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whywhatswrongwithblue · 10 months

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In honour of @tentoorosemonth2023, here's fifteen brilliant and recent tentoo x rose fics i haven't recc'd before! please make sure to leave kudos and comment on these!!

all of these are tentoo x rose endgame.

*=multichapter, E=explicit

the stars collide as the planets turn by hippiebanana132

Author's summary: Her eyes flicker open again, clear just for a moment below the matted red streaks in her golden hair. One hand still clutched in his, she raises her other arm with great effort to reach shakily towards the lapel of his brown jacket, dangerously close to his right heart. He gathers her hand up just as her fingertips brush his shirt, brings it up to his lips, tells himself the contact is for her.

My remarks: A superb slice of life fic in which we see the otp through the eyes of ten. So, so wonderful and emotional ❤️

Warnings: Mentions of a car accident; nothing graphic.

2. and now you are and i am now by @lordy-lou

Author's summary: He doesn’t find a single atom of regret in the ashes of his strictures.

My remarks: A short and sweet introspective piece on the immediate aftermath of the beach scene.

3. Hunger by @metacrisisdoctor (E)

Author's summary: His hands are out his pockets milliseconds later. He walks over to her in three large steps and cups her face in her hands and pulls her mouth to his. It's a hard, bruising kiss. It's a kiss he's held in far too long. It's the kiss of a man who stood at the grave of the woman he loves, and has been gifted with her resurrection.

My remarks: An incredibly in character exploration of how the OTP's first time could've gone down. A shot of serotonin. They ended up together!!!

4. Washed Up Together by @thirdeyeblue *(E)

Author's summary: Not long after being left on Bad Wolf Bay, the Doctor and Rose quietly contemplate why their relationship has yet to progress.

My remarks: An endearing and filled to the brim with good ol' pining take on early days of tentoo x rose; includes a drunk!Doctor and a bar fight 👀

5. The Existence of Pears by @bravehandsomehero

Author's summary: The Doctor is forced to face his greatest enemy in the name of love: Pears. Metacrisis Doctor/Rose.

My remarks: An incredibly fluffy slice of life drabble featuring expectant parents tentoo and rose ❤️

6. hush now to sleep, on the wings of a butterfly by @nostradamus0

Author's summary: Mia pretends to fall asleep in the car so she'll be carried inside.

My remarks: The absolute CUTEST kid fic you will read featuring the Tyler family today. Contains like, illegal levels of soft.

7. in human condition by @queenofthecon* (E)

Author's summary: Rose gives the Doctor nothing short of a miracle; and then the universe threatens to taken them both away from him for good.

My remarks: Compelling character study of the Doctor and how vulnerable being human makes him!

Warnings: Whump, blood and injury, pregnancy

8. Bad Wolf Rising by @wyntereyez *

Author's summary: Werewolves thrive in Pete’s World, and they’re determined to bring about the Empire of the Wolf.

My remarks: This fic is, tragically, incomplete as of now, but it's probably one of the most engaging chapter 1's i've EVER read, and i am DYING to know what the author had in store!! Featuring an extremely in character Pete's world ensemble and a very House MD-ish Doctor who's been permanently injured, and werewolves, this fic is definitely worth a click!

9. shackles by @gingerteaonthetardis

Author's summary: She should've known. Like, she really should have known. Maybe it was just that she'd gotten sort of complacent, sort of used to the comfortable domesticity of their new life. Maybe she was just a fool. But he made it so easy to forget. When he folded her socks and handed her plates of banana pancakes and grumbled at the remote control, how could she not? How could she be expected to remember? That the Doctor was, at his core, incredibly reckless and fundamentally stupid.

My remarks: An incredible and humourous take on the 'handcuffed together' trope!

10. Together by @uthers-bald-head

Author's summary: Christmas dinner in the Tyler household is hectic but joyful nonetheless. Rose finds her mind wandering to the Doctor, but not the one that sits beside her.

My remarks: Short and sweet, with a perfect hint of angst concerning the time-lord Doctor.

11. moonlit kitchen floors by @zmbiicrsh

Author's summary: "You were easily convinced, you just couldn't resist me." Rose jabbed at him with a teasing voice. Though she never really knew when he fell in love with her and neither did he. It sort of just happened. So it really wasn't a surprise when he said sincerely, "No, I really couldn't."

My remarks: Captures an incredibly tender moment of dancing in the kitchen for these two ❤️

12. Street corner at two in the morning by @messierfourtytwo

Author's summary: A day in the life of Rose and TenToo. There’s something that Rose isn’t telling the Doctor…

My remarks: SO FLUFFY. Makes you want to melt.

13. spaces in between by @naaer

Author's summary: The fate of Pete's World is at stake, but the Doctor and Rose still find time to take a minute

My remarks: Tender drabble set in a dystopian!Pete's world. Beggginngggg for an extension.

14. Opposition of the Stars by @abadplanwellexecuted (E)

Author's summary: Post-Journey's End, first night in a hotel in Norway fic. Rose and the Metacrisis Doctor end up sharing a hotel room, and walls come tumbling down.

My remarks: When i tell you my SOUL left my body upon seeing this notification!! Written as it is by one of the all time greats, of course this fic is incredible!

15. Stargazing by @elialys

Author's summary: He's not cradling her bump tonight, nor has he pressed his lips to her tense skin to murmur words she cannot hear, only feel. He’s using one finger on her, the tip of it gently tracing patterns on the curve of her stomach. At first, she wonders if he’s spelling letters, trying out the few names they’re considering for her, but Rose quickly dismisses the idea, not recognizing any letter—nothing English. What he’s drawing isn’t random, though. There is intent in the way his fingertip slowly moves upon her.

My remarks: Intimate and tender and brilliant. Forever manifesting your return to Doctor Who😭😭😭

And that's it for this list!! I missed out on quite a few, so i'll probably make another list next week. Show these stories all the love!!

#tentoorosemonth2023 #fic rec #rose tyler #tentoo #tentoorose #tentoo x rose #tenrose #ten x rose #tenth doctor

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muvaginger · 3 months

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Yandere Sanemi — he's obsessive, a traditional man, a chaste man who wants so badly to be with you as his first and only, but you're more interested in innocent Genya so he has no choice but to take you by force.

Well hello there, Anon! 🖤

First Yandere! Request I’ve had in a while and you’re coming in swinging which I LOVE.

Let’s see what I can come up with…😌

Hope you enjoy!

“Unlike Me”

Yandere!SanemiShinazugawaXReader

TW: Cursing, Animosity, angst

Unlike me, my brother has the luxury of not knowing what lurks in the dark. He can make the choice to not get involved with demons but chooses too.

Unlike me, I was forced.

Unlike me, my brother has the liberty to roam the streets without worry due to those like me who sacrifice their lives just so that people such as yourself and my brother can do just that.

Unlike me, he’s kind, polite, considerate and free from judgment. He can smile knowing he will never experience the nightmares I do when it comes to having to kill our own mother and to also remember the twisted faces of fellow colleagues now passed on from this earth being eaten by those same demons who took her and our siblings away from us.

Unlike me, his hands are not calloused and rough. They’re gentler feeling and with a body not scarred by injuries created by claws. No, he’s perfect from head to toe. A virgin—but perfect.

See, I would be content with all of this and be perfectly fine with the shitty cards that i have been dealt. But he had to catch your eye and you had to fall for him. It’s not like he doesn’t have enough luck as it is but for him to somehow get you? To have you blushing, pondering, and head over hills in love with him pisses me off. And the worst part? He has no fucking clue. None.

While you sit there and yap and yap and yap about how much you adore Genua and how amazing he is, I have to sit quietly and pretend to give a fuck just to get a sliver of your time because if not for genya, you wouldn’t look my way. Unlike me, Genya gets bragged about and has a secret admirer while I’m stuck being “matchmaker”. Fucking matchmaker.

If only I didnt introduce him to you. If only I didn’t get so comfortable that I started to bring you around—as a friend—my colleagues and my surviving family, you would be mine. But no, fate never really liked me, the stupid bitch. She had to give you to Genya. To Innocent, Dumbass, delusional Genya. And even though I’m supposed to be happy, I’m not. No, I’m pissed and want to fucking beat his ass.

I just can’t let this happen.

Call me obsessive if you want but I think you would be way better off with me than him. Unlike him, I can not just provide for you in every single way possible, I can actually protect you from said demons in the night. I can make sure that for the rest of your life, you’re loved, taken care of and with someone who can actually use his hands. If you can’t see that, I’ll have no choice but to make you see. To make you want me. To make you love only me.

If it means that something tragic has to happen to me or If it comes down to having to set my own little brother up to never see you again, so be it. Anything and I mean anything to make you mine, it will happen. Because unlike me, Genyas not man enough to do what it takes to protect what’s yours. And I’ll be damned if I let him or any other one of these fuckers take you away from me.

#muvaginger #gingerspicelattemix #gingers backup account #demon slayer #kimetsu no yaiba #kny imagines #sanemi imagines #shinazugawa sanemi #sanemi x y/n #sanemi x you #sanemi x reader #Yandere!sanemi #Yandere! SanemiXreader #anon ask #gingersdrabbles #gingers anons 👓

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dracocheesecake · 1 month

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Today’s thoughts are spent on thinking about Kai and Oogway. Guy who probably really didn’t expect to make friends on a battlefield because it’s a battlefield but found a fast friend who could match him. Guy who rags on said fast friend to hide the affection he has for him because this is still war and he wants to push down those feelings as much as he can. And then the ambush happens. They are the only ones who make it out alive (or…I assume they’re the only ones who do? Because the alternative is there were others still alive that Kai could have helped and in a split second panic he chose Oogway over any survivors of their army. Chose Oogway over the duties and responsibilities he held as a warlord of China) and despite the inner thoughts of pushing down how much he cares about this person who has matched him in every way and become his equal, his balance in life, it jumps out of him instinctually.

Kai has lost everything but Oogway, and he’s on his way to losing him too. And probably for the first time in decades, he feels fear. And that fear isn’t even for himself. He only knows how to create death and suffering, not fix it, there is nothing he can do to salvage Oogway except desperately hope he can make it to someone who can do it for him. And sure, he does, but how powerless can it make someone like a respected, venerated warlord like him feel that he has to stand by and watch this healing happen? Death is the one thing Kai can’t protect the people he cares about from, this is the one thing he feels he can’t do. He can’t heal. He can only destroy.

