#verse: post divorce

[hewantshisbrideback]

Nobody can definitively say the means which lead to the tragic ends of two such beloved public figures. Nobody can name what it was that brought the last Targaryen heir to the throne and the only daughter of House Stark together in the first place. No one knows exactly what happened, not in truth, but people can speculate. And speculate, they do.

A SONG OF INTERVIEWS AND FAKE NEWS: Retrospectives on Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark

[mihrsuri]

Listen if you took someone from the Tudors OT3 universe, took them to ours and explain about historical Henry they would refuse to believe you because As If and it’s just, it’s such a weird thing to get my brain around sometimes as a writer because like, fundamentally it would not enter in to their minds as even a possibility of a possibility.

(Yes Henry has some Bad Life Choices (derogatory) in OT3 verse - believe me I am getting into them right now but just, you attempt to explain the idea that he had six wives to someone from the OT3 universe and their head explodes).

(Someone in Tudors fandom in OT3 verse writes a beautifully written ‘crack au’ which everyone including the author is like ‘listen this would never happen but if we get past that’ about Henry executing Thomas More)

I keep thinking about like assigning mutuals like @eidetictelekinetic fic I think they would write within the tudors ot3 universe tudors fandom as well.

[vipier]

by nature of how things develop, most of what I write involves people tristan is closer with or has some sort of connection with, but notwithstanding that, with people he doesn’t know well and/or trust, he is so intentionally unreadable and just … generally unnerving to be around, which is in part just his vibe but in larger part an intentional defense mechanism. people can’t easily figure him out and he likes it that way. but also, rare to the point of impossibility, I love the concept of people he knows but who haven’t breached that barrier with him basically accidentally encountering him when he’s having A Moment bc if there’s something more jarring then tristan’s general existence, it’s seeing him even marginally emotional.

[movedto-mastcrmarksman]

@sheshootsxruns -> " Come on Clint! You said you were gonna help me train for my PAT! " -young anya in the fire academy

It was not that he had forgotten that he had made that promise. Clint meant all the promises that he made, or at least he was trying to. Helping plucky recruits so they didn't wash out as many times as he had. (Granted he had additional challenges compared to most and plainly there were a lot of departments across the country that wouldn't even give him a glance; it's the hearing aids).

Eventually, he had made it through and found himself in Texas of all places. Damn state gave him a shudder but that more had to do with bad circus memories than anything else. Clint's proven that he was more than qualified. He didn't more dangerous shit back in his carnie days than he did now.

Part of his new deal on existence was simply this; to give back to people, to life, and be what he hadn't had growing up. So he had meant his promise to Anya that he'd drill her over the PAT as many times as she needed; probably push her twice as hard as any sargarent at the academy did. If he had to, if that's what she needed. Clint knows he had needed a kick in the ass, still did but he was managing life better.

He didn't forget, but the ex-carnie was entirely consumed this week with rotting in his apartment until Anya's at his door. His phone mostly forgotten unless he heard the ring tone or felt vibration pattern from the firehouse go off (he set that up so he never missed an emergency and it let him ignore everyone else).

Lucky and Bishop were bugging him about the door and he finally relents; opening it to Anya. Clint gives her a once over and sighs, hopefully it doesn't look like he's just come out of a nap but Anya's already known him to be a patented Barton mess. ❝ You sure you're up for what old Hawkeye got in store? ❞ He's told her about what he did in his youth and early twenties, right?

❝ You take Lucky's leash, the pups can come with us for the warmup jog.... Before we even start. ❞

[angelsdean]

plagued with too many fic ideas i'll never write (bc it takes me like 2.5 yrs to write a long fic RIP)

[mknbrd]

The truth is a matter of circumstance.

clint's form is off. not by much, because clint barton has the best shooting form in the world, but it's off. even after years gone, even through a monitor with a shitty camera angle while her life is in shambles, bobbi can tell. she knows clint, like she knows the back of her hand, and his left elbow is a hairs-breadth too low. not that it makes much difference in the end result, but it's off, and she knows why.

" you wanna know the nice thing about being on your own in survival mode for a significant amount of time ? " bobbi morse is supposed to be dead. bobbi morse, for all intents and purposes was dead — the truth in most circumstances behind her own is that she'd died two years prior, and that she'd died wanting to be married to clint barton. but the circumstances change — that bobbi had not been this bobbi, and this bobbi is not dead. " you get some . . . perspective, i guess. you get to be selfish, and stop caring about other people's versions of the truth. "

bobbi rolls her shoulder out to relieve the pressure the slinged arm's created in her clavicle, furrows her brow as clint on-screen fires an arrow straight through a robot's left eye. it's inches off. he's distracted. because bobbi distracts him, and she'd shattered the truth he'd lived with for three years in telling him that the last bobbi to tell clint barton she loved him wasn't bobbi at all, but an alien wearing a bobbi mask. and sure, that tidbit coming out hours prior wasn't exactly grand timing on her part, but he'd kept pushing her to come home with him, and bobbi hates her overpriced hotel room in manhattan, but the idea of trying to heal the itty bitty broken pieces of herself while laying next to the man who'd shattered her heart to begin with had made her nauseous at the thought.

" your guy can have whatever version of the truth he wants, but mine is the only one that matters to me where we're concerned. " clint's truth is romantic. clint's truth is a dream come true — a dead wife, not dead anymore. bobbi's is ugly — it's clint leaving her alone when she needed him most, and then being the face of her tormentor for three years running. bobbi's is coming home with raised scars and bones that never healed right, and the man she should've been able to come to is a man she cannot trust. she's past the point of shrinking herself down to keep clint and his image happy, safe. squeaky clean.

bobbi lifts her chin, tears her eyes away from the screen just long enough to offer a set of pursed lips and a shrug of the shoulder that's not been practically busted to pieces. " sorry. i know him being out of it is inconvenient for you, but i deserve better than swallowing his version of the truth. "

[trans-xianxian]

what is that quote that's like. we came into the world it seems unnatural for us to leave apart

[spring-lxcked]

@florietiae ( continued from here )

His constant, simmering rage was kept in check by one fact: he didn't want her back. And that, if he had wanted her back, he could get her back. Right? The idea of her seeing another man, however, had skewered those beliefs with doubt. A date—how could she possibly be ready to move on? William, still wallowing in his self-pity and petty, not-quite hatred every night. Two years—Jayne was consistently getting on his case about moving on as well. William felt no desire to do so. He much preferred hurling petty insults, or demanding time he wasn't owed.

