#just hope it doesn’t somehow kill my hyperfixation

[wispscribbles]

Ghoap sketch page

#ghostsoap #soapghost #simon ghost riley #john soap mactavish #cod fanart #my art #doodle #I found a new brush again and so #had to test it #anyone else sorta freaking out about mw3?? hhahahah couldn’t be me (is me) #I have fics in process that could be wildly changed by what happens to our lads #just hope it doesn’t somehow kill my hyperfixation #because this is my source of serotonin at the moment (this entire year) #I am so angry that I allowed cod to have any power over me #absolutely devastating for my pride #(said with love)

[sparkbugs]

Thinking bout Chip Jrwi

This has spiraled from ramblings to character analysis to whatever it has turned into. I rewatched episodes too JUST to make sure I had the right information and plot points in mind cause I want to make sure I’m not making a fool of myself in front of all of Jrwiblr.. ANYWAYS! This is a lengthy read. Total words being 1318 under the cut. Yeah, I’d say the hyperfixation is hyperfixating for sure. Chip Jrwi you are my blorbo atm and you mean everything to me <3

Do you guys think that before they went to the Black Sea, before they left Canella, before they left the town of Zero that Chip looked at his crew, his friends, and his family and wondered if he should stop? Yeah, he lost his old family years ago, and he wanted to do everything in his power to bring them back, to do something about it that his 9-year-old self couldn’t. But do you ever stop and think that maybe he’s realized that he has a family now, a new one and that he’s afraid to lose it to the Black Sea as well? But they’ve come so far now, they found Drey and Finn, hell Finn had been with them the entire time!! They’ve come so far now, and they’re expecting him to want to keep going, to find Arlin, and maybe even some of the other crew they lost as well. I think about it a lot, maybe too much at this point.

Back in the Feywild when Chip could’ve reached out to anyone, he could’ve talked with Arlin again, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he saw something in his nightmares in Liquidis while being cured of his curse. He saw Arlin, covered and surrounded by this black ichor, and he talked to him again. He saw Arlin, the man who took him in when he had nowhere to go, and he had looked at him with so much rage and hatred.. and he had attacked Chip. This would honestly terrify me if I were in Chip’s place. The person who showed me all the care in the world suddenly turned and attacked me? And saying that this has happened before? In a nightmare situation that felt so real, Chip knew it was real… I’d be terrified to find him if he thinks I’m gonna kill him, he’d be fighting for his life too, I’m sure. The Black Sea has affected Arlin too, I don’t think they’ll be able to convince him that they aren’t going to kill him unless somehow Drey and Finn can get through to him, but it seems highly unlikely. 

I think if Chip feels this way at all, maybe not like all I’ve written exactly, I think he feels immensely guilty. He doesn’t want Arlin to be trapped in the hole in the sea, but he’s also immensely terrified as to what he’s going to find once he gets to him. He doesn’t want the person he’s looked up to for so long, the person he’s risked his and his friends' lives for, to hate him. But I also feel that somewhere in his heart (or lack of one), Chip doesn’t blame Arlin for hating him, cause he’s starting to hate himself for getting his new family dragged down into this hole in the sea as well.

Yes, they all chose to come with him to the Black Sea, but if anything happens to them, Chip will forever blame himself for it. Hell, he lost his heart and he has no one other than himself to blame. Jay almost lost her leg (did she? They haven’t made it clear if she did) and I feel that Chip blames himself for that too. Yes, they helped save everyone on the island, but Gods is Chip scared he’s going to lose his family again. Being on this ocean reminds him of when he was just a scared little kid, but now he can do something about it. He’s trying but he’s still so fucking scared. 

Speaking of his heart- he’s trying to hold onto himself. He’s an undead now, and by meta the mechanics of it are roughhhhh. I rambled a bit on another post about one of my characters named Amani, an opal Tiefling whom Chip is starting to remind me of- not exactly but they both have had their hearts taken!! Doing the checks to see if he loses a part of himself terrifies me each and every time and I know there’s going to be more, we can only hope the dice are in Bizly’s favor as we do not know when Chip will be able to get his heart back. It could be months from now, years maybe. I dread the session they head back to Zero and Chip is still undead. I dread Chip reuniting with Ollie. I don’t think Chip wants Ollie to see him that way, he can hide it with the bandana as much as he wants, but the stench of rotten flesh will give it away. Ollie told him to come back alive! Chip wasn’t able to keep that promise. It kills me to think that Chip dies at 19. Yeah he wasn’t a kid, but he was still so young- yeah he might come back once getting his heart but how much of his humanity will he have lost? How much life experience would he have gained in this undead state? He hasn’t even had the time to grieve the loss of himself with everything that's been going on, and I am really hoping with the next episode of Riptide we get to see some of his thoughts on being undead. Yes, he’s made jokes about it! But I feel he still hasn’t fully processed it all and once he finally does it's going to be PAINFUL. 

He’s grown so much from this journey with Jay and Gillion, he was using them at the start, to get back his family. I mean I could be wrong here, but it certainly feels like it at the start of everything anyway. Along the way though, he started opening up a bit and he realized that while sailing and learning about the whereabouts of his family he’s lost, he’s made a new family. And it’s become precious to him. It shows how he has grown during the fights he had with Gillion, the first fight they had dealing with Chip lying and pranking him, wounding Gill’s pride. They resolved it after communicating and getting to know each other better. The second fight was initiated by Chip himself because he knew he was in the wrong and that he had hurt his friend by keeping the fact that Edyn was working with the Navy a secret. He remembered how much lying had hurt Gill, and as much as he didn’t want to tell him at the time, he wanted to protect Gillion from the truth of his sister potentially doing something dangerous behind his and his friends' backs. There hadn’t been much time in between Gillion escaping the pearl and the time that he found out about Edyn, and Chip had tried not to think about it but those damned bracelets (WHICH I WISH THEY WOULD USE MORE?? WHERE DID THEY GO-) outed him on those thoughts. He stayed up ALL NIGHT just to build the arena, just to show Gillion he was sorry and that he needed to fix it, he wanted to fix things between them both. He goes on and on about how Gillion’s actions helped him change for the better, about how he cares about him, and that he never meant to hurt him. Of course, this ends in them battling again, them starting the fight and Jay ending it like the girlboss she is, but this battle was never out of malice or anger, it is light-hearted and fun, and it shows that they’ve all grown stronger together. 

I love Chip Jrwi, I am so happy that he got a second third chance at a family- He deserves it and the world. I totally will be coming back to this at some point but this is all I have to say for now! Feel free to reply/reblog to this with ur thoughts, or even send me an ask bout it cause I would love to continue talking about this boy!

#jrwi #jrwi riptide #jrwi chip #just roll with it #Just roll with it riptide #just roll with it show #jrwishow #Jrwi spoilers #jrwi 112 #Ramblings #bug rambles #the blorbos be blorboing #hyperfix moment #PLEASE i need to talk about him more... #I ALSO WILL BE DOING SOMETHING LIKE THIS FOR JAY AND GILLION #i just do not know when the inspiration and motivation will strike but!! #I have SO many thoughts about them. #Albatrio #my beloveds #they deserve the world #chip jrwi

[translationandbetrayals]

The Makoto scene that hit close home to me

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for “Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc” and “Danganronpa 3: End of Hope’s Peak High School”. This post also speaks about suicide and death in general, so be careful if you’re sensitive.

A couple of days ago, while watching Danganronpa content to feed my new hyperfixation, I came across a specific video which was titled “Despair Naegi”

Having watched Danganronpa the animation fully, this clip caught my interest as in both the game and the anime, Makoto never falls into despair. So I wanted to check if this was a real thing (I am one who watches a lot of spoilers lmao) and indeed: it was real.

For context, this was the video.

https://youtu.be/dFL3CO0BV6Q

(If you don’t want to watch "Danganronpa 3: End of Hope’s Peak High School spoilers" then just keep scrolling and ignore it.)

And I watched it. And I’m not sure if I regret it or not, but I am sure of one fact: it broke me.

Not only seeing Makoto being faced by the ghosts of his dead classmates on his despair brainwashing video, but also seeing him falling to despair and grabbing a knife, seeing suicide as his only way out (by following the voices in his brainwashed state, which tell him to join his dead friends; they tell him that's the way), that's something a lot of us can relate there, those who struggle with suicidal thoughts and just like Naegi, fall into despair and see to take away their lives as their only way out of their current situation.

Sure, on my way.

He's determined, he's about to do it, and he doesn't think it twice until the knife he's grabbing is thrown away by Juzo Sakakura grabs him and by force he gets Makoto out of his despairful state, with the latter finally reconsidering it when he's stopped.

Juzo then tells something to Makoto which has a strong message behind those words, in my opinion.

You’re the man who defeated Junko Enoshima… If you think I’m gonna let you kill yourself, you’re dumber than you look! Hear me ya little punk?! Not now… not ever!

Those lines can be interpreted as he’s saying “you have done some truly amazing things in your life, you really can do great things, and you're just gonna throw it all overboard? No. I'm not gonna let you do that. I know it's hard right now, but you can overcome this, come on. This is not the way out. It will never be the way out"

Sakakura is telling the boy to not give up, to continue... to not lose hope. Let's not forget, Makoto Naegi has the title of Ultimate Hope, but this just shows how like everyone else, Naegi is one person who can break down when put on a situation where things are so stressful and horrible, that you can only see to take out your life as your only way out, losing all hope in the process.

Is at these moments where it's crucial to have someone to stop us from doing that, to remind you that there can be a way out and you must keep hope that you will be able to get out of that hazy abyss of despair you're in.

Believe me, having someone to stop you and make you rethink your choices and reorganize your thoughts, show you some care and support when you most need it, it can be such a helpful thing for someone who battles with suicidal thoughts.

In my personal experience... I wish I had someone to tell me to keep hope when I was struggling a couple of years ago.

TRIGGER WARNING: SPECIFIC MENTIONS OF SUICIDE ATTEMPTS ARE GONNA BE MENTIONED.

I've... tried to kill myself twice. Life was being really bad for me during the pandemic, and I lost all hope of things getting better. I was tired of everything and I tried to put an end to it, August of 2020. It didn't work, somehow the pills didn't have an effect on me and I only got to get stomach-sick. And nothing else.

When my parents got to know, instead of asking why, of supporting me, they were mad at me. They said "don't do something so stupid ever again" and it made me feel ashamed. I also got assigned a therapist (but it didn't help much in the end) and again during 2021 (can't remember specific date) I drank (a shot? idk, it wasn't even a glass or half a glass but it wasn't just a sip either) bleach. Somehow... nothing happened? Yeah. Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.

Remember when on my "Public apology to Nagito Komaeda" I mentioned I was somewhat of a "lucky" person myself too...? Well, here's pretty much the reason of why I said that... haha... hah... okay it's probably not funny, sorry. But you can't deny it, I lived out of pure luck.

I haven't tried anything like that ever since. And most of the time, I've felt better. I've been better. My life has been pretty better ever since, and I also have a better therapist now who has helped me a lot during these times... but sometimes I fall into the abyss again, and the thoughts once more plague my mind. 

Not so long ago, actually. During the end of the semester, I was so stressed and emotionally drained after also dealing with a couple of fucked up situations with people I used to call my friends, my mind felt hazy and when I tried looking at the future, trying to give myself some hope that everything would be okay... I didn't see anything. I saw no future for me. Only the dark hazy consuming my mind.

I was losing all of my hope again.

But this time fortunately I had people to tell me to not give up. That I'd find a way out of everything, and that I would be fine. So I just had to keep my hope and keep pushing through until I could see the light.

I could say I had my own Juzo to snap me out of my own despair. 

And, curiously, while I was struggling with my thoughts again, is when I came across with this video. And it really broke me, I felt like the message was directed to me. And it motivated me to keep pushing through, and here I am today! I found my way out and things are okay again. I'm glad I didn't give up this time.

What I'm saying is, all of us can be there at least once, in Makoto's place. And if you are there, please seek for someone to pull you out of your own despair, or if you know someone who is struggling, please help them, give them a little of hope that things will be okay. 

Because things are okay in the end.

I promise they are. And they will be okay, as long as you always have hope.

Beatriz Aqueveque Henríquez.

#Anime #personalstory #submission

[day-dreamemer]

As seen in his first appearance, Striker is very charming and cunning. From buttering Blitz and Millie up at the beginning to him flat out stating he’d been “ workshopping “ his pitch to Blitz ( showing that Striker already had a plan to get Blitz to join his side before formally meeting him ), he’s a pretty smart guy.

However, Striker is also extremely arrogant and over-confident, leading him to underestimate Blitz and his intellectual capabilities ( such as how Striker referred to Blitz as a “ rodeo clown of a boss “ to Moxxie and Millie ), not to mention how easily Striker assumed he’d be able to win Blitz over by using some choice words and by taking advantage of Blitz’s obvious lustful feelings towards him.

Striker’s cockiness has caused him to nearly die thrice already: the first due to him thinking he could get away with trying to kill Moxxie, the second due to him not locking the door to the room he was using to try and assassinate Stolas in, and the third due to him gloating about how quickly Blitz and Moxxie lost the upper-hand to him.

My thoughts?:

First of all, I honestly don’t feel like Striker was trying to kill Moxxie in the first place; I think he was just trying to instill fear into him ( not to mention he obviously gets an ego boost from picking on physically weaker demons ). Striker already stated to Moxxie and Millie ( after he tossed them into some sort of cellar ) that he was planning to use them to convince Blitz to join his side, not to mention that he could’ve very easily killed them both after taking them down earlier; so this most likely confirms that Striker was just trying to assert dominance over Moxxie ( don’t take that out of context xD ). He obviously hadn’t planned for Millie to appear and almost slit his neck open, much less for her to stab him in the back multiple times.

For Striker’s second near-death experience, I don’t know what he was thinking. Why the hell wouldn’t you lock the door to the room you’re trying to assassinate somebody in?! Or at the very LEAST barricade it in some way! Striker knew there were people just outside the house, not to mention he also knew that Moxxie and Millie were in the cellar and were likely trying to find a way out ( which they already had ).

I guess he planned to use the door as an escape route, as jumping out of a window after firing a gun with a bunch of people standing outside would’ve probably been a really bad decision, but c’mon! Surely Striker would’ve thought “ Hey, somebody’s likely to barge in here, so I should probably go ahead and lock the door. “ Better safe than sorry, right?

Nope.

Lastly, Striker already saw what Blitz was capable of during the Pain Games. Hell, both of them tied for first place! If Striker firsthand witnessed all the endurance and skill Blitz had, did he really believe that Blitz wouldn’t have tried something while he stood there gloating about how quickly he overtook him and Moxxie? And by this point Blitz and Moxxie definitely had to go ( what-with them finding out about Striker’s true intentions and all ), not to mention that the Harvest Moon Festival was very close to being over, meaning that Stolas would return home soon. Standing there boasting was just wasting more of Striker’s time, time that could’ve been SAVED if he: 1. Didn’t fuck around with Moxxie in the first place and 2. Just locked the door to the damned room!

Don’t get me wrong, Striker is pretty intelligent. But he’s made three almost fatal errors during the same day ( and they all happened within a relatively quick timespan )!

I have a feeling that if he doesn’t humble down a bit, or at the very least be more careful in his next assassination attempt, his arrogance/over-confidence will likely land him into a very bad situation.

#striker helluva boss #helluva boss character analyzation #I hope he doesn’t fucking get himself killed but I feel like with how things are going it may turn out that way #regardless in my AU he’s gonna live whether canon wants him to or not xD #also I feel like Stella told Striker about Blitz and his assassination company #that way Striker would know what he’d be up against in case an altercation somehow happened between them #idk how Striker found out about Millie’s family and how they recently lost a farmhand but maybe he just got lucky? #getting on Millie’s family’s good side in an attempt to charm her into thinking that he was a good guy #to IN TURN use her to manipulate Blitz into joining forces with him for his OWN plans is incredibly crafty and #that just makes Striker even more badass #idk what he’s planning to do but I have a very strong feeling that he wants to create a big name for himself #maybe imps can become overlords?? idk but I’m sure it’s possible. just very unlikely #buuuuuut you never know! :) #yes I have hyperfixated on this character and ik I’m a simp. let me simp in peace damnit! XD

[thebibliosphere]

Like a lot of ADHD’rs, I used to rely on the stress of impending deadlines to give my brain enough of an adrenaline rush to be able to focus and do things. Now that I know I have ADHD and have been in specific ADHD targeted therapy for over a year, I know that’s not a sustainable or healthy coping mechanism. Unfortunately, I learned it too late and stress no longer invokes productivity. It just makes me freeze up and become suicidal because my body and brain has lost all capacity for processing stress hormones.

Which, I sort of already knew from MCAS. Kind of hard to ignore when stress can send you into spontaneous anaphylaxis. Yet, somehow, I’d never made the connection between that and my seemingly worsening ADHD. Sure there are other factors at play: I lost the ability to self medicate with food and caffeine over the last two years, and we now know I suffered neurological damage from the prolonged mental decline caused by the undiagnosed pernicious anemia (and yes I’m still mildly angry over this, thanks for asking.)

But it hadn’t occurred to me until recently, through a series of really intense therapy sessions, that my other coping mechanisms, like relying on stress or trying to induce hyperfixations to the point of physical neglect, were also doing damage to both my brain and my body. It just never clicked for me, proving that you can simultaneously be a smart-ass mother fucker who is clever enough to navigate profound medical health problems that would’ve killed me if I hadn't been more intelligent than all my idiot-shit-ass doctors (okay, I’m Very Angry) and also an Absolute Dumbass.

Anyway, according to the expert I pay to help unfuck my brain, it could basically be years before my brain recovers from this, and I start having normal stress responses again. This is a bit of a bummer because I was hoping the mental burnout I suffered from getting Phangs out last year would be over by now. But it turns out when your brain is already, metaphorically speaking, a house fire, you can’t pour the mental equivalent of napalm onto it and expect a full recovery in a matter of months. Sure, the fire is out, but it’s going to be a while before the surrounding area is capable of sustaining life again*.

But I’m getting there, one harrowing inch at a time. I’m just being forced to take the scenic route. Which I’m aware is a bit like saying “taking a backpacking vacation through Hell,” but y’know, even burning lakes of sulfur can look pretty if you stand far enough back and think of them right.

___

*This doesn't even account for *gestures to the world at large* the existential maw of dread that is being alive atm.

#chronic health tag #mental health tag #updates #my mental health is basically sam carrying frodo up the mountain at this point #except I am both Sam. Frodo. The Ring. The Mountain. and Gollum waiting round the corner with a rock #but i am doing my best #and that’s all I can ask of myself #tw: suicide mention #adhd #depression

[vvitchering]

Did anyone ask me to write a whole essay about how Din’s creed and armor read as a metaphor for asexuality to me? No. Am I going to write an essay about that exact thing right now because I do this literally every time I find a new character I really like? Absolutely. 

(Disclaimer: I’m writing this based on my own feelings and experiences with being ace. Asexuality exists on a spectrum and not everyone experiences it the same way. I’ve chosen to interpret the character through the lens of my own asexuality. I in no way speak for all ace people, I’m just one nerd with a dusty English degree, a keyboard, and a hyperfixation)

So I started out just wanting to word vomit some character study stuff about Din because I want to eventually write fanfiction and I never feel comfortable just jumping in until I’ve thought long and hard about how I feel about and understand the characters involved. And then I got to thinking about how relationships are explored in The Mandalorian and something stuck out to me. The show never forces or even bothers to introduce romantic bonds as necessary to their main character’s development. Rather it chooses to focus on Din’s familial relationship with Grogu as the bond that saves Din from his loneliness and aimlessness. 

But I want to dig into that lack of romance a little bit and I want to do it through looking closer at Din as a character. What strikes me as interesting is he isn’t presented to us as the typical “lonely hero” archetype you’d see in Star Wars (or anything else, actually) He doesn’t seem to have much personal investment in his profession. He’s a bounty hunter because its a way to hunt beskar and a means of income for himself and his covert. That’s it. He doesn’t have any particular passion or interest in hunting and fighting, it just happens to be that, as a Mandalorian, he’s a trained warrior. Not a TON else you can do with that as your only skillset. 

We also establish early on that he’s a lot more sensitive and emotionally vulnerable than he lets on. He bonds with Grogu almost immediately. He doesn’t even hesitate to shoot IG-11 through the head when it threatens to kill the baby. This man saw an unattended infant in danger and said “it’s free real estate” and became a dad. 

So we KNOW he has an incredible capacity for compassion and affection almost from the get-go. And that’s reinforced time and time again throughout the show by his willingness to help literally anyone who needs it, regardless of the benefit to himself. So why don’t we ever see a romance?

It’s because he’s Mandalorian. More specifically, it’s because he’s the type of Mandalorian who vowed to live by a creed that prevents him from showing his face to any living being. On the surface, this could potentially cause issues with finding love and intimacy because it physically prevents him from being open with someone else. A relationship with him would mean accepting that you will never See the person behind the armor, and I can see that being uncomfortable for a lot of beings. 

If you dig some more into that, it comes down to there probably not being a ton of people out there willing to make the compromises Din would need to comfortable and happy. I believe he’s been burned by this exact situation in the past, judging from his interactions with Xi’an in The Prisoner. Presumably they had some sort of entanglement when they worked together in the past that ended in some bad blood. She belittles him for his dedication to his beliefs, embarrasses him, and plays into Mayfeld’s childish and invasive questions. 

We’re only ever given this as an example of a past attempt at some kind of relationship, and it ended, and ended badly, because he was unwilling to ignore his beliefs and boundaries for a partner who mocked him for both. 

So it’s really no wonder we get that amazing scene with Omera in Sanctuary. He’s clearly thought about staying with her, someone who has been kind to him and Grogu, and who could maybe come to truly love him. But even she still expects him to simply “pack away” his beliefs in favor of her companionship. The way his voice cracks and shakes, the way he so resignedly (but still so gently) grips her wrists to pull her away from taking his helmet off, that’s a man who had maybe dared to hope for a second that he’d found someone who would respect his choice to keep his face covered. It’s other things, too. It’s his dedication to his quest to both protect and reunite Grogu with his people, first and foremost, but there’s definitely some personal turmoil in that scene as well.

Conclusion: Din is someone who canonically struggles to form romantic/intimate relationships with others because of the creed he’s sworn and the armor he wears. He’s made attempts that have blown up in his face (Xi’an) and while he still allows himself to fall just a little bit for others when they’re kind to him, it’s always with the knowledge that it won’t work out because they see his boundaries as surmountable or conditional (Omera).

If that doesn’t read as an asexual experience, I don’t know what does. 

(I also want to talk about ship stuff now so if you’re not interested in me talking about Dincobb you can peace out! Otherwise, you made it this far, might as well keep listening to me ramble lmao)

This entire examination is also to work out why Din/Cobb works so well for me as a ship and it 100% has to do with how the fandom has interpreted and written Cobb in their fanfic. Overwhelmingly I have seen people write Cobb as incredibly understanding and accepting of Din’s choice to cover his face. He totally lacks the expectation that someday his affection will be enough for Din to forsake his creed, which is novel for Din. 

Here’s this person who not only takes the time to get to know him as a person, fight by his side, and trusts him implicitly, but he also doesn’t come with the usual stipulation that his love is conditional based on Din’s willingness to compromise his boundaries for him. I LOVE that one of the most popular tropes for this ship is Cobb willingly blindfolding himself so that Din is able to remove his helmet and relax around him without violating his beliefs. I LOVE that there are so many fics where Cobb cooks him dinner, understands that Din can’t eat next to him, and sits down on the other side of a closed door so they can still eat together. Cobb respects Din, respects his boundaries, and Din is able to pursue a more intimate connection with him because of that allowance and acceptance, and on his own terms.

As someone who has always struggled to find a relationship free from the expectation that I must somehow trade my identity and comfort for love, this ship just hits different, okay. 

#wow this got much longer than I was anticipating #apparently I felt very strongly about this lmao #no idea if this will even read coherently #but if you're interested in an ace reading of Din Djarin and Dincobb I'm ya girl #this is maybe the most niche meta I've ever written #the mandalorian #dincobb #mine #asexuality

[scrawnytreedemon]

Shit I’ve Been Winding Up For A Long Time Now But Am Very Aware Will Probably Hold No Relevance Should I Actually Go Into This More--

This is about Bhunivelze.

