Focusing a bit more on their ptsd lately because I want to and I can, this is set a few weeks after they got to Jackson so still pretty early on. Completely fluffy though, promise!
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There is nothing worse than being alone in a crowd with no one to have your back.
Ellie's hypervigilance is in absolute overdrive after Silver Lake whenever she isn't too dissociated to perceive anything at all, and leaving the house becomes a choice between constantly looking around and driving herself half insane trying to look for something, anything dangerous and gritting her teeth and pushing through it while her brain screams at her that the worst things imaginable are seconds away from happening.
Both options are terrible, both leave her shaking and on edge, and any loud or unexpected noise makes her jump even when it is three streets down and completely unrelated to her. Going outside isn't safe, isn't fun, so she doesn't, and she is acutely aware that it's a problem she will need to solve one day, but for now her skin is stretched less tightly over her bones and the back of her neck only gives her the occasional jolt of paranoid electricity.
It doesn't even fully occur to ask someone for help when there is a movie at the theater she really wants to see that night, she thinks about it all day with a heaviness in her heart that almost has her put on her shoes and go anyway, but then the bell ringing for lunch has her almost falling out of her chair and she settles with the sour taste of defeat on her tongue. She would ask Joel to go with her, but they both know he is just as jumpy as she is, especially with her around in a closed space, and yeah it's a problem, but for now it is what it is, and she doesn't ask.
However, while she forgot about the obvious solution, Joel didn't.
That evening, Tommy comes over, which in by itself isn't surprising, that man is more at their house than at his sometimes, but he doesn't take off his shoes like he always does and waits for them in the hallway instead. She leans against his side in the greeting half-hug they tend to do, his arms around her shoulders, and the weight of it in her neck does the same thing Joel's hugs do - they absorb the panic and let it run through them into the ground, redirecting the lightning jumping across her skin. Ellie looks up at him and her face lights up before Tommy even gets the words out, putting two and two together and vibrating with excitement so bright she can't even feel stupid for not thinking about it herself.
"Ready for movie night?"
"Are you sure?"
Asking him that feels like she is stomping on a christmas present before even opening it, but her fingers are twisting in her shirt and joy is a warm, yellow sun in her chest, and she needs him to wants this as much as she does or she will feel bad for dragging him along. His hand settles on the back of her head and her gaze flicks between him and Joel, who is watching her and her only.
"Are you kidding me? Alien? Of course I'm gonna go see it, it's one of the best fucking movies ever."
There is a few seconds of silence and dizziness shoots straight into her head when she forgets to breathe, but then she falls forward and squeezes Tommy so tightly she can hear the air rushing out of him before letting go to put on her shoes. She is so focused on getting there before everyone else so they can get the best spots, planning out the quickest path to the building (although there really aren't that many options, more like three and a half possible routes), she only realizes Joel is shrugging on his jacket too when she turns to say her goodbye for the next few hours. There's a familiar tightness in his jaw, and she is pretty sure there's at least a knife somewhere on him, but his eyes are soft and she realizes that Tommy isn't just an additional anchor of security for her.
Paranoia grows all over her skin, a deep-seated itch she can never scratch enough, but Joel is right next to her and she can hear Tommy's footsteps behind her, and it is enough to keep it subdued enough for her to handle. They all silently come to the agreement to sit near the side rather than in the center, neither of them fully comfortable with being surrounded by people like that, and having space on one side, Joel on the other, and Tommy behind her makes it easy to forget about everyone else once the movie starts.
She jumps when someone accidentally kicks over a chair, and Joel gently squeezes her hand whenever she crushes his during the few times her brain tries to convince her everyone in the room is out to kill her, but they all make it through the next few hours without chewing on their panic the entire time. Tommy's quiet comments from behind her make up half the fun, and on the walk back, she paces circles around them while talking a mile a minute about a conflicting mess of a thoughts she cannot sort through in her excitement; Joel watches her just like he has been doing the entire night, and she doubts he heard a single line from the movie. The tension in his jaw has dissipated, though, and her lungs expand without resistance.
They stop right between their two homes, and for the first time since arriving in Jackson, Ellie feels almost sad to go back inside again. There's a moment of silence before she wraps herself around Tommy in another hug, her thank you a muffled whisper against his chest before she leans away, and it is hard to tell whether she is thanking him for having her back or for being family.
"Any time, sweetheart."
