#with this new weird girl whom she's sure has some connection to the lab and Nancy must prove her theory despite having no proof

[the-lark-ascending69]

Lab kid Robin who was thought to be dead by the lab at age 15 during an experiment gone wrong and was "discarded" and then found by the russians. They couldn't quite make their own supernatural kids but they might as well "recycle" this one. They had to compete with the other american kid somehow.

So they kinda brainwash her and send her to the school so she can get closer to the gang and try to kill El.

Accidentally getting adopted by Joyce Byers was not part of the plan but she's not complaining.

[windofderange]

Let’s talk about gender in Stranger Things 2!

So there’s a bunch of stuff happening in my life and I keep meaning to post something about that, but it’s serious and scary and stuff, so instead, I’m going to ramble a while about why I really love some of the subtle gender role reversals in season 2 of Stranger Things!  Like a normal, well-adjusted person!

Also, no major spoilers ahead, but I will talk about things that happened in Season 2, so if you want to come to it totally fresh, please skip this.

So I’m still a little sad that there’s no queer representation in this show.  Yes, I know it takes place in the 80s and queer people hadn’t been invented yet, but still.  (I was SOOO hoping that the big reveal at the dance would be that Dustin was building himself up to ask Will to dance, but I guess that probably would have been genuinely too much for an 80s middle school to handle.)  However, despite that, I was actually really impressed by some of the smaller ways the story undercut traditional gender stereotypes this season, and some of the improvements to how the girl and women characters were written.

That’s not to say that I thought they were poorly written last season - I just thought they were a lot more one-dimensional.  Emotional mother.  Brainy, goody-two-shoes girl exploring her sexuality.  Even Eleven, who was by far the female character with whom we spent the most time, was sort of scattered - the writers clearly couldn’t decide how unaware of the world she should be, and in turn, what things about gender she should care about (ie, she didn’t know what ‘pretty’ meant, but she still wanted to be it), a problem I don’t think they’ve entirely corrected (more on that in a sec).  The male characters were similarly archetypal - the drunk, broken-down town sheriff, the maniacal scientist, the lovesick teen, etc.

This season, I feel like the characters all got a lot more flushed out, but more than that, the way they did so also made some really interesting choices about gender and gender roles.  Also, I’m occasionally going to refer to the characters as sets because that how some of the storylines run - the adults (Joyce, Hopper, and Bob), the teens (Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Billy), and the kids (Eleven, Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Max).

1. Joyce and Bob: Okay, so I know I’m apparently the only person in the universe who doesn’t ship Joyce and Hopper, but I loved Joyce and Bob.  Bob is a ‘beta male’ - he’s fat, short, into electronics, likes Kenny Loggins, makes corny jokes, and is too much of a scaredy-cat to watch scary movies.  However, it’s made immediately clear that Joyce isn’t just dating him because she needs a man or in order to fill some hole in her life - the first scene we see of them is the two of them adorably flirting, and then hard-core making out.  Bob is also consistently shown to be the less driven of the pair (a theme that will actually come up a lot in this post).  Joyce is a fighter.  It’s an important aspect of Joyce’s character, one that was established last season, but in the context of her frantically fighting to get her son back.  In the grand tradition of the Aliens franchise and Poltergeist, Stranger Things holds that mothers are the toughest fighters, and this season makes it clear that that’s always been true of Joyce Byers - it wasn’t just the panic of losing Will that drove her; she’s always been like this.  Bob knew her in high school, and makes it clear that he’s always admired her for it.  However, the story doesn’t present Bob as emasculated (a term I hate!) - he’s jazzed as all hell to finally be dating Joyce Byers!  

