#(at least I’m pretty sure)

[shokuto]

The Way Things Are

USM continued

Katie Bishop was put in witness protection after the Hydra/Doom debacle. Granted a new identity and a new state of address where the agents of Hydra (her parents included, on the off chance they beat the treason charges) wouldn’t find her. She was to stay put, stay intact, and she was to never, under any circumstances, return to the New York tristate area.

Miles only discovers this because one of Jessica’s old SHIELD coworkers owe her a favor. He does now too, however she insists otherwise, yet that’s not what’s upsets his mind to the point he ends up nursing a headache.

This will be the first time in months he’s been face to face with Katie, let alone in the same state after…after everything. It’s a nerve-racking realization, one that has him pacing up and down the jet Jessica pulled her weight to attain under the notice of Nick Fury. Or rather, the conspicuous notice of Nick Fury, who’s job it is to notice everything.

When she touches down on a plain road beside a wide expanse of cornfields, Miles tries to picture what he’ll find when he steps out. For his peace of mind, he carries hope that it’s the girl he knows, nicely settled into her new surroundings and disconnected from the rhetoric she’d been instilled. He hopes she’s doing well.

What he expects however, is a scornful young woman who curses the day she ever glanced at him. He expects fury, he expects namecalling, he expects to be delivered a cruel and humbling penance in the form of the worst things he’s ever heard leave her mouth.

“Hey,” Jessica calls when he hasn’t moved from his spot at the hull.

He doesn’t bother glancing back. There’s no point. Behind him, she gets up from her seat at the wheel, ambling over and setting a hand on his shoulder. Gentle enough for him to relax, yet firm enough for him to also stand up straighter.

“You need to do this.”

He swallows. Takes a deep, long breath.

“Yeah, I know.”

She gently presses the hand on his shoulder.

“Just…watch out, okay?”

[…]

After maybe six minutes of aimless walking, he spots her herding a stubborn calf into a red barn, the color of which has faded to a dull maroon beneath the pale overcast. Her hair is down, and a lot longer than it’d been in school, past her shoulders and nearly reaching her hips. There are no dyed strands he can see to give it the pop she used to like anymore. Where she outfitted herself with gothic apparel, fringy black skirts and leather jackets, she now bears a much humbler t shirt and jeans.

She doesn’t really look at peace, he thinks. She looks discontent. She looks as disjointed as anyone else would be, suddenly thrust from familiar waters to the deep end, and expected to swim.

For a sparse moment, he debates turning around, debates camouflaging himself with the environment before she can see him. In seconds, it’s too late.

He watches a myriad of different emotions flutter across her face; confusion, recognition, shock, and finally…scorn. He doesn’t blame her. It still hurts to see a familiar face and know it’ll never smile at him again, and it’s even worse knowing he kinda, sorta deserves it.

Might as well follow through, he thinks, approaching her with his hands in his pockets as she remains stock still. He stops about a single foot from her, not even thinking of going in for a hug.

When it’s been almost a minute without a word gone by, Miles breaks the silence.

“Hey.”

At her side, her hand clenches to a fist. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

It’s the sharpness in her tone that quickly erases whatever words he prepared on the flight, that makes the barn behind her, his shoes, anything that can’t look at him the way she does, singularly recognizing everything he doesn’t like about himself at the moment, much more interesting to look at.

“How’re you doing?” he tries again.

“I’m working a fucking farm, how do you think I’m doing?”

He’s used to confrontation, has been face to face with tons of people who wanted him dead over the last two years, and even though it’s just Katie, his heart jumps to his throat the way it does when his life is on the line.

What are you doing, man?

“I’m…I’m sorry.”

There it is, the reason he’d come all this way. His apology, laced with several months of reflection, hurt feelings and separation, hangs over them like smog. There’s a pointed look of detachment that Katie regards him with, but he knows better. He knows what it looks like when she’s deep in thought.

Then, without an ounce of preamble, she turns her heel and walks off.

“That’s it?” He asks, a little emboldened by Katie’s dismissal. He expected a lot, but what he definitely didn’t expect was for her to abruptly walk away from him. The shock of it all threatens to reignite old wounds, remind him how she physically ran away from him once before when he bore his alter ego to her.

“Were you expecting something?” Katie sneers up ahead.

