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just-a-torn-up-masterpiece · 2 years

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doomsday

based on the song 'doomsday' by lizzy mcalpine

Pairing - Natasha Romanoff x Reader

Summary - 'funny thing is i would've married you if you'd have stuck around; i feel more free than i have in years, six feet in the ground'

Warnings - angst; sad vibes, sad reader, death, sad nat but there is some fluff mixed in

Word Count - 1851

A/N - i honestly fkin upset myself with this so i hope at least one other person is also sad because of it - i'm trying to get better at angst but it hurts :D

You’d never known true freedom. Somebody was always in control of what you did, how you did it, where you went. It’s how it had always been; from being thrust into the life of darkness and killing to the life of an Avenger, you’d never truly known free will. Decisions were made for you - you were an assassin and now you’re one of earth’s ‘mightiest heroes’, you roll your eyes at the term.

How are you a hero? Someone with a kill count higher than you could imagine and a river of blood to show for it. Surely a true hero would choose their fate, decide to take up this life of heroics themselves, not be given the ultimatum you were. Use your skills for good or pay for your crimes.

And yet, you were never free to choose that either. Your skills were invaluable, prison was merely a threat for if you stepped out of line.

So you’d made a home over the last few years, something akin to a family. You’d found a love in Natasha you never thought possible, the only time you ever feel free is with her.

—

“Let me take you on a date.” She’d said, so matter of fact you couldn’t believe for one second that she was being serious.

“What?”

“A date. You.” She pointed. “And me.”

You rolled your eyes at her teasing as she just smirked, looking at you expectantly.

“Okay, sure.” You nodded. “When?”

“Now.”

Of course she’d want to leave right now, her almost golden retriever-like energy she fell into around you was a shock but she felt comfortable to be silly with you, playful and cheery, not afraid to make a fool of herself.

“Now?” You asked but couldn’t help breaking into a grin at her smile as she bounced on the balls of her feet slightly in anticipation and the grin never faltered at the way she happily grabbed onto your arm to lead you out when you said yes.

She had spotted a poster for a carnival earlier in the day; you spent the evening under dizzying lights, filling up on candy floss, making yourselves feel sick on the rides.

She kissed you outside of your bedroom door with her lips tasting like lemonade and popcorn, the sweetest kiss you’d ever had.

—

Natasha always reassured you that your past is exactly that - your past. It wasn’t you anymore, it wasn’t truly you then; you, like her, were a trained killer. You were forced into the life you lead, knowing weapons like the back of your hand when you should’ve been fingerpainting.

She was coming to terms with the red in her ledger, beginning to realise with your help that it shouldn’t drown her the way it used to - she just wished you’d do the same.

Sometimes you let your mind race, poking around at the insecurities you try to bury. The way you still don’t feel like you deserve a home here, with this makeshift family joking around whilst a movie plays on the TV. The way you still feel trapped by the rules set out by those above you; you can’t make your own choices as an Avenger, you’re told which missions to go on and how to do them.

Natasha helped, she really did, but it didn’t make things perfect. The only perfect thing you know is her and the way she makes you feel but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’ll be enough.

—

“Babe, wake up.” She rasped, soft lips grazing over the skin of your shoulder from where she held you from behind.

“Nat, it’s early. Let me sleep.” You pleaded which of course she ignored, you expected nothing less.

“It’s the first morning in your new home, how’d you feel?”

“My old room is quite literally next door, darling.” You smiled, rolling over to face her. You stroked some of her stray hairs behind her ear with a quick peck to her lips.

“I know, just go along with it.” She pouted, leaning into your touch as your thumb stroked over her cheek.

“I feel perfect. Waking up next to you is perfect and it’s even more perfect that I don’t have to go back to my room. It’s perfect that I can see our clothes all mixed together from here and our shoes side by side over there - it’s so domestic looking. And it’s perfect tha-”

“God, I wish I never asked.” She groaned with a smile. “It really is perfect, huh?”

“It is. But do you know what’s not? That horrible photo of me that you have taped above your mirror.”

“I love that photo.” She argued.

“It’s me or the photo, baby.” You spoke, squealing with a laugh when she tackled you back onto the bed as you moved to get up to take it down.

“I’m keeping both.” She laughed, tickling your sides mercilessly until you called a truce. “I knew I’d win.” She bragged with a lingering kiss to your lips. “Come shower with me.” She added with a wink and who are you to say no to such an offer?

—

You wiped your forehead where a mixture of sweat, grime and blood had gathered before taking another agent down. He was the last one you could see so you holstered your gun with a breathless sigh before heading towards the quinjet with aching limbs and a bruised cheek.

“Y/N, you on your way back?” Steve’s crackled voice came through the comms.

“Yeah, be there in a sec.”

You were the last to arrive, resting your chin on Natasha’s shoulder tiredly as she kissed your head. There seemed to be some kind of complication, hushed words between Tony and Steve whilst everyone just waited around for them to be done.

“What the hell is the problem?” Wanda asked them, arms crossed over her chest. “I want to go home.”

“Uh, there seems to be a slight…hiccup.” Tony answered.

“What kind of ‘hiccup’?”

“What he means is that because of the security of the building, the detonation has to be done internally.” Steve returned with a sigh.

“So what does that mean?” Sam asked this time but it was clear by the look on everyone’s faces that it wasn’t going to be good.

“The only way we can ensure that this building ceases operation is if one of us goes in to enter the code but-”

“But if someone goes in they won’t make it out.” Natasha finished solemnly.

—

The night was quiet but your sleep was broken. Natasha slept peacefully beside you with her hair splayed out on her pillow, a sliver of moonlight shone through the parted curtains and landed on her face in the most perfect way.

The dream you’d had was keeping you awake, memories of your old life playing in your unconscious mind, so now you lay here with only the sound of Natasha’s even breaths and the whirring of your mind to keep you company.

She was woken not too long later from a sniffle you failed to keep in, frantically wiping at the tears on your face when you felt her stirring.

“Detka, hey, what’s wrong?” She asked, voice so soft and warm with sleep.

“Nothing, it’s okay Nat, go back to sleep.”

“It’s not nothing, tell me what’s wrong.”

She sat up next to you, immediately wrapping her arms around your waist to pull you close.

“I just feel like a monster, Nat. Like, all I did - it haunts me - there’s no escape from what I became.”

“None of that’s your fault. You are such an amazing person, you’ve helped so many people since you’ve been here.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough. It could never be enough.”

“You had no choice, you-”

“I know. That’s the problem - I never have. I never chose to be a killer. I never chose to be an Avenger. I never chose to be a ‘hero’. I was forced into all of these worlds, Nat. I have never had a say in my own life, everything has always been decided for me and it’s tiring. I just want to be free, you know?” You spoke through tears, burying your head in the crook of her neck as she hugged you even tighter. “I just want something to be mine - my choice. No one else’s.”

—

It had been at least 20 minutes of back and forth arguing of who’ll be the one to go and time was running out. Natasha’s hold on your hand had been almost painfully strong the entire time but you’d been zoning out of their arguing whilst you thought about everything. About what you have to do, not only for them but for the world. You were going to choose to be a hero, maybe now you’d start believing the word.

“I’ll go.” You spoke, stunning the jet into silence at your sudden voice.

“We can’t ask you to do that.” Steve answered, being the old supersoldier he is, he was going to be the one to go, he’d planned on it.

“You’re not. I’m offerin-”

“Y/N/N, you can’t go. No, you’re not going, I won’t let you.” Natasha rushed out, holding onto your arm as you stood.

“Nat, I have to. I’m sorry, I am, I love you so much but you know that I have to.” You choked out and fuck it hurt your heart to see the tears roll down her cheeks, you couldn’t bare to look at the tears starting to form in everyone else’s eyes.

“No. You don’t have to do this, anything but this. Tony there has to be another way - find another way.”

“This is the only way and even if it wasn’t we’re running out of time. Whoever’s going to go has to go now or we’ll all end up dead.”

“It’s okay, Nat. I want to do this-”

“No.” She sobbed out, tears salty on your lips when you kissed her.

“Let me choose, for once - let me be free - let me know what it’s like.” You uttered. “I love you - so much. I’ll never stop.”

“I love you too.” She croaked out through her tears, heart breaking at the soft smile you mustered just for her. You wanted the last time she saw your face to be a happy memory, when the pain is easy enough to bear you want her to look back at this moment and see the way you love her - to see you as a hero.

You made your way back to the building as just a small figure to the rest of the team watching from the jet in the air. Natasha’s sobs filled the space and Wanda’s arms caught her at the sight of the building being engulfed in golden flames, thick black smoke filling the air.

She was broken, the space in her heart you had once filled was empty once again. And maybe one day it’d hurt a little less but for now the ring she’d bought only months ago will sit in her drawer untouched, feeling heavier than it should.

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wasflypaw · 3 years

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My takes are Not based on characters words or how other characters view c!Dream. My takes are based on what I've watched him do literally every single time I've seen him on my screen. And every single time he's been on my screen in the last near year he's been doing or encouraging something chaotic. I came to the conclusion that he has Never been a good person because I have literally Never seen him Be a good person in all the streams I've watched live since Last July

I dont base my opinions on characters words. Never have, never will. I base them off what I see the characters do. My opinion is not based off my fav character being c!Tommy. I'm a c!Jack enthusiast my dudes I can go into detail the trauma he's gotten from c!Tommy I even made a video on it

If a character said c!Dream was an awful irredeemable villain but he hadnt done anything to show that I wouldnt immediately believe them. None of my opinions are based on what characters view c!Dream as. I didnt fuckin see him as a Friend during exile when he made c!Tommy reliant on him and manipulated him into seeing him as one. I dont watch c!Techno's POV and think "ah c!Dream really is just Some Guy because c!Techno thinks this"

I base it off the fact that even in the early days, instead of solving the L'Manberg conflict peacefully he chose to trick and murder 4 people, sending one of them into a paranoid spiral with trauma and trust issues. c!Wilbur DIED in that room, and yet HE'S painted as the guy who unfairly villainised c!Dream and forced him into a villain role? There's not even any evidence of this, I dont believe the "c!Dream was an uwu good guy forced to be a villain" because there is Nothing for this claim to stand on. He still had the servers.. respect (or just listening to him out of fear) and also his friends by his side until season 2. L'Manberg swayed no-one's decision to turn against him. I dont see how I'm the one with the horrible awful takes when I'm just basing it off actual proof 😭 All I'm Looking For Is Proof

I was c!Wilbur critical until I actually analysed his character and listened to what the CC has said about him, along with reading essays that have concrete proof from canon. I was c!Techno and c!Philza critical until I once again read essays and examined them in a non-biased light. I still disagree with their actions but I don't dislike their characters, think they're irredeemable or whatever. It's been Months since Doomsday and the Syndicate haven't done anything harmful so ,

I think c!Dream is irredeemable and unsympathetic, yes. Because none of his actions have been a necessary evil, literally none of them, he has Unnecessarily Murdered 7 people (Final Control Room Victims, Tommy again, Ghostbur, Mexican Dream) all of which did nothing to deserve that. He orchestrated Exile which was simply to horrifically abuse and play with c!Tommy, and Is Explicitly Shown Having Fun Doing It. He endorsed Schlatt, he nearly murdered c!Tubbo, he's an awful, awful person. He is literally doing something bad every single time he's on screen. I have never seen him have a "gradual downfall" from grace because he was also chaotic before L'Manberg. He is never painted as sympathetic but he is Always painted as doing whatever he wants for the fun of it and never Once trying to stop conflict that he has every chance to stop. He has had like 10 opportunities I've seen to stop a conflict that was happening and chose to either ignore it or escalate it - because he enjoys conflict

My takes arent "awful" because I base them off everything I've seen in canon rather than just taking him saying "I want a big happy family" once and running with it

I'm not sure What ppl aren implying saying my words and moral compass match with a Prison Warden and a Torturer bc I sure as hell dont condone the torture or whatever inhumane shit went on in the prison beforehand lmao

I'm not disregarding any CCs takes on their character - I literally base my opinion of c!Wilbur off what I've seen him do and what he's given us to go off - like the song he based his character off, any essays he's approved of his character, etc, literally All His VODs... But yeah, I'm the one disregarding his words when I say he wasnt a dictator/wasnt bad from the start/never cared about anyone...

I dont get the "clear canon signs that c!Dream isnt an unsympathetic character" because I have watched every damn stream he appears in and I dont see that. I've watched him in Eret's streams, in Tubbo's streams, in Fundy's streams, in Wilbur's streams, in Sapnap's streams, in Quackity's streams, etc etc etc. I see him escalating wars for fun, I see him stirring shit up for fun, I see him abusing someone for fun. I'm sorry there's mountains of canon evidence that he's just a rampant bastard and I'm not just going to take the "I was touted a villain" "I want a big happy fanily" lines and base my entire opinion of him off them, especially when his actions show the exact opposite of any mildly sympathetic thing he's ever said

Not everyone who dislikes c!Dream "dislikes him based on what characters have painted him as 🥺" I dislike him because of how many lives he's unnecessarily ruined or killed

I became a c!Wilbur critical, c!Dream sympathiser myself for about 5 minutes because I saw an essay about how he villainised c!Dream and without factchecking I was like "WOAH" and made my own essay about how c!Dream was forced into a villain role and how he was good in the beginning and how L'Manberg didnt make sense. I stopped being a c!Dream sympathiser because I looked back at canon and realized "wait there's quite literally nothing to prove this other than one vague line"

I promise you it is SO easy to make me sympathetic towards a character. SO easy. Why do you think I'm still sympathetic towards c!Quackity and c!Sam and c!Wilbur? My only issue is I havent been given enough sympathetic c!Dream in canon, I havent been given Anything to make me feel bad for him or Anything to show his actions were even remotely necessary or for a good reason. I Need Canon Evidence and I Have None

Do you want me to be extra fancy with my analysis posts and essays and add VODs and timestamps to every sentence to prove I'm Going By Canon?? Because I Can And Will. My takes arent Awful - (I've actually been really proud of them recently thank u very much) because I'm not listening to headcanons and twisting his words and flipping the narrative to make him seem better. If I've watched him kill 4 people who werent fighting back after declaring war with the words "sometimes you just gotta kill some people yaknow" why would I think he did that for any necessary reason

Not everyone dislikes c!Dream because they're a "Tommy watcher" Jesus Christ 😭 he's bad in Every Single POV I've watched since Last July

Btw yeah Fanon c!Dream is still worse peace out

#torture tw #c!dream critical #abuse tw

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yourlmanburg · 3 years

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yet another smp sibling // eret + gn!sibling!reader

(hello i genuinely do not know what got blown up in doomsday please let that slide lmao, also i am honestly really sorry about how late this is - i was super tired yesterday and i’ve been busy all day today lulw but even so, i hope you enjoy this even if i didn’t have the energy to edit it whoops)

word count: 1,343

summary: eret reveals they have a younger sibling and shows them around the dream smp

request?: yep! thank you @brianawithonen!!

---

Your brother had been streaming for about half an hour or so now while you were busy doing homework, but if you’d been watching, your heart would’ve melted. Alastair had somehow let it slip that he had a little sibling and his chat was going crazy as they spoke nothing but good about you, singing your praises and making it clear how much you meant to them.

“I can actually go and get Y/n if you guys would like?” She asked her chat, and needless to say, they were delighted with the idea of meeting another SMP sibling. You were sitting at your desk when you heard a knock at your bedroom door, spinning around to look at your brother.

“Aren’t you streaming?” You asked before he could get a word in. He wasn’t supposed to end yet as far as you were aware.

“Yep! Do you want to play on the SMP for a little bit?” They asked kindly, their tone preventing you from feeling too pressured. You couldn’t lie, the thought of showing yourself to tens of thousands of people both scared you and excited you - what if somebody you knew was watching the stream and they didn’t know you were The Eret’s sibling? What if nobody liked you? What if you said something wrong and got cancelled, or even worse, what if you got Alastair cancelled? Despite the negative thoughts crowding your mind, you realised how much joy the Dream SMP had brought to Alastair. You knew how much it’d boosted their career and you know how many lives he’d changed, and you knew about the friends he’d made. Maybe this was a chance for you to have the same as that for a segment of a stream.

“Sure!” You exclaimed with a grin, leaving your work where it was and following your brother into their recording room.

“Here we go, chat!” Alastair said with a smile, passing you a spare headset and pulling out another chair for you. “This is Y/n, my mini me, who is surprisingly good at Minecraft.” They chuckled as you looked at her with fake betrayal.

"Surprisingly, huh?" You chuckled, slipping on the headset and sitting beside your sibling.

“Oh, by the way, I’m on the VC in case anybody wants to join - is that okay with you?” She asked and you nodded, already taking over his game and walking around on the Dream SMP. This was so surreal.

“So what do I do?”

“Well, I can show you around if you’d like?” Alastair looked at you with a small grin, to which you nodded eagerly. You began in (the remains of) L’Manburg and you were shown around the Greater Dream SMP, the Badlands, Manifoldland and even El Rapids, and you couldn’t lie; you were impressed by some of the structures your brother had built. Everything was going better than you’d expected and you really did enjoy spending time with Alastair like this, until you heard the familiar Discord chime and a very distinct voice that you just could not ignore.

“HELLO ERET!” The legendary TommyInnit screamed down your ears, unaware of your presence. Alastair chuckled, letting him know that he was with his younger sibling.

“Why do you have a child with you? Do they know that I am a big man, bigger than them?” oh, somebody sounded confident as ever.

“Wanna bet?” you spoke up, Tommy for once finding himself at a loss for words.

“You suck.” he stated bluntly, causing you to burst into fits of laughter. Alastair was a little more on the unimpressed side, however, asking Tommy to calm down with the somewhat aggressive remarks. Of course, he was only answered with incoherent angry mumbles, followed by another Discord chime.

“TUBBO!” both Alastair and Tommy shouted at the same time, Tubbo greeting them with an equal level of enthusiasm. A little yellow banner across the screen told you that he’d just logged into the game, his avatar appearing not too far away from your brother’s.

“Hey Tubbo, did you know Eret is with a child?” Tommy asked him like it was the biggest deal on Earth. Tubbo let out a confused laugh, asking Alastair if this was true or if Tommy was just spouting bullshit as usual.

“Hi,” you giggled before Alastair had a chance to reply. “I believe I am said child.”

“Oh, hello!” he greeted you happily, running over towards you in Minecraft and crouching in front of your character.

“Tubbo, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Who’s Tubbo? I am Big Law and Big Law only.” you laughed at how serious his tone was, feeling as if you were really, finally seeing why the SMP meant so much to your brother. You barely knew them yet these people were some of the nicest you’d ever met (despite the fact that you’d already known of their existence and tuned into more than enough streams prior to this) and you truly felt as if you belonged - if only you could become a permanent member in the intricate storyline.

You, Tubbo and Tommy played around for a while longer with your brother by your side, every so often speaking up but he was mostly just watching you. Watching the smile on your face and the shine in your eyes; this was clearly where you wanted to be, if he could just…

Alastair pulled out his phone, opening up discord and clicking on his conversation with Dream. Meanwhile, you were very invested in the business you were starting up with the two boys, trying to persuade people like Nihachu and Ranboo to buy from you.

Dream joined the game.

You paused for a second, looking up at Alastair with a grin. You’d always wanted to meet Dream and she’d always said that he was a busy man and you just had to wait for a chance, could this be it? Could you finally be able to speak to the Dreamwastaken?

Even so, you carried on as you were. You tried not to show your excitement in fear of being seen as an overly obsessed fan, when you saw a familiar green skin hopping over to where you, Ranboo and your two new friends stood. Turning to face him, Tommy and a very confused Ranboo began shouting at you to make a deal with him for your business when somebody joined the call.

