Summary: toby's sleeping habits ever since he met you
CW: none, but there is poorly google-translated german in there. sorry germans love you i promise.
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Sleeping with Toby is like sleeping with an overgrown dog.
Toby would drape his whole body on you, covering your frame with his. It’s a bit suffocating. As small and malnourished he might have been in his childhood, he’s gained some muscles on his back, especially after swinging around two hatchets while giving chase to his latest prey. He uses those muscles to good use for you, lifting you and handling you around the bed however he likes. Don’t bother trying to struggle out of his grip, you won’t be able to. Aside from the way his whining would melt your resolve, his arms would wrap around you and constrict you to his side. Just where he likes you.
When he cuddles with you, he buries his face on your chest. He loves the feeling of your heartbeat pounding in his ears, a reassurance that you’re still here with him. When he’s positioned there, all he wants is for you to run your fingers through his wavy hair, brushing out the knots because he’s “too tired to brush it out. We’re inside anyway, not like anyone gonna see me.” Be as stubborn as you want with unravelling the tangles on his head, he won’t feel the pain. He just loves the pressure of your fingers as they comb through his hair and massage his scalp. It calms the buzzing in his head, even if just for a moment.
As the night falls and the moon rises, your position changes slightly. Toby moves farther up, his face now buried in the crook of your neck. Right by your pulse. Right where he can feel the blood pumping in your veins. Right where he can tilt his head slightly and sink his teeth into you until he can feel that familiar metallic taste on his tongue. His jaw aches with want. But not with you. Not right now. Not unless you ask. Tonight he wants to savour the warmth of your body against his.
And Toby is cold. Not just in his ruthlessness, chasing down targets and sticking a hatchet in their skull when he gets close like second nature. He’s physically cold. He’d use it to annoy people, usually. Coming up from behind you and pressing his cold hands onto your neck or under your shirt just to feel you squirm and gasp. He’d laugh at your reaction, call you a "scaredy cat” and laugh even harder when you scold him. Right now as he does the same– sneaking his hand under your shirt and rubbing your waist– he can feel you shift in his sleep, and he huffs out in laughter. No doubt your face is scrunched up in annoyance.
Toby loves how close you are to each other. It’s like he’s become one with you. He breathes in your scent, and you breathe in his. He smells like pinewood and grass and sweat. Years of navigating through the forest imprints the woods into his body. He loves the scent of you, too. Whatever it is you smell like, whether you use the sweet floral perfume he stole from one of his victims’ vanity or like your natural body’s musk, it doesn’t matter to him. As long as it’s you he’s breathing in, he’s satisfied. Like a dog, he noses your neck and hair whenever you’re near. You can practically feel his tail wagging in elation every time he takes a very obvious whiff off of you.
It’s not so different now either. He always has trouble sleeping. Fragments of his past life flash behind closed eyelids. It frustrates Toby, squeezing at his chest. It’s not like he can remember anything–not fully, at least. But that’s what keeps him awake. What was he? Who was he? When he lays in bed at night, he can do nothing but stare at the ceiling and ponder. His bed presses up against the window, the glow of the moonlight inviting him to unravel himself from his blankets and take a walk through the forests. And he often answers to the call, giving him dark bags under his eyes and a rasp in his voice in the mornings.
But now he has you. You, who he believes to be too good for him. You, who grounds him to reality when the buzzing in his head becomes too suffocating. You, who holds him through the night and whispers sweet nothings into his ear until he can feel himself drifting off into sleep. His ear always turns red while he scrunches up his face. Sometimes he hums back to your praises. But more often than not, he hides his face in your neck and holds you tighter. He doesn’t believe anything you tell him, of course. He’s not really that funny, his snark and teasing often get responses of annoyance or frustration. He’s not attractive (or at least he doesn’t think he is, you’d beg to differ), the gash on his face and the mess of hair on his head and the hollowness of his figure surely can’t be pleasing to the eyes. And he’s most definitely not a good person, not with the blood staining his hands.
But with the way your sleepy voice carries through the air like a sweet melody, he’s willing to play pretend and ignore the pressure in his chest.
If you happen to try and leave the bed, he’ll tighten his hold on your body, nearly suffocating you as he buries his face deeper into the crook of your neck.
“Hör auf, dich zu bewegen, mein Herz." he’ll mumble into your neck. His hair tickles your ear as his breath warms the side of your face. “Bleib einfach.”
