#when like. there are real people out there who have been deeply traumatized by something

[naivety]

i really don't think any of you have ever actually interacted with a fully grown adult human person who genuinely believes satanic ritual abuse happened to them when they were a child.

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[starcurtain]

Female Guidance in Aventurine's Life

One thing I haven't seen discussed in much depth yet, but which I think is especially interesting, is the consistency of female guidance in Aventurine's life: Every single person who we have seen on screen offering Aventurine assistance or making a positive difference in his life is female (with one exception, yes, I'll get there).

Under the read more cause it's longggg:

Before even diving into his family, let's just get the obvious out of the way: Aventurine is, at least supposedly, blessed by a goddess. The very origin of his good fortune--be it actual blessing or curse--comes from the literal "mother goddess" who watches over him. This is one of the only instances in Star Rail where a god character is specifically given a gender, and Gaiathra is not ever ambiguous. She is the classic female fertility goddess with all the trappings of other famous triple goddess figures of the real world. Aventurine's personal belief in the goddess may be shaky, but he nevertheless continues to treasure his people's faith. Thus, at the core, we can say Aventurine is a character who is guarded by the most quintessential mother figure possible.

Now, with the most obvious out of the way:

We know that Aventurine's father died before Aventurine was even born, and therefore he would not have any memories of his father, leaving him to be raised by his mother and sister.

Both women clearly made an enormous and lasting impression on Aventurine; they haunt every single one of his memories of Sigonia and are the key elements of the family Aventurine longs to return to. While he flirts with the concept of death as a way to see his family members again, it was also his mother and sister who instilled in him any sense of self-worth and meaning to his existence, the only things keeping him from giving up on living. His mother believed him to be blessed; his sister insisted to his face that not even the only remaining remnant of their mother had any value in comparison to his life.

It is for his sister that Aventurine first begins expressing a self-sacrificial nature, and from his sister that this self-sacrifice is reinforced when she uses herself as a shield to help him escape massacre at the hands of the Katicans.

It is also from his sister that Aventurine learns many of the deeply meaningful actions he holds onto to the present day, despite having been so far removed from his own culture.

Conversely, every one of Aventurine's early negative experiences on screen appear to have been driven (at least primarily) by men.

Although the Katican tribe of course would have both men and women, the tribal societies on Sigonia appear to be on the fairly traditional side, with Aventurine's mother staying at the camp with her child while his father was the one to go out and hunt for offerings for Gaiathra. This is also supported by Aventurine asking Jade to take him to her "chief" later on. Therefore, it is likely (although of course not guaranteed) that a majority of the Katicans' army was male, and that Aventurine's early experiences with outsiders consisted almost entirely of indiscriminate pillaging and massacre at the hands of what the Avgin viewed as savage, invading warriors. In separate instances, Aventurine was traumatized by these warrior figures three times--first with the loss of his father, then his mother, and then finally his sister.

And even their hope, supposed to come in the form of the "men in black" from the IPC, completely abandoned them, leaving Aventurine once again betrayed by masculine figures that were supposed to be there to protect him. Led by Oswaldo Schneider, another cruel male authority figure, the Marketing Department of the IPC permitted the wholesale slaughter of Aventurine's people--something which we know Aventurine is now aware of.

Then, of course, the next piece of Aventurine's backstory we're given is his male slave master. I don't really need to say anything about this, do I? This man violated Aventurine's human dignity and bodily autonomy, and forced Aventurine's hand in a life or death battle for which Aventurine still punishes himself mentally, even years in the future.

In part to escape the difficulty of his situation and rise to a position where he would have enough resources to--he thought--help his people, Aventurine joins up with the IPC. But when he attempts to make contact with a powerful man in the organization, Diamond, he is instead met by a woman, Jade, who against Aventurine's own expectations determines that she will raise Aventurine up (or use him as a tool, depending on how you currently choose to interpret Jade's motivations), granting him wealth and status beyond his imagination.

(And this line in particular is interesting, because you can take it one of two ways: 1) Aventurine comes from a patriarchal planet that traditionally put men into positions of power [thereby making his own slavery an emasculating act, aligning him further with disenfranchised women]; thus, he is making the assumption that to get anywhere in this organization, he will need to work with a man; or 2) He actually was counting on Jade taking his bet and helping him right from the beginning, because Aventurine perceives women as inherently more likely to protect and aid him than men would be.)

In the end, Jade does exactly as she claims she will, launching Aventurine into a position of power while also closing golden handcuffs around his wrists. She positions herself not only as his supervisor, but as his advocate and ally. She entrusts him with her Cornerstone, a sign of significant faith in his abilities. She even seems to be keenly aware of his bias towards the mother figure, referring to him as "child" in their conversations.

Whether this is genuine or a manipulation tactic can certainly be debated (and I'm not inclined to think at this point that Jade is a genuinely good role model or selflessly supportive person in Aventurine's life), but whatever the case, women are the only people Aventurine even remotely considers to be "in his corner."

We see this even earlier, in Aventurine's call to Topaz. Like with the example of his mother and sister, Aventurine trusts in Topaz's ability implicitly, and considers her above anyone else when it comes to completing the mission in Penacony.

Although of course we don't know if Aventurine has any other friends or allies among the Strategic Investment Department, it seems very likely that Topaz, yet another woman, is the one he is closest with. At the very least, she is the only IPC character (so far) that Aventurine has a complimentary voice line for, one that shows his respect for her talent:

Over and over again, the story aligns Aventurine with female figures in positions of authority, and demonstrates that he is comfortable (although maybe not too comfortable, in the case of Jade) with relying on them and trusting their judgment, just as he did with his mother and sister.

And this pretty much goes off the charts in Penacony, where Aventurine has more involvement with the female cast than virtually any other non-female character (even the Trailblazer!). We set the pattern off right away, with Aventurine immediately being placed into a negotiation situation with Himeko, respecting her role as the Express's leader and working to get himself aligned with the Express by acquiescing to her request for support.

Then there's the fact that Aventurine is the one who finds Robin's body, an event which, although he didn't let it show too much, was almost certainly traumatic for him, given the violent death of his own sister.

Next, twice in Penacony's story, we see Aventurine seek out Sparkle for information. He may not personally like her and her comments may be both racist and dehumanizing, but Aventurine does rely on her--being the only character explicitly seeking her aid, which no one else in Penacony seems to want.

In 2.0...

And in 2.1.

Now, say it with me, guys: Aventurine built an entire portion of his grand plan around the idea that if he looked pathetic enough, a female character would absolutely come and help him. And sure enough, the women come through for him, always! Sparkle gives him the exact last clue he needs to confirm his belief that he could use "Death" to reach the true Penacony, sealing the deal for the rest of his plan.

His plan which also hinged significantly on Black Swan's involvement too, another woman that he views as, if not trustworthy, then at least intelligent and hyper-competent.

Contrast all this, of course, with the treatment Aventurine receives at the hands of Sunday, the lone opposing male character he faces in Penacony.

Sparkle implies that Sunday would humiliate Aventurine in an unmistakably sexual and degrading way, and Sunday himself professes this same desire to see Aventurine humiliated.

Then we're "treated" to the moment in which Sunday uses the Harmony's (or perhaps actually the Order's?) power against Aventurine, in a scene which is supposed to reflect an interrogation but is also, very clearly, another nonconsensual violation of Aventurine's bodily autonomy and dignity by a man. While ostensibly seeking confirmation of the Cornerstone ruse, Sunday instead subjects Aventurine to unnecessary questions about his past on Sigonia, which recall and force Aventurine to re-endure memories of his trauma.

Even if this is what Aventurine prepared himself for and planned to have happen, the pain he experiences is very real, and he suffers both the physical and emotional consequences of Sunday's assault all the way up to his "Death" and possibly even beyond.

(Also, Sunday fans please don't get too up in arms with me for this; I also like Sunday! It's okay for characters to be morally grey!)

I think there's one other interesting example I would bring up here too, and that's Aventurine's conscious decision to weaponize his own masculinity against the Trailblazer. Through the 2.0 and 2.1 Trailblaze missions, Aventurine deliberately acts in an off-putting manner to the Astral Express crew, particularly the Trailblazer, in order to build up to the 2.1 climax where the Trailblazer is supposed to view him as an unrepentant villain and attack him without hesitation.

In order to achieve this uncomfortable, villainous effect, what does Aventurine do? Exactly what other men have done to him.

This is especially apparent if you're playing Stelle because of the ingrained societal taboo of a man entering a woman's personal space without consent, but even as Caelus, it is very clear that Aventurine is leveraging behaviors typically used to show dominance: In a complete 180 to all Aventurine's other body language in the game (normally quite withdrawn, frequently in defensive postures with his arms crossed or hand behind his back, almost always standing several feet away from other people), Aventurine violates the Trailblazer's personal bubble, looming over them (Caelus was sitting in this cutscene, lol), forcing eye contact, and commanding the space while informing them that they will have no choice.

For someone who was hunted, enslaved, had his movements restricted with chains, and due to his own slight stature has very likely been towered over by others who were intentionally asserting their power over him all his life, it is clear that Aventurine associates dominant, typically more masculine-coded physically-imposing behaviors with discomfort and even villainy.

Any girl who has ever had a man loom over her like this will realize very quickly: Aventurine wanted to make himself scary so he made himself act more like a bad man.

(Yes of course I know "not all men." I'm not saying every man behaves in this domineering way or that women cannot be domineering too, obviously, just that Aventurine had a very specific image in mind when constructing a "villainous persona," and the physically controlling tactics most typically used by aggressive men toward women was his immediate go-to.)

But where does that leave Dr. Ratio, the one male character actually on Aventurine's side?

Frankly, I don't want to derail my post about how intensely Hoyo chose to hammer on the message of "Women will protect you" in Aventurine's story with a discussion about a mlm ship, but the take-away here is going to lead in that direction anyway--so yes, Dr. Ratio is the exception.

What is interesting is that he does not come across as an exception at first, and in fact initially appears as another male character being rude and dismissive to Aventurine. Like, there are still people out there calling Ratio an unrepentant racist for this one.

Of course, it's later clarified that this is an act--likely even these insults were scripted specifically to give Sunday's spying ears the "insight" he needed to exploit Aventurine during the interrogation.

But even though it is an act, Aventurine still has noticeable trouble putting his faith in Ratio. He does genuinely doubt him a few times, despite knowing that they are working together to fool the Family.

Even his voice line about Ratio confirms that he doesn't think Ratio particularly cares for him; rather, he thinks Ratio simply tolerates him because he's slightly less unintelligent than those around them.

Ultimately, the entire act with Ratio ends up being a mirror of the real scenarios Aventurine has been experiencing with men his whole life (at least as far as we are shown his life). Men abandon him to fend for himself (unwillingly, like his father, or willingly, like Diamond leaving Aventurine to deal with Penacony alone on the inside). Ratio keeps leaving Aventurine completely alone. Men attempt to humiliate him and violate his boundaries (like Sunday and his slave master). Ratio insults Aventurine's appearance and intelligence repeatedly. Men betray him (like Oswaldo Schneider and his men leaving the Avgin to die). Ratio "betrays" him.

I'm not saying when Aventurine devised the plan for their act, he consciously drew up a list of all the ways men had hurt him in the past and had Ratio re-enact them one by one, but like... that's what happened, whether or not Aventurine intended it.

And okay, the shrinking scene in Dewlight Pavilion was just for fun and probably only slightly fetishy, the devs promise; yes, it was supposed to be a joke! ...But it's also not a mistake that this is yet another instance of a male character in a glaringly metaphorical position of power over Aventurine. Aventurine's tiny in this scene! He's completely vulnerable! He's in a dangerous position and the male character could very much hurt him in this moment.

But Ratio doesn't. (In fact, his line here is supposed to be sarcastic, very ha ha--but also, what is Ratio really saying? "I won't do anything to you without your express consent." What a good guy.)

Virtually everything negative that we see in 2.1 is Ratio doing these things as an act at Aventurine's own request. He doesn't actually disdain Aventurine; his own voiceline about Aventurine reinforces that he sees Aventurine as talented and intelligent.

Whatever you think he was apologizing for in their early scene, he's the only person we're ever shown in-game apologizing to Aventurine at all.

He worked hard to "betray" Aventurine but only as he was instructed to do, and immediately checks in on Aventurine's well-being afterward, even urging him to give up the plan if it becomes too much to handle.

And then, of course, there's the note: "Do stay alive. I wish you the best of luck."

After this point, it cannot be denied that Ratio is unequivocally on Aventurine's side, wants to help him, and is not doing so out of any sense of self-gain but largely because he is a good person who simply cares about Aventurine's fate. By the end of 2.1, it can no longer be doubted that Ratio is the exception to the "gender rule" of Aventurine's life, which--the story shows us again and again--was that guidance, protection, and care for Aventurine come from women, while men repeatedly represent dismissal, betrayal, or pain.

Ratio is, at least as far as Aventurine's story shows us, the proof that men can be good, that things are not as black and white in Aventurine's life as they might appear, and that--if you do choose to ship him with or see Aventurine as attracted to men--his attraction could be validated (and potentially reciprocated) by a male figure who would not bring additional harm to Aventurine's life. Aventurine makes the final decision to live after seeing Ratio's note--the exception to the rule ultimately proves to be the last piece needed to keep him alive.

But I promised I wasn't going to derail my own post about w o m e n, so let me get to the final point, and the one I really wanted to talk about: Although Ratio gets virtually all the credit for "saving" Aventurine in the fandom, Aventurine was actually saved by, you guessed it, another woman.

Not going to lie, the reason I started this post was specifically because I wanted to talk about how Acheron and Aventurine's dynamic was completely unexpected but actually fits flawlessly with the theme of feminine guidance in Aventurine's story.

Despite the fact that Aventurine made Acheron's life much harder and actively used her as a chip in his grand gamble, she doesn't blame or chastise him for those actions. Although she expresses some incredulity that Aventurine is actually that lucky, she then turns around and congratulations him for his ingenuity, immediately supporting him despite the fact that they don't even truly know each other.

Then it gets even more interesting. Acheron, who frequently hits her companions with deep and sometimes very emotionally fraught questions, asks Aventurine: "Have you never wavered?"

We as players know for a fact that Aventurine is constantly wavering, constantly doubting himself, his luck, and whether he'll even live--or even wants to live--to see tomorrow. But we also know that Aventurine is not forthcoming about those truths, refusing to express them to anyone, even himself. The only way we hear those dark truths is through his "future" self (who by the way, is once again another male figure cutting Aventurine down--of course it's himself but it's also, from the player's perspective, once again reinforcing the message that he isn't going to find safety or kindness in an adult male presence). Aventurine almost constantly deflects and diverts when his emotions or struggles are brought to the fore (unless he's divulging them for the specific purpose of allowing someone else to weaponize them). "I'm fine," he says, like a lying liar who lies.

But he doesn't lie to Acheron.

He chooses to be completely candid with her, to lance open the deepest wound of his life--that he can win and win and win and still have lost everything. The glitz and the glamour has all been stripped away here, at the end of everything, and Aventurine finally feels safe enough to admit that he fears he has absolutely nothing in his life worth living for.

And then, we get this direct parallel: Aventurine looks to Acheron, the woman now before him, for guidance, for explanation, exactly as he looked to his sister in the past.

He needs help, he needs answers, and he is continually seeking that help from the female figures in his life, whose support and kindness echo the lost care of his mother and sister.

"Go where you should be," Acheron tells Aventurine, guiding him across the river of death just as his sister insisted that he flee through the rain toward life.

Look guys, Acheron's even the one who reminds Aventurine to look at Ratio's note in the first place because apparently being an emanator of Nihility gives you x-ray vision, but my girl just gets no credit at all for being Aventurine's real savior, come on now!! Yes, Ratio's note was the final reminder Aventurine needed that someone would be waiting for him on the other side, but Aventurine would never have even gotten to the point of being willing to read that note if Acheron hadn't stepped in and provided him an answer to his question.

She feeds him back his own answer: "Why does life slumber? To rehearse the death for which we are not currently prepared." It is Acheron who reminds Aventurine that giving into the Nihility is pointless, and that rather than simply embracing a meaningless death, it is up to humanity itself to find and make meaning by living. It's this, not Ratio's note, that Aventurine gives as his reason for choosing to go on when asked by his own younger self. It's Acheron's words that finally give Aventurine an answer--why do we live just to die? Because there are people we can still make proud. Because when we go into death, we should do so with our heads held high, having achieved our own sense of purpose in this life.

