Luke Castellan x hypnos!fem
tags: non-romantic relationship, fluff, Luke's pov.
summary: Luke Castellan was found by the way out his nightmares.
1,6k words
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Luke remembered it quite clearly, the night in which the whole... something between them came to be what is now.
He was sweaty and drained, being the only wishful thought he felt brave to feed, for the air to reach his lungs so he could run a little further. He had lost all his will, and he was now running on the only thing stronger than his determination, his fear.
Both Titan and kid could feel it, that night he was fated to succumb to the torture. His mind had already given its last pleadful breath when his foot tripped and his face met the floor. And he now cannot phantom the thought of how different his life would be if he hadn't lifted his head, she hadn't been there.
Luke saw her sitting, with a blank expression on her face, looking down at him. His hand reached for her never expecting to actually be aid, she took it and pulled him towards her. Once they were close to each other she said to him in a bizarrely sweet voice "Your screams were getting too loud". That was the last time the girl acknowledged his presence, as well as the last time he felt that sort of fear.
Somi kept rescuing him like that every night. She never explained why. Luke never asked her either. He would only sit there in what he guessed were the girl's own dreams, and wake up in the morning with just a thin grasp of the events.
Most things about the dreams (and the dreamer herself), were awfully confusing for the swordman-boy. He felt like she looked at reality with an eager infatuation, like she knew that guy better than the arbitrary rules that defined him ever could. Being inside her mind perhaps was making a number on him. Perhaps that's why she at some point stopped posing as the spacey buzzed girl everyone meditated with at times, and held herself in a homely sort of normality he developed a liking for.
She showed a part of her no one else ever saw. Altough it would probably be more precise to say she eventually stopped hiding it. Being honest with himself, Luke admitted that he toyed with the idea of him having found her.
She acted exasperated, bored, mean. She behaved like any person he would never mistake for her on the other world would behave. Their exchange right now was especially out of character.
She had entered his dream, as every night. She stepped in front of him and pushed his shoulders down, when he fell, he was met with the softness of a bed. Tonight's dream was apparently on a room. "Sorry for the mess." She said to the boy's surprise. He wasn't opposed to a change on their routine.
"Kinda used to it and all." he said. She answered with an understanding nod. "Did anything happen?" the Hermes boy asked just to keep this anomaly alive, to which she sighed.
"Evan just left." Curiosity flourished on the boy's throat.
"Like the real one?" the girl took way too long to answer and started stroking his hair while she thought.
"No... the dream one. But I'm pissed at him. And that's a naptime dream" she answered as if it was obvious. Even more questions arose, so she explained "Those are the dreams you aren't supposed to watch." Huh...
"What dreams I'm not supposed to watch?"
"You know, Castellan." she really meant it, he didn't had a clue. She got close to him to whisper teasingly, even knowing no one would really be able to hear. "The inappropriate ones" Oh.
He understood fast though, making sense of what teenager needs usually were. "I was naive on that one, wasn't I?"
"I mean..." she said chuckling while walking away from him. She sat down on a chair in front of a desktop. The place was humorously colorful.
"Ok. But like... Evan? Does that happen often?" He asked almost gossiply.
"I mean! Not anymore! He's a total prick." that made him laugh.
"Is he?" Luke asked, enjoying seeing her so annoyed, especially as he wasn't the cause.
"Yes. And you know what? I hate that, I hate this. Cause he goes around just getting the fuck he wants, and then pretends he 'didn't mean it like that'. Then I get mad, and he thinks I'm pretty when I'm mad, and I get pissed off when he says that, and then I'm horny when I'm pissed. And you know what? He doesn't deserve horny me." Sometimes she just was that unexpectedly honest. Luke just listened amused. She looked up and let out a frustrated groan. "And now I have to take care of you." That made him laugh, but he didn't want her to know that.
"C'mon I'm not that difficult" he pretended to be offended.
