#yes she says stupid unfiltered stuff sometimes but she loves her friends okay

[autisticlancemcclain]

The tears are the worst fucking part.

They always are. They come out when she’s angry or hurt and embarrassed, and they make her feel like a little girl, which only ever makes her feel worse. It sucks to feel like you can’t hold your ground in an argument because your eyes are burning and trails of tears are blazing hot down your cheeks.

But she didn’t even get the chance to argue.

“We’re not punishing you,” Shiro had said gently, guilt visibly lining his features as her first tear fell, which only made her snarl at him. “But your bond to your element could use some strengthening, Katie. It won’t take too long, I’m sure of it.”

Just a couple vargas, he has promised her. Gather the list of ingredients for the next few meals, and see how the exposure to a natural environment makes you feel, map out your relationship with your lion. Easy peasy.

Easy for everyone else to say. The rest of them seemed to bond with their lions like it was fuckin’ easy, snapping up their elemental control like it was second nature. Hunk was as solid as the rocks and earth he represented, and it showed in the way he was and the way he acted. Shiro felt like the awesome and incredible presence of the sky to everyone he met. Keith was the most fiery person she had ever met, probably. He acted like he was powered by a raging inferno, always moving, always flickering. Lance was —

Well. Lance was water, simple as that. Everything he did was as playful and stubborn as a running river. Even his expressions have the same practiced fluidity of them, like he grew up imitating the tide.

She supposes he did. She supposes it makes sense, that he is the one sent with her, to help guide her along, so to speak.

It still kind of stings.

“Could you stop fucking humming,” she snaps, glaring at her teammate.

He doesn’t even glance at her. “No.”

She rolls her eyes, tears making her breaths stutter, and wipes some of the wetness off her cheeks. It doesn’t really work, and mostly just smears it around, but she’s so bitter that she’s kind of beyond caring.

She hates this. She hates this stupid mission, she hates this stupid forest, she hates her stupid element, she hates that Lance will not stop fucking prancing around, and most of all she hates that she can’t figure this shit out on her own.

She hates that she has to be babied.

“Oh, hey, these are the sugarplums for the not-lamb stew.” Lance stops abruptly, gentle hand on her arm to stop her, too. She resists the urge to yank it away, desperately reminding herself that it’s not Lance’s fault she’s so angry, not his fault that humiliation burns through her, not his fault that she can’t get her shit together. She’s already snapped at him once — more than once, if she’s being honest — and he’s gracefully ignored it. If she keeps pushing, he’ll snap right back, and then they’ll both be miserable.

Plus, she doesn’t actually like snapping at Lance. He doesn’t deserve her lashing out, he’s only trying to help.

“You sure?”

Pidge looks at the small purple fruits , feeling a little helpless. She has no idea how Lance has distinguished them from the various other fruits and seeds hanging from the hundreds of other trees. She has no idea how the hell she’s supposed to memorize all of this garbage. How something as frustrating and unique and random as nature is supposed to be her element, the one thing that represents her, deep to her core.

It’s not fair.

“Yep!” Lance chirps. He crouches down, starting to pull at his laces. “The bark has more linear pattern structures, see? And the leaves are smooth, not serrated, and much darker than any other fruit trees we’ve passed. And it smells like plum jam.” To her great confusion, he pulls off his shoes as socks as he explains, only standing once his bare feet are on the backed earth and moss of the forest floor.

“You’re going to get a sharp rock to the foot,” she says, unsure as to why he’s decided to ditch his shoes in the places he probably needs them most.

He snorts, kicking his shoes to the side and turning to face her, making obnoxious kissy faces and poking at her relentlessly.

“Aw, is Pidgey worried for my health and well-being?”

She scowls, shoving him away. “Nevermind. I hope you get tetanus and lose your whole leg.”