Ratio gave Aventurine a promise: Someone is waiting for you to come back.

But Acheron gave Aventurine a reason: If life is inherently meaningless, doesn't that just mean you are free to give it meaning yourself?

She saved him, as women have been saving him all his life.

Anyway, this has already been horrendously long, but really what I wanted to say is that I think it is absolutely fascinating how consistent Aventurine's writing is when it comes to portraying where his support comes from and who he seeks guidance from. (Psst, just in case you still haven't figured it out, it's women!) In virtually every instance we are shown, we see the message reinforced that women are Aventurine's greatest allies and role models, while male figures are continually positioned to intentionally or unintentionally let him down and cause him distress.

"But women playing the supporting role to a male character is nothing new, Star, why are you so excited by this?"

Because the role women are playing in Aventurine's life is not the subservient supporter and emotional crutch role that female characters all too often play to male counterparts. None of the women in Penacony or Aventurine's past were there to do the emotional labor for him, to be a trophy or prize, or to cater to his needs. They don't exist solely to help him fulfill his character motivations; they aren't following him around waiting for his next request as their only role in the plot.

Instead, with Aventurine's story, we almost have an inversion of gender roles, where the male character eschews the stereotypical "men are leaders, fighters, and stoic heroes" archetype. Instead, no matter how hard he tries to hide it and keep a stiff upper lip, it is clear from 2.0-2.1's story that Aventurine is a deeply insecure, lonely, and explicitly traumatized survivor of genocide, slavery, and exploitation. Unlike most male characters, who are very rarely portrayed as genuine victims--because come on, shouldn't men be strong enough to fight back? Shouldn't men be able to shrug it off when they are hurt, emotionally or physically? (Of course I'm rolling my eyes here!)--Aventurine is belittled, humiliated, emasculated, and victimized on-screen, roles almost exclusively reserved for women, for whom surviving victimization in fiction is seen as noble.

Meanwhile, the women in Aventurine's life take on the roles traditionally given to male characters. They're both emotionally and physically his protectors. Aventurine's sister gave her life to guard his safety; Acheron ensured he could safely pass beyond the river of Nihility into the Primordial Dreamscape. They give him the tools necessary to succeed where he could not succeed on his own. His plan could never have gotten off the ground without Topaz and Jade entrusting their Cornerstones to him. The knowledge and capabilities of the women around him--not their "feminine charms"--are what allow them to help keep Aventurine on the right path even though he does waver. Even women who disrespect him, like Sparkle, still play a positive role in his life, able to provide him insight gained with their own intellect and talents.

When he has no one to rely on and doesn't know what to do, Aventurine is able to continually turn to the women around him, asking for and receiving not servitude or fawning, but their genuine wisdom and guidance.

tl;dr: If nobody else has him, Aventurine knows this random woman he met two minutes ago on the street will have him, because the women in his life literally never let him down.

(It's just so, so good, and ultimately, it should be very clear why Aventurine's story is as popular with women as it is! A+, Hoyo!)

[furiousgoldfish]

Traumatized people are often advised to 'keep it under control' and 'find a way to contain it', and I always felt it was a fault of mine, if I freak out, or panic, or have an anxiety attack, or can't stop shaking or shivering. Now that I no longer have extreme bouts of panic, I'm starting to understand how much fear, panic and pain I contain within myself every day.

If I'm in a place that makes me anxious, I stay still, I do nothing. If I'm panicking, I will modify my behavior to the point where nobody around me will be able to see and realize that I'm panicking, I will seem happy, and pleasing. If I'm experiencing intense rage or frustration, I will shut down and won't respond or interact with anyone until I figure out what is a reasonable and logical thing to do. I am containing everything, constantly. And it's only a part of what I've been containing and keeping under control, I used to contain terror every day. I am used to circumstances where I had to act normal under threat of violence, threat to my life, every single day. I had to walk around like nothing is wrong while I was dissociating so heavily I couldn't tell if the world was even real. I was blaming myself if there was a momentary lapse of control, if the panic I was containing for months leaked out of me a little. The thought of not being able to keep it down terrified me.

I blamed myself for not being able to keep mountains of fear, grief, anger and panic under a guise, which a human being is not supposed to do. Our reactions of fear, panic and rage are there in order to point out that something is deeply wrong, that we're unsafe, that our circumstances need to change and we need safety, now. Keeping that shit contained and controlled is trying to bypass human instincts, fighting against human nature, and I did that, we all did that, because it was the only thing we were ever told to do with it. We'd be punished for anything else, threatened for any other kind of response that isn't containing and keeping it down.

And now when keeping it down is no longer humanely possible, because we did it for so long we wore our entire spirits down, now we get told we need to do more of it? More of pretense that things are fine, more of guilt and shame for not managing to be a closed human container of panic and pain? We were never supposed to keep that much in. Keeping all that inside and learning to control myself taught me to be what I am right now, keeping any inconvenient emotion down only so I could break down in private, or try to keep it down indefinitely, because I don't know any other way to live anymore. Fighting against my own instincts and fawning at others is just who I am now, and it's not who I'm supposed to be. Panic is supposed to be loud and alarming, pain is supposed to be heard, people are supposed to react with offering safety and change of circumstances that led to this. Not telling the scared, pained and panicked people to 'keep it down'.

[evilkitten3]

#It being a phenomenon that people ship two characters that would have an entirely fucked up relationship#And you would EXPECT that that's the appeal and therefore what the content is like and then it's like oh nope. Fluff#How did we get here

EXACTLY

like this happens so many times in so many different fandoms. if you wanna fantasize about your ship talking about laundry in a coffee shop then. you do you i guess, but that seems incredibly boring to me. why not have them do something more interesting, like aggravated assault

ngl my biggest issue with tobi/izu as a ship or as a friendship or even as a foemance is that there's no reality where it's not a thousand times funnier if they just straight-up hate each other's guts

[sepublic]

Amity obviously forgives Luz for not mentioning she helped Belos find the Collector for a lot of rational reasons. But among them, let’s consider that…

She knows firsthand what it’s like to unfairly blame yourself for doing something an abusive adult pushed you into doing, that had a traumatic impact on loved one(s); And so you hide this secret believing others will feel the same way, especially from your (future) girlfriend that you don’t want thinking any lesser of you, because you don’t want to sabotage this new, wonderful thing that has happened to you. But instead of admitting it of your own volition, someone else does it for you, and you expect to be hated but instead you’re loved and reach resolution.

That’s the beauty of S2 Lumity onwards; That after Luz put in so much compassion and patience towards Amity and her unpleasant side, Amity is repaying that same favor. It’s her side of the relationship now with someone who’s trying to love but has also been deeply hurt and become difficult, but is trying to accept they can love themselves too.

It’s heartbreaking for Amity to see in real time what happened to her, happen to Luz after Luz rescued Amity from that; But maybe a lot of that framework was already there too, and so Amity is understanding her girlfriend better too, in so many ways; What it was like to handle Amity herself at first, the trauma Luz hides so well, etc. Amity’s appreciating her girlfriend even more than she already did, knowing Luz had her own baggage all along but kept trying. Luz isn’t the perfect fix-everything girlfriend either, she needs help too.

I wish we could’ve seen Amity and Camila bond over their concern for Luz’s spiraling state and have a Mother/Daughter-in-law moment, particularly in For the Future (with Amity being preoccupied beforehand). But at the same time, Willow had a similar conflict and needed that focus more. It definitely made more sense to have Camila and Willow together, plus Luz needed someone to look after her while Camila received private advice; The girlfriends needed a proper conversation with each other in S3 where Amity could comfort Luz after her self-isolation in the previous episode, which we see here.

And Luz is allowed to have what she gives out. What goes around comes around. All the people Luz has helped are coming back to help her too, and when she asks why, it’s because they remember what she’s forgotten; Not just the help, but that they themselves know firsthand. And that was Luz’s wish, was it not? To be understood.

[pedrospatch]

a safe haven l six

Jackson! Joel Miller x Female Reader

series masterlist

summary: Joel opens up to you about a very traumatic loss; he makes a confession about his feelings towards you; you make a confession of your own and it leads to something more.

warnings/tags: 18+ ONLY, MINORS DNI. fluff, infidelity, Joel and reader are having a full blown affair at this point, angst, talks of child loss (Sarah), lots of feelings come to the surface, two idiots realize they are in love. SMUT. oral sex (m receiving), size mention bc i will always be convinced our man is packing) unprotected p in v sex (wrap it up pls), reader discovers she likes praise, creampie.

word count: 8.4k

August 2024

The next two and a half weeks that had passed by had done so without major incident, but things had taken a somewhat complicated turn.

You and Joel still manage to see one another a handful of times even with the exhausting amount of hours he’s been putting into his patrol duties, though it isn’t nearly as often as either of you wanted or would have preferred. But there was no other choice.

After numerous sightings of a group of potential raiders earlier on in the month, Tommy had no choice but to assign every last competent, able bodied patrol person, including himself, to work double shifts to ensure the safety and security of Jackson. He and Joel had come across the remnants of a campsite just about fifteen miles south of the settlement and they worried the group was hiding out, planning a violent, ambush attack on the community when it was least expected. Tommy had done his absolute best to keep the word from spreading throughout the commune to avoid causing a panic, but he found himself having to fess up when people went up to him and all but furiously demanded to know the truth—the real reason behind why their loved ones were now being asked to be on the other side of wall twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Joel, who you’d come to learn is one of the sharpest and strongest shooters out of everybody in Jackson besides his younger brother, reluctantly took on the role of lead patrolman. He had been assigned an absurd amount of double shifts to work, including the overnight routes, making it almost impossible for you to see each other. You’d understood he had no choice but to comply, but still—that didn’t make the situation any easier to deal with. Both of you tried to make the very best of what little time you managed to get together, but it hadn’t been nearly enough. As if not being able to see Joel wasn’t agonizing enough for you, the fact that he was out on the other side of the wall scared the hell out of you. The only way to keep yourself from losing your goddamn mind was to distract yourself.

You did everything that you could to keep your mind off Joel being out there. Burying yourself deeply into your work helped for the most part.

Besides that, Joel had asked you, as a favor to him, to keep a watchful eye on Ellie in light of his absence. You’d spend most of the day with her in the stables, you would have lunch with her in the mess hall along with Dina, and in the evening, you would go home and make dinner early enough to fix an extra plate of food for her so she had a nutritious homemade meal to enjoy instead of two decades old canned ravioli. You would take it over to her place and drop it off before Luke came home from the clinic. Ellie waited until it was late in the evening and he was asleep to return the plate back to you, and the two of you would take a lengthy, late night stroll through the town, keeping each other company for a while before heading off to bed. She hadn’t seemed to be all too concerned about Joel, but then again, Ellie had known better than you did that he could take care of himself out there just fine. If anything, you spending so much time with her had been more for your benefit than hers, and you started to suspect that just like Joel had asked you to keep an eye on Ellie, he had also asked her to keep an eye on you too. After all, you had made it abundantly clear to him that you were nervous about him being out on patrol while there was a possible threat looming in the shadows.

By the time the middle of August came around, no additional traces of the group had been found—they seemed to have vanished into thin air, causing a wave of relief to sweep through the town. Tommy and Maria finally decided to ease up and end the double shift assignments, allowing every single patrolman and woman to return to their normally scheduled work rotations. Joel went back to his usual early morning and afternoon patrol hours, which meant that the both of you could resume your clandestine meetings out behind the barn underneath the stars.

“I missed you,” you say, sighing out contentedly as you lean back against him.

You and Joel are sitting out on the large, vacant patch of field behind the barn, his soft, green flannel blanket acting as a barrier between your bodies and the itchiness of the grass the animals would graze on during the day. You’re nestled in between his long legs, your back against his warm chest as the two of you share the delicious, ripe peach he’d brought along with him as a surprise for you.

“Mm, probably not as much as I was missin’ you, sweet girl,” Joel replies with a hum before taking a bite of the fruit. Noticing there’s only a couple bites of it left, he reaches his arm around and holds it out for you, his bulging bicep straining against the sleeve of his faded black t-shirt. “Here, darlin’. Want you to go on and have the rest.”

“These will be out of season in a couple of months.” Giving a sad little pout to nobody in particular, you sigh again and sink your teeth into the peach. Through a small mouthful, you realize, “Who knows when we’ll ever get peaches around here again.”

Joel’s lips meet the spot on your neck right behind your ear and you feel him grin. “S’alright with me. I’ve got my sweet, perfect little peach right here. And I’ve got her all year round.”

You playfully elbow him in his chest. After polishing off the rest of the peach, you lick off the pit and toss it out into the distance.

“Didn’t think you’d be the type to litter,” he teases.

“It’s biodegradable,” you retort with a tiny laugh as you leaned your head back against his shoulder and gaze up, admiring the stars that sprinkle the velvet night skies. “Or at least, I think it is. Come to think of it, I never paid much attention in life science when I was in FEDRA school. It was my least favorite subject.”

You gather your hair in your hand, bringing it over your shoulder to keep it out of Joel’s face. 

“Mm,” he whispers, licking his lips as his eyes fall to the delicate flesh of your exposed neck. He ghosts his mouth over your pulse point and his warm breath fans against your cool skin, prompting your eyes to flutter closed. “Just temptin’ me on purpose now, ain’t you, baby?”

“I would never do such a thing,” you object in an innocent tone, and he immediately clocks the smirk behind it. A comfortable silence falls over the both of you and while you’d normally welcome the peaceful, tranquil moment with him, tonight it feels impossible. You had gone so long without Joel over the last couple of weeks—at least, it had certainly felt long—and you realize one of things you’d missed most about him was the sound of his voice. “Ask me a question, Joel.”

“What kinda question can I ask, darlin’?”

Feeling brave, you offer, “You can ask me anything you want. No limits.”

Humming curiously to himself, he tries to think of something he hasn’t asked you before. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Really, Joel?” You snort, trying to mask your laughter as he rests his chin on your shoulder, the scruff of his beard tickling your skin as he presses his cheek against yours. “I just told you that you can ask me anything you want and that’s your question? What’s my favorite color?”

“Yeah,” he answers, simply. “I wanna know what it is.”

He turns his head, lifting it off your shoulder to brush a gentle kiss to your temple. Joel could not, for the life of him, even remember the last time he’d shared this kind of physical tenderness with anybody. Forehead kisses, holding your hand, all sorts of little tokens of affection he didn’t think he could still be capable of giving to someone came to him so naturally with you. You had brought out an entirely different side of him, one that had been buried beneath his rough exterior for well over two decades, and the part that Joel still can’t quite wrap his own head around is that you’d done it with such ease. He’d go as far as to say that you had done it without even trying.

“So?” Joel prompts you. “What is it?”

“It’s brown,” you answer. 

“Brown? Why brown?”

“Because. It’s earthy, it’s warm—and your eyes are brown,” you state, grinning to yourself as you feel his loud laugh rumble through his chest and against your back. “What about you? I mean that’s if Joel Miller even has a favorite color,” you giggle teasingly, placing a hand on one of his denim clad legs. You then add, “Actually, I’m kind of curious now. Do you have a favorite color, Joel?”

Joel hesitates, momentarily holding onto his answer.

“I do. It’s purple,” he finally responds after a brief bout of silence. “Purple’s my favorite color.”

“Purple,” you repeat after him, unable to mask the surprise in your tone. “Really?”

Joel chuckles. “What? That weird or somethin’?”

“Uh, sort of. For one, you just don’t strike me as the kind of guy who would have a favorite color in the first place—and even if you’d told me you did, I would have never in a million years guessed that it was purple,” you admit, sheepishly. You trace a small circle around his knee with your finger and curiously ask him, “Why is purple your favorite color?”

“‘Cause. That’s my daughter’s favorite color.”

You scoff playfully. “Come on, Joel. Ellie’s favorite color sure as hell isn’t purple. Her favorite color is green. But red’s a close second.”

When he speaks again, his voice is so quiet you almost don’t hear him despite being in such close proximity. 

“I ain’t talkin’ about Ellie.”

At first, it doesn’t quite register, but after a moment of processing, the pieces click together in your mind. Joel has another daughter.

Your smile vanishes and you slowly turn around between his legs to face him. Looking at him with wide, shocked eyes, you utter, “What?”

“Her name was Sarah,” he confesses, softly. 

