#this was the most I could do without it turning into incoherent rambling

[hanbindans]

ways they're comforting (hyung line)

a/n: listening more closely to the in bloom lyrics ruined me so I'm posting this from my drafts. I'll get to the maknae line soon enough but since I already wrote the hyungs I'll post them first. enjoy me screaming into the void 🤍

jiwoong

you're like the older brother I never had. there's something comforting in the way you are exactly how I want to be when I grow up; considerate and caring and willing to love someone regardless of their flaws- kind to others but more importantly to yourself. you remind me that it's possible to go through all the stages of adolescence and young adulthood, and both see and feel so much hopelessness and negativity and doubt, and still be able to see happiness in all the small things. like finding peace in petting a small, fluffy animal. you've become the type of adult we all look up to. I'm so proud of you.

hao

I don't know, I just see so much of myself in you. in the way you were the smart kid who did well in school, the kid who worked hard at everything he did, the kid who got compliments from teachers and other people's parents. you could have had anything you wanted- you would have done what it takes to achieve it- and you chose with your heart. people probably had a lot of (high) expectations on you and you made a decision that was for you- something that you really wanted- and you worked as hard as you always did because you knew that you could do it if you really wanted to. I envy your courage to chose with your heart and follow your dreams. maybe one day I can learn it from you.

hanbin

sometimes I think that I can see when your perfect mask starts to slip and your facade cracks a little, and you race to patch up the holes before anyone takes notice. it's okay. I do it too. in some ironic way it makes you even more relatable. there's so much good in you and there's even more desire to be good, do good, make it overflow and spread to everyone around you and paint the whole world in yellows, smiley-faces and sunflowers. "don't regret what you do". I'm not sure if it's meant for me or for yourself. I hope it's for yourself. I hope you let yourself be bright, loving, and most importantly happy, even if it makes you imperfect, more raw, and easier to hurt. people will be ready to love you just as you are. they will love you because they want to return the good you have given. you make me want to do more good.

matthew

there's something very genuine in the way you carry yourself. it's unfair to just call it "unfiltered"- I think I would call it unapologetic, authentic, honest. you're not the type of person to lie about what type of music you listen to or order a plain salad when you're with people you don't know too well. I still have a feeling that you want to be impressive, but you don't try hard to impress. you want to do and be and try so many different things but you won't do it anything at your own expense. you will always say what's on your mind, always do things your way, even if not everyone agrees with you, because it's your life and you won't live it for others. it's admirable. please don't ever start apologising for the way you are.

taerae

I love how you're the colour yellow personified. from the duck emojis to the way you laugh at every joke like they're the funniest thing you've ever heard. you're so warm and fun and I just want to be around you all the time so I can re-learn how to be silly and not wince at the way my face scrunches up when I laugh. it's like you've already figured it out. how to be kind and caring and happy without being scared of being soft and vulnerable. there's so much comfort but also stability and security radiating from you and it's so infectious. I hope you never waver from that. I hope your laugh will always fill up the room and you will keep drawing your ducks and you will keep making your silly little poses. you seem like you're having so much fun.

[risuola]

PROMISE — F. READER x GOJO SATORU

You felt sick watching your husband fighting for his life, but your unborn daughter seemed to sleep just fine despite your complete distress. Little that you know, Satoru made some promises to her.

cw: manga spoilers!!! (chapters 223-235 with not much of specific details, but it’s resolved around the events), reader is pregnant — 0,8k words

a/n: this piece has TWO alternative endings — FLUFFY & SWEET & ANGSTY & DEPRESSING — choose your fighter, I guess

Sick. You felt sick, sitting in the room full of people, most of which you didn’t even recognize. You felt sick watching the screens that showcased live what was happening in the middle of Shinjuku. You felt dizzy and nauseous, and so overwhelmingly sick when you heard people betting money, trying to make profit of something that was so painful for you to watch.

“You think he’s gonna win that?” “Nah, he’s dead.” Some men were talking, chuckling like it was entertainment of the highest level for them. And maybe it was, maybe some sorcerers could benefit from the outcome that you considered the worst one, but you felt like the world was crumbling down in real time. Your world was fighting for his life right in front of your eyes.

You sat there paralyzed, unable to move as all of the voices around you slowly became distant. Yuji’s rambling, Kusakabe’s comments and Yuta’s notes all blurred into one, incoherent noise in the background and you wondered what happened, what went so wrong to lead to all of this. Why it felt like you’ll never see Megumi again? You raised that boy, you talked down his teachers in middle school from expelling him when he beat the hell out of other students, you encouraged him to train harder when he felt down, overwhelmed by the comparison to Gojo’s strength. Why now it felt, like you’ll never get to force another hug out of him, like you’ll never see his grumpy face again? You’ve already lost Tsumiki, the tears from that still felt fresh on your face and now you had to watch your husband on the battlefield, being wounded time after time by a cursed spirit that should have been dead thousand years ago.

You felt your insides turning and twisting into a very tight knot, every time Satoru got hit by Sukuna’s attack, every time you saw blood staining his light skin, you felt a little closer to heart attack. It was a sight you could never familiarize yourself with, Gojo never bled. He never was cut, not even punched and now, all of his body was covered in slits. Just once in your life you saw him in a puddle of blood, decade ago while still in high school and after that, never again. Until today.

You were scared. Petrified with the thought that he might not come back, that you might never feel his warmth again. The idea of going further in your life without him spread out in your mind in the colors of the worst kind of nightmare, your throat clenched, tears rolled down your cheeks as you watched his domain shatter. Infinite void fell down in pieces and the reds and blues were not effective either. It’s worse than nightmare. It was torture.

You felt the pain, deep in your heart, spreading in waves to every cell of your body. You wanted to go there, to jump in and help him, to shield him from the attack even if it would cost you your own life. You wanted to go there and slap Sukuna out of Megumi, to hold the boy to your heart and tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that everything’s gonna be alright. But you couldn’t do either of those things. You knew you’d only be an obstacle, a limiting factor to your husband’s abilities. You knew your tears wouldn’t bring Fushiguro back. You were strong on your own, but now, you were helpless just as everyone else. And you had a life to protect.

And so, you sat there, rubbing soft circles into the bump of your stomach that held the little girl that was yet to come to this world, wondering if she’ll get to know her father. She will, you knew that, deep down underneath all of the layers of fear and worry, you knew that Satoru will win, because he has to win. He has to be there with you, he has to know if his daughter has the same blue eyes as him and the same cute nose as you, because he bet on that. He has to be there to take all of those goofy selfies with the newborn, he has to be there to showoff the miracle that he’s created with you, to be able to put new title to his name – the best dad.

The baby seemed to be sleeping, calm in your stomach despite the utter distress that consumed you. She probably knew better than you not to worry about Satoru. She probably knew that her daddy will never leave her. He promised that to her, when before leaving to the Shinjuku district he pressed his lips to the curve of your bump, whispering things you barely heard.

He made a promise so he had to keep it.

[almostmylove]

Shatter me with your love. part 3

warning: neglect?

synopsis: a night through out Gotham without worries

“ what the hell are you doing kid?” That's the first thing you hear from cat woman that was now towering over your shaking, sobbing body.

Your silent weeps quickly turn into something that could have been considered ugly hiccups as you look up at her, dumbfounded. You don’t respond to her question but only stare for what feels like a eternity, you almost swear you could hear your tears dripping down onto the ground like a rainy night .

your eyes blink, pushing the dangling tear that snaps you out of your trance, remembering her question that you had forgotten because of shock and you scramble to answer .

“ well i just -, im not-i was just-” you stumble over your words as you try to speak, only managing to further fumbling over your quivering lips.

You would of never thought that one of Gotham’s well known and prettiest( in your opinion ) criminal would out of nowhere start talking to you so it caught you off guard. You had never spoken to her before or really know a lot about her, only hearing about her thru looking in newspapers and small comments from your father.

Over your incoherent rambling on what had happened you stopped upon hearing an annoyed sign from cat woman, making you hyper aware of everything. it was hard to believe one of your favorite villains was standing in front of you, paying attention to you( at least more then your father did)

Your tears dripped onto the dirty city floor, cat women’s gaze on you, how your hands clenched on your side or how you were slightly shivering from the autumn weather and your face felt like rubber unable to change your face from panic and suffering, your face feeling a bit too hot as if you were a cartoon character about to burst from anger, how runny your nose had been and how alone and desperate for love you felt.

The only thing to keep you warm was a small black scarf around your neck That was wrapped a bit too tightly for your comfort but you didn't to move

You were weak, unlike your brothers. You had always known that, from the time that your mother got thrown into a mental hospital to. well .now.

Your thoughts were interrupted by a latex gloves hand waving in your face , it was cat womans. She had offered her hand up to and you were not about to refuse now.

“Get up , don’t keep me waiting kid. ” she said her voice a hint of annoyance but her face seemed more say than annoyed . You take her hand and it feels awful warm despite it being covered by a latex glove. Not in a bad way tho but the kind that feels that would give warm hugs.

You never knew why she wore all latex because to you it would be very uncomfortable and inconvenient but at the same time you couldn’t really judge because your adopted dad was a middle aged billionaire that dresses up every night to fight crime in Gotham and never fully stops them because of “morals”.

Standing up makes something more apparent to you. she is a lot taller than you thought, you were up to her waist at the most.

“ thank you” you tell her shyly, you didn't why you were thanking her but you just wanted to. You stood tall , looking around around, trying to ignore the awkward silence consuming you both . “ there is nothing to thank me for , i did nothing” You could feel cat woman trying to analyze your face till something clicked in her mind. “ hey” she calls out to you, making your eyes shift to hers “ you're one of Bruce Wayne's kids no?” She question with curiosity. Her statement made you pause, freezing in place. you weren't ready for anyone to pay attention to you, let alone recognize you,

Even tho you knew it was dangerous engage with a villain but you responded either way( she looks nice enough).

“ yes ma’am that's me”

“ im gonna ask you again and give me you're going to give me straight answer, ok? “ she commands , her voice authoritative yet concerned

“ im not sure myself , i guess i was being dramatic” you chuckled to yourself , hoping she wouldn't pry and make you confess your dramatic reaction to being pushed out the way.

She signed dramatically putting her hand on her forehead as is she was getting a headache. “ fine if you don’t want to tell you dont have to. Just stop sobbing like a baby, its annoying.” She exclaimed.

Her eyes wondered around you before kneeling down to get on your level. “ i see your feeling a bit down , why don’t and you and i take a stroll around Gotham, what do you say” said says , her voice a calm and soothing tone. You didn't know why but you let your guard only respond in a reluctant hum. “ well i dont think my fathe-” you were interrupted by catwoman's voice “ listen kid, if he really cared wouldn’t he be with you”

The silenced that follow after wards was very loud but you knew she was correct. You had been out and away from the gala for over 20 minutes and no sign of them. None of them .

So in that moment you accept. No one else had comfort or even checked up on you like that in years, no even alfred. That night she took you all over gotham. From quickly (and nicely) robbing an icecream stands and eating it on a roof top to going to going to one of gothams only beaches that luckly wasn’t literally with trash. She even gave you a toy of your favorite character that you had talked about . You didn't have the heart to tell her that you had bought your own toy of the same kind. Through the night you got to know quickly a lot about her like how she was a mob boss once or that her sister was driven insane. You too shared personal stuff which took a invisible weight off your shoulders and you started to feel like you too started to bond. She offered to take you back home herself but you refused in fear of the off chance that she would try to rob the manner or that the cameras surrounding the manner ( installed by Bruce) would see you guys. You had her drop you off a few blocks away and you watch as she hopped from building to building like a sly cat tho you knew that she had followed You the whole way home, keeping you from getting robbed on that Gotham night. You never really knew why on that night she helped you out and you never got a chance to ask her after that. Once Bruce and your brothers came back from the gala they asked where you had gone and you told them a cheap answer on how you got tired and decided to walk home. You knew that Bruce didn’t fully believe you- , if he did then he wouldn’t be greatest detective in Gotham- maybe even the world, after that none of the payed any futher

It has been years since that night and your relationship with your “family” has gotten worse.

Part 4

[kassiaactuallydraws]

Okay, so about that old self indulgent Wistim Au.

Disclaimer before I go on:

I was frankly, losing it back then when I first came up with it so most of what I've got is from my incoherent rambles to myself. So it's not peer reviewed, it's not revised, I was the only one who ever heard of it so I didn't even bother to polish. It's 100% me shoving whatever I wanted into the plot with full disregard for canon

This was made right before the season 2 finale came out so it's not accurate to how that went down

Looking back at it now, it's not the best plot but eh, I had fun with it

Okay? Got it? Good.

So the Au (Which I've nicknamed Aether lord Au) was a what-if scenario for the conclusion of Hero's defeat. Basically, Steve managed to kill Hero after a battle and re-absorbed him. Sadly, both him and Withy had spent all their strength on beating Hero which meant that there was none left that could be used to sustain Steve's body. So, Steve's dying. He tries his hardest to convince himself and the others that he'd fine with it because really, he's been running on borrowed time. But him, Withy and Endy know that's not true. Imagine sort of like season 1's finale but there's no fight, just a quiet chat in the ruins of the destroyed village.

Alex tries to go for the killing blow but Endy decides that unlike last time, she's not going to just let him go. Both her and Withy will actually do something to help him. So they go fetch Endy's things

From which she fetches the totem. Steve refuses it, out of fear of what happened last time to happen again. But the demons insist, after all, he's without evil this time so the effect should be different. Ultimately, Steve accepts it right before dying and the totem's magic activates.

Unlike last time, when Steve was almost fully corrupted, the totem works in a different way. It restores Steve's body and infuses it with magic (Which somehow turns out to be from the Aether? I think I settled with the totem being a lost artifact from there.), turning into something else.

I never made like a proper design for him bc he mostly just existed in my head as the vibe of a character but he now looks something like this:

(I'll be linking the picrews in the reblogs!)

He still looks somewhat human but now he's something more.

So the plot from then on would be him getting Endy and Withy out of his head (Building a body for Withy, helping Endy's egg hatch) and learning from them what it means to be.. well, whatever he is now. He's obviously not going to heed their every advice (Bc some of it is not good sgjshs) but it's nice to not be alone when faced with something like this.

So yeah! I really like where canon ended up heading so I kinda ditched this Au shortly after but man, it's a fun Au (To me at least). As fun as it is to put Steve through the meat grinder, it's also nice to treat him to something good every once in a while. So why not make an Au where he turns into a demi-god lmao

[is-the-fire-real]

Preface: I sent you a similar ask previously (and anonymously) but I've thought on it more and think I can explain myself better (or at least more, which might make things even less clear actually. Who knows). This is not meant in any way to rush you, it's purely to rephrase some things (and I have a slight distrust in Tumblr's actual functionality lol). This is probably gonna be a bit incoherent/rambly, so apologies in advance 😅

So, I have always been a Christian, and we've gone to a wide variety of churches over the years, mostly Baptist, Church of G-d, and Assembly of G-d. I. . . haven't felt very at-home at any of them. I have had a lot of struggles within my faith, particularly when it came to standard beliefs about hell, the impending rapture, and the significance of speaking in tongues.