Unfortunately, her threat only makes him grin wider. He blows her one last dramatized kiss before turning to the large tree, wrapping his sweater around the trunk, and using it to scurry up the tree almost faster than she can register. By the time it occurs to her to question him, he’s already ten feet in the air, shifting his weight to a steady enough branch.

“What the hell are you doing?” she yells.

Lance looks back down at her, raising an eyebrow. “…Getting…fruit…?”

“There’s fruit down here!” She gestures to the dozens and dozens of fallen but perfectly good plums on the ground, many of which she’s already scooped up and put in the bag Hunk gave her. “All the fruit-bearing branches are like thirty feet in the air, and the branches are way too thin! It’s too risky!”

“Well, Pidgeon,” he says, hooking his knees around a branch to hang upside down, shooting her a wink and a pair of finger guns, “that’s the fun part!”

Before she can yell at him again to get the hell back down, he’s flipped back upright, scurrying up rapidly thinning branches to reach the higher, juicier fruit.

Pidge heart pounds.

“Lance, get down here!” Her voice is reedy with panic, but he ignores her. “You’re going to get hurt, you colossal fucking dumbass!”

But no matter how loudly she cusses him out, he keeps climbing, barely even pausing to make sure a branch can hold his weight before using it to get higher. He climbs as easily as he walks, as easily as he shoots — like it’s second nature. Despite his ease, Pidge can fucking use her brain and see that as scrawny as Lance is, the branches are scrawnier, and he is going to fall and die and Pidge is going to have to watch it happen.

Just as she’s about to call backup, Lance forty feet in the fucking air and without even the distant thought of a rope, Lance ties his hoodie — filled with fruit — to his back, stands on a branch, and fucking leaps the hell off.

Pidge screams at the top of her lungs.

But instead of falling to his death, Lance lands on a branch jutting out from a neighbouring tree, maybe five feet below the branch he leapt from.

Pidge’s yell catches in her throat.

He’s fine.

He continues like that for the ten seconds it takes for him to make his way down, hopping from branch to branch like a chickadee, smiling so wide his brown eyes are nearly creased shut. He looks elated; the happiest she’s seen him in ages.

Slowly, some of her fear starts to fade.

“You fucking scared me,” she says harshly when his feet are back on the floor. Her heart is still galloping.

Lance shrugs. “I told you I’d be fine.”

“No, you told me risks were more fun, then you jumped down a fucking tree.” She accepts the fruits he hands her, replacing the less appetizing ones she already had in her bag. “Taller than your lion.”

“Yeah, because I’ve done it before.” He places the last sugarplum in the bag and then ties it shut, securing it to his back and then throwing an arm over Pidge’s shoulders. He starts walking in a random direction, and Pidge struggles to keep up with his wide strides.

“…Oh.” She supposes that makes sense. He looked comfortable as he climbed.

They walk for the next several minutes in silence. Pidge notices that the tear tracks on her face have dried, and the terror she felt for Lance earlier has replaced her anger, her embarrassment.

She wonders if that was the point.

“Hey, look at that.” He points to a small, budding yellow flower dotting the base of a tree. “That’s hairflower. They grow at the bases of confler trees, because the confler trees always host sodiko birds, which are their biggest pollinators. Cool, huh?”

“How do you know all this stuff?” she blurts, barely letting him finish his sentence. Some of her earlier frustration bleeds into her voice, but luckily it doesn’t sound too accusatory. “I don’t — we’re not even on Earth, but somehow you recognise all the random wildlife. Nature is supposed to be my element. I don’t — I don’t know why I’m struggling so bad when you have it so easy.”

Lance trips over his feet, slightly, stumbling. He removes his arm from her shoulders, stuffing his hands in his pockets. His shoulders hike up somewhere near his ears, hunching his posture.

Guilt churns in her stomach.

“Lance, I didn’t mean —”

Did she?

What did she mean?

“I’m not dumb,” he says quietly.

She swallows. “I know.”