In setting up their relationship in these terms, the story gives us something we don’t often see - Bob is a boy-gal Friday.  In fact, he’s Joyce’s boy-gal Friday.  He’s competent, with a complementary skill set; he’s valuable, and Joyce clearly values him, and he makes a lot of connections and discoveries on his own, but he’s not capable of turning those connections into actions that drive the plot forward until he turns them over to Joyce.  And he’s perfectly happy in his role - even when he shows up in her house covered in Will’s bizarre tunnel drawing and is told he can’t ask questions, he’s clearly having the time of his life, solving a cool puzzle with a woman he loves.  Like every gal Friday, he can’t conceive of a world in which he could be the protagonist - he’s a superhero, but he’s not the Hero.  That’s Joyce

2. Hopper and Eleven: Off the bat, I have to admit that I think the writers are still doing the worst with Eleven when it comes to writing gender, just because they have the most room to play with and they’re not making use of it.  There’s no reason for Ele to have a concept of gender performance - she’s a lab rat. We know that the mad scientist raised her to think of him as her ��Papa” (whether he was biologically or not), but we’re given no evidence that she had any concept of being his “daughter” or a “girl.”  Again, I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s part of the reason I actually really liked the episode with her and Eight (also because I’m a sucker for a coming of age story) because I think pairing her gender development with the punk scene is a potentially brilliant way to play with some of these ideas in a culturally-contemporary way (since gender non-conformity was a big part of punk), and it’s something I really hope the writers come back to next season.

That being said, I did really enjoy the relationship between Ele and Hopper, and in particular, the fact that Hopper is clearly raising a kid, not a girl.  We never see Hopper force any gender norms on Ele (even though he had a daughter of his own and could potentially have those kinds of expectations for her), we see them sharing in not traditionally feminine things (building traps, eating garbage, watching scary movies - all things dads usually do with their sons in movies and TV), and even though it’s clear that Hopper knows about Mike’s and Ele’s feelings for each other, we never get any weird matchmaking or overbearing overprotectiveness from him - his overprotectiveness of Ele is always about keeping her safe from Hawkins, not keeping her away from boys.  He even embraces her “bitchin’” new look, but clearly also helps her get ready for the dance.

3. Mad Max and the AV Club: So I love Max.  I love Max so much.  And I still love the AV Club.  I do get the point of articles like this one that part of the nostalgia of Stranger Things is a nostalgia for nerds who are actually bullied and oppressed, but I think that’s over-simplifying things.  To start with, Lucas is black, and this season they finally managed to engage with that a little, in the same way they managed to engage with Dustin’s disability a little last season.  Also, I think the way that the AV club’s masculinity is presented is important.  This is not the adorkable misogyny of the Big Bang Theory.  They are not traditionally masculine and they are absolutely fighters, and those two things are never presented as being in conflict in any way.  Indeed, the constant references to D&D, including their own nickname for their group as “the party,” sort of reaffirms this - for people who know the game, they know you need a balanced party.  You don’t want all muscles, or all magic, or all rogues.  In many ways, Will becomes the ultimate symbol of this in Season 2 - he is absolutely a soft boy (Hopper even asks if he’s gay in Season 1, to which Joyce rightly replies, “why would that matter?!”), and yet, he is both the major villain AND the one fighting hardest against that villain in this season.  His strength to fight the mind flayer stems from his nontraditional masculinity - from his art, and ultimately, from his empathy, being kept in control of his body by the stories of love and affection from his mother, brother, and best friend.

Max is similarly nontraditional - we’re introduced to her by the traditional nerd trope of “girls don’t play video games!,” “girls don’t skateboard!;” however, if we’re really supposed to read the AV club as models for nerd culture, then the important element surely comes in their immediate reversal in meeting Max and seeing that she does indeed play video games and skateboard.  Not only do they not gatekeep or question her love of these things, they are immediately more impressed by her because of them.  They want to be friends with her because she’s a girl who skateboards and plays video games, and it’s clear that this is the root of Dustin’s and Lucas’ attraction to her, as well.  Even Mike’s resistance to bringing her into the party is never presented as her being a girl or a “fake gamer girl” - the show does a good job of showing that he doesn’t like having her around because she can’t know about Ele, and that having her there without knowing means that things are moving on and the others might move on, as well.  As soon as Lucas spills the beans and Max is fully on board, Mike’s resistance disappears.