“Hello?” the new voice greeted, and it was undeniably Dream.

“Hello!” you replied enthusiastically, as did the others.

“Y/n?” Oh my god, he knew your name.

“Yeah?”

“What’s your Minecraft username?”

“Y/u/n, why?” Dream left the game and there was a pause. Nobody else in the call was speaking, what was happening? Had you just fucked things up? You looked up to Alastair for reassurance, and he nodded at you with a warm smile, but you still didn’t understand.

“Okay!” Dream spoke up again, dragging out the “o” and rejoining the server. “Eret should be sending you the IP address now, go and try logging in on your account, you should be whitelisted.

And you were. You’d finally been whitelisted on the Dream SMP.

All because of your brother.

That night, you sat on the sofa beside Alastair, tired from many hours you’d spent on the server, but happy. The happiest you’d been in a while. As much as you were afraid to admit it, ever since they joined you’d longed to have what they had with everyone, you longed to be part of the plot. You finally had that chance.

“So?” She asked you with a smile. “How was today?”

“Fucking incredible!” you replied, making them laugh. You leaned into Alastair’s side, looking up at him with a tired expression. “Thank you, Alastair, seriously. You’ve just made one of my dreams come true - pun intended.”

“I’m glad! I’m so happy to have you there now, I really think you have the potential to become a really crucial character.”

“Really?”

“Really. Now go and do that maths homework you left.”

“I hate you.”

#eret #eret mcyt #reader insert #dream smp fanfiction #mcyt #mcyt fanfiction #platonic x reader #eret dream smp

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demivampirew · 4 years

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Kalentine’s Day

Henry x Plus-Size Reader

You can find more of my writings in the Masterlist

This was a request from @born2stronger : “what about if Henry meets reader through Instagram (we all know sometimes he checks on the comments) so reader gets his attention and he messages her.” I hope you like it. 😊

Triggers: Fat- shaming; talking about the lost of a pet; feeling of nostalgia.

Tag list: @lunedelorient @henrythickcavill @wolvesandhoundshowltogether @mary-ann84 @desperate-and-broken @peakygroupie @summersong69 @ivvitm1109 @madbaddic7ed @iloveyouyen @the-soot-sprite @hell1129-blog

"Happy Valentine's day everyone! For all of my fellow single pringles out there, you don't have to be in a relationship to enjoy today, it's about Love. Enjoy seeing others in Love, love your friends, your family, and especially yourself. #Kal #ValentinesDay #BestDogEver #KalentinesDay"

Henry wrote and posted the picture of Kal laying on the bed with a rose on his Instagram account.

Nostalgia hit him hard later that day. He wasn't in a rush to get back on the dating game, especially not after a recent disappointment with a lady, but he missed celebrating that day with a woman he would care about. He starting to imaging how that day would've been if there was someone special in his life: he'd had made breakfast for her to eat on the bed; he'd taken a stroll down the park after that, to enjoy the beautiful morning. They'd have had lunch in someplace fancy, then watch a movie and he'd prepare her favourite dish for dinner and he'd finish the day by making her feel unique. Every woman in his life was unique on his eyes, for best or for worst. That thought made him sigh deeply for what he decided to check some comments on his post. Cheeking comments on his photos was his guilty pleasure. He loved the nice comments and would laugh out loud whenever there were thirsty comments; some were a bit distasteful, others were cute and there were others that were so odd that made him chuckled.

As he was scrolling through comments, one caught up his attention. "@(your username) "KalentinesDay" you cracked me up, Mr Cavill! But I'd like to differ with the BestDogEver one; I love Kal, he's awesome, but my dog is...was the best. I lost him two days ago and I felt like my world crushed for I've had him since I was a kid. Being there holding his paw as the doctor put him down due to disease was the worst thing I've ever experienced. Sorry for ruining the mood, but thank you for the post, it lighted up my day! Have a nice KalentinesDay, Sir." He felt so bad for that person, so he entered her profile and hit the message option. "Hi Y/N. I saw your comment and I just wanted to say how sorry I'm that you lost your beloved companion. I've had Kal for a few years and I cannot even bear the thought of losing him, so I cannot imagine how must feel to lose your pal who's been there most of your life. Be strong. I'm sending you virtual hugs and lots of love. I hope you get better soon." After sending her the message, he checked her account for he saw a recent post with a picture of a lovely dog. It wasn't a mixed breed. It was a rescued dog. She talked so fondly of him, remembering the first day she met him and a few adventures they lived together. The stories warmed Henry's heart yet saddened him, knowing that his light had extinguished. There were a lot of pictures of her dog on her account and pictures of books and movies. Funny enough, most of the books she talked about were some of his favourites and the ones that he hadn't read, he took screen captures so he wouldn't forget to check them out. One of the movies she posted about was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and he had to see her thoughts on it. She agreed that the whole Martha plot was absurd, but the thing that bothered her the most, and in her opinion ruined the movie a little bit, was the fact that Doomsday was on the final trailer, for the movie would have been higher rated from her if she'd already known that he was going to show up. Yet, she disagreed with all the hate and the thought that the movie was bad: "It could've been better? Sure, Was it horrible? Absolutely not," "If it is too dark for you, don't watch it, period. Mr Snyder understands the soul of DC Comics. Dc is not lighthearted, accept that and move on" she wrote. Henry was too tempted to like the post and reply, but he decided that it was best not to do it. She didn't have many pictures of her, but he found one from two years ago. In the picture, she was standing to a bride and she hugging her. She had a pink dress on. Henry looked at her cute smile and was stunned by her beauty. In the caption of the photo, she wrote " Ignore my ugly fat ass... focus on my beautiful sister who just got married to her Charming Prince! Congrats, babe! Love you a lot and wish you a lifetime of nothing but happiness! ♥" Henry liked the picture and went straight to the comment section and wrote "You look gorgeous. I hope their love story is a good one and lives on." and press send. He was so caught by her, that without even noticing it, he went through every single post on her account, like all the photos she was in and same with pictures of books, movies and albums he liked.

He was having dinner with Kal when he noticed that he had a reply on IG. When he opened, he saw it was from the girl with the mesmerizing smile. "I think I should call the police, I have a stalker, 👀 😂" she wrote. "Thank you so much for the mood busting. It means a lot. He brought a lot of light to my life and it's hard to have to say goodbye." she confessed, "but instead of lying in bed crying, I'm going to use that energy to give love to another animal in need, that's what my baby would have wanted, I know it in my heart." she finished. Henry didn't wait for a second to answer her, even if that meant that his food would get cold. "Absolutely! Any animal would be lucky to have you as their momma." he assured, "Sorry for that, I didn't mean to be a creep. I swear I'm nice. I'm Superman" he joked. After a few moments, the girl messaged him again "Superman killed Zod, so...👀😜 ". "Low shot. Also, Zod was a villain" he went on with the conversation. " How do you know that I'm not a villain?" she joked, "Because villains don't love puppies" he grinned like an idiot in love as he pressed send. "Cruella did, though, 👀 😂" she said; "Touché. But I'm sure you're not a villain, you are too cute for that" he explained. "That'd be the perfect cover for a conquer the world masterplan, don't you think? To have everyone trust me and love me for me to be easier to control them?🤔" "Alright, you convinced me. You're the evilest villain in history. So, I should fly to wherever you are and get you." he playfully told her. "And I didn't want to sound creepy 😂. My apologies if my humour seems creepy," he apologized. "I think your humour is genius and I find it cute, no creepy," she pointed out. "Cute enough to meet me in person? 👀" he asked. "Absolutely," she accepted his invitation. "When are you free?" she questioned. Henry looked at the clock, it was 7:30 pm. "I'm free right now if you can." Henry offered, "Do you live in London?". "From the last couple of years, yes. I moved with my mom after my parents got divorced. She's was born here... I mean, yes, I live in London, sorry for the unnecessary information," she requested his forgiveness. "There's no need to apologize. I like getting to know more about you." he explained " Do you want to go to Mark's Club restaurant? It's a nice and quiet place where we can have a nice conversation" he proposed "I think I can get a last-minute reservation since I'm a member of the club." he informed her. "Sure, I'm going to get ready. Tell me if you get the reservations or we can go anywhere else, I'm sure there are plenty of nice places to eat where there are tables available 😊" she said. "Great, I'm calling them right now!" Henry exclaimed excitedly and went into his phone contact list and press the dial button. He was lucky enough that the manager was a Superman fan and was quite fond of him, so he agreed to reserve a table for him in the busiest night of the year for restaurants. He shared the information to her and went to change as well. He put a white sweater and a nice pair of black pants on and black shoes. A grey blazer was his coat of choice.

He asked for her address to pick her up, but she opted for meeting at the club and he accepted because he understood that maybe she felt unsafe by giving her living information to a stranger. He couldn't lie that this gave him enough time to leave Kal with his friend Ben.

He waited for her inside the restaurant for there were paparazzi outside the place. Mark's Club was an exclusive place where many celebrities choose to eat in, especially in such occasions like Valentine's day - Guy Ritchie and his wife choose that place to spend the night and so did David and Victoria Beckham. Both couples came to greet him as soon as they saw him. His table was about to be ready and she wasn't there yet. He checked for messages on his IG but there were none. Has she stood him up? That'd have broken his heart; no because someone rejected him, but because she did it. He thought that he was losing his mind: being afraid that a girl he met that day on the internet might have played a prank on him and make him believe that she was interested in him.

When he saw that it was 10 pm, he decided that it was better to inform the host of the club that he wouldn't need a table after all. He was about to get up when behind him a female voice called his name. He turned around and stood, speechless. A beautiful woman on a red dress was standing in front of him, showing that glorious smile that captivated him ours ago on his phone.

- I'm so sorry I'm so late.- you apologized profusely - It took me ages to find a cab and then I've spent literally thirty minutes outside trying to get in because paparazzi were being annoying and would get in the way for me to get in.-she explained. - No worries!- he assured her- Honestly, I was a bit afraid that I've had been stood up.-he confessed, styling his hair backwards with his hand. - Absolutely not! I don't particularly enjoy pranks. Especially not in niece people like you.- she smiled and his legs were shaking.

At that moment the waiter approached you to let you know your table was ready. Henry said "Ladies first" indicating you to go first into the table area. The place was elegant. Henry waited behind your chair and as you sat in, he pulled it close to the table. He sat in front of you, grinning like the devil. That charming smile took your breath away.

Every word that came out of your mouth amazed him for your charisma and intelligence. You were not only funny, smart, confident but also beyond beautiful. He knew that wasn't love at first sight, but he could see himself falling deeply in love with you.

Halfway through the dinner, Henry finally noticed that lots of costumers were watching them. He found that odd since he was a regular there and there were plenty of celebrities on that place that night -some way more famous than him.

- I apologized if you feel uncomfortable with people watching us. Usually, they barely look at me. They know I'm an actor, but these fancy folks don't care much for Superheroes.- he explained. You looked at him with a smirk. - They're not looking at you, they are looking at me.- you pointed out. - Are you famous?- he asked confused and you chuckled because he meant it and it wasn't sarcasm. - Yes, I'm Ashley Graham.- you joked and his expression showed ignorance; he didn't know who she was.- She's a model.- you explained and he laughed apologizing for his lack of knowledge on current pop culture. He was beyond cute.- No, I'm not famous. They're looking at me because I'm "fat"; I'm a plus-size woman and they probably can't understand why are you having dinner with me.- you said and smiled- In another point of my life this would have hurt. It did for a long time. Whenever I'd be in a date with a thin man, people would look at us as if they were thinking out loud that he was too good for me, that he could do so much better than a fat girl. Thankfully I'm no longer in a place in which I'd blame myself for their judgement. I'm who I am and I'm ok with that. They can look all they want, they don't mean anything to me.-you shrugged- But, I need to know if that bothers you. I won't judge you if you are not into me. Maybe I'm confusing things, but the fact that you made a last-minute appointment for dinner on this day is because you have some kind of interest on me and I do for you too. I'm in for getting to know each other and maybe be something if we feel it later on. But if that's the case, if I got things wrong and you are not interested in my, just tell me. It's ok and we can be just friends if you want. All I ask from you is not to waste my time. Don't get me to grow feelings for you if you have no intention in returned them.- you requested. Henry went silent for a moment. Then he put his hand on top of yours, grabbed it and kissed it. He grinned and replied, "You got it right, gorgeous."

The dinner continued with you two laughing, drinking fine wine and having delicious desserts. You tried to grab the check but he took it so fast that you barely saw it. "I'll pay next time. That's the condition for me going out again with you" you indicated firmly and he agreed.

As you were about to leave, he noticed you didn't have a coat. "I was so hurried that I forgot to grab one" you explained and he immediately took off his and gave it to you, despite you telling him that you were ok, and helped you to put it on. He held your hand to walk outside, not caring if paparazzi took photos of you and he called a cab for you. It was easier for famous people to get a ride, you noticed. He drove you to your place and walk you to the door. He was much taller than you, so he leaned in to kiss your cheek and kissed your hand as well. Henry promised to call you the next day and walked towards the car. You reminded him of his coat and he asked you to keep it safe for him until next time you saw him. With a big smile, he got in the car and after you entered your place, you heard the cab left.

#henry cavill #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill fanfiction #henry cavill x reader #henry cavill x plus-size reader #henry cavill one shot #demivampirew

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perseusjackson-jasongrace · 3 years

Text

Day 11: “Your place is on the throne.” “My place is by your side.”

Masterlist

canon-compliant

cheiristis: wielder (greek); bellator: warrior (latin)

Jason Grace does not have a good feeling about this. A god showing up at your doorstep is one thing, but being summoned to Olympus? Well it would make anyone jumpy. And gods is he jumpy. Just this morning he had dropped a shampoo bottle in the shower and screamed so loudly Leo had rushed in hands blazing, eyes wild, yelling about killing the monster. And to make matters worse, Jason hadn’t really slept in the three days since Chiron had delivered the news. He burns holes in the rug underneath him, trying, and failing, to ignore the glare of the Zeus statue in his cabin.

“I don’t need that look from you,” He hisses, “I’m already going to see it in person.”

The stare seems to be steel as it continues to pierce him. He turns away with disgust, and lets the fear in his stomach churn like acid. Just when he feels like he can’t take it any longer, the alarm on his phone blares to life and with it a flash of lightning in the otherwise blue skies.

“Welcome to doomsday.”

Jason grabs his sword from the table, swinging it around and sliding it into the pouch at his back and with a final look around the cabin he takes to the skies, letting the wind carry him to Olympus. Tempest would have been too volatile, and he didn’t want to do anything to set off the Gods, who angered if you so much as breathed wrong in their direction. Oversized, all-powerful toddlers.

It didn’t take him long to get to the Empire State, the tall spire jutting out against the swirl of golden clouds that always seemed to cover it when Olympians were present. He pulls up fast against the building and takes several breaths, trying to pull the depleting oxygen that comes from being so high up.

A crack of thunder slams into his skull. His whole body goes stiff with pain. It takes him a second to realise he wasn’t struck, it was just right next to him.

“I’m coming, you bastard!” He growls, and he hopes his father heard.

He steps onto the stone bridge of Olympus, lined with fruit trees and their dancing nymphs, and he wonders if this scene has ever inspired peace in those who come. Mostly it makes him nervous. What horrors have occurred in the throne room while the melodic reed-pipes of the satyrs play out here, harmonising to suffering like it is the greatest symphony? He shudders as he moves to the marbled floor of the entrance, and then suddenly he’s at the doors to the formidable room. The cyclopes that stand guard are looking at him, unblinking.

“I have an audience with Zeus.”

“Name?” One of them grunts.

“Jason.” His voice is shaky and he hates it. “Jason Grace.”

They share a look, and then push open the massive sea-stone doors. The gush of power that rushes out threatens to bowl him over, but he pushes down on the soles of his feet and growls with the force of staying put.

“Ah, our honoured guest.” A deep, gravelly voice mutters, “So glad you could join us.”

Jason Grace looks up, lightning blazing in those blue eyes, and catches his first glimpse of the almighty gods. There are seven of them present, most looking bored or agitated. His father sits at the head, staring at him. There is no emotion on his face, and it is that that makes the demigod move into the room.

“Father,” He bows. He refuses to look to his right.

“Stand child,” Zeus’ voice reminds him of mountains, treacherous.

The room is silent for a beat, as if each of them are holding their breaths, waiting for… something.

“Do you know why we called you here today?”

“No.” He wants to scream. “Father.”

“Cheiristis.” The King of the Gods calls. Every muscle in Jason’s body tenses, and slowly, painstakingly slowly, his eyes slide to the right.

There, in all her beautiful, composed glory, blonde curls dragged into a small knot at the base of her neck, and grey eyes as calm as lazing rivers, is Annabeth Chase.

“Hello Jason,” She says softly, stepping down from her throne of cities and floating towards him like a wraith. Like a star. Like a queen. Like a goddess.

“Hello Annabeth,” He cannot keep the emotions out of his voice, ones that threaten to shut his body down, overwhelm him.

“You are looking good.” They had seen each other only a handful of times since that fateful day, but no matter how long they spent apart the crackling energy between them, as alive as electric wires, never ceases. In fact since the last time- four months, twenty days, and roughly one hour- it seems to have grown. He can almost taste the current between them. It is crème brulee dissolving on his tongue.

“So are you,” His voice is soft, like he’s afraid talking too loudly will fracture the moment. They stare at each other, lost in clouded skies and falling oceans and the beginning or the middle, or something between, that ignites their every nerve. He cannot get over how she glows; like light bends towards her, for her. Even all those years ago, when Piper went through her transformation after being claimed she didn’t look as radiant as Annabeth does now.

“What am i doing here?”

She brings a hand towards him, brushes her fingers over his cheek. He fights to stay still, to not lean into it. “Always so serious my bellator.” She smiles. It pierces the darkest parts of his soul.

“It is not often I get called to the home of the gods.”

“I am sorry, I haven't come to visit.” Her eyes shutter; he sees the regret and worry flash in them.

“Don’t.” His voice is still soft, but there is firmness behind it that makes her look up. “You are busy. You are a god. I didn’t expect you to be with us all the time. Nobody does.”

She bites her lip, and he knows she’s holding in everything she’s no longer allowed to show. Instead she throws her arms around his neck, and mumbles ‘thank you’ into every hollowed part of him.

“We miss you.” He tries not to sink into her arms. He’ll never leave. “I miss you.” He pulls back, but isn’t willing to let her go completely. “But your place is on the throne, helping us from here.”

The unshed tears in her eyes make them look like swelling rain clouds. “Sometimes I feel like-” She cracks. “Like my place is by your side. Nowhere else.”

“Are you two done?” That same gravelly voice that greeted him at the door drawls sarcastically.

“Shut it Ares.” Annabeth growls. “The only thing on your schedule for today is getting rejected by Aphrodite yet again.” A murmur of amusement travels through the room as the rest of the gods rib him endlessly.

Jason takes the moment to pull her close once more. “We will be together again soon.”

“I know my bellator.” Her presence disintegrates in his arms and then she is back on her throne. “Son of Jupiter.” She is all goddess. “We need your help.”

He falls to his knees in front of them. “Anything for you, my lady.”

Annabeth hides her smile, but he can see it glittering in her features. Jason Grace winks at the Goddess of Demigod Battle and accepts the fate that will bring him one step closer to his wife.

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

Tags:

@nishlicious-01

@spoopylucy

@leydiangelo

#jasabeth #12 days of fanfics #pjjg series #pjjg fanfic #jason grace #annabeth chase

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superman86to99 · 3 years

Photo

Superman #84 (December 1993)

Superman takes a short Paris vacation! Like, one day short. What's the worst that could happen?

Oh, man.

