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🔥

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erik + doing That Thing where he looks at charles very intently and without blinking.

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2023 / 1992

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He is half of my soul, as the poets say.

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Wally West, the MOST skrunkly

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you are my favorite what if / you are my best i’ll never know

fall out boy’s ‘fourth of july’ is so obviously about hangman and rooster going about their lives in the years between graduating top gun and getting called back, trying their darnest to convince themselves that they’re over each other, they have to, it’s been years, for fuck’s sake (i said i’d never miss you / but i guess you’ll never know).

they can almost fool themselves—you know, if they bend over backwards, and upside down and inside out too for good measure—but what cheats them out are the indelible memories of those handful of quiet hours they would cut out for themselves the moment the door to whichever one of their rooms they would end up in would click shut, blocking out the entire world with it. rare instances where hangman and rooster’s stripping of each other didn’t stop at their clothes, layer upon layer getting peeled off like a chemical burn until jake and bradley emerged in a process that was as painful as it was liberating.

between life-threatening training exercises and the dead weight of that extra duffel of emotional baggage they both lugged around relocation after relocation in the chase of the one thing that kept their spirit alight after everything, those rare moments of solace felt oxygen-giving, sacred.

as fireworklike and downright reality-bending as their physical connection was, it is the pillow talk in the afterglow that still catches them off guard when they will themselves to forget (i’ll be as honest as you let me / i miss your early morning company / if you get me). in the makeshift bubble of their rooms, buoyed by the warm shield of their blankets, under the cover of the night and backlit by the surreal quality of pre-dawn, little liminal pockets of space and time, they only shared bits and pieces of the minefield of their lives, what they were as comfortable as they could be with, never pushing, and respecting each other’s boundaries in a way that hangman and rooster wouldn’t, but bradley and jake did.

in a twist of events that shouldn’t have been as surprising, they got each in a way that was uncanny once they allowed themselves to drop the posturing. takes one to know one and birds of a feather.

they never expressively talked about what it all meant, about what they were unknowingly giving to and taking from each other, about this tentative, unfiltered version of bradley and jake that existed only behind locked bedroom doors once rooster and hangman hung their helmets up for the day (i wish i’d known how much you loved me).

in the heat of the moment—always heat—their downfall, after one missile-like word too many in a radar lock stand-off. fighter pilot’s insticts taking over. hangman and rooster’s defensive violence invading jake and bradley’s sacred territory once they ran out of evasive flares. shoot to kill first or be blown to smithereens by a bandit to whom you have hand-delivered the exact latitude and longitude of the insides of your heart (oh, i’m sorry, i didn’t mean any of it / i just got too lonely, lonely).

they felt like that one summer you can’t forget; a chance encounter that you could swear to a god you didn’t believe in was fated, and hopelessly out of reach at the same time; polaroids from another life found at the bottom of a box buried in the back of your closet still making your breath catch on the lump in your throat (in between being young and being right / you were my versailles at night).

implacable time blurring the lines between history and wishful romanticization, relentless self-doubt coming in to deliver the fatal blow: was any of it ever even real? (oh, i’m starting to forget / just what summer ever meant to you / what did it ever mean to you?)

record scratch 

and just like that, they’re back in that same bar with that same jukebox and that same piano and all love songs are still about him. 

it goes something like this 

(and all my thoughts of you / they could heat or cool the room)

hangman, you look…. good (and now don’t tell me you’re fine)

well, i am good, rooster. i’m very good (oh, honey, you don’t have to lie) 

(the torture of small talk with someone you used to love)

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ok but why does no one ever talk about the palpable sexual tension of meeting your match. your equal. it can be in any task you excel in. just the idea of everyone before them being so substandard and then finally you have someone who can challenge you in a way that no one ever has before. someone that can finally be better than you, who can protect you in a way no has ever been able to. there is a certain loneliness in being the best of the best and here comes someone eager to overthrow you. the rivalry. the acceptance of the other’s strength. the equality in skillsets. why does no one ever talk about that? huh? HUH?

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Don’t take the bait, Dex

{blue version}

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It only get’s worse from here….

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Charlie Cox on set of Daredevil Born Again S2....A REAL DISNEY PRINCE IF YOU ASK ME

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i don’t want characters with healthy coping mechanisms, actually. i want them to yearn and weep and suffer and have their brutal worldviews informed and/ or altered exclusively by their unyielding love for like. one other person. sorry

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ben poindexter x buck cashman

went and fell a little in love with a vision of them together sprung to life in my mind in the last moments of the season after the hints that they may be both reconsidering their stance and actions. then i fell down into the rabbit hole of thinking how they actually have various aspects in common, how they instead differ, and with hopeless romantic lenses on, how they could be complementary and fall eventually in love.

i have to say i was always saddened by poindexter's villain arc in the show because of its origin rooted in a mental illness that was exploited and that he was repeatedly desperately grappling with in order to overpower it, to the point that he almost blew his brains off in a last last-ditch attempt not to spiral completely. in the end, he never managed to become his own person—he was first the army's, then the fbi's, the fisks', the prison's, the meds'.

we know close to nothing about buck other than he had a previous life before fisk brought him over, much like he did with ben. reading his original comic book character bio, he was an an agent to the united states government; so like with ben, he also seems to always have been someone else's soldier. citing his actor arty froushan, "he's an enigma wrapped in a riddle. he's a political aide, but all is not as it seems. he is operating on levels that don't immediately meet the eye. he seems very charming, slick, and he is. but there is a deadly side to him."

ben too can be charming, but he never manages to keep the act for long before spiralling and breaking down and revealing his own deadly side. buck on the contrary seems to be absolutely in perfect control of himself and can switch back and fort seamlessly between 'political aide' and fixer.

when fisk asks buck whether he remembers why he hired him, buck says that it was for his ability to think asymmetrically. on the flip side, one of the major traits of bordeline personality disorder, which poindexter seems be diasogned with in childhood, is the incapability at integrating two opposing truths in one's worldview, which leads to black-and-white thinking.

and then, of course most notably in the understatement of the century, they are both excellent marksmen.

this all sounds extremely compelling to me since their both matching and clashing dispositions and skills, if they were to face-off. maybe because fisk sends cashman after bullseye to take him out once and for all.

and then, because i am a patent sucker for at least partial redemption and broken lonely people becoming a little less broken and lonely together, and possibly unhealthy obsessions, i want to seem them break free of their shackles, but in the process become completely codependent in their devotion for each other. buck would become ben's new north star, grounded in the ease of buck's self-assuredness and gray-tinted decency, but at the same time matching ben's deadly nature, so that ben would feel truly seen and accepted as he is for the first time without having to repress or hide any parts of himself like he had to do with his psychiatrist or julie. at the same time this freedom would allow him to be more clear-headed in the first place.

they would mostly self-servingly join matt's army to take down fisk and then run off together doing their own sometime-somewhat murderous thing.

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Roy Harper appreciation post

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Devin Kelly, "Wishing I Was Looking Down at Baseball Diamonds from an Airplane Window”

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Another Hal for a good friend of mine

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soldier and devil, sitting in a tree, S-C-H-E-M-I-N-G

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i think 'I trust you with my life but not your own' as a trope is one of the ones that can always fuck me up no matter what