#I am. a whole season behind on that series? when did the newest one come out?? AUGH

[cantankerouscatfish]

idly remembers the time I was at a friend's house, and we were watching Westworld. it was the scene with the one guy glitching out and yelling about being 'a growin' boy!!'

and my friend's computer had a popup error message that blocked the screen

and it was the funniest thing I'd seen in AGES.

[babymetaldoll]

Are you mine? - Chapter six: "You killed my father, prepare to die."

Summary: It's a sad moment for the Reids: Gideon has been murdered. This is one of Spencer's darkest moments, but this time, he doesn't have to deal with it alone.  Warnings: Cursing, Criminal Minds spoilers of season 10 Ep 13 "Nelson Sparrow." It's just sad, everything is sad.  Word count: 8.405 words A/N: Hello!! So, who do you think Spencer felt about missing his daughter's first Halloween? I'm sure it was a low blow. What do you think their family disguise was about? I'm thinking Doctor Who, with Raven as a tiny Tardis. 

Series' Masterlist - Author's masterlist

Previous chapter | Next chapter

Spencer’s point of view

For a few months, things were normal for all of us. Well, as normal as they can be considering we worked at the BAU hunting serial killers week after week. (Y/N) and Kate got along incredibly well, and I could see how much she enjoyed spending time with her. She still missed Prentiss, but knowing she was just a phone call away made things easier this time.

Leaving our baby back home every time we had to go out of town for a case was still incredibly painful. Still, Sofia, Lu, Mikey, and Frank were always there with Raven, which helped us stay focused on work. Honestly, we wouldn’t be able to do it without them.

One thing made us incredibly miserable back then: We missed Raven’s first Halloween because we had to solve a case in San Diego. An unsub was kidnapping kids on October 31st, and though I knew our baby couldn’t go out trick and treating yet, it was heart-wrenching knowing we had missed her first Halloween. We had a family custom planned, and though we wore it the entire 1st of November as we stayed at home, carving pumpkins and watching the "Charlie Brown Halloween special" with her, it just wasn’t the same.

- “I wish we could promise her this is the only celebration we'll miss because of work.”- (Y/N) whispered as we cuddled in bed that night. - “But we both know that’d be a lie.”

- “I just hope next year things will be different.”- I whispered and kissed (Y/N)’s forehead as she snuggled closer.

- “I hope we don’t miss Christmas.”

We had some weird cases during that year. We even had a female unsub who ruined every fairy tale I read to my daughter. She was sure she was Cinderella and kept looking for her prince charming, killing every man who didn’t live up to her fantasy in the way. To catch her, I had to pretend to be a prince, carry one of her shoes like a crystal slipper, and nearly propose. That ended up being the only way she could go with us willingly.

I will never forget (Y/N)’s face as I approached the unsub in a cemetery, without any vest or gun. The whole idea was Hotch’s and I didn’t think it could work, but it turned out that that poor girl was so out of reality that she indeed thought I was her prince charming.

- “Not fair!”- my wife argued as we drove to the cemetery, where Garcia had located her and her newest victim.- “You are supposed to be my prince charming, no one else’s. And why did you take off your wedding right?”- and she pouted and whined, making me chuckle.

- “Come on, chipmunk! You know I am your and only yours. I’m just trying to get this unsub with the least use of force possible. And if she sees the ring she’ll know I’m lying.”

- “One weird movement and I’m gonna take her down.”- (Y/N) replied and I smiled, somehow proud of how jealous she was under the circumstances.

- “Do me a favor kids and stop being so freaking sweet when all of us can hear you.”- Rossi argued in my ear from the SUV right behind ours.

- “Never.”- my wife quickly replied from the back seat and I suppressed a chuckle.

- “Should I remind them I’m in the same car with them?”- JJ joked and (Y/N) smiled right away. It took some of the tension off, considering I knew my wife was upset I wasn’t wearing a vest to face the unsub. But I knew I didn’t need one, she had my back.

When we walked to the unsub, she had a pair of gardening scissors against her poor victim’s neck, and she was about to kill him, so I hurried and grabbed one of the evidence shoes we had from a bad and tried to get her attention, as (Y/N) hid behind a bush, pointing the unsub with a gun, and JJ did the same from behind a tree.

- “Excuse me. May I approach?”- I said, exactly as the Prince Charming did in the bedtime story I had read to Raven before we took off for that case.

- “Who are you? Go away!”- the unsub yelled back at me, and I walked slower, raising my hands, showing her I was not a threat.

- “Please, just give me the chance to speak. I've looked for so long.”

- “What? What are you talking about?”

- “I've searched this entire city trying to find the right person. Are you the right person?”- I made a short pause as I watched the guy she was about to kill move from her side. Her eyes were focused on me, so I continued speaking. -“The dance, the other evening. Do you remember?”

- “The dance?”- she stood up, dropped the weapon, and walked to me. She was indeed defenseless. Poor girl, she was actually sure she was Cinderella, and after knowing her background story, I could only hope she’d find help.

- “I met the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. We danced the whole night, and then… She was gone. But she left this behind.”- I showed her the shoe and walked a few steps closer to her- “May I?”

And so, I kneeled before her and put on her shoe. She gasped and tears filled her eyes as she stared at me with a big smile and I kissed her hand, like Prince Charming usually does in books, to seal the deal.

- “I brought the carriage.”- it was the only way I could get her into the SUV and into custody.

- “You did?

- “It's waiting for us.”

She seemed so surprised and excited, I didn’t even have to push her, she held my arm as we started walking. I looked at my wife for a second, still hiding behind that bush, still pointing her gun at the unsub, and cut her a short smile, trying to help her relax, until she finally lowered the pistol and smiled back at me.

We had a bunch of crazy cases that year, but nothing, not even the hardest mysteries we’d had to crack, could have ever prepared me for that phone call and the drive in the middle of the night to Gideon’s cabin.

He was dead. Murdered. And it felt like a part of my chest was empty. He was the closest thing I've ever had to a father, and though we hadn’t talked in years after his departure from the FBI, I knew he was out there, being happy, living his life away from the murderers and cases.

But now he was gone, and we had to finish whoever had done that to him and make him pay.

(Y/N) held my hand the entire drive to his cabin, after dropping Raven with her mother. I didn’t speak much, and she didn’t push me either. I just let the tears fall from my eyes. When we got to the cabin, JJ, Hotch, Kate, and Rossi were already there. I couldn’t say a word as Gideon’s body lay on the ground, covered with a white sheet, like any other corpse we had seen at a crime scene before. Only this time, it was personal.

I tried not to cry, but my chin quivered and (Y/N) quickly held my hand tight. JJ looked at me with a sorry glance and I locked my eyes on the sheet on the floor, still trying to process the fact that it was Gideon’s corpse.

No one said a word for a few minutes. They were all broken hearted, just like me. The record player kept spinning, after playing the last song he ever heard. The chess board was untouched, waiting for him to come back and play. Garcia and Morgan walked in after a few minutes and stood next to us, also shocked and deeply affected.

- “Are you sure?”- Penelope asked Hotch, still not believing it was actually Gideon lying dead in front of us. Hotch nodded and kept his eyes on Garcia as he replied.

- “It’s Gideon.”

That was enough for me. I had to step out of that cabin. I couldn’t deal with that kind of grief. My wife walked behind me and hugged me as I finally broke in tears, and sobbed against her neck as he held me close to her.

- “It’s ok honey, let it all out.”- she whispered and caressed my hair as I cried my heart out. I couldn’t stop. I felt a hole had been dug in the middle of my chest. How could Gideon be dead? How? Who killed him? I needed to find that asshole and make him pay. I knew I was sad and emotional, but the need for revenge was growing fast inside me.

- “How could… who would…”

I couldn’t finish sentences as I cried and held (Y/N) closer to me. Closer as possible. You don’t expect your family to be murdered. And Gideon was like family to me. We hadn’t talked in over eight years, but he was still one of the most important people in my life. He helped me grow, and he taught me so much when I first joined the FBI. He trusted my intelligence, he got everybody to call me a doctor.

How does a guy so smart, so bright, get murdered? What happened? What went wrong? How couldn’t he notice something was going on? Gideon was a legend in the FBI, and to me, he was one of the smartest guys I had ever met. How could that have happened to him?

- “We are gonna solve this.”- my wife whispered and kept caressing my hair. - “We are gonna find out what happened and we are gonna catch whoever killed him.”

I couldn’t answer, all I managed to do was nod as a reply and felt (Y/N) holding me, trying to keep the pieces of my heart together.

JJ walked out of the cabin a few minutes later. She stared at me as I did my best to stop sobbing. I wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable in front of my friends and family- and that’s what the team had always been to me- but I knew I had to put my grief aside and start working as a profiler, ‘cos we needed to solve that case.

- “I am so sorry, Spence.”- JJ whispered and walked to me. (Y/N) unwrapped her arms from my body, making me shiver, missing her warmth immediately. JJ hugged me for a moment, but it wasn’t as comforting as (Y/N)’s arms. Not mean to compare, but it just didn’t do much for me. However, I hugged my friend tight and sighed, thinking it had to be hard for her as well. Gideon wasn’t just my team partner. It was everybody’s, and we were all grieving in the same way. I couldn’t be selfish, that wasn’t about me.

- “Do we know anything?”- (Y/N) whispered and JJ shook her head. She moved and hugged my wife for a moment and I cleared my throat, trying to compose myself.

- “Forensic are on their way to remove the body. Hotch is calling the family.”

And somehow that sentence hit me. It was hard for us to know Gideon had been murdered, but I couldn't even begin to imagine how his family was going to feel. He had a son named Stephen. They weren’t close, that I knew, but that doesn’t mean they hated each other. It’s hard having a family with the job we had. (Y/N) and I knew that very well now. It was double work being present at home and keeping what we saw at work out of the house. But giving our daughter the best we had was our priority. I never wanted her to feel she wasn’t as important as what we did for a living, because she is the world to us.

Morning came sooner than I expected. Somehow it felt like only minutes had passed since we arrived at that cabin. I had only been there once before, the day Gideon left the team and I found his letter for me, saying goodbye. The only memory I had of that place wasn’t better than that moment I was living.

(Y/N) talked with the team as she held my hand. She was the functional one in our relationship at that minute. She knew I needed time to process it all, and she let me. But never, not even once, did she stop holding my hand.

A team of criminalistic took Gideon’s body from his cabin and I just stood there, staring at the scene, unable to move. I couldn’t even say a word. I just glued my eyes to the ground, reliving all the memories I had with Jason in my mind over and over again. I remembered when I first joined the team and we had our first case. He picked me to be on the team even when I was still very young. I was the younger agent to join the BAU, and he trusted my knowledge and my abilities, even when I didn’t.

Gideon taught me about serial killers and how to catch them. He taught me about chess and life. He even tried to help me get a date with JJ back in the day.

- “Remember how much he hated us hanging out when I joined the team?”- (Y/N) whispered, reading my mind at the moment. It was the first thing she had said to me in at least half an hour and all I managed to do as a reply was to nod.

- “He once called me to his office and told me I was being selfish with the team, ‘cos the way I was influencing you was taking your mind from work, and that you were the smartest of us all.”- my wife confessed after over ten years. I remembered that day exactly, she had walked out of Gideon’s office nearly crying, and I gave her candies to cheer her up.

- “You never let that get in the way of our friendship and I think eventually he realized I was a good influence on you.”- (Y/N) whispered and turned to me. I looked at her puffy eyes and sighed, they were still sparkling, even with all the sadness I could read on them.

- “Though he never got you tickets to go to a concert with me.”- she teased and cut me a warm smile.

- “I love you.”- I replied and wrapped my arms around her. - “Thank you for supporting me.”

- “Always.”- she answered and kissed my lips sweetly. - “Hotch wanted us to go with Morgan and talk with the M.E. but if you don’t want to go…”

- “No, I have to.”- I quickly answered and wiped the few tears that had fallen from my eyes as I spoke.

- “You don’t have to do anything, honey.”

- “I owe it to Gideon. I have to help the team.”

The entire drive to the M.E. we were silent. We took our car and (Y/N) drove us there. Morgan was waiting for us right outside, standing next to his SUV.

- “How are you?”- he asked us and neither of us replied. I looked at him and felt him tapping on my back a few times- “Come on, kids.”- he whispered and walked with us inside. Neither of us wanted to be, that was a fact.

We walked the same halls we had been in a thousand times during the years, and we met with the same team we had worked with a million times. They all knew how hard that was for us, and they were kind enough to try to make it easier.

- “Out of respect, I kept him covered.”- the doctor said as we stood in front of Giden’s dead body.

- “Appreciate that.”- Morgan replied and I felt (Y/N)’s hand squeezing mine.

- “'Cause of death was hypovolemic shock due to ballistic trauma. Three points of entry: left shoulder, right abdominal wall, and right temporal.”- the doctor started and I felt sick immediately.

- “Did he suffer?”- Derek asked the question we were all thinking and I didn’t move my eyes from the sheet. It was slowly covering staining with blood.

- “Not for long, no.”- the forensic quickly responded and as she continued talking, Morgan turned and looked at me, not saying a word. - “His brain stopped working before he was able to process his last breath. After the final shot, he was gone within a fraction of a second.”

- “Would you excuse us, please?”- Morgan’s words sounded like a whisper in that room, and the doctor nodded.

- “Of course.”

- “Thank you.”- as soon as she was out of the room, Derek turned to me and the tears started to fall slowly from my eyes. (Y/N) rubbed my back and kissed my hand as she continued holding it.

- “Did you hear any of that, kid? He didn't suffer.”- I couldn’t even tell him I understood, ‘cos tears filled my eyes and I nearly started sobbing- “Listen to me. Listen to me. I know you are not alone, I know you have your wife to support you, but you two are not going through this on your own. Sometimes you two put up these walls and you block us out, and you can't do that, not right now.”

I know to this day that he was right. Before being in a relationship, me and (Y/N) would do that to the world. We had our own little bubble and we would live there, help each other, and never rely on anyone else. Like we did when she helped me get clean and sober. After we started dating, that bubble became more exclusive. The way we handled Prentiss’ death was just a glimpse of how we worked. We were a team of our own and we would leave everybody out.

- “We need you, kids. Gideon needs you. Both of you.”- Morgan finished his speech and hugged me tight. He looked at (Y/N) and hugged her too, as she tried her best not to cry and remain strong.

- “I'm going to step right out there, and when you two are ready… let's go get this son of a bitch.”

(Y/N)’s point of view

One of the scariest things about Gideon’s death was dealing with the awful truth: we were all potential victims. Yes, it wasn’t the first time we had to face that fact, but you usually forget it. You are under an incredible amount of stress, dealing with serial killers, trips, your daily routine, and taking care of your baby, your house, and your husband. And then this hits you: You can die. All of your team could be in danger. And there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Honestly, it’s nerve-wracking.

I had held Spencer’s hand since the second we got that phone call and I wasn’t planning on letting it go. I knew how hard that situation was for my husband and I was not going to let him go through it alone. Never.

Morgan left us alone with Gideon’s corpse and Spencer cried for a few seconds. I hugged him and let my own tears fall free as we simply stood in front of Gideon’s body. After a silence, filled with our sobs, I let my husband go and turned to the body.

- “So, as you may know, we got married.”- I started talking and felt Spencer’s hand holding mine tighter in a second. - “It’s been three years already, and we have a little girl. Her name is Raven. You would have loved her. She is so smart, like her dad.”

- “Like her mom.”- Spencer corrected me and I brushed the tears that kept falling down my face as I continued speaking.

- “She is going to be one year old in a few weeks, and we are planning a big party. She loves animals and bedtime stories. Spencer reads her for hours before putting her down to bed.”- my chin kept quivering as I spoke, but I continued fighting the tears and made a long pause, trying to recompose myself.

- “We miss you.”- Spencer whispered- “I miss you.”

His voice broke at the end of that last word, but after a few seconds, he continued talking. 

- “I hope you are proud of the man I became, ‘cos you had a lot to do with who I am today. Every time I am scared and feel like quitting, I remember when you told me “We all have bad dreams. Everyone on the plane, who wouldn't? We hunt the worst of humanity, we see the depths of depravity, we dream of monsters.” And yet, you left us. I guess I understand why you did it. However, I don’t understand why you turned your back on us. Why didn’t you call? Why not send a letter after that goodbye? We were a family, or at least that's how I felt about you.”

My husband was opening his heart, and the only thing I could do was to hold his hand and encourage him to let it all out. That was the time to do it. The moment to start healing from any wound that the end of his relationship with Gideon left him.

- “I’m sorry you felt like you needed to leave us behind. There were so many times when I wished I could still talk to you. Ask you things, get your advice. It wasn’t just serial killers. You were my friend. And as you remember, I don’t have many friends. That hasn’t changed much.”

- “And I’m still a very bad influence for him”- I had to add and chuckled- “But I still try to make him eat his greens at every dinner.”

- “You force me.”- Spencer argued immediately and I nodded.

- “That remains the same, as you can notice.”- my words were a soft whisper as I moved closer to the table, Spencer holding still my hand. - “Thank you for everything, Gideon. I’m sorry things ended up like this. I wish you could have come to our wedding. I wish we could have had one last conversation, to know if you were ok. But I give you my word, we are gonna catch whoever did this to you, and we are making them pay.”

Spencer took a deep breath and didn’t say a word for a moment. I looked at him and cut him a short smile, caressing his hand with my thumb as I still held it tight.

- “Thank you, Gideon. I will always remember our conversations, all of them. You changed my life. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you. I owe you so much…”- he sobbed for a moment, letting it all out. It broke my heart to see my husband so affected, but it was a good thing he was being open about his feelings. He wasn’t hiding how he felt, and between us that was a great improvement. He finally understood I didn’t need him to be perfect, I wanted him to be honest. That was it.

- “Goodbye, my friend.”- Spencer whispered, wiped the tears from his face, and sighed, looking at me.- “I’m ready. Let’s catch this guy.”

I cut him a short, warm smile and nodded. I gave him a Kleenex and ran my thumb across his cheek. When we walked out of there, Morgan was waiting for us. He didn’t say a word, he just looked at us and started walking. It was time to go back to the cabin and investigate this case as any other case. We had to be profilers.

Back at the cabin, JJ, Kate, and Penelope were going through some of Jason’s things, tracing his last steps. Spencer and I walked in and overheard the last part of their conversation, as Morgan followed us closely.

- “Ok, Gideon fueled up every 350 miles, he probably stopped at some diners along the way, 'cause, you know, the man could like live off of milkshakes.”- Pen rambled as she kept staring at the screen in front of her. - “Definitely he took his sweet time going down the coast, but booked it back from Jacksonville, and instead of coming here home to his cabin, he stayed one night in Roanoke.”

- “Why? It's only an hour away.”- Kate asked but her words were ignored ‘cause JJ noticed us and looked at my husband with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

- “Spence?”

- "I just don't understand any of it anymore. I guess I'm just looking for it again, for the belief I had back in college, the belief I had when I first met Sarah and it all seemed so right."- Spencer quoted the letter Gideon had left him as he stared at a book with a picture of Sarah and her date of death.

- “That's beautiful.”- Kate whispered and looked at us, probably not knowing what else to say. - “Who's Sarah?”

- “Gideon's first love.”- I answered and looked around, still feeling wrong for snooping into someone else’s life. Someone who had taken us out of his life.

- “You're remembering the letter Gideon left you.”- JJ kept staring at Spencer and he nodded, avoiding eye contact with anyone in that room. He just stared at the book in his hands and continued talking.

- “I'm thinking maybe he rushed back and stayed in Roanoke because he was finally happy. What if he found someone like Sarah again?”- Spencer sighed and turned around. He wasn’t ready to be at that cabin again, neither of us was, but we had to start working. I started walking behind him, but Rossi stopped me before I walked out of the door.

- “Principessa, wait. Let Spencer deal with his emotions alone for a moment.”- I stood by the door and looked at my husband outside, just walking around, looking at his feet. - “How's the kid?- David asked Morgan, I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear 'cause he was whispering, but I was right there.

- “Not great. But he'll get his head back in the game.”

- “Come here”- Rossi said looking at me and I walked over, still trying to see what Spencer was doing.- “How are you doing?”

- “I’m… shocked, I guess.”- I murmured and felt his arm around me. - “What about you? He was your friend, you were the fathers of the BAU.”

- “We are going to find whoever did this, then and only then I’ll be able to deal with what happened.”

Rossi’s words sounded a lot like any FBI agent would react: logical. Somehow I felt I was never going to be able to react that way if someone I loved was involved in a case.

- “Rossi, this is crazy.”- Morgan started talking, still trying to wrap his head around what had happened- “Gideon and I used to walk around scenes like this all the time. He'd always say to me, "Morgan, I'm the unsub. How did I do it?"”

- “Well, first I shoot my target from a distance, wounding him. Then I move in for the kill.”- Rossi replied, keeping his head cold, and being a profiler on duty.

- “Gideon has the strength to shoot a few rounds into the door. But he misses.”- Derek walked to the door and stared at the scene. - “Because I've weakened his dominant hand. Gideon didn't have the strength to hold his gun steady.”

- “So, I stand over. I get off on this. My face is the last thing he'll see. And then I finish him.”- Rossi adds and stares at the blood stains on the carpet.

- “But wait a second.”- I finally interrupted them and looked at the room around me like a crime scene, and not Gideon’s living room.- “If most of the gun was from here to the door, why did Gideon shoot way over here to this wall? That makes no sense unless he did it on purpose.”

- “You are right, pretty girl. Shot's gotta mean something.”- Derek nodded and the three of us stared at the whole on the wooden wall. Rossi grabbed the painting that had fallen due to the gunshot: it was a creepy sparrow picture.

- “The devil is in the details.”- David said and sighed- “Do you mind if I take Boy Wonder with me for a ride?”

- “Of course”- I answered - “Just let me say goodbye.”

- “It’s just a ride, Bella.”- Rossi cut me a short smile, and I nodded.

- “I know.”

Spencer left with Rossi and I was left with the girls. The first thing Penelope asked was how Spencer was doing, and I simply shrugged and sighed.

- “As well as expected, I guess.”

- “Were he and Gideon close?”- Kate asked and I nodded thinking “close” wasn’t the word I would use to describe that relationship.

- “They had a friendship that was more like a father and son relationship. He took so much care of Spencer when he first joined the BAU, he was actually upset we were friends.”- I explained and both JJ and Penelope smiled, nodding, probably remembering how it used to be when Gideon worked with us.

- “Upset you were friends? Why?”- Callahan demanded to know.

- “Well, I was somehow… a bad influence for Spencer.”- I whispered and sighed.

- “You two once got to work drunk!”- JJ said and chuckled- “I still remember Gideon’s look when you two sat at the table wearing sunglasses.”

- “Drunk?!”- Kate nearly yelled, shocked. Morgan walked over and overheard the conversation, and of course, he had to add his 5 cents to the topic.

- “Little Ricky smelled like whisky and beer. It was one of the best BAU moments.”

- “They called us at 3 in the morning, for Christ's sake!”- I argued and Pen giggled staring at me- “We had had a few drinks with some friends. It’s not like we were wasted.”

- “Jr. G man was so proud, though”- Garcia said - “I remember he told me he had so much fun that night, that your friends were the best, that everybody was nice to him. And that he even learned how to skateboard that night.” - I was about to add something to that memory, when JJ suddenly said.

- “Gideon really treated Spencer like a kid. Remember that birthday he gave Spence tickets to a football game, even when Spencer has never been a sports fan, so he could take me out on a date?”

Looking back at that moment, I think I should have noticed it was wrong that JJ kept bringing up every chance she could that she went out on a “date” with my husband. Penelope and Kate looked at me, waiting for my reaction, but I just shrugged and smiled.

- “He is screwed now, my family forces him to have football Sundays when we get together. And call me crazy, but I think he enjoys it.”

About two hours later, we got a call from Rossi and Spencer. They had a clue. Apparently, Gideon had been killed by an unsub they never caught in the area back in 1978.

- “The last thing Gideon did was to shoot a bird painting. I think he was trying to tell us that his killer is the same one from a case we worked on in 1978.”- Rossi said through the line.

- “So it was someone he locked up.”- Kate suggested, but the answer was no.

- “No, those murders went unsolved.”

- “So if this wasn't about revenge on Gideon if he didn't lock the guy up, then what was this?”- Morgan asked, looking confused.

- “We all knew Jason, he might have retired from the BAU, but there is no way he ever stopped working. I’m sure he was investigating that case if he never solved it back in the days.”- I said, thinking it was a very Gideon thing to do: retire to never ever retire indeed.

- “Exactly, maybe he went after Gideon because he was back on the case again.”- Rossi agreed with me.

- “The unsub was strangling 20-something brunettes.”- Spencer said through the line and I wished I could be with him, holding his hand. - “Garcia, were there any female bodies found in Roanoke County in the past few days?”