"No. But right now you're truly inconvenient" He put his hands up in the air as his sign of surrender before laying down in the bed. She stayed silent for a minute and Luke almost thought they went back to normal. The girl usually was quiet and still, looking lost into the air, or, only the contrary, highly invested in a task and barely paying him attention. Now she was neither, the chair was slowly spinning with her wearing a childish expression. She controlled every aspect of every scenario he had observed, and even when she didn't feel like going strong at it, she would prove her domain by popping something for him to distract himself. He took note of that when he saw a ray of sunlight entering the window, leaving a path she was now following in his direction. She was standing in front of the side of the bed again. "Sit." she said, way too used to having control over here. And, listen, he wasn't about to oppose an emotional all powerful being. Once he stood straight, she st looking taller than him, barely. She supported her arms on the top of his head. And sighed again. "I hate men".
"Oh, they are terrible" he teased.
She stayed silent for a bit, he was just being used as a table. Then he heard her. "What do you think about... weird". He understood perfectly.
"I've met so many demi kids, that word just simply lost meaning at some point"
"Ok, then..." she took a step back and looked at him now, lowering her head a bit. "do you consider me pretty?" He took a second to look at her, then shrugged and nodded. "Great then... tell me when to stop." She said while sitting on his lap, with both her legs at his left side, and reaching for his left hand. The girl held it against her face and started nuzzling against him. He couldn't ignore the thought that her actions weren't sexy at all, not as much as they were needy. She was like a cat looking for attention, and he truly didn't mind. He lifted his right hand to caress her hair, and she gave in to the touch. She had closed her eyes and moved the hand of her face down to her outer thigh.
His strong hand gripped her skin, almost performatively. He flirted using a lower voice. "What do you want?" his nose under her jaw, his breath against her neck.
The answer came only with her voice, as she didn't even bother to open her eyes or explore his touch. "I'll let you know when you're doing it wrong." Moody, bossy, and assertive. This was not more than a game for them. This was just a caprice. What is wrong with wanting things that feel right?
The girl held onto his left bicep and hid her face on his neck. They just stayed like that for a couple minutes. Somi hiding on his arms when Luke faintly felt the scent of her hair.
"Why did you rescue me?" wasn't enough to disrupt the comfortability of their scene.
"I already told you why."
"I wasn't screaming tonight."
Then the silence prolonged itself for longer than he would have chosen. The girl just gently pushed his body with hers, making them lay on the bed, side by side, looking into the ceiling.
"We... don't really know each other." He agreed with the sentiment on silence. "But, we both have been here for years so I know you know me." Of course he did. "And everybody knows you." He felt like he didn't quite know what she meant by it. "Luke 'the greatest swordsman in the last 300 years' Castellan, a born leader whose smile has infatuated half our population of half-bloods, who is always there to help when someone gets hurt."
Luke analyzed those words for a couple of seconds. Apparently not enough seconds. "Do you... like me?" She laughed.
"I don't mean it like that!" She then took a pause and moved her head to look at him, he followed. "What I'm trying to say is. There are so many children looking up to you, learning from your effort, going to sleep smiling because they know you'll be there to protect them, and when they fail... you don't make them feel like they failed you. I guess for a second I realized how much our spirit was relying on you. I thought maybe you needed someone to rely on too. I'm sorry if I'm making it awkward now." He didn't know how to answer, her eyes on his were feeling heavy for a second so he escaped by closing them. He didn't know how to answer so he just breathed and hugged her, hoping she wouldn't tease him about his heart rate. She didn't. She hugged him back.
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Would unironically love to see a writeup about the anti-rpf movement and how it connects to ableism. Homophobia I can kind of see, people seem to take way more issue with m/m rpf than of f/m from what i've seen, especially in classic rock. But ableism? (Genuine curiosity btw! )
-a curious rpf lover
so i normally don't get into shipcourse, but this is something I actually feel passionate about. RPF writers and readers are attacked for a lot of reasons, some of them fair and a matter of personal opinion, a lot of them very obviously bigoted. (also I will be reblogging this on my discourse blog @political-faggotry, if you want to send me asks in response to this post send them there!)
