#if you hate either of them you may or may not be living a joyless life

[productofmtwundagore]

🫢

#all media criticism is valid AS ALONG AS it is applied without bias #personally I find both peter and kamala endearing #if you hate either of them you may or may not be living a joyless life #but that’s just me! #the marvels #captain marvel #carol danvers #ms marvel #kamala khan #marvel #madeinwundagore

[natigail]

"I figured hey, if I'm here, I might as well be honest with myself. So I dug into the archives. And I found teenage Dan. Do you remember HELLO INTERNET? There I was, eighteen years old, your average caucasian British boy with your problematic vocabulary, just wanting so desperately to be liked. I then saw myself age twenty, as a student. Not that I was actually studying anything other than the male anatomy. I had no plan. No prospects. I was in desperate need of a haircut. Jesus Christ. No, look, that was not a hairstyle. It was geometry. My hair was a square. I then saw myself age twenty-two as an adult, just trying to make my way in the world, taking any job that I could, no matter how inauthentic or degrading. And look. I don't hate these past versions of myself, alright? Apart from the square one, it can get in the fucking bin. Mainly, I just feel sorry that it took them so long to work out who they are. I then stumbled across the video titled Existential Crisis. In which I utter the optimistic nihilistic epithet: 'embrace the void and have the courage to exist'. Embrace the void and have the courage to exist. It sounded nice when I said it but for some reason it just didn't hit. I had accepted the absurdity of the world but at that time, I hadn't accepted myself. Looking back at it, it finally clicked. Anyone who has suffered with depression or any kind of trauma that seriously affects your self-worth hopes that one day you're going to have this sudden revelation and then everything is fine. I had my revelation alright. I am unapologetically gay! Don't know if you hadn't picked up on that, so far in the show. But just having this revelation did not immediately fix all of my problems, because I still feel that inherent burnt-on brand that I am wrong. And that doesn't just go away. No, I know what my problem is, alright. My problem I am always living for the future. Every day I am thinking about this dream future where all of my dreams have come true and all of my problem have gone and everything's fine. And so, every day in the present of my life can be this joyless unrelenting grind towards that future. But it's okay. It's going to come any day now, right? Learning to look yourself in the mirror and being honest about what you've been through and keep living in spite of that can be hard. It takes a long time and a relentless persistent resistance against the way that you've been trained to feel by the world. But that doesn't just mean you should give up. Because, sure, sometimes in life, you may feel trapped. I felt trapped by my sexuality. You could feel trapped by your culture or your community. Hell, you could be literally trapped in an elevator but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to get out. 'cause, sure, when I look at the state of the world, I am very tempted to just go: You know what - we're all doomed. But that isn't courageous. That is cowardly. It's the easy way out. Even if it is, as I hope you'd all agree, a really fucking cool name for a show. So that's the thing. You can either say to yourself, every day is just a discontent emoji or you can find the courage to force your inner smiling cowboy hat, ye-motherfucking-haw! And just try to find in everyday life. Which is why I made this show. So I'm not living in the future but I'm just right here, right now, with you, just trying to have one good night. And look. Hey. Who knows, huh? We may all be doomed. Death may be inevitable. But first, we get to live. Life might at times be a struggle but just being here, to put one foot in front of the other every day is living. So please, do not let the doom drag you down. You are important. You matter. Please, stay hopeful for the future. Appreciate life. Embrace the void and have the courage to exist." - Dan Howell, closing monologue of his show "we're all doomed" (2022-2024)

#wad spoilers #dan howell #we're all doomed #talking in tags #i wasn't going to do any more but why not immortalise this #mostly just saving this for myself because it always got me #dan quotes

[maxwell-grant]

Batman for the Listing meme?

favorite thing about them

PRESENTATION. Yes, in terms of character traits I'm obviously also very fond of Bruce Wayne's compassion and ability to aggressively overcome circumstance and turn trauma into a source of strength, but first and foremost, it's the presentation that's my number one favorite thing about Batman, and the Batman franchise in general. To be honest, I don’t think Batman is inherently that much more over-the-top, darker or more complex and dramatic than most other superheroes or costumed pulp heroes, but it's the presentation that matters, it's the presentation that's allowed him to steamroll everything else into submission, even the superhero he was created to live in the shadow of.

Batman didn't come out of the gate as a recipe for long-term success, not in the slightest. But it was through long processes of trial and error, endless mixing of ingredients, an incredibly rock solid foundation built and added to over the decades, an unparalled amount of creative backing, constant reincorporation of his everchanging history, and a success at pulling off a continuous state of self-reinvention, Batman's secured a presentation completely unmatched. Batman, Gotham City and his villains may have the absolute strongest branding in the entirety of Western comics and, really, it's even in the stories themselves.

Gotham City is an artistic shifting landscape of dreams and nightmares blown to the highest proportion or the starkest reality, it's biggest villains are all a collective gallery of humanity's greatest villains and fears and horrors all transforming into varying levels of deranged performance artist to aggressively top each other in branding, running amock until The Bat King of Fuck Mountain rides into town in progressively more absurd chariots and armors and knights, and proceeds to wrestle crime and evil into the dirt, because he's Batman and that’s how his world works, that’s how he’s decided to make it work.

And when I think of what I like the most about Batman that is uniquely Batman, something that only Batman does, it's the presentation that comes to mind, that balancing act of Grim and Gothic and Dramatic Noir, with the Campy Toyland Action inherent to the character's every facet and the sheer extremes towards either direction that you can get from any given Batman media, even in the span of a single story. Batman the character can be just as multi-faced and deranged as his villains, the best of which are just as mercurially chaotic as the Batman franchise is at it's best.

least favorite thing about them

Having said all that, I frankly don't care very much for the idea that Batman is the absolute greatest fictional character of all time ever, or the biggest badass that's ever lived and I get so, so, so bored of it, in-universe and outside of it. I don't care to dispute the "objectivity" of this idea and frankly it's this overblown wankery that kinda makes me like Batman a little less whenever I get exposed to it too much. I get the sense that every DC fan who isn't first and foremost a Batman fan also resents Batman's popularity, but to be honest, I only resent Batman's popularity when people are obnoxious about it.

I'm also very much on the side of Batman fans that dislike the attempts to make Batman "realistic" in a real world sense. I get why they exist, but they elicit crushing boredom from me.

Also, I absolutely do not care at all for takes on Batman that make him be too much of a grim and joyless jerk, especially if he's also neglectful or downright abusive. I don't mind Batman having flaws but there are obviously many instances of stories that go overboard with them. Also, if you depict Batman beating up or intentionally harming the Bat-kids for whatever reason, you can plain and simple Eat Shit, I frankly couldn't care as to what excuse you cooked up to have that happen. I hate that Batman as an Abusive/Neglectful/Absent Mentor or Ally is not just a one-time thing but has become baked into so many other stories. Hate hate hate it.

favorite line

For the moment, I'm going to say Bruce's conversation with the Bat monster in his soul from Batman: Ego, maybe my favorite Batman story that specifically focuses on Bruce Wayne himself, definitely a story that was quite important to me in my formative years.

Specifically, these parts

brOTP

Batman and Killer Croc. Killer Croc is not quite my favorite Batman villain (you guys already know who that is), but I think he may be the most "me" character of the Bat-mythos, in terms of what I usually like about characters and characters I kinda identify with and want to see get better. One of the things I like the most about Batman is that he gets to have a myriad of different relationships and dynamics with his villains, and I'm 100% down for him striking partnerships and personally assisting some of them on the path to recovery.

I absolutely would love to see Batman and Killer Croc stories where they work together, at least during the brief periods where DC lets Waylon stay in-character (I am still incredibly pissed we got cheated out of Monster Hotel Manager Waylon Jones)

OTP

To be honest, the only time I ever really cared about the Batman x Catwoman romance was in Batman Returns, and even then it was mainly because Selina was the real protagonist of that movie and Batman was just kind of a stooge chasing the plot after the villains ran with it (to be honest, I don't think being Batman's love interest has ever really done anything for Selina other than paint a target on her back and make her less interesting).

I can't say I've ever been captivated by a romance involving Bruce within a Batman story, but I can't say I'd ever really want Bruce to be with anyone else other than Selina, if only because being Batman's love interest seems to be a really shitty position to be in and I wouldn't want to subject any other character to that.

I've heard some really good things about the Bruce x John Doe thing from Batman Telltale, even for a premise as tired as "Batman and Joker getting together", but I never checked out those games so I can't vouch on how much I like the idea.

nOTP

Bruce x literally anyone in the Bat-family for what should be extremely self-evident reasons.

random headcanon

I'm 100% in favor of the headcanon that Bruce is actually really, really funny, intentionally or not, and that he simply doesn't get to show it most of the time or doesn't know how to, and that the only person who understands how fucking funny Batman is or should be is the Joker. I'd like to read Batman stories with the gritty inner monologues replaced with really dumb jokes or deranged inner thought processes that don't affect at all Batman's ability to be cool and mysterious, except sometimes when he says something out loud he didn't meant to, and it comes off as unnerving more than anything else.

Like he spends an entire issue thinking to himself if he should take the time to learn how human body parts taste individually should he ever run across a Hannibal Lecter-type, and then after he's finished beating up a bunch of goons in a warehouse and one of them's pointing a gun at him off screen, he hears Batman wonder out loud "No, these men probably wouldn't make for good meals, too much carb in their diets. It's best to go looking for targets with softer flesh" and the guy shits his pants at the thought that holy shit The Bat is going to eat him, and he blurts out everything he knows, and Batman didn't intend to scare him like that, but he's an improv master so he runs with it.

unpopular opinion

Buddy, you're gonna have to ask me out for dinner first before asking me to engage with Batman fandom discourse like that.

song i associate with them

I've said it before but I LOVE all of the music in the Sunsoft Batman games and all the remixes online for them (I may even make a couple of them myself eventually). They aren't exactly what most people would associate with Batman, but they are just really fun, really great themes that I would be more than happy to incorporate into Batman films, should I ever get to make one.

For the moment I'm going to highlight two remixes that I'm listening to right now, the Return of the Joker theme and the Gotham City Streets theme.

favorite picture of them

I was and still am floored by this spread from Dark Prince Charming. Story was very much whatever and kinda bad as a whole but the art was incredible.

#replies tag #comic books #batman #bruce wayne #dark prince charming #batman ego #killer croc #darwyn cooke

[trainsinanime]

For the ask game: 13, 15, 17, 19

13. Unpopular opinion about XXX character?

I’ve said this before: The Gorilla is not “Adrien’s only parent”. The Gorilla is the jailer who physically enforces the limits on Adrien’s freedom that Gabriel has set. That’s his job, and it’s one he actually does most of the time. In Gorizilla, Adrien and Marinette are trying to dodge him (and Adrien’s fans) long before he turns into an Akuma. In Origins, Adrien tries to dodge him when he wants to go to school.

Yes, the Gorilla is often bad at his job, and sometimes will let himself be bribed into being even worse at it. And yes, he has genuine affection for Adrien, more so than anyone else living in the Agreste mansion (Nathalie stans: Fight me). And I could imagine that someone else in the same role might be worse for Adrien. But still, when Adrien is running towards his freedom, the Gorilla is the person he is running from.

I don’t think he is irredeemable, far from it, and I’m perfectly okay with stories where Adrien decides to forgive him. I just think the fandom needs to acknowledge that there is something to forgive here in the first place.

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

I’m still trying to sort my thoughts enough for a long-form post, but basically, I think the strict format hurts the show. There is only ever the one villain; there is only one plot; there is only one kind of threat. If you compare it to other shows in a vaguely similar conceptual space like The Owl House or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (what is Miraculous if not Buffy but happy), you can quickly see where it leaves a lot of development on the table because of those structural deficiencies.

Having multiple enemies in succession means the bad guys can have meaningful victories over the heroes, keeping the threat level up. At the same time, the heroes can make significant progress at times. Miraculous Ladybug just doesn’t have that, and the one time they did have a serious victory for the bad guy (exposing the other heroes), they couldn’t do anything with that.

The show also generally doesn’t have B-plots; at least no B-plots with any substance to them. The time spent on B-plots is instead given to the CGI battles, and to be fair, those can be a lot of fun. But that means there is really no opportunity to develop side characters better because there is no time; even the main plot often feels more like we’re watching a summary than a well-told story.

It also doesn’t help that the show is so strict about secret identities and amnesia for akuma victims and the like. Marinette can’t talk about superhero stuff with Alya (for most of the show anyway) and Chat Noir can’t talk about superhero stuff with Nino, which means those two don’t get any development. And Marinette can’t really reason with an Akuma victim, nor talk about personal stuff while in costume, so in the end the CGI battles are fun, but usually irrelevant when it comes to characterisation and plot developments.

The show seems to address some of these issues, especially with Rena knowing, but still, it’s far from ideal.

It’s a weird thing where it sort of balances out in the end; the show doesn’t seem to have the the time to develop any overarching story well, but it doesn’t have a good overarching story to begin, so it evens out. And they have given me enough bits for the minor characters so that I love all of them.

I’m a bit hesitant to post all this stuff because it makes the show sound horrible, which it is not. I genuinely love it and enjoy watching it. I just think that it could have been so much better if it had chosen a different format.

Not sure if this is unpopular, but it is a thing we’re not really talking about.

17. Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…

Apart from “restructure the entire show completely and rewrite every single episode”, you mean? 😁

I think we could cut Lila, and instead give more time to Chloé. People keep acting like “Zoé is supposed to replace Chloé”, and no, obviously not; Lila is. People also keep saying “the writers hate Chloé”, and again, no, obviously not; if they hate anyone, they hate Lila.

Lila’s job in the show is to be the Cordelia Chase character; the antagonist for the non-superhero side of Marinette’s life. This is the role that Chloé previously had, until Marinette realised partly through season 1 that being the bigger person in that relationship is both easy and fun. But Lila isn’t a good replacement, because Lila has absolutely no character, no depth; she’s either conspiring to make Marinette’s life harder, or, more commonly, she’s functionally completely absent. The writers seem to have no clue what to do with her.

So either expand her role, or remove her. I’m leaning towards removal because Chloé could probably be a better antagonist; she has all the motivation and backstory, and the writers seem to genuinely enjoy making her the center of attention.

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

Honestly I am at a point where either the salt has died down, or I’ve managed to block it well enough, that I am basically very happy with the fandom. There are certainly a lot of hot takes I don’t enjoy, but my impression is that these are mostly the results of young people trying critical analysis for the first time, and I don’t want to be too harsh on that.

So… the thing that tends to disappoint me the most is really at the other end of the scale: I think the fandom is way too serious at times. The show is blatantly silly and cracky in every aspect, from its world building right up. Marinette may seem over-the-top, but in the context of the show, she seems to have about an average level of chill. Every single episode, if written as a fanfic, would be pure crack. The fandom is by no means a joyless place, far from it! But I think it could embrace the sheer insanity that is the world of Miraculous Ladybug even more. If you write a fanfic, and the Eiffel tower remains completely stationary the entire time, what are you really doing? 😁

#miraculous ladybug

[uniquemagicsa]

@unblot​ : "you know i don't know a lot about the laws of the queen of hearts. is there a rule that you need to have that stick up your ass or are you just like that?" the problem with being a spoiled prince apart from almost everything is that so often rielle feels like he can just say whatever he wants & can get away with it. & often he does. though he knows better than to question a tyrannical queen's rule. well, at least he's not afraid to say what's on his mind / i'm so sorry riddle

Riddle’s life has been a long, long history of this : 

Riddle’s life has been a long, long history of this :

Riddle’s life has been a long, long history of this : someone stronger than him finding a flaw.

It had made growing up into a nightmare.  His father was gone / disappeared one day and mother go worse / but even Father had never been really happy with him.  Mother was merely louder, molding and shaping and even as he fought to be what she wanted / broke their own bones to make the shape match the template she offered / it would break (  then, he thought, because he was weak and bad and inattentive ; now, he is trying to believe, because he is human  ) and she would hate him and she would punish him.  Deny him what little time he could spend sneaking away to Trey and Che’nya / deny him freedom / or harm him in other ways.  She was a strict and uncreative woman, and for a time that made him sympathetic; they knew that she could never have come up with the punishments she devised on her own, had she not been subjected to them as well.  The fact remains : to be found lacking was dangerous.  To be flawed would mean bruises or worse, isolation.

(  a memory — che’nya finding them crying with a bruise on their jaw.  a memory — begging che’nya not to tell trey.  a memory — falling.  )

It had been frustrating, too, arriving at Night Raven College.  A childhood spent breaking his own bones and his own heart to fit into the template that would make him above reproach / that would make him lovable / that would make him good.  And instead of love, it had earned him fear and muttered derision.  It had earned him cruelty and aloneness and shared, uneasy glances between Trey and Cater that he had refused to see.  

(  a memory — home for his first break, father was there, too, and they want different lies about how class is going.  )

People were never satisfied with Riddle.  Riddle was never right.  Too strict and joyless for their father.  Too lazy, too undisciplined for their mother.  Too authoritarian and cruel for their classmates.  (  too pathetic for trey, too unkind for che’nya.  )  All their life a masquerade / no, that’s not right, is it?  It wasn’t just a mask, it was a breaking.  Riddle wasn’t trying to hide their truth self ——— they were trying to kill it.

(  a memory — trey finds them sick and gets out of them that they haven’t eaten in days.  a memory — trey berating them.  a memory — not knowing how to explain that eating felt like indulgence felt like carelessness felt like being bad.  )

And for who?

(  a memory — not knowing how to explain that eating felt like trying to stay alive, and riddle didn’t feel worth that.  )

Riddle’s life has been a long, long history of this moment : being not enough.  Being bad.  Being something, anything other than what is good.  Too lazy and undisciplined for mother.  Too strict and joyless for their father.  A poor partner to their friends.  And now, to Prince Rielle, too exacting, even after the breaking that should have fixed them.  Someone stronger than Riddle finding a flaw and picking it out, like tearing off a scab.  Riddle, until so recently, didn’t even know that was wrong; after all, Mother had all his life called it love.  He had just wanted to care for his dorm mates / no, that’s not true, either.

Riddle didn’t even know that it was wrong; just that he was tired.  And that he wanted to be the strong one this time, if only to keep himself safe.  Or something like it.

(  a memory — you have to apologize, riddle.  a memory — what does being safe get you, except being a monster?  )

Rielle speaks and the Queen is, if only for a moment, afraid.  Afraid of being found lacking, of being not - good - enough yet again.  Rielle speaks and Riddle wants to collar him, to force him to acknowledge his authority, to force Rielle to know that he is stronger, that he is the one who decides what’s right, that he is too powerful to be wrong or to be harmed.  They cannot bear to be flawed as they cannot bear to be anything other than perfect and in control and ———

And alone.  That’s what perfection earned them, didn’t it?  And they are trying to be better.  (  they are trying to be ——— something.  )  If only for Trey and Che’nya.

Riddle swallows thickly and finally turn to face the prince.  Riddle is not afraid.  They must believe they’re not afraid, as they’d been so afraid when everyone turned against them / i’m alone i’m alone i have no control i need control.  As they’d been so afraid confronting their mother / i am not your doll.  This is not then.  Their hands curl and they — breathe.  Try to.

(  a memory — trey seeing something in them worth getting hurt for, and wanting to live up to that.  )

“I’m just like that,” the dorm head replies almost - easily, hands shaking where they’re tucked behind his back, and he’d laugh at that were he able.  How much is innate, how much is what he’s only begun to accept may be trauma and not the acts of a loving parent?  It hardly matters; Rielle isn’t asking.  He’s lashing out to be in control, not to be weak enough to have his flaws picked apart, because he hates what he can’t own.  Riddle would know.  Royalty is like that, whether it’s self - or other - made.

A few other Heartslabyul students look between them, waiting to see what Riddle will do — if he’ll snap or break or break someone else.  Some of them are afraid of Riddle, who nearly killed them.  And they’re right to be / and Riddle can never be that again.  They don’t want to be feared.  They don’t want to be looked at the way that’d looked at their mother.  Their hands curl together behind their back.

(  a reminder — i’m not alone, nor am i in danger.  )

“If you’ve a problem with the way that things are run in my dorm, you’re welcome to leave.  But while you are here, you will follow the Queen’s rules.  If you don’t and continue to cause problems for the students under my protection, you will be collared and you will be removed.”  Riddle is through trying to break or kill a true self for another / or is trying to be, fighting tooth and nail to be better with the same desperate determination they had broken themself with in the first place.  IF RIELLE DOES NOT WANT TO BE HERE, THEN HE SHOULD NOT.  And if he is here only to harm others as Riddle is trying not to, then he should not be, either.  But he has not earned either Riddle’s fear or Riddle’s fury, and Riddle will not give it to him.  “I trust that’s a fair arrangement.”

It hardly matters if it is; Rielle isn’t asking for fairness.  He’s lashing out to be in control, not to be weak enough to have his flaws picked apart, because he hates what he can’t own.  Riddle would know.

#unblot #♡ * — answered. #♡ * — riddle : main verse. #LOT GOING ON HERE #riddles exacting self control being directed at protecting others from himself instead of getting stronger / being in control of others.... #riddle: rielle im post-character development now im not gonna make a scene for you #abuse / #disordered eating / #suicidal ideation implied / #like. sorta.

[captainpikeachu]

Booker (and the team) - trauma and healing

Because recently I have been rewatching The Haunting of Hill House and the amazing video essay done by Ladyknightthebrave (and possibly doing a Hill House AU fic with the Old Guard characters), I have been thinking a lot about the theme of trauma and grief and forgiveness in terms of how it was highlighted in the Old Guard, especially with Booker’s story. And I just really needed to talk about some of the points that Ladyknightthebrave’s video essay brings up.

“But sometimes trauma doesn’t make you sweet, or vulnerable. Sometimes it makes you mean, or it makes you cold.”

There are characters who are easy to love, those who face trauma and never did anything wrong, those who are easy to empathize or seem to be dealing with trauma in “all the right ways” that society often tells us to do.

But then you get characters like Booker. His trauma didn’t make him some “poor sweet woobie who never did anything wrong”, it didn’t make him the most vulnerable person in the world. His trauma didn’t make how he’s dealing with it so easily digestible. It made his actions sometimes mean and sometimes cold.

He violated the trust of his family, he subjected them to their worst fears, he hurt them horribly. And yet, sometimes that is how people deal with trauma. It doesn’t make what was done okay, or even justified, but it still is human, it still is an effect of the lingering trauma. 

And I think it’s important to have characters like this existing in stories. Because sometimes, often times, people don’t act like some perfect cookie cutter trauma victim. Sometimes that trauma makes you all the wrong things, and make every bad decision there is to make. And we need to still acknowledge the humanity in all of that, even if people did wrong. 

There is no one way to handle trauma, and we do not always need to make excuses or find ways to woobify people or characters for what they did. But we do need to realize why something happens, and acknowledge that trauma, and most importantly, understand.

“Trauma isn’t a contest and there is no winner, the different levels of their experiences don’t really matter when it made all of them who they are today.”

And this is another thing. Trauma should not be a competition. It should never be about who has more trauma or less trauma. Trauma is trauma. All of our Old Guard characters have trauma. The different levels of their trauma don’t really matter because all of that made them who they are. Whether large or small, it still affected them, and they cannot just be dismissed when talking about a character’s actions and motivations.

In Booker’s case, you cannot remove his actions from the reality of his trauma. They are intertwined. It doesn’t matter if you think he should have “gotten over” the loss of his family or not, it doesn’t matter if you think other people lose loved ones all the time and still handle it well, his trauma still happened, still exists, and still effects him in damaging ways. That sadness and grief made him who he is in the story, it drove his every action, even the horrible ones.

“These characters spend so long bottling up their emotions, and their anger, and not listening to each other, and when they finally start actually talking and listening, they start to heal...”

Here is the thing. I don’t think this team, this family, has ever truly sat down and actually started talking honestly to each other about all of their emotions and really listened to each other. They likely didn’t think they needed to talk about it, they trusted each other implicitly, that’s just how things are, it’s destiny, and they took it for granted. And THAT is why Booker’s betrayal completely blind-sides them. 

There’s over 200 years of misery, grief, and trauma all bottled up inside Booker just jumping for the chance to leave this immortality train, and Andy, Joe, and Nicky simply never saw it coming. Not even one inkling that Booker can’t handle the life they are leading. 

And something of that has to speak to the state of their non-communication honestly in these matters. And no, I’m not saying this is Andy, Joe, and Nicky’s fault. It isn’t. Booker was not honest with them either. But the fact remains that this inability to communicate their emotions honestly and bottling things up and letting the warning signs slide by, it set the stage and culminated in this massive betrayal that nearly destroys them.

And yet it is because of this betrayal that finally the floodgates of honesty is open, everything is out on the table, they actually have to listen and talk and deal with what is going on instead of just living their usual life and letting it all go by for hundreds of years. And that 100-year exile, that discussion at the pub, that is the beginning of them really healing.

“Here’s a tough pill to swallow: people in your life will hurt you, in little and big ways. Your family, your friends, or your significant others. And you will hurt them. Because people are imperfect broken things, and everyone is carrying around scars from something, and that damage might cause you or those around you to do regrettable things. What can define you is how you deal with that hurt. You can hang on to it bitterly for years, you can deny the parts of it that are too painful, you can try to put the pain away, or simply lose yourself to it. Or you can finally talk to one another, and listen, like really listen, until you can accept it and move on. There’s no right way to forgive somebody, and some people don’t necessarily deserve your forgiveness.”

And this is the truth isn’t it.

Booker is imperfect. The team is imperfect. They are all carrying scars from something, and in Booker’s case, his scars caused him to do this horribly regrettable thing to the people he loves. He was extremely ill-equipped to be able to deal with the cards he was dealt with in life.

But what will define Booker, Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Nile is how they deal with that hurt. And they’ve finally reached the part where they are really talking and listening to each other, no longer just hanging onto things bitterly or denying the painful reality or try to drink it away or lose themselves to the darkness. They finally have to face this reality, accept it, and find a way to move on honestly.

There is no right way to forgive someone, maybe 100 years isn’t enough, maybe it is enough, or maybe Booker doesn’t necessarily even deserve forgiveness. But that is something each of them have to confront and deal with, and something that they now can deal with honestly because there is no hiding the truth anymore, they have all been laid bare by what happened. There is no more lies, only the truth.

How they all heal is now up to each of them.

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

Also, there is one moment in the Haunting of Hill House that I think really speaks to the conflict within Booker when it comes to being a parent and dealing with his grief, and this moment happens in a conversation between the two main parental characters: one desperately clinging to their children even to the point of killing them to keep them safe, and the other understanding that being a parent sometimes means letting your children go

“Even if they’re broken, or addicted, or joyless, or even if they die, we have to watch it all because we’re parents and that’s the deal we make, whatever that life is we bear witness.”