- “Let me check the crystal web ball.”- after a few seconds, Pen had the answer. - “Yes. An unidentified woman in her 50s was found in a shallow grave just outside of Salem.”

- “Was she strangled?”- Rossi asked right away.

- “That's the mystery. There was no foul play.”- Garcia answered shaking her head.

- “Was there a dead bird in her hand?”- Spencer asked and we all frowned, confused.

- “What? Eew. None of that fowl play either.”- Pen looked grossed

- “Hon, why the bird? Is that his signature?”- I asked.- “I’m guessing it wasn’t a random question.”

- “Yes, apparently, they were the unsub's obsession.”- Spencer answered.

- “So how did Gideon get back on the case?”- Kate questioned and looked at us - “I mean, he was retired, he should have been… bird watching. I don’t know.”

- “He saw the story in a national paper and it obviously piqued his interest.”- JJ suggested- “What are the chances that the same woods and the same ritual make headlines again?”

- “But the signature was missing.”- Kate pointed out.

- “It’s Gideon we are talking about. I think he knew something we haven’t discovered yet.”- I suggested and Hotch nodded. - “Or he had one hell of a hunch.”

- “That's why he drove to Roanoke. He needed to make sure it wasn't just a coincidence.”- Rossi supported my words through the line.

- “Well, clearly it wasn't.”- Morgan whispered.

- “And this woman would have been in her 20s back then. Age-wise, that's his type.”- Garcia pointed out and I nodded.

- “It's all there. He just connected the dots.”- I sighed and shook my head. - “If only he would have called us and asked for help.”

- “Don’t go there, principessa”- Rossi said from the other side of the line. - “What’s done it’s done. We can only try to help him finish what he needed to get done.”- I sighed one more time and nodded, which was incredibly stupid considering David couldn’t see me.

- “If she was a victim, then she was held captive for 37 years. Who knows what he did to her in all that time?”- Kate said and my mind went to a very dark place immediately. We needed to give that poor victim the justice she deserved as well.

- “What if he stopped killing because he found the victim he really wanted and held on to her?”- Spencer suggested.

- “Her recent death could have sent the unsub into a tailspin. He's probably gonna want to find someone new.”- Morgan added and we all nodded.

- “And if it's anything like what he did before, he may hunt and kill until he finds the right one.”- JJ added the part we knew but didn’t want to think of: that it might be the start of a new massacre.

- “We'll meet you in Roanoke, Dave.”- Hotch said and we all started walking outside. Only Garcia and JJ remained at the cabin, retracing Gideon’s last steps, while, Kate, Morgan, Hotch, and I got into an SUV and drove to town.

On our way over we kept talking on the phone with Rossi, Spencer Garcia, and JJ. When we got to Roanoke I was paired with Morgan, which was nice. He didn’t ask much about how I was feeling, we both focused on the case and tried our best to be professional and headed to the morgue to identify the victim’s body.

- “That ink's pretty faded.”- Derek pointed out staring at a butterfly tattoo on the victim’s ankle.

- “Yeah, she must have got that 40 years ago.”- I whispered and turned to the M.E - “What was the C.O.D.?”

- “Cancer.”- he answered with a troubled stare in his eyes. Clearly, something was bothering him.

- “Cancer?”- I questioned and he just nodded.

- “She was riddled with it. No evidence of tissue damage from chemo or radiation.”- the forensic started explaining- “At first I thought her severe muscle atrophy and bone loss was a side effect of the disease. And she clearly lost her appetite, because her stomach shrunk to half its size.”

- “You said at first you thought it was about the disease. What changed your mind?”- Morgan took the words from me as he looked at the M.E. waiting for an answer.

- “Well, I hadn't finished the exam when I explained all of this to the other one… what's his name?”- there was a brief silence after that question, Derek and I looked at each other immediately.

- “Gideon.”- I replied, trying to look like it wasn’t weird at all to talk about him like he hadn’t been just killed.

- “Yes, him. Now that I've had time to fully examine the body, it tells a different story. She's got ripped ligaments between her pelvic girdle and femur bone like her legs had been dislocated multiple times. She's got calluses like she was crawling around like a limp dog.”

Every word that explained the excruciating pain that poor woman had been through during all the years she had been held captive, hurt me. I can’t imagine how Gideon felt to know she had been alive all those years, waiting for someone to rescue her.

- “Have you ever seen that before?”- I dared to ask, though I imagined the answer.

- “Yes. On three young women many years ago.”

It was the same unsub.

Hotch, Spencer, and Rossi were waiting for us outside the morgue. My husband was holding a paper bag with a bagel and a hot cup of coffee.

- “You need some breakfast.”- he whispered as I smiled, blushing. Yes, I would still blush every time he made a sweet gesture like that. I hadn’t even finished opening the bag when JJ called and he put her on speaker.

- “Hey, Hotch, there's another missing woman. You need to get to the library on Third and Main right now.”

And off we were. At least I was finally with Spencer again.

Spencer’s point of view

That day was hard. Hard doesn’t even begin to explain it, but for the lack of a better word, let’s go with “hard.” Everything had been uphill. I even called Sofia and asked if I could video chat with my daughter as we drove back from talking with the victim’s mother. That was a balm for my soul. Finally being with my wife helped as well. I understand Rossi wanted to put an eye on me and talk about what was going on, but I really didn’t want to be apart from her that day. She was my happy place.

- “Today’s victim, Josie Behdart, 23, single, she walked to work. Local cops just found her cell phone in a trash can and, surprise, no cameras.”- Kate said as she and Hotch walked toward us at the library parking lot, holding a police file with all the info about the abduction.

- “And all the original reports confirm that each of the victims was taken within a mile of this library.”- our Unit Chief added.

- “Well, needless to say, this guy has a comfort zone to hunt”- (Y/N) pointed out and I nodded.

- “It hasn't changed since '78.”- Morgan added - “My guess is there's another significance to this location.”

- “A library could be an ideal hunting ground. A haven for the lonely. Let me check it out.”- I said and started walking. But before taking another step I turned around and looked at my wife. I didn’t even have to say a word, she was already walking behind me.

Honestly, it felt good to know she wasn’t going to leave my side. And no, that is not something I could ever take for granted.

- “You haven’t taken off your scarf.”- (Y/N) whispered as we walked to the main door of the library's old building.

- “I love this scarf, you gave it to me on January 16th, 2006, almost two months after we met.”- I pointed out and she smiled. Not your regular “that’s funny” smile, a hearty one. A “I love you smile.” I live for those smiles from her.

- “I know, honey. I remember that day too. But what I meant was it's not cold anymore, aren’t you warm?”

- “No, I’m ok. Have you talked with your mom?”

- “Yeah, she and Raven were out for a walk.”

- “Ok Reids. What are we looking for?”- Morgan showed up at our side and looked around. Kate followed him quickly and smiled at us as she said.

- “What? We weren’t going to miss a trip to the library, it’s where the cool kids hang out.”

It was obvious the team was now trying to put an eye on us, maybe even support us or cheer us up a little bit. And it was sweet, in a way. I knew we all loved each other, and we were there in good and bad.

- “Hope you are ok”- JJ texted me a few minutes later, proving my theory. It was nice to know we all had each other’s backs.

I didn’t have much time to reply to JJ’s text because we were pretty busy at the library. It was a small town and Gideon hadn’t gone undetected by the locals. Hotch and Rossi waited for us in a cafeteria, and as soon as we walked back in, we gave them the news.

- “The librarian remembers Gideon. He got a temporary card, checked out these books in the morning, and left them in the drop box on his drive home last night.”- I left the books on the table and moved a chair for my wife, as we all sat at the table with Hotch and Rossi.

- “He left the library and came here to read books.”- Callahan whispered sadly as he sat down, probably trying to see which one of the seats he had taken.

- “Yeah, that is just classic Gideon and classic profiling.”- (Y/N) added and kept her eyes on the book on the table. - “I don’t know why I find it comforting knowing exactly what he did that last day.”

- “He sat right here to let the unsub know he was watching.”- Morgan said, nodding.

- “But if Gideon was so sure he lured the right guy, why didn't he tell us?”- my wife questioned and looked at us. I couldn’t give him an answer, because I asked myself the same the entire day.

- “It's like the unsub was his white whale.”- Kate analyzed and her words made sense. - “He wanted to catch him on his own, and his last move was when the unsub targeted him.”

- “The age of the victims has stayed the same as the unsub has aged.”- Hotch pointed out. - “It speaks to his arrested development.”

- “So the question is what it's always been: Why them? Why now?”- Morgan commented and (Y/N) nodded.

- “Back to profiling one on one.”- and we all sighed - “Ok, give me those books, let’s see what Gideon was reading about.”

We all read for a while, I tried to do it as fast as possible, but I was having a hard time concentrating. The waitress brought us coffee, which we all gladly welcomed, and offered us pie. Hotch said no and I nearly pouted. I could have had some. I needed sugar to function.

- “This is it. Nelson's sparrow.”- Rossi pointed at a book after a while.- “It's what the unsub left in their hands because its behavior matched that of the insecure victims.”

- “So the unsub really knew his birds and where to find them.”- Morgan said, looking exhausted. I’m sure we all looked like that considering we hadn’t slept at all.

- “Is there some kind of bird lovers club in the area?”- Kate asked and (Y/N) grabbed her phone right away.

- “Let me call an expert. Hey Garcia, you are on speaker. Tell me, are there any nature centers or bird-watching chapters in the area?”

- “There's an old-timey bird-watching group called the Flappers, median age of like 89. They started in the sixties. Most of the members have gone extinct.”- Garcia announced in a matter of seconds.

- “And chances are the unsub and his victims weren't a part of that group, so where else would he meet them?”- Kate asked, as Aaron grabbed the picture of the unsub’s victim and showed it to us.

- “Tara was his ideal.”

- “What made her so special for him?”- (Y/N) asked, focusing on the image.

- “Tara's mother said she was broken.”- Rossi pointed out.

- “And he knew that because he spent more time watching her than the others.”- Hotch commented.

- “So he was basically a stalker. He was able to study her, not just glance as she passed by the window.”- (Y/N) said and I nodded along her words.

- “She was a few years out of high school when she disappeared. Maybe he knew her from there.”- Morgan analyzed, but it didn’t really make much sense.

- “She wasn't very social.”- I said, trying to connect their lives, with how they lived.

- “Well, neither was he, hon.”- (Y/N) said and rubbed my hand with her as she smiled at me for a moment.

- “They were both in their 20s when she was taken.”- Hotch pointed out. - “If they weren't friends in high school, maybe they worked together?”

- “Tara's mom said right out of school she bagged groceries.”- I added and Garcia replied in a matter of seconds.

- “I've got Tara working at Joe's on Main summer of '76 through '77.”

- “Are there any employees at Joe's supermarket who started in the seventies and are still there?”- Hotch asked and I raised an eyebrow.

- “You do realize you are asking for the impossible, right?”- (Y/N) whispered and our Unit Chief simply raised an eyebrow.

- “But I’m asking Garcia, I know she delivers.”

- “Well, that's nearly 40 years ago in a galaxy far, far away that wasn't using my magic binary boxes, but, yeah, the place is still family-owned and operated. Give me a hot minute.”

- “Thank you, Pen.”- (Y/N) said and I held her hand as she cut me a little smile.

- “Ok. Three of the people still working there are women. That leaves two males. There's a name I've heard before. Mallick.”- it took Garcia less than two minutes to gather the whole information. A new record.

- “Who?”- Hotch asked, confused.

- “Gertie Mallick was one of the founding members of the bird group. Died in 1974. Her next of kin was her nephew Donnie Mallick, who inherited her farm and... buys enough birdseed to let me know I should send you his address.”

We had a suspect and most likely, our Unsub. Gideon’s murderer.

As Hotch drove us to Mallick’s last known address in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t stop analyzing his life. His mother gave birth to him at only fourteen, and at eighteen she was sent to a mental facility for schizophrenia, and her four-year-old son was sent to live with his only living kin, a 72-year-old wheelchair-bound Aunt Gertrude. A part of me pitied him. He never had a normal life, he had most likely inherited his mother’s condition. I could relate to the fear and the pain.

But he had killed Jason Gideon. My mentor, my biggest influence. I wanted to shoot the guy, I wanted to give Gideon peace and give some sense of what had happened.

That was until I heard his voice in the back of my head as I remembered one conversation we once shared when I still was struggling to pass my firearm qualification exam.

- “Hotch told me that when he came to the BAU, you told him he didn't need a gun to kill somebody?”- I questioned Gideon and he nodded.

- “The only truly effective weapon we have is our ability to do the one thing they can't.”

- “Which is what?”

- “Empathize. They dehumanize their victims, we humanize the killers.”

I took a deep breath and nodded to myself. I wasn’t going to let my emotions take the best of me that day.

When we got to the house, we divided, and luckily, (Y/N) stayed with me as we went through the back. The gunshot warned us in a matter of minutes, Rossi got the unsub. And he was dead. I thought I was gonna be relieved to see him there, but no. I just felt sad for him, for his life, and for the women he had tortured and killed. At least Gideon’s work was finished.

Did Mallick give a reason to Rossi to pull the trigger? I don’t know. But I know I’m glad it wasn’t me. I wanted to go home and still be myself. A good version of myself. One that could be Raven’s dad and (Y/N)’s husband.

I was gonna miss Gideon, always, but I knew I was never gonna be him, and that was a good thing. 

Next chapter

Series' Masterlist - Author's masterlist

[yourfavouritetragedy]

I was adding onto the DSMP Actor AU post, but it turned into Wilbur musician AU, haha rip me, and I only know SBI anyways so here’s a separate post. (It goes back to actor AU at the end.) It’s hypothetically still in the same universe though, and obviously inspired by it. If anything’s phrased weirdly, it’s cuz this was originally an addition to that. 

tbh I kinda adhered to their IRL careers too much compared to the OP but whatever it’s fine. 

Also frick the “Dream SMP” for not having a better title lmaooo

Wilbur is an indie artist really on the come up

Your City Gave Me Asthma was pretty good for a first release, popular with both new fans and fans of his acting.

He had starred in a short mystery/thriller-ish series that started off disguised as a normal sitcom: Chilly in Lincolnshire {Editor Wilbur ARG}

It had a prominent release because of Jack Massey’s involvement and previous fame, but production was abruptly scrapped before it tied everything up with a bow on top, so to speak. It’s still unclear if this was actually planned in order to tell the story the way they way wanted. 

Even before that, critics had mixed reviews, either applauding the storytelling and acting or calling it “irrationally confusing, an amateurish attempt to box unconventional storytelling into a conventional medium.”

Also SootHouse was a sitcom that achieved a cult following during the two seasons it ran before cancellation. Either you’re a fan or you’re never heard of it, and people constantly forget Wilbur was in it. 

(He was a few other old shows on his resume too. Wilbur always focuses on the newest project, so everyone always forgets about what he was in before.) 

Maybe I Was Boring EP was initially just bonus tracks on his website, but his fans liked it so much he gave it a wider release

In between, he had a few comedy songs go viral on youtube. Everybody was so confused when they realized it was the same Wilbur as musician/actor Wilbur. He laughed about it in an interview, saying “How many Wilburs do you know?” 

That’s when it came out that “Wilbur Soot” was actually a stage name. (”Ha, fair, only one.” “Make that zero-- my name’s not really Wilbur.”)

He kinda disappeared after that?? Didn’t do anything, really inactive on social media. It was semi-confirmed that he was both working on his mental health and prepping some stuff (music, auditions).

But anyways he just released a series of singles, combined into Digital Love {E-girl trilogy}-- he’s transformed his image yet again, but this time he does take ownership of all his past ventures.

The release of Digital Love bridges the end of SMP Earth and the beginning Dream SMP. 

But before that there was MCC and the other stuff.

They are shows where celebrities team up do stuff-- you know the type 

but Minecraft Monday is still inexplicably Minecraft Monday. Some Youtuber just managed to get all these up and coming celebrities to play a Minecraft tournament. 

And that’s where the Sleepy Bois (minus Tommy) met IRL so that’s where they meet here. 

SMP Earth, like Minecraft Manhunts, is also a former show they were on. I’m going to call it World Domination. Don’t @ me; I know that’s trash lol. 

They and the Dream Team met up because of their shared fanbases and were even talking a crossover, but it didn’t really work that well for the stories so they scrapped it

They make a non-canon cross over episode anyways {no IRL equivalent, I think}

Everybody loves the cons. Everytime there’s a con, five friendships are made and eight ideas are created. 

Techno backstory time

He’s done a lot of long running, though not exactly popular, serials and sitcoms: Blitz, Survival Games, and Sky Wars. 

Winstreak: 1000 {Bed Wars 1000 winstreak} was so popular they made a second season, but it never got as big as the first. He worked nearly exclusively with Hypixel Studios. 

He was doing lots of random content for their new Sky World universe {Skyblock} -- the small studio was big on experimentation -- , when a fictional documentary, The Great Potato War, went proper viral. 

They made two sequels WHILE he was doing those celebrity team challenge shows and then World Domination, and they were actually good sequels.

Got a reputation for being shallow and a sell-out, but he makes a joke of it so much he gets away with it and constantly self-promos.

Also a kinda scary to work with for the first time because of how single-minded he can get, but once you realize how socially awkward he is it’s okay.  

Now that’s he’s in a lot of stuff with worldbuilding, he practically has the wikis memorized. 

Tommy mainly did limited series and movies before World Domination, where he met the SBI.

He’d had been a fan of Wilbur for a while, and was super star-struck at first, but got over it really quickly in his Tommy style

He still is a total fanboy at concerts and whenever a new music video drops. “I’m friends with the guy! I know him, Wilbur Soot!” “Tommy, you’re famous too.” “Yeah, cuz I’m practically in the video!” “No--” 

Wilbur takes Tommy to one of his concerts and he’s so hyped the entire time, especially to go behind the scenes and on the stage. 

Sometimes he gets stressed about the pressure of being a child star, but Techno, Philza, and Wilbur promise to stand by him and they make him feel protected 

One time Wilbur’s drunk and almost hands Tommy a drink before swearing and going, “You’re a bloody child! You can’t have that! God, what would Philza think?” Tommy’s not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. 

Philza laughs at the story and actually lets Tommy try a little in a more controlled, responsible situation. Tommy texts his mum first, and then hates the drink anyways. (”This is rubbish! I am a man, but I’m not drinking this!” Techno: “Alcohol is disappointing. I drink orphan’s tears instead.” “Techno WHAT--”)

Philza had been the star of a zombie apocalypse show: Golden Core 

He did canonically die to a child zombie in the movie version. Yes, they made a movie version of the TV show, because the Golden Core franchise actually has had many other shows {other hardcore series}. 

Everybody tries to get the child zombie props near him because of that (they’re puppets)

He’s done a lot of other things, like in the original actor AU post, but none of them came close in popularity. 

He gives the rest of the SBI the knowledge he’s gained from being in the biz for so long. 

There’s also a running joke about SBI meaning “Spy Boys Incorporated” and them starring in a comedy spy movie

The fans would very much actually like this to happen. There’s so many fanons for it (maybe I’ll write one....) 

Back to the DSMP. Maybe I’ll call it Dreamland or smth. 

Wilbur constantly asks Tommy if he’s okay after any difficult scenes

Especially when they were hanging out together a lot in the exile arc.

All the brother scenes were cut because Wilbur kept breaking down and crying in them.

Sometimes people actually ask Techno and Tommy if they’re actually brothers. Tommy tries to go along with it half the time on the basis of “it’s be funny,” so there’s a subset of casual fans that genuinely don’t know. 

After Alivebur was killed off, Wilbur was going to leave the show to concentrate on his music

But he missed the SMP and hanging so much that he just showed up on set one day saying “I’m a ghost now,” and everyone just rolled with it

Alivebur was so popular that, seeing that Wilbur was willing, they decided to bring him back for Season 3. He’s been avoiding doing heavy scenes, but he still seems really invested and like he wants to come back to the show.

Wilbur talks with Techno about writing and lore a lot

it’s one the few times Wilbur actually seems like the older one

Wilbur attempted to get a D&D group going in the cast, but the show was already close enough, with the amount of improvisation they can get by with

Tommy’s Pigstep cover happened, but the background was Philza clapping barely in time with just Wilbur on bass instead (and of course Techno’s “BAHP”s)

It was a charity stream. They had put on their costumes (clothes only) for a previous goal. 

This one was simply called “We rap.”

Some people were almost disappointed that Tommy was the only one actually rapping, but he was so funny it made up for it. 

Okay I spent the whole morning on this and it got way too long but I think I’m finally out of ideas. sorry haha hope you enjoyed! ^_^

[maladaptive-ninja-returns]

It’s The Avengers (03x14)

Loki x Reader Avengers The Office AU (Slowwwwww Burn)

Season 3 Episode 14: It’s Not What It Looks Like

Series Summary: Living in the Avengers facility post-apocalypse in a better timeline   Tony Stark has decided to capture every moment by pulling The Office on the Avengers. All of housemates are pretty used to the idea except for you, who had just come here to finish her degree, and the newest member- Loki.

Warnings: ehehehehehe

Word Count: my anxiety was through the roof this time. and that too on the thing that I know was not achievable. But noooo my boss just wants results. Well, fuck you and your boss who gave me anxiety. You will know the pain of these tears soon.

MASTERLIST in bio, darlings. Tags are open (check bio)

The familiar sports car shining in its red shade came to a halt right outside the door for Tony to get out and greet the lone camera covering him. "How's it going fellas?" He seemed comparatively chirpier than the last few days as he whistled his way to the boot of the trunk to take out five boxes of large pizzas along with a whole bag filled with soda and side dishes. "It's pizza party today, my lovely unicorn," he announced to the camera person; mostly because there was no one else in his vicinity.

Tony: *standing next to his car* I have come realise that I have been a bit hard on my team because of the anxiety I've been feeling ever since Y/N disappeared from right in front of me. Like last Monday. *camera switches to the video recording of Last Monday* Tony is seen in the kitchenette making detox juice for himself after a workout. Sam comes and grabs the coffee pot, looking around for a mug to pour himself some. The only mug hanging on the stand is your Brooklyn Nine-Nine themed one. "Well," he mutters to himself, "no one's using this for a while." Just as he finishes the sentence, Tony's hand slips on the juicer switch and the green spill out everywhere in the space, making Sam yell for help. "You are excluded from my will," Tony announces while looking dead into Sam's eyes before pouring the coffee from his pot into the sink and walking away. *back to present* Tony: Pepper says I went overboard but Sam didn't have to say that now did he. *makes a cringe face* Anyways. This is my way of showing them that I have made peace with the situation for now and that I trust our alien friends to get my daughter back to me asap.

Tony walked into the facility to be greeted by dead silence. "Did I miss something?" he wondered out loud for the camera while looking around the lobby and the waiting area. "I am pretty sure we were not supposed to go out anywhere thanks to that stubborn virus."  He walked up the elevator to be greeted by Clint coming back from the security room with his self-regulated watch, carrying two glasses of iced Americanos- one of which he offered Tony. "Pizza-" he seemed happy to see the boxes, taking the bag from Tony- "what's the occasion? Are you firing one of us? Is there a budget cut because of the 'Rona? In that case, just know that I spot a person without a mask from miles. And I can end them right there." Tony pressed the button for the lounge and waited for the camera to record his wink and smile till the doors closed to let the other handy camera in the elevator- following Clint- take over. Clint did a survey of the bag and was quite content with the contents. Tony, still with his glasses on, walked his usual walk that displayed well that he owned the place. "No one's getting fired unless they are eating my choco-chip ice cream." "You have set the bar pretty low." "It's pretty much up to the expectations I have from you all."

Clint shrugged and went on to agree with him, walking behind the Iron Man as the elevator dinged. The camera followed Clint and Tony out to film the scene unfolding in the Lounge. Manoeuvring away from their shoulders, the camera caught that deadpan silence in the room filled with nearly every Avenger staring at the screen with the seriousness of defusing a bomb that may go off any time. Peter was hiding under Scott's arm, peeping at the screen through his hands while Scott was biting his nails, nervousness dripping from his forehead. Wanda held Vision's hand while she muttered something under her breath- most probably a chant. Sam seemed to have forgotten he was watering the plants for the water-can was already empty and yet he still went on to pour the contents while his eyes were glued to the screen. Bucky's hands were busy brushing Zuko's fur- while the pupper took this opportunity to lay in his lap and snooze- monotonously, his gaze too stuck on the screen. "Come on, come on. Do it," Steve muttered while on the edge of his seat on the sofa. The camera swivelled back to Clint and Tony- both of whom had confused looks on their faces by now. Both of them turned to the screen in sync to witness what exactly was it that had all of them in such a grim state. And it was something like this.