And now? She was beautiful, everything that he had fallen for ( and perhaps had even left him in the ER with bloody nose). The gorgeous, intelligent, and funny woman who had helped him perfectly fulfill his ideal life—wife, sons, daughter, family home, successful business. But it had been more, the sort of love he hadn't thought himself capable of—entirely honest, never an act. . . for a time. Now, the dream was shattered and William blamed her. He hadn't wanted the divorce, had dug in his heels and fought until he was too embarrassed to try to force her to stay.

Her dismissal only reignited that embarrassment, along with a healthy dose of stubbornness. Her laughing at him frankly pissed him off. "It's a waste of time." He was shifting lanes—a nasty habit he was only partially conscious of—from uncaring to too caring. "He won't know what to do with a woman like you." And the comment was less complimentary and more I could treat you so much better.

( As if they didn't both know in excruciating detail how he could treat her. )

He reeled in the hurt and anger, forcing it back behind the curtains as he tried to settle into something more charming. He was nothing if not a manipulator. They both knew that.

He moved nearer, further into her space than he had any right to, but not quite enough to touch. "You could stay." And here came the false niceties, not a word of truth passing his lips for the next several seconds: "I know I'm being. . . irrational. But it's only because I still love you. How could I ever love someone the way I love you?" Weaponizing real feelings in the most insincere of ways—the only thing he felt good at these days. "Think of all those nights in together—when we were good." And he took the risk, then, hand reaching out to brush against hers. "Don't you realize how much you're hurting me?"

[revolutionary-thoy]

Here they are! The two edgelords you've all been waiting for, Re-verse Kagami and Luka

I had a lot of different interpretations of these two, but the one I ended up settling on is them as villains. They're the current Dragon and Snake miraculous holders and they've been working for the Supreme longer than Marinette and Adrien (hence the even more pronounced scars on their faces). They were Marinette and Adrien's superiors and trained them when they first joined, and they would also be Shadybug and Claw Noir's replacements after the two of them left.

Kagami's family has been involved with the Supreme for centuries, so her mom has been training her since birth to be the next Dragon user. Since she was basically raised by the Supreme and an even more controlling version of Tomoe, this version of Kagami is way more cold and calculated. She usually doesn't speak more words than she absolutely has to.

Luka was approached by the Supreme in a similar way to Marinette. He was at a lowpoint in his life and they took advantage of that. In this universe, he lives with Jagged, while Juleka lives with Anarka. They know about their parents divorce and of each other's existence, but they almost never see each other. Juleka has no idea about all the sketchy stuff her brother is up to. Personality-wise, he's very slimy and manipulative... snakelike even

I was debating whether I should post these along with their transformed designs, or seperately, but Evil!Viperion is taking forever to draw, so I'll probably post those later this week when they're done. I also need names for Evil Ryuko and Evil Viperion, so if you have any ideas, please tell me!

Full Re-verse cast below!

[brandileigh2003]

Older wolfstar fic recs: (older in age that is)

let me know what I missed and self recs are welcome (also as always check tags for each one to protect yourself) **And I know older is relative term bc most of these wolfstar are in their 30s I do believe. But. They have more life experience than in Hogwarts or uni.

--orange juice (i've been ready for you to come home for so long) by raggedypond: divorced parents of teddy with one bed at his graduation

-Honey If I'm Not by @brigid-faye divergent post war where remus left, jily lived, and wolfstar only reconnects years later by chance. (Also has a Sirius pov)

---used my best colours for your portrait by @littleoldrachel lie low at Lupin's with flashbacks exploring remus' life

-Looking for Moony by Writer_INFJ_2w1: meet and fall in love birthday party

-Flight of Destiny by @lucigoo lesbian wolfstar meet on plane (Luci also has several others where they're older and lots of beautiful fics

--Aging Gracelessly by orphan_account: texting fic

--the mayors of simpleton by fruity_individual divorced wolfstar get back together, raising teddy

-Second Generation by MsAlexWP single parents, getting back together. The sequel is so perfect too! It's a Nice Day for a Wolfstar Wedding

-the sea is a good place to think of the future by peachyybabe (second in series is mcd but this one is open ending)

-Of Memories and Milk Thievery by moonymoment raising teddy, get back together

--Birthday Blues by YouBlitheringIdiot @blitheringmcgonagall :Sirius is turning sixty and he is appalled...

--Give Quarter to Old Men - @krethes series

--dear your holiness by mollymarymarie

--The Postwar Chronicles by @sliebman10 post canon series

-Vigil Strange I Kept by whitmans_kiss explores effects of lycanthropy

--ten reasons (to go to michigan) by @greyeyedmonster-18 remus headed home, trying to move on from divorce

--Prettiest Star Verse by Raging_queer

-I didn’t sign up for this by Moonystoastandmarsbar divorced wolfstar

-Of Protein Powders and PTAs by @squintclover and @tracingpatternswrites rivals to lovers

-An Infinte Ocean by orphan_account raising teddy strangers to lovers

--The Road Not Taken by @mollymarymarie

-extra credit by MsAlexWP rivals to lovers

-Baby On Board by aqua_myosotis

-Of Memories, Bitter and Sweet by MsAlexWP memory loss

**luci's recs

-my love, take care of yourself by littleoldrachel

-How to romance a guy with (terrible) poetry by BayleyWinchester

-Teddy Plays Matchmaker by grow_as_we_go

-The Front Step Surprise by R33sesPieces

**Recs from others** (I haven't read all these yet but wanted to include)

--Just what the doctor ordered by WrappedUp (be aware there is age gap)

--The Lab by de_sire again an age gap

-Till We Have Arrived Home Again by prouvairing divergent post canon raising harry

-The Patchwork of Us by TracingPatterns

-The Things I Did by Lolo_row

-The Phoenix Agency by LupinsChocolatePraline

-The Fall by EuripidesTrousers

-Pages of You by wolfpants this is drarry main but apparently background wolfstar is really good

-Just Like Heaven by the_prettiest_w0lf_star: mechanic Sirius and librarian Remus

-soloorganaas

-impishtubist

***Self rec***

--Memories of You: mcd exploring memory loss

--Through the Years: Sirius thinks about the past and how handsome his husband is while holding their granddaughter.

--DN(R): Lie low at Lupin's era where they discuss decisions Remus made in the lost years.