Was. 

Your throat dries at his use of past tense.

Because you know exactly what that means. 

Opening your mouth to speak, words fail you and you close it. You suddenly remember the way he would tap dance around certain details of his first life in Texas. Whenever he would speak about his life before the outbreak, he would be cautious, careful to watch himself and his words. You’d known Joel had been keeping something from you, something he wasn’t ready to disclose to you for one reason or another—but never would you have guessed that him having a daughter would be the secret he had been hiding.

By now, you’ve turned your body around and you kneel in front of him, sitting back onto your heels. Not wanting to push him too hard or too fast, you clasp your hands together in your lap and wait silently—patiently—for him to continue when he’s ready.

“Sarah’s favorite color was purple. She’d wear it all the time. Her backpack, her school supplies, they all had to be purple or she wouldn’t use them. When she was nine years old, she begged me to paint the walls of her bedroom purple. One day, I took her to Home Depot after school to look at all the different shades.” He laughs, musing, “Didn’t know there could be so goddamn many of them. Anyhow, I told her I’d think ‘bout it. I went back to the store the next day while she was at school, bought a couple cans of the lavender shade I knew she’d like the best and by the time she got home, I had it all painted for her,” he explains, a sadness glazing over the fondness of the memory. “She loved purple. It was the color of the t-shirt she was wearin’ the last time we were together on the night of the outbreak.”

Your heart sinks. “Joel, you don’t have to tell me—”

“S’alright, peach. I wanna tell you ‘bout her,” Joel assures you, reaching out for your hand and taking it in his own. “I trust you, baby. Trust you more than enough to tell you ‘bout Sarah.”

Nodding, you lace his fingers together with your own. 

“I was never married,” he starts to say, knowing whether or not he’d also had a wife before the world ended would be a question on your mind—that’s if it wasn’t already. “I was never with Sarah’s mom. I met her in high school and we’d been friends up through senior year of college. We started to date then, but after a year, we realized we weren’t a good fit together. We broke up and a couple months later, we found out she was pregnant with Sarah. Her mom and me, well we both made an agreement to co-parent her as best as we could. Just a few months shy of our daughter’s first birthday, she realized she couldn’t handle raisin’ a child at our age. I tried real hard to convince her to stick around and keep tryin’ but I couldn’t get her to stay. She bailed out on me, but the worst part of it was that she bailed out on Sarah.”

He stops for a moment and you give his hand a gentle, but firm, encouraging squeeze.

“As if bein’ a father to a baby girl didn’t scare the shit of me, being a single father made it all feel so much scarier, y’know? I was young, in my early twenties. I was always workin’ so damn much, tryin’ to build my construction business with Tommy. Now I had this tiny little person to take care of, and I honestly didn’t know how the fuck I was gonna do it.” Joel pauses, his sixth sense detecting that your knees have started hurting from the position you’re in. He closes his legs together and pulls you to sit on his lap. “It wasn’t easy, and I probably made a lot more mistakes than I’d like to admit. But somehow, I made it work and it turned out alright. Sarah was my best friend in the whole entire world. Hell, I loved her more than fuckin’ life itself. She could be a handful, but she was perfect in every single way. She was my sweet little butterfly, my ray of sunshine on even the darkest of days.”

Swallowing harshly, you ask, “What happened to her, Joel?”

Joel sighs, resting a hand on your bare thigh. His fingers skim the scalloped hem of your floral shorts. “It was the first night of the outbreak. We were tryin’ to get out of Austin. Me, Sarah, and Tommy. We didn’t know where the hell we were gonna go or what we were gonna do, but we just needed to get far away from the city. We got separated at one point when our pickup truck got into an awful wreck. I had Sarah in my arms ‘cause she couldn’t walk. She’d broken her ankle in the crash. Tommy told me to get her to the river where she’d be safer, said he’d find his way over there to meet us.”

Your heart begins to pound. Part of you almost doesn’t want to hear how his story is going to end—because in a way, you already know how it’s going to end. But if Joel is telling you about Sarah, it’s for a reason. He’s opening up to you, the way you’ve opened up to him. He’s sharing his heartbreaking loss because he trusts you—and Joel Miller doesn’t trust anyone that’s not his family.

Draping an arm around his shoulders, your fingers toy with the curls at the nape of his neck as you anxiously wait for him to recount the event that follows next, the event that will surely shatter your heart into pieces.

“The streets were crawlin’ with infected. One caught us in its sights and chased after us. Tried to dodge it through a buildin’ but it followed us, runnin’ us out into a field just a mile from the river. I didn’t think we were gonna make it—then, a soldier came outta nowhere and shot it dead. It felt like some kinda fuckin’ miracle. I thought we were lucky. I thought we were gonna get some help.” His voice grows hoarse, thickening with emotions he’s not too sure he can hold back this time. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was given the order by his command to kill us both, even though we weren’t sick. I tried tellin’ him over and over we weren’t infected, but it didn’t matter. He shot at us. He grazed me in my side, but Sarah—he got her. Got her multiple times. I was foolish enough to think it hadn’t been fatal. I tried gettin’ her up, begged Tommy to help me—but it was useless. Sarah died in my arms. Took her very last breath in some field outside of Austin.”

“God,” you whisper shakily, a sharp, painful ache shooting through your chest at the thought of him cradling his daughter’s lifeless body in his arms, her purple shirt soaked in crimson. “Joel, I don’t—I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry.” Willing yourself to keep it together for his sake, you hold the back of his neck in your hand, fingers coaxing him to look up and meet your gaze.

“After that, I just didn’t see any point in carryin’ on anymore. I’d lost the most important thing in the fuckin’ world to me. I couldn’t see in the darkness now that my little ray of sunshine was gone. So, a couple nights later, I picked up my gun and tried to end my own life,” he confesses. Even though it’s been over twenty years, traces of shame still linger behind. “Put the barrel of a pistol to my temple. Told myself it was what I wanted to do and I pulled the trigger.”

Without thinking, you reach towards the scar on his right temple with your opposite hand, the one you’d noticed for the first time before he had kissed you in Ranger’s stall. You lightly brush your fingertips over the jagged, raised patch of skin. You’d wanted to ask him about it on several different occasions, but never had the courage to actually do it. Now that you know he’d gotten it from his own hand, it just makes the entire thing all that much more heart wrenching.

“M’sure you’ve guessed it by now, but I missed. I flinched and I missed. For twenty fuckin’ years, all I could do was wish I hadn’t missed. Spent a long time hatin’ myself for missin’ what should’ve been the easiest goddamn shot of my entire life. Then, Ellie came along.” Joel moves his hand, gingerly taking your chin between his thumb and index finger. “And not long after her, I met you, sweet girl. The two of you came at me outta nowhere.” He can’t help but chuckle, remembering his first encounter with Ellie, the way she had flown at him with her switchblade clutched in hand only to end up thrown against the wall. “You both came outta left fuckin’ field and brought out sides of me I thought had been dead and buried for years now. You and her, you mean more to me than I can fuckin’ explain. You’re the most important things in the world to me now.”

Your breath catches in the back of your throat at his declaration. It’s not like you didn’t know Joel cared about you. Of course you know that. But the extent to which he did had been something of a mystery, at least up until this very moment.

“I didn’t know I could feel this way ‘bout anyone again,” Joel admits. He slides his arm around you, pulling you closer to him. “Openin’ up my heart to Ellie, that was one thing. But openin’ it up to you? That’s been somethin’ else, peach. I don’t think you even realize the hold you’ve got over me and my heart. What really fuckin’ gets me is that you don’t even gotta try. All you gotta do is look at me with those eyes and give me that pretty smile of yours, and I’m fuckin’ done for. You’ve got me wrapped all the way around your little finger and then back again, baby. Y’need to know that I’d do just ‘bout fuckin’ anythin’ for you. You understand that?”

You stare at him like a deer caught in headlights.

“Joel,” you stammer his name, your nerve endings feeling like they’ve been lit on fire. “You really need to stop talking like that.”

“Why’s that?”

You don’t even think—you just blurt the words out before you can stop them.

“Because I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The tables turn and it’s now Joel who is at a complete loss for words.

Embarrassed by your own admission, you begin to ramble nervously. “Look, I know it’s ridiculous. We haven’t known each other long, but I can’t help it. And maybe it’s for the best if you know where I stand and how I feel. You still have time to back out of this—”

Still holding your chin, Joel carefully brings your face toward his, silencing you by slotting his lips to yours. He moves to cup the side of your face in his palm, forgetting about any kind of softness as he greedily licks into your mouth. He’s kissed you plenty of times before and you thought you knew all of his kisses well enough by now, but you’d been wrong. This one is different from all the rest. His lips move against yours in a possessive manner, but not the kind of possessive you’re used with Luke. No, with Joel, it isn’t a possessive stemming from control and abuse, rather, it’s out of pure need, want, and desire. Even as his mouth devours yours, there’s still a sweet, loving tenderness to it.

“Joel,” you whimper against him. “I—”

You falter, unable to say those three words. There’s something holding you back—maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s knowing that once you say them, you can’t take them back. Not that you would. But it’s a big step, and you’re not quite ready to say it, even if it is how you feel.

And he feels the same.

He deepens the embrace.

I love you.

Joel might not be ready to say it either, but he hopes the way he’s holding you and swelling your lips with his puts your mind at ease and reassures you that you’re not the only one who’s falling.

You shift yourself in his lap, moving to straddle him, your legs on either side of his thighs as your mouths remain fused to one another. He reaches and grabs for every single part of you that he can, running his hands all over you from your shoulders down to your hips, dragging lower until they’re unabashedly cupping the delicious curves of your ass. You whimper in his mouth again and the moment your lips part, his tongue takes advantage, darting inside to start the heated, unhinged dance with your own.

You clutch at his shoulders, your fingers curling around tight around fistfuls of his t-shirt in an attempt, and a very desperate one at that, to keep yourself planted on the ground. You hold on trying to keep yourself tethered to planet earth, but with the way his searing hot mouth moves with yours in perfect unison, it’s impossible. You’re free falling without a safety net, and you don’t even care. 

Seating yourself completely on his lap, you feel the bulge of his cock straining against the zipper of his jeans and the wetness pools between your thighs.

Letting go of his shirt, you reach around him and bury your fingers in his curls, lightly tipping his head back as your tongue explores his mouth like it’s the first time all over again. Joel tastes like the sweet fruit you’d shared, a strange mix when combined with the mint from his toothpaste. But there’s something else he tastes like and you’ve tasted it several times before, however even after all this time, you still can’t figure out what it could be. It tastes like Joel. That’s the only way you can think of to describe it. It just tastes like Joel and it’s addicting and you want it on your lips for the rest of your life.

After a minute, you and Joel finally force yourselves apart, your lungs and his begging for oxygen. 

“Joel,” you choke his name between heavy pants for air.

“Baby.” He’s about as breathless as you are, possibly even more. “Baby, please. I’ve gotta have you,” he pleads, hands now splayed on the small of your back. “Please. I fuckin’ need you. Or else m’gonna lose my goddamn fuckin’ mind.”

“Barn,” you rasp out, releasing your grip on his hair. 

Confused, Joel’s eyebrows knit together. “Barn?”

“Barn,” you repeat as you climb off of him.

You’re unsteady—incredibly unsteady. Knees wobbling, legs trembling and feeling like they’re seconds away from giving out underneath you. But you hold a hand out to Joel, exhaling a tiny, labored grunt as you help him up off the ground. Grabbing his blanket, you give it a shake before taking his hand in yours and leading him around to the front of the barn. Dropping his hand, you use both of yours to slide one of the double doors open an inch or two and take a peek inside to make sure the coast is clear. You then slide the door open a bit further, just wide enough for you and Joel to slip inside. 

“Wait a minute,” he chuckles as he watches you slide the door closed. “How’d y’know it would be unlocked?”

“I didn’t know it would be unlocked. I was just hoping we’d get lucky,” you admit, beckoning him for him to follow you. “Come on.”

Through various cracks and gaps and open windows, enough moonlight filters into the barn, shining a decent amount of light into the structure—enough so that it’s not pitch black and you two are left stumbling around in complete darkness.

Joel glances around. The last time he’d been inside the barn was back in June for the summer party. He remembered it having been cleaned and cleared out for the event and now, two months later, it’s packed to the rafters with countless bales of hay. In retrospect, he shouldn’t have been surprised. But as he walks, piles of loose dried grass and herbs crunch underneath his boots and he remarks, “There’s fuckin’ hay everywhere, darlin’.”

“Um, yeah. What else do you keep in a barn?” you jeer lightly, earning yourself a small scoff from him. “Hey, at least they don’t keep sheep and other livestock in here, Joel. Besides, beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

Joel snorts, masking his laughter at the thought of walking into a barn full of animals instead of an absurd amount of hay. “Yeah, guess that’s fair enough,” he concedes. “Might kill the mood if that were the case.”

You lead him over towards one of the far corners of the barn, your eyes falling to a large, almost bed sized pile of loose hay. Draping the blanket over it, you stand upright and then freeze, your body flooding with nerves once you realize what’s inevitably about to happen between you and Joel.

You hadn’t done anything with him since the night he’d pleasured you out on his front porch. Of course you wanted more, so much more, but that doesn’t make you any less nervous. You’re so much younger, hardly have any experience—you’ve only ever been with one man, and even then, it hardly counts. It’s been such a long time since you’d found sex something you wanted, something you enjoyed. Whenever Luke touches you, it makes your skin crawl, but when Joel Miller touches you?

It sets you ablaze, leaves you needing more of it. Of him.

Part of you wonders if your touch makes him feel the same. What if it doesn’t?

His arms wrap around your waist from behind and you exhale the breath you’d been holding shakily.

“What’s the matter, darlin’?” Joel murmurs softly into your hair, sensing your pensiveness. 

“I’m just really nervous,” you blurt out.

“S’okay,” he says, quietly. “M’kinda nervous too.”

You’re slightly taken aback. “Really? What are you nervous about?”

Joel rests his chin on your shoulder. “We’ve both crossed a lot of lines already, peach. But this one? S’gonna be the one we can’t come back from,” he tells you. “Might be what seals the deal between us, y’know?”

Slowly, you turn around to face him. “Yeah, I know,” you respond, peeking up at him through your eyelashes. “And I know I should care, but I don’t. It’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“S’wrong,” he agrees with a tight nod. “But I don’t care either, sweet girl.”

Before you can utter another word about it, Joel crashes his mouth onto yours. He snakes one of his arms around you and lifts the other, cupping the back of your neck as he ravages you with his lips and tongue, kissing you with such urgency, such desperation that it melts you into a whimpering mess in his arms. Your mind is hopelessly lost in a thick, cloudy haze—all you can focus on is breathing him into your lungs like he’s the air you need to stay alive. His hands fall down to the hem of your white camisole and his mouth abandons yours to pull it over your head. He discards it, tossing it over his shoulder somewhere behind him. He then pushes your shorts and underwear down your legs and you kick them off along with your shoes. You’re now standing before him completely naked.

Desperate to feel his skin against yours, you take the hem of his t-shirt and clumsily tug it over his head, eliciting a laugh from him. You throw it somewhere over his shoulder to join yours and your hands eagerly meet his warm, bare chest for the first time. Biting down on your bottom lip, your trembling fingertips brush over several bumps and rough, raised patches of skin that you know have to be his scars. He has so many, and all you want to do is kiss each and every single one of them, but Joel has other ideas. He pulls you into his arms, flush against his chest, and he holds you tightly.

More often than not, Joel feels as if you’re not real—worries that you’re just a perfect, flawless figment of his own imagination. He doesn’t know whether or not you’ve caught onto what he’s been doing, but he steals moments like these whenever he can, moments where he stands there and takes you into his arms and holds you without saying a word.

It’s his own way of reminding himself that not only are you real, but you’re real and you’re his. Joel doesn’t care about the fucking ring on your finger. He doesn’t care that you’re promised to another man. He doesn’t care that he can only hold you in secret, that he can’t walk next you down the streets of Jackson in broad daylight and hold your hand while doing so. He doesn’t get to share a roof or a bed with you and he doesn’t get to join you for dinner at the table every night—maybe this isn’t how he preferred things to be, but he just doesn’t care. 

It doesn’t matter to him.

Nothing matters to him except for one thing.

Your heart belongs to him. It bleeds with his name.

You’re his. You’re all fucking his, and only his, in all the ways that truly matter.