“It’s a horror.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Booker still sees it as a horror. The loss of his children. Their hate. Their despair. He is unable to see that it doesn’t have to be a horror. 

I don’t know if he will ever be able to see that. But I think reaching an understanding of that is the first step in him being able to forgive himself and to find a way to heal, even if his family may not forgive him yet.

After all, he has to want to get better for himself, not for someone else.

#the old guard #sebastien le livre #andromache the scythian #yusuf al kaysani #nicolo di genova #nile freeman #the haunting of hill house spoilers #also go watch the haunting of hill house it's really good #and go watch the video essay if you already seen the show

[ironfidus]

(un)breakable

Post-IW Iron Dad fanfic.

Read here on AO3 (@a_matter_of_loyalty).

☔︎

Summary:

“We all lost people,” Tony Stark says, his eyes unblinking and sad, devastated and broken, and the heavens weep. 

He‘s right, of course: they all lost people they loved in the Decimation. But it isn’t until the people of Earth realize that even the greatest heroes have been transformed by grief that they finally see the severity of the situation.

(Three weeks after the Decimation that robbed the universe of 50% of its inhabitants, Tony Stark finally re-emerges in the public eye. Only this time, he doesn’t broadcast his message through a press conference, or a professional interview, but rather a televised speech from inside the gym of Midtown School of Science and Technology.)

Or, Tony Stark has everything—until he doesn’t.

☔︎

“What do you think the assembly’s going to be about?” Ned asked quietly. He sounded as curious as ever, his question still drenched in the innocent wonder he always seemed to have an abundance of, but this time his eyes were dull, miserable. His voice, too, was inherently different, no longer carrying his particular brand of cheer and excitement. Instead, his voice was joyless and muted, as if there was no one left to listen to him.

At the very least, that was how Ned felt. Ever since they’d first met in primary school, he and Peter had been inseparable. Whether he was happy, or excited, or upset, or angry, it was always Peter he vented to, rambling on and on to Peter’s seemingly unending patience. Ned had never once imagined that there would come a time when Peter wouldn’t be there to listen to him.

MJ, beside him, blinked almost uncomprehendingly at the question. “I don’t know,” she said honestly—she seemed to do that a lot more now; be honest. “A memorial service in commemoration of all the students and staff members lost, maybe. Or, knowing our school, they’ll just glaze over the Decimation and start lecturing us on safe sex as if—“

She stopped abruptly, her lips slamming shut. For a second, just a second, Ned swore he saw tears gather at the corners of her eyes. But then she blinked again, and the trace of sadness was gone.

Ned swallowed and looked away. MJ may not have been able to bring herself to say it, but he heard the rest of her words regardless: As if anything matters now, in the wake of half the universe going up in flames.

“Right,” Ned croaked out, barely able to recognize his own voice. It was a familiar feeling by now—too many times he had listened to himself speak about meaningless things to his parents over breakfast, or stared into the mirror at his red-rimmed eyes and haunted gaze, and realized he no longer knew who he was.

He hated it. He hated that losing Peter had cost him himself.

He hated that he had lost Peter at all.

“Hey, Leeds,” MJ’s voice broke through his despair. He gazed across the lunch table to find her smiling sadly at him. “You okay?”

Ned flinched at her words. What kind of a question is that? he wanted to demand, wanted to get up in her face and shake his fist and shout until the reality of their situation hit her and her nonchalance fell away. For a second, he thought of doing it, thought of throwing caution to the wind and shattering the fragile balance that had settled between them amidst Peter’s disappearance. 

But the second the words gathered on his tongue, he noticed the tension laced in the hunch of her shoulders and knew he couldn’t do that to her—to either of them. He heaved a sigh, his own shoulders slumping and his anger crumbling.

Because of course he wasn’t okay. Neither of them were.

Frankly, he thought, he would be genuinely surprised if anyone on Earth was okay right now.

“I’m sorry,” Ned said, then, because he didn’t know what else to do. What words were there left to say when everything seemed lost?

MJ stiffened. Ned wondered, for a moment, if she would dismiss his apology and go back to pretending she was unscathed by the Decimation. 

But she didn’t.

Instead, she smiled, a crooked smile that twisted her face and left Ned frozen, and said, “Don’t.”

Just... don’t.

Ned took in a breath. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” Sorries are useless here, Ned, he scolded himself. You know that. Stop throwing words at a problem that can’t be fixed by anything, much less worthless platitudes.

Neither of them were okay.

The other students looked at MJ and saw a heartless girl, emotionless and unbroken when everyone else seemed left in tatters. But Ned looked at MJ and saw someone who wasn’t whole: he saw the falter in her steady stride when she passed Peter’s locker every morning; he saw the furrow in her brow whenever a teacher still called out Peter Parker during attendance and was met with nothing but silence; he saw the way her eyes would dart to the empty space beside Ned every lunch period during their stilted conversations that was always missing something (someone) nowadays; he saw the strain in her expression every time she turned on her phone and was confronted with her wallpaper—Peter’s beaming face pressed between hers and Ned’s.

He saw all the ways she felt Peter’s absence.

Grief didn’t affect MJ the same way it affected Ned. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t affected.

It didn’t mean that the grief didn’t linger, in every nook and cranny of both their lives.

☔︎

When their lunch period ended with the loud, startling ringing of the bell, neither of them jumped. (They didn’t react to much these days.)

MJ simply marked her place in her book with a bookmark (gifted to her by Peter, Ned knew, god he knew), stood up slowly, and offered Ned a nod.

The show of solidarity left Ned breathless. He stared blankly up at her, and a part of him was waiting for someone to chime in with a teasing “Are you waiting for us, MJ? Aw, I always knew you cared!”

But the remark never came. He knew MJ heard it, too—the deafening silence that took up the space left behind by Peter.

Ned pushed himself to his feet eventually, noticing that everywhere around him in the cafeteria, everyone else seemed to be affected by the same sluggishness of loss. He couldn’t blame them.

Every second, he found it harder and harder to breathe in a world that was no longer home to his best friend. It was difficult, almost impossible, to find motivation when Peter used to be the one urging him along at every turn, an encouraging grin on his face.

Ned exhaled shakily and turned away from the memory. He knew if he let himself dwell on Peter now, if he let himself cry, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“Come on, Leeds,” MJ murmured to him as he rounded the table and stood beside her. Together they stood in silence for another moment, and Ned realized all at once that he hadn’t heard MJ call him ‘loser’ since the Decimation.

He didn’t dare ask why. (He figured he already knew why, anyway. ‘Loser’ was her term of endearment for both him and Peter. It didn’t feel right to leave Peter behind and be the only one worthy of MJ’s bestowed nickname of ‘loser.’)

“I hope they don’t hold a memorial service,” Ned whispered as they crossed the cafeteria and began to head towards the gym. He didn’t know why he said it, only that he meant it. “It feels... condescending, somehow. I don’t know, I just – the other students, they...”

“They didn’t know him,” MJ finished knowingly.

Ned nodded. “They all – they didn’t see the Peter I did.” He paused. “The – the Peter we did, I mean. Sorry, MJ.”

MJ just nodded understandingly. “Yeah,” she said, her voice hushed and almost reverent. It was times like this that reminded Ned that he wasn’t the only one who’d lost Peter. MJ had, too. And – and May, oh god. 

Peter had been all May had left. (Had been. The past tense was killing Ned.)

“Maybe it’ll be a Rapping with Cap video,” Ned mused, and was rewarded with a small, amused smile splitting MJ’s face. It died a second later, but he counted all the victories he could get, no matter how small they were. He had to, or he knew he would go insane.

“Maybe,” MJ agreed. “I hope it isn’t the puberty one.” Her nose scrunched up in distaste, and Ned cracked a quiet laugh.

“Oh my god, please don’t be that one,” he snickered. 

All too quickly, though, the mood grew somber, their grins fading into frowns. The moment felt so incomplete without Peter there to shudder and point out that ‘the puberty PSA isn’t nearly as bad as the sex-ed one, come on guys.’

“Okay,” MJ interjected sharply, “you need to lighten up, pronto.” He just looked at her, unimpressed, and she pointed a finger at him in warning. “That’s an order, Leeds.”

Ned squinted. “Says you,” he snorted, pushing her playfully on the shoulder.

She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m the exception,” she said arrogantly, because she could.

Ned stuck his tongue out. “Conceited, much,” he snarked. “You’d think you—“

His voice died abruptly when they stopped in front of the gym. He wasn’t sure if they were some of the early ones or some of the late stragglers; he used to be able to tell by the degree of chatter and noise escaping through the tiny crack between the gym doors, but these days even a room full of teenagers could be as silent as a graveyard in the dead of night.

Ned winced. Not the best analogy at a time like this, he conceded.

“Well?” MJ’s eyebrow was arched, almost challengingly.

Ned sighed. “Let’s get this over with,” he mumbled, pushing the doors open and ducking inside.

Luckily, they weren’t too late—most of the students had already arrived, but the assembly hadn’t officially started yet and there were still a few seats left untouched. Ned and MJ quickly claimed seats of their own, Ned feeling Peter’s loss especially hard when he found himself looking for only two empty seats side-by-side instead of three.

Once they had settled in, MJ returned to her book, and Ned ended up pulling out his phone. They were both trying, so hard, but sometimes it was just too much of a struggle to pretend that Peter’s absence wasn’t affecting every minute they spent together.

They were still a team, and they still had each other’s backs—he didn’t they could ever stop having each other’s backs, not after everything they’d been through—but it was different now. And sometimes, every time he looked at her, all he saw was Peter not with them. Sometimes, when it was too hard to even try to carry on a conversation, all Ned could hear in the unbearable silence was all the words Peter would have said. All the words he would never say anymore.

Ned hated to admit it, but it was draining. (Everything was draining.)

He realized all too quickly, however, that drifting back to his phone was a mistake. He hadn’t really had the chance to aimlessly browse his phone since before the Decimation—in the past few weeks, he’d only ever used the device to call or text his family and MJ.

But his parents were busy at work, his little sister busy at school, and MJ busy beside him. Without a reason to be on his phone, Ned inevitably found himself launching his photo gallery—

—and staring down at his phone, breath stolen from his lungs.

The most recent photo in his album was of him and Peter on the bus to MoMa. They were both beaming into the camera, Ned’s eyes wide and full of excitement as he flashed a peace sign. Peter, who’d been responsible for capturing the selfie, had been mid-laughter when he took the shot, evident by the blur around his doubtlessly shaking shoulders and the way he’d thrown his head back slightly, mouth wide open in a gaping laugh. 

(If Ned tried hard enough, he could practically hear Peter’s laugh echoing in his ears, fond and exasperated and too loud. He missed that laugh. He’d give anything just to hear it one more time.)

Ned didn’t remember what they’d been talking about, or why Peter had been laughing, but... God, Peter looked so carefree, liberated by joy.

(Oblivious to the fate that would befall him before the day was over.)

Before Ned could start falling to pieces over a single photo (just one out of hundreds, Jesus, thousands), his phone was snatched out of his hand. He looked to the side to come face-to-face with MJ glaring at him, shutting off his phone without a second glance. “Stop it, Leeds,” she glowered. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

Ned sniffed. “Peter loved taking pictures,” he whispered, like it was a secret. “It used to annoy me so much, how he would sometimes make us stop whatever we were doing just so he could snap a photo of us.”

(“Come on, Ned,” Peter cajoled, eyes bright with laughter. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“More like ten,” Ned grumbled, jabbing Peter’s ribcage accusingly. “I know you, Parker.”

Peter grinned sheepishly. “Please?” he tried. When Ned didn’t budge, he whined, “Look at it, Ned—it looks like it belongs in a museum! It’d be a crime to just walk past it.”

“It’s graffiti, Peter,” Ned deadpanned, unamused.

“Good graffiti,” Peter argued.

“No.”

“Just one picture, I’m begging you.”

“No!”

“...please?”)

MJ was breathing heavily. “Leeds—“

“I want to get mad at him for taking photos of me when I’m not ready again,” Ned blurted out, remembering all too well Peter’s protests of but it’s called a candid, Ned, you’re not supposed to be ready in response to Ned’s complaints.

MJ froze, her grip tightening on her book until the papers creased around her fingers.

Ned didn’t seem to notice. Now that he’d started, he couldn’t swallow down the rest: “I want to roll my eyes at him for making me stop eating just so he can photograph our food first. I want to take another stupid selfie of us in front of some random statue or other. God, MJ, I’d take anything. I just – I want him back. I want him here so I can yell at him and joke around with him and gossip about how Star Wars is better than Star Trek and be his guy in the chair. I want to make fun of his dumb science pun t-shirts—”

MJ snorted at that, the spike of amusement muting the anguish for a brief moment, her mutter of ‘you wear the same lame t-shirts, Leeds’ falling on deaf ears.

The moment passed, and MJ had to redirect her focus to keeping her tears at bay.

“I want to ask him a thousand and one questions about his crime-fighting alter-ego. I want to get mad at him for leaving footprints on my ceiling. I want to tease him about Liz. I want to build LEGOs with him. I want to have a seven-hour Star Wars movie marathon in his tiny bedroom. I want to... I want to pretend to be annoyed with him when he steals one of my sandwiches during lunch.”

Ned stopped suddenly. MJ was silently glad for the reprieve—all the memories she’d tried to hold back of Peter were flooding to the surface, and she didn’t know what would happen when they broke through.

“I just want my best friend back,” Ned said finally, brokenly. “That’s—that’s all I want, MJ.”

“Yeah,” MJ said hoarsely, wide-eyed and trembling minutely. “Yeah, me too.”

Ned squeezed his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck. I don’t know if I can—“

He was cut off by the lights turning off suddenly. He froze, startled, and was privately relieved that he had been interrupted before he could confess that he was lost without Peter. MJ doubtlessly already knew it, but it made it feel less real, somehow, if he didn’t admit it to himself.

On the makeshift stage, Principal Morita took a few steps forward and gripped the edges of the wooden podium. “Good afternoon, students,” he greeted into the silence. Even he seemed less cheery than usual. “I’m sure you’re all wondering what’s keeping you from your last classes of the day.”

When MJ held out Ned’s phone, it took Ned more than a few seconds to realize she meant to hand it back to him. Ned pocketed it without a word, chest still heaving from the effort of his rant, eyes still stinging with the thought of Peter.

“To be honest,” Principal Morita carried on, “I had no intention of calling an assembly when I woke up this morning. But before lunch, I received a very interesting phone call.” He paused, briefly, and the smallest of smiles crept up his face. There was an uncanny excitement there that Ned hadn’t seen in what seemed like forever. 

Whatever this assembly was for, it was clearly something big.

“So it is with immense pleasure that I introduce our guest speaker today. Truthfully, I’m not quite sure myself why he’s chosen our humble school to make his first public appearance in – in weeks, but for some reason, he has.”

Ned and MJ exchanged a wary glance. Guest speaker? Public appearance? Ned mouthed at MJ, who looked just as confused until she glanced around the gym and finally realized that students and faculty members weren’t the only ones present. She gaped, stunned, and nudged Ned until he, too, followed her line of sight and spotted the crowd of reporters and cameramen gathered to one side of the gym.

“Who the hell...” MJ whispered.

The rest of her question went unspoken, but she didn’t have to wonder for long—seconds later, the principal grinned proudly and spoke into the microphone, “Without further ado, I’d like to call Tony Stark, owner of Stark Industries and Iron Man himself, to the stage.”

Ned’s jaw dropped. MJ’s book nearly fell out of her lap. And all around them, dozens of students came to life with hushed whispers that weren’t hushed at all.

Indeed, not two seconds later, Tony Stark sauntered onto the stage and met Principal Morita at the center. Principal Morita held out his hand hopefully, and Mr. Stark indulged him; Morita looked dazed the entire time they shook hands.

“Thank you for arranging this on such short notice,” Iron Man said eloquently, his charming words a jarring contrast to the solemn mood that had preceded his entry. 

The effect of Tony Stark’s presence was immediate: the cloud of misery seemed to lift from the crowd, replaced by excited chatter and awe-filled stares.

Even now, amid the fallout of the world’s end, the public loved Tony Stark.

The billionaire smoothly replaced Principal Morita behind the podium, turning to smile at the audience. His familiar sunglasses were already perched on his face, and his signature smirk ready for the cameras—the same cameras that immediately set off with endless flashes and shuttering noises as the press began taking pictures of Tony Stark for the first time since he disappeared into a spaceship weeks earlier. 

(The world hadn’t even known Tony Stark was back, Ned remembered, until Stark Industries’ CEO Pepper Potts released an official statement over a week following the Decimation. Evidently, he’d clawed his way back to Earth and landed in Wakanda, welcomed by the mourning and newly-crowned Queen Shuri.)

Mr. Stark tolerated the flashing cameras for a minute longer before he held up a single hand. Almost immediately, the audience obediently fell silent, and the cameramen stopped snapping photos of the billionaire.

The influence he held over them all was undeniable.

“Thank you,” Mr. Stark said again when everyone had complied with his non-verbal command.

Ned felt his jaw unhinge for the second time in five minutes. Now that the excess noise had died, he could hear Mr. Stark all too clearly, and he sounded... he sounded so different. In all of Mr. Stark’s extensive record of interviews, press conferences, and public appearances, Ned had never heard him this subdued.

In that moment, Tony Stark sounded just like anyone else: lost, broken, grieving.

But Ned knew, just as the rest of the world did, that Pepper Potts was alive. And so was Colonel Rhodes. Even Mr. Stark’s Head of Security, Mr. Happy (as Peter loved to call him), had survived the Decimation.

To everyone else, it would appear as if Tony Stark’s found family was still whole and complete.

Ned realized otherwise. His heart lurching to his throat, his mind flashed to Peter without his permission, to his best friend’s contagious grins and giddy laughter and uncontrollable rambling (Oh my god, Ned, you won’t believe what happened on patrol yesterday—I was caught up in this gang fight, and the men had guns and knives and everything and – and they had a dog, a dog, Ned! He was so brown and furry and cute and I just wanted to hug him, I—), and he wondered if Tony felt Peter’s loss the same way Ned did—like a gaping wound, an amputated limb, a missing heart.

And then, faster than the audience could react, Mr. Stark reached up to take off his sunglasses in one swift move, and Ned figured he must.

Because the man staring back at him was not Tony Stark. He couldn’t possibly be Tony Stark.

Tony Stark was untouchable, infallible, unmovable. Tony Stark was proud and witty and sarcastic and arrogant to a fault.

(“Peter, are you okay?” Ned asked urgently. His friend’s dazed eyes and trembling hands made him more than a little uneasy. “Is it... one of those days?” Is it a sensory overload? was what he didn’t say. He didn’t need to—they both knew it was what he meant.

Peter blinked, stuck in a haze that didn’t seem to want to let him go. “I – no,” he shook his head. “No, it’s...”

He hesitated.

Ned’d heart plummeted to his feet. How bad did it have to be, he wondered, that Peter didn’t want to tell him?

Peter told him everything.

Five minutes later, long after Ned had lost any hope of getting a real answer, Peter twisted the thick fabric of his sweater in his hands and whispered, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself, “It’s Mr. Stark.”

Ned sucked in a breath. He didn’t know Tony Stark as well as Peter did—all he knew was what Peter told him.

But Peter had always painted ‘Mr. Stark’ out to be a hero, resilient and strong-willed and indomitable.

Today, though, Peter stared at him through bleary eyes and confessed, “He’s not okay, Ned. He—he had a panic attack yesterday and I was there and I didn’t know what to do, I—“

Ned gathered Peter into his arms wordlessly, pretending he couldn’t feel the wetness that immediately soaked into his t-shirt. 

“I don’t know how to help him,” Peter gasped through a muffled sob. “He’s not—he’s not the Tony Stark the public sees. He’s not the heartless monster everyone makes him out to be.”

Ned closed his eyes and drew Peter in closer. He didn’t tell Peter it would be okay, because he didn’t know if that would be the truth.

“He’s – he’s hurting, Ned,” Peter stuttered. “He’s been hurting for a long time.”

Listening to Peter cry into his shirt, Ned felt his chest tighten with fear, and he had to ask himself:

If the heroes are all out there saving us, then who’s saving them?)

The man standing on that stage today was anything but emotionless, Ned realized. The tinted sunglasses had hidden Mr. Stark from the world before, but now, with them hanging loosely from Mr. Stark’s fingers, everyone could see the exhaustion weighing down his gaze, the tired lines framing his forehead, the red that colored his eyes with the telltale sign of grief.

Mr. Stark had never looked more vulnerable.

Naturally, because the press was full of the type of vultures MJ so often complained about, the cameramen and paparazzi impulsively began snapping photos again, rude and obtrusive. Ned expected Mr. Stark to immediately put his sunglasses (read: his shield) back on, but he didn’t.

He didn’t even seem to fully register everyone’s reactions. Instead, the expression on his face was dazed, unseeing even though his eyes were wide open.

(Ned knew the feeling. All too well.)

When the commotion finally died a second time two minutes later, Mr. Stark leaned towards the mic and started speaking, his eyes dark for a reason other than the dim lighting.

☔︎

Everything—everyone—was so loud. Tony had never hated high school more than he did then, walking up to the stage and greeting Peter’s principal with a handshake and a “thank you.”

He hated it even more when the same cameras he’d been accustomed to his whole life snapped more photos of him than they had in months. 

After he removed his sunglasses, it took the press even longer to calm down. Personally, Tony wanted to scream at them all. He felt like his world had ended, and yet all they cared about was who could take the best (or worst) photo of him to spread to everyone in the states.

It made him more than a little uncomfortable, staring into an ocean of Peter’s peers and ruthless reporters, knowing that they were all staring back at him. Knowing that they could all see him for the hollow shell of a man he was now.

He felt so exposed.

But even though every whisper felt like another dagger stabbing into the still-healing wound Thanos had carved into him, Tony couldn’t bring himself to re-armor himself with his sunglasses. He wasn’t doing this for himself, after all.

He was here for Peter. Peter, who’d admired him unquestioningly and called him his hero. Peter, who’d always been thrilled to spend time with Tony even if only in the lab, geeking out over all the newest technology. Peter, who was so smart and so kind and so selfless and – and just so much better than everyone (than him).

Peter, who deserved so much more than the ending he got. Who deserved to be seen as the hero he was. Who deserved to be remembered.

(Tony would always remember him. He didn’t think he could forget.)

Tony had been lying to the media his entire life, but Peter was worth more than another deception. Peter was worth everything, and Tony wanted nothing more than to give him exactly that.

Standing here in front of dozens of impressionable teens, preparing to pour his heart out about the boy who’d snuck into his life and into his heart, Tony knew he couldn’t pretend. He couldn’t just hide behind a pair of sunglasses and play Peter’s death off as anything less than the end of his universe.

(Thanos had thought that he was only taking 50% of the universe when he snapped his fingers, but he’d been wrong. Because Thanos had taken the entirety of his.)

It was with Peter’s selflessness in his mind that Tony took a breath and began:

“I’m sure you’ve all noticed that everywhere around the world, people began to fade three weeks ago. The Avengers and I have been calling it The Snap, but word on the street is people are referring to it as the Decimation. I suppose the Decimation is more accurate, given the sheer magnitude of all we’ve lost.”

Tony quieted for a moment, trying to ignore all the cameras pointed at him, undoubtedly recording his every word. But this wasn’t for the cameras. It wasn’t for the rest of the world.

It was for Peter, who was already dead and gone. Who’d already moved on, yet Tony couldn’t seem to do the same.

“I know you’re all looking for an explanation,” he said. “For an answer to why. But the truth is, I don’t have one for you. All I can tell you is this: three weeks ago, we fought a beast who called himself the Mad Titan. Thanos. The monster responsible for killing 50% of all life in the universe, and destroying the lives of all those who remain.”

50% of all living creatures. In the universe. 

Tony could practically feel the horror of his audience. He’d been fighting off the same horror ever since Titan.

And he knew—he knew—that everyone watching him could also hear the words he didn’t say: We lost. The Avengers failed.

It was their fault. His fault, because what nobody else knew was that Strange had given up the Time Stone, which had been instrumental to Thanos’s victory, in exchange for Tony’s life.

Tony still didn’t get why. He wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth more than half the universe. More than Peter.

(It should have been him.)

“In the aftermath, the rest of the world has been trying to move on, and I don’t blame you. It seems impossible, after all, to reverse a situation like this. But no matter how slim our chances, I can’t move on,” he exhaled raggedly. He paused, let his gaze fall briefly to the floor, and then straightened his posture, staring fiercely at the audience, mimicking a confidence he did not feel. “Along with the rest of the Avengers, a few warriors from across the galaxy, and Queen Shuri of Wakanda who has been generous enough to lend us her help and her lab, I’ve been trying to find a solution.”

All movement in the gym careened to a halt, shock and disbelief filling the air. Around the globe, everyone else watching Tony Stark’s speech stilled in much the same way.

A solution? they all asked themselves. Is it possible?

“And I’m not asking you to believe me,” Tony continued. “I’m not asking any of you to have faith that we will succeed. I’m not asking you all to get your hopes up if you don’t trust what I’m saying. But what I am doing is telling you that the Avengers will do whatever it takes to get back all the people we’ve lost. All the people we didn’t get to say goodbye to.”

He smiled then, grim and mirthless. 

“We call ourselves the Avengers because if we can’t save the people we love, then at the very least we’ll fight to avenge them,” he broke off, stumbling over silence for a belated moment.

The people we love. His words echoed in his mind. Love, love, love—

Peter.

He loved Peter. His kid.

“But this time, revenge isn’t enough,” Tony snapped back to himself, pulling himself together long enough to glare into the nearest camera, imagining Thanos on the other side. “I refuse to allow Thanos to take half of our people from us.”

The crowd’s murmurs grew louder.

“So I promise you all”—Tony swallowed, remembering his last promise (to Peter), remembering hitched sobs and quivering hands and shallow breaths and you’re alright, remembering that the last thing he’d ever said to Peter Parker was a lie—“the Avengers will find a way.”

The cameras went wild. The reporters did, too, jumping up into his line of sight over and over again, trying to catch his attention, roaring question upon question at him.

The students and the teachers—they were left in silence, staring at him with a worshipping kind of wonder that reminded him all too vividly of Peter. 

(Peter used to look at him like he’d hung the moon and the stars all for him. What Peter didn’t know was that if that were the case, then he was only capable of doing so because he had Peter.)

For you, Peter. “We’ll find a way,” he repeated. “We’ll get them back, however long it takes.”

He let the claim settle for a few seconds before nodding once, sharp and certain, and pointing at the first reporter. 

In the end, it only took four reporters to get to the question he’d always known was coming.