I.

You know, when I was chilling out, on my bed, that evening on that half term in early June, deciding to check up on ClementJ64′s FF retrospective because-- Hey! It’s been awhile, I wonder if he’s got around to doing the final bit of the FFXIII saga --You know, I was there, chilling, just for a laff. Just a laff.

The rest of that week was spent spiralling into a hyperfixation I absolutely did not anticipate in any way, shape, or form, because the way they introduced that character was “wwhdhfjjhHJDFJKHKJHW H A T??”

That retrospective and a good amount of wiki-scrounging is all I have as a basis for this. This is not a coherent character analysis-- Though I might tag it as that for ease of access. This is not, by any means, the thoughts of someone deeply familiar with FFXIII on the whole beyond plot synopses and overarching themes.

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.

Reading the vast yet surface-deep lore on those wiki pages on my birthday while in a delirious state of mind was enough to make me somewhat nauseous.

Do you think I’m going to go through all of that in real time?

(Someday, someday.)

Ugh, I don’t know how to begin, but let us, I guess. I’d recommend you read this church-mime-demiurge’s FF Wiki page if you want the same level of base-knowledge I had, and maybe the aformentioned retrospective if you want the experience, because I don’t think I have the wherewithal to get into all of that from the bottom-up.

I am also, so, so fucking sorry for any remaining FFXIII fans in advance. There is like, a good chance I may be butchering the characterisation completely, so bear with me here.

With that... we begin?

Where do we even start with this guy?

How on earth to you begin to explain the absolute monolith you’ve constructed from crumbs of a Guy, some material no doubt spliced in from the Pale King, Sephiroth, y o u r  o w n  G o d  O C and other characters, and the mountains of religious trauma you carry around at all times that is probably the only reason you’ve been able to latch on as hard as you did?

I’m going to try.

What gets me, in summary, about Bhunivelze is how he’s a prime example of how love and concern can become deadly forces if in the wrong hands. His first acquainting with human emotion was by deceiving and possessing Hope, reverting his body to a teenage state, and planning to live among humanity through him. He sees human sorrow and suffering, and decides that, to End This(because it must be ended, you see) he’s going to destroy all the souls of the deceased that make up the Chaos that’s been eating this world for the past five-hundred years so they all forget and Are Happy. :).

Capital G God here hasn’t been present for the vast part of human history because he’s hidden himself away from Everything due to paranoia from killing his own mother and throwing her body into the Cosmic Basement, THEN creating the beings that would come to create humanity and OTHER beings because he didn’t have the keys to the cosmic basement. And also he believes death is a thing because she’d’ve somehow cursed all things to pass(including him) out of Spite.

Which explains why he’s so fucking averse to it and anything to do with it.

Bhunivelze, to put it lightly, is Shit at stepping into others’ shoes and Getting their experiences-- All the FalCie in FFXIII are, but him especially. It’s clear(again, in the f u c k i n g JP--) that he makes attempts to sympathise with them and does what he can to help, but it’s with such a loftiness and a complete inability to Understand why anyone would want grief, The Worst Fucking Experience In Existence, and even less why they’d be willing to Go Up Against Him And HisThe New Perfect World just for it-- And what would it matter, anyway, forgetting their loved ones. It’s not like you can grieve lost memories, right?

Right.

It reminds me of when at the end of the story of Job in the Bible, where, after putting this man through hell on earth, God rewards Job by giving him ten new children to make up for the ones that he lost. I. And that’s fucked! Nothing can replace the sheer uniqueness of each individual person you loved so dearly! But if you were a nigh-omnipotent deity high and mighty, with a cursory, almost mechanical knowledge on the functionings of the human psyche, that would seem adequete; enough.

Bhunivelze is doing that on a cosmic level.

I now want to get onto the romance: that being, his affections for Lightning. I don’t know how much I’m going to say, but it’ll probably be alot. It’s something that hits very close to home.

There is this... thing, within certain branches of Christianity, perhaps even in those of various Abrahamic faiths, where God’s love is posited to be the love-- The ultimate, most-fulfilling, all-encompassing love you could ever imagine --Because, well, he is love, so the story goes, and so often the best way to convey that is through the imagery of...

Marriage.

Giving up yourself so completely, to serve, to be the Bride; to be bound by him for all eternity; and for there to be no higher bliss than this.

This angle is pushed on young girls and women the most; from the mere parallels to the woman’s role in marriage, all the way down to downright-horrifying ultra-Evangelical purity pacts. With men, God is your dad, your best bud and confidant, your boss, your king, your this, your that, and the ‘marriage‘ as it were is relegated to a sort of half-thought; a metaphor.

For me, God was an attempt at all that, and my arranged groom.

(It was almost incestuous; was incestuous, that my own Divine Father would reach for my hand in marriage.)

Bhunivelze experiences Emotions™ for the first time through Hope, experiences Hope’s sheer overwhelming admiration for Lighting(whether there were any baby-crush feelings mixed in, I can’t say), and promptly falls into a nigh-romantic obsession with Lightning, deciding that she will be Etro(his all-but daughter)’s replacement, will be his Goddess of Death to-be-- He even calls her as such, before the final boss-battle--

...In the JP.

What happened in localisation, probably due to a number of factors, all the way back in early 2014, was that everything emotionally challenging about Bhunivelze was scraped off, like it was extra fat, and tossed aside, leaving us with the bland, clichéd shell of a foe-god we’ve seen time and time again. And I mean everything. I mean his very love for humanity; the fact his ploy was, in his eyes, to save them. Because if they’d left that all on, then it would raise the question of even if there was such a seemingly pure, all-knowing, loving being hell-bent on setting things “straight,“ would they truly be unquestionable? Would we have the right to fight for our humanity in the face of the Creator of the Universe?

To reject a love so personal?

That’s what gets me about FFXIII’s tackling of God, no matter how hackneyed and poorly-executed. It’s personal.

It’s from a feminine experience.

I know that terming is... vague, and problematic, but the way Christianity and much of the video game industry handle femininity itself is weird and problematic, so as it stands, I’ll have to simplify it. Apologies.

What sets FFXIII’s Let’s Kill God™ plot aside from most JRPG Let’s Kill God™ plots is that with our protagonist being a woman, and one who is very in touch with her femininity alongside her sheer strength; often, in these stories, God is reduced to Yet Another Foe, expected or unexpected, and you are tasked with taking him down unquestioningly for the Good of Mankind-- You will fight God, because you are right to, and you will go man-to-man-to-however-many-men you decide to bring along for the bloodbath.

And that just, doesn’t speak to me.

Even as an Extian.

Especially as an Extian. And an AFAB one with a deeply complicated experience with my gender, at that.

Leaving Christianity was painful. Questioning God was painful. Coming to terms with the fact that I had been mentally, emotionally, and spiritually traumatised under the guise of All-Encompassing Love was so, so fucking painful. I had been taught since I was five years old to devote myself to him, spent my life desperate to feel something, anything, to stay connected because I just, I never could Feel It on a deeper level, never could Give Up Myself, all I was, couldn’t Die A Spiritual Death And Be Reborn As His Eager Vessel, thus deeming myself to be worthless and a broken vessel for years and years on end... And for all that to have been... Nothing.

Lightning is hollowed out, the shards of her dead sister ripped from her in-stasis, leaving her emotionally numb for the majority of the game, Bhunivelze sweeps it under the rug, pretends he’ll perform a miracle and return Serah to life in exchange for her compliance, then sends her on her way to do his work, all the while knowing he’s going to pull said-rug from under her and elevate her such dizzying heights in the aftermath--

That he’ll deny her humanity.

Sand down all the rough edges that make her her, and polish her up afterwards, gild her as he is gilded, make her a Goddess.

And he’ll do it all because he loves her.

You can’t fight God like you can everything else. To fight It is the fight Existence Itself; FFXIII even conveys that by making Bhunivelze’s model part of the arena; it’s baked into the fabric of the game, no matter how minute.

While Lightning Returns is far from perfect in its execution of this concept, and that in itself makes me wince, not even taking into account the horribly botched excuse for a localisation Bhunivelze endured, it speaks to me more than anything else I’ve seen so far.

And it’s helped uncover some things within me. Helped me untangle them, just a little more.

So, yeah. I have alot of Thoughts on Bhunivelze, I want to share them, and I’m kinda really sad I have no one but my currently-absent friend Vee to share them with. I could get into alot more, like his very Fucked relationship with familial bonds, and how Lightning’s role as saviour so deeply parallels the overwhelming panic and never-ending guilt of Evangelical proselytisation, but I think I’ll leave those for another time.

In short, Bhunivelze is the epitome of Divine Love gone deeply wrong; on all fronts.

And if all of that isn’t enough to intrigue you, then, in Vee’s words, Lightning and Velze are literally canon endgame Sefikura lmaOOOOOOOOOOOOOO--

#ffxiii #lightning returns #bhunivelze #analysis #scrawny speaks #scrawny rambles #this was written on and off over the course of a couple months #i know this will only get two notes #if even that #but fuck it i love this guy and i'm going to puke words for his sake #religion mention

[burnedbyshoto]

a sloppily thrown together, my small take on what happens to bakugou if izuku finally listened to his bullying & ended his life:

“you shitty fucking idiot,” bakugou wants to growl but can only pitifully whimper instead.

his head is spinning, his heart an inferno, and the tears refuse to fall from his eyes in the same way the bile refuses to escape his throat. he’s feeling things he has no right to be feeling, shaking with emotions he can’t figure out why he’s feeling because he doesn’t care about midoriya izuku! he doesn’t! he hasn’t in years! fucking years, damnit! “you’ve never listened to a single damn thing i’ve ever told you, a-and now... then you decided to listen? now you fucking listen to me?! werent you supposed to be the best?! how you can be the fucking best six feet under, hah?! fucking better than all might my ass!! what the f-fuck is wrong with you, d-deku?!”

bakugou katsuki stands in front of midoriya izuku’s tomb today.

it’s been ten years since his “tragic death,” one that people only ended up caring about because it happened at school. no one cared because he was quirkless, no one even cared to ask why he had climbed up those stairs that day, no one but midoriya inko had screamed and screeched, sobbing as she collapsed on the hospital stairs.

the funeral was meek and small. inko was alone, as hisashi couldn’t break away from work, and the bakugous had only shown up because of mitsuki’s relationship with inko. katsuki had stayed in the car, he refused to see the service, refused to see izuku’s blubbering, worse for wear mother absolutely losing it, refused to see the bin that held izuku’s dead essence.

he refused to see him then, utterly consumed with emotions he couldn’t deal with.

so here he was now.

bakugou katsuki, for the past ten years, has been living a life aiming for the top that has become harder and increasingly bitter. he went to ua, was taught by all might, watched all might weather and eventually die, he watched his classmates rise above all, and he grew up. but for ten years, he also found himself unable to go home, unable to talk about his childhood, unable to fully connect with his classmates.

he woke up, got ready, worked, got home, slept.

repeat.

repeat.

repeat.

he was still angry, still meeting people head on, but there was also something clearly haunting him.

he cursed people out, but he never said to die, he never said to go to hell, never said people would rather wish they were dead.

his classmates watched as their usual stoic, angry classmate break down into a sobbing mess when he got too drunk and they dubbed a stuffed broccoli doll an official classmate of theirs.

he freezes up whenever someone mentions that they’re a deku, even if jokingly.

he gazed at freckles just a bit longer, curls just a bit more.

they watch as bakugou katsuki, the person they expect the least to be gentle with people standing on the edge of the building, become raw, emotional, almost still. no one mentions that he’s crying when he comes off the building with the trembling middle schooler who is sobbing uncontrollably.

no mentions how bakugou katsuki is a prime volunteer in suicide watch, a loud advocate in suicide prevention.

everyone just suspects it’s just something he’s really into, a rare hyperfixation he has on his way to number one.

at twenty-five, bakugou katsuki has somehow made number one. somehow despite the way a curly, green haired ghost continues to haunt him, he makes it. but there’s no joy in it, there’s no sense of relief and satisfaction to this win.

mirio had all mights quirk, but he lost it at a mission in high school. he had been lucky to get his original quirk back, honestly to be alive, but the girl with the time quirk could only give him back his original quirk.

todoroki somehow has managed with only using half of his quirk. he’s lucky to be this far up with only 50% of his quirk, and he was still so cold, he, like half of his quirk, was ice cold.

bakugou can’t even remember who else is in the top ten outside of them two, he just knows they were his heaviest contenders, and he had won. but he knew it was all wrong, that something was needed to make it right, but he wasn’t sure where exactly to fix it.

so in some attempt to make himself better, to make this complete victory real, he finally ends up back in the one place he’s avoided for years. in both mind and person.

he shows up with a small bowl of katsudon, a tiny detail about izuku he remembers clear as day. it’s been ten years since he’s seen izuku, more since he knew anything about izuku, but the moment he steps in front of the stone it feels as if he’s fifteen again.

fifteen, dumb, and with burning fear for the one person in his life he couldn’t figure out and therefore feared. he hated what he feared, he hated that if izuku had just the slight bit of luck and gotten a quirk he would be his greatest rival. he hated that izuku was quirkless. he hated himself for letting it all mean so much to him in the end. he hated that he could never officially apologize to izuku, to hear that stupid kacchan in his ears one more time, to grip that shitty bastards cheeks tight in his hands and tell him that if he decided to actually jump off that roof he was going to fucking kill him.

just the other day bakugou katsuki felt like he could barely remember midoriya izuku, but just now, everything he could ever remember comes back. the curly dark green eyes, the eyes that shone no matter what emotion he was feeling, the eight dark identical freckles on his cheeks that outshine the lighter stardust on the rest of his face. he remembers the shy dimple on izuku’s mouth, and the way his voice trembles when he spoke, tremble everyone focused and ignored the steely unbreakabke spine in his tone.

where was the unbreakable izuku he knew?!

so bakugou katsuki for the first time reads midoriya izuku’s tombstone and in a feat much similar to midoriya inko ten years ago, loses it.

he curses, spits, cries, screams.

he screams until his voice is hoarse and every last thing he has ever wanted to say to midoriya izuku has tumbled past his lips and has undoubtedly woken up izuku’s dead form.

“fuck you,” bakugou snarls, it’s a weak snarl, it’s too wet, too much of a pathetic whimper. “i got number one, just like i said i would! i got number one and your stupid shitnerd self wasn’t around to watch me! ‘kacchan sugoi’ my fucking ass!! you shitty fucking nerd thinking that you should listen to me, why the fuck would you? i bet you’re laughing at me, aren’t you? laughing because i’m like this despite you not meaning shit to me. you fucking damn coward, just you f-fucking wait.”

bakugou katsuki storms away that day and decides he will continue to be the best.

he’ll be the best knowing that shitty nerd will watch him no matter where he is.

it takes years, disasterous highs and lows, but bakugou katsuki is finally in his deathbed. he was the number one hero for years, he was famous for his work with advocating for mental health with particular emphasis on the quirkless. he was still angry, still cursing villains, screaming at civilians, and he angrily cries whenever someone does anything remotely wrecklessly self-sacrificing in front of him.

midoriya inko never truly forgave him, but he appreciated the pot of spicy curry on his work desk after he opened the midoriya izuku foundation when he turned twenty-six.

he lived, loved, and did all he could to be the best version of himself. he learned to accept that midoriya izuku somehow cared for him in spite of it all, and that there was no way izuku could ever laugh at his misery. so he lived. he was living his best so that the nerd he was so desperately hoping was watching him from wherever he was happy too.

please be happy.

and with a drawing, shaky last breath, bakugou katsuki closes his eyes for the last time.

“kacchan, hi!”

“...hey, deku.”

#idk what to tag this but it’s messy and sloppy #anyways I truly honestly think that had izuku jumped bakugou katsuki would be wrecked but in subtle ways #he would never admit that his death hurt him would do everything to continue on until he gets it all #he gets it all and he realizes in horror it isn’t enough #because izuku and katsuki are apart of the same storyline #they’re the same story but without just one part of them you lose so much #and I think they both hate to admit it #idk just some fun sad stuff #lyssa doesnt shut up

[transsexualhamlet]

predictions for yuumori s2 (as a manga reader)

No matter what happens, this is probably gonna end up aging badly, but i’m hyperfixating and I’ve decided to make it everyone else’s problem so I’m going to predict where they’re gonna go with s2 of moriarty the patriot (keep in mind i’m writing this as of episode 2) and what I think would be the ideal scenario, in the likely situation that this is the last season.

So we can tell a lot about what they’re going to cut/include from the opening and ending, and the first two episodes. 

Observations/Conclusions:

-moneypenny and most likely von herder are gone, already evidenced by the first 2 episodes, which is :( but understandable bc there’s only so much space and they’re definitely cutting the arcs where they would be important

-so that means no moran backstory because duh, there’s a point in the backstory and i see value in it, moran slaps when he’s not being an ass lmao, but again, time constraints

-no matter what I can’t see them keeping in the like, child hunting thing 2 electric boogaloo, even tho it did further Fred’s and Louis’ characters, since they’ve previously cut out stuff considering them and. You know. That’s how it be.

-You can see they’re including jack the ripper arc (considering, jack is in the opening) and I have faith that they can downsize the arc without butchering it if they do it right. This is good that they’re keeping it in, considering it’s one of the... main arcs not involving milverton that advances the plot.

-Major thing we can tell is that, yeah, Milverton is nowhere to be seen. It seems like this would fuck things up bad since he’s like, the only kind of “main villain” we get here. But honestly? I agree with that. Fuck Milverton. He has no character or motivation and is like my one and only bone to pick with the manga. He’s just there to suck ass and create plot convenience?? I don’t like him and he never needed to be there if he wasn’t at least going to do something interesting. I support the anime cutting him.

-That DOES fuck over their ability to do the white knight arc, since, well, milverton is the cause of all of that. And this is the one thing I really don’t know what they’re going to do with that to connect jack the ripper directly to the final problem. I can’t predict that, but I do think there are ways it can be done that won’t be Awful.

-So considering that, Mary’s arc is definitely axed, which doesn’t bother me that much since by that point i so impatient for gay people and really didn’t care about watson’s fiance even tho she is a lovely lady. For anime effect, she does not need an arc, though I could see them having her show up a few times so watson doesn’t seem too gay either lmao.

-They’re definitely shooting to end with the final problem, considering without it there’s no big culminating event between moriarty and sherlock, which is obviously the big sell. And well. It’s. Um. The final problem. 

The season says it’s slated to be 13 episodes, since s1 didn’t have enough time for 12. I honestly think they can manage it all, if they play their cards right. 

Outlook:

This whole potential situation does sound familiar, I’ll point out that I just arrived here after the shit show of the promised neverland’s second season. But I don’t think it will get bad like tpn did. Because in Moriarty, they could afford to cut things because there are many stand alone and disposable arcs, whereas tpn really shouldn’t have, since they pretty much all contributed later to Major Main Character Plot Things. And the important points of the arcs that they’ll probably cut can actually be written into existing ones without looking like plot convenience, in my vision of it.

Honestly, I’m pretty optimistic for moriarty, it works better for this kind of adaption than in a lot of other manga that end up getting these most likely two season adaptions. I’d love to get those arcs for the servant’s and other character’s developments of course, but trying to stick that in when there’s really only time to focus on the main characters would suck up time better spent on really getting deep into the main storyline. Even if there are less characters, in a situation like this a streamlined and nuanced story will look elegant, whereas shoving as much content as possible into a few short episodes makes everyone cringe.

The situation does end up looking like the promised neverland, but it has a chance to be significantly less fucked considering,,, well,,, tpn is an insanely low bar, and they will hopefully not make the promised neverland’s same mistakes of Shove Seventeen Plotlines Into One Episode After Realizing Belatedly They Actually Needed Those Parts.

Obviously I don’t know what will happen, and this will be outdated by sunday lmao, but my projection looks something like this for 13 episodes to conclude the show.

Predictions:

(Episodes 1+2: A Scandal in the British Empire)

Episode 3: I’m very anxious for 3 considering this will probably make or break my opinion on the anime. Ideally, this episode would wrap up the scandal arc and go over the whole James Bond thing, it could be pretty baller and fit well into an episode. But though there’s plenty of Irene in the opening, there’s no sight of Bond, so considering anime as a whole is fucking transphobic, they might try to change it, twist around bond’s words or just, gloss over it altogether. If they cut it, they might have time to squeeze in another arc but I don’t think they honestly need to? With what they seem to be keeping in, they’ll have ample time to get to everything, and it would be shorter anyway considering the smaller amount of servants. 

Here, we do definitely need to cover Sherlock’s “receiving the name of the lord of crime and deciding to burn it and find it out himself because he’s extra”, no matter the status of irene/bond’s gender. If they do that right and possibly change a few things so it’s more important, this could play into them moving forward his whole discovery of their secrets.

Episodes 4-7: These will most likely cover jack the ripper arc. There’s a lot to go over here, and I’m confident they can cut it down, because tbh Moriarty is pretty long winded for a manga and cutting things is good to an extent. This covers most of the major expansions on William’s ideas and plans, and definitely has the holes to stuff in more of the points made in the arcs that will be cut out. Though I have my reservations, they could plausibly take most points in white knight and integrate them into here.

Episodes 8-10: These are the ones that are going to take the most work and probably be the most changed. They should finish up the ripper arc in 7, give or take a few episodes, and then here, If Sherlock has a little more figured out from episode 3, he can look deeper. I think it’s honestly a good idea for the one to discover the Incriminating Records to be him, as it again gives them more connection. There needs to be some other reason Moriarty’s secrets are in danger of getting leaked to the paper, but I’m sure they can put something together with scotland yard or something, or even like, Mycroft. I see that. But if that happens, then we can spend an episode or so on the merchant of london, aka little liam commits girlboss, which can be woven into the idea of everything Coming Out.

Episodes 11-13: Final problem. I see this going mostly unchanged, up until 55. Truth is they’ll probably end up cutting something but hmm. I don’t know. They should keep the fred stuff in, since they’ll cut his other development. They should keep the squad asking sherlock for help, since they cut the other parts that highlight the crime squad’s care for him. But I think they could montage most of the William Goes French Revolution On You Hoes, even the part where the kids come in front of one of them, if you see what’s going on right. But everything can proceed as in the manga pretty smoothly, I think, it all makes sense if they put it together in 7-10. You know, you got somehow, the worst case happens, and boom, scandal, final problem enacted. Killing spree. William reveals he’s been emo this whole time but it’s too late now. Everyone scrambling to catch up with his damn plans. Gay boy knocking on 221B with a fucking love letter. Shit gets found out. And then... well, yuh.

Disclaimer I still don’t know everything about this, bc I cannot find a translation of 54, only the raw with no context, and I know there’s content after 55 but I can’t find that either. But I’m sure as hell an english major and can understand where things are probably going. I don’t know what’s involved at that point, and if there’s some plan detailed to save him or something. That’s the main thing I don’t know, and if there is one detailed of course that kind of changes everything, but for now I’m going on the assumption that 54 is “sherlock runs to the bridge and yells at liam to stop being a dramatic whore while london burns around them and the murder squad watches anxiously with mysterious intent, until it is chapter 55″. (IF Y’ALL HAVE THE ENGLISH PLEASE HMU) They better not TOUCH anything in 55 or so help me god.

But as to after 55, things are going to be different. Besties, I’m an optimist, but there’s no way they’ll make a season after this. It does appear that they’ve mostly wrapped up, and they’ve gotten through what Big Revals they plan on doing. The shit hinted from the beginning has happened, and there probably won’t be enough to create another, unless the author plans on fucking shit up again, which I don’t approve of. There are a few things still left unsaid, like, Liam’s real name and everything, but if it’s supposed to be important, things that small can 100 percent be written into this.