And he takes that information, and the knowledge of Chi and uses it in what he thinks is the only way he’ll be able to: power and strength for himself. Because if he’s just powerful enough, with more strength than any number of forces could put in an ambush, he’ll never have to lose any of the people in his care again. He can’t protect the people he cares about with the strength he has now, he needs more. And if a few innocent lives need to be taken advantage of to do it? That’s the price of war anyways. There’s always a price, and Kai has always been prepared to pay it.

And then Kai not understanding why, of all people, Oogway is the one to tell him no. The same man who has been by his side for all the atrocities they’ve already committed, all the deaths of husbands, sons, daughters, wives, has decided to draw the line here. There is finally a way for him to overcome the weaknesses he has and protect everyone who matters to him- to protect Oogway himself and prevent this would be tragedy from ever happening again- and he’s just supposed to ignore it? He’s supposed to have empathy and care in his heart for strangers, or worse yet, enemies that he could use this against? The utter heartbreak in Kai’s mind of risking your career, honor, everything to keep this man protected and alive, only for him to turn around and essentially kill you for the act of trying to make sure the same man never meets this fate again.

And then centuries later, making your way back to the mortal realm and finding out your so called “brother in arms” erased you from history because he was so ashamed of your actions (and his, and yet he still gets to be honored and revered). I mean, hell, I’d try to destroy his memory too. They make for such a tragic pairing whether it’s romantic or platonic augh AUGH I LOVE TRAGEDYYY. (Sorry for the rambling but man-)

Never. Ever. Apologize for rambling about Kai and the intricate (and honestly quite unexplored) tragedy that is Kai and Oogway's relationship. You left an entire poetic ficlet in my inbox and I could not be happier because DANG this is practically spot on.

Just...imagine losing everything you could have to lose, and then almost losing the last two things you had left to lose (your sworn brother's life and potentially your own), and then lose him again- this time because (in Kai's view) he turns on you without reason. After everything you did for him, trying to save his life, trying to use this second chance you've miraculously been given to reclaim what you've lost and ensure you never lose it again- and he turns against you the first chance he gets. I could understand Kai's rage, there (of course he was still wrong but I can understand it). Maybe there's a deep sorrow there, too, buried under the rage, but you know we'll never see it.

They are absolutely tragic and it's a shame it's not talked about enough. 😔😭💔💔💔

#ask #thank you for the ask!#kung fu panda #general kai #master oogway #kaiway #kfp #kfp3 #everything about them is so tragic it hurts

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dreamingkelz · 9 months

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I’ll admit, I’m a little nervous writing this, but I’ve been thinking in circles a lot lately, and I thought writing my thoughts down would be helpful and maybe alleviate some anxiety? This isn’t really criticism about anything, so much as observations and analysis and just a general attempt to understand some of the weirder things I’ve experienced being in this fandom.

With that said, let’s get started.

I’ve talked in the past about how protective I feel when it comes to the eggs. I don’t like people threatening to kill them. I don’t like when the story puts them in danger. I don’t like how neglect deaths are still a risk. And after a few close calls over the past few days, egg welfare is in the front of my mind again, and I’ve found myself questioning why I feel this way. It’s strange, isn’t it? As many people have said, they’re just a bunch of pixels in a video game, aren’t they?

First and foremost, I want to preface this by saying I’m a writer, and more specifically, I’m a writer who loves angst. I’ve always drifted towards tragic narratives. I want to see the characters I’m invested in get tested. I want to see them cope with trauma and loss. I love when a story can make me cry. I’m not necessarily a fan of child death as a narrative device, but of all of the stories I’ve written, my favorite does see the main character watching four of his five children die in increasingly horrific ways over the course of fifty chapters, so it’s definitely not a dealbreaker for me. If the QSMP was an ordinary story, I think I would love the tension and the horror of the situation. As is, there have been some interesting character developments to come out of the constant threat of death, or the trauma caused by past deaths on the server.

So then why? Why does the thought of egg deaths still fill me with a nauseating sense of dread?

To start with, the QSMP is not an ordinary story. I don’t think any story told through this particular style of Minecraft roleplay is or can be. This is real-time player-driven roleplaying, and I think there are three medium-defining factors at play here. One: every player (usually) streams their perspective. Two: characters appear and disappear from the story based on the players’ streaming schedules. And three: while they are online, we will experience every single thing that happens to the players.

Combined, we end up with a narrative that simultaneously has characters that are better-developed than can be found in any other medium, while also somehow being worse. Any character is likely to have a vivid, colorful personality, deeply engaging relationships with the people around them, a rich inner life, and their own unique perspective on any events that occur on the server. But that same character might inexplicably be absent from a plot beat that they are heavily invested in, solely because the streamer isn’t available for that particular stream. Plotlines get dropped for any number of reasons. Backstories are, more often than not, cobbled together from references to past servers that the player has taken part in. All-in-all, narrative and even character takes a backseat to the players - their identities, their schedules, their playstyles, their comfort.

It is also worth repeating that everything that happens on the server is unfolding in real time. The narrative doesn’t cut away when the story stops, at least not for most of the players. There are a handful who might log in with a single focus for the day, stream for one or two hours, then log off again. But many more are there nearly every day for several hours at a time, and a lot of that time will be dedicated to non-story events - building, doing dungeons, making machines, or just hanging out with the other players. While any player on any stream can be prone to breaking character to talk about events from their offline lives, these long, lore-light streams are especially prone to it. And there are some players who specifically try to avoid participating in lore altogether. At the end of the day, they are streamers first, and actors in a story second.

The result of all of these factors is a server with an incredibly thin line between fiction and reality. There is a distinction between the player and the character they play, yes, but in any given stream the difference between the two can become murky.

But how does this tie to the eggs?

In the beginning, it wasn’t necessarily so bad. The eggs were just cute little blobs that followed their respective players around and needed to be taken care of. There was even a lot of confusion in the earliest days as to whether or not they were controlled by AI. If that was all they had stayed, perhaps we wouldn’t have gotten so attached? The problem came when they started talking.

Suddenly, the eggs were able to communicate things they liked and projects they wanted to work on. They were able to tell jokes, and express complicated emotions, and let the personalities they’d already started fostering shine. They started carving out niches in the community of the server - people ask Dapper for help with engineering projects and mod-related information; Richarlyson’s art is plastered over every other business and he even does concept art for builds; the eggs form relationships outside of their assigned player, with eggs and players alike. Some of them even have their own ongoing storylines. Parents are careful to make sure that every egg is taken care of every week, and everybody freaks out if they see an egg go down in chat.

Yes, the eggs are cute. They’re small and meant to evoke human children. The players are explicitly told to protect them, to raise them, and keep them healthy and happy. Of course everybody would become attached. But isn’t it strange to get this attached?

If cute child characters were all they were, I would think so. But that isn’t the case. In practice, the eggs are effectively players themselves.

Players that only exist in the context of the server.

Players that the server is actively trying to kill.

And I think that is the problem. The eggs are characters in a story, but the story has such a murky line between fiction and reality, that they wind up feeling real. After all, they follow the same rules as the other “characters” when it comes to portraying a character. This isn’t like a Cucurucho or a Walter Bob who come online once in a while to hang out, but clearly have an off-screen role to play in the story as well. The eggs may not stream their perspectives, but they spend nearly one hundred percent of their time interacting with players, and if they’re not with a player, they’re assumed to be sleeping. Furthermore, depending on whose perspective you watch, you’re going to spend a minimum of three days a week watching egg content, and when they log on, they tend to stay for hours. If you were watching in the beginning, they were online every day. That is a LOT of time to “get to know” these characters who so convincingly mimic the players.

Effectively (and unintentionally), the QSMP has tricked the audience into forming parasocial relationships with a handful of fictional characters.

I have never cried over the death of a fictional character, or even had a particularly strong reaction. When a character is in danger, usually my reaction is excitement over the narrative possibilities the situation could create. I love tragedy in fiction. I love horror. I love drama. And on the server itself, this is how I’ve consistently felt about inter-player conflicts. My engagement is at its highest when there is some kind of narrative tension between the player characters (and the fandom reactions to this kind of thing deserve their own essay).

But when Dapper lost his first life, I was so viscerally upset that I nearly dropped the series to protect my mental health. I have pointedly refused to watch any stream where an egg dies if I know it’s coming, and I tend to avoid streams dealing with the aftermath of their deaths as well.

Because no matter how much logic you throw at the situation, it still feels real. If a player character perma-dies, or is banned, or just chooses to leave, they may no longer have a presence in the server, but it’s still clear to the audience that only the character is dead. The player exists outside of the server, and for the parasocially invested, it’s usually still easy to keep up with them if one wants to. The eggs broadly do not have that luxury. Once they’re dead in the story, they cease to exist altogether, and in an environment where the fiction/reality line is already so blurred, that is going to have a strong impact on the audience. No amount of hearing “they’re pixels in a video game” is going to mitigate that.

I think the best case scenario is that they grant the eggs the same immortality as the players, whether it be through hatching or some other means, and allow them to come and go as suits them. The eggs have fulfilled their initial purpose, and the server would really benefit from removing this hurdle that disincentivizes chaos and recklessness and incentivizes harassment from a highly-stressed audience. Multiple players have already said they have no intention of returning because they don’t want to deal with the fallout that will come from potentially hurting an egg. But all of these eggs have carved out a real place in the server, and it would be a shame to lose that.

The eggs are important to the QSMP and a major draw for a lot of people. And I don’t think that needs to change. But I do think that there are ways to use the eggs for narrative drama without having to force your audience into subconsciously believing that their favorite streamer has died. The QSMP, and servers like it, provide a unique storytelling medium with its own advantages and challenges. And as with any medium, it’s important to be aware of what these challenges are in order to tell the best story possible.

