#ship: butcher/riona

[compendiumofconstellations]

Question: you seem to be aware that Butcher isn’t a good friend to like…anyone and is basically incapable of having healthy relationships (and even made a post about how he personally ruined his relationships with literally everyone by the end of S3), but you also ship him with riona. Is that in an au where he’s not as massively fucked up as he is in canon or is he a shit bag who fucks her over and self sabotages and hurts her in irreparable ways too? I just…cannot imagine the him we see in canon in a relationship that’s not toxic and unhealthy at best and massively abusive at worst and want to know how you reconcile shipping him with your beloved oc with the fact that you are well aware he treats everyone in his life like trash. I’m not saying you can’t like him as a character, love an anti hero, but I just want to know how that works. Is it like dark romance or something?

Oh, it’s absolutely not a healthy relationship at all. Riona and Butcher are both aware of this; I am aware of this. Butcher constantly thinks her life would be better if she wasn’t caught up in his shit. Riona constantly recognizes that she SHOULD just leave.

But Riona’s a loyalist, and they made a pact. In this AU, Soll’s death was due to Vought, of course. And their pact was “For Soll and Becca, and for hopefully a better end for [Butcher] than [Riona] got.”

It’s even worse after Becca dies, as now Butcher is wildly codependent while also hating himself for needing her/holding her back.

Riona is absolutely susceptible to toxic relationships, and like. Butcher is a walking red flag of a human.

But I’m also an idealist and a romantic, so I have a “happy ending AU” where things go RIGHT at the end of S3, and they all get to go live happy lives and get therapy, and Butcher and Riona both work on themselves AND have couple’s therapy and put in the effort to make their relationship healthy.

I’m also probably gonna have a really fucking sad canon compliant AU that’s honestly probably gonna end with Riona alone, having finally been pushed to leave him behind, and raising their twins by herself.

It’s a time, but yes. I’m not sweeping shit under the rug, and I know that even therapy doesn’t change that he drastically fucks her up.

But Riona loves him, and she doesn’t love herself that much. She forgives him for it. He won’t, but he’s too selfish to leave.

#ooc #ship: butcher/riona #toxic relationship tw #potentially abusive relationship tw #anonymous

[asoulofstars]

RPC Dev: Micro Challenge

Tell us about a time your muse "fell"--whether physically, spiritually, or emotionally. What was the impact of that fall to their life?

Riona’s transitions with her emotions have never been easy. She was taught that love is absolutely conditional, and it makes her want to hide it. But, as we all know, Riona is the least subtle person on the planet. However, we’re gonna talk about the happy side of her falling in love with various ships I have, because the happy side of things is important.

My current hyperfixations are Star Trek and The Boys, so why don’t we start with those AUs and my Karl Urban boys?

Riona in her Kelvin Timeline Star Trek AU falls in love with Len both quickly and very slowly. He’s so genuinely kind to her in their first meeting, and it makes her heart flutter. He listens, too, and that’s huge. He shows her in a matter of minutes, and then a matter of hours, that he really cares about her and what she has to say. So, she falls quickly. He’s charming; he’s attractive; he’s sweet. But she’s nervous and scared, and she doesn’t know how to handle that. So she just pushes it down and pushes it down over and over and over again for over six years. Even though going through Academy together meant constantly interacting; they were pretty close friends, had weekly study sessions, and Len got involved in weekly girls’ nights with Riona and her other friends (Uhura, Chapel, Gaila, and Anna). And then they worked on the Enterprise together, side by side in MedBay, and even when Riona was on Science Officer duties, Len was often on the bridge, anyways. And then Away Missions, they were always together there, too. And she learns his quirks, and she learns what his smiles mean. She knows how to read him with only a glance. She makes changes and patterns in her own life for him. (Collecting real chocolate to give to him on Valentine’s Day instead of replicated chocolate is a must.) She fell so quickly, but she keeps falling every single day as she gets to learn something new about him or see him work or experience his warmth. And it all culminates in her nearly getting killed herself, and she falls again so hard that when he finally admits to her how he feels and proposes, which is huge for a faerie, she is ready to say yes. And that process of falling changed so much for her, because she had to actively come to terms with a relationship she knew would end with loss, because she is immortal (mostly, anyways) and he isn’t.

On the flip side of that, there’s Riona’s relationship with Billy Butcher in The Boys. She goes into this relationship knowing that it comes with an expiration date, knowing that she’s never going to have him. He is looking for his wife, Becca, and he tells her that from the day they meet. But neither of them expected what would come next. Riona falls for him quickly, as she does with everyone. They have a lot in common. They’re both the older siblings; they both lost a little brother. They both had shitty, abusive parent(s). They both hold the weight of the world on their shoulders, carry a guilt that they shouldn’t have to bear. Butcher is softer with Riona, for these reasons. She receives the kindness he won’t show himself. And that means that she falls for him, hard and fast, even though she knows that he is completely emotionally unavailable. He’s charming, when he wants to be anyways; he’s attractive; he has this passion and drive that she finds unbelievably sexy. He is like her, giving all of himself, unable to do anything less. And she knows that he’s going to burn himself out in the end, that this ends badly in almost all possible outcomes. But she can’t help it. And she bleeds herself dry for him, because she can’t stand to think that he would be alone. Because he’s the piece of her that she knows she should forgive and cherish, but she can’t do that to herself, so she tries to hold him close. And—in a very non-canon compliant AU—she does end up being able to hold onto him. They get married and have twins, and they’re able to be together and heal. It means a lot to both of them to have this experience, and falling in love with each other meant having the capacity to see those things in themselves that they couldn’t treat the way they should, but they treated each other right for those reasons.

#rpcdev #a little bit of stardust (headcanons) #you have stardust in your veins (about) #otp: more scared of losing you #otp: working things out

[compendiumofconstellations]

Anon, I am really curious about what brought that ask on when I KNOW I only had one post tagged as Butcher/Riona, and I don’t really recall mentioning them being a thing on the dash.

I mean, it’s not a huge leap, as I ship Riona with a lot of my canons, and y’all know I’m very in love with Karl Urban.

But, while Riona/Butcher is probably my most toxic and unhealthy ship, I’m just curious why this one caused an ask out of my vast history of “Riona does not have great taste in men”. Like. To the point where it’s a running joke on my blogs.

And even then, I enjoy a lot of ships that are canon/canon and have a level of codependency that makes them not the most healthy, even if they aren’t necessarily toxic. (AOS McKirk, Shus, Skate—especially post S6, canon Billy/Becca in The Boys!)

If you think it’s different because Riona is basically a piece of my soul, then you’d be wrong. I’ve actually been wanting to explore Riona’s susceptibility to toxic relationships, because her loyalty and her immediate “ride or die” mentality can be a huge flaw as well as a strength.

Yes, I love my healthy, fluffy, good ships. But even those are shades of gray. People are always shades of gray. And I like exploring the less healthy side of things, too.

#ooc #about mun