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sarnie-for-varney · 7 months

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For younger Tommy and Len (Inside No.9, Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room), I actually have headcanon actors for what I believe they would've looked like.

These are my personal opinions, and I am in no way claiming any of these opinions as fact.

Len

For Len, I chose Kiefer Sutherland.

Down to the colour of his hair, his mannerisms, and the sometimes violent tendencies of the characters he's portrayed. As well as this, Sutherland has a similar body shape to what I imagine Len would've had. I think Len would hold more weight on his body than Tommy, due to his genetics.

Kiefer Sutherland has changed his look many times over the years, but I feel like Nelson Wright in Flatliners (1990) correlates the most with my idea of a younger Len Shelby:

The cuts and bruises on the left are especially in character, as I headcanon that Len would've been the type to get into a lot of fights.

However, I believe Len was the type of guy to experiment a lot with his appearance. So his style could range from this to any look he put his mind to.

Throughout the film, Nelson appears to be washed in a sort of sepia or burnt orange colour. I associate warmer colours, like orange, with Len.

Len, I feel, does like to be comfortable and he wears more casual clothes. I think Len would lean more towards a grunge or punk style of dress. I always imagine Len's hair to be more red than it is blonde, perhaps strawberry blonde.

Tommy

For Tommy, I chose River Phoenix.

He has a fantastic range and ability to play any character, which I thought was perfect for Tommy. Tommy goes through many changes in terms of personality throughout his life. Before meeting Len, he was shy and quiet. A bookworm who sits alone. After meeting Len, Tommy started taking on quite a few of Len's quirks. He became more outgoing, hanging out in places he probably shouldn't be, smoking, riding on Len's motorbike or taking the truck out for a spin (I headcanon that Len has a very strong interest in vehicles and mechanics). Len is sort of a bad influence on Tommy, but whatever. Tommy enjoys it. Later in his life, Tommy becomes the boss of a rather large digital marketing company where he learns he needs to be authoritative and straightforward.

Tommy's personality took many turns in his life, just like the characters that Phoenix has portrayed. River is thinner than Kiefer, much like how I imagine Tommy to be thinner than Len. While River Phoenix is slightly taller than Kiefer Sutherland, Tommy would most likely be shorter than Len (like Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's height difference).

Like Sutherland, Phoenix had many looks over his career. But the most reminiscent of Tommy, I think, would be Danny Pope from Running on Empty (1988):

Tommy, I believe, would excel academically and be completely in his element when in classes. In the scene on the left, Danny Pope pays the utmost attention in his studies, and this fits Tommy very well.

Here, on this character, we see rounded glasses which I headcanon Tommy wearing when he was younger (as opposed to his more rectangular glasses in the canon episode). Pope also wears a lot of blues in the film, blue is a colour I associate very strongly with Tommy.

Tommy's clothing, like Len's, is comfortable and soft. But he isn't against wearing more elaborate and complex outfits, which he takes great care in putting together. I could see Tommy leaning more towards the artsy/preppy style of dress.

Despite Tommy's hair being dark on the poster of their younger selves in the episode, I cannot help but headcanon Tommy as blonde-haired.

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bongo-clash · 2 years

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I Wonder if I Would Delete You

Ectober week prompts: Forest He thinks about the corpse in the woods sometimes. Hard to forget where you are buried.

'Valerie Gray finds out that the resident ghost kid was never buried beneath a grave. Valerie Gray finds out that there’s a body in the woods.'

(Content warnings in tags || fic under cut!!)

Valerie remembers, very vaguely, the look on Sam and Tucker’s face on the first day of highschool.

They usually had a third kid with them, she knew. Danny. She’d seen the briefest glimpse of his face in the newspaper near the end of the holidays, the offhand worry of her father when he brought it up once and never again. Nothing substantial, just ‘You know the Fenton’s youngest? Danny, I think his name was, in your year. Apparently he went missing on Tuesday and they haven’t found a sign of him since.’. He slipped through the cracks of freshman year, and the ones who’d known him since elementary school noticed (Dash, in particular, had whined at the absence of his favourite punching bag, made a face at the news, and stopped talking about it when he didn’t show up after a few days), but very few others did.

He was just one of those kids who’d never really made much of an effort to cross anyone’s radar beyond his limited social circle. He just wasn’t someone who’d made themselves all that memorable, after all, plenty of kids from middle school weren’t going to Casper High; for all that it felt weird not to see them anymore, there wasn’t much to dwell on.

His parents (the only thing he’d really been known for), though they were unnaturally quiet for the first few weeks, soon fell back into their obsession. His sister was still hoping he’d turn up again, but she was also a budding psychologist, and it was clear she was trying not to let it impede her when there was nothing she could do. It was just… such a non-issue for everyone else, in the end, even if no one knew why he went missing. (Even if Sam and Tucker sometimes made faces at each other, like they had something to say but couldn’t share it.)

