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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Serializing the first chapter of Red Team Blues

My next novel is Red Team Blues, which comes out on Apr 25; it’s easily the most “commercial” book I’ve ever written — a “grabby thriller” (to quote my publisher), or, as Molly “Web3 Is Going Just Great” White put it, “don’t start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning.”

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#unsalted-hash

Red Team Blues is the story of Martin Hench, a 67 year old, near-retirement forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley finance scams, who stumbles into the most dangerous job of his life. He gets embroiled in cryptocurrency heist that exposes the finance rot at the heart of tech and the way that it curdled the dream of technology as a force for connection and good.

I’ll be doing a giant tour (San Diego, LA, Burbank, Berkeley, San Francisco, PDX, Mountain View, Vancouver, Calgary, Gaithursburg, DC, Toronto, London, Hay, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, Berlin); you can follow the upcoming dates in each day’s edition of my Pluralistic newsletter; here’s today’s:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#bragsheet

And to whet your appetite, I’m going to spend the next week or so syndicating the first chapter of Red Team Blues, starting today. In this installment, we meet Martin Hench and the Unsalted Hash, his “foolish and ungainly” tour bus, just as he’s being roped in for the job of his career.

I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering the book! And if you read the book, I hope you’ll post a review or recommendation to your social media or blog. There is literally no greater favor you can do for a writer than to tell the people who trust your judgment about a book you enjoyed. It’s gift more precious than gold.

Here’s where US readers can pre-order the book:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Here’s pre-orders for Canadians:

https://services.raincoast.com/scripts/b2b.wsc/featured?hh_isbn=9781250865847&ht_orig_from=raincoast

And for readers in the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/red-team-blues-cory-doctorow/7225998?ean=9781804547755

And now, here’s today’s serial installment:

One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.

I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected — well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.

That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels — DMs from people who I tended to check in with when I was looking for work — and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set. Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptographic secrets in the world (nominally). So I messaged him. One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?

My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner. My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.

Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.

Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show. He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a thirty-foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.

It was a bet that there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC, whose crypto-libraries and workflow tools were the much-ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution. Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey, to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.

Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.

It had been a good marriage: twenty-two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters. She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with. He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good, and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.

A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and most respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in while the Twin Peaks project was underway. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight. They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world. Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.

They were right — given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs: customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for.

She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-8 days, people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of all the shares he’d taken in over the years to sit on advisory boards and stuck everything into Vanguard index-tracker funds — the ones that didn’t buy a lot of tech stocks.

As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive, insight, and technical knowledge, and into an investment vehicle managed by an overgrown spreadsheet, one that would multiply his money ahead of the CPI, year on year, until someone built a guillotine on his lawn.

What Sethu did talk him into was buying a condo around the corner from that Palo Alto teardown, an eight-story place, quiet, built on the grave of another Palo Alto teardown that had been snapped up by property developers in the glory days before NIMBY planning ended all high-density infill within fifty miles of Stanford.

THIS IS THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: A squared-off version of Will Staehle's cover for the Macmillan edition of 'Red Team Blues.']

#pluralistic #red team blues #books #novels #technothrillers #thrillers #crypto #cryptocurrency #crypto means cryptography #fiction

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realityhelixcreates · 1 year ago

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Some days ago you wrote a post saying that you were writing something using elder scrolls lore? I think? What's that about? Are you writing some au? I'm a bit lost on your most recent fanfics (I'm waiting until I have some free time so I can give nexus a try, I'm just a bit intimidated cause I know next to nothing about DC) but I love reading about your ideas and characters, they all sound so genuinely interesting and we'll writen.

Ohhhh yes, okay so!

Wayyyyyyyy back in the day, there were a bunch of Riddler ask/art/rp blogs, that all portrayed their respective Riddler in very different ways. Some were based on official material (YJ is from the 2011 Young Justice animated series, Arkham from the Arkham City video game, Detective was originally based off the 1992 Batman: the Animated Series, but became highly altered as their storyline continued) some, like Narci, Puzzles, and Nash, were original takes on the character. Swag stared out as a parody that became a solid character as time passed. All of these interacted with each other, and developed into a found family.

Helix (My OC) came along a little later, and began interacting with them. None of us really expected how inextricably involved she was going to become, since she's much more of a high fantasy character, than a DC character, but it all happened pretty organically, and was a lot of fun.

Back then, I started a bunch of creative projects I wanted to share with the writers of these blogs, but I had just ended my relationship with my ex-fiancee, moved back in with my parents, and was working in a pretty toxic environment, and it just slaughtered my creative output. If I were to point you to my old blog, which I shan't, you would see that I drew maybe five or six things in as many years, when previously, I had drawn almost every day.

All of those blogs eventually went silent, the last interaction being between Helix and Narci. Since then, some of them have even been deleted entirely. I forgot about the things I was going to do, and they lay ignored for years. Then I stumbled across my old harddrive, where all these ideas still existed, barely sketched out, partially begun, and it all flooded back. Yeah, those blogs are done, some of the writers have disappeared, it's all over. But those stories are still there, and so am I.

I am in a much better place than I was. I have some writing practice under my belt, and, most importantly, I have inspiration again. I can make the art I always wanted to. I can write the stories I always wanted to. I can finish what I wanted to start.

That all being said, One of the things I started a long time ago, was an elder scrolls crossover. I had also started playing Skyrim at around that time, and it was an idle idea that I thought would be fun. When I found that harddrive, the first chapter had been partially written out, and I ended up taking the ideas there, and going in a different direction with them. I now have an over thirty chapter, ongoing story involving Helix and Swag stumbling their way through Cyrodiil, told entirely through Swag's POV. I've been posting it on my main/RP blog rather than here, because I felt that Helix and Swag's relationship hadn't been well enough expressed in the Nexusverse yet. Almost all of the Nexus stories so far take place in 2011-2013, and this crossover story takes place in 2020, so there's a lot in between that I haven't gone into yet, you know?

But considering that I've been posting some of the later Nexus stories out of chronological order, I might just start posting it anyway. I think it's kinda obvious by now how some of Helix's relationships pan out, so it might be okay. What do you think?

Also, you are very sweet, and I'm glad I've been able to express some of my ideas in a way that others can enjoy them with me. I will warn you, the stories that are from Helix's POV can be a bit challenging to follow; she doesn't experience reality in the same way as most people, which I've expressed with synesthesia and the repetition of consonants, syllables, and vowel sounds in a freeform poem/prose manner. If you do start the Nexus stories at their beginning, you'll see why.