And as something that’s intending to finish up a story, depending on what manga canon really is (BESTIE I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS) they might change it. There’s two options, a bittersweet/hopeful and a tragic one, but either one will end up open ended, because of my extensive knowledge of 2 season animes with significantly longer mangas. (done badly: tokyo ghoul and tpn, done well: owari no seraph and mob psycho) Either we have it like well, oh damn, everything was destined to be Sad but well you’re with him now you’re probably dead, but you know there’s something hinted at and you don’t know for sure so that’s the catch. So you get a vague and bittersweet but possibly hopeful ending. OR something that takes,,, whatever ends up happening in the manga or whatever the plan is and turning it into an epilogue infodump.

I can see either going well depending on how they handle the messages of the story. But yeah, as far as to my extent of the understanding of the show, that’s how it’ll probably go, and what my opinion of how it should is.

To What Extent Will The Gay:

You know, this is my ideal scenario within these time limits, but you know they could always go The Wrong Direction if the anime team took a look at some of the later chapters and went “holy shit this is a bit too gay” and try to axe some of the sherliam content, which I wouldn’t put past any corporation.

In the case that they do, I see lot of good shit going. They’re clearly trying to do the final problem, so they obviously can’t cut out 55, which is good :). But though 55 is clearly, uh, really fucking homosexual, the most romantic shit goes down in 53, as far as I can tell? (keeping in mind i still haven’t found 54′s english version, if anyone would like to direct me to a translation, that would be LOVELY.) I unfortunately can see them cutting Liam’s letter almost entirely, and that kind of scares me.

You know, even if i’d hate and slander them for it, cutting out james bond would be something i would understand. But messing with sherliam would fuck them over, not just cause that would be awful, but like, because it’s like... kind of the main point.

So I’m not really too worried about them messing with it, mostly because the content itself is holding them at gunpoint, sherliam holds the whole plot structure in place, especially if you’re shooting for final problem. And even in the manga they never, like, actually say they’re in love with each other even tho historically gay lovers would probably call each other “friends” lmao so it’s not like they have to greenlight gay sex or anything lmao it’s just Very Romantic (No Homo)

And apart from that, yuumori has actually been pretty decent to the gays so far?? Damn shawty, they certainly haven’t toned down the gay yet and it’s clearly their main source of fans, and what they’ve decided to emphasize in both openings and a significant portion of the s2 ending. We’re all here for it, and they’re catering to it, so I can at least give you that.

#moriarty the patriot #yukoku no moriarty #rowan's hyperfixation essays #sherliam #Holy Shitte this is long #watch me find 54 and immediately change my stance on all of this #or something idk #watch this whole thing be irrelevant in half a week #HHHHHHHH #if it doesn't go exactly like this i will lose my mind lmao

[onelungmcclung]

Any Speirgott HC's you'd like to share or discuss? :) I'm dying for content.

f i n a l l y

if only you had found me back in my original stint in this fandom when I was thinking about them daily. it’s a great ship, you’re so right. (we don’t like to use the word hyperfixation around here, but I sometimes wonder if this one’s in my future.) do feel free to dm me, if that suits you.

I’m just gonna go all out on my Thoughts and you can do what you want with whatever, you know? 

it’s just such an interesting dynamic. the whole “self recognition through the other” vibe, and a slight undercurrent of outsiderhood (though differently experienced). the tension between the mutual recognition of each other as equals (on a personal level) vs the hierarchies and protocols of rank. there is such synchronicity between them when they are clearing the house and liebgott is translating for speirs, which doesn’t occur in their interactions with other characters, even where there are friendships. the undercurrent of humour between them in speirs’s hey liebgott, you want to sit this one out? is small but quite striking.

speirs is able to compartmentalise his emotions and fears whereas liebgott doesn’t; liebgott brings everything into his fight, love and anger and family and history; he is fighting for his people to a greater extent than anyone else in the company. they share a ruthless attitude towards combat and they both adapt relatively well to the environment of war. liebgott, I think, is likely to have a delayed reaction to the horrors he has seen. (he does break down in the camp, but it’s very brief, both because his priority is the wellbeing of the prisoners and because his grief is too raw and personal to display openly in front of the entire company.)

liebgott knows he’s seen a little as an outsider, as the only jewish man in the company, and he’s proud of that identity but he doesn’t talk to anyone about what it means to him; it’s a very personal part of himself, and we only see that vulnerability in the camp. speirs accepts, even welcomes, being seen as an outsider; there’s a value to being feared by one’s men. he references roman history, and so I think it’s nerdy relevant to mention that the latin word vereor means both respect and fear; that is a philosophy he embraces. liebgott does respect him, more quickly than he respects other superiors, and he does, upon occasion, show a degree of fear – namely in the pistol whipping scene – which is unusual for him. that scene is also interesting in that liebgott is the only one who keeps his eyes on speirs the entire time, unlike the others who draw back slightly. (this is in fact the scene where I first started to ship it. a lot.)

they both keep certain things back: liebgott doesn’t show vulnerability if he can avoid it; speirs represses the emotions he can’t wholly compartmentalise. there’s a desire, I think, an instinct, to trust each other, and a reluctance: a tension between letting their guard down vs keeping their distance. they secondguess themselves rather than each other. liebgott is a pretty shrewd observer of other people; speirs, I think, finds interpersonal dynamics a little harder to gauge precisely.

they’re both deeply protective of the people around them: liebgott with tipper, tab, alley, the jewish prisoners; speirs with grant. neither of them default towards gentleness but they’re both capable of great compassion when others need it.

I don’t know if I have many headcanons as such. I think speirs sends liebgott to interrogate/kill the commandant because he trusts liebgott, in this more than anyone else, and because he believes it’s a mission liebgott would want. (speirs has… idiosyncratic ideas about being nice, lol; just ask blithe.)

I think they probably never interacted directly before speirs took over easy company, or certainly not pre-normandy, though they may have been aware of each other. I don’t think liebgott ever cared about the rumours; he had no qualms about speirs killing the german prisoners and, if he was at all disturbed by the rumour about speirs shooting his sergeant, he wouldn’t have shown it. however, they did probably cross paths on the night of the bayonet, when lieb rushed in to help tab and speirs went to investigate the disturbance, and so speirs identifies liebgott as someone who is good in a crisis.

I think speirs much prefers working with liebgott as translator than with webster, in that liebgott is faster and more colloquial but – just as importantly – they fall fluidly into a rapport when working together. on some level, speirs is glad to pull liebgott off the patrol in haguenau; he doesn’t want to lose anyone in the company, but particularly not liebgott.

(I’m not fluent in german but listening to webster’s gives me secondhand embarrassment)

in general I don’t have sexuality headcanons re. any of the characters; but when I write speirgott, my feeling is that this is the first time liebgott has been consciously attracted to men. I don’t think this causes an identity crisis for him; the circumstances of war are too extreme and speirs is, in many ways, an exception to normal rules. pursuing a relationship beyond what is allowed is fraught with difficulty, because of the high stakes and the obstacles of rank and the background of homophobia; I don’t think internalised homophobia is a particular factor. I don’t think it is the first time speirs has been attracted to men, but that does not make the situation simpler. they are all just trying to stay alive and keep the others alive; acting on their attraction may somehow jeopardise that, but also they may never have another chance. their relationship is on a knife-edge at all times: between personal and impersonal, hierarchical and equals, vulnerability and guardedness, secrecy and discovery, life and death.

speirgott has the best potential for all the most gripping AUs, I will stand by that

… anyway, I know I should write more for them – slightly longer fics, I hope – and it’s my tragedy that I seem to have very little control over whatever I next write, but I am extremely glad to know there’s an audience for this ship. I hope I come through for you. 

ps. I am entirely up for bouncing ideas/headcanons/plot bunnies around.

#replies #speirgott #speirs x liebgott #I wondered if speirgott would hit me hard on my return to the fandom #but to my surprise mctoye has been the pressing issue #swings and roundabouts #(when I finish writing a long post I'm always like '... was that coherent?' and 'will I think of more later?' ugh.) #'charactering'

[elyvorg]

Kaito Momota: How ADHD Can Be

It’s about time I properly shared a take of mine that I never really talk about in my usual analysis posts, which is my very firm headcanon that Kaito has ADHD. While this is partly thanks to me having ADHD myself, self-indulgence is far from the only thing making me think this. There are so many reasons why this makes every single bit of sense, and this post is going to talk about all of them.

And, see, I don’t want to alienate anyone by having them think I’m about to present an interpretation of Kaito that looks nothing like the Kaito we know, because that’s not it at all. I’m here to talk about how so many of the things that were already abundantly true about him also happen to fit perfectly with ADHD. Really, you could think of it more as me talking about how ADHD actually looks a lot more like Kaito than most people might have realised.

After all, ADHD is a frustratingly misrepresented disorder that’s way more complex and interesting than most people are aware. So not only does it make a huge amount of sense to see Kaito as ADHD, it’s also just genuinely fascinating to think that this could be influencing how his mind works and the way he reacts to things throughout the story. Imagining that Kaito has ADHD could never make him any less Kaito, but I do think it makes him yet another layer of interesting on top of everything else he already has going on.

So even if you don’t have any personal investment in ADHD yourself, I hope you can follow along with me for this. There’s a lot of fun stuff to talk about here.

(Since ADHD is so horribly misrepresented that I can’t expect the average person to know what it really involves, this post is also going to include something of a whirlwind explanation of ADHD itself, in order to help people better appreciate why all these things about Kaito are potentially ADHD things. With that said, obvious disclaimer: I am not remotely a mental health professional, just someone with self-diagnosed ADHD who’s read up a lot about it. Some of this will be from things I’ve read, and some of this will be from my own experiences that I’m now pretty sure are an ADHD thing. My descriptions of these symptoms are likely to be somewhat oversimplified because I’m focusing on explaining this headcanon rather than explaining ADHD itself, so please don’t take this as a definitely-100%-accurate ADHD resource. I’m happy if this can raise awareness of what ADHD is really like, but you should look elsewhere to learn more.) 

Hyperfixations

One major thing that ought to be more commonly known about ADHD is that it’s really not a lack of attention; it’s an inability to properly control where our attention goes. It’s been described as an “interest-based nervous system” – we’ll involuntarily focus on whatever seems most interesting to us in any given moment, regardless of its objective importance.

This plus a reduced amount of dopamine receptors means that when we manage to find something that gives us a lot of dopamine, ie, is fun and engaging to think about, we cannot stop thinking about it even if we wanted to. Our entire lives will begin to revolve around this Thing that we enjoy, thinking about it, doing things related to it and consuming more information on it to get as much of that sweet dopamine as possible. This can often be to the detriment of everything else, including more objectively important matters, because who cares about that stuff when Thing is the best thing ever!?

As an example: as you might imagine, I have been hyperfixated on DRV3 and especially on Kaito for over two years now. I have not been able to stop thinking about Kaito even when I’m supposed to be doing other things, and there’s literally nothing that’s more fun for me right now than sharing all these thoughts of mine with other people. We also love to infodump about our hyperfixations to anyone who’ll listen, after all. That’s precisely why this post exists, along with many more like it on both my blogs.

SPACE 

So, this is perhaps one of the most easy-to-spot signs that Kaito might be ADHD. Because, man, he really loves space. Sure, any astronaut would have at least some level of interest in it, but Kaito is so obsessed with space that he introduces himself with a grandiose space-themed title, wears a galaxy print on his slippers and the inside of his jacket, and simply couldn’t wait for a college degree and had to make sure he got up there as fast as possible.

Granted, it’s not like Kaito talks about space 100% of the time. He is stuck in a killing game, after all, which is also kind of important to pay attention to. But, still, no matter what more-objectively-important things they can push themselves to focus on when necessary, there’s always a part of an ADHDer’s brain that’s near-constantly thinking about their hyperfixation anyway and will take any opportunity to bring it up and make things about that if they possibly can. And, well, Kaito still talks about space quite a lot considering that he’s in a life-or-death situation that doesn’t have anything to do with space at all (at least, as far as he knows for most of the story).

There’s one delightful bit of white noise I absolutely love in a debate in trial 4 where Gonta is suggesting a vehicle could have crossed the river. Someone responds to this with “Like a rocket?”, despite the fact that, A, there were obviously none of those in the Virtual World, and B, you don’t use those to cross rivers. Kaito, you dork, now is not the time. But of course now’s the time, there is always time to be thinking about space-related things, no matter how impractical and irrelevant it might be. Someone has been murdered, everyone else’s lives are on the line – not to mention his illness and the huge pile of inferiority issues he’s struggling with at this point in the story – yet amongst all that, Kaito’s brain still found time to go, “hey, speaking of vehicles, aren’t rockets the coolest!?” And… yeah, that’s genuinely what hyperfixations are like.

Then there’s the time Kaito asked Maki what her favourite spaceship was, like this is just an obvious go-to conversation starter in his mind, because of course he has a favourite spaceship. He has thought a lot about his favourite spaceship (or spaceships; let’s be real, there’s probably several that he thinks are SO COOL and might call his favourite depending on the circumstances) and could fill ages talking about nothing but that. Even though he knows this conversation ought to be making its way towards helping Maki open up about her past – this is one of his training sessions, after all! – there is still a part of Kaito that really just wants to talk about space, because a part of him always wants to talk about space.

We can see this as well in multiple FTE invitation dialogues (those brief lines describing how they hung out before the actual event starts) in which Kaito apparently spends it talking to Kaede or Shuichi about space, just because he can. There’s also several of his hangouts in the Salmon Team bonus mode where Shuichi’s suggestion of what to do doesn’t really have anything to do with space, but Kaito finds a way to make it about space anyway. ADHD minds are hyper-associative and make connections between concepts very easily – and, naturally, they’re particularly liable to make connections to the thing that the mind is already spending the majority of its time thinking about. So it’s really not so surprising or remarkable at all that Kaito can find ways to make even seemingly-totally-unrelated topics about space somehow, not if he’s ADHD.

(…To be fair, a particular fixation on a certain topic to the point of repeatedly bringing it up when it’s not called for isn’t necessarily that uncommon among Danganronpa characters, what with their talents. But hey, that doesn’t have to make Kaito any less likely to be ADHD. Rather, it would actually make sense for Ultimate students to have a higher than average proportion of ADHDers among them, since an ADHD-fuelled level of intense interest in a thing is more likely to make someone become hugely talented at it out of accumulated knowledge and practice. I’ve been increasingly thinking that Kaede could perhaps be ADHD, too, for example. But that’s not for this post; we’re talking about Kaito here.)

The longevity of space

ADHDers will generally go through many different hyperfixations throughout their life, sometimes one at a time, sometimes somehow managing to juggle more than one. An individual hyperfixation tends to last anywhere between a few weeks to a few years depending on its intensity and the longevity of the topic, but it’s rare for it to be more than that. Usually, sooner or later, the overwhelming passion for the thing will wear itself out.

And admittedly, Kaito’s passion for space has been there since he was a kid and never faded – and never will, of course! – which is far more persistent than most hyperfixations tend to be. But then again, there’s so many different things related to space for him to get excited about! Hyperfixations fade either when something else comes along that’s more exciting because it’s new and fresh, or when you’ve squeezed every last possible drop of dopamine out of it such that it no longer holds quite the same thrill. But with a topic as vast as space, there’s always more to learn to keep the excitement fresh, especially now that Kaito’s an astronaut trainee and is really on the front line of new space knowledge and technologies and is actually going to get there himself one day!

Besides, it’s not like ADHDers’ hyperfixations are completely outside of their control. My own hyperfixation on V3 and Kaito would probably have faded ages ago if I hadn’t kept it going by constantly making more content about it such as this. And similarly, there’s no way Kaito would have wanted to let go of his passion for space, not if he had any say in it himself, so he’d have done whatever he could to keep it burning during the times when the spark maybe wasn’t quite there as much. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable that Kaito could have remained hyperfixated on space for so unusually long and still be showing no signs of stopping. We all know how stubborn he is.

(House plants)

Kaito has probably had a few other, lesser hyperfixations alongside his lifelong passion for space. For example, I like to think that his fondness for house plants, according to his report card, is to such an extent that he was once hyperfixated on them. (This would have been for reasons that totally don’t bear a suspicious resemblance to other things he cares about.) I doubt he’s currently hyperfixating on them at the moment – at no point does he ever try to shift the conversation to being about house plants unprompted – but that wouldn’t stop him from still being generally fond of them and retaining all of the “useless” information he learned about them back when he was obsessed. One very rarely ever stops caring about a hyperfixation topic entirely; rather, the fixation just fades and the topic becomes no longer constantly on someone’s mind. I’m sure Kaito still could and would talk your ear off about house plants just as much as he would about space if you happened to get him started.

People

More importantly, though, I think that another of Kaito’s less obvious and intense hyperfixations – but still a very long-lasting one that’s active right now – could be, simply, people. Just, people in general: their flaws and complexities and differences, all the many ways in which they can communicate and work together, and the amazing potential they have to achieve great things if they do so. Kaito is so passionate about this stuff and has so many fully-formed opinions on things of this nature that make it seem like he’s spent a lot of his free time thinking about this, just because he can. Maybe he began to get interested in it after realising that communication and teamwork is important for an astronaut – but it also reads to me like Kaito is into this kind of stuff not because he needs to be for the sake of getting into space, but simply because he finds it genuinely fascinating and couldn’t stop thinking about it even if he had to. (Which would also help keep him interested in space, because it’s intrinsically linked to this other topic that Kaito finds fascinating!)

And within this, Kaito definitely hyperfixates in particular on his sidekicks. Once he’s made someone into his sidekick, which functionally means that he’s going to devote himself to supporting them through their issues and helping them reach their potential, he really devotes himself. It’s his hyperfixation on people in general, but concentrated on a specific person(s) that he can have a direct and tangible impact on, which means even more to him than just his feelings about how awesome and fascinating humanity is as a whole.

Kaito is really, really good at supporting his sidekicks, after all. He spends so much time, even when he’s not around them, thinking about what their problems are and the best ways he can help them. He was clearly eyeing up both Shuichi and Maki as potential sidekicks at least a day or two before actually acting on it and inviting them to training, as if he was trying to gauge exactly what their struggles were and how best to help before jumping right in. He approaches helping each of them in very different ways, making it clear that he’s specifically thought about who they are and the best tactics to help them individually instead of just carelessly using the same old script each time. On more than one occasion, he drops something on them one morning – the nickname “Maki Roll”, and the “bonus” training that becomes the katana scene – that he hadn’t mentioned at all the previous night, meaning that he’d been thinking further about how to keep helping them while on his own overnight.

So it seems to me like maybe it’s not just his selflessness, or his somewhat unhealthy co-dependency (more on that later, actually) that makes Kaito so good at this. I don’t think he could even stop thinking about helping his sidekicks if he tried. Figuring out how to help another human being grow and change and reach their full potential is so fascinating and engaging and rewarding to him that how could he ever not be compelled to do that as much as he possibly can?

The price of caring

This does, however, come with a downside. Because Kaito is fixating so strongly and uncontrollably on supporting his sidekicks, because doing that matters so much to him, it’s only going to hurt him more when he begins to feel like he’s failing at it. He can’t just brush something like that off as not really a big deal, because of course it’s a big deal. It’s everything to him, and it’s literally not possible for him to make himself feel like it isn’t.

It’s just as bad as if space suddenly twisted and became painful to think about somehow. Which… I guess that actually kind of happens too, when Kaito starts to realise that he’s never going to make it up there. And he can’t deal with that by trying to tell himself it was never that important, either, because space is always important to him. Even if he wanted to switch that part of his brain off or ignore it to help himself cope, he just couldn’t.

Caring so intensely about things feels amazing and makes a person wonderfully passionate, but it can also be a double-edged sword.

(Executive dysfunction?)

One big negative side to ADHD is that it tends to cause executive dysfunction, which, to massively oversimplify it, more or less means the profound inability to get yourself to do things that you know you’re supposed to be perfectly able to do. That interest-based nervous system does not do well with motivating us to do tasks that are objectively important but aren’t interesting or fun to actually carry out, resulting in a mental block that can appear to the outside observer like wilful laziness, even though it really, really isn’t.

This appears to be one part of ADHD that Kaito manages to avoid having to deal with. (He may superficially seem “lazy” during training, but that has nothing to do with his brain and everything to do with his body and the fact that he’s sick and doesn’t want anyone to know.) But I think that’s mostly because none of the reasons that ADHD causes executive dysfunction actually apply in the killing game.

One of the few things other than interest that motivates an ADHD brain is urgency – suddenly they can do that boring essay they’ve been putting off when the deadline is tonight, showing remarkable speed and focus in a fit of nervous anxiety over the potential consequences of turning it in late. And there’s plenty of literal do-or-die urgency to motivate Kaito during the killing game, so there’s no way he’d ever not be motivated to do what he feels he needs to do to help everyone there. Plus, the things he’s trying to do involve helping people, something he inherently finds interesting, so he’d be motivated for those reasons anyway even if it wasn’t quite so life-threateningly vital that he does so.

(Kaito is a bit flakier and liable to miss important details during the investigations and trials, mind you. This might be because, while the urgency of “if we don’t solve the case we die” is looming over him, the actual details of the case aren’t something that instinctively feels urgent or that he inherently finds interesting, so it’s harder for him to pay proper attention and take it all in even when he’s trying to. Kaito has plenty of intelligence in a lot of ways, but his brain is evidently not wired for investigations and deductions like Shuichi’s is – he’s perfectly capable of following Shuichi’s logic and understanding it, but not of figuring any of that stuff out himself in the first place. This could partly be down to Kaito having ADHD and just not being interested enough in these particular kinds of mental exercises to be able to get his brain to focus on them as much as he’d need to in order to solve them.)

I also don’t think executive dysfunction would have got in Kaito’s way much during his regular life before the killing game. (You know, if he’d actually had one, but let’s pretend for now that he did.) Motivation issues can be helped a lot by an externally-imposed structure telling you what you need to do and when, which is why a lot of ADHD people don’t even notice any problems while they’re in a school system and only fall apart once they’re adults and are suddenly expected to structure their own life. Kaito’s astronaut training would definitely give him plenty of structure to work from so that he always knew what he needed to do and never had this issue. It’s also really challenging, which is another thing that helps keep ADHD people interested and motivated. And while the actual end goal of getting to space is far-off enough that it wouldn’t be able to work as a direct motivator to an ADHD brain (we are bad at things with delayed gratification), everything Kaito’s learning would still be related to space and communication and teamwork, so he’d be interested in learning all of it simply for its own sake.

Emotional hyperarousal

Another big defining feature of ADHD that isn’t nearly as well-known as it ought to be is that it amplifies emotions to a far greater intensity than those of neurotypical people. ADHDers’ feelings and reactions are naturally bigger and louder and just more than most people’s – which sounds a lot like Kaito, doesn’t it? He’s always larger than life, energetic and passionate about everything, not just his specific hyperfixations. Look at how excited he gets about just seeing snow! And he has so much enthusiasm for so much else, too – as he puts it: “there’s nothing unnecessary in this world!” When Kaito feels things, he feels them full-throttle, with no half-measures, which is just how Kaito would always want things to be!

…But, whether he likes it or not, that also applies to the painful feelings just as much as the good ones.

Emotional dysregulation

Kaito can often be very reactionary and get unnecessarily riled up over minor things that don’t really warrant such a dramatic response. If you think about it, this isn’t really something he’d want to do, because he’s always trying to stay positive and keep people on his side. So apparently it’s something he simply can’t help, as if his brain is just wired to make him more liable to do that.

If even minor slights can cause an overreaction like that from an ADHD brain, then imagine how much worse it is when the stimulus is something genuinely worth being upset over. That already-painful emotion gets amplified to even greater levels, to the point that it can be almost unbearable. People with ADHD can often have a more difficult time dealing with things, not necessarily because they’re emotionally weaker, but because they simply feel things harder than most other people do.

Kaito goes through a lot of emotional pain throughout the story – and he’s really pretty bad at dealing with it all. He basically has only two not-very-healthy methods for doing so. One is to try to ignore it entirely by focusing on something more positive, which on its own could be put down to his desire to come across as an invincible hero who can inspire people. So this particular unhealthy tactic doesn’t necessarily mean that he wouldn’t be able to properly deal with these emotions if he actually stopped being an idiot and tried to.