So, for the past few issues, we've been hearing about children being abducted in Metropolis. Now we see that they're being kept inside a giant toy house by some creepy bald man in Quasimodo clothes who seems to be obsessed with toys -- a "Man of Toys," if you will. Side note: no wonder the children haven't been found... all the articles about them are just gibberish! (See clip below.)

The kidnapper thinks that these kids' parents don't deserve them, and that they're much better off here, in an underground hideout with a man who threatens to starve them if they don't play with him. (And I do mean literally play, with action figures and stuff.) Meanwhile, as these children cry for help, Superman is having the time of his life. While helping move a stranded ship with some huge-ass chains, Superman spots a sunken galleon with a treasure chest inside and fantasizes about keeping the booty...

...before turning it over to the authorities anyway, the big boy scout. Then, he wakes up Lois at 6 AM and tells her they should go to Paris right now, which usually means your significant other is having a mental breakdown, but in this case they can actually do it. And so, after deciding that he deserves to use his powers for fun every once in a while, Superman and Lois drop everything and fly to France with super-speed for the rest of the day/issue.

Anyway: back to the child abduction! Cat Grant and her son Adam attend a Halloween party at Adam's school, but there's a disturbed weirdo in a hideous costume lurking among the crowd. Yes, I'm talking about Jimmy Olsen in his Turtle Boy suit.

Shortly after that, a guy in a dinosaur costume (see, all the creeps are dressed as reptiles) lures Adam out of the party with the promise of "superb video games." What child could resist that? Of course, that turns out to be the kidnapper and Adam ends up in his hideout along with the rest of the missing children and, worst of all, not a single "Lextendo" console.

The kidnapper gets angry at Adam when he refers to the toys at the hideout as "old-fashioned junk" (he was REALLY looking forward to those video games), and even angrier when Adam tries to free the other kids. Adam is brave and puts up a good fight, but...

And those were Adam Morgan's final words. "Uh-oh."

Next, we have a pretty harrowing scene of Detective Turpin letting Cat know Adam’s body was found, and Jimmy and Perry White taking her to the morgue to identify the body (most people probably wouldn't bring their former boss to something like that, but Perry sadly knows more than most about losing a kid). As for Lois and Clark, they were gone so long that the Daily Planet had time to print a headline about the murders. The issue ends when the lovebirds walk into the office smiling like two people who just spent the night fooling around in Paris... only to feel like jackasses when they find out what happened.

To be continued!

Character-Watch:

And that's it for little Adam Morgan who, unlike the also tragically diseased Jerry White, didn't even get any post-death appearances. Adam went from a little kid scared of Superman, to a huge brat, to a character who was approaching likeability as of last week. That's why I hate it when DC kills off young characters like Adam or Liam Harper: in long-form storytelling, children represent potential. Look at how much Wally West or Dick Grayson evolved over the years compared to their mentors! Sure, there's a huge probability that Adam would have ended up disappearing from comics for 25 years anyway, but who knows, maybe we'd now know him as Teen Gangbuster or something. GangbusTEEN.

This issue also represents a turning point for the kidnapper, who is never named or seen clearly in the story itself but I don't think I'm shocking anyone by spoiling the fact that he's Toyman (it's in the cover, for one thing). In his last two appearances before this storyline, Toyman helped Superman save some kids from Sleez and looked genuinely sad to learn about Superman's death, so this is a pretty dramatic change for the character. We'll find out why he went from big softy to child killer in Superman #85 (but don't get your hopes up).

Plotline-Watch:

The most disturbing part of the issue, all things considered, is still the part where Toyman climbs into a giant crib and hugs a huge stuffed bunny. Look at serial killer Tommy Pickles here:

Don Sparrow says: “Even with the upgrade, Toyman is still just a man in a suit, a common complaint about Superman’s rogues gallery.” Funny you should say that, because I JUST shared an old Wizard interview in our Twitter in which Dan Jurgens talks about how Doomsday came out of his frustration with the fact that most Superman villains are dudes in suits (plus other interesting tidbits from the era, like how it was actually Roger Stern’s idea to bring back Hank Henshaw, so check out that link!).

Don again: “The entire Superman storyline of this issue feels like filler. Diving for buried treasure and soaring off to Paris -- it all feels like wasted time next to the Adam storyline.” I have a theory that the entire ship sequence is there as an excuse to put Superman in those big chains and make that Spawn joke (which I didn’t get until now, since I’ve always read this issue in Spanish).

Superman says that pulling that big ship was "a little easier than expected" -- that's either another hint that there's something going on with Superman's powers since he came back, or a subtle dig at the state of American ship manufacturing.

Another adorable "window tap" scene for the books, and this is the sexiest one so far. Is it me or has Jurgens started copying more than just Teri Hatcher's hairdo from Lois & Clark? (For anyone who thinks Lois has gotten implants, I refer you to this clip.)

While in Paris, Lois asks Clark if he's ever wondered what would happen if his rocket had landed in other countries. Don: “Clark’s conversation with Lois sounds like a bunch of concepts for Elseworlds stories. We eventually would see a Russian Superman, and a British Superman, but not yet the French Superman. (Hire us, DC!)” Yep, got my French Superman pitch ready, Jim Lee. Or just let us do Russian Superman again, since Red Son wasn’t even the first time you published that idea.

Don once more: “Another thing that makes no sense about the ‘new’ Toyman is his resentment of technological toys—when in previous appearances he himself had deadly high-tech toys to vex Superman over the years.” I especially resent his hatred of video game consoles. Incidentally, I wonder what types of games are available for Adam’s beloved Lextendo. Star Lex 64? Mega Man Lex? Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles & Lex?

No one is more upset at Lois and Clark for going AWOL than Whit. NO ONE. He's so furious that his usually grey mustache turned black.

Patreon-Watch:

As always, shout out to our patrons, Aaron, Murray Qualie, Chris “Ace” Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, Samuel Doran, Bheki Latha, Mark Syp, Ryan Bush and Raphael Fischer! Last month’s exclusive Patreon article was about the recently unearthed sequel to Superman 64 for the PlayStation, featuring Metallo, Parasite, and Lois looking even hotter than in this issue:

Hot damn. Find out more at https://www.patreon.com/superman86to99!

And believe it or not, Don Sparrow has even more to say about this issue. Read his section after the jump:

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

I should start off my section with a big caveat: I flat out hate this issue. There were several weird decisions made in the post-Death-and-Return era (most of them along the same lines of making the Superman titles more grim-and-gritty), and this story was one of the worst of them. My theory is that, despite the praise and record-breaking sales of the Death and Return storyline, the Superman creative team felt pressure to have more extreme storylines, perhaps in response to the wildly successful Image books coming out at the time. Between this story, and the upcoming “Spilled Blood” storyline, the Super books take a hard—but temporary--turn into more violent and upsetting storytelling—even though these stories are by the same writers as the previous few years. While death has always been a part of comics, and Superman comics was no exception, there is a jarring glibness and unfeeling toward the way violence is handled in these pages that is quite different from the stories that preceded it. It’s made all the more jarring by the fact that well-established personalities suddenly veer wildly out of character, Toyman chief among them.

We start with the cover, and while it is technically well-drawn (by the familiar team of Jurgens and Breeding) it’s also a very upsetting visual. I think they should have gone with the pieta type pose with Adam and Superman, OR the scary badass bowie-knife Toyman (who apparently has a Cheshire cat smile now) but not both. But the cover is a good hint at the tonal dissonance of the comic within.

We open with a splash of the now-extreme 90s looking Toyman, with his serial killer shaved head and spooky cloak, ignoring the pleas of hungry kids he has locked up in a tiny jail cell for days at a time (if that sentence doesn’t ring alarm bells for how wrong this is for a Superman story, I don’t know what will). For much of the issue Toyman’s eyes are obscured by glare on his lenses, further de-humanizing a character who was once one of Superman’s more empathetic bad guys.

We cut to Superman tugboating a huge tanker with giant chains and it’s a cool visual (one repeated in the Batman V Superman film). It feels especially out of place to focus on, given how upsetting this issue is otherwise, but throughout the whole comic, Lois is drawn smoking hot, especially on the two page spread on pages 9-10.

The scenes depicting the actual murder, while still wildly out of place in a Superman comic, are well done, and give a real sense of darkness and menace, which I suppose is the intent. Perhaps my least favourite visual is the Big Bird stuffie, silently bearing witness to what’s about to occur.

The edges of the panels on get more slashy and off-kilter (to me, looking very much like the layouts more typically seen in Image comics of the day) and I suppose I appreciate the restraint of how little Dan Jurgens shows of the death of a child, showing only a bloody slash on a black background. This is still a pretty baroque image for a Superman comic, but certainly less violent than it could be, given what is happening.

Cat Grant’s silent horror is well staged, and powerful in its way. Lastly, Clark Kent bending in sorrow and regret is a powerful image.

While this issue is handled marginally better, and more maturely than other comics on the shelf at this time, I still believe it is one of the biggest mistakes of the era. Giving a long-established character an unceremonious death for shock value is gross on its own, but making it a child definitely crosses a line for me. Making it worse is that, while the Toyman is a criminal and a killer, he has shown in past issues (a similar kidnapping storyline involving Sleez) that he genuinely cares for the well-being of children. So for a long-time reader, this also felt like a betrayal of a long-established, fully developed character. Adding to the ugliness of this is that Adam dies heroically, trying to free the children who have been caged, unfed, for days, but even in that regard, he fails. The headline at the end of the issue confirms all the children are dead. Adam’s death did not buy the other kids enough time to get away. It was all for nothing. Had Adam died, but the other children lived, maybe this issue wouldn’t leave quite as bad a taste. [Max: It’s weird because it’s all told in a way where it’s told in a way where it would make sense, narratively and within the story universe, that the other kids survived, but then it’s almost casually revealed that nope, they died too. A scene of one of the kids relaying Adam’s heroism to Cat in a future issue would have gone a long way.]

Superman doesn’t come off well in these pages, either. It’s honestly the type of story they should just stay away from, because the more you think about all the calamity that is going on around the clock, the less defensible the whole Clark Kent persona becomes. Superman carving out time to romance his fiancée directly led to the preventable deaths of innocent children—how do you come back from that?

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

I’m always looking for hints that perhaps Jimmy or Perry know Superman’s secret identity deep down, and Jimmy’s anger at Lois and Clark on their return to the Daily Planet offices would seem to give that theory some credence, as he’s as angry at them as if he knew Clark really were Superman. Either that, or he’s ticked that it fell to him, and none of them to escort Cat into the morgue. [Max: Has this issue finally converted you to the “Jimmy is terrible” side now, Don?]

I don’t think I’m the only one who disliked the new Toyman—SPOILERS BE HERE: years later, in Action Comics #865, Geoff Johns retconned this whole story, reverting Schott into the criminal who over-relates to kids, rather than the child-killer of this story. Apparently the infantile Schott, who speaks to “Mother” a la Norman Bates, is a robot so lifelike it fools even Superman, and the “Mother” he’s constantly replying to was the real Winslow Schott trying to recall the malfunctioning robot. [Max: That’s one Geoff Johns retcon I really didn’t mind, even if it felt kind of derivative of his similar “all the Brainiacs are robots made by the real Brainiac” reveal.]

#superman #dan jurgens #josef rubinstein #toyman #cat grant #adam morgan #dan turpin #whit #gangbusteen #super luthor fighter ii turbo championship edition

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hotdadslade · 4 years

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DC’s Failed Shared Continuity

This is a subject that I see touched on a lot but not really addressed, so I wanted to break it down.

DC’s core comics (That is, Batman, Superman, Justice League, etc, and not the elseworld style books like DCeased or White Knight) are generally understood to be happening in a shared continuity. That is, what happens in one book reflects in the other. The series cross over, because they take place in the same universe.

Only that isn’t true anymore.

There are a lot of plot holes that don’t really make sense, but that isn’t what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the fact that DC has absolutely no timeline, the absolute glut of events happening in and out of main books, and the fact that each DC comic is effectively its own universe, rather than shared between it.

I’m going to address the following examples, just to give people an idea of what’s going on and exactly what I mean when I talk about a shared continuity:

The fact that Alfred Pennyworth’s funeral happened before he died.

The fact that Bruce Wayne was in at least three places at once at the start of Perpetua’s invasion.

DC’s insane event schedule through 2019.

The lack of impact events are having with the readers, such as the fact that fact that the entire of South America went to war, China engaged in mass orgies, and the entire of Britain stared at the sky for days on end and almost no reader has heard about it.

City of Bane’s complete lack of impact in the larger DC universe

And last but not least: Why does this matter, and where does DC go from here?

Alfred’s Funeral is before his Death:

Alfred Pennyworth dies during City of Bane. We see his funeral in Pennyworth: R.I.P., where we see the family come together and share stories before immediately getting into a slap fight over it.

This unquestionably happens after City of Bane, because City of Bane is when Alfred died. Despite this, Ric is still around:

That little note in the bottom left makes it clear that this happens before Nightwing Annual #2.

The majority of Annual #2 is a flashback, but it specifically ends with the Court of Owls telling Cobb (that is, Talon) that Dick will soon be his, and telling him to move in. This happens in Nightwing 63, when Cobb shows up (aided by Apex Lex’s gift), and starts screwing with Dick’s life. I’ll skip over the most of it: what matters is that Talon brainwashing Dick Grayson appears the same night Perpetua’s symbol appears over the city (in Nightwing 66 and a number of other issues), Dick attacks the Nightwings, fights Condor Red, and then is freed from the mind control all in one night.

Which is great. Except this can’t happen after Alfred’s death, because the symbol of Perpetua (which appears everywhere at once) appears over Gotham during City of Bane (in Batman 81):

So we have one event happening simultaneously in Nightwing and Batman, only one happens before/during Alfred’s death, and the other supposedly happens well after.

Which leads us into...

Batman apparently can be everywhere at once

So up above we have Batman 81. Bruce is, at this point, in the city rushing to beat Bane when the symbol pops up.

Here’s the symbol popping up in Detective Comics (1014) while fighting the Freezes (the city, I’ll note, is normal Gotham at this point, not controlled by Bane):

Bruce is in Paris (in theory, after his coma) in Outsiders #6, and then arrives back in Gotham just in time for the symbol to appear in the sky in issue 7:

Even just while researching this, I realized that it happened in other issues too. The symbol appears in the sky in Batman/Superman issue 3 while Bruce is being attacked by the infected:

It also happens in Justice League, but I can’t be bothered to get pages.

This is all taking place in a shared universe, so the fact that there’s three or four different Bruce’s in three or four different books who are all doing completely different things in different areas is... baffling. DC has always played a bit fast and lose with Detective Comics and Batman, rarely defining which is happening first or what their exact order of events is, but this takes it a step beyond that.

It also leads into...

DC has how many events? and What happened to the infected?

2019 was a year. Specifically, it was the year of the Villain, but it really should have been year of the event, because DC had so many events happening almost concurrently that it was impossible to figure out what was going on when.

You had Heroes in Crisis running from late September 2018 to May 2019 (acknowledged in Batman, Flash, Green Arrow, Red Hood, and Titans, but largely inconsequential and rarely referenced again).

Year of the Villain itself spanned the whole year, with two dedicated series (YoTV and YoTV: Hell Arisen), a huge Justice League arc (14 issues!), literally dozens of tie in issues in main books, and 8 oneshots focusing on specific villains and their upgrades.

This also tied into The Infected storline, where the Batman who Laughs infected six heroes and sent them out into the universe to torment people. This, too, got a number of oneshots and tie-in issues.

You had Event Leviathan, a six issue series which then got a spinoff and soon a sequel through the second half of 2019, which promised to ‘stretch across the DC universe and touch every character’, which has been, outside of Action Comics (which spun it off), a complete non-entity.

You also had Doomsday Clock, which launched all the way back in 2017 and only finished in late 2019. This was intended to ‘impact the entire DC universe’, with the idea that when the series ended, the rest of the continuity would catch up to it and you’d see the repercussions. It’s effectively been rendered non-canon, taking place outside the universe in a single line in Justice League.

So many things were happening, and they were all stressed as extremely important, but when the chips were down...

Most of them weren’t.

Half the Villain upgrades went away with the blink of an eye (Black Mask hasn’t shown up since his oneshot, and Riddler threw his retirement out in favor of being cRaZy in Batman). Heroes in Crisis had almost no affect. Event Leviathan is waiting on its sequel, having meant almost nothing despite the fact that an entire country was taken over. Doomsday Clock is now effectively out of canon.

Many of these (mostly YOTV itself) lead into the Death Metal event happening now, but that’s the thing: they only lead into that. There’s minimal acknowledgement of those events happening in other books. Even when huge things that should be impossible to ignore happen, they have minimal to no effect on the wider continuity. When is Death Metal happening, in continuity? No idea. What about the infected arc? What about Justice League?

Who knows? DC doesn’t seem to.

Which leads into the finale, the great big ‘are you kidding me’ moment:

Remember that time hundreds of thousands of people died, the whole of South America went to war, and China descended into mass orgies?

No?

Neither does anyone else.

In Wonder Woman issue 50 (and some issues around it), a series of dark gods emerge from (you guessed it) the dark multiverse. Each takes control over a single country, enacting their dark bidding.

(Brief Suicide CW in the description below)

The goddess of war causes the entire of South America to literally go to war, invading and murdering each other. The mob god causes the whole of Britain to walk outside and stare up at the sky, not eating or drinking until they started to drop dead. A god of indulgence causes the entire of China to engage in bacchanalia, which is effectively a frenzied orgy of celebration and dancing. The nameless god has taken over Saint Petersburg, causing those within to commit mass-suicide impulsively.

And of course this has been happening world wide. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands are dead. We see shots of other places - mass murder in the streets of Hong Kong, for example.

We actually see other heroes in this. The whole arc actually starts with Supergirl fighting Diana, and then while she's briefly out of commission, the Justice League (Bruce, Arthur, Barry, J’onn, Victor, and Kendra) show up to help only to get absorbed by the big bad. That’s when the above panel happens, and then even more heroes get thrown at the problem.

In the end, Diana ‘wins’ - by sacrificing her brother Jason to the Dark Gods. The gods return the Justice League, and undo the damage they’ve caused on Earth. Those dead aren’t actually dead, for example. Time gets rewound... partially. We see the Justice League who only partially remember what happened, but the damage around the area is still there.

This should be, by any metric, a huge fucking deal. Literal gods appeared from the multiverse and fucked over huge chunks of the planet. Hundreds of thousands died and then were, in theory, un-killed. The heroes are aware of this, and have at least partial memories.

And yet it’s never acknowledged.

This is supposed to be a huge event. The stakes literally could not be higher, and yet I’ve never seen this arc even acknowledged in any other book. This isn’t even a unique thing, either: all of New York (and most of the world) flooded in Doctor Fate and no one noticed outside that book.

So what about City of Bane?

But by far the most significant example of this is City of Bane itself. City of Bane was a huge event. Some of the top selling issues of 2019 were the City of Bane issues. It received numerous ads in other books, as well as major attention. It was the culmination of Tom King’s entire run, and lasted for more than half a year. It involved Gotham taken over by the titular Bane, ruling it with an iron fist and using mind-controlled villains as his own personal police force. It was a huge, game-changing event.

And outside of the pages of Batman (and Gotham City Monsters), it might as well not have happened. Any time it is acknowledged, it’s in the most awkward and confusing manner possible.

Batman and the Outsiders, Issue 6, Bruce is in Paris, Alfred gets a callout from Ra’s, and calls Bruce home:

Bruce immediately gets on a plane and flies home, landing at the end of issue 7 when the Perpetua symbol goes up.

