I feel like The Father and Hell both understand and experience love in all the worst ways.
The Father sought to create a life form that would follow and love him unconditionally. It wasn't enough that he had a great cosmic kingdom of angels who are unquestioningly loyal, no, he needed something that knew suffering and mortality and the threat of oblivion, and would still find love at the end; love for him above all else. But after numerous implied failures at that, in his desperation, he instead created the threat of eternal damnation to force them to love him in order avert that fate. Lucifer's words must have been like a splash of cold water, but by the time he realized sheer magnitude of suffering he had unintentionally set into motion, it was too late.
He could not destroy Hell; he could not stop the cycle of violence.
That guilt drove him to seek a death that, from the looks of it, eluded him in spite of the hollowness consuming him. And now he is... somewhere, helpless to stop his experiments from consuming one another and themselves in a glorious show of blood and violence.
And then there's Hell itself, who seems to recognize love as an act of violence and cruelty. It is something that derives joy only from the suffering of other living creatures. God gave it so many toys to hurt and break and reform, and Mankind gave it new ones. Why would it understand love as anything but? It gave Minos a facsimile of the son he is most ashamed of, and delighted when he cast it, once more, into a labyrinth. Gabriel flattened all the souls within it's confines beneath his heel and gave those that did bend false hopes.
Now there's V1, tearing its way through the remaining layers and creating a spectacle of violence like nothing Hell has ever witnessed before. How could it not love them all for all the entertainment they've provided?
But deep within its recesses, hidden away from the eyes of Heaven, there was a Gutterman. A machine built for war, who eventually came to love that which it gave it life at the cost of their own. Enough to give the human welded within their coffin the mercy that both Heaven and Hell had denied them; enough to write a single love letter to them, even knowing that it would never be read by its intended recipient.
So, as things turn out, you /can/ teach a machine to love. And they will understand and experience it more sincerely than God or Hell ever could.
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not sure how to phrase this but something i have been ruminating on recently is that xue yang is strangely fragile. obviously he is also incredibly resilient. he survived, and continues to survive, impossible things. he has a million barriers between himself and the world, but none of this actually matters when it comes to what he feels. everything is personal to him. everything pierces straight through all that armor and goes right to his battered heart, the heart that no one else believes he has. that even he is not fully cognizant of. the world strikes and strikes and strikes and so he strikes and strikes and strikes back, even (especially) when the wound is something other people would not think worthy of retribution.
xue yang would never realize this- would be outraged at the concept of it- but the way everything, everything is something to rally a defense against is in itself a form of fragility. he does not know how to let go of things, or let them pass him by. passivity is death. so he is ruthlessly cruel and violent. he projects himself as a lunatic untouchable by anything you might possibly do to him, and on some level he even believes this. but in actuality he is one raw emotional wound. he never learned to separate himself from his emotions, much less process them. the volatility is not so much insanity as it is the constant lashing out of an animal in a trap, and the trap is the world, and the trap is himself, and he is never going to get out. and like so much else, this pain is just part of the background radiation of his life. it hardly registers. to be able to register the hurt, you would have to be able to register a time in which you were not hurt.
i feel like it is a fragility that could blossom into such tenderness, given exactly the right set of circumstances. how at the very first touch of softness in his life he fell into a domesticity from which he never recovered. how much was there, still, to be salvaged from the cruelty. on some level i am always thinking about the little apple bunnies. about the meal for daozhang and the straw in a-qing's bed.
it was too little, too late. it shattered like glass when the world intruded back in. but the tenderness was there. no one, least of all xue yang, knows what might have happened had it been unearthed in him any sooner.
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someone who loves you
Relationships: Most Ancient Dream & Secretive Plotter (Omniscient Reader)
Characters: Most Ancient Dream (Omniscient Reader), Secretive Plotter (Omniscient Reader)
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Secretive Plotter Identity Spoilers (Omniscient Reader), Most Ancient Dream Identity Spoilers (Omniscient Reader), Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Family Feels
Summary:
In which a young boy finds a hand to hold in the darkness and a weary man learns to love once more.
He was used to the darkness.
It was a small desk corner that comfortably supported his body. It was a closet that housed his clothes. It was the only place he could go where no one would be able to touch him. It was safe.
This darkness was not safe. It was all-encompassing. It was suffocating. It was lonely.