“I was—I was expecting a conversation.”

She scoffs, the sound harsh against the quiet of the wind. “You didn’t feel like talking the last time I saw you.”

He can’t help but flinch. Katie continues on her path, undeterred by the fact that he is too gobsmacked to react. When he snaps out of it, she’s already in the barn. He trails off after her, spotting her closing the wooden gate to what he can only assume is a cattle enclosure.

“Look, Katie, I’m sorry. But—but—“

“But what?”

“But my dad had a gun to his head, my friend could’ve been dumped in a room in Mexico for all I knew, and you were the reason any of us were there.” Miles presses, all the hurt feelings he buried beneath his sorrow reemerging like cicadas. “I could’ve lost the only family I had left, and it would’ve been your fault, okay? So give me a fucking break and hear me out.”

It hits him then, that he’d come all the way to the midwest for nothing. He thought he’d been prepared to make amends, but instead brought with him an argument there hadn’t been time for them to have.

“I didn’t think Misha would tell,” she snaps, her composure cracking open. “If you had just waited I would’ve—“

“You would’ve what? You ran off and you didn’t answer my calls, my texts, what the fuck was I supposed to do?”

“You think I wanted you stuck in there?! You think I wasn’t terrified, seeing you in that chair?! I begged them—begged them to spare you, to just—give me a second to make things okay! And then Doom came and he said he was gonna…”

“Dissect me.” Katie can’t help but wince at his candor, and a dark part of him revels in her discomfort.

“I’d never been so scared. It was the worst day of my life, because I thought I was gonna lose you, and that, yeah, it would’ve been my fault…I was a normal girl living in Brooklyn and in a matter of hours I didn’t know what was gonna happen to any of us.” she spits, pacing by back and forth.

Miles watches her, hugging herself by the stables and rendered unable to face him (once again). He…he doesn’t like how closely he has to search her for any sign of dishonesty, anything at all, nor can he feel relieved when he finds none.

He knew this wouldn’t be a parade, but he had hoped that maybe they’d find some common ground, and that for his troubles a weight would be lifted off his shoulders. Yet, all he feels now is that same weight pressing down down on him, the way it does late at night.

Then he thinks about what she’d just confessed to him.

“Normal girl,” Miles echoes. Katie looks back, waiting on him to elaborate.

“You said you were a normal girl living in Brooklyn.” He can feel his frustration bubbling back up inside him, ignited by the vague implication that he’d been the only one with secrets. Secrets like being indoctrinated in a paramilitary group. Secrets like preparing to help take over the world someday. “But you weren’t. You never were.”

Anyone else would have the decency to look ashamed. Katie doesn’t. For all the emotion she’d demonstrated moments ago, her face goes completely blank. Poised. It sends a chill down his spine, the finality to her gaze.

“This world isn’t right, Miles.”

“And you’re gonna make it right? By taking it over?” he asks incredulously.

It takes longer than he’d like for her to respond. Long enough for him to take a deep breath and ground himself by the tap of his foot. Before today, Katie had never been quick for backtalk. She had to think about the things she said before she said them, and it was in part why her sales pitch had come in disjointed pieces those few months ago.

More innocently, it was also why she expressed herself better when they were texting.

So when she looks up at him with a focused glint in her eye, he prepares himself.

“You know exactly what I mean. There are so many things wrong with the way things are, the way that these—corporations and these governments defy the natural order of things, all to keep a monopoly on cruelty, on violence, on power. And not so they can protect people like you and me, but people like—like Gregory Stark and Richard Roxxon. And they do it so that when their abominations run around and kill everyone, they’ll still have the money to clean up and try again. Don’t pretend for a second you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

And that’s the thing. He does. It’s practically written in his DNA, the lengths people like that will go in achieving as much power, as much profit as they possibly can. It’s for this that it astounds him, the way she had been inclined to follow Hydra, even as they prepared to do what she described. It’s this hypocrisy that halts the words in his throat, so that when all he has to offer in response is a twisted scowl, Katie confuses it for stubborn ignorance.

How ironic.

“What, you don’t agree? You think everything’s just fine?”

He takes it all in, the righteous fury behind her eyes, her willingness to rally herself behind the abominable for what she believes to be the greater good, and knows in his heart that he still loves this girl. That no one else but this fickle young woman before him could render him this heartbroken, this disappointed, and this angry at the dogma which corrupted the beautiful thing they had.

