#howljock

;; here's the doodle requests I got a couple days ago. They're not the best bc I was too jittery from my coffee, but oh well. I turned it into a big doodle page instead <3

y’know, if someone has asked matt what his type was before his life completely went to shit, he’d have said pretty boys with blue eyes and probably too little regard for him. 

and then everything happened and he dedicated a large, large portion of his life to a pretty boy with blue eyes that made his heart ache. and then he woke up in the hospital and the pretty boy was gone and as far as he knew he was..  well, purposeless.

so he decided maybe he’d try the whole college thing. 

spoiler alert: college is absolute bullshit. he’s not even legally there and dealing with the classes and the exams and the projects and the stupid idiots he has to deal with. 

but it’s something to keep his mind occupied, a distraction from his usual monotony of hacking jobs he takes on every day. a way to keep busy and not thinking about the trauma he’d been through. 

so college was fine. he was smart, a genius even, so it’s not like it was hard. he was more in it for the people, the ways to keep his mind off things. 

which leads to how he met one scott howl.

he actually didn’t really fully know what he was getting himself into when he came to this school. he wasn’t fully aware of the whole “monster” aspect until he really got settled, and he was already pretty much obsessed by that point.

but scott was sweet. scott was energetic in a way he’d never really dealt with before, and he went out of his way to get matt involved with his friends. to get matt out of his shell and at parties, even. scott was the kind of guy who once he decided he liked you, it was like you’d always been friends with him. invites to scott for parties were invites to scott and all his friends, and everyone knew it.

hence why matt was even at a NYE party in the first place. he hadn’t expected to be invited to one — he remembers being at his first NYE after he got out of the hospital and it’s only been a year since then — but he’s certainly not going to complain when scott’s warm bulk is standing next to him with the throng of people around them. he’d tried to insist from the get-go that he could handle himself at the party, but scott was pretty adamant about staying by his side and making sure he was taken care of. 

he can barely hear scott over the music, even when the larger man leans down to talk to him, his mouth so close to his ear that matt swears he could almost feel a hint of fang against the lobe.

( he really needs to get the crush under control. )

he’s finally able to parse what scott said, and when he does he shouts back a response, watching scott grin and then head out of the room, only to return shortly after with two cups of whatever deadly concoction was in the drink dispenser in the kitchen. matt hadn’t dared move from his position against the wall for fear of the taller male being unable to find him, or worse yet getting lost in the throng of bodies himself. 

matt takes the cup and takes a hearty sip, grinning wider at scott as he does. the cup’s clammy on the outer plastic, condensation making his fingers slip and—

it almost slips out of his hand when he feels scott’s hand close around his waist, large and warm curling around his hip and pulling him in closer to his body. scott’s even warmer this close, and matt shudders at the warmth. he can’t focus on anything but the solid line of his body burning into his side.

it’s clear the surprise is evident on his face, because for a second he thinks scott might pull his hand away, but instead he’s just laughing into matt’s ear, and there’s that hint of a fang once more, taunting matt on the edge of his awareness. scott howl, he decided, was far too attractive for his own good.

the only correct response, really, was to down the cup in his hand. even the larger male seemed to think that was attractive – or maybe just impressive was the word – based on the look in his eyes as he watched matt do it.

fuck. this was going to be so much harder than he thought.

honestly, he didn’t realize how close it was to midnight. they’d drank a bit, danced a bit, and by the time it reached the midway point of the night – because let’s be honest, the party wouldn’t stop at midnight – he was already a bit more than pleasantly buzzed, a warm thrumming under his skin that almost made him feel like he had to be physically glowing.

it was the people all moving to bunch together in the main section of the room that alerted him to the fact that oh, yeah, there’s the countdown in the living room. a room full of drunken young adults cheering along with the numbers. matt couldn’t be happier to be here, he thinks, even if he’s in a room full of people he would say he only really knows on the fringes of his mind. 

but then it hits midnight and he thinks ‘fuck it’. his fingers on his free hand curl into the front of scott’s shirt and he’s yanking him down, kissing him messily and toothily. 

@howljock​ inquired: Head Canon  + insecurity Headcanons - Accepting

(( Miranda kind of fundamentally hates herself.

It’s not like she lets anyone know or wears it on her sleeve. After all, she’s still a princess and still with an ego to match, so if you asked her, she wouldn’t describe herself in those terms. Miranda doesn’t even think of herself as the type of person who hates herself, and never uses those terms with herself unless she’s deep into a particularly bad episode. If anything, Miranda refers to herself and thinks of herself in terms of grandeur, constructs the image of herself as self-aggrandizing and perfect in all ways.