“Kelly Robinson, from the New York Bulletin. Mr. Stark, your fiancée made it clear that the press was to leave you alone following your return to Earth because you were heavily injured. Given the losses we all faced, and the personal wounds you already received, why haven’t you given up? What are you still fighting for?”

Tony’s facade of growing confidence immediately collapsed at her words, crumbling into dust the same way Peter had. How could he stay strong in the face of those questions?

What are you still fighting for? 

Steve had asked him the same thing, after he’d woken up in the med-bay to the concerned stares of the Rogue Avengers. Clint, too, had been curious, Tony had known.

After all, in their eyes, Tony hadn’t lost anyone. He still had all the people he loved—Pepper, Rhodey, Happy.

He’d walked through fire and come out on the other side unscathed.

(Except he hadn’t.)

At the time, Tony had recoiled away from the question. He’d frozen up and refused to answer, hearing his heartbeat grow louder and quicker and more panicked through the machine hooked to his heart.

And Steve and Clint both had taken one look at the tears in his eyes, the desperation with which he’d clutched his chest, and the insanity in his stare, and wisely stopped asking.

They’d realized he was determined to see this through, and it had been enough.

Tony knew the press wouldn’t be so kind.

What are you still fighting for?

He didn’t answer her question, not immediately and not directly. He knew she wouldn’t get it.

None of them would.

He needed them to understand. To see just how good a person Peter had been.

(Too good for this world.)

“My name is Tony Stark,” he said instead, “and I am Iron Man. I’m sure you’re all wondering why I need to say that—you all know who I am, after all.” Tony cracked a smile, but it was weak and the joke fell flat. No one laughed—it wasn’t funny, not anymore.

“But today, standing here in the gym of Midtown School of Science and Technology, I am not that man at all. I am not Tony Stark—Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist. I am not Iron Man, the superhero, the Avenger. Frankly”—his voice was bitter, venomous—“I don’t feel like a hero at all these days.”

He broke off into a chuckle that was more pained than amused.

He sought out Kelly Robinson amongst the reporters, locking eyes with her until she flinched and stepped backwards uncertainly. “Today,” he began, and though his voice was quiet, it still carried over the silence, “I am just another man who’s been hit by an unimaginable tragedy.”

Robinson’s eyes widened. Tony didn’t have to look around to know that everyone else’s did, too.

“We all—“ Tony stopped, stumbling over words and choking back his grief. “We all lost too much in the Decimation,” his voice was strangled, nothing at all like what they knew of him.

They were beginning to think they didn’t know him at all.

“Three weeks ago,” he started over, “some of you lost friends, some of you lost family. Some of you lost your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters. Three weeks ago, I—“

He breathed in a desperate gasp that didn’t seem to fill his lungs with air, feeling the ground crack and splinter beneath his feet, the air grow cold to his skin, the world start to crash around his ears.

His composure broke apart at the seams. 

“Three weeks ago,” he repeated, a whisper of loss, “I lost – I lost my kid.”

And the world stopped spinning.

Tony found Robinson’s eyes again. He pretended not to notice the ashen complexion of her face, or the regret in her eyes.

None of that mattered.

“You asked me why I still fight.” His words punched through the curtain of silence, cutting like the serrated edge of a knife. “The answer is simple.”

He smiled, lips curling to reveal teeth, a vengeful snarl. Thanos would pay.

“I fight for him. I fight for the smile on his face. I fight for movie marathons and game nights and afternoons in the lab.” He shoved his fists into his pockets, not caring that he was making the expensive fabric crease and crumple, ruining the lines of his suit. His PR managers would have a field day with that. “I fight for the day I can hold him in my arms again and tell him I love him.”

If he’d thought the crowd had been loud before, it was nothing compared to the noise they emitted now, screaming over one another to be heard. And yet despite the cacophony of sounds, it was Ned’s gasp and quiet holy shit Tony heard, his voice deafening to Tony’s ears after all the ridiculous videos Peter had shown him of he and Ned doing stupid things.

Tony found Ned easily, Peter’s best friend a familiar face to him even though they had personally only ever met once. Ned looked devastated.

Tony flinched. God, he should have approached Ned personally first, should have gotten over his own fears and told Ned the truth of what had happened.

Ned deserved better than finding out Peter had died in a speech open to the rest of the world. (It was one thing to suspect Peter had been Dusted. It was another thing entirely to have it confirmed.)

I’m sorry, Ned.

He was such a coward. He’d almost been too afraid to tell even May. It had taken him almost two weeks to remind himself she had the right to know. It was the least he‘d owed her.

He’d been terrified of her lashing out at him, even though he knew he would have deserved it. But Peter’s aunt... she was even stronger than he’d realized. 

It was no wonder Peter loved her so much, Tony had realized when he’d finally let the words he died fall from his mouth like a confession. Because May had thanked him.

Her nephew, the last of her family, had died and she had thanked him, as if he deserved anything more than her wrath—

(“Thank you for being there,” May whispered, her eyelashes thick with tears. “If it couldn’t have been me, I’m glad it was you who held him as he—“ she flinched and cut herself off. Shaking her head, she finished, “I’m sure he was glad, too.”

“No,” Tony’s voice was hoarse. “No. He begged, he begged—“

“He looked up to you.” May’s smile was a sad, lonely thing, dripping of misery and defeat. “You were his hero.”

“I couldn’t save him.”

May swallowed and looked away. In the quiet stillness of the Parker residence, Tony’s voice was quiet, small, broken. It was nothing like the confident facade of the great Tony Stark, smirk ever-present for the cameras.

May knew that this, here, was the real Tony Stark. The Tony Stark who loved her nephew, who told Peter jokes when he was upset, who bought Peter new shoes and jackets and backpacks no matter how profusely both Parkers tried to deny him, who guided Peter into the life he deserved.

“He believed in me,” Tony’s hands were shaking, violently, “he had faith in me and I failed him, God, I—“

The Tony Stark who was always trying to give parts of himself away to save the people he cared about.

“It’s not your fault,” she shook her head, even though grief and anger burned in her throat, itching to reveal themselves in a hail of thunderous words aimed at the man she’d trusted to protect her boy. She wanted to be mad, God did she want to (because if she wasn’t angry, then she would have to dwell on the despair and she didn’t think she was strong enough for that), but the look in Tony’s eyes made her stop.

He was just as devastated as she was. He lost Peter, too, she realized.

“I’m sorry,” Tony said, a stuttered gasp, and May closed her eyes.

“It’s not your fault,” she repeated, more slowly and with more conviction this time. She knew he wouldn’t believe her, but she needed to say it anyway—part of her knew she was only trying to convince herself. “You... you weren’t just a hero to him, Tony Stark. You made him into the hero he was, too. You inspired him to be brave and uphold the mantle of Spider-Man even when he felt powerless. He was strong because of you. Because you gave him purpose.”

“I didn’t deserve him,” Tony whispered, soft and sure.

May didn’t say that she doubted either of them deserved Peter.

Instead, she shuffled forward and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, drawing him close. It should have felt uncomfortable, her hugging Tony Stark, but it didn’t. Because this wasn’t really Tony Stark.

This was just Tony, someone who was grieving just as she was. 

Tony choked back a cry and let her hold him up, let her support him like he might drown without her there to keep him above water. “I miss him,” he said honestly, “so, so much.”

Tears stung at the backs of her eyelids. She ignored them. “I know,” she whispered hoarsely. “I know.”

She didn’t tell him she missed Peter, too. She didn’t have to—Tony already knew she did.)

So. May had thanked him.

She had thanked him and then she’d fixed him a cup of tea and a horrible meatloaf that had reminded him of the first time he met Peter and he’d ended up crying all over her again.

She had thanked him and then she’d pressed a framed photograph of him and Peter into his shaking hands (“That boy loved you so much,” she whispered, a wistful smile clinging to her lips the same way tears clung to her eyelashes, and Tony stared at the picture like he’d seen a ghost, a ghost with the most adorable brown curls and the happiest, happiest eyes and an innocent grin and two fingers sticking up from behind Tony’s head in an imitation of bunny ears and – and Tony couldn’t do anything but stare), pretending not to see the way Tony had to choke back a sob when she told him keep it, he would have wanted you to have it.

She had thanked him and then she’d gathered him into another hug, warm and engulfing, and whispered bring our boy back, Stark into his hair and he’d known, he’d known, he couldn’t fail her.

He couldn’t fail Peter.

And yet, when the door had swung closed between them, locking shut with a solemn click that had left Tony breathless and weak in the knees, mind struggling to wrap around the sheer finality he’d heard in that sound, Tony had collapsed against the door and realized he was already failing Peter again.

He was failing Peter by giving up. He was failing Peter by hiding away with nothing but himself, a seemingly endless supply of liquor, and his own goddamn fears to keep him company. He was failing Peter by burying his head in the sand and turning away from the world that needed heroes, especially in a time like this.

He was failing Peter by not doing everything he could to bring him back.

…Tony was tired of letting Peter down.

Happy had arrived to shepherd him away like he was a lost soul desperately in need of guidance, and Tony had let himself wallow in his grief for only the hour it took to drive back upstate before he’d picked himself up, gathered the shattered pieces of himself in his bleeding hands, and called Peter’s principal with an unprecedented request.

It was time he let Peter’s death bolster him rather than cripple him. His kid was counting on him.

☔︎

There seemed to be no end to the noise. Everyone had something to say.

It was so overwhelming that Ned couldn’t, in fact, hear a word of it. He doubted anybody else could, either.

In the wake of Tony Stark’s—he’s Iron Man, Peter, Iron Man!—admission, it felt as though everyone in the entire gym (and perhaps everyone in the entire country) had been sent to their feet, gasping and exclaiming excitedly to their friends and bellowing questions of disbelief.

Ned and MJ were the only ones whispering.

“Holy crap,” MJ said eloquently, having given up on her usually robotic composure after Tony Stark first took off his sunglasses. “Well shit.”

“You don’t think...?” Ned trailed off.

MJ’s eyes were blown so wide open it would have been comical if Ned wasn’t sure the size of his own eyes rivalled hers. “Peter?” she asked, needlessly.

They exchanged a look. They were both thinking the same thing: Who else could it be?

“Oh, my god,” Ned breathed. “Oh, my god.”

“Peter fucking Parker,” MJ muttered. “Damn. Of course Peter is the one person who can make Anthony Edward Stark admit he loves him in front of the whole world.”

MJ laughed, then, sharp and loud, drenched in torment. Ned watched, concerned, as her chuckles grew less amused and more hysterical, her eyes tearing up despite herself.

“Of-fucking-course.”

“MJ—”

“It should make me feel better,” she cut him off before he could say anything more—not that he even knew what he’d been about to say, “knowing that so many people cared about Peter. Knowing that we aren’t the only ones who miss him. Knowing that even Peter’s hero is grieving for him.”

It should, MJ had said. Should. 

(‘Should’ applied to a lot of things.

Peter should be alive.

Ned should be able to hug his best friend after school.

Queens should still have its favorite web-slinging vigilante out keeping the streets safe at night.

But none of those things were true.)

“It should make me feel better,” MJ repeated, tonelessly. The hysteria in her voice had died, but remnants of it remained in her eyes, opaque and unnoticeable. 

Ned noticed.

“But it doesn’t,” she said. “It just makes it all harder.”

Ned didn’t reply. He didn’t have to for MJ to know he agreed.

“Peter’s still dead,” MJ whispered.

Those three words made up the saddest sentence Ned had ever heard. He immediately wished he would never have to hear it again, but even then, even as he recoiled away from MJ as if struck, he knew he would—in his nightmares, in his daydreams, in the recesses of his mind where the voices refused to shut up.

Peter’s still dead.

Peter’s still dead.

Peter’s still fucking dead.

Ned wanted to scream at MJ—at everyone—to leave him alone. Instead he swallowed down the urge, felt it go down his throat like shards of glass, and turned back to the stage. “I want to hear what else he has to say,” was all Ned said.

MJ said nothing. After all, what else was there to say?

(Nothing. There were no words at all, not for this.)

Ned drew his knees up to his chest and wished he was seven and innocent again, giggling with Peter over his new Star Wars figurines under the green-tinted lights of the glow-in-the-dark star cutouts decorating his ceiling.

(He wished the stars would shine again for him.

But the stars had long vanished, and with them, so had their light.)

All there was left for Ned to do was tune back into Iron Man’s speech and act like he cared at all about the reporters and their burning questions, when all he wanted to do was take Tony Stark aside and demand, Is it true? Are you going to bring them all back? Are you going to bring Peter back?

For a moment, Ned could have sworn Mr. Stark’s eyes locked with his, and his breath caught in his throat. He wondered if, even from all the way over there on the stage, the scientist could hear his thoughts.

Could hear his prayers. 

Then Mr. Stark flinched minutely and took a step back, hurriedly averting his eyes, and Ned exhaled heavily.

Come on, Mr. Stark, he thought, pleaded, begged, you’ve always been Peter’s favorite. You’ve been saving him from day one, from even before you knew who he was. You rescued him at the Stark Expo, you rescued him constantly when he was getting himself into world after world of trouble as Spider-Man—you rescued him all the time.

Be his hero again. Please. Just save him one more time.

Mr. Stark cleared his throat up on the stage, shook off whatever stupor had seized him, and quickly pointed at another reporter.

Please.

“Josh Anderson, CNN News. Mr. Stark, you claim that you and the Avengers will give us back the people we’ve lost. But what about right now? What do you plan to do to help those that remain, those who’ve lost their families, their jobs, their financial security, their motivation? What will you do for everyone who is struggling to come to terms with the Decimation?”

Please.

“Thank you, Josh from CNN News, that’s an excellent question,” Stark responded. The raw anguish had been pushed back, replaced by the steely fierceness Ned had always associated with the Great Tony Stark. Yet even still, there remained traces of the other Tony in the newly-appeared smattering of salt and pepper in his hair, in the way he rocked unsteadily back and forth on his heels, and in the haunted look in his eyes.

It was barely there, but it still existed. 

“To answer your concerns, Pepper Potts and I, on behalf of Stark Industries, wish to reassure you all that you are not alone.” There was a softness to Tony’s voice, a certain wrecked quality that made Ned think it was Tony who needed to be told he was not alone. “We are here to help. To prove this, we’d first like to offer a solution for those who are suffering financially due to the Decimation.”

Please.

“Thus, as the Avengers continue to fight for all of your loved ones, it is with great pride and joy that I announce to you all the inauguration of the Peter Parker Foundation, after – after my kid.” Tony had said pride, he had said joy, but though there was indeed a modicum of relief in his expression, it was greatly outweighed by the sheer heartbreak.

Please. 

The breath whooshed out of Ned in a speedy exhale. Beside him, MJ really did drop her book this time.

“Whoa,” Ned mumbled quietly. Three weeks ago, he would have laughed excitedly, cheered, and hugged Peter as he confidently proclaimed this to be the greatest day of his life. 

(Three weeks ago, Peter had been alive.)

“‘Whoa’ is right,” MJ agreed, just as dully. She looked surprised, but not amazed. “That’s—wow. Peter… Peter would have been beyond thrilled.” And MJ was right. Peter would have been ecstatic. He would have stared at Mr. Stark in awe and cried, probably, upon realizing just how important he was to a man he’d looked up to his entire life.

Ned couldn’t find it in himself to be anywhere near ‘ecstatic.’

Meanwhile, all around him, there were whispers everywhere. Of course there were; Peter’s classmates hadn’t even believed that Peter had been an intern at Stark Industries, much less Tony Stark’s ‘kid’, apparently.

If Ned possessed the energy to feel anything but overwhelming and all-encompassing devastation, he would have probably been delighted to finally have it proven that Peter really had known Iron Man. 

But as it were, he couldn’t even bring himself to seek out Flash in the audience and revel in the doubtlessly shocked, deer-caught-in-headlights look that he could vaguely imagine on Flash’s face. 

What did it matter that they’d finally vindicated themselves when Peter wasn’t here to celebrate with?

Below on the stage, seemingly unaware of (or, more likely, completely aware of but indifferent to) the chain reaction he had set off, Tony continued to elaborate on how the Peter Parker Foundation would be aimed at helping any and all people with everything from providing their kids with an education to paying for funeral costs. He explained it all with an ease that spoke of his experience, but a stiltedness that betrayed his discomfort. 

Ned didn’t care. He tried to listen, tried to pay attention, but he couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the roaring in his ears, the stampede in his chest, the shrieking in his skull, the rattle of his bones. 

He couldn’t hear a word Tony said.

☔︎

Flash was not afraid to admit that he admired Iron Man. In fact, he had admired Iron Man since the hero first revealed himself in a dramatic moment worthy only of Tony Stark.

He admired Tony Stark, too.

But that didn’t mean he was blind to the genius’s faults—because he wasn’t. He knew who the Avenger was; he knew that, for all his greatness, one of Tony Stark’s most prominent flaws was that he was utterly incapable of processing his own emotions.

Hell, the entire nation knew that. Tony Stark’s emotional shortcomings had been documented since before Flash had even really known who Tony Stark was besides the fact that he shared the name of Stark Industries.

And yet.

And yet…

Flash found himself gawking at Tony Stark, whose presence was currently gracing their humble school. He didn’t think even the announcement that the billionaire CEO of Stark Industries was Iron Man had shocked him this much.

…It is with great pride and joy that I announce to you all the inauguration of the Peter Parker foundation. 

…with great pride and joy that I announce to you all the inauguration of the Peter Parker foundation. 

…and joy that I announce to you all the inauguration of the Peter Parker foundation. 

…I announce to you all the inauguration of the Peter Parker foundation. 

…inauguration of the Peter Parker foundation.

...the Peter Parker foundation.

...Peter Parker foundation.

…Parker.

Holy shit.

Parker. Peter fucking Parker.

Flash whimpered. (He would never admit it to anyone else, but yes, he whimpered.) He couldn’t believe he’d been bullying Iron Man’s kid. 

He wasn’t given the chance to wallow in his self-pity, however, because Tony quickly continued to speak, changing the subject to all the other ways he and Stark Industries planned to help the world heal.

But even as he spoke of rebuilding efforts and pardons for the previously-Rogue Avengers and alliances between governments, Flash could tell that everyone remained hooked only on the news that Tony Stark had a kid.

And Flash looked at Mr. Stark, and he saw a sadness in his smile—the same sadness he saw every morning when his mother came into his room just to make sure he was still there and whole—that made Flash’s chest tighten.

Peter Parker did that. Parker put that look on Iron Man’s face.

It was all too clear that Mr. Stark genuinely cared about Flash’s classmate. Peter must be something, Flash mused, to make Tony fucking Stark, genius, billionaire, philanthropist, give a damn. 

And what did it say about Flash, then, if he was capable of hurting someone so undeniably good that even Mr. Stark could see it?

☔︎

Fifteen minutes later, the reporters were still unsatisfied, each of them putting their hands up over and over again, clamoring for his attention even if they’d already had their chance to ask a question just moments before.

Tony was exhausted.

All they see you as is ‘Tony Stark’s kid’, Tony thought regretfully. That’s my fault. You’re... you’re – so much more. 

You’re everything, Pete.

“That’s enough,” Tony snapped, corralling his misery back into its cage. He was sick of standing here and regaling the world with stories of how great Peter had been when none of these people had even known his kid. Peter was beyond all of them—none of them, especially not him, deserved Peter Parker (or Spider-Man).

Peter Parker and Spider-Man were one and the same, but Tony knew better than anyone that Peter didn’t see it that way. Peter had been so unaware of his value that Tony found it inconceivable.

How was it that the best person he knew hadn’t even been able to see his own worth?

(“I don’t get it,” Tony said, frustrated. “You could knock your bully out in a single punch. Why don’t you?”

“Because I’m Peter Parker!” Peter answered heatedly. “Because when I’m at school, I’m not Spider-Man. I can’t fight back because I’m supposed to be a weak nobody.”

“You are not a nobody. Don’t you dare say that about yourself again,” Tony hissed. His gut churned to hear Peter put himself so down. “Suit or no suit, you’re still Spider-Man.”

Peter was so good. Why couldn’t he accept that?

But Peter just shook his head stubbornly, a hint of sadness in his gaze. “No, I’m not. Spider-Man is strong, brave, invincible. I’m nowhere near any of that. When I put on that mask... I’m a different person. The thing is, Mr. Stark, Spider-Man possesses a greatness Peter Parker cannot even hope to touch.”

Tony wanted to throw up. God, his kid. His precious, precious kid who he loved so much. He wished he could just hold Peter tight and make Peter see himself the way Tony saw him:

Selfless, kind, intelligent. Powerful beyond measure yet compassionate to the extreme.

Perfect.)

(“Holy crap,” Tony breathed, staring wide-eyed at the finished equation scribbled on his whiteboard. He knew without a doubt that he hadn’t yet had a chance to fix that equation.

He also knew who that handwriting belonged to.

He spun around in his chair and pointed accusingly at Peter. “Peter Parker, you are a genius,” he praised, grinning widely when the boy’s head jerked upwards and Peter was left blinking at him, confused. 

“What – what did I d–do?” Peter stammered.

Tony’s grin broadened. “You solved my equation is what you did, you little prodigy,” he teased. “Honestly, Pete, I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure that out for days now, and you’ve been here for, what, two hours maybe? That formula is way beyond high school maths.”

Peter’s cheeks pinked. It was adorable—Tony almost cooed at the sight. He didn’t, of course—he wasn’t a blubbering toddler or a gushing grandmother—but it was a tempting urge. “I – I don’t... I don’t know,”—Peter was fumbling to find words, looking anywhere but at Tony—“I was just playing around with the numbers and I thought I recognized something. I’m – sorry...?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Don’t apologize, I’m complimenting you. You did good, Pete.” His eyes twinkled proudly. “You’ve been holding out on me, haven’t you, you little rascal?”

“That – that’s not...” Peter shook his head, and the twin roses on his face abruptly faded as his expression morphed from embarrassed to disheartened. “You’re wrong, Mr. Stark. I’m not that smart.”

Tony frowned immediately. If it were anyone else, he would have dismissed the words as teenage angst, but there was something about the look on Peter’s face that didn’t sit right with him. 

“No, you’re not,” Tony agreed, and watched as Peter flinched visibly and blinked his eyes rapidly like he was trying not to cry. A little smile crept up Tony’s face as he finished, more sincerely than he’d intended, “You’re smarter.”

Peter’s eyes widened again. This time, the tears that formed were less dejected and more grateful.

Still, his stubbornness persisted. “But Mr. Stark, I—”

“No buts, Pete,” Tony said gently. “You’re a genius, kid. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. You – God, Pete, you’re smarter than I could have ever hoped to be at your age. And I know you’ll be even smarter when you grow older.”

Peter sniffled and looked away, less out of shyness and more out of disbelief. Tony hated that disbelief.

Peter should know how amazing he was.

“And you know what?” Tony carried on. “I can’t wait until you surpass everyone else in the field, including me. I just know you’ll impress them all—you’ve already impressed me.”

“You’re – you’re lying,” Peter protested, but his voice was weak. Peter wanted nothing more than to be able to believe Tony was telling the truth, but how could he? He was just a nerdy kid from Queens. “That has to be an exaggeration, or—”

“It’s not,” Tony said firmly, so sure and full of conviction that Peter faltered. “I would never lie to you, not about this. Peter, I’m so proud of you.”

Peter brought his wrists to his eyes and wiped hastily, turning bodily away from Tony.

Tony pretended he couldn’t see Peter break down in the corner of his lab. He pretended it didn’t break his heart to think that Peter genuinely believed himself to be worth so much less than what he was really worth.)

(“Well, don’t you look down today,” Tony joked when Peter walked into his lab like someone had killed his puppy.

Except Peter didn’t laugh. He smiled pathetically, an obvious farce that even a toddler would be able to see through, but he didn’t laugh.

“Hey,” Tony frowned. “What happened? Who do I need to beat up?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “No one,” he muttered, the frown never leaving his face.

“Peter,” Tony sighed, “seriously. I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me what’s wrong. So please, tell me. I want to help you.”

Peter shook his head. The phony smile on his face grew wider, as if that would distract Tony from noticing the lack of luster behind it. “It’s really nothing,” he lied. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Stark.”

Tony worried. He let it go, and he didn’t prod any further, but that didn’t stop him from worrying. 

He kept a close eye on Peter as Peter manouvered around the lab as if he belonged there, bringing a smile to Tony’s lips for a fleeting moment before he remembered something was wrong. 

All throughout the hours Peter spent working in the lab, Tony watched him, waiting for him to slip up and give Tony something to work with.

But Peter never did. He looked at Tony over his shoulder once every few minutes, chewing his lip intently, but he didn’t say a word. 

In the end, Tony was forced to let Peter go back home, eyes still dull and joy still muted. Usually, Peter would skip out of the lab with a bounce in his step, not even trying to hide how happy he was, but this time, Tony’s brows knitted when he saw how Peter seemed to be hunching in on himself as he walked, his legs practically dragging behind him.

It only reinforced the thought in Tony’s mind: Peter was upset.

Tony stressed over the question of what exactly Peter was unhappy about for hours until he finally received a text from May, instantly cluing him in on the situation.

Aunt Hottie: Hey, Tony. I need a favor.

Aunt Hottie: I’m sorry to ask you this, but Midtown offers an out-of-states field trip to its students every year. Peter was really looking forward to go and have some fun with his friends, but I’m not sure that’s possible anymore.

Aunt Hottie: I really wish I could let Peter go, but it’s just that the trip is so expensive and we’ve been struggling lately. 

Aunt Hottie: You know I hate to accept charity, but I was wondering if you could help us out, just this once. I know it would make Peter’s day.

Tony stared at his phone screen, his chest stuttering in his ribcage for a moment. His eyes skipped over May’s text messages a second time, and he knew how to read between the lines—May didn’t just want Peter to enjoy a trip with his friends; she wanted him to enjoy himself and just be a teenager for once, a kid instead of a hero shouldering the weight of the world.

“Oh, kid,” Tony whispered to himself, feeling his heart shatter. God, Peter was too fucking selfless. 

Tony closed his eyes. “Peter, goddamnit, I’m a billionaire,” he sighed, thinking of all the times Peter had glanced uncertainly at him during their lab session. “And funding your field trip is probably the best and most worthwhile thing I could possibly spend my money on.”

Didn’t Peter know that Tony would bend over backwards to make him happy?

He shook his head and started to type out his response, fingers flying furiously across the keyboard. If he focused on the menial task hard enough, he could even ignore the few tears that had gathered in his eyes. It physically hurt to know that Peter was too afraid to accept his help even when Tony was so desperate to give it to him.

Helicopter Mentor: Of course I’ll pay for Peter’s trip, May. You don’t even have to ask.

Helicopter Mentor: You know I’m more than happy to lend you guys a hand anytime. And trust me, it’s not charity. I don’t pity you. I know you want to provide for Peter, but I have the money, and Peter’s worth it.

