#my answer is hands down ted allen

[clairsaffitz]

today's food network discourse topic: who is your favorite FN chef/judge and why?

#i liked yesterday's convo about FN catchphrases so i wanted to do something similar today #my answer is hands down ted allen #because he is wholesome and supportive and pure #i also love ina and alex g #upasana.txt #delete later

[ragingbookdragon]

DC Character Insert Guide!

So, I got my second Covid shot yesterday and while I didn’t feel much of the effects then, I’m feeling them today, and I don’t want to write any fics because it’s too much effort and everything in my body hurts.

Instead, I decided to compile a list of all the character inserts I do, just so everyone can have a bit of a better background to them. Let’s start with the Batfamily, then we’ll move to the Superfamily, then Flashfamily, and finally the Lanternfamily.

-Thorne

So, within the Batfamily inserts there are four insert characters: Batmom (Bruce’s wife and mother of the Batfamily), Bat-Aunt (Bruce’s sister), Batsis (Bruce’s daughter, and Batbrother (Bruce’s son).

1. Batmom (Bruce’s wife and mother of the Batfamily) is a model by day and support at night. She stopped being a vigilante after Dick and Bruce’s falling out, preferring to stay at home and focus on raising Jason whilst caring for the family. She was born in Blüdhaven but grew up in Gotham City, eventually getting a job at WE where she quickly worked her way to the position of Bruce’s secretary where she became a valued member of his personal circle.

2. Bat-Aunt (Bruce’s sister) is a billionaire, playgirl, philanthropist by day and depending on which pairing I’m using, she’s either a vigilante by night or support for the Batfamily (non-vigilante). She’s Bruce’s younger sister and no one’s really sure if they’re related by blood but apparently one night, the two siblings sat down to test DNA, received the answers, and never spoke of them again. They’ve been together since they were in diapers—they’re siblings through and through. She is close with Ghost-Maker and Barry Allen.

3. Batsis (Bruce’s daughter) is a writer by day and a spy-network running vigilante by night. She is the oldest sibling of the Batsiblings and takes it upon herself to keep everyone in check when they need it. Because she’s older than most of the sidekicks every major superhero has, she’s not friends like Dick is with his group, so she tends to help out with the JL more. She was born and raised in Gotham City, showing up at Bruce’s doorstep at six years old. She is close with Wally West and Kyle Rayner.

4. Batbrother (Bruce’s son) is a black ops squad leader, designation SPECTRES, who runs missions all over the world that take out terrorist organizations, human trafficking rings, etc. He is the eldest sibling of the Batsiblings, and is typically compared to being a second Bruce, but a much laxer Bruce. He was born in Gotham, but his mother passed during birth, and he was raised in the mountains of Virginia by his maternal grandfather until he was thirteen. During the time, he was taught how to live off the land—which is important because it helps him during the Super Soldier Program. He traveled to Gotham City to Wayne Manor and told Bruce he was his son. After DNA testing, it was proven true. When he’s not on a mission, he’s usually at Wayne Manor bugging the crap out of his family. He is a sexual assault survivor during his time in the military and he advocates for other survivors and also runs personal missions (without his team) to bring justice to those who didn’t receive any. He is close with Kyle Rayner and his younger brother Jason Todd.

Within the Superfamily there are two reader inserts and those are Super-Aunt (Clark’s sister) and Supersis (Clark’s daughter).

1. Super-Aunt (Clark’s sister) is the world’s Superwoman. She lives in Gotham City working for Bruce, so she is technically apart of the Batfamily. She was not raised by the Kents with Clark, as their pods hit one another in the atmosphere and shot off to different locations, hers in Jacksonville, Florida. She and Clark met during a Daily Planet trip to Wayne Enterprises. She is close with Bruce Wayne and Ted Kord—and Booster Gold because you can’t have Blue Beetle without Booster Gold.

2. Supersis (Clark’s daughter) is the world’s Superwoman. She is not Lois Lane’s daughter but considers the woman her mother. She fights with the Young Justice team and when she’s not fighting with them, she’s either at her family home or at Gotham University taking classes. She is close with Tim Drake, Bart Allen, and Jason Todd.

In the Flashfamily there are two reader inserts, and they are Flash-Aunt (Barry’s sister) and Flash-daughter (Barry’s daughter).

1. Flash-Aunt (Barry’s sister) is a Flash like Barry and serves in the Central City Police Department with her brother, but while Barry is a forensic scientist, she is a detective, working their cases so that the two siblings are always on them together—they’re currently gunning for the most solved cases award. She is not the child of Nora Allen, but instead of Henry Allen during the time that he and Nora were getting divorced. When she was born, the mother gave her to Darryl Frye and she and Barry were raised together. She is close with Hal Jordan and Bruce Wayne.

2. Flash-Daughter (Barry’s daughter) was recently introduced with the fic “If We Were Fast Enough”. She is the daughter of Barry Allen in a world where the old Justice League has retired, and their successors have taken up the mantles. Unfortunately, global devastation occurred which was a result of nuclear warfare between countries. During the all-out war on the ruined landscape, she watched every JL member fall along with every Flash. She witnessed the deaths and took their speed (she did not kill them, but merely took their speed to keep it out of the hands of the enemy), making her faster than every speedster. Within the final moments of her world, she harnessed Barry Allen’s speed before he died, making her the fastest speedster alive, even faster than Wally West (just by an inch), and escaped the imploding of her world by traveling to another timeline. After a year, she broke down and told Barry the truth, but he accepted her as his daughter regardless. She works in CCPD as a forensic scientist and is the Lightning Flash when she isn’t working. She is older than most of the sidekicks, around her late twenties, but is close with Jason Todd and Kyle Rayner.

Last but not least, there are two inserts in the Lanternfamily, and they are Lanternsis (Hal’s sister) and Lantern-Daughter (Hal’s daughter).

1. Lanternsis (Hal’s sister) is the daughter of Jessica Jordan but not Martin Jordan. She was born a few years after Martin died, her father isn’t known, and was raised in the family. Because Hal was so determined to join the Air Force and fly, he wasn’t around much as she was growing up, but seeing that no one in the family wanted to talk to Hal, especially her mother and oldest brother, she took it upon herself to have a relationship with him, calling him whenever she could, seeing him when she could. They became very close when she expressed that she herself wanted to join the Navy and become a pilot. Hal taught her everything he knew about flying and she excelled in the Naval flight programs, even at the expense of her relationship with Jessica. When her mother died, she chose an honorable discharge from the military and started working at Ferris Aircraft with Hal. Sometime during Hal’s breakdown as Green Lantern and the destruction of Coast City, the Blue Lantern Power Ring found her, and she became the Blue Lantern of Earth for her undying hope that she and the ones she loved most would be okay. She is close with Barry Allen and the Four Corpsmen.

2. Lantern-Daughter (Hal’s daughter) was introduced with the fic “When The Music’s Not Forgotten”. She is Hal’s daughter, mother is unknown, and currently lives with him in Coast City. She works at a Wayne Enterprises branch in Coast where she met with Jason Todd and started training unbeknownst to her father. During a fight when the truth was revealed, she and Hal had a falling out where she returned home and was met by Sinestro who invited her to join the Sinestro Corps. She agreed and became a Yellow Lantern. All is not lost though; she eventually becomes another Lantern type. She is close with Jason Todd, Wally West, and the Four Corpsmen.

#batfamily #batmom #batsis #batbro #batbrother #superfamily #supersis #flashfamily #flashsis #lanternfamily #lanternsis #dc imagines #dc imagine #dc comics #dc #batfamily imagines #batfamily imagine #batmom imagine #batmom imagines #batsis imagines #batsis imagine #batbro imagine #batbro imagines #batbrother imagine #batbrother imagines #superfamily imagines #superfamily imagine #supersis imagines #supersis imagine #flashfamily imagine

[sohotthateveryonedied]

Living is Harder

Read here on AO3!

Summary:

Tim drops the knife like it’s white-hot. Oh, god. Oh, god.

Tim did this. He was...he didn’t mean it. He didn’t. He would never. But the man was on top of him and Tim couldn’t breathe, and...he didn’t mean it.

Tim is walking home from Steph’s house, his light-up Sketchers the only things illuminating his path through the Gotham night. He stayed out later than he planned, utterly captivated in the Among Us tournament he and Steph were playing against their Titan friends all the way in San Francisco. (And Tim would have gotten away with the murders too, if it weren’t for that meddling Bart Allen who stared Tim down every time he killed a player, watching it happen but never reporting until Tim finally cracked from the shame and called an emergency meeting on himself.)

Tim rode in Steph’s car on the way to her house, but forgot that it would mean he’d be without a ride home. Steph offered to drive him back to the manor, that she doesn’t mind losing a measly hour of sleep, but Tim insisted he didn’t mind walking. Besides, it’s not like it was a lie. Sure, it’s Gotham, which means Tim can see drug deals going down on street corners and the occasional drunkard puking into a trash can, but Tim feels at peace here.

It brings him back to his early days of climbing fire escapes, tailing Batman and Robin under the cloak of night in the hopes to get just one more photo for his collection. It was a simpler time with fewer psychotic clowns—back then it was just the one, and all he did was tell shitty jokes and occasionally tie Robin up over a swimming pool filled with Jokerized sharks. Nowadays it’s all grotesque murders and creepy masks made of human skin. Where’s the showmanship? Where’s the pizzazz? Disgusting. Deplorable. Lazy beyond all reason. Tim is insulted by the lack of artistic ability in these new Jokers, and you may quote him on that. Regardless, Tim takes comfort in knowing that if something did go wrong, Cass is patrolling somewhere a good five blocks ahead. Maybe he can track her down and pick them up some corn dogs. He’s currently in the Red Hood’s territory, but whether Jason is around at the moment is a gamble at best. His schedule is harder to tamp down than a solid answer on Ted Cruz: Zodiac Killer. Jason might not even be in Gotham right now; he could be in space for all anyone knows. Sometimes Tim feels like Jason is more of a feral cat than a brother, which isn’t too far off, really. Tim happens upon an empty beer can on the sidewalk in front of a boarded-up store that he’s fairly certain used to be an adult film shop. Good ol’ Gotham City. He stoops down to pick up the crinkled can like the good samaritan he is and drops it into a trash can at the mouth of a nearby alley. He wipes his hands on his jeans, designer style be damned. That’s when Tim is grabbed from behind, a hand reaching up to cover his mouth and muffle his shout. He’s pulled into the alley and pushed up against a wall, the bricks digging into his back and knocking the breath from his lungs. Shit, shit, shit. How could he have been taken by surprise so easily? It’s hard to make out his attacker in the shadowed alley, the only discernible features being dark eyes and bared yellow teeth—never a good sign. Tim’s hands are pinned together above him in a strong grip, practically wrenching his shoulders from the sockets. He tries to scream, but the man’s disgusting hand presses harder against his mouth. Tim freezes when he feels the poke of a knife at his throat, digging into the skin just below his Adam’s apple. “Make a sound and I’ll gut you,” his attacker says, his voice a low rumble. The stench of cigarettes and alcohol assaults Tim’s sinuses and makes his stomach roll. He’s going to have to be careful about this. Robin could get out of this hold in five different ways with varying degrees of injury to the opponent, but a civilian couldn’t. Even if the only witness is a low-life scumbag, he shouldn’t run the risk. Better to wait until he’s at the point of no return to bust out the Robin moves. Instead, Tim goes for the oldest trick in the book and knees the man in the crotch, hard. It has the desired effect and the grip on Tim’s wrists slackens, the man dropping him with a grunt. Tim ducks out of range and makes a run for it. If he can just get to the street, he should be home free. Even in Gotham City, there are always witnesses to help out a poor, defenseless teenager under attack. Tim almost makes it to the sidewalk when he’s grabbed by the hair, crying out as he’s thrown violently to the ground. Then there’s weight on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the dirty ground under his back. Tim fights, kicking out and delivering purposeful hits under the guise of a panicked struggle. “You little shit,” the man spits. He’s still got a hold on Tim’s hair, which he uses to slam Tim’s head against the pavement so hard that Tim goes blind for a good ten seconds, his head spinning. The back of his scalp feels wet, and he hates to think about what bacteria must be lurking on the ground beneath him. The knife clatters somewhere to Tim’s side and he’s almost relieved until a hand wraps around his throat, cutting off his next breath. Instinct plunges him into panic, choking on the lack of air and scrambling to get a hold on his attacker. Scratching, kicking, desperately trying to loosen the grip crushing his windpipe. “You didn’t have to make this so difficult,” the man tells him. His body presses down on Tim’s smaller form, keeps him trapped against the unforgiving asphalt, and this is it. This is the point of no return he’s been waiting for, but now Tim is here and he can’t do anything about it. Not even Robin could get out of this without a weapon, and Tim has none. He’s powerless. The creep releases Tim’s hair with a whisper of, “Don’t move.” Before he can do anything more with his newly freed hand, though, Tim’s body is thrown into action faster than he can comprehend moving at all. The world goes hazy, time itself turning to molasses. Absently Tim feels muscles flex, sees shapes move in front of his eyes, but someone else might as well be controlling Tim’s body while he’s locked in the backseat, missing the entire ride. One minute Tim is on his back with the creep on top of him, and after a chunk of time that Tim can’t remember participating in, he’s standing against the alley wall with something clutched in his hand. Tim blinks back the fog, but it lingers. He looks down and studies the way his fingers clasp the handle of the knife. That can’t be right. He wasn’t holding a knife before. Tim comes back to his body in increments, a stop-motion reel. First there’s a stinging ache on the back of his head, blood soaking into the back of his shirt and plastering his hair against his neck. His gaze slips from the glinting knife to the blood that covers his hands, warm and sticky. Then he catches a shape on the ground in front of him and Tim’s breath catches in his throat. The man from before is on the ground now, his eyes closed and blood spreading from a stab wound directly over his sternum. Tim drops the knife like it’s white-hot. Oh, god. Oh, god. Tim did this. He was...he didn’t mean it. He didn’t. He would never. But the man was on top of him and Tim couldn’t breathe, and...he didn’t mean it. Tim staggers back until his back hits the cold brick wall, his pulse pounding in his ears so loud the entire city must hear it. He just stabbed a person. He just killed a person. The one rule he’s supposed to follow, the one thing he promised never to do, and he just did it. Without even a second’s hesitation. He took a life. What is Bruce going to say when he finds out? Tim’s legs are made of jello, wobbling in warning until they give out entirely and he slides to the ground, knees pulled in close to his chest. His hands are still covered in blood. A dead man’s blood. He should...he should do something. He should act. First-aid, stop the bleeding, do whatever it takes to help in case there’s a chance. Tim doesn’t move. He doesn’t even try. His limbs have been replaced with rubber, his brain with slush. He just killed a man. In the back of his mind he knows he can’t go home, not like this. Not covered in another man’s blood. Even if he tried, Tim isn’t sure he’d make it two steps without collapsing into a puddle of whatever emotion is making him feel as though he’s rotting from the inside out. His family lives by a code, would sooner die themselves than take a life. Bats don’t kill. Tim doesn’t kill. Tim killed. His fingers shake as they take out his cell phone on autopilot, and the screen is cracked at the corner from when he was slammed into the ground. That’s going to cost money to fix. Tim gets blood on the screen, smudging over his contact list and warping the names. He finds the one he’s looking for and puts the phone to his ear. A ring. Two rings. A click. “This had better be important,” Jason says. Tim swallows. “Um. I—um.” He can’t take his eyes off of the body, lying there still as a corpse. Because it is a corpse. “My...head isn’t working. It’s—something is wrong. With me.” “Are you high or something? Because if you are, I’ll fucking kill you.” That does it. What little resolve Tim held on to cracks in one clean split and a sob bursts through. He covers his mouth with his elbow, choking on gasps. “Jay, I—it was an accident. I swear to god, I didn’t mean to. He was...it wasn’t...I didn’t mean to.” There’s a creak on the other end, maybe Jason sitting up in his chair. Or maybe he just sat down. Maybe he closed a door. Too many things in the world are creaky. “What the hell are you talking about? What happened?” “He’ll kick me out. He’s gonna take Robin away from me.” Something slams—definitely a door. “Kid, tell me where you are.” “I don’t know. It was—” His brain isn’t working. For the first time in his life, logic and reason escape him and Tim’s mind pushes into overdrive, drags him deeper and deeper into oblivion. Bruce is going to find out. He’s going to find out and he’s going to hate Tim for the rest of his life. Bruce doesn't like murderers. “Goddamn it. Tim, listen to me. Can you do that?” It takes a moment, but Tim manages to get out an affirming noise. “I’m going to track your phone and come get you. Don’t move, got it? Stay right where you are. I’ll be there soon.” Jason hangs up, leaving Tim alone again. He drops his phone back on the concrete, uncaring of potential breaks. It’s already been cracked. “He’s going to kick me out,” Tim repeats to the empty alleyway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tim is cold by the time Jason arrives. Or maybe he’s been cold this entire time. It’s hard to tell. “Fuck,” Jason swears as he takes in the scene before him. The body on the pavement. Tim, huddled against the alley wall, his eyes glazed over as he stares at the body like a horror movie he can’t turn off. Jason isn’t wearing his helmet, just a domino mask. He takes it off when he kneels in front of Tim, makes Tim meet his eyes. “Hey, kid. You with me?” “I killed him.” The words taste acrid on Tim’s tongue, sour. “Don’t worry about that now. Are you hurt anywhere?” Tim doesn’t answer. The back of his head stung before, but the pain is muffled now. Everything is muffled. “I killed him, Jay. I’m a murderer. Bruce is...I’m not supposed to kill. Robins don’t kill. They don’t.” His chest is tight, getting tighter by the minute until it feels like every breath is being sucked in through a tiny straw. “Tim, breathe,” Jason tells him. He puts his hand on Tim’s shoulder, and that helps a little. Gives him something to latch onto. “You’re in shock. Try putting your head between your knees.” Tim does, stares down at the dirty pavement between his sneakers. His eyes linger on an old fast food receipt. It has droplets of blood on it. “I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. He was���it was an accident. He was on top of me and he had a knife and then he was choking me and...I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe, so I just—I just moved. And now he’s dead. I killed him. What am I going to do?” “It was self-defense,” Jason says, as if the answer could really be so simple. “If you hadn’t acted, he would have hurt you. Maybe even killed you. You did the right thing.” “No, it’s—” Tim picks his head up, digs his nails into his knees to keep himself above the fog. “No. I took a life. I’m guilty. I can’t—there’s no coming back from that. There isn’t.” How can he live with himself after this? Does he even deserve to? “What, so you would rather be dead than have to tell Bruce you took a life? Seriously?” “Yes.” There’s no hesitation, not even a pause to let the words soak in. Jason sighs, and Tim is too far gone to decipher what it means. He squeezes Tim’s shoulder once and stands, goes over to the body still lying on the ground. (As if a dead man would go anywhere.) Jason crouches down and takes off one of his gloves, presses two fingers over the man’s neck. After a moment or two, he lets out a breath. “He’s still alive.” Tim’s breath hitches. “Really? Are you sure?” “Pulse is thready, but he’s not dead.” All of the air leaves Tim’s lungs in one huge whoosh, making him lightheaded. “Oh my god. That’s…” That’s good, right? It’s a good thing. It should be a good thing. “Yup. That’s one hell of a relief.” Jason straightens up from his crouch. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a gun, and fires it into the man’s head. “Jason!” It happens so fast that Tim doesn’t even have the capacity to think about the blood and brain matter splattered over Jason’s clothes, Tim’s shoes, the cracks in the alley’s pavement. “How could you—” “What? It’s not like he was going to walk it off or anything.” “We just—” Tim’s stomach churns. It feels like he’s going to be sick. “We just killed a man.” “No, I killed a man.” Jason holsters his gun, then kicks the body in the side for good measure. “You, however, are off the hook.” “What are you talking about? I stabbed him.” The knife is around here somewhere. That’s evidence. Proof of what happened tonight, what Tim did. What Jason finished. “And I shot him in the head. One of those is worse than the other.” “But I—” “No,” Jason snaps. He lowers himself to look Tim in the eyes. “You didn’t. Kill. Anyone. Got it? I killed him. Your slate is still clean.” “There’s a body. Evidence. I still did this.” Jason grabs the bloody knife and tucks it into his jacket. “No, the Red Hood did this. He cornered the guy in an alley, stabbed him, then shot him in the face. That’s what happened.” Tim shakes his head. “You can’t. You can’t take the fall for me.” “I’m not. I’m the one who killed him, right? I’m just taking responsibility for my own actions, which nobody is going to look twice at because this is the third one this week.” Jason takes Tim by the arm, pulling him upright and keeping him steady when he wobbles. “What about Bruce?” “We’ll tell him the truth. That you got attacked by some creep, I killed his slimy ass like he deserved, and then I let you crash at my place for the night to make sure you were safe. That’s it. Understand?” Tim isn’t sure if he does or not. He’s too numb to attempt puzzling it out, but he does know one thing he can say. “Thanks, Jason.” “Don’t mention it. Just try not to puke on me until we get to my place and I’ll call us even.”

#whumptober 2020 #batfamily #batfam #tim drake #red robin #batman #robin #idiot duckboy #jason todd #red hood #batbros #batboys #fanfiction #fanfic #dc comics #no.9 #'take me instead'

[selenophile-1]

Unknown

A Zach Addy fanfic

Chapter One

Pilot

My feet thud against the tile floor of the Smithsonian, I was running through the building trying to find the medico-legal lab. I was supposed to be here yesterday. as I got to the doors I hunched over and took a couple of deep breaths before pushing open the door.

as I walked in a girl in a blue lab coat walked up to me "Dr.Holmes?" I nodded and she led me to an office.

