I love that there are people who think the biggest issue with therapy/pop psychology today is that there are Too Many People who are being Validated and Flattered. There's no evidence to prove that. It's funny to me that they're mad that people use the language of psychotherapy for "self victimisation" (lol) specifically. Would they be cool with it if it were used by therapists to say the things OP believes would be useful in changing the "bad" behaviour? Do they know that this actually does happen still?
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summary: jess mariano has spent his whole life being misread — by a town that made up its mind about him before he ever opened his mouth, by a mother whose love was real but never quite enough, by everyone except one person he managed to push away anyway. he's been carrying something heavy for a long time without a name for it, and he's gotten very good at making sure no one notices. then the festival comes, and so does she, and jess learns that some things you can't just stand at the edge of.
warnings: grief, parental neglect, emotional immaturity/parentification, absent parent, childhood emotional suppression, toxic masculinity (brief), abandonment, resentment toward a parent, and implied cycle of generational trauma.
note(s): i didn't specify where in canon this takes place, but i'd say after rory's summer in dc. i wanted to write something that delves into jess's background, something the writers half-assed.
The Firelight Festival is exactly the kind of event Jess would have found a way to sleep through if Luke hadn't shook him awake at eight-thirty in the morning with the energy of a man who actually wanted to be awake.
"You're going," Luke said.
"I'm not."
"You are."
That was the whole conversation. Luke had a gift for economy.
So now Jess is standing at the edge of the square with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, watching Stars Hollow do what Stars Hollow does best: perform joy at top volume. There are paper lanterns strung between the lampposts. Someone — Taylor, obviously — has erected a banner that reads CELEBRATE OUR COMMUNITY in letters so large they're visible from three zip codes. A group of kids are chasing each other around Miss Patty's studio. Babette is crying. She's always crying. At festivals, at sunsets, at the time Morey tried a new chord progression in the driveway.
Jess watches all of it with the particular expression he's perfected over the years: utterly unmoved, faintly contemptuous, professionally absent.
It's a good look. It keeps people at a distance, which is the point.
He knows what they say about him.
Not the specifics — he's never cared enough to piece together the full gossip infrastructure of this town, though he suspects Babette and Miss Patty operate some kind of relay system — but the broad strokes are easy enough to read in the way people look at him when he walks into Doose's. Like they're waiting for him to pocket something. Like his presence itself is a small transgression.
Bad kid. That's the shorthand. He's figured out the file they've built on him: truant, troublemaker, drinks behind the diner, bad influence on Rory Gilmore.
The drinking thing is almost funny.
He'd tried to explain it once, to no one in particular, just turning it over in his head the way you turn over a joke that doesn't land — I've never had a drink in my life — and the punchline is that nobody would believe him. It doesn't fit the narrative. The narrative requires him to be a certain kind of disaster, and Stars Hollow has committed to that narrative with the fervor of people who have very little else going on.
He knows how to tap a beer keg. He knows how to get wine stains out of a white tablecloth, out of a couch cushion, out of carpet that has seen better decades. He knows the specific smell of cheap vodka and cheaper gin and the particular sound a bottle makes when it hits linoleum at two in the morning.
His mother had called it practical education.
These are life skills, Jess, you'll thank me.
She'd been earnest about it, that was the part he couldn't explain to anyone without sounding like he was making excuses for her. Liz Danes had her own internal logic, complete and self-consistent, and within that logic she was not a bad mother — she was a fun mother, a cool mother, a mother who treated her kid like a small adult because she never quite finished growing up herself. She'd looked at him across the kitchen table at eight, nine, ten years old and seen a peer. Someone to split the rent with, emotionally speaking.
He'd let her.
He hadn't had much choice.
He was eight the first time he got caught.
That's how he thinks of it — caught — because that's what it felt like. An exposure. A failure.