#qsmp #this draws very heavily from my personal experience so it's not going to be universally applicable #but I still think it's interesting #I'm forever fascinated by this medium #hopefully hellsite didn't mess up the formatting too much

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literary-illuminati · 4 months

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2024 Book Review #1 – How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

I read the overwhelming majority of this book in 2023 but I finished it after new years so review #1 of the new year it is! Despite it by all accounts being very critically acclaimed and well-reviewed, I had absolutely never heard of it before opening up the packaging on a ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore was doing (incredible gimmick, for the record). Overall a great book, if rambling at points and with a somewhat weak and confused ending.

The story takes place in Kosawa, a village on the western periphery of a fictional west African country, with the incredible bad luck to have been built atop a fortune in oil. The story is told through several POVs, and follows the villagers struggle against the Pexton corporation and their country’s de facto neocolonial government to try and have their home restored to what it was before the river and soil were poisoned and children started dying. It’s told on a generational scale – stretching from the ‘80s to the mid 2000’s – and follows the main cast of characters from childhood into their forties, As might be expected from that, it’s not exactly fast-paced or full of heroics – lots of promises and reassurances being given and never lived up to, and dramatic actions being taken and leading to awful tragedies or only compromised half-successes. The book really beats in the theme that if you’re really powerless and the ones fucking you over have all the cards, a lot of time there really isn’t a winning move. Well, and maybe that the heroic, principled attempts at violent resistance repeatedly got everyone involved killed but did win real concessions and aid for the other villagers who were willing to play along (or just to sell out or give up Kosawa for dead), though I’m not entirely sure that’s how the story’s intended to be read.

The prose isn’t usually eye-catching, but it’s extremely well-constructed, and beautiful at points. The story does a lot with shifting points of view, jumping from a corporate one of a particular age-group of children whose lives parallel the story, and closely individual ones from different members of a particular family whose daughter Thula ends up becoming the moral/intellectual heart of the resistance. Each voice feels incredibly distinct and focused on very different things, in a way that really worked for me. The massive timeframe covered also lets the book really indulge in showing what the day to day life of the villagers looks like – how they sustain themselves, the social rhythms of life, the rituals of adulthood, marriage, and childbirth, how widows and children are treated, and how the poisoning of the environment around them weighs down but doesn’t destroy any of it. It even does a great job of really selling the perspective and world-views of people for whom the world is enchanted and spiritual rites have real direct physical effects, which in my experience the vast majority of books about religious/spiritual characters totally fail to.

The tone of things is pretty overwhelmingly melancholic – this is a story with a deep sense of history, which also means a very tragic imagination. Characters who really dedicate themselves to trying to change the world are portrayed as deeply admirable but almost certainly doomed and even likely to cause more harm than good. You see this most prominently with Thula, whose basically a genius and devotes her entire life from childhood to activism and social change with saintly (if not near-inhuman) purity and focus, and dies in her forties having not won much at all. The ones who take what they can, get government jobs and use the opportunity to become exactly as corrupt as the men who came before them and loot the country for the benefit of their friends and families meanwhile – well, they definitely aren’t making the world any better, but they’re shown as very human and sympathetic and they mostly end up with exactly the lives they were hoping for.

#book review #clifi #literature #How Beautiful We Were #Imbolo Mbue

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mancer-in-the-abbey · 7 months

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Listening to Steam Powered Giraffe as I am wont to do when I need a break from Ghost and Honeybee came on and now I can’t stop thinking about Dew and his relationship with the previous era.

Dew was alone for the majority of his life in the pit- not for any particularly tragic reasons, at least in his opinion. That’s just how his particular variant of water ghoul works: Young ghoul pups stay with their mothers till they’re old enough to hunt for themselves and eventually they just kind of… swim off on their own, likely never seeing their parent again unless by chance.

All this to say, Dew was never a particularly social person before coming topside. Being surrounded by so many people when he was first summoned was a hell of a culture shock to him, almost immediately putting him in fight or flight.

It helped that, in my mind, Dew wasn’t immediately summoned into the Ghost project and instead spent his first year as your run of the mill nameless ghoul. Being put on kitchen duty allowed him to watch how the human staff interacted and bonded. Over time, he was even accepted as one of their own, taught to do more than wash dishes and only speak when spoken to.

Yet, even with that, Dew found himself to be… missing something. His new life on the surface had awakened an ache like the pressure of the deep sea- this longing he hadn’t even known was there till he’d gotten the barest hint of fulfillment. It gnawed at him, day in and day out, but no matter what he did, what avenue he went down, he couldn’t find anything to quell the feeling.

And then, after the loss of almost all their instrumentalists, the Ghost project opened auditions.

It was a tense time in the abbey; no one was sure where the project was heading in the aftermath of the banishments and Terzo’s place in the ministry was coming under question. Dew, however, saw an opportunity for something better, something that just might give him the thing that soothed the ache quickly becoming unbearable to him.

And somehow, by a miracle of Satan himself if one were to ask Dew, he was picked to play bass.

And the ache was, indeed, quelled by his time with the band, but not by the fame or attention it brought like Dew thought it would.

No, the relief came in the form of his fellow musicians, both those summoned and those that passed the auditions with him.

The Meliora ghouls were, for all intents and purposes, Dew’s first real family: Aether opened him to a vulnerability he’d never thought possible, even with himself; Zephyr taught him everything there was to know about the abbey, its secrets, and how to make it home; Mountain was a solid figure in his life, a tree to take shelter under when things became uncertain; Mist, though she was no longer a part of the band, was Dew’s mentor in both bass playing and how to be a water ghoul on the surface; Omega, likewise, was as close to a father figure as he ever had.

And then there was Ifrit. Ifrit, the fiery hearth that warmed him in body and soul. Ifrit, his heat and passion natural foil to all of Dew’s cold and disinterest. Ifrit, who knew exactly when to push Dew out of his comfort zone and when to reel back.

The two were instrumental to each other’s growth, with Ifrit the one to go head first into everything and Dewdrop being the one to slow down and think. Separately, sure, they were their own people, but together they made one better whole, bolstering each other’s strengths and balancing each other’s flaws.

And then, one day, it was all taken away.

One day, Terzo was dragged off stage without warning. One day, Imperator decided he would be of more use as a fire ghoul than water. One day, he was walked into the ritual chamber as a water ghoul for the last time, his pack waiting outside the room- not allowed in for fear of interference.

One day he woke up in the medical wing, burning all over, boiling hot from the inside out, and only found Aether and Mountain at his bedside, the both of them wearing looks that told him all he needed to know of the fates of the others.

(Just before the ritual, Ifrit had pulled him in a hug tight enough to press carbon into diamonds, hiding his worry with a smile. “It’ll be alright,” he promised, “when it’s all over and you feel better, I’ll teach you everything I know about being a fire ghoul. It’ll be fun, you’ll see!”)

(What he wouldn’t give to hold him close, him and all his family together, one last time. What he wouldn’t give to be that little water ghoul again, surrounded by love and joy he’d never known before.)

Nowadays, Dew does alright for himself. He runs much hotter than he ever had before, is a bit quicker to temper than he used to be, but his new pack doesn’t seem to mind- and lords below, does he love his new pack with everything he has.

But still, every year on the anniversary of his first pack’s death, he distanced himself from the rest. He grabs a spare blanket and Ifrit’s old acoustic guitar, walks out to the woods outside the ministry, keeps walking till he finds a clearing he and Ifrit shared with one another, a private place for the both of them to get away when things ever got too much.

Dew stops in the middle of the small glade, spreads the blanket out on the wild grass, sits down, takes out the guitar, and plucks out a tune his wildfire used to play him.

“Hello, goodbye, Twas nice to know you, how I find myself without you, that I’ll never know.”

“I let myself go.”

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kinsey3furry300 · 1 year

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My (very late) take on Ricky “Jupe” Park from Nope.

So, when I was a small child, my sister and I were taken to a local museum by my father and it was a wholesome and fun day out for all the family EXEPT FOR THE BADLY TAXIDERMIED WHALE SHARK HANGING FROM THE CEALLING MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT THING?! It was huge, it looked and smelt terrible, the room was poorly lit and crowded and decorated to look like the bottom of the sea and you had this thing with it’s huge open maw hanging right over you all the time. I distinctly remember that I couldn’t look. I could not look. Between the, the ocean episode of walking with dinosaurs, the underwater segment of myst, and fucking books like this that were everywhere in the 90’s!

Fuck you Nigel Marven and Jasper James, Fuck you.

…both me and my sister developed a lifelong fear of being eaten alive by giant, aquatic-type monsters. And because it was advertised and a film about a brother and sister fighting off little green men, and not advertised as a film where 40 people get fucking vored by a flying Portuguese man of war, me and my sister saw Nope together in the cinema and ohhh boy 1, did I catch shit from her about it, to this day, and 2, while I love that film, it scared the shit out of me. It scared me so badly I tried not to think about it until I plucked up the courage to re-watch it this weekend. So I’m a little late to the party, but speaking on behalf of people terrified of being gobbled up by ever-present sky-sharks (you know they’re there prove me wrong!), I’d like to talk about Jupe.

How was this not a best Supporting Actor win? Give him all the awards!

I’ve seen a surprising amount of commentary say that he’s an idiot for endangering and getting all those people killed, and that he deserves his fate, and while there is a little element of truth to the first part, I can’t fathom the second. One, no, no one deserves that and two… Do, do you guys know how story strucure works? Jupe is a foil for OJ. His life and arc mirrors OJ to a surprising degree: they’re both people of colour working in a white-dominated Hollywood system who have been held back by, or are stereotyped because of, their race. They both witness “a bad Miracle” that’s starts with a strange popping/crunching noise (the balloon for Jupe, Jean Jacket regurgitating indigestible items above them for OJ), that results in death, where a seemingly imposable thing happens (a coin falls from an empty sky, a shoe balances perfectly on one end) and where they are spared death because they don’t look the danger in the eye (Jupe has the table cloth between him and the chimp, OJ looks around whereas Ottis senior looks up and so is hit in his unprotected eye), and are traumatized. Both deal with the trauma badly, and surround themselves with constant reminders of it (Jupe’s Gordy shrine, OJ’s horses and ranch. I mean he keeps the fucking coin!). Both try to commodify and sell their trauma for fame and fortune (the paid tours of the Gordy shrine, getting that “Oprah shot”). Both also want to use Jean Jacket to reclaim the heritage that the film and TV industry has taken from them (OJ wants to save the ranch and memorialize his family’s role in the invention of film, Jupe wants to be remembered for the Starlight Lasso and not just as that Asian kid who survived a chimp attack, for taming the beast, not just surviving it). Both unwittingly train JJ to attack humans (Jupe by teaching it to associate people and music with food, OJ by putting it off horsemeat by feeding it a decoy). Both are a bit greedy, and kind of disrespectful to the dead, and nether Get Out (couldn’t resist sorry) when they should. Both put their family, friends and strangers in danger to get their payday, and both get at least one person killed doing it.