“It’s — I’m not good at the classroom shit. I have to try really hard to understand what a textbook is telling me, and I never understand instructions that aren’t explained to me three times in four different ways. I can’t even begin to understand all the fancy shmancy engineer stuff you and Hunk do. I will not pretend to understand how Altean alchemy and magic works.” He looks at her finally, and hurt clouds his eyes, but his voice is steady, firm. Practiced even, like it’s not the first time he’s had to explain this. “But I’m not dumb.”

“I know,” Pidge repeats, quieter. She doesn’t know how to take back her words, to say them better. How to fix how she feels, honestly. Because it was a lie, her backtracking — she did mean what she said. It was a mean thing to say, a mean thing to think and believe, and she had allowed herself to think it, to feel it, to say it and believe it.

That’s not fair to Lance. That’s not fair to her friend.

It isn’t even true.

“I know,” she repeats again, firmer this time. “I’m sorry. I forgot. But I know you’re not dumb.”

He hesitates for a second, but then nods, accepting her apology. He puts his arm back around her shoulder.

“I’ve always been better at learning things I can do, physically, or things that I can see have a purpose. Like dance, or shooting, or learning the names of cool things like plants and rocks. I’ve always been good with names and faces. And piloting, too, I hope I’m good at that.”

She hates the doubt there, and hates more that she might be part of the reason. “You are. Good at piloting, I mean.”

He grins at her. “Thanks. You are too, you know. Even though all this element shit is a learning curve.”

She snorts despite herself. “Not to you. You’re the living embodiment of water, basically, you naiad.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I spend time in it. I go to the pool, like, every day. I don’t even play mermaids all the time. I do boring meditative shit, because apparently that’s what Blue needs.”

She looks at him in shock. She hadn’t considered that anyone other than Shiro really meditated, or that anyone else had to work towards working with their elements. Especially not Lance. “Really?”

He nods excitedly. “Yeah, man! I thought I was good, but when Hunk unlocked his earth weapon thingie, I asked Blue what was up and she said I just needed more practice letting elemental quintessence flow through me, whatever the hell that means. Apparently it’s easy to summon when you’re panicked, but if you want to do it on a more regular basis you have to learn how to recognise it, so you can call it.”

That makes sense, she supposes. But she still feels like she’s missing something.

“How the hell am I supposed to frolic around a forest between missions? There’s not exactly one in the castle.”

Lance shrugs. “I don’t know, genius. You figured out how to turn a magical lion invisible, can’t you puzzle out how to grow a garden in space or something? Aren’t you a science nerd?”

Pidge stills.

Oh, duh.

It’s such a simple solution — plant a garden. She used to have a garden, back home, that she and her mom worked on regularly. Her mom would show her how she genetically modified plant seeds, and then they’d monitor the new plants and plant traits together.

Suddenly she understands why Green is the lion of curiosity and science as well as nature — the two are linked, everywhere, even in her. She belongs in the forest as much as she belongs in the workshop.

She can do so many weirdo experiments. Isn’t that what science is, basically?

“I owe you one,” she tells Lance, walking again beside him.

He chuckles, adjusting the bag of fruit on his shoulder and nudging her with his elbow. “You owe me twenty. Now, come on, we have lots more stuff to gather. I’ll show you how to identify it.”

[staraxiaa]

sunflowers, the afterword:

author's corner/first thoughts.

okay. so. i am insane. i am a god. i just wrote 18k words for a fic that i thought of, planned, and created fully in less than two days, bc someone said i like to make ppl suffer and yes i do. but then i was like, i am GOING to write fluff and i took it personally. to that one reader, thank you!! anyways. i wrote this with the intent of using the prompt "you wanna kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid" and barely even ended up using it. i don't know whether to laugh or cry. i hope it doesn't flop but also it's okay if it does bc i literally spent almost 48 hours brainrotting and word vomiting like it's out of my brain now and this feels glorious. it was random unfiltered thoughts and grinding away at 3am until i am empty. no thoughts left in my head. can you see? i could eat the world raw, the itch has been scratched. the sheer amount of motivation i had w this fic is never happening again. cheers! will update as i think of things! sorry to anyone who ends up reading this fully. i have been unreasonably fixated and have brainrotted over this for two hours, inclusive of sleeptime. while sleeping. i kid you not. i would wake up and something would click and i would hop over to the laptop and fucking grind away i am so sick of myself

