yall say wayward son is the heart-wrencher?? did you fucking read carry on??? simon and baz are so desperate for any type of love and acceptance that they spend the whole book crawling around collecting scraps from the bottom of the barrel. then they find each other and have no clue what to do with it. that book is fucking hard to read when you know what their happiness actually looks like jfc
Yes! I reread Carry On the week before AWTWB was released. Each time I read it I get more of exactly what you are saying—the airlessness, the loneliness, the quiet desperation, the inevitableness of any path other than the one laid out for them by their elders. The self-doubt, self-loathing, that deeply held conviction that they aren’t enough, they’re letting someone, anyone, everyone down. That they are simultaneously too much and not enough. Traumatised from a young age, repetitively so (care homes, numpties, having killing be a way of life for both of them when they were still children). Used and manipulated by those they idolised. Never feeling they were good enough, constant disappointments, broken, flawed. Touch starved, love starved, yearning for connection. Neither seeing a future where they made it out the other side.
It makes my heart ache to think how much they kept hidden, repressed, buried inside—who they were, what they yearned for, what they truly feared.
And once they had each other they didn’t feel they were good enough for or that they deserved that.
Every moment they had together in AWTWB, to have each other, to see how they were able to grow, open up, take a chance, let themselves love and be loved, made me feel like I could breathe again.
(And let’s also not forget the absolute gut wrenching stories of the mothers they lost.)