On the screen was a barely lit space that seemed like it could have been a small closet under somebody's staircase. In that barely lit space, you could be seen from your abdomen up. There you were, panting, sweating, your hair a literal mess, your bra strap dangling out of your tank top's straps. "Again," you panted, wiping the sweat beads from your forehead while positioning your hands on a surface where the camera was seemingly recording you from. And in that same dim light, a movement was discovered behind you. That movement was of the exposed muscles and skin that the viewers had never seen in their daily life. Well, neither had they seen that very person pant and sweat like this before as well. Green eyes shined in that bare light, as the familiar face came out from the shadows to apparently hover just above your shoulder. One pale hand was used to remove those clammy hair strands coming in his way before both arms mimicked your position and came to rest on either side of your arms. "Are you sure?" Loki's voice, breathless and heavy, questioned you with sincerity while his body did not budge from behind you. You nodded. "Again." The frame caught you adjusting your hips to position your butt right with his front- something that was not covered by the camera. He towered over you, adjusting to your height while grounded his arms on the surface. "Okay then," he whispered, taking one arm to move your butt a little closer to your frame before going back to anchor himself to the surface, "here we go."

The iced Americanos created a crackle and bang louder than expected- thanks to the already looming silence- when they hit the floor. The pizza box and other snacks? Not so much. Every other person jumped where they were to turn and watch the colours from Tony and Clint's faces drain away by the second, their jaws unhinged, their hearts at a pause and their lungs just no longer working. Steve- the only one in the room to have deciphered what had just gone down in those Dad brains- got up and raised his arms till his chest as of sign of caution. "It's not what you think. Tony, Clint it's not-" The elevator dinged and out came Natasha and Bruce with four feet long bags of Cheetos and popcorn, the former quite excited to rush out into the Lounge. "We found the snacks from the pantry! Did we miss something? Did they put it in yet?" Steve winced just as Bruce blurted out those words. Tony was already heaving audibly, no air going into his lungs as he nearly collapsed on the floor if not for Natasha holding him up like she was used to it. Clint, on the other hand, had 'disgusted' written all over his face, judging every single person in the room before storming out. "OH MY GOD!!!! OH MY GAAAAA~" the screams could be heard from outside while the camera zoomed in on Natasha's face- already bored and tired.

Natasha: If they had more than one working brain cell they wouldn't have fought like twelve-year-olds in the middle of an airport and then stopped talking for a whole year. *camera pans in on her face* *faces the camera* And to think they can procreate. .

One Hour Ago Eight Hours Earlier In A Galaxy Far Away One of the camera drones stepped over a stone wall and passed over a dozen guards, buzzing its best to enter the first window it could find. Passing over ogres guarding the small galleries, another drone accompanied the first one down the maze of hallways, parting at the stairway leading down to the dungeons and up to the meeting room. The way to the dungeons was one dark path that only lit up at the very end of the hallway- few lamps burning with constant flickers. The space was divided into walls and covered with iron bars. A few of these cells were empty while others housed creatures who are only spoken about with the name of their shadows. In the last cell was a shadow that seemed similar to that of a human sleeping under the lone ragged excuse of a blanket. If one tried to focus, they could hear light snores coming out of that creature too. The drone came to rest upon one of the iron bars, sending in the live feed to the cameraman behind this whole shebang. The other fly had already found the 'throne room'. The throne- as one could make out with the setting of the hall- was made out of a tree trunk burned till all that was left was an ash-covered dead piece looking up at the sky. The seat was carved right through the middle with one of the ashened branches housing a black adder with red eyes. And in the throne sat the one person no one wanted to see. "Aellae," you mumbled in the most derogatory sense, your eyes wanting to hurt her there and then through the screen in Javier's hand. And lo! Right then the God stepped in the frame, standing in front of the witch with his usual demeanour. Well, that's what it looked like. "Why do you have to bow to her?" You whispered at him a bit viciously. White entered the frame that was recording your end. Looking at the screen he furrowed his brows and wondered how you could tell that. "He stands straight," you stressed, already sensing the question from White, "and right now he is not. And he does not not stand straight for anyone." "I see you have found yourself a fine pair of pets on your galactic travels, my love," you and White hear Aellae from the screen, bringing your attention back to her. "Just a bunch of humans and a kitten to entertain me on my way," he chuckled and shrugged a little, that Asgardian charm resurfacing in his smile. Aellae smirked at him. "On your way to where?" The question had a hint of anger even when she added a wave of curiosity, something that was easy to catch of the one who was listening to layers in her voice. Loki waved his hands in the air. "You know how it is for me. Here and there, always on the move. A nomad exploring the universe." "No more," she announced, her head high, her stare stern, "now you stay with me. You will be my advisor in the day, guiding my army to every corner of this world, with nothing to spare." She got up from her throne to walk an inhumanly seductive gait to reach the God and place her finger under his chin. "And in the night, you shall be my pacifier," she whispered, making your whole face cringe for the camera to zoom into it. "You shall satiate all my bedly desires till I the very. last. drop." Something cracked on the other side, making Javier and White turn in every direction to look at the source of the sound. Lulu too was a bit confused. You were the only person not taking your eyes away from the screen.

You: I swear to God if she was not such a bitch, I would have asked her out. Would have even gone to lengths of being her *makes air quotes* bedfellow if she was not such a fucking bitch?? Javier: *turns the camera to himself with the dazed look on his face* *signs for the camera* I am supportive and all in for this but is now really a good time for her to be questioning her sexuality? When we can literally die for just breathing wrong???

"Now," Aellae snapped everyone back to the screen, "as for those pets of yours, I'll send someone to take care of them. They are just hindrance if nothing more." "Aellae," Loki's honey laden voice was now implying a sternness. "What." "They are not to be given enough importance to be-" Loki sighed and closed his eyes- "taken care of." "All the more fun to watch them die in misery." Her eyes widened with excitement at the thought of murder. "Especially that Midgardian who is living in the illusion of being your friend." Loki's jaw tightened. "If you decide to harm h-them, I will not aid you in your irrational quests, Aellae. Going after those weaklings proves that you are still the reckless stubborn creature that I left you." There wasn't an exclamation of surprise on her face but rather that particular smirk of the devil who has walked its prey right into its trap. "So, she does mean something to you." Loki kept mum. "Guards!" she yelled for the two orcs standing outside, "bring me the head of the woman!" "Aellae, stop," he begged casually. "Enough humour." "And do whatever with the rest of her!" she ordered with her eyes piercing through Loki's soul.

The next thing you know, the last fly drone that got lost on the middle floor somewhere was recording two orcs throwing Loki into a room before shutting the door behind him. His grunts echoed through the room with no windows. All around him were walls coloured in a dusty cream shade, lamps lining up the four walls with one dressing table sitting with one of the four walls, housing heavy chains, the purpose of which Loki did not want to know. He huffed as he stood up, looking at the door before letting his gaze land on those shackles on his wrist that now seemed permanent. The tension on his jaw did not go unnoticed by the tiny roommate before he slammed those bracelets- along with his wrist- into the wall in pure animalistic rage.

Witch's Den- Down the Hall Two orcs stood guard to the entrance coming to the floor via the stairs. One of them seemed to be snoozing with all the pressure sitting on his nose and brows while the other one was trying to drive away this one stubborn fly that kept buzzing around its head. Eventually reaching the threshold of irritation, he followed the fly out towards the stairs, his curved sword being swung into the air to strike the buzzing creature; only to be taken by surprise with a bright source of light. The next thing the fly was recording was the other orc waking up to the clunk of a sword dropping, this one finding gasping and taking an attack position before the camera went dark.

But not for long.

The fly in Loki's room recorded the God catching the sounds outside while he was in the middle of surveying the whole room for an escape route. The grunts and gasps of orcs outside have stopped, making him all the more cautious to the steps that steadily approach the door. He took one of the chains in his hand, with calculated steps, walked towards the door to catch whatever tried to come in next. With the sound of a heavy key twisted inside the keyhole, the wheels turned and the door opened a smidge to let someone in. Without losing even a second, Loki wound the chain around your neck from behind you, nearly choking you. "Not now, dammit!" you choked, trying to free yourself from the hold. "Y/N?" the surprise stirring along with confusion was a new shade on Loki that you would have appreciated any other day. "Wha-what are you doing here?" That God wasn't even able to squeak on realising it was you. The chains came off as fast as they had gone around your neck, giving you room to breathe and widen your eyes in horror. "No! No no no no noooo!!"  You ran towards the door as it clunk shut, leaving you to pull at it with all your might to no avail. "The door opens from outside," you groaned with a sob, thumping your head on it with low winces before a tiny realisation hit you hard enough to stop and look back at Loki. "Ow!" He yelled at the hard slap that came for his back, looking at you in simmering confusion. "You could've waited to choke me after we got out, you fucking IDIOT!" The slaps and punches got more vigorous with each word until Loki had to gab your hands with his to stop you from wasting your energy anymore. "And what makes you think coming here was a good idea?"  He struggled to keep your writhing form from hurting itself more than him. You were ready to kick him in his shins and you would have absolutely done that if Loki had not shoved you into the wall with him towering over you to restrict any movement of your limbs. The little buzzing drone came to sit over Loki's arm and capture the frame where both of you were flaming with anger and still trying to breathe enough to keep that rage alive. "I'd already told you were on your own," he grunted, his eyes drilling through your soul. "And I'd already told you I am a psychology major. I can see the denial routine from miles away, you stupid blob of six-foot galaxy brain! You think I haven't sacrificed myself to a professor for the sake of my friends?" "...what? Wait. What do mean by sacri-" "Now get off me and find us a way out of here." You pushed him back. Well, at least you thought you did. But he pushed closer to you, shooting emotions of mild surprise in your eyes before you caught yourself slipping. Fortunately, this little drone caught everything in 4K. From the veins popping in Loki's neck to the parted lips and wavering gaze of yours. "This world is not a joke, Y/N. There was a reason you were left behind. And you have done the exact opposite of that which is supposed to keep you alive." It felt as if Loki had to restrain from spilling that anger over the rim. To make that hypothesis true, he punched the wall to dissipate this emotion he did not want to be running him. And there he stood, his head hanging above you in defeat, his eyes closed and his breath wavering. "I was supposed to send you home safe," he was barely able to mutter. The drone focused on your hands coming around his torso, your arms taking as much of his frame in a hug as possible as you softly patted his back and soothed him. Loki's body twitched a little at this new touch, still like a stone before giving in with every wave of your soothing touch. "You're family, idiot. I'm not gonna leave you behind with some crazy bitch that isn't me?" A chuckle resonated through you and then the room. The next moment when you looked at him, he was looking lighter. "Now come on, use your muscles and drill through one of these walls." Raising his good brow, he judged you while tapping his fist casually on the wall. "What exactly do you take me for?" "A cheesy brooder who's all soft inside," you commented without skipping a beat, looking around to find some kind of a loophole in this square room. "Say that outside these walls and watch what this brooder does to you." "Sounds like an invitation," you sang under your breath, tapping the walls. It took a while. A while that was long enough for you to move around the room to come and sit on the lone drawer by the wall, feeling the heat of the room bursting out the sweat in your skin, other than turning your brain into an irritated mush. You groaned while taking off your top and throwing it on the floor. You wanted to cry out loud to blow off some of the unbearable heat but stopped short at the sight of that overcoat coming off. Followed by that black shirt. Muscles. No matter how he moved or what he did, his back lived in that moment to tease you with those muscles. And what was that? Sparkles? No, sweat, glistening in the dim light. Wait, why was it glisten- You looked around and realised the lamps were at their wick's end. "Same," you sighed as you looked back at Loki's back, only to find him turned around to face you. "Oh, Gods!" you jumped down from the drawer with quite the surprise in your eyes. "This is your first time seeing me shirtless?" It almost felt like he was genuinely curious. "What? No! I don't know. That wasn't the-look!" You signalled him to come closer and let your hand hang right above the drawer's top that touched the two corners of the wall. Loki mirrored you and realised it instantly. "That's a cold breeze." He looked at you with pupils expanding wide in that dim lighting. Taking over from there, he tried his best to get a look as to which section of the wall it was coming from. "There's an opening-" he immediately shifted his position to standing parallel to the length of the wall, his hands grounded on the varnished top- "we will have to either pull it-" he tried his best but the structure did not budge- "or push it towards the opening in that section." You got to work as well, standing next to him and giving your end of the small corner a good push that only ended up in failed grunts. "Okay, let's try another way," you inhaled, "I'll push the top, you be the bottom."

The drone was sitting on the drawer now, capturing all those failed attempts from every angle both of you thought possible before you nearly collapsed due to lack of air. "We're are clearly doing something wrong here," Loki huffed, his puffed-up chest, the centre of the camera's frame. You flipped your wet hair to show your tired face in the lone lamp that burned in the room. "There weren't any more of those BDSM chains inside it, were there?" Loki's breathing stopped for a moment. You looked at him for an answer. Both of you moved to open the drawers. The drone captured the disappointment in your own IQ in high definition before watching you both taking them out with nothing but pure spite. "Take a break, I'll try-" "No," you shook your head and wiped the forehead sweat, "let's do it together." Loki wanted you to stop but that you gave him was more than adequate to let anyone know you won't listen right now. "This time you stand behind me and let's use the wall behind as a supp....ort? Wait how is this room looking shorter?" You were looking around in dazed confusion while Loki closed his eyes. "It's not a normal room. Those two walls will keep closing in until..." He didn't have to say more. "Well, then what are we waiting for?" the drop of panic in your high pitched voice was evident as you positioned yourself- putting your palms on the edge. "Come on." Loki came to stand behind you, copying your position, just a bit more charismatically- and with a bit more skin- till he felt your hair come into his mouth. "One, two, three!" This time the push did budge the drawer chest a bit but your strength had been used for that movement of a centimetre. Your breaths almost felt like your lungs were on the verge of crying. "Again," you panted, wiping the sweat beads from your forehead while positioning your hands on a surface where the drone was seemingly recording you from. Loki looked at your back, clearly concerned. This time he used his hand to remove those clammy hair strands coming in his way before both arms mimicked your position and came to rest on either side of your arms. "Are you sure?" Loki's voice, breathless and heavy, questioned you with sincerity while his body did not budge from behind you. You nodded. "Again." The frame caught you adjusting your hips to position your butt right with his front- something that was not covered by the camera. He towered over you, adjusting to your height while grounded his arms on the surface. "Okay then," he whispered, taking one arm to move your butt a little closer to your frame before going back to anchor himself to the surface, "here we go." Both of you had your eyes stuck on the wall with a fiery gaze and an aura that would have burned this place to the ground. His muscles tried to take all that you could not. And just when the grunts were turning into screams, the drawer started to move from its place with a screeching noise. As soon as Loki noticed a decent enough opening in the wall to your and his side, he pushed you and himself in through the opening before the death walls came for your limbs. The drone fly followed. Both of you rolled through what seemed like a tunnel slide through the walls for a minute till that just did not seem to end. It did end though. It ended in a noisy fall of thuds and groans- you on top of him. "You okay?" you winced through your broken voice, not moving a muscle for the fear of breaking something. Also because it was awkward lying over him on your stomach. Loki replied with a quick wince. A ruffle came from next to you. Followed by a lazy groan.  Your head turned to the noise. So did Loki's.  "You two could have easily waited for another hour." The drone swerved around to bonk into the one that was already there, covering the dungeons. There under the rugged blanket, laid Carol Danvers, looking at the two of you with sleepy eyes. Neither of you knew what to say. She looked at her watch and put her head inside the blanket again. "Five more minutes."

[fruitcoops]

Hey, I love your writing! Could you maybe do like Marlene makes Sirius and Remus do the boyfriend tag for the lions media page and the questions are just a mix of cute, normal things and then really really not so cute normal things 👀

I may have gotten a little carried away with this ideas, whoops! There isn’t much ~spicy~ stuff here, but if you guys liked it I’ll do a part 2! Writing this was easily the best part of my day. Credit for Coops and Sweater Weather goes to @lumosinlove!

“Hello, everyone, I’m Dorcas Meadowes, and welcome back to Lion Pride!” Dorcas smiled at the camera and waved. “Today I’m here with team captain Sirius Black and our newest player, Remus Lupin, for the boyfriend tag. They’ll be asking each other a series of questions and they are legally obligated to answer honestly!”

“Wait, really?” Remus asked, his eyes wide.

“No, but it’s a good idea anyway.” Dorcas shuffled the small stack of notecards in her hands and passed half to each of them. “I’m here to supervise and clarify if you need it.”

“Alright, first question: how did we meet?” Sirius grinned. “Take your time on this one.”

“We met in the PT room before I was formally introduced to the team because Pots unscrewed the lids of the Gatorade bottles and the spout hit you in the eye.”

“Oh my god, I forgot about that!” Sirius turned to the camera. “Watch out, Pots, vengeance is coming.”

“Question number two,” Remus laughed. “If we’re going out to eat, where are we going?”

“Sid’s.” They said in unison.

“Number three: What’s one food I don’t like?”

Remus paused and bit his lip. “That’s a tough one. You’re kind of like a black hole for food. Uh, maybe pickles?”

“Yeah, I hate pickles.” Sirius shuddered dramatically. “Leave the poor zucchini alone.”

“Pickles are made from cucumbers.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Moving on!” Dorcas interrupted. “Remus, you’re up.”

“This is why we need a supervisor,” he said to the camera. “Okay, question four. How many siblings do I have?”

Sirius lit up and beamed at him. “One! Jules!”

“Your number-one fan,” Remus teased.

Sirius glanced down at the next card and barked out a laugh. “Oh, I’m going to get roasted so hard here. Am I a morning person or a night person?”

“You are the earliest early bird of all time and it’s terrible,” Remus groaned. “Six a.m. rolls around and he’s wide awake while I’m barely a person until eight, and that’s assuming I’ve had coffee.”

“You’re the cutest zombie I’ve ever seen at seven in the morning,” Sirius said.

“Aw, babe. Question six: what’s our song?”

Sirius thought for a moment. “Hmm, I don’t know.”

“I was going to say, I don’t think we have one yet.”

“We’re taking suggestions if anyone has ideas,” Sirius said to the camera. “What’s my best friend’s name.”

“Harry Potter,” Remus answered without hesitating. “You only like Pots for his baby.”

“True.”

Remus started to read the next card, then looked to Dorcas. “Do I have to ask this one?”

“Yes!”

“Cover your ears, everyone. What’s my nickname?”

“LOOPS!” Sirius shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “But to me it’s mon loup. What’s my weirdest habit?”

Remus dropped his face into his hands. “Your order of operations. To anyone out there who still thinks Sirius Black is cool—stop kicking me!—last night he got stuck in his t-shirt because he was brushing his teeth at the same time.”

“It’s efficient!” Sirius protested, poking him in the calf one more time. “You don’t appreciate me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Remus kissed him on the cheek. “Okay, what’s one of my special talents?”

“Hockey.”

“That doesn’t count,” Dorcas said.

“Bummer. You can sing really well.”

Remus’ ears went pink. “I don’t know about really well.”

“You do it all the time!”

“That doesn’t mean I’m good at it!” They both laughed until Dorcas cleared her throat.

“Sorry, sorry. Question number…something. If you were baking me a birthday cake, what flavor would it be?”

Remus snorted. “Bold of you to assume I can bake. But if I could, I’d do a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting.”

“You’d steal all the frosting off it, wouldn’t you.”

“Oh, definitely. Next question! Where was I born?”

Sirius was quiet for a solid ten seconds. “…Wisconsin?”

“What, the entire state?”

“I know you were born in a hospital.”

“Do you have any idea how many Wisconsin hospitals there are?”

“Well, you were only born in one of them.” Sirius shrugged. “I give up, what city?”

“I’m not telling you. You can call my mom and ask when we’re done here.”

“She’d tease me for days. I’ll get it out of you eventually.” Sirius shook his head and turned back to the cards. “Oh, here’s a good one: could you tell I liked you?”

Remus burst out laughing. “Are you kidding me? No!”

Sirius turned to face the camera. “If anyone out there doesn’t know the whole situation, we basically just stared at each other for, like, a year before anything happened.”

“I think the first time I started picking up on it was when I came back from vacation and got a fifteen-second hug from this one,” Remus said, pointing his thumb toward Sirius. “At that point I kind of went ‘…wait a minute’.”

“Let’s do the next question before you spill any more embarrassing stories.” Remus’ smile turned sharp. “Oh, no.”

“What was your first impression of me?”

“Hot.” Sirius’ eyebrows shot up. “Woah, I said that way too fast, didn’t I?”

“A little bit, but I appreciate it.”

“Are you comfortable with PDA?” Sirius looked over at Dorcas. In lieu of an answer, Remus scooted over on their shared couch and settled down in Sirius’ lap. “Hello.”

“Hi. As you can see, I can’t stand it if you even breathe on me in public.”

“God forbid we make eye contact.”

“In all honesty, I think we’ve already crossed the PDA bridge,” Remus said. “Once pictures of you and your boyfriend making out go viral, there’s really no incentive to tone it down. My turn: who’s my favorite musician?”

“Fucking ABBA.” Sirius let his head fall on the back of the couch. “Sorry, I mean ABBA.” Remus started whistling the intro to ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme’ and Sirius scrambled for his notecards. “What’s my favorite time of the year?”

It took Remus a minute to catch his breath from laughing. “Uh, fall. Autumn. We have the same favorite, actually.”

“It’s a great season. You get hockey, big sweaters, and there’s still a little bit of sunshine.”

“Halloween, too,” Remus added. “Oh, shit, you’re going to have a field day with this one. What word do I use the most?”

“Jeez.” Sirius gave him a big smooch on the cheek. “Such a Midwesterner. Where was our first kiss?”

“Pascal Dumais’ guest room, on a dark and stormy night,’ Remus said. “We got snowed in for Sirius’ birthday party.”

“It was really romantic though.”

“Yeah.” Remus planted a quick kiss on his lips before grabbing the next card. “Who would win in an argument?”

“What’s the argument about?” Sirius asked. “Dorcas, is there a specification?”

“I think we trade off,” Remus mused. “We don’t fight much.”

“Nah. Kissing or cuddling?”

“What about it?”

“Which one do each of you prefer?” Dorcas clarified. She hadn’t stopped smiling since the interview started.

“Ohhhhh.” Remus readjusted himself in Sirius’ lap so he was leaning against the armrest more. “I mean, both are great.”

“Agreed.”

“Last question for me!” Remus waved his final notecard in Sirius’ face. “How would you describe my style? Tread carefully, Cap.”

Sirius thought hard for a moment. “This is a dangerous question, Dorcas. Um, you’re going to hate me for this.”

“Spit it out, Black.”

“Sexy librarian?”

“Fuck off.”

“See! I told you!”

“Sexy librarian? Really? At least I own clothing other than monochrome t-shirts!”

“I have my game day suit, too.”

“…the suit is nice.”

Dorcas was laughing too hard to get them back on track, so Marlene had to motion at them from behind the camera. “Sorry, Marlene, we’ll finish up. Okay, Fruit Loop, am I a dog or a cat person?”

“I think you love dogs more than you love me,” Remus said. “You don’t hate cats, though.”

“First of all, that’s not true, I love you most.” Sirius kissed him soundly on the lips. “Second of all, Regulus is enough of a cat person for both of us.”

“I was genuinely afraid we’d come home and find out he’d adopted eight kittens while he was still living with us. Dorcas, is that it?”

“That’s it,” she confirmed, still dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Great job, you guys killed it. Thanks for watching everyone, and make sure to stay updated with Lion Pride social media!”

[dornish-queen]

Pedro Pascal on Fame and ‘The Mandalorian’: ‘Can We Cut the S— and Talk About the Child?’

By Adam B. Vary

Photographs by Beau Grealy

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.

At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

[bunnymcbunnister]

SPN Season 15 Spoiler Sheet, update 8/31

Waited until that second trailer came out to post. I am LIVING with all this new content! Mind the disclaimer and check it out under the cut. 

DISCLAIMER: This is gathered info from various sources. This is not confirmed information. Stuff in this WILL be wrong. Don’t take this too seriously. This is for fun. Also, if you use this info for another publication, please let me know as a courtesy. Don’t be a dick. It's all out there, but it hurts to see my same phrasing on other publications after all the work I’ve done to consolidate it…  

General Info (oldest to newest). This is a blend of pre-COVID and post COVID, so some might change. 

They are adding a whole extra day to filming to do the final scene. They will film the final scene last.  (Implies logistics- lots of returning people?) PRE COVID SPOILER

In an interview, Kripe indicated that the series ending would have “peace” for Sam and Dean

Not much new at the TCA’s, but it was said it is “unlikely” Jeffery Dean Morgan will be back since his last appearance was such a good end note. There were some jokes about a Castiel spin off. 

There will be a special tribute ep (Post COVID talk seems to indicate this will stil happen)

Misha will be in 15 out of 20 episodes this season (he’s missed 3 so far and I suspect will miss 14 and 16, unclear about 19). 

Cas’ deal with the Empty may come up later in the season. 