So why does the film kill Jupe and his family in such a hilariously awful way, but spare OJ and Em (and Angel: we love you Angel)? What’s Jupes fatal flaw, that greek tragic hubris that dooms him and that separates him from OJ? Why is he the one who gets vored by an angry stetson? Is it a eat the rich narrative? A critique of the idea of Asian Americans as the “Ideal minority?”. Is it killing off the comic relif, or just done for shock value? No, I don’t think Jordan Peele would be that heavy handed or un-imaginative. I think it’s something far more clever.

It’s this: from an early age, Jupe was trained to perform, whereas OJ was trained to handle performing horses. OJ thinks about how to safely provide the spectacle, whereas Jupe was trained to be the spectacle. OJ communicates with Angel in clicks and gestures without realising: OJ’s internalised how to talk to horses, how to use body-language. But Jupe...His plan, upon finding out that there’s a UAP flying around his home is to build and stage and make it into a rodeo attraction. That’s not a sane person’s reaction, that’s how Homer Simpson would try and Monetize first contact with alien life. That’s how Peter Griffin or BoJack Horseman would treat ET…. That how a 90’s sitcom character, who never got over that one role, would treat the situation.

Every time a name is mentioned in the chapter titles of Nope, the living being it refers to dies… except the title card “Lucky.” The horse (so long as the final shot is real and not Em hallucinating) lives. It (and OJ) makes it out. But then again….

Jupe probably thought of himself as Lucky, after the Gordy incident. He was probably told time and time again that he was Lucky, until he internalized it. He learnt the wrong lessons from the experience, he learnt that he not only needed to perform, but that he was special. “You’re’ chosen.” He learnt that he needed to perform, to be a spectacle, to survive a horrible industry that swallows people whole and chews them up and spits them out and occasionally has animal control shoot its stars dead if they go of script. He was conditioned, and trained, from an early age to treat everything that ever happened to him as part of a performance, until he can only talk about his own trauma in terms of how good the SNL take on it was.

And like every other trained living being taken from their natural habitat and forced out on stage as spectacle in this film, his training fails him at the worst possible time.

He’s “Lucky”, and he’s tragic, and he’s just another victim of spectacle, and that’s the scariest part of the film. ...Other than the FUCKING MURDER PANCAKE IN THE SKY OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!?

#nope movie #nope jordan peele #jordan peele #jupe from nope #Ricky Jupe Park #Steven Yeun #Jupe is my woobie and i would fight god for him #but i'm not fighing Jean Jacket sorry bro nope nope nope fuck that #nope spoilers

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nattikay · 1 year

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“I’m so sad that we won’t get more of Neteyam (outside of potential flashbacks or spirit tree visits) in future movies—”

yes I totally agree, his death absolutely broke my heart and the fact that his family now has to move on and continue the story without him still weighs heavy and even puts a damper on the hype for the next movie because it’s still a bit hard to see the group shots of the remaining family together without the lurking thought that they’re missing one hanging over everything—

“—because we won’t get any new content to thirst over!”

…oh (T_T)

sigh look. The reason Neteyam’s death shook my feels to the core is because that’s Jake and Neytiri’s baby y’all. That’s their little boy, their firstborn, forcibly taken from them way too soon. He was such a good boy too, brave and noble and selfless and he had his whole life ahead of him…and even though they can visit him in Eywa, his family now has to deal with the fact that they they lost one, they’re missing one, in the living world there’s now a certain hole in the family that can never be filled…it’s absolutely tragic on every level, it’s heartwrenching and something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy…

I don’t miss him just because he’s “hot”. Heck, I’m a 26 year old grown flippin’ woman, the idea of fawning over the attractiveness a teenager is naturally incredibly uncomfy for me. And yes, I acknowledge that most of the folks fangirling over Neteyam (and Lo’ak etc) are teenagers themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with teens having a crush on a character their own age, so no, I’m not going to cry p-word or any of that drama…but for me simply wanting to browse the fandom tags, find some cute fanart, read some fics, etc., it is still uncomfy to be constantly surrounded by it.

And yes, I’m aware that this may come off as “holier than thou” or thinking that my reasons for being sad about Neteyam are more noble or justified than theirs, and for that I apologize; that is not my intention.

it’s just a little exhausting to want to find content of this character and commiserate with fellow fans who miss him only for such a huge chunk of said content to be tinged with this constant horny overlay in which I am not at all interested in (and even kinda repulsed by in the more extreme cases).

So yes I love and miss Neteyam, yes his death broke my heart, and while I technically do not consider him my favorite character (the whole of the Sully family is my favorite “character”), coping with sads in my own way does give me a particular soft spot for him and desire to give him more love and focus in my own fanart etc.

But no, I am not a “Neteyam girlie”. I exactly zero desire to fantasize about dating him. I have no interest in fawning over how hot he is in whatever gif. He is not my “pookie” or “babygirl” or whatever other pet names are popular right now.

for me, he is just a brave sweet child stolen from his family far too soon.

#neteyam #avatar #vent I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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watermelonsloth · 5 months

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Why the Hell Do I Ship Royai???

(TW: brief mention of suicide and allusions to unhealthy relationships)

I know nobody asked but I find the fact that I ship Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye so interesting because, on paper, I shouldn’t ship them.

First of all, I don’t like straight ships with dynamics like the right hand man or ships that have the male character as the woman’s superior. It’s not the dynamic itself that bothers me, it’s the predictability of it. When it’s hetero, I immediately think “of course those two are gonna get together.” It feels like low hanging shipping fruit.

I also don’t like stoic badass x absolute clown (competent or otherwise) ships. I almost always end up wondering why either side likes/puts up with each other. Especially since the badass tends to be an asshole and/or emotionally unavailable while the clown (forcibly) takes on their baggage.

Lastly, I don’t like relationships where one or both sides are codependent on the other. “I’ll die without you”, “You can’t leave me”, “I refuse to go on without you”, “You’re mine/I’m yours”, “You’re my other half (seriously)”, etc. ships have never been appealing to me. I understand why people like them, but I just can’t get over how gross it makes me feel. Like, I promise the planet will continue spinning after they’re gone, get some self confidence, I’m begging you. Maybe it’s because I’m not a romantic, maybe I’m overthinking it, maybe I’ve heard too many stories of codependent relationships going south, who knows?

By all means, I should look at Royai and think that it’s an incredibly unbalanced and unlikeable relationship (at least in a romantic sense). But I don’t. And I think I know why: Royai took what should’ve been an incredibly one-sided/unbalanced relationship and balanced it.

First, it avoids coming across as predictable (because it technically isn’t canon) because the series goes out of its way to expand upon their relationship's. It doesn’t absolve the predictability, but it counters it. It avoids being forced by being taken seriously and being given serious time to develop.

Secondly, both characters are developed in ways that avoid their relationship coming across as overly cliche. Namely, they’re given reason to like each other and both are charismatic/likeable enough that they aren’t annoying (I know this isn’t much, but the bar is in hell for shounen romance. Especially background character romance). Hawkeye has her lighter and nicer moments and Mustang knows when to be serious. The problem of the stoic character having exponentially more baggage or the clown forcing that baggage onto themselves is also avoided by both of them having a lot of baggage and (something FMA nailed as a series) boundaries.

My last problem is avoided by both of them staying their own characters. They can both function without the other, the other doesn’t fill their every waking thought, they’re capable of and willing to call the other out on their screwups, and whatever pedestal they put the other on doesn’t impede their judgement (for the most part) or make them ignore others to a concerning/upsetting extent. Even after Hawkeye says she’ll take her own life if Mustang dies, it somehow avoids being ship-ruining/frustrating/ disturbing. It’s tragic, but it doesn’t make me want them to not get together (it makes me want them to work through that shit and then get together). I’m gonna add that this is probably helped by the fact that Mustang never takes advantage of her vulnerability and he doesn’t come across as the type who ever would. It would’ve been so easy to make Mustang the stoic badass in charge with enough baggage to fill an airport with Hawkeye as his softer/more lighthearted right hand woman with a concerning level of dependency on him, but the author didn’t go that route and I will be forever grateful.

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krikeymate · 1 year

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Alternative scenario for the 10 year gap between the carpenter sisters.

Sam is 20 years old and hasn’t contacted her mother in over decade after she was taken by the social worker and bounced from foster home to another until she’s an adult.

One evening, someone knocks on her door and it’s the same social worker that took her, except she’s holding hands with a small girl whose backpack is barely holding on to her shoulder. The kid looks at Sam right in the eye, her gaze mixed with anger, fear, and, confusion and she doesn’t look a day older than 7.

The social worker introduces her as Tara, her little half sister and hopes dearly that Sam can take her in temporarily since she’s the closest living relative and ensured a weekly allowance to take of things financially. Just until best case scenario (mom gets clean and stable) or worst case (looking into adoption/foster care).

While feeling really empathic towards Tara, Sam wanted to say no because she was NOT ready to take of a severely asthmatic 10 year old (yes, she skimmed through her papers while they were talking) however she recognized that look in the girl’s face all too well and while she was reluctant and kinda shocked at this familial revelation, she said “okay, until you find something better.”

But there wasn’t anything better.

It wasn’t sisterly love at first sight. That took a while and they both had deep issues within regarding family, trust, and abandonment to work on and heal from.

They grew to love each other over time, they took care of each other in the ways they could, built their lives around each other that one can’t imagine life without the other.

3.5 years later, they’re at a courtroom and Sam finally got to sign the adoption papers and there was no going back.

We're one step away from straight up making Sam Tara's mum lmao.

Ok, so, anon, I fucking LOVE this. I adore you. I had to get back out of bed and onto my computer to respond to this. I've taken this in a slightly different direction, I hope that's ok? It hits the same beats, but I make it even sadder, because apparently, I love tragic backstories now.