People take way more issue with m/m and f/f RPF than m/f RPF, as you said. This is because fanfiction and other forms of "shitty literature" have always been associated with queer people. This has been the case since at least the 1960s, when queer authors were forced to write shitty tragic stories that can't really be classified as love stories in order to have their stories told at all. A lot of queer-coded media was like this too, and cishet people caught on.
My informed opinion is that modern-day RPF was created because of an intersection of neurodivergence and queerness. Basically, ND queer people who felt out of place in society came together and formed fandoms around bands, actors, celebs, etc. Due to the increasing popularity of fanfiction in the 2000s, it was only natural that this would eventually bleed into fandoms of bands.
I think that the reason that M/M RPF fic was/is so popular is because of the trans eggs in fandom that 1) liked to project onto male characters and 2) viewed women as competition. Back when I was an egg, this was definitely what drew me to RPF. I did not like reading about Pete Wentz with his actual girlfriend, or with some female OC, I liked reading about him with a man I could project onto and who didn't feel like competition.
Anti-RPF "movements" during the 2000s was very obviously homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic. Readers & writers would regularly get called homophobic slurs, get misogynist and transandrophobic comments, and otherwise be attacked for being queer and/or perceived female.
In the late 2010s was when the rise of calling things "problematic" because cringe culture died truly happened. Instead of saying "I don't like what you write because you're a faggot", people would say "actually you're problematic for writing that". It was literally the same shit we would get told in the 2000s, replacing words like "faggot" and the r-slur with "problematic".
I'm not saying that all people who call media problematic are like this - far from it. I call some media problematic too! However, media perceived as queer was targeted with accusations of being problematic far more than media without queerness attached, and many people who were already homophobic used this as an excuse to be homophobic while still being seen as "progressive".
I have an entire other rant about how non-MLM "progressives" can be and are homophobic sometimes, but I don't really have the spoons to write all that out right now - I will do it later though!
It would be misleading of me to not also talk about how TEHMs played a big part in the homophobia and transphobia that was directed at the (queer) RPF community. For those unaware, TEHM stands for Trans Exclusionary Homosexual Male. They are basically the TERF lesbians of the MLM gay community. They believe that gay trans men, especially nonbinary trans men and autistic trans men, are straight female fetishizers trying to invade the gay community.
TEHMs often come after transmasculine fans of yaoi anime, queer fanfiction, and yes, RPF. TEHMs will claim that the fact that transmasculine people tend to be in fandoms with a lot of M/M ships somehow "proves" that we are just fetishizing. So. Fucking. Many. Of the most common anti-RPF arguments use TEHM talking points, either intentionally or unintentionally.
TEHMs make use of dogwhistles to spread their messages even to people who are often trans-inclusionary. Claims of fetishizing MLM relationships are more often than not TEHM dogwhistles. A very common claim that I see among people who are VERY anti-RPF (not as in "i do not think RPF is good, but i don't really care all that much", but more as in "if you have ever read RPF in your life you should die") is that RPF is basically sexual assault.
Why would you accuse an entire fandom of young, queer, transmasculine people of sexually assaulting people who are usually 20+ years older than them? This is TEHM rhetoric.
I also want to touch on the ableism a little. Many RPF writers are neurodivergent, as one might expect. The majority of the ones I've interacted with are. The internet loves to get mad at neurodivergent people for having "problematic" interests, and with RPF it is no different.
We are singled out and our interests are seen as inherently disordered, immoral, etc. Those who are very strongly against RPF either do not know this, or they know this and are fine with harassing neurodivergent people over what amounts to a non-issue.