**also- the wolfstar librarian is always a great resource make sure to give some likes on posts: 30yo and Up part 2 Bring Black Back Back from the Veil Lie Low at Lupin’s Post Azkaban Grimmauld Place

--Feel free to check my other rec lists, as well as the rest of my fics

[leclercsainzz]

MIDNIGHT RAIN

PAIRINGS: daniel ricciardo x singer!fem / horner!reader

TYPE: social media au

SUMMARY: in which she rewrites ‘midnight rain’ after their break up

part 1 - part 2

ynhorner

liked by carlossainz55, christianhorner and 583,891 others

ynhorner: “midnight rain” officially out everywhere!! ✨

view 7,938 comments

landonorris: already on repeat

therealgerihalliwell: so proud of you, beautiful!! ❤️

↳ ynhorner: thank you geri:) 😘

user: “he was sunshine, i was midnight rain” A BITCH IS FUCKEN CRYING RN, WTF

user: the way she compared danny to “sunshine” 😭

user: we officially know the reason they broke up now:(

↳ user: “he wanted a bride”

christianhorner: ❤️

user: “and the life i gave away” she’s definitely missing him

lewishamilton: you didn’t have to hit me like this 😔

↳ user: he’s so real for this!!!

user: “he wanted a bride” cannot stop crying 😭😭

maxverstappen1: spain without the “s”

↳ user: who taught him this!?!?? but he’s not wrong

danielricciardo

liked by schecoperez, charles_leclerc and 684,937 others

danielricciardo: returning back home 😊 @redbullracing

view 25,849 comments

user: SCREAMING OMG!!! welcome back, danny!!

christianhorner: glad to have you back!! ❤️

redbullracing: welcome back, honey badger 🤩

user: he’s returning!!! i hope my parents reconcile

↳ user: PRAYING!! 🙏🏼

user: he really is sunshine 😩

user: love that he kept his beautiful smile despite everything that happened

↳ user: pretty sure this is an old pic .. regardless of it, so am i!!

user: i lowkey want to know how christian felt with the whole yn-danny situation

user: i NEED a maxiel AND a yndaniel reunion ASAP!!!

user: yn better return home with danny bc i can’t take it anymore 😭 i miss my parents

user: i just saw the most gut-wrenching edit of yn & daniel to “right where you left me” on tiktok and i CANNOT stop crying for the love of god:((

↳ user: DROP THE LINK NOW!!!

ynhorner

liked by danielricciardo, estebanocon and 588,957 others

ynhorner: midnight & sunshine reunite ✨ (yes, we’re officially friends again, before anyone asks) @danielricciardo

view 8,839 comments

user: she knew everyone was bound to freak out once they saw this post which is why she wrote that caption

↳ user: i don’t blame her, tbh

user: THEY’RE HEALING, tHE WORLD IS HEALING, MY PARENTS ARE HEALING!!! 🥺❤️

user: freaking the fuck out over this!!!

danielricciardo: 😊

user: thE caption!! “midnight and sunshine reunite” i’m not crying, you are

↳ user: “midnight rain” really is THEIR song

user: she knows the power they hold over us

user: i’m glad they’re still in each others life, even as friends

user: when adele wrote, “even now when we’re already over, i can’t help myself from looking for you” she was talking about these two (yes, i know the song came out ages ago, now leave me alone .. thank you!)

↳ user: i saw so many edits of them with this verse and i cried every time

maxverstappen1: favs!! ❤️

↳ user: he’s a child of divorce like us

[archangeldyke-all]

masterlist 4

holy shit?!

ceo sev having a wet dream about you 💼

adhd reader

sevika helping black reader do her hair

bottom masc reader (sev breaks the headboard hehe)

more anal hcs hehe

sev helping reader with chest dysphoria

roach verse-- jinx brings home a stray

reader with vitiligo

fake dating eeek!!

pregnant reader and sev say goodbye to the old house 👶

sleep talker reader

sev forgets her tits

argument sex with cowboy sev 🤠

treating butch sev like a girl

insecure virgin reader first time with sev

princess sevika knight reader 👑

princess sevika trying to strip knight reader 👑

sevika getting chubbier

fixing her hair

the notes in sevika's lunches

sweetheart reader

club mom reader and sevika post-fight club hookup

ceo sev sees you in her shirt 💼

calling sev pretty boy

first time with trans sev

cuddle headcanonsss

sevika using your butt as a pillow hehe

adhd reader using sev as a bodydouble

getting spitroasted by ran and sevika ⚔

masturbating in plug sev's passenger seat 🍃

matching bracelets

introducing her to skincare

coming home with a puppy

little fucker's wedding 👶

u and ran fucking while sevika's on the phone ⚔

random hcs

bookworm reader

princess sev gets jealous over knight reader 👑

more random hcs

reader with postpartum depression 👶

arranged marriage between princess sev and princess reader 👑

reader who's scared of getting sick

sev gets turned on by infodumping reader

butch reader!!

some slayer hcs 🐕

the night after your royal arranged marriage 👑

trans sevika getting her first bj

reader who crochets

sev's fave petnames

sevika and little fucker go to the daddy daughter dance 👶

sevika tries online dating

sevika keeping people from touching ur pregnant belly 👶

comforting crying sevika

sevika has a dream where you cheat

little fucker being a little fucker 👶

sev helps drunk reader take off her makeup

sensitive butch reader

riding princess sevika on her throne 👑

reader with mobility aids

butch reader carrying sevika to bed

sev giving reader birthday head

touch starved reader

reader with a goofy laugh

bringing butch blue collar sevika her forgotten lunchbox

coming out as non-binary to sevika

ceo sev accidentally eats pot brownies 💼

little fucker on the little farm 💐

reader with acne

transfem flirty anxious reader

u and sev being whiskey aunts

how sev lights your cig

your parents regretting arranging you and sev's royal marriage 👑

fake hating each other

flirty anxious transfem reader and sev's first time

sev caring for u when you r sick

calling sev pretty girl

aftercare with ran and sev⚔

golden retriever masc x sev

reader cussing out silco for overworking sev

sev taking the strap hehe

silco meets little fucker 👶

great outdoors reader

sev making chubby reader understand how much she loves u

fall lover reader

sevika helping you gain weight

ride or die reader

pregnant sev!! 👶

how u and sev react to little fucker making out with her gf 👶

helping little fucker with her math homework👶

sev showing off shuffling tricks

divorced sev and reader dating again 👶

how the twins like to cuddle 👶

sevika loves to fish

pt reader and boxer sev pt. 3

divorced sev and reader moving in together :) 👶

bouncer sevika carrying reader home

fucking sevika in both holes

lactation kink with sevika breastfeeding

werecat sevika

[fiveredlights]

was listening to moon song earlier and thought about moon song verse and read all the snippets once again. man, i almost forgot the acute emotional damage i got first reading them and they are all freshly back!! it is sooo soo sooo good! the scene where daniel knocked on max's window and finally having the much needed conversation after ALL these years a divorce and a daughter, has hit me BAD and still is hitting me like a puncture at the rightest place!!

noticed the last post on moon song verse was almost five months ago and i missed them so badly!!! i must not be the only one!! will always be so excited to hear more about it!!

oh moon song. my beloved. i look at her with such reverence and hope that we can move past whatever weird production hell we've got going on together. we're like two puzzle pieces that can't quite fit together yet but i will push forward.

max and daniel really are just that special type of insane for them to go through a divorce, a child and then finally talk instead of being normal and good and talk before the wedding and before the child….

i predict that will be a while till moon song will ever get posted, so here's my favourite scene. should i save this? yeah. will i? no. for all my moon song enjoyers:

Max is washing the dishes in the bathroom sink when hands from behind him wrap around his stomach, and Daniel slots his head over his shoulders. Max turns his head to the right and gives him a kiss on the side of his head. 

