(68/365) by (DS)

that kariya, stealing tokiomi-kun’s family again~

Team Berserker being a family desu.

We draw our personal darkness around us to keep us safe from the sun. ♛♛♛

by ノサカキ

by 十七

:: n a m i d a :: by ~kuroboshi

Sakura hurts me a lot.

She bustles about the Emiya household, joining Shirou and Taiga to finally form a family with them, but never does she truly consider that it is something that can end happily, something that can be real. It’s all play-acting. It’s all a desperate last dream before reality comes crashing down and rips out her heart and makes her the shell of something else.

But there’s this tiny part of her that does insist, “It can be real someday,” and even though she probably hates that part of her for treacherously trying to give the rest of her hope, she lets it drag her along in the dream.

And then Heaven’s Feel happens, and Shirou, Shirou of all people, the boy who is the one bright spot in her life, he does something she never expected. He agrees with that part of her. He says that it’s real.

And all of this right as the darkness is descending. Is it any wonder things go wrong the way they do?

I have more I want to say, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it. Sakura hurts me.

Here’s the thing about Sakura Matou: she is in every way a victim of abuse. She is the picture-perfect example of someone who has, for most of her life, been tormented, violated, and treated as an object by the very people who she should have been able to rely on to support, protect, and cherish her.

But not quite. See, “picture-perfect” is really exactly the wrong word to use there. Normally, characters like her, meant to be rescued by the hero from their darkness, are pure. They keep the masks on neatly at all times before revealing in the most dramatic and attractive way possible that really they have terribly low self-esteem due to all their torment and must be rescued by some confident man. Sakura doesn’t do that. She says passive-aggressive things and she gets jealous. She wishes bitterly to get better while being resigned to the reverse, because her life has left her mentally, emotionally, and morally exhausted, and even if she’s rescued, it won’t be pretty. It won’t be delicate and pure.

Because you don’t go through the things Sakura Matou has been through without being corrupted by it. You don’t collapse into the pit of misery without being stained by the time you get fished out of it. And given everything she’s been through, Sakura damn well does a good job of surviving as a decent person until it’s finally too much.

But the fact that she does a good job isn’t really the point. The point is that when it does become too much, there is someone there who doesn’t care how corrupted and stained she is, because she is still a human being worth loving, even if no one in her life before him told her so.

She doesn’t have to deal with trauma in the approved way. After everything she’s been through, she can give up. She can lash out. She can rage and seethe with passive-aggressive bitterness. And it doesn’t make her worthless and despicable. That’s the point. That’s why I’ll love her even when Heaven’s Feel gets dark and she gets terrible. Because I approve of that message. Sometimes, it’s something we need in our fiction.

… Before anything. I remember the most important thing I need to verify.

via Aria