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loveswrites · 8 months

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Pumpkins Please Billy Loomis x Stu Marcher x reader

Pumpkins Please Billy x Reader x Stu

Word count: 1397

Time it Took me: 1 hours 30 mins

To my loves: It was so obvious that stu and billy would win for our celebration of 300 followers! I wrote it that same night so I've had it in my drafts for 6 days now. I was thinking if I should wait till the poll ended but we reached over 300 followers before it even did, So here you go loves! Enjoy! Thank you for the support. It makes me so happy you guys enjoy my writing as it is all I want to do in life.

Love <3

“I wanna carve a pumpkin.” You pouted.

“Why don’t we just crave someone up instead.” Billy smirked playing with the tip of his knife.

“I already have the pumpkins at my house. You wanna carve em here or there?” Stu said dropping himself on the bed making you and Billy shake with the bed.

“You didn’t tell me you bought pumpkins.” Billy said, narrowing his eyes at Stu.

“Do I have to tell you everything?” Stu laughed out.

“Yes.” You and Billy said in unison.

Stu started to laugh but slowly stopped when he realized you and Billy were not joking.

“I just thought I should have them at the house since you know it is halloween. You know our favorite holiday.” Stu said, looking in between you and Billy.

“It’s not my favorite holiday mine is-”

“Christmas.” The two boys groaned, making you smile.

“The moment September 1st came along you were running around here yelling out ‘It’s christmas!’” Billy mocked you but you could see the slight smile in his cheeks as he recalled the memory.

“It’s a lovely holiday, what can I say?” You smiled rubbing your socks together.

Billy stroked the sides of your waist with his knife sending a shiver down your spine. He did this often. To both you and Stu. Still would often get cut most of the time cause he'd always laugh or move too much. But you trusted Billy to never leave a mark on you and he never did. Never has.

Billy had three favorite things. His knives. His girl. And his best friend.

“Do we have to go to school tomorrow?” You questioned as Stu rubbed your legs while he stared up at the ceiling.

“You wanna skip again? Something on your mind, pretty girl?” Stu questioned.

“Is someone bothering you? I can handle that, you know.” Billy said with stern eyes as he watched you respond.

“No no none of that I’m fine and no ones bothering me. I just don’t want to go and talk to people you know?” You said, stressed by the thought of even being in that building.

“When do your parents get back in town?” Billy asked, putting his knife on your nightstand after taking one last long drag against your skin that sent tingles throughout your body.

Your parents had left for a business trip so you invited your two boyfriends to keep you company because why not? They weren’t doing anything before you called anyways.

“Sometime next week. It might get extended depending on some things. They told me I could go with them as always but I wanted to stay.” You said snuggling into Billy’s side.

“I would’ve left. No school and a free trip as a replacement sounds fun right about now.” Stu said, making you smile knowing that he wouldn’t just leave. He’d make sure that you and Billy were able to come as well. No matter if he wanted to admit it or not Stu couldn’t live without Billy nor you.

Looking up at Billy who had his eyes closed you know he couldn’t live without you or Stu also. He wouldn’t admit it but he shows his love in crazy ways. Rather that’s spray painting the sides of buildings to pulling pranks on literally anybody to actual crimes. Billy has killed for you and Stu. If someone hurt one of you two you either never saw them again or saw them in the news the next day. Same if it was reversed with Stu but Stu doesn’t really clean his tracks very well so it’s mostly just Billy.

You wondered if loving them made you a bad person. You wondered if keeping their victims a secret made you a murder. You wondered if not feeling a drop of remorse made it seem like you have the knife in your hand.

But at the end of the day you didn’t really care because at the end of these dark sad thoughts all you saw was Billy and Stu. The two crazy boys who were in love with you. The two boys who showed you the world and would kill anyone who got in the way of your happy fairytale. You just prayed that they wouldn’t be the one to ruin your love story.

You woke up the next morning feeling relaxed and refreshed. This made you just up and check the time. 1:24 pm. Shit you thought I missed damn near all of school. Rubbing your eyes you noticed that your bed was empty. Where did they go? Getting out of your bed you walked downstairs. Hearing voices, you followed them to the kitchen.

“Dumbass! the butter goes first, did you not read the box?” Billy snapped hitting Stu in the back of his head with said box.

“You didn’t say that!” Stu said, trying to defend himself as he wiped his cheek leaving some flour in its place making you smile.

“Maybe if you looked at the box I wouldn’t have to say it!” Billy fussed back. Stu opened his mouth to say something but that's when you decided to make yourself known.

“So are you two gonna bicker all day or tell me what you're doing?” You questioned walking fully into the kitchen.

“Baking you some cookies. Again..” Stu said, making you frown your eyebrows.

“Again?” You questioned.

“Stu burned the first batch.” Billy said, rolling his eyes.

“I did not! They just cooked a little bit longer than the rest.” Stu finished.

“Burnt.” You and Billy said in unison. That was happening a lot more often than usual.

“We just wanted to do something nice for you before you woke up.” Stu said sneezing all over the batter when he rubbed flour on his face.

“What the fuck Stu!” Billy yelled while you just turned your nose up at the fact that he just sneezed on the batter.

“It’s fine. I’m not hungry. Like at all. I just wanna carve pumpkins okay? That’s it.” You said shifting your eyes between Billy and Stu.

“I’ll go get the pumpkins then.” Stu said starting to move, making you and Billy scream out ‘No!’.

“No! I’ll do it, just stay here.” Billy said, shaking his head as he walked past you but not before giving you your ‘morning kiss’.

“You keep touching me I’m gonna throw pumpkin guts all over you.” You yelled out. Stu’s elbow kept touching yours as he attempted to show you how to carve your pumpkin.

“I’m trying to help you! You're doing it all wrong, trust me I do pumpkins.” Stu stated as if he was some kind of Pumpkin master.

“You do pumpkins?” You laughed out, tightening the grip on the knife in your hand.

“Shut up if I did you’d be jealous of the pumpkin.” Stu said, rolling his eyes.

“As if, Who wants to sleep with you?” You questioned going back to cutting your pumpkin.

“You!” Stu said laughing as if that was the funniest thing in the world.

“Only on holidays.. Billy gets Monday through friday.” You said poking your tongue out at Stu to which he leaned in and bit your tongue making you jump back squealing in surprise.

“Good thing Halloween is coming up.” Stu grinned.

“Billy, he bit me!” You pointed at Stu with the knife in your hand. Billy pointed down to your pumpkin that was hanging on for dear life.

“You need help, you keep cutting it like that there's not gonna be any pumpkin left.” Billy said, smirking, making Stu laugh.

“Shut up, it's perfectly fine.” You said going back to cutting pieces of the pumpkin.

“As if.” Stu snickered, earning a handful of pumpkin guts to the face.

“Hey!” Stu yelled out.

“That’s what you get your lucky I didn’t throw the whole pumpkin!” You yelled.

“What pumpkin?!” Stu yelled back making you gasp.

“Billy!” You yelled.

“God.” Billy said, holding his head in his hands still with the knife in his hand. All he could hear was you two fighting with each other

He was in for a long bumpy ride if he wanted to be with you two forever. But watching the two of the most important people in his life bicker made him realize that he would kill any bump in that road to make them happy.

#loveswrites #x reader #oneshots #scream movie #Scream #reader insert #billy loomis x reader #stu matcher fluff #stu marcher #billy loomis #stu matcher x reader #billy loomis x reader #poly billy and stu #billy x stu #billy x stu x reader

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pinchofhoney · 1 year

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You know I can't stay away from your writing for long so here I am againnn....angst prompt 5 and fluff promt 10. Besties to loverss plsssss.....with either Sirius Black or Kaz I can't choose

No angst...I can't take it rnnnn 😭

take a hint # 200 followers special event

» prompt event » special events masterlist

angst prompt five: “please leave before i lose myself to madness and beg you to stay”

fluff prompt ten: and it was when A watched B look at someone else the way they wanted to be looked at. does A realize how much in love with their best friend they were?

gif is not mine, credit to the owner

kaz brekker x fem!reader

word count: 3.8k

warning: kaz has no romantic feelings for inej in this one, it doesn't have a specific time in the canon, i made up one of the characters, best friends to lovers (between the lines), mention of murder

summary: It seems that Kaz always expects you to read between the lines, even though you are a thief and not an expert in interpreting written texts.

a/n: whenever i see notifications from you, i feel like a happy golden retriever puppy, hello!!<33 i feel that writing anything with sirius would be easier for me in almost every way, especially since that character has been my favorite since childhood, but i wanted to try something new and i was thrilled with the chance to do so! (it's a mess)

pages that may interest you: masterlist ♡ taglist ♡ who i write for

As you stepped out into the gloomy, rain-soaked streets of Ketterdam, you could felt the weight of the city's bearing down upon you. It was a place where danger lurked around every corner, where crime and corruption were the norm, and where only the strongest and most cunning survived. The city's winding, labyrinthine streets were treacherous and difficult to navigate, with slimy cobblestones that seemed to shift and writhe beneath your feet. The stench of sewage and decay hanged heavy in the air, a reminder of the filth and squalor that permeated every inch of the city.

The people of Ketterdam were a rough and ragged bunch, with sharp tongues and even sharper knives. Every interaction was a potential threat, every stranger a possible enemy. It was a place where trust was hard to come by, and betrayal was always just a heartbeat away. And yet, despite all of this, you couldn't help but feel drawn to the city. It was the only place where you've ever felt truly at home, where you could be yourself without fear of judgment or rejection. It was a feeling that both comforted and terrified you, and you knew that you'll never be able to escape it, no matter how hard you try.

You hated Ketterdam with a passion, yet you found yourself unable to imagine living anywhere else. Maybe it was because you hated yourself too, the mere thought of being ordinary filled you with a deep-seated loathing. You had no talents, no skills that could make others look at you with admiration, and to make matters worse, you weren't your parents' favorite child either. That distinction belonged to your older sister, the Grisha who had always been showered with adoration and affection, even when she was away in the Little Palace, thousands of miles from home.

Your parents had always compared you to her, highlighting your shortcomings and making you feel like a disappointment. Even when she was gone, they treated you worse than they ever had before, as if you brought them shame just by existing.

Yet, in Ketterdam, your ordinariness was a blessing. As a member of a gang of thieves, you were the perfect fit. Your lack of beauty and grace made you unremarkable, allowing you to blend into the shadows and avoid attention. You moved with ease through the convoluted streets of the city, navigating its twists and turns, always keeping your wits about you. Of course, there were a times of doubts, where you couldn't help but think that perhaps being strikingly beautiful would be an asset to your profession, especially when robbing wealthy merchants who came to Ketterdam seeking to indulge in its illicit pleasures. But even then, you knew that such a gift would come with its own set of complications, and in Ketterdam, complications were the last thing you needed.

You pulled the hood of your dark cloak over your head, lowering it slightly to obscure your face. You didn't want to be recognized by anyone, but at the same time, you needed to keep an eye on your surroundings and react quickly if needed.

You hastily tucked your frozen hands into the pockets of your coat and quickened your step as you saw two men who were part of the Dime Lions. Your heart skipped a beat as you recognized them. Lately, you had been avoiding these people more than usual, ever since you got into an unnecessary street fight with several members of the gang. They had made it clear that they weren't happy with you, and you knew that they wouldn't hesitate to attack you if given the chance.

But it wasn't just the Dime Lions that you were avoiding. Some people in Ketterdam knew about things they shouldn’t. It was no secret that rumors spread like wildfire in this city, and often found their way into the hands of those who would use them for their own gain. But in a world full of terrible people, you had to be worse.

You walked with no clear destination in mind, driven by the need to distance yourself as much as possible from the Crow Club. It was only moments ago that you had found yourself in a heated argument with the one person who mattered the most to you. His stubborn pride had come between you once again, making you curse his name to the heavens above.

The tension in the hallway was thick enough to cut with a knife as you and Kaz stood facing each other, both seething with frustration. His eyes glinted in the dim light, anger etched deep into the lines of his face. What had started as a minor disagreement had quickly escalated into a full-blown argument, fueled by the unspoken feelings that both tried to hide.

“You don't understand, Y/N,” Kaz growled, his voice low and scratchy. “You never do. You're always off on your own, thinking you know what's best for everyone. You can't keep taking unnecessary risks. It's not just your life on the line.”

“I know that,” you snapped back, your eyes flashing with anger. “But we can’t just sit back and do nothing. We need to take action if we want to survive.”

“Of course we need to take action,” Kaz shot back, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I'm not saying we should do nothing. But we need to be smart about it. We can't rush in blindly. That's why I'm in charge. I know what I'm doing.”

You rolled your eyes, exasperated. “Sometimes being smart means taking risks. That's how we get ahead.”

A heavy silence hung in the air between you, filled only by the sound of your breathing and the rustle of your clothes. Kaz's gaze bore into you with an intensity that made your skin crawl.

His jaw tightened, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “Fine,” he said, his voice icy. “Do whatever you want. But don't expect me to follow you blindly into danger.”

You took a step closer to Kaz, your eyes blazing. “I don't need you to follow me, Kaz. I can take care of myself.”

His eyes narrowed, and he took a step back, his hand on his cane for support. “Then go ahead and do that. But please, leave before I lose myself to madness and beg you to stay.”

Your chest tightened with hope as Kaz's words registered in your mind. Could it be that he actually wanted you to stay? But your hopes were dashed as you saw him turn his back and begin walking away. The urge to call out to him, to make him admit his feelings, consumed you, but you knew it was pointless. Kaz Brekker was not one to bare his soul.

With a frustrated growl, you clenched your fists so tightly that your nails dug painfully into your palms. Without another word, you turned and stormed down the stairs. Ignoring Jesper's questioning gaze and Wylan's confused expression, you burst out into the rain-soaked streets of the Barrel, letting the cool droplets wash away your anger and frustration.

Your mind was a chaotic mess of emotions as you walked, all directed towards the one man who had the power to make you feel so much. Kaz's words echoed in your head, spoken in his rough voice, which usually sounded like the most beautiful melody to your ears, but now it was a curse that tormented you and did not allow you to find peace.

“I don't need you, Kaz. You're the last person I want,” you muttered under your breath, and as if fate was playing a game, you bumped into the very person with whom the whole argument began. What a coincidence.

You lifted your gaze, and your eyes met with the one who infamously called himself Ketterdam's most dangerous person. Although he didn't know you, you were familiar with him well enough to know that he would want to have you with him despite your undistinguished appearance and lack of special skills.

In a rush of panic, you lowered your head, feigning humility to mask your face. “I apologize, sir,” you began, trying to hide the hint of fear you could sense in your voice. “I should be more careful.”

The man smirked, his eyes scanning over your form. “It's no problem, sweetheart,” he said, his voice oozing with arrogance and entitlement. “But you should watch where you're going. It's not safe to be wandering around these parts alone.” His hand brushed against your arm, sending shivers down your spine.

You flinched at the touch, trying to pull away from him, but then he grabbed you. You knew what type of man he was, and the last thing you wanted was to be alone with him in a dark alley. You tried to think of an excuse to leave, but before you could say anything, the gravelly rasp of a familiar voice interrupted.

“Is there a problem here, gentlemen?” Kaz's voice was calm and controlled, but there was an underlying threat that made the man release his grip on you and take a step back.

“None at all,” the man replied smoothly.

