Mi-aow, Baby!

Ooops more TUA stuff actually I'm still not over this little guy. I've been reading reading fanfictions torturing him for the last 2 months 😊

luther’s superstrength: the unintentional capacity to harm. being used to a different standard of behavior, to the extent that you have to guard your movements because you might unintentionally harm someone, because you’re used to being swung at hard, and you’ve learned to emulate that behavior, to have such a tolerance to it that you don’t realize it can really hurt someone who doesn’t. you know it’s something you can’t just do, but you can’t not do it, because you can’t turn it off. it’s the only thing your body knows how to do.

see: luther’s body language, for most of the season. he doesn’t mean to destroy things, or hurt people, he just keeps stumbling into it, and has to guard himself against it. and… well. he gives into them. for a good reason, he tells himself, but he gives into them.

diego’s super-precision: an intended capacity to harm, one that you’re so comfortable with, that’s become so easy and natural, that you’re so used to using to guard against someone taking advantage of your vulnerability (which you’ve spent a lot of your childhood having done to you, or being told that it will be done to you), that it keeps slipping out of you when you feel slightly threatened. 

see: his verbal berating of luther and vanya and allison and, to an extent, eudora. he knows exactly where to hit them to make them feel humiliated or alone or angry or disrespected and he can’t help but keep digging and digging at them.

allison’s rumoring: manipulation of others into doing what you want, being who you want, and giving you what you want. something you learn to do because you learn that nothing good ever comes for free, and that if you want love, or success or safety, you’d better claw your way in and make people give it to you, because they won’t let you have it in any other way. or, if they would, the way to get to it is totally alien to you. you have no idea what it is, let alone how to engage with it. so you fall back on the manipulation, because it’s familiar, because at least you can do that.

see: all the shit she canonically does that the show doesn’t want us to think too hard about. rumoring herself a career, a husband (and potentially other lovers, but noticeably not luther), a child. 

klaus’s seeing ghosts: being haunted. literally, being haunted by what happened, or by the people that hurt you, to such an extent that those memories follow you everywhere, that they surround you, that you can’t escape them and find yourself unable to function in everyday life.

see: … i mean. the literal ghosts.

five’s time-traveling: trauma fucks with your relationship with time and space. you become hyper-aware of where you are, and where you have to go to get away from a situation the second it goes a way you don’t like. it happened fifty years ago or a day ago, it’s happening right now, it’ll happen tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, and you have trouble telling the difference. and you can get as far away from trauma as you want physically or chronologically, but at any second, you can be sucked back into it mentally, or find yourself unable to get yourself out of a location when you need it the most.

see: five getting trapped in the future and the department store. five, having flashbacks to being trapped in the apocalypse. 

and of course the more obvious: because of this strange relationship with time, you feel like you’ve grown up so fast, when you haven’t at all. or you grow up, yet you’re still acting like a child.

see: five’s a physically-13-year-old who’s legally 29 and has a 29-year-old peer group, with a 58-year-old mind.

ben’s tentacles: trauma is ugly. trauma is scary. trauma is nausea-inducing. it’s going to burst out and leave a big mess whether you ignore it or indulge it. and you cannot control it as much as you want to be able to, and as much as everyone around you wants you to be able to, and it feels like it’s going to literally eat you from the inside out.

see: the siblings’ reaction to ben’s powers in the bank robbery. big dead-dove-don’t-eat vibes. 

vanya’s initial lack of power: having your agency stripped from you. being isolated, being made helpless and being taught to suppress. being overlooked and neglected.

and her power itself: an unstoppable storm of emotion that’ll consume everything in your life, because all those feelings you’ve been hiding for so long, that you’ve been taught to hide for your entire life, are on their way out, and you can’t stop it. 

He sees a world in ruins; he finds his siblings’ dead bodies in the rubble; he watches the bullets cut through them; he sees the mushroom cloud blooming in the distance. He can never prevent these things. The only thing he can do is watch. He is a witness, and he is soaked in blood.