In issue eight, taking place immediately after, we are lead to believe that the entire City of Bane arc happened in between Bruce flying home from Paris and arriving in time to help:

This is far from the only example. City of Bane tends to be acknowledged exclusively in terms of ‘this issue takes place before City of Bane’ editor notes. The only real thing that gets acknowledged is Alfred’s absence: Detective Comics skips over City of Bane entirely (The YOTV issues taking place before, and then going straight to ‘after), Red Hood and the Outlaws ignores it, and Batgirls acknowledgement is effectively skipping City of Bane itself to go right back to talking about ‘cleaning up the city’ with a one line mention of ‘what Bane did to Gotham’. Plenty of other books either don’t mention it at all, or the mention is so minor I completely missed it.

So why does this matter?

Early on in my time in this fandom, I noted that the more a fan is into DC comics (not the fandom, but specifically the comics), the more they’d hate the comics themselves. This extends beyond what most people on tumblr would consider the ‘fandom space’ - I’m talking reddit, league of comic geeks, comic review sites, etc. The fact is that DC has created a scenario where the more you read their work, the worse it gets. Any individual comic from the examples above reads just fine on its own, but when you read multiple comics you start getting confused about why nothing makes sense. There’s no order to things, no continuity. Things are said in one issue and ignored in the next. Major events are trumpeted as changing the status quo but don’t change a thing. DC is actively pushing away their most dedicated readers, the ones who are going out and buying 5+ issues a week.

So what comes next?

The original reason this all came up was the news that DC’s upper editorial staff had been hit with major layoffs. While nothing yet has been confirmed (this happened only three days ago), the general rumors is that DC is going to be majorly cutting back the number of titles. With Death Metal almost certainly heralding a continuity reboot ala Flashpoint, now is the perfect time for DC to figure out what it’s doing with its continuity, and realistically, they have two options.

Option One: Forsake Shared Continuity.

I’m sure a lot of people would hate this idea, because shared continuity is such an intrinsic part of DC’s history, but looking realistically at sales numbers, there’s some major appeal. There’s far less work to it (important with the loss of their editors), and this isn’t to say all the books will be separate, just that they won’t all be inherently linked. Maybe they keep TEC and JL in the same canon. Maybe Nightwing, Batman, and Batgirl share too. The point is, though, that the fact that Gotham is burning to the ground will no longer reflect on Clark, who is apparently just out of earshot with his thumb up his ass doing nothing.

There’s precedent for this as well. Injustice, DCeased, Criminal Sanity, and White Knight are all stories in their own world that are selling (or have sold) extremely well. DC’s top fifteen issues sold for January to March of this year include seven issues of Batman, one issue of Wonder Woman, one issue of Flash, and then two issues of Unkillables, the Robin 80th oneshot, Strange Adventures (its own continuity), and an issue of Batman: Curse of the White Knight. If you go farther down, it’s more of the same - you have to go through every issue of Curse of the White Knight released, as well as Criminal Sanity, to get to Batman/Superman, Detective Comics, Justice League, and Superman.

I’m not sure this is the best choice, but I can’t imagine it’s not an appealing choice just the same.

Option Two: Fix Shared Continuity.

Without question, DC’s going to be (at least temporarily) paring down the number of books they have, and there’s never been a better time for figuring out what’s going on with their continuity. Less books means less to organize. A reboot and one very determined editor could help establish a baseline to work from, but that would require DC to focus on it as a priority.

I’m sure this is the choice most people will lean for, but it’s definitely the more intensive option, and we can only hope DC decides it’s worth it.

#analysis #dc critical

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galaxina-the-pyro · 4 years

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Candace Against the Universe Predictions

Note: This is MY LIST of possible outcomes that can occur in the movie - they may differ from what your predictions are, and that’s okay. This was just made for fun.

(~)

Doofenshmirtz and Isabella’s duet (which, yes, they ARE going to have a duet in the movie, this was confirmed) is going to either be a rap battle, or a song about the two having to work together to solve a problem (I really want it to be a rap battle)

Doofenshmirtz’s reasoning for having a rivalry with Isabella stems from the fact that he doesn’t want a child telling him what to do - by the end of the movie, though, he grows to respect Isabella

Isabella might remind Dr. D of Vanessa when she was her age

Phineas and Candace have an emotional argument about how Candace would rather live on a planet without her brothers than go back home where everyone is concerned and stuff - this leads to Phineas saying they never should’ve come to rescue her and things get really emotional after that

Phineas, Ferb, and the gang listen to some of Doofenshmirtz’s backstories during the trip, and are immediately fascinated by them - they don’t doubt a single tale, but it leads to them asking a lot of questions that never get answers

Phineas, Ferb, and Doofenshmirtz build an inator together

The big bad villain of the movie (if there is one) creates a doomsday machine meant to destroy any planet that goes against his/her people’s way of thinking (the entirety of Earth included), and Doofenshmirtz saves literally everyone by installing a self-destruct button on it, which the main villain accidentally presses

Candace and Vanessa get kidnapped at the same time rather than separately

Perry somehow someway has a musical number in all this - somehow, he sings something, possibly in his head

Doofenshmirtz shares his stories about how he keeps getting beaten up by a platypus to the other kids, and these are the only stories that Phineas and the others don’t quite buy, since, you know, platypuses don’t do much - Doofenshmirtz ALMOST name drops Perry before something happens that totally interrupts him

There will be at least ONE Phinabella moment - at LEAST

Before getting kidnapped, Candace gets the impression that Jeremy is going to break up with her for either not showing up to the game mentioned in the preview, or possibly ruining the game in her attempts to bust Phineas and Ferb

Phineas’ present shown in the preview was for Candace, possibly on another day where he and Ferb are trying to make amends to her for something that probably happened previously - this present is brought with them on their trip to save Candace, and Phineas is determined to give this gift to her

The unknown gift is what makes Candace cry (again, that’s been confirmed to happen in the movie as well), and makes her realize that she can’t live in a world without her brothers, no matter how insane they are

Candace sees that weird imaginary zebra that calls her Kevin, and he actually gives some sound advice - or not. Either way he has a speaking role

The aliens attempt to sacrifice Candace (and probably Vanessa) to some kind of god/goddess

Isabella is trying to earn her “Space Travel Rescue” patch in this movie - she also earns several other space related patches

Isabella’s patches are brought into question by Doofenshmirtz, which probably starts the conflict between them as Isabella attempts to prove she can do literally ANYTHING she sets her mind to - however, he still ends up questioning them, not because he doubts Isabella’s abilities, but because he wonders why anyone would want to earn patches involving shrimp net repair, sap collecting, and other nonsensical accomplishments. He also questions how there are space-themed patches and WHY

There is a sad, cute song in this movie, and I will stand by that

Candace befriends an alien - this alien may or may not be the main antagonist of the movie, but said alien shares in Candace’s frustrations over not being taken seriously, not being appreciated, and having her “hopes and dreams” dashed by younger siblings

We learn the NAME of Phineas and Candace’s biological dad, which is, coincidentally, Lawrence - a different Lawrence to be sure, but still, his name is Lawrence, probably to hammer in to fans’ heads that their bio-dad doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things

Isabella’s dad has a speaking role

Irving was GOING to be a part of this adventure, but was inevitably left behind - they gang once in a while mentions him, acting like he’s there when he actually wasn’t

Phineas actually snaps at Ferb or Isabella or whoever about saving Candace, being super worried about her and stuff - he apologizes immediately

Ferb ends up having another uplifting speech, that dissolves into a wave of frustration as he goes to destroy the aliens that kidnapped his sister

Phineas, Ferb, and the gang find Perry in space - no one questions how he got there, not even Doofenshmirtz. Maybe Candace and Vanessa do but they stay quiet

Vanessa learns that Perry’s family is the Flynn-Fletcher’s

Candace and Vanessa have a duet

Monogram constantly interrupts Perry on his adventure, leading to Perry eventually throwing away his communicator - he feels a sense of freedom that is brief upon getting a new one when he gets home

Schnitzel gets a cameo

No she doesn’t. That’s not actually possible. This was a test to see if you actually read this

There’s a “death scene” in this movie, but the character who “dies” is okay

Milo’s brief presence in the movie inevitably is what causes the events to play out

Candace, Vanessa, and Isabella all sing a song together

Buford ends up using the canoe (that he carries throughout the entire movie, that was also confirmed) for everything except for what a canoe is supposed to be used for

Buford has an “I am so in love with her right now” moment (if it’s with Vanessa, Ferb ends up Vulcan Pinching him for seemingly no reason)

There will be a very touching Canderemy scene

The alien that teams up with Phineas, Ferb, and the gang plus Doofenshmirtz either turns traitor, or makes a noble sacrifice in order to ensure their safety

The alien is probably the younger sibling of the alien Candace befriends

Meap has an appearance in the movie, whether it’s a cameo or him playing a very small part in their overall adventure

After returning to earth Doofenshmirtz claims he’ll never go to outer space again, but then suddenly gets a sense of foreboding as Milo and Melissa walk passed him from far behind, hinting at certain events in Milo Murphy’s Law

Weird Al has a musical number in this movie (not Milo. Just Weird Al)

There’s a montage on when Phineas, Ferb, and Candace were much younger (bonus points if younger Isabella appears in this montage at least once)

Phineas, Ferb, and the gang sing a song together (probably about the power of friendship or something, I dunno)

One of the characters keeps saying space puns and drives everyone crazy (I’m voting on Phineas, but Buford is also a good contender for this, probably a better one in fact)

Phineas and Ferb both cry in this movie

There are nods to Isabella and Baljeet’s heritages (cuz I think that would be neat)

The Fireside Girls help the gang out from Earth, much like in the episode “Out to Launch”

In fact, all the episodes involving Phineas and Ferb going into space are mentioned in this episode - one such mention gets a “but that hasn’t happened yet” response from Ferb

Phineas, Ferb, and the gang end up getting captured

There’s more than one epic fight scene in this movie

One of the items that caused the possible disaster at the “big game” mentioned in the preview was the very t-shirt canon that Candace uses to fight off the alien invasion

Isabella ends up nearly admitting her feelings to Phineas when the gang are in a deadly situation with seemingly no way out - they’re either rescued by Doofenshmirtz or Candace

At the end of the movie (probably post credits), although the aliens are defeated, they end up abducting Thaddeus and Thor’s sister, Mandy - instead of helping her, they decide to go play video games

Baljeet has a musical number about the probabilities of them being able to save Candace (which is very slim); Phineas and the others keep being positive while ultimately ignoring Baljeet’s warnings

Somehow, Klimpaloon makes an appearance; we ALL know the Giant Floating Baby Head is gonna appear, so what’s the point?

Doofenshmirtz and Vanessa have a very sweet father-daughter moment (maybe one that hints at Doofenshmirtz’s future reformation, but I dunno)

Vanessa and Norm also have a sweet moment, as the reason why she was captured was because Norm is considered her younger brother, much to Doofenshmirtz’s chagrin

Vanessa and Ferb talk to each other once in this movie

Vanessa and Monty are dating in the time frame of this movie - whether Monty actually shows up in the movie or even should show up in the movie, I dunno

Isabella teases Ferb about his crush on Vanessa before he shoots back about her crush on Phineas - all while Phineas is standing there, completely oblivious

Phineas and Ferb actually have an argument

Phineas has a Candace moment. I dunno what that would look like, but that’s what I wanna see

The couple with the wife who’s like “What did you think a(n) [insert specific thing] was going to fall from the sky?” make an appearance

Isabella gets lost in Phineasland at least once

At the end of the movie, business goes back to usual - Candace attempts to bust the boys and fails, but she’s surprisingly cheery about it, probably saying something like “Ah~...home sweet home.”

The movie ends with the guitar riff, like in any Phineas and Ferb episode

#phineas and ferb #candace against the universe #catu #predictions #catu spoilers #phinbella #phinabella #canderemy #ferbnessa #montessa

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velvetdestroya · 4 years

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A Vigil, On Birds and Glass. I woke up this morning still dreaming, or not fully aware of myself just yet. The sun poked through the windows, touching my face, and then a deep sadness overcame me, immediately, bringing me to life and realization- My Chemical Romance had ended. I walked downstairs to do the only thing I could think of to regain composure- I made coffee. As the drip began, in that kind of silence that only happens in the morning, and being the only one awake, I stepped outside my home, leaving the door open behind me. I looked around and began to breathe. Things looked to be about the same- a beautiful day. As I turned to step back into the house I heard sound from within, a chirp and a rustle. And I noticed a small brown bird had flown into the library. Naturally, I panicked. I knew I had to see the bird to safety and I knew I had to retain the order of things in our home, and he very well couldn’t take up residency with us. I chased him (still assuming he was a he) into my office, where I have these very large windows. Just then, and luckily, I heard Lindsey’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and naturally being composed as she is, she grabbed a blanket and stepped into the office. He was impossible to catch, and I began to open the windows, via Lindsey’s direction, only to find out they were screened. The bird began to fly into the glass, over and over and in all different directions. Smack. Smack. Smack! I heard another set of footsteps, Bandit’s, running down the stairs in anticipation of the new day. Her entrance into the situation caused just the right amount of chaos (she was very excited to meet the bird) and we found ourselves chasing the bird into the living room. Knowing that this where it could potentially get sticky, being the high ceilings and the beams to perch on, I opened the front door as Lindsey did her best to encourage our new friend out the door. After some coaxing, flying, chirping, a wrong turn back into the library and a short goodbye to Bandit, he simply hopped out the front door- taking off on the fifth leap. We cheered. I was no longer sad. I didn’t realize it, but I stopped being sad the minute that bird had come into my life, because there was something that needed doing, a small vessel to aid and an order to keep. I closed the door. I decided to write the letter I always knew I would. It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. I have always felt that the art I have made (alone or with friends) contains all of my intent when executed properly, and thus, no explanation required. It is simply not in my nature to excuse, explain, or justify any action I have taken as a result of thinking it through with a clear head, and in my truth. I had always felt this situation involving the end of this band would be different, in the eventuality it happened. I would be cryptic in its existence, and open upon its death. The clearest actions come from truth, not obligation. And the truth of the matter is that I love every one of you. So, if this finds you well, and sheds some light on anything, or my personal account and feelings on the matter, then it is out of this love, mutual and shared, not duty. Love. This was always my intent. My Chemical Romance: 2001-2013 We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us- Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope. Fatalism. That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit. To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll. I wasn’t shy about who I said this to, not the press, or a fan, or a relative. It’s in the lyrics, it’s in the banter. I often watched the journalists snicker at mention of it, assuming I was being sensational or melodramatic (in their defense I was most likely dressed as an apocalyptic marching-band leader with a tear-away hospital gown and a face covered in expressionist paint, so fair enough). I’m still not sure if the mechanism worked correctly, because it wasn’t a bang but a much slower process. But still the same result, and still for the same reason- When it’s time, we stop. It is important to understand that for us, the opinion on whether or not it is in fact time does not transmit from the audience. Again, this is to protect the idea for the benefit of the audience. Many a band have waited for external confirmation that it is time to hang it up, via ticket sales, chart positioning, boos and bottles of urine- input that holds no sway for us, and often too late when it comes anyway. You should know it in your being, if you listen to the truth inside you. And voice inside became louder than the music. Now- There are many reasons My Chemical Romance ended. The triggerman is unimportant, as was always the messengers- but the message, again as always, is the important thing. But to reiterate, this is my account, my reasons and my feelings. And I can assure you there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor. There wasn’t even a blaze of glory in a hail of bullets… I am backstage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It is Saturday, May 19th, 2012 and I am pacing behind a massive black curtain that leads to the stage. I feel the breeze from the ocean find its way around me and I look down at my arms, which are covered in fresh gauze due to a losing battle with a heat rash, which had been a mysterious problem in recent months. I am normally not nervous before a show but I am certainly filled with angry butterflies most of the time. This is different- a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive. My pupils have zeroed-out and I have ceased blinking. My body temperature is icy. We get the cue to hit the stage. The show is… good. Not great, not bad, just good. The first thing I notice take me by surprise is not the enormous amount of people in front of us but off to my left- the shore and the vastness of the ocean. Much more blue than I remembered as a boy. The sky is just as vibrant. I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong. I am acting. I never act on stage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless- trying to shake it off- but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade. All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say. What it said is between me and the voice. I ignored it, and the following months were full of suffering for me- I hollowed out, stopped listening to music, never picked up a pencil, started slipping into old habits. All of the vibrancy I used to see became de-saturated. Lost. I used to see art or magic in everything, especially the mundane- the ability was buried under wreckage. Slowly, once I had done enough damage to myself, I began to climb out of the hole. Clean. When I made it out, the only thing left inside was the voice, and for the second time in my life, I no longer ignored it- because it was my own. There are many roles for all of us to play in this ending. We can be well-wishers, ill-wishers, sympathizers, vilifiers, comedians, rain clouds, victims- That last one, again, is important. I have never thought myself a victim, nor my comrades, nor the fans- especially not the fans. For us to adopt that role right now would legitimize everything the tabloids have tried to name us. More importantly, it completely misses the point of the band. And then what have we learned? With honor, integrity, closure, and on no one’s terms but our own- the door closes. And another opens- This morning I awoke early. I quickly brushed my teeth, threw on some baggy jeans, and hopped in my car. I gently sped down the 405 through the morning fog to a random parking lot in Palo Verde, where I was to meet a nice gentleman named Norm. He was older, and a self-proclaimed “hippie” but he also had the energy of Sixteen year old in a garage-rock band. The purpose of the meeting was the delivery of an amplifier into my possession. I had recently purchased the amp from him and we both agreed that shipping would jostle the tubes- so he was kind enough to meet me in the middle. A Fender Princeton Amp from 1965, non reverb. A beautiful little device. He showed me the finer points, the speaker, the non-grounded plug, the original label and the chalk mark of the man or woman who built it- “This amp talks.” he said. I smiled. We got coffee, talked about gold-foil pickups and life. We sat in the car and played each other music we had made. We parted ways, promising to stay in touch, I drove home. When I wanted to start My Chemical Romance, I began by sitting in my parent’s basement, picking up an instrument I had long abandoned for the brush- a guitar. It was a 90’s Fender Mexican Stratocaster, Lake Placid Blue, but in my youth I had decided it was too clean and pretty so I beat it up, exposing some of the red paint underneath the blue- the color it was meant to be. Adding a piece of duct tape on the pick guard, it felt acceptable. I plugged this into a baby Crate Amp with built in distortion and began the first chords of Skylines and Turnstiles. I still have that guitar, and it’s sitting next to The Princeton. He has a voice, and I would like to hear what it has to say. In closing, I want to thank every single fan. I have learned from you, maybe more than you think you’ve learned from me. My only regret is that I am awful with names and bad with goodbyes. But I never forget a face, or a feeling- and that is what I have left from all of you. I feel Love. I feel love for you, for our crew, our team, and for every single human being I have shared the band and stage with- Ray. Mikey. Frank. Matt. Bob. James. Todd. Cortez. Tucker. Pete. Michael. Jarrod. Since I am bad with goodbyes. I refuse to let this be one. But I will leave you with one last thing- My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too. Because it is not a band- it is an idea. Love, Gerard

(Source Rock Sound March 25, 2013) [photo credit; ashley bird]

#mcr #my chemical romance #my chemical romance the end 2013 #geray way goodbye letter to fans 2013 #it is an idea #my chemical romance can never die #mcrmy #killjoys #gerard way

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azwriting · 4 years

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The Only Hope (Forget Me Please, Kylo Ren x Fem!Reader) - Chapter Two

A/N: FUCKING FINALLY!!! I’m so sorry that this took so long, life got a little crazy and yeah. But I think im back in business so yay! Anyways here’s chapter two, we are still in Rey’s POV but next chapter we will finally start delving into who’s under the mask ;)

Also! I know Ben took his lightsaber and turned it into the cross guard one, but for the sake of my imagination and this story he just made a new one... Let me know if you want to be added to the taglist! Feedback is always appreciated ;)

Summary: The Resistance Three try to convince the mysterious Jedi ally to aid them in the fight against Palpatine. All while Rey begins to piece together some of the Jedi’s hidden past.