Going down the line: I very quickly realized that believing anyone outside of your own faith would be tortured for eternity is SUCH a toxic recipe for forming relationships with anyone who thinks differently from you, and also it was being detrimental to my mental health. After trying my best to study on my own, I decided I didn't think there was enough of anything to indicate that anything worse awaits people than the finality of death, so I decided that's what I believed and moved on.

I grew up under a rather constant barrage of "The rapture is any day now," and mostly just went "Yeah, alright, I don't have plans for a job or college anyways." Anyway, I got thrown for a MASSIVE loop when I turned eighteen, and even now only feel like I'm just starting to develop an idea of what I want to do with my life. I have so many relatives that talk about the rapture like it's their only reason to keep going. I just try to tune them out.

I never was able to speak in tongues. I had a lot of pastors/youth ministers saying it was a crucial part of being saved. I spent a lot of nights crying, pleading, begging to be saved. I ultimately just had to hope that maybe they were wrong. (I also had a youth pastor say that the only thing that mattered to be saved was to convert someone else to Christianity. He straight-up said it didn't even matter if you prayed. I was six.)

And I mean, there's also the matter of the immense amounts of bigotry and hypocrisy. That's a big one too. It's why I have always been too ashamed to actually say I was a Christian.

A long time ago, I decided that *my* Christian faith boiled down to 1. Believing in G-d, 2. Believing that G-d loves us, 3. Believing He wants us to love other people in turn, and 4. Everything else is peripheral to that. I still stand by that as a statement of my faith. I haven't been to a church in a long time. I'm growing less sure that I'm actually a Christian.

I've recently started trying to learn more about what Judaism *really* is, and like. Maybe it's just the usual "wishing things were different." Maybe it's just admiring the beauty of a culture that I'm so unfamiliar with. Maybe it's just rose-tinted glasses, maybe it's just wishing I could engage in religion with other people without such inherent shame.

But I look at it with such a feeling of longing. I've watched a couple of livestreamed services from a conservative synagogue about and hour and a half away, and they were beautiful. The Rabbi had very good and meaningful sermons (if that's what it's called in a synagogue). Most of the rest of the service was in Hebrew, so I didn't understand much of it, but it seemed like such genuine worship and praise. I got to watch their Simchat Torah service, and it seemed like genuine worship. And I've felt like I've just been going through the motions for so long.

And I don't know. Probably the simplest solution is to find a church I can stand, I know there's a Methodist one not far from here. Maybe I need to go back to trying to read my bible. Maybe I just *still* haven't learned how to pray correctly, I sure as heck wouldn't know. (Tangentially, reading about berakhot was probably when I went from "trying to learn more about a different culture" to actually "questioning my faith")

I've questioned just about every facet of who I am this year, so I guess it was only a matter of time until my faith came up. But I've also just recently reassured everyone that yes, I'm still a Christian, I'm just working through some disillusionment. And I thought I was telling the truth! But the question has still persisted, in a "what if you always regret this" sort of way (granted, I have anxiety, it's not *that* uncommon).

But like, I just had a conversation with my mom where she said, "Sometimes it takes a good-old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher to inspire change," and. . . ?!? I just. . . I can't agree with that?? I simply can't believe that the best way to inspire change in people is to threaten them with eternal damnation.

And so much of Christianity is handled this way! Any doubt or question whatsoever is immediately "of the devil," and so I grew up constantly policing my thoughts out of fear that G-d would be angry with me! Which has almost certainly had consequences in regards to my chronic anxiety! But the ONLY correct response to any doubts or questions is to double-down on what you've always believed.

Surely this isn't a healthy way to navigate life???

The biggest concern I've received in er, HYPOTHETICAL discussions of faith is "But what about your faith in Jesus?". And like, I *know* this is the wrong response, I know it's the wrong way of looking at it, but: What does it matter? Either Jesus *is* a part of G-d, in which case it stands to reason that the worship is being shared, or Jesus *isn't* part of G-d. I mean, I know that really, it's about showing G-d's love and mercy, but like? Hosea 14 very specifically demonstrates both of those traits? G-d has ALWAYS been loving and merciful. Don't get me wrong, I professed faith in Jesus before being baptized, I sing all of the worship hymns. But having specifically sought out the Jewish perspective, it makes a lot of sense??

I just don't know. I don't even know that there's even a proper question in here. I guess if anything the question is "am I willing to betray my faith," vs "is this actually even my faith as is"? Carrying all of these questions and doubts and views, can I still call myself a Christian? Is that still preferable to seeking out Judaism, thinking that my beliefs will align with it much better, even though I risk sabotaging my relationships with my family and friends? I want to have a meaningful relationship with G-d, and I want to live a good and fulfilling life, and I want to maintain good relationships with the people I care about. Can those things all coexist?

Anyways, I'm sorry this ended up being so long. I'm also immensely sorry for all of the persecution that you and the rest of the Jewish community have suffered. Thank you so much for reading all of this, I really appreciate it.

No worries, I got your back. You don't have to apologize for taking your time to explain yourself; that's how we can come to understand each other. I am sorry for how long it took me to reply to you.

I was raised a Mormon, and I actively deconverted in my twenties, long before I looked into converting to Judaism. A lot of your struggles here mirror my own. I am going to address your theological points/arguments from the general perspective of Christianity, and then talk about your interest in Judaism. I am not necessarily trying to dissuade you from Judaism, but I am going to talk a bit about how you were raised first.

It sounds like you were in a lot of Charismatic and Pentecostal denominations. This is something that's hard to get other people to understand, because what's normal for you--speaking in tongues for your early faith, baptisms for the dead in mine--is so far outside the realm of "normal" for everyone else. So, to focus on speaking in tongues: have you done any historical examinations of this practice? I have--Mormons used to do it! It turns out that what we call "speaking in tongues" is an extremely new practice which does not have roots in historical Christianity. While there were individuals and very small religious groups (usually considered cults) that practiced it, it didn't take off until the Great Awakenings in America in the 1800s.

I think you are also right about Hell and the Rapture. The thing is: these are also very new practices that were not a part of historical Christianity! The Rapture was invented around the same time as speaking in tongues, during the Great Awakenings.

As for Hell, though, that might be my more controversial claim, so let me go over it.

If you read the Christian Bible from cover to cover in order to discover Hell, you will not find it. There are places that talk about "weeping and gnashing of teeth". There are places that talk about Hades, a location in Greek paganism. There are places that talk about Sheol, which is "the grave" into which we are all shoveled one day. There are illustrative tales that seem to discuss an afterlife, but with no labeling and no great detail. There are places where there is talk of a great fire which will permanently burn away sinfulness--but no indication that this fire will burn forever.

But, I promise you this: if you read the Christian Bible and you don't know ahead of time to interpret specific verses as being about Hell, you will not find Hell in the Bible. Ever. It doesn't exist.

You also won't find Satan. You also-also won't find the Antichrist.

The reality is that Hell, Satan, and the Antichrist are Christian folklore. This folklore has built up over centuries (in the case of Hell and Satan) or decades (in the case of the Antichrist). We know it is folklore because popular culture feeds into and informs it. There was, for decades, a common stereotype that the Antichrist would have brown hair and would have a birthmark on his body of the number "666"--because that's what happened in the very fictional thriller/horror film "The Omen". Nowadays the Antichrist is blond, because that's what he was in the very fictional and very bad series "Left Behind". Stories like "Spawn" and "Constantine" and "Rosemary's Baby" and etc. all feed into and inform our perceptions of Hell/Satan/Antichrist, because you cannot find these concepts in the Bible as presented by preachers, pastors, and so-called "Bible experts".

What's even worse is that the Rapture, to pick one example, isn't something most of the teachers who preach about it believe in!

Think about it: do you think the average televangelist who preaches about the Rapture doesn't have a retirement plan? Do you think they don't have wills? That they haven't sent their own children to Bible college to prepare them for inheriting their control over the church? Heck, most of the preachers who spent the last few decades promising there won't be anymore decades have died of old age in their beds, surrounded by children who have been prepared for decades to go on preaching that there will be no more decades.

Now, I think this in and of itself gives the whole 'game' away. The highest-ranking folks preaching this stuff do not believe it. Their behavior, the only way that you can determine what a person truly believes, proves without a doubt that they don't believe it and never did. They've found a grift. A scam. An easy way to rook people into giving them money and treating them like small gods.

The ultimate purpose of the Devil, Antichrist, Rapture, anti-queer teachings, and so forth is to frighten and manipulate people with ambiguity. If you're right and they're wrong, then when you die, you're dead and the argument is over forever. But (and here's where the ambiguity knife slips in) oh but if they're right then the things that happen to you will be horrible. From their perspective, it's 'heads I win, tails you lose'.

This is the issue you faced with your mother talking about "a good-old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher". Please consider, for instance, an extremely common, Biblical phrase Christians often use to describe the gospel. The Good News. Ask yourself, in all honesty, what "good news" would sound like to you. To me, it would be stuff like "You've won the lottery you never play", "Your dog missed you and wants to jump all over you", "You're going to be a father soon", "Your sick dad can travel again", "Your busted washing machine just fixed itself", "There's snow on the mountains and you saw a beautiful cloud in the sky on your walk". Those would all be good news to me. There's a lot of stuff, I'm sure, you can think of that would be good news to you.

Does anyone anywhere on Earth, even the fieriest and most brimstone-y of preachers, really, truly believe that "good news" includes sentiments like "You will burn in a lake of fire forevermore unless you pray a set of magic words and assent to the importance of saying the magic words as a prerequisite for escaping eternal fire"?

Doesn't sound good to me. Doesn't sound good to anybody. Nobody would hear that and think Oh boy, that sounds amazing! Sign me up! No one. Ever. That is, in fact, Bad News. It's astoundingly Bad News to hear that there is a Creator who, to borrow Lewis's imagery, creates life so he can vivisect it. It is Bad News to be asked to believe that a creature who creates beings in order to torture them forever is in control of the universe. That is the worst news we could possibly receive. It is worse than there being no G-d at all.

The only way you could sincerely believe it is to be a maltheist--a person who believes G-d is evil. You will note that people who do functionally believe this, by the way, tend to deny G-d's goodness--a significant theme in the Bible, even in the Christian version of the Bible--and emphatically focus on G-d's holiness, as though holiness is a trump card that cancels out goodness. "Sure, G-d is good, but He's also holy," they say, clutching their children to themselves tighter, knowing that G-d is holy and therefore not good (what's the opposite of "good"? Not "better"!) and that G-d will take their children and burn them forever unless they pray harder, and teach their kids to pray.

Better do it if you know what's good for you.

In other words, Hell and the Rapture and similar theological concepts are ideas created in the past couple of centuries by humans who wanted to create an eternal hostage situation. This is a very common theme throughout authoritarian Christianity. It is not, however, a requirement for Christianity. There are schools of Christian thought as well as individual Christians who reject Hell, etc., outright. Non-Nicene Christians can flat-out acknowledge that Hell doesn't exist in the Bible. Nicene Christians (those who believe in the Nicene Creed) can argue that when Jesus "descended to Hell", he destroyed it forever and liberated those within it. (That is what "the harrowing of Hell" means, theologically.)

You could, therefore, consider other modes of Christianity which maintain a belief in Jesus as G-d without necessarily converting to Judaism. This is, in some ways, going to be easier and more comfortable for you than converting. Judaism is not "Christianity minus the parts of Christianity which you personally find uncomfortable". Judaism doesn't exist to heal our psychic wounds from our theological upbringings. Again, I'm not telling you that you must remain a Christian. But it is something important to consider: is your issue with the folklore Christians add to Christianity, or is it with Christianity?

I suggest you look into concepts like "religious trauma" and "Rapture anxiety". Do not look up these concepts on places like Tumblr--go to scholarly articles. There are writers, Christians as well as atheists, psychiatrists and psychologists and experienced folks, who write eloquently on the subject. There are many, many resources out there and places where you can find support.

So, about whether or not you believe in Jesus: this is what most Christians would consider to be a dealbreaker question. At a certain point, boundaries are drawn and definitions are set, and to participate in a group, you have to fit within those boundaries and meet the definition. Belief in Jesus as a part of God (Trinitarianism) or as the Son of God (non-Trinitarianism) is vital to being a Christian. If you do not believe this, then you are a theist, but not a Christian.

Addressing this is the start of your internal wisdom. If you don't believe in Jesus, that's okay. The majority of humans on Earth right now do not believe in Jesus as G-d. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived did not believe in Jesus as G-d. You have been taught to view this fact as a heartbreaking tragedy. The beginning of your reprogramming, of you giving yourself permission to reject certain ideas, is perceiving this as a fact and not a tragedy.

Now, to your questions about converting to Judaism.

There are a lot of questions, not for me, but for you about whether or not converting is for you. You will have to answer those for yourself, but I'm going to try and guide you by providing you some of those questions.

Converting is a long process. The shortest conversions I'm aware of take many months. Mine is probably on the shorter side of average; it should take me a year and a half if everything stays on track for me. The classes won't just be showing up for a Zoom call or a physical class for an hour a week. You will have to read MANY books to get caught up on thousands of years of history. You will also be expected to do reports and turn in assignments and the like. The people who've dropped out of converting who started alongside me are folks in their 20s who did not have the free time to dedicate to another class. Do you have the time and the willingness to invest your time--perhaps free time you might have spent in fandom pursuits or on social media--into conversion classes?

Also, you should take classes from the philosophical group of Jews you plan on primarily attending with, because the odds are high that the Rabbi who teaches your classes will sponsor you. Do you know which philosophical group/denomination you want to convert to? If so, have you looked into what classes are available in your area for that specific group?

If you go Masorti/Conservative, you will be expected to read liturgical Hebrew when you go to the beit din. You probably won't have to speak modern Hebrew fluently, but it would help. Do you also have the time to learn an entirely new alphabet, or possibly, a whole new language?

How did you feel about recent and historical antisemitic violence? How do you feel about being potentially targeted by this sort of violence? I understand that this is very scary to contemplate, but it is absolutely a part of the process: understanding if your longing outweighs your fear.

The thing about Judaism being a closed/semi-closed practice is that, ultimately, conversion is not about you. It's a humbling experience. You are petitioning to be adopted by a family. A major Jewish religious principle is that all Jews are responsible for the behavior of other Jews. This is why prayers of repentance are usually phrased collectively--we have lied instead of I have lied. The Jewish community will want to know what you're bringing to the table. I will point out that the vast majority of Jews I've met have been extremely welcoming, because converting right now will show a level of seriousness on your part due to the risk… but still. Are you willing to accept that converting is about the Jewish community welcoming you, and not just about you wanting to join the Jewish community?

