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ghost-proofbaby · 9 months

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ghost!!! i am sobbing weeping crying omg twenty four hours is coming to an end and it is so very bittersweet. i found 24hrs on ao3 and stayed up until three am binging it, then immediately went and followed you on tumblr, and ive been keeping track of it ever since. im not very good a tumblr since i only started using the app for fanfic last october, and i am one of those people that sometimes is ashamed of being a fangirl, so it’s almost unbelievable to me that i have a space where no one will know it’s me and i can enjoy whatever i want. im still trying to adjust to that, tell myself that it’s okay to repost fanfics and that this is a safe space. but twenty four hours has helped me with a LOT of that. before i used to kinda be ashamed to go on tumblr, but now i scroll it daily bcs i didn’t want to miss any updates on the fic. i also made the plunge and officially got an ao3 account, after oh about, seven or eight years of reading fan fiction practically non stop. so im getting there, and i just wanted you to know that twenty four hours helped me to get there.

and i think the main reason that twenty four hours has helped me get there is because of the quality of your writing. you write beautifully, intricately, and most of all—truthfully. ive never read an x reader that has felt so real, so fleshed out and most of all, relatable. i would find myself having internal monologue as i read from the ‘reader’s’ perspective and then the next paragraph would, sometimes word for word, have ‘reader’ think what i was thinking. this fic was also so healing, in a way. the way you used literary devices to describe such complicated situations had me often feeling relieved—like i had just let something go. as someone with a lot of baggage right now and who has a hard time believing they could ever be loved, it was at the very least comforting to have my insecurities and my negative qualities forgiven and proven untrue through ‘reader’ if that makes sense.

ik this is sappy as hell but i genuinely feel this way. your writing has moved me in a way that actual published books haven’t done for me in a while. so i just want to thank you for the time, effort, and thought that went into this fic. and secondly, i want to suggest the idea of adapting this into a novel to be published or a screenplay for a movie, in case no one has mentioned that to you or you haven’t thought of it. i really believe you have something good here, and with your talent, i could see you being very successful. this story of these two people—who both have internal wounds inflicted on themselves, each other, or from the past—who then grow more self aware and choose to be honest, even when it’s hard, is such a rare thing to see in literature or any kind of art. and i think the world needs more of that. bcs, like i said, this fic was more than just a fic to me. it touched me deeply. i cried, i laughed, and i reflected my own self. in short, it was a journey in more ways than one.

so thank you—for your art, for ‘reader’, and for eddie. i can’t wait for the epilogue and to read whatever stories you may have planned for the future.

(ps so sorry to have word vomited in your ask box.)

first and foremost — never apologize for word vomit in my ask box. i am always a-okay with that. 🖤

i don’t even know what to say. i have this terrible habit of putting a lot more of myself than i care to admit into both my readers and my ocs, and most of the time, it’s not the good parts. usually, it’s the absolute worst parts of myself. i take all the rot inside, and i throw it into these projections, and i try to justify how someone with those qualities would still be deserving of love. it’s always been a coping mechanism. always. and then i’ve always strived to be a better writer, make my words worth reading, because i know how much of myself i’ve put into it.

to know other people see themselves in reader or eddie or any character i write is both so strangely hopeful but also so saddening, and it just makes me want to give you the biggest hug 🫂

on the note of publishing, i have definitely considered it. it’s just a really scary journey to decide to take. but the day i do decide to take the plunge, whether with this story or any other i’ve written or any entirely new one, you all will be the first to know 🖤🖤🖤

thank you so so much for reading, for letting my writing touch your soul the way it has. i am so honored that this fic has had this type of affect on you. this message genuinely made me cry. i am sending you all the love. <3

#it’s that one poem by suzanne rivecca #‘it has to be perfect. it has to be irreproachable in every way.’#’why?’#’to make up for it. to make up for the fact that it’s me.’#in all seriousness this message made me ugly sob #i’ve got no words #thank u ily