And he is yours. 

Joel chokes out a strained groan as you press your plush lips softly against his neck, your tongue swiping across his pulse point. You firmly suckle his flesh, hard enough to break the tiny blood vessels underneath his skin and once you’ve left your mark, you trail your lips down his neck, eliciting another strangled noise from him. You sweep them over his collarbone, then down the length of his chest, showing each scar you come across with the affection it deserves. Your teeth nip and scrape at the softness of his belly and you quickly discover that it’s one of your favorite parts of him. Lowering yourself to your knees, your nose skims over the trail of dark, coarse hair below his navel and your fingers suggestively skim the waistband of his jeans.

His eyes widen. “You ain’t gotta do that—”

“I already told you, Joel. I want to,” you assure him, your voice low, sexy, filled with a lust for him and only for him. You make yourself comfortable, a challenging feat since you’d overshot the blanket and are now kneeling directly on the itchy, dried grass. It doesn’t matter, though—you’re more than willing to deal with discomfort for him. You place a hand on his hip and peer up at him. Your eyes meet his in the milky white moonlight. “You made me feel good. Please, just let me do the same for you?”

The nod he gives you is so subtle, so quick, that you almost don’t catch it.

He’d grown tense beneath your touch. 

You can’t help but laugh softly—not at him, but at the fact that he doesn’t realize that pleasuring him isn’t a want for you, it’s a need.

Gently, you pat his hip. “Relax, honey,” you encourage him, surprised at how the pet name rolls off your tongue with such natural ease.

Your hands reach for the button of his jeans and you swiftly undo it, then tug at his zipper. You start pulling the denim down his legs. Joel helps you, kicking off his worn, black leather boots before stepping out of his jeans, kicking the article of clothing off to the side. Heart racing in anticipation, you slide his dark boxer briefs down his legs, but stop short, breath hitching the second you feast your eyes on his cock. You’ve felt him through his clothes before, knew he was well endowed, but you’re still shocked to see just how big he really is. The mere thought of his hard, thick length filling you up and stretching your cunt makes your entire body ache with need. You can’t be certain how he’ll fit, but truth be told, he could tear you in half and you would thank him for it. 

Joel draws in a quick, sharp breath when he feels your small hand wrap around his base. Just as fast as he’d breathed it in, it’s knocked back out of his lungs when your other hand joins in and you run your fingertips along the thick, prominent vein on the underside of his cock. He twitches in your hands—you’ve hardly touched him, haven’t even put your mouth on him, and he’s already teetering on the edge.

“Christ, baby. You’re gonna be the fuckin’ death of me, I hope y’know that,” Joel croaks, tilting his head back to look up at the rafters as he silently wills himself not to explode too soon. His hips involuntarily jerk forward as you lick his tip, collecting his leaking precome on your tongue before wrapping your soft lips around it. Another loud, ragged groan tears from the back of his throat as you take him in slowly, inch by inch, further into your warm, wet mouth. Your own moaning around him causes a vibrating sensation, making it harder for Joel to keep himself from spilling into your mouth.

“Fuck, peach,” he curses, feeling the head of his cock nudge the back of your throat. He’s more than a mouthful for you, but you accept the challenge with eagerness and take him in further, gagging around him as drool dribbles down the sides of your chin. You, the same woman who just moments ago had said she was nervous about being intimate with him—whoever that woman had been, she was long fucking gone.

Joel’s eyes flit down and he sinks his teeth hard into his lower lip. He can see your silhouette as you work him with that pretty little mouth of yours. One glance is all he can handle before he’s squeezing his eyes shut, the pressure building in his lower abdomen and already dangerously close to reaching its peak. If Joel so much as looks at you again, he’ll come down your throat, and that’s not where he’s planning on finishing tonight.

You bob your head back and forth on his cock, your eyes watering each time he slips past the back of your throat—your cheeks hollow as you suck him greedily, and you alternate between that and stroking his long, thick shaft, your tongue swirling around his head.

Without opening his eyes, Joel reaches down with his hand and cradles the back of your head in his palm. The sounds that fill the barn are nothing short of obscene. His grunts and groans mixed together with the sounds of the moans you’d release in between your wet and sloppy slurping. He forces his eyes open and bravely takes another look at you, his heart slamming painfully against his sternum as you move your head faster, chasing his release as if you’re chasing your own.

“Fuck, baby—wait, stop. Need you to stop.” Joel’s hand leaves the back of your head and he cups your jaw, gently, but firmly, forcing you to release his cock from your mouth with an audible pop. “Ain’t gonna last much longer, not if you keep on like that.”

“Isn’t that the whole point?” you ask, smirking up at him as you wipe the mixture of his precome and your saliva away from your chin with the back of your hand.

Joel leans over and takes your arms, effortlessly yanking you up to your feet. His hand dives between your thighs to get a feel—to find whether you’re ready to take him or not. He slips two fingers between your soaked folds without so much as a warning, causing you to gasp out and grip his biceps, your fingernails digging into the firm muscle. Joel withdraws his hand from your cunt, admiring the way his digits come back coated with your slick. He looks at you, his eyes locking with yours as he lifts his hand to his mouth and slowly licks his fingers clean.

That alone nearly makes you come undone, almost makes you melt into a pathetic, whimpering mess at his feet. 

“Joel,” you say his name pleadingly. “Please.”

Sliding his fingers out of his mouth, he steps forwards and curls them around your wrist. “What is it, my sweet little peach? Hm? What do you want?”

“You. I want you,” you answer. You’re quick to correct yourself. “No, I need you. I fucking need you—I need you more than anything I’ve ever needed in my life, Joel.”

Leaning down, Joel skims the tip of his nose against your cheek before bringing it down along your jawline. “Where, darlin’?” he whispers huskily, sending a shiver up your spine. “Where do you need me, baby?”

Your mouth falls open slightly unable to say it. You don’t know why you’re suddenly shy, flustered as if you just hadn’t been down on your knees gagging around his cock.

“Tell me, peach,” he coaxes you gently with another low whisper. “Tell me where you need me. Tell me where you need my cock, sweetheart. Need to hear you say it.”

“Inside me.” Blazing heat floods your face. “I need you inside of me—I need you to fuck me. Please, Joel.”

“So polite ‘bout it, too,” he remarks. “What a good girl.”

Though he says it in a teasing manner, his praise nearly makes you collapse.

“You like that,” he realizes, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards. “Yeah, baby? Y’like it when I call you a good girl?”

“Fuck, I—yes, I do,” you confess.

“C’mere.” Joel wraps an arm around your waist, hand splayed over your back as he lowers you down onto the blanket. He follows suit. You both let out breathy laughs at the way your naked bodies sink down into the pile of hay. Propping himself up with his arm, Joel looks down at you, his smile fading as a serious expression crosses his features. He tucks a lock of hair behind your ear, finger grazing the silkiness of your cheek. “Y’sure ‘bout this, peach? Ain’t too late to stop.”

Smiling softly, you lift a hand to the side of his face, your fingers stroking his graying beard. “I’ve never been so sure about anything, Joel,” you promise him. “If you could take a peek into my mind, you would see how bad I want this, how bad I need this—how bad I need you. I don’t want to stop.” And you don’t just mean the sex. You don’t any of this to stop—the secret, late night meetings, the stolen kisses, the illicit affair. “I’m sure about this. I’m sure about you, Joel.”

That’s all he needs to hear.

Joel reaches down between your bodies, gripping his base, pumping his throbbing cock in his fist before lining himself up at your sopping entrance. Adrenaline courses through your veins—every nerve ending in your body is going up in flames. You spread your legs wider for him, hoping he’ll understand the nonverbal cue. He does. He begins to ease himself into your cunt and you hook a leg around his waist, encouraging him to go deeper. The barn fills with the sound of his grunt and your loud cry at the initial stretch. He sinks his cock further into you until he bottoms out and you cry out again, feeling a delicious burning sensation as he cradles his hips between your thighs.

“M’gonna need you to relax a little sweetheart,” he whispers gently, ceasing his movements to give your body a chance to adjust to him. Joel takes advantage of having you pinned underneath him with your head thrown back and his lips latch onto your neck, hungrily. He fervently kisses his way down the column of your throat, nips his way to your collarbone—but unlike you, he’s careful to do so without leaving any kind of mark behind. He would give anything to have the freedom to leave traces of his loving all over you. Maybe it’s the heat of the moment and the way he’s buried inside you to the hilt that brings out the primal in him, but Joel wouldn’t mind seeing you walk around Jackson covered in his love bites. He wants everyone to know he’s the one who’d left them behind, needs them to understand that you’re his. But that isn’t possible. Joel lifts his head from the hollow of your neck and nibbles lightly at your chin. “You alright, baby?”

Forcing your eyes open, you lift your head and bring yourself to look at him. At first, you feel discomfort, but after a minute, your body finally relaxes around him and it subsides. It’s replaced with the burning desire to feel more of him. The pretty glow coming in from outside the barn illuminates his face and you smile. “I’m better than alright. I’m perfect,” you assure him. You place a hand delicately on his chest, feeling his heart thrum hard against your fingertips. “This is perfect.”

Joel kisses the tip of your nose. He slides out of you slowly, then right back into you in an experimental thrust that brings your body off the blanket, your back arching in sheer pleasure. It’s such a deliciously tight fit, and he almost can’t believe how fucking good it feels to be sheathed in your taut heat. He drops his head, taking your breast into his mouth, tongue swirling around your hardened nipple as he bucks his hips once more. He’s being careful. Too careful.

“Joel—I need you to move,” you gasp. You drag a hand down his chest and over his soft stomach, letting your fingernails rake lightly over his flushed skin. It’s warm to the touch, covered in a thin sheen of sweat. “Joel, please. Fuck me.”

Thankfully, you don’t have to tell him twice.

Joel releases the pebbled flesh from his mouth with a loud, lewd pop. He pulls his cock out of your dribbling pussy, then slams back into you with such force that he places a hand on the crown of your head, keeping you in place underneath him on the blanket. You wrap your own leg around him, locking your ankles together, your heels digging into the firm curve of his ass. You lift your hips just as he rolls his own right into them. The new angle gives Joel the opportunity to fuck you even deeper and he hits the sensitive, spongy spot inside you, making you see stars. Wrapping your arms around his neck, you hold onto him, moans you’ve never heard come out of your own mouth before ringing in your ears and in his. He starts picking up his pace.

“Baby.” He’s breathless and speaks between every snap of his hips. “Fuck, y’feel s’good—s’tight around me—”

“Don’t stop, Joel. God, please don’t fucking stop,” you plead him, your finger burying themselves in his hair. “Keep going, just like that—fuck, you feel so fucking good inside me—”

You bite down on your bottom lip, adoring how Joel squeezes his dark eyes shut each and every single time the head of his cock brushes that one particularly deep spot inside of you. Knowing that you and your body has this kind of an effect on him, it gives you a boost of confidence. You’ve spent the last couple of years allowing a pathetic excuse of a man—if one could even call him that—pick on you, say things about your body, and make you feel like your inability to conceive a child made you defective. Worthless, even. And here’s a real man, one who makes you feel beautiful with the way he talks to you, the way he kisses you, touches you, and fucks you. You’re not perfect by any means, but Joel Miller makes you feel what your own husband doesn’t.

He makes you feel like you’re enough. More than enough.

The barn fills with a combination of moaning, panting, and the sound of damp skin slapping against damp skin.

Glancing down at you, Joel shakes his head and warns, “Ain’t gonna last much longer, baby. M’so goddamn close.”

An unexpected wave of courage washes over you. Planting your hands firmly on his chest, you take him by complete surprise and slide out from underneath him. A small grunt escapes him as you push him onto his back. Amused, you can’t help but giggle at the shocked expression on his face as you guide him to lie down on the flannel blanket. Eager to see his reaction, you keep your eyes trained on his face as you straddle his lap. You grip the base of his cock in your hand and then slowly sink down onto him, your cunt greedily squeezing him as you slide down until you’re fully seated.

Joel’s jaw falls slack. It’s the most stunning sight he’s ever seen.

You, completely naked on top of him, your pouty lips plump and swollen from his kisses. Your smooth, supple skin glows in the moonlight shining through the open window behind you. All while every inch of Joel’s cock was buried deep inside of you, head nudging at your cervix. Eyes glimmering devilishly, the sexiest little smirk tugs at the corners of your mouth. “Like what you see?”

He tries to speak, but he can’t.

You’ve rendered him speechless. 

Grabbing his hands in yours, you guide them to your hips. His blood roars in his ears and his fingers dig into the pillowy soft flesh, holding on as you begin to rock them back and forth. You throw your head back, your hair spilling over your shoulder. The friction of your clit against his pelvis heightens your pleasure. Joel had thought he would be the one to topple over the edge first, but he’d been wrong.

Eyes pinching shut, you start bouncing yourself on his cock, your desperation mounting. You feel the tension between your hips coiling back tightly, ready to snap forward.

“Fuck, Joel—I’m gonna—I’m so fucking close.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Fuckin’ come for me, baby,” Joel encourages you, his fingers digging even harder into your hips. One of his hands abandons your side and he reaches up and gently takes your slackened jaw in the palm of his hand. He coaxes you to look down at him. “Need you to be a good girl and look at me, peach,” he instructs you, slipping his thumb between your parted lips. “Need to see that pretty face of yours when you come all over my cock, sweetheart.”

“Oh fuck—fuckfuckfuck!”

Crying out, you unravel and fall apart all over him, the ecstasy blurring the edges of your vision. 

It doesn’t take Joel much longer to follow. He lets out a low, guttural growl, choking out a string of profanities as he slams you down onto his lap and holds you in place, spurts of warm come coating your velvet walls. Your pussy squeezes him, draining him of every last drop.

You collapse forward onto him in a sweaty, whimpering mess and he wraps his arms around you. With him still inside you, you both lay there and try to catch your breaths as the high slowly but surely begins to wear off.

After a few minutes, Joel pulls out of you and he shifts your bodies, moving you so you’re now laying beside him. Tucking you against his side, he slides his arm around your shoulders and pulls you even closer. His other hand finds one of yours and he takes it, bringing them both to rest on his chest.

“You alright?” he asks you, lacing his fingers together with yours.

“I’m great,” you answer him tiredly, prompting him to chuckle. “What about you?”

Joel strokes at your hair. “Never been better, sweet girl.”

You groan. “Joel, don’t do that,” you mumble into his shoulder. “You’re going to put me right to sleep.”

He laughs again. “We’ve still got a bit more time, y’know. If you’re tired, you can take a quick nap. I can wake you up in ‘bout an hour when it’s time to head home.”

“No, that’s okay,” you decline the offer, worried he would accidentally fall asleep too. “I really wish we could sleep together—I mean, actually sleep together. In an actual bed. Not having to worry about anything. Just like normal couples do.”

“Well, we ain’t exactly a normal couple, darlin’.”

“No, we’re definitely not,” you murmur. You don’t even realize how sad you’d sounded until you feel Joel give your shoulders a comforting squeeze. 

Neither of you say anything else about it as you spend the next hour laying there, tangled up in each other’s embrace, waiting until it was time to go your separate ways.

[pzychojinx]

so, jinx in act one of season two. see, for three years i expected a full on descent into chaos and madness beyond any repair. i'd made peace with that, too. so i'm surprised - pleasantly, joyfully surprised.

very long analysis ahead on where they're taking her and how it speaks to me.

we first meet her again during silco's eulogy sequence - a beautiful sequence, halfway between dreamlike and real. "just like when vander shoved off", she says about his death. except it's not. after vander's death, after vi's perceived abandonment, everything jinx could feel was self-centered. she would say "she's not my sister anymore". she would devalue these people entirely. in fact, every single reaction to any action done by her loved ones would be self-centered and extreme. that is very much how her mental process works, how her trauma caused her to work. and more so: when silco would ask of her any work, any mission, she'd do the job purely for his sake, his affection, his approval, never caring about the cause.

in short, she was never able to get out of her own head for as much as a single minute. now, she starts the funeral off with "chembarons warring for control of the lanes. wannabe street thugs squabbling over scraps. just like when vander shoved off." and it's not about her abandonment anymore. it's not about being left alone. it's not about her. she's talking to silco about his city, his legacy, his world, his chembarons, his lanes. she's out of her own head, and it's the first time we ever see it.