Jack will be a critical part of the ending of the show

Dean and Amara’s connection will be explored

There will be a bunker themed episode (MarySue article)

In one of his cookbook interviews, Misha used the word “we” several times when talking about the final scene of Supernatural. He said that would be the last scene they shoot. It seemed to imply that he was in the scene, but that could be open to interpretation. 

JaxCon/Vegas Con spoilers: 

Misha said the ending was “happier than he expected” but also had some sadness. He later used “sad and redemptive”

Misha mentioned that Claire will be mentioned on the show, but as of yet not appear. 

Dean says the line “stop killing my people” (to god?)

Jensen said he doesn’t see how the story could continue past this season, but Jared said its more of “a see you later”

Misha confirmed he’s in the final scene, but he also indicated he had one week of filming left (total?) PRE COVID SPOILER

Al Cal posted a pic of a “thrown away” call sheet that seem to indicate Micheal, Lucifer, and a character named “Betty” interacting in the bunker. Unclear as to the validity. 

There will be a flashback episode

Charlie (original flavor) will return

Filming will resume on Aug 18th. Per Canadian policy, they must quarantine for two weeks. Those quarantining seems to include:

Fairly Clear: Jared, Jensen, Jake Abel (Micheal), Rob Benedict (Chuck/God) Mark Pelligrino (Lucifer), Al Cal (didn't need to quarantine, but he is definitely on set)

Unclear/Rumored: Misha (he is being deliberately cagey), Osric Chau (Kevin- but likely for another project, he was a week ahead of everyone else) Jim Beaver (Bobby) flew to Vancouver on 8/26, so he could make it for the last couple days of filming with a quarantine 

No idea: Shoshannah Stern and Ruth 

Reasons Unlikely: Sam Smith (chemo treatment), Kim Rhodes (working at a camp during quarantine)

Jensen said sp 19 is more of a season finale, while 20 is a series finale. Repeated in interviews/livestreams. 

Megan Fitz. complimented both Dabb’s and Glynn’s writing on twitter. Not sure if it is in reference to rewrites or the special retrospective that is planned. 

Jensen indicated that the ending did change per COVID protocols. Unclear how much.

Misha is being very, very cagey about where he is. Some live streams seem to indicate he is not at home, but he has yet to confirm- his presence in 19/20 is hard to track. In an interview with Metaverse, he was in bed in a hotel looking space and you could see mountains in the background. He was not on set for the first week of filming, so he could be a week behind. 

Misha has thrown around the words “final”  and “what he <Misha> would have wanted” per Cas’ ending. “Sad/Proud” and “poignant” were also used. 

The final episodes will premier October 8th. The finale will air Nov 19th in conjunction with an hour long special. 

A trailer was released on 8/27. Scenes included:

A moving speech from Sam to Dean

(Possibly from 18) A teary conversation between Dean and Cas

Injured Dean being helped by Cas in the bunker

Jack breaking some cuffs/bring thrown into a wall/saying he has to kill god

Dean and his grenade launcher and a purple nightgown 

Sam in a sweater vest getting a gun from under a pillow

A glimpse of a body with “Lust” written above it/a matronly woman (I think the villain from 14) saying “Boys”

Ghost Dean? Little Sam cutting off a hand

Some intermixed scenes from past episodes

A second trailer was released on 8/31. Scenes included:

A monologue from Billie about god coming to destroy the planet plus her banging on a bunker door (with her hand all gooey) and striking someone with her sythe

Jack continuing his speech about killing god but expanding that he has a ritual to do

Lots of red danger lights in the bunker/ 3 people getting tossed around in the bunker/Chuck in the bunker

Chuck saying he doesn't believe Sam and Dean can kill him

Young Sam and not ghost Young dean

Dean angrily driving the Impala then saying “its time”

Cas drawing his blade in front of an old truck to protect someone in a suit (Jack? I cant tell)

More Dean tears

A surprise appearance from Bobby

Some of the same scenes as before

Episode 15x14

Title: Last Holiday

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME – Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) discover a wood nymph (guest star Meagan Fey) living in the bunker who is determined to protect her family, at any cost. Eduardo Sanchez directed the episode written by Jeremy Adams (#1514). Original airdate 3/30/2020.

Written by: Jeremy Adams

Director: Eduardo Sanchez

Filming Dates:1/15- 1/24

Airdate: unknown- October 8th

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? eh… I don't think so Jack ? yes

Guest stars: 

Other Spoilers/info:

Misha mentioned being at an airport the first day of filming, maybe he’ll miss this one

The director shared a BTS shot with AlCal’s chair in the background. He also posted on that looked like the statues in hell. Lots of filming at the bunker. A few impala shots were shared as well. 

In an EW article, a mysterious woman gives Sam and Dean every holiday they ever missed. Based on the title, I’m guessing this!

 Episode 15x15

Title: Gimme Shelter

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: ?? Davy Perez???? They seem to be keeping it under wraps for some reason

Director: Matt Cohen

Filming Dates: 1/27-2/5

Airdate: unknown. October 15th?

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ?yes  Jack ? Yes

Guest stars: 

Other Spoilers/info:

There was some filming done at the crossroads with only Misha. 

Alex and Misha filmed together

It seems as if J2 didn’t film at all the first week, Misha filmed six or seven days, this is a Cas centric ep

Episode 15x16

Title: Drag Me Away (From You)

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: Megan Fitzmartin

Director: Amyn Kaderali

Filming Dates: 2/6-2/17

Airdate: October 22nd?

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? I think so… briefly? Jack ? not sure either. 

Guest stars: IMDB credits Lisa Berry (Billie/Death)

Other Spoilers/info:

Alex got a cast of his face around the filming of this- so this ep or the one after

Looks like we get Dean in a robe!

They filmed at Rooster’s Sunrise Hotel for 3 days/nights

This might be the flashback ep

Episode 15x17

Title: Unity

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: Meredith Gylnn

Director: Catrion McKenzie

Filming Dates: 2/19-2/28

Airdate: Oct 29th?

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? yes Jack ? yes

Guest stars: Rob benedict and Emily Sparrow

Other Spoilers/info:

Chuck and Amara trailers were seen on set when filming in a garden

Jensen was in NOLA Friday, possible Monday

“Uriel” was around for filming (Post COVID update: Misha seemed to indicate that this was because the actor was nearby filming? Not sure if this is to cover up the spoiler or the truth)

Alex and Jensen filmed in the imala

Episode 15x18

Title: The Truth

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: BOBO

Director: Speight

Filming Dates: 3/2--3/11

Airdate: Nov 5th?

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? yes Jack ? yes

Guest stars: 

Other Spoilers/info:

Misha and Alex filmed near the impala. J2 showed up later that night. This was the source of the “last time they all filmed on set” photo)

An really emotional scene was filmed with Misha and Jensen. Jared was definitely not there, but Alex was on the flight they took with Rich, so its possible he was too. This was revealed at a con in which the four of them were on a plane that had an in-flight problem.

Filming watchers saw a bro hug

Tape Ball posted a shot of field that looks like were dean came back from hell

Misha indicated this was his “favorite episode” in a recent interview

Episode 15x19

Title: Inherit the Earth

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: bucklelimg

Director: John Showalter

Filming Dates:: 3/12-3/23/cancelled for COVID and then 8/18-8/27

Airdate: Nov 12th

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? unknown Jack ? yes

Guest stars: Jake Abel (Micheal), Mark Pelligrino (Lucifer) 

Other Spoilers/info:

Production shut down as a precaution for coronavirus on 3/13, two days into filming. It is scheduled to start again on Aug 18th. 

Jensen indicated there might be some re-writes for this ep to account for COVID protocols.

When they started filming, they indicated they were on day two. So maybe they could only use some of the scenes they shot? Then they added an extra day all called it day 9. COVID protocols makes things take longer 

AlCal was definitely on set. 

Jake Abel is definitely on set, and he posted an instagram story with his trailer and Lucifer’s (Mark Pelligrino)

Some filming was done at a gas station called Showalter’s (name of the director) with Jared, Jensen, and Alex

Jake “Spoiler King” Abel filmed a video showing chairs for Jared, Jensen, and Alex as well as Rob Benedict (Chuck/God). They were filming near a lake with a mountain view (that looked similar to where Cas died in season 13)

Rob Benedict posted it was his last day in Vancouver, indicating we won't see Chuck past this episode? Or very very briefly in 20? Jake Abel posted a similar message, also baiting fans about Misha’s whereabouts 

 Episode 15x20

Title: Carry On

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: 

Written by: Dabb

Director: Bob Singer

Filming Dates: 8/28- 911? (9/7 is Labor Day, not sure if that affect filming in Canada, or if the finale still requires an extra day. COVID makes things take longer as well)

Airdate: November 19th

Photos: 

Promo:

Sneak Peak:

Castiel ? maaaaybe? Jack ? maaaaybe?

Guest stars: 

Other Spoilers/info:

Misha is in the final scene, per pre COVID interviews. 

Jake Abel used a “we” when he tweeted about getting back to work as soon as the virus scare ended, indicating Adam/Micheal would be part of the finale. He is quarantining, so this seems likely. Now looking like he was referencing 19.

Jensen indicated filming would take two weeks, longer than usual

[madame-fouquet]

2020 Anime Retrospective

With the end of the year here, and all the anime that came with it now behind us, I feel like looking back and reminiscing on it. So, following the style of ANN's own yearly retrospectives, may I present my 2020 anime in review! Enjoy.

Best of the year: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken

    This is actually not the first time Yuasa and his crew of, let's be honest, visionaries have rolled something special out right at the beginning of the year in some weird power move against everything else that has to follow it. They did it back in 2018 with Devilman Crybaby, and then they hit us this year with Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.     You ever have one of those shows where you're just constantly in awe of everything it does? Where you never found yourself chasing merch or hunting after content based off it online, but you consistently find yourself thinking about it? Yeah, that's what Eizouken did to my brain after I watched it. It was such an earnest love letter to anime and anime production, to animation in general, that I couldn't help but get sucked into its imagination and enthusiasm. The way it was able to so perfectly illustrate that pure, boundless, childlike joy that one can derive from the simple act of creating, I'd be lying if I didn't say that it had a powerful effect on my own desire to continue creating. (Corny as that sounds, it's true.) The sheer amount of love it contains, and the equal amount it puts out into the world make it so I know I am going to be thinking about it again and again for a long long time.

Runner-up: Akudama Drive

    I don't know if it's really quite a matter of my two favorites being opposites, but there are definitely some pretty sharp stylistic and tonal differences between my two top shows this year. Akudama Drive's cocaine-fueled bender of an intro episode made it very clear what it's intentions were and what it wanted us to be prepared for. That doesn't mean I had ANY idea of where it was headed narratively, but I did know I was in for one hell of a ride. And it delivered is spades on that promise.     The twists and turns, no matter how insane, illogical, or steeped in tropes they were, were all such a colorful energetic spectacle that it would be hard to hold anything against the series. Every character was such a force that I didn't really consider any of them a weak point. Yeah, some of them were more or less cardboard cut-outs of antagonistic elements, but when the cardboard cutout looks REALLY FREAKING COOL, it's hard to get too torn up over the details. It's a show that oozes style and knew EXACTLY what it wanted to do and be, and I have to respect that.

Runner-up-up: Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun

    The next few entries aren't really in any sort of order, I actually found it near impossible to sort anything below my top two. Hanako-kun however does hold a bit of a special place for me though because, at least from a stylistic standpoint, it hits so many of my buttons. Just visually this show is the exact kind of thing my younger self would have latched onto immediately, even before knowing anything about the actual content. I suppose not much has really changed though.     I'm absolutely in love with the animation style of Hanako-kun, and I got really lucky that there is an interesting story and delightful cast of characters underneath that visual splendor. Along with the sharp lines, intense colors, and soft characters, I'm also a sucker for contemporary supernatural mysteries. That's a fancy way of saying one of my favorite shows as a kid was The X-files, but both make the point pretty well. The world of Hanako-kun has a lot to offer, and I can only hope it gets a second season so we can continue to delve into it's beautiful and terrifying mysteries.

Runner-up-up: Kaguya-sama: Love is War Season 2

    I know a lot of people will be talking about this one when it comes to “Best of” lists. I know a lot of people were talking about the first season when it reminded us just how funny anime can be back in 2018. Absurd high school comedies (Is that a genre?) could definitely be considered my favorite. Hell, of my top five favorite anime of all time, THREE of them fall under that category. So believe me when I say Kaguya-sama absolutely deserves the deluge of praise it receives. For what describing something as “laugh out loud” is worth, this show had me constantly needing to pause it just so I could finish laughing at whatever ludicrously funny misfortune had just befallen it's cast of lovable morons.     The thing is though, Kaguya-sama understands that you can't just earn love and goodwill on laughs alone, there needs to be a beating heart at the center of all the shenanigans. And when this season had me actually cheering on and feeling sorry for Ishigami of all people, I knew that beating heart was present and accounted for. Look, the cast are all self-centered idiots, but I'll be damned if they aren't also my dear children who I delight in watching slowly grow and become slightly less self-centered idiots.

Runner-up-up: Dorohedoro

    When the Dorohedoro anime was first announced, a lot of my experience was watching a group of people online scream about how they were so pumped that it was finally getting an anime. I had never heard of it before, but the excitement was very real and tangible. And I gotta say, sometimes you need to believe the hype.     I've never been one to shirk a series just because it was CG animation, (Watch ID-0 dammit!) but Dorohedoro makes a strong case for why people shouldn't sleep on something based solely on it's animation. The dirty, grease-encrusted world of Hole is brought to life with plenty of flair and style that, I feel, the CG didn't hold back at all. What I had seen said was that for a long time Dorohedoro was kinda considered “unanimateable” but I think MAPPA did the iconic manga a fair amount of justice. Even if pulpy ultra-violence isn't normally your thing, I still highly recommend giving Dorohedoro a look, it might just end up being a hole worth going down.

Honorable Mention: Show By Rock!! Mashumairesh!!

    I know what you're thinking, but hear me out. The first Show By Rock!! was definitely an indulgence for me. While not something I considered a high level series by any stretch: messy plotting, shallow characters, a weird isekai angle, a lackluster finale, and an even MORE lackluster second season, it still got is hooks into me with its sheer energy and fluffy charm. So despite the, as mentioned, rough second season, I was more than happy to check out the new series in the franchise. And boy was I glad I did.     Mashumairesh!! takes all the heart and sweetness that worked for the first series and dials it up. It then took a hard look at a lot of what DIDN'T work in the first series, and manages to fix most of the issues. Removing the isekai angle and the whole existential threat thing, and just letting the series be a “slice-of-life but in an electric animal filled music world” did wonders for the direction and consistency. Add to that more properly fleshed out characters, and you get a series that is far stronger than it's progenitor.     The next series, Show By Rock!! Stars!!, will be adding back the cast from the first series, and that could very well be a sign that it will be falling back into its old habits, but the presence of the Mahumairesh!! girls gives me hope that it might have a chance of staying the new, far better course.

Worst of the Year: Digimon Adventure:

    This one really hurts to say. What hurt more was how quickly I knew what show I'd be electing for this position. One thing to clarify is that I would not nominate a series that I'd only watched one or two episodes of, that's just not fair. So the award was bound to go to something I had at least dedicated a decent amount of my time too. And in any other year this may have gone to something that was more my “least favorite” or had an ending that disappointed me. But unfortunately I have to be honest and sit here and tell you that the newest entry in the Digimon franchise was easily the worst thing I watched this year.      I have been a long time Digimon fan. Ever since I was but a wee lass watching the original Digimon Adventure premiere on Fox Kids at a family reunion, I have always considered the franchise a sort of cornerstone of my anime fandom. So please understand the excitement I had felt when I found out they were doing a full on remake of that flagship series. Imagine how absolutely pumped I was when the bombastic movie-like premiere of Digimon Adventure: wowed us with everything it delivered, and all the promises of what was to come. And then imagine my disappointment, my despair as the show devolved until it showed us what it really was during the finale of the Fake Tokyo arc.     I would call it a production meltdown, but considering the precedent that got set back in episode 10 during the already shaky Ultimate Evolution arc, has been so clearly informing everything up to the current episodes in the early 30s, I have to be honest with myself and admit: this is what we were going to get all along from day one.     All of the heart that had made the original series so endearing, despite its own flaws, just isn't present here. What you get here is just a non-stop (and I mean non-stop) string of barely related fights with poorly-defined stakes, or sometimes no real stakes at all. It's just one ugly set piece fight after another as the children chase after vaguely implied evils. I think the most damning thing is how much more I could say about just how much this series has let me down. Like I said, this one hurts.

Best Theme-Song of the Year: Night Running (BNA)

     My opinion of BNA as a series is complex. But my opinion of its ED, Night Running, is simple: Its a god-damned bop! I could spend this whole section talking about the artistry of the ED animation itself, its fun and creative use of color, the slight variations for certain episodes, the focus on character, or the fact that it was done by an American animation team. I could even talk about the song's importance to the series as a whole and its place in the narrative. I won't though. The fact of the matter is that even without all that, I STILL probably would've picked Night Running as my best of the year because as a song it is just that much my jam. This is the kind of shit I could listen to on repeat for hours, days, weeks, and still keep coming back to it. Don't get me wrong, Ready To is a damn powerful and catchy tune that goes hard, but at the end of the day, I'm a sucker for a soulful pop tune like Night Running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWTFfEnMCCc

Best Character: Sayaka Kanamori

    This was actually probably the hardest category for me to decide on. It was stuck hard between Eizoken's Kanamori and Akudama Drive's Doctor. I know those are a powerfully different pair in basically every way, but it was specifically for their startling differences that both characters stuck out to me so much. In the end though, it was the poignant rounding out of, and emotional hooks of Kanamori's character that let her triumph over her delightfully two-dimensional opposition.     Kanamori already had me from episode one. In a show that I wasn't really worried about the usual diversions of anime ingestion like picking a favorite character, Kanamori sealed herself as “Best-girl” from the word go. I have mad respect for a girl who knows what she wants, and has a clear idea of how she's going to go about getting it (See also: Doctor.) But Kanamori was more than a driving desire for success and money. Underneath her unstoppable ambition there was a very real, very relatable driving impetus. She stood apart, and yet still believably vulnerable and invested in the people she associated with. It was always a blast watching her suffer as the only thing keeping the more creative minds on track, and yet she was never reduced to a simple task master; her love and respect for her friends was always clearly visible. I could go on and on about how Kanamori is a nearly perfect character, but I hope I've said enough already without having to resort to senseless rambling.

Best Moment: Howan confesses her feeling to Himeko (Show By Rock!! Mashumairesh!!)

    By the time episode six rolled around, Mashumairesh!! had already shown marked improvements over its progenitor in basically every area. Not only was the story in a better place by focusing on what had worked in the original series, (Ya know the BAND part of this show about bands) but the cast was also doing a good job of standing out from their seniors and feeling more equally rounded out. Where the original series had just kinda been the Cyan show with guest stars, I felt like I had an actual grip on all four of the main girls now.     There were however the usual issues that come with a cute-girls-doing-cute-things series, chief among them the “ambiguously gay member of the group who constantly reacts with clear romantic interest towards the main protagonist but the writing will never actually do anything with those feelings” trope. Retoree had spent the better part of the first two seasons fawning over Cyan only for nothing to come of it and, despite the increased focus on all of the girls this time around, it looked like we were going to get the same old song and dance with Himeko's feelings towards Howan.     But then the climax of episode six hit and, midst a really intense subplot about Himeko's abandonment complex, Howan comes out with a straight up love confession. And I kept waiting for the usual dead-ends these moments always seem to have. The “I love you! I love the girls too! I love the band!” Or a “I love being with you.” and the dreaded, “I love having you as my most precious friend.” But none of that happened. It was a full on heart-felt, “I love you, Himeko. I want to stay with you forever!” I'm just not used to getting that sort of straightforwardness from my silly little band shows, so I was shocked, but also completely overjoyed. And frankly the series just kept getting better from there.     The evolution of their relationship built off that moment, no dreaded resetting of the status quo. I daresay it was on the power of this moment alone that I wanted to include this series in my top five at all. If there was anything I would want other anime to take from Mashumairesh!! it's that it's okay to introduce radical changes to character relationships partway through a season, and it's okay to let characters unequivocally state their feelings for each other. People will respond positively to that earnestness, I promise.

[aspiring-ginger]

Forget-Me-Not Ch.1 (Jaskier x Reader)

Summary: Y/n is a college student who stumbles into the world of the witcher. Part 1 of ???

Warnings: Depression, mental illness, swearing

Word count: 2,823

Pairing(s): Jaskier x fem!reader, platonic Geralt x fem!reader

A/N: Hi guys!! I’ve recently fallen deep into the witcher hell! Having read many modern girl in Thedas fics for dragon age, I figured I’d try my hand at a modern girl in the continent sort of fic! This is my first fic so I apologize for any errors. Feedback always appreciated! Enjoy!

Masterlist I Next I

You stood up from your spot on the bed with a stretch, wondering how long you’ve been caught up in your work this time. Final exams were coming up and you knew you needed to study quite a bit for that one damned class where the professor just hated your guts. You scoffed at your understatement.

“Hates the whole world and the concept of fun itself, more like”, you grumbled to yourself as you collected various notes and papers strewn about the blankets.

It was nearing the end of fall semester of your second year of college, so time was quickly ticking by until the time came for you to choose your major. You opted to go in undecided, with a plan to get as many generic classes over with first. Frankly, you still had no idea what to choose, and you thought it was ridiculous that you were expected to decide the fate of your whole adult career just based on a few classes. 

You checked the time, 1:47 am. Stuffing everything back into your backpack, you debated whether you should just call it a night and go to bed, or stay up for just a little bit longer doing something you enjoy before bed. You knew it was probably a good idea to go to sleep but you just couldn’t help that itch in your brain that needed some fun. Netflix released their newest series The Witcher which you were very excited for, and had gone and played all of the games in preparation and to get a feel for the world. Obviously you fell in love with the story and you couldn’t wait to watch the show, but you had shown some restraint and restricted yourself from watching any of it until after finals were done because, let’s be honest, you knew you would get sucked in and binge the whole entire thing instead of studying.

It wasn’t too late at night, there have definitely been much later nights this week, plus you had done such a good job actually studying instead of putting everything off until the last minute….. it wouldn’t hurt to watch just one episode, would it? You glanced around the room, noting that your roommate wasn’t there. Right. She said she was studying with her boyfriend and wouldn’t be home that night. “Studying”. You shrugged and changed into your pajamas, then hopped back into bed with a laugh. All your friends had been talking about this show and now you could actually participate in their conversations! You quickly settled in, switched on your tv, and started the first episode.

Your mind was absolutely racing. What a great way to end the season!! You’d been on the edge of your seat waiting to see what would happen to Tissaia and Yennefer, and your heart just melted at the sight of Geralt and Ciri finally meeting. You grabbed your phone to text your best friend all about it when- 

“Oh FUCK,” Your lock screen showed the time, 10:03 am. You missed your fucking 8 am class, the one you had just spent all that time studying for, because you did the exact fucking thing you promised yourself you wouldn’t do. Thankfully it was only a review day before the final, but it was the last review day before the final, and you still had questions on the material. You groaned and slumped down in your bed, burying your face into your pillow. 

’Such a fucking idiot, I cant believe this is fucking happening,’ you thought, tears of frustration welling up in your eyes, ’of course I would do this, this is just so me. Fucking stupid and dumb and worthless and-’

Your spiraling thoughts of self loathing were interrupted by your roommate opening the door and slipping into your shared room. You reluctantly picked up your head when you heard her call out your name with a sigh.

“Really (y/n)? You fall asleep studying again? You really should set an alarm or something, didn’t you miss your early class or whatever?” She asked as she plopped down on her bed, kicking off her shoes. “I know you were super stressed about studying this year but jeez- oh come on. Netflix? Really? What happened to ms ’I’m going to do such a good job studying this semester and kissing professor what’s his face’s ass so I get a good grade’?” She mocked.

Your cheeks burned as you tried to subtly wipe off the tears streaked down your face “Look I actually have been doing a better job at keeping up with my work and everything this semester, so I can stand to take a fucking break every once and awhile!” You huffed

Your roommate rolled her eyes and scoffed, “Seriously? Haven’t you missed like 15 classes or something? Just stop kidding yourself and accept that you’re just not going to get that good of a grade, dude. Plus can’t you just play the whole depression card and get like, an extended deadline or something? Pft, I wish I could have something like that. My life would be sooo much easier. Ugh. Whatever. I’m going to take a nap, I’m tired. If you need to cry go do it somewhere else or I will throw a pillow at you," 

You flipped her off and got out of bed. You still had 2 more classes to go to, and those review packets weren’t going to do themselves. You got ready with a sigh. It was going to be a long day.