“Morning,” Daniel whispers into his shoulder. Max hums back in greeting, washing the soap off his arms. “This is nice.”

“It would be nicer if you fixed the kitchen sink, Daniel.” 

Max turns around and feeds his fingers through Daniel’s, holding them between their chests. And there’s this feeling, this tingling that he feels through the tips of his fingers, almost like pins and needles—when you fall asleep in an awkward way and you wake up and you can’t feel your arms—but it’s not painful, and he doesn’t know how to explain in a way—

Oh. 

Love, he had said. Love, you can feel it in your fingertips. You feel it in everything you touch, he had told Max when they were younger. 

Love. 

“Daniel?” He looks up from their hands, and Max has a worried expression. He has his head tilted slightly, and Daniel can feel Max squeezing their fingers together and god, he knows it now—this thing that’s been slowly growing in him, spreading from his chest and blooming down to his fingers—love. 

And he thinks about all the times Max has slipped his fingers through his, how easy Daniel had let him. How calm he had felt when Max was holding him. Max has always been the brave one between them, always pushing his way through a world that maybe wasn’t ready for him. For them.

[philtstone]

24. Showing up injured at their friend/mentor’s house: for shawn? :)

[emerges from writing this fic bloody and beaten and on the verge of collapse] ill explore karen vicks character in an overly complicated post-episode missing scene fic or die trying! set immediately post "right turn or left for dead". i genuinely dont know if im happy with this but i also cant figure out how to fix it. actually, it would have probably been easier to write if i was willing to rewatch the episodes its based on. which i am not, because i am a sensitive little soul. so i winged it. i think there are like 10 different ideas that crop up and theyre all equally fascinating as character threads but i have no idea if i tied them together in an even remotely coherent way. also, WOULD she say that??? i had to call my brother twice to ask. this is what yall get for sending me actually interesting prompts, huh

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Henry’s voice said on the phone. “I’ll send Shawn over with them on his way out. He's going in your direction, anyway.”

In her short tenure as the junior detective to Henry Spencer’s lieutenant, Karen Vick observed two things:

First, that he was a far more clever strategist than most people gave him credit for. Despite the ongoing wreckage of his impending divorce and a kid who was slipping through his fingers as everyone looked on, Karen didn’t agree with the other junior detectives’ impression of him as a smash-the-door-down old school hard ass with thinning hair and a worst attitude. The man played four dimensional chess right out of a bonafide Star Trek episode. When he really wanted something done, Henry Spencer could bullshit and bluff and battle plan with the pros, and half the time you’d get too caught up in the blustering misdirect to realize his game was intricately thought out three steps in advance.

It was how they caught the Shorttown Killer, and also how they got that idiot Trembley at the mayor’s office to finally replace their coffee maker. Karen went home to her then-boyfriend, now-husband, and, right before bed, pulled out an old school workbook and took notes.

The second thing was that Henry Spencer loved his son. 

Not a lot has changed since then, Karen thinks, staring down the weirdness that she now faces through her open front door.

“… Oh — Mr. Spencer,” Karen says, because it’s rude not to greet your employees when they show up at your home outside of work hours, and are also your old friend-slash-colleague’s kid. “Hello. Thanks for — bringing these over.”

“Dad said it was urgent,” Shawn says.

Urgent isn’t quite how Karen would describe it, but hearing through the grapevine that your department might be facing an audit sometime in the next quarter does light a fire under the proverbial ass. Karen would rather bend a few rules and make sure the last year’s i’s and t’s are dotted and crossed right than leave her detectives vulnerable to the whims of a mayoral stooge. 

In general, Karen prides herself on caring about the people under her command just enough that it inspires genuine friendship and loyalty. The just is important. Care needs tempering – it’s important to pull back, press pause, keep certain lines uncrossed. It’s especially important if you want to be successful as a woman in an authority position where lives are often on the line. 

What she’s saying is that she tries to make it none of her business what her employees get up to in their spare time. She really genuinely does. She’s shut O’Hara down gently midway through the twelfth sweetly-frazzled attempt to overshare about her dating life (or her efforts to befriend her next-door neighbor, or the endearing personality quirks of her last cat – rest in peace, Triscuit, you will be missed –) enough times to be well-versed in the art of I Won’t Ask, You Won’t Tell, But You’ll Probably Know I Care Anyway.

An invaluable rapport to maintain. In any situation, Karen thinks, but especially when you’re a person who regularly hires and works alongside Shawn Spencer.

She’s not sure whether what she’s looking at right now makes her want to second guess or double down on her usual policy. 

“Special delivery,” Shawn adds, like everything is super normal.

Karen narrows her eyes. She glances behind them into the quiet residential street.

“Shawn,” she says.

“Yes, Chief?”

“You didn’t drive here, did you?”

“Ha,” he says, half rolling his eyes to accompany a weird aborted grin. “No. Even I don’t think riding a motorcycle with a concussion is a good idea. What if someone who wasn’t me got hurt? That’s — that would be no good, then you’d have to arrest me. Wouldn’t that be a huge bummer for the whole team, Chief? Gus would cry. And my dad wouldn’t let me take his truck.”

Karen stares at him. Shawn stares at the ground.

“I got a cab,” he says.

“And you are … taking another cab – home?”

Shawn looks quite suddenly like he’s going to be sick.

“Sure,” he says. 

Shawn looks terrible. Bruised face, bags under his eyes, and a weird frenetic energy twitching in his limbs that doesn’t pair well with his general air of exhaustion. He’s holding his shoulders stiffly and can barely meet her eye. His t-shirt and sweatpants are rumpled, like he slept in them, even though it’s too early in the evening for Henry to have woken him up to send him here, and when he thrusts the promised files out into the air toward her, abrupt and, admittedly, Shawn-like, he only just hides the awkward wince that immediately overtakes his left side.