There are bigoted and hypocritical Jews. Just like every other community on Earth, Jews are not a monolith. I think that the most important lesson anyone can learn is that you'll always be alone if you want to avoid bigotry and hypocrisy, and even then, you might still not avoid them. Because there are so few Jews, it is actually more likely that you will be expected to argue with--but also worship and practice with--Jews who strongly disagree with you on a variety of subjects. Even if they aren't in your shul, they will definitely be out there in the world. There will also be Jews who think of you as a bigot and a hypocrite, and who will still embrace you as a Jew. The question is: is the problem you have with bigoted/hypocritical Christians that they are bigots/hypocrites, or is the problem that you are not socially permitted to push back against them? If the first, you should seriously reconsider joining any group. If the second, Judaism may be a better social fit for you.

Related to 6, there are going to be Jews who are bigoted or problematic in their politics who are grounded, thoughtful, and beautiful in their Judaism. Some of the most moving writing on Judaism I have encountered came from none other than Dennis Prager, who is generally a person I consider to be terrible politically. This is not hypocrisy on his part, IMO. It's that he's a person and people are complicated and contain multitudes. Prager can be horrific in his politics AND wonderful in his theology. Neither contradicts the other. Would this strike you as hypocritical? What would you do if confronted by it?

Generally, I would suggest that you talk to a Rabbi about your feelings. This is a meeting you should conduct face-to-face. Ideally, you should seek out a synagogue where you could see yourself attending. If there are no synagogues near you at all, then you can contact people via email or video calls. This is what I had to do because there are nearly no Jews in my entire province and none of them are Rabbis. I started out emailing English-speaking Rabbis in the UK, and they directed me to English-speaking Rabbis in Spain, who then directed me to the local community… who have since hired a Rabbi who lives outside the province but will guide our services. Rabbis are busy people, so that process of kicking around others' inboxes took a couple of months.

However you do it, you should tell the Rabbi about your religious history and about how you feel observing Jewish worship.

I think part of what struck me about your writing is that most non-Jews do not look at Jewish services with a sense of longing. I've heard a lot of goyim saying that such services are weird, that Jews pray funny and do silly rocking motions. I've heard goyim offer suppersessionist pity for Jews doing "hidebound rituals" when Jesus or the Prophet has "freed" them from such "unnecessary" or "wrong" practices. I've heard goyim express appropriative fascination, such as saying "Oh, this is how Jesus may have prayed" and then talking about how they plan on learning liturgical Hebrew so they can use it to pray to Jesus at their next Messianic seder. And I've heard atheist goyim dismiss everything out of hand as stupid Bronze-age superstition.

But longing? That's a different emotion entirely, and one I also understand.

I think watching those livestreams is a Good Thing, even if you choose not to convert to Judaism in the end. It's always great to expose yourself to open parts of other traditions and cultures! (I still kind of regret not being able to attend a Sikh service when I had the opportunity to do so.) And by the way, they are called sermons, but the other term for what Rabbis do during a service is called a drash.

I'll go through your more specific questions at the end, if that's okay:

The thing that makes one a Christian is believing that Jesus is the son of G-d and the Messiah. There's a LOT of variety on what those terms mean, but that's baseline. If you do believe in that in some way, shape, or form, you are a Christian. If you don't, you're not. You cannot be an atheist and be a Christian, for instance--and similarly, you cannot disbelieve in Jesus and also be a Christian. Whether you feel that way or not is up to you.

When you convert to Judaism, you will be rejected by friends and family. People will not only be actively angry at you for "rejecting" or "betraying" your original faith, they will suddenly turn massively antisemitic in ways you cannot imagine right now. The only way to avoid that is to not tell them you're converting, which is your right as an adult. You will also have friends and family who will surprise you with their kindness and support. Perhaps there are black sheep in your family who will reach out to you when they hear you're on the outs. I have a friend who's normally an edgelord who holds nothing sacred, who's become very empathetic and kind on the subject of Judaism in ways I never expected him to be. People will surprise you in both ways. The real question is this: do you want to remain in contact, as you grow old, with people who would reject you for questioning your religious beliefs and for being intellectually honest?

Yes, you can have that meaningful relationship with G-d and live a good/fulfilling life and maintain good relationships, but your definitions of what those things mean will differ.

That third one's important enough for me to explicate on a little longer.

Who "the people [you] care about" are will change. You will find new people, online and in your shul, who you care about intensely and want to maintain new relationships with. You will also lose people who you currently care about. Partly due to the aforementioned antisemitism, partly because you are at an age (forgive me for being a patronizing old dude for one second) where you're extremely likely to leave old friendships behind and create new ones. My own twenties were full of these changes. They included people who I swore would be my friends forever, my found family. The thing is that most of those changes were, in retrospect, for the best. Some of those "friends forever" folks were abusive and I only really appreciated that once they were gone. Some others were just not good fits for me. Others noticed me changing for the better and no longer wanted to be around me! And as I became a healthier person, those unfulfilling friendships were replaced, one by one, with better ones.

Which also ended, because moving and time passage still means you change and so do they, and that's okay.

I would try very hard not to worry about keeping people in your life forever. Some will leave for good. Some will leave and then come back later, having changed into better people. Some will stay and change to help you. Some will stay and try to drag you down into remaining the person they want you to be, and force you to leave. You will develop wisdom that will permit you to tell the difference. You'll mourn, you'll process, and you'll move on--telling your new friends in your Intro to Judaism class about how this person you could not live without rejected you, and commiserating when they all have similar stories.

What you mean by a good/fulfilling life is also going to change. Jewish ethics are, I'd argue, even more important than what folks would refer to as Jewish theology (and I'd also say they are inextricably inseparable, but that's my own opinion). My own Intro to Judaism class has spent more time on ethics than any other subject. That is because a great deal of the class is decolonization of thought. There's a loooooot of the Rabbi trying to unteach Christian thought and pointing us in the direction of Jewish thought.

Christian ethics, at this stage of Christianity, is largely negative (DON'T do certain things) and lacking in explanation (because the Bible says not to). Most importantly, though, Christian ethics are rooted in maintaining a hierarchy. Rather than empowering lay Christians to think for themselves, Christians are encouraged to think of what Jesus would do. If they don't have an answer to that, they are expected to ask their religious leader, who tells them what to do, and more importantly, what to believe.

Since belief is the defining aspect of what makes someone a Christian or not, that means belief (and therefore thought) must be policed and controlled whenever possible as part of Christian ethics. Hence, for instance, modern-day interpretations of the assertion that thinking of murder is the same as committing it leading preachers to announce that they would be cold-blooded murderers were it not for Jesus.

Judaism is more about empowering individual Jews to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions. This is why some Jews are atheists and some are not; there is no Rabbi with the power to force anyone to believe in G-d. This also includes ethics. Jewish ethics are more positive (DO do this), and have multiple explanations for why each thing must be done in a particular way. You can also dismiss those explanations and develop your own.

Yes, this is in direct contradiction to the supersessionist meme that Jews are trapped in a bunch of Laws that control every aspect of their lives, and if only they had Jesus/Islam to free them, they wouldn't be trapped in the Law. Remember the whole "decolonization of thought" thing? That's what I mean.

So! Not to be That Guy, but what you consider to be "good" in terms of "a good life" might end up changing. And so will what you consider to be "good" when it comes to "good people". If we're being honest, your definition of "good people" has probably already changed. You have probably seen people who you thought of as "good" reveal that they are rabid antisemites over the course of the past year and a half. You have probably seen people who you thought of as "good" remain silent over the gruesome murder of children because those children were Jewish. These changes are going to feel intimidating, but they are necessary--not for you to become Jewish, because you might not, but because you're coming into your identity as an adult person. And it's possible that even if you don't convert, you'll want to be the kind of person who believes that good people cannot also be antisemites, and you cannot have those people in your life.

Whatever you end up deciding, don't rush anything. I strongly encourage you to talk to a rabbi, not about starting the conversion process, but about your feelings and why you might consider converting. Get comfortable with this liminal space, if you haven't already (seeing as it took me way, way too long to finish this response and I'm so sorry about that). If you do decide to convert, you will be in this liminal not-Jewish-and-yet-no-longer-really-goy for a long, long time.

[qpjianghu]

shaking crying screaming throwing up re: Desire Catcher (2019)

(Show CW: there is sexual violence involved in the core case. Please take care!)

I need to just ramble incoherently for a hot sec because oooooo boy the vibes are impeccable??

The TLDR is:

The two male leads have a relationship that's like Wangxian spiced with Pingxie. I know. I KNOW. The pining is off the charts, my friends. Truly unparalleled.

There is absolutely no romance whatsoever! (Except for the case where there are two men who adopt an abandoned baby together?? I mean?? ^_^) Huge win for the aros!!

If that's all you need, read no further, I shall not spoil. Come back and scream with me when you're done.

More detail below:

There are lots of surface-level similarities to Under the Skin: Frenemies-to-bromance male leads, one is a cop with a chip on his shoulder and impeccable dark/leather jackets, the other is a floppy-haired, khaki-wearing consultant with a peppy demeanor that hides deep personal trauma... but, honestly, I think Desire Catcher is what Under the Skin WISHES it was. (No shade if you loved Under the Skin -- I just personally wanted a bit more from it.)

The male leads, my goodness. Zheng Yecheng plays Lu Fengping, and Xin Yunlai plays Luo Fei. They are both so FREAKIN' good. Their characters at first just seem like typical archetypes of the stoic one and the bubbly one (WHICH I LOVE ANYWAY) but they take everything to the next level with their microexpressions that both reveal and conceal their haunted pasts, and extreme pining. Which leads me to...

The Wangxian of it all... *delighted sigh*... The person who wrote like the one fic on Ao3 in this fandom pointed out (much more eloquently than I'm about to) that Luo Fengping spends most of the show trying (and not knowing how) to save Lu Fengping the same way that Lan Wangji spends so much time trying (and not knowing how) to save Wei Wuxian. I won't spoil anything about their successes vs. failures in this post, but I have been turning around this brilliant point in my head for a week now and I am still vibrating at a totally normal frequency about them.

Which brings me to the devastating trope of how do you save someone who doesn't want to be saved? Yes yes yes OF COURSE this is a Mysterious Lotus Casebook reference. Come chew glass with meeeeeeee

And there's also: The Girl Cop!! (lol) Liang Yin!!!!! I ended up loving her. I need to watch the show again just so I can love her more, because the whole time I was worried she would become a love interest to one of the guys she shared a past with. But they all find solace and redemption WITHOUT romance!! What a concept!

Which brings me to another show this one reminded me of: the k-drama The Guest. That show also has a glorious polycule who are all connected through a shared trauma and need each other to heal. HOOK IT TO MY VEINS.

The case of the week stuff was pretty good. And by pretty good I mean completely devastating.

The big final plot resolution was a little werd ngl but you just gotta squint through some of the copaganda, shhh, it's fine

(The ENDING though.... literally just heart eyes all over the place, motherfuckers)

Look I know I said there wasn't any romance, but Luo Fei and Lu Fengping spend at least five minutes every episode pining at each other / into each other's eyes RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY SALAD while a dramatic ballad plays in the background, so, like. That's a thing. <3

Did I literally pay for the more expensive Viki subscription service so I could gif their pining in better HD?? Who's to say???

[m3dk1t]

It fucks me up how 'advanced' we think the world is on a general sense. Like, to be fair we do have all this technology around us. Electricity, vehicles, airplanes, computers, etc. But on an even more detailed level, roads. Sidewalks. Houses with insulation & fire alarms. Safety standards. All of these things exist but we don't seem to acknowledge where they came from, how impactful they are and the role that even the simplest piece of technology plays. How can anyone use a computer without an electricity grid? How can anyone drive a car with a busted up road?

The whole western world relies on specialization. Hosts of jobs that only x number of people do, but that a huge population relies on and would be at a major loss if those people were to ever quit, start to get sloppy at their jobs or get fired.

But despite all these advancements... There's huge gaps in inequality and fairness. In fact, the divide feels quite deliberate. The ones that get the most convenient, comfortable jobs are the ones being paid the most. The ones who have to toil and work hard and suffer RSIs and regular minor injuries like cuts, scrapes and bruises? 'replaceable labour'.

Each day I go to work, I see these gaps. Things that would be easier thanks to simple innovations and empathy for our fellow human beings. Things we could make easier and safer for us. But the people in charge, usually the ones looking at the profits and deciding how much of it goes into their own wallet, happily decide that those improvements aren't worth the cost. They wouldn't see the improvements anyway. It'd all be something someone at the bottom sees and experiences, so why bother. It costs me money.

I don't really know if I have a point. This is like 2 parts freewrite and 2 parts meditation and 1 part incoherent rambling, but if you made it this far, cool.

I just get hung up on thinking about how much of innovation is done purely in the name of profit. And how the ones with the money always seem to decide that the people toiling in the fields don't need sun hats if it comes at a cost for them. What is the point of empathy if money turns it off? What is the point of wealth?

I feel like every issue always boils down to human greed. This big huge elephant in the room that we all avoid acknowledging because we've all got it in us, too. Our ambition, motivations to 'be successful' are always tied to wealth as value. We aren't anything unless we own a dream car and a new watch and have a family and a gorgeous home.

Why have we decided materialism is the only metric we care about? Why are we letting the corporations decide what we value? Do we even have a choice at all, or are we all just sorta stuck in this nasty whirlwind that sucks us all dry?

[silverzoomies]

Ooh you should do like headcannons of what it’s like sleeping next to Peter or having kids with Peter

ohhhh my gosh this is so intimidating, but i'll try my best !!

💙peter maximoff headcanons💙

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💙sleeping next to peter💙

listen, anon...

i personally don't imagine he sleeps

like, at all. ever

but if he did? he's either one of two sleeper types

he might crash like a log. and you won't be able to move him once he's conked out. like good luck tryin' to roll him off you

if you gotta get up? sucks to suck. you're stuck there for a while

but he could also be the type to toss and turn in his sleep

like, all night. super restless. kicking his legs and everything

might even talk a lot in his sleep, rambling incoherent babble

you'd wake up to him saying shit like, "ohhhh shit. forgot i left the cats in the car."

but he doesn't drive. he doesn't even have cats. what's he dreamin' about??? does he dream as fast as he moves????

he might also switch gears a lot. going from super clingy, to super distant really quick

one moment, he's got his cheek pressed to yours, snuggling super close. needing to be near you so bad, otherwise he'll literally die

the next, he wants his space. stretches himself out on the other side of the bed. and if you come too close, he lowkey groans about it. but like affectionately

he's like a picky cat hopped up on too much adrenaline

i don't think he'd be too overly affectionate, though. if anyone wrapped him up in a cuddle session for too long, he might get pretty antsy. just in case he's gotta move

don't even get me started on the potential for morning wood

💙having kids with peter💙

would strive to be the best damn dad ever, and you can't convince me otherwise

since he grew up without a dad himself. he wouldn't want his children to grow up feelin' the way he did

he'd try to be super present in their lives, and very involved. even if things got a little too overwhelming sometimes

he'd wanna be nothing but supportive and loving of all their hobbies and endeavors

peter knows when to set boundaries, but he'd have a tendency to be a little too lenient

once his kid got a little older, he'd be so tempted to drag them into some harmless trouble. to your dismay

like, they'd start pulling pranks on you together. but the pranks are as simple as pelting you with water balloons when you're least expecting it

or, oh no! he ran them to mcdonald's for somethin' to snack on. without you! and right after you said you were gonna make dinner that night too! they'll ruin their appetites like that!