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seldaryne · 3 months

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somewhere in the back of my mind i'm piecing together conversational fragments that must have happened post-cazador fight & post-orin fight (+ all that came immediately after) respectively. i don't think it'd be untouched until post-game, but probably would take place closer to the final fight. something something the calm before the storm, insomnia-induced contemplation, etcetera.

i'm not 100% sure on the tone of everyone's emotions yet. what i do know for sure is that when astarion asks velrith if she would have fought him the same way she did cazador (he's seen what she can do & knows there would probably be a decent chance of her success, which is like. at the very least a mildly frightening thought lmao), she's going to answer him truthfully.

yes, she would have, no hesitation whatsoever. & he kind of figured that would be the case, but also wants to know why. it's in the past, he's definitely not going to go out of his way to set up a new version of the ritual for himself so it's all conjecture anyway, but there's enough curiosity to justify it.

& she was still pretty removed from everything at that point, so it wasn't completely impossible to imagine her stepping back to just allow it either. it's not exactly like there's a blueprint for what the average person would do in the same situation, especially when he wasn't objectively incorrect about that type of power providing safety.

there was a case either way, but even she was pretty sure it was logically wrong to let 7000 people die for that from a moral standpoint. alexithymia aside, that's pretty obvious. she's still not even sure that 7000 spawn would be as dangerous as an ascended vampire, & would probably point out that statistically speaking, a decent number of them will probably end up destroyed before they become a threat. letting anyone ascend just seemed like an objectively worse path across the board, and while she might have a memory of mostly holes & miss out on a number of social norms, she isn't stupid by any stretch.

there's also the issue of her oath. he gets it as far as knowing it's extremely important to her & she essentially wouldn't be who she is now, but he'll probably never get it past that. in the timeline where she was personally in favour of ascension but still valued her oath, she would have made herself follow it. one of them was not going to survive that encounter, simple as that. which isn't a pleasant truth to hear, but he knows that she's definitely not lying either.

she loves him in her own way, as intensely as she knows how (which is actually quite a lot, but is very much something that requires you to know what you're looking for to actually see it), but that promise she made to an ideal, that single idea that she was able to re-build an entire identity around was going to hold more weight in that situation. there would have been no justifying it if she let him go on, no way she could crawl her way out of oathbreaking a second time (to say nothing of how badly it broke her when she made the mistake that led to the first incident).

she didn't even remember her own name after orin tried to cave her skull in & left her for dead, but she sure remembered the oath she swore before bhaal upended her life. to her, that means something. fighting him would have been terrible, yes, but it would also have been a familiar flavour of tragedy & not the same hefty blow to her sense of being. she would unhappily survive after that, probably alone by choice, but alive. self-betrayal wouldn't see the same ending.

& i don't see him exactly feeling comforted by this, because it's a lot to unpack, but he also wouldn't have bothered to ask if he wasn't able to digest the truth either (she's also historically a really, really bad liar & there would be no question if she was actually lying. it's actually embarrassing to watch her try).

the dedication makes so much sense, though. after the night she'd completely lost control, the only thing that really gave her anything resembling solace was the promise that there would be someone to end her if there was no chance she'd return to her senses. not platitudes, not gentleness, but the knowledge that someone would be willing & able to destroy her before someone else got hurt. (admittedly, that interaction left him feeling a bit weird in an inarticulate sort of way.)

& another thing--if they're having this conversation, she's also managed to piece together the memory of when she decided to pursue her oath, & more importantly, why.

rejecting bhaal had given her a notable change in her overall demeanour & energy, but absolutely nothing drastic. it doesn't destroy the typical disconnection she has with the majority of the world or the feeling of viewing everything from the other side of a glass barrier. that otherness in knowing there was something missing by the standards of her peers led her to value her body as a tool early on. so what if you can't make conversation without seeing the other person struggle not to visibly recoil? so what if you can't feel happy in a way that doesn't feel false? devotion to an ideal meant she would still meet a standard of goodness, could still serve a function & if she did it well enough, other shortcomings could be overlooked entirely. certain things were beyond her reach, but being useful and functional wasn't.

