#he's just always been in a position where he could plausibly be helping the villains and IH never question it... i kinda want it to be true | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

palbabor-writes · 3 years

Note

oh my god! your writing is amazingggg. may i please have a creepy! shiggy, dabi or hawks whichever one is easier for you where they really like the reader so they do yk normal creepy stuff like stealing her underwear and humping her bed and one day they get caught and they thought she’d be disgusted but she’s lowkey into it and she’s just super sweet and praising and a HUGE SERVICE TOP. I think they just need some good pussy 😔 if you decide to do this then THANK YOUUUU

｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ you’re too nice nonnie & tysm. i’m glad you’re here!

warnings: general degeneracy, masterbation, handjobs, SMUT, panty sniffin’��

You make a point to leave your room unlocked.

Oh, you’ll switch it up, every so often, just so he has something to work for, but you prefer to pressure him with a time crunch instead of a locked door. It’s always so much fun. You make a show of dashing up the steps, feet thudding heavily on the warped wood. Then, right when you’re on the threshold, gosh, how could you be so daft, so thoughtless! You’d left your supplies downstairs, again! You’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders. Silly, silly, silly.

The display does what you need it to, namely, giving him the chance to slink away. He’s always whisper quiet when he creeps into your space, it’s a miracle you’d caught him. But, even super-villains find themselves on the back foot sometimes, and boy, was he clumsy about this.

It wasn’t like him. That was the slip up. No, his one, original, mistake was a simple one.

He’d left evidence of his arousal, of his lewd, heated, heart thudding, want. It was tacky, sticky, absolutely dripping with the milky residue of him. He’d tried to bury it deep, pressing it down into the bowels of your hamper, likely praying that it would remain hidden and you wouldn’t question it further when you did stumble upon it, hopefully weeks later.

You didn’t like to leave your hamper open and you certainly never, ever, left it beside your bed. It had been another long day and, at first, you’d only given it a swift glance, replaying the events of the night before. Maybe you’d lugged it over, too tired to pace the small distance? You had been in a rush. It was plausible.

Kicking your boots to the floor, you raise a hand to lower the lid of your plastic hamper when you spot the cascade of clothing. Again, it’s a tiny, tiny, fragment, but he should know better. It’s your job to notice the small, the obscure. Retcon is your bread and butter and this is too much, too tempting to ignore.

Fingers follow the hollowed space his arm has left behind and you hit the panties, seconds later. They’re warm, wet, and you clutch them into your palm and pull.

Fuck.

The lace is soaking. Fresh lines of cum run in thick rivulets, falling down your upturned hand and along your wrist, dribbling onto your bare feet. For a moment, you can’t seem to process the image that’s before you, your mind whirring through the possibilities, the faces. Who...no...which one of them did this?

The next morning, you’re quiet. It’s not unnatural. After all, it’s freaking 7 am, no one at the bar is talking. As you sip on your chilled, canned, coffee, your eyes carefully size up the men who are lounged around you.

Shigaraki is perusing a newspaper, the pallid hand of father obscuring his face, but you can still catch sight of the red glint of his eyes. He looks bored. He hadn’t even looked up when you walked in, his back bowed and head down, engrossed in his search.

Dabi is perched on one of the dilapidated couches, his long legs curled under him, flicking a bashed lighter, open and closed, open and closed. Like Shigaraki, he hadn’t lifted his gaze to you at first. He had, however, answered a question. Just the one, when you’d asked him if he had found any newbies, any potential recruits. He’d snarked his reply, his cerulean irises latching onto you with a cruel sharpness. No was his answer and you hadn’t pressed for any further elaboration.

Compress was shuffling a deck of cards. Spinner was ticking through his phone. Twice was chittering with Toga. Nothing was out of the ordinary. You finish your breakfast and tell them that you’re heading out.

No one replies.

******

Unsurprisingly, it happened again.

It’s a different pair of panties but the glisten of the cum is the same. So is the lowered placement, the bevel of the clothes, and the position of the hamper. However, it’s a little more calculated this time around. The lid is closed and there are no traces of his entry, no cuts or nicks on the door handle or key hole, no scattering of your things, no dip on your bed. There’s nothing.

Alright. Two can play at this game.

The hamper is moved, strategically maneuvered into the bathroom that your room holds. You’re careful to leave the lid propped. It looks haphazard, but it takes a precise click of the plastic to lock it into that position. You’ll be able to tell if it’s been moved.

You tug your panties out of your dresser and count them, noting the colors, patterns, the imperfections in the lace. If you’re going to do this, you need to know what you’re working with. The inventory must be precise, each variant recognized and tallied.

Every day, it’s a rinse and repeat process. Yank the flutter of fabrics out, spread them across your sheets and count. It’s tedious, bordering on annoying, but you wanna know. It’s like an itch. It sits right where you can’t reach and it tickles at the back of your mind. Besides, you’ve always liked a good puzzle. Although, this isn’t quite what you had in mind, you’ll take it and you’ll solve it, if it’s the last thing you do.

Two days after you start this mind-numbing task, four pairs go missing.

******

It’s late when you stumble back into the hideout, padding past the darkened bar and up the steps. The mission, despite its lower ranking, and pay, you think bitterly, had taken almost three days. Thankfully, the information you’d gleaned was worth it, but you’re exhausted. You’re wiping a sleepy hand across your face when you notice your door.

It’s ajar.

Instinctually, you fall to your haunches, tip toeing toward the crack, eyes narrowed, fingers curled into fists. The room is pitch black but there’s something, no, someone, in there. You can make out their outline. It’s a jagged cut that sits upon your bed and you can hear the tiny hitches and groans that they’re gasping out.

As your eyes adjust, you can see more. Your knees fall to the floor, digging into the wood and you steady yourself against the wall, eyes wide. He’s propped along your pillows and his hand is working over himself, using the friction of another pair of your panties to rub himself to completion. You can’t make out the exact shape of his cock but from the rapid fire tugs of his fist you can tell it’s long. It must be thick too, since he needs to adjust his pulls toward the tip.

He’s quiet, but you can still hear the catches and moans he’s making. Your name slips out too and the utterance makes your mouth go dry. So that’s who it is. Well, wonders never cease.

In the months that you’d known him, he hasn’t paid you much mind. Even through the haze of this strange obsession, he hasn’t altered his day to day routine, hasn’t broken character, hasn’t spoken to you unless the situation absolutely called for it.

Damn. It’s too much, it’s way, way...no. No. It’s not that it’s too much, you think, mesmerized by the sight that’s splayed across your sheets. It’s nowhere near enough.

You want to march in there, yank your soiled panties off his dick and hear what kind of noises he would make for you then. Would he shove you off, or would he welcome your notice? Either way, he’s too close now.

His hips have started to rut upwards, unable to resist the rhythm he’s created. The moans have drifted into hisses and his back arches when he cums, those familiar ropes of white splashing across the pastel of your lace. He’s careful to catch the drops, pinching the end of his cock and shuddering at the overstimulation. As he sits up, you cautiously rise, unsteady on your wobbling legs.

You’re halfway down the stairs when your door shuts. His footsteps recede down the hallway and you can hear him as he thuds into his own space, the click of his lock reverberating in your ears.

******

Thus, the game of cat and mouse continues.

Outwardly, neither of you reveal your hand, keeping your cards close to the chest, out of each others line of sight. Your door locks, unlocks, and you keep losing more panties. You’ve marked the one that will make the difference. It’s your new, favorite, pair. You haven’t worn them yet, but they’re a lush item, expensive, luxuriant, an excess that you don’t usually allow yourself. You’d purchased them the day after you’d finally caught sight of him. You couldn’t help it.

Most people, you reason, would be horrified by this situation, but not you. Oh no, you’re so turned on you can barely sleep. You start to masterbate in the early evening, when you know the others are moving around, your fingers trailing past your dampened curls, a careful fingernail pricking along your clit. You’ve even left your door open, cracked, welcoming the attention of anyone passing by. Once, you could have sworn you’d heard him. The whisper of that gasp, imagined or not, had bowled you over, your thighs clamping around your wrist, your cunt pulsing around nothing, hungry, slathering, desperate for more.

You want to just toss those panties on your bed and provoke the interaction. Goddamnit, how much longer is he gonna make you wait?

******

Not even 24 hours later, they’re gone.

He’s getting reckless, too. Your hamper is knocked over, the dresser drawer that holds your underwear is a crumpled mess, and he’s deliberately left a vacant hole where the panties used to lay. It’s screaming for your attention and you can feel your heartbeat thrumming against your breast.

Finally.

The next mission you’re assigned is easy, too easy. It’s mid-afternoon and there’s no reason for you to be back this early. Well, that’s an oversimplification. There is a perfectly excellent reason for you to be back, you’re just hoping the sliver of intel that was dropped for you will pay off.

Apparently, while the rest of you were out pounding the pavement, he’s elected to stay behind. He had something he needed to take care of.

“It sounded important,” Toga informed you, her voice lilting, rising with that sharp toothed smile of hers.

“Why are you telling me this,” you’d asked her, biting your lip and crossing your legs, soothing the throb that’s pricking in your core.

“He just told me to tell you, didn’t ask him anything more. You know how he is. He can be, prickly,” Toga winks, popping her head to the side, bouncing her golden locks.

“Alright,” you reply, adding a mask of disdain and disinterest to your performance. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

Lies, lies.

So many fucking lies, but he must know that you realize, that you know. Why else enlist Toga? He hated having to lay things out. No, he must know, he has to.

The bar is empty and the upper floors are deathly still.

Your door is sensibly shut but you can make out his jerks, his gasps, and those choked whimpers that echo past the flimsy wood. Your hand catches against the knob and you take one, last, steadying breath.

Here we go.

When you swing the door open he startles upward, his white hair curtaining the flush of his cheeks. Those vermillion irises land on you and he vaults away, nearly tumbling off the side of your bed. His pants are still bunched around his thighs, so that hinders him from making a true getaway. As he’s fumbling with the dark material, you don’t miss the shake of his hands and the spread of that lovely blush.

Oh, this is too perfect.

Before he can finish tucking himself back in his pants, you’re dashing across the top of your bed, ignoring the discarded panties, ignoring the dark glare that he gives you, ignoring everything but that heated bulge that’s giving him so much trouble.

Impatient, your fingers curl around his wrists and you use the millisecond of surprise that your swift action has gifted you. With a low gasp, he falls forward, his knees sinking into the softness of your mattress. One hand lowers to brace himself, but he’s careful to keep a finger arched away, preserving the permanence of your bed. Before he can get his bearings, you’re pressing him onto his back, straddling his lean hips and lowering those dark pants back down.

His cock, badly concealed by the upper line of his boxers, springs out, curving proudly toward his muscled stomach. For his part, Shigaraki squirms under you, his scarred lip set in a forbidding scowl. His deadly hands lower to yours, but you ignore his unspoken threat, knocking his trembling digits away. Your fingers lace around his cock, squeezing at the heft of him, stroking up the spidery veins and grooves until he’s dropping his defiant head back against your sheets.

“Wh-what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he growls, his raspy voice halting over the question.

“Who? Me?” you laugh, tugging a few more gasps from his shaking lips. There’s a pale strand of precum that’s leaking from his tip and you brush your thumb over it, gathering it against the pad and using it to ease your motions. His hips buck up and he shoves himself into your fist, a long string of curses slipping through his clenched teeth.

“I don’t think you get to ask that, dear leader,” you tease, leaning over his prone form. You’re glad he’s forgone wearing that creepy hand. It hadn’t even come into your calculations of how all of this would go. “No, not with the way you’ve been behaving.”

“I-I didn’t...fuck–”

“What? Didn’t think I’d find out?”

“You’re not supposed to be here. I sent you on that– ah– that mission for a reason,” Shigaraki bites out, shifting away from your close inspection. You smile at his discomfort and cup your free hand around his chin, yanking him back to you, forcing him to look up.

“That’s too bad, cus’ I finished early. Looks like I’m just that good, huh?”

He’s seething up at you, his eyes gleaming in the low light of your room, but he’s not making any attempts to leave. He may want to, but it seems his body has other plans. His cock is swelling as you pick up your tempo, your fingers clenching and releasing as you go, edging him along.

“You ever fucked a girl?” you ask, leaning back to admire the tense enjoyment of the man under you. The muscles of his stomach, coil and writhe, flexing each time you hit his tip and relaxing as you make the swift pass back down.

“N-no,” he moans, jerking his hips up, silently demanding that you pick up the pace.

“Did you want to?” you whisper, lowering to his face again, letting your soft lips trace along his temple. His skin is rough, but you like the contrast. Shigaraki seems to enjoy it too, his eyes slipping behind his eyelids as he turns toward you. When he doesn’t answer, you slow the hand that’s passing over the strain of his length. Shigaraki hisses at the shift and his eyes pop open again. They burn as they blaze up at you, clearly echoing his displeasure.

“Asked you a question,” you scold. He’s quiet for a long breath, but, after a few tense seconds, he lowers his eyes and nods, his jaw tight. “Should I take that as a yes?”

“I want you to fuck me,” Shigaraki grumbles, flashing a quick glare your way. “Was that clear enough for you?”

“Yes, sir,” you reply, one delicate eyebrow arching at his disgruntled expression.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” he huffs, grimacing as you lift your hand from him, freeing yourself to yank your shirt off.

“What do you want me to call you?” you ask, unbuttoning your jeans and easing them down the curve of your hips.

“My fucking name.”

“Shigaraki?”

“No. Tomura,” he replies, his voice falling into that deep rasp again. He’s watching you closely and you grin down at his frank assessment.

“Alright, Tomura,” you begin, testing out the unfamiliar acknowledgement. “Let’s make this good for you, hmm? What are you wanting to try first?”

He’s silent and you can hear the grinding of his teeth. “What’s better for you?”

Oh. Well, that’s not a question you were expecting. “For me? Uh, I guess I prefer to be on top. Let’s me control things and–”

“So do that,” he shrugs, finally peeling those dark pants off his long legs. He leaves his shirt on, but it doesn’t matter, if you’re riding him it’s not like you can’t tuck your hands under the tattered fabric.

“After acting like such a creep, you’re being pretty nonchalant about all of this,” your fingers wander along his sides and he shudders again, his neck bowing off the bedding.

“You’re one to fucking talk. Think I didn’t know what you were doing?”

“Ha! Well, well. No wonder you took my bait so easily. When did you figure me out?”

“That night you sat outside your door and watched me,” his hands raise to your hips and he urges you to hurry up, grunting when your dripping cunt traces over his tip. “Then you left your fucking door open. Not just once, either, no, you did it for days. It was a whole fucking week of that shit. Didn’t even need to steal a pair of your slutty little panties to smell you then. You reeked. I could smell you from my room.”

You laugh, helping him to press up and he glides into you, stretching you, radiating a satisfying ache along the slippery heat of your walls. His legs lift and his hands fall from your hips. Once you’re fully seated, your pelvis flush with his, you give him a few gulping breaths.

“Ahh, fuck, oh– fucking damn it. Ohh, this feels nice. God, you feel so fucking good,” he mumbles, his voice falling into a hysterical edge. You bite your lip and raise up on your knees, making sure you grip him tightly as you go. Another mantra of obscenities drop from his lips and his feet brace against the bed, his hips rutting blindly as you begin that slow lift and lower.

“How’s that?” you query, moaning when he returns those broad hands to your hips. His reply is a sharp thrust and you’re tipped forward, forced to sprawl over him, fingers digging for purchase in his dark shirt. He grunts at the weight of you but he keeps his pace up, using the bed as leverage.

You’re so close to him and you can’t help but reach for his face, suddenly desperate to feel his lips against yours. He doesn’t fight your hold, but he does let out a long groan when you tentatively kiss him. It’s slow at first and you’re very conscious of those dangerous hands of his. They’re still braced against your hips, but the four digits are starting to dig into your skin, sinking into the vulnerable dips until you’re whining.

He’s unsure, so you help him along.

You suck and nip at him, teasing him until he’s raising his head for more. Finally, one of those powerful hands detaches from your waist and he snatches at the back of your neck, insisting that you let him explore you further. After a time, you need air more than you need his lips, so you shake yourself free, pulling away and grinding your hips down as he ruts into you again.

“Not bad,” you tell him, grinning when he swipes his tongue over his swollen lips, his eyes lifting to peer up at you curiously. “Want me to take it up a notch?”

“No,” he replies sharply. “I like this.”

You snort at his blunt response and give him what he’s asked for. You keep the drags of your lifts slow, enjoying how he throbs and swells inside you. Each time you rise, you roll your hips and he sighs at every minor clench that your pussy does. After a time, you can’t ignore the pulsations of your impatient clit, so your fingers trail downward, delicately rolling and grinding against the bud.

Tomura tilts his head at this and his hazy vermillion snags your attention. “Does...does that feel good?”

For a second, you’re unsure what he means, but when his hand ghosts over yours, you realize. “Mmhm,” you gasp, giving yourself a quicker tweak, delighting in the widening of his eyes when your cunt flushes another wave of arousal around him. It slicks between your thighs and pools around his pelvis, gleaming against the dark curls that rest there.

“Lemme try,” he demands, batting your hand away and replacing your fingers with his own. He’s clumsy and he’s not expecting it to be that slippery, but he’s a quick study and he watches your face expectantly each time he tries something different.

“Y-you’re doing so good, Tomura,” you praise, lingering on his name, pleased that he reacts so positively to it. “Just a little bit...oh fuck...yeah, right there is perfect.”

You’re not being facetious either, he’s honestly killing you with those earnest looks and careful prods. Each time you gasp, he presses just a fraction more, testing out his new skills and expanding on them. As a reward, you keep the positive reinforcement coming, calling out his name as you fuck him into you, loving how he keeps pulsating and groaning each time you sink down.

A thin misting of sweat is beading over both of you, but you ignore the heat, too close to care that you’re starting to falter a bit in your rhythm. Tomura is panting also, losing some of that focus as he races toward his own release.

“Harder, ride me fucking harder, (Y/N),” he commands. The sight of him gasping and groaning out your name gives you an idea. You acquiesce to his demand but as you start those quick pumps your fingers reach behind you, searching for something that you think he’ll like even more.

Ah-ha!

It’s an older pair, not as frilly as the one’s you’d saved for him, but you’ve been wearing them all day, so that scent he was complaining about should be nice and ripe. His eyes have winced shut, so the flop of your lace panties startles him. He tenses for a second, but once he notices what you’ve given him a wicked smirk curls his lips. Instantly, his hand leaves your clit and he presses the fabric to his face, huffing heavily against the crotch.

“You fucking tease,” he groans, his tongue tracing along the seams, lapping at the thin residue that you’ve undoubtedly left behind. “Ahhh, yes. I think I would have rather had you sit on my face, but this will work, for now.”

The threat in his voice makes you shiver and you rock forward as you lower, snagging the sharp edge of his pelvis against your clit. Tomura takes in another deep breath at the sensation, his hand still holding your saliva filled panties to his lips. Just a little bit more. Your fingers tweak and pull, rolling the way you need. The heavy sting of Tomura’s cock is helping too and your pussy greedily begins to tighten around him, earning you a sputtered groan from the man beneath you.

“D-do that again,” he sighs, shifting your panties down his face so he can watch you. Obediently, you flick at your clit again and that stimulation, plus the heady knowledge that Tomura is watching, memorizing every move you make, hurtles you over the edge and you can’t help but slump forward as your orgasm crashes over you. Tomura lets out a guttural moan, flinging your panties away and yanking you to his parted lips. His kiss is frantic, nonsensical, more bites and slurps than any kind of caress, but you fall into his arms, overwrought and too turned on to think.

Once he’s had his fill of your lips, he resumes that steady pounding, his powerful hips canting into you, peppering you with jagged thrusts that leave you gasping.

“What’s the matter?” he taunts, his voice a wild rasp in your ear. “Can’t take anymore? Am I too much for you?”

You don’t trust yourself to reply, already seconds away from another shuddering release. All it takes is the feeling of him swelling and the heat of his cum to reduce you to a gasping mess again. This time, a thin line of drool escapes your lips. Delighted, Tomura snags his hand in your hair, tugging until you’re hovering over him. Gluttonously, he laps at your lips, sucking until you’re not sure who’s making the bigger slob of themselves.

When he’s finished, he rolls you off of him, splaying you out on the bed. As the world falls back into focus, you catch sight of him, leering over you, his white hair cascading around the two of you.

“I don’t think I’m done yet,” he grins, one hand cupping under your jaw. “Besides, you could have given me this weeks ago. I think you owe me a few back payments. Don’t cha’ think?”

notes: ahaha. this is basically a full fledged fic. whoops.

did i have anyone wondering if i was gonna pick Tomura or Dabi?

#asks #answered asks #pal muses #on why she can't write small #it's not hard #except when it is #tomura shigaraki #shigaraki tomura #dabi #touya todoroki #todoroki touya #bnha smut #drabble #kinda?#i refuse to do a word count

765 notes · View notes

saby-chan · 3 years

Text

Fire Lord Ozai: A blood thirsty monster or the less fortunate “Zuko” of his generation?

Hello again and thank you as always for clicking and allotting some of your time to read my humble post! Since I’ve happened to notice quite an increase in posts lately regarding the controversial character and nature of the former Fire Lord, the now imprisoned fallen prince Ozai, and I’ve personally promised in my previous post that I will share my own analysis on him if people asked me to do so (which actually happened), I am here to deliver my own take on this very intriguing man’s character, while also building a potential past for him based on stuff gathered from the show’s cannon.

I would like to start this essay with what I find to be my favorite quote ever: ”Monster’s aren’t born, they are created.” ~ Naruto Uzumaki (Naruto) What I like about this quote soo much and find very inspirational is the truth it holds within its short, yet powerful message. We are often fast to judge a “book by the cover”, to reduce others to what we assume of them by their appearance or latest actions that we’ve seen them do, but never actually take a moment and wonder where they come from, if this person we soo harshly look down upon really has been this way since their very beginning?

I’ve come across many comments on social media related to ATLA, especially on YouTube videos on which people would throw with harsh comments such as “Aang being a coward for choosing to spare the villain just because they saw a dumb baby pic of them” or “Ozai is the essence of evil and even as a baby he’d been a monster”. I can’t help but wonder who hurt these people to make them be so cruel? Like, how messed up must you actually be to say that a baby, a friggin baby, is the embodiment of all evils? Or that a child was a coward for choosing to see his opponent’s last bits of humanity and opted to spare them?

Aang was soo morally conflicted about the idea of killing Ozai not only because it contradicted the morals of his people, but because he himself understood that this man hadn’t always been the cruel beast he came to met in their first and final showdown. It’s important to note here the fact that upon finding that picture, Aang was actually convinced it had to be Zuko as a baby since it looked so innocent and cute and was actually surprised to learn it was Zuko’s father. And that’s the thing, Ozai was born like us all as an innocent and sweet baby. Babies aren’t in any way evil or twisted, they don’t even have the notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ defined in their small, still developing minds. In fact, the very choice of the creators to add this picture in the show is meant to tell us this very thing: this man wasn’t always like this. But if he wasn’t always like this, then what happened to make him become this way?