"okay, but they really wanted nuggets. wouldn't stop askin' about it. they even said please! what was i supposed to do? say no!? look at this face!!" and he gestures to your kid's precious doll face

if his kid is born with mutant genes, he'd be so goddamn proud

and a little worried too. he'd be terrified of how his kid would be treated in school, especially for bein' different

that is...unless you enrolled your kid at charles's school. most ideal scenario honestly. peter would feel way more content then

his kid definitely wants to become a great, x-men hero like their papa someday

he introduces his kiddo to his favorite music wayyyy early on. like, your newborn is resting in their crib. and he's playin' pink floyd like it's a lullaby

"honey, we really gotta make sure this lil rascal's educated, don't we?" but he's talking about exposing them to david bowie

but if his kid grew up listening to all the genres he doesn't, he'd still be as supportive as he could

his kid likes lil nas or lady gaga or somethin'? he's takin' the whole family to a live show. he's wearing the merch. he's learning the songs. he's singin' those songs in the crowd

i do think he'd get pretty anxious, though. might worry he's not a good enough father. maybe thinks he's not cut out for it. you have to reassure him all the time: he's doing the best he can. better than you could ever hope for

he's busy with hero work and teaching a lot of the time. when he starts to get a lil too absent, he's terrified he's neglecting his kid in some way

but he's got no idea his kiddo thinks the entire world of him. literally the coolest dad ever in the history of the universe. his kid will go to school and be like "yeah well my dad's quicksilver"

he's the kinda dad who's gonna splurge on christmas gifts. so many, you won't be able to see the floor. you're worried he stole them all. but he swears on his life he paid for everything. he's gotta set a good example, after all !!

impossible challenge: try not to feel soft after thinkin' about him sitting in his kiddo's bed. readin' a bedtime story. doin' silly voices and pointing at all the pictures

the bedtime stories are x-men comics

[rjschoicesstuff]

Ok I watched both playthroughs for Paths Not Taken now, spoilers ahead of course!!

And incoherent rambling ahead

I'm a huuuge fan of how the choices you make rly do impact stuff!! I hope that's a sign that that might become more common in future books!

Evil thought: I kinda would've loved it if they'd been killed when you abandon cas/gabe at the creator's camp... So you're just fr on your own with your li from there on + getting to see the story with no cas/gabe. But ok then the whole thing with the beech tree couldn't have happened then and I thought that was interesting too.

I LOVED the glimpse of a Crimson Beech without leylines in one of the endings!! And a mc who stayed human!! And the whole implication that the creator will be back!!

I think the oooone thing I do rly strongly disagree with is in Gabe's route. After you find out she's a vampire and you call her a monster, she disagrees with you like 'no I used to think so too but these past weeks with you made me realise im not.' Cuz I'm like, idk I feel like that part of Gabe's character development only really happens once mc actually knows she's a vampire and still loves her despite it? Like to me that always felt like a realisation she could only have under those circumstances?

Also idk how to word this but like, I'm also never a fan of when at some point there's a spot that can be taken by different characters. (Think of AME Teagan and Bianca, terrorfest) so stuff happening to/with them isn't unique to them anymore? (Tho I get y they do it because it's easier that way) Which in this case is like once you get back to the nexus and one of them conspires with their coven leader. But like also it didn't feel ooc for either of them in either route + from what I saw their dialogue was different at least (like it always bugs me the most when characters take that place and get the same dialogue). Prob more believeably in character for Cas, like I always felt like for a while he still has a high opinion on Astoria and his opinion of her lessening is due to mc, so not applicable here. For Gabe I think it's very interesting to imagine this version of her that actually trusts Lewyn, and enough to do that/let him manipulate her like that, because I always assumed she'd just always have been more wary of him. But like it doesn't seem ooc TO ME, I can even imagine her in a way viewing him as someone who 'saved' her grandmother because by letting Gabe turn, her grandmother got spared (and still lived for a while after that, from what I understood). Like you know when you just start making yourself believe shit to cope/make a situation easier to accept? I can imagine it like that for sure. Like it's better to convince herself her covenleader is the lesser of two evils. And who at least cares about the humans too. And finally she's also surrounded by vampires who have a very high opinion of him (think of when mc meets Gabe's vampire friends and how they talk about him).

All in all it definitely confirms to me that those three are just supposed to be together, like that's when they are at their best. Nods in agreement with myself

[inseparabiles]

@vyoongi

What was that thing that I said I'd do? Write a better comment later when I'm more coherent?

Turns out! I am not capable of being more coherent and reading your fic makes me absolutely feral and unhinged to clinically significant degrees! I am so sorry! Anyway, here's the.......... 12 000 words of... more of the same.

To anybody else who sees this, read this fic. I've never been broken by anything the way that I've been broken by this story and I have never loved one like I love this one.

(dated: 23/04/25)

So, it took me a day to actually get myself back together, and I think that's an overestimation of my current state but I really want to give this the comment it deserves, which is more than whatever incoherence came out earlier. I assume this'd take at least 5 comment forms posted on AO3 and I'm so sorry about that but brevity is not a strength I have and it is what it is. (Retrospectively, this would have taken 7 AO3 comment forms to post. So yeah, here is probably the best alternative.) Trying to cut down the rambling and actually keep it to the story, but before that, I want to say I'm really glad the initial mess of a reaction didn't come across the wrong way. I realised only way after I'd written it that while I know that as a writer I love little better than hearing the raw, real, unpolished thoughts that particularly the heavier stories can get out of people, I didn't actually know at all if you'd take it that way or if it would just come out the exact wrong way. Like… we don't know each other, that could have gone horribly wrong, and I probably should have considered that first? So - I'm sorry, and you're welcome, thankfully.

I'm sincerely afraid of going through this again but I've put aside a whole day to get my bearings after so let's just go. Let's do this. It's a great sign that just writing the Tumblr tags for the reblog earlier was enough to make me sob again so I'm sure this'll go smoothly and be just as eloquent and coherent as I want it to be.

The way this starts - with the scents, and the warm breeze - is like that split second before the rumbling tremor a volcano lets out before an eruption. Like a crack that charges through the earth and then there's that splitting silence afterwards.

"A warm breeze tangled with the perfume of lilacs, and beneath it, rot. The kind you don't notice until you breathe too deep."

Which is exactly what they've been doing. This is probably literal: Rome has scents that overtone a stench that is rot, death, excrement. But it is also what is happening here and there's that tell in this very. first. paragraph. of how it'll go. Things are beautiful on the surface, but they are not underneath, and nobody here is going to be taking in a deep breath without feeling the things that they're trying to push aside.

"They said it was a comedy", and their whole lives are a comedy, to anybody else watching. No one has ever showed them compassion. They're so alone in this. In the story, in the canon, I try to avoid them in history but I cannot imagine you end up the way they did without being profoundly and fundamentally alone in a place where no amount of people surrounding you can get through. Knowing that the people around you want to laugh, and fear is the only thing that ever kept them from doing it? At your pain, at your weakness, at your isolation? A man who was supposed to be their guardian aimed arrows at them. If he did that then who is going to be kinder? Who is going to look at them and not despise them? And Geta's put it all there on display, the only beautiful things that came out of it at all. The only comforts they had, for everyone to laugh at. The single most honest expression of love that Caracalla could ever manifest for the only person he could ever feel it for - and Geta's put it there, for the entertainment of others, as a form of comedy. To be torn apart and he's watching it happen. He has to hear it happen. And he wasn't even told it was going to be there, so it all comes to him in that same moment, like it doesn't even matter that it's there.

The cold reality of nothing of them touching. The fact that the mention alone implies that Caracalla wishes they were, and how silently that longing is put into the scene. The wanting of something soft, of that comfort, to reassure him that this is loving, but it isn't, because all he has is the loneliness there in the midst of everybody, and Geta's pretending it's funny. To hurt him? Or because he just doesn't care?

The fact that they were so young when this took place. Ten, maybe younger? And the way he remembers it like everything else is flayed aside and it's just this salt on the exposed nerves. And Geta had smiled. Really smiled. That belonged to Caracalla. This whole scene is a mockery of all that was ever sacred between them. Like it doesn't matter and Geta never cared at all. Everything that he felt was just something to sneer at in the end, because he's better? than Caracalla. Never needed him the way that Caracalla needed him, and nothing he could ever give him could be meaningful in the end. It's only good for this farce, to expose to everybody in the world how stupid he was to think that it would matter.

Geta seemed not to react. Didn't even blink.

How Caracalla misses the flinching, and that means so much to him that the rest of it just wraps itself around that absence of reaction, the proof of all of his worst fears and hurts.

Knowing that it isn't like that and it wasn't meant to be like that but he doesn't know and he can't tell and Geta obviously does not have the words because if he did, they wouldn't have been sitting there to begin with. Trying to express things that can't be spoken and having the silence itself rob him of everything he was trying to say. (Geta, again, trusting others to do these things for him, because he doesn't think he's good enough to manage it. Having it thrown back at him in the worst ways.)

And then we don't get the soft breezes anymore and the rain never stops from here. It's this horrible pit in your stomach and that feeling of being washed away from hereon out where the worst things are true and time is running so short and there's no way out of it for anybody. Caracalla's dying and this is the moment he stops living, somehow. The rest is the process of struggling to comprehend that loss and everything that never was and it hurts so. Fucking. Much. How much unspoken there is left. How many things that he feared and fears and wants and wanted that just can't come out in any meaningful way at this point. Because the little things he held onto mean nothing, and never did, whatever life he ever had, whatever love he ever felt, didn't amount to anything in the end.

The black cloak clung to his arms, heavy with water and salt.

Screaming. Fucking screaming at this and how much it says about the rain that is rain but is also all of his tears and as well might be as a whole just that one thing, because has he ever let this out? Has he EVER felt these things before the way he's feeling them now? The entirety of the things he was trying to survive for his whole life, and now he's not trying to survive them anymore, because it's over and what did he even do all that for? If it never mattered.

He looked like a god gone feral because he is and I'm not taking criticism on this interpretation. Always was and always will be.

Away from Geta's stillness. That indifferent mask he wore when he didn't want to feel.

That thing that he does!!!!!!! That thing I love him for. The attempt at being unreachable, at not being human, when he is at his most human on the inside. Trying to cover it like a wounded animal.

But Caracalla felt. He always felt. Too much. And too fast.

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!! They're so much the opposite to one another in everything. Geta's forced and stilted composure against Caracalla's immediate and inescapable and vivid and overflowing, unadultered feeling. It has to hurt so much, and he's surely spent his whole life trying to find ways out of that pain, a way to imitate the detachment that Geta manages to lie about so often.

Geta in this scene being so. Shakeable. I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, but what he really needs is to have that mask taken off of him so that he can connect again, somehow, because he must be just as lost as Caracalla is underneath it. Just as afraid and confused and in pain. Because he tried to speak but he just doesn't have the words but it never goes right for them, does it? And now he's lying about it, too, because ???????? if he just denies it being real then maybe all of this will go away.

They stood in a corridor of shadows, hemmed by pillars and the distant murmur of Rome pretending not to listen.

This hits me so well, the presence of that separate audience still with them. The summary of the story really hits in for this moment - all they've ever been is actors on a stage and Rome is PRETENDING not to listen to this act because the audience is separate from the actors and for fuck's sake I want to throw something. I just want them to have good things. I just want them to have the softness they've been denied but showing it and receiving it is so complicated now. Not like when they were children and everything just was as it was, desperately present and immediate, now everything is masks and pretense because the things that once were aren't things that are allowed to exist anymore. And they weren't then, either, so they're never addressed again now that they know better. But that Geta dares to put them on show like that, to be mocked? Because they were never meant to be and it's all just a farce for other people to laugh at.

Geta didn't reply. He blinked rain from his lashes.

Rain. I'm sure it is. Like all normal rain is warm and salty. Because neither of them can express themselves in a sincere form or if they do it will cause something horrible to happen, it's the environment expressing these things for them. They have no voices and have never had any voices and this is the only thing that's left to them, the allusions and the roundabout ways of expression, stageplay, lights reflected through carefully placed mirrors and special effects used to underline a point that is never voiced.

I hate this so much. I hate everything about this. I want them to have the right to be human. Even with just one another if nobody else ever thought they were entitled to it. But we can't have that, can we. We can't fucking have that. (I made it this far without breaking and thought hey maybe I was actually fit to do this but here we are again. And I just looked at the scrollbar and I've gotten through like what, 2% of this story? The fucked up thing about this is that even on the first go, it felt like I sat here for months with them. I'm chronically afraid of timeskips because of all the things left unsaid and unseen but this story does not struggle with it. Every fucking time skip is a question left unanswered and a horrific period of unbreakable silence that stretches on and I hate that, too. So fucking much.)

The next bit about names has me so fucking feral and on the walls again that I don't even know how to put it into writing. Incoherent endless fucking screaming on the inside when I try to figure out what it is. The way their distance is so vast that Geta has no names for Caracalla anymore. Is that mask stuck to his face, did he grow his skin into it? The way wounds grow around fabric if it's left in for too long.

Meanwhile, "not even brother. Not even bastard" has me in pained hysterics and I also want to throw up a lot like this is the point where I apparently start getting sick from the grief. But just the implication that this has been a thing between them and that is the most normal thing about them, how there was a time when Geta would call him a bastard, and the way that it's framed as a derogatory synonym for brother here? He's done it when he's mad, but he's also done it with a smile. It's been a name for him because Geta's been fed up with him and his antics and there was an immediacy to that between them that isn't there anymore.

"You think I don't remember what we were?"

Geta stepped back. "We were children."

Geta is making me feral, too, in general. His avoidance. That perfect lack of anything in him, but he has cracks in that shell and what's inside hurts maybe more than Caracalla does right now, which is an achievement that I think no one should ever achieve. At least Caracalla's reaching out for something, trying to connect again, and all Geta can do is step away because they don't talk about these things and it's like. It's like the fucking Chornobyl shell around the reactor core. What's inside is excruciating and impossible to contain so he's put as many fucking layers around it as he humanely can to contain it and make it go away but Caracalla's pushing his fingers and words into it because he needs to get back inside there. Because that's where Geta keeps his real self, all the love that used to be in him, that's now too painful to feel for him, and the fear and the uncertainty that he can't afford, it's the worst fucking toxic sludge of all time and Caracalla needs it like a lifeline but if it was exposed it might actually just take Geta down with it, because there's nothing for him there that he can hold onto.