Warning(s): Me retconning TROS, a made up species, angst, a moment that feels like Reylo but its not, Finnpoe rights baby

Word Count: 4658

“The dagger’s translation gave the coordinates for Kef Bir, we informed the General of where we were heading and she insisted we come here, to find you.” Rey finished explaining, her eyes darting across the faded and worn mask in search of any sort of response. All she found were stone cold eyes locked forward, observing the three of them. The woman was not even surprised to hear Palpatine had somehow survived and if she had, she showed no sign of it. If it had not been for the quick and overpowering assaults she had thrown at Rey earlier, the young Resistance fighter would have assumed she was a statue or perhaps a protocol droid.

The four of them sat around a small unlit chamber, in the dead center of all the huts above. There had been small villages on Jakku, ones that were primitive and rural, but this was entirely different. The forest moon of Endor was silent, no one passing through since the end of the old war. No trade, no work, no nothing. The planet appeared deserted in a sense. One would grow to suspect it held a secret, as does every corner of the Galaxy, but Rey suspected this secret was far greater than what her eyes could see.

Finn and Poe sat stiffly unsure of the ally while Rey was just dumbfounded. She had been led to believe that all the Jedi, besides Master Skywalker, had died in the destruction of the new Jedi Order at the hands of Kylo Ren. Yet the woman across from her wielding not one, but two lightsabers proved otherwise.

Had this woman even been present at the Jedi temple? If so, how had she survived? How did General Organa know her? What did the purple kyber crystal represent? Why was her face hidden behind a mask? What was her name? Rey had far too many questions and nowhere enough answers. Nor did they have the time…

“Kef Bir?” The woman inhaled sharply, her posture straightening. Her head dropped down for a moment before the emotionless eyes met their gaze once again. There was a quick gleam of emotion hidden in them, but Rey could not read it. The subtle reaction made her nervous though, what was awaiting them on Kef Bir?

“I don’t know how I’ll be of help there.” She was right, Rey did not know what to expect there or if they would even need the Jedi’s help, but Leia had sent them here. Rey knew this ally was of importance, she could feel it through the Force, and Leia had known this too. The woman in the mask was strong with the Force, it flowed through her like a vivacious stream. It was why the forest moon had felt so utterly rich when she had first arrived, the mask creating it all.

Although Rey could still feel an abundance of energy, that felt far away as if it had been hidden behind a thick black cloak, hidden from plain sight. She was unsure how to describe it, but it felt distant, out of reach, guarded. Despite whatever Rey felt, it was clear that the last Jedi could be of tremendous help in whatever they faced.

“I don’t know either, but General Organa knew we’d need help and she sent us to you, you may be our only hope to prevent Palpatine’s Final Order.” Rey confessed, a gentle plea evident in her tone. She could not defeat the vile Emperor herself, many had tried and failed in doing so. The mask stood abruptly, eyes narrowing down at her.

“I’m nobody’s last hope, I’m sorry but I can’t help.” She moved to leave, but Poe caught her upper arm and roughly yanked her back. Sharp eyes turned back to glare at him in disbelief over his sudden actions, but Poe ignored it.

“Why? Why won’t you help?” The woman tugged her arm free and took a cautious step back, but Rey suspected it was so she did not harm the pilot, not the other way around.

“It’s just an endless cycle. I was born into a Galaxy still healing from the Empire and I’ve lived long enough to see something take its place.” The woman winced inwardly, eyes playing an endless amount of suppressed horrors. “You may defeat Palpatine and his Final Order, but what about the First Order? What about the next ones seeking total power or the ones after that?”

Her questions had them all looking off in thought. The Resistance was barely equipped to stop the First Order, how would they continue to prevent others from attempting to rise and suffocate the remaining freedom out of the Galaxy? It was an easy answer, one that left a bitter aftertaste in their mouths, they would not. “The Galaxy will never know peace, I’ve accepted that.” The somber tone that slipped into the modulated voice caused Rey to question if this woman truly had accepted such a dreary fate. The blank (Y/E/C) skipped across each of their faces before resting on Rey’s. “It’s time you do too.”

The woman spun on her heel and was quick to leave. The three Resistance members watched in silence, in disbelief, a look of stupor on their faces. Why would General Organa send them here if this ally would only refuse to help? There was only so much time before Palpatine released his doomsday upon the Galaxy. Rey’s stomach twisted at the sinking in reality, how was she supposed to save the Galaxy alone? Kylo would only want to assume the position, the vacancy the Emperor would leave behind and the woman refused to help, chalking it up to an already doomed attempt. They would be alone in this fight and they would lose.

Rey was truly as alone as she had been on Jakku.

The peculiar sound of birds chirping broke through the silent forest. The mysterious ally froze mid stride, head snapping up to the thick lush tree coverage. Rey’s eyes followed, searching for the source of the sweet call. The sound reminded her of a much softer, sweeter, musical rendition of the wind chimes constructed from useless scavenged parts that she had had hanging inside her small home on Jakku. When the rare dry breeze of the desert swept through the interior of the fallen AT-AT walker, the rusted parts would clink together and fill her ears with a choppy noise that signified to her that one day she would find her belonging. Her already twisted stomach dropped at the realization that she had not found that belonging yet, not with the Resistance nor with the ways of the Jedi.

The chorus continued on for a moment longer before slowly dying off leaving the forest and the four of them surrounded by an uncanny stillness. With the absence of the melodic sing-song of the birds, Rey pondered if the sound served as the same hopeful reminder to the lonesome Jedi. With the unwavering rigidness of the woman’s stature, Rey began to believe it did.

“Wait-” Poe started before cutting himself off. He hummed the melody of the birds to himself over and over again until his narrowed eyes lifted with confusion. “That was the call of the Dalae.” He announced, head snapping back to look at Rey and Finn.

“Okay and you know this why?” Finn questioned lifting his one eyebrow, unsure where his significant other was heading with such odd information and how he knew it. Rey was curious too, especially as to why the pilot felt compelled to inform them of such a thing now when their only possible assistance was leaving.

The woman was still frozen in place though, but her head now held onto the moist and moss covered ground. The Force swirled around her as she seemed to be focusing inward, her hands clenching and unclenching as she grappled with some internal conflict. Whatever this bird was, the harmony it had emitted greatly unsettled her.

“When I was undercover on Kijimi posing as a Spice Runner to obtain intel on the First Order’s weapon dealings, I had a lot of spare time. Read a lot.” Poe explained stepping closer to the two. Rey was still reeling in the fact that Poe had been a Spice Runner even if it was to help the Resistance. She was even more baffled that he had not told her or Finn about this covert mission. “Educated myself on various species across the Galaxy and the Dalae bird was one of them.”

As he moved closer, Rey did not miss the way the mask discreetly peered over her left shoulder at them. Even in a state of concentration, she still was aware. Although with multiple points to focus on, her once hidden aura started to bleed through, revealing her state of mind to Rey. She was anxious, tense, and something else Rey could not put a finger on. The woman’s body trembled slightly, the thin hairs on the back of her neck stood up, goosebumps erupting across the rest of her skin despite the layers she wore. Her heart was racing and over the quiet hum of the forest, Rey could hear the distorted and labored breaths that escaped the mask.

Fearful… the word bounced around Rey’s already cluttered mind as she came to the conclusion as to what the other emotion that had seeped through to her was. The woman who had single handedly taken her down with an unforeseeable and unparalleled skill was scared? What did she have to be fearful of? Was it them and their uprooting of her life here in this forest? Was it the looming and imminent threat of Palpatine? Or was it the past that was hidden beneath the fading paint of the mask and the barrier of two crossed lightsabers? Rey was not naive, she knew the mask hid more than a face, but she was unsure as to what.

As quick as the Jedi’s aura had slipped through, it disappeared. In an instant, Rey felt the overpowering emotions retract with the simple action of tightening a clenched fist. Besides for her curling fists, the woman was still locked in place fighting her inner turmoil, one Rey could not decipher.

“Okay Babe, this is great that you educated yourself about this stuff, really it is, but I don’t think now is the best time to brief us on all your bird knowledge.” Finn attempted to terminate Poe’s somewhat delirious ranting, something Rey had begun to tune out. Perhaps the injury he had acquired on the Star Destroyer was beginning to get to him.

Poe only shook his head in defiance, he was never one to back down from expressing himself, especially when he believed it to be of dire importance. Whatever he knew of this bird, the Dalae, Poe knew it was essential to share and be heard. No matter how inopportune the timing was…

“The Dalae bird is only native to one place and I’ll give you a hint it’s not the forest moon of Endor…” Poe trailed off, eyes skimming the surrounding trees for the incongruous bird.

“What do you mean? Where is it from?” Finn probed, his thick eyebrows furrowing once again. Rey’s did as well, but she remained silent. Her mind was a whirling disaster filled to the brim with possible catastrophes, her newly illuminated origin, and the hopes of saving a dying religion. She did not have room to digest the curiosity behind a migrating species.

“The Nayli countryside.”

Rey’s eyes snapped up, the stories she had heard over the course of the last year replaying in her mind. The General had told her many stories of how she used to visit the quieter countryside, Nayli, when she could spare time away from the fragile rebuilding of the New Republic. “Of Chandrila?”

Poe nodded reading her visible shock, “Yes. So what is a bird only native to a planet in the Core Worlds doing in the Outer Rim?” Rey and Finn exchanged a look, Poe was right. What was it doing out here? Especially a bird from the former capital of the New Republic. The former home to the General, Han, and their son…

Their internal inquiries were soon brought to a screeching halt though. “Let me get my things and then we can be on our way.” The three Resistance fighters spun to face the direction the modified voice had called to them. The woman now stood tall, hands unclenched, and head locked straight forward on them. She nodded rapidly confirming her words more to herself than to them before she took off back towards the small huts. Three pairs of eyes followed her, neither one fully processing the meaning of her statement. The Jedi would be coming with them Rey realized, she was going to help them. Perhaps Leia had been right to send them here.

Rey watched as the woman launched herself off the dirt ground and landed onto one of the many hovering bridges, only to disappear into a small hut to her right. As the small wooden door closed behind the body of green and brown fabrics, Rey began to ponder why the sudden change in the ally. The woman had been reluctant to help, seemingly accepting the inevitable defeat against Palpatine and his new Empire, but something had changed. As a cool breeze swept through the surrounding woods, the leaves brustling loudly in the trees up above, Rey recalled the terror that had frozen the ally in place… all beginning with the call of the Dalae bird.

Ewoks were… not what Rey expected. As she leaned against the rough bark of a towering tree awaiting for their new companion to return, she finally caught a glimpse of the legendary warriors who fought in the Battle of Endor. Yes the tales had spoken of a small indigenous tribe that had aided the Rebels, but the young scavenger had never realized it referred to their stature. Details like such often disappeared as the stories spread across the Galaxy. For Maker’s sake she had thought Luke Skywalker, the Jedi, and the Force were all a myth. Yet, it was all true and she had become a part of it as she embarked on her own journey.

Rey witnessed as the woman, her face still obscured by the mask, emerged from her small hut up above. Even walking on swaying lumber bridges, the ally moved with an indescribable grace and balance, features that bled through into her fighting style.

The ally bent down before two Ewoks and even though she was beneath them, Rey could still hear bits of dialogue. Although they spoke in Ewokese, a language Rey did not understand, she remained silent and eavesdropped as the three conversed. As she listened Rey could not help but wonder how long the woman had been here and why she was here in the first place. It was clear she was the only human on the moon, but it seemed like that had been a purposeful choice. Rey had been left all alone as a child, sold and abandoned, it was hard for her to imagine someone consciously making the choice to be alone. It was the one thing she never wanted to be…

“Protect.” A single word in Galactic Basic slipped through the cracks in the bridge, a word uttered by the mask. Rey focused back onto the three above and found the Ewoks to be nodding before the woman abruptly stood back to her full height. With one swift jump, the Jedi descended down towards Rey just as she had done when they had first stumbled upon the small village. The ally landed perfectly on her feet just a few steps in front of Rey, (Y/E/C) eyes focused as always.

“Where are the other two?” She alone had stayed to wait, Finn and Poe returning to the Falcon to prepare for the next stop on Kef Bir. Her voice sounded on edge, but it was possible to be just from her descent or the heavy modification of the mask. Although Rey noted the way the eyes bounced around the surrounding bridges in apprehension.

“They went back to ready the ship.” Rey answered and the woman’s chest collapsed as she let out a large exhale. What was she so fearful over? The ally was very guarded, unwillingly to trust anyone. A hand shot out and gestured for Rey to lead the way and silently the two women began their trek back to the Falcon, leaving the Ewok village behind.

The quiet fresh air of the moon encompassed them on their walk as well as total silence, but Rey could not help but glance over at the woman every so often. With such a close proximity, one where they were not attacking each other, she could not assimilate the overwhelming energy that flowed from the other Jedi.

Three words echoed through her mind and Rey shuttered. The three words had been spoken to her once during her attempt to reach out and connect with the Jedi of the past. Now they haunted her mind and plagued her sleep, never leaving her conscience peacefully. As she looked to the Force user beside her, Rey wondered if the woman knew how to help. The idea was quickly squandered, the voice had told her to restore it, it was solely up to her.

A glimmer of light reflected up and into Rey’s eyes, making the young woman wince slightly. Her brown eyes looked down and caught sight of the two lightsabers strapped to the side of the woman’s hip. One hilt was a darker gray durasteel with a black handle and the other was a silver durasteel with blue, purple, and orange coloring near the emitter. It was strangely familiar, the all silver one, something she had seen before in a dream.

Before her voice of reason could object to the impulse that flared up within, Rey’s hand hastily reached forward for the saber. As the tip of her fingers grazed against the cold hilt, flames bloomed behind her eyes and screams flooded her ears.

With a heavy gasp, Rey stumbled back in terror. The high morning sun sunk into the horizon being replaced by the pitch black night sky, full of a plethora of stars. The tall dense trees that surrounded her plunged to the ground revealing an open plain filled with small huts. One hut in front of her had been destroyed, crumbled into just a pile of rubble. Rey’s chest tightened and she felt a wave of nausea overcome her at the sight of it. It deeply unsettled her, made it feel as if something crawled up her cold and damp skin. Deep down she knew where she was, what she was looking at, but she was unwilling to believe it. She had just been on Endor how had she gotten here?

Screams broke through her disorientated state, pulling Rey away from the ruined hut. Off in the distance stood a grand temple surrounded by stone statues and pillars, a large dome in the center of the sacred framework. Her lips parted in shock as she realized the temple was encased with thick tendrils of fire. Even from where she stood Rey could hear the desperate pleas for help. She raced towards the flames before she could even think to command herself to move… it was as if something else entirely controlled her.

Dashing through the tall grass, Rey rushed towards the people in dire need of assistance but her attempt to help was quickly stopped. Long arms hooked around her waist, yanking her back and into a strong hard chest. The lightsaber she had not been aware of slipping through the fingers of her dominant hand.

“No Rey, I can’t lose you too!”

Rey’s blood ran cold, goosebumps erupting across her skin as if she was back on Starkiller base in her scrappy scavenger attire. She knew this voice, knew the desperation woven into the words, it haunted her dreams too. Twisting in the tight embrace, she turned to face her impediment.

Flushed chest to chest, Rey looked up to find frightened watery eyes looking down at her. She knew these brown irises and the hints of green speckles that were hidden in them, she knew the eyes of Ben Solo. They were filled to the brim with sadness, fear, and pain. She had seen these emotions in his eyes before; after he had killed his father, in the hut on Ahch-To, and when he had taken off his mask before her on the Star Destroyer. Yet, she had never seen them like this before; with traces of love interlaced in them.

“I tried to, b-but the fire’s too strong.” He choked out. His breathing was ragged, he was scared, and looking down at her as if she was the only thing that could save him from the torment inside. Fresh tears escaped his eyes and trickled down his ash covered face, his lips trembled as they parted and his whole body shook against hers. He was shaken to core and desperately seeking comfort, her comfort. “I never-” Ben stuttered out but his voice cracked with despair. “I didn’t want this.”

The fire behind felt like an afterthought as Rey reached upward and pressed both of her palms to Ben’s dampened face. Slowly she stroked soft comforting circles onto his skin and he let out a breath of relief. “I know. I know you didn’t but Ben! We need to help them!” The words that slipped from Rey’s mouth were not her own. Her actions were not her own. No, it was as if they were preordained, done by another through her.

The cries for help only seemed to grow and Rey snapped out of the trance that Ben had put her under. She struggled against his secure grip, feeling the undeniable cool durasteel of a saber pressed against her back despite the kiss of heat from the fire that licked up her back. She needed to help, she could not turn her back on them.

Ben’s arms suddenly released her and Rey felt the warmth of one of his palms press against her cheek. Her face was wet, she was crying as well. They were both in agony over something she did not know, something she had never experienced.

With a sharp inhale, the night faded away and the sun of Endor fell back into its rightful place in the sky above. Rey’s gut twisted as she tried to comprehend it all. She knew that she should not have touched the saber, she had learned that on Takodana what felt like a lifetime ago. But, she could not focus on that, not with what she had seen and experienced. Rey had not been there for the fall of the New Jedi Order, she had not been stopped in her attempt to help the other students, but someone else had been.

Rey’s eyes lifted up and away from the silver lightsaber to find the woman watching her intently. Traces of long buried pain surfaced in the tears pooling in the last Jedi’s magnetic eyes. “That lightsaber…” Rey’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “It belonged to someone else.” She did not dare say his name, pain that was not hers seemed to blend into her own making her heart wrench. The ally shuddered in response, tears slipping down into the depths of the mask.

“Why would you have his saber?”

As the question left Rey’s mouth, it dawned on her what she had encountered when touching the lightsaber, his lightsaber. It was a memory, the woman’s memory. She had experienced the heartbreaking night from the woman’s perspective that was why she had had no control over her actions and words. The ally and him had been close, the Force flowing strongly through them both, forging an uncanny connection. It had felt like life itself…

Rey’s eyes widened and her mouth grew dry at the realization, “You’re- you’re his balance.” Their fight only a short while ago came to mind and the familiar movements of the Jedi. She was all confident strikes, agile deflects, her attacks lying somewhere between the cross of a graceful dancer and feral animal. A way she had only seen Kylo Ren move.

The woman’s eyes narrowed swiftly and she stepped forward. Her stature was imposing as she looked down at Rey, making her feel as if she was a young scavenger again who had not brought back satisfactory parts for Unkar. “No, you don’t know anything. Those padawans are dead. There is no balance.” Her words were harsh and brimming with vulnerability just as her (Y/E/C) eyes were. As if her thoughts had been heard, the woman’s hand sprung up and closed her visor, locking away the only window into her soul Rey had. The mask quickly pivoted and stalked away, heading for the Falcon.

Rey stared after her, mentally digesting everything that had just happened. Kylo had said his balance had died and that was why the Force had connected them, her power being the only one to match his. Yet, this woman was very much alive, brimming with Force sensitivity, and hidden away in the forest of Endor. A fact the Supreme Leader did not know and Rey knew that was intentional. The woman and him had been close, she could sense it, could see it in the way he looked at her the night of the fire. Ben had looked at her with such compassion, held onto her with such need, stopped her from running into danger. The memory, the woman’s memory, replayed in Rey’s mind and she could now see that it had not been her hands touching Ben’s face, not her voice speaking to him, not her name that he had called out in fear.

“No (Y/N), I can’t lose you too!”