Helicopter Mentor: Why didn’t Peter ask me when he was over at the lab?

He didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

Aunt Hottie: Thank you, Tony. 

Aunt Hottie: I know it’s not a handout, Tony, but can you blame me for being proud?

Aunt Hottie: You and I both know Peter. He feels bad. He doesn’t want to be a burden, or feel like he’s using you for your money.

Tony’s frown deepened. He rushed to deny Peter’s assumptions, the tears finally spilling over.

Helicopter Mentor: Peter could NEVER be a burden.

Helicopter Mentor: And I know he wouldn’t deliberately use me, May. Peter’s a good kid. He deserves the world.

And Tony had every intention of giving Peter exactly that.)

No, these people had no idea who his kid was.

They didn’t know anything about Peter. They didn’t know that Peter had laughed at every little thing, heart full and happy and unburdened by hatred. They didn’t know that Peter used to constantly wow Tony with his brain—Peter could catch one glimpse of a complex problem that confused even Tony and immediately spit out a thousand and one ideas of how to solve it. They didn’t know Peter had a nervous tick; whenever he was self-conscious or flustered or anxious, he wouldn’t be able to help but stammer out every second word. They didn’t know Peter had a moral compass stronger than Captain America; they didn’t know Peter would have gladly risked his own life if it meant saving even one other person.

They didn’t know that Peter’s favorite color had been red, after the Iron Man suit, or that Peter had made Tony cry when he’d admitted that his favorite hero was the man behind the mask, Tony Stark. They didn’t know Peter had defended Star Wars to the very end. They didn’t know Peter had cried every time they watched Coco, even though he knew the movie by heart by now. They didn’t know Peter had been so well-versed in gamma radiation and nuclear physics that even Bruce Banner would have been stunned. 

They didn’t know that Peter’s favorite ice cream flavor had been Hunka Hulka Burning Fudge, but that he had always eaten Stark Raving Hazelnuts anyway to make Tony feel better. They didn’t know that Peter used to love eating pancakes with gummy bears mixed into the batter—much to Tony’s unending disgust. They didn’t know that Peter would turn into a squealing seven-year-old at the slightest mention of Thor, God of Thunder (and no, Tony was not jealous, thank you very much).

They didn’t know Peter had loved his friends dearly. They didn’t know that Peter would have never bailed on even a simple movie night with Ned, even if it was Tony Stark himself asking him to. They didn’t know that Peter had catalogued all of MJ’s favorite genres and authors just so he could surprise her with a new book every so often and make her smile. They didn’t know that Peter would have moved heaven and earth for Ned and MJ. 

They didn’t know that Peter had swung his way into Tony’s heart and refused to leave. They didn’t know that Peter’s innocence and childish glee had effortlessly gotten Tony wrapped around his finger. They didn’t know that Peter had showed up on Tony’s doorstep with a sheepish grin and a clumsily-wrapped present on Father’s Day (or that, for the first time in his entire life, Tony had finally experienced a Father’s Day he could look back at with a smile). They didn’t know that Peter had warmed up the cold rooms of Stark Tower without even trying. They didn’t know that the first time Peter had stumbled upon Tony panting on the floor, in the throes of a panic attack, Peter hadn’t shied away; Peter had stayed by Tony’s side unhesitatingly, murmuring words of love and comfort to the wounded man. They didn’t know that Peter had patched up Tony’s heart and trust after Steve Rogers had broken both with his betrayal.

They didn’t know that Peter’s first priority had always been his aunt—they didn’t know that Peter was always thinking up new ways to earn money just so he could ease the financial strain May struggled with. They didn’t know that Peter gave before he took. They didn’t know that Peter used to cry himself to sleep at night imagining all the people he hadn’t been able to save—and all the people he hadn’t even known needed saving. They didn’t know that Peter had always put everyone else before himself.

They didn’t know that Peter had made Tony’s life so much better, or that Tony was flailing without him now. They didn’t know that the Peter-shaped hole in the universe had made the lights in Tony’s life go out.

They didn’t know that Tony felt so incomplete, so broken and empty, without Peter. They didn’t know that Tony would still miss Peter long after the world had forgotten all about Spider-Man. 

They didn’t know that Tony had loved, and would always love, Peter as if he were his own son.

They didn’t know that in the seventeen years he’d been alive, Peter had touched the hearts of so many—Tony, May, Ned, MJ, even Happy and Pepper and Rhodey.

They didn’t know shit about Peter Parker.

“That’s enough,” Tony echoed his earlier words, loud enough to punch into the ears of everyone present. The racket slowly died down. Tony breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll be taking only one more question.”

Instantly the hands were back up, desperation rushing through the reporters.

Tony scanned the group slowly, and his eyes subconsciously hooked on one of the younger reporters, a man with unkempt brown hair and an eagerness that had already left his more senior peers. He was wearing a checkered shirt and a sweater that reminded Tony of Peter more than he’d like to admit.

Tony’s throat dried.

Pete.

Tony couldn’t escape him. (He didn’t want to. He’d give away all of his fortune and fame if it meant getting Peter back.)

“You, with the red sweater”—Peter preferred blue—“and square glasses.” He couldn’t help himself. He’d always been fantastic at self-sabotage.

The man blanched. It was easy to see that he hadn’t expected to be chosen—Tony could figure why: he was on the young side, and obviously inexperienced.

But so was Peter, Tony thought, and he was smarter than even the best and most accomplished of my highest-paid scientists. 

Tony watched as the young reporter recovered his composure admirably, a practiced smile falling onto his lips as he asked, much more smoothly and charmingly than Peter would have, “James Hall from The Post, sir. Who was Peter Parker to you? What exactly do you mean when you say he was your kid?”

James Hall was not Peter. Peter was awkward and a stammering mess and endearingly terrible at social situations. James Hall, on the other hand, was mustering a confidence that Peter would never have been able to fake.

It brought him both unexplainable relief and despair to recognize that this reporter, who resembled Peter only in his brown hair (Tony had loved Peter’s hair, had loved running his hand through those untamable curls) and nerdy clothes, was completely different in the ways that mattered (it mattered because Tony had adored Peter’s shy stammer more than Peter had ever known).

Tony couldn’t see Peter in Hall anymore. His kid was gone.

But the reporter’s question nevertheless made Tony’s breath still in his lungs in a way only Peter’s questions ever had before—Why won’t you let me fight with you? Why did you give me back the suit if you don’t want me to be a hero? Why don’t you care?

(He cared. God, he cared too much.)

He was my son, were the words that impulsively formed on his tongue, begging to be let out. The need to shout the claim from the rooftops burned bright inside him.

He had already opened his mouth, ready to let those four words chase out of his chest, when he realized that they were a lie. 

Peter hadn’t been his son. In fact, May—who’d raised and loved Peter for far longer than Tony had even known him, who had more of a claim to Peter than Tony ever would, who’d lost everything in Peter—was probably watching this impromptu ‘press conference’ right now from the safety of the Parker apartment.

Tony had entertained the idea that Peter was his for so long that he’d almost had himself convinced of the idea. Ever since Toomes, and ever since Tony had taken a shine to Peter and his incredible mind, Tony had discovered it was impossible to keep Peter out. As the weeks and months had flown by, he had caught himself staring at Peter more and more often, trailing his eyes over Peter’s curly brown hair and doe brown eyes and cheeky smile and thinking, fuck, I wish he was my son.

But Peter had never been his.

“He – he was my intern,” Tony finally answered, unable to fight off the wobble in his voice, the falter in his words, the shudder in his breath. “Peter was the youngest intern Stark Industries has ever had. Despite his youth, however, his application immediately stood out to us—his ideas were brilliant, full of the kind of revolutionary genius that evades men twice his age. It seemed like the only option available to us was to make an exception for him. So we did, and Peter continued to prove himself, time and again, until eventually I took him on as my personal intern.”

The cover story dripped from his lips like honey. Tony had never wanted to lie about Peter, but he knew Peter would never have agreed to revealing his identity so soon.

But there was one truth he could admit to. “Over time, I saw him as less of an employee and more of a son. I mean, who could blame me? Peter was undoubtedly one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and believe me, I’ve met a lot of smart people. Hell, I’ve met me. Plus, I’m sure everyone here is more than well aware of my eccentric nature—pseudo-adopting a teenager with an ingenuity to put my own to shame is far from the weirdest thing the press has reported me doing.”

It was the most honest he’d ever remembered being.

He paused. “So when I call him ‘my kid,’ it’s not because he’s biologically mine. We’re not related in any way—though I’m not ashamed to admit I wish we were. Peter was, well – I guess you could liken him to a leech who stuck to me and refused to let go, though I promise you he’d detest the comparison.”

He grinned, mischievously, but the amused laughs that ran through the audience did nothing but make him all the more aware of the one laugh he couldn’t hear.

I wish I hadn’t told you off for being so loud so often, because right now there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to hear that laugh just one more time.

God, he missed Peter.

☔︎

After he’d answered his last question, Mr. Stark walked away from the audience to the sound of their continued yells. Principal Morita had barely returned to the stage to dismiss all of the students before Ned was leaping off his seat and rushing down the aisle.

“Ned!” MJ’s voice halted him in his tracks, her fingers wrapping around his arm. “Where are you going?”

“He knew Peter was dead,” Ned hissed. “He knew, but still he left us hanging for weeks on end, forced to accept the fact that Peter’s gone and we never even got to say goodbye. We didn’t even know if Peter had – had vanished in the Decimation or if something else had killed him. We didn’t know.”

“Ned…” MJ sounded devastated.

“And he just left us in the dark, MJ. He has the nerve to tell the whole world about Peter Parker before telling us, his friends.” Ned shook his head furiously, tears falling onto his t-shirt, distorting the words I Make Horrible Science Puns But Only Periodically even more than he already had by crumpling the fabric in his fists, desperate to ground himself (the shirt had been Peter’s, dubbed one of his favorite ‘comfort shirts’ thanks to its large size; Aunt May had given it to Ned four days after the Decimation when she’d found him curled into a ball on the floor of Peter’s bedroom). “Didn’t we deserve to know? Didn’t we have the right to know?”

“Ned, please.” MJ’s voice quaked, her chest convulsing. She stared at him with wide, skittish eyes like she was afraid he was in danger of exploding at any moment. “St–stop.”

Ned didn’t stop. “I’ve been asking myself what happened to Peter for three weeks. Three weeks. I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe he didn’t fade in the Decimation. Maybe he was killed in battle—by Thanos, apparently. I kept remembering that moment on the bus when Peter asked me to cause a distraction and the first thing that popped into my mind was we’re all going to die. And everyday, I wonder, why did I have to say that? Why did the last thing Peter heard me say have to be that?”

Ned was inconsolable. 

MJ, listening to Ned’s outpouring of grief and anger and guilt, felt much the same way. It was as if Ned’s words had collapsed her chest in on her heart, crushing her.

She couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth, not knowing if it was to agree with him or reassure him or beg him to shut up shut up please shut up, but no words escaped her.

Ned shook his head, tore away from MJ, and rushed after the disappearing form of Tony Stark. He was vaguely aware of her pinching herself out of her stupor and calling after him, but he ignored her, his focus tunneling in on Mr. Stark.

He found the Avenger marching down the hallways in front of the auditorium, flanked by two large, imposing men.

Ned ground his teeth together. For a split-second, he saw Peter dance into his vision, eyes pleading and teary, begging him to leave Mr. Stark alone. Begging him to see that Mr. Stark was suffering, too.

And Ned knew. Ned knew Mr. Stark was suffering—there was no denying that, not when he had been able to see all the evidence of it just minutes before on the stage.

But Ned had also been suffering. He’d been miserable for every second of the last three weeks.

(“Do you still hear him?” MJ whispered one afternoon, when they were sitting in silence in the library, side-by-side but separate.

Ned felt like drowning.

“Because I – I do,” she answered herself a second later. “I can’t help it. He’s everywhere. He’s here now.”

Ned knew what that felt like.

“Y–yeah,” Ned whispered. “So do I. I hear him all the time.”)

“Stark!” he shouted. The students who were lingering in the hall started, turning to him with wide, horrified eyes, as if scandalized by his impertinent use of Iron Man’s last name. The old Ned would have been just as appalled by his abject disrespect towards one of his childhood heroes, but that Ned had died with Peter. 

The two men guarding Tony whirled around in a flash, a glare on one of them and a tired look on the other. The angry one immediately lifted a hand to the bulge in his suit jacket, chest shoving forward like he wanted to lash out and barrel towards a high school student.

Ned wouldn’t have cared. Peter had been his best friend, and now he was gone.

Nothing else seemed to matter.

But the other man faltered, and lifted a hand to stop his colleague. Ned recognized him as Happy, who had picked Peter up after school everyday without fail, who used to buy Peter and Ned ice cream if he saw them celebrating their test results, who’d honked rudely at Flash and then ‘gently’ nudged the bully with his car when he overheard Flash mocking Peter.

“Ted,” Happy said.

Ned didn’t care about that, either. Peter wasn’t here to roll his eyes at Happy and pout, Happy, I know you know his name is actually Ned. You’re not fooling anyone.

Ned nodded at Happy, unable to so much as smile. “Mr. Happy,” he greeted, and suppressed a flinch when he couldn’t help but remember all the times he and Peter had laughed at Happy’s obvious distaste for his nickname.

Who would he laugh over stupid things with now?

“I need to speak with Mr. Stark,” Ned insisted.

Before Happy could protest, Tony pushed forward and offered Ned a single nod that spoke a thousand words. His sunglasses were still off his face, and Ned could see the entire array of emotions that crossed his eyes.

“Well, I’m right here,” Tony said, too numbly to be the man who’d played Mario Kart with Peter at 1 A.M., thrilling Peter so much he’d jabbered endlessly about it to Ned the next day. “Speak away.”

Speak away. 

There were so many things Ned wanted to say.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Why did you let me wonder what had happened to Peter for so long?

Did you know that the last thing I ever said to him was “we’re all going to die”?

Why didn’t you save him?

You were supposed to save him.

But all of the words died in his throat.

Instead, when he opened his mouth, what came out was a plea—“Promise me you’re going to bring my best friend back.”

Tony didn’t blink. He didn’t falter, he didn’t flinch, he didn’t hesitate. “I’m going to bring all of them back.”

It should have reassured Ned.

But he’d been through too many days without Peter to take even Iron Man himself at his word. He didn’t trust many things anymore.

“Don’t you dare lie to me,” Ned forced out through gritted teeth. “Not about this.” Not about Peter.

This time, Tony did flinch. “Like I said,” he said finally, “I’ll do whatever it takes. I – I swear.” Tony tore his eyes away and cursed, rubbing his face tiredly, his breath tripping over itself. “I’m bringing Peter home if it’s the last thing I do.”

Ned had no idea what to say to that.

Luckily, MJ responded for him, having caught up to him by now, “You better.” She paused. “Though try to make it out alive. Peter will have both our heads if he knew we let you sacrifice yourself for him.”

“I’d do it, you know,” Tony interjected, half-desperate and half-determined. “If it comes to it. Peter – Peter’s life is worth more than mine.”

MJ gave him a long, searching look. “I know,” she said at last. “But I meant what I said. Peter would want to come home to you, too.”

This time, it was MJ who left Tony speechless instead of the other way around. He stared at her like he didn’t quite know what to do with that information. 

“That’s – I – he—“

“She’s right,” Ned said quietly when it was clear Tony was too shaken to speak coherently. “You have to stay alive. For Peter.”

Their gazes met again. In Tony’s eyes, Ned saw a plea, an apology, a denial. He saw please I miss Peter too and I want him back and I’m sorry and Peter deserves better than me and so long as Peter comes home at all, I don’t care what I have to do and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

For the first time, Ned felt like he could empathize with someone like Tony Stark, so seemingly untouchable from a distance. He glanced sidelong at MJ, and imagined that she might be thinking the same thing, if only she let herself feel these days.

(Ned didn’t get it. He was completely incapable of even trying to hide away from his grief—he felt Peter and Peter’s absence wherever he went, like a second skin he could not shed—but MJ seemed to be the opposite. Whereas he was stuck suffocating in his sadness, unable to leave, she had mostly detached herself from it, able to survive only because she had pushed it all away.

Ned thought he would die if he let Peter go. Even now, he didn’t want to.

Peter had been his best friend. That would never change.)

Then Tony swallowed and shoved his sunglasses back on, fingers shaking around the frame, and Ned was left to face his grief alone once more.

☔︎

It took Tony’s bodyguards over twenty minutes to fight off the stragglers and carve Tony a path to the carpark through the crowd. When Tony finally reached his car, Happy held open the back door for him, and then, instead of climbing into the passenger seat, slid in after Tony while Jim started the car.

Happy waited until they were already in motion, the sound of the engine constant and reassuring, to speak up: “Thank you.”

Tony froze. He could barely hear Happy, quiet as the bodyguard was being, over the vibrations of the car, but there was no mistaking Happy’s words.

“Hap,” his voice cracked, “don’t – don’t thank me. Please. I didn’t—”

“Thank you,” Happy repeated. “You know we don’t blame you, Tony. And – it’s nice to finally see Peter get the recognition he deserves as himself, too, not just as Spider-Man.”

(Spider-Man was great, yes, but Peter Parker was braver, stronger, better—

Even if he couldn’t be heralded for it right now, Peter Parker was the real hero.)

Tony didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t done what he did to be thanked. He’d just... he’d just wanted to celebrate Peter. To honor his kid.

Happy exhaled slowly. “It doesn’t make things better, not by a long shot. It doesn’t bring Peter back. But... it’s easier, somehow, knowing we’re not the only ones who see that kid for his true potential anymore. Peter deserved to know he was appreciated. I regret not telling him that more often. I wonder if he even knew – if he knew I cared.”

Tony’s eyes burned. God, but he hadn’t even remembered that Happy had loved Peter, too—that, sometimes, when Happy was so exhausted of the other aspects of his job, it was only Peter’s text messages and long rambling voicemails that could get him to smile.

And he hadn’t even realized. He’d been so consumed by his own grief that he hadn’t been able to see that Happy had been missing Peter, too; that even though he was a terrible substitute for Peter and all his goodness, Happy had needed him. 

Happy had needed him to admit to how much he cared about Peter, too, and Tony hadn’t been able to get his head out of his ass long enough to see that.

Christ, how selfish have I been that I’ve holed myself up in my room, as if I’m the only one allowed to grieve Peter? I don’t own exclusive rights to his absence.

There are others whose lives have been irreparably damaged by Peter’s loss, too. Just take a look at Happy, you asshole. He never admitted it to Pete’s face, but you saw the change in him: you saw the way he smiled whenever the hour-hand on a clock drew nearer and nearer to 3:00 P.M. on a weekday; you saw him listen to all of Peter’s voicemails eagerly even though he’d complain about it to the kid’s face; you know he memorized all of the kid’s favorite haunts and hobbies.

When Tony looked at Happy, he could easily see the new frown lines and worry wrinkles marking Happy’s face and wondered how he could have been so blind to have missed it before. Happy wasn’t crying—Tony didn’t think Happy had shed a single tear since that first day Tony had come back without the Spider-Kid in tow, and he’d been forced to admit that he’d (they’d) lost Peter Parker—but he might as well have been, for all the pain Tony could see in his eyes.

And Happy wasn’t the only other one who’d known Peter the same way he had: as the kid worth giving it all up for.

What about Peter’s friends? They didn’t look fine back at the school. They’re grieving for him, too. And what about May? 

What about May, Stark?

Tony knew he’d been selfish for too long. He’d thought that he was the only one who felt like Peter’s death had crushed the heart in his chest and transformed his universe irreversibly, but he knew now that he’d been wrong.

He stared at Happy, at this man who’d been his friend and who’d had his back for so long, and shivered at the gratitude reflected in his eyes. Tony didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve Happy looking at him like he’d done something good, when in reality all he’d done was what he should’ve done when he first landed.

Suddenly, a bone-deep weariness seeped into Tony. He needed to be better. He needed to see Peter again.

He’d told the world that he’d fight to the end to right Thanos’s wrongs. And he would. He’d fight harder than he ever had, because this time, it was Peter’s life at stake.

This time, he had so much on the line.

(“You need to get up, Tony,” Pepper whispered into the silence of their bedroom one night. Even their relationship had been stained by Thanos’s deeds. “You need to get better.”

The first time she’d begged him to stand, to rise again, he’d snapped at her. This time, he just looked at her, sad and weary, and asked searchingly, “How?”

Pepper flinched. “Call – call him, please. You don’t have to forgive him, but... the world needs the Avengers right now. And I need my fiancé. Please.”

“What can the Avengers do, Pep?” Tony was drained. “It’s already done. Thanos won, we lost. Half the universe is gone. There’s nothing anyone, even us so-called superheroes, can do now.”

“You can try,” she pleaded. “You can get back up on your feet and try.”

Tony’s open, vulnerable gaze shuttered. “I thought you hated that I was Iron Man. You’ve never wanted me to risk my life out there.”

“And I still don’t want you to now,” she admitted. “But I know who you are, Tony. And I know… I know that this—staying still, doing nothing—is killing you more than being Iron Man ever did. So get up, Tony. Bring Peter – bring him back. And come home to me, please.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Tony said weakly. “I’m not the Iron Man you know anymore. The fight with Thanos changed me. I used to be fearless, but now...”

“No,” Pepper shook her head resolutely, defiantly. “You weren’t fearless, Tony. You were reckless—there’s a difference.”

“Pep—”

“You dove headfirst into anything that would get you in trouble. You never thought of the consequences. You just... took risks. You lived like you didn’t have a care in the world.”

“And now?”

“And now you have more to lose,” Pepper said it like it was a fact, like it couldn’t be anything but the truth. Her words hit Tony harder than any of Thanos’s attacks had. “You can’t afford to be reckless anymore. If you’re more afraid nowadays, it’s because you care.”

Pepper molded her hand against his cheek, eyes soft and loving, but honest, too. “And it’s exactly because you have more to lose now that you’ll win.”

“I love you,” Tony choked out. “I love you. I love you.”

A sad smile tugged on her lips. “I love you, too. I believe in you.”)

Tony’s entire perspective had been shifted by Peter. Before he met Peter, he used to switch between categorizing the parts of his life as “Before and After Pepper” and “Before and After Iron Man.”

Now all he saw was “Before and After Peter.”

Pepper had been right. He had more to lose now. He had more to fight for, too.

Tony nodded at Happy, didn’t tell him You’re welcome, and knocked on the partition separating the front of the car from the back. 

A second later, the divider rolled down. “Yes, Boss?” Jim inquired.

Tony smiled a smile he didn’t feel. “Change of plans, Jim,” he announced. “Take us to May Parker’s apartment, please.”

Jim nodded obediently, already pulling up the address from FRIDAY’s database.

The partition went back up again.

“Tony?” Happy’s question went unspoken.

Tony looked back at the man. His smile grew a touch more real. “She shouldn’t be left alone,” was all he could say to that. “Not right now.”

Happy nodded in understanding, and that grateful look Tony felt so undeserving of took over his face again.

Tony ignored it.

☔︎

When they came knocking, May opened the door with a knowing look on her face. She’d clearly expected them to come her way, after watching the speech.

“May,” Tony greeted. He didn’t feel like breaking down at the mere sight of her anymore. That was something. Progress, am I right? 

He chuckled bitterly. Would you have been proud of me, Peter? 

May nodded back. There was gratitude in her eyes, too, so akin to Happy’s that Tony had to look away briefly. When he turned to her again, though, the expression was still there, shamelessly coloring her face.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You shouldn’t have to thank me,” Tony insisted. “It’s what Peter deserved.”

May smiled sadly. “He would have thought otherwise.”

The look on Tony’s face mirrored hers. “I know,” his voice was hushed. “I know.” He was wrong. He was so, so wrong. He deserved the world.

May swallowed tightly. Her eyes drifted from Tony to Happy, and the soul-crushing grief was back. “Oh, Happy,” she whispered. “You’re here.” May looked back at Tony. “You’re both here.”

Tony nodded. May, wordlessly, moved away from the doorway so they could both enter. Tony watched, guilt brewing in the pit of his stomach, as May slowly returned to the living room, moving with a decided lack of liveliness that unsettled him.

May was one of the strongest women he knew. She ranked right up there with the likes of Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanoff. To see her like this, so defeated, was wrong. 

There was nothing he could say about it. How could he judge her when he’d been the same way? When he still felt like that?

“Tea?” May offered, sinking into the sofa like it was the only thing holding her up. “Coffee?”

“No, that’s okay,” Tony shook his head politely, following May onto the sofa. Happy quietly settled in beside him.

“How are you doing, May?” Happy asked when Tony couldn’t, because how could he ask her that when he wouldn’t even know how to answer, if he was the one on the receiving end of that question?

May seemed to struggle with finding an answer, too. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just getting through all of this—life without Peter—day by day. Everyday.”

What else was there to do, when there was no reason to smile anymore?

“I’m still sorry,” Tony blurted out when the silence in the apartment and the restlessness in his head became too much. He pressed the underside of his palm against his head, willing away the voices to no avail.

May nodded. “I know, Tony. And you still have nothing to be sorry for.”

He looked away. Why didn’t she blame him?

It was his fault. Peter was gone—gone gone gone—and it was because of him.

“I dragged him into this life,” he argued. Why couldn’t she see that? 

“He became Spider-Man before he met you,” she pointed out.

“But he went onto that spaceship because of me,” the words stung to say, but they were true. “His exact words were ‘speaking of loyalty.’ He was there because he was blindly loyal to me, and I didn’t even have the decency to turn the ship back around. I have everything to be sorry for.”

“No, you don’t,” she insisted. “You were his hero. Of course he came after you.”

“I never meant to... I didn’t want him to get hurt. I just wanted to give him everything he wanted and more. I wanted to see him win over the whole world the way he won me over. God, May, he could’ve achieved so much,” his throat constricted around the words, and he had to fight to see, to breathe through the pain. “He could’ve done so many great things.”

“Amazing things,” Happy murmured.

“He had his whole life ahead of him,” Tony whispered, like it was a secret. “And it was stolen from him, just like that. Now he’ll never have the chance to show everyone else why he was the best kid all of us knew.”

“The very best,” May agreed, laughing wetly. “He could’ve changed the world.”

“He did change the world,” Tony corrected. “Spider-Man changed so many people’s lives for the better. He went out there every night and saved people who’d already resigned themselves to believing they couldn’t be saved. In every possible way, he was so much better than the Avengers, than me, because where we didn’t even realize we had a duty to save the ordinary people, too, Peter was already looking after all the little guys. Peter cared so much.”

A strangled sob tore out of May’s throat. She fell back against the sofa and cradled her head in her hands, crying violently, desperately.

“But Spider-Man wasn’t the only one who made a difference. Peter Parker changed the world, too,” Tony said earnestly. “He changed mine.”