Don't be too intimidated though; most Nexus stories are only 1-2000 words, with the exception of Orbital Unresonanace, which is, admittedly, a chonker. But you've been reading Lasa, so I know you can handle unreasonably large stories.

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melody-han-wayne · 10 months ago

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(OOC: Update + Apology—Long Post)

So I've been pretty much non-existent for the past 4 months or so BUT I can explain!

Basically what happened is that I emigrated to not just a different country, but a different continent on literally the other side of the world from where I grew up. And I left behind all my friends and family at home, meaning I came here alone and I'm still alone and probably will be alone for as long as I remain in this new country. So for the past few months I've been dealing with moving and settling down and making plans to secure my future in this new country—heck, just making sure I can have a future in this new country. I'm more or less settled into my new life now (except for the planning for the future part) but before that I kind of forgot about Melody for a while 🫥

So anyway the guilt ate away at my subconscious and Melody's voice came to me in a dream and berated me for abandoning her, so I woke up and quickly came to check on my baby. And I realise, to my utter mortification and horror, that I never paused my Tumblr queue, so all the half-baked ideas, the rough drafts, the tentative-but-not-in-chronological-order character development, had been posting itself while I was away 🫠. So if during the past 5 months you saw my blog degenerate into a bigger and bigger mess and wondered "What the heck is going on"—it's not you, it's me. Right now I'm just trying to salvage what I can of my blog (and my dignity) and reorganise everything I originally planned for Melody (tbh I forgot half of it but I'm sure the memories are in here somewhere, I just have to clean out the dust and oil the gears first).

Honestly I have no idea how many people follow(ed) Melody's story, I might as well be posting into the void for all I know. But like so many of the other RPers on this blog I started because I was bored and had some ideas in my head that wouldn't leave me alone, and over time I became attached to my OC and her story (perhaps unhealthily so). That's part of the reason why I decided not to just delete my blog and make my absence permanent. Because working on this self-indulgent project used to make me happy, and because I still have some ideas I want to share with whoever might be lurking around. Another reason is because of the community that welcomed me and that I personally watched grow. Even when this blog was at its 'most active' I probably didn't interact with other RPers as much as I should/could have (again, it's not you, it's me) but what little interaction we did have I truly did enjoy as we built and connected our own stories and characters while also interpreting the DC ones. I don't think I've said this before, and I don't think I'll ever say it enough, but really, thank you all for being willing to indulge me and play with me. This has been a lovely space to be in, and you guys combined are like 80% of the reason ❤️❤️❤️❤️

@florence-wayne-official @kit-the-nonbinary-wayne @that-one-gotham-kid @amira-wayne-al-ghul @warren-wayne-kyle @teagrayson + anyone I missed, knowing the rate at which this community grows there's bound to be at least one person I didn't tag (it's not a snub—again, not you, it's me and my bad memory—please don't be offended 🥺)

((idk if tagging everyone is proper etiquette after my prolonged absence, I was just going to say 'you know who you are' at first and leave it at that but I'm not sure if you guys actually know who you are 😅 so if I'm breaking some kind of unspoken Tumblr code of etiquette I apologise again))

(((I didn't mean for that above note to sound as rude as it did)))

ANYWAYS if you've read past the wall of text above to make it down here congratulations and thank you, I'll be doing my best to clean up/revise my blog and my OC and her story in the coming weeks and hopefully get some sort of continuity back on track :) I'm also trying to figure out what happened in the rest of the RP community in my absence so if I reply to a three-month-old post now: once again, it's not you, it's me, and there's totally no obligation to engage with.

Can't wait to hang out with the Batfamily again ☺️ plus all my RP siblings, half-siblings, future siblings, stepsiblings, undead siblings etc XD

#ooc

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bigskydreaming · 3 years ago

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I feel another fanon debunk session coming over me, and this one’s a BIG one.

Let’s talk about the DickKory breakup, and why it happened.

Yup, we’re going there.

Before we get going though, I want to make one thing abundantly clear: this is NOT an invitation to bash on Kory. There will be no bashing of Kory on this post if I have anything to say about it, and its my post, so I do. So nyah nyah. But seriously like, don’t get my reasons for making this post wrong. I LOVE Kory. I SHIP Dick/Kory. And I don’t actually blame Kory for any of this, no matter how the page I’m about to show makes it appear, for reasons that I will get into later in this post, but like. I really truly don’t. I don’t think the Dick/Kory breakup ultimately was either of their fault. I think it was the painful end result of them both hitting rock bottom due to endless external fuckery with their lives and their minds during the tail end of their relationship, making it all but impossible for them to be there for each other the way they truly needed and WANTED to be....ultimately forcing them to break off and BOTH try and reorder their lives on their own. But IMO, this NEVER actually marked a dissolution of their feelings for each other, no matter what either (particularly Dick) eventually claimed in order to rationalize things to themselves.

I do however think some of the other Titans bear some culpability for not seeing things as they truly were here. I can understand given what they all went through during this time period like, how maybe it became easier to just blame Dick especially as he has a tendency to be so willing to accept blame? And so I think a lot of conclusions were jumped to that at other times they WOULD have spent more time thinking through. But here and now they didn’t simply because they were so relieved to HAVE an easy, simple explanation for things going wrong and someone to blame, someone who ACCEPTED blame. And thus more easily allowing them to speed through to the portion of events where they worked on ‘forgiving him’ for what he’d done so they could all move past it.

Okay, so let me stop talking in code for those of you who have only the faintest idea of what I’m talking about.

Traditional fanon states - and most wiki summaries I’ve seen actually CORROBORATE this, which drives me COMPLETELY up the wall because I would like to have WORDS with whomever wrote each of these wiki summaries - that ultimately, Dick and Kory broke up because they rushed into things with the wedding and both realized they weren’t actually ready to get married.

Let me be clear: this is totally and completely 100% true.

Fanon and wikis go ON however, to conclude that the ‘fault’ lies with Dick, because he was the one who jumped the gun in proposing, and that he only DID so, because he thought getting married would ‘help him finally grow up’ and ‘hit one of the milestones he thought he was missing while everyone else his age that he’d known in high school and stuff were graduating college and getting married and having kids right about now.’ And also that he eventually concluded that he didn’t actually love Kory the way he thought he did and needed to let her go for her sake.

