#so that i will never feel like it’s valid for me to mourn

[dalliancekay]

Aziraphale does NOT need to suffer MORE

Can't believe I have to say this. TW: grief, mourning, death (sorry) I have, since falling into the fandom 6 months ago to escape real life, seen many takes on how Aziraphale needs to suffer in S3 to match Crowley's suffering. Mainly as the counterpart to the moment Crowley thinks he lost Aziraphale as he's looking for him desperately in the burning bookshop.

Then drinks, we suppose, to dull his pain, waiting for the Armageddon. Also, the way Crowley suffers at the bandstand argument, the 'I Forgive You' moments, which many people find utterly devastating and incredibly heartless from Aziraphale. Not to mention when he doesn't react in the 'right way' to Crowley's confession in the Final 15. And then on top of that, 'abandons' Crowley. Oh and also for, and I quote: "The smug and entitled way Aziraphale went around in S2 assuming Crowley would love and follow him everywhere." And for all this pain that Crowley endured for him, Aziraphale should suffer in S3, to I assume, even out the scores. Some people want to see him lose it, show his emotions, to cry or beg or otherwise show how much he misses Crowley and how very sorry he is for what he's done.

Now for the TW grief content I motioned above. You can skip to the next sentence in bold.

WE ALL SUFFER DIFFERENTLY I was on holiday late September last year, visiting my mum, stepfather and my two younger brothers. We went to a cousin's wedding. It was great. The day after, as I was hanging out reading a book my mum got a call. The kind of call every mother fears. My youngest brother (he was 27) died in an accident. We needed to speak to police and the coroner. She cried and cried. She's still crying. She asks questions. She gets no answers. I did not cry. I talked to the police. I googled a funeral home. I bought my brother his last set of clothes. He lived in a hoodie and torn black jeans. Mum wanted a suit. But he died in the one he bought for the wedding. I texted a lot of people. I bought snacks for the many friends who came to the funeral and wanted to speak to us after. My grief feels like a vice. I am not sad. I do not appear sad. Contrary to what people expect. But I am ANGRY. I am furious. But nobody can see this. I am not fine and I wish no one would ever* ask how I was again. TW/Personal content over. Since I was small (because I am weird like that) I genuinely wondered if, finding myself in danger, I could scream like people in films do. I don't think I could. I cope with hard situations, fear and stress and anxiety by shutting down, sometimes by retreating too, by furiously trying to find a way out. And I think Aziraphale does the same. And that's why I love him so much. And why I feel get him and understand that people sometimes can't tell how much he's actually feeling. I also express love the way Aziraphale does - by organising things for people I love, inviting them places, making plans. When Crowley said you call me for three things (and it's basically any old reason) I felt SO SEEN. This is what I would do with a friend who I know is feeling unmoored, sad, stuck. I'd text them with any old thing. I'd never actually say I love you, how can I help though, I would try to get them to talk, meet me, go somewhere. Aziraphale does not express emotions the same way as Crowley.

But his emotions are valid nonetheless. He is worried for Crowley from around 3 minutes into their acquaintanceship. And he NEVER stops worrying.

And are we quite sure he has never lost Crowley?

How many times did Aziraphale's heart freeze in horror when he realised Hell has taken Crowley and he had no idea if he'll ever come back and what is happening to him?

How did Aziraphale spent the night after vanquishing the demons and starting a war? He had no idea where Crowley was. He was probably sick with worry that Hell just took him away. We didn't see him drink, but surely, the worry must have been overwhelming. The wait for what will happen.

ALL his worries over the Arrangement. Was he worried for himself? Do we really think that?

Crowley thought he lost Aziraphale in S1, yes, we saw that. And what happened to the angel then?

He got blown into atoms which I bet wasn't pleasant and when he arrives in Heaven he limps. Why is he hurt? Why is he quickly pretending he isn't? Why is he always hiding how he feels? Also, he immediately deserts, wants no part in the Holy War and quickly finds an extremely unconventional way to get back. It's not a grand gesture, he doesn't deliberate, doesn't worry that he will Fall (although surely that must have been what he thought), there's no pomp around it, he thinks it and then does it. No hesitation.

Is this coming from an angel who just can't leave Heaven behind and longs to be a part of it? Who loves to follow rules? And let's not forget in those moments Aziraphale thought Crowley was most likely gone. That he probably left for Alpha Centauri. Last he heard from him he was told he was talking to an old friend and had no time for him. Why we NEVER talk about how that might have felt for Aziraphale?

Things are not as simple as Aziraphale has been supressing his emotions and lying to himself about how he feels and he should get over it and become free. That's not how this works. He was suppressing his emotions OUT OF LOVE. His main goal was always to keep Crowley safe. They simply couldn't run away or hoodwink Heaven and Hell. They had nowhere to go. They had no hope and yet they kept loving each other. That's courage. I know we all grew up with Romeo and Juliet and Heathcliff and Cathy and we FORGOT that those were CAUTIONARY tales. And this is not what Aziraphale wants for them. He would never allow himself to go so fast he would hurt Crowley. He feels guilty enough for agreeing to the Arrangement and for meeting Crowley at all when he knows they can be discovered and punished at any point. And Crowley knows it and RESPECTS it. He does not tolerate Aziraphale's decision to not go on a date and to hell with circumstances. He understands Aziraphale's reasoning and he respects Aziraphale's decision. Don't forget, they have NO POWER. They can't change Heaven and Hell. They can't stop believing in God and work on their religious trauma. Their Heaven and Hell are real places with real power and they BELONG to them. Aziraphale's trauma and his personality are deeply intertwined and he'd probably never be the kind of person who is open in showing their grief or stress. He will learn to be more open, I' sure. With his love especially, we see him reaching for and touching his demon in S2. Openly being with him, looking at him without guarding himself. They got a little bit of freedom for themselves despite ALL odds. So. Just because Aziraphale is not crying and screaming and I dunno, tearing his hair out or whatever some people would have him do, does not mean he isn't overflowing with pain, fear, uncertainty, doubts, worries, and so much anxiety that if he let it all out, half of the solar system would turn to ashes.

Aziraphale does not need to suffer in S3 to level out Crowley's suffering. They are, unfortunately, equal in their pain as they are in love. If there is one thing Crowley would never abide, it'd be this take from the fandom. * One more note on grief: (obviously from my personal experience) As initiated by @anthony-crowleys-left-nut in a comment

It's not that I mind to know people care and worry etc, but asking how I am can only end in me lying (fine, thank you) and both of us knowing it's not really true and feeling awkward or not lying (I feel like shit, mostly cos I can't sleep and think the world is a stupid unfair place) and both of us feeling awkward anyway. Does that make sense? I wish I could tell friends/colleagues to ask what I've been up to or something similar instead. What I've been reading (um, AO3, but I'll make something up), watching, do I want to go see some spring flowers bloom (I do).

#aziraphale #good omens #crowley #aziracrow #ineffable husbands #neil gaiman #ineffable divorce #aziraphale my beloved #good omens thoughts #aziraphale defense squad #suffering in silence #grief #tw grief #dealing with grief #loss #tw death #kaypost

[steddietogo]

So. This is my own take on Steddie meet cute at the Grammys (gets a little thirsty in the middle for a second so warning I guess??)

———

The buzzing in his veins feel too much to contain in Eddie’s body, his cheeks ache from grinning too hard. He grabs Jeff by the shoulders to shake him and Jeff takes it without complain, too busy floating in his own cloud nine to do anything about it. All four of them are.

They’re being carted off from one interview to another, it’s all hazy in his mind, all he can think of is that they won a fucking Grammy.

“We’re here backstage with Corroded Coffin with their first ever Grammy from the best rock performance category,” the interviewer is saying, then he turns to face the band, and shit. Eddie has to sling an arm over Gareth to keep himself upright. “So how are you guys feeling right now?”

“It feels very validating to get the recognition for all our hard work—” and everything else Jeff says barely registers. Eddie is staring, he’s distantly aware of it. But he should hardly be blamed. The man before him is dressed in a deep caramel suit, jacket cinching around a trim waist and bubble gum pink lips stretched in a smile as he diligently listens to what his band has to say.

“— and Eddie, he’s really put his heart and soul in this song in particular,” the mention of his name unceremoniously drags him back to the land of the living where his bandmates know him too well and are actively trying to sabotage him before the sexy interviewer. Gareth is innocently blinking up at Eddie with his I’ve-never-done-anything-wrong-in-my-life eyes, urging him to speak.

“Um,” Um? Seriously? “Mob Mentality is an especially significant song to me personally—” Eddie’s given this spiel a hundred times, not that any word of it is untrue, but the practiced response lets him zone out just the right amount to fully drown himself in the shade of hazel of the interviewer’s eyes, imagine them looking up at Eddie from between his thighs, full of tears— goddamnfuckstopit.

The man must notice, because there’s a gorgeous smattering of pink dusting his cheeks Eddie could swear wasn’t there before.

After, Eddie is pretty much bodily dragged away from there, legs refusing to carry him away. He twists even as he’s walking, desperate to keep the man within his sights for even just a second longer. To keep him looking at Eddie, which by some miracle, he still is. And like an idiot Eddie waves, wiggling his fingers at him.

The man raises his own hand in return, and then he’s turning away, leaving Eddie to mourn the loss of his attention. But then he hears it— Steve. The camera guy calls him Steve. Sexy interviewer’s name is Steve. That in itself would be enough to sustain Eddie’s daydreams for some time.

———

Predictably, its all over social media the very next day. Or more accurately there’s one particular clip circling the net like there’s no tomorrow.

Eddie Munson simping for hot guy at the Grammys.

The comments were the worst (best) part. Eddie hasn’t dated since coming out to the public. And the fact that most of the comments people have about him openly showing interest in another man is just nonchalance or excitement makes him feel much better about it.

Eddie’s heart skips as he sees the face from last night in the clip, looking even more gorgeous than in his dreams if it were even possible. And then there is also Eddie in those clips, practically undressing him with his eyes, right there in public. He looks like he wants to open him up and lick him like melted chocolate in a wrapper.

Eddie was so screwed.

———

Top comments:

user 80085: that man is stronger than me because I don’t think I’d survive Eddie Munson looking at me like that

CorrodedFC: Eddie Munson Rendered momentarily speechless? by an interviewer?? More likely that you think

you_call_me_munson: they need to date. Right this second or I’m stealing one of the hotties for myself

———

Part II

#steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things fanfiction #famous eddie munson #steddie Grammys edition

[queenofmalkier]

Moiraine being 70 vs 40

(Alright this one took me a minute because corralling my thoughts is a challenge in the best of times.)

To begin with I will admit... I am one of the people who was indifferent towards the age change in the beginning. They're Aes Sedai, they live nice, long lives, and I wasn't like, emotionally attached to a younger, canon-aged Moiraine. It does make her early years more poignant, but I'll touch on that later.

Primed for older Moiraine, the show started and after two seasons I can safely say I am so gung-ho for 70 year old Moiraine I might actually be feral.

Here's why I, personally, think it was an excellent choice: Rosamund Pike is 44 as of writing this, so she visibly fits into the book age. As an audience nobody is really questioning her age - a few show-onlys I watched season 1 with actually remarked on how refreshing it was to see an older female character allowed to just exist and be part of the narrative without trying to sex up and/or grandma-ize the role.

Little Did They Know.

So you've got an audience that's mostly accepting of this character being in her 40s, and then you hit them with "Oh she's 70 and lets explore just how horrific that fact actually is together, it'll be fun!"

It was not fun, it was gutting.

One of my main critiques of the book has always been how we have these long-lived women, powerful women... but we never really take much of a look at the reality of that concept. Nor are we given POV characters who are really old enough to remark on it. Pevara at least thinks about her family, but Cadsuane doesn't give two figs about hers.

And here's the thing... they're Aes Sedai, but they're still human. What happens to them as they get older, but the people who fill their life are the ones aging? How does it feel to watch a mother, a sister, a child, friends, acquaintances, EVERYONE succumb to time in a way you won't for a very long time after?

That has to be impactful and I wanted to see those stories - and the show delivered. Seeing Moiraine with Anvaere? Chilling, horrifying, heartbreaking. Liandrin and her boy? A kick in the teeth. Even Alanna with her family, knowing very well she's probably the oldest one sitting at that table.

The point is, being an Aes Sedai means being powerful and respected, but it also means living through a very specific kind of suffering and trauma. They're basically vampires in terms of lifespan and we should see how that shapes them.

In regards to Moiraine being older and therefore not basically a child during the foretelling, it does change that particular hit... but by no means did the show let the viewers not understand how that moment altered Moiraine's life forever.

Instead of her being sort of an unformed girl hardened and honed by a lifetime of searching for Rand, one who never got much chance to be anything else, we get a woman who was already beginning to build her life, who had achieved the shawl, found love, and was exactly where she wanted to be.

And then all of that is taken from her.

It's devastating to watch the double-barreled whammy of Siuan and Moiraine giggling about being fishwives and walking into what was in many ways their deaths. Because the Moiraine and Siuan they were before walking into that room were gone forever. They would never be able to go back to the women they were before. They never even had a chance to mourn that loss. Moiraine went hunting and Siuan set her sights on the Amyrlin Seat.

I do understand for a lot of people her age is a sticking point, and that is completely fair and valid! It's a change that I fully agree did not need to be made... but by making that change we're given such a stark insight into the lives of older Aes Sedai who are just beginning to experience what it means to outlive everyone they know, watching one by one as cherished friends and family members pass on.

Soon all they have left are the children and grandchildren of those people, fractured mirrors that are just enough of a hint at the original that it must be painful to know them - which explains even further why so many Aes Sedai cut off contact entirely with their families. It's too painful to keep them in their lives.

#wheel of time #wheel of time tv series #wheel of time book spoilers #moiraine damodred #can i make it work responses

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for changing my (30 FtM) name?

I was born with a very angrogynous/masculine name. For the sake of this post we'll say it's Alex Andrew Lastname. I was bullied for it growing up and can often see on people's faces that they were expecting someone different when they see my name first. I never liked my name growing up because I didn't think I fit the vibe. I'm just not an "Alex". But honestly, if I ever fully pass, that could change.

I recognize I've hit the trans guy jackpot. I've seen quite a few trans men change their names to my birth name, first and middle. Logically, I'd never have to change it for safety or validation reasons.

I've been using a different name for years now. My partner of 10 years doesn't know me by another name and cringes when we have to use Alex for legal paperwork. This name has been public knowledge to everyone including my family for about 8 years. We'll say this new name is "Elijah" (it is not)

The problem arises when I bring up my final legal name choice to my mom.