However, Kaito’s second unhealthy coping mechanism is to turn the pain into anger – sometimes to the point of lashing out in ways he doesn’t mean to. Punching Shuichi at the end of the first trial is very much caused by Kaito being unable to contain his pain over Kaede’s death rather than any controlled attempt to push Shuichi forward, since he regrets it and apologises for it the next morning. And then the agonising truth that Gonta killed someone is even harder for Kaito to bear, leading to him lashing out at Shuichi again in what was very much desperate pain-fuelled anger with no rational basis for it. Unlike with simply hiding his pain, lashing out like this is not something Kaito would ever want to do; it’s not exactly very heroic of him, after all. So this suggests that there’s more to Kaito’s bad coping mechanisms than just him trying to appear strong and not worry people – that sometimes the pain gets so unbearably intense that ignoring it isn’t possible and he just can’t deal with it and loses control of himself.

Uncontrollable bouts of rage can be a common problem that comes with ADHD because of the amplified emotions and difficulty properly regulating them – and it’s definitely a problem Kaito suffers from, too. That part of Kaito that lets him get so wonderfully passionate in helping everyone around him might well be exactly the same part of him that simply cannot handle it when he realises Gonta murdered someone and leads to him lashing out at his best friend.

Moping (…not a technical term)

…Okay, I just said Kaito has only two unhealthy coping mechanisms for painful emotions, but maybe there’s also kind of a third: unconstructively moping about it. This doesn’t sound like Kaito at all – he frequently gives others advice about not doing exactly that – but he can actually be seen falling into doing so a couple of times if you look closely.

In chapter 2, when Ryoma’s behaviour bothers him for all the wrong reasons and he has no intent of actually doing something about it, Kaito really should be just trying not to think about it at all and focusing on something more constructive like helping Shuichi. However, the places he hangs out in for his chapter 2 FTEs and his invitation dialogues indicate that he spends a whole three FTE slots just brooding unhelpfully about the state Ryoma’s in. This is definitely not something he wants to be doing, since he hastily changes the subject if Shuichi hangs out with him.

And in case 4’s investigation, after Shuichi’s cell phone experiment makes Kaito feel useless and unneeded (he thought Shuichi needed his help! – but, no, turns out he actually really didn’t), the pain of that feeling noticeably lingers with him for most of the rest of the investigation. He’s in enough of a bad mood about it afterwards that Maki notices it through his less-expressive virtual avatar, and he doesn’t even come with her to call Shuichi back from the rooftop and just logs out on his own in a sulk. Then he also ends up explicitly unaware in the trial of some of the information Monotaro shared with the whole group once they’d logged out, meaning he was apparently still too wrapped up in feeling useless to be paying proper attention.

(And these are the two examples of Kaito doing this that are noticeable thanks to subtle clues in his behaviour – but since Kaito would obviously never draw attention to it, maybe he actually does this a lot more than those two times and we just can’t normally see it.)

See, another thing about emotional dysregulation – plus the difficulty in controlling the focus of your attention that comes with ADHD – is that it can be hard to stop yourself from thinking endlessly about painful things, even when you very much don’t want to be thinking about them. I once saw a tumblr post describing ADHD as Chronic Cannot Leave It Alone Disorder, and I can confirm that, yes, this is very frustratingly accurate, for the bad things as well as the good. It’s possible that Kaito’s advice about not moping when you could be doing something to make a difference might have originated for himself, to try and mitigate his brain’s tendency to do this. But while I imagine this helped quite a bit in letting him control his thoughts and stay focused on the positives, it appears that, despite his best efforts, it still doesn’t always work.

Impulsiveness

The Primarily-Hyperactive subtype of ADHD (aka the one that’s definitely the subtype Kaito has, for obvious reasons) is sometimes called Hyperactive-Impulsive type, because impulsiveness tends to be a big part of it, too. I think this is kind of a combination of emotional hyperarousal and inability to control attention – the impulse to Do A Thing gets amplified to the point that it floods the entire brain, and it becomes nigh-impossible to ignore it and consider the potential negative consequences before acting on it. It’s like that Chronic Cannot Leave It Alone Disorder gets concentrated into a single instant of frequently-terrible decision-making.

It’s no secret that Kaito is impulsively reckless – and if you think about it, it’s to an extent that’s honestly kind of pathological. Cheating his way into the astronaut exam early, for example, could very well have permanently ruined his chances of ever being allowed in and making it to space. He should never have considered that a risk worth taking. So apparently he just wasn’t properly considering the risk at all – not even for the most important decision of his life.

A lot of the time, these kinds of bad decisions can be fuelled by those amplified painful emotions that get turned into anger like I talked about before. The stress of the killing game causes Kaito to very nearly get himself killed on two occasions early in chapter 1, almost lashing out in a way that would have broken school regulations. Kaito is perfectly aware of the consequences for doing that – but in the heat of the moment, it just doesn’t matter to him. His overwhelming desire to express his pain-fuelled rage simply blocks out everything else from his mind. A similar thing happens in chapter 5 when Kaito’s attempt to punch Kokichi after the supposed mastermind reveal only results in him getting knocked out and captured by the Exisals that were very obviously there and under Kokichi’s control. It’s summed up pretty well by the fact that Kokichi outright tells Kaito that punching him won’t fix any of the things he’s angry about, and Kaito’s response is, “Even if that is the case… I can’t get over it if I don’t punch you!” To Kaito, in these moments, it’s never about the consequences; it’s about needing to let out his too-strong emotions right now and to hell with everything else, even if that “everything else” literally might include his life.

Then there’s everything that happens with Kaito at the casino. The consequences for him here aren’t exactly dire, since all he loses out on is the chance to buy a prize, but still – that uncontrollable fixation on the anticipated thrill of winning and the inability to consider the really-very-high possibility that he’ll lose is exactly the type of reckless thrill-seeking that people with this type of ADHD often have.

In fact, the bonus scene at the casino is literally titled “Kaito’s Gambling Problem” – and as you might imagine, impulsive-type ADHDers are at a higher risk of developing harmful addictions to things such as gambling. While this isn’t an actual gambling problem here because no real money is involved and it does seem that he never gets tempted by the casino again after the second time, the scene’s title apparently wants us to consider that Kaito has the potential to develop a legitimate gambling problem should he ever get old enough to legally gamble in the real world. Which is a weirdly specific thing for the writers to make a point of when it has no bearing on the plot… so it makes me wonder if they could have actually been trying to tell us something here.

This kind of impulsiveness can also cause people to blurt out their thoughts without thinking about the consequences, potentially resulting in upsetting someone or embarrassing themselves. At first glance, considering that he has a lot of thoughts he’s determined to hide from the surface, Kaito doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem with this kind of impulsiveness. If he did, you’d think he’d find himself muttering stuff like “I feel like crap”, or “I hate this place” all the time and then having to hastily paper over it and insist that no that’s definitely not how he’s really feeling at all. So apparently, he’s fairly good at thinking before he speaks when it matters to him?

Except, when he’s in the Virtual World, Kaito makes multiple unthinking comments to the effect of “I like this avatar body”, which he has to awkwardly brush off when Shuichi questions him, since it rather hints that something’s up with his real body. He’s suddenly really bad at this, even though he was pretty good at it the rest of the time.

So maybe what’s going on is this: in an effort to stay positive at all times because he’s Kaito, Kaito trained himself to have a constant, unshakeable mental filter that prevents himself from impulsively blurting out how he’s feeling if it’s something negative. However, he can’t stop himself from still randomly blurting out whatever positive things are on his mind. This usually isn’t a problem, but it can sometimes include things – it feels so great to not be dying for once! – that he really doesn’t want to be voicing either, if he only gave it a moment more thought.

Rejection sensitive dysphoria

Often shortened to RSD, rejection sensitive dysphoria is a specific and especially nasty kind of emotional hyperarousal / dysregulation that almost all ADHDers suffer from. (At least, I feel like it should probably be classified as a subtype of that, though I’m not sure if that’s the official take, so don’t quote me on this.) The ADHD researcher who coined the term defines it as: “extreme emotional pain triggered by the perception – not necessarily the reality – that a person has been rejected or criticised by important people in their life. It may also be triggered by a sense of falling short and failing to meet their own high standards or others’ expectations.” That second sentence is important and frequently overlooked, because it indicates that, despite the name, this isn’t only about perceived rejection by others; it can also be about an entirely personal sense of failure.

I first read about this concept while I happened to be hyperfixating on Kaito’s mindset specifically in early chapter 5, aka that time he avoids Shuichi out of shame over feeling like he failed him in the previous trial, due to his own unreasonably high standards for being a “hero”. (If you didn’t realise that this is what’s going on with Kaito in early chapter 5, go read this other post of mine and get caught up, because you’re going to need to be for the rest of this section.) And, naturally, though I was supposed to be reading that article about RSD to help me figure out if I had ADHD, my brain made some connections. That was the moment I began to have this headcanon; everything else in this post blossomed from that as I thought about it more and realised a lot of other things about Kaito also fit this incredibly well.

The null hypothesis

So, let’s consider early chapter 5. In fact, let’s assume for a moment that Kaito doesn’t have ADHD and his emotions function like a regular person’s. He would still, of course, feel like he’s utterly failed Shuichi by showing himself to be weaker than him and doing the opposite of supporting him during trial 4. That part’s not specifically based in anything ADHD and is just a product of Kaito’s psychological issues about heroes, which I’ve already talked about plenty in that post I just linked. (I don’t want anyone to think that my ADHD headcanon is getting in the way of or diminishing any of that; this is just another layer on top of it.)

Kaito really wants to make things right and apologise for his mistakes in the trial (and for his really-not-actually-mistakes too, for that matter). He really wants to fix the rift between him and Shuichi and not leave the two of them painfully torn apart like this. He knows the responsibility to do so is on him and not Shuichi. But… he doesn’t do it. Why not?

The only possible reason would be that he’s just being a coward and running away from the guilt and shame he’s feeling rather than facing up to it. Except… Kaito’s not a coward. He may arguably seem like one in some ways given how he refuses to acknowledge his weaknesses to his sidekicks – but that’s not to protect himself and his own emotions; it’s because he’s idiotically convinced that it’s better for them that way. Here, now that he believes he’s already failed Shuichi as badly as he ever could, he should feel like he has nothing more to lose on that front (and Shuichi never even needed him anyway, right?), so there should be no harm in owning up to it and at least apologising for what he’s done wrong.

Granted, Kaito is busy trying to make up for his failure through his totally-great escape plan – but that’s still no reason why he can’t also apologise first and then keep trying to make up for things with the plan anyway. And it’s not at all like it was in the trial itself, when he was too wound-up in the heat of the moment to be thinking clearly. He’s had plenty of time to process what happened and regain control of himself and become consciously aware of what he knows is the right thing to do here.

The guilt and shame Kaito would be feeling from his belief that he’s failed Shuichi would still hurt pretty bad, sure – but I don’t think, if it really is a proportionate emotional response to what he feels like he’s done, that it’d be something he couldn’t face up to. He’s incredibly resilient and knows that sometimes you’ve just gotta face painful things head-on, and he should be more than willing to do so for the sake of making things at least slightly better between him and Shuichi.

So, I argue this: Kaito avoiding Shuichi the way he does in early chapter 5 doesn’t quite make sense unless he has ADHD. (Or perhaps some other neurological disorder that would have a similar effect on his emotions, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to be sure what other possibilities could fit.)

Too much pain

I can confirm from experience: RSD freaking sucks. Any feeling of “I should be able to do this, but I messed it up”, or any seemingly innocuous comment from someone you care about where they either point out a mistake you made or that could possibly be interpreted to mean they don’t really care about you that much – these things can hurt like hell, so much more than they have any right to. It’s as if that insignificant twinge of disappointment that most people would feel just gets multiplied by like a thousand until it practically feels like you’ve been stabbed in the chest. And I should note: the rejection version tends to be triggered by people important to you, but I find it’s especially bad if it’s someone I not only care about but also look up to. You know, like Kaito very definitely does to Shuichi.

Case 4 has plenty of things that would trigger RSD for Kaito before even getting into the worst parts of the trial. That cell phone incident in the investigation I mentioned earlier, where Kaito thought Shuichi needed his help for a second and then ended up feeling like he really never did at all? And all the times Shuichi shoots down one of Kaito’s arguments in the trial and tells him he’s wrong (which happens seven times, by the way)? Every single one of those seemingly-minor moments would have hurt Kaito not just a little, but one hell of a lot. It’s honestly really impressive and a testament to Kaito’s resilience that he managed to keep himself together and show barely any signs of how he was feeling for as long as he did.

It’s also very relevant that RSD is known to potentially trigger an externalised response of instantaneous rage, exactly like the outbursts of anger I mentioned in the previous section. I’ve already talked plenty elsewhere about how a lot of the pain that’s causing Kaito to lash out in trial 4 isn’t just over Gonta’s guilt but is also over how he’s being made to feel like a horribly inferior failure compared to Shuichi – and, yep, that’s still a perfect match to Kaito having ADHD.

By the end of the trial, Kaito’s issues and irrationalities have rendered him convinced that he’s utterly failed to be the hero he’s supposed to be, and that Shuichi obviously doesn’t need him or care about him any more (if he ever even did in the first place). That’s giving Kaito plenty of genuine conscious reason to be hurting pretty damn hard to begin with, before his ADHD brain-wiring even sinks its claws into it. Now try to imagine that pain getting disproportionately multiplied by like a thousand – fucking ouch, and then some. Nobody, not even someone as brave and resilient as Kaito, should ever be expected to be able to face up to that, to actively make it even worse by talking about it and bringing those feelings to the forefront, especially not when doing so would just be showing even more weakness to the person it hurts so much to show weakness to. I don’t believe it’d be fair to call anyone a coward for that.

Kaito’s not a coward; he avoids Shuichi in early chapter 5 because he is genuinely in too much pain to bear. The only way he can deal with it at all (now that he’s not in the heat of trial 4 and is very determined to at least not make things even worse by lashing out in anger again) is by simply trying to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. If he manages to prove himself as a hero, maybe it’ll stop hurting quite as much and he’ll be able to face up to it, but until then, avoiding the pain is all he can do.

(Obligatory Harmonious Heart mention)

Since I relish the opportunity to bring this scene up whenever I can, I might as well add that Kaito’s Harmonious Heart event is another instance in which he’d be feeling some pretty rough RSD – at least, in every outcome except the best one in which Shuichi reassures him that they’re friends and it’s okay to open up to your friend. It’d be especially bad in the worst outcome where Kaito realises Shuichi has seen his “weakness” and feels like he’s failed him. Probably not quite as bad as in canon, but still, ouch.

In fact, an interesting thing about that worst outcome is that Kaito specifically says he feels “so embarrassed”, which, when you think about it, doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing anyone would expect Kaito to ever describe himself as feeling, even at a time like this. However, I know from my own experience that “embarrassment” is in fact something that it’s easy to mistake RSD for when you don’t know what it is – just an embarrassment that’s somehow agonisingly painful, because that’s totally how embarrassment usually works for most people, right. So, A, this fits perfectly yet again, and B, since you’d usually not think to have Kaito ever use that word… it makes me wonder if the writer for this scene knew.

Coping methods (and why Kaito doesn’t have them)

Of course, it’s not like there aren’t methods to try to combat and mitigate the incredible pain that RSD can bring. One that I’ve found works really well (thanks to Kaito himself!) is exercising. It really helps to burn off that excessive emotional energy – and not necessarily just RSD, but any of the disproportionately painful emotions ADHD brings – by translating it into physical energy. “Let your sweat wash away all your sadness, fear, worry and hardships; just start moving your body and your pain will become memories before you know it,” actually sums up how this feels pretty well! It’s quite possible that this advice – heck, maybe his entire exercise-to-help-the-mind thing in general – is something else that Kaito first came up with for himself, after he found that it helped him calm down and feel better whenever he’d get too upset about something.

…So it’s really rather cruel that Kaito’s worsening illness also happens to lock him out of one of his only genuinely-healthy coping mechanisms for what he’s going through emotionally in chapters 4 and 5, isn’t it.

Another thing that’s really helped me in dealing with my own RSD is simply understanding it. When you know that it’s a disproportionate emotional response, you can remind yourself that things aren’t truly as bad as the pain is making them feel like they are, which makes it easier to take steps to stop it hurting, such as talking to the friend who unintentionally triggered it and having them reassure you that of course they care about you. Without that understanding of it, it’s all too easy to think, “if it hurts this much, I must deserve to be hurting this much,” which, yeah, that’s a bad path to go down.

One pretty important part of my headcanon that Kaito has ADHD, then, is that he definitely has no idea he has it. If he’d been diagnosed with it at some point in his life, he’d understand these problems of his better. Even if the doctors never told him all these things I’ve been mentioning here about how ADHD actually works (which is way too disappointingly common, so I gather), Kaito would have researched this stuff himself at some point, in order to better understand himself and know his limits so that he can work around them to be the best person he can be. He wouldn’t want to let anything get in the way of him helping others as much as he can and achieving his dream of going to space, not even the idiosyncrasies of his own brain. And, heck, he’d probably find it interesting if only he had a reason to look into it in the first place! Many ADHDers hyperfixate on ADHD, and Kaito definitely seems like someone who would have if he’d known.

So, if Kaito was aware of his ADHD, he’d be able to recognise what he’s going through in early chapter 5 as RSD and handle it better. He’d know that, no matter how much it hurts, things aren’t actually quite as bad as it feels like, and that apologising to Shuichi sooner rather than later is almost certainly the best way forward even if the prospect of doing so seems terrifying as all hell. For that matter, if Kaito knew about his ADHD and what it really involved, he’d almost certainly have trained himself to be able to deal with a lot of his more troublesome symptoms better than he ever does in canon.

Friendship difficulties

Because of their differently-wired brains, ADHDers can often struggle to connect with the rest of the world that doesn’t think the same way as them. And here’s a fun subtle thing about Kaito that ought to get talked about more: he’s not actually very skilled or experienced at making friends. Having sidekicks that he can inspire and support, and being a general encouraging influence on a wider group of people to keep them working together – sure, that stuff comes naturally to him. But regular, everyday friendship? Not so much.

This isn’t that easy to spot, because most of the time we see Kaito, he’s deliberately focusing on motivating people, which he’s great at. But there are a few instances here and there where Kaito interacts with people in a not-specifically-motivational way: his attempts to befriend Kaede (who doesn’t need his support), his earlier FTEs with Shuichi (which should be happening before training starts), and the conversation with Shuichi and Maki in chapter 4’s second training scene (before Maki begins talking about her past).

In all of these, Kaito turns out to actually be a huge awkward goof who doesn’t seem to have the first clue how to do regular interpersonal interactions. And basically everything about him being this way can potentially be explained by ADHD.

Too many thoughts

It’s never quiet and organised in an ADHD brain; whenever we’re not hyperfocusing on one specific thing, our minds always have like five different thoughts rattling around in them at once. So, consider the conversation with Shuichi and Maki, which Kaito was attempting to treat like a Regular Conversation (rather than the chance to help Maki open up that it definitely actually was in his head). Perhaps, in his efforts to do small talk, not one but several different possible small talk questions popped into his head at once and clamoured for his attention, such that a couple of them – “what blood type are you?” and “what [something] do you like?” – got accidentally merged together when he opened his mouth to speak. That plus his impulsive lack-of-filter meant that out came “What blood type do you like?” and Kaito sounding like a doofus.

(When Maki points out that this is a strange question, Kaito awkwardly laughs it off. It almost seems like he’s used to accidentally saying things people consider weird during his attempts at normal conversation and has learned to try and act like it’s nothing so he doesn’t push anyone away.)

This disorganisation in ADHD minds also tends to make them get too caught up on unnecessary details they find interesting and wander off down random mental tangents rather than whatever they’re supposed to be talking or thinking about. I once saw a tumblr post that said ADHDers are likely to tell “stories that start sooner than they need to and end somewhere other than the point” – and this happens to be a literally perfect description of the story Kaito tells Shuichi in his second and third FTEs. He was supposed to be telling Shuichi how he became interested in space. He began by talking about finding a treasure map and conquering the seas, and he finished with how he was busy conquering the land when his summer vacation ended. At no point did he mention space; he’d got so wrapped up in the story itself that he’d completely forgotten that was meant to be the point.

Kaito also has a bit of a tendency to make strange statements that appear to make perfect sense to him even though they kind of don’t to anybody else. He wants to learn to play the piano for when he goes to space? Well, of course; he might meet an alien! You can’t ever know how malicious other people’s secrets are? Sure, but that’s why you just gotta believe in… yourself! These really do make perfect sense in Kaito’s head (the first is about communication; the second is about people-reading skills). But it seems, perhaps, that his overly-active mind made connections too fast and jumped several tracks at once, to the point that he didn’t realise he was skipping a few steps of his explanation and that it wouldn’t make so much sense to the people listening. Which is also a thing that ADHD people are liable to do.

Too loud and excitable

A less immediately obvious thing that’s strange about Kaito’s behaviour in the chapter 4 training chat is that, when Shuichi essentially just straight-up asks Maki to start talking about her issues, Kaito admonishes him for being too direct and claims he can’t just do that. This seems odd coming from Kaito, who’s usually nothing but direct in his approaches to encouraging people, and who definitely also intended to prompt Maki into talking about her issues here.

But, apparently because he’s trying to present this as a Regular Normal Friend Conversation, Kaito didn’t think he was meant to be so direct in this context. Which suggests he’s learned through experience that his usual kind of directness that works great for encouragement apparently just kind of puts people off when it’s used in a regular conversation. So instead, he was trying to work his way towards hopefully maybe getting Maki to open up through awkward small talk that he must know he’s terrible at – no wonder he was miffed when Shuichi casually went and committed the exact social “faux-pas” he’d been trying to avoid, with complete confidence that it’d actually be fine, and it turned out it was. (Whoops, there goes Shuichi effortlessly being better than him at everything Kaito finds difficult, like always.)

Nonetheless, Kaito probably has good reason to be worried about coming across as too direct (outside of sidekick contexts, where that’s just the best way to get through to someone and help). Because, when he’s not actively trying to avoid it, he does have a tendency to get a bit carried away with things and put people off as a result. Remember the time he asked Kaede for a hug? There’s absolutely no reason to assume this was romantic or sexual in nature, because it already makes more than enough sense to think that Kaito was just so excited at meeting someone so similar to him and thought she was Super Cool and just really wanted to be her friend!!! So he impulsively expressed that sentiment in a rather-too-forward way that he was too caught up in his excitement to realise was going to come across as rather inappropriate.

Not that being too overly excitable and direct about things necessarily has to lead to behaviour that’s outright inappropriate in order to cause problems. (Though please never forget that Kaito asked for the hug and respected Kaede’s boundaries when she said no.) Even if he’s not doing anything wrong, Kaito being his usual larger-than-life self all the time might just come across as a bit Much and be kind of weird and off-putting for a lot of people. It’s that emotional hyperarousal again, which I mostly talked about the negative side of in the earlier section – but the positive side of it, amplifying the good emotions to make someone more enthusiastic and passionate, can still (completely undeservedly) be a negative thing in a social context with others who just aren’t wired the same way.

In Kaito’s second FTE, wrapped up among his ridiculous overblown childish fiction, he appears to potentially be talking about an actual playmate he had at the time who joined in his game of pretending to be a sea captain. Then they had a fight and Kaito never saw him again – and he presents that like it was just part of his game, too, but this can likely be taken to mean that they had a falling out that never got resolved and stopped being friends. If so, I can’t help but assume that this was probably because tiny Kaito was a little bit too boisterous and excessive in his playing – while still not necessarily doing anything wrong – that it overwhelmed this other kid to the point that he didn’t really want to join in any more.

There’s also one bit of FTE invitation dialogue where Kaito claims he’s about to teach Kaede how to have peace of mind… and then he tells stories that make her question his definition of that. Which makes a lot of sense considering that ADHD minds, particularly hyperactive-type ones, are never relaxed for even a moment. Kaito doesn’t know how not to be energetic and over-the-top even when the people he’s with just want to wind down and relax, which also wouldn’t really do him any favours in terms of making friends.

But none of that is Kaito’s fault; he’s not trying to be selfish or drive these people away. It’s simply the way his mind is, always going full-throttle when most other people’s usually aren’t. He just gets so excited about so many things and has a hard time toning that down. Besides, why would Kaito even want to tone it down and be boringly down-to-earth when his mind could be up in space instead!? That’s much better! …except that most other people don’t see it that way.