You sat down on a bench outside, having just finished your last class of the day. It had been pretty miserable as you predicted, your brain just absolute mush after staying awake for so long. Your temper was definitely shorter, and you had snapped at your friends way more than you should have. You had just paused to take out your earbuds and put on some music for the walk back to your dorm, when you felt a pit settle at the bottom of your stomach. You knew you definitely needed sleep, but that wouldn’t explain your sudden feeling of unease. You sat up and glanced around you, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was only late afternoon but already dark out, and there weren’t many students around. You put your headphones in and adjusted your coat, trying to ignore that feeling and started your walk back home.

As you walked, you could have sworn you saw someone following you out of the corner of your eye, but each time you turned around there was nothing but the usual barren trees and dull leaves covering the sidewalk. You reassured yourself that if somebody actually was following you, you’d be able to hear them crunching the leaves behind you. Even though you were listening to your music. Right. Everything was fine.

You nervously fiddled with the straps of your backpack as you paused to double check behind you. Again, there was nothing there, but you still had that sinking feeling in your stomach and it had only been getting worse as you kept going. You felt the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, and you could’ve sworn you heard something rustle the leaves behind you- you whipped your head back around and there was still nothing. It then crossed your mind that even though it was dark, there definitely should be people around. Classes should be ending and students should be walking home, but there was no one. You began to pick up your pace, going into a nervous jog. Your building was almost in sight, just a few more minutes and then you’d be safe- a hot bolt of terror hit and you broke into a sprint. You didn’t dare look behind you as you ran, you didn’t even know why you were running but you had a feeling that you should. You felt hot breath against the back of your neck and something claw against your back. You pushed yourself to run faster, your blood pounding in your ears along with your music. 

Your feet stomped across the sidewalk, almost there you could almost see your dorm! These damn leaves were everywhere, so many that you couldn’t even make out where the sidewalk ended and the grass began. Your foot slipped, ankle rolling as you fell face first into the leaves. You scrambled back up and continued running, your headphones now hanging around your neck. You spat out leaves as you cursed, weaving between trees that began to slow you down. Wait. Trees? You glanced to where various classrooms and dorms should’ve been, now replaced with thick, dense trees on all sides. You still heard the- the thing, whatever it was, behind you. You felt it’s hot sickly breath on your neck. You could smell the rotting stench of decay and blood. You heard it’s ragged panting and inhuman whine. It’s claws swiped at your back once more, and you seethed in pain. Your ankle was on fire and you didn’t know how much further you could run. 

Suddenly you heard the distinct sound of metal clanging behind you, followed by a wet squelch. You turned your head to look, still running forward, daring to get a glimpse of what possibly could be chasing you. You caught a flash of silver and black and brown before you collided into a tree and everything went black.

You heard muffled conversation when you briefly regained consciousness. It was loud and rushed and sounded like arguing? You couldn’t make out any words so you tried to turn your head in the direction of the noise, but found that task much more difficult than you thought. You huffed at the fogginess of your mind and the shouting came to an abrupt stop. Though you couldn’t open your eyes, you felt the presence of someone in front of you. You heard a murmur of something you couldn’t quite catch- and you slipped back into a deeper sleep.

When you woke for the second time it was a lot quieter than the first. You could hear the crackle of a fire and the wind rustling through leaves above, and smell the smoke from the fire and the damp earth below. There was also a soft melody coming from somewhere to your left, chords plucked out on an instrument you couldn’t quite recognize. You could also hear the grating sound of metal on metal. Was someone sharpening a blade? You groaned as you tried to sit up. Though your body felt stiff and your head full of cotton balls, your muscles responded accordingly. The music came to a stop as you blinked awake.

"Uhh, Geralt? I think she’s awake now, for real. Could you please not use your witchery magic on our mysterious guest so we can actually, I dunno, talk to her? Ask her some questions? Instead of just rushing ahead with your steel or silver- oh alright then,” A voice called out, and you heard the crunch of footsteps coming towards you.

You looked to the source of the voice and found a brown haired man holding a funny looking guitar standing in front of a log near a campfire. You rubbed your eyes and realized no, that wasn’t a guitar but a mandolin? Lute? Some weird instrument, so he must’ve been the source of the music. He was dressed in a dark blue matching set of… some sort of renaissance costume? His jacket was undone and he wore a plain white shirt underneath, the top of which was unlaced so a few strands of chest hair poked out. His loose yet tight fitting pants were tucked into a pair of tall leather boots. He sure looked committed to his costume, even holding a quill in his other hand.

Your attention was quickly turned to the man approaching you. He had long silver hair, half pulled back, and was dressed in all black. His outfit matched the same renaissance theme as his friend, though less showy and more practical. His tight leather pants, rolled up sleeves, and very realistic looking sword were certainly eye catching, but what drew you in the most were his eyes. They were a bright golden color, and his irises had a slight curve to them that almost reminded you of a cat’s. You realized that they must be cosplayers who already have costumes from the new show. They were both very high quality, and the special attention to detail was amazing.

The Geralt cosplayer knelt down in front of you, his hand gripping your shoulder tight.

“Who are you and where did you come from?” He demanded with a very accurate impression of the Geralt voice.

“I-I uh,” you cleared your voice “My name is (y/n) and I’m from (hometown). I was just walking back from class to my dorm when this thing started chasing me and I was running and- wait, what happened to it? Where am I? And why the hell are you guys dressed like that what’s going on?! Is this some sort of prank or something? Or- or a photoshoot? I don’t understand,”

You tried to scooch back away from the strange man, but his grip stayed strong and he just narrowed his eyes. 

“Oh the Ekimmara? Geralt already delt with it, my lady, don’t you fret. You’re safe now with us,” The Jaskier lookalike piped up from his log.

The Geralt sighed, “Yes, the Ekimmara is dead. You reek of magic and your clothes are strange, yet I can sense that you’re not a mage. Who are you?”

You had to admit, their costumes were amazing and their impressions were flawless. They even looked strikingly similar to the real actors.

“Look I already told you. I was at school, something chased me, and I woke up here. I’m already having a shitty day with my classes and college bullshit, and I just want to go home. Your cosplays are very nice, but I really don’t have time for this,”

“College? As in Oxenfurt University? I’ll have you know I just graduated from there before running into Geralt here, but I can’t say I recognize you. Are you perhaps in more art and painting classes? Although I am, of course, a master of the seven arts- poetry and song are much more my strong suit,” The Jaskier said, walking up.

“Jaskier,” Geralt warned with a glare, removing his hand from your shoulder.

“Look I get it! You really have the characters down. Can I please just go home now?” You shifted away from Geralt. You realized you weren’t wearing your coat, instead it had been draped across you acting as a makeshift blanket as you sat on a bed roll.

“Characters? My lady, are you alright? See, Geralt? I told you to go easy with the axii nonsense, now she’s confused.” Jaskier exclaimed with a scoff.

Geralt narrowed his eyes at you and put his sword down. 

“What? I’m not confused!” You protested “You even have the Jaskier attitude down perfect. Can I go now? Or you at least tell me where we are?”

“You know my name? How do you know who I am, I haven’t even introduced myself yet! I know I’ve played at many of the local taverns, but I would’ve recognized a face so lovely as yours,” Jaskier tried to mask his unease with his usual flirtatious remarks.

Geralt held a hand up for Jaskier to stop talking “Who do you think we are, and what do you know of us?”

“Well that’s easy,” you scoffed. “You’re dressing up as Geralt of Rivia. You know witcher, white wolf, travelling with your best friend Jaskier. And then you would be Jaskier-or Dandelion but I think you’re aiming for more Jaskier.”

Jaskier looked stunned, while Geralt pressed further “Dressing up as?”

“Yes. Cosplaying, whatever term you want to use. And you’re doing a great job acting like them too, but you can cut it out now. It was cool, but now it’s just getting old." 

"So…you think we’re acting? Playing the roles of Geralt and myself? We’re not characters, we’re real. And I’m not his best friend. A friend definitely, but he would never admit it. What do you know us from?”

“The Witcher. The show, the games, the books. They’re super popular again. I think it’s even back on the charts for top selling fantasy or something." 

Geralt and Jaskier exchanged looks.

"Geralt, why don’t you show her something to prove that you’re the real deal. Something only a witcher could do?”

Geralt raised his hand and traced a symbol in the air. A small ball of flame appeared in his hand, which he stretched out towards you. You could feel the heat from the fire against your skin and you looked at the two men in shock.

“What the fuck?!”

[aion-rsa]

Why The Great North Isn’t Just Another Bob’s Burgers

https://ift.tt/3rSBEcN

It’s easy to take one look at FOX’s newest animated comedy, The Great North, and assume it’s exactly like the long running and beloved Bob’s Burgers. Two of The Great North’s creators wrote a good chunk of Bob’s Burgers episodes and the shows share a near-identical art style after all. At first glance some of the Bob’s Burgers character archetypes seem to be involved as well: awkward daughter, an odd sarcastic youngest child, and a loving, if somewhat offbeat, father.  So why bother with something like Bob’s Burgers when you could just watch Bob’s Burgers?

While there are a few surface similarities, by the end of the first episode of The Great North you’ll realize there’s so much more to it than just an Alaskan set version of the Belcher family. It’s got humor all its own, unique characters, and the potential to be something that isn’t merely a rival to Bob’s Burgers but a truly unique experience.

So let’s head up north to discover all the reasons why The Great North is so wonderful. As a brief primer, the show is set in Alaska and follows the Tobin family with fisherman dad Beef, artistic daughter Judy, loveably dumb son Ham, bear-suit wearing son Moon, oldest and eager to please son Wolf, his always chipper and new to Alaska fiancé Honeybee, and Judy’s best imaginary friend Alanis Morissette…played by Alanis Morssette.

The Family’s Lack of a Mom is Refreshingly Handled

A lack of a mom is a huge trope in animation at this point (look at damn near every ‘90s Disney movie) and if there is a mom, especially in a comedy, she tends to be wacky or overly loving. The Great North puts a new twist on both of these in its very first episode.

The plot of the premiere deals with Beef struggling to get over his ex-wife years after she abandoned the family. An ex-wife isn’t anything to write home about, a single dad taking care of a family is a comedy trope in of itself, but it’s what we learn about Beef’s ex that makes this element so refreshing.

Instead of the mom just not being present or having died off screen, Beef only acts like she’s dead, a fabrication everyone goes along with to keep him sane. When he isn’t around though Judy is quick to point out the rest of the family doesn’t buy this and they never liked her much anyway. She even flat out states,

“She was a really bad mom, okay? And it was actually better when she left.”

The other kids then list off horrible things she did, like name their dog Grandma solely so, “she wouldn’t be lying when she said we were with Grandma when people asked.” She runs a blog with her “new lover” about stores that wont chase you if you shoplift. Even in her goodbye letter to Ham she just wrote, “smell you later.”

I love this so much because it replaces all the easy sentimentality of a dead or simply absent mom that comedies love and instead opens up some fantastic new storytelling opportunities. In the pilot alone it gives us deep insight into Beef, that despite how awful she was he refuses to think anything but the best of her. Why is he like that? Is it his way of not thinking about all the terrible things she did? She’s left him so broken he has to concoct an elaborate fantasy to keep himself sane. It makes you instantly love the character and while he does seemingly get over this denial in the pilot I can foresee it impacting him for the rest of the series.

It’s also so refreshing because the kids aren’t all that broken up about it. Knowing their mom was terrible helps reflect a lot of what kids go through in real life. Sometimes they just have a bad parent and there’s no deep explanation of why, they just are and it’s not great. Maybe Judy and the others are hurt by this and I’d love to see the show tackle that in the future but even if it strictly keeps this part of their characters on the comedic side of things? It’s empowering. These kids aren’t broken up by their awful mom and want her back; they’re thriving BECAUSE she isn’t around. 

Nick Offerman Being Nick Offerman

Over the years Nick Offerman has perfected the deadpan and loveable character that brought him to fame in Parks and Recreation. His role as Beef isn’t a major departure from that mold but it does allow Offerman to be even warmer than his most famous character. 

As Beef he’s a capable man who gets up to see the sun rise and chop wood. He loves nature so much he steals a potted plant from a mall to take better care of it. His love for his family is on full display and he often goes to absurd lengths to keep them together. Offerman brings a great charm to the role and all of the jokes he delivers are winners. 

The Rural Location

Bob’s Burgers draws much inspiration from its city setting, while The Great North is set in rural Alaska. This may seem like a surface level change but once again opens up all kinds of new opportunities for stories and characters. Where the Belcher family was somewhat cynical to city life (you would be to with a landlord breathing down your neck) the Tobin family openly embraces the chilly north.

Judy sits out on the roof and talks with her imaginary best friend, Moon takes great pride in his ability to mimic a soon to be eaten cadaver laying out in the snow, and Beef specifically gets up every morning to stare in wild wonder at Alaska’s majesty while whispering “hot dog.” The whole family even delights in going to the mall, which is the kind of joy only someone living out in the middle of nowhere can truly appreciate.

The Different Character Dynamics

Even after eleven truly fantastic seasons Bob’s Burgers characters still manage to never feel stale and the team behind the show always finds new ways to play around with them. With such a rock solid cast of characters you’d think they could tackle any story imaginable but The Great North is already proving to be a home for stories that just wouldn’t work for Bob’s Burgers.

The most noticeable change is that most of the kids are older. Judy and Ham are both sixteen which opens up a lot of possibilities that couldn’t be done with the Belcher kids. They can get involved in more serious relationships, have jobs (as Judy gets in the first episode), and are able to be more autonomous from the family. Wolf, the oldest of all of them, is engaged! Imagine what could be done with a soon-to-be married couple? Honeybee herself also functions as a delighted fish out of water to Alaska, her thoughts on the Tobins’ life a needed commentary. Her outgoing personality also clashes well with Moon’s stoic nature.

Read more

TV

The 10 Best Bob’s Burgers Episodes

By Chris Cummins

Judy and Ham also share a more loving sibling dynamic than any of the Belcher kids ever have. In Bob’s Burgers the kids don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves, they’re more likely to make sarcastic quips about one other. The Great North though has Judy and Ham share a special bond, the two have a secret handshake that goes for an indeterminable amount of time. It’s really sweet and it makes me excited to see what kind of comedy can be mined from this more openly affectionate family.

Ham Is Gay And I Love Him

Ham is my favorite character so far in this show. He’s a little slow on the uptake but loves everyone in his family a lot and can even make a perfect replica of a cadaver… in the form of a cake. He also happens to be gay, a fact that is wonderfully confirmed in the first episode when he blurts out, “I AM GAY!

To which Moon responds, “we know. You’ve come out to us a bunch of times.”

Beef then adds, “we love you just the way you are, damn it!”

Ham, clearly not remembering his past comings-out, yells, “WELL, THANK YOU FOR BEING AN ALLY!”

It’s a great scene and kicks any subtext out the door. Queer audiences don’t have to sit around guessing who COULD be queer in the show (as they’re so often forced to do with so little representation in media) there’s a character who said OUT LOUD he’s gay. He’s one of us!

Bob’s Burgers has had several one-time gay characters (Bob did refer to himself as “mostly straight” once but that was more of a gag) but getting a gay teen in the main cast is sublime. He’s also a different sort of gay teen then we’re used to in television, with a tiny “probably thinks it’s cooler than it actually is” mustache and his “not quite all there” personality. He’s not a stereotype, he’s got some obvious flaws, but he’s loveable! Sure enough, his family loves him and accepts him.

Having a gay character in the cast opens up so many story possibilities. Are there any other gay kids in this rural town? What if there’s only one and he’s forced to date him? Does he know what kind of guys he likes yet? Where do the gay kids hang out in this town? 

It also must be reiterated that his family loves him and accepts him. While drama over coming out and acceptance is totally valid, I’m glad that Ham will get the chance to just be gay and his family will support him all the way. We can just see him happily (if somewhat absent-mindedly) live his life and that’s needed in a world with so little queer representation. As a pansexual man myself it’s heartwarming. I wish I had a character like Ham when I was growing up. 

Alanis Morissette Is A Main Character

Yes, Alanis Morissette is in The Great North (played by the actual Alanis Morissette) but in an absolutely perfect choice she’s not the REAL Alanis Morissette, she’s Judy’s best imaginary friend who just happens to be Alanis Morissette. Judy’s artistic so it makes sense she’d look up to someone as incredible as the Canadian musical genius. As an imaginary best friend she tends to serve as a sounding board for Judy’s thoughts and gives absolutely flawless advice.

Even better though? The imaginary Alanis Morissette also only appears in the Aurora Borealis. That’s… incredible. What a way to take advantage of the show’s location!

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

 The Great North is a delight. It’s only been two episodes (the third one premieres February 14 and the first two are available on Hulu) but it’s already shown a lot of promise. Not in the “oh it’ll get good eventually” sense but in the “no it’s already great and I want to see more of it!” Don’t think of it as another Bob’s Burgers, just think of it as its own wonderful moose-filled show (it’s Alaska, what did you expect) and you’ll have a fantastic time. Truly, in these dark times we could all use a little help from imaginary best friend Alanis Morissette.

The post Why The Great North Isn’t Just Another Bob’s Burgers appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3tVzoTX

[abusybuzzingbee]

Pilot | Supernatural Season 1 Episode 1 Rewrite | Dean x Reader

A/N:::: Hello!! I am a royal dumbass and just accidentally deleted my whole tumblr. I was trying to get rid of my main account and accidentally got rid of it all!! So, this is bee from @abusybuzzingbee coming back at you with reuploads of my supernatural rewrites. So sorry to all of my supporters for my tomfoolery.

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader

Major Characters: Dean Winchester, Reader, Sam Winchester

Warnings: Canon violence, language, Dean and the reader being assholes to each other, this is going to be the slowest burn that ever did burn, so buckle up!

Word Count: 7,643

Summary: The reader is a lonely young hunter on the road to Jericho, California where she bumps into two boys on the search for their father.

Series Rewrite Masterlist

Season 1 Masterlist

It was an early morning yesterday

I was up before the dawn.’

‘Funny how the sun’s just rising,’ you thought.

‘And I really have enjoyed my stay

But I must be moving on.’

The sound of the familiar tune of “Goodbye Stranger” coming from the radio of your new hijacked wheels-- a 2002 Toyota Camry, to be exact-- put a smile on your face.

‘Like a king without a castle

Like a queen without a throne

I’m an early morning lover

And I must be moving on.’

As you drove along a remote highway on the way to Jericho, California, you threw a glance to the wind lightly rustling the leaves of the trees outside of your driver’s side mirror.

‘Now I believe in what you say

Is the undisputed truth.’

Scenes such as this have always calmed you. The first beams of light stretching up from over the horizon, the vivid colors of the tree leaves, the hum of the radio of your newest car, and the sound of your tires gliding over the pavement. 

‘But I have to have things my own way

To keep me in my youth.’

These road trips in between hunts were the only taste you had ever had of a normal life. Not that you wanted a normal life, you think you would be too bored in the suburbs. However, it is comforting to have a small break from monsters while driving from place to place to relax.

‘Like a ship without an anchor

Like a slave without a chain

Just a thought of those sweet ladies

Sends a shiver through my veins.’

The latest case you had picked up on was the disappearance of several men on Centennial Highway in Jericho. 

‘And I will go on shining

Shining like brand new

I’ll never look behind me

My troubles will be few.’

The last disappearance had been some kid named Troy. Poor bastard.

You had very little knowledge of what you were walking into. You decided that you would head to the scene of the crime to try and get a better idea of what you were dealing with.

‘Goodbye stranger

It’s been nice

Hope you find your paradise

Tried to see your point of view

Hope your dreams will all come true.’

Just a few more hours and you’d be there.

‘Goodbye Mary, goodbye Jane--’

You turned the music up just a bit as you picked up your speed on the highway and thought about my last successful hunt in Alexandria, Louisiana. 

‘Will we ever meet again?’

You were proud of how you did on that hunt, but it was freeing to leave towns you had previously hunted in in your rearview mirror.

‘Feel no sorrow, feel no shame--’

It wasn’t a matter of feeling guilty about what you had done while you were in that town; you had nothing to feel guilty about. It just always hurt you to think of the sad faces of the people who had already lost family members before you got there to do your job.

‘Come tomorrow, feel no pain--’

There would always be that little bit of trauma that you carried with you because of all you had seen on hunts, but c’est la vie.

‘Sweet devotion (Goodbye, Mary)

It’s not for me (Goodbye, Jane).’

You let your mind go blank and get completely absorbed in the music as you continued to drive along.

‘Just give me motion (Will we ever)

To set me free (Meet again?)’

Music was the one constant in your life that kept you grounded. It was so powerful. Music could express so many feelings and bring those same emotions out of its listeners.

‘In the land and the ocean (Feel no sorrow)

Far away (Feel no shame)--’

You loved oldies music. From ‘70′s hippie music to ‘80′s rock, all the way back to Edith Piaf in the 1940′s. 

‘It’s the life I’ve chosen (Come tomorrow)

Every day (Feel no pain)’

You wished you had the time to sit down for long enough to learn to play an instrument. There was a whole list of things you wanted to learn to play including piano, guitar, ukelele, and drums. 

‘Maybe one day,’ you thought.

‘So goodbye, Mary (Goodbye, Mary)

Goodbye, Jane (Goodbye, Jane)

Will we ever (Will we ever)

Meet again? (Meet again?)’

**** 

A few hours later, you were parked on Sylvania Bridge in Jericho. You had stopped a few miles back at a gas station to change into an outfit that looked a little more professional than a pair of baggy sweatpants and a t-shirt and opted for one of the many police uniforms you carried around with you. This one was a federal marshal suit. Included the khakis, shirt with a little police badge on the pocket, and a belt with your fake badge on it. It was your mom’s. She threw herself into the many roles she played on the job and made sure she had the costumes to fit the part. Once she passed, you just couldn’t let them go.

You hopped out of the car and walked over to the scene of the crime. You noticed two boys that looked about my age talking to one of the deputies on site. You watched them flash badges to the deputy, but neither was in uniform. 

‘Oh, boy.’

"You two are a little young for marshals, aren't you?” you heard the deputy remark as you walked up to them. 

“Thanks, that’s awfully kind of you,” the shorter guy laughed. 

'That’s my cue,’ you thought.

“Hiya, fellas,” you smiled brightly, glancing between the three of them.

The two guys turned back to look at you. The shorter one pointed at himself with a questioning look on his face directed at you. You eyed him, attempting to tell him to just go with it. 

“Why aren’t you two in uniform?” you asked, standing next to the taller boy and glancing between the two of them. You looked at the deputy. “Sorry to have them bothering you. New hires,” you lied, rolling your eyes. “I’m supposed to oversee how they handle this case.”

“Mm-hmm...” the deputy said, squinting at you. He was clearly suspicious.

I extended my right hand to the deputy and reached for my badge with the other. “I’m Agent Nicks, nice to meet you.” I showed him my badge.

“Deputy Jaffe.” He shook my hand and nodded at my badge.

“Man, you guys can’t catch a break. You just had another killing like this, right?” I nodded my head at Troy’s car at the center of the crime scene as I spoke. 

“Yeah, that's right. About a mile up the road. There've been others before that,” the deputy spoke as I walked over to the car, the two boys trailing behind me.

“So, this victim, you knew him?” The taller boy questioned.

The deputy nodded. “Town like this, everybody knows everybody.”

The shorter boy circled the car once and stopped between the taller boy and I. “Any connection between the victims, besides that they're all men?” he asked.

“No,” Jaffe answered, “Not so far as we can tell.”

“So what's the theory?” The taller guy asked.

“Honestly, we don't know. Serial murder? Kidnapping ring?”

“Well, that is exactly the kind of crack police work I'd expect out of you guys,” the shorter guy quipped.

Your eyes widened as you watched the deputy’s incredulous expression. You didn’t like this kid already. You bit back a snicker when the dude who was with him stomped on his foot.

“Thank you for your time. Gentlemen,” the tall guy nodded.

You turned to follow your two “colleagues” away from the crime scene. The shorter guy smacked the taller one on the back of the head.

“Ow! What was that for?” 

“Why'd you have to step on my foot?”

“Why do you have to talk to the police like that?”

The two men realized you were following them and turned to look at you.

“Uh, can we help you?” the shorter one asked.

“No,” you replied. “I’ll be out of your hair in a second. I just think it’d be a little weird if I left the scene of the crime without regrouping with my ‘proteges’ first.”

The taller one nodded. It became clear to you he was the sensible one of the two.

“About that--” the shorter one came back, implying that you should explain yourself.

“Yeah, sorry for stepping all over your hunt.”

The two seemed in disbelief that you had figured out their secret.

“Takes one to know one,” You snickered. “I had to get the same information you two did, and it’d look really weird if two rounds of federal marshals came through for one case. I’m (Y/N), by the way.” You stuck out your hand for the two of them to shake.

The taller one took it first. “I’m Sam,” he smiled, “that’s my brother, Dean.” 

You shook Dean’s hand after Sam’s.

“You shake hands?” Dean asked.

You shrugged with a tilt of your head to the side.

