of you are still growing, there’s no way of telling how your personalities change.”

“but i don’t want him to change like this,” you protested stubbornly, glaring at her. she was talking about it as if it was a matter of simply discarding a bad apple in the trash. it wasn’t easy and it made you anxious. you grew up together, shared secrets and memories. he was the person you’d always looked up to.

“y/n.” your mother sounded stern but you didn’t back down, not yet. “is it really worth it? if a person is changing so rapidly and you’re not getting through to them, you’ll have to let it go. there’s only so much you can do. people grow apart sometimes, it’s only natural. you have to let go of them, temporarily, so you both can heal and grow. y/n, i know you’re being stubborn about this but you’ll have to let him figure things out on his own. fate has curious ways to bring people back together.”

when the time came, noritoshi left to attend the kyoto metropolitan curse tech school without telling you a word. you were disappointed, apparently you weren’t worth saying goodbye to. whatever his reason was, it must’ve been pretty important. important enough to forget the promise that you’d always stay in contact. you wondered whether he'd change again, for the better maybe? maybe you would reconcile when you could finally attend the school as well and train together. you were excited to show him your sword skills, having received your family's heirloom, an elegant steel blue sword. though your skills probably weren’t up to par with the other students, you still wanted to show them off, show him what you’d learned in the year that you spent apart.

noritoshi had changed but not for the better. holy shit, did he get on your nerves. the first time he'd practiced with you, you realized that he had mutated into an insufferable know-it-all. he would give you backhanded compliments or make snide remarks about your posture, how you were supposed to hold your sword, how inefficient your fighting style was. sometimes you wished you could just beat him for once and have him shut up. there was no denying though, noritoshi was way too strong and you had a long way to go. judging from the reactions of the others, barely anyone had beat him either. 

and just like that, your feelings for him were buried. you’d taken your mother’s advice to heart, keeping conversations and interactions with him to a minimum but somehow noritoshi always found his way to you. he was everywhere and a quarrel was inevitable. noritoshi got under your skin and he knew how to push your buttons. why he chose to pick on you was beyond your comprehension; he didn’t pay much attention to the other students nor was he particularly liked by them. just how much was he going to get on everyone else’s nerves? out of all the second years, todo aoi was the most amicable; you had the (dis)pleasure to run into him on your first day and for some reason, he took a liking to you. while he was loud and boisterous, mostly doing whatever he wanted, you couldn’t deny that he was a good friend. even though he didn’t care about anyone as much as he cared about takada-chan. at one point, he’d looked at you in sympathy when he caught you staring at noritoshi, patting your shoulder (too forceful): “i’m sorry, y/n, i’m so sorry.” 

you still didn’t know what he meant by that.

ps.: todo knows and he’s kinda judging you for your taste in men 

[rederiswrites]

Conflict: honestly it’s fine

Here we go, Part 1 of the Red’s Punk Parenting series, in no particular order.

My two children get along really well. They don’t do spiteful things to each other, they don’t snap at each other much, and they don’t stay angry at each other. Note that I said stay. That matters. Now, I DID read entire books about fostering healthy sibling relationships while the second one was on the way--as an only child, I was scared as hell because I didn’t know ANY siblings that weren’t fairly adversarial. So I did a number of things on purpose to make that happen. But ultimately I feel that the most important is that they are free to be angry at each other.

Anger is an emotion. Like other emotions, suppressing and shaming are not effective approaches. Anger needs to be acknowledged and addressed. 

Kids are gonna be angry at each other. Housemates are gonna be angry at each other. You’re gonna get in each other’s way. ANYONE who spends a lot of time in close proximity, sharing resources, is going to end up in conflict. If one of those people is three and the other is six? Like, this should not surprise us.  

I’m repeating myself because culturally, MOST of us are trained to fear and avoid conflict, or at least deny it. Unlearn that! Conflict is inevitable! HONESTLY IT’S FINE. It is a sign that someone’s needs are not being met, and a useful one at that. It is a signal to look more closely.

Now sometimes the problem’s gonna be obvious. One kid needs quiet, one kid really wants to play a video game. Headphones, problem solved, yay. Or the kids just need to be heard. They just need a little help finding the words to express what’s upsetting them, and then you say, “You’re right, that is upsetting,” and that may be it. They don’t always need anything to change at all!