4. Nancy and Jonathan: So I think the teens’ stories are where Stranger Things does the best with undercutting gender roles because these stories are so ingrained and so formulaic normally.  These are also the ones that I noticed the most while watching it.  Also, full disclosure - I don’t really ship Nancy with anyone, and was sort of disappointed that last season had a teen girl, two love interests, love triangle story line.  However, I do think the lovestory between Nancy and Jonathan has some of the best gender reversals.  To start with, Nancy is absolutely the Protagonist of their story.  Nancy causes everything to happen in their story.  It’s her acts that inadvertently bring them together (by getting drunk), but she decides that they’re going to do something to get justice for Barb, she takes them to find the journalist, she comes up with the plan to blackmail Hawkins.  Even in the scenes of them getting together, we see her sitting up in bed, trying to decide what to do.  She goes to the door, and Jonathan is there.  All of the focus is on her as the decision maker.

This role reversal comes to a head in the final showdown with the mind flayer.  I loved the call back to the last season when Hopper asked Jonathan if he could shoot a gun, and Nancy took it instead - they had already established that she was the better shot, and again, this scene wasn’t presented as her emasculating Jonathan in any way (and Hopper doesn’t hesitate for a second in handing over the riffle) - it’s clearly just that their lives are at stake, and of the pair, she’s the better shot. But the best is the scene in the cabin - this could have so easily been the teary-eyed girlfriend hanging off her stoic boyfriend (which, to be fair, was a lot of how Jonathan was written last season).  Instead, we got Joyce, raging and holding down her son, who was clearly in pain, as Jonathan screamed hysterically and cried, trying to stop her, being held back and finally comforted by Nancy.

Let me be clear - this scene only makes sense this way, given what we know about these characters.  Joyce is driven and direct - she’s going to make a plan and stick to it, come Hell or high water.  Jonathan has already been shown to be way too invested in Will and his well-being, and it seems completely believable by now that he would even fight his mother if he thought Will’s life was in the balance.  Nancy is an outsider - she’s not family, and her concern is mostly for Jonathan.  However, even as exciting as this scene was, I couldn’t help but step out of it a bit as I was watching it and realize how weird it was to see a young man portrayed as hysterical, rallying against a woman with a plan, and then being comforted by another woman, who was relatively calm and unaffected.  It works so much better this way, but there are so many show where this scene would have had Nancy freaking out for no other reason than because women are hysterical.

5. Steve: Oh, Steve. heart eyes  I am so in love with Steve after this season.  Obviously Stranger Things is a show that loves its parallels, and Steve’s stories move increasingly into roles played by women in the original as the season goes on.  The initial story with him and Dustin have parallels to Stand By Me and Gremlins, but by the big showdown with the mind flayer, Steve opens embraces his role as “the babysitter,” a role that actually has some decent echoes in 80s movies - Adventures in Babysitting would be the obvious, but Steve’s role in the group also directly parallels Mary Plimpton’s character in the Goonies, as the third wheel to the big brother and girlfriend (except in this case, those two had buggered off to go do The Omen instead), who also delivers the incredibly quotable line, “I feel like I’m babysitting, only I’m not getting paid.”

However, again, we’re not given any hint that Steve has any problems with his new role.  After the rest of the adults and teens leave, he directly parallels Mr. Mom, the movie the Byers were watching earlier, wearing an apron and slinging a kitchen towel over his shoulder after doing the washing up.  But whereas the entire premise of that movie is how embarrassed Michael Keaton’s character feels to be a stay-at-home dad and how bad he is at household tasks, Steve seems genuinely proud of himself for tidying up the Byers house, and proud to serve as guiding voice to the remaining kids left in his care.  Even his use of a traditionally-masculine sports metaphor to explain why they have to stay put reaffirms how much he’s internalized his role - he clearly means for it to be rally speech, as he’s presumably delivered to his teammates, and he shows his own confusion when it concludes with, “and that’s why we’re on the bench.”

