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villainau · 6 years

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both aus / general

very soft hair when it’s not styled but you can’t touch it unless you’ve caught him when he’s sleepy and/or just waking up because you will be assassinated

his uncle’s surname is trumble so tbh valeska probably wasn’t lila’s real surname. she’d have changed it to sound more “exotic” in the circus. but let’s thank god for that and the fact that the twins are valeskas

doesn’t tend to lie because he’s more the “cruel honesty” type, but is a very good liar when he does - not as good as jeremiah because lying was always jeremiah’s forte, but jerome can easily put on an act or think up a story on the spot with enough detail to make it convincing

can easily go days without sleeping, and when he does fall asleep it’s only in his actual bed like 40% of the time

throws all of his red clothes in with jeremiah’s white clothes for washing constantly

swears so often. can easily say “fucking” twice in one sentence and throws one use of “shit” in there for good measure

no short sleeves outside ever. in private maybe, but not for long

his favourite colour is red, but he actually kinda likes pink too, especially hot pink

his first word was “miah”

villain au

lowkey hates being touched from behind e.g. pats on the back, a hand on his shoulder, etc, especially unexpectedly (and just hates the feeling of being snuck up on in general). he’ll stiffen like hell and the only people who can get away with it without him reflexively whacking their hands off of him are jeremiah and bruce, but they tend not to do it anyway because they can tell he doesn’t like it

absolutely had a super embarrassing doodle of a heart in his diary with “j + b” inside it, along with some v crude scribbles of things like him and bruce holding hands and them stabbing someone

Scary Kinks tbh. knives, pain (both others’ and his), blood, whatever, he has very little sense of limits. he is honestly not above even sticking a gun in your mouth if that’s what he’s feelin’. he’s only done that with bruce once, during the rebellious phase and the early days of the physical stuff, when he was still pushing limits and seeing how far bruce was really willing to go here and there weren’t a ton of Romo Feelings involved; he’d straddled bruce on a chair and he put the barrel of a pistol to bruce’s mouth, expecting nervousness or panic or some kind of reaction along those lines - but bruce just maintained steady eye contact and opened his mouth slightly, with no fear and watching him right back, which basically resulted in jerome thinking oh and yep, brucie’s something alright, grinning and throwing the gun off to the side to be ignored while they got on with Things. he wouldn’t do that with bruce anymore though - as dangerous as their lives generally are and as much as he loves that, he’s far less willing to go carelessly pointing loaded guns at bruce himself these days

does not like being tied up during NSFW Activities because he hates feeling confined/trapped and not being able to move his arms and not feeling in control because it’s too vulnerable, but bruce being tied up is Another Matter Entirely

lowkey praise kink. will either tell you to shut up or find Ways to distract you from talking if you actually try it, but is secretly kinda into it because he requires positive feedback in Most Things

identifies as bi but really couldn’t give a flying fuck about gender. if you’re fun and you can give him a good time, the rest is background noise

is annoyed when people are taller than him, so he avoids standing directly next to people who are too often (but on the other hand really likes standing next to shorter people because he likes to make it obvious that he Wins)

takes the fact that jonathan is the only person in the team taller than him as a personal threat. once idly mused to him about the possibility of sawing off his feet so he could be superior and just got a very deadpan try it. look and decided “…….maybe some other time”. it was probably a joke anyway. like 90%.

despite having a boyfriend who wears black almost exclusively, he pretty much never wears black himself. he’ll occasionally wear dark suits or one item of black clothing or whatever, but he always has something in his outfit with colour and tends to go for brightness over anything else

sends awful memes in the team group chat at 3am and no one thinks they’re funny except him and jervis. sometimes ivy does, and she occasionally sends a nice response even if she doesn’t just to be polite, but other times they are just Too Bad even for her

does also pm ivy Nice Things that remind him of her though, and these she does like. he also sends her random pictures of animals and flowers w captions like “is it just me or does this beanstalk kinda look like jonathan” and she can’t help giggling a lil at some of them and then feeling bad for it

master of the ironic “UWU” and “OWO” emojis and everyone else hates it

him and jervis are the only people jonathan actually responds to on the phone (other people can call him but he’ll just silently listen to what you have to say and then hang up, so it’s in the air whether he even heard you or not) and he finds it disproportionately funny that jonathan once answered the phone with “whomst.” instead of “hello”