"Why that? I would have never named you that. I don't think it suits you." I double down and explain I like the name and don't mind the religious connotation (we went to church but she's always appropriated eastern religions, I am not religious) Additionally, SHE should have been using it all this time, even when I'm not there. She complains. "Can't I still call you Alex? I mean, I gave birth to you, I should still be able to call you Alex. I gave you that name because it was androgynous and cool, why do you want to change it?" I tell her again, no. If she's the only person deadnaming me, other people will feel they have the right to. "Can I call you Al?" No, sorry. "Can I call you Andrew? I named you after your uncle, he didn't do anything wrong."

Because she's pushing back so much, I tell her the truth. Growing up, she was abusive and negligent. When she did use my name, she said it like she hated me. When I was in trouble, when she was disagreeing with me, when she bullied me. She didn't really say my name in rare situations where she was proud because she was jealous and focused on making sure everyone knew I was cool and "unique" because I was "her kid". Because of it, I cringe when I hear my birth name. It's a strong name, a good name, even, but it makes me feel small and tired. I told her I was proud of her going to therapy, that we could start over, but that I'm asking to be respected as a person.

Shortly after I was born, she asked my grandma to draw up a tattoo of my deadname. It's a large, dark piece on her entire lower back. I told her I don't expect her to cover it, that she can keep it and mourn the name however she feels, but I'd like to get a matching, small tattoo with her to celebrate my new name if she's interested. She didn't really respond. She finally said she still doesn't like the name Elijah, but asked if she could call me Eli (yeah, obviously)

Despite all of this reaching some sort of compromise, I've heard I've made a bad decision from both sides. Some think I was too gentle and understanding and should have essentially said "fuck you this is my name take it or leave it". Others think I should have kept my deadname because there was nothing wrong with it, I'm being too emotional about it, or that I'm choosing to inconvenience others by changing things age 30. There's also the idea that no one really likes their name so it's not a great reason to change it.

AITA for having no real reason to change my name and doing so anyway?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[awarmbowlofhomemadesoup]

How to Build Resilience in Long Fanfic Writing

Sometimes, when a fanfic goes past 20 chapters, people who had been commenting, began to lose interest. Maybe you'll start doubting your skill or whether you "have what it takes" to be a writer, even if you're doing it for fun.

But maybe you see all those beautifully written but unfinished long fics and mourn that they'll never be finished (for the writer's valid reason or another). And you don't want that to happen to yours.

There is also an advantage to completing long fics: you develop the discipline to write original novels which can take far longer.

So if you're in for the long haul and you want to stay steady and true despite whatever popularity your fic may have, here's how to have the resilience to finish it to the end.

(Disclaimer: this is not a reason to stop commenting on fics)

#1 Whatever You Think You're Owed, Let It Go.

Accidentally quoting Elsa aside, I'm talking about comments. Comments validate and can make you learn new things about your fics through other people's eyes.

But when you see a high-to-low ratio between kudos and comments, you may feel like you are owed.

When you push yourself to complete three long chapters and publish them all in the same day and only get one response, it can feel like people are being mean.

The truth is, we'll never know why the people who loved our fics will not talk to you about them.

Maybe they forget there's a person behind the fic.

Maybe they're having a bad day and just want to shut down after reading something enjoyable.

But whatever the case is, it's beyond your control.

This post said it best (shoutout to @radioactive-earthshine) :

"Remember - hits/likes/kudos/comments are not reflective of the quality of your fic or your ability to write. Most people just don’t comment - even if they say they do, they don’t... Even if your fic brought tears to their eyes and it haunted them for weeks and they printed it out and sent it to their friends they just don’t comment. You just have to accept it.

I'm not saying you force yourself to let it go now. But someday, you will need to let it go, and control what you can which is you.

#2 Put Your Life First Before Your Readers

I have to say this because sometimes writers would have thoughts like "I haven't written for a long time; people must be wondering about it." Nope. Stop. Not worth it.

Creating is fun, but it is also exhausting. Add into the fact that most of us have 8-hour jobs or classes.

The reason you haven't written for a long time is that other aspects of your life deserve your time and energy, too. And after all that, you would be understandably tired.

So put your life first before your readers.

#3 Make Preparations to Replenish Your Soul

Long fanfic writing is energy and time-consuming. But you cannot depend on external validation to make up for it.

External validation in the form of comments can be good because we don't want to imagine it's all in our heads. But seeking it too much leads to what I've read in the book, "Ego is the Enemy":

"If outside validation is your only source of nourishment, you will hunger for the rest of your life."

So before posting a chapter, list down what you can do to replenish your soul after. Treating myself to a cafe one time helped. So is taking walks when the air is cool.

To stop anticipating responses too much, what works for me is to post on Wednesday. Wednesday is when people are less busy. At the same time, when the weekend comes, I don't obsess over it so much and can focus on other aspects of my life or replenish my energy for the next week.

In the commitment to complete a long fic, it's important to be honest with yourself. This is to be transparent with your needs and watch out for any signs of burnout, like feeling sad and tired. If you need to walk away from your fic for a while, then do it.

#3 This is Between You and Your Creation

Yes, fandom should be two-way street. Yes, fandom shouldn't treat fanfics and fan arts like commodity. And yes, there should be interaction and engagement. But before all that, there is this thing between you and your creation first and foremost.

Just as a story has to have a "why", remember why you thought you should write your long fic. Your reason may change over time, but when you remember your "why", you remember your true goal to keep going.

#4 Write like No One is Reading

This is a perk I adapted when I only get two responses if I'm lucky after updating a fic that has more than a hundred subscribers. If people barely react, then you're free to write whatever you please in your story as if you're dancing like no one is watching. Just have fun improving your skills.

This is similar to an inspiring section of the same post that I've found:

"10.) Write for yourself, not for others. Write the fic you know no one is going to read. Write the fic that sounds ridiculous. You will be so happy you put it out in the world and there will be people who will be glad it exists."

#5 Cherish the Rare Friends You Find Along the Way

Sometimes, we get lucky and get something better than a hundred people interacting with our fic -we find a friend we would make in the way of writing the long fic that we dared to write. And they're the ones who would cheer you on and cry and laugh with you about the shared stories. Cherish them.

(dedicated to @lightreader1)

#archive of our own #ao3 #fanfiction #fanfic #fanfiction.net #ao3 fanfic #fic

[harrygoeswest]

Love Aged Like Fine Wine

Harry is drunk and lost not too far from home, and there's only one person he wants to call to rescue him.

A/N: Hello everyone 👋🏼 it has been a loooong time since I posted anything on Tumblr, and I was admittedly reluctant to do so. However, I reblogged the lovely Sarah's (@harry-on-broadway) fic challenge the other day and it inspired me, and I would be doing a disservice to write the whole thing and never look at it again, especially since I quite like it. SO, I give you my first one shot in over a year. Bear with me, I'm a bit rusty... Special mention as always to Miss Liz (@all-things-fic) for reading and validating me.

I'm using prompts 14 & 19.

Trigger Warnings: Absolutely nothing (apart from the odd f word)