"I bled for you, brother."

"You bled for control."

"Same thing."

Throwing things at walls. Just fucking throwing things at walls and screaming at this point.

Geta turned. "Go back to the palace," he said. "You're soaked."

It's these little things that threaten my remaining shreds of sanity. Is there a tone to that voice? At all? He was angry, now it's "he said" and I feel like there isn't a tone in that. It's that empty nothing but the words betray the care that is not allowed there. Go back to the palace you're soaked. For fuck's sake for FUCK'S SAKE.

"I remember."

Just fucking end me. First scene and I just. I don't know what the fuck to do with any of this fucking. Fuck.

I scrolled back up and laughed because are you fucking kidding me. I've stood here with them for 40 minutes and that was 700 words. Out of 4 000. I don't think I'll survive this and neither will whatever platform this is posted on and at this point I'm just going to have to ask you on Tumblr if you want this on Google Docs instead or something. Going to get a coffee because this is actually unsurvivable.

Okay. Everything is fine.

The rain had not stopped.

And it won't, because our two little gods in their perfect isolation are what is driving it, and they don't know how to stop it, either. You know, I think the worst part about how I ended up finding this fic was that I'd just finished a gratuitous smut and coincidentally for the first time in a month at least went to check what else is in the tag. How many people posted stories recently and what they were writing about and so on and so forth. And I was feeling really, REALLY evil and cocky and brave. Like exceptionally stable and content in every measurable way because my fic finally managed to be one where I got the boys into a situation where Caracalla could perfectly show care to Geta in his own fucked up ways without it harming either of them and the fic is themed around sunlight and warmth and hope. And I got to this and went ohhhh ohhhh could it be???? and it was and I didn't read the tags or even the summary or anything I just went in like oooohhh at the A/N and started reading and then at like. A few lines in I had to stop and go, I'm about to go to bed, right? I'm about to end the day and while it's been such a good day, I could tell at that point that this was going to be rough and like. Ask myself if I was up for it. But I had my own fic shield and I wasn't feeling particularly vulnerable in any way so I was like nah fuck it what's the worst that can happen.

And the worst that could happen is that I was in the right place for this story in all the ways that made sure it would hit me the exact right way to ensure that I'll remember it forever. And I'm sorry but that's a badge of honour to me and maybe this is unhinged but I want to carry these two with me to the grave. I want this to be a story that sticks through decades because clearly no one else loved them. No one else ever could. They had no safety and they had nothing but I've heard them and I'll take this story and I'll bury it in my heart because they deserve to be heard, they deserve to be loved, and they deserve their pain to be recognised. Somehow, this story is like the process of scarification. I want it embedded into me because that is the only way their loneliness can be honoured. They don't have the words and they never will but I've heard them, at least, and I don't judge them for anything. They were just boys. There's members in this audience who saw them at their worst and most vulnerable and did not laugh at them, but at most with them, at every sweetness that was and isn't anymore and can't ever be again in this life.

It's been one and a half hours or some such writing this comment, and I'm really glad I put aside a full day to do it. Gods know I apparently need it.

It drummed against the marble, soft and insistent, as if heaven itself remembered.

Because it does. And all about it is soft. Driving, every drop like whiplashes, but it is soft, because the things that caused all this pain are so soft, and so delicate, and silent, and perpetual and never-ending and bittersweet. How it comes over everything, paints the scenery with reminders, there's nothing left in Rome that isn't about them now.

It wasn't just the line. It was the knowing in it. That terrible intimacy. It was the sound of childhood unburied. The voice of a ten year old boy, weeping in secret, writing to his brother by lamplight while the palace trembled with their father's wrath.

The fragility of all of this will be the end of me. They were and are so tender and so vulnerable and so in need of love and care, and this, I think, is the volcano I hear, that to Caracalla is the echoing voice. I think it reverberates until it becomes that end of the world boom of foreboding and prophecy. Something falling down and breaking that hands can't hold together. It's his whole world falling apart and there is nothing that can be done about it. He can't, Geta doesn't have it in him to do it either, no one else would even think to. The memory of the most terrible thing to hear, the coming of pain and terror, equally unstoppable, in the very halls they still live in. Knowing what it means but never knowing what it brings with it this time.

Because Geta had been the quiet shield. Because Caracalla had not yet learned to be cruel. Not entirely.

Jesus Christ.

But that was before. Before nameless lovers. Before a shared empire. Before the blood between them thickened to suspicion and then to silence.

What happened to you two. Truly, what happened before this. The day between reading this for the first time and now I've been intermittently wondering about the outside of this story. It is so focused on this narrative, but they both existed in the moments between, the silences, too. There was a life around this, and there was definitely one before this. What was it like? Their everyday, the usual. Now I'm sure it's just these silences and avoidance and grief and bitterness and fear, the story speaks for itself as to what is happening between them, but so much is left outside of it, and I'm starving for the unbiased narration there. I want to know what Geta had for breakfast or if he could eat anything at all. I want to know what Caracalla did while he wasn't sleeping. I want to know about the fidgeting or the stillness and I want to know about the hot days that came before the rain, and the days that don't start from the first rumble of the impending end.

I already asked about after the end but this is me asking about the before the beginning. I want their whole lives because they should be known for themselves, in all the vibrance of colours they could never show anyone.

And then the rot is back because it creeps into the undertones of everything. The way everything in this story is falling apart with it. There's the surface but it's soiled wood and the core of it is full of sawdust and insects burrowing into broken-down matter. And it smells so foul and suffocating. The way Caracalla's illness just… manifests through this, like the first visible bits of that rot breaking through and you take a look at it and anticipate suddenly the full depth of what is left unseen and has been there for a long time. It's at this point I scrolled up and checked the MCD warning, and it was a kind of a heaviness to accompany the other weight from this. Not a surprise, but a kind of a letting go of, well, it's not going to get better, is it. And he knows it too and I think that's one of the worst things for him. There's no "things always get worse before they get better" because he will actually not live long enough to see them get better. It doesn't matter if everything could be fixed, because it will not be, and that is absolute. Even at this point, it's already absolute. There's too much to get to with no time whatsoever to even touch the surface.

But they do touch the surface, in the end. Fingers on the rotting wood that's like eggshells and nothing breaks through because they want to keep the impression to the end, the beautiful surface of what was and could have been, knowing that any pressure would shatter it and reveal the full extent of how bad it got in the end.

They said his hands trembled too, but that was not illness: it was fury.

I've been reading a book on syphilitic paresis and last night I fell asleep to the part of the chapter showing different examples of writing from patients and I can't… not think about it here. And the intertwined nature of his trembling, disease, and fury. Anger is a secondary emotion, it doesn't occur on its own. It feels so much like in this story, his sickness is a manifestation of everything that he's kept inside, they're the same thing, somehow. Both are ending him, because no human being was ever meant to endure this much pain.

And Caracalla, even now, could remember how safe he felt hearing that. He had believed love was something carved into flesh. Something eternal.

Now, he knew better. Love was a performance. A line in a play.

This is again a bit that carries a lifetime's worth of implication and meaning behind it, and peeks beyond the world of this story and into the others in a way that really hurts me about this story in particular. The thing is, like I said in the initial comment, I don't know these boys. But I know that for the ones I do know, it is carved into flesh. It is something eternal. It is something that persists through pain, distrust, anger, fear, and death. It is something that carries over and leaves traces of itself in places where they've been and shows in all the things that they put their hands to, not least in each other's souls. I'm sure they carry physical reminders, too. I like to draw Geta with a scar on his throat because that's what Caracalla is to him, in ways that I don't think can really be depicted in words.

And I don't know what world I'm looking into when I'm reading this bit. The fact that at this point into the story, there's really no way to tell. We only have Geta's silence and his stillness but Caracalla is the most unreliable narrator there could possibly be, and he's absolutely shattered with his own grief, and his own approaching death, and the time that he doesn't have left to fix this, or have them fixed. I don't think he wants to fix them at this point. He keeps lashing out to ask for it but the ball is so far in the other court by now, he does not want to be the one to pick it up and make things better because he can't. And Geta just won't. He just won't. Because he sees how this will end, too? Because he knows they don't have time? Or just because it fucking hurts and he can't do it? Because he's so young, too, and this is all that he can do to survive?

Geta had been nine when he wrote it.

The fact that all of this happened so long ago, and the fact that this was the last time they had words for each other. At whatever point after it was all sealed and they just don't talk anymore, because words like that were left in their letters and put away like things to be preserved for evidence to someone who in a better time might read them and know them, but not for them again. There's no conclusion to any of it, because at some time, it was put aside and silenced.

It reminds him of before. Of when they used to share breath under bedspreads and whisper kingdoms into being. When Geta still smiled.

I want this story from Geta's point of view. Because he wears that mask and won't tell us anything, just like he won't tell it to Caracalla. I don't want to break through that, because I agree with him in thinking that it would break him too. I just want to feel it with him for a moment and not have him be so alone with it all.

He wonders what Geta dreams about now.

Evidently I'm not the only one.

If he remembers how it felt, not to be afraid of the world. Only of losing each other.

Screaming and throwing things again. The fact that it is the world that made them silent, told them their words aren't safe to have. Did they grow to worry for themselves, or is it just worrying of losing each other still, just in a different, more aware form? A growing perspective into all the ways that they could endanger each other and lose each other? Even without any external judgement, they could still easily break each other all on their own, but for all that they were, if they'd kept it on display, it would be other people tearing them apart. With their father, they were very much pushed into their own world, but growing up, the rest of the world becomes a part of it. Did they lose each other for their own safety, or to try and hold onto having each other for as long as they could? Through suffocating it and letting it die slowly, rather than all at once, in a flash of the pain and fear that they already knew was a danger.

The end of this bit fucking kills me, with the slave and the robes. Oh my god. Holy fucking shit. I did not see that coming.

It sounds less like poetry now. More like a promise broken.

This fic fills me with a very unique sort of despair that is the need to intervene with this all happening. How much they deserve more time to have something better, something good, out of the hope that they used to have together.

And even the rain changes again. It's been a subdued background force and now it's tearing flesh from bone and festering like everything else. The way this story speeds up and builds force with it.

Again, I don't think my music is making this any better. Today's choice is Petricor by Ludovico Einaudi, because I listened to it yesterday by coincidence and realised it already reminded me of this story. Serendipitously named. But like. Neither is the fact that my entire body also hurts and I think I need to take a break from reading, but I mention this mostly because it's so. Ironic. And convenient. I think I'll be going through this fic for the rest of my life at this stage and isn't that just fitting.

I think I said in my tags that I want to go look up how to do book binding so I can put this story in pretty covers and have it in my bookshelf, and I'm thinking about that now probably as a distraction. I'm being totally unhinged about all of this but there's something in this story that just feels so sacred to me. About them and their love but in a broader way about people, children, and the human condition. Like I don't know what you did but I want to hold it in my hands and have it lined with gold, and I want it to be in a form that can be put between covers and shut close so that it's all whole for once. Spread on a screen feels too open and loose and if there's one thing that reigns through the narrative, it's the chaos of everything, the uncertainty of everything around the only desperate certainties that they have, the way that nothing can be held together, or held at all.

I wrote this so you'd never forget you saved me. That we are not alone. That I will never leave you, not even in fear.

This was written for this moment. For that time when it feels the most like they don't even have each other and all that they've ever been has been broken, because once, they knew that even what they were could be forgotten because that IS living. All can fade but these words are there to remind them that no matter what - no matter how it looks - there are truths that don't change. They can be buried and the words can bleed but it is true and this is the note from someplace very far away from someone who was just as desperate, trying to reach out through that darkness to say it again when all other voices have gone mute.

The actor's voice echoed in his head. Too polished. Too perfect. The words not sacred, but theatrical.

Because he doesn't know what they really mean. And the next line about how Geta might have, after all, reacted somehow. There could have been something. Because this, again, is Geta's fucked up way of trying to speak when he has no voice to himself. Using others to express what cannot be expressed. Trying to shout when he can't make a sound. And Caracalla wants to know that, but he can't figure it out. What is it. What is it.

The longing here for a soft, warm someone he used to know who is now as distant as the stars. The sheer desperation that is somehow radiating from Geta through Caracalla's own inability to reach him, how much of him is flinching in nearly every sentence of this story, even if Caracalla can't consciously recognise it, and he's so hurt that the possibilities and meanings being open leave so much more room for a worst interpretation, not the one that would still hold onto some hope. Because hope doesn't belong to him anymore.

"You shouldn't walk the halls alone," Geta said softly, stepping over a crack in the stone.

This whole bit this part them. Actually reaching - godfuckshit. I fucking. I hate this so much. Stepping over a crack in the stone like they're stepping over the first cracks in the foundations now that the earth is rocking and it's either they hold onto that silence and nothing ever gets said again or they brave it and said softly and for the love of gods it hurts so much.

Geta's silence wasn't cruel. It was cautious.

He embodies nothing but his caution and avoidance and every attempt at letting his warmth through it has him hurt again.

"You knew those words were mine. You heard them and didn't flinch."

"I did flinch," Geta said.

I think this is the thing that actually murdered whatever defenses I initially had left for going through this. It's so easy to be confused with Caracalla through the first bits and then Geta's here and it just hits you so bad in the face like. He did flinch. This fucking. This entire. I can't fucking handle it. How he's confessing to his motives - this was his way of speaking, trying to cross the wall of silence between them that they've built together and forgot which of them laid the first stones because it's been two pairs of hands on the opposite sides for years until neither of them can hear or see each other through it anymore. And I'm sure they shared looks over it while they still could and said nothing of it, just pushed in the next stone until there was nothing to see there anymore.

It is so brave of them to actually talk here. How the fuck are they even doing it. How is there so much weight to every word and every sentence and all of this vulnerability packed into their small gestures and tones and movements.

And more of that silence from both of them.

Why didn't you stop it. Because it was beautiful. Because someone's speaking the words that he wants to hear again, and wants to repeat, but can't. Someone HAD to say them, but neither of them could. I desperately wish I could break something like just straight up crush something in my fist right now.

Those words, so soft, spoken with reverence, slapped him harder than any insult.

And this is why you don't talk!!!!!!!! Because the reality of any love and softness and care and gentleness between you two is killing you both and you can't even hear it even though you desperately want to and need to, and Geta can't speak it because I'm sure he feels like he's biting his own tongue with every word, but doing it is SO brave of them both. Being honest and being real about it. BECAUSE the silence was broken to begin with and yes it has hurt so much and oh my god.

His large, dark eyes seemed to speak, but Caracalla did not understand that language.

I feel like the first read-through had me so… in Caracalla's skin that his own biases and limitations obscured it for me, but the more I'm reading through this now, the more this is about Geta and the way his whole story is just unspoken and unheard between the lines. Because Caracalla can't hear him and he doesn't know how to tell him in words and all of these ways that he tries to are just………. it is so desperate. He tries so much to explain but they don't speak the same language.

"I think you think love is like a sword. That to be known is to be broken."

