So i saw this post by @avelera (if i had a nickel for every time they’ve inspired a post, i’d have two nickels which....funnily enough is the exact amount that meme requires) and i CANNOT stop thinking about Hob’s first century as an immortal.
I mean surely he thought it was all in jest- his mates were having a right crack of it for the rest of the night, and Hob knew it well himself that no man escapes death; he would fight to live as long as he could in this world, experience everything he could, and when his time came he would simply find adventure elsewhere. Hob couldn’t have seriously believed Dream; he was just a nobleman with an odd sense of humour. And so what if he knew Hob’s name? Everyone in this pub knew his name, much like he did theirs, so he probably just asked.
I wonder if it remained a bit of an inside joke between Hob and his friends- when he gets injured in a fight and is laid up in bed, one of his friends says “You can’t die, remember? Got that meeting with some posh prick in 1489, what good’ll you be dead” and Hob sees it for what it is (a distraction) and plays along with a grin. Anytime he joins a new battle, its “Do prior engagements mean nothing to you, Robert Gadling?“ As said by his mate with a ridiculous put-on posh accent, “Your good man’ll be right cross when you ditch him in 1489 cause you got killed fighting for this bastard”. When Hob gets hit, its “I’ll be meeting him in 1489 at this rate! To tell him you got fucking done in, you knob-”
It might have been fun, at first. But as Hob’s friends started dropping dead around him- war, disease, killed in the streets for some gold- i think it stopped being a joke. Because now Hob was walking away from fights no else did. Now he was recovering from diseases within the week, where others were still thrashing in its grasp or going cold and still in the night. Its not enough to make him question his mortality, but it is enough to make him think he’s unnaturally lucky. Maybe he’s done something to please the gods recently, or maybe fortune was smiling down upon him for once. He could not bear it all with good-nature, because despite how fortune or luck or even the gods themselves seemed to look favourably upon him, their grace did not extend to his friends and he is still conscious of their loss.
But Hob Gadling appears to be one lucky bastard, and that’s that.
...until it isn’t.
Maybe Hob accidentally builds up a local reputation about being a reliable soldier- no matter who it is, or how many of them there are, Hob survives. I think maybe he’s died a few times by now, but he doesn’t know that- his throat was slashed by an enemy sword, and he died right there on the battlefield the moment his knees hit the dirt, but the fight lasted so long that by the time Hob woke up, gasping and grasping at his blood-covered neck, the gash which had nearly beheaded him was instead a shallow but still bleeding wound. Later he would settle on the idea that the cut hadn’t been as bad as he thought it was- why he passed out from such a wound is beyond him, but maybe it was from shock, he heard that it did that to people sometimes. Someone trying to slit your throat is different to someone slicing your arm, so even though hes still unsettled by it and sure that the wound was worse...he can’t argue with the actual wound on his body, which points to the contrary. This is probably not the first and definitely not the last time Hob dies.
So yeah, maybe he accidentally builds up a local reputation about being a reliable fighter because he simply can’t stop surviving. And its not that hes unharmed- he gets stabbed, sliced, beaten, etc. He can be out of it for days depending on the severity of his wounds or illness, but he always gets back up. And maybe eventually, as most stories go involving ageless immortals, people go from being surprised by his abilities and age, to suspicious. Hob himself took passing note of it a while ago- he thought his hair would long since be grey by now, or at least most of it would, but it isn’t. When he goes for a drink with the remaining friends he has, he notices that his hands aren’t wrinkled like theirs. Hobs hands are calloused and rough, yes, but not aged like they ought to be. He thinks its strange, of course he does, but soon he’s too smashed to think of it anymore.