It was all the more easy to forget when ghosts started showing up in Amity Park. Many regularly, one constant: Phantom.

Valerie hates his guts more than anything else, if she had to pick. Even if no one really got hurt in the fights, property damage skyrocketed, their day-to-day became chaos, and especially at first, everyone was scared. When the ghost kid ruined her life, hatred bloomed like hogweed in her chest, but the people in her class loved him. A mysterious superhero, with cool powers, flying around town every day and every night to fight off creatures from another dimension in a weird, glowing costume? It was like something out of a comic book, of course they loved it, but all she could think about was how much collateral was left in the wake, the image of that ghost and his stupid dog tearing through her life and leaving nothing but fragment pieces behind, spilt like a stain in her memory. Green, ugly, and hard to wash out. It was only natural that she took up the opportunity to get revenge when it found her, even if she didn’t trust Masters as far as she could throw him.

This is all to say: the last two years of her life have been busy. It’s a hard wire to walk on- between staying afloat enough to pass her classes, keeping up with her job to help her dad, trying to keep violent ghosts from invading the town and desperately trying to get people to see that the worst one of them all is the one that keeps attempting to earn their trust- she barely has time for anything else. Sometimes, she even lets Phantom deal with the ghosts if they’re pathetic enough, because she’s sure he’s playing the long game with them but it’s been a long game, and she really does need to keep living her life. She’s a junior, now; she’ll be seventeen in the new year, and her dad’s so excited to teach her how to drive. She’s not going to let the world stop turning for a couple of ghosts.

It’s one of those days, though, where she figures Phantom’s been flying around for a bit too long, and it’s time for an intervention. Can’t let him get too confident in his welcome. So, she’s suited up and following his signature with a tracker, listening as the thing ticks like a Geiger counter to signify the proximity, scanning the horizon for a familiar glowing silhouette and keeping her ectogun clasped in one hand, ready to shoot first and never ask.

Over the course of her flight, she finds herself much further from the centre of town than the ghost is usually spotted, but his signature is lit up green on her scanner, and it’s not moved once. By the time his figure comes into view, she’s barely in Amity’s borders at all, hovering on the cusp of thick woodlands and wild, uncut grass on its edges.

She spots a complicated look on his face as she lands. Valerie doesn’t know who he’s pretending for.

“What are you doing here, ghost?”

Phantom doesn’t dignify her with a face-to-face conversation. His head tilts like he’s trying to look at her without eyes, and his hands lift to protect his chest even though she’s facing his back; if she had to try and describe his posture, it would be ‘troubled’. Still, though, she can’t forget this is a ghost. Hard to with the glow and the slight transparency and the unnatural white shade of his hair, but still, the thing she’s talking to here isn’t a person no matter how much his figure suggests it.

His shoulders keep making weird shrugging motions, half failing on the way down and sometimes jerking backwards, and she thinks he’s trying to figure out how people breathe. “Hi, Red.” He says, something imitating a sigh, and his behaviour is as unusual as it is fascinating, but he’s deflecting and she won’t have it.

“Answer the question.”

“I- it’s nothing you’d find interesting. I’m not gonna do anything.”

Her eyes narrow with suspicion, hold on her ecto-gun tightening near the trigger. “And I’m supposed to just believe that? Let me guess: that dog ripping my house apart was you ‘doing nothing’ too.”

“No!” He retorts, finally turning around, eyes wide. His hands are twitching at his side, half-trembling, and the underneaths of his nuclear-waste eyes are oddly shadowed- as if ghosts can even sleep, let alone get tired. “No, that wasn’t nothing, and I’ve been sorry about that ever since it happened, but I- this isn’t about that. This isn’t about anything- it’s just… complicated. And not your business.”

Well, that’s not worrying at all. She doesn’t know what he’s trying to achieve by spouting such ridiculous crap, but she’s not picking it up regardless. “What are you doing, Phantom.” It’s not a question.

“I just said-“

“That was not an answer.” Valerie snaps, lifting up the nozzle of the ectoweapon from the ghost’s torso to point right between his eyes. “You know I won’t hesitate to pull this trigger, Phantom; you know I’ll tear you apart. Tell me what you’re doing.”

The part of her that’s read all of the Fentons’ academic papers knows ghosts don’t feel real emotions, knows any features can be manipulated to their liking for whatever ridiculous goal they’ve set their sights on. The part of her that picks at her old bleeding heart twinges at the look on Phantom’s face, no matter how superficial. The shadows under his eyes look like bruises in this light. Tired, tired, tired.

He sighs: a thing he has no need for and probably only does to make himself seem more human. “You really want to know?” He responds, turning around once again so he doesn’t have to look her in the eyes. Stupid, too, considering he’s turning his back to the gun. “Fine. Follow me, then.”