It smelled of vanilla and peanut butter, as I came into hearing range the women behind a set of computers were saying "..... processes it and then projects it as a three-dimensional holographic image." She was pretty, her hair was tucked into a messy bun, and her face was symmetrical. She was so close to perfection.

There were two other people in the room, tucked away behind the large hologram. The yellow lighting that was making the room almost uncomfortable heat, along with the sweet smells of this office it reminded of spending time with the other rich family's as a child.

I was stood behind the women sitting in the chair observing, as a man, who stood beside the women, who- I assumed was an agent of some kind- nodded and said "okay" he was wearing a cocky belt buckle and colourful socks, but anything other than that was very official. A dark black suit paired with a simple white dress shirt, and simple black shoes.

Doctor Brennan who was glancing around waiting, looked at him "you got that?" she then spotted me standing behind the large man and she smiled "Dr.Holmes!" I smiled back at the slightly older women and walked up beside her. She looked different than when I last saw her, Her hair was short, probably do to some heat and she looked darker-maybe from spending time at a dog site. "You're a day late." She stated giving me a glance over

I laughed, "well my brother needed me for a case" I glanced at the agent who had moved from beside the women to behind Dr.Brennan “I'm so sorry I'm late"

She smiled at me and laughed, at my excuse "Dr. Holmes, you and your brothers are extraordinary! I wouldn’t care if you were a week late.” She looked at everyone else who seemed to be stunned at my presents. "This is Dr.Iris Holmes"

I smiled at everyone around the room, before looking at Dr.Brennan, "I'm very happy I get to work with you, Doctor Brennan and your extraordinary team” 

Dr.Brennan nodded at the women at a set of computers. and she glanced over at me “well let’s begin” she muttered before beginning to type "Brennan reassembled the skull and applied tissue markers. " she said

She, along with the rest of us watch as the hologram began to form "Her skull was badly damaged" Dr.Brennan began to point at the hologram "but racial indicators, cheekbone dimensions, nasal arch, occipital measurements suggest African American."

The woman behind the computer put in the information Dr.Brennan had indicated, "And.... We have our victim" she said and on the hologram was an upper body of a female.

The agent placed his hand into the hologram slowly and wiggling his fingers while whispering " Whoa... Have to admit, that's pretty cool."

Dr.Brennan removed the agent's hand from the hologram with a very annoyed look on her face, before facing the woman then back at the hologram " Ang, rerun the program substituting Caucasian values." the image altered slightly, and my eyes got wide. then Dr.Brennan asked exactly what I was thinking "Does she look familiar to anyone?"

at the same time, I nodded and said "yes" the agent muttered a silent 'No'. I glanced at him then back at the hologram "can you Split the difference, mixed race."

"Lenny Kravitz or Vanessa Williams?"

I looked at the woman who I assumed was Ang. "I'm not sure what that means" she looked back down at the computer and I went back to looking at the hologram slightly embarrassed, the women adjusted the face slightly.

Dr.Brennan continued to look at the hologram for a couple of seconds before saying "Angela, reduce tissue depth over the cheekbones to the jawline." the agent looked from the skull to the hologram. I walked over to the skull and gently touched the grove's and curves.  "does anyone else recognize her"

one of the other guys in the room, his hair was unkempt and longer than the agents, answered Dr. Brennan "not me" but I did and apparently so did Angela.

"Wait, is the who I think it is"

"The girl who had the affair with the Senator?"

the agent sighed and placed his hand against the system "Her name is Cleo Louise Eller... the Only daughter to Ted and Sharon Eller." he looked over at the skull again, as everyone looked at him " Last seen approximately 9 pm, April 6, 2003, leaving the Cardio Deluxe Gym on K Street" he looked back at everyone "she didn't even make it to her car."

"pretty good memory" Dr.Brennan commented, shifting from one foot to the other while crossing her arms.

the agents put his hands in his pockets and said "yeah well it's my job to find her"

The last guy, who was on the shorter side with curly hair that was messy and looked to be tangled in its self, rocked back on his heels and said "Well, in that case, congratulations on your success"

"This isn't exactly the way I wanted it to end."

★━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

The group wearing lab coats sat on the steps eating, I was standing with Dr.Brennan and the agent-whos name I learnt was booth-on the landing before the stairs began. Booth continued the conversation with "Cleo Eller is not just some missing girl." He looked all around at each of us.

As Booth's gaze landed on Dr. Hodgins-the man with the curly, tangled hair-He said "Yeah, she's a senate intern who was boinking Senator Allen Bethlehem."

"I was secondary in the investigation to the disappearance of that girl and we couldn't confirm that." Booth looked down at the case file in Dr. Brennan's hand, he looked at me then back to the doctor "how did you two recognize her before she even had her own face?"

Dr.Brennan glanced at me then back to the case file and continued to talk to Booth " I recognized the underlying architecture of her features" she looked up at him "and the rest is just window dressing"

Zach looked at Booth-who had a strange look on his face-, then at Dr.Brennan "I'm not an expert but, shouldn't he be happier?"

" Oh no, believe me, I'm happy."

"You look happy to me"

Booth looked at Angela, Hodgins, And Zach and pointed at them with file "I need this kept quiet."

"Ha! Cover-up" Hodgins yells pointing down at Booth

Booth, followed by Dr.Brennan began walking down the stairs "Paranoid conspiracy theory."

"Is it paranoia that Monica Lewinsky was a KGB trained sex agent mole!"

Brennan and Booth got further away until I could no longer hear what the two were have a conversation about when I turned to the three of them sitting on the stairs "Are the remains clean?" Everyone stopped eating and looked at me, "what?"

#bones fanfic #jack hodgins #zach addy #bones tv #angela montenegro #vincent nigel murray

[deathbled]

💍 + averey & lenalee o vo

@lunaetis​    /    wedding meme send me 💍 + A SHIP and i’ll tell you—

where they get married

it takes place in a beautiful garden near where they first met; averey was surprisingly stubborn about that because, in his words, “where they met is where his life started” and honestly lenalee probably won’t say no to that logic (plus he probably used the puppy dog eyes, he’s not above that)

when they get married ( ie what time of day, what month and season etc. )

it’s late spring, early evening some day in mid-april, to be exact, where the trees bloom & the flowers slowly come out of their slumber. it wasn’t planned like that, per-se, but things happen and sometimes the most beautiful things take place at unexpected times.

what traditions they include ( do they get married under a chuppah and crush a glass, garter toss, ‘something borrowed, something blue,’ etc. )

i’m honestly unsure about this because i feel like while they probably would include some traditions it wouldn’t be as big a deal as for other people; maybe they both drink wine from goblets tied together with red string or, and he’s only doing it very lowkey because he’s embarrassed but where averey is from there’s the tradition of carving wooden spoons for your loved one and decorating them with things like key insignia ( to signify they have the key to your heart ) so maybe that plays a part? i’m honestly stumped with this one otherwise because i can promise you even after looking up wedding traditions i have absolutely no idea about wedding traditions :’)

or there’s the whole “testing the groom” thing kamui might’ve been involved with planning

what their wedding cake looks like

it is either incredibly cute or absolutely extravagant and even now i’m not sure if it’s a 50/50 decision vote like most things are with them or if they just play rock-paper-scissors to settle which one to go for. though if avereys “boss” gets to have a say it’s literally the most over-the-top cake and i’m screaming and laughing over this one

….who smashes cake into whose face

i want to say lenalee smashes cake into avereys cake but honestly i’m 100% convinced averey accidentally smashes cake into his own face in a moment of inattentiveness.

who proposed to who first

OKAY SO. THERE’S TWO SCENARIOS I CAN SEE.

they both did at the same time actually because it was kind of a “you know if i could i’d marry you right now” -”i’m not stopping you” situation that ended with “so we’re getting married?” but in like, during a picnic or something and it sounds a lot less cute than it was because trust me it was cute and wholesome. either that or one of them prepared to propose to the other, the other found the ring and then proposed first in a classic uno reverse card move.

or it was averey but only because he asked lenalee if it was okay and she was just so confused and like “yeS?” and then it happened and turns out this dumb nerd had everything prepared already but was just nervous so it’s not even a surprise but he’d rather ask if it’s okay for him to ask then ask at a wrong time

who walks down the aisle and who waits at the altar ( or neither )

i want to say it’s the classic thing but i’m so sure averey insisted the walk down the aisle together just because he hates the traditional view most cultures have on the bride being “given away” into another mans care so he just was as stubborn as a mule about walking with her

what their wedding dresses / suits / other look like

can i say wildcard for this one because i actually have no idea. i thought about it for thirty minutes now and i literally have no clue other than given that avereys birthplace doesn’t even really do weddings he’d just stress so much about what to wear he’d probably be annoying a little bit before he just kinda settles on “i’m going to ask the fanciest people i know but at the same time i am ready to cry how to fashion....”

what their wedding colour scheme is and what sort of decor they have

it’s definitely a more red & gold theme; the decor is perhaps one of the most traditional things & once again i am not sure what else to say other than they kept it classy but also very eye-catching??? idk 

what flowers are in the bouquet ( if applicable. bonus: what do the flowers mean? )

okay so to start off it’s not in the bouquet but averey has a sprig of thyme in his pocket for “good luck”, there’s probably red peonys in there, perhaps some pink roses, DEFINITELY at least one white carnation, and a pink hydrangea. 

the red peonys stand for love, passion, honor and respect. the pink roses symbolize gratitude, grace & joy, white carnations symbolize purity, good luck & in wedding contexts pure love. pink hydrangeas symbolize heartfelt emotion. i’m not a florist, trust me.

what their vows are ( eg poetry, traditional, improvised etc. )

they’re actually improvised! i’d get the feeling at least one of the two had vows prepared but instead went spontaneous as soon as it came to saying them out loud. actually, i can see that happening with both of them i don’t know why.

if anyone’s late to the wedding

surprisingly enough, no. nobody would dare be late. they know better than that :)

who’s in the bridal parties / groomsmen / other

oh god here comes my absolute lack of knowledge with d. gray man characters AND the fact averey has literally like 2 people he hangs out with on the regular but i think in the bridal party there’d definitely be miranda? maybe kanda because i can see him refusing to be a groomsmen but they insisted he’d be involved. if this is a verse where the princess averey was serving is healthy & they finally get to be friends without one of them constantly under the threat of death then definitely her too!!

as for groomsmen there’s probably allen, lavi, a very grumpy kamui and one of the rookie knights from avereys training.

and yes i hope it shows i have no idea how weddings are??? structured???

what their bridal party / groomsmen / other are wearing

the bridal party wears a pastel shade of pink just because they def ain’t gonna wear white or red dresses and anything else would legit just clash with the color theme.

the groomsmen all wear a simple suit because honestly all of them made suggestions and it would’ve turned into a disaster because they’re tastes are so vastly different so eventually both lenalee and averey just were like “how about,,, we keep it,,,, simple,,,”

who gives speeches at the reception ( bonus: what do they say? recount a sweet memory or two between them? tell an embarrassing story? )

well i mean, honestly? i think they both give small welcoming speeches until the others get a turn and then it’s just kamui going, allen giving a speech, avereys rookie friend whom i decided is now called lynell and uhh, a few others probably want to have a god but honestly therE’S NO TIME......

who catches the bouquet( s )

i mean i want to say a serious answer but just for shits and giggles i’m gonna say kanda.

what their wedding photos are like ( are they sweet, with the couple holding hands or kissing or ~gazing into each others eyes~? are they silly, with a snapshot of the ‘cake-smash’ moment? or are they artistic, with one of them facing the sunset or holding their bouquets? )

okay so most of them are sweet and absolutely the cutest pictures ever but there’s definitely a picture of averey accidentally cake-smashing himself so....

what sort of food they have at the reception

it’s an 8 course banquet and honestly i don’t even know what exactly it’d entail i just know they went all out and if i dwell on this ask any longer i’ll be hungry i’m so sorry i just can’t do food asks past midnight i’ll turn into a gremlin

who cries first during the ceremony

can averey cry first if he’s been crying this whole time?

how wild their reception gets ( who dances the best, who gets drunk first, etc. )

it’s a tame kind of wild; there’s a dance off and definitely some drunken shenanigans but nobody goes absolutely crazy

what their rings are like

FINALLY MY FAVORITE THING I KNOW THINGS ABOUT. averey made them himself and he’s super proud and yes it took literal months but look at them,, he tried to keep them simple but elegant so they don’t get in the way of work, too. i’m crying.

what sort of favours they have ( heart shaped sparklers, mini champagne bottles, personalised candy etc. )

uH,,, UHHHHHHHHHHHH, personalised candy probably but also most definitely mini champagne bottles if just because it fit with the theme or something---

where they go for their honeymoon

they actually travel for a while! they couldn’t decide where exactly to go so instead they just decided to pick the places they wanted to see the most and then travel there for a bit

something memorable that happens during the party / ceremony ( do they run out of ice and someone goes to get it in full formal wear on foot, does anyone fall asleep in the middle of the party, etc. )

averey not only accidentally cake smashes himself he also manages to accidentally use the cake leftovers on his hand like hairgel because he was careless and ran said hand through his hair

THEY DID manage to get it out for the most part though so it’s all good---

who officiates the ceremony

can i pick wildcard again because other than the classic “a priest” i don’t actually have anything in mind other than perhaps the bishop that took averey under his wing to help him with his curse a short time before averey and lenalee met??

what song their first dance is to

OKAY SO I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS ONE SUPER LONG but i honestly think it’d be to “for the dancing & the dreaming” if just because it’s super cute and also they’d probably sing along thank you for coming to my ted talk

who gives who away as they walk down the aisle

i mean given that they walk the aisle down together i don’t think anyone gives anyone away but if it came down to it you already know the answer

#lunaetis #you can tell how tired i got because i literally ended up writing the last five questions or so while I WAS DEAD #anyways i hate this but i tRIED #i know NOTHING. NADA. ZIP. about weddings #FJDFLKGJKDFFGJDKFDG the truth come out i live under a rock #bUT YEAH I TRIED TO MAKE IT WHOLESOME AND CUTE OK #but yeah the cake smash thing def happened because averey was so nervous he just kind of accidentally did that:tm: #* ALL OF THIS SORROW WON’T FIT IN MY CHEST ( reply )

[fandomexplosion]

Dc comics high school Au

Younger characters are students and older ones are parents/Teachers

Okay so I don’t have it completely writing out yet, these are just points Part 1/? Don't know if I'm going write anymore or even write a story for this.

Teachers/Parents

Diana Prince- history Teacher (mostly Greek history) and girls track coach.

Bruce Wayne- Parent. Practically the head of the pta. I mean he has enough kids.

Clark kent- both, parent and the fucking principle (Reason #1 Why Conner wants to hang himself.)

Lex Luthor- vice principal-

Oliver Queen- both, business teacher and Roy’s foster father. Will either come in on Monday morning hungover or just not show up. Mostly plays movies.

Barry Allen- teacher- chemistry teacher and boys track coach. (He’s also Wally’s uncle)

Hal Jordan- gym teacher

Dinah Lance- choir teacher.

Ray Palmer- physics teacher-

Ted Kord- math teacher. Doesn’t really want to but someone has to.

Rita Farr- drama/theatre teacher

Cliff Steel- auto and mechanics teacher.

Joe Kerr (Joker)- the drama director

John Jones- English teacher

Kyle Rayner- Art teacher- has never taught before. (It’s his first year) makes friends with students

Selina Kyle- Gymnastics teacher/Coach

Arthur Curry- swim teacher and coach.

Alec Holland- biology teacher-

Pamela Isley- earth science teacher

Harleen Quinzel- ladies softball coach, school psychologist/Counselor

Lazlo Valentin (Professor Pyg)- school nurse/doctor

Teth-Adam (black Adam) - ap/world history.

Edward Nygma- English teacher.- “Now can someone who isn’t completely incompetent answer this.” “Bart Put your hand down, you’re an idiot”

Eobard Thawne- US history teacher

Vandal Savage- superintendent.-

Every once in a while a sub will come in (Mr. Shazam? Mr. Marvel?) oddly enough He’s never subed for Billy’s class or he’s absent in said class.

Music Meister- band

Vril Dox- algebra and geometry teacher

Students

Dick Grayson- on the gymnastics team. The most popular boy in a cheesy movie about high school romance

Roy Harper- looks like a drug addict, probably is a drug addict. Voted most likely to shoot up a school. Jason Todd is his partner in crime.

Jason Todd- voted most likely to blow up the school. Has the hot bad boy routine DOWN. Wake me up WAKE ME UP INSIDE I can’t wake up.

Tim Drake- is literally a walking mess. Always has coffee. Will probably find him hunched over computer watching buzzfeed unsolved.

Kara Danvers- is a cheerleader. Tries. She really tries but she’s a hot mess. (But to be honest most in this school are) in the journalist club. (Clark and Conner’s cousin)

Wally West- track star. Will take food from anyone. Is actually a nerd.

Conner Kent- it’s almost like these hot blue eyed black hair boys are being cloned. Will flirt with anyone and everyone. Has a great style. Will tell you if what you’re wearing is bad. Is dork though.

Bart Allen- is everyone’s little brother. The cute one. Also weird. And get this boy a haircut. (Not really it’s cute) like his cousin Wally he will eat everything however his is more absurd. Like fries off the ground or random sludge he was dared to drink. Somehow related to Barry (know one knows how though)

Kory Anders- head cheerleader. Is nice but intimidating. Looks like a Brazilian super model. Also plays volleyball.

Cassie Sandsmark- also cheerleader🤷‍♀️. Akward and weird.

Cassandra Cain- quiet, cute and can kick your ass. If you mess with her and she somehow doesn’t fuck you up, you bet her four brothers will. Is a dancer. Knows asl

Garfield Logan- basketball player. Funny dorky kid. In drama class/theatre.

Rachel Roth- goth girl. Meditates. Might be possessed but is easily calmed with tea.

Damian Wayne- isn’t actually in high school but has ap classes. Will get picked up by his older siblings and will end up hanging with who said sibling is hanging with. Will usually get picked up by Dick or Jason will force Tim to pick Damian up for him.

Barbara Gordon- computer wiz. *Hacker voice* I’m in. I’m a boss ass bitch plays in the background.

Billy Batson- is that one freshman that doesn’t annoy everyone. Is kinda an outsider. Makes friends with everyone though, even the teachers. Is actually really smart and somehow knows everything. Is the one who would find ‘Secret’ passages and sneaks around a lot.

Stephanie Brown- WAFFLES! Wears a lot of purple.

Donna Troy- yearbook photographer. Is mom friend to everyone. Tells you when you’re being stupid.

Duke Thomas- doesn’t want to be here. ”All those idiots over there? Yah I don't know them.” He says like a liar.

Jon Kent- not in high school but is Conner’s little brother and Damian’s best friend.

Querl Dox- Big nerd. Everyone goes to him when the Don’t get their Math homework. Resting judging you face.

Couples

Hal and Barry- the cute teacher couple

Dick and Kory- prom king and queen. Will probably get married once they graduate. On and off a lot though.

Conner and Bart- (Okay listen, they need more love)- somehow works. If you touch Conner’s baby you will probably get thrown through a wall.

Garfield and Rachel- That’s my wife! She’s a bitch and I love her. He may be an idiot but he’s my idiot.

Harleen and Pamela- the lesbian teachers who might adopt you.

Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown- is honestly perfect for each other.

Kara Danvers and Querl Dox- most don't realize they're dating.

if you want to give ideas for it you can.

#dc comics #dc #young justice #robin #superboy #conner kent #batman #jason todd #dick grayson #damian wayne #dc comics shitpost #dc High School Au #Dc comics High School Au #superman #halbarry #dickkory #konbart #bartkon #bbrae #harleyivy #timsteph #karadox #wonder women #wonder girl #diana prince #cassie sandsmark #bruce wayne #clark kent #lex luthor #oliver queen

[ty-talks-comics]

Best of DC: Week of September 4th, 2019

Best of this Week: DCeased: A Good Day to Die #1 - Tom Taylor, Laura Braga, Darick Robertson, Richard Friend, Trevor Scott, Rain Beredo and Saida Temofonte

This was absolutely insane from start to finish.

DCeased as an event has been dire, hopeless and gory beyond all reason and while there has been some travel to different places like Keystone City or Atlantis, most of it has been confined to Metropolis and focused on Superman, Green Canary, Jon Kent and Damian Wayne. A Good Day to Die shifts the focus to an entirely different cast of characters and how they’re dealing with the Anti-Life infection.

Starting with an amazing shot of Mister Miracle, Scott Free, and Big Barda using a Boom Tube to look at the destroyed remains of Apokalips, the book establishes just how bad things have gotten for even the worst being in existence. Darkseid is more than likely very dead. Surrounded by the White Light of safety, the couple look on share a tender kiss full of love with Scott saying that seeing Apokalips decimated debris makes him feel pretty good, like a weight has been lifted off of his shoulder, especially since there were nothing but awful memories there. One of the first themes we get here is the love that he and Barda share throughout.