How many comments does it take about his age before Hob starts to close himself off? How many times must surprise turn to suspicion, because Hob says hes in his 50′s but he still looks like he’s in his mid 30′s? How many years does it take before Hob hastily fakes his first death/disappearance, because now the people he grew up with are intensely aware of how young Hob looks compared to them- its unnatural, unusual, and for a medieval peasant, probably has something to do with the devil. And i think it would be different to the witch trials Hob would later experience in the 17th century, where the whole town was after him because he became ‘complacent’- this isnt Hob being complacent, this is Hob freaking the fuck out. This is Hob not knowing how to deal with the fact that he’s not aging like he should be- of course he thinks its fucking weird (great, but weird), of course he thinks its fucking CRAZY that hes been in so many battles, been wounded and sick so many times, and yet has always come out the other side. Of course he thinks its fucking strange but he doesn’t know whats going on so he’s just..he’s just going to keep going, because what else can he do? and it isn’t until things get a little too heated that Hob turns tail and ditches town with a half formed plan and the cover of darkness.
I wonder how long it takes him to come to terms with his immortality- does he throw himself into more dangerous situations with an “Either i’m right or it wont matter cause ill be dead” attitude? Is he seriously fucking spooked by it for a few years before the dawning realisation of lifes now limitless possibilities hits him? Does Hob think of that noble stranger in 1389 often, at first with mirth and amusement because that tosser knew exactly what he was saying when he said they’d meet again in 100 years; and then does Hob think of it with growing worry and stress, because...what exactly did he give up for this power? what has he yet to give up for it? Maybe his town was right- he’d heard the whispers, part of why he hauled ass to get out of there- maybe he had made a deal with the devil, or a demon. Perhaps, when Hob is more hopeful, he prays he struck a deal with a saint or an angel.
Dream is neither of those things, but medieval peasant Hob doesn’t know that.
Anyway. Yeah I’m having thoughts about what it must have been like for one Hob Gadling to discover his immortality. I mean, using the show as a frame of reference, Hobs taken to it pretty well- in avelera’s original post we know, and can discuss, the fact that Hob seems weary at their first centennial meeting in 1489. He doesn’t know what this stranger wants from him, doesn’t know if he unwittingly agreed to a deal back in 1389 that he now has to make good on. But when Dream tells him that he simply wants to hear of his life, wants to hear what its like being a mortal-turned-immortal in a world Dream so clearly (at the time) holds little regard for...Hob is just Hob about it all. Dream thinks he’s going to say something profound, or wish for death, but instead my man started going on about how great chimneys and card games are. It makes me even more interested in what it must have been like for him to discover his gift- the highs of being able to live life freely, of realising that should that stranger be merciful and grant him more time on earth, he could experience everything under the sun for decades- Hob seems so innately positive, i mean his whole thing is that there’s always more to do and always greener grass to chase. This must be such a contrast to the lows of watching your friends and family die when you don’t, to being watched by your own town for a deal you now realise may not have been in jest at all, to stressing about what exactly you will be asked to give in 1489.
Im. Having thoughts.
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will our stan-y pooh ever get to see kyleys notes?
so, i got an ask like this a while back and was going to answer some variant of it earlier, but held off so i could develop the lore a bit more.
because i always knew that stan would eventually be made aware of kyle's letters to him, probably unbeknownst to jerseykyle, but i wasn't sure when i should have that happen or under what circumstances the reveal fall, bc really i didn't want it to feel randomly shoehorned in or feel like a cheap after thought, y'know?
i wanted, nay, needed stan coming across kyle's special stan diary entries & reading his letters, to have a strong significance to the story because the letters are such a large part of r.m. and letters in general/the act of writing a letter is such a personal intimate thing, not just for kyle, but even when other chars write things in the story.
but more on that later...
back to jers & his love letters to his *dead* sbf.
a/n: this is a very long post that you, like all my silly, silly posts, have no obligation to read, but please clap! uncle nina finally wrote an ask meme that she feels very proud of! and if you like long posts, like a very sweet anon told me once upon a time, you might like this!
so without further ado, i hope you heal, rem(ember) to smile, pendejos and of course, my darlings, as always...
please enjoy...
the very worst part of your day. ;)
so with the letters, i feel like it's imperative to note ( haha, see what i did there? ) that they're not all love letters or letters of love to stan. honestly, kyle writes in it nearly every day and actually uses it as more of a daily writing exercise to keep him grounded: a tool he can utilize throughout the day to keep track of thing —especially given that the extent of his ptsd/clozapine stole kyle's eidetic memory.