"because someone put all those holes in you", she says then. and this is so interesting because there's obviously a dissociation here, as well as a very intense grief and sadness. we are obviously still dealing with someone who's deeply traumatized and unstable, but let's compare this with powder after the deaths of vander, mylo and claggor. powder had a full breakdown, both turned into a complete de-evaluation of vi as i was mentioning earlier and full desperation. "i only wanted to help, i only wanted to help, i only wanted to help".

this chaotic desperation is something jinx kept within herself throughout the entirety of s1 up until - the tea party. which i'm getting at, in a minute. point being, for now, that the jinx we see during silco's eulogy is grieving and lost and rootless and asking herself "what am i supposed to do with that?", but she lacks the chaotic full-on desperation that would lead her to acts of explosive destruction and/or self-destruction in s1. in fact, she's incredibly quieter. she's more grounded, more present in her movements, in the way she fights, in the way she talks.

in retrospect even her final action in s1, the infamous missile, already had the energy we're seeing now. it wasn't instinctive, driven by hallucinations or trauma or rage or an unrestrained trigger; it was silco's legacy and it was calculated. silco's death, i think now, left jinx as rootless as she's ever been, but it also left her with an acceptance of who she is. "don't cry, you're perfect". the tea party ends with her 'choosing' jinx and if you'd asked me before season two, i would have said with full certainty it meant she'd be going to be a loose cannon. entirely and with no possibility of ever being anything else. that's not what i think now.

i think she came to terms with who she is. i think now that the seat at the tea party wasn't a symbol of complete derailing, it was in a way a symbol of acceptance. "here's to the new us". she's fought her fight between powder and jinx and the tea party has permitted her to gain, in some way, a sense of closure. very importantly, having lost what she perceived as vi's acceptance, and having lost a father, she has also been able to shed the constant and desperate need to be in their favor.

during the 'sucker' sequence, we see her going through the lanes with a hood on her hair, very low-key. loose cannon jinx would have never, ever done that. loose cannon jinx would, quite simply, not have cared. she would have been extra, and explosive, and in everyone's faces. she's preserving herself not to be found, and that's new. again, i think she's still lost and rootless and grieving and really asking herself what she's supposed to do now that she's entirely autonomous and i also think there's definitely still a lot of bitterness and rage when it comes to vi which we obviously get to see during their fight and in no way is she magically ~healthy or anything like that - however.

she is still walking those streets in a way that indicates self-preservation. it would have been very, very easy for jinx to be captured by any of those goons and/or got herself killed. and for some reason, whether that be an apathetic, mourning state or mind, or whether that be some gained peace in who she is, or both - she didn't.

given all this, the new element that season two act one has introduced for her that truly moved me and made me feel... healed in a sort of way, is the introduction of human bonds for jinx that defy her historical, co-dependent mechanism of idolization and de-evaluation. ergo, sevika and isha. this is incredible for her and most of all, it's realistic. it's a chance at something, but it doesn't feel forced, nor fairytale-esque, nor does it resemble your usual ~redemption arc.

sevika and isha function as people who she's building some bond with, and since she's a little bit less in her own fucking head, and since she's not clinging to them as idealized protectors / saviours and neither is she refusing them as betrayers, and since she's not constantly fighting between what she perceives as her double identity anymore, she finally has the possibility to experience healthier bonds. sevika functions as somebody who still ties her to silco, possibly the closest thing she has right now to any root she might have left, and it works: reminiscing silco with her, gifting her the arm, doesn't leave her utterly alone but neither does it let her fall into the trap of clinging onto yet another figure from whom to fully depend.

and isha, very obviously, functions as the possibility of healing her inner child which is a goldmine for her storyline. her bond with isha could clearly have a narrative tie to jinx & silco, to jinx & vi, and most importantly to jinx and powder herself - this is all quite obvious but again, it's not executed in a way that feels like a forced 'redemption arc' or whatnot. the idea of this little street kid who just imprints on her like a lost little duckling, which is in no way jinx's decision, simply feels natural and heartwarming. does this mean i presume such healing of her inner child is going to come easy to her? no. but it's something. it's something very different from anything she's ever experienced before.

even through the loss, the rootlessness, the grief and confusion, the panic attack we see her experiencing through the lanes as a consequence of the moment she sees vi and caitlyn's enforcer squad, even through the brutality of the fight with vi, - and this is all to say, she's still a very traumatized individual, which is important because it would have just been senseless to have jinx somehow get fully stable like a switch had been flipped - we're seeing something new for jinx here. i've seen many posts related to "i'm glad it's you", and i might be unpopular here but while i do think jinx still has an element of suicidality, i also think she was at least half bluffing there. comparing her micro-expressions with the ones back on the bridge fight with ekko, i'm under the impression she was testing vi, at the very least partially. "poisoning us with gas?" is also an interesting line because even in her attack at her sister, she's less focused on her own trauma and more on something that we've hardly seen from her before - belonging to the lanes.

all of this to say, i'm loving the path they're taking for her. it's still very much jinx. it feels like jinx. but she's not just about to wreak senseless and desperate havoc in order to be seen by either her sister or her father, because there's no one to be seen by anymore. she's not fighting a desperate battle between her identities either, because she's accepted her place. she's not loud and erratic, she's quieter and coming to terms with herself. closure is truly the word that comes to mind, for me, in how i see her arc right now. closure, and unexpectedly, possibility.

[flagellant]

Why can't you people be normal about slurs for 2 seconds

Just because YOU reclaimed and identify with something doesn't mean everyone else does. No one cares about you IDing as a queer or dyke or fag or whatever, people just don't want strangers to randomly assign them words that have historically been used as slurs.

Like, do you understand that people have had this word used against them by bigots? Do you understand that maybe, it's tasteless to get upset at people for having trauma regarding a word? Are you able to comprehend that maybe insisting people be okay with being called a word that means odd, spoiled, ruined or weird is not a good look?

I'm autistic and have a severe learning disability. I'm totally fine when people use the word retard, I call myself a retard, I don't care. But I'm sure as fuck not going to walk up to a bunch of other autistic people I barely know and go "lmao what is up my fellow tards!!!"

I'm not trying to start shit, I'm legitimately trying to understand why you find it appropriate to make fun of people, often victims of abuse or hate crimes, for being triggered by a word.

"I'm legitimately trying to understand why you find it appropriate to make fun of people, often victims of abuse or hate crimes, for being triggered by a word."

Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. Homosexual is a slur. Every single word we have ever had has always either had its roots in cruelty and oppression or has been used against us by our oppressors. There is no term that is pure and clean and innocent and has never hurt anyone's feelings.

Let's disregard fag for now. That one's still in the process of reclamation, I'll admit. Let's just talk about queer. Queer has been the academic term for non-cisgender and non-heterosexual history for half a century now. Queer theory has been around for thirty years. Queer was the word which we shouted as a radical inditement of our treatment by our oppressors: "We're here, we're queer, get over it" and "Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you" should both sound familiar to you.

And now it's 2012 or so and queer is known as the most inclusive term we have. It's less unwieldy than LGBTQIAAP+. It's not based in a necessity of defining yourself through your oppression like MOGAI. It's, important, a deeply private word. Not in the sense that it is used privately, but rather than it grants its user privacy. If you're queer, everyone instantly knows you're a part of the community, but you aren't being forced to out yourself or give more details about your personal life and identity than you want. It was always a word about identity.

TERFs hate this. TERFs hate this so much, because it's inclusive of people they hate, like asexual people, trans women, and other freaks of nature who society needs to put down like dogs. Queer means TERFs can't as easily define you as the Bad Other. Queer means TERFs will be recognized more easily as bigoted towards the larger queer communities. So, obviously, they do what anyone would, and decide to take advantage of the language of social justice warriors of the time and attack impressionable young kids from 13-16.

The average 13-16 year old doesn't exactly have much experience in real-life queer spaces. They don't get to go to rallies or protests, they don't stay at community centers, their lives are insular and based entirely online. Their understanding of social politics is inherently rooted in the importance of posting in the right language. Their activism is one which tweets correctly. So TERFs slid into their inboxes and went "Hey, just so you know, queer is actually a slur used to oppress people and it's problematic to use since some people have been called it".

And this works, because of course it does, and now I have people like you in my inbox bitching and whining about how queer is a slur and how you've been called queer once or twice in your life. To this I say: My apologies, but fucking suck it up and reclaim it. I don't care about traumatic events you have with queer. It has been reclaimed by the greater community and was done so long before you were born if you aren't literally 50, and more importantly, by giving queer validation as a slur, you actively give our oppressors that power over you. I'm not going to let my oppressors know that if they say an identifier for us meanly enough then we'll stop identifying as that word. I'm not giving the power to silence and repress who we are to people who would use it.

Anon, I respect you enough to say that people who consider my identity as a slur should get punched in the face, because alt-right fash cunts, pig cops, evangelical christians, TERFs, and hyperconservative political lobbyists all consider my identity as a slur. Why should I treat you any different to them? What about your specific treatment of queer as a slur ends up with a meaningfully different result? The neonazis on kiwifarms won't care why you're telling me to shut the fuck up about queer. They don't give a shit about why you're saying this. What they give a shit about is if it works and if calling people queer will get them to shut up and curl up in a little ball and admit defeat and hand them slurs on a silver platter. And I'm not about to live that sort of life, so either get with the program or fuck off.

[monstersdownthepath]

Homebrew Horror: The Unnamed

The world hosts all manner of boogeymen and ghost stories, many of which are based on very real entities that prank or prey upon mankind when the sun sets and the lights go out, but few enjoy the obscurity and success of the Thing with No Name. There is perhaps a handful of people in all the world who can claim to have witnessed the nameless horror hunt its prey, and fewer still who are telling the truth about it, as to speak of it to another is to invite it into your life.

The scant scratches of concrete information that can be pieced together all paint a similar picture: It is predator that has haunted thinking beings as far back in history as anyone can look, its methods of hunting and its means of killing leaving precious little evidence behind. What it truly is, where it came from, and why it hunts the way it does are all mysteries which cannot be solved. Rare and esoteric writings which tell of it list numerous titles, all unhelpful; The Thing with No Name, the Stain on the Page (or simply "the Stain"), the Nameless Legend, and simply the Unnamed. It is written that such ambiguous titles are to protect the reader, not the creature, for attempting to affix any more descriptive title to it is the surest way to invite its horrific attention.

The Unnamed is one of several self-keeping secrets in creation, hunting down and annihilating any creature which knows too many details or who becomes too curious of it, for reasons which may never be truly known. For those it hunts, it seems like a nightmare made terribly real in a way few other creatures can match; an unstoppable, inescapable force which will use seemingly any trick to disorient, mislead, and ultimately capture its victim.

Anyone targeted by the Stain can always feel when it's near, and rarely do they ever manage to find help before they're simply never seen again. Witnesses to the scenes rarely speak, and never coherently, never to say what they saw, lest it target them next. Even in scenes where a tremendous struggle obviously took place, investigators struggle to turn up so much as a single drop of blood or scrap of hair of the victim... but sometimes they find something else. A misshapen footprint, a handprint caused by something deeply inhuman, or some strange fluid almost but not quite like blood that causes the mind to reel with a single touch.

Not enough to solve a mystery, just enough to make one curious. Just enough to make one try and wipe away a stain of ink on some dusty old report tucked away in the back of an archive to see what could have been written underneath.

The Unnamed CR 13 Chaotic Evil Medium Aberration (Shapechanger) Init: +8 Senses: Darkvision 60ft, low-light vision, thoughtsense 60ft, blindsight 20ft; Perception +23 Aura: Unwind (30ft, DC 24) ------ Defense ------ AC 29, touch 14, flat-footed 25 (+4 Dex, +15 natural) HP 193 (15d8+105), Regeneration 5 (Cold) Fort +12, Ref +9, Will +14 Defensive Abilities: Amorphous, Unbound, Undone; DR 10/Cold Iron and Lawful; Immune: Charms and compulsions, death effects, poison; Resist: Acid 15, Electricity 15, Fire 15; SR 19 ------ Offense ------ Speed: 50ft, climb 30ft Melee: Bite +17 (1d8+6 plus poison/19-20), slam +15 (1d8+6 plus grab), 3 tentacles +15 (1d4+6 plus pull) Ranged: Bone dart +15/+10/+5 (1d3+6 plus poison/19-20) Space: 5ft, Reach: 5ft (10ft with bite, 20ft with tentacles) Special Attacks: Pull (10ft), rake (Bite +17, 1d8+6 plus poison), Unwind Spell-like Abilities (CL 15, concentration +17) Constant: Freedom of Movement At-will: Dancing Darkness, Ghost Sound (DC 13), Ventriloquism (DC 13) 3/day: Rusting Grasp, Telekinesis (DC 17), Warp Wood 1/day: Knock, Modify Memory (DC 16), Teleport, Traumatic Eyebite (DC 18) ------ Statistics ------ Str 23 Dex 19 Con 25 Int 13 Wis 21 Cha 15 Base Atk: +11; CMB: +16; CMD: 31 Feats Combat Reflexes, Critical Focus, Improved Critical (bite, bone dart), Improved Initiative, Multiattack, Traumatic Spell-like Ability (Eyebite), Sickening Critical Skills Acrobatics +13, Bluff +13, Climb +21, Intimidate +15, Perception +23, Stealth +21, Survival +23 Languages All; language mastery. SQ Change Shape (any past victim; see Uncanny), Compression, Unknown ------ Ecology ------ Environment: Any Organization: Unique Treasure: Standard (taken trophies) ------ Combat: The Stain enjoys toying with its Target out of both sadism and pragmatism, forcing them to make mistakes and expend resources battling shadows and hallucinations. It goes Unseen as long as it is able to, tormenting them with its spell-like abilities to haunt them, destroy or remove light sources, weapons, and escape routes, and make it seem as though it is coming from everywhere at once. It will attempt to hit them with one or several of its bone darts to infuse them with its poison and terrorize them with the hallucinations, but it will try to avoid killing them with its darts (including by making them nonlethal). It will further toy with them with its tentacle attacks from a distance, making them think their hallucinations are real, until eventually wearing them down and closing in to finish them off and consume them. Against a large group of victims, it will attempt to isolate and pick them off one by one after loosening their reasoning with its poisonous aura, stolen voices, and Eyebite. When the mood strikes, it leaves one survivor (never its Target) alive but traumatized and possibly insane, usually using its Modify Memory to erase the majority of the encounter. But never all of it.

Morale: If a group of creatures has no Target among them, the Unnamed will fight only long enough to potentially traumatize one into becoming a Target later, and then flee to let the memories fester. When in a combat involving its Target, the Unnamed will always attempt to kill them, even if its own life is in danger. If its foes prove to be beyond its power, it will still attempt a death or glory attack against its Target. Its own life doesn't matter. It will come back eventually. ------ Special Abilities ------

Unbound (Ex): The Unnamed will not be denied its happiness. It may make an additional saving throw at the end of each of its turns to remove any effect causing any of the following conditions, even if the effect causing the condition does not normally permit a saving throw: blind, confused, dazed, deafened, exhausted, fatigued, nauseated, sickened, slowed, staggered, and stunned. This does not require an action. If it is affected by multiple effects or conditions, it may only make one additional saving throw with this ability each turn.

Uncanny (Ex): The Unnamed can use its Change Shape ability as a full-round action to change into any creature it has ever consumed, but its shape is grotesquely twisted to the point it could not possibly be mistaken for a normal creature. It does not gain any additional abilities or attacks, the changes are purely cosmetic. Similarly, though it can speak any language, its voice is completely inhuman and distorted. Creatures under the effects of its poison (see Unwind, below) or who are confused or insane instead see and hear it as if the transformation was flawless. This effect is lost if they are adjacent to it.

Undone (Su): If the Unnamed reduces a Target to 0 HP or lower with its attacks while the Target is both within its reach and suffering from the effects of its poison (see Unwound, below), the Target's body crumbles to a fine dust the Unnamed may inhale as an immediate action or at any point within the next minute as a swift action. When it does so, it regains 4d8+15 hitpoints and may immediately end one condition or effect on itself.