(even that was ripped away, and she learned that no matter how badly she wanted to change herself, she'd only ever been intended as an instrument of death. she didn't enjoy a second of it, but she's always been a tool that needed a guiding hand of some sort. the reaction to that much death shouldn't have been apathy, but even that felt too difficult to muster up after a while. whatever hope she had at at least being able to serve the people around her in a way that made up for her deficits was gone.)

no real messy conclusion here. he sits with the knowledge that she would have killed him out of necessity, but those same reasons are also a big part of why she was unquestioningly ready to aid him in the first place. she tells him it genuinely wouldn't have mattered even if he despised her for some reason on a personal level; he brought to her attention a man responsible for the untold suffering of thousands of people, and that meant she had an obligation to become involved. not exactly the romantic ideal of a knight in shining armour, but the consistency is terrifying & splendid in its own way.

honestly, i don't even know if he would know how he felt until he has some time to think about it. the way she functions internally is just so insanely alien to him sometimes, despite her general willingness to plainly answer more or less any questions he might have. the explanations work for how, not always why. he gets the bodily disconnect, of course, and the idea that you're only as good as your last performance. & his experience with other paladins tells him that they're generally kind of odd, but not in the way she was.

he wants to know why, then, if she'd always seen herself as someone who had such a massive blindspot, did she dedicate herself to something inherently selfless? usually, that sort of decision came out of emotional connection (not to be insensitive, if there's even a way to dance around that type of insecurity delicately). & she just sort of shrugs, as if the conclusion was obvious. she could always sense that there was something incomplete & incorrect in her, and if she couldn't fix it, then she could at least make up for it in other ways.

(this is probably the most glaringly obvious example of how different their internal workings are. he cannot for the life of him imagine continually putting himself on the line for strangers like that voluntarily, knowing he'd be getting so little out of it beyond meeting some imaginary and/or arbitrary standard. she's never even considered it to be that, on the other hand, and knows that causing suffering takes approximately the same amount of effort. better to at least have someone benefitting from her existence, if she should exist at all. there's still a part of him that feels like he's owed something for all of his suffering--she's still not even certain that what she's experienced would even qualify as suffering. if it is, shouldn't she tolerate it willingly because of what she is & what her purpose was?)

he'd propositioned her at the tiefling party for a few reasons. one was, of course, the need to secure his safety via her enamoured trust. not a single one of those interactions followed his usual script. yes, she went along with them, but never in a way that he felt stemmed from unbearable lust or otherwise being completely enamoured. he'd picked up on the involuntary detachment too without realizing, but it made him nervous. the second reason was more immediate; the staring.

in hindsight, he is now aware that the people watching is a harmless (if disconcerting when you're the one her eyes are on) habit of hers, and it's not just him who ends up targeted either. she's fascinated by the mechanics of someone who's able to work a crowd, who can effortlessly draw strangers in & figure out where things go from there. body language, vocal tone, everything is observed. she's moved past envy at this point in her life, she tells him, but she suspects that probably wasn't so as a child. there's a very hazy recollection of trying to imitate the way some neighbouring girls spoke to each other when they played outside, ending in confused disappointment when her efforts were laughed at as they ran off without her.

he could talk to people, though. maybe not always as well as he did now (everyone had an awkward learning phase, he figures, even if he can't recall any similar memories of ostracization during his formative years), and that wasn't saying he enjoyed the vast majority of those interactions either, but he could do it & do it well. so well, in fact, that her observational fascination had been inevitable. what he thought was intense suspicion was actually just a curious audience, and her (correctly understood) bafflement when he'd propositioned her had also retroactively made a lot of sense. she'd seen no reason for someone like her to have a place in his performances, but was curious enough to go along with it to see how everything looked from this side.