May cried harder.

“I’ll never stop being sorry,” Tony whispered the words like a prayer. “He was my kid, but May, he was your son, and I – fuck, I can’t—”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do this,” she denied hoarsely. She didn’t know how many times she had to repeat it to get him to believe it. “I know you loved him, too. Better than anyone, I know the effect Peter has on people. He’s been changing my world since he was six, after all.”

Tony closed his eyes.

“I hate Thanos,” May‘s voice quivered as her chest heaved and she gasped for breath. “He took Peter from me. He took my boy, Tony. He was – he was all I had left. When Ben died, I felt like drowning, but Peter was always there to save me. But what am I supposed to do now? How do I bounce back from losing my child?”

Tony didn’t have an answer.

The truth was, he’d been asking himself the same thing over and over again, on repeat, for three weeks.

How am I supposed to say goodbye to you?

How am I supposed to live like this?

How am I supposed to heal?

He couldn’t.

All he could do was hold onto Peter’s memory like a lifeline.

All he could do was keep fighting for the day Peter, and everyone else who’d disappeared, could come back. 

#marvel #iron dad #fanfiction #iron dad fanfiction #peter parker #tony stark #post infinity war #spiderman #iron man #irondad and spiderson #ned leeds #michelle jones #irondad angst #marvel fanfiction #faye writes

[themalhambird]

The Starling.

Maria cannot sleep.

She supposes that one ought not to be able to sleep, the night before one’s suitor asks for one’s hand. But as much as she tries to convince herself that the knots winding themselves tighter and tighter in the pit of the stomach are butterflies, she cannot. It is dread of what is to occur tomorrow morning keeping her awake, and not impatience for the dawn- indeed, she cannot help but feeling she would rather the morning never came.

It is a most irritating sensation.

She has nothing to lose and everything- absolutely everything! To gain by agreeing to become Mrs James Rushworth. He is so very rich. He is not the cleverest of men- indeed, he is perhaps the stupidest man of her acquaintance. But her father is a clever man and Edmund is also clever, Maria supposes, and she would hate to marry a man as solemn and dour as either of them. Rushworth, at least, is not priggish. She will be able to go to London. She has exciting, if hazy, recollections of being in Town as a child- how much more exciting it must be to go as a grown woman, a married woman- a leader even, perhaps, of fashion and society? If only a man a little more exciting than Rushworth were at hand to provide such things with an offer of marriage. He might not be so very rich, but for the ability to appreciate the intricacies of a play or to talk of art for even five minutes, instead of only talking about sport without seeming to really say anything at all- for that, Maria could happily forgo two or even three thousand a year.

A very small part of her wishes that her father were here. Oh for the most part she is happy that he is far away in Antigua- sometimes she doubts that she would much care if he never came back. It is such a horrid thing to think. But she can breathe so much more easily with him gone, without the sensation that he is scrutinising her every move, looking for the smallest hint of a fault to chide her for. She cannot bare to be scolded into his joyless notion of perfection. But if her father were here, he might have been prevailed upon to take her up to Town for the season; she might have met a wealth of suitors there. In Mansfield, there is nothing; no one: Rushworth is her lot, and if she agrees to have him-

If?

Maria inhales sharply and sighs the air out again, staring upwards through the darkness. If – she means when, surely- she does not mean to refuse Rushworth, not really? Things have gone too far- she has agreed that he may speak and to turn him down now- and Aunt Norris, Maria thinks bitterly, will have already had it put about everywhere she can that Rushworth means to speak. Interfering old hag- why must she always be so busy? If she had let well enough alone…

You wanted Rushworth as much as she wanted him for you.

Maria scowls and turns on to her side. This does nothing to quiet the voice in the back of her mind reminding her that she had been just as eager for Rushworth- for Rushworth’s twelve thousand a year- as Aunt Norris is.

But I didn’t know! she argues back. I didn’t know what he was like then! I didn’t know he was the biggest bore in all of Britain.

She sits up in bed, suddenly determined that she needs to talk to someone- to seek advice from any quarter it may come from. Not Julia- she couldn’t possibly talk about her doubts to Julia. She wouldn’t understand- or she would understand, and she would laugh at her or, or despise her, or something. Not Edmund, either. He would only sermonise and tell her what a horrible person she is to place so much value on such material things as a good income and a comfortable home that she, unlike him and his living all ready and waiting, is only going to get if she marries in it. Tom might understand her desperate need for freedom- he seized his own the moment he was able to. It’s a pity he was too much of a fool not to stay just within the limits of what his father might allow him without feeling that dragging him out to the West Indies would be preferable to leaving him to his own devices. If a letter could reach Antigua and a reply come back to her before morning! But no, Maria thinks irritably : Tom decided to play the prodigal and now she’s suffering for it. The only other person to whom Maria could theoretically turn to for advice is her mother and that- Maria snorts, and falls back down on to her bed with an ungraceful thud. Lady Bertram could not be taxed even to come and sit at the balls where her daughters came ought, looked for her husbands, found one. She does nothing but lie about- Maria sometimes wonders how such a sloth managed to catch her father’s eye. And other times thinks that a sloth was probably what her father wanted. A feeble, weak-willed, and silly girl who would agree with whatever he said and do whatever she was told. Lady Bertram can have no advice worth hearing. She probably wouldn’t notice nor even care if Maria were swept away by a flood or a burnt to a crisp in a fire, except to ask Sir Thomas how such a thing could have happened! For a moment, the rest of Maria’s life at Mansfield Park flashes before her: endless stagnation, boredom, misery- not another soul alive to pass the day pleasantly with apart from Julia, or Tom if he returned and bothered to stay more than the half hour it would take his valet to pack his bags so he could ride off again to somewhere, anywhere, other than here. It isn’t fair, Maria thinks hotly, her eyes prickling with sudden, angry tears. If she had been the first son, instead of the first daughter! But she isn’t, she isn’t, and she cannot get out- she cannot get out- she will grow old and ugly and forgotten here, a complete dependent on first her father and then on Tom. Unless she marries Rushworth- which will perhaps be only a different kind of prison-

As Mrs Rushworth, at least, she would be more her own gaoler.

Maria scrubs at her face and sniffles, shutting her eyes and trying to ignore the lump in her throat and the heavy weight that seems to hang from her heart. Rushworth might improve on closer acquaintance, she tells herself- probably he is just a little too shy, or a little too uncertain of what it would or would not be proper to talk about with a lady to whom one is not yet quite engaged, to strike up any more serious kind of conversation. And if that is not the case- well! She is sure that she can manage him somehow, that there is a way in which a married couple can quite respectably live very separate lives. She only had to look at her own parents to see that. And a house as large as Sotherton might be filled with all kinds of people: Julia must come to stay, very often- Tom, if he chooses, or if he finally manages to disoblige their father sufficiently enough to be disinherited in favour of Edmund, which she and Julia have often speculated over being at least somewhat likely, sooner or than later….

It is with the image of herself graciously offering shelter to a suddenly penniless older brother, poor Tom dependent on someone else’s whims and pleasure for once like the rest of them always are, that she drifts off into an uneasy sleep. Not that she would really want to see him so reduced- she is fond of him and a ‘Sir Edmund’ to contend with would be such a bore- but what harm is there in idle fancies? To be Mrs Rushworth, with all the power and wealth of Sotherton behind her, a husband she can surely learn to manage as expertly as playing the pianoforte…

Nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Her doubts would be securely locked up by the morning, and she would accept- no, she would embrace her fate with a cheerful smile, and twist it all about to suit her own ambitions.

#mansfield park #my fic #Maria Bertram #pre-engagement to Rushworth #Jane Austen #the Bertrams are not a close family and it has reprecussions

[nerunerd7]

Let's Talk About CUPID: An In-Depth Analysis

I like books. I like good writing. I like romance, but I don’t like poorly-written romance. I like dark themes, but I don’t like it when it’s dark for the sake of being dark. I like games where my choices matter. I like not spending money on things. So… CUPID… is a MASTERPIECE, and no one’s talking about it. This analysis is my love-letter. And also my excuse to talk about it. I also want to thank the CupidVN account on tumblr run by Ame, who conceptualized Cupid and subsequently started the team Fervent, for letting me pester them nonstop with my questions, otherwise I may not have been able to finish this review. I’m kind of dumb sometimes. (If I refer to this post as a video it's because this was supposed to go up on my YouTube channel but didnt.)

I’m gonna give a quick summary of this game, because I hate “reviews” that just explain what the plot is without actually commentating on the media. You should go play it before watching this video anyway, but stay for the summary if you want. I’ll be getting to spoilers right after it. CUPID is a game by Fervent that follows a young witch called Rosa by her friends, but we never find out her birth name. You, the player, will call her “child” since you play as the spirit of Rosa’s deceased mother. It’s obvious pretty quick that Mother is abusive, controlling Rosa through emotional manipulation. You cannot change this. Your options are to yell at Rosa until she complies, or belittle her into thinking she’s too dumb to live without you. It is after establishing this that we meet the other main characters: Catherine and Guilleme. Catherine is a piano child prodigy, and Guilleme is a Marquis that sponsors/adopts her. Catherine protects Rosa from a group of bitchy aristocrats, and demands that Rosa be adopted as well, thus beginning a lifelong friendship/budding romance between the three. And it is lifelong, because right after this, we cut to Catherine’s suicide. F in the chat, boys. The story then becomes a mystery. Mother is convinced that Guilleme is responsible for your friend’s death, and orders you to use your magic powers to find out whatever he’s hiding. The rest of the game is a journey through Rosa’s memories of the past few years, especially Catherine’s relationship with Guilleme and his relationship with Rosa. So let’s talk about the characters, shall we?

CATHERINE Catherine is a fairly simple character at first. She’s spunky, she’s spoiled, she has a temper, she’s as stubborn as they come, and she is a kind person. As she gets older, her relationship with Guilleme begins to take over her life. She becomes irate when Guilleme courts her older sister, fighting her to the point of indirectly causing her death, and knows something is wrong when he proposes to her years later. She’s headstrong, but she’s not stupid. So why does she accept him when he confesses again after disappearing for two years? It’s not because she’s a lovestruck idiot. But she is, in fact, very confused. A while after accepting his proposal, Catherine gets into one of many arguments with him about the rumored affairs, which leads her to get drunk with Rosa. And, as you can guess, one thing leads to another… Catherine realizes that she might actually be homosexual, as her albeit short experience with Rosa was nothing like any of her experiences with Guilleme. This causes her to run to Guilleme, wanting to confirm if it’s true, and this is when her fate is sealed. This is where Catherine evolves from a beloved childhood friend to something more. Catherine is terrified when she discovers the truth of her sexual identity, because in this time, being a lesbian would mean no happy ending. Either she traps herself in a joyless marriage, because women were expected to marry and have children, or she lives her life constantly worrying about if her reputation as a spinster will ruin her musical career. Happily dating a woman behind closed doors wouldn’t work, since Catherine knows all too well that walls talk. When her older sister was being courted by Guilleme, part of the reason why Catherine was so upset was because there were endless rumors about the affair. These rumors brought shame on the entire family, including Catherine, who was still training as a pianist. Catherine knows more than anyone how harmful gossip can be. So, she runs into Guilleme’s arms, and sleeps with him in a last-ditch attempt to save her social life, and dies weeks later. And the way FERVENT shows her descent into insanity is INCREDIBLE. When Catherine flees to Guilleme’s room, he notes that her fingernails are bitten to the nub. Catherine reveals that she cares obsessively over her nails, after having bitten them as a child and swearing to take better care of them and keep up appearances. Days later, we discover Catherine scratching at the walls until her fingers - and subsequently, her nails - are a bloody and hopeless mess. If Catherine biting her nails down symbolizes a terrifying reveal, this symbolizes that she’s gone to the point of no return. She never returns to normal, ranting about love and hatred and Guilleme, and hangs herself shortly after. So, what happened? What turned this intelligent, stubborn, kind girl into a deranged woman? More specifically, what did Guilleme do to her?

GUILLEME I’m not even gonna beat around the bush with this guy. There is no understanding Gilly until you understand what he is, and he is not human. Guilleme is not intended to be attached to any myth, but it is my headcanon that he is who the game is named for, Cupid. I believe this mainly because he once mentioned a woman called Psyche being one of his past lovers. This requires some understanding of Greek mythology, so let me explain. Psyche was a woman praised by men for her beauty, so much so that they forgot to leave offerings for Aphrodite. Offended, she sends her son Cupid to strike Psyche with a love arrow so she can get married off and men can stop pursuing her. But Cupid himself is so shell-shocked by her beauty that he accidentally stabs himself with the arrow and falls in love with her. He poses as a monster and asks for Psyche’s hand in marriage; her family can’t refuse the dowry so they accept and Psyche weds Cupid. There’s more to the story, Psyche trying to stab him, then becoming his immortal wife, yada yada, but it’s not important to the visual novel. The VN takes a darker spin on its themes of love by revealing to be an immortal being that adapts to the needs of his victims and feeds on their love, and Psyche may be his first victim. Catherine is a demonstration of what he does to people (he preys on all genders); he literally robs them of their ability to love. They become obsessed with him, desperate for him to love them and give back what he took, until their grief and loss causes them to perish. Guilleme does not directly kill them, but he is 100% responsible for their deaths. Yet, we see a side of him that revolts against this nature in his journal. He attempts to starve himself for days, he sleeps with girls he hardly knows to try and subsist on a shallower love, but ultimately he cannot deny this other side of him that craves love. Guilleme is split between these two sides: the person he tries to be, and the monster that he is, and we end up with an amazing allegory for addiction. And sure, that’s like being addicted to eating, but I guess that’s exactly what he is. Guilleme feels guilty for his nature, but Cupid (because I need to use a word that isn’t monster) has no qualms with it and will force Guilleme to continue to satisfy his addiction. We see this most prominently in the sex scene with Catherine, where FERVENT describes in excruciating detail the inner struggle between Guilleme and Cupid as Catherine’s love is devoured and her grave is dug. Guilleme is helpless to stop him. And Cupid comes to personify his addiction that he must constantly work to suppress, even as it destroys himself through doing so and the people he loves through failing. He has to justify his actions through any means necessary; humans are as selfish as I am, they only care about the beautiful people, they only respect people with power, humans are horrible so there’s nothing wrong with me killing them, etc. This is a cycle that Guilleme has endured for millenia, going through different identities, different titles, but remaining ever young and beautiful, ever enchanting, ever a monster. Catherine’s MARRIED sister had no choice but to accept his advances, and Catherine the lesbian herself never had a choice. There is, however, one woman who can refuse him. One woman who can tame the monster. But before we talk about that, I wanna talk about the people that he mentions in his nightmare.

ROSA Rosa is the eyes through which Mother witnesses these events. She is a vessel that carries out her mother’s will, despite slowly recognizing that the way her mother treats her is not normal. Rosa’s childhood memories are faded, but we know that she has been raped by at least one man. I saw somewhere that the game implied how Mother had coitus with Rosa, but I didn’t see that anywhere in the game, so I’m gonna ignore it. Our first experience with Rosa is when she flees from her rapist to a church as a child, already being scolded by Mother for daring to trust the priest that tends to her wounds (though the priest is admittedly attracted to her in spite of himself). As a result of this scolding, Rosa atones by gouging out her left eye. So we quickly know that Rosa is already very weak from her mother’s abuse and is more than willing to injure herself if that’s what it takes to make mother happy. But this doesn’t stop her from taking an opportunity to feel loved. Mother tries to keep her away from society, but Rosa disobeys and is adopted as a result. She becomes part of a family and knows real love for the first time. She sees Catherine as her sister, but also falls in love with her. She knows Guilleme is off-limits, but she is also drawn to him. Her kindness and selflessness shines through as she endures Mother’s emotional abuse and predictions that these two characters will leave her, while allowing their relationship to blossom (not knowing it will wither of course) even if it alienates her. She supports Catherine through all of her mood swings, which might be a hefty task if not for Mother showing her worse every single day. At the end of the game, Rosa tries to save Guilleme. She even forgives Mother and continues to love her despite knowing that the abuse she suffered was wrong. We know Rosa is kind and merciful, but we also know that she has killed before. We know that she has experience with dark magic and familiar with its consequences. So since she’s a kind person with remorse for hurting people, we realize that Rosa is strikingly similar to… Guilleme. And both characters are aware of it. They don’t know why they are similar, but they are drawn to each other. Guilleme knows that his personality adapts to what Rosa desires when they are alone together, but he also shows a hint of his true self to her in spite of himself. Why is this? The answer is their link to Mother.

MOTHER We come to discover that Guilleme is Rosa’s father. Mother is one of his victims, and is obviously scarred by it. When she has her child, she realizes that Rosa could become just like Guilleme, since they are both monsters that feed on love. Mother hides this information from her daughter and attempts to raise her so that Rosa becomes a better person than Guilleme, but the psychological damage on Mother overtakes her and she becomes abusive. Her love for Rosa is genuine, but so is her fear of Rosa. She cannot reconcile these feelings for her daughter, and that is why we also have no choice but to be abusive to Rosa. If there was another option for Mother, we would’ve been given it. She has to control her, because if she doesn’t, she will have raised a monster. For better or worse, this works very well; Rosa is able to live entirely off of her mother’s love, and subsequently the memory of her mother’s love after her death. It’s actually incredibly foreshadowed right before Rosa meets Catherine; Mother asks if Rosa is hungry, Rosa says yes, and Mother promises that she will provide; that is, provide love to feed on, and the high-class food will upset her stomach, since Rosa feeds on love and not regular food. After this, however, Mother becomes a reflection of the player: her motives change depending on which ending you get. The game actively takes your choices and tries to decide what kind of story you want, and then bases the endings and Mother off of that. Rosa also ends up becoming a kind person despite the constant abuse until one vital moment. The most pivotal choice in the game is when Rosa confesses that she has a plan to save Guilleme rather than killing him. As Mother, you try to convince her to kill him, but Rosa pleads with you that he deserves to be saved because she is a monster like him, except she hasn’t given in to the temptation of consuming love. I played through the game to test it; you can pick all of the nicer options, but it all comes down to whether or not Mother thinks that Rosa is a monster. If you tell Rosa that she is a monster, and the only reason she hasn’t killed anyone is because of your influence, Rosa will snap and cast a spell to torture Guilleme before attempting to murder him. If you tell Rosa that she is not a monster like Guilleme, she will “disobey” you and cast a spell to try and save him. In the end, Rosa’s fate is still your choice to make, and none of the choices beforehand have an effect on this decision. So why is this choice in the game? Why isn’t Rosa allowed to make her own decisions? Because that choice is not about Rosa - it’s about Mother. Mother has to decide in that moment if she can trust Rosa to make her own decisions; if she can be done with her motherly role and rest in peace. Mother has to choose if she can stop the abuse or continue it. And that’s entirely determined by the player watching Rosa and Guilleme’s journey, and deciding which of the two is more powerful. Either way, Mother’s role in the story ends, either by allowing Rosa to be independent, or by abusing her so much that she is destroyed by Guilleme or herself. The player has to decide which ideology speaks most to them - trust or control.

HOW TO TELL A STORY The writing in this game is absolutely incredible. The prose is beautifully descriptive and pulls no punches. The color in the words is the most vibrant I’ve seen in a long time, and the sensations described are so familiar. We all know how it feels to be lightheaded with rage; those of us not on the ace spectrum are all familiar with the weight that forms in our stomach when we are first introduced to sexual contact with another. The writing can be terrifying, uplifting, even comedic. Take this scene, directly after an explosive fight between Catherine and Guilleme regarding his affairs. FERVENT takes on the guise of the bard (include a picture of Shakespeare so the audience gets it) by writing poetically, turning their petty squabble into a dramatic romance. We already know that something darker is going on behind the scenes here, so the stark contrast between the tone set by the game and the tone set by this scene is nothing short of hilarious, and anyone who appreciates horror knows that it walks hand-in-hand with comedy. And the horror in this game is MARVELOUS. It never fails to describe in hauntingly beautiful detail exactly what’s happening in a given scene, whether it be the awkward attraction between Guilleme and Rosa or the duel between the two sides of Guilleme as they destroy Catherine. The game is in third-person omniscient for most of its duration, while also telling the story using the dialogue between Mother and Rosa, and that is a really smart choice. In visual novels, and writing in general, some people find an overuse of narration to be pretty boring. Using mother to stifle out what could have been a narration of Rosa’s thoughts really helps, and the choice to make it omniscient means we have access to everyone’s thoughts at one point or another. I do think some of the endings went really really heavy on the narration, but only because Mother was no longer an option for letting the player see Rosa’s thoughts. And for this game, I personally can allow it, just because the style of writing is incredible. It’s approached in a formal manner, which really fits the time period, but we still know word-for-word what Rosa is seeing and feeling. It also helps because the narrative is non-linear, so we’re jumping back and forth in time. Some people may not appreciate this, but I think it helps in Cupid’s case because it helps us feel as confused as Rosa is. She may have the context of the situation before we do, but our minds aren’t clouded by Mother’s abuse the way Rosa’s is, so it balances out. For a murder mystery - yes, we’re supposed to be confused! But I digress. It would be rude of me to only talk about the amazing writing without addressing the other key factors in a good visual novel - art and sound design.

THE FAST PART You know, I typed out a whole thing about the art and sound design, but it was really rambly and didn’t really say anything other than “It’s good” because I don’t know as much about art and sound design as I do about writing so I’m just gonna sum it up-The soundtrack is good they used Yasupochi who made music for Ib and Ib is my favorite childhood game so that made me happy and they also used tracks by Kevin Macleod who writes all the generic youtube music but they picked tracks that you’ve probably never heard of unlike The Letter which has bad sound design and costs $20 more than Cupid because Cupid is free and it’s amazing that a free game can be better than a $20 game but haha here we are capitalism! They also used old piano music and it worked well with the writing because it made me feel what Catherine was feeling and I was like “wow! Instrument language!” and I’ve never studied instrument theory but it spoke to me anyway and I was really impressed! The sound effects are good too and juxtaposed really well with the music, like the music will cut out to punctuate a sound effect and that’s good, I also really liked the ambience because of the creepy whispers and breaths and Fervent picked a lot of really good ones so good job!The art is also really good, the sprites are kinda low-res and if you play the game in fullscreen the CGs get a little pixelated and it’s weird but it’s an aesthetic I guess so I don’t really mind, and they have a mature filter so if you’re squeamish with blood you can use that, but it doesn’t censor the sexual CGs and that’s a great idea because the game is about sex and we’re all adults here! Hopefully! The sprites are still good though because there’s a lot of them, like, different outfits to show different parts of the storyline which helps because the story is nonlinear, and the girls age but Guilleme doesn’t and that’s good because at first I just thought “wow he aged really well he doesn’t even look different just more powerful” but no he’s just immortal so joke’s on me I guess? Wait. I paused it. I gotta slow down because I wanna talk about my favorite image in the game and it’s - hold on, wait for it…

This one. This is an image from Guilleme’s nightmare, specifically the one he has about Catherine. It is absolutely grotesque but beautifully symbolic. It’s a reflection of Guilleme’s true form as much as it is a reflection of his victims and how he views them. The groping tentacles that he always feels on his back, the eyes on this creature’s chest from endless backs arched in ecstasy, and of course, the gaping sharp-toothed mouth on its nether region, which can represent how desperately people want him when he’s enchanted them, or how he himself feasts on their love. The Rosa variant has another face growing out of the side of her head where her eye is gouged out, representing Mother as a part of her, like they’re both committing this violence against Guilleme. All of it is just… insanely creepy. I made it my computer lockscreen because what better what to deter snoops than this staring them in the face? A lot of the art and 3D renders for Guilleme are really symbolic for everything that he is, and I wish they were all CGs so I could stare at them, but they are not. Either way, it’s apparent that Fervent’s choices for the game’s art is near masterful and the sound design works incredibly to enhance it.

GAMEPLAY One playthrough of CUPID will take a few hours, so it can easily be done in a day, but it might take you several more hours to unlock all of the endings and special dialogue. It provides around 48 save slots that are immediately accessible via six pages and then what seems to be infinitely more. I only ended up using 19 slots to get all of the achievements, but I also used an achievement guide after my first blind run of the game, so you may end up using a few more. The game conveniently lets you use the mouse wheel to scroll back and forth through dialogue, and will even let you change your choices, in case save-scumming isn’t for you. You can also fast-forward through dialogue you’ve seen in other playthroughs (so it’ll stop if you trigger a line of dialogue that you haven’t seen before) and you can even skip ahead to the next unseen line of dialogue or choice, which makes it easy to save time. The UI is tasteful, if not a little low-res, but I can’t fault a free game for having some low-res graphics. The menu is actually an overlay rather than another screen, which helps to keep the player immersed in the game, but it is a little more difficult to see, especially for those who are far-sighted or sensitive to peering at screens. The controls at the bottom are colored light-grey, so you can easily see them when other characters are talking, but Mother’s dialogue and choices are in the middle of the screen, so the controls are easily washed out among the light backgrounds. At first, I even thought the game was taking away my ability to save if I was being provided with a choice, forcing me to predict when I would be making a choice and saving beforehand. I’m glad this isn’t the case, but believing it to be was not fun. In regards to how meaningful your choices are, it’s… complicated. I personally prefer choice-based games where all of your choices gradually shape the story from the beginning, and if you ask me, the only game that does that right is Detroit: Become Human, as in, not even the other two games by Quantic Dream make the cut. I’ve grown disillusioned with choice-based games because they hype up that your choices matter, when really, the only choice that matters is the last one. In Life is Strange, your final choice erases all of your progress no matter what choices you made before, so none of them matter. If you save a person in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, they’ll just die later, so what was the point of saving them at all? In CUPID, exactly two of your choices matter towards which ending you get. This one, which we’ve already talked about, and one other. If you tell Rosa that she is a monster, she will go beserk and torture Guilleme. Guilleme will then sow doubt in Rosa’s mind about Mother in an attempt to save himself, and that’s where your choice is. If you stay silent, Rosa will break and Guilleme will keep her as his slave. If you speak up, Rosa will kill Guilleme. None of your other choices will influence these three endings. Now, in my book, this would count as a failed choice-based game, except that Cupid has four endings. Ending 1 is unlocked after you get Ending 2, but you can only get it by fulfilling a specific list of circumstances, a list that is quite a bit longer than the list of requirements for the other endings. If you compare the walkthroughs, the choices are a little bit different, but fulfilling all but one of the requirements for Ending 1 will result in Ending 2, making the two routes pretty similar. So it’s not a complete failure the way Life is Strange and The Walking Dead are, but it’s not on the same level as Detroit: Become Human. It’s in this weird middle-ish ground. Overall an enjoyable experience with convenient mechanics for a visual novel, but not the most choice-based game on the market.