“Your name, I heard him speak it.” Rey called after the Jedi, the woman who’s name she now knew. She was uncertain as to why she felt compelled to tell her of her insight, maybe because the young Resistance fighter wanted to prove that she did in fact know something. It was an unwise decision though, to provoke such a powerful Force user.

The ally ceased in her steps, swinging back around with such ferocity, Rey gulped. With the visor closed all she could see was her reflection in the mask. The helmet was cold and distant without the small opening, reminding Rey of a Stormtrooper, or a Knight of Ren, or even Kylo himself… an enemy. This woman was not supposed to be her enemy, no they were allies, brought together by the General and perhaps even the Force.

“And if you were wise, you wouldn’t.” The woman instructed, voice nothing but hostile. She turned once again and left, heading towards the direction Rey had appointed.

Touching the saber and revealing a piece of her buried past had struck a nerve in their already defensive ally. Turning her from guarded and reserved to cold and bitter. Rey’s eyebrows furrowed, she had touched Ben’s saber and saw a memory from the woman’s perspective. She had to be the balance Kylo spoke of, Rey could still feel the phantom attachment the two had in the past. A bond…

Like she had been caressed by a ghost, a chill bit up Rey’s neck as her mind began to repeat the three words the Force had spoken to her months ago. The three words the Force had whispered to her as she searched for a balance. Only when she would repair it then balance could be found within the Force. She had believed that the Jedi could help her in restoring what she had to, but what if this woman, (Y/N), was one half of the broken piece?

Taglist: @2heures @thephantomwriter @thefandomzoneisdangerous @carol-chann @gambitsqueen @pancakefancake @zaneholtzwrites @moonprincess003

@siren-queen03 @dixonsbugaboo @keithseabrook27 @minluc @vampgguk @nhievyenne @robindoesntloveme

#kylo ren #kylo ren x reader #kylo ren x fem!reader #kylo ren fanfiction #ben solo #ben solo x reader #ben solo fanfiction #ben solo x female reader #star wars series #star wars fanfiction #star wars imagine #Adam driver x reader #azwriting

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fc5holidayexchange · 4 years

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An Inconvenient Longing

T- Rating: mentions of violence.

Hey, hey, Happy Holidays! My beta and I had to co-write some of this, especially the end, because I was running a fever for most of the last two weeks. I hope this is okay.

Rook first thought Joseph Seed only referred to his brothers and counterfeit sister as his family. Father, after all, was a common enough title for a priest. None of the Seeds used social media but some members had profiles hiding in strange little corners of the web. Yet, as the investigation wore on, those rare profiles disappeared. The idea filled Rook with a strange longing to delete their own profiles. What had one of the audio files of Seed's sermons said again?

Our family does not live in the digital cloud, or some bullshit.

Yet, like most mildly inconvenient things, Rook shook the longing off. Marshal Cameron Burke made it even easier to shove the feeling into the back of their mind. A kind description of Burke would be 'dedicated to his job'. Rook mentally deemed him a self-important asshole the moment he waltzed into the station. Still, someone had to arrest the guy.

The strange longing didn't strike Rook again until a few days into the Resistance. As they scouted the Durbman Marina one night, they caught sight of a female cultist kicking a vending machine. Although his gentle whisper could barely be made out over Mrs. Durbman's irate words, a male cultist reacted with strange familiarity. "Sister, calm your wrath, please. What would the Father think?"

The two looked nothing alike, didn't even pass as the same race. Rook watched as the woman relaxed into the touch. They didn't catch her response over the sound of their own heartbeat. They fled the scene, and tried to squash the longing. True, Montana was not Rook's home. The other deputies and Whitehorse were not their family. The other fighters were barely even friends. Still, Rook had a job to do.

Learning new skills became the easiest way to distract themselves. Want to lure a Peggie away from a hostage? Blow up a car nearby. Bow hunting? Well, Rook didn't consider themselves to be much of an outdoors person but ammo and food didn't buy themselves. Want to learn rock climbing? Sure, grappling hooks can be useful. Those ridiculous stunt courses some local hero set up? Why not!

It didn't take long for Rook to start traveling alone. They cleared entire outposts without alerting a soul. The missions turned into a twisted but soothing routine. First, survey the area, choke someone out, drag their body to a dark corner, loose an arrow at someone else, turn off the alarms, and call in the Resistance. Rook suspected that they'd need therapy after this violence but that inconvenient line of thought got pushed down with the longing.

Of course, the Seeds didn't let Rook do this undisturbed. Jacob called it 'playing soldier' and threw them into a red-tinted world of horror. Pratt, poor, downtrodden, equally broken Pratt, told them they shouldn't have come. Boy, did they believe it. Fleeing the north made sense. Faith pulled them into The Bliss twice. Images swirled in Rook's head. The Marshal's leap. Jackalopes. Joseph's Vision. The world covered in ashes. No, not ashes. Nuclear. Fucking. Fall. Out.

Oh Lord, the Great Collapse.

They moved to into Holland Valley. It only took a few interrupted baptisms, complete with drowned VIPs, and exploded silos for John to take notice. Rook's own baptism came with Bliss sparkles and too little oxygen. They stopped drowning VIPs after their escape.

The people of Fall's End did great things to squash the longing. Welcoming folks, with warm flannel and lukewarm beer. Boomer, a trusty old dog, became Rook's constant companion. The Spread Eagle turned into a place that felt like home. Rook saw themselves fitting right in here, when the dust and gunpowder settled. Not a Montanan by blood or upbringing, but by sheer grit.

It all changed when John took Rook again. It should have been straight forward. Get out, preferably quietly, and get back to Fall's End and Boomer. Rook prepared to jump a man kneeling for prayer. Unfortunately, the longing had other plans. The prayer, a simple 'help me accept these people', struck deep. Despite the fact that these people were doing evil, this one man had nearly pure intentions.

Rook didn't mean to cry. They went from a crouch to sitting awkwardly on the floor like a child.

The man startled and grabbed his baseball bat. "Hello?" Then, just like that, he was squatting in front of them. "Aren't you the Junior Deputy?"

Rook nodded once.

"My name is Eric. Is Rook your name or just something the sheriff's department calls you?"

"It's my first name, yeah. I picked it myself," they croaked.

Eric took a deep breath, straightened up, and offered his hand. "Let's get you back where you belong before John becomes too wrathful. You'll have to confess to trying to escape."

Rook nodded and followed behind Eric. They ignored the staring eyes of the other Peggies until they got back to the torture room. John came bursting through the door they were about to enter. "Brother John, I found Rook."

Rook watched, fascinated, as the televangelist facade slipped onto John's face. Before he could say anything, they blurted out, "My sin is Envy."

John smile turned dark. "Confessions are private, Brother Eric."

"Good luck, Rook." Rook stepped back into the blood soaked room with John. The door slammed and Rook flinched.

"We'll have to do this on the floor, Deputy, since you destroyed your chair. Sit."

Rook found a spot that was mostly dry and sat ungratefully. With their shirt collar ripped, the room felt cold. "What happens now?"

John knelt beside them with a roll of duct tape. "Legs out straight. I need to make sure you won't escape. You must reach Atonement."

Consenting to it all felt strange. John quickly cocooned Rook's legs in tape, like some redneck mermaid. Unlike Eric, there was no compassion or affection in John's eyes. He seemed excited as he moved his equipment to floor level. The light shined painfully in Rook's eyes. "This isn't meant to be comfortable. Let's start at the beginning."

"Well, I said my sin was Envy."

Rook should have expected the smack but it still stung.

"I mean your beginning, dear Deputy."

***

It took hours of punches, smacks, and swallow cuts for John to accept Rook's rather undramatic life story as truth. He examined everything for truth. Yes, their birthday really was Christmas. No, there's no deep reason why they aren't close to their retired parents anymore. Yes, they'd legally changed their name to Rook when they were 22 and stupid just because they wanted to. Weren't you a lawyer John? Those things are public record. Fuck, there wasn't even a noble reason they moved to Montana and joined the Sheriff's Department. It was just a job. They were pretty confident they had never spoken about themselves that much. Everything hurt, seven their throat. Satisfied, John stood. "Now, why Envy?"

Through their sore throat, they whispered, "I envy the Project's sense of community." The room fell into a tense silence. Rook closed their eyes, expecting a kick.

"Why is that a sin, Deputy?" Since they closed their eyes, they only felt John push the ripped fabric of their shirt aside and the tattoo gun buzz to life. "Come on now, open your eyes."

Rook didn't. "Because there's a community in Fall's End that isn't a brutal, murdering, doomsday cult?" The attempt at snark came out weak, with a questioning tone that turned into a painful cough.

"No, Deputy, try again. Surely you can figure it out." The buzzing temporarily stopped. "Hold still. It's not supposed to be only an E."

Rook took a deep breath to stop the coughing fit and raced through every impression they had of the cult and John. What did he want them to say? It was the truth. In those moments of profound loneliness, they could have gone to the jail, or the Whitetail Milita or talked to Father Jerome instead of the dog. As far as they could tell, it was an honest confession. They opened their eyes.

John sighed, then stood again, walking back his tool bench. "Deputy, Deputy, Deputy. Should we add pride as well?"

"Joseph does disappointed better than you." A familiar flash of anger crossed his features, like the moment he almost drowned them. Inspiration hit and the lie tumbled out. "I should have said yes. I could have turned myself in at any time. What I wanted was right there and I was too prideful to say yes. Instead, I fought against what I wanted."

"Are you going to say yes now, Deputy? Will you work towards Atonement?"

"Yes."

***

Rook came out of that bunker with three tattoos: Envy, Pride, and Wrath. John explained the last one for them. "You don't kill that many people without being fueled by anger, Deputy." They hadn't expected to come out at all. Waiting for the Collapse in a cell in an abandoned missile silo seemed fitting somehow. Yet, Joseph wanted to ensure a genuine conversion. Rook moved into the Invidia dorm on his little island with only a single radio announcement of their conversion.

Before returning to the island, Rook assumed Joseph's compound housed some of the elites. Instead, it housed everyday Peggies. Devout, yes, but they weren't major players. The only thing they seemed to have in common was a need for Joseph's direct attention. Many beds were empty. On duty elsewhere or dead, Rook didn't dare ask.

A certain familiarity coursed through the compound. Everyone knew everyone's name. Rook expected the Peggies to use all sorts of cruel nicknames for their newest convert but instead 'sibling' slipped out.

Like he did with most people, Joseph called Rook his child, and, more surprisingly, little lamb. Rook's role appeared to be following him, just like Mary's lamb. Rook wasn't extra security, even though they were trained. They weren't allowed weapons. Part of their conditions of atoning for wrath, according to John. Rook didn't understand why Joseph wanted them near. Part of them longed to know but it terrified them

By day three of prayers, sermons, and the random things like gardening, canning, and laundry, Joseph realized Rook wasn't speaking. The group that didn't have guard shifts were eating lunch. Most sat around a picnic table. Those with prominent Sloth tattoos stood. "I watched the play back of your confession, my child. Did I miss the part where you took a vow of silence?"

It took a moment for Rook to catch that he was teasing. "I--I'm sorry?" A rather unfortunate voice crack and a cleared throat later, they tried again. "I'm sorry. I've never been super talkative. I work alone, usually."

"You aren't alone now," a Peggie said. "You have us."

The words, the lie, slipped out naturally. The longing for it not to be a lie bubbled up but they squashed it. "And I'm thankful for it. I just need time to process this."

"Of course you do." Joseph's sympathetic smile seemed almost genuine.

Things fell into a routine. For two weeks, things stayed peaceful. Rook even let themselves smile and relax around Joseph and the cultists. Simple touches stopped making them flinch. Joseph let them work alone with the others while he prayed. Rook helped wherever they were needed. Weapons were still, regretfully, off limits. Rook understood why, but the lull in action made all the inconvenient thoughts simmer on the surface.

Then, Faith's body washed onto the compound's boat dock. An attempt to take the jail must have gone horribly wrong. Rook had to shut down the part of their brain that enjoyed investigation. Instead, they watched Joseph mourn. Joseph filmed the eulogy alone, just the two of them and a camera on tripod.

Rook stood awkwardly near the door of the Church. "My children, a seal has been open."

Rook quietly stepped outside the church, leaving Joseph to his broadcast. Sitting on the floor, or in this case, the ground, had become an unexpected past time. Rook at for as long as was reasonable and then returned to work.

No new Faith took the mantle but Rook briefly wondered if Joseph meant for them to take the job. He never broached the topic. Joseph withdrew, spending more and more time praying and fasting in the church. Rook made themselves indispensable around compound.

Rook consciously recognized the moment they started believing in the coming Collapse. While waiting for some freshly and taking a break in some shade, it dawned on them. The government didn't react to a Federal Marshal going missing or an entire county going off the map. Hope had decommissioned missile silos. Was that information declassified? Was Hope a target?

Joseph appeared seemingly from nowhere. "My child."

"Father. Forgive my sloth." Rook got to their feet.

"You see now."

"I do." It felt like another confession but they couldn't force out an apology. Something bad coming didn't excuse the kidnapping and murder. Their eyes went to the fence around the property. Despite the longing, they were technically a prisoner.

He did that strange forehead touch. "Child, I have news. Sheriff Whitehorse and Marshal Burke are dead. They were beyond saving."

"Oh." Rook blinked. They expected some inconvenient feelings but nothing came up. It was as if they'd been made blank. "I was only a Deputy for a few months, Father. And, this is an unchristian to say, forgive me, I didn't particularly like Burke. We'd only just met."

"I assumed they were your friends."

"No, Father." Rook didn't feel the need to explain further. "I didn't belong there."

"Do you see where you belong now?" Joseph asked.

"Here?" That longing, inconvenient as it was, surged. Shame came along with it. Murderers, kidnappers, thieves, and Rook wanted to be one of them. Although they would never admit it out loud, they'd been interested in the cult from the beginning.

"Yes, my child. This is your home."

Rook sank into the feeling, the longing finally gone.

#Gender Neutral Junior Deputy #Joseph Seed #John Seed #found Family if you squint #Alternate Universe: Canon Divergence #alternate universe: Rook joins the cult #i implied that the deputy was Non-Binary but it's not directly expressed #a little angsty!#submission #gift: fic #tw: violence #tw: mentions of torture #fandom gift

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unfolded73 · 5 years

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How Do We Get Back (13/16) - schitt’s creek ff

Summary: In a literal alternate universe where the Roses escaped financial ruin, David and Patrick struggle with loneliness and a sense that something isn’t right. A chance meeting in New York and a terrible tragedy drive them to question whether the timeline they are on is the right one.

This chapter is explicit, 4k words. (ao3)

_____________________________________

Chapter 13

Patrick was drifting, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, thinking about the nature of orgasms.

For a long time there had been two kinds of orgasms that he had first-hand experience with. There was the masturbatory kind, which he took care of in a perfunctory, utilitarian way when he felt like the needs of his body were distracting him from something more important, like schoolwork or practicing the guitar or a good night’s sleep. Quick and harsh, a tight fist and hand lotion and his brain carefully blank while he was doing it, just an efficient, neural shortcut to a little burst of pleasure, then a quick cleanup and it was back to whatever he’d been doing before.

Then there were orgasms from sex, where quick and harsh wouldn’t cut it, but where again he shied away from thinking too much about what he was actually doing. It felt like a job, being skilled enough at sex that his partner wouldn’t have any complaints. And he was happy that he could please another person, he was, but it left little room for the work his brain needed to do in order to find that neural shortcut. A lot of the time, he never got there. When he did, it was underwhelming, to say the least.

If those experiences were like weakly flickering light bulbs, then being with David was like a supernova.

Patrick did things for David, touched him and sucked him and fucked him, not because of an obligation to be competent at sex but because he wanted to. No, want was too small a word for what he felt — he was starving, he was aching to do those things for David. And orgasming with David didn’t take effort; it was inevitable — it was simply impossible not to be swept along to that heart-stopping conclusion, so intense sometimes that he felt like he barely stayed conscious.

“What are you grinning about?”

Patrick slowly opened his eyes and looked over at David. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Nope.”

“I was thinking about orgasms, if you must know.”

David hummed in a way that said, Oooh, I’m intrigued, tell me more.

“Also I was thinking that as much I’ve enjoyed this weekend of hardly leaving the bed, I do have to go to work tomorrow. Will you be okay on your own for the day?”

Looking offended, David said, “I’m not a child.”

“No, of course you aren’t. But I don’t know if being alone is necessarily the best thing for you right now.”

“I’ll read a book. Or maybe, I don’t know, take a walk.” Patrick raised an eyebrow; David going for a walk without a destination in mind seemed a bit out of character, but there were likely hidden depths of David’s character that Patrick hadn’t seen yet. He was excited to learn them all, every facet of David’s personality, every quirk and annoying habit.

Whoa, slow down, he thought to himself. Just because David had chosen to lean on him in this time of mourning, it didn’t mean he was thinking in terms of a long-term relationship. Just because they’d spent most of the last two days in Patrick’s bed, learning each other’s bodies, didn’t mean David was falling in love with him. For the first time, Patrick realized how in danger his heart really was. And that perhaps it was too late to do anything about it.

“What’s wrong?” David asked.

Realizing his face was betraying his thoughts, Patrick relaxed his features. “A walk sounds like a good idea.”

~*~

“This place is cute,” David said, the grimace on his face saying he thought it was anything but.

Patrick looked at the local bar through David’s eyes: televisions tuned to a variety of sporting events, signed hockey jerseys mounted on the walls, wide-board wooden floor and tables with decades of initials carved into them.

Giving him two firm claps on the back (“You’ve got such straight boy body language,” David had once said), Patrick grinned at him. “Come on, I promise you’ll have a good time.”

Dennis had invited them out, having no doubt heard through his parents or perhaps just through the town rumor mill that Patrick had a guy staying with him. Between the other tenants in Patrick’s building and the people in the bookstore and coffee shop that David had visited over the last few days while Patrick was at work, Oak Grove was almost certainly churning with news that little Patrick Brewer had a boyfriend.

Not a boyfriend, Patrick reminded himself, although with every day that David didn’t return to New York, it felt more and more difficult not to name him so. David had been in town a week now, and with every day that passed it seemed more impossible that the day would come when this would be over.

Patrick spotted his cousin at a table near the bar and he steered David over.

“Hey, man!” Dennis said, up and out of his chair and hugging Patrick before he quite understood what was happening. He didn’t particularly remember Dennis being a hugger, but he went with it.

“Um, this is David,” Patrick said simply. Dennis reached out and shook David’s hand enthusiastically, as if being introduced to a man that Patrick was in an unlabelable romantic relationship with was a normal thing that didn’t require remarking upon. Which, maybe it didn’t.

They fell into easy small talk; it turned out that Dennis had a lot of opinions about music and so did David, and Patrick could just sit back and watch another member of his family welcoming David into the fold. When Dennis suggested they play darts, David didn’t want to play but he seemed content to serve as Patrick’s one man cheering section. And when Patrick won and got a kiss for his efforts, he tried not to let it show on his face how overwhelming it was, the simple fact being out in public and sharing casual affection with a boy he liked.

Ash brought over their third round of drinks themselves, as things at the bar had started to slow down.

“Ash, dude, what’s this I hear about you moving away?” Dennis asked.

They shrugged. “I’ve got some people in Norway that, if the world is ending, I’d prefer to ride out the apocalypse with,” they said, collecting and stacking empty glasses.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said, “‘if the world is ending’?”

Ash gave him an impassive stare for a second. “Have you read the news recently?”

Patrick frowned. He hadn’t, really. He’d been too busy with David to give any thought to the outside world.

“To the people living in any particular time, it always seems like things are the worst they’ve ever been. It doesn’t mean you need to go join a doomsday cult in Norway,” Dennis said.

“There it is, cults again,” David said, making Patrick raise his eyebrows in surprise. “I swear I keep hearing things about cults these days.”