Well, in order to find out the reason, we must go back in time to the very beginning: Ozai’s childhood and upbringing. For this next part I am going to solely focus on the show cannon, as the comics aren’t the products of BryKe and have a lot of inconsistencies to the source’s cannon (you can go and read my other post on why they fail when it comes to Zuko’s character and his family).

From what we know and can easily deduce by ourselves just from their appearances, Ozai and his brother Iroh have a huge age gap between them (somewhere between 10 and 15 years). This has to be our first red flag: isn’t it soo odd that this family opted to have their children at such a long distance between pregnancies? It almost feels as if Ozai hadn’t actually been part of his father’s actual family planning... In other words, he was a ‘mistake’ child (I actually hate having to use this terminology, but it will become relevant to when we expand on Azulon’s relationship with his sons). Sure, some may argue that Azulon actually decided to have two sons in case something were to happen to his first born, but wouldn’t it have been more logical to have his second born at 2-3 years max distance from his first? Why choose to have your second child when you are much older and thus risk having a baby with issues, if your sole purpose of this child is to serve as an insurance that you don’t ‘run out’ of heirs? It just doesn’t make much sense, so let’s go for the moment with the possibility that Ozai was an unplanned pregnancy.

This perspective actually gives way to another very interesting aspect: remember the infamous “Born lucky...Lucky to be born” quote? What if I tell you that there is a possibility that this quote wasn’t Ozai’s personal wicked invention, but actually something he himself heard from his very own father? It had been puzzling me for a long time why he choose to say “You were lucky to be born” to Zuko, which implies that Zuko wasn’t supposed to exist. I mean, it’s soo odd that Ozai went with something implying that Zuko was an unplanned pregnancy, since Zuko was the first born. So my theory is that maybe Ozai wanted to convey a different message to Zuko when he said that quote, but due to his anger he ended up replicating the same line he received from Azulon at some point in his childhood. We never got the exact flashback when the line was delivered from Ozai to Zuko, so we don’t have the exact context that lead to it (remember, we are excluding Yang’s take on the matter from the comics).

I mean, this feels like something that wicked old Azulon would have said to his least favorite child. Okay, so let’s go with the scenario that Ozai was an unwanted child, to which we could also add the possibility that Ilah’s health deteriorated after the first birth, which makes plausible the family’s initial decision of stopping at 1 kid.

Moving on, we know from the old ATLA character wiki’s that Ozai’s character design was made with Zuko in mind, being meant to be a grown up version of Zuzu, without the scar. An interesting choice indeed and even Iroh’s letter to Zuko on Ozai from one of the ATLA books describes Ozzy in a similar way to teenage Zuko in book 1: stubborn, feisty, determined and with a volcanic personality (easy to anger and competitive), so it means that these were intentional choices to imply that Zuko and his father are more similar than we were led to believe at first glance. Maybe Ozai was the “Zuko” of his generation. Also, in one of the interviews on the royal family, BryKe stated that Ozai worked very hard to get where he is in book 3, referring to his firebending specifically (we all know how Ozzy got the throne, so clearly, he didn’t “work hard” for that), so maybe he wasn’t always the strongest man alive, with the most exceptional firebending skills out there, like Azula who showed ease in her learning, but rather someone closer to Zuko’s weaker performance as a child, building his way to success through endless hard work until he became the prodigy we know today.

Continuing with our theoretical scenario, after his birth, the second child show’s lesser skills compared to his brother Iroh (by that I don’t mean that he wasn’t gifted at all, but that maybe Ozai wasn’t as fast and great of a learner like his big bro), so Azulon opts to just ignore him and continue focusing solely on his golden child. In my headcannon I actually think that Ilah survived the birth and so she was left in charge of the younger child’s education and upbringing. At this point Iroh is already 10 or older, so he is forced to focus on his development, which prevents him from spending time with his lil brother, but just for the sake of being positive, let’s assume that Ozai still had both his mother and his big brother to keep him sheltered from Azulon’s darkness for a small portion of his childhood.

I choose to believe that Ozai had his mother’s love for a small bit of his childhood due to his willingness in the show to allow Ursa (who mind you, as the granddaughter of Roku was considered a treacherous individual) to spend a ton of time with both Zuko and Azula and share her philosophy with the children, as seeing his wife playing with their children probably reminded him of his own bitter-sweet memories he had with Ilah. They also probably spent a lot of their time near the turtle-duck pond since that pond’s existence prolly dates long before Ozai and Ursa married and had their own children.

Unfortunately, Ilah dies and little Ozai remains all alone, to be influenced negatively by his father (and even by his grandpa Sozin, we don’t really know for certain when the old man died, so he prolly was there for a short time when Ozzy was still a child). Azulon most likely blames Ozai for his wife’s death as the second birth might’ve really had a huge toll on Ilah’s already fragile body, bringing her closer to death, so he still neglects and ignores the child, if not straight out bullies and abuses him for not being on par with Iroh. This prolly leads to Ozai becoming jealous of his brother since Iroh has their father’s love, pushing them further apart. I headcannon that this jealousy between the siblings led to Ozai complaining to his dad when he finally had too much of their father’s discrimination (at a similar age to when Zuko prolly did and got the infamous line, if not younger) only to get the “Iroh was born lucky, you were lucky to be born!” line with the sole purpose of hurting him since now the child knows that he was never wanted.

When Azulon scolds very furiously adult Ozai in Zuko’s memories for daring to ask to be named crown prince, he literally says something like “What, you dare ask me to betray MY own son?!” (this is like red flag number two), line that pretty much testifies how Azulon chose to pretty much treat Ozai as if he wasn’t his son too, showcasing how much he despised his second born and favored the first child over him. Since we are on the topic of their last conversation, the punishment Azulon gave to his son alone proves this man’s level of sadism, which leads me to be believe that Ozai’s childhood was full of this type of punishments for bad behaviors that could be easily corrected trough a long serious lecture or a lesser punishment focused more on teaching him an actual lesson.

The old wikis also mention on the page about the hall with portraits of the previous Fire Lords that it was the place where Ozai chose to spend most of his time in his youth, seeking advice from his ancestors. I mean, seriously now, if he had a good and supportive father and a present brother in his life, would Ozai had chosen to seek guidance from the dead instead of his living family? That piece of information that was easily overlooked by many proves how lonely this man was in his youth.

So for the most part of his life, Ozai grew up under the toxic influence and abuse of his tyrant father who refused to acknowledge him. Yet he managed to grow up still full of determination to one day prove his worth to Azulon and gain his acceptance (just like we saw with Zuko in book 1, who was desperate to regain his honor and be accepted by his father). But unfortunately, no matter how strong he became or how good of a firebender he was, Azulon was unmoved and unphased by his second son’s performance.

From what we could gather from the little info we received in the show, it seems that Ozai was never sent to the battle field to aid his older brother, being kept as a stay home prince, with the only occasion he actually left home being to search for the Avatar (I don’t think Iroh was sent to do his part on searching the Avatar since he strongly believed that there wasn’t going to ever be one, so it’s safe to assume Azulon assigned Ozai with this mission just to get rid of him for a few years) and the only purpose he ever served to his father was to become part of the old man’s genetics experiment in order to create strong unparalleled firebending offspring (which I am pretty sure were meant to be ‘biological war machines’ used by Azulon in the war, as he didn’t really seem to give a shit about Ozai’s children compared to Lu Ten). So just imagine the level of disappointment and dishonor Ozai must’ve felt as a man and young aspiring soldier to find out that he was going to be used like a ‘non-bending daughter’ in a strategical marriage and never get to serve his country in what he’d been taught was the greatest and most important war for their Nation.

All in all, this marriage didn’t really end up that badly because it seems he and Ursa were actually very compatible. The old wiki for Ursa states that she was a noble woman and the perfect match for Ozai, which leads me to believe that show Ursa was intended to be a very strong willed and determined woman who earned his respect. The show never stated that Ozai never wanted his first born or that he was disappointed with Zuko from birth like the comics say, so it’s safe to assume that Ursa and Ozai actually ended up falling in love at some point since they had not one, but two kids with relatively a short time in between pregnancies.

There are actually many signs in the show that actually prove that these two loved each other and Ozai didn’t abuse his wife: from the fact that they went every year to see Ursa’s favorite play despite Ozai hating the poor performance of the Ember Island Players (I mean, what man would do such a sacrifice as to endure the same torture every single year just to make his wife happy if he never loved her?), Ursa’s undeniable and sincere love for their children (in the show it was never stated that Ursa saw Zuko and Azula as someone else’s children, so if she were indeed an abused woman who was forced to have these children, she wouldn’t have ever loved them to such an extent, especially Zuko who resembled his father the most physically), the fact that Ursa had equal rights in their marriage and raising of their children (her even scolding and grounding Ozai’s favorite child without hesitation), to the most significant scene to the Urzai ship in Zuko’s flashbacks: Ozai sitting troubled all alone in Ursa’s favorite spot by the pond, in a sad and brooding atmosphere, after he lost her, instead of celebrating what had to be the happiest day of his life since he was finally crowned Fire Lord (it’s clear who had more importance in his heart: Ursa meant more to him than the throne, so losing her outshined his achievement). In fact, Ursa must’ve been the only thing that still kept him outside of the darkness that threatened to swallow his heart and once he lost her, Ozai had nothing else to keep him on the right path.

And even as a father, it seems that Ozai wasn’t always cold and distant to his children, as his true self depicted in Zuko’s memories on Ember Island shows him caring for both of his children, even holding Zuko close to him with a protective arm on the boy’s shoulder. Except the Agni Kai, there don’t seem to be any instances in which he was physically violent towards his son before the banishment (Iroh literally let Zuko in to join that faithful war meeting willingly. Would’ve he done that if he knew his brother to be very violent towards his children in case they disobeyed? If yes, then it would make Iroh actually very questionable on a moral standpoint) and even on an emotional level, I don’t really think that he was actually abusive to him (at least while Ursa was there) because from Zuko’s conversation with Zhao, he’s adamant that his father will take him back and even states "You don't know how my father feels about me. You don't know anything!", meaning that the father he used to know showed him a level of respect and genuine affection (if Ozai were to bully Zuko since the boy’s very early childhood, do you think this kid would grow up to be so sure that his father wants him around and would he defend this bully when someone badmouths them in front of him?).

Even with Azula, despite people demonizing her from early childhood and saying that she was manipulated since birth by Ozai to become a war machine, I do believe that she shows genuine love and affection towards her father. I do choose to believe that back in the good times when the family was happy, Ozai spent quality time with his daughter, filling in the gap left by Ursa’s neglect. I theorize that the reason why kid Azula badmouthed her grandpa and uncle was because she was being very protective of her father: since she used to like spying and eavesdropping, it’s safe to assume that she prolly witnessed many instances in which the old man bullied or insulted Ozai, favoring Iroh over him. It’s a bit harder to see it that way since her snarky comments involve dark topics, but since they live in a society governed by power and war, I see them as something similar to if Azula would’ve said “Uncle sucks and he will surely be fired from his job!” or “Grandpa is old and weak, he should leave the family business to dad!”. Even the fact that the only thing capable of shattering her to pieces was her father leaving her proves how much she cared for him. Ty Lee and Mai’s betrayal was a big blow on Azula’s control and sanity, but she didn’t breakdown until Ozai discarded her after his coronation as Phoenix King. There’s nothing more painful in this world than to be left behind by the person you loved the most and was there by your side your whole life, whom you wanted to follow to world’s end and back. That was the moment Azula finally realized that the father she used to know and love was actually gone and had been in fact, long gone for years at this point.

But if Ozai cared for his family what made him change? Easy, it all comes back to the fact that his father never acknowledged him. The throne doesn’t seem to be his ultimate goal in life since Ozai discarded of the Fire Lord title very easily, tossing it to Azula without any remorse or hesitation. It was more about the meaning behind getting the crown: replacing Iroh in the line of succession was the ultimate proof of his father’s acceptance, that he wasn’t only a “mistake” and “failure” in his father’s eyes, but since Azulon ended up saying and doing what he did, backfired Ozai and made him understand that no matter how hard he tried, the old man will never see him for what he is. So yeah, for a proud man like Ozai this was a hard defeat to swallow, which in turn sparked his strong desire of winning the war and becoming the king of the world: if Azulon wouldn’t accept him even in death, then Ozai will prove to the whole world that he was above his father and his “perfect” brother by accomplishing what they never could and even better and no one was going to stop him, not even his own family.

This is what differentiates Ozai from Zuko: while both had similar upbringings, Ozai never broke away from his obsession of gaining his father’s admiration, allowing himself to fall prey to the darkness left by Azulon in his heart and abandon his true self, only to become the copy of his abuser, while Zuko stood up to his dad and chose his own destiny. If Aang were to come back around 20 or 30 years earlier, then he might’ve actually been able to save Ozai just like he saved Zuko, but unfortunately it wasn’t this way.

Do I think that Ozai could still be saved and redeemed even after the events of book 3? Definitely! Since he’s actually a broken man and still has a tiny bit of humanity left within, I think he still has a chance to change his heart. The only thing is that it’d be a long lasting process: first off he needs to spend a long time in solitude and reflect on his life’s choices and his past, understand where he went wrong and that what happened to him in his childhood is called abuse, which he ended up replicating on his own children. After he understands his wrongdoings and becomes willing to rediscover his true self, he needs to understand the truth about the war, that everything he’d known was fake propaganda and that there was nothing glorious in what he, his father and Sozin did under the excuse of “sharing their Nation’s greatness with the rest of the world!”. But most importantly of all, the only remedy that could possibly save him is love. It sound cliche, but by responding to hatred with more hate like Zuko did in the comics would never change the world “for the better” or bring it “to reality”. The only way to save both Azula and Ozai would be trough showing them the power of love, hope and empathy, how they don’t have to struggle alone and push everyone away. And especially by redeeming Azula, she would be a very important piece in Ozai’s redemption: since he had a closer parent-child relationship with Azula and cared for her the most when he did care, realizing how much he made her suffer through his actions, that would probably break Ozai enough to make him admit that he was wrong all along.

So yeah, this is my analysis on Ozai’s character using the cannon information from the show and old wikis and why I think he is just the product of a very bad environment and an abusive parent who never showed him love (if there’s a reason for why Ozai might be uncapable of showing a healthy parental love to his children is because you can’t show what you’ve never learnt yourself), being the Zuko of his generation who never got to experience the positive influence of an “Uncle Iroh” to guide him on the right path.

You can agree with me or not on this one, but this is what I choose to believe. Maybe I am way too good by choosing to see any potential good in anyone, but I feel it’s a better way than to counter hate with more hate like Yang did in his monstrous portrayal of Ozai in The Search.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you agree with anything I’ve said, feel free to leave a like and to reblog this post.

See you next time and stay safe! Bye-Bye!

Saby out.

#atla #atla rant #avatar the last airbender #ozai #azulon #ursa #zuko #azula

33 notes · View notes

steve0discusses · 3 years

Text

S5 Ep6: Joey Wheeler is on Fire, Yet Again

Came down with a little sickness-not the biggie, just a little sly guy. But I took some meds, I’m a little floaty, I’ve only been listening to baroque music all morning for some reason? And I hate baroque music usually? But I’ll leave it to bro to tell me if this is fluid enough.

Just so you know, these caps were kind of a hot mess for a while and some of them read like that Garfield in of hot eat the food comic until...today. So pls don’t judge me, Judge my damn DMV where no one was following Covid regulations because I’m pretty sure that’s where I got this damn cold.

We start off with Roland getting more attention than he ever has in his entire life. Like honestly, I don’t know what Roland’s job really is...but he’s got a very diverse set of very useless skills. One of which, is knowing how to announce sports games that aren’t really a sport, while those games he’s announcing slowly fall into chaos.

Anyway, Roland’s taking so long cherishing his sweet time before everything goes to hell, that he’s boring Joey, who’s kinda turned into a ball of stress in the waiting room.

A lot of this episode is us watching them watching Joey having a break down moment by moment, TBH.

(read more under the cut)

Yugi telling Joey to study his cards and straight up--what?

Like at this point they know what’s on the cards, right? Like there comes a point where even Yugioh cards have a finite amount of words and I’m just going to assume that like...Joey probably knows them all in his own deck, right?

(bro note: they have no limit on what they will put on a card)

Then again, maybe Yugi doesn’t know what “study” means?

Also, appreciate how some artist crosshatched the hell on Joey’s nose there and I zoomed out and ruined it.

Now for some reason every duelist is hanging out in the duel lodge, including our current arch-villain guy who’s brought a book. I want to know what book this guy even reads so no one could suspect he’s actually a hacker who uses computers. He’s reading romance, right? And I don’t think he’d even be into Twilight, I think he’s straight up into hard core Mom romance like a lame ass Nicholas Sparks over there reading “Dear John” for the millionth time because he is completely un-phased by anything else happening in this room.

Joey, our hero, just out there being an asshole for no reason.

After Tea is pushed into a locker or something screaming about her need for female friends (which she screamed in earshot of Rebecca again, who I figured was on friends terms with her after last episode...but I guess not) Leon hops up to remind us that we should be caring about the fact that his character exists.

And like, I love Leon’s hair color--that’s a good choice, and legit that is the color I tried to dye my hair at the beginning of the epidemic (it didn’t work PS, my hair cannot take dye for the life of it) but also like...he just kinda feels like a weak Rebecca as far as characters go. He’s young, he’s good at cards...I think he goes to a private school? That’s all I can think of about Leon.

He mostly just reminds us that the big prize of this tourney is to duel Yugi, who anyone could have dueled at any point even without the tournament.

On the way out of the...duel room? lounge? Area? Joey decides to like...make peace with Zigfried, and I gotta tell you, I kinda have to side with Zigfried, because Joey spent the last ten minutes being a freak in the dressing room/lounge/bathroom and at one point looked like he was going to hold the entire locker room in a stranglehold.

I would also want some space from Joey Wheeler, is what I’m saying.

After insulting Joey’s style (which honestly, Joey...has a style? He pops his collar, that’s his entire style.) Zigfried assures us that Joey’s gonna lose and like...

...probably, right? Just looking at the plausible direction this season will go.

Anyway, Joey is such a mess (which is the theme of the episode, that Joey needs to learn to chill in order to win at card games) that Rebecca is like “I understand if all of you leave me to go help our poor baby Joey.” And no one felt bad for her.

Mokuba comes over to tell everyone all of the Kaiba family secrets because Mokuba has no filter.

Seto has devoted himself to staring at a computer screen for the rest of this episode. I guess he’ll put their names into Google, realize that social media hasn’t been invented yet, and then just lie his head down on the desk and take a power nap until the tournament is over. Much like I did after taking Dayquil this afternoon.

I like how Seto dressed for success and then locked himself in the server room for most of this arc so far. Maybe he’s just...really tired, I dunno. I don’t really blame the guy, he’s had a hard time.

And then Yugi was like “DAMN IT MOKUBA, JUST ONCE CAN YOU NOT INVITE THE ILLUMINATI???”

And we had a weird scene where Yugi just started talking to the ghost and it was while he was talking to everyone else, and the show didn’t treat it like that’s a weird thing to do...but it was a weird thing to do.

This show does that sometimes, where I guess they imply that Yugi’s Pharaoh conversations are split second conversations but...they’re not, right?

Also this chick ain’t gone yet, and Mokuba is just failing at his entire job for not zeroing in on vibes coming off this chick like stinky cheeseman.

So listen.

Did the Kaibas make like 3 types of Blue Eyes Caboose to one up Noah? Because Noah made one choo choo dragon, and then Mokuba and Seto were like “how dare” and then made sure that everyone ride every single version of the blue eyes caboose just to see how proud of them they were.

How many months of troubleshooting was the train? Like how long in development did Seto and Mokuba spend on these? A lot right? Like most of the time?

I did not check the subs to see if Roland said Jumping or Champion but I like to believe that Roland thought it was a cool new name he gave him.

Then these guys all showed up.

Hey so...can we talk seating arrangements?

Tea decided not to sit next to Yugi after complaining about not spending time with him for like how many episodes? Or was it too awkward to sit on top of what was probably Pharaoh?

Or did Mokuba go like “please, Tea, I cannot sit next to the others because I’m pretty sure one is a mole that is about to go cray” and was Tea like “Good, I need female friends, these ones are driving me crazy!” and then was Mokuba like peering desperately over the edge of his self made dragon train prison realizing he has to listen to Tea complain about boys for the rest of his ride across molten lava?

Headcanons abound about this weird seating arrangement that the animators drew for the reasons they did...but reasons I cannot fully understand. That and the Dayquil is making me overfixate on random stuff.

And also, Tea is kind of the Kaiba’s security’s understudy. Just there to always protect Mokuba with her ass because she’s the strongest woman alive.

PS I missed the tumblr wars because at the time I was trying to like...run a proper business on blogger. When Blogger died and I jumped over here it was like a weird ruin where everyone was like “tumblr is the most toxic place alive” and...I’ve had a really nice time here, actually. Completely missed that civil war period and I have no regrets.

Now I was there for the Petz wars (warz, I guess) where people were very militant about Petz abuse (abuze?) where apparently people were using the spray bottle on their catz too much and people were very, very upset about it to the point that they were like campaigning about it on their angelfire websites with the most bizarre grassroots campaigns that I still recall, to this day because they were like...well they looked like this:

PLAPA. Not only am I 100% positive that only this one guy ever called this movement PLAPA, but I’m 100% positive that not only are Catz not real people, but also this wasn’t actually happening and we never had any proof that it was. Either way, if people knew or suspected that you hadn’t deleted the spray bottle from your game (which at the time I had no idea how to do because I was a wee child) they would basically assume you were on a one way road to being a mass murderer in real life.

In real life we were 7 years old so like...thanks?

But that’s the closest I got to toxicity and at the time I was too young to make an email account and actually converse with these people. I was just there to download their Petz hexes, and I already made a post about how wonderful and incredible Petz Hexing was.

And y’all, I heard, just now after a little deep dive into the Petz Abuse debacle (which yes, is on the wiki), that apparently, like gardening, Petz Hexing came back in a big way during the epidemic--and I have found an active Petz forum in this the year 2021. The only problem is that I no longer remember how to use old timey forums...and I think I’m locked out of seeing most of these threads (and like this forum is so old I think I have to send them a letter in the physical mail to apply). But, I’m pretty sure they’re hosting a picture contest for who’s dogz poses the best. And I’m pretty sure someone created a hexxed Pickle Rick. Or it’s a photoshop that was made to look like a hexxed Pickle Rick.

Dammit why did it have to be Pickle Rick? That’s not worth re-installing Petz and getting it to run on Windows 10...