Word Count: 6533

~~~

“What do you want, Harry?”

An offended scoff was his initial response. “Not a very nice way t’greet y’best friend.”

He was right, it wasn’t. “You’re not my best friend.”

“Ouch. Though’ we were besties ‘n now y’makin’ me feel sad.”

Harry was slurring more than he usually did. I feared if he tried to say obviously, ‘overshly’ would turn into a soft, deep single syllable alike to the word ‘shush’. It wasn’t particularly late to warrant his level of drunkenness. Especially on a Tuesday evening. Chewsday, if you will.

“Harsh truths are easier to take when you’re drunk.” I said, shrugging as if he could see the action.

“Why’re y’bein’ so ‘orrible?” He whined.

“Why are you calling me pissed as a fart at 8:45 on a Tuesday night and ruining my bath time?”

“‘S there some space lef’ in the bathtub?”

“Don’t make it weird.” I grimaced. “What’s going on?”

He produced an incoherent mumble. I heard the rain get heavier, both on the phone call and outside my house.

“What was that?”

“M’st…”

“Aye?” I asked, my face surely a bewildered picture.

“I’m lost.” He huffed, agitated.

I sat up in the bath, water and suds sloshing around me. “Lost?”

“Yes.”

“W-,” words failed me, and I barked out a sharp laugh. “How are you lost?”

“How does anyone else get lost?” He said, stroppy.

“Wow, you really are drunk.”

He hummed, but it was a defeated noise. “C’ya come ‘n get me?”

“How am I supposed to come and get you if you don’t know where you are?”

“Well I was only at The Holly Bush.”

I laughed twice as hard that time. Put in perspective, The Holly Bush is no more than a ten minute walk from Harry’s house. “How long have you been walking?”

“‘Bout ‘alf an hour.” He muttered.

Now I was really howling, like a hyena on laughing gas. “Jesus Christ, Harry!”

“‘S not funny!”

“On the contrary, years of comedy begs to differ.”

He practically cried my name down the phone. “‘M really tired ‘n cold ‘n… weh,” I think he meant wet, “please come get me.”

I took a deep breath and mourned my premature bath. “Fine. But do not move from wherever you are.”

“Won’t.”

I stood up and watched water and soap suds cascade down my body with a pout. “What can you see?”

“Er…” a pause followed, I assumed for his vacant thoughts. “‘S like a lot of trees.”

I rolled my eyes. “That could literally be any part of the Heath, mate. Say more words.”

“I can’t see shit! It’s dark and it’s pissing it down!”

“Don’t get arsey or you can stay there and drown in rain water.” I warned him. “Find a road sign. Or a street name.”

He grunted. After no more than fifteen seconds he produced, “Platt’s Lane.”

“Alright, I know where that is. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Thank you.” He said. At least I think that’s what he said.

I murmured a little, “Sure,” and then hung up. 

I dressed quickly in the easiest clothes I could find - a pair of tie-dye jogging bottoms, an old t-shirt and a crewneck over the top. I pulled on the first pair of trainers I could find and ran out to my car whilst fighting the rain. I also took a towel with me. My hair was still in the bun I’d put it up in for my bath.

It was really battering it down now - it was loud inside the car and the windows were steamed up. It was even louder when I turned the air conditioning on to defog the windows.

Once I could see outside the front and back windows I finally made my way to find Harry. I still mourned my bath as I drove - I missed how warm it was and how comfortable I had been. Now I was out in the cold and wet to rescue my drunken idiot friend.

It didn’t take me very long to find said drunken idiotic friend. He was sitting on a yellow grit box under some trees at the junction of Platt’s Lane and West Heath Road. He was soaking, shoulders slumped and looking at the floor. I pulled up as close to him as possible and leaned over to push the door open.

“Get in, you moron!” I called.

Harry looked up at the sound of my voice. He leapt to his feet almost immediately after, and staggered his way over to my little car. He nearly tripped over twice on his way, and he hit his head as he sat down.

“Fucking hell.” I muttered. “Look at the state of you.”

He grumbled, readjusting his sodden jacket, and then looked right at me. His hair was drenched, water dripping from his neck down his arms and chest, and his forehead down his nose and cheeks.

“Here,” I threw the towel at him. “You’re gonna make my car smell.”

“‘S tha’ the wors’ a’ya problems?” He asked, a snide tone laced in his mushy words.

“I wish it was.”

I pulled off again as Harry began to attempt to dry himself off, although I feared a towel would do very little to help him. Fortunately we were only a mere five minute drive from his house anyway. He probably could have walked home faster if he were sober. 

It was a relatively quiet drive since Harry spent most of it rubbing my towel over every available inch of his body. He did however sing along to the one song he heard playing, but he didn’t quite have the same masterful tone as usual. He even seemed quite timid.

I parked as close as possible to his front door and shut the engine off.

“Where are your keys, H?”

He gave me a dopey blink and then looked down at himself, double chin appearing accompanied with a pouty lower lip. “Dunno. On me somewhere.”

I sighed and unclipped my seatbelt, then reached over to him to feel through each of his pockets for his house keys. Of course I found them in the hardest one to reach on the inside of his jacket. He giggled while I did, like a child being tickled. I smacked him on the arm before I got out of the car.

I ran up to the front door and unlocked it, opening it so that my paralytic companion could be jettisoned inside his home as quickly as possible without getting more wet.

“Come on, then,” I said as I opened the passenger door, my shoulders hunched because the rain felt weird on my neck.

Harry practically fell out of the car at my instruction, so I lifted him up and placed his arm around my shoulder so I could manage his weight better. I kicked the car door shut behind us and walked him to the door. I realised on our little walk how unfit I was.

“‘M sorry.” He mumbled.

“It’s fine.” I said, my voice tight. It was only strained because he was heavy and I was weak.

“Didn’t even think I drank tha’ much, was only few whiskeys.”

Only a few could range anything between 3 and 30. I didn’t chide him for that. “It’s alright, Harry. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.” I meant that genuinely and not as a threat I’d be getting that level of drunk in the future just to call him to rescue me.

“Would.” He insisted.

I awkwardly held onto him as we got inside, twisting at an awkward angle to close the door and keep any more rain from getting in. Harry felt like dead weight against me.

“Ready to get upstairs?”

His affirming nod was the surest action I’d seen from him this far.

“Alright,” I took a deep breath, “let’s go.”

I made sure we navigated the stairs one at a time, because I had visions of him tripping up and cracking his head open if he tried to do anything by himself. And now, in the warmth of his massive home and up this close to him, the boy reeked of stale beer and sweat. I didn’t want to ask what he’d been doing in The Holly Bush for him to get that bad. I hadn’t seen him that wasted in a very long time.

“Meant it, y’know.” He slurred.

We were only halfway up the stairs and all I could hear was my own panting. Admittedly I was surprised he hadn’t passed out yet. 

“Meant what?” I heaved, and pushed him up the next step.

“I w’ do the same f’you.”

“I know you would.”

“Don’t even have t’ be drunk.”

“Right.”

We stopped for a minute, not at anyone’s request but Harry didn’t seem to want to move. I looked at him as he did me, and he produced this hazy-eyed, closed-lip smile. 

His woolly but content expression made me laugh. “I think it’s bed time for you, mate.”

He groaned. “Don’t call me ‘mate’.”

I frowned. “Alright. Sorry.”

When we finally reached the top of the stairs, Harry collapsed on me by way of a hug. We were standing in the middle of the hallway, his entire body somehow wrapped around mine. I was suffocating in the smell of a brewery.

“Don’t leave me.” He begged.

“I’m not… Need to get you to bed somehow.”

He pulled his head back to look at me, eyes heavy. “You can take me to bed.”

“That’s what I just said.”

He nodded repeatedly like a bobble-head figure. 

I made a face, perturbed, and nudged him in the direction of his bedroom. He nearly fell over as he turned around, and ended up palming the wall the rest of the way. I kept a hand on his back just in case.

As soon as he saw his bed he was climbing onto it, still fully clothed and in his muddy trainers.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered, reaching after him like he was a toddler, “Harry, take your shoes off.”

He laughed maniacally into his bed sheets, the muffled sound disturbing.

I huffed with a scowl and did it myself. His vans were dripping wet so I took them to the radiator and left them on top to dry. I made sure the radiator was turned on, too. The last thing Harry Styles needed was the flu again.

He was sitting up now, watching me with a warm expression. I ignored it.

“Need to take your clothes off or you’ll get a cold.”

“Yes, Miss.” He was beaming now.

The attempt at taking his t-shirt off was painful, and I ended up having to help him.

“Jeans too.”

I knew that would be more agonising to watch than the t-shirt, and I didn’t want to have to look at his bare chest for too long, so I went for a walk to the closest bathroom to get another towel. His jeans were still around his knees when I got back.

“Jesus Christ.” I said through gritted teeth, and freed his jeans from around his ankles. They were a heavy kind of damp and thudded when I put them on the floor.

“‘S cold.” He commented, staring up at me.

“I’ve just put the radiator on.” I told him, and handed him the towel. “I’ll find you some clean pants.”

I left him to dry his no doubt tacky chest and legs while I searched through his drawers for some clean underwear. I threw them at him once I’d located them.

“Where’s your laundry basket?”

“Wardrobe.” He said, voice getting gruff.

I collected his dirty clothes from off the floor again and wandered into the walk-in wardrobe attached to his bedroom. I stared at it for a while, not just because it was ginormous but also because I couldn’t believe the amount of crap in it. It was bulging with clothes - some I hadn’t seen him wear for years and others I hadn’t seen him wear at all. Ever. 

I dropped the clothes in my hand onto the overflowing basket in one of the cupboards, hating to do so because it was just adding to more chores. And then I realised that this was not my house and I would not be responsible for washing any of his clothes.

“Harry, do you want something to wear in bed if you’re cold?”

He never answered.

I peered into the bedroom to see he’d already tucked himself into bed.

“I guess not.” I muttered.

I stood next to his bed and watched him for a minute. His eyes were closed and he was breathing regularly but I couldn’t work out if he was actually asleep or just pretending to be. His eyelids looked shiny and delicate and his cheeks were dusted pink - a combination of his inebriation and being outside in the cold for so long. I could hear the radiator chugging and it was definitely warmer than it had been when we arrived.

Without thinking, still staring at him while possibly passed out like a lunatic creep, I wrapped my index finger around one of his curls and moved it out of his face.

He giggled suddenly, catching my wrist. “That tickled.”

I smacked his hand away. “I thought you were asleep, you absolute git!”

“Not yet.”

I rolled my eyes and scowled at him. “I’m goin’ home. Seeing you in bed is making me want mine.”

“Can always share mine.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I scoffed, and made a move to leave. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”

“Aye, wait!” He shouted at me.

“What?”

“I don’t want you t’ leave yet.”

“Well, I’m exhausted, and you’re about to pass out on me anyway.”

He said something that was complete and utter incoherent nonsense.

“I don’t know what you just said but I’m not changing my mind.”

He whined my name again and reached for my hand. “Please stay bit longer? Like havin’ y’here, havin’ y’around.”

“Well, that’s nice of you to say, but I still want my own bed.”

“Please?”

“No.” I stood my ground, but I took a step closer and pinched his cheek. “But I’ll come back tomorrow after work if that makes you feel better.”

“Feel better if y’stayed wi’ me now.”

“Well that’s not going to happen. Just call me if you need anything.”

“Need y’now. Need y’all the time.”

“Stop being daft.”

“‘M not bein’ daft - I mean it.”

“You are being daft. Just go to sleep - I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.”

He stressed my name and sat up. “Y’not listenin’ to me. ‘M bein’ proper serious - I want ya t’ stay wi’ me. I need y’here.”

“No, what you need is sleep.”

He scowled at me.

“I’m going to go and get you a pint of water and a paracetamol and then I’m going home. And that’s the last we’re gonna say on this, end of.”

I left the room and  found my way to the kitchen, though admittedly I did get lost on my way there since I’d only been here once before and it was a considerable amount of time ago. I did as promised and got him a pint of water and found some paracetamol in a drawer full of miscellaneous items close to the sink.

I couldn’t fathom why Harry was so needy, insobriety aside. We were friends, yes, and had been for some time, but we weren’t that close. Or perhaps we were and I just refused to admit it due to his increasing popularity and the fact that being perceived near him in the public eye terrified me. I was perfectly happy with my mundane job and my mundane life. I appreciated Harry for what he was - a friend -, and didn’t expect anything more or less from that level of our relationship. Nor had I ever, and it surprised me that he suddenly did.

Perhaps I was overthinking it all. That was likely.

I returned to Harry’s room to find him out of bed in just his pants.

“What are you doing?” I asked, putting the water and the tablets on his bedside table, trying to avoid looking at his chest.

“Need the loo.” He said without hesitation, and marched past me.

I sighed, watching after him until he was safely in the bathroom with the door closed, and then I perched on the edge of his bed with my head in my hands.

I was irritated, yes. I knew I shouldn’t be as irritated as I was, but I couldn’t help it. This was not the evening I had planned for myself. I was supposed to have an early night and go to work in the morning with a clear head and no bags under my eyes. Now I was going to look like the walking dead, and feel like it too.

I stood up again when Harry reappeared. I watched him stagger and sway across the corridor and it made me nervous. He tripped once and nearly smacked his face against the doorframe.

“Fucking hell, Harry.” I said, panicked, and reached forward to steady him.

He laughed, more a giggle of that from a small girl. “I’m so drunk.”

“I know you are. That’s why you need to get into bed.”

“I will, jus’ one more thing before I do,”

I thought he was going to start running riot around the house and I was going to have to chase after him, like a dog owner with a tyrannical pooch. But instead, he just wrapped his arms around my middle and shoved his face into the crook of my neck. His body was warm and it felt strange being this close to him when he had so little clothes on.

I let out a long breath, reciprocating it this time. “You’re a twat.”

He hummed when I stroked my hand over his damp hair. “Not very nice.”

“And yet still true.”

He grunted, but never moved a muscle. A moment of silence passed before he said anything else. “Thank you f’ comin’ to rescue me.”

“Sure, anytime.” I didn’t mean that. Or maybe I did, but I’d be bitter about it if it became a recurrence because I couldn’t stand to disappoint people who meant a lot to me.

He let me go, and I thought that was finally going to be the end of it. Instead, he took my face, quite harshly, between both of his hands until my cheeks squished. His gaze was dopey and warm again, but somehow different to last time. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Harry, that hurts.”

He ignored me. “I love you.” It sounded more like ‘ah luff you’ but that wasn’t relevant in the moment.

“Yeah, I love you too, now let go.” I was trying to pull his hands away but apparently he was still physically stronger than me even that drunk.

“No,” he shook his head at me and then brought what felt like my entire body against his chest. “I mean I really love you.”

I couldn’t see anything. I felt us begin to fall sideways, but with his strength I had absolutely no control over where we were going.

“Harry!” I screamed, still trying to fight him with no luck.

I think we hit the bed because the landing was softer than anticipated and Harry didn’t wince or flinch. That could also be attributed to the levels of alcohol in his body. He was probably majoritively quite numb.

“Y’like, my favourite person.” He said, voice much quieter now, and I could feel his nose in my hair. My face was pushed into his chest. “Want y’around all time. Rubbish a’ showin’ it but I miss y’when ‘m nor’ at home. ‘N I don’t mean everyone, I mean jus’ you.”

I was listening to him with baited breath. I’d never really been on the receiving end of ‘drunk words, sober thoughts’ - I was usually the one talking and making a fool of myself. Once I told my sister’s boyfriend (at the time) what I really thought of him in front of our entire family after keeping my mouth shut for so long. They broke up the next day and she came to live with me for a month. I felt almost paralysed now listening to Harry.

“Mus’ think ‘m nuts ‘cause I’ve never said anythin’ before, bur’m scared. You’re a scary woman.”

I tried not to take offence to that, even though it was likely true. I had tried for the longest time to give off a very ambiguous aura. I didn’t want anyone to know me, least not the real me. I liked the illusion of being dead inside even if I was far from it.

“Loved y’ for so long now I can’ ‘ide it anymore.” He was really slurring now and words were about to fail him. Somehow, he was still holding onto me. “‘M like tha’ 1975 song.” I wanted to ask which one, but I didn’t have to. He proceeded to sing the words, “I’m in love with you.”

Just once he sang them, maybe slightly off pitch but it still sounded good. Not sure it would hold up to any of his previous performances, but I’d take it.

I didn’t know what to say. I was in a state of shock to be honest and the thought of moving terrified me. But then his grip around me loosened, and he let out a singular loud snore.

I pulled back, horrified, to see his sleeping face - mouth wide open. Another snore was released. “You are fucking joking.”

I sat up, his limp body falling away from me. I smacked his arm in the hopes of waking him, but he never flinched. “Harry,” I said, hitting him again.

Still no movement.

“Oi.” Smack.

Nothing.

I didn’t know what to do. Who does that? Who makes an admission like that and then falls asleep? And why did it have to be this boy? I was speechless, and when I finally managed to clamber off the bed I was also useless.

I stared at him with a look of bewilderment, as he lay there passed out on his unmade bed, mouth agape and naked besides his white y-fronts. It was then that the reality of what he’d said hit me, and I started to cry.

I wasn’t angry or upset - I was overwhelmed. Drunkenly, Harry had just told me he loved me. Then immediately passed out. Now I was left with my own feelings and his and no one to talk to about it. What was I supposed to do?

I desperately wanted to leave and get some sleep, but I also couldn’t help but think that would be morally inappropriate. Leaving a friend alone while dangerously intoxicated was how 50% of all murder documentaries started. Not that Harry was likely to get killed by an intruder in his mansion complete with security fortress. But he might accidentally fall down the stairs or choke on his own vomit.

And yet, the idea of staying in this massive and unfamiliar house to process all those thoughts made me even more hysterical. The idea alone provoked a loud sob, and I quickly covered my mouth because it was such a horrendous sound.

I made my decision that instant. I put Harry properly into bed with all of my remaining strength, covered him with his duvet, and then I fled from his house like a bat out of hell. On my way out, I took his spare keys with me.

I barely slept that night. My head was swimming and even though I couldn’t keep my eyes open, my brain was in overdrive. That, and the cat was sleeping on my chest and purring right in my face. His whiskers tickled my nose.

I found myself thinking about the early stages of mine and Harry’s association. 

I couldn’t have called him a friend when we first met because I hated him. I don’t think that feeling was ever reciprocated on his part but I couldn’t ever stand to be in the same room as him. Why? Because I felt the need to constantly contradict societal comments and beliefs. The world - at least people in my world - deemed him a golden boy who never did any wrong. I was convinced it wasn’t the case. My downfall was my lack of determination to prove it.

We met through mutual friends, as these things always seemed to happen. I couldn’t even remember which friend it was - neither me nor Harry talked to them anymore. But one day he was just there, and periodically from then onward he continued to show up. I couldn’t even remember when it was, but it was before he cut all his hair off. One Direction’s last few remaining days, perhaps? Anyway, he was suddenly omnipresent and came with an abundance of attention and it infuriated me.

I remember once, Harry confronted me on my obvious dislike for him. That was our first encounter collectively with ‘drunk words, sober thoughts’. I can’t remember exactly what I said but I wasn’t very nice and I remember the Bambi look in his eyes when I walked away from him. After that he was notably absent for some time. If I asked him about it now I’m not sure how honest he’d be about it. He was lucky enough to be able to claim work absences for long periods of time - I imagined he’d use that excuse. How truthful that would be, I didn’t know.

Our reconciliation came after that. He saw me alone in the nearby shop and asked me to join him for a coffee. I couldn’t really say no - it was a Sunday afternoon and I was only going back home to vegetate for the rest of the day. I think it was spring - I probably would’ve just read a book and gone to bed early. We spent the next 3 hours in Ginger & White, and after we got kicked out of there we went up to The Holly Bush, ironically.

I saw a different side to Harry that night, and I always put it down to having him to myself. There was no one else there with us apart from the locals in the pub who wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It was just us, and he was unapologetically himself, as was I.  We suddenly had an entirely new perception of one another - a higher level of understanding. On that random Sunday evening alone, I came to appreciate Harry for just being Harry. I saw who he really was, and I liked him.

From then on, I enjoyed his company. It became a regular thing - an afternoon doing something random together, just the two of us. And it ranged from simple coffee shop talks to entire day trips out of London. I realised then that what we’d basically been doing was dating for about 5 years with no physical contact.

I laughed out loud, disturbing the cat. He ran off and left me alone. 

We’d had our own intimate relationships with other people outside of our friendship, which I guess is why I’d never thought about it that way before. He also seemed to do that with multiple other people - I wasn’t the only one. Was I?

I never had to apologise for the night I was rude to him. I always wondered why, and I always berated myself for not saying I was sorry. I’d admitted I was wrong about him a long time ago, but only to myself. It seemed a bit too late to do it now, but I assumed he’d forgiven me. I could’ve been wrong.

I think I finally fell asleep around 4am. My alarm for work went off just 3 hours later and I burst into tears as soon as I realised the situation I was in. I called into work sick and went straight back to sleep.

How much more sleep I had was uncertain. It felt like only 2 hours, but it could’ve been more. Since I wasn’t working, I decided to get a McDonald’s after showering. Mostly for Harry rather than me, although I’m sure he’d make a comment about it.

I used the key I’d stolen last night to let myself in and went straight up to his bedroom with the McDonald’s in my right hand. Except I didn’t make it to his bedroom, because I found him on the bathroom floor next to the toilet, on his front with his cheek pressed to the tile floor.

“Harry…?”

He moaned, limply raising his hand and dropping it again immediately.

I moved into the room, leaving the McDonald’s in the hall because the smell would not go well with the pre-existing one in the room. It seemed Harry had vomited since I left. I sat on my knees beside him and stroked a finger through his curls, similar to how I had done last night.

“Are you alright?”

“Not really.” He said, voice whiny.

“No, I’m not surprised. I brought you some breakfast.”

He managed to lift his head and look towards me. I pointed at the hallway and he followed where my finger suggested.

“What is it?”

“McDonald’s.”

He screwed his face up. “You know I don’t eat meat.”

“Yes, that’s why I got you a Fillet-O-Fish. And mozzarella sticks.”

“Not very healthy.”

“Well, boiled eggs and avocado doesn’t make for very exciting hangover food if you ask me.”

He blew a breath out so that his lips wobbled. “True.”

“You gonna sit up and eat it?”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

“Come on, then,”

I took his arm and helped pull him to a sitting position. He sat against the bathtub and rolled his head back, mouth open and breathing heavy. I left his food in his lap and sat opposite him with my back against the wall.

“This is probably one of the worst hangovers I’ve had in a long time.” He said, grimacing into the paper bag. At least he could form complete words this morning.

“How much do you remember?”

He laughed once. “Not much. I remember calling you, and waiting for you to come get me. I remember when you turned up, but that’s about it. I don’t remember getting home.”

I swallowed thickly. That meant he probably didn’t remember telling me he was in love with me. Or rather, singing it.

“Next thing I’ve woke up in my pants about to vomit.”

“I think you were the most drunk I’ve ever seen you.”

He paused before he took a bite out of his fillet burger. “Really?”

“Hands down. You fell over nearly three times. And you wouldn’t let me go home.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised by that. I’m a very clingy drunk.”

“I was aware of that before last night.” I muttered. “Who were you with?”

“Tom and Tyler.”

“Ah, one of those evenings, was it?

“Yeah, didn’t expect it to be quite that bad, though. Was only going for one.”

“That’s how they all start.”

“Mm, I should know better.”

“Yes you should.”

He laughed around his mouthful and then swallowed it. “This was a good call, thank you.”

“No problem. Although I have to say I did not expect to watch you eat it on the bathroom floor.”

“I know. Feel like a uni student.”

“I don’t think uni students have bathrooms this big.”

He smiled, but didn’t say anything while his mouth was full. “Think I’m gonna have a shower, if you don’t mind?”

I shrugged. “Your house.”

“Right.” He rolled his eyes in jest. “Will you hang around a bit while I do?”

“Sure. I’ll put some coffee on.”

“Cool.” He grinned. 

He shoved the empty box into the paper bag and screwed it up. I took the rubbish off him once we were standing again and left him alone to shower.

I did as I said I would and made him a coffee, and then helped myself to a glass of water and an apple out of the fruit bowl on his counter. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen now. He seemed to be behaving normally, so I was certain he’d forgotten his admission, but that worried me because I was now going to have to admit that I knew. And I still wasn’t entirely sure how I felt.

When Harry did reappear he was fully clothed and looked a lot fresher than he had done before. His hair was damp but beginning to curl and his complexion had a bit more life to it.

“Feel better?”

“Loads better, thank you.”

“That’s good.” I said with a pressed smile. I pushed his coffee towards him.

“Cheers. Where’s yours?” He asked with a subtle frown as he took a sip out of his mug. He made an approving sound. “That’s good.”

“You know, I don’t actually like coffee.”

His frown deepened. “You have coffee all the time.”

“No, I have a mocha.”

“That’s still got coffee in it.”

“Yes, but the hot chocolate kind of makes it a fake coffee. A coffee for people who don’t like coffee.”

“Right.” He chuckled. “I had a thought upstairs just now… why aren’t you at work?”

“Because I barely slept.”

He looked concerned. “You better not have stayed really late because of me. Should’ve kicked me in the crotch and told me to get over myself.”

“Oh believe me, I tried to leave you here to go to bed, H. But I actually got back at an acceptable hour, that wasn’t the problem.”

“Just a bad night?”

I hummed. “No, I still blame you.”

“Why?” He asked, leaning his hip against the counter side.

I looked at the kitchen top and pursed my lips. “You… you told me something that gave me a lot to think about.”

“I didn’t give you some rubbish music samples, did I?”

I snorted. “I wish. Might’ve helped me sleep.”

“What then? I can’t remember anything.”

After a charged silence, I let out a long sigh. “You told me you love me. You said you love me, and then gave this little speech about missing me. And not just as friends - you said like The 1975’s song, I’m in love with you. But you sang that part, and then immediately fell asleep.”

When I met Harry’s gaze again he was staring at me, and biting his cheek. Neither of us said anything for a while. I was hoping he’d say something. Or perhaps me repeating what he said last night meant he felt like he didn’t need to say anymore.

I cocked my head. “Did you mean it?”

He stood taller, inhaling as his gaze became glassy. “Yeah. Yeah of course I did. Well, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, obviously. But I meant it, although I didn’t mean to tell you in that way… you know, while utterly shit faced.”

“You were completely shit faced.”

“Yeah… no, that’s not how I planned on telling you.”

“Was there a different plan?”

“Maybe…” He turned his nose up and scratched the back of his head. “If I told you what it was you’d hate it-,”

“You don’t know that.” I retorted.

He raised a judgemental brow at me. “Er, yes I do.”

I laughed and put my head on the table. “Whatever.”

“Anyway,” he huffed, but it had a lightheartedness to it, “of course I fucking meant it. Been living with it for ages - it’s all had time to brew. Aged like a fine wine.”

I started laughing, and then I felt his arms wrap around my chest. I was pulled up by him to stand straighter, and he rested his chin on my shoulder. His back was against my front and it felt quite nice. I don’t think we’d ever stood like that before.

“Your love has aged like a fine wine?”

“Sounds right cheap when you say it like that.” 

“You said it. That is literally what you said.” I was still laughing.

“I know.” He whimpered.

I twisted my head to look at him, but he’d hidden his face. “You’re gonna have to bear with me.”

“In what way?”

“Well, this is a lot for me. I’m still… processing it, and I don’t know how I feel. You’re my friend and I love you, of course I do. Just…”

“Not in love with me yet.” He concluded.

“Yet.” I sniggered.

“I’ll remain optimistic, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

He giggled, and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “Take your time. Preferably not forever though, ‘cause… the biological clock is ticking.”

I snorted again. “Reel it in.”

“Sorry.” He hummed and squeezed my shoulders tightly. “I am going to have a movie day on the sofa. Do you want to stay?”

“For that I do, fuck yeah.”

“Sweet… go and make yourself comfy. I’ll get the snacks.”

He bumped my hip with his when I passed him so I kicked him back. He gave a childish laugh, and I shook my head at him, but I found as I wandered into his overcompensating living room that I had this giddy feeling in my stomach I’d never felt with him before.

What was I, the most stubborn woman on Earth, going to do?

~

“What d’you want, H?”

“Not a very charming greeting.” He groused.

I pouted. “You’re interrupting my bath time.”

“Is there some space left in the bathtub?”

I smirked and sank lower into the water. “For you? Never.”

“Hey!”

“Always,” I laughed around my correction, “I meant always.”

“That’s more like it.” He chuckled. “I was calling because I think it might be my turn to get dinner. So what do you fancy?”

“Well, you, obviously.”

“Obviously.” His matter-of-fact tone matched mine. I could imagine him nodding his head. “How about a chippy?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. My usual please.”

“Curry sauce too?”

“Wouldn’t be my usual without it.”

“Just checking. So, I will be knocking on your door within the next hour. Make the most of that bath ‘cause I’m coming.”

“Cool. See you in a bit.”

“Bye-bye.”

“Love you!” I shouted before he could put the phone down.

He was quiet for a minute. “Blimey. Don’t need to shout it, darlin’.”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Just in case you forgot.”

“I could never. But I love you more. See you shortly.”

“Okay, bye-bye. Love you most.”

“No!” He shouted, but I cut him off before he could refute it more.

I felt smug. I let out a satisfied sigh and laid my head back against the edge of the tub. 

I had taken my time in coming around to Harry’s admission, but he was incredibly patient with me and I was always grateful for that. It had been little over a year since his little bender, and I felt really good about everything. We felt really good about everything.

Our relationship seemed to only be moving up at a pace we were both happy with, and I couldn’t ask for anything more. All we had to do was keep it that way, and I had every confidence we could.