Derek had been around for about three months at that point, which made him practically a fixture by Liz's standards. He had a motorcycle and a laugh that filled up rooms and he called Jess little man in a way that was meant to be affectionate and landed somewhere adjacent to it. Jess had been trying to figure out if he liked him. He was still in the phase of thinking that mattered — that his opinion of the men who came through their apartment was something that would be consulted.
He'd been crying in the bathroom. He didn't remember now what about — something small, probably, the kind of thing that feels enormous when you're eight and you're tired and you've been holding yourself together for longer than a kid should have to. The door hadn't been fully latched.
Derek had pushed it open without knocking.
There'd been a beat of silence. The particular silence of a grown man looking at a crying child and deciding what to do about it.
"Hey," Derek said. Then: "Ah, come on. Boys don't do that."
Jess had looked at him.
"Toughen up, yeah? Don't let your mom see you like that, it'll upset her."
And then he'd left. Closed the door behind him. The lesson was clean, surgical: your feelings are a burden, and moreover, they are your mother's burden, and it is your job to manage them so she doesn't have to.
He'd learned it thoroughly. He'd been a good student.
Derek was gone by spring.
The thing about Rory Gilmore is that she looked at him and didn't immediately start editing.
He didn't know how to explain that to anyone, mostly because he'd never had the language for it, but that's what it was. Everyone else in his life — Luke included, and Luke was the best of them, Luke had fed him and housed him and asked for almost nothing in return — everyone else came with an agenda. A theory of Jess that they'd arrived at before he'd opened his mouth. Luke's theory was troubled kid who needs structure. Taylor's theory was delinquent. Lorelai's theory was—
Well.
Lorelai thought she understood him. He'd seen it on her face, that flicker of recognition, the way she looked at him sometimes like she was looking into a mirror she didn't particularly want to see. And she wasn't entirely wrong — there were surface similarities, he wasn't stupid — but she'd gotten the story backwards and she didn't know it.
She'd had resources. She'd had the Gilmore name and the Gilmore money and a town that had watched her grow up and loved her anyway, had built a mythology around her, had made her charming dysfunction into a feature. When Lorelai Gilmore blew up her life, Stars Hollow shook its head and smiled. She got to be quirky.
His mother got to be quirky too, for that matter. They loved Liz here. He'd seen it already — the warmth in their voices when they said her name, the way they talked about her like she was a character in a story rather than a person who had made consistent choices with consistent consequences. Oh, Liz, she's something else.
Which made Jess the something else. The evidence. The proof that the story had costs.
He loved his mother. He needed that to be legible somewhere, even if only to himself, standing in the middle of a festival he didn't want to attend — he loved her. He had always loved her. He had loved her through every man she'd chosen over him, every morning she'd slept through, every school meeting she'd forgotten, every time he'd stood outside her bedroom door listening to her cry over someone who hadn't deserved the tears, trying to decide whether to go in, trying to remember whether consolation was something she could receive right now or whether she'd turn it into something about herself.
He had learned to be very good at deciding that.
He just — couldn't help the other thing. The shadow underneath the love, which was something he didn't have a word for. Not hate. Not hate at all. Something more like grief, maybe, or like standing in a house where all the furniture is slightly wrong, everything two inches from where it should be, and you keep running into corners you should have learned to avoid by now.
He couldn't help that he resented her. He'd tried.
He's thinking about this — he's always thinking about this, it's the background music, the channel he can never quite turn off — when he sees her.
She's standing by the lantern booth, wearing a purple wrap that Jess recognizes from approximately 2002, her blonde hair down and loose. She's laughing at something the man next to her has said. Her whole face does that thing it does when she laughs, that thing that makes her look younger than she is, that thing that used to make him think this time it'll be different, when he was young enough to think that.
He stops.
She hasn't seen him yet.
This is the moment, he knows, where he could turn around. Walk back to the diner. Finish the book he's been rereading, the Kerouac he keeps returning to not because he loves it but because it makes him feel less insane for wanting to move, for needing to move, for the low-grade terror that's been following him since he got to Stars Hollow — the fear that if he stays somewhere long enough he'll calcify, he'll root, he'll end up marooned in his own life the way his mother keeps ending up marooned in hers.