I think this is both of you. Your love is that rotting wood with the eggshell skin and any touch on it might irreparably spill everything from within that can't be put back together after. In every shade of its ugliness and the beauty of things that were and the way you were when you could still be true, covered and rotted into what you have left, and there. isn't. time. to find the beauty in that. Is there.

The silence that followed was a scream in disguise.

Which is also what both of you have been doing, until both your throats and ears were shredded, for evidently at least a decade here. And there's the volcano again except it's thunder this time and not voices.

Caracalla woke with the taste of ash in his mouth. His pillow was wet. Rain, or tears. He didn't know.

The. Way. The. Rain. Keeps. Coming. Through. Into places. It has NO fucking business. Being. Inside rooms and on his pillow and being salty when it's outside. The way you turned it into this pervasive force of horror that holds every bit of their grief and the unspokenness of their feelings of every kind and the silence itself that is the noise of it that engulfs everything else and doesn't ever let up. I am feral and I am going fucking insane with this again.

He sat on the floor of his chamber, surrounded by the drenched scrolls he had torn from their shelves.

Why are the scrolls drenched!!!!!!!!!!! Where is this fucking rain coming from!!!!!!!!!!!! It haunts me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some were his. Some were Geta's. Because of course they are. And now they're being dried in the corner as though drying words could save them.

I am fhdgkhngsjnjksdnbgkjsdgnkjsdgnkjdngkgn. At a loss. For words. This fucking thing keeps. Pushing me to the limits of the English language and all I have left is just internally screaming and all of the 5000 swearwords I'm dutifully erasing from most places here because repeating fuckpissshitassfuckshit is like taking a piss at an altar here but it's genuinely half the time the only thing that I can actually write onto the page. What the fuck is happening. Why is this story like this and how did you manage it. What the hell did you do and how did this come to be from the prompts I threw in your inbox like nothing. I feel like. Christ you know how the smallest things can change your life around. You say something or do something that doesn't mean anything at the time and then two days later you're not the same person anymore because something changed. What you did with those throwaway words changed me in a way that fucking aches. So bad. And it's ridiculous that this is "just" a fanfic. "Just" a prompt. I don't know why it hits me like this. I can't get it out of my head. I don't even understand this story. I think I could read it in ten different ways and I have no idea what's actually intended to be there. Maybe I'm making the whole thing up as I'm reading it I don't know. I don't understand them because they don't understand themselves or each other. I'm taking wild stabs in the dark about what any of it means and I feel like it could all be true and it is the STRANGEST thing to be looking at a story that feels like it opens in all different directions at once. Like you said in your reply that they're not the same ones from the movie, but they're not the same ones from history either, and what you've created here is a purgatory for where all their possibilities went to be for one moment in time and the force of that degree of grief and suffering is hacking a hole straight through my body and soul.

And this scene. What they say and what they talk about. And Geta pushing through his silence and taking the lead that Caracalla demanded of him to begin with - don't lie, and say what you mean. I'm obsessed with how he's pulling himself back together and doing this for them. He's not quietly stepping back anymore when confronted, now he's doing the confronting. Again, I want to know what he's been doing all these evenings when Caracalla doesn't see him. Did he pace? Or just sit there hugging his legs to his chest, staring at nothing, running the words through his head. Did he practice? Or just harden himself so that it wouldn't break him when he lets them out?

"Something is wrong with me, Geta."

"I know."

Absolutely. Fucking. Unbearable.

How long that confession has sat there. How Caracalla said what he said but did not want that answer. But he did say - don't lie. Not about this. And now Geta's not lying and the things he's saying are. Breaking the tiles on the wall they built.

"Do you? You always look at me like you do."

Like some kind of a monster that isn't who he once loved and took the person that he did but is, still, in some way, that person, and inescapable, and un-unloveable.

"But you never say anything."

"I'm saying it now."

And it's not too late yet. It's not too late. That surface touch that they can't have and won't have but are having, either way.

They stared at each other for a long time. Not as emperors. Not as rivals.

As brothers.

As boys who once wrote each other letters soaked in fear.

The bridging of the past into the present and the fucking words from the letter that Caracalla pulled out - I wrote this so you'd never forget that we are not alone. That I will never leave you, not even in fear.

Fuck me. Just fucking end me like. I don't. All of this. All of this. Wildly gesturing. It hurts so much and I'm so proud of them and I am so angry at the world for not allowing them to have what this is and what it could be after.

The way Caracalla's breaking his own silence on his fear and putting names to it, that something's wrong with him, that Geta might have been the only person who cared if he died, that he feels like he's dying, and that he knows it's not happening all at once but slowly like rotting from the inside or shattering the way the vase did that they broke as boys that's been there for years but none of it is whole or will be again. That maybe he's not even human anymore.

And how the pieces that he loses are lost in such a way that they don't even recognise him before they're gone. That detachment and separation of slowly falling apart and losing himself. God I cannot fucking take this.

And Geta, soft and slow, knelt beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Then, he replaced it with his forehead.

The way that Geta is all the softness that Caracalla has to his world, beside the rain that is of them both somehow. And both of these things are flaying him and tearing him apart in the same way. The touches and sounds are soft but the impact is not, that is the thing that is stripping paint from him, altogether too violent to be endured if fully exposed to it.

And then it's over? Because Caracalla can't keep it up? He's put all of himself into that downpour and into them and this confrontation and the next thing is that there's just nothing to give anymore. And now Geta's there, because he has always been, even in fear like one boy promised another a long time ago and it hardly even mattered which one it was that time because the reciprocation was so desperate, and there's no way he'll leave now, regardless of whether Caracalla is the boy that he loved or something that could be or should be described as a monster, and the sky is not clear for them but it's actually, really, quiet this time because they're not using the rain to speak to each other anymore.

The way Geta will care for him for the rest of this. Every softly-spoken word, every gentle and caring touch, every gesture full of reverence, because, in this, he can speak the language that he knows and Caracalla can hear him now because he's not half-way someplace else. This is all that he has left of himself and Geta is speaking to all of that and that is everything that Caracalla has left of the world.

"Do you think this is poison? Have you come to finish what Father started?"

"Don't say such a thing."

This is both what it is and probably the first bit of banter they've had since. Ever. It is both serious and horrible and also that flicker of insult and irritation that isn't bone-deep even though it hurts. That's an echo of something that was in something that is and couldn't be further away but it is and I miss Geta calling him a bastard again. The simple shut-down of a ridiculous and hurtful thing to say, but I'm sure to Caracalla, it's very real, and to Geta, his answer is, too.

"You're not mad," Geta lies, but not unkindly.

I would sell my soul for this kind of eloquence. This is a thousand word story in eight.

And the way he keeps insisting, this isn't the end, you're not dying, I'll bring you back. I want to give him that power. I think I've written several stories now to give him back that power but it never really works. You're sick, not broken. Is there a difference?

Is there, honestly? Now I'm thinking of the amphora again. Reading this story is like willingly dipping hands into boiling water.

In the darkness, a memory: two boys hiding behind a pillar, their father's shouts echoing down the corridor. Geta's small arm thrown around his shoulders. A whisper: Stay very still. I'll take the blame.

"You always protected me," Caracalla says, voice low. "Even when I didn't deserve it."

Geta doesn't move. "You were a child, so was I."

There is NOTHING I can say to this. I can't stand this. I just cannot fucking stand this. Geta's stillness again when they breach territory, but also his staying presence, his refusal to budge now, no backing off. He's being so. So utterly, devastatingly honest now.

"I'm not anymore."

"I know that."

"So why are you still here?"

There is so much desperation in this. So much self-hate and so much blame for things that are and aren't but could be, and such a hint of gratitude that also could be, but isn't, because I don't think he trusts it. He's always waiting for the rejection that he's been feeling this whole time. And how much of the monster of him has been not just his own self twisting but to find where that final line is really drawn? Because not knowing has to be excruciating. Waiting with the potential of discovering, suddenly, that now he's not loved anymore, not even in these little pieces that remained that let him feel connected to his own humanity. Walking on ice you don't know how thick or thin it is, but it feels thin, and you just want to use something to bash through to know for sure, even with the understanding that it'll also drown you when it breaks.

"Because when you're not like this… When you're whole, you remember me. And I still remember the boy who wrote me letters. I don't care if you buried him."

And the blame in this. It's not you didn't or I don't blame you, it's I don't care that you did. You took him from me but I'll love you regardless. Is it just for the glimpses? Or because Geta has his teeth so deep in he can't let go anymore? Or is it. I'm not finishing this sentence I can't do it.

"Do you hate me?"

"No," Geta says, instantly.

Fucking end me. The "instantly" bearing so much stupid fucking weight on it. Like a stab through the chest. The instinctive full sincerity without even the potential for falseness.

"I tried. But even when you took things too far, I looked at you and saw a part of myself."

Please please for the love of gods please tell me more please explain what any of this means. This is a whole another story and all I have into it is like someone took a scalpel blade into a blackout curtain and that's the only light pouring in. I can't see what's outside but I know it's a whole world. What does ANY of this mean. What did he do to cross the lines? WHAT part of yourself did you see in him? What does that mean for anything. Why can't you hate him for that. Why is that the deciding factor. What is it. Dear god I am fucking dying what are these things that you're not saying. What happened to you two and why did that break you so bad.

Caracalla's lip twitches. A ghost of something close to grief. Or tenderness.

"You were always better than me," he whispers.

"No," Geta says. "I was just better at pretending."

I'm actually feeling physically so ill at this. The fucking grief. I can't deal with this I cannot fucking deal with it. And how true it is. Again in canon and in here, how fucking true that is. Geta isn't one bit better or more decent, but he is so stilted, so stuck in himself, that by suppressing everything human he's also suppressed his own monstrosity in the process. If you cut his shell open at this point I'm not even sure if the liquid core of rot would actually be in there or if he'd just be hollow. It'd just be nothing that kills you when you breathe it.

Later, Geta reads aloud. Some poem neither of them particularly likes, but the rhythm comforts. Caracalla dozes in and out, eyes fluttering. His hand, pale and shaking, slips from the blanket.

Geta holds it.

For the first time in years, neither flinches.

And I'm actually going to be sick I can't. First time, I read through these last bits with the same urgency a person throws themselves out of the way of an oncoming speeding car so I wouldn't have to fully feel them but now that I'm supposed to be talking about them I just have to stand there like a fucking idiot and take it as it comes. There's a whole lot here that I can't even write because nobody cares honestly and it's not real to anybody else anyway, but Geta reading to Caracalla for comfort, that being something that remains, replacing words when they're too tired to think but it's the voice that is craved, that is true, that is as honest to them as anything, that is an echo in every world for them.

And the storm is truly over. Btw. Just btw. :) Because the silence isn't even lingering anymore, the threat of things going back to being unsaid. You can't unsay these things. And Caracalla's too tired to hold the clouds there and something in Geta has loosened like a knot in silk thread.

This story is sincerely unbearable in the way that burning iron on skin is unbearable. I feel like I've drank water out of a boiling pot and it's just sitting there in the bottom of my stomach by the way that my body physically fucking hurts at all of this.

"Do you remember what you said? In the letter? That you'd never leave me. Not even in fear."

"I lied."

"No. You forgot."

I am. Going. To.

Apparently start crying again and lean my head to my hands for a while. The repetition. The exchange of parts between them for the promise. That isn't broken because they've never left each other alone, not really. The bitterness of Caracalla's words to Geta - that he only thinks of him as not a monster because he sees the boy that he was and not the man that he's become, and Geta not denying it? Like legitimately I think at this point I would rather be chewing rocks than going through this. Again not because I don't love the story if that was in the slightest unclear at this point but because I can't fucking endure this. This is violent. This is unendurably violent, in the force of all that they are for each other and were denied and the things that have replaced it and how final it all is because there's no way out and nothing to change course to. This is all it'll ever be, the best they could ever amount to.

It's fucking unbearable.

Caracalla sits up slowly. The fever is still there, quiet now, like a coiled thing waiting. His joints ache. His thoughts feel like blunt nails, but he is present. More present than he's been in days.

Fuck me over with this terminal lucidity, then. Just do it. Straight up rock in a fist against the side of the skull.

Geta is seated in the front row, alone, watching nothing. The stage is empty. No actors. No lines. Just the echo of what used to be.

Because this somehow manages to be so meta and between the worlds, and he's still the actor on his own stage and we're the audience watching him and his mirror counterpart entering the scene from the back. If this was on a real stage I would have left because I genuinely don't think I could survive watching this unfold this long, but the worst thing about a written story is that it won't leave if you get up halfway through. I've already felt everything they've felt so far and that won't leave me if I press the x because all of this is now a part of me, too. I said before that reading this feels like scarification and I want to repeat that here because this is scarification. Take off the blade but the marks are there. And I can't leave them unfinished like this, either.

Which makes the ending worse, because I hate being torn from Geta the way that Caracalla is. (And I hate, equally, not being there with him when he dies, for that matter.) Who the hell does he have left then? When the curtains close and there's just nothing after. He's never had a life that wasn't this and in the absence of anything and everyone, is he any less dead than Caracalla is? And for how long? And to what end?

I genuinely have never read a fic that is less than five thousand words long that I'm actually actively reading but that still takes me the whole fucking day somehow. I've been here for six hours. This is a full-on torture session and I don't want that to read in a blaming way, I just genuinely cannot express how deep this is biting me somehow. By this point I think it's well established that I'm not normal about this and like. I didn't read fanfic for… I'd say 15 years? At all? Because some of these things hit me worse than any other media does. Something about these stories is so absolute - mixing the love I have for these characters with the unchangeability of what is on the page. With canon, I have the power and ability to change the story. I can look at it and say well, that's fucking rude, but luckily I can write a different story that ends better. I can't do that with fanfic, because this is the dead end somebody else already made for them. The non-negotiable final destination where these people are taken from what was before and put on a line and this is where it all led. And I can't save these people. They're not mine to save.

But I want to so badly.

Caracalla walks down the aisle. Slowly. Like approaching a tomb.

The fact that he's the one who's dying here, but it's not his grave that he's walking to. And also is, in some ways, but he's not in it yet. He's the silence on the stage and the body in the tomb is everything that isn't on the stage anymore, the absence that creates the silence that he's become.

The amount of trauma that they went through in front of that bow.

And again the things they say - the confession, the non-answers - straight into a territory I can't write about because it wouldn't make any sense. But this, "I didn't know how else to feel it. It came out wrong. It always came out wrong." and the truth of it, how there was never any chance of them coming out of this any other way but bent and broken and twisted into shapes that children and men weren't meant to be. Geta's - gratitude? For Caracalla keeping to his boundaries, and never forcing him into things that are still unspeakable to them. "But I wanted to. I wanted to be close to something I trusted. Something that didn't make me afraid." Again because there was NO other way for this to be. He'll never love anybody else because he cannot. And he is so deeply human, despite everything, he needs those things, and there is no other safety, no other softness, no other care and love for him in the world but the one which was offered to him at birth. I couldn't blame him for that if I tried, because he deserved that love, every bit of it, and he still does, despite his cruelty, his inability to love a world that never loved him back. And Geta, "I was just better at pretending." That the world didn't have to be like that and they could be like others, the way people were meant to be and feel and behave, and if he put down those boundaries then it would, could, maybe just be that way one day and nothing would hold them back from embracing it then. That things which are so fundamentally broken and for which the basics of safety and security have been denied can just heal, if the wounds aren't on full dispaly.