“Weird.”

You raised an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” you sighed, “I got this hunt under control if you boys wanna hit the road.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, lady,” Dean started, “We were here first.”

“Geez, sorry. I thought I was doing you guys a favor by letting you hit the road.”

“Sorry,” Sam spoke for his brother, “We’re looking for our dad. The only information we have on where he could be is here, so we’ve got this covered.”

You nodded. “I hope you find him soon. Good meeting you two.” You turned to leave.

“Wait,” Sam called after you. “Three heads are better than two. We could use your help.”

Dean was quick to cut in. “No, no we do not--”

“What?” you asked, smirking. “You don’t like me Dean-o?”

He opened his mouth to respond, obviously trying to think of something to say. He came up blank after a few seconds.

You chuckled. “I’m down to help.”

Sam smiled brightly at you. “Great!” 

You glanced over Sam’s shoulder and your jaw clenched. Sam turned to follow your gaze.

The sheriff was talking to two FBI agents. He looked at you three pointedly. “Can I help you kids?”

“No, sir, we were just leaving,” Dean told him. He then nodded at the FBI agents as they walked past your trio. “Agent Mulder. Agent Scully.”

The three of you headed past the sheriff, whose gaze you could feel piercing through your back.

You noticed the 1967 Impala parked a little farther back than your car, wondering how you could have missed it when you pulled up to the scene.

“Aw, cool!” you exclaimed, quickly walking over to it. “Sweet ride.”  You ran your hand over the hood.

“Hey,” Dean called, “Hands off my baby.”

“You dating a car, Grumpy?” you smirked. 

He rolled his eyes at you. 

“Those your wheels over there?” Sam asked. He nodded towards your Camry.

“Unfortunately. Had to jack that car a few states back,” you responded.

Sam nodded. “You can catch a ride back with us if you want.”

Dean tossed a look at his brother.

“Cool, thanks,” you answered, smiling. “Let me just pull it off the road into some trees or something.”

***

"Who are we looking for again?” you asked the boys as you strolled around town. You had ditched your federal marshal getup and left it along with the rest of your stuff in the back of Dean’s car. 

Dean scoffed at your question.

“Hey, you didn’t answer the first time I asked, so I had to do it again,” you threw back.

“Troy’s girlfriend,” Sam answered.

“Thank you, Sam.” You threw a pointed look at Dean. He just turned his face away from you.

A few paces down from your pack, a young girl with brown hair was putting missing posters up with Troy’s face on them. 

"I'll bet you that's her,” Dean pointed out.

“Yeah,” Sam affirmed.

Your group walked up to her as Dean spoke, “You must be Amy.”

“Yeah,” she answered plainly.

“Yeah, Troy told us about you. We're his uncles. I'm Dean, this is Sammy.”

“And who’s that?” Amy glanced at you.

“I’m (Y/N). A friend of theirs.”

Amy nodded, looking back to Sam and Dean. “He never mentioned you to me.” She began to walk away with her posters.

Dean was quick to follow her. “Well, that's Troy, I guess. We're not around much, we're up in Modesto.”

“So, we're looking for him too, and we're kinda asking around,” Sam continued for Dean.

A friend of Amy’s came up to her and asked, “Hey, are you okay?”

Once Amy responded with a simple, “Yeah,” her friend stayed with her.

"You mind if we ask you a couple questions?” I asked Amy.

***

You, Amy’s friend, Rachel, and Amy were packed into one side of a diner booth while Sam and Dean sat opposite you.  

Amy spoke about what happened the night Troy went “missing.” “I was on the phone with Troy. He was driving home. He said he would call me right back, and...he never did.”

“He didn't say anything strange, or out of the ordinary?” Sam asked.

Amy shook her head. “No. Nothing I can remember.”

You glanced at the pentagram pendant she was wearing. “I like your necklace.”

“Troy gave it to me. Mostly to scare my parents with all that devil stuff,” Amy laughed. 

You smiled. “Actually, it means just the opposite. A pentagram is protection against evil. Really powerful. I mean, if you believe in that kind of thing.” 

“Okay,” Dean cut in. “Thank you, Unsolved Mysteries.”

You rolled your eyes at him while he took his arm off of the back of Sam’s seat and leaned forward on his elbows. “Here's the deal, ladies. The way Troy disappeared, something's not right. So if you've heard anything...” he trailed off, waiting for them to answer.

Amy and Rachel glanced between each other. 

“What is it?” Dean asked.

“Well, it's just,” Rachel began, “I mean, with all these guys going missing, people talk."

“About?” You questioned turning a bit more inward to Rachel. 

“It's kind of this local legend. This one girl? She got murdered out on Centennial, like decades ago,” Rachel stated.

You watched Rachel attentively, nodding.

“Well, supposedly she's still out there. She hitchhikes, and whoever picks her up? Well, they disappear forever.”

You glanced at the boys with a quirked eyebrow.

***

Dean typed away on the library computer on the archive search page for the Jericho Herald. He had the words “Female Murder Hitchhiking" typed into the search bar. When he pressed enter, nothing came up. Dean replaced “Hitchhiking” with “Centennial Highway,” and once again, crickets. 

“Wait a minute,” Sam started, “So angry spirits are born out of violent death, right?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied as if it was obvious.

“Well, maybe it’s not murder,” Sam stated.

“Ohhh,” you started, “I’m pickin’ up what you’re puttin’ down.” You knew Sam was thinking suicide.

Sam smiled at you.

“Let me try,” Sam told Dean.

“I got it,” Dean came back.

Sam shoved Dean out of the chair and took over.

“Dude!” Dean hit Sam on the shoulder. “You're such a control freak.”

You laughed at their banter.

“Can it, (Y/N),” Dean told you.

“So, what I can’t laugh?”

“No, no, you can’t.”

“I literally just met you and I’ve had it up to here--” you flattened your hand and put it up by your eyebrow, “--with you already--”

“The feeling is mutual, sweetheart,” Dean cut you off. 

“You two wanna stop?” Sam asked. “Come look at this.”

Just as you thought, Sam had put “suicide” in place of “murder” in the search bar.

Sam snapped you out of your thoughts by saying, “This was 1981. Constance Welch, twenty-four years old, jumps off Sylvania Bridge, drowns in the river.”

“Does it say why she did it?” Dean asked.

“Yeah,” you started, leaning over Sam’s shoulder to get a better look at the screen, “An hour before they found her, she calls 911. Apparently, her two little kids are in the bathtub. She leaves them alone for a minute, and when she comes back, they aren't breathing. Both die.”

Something about the situation did not sit right with you; it sounded familiar. 

Sam continued reading. “‘ 'Our babies were gone, and Constance just couldn't bear it,' said husband Joseph Welch.’”

“The bridge look familiar to you?” Dean pointed out, looking at a picture of a man-- presumably Constance’s husband-- crying standing next to Sylvania Bridge.

“Well, we know where we’re headed,” you commented, walking toward the exit of the library. You could feel Dean’s eyes on you as you left.

***

By the time you finally got to Sylvania Bridge, it was late at night. You and the boys had stopped for a bite to eat before going back to the bridge. Troy’s car had long since been removed, the crime scene completely cleared out. 

Dean looked out over the edge of the bridge, standing next to you and Sam. “So this is where Constance took the swan dive.”

“So you think Dad would have been here?” Sam looked over at his brother.

"Well, he's chasing the same story and we're chasing him.” Dean continued down the bridge, the taller boy trailing behind him.

“Okay, so now what?”

“Now we keep digging until we find him. Might take a while.”

Sam stopped. “Dean, I told you, I've gotta get back by Monday—”

The brunet stopped, turning around. “Monday. Right. The interview.” Aggravation was clear in his tone.

“Yeah.”

You thought it best to take a step back while they had this discussion.

"Yeah, I forgot. You're really serious about this, aren't you? You think you're just going to become some lawyer? Marry your girl?” Dean’s tone got a bit more of an edge to it.

“Maybe. Why not?” Sam pushed back.

“Does Jessica know the truth about you? I mean, does she know about the things you've done?”

Sam stepped closer to Dean. “No, and she's not ever going to know.”

The older boy did not back down. “Well, that's healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy. But sooner or later you're going to have to face up to who you really are.” He turned around and kept walking.

Sam followed him, his arms out in question. “And who's that?”

“You're one of us.” Dean gestured to himself and back to you staying several paces back,

Sam hurried to get in front of his brother. “No. I'm not like you. This is not going to be my life.”

“You have a responsibility to—”

“To Dad? And his crusade? If it weren't for pictures I wouldn't even know what Mom looks like. And what difference would it make? Even if we do find the thing that killed her, Mom's gone. And she isn't coming back.”

When Dean grabbed his brother by the collar and shoved him against the bridge, you jumped into action.

“Hey, knock it off, Dean.”

“(Y/N)--” Dean warned, giving you a sideways glare. He looked back at Sam. “Don't talk about her like that.” He let Sam go and walked away from him.

You hurried over to Sam. “You okay?” You put your hand on his shoulder and met his hazel eyes.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Guys,” Dean called.

You looked to Dean who stared down to the railing at the edge of the bridge.

“Constance,” you let out, coming to stand next to Dean.

Constance looked back at your group before stepping off of the railing.

The three of you ran to the railing. 

“Where'd she go?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know, wanna jump down there and find out?” you sassed.

Dean glared at you as the sound of the Impala’s engine roared behind you.

The older Winchester flipped around. “What the—” 

Sam wheeled around, too. “Who's driving your car?” 

Dean pulled the keys out of his pocket and jingled them, his green eyes never leaving the Impala.

The car jerked into motion, barrelling over the bridge straight toward you and the Winchesters.

“Go! Go!” you yelled, turning and sprinting away.

Dean and Sam sped ahead of you, and you noticed the car gaining on you. Your heart raced and your breathing was labored. The car was way too close for comfort and left you with just one option.

You threw yourself over the railing, just barely managing to hang onto the edge of the bridge.

You heard the car engine stop just as something-- or someone-- hit the water.

You pulled yourself back over the railing and noticed Sam sitting on the railing calling for Dean.

You rushed over to Sam, leaning over the railing to try to find Dean.

He popped up a second later, his usually spikey hair flattened to his head with mud. In fact, his whole body was covered in mud.

“You okay?” You called down to him.

Dean sarcastically held up a thumb and pursed his lips. 

“Hey, I’m just checking on you, don’t be an ass,” you yelled back, a small smile playing on your lips.

“Fuck off,” he grunted, annoyed.

Sam laughed and got back onto the bridge.

You headed over to the Impala and checked it over, grabbing a towel out of your bag.

Dean had managed to climb back onto the bridge and made his way over to his baby. He opened the car’s hood and poked around to see if Constance had damaged it at all. After a moment, he shut the hood and leaned on it.

“Your car all right?” you heard Sam ask are you walked over to Dean with the towel.

“Yeah, whatever she did to it, seems all right now. That Constance chick, what a bitch!” He yelled at the spirit. 

You put the towel on Dean’s head and started to dry his hair off when he jerked away from you.

“What are you doing?”

You were quick to put the towel back on his head. “Helping.”

The dirty blond ripped the towel out of your hands. “I got it.”

“Fine.” You raised your hands up in surrender. You leaned against the car next to Dean. “You know, I been thinkin’.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Shut up, Dean. I’m serious.” You paused, taking in a breath. “Constance is a woman in white.”

Sam pursed his lips, shrugging. “Makes sense. I mean, the dead kids, suicide, killing unfaithful men.”

“Maybe.” The older Winchester’s monotone voice was followed by silence. A silence that was broken a few moments later by Sam.

“You smell like a toilet.”

You scrunched up your nose and giggled. 

“Can it, (Y/N).”

***

“You guys having a reunion or something?” the clerk asked, looking at the credit card Dean had placed on the motel’s front desk.

Sam cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”

“I had another guy, Burt Aframian. He came and bought out a room for the whole month.”

Dean looked over to his brother briefly and then turns his head back to the clerk. “What room’s he in?”

“Listen, kid, I can’t go around giving out people’s room numbers.”

Dean rolled his eyes.

You stepped out from behind the two boys. “Oh, please sir? He’s family, and we haven’t seen him in a while.” You gave him your best puppy dog eyes.

“Fine.”

***

“That how you get all the guys?”

“What?” you asked, not bothering to face Dean to answer his question. The two of you were stationed outside of John Winchester's room playing lookout while Sam picked the lock on the door.

“You know what I mean. I saw you makin’ eyes at the clerk.”

“Yeah, to get a room number.” You turned to face him, crossing your arms over your chest. “And it worked, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. It worked real well.” He turned to face you.

“You know, you don’t have to be such a dick all the time. I met you yesterday and have given you no reason not to like me. What’s your deal?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, my plate is kind of full. I’m trying to figure out what the hell happened to my dad. I have no idea whether he’s alive, dead, or captured, and he’s the only parent I have left. And my little brother is solely concerned about getting back to fucking Stanford, and I’m not even sure he cares about what happened to our dad. And now, enter (Y/N) trying to take over a hunt that is the only tie I have to my dad.” Dean’s face was incredibly close to yours.

Sam had long since gone into the room and decided to leave the two of you alone to hash out your frustrations.

You held your ground, but your voice took on less of an angry tone. You were strictly playing defense at this point. “But I wasn’t trying to take it over to be mean, and as soon as you got so defensive about the hunt, I backed down and just offered to help--”

“Yeah, and I didn't want your help. Sam was the one who let you in, probably hoping that if you were here he could shag ass back to Stanford. So forgive me if I’m a little on edge.” He pulled his face away from yours, wheeling around to pinch the bridge of his nose. 

“Well, I’m sorry for being such an inconvenience. Perhaps you’ve forgotten the fact that I’ve helped you guys more than I’ve hurt you. I pulled your asses out of a crack when you were talking to the police. I was the one who figured out what kind of a spook we’re dealing with here. I want you to find your dad. I really do. But I also want you to stop being so awful to me. And it’s just me specifically!” You threw your arms up in the air. At some point during the first part of your rant, Dean had looked back at you over his shoulder. “You’re so nice to Sam--I mean, about as nice as brothers are to each other-- and I can tell you care about him. I can tell you have a good heart. So why choose to be an ass?”

When Dean didn’t answer, you shook your head. “Whatever. I’m leaving.” You clutched your duffel bag strap on your shoulder tightly, your knuckles turning white.

“To go where?”

“Away. You win. Ya got what you wanted.”

“Wait, (Y/N)--”

“Tell Sam I said ‘bye.’”

***

The heat of midday had your baby hairs stuck to your head with sweat. You had been walking for a while now, just trying to find somewhere remote enough that you could steal a car without getting seen. 

You hiked along a highway surrounded by dense trees, the rustling sound of the green leaves filling your head. You took a deep breath, allowing peace to wash over you. You never had to see Dean Winchester again, although you would miss Sam. He was the closest thing to a friend you’ve had in a while. 

A familiar engine roar overpowered the sound of the rustling you had been hearing. The car pulled off of the highway just behind you, coming to a stop. 

You took your bottom lip in your mouth under your top one, closing your eyes and stopping your walk.

You heard the opening and closing of the car’s door as you turned around, a small smile on your lips.

“You know,” Sam started, walking toward you, “It’s kind of rude to leave without saying ‘goodbye.’“ 

You let out a laugh. “Hey, Sam.”

He pulled you into a quick hug. “Hey. I heard what happened.”

You looked down at the mixture of grass and gravel below your combat boots. “Yeah.”

“And I know you probably never wanna see Dean’s face again, but we need your help. I do, and he does, whether he wants to admit it or not. We can all get out of here a lot quicker if we work together. You can get away from Dean, I can get back to Stanford, and Dean can find our dad.”

“Where is Dean?”

“Arrested.”

“Oh,” you said quietly, nodding.  “Okay.” You put on a smile. “What now?”

***

Much later in the day, after going to visit Joseph Welch, you and Sam were sitting in a diner grabbing a bite to eat. The both of you were brainstorming what to do to get Dean out of jail and what to do about that Constance bitch. The conversation had shifted from those two topics once you had a solid plan to simply small talk between friends.

“So what’s your story?” you asked, taking a bite out of one of your fries.

“What?”

“I picked up from conversations between you and Dean over the past two days and the very loud conversation I had with your brother earlier that you left hunting to go to Stanford. What happened there?”

Sam chuckled, looking down. 

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. I crossed a line,” you told him sincerely. You stared at your ketchup. 

“No, no,” he responded. He took in a sharp breath. “My dad and I had a big blowout fight before I left for college. He told me if I left for college to never come back. Haven’t talked to him in two years.” He took a bite of his salad after he finished talking.

“Oh,” you said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

You decided to change the subject. “Alright, we’ve let Dean rot long enough. I’m gonna go call the police.”

Sam laughed, shaking his head. “I’ll get the check.” 

You walked outside of the diner, heading to the payphone you spotted at the entrance of the parking lot. You picked it up and dialed ‘9-1-1.’

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

You made your voice frantic, forcing tears to well up in your eyes. “My-My husband! He’s been shot!”

“Ma’am, calm down for me, okay? Where are you?”

You screamed. “He- He just shot another guy! Oh, my god!”

“Ma’am, where are you?”

“I’m on Whiteford Road,” you said. “Please, please, please hurry!”

“Okay, okay, um, w-we’re sending a unit out to you now. Can you stay on the line for me?”

“No, no! Please!” you cried. “Plea--” You cut yourself off and hung up the phone. 

You noticed Sam standing next to you using one of his forearms to hold the door open as he leaned on the door frame. 

“What?”

“That was damn good acting,” he noted.

“Thanks,” you chuckled. “I actually wanted to be an actress growing up.”

“Hunting got in the way,” Sam figured.

“Exactly. But, acting is kind of part of the job. Gotta be real good at lying and pretending to be feds,” you shrugged, making light of the situation.

A comfortable silence blanketed you and Sam as you lamented over what life could’ve been for you. You sucked in a breath and said, “We better get going. To Constance!”

***

Sam’s phone ringing pulled the two of you out of a conversation about his girlfriend, Jess, and his life at Stanford. 

Sam looked at the caller ID, shrugging at you when he didn’t recognize it.

“Fake 911 phone call? Sammy, I don't know, that's pretty illegal,” you could hear Dean jest through the phone.

The brunet grinned. “It was (Y/N), actually.”

He paused. “(Y/N)? She’s with you?”

You took Sam’s phone out of his hands and said, “Yup. Hi, Dean,” into the receiver. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

You gave the phone back to Sam. 

The older Winchester changed the topic from you to something else. “Listen, we gotta talk.” 

“Tell me about it,” Sam jumped in. “So the husband was unfaithful. We are dealing with a woman in white. And she's buried behind her old house, so that should have been Dad's next stop--”

His brother tried to cut him off. “Sammy, would you shut up for a second?”

“--I just can't figure out why Dad hasn't destroyed the corpse yet.”

“Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you. He's gone. Dad left Jericho.”

Sam threw a look to you before glancing back to the road. “What? How do you know?”

“I've got his journal,” you heard the dirty blond explain.

“He doesn't go anywhere without that thing.”

“Yeah, well, he did this time.”

“What's it say?”

“Ah, the same old ex-Marine crap, when he wants to let us know where he's going.”

‘Ex-Marine crap?’ you thought to yourself.

Sam noticed your puzzled expression and directed toward you, “Coordinates.” He spoke his following words to Dean. “Where to?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

You propped your head up on your elbow on the passenger’s side door, legs tossed in an ‘L’ shape on the seat beside you. You stared out of the window into the dark night, taking in the gloomy appearance of the dead trees and fallen leaves. 

The younger Winchester shook his head. “I don't understand. I mean, what could be so important that Dad would just skip out in the middle of a job?”

A figure in the road caught your eye, causing you to squint and look out the windshield. 

Sam was still rambling to his brother. “Dean, what the hell is going on?”

You registered that Constance was in the road. “Sam, look out!” you shrieked.

Sam looked up, dropping the phone and slamming the brakes hard. You had to brace yourself on the dashboard in front of you, your body jerking forward and backward in your seat. 

Constance was gone, and you and Sam tried to catch your breaths. 

“Sam? Sam!” Dean’s voice came through the phone.

You picked up the phone from under the glove box. Dean had hung up before you got the chance to tell him Sam was alright.

You turned to the brunet, who swallowed hard and looked into the backseat through the rearview mirror.

You whirled around to look in the backseat, and there Constance was. “Take me home,” she ordered. She looked directly at you. “Take me home!”

“No,” you stated firmly, holding her gaze. 

Constance glared back at you as you heard the doors of the car lock. You wheel around in your seat and try to reopen them. Suddenly, your body was thrust back into the seat as the car began to drive. 

“Sam?” you yelled over the roar of the engine.

“That’s not me!” He tried to grab the steering wheel to drive, but Constance wouldn’t let him. 

You continued to struggle with the doors until the two-- well, three, counting Constance-- of you pulled up to an abandoned house, presumably the Welches’ old house. The windows on both of the two floors had been covered with boards, the paint was peeling off of the wood slats, and the screen door had been ripped. The house looked like it was falling apart more and more with every passing day. It had the stereotypical appearance of a horror movie house.

The engine of the Impala shut off.

“Don't do this,” the younger Winchester pleaded.

Constance flickered in the backseat. “I can never go home,” she moaned, her voice sad.

As if a switch had been flipped in your brain, your face shifted from scared to enlightened. “You're scared to go home.” You turned to look in the back seat, but Constance was gone. As soon as you turned back around, you noticed Constance in between you and Sam on the leather bench seat. 

You jumped, back pressed against the passenger’s side door. Constance climbed on Sam’s lap, shoving him back against the seat hard enough to tilt it backward. 

You tried to lunge for Constance, but she shoved you against the Impala’s door hard enough with a flick of her wrist to send the door flying open and you sailing through the air.

“(Y/N)!” You heard Sam yell.

You skidded to a halt on the rocky gravel surrounding the house, feeling your arms and legs get cut up. The wind was knocked out of you, and your head bounced against the small rocks. 

“Ow,” you groaned, trying to get up. You saw Constance had closed the passenger’s side door once more, and through the window could see her kissing Sam as he reached for the keys.

Another thing you saw was a figure appearing on the other side of the car through the driver’s side window. You hoped to god it was Dean.

You heard whoever it was fire a shot as Sam screamed in what seemed to be pain, so you immediately ducked. A few more shots were fired and you felt safe enough to raise your head.

You scrambled to your feet when you saw the Impala go careening through the porch and into the old Welch house. You ran into the house, being as careful as you could to avoid any of the broken pieces of wood and furniture the car had left in its path.

Dean was quick to follow you, calling out to his younger brother. “You okay?”

Sam groaned. “I think...”

“Can you move?” you asked, leaning through the passenger’s window. You looked him over for serious injury.

“Yeah,” he told you. He reached a hand out to his brother. “Help me?”

You stepped to the side as Dean pulled Sam out through the rolled-down window. 

You noticed Constance picking up a picture frame of her and her children that had fallen to the ground. 

She turned her attention from the picture to you and met your eyes.

She pinned you and the boys against the Impala with a bureau. It hit the boys in their pelvis but nailed you right in the stomach. You groaned in pain, desperately trying to push it off of you. 

You stopped your struggle when a sound caught your ear. It sounded like liquid trickling and watched as a stream of water just thick enough to cover each step cascaded to the ground.  You followed the stream to the top of the stairs to see the dark silhouettes of a little girl and a little boy holding hands.

“You've come home to us, Mommy,” they spoke in chorus.

Constance looked distraught as she got closer to the stairs. They were suddenly gone from the stairs and appeared behind her, hugging her and looking up at her with warm yet slightly disturbing smiles. 

Constance screamed, and she and her children melted to the floor flickering between apparitions of skinless and skeletal forms of humans. They melted into a puddle of an electric purple goo that seeped through the floorboards as the ringing in your ears from Constance’s shrieks subsided. 

You and the Winchesters shoved the bureau over, and you dusted off your hands as Dean spoke.

“So this is where she drowned her kids.”

“That's why she could never go home. She was too scared to face them,” Sam told you and his brother.

“You found her weak spot. Nice work, Sammy.” Dean slapped him on the chest where holes had been burned through his shirt that you were assumed were the products of Constance. Sam groaned out in pain but laughed nonetheless.

“Actually, it was all (Y/N). I’m just the jackass who drove your car through the side of a house,” Sam smiled, jutting his thumb back at you.

Dean hummed as he continued to walk away, clearly disinterested but making an effort to sound impressed. He leaned on the open window of the passenger’s side door, looking over his baby. “Speaking of that, if you screwed up my car--” he paused, looking back at Sam, “--I’ll kill you.”

“Aw, shame,” you cut in, “Sam’s my favorite Winchester.”

Dean glared at you. “Can it, (Y/N).”