So, nearly-10-year-old Sam gets removed from the Carpenter household, and Christina immediately gets pregnant again. She wants to fill the void that having her daughter taken from her has left (it was already there, it began the day her lover died, but she drowns those thoughts in alcohol), but it's not the same. This girl isn't like Sam, she isn't strong, she isn't his, she can't bring herself to feel anything for this mewling child.

Sam was removed because her mother was a constant drunk, she got behind the wheel with her daughter in the backseat, and crashed the car. They tell her she can have her daughter back if she gets sober, she never gets sober. Between constant drinking, barely eating, and baggy clothes, they never catch on that she's pregnant again, until 5 years later when the police are called about a domestic disturbance. Hicks finds the child hiding in a cupboard, hands cupped around her head, drawn by the noise of her wheezing.

The mostly absent father never bothered trying to get Sam back, he had a suspicion she wasn't his in the first place, drunken rambles from his wife suggesting so. He checked out of his marriage long ago, has lovers in every state he travels to for work. It's a marriage in name only, he considers leaving, until she reveals she's pregnant. He makes sure to get a paternity test this time, privately of course.

After the incident with the police, they threaten to take his daughter away from him, so he kicks Christina out, and takes custody of the girl. She never ends up going to school, he takes her with him when he travels. She spends the next 3 years mostly alone in hotel rooms, it's still not as bad as being with her mother. He still gets rough when he's mad, but she has cleaner clothes now - because sometimes he takes her with him to meetings to endear himself to the clients. And she gets sweets sometimes, a regular meal once a day. And medicine! She never knew what breathing was supposed to be like until the day the doctor handed her an inhaler.

She's 8 when her father overdoses in a seedy hotel room. She spends several days hiding in the shower, until the door is forced open by a lone security guard and a cleaner. Somehow she ends up back with her mother. That's where she stays until the day her mother tries to kill her. The neighbours hear the screaming and the crying and call the police. She doesn't put down the knife even when they point their guns at her. She just holds the child's hair in one hand and a knife to her throat with the other. They make a decision.

When Sam's first contacted, she thinks it's a joke. Both her parents are dead, and they left everything to her. Oh, and also she has a little sister, if she's interested in taking her in? She says no. They say understandable, and that she'll be handed over to the state. The man on the phone mentions the name of the home she'll be sent to - in case Sam is ever interested in connecting with her, and goes to hang up. She says wait. She remembers that home and how criminal it is that it's still open. Fuck it, she'll think about it. She wants to meet the girl.

Sam meets the girl at the social worker's office, in a room designed for children to play in. The girl sits, hunched over, in a chair at the table. She's still and doesn't lift her eyes. Sam thinks of the files she was given, the medical file, the police reports, and she wonders how this happened. Her father was absent and her mother a drunk, a little neglectful, but they weren't a bad people (not like some of the people who ran the foster homes). The files told another story, one Sam wished she remained ignorant of.

The girl is 10, but you wouldn't know it. So small and fragile, hair long and greasy, and skin pallid. It all serves to make the bruises stand out. The girl is wearing baggy clothes that Sam almost recognises, they used to be hers once upon a time.

Sam sits down and tries to greet the girl, and introduces herself. The social worker informs her that they can't get her to talk, that they think she can, that she just won't. Sam sits there for a while, observing the girl. After a while of silence, Tara looks up and the woman before her, and her eyes go wide. This woman looks like her mother, not quite the same, but enough for her heart to begin to thump. Sam sees the fear in her eyes as she looks at her, sees the way she clenches her jaw as she looks away, how she frowns, hands fisting in her lap. She remembers being this girl once upon a time, sitting in a similar room as a social worker spoke down to her.

The social worker sighs and ends the session shortly after, disappointed at the lack of progress. She takes Sam outside and apologises for wasting her time. Sam tells her she'll take her.

#/mp #ask box #Scream #Tara Carpenter #Sam Carpenter #my writing tag #AU: foster this love make me whole again #trigger warning -> child abuse #fuck christina carpenter club #I have more to say on this but it's nearly midnight and I have to get up at 6. so tune in tomorrow for the other half of this.

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phanfictioncatalogue · 3 months

Text

15k Words (2) Masterlist

part one

A-Lister (ao3) - tastefulcucumber

Summary: Phil’s Dad owns a small photography business. Daniel Howell, academy-award winning actor decides that Lester’s Portraits is the best place to get his head-shots for his portfolio. He expects to get his pictures taken, but what he doesn’t expect is the photographer’s son to be so captivating. No one else has treated Dan this normal since the beginning of his acting career. Maybe that’s just what Dan needs, a friend who is there for him, and not for his status.

A Little Bit Of Magic - dxnhowell

Summary: Dan is the new potions teacher at Hogwarts and is muggleborn, this is his first year teaching and whilst he’s excited, he has to get used to being in the castle with absolutely no muggle technology. Phil is the herbology teacher and is clumsy and likes puns and likes to help Hagrid with his magical creatures. Dan and Phil eventually meet and become rather close, some of the students realize this and try to get them together before the end up of the year.

Amaryllis (ao3) - bokeae

Summary: In which Dan has to wed Princess Alice when he would much rather marry her brother, Philip.

Ardour (There’s a World Outside These Walls) (ao3) - centroid

Summary: Dan’s facade crumbled. His breathing was the first to go, leaving his lungs with short gasps of air. He brought his hands up to press the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as tears trekked down his cheeks. Dan’s romantic life was always covered in a veil of sorrow, but never once had he cried over it. Never once did he let his walls down and just weep. Dan was relieved, so relieved but at the same time he was in despair. It was as if his fate had been set in stone, finalizing that he was and would forever be alone. In a world with its foundation dug heel toe into romance, he was someone who had to go without.

billet-doux (ao3) - Tarredion

Summary: Dan and Phil, gang leaders and rivals to the highest degree, harbor big secrets they want no one to see

Coffee and Calligraphy (ao3) - brookwrites

Summary: Dan’s a barista at the local cafe, where writer!Phil decides to sit with his journal. Dan likes Phil. A lot. But things change when Dan finds something out about Phil that breaks his heart.

Colour Me Blue (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: What if a boy, whose heart was so full of darkness, that he couldn’t believe in colours anymore, met someone so full of light who slowly painted his world bright again?

Demons In My Head (ao3) - kae_karo

Summary: An unconscious demon mysteriously shows up on Dan's property, and Dan heals it, promising he'll send it back to where it came from as soon as he finds out why it's there. Finding the will to banish a charming demon is harder than he thought.

for you I’d wait (til kingdom come) (ao3) - blueshirt

Summary: The time that Dan misunderstands one little conversation—which he still maintains is PHIL’S FAULT, not his—and it leads to six years of unrequited pining.

going the wrong way home (ao3)- moonlightmusings

Summary: the almost-college au where dan and phil take a summer road trip.

I heard the March birds singing, and oh, what a beautiful sound. (ao3) - emonerd_io

Summary: Inspired by the anime 四月は君の嘘 (Your Lie in April)!

The piano initiated the opening chords, and she drew the melody out in simple, yet alluring and complex lines. It’s a tune Dan did not recognise, but fell in love with immediately. Deep, and filled with a certain longing, yet tragically beautiful. It’s the type of music that allows you to fathom why exactly some people practise for years and for decades, trying to master their craft, just to play something so modest and stark, yet so exquisite.

This is the story of two young musicians, Dan and Phil, and how their lives became entwined over the course of one year in high school.

In Faded Holograms They Speak (ao3) - artdeficient

Summary: They’re in japan and nothing seems to make sense, so they hide in hotel rooms and pretend they can’t see what’s right in front of them, and it works, for a while. (badlands au based off of halsey’s album)

no longer feel alone (ao3) - natigail

Summary: who'd have known that a random act of kindness from a stranger could lead to this.

refraction (ao3) - indistinct_echo

Summary: (To be read after completing Monochrome by intoapuddle.)

Dan doesn’t want to wait any longer: it’s time to share with Angie and PJ his Fall Whisperer identity. This really isn’t so scary… oh, who is he kidding, it’s terrifying.

Cue supportive-boyfriend Phil, amateur-therapist Dan, and a healthy dose of luck (+ bonus smut).

Teach Me to Fly (ao3) - thesleepdeprived

Summary: Soulmates!AU, Wings!AU. People had always told him that wings were the solution to everything, the key to your love life, your friend circle, who you are as a person, even. Yet somehow, Phil just can’t bring himself to see it that way. Who would want a soulmate that would never fly? (or, as my planning outline so eloquently puts it, kiss kiss fall in love you emotionally repressed motherfuckers) COMPLETE

These Violent Delights Of Love (ao3) - cyanica

Summary: Dan is hopelessly in love, Phil’s seemingly oblivious and they’re on a world tour just to make things more chaotic.

And yet, the Gods, or the Ruler of the Universe, or whoever the hell was in charge decided Dan needed to die in the end, too. Currently, leaning over the porcelain throne of shit and piss was the Gods’ human voodoo doll, throwing up the contents of his unfortunate Indian dinner – and significantly more alarming than that: black tulips. Fucking flowers. This wasn’t real life.

waiting to be found (ao3) - dizzy

Summary: Dan and Phil meet at a club.

(And then a coffee shop.)

Who’s Taking You Home Tonight? (ao3) - whatkindoffanfics (orphan_account)

Summary: October, 1944. While World War II rages on, Dan Howell finds himself thrown into the secretive world of Bletchley Park, a headquarters for intercepting and breaking the codes of encrypted German messages.

#phanfictioncatalogue #phanfiction #phan #phanfic #masterlists #15k #15k masterlist

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justhereforqsmp · 1 year

Text

QSMP Theories: What’s going to happen on Day 6?

Before the fated day arrives, here’s some theories and (possible) coping on how the eggs will return/ still be instrumental to the plot of QSMP in some way.