so actually, a lot of the pages are nonsense, notes he started and never finished…
…grocery lists of things that need to be replaced.
sadly, several of said grocery lists are usually followed by a dream list of grocery itineraries of the ingredients he would buy if he was rich or finally healthy, followed by things like tea and top ramen, things he'd actually eat or, sigh, regurgitate and stare at until they disgust him.
worse over, a lot of these catalogs as finished sad, scribbled journal entries that silently speak to his experiences in grocery stores and how their both like heading to his execution and going to the amusement park. because he's surrounded by all this lovely food so when he's fasting and slowly starving himself, he eats with his eyes.
other times, when the medicine makes him lethargic and light-headed, he lets himself get carried away in a little fantasy, a shameful secret, a silly guilty pleasure where he pretends like he's getting ready to cook a beautiful, delicious dinner for a boy that he loves, someone like stan, and gathers ingredients via a recipe he found online, planning to use some fancy techniques he saw on masterchef to impress his dream boy, feeling the smooth, scalet flesh of the roma tomatoes until he finds just the right ones to put in his shopping cart,
breathing in the soothing, earthy scent of fresh basil, imagining tickling the tip of stan's nose with it playfully when he goes to sniff, the cacophonous, melodious sound of stan's squeaky laugh and the dizzying scent of cinnamon that fills his mouth as stan leans up to kiss him in the produce section, gathering the pine nuts he might need to craft the perfect pesto sauce, imagining feeding the small, spiced, succulent spirals to his stan, who is alive and well, and sighs in elation, smiling that 1000 watt stan marsh smile, his beautiful face flushed from candlelight, a little box wine and a lifetime of love.
...then the sprinklers go off and douse him, splashing him in the face like some kind of rude, watery wake up call, the screech of the grocery cart sounds nothing like stan's laugh and neither does the ugly voice that cracks over the PA system in the store announcing that there is only thirty minutes left before it all goes dark and the check out lanes close. so kyle frantically rushes to buy the things he needs in the real world, where his sweet stanley marsh is dead, with his ashes scattered to the wind, grabbing paper towel rolls and coffee pods and green apples for the pie marjorine wants to bake that kyle will never eat. and after he checks out with a bag full of groceries and an empty stomach that growls at him, reminding him of the monster he's become...
he walks over to the gas station, and purchases a packet of american spirits, the blue box that reminds him of the lovely color of his stan's eyes before they turned a cruel, glassy grey as the weight of his death and the rigamortis set in, then pitch black from hell fire, admiring the pretty sheen of the package, almost silver in the moonlight, that he thinks, in his disillusionment, look almost like the tiny silver specks that swam in stan's eyes like silverfish.
along with a bag of skittles, where he picks the best ones out, feeding the rest to the birds, who might not eat them either — there's a small comfort in knowing that, that as lonely as he feels tonight, they share his sick sentiment — his legs swinging off some bench with graffiti and the names in hearts of people who can love scratching at his arms, taunting him, as he, with a cool, surgical precision, separates the red out of the rainbow and sucks the red 40 and delicious cherry coating off each one like a popsicle until they look as grey and lifeless as he feels inside, his precious fantasy shattering all around him as he remembers he wasn't meant to be sweet or soft or swirl pasta pleasantly in a pot...
for hideous creatures born of hatred...
...were not meant to love anything.
but i fear, friends, that that is not the worst of it. that there are even bleaker entries, where kyle's hand writing is not perfectly printed, but rather, is very chaotic and disorderly, rushed, with words scratched out, written in a hurry...in fear he might not have much time left. :(
tw for mention of suicide
there is one entry in the stan journal that is particularly unpleasant, unsettling and haunting, where kyle writes stan his last will and testament. it features a kyle who stands so tall and fearsome, scared absolutely shitless as he tells stan ‘he did a bad thing’ and that he is frightened and doesn't know what to do. he says it was a moment of weakness, which disgusts him like himself for being such a worm, and that he felt the world a cruel dark place and that looking into the light would be like looking into stan's eyes and that...he misses him.