Soon after, we cut to Mister Terrific conducting a myriad of test on a captured but infected Captain Boomerang. There is never a reason given for why he has Boomerang, but his studies ultimately lead nowhere as he too is stumped about how to solve this problem. What makes this interesting is that, Michael Holt is one of the smartest minds in all of the DC Universe. He has almost as many resources as Batman has with double the mind power to piece together a solution, but he’s got nothing. So he turns to the only two people that may have a first person perspective of things - Scott Free and Barda who have just returned to Earth.

Truly, the only thing that could have made this better would have been an appearance from Guy Gardner for most of a Justice League International reunion. This was alluded to by Ted when Barda first showed up and while this does get some more creedence later on, it is far more gruesome than I would have expected, but it was a fun nod to some old history.

Taylor makes one of the first of many jokes as Terrific knocks on their door, but Scott is convinced that it’s a zombie with their bloody stump until he rings the doorbell, Braga then pulls in close on Scott’s face with the most serious look with him saying, “Answer the door.” and I just couldn’t contain myself. After Barda explains that Apokalips holds no answers as it too was destroyed, we cut to Blue Beetle and Booster Gold holed up in Kord Industries office building. Ted notes that the door is made of titanium and that nothing could get through it… Until Barda gets through it. Scott and Terrific cut down the zombies with ease, allowing the group to escape to Blue Beetle’s Bug on the way to another hope!

After all of that, we venture to the wonderful land of Liverpool, England where John Constantine is being chased by hordes of the Undead and yelling at Chas to start the car. Unfortunately for him, Chas had been looking at his phone and succumbs to the virus himself, forcing John to incinerate his best mate.

Darick Robertson is the artist for these pages and he does an excellent job of drawing a crowd of zombies with bloody faces. He's even better at setting a scene in only a few panels, showing John running from them at a distance, and keeping that same shot, bringing John closer and closer as we see just how dense the horde is. John is absolutely lucky that he manages to survive. The sheer terror on his face as he runs ragged away from danger is a delight and actually makes me feel horrified for him too.

Terrific and the others save John, asking if magic might be able to help them, but John retorts in his normal snide manner that if it could, he would have done it already. Not before making fun of their superhero names, John says that he's going to wait to die while being drunk off his arse in typical fashion.

Laura Braga's art shifts between the gruesome and the beautiful so often in this book that when Scott and Varda are on screen, they stand out well amongst the drab browns and reds of the zombies. While this is mostly thanks to Rain Beredo's great use of colors in Barda's iconic dark blues and yellows as well as Scott's distinct greens, yellows and red, credit should be given for Braga's amazing posing and scene setting. Seeing Barda and Scott so in love and having it juxtaposed against impending doom is just a wonderful sight to see.

The groups efforts are further impeded when Waverider, a "time cop" comes to prevent Booster from using his time machine to save the universe. Constantine returns out of guilt in the nick of time to try to save the universe, headbutting Waverider for a distraction when ZomBarda crashes through a wall and kills Mister Terrific. This keeps Booster away for time to take its toll as Waverider tells him that Superman apparently finds the body of Barry Allen in some rubble in Keystone, causing Booster and the future to start fading away.

With little options left, Terrific places his faith in the hands of Booster Gold who still has a working time machine somewhere. Even Booster acknowledges the idiocy of that idea, but what else can they do? Booster says he left it in the hands of some trusted friends and where do we go? Malibu! The home of Fire and Ice, the other two members of the JLI as mentioned earlier! Unfortunately for Mister Terrific’s team, both Fire and Ice lost the fight against the hordes and succumbed to the infection themselves. Seeing no other option and quickly being overcome, Scott and Barda sacrifice themselves so that the others may escape. They share one last kiss before getting completely overwhelmed.

I actually almost teared up as I tend to do when things involve Booster and Beetle. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle have the most adorable bromance in the history of comics and watching Ted frantically try to calm his dissipating friend is nothing but heartbreaking. Booster apologizes to Ted that he'll never know him and it's almost too much, even in this series.

The biggest and best change here is John's unwillingness to let this universe fall. John's never been one for superheroics, but seeing just how close Terrifics team came to actually having something of a solution and knowing that he could have been a great help makes Constantine see that the world can still be saved.

DCeased has me far more involved at this point than I ever expected. Even if it's not a canon story, I really do feel for each character in it. This particular spin off is even better because it has some of my favorite characters and shows just how they'd deal with a rapid zombie infection. Tom Taylor must have been reading old issues of Justice League of America/International because he captured some of the essence that made that series so hilarious with great characterizations and gags.

Laura Braga's art stuns by being every bit as violent as Trevor Hairsine's on the main book while also being very distinct from it with thick lines, excellent facial expressions and good backgrounds. Her cities feel desolate, even with zombies roaming the streets and the way she drew Blue Beetle's Bug brought me back to my love for the character and the wackiness of the vehicle.

Things just tumble down from there as Ted allows himself to be infected and Constantine keeps Waverider locked in place so that he has to face the consequences of what he's allowed to happen. Ted kills Waverider just as Doctor Fate and Zatanna show up to try and rescue Constantine.

I really hope that this spin off continues to every part of the DC Universe and that even when the main series is over there will still be more stories to tell. Like Marvel Zombies, there's a lot of ground that can be covered and it can't just be contained to a six issue miniseries. I mean, it can to avoid oversaturation, but I love this so far.

#dceased #dc comics #dc #mister miracle #big barda #mister terrific #blue beetle #booster gold #john constantine #horror #zombies #tom taylor #laura braga #darick robertson #rain beredo

[raywritesthings]

What Have They Lost? 3/?

My Writing Fandom: Arrow, The Flash Characters: Laurel Lance, Oliver Queen, Connor Hawke, Ted Grant, Barry Allen, Iris West, Barbara Gordon, Wally West, Cisco Ramon, Caitlin Snow, Joe West Pairings: Barry Allen/Iris West, Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel Summary: “I can definitely tell you that there’s a way we’re going to bring [Laurel] back and she’s going to be alive and well. And Flashpoint might have a little bit to do with that.“ -Wendy Mericle AKA: The AU where that wasn’t a blatant lie, and Flashpoint has bigger repercussions for Barry’s friends and allies than he first realized. Notes: Much thanks to @colorofmymindposts for beta-ing as well as to the Lauriver discord server for helping with world-building and character histories. Anyone interested in joining the server should follow this link: https://discord.gg/gp9ANVr  *Also can be read on my AO3*

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Damn age getting to him.

As it was, Ted woke on his couch to the sound of a key trying to find the lock and muttered curses. He got to his feet just as Dinah pushed through the door and slammed it behind her, glancing back through the window.

“Alright, we expecting company?”

She looked at him. “Ted, it happened again.”

He sighed. “Okay.”

“I don’t know what it is,” she burst out. “I mean I do, but — I mean, why me, right? Babs is fine, Helena’s fine, and Pam—” she drew up short. “Well, nobody’s really sure what’s wrong with her. But at least it’s consistent.”

“Not getting worse?”

Dinah chewed her lip. “Harley says they’ve had to up her dosage again, or that rash keeps coming back. If that stupid explosion hadn’t knocked her back into that ivy…”

“Or hit you when you were holding the mic?”

“Yeah.” Dinah looked down and sighed. “I just need to, I don’t know, take a breather or something.”

“Stuff’s in your room.”

“Thanks, Ted.” She touched his shoulder distractedly as she made her way down the hall into the spare room she used whenever they stopped here. A few minutes later, he could hear sounds of a familiar melody on the guitar. Ted shook his head.

It wasn’t any wonder she’d gotten worked up and that this whatever-it-was had activated again. Dealing with that washed up excuse for a father, being back here…

He found his phone on the coffee table and went through the recent contacts. His call was picked up after a single ring.

“Hey, Ted.”

“Barbara. You got any time?”

“Yeah. Dad’s got another night shift. He won’t be back for hours.” He could hear fingers clacking away at a computer’s keys rather than a keyboard’s. “What’s up?”

“Dinah’s had another accident. She’s a bit shaken up.”

“Put her on. I’m switching over to video.”

Ted went down the hall and knocked on the door. It wasn’t completely shut, so it swung in a few inches.

“I tried to look for you in the dark water, but I got lost along the way,” Dinah was half-singing, half-saying under her breath. She really wasn’t giving that one up, was she?

“Hey, it’s Barbara.”

Dinah smiled up at him and set the guitar aside. “Thanks, Ted.”

She took the phone and set it up so she and Barbara could each see each other’s faces.

“So what happened?” Barbara never was one to mince words. Probably got it from the old commissioner.

“There were some creeps trying to force a woman into having their sick idea of fun. I didn’t like the look of it, so I said something.”

“And then screamed something, huh?”

“He was running at me. It was, I don’t know, instinct. Something like that.” Dinah dragged a hand back through her hair. “I thought for a second somebody else saw — but nobody was there. I must be getting paranoid.”

“Well, we do need to talk about what to do going forward, Dinah. This clearly isn’t something you can ignore or force to stop happening.”

“I know. But what do you want me to do, announce to the world I’m a metahuman? The Flash would just zip up onto the stage and have me in handcuffs,” Dinah remarked, the humor in her tone only barely masking contempt.

“Who says you have to tell people you’re the metahuman?” Ted asked. Dinah turned towards him and it was clear that Barbara was listening as well. “Nobody knows who the Flash is. That’s why he isn’t in prison.”

Dinah looked back at the phone screen. “What do you think, Babs? You’re the masked crusader expert.”

“Don’t remind me,” Barbara replied with a grimace. “But I do think you need to find a way to separate your identity from the woman who can knock down walls with her voice. If only so the latter can do some good.”

Dinah stood, her arms crossing over her chest. “You sound like dad. He was just reminding me tonight how I used to want to do something for the world with my life.”

“Well, don’t you?”

Ted held his breath, watching and waiting.

“I can barely do enough for myself,” Dinah said. “I’m not some hero, Babs, or even a guy in a bat suit with an ax to grind. I just got dealt a bad hand.”

“And why let that stop you?” Ted asked. “You climbed out of poverty with your music, Dinah. You got yourself out of the foster care system. You’d be free of the abuse if you’d cut the old man off.”

She scoffed.

“I know you feel you haven’t done what you set out to do,” he continued, placing his hands on her shoulders. “But don’t you think you might find out more about yourself if you look to the future instead of the past?”

“I can’t stop looking, Ted,” Dinah said, her eyes wide and pleading.

“And you won’t. But tell me, where did that little girl who snuck into my gym ‘cause she kept getting into scrapes go? Where’d that young lady who kicked guys in the head for harassing women in the crowd go?”

“You know I’d be out there if the answer had come back different,” Barbara offered.

Dinah scowled. “Who cares if Batman said no? You could still do it.”

“Maybe now that I have some money behind me,” Barbara allowed. “But I don’t have the kind of power that accelerator gave you, Dinah.”

“I could hurt someone,” Dinah stated. It was the fear first and foremost in her mind ever since they’d learned what she could do, after all the months of worrying that the accident had stolen her voice. Maybe it had in a way; it was making her hold herself back.

“With the right kind of training, I don’t think so,” Barbara countered. “But that’s gonna take practice, the same as all our other lessons.”

“So where am I supposed to practice? I don’t exactly have my own city lying around somewhere unless you two are surprising me this Christmas.”

“Well, you are home,” Barbara said.

Dinah raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t Star already have a guy?”

Babs shrugged. “Just Green Arrow. Batman never took him that seriously. Thought he liked to make speeches more than get anything done.”

“Forgive me if I don’t hold Batman’s opinion that highly,” Dinah said with a cool tone, “considering he clearly doesn’t know talent when it knocks on his door.”

“Things might have been different,” Barbara said not for the first or probably the last time. “Just my dad being the GCPD liaison with him...it complicates things.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that involved of a discussion with Batman would necessitate you knowing who you were talking to,” Ted remarked.

“Nope, not falling for it, Ted.”

He grinned. “Worth a shot. I really am starting to wonder if I should make the rounds and get these new boys into shape.”

“Yeah right,” Dinah said, some of her old bite back in her voice. “You like us too much to go over to that boys’ club.”

“All the more reason to get you out there, Dinah.”

She sighed, looking down at her guitar. “Just...let me think it over, okay?”

“Sure thing.” He retrieved his phone and headed for the door.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help,” Dinah said before he had quite left. “It just feels like every time I try...someone gets hurt.”

“That’s just the growing pains. But I think you’re ready to fly now, Dinah.”

She nodded once, and Ted shut the door behind him as he left.

“You think I might have pushed too hard?” He asked Barbara, who had stayed on the line.

“She doesn’t think she’s the right person to be a hero,” Barbara said. “But that’s exactly why she is.”

“Right you are, Babs. Think I’ll go air out the old gym here. We might be needing it soon. You feel like joining in?”

“Give me two weeks. I promised my father we’d spend some time together.” Barbara gestured around the empty apartment she currently sat in. “You can see how that’s going.”

“Well, you hang in there. We’re gonna get you your chance, too.”

“Thanks, Ted.”

He hung up and smiled to himself. Much as he liked his role with the band, he was looking forward to being a teacher again.

—-

Combing through the old family papers was easier said than done. Back when he’d first returned from the island, he had found out that they’d all been boxed up and stored in a warehouse. Walter had been meticulous about the organization of it all, but Oliver had just gotten out what was necessary to declare himself alive again and then looked for a new place to live. Even if the old Manor hadn’t been sold, he couldn’t have gone back there. Too many empty rooms.

Now, he was looking for something entirely unrelated to him, something among his mother’s things. He had to stop every now and then, smiling with watery eyes at her handwriting or an old photo. She’d kept every one of his school pictures, notating them on the back: Oliver, 6th grade.

God, why’d she let him have that hair?

Eventually, he came across an old lock box. Walter must not have touched it beyond moving it here, though he clearly hadn’t found the key.

Oliver looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry, mom.” He broke the lock.

Inside were a number of yellowing papers, some looked to be about financial matters while others were of a more personal nature.

There was also a checkbook tied to an account number Oliver didn’t recognize, nor was it from their family bank. It recorded monthly payments to one of the local orphanages, up until the last month before they all got on the Gambit.

Heart thumping in his ears, Oliver reached a birth certificate at the bottom of the stack of papers. Mia Dearden, was the name given to the child, born January 21st, 1995. She was ten years younger than him. He had a kid sister?

There was a photo paper-clipped to the back of a tiny baby sleeping in a nursery. It was irrational, maybe, but he felt a fierce longing for this tiny life he’d never known.

But he should have. How had his parents kept this from him?

The birth certificate was from a hospital whose name he didn’t recognize. A quick search on his phone showed that it was out of state. He tried to remember that year. Had his mother been away on a trip? Had she hidden the pregnancy that way? His father’s name wasn’t on the certificate. Did that mean…?

There was nothing to indicate if his father had known, or what he had thought if he had. But there had to be some reason Mia Dearden hadn’t been raised alongside him in their home. Never mind that his mother must have purposefully brought her back to the city and kept up payments that must have seen the orphanage well outfitted. At least until 2007.

She would have been twelve, or around that age, Oliver realized. What had happened to her after? Would the orphanage know? Had she found another family, someone to provide the love and care his parents had either been unwilling or unable to give?

“Dad?”

Oliver looked up from his desk, spotting Connor in the shadows by the door. It had gotten late, and the single lamp he had on was the only source of light in the room.

“Hey. Sorry. I got, uh, caught up with all this. You eat yet?”

“Did you?”

Fair enough question. Oliver set the birth certificate and the photo of his baby sister aside, standing up. “Okay, what do we want? Chicken? Chicken tacos? Think we still have some wraps.”

“We could order a pizza,” Connor suggested. “You look tired.”

Oliver looked down. His son was probably right; he’d been at this for three days now, only stopping for meals or to go out on patrol.

“Okay. You pick the toppings.”

They settled out in the main room to wait after Oliver called the order in. He looked Connor over during the silence. He had failed to be the father this boy should have had for the first several years of his life, and now he was finding that was an all too common mistake of his when it came to family. Even if he really had been a kid in the case of Mia Dearden.

“So,” Connor began, “what did you find out?”

Oliver grimaced. “Uncle Barry was right. Sort of, anyway.”

Connor’s eyes were wide, in excitement or worry he couldn’t tell. “So there is a Thea Queen?”

“I don’t know about her, but my mother had a daughter she never told me about. Her name’s Mia,” Oliver said, his voice cracking slightly on the name. He cleared his throat. “Mia Dearden. She has mom’s maiden name.”

“How come your mom never told you?”

“Well, if I had to guess...my parents were partners in the business sense. They built the old company together, as equals. But in their relationship, it wasn’t exactly like that.”

Connor nodded sagely. “She had an affair.”

“Seems that way. Not exactly the best example us Queens are setting for you. Don’t get any ideas,” Oliver quipped when Connor made a face. He was definitely glad that his son still seemed uninterested in the dating scene, and prayed it would last at least a little longer.

“What are you gonna do about Mia?”

That was a question he hadn’t let himself contemplate yet. “She’s a young woman now. Probably out on her own. I don’t know how happy she’d be to learn the truth now.”

“But you wanna meet her.”

It was remarkable how well the kid could read him.

“It’s hard not to wonder. How different would things have been, you know? The way Barry was talking...it sounded like he thought she’d be here.”

What would it have been like to return after those five years to family, to someone he knew had missed him and cared about him? Someone who could’ve been the listening ear he’d needed when Connor had first arrived, who could’ve helped him.

“You know, she’s not the only one Uncle Barry thought should be around.” Connor’s voice pulled him out of that wondering, and when he looked up his son was grinning. “How are you supposed to know the lead singer of one of the hottest bands in the country?”

Oliver shook his head. “That’s maybe the one thing hardest to buy.”

He’d been vaguely aware of his parents’ infidelity. The idea that one of them had had a child in that context was not unthinkable. But where would his path have met up with someone like Dinah?

Barry had said something about the team. “Laurel’s still — I mean, Dinah. Dinah’s still…”

Still what? Singing? Way out of Oliver’s league? Barry had been worried about Thea’s — or Mia’s — existence. Had something about Dinah not been right? And who was Laurel?

A knock at the door interrupted them, and Oliver got up to get their food and tip the delivery man. When he came back over to the couch, Connor held up his phone. It was displaying a social media page of some sort. He could never keep the sites straight.

“Think this could be our Mia Dearden?”

The profile picture was of a young woman with short brown hair and delicate features, almost like a pixie if he had to put a word to it. But her eyes...those were his mother’s eyes.

“Says she’s a bartender on 4th and Wells in the Glades,” Connor continued. “We could go check it out?”

A part of Oliver wanted to throw his coat on and take the elevator down to the lobby right now. But he looked down at Connor.

“Are you sure? I still feel like you and I are figuring out how we work together now, and this would be a lot. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pushed aside in favor of the next surprise relative I have.”

Connor put his phone away. “I came to Starling to get to know my family. All of it. If this lady is your sister, then that makes her my aunt. I’ve never had one of those.”

Oliver felt himself smile. Trust his kid to look on the bright side.

“And anyway, it’s not like you’d just forget about me,” Connor joked half-heartedly. There was only the slightest hint of vulnerability there, but it was enough for Oliver to read.

He dropped a knee onto the couch and wrapped his son in a hug. “No. Never.”

They settled back in to enjoy their pizza, another night as father and son. Maybe in a week or so, they might have more company. Oliver eyed the armchair across from the couch, trying to imagine the small girl in the photo sitting there. Would she be happy to join them?

Barry had been right about his sister. Could he really be right again about Dinah? Oliver sent Connor to bed and went back to his office, shifting his mother’s old things aside to unearth his computer keyboard. He scrolled through articles and photos alike.

No one knew the woman’s full name. It was likely she came from Gotham, as the rest of her bandmates had. And Gotham was hardly his territory.

But the more he stared at her photo, he thought he should know her. Was it the old paranoia, the placebo effect resulting from Barry’s words, or was there something more than wishful thinking to his wondering if those lips had smiled up at him once before?

—-

Barry sat on the information he had about Dinah for a few days, nervously turning it over in his head. The trouble was, he didn’t really know who to go to.

If he alerted the police, they wouldn’t really be prepared for the kind of power that sonic scream held. If he went to Oliver and his team, he wasn’t sure what they would think. He’d already probably said way too much to Oliver in his distress.

Truthfully, Barry wasn’t sure what to make of this new version of his friend. Oliver wasn’t as different as some of the others had been in the Flashpoint timeline, but there seemed to be a subtle sort of change to him hard to pin down. And Barry just didn’t know if he should trust this Oliver to handle something like a Black Siren. If that was even what they were dealing with.

It was up to his team, as Iris kept nudging him into realizing over the week. They knew how to manage a metahuman, even if the weapon they’d used against Siren wouldn’t work against a Laurel of this Earth. But he needed Cisco and Caitlin’s help if he was going to brainstorm a backup.

With some trepidation, Barry entered the lab that afternoon to the now-familiar sounds of Laurel’s voice on the speakers. Since learning Barry had next to no knowledge of Birds of Prey, Cisco had taken it upon himself to play the band’s entire discography, along with anything and everything he could find with Dinah’s vocals attached. This particular song didn’t even sound like rock at all, come to think of it.

“Uh, dude?”

Cisco swiveled around in his chair and seemed to understand Barry’s confused point up towards the ceiling at the music.

“Oh, hey. Yeah, this was released a year or so after the accident, all studio-recorded. She did an album of the Great American songbook sort of stuff, sort of for the slower crowd, you know? People still went nuts over it.” Cisco’s sigh had a dreamy quality to it as he added, “She could sing the phone book.”