Dennis chuckled. “I mean, between climate change and so many of the world’s governments being taken over by dictators, maybe it’s not surprising that people are turning to mass protests and weird religions.”

“We saw protesters being arrested at the airport in New York,” Patrick said. “A lot of them.” He felt embarrassed that he’d let the event slip his mind entirely.

“The violence has only gotten worse in New York the last few days,” Ash said, looking annoyed at them for being so uninformed. “They’ll probably have to shut things down like they did with O’Hare and LAX.”

“I’m sorry, shut what down?” David asked, his voice rising in pitch.

“The airports. There have been so many threats of terrorism that they can’t afford to keep those airports running. I’ve got a flight out of Toronto to Heathrow in three days, and I’m praying that things don’t get too bad before I can get on that plane.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Patrick asked no one in particular.

“The world is falling apart, man,” Ash said. “And the old gods are in ascendance.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I read that Neil Gaiman novel,” Dennis said in a way that made it clear he wasn’t taking any of this seriously.

“We should make sure we have a way to get you back to your parents,” Patrick said, trying not to wish too hard that David would somehow be stranded here with him forever.

David looked startled, and he paused before saying, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess we should.”

“I wouldn’t go back to New York now,” Ash said. “Best to stay out of the big cities. That’s where the worst shit is going down.” They looked over at the bar, where more people were waiting for drinks than it looked like Ash’s assistant could handle. “I’ve gotta get back, guys. Good luck with everything.”

“Thanks?” Patrick said.

“Just…” Ash gave him a piercing stare. “Don’t ignore your dreams, Patrick. Let your subconscious be your guide.” They turned and went back to the bar then, leaving the three of them looking at each other, bemused.

“That was weird,” Dennis said.

Unnerved, Patrick reached over and took David’s hand. “Yeah.”

~*~

“That bartender was right.” David was looking at his phone when Patrick emerged from the bathroom, ready for bed. “JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia are all closed as of today. It says they don’t know for how long.”

“That’s insane. How is anybody flying anywhere?”

“They aren’t. It’s almost like 9/11, when I was stranded for four days in Portugal.”

Patrick lifted the blankets and got under the covers with David. “I was only thirteen on 9/11.”

“Oh, fuck off,” David said affectionately.

“And what was the thing Ash said about dreams? Let my subconscious be my guide? What was that?”

David gave him a sidelong glance. “I don’t know, had any interesting dreams lately?”

Patrick laughed. He didn’t usually remember his dreams. Except… “I mean, I dreamed you and I were planning to get married in Schitt’s Creek, but…” He blushed at having admitted even that to David. “It was silly.”

“Wait, what?” David asked, turning fully to him.

God, David must be freaked out by what that might reveal about his feelings, Patrick thought. “It was just a dream, it doesn’t mean I actually want to—”

“No, that’s not… I dreamed the same thing, that night at the motel. That you and I were engaged.” David looked down at his bare fingers. He always took his silver rings off at night and put them in a little dish on the bedside table that he’d borrowed from Patrick’s kitchen.

“Huh. That’s a weird coincidence.” Patrick settled down onto his pillow and closed his eyes.

“Is it?”

“Is it what?”

David huffed and nudged Patrick’s shoulder until he opened his eyes. “Is it a coincidence?”

Patrick laughed. “Well, what else would it be, David?”

“I don’t know, it’s your bartender friend who was spouting all that mystical stuff about old gods and dreams!” He gesticulated wildly with his hands.

Patrick sat back up. “I don’t actually know Ash all that well, but… look, I just don’t believe in stuff like that. Stuff I can’t verify with my own eyes and ears.”

“Okay, fine, so let’s collect some data. What else happened in your dream?” David said.

“David—”

“Humor me.”

“Okay.” Patrick rubbed his face, trying to remember. “We worked in a store together.”

Now David looked genuinely alarmed, as if even though he’d been arguing on the side of the import of these dreams, he hadn’t really believed in what he was arguing. “Without telling me what it was, do you remember the name of the store?”

He did. It had been all over everything — baggies of coffee beans and bottles of who-knew-what; it was abbreviated on the wall and on the top of the refrigerator case. Patrick took a second to be amazed that there had been that level of detail in the dream, and that he remembered even a fraction of it. “I remember it.”

“I’m going to tell you what it was, then, since you’re the skeptic. It was Rose Apothecary.”

Patrick’s heart started to thunder in his chest. “Maybe… maybe there’s a mundane explanation.”

David crossed his arms. “What?”

“Maybe we saw a place with a similar name somewhere, and it happened to register in both of our subconsciouses—”

“Two little roses, one on either side of the name,” David said. “And I had four gold rings in place of my silver ones. I’m pretty sure you gave them to me.”

Patrick stared at him. “Okay, so… so we shared a dream?”

“I don’t think it was a dream. Or, it was, but it was more than that.” David was up and out of bed now, like he couldn’t contain these ideas unless he got up and walked them off. “It was like a view of an alternate reality. One where for some reason my whole family was in that town, and so I met you a while ago, and… I don’t know, but it was good. Everyone was happy, and…”

“And Alexis was alive,” Patrick said as soon as it struck him why David wanted the dreams to mean something. “That’s what this is about, right? Your sister was alive.”

“Yeah, this is the ravings of a grief-stricken person except you saw it, Patrick. It wasn’t just me. You saw it too! And you felt something when we were outside that general store, didn’t you? And… and the waitress said it was… that the veil between worlds was thin or whatever.” He was so manic now that Patrick worried that David might be on his way to a panic attack if he didn’t calm down.

“I don’t know if I’d hang this theory on Twyla,” Patrick said, but then he had to pull himself up short, because it was triggering something else in his memory. Someone else who’d raved at him… “The homeless woman outside your building,” Patrick said softly, lost in memories of those nights, months ago, when his whole life changed.

“What?” David stopped pacing, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.

“There was a homeless woman outside your building; I ran into her both times I left your apartment in the early morning. And she said…” — he struggled to remember. “She said that this world was wrong and we needed to get back to the right one. Wait, before that, the first time I saw her, she said to me ‘you found him.’”

“Patrick, if you’re fucking with me—”

“Why would I fuck with you?” Patrick rubbed his sweaty palms off on the bedspread.

“I know who you’re talking about; she was a regular in the neighborhood,” David said. “She used to say all kinds of crazy stuff to me, stuff like…” He dragged a hand through his hair, making it stick up at all angles. “That my family and I were supposed to be living in a motel together.”

Patrick didn’t want to, but it would have been dishonest not to connect those dots. “You did say those rooms felt familiar.”

David sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. “Fuck.”

Not knowing what else to do, Patrick crawled over and rested a hand on David’s back.

“What do we do?” David asked.

“We… we get you back to New York, to your family, for a start. And we try to find that woman, because maybe she knows more.”

“The airports are closed,” David pointed out.

Patrick shrugged. “So we drive. If we leave early in the morning and take turns driving, we can probably be there by this time tomorrow.”

“What about your job?”

“David, we’re going to drive to New York in the midst of a violent uprising to seek out a mystical homeless woman to explain why we’ve both dreamed of the same alternate reality. My job can go fuck itself.”

David laughed, an edge of hysteria in it, and kissed him.

~*~

“This is insane,” Patrick said as they pulled away from the third police checkpoint since crossing over into Manhattan. Only David’s ID with his Chelsea address had allowed them to get this far.

This is insane had been Patrick’s mental mantra for many of their hours of driving, and he wasn’t sure if the increasing evidence of societal collapse was bolstering the idea that they were doing the right thing or detracting from it. He knew it was insane when he called his parents from the road to tell them that he was driving David to New York since the airports were shut down (the rest of the story, he left out). He knew it was insane when they had to spend almost a full hour at the U.S.-Canadian border, undergoing extensive questioning before they were allowed to cross. He knew it was insane when he left a message for his boss, resigning his position at Rollins Electrical Supply via voicemail. He knew it was insane when David had an extended phone call with his parents as they drove through Buffalo, arguing about which of the properties that his parents still owned would be the safest if civilization fell.

David directed Patrick to a parking garage near his apartment. The automated gates had been broken off, so Patrick drove in without taking a ticket from the machine.

“If we somehow manage to get away without paying to park in Manhattan, then society really has collapsed,” David said, which made Patrick laugh.

Rain was coming down steadily on them as they walked to David’s apartment from the garage. Even Patrick, with his limited time in New York, could tell that the streets were unnaturally quiet. “I don’t see our prophetic friend,” Patrick said as they approached David’s building.

“With the rain, she might be in a shelter,” David said. “We can try to find her tomorrow.”

He looked as exhausted as Patrick felt, so Patrick didn’t argue.

At least nothing had changed in David’s apartment during their days away, and Patrick was struck by the way the smell of the place took him back to that first night in February, when he’d gone home with David and ended up in his bed. That had been insane too, but it might have been the best thing he’d ever done in his life. Maybe insane wasn’t the worst thing.

They took turns showering off the funk of the long road trip, and while Patrick waited for David in his bed, he started trying to catch up on what exactly was going on in the world. By the time David joined him, Patrick’s palms were sweating and his stomach felt queasy.

“David, I’m starting to think the world might really be ending.”

“Why?” David asked, sitting down on his side of the bed and rubbing some kind of moisturizer into his heels.

“The amazon rainforest is on fire, for one thing. Like, intentionally. They’ve instituted full-on martial law in Brazil. And that guy Jeff Bezos and some other billionaires have bugged out to some private floating city and disappeared, which I’m pretty sure was the plot of an Ayn Rand book.”

“Don’t tell my mom, she’ll be pissed she wasn’t invited,” David said, settling down onto his back and pulling Patrick into his arms.

“And legitimate people are writing articles questioning whether it’s possible for the U.S. to ever have fair and free elections ever again,” Patrick went on.

“Okay,” David said, his hand caressing Patrick’s hip.

“You don’t seem worried,” Patrick said.

“It’s not that I’m not worried, it’s that my brain literally doesn’t have any room for anything else to worry about.” David rolled them so that he was on top of Patrick and began kissing down his neck. “Also, fifty-seven percent of my brain is occupied with thinking about sex.”

Patrick grinned, wrapping his arms around David and sliding his hands down to David’s ass. “Fifty-seven percent?”

“Eighty-three percent.” Patrick thrust up with his hips, grinding against David. “A hundred and nine percent,” David breathed.

They quickly shed their clothes and were back to grinding against each other immediately, their bodies almost on auto-pilot, desperate for friction and closeness and connection.

“So I guess there’s a universe where I asked you to marry me,” Patrick said when David pulled away long enough to lube both of them up, his slick hand on Patrick’s cock and stomach and on himself. The idea of that being real somehow had turned itself over and over in Patrick’s mind on the drive until he felt compelled to speak it out loud.

“That’s the part that strains credibility, that any version of you would want to spend your entire life with any version of me,” David said, and only David Rose could manage to be self effacing while he stroked himself.

“David,” Patrick said, reaching up for David’s shoulders and pulling him down so that they could kiss, and now each thrust of their hips was slippery and so wonderful that it almost brought tears to Patrick’s eyes. “That part is easy for me to imagine.”

David kissed him, frantic, and when they separated to breathe, David’s eyelashes were fluttering as he tried to blink away his own tears. “I doubt that, but thank you for saying it.”

Patrick pulled him as close as he could, rolling his hips, trying to bring him pleasure and comfort in equal measure. “That life with you, the one we dreamed… I’d take that life in a second.”

Gasping, David kissed him again. “Me too. God, Patrick, me too.” He buried his face the crook of Patrick’s neck, his hips slowing into a more gentle undulation. “Can we pretend, just for a minute…?”

Patrick brought one hand up and carded it through David’s hair. “That we’re in that world?” He felt David nod.

His heart hammering in his chest, Patrick matched David’s rhythm and tried to imagine what he would say in that life, comfortable and confident and in love with a man that he planned to spend the rest of his days with. “I’m so happy you’re going to be my husband, David,” he murmured, his voice pitched low, and the answering noise from David told him he was on exactly the right track.

Considering and discarding several other endearments — he didn’t want to tell David he loved him until he could be certain David knew he meant it — Patrick went on. “I don’t ever want this to end. I don’t ever want to not be sharing your life. You’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.”

“God, Patrick, I—” Whatever David was going to say got lost as he climaxed, wet and hot against Patrick’s stomach. Patrick groaned and moved faster, seeking and finding his own peak, biting down on David’s shoulder as he came.

After a quick cleanup, they settled back into bed together, Patrick resting his head against David’s chest.

“Thanks for… I probably shouldn’t have asked you to do that in the heat of the moment,” David said. “Roleplaying scenes usually require some pre-negotiation.”

“I didn’t mind,” Patrick said. It’s not like anything he had said hadn’t been a sort of truth. “It, umm, worked for me too. Obviously.” He pressed a kiss against David’s sternum.

David laughed uneasily. “Who knew that my kink was domesticity?”

It gave Patrick a chance to lighten the mood, to get out of the territory that was going to lead to premature confessions of love, and he took it. “Should I have also talked about mowing the lawn?”

“That depends, what do you wear when you mow the lawn?”

Patrick laughed. “I’ll save my material on painting the garage for next time, it’ll drive you wild.”

Chapter 14

#schitt's creek ff #schitt's creek #david x patrick #david x patrick ff #david x patrick fic #hdwgb fic #my fic

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barefootdancinghospital · 4 years

Link

“The world might be ending.

* * *

There’s a commonly replicated piece of anarchist folk art that means a lot to me. I don’t know who drew it. It’s a drawing of a tree with a circle-A superimposed. The text of it reads “even if the world was to end tomorrow I would still plant a tree today.”

I grew up into anarchy around this piece of art. It was silkscreened as patches and posters and visible on the backs of hoodies and the walls of collective houses. It was graffitied through stencils and it was photocopied in the back of zines. It’s a paraphrasing of a quote misattributed to Martin Luther (the original protestant Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, Jr., although plenty of people misattribute the quote to him as well). The original quote is something like “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” The earliest reference to it anyone can seem to find is from the German Confessing Church, a Christian movement within Nazi Germany that sought to challenge Nazi power. The quote was used to inspire hope, to inspire people to action.

That’s something I can get behind.

* * *

There’s this book that means a lot to me, On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. I’ve never read it. I can’t bring myself to. I think about it quite often, regardless.

The novel describes a nuclear war destined to kill all life on earth, and it describes the last days of people living in Australia waiting for the inevitable death of all things. It describes how they live their lives, how they find meaning during the apocalypse. It’s a book about how to live without hope. It’s a book of resignation.

It’s too much for me, I think, at least right now.

* * *

The world might be ending.

A lot of people will argue with me about that. They will correctly point out that for large numbers of people all over the world, especially in the parts of the world long ravaged by Western imperialism, the world has been ending for a long time. They will correctly point out that the world itself isn’t going anywhere, that change is constant, and even if what is left behind by climate catastrophe and war is a scorched desert, it’s probable that life will continue. Human life, non-human animal life, and plant life will all, in some form or another, survive all of this.

People will argue, correctly once more, that most every generation has believed that the world was ending. The machine gun slaughter of World War I, the genocide of World War II, the Doomsday Clock of the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, those all must have felt like the apocalypse. For entire peoples, they were. Yet here some of us are today, alive.

None of those arguments detract from the fact that it sure feels like the world is ending.

Mountains are blown up for coal to pump poison into the air, pipelines clearcut the last vestiges of the wild to help us pump more poison into the air. Oceans are swallowing islands, hundred-year storms happen every year, and it feels like every day we break new climate records. A sense of urgency about coming disaster is fueling a rise of “I got mine, fuck you” nationalism, and climate scientists are being ignored to an unconscionable degree.

The world is ending.

It’s always ending, but it’s ending a lot right now. For me and the people I’m close to, it’s ending more dramatically than it was when I was born thirty-seven years ago.

That’s fucking paralyzing.

The news is full of extinction and fascism and death and death and death.

And we’re expected to get up in the morning and go to work.

* * *

For awhile, I coped by means of a cycle of denial and panic. The potential apocalypse was, basically, too-much-problem. I couldn’t wrap my head around it or its ramifications, so I acted like it wasn’t happening. Until, of course, some horrible event or reminder of the apocalypse broke over a certain threshold and sent me spiraling into despair. Then numbness took over once more and the cycle began again.

That didn’t do me much good.

About a year ago, I decided to embrace four different, often contradictory, priorities for my life. I run my decisions past all of them and try to keep them in balance.

Act like we’re about to die. Act like we might not die right away. Act like we might have a chance to stop this. Act like everything will be okay.

Act like we’re about to die

Every breath we take is the last breath we take. You Only Live Once. Smoke em if you got em. Do As Thou Wilt. Memento Mori. Our culture is full of euphemisms and clever sayings that focus around one simple idea: we’re mortal, so we might as well try to make the most of the time we have.

Embracing hedonism has a lot to recommend it these days. It’s completely possible that the majority of us won’t be alive ten or twenty years from now. It’s completely possible, although a lot less likely, that a lot of us won’t be alive in a year.

I used to think, when I was younger, that I was a terrible hedonist. As a survivor of sexual and psychological assault and abuse, I’ve never had much luck with drug use or casual sex. But fucking and getting wasted, while perfectly worthwhile pastimes, aren’t the only ways to live in the moment. Hedonism is about the pursuit of pleasure and joy. The trick is to find out what gives you pleasure and joy.

For myself, this has meant giving myself permission to pursue music, to sing even though I’m not trained, to play piano and harp. To travel, to wander. To seek beautiful moments and accept that they might be fleeting. I’ll rudely paraphrase the host of the rather wholesome podcast Ologies, Alie Ward, and say “we might die so cut your bangs and tell your crush you like them.”

My hedonism is a cautious one. I’m not looking to take up smoking or other addictions. I’m not trying to live like there’s a guarantee of no tomorrow, just a solid chance of no tomorrow. Frankly, this would be true regardless of the current crisis, but it feels especially important to me just now.

Act like we might not die right away

Preppers have a bad reputation for a good reason. The people stockpiling ammunition and food in doomsday bunkers by-and-large don’t have anyone else’s best interests at heart. Still, being prepared for a slow apocalypse, or dramatic interruptions in the status quo, makes more and more sense to more and more of us.

Preparing for the apocalypse is going to look different to every person and every community. For some people it will mean stockpiling necessities. For other people, securing the means to grow food.

One thing I’ve learned from my friends who study community resilience and disaster relief, however, is that the most important resource to shore up on isn’t a tangible one. It’s not bullets, it’s not rice, it’s not even land or water. It’s connections with other people. The most effective means of survival in crisis is to create community disaster plans. To practice mutual aid. To build networks of resilience.

Every apocalypse movie has it all backwards when the plucky gang of survivors holes up in a cabin and fends off the ravaging chaotic hordes. The movies have it backwards because the ravaging hordes are, in the roughest possible sense, the ones doing survival right. They’re doing it collectively. Obviously, I’m not advocating we wear the skulls of our enemies and cower at the feet of warlords (though wearing the skulls of would-be warlords has its appeal). I’m advocating staying open to opportunity and building collective power.

There are infinite reasons not to count on holing up in a cabin with your six friends as an apocalypse plan, but I’ll give you two of them. First, because living a worthwhile and long life as a human animal requires connections with a diverse collection of people with diverse collections of skills, ideas, and backgrounds. It’s all fun and games in your cabin until your appendix bursts and none of you are surgeons—or you’re the only surgeon. Likewise, small groups of people who tend to agree with one another are subject to the dangers of groupthink and the echo chamber effect, which will limit your ability to intelligently meet challenges that face you.