(everything worked out anyway, but he still feels a little stupid for being that off-base when she'd never even thought of hiding her motivations.)

there's also so much to unpack about withers dragging her back from the dead. she didn't even question it being a 'no peace due to the weight of your sins' scenario (which... i'm not certain it was entirely?). the only alternative she might be convinced of is knowing the reality of her strength and how valuable it would be for the upcoming fight. stepping into the actual gameplay for a second but she had orin down single-handedly in 1.5 turns. just over a minute of combat. that's not nothing, and would almost definitely be horrifying to watch happen in real-time. yes, that's your friend, yes, that's your lover, but it's a good thing she's not your enemy or else you might also be reduced to a pile of viscera.

i'd say this is probably the point where the lack of value she has for herself is crystal clear. not purposefully, but he's had some pretty pressing matters on the brain & didn't catch on while his focus was elsewhere (like not dying or being recaptured, for example). & she's also actually sort of... passive in a lot of ways? she's got a code she adheres to and acts accordingly in situations where it applies, and naturally there were some pretty strong reactions about bhaal's connection with her. but beyond that she tends to accept things as they come to her, operating without solid intentions or a notion of preference until after the fact.

this gets me to another thing i'll probably have more thoughts on later (or more in-depth anyway). him understanding & functioning for the majority of his existence with his worth measuring up to what he could do for cazador specifically. how good he is at reading people, using that to mold himself into someone that they'd be head-over-heels for in one evening and how easily those habits still show themselves presently & he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to unlearn that instinctive reaction, compared to her complete inability to hide anything. she will never be charming, or smooth, or even be able to do the briefest impression of 'normal.' people don't like her, even without bhaal's influence on her actions; there's still something that always flags as subconsciously wrong to them. and she'll accept the treatment anyway because it seems to be the best she can achieve. he knows how to have people falling at his feet with minimal effort; she's consistently surprised when anyone likes her at all.

(there's a parallel/connection here that i'm grasping towards but haven't quite defined yet & it has something to do with physical autonomy/reclamation of the self and how that can manifest.)

she also wasn't surprised when he confessed to having less than honourable intentions about their initial hookup. she didn't know the exact reasons behind it, of course, but she assumed it might just have been his own curiosity or even boredom that drove him. lightly insulting but another thing that explains her behaviour at the time. it was still something she wanted to engage in, but there was never any assumption that it was something more than skin-deep & honestly i think he might have been a bit miffed to learn that? in a way that isn't even entirely logical, since it also means someone didn't just fall for the ruse (& wanted to be around him anyway). but also: someone didn't fall for it, meaning there was some sort of hole in the armour, some type of vulnerability that gave it away. knowing now that he wouldn't have been persecuted doesn't mean this is any less of an anxious thought.

she's not aloof & never actually has been. she doesn't think she has that desire to connect because it's never been reciprocated, but it's there & it's strong. she'll take whatever she can to try and figure out what's missing in her, and this desire has been exploited before without her knowing. if bhaal's control made all her efforts pointless, able to control her body & override her own thoughts for the sake of murder, then there wasn't anything left to fight for. having her memories taken was inherently violating, but also probably the only way she was ever going to gain a desire to live for herself in any capacity. there's something just a bit extra tragic about someone who's never been offered anything remotely self-worth building to the degree they think 'hollow' is a positive state.

anyway, this definitely isn't a happy conversation for them, but it's important & revealing. it's also her first time really vocalizing what she thinks of herself, so that's pretty big too even if it's indirect. i also get the sense he might be even somewhat paradoxically angry. not at her, but more just the whole situation & the fact that these are the lengths she feels she has to go to for... what, exactly? the off chance that someone might speak to you like a person instead of an anomaly to avoid? it's gone on so long now, he knows she's never even considered that there should be an alternative. he's having to build himself back up again & it's been varying levels of struggling to do so, but he's never actually considered what starting from total 0 would look like. evidently, it looks like not even understanding what the issue is in the first place, or that it exists at all. he doesn't know if one is worse, or if they're just two types of the same hell.