~~~

If you read this far, thank you <3

Come Talk To Me

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[obsessedwithtoomanythings]

The Terrifying Ordeal of Falling in Love with Leon Kennedy

CHAPTER 1

Pairing: Leon Kennedy x Reader (female reader)

Series Warnings: Minor injuries, Leon teases reader a lot, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Drinking, Drinking followed by driving, DO NOT DO THAT THIS IS FICTION, Anxiety, Leon S. Kennedy has PTSD, Leon has an anxiety attack, Anxiety Attacks, Swearing, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Nightmares, Leon S. Kennedy has Nightmares, Cuddling & Snuggling, Probably incorrect medical talk, Strangulation in one tiny little scene, Reader's brother was a cop who was KIA, Slow Burn, Slow Build, Grief/Mourning, Christmas Fluff, Mistletoe, Fluff and Smut, Eventual Smut, Arguing, Love Confessions, Looking for Alaska is mentioned, Inconvenient Love Confessions, Penis In Vagina Sex, Dirty Talk, Dirty Thoughts, Oral Sex, Cunnilingus, Leon loves eating Pussy change my mind, Shower Makeout, romantic smut, Desperate Leon S. Kennedy, They are both desperate for each other tbh, They say I love you as they come, Scar Kissing, Enthusiastic Consent, Always pee after sex, UTI PREVENTION, POV First Person, No use of Y/N

Words: 1.6K

A/N: Alright, this took MONTHS. Big thanks for @chaosandbubbles for always validating my writing.

Masterlist

January 2004

Walls of insincerity, shifting eyes and vacancy

Vanished when I saw your face

All I can say is, it was enchanting to meet you

-Enchanted, Taylor Swift

“Hey hon, want you to take this one,” Dr. Dalton says, a hint of pride in his voice as he pokes his spikey ginger hair in through our shared office space. I glance up, confused for a minute and he chuckles at the sight, coming into the room leisurely, his stride confident and collected. The clipboard is clasped between his fingers as he offers it to me with a smile. “I want to see how you do without me looming over your shoulder and breathing down your neck.” I feel my eyes practically bulge out of my head. “Relax. The guy’s in here pretty regularly, he’s decent. He won’t bite,” he adds, pushing it into my shaking hands as I stand. He tacks in a barely audible “Probably.”

“A-Are you sure?” I mumble, words practically being choked out.

“Trust me. You’re ready.” His hand lands on my shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Besides, if he starts convulsing or salivating at the mouth, I’ll be right in here.” I breathe a deep sigh, attempting to bury the anxiety that swirls through my mind by retying my hair into its almost-too-tight ponytail. Spinning on my heel, I walk into the sterile white room. Why they don’t paint these rooms to be more inviting, I will never understand. 

The lavender diffuser does little to cover the overwhelming scent of antiseptic and bleach, my nose scrunching unconsciously as I glance down at the clipboard in my hands, which are still trembling.

“Glad I’m not the only one who hates the way it smells in here.” The voice that speaks is deeper, and I jump a little at the suddenness of the unexpected sound. Finding the source is easy, and my stomach flips when I see him sitting in the blue plastic chair.

Dark tee shirt clinging to defined muscles, the fabric stretching to accommodate the flex as his arms are crossed across a broad chest, black pants a little less tight but still leaving no question of his strength and stature. His legs are outstretched in front of him, crossed at the ankles leisurely. His stringy blonde hair is curtaining over his cheekbone, not quite covering the obvious blue of his eyes. The lingering sensation of those eyes trained on me makes me feel exposed, like a bug preparing for dissection, but I shake the feeling off.

“You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I can’t seem to get over it,” I say, glancing down at the clipboard once again, just long enough to get his name. “Do you wanna come sit over on the exam table so I can get a good look at you, Agent Kennedy?” I ask, watching as his eyebrows raise with a small smirk appearing on his lips. I quickly tumble over more words. “I mean, a good look at your injuries, not you specifically. I mean, not that you’re not…” I take a shaky breath before laughing slightly at myself. “I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead.” He chuckles to himself, almost silently, like he was trying to conceal it before standing and following me to the table. The clipboard hits the table with a crisp clang before I turn to the agent now seated on a slightly softer plastic and crinkly paper.

“I hate being in here, but Hunnigan insisted on it this time,” he explains, fingers clasped together, resting in his lap. It’s hard not to notice the way his eyes dart around the room at the smallest sounds; Dalton stapling something in the office, the ding of the elevator, even the wheels of some kind of cart out in the hallway causes his muscles to tense almost painfully.

“Any reason why?” I ask, grabbing two blue nitrile gloves from the box labeled with a tiny little ‘S’ while trying to keep my eyes on him. He shrugs.

“My right shoulder took a hit, and I think a couple of my ribs are broken.” It’s a start. I move toward him, moving slowly enough that he is able to predict my motions. No need to put him more on edge than he clearly already is.

“Can I have you remove your shirt so I can take a look at the shoulder?” I ask innocently. “I can turn aro-” I practically choke on the rest of the words as his arms cross over his chest before gripping the hem of the fabric and easily removing it. He sets it down next to his thigh on the makeshift bed. A light chuckle pierces my ears and I look away from the black and blue patches of bruises that are smattered across his ribcage.

“You’re looking like you’ve never seen a guy without his shirt on.” The tone of his voice is cocky, pride wafting off of him in waves. Or maybe that’s the sweat.

“That’s not why I was surprised,” I admit, walking over to remove an ice pack from the freezer before tossing it to him, which he catches easily. “Press that to your ribs, please, Agent Kennedy.” It has a ‘please’ tacked on, but the man can clearly tell that it wasn’t a request. He listens, hissing at the chill on his skin as I move around to look at his shoulder. Asking him to turn away from my frame, I take a small breath at finally being released from his intense gaze. The shoulder is much worse than I thought, something bloody hidden under some crude gauze pads secured with medical tape. “I’m gonna remove this gauze.” He nods, his hair bobbing slightly at the movement.

“Can I ask what did this?” I question, tenderly attempting to peel the gauze off with as little pain as possible, but the skin has taken to sticking to it cause of the dried blood. I feel him tense slightly at the sensation.

“That’s… classified.” Mumbled words barely audible. I nod in understanding, despite knowing he can’t actually see it. I drop the piss-poor patch job onto the table, frustration rising. There is a gash the size of my forearm sunken into the light skin there. “Did they disinfect this?” He shrugs noncommittally with his left shoulder. I sigh, irritated at his lack of communication. This is his body. Why does it seem like he’d rather be anywhere else?

“I’ve never seen you in here. Are you new?” He asks, making small talk to fill the blatantly uncomfortable silence.

“Yeah, just started a few weeks ago. Dr. Dalton wanted me to take care of this on my own,” I explain and then, giving him fair warning before I gently pour some disinfectant on the wound. Another hiss. A mumbled apology.

“Ah, so I’m your first victim?” He asks with a smile, his head cocking to the side to make brief eye contact. A poor attempt at an evil laugh leaves my lips in response, cheeks dusting pink at the smile I receive.

“Yes. How does it feel, knowing your name will live in infamy once I’m caught?” I ask, a teasing lithe in my tone. He scoffs, but I can still see the small smile he wears.

“Just make it quick, yeah? I won’t even plead for my life.” The words are meant to be a joke, and deep down, I know that. But the way he says it? It’s almost like he actually wants that. I give my head a slight shake to clear the thought as I tenderly place a softer gauze over the gash before securing it, the wrapping going over the top of his shoulder and under his armpit a few times. I pat his shoulder gently before walking around in front of him again, his eyes finding mine quickly.

“I have good news, Agent. You’ll make it.”

“Yeah? Not gonna keel over?” He asks, gesturing to his shirt. I nod, signaling to him that he is free to put it back on.

“Nope.” I pause, mind running with the desire to help. If he’ll let me. “Can I ask you something?” His gaze returns to me after tugging the fabric back down, watching as it settles comfortably over his form.

“Sure.”

