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Art is for chapter 16: homecoming by the wonderful @rillyrillo

Chapter 27: grey crowned crane Chapter Summary:

Maman Marie teaches Alastor who he is, initiating him into the family’s spiritual practice.

Fic Summary:

Nothing in life is certain, except death, taxes, and Alastor and Vox. Somehow, no matter what universe they’re in, the two manage to find each other. Alastor is nine years old when V and his fancy family move into the house at the end of his street. They’re not at all how Alastor expects. He’s never met anybody as cold and controlling as V’s parents, and he’s never met anyone he’s liked as much as he likes V. They quickly become friends after Alastor saves V from a cruel punishment in the Louisiana sun, and V finds himself welcomed into a family where nobody yells at each other, nobody gets hit for misbehaving, and where he can be free for the first time in his life. What kind of men can two boys become when found family and love disrupt the cycle of isolation that creates monsters? (A queer coming-of-age exploration of how connection, trauma, and environment shape who we become, told with grounded psychological realism. A litfic-style narrative following Alastor and Vox from childhood into adulthood as found family rewrites their trajectories. A companion piece to It’s Not Murder, imagining what might have happened if the two hadn’t grown up in isolation, but readable as standalone.)

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What do we have to look forward to with V and Alastor relationship getting older in the fic like would we see them prepare for college if they plan to go or talking them about how they’ll together or will we get V’s thoughts on how he’s planning to live home? :D I’m very curious ❤️❤️❤️

HellO!! I just posted an update to WBGU, what good timing. :) I’m glad you’re enjoying it!

I didn’t set out to write them as specifically something but I put a little bit of myself in all my characters, and I’m AuDHD, so they naturally got a bit of it. :)

I don’t state in INM proper anything, but in the poly fic Travis does say that Alastor is autistic.

Oooh fun question!

Vox would probably be like, “Awww cute,” like how you might if a little kid has a crush on you.

Short answer: Peter, Beatrix, Allie, and Vox (to some extent) actively concealed Vox’s abuse from her.

Vox’s abuse started 2 years before she was born, and he was just starting school when she was born, which is when Peter started taking Vox along with him on “business trips” when the abuse got bad enough people might notice.

Kids don’t really start developing episodic memory recall until around 3-4, so although Izzy would’ve felt that things were slightly off before then (different memory mechanisms than episodic memory), that her dad was weird around Vox/around them, before 3-4, she didn’t have any evidence, and her entire family worked to make sure she didn’t know.

They had a really big house, too, so it was easier to just sort of make sure she stayed in one area of the house when shit was going on.

If she ever questioned it, the answer was coordinated—she either got the same response strangers did, that Vox just fell down the stairs or something, or was discouraged from asking, and you’re very malleable as a child. She learned not to question or think too hard about how weird their dad was.

She says in chapter 43 that they were a little mean, which would be consistent with what she would have been able to pick up, when everything else is managed.

The quote:

“I mean, they were a little mean, sure,” Izzy says with a shrug. “But they weren’t that great to any of us. I don’t see why that’s like… reason enough to ban them from the wedding.”

And then, as an adult, Allie again continued to try to hide everything, and Peter didn’t see what he did as abuse, so he wouldn’t talk about it like that, and Beatrix never wanted to look at it in the face, to admit what was going on, which is why she made Allie do all the caretaking.

So overall, Izzy would have felt things were off, learned not to question too deeply, and had no direct evidence for anything. She just figured they were maybe a little meaner to Vox, & her way of explaining it to herself would’ve been something along the lines of Peter just having more expectations for his son than his daughters.

Just how terrifying is that man??

Terrifying haha. I think Izzy states at one point, early on to Catarina, how Vox doesn’t fully view people as human, which Vox also states in ch1 and ch50 (essentially), but Izzy’s explanation was that Vox sees people as either tulips in his garden, some of them being his very precious prized tulips, tulips in other peoples’ gardens, or weeds. If somebody is a weed in somebody else’s garden, he doesn’t quite care, but if one of those weeds tries to sneak its way into his garden, the remedy is removal.

And if he has to pluck the weed in somebody else’s garden, whatever, it’s a weed. Tulips in other peoples’ gardens he leaves alone because it’s not a hassle, but any tulip can become a weed.

Alastor’s family is Off-Limits Super Special Tulips, because they belong to his gardener husband, and they’re not his to remove. His own sisters are his Super Special Tulips, but tulips are tulips.