FINAL THOUGHTS I think this game just spoke to a part of me that needed attention. I haven’t read anything with such beautiful prose since high school. And its themes are topics that I absolutely adore in fiction. Romance, tragedy, comedy, horror the fight between good and evil and the struggle to define the two sides. Especially that last one. Psychological battles of self-justification are incredibly fascinating to me, and I believe that they inspire people to think critically and ask the big questions. I think that’s something I’d started to forget, (some people I know definitely have forgotten it) so getting this amazing piece of art was everything I needed. It brought back a bit of my passion for literature from when I was young, but had the mature themes to keep my interest as an adult. While researching this game, I got to speak with Ame, who is an absolutely lovely person and answered all of my questions, and by talking with them my appreciation for this game grew even more, especially for how the endings were written. Ending 2 is perfect for me; Rosa stays hopeful that she can save Guilleme, but when it’s obvious he’s gone too far, she puts him out of his misery and doesn’t make him die alone. A more active person might get the ending where Rosa kills Guilleme out of malice, and think that is perfect. A pessimist might get the ending where Rosa becomes Guilleme’s slave, and think that’s the best way to end the story. And then you have ending 1, where she succeeds in saving him, but doesn’t go so far as to sacrifice herself to make sure his rehabilitation goes smoothly. There is no one canon ending. I mean, there is the secret ending, but we don’t talk about the secret ending. In fact, you know what? The only canon ending is the one where Guilleme’s diary turns out to be written like a middle school girl who thinks she’s all that. Speaking of which, there’s a plethora of amazing bonus content and even a hint for a prequel about Mother. Fingers crossed!! Everything about this game just… spoke to me. And I hope it speaks to you too. I’ll be buying the artbook as soon as I get the money for it, and definitely playing more games by Fervent. You should… also do that. And then come talk to me about it. I wanna talk about this game. Which is why I made this review… and now the review’s over.

#cupidvn #cupid #catherine #guilleme #rosa #analysis #review #this was supposed to be a youtube video but i can't talk

[imaginesmai]

Stiles Stilinski-Angst Alphabet

This was requested a long time ago by @walkxthexmoon (I accidentally erased some of the requests I had, I’m so sorry!) But here it is! It has taken a little longer becuase I have had problems with an exam and I wanted to write something good, I hope you like it!

WARNINGS

There are a lot of them, because it’s an angst alphabet, so everything is sad. Please, read carefully the tittle of each letter and avoid things that may be triggering for you.

Alcohol (do they drink too much?)

Stiles doesn’t have a big problem with alcohol. Actually, it’s strange to find him drinking just because he wants to. Before you met, he didn’t go to parties or had any alcohol; Stiles preferred to stay at him quiet watching a film.

However, we all know Stiles. And we know that he doesn’t care about how far he needs to go to get the girl. You met him in a party, you went with your friends and he was with Scott and Liam. When he saw you standing there, beautiful and stunning, he tried to seem cool and go talk to you, with a huge encouragement from Scott. In the end, he leaned on a table and it fell down, covering the floor with alcohol and food.

After the first try, his next attempt to get your attention was a little more drastic. He started going to parties where you were and drinking like most of teenagers. Only that he hadn’t been drunk before and just a few shots had his head spinning. It went on for a few months, until you two got paired up in a science project and you got to see the cute and nerd guy behind all that “alcohol”. Two weeks more passed and you finally told him that he didn’t have to drink to impress you, that you liked the real him.

Since that moment, Stiles doesn’t drink too often. Sometimes he might have a few drinks, but he doesn’t like alcohol and usually doesn’t party.

Baby (you’re pregnant and something happens)

Saying that Stiles is overprotective during your pregnancy is underestimating him; he has read every book on the library about pregnancy and knows what to do in almost every situation. However, not even that way he can prevent some werewolf attacking you in midnight.

He was outside with Scott, and there is not a day on his life where he doesn’t regret not being there to protect you. You had been staying at his house, because after your parents found out that you were pregnant they kicked you out.

Maybe the werewolf was aiming for Stiles, or he already knew you were there and you were the main target. Either way, you woke up with an enormous pain in your stomach and a pair of red eyes in front of you. Three long claws covered your big belly, that was bleeding profusely, staining the sheets sheriff Stilinski had so kindly lend you. Your horrified scream woke him up, and the man ran immediately to your room, gun high. Probably two seconds late, as the only thing he saw was the werewolf jumping out of the window.

You didn’t remember much after it, just pain and tears. As soon as you got to the hospital, the sheriff called Stiles and tried to tell him the news with calm; he was there in less than ten minutes with Scott and the whole pack behind.

Stiles remembers… pain. He remembers the white lights of the hospitals corridors, the dried tears in his father’s eyes and the calmed words that left Melissa’s mouth. He didn’t understand them in that moment, neither saw the pain in her eyes; he could only focus on her bloody clothes. The uncomfortable chair where he sat for hours was also a part of his memory, and the cups of coffee handed by Scott that kept him awake through the night. However, if there is something he remembers clearly, is your face when they told him it was safe to see you. The pain, the sadness, the horror.

He hugged you close and you cried together for your lost child.

Catcall (you’re catcalled and he’s with you)

Stiles would be… angry. Furious. Livid. He takes very seriously women’s rights and protection, and if he lived in our world, he would be probably the number one supporter of feminism. So when he hears someone whistling at you from the other side of the corridor, he has no problem to use his fists. He doesn’t care how big, tall or strong the other man is; he could be a werewolf for all he cares.

The problem is that he doesn’t know when to take a step back, and that usually leads to a broken nose. First, he walks towards them and quiet literally invades their personal space. If talking and threatening don’t make them apologise to you, most of the times, he will punch them without hesitation. The first punch is unexpected, and gives Stiles a winner sense. However, nearly always the guy is ten time bigger then him, and Scott has to finish the fight while you take care of a very injured boyfriend.

Die (their reaction when you die/your reation when they die)

I’ve just realised this is kind of, dumb? I can’t possibly tell or write how you’re going to react when the character dies, because it’s up to you probably. So I’m going to just write about your death.

If you died, Stiles would completely blame the supernatural. The world his friends live in is dangerous and he had seen how it had taken away a lot of people. It doesn’t matter if you die because of a natural cause or a supernatural being; he will blame it. He would lock himself in a room for a month probably, at first in denial and trying to wrap his head around things that still are related to you; then, he would be broken.

Stiles’ smile, laugh and enthusiasm would disappear completely, to the point that his father would force him out of his room. After understanding that you weren’t coming back, he would tear apart from the supernatural world. His friendship with Scott, Lydia and company would still be there, but it stops there. He would try to go on, study what he loves at university and rebuilding his life. Having you always in his mind.

Emotion (what do they keep to themselves)

Stress. Stiles is always under a lot of stress, between schools, werewolves and other supernatural beings, and trying to keep his anxiety under control. He doesn’t want to be seen as the weak one, seeing as in his group of friends he’s the only human.

You notice when he’s stressed when he starts to do things that are not good for his health. Not sleeping enough, forgetting about lunch or dinner, training until his body can’t take it no more and sometimes getting too deep into federals investigations. There is not a human way to stop Stiles from stressing, it seems to be his middle name. So the best thing you can do it to keep him for yourself for a few days.

You drag him to your house, where you switch off his phone, computer and any other mean of communication. Complains and cries only appear on the first hours, because as soon as you put on TV his favourite film and open your arms, he’s cuddling you like a little child.

Frustrated (how do they act in a fight?) & Joyless (something that makes them sad)

Talking might seem like his favourite thing to do, as you sometimes grow tired of his incessant flow of words. If you two fight, which honestly never happens because he’s ready to give it all away for you, he shuts up.

Stiles thinks that your fights is positive criticism; he will sit down for a while, think about why it started and try to find a solution, from a change in his behaviour to your relationship. He doesn’t like shouting, not to you. Silly fights over films often happen between you two, but he doesn’t take them seriously, even if he shouts at you for at least an hour.

A real fight between you two means that Stiles would lock himself in a room for at least two hours, and you won’t hear a pencil drop in that time. The firsts fights scared you, because you thought something might had happened or that even he had jumped out of the window to avoid talking to you. After you opened the door, you found him with tears in his eyes, crying because he thought he was going to lose you. You had to listen to Stiles apologizing for at least an hour, making promises about how he was going to give you the best and telling you how much he loved you.

Grounded (your daughter/son tells him they hate him after a fight)

“God, I wish my dad wasn’t such a weirdo!”

The world seem to stop around Stiles as his daughter tells him that words. It was an accident, at least she finding out about Stiles’ making a whole FBI profile of her new boyfriend. He hadn’t met the guy yet, so he decided to take the matter into his own hands and to start looking up in his social media, friends… even if you told him not to, because it was invading your daughter’s privacy and you knew it would end up badly. How right you were.

You had been out your house when it happened, and not a million bad experience had prepared you for what you found when you came back. Stiles was sitting on the couch, facing away from you and not answering your calls. You called him a few more times, not receiving an answer and getting worried. Maybe he had had an anxiety attack, maybe something had happened. The bad possibilities ran wild through your mind when you saw tears running down his cheeks.

Kneeling in front of him, you tried to clean his face with your thumbs, but only got back more sobs. Within a few seconds, he was sobbing in your shoulder, both of you in the floor and his face hidden in your neck. You ran your hand up and down his back, caressing his head and listening to his sad and hurt words. It took a while to understand what was happening; once you did, you could almost feel his pain and sorrow.

It took him nearly an hour to calm down. When he did, you made him go to your daughter’s room and talk to her. You opened her door to find her crying too, with her head between her hands. Before you could left the room, father and daughter had squeezed out each other’s life in a big where you stood in the middle. Both of them tried to apologise at the same time, not making any sense but understanding each other.

Everything was solved with a trip to the supermarket and a marathon of star wars in your couch.

Humiliation (someone says something humiliating about you in front of them) & Unfair (someone’s unfair with you)

“I don’t think you will ever achieve anything in life, Y/N. You really should drop out of high school and start looking for… more available options for you.”

You focused on the failed exam on your desk, feeling the pitiful stares of your classmates and the hard words of your teacher. It was the third exam you had failed in that subject, but you couldn’t do anything about it; you were pregnant in highschool, your parents had kicked you out of your house and your friends were in the middle of a war with some strange “doctors”. You couldn’t focus on your studies.

No one apart from your friends and boyfriend knew the whole story; just that you were pregnant because you didn’t take protection and that you were living with your boyfriend then. Your teacher, who had always been extra hard on you because some unknown reason, loved to point out how you weren’t going to be anything in the future. But that time he had stepped over the line.

Tears started to run down your cheeks, unable to keep them at bay any longer. Stiles, who was behind you listening to all those words, didn’t notice them; he would have said something by then if you would have let him, but you didn’t want him to be expelled. However, your teacher made sure to point out your embarrassment out loud, and that’s when Stiles lost it.

It was like an hurricane; shouts and screams left his mouth with an incredible speed, all of them full of sarcasm and hurtfulness. Everyone turned to look at Stiles, who had got up from his chair and looked like he could burst into flames in any second. It took the coach and two other students to made him shup up.

He was dragged to the director's office and, after a long chat, he was released with just a warning. You waited for him in the parking lot, next to his jeep and with your hands covering your little bump. As soon as he got out, expecting a huge scolding, you wrapped your arms around him and kissed him like you had never kissed before. If it was because of the hormones or the gratitude of not being expelled, you didn’t know. But you were proud as fuck of your boyfriend.

Injury (how do they react when you’re hurt?)

I could end this post with just a word; freak. Stiles Stilinski could be described as a ball of caffeine, sarcasm and anxiety. If we mix those three things and that he faints with the sight of blood, when talking about your injury, a picture of himself should appear on the dictionary next to the word freak.

It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, bloody or just a scratch, somewhere visible or inside your clothes. He almost fainted when he saw by accident your stained panties because of your periods. Stiles will try to be helpful in any situation, but with his constant and exaggerated worry is better if he steps aside

He won’t stop worry after you spent at least a week in bed after you’re injured. The only good thing about it is that you will have a personal servant for that time.

Joyless (something that makes them sad)

Look up to frustrated.

Kidnapped (you’re kidnapped)

As a human with a lot of supernatural friends, he’s always left out of your rescue. You have been kidnapped a few times, mostly because of a problem that could have been solved if Stiles wasn’t that impulsive.

When he discovers that you’re missing, he will call everyone he knows; Scott, Derek, his father, Peter, Lydia, Allison’s father… and will push them until they are looking for you. He tries to tag along, but most of the times it’s too dangerous. His bat is not enough.

Still, he’ll wait for you in his house, pacing up and down or tapping his foot on the ground until the doorbell rings. The aftercare is his part; he’ll wrap you around a blanket and not let you go for days, showing how scared he had been.

Loss (their greatest loss)

His greatest loss is, probably, Scott’s humanity. Stiles loves the supernatural world, and without it he might have not been the same.

But sometimes, late at night when he can’t sleep, he wonders if things would have been better. If his father would have been safer or his friends would be all alive. If you would have a better life out of his shit. Those thoughts usually ends up with an anxiety attack, as the feeling of not being able of doing anything crushes his chest.

Mistakes (make up after a fight)

He’s mostly scared about the fights, because he’s really afraid to lose you. If you have a fight of more than one day, he feels like his world his crumbling down. Besides Scott, you’re the only person who is a daily reminder that he’s something more than a buzzing body full of caffeine and anxiety; not talking to you because of a fight makes his day dark.

Material gifts are not his things. There had been two or three times where he had bought you a bouquet of flowers or something that had reminded him of you. But he knows that’s not the right way of fixing your fights, so he’ll use a more personal way.

From a home-made dinner to a movie marathon with your favourite films, he has tried everything. He’ll coax one of his friends to talk to you and make you come to the park, his house or wherever he has prepared the surprise. Once, he tried to make a poem about how much he loves you. You tried to keep your laughs at bay, yet when he tried to compare you to scoring in lacrosse, you couldn’t. The intention is what matters, isn’t it?

Nothing (you lose everything, your house, your car… how do they react?)

Being positive about the situation is the antonym of Stiles. Your parents had kicked you out of your house when they found out you were pregnant, afraid of the talks around the town and about what their friends might say. You appear on Stiles door with two suitcases with your personal things, hoping that he would take you in.

He doesn’t see the bright side, all he can do is worry about what you have lost and might need. You have to make him see that it’s not the end of world, you can make it out with work and the help of his father.

The baby is something that trouble him for days, because not having the economic support from your parents means that they might not have the best life. However, he doesn’t doubt about working in whatever is necessary to recover the loss.

Offended (you offend them without knowing it)

It’s hard to know when Stiles is offended, since he won’t say it to you or talk about what he doesn’t like. However, if there’s a thing that let you know that something you have said has offend him is his sarcasm. More than usual. He start laughing at what you have said and mocking it, trying to make you see that he doesn’t care about it.

Most of the times it has to be with his ways of getting information and his strange way of connecting everything with cords. He spends a lot of time on it, and tries to do it as perfect as he can. So, when you go to his house and laugh about it, he feels his heart drop to his feet.

He starts saying that it’s not a big deal, that he has done it in a few minutes and that it’s not even finished or complete. Excuses fly out of his mouth and he even tries to push you out of his room; still, when you see that his eyes are not bright and that he won’t meet yours, you know something is wrong.

Your apologies catch him by surprise, and you’re quick to try and fix your mistake. Looking for anything logical in that mess is hard, yet you find something that you like or understand and let him know a few times. And you offer him to help him finish it, or to sit on his bed while he explains it to you; making Stiles the happiest man alive.

Pressure (they reach their breaking point)

Stiles IS a breaking point. There isn’t a day where he doesn’t reach it. If it’s not because of the highschool stress, it would be for any supernatural deaths; or because of his friends’ problems. Anyway, almost all nights before he met you he had anxiety attacks as he tried to keep everything around under control, failing.

When he met you, the stress multiplicated by ten. He had to focus of not making a fool of himself in front of you, even if he fails at that too. As I’ve said before, he starts going to parties to catch your attention; so he has less time for his stuffs and ends up almost fainting.

When the relationship starts going somewhere, you discover about his anxiety; and just know when he’s having a bad attack. Stiles doesn’t like to talk about it, and if you’re with him he’ll try to leave to the bathroom. You hear his ragged breaths and quiet sobs through the door, and after a few sweet words, he opens the door and you kneel with him.

He doesn’t like to talk, your voice is enough for him. You can talk about your day, about a film or just be quiet while he hugs you.

Quake (past experience that hurt them bad)

His mother’s death. It didn’t hit him when she died, it was more like a gradually effect. For years, the fact that his mother could have died because of him had eaten up part of his conscious, and now it’s always in the back of his mind.

Which makes him be scared. He doesn’t let it show, but he’s scared that you will leave him because he’s not good enough, that his friends will die because he hasn’t been fast enough, or that his father would get angry at him for not following his expectations. Around him, there is always this pressure of doing what is right and what it’s better for everyone that it’s often that he forgets about himself. He can spend days without taking care of his own health, but the reason behind that is he doesn’t want to fail.

His mother’s feels like a failure for him, a failure that had caused someone’s death. He thinks that failures come with something terrible, so he tries to avoid them as hard as he can.

Rob (your house gets robbed/you get mugged)

Kind of a short imagine, I hope you like it!

Stiles was used to you calling before you appeared in his house. In all of your years of relationship, you had always made sure that you were welcomed there before you went. Not once he had told you that you couldn’t come, but still you called always. Out of respect or routine, Stiles didn’t know.

So he was surprised when you knocked on his door at eleven thirty. He was having dinner with his father in silence, the TV in the background and the poor cooked vegetables on their plates. The doorbell rang a first time, and he looked to his father, wondering who could be at their door that late. According to what you had told him, you were in the library with Lydia and Scott was out of town. They didn’t know that much people.

He got up and walked towards the door, while the doorbell rang a second time. He shouted that he was going and walked a little faster. When he opened the door, Stiles was received with your body crushing into him as he fell onto his butt. A surprised gasp left his mouth, his brain trying to process what had happened.

“Y-Y/N? What-Are you okay?” he asked, once he noticed your trembling body and your heart-breaking sobs.

You tried to say something between the tears, but only managed a messy blur of incoherent words and becoming short of breath. Your hands closed into fists on Stiles’ pyjama shirt just when his father came into the view with a worried expression.

“Y/N? Stiles, what are you doing in the floor?” he kneeled down beside you, caressing your hair softly. “What’s wrong, kid?”

“She just ran in” Stiles whispered, wrapping his arms around you. “I can’t understand anything she’s saying.”

“Let’s take her to the living room.”

With the help of his father, Stiles could unwrap you from his body between sweet words of encouragement and sit you on his couch. Once you were there, under the light of the lamp and not curled into a ball, he could see you clearly.

Your hair was dishevelled, pointing to every direction. Your cheek was red and you had a little cut on your eyebrow. The brown jacket you loved so much was missing a sleeve, letting Stiles see a deep cut and some bruises forming.

He opened and closed his mouth a few times as you kept crying, hiding your face between your hands. The Sherriff was the first to move, running to the bathroom and grabbing the first aid kit.

“Sit with her and keep her still, this is going to hurt a little” he explained, opening the bottle. “Can you hear me Y/N?”

Both of them sighed when you nodded softly, relived that you weren’t in any kind of shock. Stiles sat on the couch with you and took you between his arms as his father cleaned your wounds.

When your breathing came back to normal, you started talking about what had happened. You had went to the library with Lydia, you had studied and everything had been just good. Stiles was almost tempted to scold you when you said that you had left Lydia in her house (which was pretty close to Stiles’ one, thank God) and that you decided to walk alone. That’s when a man came out of nowhere and tried to take your bag; after a few seconds of struggling, he took it and you fell to the floor.

Father and son’s faces frowned into anger as you told them that the guy didn’t find any money on your bag and kicked you around for a little bit. By the end of the story, you were crying again and Stiles arms were shaking around you.

“Maybe he’s still around somewhere” Stiles said, looking to his father. “I can call Scott, that asshole’s going to-“

“Stiles, you’re not going to drag another teen into this”

“Then let me just grab my bat, dad. We can’t let him walk away! Look how he has hurt her!”

“Tomorrow we’ll fill a report, when you’re feeling better, okay?” the Sheriff smiled at you, ignoring his son’s protests and placing a hand on your knee. “Do you want me to call your parents? Or I can take you to your house.”

“I’m-“

“Her parents are away for the weekend” Stiles interrupted you. “Y/N is staying here.”

“I don’t want to-“

“No, I’m not buying that” Stiles shook his head. “She’s staying here. In my room, dad.”

“Why don’t you let her decide?” the Sheriff rolled his eyes at Stiles, and then looked back at you. “Do you want to stay here? You can stay the night or we can call your parents and wait until they arrive.”

Your parents weren’t the kindest people in the world. Actually, they didn’t have a good relationship with half of the town, including Stiles and his father. Your relationship with him was a taboo topic in your house; since they didn’t get you to break up with him, they didn’t talk about it. Calling them meant having them scold you for at least two days in a row.

“I want to stay” you whispered, your voice rough from crying. “If-If that’s okay with you.”

“More than okay, kid” he got up smiling. “This house is your home whenever you want, Y/N.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Beside, I like you more than I like Stiles” he laughed.

“Dad!”

Surgery (their reaction when you’re in emergency surgery)

At first, he tries to stay calm for you and for the medical stuff around. You had woken up that morning with a stomach ache, that with the passing hours had became a full pain that had rushed you to the hospital. His usual shaking and annoying questions don’t start until you’re out of sight, and then the poor doctor wishes to never have met him.

He asks the weirdest things; from what are the risk of that surgery, how is it going to be done and why can’t he see it from the transparent glass, to how high is the death percent of that hospital. In a few minutes, while he’s waiting for you to be released, he looks up into the internet all the information about that place, which only makes the situation worse.

Melissa has to hold him down because he gets riled up about the hygienic measures that are being taken, and he probably gets kicked out of the hospital by the security. That doesn’t stop him from staying in the front door, sitting on the hard ground for hours, until she comes back and tells him to wait in her office.

It doesn’t matter if you recovery is short of long. Stiles can stay in a small chair and even sleep on the floor to just stay with you. He might not be able to control things inside the surgery, but he will take care of you not feeling alone while you’re there.

Time (you’re ill and only have a few months to live)

Kind of a short imagine, I hope you like it!

Another cough left your lips, although you tried to cover it with your elbow. It seemed impossible as at least ten more shook your weak body, and soon Stiles was by your side with a glass of water and a comforting smile, his eyes full of sleep.

You hadn’t meant to wake him up, he hadn’t sleep probably in days and he needed a few hours of sleep. But he was too caring towards you, and probably your blinking would have woken him up in some moment.

“How are you feeling? Do you want me to call Melissa?” he asked with a quiet and calm voice, a huge contrast with his nervous self.

Shaking your head softly, not that the constant pain let you do it any harder, you moved slowly so that he could lay with you in bed. He stood in his place, doubting if that was a good idea; after looking at your pleading and not so bright eyes, he sighed and laid with you.

It didn’t feel natural, even if you were cuddling him like always and he was still the same boy you had been in love for years. It didn’t feel natural because a few inches from your bed, in your nightstand, stood the pile of receipts and medical stuff you had decided to ignore. Cancer had won the battle, and you were both aware of that.

For two years, you had tried to overcome it. Stiles had been by your side, doing the impossible to keep up with the university and spend time with you every day. It had not been enough, and the only thing you got was two months before it was over for you.

“I’m going to miss this” you whispered. “I don’t think anyone has this ugly t-shirts up there.”

You heard him taking a shaky breath and he squeezed you tighter, trying to not break down again.

“And Scott’s confused face” you attempted to laugh, only to come out as a sad cry. “I-I’m going to miss so many things, I guess. If there is-“

“Shut up” Stiles interrupted you. “Shut up, please Y/N. I can’t bear to think any more about losing you.”

“But it’s going to happen, baby” you said, moving your pale hand and gripping his own. “I don’t want to spend my last month in silence. I want to remember the sound of your voice and laugh.”

“How can I laugh when the best thing in my life is going to disappear?” he chocked a sob. “I don’t want to live like this! It’s not fair!”

After that words, he let the tears run wild. Of all the people that surrounded him, of all the causes behind a death that were possible in his life, it had to be you and because of the stupid cancer.

He had been in denial at first, not wanting to accept that the love of his life, his anchor, was slipping away. Stiles had ignored you for almost two weeks when he learned about your condition, until you fainted in your house and Scott called him from the hospital. Since then, he had been by your side; when you decided you didn’t want the chemo, when you went back home and when you needed help for things as simple as getting into the shower.

“I don’t mind” you looked up and gave him a calm smile. “I think I’ve lived a good life, Stiles. With friends, family. With you. I wouldn’t change the time I’ve spent with you for thousand years of life, you know? You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

“And you’re mine, Y/N” he smiled back through the tears.

“Promise me you will keep going” you frowned “That you will finish college, find a work you love and a family to build.”

“I can’t promise you that because you’re in all of those things!”

“Stiles, I want to go knowing that you will keep going” you reached his face with your hand, wiping his tears. “Please.”

“Then don’t fucking go. It’s-It’s not fair, it should have been me who went up first! I’m the one who is always messing with danger, not you.”

“Baby, if it’s this way it’s because I wouldn’t be able to go on without you” you let out a sad laugh. “But you’re. Please, Stiles. Promise me you will build a life.”

“I promise, Y/N. For you, I promise.”

You smiled happily, and went back to the comfort of laying on his chest. Soon, your eyes closed and a dreamless sleep came to you. For Stiles wasn’t the same; sleep seemed to avoid him. The only thing that filled his head were the facts. Obvious facts that he hated.

How your hands were colder, your cheeks hollower and your lips bluer. The pale tone of your skin, the shakiness in your bones. It was not fair, he thought. Not fair.

Unfair (someone’s unfair with you)

Look up to Humiliation.

Vent (how do they let things out after a bad day?)

He doesn’t like to vent out to you, you’ve done nothing wrong and his anxiety is not your fault. So he always tries to have a little time for himself whenever things turn wrong. He’ll lock himself up in his room, which usually lets his father know that there is something wrong. The sheriff calls you and you’re up in his room in no time, so his plan of calming down before venting this is ruined.

Your arms are always his safe place, and even if he won’t admit it to his friends, he loves being the small spoon and being cuddled. His head on your chest and his arms around your middle as you stroke his hair is probably his favourite position. Then, once he’s comfortable, he feels like he can vent out. At first it will only be one word, whatever is bothering him will be just a whisper. You have to encourage him for a while until he won’t shup up.

Probably it has to be with the coach, with supernatural matters or with his friends; whatever it is, you listen to it closely and he’s forever grateful for that.