He knows that's what he's doing. He's not stupid about himself. He had done it to Luke, he'd done it to Rory — looked at the thing being offered to him and understood on some molecular level that if he let himself have it, really have it, he would eventually do what his mother did. He would hurt the people who'd made the mistake of caring. He would ruin it.
He is very good at ruining things. He came by it honestly.
He watches his mother laugh at the lantern booth, and he doesn't move, and she turns —
— and sees him.
Her face does something complicated. Something he's spent a lifetime learning to read. There's a beat where she's deciding what version of herself to be, and then she lands on the one he knew she would, the one she always reaches for:
bright, warm, slightly too loud.
"Jess."
He stands there.
She opens her arms.
He stands there for another half a second, which is the most resistance he ever manages, and then he crosses the distance between them, and he lets her hug him, and she smells like the same drugstore perfume she's worn since he was four years old, and he doesn't say anything, because there's nothing to say, because there's never anything to say, because he learned a long time ago in a bathroom with a poorly latched door that feelings are a burden and it is his job to manage them.
His mother pulls back and holds him by the shoulders and looks at him like he is the most wonderful surprise of her life.
"You're so tall," she says.
"I was tall last time," he says.
"Taller." She squeezes. "Isn't he tall, Gary?"
He looks at Gary.
Gary has the motorcycle. Gary has the laugh.
Gary says, "Hey, little man."
Later — much later, when Liz has drifted toward the dancing and Gary has drifted with her — Jess finds himself at the edge of the square again. Same spot. Same jacket. Same expression.
Rory finds him there, because Rory has a talent for finding him, which is one of the things he's done his best not to think about.
She doesn't say anything immediately. She just comes to stand beside him, and she looks at the square with that particular quality of attention she has — like she's already writing it down somewhere — and for a minute they just stand there, watching Stars Hollow celebrate itself.
"Is that your mom?" she asks finally.
"Yeah."
"She seems—"
"She's having a great time," he says. His voice is flat. Not mean. Just flat.
Rory doesn't push it.
She'd never assumed anything about him. She'd waited. She'd asked. She'd read the same books and argued about the ones they disagreed on and never once looked at him like she already knew the ending of his story.
He'd ruined that too.
He's aware of the irony. He is always aware of the irony. He is made of irony, sitting on top of a layer of dread, on top of something he refuses to examine, on top of an eight-year-old kid in a bathroom who learned the wrong lesson about the cost of being seen.
His mother laughs, somewhere across the square. The sound carries.
"You okay?" Rory asks.
He almost doesn't answer. He almost lets the question sit there, the way he lets everything sit there, untouched, the way he's always let everything sit there.
"Yeah," he says.
She looks at him. She doesn't say are you sure, because she's not like that. But she stays, which is its own kind of answer.
He watches Gary put his arm around his mother.
Jess puts his hands back in his pockets.
The lanterns are pretty, he thinks. He won't say that out loud. But they are.
i know i'm not saying anything new but, sometimes ppl just don't think about things like transmisogyny as being systems. like, they'll just see it as hatred, descrimination, disgust, etc., and i think this allows for people to think things like "well, i don't hate trans women. i even have friends who are trans women. i'm not a trans misogynist! i want them to have equal rights and be treated fairly!" and then they'll continue to hold very trans misogynistic beliefs, openly express them and have those beliefs go unexamined so easily bc trans misogyny is largely considered the norm, unfortunately.
pairing(s): lottie matthews x jackie taylor x shauna shipman (butcherqueen x frostbite)
summary: lottie, jackie, and shauna spend a day at the mall.
warnings: no crash au, capitalism, and mild profanity.
note(s): based off of this post by @freudian-chemise!! as soon as i saw their post, i just had to write something based off of it.
