⦿ ado ⦿

happy belated birthday to my favorite shipchild of all time i‘m sorry about your parents btw <333 they’re kind of a lot huh

not even consciously half the time. any reflective surface catches his attention for a second too long and boom - he’s adjusting.

the tilt of his grin, the sharpness of his eyelights, his posture, shoulders, where his hands rest, how approachable he looks, how dangerous, how tired, how unaffected.

again. and again. and again.

and it's so deeply devastating to me that killer is so good at shifting himself depending on who stands in front of him. humor here. carelessness there. cruelty when necessary. charm when useful. he understands presentation almost obsessively because somewhere along the line he learned that appearance dictated worth. that people saw, judged, and discarded first. that carelessness made you undesirable, and undesirable things were not kept.

i think after enough time, that kind of performance stops feeling separate from the self. the line blurs. expression becomes calculation. body language becomes maintenance.

so every reflection turns into a small dissection.

is the smile convincing enough? no, that's too sharp...fuck, not sharp enough. wait, do my movements match the image in my head? ...do i look unstable? do i look weak? do i look like myself at all?

if the answer is no, i can see it spiraling very quickly into frustration. paranoia, even. that horrible feeling of body and mind failing to align correctly, of something being wrong in ways he cannot fully articulate but immediately feels beneath his bones.

and honestly, killer being deeply insecure about his body adds something so tragic to all of this :( i can imagine him standing there for far too long, trying expression after expression until disgust starts creeping in. until every gesture feels artificial. until he leaves the mirror more dissatisfied with himself than when he first looked.

...wait! hold on...there...YES, there...mhm...yeah, now i look like someone actually worth staying for, huh?

for someone so often associated with movement - restlessness, reinvention, the constant reaching toward something new - the preference for sketching backgrounds feels almost contradictory. he chooses subjects made of stillness. buildings, streets, structures - things content to remain where they are placed.

monsters though?

they move too much. not only in body, but within themselves. they shift, contradict themselves, and conceal what lies beneath the surface. they refuse clean outlines, and don’t stay where you leave them, no. expressions shift. emotions can alter the architecture of a face in seconds. to draw a person well is to keep pace with change.

but backgrounds stay still.

a street holds its lines. a wall is honest about being a wall. a window does not suddenly become unreadable. perspective can be measured, structure can be learned, and once something is set upon the page, it tends to remain there. lines meet where they should, and foundations either hold or they don‘t. there’s clarity in it.

perhaps after a life shaped by manipulation, instability, and being remade to suit another’s design over and over again, what appeals to him now is not novelty at all, but permanence. not the thrill of what may happen next, but the relief of what will not.

souls can be incredibly messy and unpredictable, forever slipping beyond whatever blueprint is made for them. a background, however, asks only to be observed. and backgrounds, too, are worthy of interest.

⦿ happy birthday killer :)