Unknown (Su): Whenever a creature attempts to give a more descriptive title or a name to the Unnamed, or attempts to describe or dictate its appearance or abilities in detail to another being, they must attempt a DC 19 Will save. Success indicates that they stop themselves from going through with the attempt as a brief sense of dread washes over them. Failure allows them to fully convey the information, but they become a Target. When creature becomes a Target, they are shaken automatically for one round by the sense that they have committed some unfathomable wrong. What "naming/describing the Unnamed" entails will vary at the DMs discretion; it could be as simple as writing details into a document meant to be read by another, speak the details aloud to another, or drawing it a little too clearly, but it must be a willing, conscious attempt to define or describe the Unnamed to another intelligent creature. Creatures defining or describing the Unnamed only for themselves may still become Targets, at the DMs discretion (it often allows these creatures to write just enough to make a potential reader curious, but no more). The Unnamed knows the precise location of all Targets not shielded by divine power, as well as the distance and direction to them relative to itself. Targets become permanently shaken whenever the Unnamed is within 1 mile of them as a feeling of impending doom creeps into their minds, and if it is within 100ft, this condition pierces all forms of immunity to fear. All parts of this ability work across all boundaries and through any barrier.

Unseen (Sp/Su): When not being observed by an intelligent creature, the Unnamed may become invisible as a standard action, as per Greater Invisibility, except the effect lasts until an intelligent creature successfully sees the Unnamed through any means (such as if it's outlined through Glitterdust or mundane dust, or viewed through True Seeing), until any creature ends its turn adjacent to the Unnamed (or vice-versa), or until the Unnamed ends the effect itself as an immediate or free action. It can only use its spell-like abilities while invisible using this ability.

Unwind (Ex): The Unnamed produces a powerful, hallucinogenic poison which it delivers with its bite and dart attacks. It may also produce a colorless, odorless version of the poison as an aura with a 30ft radius, affecting all creatures which inhale it, though they gain a +5 circumstance bonus to the save. It may begin producing this aura version of its poison as a full-round action and stop as a move action; its bite and dart attacks do not poison their targets while it's producing the aura, and it can only maintain the aura for a total of 7 rounds a day (they do not have to be consecutive).

--Unwinding Venom: Bite, dart, or aura--injury, contact, or inhaled; save Fort DC 24, frequency 1/round for 5 rounds, effect 1d3 Wis damage plus hallucinations for 1 round (all other creatures have 20% concealment), cure 2 consecutive saves.

[raviolirash]

What do you think about the "the problem with what Cazador did is that he did it to ME" scene? I've seen people hold it up as proof that he really is evil.

I think people are extremely sheltered if they use that line as proof of him being evil. I think after 200 years of torture, it would be insanely weird for him to NOT say something like that.

I don't know. Maybe this could be a Layer 8 issue on my end. Maybe my chart for "what constitutes as evil" is severely warped due to real life experiences. Nevertheless. In that scene, Astarion is rightfully bitter (to say the least), furious, and terrified. His true thoughts come out in the day-after aftermath of dealing with the 7k spawn: he feels actual remorse if you kill them and wonders what could have happened if they were given the same chance he was. He says "to kill [the spawn] would have been a [great crime]". I can pull up the dialogue files if someone questions this.

Astarion says a lot of shit. But a lot of what he says is "I didn't want this life. I didn't ask for this. I was thrust into this world and now I'm stuck in a very bad situation and I just want to escape it and I am lashing out accordingly". But he doesn't say this word-for-word to people who need to be hit with a car to get a narrative point, so people automatically jump to "OMG this guy is clearly evil".

People want victims of trauma in their fiction but whenever they aren't palatable they get slapped with the "EVIL" stamp. God the way people comment on Astarion you'd think he barbeques babies or something like that one Sims 2 mod, or doing some Gortash level activities. An abused cat who hates human touch and wants to bite every hand isn't evil.

"But this other deeply traumatized person didn't act like this" hit yourself in the nuts with that clown hammer you wield so I won't have to. In real life there are multiple case studies of how differently people react to trauma/living in severely abusive situations. Almost like human beings are nuanced or something. But I've noticed this discussion also is conducted by creeps about real people to, such as "Well why did x person kill their abuser but y didn't when y had it so much worse?" and it is really gross lol.

[kingmagnificoofrosas]

It really hurts me how bad this poor man was treated and still is by Disney and some empathy and compassion lacking, not-thinking peewees.

My biggest rant post in cooperation with Magnificolover from Insta is still cooking. And let me tell you, it's gonna be spicy, blunt and long.

Mags might be the star of the show but this topic goes beyond him.

Furthermore, I keep hearing that more and more children are siding with Magnifico. Children!! My people!

Now, teens and adults hating and shitting on Mags because they cannot see past the rim of their plate of narrow-mindedness is one issue by itself, but you know something is seriously wrong when children tell you "But he isn't a villian at all!" But the the others around him! And yes, like him a bunch more than Asha.

I know that disney intented to create a nice story with another lovable heroine but instead we got a deeply traumatized, altruistic man, who, despite his great pain, built an untopia just for the reason so others would never have to suffer like he did. He constantly gave, cared more for others than himself, only wanted love and some respect in return. But got none of that! He didn't get love, he was constantly kicked and picked at his scars. He's not being taken serious, and only ever seen as a source for favors and a scapegoat. No one was ever there for him. He had no one! Not even a sidekick! No one ever saw and heard him, took him into their arms and let him breathe. This man struggled and drowned and people watched, worse even pushed him down further!

And worse of all, he was pushed to the point of mental breakdown, where he was so terrified and done that he got himself cursed and possessed by an evil force. And then the people who had gotten everything from him and still treated him like shit locked him up to suffer even more for eternity?

This is so so wrong! What the actual frick! My God! The whole movie is a horror show! Magnificolover and I have been fighting for Mags and against this toxic shitshow that disney pulled for over six months now and we won't stop!

If someone really takes the time to carefully read our analyses (which are explained down to the tiniest nitty gritty detail) and still sees Magnifico as a villain ( purely evil person/being) then there is something seriously wrong with them! Why are such people and disney acting like heartless monsters?

We don't want that! You think something like this is fun to watch? Seeing a broken man getting broken even further because people are greedy, ignorant and selfish is not fun! This is horrible! It's sickening to stomach if anything!

This doesn't celebrate everything good that disney has stood for those past 10 decates! It spits at it and in the faces of everyone who truly loved the content this company has given in the past.

You want a real villain? MAKE ONE! For goodness sake! But not, whatever the obnoxious toxcitity shit, that happened with Magnifico.

We hate it! I hate it!

If I could sing one song to Magnifico, it would be this from Lewis Capaldi :

In the moment you feel half complete

Know the moments are temporary

When the fear fuels the fire underneath

I'm gonna love the hell out of you

Take all the pain that you're going through

And I'll bring you heaven if that's what you need

'Cause you've always loved the hell out of me

You don't want him? Fine! I'll take him and not give him back ever again! If someone cannot see this man is a jackpot on two legs that's their problem not mine.

Magnifico is many things but most definitly not : a villain, a bad person and a sextoy.

[dkmbookworm]

Fizz Character Analysis (Spoiler Warning)

So when I was watching the newest episode of Helluva Boss, I will admit that I was slightly confused by Fizz’s explanation for why he felt he couldn’t quit working for Mammon. After all we saw that Asmodeus was trying to get him to quit working for him already and had spoken of how much he despised the man. So why does Fizz think that Ozzie will leave him or he’ll lose everything if he quits

However, when you look at the circumstances of Fizz’s life leading up to know and the influences he has around them, this actually does make a lot of sense for his character.

Chronologically speaking, we can see that at the beginning of his life in childhood, Fizz was already a child star in the circus, and was well loved and admired for his talents. He completely outperforms and overshadows Blitzo, and garners the attention of his father, Cash Buckzo. It’s been a running joke that Cash far prefers Fizz as a son because he is better than him and rakes in a lot more of a profit. But, we can understand this isn’t real affection, Cash assigns worth to being a good performer and being able to provide something to someone else in order to be loved. Fizz is overworked and under a lot of pressure in this kind of environment

This pops up again, when we see Fizz as a teenager. The pressure of being perfect is starting to get to him and he struggles to establish firm boundaries with others as we see with that rabid fan. Blitzo was the one who had to step in when he got aggressive, and even though everything that fan said was bullshit, his words still deeply affected Fizz.

Jumping forward again in the timeline, we see that Fizz has been picked up my Mammon as a performer. And again, all boundaries are gone as he makes robotic versions of Fizz to be sold all over hell for all manner of uses, and most commonly in the form of sex dolls. This very obviously makes Fizz incredibly uncomfortable but because he feels he owes his success to Mammon it is harder to turn him down without the backup that Blitzo provided to him when they were young.

And based on his treatment in the present day, Mammon Regularly

Scrutinizes his weight and appearance

Touches and manhandles him

Puts him through dangerous stunts

Forces him to talk to crowds of people when he’s already tired or stressed

Makes him deal with sexual harassment

Putting him into costumes that feel restrictive

And most likely he was already dealing with this kind of thing long before he even met Asmodeus and began to date him. The mindset he grew up with in childhood is being reinforced in this time frame. He is worthless if he isn’t performing, he always has to be striving to be better, he needs Mammon.

Another factor to keep in mind, is that while we don’t know this exactly, fizz has just come out of being severely disabled and traumatized by what happened in the fire with him losing his limbs and horns. And with the theory that Mammon was the one who initially provided him with his new robotic attachments, he would have to be feeling a lot of gratitude towards him for this. His image of himself coming out of this is fragile with this new version of his body to come to turns with, on top of losing his best friend. Making him extremely vulnerable and easy to take advantage of.

Then jumping forward again, we see that fizz has started a relationship with Asmodeus, one of the deadly sins, ranked only under Lucifer and his family. Both of them care very deeply for each other and have established very strong mutual trust and boundaries. Albeit, they do have to keep this secret (even tho they are very bad at doing this). Ozzie is protective of Fizz’s safety considering he is ranked much lower than him in hell’s hierarchy and that much more vulnerable to being hurt. This is one of the first positive relationships that fizz has been able to enjoy in a long time, and you can see that Ozzie has sort of filled the hole that blitz left (no pun intended). He acts as that barrier/voice that keeps him from people who cross his boundaries.

And while we can see that Ozzie is an amazing, loving partner to him, this isn’t going to fix the years upon years of problems he’s faced. His childhood, teen years, and a portion of his adulthood have been in the spotlight with managers exploiting him for profit. It is all he knows and they’re going to make sure he can’t leave.

Think about how Mammon knew that Fizz and Ozzie were an item. Think of how he would be talking to him in private telling him that Ozzie could leave him at any point because he’s just some imp. That without his fame and talents that he is nothing. The bottom of hell’s hierarchy.

One of the strongest elements to Helluva Boss’s storytelling is the way they lay out hints and background details that allow audiences to put together the story without it having to be exactly spelled out to us. And I think that is what they have done here, even if the pacing of the show can be a bit off at times. When we go back and rewatch the episodes that feature fizz we can see begin to see how he got to this point in his life and what it took for him to break out of it.

[fastcardotmp3]

stranger things au where when it's all done, instead of the general fandom usual of NDA's and cover stories, those guys at the NINA Project figure out a way to use that same technology that brought El's memories back to instead wipe the memories of anyone involved in saving the world/ anyone who saw anything abnormal and replace them with the mundane.

It's the only foolproof way to make sure that none of That gets out, to make sure that no one decides to go poking around again 10 years down the line or write a book or a song or a movie that hits a little too closely to the truth, and the government loves themselves something that seems like a foolproof plan.

But what does this mean for our heroes? They don't remember the circumstances that brought them together, only the cover memories that were inserted in their place. They don't remember why they care so deeply for one another because a summer scooping ice cream or a walk through the woods or an-- impromptu game of baseball???-- doesn't quite line up with how it feels.

It feels bigger than that. It feels--

There are explanations for Steve's scars, he remembers a big dog and a trip to the ER, he remembers getting in a car accident and the seat belt coming loose enough to get stuck across his throat instead of his chest. He remembers-- blood on his hands, blood on his clothes, the outline of a man torn half to shreds--

He remembers a bad trip with Robin, but sometimes Robin will say something and it's-- when we got drugged- took those- when we uh, y'know tried LSD that time?-- fuzzy because of the bad trip of it all.

It's easy to accept the truth as the truth, because he remembers. It's easy, for years, to let the truth be the truth, to forget entirely that there are pieces that don't make sense, that there's no reason he should be as close with Dustin Henderson as he is because wait how did we meet? over a missing cat? It's easy, to just let it be true, because the love is there and that's what matters.

The love is there for a year and two and five and ten and Steve's life isn't always easy, in fact he's gone through his fair share of therapists for the insomnia none of them can explain, the confusion that both him and Robin talk about sometimes in the dead of night but can't remember talking about in the morning.

Eddie gets medicated for some sort of psychosis for a while because he had years of these intense night terrors that he could never explain to people, screaming at the top of his lungs, but the minute he would try to tell a shaking and terrified Steve or Robin or Nancy or whoever was present what it had been about he would just sob with frustration because he couldn't remember.

Max has a condition which made her lose her eyesight rapidly as a teenager, who has chronic pain that no doctors have ever found a real cause for despite Steve dragging her to appointment after appointment with fierce protectiveness in his eyes and voice, a desperation that there has to be a reason.

It's easy to accept it as the truth, that they all gravitated towards each other because they're all just a little fucked up in unrelated ways. That they connected to one another because oh you get scared sometimes too? scared like I do? scared like no one else understands?

Lucas starts spontaneously sobbing when some Kate Bush song plays on the radio in 1992. Can't explain it except that it hurts.

Nancy goes to a shooting range and feels her hands go steady for the first time in years in '93. She's never shot a gun before.

El Hopper had a traumatic enough childhood that doctors say she likely won't ever remember all of it, that her brain is protecting her, that-- that's probably true. They're doctors. They know better than Steve, they know about everything except why Max's legs hurt so bad she can't move sometimes.

They know everything except why Eddie can't feel pinned down without having a visceral belief he's dying.

They know everything except why Jonathan swears that their old house used to be painted a different color in the living room.

There are explanations for Steve's scars. He remembers a big dog.

Sharp teeth. Snarling.

He's in his thirties when he kisses Eddie Munson for the first time, because they're fucked in the head in the same ways, because no one else has ever gotten close enough to see the scars and hear the screaming and feel the desperation and not suggested maybe you need bigger help than I can give.

He's a grown man, and it's easy to believe the truth of his past, easy to think that growing older means it's supposed to be a little fuzzy around the edges, and that's okay because this feels bright and clear and technicolor, this thing with Eddie who has run away and come back half a dozen times but always does come back.

Whether he goes to Seattle or LA, New York or Boston; whether he and Steve are in the same place at the same time for more than a couple of weeks, he always comes back, they always find their way back to each other no matter where in the world, except--

Except there.

Everyone left that town with a haste-- or was it one at a time? No, it was the Byers first to California, except-- didn't Will graduate from that school? No. Because El went to school in Chicago at the same time that Robin started college there and she helped Will apply to the Arts Institute and--

And it was Max who went to California-- no, she was from there, but she also-- did she go back?

And why does Steve remember the house he grew up in but the minute he tries to step outside the back door onto the patio in his mind, out by the-- with the blue light and--

"Have you ever been back?" he asks Eddie one day, 32 years old and living in Chicago now full-time together. Robin's just down the road, Nancy's at the Tribune, Argyle has been franchising that coffee shop of his, is opening a spot here in town near his friends who he met when--

"Back where?" Eddie trails his hands through Steve's hair, laying half on top of each other on the couch and listening to some old tape of Jonathan's.

"Where we're from."

Eddie's fingers slow to an almost still and Steve props himself up to watch the way his brow furrows in concentration.

"Why would we go back?" he asks, and Steve has this flash-- like they've had this conversation before.

Like they've talked about where we're from before, although the name of the place never crosses their lips.

"I dunno," Steve slumps into Eddie's chest. They're getting older though so maybe just, "nostalgia?"

"Are you feeling nostalgic?" A rediscovered rhythm to gentle nails across his scalp. Soothing.

"It's where we met," Steve says. It feels true, although when he thinks about it-- "remember? How we met?"

"I..." Eddie's jaw clicks. It does that sometimes, on the same side with the scar.

There are explanations for Eddie's scars too-- a drug deal gone wrong, too many guys with too may knives-- or was it broken beer bottles? They used those as weapons, yeah. Tattered clothes and tattered skin and blood on Steve's hands--

No. He wasn't there. Blood on-- it was Dustin who found him? No. Wait, it was Wayne. Wayne found him, yeah, exactly--

"We met there," Eddie's gripping Steve's hair now, by the root. "We met back there. High school. Do you want to go back?