Scenario 1: The Most Messed Up Ever (probably not going to happen but I thought of it while theorizing and it broke my heart)

On the dawn of Day 6, the players log in and the egg task is a little different:

Take a life from another egg as a lethal task. (The eggs themselves or the parents for the original ticket families—so Phil killing an egg wouldn’t count for Tallulah, for example)

So if you refuse to do it, your egg loses a life.. but at the same time everyone else is pressured to hunt for eggs

THIS WOULD BE SO MESSED UP AND SO DEVASTATING. But it would be so interesting and so so angsty and build so much conflict. Perhaps the Binary Entity corrupted the code that gives the egg tasks, or this is just the final stage of the experiment

There are not enough lives to go around, so even if the eggs with double lives gave up one life for another egg, they would still need to take a life from another egg.

Those who refuse to kill would have to worry about those willing to kill to keep their egg. The possible betrayals. The possible sacrifices! And weirdly enough the parents without eggs may end up being neutral chaotic parties that can help or hurt the other families.

- Imagine Tallulah refusing to kill another egg, offering up her lives to others while her family would probably start murdering to protect her

- Bobby )::: he’s already done a little bit of forgiving, but he’s also all about combat. I think it would be incredibly meaningful if he refused to take another egg’s life in the end because he recognizes it’s meaningless. As an alternative Jaiden and Roier could suddenly turn on the others in order to save their beloved son.

- Imagine Gegg being exposed as Gegg because people tried to kill him to satisfy the requirement (Imagine if it works, and the loophole lets the eggs survive one more day?)

This would ensure there is a last survivor (unless somehow the last two eggs kill each other at the exact same time) for a family to win the “happiest egg” prize while the others receive punishment

Would break up and shake up the existing friendships, creating the possibility for new dynamics that the new players could more easily fit into! ….and also be super super tragic

Scenario 2: Missing

They just log on… and there are no eggs ): Deserted. Absolutely devastating. Gone not with a bang, but with a whimper. The signs left behind ): The gardens and houses and nurseries ):

But the announcement days that the Children will die so I doubt they’d just disappear. I think omelettes will be made.

(If the eggs are kidnapped/taken/dissapeared : What if Gegg goes too because the experimenters recognize him as an egg, and we het an interesting Charlie POV on behind the scrnes of the experiment?)

Scenario 3: The Mother Dragon arrives/Scenario 4: The Binary Entity

Maybe they can fight off the dragon/Binary Entity or maybe the babies perish in an impossible fight to stay by their caretakers side.

Scenario 5: The QSMP Federation

They’re definitely somehow involved?? It’s still unclear what the relationships between the entities of the island are, what their goals are, etc.

Scenario 6: Poison??

The eggs get weaker and weaker over the course of the day. No enemies to fight, just a slow, sad sort of thing. Lots of goodbyes ): No enemy to fight, just helpless despair

^^^ This could be because of the experimenters?? The eggs were created to, so maybe they just… are made to die after this stage of the experiment is over, like a slow decay. Who knows.

Scenario 7: (a little troll, but it leads into my next theory for what happens next)

The new members arrive in an airplane that crashlands onto Quesadilla Island. All the eggs are in one place when the airplane crashes and boom! All dead

Scenario 8 (added just today, based on Tallulah’s Nightmare…)

QSMP Federation? Binary Entity? An overwhelming number of mobs spawning on the island purposefully to overwhelm and turn the QSMP into tower defense simulator? Who knows?

(Source: QSMPEN updates on twitter, BadBoyHalo’s stream)

And hey it says all turns black which means MAYBE NOT DEATH

POST-DAY 6 Theories

While it would have been nice to stay in slice of life egg mode for forever, Philza and Wilbur’s sleep schedules are suffering with the obligation to log on and take care of the eggs, and likely streamers from different timezones will be joining so unless there are more eggs coming out of nowhere it’ll be weird to have some players with eggs and some players without (excepting… the ones who have already lost their eggs in rp)

ALSO I mean come on we as the audience live for the drama and new things happening in the story… even though it comes at the cost of the egg’s safety…there is much still to learn about Quesadilla Island.

And, since there will be more members, there won’t be as much of a need for a log on requirement for the server to be somewhat active every day.

BUT!! “Post-Egg Arc” kind of implies that the eggs are a self contained event, but I really do believe the eggs will still be super important to the future of the server— even if it wasn’t planned that everyone would get so attached at first, it’s clear they’ve become well beloved characters and most importantly, the majority of the players are attached and will do anything for them.

Like DMs and NPCs that the players will be motivated to keep safe, the eggs are a powerful tool to drive plot and for the players to ask questions and dig deeper. After the 6 days, even one CRUMB or HINT that the eggs could return, or that they’re being kept somewhere (like in the case in the 5 min period we get to see Juanaflippa, Tilin and Huevo Trump again), or how to revive them would like. The players would do anything to have more time with their eggs!! I doubt that the OOC storytellers or the in character overlords of the QSMP experiment would give up this method of control over player motivation.

But what if the egg plot and the new players are tied together? It’s happening on the same day…

APRIL 28TH UPDATE: that’s a shipping container. They’re in a plane or a boat??? Friends the eggs are going to be crushed by a shipping container (/j)

I welcome any and all fellow theory crafters to add their thoughts and predictions!!! Also I’m excited for the new players, unfortunately I know nothing about them— if any of you are fans or have heard of them, I’d like to hear of the,!

#qsmp #qsmp theory #qsmp analysis #help I’m in too deep #I genuinely love the mystery though I don’t know what’s gonna happen next

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bedlamsbard · 8 months

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Part 2 of the "Hydra took over SHIELD before Steve came out of the ice" concept! This is in the back of my head as one of the concepts that's likely to turn into a full story, but I know better than to make any promises. (Note: I use the 2008 date from the BW deleted scenes for Natasha's defection.)

This sequence immediately follows the previous sequence.

About 5.3K below the break.

*****

Alexander Pierce had come to tell Peggy personally the day after he had forced Nick Fury out of SHIELD. At that point Howard’s son had been dead for six months, killed in an industrial accident that most newspapers had written off as the tragic but natural outcome of Tony Stark’s increasingly erratic behavior. Howard had kept the two halves of his life so separate that Peggy could count on one hand the number of times she had actually met Tony Stark, even considering the years when he had still been in nappies. She hadn’t gone to the elaborate funeral that Obadiah Stane had thrown for his erstwhile employer.

Pierce she had known quite well from his SHIELD days, before he had moved over to the State Department and later to the World Security Council. He had been quiet and apologetic, with barely concealed anger underlying his words and a couple of SHIELD agents posted at the door to keep anyone from overhearing their conversation.

“Nick got away,” he told her after he had given her the Cliff’s Notes of the situation over at SHIELD – much worse than he had given out, Peggy had found out later, since there were still active sieges going on at half a dozen SHIELD stations worldwide even while he had been sitting in her room drinking tea. “We’re doing what we can to find him, but cleaning up SHIELD is going to take priority. Besides, he knows the entire playbook – he wrote the playbook, at least the parts of it that you and Howard Stark didn’t write.”

“You’re absolutely certain?” Peggy had asked. “Turning us against each other is the sort of thing our enemies have tried in the past –”

Pierce had put down his teacup to gesture one-handed at the sling on his left arm. “I got this when he shot me. Personally.” He picked up his teacup again. “I wish I had any doubt at all.”

Peggy nodded slowly. “Will you be all right?”

He smiled a little. “Flesh wound. It will take us months – probably years – to untangle all the damage he and his people have done. We’re not sure yet how deep it goes. I’m sure you can imagine the calls I’m getting right now.”

“Certainly an eventful start to a new administration,” Peggy observed; President Obama had taken office barely a month previously.

Pierce winced. “The White House is responsible for a fair number of those calls.” He glanced over at the door, then said, “I’m going to leave a protective detail here for you. Right now Nick’s acting erratically and there’s a chance that he might come after you. A small chance,” he hastened to assure her, “but a chance nevertheless.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Peggy said.

“You’ll hardly know they’re here,” Pierce said. “Madame Director –”

“It’s been Peggy for years, Alex.”

He smiled again. “Peggy. It’s just until we catch Nick and his people. Better safe than sorry, that’s what you taught me, remember?” He hesitated a little, and Peggy might have passed the better part of her century, but she could still tell when he was acting. Whatever he was going to say next, he had come here expecting to tell her.

“Spit it out,” she instructed him. “It can’t be worse than anything else you’ve just told me.”

Pierce sighed. “Like I said, we’re still digging and will be for a while, but – it looks like Nick might have been involved in the Stark murder. Howard, not Tony, I mean.”

Peggy actually stopped breathing for a moment, then started coughing. Pierce jumped to help her, getting her a glass of water instead of more tea. She waved him off until she had gotten her breath back, then croaked, “You’re sure?”

“No,” Pierce said, watching her. “But it’s looking that way right now. This didn’t start recently and it didn’t start when he became director of SHIELD. He’s been at this a long time. A regular Philby.”

Yes, Peggy had thought later, after Nick Fury had finally gotten in to see her without being shot or arrested. A regular Kim Philby. Only Pierce had been talking about himself, not Nick Fury.

After more than three years she knew her security detail quite well, since Pierce didn’t rotate them. That was probably for Peggy’s benefit more than theirs; the more familiar with them she was the less she would suspect them of anything, like, for instance, being Hydra. She was fairly certain that they were all Hydra; it wasn’t to Nick’s benefit to waste any of his SHIELD loyalists on her, not when every single one of them was needed in the Triskelion or at one of the satellite SHIELD stations.

She waited a full twenty-four hours after Nick had left before she got out her photo albums, trying not think about what he had said in the meantime. There was nothing suspicious about that, she told herself; it was an old woman’s prerogative to dwell on her past if that was what she wanted to do.

There weren’t many photographs from the war – not hers, anyway. She had a few from Bletchley, one from SOE, and a dozen or so from the SSR. None of the SSR photographs in her album had copies in SHIELD’s files or anywhere else; Peggy thought that she was owed the privacy of her own memory, at least for a few more years. After that, it would be up to Sharon to decide what to do with them.

They had all been so young, she thought, turning pages slowly. It had been a lifetime ago, almost three-quarters of a century, and Peggy had buried everyone in those photos except for the ones who had never had graves – and who hadn’t died at all, as it turned out.

Steve’s alive, Peggy told herself, staring at a photograph of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes sharing a bottle of Coke and laughing, both of them looking impossibly young. Nick had told her about Barnes a few years ago and that had been hard enough, even though Peggy had never had much to do with Barnes. Steve’s alive, and Hydra has him. They’ve had him for the last six months.