“Do you wanna talk to Dr. Dalton about any kind of therapy or medication? I couldn’t help but notice how on edge-”

“It’s cause I just got back. The overactive perception fades after a bit. I’m fine.” The softness of his eyes has faded, turning into a brick wall. Or a dam, to hold it all in.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. I was just trying to he-”

“Am I good to go?” The tone in his voice has shifted, cold and distant, all sources of the smiles I saw earlier gone. I nod mutely, handing him a form and a pen to sign the paper with. Then the pen scratches across the paper roughly before he hands it back, and I’m finding it impossible to meet his eyes, despite his earlier behavior of not looking anywhere but at me. He walks toward the exit, and I can hear his boots thudding against the tiled floor.

“You did good.” I turn quickly toward the door at hearing his voice again.

“Sorry?” My voice is quieter than intended, almost making it sound like I’m afraid. Agent Kennedy’s head tilts, looking over his shoulder, no smile, just looking.

“You did a good job. You took good care of your first victim.” For a moment, and only a moment, I see a glimmer of a smirk flit across his mouth before he’s gone, the echo of his boots practically filling my ears as he makes his way down the hallway.

Leon: @house-of-kolchek @bonnibuckets @athanasia-day @muffimtv Everything: @chaosandbubbles @kassiekolchek22 @akiramoon8088

#leon kennedy #leon kennedy x reader #leon x reader #resident evil fanfiction #leon kennedy smut

[doumadono]

Idk if this counts as a emergency request but I might as well see right? Basically to make a long story short I never knew my dad all that well he left when I was super young and he passed away 3 weeks ago and even though I didn’t know him like at all it still hurt you know. And then my dog that I’ve had my entire life passed away 2 days after my father. And then 4 days ago my mom passed. It’s all been so sudden and back to back especially when my boyfriend left right after too I just feel so lost and alone and I don’t know what to do I’m finally like realizing that no one lives forever and it scares the shit out of me..Yeah so idk if that counts I’m but if you could write like bakugou or if you write Deku either one just helping me out. I was going to not do an anon request but I just writing it all makes me feel too vulnerable. Thanks. Much love 💗

Izuku & s/o in mourning - headcanons

A/N: I'm truly sorry to hear about the overwhelming challenges and losses you're going through, dear Nonnie. Please accept my condolences. It's important to acknowledge and process these emotions. Take your time, and I can assure you that brighter days lay ahead.

EMERGENCY REQS MASTERLIST

"I can't imagine the pain you're going through, but I want you to know that I'm here for you. Whenever you're ready, I'm here to listen," he tells you, holding your hand in his, drawing little circles on its top with his thumb.

Midoriya, known for his empathy, approaches you gently, recognizing the weight of your recent losses.

He sits down with you, offering a listening ear, allowing you to share your feelings at your own pace.

Deku may express his understanding of loss.

Midoriya acknowledges the depth of your pain, validating your emotions and letting you know that it's okay to grieve.

He encourages you to feel and process your emotions, assuring you that it's a crucial part of healing.

Sharing positive memories of your dog and mom, he aims to celebrate the joy they brought into your life, fostering a more positive outlook. "Let's remember the good times. Your dog and mom brought so much joy into your life, and those memories are something no one can take away."

Assuring you that he's there for you not just in this moment but for the long haul, Deku promises ongoing support, understanding that healing is a process.

"I know it's hard to see right now, but there's a future beyond this pain. We can take it one step at a time. I'll be right there with you," Izuku assures, gently kissing your temple.

#emergency request #bnha x reader #mha x reader #izuku hcs #izuku x reader #izuku fluff #izuku midoriya #izuku midoria x reader #mha fluff #izuku midoryia #deku fluff #midoriya fluff #midoriya x reader #mha midoriya #midoriya x you #deku x reader #deku x reader fluff #izuku midoriya headcanons

[bonesandthebees]

Selfishly, the thing I hate the most (besides what Wilbur actually did to Shubble and others) is the loss of a good chunk of the fanfiction/fanfiction authors in this community. Like, do you know how hard it is to find platonic content? It’s almost all exclusively romance! And don’t get me wrong, romance is fine everyone once in a while. But it’s literally just everywhere’s you look. This was the one place I could come to find platonic found family content, and now so many of the authors have just discontinued their works. The discord servers I’m a part of to follow authors for updates are opening up for romance/NSFW content. And I know, I know this was going to happen eventually. People had slowly been loosing interest in the dsmp anyways and it was bound to happen. But this just sped that process up. I just hate it. It’s sad to say, but this online space is the only safe space I had left and now it feels like it’s disappearing. I scrambled at the beginning of the announcement to download as many of my favorite fics as I possibly could before they got deleted. And it’s valid as hell that people don’t want to be associated with this fandom or Wilbur anymore. But like damn. Damn. Im so angry about this. Is it that hard not to be just a terrible fucking human being? I’ve already had abusers steal so many good things from me in the past, and now it just feels like it’s happening all over again. It’s just frustrating. Anyways, selfish rant over I guess. Feel free to just ignore this if it’s too much or whatever. For what it’s worth, thank you for what you did write for this fandom. “The stars and their children”, and “through a glass divine” are especially favorites of mine. I remember being so excited every time I saw new updates for them. Thank you for the good memories.

yeah believe me this was one of the things that hit me really hard. as a writer I've found so much inspiration from c!wilbur as a character for so many years now, and I've loved reading crimeboys fics for so long. the dsmp fanfiction community left such a lasting impact on the fandom as a whole and I'm so honored that I was able to make my mark on it while it was around. but yeah, while I myself had been shifting towards wanting to write romance again, I genuinely had grown to love writing found family so much and it really sucks that we're likely never going to see a fandom so heavily built around found family like that again

overall, yeah, the fandom was already dying. I've been aware of that for a long time and knew it was inevitable. but it feels cruel to watching the dying community crawling along on the ground get shot point blank in the head like this

I also get feeling selfish for feeling this way. I do too. but we're allowed to be upset, and I truly mourn all the wonderful stories that have been deleted because of this. I fully believe it's within the authors rights to do what they want with the story, it just sucks that they were so hurt by this that they felt they had to completely erase something they put so much love and effort into

I'm so glad I was able to provide good memories here, and like I said, I'm honored I was able to leave a mark on things. I won't delete my fics as I've said, so at least anyone who wants to reread them will be able to go back and revisit those memories

#ask #anon #wilbur situation

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

#the haunting of bly manor #bly manor #thobm #dani clayton #jamie taylor #dani x jamie #damie #sapphic romance #lesbian romance #mental health #compulsory heterosexuality #queer representation #not a fix-it fic but a fix-it essay

[circus4apsycho8]

Hello! I love your blog so I wanted to make this request for Ninjago!!

I was wondering if you could write a scenario for each ninja were they have an older sister reader where the reader is reflecting on hard times from the past and the ninjas are there to comfort their older sister and just a bunch of sibling fluff!!( Also is it alright if you do Kai and Nya together so they both can have an older sister cuz some writers do them separately!!!) No rush take all the time you need 🩷🩷🩷

𝚊/𝚗: 𝚘𝚏 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎! 𝚒 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚊 𝚘𝚏 𝚋𝚒𝚐 𝚜𝚒𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚛 :))))) 𝚒 𝚑𝚘𝚙𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚎𝚗𝚓𝚘𝚢!

older sister!reader scenarios w/ the ninja

𝚔𝚊𝚒 & 𝚗𝚢𝚊

You’re happy that your parents are back. You really are. 

So, why does it feel like you’re lying to yourself? 

You find yourself alone in the Bounty early one morning - just before training. The others have yet to wake, leaving you to the quiet and your thoughts. 

A stab of guilt courses throughout your heart as you think about your parents - both safe at Four Weapons. You, Kai, and Nya would be stopping to visit them in a day or so. And part of you is…what? Apathetic? Is that how you’re feeling?

When your parents had disappeared all those years ago, they had left you to look after both your siblings and the shop - hardly a burden a child should have to bear. But you did. Many nights, away from Kai and Nya’s prying little ears you would silently cry - mourning their disappearance, wondering if they’d ever be back. With the stress of it all piling on, you had hoped and hoped for them to return. 

But they never did. 

And so it continued - the stress, the chores, the ongoing lack of money, the burden of raising your siblings. It sucked every ounce out of you, and a side of you had been angry. Angry that your childhood had been snatched away overnight. 

Are you just taking it out on them? Are those feelings finally resurfacing for you to sort through? 

Conflict gnaws away at your insides as sneaky footsteps pad in your direction. A creak in the wood catches your attention as you snap your head in the noise’s direction. 

“Woah! Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Kai notes, grinning apologetically as he sits down a few feet away. Nya follows suit, the three of you sitting cross-legged in a triangle shape. 

“You just look kind of down,” Nya admits, folding her hands together. “Is everything okay?” 

You sigh, glancing over the horizon. “Yes…well, I don’t really know.” 

“It’s about Mom and Dad, isn’t it?” Kai prompts. 

With a sigh, you nod in response. “Yeah.” 

“We haven’t really gotten the chance to talk about it,” Nya notes. “And a lot’s happened.” 

“Are you guys…happy?” you wonder. 

“I am,” Kai admits. “Uh…but I’m also kind of nervous, if that makes any sense?” 

“Me too,” Nya adds. “I just…I don’t know what they’re going to be like, or how they’re going to act, or how I should act…” 

“It’s certainly going to take some adjusting to have them around,” you muse. “But I guess I’m in about the same boat. Happy, but conflicted all the same. And I’m beginning to understand why, I think. Because…well, of course I can empathize with their situation. I get that it wasn’t their fault. But, at the same time, I still can’t help but be angry. I don’t know…it’s just a lot. And with Sensei gone, it makes it more difficult for me to process.” 

“I know…and it happened so fast, too,” Nya replies. “It was hard to process all at once. And I think that any feelings you might have are valid.” 

Kai nods, his eyes blazing with that comfortingly familiar determination. “Just know that we’re with you. We’ll tackle this together, like we always do.” 

You grin, a tear running down your cheek as you shift to your knees, scooting towards your siblings so that you can bring them both in for a hug. 

“I love you two so much,” you mumble, voice breaking slightly. “Never forget that.” 

𝚓𝚊𝚢

“No way.” 

“Yes way,” Jay counters, chuckling as he dangles a key from between his fingers, smirking at you before going to unlock the door to the giant mansion before you – the mansion that apparently belonged to your biological father. 

Sure enough, the door swings open, allowing the two of you to slip through. Jay makes for the light switch while you’re left gawking at the interior. 

“Fritz Donnegan? What?” you mumble, staring at a giant statue of the character. 

“Our dad played Fritz Donnegan!” Jay chatters excitedly, beckoning you closer to him. You frown at that title – dad. Cliff Gordon? Your true father? It doesn’t stick well with you just yet. While they aren’t your biological parents, Ed and Edna would forever be your mom and dad. Not some egotistical, womanizing actor who hadn’t bothered to make contact with either of you. 

Regardless, you make your way over to your little brother, arms folded as you watch him move a golden trophy. To your surprise, it opens a secret room. 

“Isn’t this just the coolest thing?!” Jay chirps, rushing inside. “Our dad has a secret room!” 

You sigh, unable to prevent yourself from smiling at your brother’s excitement. At least he’s happy. 

“Yeah...it’s cool, I guess,” you mumble, glancing around. “Wow, he actually kept up with us?” 

“Yeah, he did,” Jay answers as the two of you study the section of the wall filled with pinned pictures and articles featuring you and Jay. “I guess he cared at least a little bit.” 

You remain silent, turning away from the wall as a newfound bitterness wells within your chest. 

“Hey...what’s wrong?” 

“I...I don’t know,” you confess, sitting down on the floor with a sigh. Jay sits a few feet away from you, a toy gun in his hand. “It just...doesn’t feel real. Or right, for the matter. I mean...we’re his kids, but he didn’t even want to meet us. Well, I-I get that having kids isn’t for everyone, and still we don’t know what happened between him and our biological mom, but still.” 

“I understand,” Jay agrees, twirling the toy in his hands. “I mean...I didn’t have much time to process it either, what with the threat we had been facing at the time. But this doesn’t have to change the fact that Ed and Edna are the ones who raised us. We don’t have to stop calling them Mom and Dad because of this.” 

You pause momentarily, pondering Jay’s words before nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Thanks, Jay.” 

“Anytime,” he replies, aiming the toy gun at you before pulling the trigger. You squeal, expecting to be hit by foam dart or something. “Haha! Got you!” 

You frown, glancing at the fake gun only to find that there’s a flag with the word “Zap!” printed on it. 

“Jay...” you growl, sitting up slightly. 

“Ah!” he shrieks as you promptly tackle him.

𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚎

“No. Nope. Not happening. We will steal that cup before I have to deal with him again,” you spit, stomping out of the brig. 

“Wait, why?” Kai wonders, the others glancing among themselves in confusion. 

Cole sighs, holding his hands up to the rest of the team before following you out. “Hold on, let me talk to her.” 

You hear this, sighing in irritation as you make your way outside of the Bounty. “Are you seriously willing to put up with Dad’s shit just to get the Blade Cup when we can just steal it? We won’t risk our cover that way either!” 

“Okay, wait, just slow down,” Cole encourages. You twirl to face him, crossing your arms as you glare at him. “Trust me when I say that I don’t want to face Dad either.” 

“Great. We’ll steal it tonight and be on our way.” 

“But I don’t want to exactly steal it either,” Cole adds. 

“Cole, we’re talking the Great Devourer here. You know - massive snake that will consume all of Ninjago. I think I’m willing to break a few locks rather than risk the entirety of mankind, thank you.” 

“I agree, but I think there’s something else we should both consider,” he starts tentatively. You clench your jaw, hoping he doesn’t bring up what you think he will. “I know that we’re not on good terms with him right now. But...people can change-” 

“No,” you decline, stepping back. “Lou won’t ever change. He’s got his head so far up his ass that he refuses to confront reality. He’ll just force his kids to do it instead!” 

“That was then!” Cole counters, voice still calm. “We don’t know the person that he is now. Don’t you think that Mom would have wanted us to give him another chance?” 

“Mom is dead,” you hiss. “And she would have been mad at how he handled her death.” 

A heavy silence drapes across the two of you as you find yourself tearing up, averting your gaze from your little brother. 

“I...you know I’m not denying that, right? I’m not saying that your points are wrong, because they’re not. We have a reason to be mad with him. But...all I’m saying is that we just give him a last chance. We can keep our cover going, or we can tell him who we really are, but...I don’t think it’s right just to avoid him now. If we see that he hasn’t changed...then we can just cut him out completely.” 

You stare absentmindedly out towards the sunset, contemplating Cole’s words. Part of you doesn’t know if you’re ready to see Lou again, but...the other half of you knows that Cole is right. 

Closing your eyes, you nod. “Okay. Okay. You’re right. But...if it goes downhill...” 