Kaz stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. “I suggest you leave the lady alone then.”

The man scoffed. “I suggest you mind your own business, boy.”

Kaz's hand, covered with a leather glove, tightened on the crow's head ornamenting his cane. “I'll make it my business if I see someone harassing a woman in my city.”

The man sneered, clearly not intimidated by Kaz's threat. “Your city?” he asked with a hint of derision, studying Kaz more thoughtfully. Suddenly, as if he had just connected the dots, he added, “Last time I checked, it was still called Ketterdam, not Dirtyhands's kingdom.”

Kaz's expression didn't change, but you could sense the tension in the air. “Believe what you want, but if you don't leave now, I'll make sure you regret it.”

The man seemed to consider his options for a moment before finally releasing a grunt of annoyance and walking away, oblivious to the inevitable fate that awaited him regardless of his decision. Death was the only possible outcome and the only variable was who would carry out the execution.

Finally, the man was out of sight, and you released a breath you didn't even realize you were holding. Kaz turned to you, and you met his gaze with a mixture of gratitude and anger. Despite feeling indebted to him for his intervention, you couldn't help but feel frustrated by his interference. “I didn't need your help,” you said, trying to sound confident.

Kaz raised an eyebrow. “It sure looked like you did.”

You glared at him, feeling embarrassed and exposed. He had seen you in a moment of vulnerability, and you hated yourself for it. “I could have handled it,” you insisted, although you knew it was a lie. You couldn't have handled the situation on your own. You were a skilled thief, but you lacked the physical strength to overpower a man twice your size. You were not armed with revolvers, nor did you possess the abilities of a Corpsewitch. You were just an average person, with quick fingers and the ability to pick locks, nothing more.

“How did you know where to find me?” you added.

“Did you think I wouldn't follow you? I had a feeling you'd get yourself into trouble, but I didn't expect it to happen so soon.”

You rolled your eyes, but a small part of you was grateful that Kaz had your back. “And what about-”

“Inej will take care of him,” he said, cutting you off, signaling that he didn't want to discuss the matter any further. “Let's head back to the Slat. You're soaked.”

Kaz started walking away, disappearing into a dark alley without waiting for you. You sighed and followed him, feeling the dampness of your clothes sticking to your skin.

The walk back to the Slat was silent, with only the sound of raindrops hitting the cobblestones to fill the air. As you entered the place, you immediately noticed the curious looks of your crewmates. Jesper was there, even though he usually preferred gambling at the Crows Cub and Matthias stood at the top of the stairs, watching you with his arms crossed. It seemed like everyone was waiting for you to return, and you couldn't help but feel uneasy.

Ignoring the greetings, Kaz announced, “You'll never guess who Y/N met.” The room fell silent, and Kaz removed his hat as if to emphasize his point. “Antoon Beudeker.”

A hum of surprised sounds ran through the room, and all eyes turned to you. You felt uncomfortable being the center of attention. You had been trying to track down Beudeker for weeks, but he always managed to slip away from you, as if someone in the Dregs was tipping him off about your plans.

Nina spoke up, breaking the silence. “What do you mean by that?”

Kaz looked at you, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “A talent for stealing isn't Y/N's only skill. As you can see, the talent for trouble far outweighs it.”

You shifted uncomfortably under Kaz's gaze, feeling a mixture of embarrassment and frustration. You knew you had made a mistake by bumping into Beudeker, but it wasn't even your fault. All you wanted was to cut yourself off after the argument with Kaz, and now he was the one who was right again.

Wylan's voice carried through the quiet room, breaking the tension. “What are we do with him now?” he asked, but no one answered, assuming that it was up to their missing Wraith to handle the situation.

Jesper's frustration boiled over, and he jumped up from his seat. “It's not fair!” he exclaimed, pointing his revolver at the wall. “I was the one who wanted to put a bullet between his eyes.”

Matthias stepped forward, before anyone reacted to sharpshooter's words, his expression serious. “We need to figure out who's been leaking our plans to Antoon. This could be dangerous for all of us.”

“I agree,” Nina added. “We need to find out who's been betraying us and deal with them.”

Wylan's voice piped up, “What if we set a trap?”

Kaz nodded, considering the idea.

“We could feed different information to each member of the Dregs and see which version gets back to someone who will claim to be Beudeker now. That way, we'll know who we can trust and who we can't,” you suggested.

Nina grinned. “I like it. And if we catch the traitor, we can make an example out of them.”

Jesper's eyes gleamed with anticipation. “I'll provide the entertainment.”

Matthias shook his head. “No, Jesper. We can't take the law into our own hands. We'll handle the traitor according to our own rules, but we won't kill them.”

Jesper shrugged, disappointed but not arguing. “But killing is our rule, Helvar.”

Matthias's expression darkened, but before he could reply, Kaz spoke up. “That's enough. We're not discussing this any further. We need to focus on finding the leak first, not arguing about how to deal with them.”

Jesper and Matthias both looked at Kaz, but neither of them said anything. The silence in the room was heavy with tension, and you could sense the frustration emanating from Jesper and the anger radiating from Matthias. Kaz's tone had effectively shut down the conversation, but you knew that it was far from over.

“We'll start investigating tomorrow,” Kaz's voice filled the room again. “For now, let's all get some rest. We have a long day ahead of us.”

As Kaz's words faded away, the tension in the room dissipated, and everyone began to go their separate ways. You hesitated, still reeling from the events of the evening, unsure of what to do next.

Sensing your unease, Kaz approached you, his expression serious but not unkind. “I know this is a lot to take in,” he said, his voice low. “But we have a job to do, and we can't afford to let our emotions cloud our judgment. I need you to be focused tomorrow, do you understand?”

You nodded, feeling a bit guilty for today’s argument. “Yes. I'll be ready,” you replied, determined to not let him down.

Kaz gave you a small nod of approval before turning to leave. You watched him go, listening to the rhythmic tapping of his cane on the panels. The weight of his words settling on your shoulders. It was true that you couldn't afford to let your emotions get in the way of the investigation, but it was easier said than done. The events of the evening had shaken you to your core, and you weren't sure if you could push them aside so easily. Life in Ketterdam has been hard, but never before has such danger reached you directly.

With a heavy sigh, you made your way back to your room, hoping that a good night's rest would help clear your mind.

You were surprised to find the Antoon's spy so easily, feeling foolish for not discovering it sooner. Despite the setback, the mood in the Crow Club remained peaceful as the days passed. The seventh of you sat together, planning your next move and gossiping about Ketterdam's richest people. Kaz seemed more relaxed than usual, and even Jesper and Matthias were on their best behavior, seemingly content to simply enjoy the moment of peace.

As the night wore on and the group's conversation continued to flow, you couldn't help but notice Kaz's eyes on you. You caught his gaze a few times, and each time you felt a jolt of electricity run through you. It was a feeling you had been trying to ignore for a while now, but it was becoming increasingly difficult with each passing day.

As you turned to look at Jesper, who was recounting a funny story, you noticed Kaz's expression change slightly. It was a subtle shift, but you could tell he was suddenly distant, lost in thought.

After a few minutes, Kaz stood up and motioned for you to follow him. You looked around at the others, confused, but they simply shrugged and continued their conversation. You followed Kaz up the dimly lit hallway to his office.

Once inside, Kaz closed the door and motioned for you to take a seat. You sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk, feeling a bit nervous. Kaz took a seat opposite you, resting his cane on the desk, right next to the chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his desk.

His expression was serious, but not unkind. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” he began, his voice low. “I've noticed that things between us have been a bit... different lately.”

You shifted in your seat, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “Different how?” you asked, not sure if you really wanted to know the answer.

Kaz leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I think you know what I mean,” he replied, his gaze fixed on yours.

Your heart skipped a beat as you realized what he was talking about. “Kaz, I...” you began, but he cut you off with a wave of his hand.

“I just wanted you to know that I'm aware of the situation,” he said, his tone even, then he paused for a moment. “You know, Y/N. I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to care for someone. To really care for someone,” he looked directly at you, his eyes intense, emphasizing the weight of his words. “And I've come to the conclusion that there's no one I care for more than you.”

You were completely taken aback by Kaz's words. You had never heard him express his feelings so openly before. Your heart raced as you searched his face for any sign of insincerity, but you found none. You were overcome with a mixture of shock, disbelief, and joy.

His heart sank as he watched you gaze at Jesper with a look of admiration and affection earlier, even if you two were just friends. It was then that he realized how deeply in love with you he truly was. He had been trying to ignore his feelings for you for so long, but seeing you look at someone else with such tenderness was too much to bear.

Kaz carefully chose his words, wanting to express his feelings without being too direct. “I've been thinking about our friendship,” he said, his voice low and serious. “I value our bond more than anything else in the world, and I want to make sure that nothing ever comes between us.”

“Why are you bringing this up now?” you asked genuinely confused by Kaz's sudden openness.

He shifted in his seat, looking almost uncomfortable, “Well, I just wanted to make sure that you know how much you mean to me,” Kaz said, his eyes meeting yours. “There's no one else I trust or care for more than you, Y/N.”

You could feel the weight of his words, the sincerity and depth of emotion behind them. You knew that he was a man of few words, and when he spoke, it was always with a purpose. It was hard to reconcile this Kaz with the cold and distant one you had grown accustomed to over the years.

You couldn't help but feel that there was an underlying message in Kaz's words, something that he wasn't explicitly stating. Your intuition was telling you that there was more to the story than what he had let on. You couldn't ignore the nagging feeling that something was amiss.

“Kaz,” you began, your voice hesitant. “Is there something else you want to tell me? Something that you're not saying?”

Kaz's expression remained neutral, but you could sense a hint of discomfort in his demeanor. You knew that he wasn't one to wear his heart on his sleeve, so you weren't surprised that he was hesitant to open up to you completely.

“I've said what I needed to say,” Kaz replied, his voice flat. “There's nothing more to it.”

His reply felt like a dead end, and you couldn't help but feel a pang of disappointment. You knew that he was a complex person, with layers that even you couldn't fully comprehend, but you couldn't shake off the sense that he was still holding something back. Nonetheless, you tried to put on a brave face and show your gratitude for his honesty.

“Okay,” you said, rising from your seat. “I appreciate you telling me how you feel. Our friendship means the world to me too, Kaz.” You couldn't help but wonder what his true intentions were, but you knew that you needed to be patient and let him come to you when he was ready.

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foxalade · 2 months

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"never did see one without the other, did you?"

SOBBING.

Sirius and James are just so idk how to explain it?? I can't BELIEVE Sirius went to Prison because he was framed for killing his BEST FRIEND. HIS SAVIOUR. Literally his platonic soul mate. I can't believe so many people knew them and didn't even bat an eye when he was put in Azkaban.

The fact that people were just like "How could he?" and then moved on with their lives, while Remus was distraught at losing ALL of his best friends in one single night.

SIRIUS FOUND HIS BEST FRIEND DEAD. I'm sorry but if I found my best friend dead in her house I'd die, HOW TRAUMATISING IS THAT?? Imagine going to check up on them and finding their house in pieces, and then finding them dead. His best friend. His family. HIS BEST FRIENDS WIFE. THEIR SON??? THEIR ONE YEAR OLD SON.

You know what's worse?

They probably had Sirius' Birthday all planned out. James and Lily were murdered on the 31st of October, 3 days before Sirius' Birthday on the 3rd of November. They would most likely all have bought and wrapped present, perhaps even booked a table at a restaurant or maybe concert tickets or whatever.

But they never went. Never got to do anything. Sirius spent his 22nd birthday locked up in Azkaban while James was dead and Remus was distraught and Peter was "dead".

Harry was taken away and treated like shit. James and Lily's one year old, ONE YEAR OLD, was left orphaned, with no idea about his parents or his parents friends. He could have had a life with Sirius, but that was taken away from him.

Imagine meeting a wanted Murderer, and he goes on to tell you that he loved your father so, SO much and that he saved him. Saved him from years of torture and abuse in his own household and let him stay somewhere safe. And then got FRAMED by their other best mate for his MURDER which he spent 12 YEARS in prison for.

Even when Harry did move in with Sirius during his fifth year, he didn't have very long with his father's best friend either.

Sirius died protecting the last piece of James he still had. After all of those years, Sirius still loved James, loved him so much that he died to protect his son.

"Nice one, James!"

HE DIED THINKING OF HIS BEST FRIEND. HE WAS THINKING OF JAMES IN HIS LAST MOMENTS ON EARTH. Not Harry, not himself, not Remus. JAMES.

Idc if someone thinks "It's so wrong that Sirius only saw James in Harry, and Harry only saw James in Sirius"

Okay, and? That was all they had left. Sirius was the closest thing to his dad, let the poor boy have that small piece of his life. And Sirius loved James. He said himself that he would rather have died than betray James.

And he would have too. If Sirius had been there when Peter and Voldy showed up, he would have told James and Lily to run and sacrificed himself so they could live a life full of love and raise their son.

James was Sirius' only family. Sirius had nothing without him. NOTHING. "Oh but what about Remus?" I love Remus, don't get me wrong, but Remus would never be able to live up to what James was for him. That boy saved him.

I hate it when people come after James. How could you say he was a horrible person when he literally took Sirius in. HE SAVED HIM.

And I just realised that Sirius didn't get to go to James' funeral. He never said goodbye. Remus was there, ALONE, still thinking that Sirius was the murderer and that Peter was dead too. Peter probably had a funeral too??? He wasn't even dead but because he pretended he was treated as dead.

Now imagine Peter's grave is next to James and Lily's. Think about that for a second.

THE GUY THAT BETRAYED THEM IS "BURRIED" RIGHT NEXT TO THEM. AND SIRIUS?? JAMES'S OTHER HALF???

Well. He isn't burried, is he?? WHY? CAUSE HE DIED FOR HARRY. JAMES 2.0. HE DIED FOR HIS BEST FRIENDS SON.

I can only aspire to have a friendship like Sirius and James had.

Ladies and Gentlemen and everyone else, thank you and good night

(it's not a good night and never will be a good night because James died and Sirius was locked up for it. HIS BEST FRIEND.)

#sirius black #james potter #marauders #lily evans #remus lupin #harry potter #Live laugh love James Potter #stan bambi #He saved Sirius and people dare say he was a bad person #Sirius loved James so much he died for his son.#sirius and james #Sirius over Peter any day #Peter sucks ass #peter pettigrew #There's a reason his animagus was a rat

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 1 year

Text

North To The Future [Chapter 14: Strong Enough]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, sexual content, violence, angsttttttttttt (but what else is new 🥰).

Word count: 5.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @doingfondue @tclegane @quartzs-posts @liathelioness @aemcndtargaryen @thelittleswanao3 @burningcoffeetimetravel @hinata7346 @poohxlove @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @travelingmypassion @graykageyama @skythighs @lauraneedstochill @darlingimafangirl @charenlie @thewew @eddies-bat-tattoos @minttea07 @joliettes @trifoliumviridi @bornbetter @flowerpotmage @thewitch-lives @bearwithegg @tempt-ress @padfooteyes @teenagecriminalmastermind @chelsey01 @anditsmywholeheart @heliosscribbles @elsolario @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @tillyt04 @cicaspair418 @fan-goddess @ladylannisterxo

Only 1 chapter left! The series finale will be very...eventful 💜

Ice clinks in Aegon’s rum and Coke, his fourth in an hour; lemon juice and crystalline sugar is a halo around your appletini. The sky is a watercolor painting blending from lavender to violet to indigo, clouded, moonless. Downstairs inside Ursa Minor, shadows grow longer, slanting across the red-brown hardwood floor: hands turn into claws, men into beasts, skeletal and reaching. If this was a movie or a book, you would be able to see the Northern Lights, just like you did the first time Aegon brought you up here. It would be a full-circle moment that would soften a goodbye with a homecoming. Instead, the sky offers no consolation, no hint of any grander design. Sometimes things just blink out of existence like an eviscerated star. Sometimes things are just over.