and wanted to be with him.
but that stan wouldn't want that. no, stan would be horrified. just like he is as he scrambles to form sentences in between shallow breaths. he took a lot of pills, it was a stupid thing, but it seemed smart at the time, he remembers one time that stan oft wondered how someone so smart could be so stupid at the same time — he told kyle that when stan told him that he had a crush on him in sixth grade and kyle had no idea even though he was extremely obvious about it — but that it would ruin his mother and ike's life, his a-hole father would call him a disappointment, a blight or burr on the broflovski family tree, and that tweek would be home in an hour and find him there and that he would probably never recovered from seeing him in that state. and that more than that, selfishly...
…he's absolutely terrified of death.
however, the entry ends a couple lines later with kyle assuring stan that he is alive and well, he knows this because his knuckles are torn to bits and bright red, sore and stinging, ( and also because stan is still a book and not the body of his favorite boy/super best friend ) and that really...it's a good thing, he supposes, he has years of experience...
...throwing things up. :(
i hate everything about this; fuck my life.
but all this to say, in way too many words like verbose jerseykyle, that the stan journal entries are extremely varied in notation and speaking of notes, or notable notes, that the letter that kyle wrote on stan's 21st birthday is among those letters...but the whole thing was so hideously embarrassing to him, that he'd ripped the pages out and had planned to throw them away...but forgot...fuck you, clozapine... and fell out of his notebook sometime during the south park trip.
jimmy, having no idea what the letter might be attached to, only saw that the letter was addressed to stan...gave it to him without thought.
stan read the letter, which devastated him, but also was the most beautiful and precious thing he'd ever read and stashed it away, like the secret that he had it in his possession, of course, telling kyle would only drive the wedge further between him...as he yearned. :(
but the contents of the letter return...at the end of our thrilling tale.
which, i want to remind you all again, especially our new readers, which...oh my god? i'm. like, seriously Shook, but mostly excited that this blog has more traction and interaction than it even did when i was actually writing my fanfictions! hello, new friends! welcome to hell! but back to what i was trying to relay, which is that my fanfiction can often be...very, very dark. they explore a lot of mature and macabre themes, things that the show set up very nicely but bc it's a comedy, were not really explored and, in my humble opinion, were kind of bastardized and written immature and in very poor taste by matt and trey, and...ofc, this is my spin on all that, and my spin is that these serious topics should be handed with care with authenticity and that often means that they will be...gruesome.
in the vein of gruesomeness, we readers, find out much later on during the south park portion of the story, while the fanfiction is set up to seem like the biggest secret/apex of the fic is kyle finding out who stan is...that was actually a curtain that hides the real meat and potatoes of the fanfic aka what swirls beneath the surface of a sleepy mountain down and the scandal that rocks it out there in the rockies.
specifically ( which is where the mackey's lackeys aka kyle's crimina laur classmates on his special case team/group, come in ) the dissappearance of a south park resident from well before stan's...
which we come to find via sonrisa/sharon marsh's personal diary which was stashed in a secret hatch in sharon's guitar case, one of the few things stan took with him from the house before setting the whole thing blaze...makes mention of one south park res in partic...
dr. tom, of tom's rhinoplasty.
publicly, the owner of beloved town business
...sharon's secret secret lover.
in these letters, stan comes to find that sharon and tom had plans of running away together, that she would never forgive herself for leaving her children behind with that monster, but that tom would fake his death, leave michelle and stanley his generous savings and his business in his will and that would start over...some place kinder.
they had planned to meet at mabel...