At this point, I'm just left wondering at what it is that he ultimately denied here. Caracalla's comfort and safety and the love that he felt and wanted to feel? Was that the price of it? Or is it both of theirs, regardless of how willingly and knowingly Geta put the boundaries down for them? What is the thing that happened that made them this way? What is the thing that made them incapable of crossing the cracks in the foundation until now? How did he suffer? The same, different? Where does his pretending end, and what is the part that he saw in Caracalla that made him incapable of hating him? Is his love and forgiveness compassion, or does he feel the same way, and it's all just part of that mask he wears to deny it? What part of yourself do you see in him. The part that is broken or the part that could have been which you managed to salvage, but only part of the way through?

"You don't have to explain."

"Yes, I do." His voice shakes. "Because you never said it back."

What words did you say to him, in what place, in light or dark, in which rooms, in what voice, and how did he then leave you with it. And what happened to you after? Is that just how the wall was built, after, there was no way to make it unsaid, and it's all silence from thereon, so that,

"I was afraid of what it would mean. Afraid of losing you. This kind of reality of ours that was never theirs. I thought pretending to live in ignorance would be the best for both of us, especially for you."

Caracalla laughs. Bitter and soft. "And now look."

nothing that they might say or do would make Geta falter from that decision? Because he's still protecting them. Protecting them because the audience is watching and the others will surely destroy that last thing that they never wanted to lose - because they're not afraid of dying, but afraid of losing the other. And now look, the ends that that has left them with. Neither of them fully loved, years lost to grieving the distance and growing it worse and worse in the fear of breaking something that other people made sacred for them. And if they had abandoned it, then what? Because maybe he's right and it would have been worse. Trading that one while full of the only genuine comfort and joy that they might have ever had for something that is like their father but worse by a thousandfold and then nothing ever again. To Geta, that must be a betrayal of the same calibre that Caracalla saw in his stillness when he should have flinched, and in the laughter of the audience. Prioritising this… what would it be? One true pleasure, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year or two or three of sincere and complete happiness and wholeness, over Caracalla's safety? After all that they endured, just taking it for what it's worth and letting the world break them after? Would that not be the worst, most selfish thing he could have ever done? Letting himself have something that wasn't meant for him, like Caracalla is something for him to consume.

But by not doing that, they've ended up here, and it's just been a slower death for the both of them, with none of what could have been, or should have, or maybe wasn't meant to be and could have been worse but probably wasn't. It was their reality that wasn't meant for anybody else. I don't think the same rules apply there as do for others. They never had another world to join, but they were held to it anyway, because they weren't meant for this one any more than other people were. They were forged into it like a prison with no doors.

I have absolutely nothing to say for the next bit that follows. I just don't have it in me to touch that. I think I will actually just fucking die if I dwell on it more than I did here reading over it again. The almost but not and the lingering of it and the closeness and proximity that they've never fully had being there in that moment and that moment being so still and present and real to them before the world cuts into it again.

The fact that it's always been this close. And, tossing two paragraphs up from here, "and what happened to you after? Is that just how the wall was built, after, there was no way to make it unsaid, and it's all silence from thereon, so that nothing that they might say or do would make Geta falter from that decision?"

Yes. Because it was always that close. Any word might have collapsed this house of cards and I want to burn the whole world down for making them hold onto it anyway.

"You'll remember me?" Caracalla asks.

"Every version of you."

The way this again just takes a knife to the separation of worlds and tears it open. Geta means every version of Caracalla that has been for them and for him but there are so many others, too, that he'll remember, and be remembered by, because for whatever reason I cannot look at this story without it existing in that purgatory of all places and worlds and lives that they ever shared, like everything about them is concentrated into it and forced into a space that is so claustrophobic and raw and thick with what they are and all the things that they could have been.

How so many things that they say echo true through places that they've never been, like mirrors set up to reflect them, facing each other, so that the reflection never ends.

He says, his voice and soul broken.

This, too. This, too, is splitting open things that don't just belong to the here, somehow.

And the way that already here, the perspective of the story has shifted from Caracalla. He's never seen Geta enough to tell his thoughts but now we've had multiple paragraphs that tell us what Geta feels, how he sees all of this from his perspective.

Maybe, this time, he will remember to stay.

Stay with himself and be who he always was, with all the pieces that remember who they belong to, as the boy who can see his brother's thoughts and feel how he feels, too.

Per the epilogue, frankly, I think perhaps Geta should have burnt the servants instead. Fuck them asking things like that. And the rain is back because the silence and the unspeakable is back and Geta still has strength to make the heavens weep for them, but he is not strong, either.

Even on the second time, I can't get through this part without crying the same way I've only ever cried when I've lost someone I really loved. I think I said in the tags that the last time was when my dog died last spring. It comes in these ugly loud waves that fold me from the middle and I don't understand how you can put this much real grief and loss into so few words. How you can practically feed me this man's soul and put his grief and longing and loneliness into me. I want to say that I don't want it but I read this again voluntarily even if I don't think I can ever do it a third time again, but it doesn't matter, because I can't unfeel these things and I can't not let him be part of me now, because I've eaten both their grief and their love for each other and the memories of what was and everything they denied themselves and each other to protect what was never allowed to be there at all. Even if it wasn't their fault. Even if it could have been beautiful.

And his own confession to the darkness. The one thing he could never allow for himself, never let Caracalla have, because it could have ended them too early. At least this way, he had him to the end.

And in that silence, in that ruined peace, Geta whispers the only truth left behind:

"You were not unloved."

And neither are you now. Never were, and never will be. And this is the thing that I think makes me so fucking unhinged about this story as a whole - I've been through this with them and now it's my job to remember them, and love them, for all the things they could never speak out loud, and all the things that made them so weak and monstrous and bad. It's like being handed something very fragile, utterly unique in all of the worlds, without instruction: carry this or leave it behind.

And I'm taking it with me and I'm not going to let go of it. I keep repeating that I don't know what you did and I don't understand any of this but I have never felt this way about a story, or loved two boys from any tale this fiercely.

We briefly exchanged about an afterlife, and I hope they get their whole kingdom there, in every detail they wanted to paint it in, filled to an abundance with only things that are theirs and for them and which will love them and shelter them and keep them safe. A kingdom in the sky where no one ever dies, or has to cry unless they choose to. Where they can safely be broken in every way that they are, and finally heal those wounds that could never close before, and love and be loved exactly as they were meant to, in all the ways that they were capable of, but never had the chance to discover.

I don't know what to do now, or how to move on with this.

23/04/2025 PS. The universe threw me Into the West from the LotR soundtrack, and it's theirs now, I think.

24/04/2025 PPS. A question I keep having - when you say they're not the ones from history and not the ones from the movie but have elements of both, do they look the part? Are they still their pale redheaded selves, or darker, with tighter curls in their hair?

25/04/2025 PPPS. There was something else, but I forgot it, and now it really bothers me. But even reading through just my own notes to make sure this is at least part of the way to legible, I still cried, and I still feel sick, and I still want to burn the whole world down for them. Everything has reminded me of them since I read this the first time. Duolingo's Latin course is obsessed with words like stage, actor, poet, father, severus, letter. It rained for three days straight and everything smells of rot. I physically recoil from the main quote of the story and you can see that it's never repeated in this comment because I physically cannot type it down or bear to read it without averting my eyes from it. It's included so many times in the story and I can't remember how it goes because I can't endure thinking of it even long enough to actually read it into my consciousness. Water dripping down from the porch roof last night took me to an amphiteatre I've never been to before.

It's going to rain again today.

PPPPS. It's at the point where it's every song, too.

[lunar-rcp]

𓏲 ₊˚๑ ꒰ A halloween dilemma ?! ꒱ ໑

🌷🔥 ミ royber short oneshot

☆ Something short. I've been taking a while with oneshots, so i decided to make a little something for myself and you guys if you're all interested !

Halloween was just creeping around the corner, and everyone was understandably excited for a spooky holiday.

Eating candy till your stomach twists, wandering around town admiring the decorations everyone had set up, scaring everyone out of their engines..

A very exciting holiday, indeed.

But last and for more importantly;

What's Halloween without a dazzling costume to show off?

A situation the rescue team would rather avoid. They are the face of the town, the stars, if you will. They must dress to outshine the others as stars do.

And so, they were all situated at their base. Clothes are scattered all around on the ground, concept sketches were made of a mess on the desk.

“Amber, have you found something to wear yet?” Helly tilted his head in curiosity, the fabric made stem of his pumpkin costume slightly dropping down.

All of the others had already been pleased with their costumes. However, Amber was in a slump as she couldn't figure out what to wear for hers. And time was ticking!

“Not yet..” A long, weary sigh rolled out of Amber. She just had to think of something, but what could she do?

“Hmm..” Poli hummed, rubbing the side of his head with his palm. “Perhaps you can take inspiration from something you like!”

“Something I like?” Amber's eyes averted towards Roy's door.

And as if fate had tied the strings of inspiration together, an idea had popped up in her head.

A great one.

“You all look amazing!” Jin clapped her hands together. “I just can't wait for halloween! All our costumes look–” Jin put her rambles to a halt when she spotted Amber wasn't in the room with the others. “Huh?” Jin raised an eyebrow. “Where did Amber go?”

“Ah, I think she's in her room at the moment. She did say she needed time to prepare her costume.” Roy gave a tiny smile. “Would you like for me to go get her?” Roy offered, his hand raising up as to gesture his offer.

“That would be great! Thanks, Roy!” Jin placed her hands onto her hips, looking content.

A minute or so later, Roy stood in front of Amber's door. For some reason he didn't know himself, he felt oddly nervous. As if something was awaiting just behind the door.

With a deep breath, he knocked onto her door. “Amber? Jin needs you, are you there?”

“Come in!!” A muffled voice spoke from behind the door, only adding to Roy's concerns.

“Uh, alright?” Roy answered Amber's voice with a puzzled tone of voice of his own. Just what was she planning?

“I'm coming in!” Roy hesitantly pushed the door aside, stepping into Amber's room only to find a room filled with a black void of darkness.

Why aren't the lights on? “Uh, Amber! I'm turning the lights on, I can't really see.” Roy directed his headlights towards the light switch, he then flicked it on.

He was met with a sight he'd never expected to happen in a million light years.

“Well, well!” A mischievous giggle emitted from the ambulance as she twirled around, the sweet smile she usually had was now a smug one.

Amber had decided to wear something she likes the most!

..That being, an outfit like Roy's. To the firemen's hat to the huge boots he always wore, she had it spot on.

“Y'know, Poli told me to wear something I'd like!” Amber sweetly giggled. “Sooooo..”

She pointed her finger directly at the widen-eyed fire engine.

“I'd like to put out those flames that dance around your heart, Roy!” A soft pink hue was lightly brushed on her cheeks, but she had winked to play it cool.

Roy, on the other side.. wasn't playing it as cool as he hoped. A bright, red blush had emitted on the sides of his cheeks. His blush was even redder than his own paint.

“I– oh my god– Amber– Uh–” His words only spiraled into a row of incoherent mumbles. With everything he had tried to say, he had clumsily tripped over his words.

Safe to note, Amber had decided on the devil concept she had initially. Otherwise, she'd need to put a fire out that had blazed from out of the fireman himself on the top of his head.

Although, that was the cutest reaction Roy has ever had in a lifetime. A memory that Amber will always look back upon with a warm feeling sparked within her heart.

divider by @cafekitsune !

[articskele]

Yall I just gotta spill my incoherent rambles about Its Name Was Cesar Torres because GRAAAAHHHHH

Spoilers under the cut!

I saw one post that was like “Ok but which would be more fucked up: the alternate killing Cesar while wearing the face of his mom, or vice versa?” And this fic gave us a third and even more devastating option holy shit-

“Picking up the receiver, it paused before pressing at the shapes in the pattern it knew would make Cesar Torres’ friend speak.”

DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS LINE.

Understanding the how but not the why, having the knowledge but not the experience, the inhuman detachment of it all. One small detail that betrays its whole state of being right now: An imitation.

And don't even get me started on the headcanons for how alternates work bc they're so FASCINATING

The way alternates just. Absorb? Things? To take on their form? One of the comments mentioned the alt wearing Cesar's corpse like a parasite and AOUGH

The way emotions have taste- Altsar's initial plan to understand pain just so it could make Mark's suffering that much better to savor- It's just the sheer embodiment of their nature as entities of consumption, born into a state of empty eternity

The way alternates have no personal stake in the war and are just doing what they do best because they can- The way alternates can't die and are just cast back into the void from whence they came, only delaying the inevitable-

Pfffft Mark walks in and just sees Altsar like 🧍 aksjdalkfh- Not a single thought between those eyes dude

Mark with the chewed up fingernails he just like me fr

THE BIBLE REFERENCES THE BIBLE REFERENCES OUGHHGHGHH HOLY SH IT

I don't even know why I love em so much they just make me FERAL- OK BUT THAT SCENE IN CHAPTER 2 WITH MARK RECITING THE FUCKIGNF PSALM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

BRO IS CLINGING. HOLDING ON FOR DEAR LIFE SOMEONE HELP HIM. GO CHRISTIAN BOY GO!!!! Voted God's little lamb most likely to be slaughtered-

THE PANCAKESSSSS. WHAT IF I CRIED. A glimpse of silliness in the storm, and Altsar fuckin grinning from ear to ear (perhaps literally lmao-) I love that and I want them to be ok in the end-

Can we talk about the deer alternate. Can we tALK ABOUT THE FUCKING DEER AAAAUGHH

They had us in the first half not gonna lie with the Mark fakeout- The way I slapped my hand over my mouth like "WUH? HUH??"

AND THEN ALTSAR, OVERWHELMED WITH RAGE, STRIKING THIS ABOMINATION WITH ALL OF ITS THEIR MIGHT. AND YET IT JUST KEEPS TALKING. WORDS DRIPPING FROM ITS SLACKED JAW LIKE SALIVA. WHY WON'T IT STO P.

The moment Altsar realizes he's gotten way in over his head past the point of no return- The constant change of it to they to he, struggling with newfound humanity and unable to see where the alternate ends and the dead man begins. Is there even a difference anymore?

The whole warm and cold thing..... Mark taking Altsar's hands into his and bandaging his its wounds..... Injured. Broken. Both of them living a lie for as long as they can.