The last couple days have been a bit of a whirlwind, so Karen can’t say she necessarily blames herself for not looking more closely. 

Even so.

Slowly, Karen reaches forward and divests him of the case files. They slip a little bit, because Karen can’t seem to stop peering shrewdly at Shawn’s face while she does it, and on instinct he reaches forward to stop the stack from toppling. 

It does help, but the autopilot he moves on makes it harder to mask what is to Karen’s eyes a very obvious flinch. 

“Alright,” is all he says. “Well, good to see you. Time to head back to the old hay stack.”

Like a needle in a haystack and time to hit the hay, Karen supplies needlessly in her own head. Aloud, she says, in many ways against her better judgment, 

“Mr. Spencer, are you okay?”

Shawn sways on the spot for a second, one fist clenched, mouth half open. For a strange moment, Karen gets the impression that he’s trying really hard not to say the wrong thing.

“... As rain,” he finally manages, then nods to himself like he achieved some great feat. “Okay. Well –”

“Did something happen to your shoulder?” 

“What? No!” Shawn’s eyes flutter closed and he shakes his head, “I’m – fine, Chief. It’s not – I mean, I’m – normal, fine. Fine in a normal way.”

“That’s not something an individual who’s fine in a normal way would say,” Karen says. 

“Uh, is it not! It is. I would know, because I am that individual. It’s – I was – there’s just mild – pfft … stab wound – or something, who would even …”

Is Shawn broken? is the unhelpful thought that pops into Karen’s head. She’s never heard an attempt to bullshit collapse so quickly into pathetic nothingness before – certainly not from Shawn.

Perhaps even more than his father, the kid’s a pro.

And then the rest of the sentence catches up with her.

“A mild stab wound?”

Oh boy. She watches Shawn’s eyes widen with the panic that proceeds an unquestionable blunder.

“Chief –” 

“In.”

“Chief, I really, really don’t think –”

“Inside my house. Now.”

He’s certainly uncoordinated enough that he doesn’t put up much of a fight. Karen herds him  through the door as firmly as possible and leads them in a beeline past Richard’s office toward the bathroom, ignoring the reedy stream of consciousness that spills out of Shawn’s mouth as they go.

“Oh, hey, woah, it’s been like forever since I was in here. Did you redecorate? I swear that lamp wasn’t there the last time we visited. It could be the tacos I had earlier, but I’m sensing a distinct neo-modern Chinese aesthetic going on here, Chief, which calls to mind the merits of cultural appreciation in suburban home decor – hey, is that your husband’s office? Can I meet him? Is he home? That man is a true enigma to us, Chief, and it’s leading me to believe that he must possess all the facial and personality qualities of the pop superstar Mr. Pitbull Worldwide –”

Richard is home, actually, and Karen needs to alert him to the fact that they have an unexpected house guest, so, ignoring Shawn completely, she calls out,

“Honey? Shawn Spencer’s here for a couple minutes about a work thing! I’ll go up to put Iris to bed in a second!” in the finely-honed There Are Many Layers Of Complicated To This secret married tone that Richard should probably be able to catch through the closed office door. 

“Alright,” floats out her husband’s pleasant voice. “Tell him hi from me.”

Perfect. There’s about a ninety-three percent chance he understood.

They make it to the bathroom, only stumbling slightly. Shawn says,

“-- or The Rock. Does your husband look like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson? I really think that would make so many things about the Chief Vick family make sense –”

Karen closes the bathroom door with a snap and crosses her arms.

“Sit,” she says, in a voice that even he knows brooks no argument.

Shawn does. He looks – well, beyond uncomfortable, and more than a little bit miserable, and probably closer to completely dissociating than either of them are prepared for. Karen wonders belatedly if he's gotten any sleep at all in the last forty-eight hours.

“I’m assuming you have not been to the hospital.”

He gives her a baleful look, like he really expected better of her. She only just stops herself from rolling her eyes in response. And there’s that huge goose egg on his forehead, too. What, exactly, he got up to in between Carlton’s wedding reception and oh-eight-hundred hours this morning Karen has no idea, but he looks like someone’s run him through the world’s most aggressive industrial tumble dry cycle and spat him mercilessly back out. 

Or maybe over with a truck.

Sending a silent prayer to the universe that Iris never hit puberty and remains a sweet-tempered six-year-old forever, Karen gets to business.

“Well, I had to at least ask. Shawn. Does it need stitches?” He mumbles the answer the first time, and then looks beyond startled when she grabs him under the chin so he’ll look her in the eye. “Listen. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. But you’re going to tell me the truth. Got it?”

Shawn grimaces so hard at her words it’s almost a flinch. 

“No,” he says finally, clearly enough that she hears him. Karen raises an eyebrow. “No, I don’t think it needs stitches,” he articulates, but doesn’t meet her eye.

“Hm. Alright. I have gauze and tape in the medicine cabinet. Can I … is it alright if I pull up the sleeve of your t-shirt?”

Released from her hold, he groans and presses his face into one palm. “Chief –”

“I don’t really know what you expected, coming here! It’s not like I’m any less of a hardass than your father.”

“Yeah, but I can bitch back at my dad,” Shawn says, sounding like he’s finally realizing the magnitude of his mistake. Karen smiles grimly.

“Tough. Now pull your shirt up while I get the first aid kit.”

While Shawn proceeds to wrestle awkwardly with his t-shirt in a muted shuffle against the toilet seat, Karen rummages efficiently through the cabinet and eyes him through the bathroom mirror. He seems oddly reluctant to expose himself. In fact, in a stark contrast to his usual insistence on making his presence and contributions as obtrusively obvious as possible, Shawn seems intent on shrinking into the aforementioned Asian-flavored floral wallpaper (which does need an update, unfortunately) with all the equanimity of an anxious chameleon. Karen feels her eyebrows crease. Taking the first aid kit in hand, she brings it over and deposits it into his arms, ignoring his small startle.

“How about you hold that,” Karen says. Shawn does, against his chest, like a pillow. She walks around him and surveys the damage, antiseptic gauze in hand.

He wasn’t lying about the severity, at least. It’s a shallow thing, already mostly congealed, and has only stained his shirt in a small smattering spot of crusty brown blood.

Karen swabs at it with the alcohol using light careful fingers.

“Ow, ow ow ah –”

“Don’t be such a baby. It’s hardly a life-threatening injury.”

“Super insightful, Chief,” Shawn snaps, as genuinely sarcastic as he’s probably ever been with her, “never thought of that myself. Totally the reason why I just had to go to the hospital.”

He doesn’t pull away, but she can feel the tension radiating through his back. She blinks, one eyebrow crawling up her forehead. 