Guys is this the Dayquil? Is this really happening? I feel like I’m losing my mind for so many reasons...

Anyway, speaking about useless hexing it’s about time that our villain did something that was actually dangerous, so Zigfried decided to install a new virus that does more than turn off the lights. (it still turns off lights)

the Spreadsheet Virus!

Confounded by the spreadsheet software, it...um...it does this:

Straight up how does Excel make a volcano erupt? Is that why I have to pay for Microsoft office now?

All this because Joey made fun of Zigfried’s naturally pink hair? Which is the most normal hair on this series outside of like...Tristan?

Hey guys...Joey’s fine, right? Like how many times has Joey been on fire? And once in an iron cage next to like...a Fire Golem?

Joey’s fine.

MAN I miss Fire Golem. He had a good mug.

And then we just kinda watch chaos go across the park, chaos that includes: Too many ghosts in the haunted mansion (which honestly--you’ll get your money’s worth, sounds great!), the Ferris wheel goes kinda fast and thus might accidentally be fun, the lights turn off at some concert stage that only had 2 people on it (so it might just be motion detector lights and not even a virus), and um...literal fire and magma are going to set Joey Wheeler on fire.

Just...one of these events does not seem like the others. In fact most of these things sound like good improvements to the park and they should just hire Zigfried at this point.

Roland puts down his microphone and jogs across the stage, about a mile through the audience bleachers, and into the staff lounge, to go and bother Seto Kaiba, who is in a room that has a hi-def classical painting copy-pasted on the wall and I can’t look away from it.

I almost did a Google search on this painting but then thought better about it. There’s like...a billion classical paintings that look exactly like this, and they wouldn’t use like a Monet, they would have to do something that’s harder to catch to avoid copyright issues (because yes, even old ass paintings have copyright issues, but no one tell NFT’s which are going to be so freakin screwed and was such a bad idea, that I can’t even start).

Anyway, I have no idea who it is and it is legitimately driving me up a wall, but I’m on too much meds to do the effort of putting it in a reverse google image search.

Plus, a reverse google image search would only pull up Seto Kaiba.

So Kaiba takes us on a little flashback to his weird ass past, a weird ass past that just...doesn’t follow any of the established timelines, but I assume was shortly after adoption but before Seto got into a phase where he wore his school outfit everywhere and tried to shove his MMO off onto his Dad as a business model.

Seto is like 8 for some reason. I don’t know why, they kinda drew him younger this season anyway, like maybe they got a lot of fan mail and realized “Hey I think we made the 16 yo boy too sexy?” And they just toned Seto the hell down. That, and it’s a different animation team, and maybe they looked at Seto’s character design and were like “we don’t get paid enough to draw this well.” So...since Seto actually looks like a teen again, I guess his 12 year old self has to look like he’s in Elementary school.

Also, I only recognized this, because at some point in S3 as I was roasting Noah Kaiba’s weird fashion:

I remember distinctly roasting that little bow tie. I don’t remember when I wrote it, I think there was a version of this outfit that was in color...but I don’t remember where.

Anyway, it’s not the same jacket...but man that’s kind of awkward, ya? Like the maid who dressed Mokuba deffo got fired?

He um.

Turned the lights off a little bit.

Guys this villain is like...

...why does he think lights are scary? Like look at little Seto here. The boy is already bored. Seto duels on the edges of cliffs...he doesn’t care about the freakin dark.

We had a guy who killed everyone on the planet last season, and this season we have a little fashion gremlin standing in the corner and flicking the light switch going “wooooo you never catch me!” and it’s like...

...I’m starting to think this guy isn’t a witch.

Like we’re at Episode 6, there’s still time for this guy to be a witch...but I really am starting to think this guy is just...straight up not a witch. It’s everything Seto wanted, a rival who isn’t a freakin magic person...and sets Joey only fake on fire instead literally on fire like last time...

and Seto is just completely unhinged by it.

Anyway, I’m off to go drink a bowl of soup and pass out. If you’re new here, this is a link to read these in chrono order.

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

#yugioh #yu gi oh #ygo #S5 #Ep6 #Yugi Muto #Seto Kaiba #Joey Wheeler #Tea Gardner #Tristan Taylor #Mokuba Kaiba #zigfried von schroeder #rebecca hawkins #I talked about catz again #leon #but not the kings of leon guy #I mean he could be

38 notes · View notes

dorki-c · 3 years

Text

The three cups; ‘Cup of Curiosity’.

Characters: Vil!Deku, (Reader), Brief mention of; Dabi, Mr.Compress, Shigaraki, Toga, and Kurogiri.

Relationship: Villain Deku X (Reader)

A/N: SO, now that this whole shit storm of a year is coming to an end, I decided to celebrate it by making a three part series of Villain Deku, because somebody (who ilsm) relates to me when its that time of day and we have Villain Deku brain rot. But this three part series was actually inspired by my own actions, so I gotta blame myself! XD

TW: Alcohol, intimidation tactic (If ya squint!), and lots of swearing (But this is me for crying out loud...)

[Next Part: --->]

It was strange to be called upon by Deku.

Sure, Shigaraki called (*cough* *cough* bribed *cough*) you to his ‘meeting’ room to inform you of the following ‘errands’ you had to do- it’s mostly going to several over secret hideouts and torturing small-town gangsters who thought it was funny to fuck around with debts they owed to somebody who asked or hired (you didn’t pay attention to what it was called) a person from the LOV to ‘rough’ up the victim - but every now and then, it would be to go to GIran with Dabi, also known as telling Dabi not to be a fucking prick to our most trustworthy broker.

But the likelihood of Dabi not being a prick is below negative one hundred percent. So, don’t have anybody start on any solution to stop it, because you certainly don’t want any participation in the patchwork villain’s business.

Though, a clicking sound that vibrated and bounced off of the vacant corridor walls had reminded you where you were headed; Deku’s room. The room of a gentlemen (asshole), who commands us alongside Shigaraki (a wannabe leader compared to Shigaraki), and helps us get our weapons to assist our quirks (that’s actually Mr. Compress’s job in reality).

Were you in trouble? There was no plausible answer to this sudden announcement. Though, what is surprising is that it’s probably the second time- in a month- this has happened to you.

Who even cares at this moment? Besides the main factor that everyone (besides you) knows the green-haired villain has a crush on your cold-hearted attitude and your mouth-watering body, it isn’t a surprise that he wants a bite outta you- considering the high frequency of times, you have felt somebody’s ‘laser’-eyes burning judgement and criticisms into your back every goddamn minute- as you swirl a shot glass of tequila when sitting in the bar area of the base, it all pointed back to a green-haired villain as Toga would gush over how he seems distracted because of somebody’s revealing outfit....

(I’m sure you can figure out who’s outfit it might have been.)

Creep. Hissed the back of (y/n)’s mind, when she sees those polished and distinguishingly clean silver door handles jutting out from the jet-black door. “Here we go again.” She muttered under her breath when grasping the unusual- is it even wrong to call it ‘unusual’- cold door handle and pushing it open.

There, he relaxed under the glamorous illuminations that spiced the boring white walls of his room- acting like a spoiled fucking brat. (You wished that you had a teleportation quirk like Kurogiri at this moment.)

Green bangs were swooped backwards to reveal a pair of verdant emerald eyes- where they had a thin line of twinkling smugness- as the top two buttons of his ‘designer crafted’ white blouse scantly reveals the edge of his collar bone alongside seeing a faint trace of the skin on his waist as his black trousers lightly tugged downwards helping the white shirt pop out ever so slightly from the waistline.

Even if he looked handsome, there was always a hint of jealousy and hatred for him. There was always going to be that hiss or venomous snap of your voice when you spoke to him because he had so much more than you or was it the power he held?

Nonetheless, with one of his legs crossed over the other one as it was held up by an armrest, Deku’s back hit the other armrest where his attention was gathered at a newspaper article and the simple curved glass of deep crimson liquid pooled peacefully at rock bottom.

As half of his body was covered by the shadow of his chair- which he arrogantly claims as his ‘throne’- the sleek black leather was delicately shined to his appropriate standard, you couldn’t help but roll your eyes at Deku’s ridiculous sitting position. It's like he wants to be seen as an adult but instead ruins that image by acting like a child.

It’s not like he’s noticed you yet, maybe you should time how long it takes for the boy to see your impatient form tapping the lacquered brown floor with only the tips of your boots alongside hearing the metallic objects jingling- more like clanking, however, who gives a shit?

You didn’t have time for this, the mission that both you and Twice had to leave for was starting tomorrow and with all of your weapons needing a really good clean after last nights turn of events, Deku could really make effective use of his eyes to notice that somebody is waiting for him to speak.

Maybe it has been five or ten minutes? Maybe you should leave or maybe he finally noticed you. (Y/n) was already becoming annoyed with the sudden announcement, but now this shit? Does she need to call the manager or something- it's like she is receiving crappy service at a restaurant, which isn’t good.

The subtle- and very lazily- toss of the flimsy newspaper didn’t distract you from eyeing the male’s actions. Tilting his head towards the wine glass he was holding, an eyebrow quirked up in fascination of (y/n)’s impatience with a steady scowl crawling slowly against her lips- she just needs to stay calm and respectful- however, it’s becoming ever so difficult by each millisecond.

“What do you want, doll?” Furrowed eyebrows created creases in her skin, “I should be asking you that question, sir.” He smirked, took a dainty sip from his wine, and moved his body into a normal sitting position.

God, she’s so enticing to anger and manipulate, it’s becoming more than a drug for him- its steadily on the route of becoming an addiction.

“My, my, doll face- I never knew you were feisty!” As he took another sip out of his glass, his head shook in amusement of your response but as well as in curiosity of your next response. “So what? I never knew you were an alcoholic,” Placing a hand on your hips, you continued, “yet, you have at least seven empty bottles of red wine- all of them being the same brand.” His, on cue, falsely offensive gesture- where he places his free hand on the crest of his chest and gasps- was presented to you as a way to ‘let go’ on him.

Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean- you have no sympathy for him. “Now, are you going to tell me why I’m here?” Snapped (y/n), as Deku really knows how to push her buttons. He really does.

“Aww, that won’t be necessary…” Again, that smile of white but deadly opaque canine teeth was used against you as those broad shoulders curled inwards allowing a darken gaze of predatory domination where a thick glob of colourless liquid pushed against (y/n)’s throat to force itself backwards.

“I’m not playing your game, Deku.” A staggering step backwards betrayed your brave tone as you saw the last of the drinkable liquid pour downwards and a loud crash of glass elegantly shattering against the floor similarly to the elegance the man in the room carries around like a trophy.

Shaking his head in disbelief, it wasn’t till then that you swore you needed first aid assistance due to your heart bashing against each singular rib bone as it held a deadly sledgehammer. “I never said you were, doll face.”

Although he tried to get closer to you, the moment he placed both of his feet down on the floor is when your feet took you outside of the room and away from his reach.

“She’s so cruel…” Murmured the green-haired villain as it piqued his curiosity.

Taglist:

@orenjineki, @haredabi, @in-this-house-we-stan-izuku, @glitterfreezed

69 notes · View notes

halfwit-halfblood · 3 years

Text

First person perspective doesn’t bother me usually, but I think Shadow and Bone suffered a lot for it.

Hear me out.

This is mainly in relation to readers’ dislike for Mal and Zoya and the romanticisation of the Darkling despite him being a predator. (Remember when he forced himself on Alina in Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising? Yeah. Me neither, until I reread the books this week, but I’ll get to that later)

Under the cut because this got long

Regarding Mal, I think his hate stems from two directions – from people who wanted Alina to end up with the Darkling and saw Mal as an obstacle, and from those who just found him whiny and insecure (AKA me when I first read the books years ago. I was actively wishing for his death during R&R).

However, several of the lucky reviewers who have watched the Netflix adaptation already have stated that though they didn’t like his character in the books, he was much more likable in the Netflix series. Part of this I think is thanks to Archie as an actor, but also the fact that we’re no longer seeing him through Alina’s eyes. We don’t have to feel her jealously and resentment when other girls take an interest in him, or her anger in him “pushing her away” and staying distant. I’ve tried to read the books without the influence of Alina’s viewpoint on the situation, and it helped. Mal was happy as a tracker. He had friends in Dubrov and Mikhael and Alina. He had a normal life. Because of his love for Alina, he didn’t feel he had a choice when it came to choosing a future that didn’t concern her. As she ascended into her title of Sun Summoner/Sun Saint, he saw his friends die (and blamed himself for it), he was ostracized from his peers – around Alina and her friends for not being Grisha and around the other trackers and huntsmen for being close to Alina – and had to become a killer to survive. He stayed distant from Alina to protect them both and always took the opportunities he could to better himself as a fighter so he wouldn’t fail her. He gave up everything for Alina. Yes, he was whiny, but he had every right to be and it’s hard to see that when we’re forced to view him from Alina’s perspective and made to believe her assumptions as fact.

I think in recent years there’s been far more support for Zoya than there was when the books initially came out and that’s partly due to what we see of her in King of Scars. The insight we get into her as a character helps to expand her beyond the mean-spirited, jealous bully Alina views her as in Shadow and Bone. While rereading the trilogy, it felt like even as the books went on and we saw them form a tentative alliance, every positive interaction Alina had with her was partnered with a reminder of her actions in the past and Alina’s dislike for her. Recently, I’ve also seen more people addressing and rejecting Alina’s internalised misogyny that impacted how she thought about these other women, and I’m glad for it. Her opinion is jaded by her jealously of Zoya’s looks, power and attraction to Mal and this impacts their every interaction and constantly undercuts any enjoyment of Zoya as a character as we are forced to see Zoya’s qualities through a negative perspective whereas in King of Scars where the narrative is more neutral, she’s become a fan favourite.

Finally, the Darkling.

The most notable thing I noticed rereading the books recently was that are two instances where the Darkling forces himself on Alina and kisses her without consent and I’ve never seen anyone mention them. Both instances take place using the connection formed between them by the nicho’yeva.

In Siege and Storm, at the end of Chapter 20, Alina is sleeping. She wakes up to someone saying her name and kissing her. She believes it to be Mal, even says his name, and kisses him back. When she pulls back and sees the Darkling’s eyes on Mal’s face she is horrified and pushes him away. The Darkling smirks and disappears.

I won’t type out the whole thing as it goes on for a page and a half, but the key quotes are:

“Alina.”

I woke to the soft brush of Mal’s lips on mine, the barest touch to my temple, my eyelids, my brow ….. he bent to kiss the curve of my throat ….. I hesitated, confused, not quite awake ….. “I missed you Mal,” I murmured against his ear ….. He kissed me again ….. I felt his weight slide over me ….. He was kissing my throat my collarbone ….. He smiled then, a cold, clever smile like none I’d never seen on his lips ….. The Darkling rested one gentle hand on my cheek. “Soon,” he whispered. I screamed.

She is woken up by him kissing her. She returns the kiss believing that he is Mal and he makes no move to correct her because he knows she would not consent to kissing him as the Darkling.

In Ruin and Rising (Chapter 9), Alina visits the Darkling and during their conversation he reveals his true name to her. Then this happens:

He leaned in. I felt his breath against my neck, then the press of his mouth against my skin just above the collar, almost a sigh.

“Don’t,” I said. I drew back, but he held me tighter. His hand went to the nape of my neck, long fingers twining in my hair, easing my head back.

Alina explicitly tells him no and his response is to hold on and continue kissing her.

There are still fans who wholeheartedly claim that the Darkling loved Alina despite everything. With the first person perspective, Alina’s constant questioning of what she wants in life in terms of power and status, and the general hoard of book readers who will fall for any character with pale skin and black hair despite them being manipulative predators (this is also a jab towards Rhysand from ACOTAR and Hawke from FBAA), it’s easier for people to disregard the unredeemable nature of his character. I’m hoping that the Netflix series will make a firm point of the Darkling being a hundred-year-old villain who groomed a teenager rather than a plausible love interest for Alina and that without having to hear her inner monologue it will be easier for people to see him as he is.

But yeah. Fuck the Darkling.

#when i read the S&S scene between alina and the darkling i thought i was overreacting #then it happened again in R&R #and now i'm just tired #somehow that turned into this 1.1k mess lol #shadow and bone #siege and storm #ruin and rising #king of scars #leigh bardugo #alina starkov #the darkling #mal oretsev #zoya nazyalensky

24 notes · View notes

five-rivers · 4 years

Text

Interview with a Ghost (part 5: Buried)

(PART 1) (PART 2) (PART 3) (PART 4)

"What?" said Captain Jones, as Collins and Paterson finished explaining their understanding of the situation to him. "What? What?"

"That was my reaction, too," said Paterson. "Just, you know, internally."

Jones waved one hand, the other supporting his forehead.

"Er, sir?" said Collins, leaning forward, trying to catch the captain's eye. "How should we, you know, proceed on this? I don't think there's any precedent."

The captain bit back a groan. "No, there isn't. He was insistent that the Fentons, his parents, didn't do anything to him?"

"Yeah."

"But it still can't be- can't be healthy for a ghost or- or whatever he is to be there," said Jones. This was making his head hurt. "They have weapons, and even if it was an accident, he died and they- No one noticed!"

"That is pretty messed up," agreed Paterson.

"That's got to be child neglect, at least, right? Negligent homicide?"

Collins nodded. "We can't really charge them with that, though, can we? Not without revealing he's a ghost and getting the GIW and whoever stole the body coming down on us."

"That could just be something Phantom's saying, though," said Paterson. "We don't know if it's true or not."

"It felt true," said Collins. "He sounded like he was actually scared."

"But can we just let a kid- two kids, with his sister- be in a situation like that? Even if one of them is dead. Especially if one of them is dead. Or whatever Fenton, Phantom, whatever, is claiming to be."

"He didn't really claim to be anything, really," said Collins.

"Look, I already have a headache as it is. What it comes down to is, I don't want a kid to be living under the same roof as people who regularly and publicly shoot at him."

"So, what do we do?" asked Collins. "He doesn't want to leave, and I don't think we can make him, physically."

"No, we can't. But does he know that?"

"I think he's aware of his laser murder powers," said Paterson.

"He kept coming to talk to you, though," said Jones. He massaged the bridge of his nose. "There's something here..." Suddenly, it all came together. He clapped his hands. "He wants to keep his secret from the public, right? That's our leverage."

"Leverage?" asked Collins, dubiously. "Captain... he is still a teenager."

"I know, I know, but hear me out. We tell him, he has to let his parents know, and his parents, they have to make their house safe for him. If they're reasonable, they'll do it. If not, we can get them for, I don't know, going crazy and thinking their kid is a ghost, or having weapons all over their home. Obviously, he isn't. That's the position we'd maintain." Jones took a deep breath. "No need to expose him publicly, and, as long as he isn't, he'll have to act like he's human, right? If he wants to maintain the illusion?"

"I guess that would work," said Collins. "But... do we have to get child protective services involved? I don't see that going well."

"Not if everyone is reasonable," said Jones, a crazed look in his eyes.

"Hold up," said Paterson. "Doesn't this hinge on getting him to, you know, tell his parents?"

"Weapons. Home. Around children. And- We'll agree to bury the rest. Tear up documents. Hide everything. Cover for him. We already know what killed him. What's the point of bringing it into the light?"

Collins and Paterson both nodded slowly. "I'll call him," said Collins.

There was a knock on the door. The three glanced at each other.

"Come in," said the captain.

One of the officers stuck her head in. "Sir?" she said. "The mayor is here to see you."

Danny would have been at home, plotting with Jazz about how to get his body back, but, no, Skulker had to show up, again. He should have wrecked his suit instead of just sucking him into the thermos last night.

"Hah! Ghost child!" shouted Skulker. "Today I will have your pelt! I have new-!"

Danny screamed in frustration, the harmonics of his voice almost touching a ghostly wail. "Can you leave off about my pelt for like five seconds?" demanded Danny, attacking more aggressively than was his usual wont. One of Skulker's arms flew off his body, clattering on the tiles of a nearby roof. "Didn't you have enough of that, helping Vlad steal my corpse yesterday?" There, after days of dancing around the word, he had finally said it.

"Wait, your what?" asked Skulker, pirouetting awkwardly to avoid another barrage of ectoblasts.

"My. Corpse!" screamed Danny. "You helped him steal my corpse!"

"You don't have a corpse, you're still alive!"

"Shut up!" It was a good thing they were so far up. Even at the volumes they were speaking, they wouldn't be overheard. "You don't know anything! I'm half dead, so I have half a corpse, and I had to bury it, and then the police found it, and you helped Vlad steal it!" Danny was basically in tears at this point, hands clenching the metal of Skulker's chest so hard it buckled and warped, holding the unfortunate ghost above his head.

A number of complicated emotions passed over Skulker's face. "Uh," he said. "Time out?"

"What?" snarled Danny. He was more than ready to rip Skulker apart.

"Your body, whatever there is of it, did Plasmius really take it?"

"He basically gloated about it to my friends," said Danny.

Skulker's face twisted up, the metal plates it consisted of glinting in the sunlight. "Disturbing the remains of another ghost is... distasteful, at best." He shifted, obviously trying to get out of Danny's grip. Danny held on, tighter. "Let me go," he said. "I'll spread the word. There won't be a ghost in the Zone who'll work for Plasmius after this."

Danny sniffed. "I want it back," he said.

"Of course you do," said Skulker, nervously. "Just- let me go, alright, ghost child?" He paused. "Phantom?"

Danny relaxed his grip. Before Skulker could recover, he whipped out the thermos and sucked the other ghost in.

"I'll let you go," he grumbled. "Right into the Ghost Zone."

Jones did not like Mayor Masters. A complete outsider, a stranger to Amity Park, the man had somehow wormed his way into the mayor's office. Jones had always suspected bribery, but had no evidence.

This visit of his... it was suspicious. Incredibly suspicious. The timing felt rotten. Masters had barely set foot inside the station before this.

Well, the timing and the questions he was asking. Jones was glad he had told everyone to deflect questions about the body and Phantom beforehand, no matter who was asking.

Jones fixed a grin onto his face. "I'm sorry, Mr. Masters," he said. "We can't discuss ongoing investigations."

"I think," said Masters, "that, as mayor, I am exempt from that rule. I am, after all, your boss."

"That's true," said Jones, "but this case is especially sensitive, and everyone is a suspect."

"I can't possibly be," said Masters. "I didn't even live here two years ago. I believe you are dancing around the subject, sir. Let us not have our personal feelings get in the way of things, hm?"

This bastard- There was no way he should have known that particular detail. Not without suborning the ME or her assistant.

Or stealing the records. The initial reports had gone missing with the body, and the computer system had been hacked.

Jones pressed his teeth together so hard they ached. He could feel them grinding inside his head.

"Why don't I give you an overview of what we know so far?" he asked, voice as sweet as he could stand to make it. "We'll start with Cameron over here. He's the head of our cult division, and a real wizard with computers."

If anyone could drive the man off, it was Cameron.