Too much infodumping

In the training chat, after embarrassing himself with a bungled small talk question and being shown up by Shuichi making it look like it’s actually somehow not a problem to be too direct after all, Kaito attempts to bring things back around to small talk with the, uh, “safe” option of asking Maki what her favourite spaceship is. Which isn’t really small talk at all, of course – but then, actual small talk is hard for ADHD people, because it’s not interesting enough to care about paying proper attention to. They’d much rather be acting on that constant desire to talk about something they’re interested in, such as one of their hyperfixations, which is not always the best way to connect with others who don’t happen to be interested in the same thing.

(Fortunately, since another of his hyperfixations is Maki and her issues, Kaito is perfectly happy to listen once she starts talking about her past, and the conversation shifts back to a comfortable hero-and-sidekick situation again rather than an awkward and confusing how-do-I-friends???)

There’s another of those FTE invitation dialogues in chapter 1 where Kaito tells Kaede he’s a good listener… and then apparently Kaede spends the entire time listening to him instead. Except, obviously Kaito really is a good listener when it’s in his hero-and-sidekick context and he’s helping someone with their problems, because he’s invested in supporting them and so it’d be easy for him to pay attention. But perhaps, when it’s in a regular friendship context and the person he’s talking to doesn’t need his help (like Kaede doesn’t), Kaito’s not quite so good at listening because he’s not necessarily as interested in what they have to say. So he might be liable to just impulsively act on the desire to talk about the things he wants to (such as SPACE; there is always time for space) and then get so focused on it that he overlooks the other person’s feelings and genuinely doesn’t realise he’s coming across as kind of brash and self-absorbed.

Kaito’s second and third FTEs with Shuichi are an even better illustration of this. Upon Shuichi choosing to hang out with him for a second time, Kaito apparently realises Shuichi is interested enough in him to possibly want to be his friend. So he responds to this by… launching into a huge ridiculous story about his (completely make-believe) heroic adventures as a kid. This kind of one-sided conversation and bizarre topic choice is not, in fact, a great way to make friends with someone, but Kaito doesn’t seem to realise this. He finds his story so cool and exciting that he impulsively assumes Shuichi would too and jumps into it without actually confirming whether Shuichi wants to hear it or not. And, honestly, it seems like Shuichi doesn’t, at least not particularly, and is only listening out of politeness and an inability to get a word in edgeways. His less-than-enthusiastic response to Kaito’s story suggests that these FTEs are canonically meant to happen before training begins and Shuichi comes to properly consider Kaito a friend – and therefore that Kaito’s not really doing the best job here of making Shuichi begin to consider him a friend.

Still himself despite it all!

All of these potentially-ADHD-fuelled idiosyncrasies of Kaito’s make it a lot harder for him to make friends in the normal way – and he seems to be somewhat aware of this. Some of the things from the chapter 4 chat hint that he’s slightly insecure and afraid he’s going to put Shuichi and Maki off by being so dorkily himself. There’s also a little more of this in the Salmon Team bonus mode, in which friendship is the entire point, and yet a few lines when he’s inviting Shuichi to hang out hint that Kaito isn’t completely convinced that Shuichi would want to hang out with him as a friend rather than as a sidekick who needs his advice and support. If he was more used to having friends, he probably wouldn’t still be so insecure about this – so this honestly kind of suggests that Shuichi and Maki could be the first real friends Kaito’s ever managed to make.

Because of these kinds of issues in connecting with people, a lot of ADHD kids grow up unconsciously learning to suppress their true selves, hiding their boundless enthusiasm and unusual interests to seem more “normal” so that they can fit in. I know this because I was one such kid, and I’m still struggling to unlearn this as an adult. So I have huge admiration for Kaito having managed to not do this, refusing to let anything stop him from being himself at all times. His convictions about staying true to himself are even more impressive when you realise that he would have felt so pressured to break them and pretend to be someone he’s not in order to more easily make friends.

As strong-willed as Kaito is, I doubt he’d have been able to do this as a kid without help. His parents and grandparents must have been really, really good in validating his passion and energy and never making him feel ashamed for being the way he is, assuring him that if other kids can’t see how great he is then that’s their problem and not because he’s doing anything wrong. He wants to go to space more than anything else in the world? Awesome; he should chase that dream with everything he has and not care how ridiculous and childish and impossible everyone else seems to think it is! Not all parents would do that.

After all, there are a lot of occasions in which Kaito does just brazenly present his larger-than-life self to someone in a clumsily overbearing attempt to make friends, without showing even the subtlest sign of being worried it might put them off. For that matter, Kaito is generally very willing to just throw himself into things he’s unfamiliar with and possibly end up failing spectacularly and making a fool of himself – something that’s likely to be pretty painful for him, given how RSD is. While some of this is probably down to his impulsiveness and not even considering that he might fail, I’m sure sometimes he’s got to be aware of it, and if so, that’s some impressive resilience and determination. People with ADHD can become unconsciously inclined to never try at anything out of a fear of that painful failure, but of course Kaito would refuse to let that happen to him – which is really quite admirable.

Interestingly, all of the times Kaito is subtly insecure about his social skills – the chapter 4 scene, the Salmon Team bits, and maybe that time with the former friend in his FTE if you assume that him wrapping it up in a fiction means he’s still uncomfortable about what happened – involve someone he’s already friends with.  After all, it’s probably easier for him to fearlessly dive in with someone new, because it’s less of a blow if he messes up in that context – not everyone’s going to click with him and that’s just how things go. But once Kaito’s already built a strong connection with someone, he becomes more afraid of messing up, because being rejected by someone important to him would be agonising. You might think that he ought to feel more comfortable around people he’s already friends with because he should trust them and know they’re not going anywhere no matter how much of a dork he is – but when RSD is a factor, it makes perfect sense for it to be the opposite.

Sidekicks can be friends, too!

Perhaps part of why Kaito is able to remain so confident in himself most of the time is because he nonetheless hasn’t grown up alone and lacking meaningful connections to other people. Despite his difficulty in making regular friends, he’s compensated for this by having sidekicks, which are a very different matter that his eccentricities conversely make him very good with. Being enthusiastic and energetic and over-the-top like Kaito can never not be is helpful when he’s being an inspiring hero, not weird or off-putting at all!

Still, while Kaito has a far easier time forging that initial connection with someone through the sidekick approach rather than the friend approach, that doesn’t make him worse at actually being someone’s friend (and not just their “hero”) once he’s got his foot in the door. If Kaito had told the story from his FTEs to Shuichi after they’d started training and properly bonded, Shuichi’s reaction would have been completely different: still probably exasperated, but in an affectionate kind of way, because he knows that’s just part of what makes Kaito who he is, and it’s actually pretty fun to be around. He has a lot of this sort of response to Kaito once they’re friends, and it’s adorable. It’s the same in the chapter 4 training chat – neither Maki nor Shuichi are at all put off by Kaito’s awkwardness, partly because they’re not exactly great at social skills themselves, but also because they know how much Kaito cares about them, and no amount of arbitrary social missteps could ever change that.

When someone becomes Kaito’s sidekick, meaning they’ve accepted his support and understand how much he wants to help them, they can see everything else about him that they might have found weird before in a new light. They learn that his eccentric behaviour isn’t him being deliberately rude or self-absorbed at all. It’s just genuinely how he is, and it’s part of how he can support them so well like he does, but that’s not all it’s good for. They come to appreciate Kaito not just for his incredible supportiveness, but for everything else about him, too. He’s not just their hero, but also their friend.

However… Kaito apparently can’t see that. Since he’s never been that good at forming regular friendships with people who don’t explicitly need him, he’s all too liable to assume that the people who do need him are only sticking around because of that, and no other reason. That co-dependency of Kaito’s I mentioned earlier, aka his rather unhealthy need to be needed? While the stressful context of the killing game definitely made it way worse throughout the story, it seems it was already slightly a thing in the first place – and if so, Kaito having ADHD could very well be the root cause.

Kaito is Good

Being realistic about how sadly uncommon well-represented neurodivergency is in fiction (and how misunderstood ADHD tends to be), I don’t know if I should try to assert that Kaito being ADHD was definitely the writers’ intent. However, almost every major facet of his character and personality fits with it so damn well that I want to think it’s at least possible that someone on the writing team could have had it in mind. Especially with the couple of bits I mentioned that seem like they could have been deliberately included by someone who Knows.

Still, even if it wasn’t intended, it’s amazing how good of a fit this is. Maybe it’s just that, in creating a character as intensely passionate as Kaito, the writers naturally wrote into him all the downsides of being that way as well, without even realising they were near-perfectly modelling the highs and lows of ADHD. After all, the human mind’s ability to simulate other human minds even when they’re not real is freaking magical. Kaito is such an incredibly well-written character with so much thought put into him whether or not he was meant to be as extremely ADHD-coded as he is.

I’ve always believed that Kaito is a fantastic example of how the best way to write realistic and interesting flaws into a character is to have them organically draw from traits that, in other situations, can be that character’s greatest strengths. And in my opinion, this is also kind of true about ADHD. When I figured out I had it and what it really meant, it was hugely validating for me, because I learned that almost everything I’d been struggling with was basically just the logically-inevitable downside of some of the things I’d always liked about myself, such as my ability to get so ridiculously analytical about stories I love like this. I wouldn’t trade those parts of myself away for anything – and I can’t imagine Kaito would, either.

I’ve seen a few posts and articles focusing on the bright side of having ADHD by listing some of the positive traits ADHDers often have because of it, and, delightfully, so many of them – fun to be around! compassionate! persistent! to name just a few – are things that Kaito has in spades. So, well, if ADHD can look so much like Kaito… then surely it can’t be all bad.

-----

(P.S.: High-five to anyone who headcanons Kaito as autistic! There’s a lot of overlap between that and ADHD. Many of the symptoms I’ve talked about here can also be symptoms of autism, and even with the non-overlapping bits, a lot of Kaito’s idiosyncrasies that I linked to ADHD could be interpreted slightly differently to link them to autism instead. I believe ADHD fits him somewhat better than autism does, but then I’m more knowledgeable about ADHD so my data is skewed, plus I’m pretty obviously biased since I’m personally invested in the idea of Kaito being like me. Taking a step back from my more specific headcanon here, though, there’s still every reason to assume that Kaito is at least some flavour of neurodivergent, and I think that’s pretty awesome.)

#danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers #kaito momota #character analysis #kaito's hero issues #ramble #adhd #adhd headcanons #creating that tag because i can already tell kaito won't be the only adhd headcanon i make #oh my god this ended up *longer* than the hero ramble how did this happen #and yes i will link to the hero ramble in every single other kaito ramble because it is always important #i also talked about myself in this more than i ever usually do on here so uh #personal?

[dyke-remy]

Live And Let Die, part 4

Part 1    Part 2    Part 3   Part 5   Part 6

Description: Agent 008 and Agent 009, professional spies for the MI6 with liscense to kill. Partners in both work and love. After an agent goes missing the partners have to once more go out into the field. (It’s a James Bond AU)

You don’t need to know anything about James Bond to be able to read this fic, trust me

Note: If anyone tags this as r/mr/m I will hunt them for sport

Words: 4853

6 years ago

Remus looked out of the car window. He felt like he wasn't supposed to be here. This was the wrong place. The wrong time. Maybe he should make the car turn around.

"You still here bro?"

A hand landed on Remus' shoulder making him jump in his seat. He looked over to the driver. To Roman.

His brother sent him a smile before looking back at the road "Seriously you good? You looked like you were going to mars"

"Just kinda zoning out" Remus replied.

"You took your meds right? I don't want you nearly getting us killed because you were too busy daydreaming about Beetlejuice again"

"He's the man of my dreams Ro-bro!!!.....and yes I have taken them"

"Re-Re I gotta get you a date once we get back. I can Not let Beetlejuice be your standard of men!"  Roman playfully poked his elbow into his ribs "Hey that new Q assistant has been staring at us even since they read our files. I'm sure all it'll take is asking them out and they'll fall head over heels for you"

"They would probably only be interested 'cause of dad" Remus muttered out while crossing his arms "It's always like that. Either that or 'cause of mom"

"At least It's definitely not because of your horribly ugly monster you call a mustache" Roman got a bonk on the head for that.

"Whatever. You go and get yet anotha fling once we get home why dont you. One day you're either gonna get cannibalised or get syphilis. Or both!!!"

Roman let out a gasp "I am far too clean and princely to get syphilis you dirty heathen!!!" He smacked his brother with one arm while driving with the other.

Remus smacked him back "No-oh. Syphilis and gonorre and some weird blue stuff!!"

The smacking got more intense and the prince's gasps and shrieks of defence even louder and nasalier with every sex joke. Until he finally stood on the brakes. The car stopped so suddenly Remus had to hold himself back from flying out the windshield.

"We're here" He simply stated.

Remus let out an overly extra breathe of relief "Finally! Thought my skin was gonna rot off my bones before we got here!"

Roman leaned back and took out his usual weapons from the box sitting in the backseat while continuing to talk.

"Remember: this is a serious mission! Not just some ol' dragon we gotta arrest. Army of fire breathing dragon witches levels of serious. No unnecessary fighting and absolutely no inspecting dead bodies!!"

"You know I can't promise that" Remus replied while stuffing the biggest handgun he'd been able to get his hands (heh) on into the holster stuck onto the side of his waist.

"I know far too frick fracking well"

"PLEase just say fuck!"

"No. Fuck you!!"

They got out of the car. Their feet sank down into the sand the moment they stepped off the gravel road. For dozens of miles around them there was nothing but them, sand and a few even sandier hills.

And of course the statue. That goshdarn statue.

Enfuel, a company with ties to both energy and oil distrubution, had recently bought this random piece of land in the middle of the desert. A statue was placed in the middle of it a year or so later. It looked similar to one of the old egyptic statues and when they looked up information about it all sites said it had been around for hundreds of years. Of course MI6 had satellite pictures to show otherwise.

MI6 had been keeping check on Enfuel for a while. An anonymous worker had been selling them information for months. Even without the leaked information the vast buying of land and spikes of Enfuel employees dying in 'accidents' was enough to rise suspicion.

The agents made their way towards the statue. Guns ready in their hands. No one was around. It was a large one. Over 20 feet wide and at least 15 feet high.

Roman hunched down in the shade from the statue and took out a mechanical gadget he'd gotten from Q. It was a scanner. He placed it on the ground and activated it.

"And now we wait"

"Time to rant and or infodump?" Remus asked.

"Yes but not from you. You got to infodump the last time. It is my time to rant to kill time on a mission!"

He rolled his eyes "Yeah sure go ahead"

His brother instantly went on a long rant about the local theater production he'd landed a role in. It was the first time he'd ever acted. Aside from exercising and his special interest (disney) the theater was the first time he'd ever had a real hobby. His (now ex) boyfriend had been the one to take him to audition after introducing him to (and accidentally making him instantly hyperfixate on) musicals.

"And I just can't wait to-"

He stopped midsentence when the machine made a sound. He was still happy stimming as he checked it.

"Holy zeus" He gasped out.

He showed it to Remus. The scanner had created a blueprint of everything within a 10 feet radius. It clearly showed that there was something built under the ground. There was also an entrance built into the statue.

Remus went over and clicked on a specific point on the statue like the blueprint showed. A keypad appeared. They sent a photo of it to Q. Within minutes he'd somehow been able to come up with the correct code.

He put in the code and a hidden door nearly obscured between two pillars opened up. The brother sent each other excited smiles before entering.

There was a short staircase that led down into a corridor. The walls looked like something they'd find in a mourge and the dim lights shone a cold blue. Roman buttoned up the shirt he had on that was supposed to look like the uniform many Enfuel employees wore.

"Sure doesn't look ancient" Remus muttered.

It was practically a maze of corridors and rooms. Everywhere that cold blue light was the same. None of the rooms they passed seemed to have any important information in them. Having a secret facility wasn't enough for an investigation! It was just aesthetic as fuck!

They aimleesly stumbled around for at least half an hour as they got to the parts the blueprints hadn't showed. They probably walked in circles a few times too. Roman was about to suggest they call up Q when he saw guards, armed guards, out of the corner of his eyes.

He threw out his arm to stop Remus and dragged him back to hide behind a wall. He peeked out and saw how the 2 guards were staying outside a door.

"Bingo" He whispered. He turned to his twin "Wherever there are guards are the important things"

"The juicy secrets!" Remus agreed.

The brothers got out from their hidingspot at the same time. They tried to look casual while walking up to the guards. Right when one of the guards moved to stop them, to ask who they were, Roman took out his gun and shot them in the knee.

Remus elbowed the other guard right between his ribs before pulling his arm around the guard's neck. It didn't take long before he let the guard collapse onto the ground after choking him to unconsciousness.

The other guard feeble sat on the ground with their hands pressed to the wound on their knee. Roman held his gun to their head "Give us the key to the room"

They didn't even hesitate to throw the key over to Remus. They looked up at Roman with pleading eyes. With one swift kick they too laid on the ground knocked out.

The brothers pushed the guards to a good hiding spot in silence. The door opened reveleaing a quite small room but it was filled with computers, databases and of course at least 10 people working on those computers.

All it took was Roman holding up his gun to one of them to make the others freeze in fear. It was very clear that they were just doing their job so Remus tried to go as nice on them as possible when he knocked them out.

"Remind me to request instant sleeping pills from Q" He said after the last one laid still on the ground.

"Noted" Roman replied while barricading the door so no one could get in.

Remus glared at the computer with the biggest screen. He tried to read what was on it but only got a headache and some scattered words. Roman gently pushed him aside.

"It's probably better if I try to find what these guys are up to and you stand guard. Please try to not let me get shot"

"I'll do my worst! Maybe I'll even shoot you myself!" Remus joked.

He looked through the room while hearing Roman mumbling to Q about decoding and taking down firewalls. It didn't take long to realize there was actually a second door in the room. He wasn't sure where it lead but decided to barricade it as well.

"You're still free on Saturday right?" Roman suddenly asked while waiting for Q to hack into the database for him.

Remus rolled his eyes "Nah dude I suddenly got loads of friends and we're all gonna go raid a cemetery and create a zombie army. Supa busy that day sorry"

"Ha Ha" He let out druly "Well the new mission impossible movie is coming out so I kinda thought we could go see it. Y'know cinema caturday like we used to do"

"Oh yeah using our free time away from our spy work to watch a spy movie. Real smart decision Ro-bro"

"It can some other movie! I just wanted to do something" Roman slumped back against the desk so he was leaning on it "I know I've been kinda busy like whenever we're not on missions with the whole theater work-"

"Kinda?!" Remus let out a scratchy laugh "Bro you've been going to that theater like you'll turn to dust if you're not there all the time"

Roman plucked at the green bead bracelet on his wrist "Well it's exciting! I never really thought I could wokr with anything that didn't involve fighting or smugling. It's...nice..getting to do something else. I can't wait until it's time for the premiere and I'll actually get to hear the audience"

"Let's just hope no villain decides to try and take over the world during your perfomance nights" Remus joked. Roman's expression went from excitement to worry "Ro-bro I was kidding. I'm sure if anything happens I can just go with 0012 or something- or I mean like I'll come see you of course I just- It'll be chill!"

There came a silence. There always came a silence after talking about the theater thing. Spending an entire childhood learning about jewel smuggling, self defense and the innerworks of crime made any kind of work that didn't involve any of those shocking enough to warrant silence. Especially after it was Roman's idea to start working at the MI6 as soon as they moved away from their mom and the floating palace at 18.

He'd wanted to be a hero. Remus had just wanted to stay close with his brother.

"But yeah I guess I'm free on Saturday if you wanna go see that movie or whatever" Remus muttered while glancing over to his brother "More surprised that you're not busy honestly"

"Oh I was! Some friends from the theater heard I would get back from 'work' soon and wanted to hang out and I still got that guy who wants to go on a date with me as soon as possible and some guys from the Q branch asked me to test some gadgets for them. But I made sure to clear time in case you said yes" Roman replied with a smile.

"That's....That's....Ro-bro you're a sappy dork you know that right?"

"Of course! That's part of my everlasting and undying charm!"

The conversation was forcibly stopped as Q announced that the code was cracked. Roman flapped his hands in excitement to see the movie, Remus flapped back. They both turned back to what they were doing.

The duke to his surprise noticed a small crack in the wall right next to the door. He couldn't stop his curiosity from taking the better of him and looking through.

On the other side was a big room. There was a long dinner table in the middle with excessive amounts of expensive food on it. There were crystal candelabras hanging from the ceiling. The walls were white just like the floor but there were old paintings decorating the walls.

Most importantly there were 4 people in it. 3 men who looked to be at least 40. All of them were wearing suits but one of them was sitting in a chair by the luxurious table in a glistening dark purple suit. The other two were standing by the table with briefcases gripped in their shaking hands. Remus could see the sweat from nervousness dripping down their neck all the way from where he stood.

Last and least was the fourth person. A young boy, he was at the most 9 years old, sat on another chair by the table. He was holding the hand of the older man. His eyes were hidden by his hair and he had a large hoodie on.

"-So even though there has been someone selling important information about my company you two are 100% certaint that neither of you have destroyed my trust?" The man clad in purple asked.

The two men quickly shook their head. The purple clad man, who happened to be the leader of the Enfuel company, shone up into a wide grin. It was too wide. Too eerie. Not happy. Just sinister.

"How wonderful! I knew I could trust you both!" The leader took out a gun and shot one of the men in the leg.

He fell down on the ground and writhed in pain. The young boy let out a scream and flinched away. The other man bolted for the closest door which instantly made Remus take out a knife and get ready to defend Roman. But before he could get anywhere the leader had pressed a button on his chair which made all doors lock.

"I heard that the MI6 were on to us because of you fools running your mouths" The leader said while standing up. Remus nearly chuckled at how right he was.

The shot man simply cried while the other got down on his knees and begged "Please please I'll do anything. I have a family. I have 2 kids. I can- please don't kill me"

"How funny, I have a kid too" The leader held out his hand "Son come here"

The young boy quickly ran over and took his dad's hand. He was already crying. When the gun was reloaded he turned his head to look away. It resulted in the leader grabbing onto his son's head and dragging in it so he was forced to look at the helpless men, soon to be corpses. Remus could hear the boy whimper from pain.

"Do I-I h-have to see ev-every time?" He cried out.

"Until you learn to stop crying over some insect's death, Yes. These people are traitors. They're beneath us because they have hurt us. You have to see what we do to people who hurt us"

A bullet went off. One of the men collapsed dead on the floor. The other desperately crawled away until he hit the wall. The young boy's crying turned into sobs.

"You should be used to it by now" His dad said in a calm tone.

The leader forced the gun into his son's shaking hands. He held onto his hands so he couldn't let go. He moved his hands for him, reloaded the gun for him, held the gun to the living man's forehead for him. The young boy's entire body was shaking from fear. He closed his eyes. Pretended like the cold metal wasn't in his hands. Pretended like he wasn't one move of his finger away from taking a life.

"Open your eyes son" The leader commanded "You have to see. See the fear in his eyes. That is the look of a dead man. We could ask anything of him"

"I-I want him t-to live. P-Please dad w-we can send-d him to the b-bad room instead"

"The bad rooms are for those who are of use to us. This man has nothing for us"

A hand landed on Remus' shoulder. He turned around and pointed the knife at the person's neck. Thankfully it was just Roman.

"The files are all here" Ro informed while holding up an USB drive. He had on a strained expression "It's sick. Q told you they made it so Enfuel was the only company avaible for like an entire part of Latvia right?"

"I wasn't listening but probably yeah"

"They're planning to make all electricy and fuel unaviable for those cities for months. And they're going to make it look like an accident so they won't even have to take accountability. They're planning to try and completely cut them off from the rest of the world"

"People are gonna die" Remus concluded.

"Bet"

"Why the fuck would someone even do that?"

Roman shrugged "Said nothing about that. At least we can stop it if we know it will happen. All we have to do is get out of here and get it to M"

Remus was about to nod but then he heard muffled sounds from the other room. He closed his hands into fists. There was a cold lump stuck in his throat.