“Is everything alright, Barry?” Caitlin asked, watching him carefully. He must not have hidden his nerves as well as he hoped.

Joe came through into the cortex, followed by Wally, and he knew it was now or never. He was going to need his team behind him for this, however willing they were to be.

“Okay. Guys, um, I really hate to bring this up again, but we’ve got to talk about Flashpoint.”

Immediately Cisco’s shoulders hunched, and Caitlin grimaced. Joe shifted a bit on his feet. Wally alone seemed ready to talk.

“Alright, what about it?”

“It’s not really to do with anything here,” Barry was quick to reassure. “Not exactly. It’s...it’s the Arrow Team.”

The others looked at each other. “They’ve been affected? How?” Caitlin asked.

“Well,” Barry hesitated, looking to Iris for support. She gave him an encouraging nod. “It’s about Dinah from Birds of Prey,” he admitted.

“Oh no, what did you do to her?” Cisco immediately said.

“I — nothing! I mean, it’s confusing, but she is different because of the timeline changing, yeah,” Barry admitted. “I tracked her down the other night and saw her knock a guy down with sonic waves. From her mouth.”

There was a long beat of silence as the others digested that bit of news. As before, Cisco was first to react.

“Dinah from Birds of Prey is a meta? Barry, this is the best news you’ve given us in forever!”

“No, not great news. Because we’ve already met a Laurel — I mean Dinah — who was a meta, and she was evil. Does nobody remember Black Siren from Earth-2?” Barry looked around but received mostly quizzical looks from the group. He should’ve expected it; Cisco would’ve said something if the rockstar he idolized had a double he’d met.

“So, you’re worried that this timeline’s Dinah is also evil,” Joe surmised.

“I don’t know,” Barry admitted. “I mean, when I saw her use her powers, it was to help this other woman. But then what’s her goal long-term? I’ve seen her powers in action when Siren used them. They’re powerful.”

“Tell them about Laurel,” Iris spoke up unexpectedly. “The one you knew, Barry.”

“Who’s Laurel?” Caitlin asked. “And why do you keep correcting yourself by calling her Dinah?”

“Because that’s how I knew her before. How we all knew her. As Laurel.” Barry looked around the room, watching their intrigued but otherwise blank faces. Not for the first time, he wished somehow he had the power to show them what they had once lived along with him rather than just tell them. But he couldn’t.

“Dinah Laurel Lance was the ADA of Star City, and at night she was part of the Arrow Team as a vigilante called the Black Canary.”

“That’s her real name? Dinah Lance?” Wally asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Barry blinked, though it occurred to him a moment later that in this timeline he’d had yet to hear anyone else use her full name. Thea — or Mia — had even been surprised to learn who Laurel’s father was. What was Dinah’s story, really? What could’ve had such an effect on her past?

“She- she died last spring. Before Flashpoint. There was a sorcerer they were fighting, and he killed her. But now none of that ever happened.” Barry was aware he was pacing, but he couldn’t really stop himself. “She’s a singer instead of a lawyer, Oliver and the others don’t know her, Oliver’s son showed up a whole year early and is Connor—”

“Whoa, what’s wrong with my man Connor?” Cisco demanded.

“Nothing, just, you know, he’s different! Oliver had a whole different kid named William who apparently doesn’t exist anymore!”

“Oh, Barry,” Caitlin sighed, disapproval inlaid in every syllable.

“I know,” he ground out. “This is not good. I just don’t know how to fix it.”

“Don’t.”

The single word came from Cisco, and Barry blinked in surprise. “Don’t?”

“Yeah. Trying to ‘fix’ things was what caused you to mess everything up in the first place. So just live with it like the rest of us.” His friend stood and walked out of the cortex, likely heading for his workroom.

“Cisco’s right, Barry,” Caitlin added. “Your time travel never seems to put anything back fully the way it was. It’s better for you to just leave it alone.” She, too, turned away. He could tell by the look on Joe’s face that he was thinking something similar, even if he’d probably say it in a gentler way.

Barry looked to Iris. “We still need to be prepared to deal with- with Dinah if she’s more like her Earth-2 counterpart was.”

“Give the others some time, Bear,” was her advice. “You’ve just dumped a lot of information on them. It’s going to take some time to process.”

“We’ll be ready when it counts,” Wally added with a confidence Barry wished he felt. “And hey, maybe she is on our side.”

“Maybe.” Barry sunk down into Cisco’s abandoned chair and felt Iris walk up behind him, her hands massaging at his shoulders.

“We could start with some recon,” Wally was suggesting, using Joe as a sounding board just as much as he was using Barry and Iris. “Most of the band’s from Gotham.” Wally snapped his fingers. “Maybe Batman knows her!”

Barry’s head lifted sharply in bewilderment. “Bat-who?”

At the same time, Joe gave a sharp shake of the head. “Oh, hell no. Not that nut job.”

For someone extremely used to the feeling of deja vu, Barry seemed destined to find himself unaccountably lost.

#lauriver #westallen #laurel lance #oliver queen #barry allen #arrow #the flash #iris west #ted grant #barbara gordon #connor hawke #cisco ramon #wally west #caitlin snow #joe west #laurel x oliver #green arrow #black canary #my writing

[ofmorninglory]

listen, i’m really trying to get that wedding au thing written down but my words are basically not working so here listen: steve and tony are getting married! steve is an Allen, cousin to twin brothers barry (who brings his boyfriend hal) and clint (who takes his wife natasha) and also bart! who is the only non-blonde, non-blue-eyed cousin in the family because hey, genetics!! tony invites his childhood friend ted, who flies in all the way from el paso, with his godson jaime!!! don’t ask jaime why ted is taking him instead of his husband, michael, because he’ll just roll his eyes and mutter about stupid over-grown children (long story short: they’re having a fight and ted is being petty)

jaime is upset that this is an actual, legit latine wedding, (all-inclusive, too--the dj is playing cumbias) and he has NO ONE TO DANCE WITH (ted is not an option, he’s basically a TREE) so he just sits at his table, looking gloomy, but also really enjoying seeing the happy couple miling about (captain rogers is very bad at dancing cumbias or any other kind of rhythm, but he’s very good at ballroom dancing, which is.....oddly confusing) 

suddenly, there’s someone stumbling against his chair, laughing about something, and jaime bolts in his seat, a little startled. the man is apologizing over and over, then, saying something about being clumsy and stuff like that. jaime really can’t stop staring at those green eyes of his. reyes is gone. reyes is no more. 

when he finally snaps out from his reverie, he tells the other man (who is probably around his age, maybe a 3 or 4 years younger, if jaime can be trusted) his name and the other man’s face lits up like a christmas tree and--ay, cabrón, Jaime is going to fucking die. 

“name’s bart allen!” the auburn man introduces himself, sliding into the seat next to jaime, “i’m on the groom’s side--ah--the captain’s--they’re both the grooms, that was stupid.” 

“i’m on the groom’s side,” jaime answers, grinning, “but the genius, billionaire, not-quite-playboy, philanthropist one.” 

they start talking, like one does, and jaime does a stupid comment like “hey, aren’t all Allens supposed to be blonde and blue eyed?” which bart only rolls his eyes at and jaime thinks that’s the most adorable thing he’s ever seen. 

jaime tells bart about working for ted, meeting tony stark once upon a time a long time ago in malibu, his life in el paso. bart tells him what it was like growing up the youngest allen, how overbearing his cousins are (especially, surprisingly, clint, who is annoying and overprotective). they form a quick bond, and then the first two notes for “amor prohibido” by selena sound and jaime just loses it

“we gotta dance, ese,” he tells bart, caution be damned, “we gotta dance right now, i will not take no for an answer” 

bart is surprised, but he laughs, shakes his head, and takes jaime’s offered hand “if i step on you, i’m just gonna blame it on genetics--did you see steve dance earlier? he’s a wreck” 

and wedding AU man, i need it

#au;request the honor of your company #;long list of aus in my head #i really like this #it's so simple and sweet and it's SOFT #just bart and jaime meeting #in a WEDDING #like it can't get more non-powered than that #also! #there's also tons of room for expansions and other side-stories #steve and tony talk by the cake about who bart is talking to smiling secretly between themselves #natasha has to stop clint from trying to kill jaime #hal and barry were the ones who pushed bart towards jaime anyways their plan is going FLAWLESSLY #booster appears halways through the reception to apologize to teddy #it's a good au

[distant-rose]

Seal of Fate Ch. 5 (6/8)

Notes: I’m gonna ask you to trust me for this chapter and the next. Like it’s going to be a roller coaster from here. A lot of craziness happens and some of it is painful but I promise its worth it. In any case, thanks to @cssns​ for a wonderful event. Thank you to @shireness-says​ and @katie-dub​ for being amazing cheerleaders on this fic. And a special thank you as always to my beta @aerica13​ - without you, I would just weep over a blank page. Summary: Emma Swan is looking for only one thing - answers. Abandoned outside a police station in Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard, Emma has dedicated her life to finding out where she comes from and why she was given away. She finds an unlikely partner in Killian, a selkie she inadvertently summons in a fit of frustration over her cold case. Word Count: 5,100+ AO3: [LINK] Chapters: Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Epilogue Rating: T+

Emma couldn’t stop running her fingers over the soft fur of the pelt on her lap. Every time she tried to take her hand away from it, an almost anxious feeling would take hold of her. It was a compulsion that frightened her but she couldn’t stop touching it.

Granny watched her intently, fiddling with her whiskey glass. There were thousands of questions that were swimming in her head and she couldn’t figure out which one to ask first. So much had been revealed in the past five minutes that Emma felt whiplashed. “My parents...” She swallowed, finding her throat dry. “They’re...they’re gone aren’t they?” “I’m sorry.”

Emma squeezed her eyes shut, fingers curling into the pelt. She had considered the possibility that if she ever found who her parents were that they might be dead but now that the possibility was a reality, she felt crushed. The connection that she had been so desperate to find her entire life was now impossible. “You knew them?” “I did...their names were David Nolan and, well, your mother’s name we could never pronounce but we called her Mary-Margaret...they were wonderful people and good friends with my Anita. I thought of them as my own.” “Good people, huh?” She tried not to sound bitter but she could feel the hollowness in her own words. “The best people.” “Then why did they leave me at the police station?” “Oh honey, they didn’t leave you there,” Granny said, putting her glass down and reaching across to place her hand on top of Emma’s. “I did.” The blood in her veins froze as an icy feeling took hold. She didn’t move, too stunned at first, but as soon as she fully grasped what the other woman had told her, she pulled away. Everything inside her was screaming. “Why?” The question came out like a curse. “Because I needed to get you off the island and fast,” she replied, looking at her with a mixture of regret and irritation. “You don’t know how much danger you were in, Emma. I had lost two dear friends of mine to that...that man...and I would have never forgiven myself if he got you too.” “By that man....you mean Gold, don’t you?” Granny didn’t say anything, merely sipped her whiskey. The silence between them was heavy and it was during this moment that Emma realised with stunning clarity that the jar of teeth upon the mantle in Gold’s house could potentially contain some that belong to her parents. Cold feeling inside her grew, clawing into her chest and squeezing her heart. She wanted to throw up. “When I came here...did you know who I was?” “Not at first but I had my suspicions. You looked so much like your mother that I couldn’t help but suspect. It wasn’t until your boyfriend came around asking questions about who found you that I knew for sure.” “But you suspected.” “I did.” “And you didn’t feel the need to say anything to me, to anyone?” “Emma.” Granny’s voice was now sharp. “This isn’t something you can just tell anyone about. You’ve been on the island long enough to know that we don’t work the same way you do on the mainland. You can’t just go to the police or the papers or anything. Fishing is God here and Gold owns the fishing, the paper and the majority of the fish markets in Chilmark and Tisbury. No one goes against him unless they want to be out of work or have someone they love be out of work…I have Ruby to think about. She’s the only thing I have left.”

“At least you have something,” Emma replied bitterly. “I have nothing.”

“Oh? Not even that young man of yours? Imagine how you feel if he was in danger.”

“I don’t need to imagine,” she snapped. “Killian is...he’s like me.”

“You’re both selkies,” Granny whispered in horror. “You need to leave. Now. You should have never come here.”

“I’m not leaving. I’ve been alone all my life and wondered why...why I was never wanted...why anyone would be so cold as to leave me like that. I want answers and I’m not leaving until you give them to me.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment, too busy locked in a staredown; Emma glaring at her and Granny looking back in annoyed exasperation. Emma’s fingers curled so tightly around the pelt that she was almost afraid she would tear it apart. It was the only thing keeping her together at the moment and from giving in to the maelstrom of emotion inside of her.

It was Granny who turned away first, grabbing for her whiskey glass again. Emma briefly wondered if the older woman was trying to get herself drunk before eight o’clock.

“I watched David grow up. The Nolans never had it easy. Their father Robert went to the same school as me and even in high school, he was a mean drunk and worked on the old sheep farm over by Katama...that has since turned into a llama farm and the sheep were sold to Allens in Chilmark...anyway, he drowned in boating accident off of Gay Head and left Ruth alone with the two boys…”

“Two boys? I have an uncle?”

“Had. James died long before you were even born. Car crash in high school. In Chappaquiddick. Like Ted Kennedy but not so lucky.”

“Not sure Mary Jo Kopechne would call that lucky.”

“You know what I mean,” she replied, waving her hand as if she was swatting the comment away. “Went off that same bridge. Poor bastard was 17.”

“Jesus,” Emma muttered under her breath, finally picking up her own glass and taking a sip. She coughed as the alcohol burned her throat.

“Ruth didn’t have a lot of luck but she was a tough woman and worked as a seamstress and a damn good one too. All those fancy parties at Blue Heron? The Kennedys? The Clintons? Your grandmother did the fitting for all of their dresses.”

“Holy shit.”

“She also did my daughter’s christening, first communion and wedding dresses. Could have charged me an arm and a leg, she was that talented but never did. I wanted her to do Ruby’s too but she was too sick by then.”

“Was this before or after my father died?”

“After,” she replied quietly. “I have two regrets in life, Emma. Putting you in the sanctuary box and not telling your grandmother what truly happened to your father. I couldn’t and she suffered for it. She spent all of her time and energy trying to find him, refusing to believe he was gone.”

“You’re a coward,” Emma replied frostily, fingers trembling with cold rage.

“Perhaps I am but I’m alive and my granddaughter is alive. And frankly that’s more than what can be said to those who go against Robert Gold. I’ve watched so more than my share of brave souls go against him and lose….including your father.”

“I thought you said you loved him like a son.” Emma scowled at her over the rim of her glass.

“I did. David was a good man. Hardworking. Intelligent. Handsome. He could have done anything he wanted in life but he chose to stay here and look after his mother. Gave up university so she could keep the house and became the island handyman...sinks, cars, boats, you name it, he could fix it….That’s how I think he met your mother.”

“You think?”

“Well, I don’t know the whole story with them, to be honest. I know the story they spun. That she was a fisherman’s daughter from one of the Carolinas.  I knew that was bullshit from the beginning. She was far too beautiful to be spending weeks on end without bathing.”

“So she was the selkie?”

“I think that ball of sealskin in your hands answers that question more clearly than I ever could,” she replied sardonically.

“What was she like? Aside from pretty.”

“Smart. Feisty. Fierce. She loved the living hell out of your father. The legends always talk about how selkies ensnare humans but I think she was just as head over heels for him as he was for her.”

“How did you find out that she was a selkie?”

“Because when you’re young and in love, you do stupid things. Like meet up in public places like the beach out back. I caught her shedding that skin of hers. And honestly, it was pretty gross. That don’t come off gracefully.”

Emma couldn’t help but pet her pelt defensively in response to that. She didn’t know why but Granny’s words felt insulting to her. The other woman didn’t seem to register her bristling however.

“They tried to play it off like it was some kind of wetsuit but I’ve never been a fool a day in my life,” she continued. “I almost didn’t believe them when they told me the truth but I couldn’t deny what my eyes had seen...I grew up on stories about selkies. My Nan used to whisper about them…Seal wives taken by fishermen and the dangers of selkie men and their kisses….”

“What did you do when you found out?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say a word. I let her stay up in the loft and she shared a room with Anita. Like sisters the two of them. Anita wasn’t the same after it happened. She died eight years after them.”

“What happened?”

Granny pursed her lips. “I’ve lived in this village my entire life and as long as I’ve known Robert Gold, he’s been obsessed with hunting seals. It wasn’t always illegal, you see. And before he completely took over the fishing market, he owned a sealskin business. Expensive, durable and sleek. They were all the rage on the Canadian market and he made the majority of his money off sealskin.”

“You mean he made the majority of his money off slaughtering selkies,” Emma replied, looking down at her pelt as a wave of nausea took hold again.

“I don’t know. When I was a young woman, I didn’t think much about it. I don’t know what came first, whether it was the hunting of seals or selkies. I was never close enough to the man to ask...all I know is rumour.”

“Rumour?”

“That his wife ran off with a selkie man and drowned herself.”

“The rumour mill knows about selkies?”

“No, that’s just my theory but she did run off and came back in a closed coffin. Their son wasn’t the same and he ran off himself after high school. No one has heard from him since. Smart kid. It’s the best thing he could have done for himself rather than be stuck here.”

“And what’s this got to do with my parents?”

Granny eyed the bottle of whiskey that was now down to its last dregs. She reached for it but Emma was quicker, reaching across and snatching it. She held the bottle just out of reach, shaking it violently.

“Answer me.”

“See, this is what I mean when you’re just like them,” Granny scowled. “You don’t think before you act and go around irritating the wrong sort of people. Not ones for tact, your family.”

“What happened to my parents?” Emma asked, unfazed. “You’ve spent the last ten minutes rambling about everything other than what happened. Just tell me.”

“It’s just as I said. They, specifically your father, went around irritating the wrong sort of people. David didn’t take kindly to bullies, especially not Gold. You see, David was a handyman around the island but he wasn’t Gold’s handyman…You see, he had his own guys, and the people renting out his houses were only supposed to use those services...Gold would charge you your soul if he could to have his men snake your pipes. Lots of people couldn’t afford their repairs and they were living in shacks that were expensive enough as is.”

“Jesus, that man is the Devil.”

“No, the Devil is kinder. David got on his bad side by going to the houses and making repairs free of charge. As you could imagine, Gold wasn’t happy about that. They often were at each other’s throats and it wasn’t uncommon to hear them threatening each other...and it wasn’t too long after Gold threatened to sue him that David disappeared.”

“How did you know it was Gold that got him?”

“I didn’t at first,” Granny replied. “I thought perhaps he went to the mainland to find a lawyer and just forgot to tell anyone. It’s wasn’t until Mary-Margaret that I knew what had happened…”

“What happened?”

“Three days after David disappeared, Mary-Margaret came back...with you.”

“Where did she go?”

“Home, I imagine. She would stay for awhile and leave for months on end. She loved your father but I don’t think she could stay away from the ocean for too long. She would get this look when she saw the waves and it was like a compulsion at times. David never begrudged her for it as he seemed to always know she would be back...he would miss her terribly and lord, he would play that Brandy song non-stop. I had to break into that goddamn jukebox myself and remove the record to get him to stop.”

A lump formed in Emma’s throat at this information. She had parents; parents who honestly loved each other. None of this was what she expected. She had half-expected her parents to be teenagers who made a mistake and couldn’t deal with the consequences. Instead, they were something out of a fairytale. She didn’t know which was worse.

“How long had she been gone?”

“Emma, I honestly don’t remember but it had been a while. I didn’t know she was pregnant. Shocked the hell out of me to see her crawl up the beach with you, all swaddled in that pelt. You were cuter than any newborn had the right to be. New babies are supposed to look like aliens. It’s an unwritten rule in the book of humanity...you were perfect.”

“What happened?” She sounded like a broken record at this point but she needed to know. There were still so many questions. She was afraid of the answers but knowing was better than being left in the dark like Ruth, searching blindly and left with nothing but fear and speculation.

“She went looking for him. She left me with you, believing it would take only a matter of hours before she would be back and you would get to meet your father...The hours went by and then  days and then I woke up the one morning to your mother’s pelt on the god awful rack alongside your father’s shirt. Both were covered in blood....Anywhere else in the world, the police would have questioned him about David’s shirt being on that rack...they never brought him in for even questioning.”

The chill from earlier returned. This time it was more condensed, like a ball of dry ice in the pit of her stomach. She had a feeling this was how the story would end. There was a sick poetry to it. Her parents were the stuff of fairytales and a fairytale ending they got, not the sanitized Disney endings that Emma had fallen in love with as a child but the Grimm brothers’ endings with stepsisters cutting their feet to fit a glass slipper and Rapunzel left alone and wandering in the wilderness without her prince.

“Why did you leave me at the police station?”

“I already told you. You were in danger. He killed your parents. It was only a matter of time before he figured out who you were.”

“Why the police station? Talk me through the logic of leaving me there.”

“The police station was close to the diner and it had a sanctuary box...I’m not sure they’re a common thing on the mainland...sometimes they’re called safe haven boxes or baby hatches. In the 1960s, we had issues with abandoned babies. The women from the boats...living at sea is no life for a child, let alone a newborn and they would leave them out in the cold. The St. Andrews Church in Edgartown started the sanctuary boxes in order to give these women a place to put them where no one would ask questions and the children would survive...I figured it was the easiest way to get you to somewhere safe, somewhere far away.”