***

You lip-synced the words to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” which boomed through the speakers of the Impala. You were sat in the backseat, leaning on the front seat between the two Winchesters with your forearms atop their bench seat. You looked over Sam’s shoulder as he opened up a giant map and opened his dad’s journal. He went to tuck a flashlight under his chin so he could actually see what he was doing, but you stopped him.

“I can hold that for you.”

“Thanks,” was his short reply as he handed off the flashlight to you, his eyes never leaving the things on his lap. You clicked the flashlight on and held it over his shoulder as he scanned the map for the coordinates “35-111″ as was written in his dad’s journal.

Sam tapped the spot on the map once he found it. “Okay, here's where Dad went. It's called Blackwater Ridge, Colorado.”

“Charming,” you quipped.

“How far?” came Dean’s question.

“About six hundred miles,” the younger Winchester told his brother.

“Hey, if we shag ass after we drop (Y/N) off in the next town over we could make it by morning,” Dean suggested, looking over at Sam. 

‘This guy is so ready to get rid of me,’ you thought, shaking your head.

Sam cocked his head to the side and looked to his brother. “Dean--”

Dean stared back to the road, his pitch dropping lower and his disappointment apparent. “You're not going.”

“The interview's in like, ten hours. I gotta be there,” Sam reminded him.

“Yeah. Yeah, whatever. I'll take you home.”

You clicked the flashlight off, sinking back into the backseat. 

‘Awkward.’

***

Dean’s face was still set in a frown as the Impala pulled up to Sam’s apartment complex. You jumped out of the car as Sam did, pulling him into a tight hug. 

“I’m gonna miss you,” you told him, squeezing him harder with your eyes shut. You were genuinely disappointed. Sam was so nice and the two of you had become great friends very quickly.

“Hey, you have my number. Call me.”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same.” You pulled away from him. “Say ‘hi’ to Jess for me.”

The brunet chuckled. “I will.” He leaned down into the open window of Dean’s car. “Call me if you find him?”

Dean nodded. 

“And maybe I can meet up with you later, huh?”

“Yeah, all right.”

Sam clearly did not know how to end the conversation from there, so he simply patted the inside of the car door twice and turned away. Dean leaned toward the passenger door, calling out to Sam in one last attempt to get him to come with him. “You know, we made a hell of a team back there.” 

“Yeah,” Sam nodded, which was clearly not the reaction Dean was expecting. He just sighed and waited for you to get back in the car. You had barely shut the door before Dean shoved off. 

You jerked around in your seat. “Easy, tiger. Jesus.” You slumped down in your seat after getting no response from Dean. You crossed your arms and looked out of your window. 

The familiar smells of coconut and tobacco filled your nose, and you immediately straightened up. 

“Turn around,” you told Dean, your eyes wide.

“What? No,” he snorted. “Why?”

“Just do it!”

Your exclamation caught Dean off guard. “Jesus, fine.”

He put the car in reverse and headed back up the street. 

Dean hadn’t even stopped in front of Sam’s apartment complex before you threw the car door open and sprinted toward the apartment as fast as you could.

“Whoa, crazy lady, where are you going?” Dean caught up to you and grabbed your arm, spinning you around. 

“Sam’s apartment. Which one is it?!” You asked in a panic. 

“Uh--” He glanced away from you, still puzzled as to why you were a basketcase at the present moment.

“Dean!”

He looked back at you, shaking his head, but he ran up the stairs and led you to Sam and Jess’s shared apartment. 

He stopped in front of the door, turning back to face you. “Now, why--”

Before he could finish his statement, you used all your might to kick the wooden door in, yelling Sam’s name in concern.

“No!” you heard him yell from another room.

Dean jumped into action, sprinting through the apartment with you hot on his heels. The two of you got to the younger Winchester’s bedroom just in time to see a woman in a white nightgown stained red at her belly from bleeding with blonde hair on the ceiling burst into flames. 

“Jess!” Sam yelled, paralyzed on his bed in shock. He quickly moved one arm to shield his face as the flames got closer to him. “No!”

‘Oh, shit. His girlfriend...’

You shook your thoughts away from you and helped Dean lug a screaming Sam out of the door and out of the apartment complex. You fished through your bag in Dean’s car for your phone and called the fire department as Dean tried to hold Sam back from going back in for his charred girlfriend.

***

Flashes of red and blue broke through the black of night, emanating from police cars and firetrucks all around you. You walked through the chaotic scene of police and firemen holding back onlookers and firemen dousing the remaining embers of the fire in water. Black, charred wood stuck out from the turquoise exterior of the complex, and you could see into the apartment through giant holes that had been burnt out of the wall. 

You walked back over to the boys who stood by the Impala. Sam was fooling with weapons concealed within the hollowed-out bottom of the trunk, and Dean stood next to him, watching his brother’s face. As you got to them, you put a hand on Sam’s shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. He looked up at you, his normally soft and cheery expression suppressed by a look of both desperation and anger. He shut the trunk with a hard slam.

“We got work to do.”

Tags are open and feedback is always appreciated!

Series Rewrite Tags:

@rach5ive​ @ppeachygemss​

[leepace71]

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

x

[stevenuniversetanzanite]

Second First Meeting (Sally x reader)

I got some dialogue from my directing class about a junkie named Sally you all can guess who I thought of. I think the dialogue is from an Australian tv or web series called Blue mountain. Anyway, I adapted the story so I could work in into a story.

As this is a one-shot for the sake of the story, I am forgetting time is a concept that applies to humans. You get to choose if you age like a normal human or you were turned into a vampire and are immortal. Whatever makes your experience more enjoyable- however, you have to age slightly after the leaving part.

This is a lot more dialogue than I normally do. So I hope it isn't too bad. Also, I've written for sally. She is a bit ooc but I feel like it works because none of it is set during the main duration of the season. 

The story starts here:

"What are you doing?" You asked your girlfriend who you ran into unexpectedly on your way to a deal.

"Nothing" she said in a daze.

The woman in a leopard print tried to stumble past you, having places she needed to be that didn't concern you. She was happy until you interrupted her euphoric dream of a world her lasted dosage of drugs gave her. She'd found the stash in your shared apartment, knowing how to do it from when you showed her long ago when you first sold her drugs. Years had passed since your high school days, the two of you had fallen further into the world of junkies and quick fixes in order to feel something.

A month ago, you both promised each other you'd give up drugs and make a life for yourself. You'd finally seen the damage it had done to her, you and the people you sold drugs to. Most people you couldn't care about, but her, you'd do anything for. She was no longer on the 'beginner' stuff, moving on to higher doses, more frequent use and stronger drugs. She outdid you nowadays with her intact. You had lessoned your usage, the reason you got into the scene, economic problems were now fixed, you were wanning your dependence on the substances. Who knows, soon you might be able to get a normal job.

When you made your empty promises, you had the full intent on giving up that life, her fingers were crossed behind her back. You'd half kept your promise, you still sold on the side, but you kept telling yourself that you'd stop soon. You just needed to get rid of the stock. You said that last batch. A part of the newest batch was what was giving your girlfriend her high.

"What are you doing here?" You were a quarter of a block away from where you dealled, standing outside the Hotel Cortez.

"I just came to visit some friends. I just wanted to get out of the house!"

"What, so you come here? What are you here for?" You spot her bag, having a hunch as to why she was there, you snatched her bag to search it.

"What am I supposed to do? Sit at home and watch Days of our Lives all day?!" Sally yelled as she attempted to get her bag back, but you push her back.

You throw the bag to the ground and ask, "You using something huh? Show me your arm." You grabbed her arm. She yanked her arm about, but you held onto her with a firm grip.

"Jesus Christ Y/n, you're a stupid arsehole! Let go!" Sally gets out of your grasp and walks over to her belongings and began to off.

"Where you going?" You went after her to stop her from leaving both you and the situation, catching the handle of her bag and holding her back. "Why don't you show me what's in the bag."

"There's nothing in the bag!" She cried. You glared into her eyes, scanning her for anything that would tell you that she was lying. You couldn't see anything. You went to your next guess. "You up here screwing some guy? How the hell am I supposed to trust you? How am I supposed to trust you Sal?"

"I hate all this shit! You're so bloody jealous!"

"Junkies....You're all bloody junkies!" You were no better and the fact that she didn't point it out, still astonishes you. She was two caught up with the personal attack to come up with something better. You'd never called her a junkie before though you both at one point met the criteria.

"I'm not a bloody junkie!"

"Well you're an addict. What's the difference?"

"I know what I am, you get it right."

"You know what? You whatever the fuck you want. Go blow some dude for all I care."

"Okay, I will."

"Good, have fun."

She took your advice but when she came home, there was nothing left. All your stuff was gone. No note detailing where you'd gone. The apartment was trashed, and all her stuff was shoved into a box near the front door.

She never saw you in all your favourite spots or the alleys you used to deal. Your existence was erased from the world, the only evidence that you existed was her memories. Maybe you were an hallucination the whole time?

Ever since she sought out potential partners with a desperate need to be loved. It was fine at first. She pretended to forget you, found her true path in music and even got a job composting for her friends one of her favourite musicians. She found herself needed more then drugs, she never realised that you, yourself was a drug to her, the love you gave her, she craved it and for a fraction of a moment she found it in the duo. They two gave her a new life from one she was trying to escape. You had helped her with her initial problems, a bad experience in youth and these two helped her to forget you if only your face.

The night you disappeared from the world you decided to go into the Hotel Cortez for some drinks. A bold lady sat reading a newspaper at the reception desk. She peered up from paper to give you a once over. Your hands were stuffed in your vinyl coat to keep them warm. You made your way straight over to the desk and asked how much a room was in your sweetest sounding voice you could muster up. After being told, you pulled out a wad of cash and handed her the amount. She gave you an odd look at the amount you carried on you. You payed her no mind. Waiting for her to fetch you the key to your room before asking her about the status of the bar, "Is the bar opened?"

Once checking out your room and tidying yourself up you headed down to the bar. The same woman form before was now behind the bar tending to it. "You don't have much staff?"

"Not many people stay here at once."

"That's a shame, it's a cute hotel. Very vintage."

Liz asked what drink you wanted then went to prepare it. "So, what made you decided to stay with us, Y/n?" You told her your name when you reserved your room.

"Had a fight with my girlfriend?"

"Got kicked out?"

"No, I just don't want to go home and face her yet." The woman, who's name you learned was Liz handed you a drink.

You spoke to her for hours, admitting things that you'd told no one. She gave her outsiders perspective on your situation and to put it simply, maybe Sally wasn't the right girl for you. You wanted to move to grander places and your half success showed progress. You would have to cut all ties to that lifestyle in order to move on completely. You mentioned to her a business propose a family member offered you that you were considering taking up but didn't because you knew you wouldn't be able to do it with your current life. It involved you moving across the country which you couldn't afford before, but if you sold your apartment and used the money for plan tickets you might be able to make it work.

You didn't know if the offer was still available, Liz told you all you had to do was call up the person and ask. She offered you encouragement in doing so and even offered you a free drink if you did it.

Your family member was ecstatic that you accepted the offer, preparing a space for you when you arrived. Said member knew of your struggles and was willing to help you out of your rut, as well as offer a job helping with their fashion line. You were a business person, you knew the trade which was what made you a great drug dealer to begin with, it would be a different scene but all you could do was hope you were a fast learner.

You spent your last week in room 64 trying off loose ends so you could start anew.

Years later Sally found herself trapped in the inner walls of a hotel, haunting the grounds, finding pleasure in killing whomever she pleased in whatever way she like. Her choice, as with most things, was with drugs. Her face was permanently stained with tear tracks darkened by her runny mascara.

It was no longer the 80's. Decades had passed, and you found yourself back in Downtown LA. You were there on business, one of your companies provided funding for Will Drake's fashion line for years. You saw potential in his works and helped him by providing resources. His newest fashion show was exclusive, but you managed to easily get a spot. You'd heard that the fashion designer had a new 'face' for his brand. You'd never met the person face to face, but the name was familiar, Liz Taylor. It must have been a common name. You were surprised when you discovered Will Drake wasn't the one to request for your invitation but Liz. You were happy for the invitation none the less. It didn't strike you until you entered the newly renovated hotel Cortez who Liz Taylor was.

There were very few invinations and all phones and cameras a band making the whole show more intriguing. The models were unusual, the variety was a present surprise. One woman sent you back into your past. You audibly choked catching the attention of a few of the people around you. You brush them off and watched on.

At the end of the show, all the models walked out to show of their outfits one last time. The models lined the edges of the runway. The model resembling your past love stopped in front of you. She looked out into the far back of the audience. Her eyes glaze over you and she stiffens, tilting her head slightly in confusion but trying to act professional. The audience abrupted in applause, you delayed for a moment before following in the others lead. You maintained eye contact until she had to turn to leave the stage. You hit the open bar as soon as you could, wanting to forget what just happened. You'd downed a couple drinks before you heard the familiar voice from beside you.

"Hello there," the carbon copy purred.

"Hello," you squeaked out before downing another drink. She smirked. You stared into her eyes, wanting to quiver under the wait and power of them. "Drink?" you said pointing to the alcohol.

She chuckled, before getting some for herself. "You seemed mighty fascinated in me while on stage. I thought I would return the favour."

"Well, in that case. How do I look?"

"Not bad. A bit older than I'd usually go for."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"Not nearly. More experience."

"I guess you could say-"

"L/n-" your attention snapped form the timeless relect in front of you to the new face of Will Drake but an old face to you. What was with this looking vintage place and the past. Sally reacted to your surname even going so far as to repeat it.

"Liz, I wanted to congratulate both you and Drake on an amazing show. However, I never expected any less." You said shaking the woman's hand. "I assume you'll pass on the praise to Will Drake yourself as he's become recluse from the public eye."

"Of course, L/n. I see you met one of our models. I hope Sally isn't give you any trouble."

"Sally?" Your eyes darted back to her. A look of bewilderment on your face. How could it be? Liz's eyes dart between the two of you. You both shared the same expression. She knew she was missing something. "What's your last name?"

"Mckenna."

"Oh fuck- Shit. How is it you? Oh god."

"Y/n? You got old."

"You haven't aged a day."

"You two know each other?" Liz asked.

"I was her dealer-" "She was my girlfriend-" you spoke at the same time. Liz understood immediate, remembering your tale from decades prior. You'd called her Sal the whole time you were talking about her, it could have been short for anything. From all the stories Sally had spat out in one of her angry drunk sessions Liz had all the clues to piece it together sooner.

"Was I nothing to you?" Sally asked. "I should have guessed when you abandoned me-"

"Sally, quiet down-" some of the guests turned to when hearing her yell.

"No- don't you dare talk to me-"

"You can yell at me all you want, just not out here." Here eyes followed yours catching the stared of the crowd around them. She had to stop herself from snapping at them. She didn't want to ruin Liz's show.

Even though she had all this anger built up, from your general presence being back a time she had recently gotten over. She'd wait until your both alone to tear you into shreds.

"We can go to my room." Sally grumbled before grabbing arm to tug me off. Liz warned her not to harm me as she was better than that (also it would affect business). I told Liz I was used to 'her type' which enraged Sally more. Your ex dragged me all the way to the elevator before tossing me inside and selecting the level. "You're lucky this isn't the last show they had here." you didn't know what she meant by that. Was she a different person then? Had she changed since then? You knew she was implying something but weren't exactly sure what.

By the time she reached her destination she'd didn't want to slit your throat at the sight of you.

She pulled you to room 64, wait this was your room, why was she taking you to your room? She pulled out a key and opened the room. You entered before her, noticing all your belongs in the same place as they were normally along with the random keyboard in the room.

"You want to explain why you have the key to my room?"

"It's my room."

You pulled out your key and showed her it. "Liz?" she asked. You assume she meant the receptionist.

"Iris, I believe or at least she was the one who gave me the key."

"They must have run out of rooms and started evening our rooms away."

"Why would they give your rooms away if there yours?"

"Long story."

"Make it short."

"I don't have to answer to you."

"How about a question for a question?"

"Fine."

"You answer mine first."

"I don't think you'll believe me-"

"That's not an answer. I don't have to believe you; I just want the truth."

"What was your question again?"

"Why did they give away your room if it's yours?"

"Right. I'm dead."

"You're right, I don't believe you."

"Told you."

"Keep going."

She rose her brow. You didn't believe her, yet you wanted to keep listening. "As we are dead and can't move on from this place, we haunt this hellhole."

"There's more ghosts?"

Sally nodded. "That's two questions. My turn, why did you leave me?"

"I don't know a good answer do that." Sally was going to make a snappy comment, but you kept talking. "Short answer, I wanted more, and my life was holding me back. I was torn between the opportunity of a lifetime and life with you. I got an outsiders opinion and they helped me figure out I couldn't have it all and be with you."

"Were you happy?"

"For a bit. It was hard at first with rehabilitation and learning to fit into a life I hadn't had in years. It's different on the other side. I had something holding me back to my old life, a loose end I never resolved."

"What was that?"

"You. I never told you I left. I felt guilty for not telling you. Always wondered what happened to you but never dared to find you."

"Scared I'd pull you back in?"

"No, I was scared I made a mistake."

"You did."

"I don't think there was a good option. I'd lose either way."

"What about you? What have you made of yourself?"

"Other than a ghost? I perused music."

"Good for you, you were always talking about doing that."

She ended up telling her whole life story up until getting stuck into the hotel. She spoke about how she was making music with Patti Smith in the 1980s, but she got fired from the project. She went on about how her addiction got worse and with the loss of you and abandonment issues were enhanced. She mentioned how she was working with Patti Smith for a while at the time before you left but never mentioned it because she wanted it to be a surprise. In 1993, she was a songwriter and had a threesome one night with her friends, a couple of musicians. Sally injected all of them with heroin and in a bizarre drug-induced psychosis, developed the idea to sew all of them together. Her friends died in the process. She was trapped for three days whilst lying trapped next to the corpse of her friends. While being tortured by something she called an 'Addiction Demon.' You didn't understand why she was telling you about this even, but you listened nevertheless. For a moment, it seemed like old times, you were entranced by every word. She told you about being murdered in 1994 when a guy, iris' son, died from an overdose, much to Sally's indifference. Iris pushed her out the window. She goes on to say, now the two where okay. Iris ended up introducing Sally to the internet and showing her a world she never thought she could have again.

"Did you move on?" She was unsure as you didn't mention anyone in your tale of the past, while she went into detail- mainly because she couldn't harm you, so it seemed like the second-best option. She hoped it made you jealous.

"Couldn't." Your answer was short. You didn't want to go into depth about your lack of interest in anyone besides her, so you lied. "Too busy."

Once the two of you were done, you sat in silence. No more questions among the two, closure on both your ends. So, what now?

Part 2

Considering doing a part two as 2 people on wattpad wanted me to. However I have no idea where to go from here. 

[talesofafangirlwithadvr]

AUGUST PICKS!

And we’re back with another month wrap up! August involved a lot of TV watching (as per usual), but I feel like I watched a lot of things I’ve already talked about before (ex: The 100, Violetta). So it was a little bit harder to feature some new titles. I felt accomplished this month because I finished quite a few series. So, without further ado...let’s do this!

Spoilers!! But you knew that already :) 

..

...

......

So I know I’ve spoken about some of these shows A LOT recently, but I still had to include them in this wrap up because they were a good amount of the month. (Even if they feel like they were so long ago.) 

CURSED

This book to screen adaptation on Netflix following Nimue (AKA the Lady of the Lake) re-invents the King Arthur myth. It was an entertaining and enjoyable watch that makes me hope there’s a second season. There were certain parts that bothered me and I wish some characters had more time on screen, but as someone who likes King Arthur and fantasy TV I’d recommend it. 3/5 for me. 

For more on my thoughts regarding the show check out my earlier post: **Spoilers** Featuring Cursed

DC’S STARGIRL

A show that I’ve often been documenting my reviews/feelings after watching each episode. (That’s how you can tell IT’S THAT GOOD.) While it was a bit slow in the beginning (mainly because of it having the quality of being on a streaming service-ending on a cliffhanger for you to binge the next episode immediately kind of feel), it picked up and has easily become one of my favorites for the year. (YEAH...I KNOW. I SAID YEAR.) You can check out my page for more specific reactions in my posts, but here are some of the moments that stick out to me the most when I think about season 1.  

I can’t wait for season 2!!

AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER

June doesn’t feel like that long ago, but because I started season 1 two months ago (and because of the world of quarantine) it feels like a long time ago. Especially when this show is only 18-20 episodes that are each about 20/25 minutes. For me, I enjoyed season 1, but not as much as seasons 2 and 3. I definitely watched the first season slower because of this. Once the Ba Sing Se plot happened I was very invested. I enjoyed most of Book 2 in the Earth Kingdom before this, but Ba Sing Se was definitely the best. I was so impressed that they put that into a kid show. Then again, there’s so much in this show that is well done and brings up such relevant issues to a younger audience. I loved following Aang, Katara and Sakka and enjoyed Toph’s addition to Team Avatar. Overall I think Uncle Iroh is my favorite character in the show. I loved all the wisdom he had and how he saw the best in Zuko the entire time. Their team up was great and I am so happy he got his tea shop in the end. His escape from prison was amazing. I love a good redemption arc and from the start was excited to see Prince Zuko’s (it’s one of the ‘spoilers’ I knew going in). I think it was really well done and I liked how they showed him struggling with it. The last agni kai between Zuko and Azula was such a beautiful scene and the music score behind it was so chilling. I love how they chose a slow, instrumental song to play in the background. It’s not what I was expecting and it was such an awesome choice. Overall, I really liked the music and have added it to my writing playlist. I’m really glad I decided to watch Avatar the Last Airbender. 

From one binged show starting in June to another....

VIOLETTA SEASON 2

It’s crazy; you don’t think 80 episodes would go by that fast, but they do. Once you hit episode 50, I just zip by the rest in the season. So many of the plots get SO GOOD, you can’t help but watch so many episodes back to back (to back). For season 2, episode 75 was one of my favorites for the whole season. I love how some of the cast actually got to go to Madrid. (Even the intro music changed when they were there.) Diego really grew on me. I loved the added plot of discovering who his dad is! Feels very telenovela. Gregorio’s reaction was priceless-such great acting-and I loved how much it has changed his character so far. I’m excited to see where he is headed for season 3. 

Leonetta forever! The reason they weren’t together was a bit weak, but I get they needed the love triangle. Overall the Leon/Violetta/Diego love triangle was a lot stronger than season 1′s (in my opinion). It felt better developed. I enjoyed a lot of the couples this season. Frederico and Ludi are a pair I didn’t know I wanted till it happened. Olga and Ramallo actually got a kiss!!! I loved hearing Ramallo talk about how Olga is the only woman in his life. So rare to see such emotions from him. Fran and Leon’s friendship was adorable. I loved their moments in Madrid. She was their #1 shipper. I know in the beginning I said there wasn’t a lot of music and performances, but as the season progressed we definitely got a lot of new songs (which I cannot stop singing). I miss my time at the Studio and hope the third season will be streaming on Disney Plus soon. I heard it could be September 18th so fingers crossed!! 

THE INBESTIGATORS

Filling the void that was left by Little Lunch (and produced by the same studio) is the InBESTigators! A show that follows 4 elementary students who live in Australia and solve mysteries. One of the things I really loved about Little Lunch was how serious they made really trivial, kid-like things sound. I have often described it as an Office-like children’s show, where they talk about their problems directly to the camera and give several ‘Jim’ stares and glances to the camera. With the InBESTigators it’s a similar set up where our four sleuths, Ezra, Maudie, Ava and Kyle, relay a mystery they solved directly to us the viewer, while we watch in flashback. All of the mysteries are typical things that could happen in school or home; from overwatering a neighbor’s prize-winning flowers, packages getting stolen, a lost notebook or catching a cheater during a test. All of the kids are entertaining and funny. They each have a different dynamic that brings something to the team. Currently two of the seasons are on Netflix, and there will be a third season (but who knows when it will be filmed-I’m just happy it will eventually happen). 

If you’re looking for a fun/light-hearted watch look no further. You’ll have a good time. 

UNITED WE FALL

This ABC sitcom fits well on the network and like it would be on Friday nights, but has a stronger day in airing thanks to the pandemic. I hadn’t really heard much about the show and then BAM it was advertised. It felt like the network had it in its back pocket. Nevertheless, I am really enjoying it. The actors have a nice dynamic and it is very funny and relatable. I like how it represents a family with two different cultural backgrounds, but doesn’t make that the main focus of the show. Instead it is discussed naturally. Overall, I don’t know how many people know about it, so I wanted to share it as one of my picks for the month and suggest you watch it if you are looking for something both funny and optimistic. 