You stand together on the rooftop patio in a patch of snow that is only shin-deep, exhaling white fog that evaporates into the nightfall, drinking. You don’t speak, because speaking of the end will make it real. You don’t look at each other either. You gaze out over the channel, where dark waters ripple and boats bob in easy waves. When Aegon offers you his rum and Coke, at first you don’t understand; and then you realize he wants to trade.

“I thought you hated these,” you say as you pass Aegon your appletini, Dale’s newest addition to his repertoire. You taste the rum and Coke: solid, heavy, bitter, biting.

“Figured I shouldn’t miss my shot. How often does someone get the chance to enjoy an appletini with an Appletini?” He gives you a wry, off-balance smile as he sips it, saccharine and emerald green.

You down the rest of the rum and Coke, haul up your courage like a body from the silt of a lake. And then you ask him: “What if you went with Aemond?”

Aegon stares at you in disbelief, in betrayal. “What?”

“Back to Miami. What if you actually went?”

“Whose fucking side are you on?”

“No, really, think about it,” you plead. “They can afford to get you the best treatment, take you to the best doctors. You can go to rehab and then, maybe, maybe after you’re better—”

“You want me to go crawling back to my parents after—?!”

“Then don’t do it for your parents!” you shout, your breath short-lived mist in the Arctic wind. “Do it for Aemond and Helaena and Daeron, do it for yourself, do it for me. You’re young, you’re brilliant, it’s not too late for you to start over. You could stop running, you could make amends.”

“I killed three people. How can anyone make amends for that? Aemond lost an eye, he’s maimed for life. How could anyone make amends for what I’ve done? What would me being home do for anybody except serve as a constant reminder of the fact that I got to walk away without paying for my mistakes?”

“You’ve paid,” you say. “You’ve paid for six years.”

He shakes his head, peering into the channel. “I can’t go back.”

“You really think you can run for the rest of your life? You’re never going to get married, have children, own a house, file taxes, start a business, go back to school, keep the friends you’ve made? Aegon, think about it! You can’t even play in a band good enough to book a spot at a festival or a club without there being advertisements, magazine articles, Google search results. You can’t disappear, not in the world that exists now. You can’t disappear and have any life worth living.”

“I’ve made it this long. I’ll find a way.”

“You’ll die,” you tell him, cutting like glass, like the splinters of a broken window. “You can’t keep doing this or you’ll die. And what then?” What about me, Aegon? “What was this all for?”

“I can’t go back.” It’s an echo, mindless and reflexive, a survival instinct. There’s no reasoning with it. He drains the appletini and pitches the glass off the roof, out into the darkness.

You hear footsteps on the staircase, and again you are reminded of the night Aegon kissed you for the first time, the night he sang Everlong, the night under the Northern Lights. Then it had been Heather who interrupted you. Now it’s Kimmie. She bursts through the door, panting from the effort of scaling the steps in five-inch hot pink heels.

“She’s here,” Kimmie informs you and Aegon from the doorway, her face an exaggerated, childlike pool of sympathy, all soft edges and slick eyes. And then she hurries back downstairs.

Heather, sitting in the usual booth, is inundated by well-meaning spectators who offer sympathy, support, thinly-veiled prying so they don’t look quite so much like kids gawking at a zoo animal. They hug her and pat her back reassuringly; they buy her drinks. There is a small army of Sex On The Beaches on the table. Kimmie climbs nimbly into the booth, snuggles up beside Heather, and rests her head on her shoulder. Heather, for once, does not seem to regard this as an intrusion. Aemond, attempting not to encroach, is sipping a Caipirinha at the bar in his black Armani suit. Dale has apparently at last tired of Shania Twain songs. From the stereo drifts the wistful acoustic chords of Sheryl Crow’s Strong Enough.

You slide into the seat across from Heather and take her hands. Joyce is beside you, no book to be found. Brad and Rob are standing a few yards away, both drinking heavily, both murmuring in dazed, conspiratorial voices. “Guess the Hulk jokes aren’t so funny now…can you imagine…he did get kind of aggressive sometimes…the best quarterback Juneau’s seen in decades…but the boots…who would have guessed…?”

“I can’t stay long,” Heather sniffles. Her eyes are red, her face puffy from crying. “My parents are calling around trying to get a good lawyer. They’re in shock, they’re fucking devastated, we’re all just…just…” She crumbles into loud sobs, shoving a fistful of tissues against her nose.

“Shh,” Kimmie says, stroking Heather’s hair. “Shh, shh…”

“Heather,” you begin, not knowing how to put it delicately. “Were there any…you know…any signs? That Trent could be the Ice Fisher?”

She shrugs despondently. “You know how he is. He’s a dumbass sometimes. He gets angry…he says the wrong things…but he doesn’t kill people!” She starts crying again.

“He does fit the description,” Joyce says softly. “He’s big, he’s athletic.”

Kimmie marvels: “I can’t believe we spent all that time around him. We were totally clueless. Out in the woods with him? Hanging out together at night? Trent could have gotten any of us.”

Heather wails, mopping the tears from her face with the damp mass of tissues.

“So he’ll stay in custody?” Aegon asks Heather. “Until the trial?”

“That’s what the cops said. There’s no way he’s getting bail.” She shakes her head. “Chief Baker came to the house to talk to my parents about what was happening. What they had found in Trent’s apartment, what the next steps would be. He looked so sorry to have to deliver the news. That was nice of him, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to do that.” More sniffling, more tears snaking down her cheeks.

“Heather, please,” you say helplessly.

“I hate this,” she sobs. “I hate this!”

Kimmie holds her tighter. “Shh, shh. I know.”

“It’ll kill my parents. They were always so proud of Trent, they loved him so much…they still do, I mean, but now…now…”

“Did he say anything to you?” you ask Heather. “After he was arrested? He got a phone call, right? Did he confess, did he give a reason why? Did he say anything?”

“Yes.” She gazes across the table at you, eyes murky with bewildered, immutable horror. “He said he didn’t do it.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Heather, somewhat mollified by a number of Sex On The Beaches, asks Joyce to drive her home. As Aegon bids goodbye to Rob and Kimmie—a permanent goodbye, a remorseful one—you retreat to the bar to give him space. Brad must know about the transitory Kimmie-Aegon situation; he glares at him as he knocks back glass bottles of beer misty with condensation. Aegon is working on his sixth rum and Coke. He sways, he slurs, he blinks in slow motion.

“Can you believe it?” Dale asks as you sit next to Aemond, sliding you a fresh appletini. His bushy eyebrows are raised: incredulous, inquisitive. “Trent? Our very own hometown hero?”

“It’s disturbing, for sure. But he was prone to…outbursts.”

“Yes,” Dale says, a little vaguely. “I had noticed that.” He lumbers away to take orders. Ursa Minor is full of locals clamoring for gossip, theories, commentary, self-medication.

Aemond nips at his frosty Caipirinha, his eye fixed on Aegon. “He’s stalling.”

Why lie? There’s no shade of dishonestly that he can’t see through. “Yes.”

“It won’t work.”

You watch Aegon from across the room: the way he talks with his hands, the way he smiles crookedly beneath sad eyes, the way that lock of white-blond hair falls over his face. He’s leaving. He’s really leaving. “Show me more pictures from Miami.”

Aemond smirks. “Now you’re stalling too.” Regardless, he produces his wallet and starts leafing through a small stack of photographs. He plucks out the ones you haven’t seen yet with lithe and yet curiously dangerous hands. There are more images of Vhagar, several mansions and yachts, some of a young woman who must be Helaena—slight, delicate, intensely vulnerable—and a boy in his late-teens playing golf.

“Daeron?” you guess.

Aemond nods. “He’s the most balanced, the least damaged. He would have been Dad’s choice to inherit the leadership of the company if he was older. He’s the best of us.”

“I doubt that.” You sift through the photographs until one stuns you: an olive-skinned, black-haired man, perhaps thirty, with his arm around a woman’s shoulders. He wears a modest, strangely burdened smile, but his dark eyes are warm. “Who’s this? He’s gorgeous. And he actually looks Greek. Don’t tell me you have yet another brother. If so, I fear I might have allied myself with the wrong one.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” he says with just a dusting of sarcasm like flurries. “No, he’s Criston Cole. He’s been Dad’s bodyguard since before I was born.”

You squint at the photo. “How old is he?”

“He’s in his forties now. I know he looks younger.”

“And the woman is…his wife? Girlfriend?”

“My mother, actually.”

You raise an eyebrow. Aemond smiles bashfully, averts his gaze. “They share an affinity. He’s helped her immensely through Dad’s illness, through…well.” He gestures to Aegon with his glass. “Everything.”

“I mean…yeah. I’d probably find an excuse to fuck Criston too.”

Miraculously, this works: Aemond laughs, the first time you’ve ever heard him do it. It’s a joltingly beautiful sound. It’s like the earth waking up again at the end of winter. He gathers up the photographs, places them safely back into his wallet, sips his Caipirinha contemplatively. “You’re not stupid,” Aemond says. “You have to understand that there’s no way this ends with you and Aegon together.”

We were supposed to have two more months. And maybe I even dreamed of more than that.

Aemond continues: “He has to get better before it’s too late. He has to get sober. I can’t give him a new liver. Dad’s the only one in the family with Aegon’s blood type.”

You turn to him, bemused. “You’ve already thought about that.”

Aemond is annoyed, like you haven’t been keeping up. “Of course I have.” His BlackBerry beeps, and he slides it out of his pocket. He reads the onyx pixels on the screen, his eye widening. He reads them again. And then he says: “I need a phone. Immediately.”

“Okay, um, well there’s a payphone outside, and Dale has one behind the bar—”

Aemond flags down Dale, expresses that he has an emergency, is swiftly ushered to the phone. While he’s gone, Aegon makes his way back to you. He finishes his latest rum and Coke, bangs the glass down on the counter, kisses you with unaccustomed roughness, his calloused fingers cradling the arc of your jaw.

You tuck his unruly lock of hair behind his ear. “Aegon—”

“We have to leave now,” Aemond says. He’s reappeared, and he will not be ignored.

“Go buy a newspaper and jack off to the business section,” Aegon flings at him, bringing his lips to yours again, burning with dark rum.

Aemond grabs the neckline of his brother’s royal blue sweater and drags him away from you. Bar patrons glance over. You’re beginning to attract attention. “We have to leave. Now.”

“Okay, okay,” Aegon agrees; but there’s something flighty and devious in his eyes, like an animal too sly to be caged. The three of you walk back to Aegon’s apartment together, stepping in footprints already left in the snow. Each time Aegon staggers, you catch him and haul him upright again. You can’t even resent him for it. Soon you won’t be able to touch him at all.

Sunfyre is waiting when Aemond unlocks the door. He gives the golden retriever an absentminded pat on the head as he glides past him. Aegon lurches into the kitchen, where the mugs are still waiting on the counter for the hot chocolate he never made. And then he just stands there unsteadily under the goldenrod florescent lights. He’s run out of room to run. He’s a rat at the end of a maze, not an open door but a brick wall.

“Pack your things,” Aemond orders.

“No.”

With one powerful hand, Aemond shoves him against the refrigerator. Magnets—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Baltimore, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, many more—go flying in every direction. “Pack your fucking things.”

“No,” Aegon repeats.

“Dad’s in the hospital,” Aemond says. “He was admitted this morning. It’s bad, he has a pulmonary embolism. He might be dying. I need to be there to handle things.”

“So go,” Aegon replies dismissively.

“Not alone.” His only eye is an icy blue, sharp and ferocious; but it’s heartbroken too. “Not without you.”

“I’m not going.”

“Aegon,” he implores, he begs. “Mom can’t make these decisions alone, Helaena doesn’t have the spine for it, Daeron’s too young, we need to be there!”

“You need to be there. Not me.”

“Pack your things,” Aemond says again.

“No.”

“Then you can leave as you are.” And he lunges for Aegon, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat. Sunfyre barks franticly.

“Aegon, no!” you shout, because you realize what he’s going to do. He grabs the green mug off the kitchen counter, shatters it against the stovetop, and wields a thick, five-inch-long shard of it like a dagger as Aemond grapples for him. Aegon’s arm is lightning in the air, striking blindly. The jagged sliver of the mug connects with Aemond’s face.

“What’s wrong with you?!” Aemond roars, touching his palm to his forehead and seeing the blood. “What’s your plan? To cut out my other eye too?!”

“No.” Aegon brings the shard to his own throat and starts slicing: not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to show he’s serious. A trickle of blood flows down his neck like a string of rubies.

“Stop!” you and Aemond shriek together. He gets to Aegon first. Aegon careens away from him until his back hits the wall. Aemond knocks the piece of the mug out of his grasp; it clatters over the hardwood floor like a rock skipped across water. Aegon slaps at his brother’s face ineffectually, then finally slams his elbow into Aemond’s nose. Blood rockets, blood flows like a river. With an open palm, Aegon smears it upwards into Aemond’s only remaining eye. Aemond screams in anguish and frustration, fumbling blindly for the kitchen sink. Then Aegon reaches for his brother.

You shout: “Aegon, don’t hurt him—!”

“I’m not.” As Aemond twists on the faucet and splashes water into his eye, Aegon thieves his few consequential possessions from Aemond’s pockets: his keys, his wallet, his cash. And then he retreats to the other side of the room. His message is clear. He doesn’t want to fight; he wants to run. He wants to start running and never stop. Sunfyre scurries over to him, claws clicking on the floor, examining Aegon like a fretful mother.

You yank a dishtowel out of a drawer and go to Aemond. “It’s me, it’s me,” you say gently when he flinches away. You help clear the blood from his eye, assess his nose. Not broken, but bleeding like hell. Aemond doesn’t even look angry. He looks exhausted, he looks hopeless. Aegon watches from across the small apartment, holding his belongings, clutching them to his chest, a coward and hating himself for it.

“Six years,” Aemond says, his voice clotted with scalding blood, with an ocean of time. “For six years I tried to find you and this is what I have to show for it. You didn’t miss me at all. Not even sometimes. Not even for a second.”

“I never said I didn’t miss you.”

“But you won’t come home.”

“No,” Aegon says, like an apology.

Aemond readjusts his suit, smooths his hair. He doesn’t seem aware of the blood still streaming from his nose, his forehead. “I have to go. I have to be there.”

“Then go, Aemond. That’s where you belong.”

He stares at Aegon with a vacantness that you can feel in your own bones: excavated marrow, howling void. “This isn’t over,” he says. “All I’ve ever done is live in your shadow. I don’t know how to stop.” And then he gets his green Louis Vuitton suitcase and vanishes through the apartment doorway. You bolt after him, chasing him out into the darkness, a starless night with a cold wind that slits into your lungs like needles.