...but tom never came.
the town just assumed that the man had disappeared, skipped town for some reason or another...but stan and co...are not so sure.
so using sharon's letters, their sleuthing abilities and the crows, which, a sort of symbolic point of the fanfic is sharon calling stan cuervo for his shiny, oily black hair, his lovely singing voice and because stan fed the crows/ravens ever single day while randy shooed them cruelly off the properly and ravens...
rem(ember) faces. ;)
...and despite his new name, his now blue hair, all his piercings and being all grown up, the crows remember stan's kindness...and lead him to things. they show him clues and are a useful tool in getting to the bottom of tom's cold case...or rather...*cough*...
his murder.
which all comes to a head one very fucked up, winter night when a gun is pulled on ravenstan and right as he's about to get shot...
jersey jumps right in front of him…
…catches the bullet in his chest.
( this mirrors when stan took the hockey puck in the face for kyle )
it's a very gruesome traumatic to-be crime scene as jersey lays there bleeding out in stan's arms, who speaks to him softly thru his grief
( i don't have all the dialogue or everything blocked out, but i did start some snippets of dialogue in this cruddy post over here, lol )
and at the very last part of that excruciating exchange, stan is cradling kyles head in his hands and tells him to stay with him, because they have a shitty apartment to share together, lots of kyle nagging stan to pick his dirty towel up off the floor when he forgets for the umpteenth time, and delicious dinners that kyle will cook, slow dances in front of the refrigerator ala taylor swift like the one they shared at the sadie hawkins dance, that their second child, because the first one was the egg that they took care of together in third/forth grade, will know how to speak spanish and yiddish and that together, they'll make up for lost time...and have a long, lovely life together as stan's sabelotodo...and kyle's zeeskiet </3
and finally...while kyle is waning in and out of consciousness, stan sings to him a special little song, just like heaven by the cure, which is kyle's favorite ( in lady on the way to the diner where part three of the ravesey hate takes place, kyle sang along to it on the radio...with the pronouns changed...perhaps with a certain person in mind...and please note it was a lovely, lovely song...jersey actually has a beautiful singing voice, but the only audience he ever entertain is his shampoo and conditioner in the shower )
and stan just sits there, holding the love of his life, like if he held him tightly enough his pieces would come back together and sang to him, only getting halfway thorugh the second 'i'll run away with you' before kyle's eyes closed completely and his body went limp.
...they pulled ravenstan away from kyle kicking and screaming, swearing and sobbing hysterically...it took three emts to do so.
later on, in the hospital, while kyle is fighting for his life :(, bebe entrusts stan with kyle's special journal and tells him to read it. stan does, in spite of it being extremely difficult for him, both emotionally and for the simple fact that despite kyle's handwriting being lovely, immaculate, beautiful and neat just like him, it is also teeny-tiny and written entirely in cursive which, when you have as severe a case of dyslexia as ravenstan does, makes reading cursive a near impossible task. but then, stan believes in the impossible, which means he believes that his kyle will come back to him the same way he had just a month ago, though that feels so faraway now. like kyle, who though he's a mere pace away from the chair stan sits in across from his hospital bed, stan still feels is not close enough as he turns to on the next available page in kyle's therapy diary, and in stark contrast to kyle's cursive calligraphy, slants stan's chicken scratch which practically terrorizes the strict, dashed guidelines, stan starts to write kyle a heartfelt letter of his own, only taking breaks between lines to kiss the top of kyle's head and stroke his cold cheek.
the beginning of said letter, goes something like this:
oooOOooufff, that makes me want to cry so bad!
but anyways!
shortly after that, stan gives him a rundown of what he missed while he's been asleep. stan tells him that his hair is short now, a lot of his hair was matted and got covered in blood from his gun shot wound, :( or got caught in the myriad of dumb, gaudy emo boy pins that stan affixed to his jacket, which made it difficult to take off when the doctors needed to operate on him; so to make things easier, they just cut kyle's hair. he jokes that kyle is probably going to hate it and say that he looks like justin freakin' bieba' or lil orphan annie or shirley goddamn temple, but that stan thinks he looks very cute c': ( aw ) and that it frames his gorgeous face nicely with all the thick, ginger ringlets curling around his cheeks and the tips just barely kissing the sides of his jaw, where stan has left several of his own as a little gift for kyle when he wakes up...ones that, stan hopes,
kyle will eventually return. </3
he boasts playfully that while kyle was the one playing hero, stan was Actually the one who saved the day after all, or, his abuelito's gay ass ww2 jacket which kyle was wearing at the time of the accident and that because of it's thick, leather material, the speed of the bullet slowed down and saved his life ( in your face, dummy ) right before it reached his heart and obliterated that important artery. and that that heart, that stan loves with all his because it's attached to his favorite boy in the entire world, beats on, faintly...but still there.