he never self-harmed in the sense of cutting, but he also doesn’t have the same reservations about causing himself pain that others do, so he’s done things like put out cigarettes on his wrists/hands, test the sharpness of knives on himself, etc. and physical pain can be something of a release for him

generally fearless, but he was genuinely scared of his mother, uncle and the men his mother had over - killing lila and zach helped with a lot of this and made him feel like he’d won. he still gets a little on edge when someone reminds him of them in speech/appearance/personality, but he’s more likely to use it as an opportunity to prove to himself that he has power over the memory of lila/zach and that they can’t hurt him anymore by getting one over on the person in question too

in the very early stages of the abuse, he coped with it by believing that his mother loved him no matter what and clung to the hope that it would all stop one day and she’d sober up and love him properly. it sinking in that she didn’t love him at all and that it was never going to change was one of the things that ended up contributing to his eventual psychotic break

what is a stable self-esteem? jerome doesn’t know. can go from calling himself garbage to calling himself a god in .0002 seconds

tried to strangle an arkham therapist once because she brought up his childhood abuse and kept pushing him to talk about it and he just lost it. after that, all attempts at therapy for him were dropped

has an uncomfortable amount of knowledge about how to set broken bones and put in dislocated joints because there were times in the circus when things got really really bad and he should have gotten hospital treatment, but obviously nobody would have taken him, so he had to learn to do even the serious shit himself. early on, he came dangerously close to seriously fucking himself up and making his injuries worse more than once thanks to his amateur first attempts at fixing them

people in the circus were kinda-sorta aware of what went on with his mother, but basically just didn’t care; it wasn’t their business

touch-starved. one of the reasons he reacts so strongly the times when bruce is super gentle with him is because literally no one has ever just touched him softly before (and generally he isn’t used to being touched at all without pain immediately following) so at first it’s almost too much

generally isn’t affected by his facial scars and isn’t self-conscious about them at all, but is very used to other people finding them scary/unpleasant so was genuinely thrown off-balance the first time bruce traced them and called him beautiful

surprisingly, he can actually cook - he had to make his own food a lot in the circus when he was younger, it was either that or scrounge from the circus food stalls, bc lila sure as hell wasn’t making him meals - he just chooses not to anymore because, frankly, he can’t be bothered

he and bruce don’t really ever say “i love you” in so many words. they know what they have going on, so why would they need to verbalise it all the time when they already know it’s there? jerome’s really not into that kind of thing anyway, and honestly bruce isn’t the most emotionally open person either. bruce was the first of them to acknowledge and accept how he felt, and never denied it when asked by someone else, but he knows jerome and his background and thus never said it first in order to avoid pushing him into territory that may be uncomfortable for him. but the first time either of them said the words to the other, it came, surprisingly, from jerome, spur-of-the-moment - one of the nights he spends in the city with bruce alone, doing the dark shit they do. at one point, bruce slit a man’s throat in a particularly vicious way; jerome was at his shoulder, watching how he did it, and it came out without him really meaning it to: “god, i fucking love you.” bruce might not need to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good when he does - he made sure jerome had no chance of trying to play it off as a joke by turning around and promptly distracting him with a kiss. ...blood-covered and all.

has some experience with sleeping rough because sometimes lila would just kick him out because she didn’t want to see him that night, so he had to crash with someone else in the circus if they took pity on him or find somewhere else on the grounds/surrounding streets. he’d venture back a couple of days later when he knew she was out, and she’d come back and see he was there - she wouldn’t say anything and would basically just blank him, and that was the cue that he was safe to say

used to cry a lot and got called a crybaby by other kids in the circus when he was very young. over time, he taught himself to laugh whenever he felt like crying, and it got to the point where it was just an ingrained thing, so instead of breaking down and crying, he would get half-involuntary laughing fits instead. he got into a mindset of “everything is hilarious if you just think about it for long enough” as another coping method, because why should he be sad when everything in the world and everything that is happening to him is so damn funny?