Peggy wished she didn’t know exactly what Alexander Pierce had done once he had made the decision to use sex with Steve. She had done it herself – sat at her desk with a stack of personnel files, trying to determine which SHIELD agent would have the most appeal for their target. It wasn’t just about looks, though looks helped.

An operator, she thought. Someone physically capable, even if there was no one else who could go toe to toe with Captain America for more than a minute or two. That she would be beautiful went without question. Probably not someone who physically resembled Peggy herself, which meant that it wasn’t Sharon; that was something of a relief to Peggy. Pierce was too subtle to be so heavy-handed. Someone who wasn’t going to be overly-impressed by Captain America; Steve had never had much patience for that. Someone with a sense of humor who could keep up with him intellectually. Maybe a veteran, but maybe not.

And most importantly, someone whom Pierce thought was willing to sleep with Captain America for Hydra.

She was still thinking about that a week later when one of Pierce’s agents on her security detail knocked on her door. The woman came in after Peggy had called her agreement, still holding her mobile phone.

“Madame Director, I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said. “There’s been an incident at the Triskelion and Director Pierce would like to take you into protective custody for the time being.”

“What kind of incident?” Peggy asked, startled.

“Agents were killed,” said the Hydra agent. “That’s all I know, ma’am, I’m sorry. Let me help you pack a bag; Sarah’s bringing around the car.”

“Well, that’s dreadful, but I don’t see what it has to do with me,” Peggy said, hoping that her poker face could still hide an adrenaline spike. The only reason she could think of for Pierce to want her moved was that something had happened with Steve. Nick got him out.

“There might be some threat, ma’am,” the agent said apologetically. “Where do you keep your bags, ma’am?”

Since she searched Peggy’s room regularly, she knew perfectly well, but Peggy directed her anyway. She packed up her jewelry and her photographs while the agent packed her clothes; Peggy knew Nick well enough to guess that he had his own agents watching the home and they would be moving in at any moment. Once they took her, she wouldn’t be coming back; better that Hydra do her packing for her than waste time making Nick’s SHIELD loyalists do it.

“I need my pictures,” she told the agent, who nodded in understanding and wrapped the framed photographs carefully in several scarves before closing the suitcase lid on them. She helped Peggy into her coat and turned towards the door, where the man who had just come quietly in promptly tazed her.

“Phil Coulson, Madame Director,” he said, catching the Hydra agent and lowering her to the floor. “Nick sent me; Abe’s boy is out of the hospital and Nick thought it would cheer him up if you came to visit. Is this everything?” he added, looking at her suitcase. “I hate packing.”

“That’s everything,” Peggy said, amused. “Is Abe’s boy all right? Our friend told me there was some trouble with the surgery.”

“He’s sleeping now, but he’ll be all right,” Coulson said, and Peggy felt a knot of unease loosen in her chest. “Not to hurry you, but we’ve only got a fifteen minute window.”

He bundled Peggy and her bags out of the home and into a waiting a car, which was driven by an Asian woman who looked vaguely familiar. At the other end of the block, two identical cars turned out of a shaded driveway and peeled off in opposite directions; through the window Peggy saw that they had the same license plate as the car she was in. She sat quietly in the back with Coulson for another twenty minutes of circuitous driving until the Asian woman said, “I think we’re clear. Melinda May, Madame Director.”

“Pleasure,” Peggy said, then looked at Coulson. “Is Steve – Captain Rogers – really all right? Give me a situation report.” She hesitated. “This is about Captain Rogers, isn’t it?”

“Last I heard,” Coulson said. “I don’t know much; Director Fury can tell you more when we reach headquarters.”

“Tell me what you do know,” Peggy ordered.

Coulson exchanged a look with May in the rearview mirror, then said, “Sometime in the last five hours, Captain Rogers killed the scientist Hydra’s had working on – on him, along with some STRIKE agents. The agent Pierce and Sitwell have had handling him is one of ours; she was meeting with Fury today while Captain Rogers was supposed to be in the lab. Captain Rogers broke out of the Triskelion and trailed her to the meet, where he disabled another half-dozen SHIELD agents – ours, this time. He apparently had a nice conversation with Fury before Hydra realized he was gone and activated his governor implant. That was about half an hour ago. Last I heard he was going into emergency surgery to remove the implant.”

“Pierce put a governor implant in Steve?” Peggy said, shocked and then annoyed with herself for being shocked. Of course Alexander Pierce would have put a governor implant in Steve Rogers. “Of course he did. Steve – Captain Rogers – broke himself out? What’s been happening in there? What have they been doing to him?”

Coulson just shook his head.

Nick told her more once they had arrived at the SHIELD black site. Peggy had no idea where he and his SHIELD loyalists had been hiding out for the past three years, but since they were still running around, apparently Pierce didn’t know either.

“Rogers wiped the computers in the lab, stole the data, and set a time-delayed explosive on his way out,” he informed her. “The Triskelion’s on high alert right now, so none of our people still inside have been able to tell us exactly how much Hydra knows or if they managed to save any of the data or biological samples. We have to assume they’ve got some of it stored off-site. A good kill on Nagel,” he added. “Rogers is still under and can’t tell us what sent him over the edge today, but from everything I know about Nagel he’s a nasty piece of work. Romanoff says he did a number on Rogers while they were at the Triskelion; he’s been working on him ever since he came out of the ice.”

“Wilfred Nagel?” Peggy said. “I recognize that name –”

“Yeah, he’s a son of a bitch. When Romanoff – my agent – found out what he was doing to Rogers she told us we had to exfil him first chance we got. That was a couple weeks ago.”

Peggy took a deep breath. “What was he doing to Captain Rogers?”

“Testing his enhanced healing, among other things. Romanoff said Rogers was terrified of him.”

“Steve’s not afraid of anything,” Peggy said reflexively, but she knew from Nick’s expression and the gentle tone in his voice that it was the truth. She also knew that “testing his enhanced healing” was a polite way to say “torture,” though from what she knew about Dr. Nagel he probably hadn’t even thought about that. He would have been one of Arnim Zola’s protegees if Zola had lived longer. She shut her eyes, breathing hard, before she looked at Nick again and said, “Where is he now?”

“Just came out of surgery.”

“I want to see him.”

Nick nodded. He took her down several hallways to a makeshift but very clean series of rooms being used as a medical bay, stopping her in a room with a large window into a second room. Beyond it, Peggy could see a woman sitting by a hospital bed. She was young and very pretty, currently engaged in braiding her curling red hair into a thick plait. Most of her attention seemed to be fixed on the man sleeping beside her.

It was Steve.

He looked like Steve, Peggy thought with a shock. He looked like the Steve Rogers who lived only in her memory and her photographs, like he hadn’t aged a day in sixty-seven years of Sleeping Beauty slumber. The shield was propped up at the foot of the bed.

Peggy took a deep breath, her heart hammering. She pressed her hand to her chest in an attempt to calm herself down, then made herself ask, “Is that her?”

“Natasha Romanoff,” Nick said. “Alexander Pierce’s handpicked choice to handle Captain America and fortunately one of our agents; she would have been my choice too.” He hesitated for an instant, then went on, “You’re not going to like this part. She’s ex-SVR, Red Room-trained; defected in ’08, the same week that the fiasco at Stark went down.”

He was right; Peggy didn’t like it. She was a little shocked that Steve evidently had. “Red Room?” she repeated, focusing on that. “I thought the program had been shut down in 1993, 1994, not long after the Soviet Union met its ignominious end. That girl’s, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-seven, same age as Rogers, give or take seven decades and a few years.” Nick shook his head. “The Red Room just went underground. Romanoff killed the guy running it when she left.” The corner of his mouth quirked a little. “So she and Rogers have got that in common.”

“Pierce isn’t dead, is he?” Peggy said, startled.

“Not that I’ve heard, but I doubt he’s going to last much longer,” Nick said. His fingers flexed a little, like he was thinking about wrapping them around Alexander Pierce’s neck. “This is it, Peggy, I can feel it. This is how they lose and we win.”

“I’m sorry about this, Nat.”

Natasha finished tying off the end of her braid and looked up at Clint, frowning. “About what?”

“Getting you into this.” He pushed away from where he had been slouching by the door and came over to her, pulling up another chair next to Steve’s bed but angling it so he wasn’t looking at Steve. “I made you some promises four years ago and six months later you were dumped into Hydra.”

Natasha shrugged. “I knew what I was doing. You and Fury and Hill made it pretty clear to me what I was getting myself into when I decided to stay. Besides, it’s nothing I’ve never done before.”

Clint tipped his head towards Steve and said, “Not this.”

Natasha glanced up at him, frowning. “What you think I did? I’ve done it before. Besides, this wasn’t that.”

“They made you sleep with him.”

“No, they wanted me to sleep with him,” Natasha corrected. “I slept with him because I wanted to. There’s a difference.”

His mouth worked briefly. “You should never have been in a position where we ended up having this conversation.”

“I had plenty of chances to get out, Clint,” Natasha reminded him, flicking a glance at the two-way mirror that took up most of one wall. She was pretty sure that there was someone behind it, keeping an eye on them; whoever it happened to be was certainly getting an earful. “It was my choice to stay under, not yours.”

“But you shouldn’t have –”

“Four years ago you said I had the right to be able to make my own choices,” Natasha cut him off. “That means all of my choices, Clint, even the ones that you wouldn’t make. Even the ones that you wouldn’t have to make.”

He winced. Clint was more of a soldier than a spy; he could flirt with the best of them, but like Americans Natasha had known he didn’t have the temperament for the kind of work she had been trained for. Even if he hadn’t already been too closely associated with Fury to pull it off, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a year undercover with Hydra. Natasha had no idea who the other loyalists at the Triskelion were and had forced herself not to speculate; it was safer for all of them if no one knew who the others were.

“Sitwell and Pierce couldn’t have made me sleep with him,” Natasha added. “They knew that. If they had wanted someone who would try to jump into bed with him immediately, there are other people they could have chosen. It wouldn’t have worked, anyway. He’s not that kind of guy.”

“And I’ve got no idea what kind of guy he is, Nat,” Clint said. “Everything I know about him comes out of reports and History Channel documentaries.”