“You never thought to give me to Ruth?”

“The thought had crossed my mind but that meant telling her what I knew. And she would have thought I was crazy. You weren’t going to be safe, not with me, not with Ruth, I thought I was giving you your best chance.”

Over the course of her life, Emma had gotten good at hiding her emotions, placing a wall between herself and the rest of the world. Before she came here, she could count on her fingers the amount of times she had cried on a single hand. She had cried when she had been arrested, when she found out she was pregnant, when she gave her child away, when she was released from prison and Neal wasn’t there and finally when she first saw her foundling papers.

The walls she had built with trauma and heartbreak had been crumbling over the past few weeks. The bricks had started falling since that first police report, then with Killian and then with each dead end they had encountered. Now, she was left with nothing, not even a foundation.

She didn’t realize she was crying until Granny had reached over to give her a tissue. Emma snatched it quickly, settling as far into her chair as she could to keep distance between them, feeling incredibly raw and vulnerable. Granny seemed to understand her need for space and tentatively grabbed Emma’s forgotten pelt off the floor with the tips of her fingers before placing it carefully on her lap and backing away. She wiped at her face briskly before cradling her pelt to her chest like it was a lifeline.

“I would ask if you were alright but I feel like that’s a waste of breath.”

“No shit,” Emma snapped.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry...for everything.”

Emma didn’t want her apologies and she opened her mouth to make that fact known but as soon as she did, she found the words stuck in her throat. She shut her mouth abruptly, jaw clicking and teeth clanking loudly. It was a waste. All of it was a waste. 

“I need to leave...to think…” Emma said, getting up abruptly.

“You have a lot to process,” Granny nodded in understanding.

“I…” she sucked in a breath. “I’m not sure if I can forgive you.”

“I don’t expect you to. Just know that I tried to do what was right by you and it was never my intention to cause you or anyone else pain.”

She couldn’t respond to that, at least not without lashing out.  Instead, she gave the older woman a curt nod before heading back downstairs. She ignored Ruby’s questions as she walked out of the diner, completely forgetting to pick up the coffee and donuts on the breakfast bar.

She had solved her case. It was a realization that hit her as she was walking up the street and she was so stunned by it that she stopped in her tracks. She had spent her whole life trying to find out why she had been abandoned and who her parents were. It had been her one goal as long as she could remember. And now that it was over. She didn’t know what to do. Not with the information. Not with herself. She never thought past finding the truth because honestly, she never expected to find it. Two weeks in Menemsha and the search that had become her life’s mission was over. What the fuck was she going to do. “Emma…” She broke out of her reverie to see Killian standing in front of her with a tentative expression on his face. She blinked in surprise, taking in her surrounds. She was standing on the beach where she had met him. She didn’t even remember walking here. “Emma…Are you alright?” It was a question she had been asked a thousand times before in life by foster parents, social workers, doctors, nurses and even by the police officer who had arrested her. The question had never felt sincere before, obligatory almost with perhaps a mild surface interest in the answer. Until now. There was a deep furrow in Killian’s brow and her fingers twitched in a sudden impulse to run across the play of folds. His lips were twisted in a small frown as he took a few steps forward into her personal space. The genuine concern in his question reflected in his eyes and she couldn’t stop herself from launching at him, the snow white pelt she had been carrying since Granny’s falling into the sand.

He took it in stride, outstretching his arms and allowing her to fall into them as he curled them around her. She buried her face into his neck in order to hide the quiet sob that came boiling up to the surface again. He didn’t say anything about the sudden wet patch on his shirt, merely held her while swaying them both back and forth. He murmured nonsense into her hair and placed a soft kiss there. Emma just closed her eyes and allowed herself to be comforted, taking in both his scent and the salt of the ocean coming off the breeze.

“I wish you waited for me before going there. I didn’t want you to go on your own…”

“I didn’t want you to be disappointed if it was nothing.”

“I’m assuming it wasn’t.”

“No. It was the opposite of nothing. It was...everything.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked softly, soothing small circles into her back.

“No.”

He nodded, resting his head lightly on top of hers and just continued rocking them back and forth. Emma couldn’t help but feel grateful that he hadn’t pushed her on this. Neither of them spoke for a minute.

“You forgot the donuts.”

She couldn’t help but laugh at that, whacking him in the shoulder. More tears leaked from her eyes but this time they held more mirth.

“Oh my god, you would!”

“You promised me donuts, Swan,” he teased, lifting up his thumb and wiping her cheeks. “Donuts and coffee, I believe your note said.”

“Yeah, well, I got a little preoccupied.”

“I noticed,” he said gently before pulling away.

She felt bereft for a moment from the loss of contact until she realized he was picking up her pelt. Something akin to panic jolted through her as he gingerly took it into his hands, his thumb running over it gently. He looked up at her with almost mournful expression before holding it out to her. She snatched it out of his grasp faster than neither of them could blink, hugging it to her chest.

“That,” he spoke so softly that Emma almost missed the anger in his voice, “is an abomination.”

“What?” She looked at him in horror, completely taken aback by his words. She clutched it closer to her, as if trying to shield it from him.

“It is an abomination,” he repeated. “To take a pelt from a pup.”

“I didn’t take it,” she hissed. “It’s mine!”

“I know it’s yours,” he said, meeting her eyes. “I’m not angry at you, love. I’m angry for you. You have no idea what has been stolen from you. It’s really no wonder you felt so lost and alone all of your life...you said you felt like something was missing all of your life...and it was...but it wasn’t your parents...it was you.”

Emma flinched at his words, looking away from him and down at the soft pelt in her arms.

“How did you know it was mine?” she asked slowly.

“Because I know you,” he replied quietly. “And you aren’t the type to do such a thing...and because I already suspected.”

“You already suspected what?” She looked up, narrowing her eyes at him.

“I suspected that you might have selkie heritage,” he admitted.

“How long?”

“Since the first night if we’re being honest,” he replied. “When you pushed me away.”

“You suspected I was a selkie because I wouldn’t sleep with you?” She spat.

“Selkies can’t seduce selkies, Emma.”

“You knew,” she whispered in disbelief. “You knew all along and you never told me!”

“Knowing and suspecting are entirely different things! I didn’t want to believe that you were because I knew it would mean this!” He said, shaking his head. “I kept hoping it wasn’t true and I allowed myself to believe that because you’re blonde, maybe you were just human after all.”

“What the fuck does hair color have to do with anything?”

“Seals are dark, Emma. Our adult pelts are dark, so in human form we tend to have brown, black or gray hair.”

“My father was a blond!” she shot back.

“Emma.” His voice was strained. “If you have a pelt, you were born in the water. You weren’t born human, you were born a seal. Human genetics don’t apply here.”

She didn’t reply; couldn’t think of anything she could say in response to that. How did one respond to finding out they weren’t necessarily human? She didn’t know and a part of her wished there was some sort of manual - a How to Come to Terms With Being a Different Species for Dummies.

“The only reason for you to be so light is shedding your pelt as a newborn. That pelt you’re holding, we only have for three weeks, Emma. You were less than three weeks old when you shed your pelt. I can’t think of any reason why a mother would allow you to shed so young!”

“She wanted me to meet my father,” she replied softly.

“Your father was human then?”

“Oh, you didn’t suspect that too?” she asked bitterly.

“You’re not being fair.”

“No!” she hissed at him. “You do not get to talk to me about fair! Fairness doesn’t exist! If the world was fair, I would have had parents! I would have had a home! I would have had my son! Nothing, absolutely nothing, is fair!”

He stepped away from her. “I’m not the one you’re mad at, love.”

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure you’re the asshole who withheld the fact that I’m a fucking seal!”

“Selkie,” he corrected. The word seemed to fly out of his mouth automatically.

“Oh fuck you!”

“Calling yourself a seal is derogatory, Em-”

“I really don’t fucking care,” she cut him off. “I don’t. I really just don’t.”

His lips formed a tight thin line and Emma could tell he wanted to argue with her but he remained silent. There was a long pregnant pause and Emma wanted nothing more to be away from him, from everyone.

“I don’t know what to say to make this better,” he said after a moment, licking his lip. “You’re right. What happened to you isn’t fair. I don’t know what she told you or what exactly happened but I can only imagine that it was something horrible.”

“They’re dead…”

“I figured as much.”

She debated telling him about Gold but decided against it. Killian would do something with that information, something bad and much worse than trespassing onto Gold’s property. She knew he would murder the man with his bare hands if given the opportunity and though Emma was angry about what had happened to her parents, Gold’s death would not bring them back. The only thing it could do is potentially take Killian away from her.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” she asked bitterly.

“You make it seem like I know everything. I don’t. I just know that I’ve spent the last two weeks with you and that the only way someone in their right mind would have left you is if they couldn’t come back.”

“Tell that to the eleven foster homes I went to,” she replied bitterly. “Tell that to fucking Neal.”

“I think the key phrase there is ‘in their right mind.’ Which they weren’t. Couldn’t possibly have been.”

“I…” she sucked in a breath, feeling some of her anger leaving her. “I just...Thank you.”

“It’s just the truth, love.”

She couldn’t handle it. It was just too much between Granny, what had happened to her parents and the revelation that she was actually a selkie. Adding Killian and his goddamn sincerity and emotions on top of it was overwhelming.

She needed to get away.

“Listen, thank you,” Emma mumbled. “I just…I think I need to go grocery shopping.”

Killian blinked, looking lost and horribly confused.

“What?”

“I need to go grocery shopping,” she repeated.

Killian opened his mouth to reply but seemed to think better of it. He looked at her in something that looked suspiciously like understanding and Emma had to avert her eyes. She fiddled with her pelt nervously.

“Okay,” he said softly. “It’s okay. I get it. You need those bloody Poptarts.”

“Yes,” she laughed uneasily, as she walked . “You hate them.”

“They’re absolutely disgusting,” he replied with a tight smile.

It wasn’t until she was in the car that she remembered that Killian had done the grocery shopping yesterday. And he had bought the Poptarts. Cursing under her breath, she turned off the main track and went onto North Road, heading west. There were only two Stop & Shops on the island, one in Vineyard Haven and the other on the outskirts of Edgartown. She reasoned to herself that trekking thirty minutes to the other side of the island would be worth it if she was able to pick up a few things that wouldn’t be available in the village market.

It would also look like she hadn’t completely run off on him.

“The market doesn’t have Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” she mumbled aloud, trying to reason with herself.

There were only three cars parked in front of Stop & Shop but Emma still parked near the back of the lot, trying to keep distance between herself and anyone else. A large black sedan parked right next to her, dashing her strategy but she paid it no mind as she walked over to the trunk of her car to collect her plastic shopping bags, willfully ignoring the car and its driver.

That was a mistake on her part.

As she closed the trunk, there was a sharp pain in the back of her head and suddenly everything was black.

#cs ff #captain swan #cs fic #cs fanfic #cs fanfiction #cssns #seal of fate #my fic #my shit #do not come for me

[deanmiles13]

I WANNA’ BE ELECTED

“THE TIME I CADDIED FOR ALICE COOPER AND LIVED TO TELL ABOUT IT!!!”

I Wanna Be Elected! Well not really. You see.... I was working at a shop that had been bought by Neil Lomax. He was a Portland native, who had graduated from P.S.U. and had a career in the NFL. The Cardinals to be specific. Which, had relocated to Phoenix Arizona in 88.

Home of J.F.A., The Meat Puppets and the great Mighty Sphincter. Oh and George Lynch, and Rob Halford. And the one and only Alice Cooper.

Now, almost everyone knows that Alice is a serious golfer.  And that’s where we are going with this story. Not really a Rock and Roll story except for when I hound him with trivia questions, later. So, back to Neil. Super sweet man and excellent human being. He was heading to play a golf event that Alice would be at, in Phoenix one weekend, and he said, “Hey Dean, going to see your buddy Vince Fernier. See, Neil actually thought his name was ALICE COOPER. I corrected him one day and he loved VINCENT. He even came back from this event with a framed Hatch Show Print poster of the event. He let us display it in the shop when he got back. I was hoping he didn’t care for it and would part with it. But alas, my reward was yet to come. He actually had another golf tournament and I sent him down with a copy of Killer.

It came back signed and I was stoked. But there would be more....

So, then Its Neil’s turn to have his big golf event “The Quarterback Shootout”. 

It’s an annual charity event he is really known for in Portland. A meet and greet with NFL legends and local celebs. The big ones I can recall are Drew Bledsoe, Marcus Allen, Charles Barkley, Jim Plunkett.

Having worked with Neil for a while, he had events and people would help and volunteer from work. The big event was this golf thing. Everyone fought over caddying for Charles Barkley. He was big tipper. The real cool thing was, this year Alice was coming up for it as a favor to Neil. No one at work was stepping up to caddy for him. What I knew about golf fit into a golf tee.

I imagined me out there fumbling around and dropping clubs to the sound of all that iron clanging and people laughing. So I was petrified, to say the least, when it was decided that I was going be Alice Cooper’s caddy. They demanded that the “residential rocker” at work, handle this rock royalty on the links.

Well the thought of me on a golf course was as foreign to my mind as being a surgeon, so I spent the morning getting ferociously stoned at home. The event was held at Heron Lakes Golf course and I lived pretty close. I got to the golf course and met up with everyone from work and just kinda waited.

Some people were already on the part where you tee off and practice. The driving range?!?!? You can see I’m out of my element here!

Anyway, we are kinda waiting for our assigned celebs to show up when a car pulls up, out comes this really petite person. All in black with their back to me. I was unable to make out who it was. They turn around and it’s Alice. People cheer and they hand me his clubs. This is the first time I have EVER held golf clubs. I used a golf bag for my drum stands to carry to many clubs, but this was the first time the had actual clubs in it. 

He signs some stuff and is escorted my way, and I’m on the driving range. The first thing I tell him after we are introduced is “Alice, there is NOTHING I can tell you today to help you in any way on the course today!!!” He smiled and said “ I think I got it.”

That put me at ease right away.

We made our way to a practice area of sorts and already, people were coming up for autographs. I got the impression I would be doing a little security work today as well.

That was no problem actually since I had done set security on movie sets and all sorts of events. And he was approached by all sorts of people. Old, young, and everything in between. The first person I remember to approach held out a cassette and said “I took your music to Vietnam with me!” Alice stopped on a dime and just talked right to the guy. Not to/at him, but TO HIM!!!.

I could tell right away that this dude was genuine. Little kids with Todd McFarlane/Alice Cooper dolls would come up and he would sign the smallest signature. Taking time with everyone he took a photo with. He had a line for everything. After the photo was snapped he would say “Now, I may not show up in the picture when you get it developed.” He was, in a word “PROFESSIONAL”

This is a guy who hung out with Harry Nelson, Keith Moon, Salvador Dali.

I mean, he was on the Muppets for cryin’ out loud!!!

I know we were paired up with Jim Plunkett and played against Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Jim was an old school NFL dude and was here to have a good time. Drew Bledsoe did some things that day that I thought really were uncool. For someone being asked to a charity event, to sign autographs and take pictures, he was acting like he was being put out. It was interrupting his game. That was the whole point of this thing. You could saddle up next to the celebs and say hi and a bit more. It’s what they paid for, quite frankly. He was taking his golf game a little too serious if you ask me. Jim and Alice had wagers going as to who could drive the ball the farthest and stuff like that. Alice was a petite guy and Jim was a bigger dude.

Alice won the drive contest. The main thing that I took a way that day was answers to a load of questions that I had. Some prepared and most just off the top of my head.

As I relate some of these, just realize, that I’m paraphrasing what was said. He was so totally open and honest with me, it was quite staggering to be honest. I would feel horrible if anything was misinterpreted. 

I started by asking about Johnny Rotten doing the liner notes on a Rhino Box set and he said “Johnny hates EVERYONE.... EVERYONE! Except ME! I can’t believe it. 

I guess him and Sid used to play Dead Babies on acoustic guitars to make pocket money.” 

I was like, Oh, it’s on! We proceeded to hole one, and I started chronologically with his career and headed back to Detroit. I asked about Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, MC5 and Iggy. He said “I’ll open for anyone! The Stones! The Who! But not Iggy! He just wipes the crowd out. Uses them up and wrings em’ out, and I can’t come on after that.”

I asked about his song “Only Women Bleed” and he said that was a number one multiple times, multiple countries, for multiple people.Tina Turner had a hit with it and he was proud of that.

I asked if he was a WHO guy or a STONES guy. He said “Listen to the opening of Elected.” DUH!!!

There were some interesting crowd interactions. From, two young dudes that wanted to have him sign a joint they had, to the McFarlane dolls and everything else. I told kids with the joint, there was no way... Then I mentioning it to Alice and he said “Yeah, it’s like right when you quit smoking weed and your friend comes over with 8 ounces and says “Hey, I’m leaving town for a few months, can you hold onto this for me?!?!” 

This one women came up to us and was yelling to get his attention. Frankly, I was a little sketched about having to “deal” with her. We go over, she says “Can you sign something for me?” He says “Of course, what do you want signed?” She starts pulling scarp pieces of paper out of her pocket and I mean like a match book, a receipt, and just whatever. So he signs whatever it was and we walked away. He is being real silent, like in his head and he said “Man, that was 40 miles of rough road!!! I often wonder what I would be like if I had kept drinking and what not ?!?!”

That was probably one of the most profound things he said that day. I asked him when he quit drinking and he said, when his daughter was born. I too had recently quit with drinking and found this to be sort of a bonding moment for us. I remember that I had brought some items to have him sign. A postcard and an album etc. But the cool thing was I asked him at the last minute if I could have the ball he had used for the whole game. That was awesome, and I still have THAT. 

I had all the stuff I wanted to asked and had kinda prepared the questions in my head, but it was the interaction with his fans that was really neat to see. The two young women who came up and started to bow and say “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy.” I had kind of spaced the whole Waynes World thing, and when I told him “Oh man, I kinda forgot about that!” He replied “ I didn’t!!”

I asked if he gets that from people all the time, seeing as it was a whole new generation of exposure sorta thing. He said “No! It’s just that, when you get a movie script and you just see your scene, it’s not like you get to see the whole movie. It’s just me, backstage, Mila-wa-kay- and then we split.”

I’m still not really picking up what he’s putting down... “So when they asked us what we wanted, we just took my day fee for the movie and didn’t worry about any “back end” so to speak. So what happens? The movie goes on to make 18 million opening weekend.” He was not kidding... you could see that this one hurt.

I had mentioned a quote from him in Rolling Stone, I had recently read in which he commented on Marylin Manson. He said “Yeah... Real original. Call your self a girl name and put makeup on. Where have I heard that one before?”

Not in a rude or snide way, but in a kinda joking way. With a smile... I guess that’s what it all came down to that day. Here was a man who had done it all, seen it all, drank it all, and snorted it all. And in the end, he was alive, enjoying something that kept him sane (golf). Now, he’s out the other side, meeting people, saying HELLO - HOORAY!!! Let the show begin!!!

He was so at ease with it all and it was a true pleasure to watch him “work”. When anyone ask, what was he like?

I just say... “In a word - KILLER”

He was a man who seemed very content where he was. I mean if you weathered a storm like he did and lived to crawl from the shipwreck and right yourself for a second, third career?!?!? 

Man... that’s it!!!  That’s a success.

Telephone is ringing......

#alice cooper #golf #rockandroll

[thebetterjonesboy]

2:50 am Thoughts

(ﾉ>ω<)ﾉ :｡･:*:･ﾟ’★,｡･:*:･ﾟ’☆

sweet pea loves food network. like, he’ll get sucked in and spend hours watching it.

so much yelling: as a chef uses truffle oil, knowing that no contestant uses it correctly; the final 2 both running to the only ice cream machine in chopped; making a bread pudding in the dessert round of chopped; etc

grumbling as a contestant is overly prideful and cocky

tears of laughter during worst cooks in america “the dude is LITERALLY GRILLING A SLICE OF CHEESE”

scoffing when a contestant stops bidding at $7k for the privilege of using salt on cutthroat kitchen

“so i’m looking down at my basket and i realize i forgot [most important ingredients]” memes irl aka “so i’m looking down at my homework and i realize i forgot to write the answers down”

“*gasp* the wontons” memes irl aka “*gasps* the dishes” “*gasps* the [literally anything, relevant to the situation at hand or not]”

he’d start saying “thank you for that chef” like ted allen does after a contestant gives their entire life story ironically then never be able to stop saying it

#sweet pea #headcanon #riverdale #southside serpents

[blubeetlc]

( ALFONSO HERRERA, MALE, HE/HIM ) — ✧ that looks like JAIME REYES! they’re the THIRTY THREE, known as BLUE BEETLE. i hear they’re SELFLESS & PATIENT, but tend to be REACTIVE & LAZY. he is/are a ENGINEER AT KORD INDUSTRIES at paragon.

this gif perfectly illustrates my son

WELCOME TO MY ANGEL JAIME REYES I am using a little comics and a little YJ and some HC for him so bear with me

Jaime Reyes grew up in El Paso with a normal life and a normal family

His mother is a doctor, his father is a mechanic, and he has a younger sister named Milagro whom he loves a lot

He is Mexican

When Jaime was 15 he happened upon the Scarab completely by chance - nothing special, no crazy circumstances, he picked it up, took it home, and in his sleep it fused to his spine and refused to let go

Jaime quickly found that the scarab was not easy to live with - it was violent and pushy and often tried to take over and force Jaime to do things he didn’t want to do

It also talked to him in his mind and it took him a while to learn how to mentally communicate with it rather than answering out loud, so for a while he looked preeeetty crazy

Ted Kord, the previous Blue Beetle and owner of Kord Industries, started to train him while also running tests on him to see what effect the scarab was having on his body, and after a few months was approached by Nightwing to offer him a spot on the YJ team to help him adjust to his powers

Jaime never wanted to be a superhero - he was happy with his life, he wasn’t out there looking for something new or different or special, but.. the scarab didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so he went along with it

YJS2 happened with the Reach and the alien invasion etc but the most important part was that Jaime met Bart Allen

Despite the mission Bart was here to do he and Jaime became close friends pretty quickly. Jaime’s relaxed, chilled out nature complimented the speedster’s on-the-go attitude well and they just.. fit

This was only strengthened by the way Bart helped him through everything and helped to save him from being a Reach puppet and subjugating the Earth

This was also when Jaime and Scarab - whose name is Khaji Da - began understanding each other. Jaime began to learn what Khaji was really like aside from it’s murderous programming, and Khaji began to learn more about humans and emotions and all of the things it was never programmed with

Over the years Jaime has worked alone, on the team, with the Teen Titans, and here and there gets dragged in by Booster to help the Justice League (usually against his will mind you)

He and Bart also grew closer as they grew older - they started dating when Jaime was 17, and married in their mid-20′s. 