unwritten scenes, headcanons

you guys are 20. you haven't started dating yet. you're a doctor. you guys are yelling at each other. you say 'you want to kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid.' katsuki's so angry that he does. ⇁ this was the original ending btw but i thought this one kinda fit better he brings you sunflowers sometime. real ones. he's sneezing all the while. you take one look at him and you die of laughter. he's still sneezing. you tell him: you know i actually didn't even care about them until i found out you were allergic. ⇁ if i could write nsfw i would do it here like dude do u see the vision omfg a whole side plot where he's like what the fuck do you mean you weren't dating deku. you're like. what the fuck. are u stupid. someplace where you actually address how you treat midoriya, his lack of a quirk, and how you stood by and watched it all happen ua sports festival. you kick everyone's ass. #you have been trained by eraserhead and you are super duper cool i also don't remember if i included this, but: your mother asks you after the first evening. "you're not really friends are you." you say: "nope!" and it is the happiest she has ever seen you. the ua boys try to flirt with you and get hurt really stupidly a lot on purpose. you wonder why they've stopped showing up. it's bc katsuki gives them a whole earful. and you're like bitch what the fuck im a doctor and and hes just tsundere about it first kiss scene instead of the ending where he's like you care and you're like of course i do??? what the fuck?? are u stupid?? you guys start yelling at each other and you're both acting like ur 2. he calls you stupid and blind. you call him ugly. he's so mad he literally just lurches forward and kisses you. it's awkward and messy and you guys are so mad at each other. you literally headbutt him in the face. ah young love. ⇁ this was another alternative ending more exploration behind reader's character, her insecurities, and about some of the stuff i info dumped before the start of the katsuki povs? i feel like i didn't handle that as well as i could have, but i also didn't want to go on 10 billion tangents for things that had very little relevance to the story. i also think the transition to the last scene was a little abrupt, but tbh at that point i was just so ready to call it like. i just didn't see the point. i think it would have made for a more natural reading experience, so here's the tea: he's proud of u but u guys are angsty and ignore each other until after training camp. [more brainrot pining moments]. if i had to write the above scene, i think i'd do something along the lines of: you're first aid relief at the sports festival, not actively participating. dunno if you'd be nearly as badass, though. you definitely get pissed when they muzzle katsuki and probably get rly mad but ofc u cant show it. so u just unmuzzle him and walk away and hes staring after u. this is ur ??? elsa arc? i dont remember the disney princess. the training camp is torture. aizawa makes u run with them. you tell him straight up that u hate his guts. he grins like that is the best thing anyone has told him in his life. katsuki definitely blows up some earth monsters for u. but while ur not looking. he's angsty like that. the bath scene? oh lord u just know he blows mineta up. maybe he lowk fucks it up too and you have to heal it! the potential HAHAHA. i dont know how you end up getting kidnapped, but id probably just bullshit a reason like ur the #1 healer in the world hurr durr and afo wants u! idgaf if the plot makes sense or not this is entirely secondary to my scheming. katsuki just about loses it when he hears you're one of the targets -> how you get kidnapped? idk. you're not a remedial student, so you're probably participating in the game (odd number of ppl right). unsure of how i'd handle the news of your kidnapping: just know katsuki loses it again. for like the 5th time. yipppeeeeee