doesn’t happen often, but very occasionally he sleep-talks and says some weird shit and bruce is just like “……..Alright.” he never remembers this in the morning

sleeping position varies depending on the time period. he’s either curled up on the very edge of the bed and taking up as little space as possible without falling off, or he’s sprawled out over the entire thing, and there’s no in-between. the ‘taking up no space’ thing is left over from childhood, but bruce notices this and the longer he’s with bruce and the more comfortable he gets with him (and the more it sinks in that, no, there will not be Consequences if he just lets himself relax - because he does a great job most of the time of not showing any vulnerability over his childhood, but when it comes to night-time and sleeping with someone else there, old habits and fears kick in a little at first), the more he just becomes The Most Fidgety Sleeper Ever. bruce gets smacked awake by his arm in his face a few times, but he has figured out a Solution - if he intertwines his fingers with jerome’s or shifts jerome’s arm down to his waist or something, jerome will just latch onto him in his sleep because warmth. no mentions of this in the morning allowed though, and he was definitely not cuddling, never call it that, he can’t control what he does when he’s asleep, BRUCE

still has nightmares sometimes - nights are when he’s at his most vulnerable basically, so bruce knows damn well that jerome letting him see that side of him is a gesture of trust

is lowkey intimidated by ecco because that girl picked his ass up when he was unconscious and dead weight, so she could absolutely pick him up while he’s fully awake, and that’s just too much strength for such a tiny woman. he will never admit this. tries to scare her instead because he has a reputation to uphold and is eternally annoyed about the fact that she doesn’t seem at all affected (but he’s convinced that she’s just hiding her fear really well)

high school au

climbs through bruce’s window a lot unnecessarily because he doesn’t want alfred to open the door. alfred usually finds out he’s there anyway, so he would be perfectly fine just going to bruce’s house the normal way, but he likes to pretend that he’s being sneaky and thus cool

watches a lot of stand-up comedy but is also the world’s worst critic and constantly makes comments about how he “could have made that joke better” or “there was a better way to word that”, which is what originally kickstarts the idea of going into comedy himself

………hm………. concept………. jerome w a pierced tongue………

watched twilight “ironically”. team edward if he had to choose, but thinks both edward and jacob are idiots and will get into an argument about this. will also legitimately debate about vampires vs werewolves. thinks that there should have been a big bloody fight at the end where everyone died, because if there is no violence/gore it’s a shit movie, this is a non-negotiable rule of his

has a fondness for gross/creepy creatures. he’s not at all scared of spiders and will kidnap the bigger ones in glasses and attempt to keep them until jeremiah (and later bruce) makes him put it outside. he’ll straight-up pick up a spider and let it run across his hands while other people scream about it

before bruce and elijah come along and before things start to change, he’s essentially living for jeremiah. if it weren’t for the fact that he has to look out for jeremiah and would never leave him in that environment alone and the fact that they promised each other they would always be there for each other no matter what, jerome’s lack of self-preservation would be a lot worse than it is bc without that to keep him tied to something he just wouldn’t care

when they were very little, the twins had a habit of sneaking into each other’s beds to sleep at night, usually after it had been a bad day with their mother and something had happened. they grew out of it when they got a little older, especially jerome once he stopped being so open with vulnerability/affection, but it was still a comfort that they slept near each other thanks to their caravan being too small for anything else so they knew the other was close-by. once jerome developed a habit of sneaking out at nights, this was also how jeremiah would often hear him leaving or would wake up and immediately notice he was gone

no one will play mario kart with him anymore because he gets ridiculously competitive and ruthless and he has no honour. he will shove you off of your seat so he can overtake you while you’re still getting up.

the only people who can tell him and jeremiah apart by voice alone are bruce and elijah. if anyone else calls their apartment, it’s just impossible to immediately work out who’s answered the phone at first unless they throw in a really obvious mannerism. if the person who picked up the phone is speaking with their mouth full and answered with “yo wassup”, it’s probably jerome. that or jeremiah’s finally broken.