They are now very happily raising an adopted baby girl named Isabela - they found her on a mission when she was a baby and fought tooth and nail to be able to adopt her. She is now 4 years old.

Jaime is working at Kord Industries as an Engineer, and still works as Blue Beetle

Personality:

Jaime is very good hearted and generally just wants to do the right thing, he would never go out of his way to cause harm and often doesn’t get why others do such terrible things

He loves to sleep which you can imagine has gotten pretty scarce with a kid but let me tell you any chance he has to sleep in he will take it

He’s known to sleep in until noon if given the chance

He’s very laid back and generally pretty chill but that has been known to backfire on him - despite being pretty smart, his lazy attitude keeps him from working and researching things he should know and he’s had to learn to be more proactive over the years if he wants to get anywhere

He adores his family to pieces, especially Bart and Isabella

He is always giving Ted hell for just about anything but the truth is he does look up to the man quite a bit and is very relieved he is not dead

Abilities:

Scarab-given:

Construction: The suit is able to construct certain objects, such as staples and Reach-tech Eggs through nanotechnology.

Durability: The suit has protected Jaime from the deleterious effects of being stomped on—twice—by the Appellaxian Golem. The Scarab also calculated that it could possibly survive the bomb blast that destroyed Mount Justice.

Energy blasts: The suit can transform parts of the armour into a sonic cannon or plasma cannon. The suit can also transform the chest into a larger plasma cannon.

Flight: The suit can sprout translucent wings, enabling him to fly, but they do not flap like real wings; instead they stay in one place. The suit also has additional rocket boosters.

Holo-projection: The suit can generate holographic images.

Sensors: The suit has a variety of sensor systems. It is capable of producing scanner units that can be used to detect the presence of people in buildings. The Scarab also has passive sensors that can monitor other people's physiology which, along with voice analysis, allows it to tell when a person is lying or being truthful, or has hostile intentions.

Super strength: The suit grants Blue Beetle enhanced strength, allowing him to knock down powerhouses like Tuppence Terror and Superboy.

Technology interface: The suit is capable of manipulating Reach technology upon contact and altering its functions. This extends to the ability to link with other scarabs through tendrils, allowing attempts to reset or destroy the other scarab. This is not without risk, as such attempts can be resisted and even reversed.

Transformation: The suit can change into different forms. Examples of his transformations are a sonic cannon, battering ram, staple gun, a lockpick, maces, drills, scythe blades, and a plasma cannon.

Translation: The suit has demonstrated the ability to translate Krolotean and other alien languages, as well as Earth languages like Japanesee

Self-developed:

Hand to hand combat as a result of training with Ted and other League/Teen Titans members over the years

He’s also quite intelligent and has become an engineer, working with Ted Kord

#sidekick.intro

[lokirupaul]

Lokiru Paul : Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.

BY ZACH BARON, GQ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HILL & AUBREY

July 13, 2021

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On the day that he wrapped shooting on the second season of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis sat in his trailer in West London and drank a beer and exhaled a little, and then he went to the pitch they film on for the show—Nelson Road Stadium, the characters call it—for one last game of football with his cast and crew. There's this thing called the crossbar challenge, which figures briefly in a midseason Ted Lasso episode: You kick a ball and try to hit not the goal but the crossbar above the goal, which is only four or five inches from top to bottom. And so Sudeikis arrived and, because he can't help himself, started trying to hit the crossbar.



Jason Sudeikis covers the August 2021 issue of GQ. To get a copy, subscribe to GQ.

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Confidence is a funny thing. Sudeikis has been riffing on it, in one way or another, for his whole professional life—particularly the comedy of unearned confidence, which he is well suited, physically, to convey. Sudeikis is acutely aware of “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying”—six feet one, good hair, strong jaw. He's a former college point guard. On Saturday Night Live, where most of us saw him for the first time, he had a specialty in playing jocular blowhards and loud, self-impressed white men, a specialty he took to Hollywood, in films like Horrible Bosses and Sleeping With Other People. He became so adept at playing those types of characters, Sudeikis said, that at some point he realized he'd have to make an effort to do something different. “It's up to me to not just play an a-hole in every movie,” he said. In conversation he is digressive, occasionally melancholy, prone to long anecdotes and sometimes even actual parables—closer, in other words, to Ted Lasso, the gentle, philosophical football coach he co-created, than any of the preening jerks he used to be known for. But he can definitely kick a soccer ball pretty good.

So he's up there trying to hit the crossbar, and he's got a crowd of actors and crew members gathering around him now, betting on whether he can hit it. And he's getting the ball in the air, mostly, but not quite on the four-to-five-inch strip of metal he needs to hit, and the stakes are escalating (“I bet he can get it in three.” “I bet he can get it in five”), and after he misses the first five tries, Toheeb Jimoh, the actor who plays Sam Obisanya on the show, says, “I think he can get it in 10.” Then Sudeikis proceeds to miss the next four attempts. But, he told me later, “there was no part of me that was like, ‘I'm not gonna hit one of these. I'm not not gonna hit one of these.’ ”

Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It's a very interesting space to live in, where you're living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you—are any of us—open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stuff, professional stuff, I mean, it's all…that Venn diagram for me is very”—here he held up two hands to form one circle—“you know?”

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Anyway, Sudeikis hit the crossbar on the 10th try. “It's a tremendous sound,” he said of that moment when the ball connects with the frame of the goal. He'd done what he knew he would do. Everyone on the pitch was cheering like they'd won something. It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a very Ted Lasso moment—a small victory, a crooked poster in a locker room that says Believe. “There's a great Michael J. Fox quote,” Sudeikis told me later, trying to explain the particular brand of wary optimism that he carries around with him, and that he ended up making a show about: “ ‘Don't assume the worst thing's going to happen, because on the off chance it does, you'll have lived through it twice.’ So…why not do the inverse?”

Watch Now:

10 Things Jason Sudeikis Can’t Live Without

Ted Lasso. Man—what an unlikely story. The character was initially dreamed up to serve a very different purpose. Sudeikis first played him in 2013, in a promo for NBC, which had recently acquired the television rights to the Premier League and was trying to inspire American interest in English football. The promo was the length and shape of an SNL sketch and featured a straightforward conceit: A hayseed football (our football) coach is hired as the football (their football) coach of a beloved English club, to teach a game he neither knows nor understands in a place he neither knows nor understands. The joke was simple and boiled down to the central fact that Ted Lasso was an amiable buffoon in short shorts.

But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and for whatever reason the character stuck around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis developed and pitched a series with the same setup—Ted, in England, far from his family, a stranger in a strange land learning a strange game—that Apple eventually bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he had changed. He wasn't loud or obnoxious anymore; he was simply…human. He was a man in the midst of a divorce who missed his son in America. The new version of Ted Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned kind of way, where the jokes he told and the jokes made at his expense spoke to the quality of the man. He had become an encourager, someone who thrills to the talents and dreams of others. He was still ignorant at times, but now he was curious too.

In fact, this is close to something Ted says, by way of Walt Whitman, in one of the first season's most memorable episodes: Be curious, not judgmental. I will confess I get a little emotional every time I watch the scene in which he says this, which uses a game of darts in a pub as an excuse to both stage a philosophical discussion about how to treat other people and to re-create the climactic moment of every sports movie you've ever seen. It's a somewhat strange experience, being moved to tears by a guy with a bushy cartoon mustache and an arsenal of capital-J jokes (“You beating yourself up is like Woody Allen playing the clarinet: I don't want to hear it”), talking about humanity and how we all might get better at it. But that's kind of what the experience of watching the show is. It's about something that almost nothing is about, which is: decency.

In the pilot episode, someone asks Ted if he believes in ghosts, and he says he does, “But more importantly, I think they need to believe in themselves.” That folksy, relentless positivity defines the character and is perhaps one of the reasons Ted Lasso resonated with so many people over the past year. It was late summer, it was fall, it was in the teeth of widespread quarantine and stay-at-home orders. People were inside watching stuff. Here was a guy who confronted hardship, who suffered heartbreak, who couldn't go home. And who, somehow, found his way through all that. Someone not unlike Sudeikis himself.

“If you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Sudeikis likes to say, in homage to his background in competitive sports, that there's no defense in the arts. “The only things you're competing against, I believe, are apathy, cynicism, and ego,” he said. This is a philosophy of Sudeikis's that predates Ted Lasso by many years, though you wouldn't necessarily have known it until recently. He grew up outside Kansas City, in Overland Park, Kansas, a “full jock with thespian tendencies,” as he once described himself. His uncle is George Wendt, who played Norm on Cheers. “He made finding a career in the arts, in acting or whatever, seem plausible,” Sudeikis said. But mostly he was drawn to the camaraderie of athletics. When Sudeikis first tried his hand at professional improv, in the mid-'90s, it was through something called ComedySportz, a national chain with a fake competition angle, teams in sports uniforms, and a referee. Brendan Hunt, who co-created and costars on Ted Lasso, initially met Sudeikis in Chicago, he told me. Sudeikis had traveled the eight hours up from Kansas City to do a show: “Suddenly there's a beat-up Volvo station wagon, like an '83, and this is '97, I think, and these two guys get out, all bleary-eyed, and wearily change into their baseball pants. And one of them was Jason.”

Sudeikis had gone to community college on a basketball scholarship but failed to keep up his grades, and he eventually left school to pursue comedy. For a while, he said, his sincere aspiration was to become a member of the Blue Man Group. He got close. “They flew me out to New York,” he said. “That was August of 2001, right before 9/11. And I got to see myself bald and blue.” (In the end, he wasn't a good enough drummer.) By that time, he was living in Las Vegas with his then partner, Kay Cannon, doing sketch comedy at the newly formed Second City chapter there. “Ego,” Sudeikis told me about this time, “that gets beaten out of you, doing eight shows a week.”

Eventually he was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. “I didn't want to work on SNL,” Sudeikis said—he'd convinced himself that there were purer and less corporate paths to take. “At a certain point in your comedy journey, you have to look at it as like McDonald's,” he said. “You have to be like: ‘No. Never.’ ” Then he got the call. “It was like having a crush on the prettiest girl at school and being like, ‘She seems like a jerk.’ And it's like, ‘Oh, really? 'Cause she said she liked you.’ ‘She what?!’ ”

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Sudeikis auditioned, of course, and was hired, in 2003—but as a writer: “It was like winning a gold medal in the thing you've never even trained for. You just happen to be good at the triple jump, and you really love the long jump.” He wrote for a couple of seasons, but he was unhappy—Cannon was still in Las Vegas, and Sudeikis missed performing. Finally he went to Lorne Michaels, to ask for a job as a member of the cast. “He had the best line. I go, ‘I had to give up two things I love the most to take this writing job: performing and living with my wife.’ And on a dime, he just goes, ‘Well, if you had to choose one…’ ”

At Saturday Night Live, Sudeikis often channeled the same level of cheerful optimism and forthright morality that he'd later bring to Ted Lasso, but audiences didn't necessarily notice it at the time. One of Sudeikis's most famous and beloved early sketches on SNL as a performer is 2005's “Two A-holes Buying a Christmas Tree”—Kristen Wiig and Sudeikis, chewing gum, oblivious to their surroundings, terrorizing Jack Black at a Christmas tree stand. It's a joke about a very familiar form of contemporary rudeness; it's also a riff on a certain kind of man who speaks for the woman next to him, whether she wants him to or not. And people laughed and moved on to the next bit, but to this day Sudeikis can tell you about all the ideas that were running through his head when he created the sketch with Wiig. “That scene was all about my belief that we were losing touch with manners,” he told me. “And yet it's also about love, because he loves her, and that's why he interprets everything for her—she never talks directly to the person.” But, he said, sighing, “once you start explaining a joke or something like that, it ceases to be funny.”

Sudeikis brought this type of attention and care to the movies he began acting in too, like the workplace comedy Horrible Bosses, even if it was lost on most of those who watched them. “That movie, Horrible Bosses, is riddled with optimism,” he said. “The rhythms of that movie, of what Jason Bateman and Charlie Day and I are doing, are deeply rooted in Ted Lasso too. But people don't want those answers. They want to hear the three of us cut up and joke around.”

So that's what Sudeikis did. He got used to a certain gap between his intention and how it was understood. During his time at SNL, his marriage fell apart. “You're going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that's affecting you personally, and then you're dressed up like George Bush and you're live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.’ ”

For a time he became a tabloid fixture. He remembers “navigating my first sort of public relationship, with January Jones, which was like learning by fire. What is the term? Trial by fire.” In a 2010 GQ article, when confronted with a question about rumors that he was dating Jennifer Aniston, he sarcastically responded that she should be so lucky. “And obviously I'm fucking joking, you know?” Sudeikis said. But back then, he treated interviews like improv—Yes, and—and that could create misunderstandings. Asked once on a podcast about what people tended to get wrong about him, Sudeikis responded, “That I was in a fraternity—or maybe that I would be.”

To that point, Hunt told me, “He's much less the assumed fraternity guy than you'd think.” But Hunt said he also understood where the impression came from: “I don't know where he learned it necessarily, whether it was from his parents, or his basketball coaches, but he exudes an easygoing confidence. And it's easy to hang with a guy like that. But some people are also like, ‘Fuck that guy,’ intrinsically.”

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When he won the Golden Globe, Sudeikis gave a dazed speech while wearing a hoodie, sparking glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” he said.

Shortly after Sudeikis and Wilde got together, near the end of his SNL run (he left the show in 2013), Wilde made a joke during a monologue that she read at a cabaret club about the two of them having sex “like Kenyan marathon runners,” and Sudeikis spent years answering questions about the joke. “The frustrating thing about that is that Olivia said that in a performance setting,” Sudeikis said. “It wasn't like she just was saying it glibly in an interview.” He described the experience of growing into celebrity, and confronting other people's misperceptions of him, as a disorienting one. “You're just being tossed into the situation and then trying to figure it out,” he said. The picture of him that was circulating wasn't exactly the one that he had of himself. But he didn't fight it, either. “You come to be thoughtful about it,” he said. “But also try to stay open to it. I don't ever want to be cynical.”

So he tried to stay open. But it wasn't until Ted Lasso that people really saw the side of him that comported with the way he saw himself. Last year, as it became clear that the show was a hit, he found himself answering, over and over, some version of the same question. The question would vary in its specifics, but the gist of it was always: How much do you and this character actually have in common? Sudeikis told me that over time, in response to people wondering about his exact relationship to Ted, he developed a few different evasive explanations. Ted, Sudeikis would say, was a little like Jason Sudeikis, but after two pints on an empty stomach. He was Sudeikis hanging on the side of a buddy's boat. He was Sudeikis, but on mushrooms. Sometimes, in more honest moments, he would say that Ted is the best version of himself. This, after all, is how art works: If it was just you, then it wouldn't really need to be art in the first place. And so Sudeikis learned to separate himself from Ted, to fudge the distance between art and artist.

Except, he said, after a while, every time he tried to wave off Ted, fellow castmates or old friends of his would correct him to say: “No.” They'd say: “No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.” It's not you on mushrooms, it's not you hanging off a boat, it's just…you. One of Sudeikis's friends, Marcus Mumford, who composed the music for the show, told me, “He is quite like Ted in lots of ways. He has a sort of burning optimism, but also a vulnerability, about him that I really admire.”

Hearing people say this, over and over again, Sudeikis said, “brought me to a very emotional space where, you know, a healthy dose of self-love was allowed to expand through my being and made me…” He trailed off for a moment. “When they're like, ‘No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.’ That's a very lovely thing to hear. I wish it on everybody who gets the opportunity to be or do anything in life and have someone have the chance to say, ‘Hey, that's you. That's you.’ ”

And if he's being honest, that's the way he feels about it too. “It's the closest thing I have to a tattoo,” Sudeikis said about Ted Lasso. “It's the most personal thing I've ever made.”

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On the first Saturday in June, Sudeikis flew with his children, Otis and Daisy, from London to New York, where he owns a house in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is home,” he told me simply. While filming the first season of Ted Lasso, he'd had the house renovated—there was black mold to get rid of and other changes to make. “So Olivia and the kids had to rent a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But it's not home. It's someone else's home.” Saturday was the first time Sudeikis and his children had set foot in their own place in two years. “The kids darted in,” he said. “Last time Daisy was in that house, she slept in a crib. So now she has a new big bed. It was hilarious. I walked up there after like 15 minutes and both rooms were a mess.”

He and Wilde, he said, no longer share the house. They split up, according to Sudeikis, “in November 2020.” The end of their relationship was chronicled in a painful, public way in the tabloids after photos of Wilde holding hands with Harry Styles surfaced in January, setting off a flurry of conflicting timelines and explanations. Sudeikis said that even he didn't have total clarity about the end of the relationship just yet. “I'll have a better understanding of why in a year,” he said, “and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it'll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Right now he was just trying to figure out what he was supposed to take away, about himself, from what had happened. “That's an experience that you either learn from or make excuses about,” he said. “You take some responsibility for it, hold yourself accountable for what you do, but then also endeavor to learn something beyond the obvious from it.”

In the first season of Ted Lasso, the comic premise of the show is revealed to be a tragic one: Ted is in England, far from home, doing something he doesn't know how to do and probably shouldn't be doing at all, in order to give his failing marriage space to survive. When the character's wife and son visit, in the show's fifth episode, his wife tells him, “Every day I wake up hoping that I'll feel the way I felt in the beginning. But maybe that's just what marriage is, right?” It's a wrenching moment that also gives new meaning to the show: Ted Lasso's heart is big, but it can also be broken as violently and as easily as anyone else's. By the end of the season, Lasso is divorced and renegotiating his relationships with his now ex-wife and son.

The first season of Ted Lasso had already been written—had already aired—by the time Sudeikis found himself living some aspects of it in real life. “And yet one has nothing to do with the other,” Sudeikis told me. “That's the crazy thing. Everything that happened in season one was based on everything that happened prior to season one. Like, a lot of it three years prior. You know what I mean? The story's bigger than that, I hope. And anything I've gone through, other people have gone through. That's one of the nice things, right? So it's humbling in that way.”

And in fact, the seeds of Ted's heartbreak, Sudeikis said, went all the way back to a dinner he had with Wilde around 2015, during which she first encouraged him to explore whether Ted Lasso could be more than just a bit on NBC. “It was there, the night at dinner, when Olivia was like, ‘You should do it as a show,’ ” he said. They got to talking about it. Sudeikis asked why Ted Lasso would move in the first place, to coach a team he had no real reason to coach: “ ‘Okay, but why would he take this job? Why would a guy at this age take this job to leave? Maybe he's having marital strife. Maybe things aren't good back home, so he needs space.’ And I just riffed it at dinner in 2015 or whenever, late 2014. But it had to be that way. That's what the show is about.”

I said to Sudeikis that I thought that while it was common for artists to put a lot of their lives into their art, it was less common that they end up living aspects of the art in their lives, after the fact.

“I wonder if that's true,” he replied. “I mean, isn't that just a little bit of what Oprah was telling us for years and years? You know, manifestation? Power of thought? That's The Secret in reverse, you know?”

But…if we're being honest, is that a thing you wanted to manifest?

“No. No. But, again, it isn't that. It wasn't that. And again, that's just me knowing the details of it. Like, that's just me knowing where it comes from, where any of it comes from.”

But he acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not necessarily a bad one, but a hard one. “I think it was really neat,” he said. “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Is that easier said than done? To land like an Avenger?

“I don't know. It's just how I landed. It doesn't mean when you blast back up you're not going to run into a bunch of shit and have to, you know, fight things to get back to the heights that you were at, but I'd take that over 412 bones anytime.”

He paused, then continued: “But there is power in creating 412 bones! Because we all know that a bone, up to a certain age, when it heals, it heals stronger. So, I mean, it's not to knock anybody that doesn't land like an Avenger. Because there's strength in that too.”