Especially when they’re little, but honestly right up to adults, they may not know what’s actually upsetting them. You may need to help. Help them find words, or dig to unearth the real problem. It may not be whatever the original complaint was at all. It may require some detective work and trained intuition. They start out furious because someone else is playing with their toy, but actually they’re anxious as hell because you were sick the other day and they’re terrified of losing you. Getting the toy won’t help. Cuddling on the couch and watching a movie together might.

You may have to institute formal systems of apology (a good basic one is ‘lay out how you hurt the other person/”I’m sorry”/describe how you will avoid repeating the problem’), but forced apologies are trash. I try to get the kids to see things empathetically, and if I fail I move on and hope for better next time. If the kid (person) doesn’t actually understand what they did wrong and possess a sincere desire not to do it again, an apology is totally meaningless.

I’m getting distracted; this is not really a post about the huge subject of conflict resolution. It’s a post about unlearning your own fear of conflict. Conflict is not bad, it is the first step in building a better relationship. Don’t give it more power to hurt. Don’t teach your kids that it’s bad; or that they should hide it until the problem is much bigger.

So when a kid yells, “I HATE you!!”, don’t say, “You don’t mean that!” Take it for the hyperbole it is, and say, “Wow, you sound really angry. Help me understand the problem.”

Honestly, it’s fine.

[annacaffeina]

Ok this post is going to suck because I haven't put nearly enough thought into planning it out and it's going to touch on a lot of sensitive stuff in a poorly thought out way.

When I worked with families in which the dad was horribly abusive there was often this dynamic that would occur where the children would grow up very very angry at their mothers for not protecting them. "If she'd just been nicer to him... if she'd just stood up to him more... if she had just been a better wife... if she'd just left him..." a thousand reasons the mom could have saved the kids from the father if she'd really wanted to.

And I get that anger. When you are a kid it is the job of your adults to protect you, and when that doesn't happen it's reasonable to be upset at both parents. Mom should have protected the child. Sure as adults maybe we can see all the ways she couldn't, but as a kid that stuff isn't your job to understand.

The thing that I used to struggle with is that the anger never then extended to the father. The horrifically abusive father who was the literal source of the suffering was granted this god-like status that treated the abuse as if it was somehow outside of himself. As if it were a force of nature, and not a series of choices that he actively made. As if he could never be seen as responsible for his own behavior. The inability to put the cause and the effect where they belonged caused a lot of children to struggle to develop any sense of agency over their own feelings of safety. It was a very common problem.

I was unprepared to see that dynamic play out over and over again on the national political scene.

Again and again and again and again I see the same take over and over and over about how democrats are failing to protect us from republican policy and all the anger and the hate bypassing the republicans entirely and landing right on the democrats. What the FUCK??

One party is trying to kill you. THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU. COVID, gun control, health care, abortion, civil rights, etc. Republicans are TRYING TO KILL YOU. Not in a hyperbole sense. They think you should die.

And democrats are trying to make those things better. Not always in the way you would like, maybe not as much as you would want, but REPUBLICANS ARE THE ABUSERS.

If I see one more Weak Ass Whiny FUCKING take about how DeMoCRatS aren't saving us without ANY acknowledgement of the fact that the thing we need saving from is LITERALLY REPUBLICANS I AM GOING TO LOSE MY SHIT.

If you are old enough to vote you are an adult now. GROW THE FUCK UP. LOOK AROUND YOU. ARE YOUFUCKIN KIDDING ME?? Democrats are too middle of the road?? WHILE YOU IGNORE THE LITERAL FUCKING TERRORISTS IN OFFICE?? WE KNOW WHO THE BAD GUYS ARE. They aren't hiding. They're CAMPAIGNING on being fuckin evil.

PUT THE ANGER AND THE BLAME WHERE IT BELONGS. THE TERRORISTS.

there is nothing any democrat is doing that is worse than anything any republican is doing. Any single democrat, even the worst ones, are miles better than even the best republican. because republicans are ABUSIVE TERRORISTS. So Vote Like It.