“Didn’t one of those say he was abducted by aliens?”

“Yeah, but according to the alien I know, that one’s not true.”

Natasha’s eyebrows went up. “What alien?”

Clint waved that aside. “That’s not important. What is important is that I don’t know anything about this guy except that Hydra’s had its fingers in his brain for the past six months and he didn’t even notice.”

“He noticed,” Natasha said pointedly, “or he wouldn’t be here right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Convenient,” Clint said suspiciously. “So what the hell were they doing to him in that lab today that finally made him snap?”

“Does it matter?” There was a scratchy note but no emotion in Steve’s voice.

Clint and Natasha both jumped; Natasha hadn’t realized he was awake and Clint clearly hadn’t either. Steve flinched when she bent over him, his mouth trembling a little and tears leaking slowly from the corners of his eyes, and Natasha knew immediately that he had been awake for a lot longer than he had let on.

“It’s just me,” she assured him. “It’s just me. Ignore Barton, he’s being an idiot.”

Clint had already gotten up to pour some water from the pitcher on a nearby table, his expression suggesting that he knew he had fucked up by having this conversation where Steve could overhear it.

“They took the implant out,” Natasha assured Steve before he could bring himself to ask about it. “Mine too.” She turned her head and held her braid out of the way so that he could see the bandage on the back of her neck. “Mine was easy to take out, yours not so much, but it’s gone. How do you feel?”

He moved one shoulder in a shrug and didn’t say anything, but he let Natasha help him sit up. He looked suspiciously at the cup Clint brought over and didn’t make any move to take it; Natasha finally took the cup out of Clint’s hand and took a sip to prove to Steve that it was just water. His hands were shaking, but he took it from her, and she closed her hands over his and held it steady until he could drink without spilling water all over himself.

“I’ll tell Fury you’re awake,” Clint said, beating a hasty retreat.

“I knew you were under orders,” Steve said eventually. “I’m not – I knew.”

“You shouldn’t listen to anything Brock Rumlow says, either,” Natasha told him, which got the corner of his mouth to turn up briefly before he went back to frowning.

“If I hurt you –”

“You didn’t hurt me.” Natasha put her hand to his cheek to make certain he was looking at her and said, “You never laid a hand on me I didn’t want you to.”

Steve stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.

“Do you hate me?” Natasha asked him softly. “For lying to you?”

He shook his head. “You didn’t lie to me. You didn’t tell me everything, but you didn’t lie to me, either.”

Natasha took the empty cup from him and set it aside, returning to her seat on the bed next to him. “I am so sorry that this happened to you,” she said when his gaze flickered up to hers. “I wish I’d been able to get you out earlier.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I still should have tried,” Natasha said, and was a little surprised to realize that she meant it. She had weighed the chances of an exfil early on and discarded the option as unviable in those first few months; Steve was watched too closely. Even the ops they had had been on had always been in company with STRIKE and had been in isolated areas that made it nearly impossible to run.

“It would have gotten both of us killed,” Steve said bleakly, his mouth working silently.

Natasha wondered if he had been running the same math that she had and when he had started doing so. “Probably not killed.”

He grimaced and made a gesture of acknowledgment, knowing as well as she did that the two of them together were too valuable to Alexander Pierce to risk that.

“Nat,” he said hesitantly. “The ops we ran for Pierce –”

He didn’t have to finish the question. “I don’t know for sure,” Natasha told him. “I can find out. But for what it’s worth, most of what they’ve been doing at the Triskelion is what SHIELD – the real SHIELD – was doing four years ago. I think the ops we were on were like that. They’d – Sitwell and Pierce would have wanted to have you on softballs first, and push it up from there to see how far you’d go. Not that they talked about it with me at all.” She bit her lip. Rumlow had said a few things that in retrospect made her think that he had known very well what Pierce was doing, whether or not Sitwell had ever told him.

Steve shut his eyes, breathing hard, and put his head in his hands. Natasha had known what she was doing; Steve had just found out he had been running missions for Hydra since he had first gone into the field three months ago.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, not sure whether or not to reach for him. She would have known what to do back at the Triskelion, when she knew they were under surveillance and that Steve had no idea what had been done to him, but now he did and Natasha didn’t know what to do.

Steve’s gaze cut sideways, then went up as the door opened and Nick Fury came in. Natasha sat back, feeling self-conscious and obscurely guilty.

Fury considered her for a moment, then turned his attention to Steve. “How are you feeling, Captain Rogers?”

“Like I’ve had a chunk of metal pried out of my spinal column,” Steve said, hesitating before he added, “Thank you.”

Fury nodded acknowledgment. “I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Steve looked wary, then his eyes widened as Fury stepped back so that Coulson could wheel in an elderly woman in a wheelchair. She smiled a little tremulously and said, “Hello, Steve.”

“Peggy?” He stood up like he meant to go to her, and then stopped, his expression uncertain.

“It’s all right,” Peggy Carter said. “I don’t bite.” She held out a hand to him, smiling.

Despite the thinness of her face and the mass of wrinkles, her bones were still elegant; Natasha could see the beauty of the woman she had been seven decades earlier. She had seen pictures of Peggy Carter before, some video footage from later in her life – there was none from the Second World War – but none of it compared to the woman herself. There was a blazing aliveness to her despite the fact that she had to be, at Natasha’s quick estimation, ninety-six or ninety-seven.

Natasha eyed her a little warily. She knew perfectly both who Peggy Carter was and who she was to Steve; she also knew that her great-niece Sharon was back at the Triskelion. To the best of her knowledge, Sharon was part of Pierce’s inner circle, Sitwell’s second in command. There was always the chance that she was another one of Fury’s loyalists, but Natasha wasn’t willing to bet money on it.

Steve went hesitantly to Peggy, his bare-footed passage near-silent. He only touched her fingertips at first, like he was afraid she would vanish, then went slowly to his knees in front of her. “Hi.”

“You’re late,” she told him, reaching down to turn his face up to her.

“Traffic,” he said, trying to sound light, but his voice was trembling on the syllables. Then he put his head down against her knee and started to cry.

Fury caught Natasha’s eye and moved his chin slightly in the direction of the door; Natasha nodded and got to her feet. As Natasha passed her, Peggy reached out to touch her sleeve. Natasha paused and looked down at her.

“Thank you,” Peggy said.

Natasha nodded in response and followed Fury and Coulson out.

“How’s he doing?” Fury asked after he had closed the door behind them. Clint was waiting in the corridor; he nodded to Coulson as the other man left, presumably for the observation room that looked in on the hospital room.

Natasha thought the answer to that was fairly obvious, but said, “He’s scared. He just found out about Hydra a few hours ago, remember? He doesn’t know anyone here except for me – and Peggy Carter,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder at the door, “– and he doesn’t have any reason to believe that we’re any different than them.”

Clint scowled. “We didn’t put a fucking chip in his head.”

“You know he has no way of knowing that,” Natasha said. “It’s not the first time he’s woken up in a hospital bed after emergency surgency. Though the last time it wasn’t to a stranger standing over him accusing him of rape.”

“That’s not –”

“That’s what he heard,” Natasha said, a little surprised at how angry she was. “You had no right to say that about him. Or about me.”

Clint shot a slightly panicked look at Fury, whose expression suggested that since he had gotten himself into this mess he was perfectly capable of getting himself out. “You two need a minute?”

Natasha nodded, her mouth tight.

“Get this cleared up fast,” Fury advised. “Pierce isn’t going to give us much time. Even if he doesn’t know for sure, by now he has to guess that we’ve got Rogers.”

He was already reaching for his earpiece as he left.

“You have no idea what it’s like there,” Natasha told Clint. “You’ve been here for the past three and a half years. You don’t know.”

Clint took a deep breath, then said, “So what’s it like?”

Natasha thought for a moment before she said, “Everyone’s watching each other all the time, telling on each other to Sitwell or Carter or Rumlow. They’re always looking for loyalists, people who didn’t buy Pierce’s story about Fury but weren’t involved in the sieges. Sometimes people just disappear. If you know about Hydra, then it’s worse. You’d think it means they trust you, but it doesn’t; it just means they have more to lose if they’re wrong about you, so they watch. All the time. I know every inch of that apartment Steve and I had in the Triskelion was wired. I’m pretty sure he did too, but we never talked about it. You don’t talk about it. No one does. Everyone knows, but no one talks about it. You go on ops, you don’t know why, you don’t ask; you just hope they’re one of the ones that SHIELD would have run anyway and not one of Pierce’s pet projects. Steve and I weren’t the only ones with governor implants there; everyone has them, even Sitwell and Rumlow.”

“Nat…”

“I grew up like that, Clint,” Natasha said bluntly. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Even the six months I was at SHIELD, I know Fury had me under surveillance; I know you were reporting to him about me.”

“Nat –”

“Do you know the difference between being in the Red Room and being in Hydra?” Natasha asked him.

Clint shook his head.

“When I joined SHIELD, I thought I was going straight,” Natasha said. “But I just traded in the SVR for Hydra. The difference is that I knew whose lies I was telling and why I was telling them. All that time I was under it was a chance to make up for all the pain and suffering I’d caused.” She raised one shoulder. “That I was still causing. That maybe I could wipe out some of the red in my ledger even while I was adding new lines. I didn’t do it for SHIELD or for Fury or even for you.” She swallowed hard, surprised to find her hands were shaking a little. “You had no right to say that to me.”

Clint took a deep breath, clearly fighting back an assortment of automatic responses, then finally said, “You know I never liked the idea of you staying in. I just want you to be safe.”

“What’s safe?” Natasha said, shaking her head. They had been working together closely the six months she had been with SHIELD, but since Hydra had forced Fury out she had seen him perhaps a dozen times. “You and I, we’re not the kind of people who get to have that. I owe you for getting me out of the Red Room, but I don’t owe you that.”

“You got yourself out of the Red Room,” Clint said. “I just threw you a rope, that’s all.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Natasha said. She wasn’t sure if he actually meant it, but it was probably the best she was going to get.

Clint ran a hand back through his hair, looking tired. “Are you in love with him?”

Natasha glanced up at him, startled by the blunt question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

#cut scenes and concept writing #ws steve au concept tag #as always comments are appreciated

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