mia-n-ceetee
Changing the relationship status to "Stalemate"
mia-n-ceetee
Changing the relationship status to "Uneasy truce"
mia-n-ceetee
Changing the relationship status to "Mutually assured destruction"
Lucy: listen, we need to talk
Skull: oh my god. you're leaving me.
Skull: is there someone else? who is he? i will kill him.
Skull: no- no i won't kill him! i'll be his friend!
Skull: i'll be your friend- we'll coexist. i can coexist with you and him- we could even have a podcast about how well we coexist!
Lucy: slow down, i'm not leaving you
Skull: then open with that!
Skull: in fact from now on instead of 'hi honey' always start with 'hi, i'm not leaving you'
Lucy: can i speak?
Skull: yes, whats taking you so long?!
Lucy: i haven't been completely honest about something
Skull: i knew it, we're broke- this is all a house of cards and lies!
Lucy: Skull
Skull: its ok- i'll get a second job! i can- i can- i can bus tables at that terrible american diner, and- and i can get my job back as a candle sniffer!
Lucy: Skull.
Skull: and- and i think that escape room is still looking for testers! i can still apply there! its ok! we can make our rent!
Lucy: Skull!
Skull: what?! tell me already!
Lucy: i had a check up a few weeks ago, and the doctor said i had something on my chest x-ray
Skull: why didn't u tell me?!
Lucy: i didn't wanna freak u out
Skull: how's that going for u, huh?! i'm too young to be a widow!
Person A: "There is truly not a single day where my blood pressure doesn't spike around you."
Person B: "Sounds like a you problem."
Person A: "If I die of cardiac arrest, do feel free to write your name under my cause of death."
Person B: "Was already gunna."
ALTA fellow of infinite jest btw
ship dynamic but it's 90% of the time they are pissing each other off and 10% they have a raw and honest conversation
a red string of fate can be a leash. if you're enlightened
what if i decided to love you anyway. what if i decided to love you on purpose. what if im so damn stubborn that you cant stop me from loving you even if it kills me.
i hope everything reminds you of me and i haunt you forever (flirting)
trick or treat!! 💀🎃
two for you as a thank you for your monster mash masterpiece! the first: shadow & sunlight, a post-canon exploration of locklyle and skullyle.
then, please accept my other very meagre offering, which is essentially fanfic of your work which is going to live rent free in my head forever:
—
Second Chance
Wading into the icy water, the silent skull cradled in her hands, the guilt is so heavy it could drown her. She could have saved him—should have saved him, while his soul was still intact. If she hadn’t been so selfish.
But maybe it’s not too late.
“Please come back.” A whispered prayer as she gently brushes her lips across his cold forehead. She kneels, lowers him until he’s a distorted image below the surface. Lets a teardrop fall, ripple out. Then, it begins.
The water froths and she feels the skin smoothing itself over bone, the hair growing through her fingers. Choking back laughter as the tears flow freely now, she lifts his head to her lips and he’s warm. There’s his spine and his ribs; she can almost feel his heart beat.
A tentative hand to her cheek. Jet black eyes flutter open. He smiles.
“Sweet Lucy. I’ll always come back.”
He guides her lips to his and it feels like coming home.
THANK YOU SO MUCH???? THIS IS UNREAL
i LOVE how you wrote lucy feeling skull's resurrection under the water and the contrast between cold bone and warm flesh—something i intended with visual parallel in poses! im really glad that you picked it up and given it your own spin!! and lucy's guilt mixed with love that brought her there yess yesss
they did butcher skull's character in the show but even if they hadn't, i think a screen adaptation of skull's dynamic with lucy was always just a little bit doomed to fail. it lives so much off of lucy's internal monologue
average skullyle interaction
skull: these people suck. you should kill everyone in this room
lucy: if you don't shut your trap right now you get to find out what death two looks like
lucy narration: as usual, the skull was entirely right
The book dynamic works because to literally everyone Skull is a dangerous, terrifying ghost manifestation but that's only because they can't *talk to him* literally every person who is able to talk to him is like "oh ok, you're a rude little teenager Victorian shit who got himself shanked and stuffed into sewer pipe and frankly it's insulting to Bazalgette that they did that given your attitude"
Lucy forms a relationship with Skull because they are two of soul - two very poor neglected lower class children used by adults and living trapped in a hellish reality. Lucy escapes her hellish circumstances literally and physically by running away but her experience haunts her, isolates her, prevents her from making connections with people, prevents her from having healthy friendships and relationships, prevents her from having a life, from finding love. When she gets that in the end, friends, a found family, a home, interests and hobbies and love, she and Skull are no longer the same. She understands how trapped he is and how trapped she was. And she releases him. And he uses his freedom to save her and Lockwood (thought he is loath to do it) because they free each other. This dynamic is all internal, it has to happen jointly with Lucy's very heavily biased, very unreliable, first person narration. In any adaptation this goes out the window because by definition the interactions are going to be more objective. You don't have that contrast between what Lucy says and what she does, what she perceives and the reality Skull points out and riffs on. I don't know how you could ever adapt that. I don't know if anyone could.
great addition by indelen as always, i just want to double down on it.
both lucy and skull being used by adults in their lives and both helping each other to find their own agency—in life and in death respectively— is very dear to me. “carlyle & skull” agency might've been played for laughs but i cannot unsee it being a clever nod to them finding their own agency and their identities though each other's company aka tiffs and bickerings
in my opinion it's these very aspects of their past that initially so push them to grasp for control over each other, and the reason it's so hard for either of them to say what they really mean. it's pivotal to their dynamic with each other.
skull, for lack of any ability to take action, uses his voice: he spits insults and swears all day long, he puts other people down, because all his anger and frustration at his own helplessness can finally go somewhere. he tries to interact with the world through lucy by manipulating her or convincing her to do things (to… varying success), but also by helping her—without ever admitting that that's what he's doing, of course. he would rather do anything else than look the power she has over him in the eye.
lucy, on her end, is faced for the first time with the experience of having something that is of enough value to somebody else that she can leverage it over them. she discovers pretty early on that one of the only ways to control skull's behaviour is to threaten to close the valve on his jar. she uses this to out him down when he acts out, but also to extract information from him, the same way it's probably been done to her. she doesn't really think all that hard about what that means or whether she feels justified in doing this, because she perceives the skull primarily as a threat (which admittedly is not entirely unwarranted). she has yet to really see him as a person.
only in the later books do we see the two of them gain an amount of mutual respect and shift their behaviour to establish agency for the other, instead of over each other. lucy defends the skull to other people, holds deeper conversations with him, starts to tentatively affirm his personhood. skull's language towards her evolves from vitriol more towards teasing, and his running commentary on her social struggles, while filtered through consistently dense layers of insults and sass, seems to spring from a place of genuine concern, and often voices the very same things lucy is unwilling to admit to herself. they've grown past seeing each other as a means to an end.
lucy's decision to free him in the end is a rejection of the notions instilled in her by her abusive past; she lets go of control to help somebody else find agency. skull, in kind, overcomes the impulse to hold on the power he was so coveting all this time, and uses it instead to save the person he's come to love, in one single, entirely selfless act.
Skull: the real secret to my immortality? not dying. you want to be immortal? ok, easy. don't die. that's it. refuse to die. there u go
Lucy: but-
Skull: "but how?" you might ask? easy. just don't. i refuse to. say "no thanks."
Marissa: his right.
starting a collection