The episode briefly looks as though it’s going to offer Steve a redeemingly masculine role of protector with the arrival of Billy, Max’s big brother.  We get some macho posturing and a fist fight, and although Steve does get to come to Lucas’ rescue, he’s still soundly trounced by Billy. Again, this is completely in keeping with the characters - we’ve already seen that Billy isn’t just up for a fight, but abusive and dangerously violent.  However, it’s Max, the only girl in the room, who puts down Billy, again in a series of gender undercuts - first, she beats him subversively by drugging him (poison being a woman’s weapon and all that), but then, in another reversal, she takes the opportunity as he’s weakened and blacking out to threaten him with Steve’s baseball bat, extracting protection for her and the AV club using the same oath as we’ve seen used previously by Billy’s abusive father.  The rest of the episode is clearly The Goonies, with Steve-as-Mary-Plimpton and the kids running around underground, and Steve reiterating that he’s there because he’ll be held responsible if anything happens to them.

Even in the final denouement at the dance, Steve gets the same final appearance as Joyce and Hopper, the other two caregivers, dropping off his ‘kid’ and driving away.  (Interestingly, of the teens and adults, only Nancy gets a denouement at the dance - Jonathan is also there, but just gets to smile and wave from the sidelines, the same ending as basically every supporting girlfriend from every teen movie, again highlighting that it’s Nancy who is the Protagonist.)

So why do I care about all of this?  Well, one of my biggest frustrations with a lot of TV and films is that I feel like writers still suck at writing women - in particular, women as protagonists.  It seems like way too many writers can’t understand how women can make choices that drive the story forward, and that means way too many stories fall back on traditional tropes where women are the backups and support.  It’s cool to see so many of those tropes not only avoided, but directly reversed, and so effectively.  Bob, Jonathan, Steve, and the AV club are cool, interesting, likable characters.  They’re not diminished by not being the protagonists, or not being traditionally masculine.  Like I said, I would love to see the writers do more with Ele because there is so much opportunity there for a truly agender character, which is something else sorely missing from modern TV, but I also hope they continue to present women who are ambitious and driven, and men who are emotional and empathetic because it’s super cool to finally get those kinds of stories.

[florchis]

I'd love to hear more about your demisexual Fitz headcanon because the more I think about it, the more I love it. Like, do you think Fitz knows he's demisexual? Is he out to anyone? Give me all your theories! :-)

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. I never knew I had so many *ideas* about this until I started writing it. For some reason this ended up being a re-telling of the canon-Fitzsimmons storyline with demisexual Fitz? To be honest, I think I didn’t change the story much, but it still was so important for me to tell.

{Mentions of both of them being with other people, mentions of both of them being bi, mentions of Will Daniels, a lot of discussions of sex, but nothing explicit.}

Growing up, Fitz knew that he wasn’t much into girls like his classmates were, which led him to a small sexuality crisis, like, was he gay??? He finally decided that probably not, because he didn’t care much about boys either (the discovery of his biromanticism came later in life), he was just Weird Like That, and too busy building things and getting a PhD at fifteen to pay much attention to people.

Then he met Simmons at the Academy, and Simmons was still a genius, still his own age and still fanning herself over people?? Like he couldn’t process it? Again, he assumed his lack of interest became from His General Weirdness and from his “it’s not like anybody would give me the time of day, anyway” belief.

Simmons talks about sex all the time. Like. All. The. Time. Not in much detail, but since she is bored by people that is not him, she usually has a lot of comments to share. “I kept him longer than usual because he is not that bad in bed” and “If he put the same effort into giving oral that he puts into trying to get me to give him oral, maybe he wouldn’t be half bad”. Fitz is baffled by this. Like, not disgusted, but for him sex is a thing that exists in a plane outside of reality. One of that kind of things that your parents tell you “You will understand it when you are older.” But apparently he is old enough now- because Simmons is-, and still he is not getting it?

Just before they graduate from the Academy, he decides that he has to know what is all the fuss about. It’s not a decision made out of desire, it’s not something his gut is telling him to do, it’s a very conscious, intellectual decision. He is a scientist, and scientists ought to try things before drawing a conclusion.

He picks a Nice Girl, one that is a freshman and therefore doesn’t know much about his weird reputation, but still one or two years older than him. He takes her out, does all the expected things, or so he imagines. When she invites him into her dorm room, he says yes.