But! There are other gardeners (people he sees as humans with agency): Alastor & Travis, and near the end, probably Maman Marie. For all three, the underlying reasoning boils down to sort of the same thing: they see through his bullshit, they see all the different disparate parts of him, so they can’t be tulips, because tulips can’t comprehend their gardeners like that.

in Chapter 26 of INM when Alastor tells Vox that he’d kill his family for him, was he being literal? like in the impossible scenario where Vox actually asked, do you think Alastor would really do it?

I need to stealth edit that bit out 😭 Many of the older chapters have little things where I was like “idk how to figure out how to say this better let’s just post and hope this doesn’t bite me in the ass later.”

But no. I think if Vox asked and was serious Alastor would be like, “Uh, about that. How about no, and fuck you for asking?”

Travis arranged a hit on Valentino when he was in custody (Chapter 47) and the hit was carried out in Chapter 51 after Valentino was brought up in conversation & Vox had a bit of a panic attack.

I had initially had plans to do a lot more torturing and murdering in the story but the Kevin chapters took a lot out of me to write. I sort of imagine myself in the POV character’s mindset/place so I can write from within their uh, well, point of view, but they were so brutal and exhausting to write that I found it difficult to do much worse in the story.

I tried to make each new murder add something new/be something new and interesting, but at a certain point I felt like there wasn’t much more I could add that wasn’t just brutality for the sake of brutality, which, with the way I write, is really rough.

The original conception was for more torture for Valentino and also for Peter, but the murders started burning me out so I had to decide which ones would be onscreen and which ones weren’t as important.

I felt like it made sense that Vox wouldn’t want to face his abuser again even if for murder, and Alastor could see the value in just “removing the wolf” as it were, to use the language I did in Chapter 54.

As for how Vox and Valentino lasted for five years, Vox had, for his entire life, understood relationships to be cold, abusive, and violent. He meets Valentino, he’s 18, and Valentino treats him with love and warmth, validates his experiences, and then does what any abuser does—turns up the heat, tests boundaries.

And Vox, not having any sort of healthy basis for what love or relationships could look like, stayed, because Vox was conditioned at that point to expect from his relationships intensity, to tie his self worth to what that other person felt about him, because he had no basis for who he was or his value as a human being.

There’s also something to be said for conditioning as well, like, the intermittent reinforcement. If it was always negative, Vox would’ve associated negativity = Valentino, and he might not have had such a strong connection. But when the reinforcement is intermittent, if it’s sometimes bad, sometimes good, his brain can’t anticipate what might come next to, so you stick around hoping it’s the Good response.

Slot machines are sort of similar in that regard. It’s harder to break out of because it’s negative a lot of the times but sometimes it’s amazing, and chasing that sometimes becomes an addiction.

Like literally, physiologically, there is something that happens in your brain that makes it more difficult to leave. Logic has nothing to do with it. You can want to leave, but your body is literally working against your goal of leaving. It is equivalent to an addiction.

Hmm good question.

They might react differently but I still don’t think they’d be okay with it. Being anything but straight still comes with stigma no matter where you’re from, though I think the reactions would be less overt.

Good question!

A few different things are at play here.

First, the bodies during Katrina: there is a very big difference between freshly dead, undecomposed bodies and the bodies that people found during the Hurricane Katrina rescue/recovery efforts. Due to the heat and the water and the time it took to get to checking houses, a lot of the bodies that people found were already partially decomposed, bloated, etc.

Freshly-killed looks like a human, post-Katrina rescue effort stuff looked like a decomposing corpse. Also, the smell plays a big part. It wasn’t just seeing it that had Alastor puking, it was the combination of the sight, the realization at what he was seeing, and the smell.

Secondly, INM Alastor and WBGU Alastor diverged when Marcus survived. The trajectory that WBGU V and Alastor are going down in their life is not the same as in INM, and we’ll see the greater impact of that on who they become later in WBGU, but INM Alastor had 3-ish years of festering hatred/resentment that was unexamined and untouched by any therapeutic interventions, plus he had grown up with no friends and in almost total isolation apart from his family.

And now his biggest protector/the person he looked up to most was gone, and he doesn’t know how to cope with that, and Gloria, as much as she tries to be there for him, isn’t able to stop/doesn’t recognize that descent into darkness. The way he saw people changed, and the people he killed, their dead bodies did not look like the ones during Katrina.

If fem INM Alastor did, it would likely be an atypical presentation. I will put this under a read more but:

Content Warning: ED Discussion

I have not talked about it before, don’t worry.

My pronouns are she/her!