“Aemond!” you call, and he stops. “Where are you going?”

“Home. The jet is waiting.”

“But you can’t walk to the airport from here. And I’ve had one too many appletinis to drive you.”

“I’ll call a cab from the bar. You do have cabs here in Juneau, I assume?”

“Yes. Two, I think.”

“That’ll do.” He stands in the weak beam of the streetlight, heaving in labored breaths. He wipes the blood still pouring from his nose with the back of one hand. “Good luck with him. You’ll need it.” And then he’s gone, his suitcase bumping over thickets of snow and ice.

Upstairs, Aegon is dragging his own suitcase—black, tattered, Samsonite—out from beneath his unmade bed. He opens it and starts throwing in clothes: band T-shirts, sweaters, jeans, flannel. Sunfyre, whimpering, crawls under the bed and stays there.

“Aegon—”

“If my father stabilizes, Aemond will come back. If he dies, Aemond will come back. He might try to bring my mother up here, or Helaena, or Daeron, or Criston, or the whole fucking family, who knows? I have to be long gone by the time he returns to Juneau.”

“Aegon, please, think about this—”

“I already have a guy lined up to buy the Nova…I think I still have his phone number…I don’t have enough cash yet, but I will once I’ve sold the car…” He’s mostly talking to himself. He’s not really in Juneau anymore; he’s in the future, he’s in the past.

“You don’t have to go—”

He says suddenly, looking at you: “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. We’ll do this together.”

And for a second, you almost say yes. You can see it in one of those flashes, brief and inescapable like lightning: sand, surf, wild children with white-blond hair. Then reality roars back in like a storm. “What, so I can drag you off the floor, clean up your messes? So I can have a front row seat to your self-destruction? So I can burn all the bridges behind us as I follow you into exile? There’s no place for me in a future like that. That’s not a future at all. It’s a cage. It’s a different kind of cage than the one I’m in here, but it’s a cage nonetheless.” Your voice isn’t harsh. Perhaps it would hurt him less if it was. You sound patient and sad and old, like you’ve already seen it all and returned as a ghost, wearing decades of regret instead of white sheets. “And you’ll drink away the money I make, or you’ll inject it into your arm, or you’ll buy pills with it, and I’ll resent you, at first just a little bit, and then more, each time stacking up like pennies in a jar, getting heavier and heavier until I can’t feel all those reasons why I fell in love with you, I can only feel the crushing goddamn weight.”

He can’t even tell you that it’s not true. He wants to, he wants to desperately, but he can’t.

“Tell me you’ll get better,” you say in a whisper thinner than a knife’s edge. “Tell me you’ll try, at least, that you’ll go to rehab, that you’ll face your past, that you’ll make amends. Give me something, anything to hold on to. Give me a reason to leave with you. Please, Aegon, please, just give me one fucking reason.”

“I’m not capable of what you’re asking for.”

“Then I can’t leave Juneau.”

“If you walk out that door, it’s over,” he says, his eyes glassy, tiny barren oceans. “I can’t wait. And I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Maybe that’s for the best.”

“Then get out,” he hisses. “You want to go so bad? You want to get away from me, you want to start forgetting? Just get out. You don’t need to make polite excuses. You don’t need to placate me. I understand. I understand perfectly.” And he doesn’t hit you, but it feels like he does. “Go find some painfully ordinary Juneau boy that you won’t give a fuck about. Maybe he’ll be a logger, maybe he’ll work on a fishing boat, it doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ll play pool with him and you’ll stroll through Blockbuster together and you’ll let him order you beers you don’t want and sooner or later you’ll be lying underneath him, and he’ll be fucking you, and you’ll be amazed by how it’s possible to be so close to another human being and yet so far away. And you know what? The whole time you’ll be thinking about me.”

“Yes,” you answer, dripping with cold venom. “I’ll be wondering what morgue you ended up in.”

“Then get out,” he says again, he dares.

But you don’t turn to go. You don’t even move. Aegon’s gaze sweeps over you: face, down to your boots, back up to your eyes.

His lips curl up at the edges, not in a smile but something stinging, boastful, cruel. “I know what you want.”

Don’t touch me, you wish you could say, you wish you could stab him with like a blade, all the way to the hilt. I don’t want you to touch me. I don’t want you at all. But Aegon has learned every one of your languages, and he can read lies on you like scrawls of ink.

He crosses the room, buries a hand in your hair, holds you still as he skates the other into the front of your jeans. You cry out, opening your thighs for him, surrendering, ravenous. One last time. Yes, oh god, please, one last time. He yanks your jeans down to your ankles and unbuttons his own. Then he turns you to the wall. You brace yourself against it—a palm pressed to fraying wallpaper—as he slips into your wetness, becoming a fleeting visitor rather than one with you, a lover without a name, a face.

And you want it, yes, yes, there’s no ambiguity there, but still it’s agony, because it’s nothing like it was before. Aegon doesn’t whisper to you, doesn’t kiss you, doesn’t touch you anywhere that isn’t necessary. He makes you come, yes; but quickly and mechanically, like it’s a necessary task to be checked off a list, a patched roof, gasoline into his Nova. He doesn’t leave bruises on you, yes; but that doesn’t mean anything. He never left bruises on Kimmie either. When you reach back—instinctively, without thinking—to touch his face, his hair, he catches your hand and pins it to the wall. You could be anybody, and you will be: soon enough the girl standing in your place will be from Des Moines, Modesto, Scottsdale, Buffalo, Plano, Durham, Wichita, Knoxville, Fargo, Ann Arbor, Hartford. It doesn’t matter where she lives, because he won’t be there long. It doesn’t matter who she is, because that’s not why he wants her.

Aegon finishes with a shuddering gasp, is still for a moment, and then recedes from you. The sensation of abrupt emptiness is forlorn, sickening. I feel worse than I did before. How is that possible?

“Now get out,” he says, zipping up his jeans in the sepia florescent light. He can’t even look at you. He stares down at the floor instead, pretending to be scrutinizing something, a scuff or an indentation. You both know he doesn’t care about things like that. You both know he’s done with you. You dress yourself, grab your purse, and break out into the freezing darkness.

You go to Ursa Minor and clean yourself up in the bathroom, a tear-streaked ghost under stark white lights. Then you go to the usual booth. You don’t order anything, not even when Dale swings by to check in with you, his forehead crinkled with questions and worry. You don’t talk to the few locals who are currently drinking their January evening away. You just sit there, staring at the wall, not feeling time as it breathes through you: an invisible truth, a string that ties the past to the present like an anchor. Eventually, you get up and leave, climb into your Jeep, drive back to the place you’ve always called home.

You walk into the house, into the nightscape silence. Your purse drops off your shoulder and thumps against hardwood. And you stand there, not speaking, not seeing, just feeling the ionic bonds between your atoms being snipped, your veins and ligaments unweaving, pieces of you falling away until you vanish. You can feel yourself becoming transparent. The pigment of your eyes, your hair, your skin evaporates—boiled water from a tea kettle, steam off a bathroom mirror—and is replaced by the muted grayscale of Juneau. Your eyes are puddles of melted snow on asphalt, laced with salt and stray earth. Your hair is wisps of fog. Your skin is the Gastineau Channel, a silver-cold river deep with bones. It’s not that you can’t imagine a future. It’s that you’ve forgotten how to imagine anything at all.

“You’re home already?” Your mom steps out of the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishtowel. “Dad went to the Foodland. I found this neat new cookie recipe but we’re out of baking powder—”

You look at her, and she sees you, really sees you. And the totality of the understanding on her face is like you’re under a spotlight, like you’ve never had a secret and never will. “How did it happen?”

“He’s leaving Juneau. I can’t go with him, not the way he is now. That’s all.” You show her your palms, empty.

“Well, it’s not necessarily goodbye forever, is it? I mean, you can still stay in contact with him. Make phone calls, send letters…”

“There’s no point, Mom,” you say, with more despair than you intend to. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ladybug…” She hesitates, wringing the dishtowel. “Your dad and I…we want you to be happy. You know that, don’t you? And we like having you here. We love having you here, it’s the greatest gift we could have ever hoped for. But if you need to change things to be happy…if you need to see other places, experience different things…we would want you to do that. We would want you to do whatever it takes for you to feel that you’re truly living.”

You stare at her like she’s speaking a dead language: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Gothic, Illyrian. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

I could get out of Juneau. They would want me to. “But even if I did leave one day, I couldn’t go with Aegon.” Your voice breaks, your lips tremble. “He’s too damaged. He’s too much like Jesse.”

“Oh, ladybug,” your mom says, smiling with tears in her eyes. “Aegon isn’t like Jesse.”

Of course he’s like Jesse. He’s exactly like Jesse. And that’s why he’s going to end up dying the same way Jesse did. “He’s…not?”

“Well, he is, but he isn’t. Aegon is more defenseless, more gentle, more kind. Aegon would never hit you. There’s more good in him, I think. There’s more of a chance.”

You want to believe her. It shocks you how much; you’ve never wanted to believe in anything this badly. “So you think I should go with him.”

“That’s something you have to decide,” your mom says. “And only you. Because you’re the one who has to live with the choices you make. All I can tell you is that if you see potential in someone, even a glimmer of possibility, and you don’t try with every shred of yourself to make it work…you might regret it for the rest of your life.”

A question occurs to you that is so horrible you almost can’t bring yourself to ask it. “Do you regret being with Dad?”

“No, never,” she says, and the relief rolls through you. “But I think that if I had handled things differently with Jesse, he would still be alive. I had given up on him by then. I had stopped trying to help him, I had stopped believing him when he told me he wanted to change. I wasn’t there for him at the end. And I should have been. Because it really did seem like he was getting better.” She embraces you, warmth and unconditional harbor. “If you want to run after Aegon…if even the smallest part of you does…then I don’t want you to ignore that because of your love for me and Dad. We’ll be alright. Do you hear me? As long as you’re happy, we’ll be alright.”

“Okay.” You kiss her on both cheeks and hug her one last time, your arms slung around her neck, clinging to her like a child. “Okay, Mom. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love you.”

“I love you too, ladybug. Now go. Go, if that’s what you want.”

So you go. You snatch up your purse, bolt for the door, run through the frigid darkness to your Jeep. Dim gloomy streetlights flick by overhead as you drive, snow and ice and salt crunching beneath the tires. The channel is a glistening ribbon to the west, the mountains vast ancient shadows to the east. And you think about what you’ll tell Aegon, what perfect confession you’ll make; but the truth is, you won’t need to say anything at all. When he sees you, he’ll know.

You swerve to a haphazard stop under the streetlight outside Aegon’s apartment building. You dive out of your Jeep, sprint up the steps, rattle the spare key he once gave you in the door. It opens. So does the rest of your life.

Inside, Aegon’s apartment is silent and still. The refrigerator magnets have been collected from the floor like seashells from frothing surf. The battered green electric guitar is missing. His closet is bare; the blue mug has disappeared from the kitchen counter. There are pawprints in the dust on the hardwood floor. But there’s no Sunfyre, and there’s no Aegon either.

He’s gone. He’s just gone.

#aegon x reader #aegon ii targaryen #aegon targaryen #aegon ii #aegon targaryen ii #aegon targaryen x you #aegon x y/n #aegon ii x y/n #aegon ii x you #aegon ii x reader #nttf #north to the future

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mylittlegemlins · 3 months

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Random theorys/headcanons SpyxFamily

Two options:

-Loid is considering how to keep his wife and daughter now that he is close to finishing his mission, but his enemies discover his family and hurt them so that Twilight appears, making Loid make the decision to go as far away from them as possible to ensure that they are alive.

EITHER

-Loid is looking for a way to abandon Anya and Yor in the least painful way possible now that he has to leave. But there is something that makes Loid reconsider his decision to keep them.

-Anya loses Chimera because of some mistake in the laundry room in her building, Loid tries to cheer her up by all means but no matter how many walks, gifts and cakes he gives her, the girl remains depressed, once he finds out that it was a gift from her dead mother searches every garbage dump in the country for the sake of the mission.

-Loid realizes that he read thousands of books on parenting but none that talked about adopted children, so he has to look for new books and research to understand Anya's needs.

-Anya laughing out of nowhere because she heard something supremely funny from someone's head but that someone only thinks she's crazy.

- Loid already knows that Anya is a telepath, on the contrary he thinks that she is important, useful and collaborative. So they go to the Desmonds' house to talk to Donovan, Twilight has her second meeting and chats with him hoping that later Anya, who is talking about studies with Damian, tries to hear a little of what she is thinking. She tries but, she doesn't hear anything.

-Denovan has a plate of some extraterrestrial metal in his skull because he knows about the Apple project.

-The wedding ring asking, do you want to be my real wife?

-The adoption anniversary cake asking do you want to be my real daughter?

-I seriously want to see how Loid turns on a radio to listen to the news and a song starts playing and they end up dancing like they do in the ending

-An old gossip telling the Forgers that they are pampering that girl too much. But they already know that this girl was probably electrocuted until she passed out on her 3rd birthday for the sake of "world peace" they send that old woman to hell so she doesn't bother.

-Anya having to live temporarily with WISE without being able to have contact with Loid because they fear that she will find out more things that she should not know, trying to do ethical studies and investigating her legal situation since when she was born in a laboratory. Anya doesn't understand anything and just wants to go home.

-Loid realizing that she dated over 30 women pretending to love them just to get information but for the first time she wonders, is this what love feels like?

-I need to see in the manga Anya's past adoptions and if she became attached to those families.

-Franlky yelling at Twilight to stop her from staying with her family "What? And what do you think you're going to do when the girl grows up and needs $150 mascara? Or when you have to kiss another woman to complete your missions? I told you not to get attached to them! "

And Loid type: help me keep them and I'll help you get a girlfriend.

-Yor happy reflecting that she likes being a mother.

-Damian getting a tonitrus (in general it would be interesting) but imagine if it is because he unconsciously saving Anya from having another one.

-Anya feeling uncomfortable because now her parents think differently now that they know she can read minds. Probably repeating "don't think about anything" thousands of times or imagining a white wall in front of her. Yor would even imagine the murders of her with censorship and avoid her the firts hours.

-Yor is finally sent to kill Twilight, she runs away from her family to find him, and when she arrives at the battlefield she sees him and says: "Loid! What are you doing here? Go hide or Twilight might kill you! But I'll kill him first!" "I'll explain everything to you later!"

-Imagine Loid reading the files of the 007 experiment together with Anya, always leaning his shoulder on her so that she does not focus on the trauma, but rather they take the opportunity to learn important details about Ania's origins that she did not know or not remember, her date actual birthday, her mother's name, the country where she came from, photos or videos of her when she was a baby, everything so that the girl feels happy to know a little about herself to better forge your identity.

-The day Anya calls Loid dad, he will be thoughtful and recognize that He is her dad!

-Anya dealing with a bully but she doesn't dare to defend herself because she already has 7 tonitrus, but her father is there undercover as a teacher and he makes sure that those bullies are expelled by giving them 3 tonitrus, although he would hit them himself if he could.

-Loid thinks because this mission is about to end and it is being so difficult that he goes out to spend some time with Frankly, he gets carried away by his feelings, he gets drunk and without anyone questioning him he tells him crying that he loves Anya and Yor.

-Anya could gets a tonitrus for rescuing rats from a high school classroom because they were going to be cut open for vivisection, flashbacks to the lab.

