Violet realized she’d never been taken care of in this way before. And, she realized, she liked it. Mira was right, Violet thought, drifting off as sleep slowly claimed her. This was fucking dangerous.
This particular quote comes from The Mile High Lie by @saranova and @tegantales but it's an echo of the canon, and one that is an emotional backbone of a lot of fics in this fandom.
Xaden and Violet's relationship has a "soft only for you" theme that gets highlighted over and over because even if we have friends we care about, family, significant others... it's easy to realize you don't even have walls up all the time because there are people who see fewer of your walls than others.
It's like a fortress with outer walls, inner walls, maybe a moat... just because you've let people in through one or two of your walls doesn't mean you're letting them all the way in, but it's easy to forget you're living inside those walls if you never leave them.
We're heading into the gift season of the year, and gift-giving (whether physical gift or art or fic) is definitely something I put a lot of thought into. @sarcasticmothwrites and I have been together in some iteration or another for more than 20 years now. As you may have guessed, I've given them a lot of gifts.
But every time I do, I think about when they told me they always believed they were hard to buy gifts for. They're not the only person I know who says that, though. It's achingly common for us to feel like we can't be high maintenance. We can't be demanding. We can't need things.
Maybe one of the things I love about Violet and/or Xaden (depending on what I'm reading them in) is how relatable it is to see characters believe that the bare fucking minimum they should have from people who care about them is dangerous to want.
Especially Xaden, for me-- it's common for people socialized as female to be taught not to take up space, but I've not made a secret of the fact that I identify with Xaden a lot and the ways we see him allowing himself to be vulnerable, to be cared for, whether it's cake on the roof or a scene in a fic...
I've spent twenty years unpacking the belief that I have to be unobtrusive or useful or both or else I'm not worth keeping around. It's probably not an accident that it's about the same amount of time I've been with Moth. It's a slow process and I've had a lot of friends help along the way. The generosity of this fandom has blown me away repeatedly, and I'm still learning that it's okay to let people care about me. I probably always will be relearning it.
But I appreciate everyone who's messaged me when I was sitting on my theoretical rooftop and offered chocolate cake. And I hope you have people offering you the same.