"I didn't think babypop even had a corpse," said Ember, crossing his arms. "Are you sure he isn't just delusional?"

"He could be," said Skulker, "but that's not the point. He believes it. Do you really want to be dealing with him as a restless spirit?"

"Oh, god, no. He's already such a spoilsport. Can you imagine?" The blue flame her hair was drawn back into shuddered.

"I don't have to imagine," said Skulker. "He tore my arm off."

"He always tears your arms off," said Ember, dismissively.

"He's only going to get worse though," said Skulker, "if it really is his body. If Plasmius is doing anything to it. That anxiety. A person's body should be taken care of properly, not messed about with."

"Hey!" said Technus, who was on the other side of the room, fixing Skulker's mechanical body. "I donated MY body to SCIENCE! I'm perfectly fine."

"Yeah," said Ember. "Some people would disagree with that, but the thing is you chose to do that. Those're the rites you wanted."

"Do you think I, the great TECHNUS, master of all things technological and-"

"No, actually, I don't think you knew," said Ember.

"Ohhhhh! I'll alter all your auxiliary cables, you little-!"

"Can we get back on topic?" asked Skulker, his high-pitched voice cutting above the argument. "We need to get Phantom's body back! Otherwise he'll be completely unbearable!"

The ghosts looked at each other. "Agreed," they said.

Danny leaned over Tucker's shoulder. "Are you sure?" he said.

"Positive," said Tucker. "Sorry, man, but Vlad's super secret super villain stuff isn't online. Your body isn't mentioned at all. Nothing is. His internet enabled stuff is all pretty bland, compared to what we know he's doing. I mean, some of it is kind of sketchy, but it just isn't the same level."

"Anything we can blackmail him with?" asked Sam.

"Not really. We can't exactly say how we got it, after all, so he'd have plausible deniability."

Danny groaned. The groan turned into a long plume of blue mist. Danny growled. "Whoever is interrupting this time-"

"Whoa, calm down, man," said Tucker. "This is pretty normal."

Danny's phone began to ring. If this was those detective he was going to-

It was Jazz. "What?" he asked.

"The ecto-exodus alarm is going off," said Jazz. "Where are you?"

"Tucker's," said Danny. "I'm going to check it out."

"Be safe. Mom and Dad are out there with blasters, and they've notified the GIW."

"Noted," said Danny. He hung up, then turned to Sam and Tucker. "This is a big one, apparently. You might want to stay in."

"Good luck with that," said Tucker, pulling a ecto-rifle from beneath his desk. "I've been wanting to try this baby out."

"Please don't name it," said Sam.

"I think I will!" said Tucker.

"Just don't shoot if we're not fighting, okay? They might not be here to cause trouble. Don't give me that look, I'm trying out some optimism."

Before his friends could say anything about that, he flew up through the roof. From there, he had no problem picking out the crowd of ghosts who had just passed by.

Skulker was leading them. Danny scowled, and flew forward to intercept them, too angry to process whether or not confronting a group of ghosts that large was wise.

"Hey!" he shouted. "I thought you said you'd leave!"

"Chill, babypop!" shouted Ember. "You're a cold core, aren't you? We're here to get your body back."

That brought Danny up short. "Wait, really?"

The other ghosts, largely the rabble of the Wastes, the region of the Ghost Zone right outside the Fenton portal, gave a ragged sort of cheer.

"Yeah. And trash Plasmius's crap."

"Oh," said Danny, taken aback. "He has a ghost shield around his mansion, you know. A human shield, too, before you say I can get past that."

Poindexter floated up, over the mass of the crowd. "He can't keep them up all the time, can he?" he asked adjusting his glasses.

"No, I guess he can't. One sec." He pulled out his phone. "Hey, Tucker, can you find out where Vlad is right now?"

"... and these are the cults that believe ghosts are divine messengers, there's a lot of variety in them, too," Cameron was saying, pointing eagerly at his computer screen.

"Excuse me," said Vlad. "But I don't see how this is relevant. At all. To anything."

"Oh, it's very important," said Collins, nodding sagely. "We got some of our best leads in this case from the cults."

Cameron beamed.

"I am myself quite familiar with the local cults," said Vlad. "If they become relevant, I'm sure I can come back to-"

"No, no, Mr. Mayor," said Paterson, "you won't understand without context."

"I-"

Several dozen ghosts suddenly entered through the roof. Everyone dove for cover.

"Hiya, grave robbers!" shouted a ghost with fiery blue hair. Ember McClain. "Or one grave robber in particular."

Actually, come to think of it, she'd masqueraded as a human for a while, too. Collins was going to have a crisis about how easily ghosts could blend in with humans at some point in the near future. Not today, but before the end of the week. He'd need to talk to a shrink. Preferably one who wasn't a ghost.

Oddly, the ghosts weren't attacking.

The sound of Mayor Masters clearing his throat issued from behind a sizable desk. "What are you here for?" he asked.

"You know, grave robber. We've got a bone to pick with you, until you give back what you took."

A few feet away from Collins, Jones inhaled deeply. He stood up. Collins resisted the urge to drag him back down.

"We don't have Phantom's body," said Jones, "if that's what you're here for."

"We know," said Ember. "That's what this's about. We know who took it, and we don't want to deal with Phantom while he's freaking out over some jerk having his body. So. We're giving an ultimatum-"

"Hey, guys," said Phantom's voice. "I found the shield deactivation button. It was in his car, next to his garage door opener."

"Oh, cool. You trash his car?"

"Nah, I let these little gremlin dudes do it. They looked like they were having fun."

"Whatever, babypop. Let's go get your body!"

As quickly as they came, the ghosts were gone.

Mayor Masters swore, and started for the door.

"Hold up," said Jones, putting a hand on the taller man's shoulder. "Where exactly do you think you're going?"

"To call some competent ghost hunters, since those menaces are clearly after my belongings!"

"Nuh uh," said Jones. "We've got some questions for you."

"Yeah," said Collins, "like why you seem to think that they're going to your house, when they could have been talking about anyone."

"Wow!" said Cameron, smiling. "That was exciting! I'm glad I was livestreaming, like you told me to, Paterson!"

"Well," said Vlad. He paused. "I need to call my lawyer."

"Better make sure they're a competent one," mocked Jones.

Collins was surprised when Phantom materialized in the middle of the room with a long, dark plastic body bag in his arms. So were most people. Across the room, next to the coffee machine, one of his more caffeine-addicted coworkers do a spit take, and Jones burst out of his office in an avalanche of paperwork.

"I want a burial," said Phantom, finally. "A real one, this time."

Silence.

"I think I can arrange that," said Captain Jones.

#danny phantom #dannymay #dannymay2020 #dannymay 2020 #day 27

369 notes · View notes

bcbdrums · 3 years

Text

Immolation

I’m heavily depressed, so you get heavy angst. This is a direct sequel to “Torment”

FFn AO3

--------------------------------------------------------

Immolation

Shego ran the dampened washcloth over the smooth, polished surface of the bar and stared at the grains of wood beneath. She nearly had them memorized, for how many times she'd run the cloth over them to wipe away the condensation left by the rims of drinking glasses. She always tried to find vague shapes in their patterns; faces and objects and sometimes familiar ocean waves. She didn't have anything else to do with her days, after all.

The small wall-mounted television in the corner continued to play news from the local channel, and after three years she could finally understand the Spanish of the broadcast. She'd picked up the local slang faster by necessity, since she couldn't use her powers to protect herself from the type of crowd the bar attracted. It was ironic, for its nearness to the Caribbean, but the slums of El Salvador had been the perfect place to hide. She easily translated the broadcast into the more comfortable English:

"...And here is Dr. Drakken only days ago, unveiling his latest innovation at the world's largest scientific conference in Berlin..." the voice from the TV cut through the minimal noise at the late hour in the bar.

A soft smile came to Shego's face. And then suddenly her vision was filled with the large form of a dark-skinned man wearing a t-shirt that had seen too many years, and with a face that hadn't seen a razor in weeks.

"Venga, chica. Bailar conmigo."

Shego stepped back from the strong scent of alcohol and scowled at the man, a regular at the establishment, but one who never quite took the hint. Especially not when he had had too many.

"Raquel?" came the accented voice of Esteban, her boss and the owner of the place, from across the room where he was wiping down tables and stacking chairs for closing.

She leaned around the offensive man to merely smirk at her boss knowingly in return. He grimaced slightly, no doubt wondering how much of a mess there would be to clean after she was finished with the brute.

Truthfully, she didn't always reject the men who asked her to dance. Whenever she'd had a few shots it was easier to say yes, and she enjoyed closing her eyes and moving to the rhythm of the music, and imagining herself in a different place. But it would always end the moment any of them tried to lay a hand on her...

She couldn't cross that line. There was only one set of hands she ever wanted to touch her, and they never would. Allowing herself to indulge once and pretend with anyone else would open the gate to far worse sins than her most definitely out of control drinking, and she didn't want to deal with the ramifications of heading down that path.

She still wasn't sure when she'd fallen in love with Drakken. She'd certainly been in love with him before she left, but she'd only realized the fact while in her self-imposed exile, when all she could think about was him.

Numerous magazines and newspapers were delivered to the tiny room she rented above the bar, but not of the variety she'd used to get. Now it was all science periodicals, and world news... And her wall was adorned with newspaper cutouts with his familiar, confident grin. The only reason she watched the news at all was for word of him.

She was pathetic.

Her 'clean break' as she'd hoped to make it seemed to have worked for him. He was finding the success she knew he would as soon as she was out of the picture, no longer holding him back. She knew that would have been the result had she stayed, making him question his sudden yearning for 'good.' Less for good, she knew of course, and more for the recognition and honor his genius rightly deserved. She wouldn't have said that years ago, but with the new understanding she had of her feelings...

She couldn't have stayed. He would have denied himself for her. And she refused to let herself think it was because his feelings were deeper too. No, that wasn't possible. It had been made abundantly clear to her over their four years as partners in crime that he simply didn't think of her that way. She was little more than an asset and a comfort; a listening ear for his endless dronings and rantings, easily replaced.

So she had left a note on her pillow one day after painfully listening to him describe the amazing job offers he had received, and simply vanished. She knew he would come looking for her, as he always did because 'he needed her,' so she had made herself impossible to find. She'd not hardly used her powers in three years, and she'd managed to convinced the locals in the high-poverty, high-crime rate slums she'd hidden in that her skin color was due to something between genetics and illness.

'Shego' was gone.

Now she was Raquel, the barmaid who drank too much, wouldn't let anyone get close, and who had a strange obsession with science magazines. Esteban and others had tried to get her to talk about herself, or her apparent science interest for awhile, but they'd finally taken the hint that she was out there in the middle of nowhere, at one of the only respectable establishments in those slums, to make sure know one ever knew her story.

Shego waited until Esteban wasn't looking, and then she lifted her hand above the leering man's head as his greasy fingers reached across the bar for her, and she let him have just enough of a pressure blast from her glow to knock him out. When the man's large, dead-weight hit the floor, her boss turned with a start.

"Ai ai ai, Raquel! Someday I will see how you accomplish that."

Shego merely smirked as her eyes shifted back to the television. It was a simple, lonely life... One that she might leave someday to pursue other interests. 'Shego' as the world had known her could probably never return, after her world-saving ventures with Drakken. She wouldn't want to put his career at risk in any way. But living from day to day and drink to drink, with only her periodicals and the TV to briefly soothe the ache in her heart wasn't plausible. She needed to move on.

The reason she hadn't was for the lack of one thing in every photo, article, and broadcast about the blue former villain who had saved the world: he was always alone. Even the candids taken by paparazzi that she would find in the trash magazines she had specially delivered only ever showed him having breakfast alone at a sidewalk cafe, or seated alone in an audience as he waited to accept an award.

Why hadn't he met someone and settled down already?

That was the last piece... That was what was missing. When Drakken finally had a woman on his arm, and his happiness was complete...then she could risk moving out into the world and being seen again. If he had someone else, he most definitely wouldn't need her. And she wouldn't have to face up to the fact of possibly seeing him again, with the feelings she'd been harboring for too many years that simply refused to die.

"...It has been confirmed to have been a suicide now, as the note was leaked to the press by a source who wishes to remain anonymous from within Japanese Intelligence..."

Shego's attention snapped to the television, where now a years-old photograph of Drakken at the UN, wearing his medal, was displayed in the corner of the screen as the Spanish news anchor continued to read the copy.

"The note was addressed to fellow-hero Kim Possible, and the text reads: 'I can't figure out what I did wrong. I can't live without her anymore. I'm sorry.' The note was not signed, but handwriting analysis easily showed it to be in the script of Dr. Drakken."

Shego felt the world spinning around her as her vision seemed to spin in the opposite direction. Her head swam and ached all at once, and she could see bright spots dancing in front of her eyes even as her view darkened. She stumbled forward to lean against the bar as she struggled to listen to the television.

"And the world remains in shock, one week from the date the acclaimed scientist took his life by jumping from the roof of the Osaka World Trade Center. We will keep you updated with more details as the story continues to unfold. This is Paola Ramos, reporting."

Shego's eyes fell back to the wood grain of the bar, dotted now with rainbow lights as she replayed the words over and over in her mind.

Dead? Suicide?

It couldn't be true... And if for an entire week, why hadn't she heard anything yet?

And worse... What had his...his suicide note, meant?

"I can't live without her anymore," it had read.

He couldn't... He didn't... He wouldn't...mean me?

Shego felt like she might throw up, and she let herself sink to the floor behind the bar until her cheek was pressed down against the cool tiles of the filthy floor.

He can't be dead... He can't.

She lay there, her breaths coming too quickly, until a voice broke through her racing, panicked thoughts.

"Raquel! ¿Qué pasa?"

She peered upward and let Esteban take her hand and help her to a seated position.

"Phone..." she managed to choke out, her throat strangely tight.

"What? But what has happened?"

"Phone..." she said, and started slowly crawling around the bar, her vision still swimming. She couldn't use Esteban's phone... But, the man she had dropped earlier...

She found the unconscious man and with hardly a grimace she fumbled in his pockets until finding his mobile phone, and then leaned back against the bar as she began dialing a long-memorized number. She realized as the phone rang that she didn't know if the number would be the same after so long, but that thought was broken by Esteban kneeling in front of her.

"Are you calling 911?" he asked, his dark eyes wide and worried as he studied her frantically. But then, the phone connected.

"Hello?" the familiar voice said through the line.

Shego suddenly realized, she had only ever called the girl 'Princess' or 'Pumpkin' or 'Kimmie,' and wasn't sure how to address the now young woman and for a brief time, ally.

"Kim..." she finally settled on, the name leaving her throat hoarsely.

"Yes? Who is...?" A familiar gasp sounded through the phone. "Shego?"

"Drakken..." was her one-word answer as suddenly tears began filling her eyes. "Drakken's note."

"Where have you been!? Where are you? We looked for you for over a year!"

"Did that note... Was it real? Is he...is he really...dead?" she asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand before digging her fingers tightly into her side as her hands started to shake.

"...Yes," Kim answered with a sigh, "he's gone."

Shego felt even more of the world around her fall away somehow. She could still see Esteban's scuffed tennis shoes and his knees where he knelt in front of her, and she could even see the leg of the collapsed man on her other side. But it was all through a dizzying haze.

"The note I heard them read on the news. Did he...did he mean me?"

"...Of course he did. Shego, are you okay? Where you have you been?"

"No..." Shego breathed, even as she lowered the phone from her ear despite Kim's continued questions. She almost forgot herself and ignited her hand, but instead she flipped the phone closed and dropped it on the ground.

Esteban helped her to her feet again, and he let out a small yelp of surprise as her heel came down hard on the phone.

"Ai, Raquel! What if he finds out?" he said worriedly, looking at the unconscious drunkard.

Shego didn't answer as she leaned on the bar and continued grinding the phone down to nothing, and then with her vision still dotted with color she stumbled back behind the bar. Her shaking hands reached out to familiar places until she found bottles of tequila, and then with four clutched in her arms she turned to head toward the stairs and her small rented room.

"Ai, Raquel, that is too much! That is too much!"

Shego ignored Esteban's words as she moved numbly to her room, pushing through the door and stumbling against the bed, all but one of the bottles of alcohol falling from her grasp. She spun around, and after shoving the door closed she melted the lock with her glow. Then she fell back to sit on her narrow, uncomfortable mattress as she fumbled with the lid of the tequila bottle.

She looked around at her walls, with their newspaper clippings and magazine cutouts of photos and articles about Drakken's successes. Tears fell from her eyes anew as she brought the bottle to her lips and soon felt her throat burn nearly as badly as her eyes. And the words of Drakken's note played through her mind repeatedly, her every thought and excuse for the past three years dissolving into torment.

----------------------

The next day, Esteban stood nervously outside the door that Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable were breaking into, explaining about the night before and the bizarre behavior from his employee. Of course, Shego's destruction of the mobile phone hadn't been quick enough to block Wade Load's trace.

When the trio finally pushed the door open, three pairs of worried eyes went wide before the faces fell to sadness and horror.

"Aaiiii, Raquel, ¿por qué? ¿Por qué, mi lucecita, por qué?"

Kim's eyes lit upon the one piece of paper not tacked to the walls, having fallen from the bed where it had previously been held in the occupant's hand. Her breath caught as she picked it up and together the trio read the sloppily scrawled words, the bartender sobbing over the shoulders of the two younger people.

"I didn't want to hold him back. I just wanted him to be happy."

---------------------------

"...And broadcasting live from Osaka Prefecture, a tragic tale of unrequited love as we bring you the public funeral of acclaimed world heroes, Dr. Drakken and Shego."

16 notes · View notes

fictionadventurer · 3 years

Note

Top 5 books/songs/moments from last year?

Books (for the sake of variety, I’m limiting it to the top 5 rereads. Mostly rereads that gave me better appreciation of the book.)

1. Northanger Abbey. I’ve always liked this book, but last year’s reread showed me there was more character depth and writing skill in here than I ever imagined.

2. The Hobbit. Reread made me appreciate the characters more (Beorn!!!!), but it especially made me love just how different Middle Earth feels in this book. Far more mysterious and whimsical, with its more fae-like elves and unexplained bear shapeshifters and such.

3. The King of Attolia/A Conspiracy of Kings. These were great on first read. On second read, I was finally able to understand them well enough to see just how brilliant they are.

4. Valiant by Sarah McGuire. I’ve always considered this one of my favorite fairy tale retellings. When I started reading it, I wondered why. Those first few chapters are so dull. But once the giants came on the scene, the rest of the story was gripping and it cemented its position on the favorites list.

5. Rapunzel Let Down by Regina Doman. I appreciated this book on first read, but found lots of things implausible. But on reread, I was able to appreciate just how brilliant a lot of the story is. (That scene where he’s in a moonlit cell, unaware of the danger she’s in, but desperately praying for her he knows not why--literary genius). If only it ended before the final act. That last section makes the villains far too over-the-top.

Bonus: Matched by Ally Condie. Reread made me more aware of the weaknesses of the story and central romance. But I was impressed with the eerily plausible worldbuilding.

Songs

1. “Hard to Forget” by Sam Hunt. It’s got a very weird sound, but for some reason, I found it irresistibly catchy.

2. “Starting Over” by Chris Stapleton. Not a favorite, just a song that’s always on that’s good enough to listen to when it’s on.

3. “Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me”. Only the first two lines. My dad remembered it from Hee Haw and I heard him sing it when the shutdowns first started happening. It became a private joke and I sang it a lot throughout the year, for obvious reasons.

4. “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. I became aware of just how perfect this song is for one set of my characters, and I listened to it a lot when I felt like angsting over them.

5. “The Little Drummer Boy” by Carrie Underwood and Isaiah Fisher. This has always been one of my least favorite carols. Turns out that all it needed was an adorable little boy to lisp his way through half of it (Pa WUM pa pum pum). After that, I wound up finding several versions of the carol I could tolerate.

Moments

1. A drive-through confession experience in the brightest, sunshiniest May day. Afterward, I just sat in my car looking at the ridiculously gorgeous day and feeling at peace.

2. Sitting in my car by a little chapel, reading out of my new book of Andersen fairy tales before going into the chapel to pray. So peaceful and relaxing.

3. New Year’s Eve. Helping my sister clear the snow off a frozen swamp so we could skate on it. Bright sunshine, no wind, wonderfully warm. I skated for hours.

4. My nephew reacting to his new jack-in-the-box. He was so excited! I never quite understood the point of that toy until I saw that and someone pointed out it’s just peekaboo-in-a-box, and since that’s the best game ever to my nephew, it's the perfect toy!

5. Getting to eat the best omelet ever in a little cafe. I hope that restaurant is open again, because I have been craving that specific omelet for weeks.

#thanks for the ask!#ask games #answered asks #thebirdandhersong

8 notes · View notes

dragonmaiden79 · 4 years

Text

Enlightenment (part 1)

Introducing, my latest OC Xenisha (Zen-E-Shuh)! She’s a genius from Earthrealm who moved to Outworld by her own choice and though she would much prefer to keep excessive attention off herself, that becomes less and less plausible when the Kahn and Queen start hearing about her inventions and technical ability. New job with new demands is something she doesn’t care for, but when Shang Tsung gets involved, she decides maybe it’s not so bad.

Part 1, Enlightenment; First Encounter

(Shang Tsung x BlackFemaleOC, No warnings)

The sun scorched landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. The main parts of Outworld were composed almost entirely of the hardened cracked sand that Xenisha’s hover-pack kept her in flight over. A summons had been brought to her door, requesting presence before Empress Sindel and Emperor Shao Kahn. Immediately. Two days, was all she had to get herself together and head for the rust colored mountains, where one of their many lavish palaces was located.

From the moment she discovered the notice pinned to the door of her home, Xenisha had to ensure preparedness and punctuality to the meeting. Heat was a given, the sun was always so relentless, especially when heading into the private properties of the mountains, so she had to dress light and still remain presentable– Though she had no intentions of going overboard to put up any appearances. Never that. A neon green t-shirt with navy blue denim overalls would serve just fine. They were both made from the genetically altered cotton that was grown on her plot of land; As a result the clothes could nearly breath and were resilient to external temperatures. In other words, by her own creation, there existed a fabric that remained roughly an even 60 degrees to the touch at all times. Long gloves that went past her elbows with fingers tipped in soft metal to operate any of her custom interfaces and made of a hardier version of the same cotton accompanied it, as she was determined not to let the sun sear her skin the same way it had the terrain.

As for her hair, she began washing it immediately after her outfit was chosen. This was one part of her appearance that couldn’t be compromised. It was long, impractically so– Although it didn’t appear to be, favoring instead a thick, mass of tight, puffy, dark colored coils that grew from her scalp in all directions and came to rest on her shoulders, with some continuing midway down her back. For the impromptu journey it needed to be fully hydrated, double twisted and then pinned into a bun, to finally be covered with a decorative silk headwrap to keep it from sustaining heat damage from Outworld’s unforgiving climate. It was treated as her crown– One of the few non-science related indulgences that she simply adored participating in.