In fact, all of this thought of herself as someone who is perfect and great and flawless is what enables her self-hatred, or even becomes just another aspect of it. She acts differently than how she actually, concretely feels about herself, because doing so allows her to ignore and hide how deeply dissatisfied she is with herself. She doesn’t have to interact with nor acknowledge how actually upset she is at being who she is, if she simply convinces herself that it’s not there, and even pointing out the existence of that self-hatred is making it true.

Very simply, Miranda’s self-aggrandizing is what she thinks she should be. She should be a perfect, flawless princess, she should be confident in herself and assured in all that she does. She should have all of this power and self-worth and be wholly unchallenged in that. One single flaw in that image, one single moment of her being revealed to not be that kind of person, and it sets off a cascade where none of it is true. She will not reveal that she doesn’t like herself or even despises herself, because that alone validates all of her self-hatred and sends her back into a spiral.

She hates that about herself. She hates that she’s not living up to her own potential, she hates that she has flaws that can be exploited and exist at all, she hates that she’s not who she says she is and who she’s desperately convincing herself that she is. Everything about Miranda both is and isn’t an insecurity, because they are insecurities so deep and painful that she’ll refuse to engage with them at all. If other people think she has ego problems, if she thinks she has a big ego, then it’ll have to come true.

Miranda is a person who is constantly putting on an act in every regard in her life, because simply being in any way that is not wholly what people expect to see is dangerous and potentially lethal to her. She cannot reveal her true intentions, she cannot tell the whole truth, she cannot let someone see who she really is, because that’s not the nature of the play she’s been born to act within. If one thing falls, everything else does as well.

This combines badly with her life on land. She cannot tell someone that walking around bipedally so much hurts her, because that would promise that she can be hurt. She cannot tell someone that she feels like a perpetual outsider amongst even her own friends, because then she would be an outsider. She cannot let anyone know that she feels deeply dissatisfied with her own life, because that would mean that there’s something wrong going on. To look it in the eye is to make it real, even if it’s a fairly simple and fixable issue. It cannot be a simple problem, because Miranda is not supposed to have simple problems. She would sooner sit in the flames and be consumed by them than to acknowledge their existence and all that they’ve destroyed. Pain is easy, but exposure is unthinkable.

Miranda can’t tell people how much she hates herself, or doesn’t want to live the life she’s supposed to have, or doesn’t want the body she was born into, because then it’s real. If she acts like she’s madly in love with herself, and willingly chose this life for herself, and that everything about her is the epitome of perfection, then it becomes closer to the truth, or at least prevents anything else from being real.

@howljock​ inquired: Head Canon + morals Headcanons - Accepting

(( Miranda doesn’t really... have morals?

Which, don’t get me wrong here. I don’t mean that in the sense that she lacks a moral character or thinks everything is okay or would be okay with everything. It’s not that she’s purely chaotic, going along with whatever because she’s wholly ruled by what feels good in the here and now.

But rather... I mean this in the sense that she hasn’t been able to develop a moral code of her own. She doesn’t have morals because she hasn’t been able to form them, not that she doesn’t want to have them.

The issue, as it so often is, is that Miranda has been under a high control situation all of her life. She’s never been allowed to be a person, and has been treated as a role and a necessary organ for the functions of empire for all of her life, and only recently has been allowed any kind of outside influence to leak in and let her make her own decisions.

The throne has always imposed its own moral character onto Miranda, and thus, what it thinks is right is what she’ll say is right and what it thinks is wrong is what she’ll say is wrong. If you ask her, what she’ll say and do is exactly what the throne wants Miranda to say and do, because that’s what she’s learned. It’s not that she necessarily believes this either, she’s certainly uncomfortable with a lot of what the throne has her parrot and what she has to do for it, but she has so little of any other choice that it’s just easier if she convinces herself she does. There’s never been any reason for this, not internally and from Miranda herself, but rather her just reading off the reasons that were told to her about why things are the way they are.

And, really, right now she’s in the beginning stages of forming any sort of internal morality too. She’s motivated more by what she wants to do and what feels nice for her and what she likes than any consistent internal code, which is why you get her doing what she does with her friends, and why she can so readily be influenced by them. There are things that she doesn’t like doing and things which greatly upset her, but she hasn’t put these together into anything resembling a moral sense.

In a way, it’s another part of her trauma, and leads to the whole feeling of her somehow being both a child and an adult at the same time: forced to have the same responsibilities and the same world as an adult, but only having the same resources and knowledge as a child to handle those things. She was both forced to grow up too fast and not allowed to grow up at all, and it gives her an inconsistent sense of identity that keeps changing and warping beneath her.

@howljock​ inquired: Headcanon + reputation Headcanons - Accepting

(( It always depends upon who you ask, of course — as much as Miranda’s reputation precedes her, she still has different manners of conduct based upon who knows her and why.