stan calls him a stubborn bastard, on account of his refusing to die.
he tells kyle that everyone comes in to visit him in shifts through out the day, notably his mother and ike, who both weep and wish for his speedy recovery. stan lets kyle know that sheila keeps telling him to 'go home and get some sleep, orev. he'll be here when you wake up.' but that he wants to be here when kyle wakes up and won't budge.
he guesses he's a selfish bastard too and kyle's rubbing off on him.
stan writes that he brings sharon’s guitar to the hospital room and sings to him every day, sometimes its the cure or acoustic abba or taylor swift, even though kyle, a stubborn bastard as we mentioned, claims not to like her. he also sings kyle a lot of secret stuff just for him, written about him in private and that when kyle wakes up, during the summer, he's gonna take kyle on tour with him and kiss him in every country and continent, and that crimson dawn's next album is going to be filled with sappy love songs all about him that are going to make him so embarrassed and sick to death of him that he'll wish both he and stan actually died. and that sometimes hoards of excited children in the hospital come in to sing to him to leave him lots of flowers, letters, trinkets, odds and ends...and tell him stuff that maybe...he can hear? it's stan's wishful thinking, of course, but then, he's the dreamer...even though this is his worst fkn nightmare.
as an homage to peppermint, stan also tells kyle that he reads to him often, tries to do funny voices but kyle is better at it, y'know, since he has a funny voice that stan would like very much to hear again, the most beautiful sound in the world that makes his synesthesia light up. he tried to read the books in kyle's messenger bag, lots of dense, archaic, academic boy stuff written by old, dead russian authors, but that they're kinda..depressing? and he's not a very good reader, so he started reading him children's books and ya novels, specifically percy jackson which they read as kids together in stan's tree house. stan says that kyle reminds him so much of annabeth who is super smart and cool, even though he looks more like rachel dare, and that he knows that kyle would say he's a dead ( haha ) ringer for percy, but that he's no hero... and if he was, he would've saved ky. :(
he does not tell kyle that he's hooked up to an iv drip that feeds him nutrients through a system of tubes that are actually helping him retain a more healthy weight because that would trigger him. but stan is secretly so grateful and even though he's pale as a sheet...
but stan thinks that he's absolutely radiant
and glowing. :')
there's lots of other stuff written in this letter that stan writes that i hopefully will write and share with you all eventually...if i ever have time between working and being a depressed idiot...ravenstan calls jersey mi sabelotodo a lot ( awww x2 ), tells him about all the stuff he wants to do with him...detailing some scenarios that pc principal would *naught* approve of...that everyone misses him, but no one more than stan, who fell asleep writing the last part of his letter...
with his head on kyle's shoulder,
…snoring loudly and obnoxiously — the way kyle loved.
regrettably, some of the words stan wrote are illegible, which, the whole Goddamn Thing is fucking illegible because stan is illiterate and his handwriting is hell ( kyle can read it though, bless him ) but mostly because stan cried a lot writing in and his tears smudged a lot of the words on the pages...which do smell lightly of spiced apple cider, fireball ( stan drank a lot from stress :/ ) and...as for metal, that once kyle wakes up, he will gladly spend the rest of his life cutting kyle's lip open...on that god awful can-opener he calls a lip ring. <3
anyways, my dearest darlingest! i hope that answered your question. i realize it probably wasn't the short, sweet, heart-warming answer that you were hoping for, but i am a hurt/comfort angst queen so i think we all know by now that that's not how i rock and roll. ;)
but everyone say i hope you heal jersey.
we love you, baby. :(
-uncle nina, who is short-circuiting my computer w/ my leaking face
it's that goddamn branch in my eye again.
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