speaking of phone calls, jerome is a nightmare when jeremiah is expecting a work call. if jerome gets to the phone first, it’s just: “is - is this mr. valeska?” “…you’re gonna have to be more specific, pal.” “…the j. valeska that i was supposed to call–?” “nope, pause, do better than that.” then the caller has to wait on the line while they hear “[muffled voice in the distance] JEROME, IS THAT THE CALL I SAID WAS IMPORTANT” “i dunno, maybe. i wasn’t really listening” “i SPECIFICALLY TOLD YOU NOT TO ANSWER THE PHONE IF IT RANG WHILE I WAS SHOWERING” and then vague sounds of clattering and voices before they get a flustered jeremiah on the line like “i am so sorry”

jerome is by far the messier twin, so his room is always a heap of dirty clothes and food packets and empty bottles/cans, but jeremiah can get really fixated on his work so his computer desk and his work-spaces are just full of papers and documents and empty coffee mugs. whenever he gets on at jerome about cleaning up after himself, jerome’s like [WILL SMITH POSE @ JEREMIAH’S DESK] WHAT ARE THOOOOOOSE

jerome and elijah have been to the hospital so many times because of the stupid shit they do that they’re basically on a first-name basis with a bunch of the doctors and nurses. whenever they come in, it’s like “oh, what have you boys done now?” (but really the nurses all love them bc they’ve charmed them and their stories about what happened this time are always hilarious)

bruce cooks sometimes and jerome “helps”, by which i mean he sits at the kitchen counter and just gossips to him, plays on his phone and/or watches him without actually lifting a finger to do anything - until he gets bored and things end up burning because bruce gets Distracted. eventually bruce enlists him to help chop vegetables and stir things because if he’s here, he can be useful, and jerome’s like “hmm what do i get in return?” so they develop a barter system where [x] activity gets jerome [x] amount of kisses and thus things actually get done while satisfying both of them without too much distraction. the only issue being that jerome keeps a) raising his prices and b) insisting on getting rewards for the most ridiculous shit now, like passing a bag of carrots over the counter because it’s just “SO MUCH UNPAID LABOUR, BRUCE”

still has moments where he reflexively flinches if someone significantly older/bigger/taller than him moves too quickly or suddenly, though people around his size/age or less are fine

is actually more self-conscious about his burnt hand than he lets on. he puts on a front like it doesn’t bother him, but the fact that he’s usually wearing fingerless gloves or has a bandage wrapped around it or has his sleeves pulled over his hands when he can’t have either of those says something. he actually managed to keep bruce and elijah from seeing it for quite a while, since that would have been harder to explain away than other things - they noticed he usually had his hands covered but didn’t think it was for a particular reason beyond it being a Jerome Quirk. one of the most notable things that happens in the future when things start to improve is that he stops wearing the gloves and eventually actually lets bruce hold that hand, whereas before if bruce tried he’d usually pull away and switch sides so bruce could hold the other

the others convinced him to see a therapist after he was officially diagnosed and unexpectedly he agreed (mostly to get everyone off his back), and he was assigned to a relatively young woman called bee. he didn’t expect it to accomplish anything and basically spent the first few sessions being an uncooperative shit and turning everything back on her and giving her smartass answers to her questions. it took a long while, but she eventually proved to be Cool and Funny enough for him to start warming up to her - which didn’t mean he was any more cooperative with the therapy side of things, but it did mean he started to use the phone number she gave him to text her about completely unrelated things in the vein of “holy shit bee you’re not gonna believe what miah just did”. she went along with it and their sessions morphed into jerome mostly giving her Gossip or them having casual conversations - but girl knew what she was doing. he gradually started to talk about bruce, jeremiah and elijah, about his relationship, about school, about the circus, and eventually opened up more about certain things that happened. he never quite got to the point of discussing his feelings about the abuse in-depth (though he did end up telling her a fair amount abt how he felt about bruce) but all in all therapy ended up having a positive effect on him, though bee was v talented at letting him think he wasn’t really giving her much info and that every realisation he came to during their sessions was down to him alone and not because he was talking things through with someone

likes hugs/cuddling/hand-holding much more than he will ever let on

never completely stops smoking, but he does tone it down after they all leave high school. he’ll smoke with other people and sometimes when he’s really bored or waiting for someone, but it’s not one of his first methods of passing the time anymore. trying to get him to stop drinking is a lost cause, though.

#t: original #ch: jerome valeska

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