Now let me also be clear: this is also MOSTLY true in the sense that he did eventually THINK these thoughts, some ten or fifteen issues after their crashed wedding, when he was off on his own and thinking through everything that was going on in his life and trying to make sense of the decisions he’d been making lately, most of which he was unhappy with.

The one part that ISN’T true is that last bit, which a lot of people extrapolate from and use as their basis for saying Dick ‘fell out of love with Kory’ and ‘realized that he no longer loved her the way he once had,’ with this leading into why they never got back together after Kory returned to Earth in the Titans revival series in the late 90s.

HOWEVER.

There’s a tiiiiiiiiiny little correction I must make to that last part, which might seem insignificant, but becomes ABUNDANTLY important when added to some other much needed - and much ignored overlooked - context:

Dick never ACTUALLY said or thought that he didn’t love Kory anymore, full stop. What he actually said, in its entirety, was that he realized “he never really loved Kory the way she deserved to be loved.”

Why is this distinction so important? Hang on just a sec, we’re almost there.

Now I would like to share with you, for those who have never seen this page or those who perhaps have forgotten it or its significance, the EXACT page where Dick proposes to Kory, from The New Titans #99, one issue before their wedding special in issue #100. (What’s that? You’re surprised that they got married the very issue after the proposal? You thought that they were engaged for a lengthier period of time? Ohhhh don’t worry, fair readers. We’ll get there. Ohhhh we’ll get there).

But first, those of you who have never actually read this page before, I would like you to take a look at it, and see if you can Where’s Waldo what it is about this page that makes my blood reach a boiling point in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit every time someone utters the words “Dick rushed into marriage because he thought it would make him grow up or hit some important life milestone.”

Take a gander, what do you see:

See it? Get what I’m talking about?

Any talk of Dick and Kory breaking up because they weren’t ready to get married, and Dick having been the one to rush them into it before they were ready, COMPLETELY fails at accurately representing the events of that time if it fails to mention the fact that:

DICK ONLY PROPOSED WHEN HE DID BECAUSE HE WAS DESPERATE TO CONVINCE KORY, HIMSELF AND EVERYONE ELSE THAT HE LOVED HER AND ONLY HER AND SLEEPING WITH MIRAGE HAD MEANT NOTHING!

(Since, y’know, he didn’t actually sleep with her so much as he was raped by her).

I mean, your mileage may vary, but me, I happen to think that bit there is pretty CRITICAL FUCKING INTEL when it comes to this whole matter.

Claiming Dick is to blame because he rushed into marriage because he was looking to grow up or hit some milestone utterly FAILS as an analytical conclusion in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY....

When there is both ZERO indication from him BEFORE the proposal, that those are reasons or thoughts he has that has him leaning towards proposing.....

As well as ZERO reflection AFTER the failed wedding, that being desperate to convince everyone who thought he’d cheated on Kory that he really did love her, was at all a key motivating factor in him proposing when and how he did.

Like it or not, Mirage and the storyline surrounding that is utterly CRUCIAL to the DickKory breakup, because EVERY mention of that describes the cause of that breakup being rushing into marriage, and if you take away that storyline - and every character’s reaction to it - there is absolutely NO reason to even THINK Dick would still have proposed when he did.

And thus, leaving the Mirage story ENTIRELY out of all talk of the end of Dick and Kory’s relationship, is just....blatantly not indicative of what the story actually was.

Now, in addition, I know we tend to talk about this story as though DC sucks for never calling the rape what it was, and say that if DC’s not willing to treat these things as what they really are, they shouldn’t be using them as story points. First order of business: Yes DC sucks a lot and their handling of all this sucked.

BUT.

It is also not entirely accurate to say that they never TREATED this story as what it was.

Because while everyone else may have been fixated on it as Dick cheating on Kory....initially, at pretty much every point UNTIL the wedding....Dick at least was STEADFAST in not considering HIMSELF having cheated. I mean, look at his language in just the page above. He talks about being “repulsed” by what Mirage did. The writers might have never actually called what happened to Dick ‘rape,’ but initially they were VERY consistent in nevertheless writing him as someone who at least to some degree felt victimized by what happened, rather than culpable. He was trying to convince everyone ELSE to see it that way - until eventually he kinda gave up, and started to see it THEIR way.

You can literally see him already starting to make the pivot towards rationalizing that POV to himself in the above page....he talks about ‘thinking with his hormones’ and that leading him to make a mistake, even though his hormones had nothing to do with whether what happened was wrong or not.....it was always entirely about: would he have consented to sex with Mirage IF he knew she wasn’t really Kory. Thinking with his hormones in no way addresses the fact that its completely unreasonable to expect anyone to be so on guard 24/7, even in the privacy of their own bedroom with their own girlfriend, that they have their eyes peeled for an impostor even there.

In fact, imagine what the others would have all said if Dick hadn’t slept with Mirage that night, or else had confided in them later that it felt not right, that something was wrong, at some point BEFORE Mirage entered and told Dick in front of everyone that it had actually been her. How likely do you think it would have been that instead of taking Dick at face value, many of them would have instead viewed this as just another time Dick was exercising “Bat-paranoia” rather than allowing himself to be intimate with a loved one the way normal, non-Batfolk do, y’know? Do you think they would have automatically agreed with him that there was something up and he had reason to feel that ‘something wasn’t right about Kory’ when Dick probably still would have had no idea what for sure he felt was off, let alone that it wasn’t ACTUALLY her? Or would they have gotten on his case about how this is just him self-sabotaging again and letting his issues come between him and someone he cared about?

Tbh, one of the things that was greatest about Dick and Kory’s relationship IMO was that she was one of the best at getting him out of his own head. With Kory, when they weren’t both being jerked around by brainwashing plots and the like, Dick was better at just....letting go and just being himself around her. He didn’t feel like he had to constantly be on his guard or waiting for the other shoe to drop. Ironically, IMO, Dick DOES have a tendency to self-sabotage at times and let paranoia or other issues keep him from totally dropping his defenses and letting himself be vulnerable with other people.....meaning he probably would have been MORE likely to cue into something being off, if it had been anyone BUT Kory he’d been dating when Mirage replaced them.

So bottom line is, you can’t actually fully blame the writing for the others’ reactions to this story. Because whether they ever actually acknowledged it or not, for a good ten to fifteen issues up to the wedding, the writers pretty consistently depicted Dick as someone who was and felt victimized, even if he didn’t consciously realize it yet himself, let alone why. There were repeated moments between Kory initially breaking up with him after it happened through this proposal above, where it basically reads like Dick yelling “Ask me how violated I feel! Go on, ask me!” Except he never really got the chance because he was too busy replying to everyone around him that he hadn’t cheated on Kory, he thought he was WITH Kory, and that was the ONLY reason he had sex that night.