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In February, Sudeikis attended the Golden Globes, which were being held remotely on Zoom. He had his misgivings about the event—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the awards, had been in the news for a series of unflattering revelations about its organization, and also the show was taking place in the middle of the night in London. Tom Ford had sent over a suit for Sudeikis to wear, and he tried it on, in his flat in Notting Hill, but he felt ridiculous, there in the middle of the night, and so changed out of it and into a tie-dyed hoodie made by his sister's clothing company. “I wore that hoodie because I didn't wanna fucking wear the fucking top half of a Tom Ford suit,” he said. “I love Tom Ford suits. But it felt weird as shit.”

“With kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’… All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it!”

The rest of this story you know: Sudeikis ended up winning best actor for Ted Lasso and gave a dazed acceptance speech while wearing the hoodie, and this in turn sparked glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. For the record, “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” Sudeikis said. It was just late at night and he didn't want to wear a suit. “So yeah, off it came and it was like, ‘This is how I feel. I believe in moving forward.’ ”

Lately, Sudeikis told me, he had been trying to pay more attention to how he actually felt about any given thing, to all the various signs and omens that present themselves to a person during the course of living their life. Even in his past, he said, there were moments that were obvious in retrospect, in terms of what the universe was trying to tell him, messages he missed entirely at the time. In Vegas, where he was living with Cannon before Saturday Night Live, he developed alopecia and his hair stopped growing, and he didn't know why. And then, at the end of his 30s, “during the nine months before Otis was born and the nine months after he was born,” Sudeikis developed extremely painful sciatica. “I went and got an MRI and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, the jelly doughnut in my L4, L5, is squirting out and touching a nerve.’ ” But why? When he had his second child, this didn't happen at all. So: why?

“I mean, since last November,” Sudeikis said, “the joke that feels more like a parable to me is a guy is sitting at home watching TV and the news breaks in to say flash flood warning. About an hour later he goes outside on his porch and he sees that the whole street is flooded.” You've probably heard the rest of this joke before: While the guy is praying to God for some kind of help, a truck, a boat, and a chopper come by, offering aid, which the guy turns down. God'll provide, he says. Sudeikis finished the joke: “Two hours after that, he's in heaven. He's dead. He says, ‘God, what's up, man? You didn't help me.’ God goes, ‘What do you mean, man? I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a speedboat, I sent you a helicopter.’ ” So, Sudeikis said, “you can't tell me that hair falling out of my head wasn't—I don't know if it was the speedboat or the pickup truck or the helicopter, but yeah, man, it all comes home to roost. What you resist persists.”

He went on. “That's why I had sciatica,” he said. “That's the speedboat. That was like: ‘Hey, you gotta take a look at your stuff.’ ”

And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered. “I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. That's the other half. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’ Oh! Well, knowing is half the battle. All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it! Get better at names. Show up five minutes early, make it a point to do it. So, I'm still learning these things. But hopefully I've got plenty of time to do something about it.”

Sudeikis smiled a little wearily: “I mean, at the end of that joke, the guy still got to go to heaven, you know?”

Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2021 issue with the title "Jason Sudeikis Paints His Masterpiece."

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Hill & Aubrey

Styled by Michael Darlington

Grooming by Nicky Austin

Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh

Set design by Hella Keck

Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions

[ittybittypbandj]

The Internship - Chapter 3

We’re 3 chapters in, team! Halfway there and things are about to get real!

So buckle up, let’s keep going with this multi-chapter Bittyparse fluff-fest, now featuring special guest Angst.  5 chapters, weekly updates.  Also on ao3. <3

Fic Summary:

Eric Bittle arrived in New York two weeks ago, newly single and ready for a fresh start. This internship was just what he needed to jumpstart his life.

Kent Parson loved his life in New York. He was at the peak of his NHL career. He had friends, the world’s greatest cat, and everything he thought he needed.

He never expected a small Southern blonde to burst into his life and turn everything on its head.

“Okay, brah, so what happened after that?”

Bitty rolled his eyes and adjusted the laptop resting on his knees. “C’mon, Shitty, I told you this part already. He grabbed my arm so I wouldn’t fall and then stared at me for a minute.”

Shitty cupped his chin in his hand and sighed longingly at the screen. “Fucking love at first sight, my man. Like a scene out of a queer-positive, alternate universe John Hughes movie.”

“You sap,” Lardo snorted, and shoved Shitty’s shoulder. “So what will you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you obviously want to bone him and have his hypothetical babies, so what’s the plan?”

Bitty sputtered. He could feel his cheeks blushing and he covered his face with his hands to hide the evidence. This was embarrassing enough as it was.

“I don’t know, guys…I don’t even know if I like him like that.”

Lardo arched one eyebrow.

Shitty leaned offscreen briefly, then reappeared with a joint between his fingers. He waved it at Bitty decisively. “You can’t fool us, little brah. You look super glowy for a dude who just spent two hours with another dude he didn’t like.”

Bitty sighed. He knew it was fibbing to say that he didn’t like Kent. But what was he supposed to do? He didn’t want to lie, but the situation was a mess. Kent was his client. And Jack’s ex. And a hockey player. Apparently Bitty had a type, and his type was Closeted Top Scorers in the Eastern Conference.

He was pretty sure Kent felt something for him, too. He may not have a lot of relationship experience, and goodness knows it took him and Jack long enough to sort out their feelings, but he also wasn’t born yesterday, and Kent’s winks and smiles and lingering stares…well, he could read between those lines.

“Earth to Bitty…hellloooo?”

Bitty looked back at the screen, where Shitty was waving his arms at the camera.

“Look, I like him. Okay? I want to have his – lordy – his hypothetical babies. But he’s Fancy Feline’s client. Isn’t that illegal or somethin’?”

Shitty stroked his mustache. “It could be problematic, I’ll give you that. But it’s only a conflict of interest if it affects the business relationship. As long as you keep it on the DL and don’t, like, grab his ass in meetings – although, the guy does have a handful of handsome ass…maybe a couple handfuls…”

“Shitty!” Bitty cried. His cheeks were seriously going to catch fire.

“Sorry bro. What was I sayin’? Oh, as long as you keep it professional and don’t let it affect your business decisions, I wouldn’t sweat it. Besides, if they transfer you to another department when your internship ends, you’re golden. You can grab all the hot hockey ass you want.”

Bitty leaned his head back against the headboard. What did he even want? He didn’t want to jeopardize this job, goodness knows he needed it for his resumé. But he also wanted Kent. Lord, how he wanted.

Bitty tried to remember the last time he was this infatuated with another person. It was obviously Jack – he and Jack had circled each other for two years before making a move. They’d wasted so much time that they could have spent together. Bitty didn’t want to make that mistake again.

He didn’t have the luxury of time with Kent. At the end of September, his three-month internship would be over. That was only a month away. What if the company didn’t extend his contract? The Rangers’ season would start in October, and it’s not like Kent would have loads of free time. If Bitty didn’t give him a reason to make time, they might never see each other again.

Lardo leaned in and eyed the screen as she said, “You’re thinking awfully hard, Bits. Care to share?”

Bitty nodded to himself, decision made.

“I’m gonna go for it.”

Shitty whooped and Lardo smirked.

“Shitty, you’re right. I reckon we can keep it professional, and I don’t wanna lose my chance by waiting. If he’s interested – and that’s a big if.” Bitty pointed at the camera for emphasis. “If he’s interested, I want to give it a shot.”

_/_/_/ \_\_\_

Kent’s phone buzzed for the fifth time in an hour. It was from Eric, another chirp about the episode of Chopped they were both watching. Kent grinned and tucked his toes under Kit’s couch cushion as he typed a reply.

Somehow, ever since their meeting in the café, Kent and Eric had gone from business acquaintances who occasionally texted, to text acquaintances who occasionally talked business. Kent was totally down for the shift. He hadn’t seen Eric in person since then – his schedule had gotten crazy and he knew Eric was swamped with his job – but he was already imagining the things they would do the next time they saw each other.

It was super lame to be crushing this hard on someone he hardly knew. He was almost thirty, for god’s sake, and he probably should have wised up a decade ago. But you know what, fuck it. He’d wasted most of his twenties pining after a teenage heartbreak. He was a grown-ass dude now and he could do what he wanted.

Kent: i found where we should go to our next meeting thingy

Eric: Our monthly touchbase? That’s great! Where?

Kent: i’m not telling. it’s a surprise

Eric: Ok lol, how am I supposed to get there?

Kent: i’ll pick u up

Kent: lambo or r8?

Eric: Bless you

Kent: cool, r8 it is

Eric: [puzzled emoji]

Kent: [sportscar emoji] [thumbs-up emoji] [sunglasses emoji]

Kent set his phone on the table when it became clear Eric wasn’t replying right away. He snuggled further down the couch, and Kit stretched out on her cushion like she was trying to protect her space from his feet. Kent’s legs were sore from a grueling practice today, and it felt good to relax at home.

Kent’s phone buzzed and he grabbed for it. That would be Eric, chirping him about his flashy cars.

Jack: Hi Kent. Ready for pre-season?

Definitely not Eric. That was cool, he could roll with the punches.

Kent: hey zimms

Jack: When is your first game?

Kent: next saturday at home, then leave for a 2-game roadie in cali

Kent: u?

Jack: We play the Isles next Friday

Kent: cool

Eric: how on earth you justify TWO sports cars in NYC, I’ll never know. smh.

Kent’s stomach did a little flip at seeing Eric’s name on the screen.

Kent: three

Kent: sports cars, that is. if u count the beamer

Eric: Lord, where do you even park them?

Eric: Also what day is good to meet? How 'bout Saturday?

Jack: Would you want to meet up this weekend? We’ll be in New York until Saturday afternoon.

Jack: It would be nice to see you.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

Kent muted the television. He needed to think right now, and he couldn’t do it with Ted Allen describing kumquat soup in the background. Fucking hell. Of course Eric and Jack wanted to meet on the same goddamn weekend. Kent’s life was basically a Lifetime movie. He scrubbed his face with his hands and weighed his options.

He really wanted to see Eric. That was a given. Eric made him feel weirdly happy. It was the first time in forever that he’d felt this optimistic about someone.

And Zimms…Kent hadn’t hung out with Jack since the doomed frat party of 2014, not unless you counted the small talk at galas and awards ceremonies. He didn’t even know what they had in common anymore other than hockey. It might be totally weird, but meeting up was part of his Being-Friends-With-Jack Master Plan, and he still wanted to be friends, even if it required super awkward hangout time.

A niggling part of Kent’s brain was worried that seeing Jack would dredge up old feelings. Kent was doing fine now, doing great actually, but when Jack had called him ‘Kenny’ last month, his brain had gone totally haywire. What if seeing him was like that, but a million times worse? What if he fell hopelessly in love again?

Kent flopped across the couch and onto Kit, trapping her with his arms and nuzzling his face into her side.

“Tell me what to do, baby girl.”

Kit twisted like a goalie blocking a wraparound and jumped free of Kent’s arms. He watched her disappear into the bedroom.

“I see how it is!” Kent called after her.

His phone buzzed. Crap, he probably should have texted Eric and Zimms back like five minutes ago.

Eric: I'm also free Thursday or Friday

Kent’s stomach swooped. Before he could answer, his phone dinged again.

Jack: I’m sorry if that was overstepping.

Jack: I understand if you don’t want to meet up.

Kent noticed that his stomach didn’t do any swoopy-feelings at seeing Jack’s name on his phone. Huh. That was a good sign, right?

Eric: Basically I have no life yet in this city........ :/

Kent felt the swoopy feeling again. Yep, he definitely only felt it for Eric. Taking it as a sign from the Lifetime movie gods, he replied,

Kent: how's thursday? gotta get my beauty sleep friday and saturdays the game

Eric: Thursday's great! 6pm?

Eric: Y'know, can we make it 7pm instead?

Kent: 7 is perf. text me ur address

And to Jack,

Kent: sure zimms, let’s meet sat morning

Kent unmuted the television and stretched his legs along the full length of the couch. The upholstery was warm where Kit had been sleeping.

Now would probably be a good time to tell Jack and Eric about each other. He was pretty sure adults were supposed to tell each other about being friends with exes, although he’d never been in that situation. It seemed like an upstanding thing that a real adult would do.

But what would he say to Jack that wouldn’t scare him away? And more importantly, what would he say to Eric that wouldn’t be a total buzzkill for whatever feelings Eric potentially had for him?

He stared vacantly at the TV. If he told Eric about Jack, and then Jack decided to ghost him again, he’d ruin his chances with Eric for nothing. His and Jack’s track record of being friends wasn’t exactly stellar. Hanging out with Jack might be awkward and he'd bail after an hour. Surely that wouldn’t warrant telling Eric about. And if it went well, Kent would have plenty of time to tell him later. Right?

Kent nodded at his own logic. He would wait to tell them. It would be fine.

Everything would be fine.

_/_/_/ \_\_\_

“…I’ve been here all night….I’ve been here all daaaay…and boy you got me walkin’ side to side…”

Bitty swayed his hips and sang along over the hairdryer.

He’d been looking forward to this meeting all week. If he was being honest, it was a work meeting only in name. He’d transferred his work files to his phone so he wouldn’t need a laptop. He’d pushed the start time to 7pm so they wouldn’t hit happy hour. He wanted to have the luxury to take things slowly, to suggest dinner or more drinks without the pressure of happy hour ending at seven.

He stepped back from the mirror and gave himself a come-hither look. Should he add eyeliner?

He grabbed his phone off the toilet back.

Bitty: eyeliner??

Lardo: yasss

Bitty: [blowing kiss emoji]

He closed one eye, stuck out his tongue in concentration, and started to apply.

At 7:05, Bitty’s front door buzzed. Kent was downstairs, leaning against a royal blue Audi. He flashed Bitty a smile as he opened the passenger door, then walked to the other side and slid into the driver’s seat. When he pressed the ignition, the powerful engine settled into a deep purr.

“You ready to start your New York education?”

As they crossed the Manhattan Bridge and drove into lower Manhattan, Bitty’s leg bounced restlessly. He forced himself to sit still and squeezed his fingers together in his lap. Kent was right here, and he was so much hotter than Bitty remembered. It was hard to be around him without staring; everything about him felt electric. Eric willed his dick to ignore the observation. His skinny khakis wouldn’t exactly hide an erection.

They pulled up to a swanky hotel and a uniformed man opened Bitty’s door. Kent gave instructions to the valet and handed her a folded bill.

“Is this where we’re going?”

“Nah, we’re just parking. The Dominick does good valet service.” Kent grinned and motioned for Bitty to follow him down the block. “You’ll see. We’re going to a real New York institution.”

The location Kent had picked for their date (meeting, Bitty scolded himself) turned out to be a 1960’s tiki bar that had been in business for fifty years. Kent peppered Bitty with details about local history as they made their way to the bar.

The interior of the bar was dark and hazy. The ceiling was completely covered with autographed dollar bills pushed into the ceiling with drink umbrellas; Kent pointed out his own name, and Bitty politely pretended he could see it in the mass of bills. Surfing movies played on a TV in the corner, vintage posters covered the walls, and everything was covered in a fine film of dust.

Kent ordered drinks – two variations of something fruity and blended, garnished with pineapple – and he let Bitty try both and pick his favorite. They slid into a mostly-hidden back booth. Bitty noticed the bill Kent slipped the bartender, and the ‘Reserved’ sign the bartender removed from the tabletop before they took their seats.

Bitty couldn’t help feeling a little bit awed at the way Kent spent money. Jack and Kent both made a lot of money playing hockey (Kent made two million more, not that Bitty’d checked, that wouldn’t be polite). But they spent it so differently. Jack was reserved and cautious, investing in real estate and vehicles with good mileage and safety records. Kent spent money like it was water. He seemed to view money as a means to solve problems and enjoy himself. After years of coexisting with Jack, Bitty found Kent’s largesse exciting.

As they sipped their drinks, the conversation was light and easy. Bitty leaned into Kent’s space and listened to him describe his favorite New York restaurants. They traded stories and chirps until their glasses were empty and Kent hailed a waiter.

“Another?”

Bitty grinned and nodded. His limbs felt loose and warm. Lordy, he couldn’t even taste the rum in these drinks.

When their refills arrived, Bitty leaned forward to taste Kent’s drink and used the movement as an excuse to shift his knee so that it pressed against Kent’s under the table. Kent glanced up sharply. He didn’t move away. Bitty’s stomach did somersaults.

The thing Bitty loved about conversations with Kent, is how he felt like an equal in them. He didn’t feel young or inexperienced or like an object of adoration – although watching the way Kent’s eyes tracked him as he talked, maybe there was a little of that, too. But he felt like an adult and an equal. Bitty had as many stories to share as Kent did, and Kent seemed genuinely interested in them. He asked follow-up questions about Bitty’s job. He whistled at Bitty’s recounting of the Jam Fiasco of 2015. Bitty thrived on the attention.

By the time they finished their second drinks, Bitty had his hand on Kent’s forearm as Kent regaled him with an embarrassing story of him and his old teammate, Jeff Troy, at a state fair. Bitty gasped as Kent concluded the story by miming a bin of stuffed animals falling on top of them.

“Oh my!” Bitty exclaimed. “Thank goodness y’all were alright.”

Kent looked down at Bitty’s arm, opened his mouth to say something else, closed it again. Bitty was suddenly very aware of the places their bodies were touching.

Feeling brave, he traced his finger down Kent’s arm to his wrist, following a vein just below the skin. Kent inhaled. He watched Kent’s lips, parted slightly with his breath. Bitty wanted to kiss him so badly. He felt invincible from the alcohol and Kent’s attention.

Before he could lose his nerve, he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to Kent’s.

The kiss was gentle and lasted only a few seconds. Kent moved his lips against Bitty’s, hesitantly, chastely. To an outsider it probably looked innocent enough, and before Bitty could lose himself in the moment, Kent pulled away.

“Not here,” he breathed.

Bitty leaned back. Oh lord, how had he forgotten? Kent was famous in this city and he wasn’t out. There could be cameras anywhere. Kent could be outed on Deadspin tomorrow and it would be so awful for his career. Bitty pressed his hands to his face. Goodness, he’d been so selfish.

Kent looked at Bitty with concern. Bitty could feel the flush of embarrassment rising in his cheeks.

“It’s okay,” Kent whispered, “I…I want to, just…later?” He cocked his head to one side and asked in a normal volume, “How about we get some food?”

Bitty nodded, still feeling horrified. Things had been going so well, and he totally messed it up with his stupid recklessness.

They closed their tab and walked outside into the warm September night.

_/_/_/ \_\_\_

“So, uh, is pizza okay? I had a place picked out, but we could find somewhere else if pizza after Mai Tais is a no-go.”

Kent looked at Eric hopefully, wishing he could turn the dial back ten minutes and put the wide, happy grin back on Eric’s face.

“Pizza’s fine.”

Kent tried a new conversation topic. “Got any plans after your internship ends? It must be soon, right?”

Eric nodded. “I think they might give me an offer in a different department, outside the Pet division. I’ve had a couple interviews.” Kent nodded as Eric got into the rhythm of the conversation and started to sound more like himself. “Of course, I want to move to the magazine – Home Cooking, they sell it in supermarket checkouts?” Eric glanced over and Kent made a noise like he’d heard of it, “but it’s so darn competitive. I don’t know where I’ll end up.”

Kent half-smiled. He was happy for Eric, even if it blew that he wouldn’t work with Kent and Kit anymore. He’d known from the beginning that Eric’s internship was temporary. He wondered if it would be appropriate to send a letter of recommendation to someone about the food magazine. He’d seen firsthand how good Eric was at his job. The company would be crazy to let him get away. He filed the thought away for later.

“Will you stay in New York?”

Eric nodded and looked around him in a way that made Kent imagine he was assessing the worthiness of all New York City.

“Yeah, the city’s growin’ on me. The company’s based here. And I’ve made some friends,” he turned and met Kent’s eyes, “I’d feel like I missed out if I left now.”

They lingered over pizza at the little restaurant Kent picked out. Eric perked up after a slice of margherita pizza and a coke. He asked Kent all about this year’s team and how Kent felt about their chances in the preseason.

Kent couldn’t stop looking at Eric’s eyes. They looked fucking beautiful, warm honey brown ringed with dark lashes, and it was all Kent could do to keep his hands to himself. He wished they were somewhere private so he could kiss him again. He wanted to feel Eric’s fingertips on his arm again, to lean into his kiss instead of having to pull away. Would Eric be down for it if Kent asked him to come back to his place? What if he was hella offended? He was Southern, did that make a difference? He should have googled this shit beforehand.

Kent waited until they were back on the sidewalk, strolling away from the restaurant with no particular destination, to ask the question.

“Uh, so, I only live a few blocks from here. It’s a nice night…do you, um, maybe want to walk back to my place and leave the car? I can hire you a ride back to Brooklyn whenever you want.”

He could see Eric blush in the yellow light of the streetlamp. It hadn't been his smoothest line, and he hoped he’d read the situation right.

“I wouldn’t be a bother? Don’t you have early practice?”

“You could never be a bother.”

Kent cringed. Welcome to Cheesy McCheesetown, population him.

Eric smiled tenderly, apparently not noticing Kent’s total lack of cool.

“Well, then. I’d love that.”

Kent grinned. His chest felt lighter than it had in months. Eric liked him. Eric wanted to spend time with him and kiss him and come back to his place and hopefully do other things with him. He felt like he’d won the fucking lottery.