She doesn’t deign to give him an answer, but he seems to interpret the silence as one either way. He goes forward into the thick, and before he can disappear, she follows.

The ghost isn’t floating, is the first thing she notices.

It’s their natural instinct, she’s sure; half of them probably don’t even remember how to walk, with all the time they spend up in the air or drifting about in whatever version of Hell they come from. But Phantom walks now like his feet are tethered to the ground, forced into it with something deeper than gravity. For all that he usually never shuts up, he doesn’t say a word. It seems he doesn’t even notice she’s still aiming a blaster at the back of his head, doesn’t even care.

Time passes between steps. Slowly, as if the further they walk the deeper into space they go, the sunlight overhead is shut away by canopy cover. Oak and ashwood trees disperse themselves along a nonexistent path, roots hidden beneath the browns of old leaf litter and dirt, an imitation of tripwires as Valerie tries not to catch her feet on something. The forest is too dense for her hoverboard. She’d crash into all the low-branches if she tried. Grounded as he is, though, Phantom doesn’t trip once; there’s got to be a reason he has the route memorised, if he’s not just leading her in circles, but she’s never caught him around this area before. Is this where he goes after fights?

An artificial night surrounds them by the time Phantom begins to slow down, stars in the form of microscopic sunspots and the vague shine of lichens. It comes through something silver in the place they’d stopped- just underneath an oak’s armspan. Old leaf litter covers what looks like a molehill.

Phantom sits down, but she doesn’t bother to do the same, too wary. “What is this?” She questions. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll told you I wasn’t gonna do anything.” He says, posture hunched over. “I just wanted to… y’know, sit for a bit.”

Yeah, not buying it. She rounds his figure, not quite putting herself in his direct line of sight, but enough that they can both see each other’s front, and enough that she can gauge his expression, for as little as that counts for.

…Maybe a little more than she bargained it counting for, if she’s being honest. His lips are pinched to a downward-curving line, like he’s trying to hide the shape by pursing them but failing. His knees are pressed to his chest, arms wrapped around and gripping each other like a lifeline, jumpsuit creasing oddly around them for all that it shouldn’t, with ghost fabrics not adhering to normal physics. The eyes are worst of all, though. Seeming duller, somehow- less green and more turquoise, maybe- shining with something Valerie can’t parse and doesn’t like. Something familiar on an unrecognisable face, settled onto the slight bump in the dirt.

There’s a direction her brain his heading to in its conclusion, because this is a ghost looking far too intensely at raised ground, and really, there’s only so many conclusions she can reach, no matter how much she hates it.

It’s rude to ask, she knows. She lets it slip anyway. “Phantom,” She starts, oddly absent of her usual barbs past the dread. “What’s under there?”

His gaze flicks briefly towards her, shoulders tightened and wary of the questioning. She’s never seen him this closed off before. “You don’t wanna know.”

“Tell me.”

“Idon’t want you to know.”

“Phantom.”

Phantom’s expression is awful, awful, awful. “I died two years ago.” He says, voice devoid. “No one’s found me yet.”

Oh.

Oh God.

This is still in Amity Park borders. It’s on the cusp, near the edge, but this is still Amity. This is about a thirty minute walk from the other end of Casper High; if you turned left from where she’s standing and kept going, you could probably come out the other side near the Nasty Burger, its back some distance to all the trees. This is Amity Park, and she’s been living in its vicinity all her life, and there’s a body in the woods and no one knows it’s here.

Briefly, her mind brings forth the image of something beneath the soil, and she closes her mouth around the bile it sends careening up her throat. She doesn’t know what Phantom might have looked like before he died, but she’s certain that if she tried to look, all she’d find would be bones. It’s been more than long enough for the rot to set in and run its course, anything more than that melted away and chewed through by whatever insects buried themselves with him in the decay. She feels like the smell of something foul is caught in her nose now that she knows what she’s practically standing on. She wonders if he’s buried shallow. Guesses at the answer lying idle in the turned soil.

He takes in her speechlessness with a strange mix of fear and exhaustion. “Red? You still in there?”

“You- I- two years ago?” And it’s not like her, but she can’t help it. There’s nothing she can say in the face of this, nothing she can feel beyond the roiling wave of nausea and catatonic shock. They looked about the same age when she started out, and he died two years ago. He looks younger than her now.

“I’d be sixteen this year.” He says, helpfully, as if that makes anything easier. She got her provisional driver’s license in the mail a few months ago and she’ll be old enough to take lessons next year, and he’d be doing the same thing as she is around now but he’s dead. He’s dead and she’s not heard a thing about a kid dying in the last few years. He’s dead and buried shallow.

There’s not many other conclusions to reach. She’s not sure how it’s never crossed her mind before now, but for the first time in two years, Valerie wonders who Phantom used to be. Wonders what he did to get murdered in secret.

Wonders if who (or what) did it is still around.

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