Slight tangent - this btw, is why I can never even get worked up enough about Nightwing Annual #2 to be like, defensive about it. That was the flashback issue written YEARS after all these events, where retroactively Andreyko inserted at some point between this proposal and the wedding - without changing anything else or the events he wrote ever being brought up or acknowledged again - a story where Dick went to visit Babs to personally deliver her wedding invitation....but only AFTER they slept together. And then when he gave her the invitation and she got furious about what had just happened, he just blithely said oh Kory won’t mind, and Babs was like yeah well I MIND!

Which was a totally valid reaction for Babs to have to those events as depicted, its just....I can’t remotely take them seriously, not when I’ve actually READ the events that by Andreyko’s own admission are meant to bookend that story. So you’re telling me, that right after Dick proposes to his longtime girlfriend SPECIFICALLY because he’s desperate to convince her he loves only her and would never willingly sleep with anyone else......he would go and sleep with someone else between then and the wedding? And then just without a hint of remorse say oh what’s the problem, Kory would be fine with it - when literally everything else about the wedding even HAPPENING was based on the fact that he knew for a fact that Kory would NOT in fact, be fine with that? Umm, make it make sense, except you can’t, because that story and the point where it makes sense are in two entirely different galactic quadrants. Green Lanterns couldn’t make it from Point A to Point B. So lol, sorry not sorry, I’m gonna stay not taking that story or claims that Dick is ACTUALLY a cheater, like, remotely seriously. I mean, your mileage may vary, but I especially don’t think anyone who can make excuses for Bruce’s many transgressions being OOC like, has any business trying to pass this particular story off as in character, but WHATEVS. Like, you CAN do it if you really want to, but I mean, I’m just gonna think that’s silly. I’ll be like OMG you’re so silly. Why are you so silly, can we just stop with all the silliness. And then like, I’ll go do something else or whatever.

(Oh and for the record, the wedding was the issue after Dick proposed, but it wasn’t meant to be like, the day after or anything. BUT we do know it was still pretty damn soon after, like at most a week or two....because the concurrent storyline was Roy being upset because the government was trying to shut down the Titans and said they would unless Roy took leadership from Dick and ousted him, which Roy understandably was NOT keen to do, even and especially with everything going on as the Titans were a family first and foremost and he was stuck between trying to preserve them and keep them going and betraying everything they stood for by basically instigating a vote of no confidence in Dick’s leadership.....but point being, Roy kept stalling the government agent asking for his answer......when said agent was very impatient, and asked repeatedly both in issue #99 AND issue #100. So you’re never going to convince me Roy managed to stall said agent for months or whatever, or any longer than a couple weeks at most, to allow for Dick and everyone else to put together a shotgun wedding for him and Kory. Which just further adds to the make it make sense aspect of the above mentioned Annual, but I absofuckinglutely digress).

Anyway.

NOW, let’s bring it back around to when I said like, don’t do the thing, don’t actually blame Kory for any of this, don’t you do it? /paraphrase

Yeah. So we’re there at that point now, and I reiterate once more for the court, like, hey, what if you just don’t? Y’know? Even if you’re looking at her dialogue in the above page I posted and are like, I’m feeling the urge, the urge to.....idk something that rhymes with urge but is bad I guess? Whatever. Just like. Don’t do it. Say nasty things about Kory because of this story three times in front of your computer and I will totally like, be conjured by that and crawl out of your screen all creepy girl from The Ring style. It will NOT be pretty. I am NOT meant to fit through there. I can NOT make it look good. You have been warned.

Okay so like, the reason I say none of this is on Kory even though I don’t make the same distinctions for the other Titans is threefold. No, lbr, its probably more on account of I can’t count and I’m always wrong about this shit. But let’s start with three.

1) The first thing we need to address is the fact that Dick WAS acting erratically and out of character through all of this time, even before what happened with Mirage. This was still in the near aftermath of Titans Hunt, and he was still reeling from that, and holding himself totally accountable. People who’ve followed me for awhile have probably seen me fixate on Titans Hunt before, but I honestly don’t think anyone who hasn’t read the full extent of comics from that storyline all the way through like....The New Titans #115 or so, like.....truly grasps the extent of just HOW much that single storyline affected Dick. He was at rock bottom because of it in a way that is probably only truly comparable with the Blockbuster storyline, but for even LONGER. Like the span of comics I referenced just now covers probably like....almost fifty issues.

That’s fifty issues where Dick consistently brings up his failure to stop that and how much Joey and Charlie and Arella and everyone else’s deaths during that like, just weighs on him, and fucks with his confidence and just.....his overall sense of purpose and self. He WAS lost and aimless for a lot of that time. And he DID absolutely even recognize HIMSELF that it was affecting him. Like ten issues or so after the crashed wedding, when he’s on his own journey of self-discovery while looking for Kory in the Amazon (uh yeah, that’s a thing. I’ll get to that)....like, he acknowledges to himself that ever since the Titans Hunt he’s been getting crazier and more demanding (his words) and he doesn’t even recognize himself anymore...and he attributes all of that to not having come to terms with their deaths and his inability to prevent them.

Now, notably, he DOESN’T ever at this time acknowledge that his behavior took an INCREASINGLY downward spiral ever since Mirage and specifically due to everyone blaming him for what he deep down felt wasn’t actually his fault but was losing conviction in. And quite frankly, even though he SAYS at this point he’s ready to move on from their losses, I don’t think that actually happened, but I’ll get back to both those things. First, the important point here, in terms of Kory, is that from her perspective, Dick had been increasingly unpredictable and not himself ever since the losses during Titans Hunt. Actually, given that she was the one who went with him to the Manor after Jason’s death and the only one who saw him come in and out and who thus knows the full extent of what transpired there - with this all happening not long before Titans Hunt - you could additionally say her awareness of that also has her almost prepared to expect the totally unexpected from Dick at this point.

Does that mean its right? No. But it does mean that its there.