“You talk so big, about ‘the way things are’…” Miles opens darkly, the words dragging out of his throat like gravel. “You all do. But when it comes down to it, all you have to add is another gun to the pile. That is not the girl I remember.”

At that, he imagines he has her stumped. That the resolution in his voice can open her eyes to the error of her ways, that she had been misled by forces who care nothing for her. When her exhausted eyes meet his evenly, he thinks maybe this is how it starts. But she says something that shocks him instead.

“Well. I remember a boy who’s…who’s world ended last year. I remember waiting for him in school. Holding him. Being there when no one else could, because I loved him.”

It’s a cheap shot. One that should infuriate him; he’s been rendered a screaming mess before, at the mere mention of what happened in that hospital, a button everyone knows better than to look at, let alone press.

But with Katie, who offered her presence, her embrace when everyone either gave him a wide berth or forced him to confront things he wasn’t ready to, it’s different. With her, it isn’t pushing a button, it’s her offering a bridge for him to better understand her, because she knows of which she speaks.

And maybe, her sentimentality melts his stern resolve, renders the fire within him into a dull set of embers. It wouldn’t surprise him if before long there’s hardly anything left but the unrelenting sorrow at how things devolved, at the gap between them that seems uncrossable.

The bitter turn her voice suddenly takes emphasizes it. “No one cared enough to think about what really happened and why. How that…that thing came from this Roxxon lab in Atlanta, and ended up in Brooklyn. I did, though. And you know what I saw happen after that?”

He knows, but she’s forced to answer for him anyway.

“Nothing.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Not because she made the right choice, but because her eyes, like his, had been open to the world before her, and she found herself commanded by the overwhelming need to do something. Anything.

“I was sick of it. The violence, the greed, the fact that no one learned anything, all of it. It makes me so fucking angry,” She admits scornfully.

She lays it all out in such earnest, that if he blotched out key pieces of context she’d seem righteous. Her ideals would seem so honorable, so upstanding, that the things she intended to do with such umbrage would make it look like someone else was behind the wheel. When he thinks about what it led to, the way he’d been suspended before an entire army like a sacrifice, it doesn’t ignite his fury. It only exhausts him.

“You wanted to do something,” he supplies.

“Yes.”

Katie Bishop was a lot like him. It’s what made them fit so well together, back then. She was sensitive, thoughtful, and always attentive to the needs of others, always willing to lend a hand and get to the bottom of things. But like him, she was too focused on others…on him—to the point that she neglected to share the big things that weighed on her. For all she moped when she hit a rock with him he wasn’t willing to uncover, she wasn’t exactly volunteering her discontent with society.

It’s bearing witness to her anger, her bitterness at the world, that makes him come to this realization. And he’s disappointed in the both of them that he’s only gotten to see it under circumstances like these.

But apart from that, there’s something else he has to know.

“And now?” he asks, daring a glance at her, observing her response closely.

“Now, what?”

“Don’t do that. Hydra locked me a room and hung my friends over my head. My family. They were prepared to make more of me, no matter what. So what now?” His gaze hardens into stone. “Are they still your answer?”

He locks his heart behind a steel cage. He detaches himself from the way her eyes, a striking shade of amber, compel him like rings of gold. He has to, because he will never be the same if he doesn’t and she confirms his worst fear. He thinks he rejected her so swiftly in part so that he wouldn’t have to face it, but here they are, months later. He has to know.

It comes out like a weed. It’s a struggle that forces her to reach deep inside herself, and release the rotten word on her tongue; her betrayal, laid bare for the both of them.

“No.”

Miles can practically hear his uncle bemoan how soft he is from beyond his fiery grave, because he thinks he could cry right now.

“They weren’t who I thought they were,” Katie persists, “I thought they were better, but they weren’t. And for that, I’m…” she trails off, before locking eyes with him again, remorseful. “I’m so sorry, Miles.”

It’s only now that he feels that weight hefted off his shoulders. He feels like he can finally admire her openly again, and wonders if now, or later on, they’ll somehow put this behind them. There’s only one other thing he’s curious about now.

“Why didn’t you share this with me? All these feelings about the world?”