Around the school, her title as one of the Eight Most Charismatic Classmates is what she’s most well-known as, and a decent summary of most people’s thoughts on her. As rude, and mean, and flat out terrible as Miranda can be, she’s still charming. Almost startlingly so. Miranda’s primarily motivated by a want for love and a want for affection, and even though she can tear down anyone who gets on her wrong side, she’s just as easily swayed by a promise of attention, of affection.

She’s cute, disarmingly cute, and she still holds the merfolk desire for play deep inside her chest. She’ll chirp, and purr, and trill, and she’s bright pink, and her face is stuck in a permanent :3, and even though those who have been there longer than the others can remember a time when Miranda wore her cruelty far more openly, she’s still fairly easy to get along with. Even her cruelty seldom goes as far as it used to, and if you haven’t severely upset her, it’s not even all that bad compared to pissing off some of the other students around. She has a way of worming her way into other people’s hearts, even if that does involve her sometimes just showing up and sitting on someone else’s lap like she’s always belonged there.

(It also, perhaps, helps that Miranda is widely known for not understanding how money works. So, if you’re decently friendly to her, and you ask her for cash, even a relatively small amount, she will give out entire family fortunes at the drop of a hat. The same goes for physical objects, or access — especially because Miranda can get offended that these things don’t already belong to said person. Because she seldom asks for anything in return save goodwill, more than one person has been able to use this to their advantage.

In all respects, she genuinely does seem to mean well, but has extremely odd ways of going about it. Liam’s Prom King ending wasn’t the first nor will it be the last instance of Miranda taking some personal offense on someone else’s behalf and going out of her way to help them.)

Of course, there’s always certain negative views of her. That Miranda is shallow, or prissy, or stupid. That her getting easily upset over certain things, things which are unusual but make sense for her, is still nonetheless a kind of difference that’s easily picked up on. There’s a lot of assumptions being made about her bossiness and her life in general, that she’s simply a spoiled princess who’s never had to do a hard day’s work in her life, and needs to be taught a lesson for it.

Most of the time this is about as far as it goes. Some people just don’t like her, and that’s fine. Miranda has her friends, and sure it can nonetheless hurt, but typically it’s just things she’s gotten used to hearing and isn’t too bothered by.

Other times, it can get bad. Part of why Miranda’s afraid of so many mundane things is because they can seriously hurt her — but if someone’s not aware of the actual risk it poses to Miranda, they can do things to try and “knock her down a peg” that actually harms her. When Miranda discusses her hatred of freshwater or pools, people don’t always catch on that it’s because freshwater messes up her body’s water and salt levels and can swell her throat closed if she’s stuck in it for too long, or because the chlorine levels in even saltwater pools is enough to work as a chemical weapon against her. Which, because neither of these things are all that harmful to the landfolk she surrounds herself by, they can try splashing her, or even pushing her into certain bodies of water. When Miranda starts to protest something and say that she doesn’t want to do it, just because it’s not a limit that’s seen as “normal” by the people around her and is considered her just being “stuck up”, her boundaries can end up violated and Miranda severely upset at the least.

However, outside of school and more in line with Miranda’s work as an ambassador, her reputation is indeed far more in-line with the Merkingdom’s. The general carefree attitude that she has towards behaving in that setting all but vanishes the second Miranda’s actual duties step into the picture, and those in positions like Damien’s or Vera’s are well aware of this transformation.

The first aspect, and the biggest one, is that not a lot is known about Miranda, just as much as not a lot is known about the Merkingdom. Don’t get me wrong — she’s known for being polite, and well-mannered, and clearly professional in what she does. But what she does is pruned, refined, perfected. In terms of her job, working with those at the upper echelons of society, she’s a master in what she does, conveying power and yet easy trust in the same move. But she’s not working as herself, and she shows very little of her own personal life or thoughts, serving much more literally as a conduit of the Merkingdom itself.

There’s also a sort of fear around her. Not because she does anything threatening, much to the contrary, and remains very easy to work with and easy to please, but because... there are certain implications around what she’s like and what the Merkingdom has at their disposal. It’s no secret that the Merkingdom is powerful, and they’re not to be messed with, even though the sheer depths of what they’re actually like is entirely unknown. But they have extreme riches at their disposal to toss around like candy, offerings of weaponry and resources that should be the best of the best, but the Merkingdom treats them like the others are asking for children’s toys.

There are rumors about what the Merkingdom can do, who they can make simply vanish with ease. There are rumors about Miranda, about what she’s hiding, though nothing that can ever be confirmed. Attempts to spy on her or otherwise obtain information notoriously fail, all disappearing without a trace, and seldom does it ever turn up anything before they do so.

Alas... another disaster has struck the little girl. A cookie, smashed to pieces after some reckless passersby bumped into her, causing her to drop her treat and subsequently watch it get obliterated by their feet.

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