-When Anya begins to say dad to Loid, he realizes that he cannot say no to that creature and wonders when that stage will end. "Dad buy me more peanuts" you got it "dad will you take me to disneyworld?" Granted "Will you buy me a pony.... dad?" Loid is desperate because he can't say no.

-One of Anya's foster families took her to a soccer stadium But she ran away immediately because damn it was the loudest place she had ever been and she would spend the entire game going in and out of unconsciousness.

-I really want to see Anya saying sad things without knowing it because she hasn't lived a normal childhood. Why do people celebrate her birthday? Have you never been electrocuted?

-Remember the episode where Loid and Yor are drinking and the bartender is listening as Yor suspects Loid's infidelity? Well, imagine him listening to the sequel, hearing a drunk Loid cry for her family because he has to leave them because her wife won't love him for cheating on her, and Frankly yelling at him that they will get a lawyer to keep the child.

#spyxfamily #spy x family headcanons #anya forger #loid forger #yor forger #spy x family anya #sxf #sxf manga

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still-a-morosexual-help · 10 months

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Here's MY thoughts on the love island the game's seasons, for no reason other than I want to:

Also because the majority of the people following me are here for OM! & I want to drag more people down into the litg hell with me :)

Season 1: why is everyone so bitchy for no reason????? Talia & Jake are okay but other than that it's meh... don't really like the art style either

Season 2: Immaculate. Chef's kiss. They hit a high they never reached again. Somehow managed to balance the drama & the found family aspect and created a dynamic where you can actually believe everyone is friends and having fun even if sometimes they try to kill each other. Characters are flawed but generally decent people who are allowed to grow throughout the season. You get the option to make MC a bi gym-bro who can devour an entire cake in one sitting and bench press her partner. There's a reason this got two sequels.

Season 3: It's fine ig. Short and kind of boring. Nothing much happens. AJ is so cute though she almost makes up for it.

Season 4: Honestly a close 2nd favourite. We get a lot of character backstory and like s2 it touches on some serious issues. The season with some of the funniest moments/lines of dialogue - multiple moments where I just laughed out loud. I'm still only half way through it but the "villain" is just straight up mean for no reason and doesn't get any character development like the characters in S2 but makes up for it by having some of the funniest interactions with other characters and I was so sad to see her go. Also the season where I desperately wish MC was allowed to be in an open relationship till the very end and finish off the season in a polycule with every other islander who was in the love "triangle"s of the the season because this was the hardest season to pick a LI - Najuma is just all around amazing, Bruno is sweet & funny, Tom is so pathetic* MC & Thabi's friendship is also the best thing? It's great seeing a platonic relationship that is as loving (if not more so) than the romantic relationships. It's literally:

Season 5: Psychological horror. The producers said 'hey wouldn't it be funny if we torture this woman on national tv' and then committed to the bit. My memories are hazy because even though I only played it earlier this year it upset me so much I did my best to block most of it out but also I'm 100% sure there was actual galighting happening. Don't know why MC stuck around till the end because all she's gonna be able to use the money for is to pay for her therapy. Anyway I think MC should have been allowed to brutally murder everyone, she deserved it <3

Season 6: I liked the concept but I think they should have utilised it more. I'm still right at the very beginning (around ep 9) and I KNOW the general consensus from everyone who has reached the last eps seems to be that Amelia sucks MAJOR ass. But look, this is the first time a game has given me a MC with a canon family member who is also part of the game so in my opinion Amelia could commit war crimes and she's still be the most precious little uwu ever because I'm activating MC's insanely overprotective oblivious to all faults ""big"" sister mode

Edit:

*I just played more of S4 and holy shit someone needs to get this man away from his parents and also maybe get him some therapy jfc

Edit 2:

** youcef, mc & valentina helping tom figure out he likes flowers and pink and tie-dye clothes and makeup and being complimented and called pretty and getting hugs is getting to me okay his parents better watch the show and see their adult son finally discovering himself and what he likes instead of what they think he should like and finally being able to let loose and have fun without worrying about what others think of him and finally being happy and they better get some sense knocked into them OR he should go to therapy and realise that no matter how much he loves his parents their love and regard being so conditional to the point that he's hidden his entire personality and is now so extremely self-conscious of it whenever it does manage to peak out, that he nearly cries on national tv after a practical stranger compliments those hidden bits is not good. Also the man has some of the most insane repressed queer vibes???? What do you mean he sees a canon nonbinary person wearing a floppy hat and is reminded of the floppy hat he loved as a child that his father threw away and replaced with a baseball cap and then when he "lost" the baseball cap his father bought him the exact same one again

Edit 3:

*** i was 100% sure i was going to get mc to stick with najuma (dorky mischevious goth who is so so bad at flirting hello!!!?) but i got caught by "sad & shy with serious self-worth issues hidden badly behind an overconfident exterior (who blushes & gets flustered easily because he so rarely receives genuine praise/compliments) experiences postive regard for the first time and loses his shit" for the third fucking time

Edit 4:

Okay but why does Dylan get (rightfully) called out by everyone in S4 for all the bullshit he does to MC from blatantly lying to her to not listening when she says "No" But in S5 when Suresh (admittedly, more subtly) pulls off the same shit no one says anything, even MC's "friends" don't believe her.

In S2 when Luke/Henrik gets a little too forceful after MC says no, he gets called out by MC's partner and immediately apologises

In S4 when Dylan does the whole "stop pretending you don't want me" routine after MC rejects him multiple times, the rest of the islanders band together and basically chase him off the island

In S5 when Suresh pulls literally the same thing from the very first episode itself but none of the other islanders believe MC, and Suresh keeps getting to do this until almost the very end while also managing to constantly play hot & cold with MC and chase away all of MCs other romantic interests

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crossdressingdeath · 6 months

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Thinking about the disappointing ending to Durge's personal quest and how they either go full villain or lose most of what makes them unique as a character and basically just become Tav, and like... since Durge's death and immediate resurrection adds nothing to the plot (and what with things like the companions not responding to it, there being no clear reason why Durge is able to do something that Withers specifically says breaks cosmology and Withers apparently being unable to resurrect Durge if they kill themself to defy Bhaal at the very end of the game for no apparent reason it actually causes a surprising number of problems in the writing), why couldn't the good ending just involve finding a way to stop Bhaal from interfering in their life rather than Bhaal killing them?

Here's one potential solution, just off the top of my head. All the other origins' personal quests have trade-offs, right? Durge is the only one with this perfect "you get everything you want with no downsides" sort of ending. So what if instead of Bhaal killing them and them immediately getting brought back, they had to make a deal with him? He sets them free, and in exchange they do something for him. I can't think of what the exact terms would be, maybe something like... I don't know, "You'll uphold the usual 'murder once a tenday' tenets of the Bhaalists and if you stop you're mine again" that wouldn't really do anything in the game itself but would become an issue afterwards (like Astarion losing the ability to walk in sunlight if he remains a spawn and Wyll losing his warlock powers if he breaks his contract)? But whatever the terms are the upshot is that Bhaal removes the Urge as a show of good faith and the party is allowed to leave freely. Maybe also add in something like Shar still harassing Shadowheart if she spares her parents, like... maybe Bhaal removing the Urge and agreeing not to force Durge into their apocalyptic destiny doesn't mean he can't try to convince them to do it of their own will, so he occasionally pops into their head and tries to push them in a more murdery direction in a less aggressive version of the Urge that can't directly take over them? Or possibly just. hurts them out of spite because as long as he doesn't do anything permanent or force them to harm anyone else he's remaining within the bounds of their agreement. And that way they remain a piece of Bhaal's divine gore with everything that entails, they're just not on Bhaal's leash anymore. And they've also agreed to do something pretty fucked up of their own (coerced) will in exchange for their freedom, so they don't retain the annoyingly spotless moral high ground of the canon end of redemption Durge's story where they selflessly die rather than become Bhaal's apocalypse-triggering Chosen again.

You could even keep that "I'd rather die than serve you" energy without actually pulling the trigger: since Durge is actually a part of Bhaal rather than just his child like other Bhaalspawn, maybe they'd have ammunition for forcing Bhaal to bargain with them that regular Bhaalspawn don't. Like, say... maybe since they're a part of Bhaal them being destroyed utterly would do a fair amount of damage to him (which may have something to do with why they can be resurrected despite that usually being impossible for Bhaalspawn), and—to keep Withers's involvement in the quest, since that's actually really fun and given his distaste for Bhaal makes sense—the death god they're palling around can help make that complete destruction happen. Under those circumstances it would be better for Bhaal to lose them as his Chosen and mess up that particular plan for total victory rather than continue to try to force them and weaken himself permanently! I think if nothing else all that wouldn't make less sense than the canon ending.

#bg3 #durge #and it could come up in the epilogue too #like... maybe durge is investigating the history of bhaalspawn looking for a way to free themself from bhaal entirely #maybe even an option to suggest they're looking for a way to use their connection to him to USURP him?#that could be fun

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script-a-world · 30 days

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Submitted via Google Form:

I'm building species for my world and I want to know the difference between human races and variations vs animal breeds and variations biologically. Also, why is selective breeding humans called eugenics and gets a nasty rep, but selective breeding animals is a good thing? Is that just 'humanity' talking? Like killing animals is just nature although nasty stuff moves into cruelty, but killing humans is just straight up murder?

Wootzel: This isn’t really a worldbuilding question the way you’re asking it, it’s an ethics question. However, since it has come up a few times on this blog, we’re going to try to break it down as we’re able to and address the implications of thinking about humans using the terms in the ask. It should go without saying, if you’re thinking of a made-up species with human-level intelligence, everything said here should apply to them as well.

Discussions of eugenics, humanitarian atrocities, and racism under the cut.

People cannot be forced to reproduce or kept from reproducing by other people without ethically horrible results. Full stop. The only exceptions to this are people who do not have the cognitive ability to understand child-rearing, either because they are children themselves or because they have cognitive impairments that result in them being in another person’s custody in adulthood.

This DOES mean that people who are not fit to be parents raise children. This DOES mean that people can have children who are physically or mentally incapable of taking care of them. This DOES mean that sometimes debilitating genetic problems are passed on. There is no ideal solution to any of these problems, and there never will be.

If people can be kept from having children based on any criteria other than individual cases, there will always be opportunities for abuse, and there will always be abuse. Humanity is too complex for us to ever draw lines between those who “should” be allowed to reproduce and those who “shouldn’t,” because a line that would be beneficial in one case will be a violation in another case.

To make this clearer, I’m going to include some examples. These are not based on any individual case or person, but do reflect real-life scenarios. Reader, if you’re a member of a group that is often threatened with eugenics and might find these discussions distressing, proceed with caution or skip the next two paragraphs.

Genetic Cognitive Impairments, such as severe learning disabilities and autism, are often mentioned in conversations about eugenics. Some of these conversations can even seem well-meaning, because there are absolutely people in these diagnostic groups who would be entirely unable to parent a child. They’re still wildly unethical because these people exist on a spectrum, and there are people with every mental condition known to man who make wonderful parents. If one person’s autism diagnosis could be used as a reason that they aren’t a fit parent, then what’s to stop that precedent from threatening every other person with that diagnosis? Where does one draw the line? ADHD has some similar symptoms to autism, and in some cases it can make parenting difficult, too. So can depression or anxiety, which in most cases are not genetic. NONE of these conditions can ever be used as an indication that a person is not fit to parent. I have ADHD and know several autistic people, and most of us would not choose to trade in our weird brains for a neurotypical one, even though they can cause us difficulties. There is joy to be had in life at every difference and level of functionality, so no argument against letting children be born with these conditions holds validity, either.

There are lots of heritable conditions with primarily/only physical symptoms that might be the target of eugenics discussions as well. I don’t know enough to touch on all of these, but I can still break apart some arguments here as well. Some conditions, like Sickle Cell Disease and Cystic Fibrosis, can be debilitating and no parent could ever want their child to inherit them, but most conditions that are this severe are recessive (must be inherited from both parents) and without genetic testing (which is not even possible for all conditions due to the complexity of genetics), it’s difficult or impossible to know if a child might inherit a condition. Many other conditions, for example Diabetes and Migraines are associated with multiple genes, and most of them aren’t well-understood yet, so even the presence of a group of genes isn’t a guarantee. A possibility of passing on a genetic condition is not a good enough reason to restrict someone from having children.

End of real-world-condition examples.

The argument of “no genetic condition is bad enough to justify eugenics” is only part of the picture. Another issue is: How would this ever be enforced?

There is no form of preventing someone from reproducing that is ethical to do to a human due to our highly developed sense of self, sense of agency, and comprehension of our circumstances.

Preventing access to reproductive partners is way too much restriction of freedom and would probably result in social needs not being met.

There is no form of temporary birth control that’s effective and safe for everyone, and there are probably some people who can’t use any form without suffering. Many of these can easily fail or be sabotaged. Forced medication is a violation of bodily autonomy, which comes with trauma, and there’s no way to force someone to use birth control without restricting basic freedom as well.

Permanent sterilization involves surgery no matter what gonads you have, and surgery is inherently risky. Forced surgery is also a massive violation of bodily autonomy, which is deeply traumatizing, and might have long-term unintended consequences on bodily health.

Legal consequences to reproducing would not change the outcome: A child was born. They would also result in children being separated from fit parents. This would probably also result in people--children and parents alike--having a lower quality of life because of legal or social consequences of existing.

If someone has a condition they don’t want to pass on, but they could have a healthy child with the help of something like IVF, they should be free to make that choice just as much as someone without any known genetic problems.

The third side to this problem is that if there’s precedent for restricting someone’s reproductive rights against their will, people in power with shitty intentions will use it against groups they don’t like and fall back on a medical excuse, even if one doesn’t exist or is invalid. This is not a hypothetical: women of minority groups have been sterilized against their will while in surgery for a condition that didn’t require them to be sterilized to survive.

The only thing that can ethically be done to prevent the passive of heritable genetic conditions is education and access to medical care. LOTS of people with genetic conditions will go to great lengths to avoid passing them to their children, and these choices should be available to everyone.

To wrap it up: Humans have a greater capacity for understanding than other animals, and we can make our own choices. Removing those choices and removing the potential for parenthood is enormously damaging to individuals, and can even result in genocide on a larger scale. There is no way to adequately draw defensible lines around the people who “shouldn’t” be allowed to reproduce, or to prevent those lines from being crossed if there were to be drawn.

Tex: This is historically a hotly-debated topic, so I’ll be adding a lot of reference links for your perusal that I recommend reading, in order to add an appropriate level of context to my answer. Very broadly speaking, eugenics involves a group of people deciding that a selection of characteristics - usually phenotypes but now the argument has begun to include genetic code - that are allowed to reproduce. This is usually enforced by killing, sterilizing, and/or maiming anyone (via bad medical practices) that does not get approval from this group of people. Who these people are matter very little, as it changes according to era and geographical region - they share the common characteristic of violent enforcement of their ideals, which often leads into things like war and the accompanying war crimes.

Animal husbandry typically does not include humans, though only by the slightest framing of definitions - we still have plenty of similar actions taken against other humans, such as human trafficking, forced births, and arranged marriages. The domestication and rearing of animals is generally used for agricultural purposes, such as meat, dairy, and egg consumption, when it does not also include textile, leather, and sundry product production.