AND CAN WE JUST APPRECIATE THE WAY EVERYTHING COMES TOGETHER AT THE END:

The Mary statue and the deer alternate coming back

Mark's righteous fury framed by the shards of the Evangelist

The change from ¬ Shoot me, Mark Heathcliff. I am not what you think. ¬ to ¬ Don’t shoot me. I'm not what you think. ¬

Altsar finally experiencing pain, only for it to be at the hand of his best friend. Bleeding out as he screams for the one thing he just can't go without.

“It hurts, Mark. It hurts.”

IT'S JUST SO!!! GODDDDDDDDD. WHAT IF I CRIED. WHAT IF I TURNED INTO A LITTLE PUDDLE HUH. WHAT THEN.

I just. I struggle to find the words to describe how much I adore this fic, yall. If you were to look in my brain you would just find that one video of the guy shouting "HEEEELP. HEEEEEEELP. HELP MEEE." with the most expressionless face-

I like this fic. I like it a whole lot. And I can't wait to see what comes next ouo

[tragedy-peanut-gallery]

How do you think myriah and daeron fell in love?

Ohhh this is a really fun question! Honestly when it comes to these two I think it was less this instant moment and more like a slow burn timeline- and because I have a lot of thoughts on them that might become a lot of incoherent rambling I’m gonna put it under the cut here for convenience lol-

So from what little info we know+ a bit of guesswork, it’s clear that Daeron and Myriah most likely weren’t in love at first sight given the general circumstances as to why they were getting married lol. In the beginning they’re respectful to one another, but distant and untrusting due to preconceived biases. They get to know each other on a surface level just so they aren’t complete strangers to one another cause Daeron definitely doesn’t know how to properly interact with any woman besides his mom, and Myriah’s more than a little suspicious that this white boy’s going to end up being a prick like his dad (and surprise! They may or may not bond over mutual hatred for Aegon)

Around the time Baelor’s born and the other Baelor kicks the bucket though, I could see some walls slowly breaking down as they learn to trust one another. After all, Daeron’s now in the direct line of succession with the expectation that he and Myriah raise a future heir to the iron throne, and you can’t exactly raise a kid together without trusting your partner who’s helping you raise them (well… technically you can- but you know what I mean). So around the reign of Viserys II, I could see them becoming at the very least co-parents for their kids with a bit of affection thought to be friendship for one another sprinkled in for flavour.

When Aegon IV takes over however, that’s when the dynamic changes a bit. Now they’re no longer just the other parent for their kids- now they have to work as a team in a court that’s mostly hostile to them both. They have to be a united front, to be the perfect successors and the better alternative to the asshole currently sitting on the throne, so they definitely got each other’s backs (which is a bit of a fact! Seeing as from what we know Daeron he was a bit of a thorn in his dad’s side when it came to Aegon’s schemes, particularly the ones concerning Dorne). But that’s just generally a given, I think what really got them to slowly fall for one another was the moments alone with one another in between, where they could just be together without every move being a deliberate political statement to a constant watching eye.

By the time Daeron himself becomes king, I think they’re still definitely a team, but more partners who genuinely care and love for each other based on their slow bond. Unfortunately they can’t really be equals, since nobles might take it less as “Oh they want to have a joint rule together, that’s nice :)” and more “!!this evil horrible snake is controlling her husband like a puppet!!1!1!1”, so while Myriah’s not going to sit on the iron throne or anything like that, I’d like to think she’s one of Daeron’s most trusted advisors and generally helped him rule the realm without putting herself too much out there. Also, I’ve seen this take get tossed around a little bit but I wanna put it here anyways- I definitely think when their kids were old enough to have their own kids, they were the sweetest grandparents imaginable, those kids could get away with just about anything when it came to them lol.

Will Grrm inevitably ruin this and make it another toxic marriage disguised as a love story come Fire and Blood Vol. 2? Probably, but I’m still going to hold onto the hope that my boy doesn’t turn out to be a dickhead and actually loved his wife through mutual love and respect, no matter how weird he might be otherwise!

(Also I have a lot of headcanons for these two but I’m a bit worried that I rambled for a bit too much lol- thank you so much for the question!)

[spring-lxcked]

taking a small break to ramble incoherently abt my portrayal of william in what will be a very confusing post lmao

i'm thinking about how my portrayal, which draws inspiration from two specific characters at times, and how i apply that inspiration to william (which started off as the focus of the post before it derailed how did this get so long i'm sorry)

the first is (and i do hate to make this comparison ngl) my portrayal of kok.ichi over on @takinghisbow. i mean, one of the running themes of the blog is the "mask" kok.ichi wears to conceal his true emotions and i've consistently tried to keep myself from falling into that exact turn of phrase on this blog for the most part. these are two characters who do not want you to actually know anything about them and hide everything from intentions to feelings to expressions (yes hello i have realized in the last year that i mask in public thanks for noticing). the obvious differences between these two are motivation (kok.ichi is motivated by trust issues and self-hatred, william is motivated to try to cover up his misdeeds) and method (kok.ichi acts antagonist/annoying to push people away, but william acts falsely kind to draw people in while still keeping them at an arm's length). kok.ichi has questionable morals, but tries to be good where it counts. william is a terrible person and has no intentions of changing that, although he can be kind to those he likes if it isn't "a burden" to him.

the other character (who i also tentatively write) is hann.ibal lec.ter (specifically the NB.C portrayal). and i've said it before, but "you're not a person, you're a monster wearing a person-suit" is william-coded lmao. they're both monsters, and yet capable of caring. they are not incapable of empathy or sympathy, but choose how to wield it. outside of their very horrific hobbies, nobody would ever think they were killers. both are surrounded by death, and yet not suspected because nobody could ever believe they'd do it (until it's too late).

going into making this blog, i was very adamant that i wanted a complex portrayal that didn't fall too far into generic movie serial killer stereotypes. we don't throw around potentially offensive terms like "psychopath" or "sociopath" here. we don't suggest that lack of empathy = bad person here. i also was very, very loathe to do the whole "evil guy looks Totally Evil and is so obviously creepy" because it quite literally made little sense to me. how is this guy killing so many kids and not getting suspected if he screams "Serial Killer" just by looking at him? if he's antagonistic and creepy and clearly threatening? and in that same vein i wanted to avoid "bad person is bad all the time 24/7, never does anything decent ever" because i live for nuance, not the chr.istian fund.amentalist black/white thinking i grew up in. i wanted him to be irredeemably, unmistakably evil without losing the fact that evil people are humans, and humans are capable of great evil if they choose.

i want the moments where he's being decent—a seemingly good friend, father, or romantic partner—to be almost disarming. because, while william is perfectly capable of caring for people, his actions (both in what he does and what he doesn't do) are intentional. always. his sense of humor with his adult friends or romantic partners is half because he genuinely enjoys joking around and half because he wants to be viewed a certain way. funny. normal. just one of your buddies. him doting on his kids is because he loves them, but also because he needs for everyone—both the kids and the community—to be able to say, "What a good father, he would never hurt anyone (and especially not a child)." when he resists showing anger (whether entirely or just the full extent of it) toward someone he's upset with, this is part of the persona. when he pretends to like someone he dislikes, this is part of the persona. when he agrees to something he doesn't want to do, this is part of the persona.

it's part of what makes sprin.gtrap seem so different from william prior to the springlo.ck incident. william is throwing everything behind his persona. he's a calculating man, even when he's genuinely enjoying himself. he can be truly having a nice time with someone, but the thought of how this is benefitting his persona is always in the back of his mind. you're just another character witness to william. after the springlo.ck incident, there's no longer a point. the persona is gone. get ready to meet the real man beneath it.

[thehypnone]

Mushy May Day 2. Crush/”I made this for u” - Rulti

WC: 830

Swiss is head over heels for Rain and makes him a gift.

Read under the cut or on AO3.

Swiss was fucking terrified.

It took him weeks, even though he technically finished in three days, he was still somehow finding more imperfections that he had to fix, he had to make it absolutely perfect. Swiss was on the verge of a breakdown. 

What if he would think it’s stupid? Ugly?

What if he just doesn't like it a bit?

What if he doesn’t like Swiss at all?

So much could go wrong, and he chose such a shitty way of confessing his feelings, it had to go wrong, it just couldn’t be right, not with Swiss and his stupid gift, it was all so stupid!

He prayed so hard that he wouldn’t be in the common room, even though he texted him that that’s exactly where he is two minutes ago. He wanted him to be there, but he was so scared, but if he saw him, there was no way the multi ghoul could stop himself from doing this stupid shit, and- oh, fuck, he was already in the commons, and the other was there too.

“H- hi, Rain,” Swiss stuttered, his hands behind his back, moving to stand in front of Rain sitting so gracefully on the couch. How could he look so good just fucking sitting? “You have a moment?”

“Sure thing, Swiss, what’s up?”

The multi ghoul was completely sure he wasn’t so stressed ever in his long life, never in Hell, never Topside. 

He had the biggest crush on Rain, a one that he has no idea how and when he even developed. He just realized one night, during a ritual, that he was staring at the water ghoul practically all the time, and when said ghoul smiled at him at some point and when Swiss thought about it, he came to a conclusion he fell deep. 

Swiss was planning on making a move for weeks now and not one idea he came up with appeared enough to be worthy the ghoul that Rain was.

But eventually he said ‘fuck it’ and followed his gut, which lead him here, even though he still didn’t think it was an idea even coming close to being a good one.

“I- I made this for you,” he said, quickly reaching from behind him, placing his gift on Rain’s lap and backing away, his hands nearly trembling, one fidgeting with the other.

Rain processed for a moment. He was worried when Swiss came in so tense and stressed, it wasn't like him at all. But now, the water ghoul was nearly sure what was happening, and he prayed his relief didn’t show on his face.

Little did Swiss know, but Rain also liked him.

  A lot. 

But where Swiss was, usually, confident, Rain wasn’t, not like that. He wasn’t shy, contrary to a popular belief, but he wasn't Swiss. That’s why he, maybe selfishly, waited.

Rain picked up Swiss’ gift and turned it, inspecting. When he realized what it was, he jumped up from the couch and threw himself at the multi ghoul without thinking, wrapping his arms around his neck.

It was a handmade stuffed animal, a shark to be exact, and it was the best fucking thing Rain saw in his entire fucking life.

Sudden rush of Rain’s salted sea water scent made Swiss literally dizzy, and maybe that’s why he didn’t fix his balance and ended up on the floor with the object of his affection on top of him.

Perfect situation.

“Do you- do you like it?” Swiss asked, blushing like crazy, and the few milliseconds before Rain answered was the most horrifying moment of his life.

“Like it? Swiss, I fucking love it!” Rain shouted, flushed deeply himself.

Swiss sighed in relief, smiling dumbly up at the ghoul straddling him.

Wait, what?

Fuck, that was more compromising situation than they initially realized.

Rain mumbled something incoherent and made a move to get off of Swiss and sit next to him on the floor, the gift returning to his hands from where it landed a bit to the side.

“I heard you saying you liked sharks, and, well, I like you, so I tried my best to make it at least resemble a shark, and this came out, and-” the multi ghoul started rambling, fidgeting with a ring he wore.

“Swiss, it’s fucking perfect,” Rain beamed. “I can’t believe you did something like that for me.”

“Well, as I said, I like you, so…” Swiss suddenly got shy again, dropping his gaze to the floor.

“Guess what, then” the water ghoul chuckled.

“W- what?”

“I like you too.”

“You do?”

“Hell yeah, how could I not? You’re so talented, and kind, and friendly, and so fucking hot, and-” 

He would list out more, he had a lot in mind, but he was cut short by Swiss pouncing on him, similar as he did not so long ago, but this time the multi ghoul’s soft lips found his chapped ones and suddenly, Rain’s mind was empty.

[inhurtandincomfort]

So unrelated, it’s the idkanonymystuff person who originally asked about magic stuff and said something about sharing immunology/biology and how that could apply to magic and, uh, I procrastinated and then forgo my entire train of thought

Not really sure why I’m sharing this (most likely me overthinking) but ye, apologies for that. So to right that (self-perceived wrong), I am going to try. No I don’t know what I mean by that

Since the thoughts can’t be coherent (and also if I tried to explain the thought process, this would become a college essay), gonna try my best to summarize the one coherent thing, allergies and intolerances.

Gonna put a lil warning (notice??) here, wording and explaining coherently is not my strong suit so I’m trying my best and also it’s gonna be long and might not make sense. I apologize for that and can clarify if you have questions, but in the meantime, uh, words :D

That on its own doesn’t make much sense, but me personally, I feel like there is a lot you could do with that, both absurd crack shenanigans and actual whump. The way I have for my own magic system, to try and explain, imagine being able to use magic all your life, and then one day, your body just starts trying to self destruct because it now randinly and by chance catagorized the magic you used for your entire life as “foreign” and needs to be destroyed (that is actually how some allergies form. You can be allergic to almost anything).

You could be born with the allergy (aquifer quiet acquire at a very young age), have it be used against you (irl super effective) not to mention the danger of exposing yourself to the “allergen” more often, reactions getting more severe from mild discomfort to your body almost shutting down. Furthermore, autoimmune allergies exist (ie your immune system, the thing meant to protect you, turns against you) and in context, could lead to someone becoming completely unable to use magic without risking certain death. There is an ungodly amount more I could go into, but I’ll stop there before more thoughts inevitably spawn.

On the topic of intolerances, in the case of my worldbuilding, it can have many different outcomes, but to keep this short and to throw in an example, I have a blorbo who has an intolerance to specifically healing magic, that is to say, it’ll still work, but the side effects are quite nasty the more effective, from minor discomfort to feeling like your bones are decaying instead of mending, or in some case, violently rebelling/rejecting the healing magic and making everything worse.

Or in the case of having to use magic you’re intolerant of (just realizing it could technically also mean less effective so actually could be a good thing?? New worldbuilding to develop yay), having to deal with more severe repercussions of using magic that others might otherwise not have to deal with (I’d list them but my brain just did a software reset. Apologies).

I am not joking that there is so much more potential (that I see anyways) and complexity to these things and, if you have me an hour to gather some resources and hyperfixate, I’d create an entire 12-hour college lecture complete with little examples and slideshows and all that, but it is literally 2am so I’m not doing that, also so I don’t become a college lecture in your ask box.

Apologies for the absolute wall of text (I really like rambling about immunology/biology, it is a very interesting thing for me) and I hope my ramblings aren’t incoherent and somewhat interesting to consider and all that, since I am unsure about if rambling lore in inboxes is the correct use for tumblr etiquette stuff.

ANYWAYS hope you have a wonderful day/night and are taking care of yourself and staying hydrated and all that jazz :]

-idk (also @idkanonymystuff for clarification. This is just my tag, probably gonna stay lurking tho)

THIS IS SO COOL OMG. The idea of becoming allergic to your own magic... I never thought of that but it's so cool, you're right there's so much you can do with it! That's fascinating I'm in love with that idea.

Thank you for sharing! I always enjoy reading peoples lore and worldbuilding, never feel bad about rambling to me :) I really love your idea