"There's a kid here. Like 8? 9 maybe? Being made to hold a gun" He whispered.

"Mom teached us how to use pistols at 12" Roman replied with a shrug.

"She made us shoot at targets" Their mom is a very powerful lady so they had to know how to defend themself since so many people wanted to hurt them to get to their mom "This is-"

A gunshot went off. Gutwrenching screaming followed. It sounded like it came from the boy. Soon sobbing took over.

"Don't cry like that. You weren't even the one pulling the trigger" His dad snarled out.

The brothers at looked each other. They both knew that the mission was hundreds of times more important than one kid but....with that one look they both knew they had to do something.

"Okay new mission" Remus said "Protect the kid"

They searched the room and found an entrance to the vents in the roof. They climbed in and crawled as quietly as possible until they could see down into the other room. The leader had gone back to sitting by the table, he was drinking some wine. The son was still sitting by one of the corpses. His sobs was racking his whole body as he held onto the dead body. Quiet beggings to wake up could be heard.

The brothers took out their guns in anticipation. Remus slammed his foot down into the vent panel and jumped down onto the ground. He jumped back up on his feet and held the gun to the leader's head.

Roman was just as quick with getting down. He went over to the kid and hunched down in front of him, half to comfort him and half to be a human shield.

"It's okay now kid. We won't hurt you. We'll get you out of here. I promise" He whispered to him while sending him a warm smile.

He was full on hyperventilating "No. No. Please. Get out. I don't- dad will- I don't want to have to see anyone else die- I don't want to hurt anyone- please- NoNoNoNo"

"Shhh. No one will be hurt. Just focus on my breathing okay. In and out. Deep breathes. You'll be safe soon" Roman assured. He kept one hand on the young boy's shoulder and the other hand on his gun.

Remus held the gun as still as possible against the leader's forehead. The older man didn't look away even for a second. His cold blue eyes stared at him until it felt like he was digging into him. The agent tried to glance around for a clear exit. At best he saw another entrance to the vents close to the wall on the side of the room.

"I've buried people like you before" The leader let out in a dry emotionless tone. "Even if you do get anyway it won't do much. All of the evidence will be gone except for a meek little plan I can easily manipulate away in court. You're really just delaying the inevitable"

"Not letting people die isn't doing nothing" Remus snarled back.

A smile crept up on his face "Letting people die does just a little"

He pressed down on a hidden panel on his chair. All Remus could see was that it was some sort of controller before hearing a muffled shout. He spun around in time to see Roman sitting with his arms around the kid. Blood was seeping out of his shoulder.

By the press of a button a panel on the wall had turned around and a mechanic gun had become visible, useable too via the panel. The gun head moved again, readjusting it's line of sight.

Logically Remus should have moved his gun back towards the leader's head. Logically he should have shot his brains out. Logically he shouldn't have made a single sound. Logically he shouldn't have shown any ounce of care or emotion (weakness), it'd been drilled into them during training after all.

But Remus wasn't thinking logically. His brother was hurt. His brother was in danger. He had to protect him.

A guttural sound of terror left his throat. It sounded like something close to his brother's name. He wasn't fast enough. There was nothing he could. He watched as the bullet went into Roman's chest.

Remus didn't reach him. There was a hit to the back of his head. The hit was hard enough to make it feel like his brain split apart. He was already unconscious as he fell down on the ground. He was just close enough so the blood from his brother reached him.

--

The moment Remus awakened again his heart immediately began to beat fast enough so he could hear it. He wanted to yell out for his brother before he'd even had time to open his eyes.

The fear calmed won just a bit when he did look up and saw Roman, thank god he saw Roman, laying next to him. He didn't calm down completely because his brother was visibly hurt. Hurt badly.

There were swelling on his cheeks from soon to be bruises and his right eye had closed completely from a black eye. Blood had dried around the wound on his shoulder and the one on his chest was still bleeding. Thankfully it hadn't hit his heart but it was still heavily bleeding. The kid's hoodie had been pressed against the wound. His left leg from the knee down had been mangled and turned the wrong way.

Remus had rope tied around his wrists and ankles. They hadn't even bothered to tie Roman's ankles. Even with all the injuries his twin tried to send him a weak smile.

"don't speak too loudly" He whispered out. His breathing was uneven and raspy.

Normally Remus would have screeched in defiance. Now he glanced around the room while making his every move as quiet as possible.

The leader and his son were still in the room. The leader was polishing a knife. There were multiple knives and other gratuitous tools laid out across the table. Oh god he'd only kept them alive to make them suffer until death as much as possible.

When he turned back to Roman there were tears in his brother's eyes. His smile was strained.

"I was going to resign"

Roman let out a sob as his smile disappeared. It only left an expression filled with pain.

"I-I never really wanted t-this! I just- I didn't know what else I would be. Re I was planning to make this my last mission. I don't know if I want to be an actor. But fuck at least I-I want to be an actor ten times more than I want to be an agent"

Remus tried to move closer. He wanted to reach out and hold his brother. Comfort him. Tell him half the things he said didn't make sense.

"You- What-" He let out a nervous chuckle "Ro-bro what are you talking about?"

At first there was no reply. Just a choked back sob. Roman moved closer and stared at the ropes around Remus' wrists. Anything was better than looking at his face. He moved his hands to try and untangle the ropes.

"You have to hug mom for me. And tell her I love her. And hug Lucy a-and Macey and Amita-" Roman closed his eyes, tried to force back another wave of tears "-And Everyone on the island. All of them. And the people at the theater. A-And everyone in Q branch a-and Oh god Q. Please hug Q- Logan. Hug Logan for me. Please. And Patton and M even though he will hate it. Please. I wish I'd known. I just want to be able to say goodbye at least. I just-"

"Shut up you dork. We're getting out of here. I'll just carry you. What's some old weak boned guy and some kid gonna do against us"

Roman glanced up at him, just for a moment, before going back to the ropes.

"Remus I-"

He coughed. His entire body shook and writhed in pain. He ignored it and continued with the ropes. Blood was coming down his lips. He was coughing up blood.

"Remus-"

Roman met his eyes this time. He didn't have to say anything more. They both knew it. Even if one of them didn't want to accept it. It'd taken at least an hour to drive here. He wasn't going to make it unless he got medical help within the next minutes. He wasn't going to- He wasn't-

Roman wasn't going to make it.

"You can't- I- I'm sure- I can-" Remus stuttered out.

"You need to take the information and get back to M alive" He pulled the ropes away from Remus' wrists "There's a vent right above us. The bitchass dragon witch is too busy with torture devices to look at us. If you go now you can-"

"You will-"

"Remus I'm already dead! The kid isn't being saved either! He's stuck here! We failed! The least you can do is try to stop more death!"

"But you will-"

"Please I need you to survive" Roman pressed the USB drive into his hands. His hands were shaking "I-I'm trying to stay strong to make this easier for you b-but-" He let out a shakey sob "I just want to hug mom again. I want us to-to- I- I need you to survive. I need you to stay alive. Please. If I know you survive I can attempt to die in peace. I can't- I can't-" It continued into incoherent sobbing.

They couldn't hug each other, the leader would realize they were awake if they did. All they could do was press their hands together. They held onto each other's hands so tightly it hurt. Neither wanted to let go.

"....I love you...I wish- I don't- I just want you to- I love you" Remus choked out through tears.

Somehow Roman mustered a smile "I love you too" He wiped a tear away from his twin's cheek "I'm sorry. I wish I could stay with you. Please go. Please survive"

Remus tightened his grip on his hand for one last second. He wished he could drag it out. Even Continuing to exists in this moment of misery sounded better than spending the rest of his life without him.

He forced his hands away and sat up. Heuntied the ropes around his ancles in one rushed pull. He heard a yell from behind him. He jumped up and grabbed onto the vent. A bullet went past him as he climbed in.

He continued to cry as he hurried away. He kept the USB drive in his mouth. It felt like a part of him had been ripped out. A big part. A part he needed to live.

(He wished he'd never noticed the crack in the wall. He wished he'd just left the kid to be abused. He was horrible. He just wanted his brother to be okay)

It should have been him who was left for dead. Roman had so many more people who would mourn him. He had had a future. Goals. Dreams. Relationships. Remus was replacable.

Remus pushed himself out of the vent. His lungs were burning. He was numb. There were so many emotions he'd overloaded. He couldn't even feel the cold against his skin. Only the tears against his cheeks.

He escaped the facility and ran. In the distance he could see the car. He wanted to die. He couldn't imagine a life without his brother. Roman was the one who was supposed to come back with the information to save people. Roman was the hero! It wasn't fair!

Remus wanted to stop and let the guards catch up to him. Wanted to let himself scream and sob and be killed. Wanted to hug his brother again even if the only way to hug him was if they were both dead.

Instead he forced himself survive but only because it'd been Roman's wish.

#not countdown #live and let die #roman sanders #remus sanders #ts remus #ts roman #sanders sides #thomas sanders #creativitwins #roman sweetie i am so sorry a dumb bitch like me would do this to you

[justsomeartsthings]

Print Me A House And Home

Summary: Sans breaks the lab’s printers while Alphys is away. With a little applied quantum theory, this somehow leads to his boss becoming his flatmate. Pre-Sanster, Sans POV, Fluff (with a sprinkle of Angst).

.

“ya gotta be kiddin’ me.” 

You rap your knuckles on the side of the printer. There’s a click and a foreboding thump from inside. You take a cautious step back, hands raised. 

“uh. hey, doc, is al in today?”

No response. You glance into the empty office behind you.

“boss?”

No dice.

“…i’m stealing your snacks. speak now or forever hold your chisps.”

Nada.

“your loss, dude.”

You snag the bag of popato chisps off of his desk and pop them open. The noise is like a firecracker set off inside your skull.

…Still ix-nay on the eleton-skay.

You toss a few chisps past your teeth and knock on the printer again. No one home. Not even a suspicious ticking noise. Lame.

You’re halfway through the chisps bag, tapping an absent rhythm on the printer, when there’s footsteps and the rustling of papers in the hallway. A few seconds later, Dr. W. D. Gaster strides through the doorway, head bowed. It’s a rare candid moment; he’s too engrossed in the notebook in his hands to notice you.

You watch him for a bit, debating whether to spook him.

“‘sup.”

To his credit, he doesn’t physically startle. He does snap his notebook shut, abruptly alert. “Sans. What are you…?”

“had to use your printer.” You extend the open pop bag. “chisp?”

He doesn’t even check to see if they’re his. He takes one. “The vending machine is two floors down.”

“eh. too far.”

“You could use the elevator.”

“why bother. it’s just gonna let me down.”

“Mm. And I suppose you’ve vetoed the stairs because they are ‘up to something’.”

“hey. don’t knock my jokes. they’re hy-stair-ical.” You crumple the empty chisp bag and toss it at Gaster, who catches it and drops it in the bin. “is alphys clocking in anytime soon?”

“She’s at a seminar in New Home. She won’t be back for another four hours.” He places the notebook on his desk. “Is there something wrong with your own printer?”

“yup. i tried to print a report of some results for an experiment this morning. somethin’ went wrong, think i jammed it. figured i’d use yours.”

His eyelights snap to the printer. “And it’s jammed mine as well?”

You chuckle. Break into the man’s office under printing problem pretenses, and watch him squirm. Give him a printer to fix, he’ll hyperfixate on it so hard he almost seems sane.

“looks like it. same thing happened to al’s printer, too.”

“That would explain why I couldn’t print my notes a few hours ago.” He approaches the machine, huffing. “It’s only Tuesday, and you’ve already managed to break all three of our printers.”

“i call it a magic touch.”

“I find it highly unlikely you would ever employ percussive maintenance. Especially of the bullet pattern variety.”

“heh heh. point taken.” You shrug. “wrong on the first count, though. i gave ‘em a few love taps.”

“Mm. Bandages are on my desk.”

“cute. i can take a printer, old man, and i could take you.”

“That would put you at two counts of theft and one of kidnapping. Tread carefully.” He removes the back panel of the printer and peers inside. “That’s peculiar. This experiment report— was it for the causality trials?”

“just the test run.”

“And your printer has the same kind of jam?”

“same jelly, same jar.”

“It appears to be routine.”

“bread n’butter.”

“It looks fried.”

“that’s probably a doughboy, then.”

“It can’t be a coincidence.”

“i didn’t say coincidence, i said doughboy.”

He snaps out of his thoughts at that. “What? What’s ‘doughboy?’”

“uh, s’like pre-bread? don’t call me ‘boy’.”

“I didn’t—” He shakes his head, baffled. “What in Asgore’s name are you going on about?”

“the printer. you sure you know what you’re doin’?”

He shoots you a glare just before shoving his hands all up in the printer’s mechanical guts. “I’m a highly skilled engineer who just so happened to design and construct the self-sustaining generator which the entire Underground, including this lab, runs on. I can handle a jammed printer.”

“ok, jeez, doc. no point tryin’ to print receipts, the printer’s already doughboy-ed.”

Gaster doesn’t reply, but after a few moments of tinkering, he does squint in a concerning manner. “Hm.”

“hm?”

“Hm.”

“i’m no printer engineer, but ‘hm’ doesn’t sound like a technical term.”

“It is when I say it.” And, well, he’s got you there. “It appears Alphys has been printing Mew Mew Kissy Cutie posters on her work printer.”

“uh,” you say. “what? how do you know?”

In response, Gaster pulls out an impossibly large poster from the back of the printer. It’s slightly crumpled, due to its dimensions being bigger than the printer could ever realistically print, and even laminated, which you’re pretty sure Gaster’s printer can’t do.

“Something tells me we will find your test results in Alphys’ printer, and my notes from this morning in yours.”

“woah. you’re kiddin’. scoot over,” you say, sidling up to him to peer inside the printer’s exposed mechanics. “you think alphys’ printer and my printer are superposed in yours?”

“Potentially.”

“that’s… uh,” you say. “impractical.”

“To say the least.”

“alphys is gonna have a field day with this when she gets back.”

“I’m sure the eventual clutter of dismantled printers will speak for itself.”

“heh. i gotta say, i’m kinda disappointed. i expected superposition to sound a lot more chaotic.”

He makes an assenting noise. You look over at him, and then nearly do a double-take. You didn’t notice before, but he’s as tense as a compressed spring, very intently inspecting the Mew Mew Kissy Cutie poster. Or, more likely, very deliberately not looking at you. 

Upon second glance, you are a lot closer to him than you reasonably need to be.

“heh. whoops. my bad,” you say, stepping to the side. “didn’t mean to crowd you.”

“…Not at all,” he says quietly, then clears his throat. He puts the back panel over the printer again and straightens up. “We should, er, go check the other printers. Just in case.”

“sure,” you say.

“Good,” he says.

“great,” you say.

And you go.

It’s kind of funny, this sort of dance the two of you have fallen into. Stepping on eggshells, tiptoeing around each other at work. Ignoring that you’ve got a crush on him. That he’s got a gigantic crush on you. It’s ridiculous, and hilarious, mainly because he’s centuries old and you’re, well, not.

For whatever reason, whether he’s worried about being deemed a cradle robber or a douchebag boss, or something else entirely, he hasn’t made a move on you yet. But hey, that’s fine by you. You’ve got all the time in the world.

Though you do hope it won’t actually take him that long.

“It will be faster if we split up,” he says, once you reach the intersecting hallway between your office and Alphys’. He starts to take off by himself, leaving you behind.

You reach out and grab his wrist.

“hang on a sec. if you’re right about superposition—”

“It’s very likely that I am.”

“then you realize checking the printers separately could affect the outcome. ‘that which is observed is changed’, n’all that?”

“Well, yes. But it may be an inevitability anyway,” he says. “And even so, the replication of this event is statistically extremely unlikely. This may be our only chance to see whether our theory of personal observation holds true.”

“but it’ll kill the control variable, won’t it? we already saw your printer—”

“Oh, it could, most certainly— but not if our current theories of quantum entanglement hold true.”

“quantum—? for a whole printer? boss, we’re years away from proving that particle entanglement exists on the subatomic scale, never mind above it.”

“Not once we check the printers, we won’t be,” he points out. “There’s a chance the only way to trigger binding entanglement at such a large scale is through unrelated proofs.”

Unrelated—?

And, oh. 

You’re physically incapable of gaping, but the sentiment must show in your eyelights, because he grins down at you, the smug bastard.

“All caught up?”

“we’ll know entanglement can occur if our personal observations affect the outcomes of a superimposed subject— and if it doesn’t, we’ll have potentially disproven three separate quantum theories at once, since each cannot exist without the other. it’s… extremely assumptive and unreliable science—”

“Unless it works.”

“uh, no, i’m pretty sure it’s still unorthodox and totally fallible,” you say. “but hey. personal confirmation’s gotta count for somethin’, right?”

He laughs, bright and clear. “Yes, yes, I suppose. In a sense.”

“well, then, in a sense, it’s genius.”

More than genius, really. And Gaster knows it is, going by the look on his face. For a moment, time slows, and you take in his eyelights, fuzzy and dilated. How his entire silhouette brims with restrained excitement. Riding on the high that comes just before a dramatic breakthrough.

And yeah, maybe there’s more important things at hand, but god, he’s beautiful when he gets like this.

“heh. how ‘bout we save the ego inflation until after we get results,” you say. The cusp of quantum discovery isn’t the time or place for mutual, unspoken workplace crushes.

“Right. Then we’ll meet back here as soon as possible,” Gaster says, and turns to go—

Only to be yanked back by your hand, clasped tightly in his.

Oh.

You stare at your joined hands, soul fluttering. His fingers are intertwined with yours, slender phalanges and thick knuckles complementing each other like a welded whole.

At some point, you must’ve let go of his wrist and taken his hand instead. You hadn’t even noticed.

“uh. eheh. whoops.” You let go and try to pull away. But Gaster’s hand doesn’t budge. “doc?”

He’s as still as a statue, his eyelights focused somewhere over your shoulder. A flighty feeling grows in your bones the longer you have his hand in yours. 

And then he says, quietly: “Have you been sleeping here, Sans?”

Your soul wrenches itself in another direction.

“what?”

Gaster gestures behind you with his other hand, but you don’t turn to look. In a rush, it comes to you, what he must be looking at. 

You’d had a long night, then a rough morning with Pap. This afternoon, you weren’t as careful as you usually are. You remember leaving your office door open, and, like the idiot you are, you remember leaving out your sleeping bag, your cheap diner food wrappers, your half-sharpied sneakers. And then you got so caught up in causality, your experiment, and printing those results— 

You forgot to hide your mess.

Fuck.

“You’ve been sleeping here overnight.”

“it’s not, uh,” you begin weakly, but it really is what it looks like. And judging by the way Gaster hasn’t torn his eyelights from your mess, he knows it. 

There’s no point making a fool out of yourself by lying. 

But that doesn’t mean you don’t hate the way your voice goes quiet without your consent. 

“…it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“What about your brother— Papyrus? Is he—?”

“no. god, no. trust me, you’d know if pap was loose in this place,” you chuckle a little desperately. “he stays with a couple of friends in new home while i work. temporarily, y’know. just while we’re between houses.”

“Between houses,” Gaster echoes, finally looking down at you again. It’s fine. You’re fine. “I locked down the lab last weekend— were you on the streets for that time?”

“nah, we, uh. heh.” You clear your throat. Look to the wall. Shove your free hand in your pocket. 

Anything to distract from the fact that you can’t keep your voice steady.

You’ve never talked about it to anyone before. Out loud. You didn’t expect it to be this difficult. And it doesn’t help that Gaster doesn’t give you an out. He just stares at you, expectant. You have no idea how to read the expression he’s wearing. 

So you gather yourself and let your mouth run like a loose motor.

“we house-hopped for a while, ‘til we could make it to snowdin. there’s a place out there i’ve been savin’ up for. real spacious, real cheap. y’know. somethin’ decent we can handle the mortgage for with my salary. and the guy who owns it wanted to meet up anyway. so th’ timing worked out.”

“Sans—”

“it’s fine, doc. really. trust me. been doin’ this since i could remember,” And it is fine. The more you talk, the less he’ll hear. You’ll be fine, as long as you don’t let him speak. “listen, i’ll pack it all up when i clock out, i’ve got friends we can bunk with—”

“Absolutely not.”

“—i can make it work, but, uh, y’know, i’m sorry i—”

“Sans.” He squeezes your hand, tight. Your soul scales your throat and smothers your protests. “You’re staying in my apartment until the house is yours.”

You blink up at him, uncomprehending.

“Asgore rents the place out to me, as per our contract. I can assure you, you would not be imposing.”

Slowly, the words start to trickle in. Imposing. In his apartment.

He wants you to stay. With him. In his apartment.

“oh,” you say. Like an idiot.

“It’s fully stocked, and more than big enough to house you, your brother, and I.”

The mention of Papyrus is enough to get your thoughts moving again.

“wh— uh. hang on. slow down, doc. i can’t do that.” He doesn’t reply. You shake your head, even as some part of you starts to settle into the idea. A house, regular meals. Gaster sleeping in the neighboring room. “no, no, c’mon. i’m serious.”

“As am I.”

He is. And you hate that. You hate that he’s serious. 

You hate that you want him to be serious.

Now you can’t stop yourself from considering it. Your thoughts run ahead of you, wondering what you’d be able to do if you weren’t constantly worrying about food on the table or the roof overhead. What a relief it would be to have a stable home life, not in a few years, not in a few months, but now.

No more bed hopping, or borrowing clothes. No more stretches of time spent starving in dank alleyways.

No need to worry about transportation to the lab or to wherever Pap ends up staying during the work day.

And not just that, but someone to secure it for you. Someone you know for a fact won’t toss you out at the drop of a pin, who won’t hold it over your head, or pander ulterior motives. 

Someone who doesn’t think you’re a disgusting excuse for a monster.

It sounds too good to be true.

And to top it all off, here Gaster is, looking at you like he knows he’s offering you dinners and bedtimes and breakfasts and domestic things and stability and a normal life that you could never get on your own merit.

And the only objection you can think of is:

“doesn’t that break some sort of— i dunno, fraternization rule, or something?”

Gaster blinks down at you. You’re slightly relieved to see his expression change into something more familiar.

“We are a collective twenty steps away from an immense scientific discovery that could redefine the way we conceptualize reality itself,” he says, “and you’re worried about fraternization.”

Which, okay, that’s a little unfair.

“doc, we’re twenty steps away from an immense scientific discovery, and you wanna argue about where i sleep at night.”

He takes a breath to argue, then cants his head. “You have a point.”

“don’t i.”

“This can wait.”

“can’t it.”

“I suppose we should… get on with it.”

“uh-huh.” You swallow around the lump in your throat. “as soon as you let go of my hand.”

“Oh. Right. Yes.” He releases your hand a little sheepishly. Centuries, you have to remind yourself. “Apologies.”

“don’t sweat it.”

As soon as he starts moving, you turn heel and make a beeline for your office. 

You shut the door behind you and slide down the back of it until your knees hit your chest. Then you tuck your head between your legs and you breathe.

You’re fine. It’s fine. You just— you need a minute. Just a minute. In a few seconds, you’ll open your eyesockets, and you’ll be fine.

Alone. Safe.

Fine.

You open your eyes.

Your mess awaits you, splayed at your ankles. It spirals far into the room like an extension of yourself. You stare at it with the appropriate amount of disgust.

Strewn wrappers, unwashed laundry. Empty bottles and cans you planned to sell for a couple G apiece. You never left any of it out during the daytime before. Not where the stark laboratory overhead lights strip it of nighttime’s leniency. Right now, it’s all there, laid bare for the world to see.

It’s just things. Fabric and plastic and glass and other meaningless things. 

It is what it is, but it’s not. It’s more than that.

And you know, if it would’ve been Alphys, it would’ve been easier. Because you’re not ashamed of your situation. Really. It sucks, but it happens. You get that. She would get that. It’s just. You just didn’t want anyone to know. You didn’t want Gaster to know. 

You didn’t want Gaster to look at your things and see more than just quirks or weird habits. But he did. Almost too quickly. He saw right through you. 

You wouldn’t have pegged him for a monster who has fallen on hard times. Not like you have.

But it happens. You get that.