“We won’t talk to him again,” Cole assures. “Sound doable?” 

“I think so,” you reply, smiling sadly at him. Cole quietly comes over to you, offering you a hug which you accept. 

“We’re not going to let him walk over us again,” he mumbles. 

“I know. I know. I just...” you trail off, unsure of how to phrase your feelings as he hugs you. 

“We’ll figure it out,” he replies. “We always do, don’t we?”

𝚣𝚊𝚗𝚎 

Your fingers absentmindedly trace patterns within the snow topping the earth, eyes lingering on the tombstone jutting from the ground. 

It’s been months since your father died, leaving you feeling lost and with a newfound little brother whom you’d met at his funeral. 

Tears sting at your eyes as you close them, wishing you had found Julien earlier. Why did he have to pass so quickly? He was a good man, and you were only just beginning to reconnect with him after being separated for a few years. 

Your thoughts are interrupted by the crunching of snow behind you. After taking a moment to wipe your tears, you turn around. 

“Oh,” you say, spotting Zane standing a few feet away from you. “Hi, Zane.” 

“Good afternoon,” he greets quietly, coming to sit beside you. For a moment, the two of you are simply quiet, both working through your own thoughts. “I thought you had left for college?” 

“I’m about to,” you explain, gaze downcast. “I just...needed to say goodbye, I think.” 

“I understand,” Zane answers. “Our team is preparing to take another mission, so I know I will not be able to visit for quite some time.” 

You nod, biting your lip as a tear falls from your cheek. “I miss him, Zane.” 

Zane turns to look at you, eyes furrowed and expression sharing your pain. “As do I.” 

“I wish he was still here,” you admit. “I just...how do I know that I’m taking the right path if he isn’t here to guide us?” 

“There is one fact I know for certain: he would be proud of us no matter the path we choose,” he states. “He would be so happy to see you beginning your new life.” 

You smile softly, nodding in agreement. “Yeah. You’re right. And he would be proud of you, too.”

𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚢𝚍

You can’t believe that woman has the audacity to show herself to the two of you. Your glare is stuck on Misako for a moment before you spin, immediately making your way out of the area. 

Thankfully, Lloyd seems to be on the same page because he follows you through the twisted halls of the museum, both silent as you stew in your anger. Soon enough, the two of you find a secluded spot to sit at. 

“After all this time...” you trail off, exhaling sharply as you shake your head. “Now she’s showing her face. Can you believe it?” 

“No...no, I can’t,” Lloyd answers, sitting down next to the bottomless pit. “Why now? And not when we needed her?” 

“And especially after Dad tried so hard to keep us together! She just cast us aside at some random school. For what? To get rid of us?” 

“Who knows,” Lloyd responds as you sit next to him. You remain silent, biting your lip to prevent your voice from shaking. 

Even without words, Lloyd understands that you’re upset. He simply lays his head on your shoulder, the two of you thinking in silent support of each other. 

“What do you think we should do?” Lloyd wonders after a few minutes, pulling away slightly. 

“I honestly don’t know,” you admit, shaking your head as you stare at the depths of the pit. 

“Well...whatever you decide to do, just know I believe in you,” he adds. 

You smile softly, ruffling his hair. “Thanks, kiddo.”

#ninjago & reader #ninjago x reader #older sister reader #sibling fluff #ninjago x sister!reader

[tryingtograspctrl]

SHE: BILLY LOOMIS AND STU MACHER X BLACK PLUS SIZE READER

SUMMARY - You moved to Woodsboro 2 years ago and quickly became friends with Marlon and Shawn, you did your best to make friends with their friends but you couldn't help but feel uncomfortable around them because of those two... and your feelings were very valid.... Title inspired by the song "She" by tyler the creator. I reccomend you listen to it.

☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

You jolted up at the sound of your alarm clock blaring. You reached over smacking your hand against it to quiet it down while simultaneously blowing out the candle you seem to always leave lit, one day you were gonna burn the house down.

"I don't know what it is that you've done to meee, but it's caused me to act in such a crazy wayyyy." You sang along to the radio as you brushed your teeth.

You got dressed as quickly as you could knowing Marlon and Shawn would be in the driveway any minute.

You met Marlon and Shawn when you first moved to Woodsboro around 2 years ago.

Your parents had been killed in a car accident and you had no other living relatives in your hometown so you were forced to move in with your Aunt in California.

She traveled often due to work so you only saw her a couple weeks out of the year.

You didn't mind it though, you liked to be alone, sure you'd get homesick sometimes, missing all your old friends but Marlon and Shawn filled the empty space well.

The hardest part for you was mourning the loss of your parents and adjusting to a new school, nobody liked being the new kid. Plus there was a lot of attention on you due to your appearance, you had been a big girl your whole life and people always tried to use it against you, but you loved your body no matter how other people felt about it. You cherished every curve and every inch.

The eyes could be annoying though, people acted like they've never seen a plus size black woman before.

Flashback

"Heyyy slow down a little girl, I'm Shawn you must be new here?" The tall dark skin man stood in front of you, hand extended for you to shake.

You looked him up and down, scoffing before attempting to make your way around him.

You knew plenty of guys like Shawn, one of the schools golden boys who every girl wanted to be with, and every guy wanted to be. You had met plenty of jackasses like that back in your hometown, the ones that would play friends with the big girls and the weird kids for shits and giggles with their asshole friends.

"Damn i just wanted to show you around, why you so harsh on a brother?" He stood in front of you again.

"Listen, i don't need no help. I can find my way around on my own, ok?" You snapped placing your hands on your hips.

"Whatever you say." He held his hands up in defense.

You looked down at the paper the lady at the front desk gave you, a schedule with your classes and which room they were located in.

"It looks like you have science first period, i do too. I can lead you there." Shawn pointed from over your shoulder.

You jumped slightly at his voice, not realizing he had been following you.

"Fine." You gave in, he seemed too hard to get rid of and you didn't feel like putting up a fight.

He walked ahead making sure you kept up behind him.

"I never got your name." He peeked at you.

"Y/n." You spoke softly.

"Y/n, thats pretty. Listen my brother Marlon is in this class too, i just wanna give you a heads up, he's super loud and goofy but he's got a good heart don't take him too seriously ok?" He looked down at you.

"Ok." You nodded.

You both walked in together and despite the teacher's best effort to get you to do the whole awkward introduction thing Shawn had stopped him, explaining that you were tired from the big move and just wanted to get settled.

You smiled a little at him, you really appreciated that especially since you'd get super anxious speaking in front of other's. Maybe you shouldn't have judged him too quickly.

"Damnnn the new girl is fione! Yo i'm Marlon what's your name baby?" He pulled his desk closer to yours, the legs making an awful screeching noise as they moved across the floor.

"Hey man get out of her face, and stop being so damn loud it's 7 in the morning." Shawn glared.

"My bad a brother can't be cheery in the morning? Who pissed in your cheerios?" He huffed.

You giggled at his antics shaking your head.

"At least someone appreciates me." His eyes lit up.

"I'm y/n." You shook his hand.

"Pleasure to meet you madame." He spoke in a terrible french accent lifting your hand to kiss it.

You laughed swatting at him.

"Hey you're a lot nicer to him than me." Shawn frowned.

"What can i say, i like funny guys." You winked.

Back to present

You smiled fondly at the memory as you laced up your shoes.

"Here she comessss, the beauty queen!" Marlon sang as you walked out the front door.

He got out of the car and opened the door for you bowing.

"Stop it boy." You laughed getting into the car.

"Did you sleep good?" Shawn asked kissing your cheek.

"Yeah i did, how was the party last night? Sorry i couldn't make it." You asked applying your chapstick.

"Eh it was fine, nothing crazy. You coming to the big game tonight right?" He asked taking his eyes off the road for a moment.

"Of course, i couldn't miss the biggest game of the season." You smiled at him.

He smiled too shutting off the car once he found a place to park.

"You guys go ahead i'm gotta go use the bathroom first." You grabbed your bag shutting the door.

Small time skip

You shook your hands out as you made you way across the courtyard.

"That bathroom never has any paper towels." You shook your head talking to yourself.

"Hey y/n?" Someone called out to you.

"Oh hey Randy." You turned around.

"I haven't seen you in the video store in a while, a bunch of new releases came out." He jogged catching up to you.

"I've been busy studying, my grade in math has tanked and i'm trying to get it up before the end of semester." You frowned slightly.

"Hey if you ever need help i can tutor you, i'm great at math." He placed a hand on your shoulder.

"That'd be great thank you." You smiled brightly at him.

"Of course, and when you get the time stop by the store. I got something for you." He smiled.

"I will, see you later." You waved turning back around and walking toward the fountain.

"What did that creep want?" Tatum asked a look of disgust on her face.

"Don't be like that, Randy's sweet." You frowned.

"Yeah trying to sweeten his way into your drawls, i don't trust him." Marlon scooted towards you as you sat beside him.

"Awww you jealous?" You pinched his cheeks.

"Jealous? of Randy? Girl have you seen me?" Marlon stood flexing.

"Feel that girl." You pointed at his bicep.

You just laughed squeezing his arm.

"Alright come on muscle man before we're late." You grabbed your bag.

"You're coming to the game right?" Sydney tugged at your wrist.

"Yeah of course i'll be sitting right in the front." You nodded.

"That's great, we'll need our favorite cheerleader." Stu spoke up for the first time that morning.

You laughed brushing it off as a joke.

You looked over at Billy to see him already looking at you, staring directly into your eyes.

Your face fell and chills ran up your spine, but you quickly recovered doing your best to smile at him.

"I was thinking we could stop by that mexican spot after the game, you know like a celebration dinner." Shawn suggested.

It took you a moment to peel your eyes away from Billy but you eventually did, nodding in agreement.

"Whatever you want." You relaxed in his embrace.

Part two coming soon, let me know if you guys like it. ☺️

#black plus size reader #plus size reader #scream #billy loomis #stu macher #shawn wayans #marlon wayans

[clarabowmp3]

here's what I love about loml: the melody and lyrics fit together so well that nothing sounds clunky, but she's still not compromising on artistic value. in fact, i'd say the shorter lyrics enhance the quality as its just sucker punch after sucker punch. the cadence of most of the song (as per the line fragments) sounds like someone taking short breaths, as if debilitatingly encumbered by emotion. or, if we take it further in the context of the funeral motif, like someone taking their last breaths.

there is this 'duality' (opposites) to the song in sooo many ways: first in the lyrics (never before/never since, one kiss/getting married, alive/cemetery, low-down boy/stand-up guy, all time/momentary, "I'll never leave"/"never mind") then in the first chorus she paints a picture of a wedding but its almost unnervingly unclear because of all the funeral diction (cemetery, killing time, (holy) ghost). as the song shifts from 'love' to 'loss,' the wedding image gets juxtaposed by one of a funeral, and YET there are parts where the two blur together (suit and tie, at some point that glow starts to feel like a hole) -> which I feel so perfectly represents the tension in that relationship where there is such a fine line separating the two harsh extremes.

even as the duality starts to dissolve past the first chorus (more emphasis on the 'loss' --> con man, get-love-quick scheme (scam), hole), the tender melody and pleasingly smooth vocals remain which creates this unsettling effect since that quiet peace has been flipped on its head to be turned into this quiet devastation. taking it one step further, the fact that this song is phrased to be written completely in hindsight (past tense throughout) it makes the quiet unassuming joy the speaker gets from their fictional wedding feel even more tragic.

by the time we get to the second chorus there is minimal ambiguity in her tone, it is 100% fully one of mourning and bordering on anger (as seen in the bridge). even in her contemptuous 'Mr. Steal Your Girl,' she follows it up with how hurt she feels over him calling her the love of his life as if she can't even be properly/fully angry at this person. in fact, that line is at the end of the chorus, almost symbolising how she can feel as angry as she wants at him, but despite all that there's this underlying grief and despair over his inability to follow through with his love-of-his-life promises. as the message gets clearer, the message/feeling of the song hits harder as there is less confusion or ambiguity.

in the bridge, there's this fantastical image of 'dancing phantoms' which reignites that confusion in the song with the added instability from the sinister image of the phantoms, plus the cadence of the song increases, she's talking faster now and there's less 'empty room,' indicating more pointed/stronger emotion. with the song's tone of this bone-deep grief, the 'terrace' might be a very very subtle nod to suicidal ideation, emphasis on the might. throughout the song she rattles btw love and loss, so this sudden suggestion that it was 'counterfeit' casts doubt on the validity of her emotions in the first place.

here we also start to move past from the duality as indicated by the three tiers of legendary -> momentary -> unnecessary, as if she is washing her hands of the whole affair ('should've let it STAY BURIED'). this lyric also indicates her moving past the duality as letting something stay buried implies that it has already been buried, ie its 'funeral' has passed, and the funeral motif was used as part of the duality representation from earlier.

anyways all this to say for most of the reasons above ^^ this song also gives me STRONG corpse bride vibes of which i made an edit here if anyone's interested :)

#this has been a loml appreciation postTM #this analysis is my baby i'll be pinning it for a while #loml #taylor swift #ttpd #the tortured poets department #lyric analysis

[romanoffsbish]

I Almost Do

Florence Pugh x Fem!Reader

…and Broken Promises

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

I bet, this time of night you're still up. I bet, you're tired from a long hard week. I bet, you're sittin' in your chair by the window looking out at the city, and I bet, sometimes you wonder 'bout me.

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

Florence had just returned to her hotel after another successful week of shooting in Prague. There were mints laid out on her pillows, and a few complimentary pieces of hotel swag on the bed but she only swept it all onto the floor. Her body collapsed into the soft mattress, and she curled in on herself while staring at her phone.

The notification-less phone, one that used to ding all day long until she had to put it on do not disturb was now drier than ever before.

Tears soak the white sheets beneath her as she once again mourns the greatest loss of her life. Mistakes she herself made led her to moments like these where she was left without the warmth of the only person she'd called home.

———

———

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

I bet, you think I either moved on or hate you. 'Cause each time you reach out there's no reply. I bet it never ever occurred to you that I can't say "Hello" to you, and risk another goodbye.

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

"Please, Y/N, once you get this message call me back, I-I'm desperate.," Florence chewed on her lower lip as she left yet another voicemail. A heavy sigh left her lips as she pondered over the fact that you'd yet to block her, a tiny part of her believed there was a chance to fix this.

With a cigarette between her lips she felt the stress of this predicament melt away, you'd always pleaded with her to quit, and for the longest time she had. Funny, you made her a better person, and yet she wasn't ever enough. If it wasn't the smoking, it was her long hours, if it wasn't the hours it was her partying with friends, and she's sure the list goes on. Deep down she knew your feelings were valid, but she was too angry to rationalize them as such.

How following her dreams, and becoming an overnight sensation led her to losing you was beyond her. Five years of bliss down the drain as soon as she shot to stardom, the same one you encouraged and supported her to chase. Now though, without you it's just an empty accomplishment; if you'd only answer the damn phone you'd know she wants you more, she'd give up the stardom if it meant you were back in her life, and more over in her arms.