“Killing” animals implies that an animal died for purposes other than the above listed purposes. This would include social habits such as trophy hunting, which is frequently frowned upon as the people participating in such hunting do it for obtaining social status among their peers rather than subsistence.

Predation - which often includes but does not only include animals - is when one species preys upon another species (I use “preys upon” in the literal sense, here, not the metaphorical or euphemistic). When this happens, for various reasons such as energy conservation in the predator, impatience due to hunger, and need to prevent injuries from the prey fighting back - the prey is usually killed rather quickly. Predation establishes trophic levels, and the differentiation of species from autotrophs to detritivores.

Humans are omnivores of varying degrees, obtaining their nutrients from a variety of food sources. I bring this up because it impacts both reproductive habits within human societies and the development of food resources by community. As the following links will inform you, there is a gradual, shifting line between the definitions of “who” and “what”.

Across many, many different cultures and across many, many different eras there has been debate upon what is human, and therefore, who is human.

Is a human merely that which is part of the community? If so, is a pet dog human? If not, why so? What lines are being drawn? A pet dog would, in some parts of the world, not be considered a source of food - some places have both considerations in hand, where the animal we know of as a dog can be both a pet residing in a household as well as a component in a dish. The same goes for cats, birds, horses, and any other animal - or non-animal - one could conceive of rearing and caring for within the boundaries of one’s home. Is a human who is not a member of your household - and thus, your community - a person? There are varying degrees in nearly every part of the world that changes whether one answers “yes” or “no”. In which case, if you define a human not part of your community as a “who” rather than a “what”, even if another community holds this same human as a “what” rather than a “who” - who is correct? Who is more correct? On what grounds can these opinions be enforced?

By that same metric, if another community considers you a “what”, does that mean you cannot be referred to as a “who”? On what basis is this defined, and “who” gets to enforce these definitions?

If someone is a “who”, can their reproductive habits be dictated by another? If something is a “what”, can their reproductive habits be likewise dictated? Can a human be treated like an animal? Can an animal be treated like a human? To further articulate, which of these is a person? Can a person only be a human? Can an animal - or other species - be considered a person? What is the definition of personhood? What is the definition of humanity? Who gets to decide that? What gets to decide that?

Further Reading

OpenStax Introduction to Philosophy

OpenStax Introduction to Anthropology

OpenStax Introduction to Sociology

OpenStax Concepts of Biology

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection

Wikipedia Deductive reasoning

Wikipedia Abductive reasoning

Wikipedia Inductive reasoning

Wikipedia Existentialism

Wikipedia Philosophy

Wikipedia Infinite regress

Wikipedia Value theory

Wikipedia Outline of philosophy

Wikipedia Problem of universals

Wikipedia Subject and object (philosophy)

Wikipedia Selective breeding

Wikipedia Animal husbandry

Wikipedia Culling

Wikipedia Eugenics

Animal Cognition (tw: contains images of spiders on home page)

Addy: Tex and Wootzel put in some absolutely fantastic stuff, so I'm just going to share a bit on why I think we generally differentiate between humans and animals when it comes to genetic lines… and animals as working animals (plowing, herding, meat, livestock guardians, etc) vs animals for aesthetics (pugs, Scottish fold, pets).

Golden retrievers were bred for a strong retrieving instinct and for soft mouths, that they'd cause less damage to waterfowl carcasses. Collies have generally been bred for intelligence and herding instincts, for obvious reasons. Draft horses are bred to pull loads. In a working animal, you don't get the severe health issues you get in aesthetic animals. They're bred to do a job, and if they're sick or ill, they can't do that job very well.

I think there's something about being responsible and something about being careless with genetic lineages in animals. We have a degree of control over these things (re: domesticated animals that are born for the purpose of human use), like it or not. It's what we do with it that matters.

Many animals will happily commit incest. Dogs from the same litter, for example, will happily mate with each other. Do you stop it (either by separating the animals or by neutering/spaying), or do you stand by and let it happen? Animals, just like humans, carry recessive genes that can cause health issues. Responsible breeders keep all sorts of records to keep genetic issues out of their lines. Irresponsible breeders don't care.

Think about the practice of fixing (neutering/spaying) animals in general - it's common practice to get an animal fixed once they're old enough, to keep them from reproducing. These animals don't live in a wild environment, where their populations are kept in check by other factors. We domesticated them, and they live in our spaces. If we let them breed willy-nilly, their populations will grow out of control and ruin/imbalance local ecosystems. They live in a human environment, and they're our responsibility.

On a tangent, mules used to be a whole industry

When it comes to making decisions re: the reproductive habits of other humans, the power imbalance of domestication isn't present. Other humans (and their reproductive habits) are not my responsibility. It's their business.

You do get some laws in some places about letting first cousins marry, but – on the whole – if someone with a genetic issue thinks about having children, I am not part of that discussion. That person is allowed to make their own decisions about what to do with their genetics. Since their genetic code is theirs, having an outsider mess with that (eugenics) is seen as a human rights issue. It takes the autonomy of that choice away from them.

Also…. The other side of selective breeding isn't just culling, it's breeding. With animals, that generally isn't an issue. If it is, there are all sorts of strategies to make animals more likely to be willing to do to the do with each other. But humans? If you have a human that doesn't want to have children, who doesn't want to reproduce, eugenics would say that that doesn't matter. That you want to push forward certain genetic lineages, even if the members of the population with those desired traits don't want to comply.

And that, for obvious reasons, causes issues.

#google submitted #reproduction #species #evolution #eugenics #racism

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bubblesxo · 2 months

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Okay I just found out about your g!bruce meets the batfam AU and I LOVE IT SO MUCH - have only gone through the tumblr posts but I have the fic on my list to read. Wondering how you think of Jason's resurrection and Barbara's paralyzation working in a post-Gotham world? (Not specifically related to your AU sking you because you also seem really excited about these two worlds clashing!)

Because the way I see it, Hugo Strange was a well known factor and his resurrections don't appear to have any side effects. So why didn't Bruce try to get Jason resurrected, even if it meant working with an enemy?

Barbara's paralyzation pretty much happened exactly like Selina's did - so would Bruce not only be beating himself up, but also be able to approach Ivy for help? Or at least wouldn't Selina or Barbara Kean do it?

thank you so much!! i'm glad that you like the au even without all the material that goes around it! the au actually started out on tumblr in a few different textposts before i decided that i might as well just write it atp.

okay okay, jason's death and barbara's paralyzation.

jason first.

imo, if bruce ever comes face to face with hugo strange again, there won't even be words involved, that man is getting the beat down of his life. batman will MAKE IT so that that man stays in jail, if even only because he would be beat half to death again if he was let out.

hugo strange ordered the hit on bruce's parents, after all, and while bruce is opposed to murder, he is not, as we have seen, opposed to beating the stuffing out of someone repeatedly.

i also feel like that one girl who was introduced to the show really had more of an impact on bruce than is explored, because the show set them up almost like siblings. the girl, karen jennings i think? yeah, she was really close with thomas wayne before his death and he came to visit her often. he was involved in keeping her safe from the people at indian hollow (who moved there after pinewood was shut down).

karen suffered IMMENSELY under the hand of hugo strange, and during her short stay on the show, she and bruce got very close and developed what i personally see as an early sibling bond (and another example of bruce latching onto people and becoming emotionally involved way too quick, like, as a pattern).

anyway, hugo strange's mechanisms eventually end up getting karen brutally murdered right in front of bruce, so i feel like that could have a major effect on his mind, esp at that age and knowing what he does (or later did? my timeline there is fuzzy) about strange being involved in his parents' death.

because of his personal anger with him, deep-set mistrust of him (he likely heard about how he put a chip in ed's brain after penguin payed him to, essentially, revive him from the dead), and his respect for karen, he wouldn't ever get hugo involved, i believe.

as for barbara's paralyzation, i think that selina's side effects would play a huuuuge role here. in the show, when bruce gets the cure from ivy, she warns that it might have some side effects, and soon after, selina begins exhibiting animalistic and highly emotional traits, such as irrationality, extreme anger, low temper, excessive growling/hissing, etc.

it was during this time that bruce and selina's relationship was coming up on its time for both of them to decide what would happen next. after reunification, what would happen to both of them? would they still be a "they?"

even though both selina (deal with penguin) and bruce (helicopter, but also the interrupted dinner scene) want to leave gotham, either for good (selina) or for an extended period of time (bruce), neither of them are truly 100% involved in the discussion, which leads to communication issues, which is what eventually causes their breakup.

what i was more getting at bruce thinking here, however, i would say that bruce blames himself for getting her involved in the first place (as she literally did blame him, not that i can be mad at her), that she got shot because of him, and that he made the personal choice to force her to live on and feels responsible for taking the cure which gave her so many side effects (which she likes but he hates), bruce ultimately blames himself for their messy breakup and all of the pain that has caused.

which, of course, he hasn't processed at all, so instead he deflects it.

instead, he blames ivy and her weird eyeball-looking plant for taking away his best friend / girlfriend.

i definitely don't think that bruce would trust in ivy enough at this point in the timeline for her to be involved, but that i agree that (other than this) he (i fell asleep right here lol so im back now that it's morning) would totally do everything he possibly could to help barbara.

as for barbara kean---i'm going to be so real with you, i've been specifically not actually watching the series finale so i can stay on-track with bruce's line of thinking, so when i heard she got shot i honestly thought she died. i just checked last night and found out she got shot in the leg. so yeah, she's dead in this au. sorry guys 😭😭😭😭😭

i'm probably gonna go more in depth about this in the story, esp since i already thought she died LOL

so basically i'm giving babs extra childhood trauma (going the jim and bruce route with that), which honestly kinda fits because of the whole generational hero thing that jim and bruce kinda have going on (bruce's and jim's dads, jim passes it on to bruce, bruce passes it on to his kids, they both pass it on to babs).

more on that in the actual story LOL. i never really pictured barbara kean as working in the canon batfam universe anyway (just because penguin kinda has her niche). since in batfam canon it always seemed like she was at least primarily living with her dad, whereas barbara lee from gotham seems to be living primarily with her mom, and the only time i can see this changing is if something happened to her mom.

partially, i also think that babs herself had some sway in the whole not-going-to-ivy thing. barbara isn't a damsel in distress, and she likely wouldn't like bruce overstepping like that and just assuming that she wants to be cured just because selina did (not that she knew about selina being temporarily paralyzed, unless her dad told her). barbara doesn't see herself as any less of a person for her disabilty (which is good of course! though it took a little while for her to get used to everything and truly accept it) so she basically tells bruce to not get involved with any magic stuff for her.

the selina-barbara parallel is kinda crazy tho. i'm definitely gonna have to explore that in my fic (how bruce feels about it, selina, and babs of course).

bruce majorly spiraled after jason's death, so honestly i think that his mindset just wasn't in the best spot and that he wasn't doing okay mentally at all. honestly, he might have gone back to his old alcohol habits from his brucie phase (yes i know in gotham it's spelled brucey but i hate that) like some people headcanon.

basically, i don't really want to change any of the existing batfam canon as much as i can (like retconning barbara to have been cured, idk i just don't like that) and also i feel like bruce would never trust any of those people to be close to any of his loved ones haha.

thank you again so much for the ask!! hopefully this was intelligible, having been written on two different days. thank you so much for your support!! hopefully you like the story when you read it. feel free to send more asks anytime if you want!

#asks #asks open #ask response #ask reply #g!bruce meets batfam #gotham tv show #gotham #gotham tv #gotham tv series #batman #bruce wayne #gotham!bruce #tv: gotham #gotham 2014 #gotham fox #barbara kean #barbara lee gordon #barbara gordon #batgirl

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checkoutmybookshelf · 2 months

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Don't Fire Your Editors, Kids

When I started reading the ACOTAR series with my reading buddy, my sister started getting all up in my ear going "Throne of Glass is waaaaaaay better, you should read it." My skeptical little brain went, "that is rarely how authorial quality works," and then I picked up the book, read it in two days, and had to eat MASSIVE amounts of crow. Because when I finished the book, my abiding question was, "WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THIS BOOK AND ACOTAR????" Celaena has a personality, a well-handled and vaguely mysterious backstory that held my interest, her relationships were interesting, and she's damn competent. On top of that, the book was decently plotted and paced, and even the side characters were interesting. This was a pretty decent book, and I admit to being deeply but pleasantly surprised. Let's talk Throne of Glass.

Some light spoilers below the break, so be warned if you haven't read this and want to go in without being spoiled!

So apparently this book was pitched as "Cinderella, but if she's there to kill the prince, not kiss him," but she ended up doing a lot more kissing than killing, despite the fact that she's literally in an assassin's competition to be king's champion. I wasn't mad about it though, because by the time we actually get to the ball, our murder Cinderella has developed real--if somewhat complicated--relationships with Dorian, Chaol, Nehemia, and even Cain and the political actors of the castle that are driving a lot of the character development even as the contest sort of grinds the plot along. Ok, "grinds the plot along" might be ungenerous, because it's pretty clear that the contest isn't the main focus of the book, it's just the plot device that gets Celaena into the castle and back into society, and the fact that it gets pretty aggressively sidelined for actual character stuff isn't a bad thing, but while the character development is compelling, the plot pretty clearly understands that it's not the main character.

And I do enjoy our main character here. Celaena is deeply competent as an assassin, and she is deeply competent at survival. She survived a literal death camp for a full year, and still had her senses of humor and joy on the other side. She's kind of a murder Barbie as well, which I adore, because being a badass should not preclude enjoying pretty, sparkly, girly things like pretty clothes and jewelry, if the character wants to like that. Basically, I'm never going to shame a badass girl for encompassing BOTH those words.

Celaena also enjoys poking at Chaol, which is never ever not fun, and I really do like the slowish burn of Chaol learning that there is more to Celaena than just "best assassin in the world." That relationship is deeply fun, and honestly I prefer it to her relationship with Dorian as far as a romance goes, because while Chaol doesn't have NEAR the experience with brutality and mortality that Celaena does, the two hold more of a shared understanding of things that are hard in the world than she and Prince "My Parents and My Younger Brother Suck" do.

That said though, I think the relationships that I like the most are Celaena and Nox and Celaena and Nehemia. That Celeana was able to find a friend among her competitors speaks wonderfully to contradict our assumptions about her as an assassin. She is kind, she wants friends, and she is willing to not only put herself out to save Nox's life, she is willing to work with him on skills that, whether or not he is successful in this competition, will serve him well out in the world. Celaena doesn't necessarily get anything out of this either; if she loses, she dies in Endovier. If she wins, she's stuck stooging for the king for four years, and she or Nox could die before they ever see each other again. The relationship cannot be permanent, has no long-term guarantees, but they still find each other and help each other and make the best of the time they have. This relationship is super cute and I appreciated that there was more than just aggressive competition with the other dudes in the mix.

Speaking as a cishet AFAB gal, relationships between girls can be CHALLENGING. We don't get hard details about why Celaena doesn't trust other girls in this book, but we do get the lovely realization that actually she can trust other girls and have trusting, meaningful, and positive relationships with them. It's not easy, and the communication is perhaps suboptimal for political and security reasons, but learning that it's ok to trust Nehemia and lean into the feeling that she likes her and have that rewarded is lovely, and given the unfortunate continuing prevalence of girls hating on other girls in books, it was nice to see that addressed directly and directly contravened.