They started walking. Kent looked quickly behind them to see that the street was deserted, then reached out and traced his index finger down the outside of Eric's hand. Eric moved his hand closer and pressed their fingertips together. Kent's face felt warm. He felt like a giddy teenager walking home after the homecoming dance, not that he'd ever had a homecoming. He briefly squeezed their fingers together.

When they reached his building, Eric casually put his hands in his pockets as he followed him inside. He stood off to the side, typing on his phone, as Kent asked the concierge to retrieve his car from SoHo; and Kent remembered that Eric had done this before.

Eric knew how to date a famous athlete in the closet. This wasn’t his first time looking unobtrusive in the lobby of a condo building. It was a very specific skill set, and Kent wanted to fight every homophobe who'd made it so Eric needed to learn those skills in the first place. He deserved so much better. Although he had to admit, not many people knew how exhausting it was for guys like Kent and Jack to keep up the bro-ey pretense of heterosexuality, and it felt really fucking good that Eric understood.

Kent nearly vibrated out of his skin as they rode the elevator up to Kent’s apartment. He kept his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, trying not to look nervous.

As soon as the apartment door closed, he turned to Eric and gingerly took his face in both hands. Eric stared up at him, eyes dark.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

Eric grinned without answering, then leaned forward and pressed his lips against Kent’s. Kent tried not to moan at finally getting the contact he’d wanted all night. He brushed his tongue inside Eric’s mouth, relishing the hot wetness. He ran his fingers up through Eric’s hair and smelled his coconut shampoo.

Kent hummed in encouragement as Eric wound his hands around Kent’s back and down over his ass. He squeezed playfully, smiling against Kent’s lips, then pulled away just enough that Kent stopped and looked at him questioningly. When Eric seemed satisfied that he had Kent’s attention, he pushed Kent backward with more strength than Kent would have expected, pressing him against the wall of the entryway and bracing him in place with a hand on each of his hips.

“This okay, hon?” Eric asked through his lashes.

Jesus fucking Christ. “More than okay.”

Eric kissed him again, deep and filthy. A shiver ran down the whole length of Kent’s body, and he instantly felt himself go from mildly aroused to hard as a fucking rock.

A small chirp sounded from behind them. Kent groaned.

He turned his face away from Eric’s lips and grumbled, “Go away, Kit. I’ll feed you later.”

Another chirp. This time Kit came right up to them and butted her head against Kent’s shinbone, annoyed. Kent wondered if locking her in the guest bath would be considered animal cruelty. He sighed and relented.

“Sorry, Eric, I forgot. I usually feed her right when I get home.”

Eric gave him an amused little smirk. “You’d better get on that, Mister Parson. She looks mighty displeased.”

“I’ll be back in two minutes.” He leaned forward and kissed the smirk off Eric’s face with quick, silly, closed-mouth kisses. Eric laughed and squirmed away.

Kent ran to the kitchen and proceeded to set a land speed record for preparing cat food. When he finished, he found Eric in the living room with all the lights turned off, watching the city from the wall-to-wall windows. The night skyline of Manhattan lit up his face in a warm yellow glow. Kent stood behind him and circled his arms around his waist, resting his chin on Eric’s shoulder.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

Eric half-laughed, half-sighed. “If you’d told sixteen-year-old me that in a handful of years I would be living in New York City, making it on my own, enjoying dinner and drinks and this,” he gestured pointedly between Kent and himself, “with a hot NHL star...I would’ve said you were downright crazy.”

Kent smiled and trailed little kisses down the back of Eric’s neck, feeling pleased with himself when he felt Eric shiver. “C’mon,” he whispered into Eric’s ear.

“Hmm?”

Kent slid his hands over Eric’s torso, brushing the exposed skin at the waistband of his khakis. “Come with me. I know a few things we could do that would make sixteen-year-old Eric blush.”

Eric snorted. “Oh my god, Kent, that line was awful.”

Kent grinned. “Did it work?”

Eric just laughed, full and throaty, and pulled Kent in the direction of the bedroom.

“Uuuugggghhhh.”

Kent groped around on the bedside table for his phone. Why the fuck was his alarm going off? It was so goddamn early. How was anyone awake at this ungodly hour?

He turned off the offending alarm and reached out for Eric, but the bed next to him was empty.

Kent was immediately awake. He sat up.

When had Eric left? Oh god, had he done something to offend him? He tried to recall what would have upset Eric enough for him to leave, but nothing stood out. The last thing he remembered from the night before was both of them crawling under the sheets, post-orgasm, and Eric laying his hand on Kent's chest as they passed out.

He scrubbed his hands over his face and looked around. A little yellow sticky note sat next to his phone.

Kent,

I had so much fun last night.

I left early, needed a shower & clothes before work.

Kick ass in your game.

<3 EB

_/_/_/ \_\_\_

Bitty scrambled for his phone when it buzzed, praying it would be Kent. He’d had two false alarms already this morning – a good-morning note from his mama and a string of eggplant emojis from Shitty.

Kent: my pillow smells like you

Bitty: [blushing emoji] you got my note?

Kent: i did

Bitty: Sorry I had to run, I forgot we had a team meeting at 8 and I kinda needed a shower

Kent: heh yeah

Kent: i mean, if you’d let me swallow like i was planning to

Bitty: Oh lordy

Kent: but nooo, u wanted it on my abs

Bitty: Kent Parson

Kent: and then it got everywhere

Bitty: We are not having this conversation while I’m sittin’ in a SHARED cubicle

Kent: [smiling devil emoji] [winking kiss emoji]

Bitty swiveled his chair so he faced away from his cubicle-mate. He hunched over the screen and reread Kent’s texts, beaming like an idiot.

Bitty: Will I see you before your roadie?

Kent: probably not

Kent: we have practice & team photos today, game tmrw, then hit the road right after

Bitty: :( :( :(

Kent: I’d love to meet up next weekend after i’m back

Bitty: I’d like that :D

Bitty: Btw you earned serious baked goods last night

Kent: i live to please [cherub emoji]

Kent: and my favorite flavor is blueberry

Blueberry. Hmm. Bitty had all sorts of blueberry recipes he could bake for Kent. If he stopped by Whole Foods on his way home from work, he could whip up a batch of blueberry mini crumbles easy-peasy. Or maybe the blueberry brie tartlets the boys had been so fond of at the Haus? He opened his browser to research recipes.

It was a bummer that Kent couldn’t hang out until next week. Bitty had no plans tonight and baking would take his mind off the excitement of the last couple days.

That’s alright, he could wait until next week.

He could wait.

If he stopped on his way home and picked up some blueberries, surely that was alright.

If he washed the blueberries and set the butter out to room temperature, that was just smart preparation.

Well, as long as everything was out, he might as well make a little somethin'.

Two batches of mini crumbles, two batches of tartlets, and one batch of sweet potato cat treats later, Bitty finally felt calm enough to crawl into bed. He knew Kent would be busy tomorrow, but he could drop by quickly and give Kent the baked goods and a good-luck kiss. He wouldn’t even have to go inside. It would be sweet and perfect.

The next morning, Bitty tied two bakery boxes with twine and a little note; presentation was important. Kent had said their practice was over at 10, so at 10:30 he skipped up the front steps of Kent’s building and set down his boxes in the lobby.

Bitty: Hi hon, are you home?

Kent: hi what’s up?

Bitty: I have a surprise for you [winking kissy face]

Kent: ??

Bitty: Let me up and I can show you [winking emoji]

Kent: how about I come downstairs to u?

Bitty: Oh don’t you worry, this won’t take but a minute

Bitty: I don’t mind makin’ the trip

Kent: that’s ok you don’t have to

Kent: i can come down

Kent: i don’t mind

Kent: eric?

Bitty hopped into the elevator with a woman holding a Pomeranian, pushing the button for Kent’s floor after she’d swiped her keycard. He smiled in what he hoped looked like a friendly-not-intruder way. Kent was so silly. He didn’t mind coming up at all. No reason Kent should have to interrupt his routine for Bitty.

Bitty knocked on Kent’s door and Kent opened it right away, like he’d been waiting for him. He had on basketball shorts and a Rangers t-shirt. His hair was sweaty. He didn’t invite Bitty in.

“Hey Eric, I didn’t expect you today.”

“Oh honey, I was just in the area and thought I’d drop off a little somethin’ for the boys on your roadie.”

Bitty handed Kent the packages and Kent smiled as he sniffed appreciatively. He turned briefly to listen to something in the other room, and his smile faded. He turned back to Bitty.

“That’s really cool, man. Thanks.”

Bitty started to wish him good luck, but he stopped when he thought he heard…was that footsteps?

Kent jumped in, “Sorry I couldn’t hang out today, I just–”

“Parse, where are the bowls?”

A tall, dark-haired man in running shorts and yellow sneakers walked into the entryway holding a box of cereal. He froze when he saw Bitty.

Bitty’s heart stopped. “Jack?”

“Bittle.”

Bitty backed away, clutching his phone to his chest. What was happening? He couldn’t breathe. Why was Jack here? From somewhere far away, he heard Kent saying his name.

He turned and ran.

#bittyparse #eric bittle #kent parson #kit purrson #jack zimmermann #omgcp #omgcp fic #omgcp fanfic #kent plays for the rangers #parsepositive #i'm posting all of this because i'm too excited to wait #hope you like it!

[aion-rsa]

Talalay’s Terrors! The Director Breaks Down Her 5 Scariest Scenes

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Rachel Talalay knows horror. The British-American filmmaker got her directorial start with 90s horror flicks Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Ghost in the Machine before helming cult classic Tank Girl. In the last few decades, she has directed dozens of TV episodes that dip or full-on dive into That Most Chilling Genre. From Doctor Who and Doom Patrol to Supernatural and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Talalay has been asked to tell many a spooky story.

Talalay’s latest, A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a feature film adaptation of the kids comedy horror book series from Joe Ballarini, and it drops on Netflix today. In honor of the occasion and of the Halloween season, of course, we talked to Talalay about five of the scariest scenes she’s ever directed.

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Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) — Carlos’ Q-Tip Death

Film synopsis: In this sixth film in the classic horror series, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) returns with a new target for his terror. After having slaughtered more or less every child in his hometown, Krueger finds new prey in the town where his long-lost daughter works as a therapist for troubled youths.

The scene: Freddy dream-tortures deaf teen Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) by putting a Q-tip through his ear. In the sequence that follows, Freddy turns sound itself against Carlos, turning his hearing aid device up so that every sound is magnified 1,000-fold until poor Carlo’s head explodes.

Talking to Talalay: “The most important thing is how you’re setting things up,” says Talalay of good horror. “I like this scene because I like the way we build on him not being able to hear, and the way we start with the water drop, and then do the pin, and then do multiple pins, and lead that into the blackboard and the nails on the blackboard.”

Part of the scene’s set-up sees Freddy sticking a Q-tip in Carlos’ ear until it comes out the other side. It’s the kind of horror that plays on a mundane anxiety, says Talalay. “There’s something about [it], says Talalay. “You’re always told, ‘Be careful of Q-tips, you might hurt yourself. Don’t put Q-tips in your ears.’ It’s something we’ve all done and touched on. That’s another reason it works really well.”

Talalay, who has been using the quarantine to go through her troves of production keepsakes, pulls the Freddy’s Dead script out during our Zoom interview. “There were certain things that were in the script that surprised me,” says Talalay, using the example of Freddy’s popping up behind Carlos during his torture sequence, one instance of the villain having a much campier quality than previous films in the franchise.

“It directly says in the script, ‘Freddy is really enjoying mugging it,'” says Talalay. “[It] directly uses the word ‘mugging’ behind Carlos. And I thought, ‘Okay, that’s why I did that.’ Because there’s a version of it where Freddy just pops up, there’s a really scary version of it. So I was paying attention to the script, which is what I was paid to direct.”

Horror lesson: Q-tips aren’t worth the risk.

Ghost in the Machine (1993) — Microwave Murder

Film synopsis: When Karl (Ted Marcoux), aka “The Address Book Killer,” gets in a car accident and is brought to the hospital, his soul is transferring into a computer through the MRI machine. As an artificial intelligence, Karl continues his killing spree using various objects connected to the electrical grid and computer networks. He is… a ghost in various machines.

The scene: Using the address book of protagonist Terry (Karen Allen), Karl goes after Terry’s boss, Frank Mallory (Richard McKenzie), taking him out using his own microwave oven.

Talking to Talalay: The “microwave murder” sequence starts with our ghost, Karl, finding his victim, Frank, through a network of computers. As viewers, we are inside the computer hardware, in a series of visually ambitious shots that utilize Talalay’s background as a computer programmer.

“There’s a really beautiful, for the time, sequence where we’re inside the computer trying to bang against the computer and glitching the computer,” says Talalay, “which is really funny because he’s on the TWA website. Then we watch him travel through the wires, and we do this macro stuff through the wires. And then on the outside of the wires, and through the plug hole, and into the microwave.”

Once out of the microwave and into the kitchen, the shots get a bit more traditional but no less ambitious. Slowly, the microwave starts to take over the room, heating things from the inside out. Popcorn pops out of its box. Eggs explode from their shells. Bananas ooze out of their peels, and grapes turn into raisins. Eventually, Frank is affected too, his skin erupting into truly disgusting boils.

“All these things were optical effects, not digital effects and they were really, really hard,” says Talalay, noting how much faster this would be to do on a computer today. However, in the early 90s, it wasn’t an option. Instead, Talalay and her team had to get practical with the effects. They used Tesla coils to create electrical bolts between the hanging pans and recorded the grapes using stop-motion in the oven until they turned into raisins.

While the “Microwave Murder” may be one of the most memorable scenes from Ghost in the Machine, Talalay is also particularly proud of the “Crash Test Dummy” scene that comes later in the film. In it, we see Karl the Ghost go after Terry’s friend Elliot (Jack Laufer) using a car that is part of a test crash. Elliot manages to survive the crash, but is killed minutes later by a hand dryer that erupts into flames. It’s a scene that Talalay says she often used when she was teaching film because it “has the three classic beats and then surprise.” “That is scene that [is] really well-structured and carefully developed,” says Talalay, calling attention to the way the scene cycles through building tension and releasing it until the final moment of surprise.

“I really am very, very pleased with that scene,” reflects Talalay. “And that’s music as well, incredibly important building the tension, letting it down, music and sound.”

Horror lesson: Never trust a microwave.

Doctor Who, “World Enough and Time” (2017) — “Pain, Pain, Pain.”

Episode synopsis: In the penultimate episode of Season 10, The Doctor (Peter Capaldi), Bill (Pearl Mackie), Nardole (Matt Lucas), and Missy (Michelle Gomez) answer a distress call from a gigantic colony ship trying to escape the pull of a black hole. Almost immediately, Bill is shot by a terrified passenger, and is taken away by figures in hospital gowns claiming they can restore her. She is brought to the ship’s lower levels, where time moves much slower than the top levels. Because of this, Bill must wait many years for her friends to rescue her.

The scene: Bill awakens in a hospital to a voice saying the word “pain” over and over again. She follows the sound through the mostly abandoned hospital wing until she finds the source: a patient, their head covered in a tightly-fitted cloth that obscures their features, at the end of a row of other patients. A nurse comes to address the patient, and Bill watches from her hiding spot behind a nearby curtain; the nurse turns a knob on the patient’s IV pole and the “pain”s stop. Once the nurse leaves, Bill realizes that the nurse didn’t alleviate the patient’s pain, but rather muted the volume of their suffering. She realizes that every patient in the room is muted.

Talking to Talalay: “Steven Moffat is such a genius,” says Talalay, referring to the script written by then Doctor Who showrunner Moffat. “When you hear about people who had surgery and were awake during the surgery but couldn’t communicate, I think it plays into that fear. So the idea that you would be feeling, that the humanity is still in there but in capable of communicating [is terrifying].”

Unlike the previous, cinematic scenes discussed, this one is part of an ongoing TV show, which means we’ve spent hours with the central character featured. This, perhaps, makes the impending horror that much more affecting.

“You have Bill … knowing that this is going to happen to her,” says Talalay. “So you have the human you care about, seeing what’s going to happen to her, being fully aware of what’s going on and not being able to do anything. And there’s something so elemental about just hearing ‘pain, pain, pain.'”

As a director, Talalay worked to make the hospital ward particularly creepy, using rack focuses across the faces of the patients “as if everyone is faceless.” When creating something for Doctor Who, which is considered a family show and generally airs earlier in the evening in the U.K., Talalay notes that it is important to keep the horror acceptable for a broader audience.

“Initially, we did some stuff with plastic and [the patients] just looked like they were being asphyxiated,” says Talalay. “So there’s definitely a line on Doctor Who where you understand being really scary without being gross. It isn’t gross, but it’s disturbing. And Doctor Who really understands how disturbing it is to be missing any part of your face.”

Talalay and I discussed the pacing of the scene, which takes its time getting to the big reveal.

“The nice thing about doing a Doctor Who episode that Steven wrote is that you’ll be allowed a little bit more time,” says Talalay, adding that, because of this, she didn’t have to cut the tension to get to the next story beat in away that might be required on a different TV show. “Even when they’re outside in the hallway before [Bill goes into the ward], and the ‘in’ and ‘out’ [signs] and just hearing the ‘pain’ [allows] for that tension. And also, I worked really hard. One of intentions on Doctor Who was to try and make all my episodes beautiful and also different.”

Talalay credits one of the central conceits of the episode—that time is passing at a different pace for the Doctor than it is for Bill—as creating an added layer of tension, even when the plot point is not being specifically mentioned. “The slower and the longer you’re downstairs with Bill, the more you think, ‘Upstairs, oh my God, only a minute has passed.'”

Horror lesson: When on a ship experiencing time dilation, use the buddy system.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “An Exorcism in Greendale” (2018) — Uncle Jesse’s Astral Projections

Episode synopsis: Susie’s uncle is possessed by a demon called Apophis, a parasite that is devours its host from the inside and who preys on the fears and insecurities of those it torments. Because Sabrina’s friends Ros (Jaz Sinclair), Harvey (Ross Lynch), and Susie (Lachlan Watson) touched the possessed Jesse (Jason Beaudoin) when they bound him to a bed, they are being plagued by Apophis and are set to be his next hosts once the demon is done with Jesse. You know… just another week in Greendale.

The scene: Apophis uses his control over Jesse to astral project into Harvey, Ros, and Susie’s homes when they least expect it.

Talking to Talalay: Talalay chose this episode of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to talk about because her daughter has called it “a whole nother level of scary.” While Talalay notes that she could have chosen the exorcism scene that comes later in the episode, she chose this scene not only because she had a lot of fun filming the moments of demonic surprise, but because of the “textures” she added to the relatively straight-forward horror reveals.

“In the bathroom, for instance … the fan is melting, and the fan is doing things that it shouldn’t be doing,” Talalay says. “And those kind of horror textures make for the whole atmosphere of making it much scarier. You set up the audience to know that they should be scared and they’re going to be scared.”

Elsewhere in the sequence, Talalay gets to use her filmmaking fluency to visually reference other classic horror. The way Harvey lounges on his bed in his crop top is a direct callback (written in the script) to Johnny Depp in Nightmare on Elm Street, the horror franchise where Talalay got her directorial start. In the same scene, Uncle Jesse’s head spins Exorcist-style—”it’s just really, really effective,” says Talalay of the effect. In the grand scheme of the episode, these are all relatively brief and inconsequential moments that Talalay manages to pack with an impressive degree of cinematic depth.

Horror lesson: Don’t move to Greendale.

A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting (2020) — Kelly’s Horror Origin Story

Film synopsis: When her babysitting charge is taken by the Boogeyman (Tom Felton) on Halloween night, teen math genius Kelly (Tamara Smart) discovers a secret society of babysitters whose job it is to protect their kids from the world of monsters.

The scene: In a flashback that begins the movie (and that we get more of later in the movie), we learn that Kelly too was targeted by the Boogeyman when she was just a little girl.

Talking to Talalay: “This was the most difficult and controversial scene we did from the standpoint of ‘How scary can you be?'” says Talalay, who put a lot of thought and had many conversations about where the horror line is when it comes to creating entertainment for kids during the course of making this movie.

“It’s going to be on Netflix, so if you scare kids too much or parents too much in the first minute, then you’re done,” adds Talalay. “On the other hand, we want to entice teenagers … So it was a constant discussion on set.” As a result, Talalay storyboarded the tale of “Kelly’s Origin Story” 17 times in order to get the tone just right. “And then when we were shooting it, there was a lot of discussion, ‘Is this too scary? Is this too scary?’ Which led me to say to the executives frequently, ‘You can’t judge how scary something is until you put the sound and music in.'”

Talalay said she used the example of “the magic of Tim Burton,” specifically The Nightmare Before Christmas, as a way to explain the power of music to shape the audience’s reaction to a scary set of images. While the first test screening for the opening to A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting was deemed too scary for young kids, Talalay “lightened up the music” to alleviate some of the horror tension.

“It was hard for me not to be scary because it’s part of my vocabulary,” says Talalay. “And it was hard of me not to say, ‘But like Doctor Who‘s family, and it plays at 6:00 on Sunday nights and still, it’s terrifying.’ And Netflix saying, ‘No, we don’t want to be that scary.’ And my absolutely respecting their understanding their audience and their metrics. And then trying to keep the tension and still make it feel family.”

Horror lesson: Pay your babysitter well.

A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is now available to stream on Netflix.

The post Talalay’s Terrors! The Director Breaks Down Her 5 Scariest Scenes appeared first on Den of Geek.

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