As she stomps on the cigarette and makes her way through the bustling streets of New York she prays to stumble upon you. Hope in her ever beating heart that you'll be at the cat cafe, or at the park you two used to frolic through. When she stumbles throughout Central Park though, to go cup in hand, her shoulders fall.

Where you are is a mystery to her ever since you turned your location off. Her heart aches with the prospect of you finding a new love, something fresh, and that will allow someone else to fill the hole in your heart she once did. It's infuriating the more she thinks about it, how you could consider such a thing when she is still so heartbroken over your absence.

Day in, and day out her heart continues to beat for you, even when you continue to give her nothing to show for the dangerous hope that she's desperately clinging to; she misses you.

Unbeknownst to the starlet, you miss her too.

However, after the last blow out you know that the distance is all that's keeping your heart from total ruin. Another movie that would "raise her star power" came around, and she refused to turn it down, even with your threats to leave. She walked right out the door, so you helped her by pushing her out of your life.

That day broke you in ways you'd never imagined possible, at least not coming from her, because she’d always promised to cherish your heart, and yet there she stood, breaking it into tiny pieces without even a glance back.

Florence never really was much for the bigger picture, she was always for what she could see right now, and so these opportunities knocking at her door were ones she couldn't fathom turning down in the thrill of the moment.

So as you sit here with your phone to your ear, cycling through this months set of voicemails you let the tears fall. A once blooming love is showcased in the memories on your phone that you can’t bare to delete, and her heartbroken voice flows through your ears and strikes at your fragile heart:

“Y/N, my darling girl, what happened? How did this break so tragically? I miss you so….”

“Y/N/N, this is getting ridiculous, talk to me!”

“Hey baby, I saw a cat while filming today, we shared lunch on the lot and I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It was uncanny, but the little feline had your eyes… I miss those eyes.”

“I love you, and I will never stop. I’m not giving up on you, even if you’ve done so with me. We’re soulmates Y/N/N, I’ll wait forever.”

You wipe away another set of tears, your heart aching for the love of your life’s affections, but you remain steadfast in your decision here, you cannot contact her. Because you’re absolutely certain that if you were to let her back in, she’d only ever break your heart further.

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

I just wanna tell you it takes everything in me, not to call you. And I wish I could run to you, and I hope you know that every time I don't I almost do.

—•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•~~~~~~•—

Florence continued to sulk as she traipsed around the city of New York, your once shared villa up the road now sits barren as you'd vacated it to go live god knows where, with whom she doesn't know either. Echos of your shared laughter hits her as she passes on by, her heart aches, and her knees nearly give out.

Especially when she realizes the sound wasn't imaginary, not at all, because just across the street you're sat with your phone to your ear. You're alone, which Florence internally beams about, but you're also in a melancholy state. Tears streaming down your cheeks lead her to wonder why you were laughing, then it dawns on her when a reminiscent glint shines in your eyes that you're watching super old videos.

"Y/N?," she calls out hesitantly, she honestly didn't want to break the moment, it'd been half a year since she'd last been this close to you, and when you jump to your feet, looking to her like a deer caught in the headlights she knew she should've been closer before speaking.

"For fucks sake.," she groans, taking off in a sprint as you'd just done seconds prior, you were never going to make any of this easy for her, of course not, it was as if you two were in your very own, incredibly frustrating rom-com.

"Y/N, please! We need to talk!," her plea seems to only make your legs move faster as you descend into the underground subway tunnel, the blonde groans at your decision, but she's far too stubborn to relent so she follows.

By the time she passes by the influx of people she's hobbling over the MetroPay machines to get to you faster, whatever fine comes her way would be affordable anyways, so like any main character would she breaks the laws for love.

Then in true antagonist fashion you evade her by mere seconds, the subway door slamming right in her face, she tries to pry them open, but when a security officer pulls her back she knows she failed her objective of getting you.

The both of your teary eyes meet though, she can see the fear that keeps you from her, it has your heart on lockdown, and she wants nothing more than to pull you close and quell the fears. To tell you that she's sorry, and she's ready to fix her mistakes, even if she's still a bit lost herself on what exactly she did to break this.

Then she see how your eyes fall to the ground suddenly as your hand grazes over your throat, a panicked fist hits the glass and she follows your gaze to find your locket was on the dirty cement. She drift's back up to see you running through the car's in desperation as the train had left the station, and she swiftly holds the jewelry up and sends you an apologetic smile.

You still had it, the heart necklace she got you for your first anniversary with the photo of you two on your first date together. It was a shot of you with a script in hand, in a silly get up to emulate that of the leading male love interest. Helping her run lines for a last minute audition even when you'd originally planned to take her to dinner. It's in this moment, when Flo's tear hits the millimeter long photo that it clicks.

Never once did your support for her waver, it was her lack of reciprocity that brought this relationship to ruin. Every new film came with expectations far too demanding for your heart to bare. Relationships were about give and take, but now she knows she'd stopped giving to you, and the realization is truly debilitating.

Six months of your silence and all it took was the memory of your start to give her clarity.

She collapsed to her knees, uncaring of the filth of the ground or the flashes and whispers that came with her very public breakdown. With the shakiest of hands she pulled her phone from her pocket, sending you a hopeful text, and all she could do now was pray for a miracle.

*6pm, Joes Pizza, I’ll be there—I hope you will show up. Y/N, my sweetest love, I’m so sorry.*

——

1,702 Words

Final Taylor fic

❤️ Kaitlyn 🤭

#florence pugh #florence pugh oneshot #florence pugh imagine #florence pugh angst #florence pugh pov #florence x y/n #florence x you #florence x fem!reader #florence x reader #florence pugh x you #florence pugh x y/n #florence pugh x reader #florence pugh x female reader

[writing-for-life]

Sunday Mourning—About Dream Entities and Stars

Why Head-Canons Are Wonderful, But Forcing Them On Creators Isn’t

And as always: Send me asks about everything Sandman-related!

First of all: I don’t want to take anyone’s head-canons away from them, it’s what fandom is partly built on. I support them, I love them, I have plenty of my own. The Sandman very explicitly tells us about “books never written” in Lucien/ne’s library, and we can be sure ours is in there.

But that’s not quite the same as harassing both creators and other fans in an attempt to make fanon canon, and that’s what partly sparked this post. So if a super-long meta exploration of “Sunday Mourning” (and there is a lot in this post) that also contains a bit of fandom criticism (feel free to skip that if you just want the meta) isn’t your thing—this is your warning 🤣

Also: Massive spoilers ahead…

The theory that Morpheus forever lives in Hob’s dreams (and with Hob) as a dream entity regularly makes the rounds. And it’s a nice theory, and I get why people like it. I also get that “The Wake—Sunday Mourning” is maybe ambiguous enough to consider it a possibility (which then goes into head-canon territory). All good so far.

What’s problematic is when fans begin to leverage their head-canons/theories as “true because Neil gave it a like”, and then proceed to present them as canon.

Neil likes posts, yes, but he said *several times* and *very explicitly* that’s never endorsement of anything, but rather valuing that people put thought into stuff and engage with his stories critically (and he also said that it’s sometimes just a slip of his finger, but that just as an aside, you’ll find one example here).

So if Neil liked a happily-ever-after-dream-entity post, that means he supports your head-canons as head-canons because he always does (or his finger slipped—I guess we’ll never know). He is awesome that way and always was. Again: In a way, it’s even an integral part of The Sandman. It also means that he likes the fact you engaged deeply with the source material, in either a heartfelt or critical way.

What it *doesn’t* mean: Head-canon is the same as canon despite both being valid in their own way. He said all of this a million times in a million posts.

Let’s explore that particular theory and start with an ask:

His endorsement goes as far as acknowledging that “it’s never only a dream,” and that “dreams are where the stories are.” And we need to stop pretending it’s anything more than that, even if he likes a few posts here and there (posts that go in all different directions, btw). Neil used his own experience with grief and mirrored it 1:1 in how Hob handles Morpheus’ death in The Wake and Sunday Mourning.

Here is a quote from the Sandman Companion:

NG: […] Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

HB: It also makes me think of Hob's dream in part 3.

NG: That was something that actually happened to me. [1]I dreamt about a friend who'd died six months earlier, woke up completely upset that she'd died, [2]and then realized I'd simply had a dream and felt enormously relieved... [3]and then I woke up all the way and remembered that she really had passed on.

[numbers and bold by me]

And then remember what happened to Hob:

1. He found out in a dream Morpheus had died and woke up upset and crying in The Wake, Chapters 1-3 (#70-72).

2. Then he had another dream that somewhat gave him closure and a sense of relief (Sunday Mourning, #73).

(Can I also just point out where Destruction’s fingers are pointing here and then contrast it with what he told Daniel in The Wake about “walking amongst the stars”, or Morpheus actually turning into a star?)

(What might the end of the story be? Who knows, but once again, have a look where Destruction’s fingers are pointing.)

3. Then he woke up all the way and felt peace (also in Sunday Mourning).

Make of that what you will, but to me, saying that scene was based on his own dream is basically Neil confirming that Morpheus has “really passed on.”

Will Hob remember Morpheus? Of course he will. That’s what humans do. Does Morpheus live a happily ever after in Hob’s dream with Hob? And would that be in character? And would he want his memories to be intact to make that happen? Would that truly be passing on?

I will explore why canonically, we don’t find much to support that notion, and why it would seem OOC. But if you believe it, it’s your personal truth. Should we call for the ending to be changed though to make our personal truth that of the author?

Life and death are our own, and it’s never just a dream

Destruction was in Hob’s dream (when Hob never really knew him), and Destruction walked away from it all. As did Morpheus. They’re both free. It was very likely (and I'm phrasing this carefully on purpose) a dream gifted by Daniel!Dream (who had a very long talk with Destruction during the Wake) to give Hob closure, and it seems straightforward enough if you read The Wake not just single-mindedly focused on one thing. Daniel!Dream is not in the original panel, but he is in the background of concept art of that panel for a movie pitch by Jill Thompson and Neil Gaiman, so we can probably assume it was always the intended subtext.

And what does Death say in Façade? Or what does Morpheus say to Orpheus, or to Delirium after he killed Orpheus? That life and death are our own.

Destruction’s life is his own.

Morpheus’ death is his own.

And Hob’s life AND death are his own.

The three of them are the literal embodiment of that sentiment:

One walked away and chose life.

One walked away and chose death.

One chooses life for as long as he sees fit and can choose death if he stops doing so.

It makes sense to put them in a panel together at the end for that very reason (and a few others of course).

That, right there, is already “more than just a dream.” It is the story, not just a metaphor. It is canon, and it is fairly explicit.

Would Morpheus ever want to be a dream entity with all his memories intact?

From this point onward, we get more into interpretation based on canonical character traits:

Morpheus living forever as a dream entity *tied to Hob’s dream* is canonically antithetical and OOC. There, I said it. He wanted to be free from the Dreaming, he even said so to Death (“But even the freedom of the Dreaming can be a cage, of a kind, my sister,” in #69).

But existing as a dream entity WITH ALL HIS MEMORIES INTACT (that alone should make people say, “He would never want this in a million years” because it’s the very source of his pain—he wanted punishment for Orpheus’ fate/death—Nuala called him out on it) would forever tie him to it. Plus, it would make him Daniel’s subject in a way. It would be, again, very OOC.

Also: Dream had very strong feelings about the dead NOT belonging into dreams/the Dreaming permanently, or the living building their lives around them. WHY would that apply to Hector, but not to Morpheus himself? Again, it makes no sense in continuity.

But Destruction was in that dream…

Destruction visited Daniel!Dream during the Wake. They talked about a lot of stuff that’s very relevant, I recommend a reread if you’re not certain (this is long enough as it is, so I’ll skip it at this point). And it makes narrative sense to anchor that in Hob’s dream for reasons already outlined (they might not make sense to Hob, but they make sense to us, the reader, if we are willing to see that “it’s more than just a dream” isn’t equal to two people riding off into the sunset together, as nice a head-canon that might be). What I *do* want to point out though is that Destructions talked about “walking amongst the stars” and again, where he points in Hob’s dream.

Someone said this somewhere else and drew parallels to Stardust: Morpheus *does* become a star (or returns to them, who knows), it’s all over The Wake. That star is in literally *every* panel with a window/sky after his barge has transformed. And what becomes of him as that—who knows, since we all know stars have some sort of sentience in Gaiman’s universe, and that “oblivion is not an option” if Death took your hand to lead you into the afterlife. Again: Head-canon territory…

Head-canons are beautiful

No one is trying to take them away from us. Let’s knock ourselves out in fanfic and fanart, it’s comforting and healing. The Sandman is a story about stories. Our stories are our own, and they are true for us, that’s the whole point. And Neil will *never* tell you your head-canon is not real, because for you, it is, and that’s all that matters. But the constant need to elevate fanon to canon really gets exhausting at times, especially if it involves pestering the creators, constantly being on their blogs/tagging them and trying to get them to confirm what we want.

And to those that insist we will undoubtedly get a happily ever after because “Hob’s dream says so”, and think the writers somehow should “read the room” and provide fan-service (side-note: What is it with this entitlement in fandom? The creator tells *their* story, not yours):

One of the main messages of the story is (already in 24/7) that stories only have a happy ending because we know when to stop, but that they ultimately *all* end in death. No matter how much people say that “the show is so much more hopeful”, that very line has already been brought into the show. They didn’t take it out. It will have weight at some point, I’ll put my money on it.

But show!Murphy isn’t comics!Murphy...

People point out that show!Morpheus is different from comics!Morpheus to justify we will get a different ending. Making Morpheus a bit softer around the edges seems, at least to me, a move to make him likeable as the protagonist, because it would be very hard to like early comics!Morpheus, to be frank. The fact that he brought Gault back from the darkness—I saw that as giving show!only fans a nicely wrapped end of the first season, because we didn’t even know if we would get a second one at that point. It also shows us that he is capable of change—a thing I am near certain he will repeatedly deny as we go on (he already did). So no, I personally don’t think it set him on a different path. There are even scenes in the show that very heavily foreshadow The Kindly Ones (the cracks in the window are overlayed onto his face in such a way that they heavily hint at the scar he is going to receive).

So yes, by all means, let’s have a bit of ambiguity in Sunday Mourning for the people who don’t like the tragic ending, but let’s also focus on more than just making everything about the ship. Their relationship is important, and even more so because it isn’t romantic—that’s why it grows and lasts (unlike Morpheus’ romantic relationships). But it’s only the tiniest fraction of what The Sandman is about.