Both, she decides, and they all know without having to say a single word.
There is nothing worse than being alone in a crowd, but she is no longer just by herself, and although she forgets sometimes, there will always be someone to have her back now.
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having a tav that's a Lloth-sworn life domain cleric of a noble background who before getting yeeted into the nautiloid was a sacrificial priestess (gn) during one of the cycles of Drow society and had their own altar and temple under their care, means Solune would have the most insane however many minutes they spent interacting with Minthara and I am obsessed about it.
As far as I'm conceptualising it, I'm thinking of Lloth as extremely Ungoliant-like. Goddess of hunger, goddess of wanting and consumption, goddess of excess and exuberance, goddess who unmasked the hypocritical gods of starvation, guilt and purity into a society that cherishes a certain kind of clarity about the double standard they impose. For Drow are evil for their wars and their wanting and their taking, but those other people with their other gods kill, warmonger and enslave with no regard and no self-awareness, calling the indignation about receiving scraps from a bunch of silent, unrepentant gods, "guilt and shame". There is violence in denial and her Children will not suffer it.
In the season of Life, they do not sacrifice the unwilling. It is taboo. The only sacrifice that matters is the desire to be devoured and destroyed by the things you love the most.
And Solune sees Minthara and is like fucking finally, someone rational enough to get what I'm going through, that they're losing their mind that their life was taken from them and if they become this other thing, if they transform, if they do not remain Luxe Solune Mizzmyrra, Life Knife of Lloth, they're never going to be able to be reintegrated into that life. They will die away from home, from their temple, from their (first) spouse, from their mother and their siblings and there won't be the day when they too succumb to the knife, when it is time, when the day they no longer feel hunger comes.
And then the parasite gives them an in into Minthara thinking she was raised from the darkness into a FALSE GOD? One thing you do not do is steal from Lady Lloth, and oh my god, there could've been a time, a chance that existed only in ignorance, of Solune lending a hand to Minthara but this to them is unforgivable because Solune is genuinely a good friend to their friends, but if you keep peeking into whatever mindset nobility and religious authority has given them it's like realising your friend is a cesspool of "what the actual and everliving fuck", and when the knife of the morningstar priestess comes down on Minthara it won't be with love but with absolute rage, grief and disgust and I will be thinking about this for evermore. Thanks, I'm not well
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It's been interesting getting back into both Sam/Jack and MSR at the same time, I get to compare and contrast really similar themes (secret duty, dangerous truths, aliens, government oversight, honor, loss of family, pining, devotion etc) from really different framing. The X files is a much darker show overall and Chris Carter's misogyny problem and hand of fate baby arcs are frustrating and painful, and yet the MSR fic has so much more room to be much sweeter and more openly domestic and a lot of times the stakes are lower because as much as it affects their own lives, the Syndicate and the threat of Colonization is much bigger than what they personally alone can bring about or prevent. They have guilt and repression and fear of losing each other or the work to contend with, but we're also shown that as long as they have each other they're generally okay even without the work -- I mean aimlessness and depression (and out of character writing choices) yes, but the Syndicate operations aren't that closely affected by if Mulder and Scully are in the basement office or not, so you can conjure up a wide variety of believable paths for them to be together with or without 'the files.'
Meanwhile Sam and Jack could literally be prosecuted for disobeying orders/getting involved within the same chain of command, they could get their team or the whole program taken apart thanks to that excuse in the hands of Simmons or similar, they're directly on the front lines for 8 years and they're repeatedly shown via the quantum mirror that Sam and Jack both being active members of SG1 is the only reason Earth wasn't decimated in a hostile Goa'uld invasion so they can't just resign and be together. For a second you think there's a window but then there's a new war and they make Jack everyone's boss and send Sam to a different galaxy and then put her up on a ship, and you go; Oh. So that's an endless set of circumstances, then. There's so much 'be miserably, honorably apart, serving and pining forever or the destruction of Earth will directly be your fault' baggage baked into Sam and Jack's narrative setup that you're boxed into either character-bending wish fulfillment (which is satisfying to read but hard to commit to writing ime) or the soul excoriating 'hanging on waiting for what can never be' flavor of overly believable quiet tragedy.
I'm finding I'm spending more time with the show where the skinny grey aliens with big eyes are a lot more evil and the themes are more bleak but the characters are less entirely trapped by their own best intentions 💀😭😭
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