It is… an okay experience, but nothing to write home about. He still doesn’t get it. He can get as much physical satisfaction by jerking off and way more emotional satisfaction during a night in with Simmons.

During they stay at SciOps, Simmons sets him up a couple of times with female co-workers. Fitz goes out obediently with all of them, but never asks them for a second date, and just barely kisses them goodnight. He doesn’t connect with them as much as he connects with Simmons, and then what is the point in getting physical with them? He barely has enough free time as it is to add up another thing to the list.

After the fifth lukewarm date, Simmons confronts him.

“Are you gay, Fitz?”

“No. I mean, it doesn’t make much difference to me, a man or a woman. I am just not interested in them, okay, Simmons?”

“Don’t you get sexually frustrated?”

“… should I?”

“… Fitz, are you asexual?”

“I’m not repulsed by sex!”

“You don’t have to be repulsed by sex to be asexual, silly. Let’s look it up.”

They look it up. Simmons redirects him to tons of webpages, forums, personal blogs. Always the biologist, she is the one more interested in Putting Things Into Categories. Always the engineer, he only cares if Things Works, and they don’t need to have a label to work.

“Okay, but don’t you find Amy hot?”

“I find her aesthetically pleasing, if that is what you mean.”

“… and what about the Doctor?”

“Well, he sure is a sight for sore eyes.”

“I will just say it very crudely: wouldn’t you bang one or either of them if you had the opportunity?”

“No, why would I?”

(He has sex dreams about Simmons from time to time, but that is normal, yes? To have sex dreams about someone with whom you are close, about whom you care very deeply? He refuses to acknowledge that sometimes those “sex dreams” are not “dreams” at all, because he is fully awake during them.)

He tells Simmons that her research is dope, but that it doesn’t feel quite right, that he is just Weird and they should leave it at that. He doesn’t tell her why.

He still wigmans for her from time to time, but always comes home alone.

“Don’t you get lonely, though?”

“How could I, when I have you?”

“You are absolutely right.”

Right before they are assigned to the Bus, Simmons is courting this legs-for-forever-ballet-dancer during a night out, and Fitz gets stuck with her brother. They hit it off quickly, talking about football (real football) and engines. They end up making out heavily in a dark corner. Things are going sort-of-smoothly, but when the boy asks him- very gentlemanly, by the way- if Fitz wants to go back to his place, Fitz feels like someone is pouring a bucket of iced water over his head, and he flees. Simmons never gets to find out if the dancer is as flexible as she claimed to be.

“At least we found out that is not a gender-related thing, yeah?”

“Shut up, Simmons. Just shut up.”

It’s strange living in the Bus, so close to so many people, after living only with Simmons for so long. He feels a little dizzy, getting used to new people, and he flirts with Skye almost unintentionally, because he truly likes all of them- and Ward is so way out of his league-, and when Simmons points out that she thinks that Skye may not be picking up on his flirting, he shrugs. That’s almost better, in a way. He doesn’t know how he would react if she flirted back, and had expectations about him, and.  

When he realizes that he is in love with Jemma, the sexual urges don’t come right away. First comes the desire to kiss every inch of her face, and hold her close, and tell her that he loves her. Which are, frankly, some of the few non-sexual things they still don’t do together.

The sexual desire for her comes with time, but it is so shocking and new that it almost throws him off balance. One day she is leaning down on one of the lab’s counters, and he just side-looks at her and his brain goes Damn, would I tap that, with no intermission whatsoever. He starts hyperventilating, and has to shoo away her concern before things get even more awkward.

Things only escalate from there, and he feels deeply ashamed, because she is his best friend, and her own woman, and a human being, for god’s sake, but he still gets bombarded by sudden desires to lick every freckle he knows she has on that milky white skin of hers. He tries to repress so much consciously that his dreams get absolutely insane.     

He wonders, sometimes, why did this sudden change happen? Why with Simmons, of all people? He has been so apathetic about sex for all his life, why that had to change? Deep down, he knows why, but he doesn’t have much time to process, because the fall happens, and then the pod, and then everythings goes to hell.