I write fanfic. I give Morpheus happy endings, too. I get it, I want him to be happy, too. But no matter how much we write him in character, we will ultimately break character the moment we make him do things that lead to a different outcome. In canon, he is the way he is. And I am afraid to say:

I personally think he is also like that in the show, even if they softened him a bit around the edges and shoved certain messages down our throats that people who know the comics didn’t need, but newbs to the Sandman did (“I’m listening now…”)—it was a good move, and all of that made sense for show-narrative reasons. But not once did I have the feeling that he wasn't exactly the same Morpheus underneath it all, and we already had too much foreshadowing to think that we would really get a different ending.

Why chemistry isn’t confirmation of the ship

That’s another one: To turn one (!) show-writer’s comment that Morpheus’ and Hob’s chemistry was a thing, and that they allowed that type of ambiguity, into, “Their romantic relationship is canon.” These two things are not the same. And Neil said that Benton’s comment did not make Dreamling any more real/canon, but people conveniently forget that. He also didn’t deny it, he just didn’t confirm, because, again: He doesn’t confirm or deny head-canons. They’re ours. Let's please stop pestering the man to confirm our head-canons and fantasies, but that just as an aside.

It shows one thing, however:

How conditioned fandom is to make everything about romantic relationships (ideally m/m), even if they have nothing, and I say nothing, to do with the main message.

And it’s okay the wish for these relationships matters to some people, but they don’t have to matter to everyone else, to the extent that we expect the actual story to change. Why try to twist his arm into changing his own story, and the way he wanted to tell it?

So again: Head-canons are beautiful. Trying to get them confirmed by creators and foist them upon everyone else (to the extent that people get harassed) is not.

And if I'm proven wrong on this, I’ll still die happy, but I'm putting my chips down right now and say:

Morpheus will die in exactly the same way as in the comics. And if we get The Wake, we will get a scene in Sunday Mourning that can hold ambiguity for processing our grief, just like the comic can. And the shippers will say, “He’s with Hob, yay!”, and the non-shippers will say, “Nah, not what I saw.” And Neil will get a million asks and answer each single one with:

“What do *you* think?”

#the sandman #neil gaiman #dream of the endless #morpheus #hob gadling #sandman #sandman meta #sandman spoilers #sandman comics spoilers #the wake #sunday mourning #façade #sandman book club #sandman bookclub #canon vs fanon #harassing creators and other fans is never okay #neither is constantly creeping into their inboxes to get your head-canons confirmed

[cheriecelestial]

Luminary Pt.II

pairing *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ Yan Emperor!OC X Swordmaster!OC

disclaimer *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ yandere thoughts. hurt/ no comfort. angst. mentions of violence and character death. lovers to enemies.

a/n *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ Please listen to Joel Sunny’s Luminary for the whole experience. COMMENT LIKE & REBLOG ✿.*･｡ﾟ (ㅅ´ ˘ `) Pt.1

“Atticus was kind,” Atticus' ears perked up at his mention, his brows knitted in confusion as to why she was referring to him as if she was talking about someone else ? “You said your magic erases insignificant feelings. You were always so full of kindness, what happened?” Her words struck the platinum haired man like lightning. But what she saw in him was just him mirroring her light like the moon does with the sun and nothing else.

“To you my darling. I was kind because you deserved it. I cared because you did, always. You broke me out of my mould, out of all the rules and conceptions I had about my life. And I loved you for it. But before I knew it i started doing everything by your book. Everything for you. To win you, for validation, for love. So much so that I lost sight of my goal.” His words died by the end of his sentence, if they were talking truth now — he might as well splay his feelings out in front of her.

“I was just trying to save you. I-I-”Cecily barely stuttered out. He felt Cecily's hand on his shoulder dig in. Her bottom lip quivered and her body trembled to the point that she swayed slightly on her feet. If he could feel any guilt or remorse he was sure that the look on her face would've devastated Atticus more than anything he had experienced before but all he felt was a strange tightness in his chest.

Calming herself, she took a deep breath and spoke in a low tone,“ Is that what I was to you ? A distraction from your goal ? I tried Atticus. I tried so hard to save you from yourself.” He telt a part of his shoulder burn where she rested her hand.

“Distraction ? No my love. I know you tried to save me and for a moment there - I swore you did . But leaving behind all I had ever known was a risk I was never willing to take, because what will become of me when I abandon the laws that have shaped me ? You gave me life but my vengeance gave me purpose.” Atticus knew he wasn’t a good man from the very start. That something was fundamentally flawed about his existence. An inadequacy, one he’d never overcome. And somewhere deep within, he was jealous. Jealous of Cecily for being so perfect . She always so full of vitality. Like a star, even when she held his face in her hands — she always somehow felt so far away, somehow felt so unattainable. The problem with being born in hell and then being getting a taste of heaven was - that no matter how hard you tried you could never overcome that nagging feeling in the back of your head that told you that you didn’t belong. There was one sole lesson he learnt from all of this was he had too many demons to love an angel. So if he couldn’t belong in the heaven, he would drag his haloed darling to the hell.

“The reason I came here was to see if there was a modicum of redeemable humanity left in you. If there was any part of my Atticus left. Marcel was right, you have changed beyond recognition. I no longer recognise the person I’m looking at.” Her tone grew distant by the second. It was the same tone people talked about the deceased at funerals. Mourning him as if he had died, like he wasn’t still alive and breathing in front of her. She almost thought it would be easier if he had died. At least she’d feel some sort of closure, knowing he’s not coming back. But this, this was a nothing but pure torture for her.

But then he wasn’t gone, if anything he was doing better than he ever was. Leaving her behind to pick up the shattered pieces of what they once had. Yet somehow, she couldn’t hate him for that - not really anyways. No amount of anger would mend the torn pieces of her broken heart. She was left in emotional turmoil, love mixing with hate mixing with rage, betrayal and depression. No matter how many times the word hate flashed through her mind, it was never truly directed at Atticus. Rather the world, the things they had forced upon him, the pressure he had been made to feel.

Shakily, Cecily raised her palm to caress his hair. Atticus almost flinched at how warm her war calloused hand felt against his face. He nuzzled his face closer to her palm as his emotions as a cacophony of fear, desire, hate, and desolation, all battling one another for control. Her touch was a fire he would willingly walk into.

Cecily cupped Atticus’ face and tilted her chin up to him, parting her lips ever so slightly. Atticus’s brain went into overdrive at her invitation. She resembled a siren, calling out to him with her sweet song and in the back of his head he knew there would be consequences to this. But the moment her lips touched his he stopped breathing. His mind went blank. Every feeling, thought, and emotion that he has ever felt floods through him in a torrent. He could barely comprehend the feeling of her lips on his own. His hands wrapped themselves around her back and tighten as the rush of emotions overwhelms him. At the same time, he was aware of how much he hated this. She was ruining him and she had no idea how much her touch was destroying everything he spent so much time meticulously building.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.” Cecily’s emerald green eyes looked hollow yet somehow reverential when she pulled away. Atticus wanted to grab her shoulders, shake her violently and yell that he was still here so why did she look at him with such melancholy.

“I don’t need saving Cecilia. Join me my darling. Be my queen and I swear we could restore this empire to all its deserved glory.”He gripped her hand resting against his cheek and pleaded. He didn’t care if he sounded desperate or pathetic, he just needed her to say yes.

Cecily shook her head slowly and said,“ As appealing as it sounds, you and I both know you don’t plan on making me anything apart from your canary in a gilded cage because I will never approve of you methods and neither will I aid you in them.” Atticus sighed in defeat. He bit the inside of his cheek till he tasted blood. If she wasn’t going to give in voluntarily, he just had to make her.

“You know you can’t win against me. Even if you persevere and defeat my armies. You can’t kill me. Dark magic makes me impervious to all weaponry and magic. No one in history has ever been able to accomplish it. What makes you think you will be able to do it ?” Atticus challenged her knowing that even with all her strength, there was no way in hell she could win. She wouldn’t fight for so long if she knew she didn’t stand a chance, an ominous voice warned him .

“None but one”

He knew who she was referring to. The legend Seraphina Andrea Reginald and her aura sword — the Caelum Lux. The founder of the continent. She was this golden figure who was the beacon of morality, freedom and justice. An allegory and dubbed to be reincarnation of the goddess of light Lumine. But that was the end of it- a legend, another one of story tellers’ dramatic gimmicks to make little children believe in virtue. Even though Cecily belonged to her bloodline, calling upon such power was next to impossible.

“It’s a children’s story my darling. The Caelum Lux isn’t a real sword and you know it.”

Cecily lightly shrugged in response as a silent ‘yes well’. The orchestra began their final piece and a familiar melody swirled around them. It was the song Atticus often played for them at late hours when they’d sneak into the music room at the music room back when they were in the academy. What were the odds that they would play this very song as their final piece ?

“It’s the last waltz your majesty. Dance with me. Just like the old times.”

Wordlessly, Atticus pulled her closer. Her cheek was resting on his chest and his other hand almost holding her in a half hug. This wasn’t the standard waltz position, but it was something so comfortingly intimate to them. She was good to him but not to his cause. To Atticus Asterin – Cecily Reginald is an obstacle, but to Atty - Ces is an anchor. His heart felt at peace but his instincts were blaring sirens as if she was his greatest enemy and who knows maybe she was. Push her away and leave, the voice told him as a sign of fatal danger. He gripped her closer as if retaliating to the instinct. Atticus wasn’t going to let anyone take Cecily away from him, not even himself.

“The Caelum Lux isn’t a sword, it’s a bloodline.”Cecily stated calmly as if it wasn’t the most groundbreaking piece of information Atticus had heard. “You remember my father, the late duke, had all my distant relatives covertly killed a few years ago ?”

“Yes, I do remember. It was perhaps the only occasion you mustered the courage to confront him,” he countered. Instead of retaliating in her usual fury, Cecily merely smiled and continued, “Its aura can be invoked by the last descendant after absorbing the light energy of their deceased kin. Seraphina Reginald wasn’t a swordmaster — she was a mage. The most formidable one to ever exist.” Atticus’ blood ran cold. He remembered the duke and his cold eyes. They were the same colour as Cecily’s but they always held nothing but disgust and disdain, looking at him as if he were nothing but an insect. The only time a different expression crossed the duke’s face was as he lay dying. Atticus pressed the sword to his heart and the duke just smiled back at him. The same smile Cecily was wearing. The same smile a hunter wore when they caught their prey.

After gaining his power, Atticus believed he could shed his fear. He swore to himself that he would never go back to being that helpless weak boy who was even scared of his own shadow. He wasn’t supposed to feel this anymore.

Push her away. She’s dangerous.

Push her away.

Push her away.

“I see.” He felt as though he was stepping forward over this ravine with a snapping tightrope, but she was on the other side with a lamp and a knife, daring him to cross it. But it didn’t matter because she wouldn’t catch him — not anymore. He had emerged victorious, then why did he feel like he was exactly where the duke wanted him to be ?

Atticus looked down to her face pressed against his chest. It was a pleasant. Despite having this beautiful perspective emphasised, Atticus found his head reeling and his breath shallowing. His heart hammering in his chest unstably, feeling somewhat claustrophobic. She can’t defeat me, that’s what the platinum haired man kept telling himself. He was caught in a tailspin, a tailspin that was only leading him one place. He couldn’t let that happen. But she kept haunting his thoughts, along with the other ghosts holed up in his head. Did ruination and salvation always look this identical ?

You can’t put Atticus upon yourself to save — he made the choices he made, you can’t change them. You can’t save a person who doesn’t want to be saved. She told herself sternly. She must done what she had to, what she came here to do. Cecily took a deep breath and steeled her resolve. She didn’t know if she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t recognise him. Everything about him, every minuscule detail about him, had been exactly as she had remembered. He still had the same sweet and playful look in his eyes. He still had the same charming smile. He was still the same person she fell in love with all those years ago so it hurt. She cried, wailed, and tried to be strong as she thought about the moments shared with him and how cruel it was that this was where she ended up.

Their eyes lock, returning each other's gaze, scrutinising the abysmal of their souls that was built with a blended sentiment. She saw a bead of perspiration run down the side of his forehead and his breath getting more laboured by the second. She had to act fast.

For a fleeting moment, silence prevailed in between, the rhythm of their breathing stirring with the progression of the music around them. The music of the waltz filled the room with a gentle, flowing melody. It began with a simple rhythm, gradually building into a sweeping cadence. Footsteps and hands were in perfect time with the music, moving with precision and grace. It was a soothing, romantic piece. The tempo of the music shifted and changed, following the dynamics of the song and the movements of the dancers. Soon it reached a feverish crescendo indicating its dramatic ending .

Atticus wrapped her waist and lifted her in the air for a spin. When he set her down he noticed her eyes were closed. “Love ?” He asked but she didn’t respond. Growing unnerving due to the lack of response he reaped, he called out to her again. An ominous feeling crept up his spine as the voice in his head chided him, too late. When she opened her eyes, they glowed with unnatural amount of light almost as if the goddess Lumine herself had descended from the heavens. Wait, goddess ? Now it all started to make sense to him. Her coming here, the legend of Seraphina Reginald and the Caelum Lux.

Blinding light engulfed the ballroom leaving everyone stunned. And when the light faded, Atticus heard someone scream. He felt oddly disoriented and overwhelmed. What is going on ? He opened his mouth to speak but nothing except blood came out. His hand flew to his neck to feel the thick waterfall of blood dripping from the side of his neck. Before he could register what happened, his knees bucked as he stumbled. Is that my blood ? Am I dying ? His vision started to blur and he felt life slipping away like sand from his fingers. Unlike anything he had ever imagined, instead of fear he felt warmth.

In that moment, he saw the star decorations in the centre of the dome and all the incomplete dreams and promises of forever they made in their youth. His vision cleared for a second and he saw her. He saw everything he ever loved about her – her countenance bore an undeniable allure. Her spun hair, painstakingly brushed to perfection, flowed like silk threads, infused with small silver flowers, an extravagant touch. The jagged burn scar that ran down the side of her face, something that never deterred him from loving her all the same. Swathed in rich lace, her garments caressed her form with the grace of luxury, their hue an enchanting shade of white. This allure was further accentuated by her green eyes, glinting like shards of frozen emeralds, reflecting an unyielding mysterious depth — a landscape of evergreen forests like the ones they would often go hunting in. He stared at her till his vision was tainted by red.

As the world around him darkened, he was left with the haunting echoes of what once was, leaving him to wonder how it all came to this point. too many questions, too little answers. They said love healed, love nurtured, love saved many. Unfortunately for them, the poets were wrong after all, not even love was enough to save them. Her lips moved to say something he couldn’t quite catch, Atticus used the last bit of his strength to strain his ears to hear the last words she would say to him before he left this world .

“Rest now my love, may the gods receive you on the other side, pardoning that which may be absolved.”

#yandere #yandere oc #yancore #yanderecore #yandere x oc #yandere male #male yandere #tw: yandere #yandere imagines #oc x oc #songfic #lovers to enemies #hurt/no comfort #angst #historical fantasy #yandere x reader #yandere x y/n