It was the only thing he knew how to do. The thumps that could be heard on the other side of the wall made him flinch. Maybe if he wished hard enough, he would be able to mistake the noise for his own pounding heartbeats.
“Dokja-yah. Just hide and stay quiet, okay?”
He was scared.
The boy slid down the wall and curled up with a whimper.
“I—” His voice cracked as he whispered to himself. “I am…”
…Yoo Joonghyuk.
No, that wasn’t right. He could never be Yoo Joonghyuk.
A gruff voice called out to him amidst the darkness. “Kim Dokja.”
The voice was one that commanded the attention of crowds. It was impossible for him not to know who it belonged to.
Kim Dokja’s eyes finally focused on the person in front of him. He sat up, stock-still, and hurriedly wiped the tears from his eyes. “Ahjussi.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s brows furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing! I just…” The stilted words clogged his dry throat as he mumbled. “Had a nightmare.”
He was ashamed that Yoo Joonghyuk saw him like that.
Guilt bloomed in his chest as he stared at the real Yoo Joonghyuk who stood before him. The strongest person he knew. Someone who lived through 1,863 lifetimes and overcame every single obstacle he faced.
In contrast, Kim Dokja was a weak person who used Yoo Joonghyuk to protect himself from his own shortcomings. It was despicable.
A nightmare was a nightmare. He didn’t actually experience a real situation, but something his mind conjured up whilst sleeping.
Yet, it felt so real.
Kim Dokja stared down at his trembling, unblemished hands. He couldn’t remember the last time his pale skin was free of imperfections.
Yoo Joonghyuk cleared his throat lightly. The boy looked up at him, impossibly small for his age.
The tear streaks on his face were the only marks that outwardly showed the sorrow of a child so young.
Despite his anguish, his eyes glistened as though he was looking at a star. It was a gaze Yoo Joonghyuk had yet to get used to.
“Come with me.”
Kim Dokja’s hand hesitantly took his. As they made their way down the hall, he spoke quietly. “Ahjussi?”
“What is it?”
“How did you know I…”
His mouth closed shut as a faint smile spread on Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. “You are my sponsor, after all.”
Unlike his own, Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand was calloused and scarred. He clutched onto it like a lifeline; he didn’t think he could ever let go.
Right. The reality he lived in was different from his nightmares. The darkness didn’t feel as lonely as it did before.
They stopped in front of a door similar to the one that led to his bedroom. Kim Dokja watched curiously as he opened the door.
“You may sleep with me tonight,” Yoo Joonghyuk said cooly.
“Really?”
The young boy’s face twisted into something between shocked and hopeful. He pulled on the ends of his shirt.
For some reason, Yoo Joonghyuk was reminded of Yoo Mia.
His hand unwittingly ruffled Kim Dokja’s hair as an obscure emotion made itself known once more. “You won’t be alone anymore.”
It would take time for the boy to grow comfortable and realize that he wouldn’t be abandoned. In the meantime, Yoo Joonghyuk contented himself with the first bright smile Kim Dokja ever gave him.
How sad that the others missed it.
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I have just the weirdest relationship with Check, Please these days. Every time I think, hey, you never actually finished that comic, I go back and try to pick it back up but I just cannot get myself to engage at all past the point where the focus shifts to all these new characters and new teams and a Lot of just Jack & Bitty stuff. It makes complete sense for the comic to go that way and it is also just the way of thing that as Bitty gets to be the oldest Haus member he spends his time with all these new people bc everyone else has graduated, and also with Jack bc that’s his boyfriend. It just doesn’t grip me the way it did before.
But then here’s the other thing, and that thing is that I was just stupidly attached to these characters for a long time and that has gone nowhere. I just said “whatever” and spent the couple bucks to get one of these little extra books Ngozi has put out in the intervening years and there’s some pictures of the old crew in there and I just got so giddy about them, like. it was like seeing old friends again. and then... at the very end just hidden away quietly there’s this one little unassuming comic strip thing where -- and I had not heard a thing about this, I didn’t know -- where we actually do, at long long last, find out Shitty’s first name? And I almost teared up? I have no idea if I’ll ever read the comic to the end but that there felt so much like something coming full circle, like a little bookend at the close, that I suddenly feel like I have finished it, after all.
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