The fluorescent lights of the mall buzzed overhead like angry wasps, casting everything in that particular shade of retail purgatory that made Shauna's left eye twitch. She stood in the center of the main concourse, flannel sleeves rolled up to her elbows, ten shopping bags cutting circulation to her fingers as she watched Jackie emerge from yet another store with the kind of triumphant smile usually reserved for victories.
"Okay, so I know what you're thinking," Jackie said, practically bouncing on her toes as she approached with three more bags. "But the sales associate said this color would look amazing with my skin tone, and honestly, who am I to argue with a professional?"
Shauna's jaw clenched. "A professional whose job depends on commission?"
"Don't be so cynical." Jackie's voice carried that particular lilt that meant she was about to deploy her secret weapon—the pout. "Besides, Lottie agrees with me. Right, Lot?"
From her position near the fountain, Lottie looked up from where she'd been people-watching, her dark eyes unreadable. "About what?"
"The sweater. The one I just bought. You said it was nice."
"I said it was expensive." Lottie's fingers drummed against her thigh, and Shauna noticed the way her jacket pocket seemed unusually bulky. "There's a difference."
Jackie's face fell for exactly two seconds before she rallied. "Well, expensive usually means quality. That's basic economics."
"That's basic capitalism," Shauna muttered, shifting the bags to redistribute the weight. Her shoulders were starting to ache, but she'd learned long ago that complaining would only result in Jackie's wounded doe eyes and a lecture about team spirit.
"What was that?" Jackie had moved closer, close enough that Shauna could smell her perfume—something vanilla and warm that made her stomach do complicated things.
"Nothing. Just wondering if we're actually going to eat at some point, or if I'm going to starve to death holding your retail therapy session."
Lottie stood up then, moving with that fluid grace that made her look like she was gliding rather than walking. "I could go for food." She paused next to Shauna, and her hand brushed against Shauna's lower back—a touch so brief it might have been accidental if not for the way Lottie's thumb lingered for just a second longer than necessary. "Want me to take some of those?"
"I'm fine," Shauna said automatically, even though her arms were screaming. Pride was a hell of a drug.
"You're being ridiculous." Jackie moved to Shauna's other side, reaching for the bags. "Here, let me—"
"I said I'm fine."
The three of them stood there for a moment, locked in a standoff that was becoming increasingly familiar. Jackie with her hands outstretched, Shauna clutching the bags like they were the last lifeline on a sinking ship, and Lottie watching it all with the kind of detached fascination of someone observing a particularly interesting social experiment.
"You know," Lottie said finally, "there's something poetic about this whole situation."
Shauna raised an eyebrow. "Enlighten me."
"Jackie buys things she doesn't need with money she doesn't have. I redistribute wealth from corporations that exploit their workers. And you carry the weight of both our sins while complaining about it." Lottie's smile was sharp around the edges. "It's very... symbolic."
"Redistribute wealth?" Jackie's voice cracked slightly. "Lottie, please tell me you didn't—"
"Relax." Lottie's hand found Jackie's arm, thumb tracing small circles that made Jackie's breathing hitch. "I paid for your stuff. The universe owes me some compensation for my generosity."
Shauna felt something shift in her chest—part exasperation, part affection, part something else entirely. "You're both insane."
"But you love us anyway," Jackie said, and there was something vulnerable in her voice that made Shauna's defenses crumble just a little.
"Unfortunately."
The word came out softer than she'd intended, and she saw the way Jackie's face lit up, the way Lottie's smile turned genuine instead of sardonic. They were standing close enough now that Shauna could feel the warmth radiating from both of them, could count the freckles on Jackie's nose and see the way Lottie's eyelashes cast shadows on her cheekbones.
"Food court?" Lottie suggested, and her voice was gentler now, the sharp edges smoothed away.
"Food court," Shauna agreed, finally letting Jackie take half the bags. "But next time, we're setting a budget."