Weak (they break down in front of you)

On the contrary of what people might think, he’s not afraid of crying in front of you. Stress and need might not be his favourite emotion to share, but he’s comfortable enough around you to cry and be himself in front of you.

Sometimes, he will appear in your house at two in the morning, when the demons around his past and mind are too much. He asks you to hold him, not wanting to talk about it but whishing to be with you.

(I know this is short, but I’ve written about his emotions and the way he handle them in other letters)

XX (sexual assault) PLEASE WARNING: THIS IS RAPE. NON-CON. IT DOESN’T TALK ABOUT IT, IT HAPPENS. I DON’T APPROVE THIS, AND IF YOU’RE UNDERAGE OR UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT SCROLL TO THE NEXT LETTER.

The person who requested this wasn’t comfortable with rape.

Yearn (something they want and they can’t have)

On the outside, Stiles is a sarcastic bitch who drinks his coffee black and trolls everyone and everything. On the inside, you have learn that there are a lot of insecurities and problems, hidden deep in his feelings. Talking about it is hard for him, and you need a lot of patience to overcome his sarcasm and reach his pain.

He yearns a life with his mother, for example. He will always regret her being ripped away from him so soon, and sometimes, he even feels guilty for his death. Stiles has heard his father talking about how she killed herself because of her dementia, that made her think he was dangerous. When those thoughts fill his head, he sends you a message, asking you if you can pass by. Usually he’s the one who appears in your home, so when he sends it you know something is wrong. Just your presence and knowing you won’t leave him it’s enough for him to have faith in himself.

Zombie Apocalypse (how would they survive in a zombie apocalypse)

Stiles would be the key of the group. Even if a lot of people don’t think he’s worthy, he’s good in plan making and always has a solution for your problems. He’s not very good with weapons, so given a risky situation is up to you to probably protect him, since he’s a little scared of the zombies (even if he doesn’t say it out loud). However, he’s always worried about you and won’t hesitate to throw himself in danger because of you.

Want to know more about me? Here is my Masterlist! Feedback is always appreciated!!

#stiles #stiles stilinski #stiles imagine #stiles x reader #stiles one shot #stiles angst alphabet #teen wolf #teen wolf imagine #teen wolf x reader #teen wolf one shot #angst alphabet #request #imaginemai

[gerryconway]

Burton's Revenge.

After a miserable time at the movies last night, I've come to the conclusion that Tim Burton's grim and joyless "Dumbo" is an auteur triumph.

SPOILERS AHEAD. (Though for this movie, "spoiler" is descriptive as well as a warning label.)

I don't recommend "Dumbo," but I admire it. Burton has accomplished something almost startling with this film: he's made a movie that is about as unsubtle a "f**k you" to both his corporate sponsors and the audience as one could get without actually superimposing "F*CK YOU!" on every frame. Contempt for Disney and for the audience that gobble up the company's live action remakes of classic animated films oozes from every shot, every scene, and in particular, from the entire second half of the movie. If some films are a love letter, this is hate mail. Tim Burton clearly hates how Disney is exploiting the animated films he cherished as a child, and "Dumbo" is his bitter revenge.

Why am I sure "Dumbo" is the angry vision of a furious auteur and not a well-meaning misfire? Because I respect Tim Burton as a filmmaker too much to believe this movie isn't exactly what he wanted it to be.

Burton has been making films for thirty-five years, and though the films he's made lately haven't been quite as quirky and strange as his earlier movies, they still display the control of a man who knows what he wants to achieve, and how to achieve it. You might not like where he goes, but he knows how to get you there. So, "Dumbo," with all of the issues I'll mention below, is exactly the movie Burton wanted it to be.

The question is, why? Why would Burton want to make a movie so driven by rage against audience and corporate sponsors both?

And why "Dumbo"?

If you've seen Burton's interview with Ray Harryhausen, available on some of the Blu-ray reissues of Harryhausen's films, you're reminded of how much of Burton's vision of filmmaking is informed by his still-childlike appreciation for simple wonder. As he sits with Harryhausen and plays with the saucer models from "Earth vs the Flying Saucers," Burton looks and sounds like a five year old kid gawping in awe at a shopping mall Santa Claus. He still loves the things he loved as a child, and he becomes a child again in their presence. His joy is sincere.

The man who felt joy and wonder in the presence of Ray Harryhausen could never have produced the grim, joyless, misery-soaked downer that is "Dumbo" unless he was trying to say something about the destruction of his own childhood sense of joy and wonder.

I think "Dumbo," in its not-so-thinly veiled critique of the cruelty of corporate exploitation of children and nostalgia, is Burton's attempt to tear down the structure he helped to build.

It was Burton's own remake of "Alice in Wonderland" that set the current live-action remake frenzy in motion, remember. Whatever you may think of that movie (I like it for its weird and subversive charm), there's no question it was enormously successful and clearly inspired the corporate minds at Disney to authorize a wholesale ransacking of Disney animated classics as fodder for subsequent live-action redos.

As a loving fan of those original classics, I think Burton must have been horrified by what he'd unleashed. He couldn't have felt otherwise. Again, look at his interview with Harryhausen. The kid in him cherishes joy and wonder. Whatever virtues the Disney live-action remakes have, with the exception, I'd say, of Burton's own "Alice," joy and wonder aren't an apparent high priority for the filmmakers involved. If anything, most of the remakes are drained of wonder by the translation from the imagined to the tangible.

Which brings us to "Dumbo."

The original "Dumbo" is a slight, one-hour fairy tale, centered entirely on a baby elephant with big ears who can fly, and cast almost completely with talking and singing animals. With the exception of a thoughtless racist element, it is a film of charming childlike innocence with a simple message about the strength of mother and child love and the power we gain when we let go of emotional crutches. ("I need a feather to fly.")

This is not a movie that demands a live-action remake, or even, in its story elements, supports the possibility of one.

And, in fact, Burton's "Dumbo" isn't a live-action remake-- it's an angry, passionate argument *against* such a remake. The baby flying elephant is a MacGuffin in Burton's "Dumbo"--not the emotional core of the story. There are no talking or singing animals, no other fantasy elements, not even a hint of fairy tale atmosphere. From a character point of view, I'd argue, there is no emotional core: none of the "live" characters in Dumbo have any emotional resonance at all. They are all bleak and joyless and broken, emotionally dead, barely responsive to the world and the story supposedly taking place around them. One of them, a little boy, has no character existence at all-- I'm not sure he's even named, and he could be removed completely from the film without any discernable impact. For a filmmaker with Burton's skill set such a failure to develop even marginally interesting characters with a vital stake in the story is inexplicable-- unless it was intentional.

I think it was intentional.

I think "Dumbo" is an act of auteur subversion, one of the most breathtaking acts of creative defiance since "Citizen Kane," though certainly far less successful as a piece of entertainment. In fact that may well be the movie's most defining artistic characteristic-- its complete unwillingness to entertain.

It really is a remarkable achievement. To trick Disney into financing and releasing a major motion picture which savages everything about the company's approach to its classic films, and, in addition, to its entire corporate raison d'etre, is a stunning accomplishment. What a trick. I imagine the script reads very different from what Burton shot-- it's possible to describe something one way, shoot it another, and edit it all together to produce the opposite effect from what the screenplay suggests. Because there's so much CGI involved, Disney executives probably never realized what Burton was doing until final cut. And that, in itself, is part of Burton's savage attack on Disney's corporate methodology. The further film executives get from true hands-on creative involvement in the films they make-- through increasing dependency on CGI and post-production manipulation-- the less they really know about the movies they're making. The very power to ham-handedly rework a mediocre director's work in post allows a master director to hide his intentions until it's too late to reverse them. By the time Disney executives possibly realized what Burton was up to, if they ever did, they'd sunk too much money and time into his version of the film-- and had no choice but to either scrap the movie entirely or release it as it is. Given the exigencies of corporate finance, and the apparent belief on the part of Disney executives that the appetite for live-action versions of beloved animated classics is insatiable, releasing Burton's hate mail movie was ultimately the only logical thing to do.

In the end, "Dumbo" isn't a good movie. It probably was not intended to be. It's Tim Burton's angry rant against making movies like itself. It's a slap in the face to the people who financed it and the audience who shows up for it. As a work of protest it's kind of admirable. As a film-going experience, as I stated above, it's a miserable two hours.

You've been warned. At least now, if you see it, you can "enjoy" the movie for what it is-- a scream of contempt, an artist setting fire to the gallery displaying his work. Personally, now that I've defined it... I think I like it.

YMMV.

#dumbo 2019 #Dumbo

[curupiracue]

A Bunch of Unimportant Ramdomness

...That was odd.

It’s true that I, Ienorb Yenruoj escaped with my life thanks to a sudden evolution in my methods… However. There is something quite strange about these events.

First they wanted me away… And then I was attacked. And that person attacked alone: it took a while before those two went after me. A conflict of plans, of interests? Then the three were not working together.

That is good and all, but what about now?

If they didn’t know each other, then they’re definitely working together now. Almost a 100% guaranteed. But… Could it really be, a duo of incredibly powerful psychics discovering evidence of my crimes at the same time another psychic does the same? Or could it be that the second one was just passing by? That doesn’t seem very likely either…

Which means they probably did know each other, but there is some sort of conflict between them that stopped cooperation. Though, well, now that they experienced first hand the consequences of not working together, it might be that they decided to form an alliance… I really can’t say without knowing more.

“And I won’t be able to know more, because they’ve got me cornered in that sense...”

Thank goodness I decided to check that crow and kill it. I couldn’t really see much, but now that I know all about what’s presumably that woman’s construction, I understand my situation much better. Though I ran away, it should be the opposite: since the more time passes, the more they (or at least she) will discover about me, and the more at a disadvantage I’ll be, it should be best to stop them dead on their tracks right now.

Of course, I’m shaking in fear, quite literally. Perhaps because of that, I decided to give it a day or two. Thought it’s also because, if they’re working begrudgingly… then it’s possible that they won’t be staying together.

If so, there is my chance. All I need to do is go after those two… not only do I know where they live already, but I also admit that a bout against that woman is not something that I look forward to.

“But… If they prove too strong… Then I’ll need a plan b. And for that...”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

“...Wake up, sleepyhead.”

(dreaming...)

“Hey! Nim! Wake up already!”

AAAAGGHGGGGGHGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHRRR!!!

“Ugghhhh… What time is it…?”

“Doesn’t matter. It-”

“If it doesn’t, I can go back to sleep… ahhh...”

“...We have things to do.”

“Uuuuuh… Goddammit...”

Novalue sat in the bed besides me and caressed my hair.

“(sigh...) Come on. You’re taking even more time than I do getting out of bed.”

“Mmmm… fine...” I replied, feeling as if my head was about to burst open, and someone punched me in the stomach. Also, heavy eyelids, but that is SO cliché.

“Hey, Novalue, can you like, open the window?”

“Sure.”

His action was followed by the radiant rays of the sun, alongside a most pristine breath.

“...Lindíssimo!” I said, looking through the window.

“...Stop referencing Dom Casmurro and get out of bed.”

“Oook~ But like… What’s the thing we have to do again...?”

Novalue seemed as if he could facepalm, but then suddenly figured it would be too much of a bother, and just stared blankly at me before answering:

“We’re meeting up with Wims to hear ab-”

“Oh, fuck no!”

“Wh-”

“Yeah, you’re going alone. See- ciao, adios! Hell, why did you even wake me up?! For fuck’s sake! UGH!”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

...Unreasonable, as always. I thought, while reminiscing over the events of the morning.

...In retrospect, I should have seen this coming.

Well, not like I care.

“Yo!” I’m suddenly greeted by a familiar voice

“...Well, aren’t you in a good mood.” I turn towards it, finding Wims looking at me.

“Well, I don’t have to meet Mr. Imsogreat, so that is certainly a reason.”

“Oh, good. I thought someone had died.”

Wims grimaced in response:

“Mind your tongue!” She said, clearly having took umbrage.

“Journalism is the work of gods! To spread the truth is like a sacred duty passed through universities by those who had mastered it! Life is just one big flow of events, and a society is a flow comprised of all the minor flows of the people living on it! It’s impossible, IMPOSSIBLE I say, to be able to witness the TRUE flow of a society, even when looking at large scale events! However, if you look at the individual flows of enough people living in it, and sum them up, then you’ll be able to reach it! A complete understanding! It’s got nothing to do with merely looking for drama and polemic like a damn vulture!” She then promptly summoned a guitar Hallucinogen, and started playing it:

“We are the fourth power, we rule this world!”

“Ever since people started talking, everything has whirled!”

“But some may seek it, a truth most priiiistiiiiine!”

“And among all of these, I’m the indisputable queen!”

“Oooooooooh YEAAH!”

(Guitar solo)

“Just try and stop it, the endless flow!”

“Fucking hell, go ahead and make a row!”

“But sorry to say this is the status quo!”

“Compared to information, you’re all slow!”

“Slow slow slow slow!”

“To be a journalist, one must dare to be a badass.”

“And this is a test, that not all may pass!”

“Countless obstacles await you...”

“If you wish to be part of the highest class!”

“Journalism! IS! Awesome! Journalism! IS! Awesome! Journalism! IS! Awesome! Journalism! IS! Awesome! WOO-HOOO!!”

…Wow.

“Did you write the lyrics beforehand?”

“Course not, dumbass. I’m a goddess, no, more than that, I’m an entity gods and goddesses envy. Improvising these was child’s play.”

“Ugh… Please, just… stop. It’s bad enough when it’s Nim, but now I have to deal with another egocentric...”

“Bah. We’re different types of egocentric, sucker.”

“Yes, and I much prefer his.”

Wims glared at me for a moment before shrugging.

“Well, look at me. Can’t even stop myself from picking a fight with you. How am I gonna’ cooperate with you two like that? I guess it’s better to just skip straight to business.”

“Indeed.”

“So. I’ve been getting lots of suspicious activities with my crows, but… that’s all par for the course. When I go to read the memories of those involved with Film Tape, I don’t get anything related to the killer.”

“Don’t you know of a little thing called “privacy”?”

“Don’t you know of a little thing called “bullshit”? Anyways, I don’t really have much to report… though that in itself is a report. Seems as if the killer is scared of us.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s good.”

“Because it isn’t. But it’s not all bad either: I’ll find him, eventually, but surely. And without a escape route, he’s doomed.”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

I, Ienorb Yenruoj, am walking towards work.

...Then all of a sudden, I pass through a trash can, and slip on a banana heel, falling inside.

“WAAAAAAUGH! FUCK!”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

“Meaning… There are two worst case scenarios. ...If he manages to do something while you’re not looking… or if he decides to attack us suddenly.”

“The first case is possible, but too unlikely. He won’t want to risk himself, and if he does, it’s highly likely I’ll catch him, since I have crows at most points of interest of this city… As for the second one...”

...Yeah.

It can’t possibly work. The obvious counter-measure.

“If we stayed together, the killer would be the least of our worries.”

“Yuuuuup. Glad you’re understanding… Incidentally...”

“?”

“Can’t you track him?”

“...Even a homing missile needs to have a target set.”

“Pfff, useless as always.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

Unexpectedly, Wims seemed to feel a bit bad.

“Oh, come on. Don’t say that. You’re an amazing person, and not a dick.”

I simply shrugged. This wouldn’t lead me anywhere.

“There’s something else that I wanted to ask you.”

“Hmm?”

“Do you have a crow around us?”

“Nah, I don’t. Ni- that stupid little shit, I mean, already does the crow’s job, and probably better. Or… are you saying you two would need my help?”

“I wasn’t saying anything. I merely asked.”

“Hah. Well… anyways, I don’t have enough crows for that. I need to spread them out and keep them as sentinels at various points, as well as have them conduct ordinary research. Speaking of that, Shiva found a demolition man slacking off on his job to go have sex.”

“Why is that important?”

“Well, it tried to peck the guy to death, as usual, and I had to stop it.”

“...Again, why is that important?”

“Ah, whatevs. Go away, shoo. Gotta’ feed some crows.”

Craa!

“See? I bet Nim’s waiting for you, too.”

(Time passes...)

“Oh hey!” Nim greeted me.

He was enjoying the armchair while drinking what I think was grape juice. Though, once he saw me, he immediately went out of his relaxed position. Almost seemed like he would get up.

“I’m back. Nothing new, before you ask.”

Nim frowned.

“Man, c’est una desgraça. How much time will grand me have to wait before I get to the most awesome interview ever?”

“If I’m going to be honest…” I start saying while I sit in the armchair “I think you already did it that one time with radio host. You’re not topping that.” Nim perked up:

“Mm! True that. Hey, want some juice?”

“...You know I hate grapes.”

“...And I also know that my knowledge of the gustatory arts is ultimate and supreme. Here, drink!”

“Sigh… Fine- ! ...!” Nim suddenly forced the cup on my lips “...Huh. Ignoring you being you being you, that was actually pretty good...”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

“Viu? I told you, Novalue. Jeez, I’d figure eating my cooking every day would create an- H-Hey, don’t drink it all! I wanna’ drink too!”

“? You’ve already drank thou-”

“Shut up!” I picked the cup out of his hands and downed the rest of the juice. “Pronto! Nada más, nihil grape juice! Now let’s get to work!”

“It isn’t work, though?”

“Novalue, do you want me to defenestrate you?”

“Hah.” He gave his usual joyless, poker faced laugh “Should I start boarding up the windows?”

“No, you should start stopping the string of stupid dumb shit coming out of your mouth just to tease me!”

“Nah. You’re adorable when you’re mad. ...Well.” He added in consideration “Assuming you’re not ACTUALLY mad.”

“I am gonna’ be, if you keep this u-gah!” Suddenly, he hugged me.

“See? Not mad anymore.”

“...That’s cheating.”

“When you’re actually mad, this doesn’t work. So, not really cheating.” he said, letting go of the hug to my disappointment.

“Anyway…! We should get going. Though we don’t have a construction useful for this, we still need to prove our superiority! March!”

“Where to, though?”

I opened the door, jumped outside, opening my arms and laughing maniacally.

“Worry not, my little disciple! For I, the great Nim, whose greatness is uninterrupt, devoid of any and all transience, have a ploy that will breach the heavens, teaching to all who is the almighty being in this world, and striking a most deep fear in the depths of that vile killer’s mind!”

“...What’s your plan?”

“Secret~ Just follow meeeee~!”

I could tell Novalue was bothered, but he still followed me when I started walking.

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

I could tell that Nim could tell that I was bothered, and he probably could tell that I could tell that. Yet he still went on walking… Sigh… So selfish…

Well, for now, I might as well follow him.

On our way, we passed through a large building which I barely recognized. And just a few more steps afterwards, we came face-to-face with a man.

He was of average, though quite healthy build, with above average height. Blond hair and green eyes, the very epitome of bishounen, wearing an ordinary white suit, a striped green and red tie, a wristwatch and a horrified expression.

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

...Oh…?

This is…

“Hey, you’re the killer, right?” I asked. In response, the man dropped his jaw even more and ran away. “Yup, sure is~ So, Novalue, let’s drop the ploy that will breach the heavens, teaching to all who is the almighty being in this world, and striking a most deep fear in the depths of that vile killer’s mind and instead run after him!” I started running after the killer, but a hand grabbed me:

“Hold on. Shouldn’t we communicate with Wims?”

Communicate with her… Neither of us has her cellphone number (if she even uses one) and any psychic messages will be too flimsy and random: these can probably be intercepted by the killer, and he could even use them to pinpoint her location.

A crow? But, alas, there were neither a crow nor a drunkard in sight.

“Damn. Guess not.” Novalue said, having followed my train of thought and started running after the killer.

“H-Hold on!”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

...Out of all the moments! Out of ALL the moments!

But then again… This could be good. I’ll have my opportunity to take them out. I might be a little inexperienced in combat, but I’m stronger than both of them. And inexperienced I may be, but uncreative I am not. Just wait and see… I won’t be running away to escape you… I’ll be running away to make sure you can’t escape me…

I already have a plan. And the first step…

...Is to enter this apartment building uninvited!

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

“Where is he?”

“D-Dumba-”

“Save your breath.”

“...He went... in there...” ...How… How the hell can people keep this up…?

“That apartment? That’s odd...”

We bust the front door open and looked at the attendant.

“Wher-” Novalue started.

“Upstairs, room 216” I finished for him.

“I know it’s efficient, but you sure are lax with mind reading...”

“Shuuush. He can’t... escape now...!” Then again… Why would he come here if he can’t escape? ...Better stay cautious…

We ran up the stairs, with me feeling like I would collapse at any moment, although, mercifully enough, room 216 was just after a turn in the corridor near the stairway. I could also feel a presence inside it, and the door was evidently unlocked. With that obvious fact, Novalue moved his hand towards the doorknob… but…

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

I put my hand on the doorknob to open the door, but I am suddenly interrupted by a screaming Nim:

“Don't!” I looked at him to find his face filled with panic “That doorknob is a trap!”

I look back at the doorknob, confused, and find that the doorknob was actually a knife.

And looking back at my fingers, I discover that they were bleeding.

“...What...? ...He... Took out the doorknob, put a knife on the then empty hole and created an illusion…”

“Yeah... I only realized it because of the design. The door had a very distinct design that was quite famous 40 years back, but the doorknob, while following the design, was flawed. The lines were too thick, and it's body too big…”

Perceptive. But more impressively...

“...Though he could only do it because it was a small sensorial thing, he still infiltrated an illusion on our minds... What power... And this knife... Looks like a pretty sharp butcher knife. If you hadn't warned me... I might have lost these four fingers…”

“Yeah, no shit dumbass! Try and pay more attention for fuck's sake! I'd pummel your head in if that were any other situation!”

...Yeah, as if. Still, he's got a point... This serial killer is way more than I bargained for. I can't keep underestimating him...

“What? You worried?” ...though that wouldn’t stop me from having fun.

“I’m not worried! You should be worried! UGH, shut up!”

“Um, if you didn’t fall for my trap, can you get a move on? It’s not really time for romance and all, and I’m afraid I might end up being late to my night shift...” we could hear the serial killer’s voice coming from the other side of the door.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Oh, shut up!”

#stories #Mywhatamentalworld

[ambroseias]

hyulari . female . she/her ━━ 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳? mai khanh “melee” nguyen  signed the contract to 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘴. you’ll find the twenty year old bassist arriving the venue in their vw bug. i heard the duchess member can be combative at times but can also be enigmatic once you get to know them which is why melee often reminds me of a cracked phone screen, an always tuned electric guitar, and fingernails chewed to a quick. plus, weren’t they on the front page of a magazine because they were constantly subtweeting anyone who disses the band? although, rumor has it that they worked on a solo ep without the rest of their band knowing. fingers crossed the tabloids don’t find out!

hi! i’m doing my best to write up an intro, but things are hard, you know? anyways, meet melee or mai-- all-round mess, mom friend and bass guitarist extraordinaire.  

LIKE THIS POST n I’LL SLIDE INTO UR DMS for PLOTTING.

music >>> anything, that’s the rule. 

she was born in cali.

she was a single child until her little sister came along. at least, that’s how she puts it. how else do you account for a sibling that shows up when you’re in your first year of high school? is she hella guilty that she left her home to play in the duchess and, thus, didn’t really get to partake in her younger sibling’s life? yes. would she change anything? no. 

she grew up with really nothing. her parents ran a korean grocery (it’s vietnamese, because we’re vietnamese! her mom always said, but if you looked at the brands-- it was korean) and so she did her best to help out where she could. 

but, when she was eight, for her birthday, she got someone’s hand-me-down guitar-- and it was over. 

i suppose you could call her a prodigy? but it’s more like she played that too-big guitar every waking moment, knowing that this was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. 

while even then the sight of her onstage was... magnetic, it was safe to say that her stage presence was a little chaotic. at one of her performances, got her the name melee and, with her habit for getting into squabbles with nearly everyone she came into contact with, the nickname stuck. 

for years, really, just as a kid, she hustled. played guitar and sang at every local event she could find. and, eventually, she switched from a standard electric to the bass and she uploaded guitar covers to youtube. they’re still up there-- a testament to her early promise n talent-- but they never really became viral or anything.

ig this is where the rest of the members got in contact with her but also i mean ??? who knows ??? you know??? 

so yeah. music >>> anything. but now that she’s in the duchess, that also means the band >>> anything. right?

outside the band, her personal relationships have always been a little shaky. she’s still young and kinda naive, but she also refuses to acknowledge that and has a tendency to leap before she looks. combine this with being very protective of the group and the possibility that she’s still-- not so sure if the newest addition to it is what’s going to be best, and you really have a garbage fire. she’s very touchy about perceived slights against the band. 

she’s not managed to get into a fistfight yet, but she’s never minced words when it comes to how she feels. subtweeting is her passion, apparently. 

but... if u actually get close? she’d lay her life on the line for you.  music >>> anything, but sometimes it gets in the way of her emotional wellbeing and growth. maybe she’ll learn to put herself and her needs first. 

then again, this is melee we’re talking about. 

PERSONALITY –

[ + ] generous, loyal, charismatic, enigmatic, talented, hard-working, witty, caring, entrepreneurial, melodramatic. 

[ - ] mercurial, attention-seeking, short-sighted, naive, guarded, obsessive, reckless, combative, 

-

EXTRA

her parents ran a vietnamese (broadly asian) grocery and that’s how she grew up, sipping on yakult, sitting quietly behind a counter, head on his hand, watching people push their rusty shopping carts through the narrow aisles of cans.

there’s a joyless moment when you’re behind the counter—you see all the people passing by and you catch glimpses of their lives. but you never really get to partake in it. and, even though you know exactly what aisle and what shelf, they can find their favorite brand of yakisoba, you never really get a chance to do more than ask if they liked it.

and i suppose. she always longed for it. to have something real, for once. to live a life where he wasn’t just living on the sidelines.

-

her parents said it once. cried about it. they didn’t want her to know, but she was just behind the corner where they couldn’t see her.

“she wants to leave, you know,“ her mother said, rubbing the back of her neck, “but i don’t think she’s ready.”

her father sighed, “come on, linh. ready or not, we’re not going to be able to stop her. we’re just going to be here for her when she falls.“

when. not if. her mother teared up and mai shook her head. they were wrong to worry, to doubt her. they were all wrong. 

she would show them. 

WANTED PLOTS + CONNECTIONS

someone who really knew her before she was famous. bonus points if they had a falling out and this is them reconnecting. (messyyyy)

someone she’s teaching the guitar/has taught the guitar (and bc i love angst... has used the power of their guitar talent against her)

a frenenemy

her “in” with the industry

i really kinda want melee to be ‘discovered’ like u saw a video of her or witnessed her performing early on and u were like... look. i think u can make it. here’s my phone number. idk if u were actively involved in her life or not, but just the concept. 

a bad influence

someone has convinced her that she might be better solo. was this you? she regrets recording the ep... but also... there were some cuts on there-- that weren’t trash. 

someone who is telling her to act up for the cameras / knows that she has a easy trigger and will go off. 

a mentor

someone she looks up to as they try to navigate through this messy world together. 

a mentee

she thinks she can take you under her wing. she’s wrong, ofc, her life is spiraling out of control. 

a band enemy !!! this is absolutely something i want !!!! someone who hates her band just to hate the band !! and the two of u will bicker all the time. 

a crush (either someone having a crush on her or vice versa. she’s naive to the world in general so she might be really stupidly Oblivious.)

look !!! anything !!! i want the world !!!