Besides, we still get Kaltain being mind-whammied into mean-girling, and if Perrington doesn't get his ass handed to him for that, we riot.

I will say that the relationships and character scenes are what I enjoyed most about this book, and I'm floored that it's as much better than ACOTAR as it is. This book was clearly well-plotted and well-edited, and I had fun reading it.

#throne of glass #fantasy books #fantasy novel #sarah j maas #books and reading #books #books and novels #books & libraries #book recommendations #book review

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theheirofthesharingan · 10 months

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Hii!! What are your thoughts on those who say Itachi is a terrible person and on this opinion?? I know you love him so I would like to know your thoughts on this .

I have no opinions on his haters, except for the fact that I want them to keep their hate boner for him in their pants and the relevant tags and not slip into my notes, which unfortunately doesn't happen, because haters think their hatred for a morally grey anime boy makes them morally superior, and they can't fall asleep unless they have broadcasted this everywhere in the world. I've seen haters invade the most normal posts about him to express how agonized they are because people love a character they hate. Who'd tell them the world doesn't revolve around their hatred for one character? Give it a break already. You're allowed to hate him or whatever but stop acting like a prick and let people have fun without getting offended.

As to the opinion that he's a "terrible person."

Sighs.

People have a hard time separating a character's motivations/actions with his intent. When you're analyzing any character, there are two factors to be considered — Reason and Consequences. Itachi is judged based on the consequences of his actions rather than his reasoning behind them. Everything else, except for the character in question and his feelings, is secondary in his analysis. This fandom makes everything else primary when it analyzes Itachi, whereas his own experiences and trauma aren't taken into account. If he hadn't lived the life he did, his, the clan's, and eventually Sasuke's fates would have been completely different.

If he wasn't taken to the battlefield when he was four, he wouldn't have developed the desire to end the conflict in the first place. He might have been able to preserve his innocence a little bit longer.

If he wasn't sent to Anbu at the age of 10, or if Danzo tried to persuade his family and his family refused, he wouldn't have witnessed the darkness that consumed him slowly.

If Shisui hadn't died he would have one person he could rely on.

If his clan didn't consider him a traitor he might not have lost it either.

If his family hadn't given up on him after Shisui's death, MAYBE things wouldn't have gone as bad for anyone.

Not only the way the village treated him but also he way the clan treated him made it impossible for Itachi to put his trust in anyone.

He didn't choose any of this to happen to himself. These things did and he drew into himself, entirely incapable of trusting other people. So, if I'm analyzing Itachi's character his experiences and feelings are to be prioritized first and foremost.. The consequences come later on, the primary factor is always the reason behind his actions. Not just for Itachi, but for every character who falls in the same category that Itachi does.

Ah, yes... Itachi is so terrible as a person that —

When he saw war happening in front of him, dead bodies, pain on the faces of the dead, his first instinct was to stop this destruction instead of letting this to be their future.

When a bunch of seniors came to bully him (in the novel) clearly with the intent of violence against him, he chose not to fight with them, even though none of them stood no chance against him.

Whatever horrible thing he did — murdering his clan or destroying Sasuke's life — he didn't expect any redemption or forgiveness even if his parents would have forgiven him and Sasuke also forgave him. In canon, it's impossible to change his mind about his self-loathing. He took the responsibility of his actions and lived and died with it.

When he returned as Edo Tensei, he chose to protect people because he knew war was hell. You could argue he was under the influence of kotoamatsukami. But someone in complete control of kotoamatsukami wouldn't be disgusted with Kabuto for doing something that broke grieving hearts of the loved ones of the dead again, making people go through the agony they'd once witnessed. What kind of terrible person feels this way?

When he learned Kabuto was also used by the Shinobi world, just like he was, instead of leaving Kabuto in Sasuke's care, entrusting him to kill Kabuto, Itachi chose to save his life.

Anyone who came closer to knowing Itachi, who had nothing to do with the village or anything, couldn't help but respect and admire him, despite him being a renowned criminal. Kisame, Killer Bee, etc., for example. It's a pity that very few people did and those who did never bothered to know the truth behind the massacre. And the others were dead.

Itachi wasn't a bad person. He was placed in the terrible circumstances that demanded him to make decisions. If his life had been teensy bit easier or if he'd had someone to support and guide him, he would have been more aware of his own faults, weaknesses, and tried to find a different path to handle the same situations. Just because he took the moral responsibility of his actions doesn't mean he was the only one responsible for the mess. He seems to be in complete denial of his trauma and sufferings, which is why we never see him blaming others. He, too, judged himself for the horrible things he'd done, and that was why he wanted to die at Sasuke's hands to avenge the clan or be hated by Sasuke forever.

#itachi #ask #anon #itachi uchiha #uchiha itachi

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samynnad102687 · 28 days

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You're Pathetic

@struttingstag

May 10 prompt: You're Pathetic | Jegulus | 2727 words

CW: NSFW, murder, blood, violence

James was sitting on the couch when Regulus finally walked into the house from his Death Eater meeting around two in the morning. His parents may have forced him to take the mark but they couldn't control what he did after that. Regulus pleaded for James to believe him about his parents forcing it on him. He did and James offered to help him with whatever he needed to do to make it through the war. Regulus became a spy but the only ones who knew were James and Dumbledore, since Regulus was his spy.

"How was the meeting?" James asked when Regulus sat down next to him with a plop.

"Exhausting. He never fucking shuts up."

"Well, he is a narcissistic egomaniac," James mused and Regulus glared at him. "They tend to like talking about themselves."

"Sad but true," Regulus huffed out a short puff of laughter.

"Is there anything I should know about?" James asked seriously.

"Yeah, actually. Turns out that the Order has a traitor among them."

"Who?"

Regulus scoffed. "Your rat of a friend."

"Peter?!" James sat up straight at that. It wasn't possible.

"Yeah. Him. He was sitting right next to Voldemort and Voldemort was going on about how he was their new spy in the Order. I told you before that I didn't trust him."

"Yeah, I know you did," James said defeated.

"He just gave me a weird vibe."

"What are we going to do about him?" James asked quietly.

He figured that Regulus would probably already have a plan and James was sure it did not include telling Dumbledore about him. Regulus didn't trust him either.

"Well, I know what I want to do but I'll leave it up to you, Jamie. He was your friend after all." Regulus shrugged.

James thought about it for a little bit while they sat in silence with Regulus curled up into his side. How could Peter do that to them? He was one of James' friends from before Hogwarts and now he joined the dark side. But for what? What could he possibly have to offer Voldemort?

"Do you think we could talk to him? Get him alone somehow?" James asked a few minutes later, breaking the silence.

"Probably," Regulus mused before he yawned. "I don't think it would be too hard for you to get him alone. He doesn't know we are still together, does he?"

"No. Everyone thinks we broke up after you took the mark."

Everyone needed to believe it. James and Regulus didn't want to give Voldemort any more reason to go after James or anybody else that Regulus cared about.

"Good. Invite him over for tea or something and see if he will tell you anything. Just know that I'm not letting him leave until I get my own answers."

"I would expect nothing else, love," James said as he leaned down and kissed Regulus on the forehead.

After that, they made their way to the bedroom and changed into their night clothes before crawling into bed. James fell asleep with Regulus curled into his side. After James and Regulus moved in together, they increased the wards around the house so that nobody would be able to get in without prior approval. Their floo code also changed on a weekly basis and Regulus would change into his animagus form anytime Sirius wanted to drop by.

The next day, Regulus met up with Barty and Evan while James went to the Order meeting. Remus wouldn't be there and neither would Sirius. They were both on missions for Dumbledore. James decided to sit with Marlene and Dorcas while he listened to Moody talk about there being a spy among them. James' eyes slid to Peter for a second before someone claimed that the spy was Sirius since he wasn't there. James may have got a little upset and went off on them before he was asked to step out for the rest of the meeting.

When it was over, James was leaning up against the house with a cigarette between his lips. It was a habit he picked up from Remus. He watched as everybody filed out until Peter was the last one. It was now or never.

"Hey, Pete," James called as he dropped the cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with the heel of his boot.

"Oh, hey, James. What's up?"

"Oh, nothing much. Just trying to survive, you know."

"Yeah. You seemed a little worked up in there," Peter mentioned as he looked around.

"Yeah. So how have you been? Haven't seen you around as much."

"Yeah. I've just been taking care of my mum. She fell ill again."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," James replied as he tried to keep his tone level. "Hey, do you want to come over for some tea and catch up? Maybe I'll be able to help with your mum too."

"Sure. I'd like that," Peter said with a smile after he relaxed.

"Great. I'll meet you at my house in a little bit. Just need to run to the shops and grab something."

"Alright," Peter said easily before he apparated away.

James apparated back home to see if Regulus was back yet. When he walked in, Regulus was sitting in the kitchen making tea. James plopped down at the kitchen table with a heavy sigh. Regulus looked at him with a raised eyebrow before he brought over a cup for James.

"How'd the meeting go?"

James huffed out a laugh, "I got kicked out."

"What?!" Regulus snapped his head up. "How did you get kicked out of the meeting?"

"I may have gone off on Gideon for insinuating that Sirius was the traitor. Moody brought that up today."

"Oh, do they know who it is?"

James shook his head. "No. It's all speculation right now."

"Okay. Was Peter there?"

"Yeah. He's coming over in a little bit for tea. I told him that I had to run to the shops first."

Regulus hummed as he took a sip of his tea and looked at James over the rim.

"Okay. I'd recommend the tea sitting on the counter for when he comes over," Regulus said with a smirk.

"Do I want to know what's in it?"

"Probably not. Just don't drink yours."

James nodded and finished the tea in front of him. He would be making another cup later. Before long, the wards chimed to let him know that somebody wanted in. James glanced at Regulus who set his cup in the sink and shifted into a black cat and curled up in the cat bed in the corner of the kitchen. James walked to the window to see who it was. When he noticed it was Peter, he opened the door and let him into the wards. They would change them again later.

"Hey, Pete," James said cheerfully as he held the door open.

"Hey."

They walked to the kitchen and James started the kettle to make their tea. He didn't know what Regulus put in the cups on the counter but James trusted him enough to know that it was probably necessary. Peter sat at the table and looked around the room. It had been a while since he had been here.

"Aww, when did you get a cat?" Peter asked as James set the tea on the table and slid the cup to Peter.

"Oh, him. I've had him for a while," James replied as he smiled at Regulus, who was glaring at Peter. "He doesn't typically like to come out when I have company."

"Ah. Yeah, cats can be temperamental, can't they?"

"You have no idea," James laughed lightly. "So how's the tea? It was still two sugars, right?"

"Yeah. It's good."

They chatted about what they had been up to in their lives when they weren't at the Order meetings while they sipped on their tea. After Peter finished his cup, James took it from him and set both of their cups in the sink. He was about to ask Peter if he wanted some biscuits when there was a thud and James turned around to find Peter slumped over on the table. Of course, Regulus had put something in it. James shook his head as he looked at his boyfriend who was walking over to the table, having shifted back to human.

"What did you put in the tea, love?"

"Nothing bad. I promise," Regulus smiled innocently.

"Uh-huh."

"It's just some veritaserum and a potion to knock him out for a little bit," he said with a shrug.

James sighed before he grabbed Peter and slung him over his shoulder to follow Regulus to the basement. They had discussed what they were going to do the night before so James didn't have to ask. He just did as he was told.

After making sure that Peter was secure to the chair and the anti-magic wards were up, James pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, resting his arms on the back of it. Regulus was standing behind Peter with his arms crossed. He started to pace after ten minutes of waiting. James could see that he was getting anxious. James just sat there and stared at his ex-best friend until he stirred. Regulus stopped his pacing and leaned back into the wall with his arms crossed again.

"James?" Peter asked as he tried to move his arms.

James didn't say anything. He wanted to wait until Peter noticed him. James glanced at Regulus to have a silent conversation. James was trying to think of what lies to catch Peter in, not that he could lie with the amount of veritaserum that Regulus put in his tea.

"What? What is going on?" Peter asked frantically as he fought his binds and snapped his eyes up at James with a very confused look.

"You know, Pete," James mused as he watched him struggle. He wanted to feel bad about it but with the new information that Regulus got from Barty and Evan, he had no sympathy left for him. "I really don't appreciate being lied to."

"I wa- I wa- When did I lie?"

"I know that your mum isn't sick and you weren't at her house last night. Were you?"

James watched him try to fight it as Regulus twirled his dagger in his hand behind him.

"No," Peter gave in but looked shocked that he did.

"Where were you, Pete?" James tilted his head in question.

Peter snapped his mouth shut. He was forcing it not to open and reveal where he really was the night before. James wondered if he knew that James already knew where he was. He wondered how long Peter was planning on betraying them. Regulus informed him that Peter gave Voldemort locations for different Order members including James and his parents.

"I suggest that you answer his question," Regulus drawled from behind Peter, causing Peter to whip his head around to try and see him.

"Regulus?" Peter gasped once Regulus moved into his field of vision. "What are you doing here?"

"Fulfilling an order. What are you doing here?" Regulus smirked as he twirled the dagger with the tip pressed to the palm of his hand.

"I- I- I was invited."

"And why do you think that is?"

Peter turned back towards James with frantic eyes. "James?"

James didn't say anything. Instead, he sat back and watched as he struggled. He shouldn't take pleasure in it but he couldn't help what his body did when he watched Regulus with his dagger.

"What is going on? Why do you have a Death Eater in your house?"

"I think the better question is," James drawled after a minute, "Why are there two?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

"You're a Death Eater, Peter," James spat, standing up and knocking his chair over.

"I- I'm a spy," Peter tried.

"For who?" Regulus asked. "Dumbledore?" Peter nodded but didn't say anything. "That's funny. He didn't tell me that he was sending somebody else in."

Peter's eyes widened as he looked between James and Regulus. He seemed to realise that he wasn't going to be able to lie his way out of this and deflated. Fully sunk in his binds, losing all fight for a minute before he straightened as much as he could and stared at James.

"What gave me away?" Peter asked levelly and James felt the anger bubble under the surface again.

He did it on purpose. James had known him for ten years and he betrayed him on purpose. Regulus must have sensed something in James because he walked over to him and set a gentle hand on his arm to calm him down. Regulus was the only one who was ever able to do that.

"Now see, Pettigrew," Regulus drawled. "We're not going to tell you that. You may have thought that you were doing something important when you joined Voldemort but you were nothing except a pathetic little rat."

Peter's eyes widened again in shock when Regulus mentioned his animagus form. Nobody aside from a few people knew they were animagi, let alone what their forms were. James smirked when he looked at him with a question in his eyes. Regulus smirked as well as he leaned back into James' arms and James wrapped them around him.

"I thought you broke up," Peter blurted out after a minute.

"That was the point," James shrugged as he hooked his chin on Regulus' shoulder. "I will do anything for the ones I love, which does not include you anymore. How unfortunate for you."

"What?" Peter choked out.

"Did you really think that you could betray him and his parents and he would still love you as he did before?" Regulus asked as he levelled Peter with one of his death glares. "No, that love dissolved as soon as you showed up at the meeting last night. Now I'm sure that wasn't the first time that you had met with Voldemort, considering where you sat at the table but I sure as hell know that it was your last."

"What are you going to do? Kill me?"