mix this in with some guilt-tinged relief, though; if she's just piecing together herself now, then she's also not judging any of his own missteps. her tendency towards acceptance could probably use some more discretion on who receives it, but it's that same quality that allows her to gracefully deal with whatever he throws at her. if she doesn't know how, she will learn, not just for him but so she has the skill in the future. stubbornness can be a problem, but tempered with humility & patience? a lot of good can be done. he's done/said very little that she hasn't been able to take in stride and add to a growing list of experiences. it's also not like he's never crossed a line before, and it was made very explicit when it happened. his attempt to make light of the oathbreaking situation had backfired terribly, and that was apparent the very millisecond it happened.

but every time he asks something of her, or reveals a little more of himself, or dares to express discomfort, there's never been a need to push for it. how fear-filled had he been, wanting to crawl out of his own skin, when he'd choked over wanting to step back from sex? he'd expected something. disappointment, most likely. perhaps anger. a demand to be the exception. definitely not a thoughtful look while the request was digested before agreeing to it shortly after, only asking a question to clarify if he meant a break from physical contact entirely, or just certain kinds? & he just blinked back for a solid few seconds, processing how easy that was, how it didn't need all of the build-up or trepidation. ask & receive. that's it. & he asks why, because it's all he can actually think to say in the moment instead of an answer to her question, which produces an equally baffled because you... asked? what other response would there be?

as if no other option existed. as if what he said was completely reasonable and not something the majority of people he'd interacted with would have taken as a personal slight. the only concession she'd needed was clarification. and because he couldn't leave well enough alone, he did eventually manage to wheedle out that yes, should he have been turned off entirely from any sort of physicality whatsoever, she would have been somewhat disappointed (expected, honestly, especially since her recent discovery of general touch being something she craved after years of denial), but still wouldn't have pressed.

while grateful at the time (still grateful now, actually), he can't pinpoint if this was purely for his benefit, or just another side of how quickly she could deny herself anything that brought her the slightest amount of pleasure. it's not innocence, because it doesn't make sense in any world to apply that word to bhaal's former favourite, and she's aware of things even if she fails in their application. perhaps it's just the natural result of conditioning & neglect, a lack of recognition pushing her to accept scraps in place of something more thoughtful.

& sitting here now with her, learning that the one thing she had when everything else was stripped away was actually something she took up out of a desperate need to make up for the fact that she was simply born as herself is...

well. it's something, that's for sure.

because it's still important to her & likely will be until she's dead. it brings comfort and direction, providing a framework that she can use to navigate other people on occasion. he's not even going to broach the topic in a potential shift in interests. it wouldn't go anywhere or do anything beyond making her pull away. he'd been made to feel all sorts of shamefully inadequate over the last two hundred years, but he could at least sit with the knowledge that he had a few decades before all of that. it wasn't much comfort, especially with the understanding that he would be dealing with the ripple effects for an undetermined amount of time, patching the damage he could & learning to accept what he couldn't. but he knew enough to be able to mourn what had been lost.

so perhaps the solution here isn't to remove it, but to just... introduce more things into her life for variety. he's not sure yet, nor does he think he's really the best candidate to help either. (ironic, since she feels like she's the least qualified person in camp to help anyone with anything, but here we are.) & that's if a solution is even necessary here. perhaps it really is just a matter of time before there's a shift. she's been free of bhaal's influence now for... what, a week? possibly less? which leaves years to sort things out after, assuming they survive this anyway. a lot could change in that time.

another item on the post-tadpole to-do list, another bridge to cross when they arrive.

#bg3 #astarion x durge #i think i ended up combining a few stray thoughts here.#its def not developed enough yet to my liking if i wanted to write fic tho #might come back to it might just rework it for something else whomst knows #anyway. mentally ill thinking about her path to fleshing out herself as a person for the first time.#not even grasping the depth of the damage because to understand that would be to sign off on your own destruction.#the depersonalization is protection in her case.#which likely ties into why she does just accept certain things at face value. its just subconscious.#oc tag #velrith #couldnt get that one suzanne rivecca quote out of my head either #'to make up the fact that it's me.' yeah. Yeah.#she Does feel that way & doesn't realize just how much she does.

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