And who are you to refuse him? Not when he peers up at you through his messy brown curls like you hung the moon and the stars. Not when his fingers clutch at your clothes like it's his lifeline. Not when his cheek presses up against your shoulder and he has to tilt his head to plead with his sleepy eyes.
Oh, his eyes. After years of working as a proxy, the light behind them gradually fades, leaving behind an empty abyss. You’ve seen how his eyes dim when he comes home from his missions– chest heaving, shoulder rigid, and clothes tattered and bloody as a memento from his hunt. You’ve seen the hollowness behind them as you push his goggles off his face, an unfocused bottomless hole like he’s mentally someplace else. You’ve seen how his eyes focus in on you while you wipe the blood from his face, his body relaxing into your touch as you cradle his face and tell him “Welcome home.”
But now, as he pleads with his eyes for you to stay, that dark brown abyss is nowhere to be seen. The moonlight shines above the two of you, illuminating his sleepy face. For a second, you can catch a glimpse of the boy he used to be. The boy he still is under all that roughed up exterior. The scared little boy holding onto hope that it will get better someday, that he’ll one day get to run away and find a life worth living for. You gently stroke his hair before moving your hand downwards and caressing his face. The moonlight catches in his eyes. For a second, you believe that his light has returned.
“I’m not going anywhere,” you whisper back.
He relaxes against your touch.
You slump back against the sheets.
You both close your eyes and drift back into sleep.
The Clockers Family but I make the dysfunctional even worse.
Etho has a habit of lying about so many things, Cleo isn't even sure about what part of his backstory is real or not.
Cleo is trying her best but she has enough inconsistencies in the rules that it throws Bdubs and Scar off a lot, and sometimes she tends to favorite one over the other.
Bdubs and Scar are always against each other, sure they can have moments of peace, but they both believe that they are right and that the other is always wrong.
Bdubs' admiration for Etho makes him push down a lot of bad memories associated with Etho. Etho hurt him? No, Dad would never!
Scar can somewhat recognize that Etho isn't *good* and so he stops going over, sometimes even begging Cleo to not make him go.
Cleo is raising two kids on her own (who are neurodivergent one or two ways) and they sometimes have a hard time comprehending that Bdubs and Scar learn different and don't understand what she's saying. This leads to a lot of moments where either Bdubs or Scar needs something and Cleo just tells them something that makes it worse.
saja boys livestream . they're asked to play a shooting game . most of them are doing shit or middling but baby is an absolute monster and the reason the other four are dying in the game is because they keep fucking staring at him
Dave needs glasses. Like, actual glasses, not just shades. He wasn't able to get them with bro (obviously) and he hid it on the meteor bc he didn't even really realize it. And obviously karkat noticed like immediately like : "WHAT THE FUCK???? GET GLASSES?????" and Dave was like "nah dude its always been like this im good--" The second they're on Earth C karkat forces him to get prescription shades and Dave just. Doesn't know how to react now that he can actually see.
okay so i wanna talk about ketbine!! this probably won’t be very long but i need to get the thoughts down
so, we know ketsu left sabine for dead in a bomb blast. i’m pretty sure this is after she broke out of the imperial academy, since this is when lots of people seem to agree she joined the ghost crew. just getting this down for timelines sake.
so. sabine is queercoded. if you disagree do not read any further. there’s a really great post explaining it that i’ll link when i find it. anyway, we see sabine say “we were once like sisters” to ketsu in blood sisters. obviously, “they were like sisters” is a get out of jail free card for stuck up conservatives when it comes to historical sapphics, and on a meta level that’s almost definitely what’s happening— but bear with me cause i’m overanalysing what’s going on in-universe. sabine was effectively a golden child, right? we see with the duchess that she excelled at the academy, and she was absolutely a subject of criticism for her mother, who needed the empires approval desperately, and then she was cast out when it… backfired. so she meets ketsu, a pretty capable bounty hunter, who offers to help her. now back to the golden child thing— despite what disney’s been bullshitting these past couple years, the empire is very much a bigoted hive of fascists. what i’m getting at is, sabine was pressured to settle down with a nice man under the empire’s regime. it doesn’t seem something they’d bother with, really— but (and this is definitely drawing on my own queer-golden-child experience) they don’t have to outright yell it at her for it to cement in her mind. so, she’s got a crush on her new friend, and is absolutely in denial. she may not be crumbling under the empire’s agenda anymore, but that shit sticks. so she calls ketsu her sister, and pushes it all away.
i hope my thoughts are actually explained enough, i’m a bit tired tbh. thanks for listening !