"Precisely," Regulus shrugged as he threw his dagger up in the air and caught it by the blade.

"James? Please? You know me," Peter begged as he looked at James.

"I thought I did," James replied as he let go of Regulus' waist.

Regulus turned and kissed James on the lips before he whirled back on Peter with a deadly smirk. Peter started to thrash around in his binds as Regulus stalked towards him, dagger in hand. He plunged the dagger into Peter's stomach all the way to the hilt before taking it out and watching the blood splatter onto the floor. James pulled the chair he was sitting in up off the floor and sat in it to watch the show. And yes, James knew it was fucked up to sit back and watch his boyfriend mutilate someone who was once one of his best friends but as Regulus said, the love he held for Peter died as soon as he betrayed him.

Regulus made his death long and painful. Bringing him back to consciousness every single time he passed out from the pain. It lasted over an hour before Peter was dead. Although, Regulus did try to bring him back from the brink again but it didn't work and James couldn't help but smile at the pout he had on his face.

James pulled him in for a deep kiss. They were so lost in their passion that James didn't realise the blood underneath him until he slipped into it, bringing Regulus down with him. They both laughed before they started making out again. They pulled back after a while to catch their breath. James looked at the mess and his dead ex-best friend slumped in the chair next to them and sighed. He pulled them up and grabbed his wand, getting ready to clean everything up but Regulus stopped him.

"I'll do that later." He smirked up at James. "But first, I think we need to go shower and take care of ourselves," Regulus remarked as he cupped the bulge in the front of James' jeans causing him to bite his bottom lip and nod frantically.

Also posted on Ao3: Trapped Rat

#marauders fandom #dead gay wizards #regulus arcturus black #james fleamont potter #marauders fanfiction #regulus x james

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thingintheroad · 2 months

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trans!nigel, less murderous, w/ loving parents mention.

trans nigel inspired by/credit to @gali-in-distress and @laurelwen

might write a canon-adjacent one when i feel more sane so keep ur eyes peeled :3

／(˃ᆺ˂)＼

it had been a particularly strange week. nigel had been acting off for a few days, and had stopped bringing in animals like he usually did.

yes, alex almost preferred the lack of carcasses being split open in the room he slept in, but he knew it was something nigel enjoyed.

one night, nearing midnight, alex woke to nigels bed empty and the door to their room open. this was strange, but alex thought his roommate had simply gone for a weirdly late walk. it made sense with the whole...everything about him.

he got up and headed to the bathroom, cup in hand, to get some water. he had fallen asleep far too early and forgotten to get one like he usually did, so his mouth felt like it was full of dust.

as he approached, he heard a low voice reciting hail marys - in latin.

"Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum."

that was definitely nigel. he had seen nigel's extensive collection of rosaries. it had been unexpected, but the boy definitely seemed the sort to collect.

alex had heard nigel praying the rosary, and had been dragged along to a rosary service when nigel insisted alex and susan at least join him once. not in latin, though, but this didnt come as a surprise either.

"Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus."

he could hear running water behind nigel's voice, and saw steam rolling out from under the door. he might have thought to knock, had he not been transfixed by the hum of his outward devotions.

"Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen."

without thinking, alex grasped the door handle.

very, very thankfully, nigel was stood in front of the sink in his pyjamas. the rosary he had been gifted when he first started at the boarding school was wrapped around his hands, wooden beads clacking softly. as moved closer, alex realised there were a pair of blood-covered gloves on the sink. he froze in place.

"nigel-"

the boy at the sink turned, eyes wide.

"nigel why are those gloves covered in blood"

he took a second, turning to look at the gloves then back at alex.

"period, sorry, i ran out of what i take to avoid it."

alex felt the biggest wave of relief wash over him. he would have collapsed right on the floor were it not for the fact it would have resulted in a cracked-open skull.

"dont be sorry, do you need anything from the room?"

he attempted to not let the relief seep too far into his voice, but the grin that overtook nigel's face told him immediately that he had failed.

"you thought i'd killed someone!"

the tone was playful, unaccusatory, but still made alex cringe at himself.

"an animal, not a person, i dont think youd have it in you to take down a whole human."

the two went back and forth on this for a little while, before nigel banished alex, as the bath had filled.

back in the dorm, alex considered what he would have done if it had turned out that nigel had killed someone, and came to the conclusion that he would have helped him bury the body.

when nigel came in, hair damp, alex felt at ease again.

"would i be able to ask a question?"

"no. joking, go ahead"

alex pondered the phrasing. he didnt want to come off as invasive, but was genuinely curious.

"so, why do you pray rosary in latin during your period?"

a grin similar to the one earlier split the boys face again. he hung the beads on the pegboard above his bed, and sat facing alex.

"i dont like thinking about it too much, obviously, but i feel a sort of duty to take extra steps in my faith during the week. its a distraction i guess, my period is a physical reminder that ive got a while to go in terms of transition. i learnt to use the rosary as a distraction when i first got my period, i thought i was being punished for not being enough of a boy and began praying and advocating that Mary would ask God to forgive me for it. obviously i know it isnt, now, my parents had to sit me down with a priest to explain that i was fine."

settling down to sleep, alex thought about how he might have reacted in the same situation. would he have also assumed he was being punished by God, or was that a nigel-specific attribute?

he never got the water.

#coping #projecting #authors feelings adapted into canon-typical assumptions #alex version coming soon #like minds 2006 #like minds #nigel colbie #trans nigel #susan mueller #susan is alive #nigel's parents love and care for him

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solradguy · 8 months

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I’ve never thought about Sol having sex (<-lie) but genuinely it never occurred to me that if Sol had sex then he might pass down his FoC Prototype Gear genes. Do you think he could command them? Like in a non-parental, Command-type Gear-type way. Would they be Dragon-Install children?

Oh geez, this sounds like a nightmare Sol would have where Justice is the mom, and he would shoot up in bed and Jack-O’ would say, “What’s wrong? Go back to sleep.” And Sol would look over and Jack-O’ would be Justice in pajamas! And then he would shoot awake in bed! All a dream! And then he would look over at Aria and then-

All of this is ruined if you subscribe to the theory that Sol had rawdogged Justice though. Dizzy’s not even a little Dragon-Instally…

The depth of Sol's Gear abilities has never really been fully explored (probably because he hates being a Gear and mostly avoids tapping into it) so I'm not actually sure if he could command other Gears like Justice or Dizzy could? I'm gonna assume probably not though because being able to rip control of at least a few Gears from Justice during the Crusades to make them easier to kill would have been an insane advantage and we never got anything saying he ever did or considered doing that lol

But, kinda like what you're saying here, it might be a difference between him being a Flame of Corruption Gear and all the others being Scales of Juno. Justice says she couldn't control him in Missing Link because he's a "prototype" but they hadn't dug into the two different Gear seeds yet back then. It could have just been the difference in Gear cells preventing the control from working. I don't actually know what would happen if there was more than one FoC Gear.

Based off of how Sol talks about the FoC and the obvious side effects we've seen of it, I'm going to guess that maybe SoJ Gears are inherently more orderly than FoC Gears, which more naturally just want to go apeshit bananas without a real cohesive "leader" element keeping them in line. We can't know for sure though. Sol is the only major source of information (AFAIK) we've been given for Flame of Corruption-type Gears. It might turn out that the two seeds are basically the same outside of some aesthetic differences and Sol's just ended up making him want to kill all of the time because Asuka fucked it up somehow.

Dizzy has a canon install form via her +R instant kill "I Can't... Contain My Strength." Mechanically, it's completely unlike Sol's in-game install (or HOS's DI Sakkai "instant kill"), but she definitely has a powered-up state that changes her physical form like he does:

Since Ky now has an install that makes him stronger and changes his body too, it might be fair to assume that any substantially powerful enough Gear can go into an install state no matter if they're FoC or SoJ.

I don't think Sol would have had the time to rawdog Justice (or even want to; they turned his fiancée into a giant murder monster) without someone else knowing or seeing it happen. I do think Dizzy wasn't originally meant to be his kid though and it was written in without taking the timeline into serious consideration lol Either Gears can delay their pregnancy for insane periods of time or Asuka somehow got a... tissue sample... and made it happen via mad science. I hope it's the former because the latter is dark even by GG standards.

Dizzy biologically being Sol's offspring crumbles apart under any amount of scrutiny lmfao It would be cool if they actually explained that in more detail some day. Top 3 biggest Guilty Gear mysteries tbh

#asks #long post

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thegeminisage · 10 months

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i decided to make a list of 15 of my favorite plot devices

i think they're mostly in order but all things are subject to change. time to explain my passions

1. asexuals - self-explanatory. the best number one joy of all time is when there is an asexual person, canonically, and not just in my mind palace. so far no show has managed to do this except fucking shadowhunters (and bojack horseman ig but it's not my thing). i know there are people out there who can write way better than the shadowhunters writing room but i don't know why they aren't getting on this. tick tock. example: raphael shadowhunters

2. amnesia - notably different from dementia, which is depressing and bad (thinking about you, dean winchester). amnesia is only good because eventually they get it back. the best thing about amnesia is that it shows you who your Little Guy (gender neutral) is with everything stripped away from them including their sense of self. do they still go for the same kind of coffee? do they still click with the same people they used to love? can they still fight? what do they stand for? it's very rewarding when your little guy acts the same way without knowing why. it's also especially cool for action heroes bc they'll still be able to win a fight and it's like wow <3 fight scenes with emotional stakes!! also i love that it gives us a mystery to solve. sometimes a partially amnesiac character is amnesiac because they did a terrible crime. and they've got to solve it while accidentally working against their past self. fun! examples: fang from ff13. wolverine. why, who did you think i was going to use

3. brainwashing - for the same reasons as amnesia. it's the same concept: take away everything and who is your little guy? the real little guy is in there and they are working so hard to get out. also they will be sooo sad about all the crimes they did later. example: fenris dragon age. d'avin killjoys. and okay fine one other guy we're not talking about

4. enemies to lovers - what's better than two people wanting to murder each other until they don't......always a good side of bickering with this as well. main draw tho is the process of simply two people getting to know one another in the way that you can tell strangers things you can't tell your friends. it's more work to love someone when you hate them and with more work comes a better reward. also, sexual tension. example: so many. fenris/hawke. fenris/anders. botw link/zelda. john/aeryn. bonnie and damon if the cw weren't cowards and i don't even like damon i think he's unforgivably horrible (derogatory)

5. monster under the bed character - i don't know if this has a real name. it's like the One Guy (again, gender neutral) who has shaped the protagonist's whole life who is threat number one in any given situation. Primal Fear of this guy and all they represent is similar to how little kids are scared of the monster under the bed hence the name. it's not JUST an arch enemy or an antagonist it's like. the only enemy that matters. not a bad guy but THE bad guy. if you can boil someone's issues down and stuff them all into a single person and then also make that person scary. and then also they can fight!! fuck yeah fight scenes!!! if you're really lucky this will overlap with either somebody's parent or somebody's ex. examples: AUGH SO MANY. for dean winchester it's yellow eyes. for sam winchester it's lucifer. for fenris it's danarius. for jace wayland it's valentine. for dutch killjoys it's khlyen. for anakin skywalker it's palpatine. for derek hale it's kate argent. going nuts just thinking about it

6. reluctant assassins - crucially if they don't care about being assassins it doesn't work for me (sorry kassandra asscreed). i went into this in more detail here but your assassin simply Must be compromised in some way so they can regret all their little crimes later. otherwise what's the point?? this overlaps so thoroughly with brainwashed iedk if it should count as its own entry but whatever. examples: fenris dragon age. dutch killjoys. d'avin killjoys. elliot leverage. and the other one

7. two-person love triangle - this is a very specific sub-example of secret identities in general which ARE good except they're usually in superhero media and i am really just so totally fucking over the entire CONCEPT of superheroes. anyway it's when one person has a secret identity and the other person forms a relationship with their "real" identity and their "secret" one. and then they feel conflicted about loving two people at once and having to choose but SURPRISE it's the same person! i like this because it has anti love triangle energy. lots of romantic tension and none of the dumb fucking YA bullshit. (apologies to YA.) example: arthur and merlin (who is also "emrys" at least in fanfic)

8. 4th wall shit - when the piece of media is in your house with you. i don't feel i need to clarify further than this because dr gaster is probably spying on me as we speak. examples: everything toby fox has ever made. s*pernatural, sometimes. i also had a deeply haunted experience with final fantasy x.

9. last guy (gender neutral) standing - part of a team or group that got tragically mcmurder prior to the start of the story and this person is so terribly sad about it. crucially this has to be a side character whose relationships with dead people are more important than or equally important to their relationships with the current living cast members. character deaths you almost agree with because then at least they can be with their fallen buds. examples: auron from ffx, noel from ffxiii

10. immortal characters - for the same reasons as above but also they CAN'T DIE EVER so they don't even have that to look forward to. also sometimes they wind up being science experiments. examples: jesse turner from @cambionverse (sorry jesse)

11. evil doppelganger - usually this is in video games where they just take the sprite or the polygons and recolor them to be black but also you have some mirrorverse/au shit going on sometimes and then there's evil twins, and shapeshifters, and clones...i love when everybody gets tricked into thinking somebody is doing crimes but actually theyre just out here and it's their evil double causing problems on purpose and not even being the one to go to jail forever because of it. also, when the evil double has mind-reading powers or whatever b/s to 1. make them a better trickster 2. to make them better at precision-point roasting of whomstever they look like. also acceptable: when you little guy just suddenly turns fucking evil and/or gets possessed and you have to cure them to get them back. idk maybe that should go under brainwashing. examples: dutch and aneela. link and dark link. zelda and the puppet. soulless sam. demon dean. hullen johnny.

12. fire powers - WHO doesn't love a little arson...i feel like this is the same concept behind werewolves which boils down to "fear of anger" bc with anger comes the loss of control and the devastating fallout... your fire guy (gender neutral but idk any fire girls) has to have a lot of self control or they'll fuck everybody up. they're very dangerous! not unlike assassins. also, fire is pretty. bonus if they have done crimes before either on purpose or on accident. examples: jesse turner again, roy mustang aka the OG fireguy, prince zuko

13. big damn reunion - when two people are split up with little to no chance of ever seeing each other again and then they do anyway. this is why i'm never mad when they bring characters back from the dead. examples: i'm actually totally blanking on these, i feel like it tends to happen in fic so much more often. also i've been writing this list awhile

14. time travel - i love! time travel! i love when people see an apocalyptic future and go back and fix it (chrono trigger, ff13). i love when there's a stable loop (tears of the kingdom) or a paradox (song of storms in ocarina of time). i love visits to the ancient past (skyward sword). i love when there's just an actual fucking timeloop (s*pernatural). it's really good!!! examples: oops i just listed them all

15. body swap - last but not least i think it is so fun when two people wind up living each other's lives. it's more fun in tv when people get to switch which character theyre playing but it's good in any form because what a way to get to know someone and also the endless potential for shenanigans. examples: dreamless (webcomic), your name, various episodes of tv shows many of which are bad (s*pernatural's was extremely bad).

ok, that's the list. originally it was 10, then 13, then 15, so i think i'd better stop here.

#personal #liz loves writing #i guess #it's stupid to post this at midnight but if i stick it in my drafts for later i'll never see it again #i'm mostly talking to myself anyway lol

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