2) Next. Kory was not actually offered the chance by the storyline to internalize what happened between Mirage and Dick from a stable, grounded headspace. Mirage KIDNAPPED Kory and replaced her before she slept with Dick. In the grand scheme of things, what happened to Kory specifically here is probably far from the worst thing that’s ever happened to her, but it couldn’t have been pleasant and I’m the first to yell NO TRAUMA OLYMPICS so in that spirit, fuck whether it was as bad as it COULD have been, and again, just acknowledge that it happened, and its reasonable and expected that it would have a negative effect on Kory. She was targeted and victimized by Mirage too. Not in the same way as Dick, but add that to the fact that unlike the other Titans, she was the one IN the relationship with Dick and thus the only one besides him that had a stake in what Mirage’s actions served as a catalyst for in that regard, like....she was not an impartial bystander to all this, and that needs to be considered. She was PART of it. It was her life that was hijacked by all this too.

3) Third.....it is extremely extremely EXTREMELY important here to acknowledge that Kory is herself a rape survivor. She has extensive trauma from her childhood in the Citadel, and that is bound to color her perceptions of what happened here, at least initially. I am 174% soooooo not here for vilifying another rape survivor in defense of a different rape survivor. Like, I’m just saying.....do not throw Kory under the bus for not acknowledging Dick’s trauma and trauma responses as a rape survivor in this story if you’re not also YOURSELF acknowledging Kory’s OWN trauma as a rape survivor.

This is key not because it says any opinions she had at this time don’t count, but rather that they simply don’t come from the same place as the VICTIM-BLAMING that is the central issue with others holding Dick accountable for his own rape. In Kory’s case, we have to consider the issue of projection. The ways in which her own experiences and how they’ve informed her DEFAULT perception of something that deeply affected her, might skew her initial reaction to experiences which share a LABEL, but not specific ELEMENTS.

What I mean here is both Kory and Dick, as of this point in time, are rape survivors. But they survived very very VERY different kinds of rape. Both were abundantly clear that they DID NOT WANT what happened to them, that they were not willing parties to what actually transpired....but what springs to Kory’s mind when someone says “I didn’t want the sex that happened” is understandably going to look VERY different from what Dick was describing when he said “I didn’t want the sex that happened.” So its not really all that unreasonable for Kory to hold those two things up in her head and say these are not the same, and from there jump to the unfortunate conclusion that Dick HAD wanted it on some level, else it would have looked more like her own experiences...especially because others around them were already voicing and affirming this opinion in various ways.

Again, is this fair, or deserved? No. But I talk all the time with other characters and with Dick himself about how its just not reasonable to expect characters - especially ones with highly CHARGED emotions related to their own parallel experiences - to act from an unbiased state or POV and thus leap to the most ideal conclusion without at least first stumbling through some other ones. So with Kory, her own context with rape simply CAN NOT be divorced from the fact that recognizing the central issue of this later moment in time was that it was a rape. Her own experiences and the likely projection of them onto the moment at hand add a degree of context to conclusions she arrived at that other characters simply do not have....and thus, again, its not okay to paint her with the same brush as all those characters. And unless you’re already somehow making a distinction as to why her reaction is different from others despite superficially appearing the same......then like. You need to be. LOL.

4) The other factor that’s important to consider here is that just like Kory was never offered the chance to RECEIVE information of what happened from a relatively grounded place and headspace....the stories never gave her any real time to think things through, process over time, and arrive at different conclusions from her earlier ones. Again, I talk all the time about how Dick’s experiences with the Titans pre-his time in Bludhaven were colored by multiple instances of brainwashing and his head being fucked with and being personally targeted and jerked around in a ton of ways? The same is true of Kory, and it needs to be given equal weight.

Their wedding was crashed by ‘the dark soul self’ of Raven - who they thought was dead - as she infected Kory with what she called a demon seed that was going to grow a new demon inside of her. Due to her possession, Kory spent weeks in a mental institutition, trying to overcome the entity inside her (with Dick sitting by her side and holding her hand through all of it, just FYI). When she finally did purge the entity from her, Kory took off and ended up in a village in the Amazon, with the ordeal having given her amnesia. Dick went after her, but he’d only just tracked her down when she took off again to foil an alien invasion using radio waves that she was uniquely suited to recognize due to being familiar with their tactics, but which pitted her against most of the rest of the world in like, the Ultimate Gaslighting Showdown as everyone kept telling her she was crazy (she was wearing a tinfoil hat to protect herself from the transmissions, the writers were deliberately not doing her any favors).

Only after that was foiled did she regain her memories, and while off the page she agreed to meet with Dick to talk about their failed wedding and everything that happened afterward, as he’d returned from the Amazon by now, where he’d ultimately come to his own self-realizations about everything (or what we were told to accept were his realizations)....in the end she took off for Tamaran without meeting him, leaving him waiting where they’d agreed to rendezvous. Again, I say this not to vilify Kory, because I absolutely think she made the best choice for herself at the time, and should have, and I don’t think Dick has ever blamed her for that and tbh they both separately came to the same decisions about needing to be apart to recollect themselves and figure out who they were and where to go from here, like, without having to actually talk it out to arrive at the same point. I DO raise this point simply to put out there that in contrast to many other things I’ve seen said about the break up......they....never technically broke up?

Like I mean, don’t get me wrong. They DID. They both considered themselves broken up and eventually moved on with other people, Dick with Babs, and Kory with a general who she married back on New Tamaran before it was destroyed by the Sun Eater (again, Kory went through some SHIT after their break up. Dick wasn’t the only one.) But I just mean like.....it was LITERALLY the most mutual break-up that is possible for a break-up to be, because neither one of them ever actually communicated their intent to the other in order for them to both CLEARLY be on the same page. There was no “Dick called off the wedding” - that never actually happened, it was just....never revisited. There was no “Dick told her he no longer had feelings for her” - that was something that happened later, and yes, I’ll get to that too. OMG shut up me. But also shh I’m talking.

But yeah like.....their break-up, despite being almost universally claimed as Dick’s choice and responsibility, with zero mention of Mirage’s role in it in any official accounting of it I’VE ever seen, and with Kory painted as being the victim of Dick’s wandering ways and not knowing what he wanted in the distant aftermath of their break-up, as it was said that due to being Tamaranean, she loved for life and thus would always be in love with Dick even though he after her return claimed he no longer loved her (like, I don’t blame Kory but I also don’t like takes that act like Dick DID all this to Kory somehow. Like that’s literally the entire point here, neither of them needs to be to blame or each other’s victim according to how the story ACTUALLY went).....

But yeah, despite all that.....it really was the most mutually arrived at decision ever, because neither one of them actually EVER EVEN SAID ‘WE NEED TO BREAK UP’ to the other. They both just....ended up there on their own.