While she is away, he tries his best to not think of her on any romantic or sexual capacity. He just thinks about his best friend, and about how much he misses her, and about how much he needs her, and about how betrayed he feels. All the hurt and all the anger and all his struggles cover up all his other feelings pretty well.

But then Jemma comes back, and she is even more pretty than he remembered, and she is sad all the time, and he is angry all the time, and wanting to kiss her is the least of his problems, to be honest.

Life within S.H.I.E.L.D. is never easy. There is always something crumbling down, someone on the verge of dying, someone on the verge of taking over the world, someone keeping a terrible secret, someone gaining superpowers. But maybe there are certain  things that they still can make okay. When he leaves the Playground with Fury’s cube, his favourite sandwich and a Love, Jemma forever imprinted inside his eyelids, his heart is beating faster than it has beaten in a long time, and there is no time, there is never truly time, but he still says to himself So this is what being thoroughly turned on feels like.   

Life within S.H.I.E.L.D. is never easy. He doesn’t have time to relish what she told him before he took off, much less to savour the triumph of asking her out, that she is taken away.

He gets single-minded after that, trying to get her back. (Or he wish he could be single-minded. He keeps getting distracted by the curve of her lips saying oh after he asked her out, by the texture and the weight of her hand on his, by the intensity of her voice when she said maybe there is. He misses her with a fervor he never thought was possible, he misses her in every way he ever had her and in some ways he never did, and it is an all-consuming feeling. He dreams about her, sometimes in platonic-ways, sometimes in so-not-platonic-ways, and he wakes up in twisted, sodden sheets, crying bitter tears.)    

Having her back in his arms, tattered and bruised, scrawny and dehydrated, but alive, is the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Jemma is having a hard time adapting back to Earth. That’s okay. He can wait. He has waited twenty-eight years. She is healing, and he can wait forever for her. Her happiness has always been his priority.

The harder part is that she is not opening up to him, and he can feel her running between his fingers like water. Or like the sand of that goddamned planet. She dresses on his clothes and walks around the base holding his hand, and searches him for comfort during sleepless nights, but that doesn’t mean that she is talking to him, and he wants to respect her time to process and her boundaries, but his heart aches for her.   

Then she tells him about Will, and it’s like someone filled up his lungs with liquid lead. It makes total sense, just because she is the sun of his solar system, it doesn’t mean that the feeling had to be reciprocal, does it?

But he is still her best friend and there is still a good man stranded on a planet for fourteen years, and there is still work to do. There is always work to do. He has no right to grieve something that never was. (Never, ever, has he felt more guilty for the way he just wants her, not even while she was missing.)

There is a recording of her talking about how much she thought about him and about them, about the future she wants with him, and she claims that it was the more clear-headed she ever was. It takes every ounce of willpower on his body to not jump her then and there. (It’s so confusing. What is he finding so arousing: the promise of a future, the love confessions, her? How is he supposed to tell all of them apart, define what is the source of his emotions?)

Then they are screaming at each other, in the lab nonetheless, and she shouts that he dived into a hole in the universe for her, and he has to kiss her, because she still doesn’t understand that it’s the less he would do for her. While he kisses her, his blood turns to liquid fire. He never knew there were so many nerve endings in his body. (Or he knew. But he never felt them before.) It’s hopeless, anyway. They are hopeless.

(There are some things he never talks about; hearing Jemma scream, unable to do anything to alleviate her pain, having to listen to her asking him to let them kill her, are only some of them.)  

When Ward teases him about killing Will because he slept with Simmons, he tells him to grow up because Ward is a dick. And he is not a killer. And Will is a decent human being who deserves so much better. And Jemma is not his possession. And what he feels for her goes so much deeper than just sex, not that Ward would ever understand that.

In a way, he knows he did the right thing in Maveth. But the guilt is real, the responsibility is real, the weight of Jemma’s disappointed gaze is very real.

Everything is too much, and he needs to take a step back. It doesn’t matter that his heart pleads for her, his mind pleads for her, his body pleads for her. Some things are just not meant to be.

Jemma tells him I miss you, and Can we start over, and maybe they should do that, so Fitz doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he doesn’t think he can.