DOUBLING DOWN WITH THE DERRICOS

I LOVE this family! As TLC is a network with predictable choices in TV shows, one about a family with multiples does not seem shocking. However, this is not your average family with multiples. At the start of the show, Karen and Deon have a total of 11 children (with only two of them being what they called ‘singletons’). They have twins, quints, and another set of twins (that would have been triplets). Her last three pregnancies were multiples and then she becomes pregnant with triplets. AGAIN! This family is considered a miracle because she had no IVF or anything like that for her conceptions. I love watching them because they seem like a great group to be apart of. They are what the epitome of family should be like. There is so much love. I know when my family watches the show we are all so impressed by how well behaved all of the kids are. People with half the amount of kids often have trouble teaching them to behave. I highly suggest giving the Derricos a watch. New episodes are now airing on TLC. 

SOME LAST MINUTE ADDS....

I know Ben Platt’s concert has been available on Netflix for a while now, but I just got the chance to watch it this month. It was SOOO GOOD and I was upset when it was over. It felt so fast! I had already added a lot of his songs to my playlists, and after watching added the last few I had missed. Now I’ve been listening non-stop. I loved how his concert welcomed us so much into his personal life. The added stories in-between songs helped to see why he created that specific one. Watching the concert was a fun time and something you should consider if you are feeling down during quarantine. 

Every Saturday night we try to watch a movie while we eat dinner. It’s become a new tradition since quarantine began and we were unable to go out to eat or to the movies. This week Jojo Rabbit was the pick. Going into the film, I didn’t know much expect, but that it was a comedy and I assumed a satire. What I didn’t expect was how dark of a turn it would take. It’s amazing how a film can have you laughing uncontrollably at the start and then have you crying at the end. This is definitely a film I could see analyzing in a film studies class. There was so much foreshadowing and moments where so much more was going on then what was shown on the surface. I think it did a great job making the viewer think not only about the time in which it was supposed to take place, but also our current world. I know it’s a good movie when it still has me thinking about it days later. I even did some research into it after watching. Definitely can understand the hype about it and will watch it again in the future. 

When I was putting this list together I was just starting to watch Umbrella Academy. I know, I’m late to the party, but with the newest season coming out this summer I knew it was now or never. (I just had to finish some of the other stuff I was watching first.) Currently, I only have 1 episode left in the first season and am really enjoying it. I was pretty good about spoilers going into it, so a lot of it was new to me. I made some theories on who I thought would be the cause of the apocalypse and so far I am right. I am very interested to see how this season ends and get into the next one because I heard that the majority of people liked that one more. I’ll have a more detailed review in my September Picks, I’m sure of it!  

[maladaptive-ninja-returns]

It’s The Avengers (03x13)

Loki x Reader Avengers The Office AU (Slowwwwww Burn)

Season 3 Episode 13: That One Stranger

Series Summary: Living in the Avengers facility post-apocalypse in a better timeline   Tony Stark has decided to capture every moment by pulling The Office on the Avengers. All of housemates are pretty used to the idea except for you, who had just come here to finish her degree, and the newest member- Loki.

Warnings: eep sorry

Word Count: last weekend was a blast!! My cousins, my brother’s best friend, all of us gathered and karaoked while drunk. Bro’s bestie even brought dad in for a song and two and broke a few glasses coz he was THAT drunk. Poor dude even apologised for that.

MASTERLIST in bio, darlings. Tags are open (check bio)

The camera was coloured in darkness when it heard a troubled and tired whine. It took a second or two to come out of someone's backpack- quite possibly Javier's- to record you nearly lying over a rhino-like alien with a dinosaur-like tail. Your eyes looked sad and frustrated, your limbs tired- hanging on either side of the slow creature carrying on its own pace. A scarf was thrown over your head that ended up covering your face, making the camera shift towards the tall figure of Loki walking beside the new transportation service. His figure- with the usual black jeans and equally black shirt- was covered in a cloak that protected him from the harsh rays of the neighbouring star. "They're gone. Stop whining," he ordered without even looking at you. "The only  breathing insane person you need is me."

Lulu, who was sitting over your back now, was enjoying the languid bumpy ride through the desert that was filled with little crowds around the oasis -found around every two kilometres- while his camera recorded Javier sitting on his rhino facing you guys. You pulled the scarf away from your face and pouted, letting your face rest in your palms. "But they are all so cute." A blink later you turned your eyes towards Loki and smirked. "OoooOoooh!-" you deepened your voice- "'The only breathing insane person you need is me'-" and then squirmed out loud- "you naughty-naughty. You teasing me. You naughty-naughty!" Loki turned to face you, his steps so in sync that he was right next to your face the whole time his eyes kept yours captured. "What exactly is it that made my words tease you, darling?" All the playful giggle vanished as soon as it had come. You felt your body straighten at that smirk running wild over his lips while Javier's camera caught the change in the shade of your face.

You: *annoyed* You have to be really careful how you go about joking around with Loki 'cause that son of a bitch can turn anything into something sexual. *looks at the camera* *feels a shiver go down your body*

Loki: It is *stresses* so easy to make Y/N uncomfortable. All I have to do is make her think I am thinking something impermissible and then sit back to watch her fumble. *chuckles* It's one of my many talents. *feels a confidence boost*

"You are so annoying sometimes," you muttered under your breath while scratching an itch on the back of your neck. "Sometimes I forget you get a high out of making people miserable." "Oh, no. The high is solely out of annoying you," Loki pointed out innocently. Grabbing one end of the scarf, you flipped it in the air to smack Loki's back with it. "You do not deserve any of the lava cakes I make in the future!" "Thank the Norns. They kept giving me the worst pains." "You sonova-" Another flick of your scarf was easily caught by the God to pull you towards him. You nearly fell on his chest if not for your hands landing on those pecs first.

You: *mouth opened in an 'o'* *blinks slowly* I think I grabbed his boobies. *purses lips* *thinks for a long moment* *camera pans in* *raises brows* those are some really hard boobies.

"What." Even when you were sitting on the rhino- who came to a standstill on its own at the moment, clearly sensing some heat in the moment- Loki did not have to bend his beck even a smidge to stare right into your soul. "What," you spat back a bit hesitantly, trying your best to fume, taking your hands away from his body to hide them somewhere before they were executed for their crimes. "You are being quite bold these days," he commented while wrapping the scarf around his hand, never letting his gaze falter. "I was always bold-" you shrugged- "especially when it came to anything that had to do with you." Loki chuckled. And licked his lips. The camera caught the one strong inhale you took in. "What did you expect would happen in the long run? That I would go all soft and mushy on you like those fangirls you have on earth? Stand outside your home and shout-" "Loki?" The voice wasn't yours. You could never carry that kind of sultry weight in your throat even if you wanted to. It felt like it had come with the wind. Or maybe an echo? It wasn't until you looked at Javier's camera that you looked behind you and found a woman dressed in red standing within inches of you, giving you a mini heart attack, leading to one great fall. Loki could have broken your fall if he wanted to but from the look in his eyes, he was stuck on the woman he was seeing standing a few feet away from him. Lulu's camera caught this woman perfectly. From every angle, she looked human. Her pale skin was akin to a glass moulded in the shape of a Goddess. Her thin lips were coloured a shade of purple. Her eyes a shade of blue that was darker than usual. They were less of an ocean and more of a pool hidden in the caverns that were bottomless and unexplorable. A red cloak covered her head- except for a few strands of silver hair- and the rest of her body. It was not hard to miss for the cameras recording a couple of things that happened in a little span of time; like the slipping of your scarf from Loki's hands, the rhinos excusing themselves from the scene, the nervous fluffing up of Lulu at the sight of this stranger, the sudden chill in the air in the middle of the desert making the animals- and you- shiver. On top of that, the piercing rays of the nearest star seemed to get dull by the second till the camera realised there were clouds gathering above them out of bloody nowhere.

"Is that really you? Loki...son of Odin...and son of Laufey?" "It's Freya," you whispered, internally correcting this stranger who was visibly making you quite uncomfortable. "It has been a while." She completely ignored you if she heard that. Her smile seemed to stretch from one ear to another at the sight of the God- who was evidently the only thing she wanted to see. "Aellae." It was not the name itself that produced the moment but the way it came out to make you turn towards Loki. 

You: *frown at the void* It was almost like he was recalling something he had...lost. Like that one book that you repeatedly read and then it just disappeared one day only for you to find out that you had yourself kept it in an ultimate secret place that you yourself forgot about. So, when you find it you feel guilty for facing it again. *breathless* *camera pans in* *looks at Javier* does this make sense? *blinks at Javier who is signing something* *frowns harder* What do you mean why it's gotten me all worked up? I mean *stutters and points in the distance*  *camera pans in Loki and Aellae standing in the distance looking at each other and not really talking much* W-who knows what's the history there. Like is she a friend or foe? Or a fr-o. *camera pans back on your face* *tsks* of course, this doesn't make sense. None of this does. *looks at the pair and crosses her arms* *fumes at no one in particular*

"I thought I-" "Lost me?" Aellae simply smiled. "You should know better than that. After all, it is me, my love." There was no hesitation in the movement of your eyes when you looked at Loki for an answer to that statement. If it wasn't for the brilliant observation of this talented boy named Javier, one would not have caught the slight movement of his eyes when he wanted to glance at you from his peripheral vision while taking in a lungful. "My love," you stressed that last word to make sure Loki understood the question scratching beneath the sarcasm. There was a slight roll of his eyes followed by him completely closing them for one elongated moment. "I have been waiting for this day," Aellae continued, making a part of you itch for completely ignoring your presence, "when I finally found you again." The tilt of her head and that hollow gaze that tried to be soft gave her an eerie touch. "And to think I was only living on your memories till now." Aellae took a step forward and stopped when she found the God taking the lead with this one. In this situation, the angle mattered a lot. Because from where Lulu stood- right on your shoulder- it looked as if this stranger had taken a step where could she step right where the distance between her and you two was the same.  From where Javier stood, his camera saw Loki step towards Aellae while completely blocking you from the boy's view. But what he did record was Loki bringing forward his hands for her. That hollowness in her eyes suddenly swirled into an ounce of mild ecstasy. when she put her hands in his and felt his thumbs rest on top of the back of her palms. "It has been one long while," he concluded, forcing Javier to walk- with quite the struggle- in the sand to pan in on this confusion fused with this piercing hint of disappointment on your face.

"I'm sorry," you sputtered, "come again?" "Title of your sex tape," he muttered under his breath. "Hm?" Aellae turned in question. "Nothing, my dearest," the God assured her before turning to answer your question. "I said you are on your own now. Look for a cavern at one of the oasis and they will drop you at a shelter. Hopefully." Your head did feel the just of surprise even though the last twenty seconds of their hand-holding had you all ready for a surprise. Words were being a stubborn bitch in your lungs- never escaping your mouth right this moment and all your could do was exhale and mock a burst of laughter at those words. "And then? And then what?" Your heated brain really could not think of anything else. Loki shrugged.

You: *shouting* THAT SON OF A BITCH SHRUGGED!!! *pointing at yourself* AT ME!!!

"I don't know. Look for a rainbow." Without another word, he turned back towards the woman. Just like that. The only sound was that of the wind running through the desert as you, Javier and Lulu watched Loki walk away with this strange creature. It took a minute for the little one figure out, for when he did, he pressed his stomach and stood up on your shoulder, his heart beating faster than it usually did. And when the realisation dawned on him, Lulu jumped to the ground to take a few steps in Loki's direction and yell for him to come back.

'Member the way You used to say I was your meaning? You'd always need me

You just stood there, dried lips parted, eyes shrinking under the gaze of the star, arms dangling with nearly no life in them. For a second there, Javier felt you were about to fall, for Lulu's camera caught the boy come to your side, ready for anything that was bound to happen.

Did you forget What that shit meant? You were my answer You were what mattered

But all you did was stand there with disappearing emotions just like those two disappeared with the last sand dune in front of you. With the last silhouette of Loki gone in sand, you closed your eyes, worrying your companions for that stretched moment. 

Lived at your place Know the way that I taste Yeah, you know things Yeah, you know things

"He knows," you whispered to yourself, your brows furrowing together, your fingers curling into fists.

I met your mom Even got us a dog That ain't nothing, oh

A piercing scream came out of your lungs making the little floof jump five feet into the air to land away from you while Javier's camera recorded his three-second jolts before falling straight down from his hands.

Say you know me Say you know me Say you know me, know Say you know me Say you know me Say you know me

"HE FUCKING KNOWS!!!!" Your voice was at the edge of a massive breakdown, shaking while your eyes blurred themselves in this uncontrollable rage. 

You always will

"That son of a bitch knows how bad it is for me alone in a strange land," you croaked, trying to kick some sand with your boots. Javier signed something from outside the frame to you. "Hey, you're not alone. I'm here too," Lulu's camera caught his words. You looked at him for five seconds. "You lost your socks while sleeping on your first day. You were wearing those bloody socks." Javier- clearly offended but also guilty- mocked a gasp as he took a few steps away from you. The soft strings of guitar added to the air around you looking in the distance where nothing could be seen now. No one. Sand for infinity and a few oases that did not lead to him.

.

Feet were dragged through the stubborn sand that let won't you walk straight. All the effort that was going into being angry was now running down towards your legs. But that did not stop you from fuming so hard that the camera could catch the difference in your features. 

See, I know What it is, what it is, what it is, babe

But as the camera panned over your face, it seemed more of a sullen sulk and less of that rage you had just shown. 

See, I know What it is, what it is

And were those tears in your eyes that you were trying to blink away? That you were trying to hide from Javier as much as possible?

Let me miss What it is, what it is, what it isn't Let me miss it Let me miss it

Giving up, you walked towards the first oasis in your way, populated generously by desert animals and a few nomads.  The tents seemed somewhat similar to those you found on earth except for the spherical air pockets surrounding them to keep them cool. One of the nomads was kind enough to open the doorway for you and bow down in their own way, making the rainbow stone in his necklace reflect the starlight right into your eyes as you entered the place. "Did some order a seven-spice rainbow with a generous dash of sexy on the side?" The light that has just left your eyes came back with a sweet gasp. "My White Knight!" you nearly choked on your own joy. .

The camera felt itself shake when the rainbow drink was kept on the table. Thanking White, you dragged the sparkly fizzy thing towards you to get a taste. "So-" White furrowed his brows licked his lips in a thought- "you're saying Loki did leave you but he did not leave you." You just nodded, your lips not ready to leave the straw. "Easy," White ordered with a serious face, receiving a pinch from Green and Orange sitting next to him without looking away from you. Both of them seemed to be caught in a sweet trance that was clearly you. And when you finally did leave the straw, the elated sigh of a content throat made both of them close their eyes and smile. "Oh, God! This is so goooood," you exclaimed as no voice came out of you. "Y/N," your White Knight called out to you, "focus." You set the drink down and straighten yourself. "Yes, sir," you whispered. "Not that much of focus," he muttered while clearing his throat, adjusting himself where he sat. Violet rolled his eyes and sighed. "What do you mean when you say he did not leave you?" You looked at Violet and put your hands on the table. "I mean that I don't think he went with that woman....goddess...witch...whatever...on his own. I think he was kinda kidnapped." All the boys- except Orange- shared a look with each other. Orange was just too engrossed in you at this point. "Are you sure he just didn't go on his own?" Green stressed. "He would be one dumb bitch to leave me alone like that," you nearly shouted before going for that unicorn juice again. "There must've been a reason." Orange nodded vigorously in agreement. "Very dumb bitch," he tsked. "Because he knows I will kill him if he did-" you sipped the cold fizz- "and if I didn't, our family definitely will." The camera panned in the emotion of slight disbelief White felt as his eyes remained hollow while that smile was still stuck on his face. It took him a few seconds to bring himself to mutter, "our...family," and scratch an itch on his neck. "So," you burped and excused yourself, "before anyone from my home flies here just to kill him, I am going to rescue him." "Whaaa-at?" Sky mutters from behind the bar counter. "Help you go after some strange and powerful witch that we have absolutely no idea about?" Javier's camera- which Javier had in his hand as he stood right behind Sky- recorded the endless stash of weapons and potions kept behind the bar right there within Sky's reach. The camera especially zoomed in on the one bundle of spears marked 'Witch skewers: Do not wash, Do not touch. Poisonous'. "And that too on such a short notice?" Sky faked a laugh.

Sky: *tired* Of course we know Loki's been kidnapped. White: *casually* Of course, we'll help Y/N. Violet: *stone face* I'm down to hunt some bad girls any day. White: *sighs* I really wish we could leave him with his kidnapper though. *pause* *everyone mumbles in agreement* *silence resumes around the table* Orange: *thinking while looking at the void* but that would make Y/N sad. *nods and pouts around the table* Red: Once we rescue him, let's kidnap Y/N. *hums of agreement around the table*

"Okay-" you place the empty glass on the table and get up to look around the table before looking into Javier's camera, "let's go save a God today."

[annoying-lucy]

Evan Evagora did an AMA involving the Star Trek Shitposting Facebook Group - the questions and answers below were copy/pasted direct from the collated master post. Evan is a member of the group, who participates under an unknown pseudonym.

———————————————

AMA Master Post!

Thanks so much to Evan Evagora for taking time out of his day for our AMA earlier. To make the questions and answers easier for ya'll to find, here they all are together below.

Q: How does my love of cats compare to Elnor?

A: Im actually more of a dog person, there was a scene that had Elnor and spot 2 unite briefly but unfortunately it didn’t leave the editing room

Q: How familiar was I with Star Trek before and did I have to do research?

A: I grew up with TNG, I’d have to say either worf, Guinan or Q are my favourite characters. And I was given episodes to watch that were to help with information before filming Picard

Q: How was I prepped to deal with the crazy fans?

A: I got told to join Star Trek shitposting 😉. Not but in all seriousness, it was Jonathan Frakes who gave me advice on entering the world of fandom from the other side and he said it’s been nothing short of a pleasure

Q: So if Hugh had survived would they have made out?

A: what happens on the cube stays on the cube

Q: My favourite moment of s1

A: getting to slice that romulans head off

Q: How did I hear about Star Trek shitposting?

A: most of the crew is either a part of the group or knows about, one of the amazing hair and make up ladies got me into I think my first or second day

Q: If I had to be Tuvixed with someone excluding elnor?

A: mirror verse Elnor, nah worf to be honest

Q: What is something I’d like to do in season 2

A: Id like to see Elnor and spot 2 together

Q: How am I passing my time woth quarantine?

A: ama for the gronp! Nah I’ve just been reading, writing and also the contact I’m having with the fans too has really helped a lot

Q: If I had to quarantine with any of my costars who would it be and why

A: I’d go with hardy treadaway he’s got the nicest place

Q: What am I hoping to see in Elnor’s future

A: Inner peace, contentment and possibly shorter hair?

Q: Am I intimidated by working on a show with such a big fan base?

A: no I grew up with Star Trek, you’re really in a bubble of filming when you’re making the show, it all didn’t really hit home until the first trailer at San Diego

Q: Would I consider playing Elnor as non binary

A: I’ve seen a lot of debate and discussion about not only my character but others in the series, if there is something that connects you with a character on this show and it resonates with you, even if it’s shown, not shown or hinted at I’m all for it. I am not for the constant belittlement, bullying and criticism of not only the characters on the show but also other fans. It really does break my heart reading comments where people aren’t welcoming of one another, because that is the whole reason why Trek has bought so many together and by spewing these disgusting cruel words out your not only showing the world you don’t understand the meaning behind the show, you also are destroying the thing that makes us all love it

Q: Is there Australia on romulas

A: yeah they have a down under I’m sure of it. No the accent can easily be explained with, Elnor left romulas at a young age, moved to a planet with different species and languages spoken so that influenced his accent

Q: Have I seen Elnor fan fiction and art?

A: yeah some of it has been really amazing! And some others have been...creative

Q: How excited am I to make home movies with my action figures?

A: my plan is to buy everyone’s, make them record audio and then film shit using the dolls and their voices

Q: Are you playing animal crossing?

A: I’ve preordered it because they’ve sold out here in aus, but in playing civ 6 to pass time and Mario party

Q: Did I get to try Romulan ale?

A: no I wish, I’m kind of hoping for a scene next year where Elnor gets drunk for the first time

Q: What character did I wish would appear in our show?

A: one word, one letter Q

Q: What’s my background have I been acting long?

A: Picard was my third acting gig, and the first project to release, so I have got some experience acting and I have previous work but it has either just aired or is going to next year

Q: Please my friend choose a charity you would like us to donate to

A: food bank

Q: Favourite ninja turtle

A: it’s always been Raph and always will be

Q: Do I know much about Elnors background

A: I know things that haven’t been mentioned yet, but also given his character is new and season 1 just finished, hopefully some of those things are explored

Q: How would o feel about the fan theory that Spock is my father

A: I mean, I’m not really sure, I can always shoot Ethan a message and ask him what he thinks too

Q: Which classic episode trope would I like to see?

A: mirror universe

Q: Can we look forward to more ninja representation?

A: is Elnor not enough? ☹️

Q: Were there any particular characters I drew inspiration from, any elves?

A: there’s a particular group of people I think Elnor might have been inspired from. Can I just say how cool it would be if Elnor is just cosplaying as an elf because Picard left him a copy of Lotr when he was young

Q: Would I be open to exploring Elnors sexuality in s2 and what would it be?

A: I am totally open for that, and as for Elnors sexuality, I’m not sure he’s only 17 he’s just left his planet and gone off on an adventure where he openly knew the success may lead in his death or others he hasn’t had time to figure himself out so seeing his sexuality explored would be amazing

Q: What stories did you hear about working on precious trek series from the OG actors?

A; So we found out Michael Dorn used to muddle his lines up because he was normally the last close up of the day. They used to put bets on to see how many takes he’d have to do. All I must add in very fun spirits nothing ever malicious or mean

Q: My long term career goals

A: id like to keep pursuing more roles I’m acting, I’m a big writer and have some projects I’m looking at getting created but right now I’d say I’m just here to learn and grow

Q: What do I write?

A: right now I’m working on three screenplays and two pilots most of the stuff I’ve written is just sitting on my hard drive just waiting to be used

Q: Ever fried an egg, buttered and vegemite'd some toast and eaten it like a sandwich?

A: what I just read, scared the crap out of me, I love vegemite but the most I’ll do is add cheese to it

Q: What is one of my favourite stories about s1

A: Jeri Ryan and I had a scene together in the borg cube (what a queen she made!) it was shooting at night and I think it was the final shot of the day, we couldn’t keep a straight face and just laughed through about fifteen takes

Q: Are you a big fan of fandom besides Trek?

A: Star Wars, lotr, the magician series Raymond e feist, a song of fire and ice series, avatar last air bender and legend of Korra (would love to play zuko) and of course Batman (fav Jason Todd as the hood)

Q: Could I see myself playing Elnor for six or seven years?

A: as long as there’s a good story that myself and fans will enjoy, but if it didn’t meet my expectations no. And also hopefully the writers and creators would want to

Q: My top TNG eps are in no particular order

I borg, all good things, tapestry, the measure of a man and all good things

I’ll also add I borg especially because it’s just cool seeing where Hugh began and how he ended up

Q: How did I land the role of Elnor?

A: I was on a break from filming Fantasy Island (a movie based off the old tv show) and I was home for pilot season which is when they cast for shows, I had two weeks of daily auditions before I was due to fly back and start filming again, two days before I was meant to leave I got an audition for Picard, the script had a code name and Elnors name was Kbar on it, but I was told it was Star Trek. I went into the room and thought I didn’t do a very good job, then I flew to film and two days later I was told I’ve made a list of people being considered, after a few more auditions and a couple of phone calls from producers and everything I found myself on a plane to LA five weeks later

Q: Have I made friends among the cast?

A: no, we tried really hard to become friends, but unfortunately we ended up becoming a family instead. Everything we say in interviews about us getting along is all true and not fake. I’m the newest to acting out of everyone so I was kind of of shocked to find out that how close we all are isn’t necessarily how it will be when I shoot other projects, so I think we just got lucky or they casted really well

Q: Have the Picard people seen your memes?

A: yes I’ve shown them the memes from the page, I’ve shown everyone including Patrick we find most of them funny (some shocking)

Not shocking in a bad way

Unexpected I should say

Q: How do I feel about the ears?

A: I wore them so much they came up in my dreams, but they were the easiest thing to apply onto me

Q: Which non tng character would I like to see return?

A: I wouldn’t mind seeing the doctor

Q: The most relatable Star Trek character?

A: Look for me growing up it was Wesley, i just picked anyone who was the young one. And I grew up with my sisters and was always being told I’m either wrong, an idiot or just to shut up

Q: Did I have previous martial arts experience before the show?

A: I have a background in boxing which helps when it comes to movement, reflexes and just all around fitness for stunts. I didn’t have any sword fighting experience before we began training for the show however

Q: How do you think being raised by an order of women affected Elnor?

A: I think it gave him a healthy understanding of not only the strength and resilience of women but I think he understands not only gender equality but just equality in general and I think that’s directly to do with growing up in a sect of all female warrior nuns

Q: What is a type of meme you would like to see more of in the group?

A: I love all the memes in the group, I hardly like any of them now incase someone figures out who I am though ahahah

Q: Favorite recent memes?

A: See my comment below