Now, that's the end of my point, but I have a few things to clarify. I am not trying to say that if you personally don't like RPF that you are actually transphobic, homophobic, and/or ableist. You are allowed to dislike anything for any reason and I don't care. My problem is with the people who hate RPF so much that they believe that reading it is a moral failing, or that it is okay to harass those that like it.
It is incredibly important to have boundaries writing RPF, which means not doing it anywhere that it is likely the people you are writing about will see. It is also okay to believe that RPF is inherently breaking a boundary; I disagree, but I see where your (not at anon) opinion is coming from and I respect it. It is not at all bigoted to dislike a thing for those reasons, as they are valid reasons to dislike something.
There is also a larger discussion to be had about the commodification of humans themselves in the music industry, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
I really only have a problem with the people who believe that it is a moral failing, or literal sexual assault, to be in a mostly harmless community that has been historically associated with queerness. That is all.
Please don't bring proship/anti discourse to this post.
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What is a valid #Hreflang ?
What is a valid Hreflang?
Sometimes users of our Hreflang testing tool see an error like this and get baffled:
Invalid hreflang (en_US) found in HTML.
Why is en_US incorrect? Because the correct way to write a language code is with dashes, not underscores. The correct value is en-US.
What are valid values for Hreflang?
A valid hreflang can be specified as:
A 2-character language code (e.g. “en“), or
a combination of language and region code (e.g. “en-US“), or
a combination of language and script code (e.g. “sr-Cyrl” or “sr-Latn“), or
a combination of language, script and region codes (e.g. “sr-hu-Latn“)
A special value of “x-default”, used for country/language selectors and redirector pages. These pages are not specific to any language/locale. Users either choose their language/country (e.g. from a map or dropdown box), or the website uses the IP address of the visitor to this page and automatically redirects them to the page that is appropriate for them.
Examples of invalid Hreflang
Here are some examples of invalid language codes found recently by the online testing tool. See if you can figure out why these codes are incorrect:
en_US: Underscore used instead of hyphen
en-en: The second “en” is incorrect because “en” is not a valid region code.
en-UK: “uk” is not a valid region code. Use “en-GB”.
us-en: The order is inverted. It should be “en-US”.
ua: ua is not a language code. It is a region code. So it is incorrect to use it by itself, i.e. without a language code.
cmn-CN: The country code for China is correct (this page was in Chinese and the URL was a .cn URL. The language code is incorrect.
Valid Codes for Reference
Valid Language Codes (2-character ISO-639-1 Codes)
A list of valid 2-character language codes is as follows (the format is ISO 639-1):