Lastly, since she had no intentions of showing up empty handed, some of her tech was chosen for the occasion. Hover-pack, teleporter, and sub-space sash with a pair of flexible, comfortable shoes, and she was ready to go.

The whole way there, she tried to think not annoyed thoughts. Not only was the day a complete loss, meaning no time to dig around for parts or work on any of her near finished projects, but this situation was one that she’d found herself in constantly and she hated it. Xenisha didn’t mind inventing and creating things for commoners and poor folk, but when it came to powerful authority figures she’d learned to avoid displaying her talents. She preferred not being a pawn to be bargained with, bought or sold.

The ‘locals’ were near destitute, left to scratch around and work as slave laborers once their home realms were fused into Outworld. Out by the Rust Wall, i.e. the cluster of shantytowns that survivors gathered in to preserve what they could of their culture, is where she amassed hidden influence. It wasn’t on purpose, but after building a permanent home and using gene tampering to grow fruit and vegetables year round, she began to garner much attention. Soon enough, she was handing out free food to beggars and giving away bundles of the specialized seeds to farm and be planted in high traffic spaces. The sudden abundance of plant life earned new nicknames for the area, and soon the Rust Wall became the Green Wall (or any other variation of that name).

People repaid their gratitude by giving her things like books, materials, currency, and whatever else they could get their hands on. She didn’t ask for much, if anything at all, just to be able to hear how this invention and that new plant was working out. If anything needed improvement. Doing things that way helped her research extensively, which was satisfaction enough. It always had been.

But as the Green Wall grew and word of it spread, the Emperor and Empress became interested. Hiring her for small tasks and offering higher and higher payouts whenever she tried to say no, until they started sending Kollector to retrieve her, in lieu of making requests. Now she was abundantly wealthy with a position she never wanted or needed.

She shook her head. This was her own fault. Had she not been so eager to toss her creations at everyone she saw this wouldn’t be happening right now.

But they were all just so dang poor! How the hell was she supposed to ignore them?

She sighed as she touched down. It didn’t make much of a difference at this point.

Now standing before the spear-like rod iron gate that allowed entry on to the grounds, she was greeted by the hulking Shokan guards meant to escort her to the throne room. They would’ve let her walk there on her own, but the place was vast (ugly too), and she’d failed to navigate it more than once (gotten lost).

While it was wise to build around the largest oasis in the area, the 'sharp’ design of everything from the torch holders on the wall to the impractical black spiral staircase that led to (lo and behold) another long hallway and another flight of stairs (this time not spiral) was just ridiculous. Black, green, dark red, with skulls, warped faces, and spikes was the entire motif, and it was… Unbearable; A melodramatic over statement of 'I am Villain, I am King, I will be obeyed’, if Xenisha ever saw one.

Finally, after more stairs than anyone would ever care to walk, they arrived in the throne room. It was large enough to have a troop of soldiers gather and receive orders all at once. Crossing the polished sandstone floor, flanked by two guards on each side, Xenisha stopped just before the (godforsaken) stairs that lead up to a platform that held a set of matching thrones. Two powerful entities sat atop them with one advisor standing next to each seat neither of whom she’d met. They were just high enough, make a person feel beneath them and know who had the power.

“Your Majesty.” Xenisha bowed to each of them, “Your Majesty.”

The proud beautiful Empress Sindel spoke first. “Hmph. The girl continues to offend me,” she scoffed to Shao Kahn before turning to her. “Must your lack of effort always be so apparent?”

The simmering annoyance that she’d had been feeling became a blaze of anger, and she had to bite her tongue to push it down, avoid getting her head taken off. The Empress enjoyed antagonizing those who were 'lower class’ than her, especially appearance wise. She hated Xenisha’s work clothes and made sure to say so every time she saw her in them.

Do not start with me…. Xenisha thought, rolling her eyes.

Bringing a hand up to her ear and twisting the stud earring there, she exhaled slowly before answering. “With all due respect Madame,” she urged herself to say, “The letter didn’t say this was a social call.” She replied, with the tiniest edge of condescension.

Obviously satisfied with herself, Sindel waved a dismissive hand smirking. “I care not for your excuses.”

“Right…” Xenisha grumbled, letting go of her ear to slip her hands in her pockets. “How can I help you guys today?” She sighed.

Shao Kahn spoke. “Some of our 'allies’ require a small amount of monitoring. I gather you are capable of creating such devices.”

“Sure.” She replied.

“Excellent.” He nodded, “The intel will prove to be a valuable asset.”

“Mmmhm. Wonderful.” She said flatly.

“How much time will this take?” Sindel asked.

“3 months– 90 Earth days.”

“Your 'enthusiasm’ is contagious.” Shao Kahn remarked sarcastically. “Very well. Part of your payment will arrive at your home tomorrow.”

“Great.” Xenisha nodded, quickly. “Will that be all?”

This was always how these conversations went; The Queen or the Kahn stated a 'request’, she said 'Yes I can!’, performed said task, and received a massive sum of money. She had more Shao Koins and Sin-Dollars than she knew what to do with, but admittedly it was nice being able to buy more rare and expensive metals. Even if only because it took away some of the time and effort of having to scavenge.

“No.” Sindel said, sitting back and crossing her leg, gesturing to the right. “That will not be all, Xenisha. Shang Tsung will be overseeing this undertaking to ensure quality, as well as personally screening any intel that you may find.”

Xenisha glanced at him, who raised his eyebrows and smirked.

“Actually he can stay here, I don’t need any supervision. But thanks.” She said, uneasily shifting.

“On the contrary,” Shao Kahn interjected, “Since you will be the one collecting the information–”

“I never said I w-”

“–Reporting to him directly will bypass the tedium of having to await your arrival.”

“…..Ya know what? I… Guess that’ll work.” The idea of periodically having to meet up with them was enough to have her agree.

Hopefully this situation wouldn’t carry on for too long, but from Shang Tsung’s expression, he was likely to make this as difficult as possible.

***##***

Hope you all enjoyed my new shit, and thank you for reading❤❤

#shang tsung #oc #ocs #black oc #black ocs #shang tsung x black oc #shang tsung x black character #black characters #black female oc #shang tsung x black female oc #shang tsung mortal kombat #mortal kombat #mk #mc #black mc #dragonmaiden79

21 notes · View notes

lena-in-a-red-dress · 4 years

Note

Sorry I’m just a bit frustrated. I started thinking about how this whole mess is the product of ooc actions by Lena which were the product of ooc actions by Kara. None of the angst should have happened keeping in view Kara and Lena’s whole season 2 relationship. Or rather it should have been different angst. It’s just staggering how much of even our fandom conceptions of these chars have been colored by the cw always writing for maximum soap operatics & regardless of nuance and plausibility

Here are my big problems with what we've gotten since the reset:

- Kara and Lena's falling out is not a primary focus. They're maintaining the separation, but not the urgency behind it, and it's a stark departure from what was hyped about the season all summer. We aren't exploring Lena's loneliness, or seeing how Lena's absence is affecting Kara in everyday life. There's been nothing to suggest either of them particularly cares about the current state of affairs.

- Lex is becoming Kara's villain, when he should be Lena's. He has always been Lena's and honestly, the threat his presence is to her is far greater than any threat he poses to Kara. If Lex interacts with Kara, it should be with Lena at the heart of their exchange. This could be as the silent figure standing at Lex's shoulder as he monologues, or it could be as the oblique threat Lex whispers as a way to keep Kara from looking too closely at his activity. "It's been great having Lena back where she belongs... it'd be a shame if anything happened to her bc her best friend simply couldn't leave well enough alone." Instead, Lena hasn't even been a blip between them.

Granted, there's been a lot of the past two episodes that I really do like, but my point is: I understand your frustration.

I've spent the past few weeks considering how I want to conduct myself on this blog in the face of the disappointment I've been feeling (a disappointment compounded by unrelated depressive symptoms). It'd be easy for me to go on for ages about what the show could or should have done, but that doesn't help anyone. It doesn't even make ME feel better.

So, the little ficlets that have been happening this week are the result of that internal discussion. It's healthier for me to just suggest scenes that could have happened than it would be for me to pick out everything I don't like about current canon.

I want to get back to playing in fandom, rather than going in with the intention of "fixing" canon. It's more positive, and keeps my brain move out and up, looking for "more" rather than "instead of." It's a thin line, but I think it'll be good for me in the long run, and hopefully for anyone else who reads my blog.

#supercorp #reveal angst #personal #fandom thoughts #create responsibly

98 notes · View notes

rachelkaser · 3 years

Text

Stay Golden Sunday: The Truth Will Out

Rose’s daughter visits, leading to the revelation of a secret about Rose’s late husband, Charlie. Blanche becomes obsessed with a murder trial.

Picture It...

Rose is making a snack in the kitchen in preparation for the arrival of her daughter and granddaughter -- a Maple Syrup Honey Brown Sugar Molasses Rice Krispies Log. Blanche enters, all fired up about a society murder in the news called the Duncan Osgood Trial. She believes he’s guilty because the late Mrs. Tippi Osgood was found at the bottom of their lake clutching her husband’s dicky.

ROSE: *about the Log* Some people put flour in it, but I think that makes it too heavy. My kids always liked it this way. DOROTHY: *choking* Tell me, Rose: Do any of your kids still have their own teeth?

Sophia, meanwhile, is sour about having to room with Dorothy while Rose’s daughter Kirsten and granddaughter Charley are in town. When Rose admits to being nervous about the visit, though, Sophia is the first to ask why. Rose says she has to show Kirsten, who she’s made executor, her will, and is worried what her daughter will think, but doesn’t elaborate on what she thinks will surprise Kirsten.

Ahead of Kirsten and Charley’s arrival, Blanche confides in Dorothy that she’s suspicious of Rose’s reticence regarding her will. She’s mostly basing it on the Osgood case, as Duncan Osgood was his rich wife’s heir. Kirsten and Charley arrive -- Kirsten says Charley is going to a kid’s astronaut program while she reviews Rose’s “estate papers.” They gift Blanche and Dorothy their own Maple Syrup Honey Brown Sugar Molasses Rice Krispies Logs.

BLANCHE: *aside to Dorothy* What are you going to do with yours? DOROTHY: It’s a log. I’m going to burn it.

All four Girls are having dinner with Kirsten and Charley, and Rose and her daughter go to the kitchen with dishes. Kirsten effuses about Rose’s friends, and says she now understands why Rose moved in with them despite (as far as Kirsten knows) not needing to save the money. Rose decides to show Kirsten her will, and visibly braces herself. Kirsten is confused, as Rose’s will shows she doesn’t have much money to leave. Blanche and Dorothy drift into the kitchen and overhear Kirsten asking how Rose could have burned through Charlie’s “fortune,” which Rose says happened because of bad investments. Kirsten leaves in tears. Blanche and Dorothy don’t believe that’s what happened, but Rose storms out without answering their questions.

Later that night, the Girls meet up in the kitchen. Rose won’t explain what’s going on with her will, but she asks what the others think about lies. Blanche and Dorothy tell stories of their own previous lies. When they try to reassure Rose that lies aren’t the worst thing, Rose says her lie to Kirsten has Kirsten hating her. Sophia tells her to tell the truth, but Rose says she can’t let Kirsten find out the truth about her late husband Charlie and leaves the kitchen. Blanche, in full detective fervor, wants to know what secret Rose is hiding, but Dorothy says it’s not their business.

BLANCHE: No, of course it’s our business! We’re friends. We’re roommates. I have no secrets from you. My whole life is an open book! SOPHIA: Your whole life is an open blouse.

Charley is in Rose’s room, dressed up in jewelry, a snazzy hat, heels, and what looks like her grandmother’s cardigan. Rose enters, and Charley says she has a date [side note: I have no idea if the date she’s talking about is with a real boy she met at camp, or if she’s talking about an imaginary person; the episode doesn’t really make it clear]. Rose helps her put on her makeup, and Charley says the boy reminds her of her grandfather, in that he’s very rich. Rose is taken aback when Charley the Second says that’s all she knows about Charlie the First.

In Dorothy’s room that night, Sophia leaves in frustration as Dorothy won’t stop tossing and turning. Rose enters and offers to swap. When she lays down, she tells a silent and presumably sleeping Dorothy that she was willing to let her lie to Kirsten continue. But now she realizes that lying to her daughter is effectively lying to her granddaughter, and she’s going to come clean in the morning. She tells Dorothy she loves her and to sleep well. After a few seconds of silence...

DOROTHY: Oh thank god, I thought you’d never shut up.

In the morning, Blanche reveals the outcome of the Osgood trial: Shockingly, Duncan was innocent, and the butler and maid were framing him. Rose catches Kirsten and tells her they need to talk. She insists on Blanche and Dorothy hearing the truth as well: Charlie, her husband, didn’t leave her a fortune to squander. Rose says that he was a great man, but not a great businessman. But since he traveled so often, she let her children think he was financially successful so they’d think as highly of them as she did. She apologizes to Kirsten, who, knowing the truth, forgives her mother.

After they leave, Blanche is a little put-out that the big secret was so mundane, given she’s been so wrapped up in the Duncan Osgood mystery. But she does come around, saying that things seem to have turned out alright since Rose and Kirsten no longer have a big secret between them, and an innocent man didn’t go to jail for murder. Dorothy’s response to her good humor?

DOROTHY: That’s easy for you to say. You’re not at the bottom of a lake clutching someone’s dicky.

“How practical: A snack you can panel your den with!”

Before I say anything else, I want to dedicate this post to Bridgette Andersen, the child actress from this episode. Andersen struggled finding acting work in her teens and died at age 21 of an opioid overdose. As always, Hollywood is an absolutely brutal place for young women. Rest in Peace, Bridgette. You’ll always be our little Charley.

I’m realizing, as I continue this series, how hard it is to cover episodes I consider less-than-great. We’ve all got those episodes in the Golden Girls rotation we skip when they come up, and while this episode has its good points, the A-plot is such a relentless downer that, like my last two-slice episode, I had a hard time watching this one enough times to finish the analysis.

It isn’t just boring -- it’s kind of infuriating. The episode makes it seem like the major conflict is Rose lying to Kirsten, but it’s actually Kirsten being upset with her mother for not giving her a lot of money. If seeing Rose sob, “I lost it all, I’m sorry,” like a child being scolded before Kirsten stomps out in a huff doesn’t raise your hackles, then I don’t know what will. No matter how hard the writers try to position this as a moral quandary (even going so far as to put poor little Charley in the middle), the whole thing feels very unfair to Rose.

BLANCHE: Oh boy, I’d love to put some surprises in my will. Like leaving a small remembrance to each of the men who’s brought some special joy or pleasure to my life. DOROTHY: And where would they read that will, Blanche? The Astrodome?

I’ve never been in a position to inherit a large sum of money, so I couldn’t relate even if I wanted to, but I think Kirsten comes off very unsympathetically here. She softens later when she learns that Charlie never left any money to begin with, and that Rose had been inflating stories of his being a success, meaning the actual issue is dodged. But when you take a step back and look at what Kirsten was expecting from her mother, it’s pretty unreasonable.

In the first place, the episode doesn’t make it exactly clear how large a fortune Kirsten thought her father had. I mean, he sold insurance; he didn’t found IBM. She’s also ashamed -- her word -- that Rose managed to “piddle away” a fortune in 15 years, as if 15 years is a brief span of time. Rose is a widow without a lot of career training who works a low-wage job. Even if Charlie did leave behind an 8-figure sum, Rose would have had to burn through a lot of it just to stay alive.

Also, Kirsten kind of contradicts herself in the scene with the will, because she mentions that she expected her mother to be living a more independent lifestyle than she was, and yet she gets upset when Rose apparently spent the money for her own purposes. “I expected you to be spending daddy’s money... wait, you spent daddy’s money?!”

BLANCHE: Oh honey, you didn’t eat your Brussels sprouts. CHARLEY: I don’t like Brussels sprouts. SOPHIA: Neither do I. *opens her purse* Put them in here with mine.

But even if Charlie the First had left behind a fortune, and even if Rose had spent it frivolously, I don’t think that’s Kirsten’s business. It would have been Rose’s money and she could spend it however she likes. I get that Kirsten was hoping that the money would go to her, her siblings, and the grandchildren, but the only “crime” she can accuse Rose of is not being as wealthy as she was supposed to be. That’s not reasonable -- that’s the villain’s motivation in Northanger Abbey.

The timeline is also very confusing here. This episode reaffirms that Charlie Nylund has been dead for 15 years. Given that Charley looks like she’s at least 12, that means Kirsten has to be at least in her early thirties. The episode doesn’t make it clear whether Rose talked up her husband’s financial success while he was alive. So the options are either A) Rose somehow managed to lie to her children about the size of their dad’s pocketbook while said dad was still alive -- which, unless they lived in the I Love Lucy show, someone would have unraveled by now -- or B) Rose felt the need to lie to her adult children after their father died so they wouldn’t think he was a loser. Why do neither of those sound particularly plausible?

Speaking of continuity, what exactly are the sleeping arrangements in this episode? Sophia opens the episode complaining about having to sleep with Dorothy, and says she’s giving up her room for Rose’s family. But later Rose swaps with her and Sophia says “I’m taking my bed back.” Also, Charley’s scene with Rose is in Rose’s room. So Kirsten and Charley are staying in Rose’s room, Rose is staying in Sophia’s room, and Sophia is staying in Dorothy’s room? These musical bedrooms are making me dizzy.

SOPHIA: *getting out of Dorothy’s bed* That’s it, I’m outta here! DOROTHY: Ma, what’s the matter? SOPHIA: I can’t sleep! All night long, tossing and turning -- I’d get more rest on Space Mountain!

I don’t want this analysis to be nothing but complaints, though. There are some decent jokes in this episode, and the B-plot of Blanche getting way too involved in a sensational murder trial definitely feels very in-character for her. We all know Blanche loves the drama, and I love episodes where she gets to show character traits that don’t revolve around men and sex. Having said that, when Charley says she’s going to astronaut camp because she wants to “meet boys who want to be astronauts,” Blanche’s big smile and conspiratorial whisper of “Me too!” is adorable.

The funniest thing about the episode actually doesn’t happen in the episode itself. In the scene with Charley, where Rose helps her put on her makeup, child actress Bridgette Andersen wasn’t available for the initial rehearsal (I’ve heard different reports -- she was either sick or in school that day). So stage manager Doug Tobin took her place, and he made the colossal mistake of trying to improvise a joke while reading from the script. When he reads Charley’s line about going on a date with “Robert,” he adds with a giggle, “He’s the PA!” referring to production assistant Robert Spina.

Betty White visibly pauses when he goes off-script, and, even in the grainy film footage of this moment, you can see she gets a look on her face like, “Oh, you done did it now, boy.” She then picks up a makeup puff on the table, which looks like it was dipped in flour, and covers Tobin’s face in white powder. By the time she’s done slapping him with this giant puff, it looks like she slammed a pie in his face. Here’s the moment caught on camera.

youtube

Doug Tobin said in an interview with Golden Girls Forever that he realized later that, even though he kind of provoked Betty by going off-script, the whole thing was set-up ahead of time. As he said, they didn’t usually put film in the camera during these rehearsals, so someone knew what was going to happen and made sure to film it. He also said he looks back on it and wonders what he was thinking, trying to mess with Betty White. As he says, “The woman could destroy me in a second!” And she did, Doug. She did.

Episode rating: 🍰🍰 (two cheesecake slices out of five)

Favorite Part of the Episode

SOPHIA: *interrupting Rose’s scene with Charley* Are you two coming? The spaghetti is getting cold. ROSE: We’ll be there in a minute, Sophia. We’re in the middle of a makeup lesson. SOPHIA: I hope the kid can help you. You wear more rouge than Miss Piggy.

#golden girls #bea arthur #rose nylund #blanche devereaux #sophia petrillo #picture it #s01e16 #the truth will out #stay golden #stay golden sunday

2 notes · View notes

scribblesandsnark · 3 years

Text

“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)

There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)

I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)

Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,

Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.

But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.

Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?

I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.

There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.

So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.

There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)

…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??

(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)

The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).

Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start. In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)

I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife. And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).

Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.

Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)

Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.

Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)

Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.

Con: Leon is a fucking moron.

Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??

Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)

Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.

Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.

I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))

Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!

It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.

Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.

There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.

Dammit, Shane.

You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.

Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)

I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.

Moving right along…

Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.

I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?

I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.

Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.

It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”

Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)

Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.

Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)

The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.

I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.

On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?

At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)

Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.

I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…

Ahem.

Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)

Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.

Wait.

Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.

I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.

I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.

PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.

DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.

The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.

That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.

I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…

I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.

That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.

Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)

Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.

There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.

The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!

(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)

CORAAAL!!

Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)

Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”

As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)

Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?

Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.

Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.

(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)

Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.

Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…

Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.

The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.

Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!

Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.

Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?

As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?

There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!

Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.

I do love that shot though.

Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.

Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.

Sidebar complete.

I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.

It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.

I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.

Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.

Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.

Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)

How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.

Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.

Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)

There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.

Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)

Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.

How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??

I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.

Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.

Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?

This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.

Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.

I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)

I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.

“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.

I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.

As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!

RIP Leon Basset.

I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??

Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.

There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).

Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.

Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.

Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:

Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.

Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.

WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.

Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)

Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…

It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.

God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.

Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.

I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??

So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??

Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.

…that poor horse.

Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.

Iconic shot!

It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).

Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)

There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.

One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…

I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.

And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.”

So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.

For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.

Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.

I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)

That poor horse…

Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”

Men have huge feet. Yeek.

It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)

Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.

I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.

“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.

Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?

love em

5 notes · View notes

waitimcomingtoo · 5 years

Text

In Case You Don’t Live Forever - Chapter Sixteen

Pairing: Peter Parker x Venom!reader and a lil something else for the kids ;)

Warnings: Endgame spoilers, mentions of suicide

Authors Note: This story is far from over. Feedback is always appreciated ♥️ thank you for reading

Masterlist

“Braid chain!” You clapped your hands. A few amused laughs escaped from Carol’s and Nat’s lips as they sat down in front of you. This was a regular routine for you whenever all the girls were together. You positioned yourself in the back and took Nat’s hair in your hands. Her red hair was down her back now and only the very tips were blonde. It had been three more years. Five years total since the snap.

Your life had gone on, no matter how much it felt like it hadn’t. Or how much you wished it hadn’t. You threw yourself into your work and covered stories on men like Flint Marko, Dr. Curt Connors, Norman Osborn, and Max Dillon. All ordinary men who become a threat over night. Without Venom, you weren’t much use to stopping villains. But your suit and your webs offered enough protection to distract villains until the police came. You steered clear of your old neighborhood. You couldn’t bear to be around it. Aunt May had vanished in the snap, along with all of Peters friends. You cleared out May and Peters apartment and put the stuff in a storage locker.