Alright then. So that’s how it’s going to be. 

“I’m assuming your father doesn’t know about this,” she says.

Shawn grunts, noncommittal. Huh. Maybe he does know, then, and has just been disallowed from doing anything about it right now.

She tosses the first used antiseptic wipe into the trash.

Goddamn four dimensional chess.

She supposes she’s never been bad at the game. She may as well work her way backwards through the moves: Guster, the most obvious node in Shawn’s turn-to-in-a-crisis-system, would never voluntarily abandon his friend in a time of need, so Karen assumes that whatever this is has either already included his support or not been made known to Gus at all yet. Henry’s likely exhausted his own usefulness in the situation, and Detective O’Hara is …

Karen has to work very hard for her hands not to pause in a way that gives away her hard-earned mental sleuthing. A bad feeling wholly unrelated to her ill-advised hangover of the day before begins to bloom at the back of her gut.

“You have really small hands, Chief.”

Shawn’s voice is notably more subdued than before.

“Do I?” 

“They’re like … little kangaroo hands. Like the mom kangaroo from Whinnie the Pooh.”

“Didn’t you know?” Karen says, not unkindly. “They’re given out at the hospital when all first-time moms leave with their baby.”

He lets out a tired little laugh, more boyish than he probably means it to be, and in spite of herself Karen feels her heart clench. She isn’t blind. In all her last seven years as the leader of their chaotic little precinct, she has never seen Juliet O’Hara look as ill as she did yesterday morning. The usually sweet-faced young woman had all the pallor of a Victorian ghost, and stood so far away from Shawn in any given room that to an unassuming observer he might have had the plague.

There are only a handful of things, Karen thinks, that could have invited that particular evolution in their dynamic. She rips the surgical tape from its canister a little bit more harshly than is strictly necessary and fights the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

“So,” she says conversationally, laying the tape down in neat, gentle little strips, trying not to pinch the wound too tightly. “Any fun plans for the evening?”

Shawn sniffs. She can see him gripping his hands together over his knee from where she stands above him.

“Um, yeah, uh –” he clears his throat, “you know me, Chief. We’re working our way through a Robert Guillame marathon, which means some good old fashioned Benson, running commentary on the quality of that child acting, naturally.”

“Naturally.” 

“Then Gus and I were gonna hit up the new, the new chili cheese joint up by Hermosa, you know – they’re doing sliders –”

“Chili cheese sliders?” Karen hums, contemplative.

“Buy ‘em by the pound,” Shawn agrees. “Then I was thinking of getting a tattoo, maybe a belly button piercing, I’ve been really – really needing a change – would you let Iris get one, if she asked?”

“A tattoo?” Karen clarifies, cutting off the next piece of tape. The skin around the cut is warm to her touch but Shawn’s arms have goosepimpled. The hair at the back of his head sticks up unstyled, like he slept weirdly and couldn’t be bothered to fix it come morning.

“Of a marmoset. That’s what I’m thinking. With distinctly effeminate vibes.”

“Well, Dick hates marmosets. So I’d probably encourage her toward something else. Perhaps a sea lion.”

“Like Shabby.” The nervous note has bled into his legs again, and his earlier subdued tone has gone back to sounding strained. “Yeah, that’ll – that could be it.”

“All in one night, huh?” Karen says.

“I –” Shawn doesn’t even hiss when she presses down with a cotton gauze to cover the last of the thickened blood. His legs are properly jittering again. “I was – yeah, y-you know me, Chief, total night owl.”

“Shawn?”

“Yeah?”

“What about going home?”

Silence. Shawn doesn’t answer for a moment long and pregnant enough that Karen wonders if her question will be ignored entirely. 

Then,

“Chief,” he says finally, in an awful, tiny little voice, “I really, really fucked up.”

Finally, her hands do falter in their ministrations; as emotionally exuberant as Shawn often is, she doesn’t think she’s ever actually heard him close to tears. For a horrible moment she wonders if Shawn Spencer will suddenly start crying atop her toilet seat for reasons neither of them are capable of discussing honestly. Then she wonders if her horror makes her a terrible boss.

Boss – mother – person.

Oh, dear.

She sets down the surgical tape and lays a ginger palm over the newly-bandaged gouge in his shoulder. It’ll probably scar, but not at all badly. She doesn’t like to think about the far more obvious one just below, puckering in a violent yet unassuming divot. Another narrow miss for Henry’s boy. 

At this point there are so many of them to count, Karen has to question the statistical likelihood of the whole thing. Becoming a mathematical anomaly is, Karen can attest with confidence, not exactly the future the Lieutenant Spencer she knew dreamed of for his increasingly unmanageable teenager. 

Doing what he loved, on the other hand – absolutely. Being with a person he loved, even more so. Karen grits her teeth at the irritating web she’s spent the last six years constructing around herself and wonders if this evening right here is some kind of cosmic karma for leaving Iris in the care of nannies for the first three years of her life.

That sounds like the kind of thing those horrible parenting magazines and Karen’s mother-in-law would claim, anyway.

“Shawn,” she says slowly, because she has to at least knock this possibility off the list before risking her career in an attempt to mediate her detectives’ love lives, “did you … you weren’t – unfaithful, were you?”

“What?!” 

Shawn yanks his shoulder away and whirls around to face her with such a look of horrified betrayal on his face that it’s almost comical. 

“No!” 

Thank fucking God, Karen thinks. Aloud, she says,

“Well, I’m sorry, I had to at least ask!”

“No! No! What the hell, Chief!”

“Oh would you be quiet! I’m gathering my evidence here!”

“How could I – I would never – you’d even think that I could –”

“I know! Shawn, for God’s sake –” He’s scrambled to his feet in the cramped bathroom space, glaring, and has probably messed up all that surgical tape in the process. The half open first aid kit and his crumpled shirt press lopsided against his front and her garbage can is now full of oxidizing bits of cotton. Karen officially gives in to the urge to press her palms against her forehead. “I had to ask!” she repeats finally. “You and I both know you’re not gonna give me much else to work with, and you sounded so – so sad!” 

Shawn barks out a hysterical little laugh. Karen almost growls in frustration. 

“I am not going to risk all the very hard-earned rules I have in place without knowing for sure that my instincts aren’t wrong. Is that so hard to appreciate?”