character notes, thoughts

your quirk is literally just you take people's injuries into your own body and heal it yourself. you're superhuman. i put 2 thoughts into this: 1) you're a healer and 2) i like cool characters. congratulations. you have now been born. i don't even remember if i kept the shouto scene. but anyways i think my bias was showing. just had to throw him in there. also the kuroo mention. sorry i'm totally normal and i mean it ⇁ btw i love you all (everyone who likes/interacts with my fics) but i joke to my friends everytime someone interacts w my first bakugo/midoriya ones from lacuna bc guys!!! my shoto fic is RIGHT THERE!!! the baby that launched the entire collection. please show him some love this reader is probably one of the favorite ones i have written, more of an oc at this point i think, and i wasn't expecting her to grow on me so much. but lowk i love her and am so proud of the way i wrote her growth!! i do feel like i wrote her very soft, but i hope her flaws were made very clear⏤ she is meant to be a sort of unreliable narrator, so she also is overly critical of her own, but there were several things that were not addressed as i was writing, particularly concerning midoriya. (quirk, the bullying, bystander's guilt.) however, i think that including them would have made me go off on a tangent, and detract more from the main point of the story i also do think i wrote katsuki a little ooc, if only because i didn't see the point of including what's already there in canon. sorry. my brainrot did not extend that far, and by the end of this, i was literally ready to drop. his perspective isn't meant to be all-encompassing (in the story, it may seem like it purely bc of how i paced it) but those are meant to be like. random thoughts that appear in several scenes. reader does not have bakugo living rent free in her head 24/7, and neither does he. they're just stupid and pining and i just wrote all the moments in my head where they do.

[thundersnowstorm]

Wait hold on ndkslsnwk I’ve never considered Theon/Robb/Rhaenys now I feel like I need to know so much more about that omfg like that’s so interesting??

okay aldkjksldj so the basic outline to how theon x robb x rhaenys ends up happening is still in flux for me, but i have a Lot of thoughts on the matter so here’s me processing them via word dump. maybe if i get my act together someday i’ll actually write the proper 10k fic this deserves.

as always, under the cut because i do Not know how to be concise

at some point before rhaenys ever came north, robb and theon went out drinking and got lowkey plastered. it’s a lot easier to be honest about serious stuff when you can blame it on the alcohol, y’know? and they’re just sitting outside talking and drinking, and then one of them kisses the other. later, neither will remember who initiated it. they’re both very drunk and uncoordinated and the kiss is sloppy and awkward and way more intense than either one of them will admit. 

the next day, neither of them speaks a word about it, and it’s forgotten. mostly. theon eventually convinces himself he just imagined it, because his memories of that night are very hazy and there’s just no way. robb doesn’t forget, but he doesn’t let himself think about that night. theon’s just a friend and he’s going to be married soon anyway, so what’s the point? 

intimate_rituals.jpeg

then rhaenys shows up and the events of crownless unfold as they do. fast forward through the long night (the north and humanity prevail, the others are defeated, etc etc etc). everyone’s back at winterfell now, and there’s no more looming war on the horizon. things are back to normal.

(well, as normal as normal can be when they’re all dealing with like, ptsd, and grief and anxiety and all the shit that comes with war and death. but that’s their new normal now, and they’re mostly dealing.)

it’s weird, living in winterfell without the constant threat of war. in an odd way, it reminds robb of a time long ago, before ned stark ever went south. obviously things are very different now, but it’s enough that he’s reminiscing a lot on those days. and, among other things, he remembers that kiss from so long ago. and then he tries to forget it again. it doesn’t go great.

rhaenys has always been perceptive. she watches, notices things. she watches robb and theon interact, and there’s a shift. not a shift in how they interact, but a shift in how robb looks at theon. she can’t describe it, but there’s something different about it.

oh.

here’s the thing. rhaenys went into marriage expecting very little from it. a discreet mistress at the very least, and, she hoped, a semblance of respect from her husband. even now, after years of love and marriage, there’s still part of her that’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. so she approaches this with the same ruthless practicality she uses in ruling. 

robb isn’t having an affair, she’s sure of that. but one of these days, he’s going to tire of her, and she’d rather not be blindsided by that day. with theon, there’s no risk of a bastard, and she trusts theon enough to know he wouldn’t be a risk to the starks if he became, for lack of a better term, robb’s “mistress”. 