You kept most of Peters clothes in your bedroom. His wardrobe had become your wardrobe. Your style had completely shifted from comfortable and casual, to sweaters, hoodies, and baggy t-shirts, all belonging to Peter. Nat noticed your change in appearance but said nothing. She knew it was your way of grieving him. You didn’t wear everything, though. Some things only he could pull off and you were okay with that. You kept his favorite sweaters in a box and would smell them occasionally just to get a whiff of his cologne. The scent had faded over the years but boys drown themselves in axe and Peter was no exception. You could still smell his sweet scent and it brought tears to your eyes every time.

You ran your fingers through Nat’s hair as she skillfully braided Carols. Everyone, Steve, Rhodey, Carol, Nebula, Rocket, Thor and Bruce were over. Your meetings were usually digital but you had decided to meet in person for the five year reunion. Everyone looked different up close. Bruce was the most changed. He had mixed his DNA with the Hulks and became one entity. You sat down with him and talked seeing as you had similar powers. You both turned into something that was bigger and stronger. The Hulk was different from Venom though. The Hulk didn’t really talk to Bruce and he didn’t chose when he came out. Seeing Bruce as the Hulk made you miss Venom terribly. Sure, you were without her way longer than you were with her, but she was your best friend. She knew you inside and out, literally. You would still talk to her, you just had to get used to the fact that there would be no answer.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Nebula watching you braid each other’s hair. You couldn’t read her expression from where you were but you knew it couldn’t be good.

“I’ll be right back.” You whispered to Nat. She hummed in response and focused again on Carols hair.

“What are you doing over here? Come join the Braid Train.” You took Nebula’s hand and led her over to where Nat and Carol were seated. Nebula looked embarrassed.

“I don’t have any hair.” She said only to you. You could tell she was ashamed. You gave her an assuring smile.

“So? You don’t need hair to ride the Braid Train. All are welcome. I’ll let you in on a little secret. If you sit in the back, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have hair. You can braid mine.” You told her. Nebula beamed at you. She didn’t smile often, and when she did she looked uncomfortable with it , but you always appreciated it. You sat back down and took your hair out of your ponytail. You always sat in the back and were used to no one braiding your hair. Nebula was the perfect addition. She gingerly placed her hands in your hair and began to weave it together.

“You know, I was bald too once.” You said to Nebula as you resumed braiding Nat’s hair.

“Really?” Nebulas monotone voice sounded excited.

“Yep. My sister and I had shaved heads.” You replied.

“My father didn’t let me have hair lest I fall victim to vanity. He wanted me to be a weapon.” Nebula said. You reached back and squeezed her knee. Or, you tried to. It was metal and cold, but she understood the gesture.

“I don’t think you’re a weapon.” You shrugged.

“Then what am I?” Nebula asked.

“Anything you want to be. That’s one of the perks of girl power. You can be anything you want to be.” You informed her. Nebula was easy to talk to because she didn’t expect anything from you. She just wanted to talk.

Steve suddenly burst into the room with something you hadn’t seen in years in his eyes,

Hope.

“We found something.” Steve smiled, unable to contain his excitement.

“I found something. And ask them if they know Ant-Man.” An unfamiliar voice called from the other room.

“Is that Scott?” Nat asked.

“Who’s Scott?” Carol asked. You didn’t know either.

“Scott Lang. Ant-Man. He disappeared 5 years ago.” Steve rushed out. You all stood up and went to Steve.

“You mean someone returned from being dusted?” You whispered in shock. The hope was contagious and infecting you as well.

“Well, no. He wasn’t dusted. He was in the Quantum Realm. He’ll explain it. Come on.” Steve pushed the you and girls into the room with Scott. Little did you know, you life was never going to be the same.

Scott was on board

Nat was on board.

Nebula was on board.

Steve, Rhodey, Bruce, and Rocket were on board.

All that was missing was Tony.

“I know Tony. He isn’t going to say yes.” Steve sighed as you, him, and Scott sat in a car in front of Tony’s cabin.

“He will once we tell him our plan.” Scott responded. Scott reminded you of a teenager. You knew he had missed the last five years, but it felt like he’d missed more. His child like demeanor was refreshing.

“And what if he doesn’t? What if this is our last chance and it fails?” You asked sadly. Scott looked panicked, like he wasn’t used to people looking to him for answers.

“We won’t know if we don’t ask.” Scott said. Steve looked at you and sighed, looking for your approval. You nodded and opened the car door.

“Pretty!” A little girl ran up to you as you walked up Tony’s porch steps. She made grabby hands at you and you instinctively picked her up and laughed a little. She brushed hair out of her face and did the same to you.

“Hi.” You said to her. You hadn’t interacted with a child since elementary school. You didn’t really know what to say. The little girl became shy suddenly and buried her face in your neck.

Tony followed shortly after her and smiled at the sight of her in your arms.

“Looks like Morgan likes you.” Tony commented. You looked fondly at the little girl upon learning her name.

“Hello Morgan. I’m Y/n.” You told her. Morgan smiled at you and toyed with the necklace you were wearing. It was a simple chain with Peters class ring hanging from it. You adjusted her on your hips looked at Tony.

“Is she yours?” Steve asked Tony. He smiled proudly.

“Yep. 100% baby Stark.” Tony said.

“Wanna see my dolls?” Morgan asked you. You smiled at her.

“I’d love too. Steve, Scott, you okay without me?” You asked Steve and Scott. They nodded and you left with Morgan.

After playing house with Morgan for half an hour, she told you that she missed her dad.

“Then let’s go see him.” You smiled at her. After not being able to protect Peter and Venom from the snap, you felt an overwhelming desire to protect Morgan and make her happy. You picked her up and walked back towards Steve, Tony, and Scott just in time to hear Tony speaking.

“I wish you guys had come here for anything else. I really do. But I can’t help you.” You overheard Tony telling Scott and Steve. You looked down in disappointment, not wanting Morgan to see you cry. You felt Tony’s eyes on you as he began to formulate another excuse.

“Please.” You interrupted. Everyone’s eyes fell on you. As much as you tried to fight it, your eyes were swimming with tears. Tony opened his mouth and looked at you sympathetically, but no words came out.

“Please. Please, Mr. Stark, this could work. We could see him again. Please.” You begged. Scott and Steve looked from you to Tony. Tony looked between you and Morgan.

“Y/n…” Tony began.

“Don’t. Don’t say my name like you’re about to tell me no.” You pleaded with him. You set Morgan down and took a step closer to Tony.

“It won’t work. Your Time Warp-“ Tony began.

“Time Heist.” Scott corrected.

“Yeah whatever, Doc. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not plausible. I wish I could help you. But I can’t.” Tony concluded. You knew it was no use trying to argue with him. Steve knew it too but Scott was still hopeful.

“He’d do it for you.” You raised your voice a little. It was shaking but you didn’t want to sound weak.

“Y/n…” Steve tried to stop you.

“No.” You yelled at him. “He would do it for you. If you were gone, you know he’d go to the ends of the earth to bring you back. Doesn’t he deserve the same?”

“Are we still talking about Back to the Future?” Scott cut in.

“You know I miss him as much as you do. But you cannot mess with the flow of time.” Tony pleaded with you but you weren’t having it.

“Not with that attitude you can’t!” You shouted. Scott snickered.

“Alright! That’s enough. Y/n, get in the car. We’ll see you later Tony.” Steve broke up your fight. Steve guided you with his hand on your back back to the car. You got in the backseat and folded your arms like a child.

Hey, what happened back there?” Steve asked cautiously after driving in silence for a while.

“He was being unreasonable.” You huffed. You felt like you just had a fight with a parent.

“Who was that boy you were talking about?” Scott asked you. You turned to face the window.

“Your mom.” You grumbled. Scott knew he set himself up for that one.

“Did you know Spider-Man?” Steve asked you while looking at you in the rear view mirror. Your face contorted with a mixture of anger, sadness, and embarrassment. It had been years since anyone said his name around you.

“Don’t wanna talk about it.” You muttered as you began to play with the window, something Venom used to do. It was times like these when you missed her the most.

“I have a feeling she knew Spider-Man.” Scott said. You glared at him before staring back out the window.

A few days later, Tony rolled up to the Avengers tower with a change of heart and a time machine. When you asked him why he changed his mind, he smiled at you and said “he’d do it for me.”

A plan was made to retrieve the stones from the past. After some trial runs, trouble shooting, and practice trips, you were ready to go.

You walked down the corridor with the rest of the Avengers in your matching suits. You weren’t gonna lie, you felt pretty badass all clad in red and white. You pushed a final bobby pin into Nat’s hair as she squeezed your hand.

“See you in a minute.” She smiled.

Buttons were pushed and you were off on your journey.

The plan was set. You, Thor, and Rocket were going to Asgard to get the Reality Stone. Upon your arrival, Thor had a mental break down that you and Rocket had to bring him back from. While Rockets approach was to slap him and tell him to snap out of it, you had a much calmer approach. You took Thors face between your hands and forced him to look at you.

“Hey big guy. I know you’ve been through a lot and it’s really taken a toll on you, but we need you to be strong. Your depression does not make you less worthy. You can still do this. I believe in you. And Rocket believes in you. Right Rocket?” You asked.

“Whatever Jackass.” Rocket waved his hand dismissively.

“Thank you, Lady Y/n. You’re right. I am still handsome.” Thor said confidently.

“Who said you were handsome? You look like melted ice cream.” Rocket sneered. Thor ignored him and held out his arm. A huge hammer came flying through the air and landed in his hand.

“Yes!” Thor bellowed. “I’m still worthy!”

Rocket and Thor went to find Jane as you went to complete your part of the mission.

“Who goes there?” Came a voice. You followed the sound and found Loki lying on a couch, tossing something in the air and catching it. You put on your best innocent face as you entered the room.

“I’m so sorry, but my friends and I are here for the festival and I just had to sneak away to find you.” You gushed. Loki took long strides towards you as he took in your appearance.

“My brother isn’t here.” Loki informed you, his voice thick with annoyance.

“I’m not here for your brother.” You said coyly as you took another step towards him.

“You’re here for me?” He cleared his throat to mask the disbelief in his voice. You nodded sweetly.

“Of course. Won’t you show me a magic trick?” You batted your eyes flirtatiously. A slight smirk appeared on Loki’s face.

“A magic trick?” He asked. Mischief swirled behind his eyes.

“Well you are the God of Mischief, aren’t you?” You teased. A full, open mouthed smirk dressed his face now. He held up your hand and held your wrist tightly between his fingers. He brushed his fingers on his other hand over your palm and a diamond appeared. You looked at the beautiful diamond, weightless in your hand, and gasped. He had made it appear out of thin air.

“Oh, Loki. Must you think so little of me? I’m a woman of substance. Diamonds don’t impress me.” You have him an over dramatic sigh, but he completely fell for it. He felt a twinge of competition brewing in his chest, like he had to win your favor. You faked a yawn and his eyes gleamed with determination.

“You don’t like that? Well how about this?” Loki challenged and waved his fingers over your palm again. This time, a flower appeared. It didn’t look like any earthly flower. It was ten times more beautiful and smelled better than anything you had ever smelled before. The flowers colors were green and black with accents of gold, just like Loki’s outfit. You stared at the flower in amazement before looking up shyly at him. If you weren’t mistaken, the God of Mischief had a blush on his cheeks as he watched your face carefully for approval. Loki picked up the flower and tucked it behind your ear. He began to lean in slightly but you were interrupted byThor and Rocket knocking over a vase. You noticed they had the stone and were ready to go. Luckily, you saw them before Loki did.

“What was-“ Loki began to turn his head towards the sound but you quickly put a hand behind his head and pulled him into a kiss. You felt his eyes flutter shut and you opened yours. You could see Rocket and Thor pretending to gag out of the corner of your eye. With one hand, you motioned for them to move. They quickly scattered and you pulled away. Loki was fully blushing now but doing his best to conceal it. He seemed completely bewildered, making you wonder if he’d ever kissed anyone before. You certainly hadn’t kissed anyone since the day Peter left to visit MOMA with his school. That felt like a million years ago. You touched your fingertips to your lips and felt a pang of guilt. You hadn’t even looked at another since Peter vanished. He was the love of your life, you were sure it of. And you already had your great love story with him, though be it short. You waited for him for five years now. Surely he wouldn’t mind you kissing one other man, especially if it was apart of a plan to bring everyone back. Loki appeared to be just as lost in his thoughts as you were. You had slightly messed up his long black hair but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Thanks for the flower. And for everything else. Bye!” You stammered and made your escape. Loki was too taken aback to chase after you. You met up with Rocket and Thor and went home.

When you arrived back at the tower, everyone rejoiced when they learned they had succeeded in retrieving the stones. You felt that familiar glimmer of hope again. There was finally a chance of seeing Peters pretty brown eyes once more. You had a rule of never letting yourself get too hopeful. Never letting yourself think you’ll see him again. You knew you weren’t strong enough to handle losing Peter twice. You ran to Nebula in excitement and tried to give her a hug, but she acted like she didn’t even know you. You brushed it off as her being shy.

You looked around the room with glee until your eyes fell on Clint. He was stolid and not speaking. He looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

“Clint?” Steve asked. He seemed to notice Clint’s indifference same time you did.

“Where’s Nat?” Bruce spoke up. You felt your spine tingle and your eyes quickly darted around the room for your red haired friend. You felt fear rise in your throat when you couldn’t find her. Your eyes were drawn back to Clint as he fell to his knees. The Avengers rushed to him with their questions. You didn’t want to hear what he had to say. You left the room immediately and threw up in the bathroom.

You all sat outside by the lake and contemplated what to do next. You hadn’t spoken in hours, unlike everyone else. They were discussing Nat’s death and how to move forward. You jumped slightly when you heard a splash far off in the lake. You noticed a bench was now missing but you were too numb to comment. You tried to go to Nebula for comfort but she was acting strange. She didn’t seem to care at all for Nat’s death.

The decision was eventually made. You weren’t going to let Nat’s sacrifice go to waste. She gave her life for the stone and you were going to make damn sure she did it for a good reason. All the stones were in place. The gauntlet had been crafted, this time in true Iron Man colors. All there was left to do was decide was was going to snap.

“It should be me.” Thor immediately volunteered. You knew Thor was desperate for a win after feeling like he failed in stopping Thanos. He was instantly met with disagreement from the group. You hadn’t said anything in eight hours at that point. You didn’t feel that need. What could you possibly say? Your best friend died inside you. Your boyfriend died scared and on a foreign planet when he was just 18. You made a new best friend and she was ripped from your fingers without a goodbye. You had no words. None.

Bruce was the next to offer himself up, then Tony.

“No.” You spoke up. Your voice was horse after not speaking for hours. You had also been crying and that didn’t help. Everyone looked at you, most had forgotten you were even there.

“Not now, Area 51. The adults are talking.” Tony dismissed and went on about why he should weld the gauntlet but you stood up angrily.

“No. It can’t be you. He needs you. It has to be me.” You said firmly. You were hellbent on doing it and at this point, no one could stop you. Tony looked at you and practically laughed in your face.

“You think he needs me more than he needs you? Y/n, the boy worships you. You know he told me he takes the long way to school just so he can call you and talk to you for longer? And that he absolutely hates chicken and rice but he says it’s his favorite food because you love to make it. He deifies you. He venerates you. He’d do absolutely anything for you. You really think he’d ever forgive me for bringing him back into a world that you’re not in?” Tony reasoned with you. You walked closer to Tony, blocking out every other thought and person in the room.

“And what if this doesn’t work, Mr. Stark? What if you snap and it kills you and no one comes back? Am I a genius who can fix the problem and make a new gauntlet or are you?” You shot back. You were on fire now and didn’t wait for an answer. “Look around the room. I am the most useless one here. Without Venom, I’m just human. And if Thanos comes back for round two, who’s gonna stop him? Some girl or Iron Man?”

Tony didn’t answer. No one did. The answer was clear.

“It has to be me. We all know that the snap will most likely kill whoever does it. And we all know that I’m the least valuable asset to this team. As morbid as it is, it’s okay if I die, if it means you can fix the gauntlet and try again. Everybody in this room knows I’m expendable. I mean, you made me the freaking shiny object to distract Loki with on the Time Heist, right?” You looked around the room as the Avengers looked down in shame. There was no denying you were right.

“Why are you thinking so little of yourself?” Tony demanded. He wasn’t angry anymore, only saddened by your words.

“Because I’m useless. And I won’t be if you let me snap. You can’t help us defeat Thanos if you’re dead, Mr. Stark. I can’t help you defeat Thanos whether I’m dead or alive. I’m the one we can risk losing. It has to be me.” You repeated. You started towards the gauntlet and tried to slip your hand inside. Before you could get it in, Tony grabbed your hand in his and looked at you desperately.

“Please, Y/n. He would never come back if he knew this was the price. He would never risk losing you. Let me do it.” Tony begged you. You shook your head sadly.

“And let you die? Mr. Stark, you have a wife and a daughter.” You reminded him.

“My dad wasn’t there growing up and I turned out to be a billionaire. Morgan and Pepper will survive without me. All my money will be left to them. I wasn’t cracked up to be that great of a father anyway. All I can really do is spoil Morgan and give her my empire.” Tony answered you. Your heart broke at him thinking he wasn’t a good dad.

“Bullshit. You’re a great father. You didn’t know me and you went out of your way to take care of me and protect me. You gave me my suit. That is a quality of a great man and that is what makes you a great father. Not the ability to spoil your kids. Morgan needs you. She needs her dad. And other people need you too. There isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t benefitted from knowing you. This is your family, Mr. Stark. You can’t leave behind your family. There are too many people who care about you.” You raised your voice again. You were never going to back down.

“There are people who care about you too.” Tony tried to protest.

“No there aren’t.” You laughed bitterly. “Who do I have? Everyone I loved became everyone I lost. So if I don’t come back, it’s fine.” Your voice cracked as salty tears streamed down your face. “It’s not like I have anything to come back to. Ask yourself this and answer honestly. Who would he rather lose, me or you?”

“Me. He’d rather lose me.” Tony answered weakly. Even he didn’t believe it. You made a face.

“His father figure? You’ve got it all wrong, Mr. Stark. I’ve known him for five years. He only knew me for 6 months. He’ll meet another girl. He won’t meet another Tony Stark. He can move on from me. He can’t move on from you.” You said. You felt sick to your stomach at the thought of Peter with another girl, doing the things you used to. You only hoped he’d remember you.

“He won’t move on. I know him. He will never move on.” Tony stated, his grip still firm on your hand.

“Well neither could I! I have been a shell of a person for the past five years. I couldn’t even kill myself because I was so terrified of him not being there when I got to heaven. At least while I’m alive, I can see him in my dreams. But I can’t keep living everyday when the only thing keeping me going is the thought that he might visit me while I’m sleeping. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do anything anymore. I can’t eat, sleep, work, function, even breath without him! But I can do this. Please, Tony, let me do this. Let me bring him back.” You pleaded, almost on your knees at that point.

You had never called Tony by his first name before. Tony realized it too and finally, finally, nodded his head. He let go of your hand and backed away.

“This is suicide!” Thor protested. He tried to run to you but Tony held him back.

“Let her do it. Everybody, get back.” Tony said in defeat. He suited up and placed a shield in front of him. Everyone backed away from you and grabbed something to protect them. You looked to Nebula for support, but she was nowhere to be found. You knew there was no one there to hold your hand this time. No Peter. No Venom. No Nebula. No Nat. Just you.

You raised the gauntlet and slowly slid your hand into it. It opened to fit your arm before molding around you perfectly. You felt the surge of the Infinity Stones rush through your body. You were wearing your suit, but it did nothing to ease the pain. You cried out in pain and Thor once again stepped forward to stop you, but he was held back by Rhodey. You fully slid your hand in and raised it up. Tears poured down your face from the pain, and from knowing there was no way you were going to survive to see Peter again. You gave Tony one last look, but his face was covered by his Iron suit. You gave him a gentle smile, as if too apologize for yelling at him. He nodded his head once. You only wished you could see his face one last time, but he needed protected. You turned your attention back to your hand and put your fingers into position.

With tears rushing down your face, and with great agony in your entire body, you snapped your fingers.

Tag List 🏷

@monimiin @truthdaze @honeyccoated @constellationswithapurpose @condy-wants-a-cookie @zipp0flare @vxidnik @maddie-laufeyson @bubblegumholland @the-blindwatcher @pmvelez97 @ziggyspurplehaze @grippleback-galaxy @fangeekkk @twilight-loveer @assemblemotherfuckers @bolivianchickennugget @founding-fuck-bois @neonpandicorn @charismas-world

515 notes · View notes

halorocks1214 · 4 years

Text

the law of relativity

AO3 Link

Word Count: 9963

Summary: The Law of Relativity states that each person will receive a series of problems (‘tests of initiation’) for the purpose of strengthening the ‘light’ within. We must consider each of these tests to be a challenge and remain connected to our hearts when proceeding to solve the problems. This law also teaches us to compare our problems to others’ problems and put everything into its proper perspective. No matter how bad we perceive our situation to be, there is always someone who is in a worse position. It is all relative

Previous Parts (in order): Alan | Virgil | You are here! | Gordon

WHY 👏🏼 CANT 👏🏼 I 👏🏼 WRITE 👏🏼 FICS 👏🏼 IN 👏🏼 MO 👏🏼 DER 👏🏼 RATION 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 also just bluuuergh. dont ask about this fic. part of it was written in a dark auditorium, another was written in a different state, another was written on a frickin bus, this fic has been places ill tell you what. half the time i think this is hot garbage and the other half i think its actually decent so im posting this while my head is in a good headspace and then promptly yeeting myself off the internet for a few hours to wait and see what happens. this series is becoming less of a canon divergence AU and more of a straight-up AU because of certain details im trying to worm in there buT IM TRYING MY BEST

thanks once more to @gumnut-logic, because of the length, this time i used three prompts, them being "What do you mean?", crease, and dream (and they werent even used that much sksksksk)

Warnings for both graphic and non-graphic depictions of violence, as well as mentions of torture and other PTSD/panic attack related stuff. I went deep with this one fellas

Orphan.

The word tasted dirty in his mouth.

He can still see the footage in the backs of his eyelids from when he watched it exactly one year ago. He was the only other (living) adult at the time in the family outside of Grandma, so he was permitted to see it. He remembered they originally didn’t want to show him, mainly because of his age, but Grandma was fierce, and she put one hell of an argument on the table.

One Scott refused to let fall through the cracks by breaking down. If only Grandma knew how he cried his eyes out and screamed to high heaven that night in the hotel room after essentially watching his father be blown to bloody smithereens then she was a goddamn saint for keeping it a secret. It made sense, she was the mother to his father. She had quite the line up of stories from Jeff’s childhood. Scott sensed the early-greying of his hair came from her, heh.