(And also because DC wanted them there in order to secure the rest of their push to put Nightwing solely back in the Batbooks for the next several years. With, don’t forget, this all coinciding with the government forcing him out of the Titans and putting Roy in charge and with this all culminating in Dick having his initial adventure in Bludhaven at Bruce’s ask, and then deciding to make that his new base of operations and kinda reinvent himself there, at the start of his solo title. Again, shout out to the myth of “Dick Grayson always runs from things because commitment issues” - not only did he NOT flee to Bludhaven because he just changed his mind about the wedding and said whoops sorry Kory, it wasn’t even his CHOICE to leave the Titans, even if eventually he agreed it was for the best right now. His ex went back to her home planet and he was asked to leave his team. Why the fuck WOULDN’T he go somewhere else?)

NEXT. (jfc he mumbled to himself under his breath. what the fuck did I start here).

Circling back around AGAIN, this time back to Dick’s STATED reasons for deciding things were over.

Two...umm, fuck it, ‘a number that is more than one’ things that need to be kept in mind HERE:

1) The most crucial bit of context when examining Dick’s journey of self-exploration in the Amazon while searching for Kory and what he comes to say and think about everything that’s happened and his own behavior....

Is that he is an EXTREMELY unreliable narrator at this point in time. Y’know how we talk about Dick having that tendency to take on more accountability than is actually earned and is way quicker to view himself as in need of apologizing than he is to view others needing to do that for him?

Yeah I mean, that’s a thing, I definitely have like a billion citations ready to go on a moment’s notice, but point is, being aware of that tendency means absolutely nothing if you don’t actively APPLY that awareness to Dick’s periods of self-reflection and like....compare and contrast what he THINKS about things he’s said or done with like....what he’s ACTUALLY said or done.

For instance, on the way to his so-called epiphanies about all this, he makes the claim that the entire time Kory was dealing with the demon entity inside of her, he was being so selfish because all he was doing was wishing she would wake up or be free of it so that she could help him with his problems instead. (And just for the record, I can provide actual panels for everything I reference in this post, I’m just limiting myself to a couple because I’m just trying to NOT beat War and Peace’s pagecount as it is. Will I succeed? No. Did I try? Yes.)

Now, Dick spending his time at his possessed fianceé’s side doing nothing but wishing she would snap out of it and focus on his problems instead.....is that selfish of him?

Well, yeah.

But is it TRUE?

I mean, you tell me:

This is right smack dab in the middle of that whole storyline, set only a few issues after the crashed wedding, and before Kory successfully evicts the demon entity and loses her memories. This is literally what Dick was ACTUALLY like the entire time. At the TIME, every single thing he said and did was focused on her.....the CLOSEST he came even in his internal monologue, to making it all about him, was him thinking about how this has shown him just how much he needs her.

Do people helping a loved one through something traumatic occasionally have selfish thoughts where their awareness of their own troubles momentarily supersedes their focus on their loved one? Yeah. Does this actually make them selfish if their ACTUAL focus and actions and words are aimed entirely at their loved ones the whole time, with no single actual detour to “hey, while you’re up, can we talk about me for a sec”?

Mmmmm....I feel like no, but I am open to you drawing other conclusions as long as you are aware that they are wrong and mine is right, kay. I mean okay, fine. You can disagree with me here but I’m still gonna disagree about your disagreement there and its just gonna be this whole big thing and its like, ugh, whatever, y’know?

But hey, you do you.

ANYWAY, point is, unless you draw the wrong conclusion here in which case PTTTHB!, like, I think its safe to say Dick thinking in the midst of his self-awareness deep dive that he was being nothing but selfish during that whole story and thus didn’t deserve Kory, like....whether or not the writers are actually AWARE of it or not, I mean......that’s still a pretty good context clue that his internal monologues at this point in time are maybe a little bit skewed towards being more about accepting blame than reflecting reality, right? Yes, no, maybe so?

Well then again, if you agree with me, then add to that awareness the added bit of trivia that every single other one of Dick’s ‘ultimate realizations’ (he just wanted to get married because he thought it would bring stability to his life, it would help him grow up, hit one of those aforementioned milestones, etc)....like every single one of them.....was an opinion that was FIRST offered by one of the other Titans.

Every. Single. One.

(Wanted to get married for the stability was something Donna said she thought was his reasoning, to the other original Titans. The bit about thinking it would help him grow up was unfortunately ALSO Donna, but said to Kory before the wedding when Kory asked if she thought this was a mistake and if she thought Dick had proposed for the right reasons. The milestones thing was said by either Roy, Garth or Wally, I honestly forget which, but it was when the three of them went out to discuss the pending government takeover of the team and how to break this to Dick with everything else going on).

And with not a SINGLE one of these opinions present in ANY of Dick’s internal monologues BEFORE the proposal, hinting that they were anywhere near being on his radar at THAT point.

So....which makes more narrative sense? That Dick ultimately just realized that everything he THOUGHT was motivating him when he proposed was NOT true and that it was only his friends that clued into his actual reasons, which he must have overheard at some point and internalized in order to have replicated said opinions in his thoughts so exactly? Again with ZERO mention alongside any of this, that peoples’ views of what happened with Mirage was at ALL a factor in his thinking?

Or.....does it maybe better track, that over the course of Dick repeatedly expressing that he didn’t know it wasn’t Kory, that he never wanted to cheat on her, that he loved her and only her and would never knowingly do that....with NO ONE budging and everyone from Kory to all of his best friends acting like his adulterous guilt was an over and done with conclusion and they’d already long since moved on to the point of how willing or not they were to forgive him, based on everything else he’d been going through.....and with Dick thinking that how remorseful he appeared to be and how willing to ACCEPT accountability was likely to play a part in how much people were willing to look past all his recent fuck-ups here.......

Does it maaaaaaaybe actually make a little bit more sense that Dick’s total 180 into taking full responsibility and coming up with all these rationalizations for his actions that essentially just mimic theories everyone else had for his behavior has more to do with his deeply internalized acceptance that nobody was listening to his side of the story or what he was actually trying to say (without even real SELF awareness at the time that what he was feeling wasn’t just ‘I’m innocent of what you’re accusing me of’ but ‘I was violated and used’)?

That it was more about him finding ways to justify to himself getting on the same page everyone else ALREADY seemed to be on in regards to him and his recent behavior, as that seemed to be the only way to move forward, that he was tired of fighting everybody and feeling like he was in the wrong for it so honestly, maybe they were right?