Does it count as sound police work when the framework for your investigation is an unacknowledged lie? Karen doesn’t really know. Probably there’s another math metaphor to be made in there (you screwed your proof from the very beginning, maybe, Richard the professor would definitely have thoughts), or just a straight up joke. How to solve a case that’s cold before it ever has the chance to go live; a cover-up if she ever saw one. Unlikely that O’Hara will peep a word, and things will be a true mess for a few weeks, if she can’t make an educated guess about it. And no one will be explaining anything to Carlton, either …

Right before their goddamn audit, Karen thinks, aggrieved. She wonders if Henry considered this in his calculus. Send Shawn over, have her deal with him. Offer a huge unspoken you’re gonna be walking into a shitstorm tomorrow canary for her perennially chaotic mess of a coal mine. 

She can’t help but feel begrudgingly grateful, but that doesn’t mean she and he won’t be having words about this later.   

“Jesus, Karen,” Shawn mutters, pressing his face back into his free hand. Karen shakes her head and squares her shoulders.

“Well then! Back to the issue. You fucked up.”

“You know what? I can’t talk about this with you.”

“Oh, Mr. Spencer, I assure you I am more than well aware.”

Shawn blinks at her between his fingers, looking genuinely confused for the first time since he showed up at her door. 

Karen does not bother to clear up his confusion; it’s better this way, anyhow.

“Will you be sleeping at Gus’s place or your father’s?” she asks, crossing her arms.

“I’m – I don’t –” Shawn doesn’t meet her eye. The earlier thread of anxiety is back. “I wasn’t …”

So, neither. 

“Put your shirt back on,” she says. “We’re relocating to the living room.”

“Chief –”

“That was an order, Mr. Spencer.”

The living room is as quiet and mundane as it was an hour ago. It’s past Iris’s bedtime – she’ll have to go up, and soon at that. Karen seats her guest, retrieves a mug and a bag of chamomile from the kitchen, and removes the fluffy throw blanket from the basket behind the couch on her way back in. He’s deflated completely by the time the tea and blanket are set in front of him. Small and exhausted. Caught. It’s a horrible way to think about it. But she can’t avoid the hundred yard stare – Karen has seen it one too many times in people only just realizing they’re about to go away for life.

“Shawn,” she says, firm as she can make it. “Drink the tea. You’re dehydrated.”

“I’m … what?”

“Your lips are dry. You shouldn’t be dehydrated with a concussion.”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Karen suddenly wonders if he’s going to get up and leave. She has experience with these things – she knows a runner when she sees one.

“I might as well have,” Shawn finally whispers.

She doesn’t catch it the first time. “What?”

“I – I might as well ha – Chief, I …” Deep shuddering breaths. He’s finally shutting down, she realizes. She can’t send him back out like this; Henry would give her the stink eye for a month.

Goddamn Spencers and their goddamn irritating overcomplicated lives.

Karen pushes the tea directly into his hands and tilts her chin so she can meet Shawn’s eye. He’s still lucid enough that she doesn’t think he’ll start hyperventilating, but now that the outrage and adrenaline has worn off, the symptoms of shock are pretty hard to miss. “Shawn,” she says again, and wills for him to understand.

“What if she – what if I never –” He can’t get the full sentence out. He looks at her, eyes wide and terrified.

Life sentence, Karen thinks again. The messy stack of files Shawn brought over sits almost unimportantly on the coffee table between them and a memory comes to her, unbidden, of words penned carefully in the corner of a modified police report that she pulled the minute the door closed on the McCallum case seven years ago. 

Date: May 4th, 1995. Reporting Officer, Spencer, Lt. H. Perpetrator a caucasian male, brown hair, five foot nine, insists on wearing those stupid earrings just to spite me. What the hell do you want me to write here, Chief? Spent two hours in the fucking principal’s office convincing them not to expel him one month off from graduation. All that effort, and I still booked the kid. It’s gonna follow him for life, and it’s gonna be me that did it to him. For life. You think he’ll ever forgive me? He’s the greatest thing in my pathetic little world and he keeps breaking my heart, and I can’t even properly accept that it’s my fault. 

How’s that for a fucking crime.

She needs to go put her daughter to bed. It’s the thought that keeps running through her head, oddly enough, like a strange antidote to the impotent anger and heartbreak and frustration she’s feeling for the people under her care.

With all the notes she took in that little workbook, she still let herself become complicit in the painstaking, convoluted resolution of Henry’s mistakes without accounting for all the variables.  

Richard’s footsteps sound muffled in the next room; he’s made his way upstairs in Karen’s absence. She needs to go. She wants to hear the soft and sleepy love you Mama that with her unpredictable hours and regular long nights isn’t nearly routine enough.

“Shawn,” she says evenly. “Do you love her?”

It’s hard to reconcile the smarmy kid who tried to barter with her for twelve hundred a day with the devastated young man sitting on the couch in front of her.

“Chief …” he starts, barely above a whisper.

“Good. Then she’ll see that. Detective O’Hara is a smart and observant woman. What she chooses to do next is her decision, but … you might be – well, comforted by the fact that she’ll know that – truth.”

Shawn stares at her. The tea steams in front of him, cooling in increments. She takes a deep breath and gets to her feet, patting his uninjured shoulder brusquely. 

“I have to go check on Iris. When I come back down, I can drive you to the Psych office.”

Iris is fast asleep when she gets there. A library book lays open face down over her stomach, and her soft brown hair fans out against the pillow, silhouetted by the soft glow of the unicorn nightlight in the wall above her. Karen turns off the bedside lamp, tucks her daughter in, and kisses her forehead. Just before she leaves, she hears it: murmured, half-awake.

“Love you, Mama.”

“I love you too, baby.”

Karen goes back to her living room, car keys in hand. She’s planned her next move in the driver’s seat enough times throughout her career that it shouldn’t be too hard. 

[uglylilclown]

Hiiii I've been having awful brainrot about John Doe Noel lately and I wanted to ask. How is he a John Doe? If that makes sense. Like nobody knew Penny because she was new and no family came yada yada... How would that work for him? I'm curious!