The rest of his family eventually saw it, of course, they did. Scott couldn’t shield them forever. What he will protect, selfishly he might add, was how angry he was at how much better they took it than he did. They cried, yes they did, but they never fully broke down like Scott did. Later in life, he wondered if it was jealousy: jealousy at not truly being able to let go. Whatever it was, he made sure to swallow it along with whatever alcohol he chose for the weekend.

Just add it to the ever-growing pile of shit he had to deal with. Nothing new.

Suddenly he’s 20 again and seated in a plane to be taken to his first stint in the Air Force. He said his goodbyes to Virgil, Gordon, and Alan back at home while Grandma and John metaphorically held his hand all the way to the airport. John was… quiet, more so than usual, but Grandma was stuck right in the middle between being a sobbing mess and ecstatic at the fine young man he’s become.

You’re just like your father. He would be proud.

Scott was secretly glad she never physically said it. It gave him plausible deniability in thinking that those words weren’t laced behind her big, bright, prideful eyes.

The first time went well, maybe even great. He stayed for a couple of months, did some flight tests, and while the training was brutal, boy did he learn a lot. When he came back home it was to a family slowly stitching itself back together. Grandma was a full-time house member, Virgil had taken up painting, Gordon talked about potentially going back to his swim meets, and while Alan was still as silent as ever, he was perkier than when Scott last saw him.

It would be on and off for the next few years: a couple of months at home, slowly and painfully taking over the role their father had (he can’t remember when he essentially received joint custody of his younger siblings with Grandma, but hey, he’s not complaining), then a couple of months out at the Air Force base where he slowly climbed up the ranking platform. He became skillful, perhaps too skillful. When he got his rank of Captain he felt it was less of an honor and more of something they owed him.

He was getting cocky. Never enough to be a danger to his fellow men, but enough to be somewhat of an occasional annoyance. Charles smacked him upside the head more than once. It felt like the world was right-side-up for once. Scott made many-a-calls to John and Virgil, the former enjoying his first few rotations up in space and the latter squarely in the middle of college. Gordon was being offered sponsorships to hell and back, and Alan was quietly getting along with the other kids at his school. Grandma was on welcoming duty for Kayo, who was taking her slot in the Tracy family with grace, though, a warning that their family would take custody of her if something were to happen to her parents would have been nice, Dad.

Of course, nothing ever goes right for their family for too long.

Orphan.

Age 24, it was supposed to be a simple retrieval mission of civilians. Scott was put in charge of his squad and then some. At night, they rolled-- well, flew out to get the job done. Scott can’t even remember the country anymore when minding his own business. Australia? Finland? Perhaps Bangladesh? There was a place John was insistent Scott never do rescues in, Virgil tended to agree, and the eldest unhealthily let them banish him from ever stepping foot there without argument. He could never remember the name off the top of his head until John’s familiar International Rescue, we have a situation rung out in the living room followed by the name of the country.

He would immediately forget it later, trauma too strong, too volatile, but the way his heart stopped and his head shattered and the way he felt ice water rush down his back was a good enough reason to quietly leave the room and let John delegate the job to one of his brothers. Sometimes John found him retching in the toilet halfway through the mission. He made sure to always mute Scott’s wrist communicator, even if it was never turned on in the first place.

The plane touched down. Orders sent the ground team out. But then the ground team took longer than estimated. Scott tensely waited where he was told to. It wasn’t the first mission that took a little longer than predicted and knowing humans, it surely wouldn’t be the last. Then, words mixed with heavy static came over the radio. H--p. Co-- ---7--. --nd ba---p --me--at--y.

Scott sat tensely in his seat, remembering his orders and suddenly hating them. Radio back to home if the mission goes south. Well, it didn’t look like they had the radio anymore. Still didn’t hurt to try at least. Scott spoke the familiar protocol that was ingrained into him when trying to call base. Dammit. Nothing. Probably some kind of blocker of sorts. Sitting up straight as a board, Scott looked through his options.

… He was in charge here. If something happened to his team the fault would lie squarely on his shoulders. Going against everything but his gut, he went out to help his squad. He can’t really remember what he exactly did anymore, but he does remember that it made a noise. Like a Looney Tunes scene: he flinched, froze, waited to see if anything or one heard, breathed a sigh of relief, and continued.

He eventually stumbled across one of his closest comrades, Arnold Brigeets. Yes, the name was ironic and half the reason he joined the force in the first place. The guy was one of the people that actually trained Scott and also seemed to be one of the few that was genuinely proud when Scott became a higher rank. It’s why Scott was more appreciative of Arnold than others, that, and well… Scott thought his fatherly abilities were good. The guy did have three kids back home.

Orphan.

Ducking down behind the cover his older friend was semi-situated behind, Scott watched as Arnold jumped at the intrusion before sighing. Scott had run into some enemies that he swiftly took down-- nothing too serious, he didn’t have the time or weapons for such an act, but they definitely would be out of it for a while-- so Arnold must have too on his way to find cover as well, hence why he was so on edge.

“Thank God,” Arnold wiped his forehead, “Glad to see you join us, kid.”

Scott was breathing heavily, but the grin he attempted was still there, “Y-Yeah, so what happened? More threats than we thought?”

Arnold shook his head, “Yes and no. There were a lot more baddies than we thought, but that’s because the civilians weren’t civilians. It’s a tr--”

Boom. The familiar sound of a gunshot.

Arnold fell over. Never got back up. Dropped like a rock in a lake, never to come up to the surface again.

Scott was so caught off guard he couldn’t react to the gun that swiftly beat him over the head, knocking him out cold. The only thing on his mind was oh fuck oh fuck I messed up I shouldn’t have come I wouldn’t have made any noise that way why did I--

They had him for roughly two weeks. Scott always thought the plotline in movies where the villain vehemently denied knowing any important information was dumb as hell. We’re not stupid. We wouldn’t go after someone if they didn’t know something.

The things they did hurt and no amount of I don’t fucking know anything! would help. Those two weeks were lost to Scott in a sea of pain and torment. The only thing he remembered was being captured, then waking up in a hospital drugged up to his gills with his superiors staring at him like he cured cancer.

“You saved the rest of your squad from sharing the same fate as the first half.”

“I-I did?”

“You betcha, son. I only wish I was there to see it! People be saying you were like an animal in how you took ‘em all down.”

Scott’s never remembered, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He was given the highest honors, even the chance to skip a couple of ranks to be at the same level as the big boys, but the night they were going to share the news to the golden boy himself, they found him in one of the bathrooms with a bloody hand and a mirror shattered with no hope of fixing it.

He was honorably discharged to a family that was so thankful he was home. Words like missing in action and POA never stopped haunting their nightmares. Scott was too, God, of course, he was, but sitting around and doing nothing was the last thing his traumatized mind wanted or maybe even needed. After doing what he considered to be the biggest fuck-up of his life, he needed to feel important.

This isn’t the first time he’ll say this and it surely won’t be the last: thank Christ for Grandma.

“You want me to take over?...”

“Yep, it’s about time Tracy Industries received a new pair of eyes. The Board certainly thinks so.”

“But… they’d rather have a crazy, PTSD-infected veteran over you?”

A rough pinch to his ear, “Hey now, don’t call yourself that,” the gentle motherly tone was back as soon as it left, “Besides, that crazy might exactly be what they want. Half of their argument is that I “don’t take enough risks.” They’re getting tired of listening to an old fart like me.”

A moment of contemplation, followed by the cheeky raise of an eyebrow, “So you’re saying you want me to take so many risks they have no choice but to take you back?”

A bark of laughter, “Damn straight.”

He learned the ropes faster than normal (healthy, is probably the correct term), and he immediately won the hearts of both young and old in the company. Instead of flying planes every few months, he worked on business reports and vetoed new ideas every couple of weeks. It felt satisfying for the most part, and his family was just happy he was still alive to enjoy it.

However, there was a slight roadblock on his way to becoming a somewhat stable person.

He became prone to violent blackouts. It had to have started when he blacked out and saved himself from those two weeks of hell, which made the most sense. Something was always destroyed when he came back to life. John was the best at calming him down due to his own experience with panic attacks, however, John couldn’t always be there, and the next rotation for NASA was coming swiftly. Scott swore up and down he would be fine, he could figure something out. John went back into space with an eyebrow permanently raised.

It was just him and Virgil home (Grandma had taken Alan and Kayo to watch Gordon swim) when he, unfortunately, proved John right. Scott wasn’t sure what triggered it, but he vividly remembered coming back in Virgil’s extremely tight hold. The first thing Scott thought to say was damn, beanstalk, when did you get so strong? but then he laid his eyes upon the forming bruise on his younger bro’s face and hasn’t recovered since.

Virgil swore he never held it against Scott. Scott definitely thought he should have.

That night brought sudden clarity to Scott that he was doing this horribly wrong. He was a ticking time bomb, and it wouldn’t be long before something was damaged in a way that couldn’t be fixed. Scott needed an anchor. Something to ground him before he took it too far. John wasn’t going to be earthside forever, Grandma was busy with Kayo, Alan was just a kid, and Gordon was living the dream. None of them were viable.

Then, as he was thinking, he was suddenly aware of how calming Virgil’s arms were around him, how they were preventing the growing panic attack in his chest from getting even bigger.

It was easy.

For once in Scott’s life, his eyes were big and young as he asked Virgil, “Help me, please.”

After a few brief seconds, Virgil gulped, “Okay.”

From then on, Virgil was Stone Number One. Scott’s admiration for Virgil outweighed the guilt of putting the black-haired man in that position in the first place. Virgil was glad to follow his older brother’s leadership, but just as qualified to bring him the hell back when he went too far. From getting too sacrificial to preventing a good punching-out some of the idiots they dealt with, Virgil made sure Scott knocked that shit off.

Time went on, Scott was a top-notch CEO at Tracy Industries, John was having one hell of a time up in space, Virgil was graduated and had so many life opportunities to pick from, Alan was thriving at being a (mostly) stable kid, Kayo was 100% acclimated to the family, and Gordon--

Scott found himself gripping the wooden desk very abruptly. He was shocked he didn’t snap a chunk off in the process. Why was he thinking about this right after a giant business conference? Who knows at this point. If this giant origin story seemed jagged and jumpy, maybe even somewhat vague, good, that’s how it fucking felt.

Back to said story.

Scott always thought he and Gordon would have the least amount in common.

They do, but out of all the things they could have picked to be similar, why did it have to be the PTSD caused by military-related jobs? Scott was 24 when he got his, Gordon was just under 20. It may have been a few years since their respective accidents, but they’re never going to go another day without it feeling like it was just yesterday.

At this point, Gordon was up and walking again, mainly thanks to John and Alan while Virgil and Scott helped in their own ways. Grandma’s cooking was what probably motivated him the most though, ha, the need to get away from it… Scott smiled. Grandma was always a constant. Honestly, if it weren’t for her, the family might have fallen apart. Literally.

What has he been saying throughout this whole shindig? Thank Christ for Grandma.

One day out of the blue, Grandma reserved the entire family (yes, even Kayo and Alan) private plane tickets so they could spend some time on the mainland for a few days. Honestly, even if the island wasn’t getting major renovations, you hooligans need to get out more. Have some fun. Try not to kill anything, especially each other, she all told them while creepily grinning. John and Virgil smacked Gordon more than once on the plane for insisting that she finally snapped, dudes, she’s gonna kill us.

Most of the time during their little vacation, Scott heavily focused on his breathing. He was pretty sure he knew what she was doing. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t nervous, but the same went for his excitement.

Dad showed him these plans the day after his 18th birthday. You’re a man now, Scotty, I need your help making this big boy decision with me.

As soon as they reset foot down on the island, Scott took a deep breath and felt relaxed at the salty taste in the air. It was weird, nothing on the outside was changed, and yet… it still felt different.

“Guys!” Virgil yelled out, “Stop playing in the water! We just got back, aren’t you two tired?!”

Blinking back to reality, Scott looked over to see his two youngest brothers doing exactly what Virgil was yelling at them for. Poor Johnny was a little damp too, which is what probably caused Virgil to shout at them in the first place. The blondes didn’t care. They continued to prance around in the shallow waves with their pants legs rolled up, acting as if they didn’t hear anything outside of their laughter. Gordon shoved his hands down into the liquid and threw some directly at Alan, nailing him right in the face.

Scott exhaled slowly. He couldn’t imagine them doing this 8 years ago.

Regardless, the artist was right, and they couldn’t waste too much time. Kayo was swift in grabbing both gentlemen by the ears and dragging them onto dry land. They all painstakingly trekked their way up to the-- what would you call Tracy Island? Mansion? Over-blown cabin? Well, whatever it was, Scott would always be willing to call it home.

Stepping inside, each brother took in the view, which was underwhelmingly not that much different, except for one tiny thing. John suddenly noticed a figure already standing in the living room and blinked, “No way… it’s--”

Gordon jumped in, both with his body and his words, “Brains?! Dude, how’s it hanging?!”

The scientist in question jumped at the voices before clearing his throat and readjusting his glasses, “O-Oh, hello again, T-Tracys. It’s good to see you all once more.”

Virgil slung an arm around his shoulder, ignoring the blatant squawk, “Man, how long has it been?! What made you finally decide to crawl out of your hole?”

Snickers came from all corners of the house. Brains stood up straighter, “W-Well, I was contacted b-by Mrs. Tracy over here with an offer I c-couldn’t turn down.”

Eyebrows tilted in all shapes and sizes. Someone cleared their throat. Everyone turned to look at Grandma once again, “I think if you all follow me, you’ll swiftly understand what I’m talking about.”

I already do, Scott thought matter-of-factly. John seemed to be understanding it now, Virgil was on the cusp of remembering what his father was hinting at for him, and Gordon was just as lost as Alan. It made sense, Jeff talked to all of them about it, but the oldest had seniority. The two youngest not remembering just by words was expected, especially since that was going to be rectified very quickly.

The hangar under the island was beautiful. Point blank. It smelt of iron and steel and grease and engine and that was the first time since Scott had been in the Air Force that he didn’t gag or flinch at the thought of flying something again. Scott had seen the plans his father drew. He assumed Jeff finished building it, but he never got to physically see it since…

In some ways, he was glad he didn’t. Now he got to experience it with (most of) his family, and that made it ten times better.

After letting them absorb the scenery, Grandma slowly turned around to look at them all, “You remember that dream your father had?”

The four oldest blinked, Kayo simply raised her eyebrows, meanwhile, Alan, being the teenager he was, didn’t read the emotion in the room, “Oh, yeah! Aunt Casey always talked about how he was going to “change the world” and stuff. What did he call it again?”

Scott felt way more confident than he had in a while, “International Rescue.”

Grandma nodded, gleeful at the happy look on her oldest and youngest grandsons’ faces, “Well, I’ve been thinking about some things. I know we don’t exactly worry about money, but after everything your father put into these girls… I’d hate for them to go to waste.”

The Tracy family jumped at that. John’s mouth was wide open in shock, yes, shock, “That station is still up there?”

Grandma sighed, “You mean ‘Five? Not for long. Not if we don’t send someone up there within the next few days.”

John blushed at the grin Grandma gave him. Clearing his throat, his big brain came to a startling conclusion, “Wait… you brought Alan along?”

The other big brothers in the room jumped at that. Kayo was the only one with enough balls to say the truth out loud, “Mrs. Tracy, I mean no offense, but he’s--”

“Just a kid?” Grandma smirked, “A kid that’s topped the VR charts for Intergalactic Fury for weeks straight while simultaneously getting nothing but A’s in his classes?”

Scott nodded slowly in comprehension. He remembered Alan talking about that game for a while. It was some kind of online racing simulator of sorts. Scott caught the prettiest string of words from Alan when going to bed one night. Nearly made him shit his pants. He made the kid promise to keep it PG-13 if he wanted to keep playing.

Still, the elders in the family slowly turned to look at the freckled boy with both shock and pride. Alan blinked with wide-eyed innocence, “But my English class is only at a B--”

“Shh, kiddo, I’m making a point,” Grandma rolled her eyes. The other brothers snickered. Yep, still Alan. Grandma sighed, “Now before you point out that video games are different, I know, but the difference between them and this is that video games don’t have some of the most talented older brothers in the world to guide him.”

Said older brothers jumped at the idea. Before any objection could be made, Grandma continued, “Besides, the GDF seemed to be okay with it. The Colonel was willing to oversee some of his training too.”

John flinched at that, “But IR is supposed to be independent!”

Grandma slightly frowned. She didn’t exactly like it either, “It still is, but in the world of business, compromises have to be made.”

Virgil huffed and crossed his arms, “Well, that’s… rough. Here I thought only Scott would have to deal with the bullshit of business.”

Grandma chuckled at the somewhat un-Virgil-like behavior, “It really is, Virgil. But about that Scott part,” she slowly turned to look at him and him only, “I hate to give you more work to do, but if you want to work within their restrictions?”

Suddenly every pair of eyes in the room was on the head of the family. Gulping, Scott looked down at his feet to think. It was a tense few moments, nobody sure what he was going to decide, least of all him, before the brunette cleared his throat and brought his face back up with a grin.

“Well then,” Scott turned to look at the bright tip of ‘One, chest fluttering with a feeling that became unfamiliar to him over the past few years, “I guess now it’s time to state the obvious.”

From then on, every time he loaded into that cockpit of his girl, he felt lighter than air.

“Thunderbirds are GO!”

Everything was okay again.

Mostly.

Orphan.

Scott took another sip of his whiskey and refocused on his reports.

---

Scott was in some kind of dissociative state the whole way home.

Alan doesn’t deserve this. He’s still a kid, barely an adult, and he’s going to go through utter hell because you screwed up. You were 24, Gordon was just under 20, Alan was barely 18. Alan’s going to get fucked up like you and it’s all your fault.

His movements were robotic and rigid. Anyone with a working eye could tell he was deep in shock and running on autopilot. Mostly Jeff. Especially Jeff. The rest of the brothers all noticed too, but they were also running on their own empty fuel tanks, so the only thing they could do was guilty send their older brother the occasional glance of pity and concern.

Jeff was going to need to talk to them about that. Somehow. Maybe he shouldn’t be the one to point it out since he feels just as bad. His sons were too much like him, sometimes, and that made his guilt burn all the same. He should’ve been there to warn his sons about the dangers of unnecessary guilt. Having that kind of guilt was a parent’s job, dammit, and maybe grandparents only occasionally.

But then he remembered where he’s been for the past 8 years and… who really was Alan’s parents anymore? His gut was screaming it sure as hell isn’t you, but he knew his sons would want him to step back into the role as soon as he was physically fit to do so, not just for Alan, but for themselves as well. They would deny it, but they probably just wanted to be kids again too, even if it was only brief, fleeting moments.

Who was to tell the protective, fatherly side of Jeff no to that? No better time to fix things like the present after all.

He saw Scott go up the stairs when they first stepped into the living room, so that’s where Jeff was going to go too. Footsteps light, Jeff retraced his eldest’s pathway to his bedroom. Only, he stopped before said bedroom. Unfavorable noises were coming from the closed bathroom door, and Jeff could only swallow whatever emotion it made him feel. Taking a deep breath, he slowly opened the (unlocked) door to the bathroom and laid his eyes upon the incriminating scene.

Jeff was met with the sight of Scott retching his entire stomach into the toilet, hands aggressively grabbing his sticky, hair-gelled hair and trying to make himself bald from the strain.

Jeff’s reaction was always based on autopilot, and it will never stop being so.

Ignoring his protesting body, Jeff kneeled and placed a hand on his son’s back, only to abruptly pull back like he touched a hot stove when Scott only got more hysterical at the contact. The brunette clenched his eyes shut even more (and they were already shut as much as possible) while his head became a special kind of crease. Like he was in pain, “God, I wanna go home. Why won’t they listen I swear I’m telling the truth! Please, I just want Dad--”

Jeff was frozen on the spot, heart stopping in the process. His brain shut down while he watched his son continue to mindlessly ramble and panic. His freaked-out mind barely registered footsteps from behind in the hallway, followed by a voice going what’s going-- holy--

Something thundered past him. Blinking once, Jeff guiltily watched as Virgil kneeled behind the eldest and wrapped his arms around the thin man’s shoulders while taking Scott’s hands in his in a protective blanket, “Scott! Jesus-- we’re at home, you’re safe and it’s June 14th, 2--”

Scott only struggled more, panicking at the fact he could no longer yank his hair out. Dammit, it was the only way he could feel in control, don’t take that away too! “No! I swear I’ve said everything! Please--”

Virgil immediately knew that this was one of those attacks that Scott wasn’t coming back down from with pure human intervention. Add-on the sight of his father’s big eyes signifying the man was at a loss at what to do, Virgil had no choice. He snapped loudly, remembering the comms were still on and only feeling slightly bad at the way Scott flinched in his arms, “Shit-- John! It’s Scott! Get the stuff! We’re in the upstairs bathroom!”

Muffled footsteps through a few walls in the house could be heard. Jeff’s mind was only starting to catch up when the brother Virgil called for came rushing into the bathroom (Jeff never remembered it being big enough to hold four of them) and ignoring Jeff (practically shoving him out of the way too, man, this was bad) on his way to the main problem at hand. Landing on his knees in a way that made Jeff wince, John gently grabbed one of Scott’s arms from Virgil’s hold and subsequently pulled a needle from nowhere and injected something into Scott.

The response was instantaneous.

Scott’s breathing, while still labored, got slower. He stopped struggling as well, and the way he sagged reminded Jeff of ice melting into a puddle. The two other brothers’ shoulders also sagged, relieved at the crisis averted. John stood up, knees cracking as he rubbed the back of his neck. Then, he froze at the sight of something in the doorway, “G-Gordon…”

Virgil snapped his head up from where he was looking at Scott. Jeff did something similar. Yup, in the doorway was the strawberry blonde, eyes wide, making him younger by about 10 years. The ex-Olympian in question inhaled, closed his eyes, and soon speed-walked his way out of the entrance to the bathroom. Dammit, neither Gordon or Alan have seen something like that and it probably spooked him more than anything. He’d understand with his own PTSD-related issues, but still, seeing the “never weak” big brother freak out in such a scary way...

John combed a hand through his hair, shaking his head. As he started walking out of the room, he whispered to himself, probably hoping no one heard him, “Dammit, this is all so fucked…”

Unfortunately, Jeff did hear, and the dirty language made the father flinch. John was always the best about making sure Grandma didn’t wash his mouth out with soap, and the fact that he so willingly didn’t care meant that everyone was at the end of their rope. Still reeling at the sight, Jeff couldn’t react to the gentle arms that picked him up off the floor and slowly led him out of the suddenly stuffy room.

With the click of the door shutting, Jeff realized what Virgil did, “W-Wait, Scott--”

“Will be okay for a few seconds,” Virgil finished for his dad, “I know it’s nearly been a decade, but the one part of you I definitely know hasn’t changed is the need to comfort us, just like we hoped.” The small grin that fell over the middle child’s face put Jeff a little bit at ease, but Virgil wasn’t completely done, “So, I’m going to let you take care of this, but I just want to make sure you’ll handle it with grace. Take this slowly, okay? Scott might be doped up, but he’s still… volatile, in a sense.”