"Why would we go--"

Steve startles himself with the words, like they just-- like they weren't a choice to say, like they said themselves, like--

"Ed."

Breathing is tight. Steve sits up straight and looks at him. Scars on his face. Eyes so big and deep they hold endless histories--

"Eddie, do you want to go visit-- visit, uh, you know?"

"Why would we--" Eddie claps a hand over his mouth and hums out a sound of frightened discontent. "What. What the fuck."

"How did we meet, again?" Steve swallows. Eddie stands up, paces to the other side of the apartment.

"High school."

"How in high school?"

"Steve, I stopped taking those meds because they didn't help, but this isn't helping me not feel fucking certifiable either--"

"Eddie, I don't remember."

"Okay, so we're getting old!"

"We're not even middle aged!"

Eddie stops where he stands, shakes his head, and Steve watches him because it's easy to watch him, easy to look at the life they've lived and accept that they found each other, fell in love, because no one else gets what it's like to be fucked in the head. To know what's true and still feel wrong in that truth.

To believe it and still get lost in it.

Eddie clenches down on the tremble of his jaw and his eyes go big and imploring.

"What's happening, Stevie?"

There are explanations for all of it, but no one has ever been able to explain Max's pain or Nancy's sharp-shooting or Robin and Steve's inability to get drunk without losing it or the color of the paint in the Byers' old living room in that fucking town that Steve can't even think the name of--

"I'm calling Robin," he says, already striding across the floor. "I want to go back."

There are explanations.

Maybe that's not good enough anymore.

[angel-fics]

Better Later Than Never: Dalton Lambert x Reader

Summary: Chris takes you and her old roommate Dalton to a frat party and insists the three of you mess with their things. When you and Dalton nearly get caught, a misunderstanding puts Dalton into some hot water with his crush; you

Warnings: Dalton being an idiotic virgin. Chris is such a fucking instigator, I love her. Nick makes a dick-ish appearance. Fem!Reader is having a hard time being patient. As a result, we get ooc!Dalton who is suffering from acute horniness. Smut ensues. Sweet Dalton. Switch!Dalton, Switch!Reader. loss of virginity. first kisses. little bit of angst. fluffyyyyy. raw sex, wrap before you tap, folks. doggy-style. Riding. Oral (female and male receiving).

The party was loud to all of your senses. The booming bass of whatever shit song was playing made your skin feel like it was vibrating. The smells of sweat, weed, sex and the toxic fumes of axe body spray overwhelmed you and gave you a head ache. But Dalton was there, so you might as well have been dreaming.

Dalton Lambert was an art student and the former roommate of your current roommate, Chris. You and Chris didn’t have much in common but she was easy to get along with and was a great roommate. You were a history major who minored in the arts, and Chris…liked music.

She got in a situation with Dalton that involved his possessed body throwing her into a wall, and that’s how you found out that ghosts and demons and astral projection were all real things. And you and Dalton got along easily, enough for you to develop feelings for him over the months as Chris helped you bond through things she liked her friends to do with her.

Like parties, Chris liked parties. But not in the typical drinking-and-dancing-and-fucking way. Chris liked to go to parties to make fun of party people and rifle through their things. And she liked to drag you and Dalton along with her, at least until she lost track of you while doing something else.

Right now, for instance, was the perfect example. You and Dalton were awkwardly standing at the edge of the dance floor in the living room of a frat house while Chris nosied her way through the brothers’ bedrooms. Dalton looked beautiful under the colorful strobe lights, the flashing rainbows contrasting with intense shadows across his handsome features. You couldn’t stop glancing at him.

“I hate this. Hate it. Let’s leave,” Dalton grumbled deeply in your ear, his soft hair tickling your cheek as he shook his head in disdain.

You shivered lightly and disguised it as a laugh. “Happy to, as soon as we find Chris. We can’t leave her here by herself.”

“Fine, let’s look for her. And go.” Grabbing your hand, Dalton stomped his way upstairs with a look so venomous that people automatically parted to let the two of you pass.

You flushed, staring at your joined hands blankly, and nearly tripped trying to keep up with your friend. At the top of the landing, Dalton unfortunately let go of your hand and turned to face you.

“Let’s split up and look for her. And hope she hasn’t gotten herself in trouble,” Dalton ordered. You nodded and turned around, then the lights went out.

“ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT! GLOW IN THE DARKKKKKK. HOPE YOU’RE WEARING LIGHT COLORS,” came an echoing shout from downstairs. It sounded like Nick, much to your chagrin.

A body crashed into yours and long, thin fingers clutched at your waist and around your shoulder. The hand on your shoulder grazed your breast and you were about to elbow whatever skeeze was trying to coo a feel when you heard Dalton in your ear again.

“Y-Y/n,” Dalton whimpered. It wasn’t a question, but more of a sigh of relief. You wrapped your own fingers around his and squeezed them lightly to reassure him.

“Let’s look for Chris together and dip,” you offer, knowing he wouldn’t refuse. Dalton would go for any option that got him out of the dark the quickest. Even after his traumatic encounter in the Further, it seemed like he was even more afraid of the dark. Not that you blamed him.

You nodded and held onto his hand as you walked into the first bedroom that connected to another bedroom. Closing the door behind you so as to not draw unwanted attention, you and Dalton looked around in the mostly dark room for your eccentric mutual friend.

“Chris?! Chris! Let’s go,” Dalton hissed harshly into the room. When his demand was met with silence, you moved to the connecting room to look there.

“Chris? Listen, you’ve had your fun, but me and Dalton wanna leave. Can we just go?” Once again met with silence, you sighed in frustration and grabbed Dalton’s hand again to guide him back into the hallway.

Then the door started opening from the outside and you instinctively slammed it closed again. Dalton’s gaze shot to you in shock, pulling you closer to him protectively.

“Hey! What the hell? Who the fuck is in my room?!” Great…Nick the Dick.

“Fuck, again?” Dalton had a few run-ins with Nick, one of them resulting in what Chris called “A God Awful First Kiss, Oh My God, Dalton, I’m Still Sorry About That!” It was easy not to feel jealous about it, but you wished you could have the chance to kiss Dalton.

“This is why we don’t go to parties,” you muttered in annoyance.

“What do we do?” Nick was banging on the door and hollering in jest to his friends, yelling about catching someone in the act. Probably trying to humiliate the two of you into coming out.

“We got two options, fighting or fucking. Not real, obviously, but y���know…You choose.” You hoped he’d choose to kiss you, so you would know he’d actually want to before he did. It’s a subtle way to find out how he feels, or at least if he is attracted to you.

From what you could see in the dark, he stared at you blankly for a moment, each second had you panicking at the possibility of being caught. More voices of raucous frat boys got closer to the door.

“Dalton!”

“Uh, fight?! How would that even work?” His hands darted out towards you in the dark and pulled you in even closer in panic.

You tried to hide the crestfallen expression on your face with a witty smirk and hoped the dark hid your sudden wave of insecurity.

“Follow my lead.” You cleared your throat and approached the door. “OH, SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING PRICK! YOU ARE SUCH A SELFISH AND CONCEITED ASSHOLE! EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ABOUT YOU! NO! DON’T TELL TO BE QUIET, TYLER! I’M SO SICK OF YOU! IF YOU WON’T MEET MY NEEDS, I’LL FIND SOMEONE WHO WILL!”

You threw open the door and stormed out with a look of rage adorning your features. Dalton ran after you silently, quickly enough that the still dark and crowded hallway helped conceal your identities.

Once the two of you were safe from Nick and his cronies, you heard Dalton giggling behind you. “Holy shit, that was awesome! I could really believe that you were mad at me.”

Shame flooded you as you admitted to yourself that you had let a bit of your actual bitterness at his apparent rejection bitterness cloud your performance. You shrugged noncommittally as you dragged him downstairs.

All you want right now is to leave the stupid party and drown your sorrows with a pity party, some ice cream, and dancing to early 2000’s party music while alone in your room. And your bad mood worsens when you spot Chris, flirting with a sorority girl in the kitchen on the first floor.

You huff irritably and roll your eyes, pushing your way through the crowd carelessly. It takes you a minute to register that Dalton is still following you.

“Hey, let’s go back to your dorm. It’s not like you have anyone else to go back to,” Dalton jokes lightly as he keeps up with you easily, softly apologizing to all of the people you’re practically shoving aside.

“Sure, fine,” you shout back at him over the music, not bothering to look back at him as you start to grab your belongings that you’d hung up on the coat rack when you’d arrived.

Dalton grabs your upper arm as you shrug on your jacket. You whip around to look at him and try your school your features into something less angry. As upset as you are, it’s not his fault that he doesn’t share your feelings, it’s not like you’d even admitted anything to him anyways. He didn’t know how much his rejection had actually hurt you.

But he sensed something was up with you, you knew it. Dalton was the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, you always knew exactly what his intentions were by just the look on his face.

“What’s up with you? Why are you acting so weird?” His sad and confused puppy-dog eyes were enough to end wars in your opinion, but right now, his words lit a fire in your chest.

Then you got a text from Chris telling you that she was going to go home with some sorority girl, and to make a move on Dalton. Fuck, this night was going terrible. You sorta kinda maybe blew up at him, just a little. The music made it hard to carry the message without a little bit of yelling.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m standing in the middle of a party that I didn’t even want to go to. Surrounded by obnoxiously drunk people with music that’s so bad and so loud that it’s giving me a migraine. After nearly having to get caught in Nick the Dick’s room because Chris can’t keep her hands to herself. Literally. Because we went through that entire thing upstairs only for her to be down here the whole time flirting with some random chick. So I apologize for forgetting my manners for all of five fucking seconds and not being more polite when addressing you, Dalton.” Your chest was heaving by the end of your winded rant and you couldn’t tell if you were relieved or even more enraged that no one but Dalton seemed dazed by it.

He was staring at you again, puppy face in full effect. His lips parted then shut as he made to speak before thinking better of it. His eyes flickered all over your for a few seconds and you had to convince yourself that you were delusional, thinking that they had temporarily settled on your lips and boobs.

“I didn’t want to come either, why are you taking it out on me?” Turns out he wasn’t thinking better of it. Stupid puppy dog eyes tricked you. “I just wanted to know what was bothering you, like a good friend, and it doesn’t even seem like you want to be around me.”

You didn’t, not now, when your heart and ego had taken a huge hit from him, unbeknownst to him of course.

“Exactly, you didn’t want to come, I don’t know why you’re stopping us from leaving,” you countered, ignoring his last comments.

He exhaled sharply and shook his head, moving around you and opening the front door. You walked out with him and noticed that the both of you were headed in the same direction. Even if you both lived in the same dorm house, you’d assumed he wanted to go somewhere else on his own.

“Where are we going?”

“To your dorm? Duh. I figure you’ll be in a better mood once we get away from all of this crap,” he explains tiredly, chalking up your tantrum to an ill-timed venting session. You were thankful for it, but you weren’t about to say anything. It didn’t change that his assumption was wrong and you were secretly upset with him.

It would be hypocritical, seeing as you weren’t opposed to him spending the night in your dorm.

You hummed your assent and the walk continued on silently. Or at least, until Dalton slowed down to walk side by side with you, trying to “covertly” get your attention by pointedly staring at you.

“So…what’s new with you? Dating someone?” It was a weird question to ask and you had to trample down that small bit of hope that brightened within you. He’d made his side of things clear.

“If I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t be spending my Saturday night at a frat party of all places with you. I’d be with him and probably getting laid.” You cringed internally at the mention of sex and regretted adding that bit. It had been a really long time since you’d been satisfied by another person. Or yourself.

His face fell slightly and you knew he probably misinterpreted what you’d said. It did sound like an implication that you didn’t want to hang out with him. You tried to lighten the mood by amending your answer.

“If I had been at a party, snooping with my boyfriend, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kiss him to avoid being caught,” you joke with a salacious wink.

Dalton made another face, but it wasn’t as easy to tell what was going through his mind as he thought over what you said. But you could safely register that you hadn’t lightened the mood at all.

“Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Why wouldn’t you kiss your boyfriend in that situation?” Dalton stared ahead of you, at the path leading to your dorms as you both approached the building. He sounded more like he was talking to himself, though, and you didn’t know what to do to get rid of this heavy feeling that sat between you two.

Thoughts flooded you ranging from guilt to irritation to loneliness to frustration to lust…

“It just felt like you didn’t want to be around me back there. And I’ve never gotten that vibe from you before, so I just kinda assumed that maybe you had someone else you’d rather be hanging with.”

He opened the door for you and fixed you with a look so deep that it made you breathless trying to figure out what he was trying to say. It wasn’t like he felt the same way you did. Did he want you to get a boyfriend?

“C’mon Dalton, Id never prefer anyone’s company over you and Chris. Even if they wanted to do something I actually enjoyed over going to a frat party,” you assured him with a laugh. “Maybe I should get a boyfriend, though. It’s kinda sad I spend all of my free time with you and Chris.”

“Why?”

It was so simple. Just a singled word. But it floored you and you nearly fell off the stairs you were climbing. Luckily you made it to the second floor landing, Dalton’s floor. You had one more flight to go up before reaching your room. You paused as the possibilities of what you could say and what he was implying swirled about your mind before you could even try to control them.

“Because I want someone who doesn’t want me. And the best way to get over someone is to under someone else,” you replied honestly, not seeing a reason to beat around the bush.

“Why bother? Just find someone else that you already like and try going out with them. I mean, I’m right here,” he suggests so casually that you actually considered violence against him.

The muscles in your jaw ache from clenching as your words fall like bricks from between your teeth. “Maybe I considered that before. Maybe I’d hoped for it, every time I looked at you. But it sucks, because it’s kinda hard to date someone who won’t even kiss you.”

He opens his mouth to argue but you jab a harsh finger into his chest to stop him in his tracks. “No, I’m not done. You’ve had every opportunity. Not to respond to my lack of hints, I didn’t expect that much from you. But if you were interested, you would’ve made it known long before now. And even if you hadn’t, you had a chance delivered in your lap at that party. You could’ve kissed me, but no, you chose to have me make up an argument on the spot just to avoid it. So whoops! My fucking bad for not considering you as the perfect candidate.”

He doesn’t look confused anymore. Or sad. He doesn’t even look embarrassed or defensive, like most guys in his position would’ve reacted. He looks enraged and offended.

“Do you seriously think that low of me? That I’d seriously want to kiss you for the first time to avoid Nick. That I’d waste that opportunity like that! For Nick?!” He wasn’t being loud, but his words still echoed in your ears as he got all up in your face. He glowered down at you, his blue eyes enflamed.

“You want the truth? If I had chosen to kiss you, I wouldn’t have been able to stop,” he admitted, still angry, but a lot quieter. Vulnerable.

You softened, just slightly. It was hard for you, too, to be open with him about this. I mean, look what happened as a result of you trying to be. Still, you could feel the tension and frustration filling the air, and just because it was hard for him to say the words, doesn’t mean that he hadn’t said them. He wanted to make a big deal about resisting the temptation, you were going to make him regret that.

“Dalton,” you began, stepping so close to him that breathing a certain way would’ve pressed your chest into his. “If you had let me kiss you, you wouldn’t even have clothes on right now, Nick’s room be damned.”

He sucked in a harsh breath, his pupils dilating drastically. “My room’s closer. Let’s go watch a movie.”

For some reason, that has absolutely nothing to do with your aversion to vulnerability, this ticked you off. Your fury was reignited. Did he seriously think admitting to wanting to kiss you once would abate the months you spent pining after him? He literally rejected you, then pulled some sentimental crap to try to make up for it. Only to suggest Netflix and Chill. All men were the same.

You ignored the small voice in your head telling you that your precious virgin Dalton had never had sex, or been remotely intimate with a woman before. You ignored the fact that from how well you knew Dalton, he had no idea what sexual tension was and was simply trying to defuse the situation until he could get himself under control. So, you lashed out, because the sexual tension and anger felt safer. You didn’t want to go back to normal. You wanted him to do something. Anything.

“Fuck you. I’m not some skank who’ll screw you just because you invite me in for a movie. If I wanted a one-night stand, I could do better than you,” you hiss at him angrily before backing away from him. “As a matter of fact, I think that party is still kicking. I’ll go find someone there. I know Nick is probably desperate enough to show me a good time.”