"Sure we are," Jackie said, already scanning the storefronts they passed. "Oh, look! Victoria's Secret is having a sale—"
"Jacqueline Taylor, if you so much as look at another store, I'm leaving you both here and driving home without you."
But she was smiling when she said it, and when Lottie's fingers found hers and Jackie pressed a quick kiss to her cheek, Shauna thought maybe carrying a few extra bags wasn't such a terrible price to pay for this particular kind of chaos.
After all, someone had to keep them grounded. Even if it meant her arms would be sore tomorrow.
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JACKIESHAUNA (FROSTBITE) - BETWEEN WANTING AND RUINING
pairing(s): jackie taylor x shauna shipman.
summary: shauna's been watching jackie's hand on travis's arm for four minutes too long, and when jackie finally drifts over with that smile that cracks doors open just wide enough — something is about to give.
note(s): shauna and travis are step-siblings in this 'cause i'm shoving the propaganda anywhere i can.
The bonfire crackled low, and Shauna had been watching Jackie laugh at something Travis said for approximately four minutes too long.
She wasn't counting. She just knew.
Jackie had her hand on his arm — that specific hand-on-arm that meant absolutely nothing and somehow everything, fingers curled just slightly, head tilted so her hair fell the right way. She knew exactly what she was doing. She always knew exactly what she was doing.
Shauna looked back down at her drink.
Travis caught her eye over Jackie's shoulder and gave her this tiny helpless shrug, like I don't know how I got here either. She almost felt bad for him. Almost. He was a prop in something he didn't fully understand, and the worst part was Jackie had probably picked him specifically because he was Shauna's stepbrother. Because Jackie Taylor did not do anything by accident.
"You look like you're doing math," Natalie said, dropping down beside her.
"I'm not doing anything."
"Mm." Nat took a long sip. "Angry math."
Shauna didn't dignify that.
It took another six minutes — she wasn't counting — before Jackie drifted over, Travis having quietly peeled away into the dark like he'd sensed something atmospheric shifting. Smart. He'd always had decent survival instincts.
"Hey, you." Jackie sat close. Too close, then exactly close enough, the way she calibrated everything without seeming to try.
"Hey." Shauna kept her voice even.
"You've been quiet."
"I'm always quiet."
Jackie smiled, slow and a little dangerous. "Not with me."
And there it was. That thing she did — cracking open a door just wide enough to make you lean toward it. Shauna felt the familiar pull and hated herself for it, hated Jackie a little too, the productive kind of hate that lived right next to something warmer.
"Don't," Shauna said.
"Don't what?"
"Jackie."
"I'm just sitting here, Shauna." All innocence, eyes bright with firelight and the specific satisfaction of someone who knows they've already won the first round. "You're the one making it weird."
Shauna laughed, short and humorless. "You had your hand on my stepbrother's arm for like twenty minutes."
"I was talking to him."
"You were performing at him."
Something flickered across Jackie's face — not quite guilt, more like being seen more clearly than she'd planned. She recovered fast, because she always did. "You don't own him."
"I know that."
"And you don't own me."
"I know that." The words came out sharper than she meant them to, and the silence that followed had weight. The fire popped. Somewhere behind them, someone laughed at something unrelated to all of this.
Jackie looked at her for a long moment, unreadable in the way she sometimes got — the performance dropped just enough to show something real underneath, and then, predictably, not enough.
"You're so frustrating," Jackie said, almost fondly.
"You're frustrating. You do this thing where you—" Shauna stopped. Pressed her mouth together.
"Where I what?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
"No, tell me." Leaning in now, genuinely curious, and that was almost worse than the performance — Jackie actually wanting to understand the damage she caused, like it was interesting to her. Like Shauna was interesting to her. "Where I what?"
Shauna met her eyes and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
Jackie held her gaze a beat too long, then looked away first.
They sat there in the particular silence of two people who had said everything and nothing, the fire burning between them and the night wide open around them, and somewhere in the dark Travis was probably very wisely staying there.