#ghq;intro

[youngerdaniel]

A WAFFLE TOPPED WITH TROPES AND EXPECTATIONS TO FULFILL: ADVENTURES IN REWRITES - PART FIVE

If you’ve never heard of TVtropes.org, you are living under a very joyless rock. Part encyclopedia, part snark factory, and always running rampant with spoilers, it’s a treasure trove of every single trope known in storytelling.

What the squirrel-scrambling shit is a trope, you may ask?

According to one dictionary definition, “in the arts a trope is simply a common convention in a particular medium.”

Tropes are why Game of Thrones is full of epic sword clashing battles with ice zombies; why kids who go to remote cabins die in horror movies; why people who seemingly hate each other fall in love in romance movies; why Jessica Jones is a hard-drinking misanthrope instead of a misanthropic soccer mom.

There's no audience on the face of this earth that approaches your tale from a vacuum. They’ve seen stuff before. Over the years, certain ideas have become traditions in narratives, and these traditions create a sort of literary grammar that fuels expectation from your audience. You might think expectations are the bane of creative existence, but it’s not so with story. With stories, this pre-established language we speak with the audience allows them to predict what happens next — and that? That’s the good stuff. It's what allows you to throw a zag where everyone's preparing for a zig, and that gap between expectation and development cues a lightning strike in the dopamine pathways. It's what makes people lean in.

You can subvert them, or you can play them straight, but expectations are always a storyteller’s best friend.

The conventions of a given genre help you brainstorm the elements your story needs for it to be accessible, and this is by no means a limitation. Case and point? Witness.

No, no... Wrong movie.

WITNESS THIS USE OF TROPES

In Witness, we meet John Book, a city cop who’s on the path to discover some serious corruption within his precinct, and find himself in a life-or-death battle to expose the truth and right wrongs. Sounds pretty familiar, right?

But not if the entire third act (and much of the second) takes place on a farm… in an Amish community… with a freaking barn-raising sequence and everything. The genius of Witness is that it plays a lot of classical film noir conventions about flawed heroes putting themselves on the line to weed out corruption and throws your expectations out of whack by dumping you off in an almost alien world. You know what should happen, but because things go so off the rails from what’s familiar, you’re constantly doubting if a zig or a zag is on its way.

Inside of Witness, we find a lot of familiar turf: whether or not the big cop can trust his superiors, a murder that needs solving, the revelation that there may be no easy recourse when the murderer is revealed, and the need for John Book to take matters into his own hands, wrestling with the cost of violence and the need for justice. The reason this stuff works isn’t because it’s prescriptive; it’s because it speaks to something inside of us — all of us.

Tropes, conventions and expectations of genre, provide a shorthand that helps us see how — much like certain things show up in certain movies — certain things show up in certain parts of life. They are unifiers of experience. They remind us that while it often feels opposite — we all go through a lot of the same stuff as people.

Are you with me yet? Tropes are good. They’re your friend.

Well, either way, they’re my friend. Nestled away in the first draft of the Librarian and use it as the engine that drives conflict and pacing. So now that I’ve decided on a thematic premise and a genre — what does a mystery story require?

THE NECESSARY NECESSITIES

FIRST OF ALL, YOU NEED A MYSTERY. (HOLY DUH, BATPERSON!)

With this one, I’ve got the looming question of “where are all these missing kids going? Who’s behind it, and once we learn the truth, will our leads get to the bottom of it and free them before the curtain drops?”

This is why second drafts are fun: I’ve got all that figured out. The kids are stuck in Hazel West’s cavern lair outside of town, hooked up to her Wicked Witch machine that’s syphoning out their imaginations. I know somewhere near or in the third act, the Librarian is going to offer to give Hazel her substation imagination in exchange for freeing the kids, and Rory will have to operate on her own to save her.

YOU NEED A SLEUTH (DOUBLE-DUH, RIGHT?)

Another checkmark. Some things I’ll have to keep in mind about this are dynamics: Rory and Fiona the Librarian undergo something of a buddy cop arc, and to keep things interesting, their points of view are best served at odds with each other. I’ll do some more focusing on this when I start clarifying my character dynamics, but I’m planting the seed early so I don’t forget this. If I do, I run the risk of losing momentum and tension, and if they don’t start off with some friction, Fiona’s big sacrificial play and the bond these two form will go out the window.

YOU NEED A VILLAIN WITH A MOTIVATION THAT BRINGS THE PROTAGONIST’S INNER DILEMMA TO THE SURFACE

It’s not enough just to have a Wicked Witch doing wicked and witchy things. What’s essential is the element I sketched out when I was thinking about theme — if Hazel’s reason for kidnappings stems from her desire to deny her true nature, it will help Rory to get the perspective shift needed to deliver a satisfying arc. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder sees mysteries not so much as whodunit, but whydunit. He sums up the overall purpose a story of this nature serves as such:

“…The investigation into the dark side of humanity (read: the crime) is often an investigation into ourselves in an M.C. Escher-kaleidoscopic-reptile-eating-its-own-tail kind of way. That’s what a good whydunit does — it turns the x-ray machine back on ourselves and asks, ‘Are we this evil?’”

THE MYSTERY’S STAKES NEED TO BE IN MOTION; THEY MUST ESCALATE AND GET PERSONAL FOR THE SLEUTH

From Hannibal to Knives Out to Se7en, it’s necessary that at some point the mystery starts getting personal. It locks the protagonist into solving the case: the killer sets their sights on the sleuth’s love interest, a key piece of evidence turns the investigation around and suddenly the hero is being scrutinized. This kind of progression keeps your second act from becoming inert, and it also keeps the audience from asking the ever-dreadful question of, “why don’t they just walk away?”

If things get personal, it’s much harder to walk away from the case. It raises the stakes. It’s a great midpoint to build to that spins the story in a more visceral direction and adds a layer of emotion that keeps the case from going cold.

In my current draft, I’ve got Hazel turning Rory’s parents — whom she’s been resenting for moving her from NYC out to rural California — into flying monkey henchpeople.

Riffing off my guiding principle of “If you reject who you are to avoid rejection by the world at large, you’ll wind up forgetting the value of who you are.” It stands to reason that I’ll expand the world a little and give Rory some classmates who become friends — and if you’re thinking “she’ll wind up stuck with a band of misfits who are ostracized by the school’s ruling class” well, you get a cookie.

I’ll dig more into what else I plan to add in another post — right now, I’m just making sure I know what ingredients I’m cooking with.

A TRAIL OF CLUES AND WITNESSES TO INTERROGATE

You can’t solve a crime without clues. You can’t get to the truth without asking a few people what’s going on. Without a trail for the detectives to follow, your mystery becomes inert. As I’ve harped on previously, a screenplay must have an unyielding sense of propulsion. Unlike novels, which are stories that start and stop and find their movement more from the inner world of its characters, movies are stories in action. They’re moving pictures. Now this is where the real fun and games of The Librarian might live: Imagine interrogating Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, or having the chief suspect being the Pied Piper (hey, he is known to kidnap children…), or how about seeking the help of Holmes and Watson to solve the case in a rapid-fire montage?

A lot of this was already coming together in the first draft, but with the help of knowing my genre and having a theme to guide things, I’ve got a chance of making it pop.

RED HERRINGS — SOMETHING FISHY, BUT NOT THE ANSWER

You know these, yet they always get you off-guard. It seems like the sleuth’s found their lead suspect; or maybe the supposed killer is behind bars. All signs point to Colonel Mustard in the study with a candlestick… But then, the unthinkable happens: another victim appears, an unexpected message arrives or a fresh piece of evidence appears in the mailbox. Great Garbanzo Beans! We had it all wrong, Scoobs! A good red herring isn’t just about throwing in a twist to keep things fresh, it’s there to let put your audience in the detective’s shoes. You invite them to solve the mystery, and maybe even get ahead of the protagonist so that they’re sitting back in their chair with a smug expression, saying: “I’ve got this all figured out. I could be a detective.”

The best way to keep an audience interested is to let them use their desire for predicting the outcome and turning it against them. It’s one of the few areas in life where duping someone makes them like you. Now, it’s essential that you play fair, and that when the real perpetrator is revealed, it doesn’t feel like you just randomly chose somebody to pull one over on your audience… So the trick is having the evidence lead to both the Red Herring and the True Blue Herring.

THE BIG REVEAL/SOLUTION TO THE FINAL PROBLEM

Once all the evidence has been pored over, after every suspect is interrogated, after the stakes close in and get personal with the detective, and once we’ve see the true color of the herring, there’s only one thing to do: bring the truth to light in the final confrontation. Many times, this sequence climaxes with the killer/thief/kidnapper doing a big “Why and how I did it” speech — sometimes with a slew of flashpops showing all the places we missed them at work on our way here. Think of Hot Fuzz when Nicolas Angel finally learns that the town council has been killing off villagers who stood in their way. Think of the tastefully-sweatered Chris Evans when his plot to steal his father’s estate is revealed by Southern Drawl Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas. Don’t linger too long on creep-show Kevin Spacey’s rant about the sins of this world and how Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are no exception… But you get the picture. It’s, “Okay. You got me, but by the way…”

There’s always an opportunity in this sequence to throw in one last twist; a final explosion of excitement that makes us question whether the hero will find justice or wind up a victim themselves. This is the moment where the dark flaw shared by protagonist and antagonist comes to a head — and it’s their different tactics for wrestling with their dilemma that decide the story’s conclusion.

You can be happy or you can be sad here. Doesn’t really matter. But since I’m writing for kids and am much more interested in doing material that offers hope instead of cynicism, I think I’ll go with happy.

——

And that’s the list. At this point, you might be thinking, “Wow, this is super paint-by-numbers, isn’t it?” Well... no. You can’t subvert something if you don’t know what the thing is. Not to mention, these are all pretty wide bins to start collecting different story elements. They’re not prescribed plot points; they’re tropes that help build gaps between the audience’s anticipation and the results of my scenes. They inform more than they dictate. One of the best ways to play with all of this stuff — aside from altering the setting like Witness does — is to place these elements in unexpected places: for me, I’m loosely planning to have the “big reveal” scene come early, before my “all is lost” and have my third act be a big chase sequence to pay off my original intentions of writing a fun kids’ adventure tale. Yours may be different. That’s the thing about cake: it’s still cake any way you slice it.

I’ll have to brainstorm on the exact what’s for each of these before I go to pages, but armed with this as well as my thematic premise, I’ve got a general sense of my story’s shape. There’s only one thing left to get super clear on before it’s time to get into story beats and outlining… And that’s the ever tasty waffle of character.

#journal #screenwriting #craft #writing

[jeranrox]

a corpse

so i’m gonna display my darling’s defiled corpse on tumblr. in other words, this is a “deleted scene” pfft.

It’s rated B for Bad and V for Very Very Very Rough. You should still read it though... because one of the lines is “It was understandable to launch garbage at your enemies, but only a psychopath would cook liver to perfection and then lob it at people.” and I live for very strange sentences.

It’s not a very long scene though, only 870 words and honestly... it was all useless to the actual story. 

The rain stung.

Danner mindlessly watched the water pool into his palm and fork out into tiny rivulets over his fingers. Droplets rolled off his fingertips onto the strange mass of green the grass had faded into. At this scale of observation, his feet seemed impossibly far, as did everything else, and especially his thoughts.

This was good. At least, he would have judged this state of mind as good if he were at all in his head. He needed to get away, forget about any big picture the world had.

So he continued staring at the minuscule waterfalls dripping off his hand, backdropped by a dark, serried mass that hardly looked like his tunic at all. The nearby approaching footfalls hadn’t even entered his notice.

“Danner,” came the call. When it hadn’t prompted any sort of response, it repeated: “Danner!”

This time, the blue Wocky jerked his head up to face the speaker. “What--what?”

“It’s almost nighttime,” replied Jeran, as if that phrase was supposed to mean something. “You’ve been here since the afternoon. I would hate to sound like your mother, but if you stay out here longer, you might catch a cold.”

At the word “cold,” Danner felt a slight shiver. “I’m fine.” Then, out of an unspoken sense of obligation, said, “Just give me a few minutes.”

“You want to be left alone?”

He thought about it. “No.”

Danner had expected this to start a conversation, for Jeran to have said something like, “well, all right, then come inside, there’s plenty of noise there.” Instead, Jeran gestured for him to make room and sat next to him on the bench.

Silently, they glanced up at the blood-red twilight sky. Past the ashen clouds, the sun was angrily refusing to give way to even the first scrap of night.

"Still thinking about Havister, are you?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really.”

"I'll be as useful as chopped liver, then," said Jeran with an exhausted smile. He weakly laid a hand on Danner's shoulder.

Despite Jeran being as soaked and cold as Danner was, the gesture did provide a sort of fuzzy warmth. "Not at all. Stewing in your own thoughts alone can be somewhat maddening."

"As opposed to stewing in your thoughts with someone else nearby."

"I was more thinking about using you as a distraction," admitted Danner, "so that you'd be slightly more useful than chopped liver."

Jeran scoffed. "I guess there's not a lot of chopped livers out there that can effectively serve as a distraction, unless you end up loading trebuchets with them."

"Then, what would be the better distraction? Cooked chopped liver or raw chopped liver?"

This was a very important question, one that Jeran dedicated considerable mental resources to. On one hand, raw chopped liver was more viscerally disgusting. On the other, well, cooked chopped liver would certainly plant confusion in the minds of your enemies. It was understandable to launch garbage at your enemies, but only a psychopath would cook liver to perfection and then lob it at people.

"Giving your enemies free food, though? Wouldn't that be counterproductive?"

"It's liver, Danner. If they're desperate enough to eat it, it will suck the life out of them."

"Hey," protested Danner, "I'll have you know liver is an acquired taste."

"And you're sure you're not a delinquent?" said Jeran. He moved his head to get a better look at Danner's face. Unfortunately, it was covered with mottled hair.

"Quite sure," replied Danner. "Delinquents do things like steal coin and vandalize official government notices. I steal... well... I steal hearts, probably."

"That may be worse than stealing coin."

"Ah, but it isn't illegal."

"The laws of this land are clearly inadequate," replied Jeran. "Clearly, whatever joyless lawmaker who first put pen to paper wouldn't be the type of person to have their hearts stolen, so they wouldn't know what it feels like."

Danner had a very hard time believing Jeran could have been a victim of such a thing--or if he was, he'd never mentioned it. "Well, it's not the worst thing one can do, at any rate."

"Certainly not, but that's not a very high standard. There are always worse things one can do."

Danner shrugged and finally made a motion to remove the stray strands of hair that covered his face. "I suppose there are always worse things you can do."

The fiery sky had died down, and so had whatever light that returned to Danner's eyes. Jeran extended his arm to wrap around Danner's shoulders. He sighed, but didn't seem to respond otherwise.

After a good minute, he said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be as... mercurial as I am."

"It is no trouble," replied Jeran. "Though, if you wanted my advice, we should probably go back."

"Probably."

Silence.

"Hey, Danner, I--" he paused for a moment, either recomposing what he was about to say, or thinking better of it. He already had his attention either way. "I'm glad you're still here."

That was the most lukewarm statement he had ever heard, and not one he necessarily agreed with, yet Danner couldn't help the corners of his mouth curling upward.

#family-friendly heads on pikes #yea that's going to be my actual writing tag from now on #jeran and danner do get into a lot of long-winded conversations naturally and it's really hard to make them have a point.. so trash 'em #anyway i am a very bad writer especially when i do not edit things feelsbadman #also unintentional subtext that really would not work for the rest of the story lul... so that also gets axed #hmm should i drop this in the neolodge... naaaah

[donttouchthegun]

Confessions Of Love

Requested by anonymous. Prompt- "I know I didn't tell you I'm married. It was because I was embarrassed. But you kissing Rosita has thrown me for a loop and I'm not sure how to get past it" Read it here as well as on AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11829351 *** "We have to talk." "I know." "There's a lot we have to discuss." "I know." "This isn't gonna be easy." "I know." Waverly cringed the third time the words left her mouth, but really, what else could she say? Of COURSE she knew how difficult this is going to be for the both of them. A sorry party may have sounded heartbreakingly cute at the hospital, but that was also before Waverly knew they would be talking about a previous marriage, and before Nicole knew they would be talking about a drunken kiss with someone else. And now, sitting in the silent confines of the officer's living room, a broken coffee table still on the floor in ruins and scratch marks still visible from the struggle with the widow, it was suddenly even worse because now there was no long viable excuse for either of them to hide it. They sat in silence for awhile, unsure of where to begin or who should even be the one to engage the conversation. "I'm not mad about the DNA results," Waverly decided that was the best place to begin, because she wasn't. She wasn't mad about them because really, she knew that her girlfriend had good intentions, and while she had been hurt, she understood. She understood making rash, impulsive decisions to protect the people you love. Hell, if she said she didn't, she'd be an even bigger liar than she already felt like she was. "Waverly... If we're going to do this, I don't want you to try and preserve my feelings, I want-" Nicole began, but the smaller woman beside her cut her off with a shake of her head. "I'm not mad Nicole. Honest. I... I was. I really was, but it wasn't just about that. It was everything. The fact that you hid them was just the icing on the cake. Wynonna was pregnant, I'm not an Earp, I may be half revenant... It was so crazy already and I just needed something to be angry about," she explained with a sigh. "And... You're married... God you're really married," the laugh that escaped her lips was harsh, joyless, almost cruel. "I know I didn't tell you I'm married. It was because I was embarrassed. But you kissing Rosita has thrown me for a loop and I'm not sure how to get past it," Nicole hadn't meant to sound so harsh, and she really hated saying it out loud, more than she would have liked to admit, especially seeing the look of guilt that washed over the younger Earp's face, watching her head hang in shame. She couldn't deny that sometimes, she still got a bit jealous of Champ, that he got to be Waverly's first, that he had kissed her and touched her and degraded her with insults and verbal abuse, but this was different. This was something that happened while they were in an established relationship, and while she was curious as to what really happened and who initiated what, she really wasn't sure she could stomach any details. "I know," again with those goddamn words. Waverly sighed, her hands clutched together tightly in her lap. "Did it feel good?" the words were barely audible as they squeak out from the taller woman's vocal chords, and when her girlfriend looked at her, really looked at her- The way her eyes are darting from side to side, her head is lowered slightly, and her hand rubs at the scar on her arm concealed only by a thin layer of fabric- She could see just how terrified Nicole is of every word that comes from either of them at the moment. Deciding to take a chance to risk it, Waverly reached out carefully and took one of the officer's hands in her own, relieved when she felt a gentle squeeze back. "It felt like I was drowning," she finally began, almost shuddering at the memory. "I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move, all I could do was think about you, and how it's nothing like kissing you," because really, it's not. Kissing Rosita was NOT like kissing Nicole, not by a long shot. Sure, the basics were there. A woman's touch was something that Waverly never thought she would find herself craving, but it's more than that. Rosita was soft and warm and all around gorgeous, but was not Nicole Haught. She wasn't the red headed police officer who won Waverly's heart with nothing more than a dimpled smile, who made her knees weak and her heart pound against her chest, who made her question why she ever thought someone like Champ could even compare to someone like Nicole. Confessing about the kiss had been a sickening task, because she could see how hard the woman beside her had tried not to react, how much she tried to keep her feelings in check because despite a cheating kiss she still felt she was the bigger party at fault and being hurt when she had clearly done more hurting on her own part wasn't acceptable. Not to her. It only made the whole revelation worse. "I'm sorry," it was really all Waverly could manage to say. "It didn't mean anything" seemed cliché and insincere, and though she was completely sure of her feelings, "I love you" didn't seem appropriate, especially not while trying to defend kissing another woman. Besides, she hadn't actually ever said that yet, never fully confessed her love for the woman beside her out loud for all the world to hear, or at least the two of them. Nicole wasn't really sure what to say about it either, so for awhile, she didn't say anything. "Do you want this to be over?" now it was the ginger's turn to wince at her girlfriend's voice, and she turned to see Waverly trying to force back tears. "No!" she answered quickly, squeezing the hand in her own tightly for confirmation. "No, unless... Unless you do?" her voice trembled at the possibility that maybe this was the end, maybe Waverly wanted to leave. Maybe she SHOULD leave. Instead of answering, the brunette ignored the voice in her head telling her it was a bad idea and leaned forward, at least restraining herself enough to keep the kiss gentle. Relief washed over her body when she felt the officer lean into the kiss. "Do you still feel it?" Waverly's voice was quiet, and she kept their foreheads pressed together. Nicole nodded, didn't need the smaller woman to clarify what IT is because she knows. She know what Waverly means. She means the way that their hands slide together effortlessly, like they were always meant to find each other, meant to only hold each other. She means the way that they can't keep their hands off each other when they're together, no matter how long they practice their self control and their patience, they somehow always end up in a heated make out session or at least always holding each other close. She means the way that every touch, every smile, every subtle glance of the eye ignites a passionate flame that bubbles just under heated skin and builds like a fire. She means the way that every single kiss feels like it's the beginning of something remarkable, like it's a breath of fresh air after spending an eternity drowning. "Tell me about her," Waverly didn't clarify who she meant and the ginger didn't need her to. But, she also didn't want to bring that up right now. "I will," she promised, and the woman beside her knew she meant it, because if Nicole was anything she was a woman of her word. But now isn't the time to discuss Shay or what she had meant, because now she didn't mean anything other than an old friend. And yeah, maybe marriage was a bit of a big thing to hide, but Waverly didn't push her into asking why she never told her because how could she have? It was then that the guilt really began to consume the younger Earp, because so much of her time was devoted to everything else, everything that wasn't Nicole, and she hated it. It was always Wynonna, her pregnancy, demons, monsters, evil all around them. So much of her life was already planned out, simply because she had no other choice. "There's so much I don't know about you," Waverly's voice was thoughtful and her eyes were pensive, staring at the wall as if she's staring through it, and Nicole felt her heart melt in her chest at the sheer beauty of the woman sitting next to her, the woman she loved. Still did love. And she almost said it too. "I..." but she didn't have anything to follow it up with, and she cut herself short, deciding that it was better to stay silent than try to come up with something else to say. "I know." She retracted into herself then, pulling back from Waverly's touch, instead holding her arm in her hand where her scar still remained, a deep flesh wound with bite marks and thick, sickly blood-red veins still formed around the edges. It didn't hurt, not anymore, but the memory of the pain was engrained in her mind, and she wasn't sure she'd ever really forget. Waverly, for her part, was fidgeting with her hands, her lip between her teeth as she tried to think of what to say next. When she looked up, seeing a long fought battle that had finally been lost and a slow tear rolling down the side of Nicole's face, she visibly grimaced, reaching over and catching the drop of salt water before it fell. There were a hundred other moments she could have confessed, all of them better than their current situation. She could have told Nicole the first time they had sex after the possession. She could have told her their first time ever. She could have told her when she apologized for making a scene in the gymnasium. She could have simply said it louder in the police station, right before Willa fired a gun and almost ended everything Waverly had realized suddenly that she couldn't live without. She could have told her then too. There had been three occasions now when Nicole stood in the face of death and spat in it, ready to do anything to keep her girlfriend safe without a single regard for her own safety. But now, sitting in the dim light of the moon that streamed in the window of the officer's living room, Waverly couldn't think of a more perfect time. "I love you." And the way Nicole stared at her only made it so much better and worse all at once, because she looked at Waverly like she was her oxygen supply, her reason alone to continue existing. But clouding her eyes behind the shock and the love was something much darker- Doubt. Doubt that the younger Earp really meant her words, doubt that it would last, doubt that it was more than a temporary kind of love. But it wasn't, and to prove it she moved forward, but not to kiss the taller woman. Instead, she took her arm gently and slowly lifted the sleeve, her eyes never leaving the ginger's in case she saw any indications to stop. When she was sure there were none, she pulled the sleeve back to reveal the scar, deeply engrained in her skin. Nicole's head fell in shame. "I know... Such a turn on right?" her voice cracked as she attempted a pathetic joke, the corners of her lips turned up in a forced, watery smile. Waverly leaned down and pressed her lips to the scar, leaving her head down against her arm. "I love you," she whispered again, quieter than her first but firmer as well. "I love you, I love you, I love you," she repeated the words as she pulled Nicole against her, pressing gentle kisses to her collar bone and her jawline and just below her ear. The sound of her hushed voice resonated in the officer's ear and she shivered, her fingers immediately finding their way to thread through long, brunette tresses. Waverly looked up and saw the doubt fading away, replaced with some of the confidence she'd seen what seemed so long ago, something that looked more like HER Nicole. "I love you." Her voice trembled and this time it wasn't just a confession, but a question. Do you love me too? "I love you." And now Nicole's was an answer, that yes, YES she loved her too, how could she not? How could anyone NOT? But it wasn't that simple for Waverly, because she had screwed up, and for so long screwing up meant that she wasn't worth it anymore, that she was worth giving up on. That's not how Nicole worked, not what she valued in a relationship. It made it easier, if anything, having solid proof that Waverly wasn't as perfect as she'd once feared, and it only made her more beautiful. She too, was human. Nobody had ever loved her for her mistakes before. Nobody had ever been okay with sticking around even after she messed up, did something impulsive, so for years she bottled it up, didn't let anybody see that she had flaws because they wouldn't love her with them. But Nicole did. "We're kind of a mess, huh," Waverly laughed, the first real laugh in what seemed like weeks. Nicole laughed in agreement, and soon the two girls were doubled over in a fit of giggles, tears streaming down their cheeks, and neither one was really sure if it was from laughter or everything else. Maybe it was both. But by the time the tears ceased and the laughter died down, Nicole was left with a brilliant smile on her face, the same one she'd flashed all those months ago in Shorty's, and when Waverly had kissed her in Nedley's office, or when she had picked the younger woman up and carried her to her bed like she weighed nothing because she felt like she was flying. Waverly matched her grin and leaned up, pulling her into a slightly hesitant kiss that was only consummated when the officer nodded in consent. It was sloppy- All teeth and swollen lips and lost time- But the smiles on their lips never died. And they stayed that way into the night, the only sound ever confirming a presence in the house being the soft whisper of an occasional confession of love.

#WayHaught #Waverly Earp #Nicole Haught #Post 2x10 #Angst #Happy ending #Wynonna Earp #Fanfiction #AO3