Because from there.....

Its only a veeeeeery short hop, skip and a jump from “well I guess I DID do what they say and I SHOULD have known it wasn’t Kory”.....to.....”since the only thing I kept clinging to for how I couldn’t know was my insistence that I truly loved Kory, and it turns out that I still SHOULD have known anyway......doesn’t that mean that I didn’t really love Kory the way I thought I did? Or as much as I thought I did?”

“Did I never really love Kory as much as she deserved?”

Cuz uh, remember earlier when I talked about it being significant that Dick never ACTUALLY claimed during this time that he didn’t love Kory anymore or fell out of love with her or anything like that, but rather that his precise claim was “I didn’t love her AS MUCH AS SHE DESERVED”?

Aka.....”enough that I would have known it wasn’t actually Kory that I was with?”

Yeah. Uh, that. That’s the significance there. Yeah. So....

2) Now as to something else to keep in mind in regards to Dick’s eventual ‘self-realizations’ - this calls back to when I said earlier that Dick WAS acting erratically during this time, stemming all the way back to the Titans Hunt aftermath. He was overly aggressive, he was ready to fight anyone at a moment’s notice, he was tunnel-visioned.....in short, he was actually quite a lot how the fanon interpretations of his temper I rage about usually depict him. But the key thing here, and the reason why I wouldn’t have a problem with people drawing references from THIS time when talking about him behaving this way.....

Is that much like when Dick was behaving erratically during the Brother Blood storyline, it was with NARRATIVE INTENT.

There, Dick’s behavior led to the reveal that he was lashing out because he was fighting the Church of Blood’s mental conditioning. Here, Dick’s behavior is directly tied to his downward spiral resulting from the trauma of Titans Hunt and his guilt from that.

In both cases, I’d have zero issue with people referencing specific instances of this behavior....

As long as they ALSO reference and acknowledge the specific narrative context that was directly CONNECTED to that behavior. Its not about whether or not it excuses any specific thing he does, its about the fact that while these behaviors did happen, they shouldn’t be depicted as indicative of his OVERALL characterization, because they were specifically and deliberately written into his actions WITH INTENT by the writers, who were trying to use his DELIBERATELY out of the ordinary behavior to arrive at some narrative point or conclusion.

And here, for Dick, that was the eventual realization that he’d never fully dealt with his feelings about the losses during the Titans Hunt.

I don’t like how he acts in a lot of the issues around this time. Its ugly. But its MEANT to be ugly. I don’t like Dick’s fight with Roy when he tells him about taking over leadership because of the government’s interference. I don’t like it AT ALL.

But what I DO like is how the very next page after the fight, after Donna follows Dick out of the room, Dick turns around and acknowledges how out of control he’d just been and said he felt it proved that everyone was right, things HAD gotten to him more than he’d realized or admitted to himself, and it probably was a sign he needed to take a step back, and besides, Kory needed him more than the team did right now anyway.

THAT’S one of the core things I like about Dick Grayson, that almost without exception, his worst actions or behaviors are almost immediately followed by his realization of this and a tangible action or change in his actions to address it. That’s not something every character can claim - in fact, its unfortunately pretty damn rare.

But here’s the problem with that, in this specific scenario:

Dick WAS spiraling, he DID act out in ways he was right to be called out on and to feel guilt about, and there WAS basis for him acknowledging that there was stuff he needed to address in his life and his head, and to take responsibility for.

Thing is though, nobody else at any point ever stood up to point to where in his willingness to hold himself accountable for his mistakes and try and do better in regards to his friends and teammates and overall relationships....

He additionally took on guilt that WASN’T deserved. Because the other Titans were the ones who in their overall rush to judgment about his behavior and the reasons why.....still erroneously lumped in with the rest, their conclusion as to how the situation with Mirage should be viewed.

And frankly, though this doesn’t make them look good, there’s plenty of places you can go with that which don’t make them heartless monsters either. They were wrong, not to listen to him about Mirage, and I maintain that this tangibly WORSENED his already existing downward spiral from Titans Hunt, because that was already stuff he really could have benefited from support for the others from....and then this other thing happened that he additionally really needed support about, rather than blame.

Problem is, the overall impression given off by the other Titans was that they thought they already WERE doing their best to be supportive, by being so willing to look PAST ‘what Dick had done with Mirage’ and FORGIVE Dick for that, make allowances for why it and other decisions they didn’t agree with, like his rush to marriage, might make sense based on what they were attributing as the reason for his out of character behavior....the fallout from Titans Hunt...but ONLY that.

Like to be clear, I’m aware that there is a flip side of things in fanon, where some stans overcorrect on Dick’s behalf and act like the Titans all universally slut-shamed Dick and were terrible to him. No. That’s not what happened either. There was ONE slut-shaming Titan and ONLY one....and that was Pantha, who to be frank, like.....she was literally written to be the button pusher in regards to everyone. She likely would have said the same thing no matter who was in that situation, because she honestly didn’t care, she was just interested in making the cheap jokes at their expense.

The other Titans though did not adopt a slut-shaming stance against Dick...just a victim-blaming one. Which makes some things better, but some things worse IMO.

Its easier to understand how they could have all fallen into this trap despite all being seasoned heroes who should have known better than to view these specific events the way they did....if you consider that their fatal flaw here was ironically that they were SO quick to try and find a reason that Dick might have done this that they felt they could forgive....that they never actually thought things through long enough to recognize how quick on the draw they’d been in their reactions. And then they failed to listen to Dick’s side of things because they’d kinda convinced themselves that they were ALREADY doing him a favor and hearing him out by having decided to look past what he’d done and make allowances for it....and so they kinda filtered everything he was saying through a lens of like...waiting for him to catch up to what they’d already decided had happened and onto the part where he did the Dick Grayson thing and apologized and accepted responsibility for it....at which point they, as his friends, would be honestly able to say “already forgiven, dude.”

You could additionally factor in the idea that their very respect for his capabilities and high opinion of his overall ‘on the ball-ness’ made what had happened easy to view as something that’d just slipped past his radar, a rare oversight that again, he could be forgiven for, rather than what it was....again, something that he should never have been expected to ‘catch’ in the first place, any more than they would have been.

Either way, the real problem was always just that they failed to support him in the ways he actually needed, because they were already busy forgiving him for things he didn’t actually need forgiveness for because they were never his to accept blame for in the first place. But then BECAUSE Dick was already primed to accept the blame for what he WAS right to accept responsibility for, he overextended and took on everything that was held against him, rather than first differentiating between where a mea culpa both was and WAS NOT due.