aa, ab, ae, af, ak, am, an, ar, as, av, ay, az, ba, be, bg, bh, bi, bm, bn, bo, br, bs, ca, ce, ch, co, cr, cs, cu, cv, cy, da, de, dv, dz, ee, el, en, eo, es, et, eu, fa, ff, fi, fj, fo, fr, fy, ga, gd, gl, gn, gu, gv, ha, he, hi, ho, hr, ht, hu, hy, hz, ia, id, ie, ig, ii, ik, io, is, it, iu, ja, jv, ka, kg, ki, kj, kk, kl, km, kn, ko, kr, ks, ku, kv, kw, ky, la, lb, lg, li, ln, lo, lt, lu, lv, mg, mh, mi, mk, ml, mn, mr, ms, mt, my, na, nb, nd, ne, ng, nl, nn, no, nr, nv, ny, oc, oj, om, or, os, pa, pi, pl, ps, pt, qu, rm, rn, ro, ru, rw, sa, sc, sd, se, sg, si, sk, sl, sm, sn, so, sq, sr, ss, st, su, sv, sw, ta, te, tg, th, ti, tk, tl, tn, to, tr, ts, tt, tw, ty, ug, uk, ur, uz, ve, vi, vo, wa, wo, xh, yi, yo, za, zh, zu
Valid Region Codes (2-character ISO-3166-1 Codes)
And here are all the valid region codes (ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format; note that the code for the United Kingdom is “GB”, not “UK”):
AD, AE, AF, AG, AI, AL, AM, AO, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AW, AX, AZ, BA, BB, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BL, BM, BN, BO, BQ, BR, BS, BT, BV, BW, BY, BZ, CA, CC, CD, CF, CG, CH, CI, CK, CL, CM, CN, CO, CR, CU, CV, CW, CX, CY, CZ, DE, DJ, DK, DM, DO, DZ, EC, EE, EG, EH, ER, ES, ET, FI, FJ, FK, FM, FO, FR, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, GG, GH, GI, GL, GM, GN, GP, GQ, GR, GS, GT, GU, GW, GY, HK, HM, HN, HR, HT, HU, ID, IE, IL, IM, IN, IO, IQ, IR, IS, IT, JE, JM, JO, JP, KE, KG, KH, KI, KM, KN, KP, KR, KW, KY, KZ, LA, LB, LC, LI, LK, LR, LS, LT, LU, LV, LY, MA, MC, MD, ME, MF, MG, MH, MK, ML, MM, MN, MO, MP, MQ, MR, MS, MT, MU, MV, MW, MX, MY, MZ, NA, NC, NE, NF, NG, NI, NL, NO, NP, NR, NU, NZ, OM, PA, PE, PF, PG, PH, PK, PL, PM, PN, PR, PS, PT, PW, PY, QA, RE, RO, RS, RU, RW, SA, SB, SC, SD, SE, SG, SH, SI, SJ, SK, SL, SM, SN, SO, SR, SS, ST, SV, SX, SY, SZ, TC, TD, TF, TG, TH, TJ, TK, TL, TM, TN, TO, TR, TT, TV, TW, TZ, UA, UG, UM, US, UY, UZ, VA, VC, VE, VG, VI, VN, VU, WF, WS, YE, YT, ZA, ZM, ZW
Valid Script Codes (4-character ISO 15924 Codes)
All valid script codes are as follows (the format is ISO 15924):
Adlm, Afak, Aghb, Ahom, Arab, Aran, Armi, Armn, Avst, Bali, Bamu, Bass, Batk, Beng, Bhks, Blis, Bopo, Brah, Brai, Bugi, Buhd, Cakm, Cans, Cari, Cham, Cher, Cirt, Copt, Cprt, Cyrl, Cyrs, Deva, Dsrt, Dupl, Egyd, Egyh, Egyp, Elba, Ethi, Geok, Geor, Glag, Goth, Gran, Grek, Gujr, Guru, Hang, Hani, Hano, Hans, Hant, Hatr, Hebr, Hira, Hluw, Hmng, Hrkt, Hung, Inds, Ital, Java, Jpan, Jurc, Kali, Kana, Khar, Khmr, Khoj, Kitl, Kits, Knda, Kore, Kpel, Kthi, Lana, Laoo, Latf, Latg, Latn, Leke, Lepc, Limb, Lina, Linb, Lisu, Loma, Lyci, Lydi, Mahj, Mand, Mani, Marc, Maya, Mend, Merc, Mero, Mlym, Modi, Mong, Moon, Mroo, Mtei, Mult, Mymr, Narb, Nbat, Nkgb, Nkoo, Nshu, Ogam, Olck, Orkh, Orya, Osge, Osma, Palm, Pauc, Perm, Phag, Phli, Phlp, Phlv, Phnx, Plrd, Prti, Rjng, Roro, Runr, Samr, Sara, Sarb, Saur, Sgnw, Shaw, Shrd, Sidd, Sind, Sinh, Sora, Sund, Sylo, Syrc, Syre, Syrj, Syrn, Tagb, Takr, Tale, Talu, Taml, Tang, Tavt, Telu, Teng, Tfng, Tglg, Thaa, Thai, Tibt, Tirh, Ugar, Vaii, Visp, Wara, Wole, Xpeo, Xsux, Yiii
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