(the effects of marriage as an institution in asoiaf on women is just. oof. but that’s a talk for another day.)

so rhaenys tells robb, plainly, that if he wants to sleep with theon, it would be fine with her.

robb, unsurprisingly, is a mixture of shocked and horrified and confused. regardless of whatever feelings he’s trying to parse through about theon, he loves rhaenys dearly and here she is, giving him a permission to have an affair. 

“do you want me to have an affair???”

what follows is the weirdest argument ever, in which they each say i love you approximately twenty times apiece, robb tells her she’s pushing him away, rhaenys tells him he’s pushing her away, robb denies and then promptly admits his feelings for theon, rhaenys denies and then inadverdently alludes to her insecurities about marriage, robb possibly gives her permission to have an affair, rhaenys lets slip she knows theon’s got feelings for robb, and it’s just a bizzarre mess.

this goes on for several days. all of winterfell is very confused, because it seems like the king and queen are fighting but they also keep very pointedly telling each other how much they care. it’s just. weird.

onion headline: town watches local couple fumble their way through polyamory negotiations. third person has yet to be informed.

eventually they manage to get beyond their defensive reactions and have an honest, unfiltered conversation. yes, robb has feelings for theon that are probably not going away anytime soon, but his feelings for rhaenys have not changed. yes, rhaenys has a lot of insecurities and she’s dealing with them the best she can. that being said, if robb wants something to happen between him and theon, she genuinely wouldn’t mind. she knows he loves her, this doesn’t have to change anything.

blah blah blah makeup sex

nothing happens for a while. robb’s still not entirely convinced that rhaenys is truly okay with the idea, and anyway, he’s not entirely come to terms with it either. but they’re talking, about theon, about Feelings and Whatnot, and things are better.

theon, poor guy, has no idea what is going on with the two of them. the two of them had some sort of fight that robb never explained, and now things are back to normal but they keep looking at him? but maybe he’s just imagining things. married couples can be weird sometimes.

anyway, there’s a hunting expedition one day and what seems like all of winterfell goes. at one point, grey wind smells something and leads robb and theon off on a separate path. it’s a buck, and before robb can grab his crossbow, there’s an arrow in the creature’s neck.

“stop showing off, theon”

so they dismount to strap the carcass to one of their mounts to take back. and they’re teasing each other, saying a lot of stupid nonsense, and the mood is high. anyway, somehow robb ends up kissing theon.

“what the fuck stark.”

theon’s mostly in shock. a little confused. a little indignant on rhaenys’s behalf, which he didn’t really expect but she has a way of creeping up on people and besides robb, ur a married man!

robb tries to explain everything. mostly it comes out as word salad. theon is just further confused.

the rest of the hunting party shows back up, rhaenys included, and they head back to winterfell. 

"i kissed him," robb says, once they're away from anyone who might be listening in. "yeah?" says rhaenys, arching an eyebrow. "how was it?"

okay confession time. a good amount of the reasoning behind this ship is that i just think the three of them would be hot together. so just. keep that in mind.

anyway, they manage to find theon after dinner and robb explains it all, properly. theon uh. doesn't quite know how to take it. bc he and rhaenys had talked about his feelings for robb, and he had always assumed nothing was going to come of it all. and he’s lowkey pissed at rhaenys and just very confused at robb and just. it’s a lot. he needs some time to process everything. 

but yeah, eventually the three of them end up in a sort of poly/ open relationship sort of thing

actually I think ms april ludgate described it best:

except rhaenys and theon are closer to "friends who will never admit that they're friends except they talk about emotions sometimes and maybe have sex but not like in a romantic way" but yeah

anyway. the three of them have enough issues to be a magazine and it's hardly smooth sailing but they make it work? also the sex is pretty great

thank u for coming to my ted talk.