You turned away and managed to make down to steps before Dalton displayed a rather impressive amount of strength and yanked back up into him, your back colliding with his chest.

Dalton reaches up to pull your hair across the back of your neck before leaning down to press his lips to your ear. “If you want a one-night stand, that’s fine. But don’t think for a second that that’s why I’m inviting you in. If you go into my room, you aren’t coming out when the night is over.”

Fuck that was hot. The universe must have speeded up the plot of this chapter for you, because how the hell did he do a complete one-eighty in the blink of an eye like that? You could feel the heat of his body soaking into yours and resisted the urge to lean into it. You refused to make this easy for him.

“What exactly are you offering that I can’t get from someone else? Someone that wants me more and is willing to show it. I don’t want it to be a fight every time between us because you can’t give me what I want until I’m begging.”

He pulls you away from the steps and presses your front against the wall. You are seriously debating whether or not you think he’s drunk right now. Normally, Dalton is never this upfront or confident. You liked it a lot and hoped it wasn’t some show.

“I like you begging, it turns me on,” he whispers while his face is tucked between your shoulder and neck. You feel yourself heating up for an entirely different reason as you feel his hips pressed into your ass. “But I promise to fulfill all your needs, every time.”

You laughed mockingly. “Oh? You can try, but I doubt you could really satisfy me without my help,” you taunted. Virgin men were usually cocky, having false ideations of skill and stamina. They usually disappointed, and you refused to indulge those ideations. But you weren’t looking for a quick fuck with Dalton, and you were happy to train him.

“Sex is a two way road, of course I’ll need your help,” Dalton his lips brushing your skin reverently, his tongue licking the flushed flesh in short and heated bursts. You moan, turned on even more by both his actions and his admittance. You were genuinely impressed, but it was getting gradually more and more difficult to focus.

You grab his hands and move them to your hips, pushing off the wall and further into Dalton. He whimpered, the sound reverberating in your ear and you slowly guided you both down the hallway backwards.

Dalton got the message and aimed himself towards his own dorm door. Miraculously, you two made it without having to separate and without falling over or tripping. The whole way hand Dalton exploring your torso without ever going too far up or down. His fingers played with the edge of your shirt and his face remained burrowed in your shoulder.

You hummed in discontent as he removed a hand to open the door as the other gripped your waist for balance. You lifted a hand to grip the hair at the crown of his head and keep his mouth tethered to you.

Finally in the privacy of his room, you turned and walked him to his bed, straddling his lap as soon as his knees buckled. You lean in for a kiss just as he’s adjusting his position under your weight and his chin hits your teeth painfully.

“Ah! Fuck,” You hiss with a wince. You lean away and you run your tongue over your top teeth to check for blood.

“Shit, sorry!” Dalton’s hands come up to cradle your face and check for a busted lip or potential bruising.

“It’s fine…” An awkward air ruins the mood a bit and you chuckle nervously as the unpleasant tension set in.

“I acted like such an idiot,” Dalton groans, burying his face in your neck again, only this time in embarrassment. “Acting all big shit. Like I actually knew what I was doing.”

“So you’re happy that you slammed your hard head into my face?” You tease, running your fingers through his hair.

“God, no! And it was totally your fault, you were all over me,” he denies with a laugh, pulling you closer and hugging your body to his.

You scoff and use your hand in his hair to yank his head away from your throat. He groans but complies easily enough and meets your gaze head on and without hesitation.

“I have feelings for you. More than just having a crush or being attracted to you. I wanna be with you, in all ways,” he whispers, the dark stillness of his dorm carrying the words and holding them between your bodies.

Dalton’s big blue eyes seem so clear to you in the low light; earnest and enamored. His fingers twitch against your back and you wonder if he’s trying to pull you closer or push you away to avoid your rejection.

You quickly quell his insecurities before they have time to fester and pull him in for a desperate kiss. Realizing it’s the first kiss you’ve shared, you slow down, enjoying the feeling of his inexperienced lips pressing against yours.

“I adore you.” You say simply, whispering just as he did. Your lips brush with the three words and he leans in a little closer with each one.

Dalton initiates the next kiss, eager and happy, his lips pulled up in a smile against you. His hands settles in the locks of hair behind your ears to drag you further into the kiss. Your own hands move to his shirt, wrinkling the soft fabric and gasping into Dalton’s mouth.

He grabs your hands and removes them from his shirt, using the freedom to remove the garment altogether. His hands don’t stop there, though, and you quickly find yourself topless and breathing hard from your perch in his lap.

You push him down on his back into the mattress and cover his body with your own, kissing and licking at the exposed skin. As you go lower, you come to find that Dalton is quite loud when aroused.

“Please! Please, please, please…” His begging trails off in favor of gasping moans as you begin undoing his pants.

“How far have you gone, Dal?” The only sounds in the room are the sounds of his heavy breathing and the rustling of clothes as you pull his pants down.

His boxers hide an impressive tent and you quickly relieve him of that particular burden as well. Dalton’s hands clawed at the covers of his bed, his eyes silted and watching you.

“N-no, nothing. Chris kissed me at a party once to distract Nick,” he breathed in a rush, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth as his dick slapped against his stomach.

God, it was pretty. Seeing as it didn’t get a lot of action, Dalton didn’t do the best job with maintenance, but it didn’t look gross or dirty, just unkempt. Circumcised with thick veins running along the sides, his cock made your mouth water.

You can see why he didn’t want to kiss you at that party, the similarities making you huff a chuckle to yourself. You blew a cold breath onto the head of his cock and watched his abs tense up.

“Please, baby, please. Anything!” He rose up on his elbows and fixed you with a needy stare. You flushed at the attention and focus on his erection, using his arousal for you as a means to ground yourself.

You use the influx of saliva in your mouth to lubricate his length, licking a long stripe from the base. Dalton released a long sigh of relief that ended with a whine.

You wrap your lips around the head and hallow your cheeks. Dalton cries out and his hands fly from his sheets to your head. You’re not sure if he’s trying to pry you off of him or keep you where you are.

His hips raise slightly off the bed, pushing his cock further into your mouth. You decide he’s trying to keep you there. Now that you’re paying more attention to him rather than his genitals, you can hear that he’s muttering to himself. At least, it’s too quiet for you to assume he’s trying to actually talk to you.

“So wet…so good…fuck yes…please…” Most of what he was saying was unintelligible and he kept cutting himself off with moans.

Smirking around his cock, you take all of him down your throat at once. Dalton’s eyes fly open and he shoots up, accidentally pushing you even further onto him, your nose flush with his pelvis.

Dalton’s making a weird face, a cross between pain and pleasure, and he pushes you off of him. Bracing himself against your shoulders, he takes slow and deep breaths for several moments.

“Why’d you stop me?” Your voice is slightly hoarse from the unexpected deep-throating, but you’re grinning up at him like he’s the second coming of Christ.

“I didn’t want to be done yet,” he murmurs once he’s calmed himself down.

You laughed and stood from your position to kiss him soundly. He pulled you back on top of him before rolling you onto your back, kissing your shoulders and chest much in the same way you did, and traveling lower.

“Dalton, you don’t have to. We can do more next time. I need you now!” What you said was partially true, but another part was that you didn’t want to waste time taking him through it. At least not right now.

“Just wan’ a taste. Wanna taste. Real quick. Wanna taste you, baby,” He tells you between biting kisses. Your skirt is pulled off, his nails leaving red trails down your hips and thighs.

His thumbs and forefingers are spreading your folds and you choke on air as Dalton licks a bold stripe down your labia. You jolt in place and your hips rut off the bed as he does it again. And once more. And one more time. It’s so simple, no technique or maneuvering, just licks. Enough to stimulate, but not enough to get you anywhere near completion. It’s like he’s torturing you.

“Fuck! When we’re done, I’m gonna pin you down and have at you for hours. Gonna fill myself with you. Gonna make you cum all over my face.” He stops licking to leave sucking kisses. First on your folds and somewhere he may have thought was your clit, then to your thighs and up your stomach.

“And I’ll tell you exactly how to do it right. But I really want something bigger than your tongue in me right now,” you urge, wrapping a leg around his hip.

He nods and grabs a pillow under your hips, impressing you further. You make an approving face at him, kissing him deeply. He moans into the kiss as he begins entering you.

You break the kiss and toss your head back in a whine, your back arching off the bed and pushing your chest into his. Dalton latches onto your nipple, the extra stimulation causing your hips to thrust up against his and your pussy sucking him in the rest of the way.

Dalton’s initial pace was shaky and unsure. He was struggling between what felt best to him and what he thought might feel good to you. His hands fluttered along your flesh, going from light caresses to harsh groping whenever a thrust felt particularly good to him.

His eyes kept flashing to yours in questioning, then looking away in embarrassment. Warmth filled you at the effort he was putting into making his first time good for you. You just wanted him to cum inside you, you just wanted him to enjoy it fully.

You placed your hands on his shoulders and pushed lightly. Dalton immediately pulled out of you and sat back on his knees.

“What’s wrong? Did I hurt you? Does it not feel good?” He starts rambling, his insecurity shining through. He’s grabbing a blanket and trying to wrap you in it when you stop him by grabbing hands.

“Are you enjoying this, Dalton?” You ask, pushing your own body up and pressing yourself into him. He wraps his arms around you and breathes a sigh of relief seeing as you weren’t rejecting him.

“God yes, just want to make you feel good,” he replies in your ear. His hands are going up and down your back and you can feel him, hot and hard, against the cushioning of your stomach.

“This isn’t just a one-time fling, Dalton. But it is your first time, I wan this to be about you,” you assure him, cradling his handsome face in your hands. His long hair is missed sound his head, the soft and minimal lighting making it shine like a halo.

“How can I feel good if you don’t?” He questions with a look so innocent that you could’ve been fooled into thinking he wasn’t talking about sex.

“I am feeling good, Dalton. But this time is all about you,” you push, widening your eyes at him comically for dramatic effect.

“I wanna make you cum. I want you moaning, loudly. I want you all over me for the rest of my life,” he reiterates, leaving a trail of kisses along your shoulder.

You shiver and moan at his words, pulling away from him and turning around, bending over on your hands and knees.

“You wanna make us both feel good? Fuck me like this,” you demand, peering at him from over your shoulder.

Dalton is slack-jawed and staring at you in awe. In less than a second later, he’s pouncing on top of you and layering his body over you like a second skin. The sounds leaving his mouth are loud and plentiful as he entered you for the second time.

You can also hear the slapping of his hips and balls against your ass and the slickness of your cunt as he pounded into you. You couldn’t tell the difference between your moans and his as he fucked into you deeper. You thrusted back against him, crying out into his ear and encouraging him.

“Fuck, Dalton! Yes! Just like that! Doing so good for me! Yes! Fuck! Yes!”

His fingers curled around your hips as he forced you to accommodate the grinding of his hips into yours. His movements were leagues more confident, and desperate. He was chasing his and yours releases, fucking into you wildly.

“You feel…amazing! Love this tight pussy! Warm and wet and…sooo fucking good for me! Gonna fuck you every day, fill you up. Everyone’s gonna know you’re mine now, they’re gonna know how much you want me!” He growled, thrusting into you harder.

You knew he was close, his movements becoming jerky and out of pace. You were getting close, too, much to your surprise. You could feel that coil stretching within you. And you knew just the thing to snap it.

“I want you, Dalton! Want you so bad! Need you! Cum inside me, right now! Please! No one makes me wet like you, Dalton. Ooh, I’m about to cum,” you yell, reaching down to rub your clit in time with every pass of his cock within you.

It takes four harsh pumps of his hips for him to cum and the rubber band snaps as his warmth fills you to the brim. You see white as your orgasm washes over you and sends you reeling over that sweet edge in pleasure.

Dalton rolls off of you and pulls you over him, reaching up to turn on his fan. The coolness feels nice against your sweaty skin and you can feel his cum dripping down your thigh. It feel gross but you don’t want to ruin the moment.

Luckily, Dalton jolted out of bed unexpectedly and jumbled his way to a stack of wash clothes. Wetting one with a water bottle, he cleans you up and hands you the bottle to drink from.

You giggle at his treatment and snuggle into his side, excited to wake up as Dalton Lambert’s girlfriend.

******

Oh my fucking god, I know the ending sucked, I promise. I ran away from a toxic household a couple of weeks ago but I’ve had this in my drafts for nearly a month and needed to finish it. Not only am I answering a poll, but I’m celebrating 100 followers!

Im so excited and grateful with this achievement and I hope to get into the flow of writing more often now that I’m adjusting to my new living situation. Please, feel free to send requests and interact with my posts

Like, share and reblog please, love y’all and I hope y’all enjoy!

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

“The updates are making me like Idia more, but in the same way you'd like a character for being pathetic” I’m shocked you didn’t like Idia at least from what I remember? He’s basically the same as Rollo (a character you do like I think) and in more ways than one. They’re both gloomy looking guys and traumatized big bros that are self righteous and pathetic. What kept you from liking Idia before if you don’t mind me asking?

[Referencing something I said in this post!]

Okay, confession time: when I was a little kid (I’m talking like 7-10 years old), I was SUPER into Greek mythology and more specifically the story of Hades and Persephone. I ate up ALL the Hades and Persephone retellings/reinterpretations I could find and actively hunted for more 💀 so you’d think I’d like Idia, who is twisted from Hades, given how I gravitated to Octavinelle because of my attachment to The Little Mermaid in my childhood…

I think what puts me off of Idia in spite of his similarities to Rollo, a character I do really love, is a combination of Idia's appearance and his attitude.

To tackle the shallower aspect first, I actually don't like characters that look "too" gloomy. I would say Rollo is stoic-looking, but not gloomy? He has a pretty neutral face most of the time and the only gloomy thing about him at a glance is the dark circles under his eyes. With Idia... There's a LOT going on here. The hair is definitely unique, but I've never been into super long hair. The nature of it kind of overshadows his face and Idia usually looks miserable as a default. I've mentioned before that I'm unnerved by his coloration too; the super pale skin plus the blue lips is reminiscent of a corpse and, well... while I do see there being an audience that finds him beautiful, I don't think that's a cute look for him.

Now, his attitude. I'm not going to fault Idia for being passionate about his hobbies, as we all have our niches that we're super into. What irks me is how Idia expresses himself and acts out on behalf of those interests. He talks down to people who "don't get it" and takes other measures to defend the things he likes that I think is crossing a line. For example, he tracks down the IP addresses of Ignihyde mob students that defaced his favorite idol group's website. In the EN version, Idia threatens to doxx the mobs too (though he never does, this was just a localization decision). Yeah, you could do that I guess... but should you? 😭 The other characters also do questionable things (as a J word fan, I cannot deny this) but those actions are usually so outlandish no one irl would do it (like how Azul is a high school student that runs his own shady business). Idia's behavior, meanwhile, embodies some very real and very toxic aspects of fandom culture. I think part of why I disliked Idia at first is also his manner of speaking; it's riddled with so much internet lingo that it's hard to take him seriously sometimes. This is even more true of the EN version of the game, which has added even more slang than was in JP. Like... sorry, am I NOT supposed to be giggling when OB Idia is making threats while talking like an enraged gamer (both in EN and JP)? There is a ceiling on how much pathetic I can take in one sitting, and Idia far exceeds it every time he talks. Other characters (like Rollo making cheesy villain speeches, Azul being teased, Jamil's DOKKAN, etc.) have their moments of funny ha ha-cringe as well, but at least I can still see them in a serious light.

Books 6 and 7 are enhancing my opinion of Idia solely because they focus on the "traumatized big brother" part to his character. In Glorious Masquerade too... Idia gets the courage to call Rollo out because he knows their experiences are so similar. I think the storyline was done very well, and I loved seeing how Idia grows from an event that no doubt affected him deeply and still continues to influence him to this day. It's clear that he cares deeply about both Orthos and will step up to protect them. I LOVE THAT FOR HIM, it's not as though Idia is completely throwing aside one brother for the other, he's acknowledging them both as his "true" brothers. The way he goes from laughing to crying in his post-OB flashback... Idia getting so mad at us attacking Phantom Ortho with lightning... the willingness to "go" with OG!Ortho to the world beyond... apologizing to Robo!Ortho for falling for the dream's promises of eternal happiness... Aaaah, it's just too good 😭

DIHLBASOFYIAYVYEBfsWPYWPF WHAT CAN I SAY... I like me a reliable onii-san character 🤡 I'M NOTHING IF NOT PREDICTABLE