So…

So maybe you have less to worry about than you thought.

You swipe at your eyesockets and take to your feet. Either way, you shouldn’t dwell on it, not now. Not when you have work to do. 

...Not when you have three quantum theories to potentially disprove, what in Asgore’s name are you doing?

Your printer is just as you left it on your desk. You loop around the back of it, kicking a stray ketchup bottle out of your way, and take off the panel without a hitch.

No Mew Mew Kissy Cutie poster in sight. Small mercies. You plunge your hand into the printer’s depths.

“yahtzee,” you mutter under your breath, once you’re elbow-deep. 

Anticipation sneaks past your defenses, as you pull out the piece of paper touching your fingertips. Your shambles of a home life aside, this is a big moment. You should be enjoying it.

You shake out the page, flatten it against your desk, and quickly scour its contents.

...It’s Gaster’s notes. In his handwriting, scanned and copied and printed.

Unwittingly, you start to re-crumple the paper between your fingers. The mess in your office melts away, suddenly distant and small in comparison to the realization cresting your thoughts— the mantra ringing through your head over and over like the chiming of the Judgement Hall’s bells— 

He did it.

He was right.

Superposition, entanglement, personal observation— everything. He was right.

You don’t get the chance to bolt out of your office— he meets you at your door. You swing it open, blustered by the draft, and hold up Gaster’s notes. He starts laughing before you even see your experiment report in his hands.

“holy shit,” you breathe.

“Indeed.”

“holy shit.”

“I am treating both you and your brother to dinner tonight,” Gaster pants, slapping the report into your hands. “Until then, we can discuss a more suitable salary for your expenses. Come evening, we’ll pick up Papyrus…”

He keeps talking, but you can’t process a word of what he’s saying. It doesn’t occur to you that you probably just got a raise, or that you won’t be dumpster diving tonight, or even that you’ve somehow completely accepted the fact that you’ll be roommates with your boss for the foreseeable future.

None of it matters, because Gaster is grinning, eyesockets wide, breath stolen from wonder, his hands planted firmly on your shoulders. He looks barely in control of himself.

You can’t believe you thought he was beautiful before. You’ve never seen him look at you like this.

You don’t want him to stop.

Eventually, however, he realizes you aren’t listening to a word he’s saying. So he stops talking, rolls his eyelights, and abruptly turns around to lead the way back to his office.

You blink after his receding outline, still blinded by the afterimage of his expression. Something brushes your side, and you look down.

One of his conjured hands is clutching yours. The asymmetry of the grip is just as perfectly aligned as it was with his real hand. 

You give the mimic a squeeze. It squeezes back.

With one last look at the chaos of your office, you shut your door behind you and drift along in Gaster’s wake, smiling.

.

AO3

#sanster #undertale fanfiction #undertale fic #sans #gaster #print me a house and home #another day another fic #S/O to the sanster discord 'cause everyone in there is incredible #hope this is alright #hope the very obvious bullshit way i wrote the science isn't super cringe i just wanted an excuse for them to geek out but like #i'm a theatre major lmao so my b #anyway take a shot every time you read the word printer #=3

[echo-inthevoid]

Season 2 q&a and overall reaction

Jonny stealing everyone's names XD 

Is martin going to be ok!? I also need to know! 

He said no;-; 

ok ya, no one's gonna be ok. 

Ya, he must do sooo much research. 

Ya, except for "fatigue" lol.

Eyyy the mechanisms!! 

What's the red string brigade? Ok, I guess a group of fans theorizing about stuff. 

Oh ok so someone else did martins poetry. Ooh, there's more martin poetry out there! *grabby hands*

Ok ya, Alex clarifying that Jon isn't stupid he just makes poor decisions. Probably if he'd paused and thought about it (like I did lol, I had to go do some stuff in the middle of that ep and thought about it a whole bunch lol) instead of immediately going out and buying an axe and further isolating himself and panicking immediately he probably would have figured it out. This is why it's bad to panic in a crisis guys. 

Eyyy! Jonny's parents voiced Gertrude and Leitner! That's so cool. 

XD Jonny grumbling about having to work with his parents. 

Hmm, I hadn't really thought of Gertrude being like a mother figure in the story? She just seems very cut-throat I guess from what Leitner said. Idk so far I've been very suspicious of her. Especially since that one statement where her photo burned a whole bunch of people or something. She just seems very shady... 

Alex chortling over Jonny's pain. XD

Side note, Every time there's a q&a I just can't stop noticing Jonny's voice going in and out of archivist range? Like most of the time I'm just listening along and then he'll say a sentence a bit grumblier and my brains immediately like "ARCHIVIST! That's THE ARCHIVIST!!" 

Martin would be the last one alive in Friday the 13th! It's official! 

(Is it bad that this gives me hope)

Jon likes Nonfiction, documentaries, and probably collects something just a little bit weird. *writes down for use in potential fics* 

also while im at it I remember jon saying he dislikes coffee at one point,  and so many people have him liking coffee in their fics! This has been your daily reminder of that fact because ever since then it keeps bugging me lol. (But also do whatever u want.)

Alex's spluttering sounds so much like Martin.

Yes!! I want to hear jon sing!! Yes! Musical Episode When!!?

Ah yes yes yes! All the characters are so unique!!? How does he do it!! 

Ya, it being in audio format sometimes makes it hard to understand what's happening in the live-action bits. (Live-action is the wrong word but u know what I mean.)

Oh ok ya, how he mentioned he got a pipe was quite clever I didn't realize that that's why he mentioned it at all. 

Ooh, there's a manga where there's something similar to Michael? I'll have to look that up later...

XD Alex and Jonny arguing about apples. 

Ok, so all the statements we're hearing ARE for reals. I kinda assumed but good to have it confirmed.

They used to hang out together!!? Work function curry nights!! ;-; 

Ya Ya! Who made the leitners!?

"You are assuming a book needs to be written" ...ok then. (but it has to have been created somehow??? Did they just spring fully formed from the powers? why? And why take the form of books?)

Alex's mischievous laugh about whether jon has friends *trembles in fear*

Yes!! Micheal is so good! I'm so happy they love him too! Yesyes! His laugh! 

Ah Yes!! Mary kaey was so creepy! 

XD yes yes yes fatigue was written on zero sleep, I knew it! 

Akskdjdkd I love them so much. Also, I've looked up Michaels voice actor luke booys and he does some other horrory type sketches n stuff and I kiiinda want to do a little animatic with some of those but it's Michael like annoying some poor soul lost in his halls... I think that'd be fun. I wonder if anyone's done that yet? If so someone send me the links I neeeed iiitt :3

Season 2 summary:

Uuuuu ya so this season was really good. I kinda listened to it in bursts of about ten episodes every couple weeks and then have been saving up the reactions to post later so these are usually going up about a week or so after I actually listened to the episode just FYI. 

I also do have a lot of spoilers cause I can't keep myself away from fanfic and people don't always tag for spoilers and I kiiinda wana know what's coming beforehand anyway? Idk it's hard man I get very stressed about what might happen and then also listening to too much at a time is too spooky for my poor little heart so I gotta read the less spooky fanfic to fulfill the hyperfixation you see. (If anyone has fanfic with spoilers only up to season 2 that'd be great btw) 

Anyway, I try not to take spoiler type stuff into account unless I'm just so sure of it I can't really not acknowledge that I know about it. 

Also, can I just talk about Michael for a minute?? Cause he's such a unique character? And I guess maybe there are other characters like him but I haven't ever seen one -tho to be fair tma is only like the third horror thing I've ever really got into (the other two are the SCP Foundation in its various forms and Little Nightmares. Hence why I keep making reference to SCP it's really the only thing I know similar to this.) But he's such a cool concept!!? Like someTHING that still has a personality? He's so not human? Like I get what he says but also I don't really? Idk im pretty sure he's an avatar right? Right?? Idk if that means he was a person at some point? But all this to say that he is probably the most inhuman character I've come across so far and I'm trying to figure out what it is about him that's so "other" to me? Like... I don't really know what Micheal's deal is? he seems to want to be sort of a neutral mischief-maker but also it seems like he keeps getting invested. But also I just love the way he talks about himself. Like he's a monster that has a personality and is fully intelligent but isn't just evil but isn't neutral either and certainly isn't benevolent. Like he's so complex and just,,,, the idea of a "thing" that's got a personality?? I love it? Kind of like dryads or spirits of things? Like the idea that after a long time things gain personality just by existing? Not that that's what Michael is necessarily? but that same sort of concept applies to him I think. Like the way he IS the maze and wants to help but wants to just watch but wants to kill them all. He's just so interestinggggggg. (And another vision of what jon could become?)

 also "es Mentiras" is a beautiful name 💕

So are him and not-Sasha avatars? Not-Sasha also seems completely inhuman and I was under the impression that avatars were (or used to be) human? Or are they like personifications of their power? Do all the powers have personifications of themselves. not-Sasha seems even less human than Michael? Like she seems to just really genuinely enjoy causing fear? Tho I guess we didn't really get to hear a lot of her. She just seemed kinda gleefully angry most of the time we heard from her. Was she... Human once!???

Anyway. Also, can I just talk about leitners line about jon belonging to the eye!!? Just..*chefs kiss* hnnnngg I need more jon grappling with that. I just need more everyone dealing with the fallout post all of the finallies ok? I still need more of jon angsting over his worms scars and stuff and now I also need jon freaking out about belonging to a fear god power thing. 

Also Martin! Is Martin ok? He sure did a lot of yelling which he doesn't usually? Look I love him and he actually thinks before he acts (unlike SOME people *looks at jon*) and he writes poetry and it is pretty good poetry ok!! And he cares about everyone and just wants a happy ending and aaaaa😭

Petition to get some statements from Martin's pov tho? I mean that's not gonna happen cause Jon's the archivist but I want more martin pov!! Maybe we can get some of his poem tapes??? Pls????? 

I feel so bad for Tim. It sounds like he's kinda fallen into despair.

Also Elias!!? Is showing his spooky side!!? He can control cameras and beat a man to death with a pipe!!? This is his "place of powerr"!!? I am afeared!!? At least jon knows he shouldn't trust him now. Oh jeez, I wonder if jon will listen back to the tape and know what happened. Thhhatsss rough. Oh dear, I hope he doesn't feel guilty cause Leitner did keep trying to hurry him and now everyone thinks it was him. Even martin thinks he did it? Wich like I kinda want to hear more of his thoughts on that? How much does he believe that jon did it? Tim certainly seems pretty certain but he's a bit biased and cynical right now so. 

And they were in the maze for DAYS? 

Now I need martin recovering from being stuck with Tim in Michaels maze for days being angry and worried and hungry etc... Dksjdksa knowing jon could be dying RIGHT NOW and there's nothing he can do. Please someone give me the fic links if this exists!! I've already written like 5 drabbles based entirely on spoilers/other fics (which I'll probably post (w/ links to their inspirations) once I'm caught up and can make sure I'm not just completely demolishing cannon lol. 

Leitner didn't even scream or yell or anything when he was murdered. Literally the chillest dude ever. F

Overall super great, Elias is terrifying, let's dive into the next season!!! I've got 2 seasons to finish in like, less than 2 or so weeks(?) if I wana be caught up by season 5 hhhh,,,

Better get started I guess. 

#tma #tma lb #tma liveblog #liveblogging #tma season 2 #season 2 #season 2 q&a #season 2 finale #the magnus archives

[ineffablecolors]

The Wife [22/?]

The Wife || Ch 22 ~ 4.4k || Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Ch4 Ch5 Ch6 Ch7 Ch8 Ch9 Ch10 Ch11 C12 Ch13Ch14Ch15Ch16 Ch17 Ch18 Ch19 Ch20 Ch21 ||FF.NET&AO3

Summary: No one knows all that Emma has been through and certainly no one knows all that Killian has been through and being husband and wife doesn’t make them any less unknown to each other. And really, how can you help someone heal when you don’t even know how hurt they are?

A/N: Hey, guys, sorry for the longer wait. Currently hyperfixating on Ineffable Husbands but I'm not leaving those babies right before the end point so no worries ;)

Upon Alice and Robyn’s arrival, Emma’s life seems to settle for the first time in what is in reality less than half a year but feels very much like a couple of lifetimes. It’s a peculiar feeling to associate with the girls who, more often than not, move like little pocket hurricanes through the house and leave traces of themselves like debris behind.

Emma expects, is almost familiar with, Alice’s uncontainable energy, the childlike capacity for wonder and the safety to be herself and even a bit wilder, a bit freer – somehow more than the self that she presents to most of the world. It’s all Killian’s presence boosted even further, made sweeter, by Robyn’s.

It’s this other young lady that has surprised Mrs Jones. Robyn is all propriety and politeness at first, somewhat quieter than the vague image Emma formed in her head based on Killian and Alice’s stories, somewhat more subdued – her hair always pulled back and her movements strong but contained, her blush fierce whenever Alice’s hand would brush against hers or Alice’s lips would peck her cheek in front of Emma and Killian.

In all fairness, Emma knows – knows from personal experience – that it makes perfect sense for Robyn to be a bit more reserved, a bit more cautious. It just isn’t what she expected. Which is probably for the best. Since it lasts all of a week.

A week and some gradually warmer weather is all it takes for Robyn to start cajoling Emma into trying her aim at one of the practice targets that Killian put up at the very back of the grounds for the girls. A week for Robyn to accept Emma’s offer to take Buttercup out for a ride with Jolly and Alice. A week for her to start coming down to breakfast with her hair in a state that makes Ruby groan in near pain. A week for her to settle hip to hip with Alice in the library and another to rest her head in Alice’s lap while they race each other over the identical copies of whatever book Killian has bought them last.

“You do know this is all on you, don’t you?”

Emma looks away from the dissolving clumps of cinnamon in her cocoa and picks both mugs, heading toward the door and inclining her head in an invitation for her husband to follow. She and Killian retiring to their bedroom before midnight is another development that has been, at least partially, brought on by the girls’ presence and their love for lazing around in the library late into the night. Emma has settled into that without too much protest as well.

“What is?” she asks on her way up the stairs and grins at the way Killian glances down the corridor, toward the library door – part guilt and part suspicion that Emma has decided only parents can imbue with quite so much fondness and frustration at the same time.

“This. The usurpation.”

Her laughter makes a little bit of cocoa slosh over the rim of one mug and she bites her lip and glances guiltily at the spot on the stairs but Killian waves a dismissive hand and urges her up the stairs. Emma likes to think she would have normally protested and made them stop and clean up but his urging takes the form of his hand fitting neatly under her bottom and almost lifting her toward the next rung so she feels decidedly overruled on this one.

“Usurpation?” she giggles again as Killian crowds her against their bedroom door for a moment before turning the handle.

“Aye. I’ve been going to bed at a time befitting a gentleman quite a bit older than myself for weeks now.”

“Ah, yes, because it is all peaceful rest that transpires in this room.”

Emma does so love the way she can still make her eloquent husband sputter with barely an allusion to bedroom activities.

“That is entirely beside the point, love. I adore my daughter and I’m absolutely delighted how at ease you have set Robyn. But frankly, a father is happy with the abstract knowledge of his daughter’s successful romance, not very concrete encounters with it.”

There is a barely restrained current of amusement under Killian’s words and Emma makes sure that he sees her eyeroll and her knowing look before she sets their mugs on the floor before the fireplace and sits down with her back to him.

Killian’s knees press under the small of her back as he lowers himself behind her and works his clever fingers beneath the laces of her dress.

Of course, he is not entirely unjustified in his indignation, however playful.

When the library was usurped, as he put it, they tried sequestering themselves in his study but Killian found the idea of spending his evenings where he spend the majority of his days understandably less than appealing. Any period longer than the time required for the manifestation of some hot chocolate in the kitchen earned them Granny’s vocal displeasure and, as soon as the world outside started thawing, the chances of them running into Alice and Robyn in the garden were just as good as stumbling on an intimate scene in the library. Alice maintains that her father built that swing in the back for her so really it is them who have been trespassing.

And Emma has to agree with Killian – she is overjoyed to see the girls happy and in love but the image of her step-daughter loosening a corset is not one she needs imprinted on her mind. So, their bedroom it is – the last stronghold that they haven’t happily relinquished control of.

“What do you mean I have set Robyn at ease?” she twists her head to look at Killian over her shoulder.

He gives her a look that says he can answer her immediately but instead takes his time to finish undoing her dress and run his fingers through her hair a few times even though it has been free and loose all day.

“I’m confident in the very amicable relationship I have with Robyn,” he starts eventually, when Emma turns around to face him and takes a sip of her drink. “But surely you realize that it is you who has made her feel comfortable and at home here, my queen.”

“I wouldn’t say— That is I have…”

She has been trying to do exactly that actually, she just never connected the desired result with her efforts.

“I think it was the horse,” Killian says with a light in his eyes that she suspects has much to do with her own expression of realization. “I’d never let her ride my horse.”

“You’d never let anyone ride Roger and thank god for that. He’d probably kill just about anyone else.”

Killian hums as if the idea has quite a bit of merit and he is perfectly alright with that. When he moves to kiss her, the vision of him astride his gorgeous and equally dangerous beast is not far from her mind.

*****

She is already naked, still kneeling in front of the fireplace but now with her husband pressed fully –intimately – against her back, his hand low on her stomach, holding her to him and upright and grounded – she is already half gone by the time the thought crosses her mind – of the possible consequences of this, of the desired consequences.

At first, Emma was almost afraid that it will spoil it, that the constant hope and expectation and wondering of maybe this time will erode some of the sheer enjoyment of making love to Killian. She thinks maybe it did, the first few days – not so much erode as strain, add a particular weight to the act, send vibrations of anticipation along the link between them. But it is rather difficult to anticipate anything else when she has Killian all around her, inside her. The answer of him outweighing any question of anything else.

And then, a couple of weeks after she convinced her husband that they should at least try, on a night when they came to bed late, after too much food and some wine, and came together with the minimal amount of movement and effort and removal of nightclothes required, Emma realized that if they never get there, if she never gets anything but this, it will be alright. It will be more than alright, it will be enough for her to be iridescently happy for the rest of her days.

And now, as Killian’s hand slips lower and she can feel the scratch of his hair and the cool points of his nipples against her back, as he whispers things that make her bite her lip and try to swallow down the tidal wave in her chest, she forgets there is any point to this other than chasing that hill that Killian has shown her how to climb and making him jump off with her.

*****

None of that can quite keep down the instinctive longing she feels when she holds Mary Margaret’s newborn son for the first time but it certainly helps her smile and coo at him in genuine delight instead of masked resentment.

He is healthy and lovely and Mary Margaret looks so splendid and relaxed that Emma has a hard time imagining Leo’s birth including anything but her friend smiling serenely and sighing happily as she coaxes her baby to join her into the world with just a few whispered words. It’s a preposterous image, of course, but the more Emma listens to Mary’s lilting voice and watches her cradle her baby, the more she cannot picture anything else. There is a vague thought at the back of her mind that, even if she were able to bring a child into the world, there is no way she is able to do it as gracefully and seemingly effortlessly as Mary Margaret.

So she spends all her joy in the Nolan’s picturesque home and she stares unseeingly out of the window on the ride back home and then, as soon as she sets foot on the stones leading to the house, she has another vision in her mind. One of her finally taking one of Robyn’s bows and shooting arrow after arrow at the target, each one sinking it with satisfying success, perfect execution, perfect control. She starts walking around the house before she has had time to scoff at herself.

And Robyn is exactly where Emma imagined she would be, alone like she imagined she would be. It fuels Emma’s fantasy.

“Emma!”

The girl smiles brightly at her. She stopped calling her Mrs Jones around the time she stopped glaring at Alice every time she tugged on Robyn’s braid to try and bring her cheek to Alice’s lips.

Emma’s dramatic response is to throw her hat to the damp grass, pulling a few hairs on the way and squaring her shoulders. She doesn’t ask, she just takes one of the bows Robyn is not using. Emma has always been good enough with her hands, she only needs to see something done once or twice to be able to replicate it almost exactly. This is probably the reason she actually manages to cock the arrow properly. The adrenaline in her veins and the vision in her mind’s eye is probably the reason she manages to pull her arm back, a tremble going down her spine as she lets the arrow fly.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, it should be anything but, when the arrow dives down and falls impotently to the grass before even reaching the target.

Some part of Emma hears Robyn make a sputtering, helpless sound but all the rest of her is focused on keeping her muscles from shaking off the bones of her arm as she pulls another arrow back and watches it sail far to the left.

“Emma, let me at least show—“

The third one she can’t even pull all the way back and it takes everything inside her not to throw the bow to the ground and stomp her foot like a petulant child.

Then Emma feels a pair of arms wrap around her and with a little twist, a strangled sound and a hum that almost manages to settle her trembling hands, half of her weight is no longer on her feet, her fingers grapple with unfamiliar fabric and her face is buried in blonde curls. For the next few minutes she just clings to Alice.

“First time around, I couldn’t even pull it all the way back.”

The words are warm against the side of Emma’s head, the levity inside them isn’t really forced and there is a thread of admiration running through them that Emma doesn’t deny herself from picking up.

“Oh, yes, I’m a natural.”

She feels the vibrations of her and Alice’s laughter undulate against each other and flow together.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Robyn’s voice is tentative behind them and Emma lets one of her arms drop away from Alice so she can turn around and give her an apologetic smile. “It’s not really… an emotional sport.”

Emma manages to chuckle a little and nods.

“Maybe you can give me a proper lesson and demonstration. Tomorrow?”

Robyn’s smile is bright and excited and Alice’s hand tightens on Emma’s waist and Emma feels the little pockets of emptiness that tried to fit themselves into her heart filling again.

“I think papa was just going for a ride.”

Emma gives Alice a grateful smile and Robyn one last hopeful look.

“Tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow. Go on before I make you gather the arrows you shot.”

She doesn’t feel all that childish when she runs off or perhaps she just doesn’t care.

*****

Killian has just swung into his saddle when she rounds the corner of the stables. She supposes the pinkness of her face, the labored breathing and her hair flying all over the place justifies the startled look on his face but she lifts her hand to stop him from getting off his horse and makes her way to him at a slightly more reasonable pace.

“Take me with you, my heart?”

She holds her hand towards him and doesn’t squirm or doubt when Killian looks her over with a raised eyebrow and narrowed eyes before he nods and helps her settle behind him. Roger makes a noise that seems to indicate that this is a one time thing that they are being allowed and then they are off.

They ride in silence until the house looks like she can put it in her pocket. Killian knows where she was, he offered to go with her, she thinks next time she will let him. But she doesn’t regret going alone now, she doesn’t even regret her display with the bow and arrows, she doesn’t regret anything at all as she presses her breasts firmly into Killian’s back, her hands into his sides and her nose into the hair on the back of his neck.

It’s so different from leaning into Alice’s softness and hanging onto a frame no bigger than her own but the certainty that they will hold her up and keep her until she grows warm and sure again is almost identical.

*****

They come back when the sun has almost completely disappeared, both starting to shiver a little from the early spring wind. The damp patches on his trousers hardly help, he has missed one leaf in Emma’s hair and quite a few little twigs that embedded themselves in her coat, so Killian squeezes her wrist and drags his wife up the stairs before anyone can catch sight of them. He will have to forsake the right to grumble and roll his eyes at Alice and Robyn if either sees them in this state. Though they might go easy on Emma today from what she told him – he squeezes her soft hand again and pulls her closer to his side as they rush into their room and start the process of making each other presentable again.

He watches her carefully still, trying to spot a certain rigidness in her shoulders or a tightening around her mouth but it’s all gone now. He runs his hand down her spine as she takes off his brace and kisses the corners of her lips while she tries to tame his hair, just to make sure.

It’s mostly habit that makes Killian peak into the library when they make their way back downstairs and he does a double take when he finds it empty. They exchange a disbelieving look but make quick work of spreading themselves over the pillows left in front of the fire. The look Granny gives them upon entering the room makes it quite clear that she still hasn’t decided who is the most immature individual living under this roof.

“Supper will be another hour, seeing as the Misses decided to take a bath.”

Killian honestly has no idea what possesses him to arrange his features the way he does or say what he does – no idea other than the warmth of the fire and Emma’s head on his thigh where she has buried her nose in a novel she has been trying to snatch from Alice for a week, no idea but wanting to see Granny put her hands on her hips and huff and storm out.