Jeff cleared his throat, suddenly choking on the unneeded tension, “Okay, Virgil, I promise, just… what happened? That was… bad, and really bad at that too. I know Scott would never let something that severe willingly come out in front of his family.”

Virgil rubbed the back of his neck, clearly not ready for this conversation, “Listen, Dad,” he inhaled sharply, cutting himself off before sighing in a way that said fuck it, might as well get this over with, “As much as it felt like it did, the world didn’t stop spinning because you… well, we had lives we somehow wanted to continue living. We all have lives and stories now, and this is Scott’s story to tell.”

Jeff was getting misty-eyed again. Back when he was just a kid, Virgil couldn’t keep a secret to save his life, mainly in part due to his insomnia-related issues (Jeff has to wonder if he still has them, more problems for the future) and general lack of filter because of sleep-deprivation. Now Jeff knew there was a starch difference between a kid who couldn’t keep his mouth shut and a man who genuinely knew how to respect another man’s privacy, but…

It just hammers home how much he’s missed with his boys. Gulping, Jeff made a mental note to talk with his mom about certain things he’s missed. She’ll know a lot more than he would, “Okay, Virge. Thank you, for stepping up there.”

Virgil’s shoulders relaxed at Jeff’s words, as well as his father’s hand patting him on the shoulder, “Thanks, Dad. Just… go easy on him. I know it’s a little late for this but none of us ever properly talked about things. It was very unhealthy, deep down we all knew that, but…”

“You just couldn’t get the proper emotions out?” Jeff finished for his son. At Virgil’s soft nod, Jeff exhaled, “I’m not going to say that it was a smart decision, but we’re all here now. We can move forward with this.” Jeff squeezed where his hand laid.

Virgil blinked before curtly going, “Yeah. Goodnight, Dad. Take care of Scott.”

Virgil stepped around his father and walked to where his bedroom most definitely was not, but Jeff could deal with that in a little bit. He had another son who he was pretty sure just had a violent PTSD attack of some kind, plus, Virgil seemed to sour at something Jeff said. The ex-astronaut wasn’t sure what it was, so he didn’t chase after him out of worry that--

Wait.

We’re all here now.

Dammit, Jeff. Out of all the sentences you could’ve picked...

Alrighty, just add that to the ever-growing pile of things that need to be talked about later. No biggie. Jeff found himself sighing and rubbing the back of his neck much like Virgil did a few minutes ago. Turning around, he was met with the bathroom door once more. Shaking his head, Jeff slowly crept into the room and saw that not much was different, especially with Scott.

His heart softly cracked, but, again, he can deal with it later.

Sitting down on the ground and grimacing at the way his body ached (was gravity always this rough?), Jeff leaned against the floor cabinets about 2-3 feet away from Scott, who made himself into a nice comfortable ball in the corner next to the toilet, his palm smushed against his forehead. Jeff waited a few seconds. Then minutes. Then he realized he would have to be the one to initiate the conversation. He probably should’ve realized that right when he came back in. He opened his mouth, but his wasn’t the one that words came out of.

“It was… Zambia.”

Jeff’s heart stopped and his mouth snapped shut. He couldn’t stop the way his eyes clearly showed his panic, but hopefully, he guiltily thought, Scott was a little too doped up to not realize it, “Scotty, what do you mean?”

Scott shrugged in a way that spoke he thought what he was admitting wasn’t a big deal. Yep, clearly not with it, “Mission went bad… caught for a couple of weeks.”

Jeff was hoping his first fuck back on Earth, spoken to himself like right now or otherwise, would have been a comedic thing, but the way nausea rose in his throat said this was anything but funny.

Scott wanted to be in the Air Force. Badly. Who was a father to deny his son’s want to be part of such a noble cause? He gave him tips, took him to meet friends in high places, sometimes even sparred with him when he turned 18, but then Jeff was suddenly thousands of miles away with no hope of ever having the chance of sparring with his eldest again. Despite it, Jeff hoped Scott went on to become the best pilot the world has ever seen.

Part of this looks like he did, but at what cost?

As much as it felt like it did, the world didn’t stop spinning because you… well, we had lives we somehow wanted to continue living.

Aw hell, “Jesus, Scott…” Jeff couldn’t tell if it was the brashness or the lack of a nickname that made Scott flinch and he hated it. He immediately softened his tone and brought his 27-year-old child into his arms, “Shh, shh, we’ll be okay. We’ll figure this out.”

Like father like son, old habits die hard, and as easy as it was to still be able to comfort his children, Scott seemed to just as easily take it as he used to 8 years ago, “Alan doesn’t deserve this kind of hell, God, he’s barely not a kid anymore! Why--”

Jeff tightened his hold to keep his son in reality, and because he didn’t like the tone behind those words, “Hey, you didn’t either--”

Scott somehow managed to fling himself out of the hug, focus incredibly on point for someone who was doped up to his eyelids five seconds ago, “But I fucked up! I made the wrong call and then suddenly Arnold was dead and he had a wife and kids-- shit, what the hell did I do?”

Okay.

First of all: way to put him back in that headspace when that’s the exact opposite you were going for, Jeff, father of the year. Second: dammit. Just… dammit. This was a big fat hand grenade in a giant handbasket that they didn’t have time to gently get out while simultaneously not yanking the pin clean off with the grace of a drunk elephant. Jeff was no stranger to Survivor’s Guilt, but there was a whole untapped pile of metaphorical C4 within his son’s head that was ready for someone to push the goddamn button.

He wanted it to be him, desperately, because it sounded like he already failed his family enough, it was all he could do at this point, but he absolutely hated that he couldn’t do it right now. This was going to take a lot of time, which they didn’t have, plus, Jeff thought he had a pretty good understanding of this new Scott and the rest of his kids. Jeff was aware that if he didn’t help his sons find their baby as fast as possible over everything else it’ll lead to a fate nobody wanted.

A shaky sigh, “Okay, Scotty, let’s get you to bed. We’ll talk strategy in the morning.”

Scott simply nodded as his father flung Scott’s arm around his broader shoulders and picked him up. Slowly and painfully but surely, father and son meandered their way to Scott’s room. With a thump a little harder than Jeff wanted, Scott flopped down on top of his sheets and immediately started snoring. Despite everything that just happened, the father couldn’t help but grin at the sight. Well, there was another thing Jeff gracefully passed onto his son.

Jeff only took Scott’s shoes off. He would’ve loved to pull the sheets up around him too, but the father didn’t want to take any chances at waking him up. Slowly tip-toeing out of the room, Jeff gave one last glance back at his son before finally letting him be and gently shutting the door. He had three other sons he needed to console, but his tired joints told him to selfishly take a moment for himself for right now unless he wanted to collapse and give his family more to deal with.

Jeff eventually made his way to his room-- which was sadly unkempt, he noticed-- and sat down on the edge of his unfamiliar bed to think.

He’ll figure something out. If he had to crawl through images of his son being brutally and bloodily tortured then by God he would with the fury of a thousand suns.

He was back and he wasn’t going to throw away any second or even third chance he was given.

---

“I got him.”

Virgil turned his comms back on, and with it, Scott’s heart restarted for the first time in a few weeks. Taking a moment for a breather, Scott leaned against the wall while practically wheezing. They have him back, holy shit, they have him back. Scott vaguely heard Gordon cry in pure relief and joy. He saw John’s side of the comms flutter for a bit before a bright flash happened. Blinking away the white spots, Scott looked at his wrist to see a fully detailed map of the compound.

Gordon spoke what they were all thinking, “Woohoo! First Allie comes back, then Johnny-boy gets us a free ticket out of here! We’re winning this race, baby!”

A very loud moment of silence. John cleared his throat, “Actually, I was going to say glad to see you in one piece, you little shit,” a playful gasp came from Virgil’s side. It was too high pitched to be from the pianist’s mouth. Scott chuckled, but the paranoid part of his brain said John wasn’t done. His brain was right, ‘“But guys… that wasn’t me. Or EOS. We still haven’t found a way to get past the metal they made these walls out of.”

That silence was even more deafening than the last, and before Virgil could utter out his typical what the fuck, a small logo appeared at the corner of their new map. One that was all too familiar. The Chaos Crew wasn’t the only one who could brand their awful deeds.

Son of a bitch.

Virgil’s order over the radio was meant for Alan, but Scott couldn’t help but listen to it too.

“Shit, Alan, you need to run.”

Making quick work of the compound once more, Scott, while booking it even quicker than last time, opened a private line between him and Gordon, “Hey, how would you feel if I said go help Virgil while I cover Alan?”

The first response was stuttering, which Scott expected, but then it was followed up by something completely out of left field for Gordon, “... Okay, just as long as you promise to bring Alan back in one piece.”

Part of Scott wanted to console Gordon, another was questioning why Gordon was so quick to give up, another wanted to say of course, I will, idiot, but the first part that made itself verbal was easy, “You know I will, buddy.”

Scott could physically picture Gordon’s tiny, little, somber nod clear as day, “Sounds good, captain. See you on the other side.”

With a click, Scott was back on the group comm. Suddenly remembering what exactly his job was, he pulled out the map so graciously given to them by The Hood. Looking at all the dots, one was heading towards a prone one (oh if that asshole did anything to Virgil…) while another one was heading right for Scott himself. Actually, in just a few seconds, right as Scott rounded the corner he would--

“Woah, look out there, Tigger!”

Yes, you heard that correctly: not tiger, Tigger. Tigger hadn’t been used since Alan was itty bitty. It always seemed like the kid had endless energy with the way he wouldn’t stop bounding off the walls and furniture. Even as a baby, Lucy had to sit with him for a few hours while he slept in his crib to make sure he would stay there. In fact, their mother gave Alan that nickname herself. She was quite the Winnie the Pooh fan, and the rest of the family figured it would be one of the ways they could keep her legacy alive for the tiny potato.

Wrapping his arms around said flailing potato, albeit much bigger than a baby, Scott thought he would collapse then and there. Alan was here, in his arms, and yeah, the sight of his dirty and somewhat ripped up IR uniform made him mad, but Scott, for once in his life, decided to focus on the here-and-now, aka his precious, alive little brother, who finally stopped struggling at the realization that hey, the person holding you is a good guy, time to turn off fight mode.

Smushing their foreheads together as much as possible, Scott desperately fought to keep the waterworks back, a smile from ear to ear hopefully taking whatever energy his tear ducts had, “You are getting such an ass beating when we get home, little bro.”

Alan jumped back with a look of What the hell?! What did I do now?!

Scott simply rolled his eyes, “Really? “Not important”? You graduated high school, tiny dude! That’s huge! You remember Gordon’s party, right?”

Alan’s mouth gaped before he closed it with slightly puffy cheeks. Those same cheeks tinged with a small blush. Alan wasn’t exactly expecting to be smothered so soon (well, he did cry his eyes out on Virgil’s shoulder, but that was different!). Shaking it off, Alan moved his hands rhythmically and rapidly, To be fair, we weren’t sure he was going to get one for a while.

Scott faltered a little bit at the ASL. Darn, he should’ve seen Alan’s lack of talking from a mile away. Scott carefully hid his disappointment from Alan. Lord knew what the kid would take it as, “Yeah, that’s what he got for barely making it. Imagine what you’re going to get!”

Scott assumed his semi-fake charm worked, as Alan seemed to play along without any kind of suspicion, Oh yeah. Fair enough.

This kid, man.

Then, slow clapping came from a dark corner, making Scott’s heart leap out of his throat as well as push Alan behind himself. Glaring as much as he could towards the invisible evil-doer, Scott didn’t have to think twice, “Alan, take my map and find Virgil and Gordon.”

The youngest looked like he was going to object.

“Go.”

He no longer did. Good.

Listening to the field commander’s orders, Scott felt his wristband slip off his wrist and a warm body leave his vicinity. An inhale. Also good. An exhale, followed by an even darker glare, “What more do you want?”

Short and straight-to-the-point and angry, two things Scott typically wasn’t. Regardless, like a cold gust of wind, footsteps started approaching him from the shadow. Once Scott saw the outline of a body, he tensed even more. Virgil would snap at him for clenching his jaw so much.

A dark chuckle reminded him of what was important. The voice that spoke reminded him of something completely different, “Now then, brother, let’s not be rude to each other!”

Scott’s pupils shrunk at the familiar sight of Gordon stepping towards him. Except it wasn’t Gordon, because Scott knew that Gordon knew better. He also knew Gordon didn’t cheekily smile like that, even after a prank, nor did he walk that straight. He always had a funny walk after WASP, and Gordon wore that fact like a badge of honor.

Oh no, Scott definitely knew who this was, “What the hell are you playing at?”

Fake-Gordon rolled his eyes, like it wasn’t obvious, “I mean if we want to go that route, why did kid insist you being in the military was the coolest thing he’d ever heard you do? Maybe I wouldn’t have been pressured into joining a branch myself in the end.”

Scott’s nostrils flared, and by God, his pupils might have actually slitted like a snake’s, or possibly even a dragon’s, “Excuse me?”

Scott blinked, and suddenly he was met by not-Virgil, “Plus, why was our conclusion after hearing a three-year-old wanting to see snow to go to a ski resort? It had to have been those big, selfish, beady eyes, right?”

“C’mon, Scotty, we gotta give you some kind of calming exercise. There’s going to come a time when neither me or John are going to be there.”

“Hmm… does yoga work?”

A snort, “Well, that’s not too bad of an idea. Maybe the person pissing you off will stop whatever they’re doing at the sight of you spontaneously doing downward dog.”

Laughter, an unfamiliar action, “Yeah, okay, but for real, those breathing exercises I’ve seen you do look okay. Let’s start there.”

Scott was not a liar by heart. He had to admit that those exercises were doing jack shit right about now.

Another blink, another brother. Familiar ginger hair was all Scott could see, “To continue that previous point, why did Dad start International Rescue again? And what led to his demise?”

“Sounds like a piece of work. Why do you keep dealing with these people again?”

“Someone has to pay the bills, Johnny. Grandma’s too focused on making the perfect poison for us.”

A roll of eyes, “Right, because the billions we have saved wouldn’t be enough to last a couple of families a few lifetimes. Glad to see your calming exercises are working at least. How’s that going for you, by the way?”

A pause. A flicker of vision around the room. Someone cleared their throat, probably himself, “It’s probably not as bad as whatever space is throwing at you. You handling it okay up there?”

Another pause, followed by a sigh, “Well, since you asked so nicely…”

Scott wanted to deflect the truth so badly right now more than anything else. Telling him he couldn’t pilot ‘One anymore would be a much more enticing option than what he was hearing.

Suddenly, Scott was looking in a mirror, “Besides, I know more than anybody that he wasn’t wanted. A mistake. I thought we Tracys hated being imperfect?”

The Hood must have known their backstories from internet articles, and being the mastermind he was, it probably took him all of three seconds to see Alan had some hidden self-worth issues. By playing the biggest Guess Who? game of all time, The Hood was most likely able to figure out some less-than-positive ideals Alan thought about himself throughout his childhood and danced circles around his already weakened mind to string together some spineless blame to put on the kid by sheer evilness alone.

Knowing his kid brother, it worked.

Scott wasn’t thinking straight-- maybe even at all when the first punch was thrown.

Just like that, Scott blacked out and was running on terminator mode. John would be disappointed. Virgil would be horrified. Gordon might find it funny. Alan wasn’t here, and thank God for that. Scott wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing. All his mind was telling him was make lots of pain hard and fast. His brain also blocked out any hit The Hood was giving him in return. Pain flared for a few seconds, then it was swept away in the puddle of rage his mind was currently being consumed in.

Soon, his out-of-it mind found its target and gripped his-- The Hood’s arm, no disguise would make him have an identity crisis, thank you very much-- nice and rough.

Scott heard the familiar snap of cartilage and felt only partially bad. If he was thinking more clearly, he would be disgusted with himself. Yes, even The Hood didn’t deserve this level of Scott’s fury. Oh, he definitely deserved to be hit by a truck, but not by Scott. It was mostly due to Scott’s sanity. If he could be this graphic and violent at all, even to the worse possible criminals, that meant he could be that way during other moments, and that was not a territory he wanted to cross into.

Welp, he was here now, and he’ll hate to admit it in the future, but the only thing that brought him out of it was a tiny gasp from a few feet away. Snapping his head up, Scott’s eyes landed squarely on a smaller-than-normal Alan, who was currently clutching his arm to his chest in an emotion Scott didn’t want to figure out at the moment. So much for going and finding Virgil and Gordon.

“Allie, help…” fake him grunted out, only making real Scott growl and tighten his hold (and probably making his case worse). Looking up from the person in his arms, Scott felt his heart split in two at the sight. There was fear and uncertainty in Alan’s blue eyes and boy did it hurt. Scott couldn’t tell if it was because even seeing a potentially-fake Scott being beaten up was bad or if it was because he’d never seen big brother be this brutal, even towards their enemies. Whatever the reason, it involved Scott being the main root of the problem.

Wait, that was The Hood’s plan. Shit… make Scott act past the point of no return in a way that was unfamiliar to Alan so the kid couldn’t be fully sure who was who, and Scott fell right into his trap, hook, line, and sinker.

Fuck.

Bloody well done, Scott, you absolute moron.

Scott faltered a little bit, “A-Alan, I--”

That falter was enough for The Hood to break an arm out of his grip and elbow him in the face. In the brief second of freedom he had, he tried dashing towards Alan, but Scott was too quick for everyone’s good and soon had the imposter back in his arms, both of them struggling in a way that made them look like they were tied into the weirdest knot in existence.

Then, an earthquake struck.

No, literally.

A big shake of the abandoned compound threw the look-a-likes about and subsequently off the platform they were on. The place was old; it didn’t take a lot of weight for that guard rail they made their way over towards while fighting to snap right off. With a yelp, the two of them gripped the edge as much as they could and held on. Crap, I know we talked with Fuse about potentially setting some stuff off, but--

Blinking, Scott saw a familiar mop of blonde hair come into view. Alan was rather panicked, clearly not sure which Scott was the real Scott. Not only that, he had little time to decide which one to save. Goodie, another reason to despise The Hood: not only has he put Alan through weeks of torment, now he’s forcing the kid to decide to either save his oldest brother and biggest hero or his personal torturer.

And Alan won’t know until he picks.

Holy hell, this was getting worse by the second. Hopefully, big brother charm can work its magic and get them the hell out of there.

“Alan, quickly, over here!”

“I can’t hold on for much longer, Alan, hurry!”

The two Scotts glared at one another in the exact same way, not making Alan’s job much easier. Another shake, another slip down the metal cliff, more screams, and Alan looked ready to tear his hair out. Scott watched as the kid looked around rapidly, probably praying for a miracle in the process. Suddenly, the kid jumped when he must have spotted something important. Within the blink of an eye, he was gone and out of their range of visions to retrieve it.

Whatever the hell he noticed better be important, because if just ended up wasting precious time then--

Another shake, probably the last one. Still, it was enough.

Both their grips gave away at the same time, screams identical (God, did he always sound that wimpy?) as they plummeted to their demises. Scott was briefly able to look up to see his brother pop his head over the cliff like a chipmunk again and grab the (albeit broken) arm of The Hood and save him. Dammit, Scott should have expected that, though, that display of anger was uncharacteristic to Alan. Probably terrified him even more than he already was. Fuck, Scott deser--

Suddenly, a rope wrapped itself around Scott’s left arm and stopped his descent. Hard. Hopefully, it was only torn stuff, they didn’t have time to deal with dislocation--

Wait.

Scott wasn’t dead if he could think about these kinds of things.

Blinking, he looked at his arm to see the familiar rope of his grappling hook around his forearm. Moving his eyesight to look past that, he saw the wide, blue eyes of his baby brother struggling to stay on top. The Hood was using his non-broken side to try and climb his way back up to safety. Huh, that’s weird. When did Alan get ahold of that? Scott must have dropped it during his scuffle with--

That’s when it hit Scott.

Alan saved them both.

And it would be all for jack shit if Scott didn’t get his ass up there to help.

Panicking, Scott gripped the rope and started to ascend. He had two working arms and a smother complex to boot; it wasn’t long before he overtook a struggling Hood, who could only use one arm and a weakened brother (that bastard was so lucky Alan had a literal heart of gold).

Flinging his arms over the edge and pulling himself up-- and shrugging off the extra help Alan offered. Save your strength, baby bro-- Scott was in a much calmer search-and-destroy mode. He yanked his evil look-a-like up, turned him on his stomach, pinned him down, and before he could even watch Alan blink, “Sign something.”

There, now he watched Alan blink.

Scott pulled out one of his best ‘big brother’ smiles ever, “Tell me something in ASL. I don’t think The Hood learned that kind of etiquette.”

The body beneath him growled, making Alan jump and Scott tighten not only his hold but his glare. Further prove big brother’s point, why don’t cha? He lost the angry look immediately to grin at Alan once more, who seemed to be slowly getting the picture. With a gulp, the blonde slowly strung together a sentence that Scott had to laugh at, just a little bit.

Damn, could you teach me to fight like that, Scooter?

Nodding his head, Scott had to concede, “Sure. Consider it a graduation present.”

Alan blinked again, and the immense relief that washed over the boy’s shoulders would be enough to banish nightmares for at least a couple of days. Suddenly, The Hood’s disguise blinked out of existence, making both brothers jump that time. Scott didn’t falter in his grip, however. This man was going down right here and now, Scott thought darkly, staring at the prone body beneath his.

Scott saw Alan continue to sign out of the corner of his eye, You know you look like shit, right?

Scott chuckled. Alan was always able to put a smile on his face no matter the circumstances, “Yeah, well, kindred spirits, little bro.”

Scott was probably as pale as Alan was with such lack of sleep and food. Running on what was essentially a prolonged PTSD attack wasn’t healthy in the slightest, and no doubt whatever kind of bruises and scratches The Hood gave him didn’t help, however, seeing hope fill those deep-blue eyes when Alan learned he was truly being saved drowned everything out, including the way those freckles were getting lost in those eye bags.

Yeah, their entire family probably looked like shit, and the recovery process was going to be even shittier, but they were going to suffer through it together as a family would.

That made it all worth it.

Shuffling himself so one arm was free while the other kept The Hood pinned, Scott held it out towards Alan. The flinch the youngest made tore a hole in Scott’s heart that was only slightly patched when Alan leaned into the warmth and safety of his biggest bro. Long recovery process, remember? Regardless, Alan still took to the hug like a dehydrated zebra did a pond, and that was good enough for Scott.

The Hood groaned underneath them.

Yep, good enough.

#fabfivefeb #fabfivefeb2020 #thunderbirds #thunderbirds are go #scott tracy #alan tracy #jeff tracy #grandma tracy #the hood #virgil tracy #john tracy #gordon tracy #my post #my fic #series: rules of alchemy

33 notes · View notes