It’s been so long since I’ve drawn them :’33 💔💔

And thank u!! I think I’ve done a similar post but I will happily repost it :DD

In the John Doe verse Noel’s mom was newly divorced and moved into Uranium with Noel and had him sign up for the choir (like the day before the fair) :33

So he went to that school for like a day but all of the transfer info from his previous school had yet to be processed so teeeechnically by the time the roller coaster accident happened he wasn’t considered a student and therefore could not be identified :33

I am keeping the fact that his mom had to like immediately go out of town for a few days/weeks and thus couldn’t come forward about how he was missing 💔💔

In this AU Penny was a student for a while but she was a little too strange for the student body so people avoided her like the plague,, and even in the choir no one really wanted to talk to her and she was stuck being backing vocals for Ocean 😔😔

Sorry if the explanation’s a little all over the place ive been having a bit of brain fog for the last few days 💀💀

But yeah :33

Edit: I FORGOT TO REMIND YALL JUST IN CASE,, the physical appearances I draw r based on some actors who have played the characters but r not necessarily intended to be them,, hence why Noel is Mexican 😋😋

[v-arbellanaris]

PLEASE share about the Cullen Cult Arc

sighs. this is my second time writing this post ;~; literally why does the autosave option exist if tumblr doesnt actually bother to autosave anything, i dont fucking get it.

this is going to be much briefer than the original post i wrote because im still REELING over how tumblr just ate the entire fucking post. its fucking gone. and idk if i have the energy or mental capacity rn to rewrite the whole thing. basically, this arc - which is the arc i developed for him in vee verse - is the arc i think cullen should've had in dai.

firstly, i'm not retconning anything he said or did in dao or da2. this is because those things serve a narrative purpose. cullen is a good templar - that's the entire crux of the problem. he exists in these two games as a narrative tool; he represents the views of the chantry. as such, anything you do with his character arc cannot be divorced from the reality of the mage/templar conflicts, and the glaring issues of the chantry and must, actually, address and involve those things, because cullen is a product of his surroundings. i'm not saying this to minimise or give him excuses for anything he's said or done, but that is made true for him by his very positioning in the narrative as being the chantry's voice. for most of my playthroughs, which lean pro-mage, cullen is an antagonistic force - he has to say and do horrific things, and it would be stupid for me to retcon the horrible things he did.

secondly, my main issue comes from his writing in dai - probably to no one's surprise. i am not unopposed to having a redemption arc for him in dai - this is villain-fucking the blog, sorry not sorry - but the problem is that he does not have one. to have a redemption arc, the following two things needs to happen:

the realisation/acknowledgement/knowledge/whatever that he caused harm to people with his actions/inactions

addressing the False Belief that he has embraced that has previously justified his harmful actions/inactions in order to accept the Truth (this is just basic character narrative construction).

and dai fails to do both of these because the writing team in inquisition is physically incapable of admitting the chantry is wrong and has done wrong and will continue to do wrong. they are physically incapable of looking at fucked up power dynamics and clear cases of oppression and not going "but what if the oppressed people. wanted to be oppressed. NEEDED to be oppressed, even."

which leaves his character arc - whether you want to consider it redemptive or not - confusing. he's trying to shake a lyrium addiction? sure, okay. but why is he addicted to lyrium? why is being addicted to regular ol' lyrium bad? it's not blue lyrium that killed meredith, it's not blue lyrium that corypheus and samson are using.

you get confusing things like cullen's entire character arc being centered around lyrium addiction... but no one seems to give a shit if the inquisitor takes lyrium and becomes a templar, except cullen. you get confusing things like cullen's entire character arc being centered around recovering from lyrium addiction and the templar route in dai and you get to the scene where all the templars get their lyrium draughts. the ceremony and chanting and celebration around getting the lyrium, when barris takes his draught, which is frankly revolting. but it highlights the inconsistency - lyrium, this scene tells us, is good. because the templars are good, and they use it for good. yet cullen's entire arc is about overcoming his lyrium addiction, but don't worry!!!! templars are still good and lyrium is still good. its fucking INCOHERENT!!!!!!

he is addicted to lyrium because that is how the chantry maintains absolute control over its templars. it is a mind-altering substance that causes paranoia, which the chantry specifically takes advantage of and feeds with their all mages are inherently dangerous rhetoric, which is a false rhetoric, as i've pointed out before. but instead of acknowledging any of that, dai's writing goes "lyrium is Bad because [mumble mumble] and its So Important that he doesn't take it so that [mumble mumble]".

because the story is physically incapable of uttering anything even vaguely critical of the chantry.

so, this covers my main issue with his writing in dai. i would ideally try to fix it - without retconning anything he did in dao or in da2. this is what the cullen cult recovery arc is referring to.

i'm not going to go into it in too much detail but the templar order - inclusive of the seekers - fits a lot of the parameters of a cult. specifically, the BITE model, but also this checklist, and a whole bunch of other parameters i found when researching into cults for this specific reason. (which. makes sense. seeing how the orlesian chantry is was also technically a religious cult that becomes the main religion of the lands by actively slaughtering all the other sects)

but what's particularly interesting about it specifically is that, in-world, no one else seems to think it's a cult. for all of cullen's views, he is not the extreme end in da2 - alrik is. meredith is. what's particularly disturbing to me about cullen's point of view is that because he's a product of his environment, because he's a narrative tool representing the chantry's views, cullen's opinions and actions are actually a normality test. people in thedas don't find cullen's views repulsive because most average joes in thedas agree with him. i think it's easy to forget cullen isn't the outlier in-universe - we are.

but, canonically speaking, this is what happens: cullen, like most good antagonists getting a redemption set up, misses his chance to Embrace Change at the end of da2. he sides with meredith too late for it to matter or make a difference - mages (who you learn on the templar route, he's not exactly eager to kill) who he's supposed to protect are already dead. but what happens in kirkwall shakes him to his core and he looks to leave the order entirely - a good step.

the problem is that he leaves the order to join the inquisition. the inquisition, which is headed by the left and right hands of the divine. the right hand of the divine is a seeker herself. the inquisition is spearheaded and justified by the divine, who he has been trained for most his adult life to be subservient to. the divine who formed the inquisition to replace the templar order and hired him to essentially train and recreate the order.

worse, still. no one thinks he did anything wrong. kinloch was not his fault, it was the fault of greagoir and the older templars who were simply not vigilant enough, meredith told him. how he acted to keep order in the circle and the city after the viscount was executed is admirable, cassandra tells him. he was only following orders, leliana admits grudgingly, he stood up for what was right when meredith went too far. no one thinks he did anything wrong, because he is a good templar. because all the atrocities he committed were not committed against people - they were committed against mages, who are not people, not like you and me.

cullen hops from one cult to the next. the inquisition is the exact same thing he's always done and known, just repackaged - quite literally, considering the inquisition's symbol. but canonically, he thinks it's something different. he wants it to be different.

it's not, though.

so, the thought process behind my thoughts for him boils down to this: how does he get the language to describe exactly why this is wrong? how does he get the language to describe why it matters, why it's important, that he hurt real people? how does he get past the Lie that he believes - that he has to be a good templar, to stop anything like kinloch from happening again, since kinloch happened because they weren't vigilant enough, because they were too sympathetic to mages?

his arc shouldn't have just been about overcoming lyrium addiction. his arc should have been a story about recovering from being part of a hate group, a story about recovering from part of a cult.

there's several ways to go about it, i think. and if you want to specifically know how i'm going to do it, you guys should encourage me to write vee verse 😌