“Ah, that is quite alright. Perhaps, in the meantime, you can bring us some of those biscuits Ruby was making earlier.”

Granny doesn’t disappoint him.

*****

Killian Jones has spent a likely disconcerting amount of his 40 years of life on the floor.

When he was young, the day the summer firmly turned the tide and the heat overpowered even the night coldness, he would sneak a blanket from under his mother’s nose and go to sleep on the still warm grass outside, trying to read words in the stars until his eyes betrayed him. He doesn’t count those years on the grass.

When he was in the Navy, few things rankled more than sharing space with men that were as far from the title of a “gentleman” as one could get and yet, space on a ship was scarce and sharing it was not really a question of preference and sensibility, so he would trudge up from the crew’s quarters and find himself a square of planks that looked almost as fine as the bunks below them and try to remember what stories he used to read in the stars when he was young. He doesn’t count those years on the planks.

When he returned from sea, the concept of earth under his feet at all times seemed preposterous and yet, the sight and feel of chairs and settees seemed even more so, and when he could get away with it – meaning not around Liam or anyone they did business with and not around any ladies (not until Milah) who felt it an offence to be in the company of someone so queer about such a simple matter as sitting – he would much rather sit on the floor than on any furniture designed for that express purpose. He doesn’t count those years on the floor.

When Alice was born, with all her quick little limbs and her devious little mind, with her innocent baby face and all her ideas defying gravity and logic, he found it much sounder to spread his papers and books on the carpet around her, to keep pen and paper and baby all within the reach of his hands – not to mention, how much better he could delight in exactly those devious little tricks of hers when they were sharing almost the same height and surface. He doesn’t count those years on the carpet.

When they came back from the war, it was Liam who would grab two pillows and throw them before the fireplace whenever Killian stayed over after dinner dragged on too long or the rum kept flowing a bit too late, and Killian never quite figured out if his brother did it for him or for himself and perhaps he was reluctant to ask because it was the best sleep he got for the first couple of years after and perhaps because, whoever it was for, they both needed it. He does count those years in front of the fire.

When he got married, nothing felt quite right – not taking her arm when they walked down the street, not introducing her as the mistress of the house to staff and guests alike, not sharing a table with her on the occasion when he slept in too late or got lured into the dining room around supper, not raising a child with her – to whatever degree what she did could be called raising anything, rather than bringing down things that Alice had cultivated herself or Killian had carefully, secretly, nurtured, and certainly not sharing a bed with her, so he was rather glad for all the practice he’d had of sleeping on grass and planks and carpets alike so that, when he couldn’t stomach the thought of lying down beside her and couldn’t escape the room altogether, the floor felt like no big sacrifice. He does count those years on the floor.

When Milah was gone for honour and Eloise was gone because the world had decided to finally let him breathe a little and Alice was gone because he loved her too much, he had all the rooms and beds and linen that one could wish for and that, most likely, was why every other week he would still find himself sleeping on the floor before the fireplace – not with his brother because his brother had grown up and then he’d healed and then he’d found love that he could keep – thinking that maybe the following night he would take a blanket and sneak out into the back garden and see if there has been anything new written in the stars. He does count those lonely years on his own.

Now he remembers the last time he slept on the floor. A month ago? A bit more? They hadn’t made love on the floor the way they had a number of times before, hadn’t even taken more than one pillow and the throw from the armchair a couple of feet away. They hadn’t meant to stay there that long at all and then, the next thing Killian was aware of was the sunshine hitting his face at an unusual angle and his back feeling stiff beneath him and his neck doubly so, and then he opened his eyes to see his bedroom ceiling from a point that he hadn’t in a while, since some weeks before Emma first set foot in the house, with the woman in question, lying on his chest, her arm wrapped uselessly around the only pillow that neither of them seemed to have used and snoring lightly in a way that made him want to laugh and wake her with kisses to the back of her neck all in the same breath. He does count that morning.

All in all, his time lying on the floor has vastly improved as of late but this – this is by far his favourite. So he tries to catalogue and store away all the details – the soft depths of the pillow under his head, the scratch of the carpet under his right elbow where Emma rolled up his sleeve as he was preparing drinks; the smell of chocolate and cardamom tea and something stronger that he and Robyn spiced their respective beverages with; the quiet, random popping of the logs in the fireplace and the faintest traces of smoke in the warm air; the texture of the book he keeps splayed open with his fingers and the light rasp of the page under his thumb; the feel of Emma’s toes digging into his shoulder as they all lie in a circle of their own making, their shoes lined perfectly under the table.

It feels like a scene from a children’s book, he would bet it looks like one as well. He feels his skin itch from the joy of it.

“Now, how does this work exactly, darling?” he tries to introduce some reluctance into his tone but is afraid it comes out just painfully fond.

“You read a page and then I read the next and then Robyn reads the next and then Emma reads the next and then it’s you again.”

“Right. Splendid. But what precisely is the purpose of this orchestrated reading?”

“The purpose is that we all read at the same speed and I do not find out that Beth is going to die because Emma gasped in horror ten pages ahead.”

Killian tilts his head back to watch in amusement as his wife’s face floods with color.

“And I reckon it would be rather nice, don’t you?”

He drops his chin to his chest so he can now catch his daughter who has propped herself on his knee, her eyes bright and wide and so earnest that he can’t do anything but agree.

Before the night is through, the book makes ten full turns around their circle, passing from hand to hand, sighs and grumbles and indignant exclamations when it is dropped and the page lost, but mostly the pleasant change of tone and tempo as they take their turns and experience the story together.

Killian doesn’t know when he falls asleep – it might have been Alice’s too gentle voice or Robyn’s somewhat unadorned reading or perhaps the calming sound of Emma’s tones that his mind associates with safety and rest. He imagines she went to pass him the book, keeping her ring finger carefully marking the page, only to not find his hand waiting to receive it. He imagines Alice rolled her eyes and made a comment and Robyn shushed her and urged her up with a squeeze of her ankle and Emma marked the page and shuffled closer to him. He is quite certain about that last one because he wakes up on the floor, to the fire almost dying and the girls long in bed, with Emma’s front pressed against his side, her fingers running absent-mindedly though his hair and her breath teasing his throat.

He most certainly counts this one.

*****

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[acrobaticcatfeline]

Logan and His Little Bumble Bee (Single Dads AU) Chapter 4!!!

Word Count: 3643

TW: swearing, deceit, vague mentions of vague trauma, arguments, crying, unconscious projecting, one quick mention of homophobia, roman is a big nervous a lot lmk if I missed anything!!!

Notes: This was out way sooner than I expected. So I made this one revolving around Roman and Dmitri for once, because we don’t get that much and now he has thoughts and things to say!!! Anyways it starts a bit angsty but its really soft and fluffy and I love my baby gays. It’s dialogue heavy this time around, it’s almost as if my writing changes subconsciously depending on which character I am writing. Huh. I hope you enjoy it, I worked my butt off for it. Previous chapter here, first chapter here!

Summary: “you are 15 years old! Absolutely not!!!” Logan is having trouble letting Roman be himself, projecting his own bad experiences on him without realizing it. Roman and Dmitri kiss a lot because they’re really soft and really gay.

“you are 15 years old! Absolutely not!!!”

“dad people in my grade have been dating since they were 10 come on!”

“and they're irresponsible and don’t know better! Roman it is not a good idea-”

“Logan dear be rational; kids are supposed to-”

“NO!”

Everyone paused as Logan screamed. Roman had flinched and Logan winced knowing he caused it, but he couldn’t just stop at this point.

“Roman, dating this young is a bad idea, take it from me. I mean that was when I got together with mercy-”

“you can’t say that like it’s the biggest mistake you’ve made dad!!! Because… because if it was then I would have-I know it ended badly with you and her, but you were still happy at the time! You can’t just keep me from experiencing things because you're scared dad. I'm not you. I-I need to live my own life eventually, and if I don’t know how to then what am I gonna do when I'm an adult?”

“you don’t- Roman that isn't necessary to be happy, I mean look at me and Patton-”

“well maybe I don’t want to pine for someone for 9 years!!! Maybe, maybe I want to live my life now, instead of waiting in fear!!! Maybe I want my happily ever after before I settle down, maybe, for once, I want to live my life without worrying that I'm a disappointment to my parents!!! I know you don’t mean to but you just, you make everything so hard! You-you have so much, so much hope. That I'm going to be this perfect kid and I'm gonna grow up to be amazing, and its exhausting! I want to make a decision without worrying that I'm going to do wrong by you! And then mercy… mercy never saw me for me, and I always had to be perfect for her and she's gone now but I'm just so tired dad! I'm tired of trying to fit inside this perfect box that I think you have for me, I want to be a teenager, I want to date, I want to go to parties, I want to make mistakes and not cry myself to sleep thinking I've made you hate me. It’s so hard to try to make you happy all the time. I want to have a chance to just make me happy.”

Logan stared at Roman. He had been trying so hard to protect him and take care of him, and all he had been doing was overwhelming him. He had never meant to do any of it, Roman was right, but he went back through his brain and it hurt to see that he had unconsciously pushed his son onto a pedestal that was impossible to escape from. He was never disappointed in him, whether he did good or bad or made mistakes, he had always tried to show that he was proud no matter what. He felt tears welling in his eyes and saw Roman twist uncomfortably. He felt Patton's arm wrap around his shoulders, but he couldn’t stay there, his mind was racing too fast. He was catastrophizing he knew, but he couldn’t so easily stop himself. His head was knocked out of the process when Roman ran into his arms, wrapping him in a hug. He let his arms fold around his sons waist, letting a few tears fall.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry dad I just- I needed to tell you and I was going to tell you in a nicer way, a better planned way but then this happened and it all came out I'm sorry dad I didn’t mean to make you cry”

“it’s- its fine Ro. I needed to hear that from you. I'm. I'm sorry Ro I didn’t mean it. I try so hard to show that I'm always proud of you, god you have helped me so much and I've never realized that I was making you feel so pressured I'm sorry bee, I’ll try harder, I didn’t know-”

Logan’s head was buried in Roman’s chest, it was the benefit of his son growing taller than him, he could hide his tear stained face out of sight. He sniffed a bit, rubbing his eyes before letting go of him. He smiled widely at Roman.

“I was wrong to have set such impossible standards. It was wrong of me to treat you like I had a second chance at my childhood. I really, just want the best for you but-”

He took a sharp inhale and looked him in the eyes.

“but its your life. And-and if you want, if you want to date. Then, I-I support you completely. Because, because I love you Roman. So so much.”

His eyes teared up again, and he let out a choked laugh while rubbing his eyes clear. Roman smiled at him and hugged him again, thanking him profusely. At that point Virgil walked back inside. He looked at the scene, sending a questioning glance at Patton over the other two. Patton let out a small smile and shook his head, to which Virgil shrugged and went upstairs without a further thought.

 “so, he was fine with it?”

“I mean he wasn’t, but I explained a few things and he's fine with it now. It took a little bit of the harsher truths to be spilled for him to understand my point, and a few tears, but yeah.”

“wow. I haven’t seen… either of you cry in my entire time knowing you.”

“yeah it doesn’t happen often. I think the last time I saw my dad cry was when he told me that mercy wasn’t coming back.”

“geez that’s a long time. And its always baffled me that I've never seen you cry; I've known you since you were 2.”

“yeah, I'm a uh, private crier. I don’t think I've cried in front of people really since I could talk.”

“fuck man how the hell did you manage that?”

“… I mean I don’t remember it, but I think it was a leftover from when I still lived with mercy.”

“what.”

“eh, it doesn’t matter.”

“no wait what? What did she do to you?”

“pfft, I just told you Vee, I don’t remember. I get vague fuzzy feelings that are sorta like if memories were feelings, but otherwise I have no idea.”

“that’s fucked up man”

“meh. Anyways back to the original topic, soooo can I get Dmitri's number?”

“oh my god.”

“oh, and you're at 75 cents.”

“shit.”

“a dollar!”

 Virgil had handed over his number easily, smirking as Roman gave him a hug before dashing into his own room. Roman had immediately sent Dmitri a text, ‘hey, its Roman! Dads way more chill now so I stole your number from Virgil’ and he had responded almost immediately.

‘neat so are we gonna talk about what that was?’

‘I mean, I thought it was p straight forward, but I mean if you think we should?’

‘I mean yeah but’

Radio silence for a minute

‘but like, idk if you want this to be serious or smth like, casual. I mean I don’t care either way’

‘oh! Well something serious sounds nice!’

‘thank god I was not prepared for something casual regardless of what I said’

‘pfft, its fine tough guy’

‘if that nickname sticks you gotta use it around rem, it'll make him bug out’

‘alrighty! Tough guy~’

‘ouch yo chill it with that I'm in public’

‘pfft ur a dork Dee!’

‘I am absolutely not a whale’s penis and I'm offended you would even imply it’

‘oh my god I'm gonna break up with you’

‘nooooo don’t do that I'm too dark and mysterious to be broken up with for that’

‘dark and mysterious my butt! The only dark thing about you is your humor and the only mysterious things about you are your eyes!’

‘babe I have a reputation to keep up!’

‘guess your rep will just have to fit me in there somewhere then!’

‘god you are adorable, I gtg before you somehow make me start uwuing at my family’

‘uwu bye bye mistew dmitwi!!!’

‘god its disgusting kill it with fire’

‘love you too Dee! <3<3<3’

‘<3’

Roman set down his phone afterwards, feeling the butterflies attacking his insides like rabid animals. He changed the tab over to his YouTube and put on his headphones, listening to his curated BTS playlist, starting off with answer: love myself, bopping along and humming. He switched the tab and scrolled through Tumblr smiling at the posts about his favorite superheroes.

 The next week was absolutely blissful for Roman, he alternated between sitting at his table with a few of his acquaintances who he would chat with about his hyperfixations, and with Dmitri and his friends. Virgil had a different lunch hour luckily, otherwise he would have been slightly embarrassed. But hilariously the first day he sat with Dee, his friends were caught off guard as a boy in soft pastels and stonewashed jeans sat beside Dmitri and was immediately nestled underneath his arm. There were words signed across the table and Dee would chuckle and respond which sent their eyes flying to Roman in his seat as he ate his sandwich oblivious to the reason he was being stared at, just sending kind smiles back at them.

When lunch had ended, he had stood on his toes and kissed Dee’s cheek and his friends all had the shocked looks on their faces again. He ran off to class and had forgotten about the whole interaction afterwards. He was only reminded after school through a text from Dee.

‘sorry about my friends at lunch, they're judgmental shits. I told them off but knowing them they might continue to be asshats anyways’

‘huh. Didn’t even notice. I really need to get around to fully learning sign, I have the smallest feeling that if I'm hanging out with you more it might possibly be useful.’

‘meh, if I really need you to know something and I can’t talk I’ll just text you.’

‘mmm but I still want to learn! Anyways what were they saying’

‘oh they were being dicks about your clothes and then they were being shits about me dating you, they're assholes, I only hang out with them cuz coach had everyone learn sign for me and they're the only people I can talk to during the school day’

‘oh, that’s rude! Do you want me to stop hanging out with you at lunch?’

‘no not at all, I just want you to know what you're getting into’

‘mhm!’

The next time Roman sat with them, he had sent about 8 insults to the people around the table while Dee wasn’t looking, essentially ‘fuck off you judgmental homophobic dicks’ and after that the group shut their traps about him and Dee.

 The week after, Dmitri was busy almost always. There was a big game this weekend and he Remy and Virgil were always either practicing, doing schoolwork, or sleeping for the most part. He would send good morning and good night texts but that was mostly it and Roman felt dumb for missing him so much. Virgil invited him to practice after seeing him sitting around staring at his phone like a kicked dog.

He had sat on the bleachers, watching the coach drill them and them playing near their best. They had taken a rest and Dmitri had made his way up to him, a giant bottle of water in hand. He smiled and let out a croaked hello.

“oh, Dmitri when was the last time you spoke?”

He had coughed and held up a 6 on his fingers. Roman pouted and placed a kiss on his chapped lips. Dmitri waved his hand to say it isn't a problem with a smile on his face and it made Roman pout more and kiss him again, wrapping his arms around himself after. Dee ruffled his hair and went to say something when the whistle blew calling them back. He sighed and stood up, signing ‘I love you’ before rushing back to the field. Roman sat in silence, watching them play once again.

 Roman was beaming. The game was today and that meant he would get Dmitri back afterwards along with Remy and Virgil. He was filled with jitters; he knows the team had been working tirelessly for the whole week and he was excited to see his friends kick the rival schools butt! He was rushing Patton out the door again, just like he was a few weeks before but for a separate reason this time.

He wasn’t expecting the time at the game to fly as quick as it did, but here he was. It was nearing the end and they weren’t very far ahead, and the worry was clear on the teams faces. And then Dmitri had the ball! The crowd roared in surprise and excitement as he weaved around the opposition. He got caught near the goal and Roman was on the edge of his seat as Dmitri kicked the ball straight into the goal. The cheers were immediate, the buzzer signaling the end of the game followed a few seconds later. Roman was up and standing at the edge of the guardrail of the bleachers jumping up and down and screaming. He raced down and met Dmitri at the entrance of the showers, looking around before tugging him off towards the underside of the bleachers. He spoke in barely restrained squeals.

“Dee I'm so proud of you!!! Oh, my goodness you did so well!!! I can’t even-”

Dmitri cut him off with a kiss, one that Roman reciprocated immediately, wrapping his arms around his neck and tilting his head as well as he could with the height difference they had when suddenly he wasn’t standing on his own feet but being held in the air from his waist. He broke the kiss with a squeak, placing his hands-on Dmitri's shoulders as he was hoisted in the air by a happy Dee. He squeaked again as he was spun around before being set on the ground. When he was steady again, he looked up at Dmitri with an amused but confused face.

“we did it”

“you did! Had you not processed that yet?”

“not really no.”

“oh, my goodness you are a dork.”

“listen if you had scored the last goal you would be a little stunned too”

“valid however-”

“oh, just shut up and kiss me again you prep”

“gladly”

“ey before you two start making out you might want to go talk to the team? They're sort of wanting to congratulate you, but you disappeared.”

Roman froze in embarrassment at his brother catching them. Dmitri just smirked and turned to face him.

“listen if any of them could get a significant other they would understand. But considering that even you haven’t gotten the nerve to ask out Remy yet, I guess they wouldn’t so I guess I should grace them with my presence, huh babe?”

“hey, fuck off my little brother didn’t need to know I like your brother!”

“oops!”

Roman giggled a bit at the blush that spread across Virgil's face. He nudged Dmitri.

“be nice honeybee. And he's right, I stole you from your festivities! We should head back over; we can be cute later”

“nonsense, that implies that you can stop being cute”

“bluhhhh that’s my brotherrrrr come on you two, be gross later”

 “DMITRI THAT WAS LEGENDARY!!!”

Dee had a cocky look on his face as his teammates congratulated him, Remy running up and tackling in a hug at first sight. He chuckled wordlessly at his brother who was screaming praise at him and then dragging him into the showers. The team followed them in all continuing to shout praise and Roman contemplated following as well. He eventually just went in after about 10 minutes, finding Dmitri surrounded by his team and. He blanched and turned around a corner, hiding his face in his hands. On the other side, Dmitri sat with blue jeans and no shirt, still dripping water from his hair. He took a few big breaths before wandering back over, not trying to push past anyone and just standing where he knew Dmitri could see him. He flushed when Dmitri smiled and winked at him over the heads of his teammates, curling up in his arms and covering his face again. He whispered to himself in his hands

“gosh I'm really gay and he's unfairly pretty”

It wasn’t much longer before the group had filed out, done with the celebration, Virgil given him a nudge as he left. He walked in, seeing Dmitri finally pulling out his shirt, and Roman couldn’t help but turn away with a bit of shyness hitting him again.

“what's up Roman? You good babe?”

“mhm! You just um,”

His mouth felt dry as salt and he was wondering when that happened.

“you look nice…”

“pfft you're a nerd.”

Roman’s mind came up with several scenarios for what could happen as he stood up to kiss him. Of course, all that happened was hands around his waist as Dee leant down to give him an easier time. He still felt fuzzy but ignored it as Dmitri pulled away to put his shirt on, quickly pulling on his leather jacket on afterwards before placing a kiss on Roman’s temple and grabbing his hand.

“come on, I'm stealing you, my folks are treating the team to ice cream and pizza and they’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“wh-what? Wait you talk about me with your parents?”

“Remy sold me out day one, but yeah, they seem genuinely interested in meeting you, so I mean why not?”

“oh. Ok then. I should probably tell my dads first, but I’ll be back!”

He ran up to Logan, wrapping him in a hug before explaining everything to him and Patton. Logan looked unsure but Patton backed him up.

“Lolo, Virgil's going to be there too, and it’s not like he's going to be stranded! Plus, there's a new diner that opened a bit ago that I've been wanting to take you to!”

“…ok. You have your keys and your wallet and your phone, right?”

“yes dad!”

“…ok then. Go have fun. Let me or pat know when you are coming home.”

“ok! See you guys tonight! Love you!!!”

 The party was far more calm than Roman had expected, most of the team dipping early on leaving just him and Virgil as guests. Neither could complain, they had free access to an abundance of pizza and ice cream, and they could spend uninterrupted time with the objects of their affections. Virgil and Remy had absconded upstairs playing games or something while Roman was sitting next to Dmitri and his parents.

“how long have you been dating now?”

“um, 2 weeks!”

“wow! And you two are already attached by the hip huh?”

Roman nodded as his cheeks burned. He felt his boyfriends arm snake around his waist, pulling him closer.

“oh, you two are adorable! We’ll leave you be, don’t have too much fun with him kiddo!”

Roman visibly relaxed as they left, leaning against his boyfriend and letting out a sigh. Dmitri moved his arm up, running his fingers through his hair, grinning at the purr like noise Roman made in response.

“you should stay the night”

“my dad wouldn’t let me do that unless-”

Virgil stormed down the stairs with a lovesick expression.

“Roman we’re staying the night!”

“oh! Does dad-”

“yeah don’t worry its fine they're chill!”

“what happened?”

“I-”

“BOY YOU BETTER GET BACK UP HERE AND KISS ME I'M HAVING KISS WITHDRAWL”

“let’s say me and Remy are a thing now? Gotta go!”

“…about what I was saying…”

“isn't that the best timing huh?”

“oh hush!”

“wanna head to bed? It is pretty late.”

“um, sure. But I wanted to cuddle some more…”

“who said I was gonna stop cuddling you nerd?”

“I? um uh”

“you can share a bed without it being sexual I hope you know.”

“oh! Oh yeah I totally, yeah duh, of course”

“come on babe”

Roman frowned at him rolling his eyes but followed him upstairs. He had walked into his room and grabbed some clothing before filing into the bathroom. When he came back, Roman had to confronts his gay again, as he was shirtless once again and he was talking to him and he's got to focus dammit!

“-so that’s why, also I have various pajamas in there, and I also have shirts that are probably way to big for you in there as well, take your pick.”

“oh um, I was just gonna sleep in this!”

“…yeah no. those jeans are way too form fitting to get away with sleeping in, and your shirt does not look nearly comfortable enough.”

“o-okay then I guess…”

He grabbed a pair of sleep shorts and one of his shirts and headed into the bathroom. When he came back, he immediately launched himself into his boyfriends’ arms. Dmitri giggled seeing the shirt choice, placing a quick kiss on his nose.

“nah you're a sarcastic butterfly”

“shhhhh I'm a sarcastic mothhhh”

“keep tellin yourself that precious”

Roman sputters a bit before giving up and hiding his face in Dee’s chest. Dmitri goes back to playing with Roman’s hair, and Roman leans into the touch. After a bit of time passes, he stops, and nudges Roman fully into bed.

“why’d you stop?”

“because that’s not a comfortable sleep position. Lay down prep, sleep is important.”

“but I don’t want to sleep, I want kisses”

Dmitri rolls his eyes and kisses Roman. By the time he pulls away, Roman has passed out. He laughs quietly and wraps his arms around the smaller boy, letting himself drift off as well.

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