Apparently it was a long-con, because she then takes his own quantum physics explanation and turns it against him, and says that the future is set and that they are inevitable. His heart literally melts.

She is highkey flirting with him, and his body is screaming at him I have only ever wanted this one thing, why are you denying it to me? Some things apparently are inevitable, or at least they are, because he is not sure who kissed who, the only thing that matters is that they are kissing, and it’s magnificent.

Her hands are on his neck, she is sitting on his lap, and Fitz’s body feels electrical, like a high-wring spring, full of potential energy ready to be transformed into kinetic.  

“Sorry, sorry, I don’t want to push too fast either.”

“What?”

“You know, with everything with you, and, and, and sex. I’m cool with whatever makes you comfortable. I don’t want to overstep any boundaries.”

“Jemma?”

“What?”

“You are rambling.”

“Oh.”

“I will let you know if I’m not comfortable with something, okay? But I- well, let’s say that I have thought about it. Before.”

“You mean… sex?”

“… yeah.”

“Sex, sex and, and us?”

“You don’t have to put it like that, like, like I am some kind of-of pervert, or something!”

“Oh, Fitz.”    

“We should consider all variables as we move forward, because things are bound to get… complicated.” He needs to ask for confirmation that nothing will change between them if- when- they have sex. He is scared, scared of how much he wants her, scared of messing this up, scared of being in unknown territory. Sex is not a thing that comes natural to him, and combined with their complicated history… yeah, chances just aren’t good. He wants her deliriously, but he is also scared shitless. He has thought it over and over so many times that the only solution that comes to his mind is to stop thinking and just listen to what his body and his heart are telling him.

“I’ve been thinking about it, about us, and, um, it clicked. The crux of our relationship is like the singularity in transhumanism. Singularity is the defining moment-”

“-the point at which a measurable variable becomes infinite.”

“Our friendship is linear. Simple, comfortable.”

“Effortless, really.”

“As soon as we deviate from that path, change becomes exponential. The point of no return.”

“Are you comparing us sleeping together with crossing the event horizon? It’s quite lovely when you think about it like that. And also terrifying.”

“Yeah, exactly. So, we should stop thinking altogether… “

“… and just do.”       

(He feels very comforted that Jemma also finds this experience a little terrifying.)

He is not nervous anymore when he gets to the hotel room. So many things have passed during the last two hours that the only thing he wants is her, her, her, in all the ways she wants to give herself to him. And most importantly, he wants to give himself to her in every way imaginable, and that’s a certainty that he has never had before.

They laugh so much during sex, and that is truly the best thing that could have happened to him. They are still the same people, this experience is not changing the baselines of who they are, and that’s good. His love is real, his desire is real, and right now, everything he has to give is for her.

[headbangingsappho]

so i was thinking about that brilliant haus memes post the check please fandom compiled and i realized that man. les amis memes must be absolutely fucking incredible too

- saying “thats my first name actually” after random things

éponine: i just dont understand white people, like who would name their own child, their own flesh and blood something like McKhynleigh feuilly: thats my first name actually

grantaire, seductively: whatcha thinking about enjolras: brexit grantaire: hmmm interesting.... did you know that thats my first name actually

- sometimes they play dnd together (combeferre is the dm) and they constantly bring up things that happened in game in irl arguments

cosette: hi courf do you maybe happen to know who ended up shedding glitter all over my apartment courfeyrac: i dont know cosette do you happen to know who watched my DEATh in COLD BLOOD and then proceeded to LOOT MY CORPSE for vALUABLES

joly: im just not sure if i can trust you after you cheated on me with that barmaid last night bossuet: babe that wasnt me that was my alterego countess boochie flagrante