Second, because by removing yourself from society, you’re removing your ability to shape the changes that society will go through during crisis. If you go hide in the woods with your stockpile and your buddies, and fascists take over, guess what? It’s kind of your fucking fault. Because you weren’t at the meeting when everyone decided whether to be egalitarians or fascists. And guess what? Now that rampaging horde is at your doorstep, and they want your ammo and your antibiotics, and they’re going to get it one way or the other. Fascism is always best stamped out when it starts. It’s never safe to ignore it. Not now, not during any Mad Max future.

Tangible resources do matter, of course. Any likely scenario that prepping is good for won’t be so dramatic as an utter restructuring or collapse of society. It might mean food shortages, power outages, water contamination. It never hurts to keep nonperishable food, backup sources of power, and water filtration systems around for yourself and your neighbors.

Still, this is a terrible basket to put all your eggs into. You probably shouldn’t live out your days, whether they’re your last ones or not, over-preparing for something that may or may not come to pass.

Act like we might have a chance to stop this

We can and we should stop the worst excesses of climate catastrophe. We can and should stop fascism by whatever means necessary. Throwing up our hands and walking away from the problem is no solution.

It’s hard to remember that we have agency. Unless we were raised ultra-rich, we’ve had the concept of political and economic agency stripped from us at every turn. We’ve been told there are two ways to effect change: vote for politicians or vote with our dollars. Politicians in western democracies are likely incapable of changing things as dramatically as they need to be changed, and they certainly won’t bother trying unless we motivate them to do so in fairly dramatic ways. As for economic agency, there is a small handful of men with more wealth—and therefore power—than the rest of us combined.

We’ve been told we cannot take matters into our own hands, politically or economically. We’re not allowed to have a revolution. We’re not allowed to redistribute the wealth of the elite.

You’ll be shocked to know that I don’t put a lot of stock in what we are and aren’t allowed to do.

Still, even if we give ourselves permission to undertake it, revolution feels like an insurmountable challenge. We’ve got, optimistically, ten years to completely overhaul the economic system of the planet. It can be done. It has to be done. Yet it feels like it won’t be done.

We’re all running the cost/benefit analysis of acting directly. We all have different “fuck it” points—the point beyond which we can no longer prioritize our immediate wellbeing but instead must act regardless of the outcome. In the meantime, we’re waiting until it seems like we can act and actually have a chance of winning.

All over the world, even in some Western countries, people are no longer waiting. They’re acting. We need to be helping them, supporting them with words and actions, while we get ready to act here as well.

The revolution needs mediators and facilitators, medics and brawlers. It needs hackers and propagandists and it needs financiers and smugglers and thieves. It needs scouts and coordinators and it needs musicians and it needs people invested in the system to turn traitor. It needs lawyers and scientists and bookkeepers and copyeditors and cooks and it needs almost everyone, almost every skill.

One thing it doesn’t need, though, is managers. The people who claim to know how to run a revolution don’t know how to run a revolution or they would have done it by now. The authoritarian urge, to decide what the revolution should and shouldn’t look like, how people should and shouldn’t express their rage and reclaim their agency, will fail us every time. Authoritarian communism is the death of any revolution. Authoritarian liberalism is the death of any revolution. Even the more dogmatic anarchists will get in the way if given a chance. The revolution cannot be branded. Despite Hollywood representations of rebellions, they don’t work as well under a single banner. They are diverse, or they are not revolutions.

The revolution cannot be controlled by a vanguard of activists; if it is, it will fail. The revolution must be controlled by its participants, because only then will we learn how to claim agency over our own lives and futures.

We have a chance to stop this.

I forget that sometimes, but I shouldn’t.

Still, I can’t count on hope alone, or the days when hope fails me would lay me low.

Act like everything will be okay

All the times the world has come close to ending before, it hasn’t. It’s ended for some people, some cultures. Civilizations have collapsed. Ecosystems have radically shifted. Species have gone extinct—including the species of humans before homo sapiens. Colonization was an apocalypse. Some people survived those apocalypses, but plenty more didn’t.

Still, the world is still here and we’re still here.

Capitalism is a sturdy beast, quite adept at adaptation. Marx was wrong about a lot of things, and one of those things was the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions. With or without capitalism, the society we live in might stagger on. We might curb the worst excesses of climate catastrophe through economic change or wild feats of geoengineering.

I won’t bet on it, but I won’t bet entirely against it either.

As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.

I’m keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health.

* * *

The world might end tomorrow, and it might not. If we can help it, at all, we shouldn’t let it end. We still ought to act like it might.

We ought to figure out what trees we would plant either way.

If you appreciate my writing and want to help me do more of it, please consider supporting me via Patreon.

“

#climate change

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1358456 · 4 years

Text

Review Response, Dec 29 2019 - Jan 4 2020

A lot of stuff here. ... Yay!!

Legacy #009

1) Omg the confession chapter! Loved this chapter to bits! Also happy 2020!

Yes! The confession has finally happened! Hell, it’s about time. Happy 2020, the year of the rat 庚子年!

2) Lol sun being A scared shit and A sweet confession. Looking forward to the next chapter

Sun being terrified... heh. It’s what Black would be in that situation. Sun? ... Who knows. The next chapter might happen soon, depends on how this chapter went!

3) Hehe, it really did work out for the best for Blue. Makes perfect sense to give Platinum the LuckyShipping confession MVP award now. Her little chat with Red was probably the best scene in this chapter for me.

Nice to see a fluffy chapter before the action kicks in again. Poor Yellow, though - she's going to be suffering for a bit...though it would be nice to see if/how Yellow gets over it. And I wonder what the "calling" thing is about. I suspect her target is a Mimikyu, but is this more Moon's instinct saying that a potential new team member is nearby or maybe there's some psychic stuff going on here?

Anyway, it's nice to see this story finally getting so many reviews! Happy New Year! As always, can't wait for the next chapter!

Hehe. Platinum the MVP, even though she really didn’t want to interfere in the matter. ... And no one’s going to be giving thanks to White or Y. Hahaha.

Poor Yellow? Not yet. It’s too soon. And no, the target is not a Mimikyu. Sun already has one. And you know from the overhaul post that Moon does not get a Mimikyu. Moon gets a Banette. And in the Thrifty Megamart, there are wild Shuppets. Fun fact: I do research to see what Pokemon are in what area so the Dex Holders will run into a Pokemon that makes sense in that area. Psychic stuff? Nah. Ghost stuff.

And Happy New Year to you too!

4) AAAAAAH THEY DID IT OH MY GOD THE FLUFF IS REAL

The fluff is real and it’s going to get fluffier. It’s going to be so fluffy that Yellow suffocates and Red and Blue get a bad case of static shock. ... Wait, what?

5) They’ve finally done it and platinum once again proving to be of help to both red and blue in getting the together. Your slowly making platinum one of my personal new favourites from these and I fine with that. It’s a really sweet chapter. Anyways Happy new years!

Platinum’s so nice. Hehehe... She’s a wonderful character! ... Yeah, yeah. Bias. Happy New Year!

6) I love the interactions between White and Y - they honestly seem really close and it’s really nice to see! I love the chapter I hope you had a good New Year’s Eve and Christmas and thank you for the new chapter!

I like the interactions between White and Y too, which is why I put in a lot of them. And they’re not exactly a senior/junior type, but rather, good friend type. Hence Y’s line of “oh eat my ass” in the last chapter.

7) Loved iT! Looking forward to the next chapter

Thank you. More to come soon...ish?

8) So excited to see if moon hits the Pokemon. Loved this chapter and white with the rapidash was great

Hehe. Of course Moon would hit it. White failing miserably in riding Rapidash, just like in that one SC chapter (SC #007: Memory Lane).

9) I'm glad Blue managed to confess her feelings for Red after struggling so hard with them. Crushes are really stressful, and in her case in particular, with her fear of getting close to and hurting others- just ah. The secret's out, and Red reciprocates. Now at least they'll have this moment of happiness! ...Though poor Yellow has rather unfortunate timing.

Is Moon being called to by a Mimikyu, I wonder? That'd be a strong and cool addition to her party!

Only happiness awaits for Red and Blue! ... Until the plot hits them, as foretold. Yellow’s purpose in the story is now halfway over.

And no, Moon is not being called by a Mimikyu.

10) Awwwww that was really cute! Hope we get more fluff next chapter!

Oh, there will. Flufftacular chapters are inbound.

11) Looking forward to the next chapter!

Thank you.

12) Hey again, hope your New Years went well! Glad to see an update to this story. Regarding the latest chapter, I'm pretty mixed - but not in a bad way.

The first half was pretty enjoyable to read. Honestly, Red does seem like he's become the person to think things over a bit before diving in from what I saw in FRLG and him asking Platinum what was up with Blue was enjoyable. Red also deciding to take the leap and press the issue to not prolong Blue's suffering was pretty fun to read too. I half expected Blue to go on a rant about why she likes Red to him, she seems like the kind of person to justify everything (since you've shown her thoughts and rationale about why she "musn't" let Red she likes him in earlier chapters) but I guess it wasn't needed or maybe she'll do it when she's a bit calmer. I'd like to see Red react to him unknowingly saving her back in Chapter 1. Also, I've said it before - I used to like Red and Yellow, but this kinda does cement why I like Red and Blue - I kinda got a kick out of Yellow spying on the two of them, felt somewhat ironic.

I might be the only one but I kinda just gloss over the Sun and Moon parts of the story. I still read them, but I just feel more invested in the older Dex Holders' adventures since they're more emotional and I'm way more attached to those guys.

Regardless of my personal bias, great chapter. Looking forward to more as always.

Red is reckless when it comes to like... battling and combat. But outside of that, he’s not stupidly reckless. And hopefully, given how old he is in Legacy, he would’ve mellowed even more. And so he is now considerate. Huzzah! Blue will go on a ramble and talk about her fears later on once things have settled. Right now, she would be quite exhausted, actually. And then she and Red can have that discussion that was in Destiny, but in Legacy with updated interactions and no doomsday on the horizon. Getting a kick out of Yellow getting heartbroken, huh? Hahaha. ... More to come later.

Eh, it’s not that surprising. After all, statistically, the newest Dex Holders are generally ignored by the readers. Black and White in SA, X and Y in early Destiny, and now Sun and Moon in early (still) Legacy. Now, Sun and Moon aren’t that new anymore, so they’re not being as ignored, but they’re still the newest (since we don’t know sh*t about Sword and Shield yet), so... yeah.

13) Loved this blue being shy is so unexpected aswell!

Timid Blue is unexpectedly cute, eh? Hehehe...

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Surprised that no one talked about the title. I guess f*ck Heart, right? Heh.

So, good news is... the newest chapter is above 10. So... update will happen in this month. “Bad” news is... the update fails to reach the average. But given how the average was raised, the updated chapter is still above most of the others, and it’s been less than a week, so... update will still happen this month, just not this week or the next. Give me some time off, eh?

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DE #003

1) These two cinnamon rolls are so cute!

Yep. Black and White are stupidly cute together, whether they’re surrounded by fluff or blood.

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DE #013

1) Cute Ruby and White.

Surprisingly cute, huh? Same goes for Sapphire & Black!

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DE #020

1) Red and Blue (female) are so cute!

Yep! That they are! Hehehe.

2) So cute

Yes indeed.

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DE #021

1) Just give her a ring and kiss her already. Geez these two are so cute.

Hehe. Short Story - The Question. Pop the ring!

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DE #028

1) Cute,l!

Well, I guess this chapter was cute. Its prequel, however... hehe...

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DE #031

1) Good stuff. Will take a long while for Sun and Moon to even be this intimate tho. What with all the fighting.

I don’t think Sun and Moon can ever actually be that intimate. For one, Moon will have to surgically remove that coin lodged in his brain, and someone will have to shove a classy romance novel into his face over and over until he learns the concept of flirting and proper responses.

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There’s no need to see the DE chart, so...

SC #015

1) Coming back to this chapter after knowing what Red's up to makes their job occupations work very, very well together. Blue provides the advanced technology, Red carries out the "fieldwork". Both manage to work unique occupations during the day and still spend a wholesome time together when they're back home. Loving their dynamic!

Oddly, the Covert Ops series, whose idea I scrapped, has come back in a very weird fashion. Instead of Blue doing the fieldwork (or Rakutsu), she’s just providing the tech to Red. Interesting.

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SC #017

1) *Mission Impossible theme plays with the sound of jingle bells and terrified shrieks of thugs in the background*

Merry (late!) Christmas to the unfortunate baddies of the world who Dex Holders deliver justice to. Can't say I ever expected Red to become a hitman, let alone dress up as Santa Claus and deal out punishment to evildoers. Sure was a hilarious read, however!

“Santa Claus is gunning you down~” Ahem.

Red the mercenary. And coincidentally, the chapter is based on a Hitman Santa rampage that I used to do back in the days. “Santa’s coming to town!”

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I appreciate what you did, but... +1/+1 doesn’t actually do much. Like, SC #015 is now no longer the least reviewed chapter, but instead, TIED at the least reviewed chapter, along with the Wings update from many months ago. The two chapters you put the pity reviews for, are still not even at half of the story’s average. +4/+4 from now, and then maybe we’ll see.

#qna

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working-write-now · 5 years

Text

Comparing the Eras of NuWho: Moffat and Davies

I wrote this a year ago, before Jodie Whittaker’s series came out. I’m not going to add Series 11 to the comparison, because Chibnall’s run on Doctor Who isn’t done yet, and I don’t want to evaluate it before it’s done. In the original google doc, I had some footnotes, which unfortunately can’t be used in this format, so I adapted them as [NOTE: <more here>].

Now that Steven Moffat’s time as head writer on Doctor Who is done, it’s a good time to take a step back and examine the differences between how he and his predecessor, Russel T. Davies, wrote for the show. Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead for the entire revived series of Doctor Who.

One good place to look at how the writers differ is how The Doctor’s companions are introduced. Davies introduces companions to the audience prior to their meeting The Doctor. As “Smith and Jones” begins, Martha walks down the street, trying to mediate her family drama. She then attends her class at the hospital, where she meets The Doctor. Rose’s introduction was similar: in the middle of an ordinary day, Rose is suddenly attacked by mannequins, and The Doctor appears. Donna’s introduction disrupts this pattern. She appears in the TARDIS at the end of “Doomsday.” However, in “The Runaway Bride,” her first full episode, she is walking down the aisle at her wedding when suddenly she’s transported to the TARDIS. When she’s reintroduced in “Partners in Crime,” the episode begins with The Doctor and Donna performing similar actions even though they don’t actually meet up until later. Davies even introduces one-off companions this way, such as Christina de Souza in “Planet of the Dead,” which begins with her robbing a museum, and eventually getting on the same bus as The Doctor to escape the police. By introducing the companions before The Doctor, Davies develops them, establishing them as characters before they travel time and space.

Conversely, Moffat’s episodes which introduce companions are centered on The Doctor. The pre-title sequence of “The Eleventh Hour” shows The Doctor and the TARDIS crashing through London, and “The Bells of Saint John,” which introduced Clara, begins with The Doctor in a monastery. Although “The Time of Angels,” which reintroduced River Song, begins with her on a spaceship, she doesn’t stumble into The Doctor like other companions, instead summoning him for assistance. “The Pilot” begins with Nardole bringing Bill to The Doctor, and the audience doesn’t get a glimpse into her life until later. By not taking the time to introduce the companions before The Doctor, Moffat implies that it doesn’t matter who the companions were before The Doctor shows up in their lives, and that the focus of the show should be on him.

Moffat continues to put the emphasis on the Doctor by making him an independent hero, while Davies emphasizes the importance of the companions. In most episodes Davies wrote, it’s not The Doctor, but his companions who save the day. Take “The Parting of the Ways,” for example. The Doctor can’t defeat the Daleks without also killing all humans, and decides to put himself at the mercy of the Daleks instead, until Rose shows up as the Bad Wolf and destroys them. Martha also saves the world; in the year between “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords,” she travels Earth, telling people about The Doctor and to think about him during The Master’s Countdown. [NOTE: There are probably some of you who are arguing that the plan to defeat The Master was made by The Doctor, but it was Martha who implemented it, and the only thing he told her was to “use the countdown.” Martha had to figure out about the Archangel Network and everything else on her own. Thus, I attribute this win to Martha.] Donna too saves the day in “Journey’s End” when there’s not just one, but two Doctors running around, both of whom are powerless to stop Davros. Donna, who has become just as smart as The Doctor, is able to deactivate the reality bomb and save all of creation. In fact, in the “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End,” the episodes that function as the magnum opus to Davies’s time as showrunner, The Doctor is mostly helpless, and it’s his companions who work together to save the day. In “The Stolen Earth”, the Earth has disappeared and The Doctor has no clue where it’s gone or how to find it until Jack, Sarah Jane, Martha, and Harriet Jones all work together to let The Doctor know where they are. In “Journey’s End,” The Doctor spends most of the episode trapped in a holding cell, and it’s his companions who try to foil The Dalek’s plan, Martha by threatening to destroy the Earth, and Jack, Sarah Jane, Mickey, and Jackie by threatening to blow up the Dalek’s ship.

In contrast, Moffat’s episodes generally feature The Doctor saving the day. In “The Eleventh Hour” The Doctor alerts the Atraxi to Prisoner Zero’s presence, so it can be imprisoned once again. In “The Big Bang,” it’s The Doctor who flies The Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, rebooting reality. [NOTE: Though Amy remembers The Doctor and brings him back, that happens after the main problem of the episode is resolved.] In “The Wedding of River Song,” it’s The Doctor who comes up with the plan of hiding in the Teselecta to escape his death. The Doctor is also the one who saves the day in “Flesh and Stone,” “The Day of the Moon,” and “The Time of The Doctor.” [NOTE: Though Clara convinces the Time Lords to grand The Doctor more regenerations, it’s The Doctor who destroys them with regeneration energy.] This trend continues into Peter Capaldi’s time playing The Doctor, notably occurring in “Death in Heaven,” where although it’s Danny Pink who destroys the Cybermen when given control of them, it’s The Doctor who grants him that control. The trend is also present in “Hell Bent” where it’s The Doctor who makes the heroic sacrifice to forget Clara so that she and Arya Stark Lady Me can travel time and space together.

Also interesting are the ways in which the two writers present the companions before they meet The Doctor and why he asks them to travel with him. Before traveling with The Doctor, Rose, Martha and Donna are all very ordinary people: a shop worker, medical student, and temp. The companions during Moffat’s run, however, are mostly chosen because of who they are: Amy grew up with a crack in reality in her bedroom wall, River Song and The Doctor keep meeting out of order, and Clara seems to be fractured through time and space [NOTE: Bill Potts is a bit of an outlier here, though she is picked out by The Doctor because she smiles when she doesn’t understand something, where other people frown. ]. For Moffat there needs to be something special about a companion, whereas for Davies, ordinary people have something to offer to The Doctor. In fact, when Davies’s Doctor travels without someone for too long, he becomes callous and cold. Just look at the “timelord victorious” mentality he exhibits in “The Waters of Mars,” or the way he ignores the suffering happening around him in the destruction of Pompeii until Donna begs him to help (“The Fires of Pompeii”). Davies’s Doctor needs someone to travel with him to help him have a sense of humanity.

To sum up, while Moffat was the main writer for Doctor Who, it was very clearly a show about The Doctor, who invited companions aboard his ship if there was something special about them. While Davies was running the show, Doctor Who was a story about the lives of the companions, in which The Doctor happened to show up. Davies’s mentality, I think, was part of the reason Doctor Who succeeded when it came back onto the air: everyone could imagine themself as a companion. There wasn’t anything special about the people The Doctor picked--they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Anyone could go on adventures through time and space, even people sitting on their couches in front of the TV. With these in mind, it will be interesting to see which of these mindsets Chris Chibnall, the new head writer, will take when it comes to the new companions being introduced alongside Jodie Whittaker Doctor this autumn.

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