She shrugs weakly. Looks off to the stables, to the farm animals ignorant to their little quarrel. “I didn’t wanna scare you.”

“I wouldn’t have been scared,” he challenges. “I would’ve faced it head on.”

Her gaze snaps up to meet his equally. “Like you did in July?”

“You know that’s different,” he says after a while.

She folds her arms with a huff. “Yeah, well. I guess it’s why you didn’t tell me you were Spider-Man for so long.”

They stand there, lost in thought for a long time. He can see it in her hands tensing every few seconds, the way she wants to hold something. And that it’s probably him. He nearly makes the first step towards her when she speaks up again.

“You wanna see my pig?”

[bizlybebo]

thinking about how when the butcher army came after techno and he decided on the 1v4, he whacked ranboo a couple times but only ever specifically rounded on + killed tubbo and fundy

[skyward-floored]

um. does anyone know what this means

[humming-fly]

I love how Gerald was trying to keep Shadow from spoiling anything about the future meanwhile literally everything Shadow says and does around Maria is the biggest death flag ever

[chloesimaginationthings]

The secret ending in FNAF into the pit..

[loopyart]

Them ✨ 🕷️ 🎲

[odetojupiter]

the fact that kevin day also witnessed a man being chopped up in the tower at evermore after neil’s audition is mad, and it’s something that is very much not addressed ever. like, maybe part of kevin was so accepting of how things were in the nest because he knew that this is the second branch, and if he were to leave, he’d become the main branch’s problem because he knows too much, and the main branch casually chops men up as a warning to literal children. and then he’s still called a coward for leaving ?? but also a coward for wanting to go back to make the inevitable less painful for him ??? and that’s not even considering what riko and tetusji did to him specifically, before even jean arrived at the nest. and his mother’s death would’ve been quite recent at that point. just insane.

[spottedgardeneelstan]

good plan sqq. if it fails just blow yourself up again

[ID: A meme redraw of Shen Qingqiu from Scum Villain. He points at the sky while captioned, "If nobody got me, blowing myself up got me. Can I get an Amen?" End ID]

[gothicwill]

Having a good day then remembering this was the first time he addressed Hannibal with his first name..

[hplonesomeart]

@scimagic Uhhh made this because I just think they’re dynamic is neat. Also completely agree with the Puzzle headcanon super fun silly and very on point. As we speak he is clinging for his dear life :))

I really enjoy seeing the illustrated storyline you have unfolding between the two and figured it would be nice to see this motorcycle sequence in motion. So tadaa here it is! In animated form! Now your obligated to make a full length written novel in-depth about their relationship /j

Sincerely though thanks for the creative inspiration and keep on being a swagger artist 👍✨

[winchester101]

I want to see Luffy kill a man for insulting Sanji’s cooking

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

All I can think about recently is that there are three main career options for Grishaverse main characters:

A) Child soldier

B) Criminal

C) ✨Both✨

[mossy-paws]

Mangograft! (PHIGHTING!)

Would one care for a mango? (It’s a bomb /j)

ANYWAYS I forgot to post this so here it is! Live laugh Mangograft this was a suggestion from a friend since I was bored :3

Also here’s this gem too no im not giving context

[kiwioala]

idk how many ppl watch clowns pov but i don’t think clown necessarily intends on Betraying foolish, he’s said several times that he has some sort of loyalty to the kingdom, he just wants to manipulate/control foolish and his reign a little bit from what i've heard ^_^ however owen is a different story he fucking hates that guy and wants him Dead.

[island-ofthelost]

“gob is actually bi!” “mac is actually bi!”

🤏 shut

these are two characters that have been explicitly confirmed to be gay. It’s been confirmed by the creators of Arrested Development that Gob is gay. Mac has flat out said “I’m gay” meaning he came out explicitly as gay. “but they’ve shown attraction to women which means they’re-”

🤏 SHUT

Do you not know what compulsory heterosexuality is? Would you go up to a real life gay person who’s dated someone of the opposite gender and tell them they’re actually bi? No, right? Because that would be disrespectful. Hot take? But headcanon is over when that aspect of the character has been explicitly confirmed. ESPECIALLY if you’re going to negate it.

[kinnsporsche]

we’re trending first again?!?? we really can’t be killed