- they also have a thing for alignments

bahorel: *throws textbook against the wall* fuck the law feuilly: chaotic neutral

marius: *too busy daydreaming abt cosette to watch his step, trips falls and knocks down a garbage can* courf: chaotic stupid

azelma thénardier: so i told this dude that all lesbians are in a telepathic connection with each other right? and he was like “oh rly.... then whats ellen degeneres doing right now”. and i told him that she was eating her morning cereal, yknow, bc of the time difference between france and the u.s. then he was like “oh rly.... what kind of cereal” and my brain just shut down and i swear to god i couldnt have thought of a single american cereal brand if my life had depended on it so i just said “crunchster munchster” and you know what... he bought it. he asked me if i could check if this one girl he has a crush on was a lesbian and i said “ye dude, for ten euros”. and i thought that was it but i shit you not the next day he walked up to me with a list of twenty names and asked me if he could pay by credit card. rey from star wars was on the list. like not even daisy ridley, straight up “rey from star wars”, except misspelled as “rei”. i told him she was a lesbian éponine: .........chaotic gay

- combeferre is the jack zimmermann of les amis. his “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and on behalf the entire debate team id like to sincerely apologize” is legendary among teachers and students alike

*bahorel gets in a fistfight with someone* “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and on behalf the entire debate team id like to sincerely apologize” *joly and cosette watch cute animal videos on a school computer and end up loudly sobbing in the middle of the library* “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and on behalf of the entire...” *éponine smuggles gavroche’s pet tarantulas in and scares the shit out of an entire class* “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and...”

ferre is a total hypocrite about it tho. *almost blows up the whole chemistry lab bc he had a great idea for an experiment he wanted to try* “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and on behalf of the entire debate team...” *arrives at class late with nothing but a laptop and a pack of monster energy drinks, wearing his doctor who themed pajama pants* “im combeferre, vice president of the college debate club, and on behalf...”

- musichetta is a muslim, joly is a buddhist and bossuet is an atheist so christianity in general is kind of like a weird relationship meme for them

courf and ferre: *came over to the jxbxm apartment, lowkey cuddling on the couch* musichetta: um guys noah fence but this is a good christian household where we always leave some room for our lord and savior jesus christ

bahorel, in one of their shared law classes: are seriously telling me you havent read any of the compulsory readings for today bossuet: bahorel my guy you know damn well that the only book ive ever read and im ever going to read is the holy bible amen

- every time anyone complains abt any minor annoyance or rudeness they suffered from someone éponines advice is to kill them, and she often adds that she knows a guy if they know what she means, which would be funny if it wasnt for the fact that they all know that éponine is best friends with a major drug dealer and through montparnasse she most certainly could find someone whod kill a dude for money and they have no idea whether shes kidding or not

- you know how artists always get asked if their work is anime.... grantaire gets ahead of that and names all of his pieces, like every single one, even the abstract ones that are literally just him splashing some shitty cheap wine on the canvas, he titles all of them “neon genesis evangelion fanart #x”

the numbers are not in order but have some logic to them, like he painted a portrait of jehan once and named it neon genesis evangelion fanart #420, or his portrait of joly was titled neon genesis evangelion fanart #6x10^23

once he drew an actual piece of neon genesis evangelion fanart and he named it homestuck fanart #69

[enjolras voice] i just dont understand modern art

- speaking of R and nge, he has a ramiel shirt and once when he was wearing it enjolras walked up to him and said “nice octahedron” and grantaire, who hates maths with the burning passion of a thousand suns, just went “how dare you speak that word to me” and walked away. enjolras was like ???? i just wanted to be nice but the others thought it was hilarious

marius, studying latin words: hey jehan whats the gender of- jehan: how dare you speak that word to me

musichetta: yo courf remember last new years eve when you did all those jägerbombs and- courfeyrac: how dare you speak that word to me

bahorel still has this reaction to “law” in spite of hearing it approximately fifty times per day

- every single member of les amis is 100% convinced that gavroche is their son

cosette: gavroche, my sweet child whom i birthed and raised myself,

gav: *is wearing crocs* bahorel: son i did not carry you in my womb for nine months for you to disrespect me like this

- they also like to act as if jean valjean is their father which is kinda really weird bc at least half of the amis have a crush on him

courf once called jvj “daddy” to his face. no ones letting him ever forget that

- anyone who tells a longer story ends it with “in conclusion, death to the bourgeoisie and a happy hanukkah to y’all” after a memorable speech grantaire held in their debate club once

please feel free to reblog with more quality les amis memes, im always here to discuss them