No matter how you slice it, the Titans WERE wrong on this front, and Dick absolutely DOES have canon grounds to nurse some bitterness and resentment about, towards them. Again, with a lot of ways that can be approached. Personally, when I think about fics tackling this subject, my big want is always gonna be like.....confrontation fics? Like that’s what I’ve always really wanted to see here....like there’s a lot of obviously valid catharsis to be had in fics that have someone walk Dick through what a more objective view of what happened back then and let him finally unburden himself of all that unearned guilt there...BUT all the focus there is typically on that realization of the truth for DICK, that like....there’s almost never any follow-up where that realization is further pursued and extended to the relevant Titans? And tbh, I’ve always viewed that as the far greater ‘crime’ this story executed in regards to Dick’s character....not an overall obliviousness to his own victimization, period, but the fact that he was basically pushed into ACCEPTING a culpable view of events when actually, he’d always KNOWN on some level that it wasn’t really his fault and he had every reason to feel repulsed and angry and violated.

Like, I do obviously view Dick as someone with a large degree of self-awareness, in no small part due to how often he DOES do these introspective deep dives and reflect on events and actions and behaviors, and even though I understand the viewpoint that things look different when applied to yourself than to others, I do think its perfectly likely that Dick would at some point come to his own realization about what had actually happened with Mirage and why he’d initially felt the way he did about it. Maybe not before the events with Tarantula, but in the aftermath? I think he absolutely would connect certain things then, even if just because of how FAMILIAR everything felt to that earlier time post-Titans Hunt. The Blockbuster arc was like, the most rock bottom Dick had ever been SINCE that point, and various similarities could have definitely been pinging all over for him....the losses he suffered reminding him of his guilt for the fallen Titans, the end of Dick and Babs’ relationship, while based on more reasons than just Tarantula kissing Dick, like, still including that as a reason and so thus bearing an uncomfortable similarity to the last time he was held accountable for his rapist and now eventual rapist’s actions, etc.

And I do think that Dick having some realizations of his own post-Blockbuster could explain a LOT about his later interactions with the Titans, who I honestly don’t think he was ever quite as close to again?

Which makes a ton of sense if you view the 1999 series, and how difficult it was for them to get Dick to join up, and how he was plenty ready to leave at any point...like, that makes a TON of sense if you consider that Dick might have at this point been quietly nursing hurt of his own that everyone was so eager and willing to let bygones be bygones and ‘forgive’ his mistakes of the past, that nobody still had ever realized what he’d had to realize all on his own....that THEY all had a perception of events and like, their friendships, that included forgiving Dick for a betrayal that Dick NEVER ACTUALLY ENACTED. Where its like, thanks, but I didn’t actually need that, what I needed was someone to listen to me. But at the same time its totally understandable why he wouldn’t ever want to bring that up himself....because he’d already TRIED expressing himself on this matter years before, and been shot down, and its totally reasonable that he worried history would just repeat there rather than bring him the closure he WANTED on that front. But again....the distance he keeps a lot of the Titans at after his return to the team pairs pretty damn well with him being both quietly resentful of forgiveness he never needed and wondering when it was everyone else’s turn to accept the accountability for wrongs done that everyone was always so quick to demand from him....as well as why the last thing in the world he’d want to do is bring this all up again himself.

Similarly, this is why I think he always expressed to Kory, ever since her return to Earth, that he wasn’t in love with her anymore.....I don’t think its necessarily true that his feelings ever fully went away, and I also don’t think he’d bear the same resentments towards her that he did the others, even though Kory too ‘forgave’ him for something he never needed absolution for. Because I think at the same time, he’s more aware than most of Kory’s own history, and he has too much empathy for what all that likely stirred up for her at the time as well as his awareness that she really did love him and always had and that she’d mourned their relationship just as much as he had.

So I truly don’t think Dick blames her, in ways that can’t be said of the others, and I don’t think it was truly that he didn’t love her anymore, or that there was no longer anything there....I think he always just said that in order to protect himself, because he was still hurting from everything that had happened back then and how everyone had always painted it as his fault ever since, and his own traumas had only compounded those very specific feelings with later events like Tarantula and her impact on his life, and its just like......I think if it ever came out via someone else re-raising the issue, Dick would be like okay, yes, absolutely let’s finally talk about this....but I totally understand why Dick would never want to re-raise it himself because....he definitely did TRY to express his violation way back when. Why should he be the one to have to essentially.....retry his own case with his friends in order to finally get the verdict he should have had all along, y’know?

Its one thing to get that its probably never going to happen without initiating it himself, but its another thing for that to get you past the hump of just not wanting to relive some of your worst moments when your best friends not believing in you or being so willing to believe something about you in some ways did just as much damage to you as the actual initial violation.

But again, all that said, I would absolutely like, rob the Louvre (Okay I’d also rob the Louvre just for money but like. You get it) for stories where one of the Titans has an ‘oh shit’ realization about everything with Mirage years later. And they tentatively try and bring it up with Dick in the hopes of ‘fixing things’ by correcting the damage they’d done when making him feel it was his to accept blame on.....and for Dick to just be like. “Yeah, uh, I was there. I figured all that out a long time ago, I just didn’t see the point in trying to convince everybody twice.” And them like....being like oh crap we have to figure out a way to make things right, like all this time we’ve thought things were kinda broken between us because of what Dick did but actually it was the other way around and about Dick’s feelings about what WE did.

Okay now like....don’t laugh but I’m literally still not done, because I had this whole other thing about how now we needed to finally talk about the Zitka in the room, which is that IMO its always been kinda backwards to view Tarantula as the focal point of Dick’s traumas here and what happened with Mirage as some kind of footnote kinda....personally I think it should be the other way around. That its Mirage that weighs on Dick the most because what she did was premeditated where with Catalina it was a crime of opportunity. With Miriam though, it was always going to happen no matter what, because it only happened because she MADE it happen. She like....stalked Dick pretty much from the time of her arrival in this timeline (or at least how that initially was viewed - the timeline thing, not the stalking thing. Forget it. Weird story is weird. Doesn’t matter). But like....Mirage went after Dick with intent. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she was willing to do whatever to make it happen, up to and including kidnapping Dick’s actual girlfriend and taking her place.

With Tarantula, like, she was more than quick to seize on the first opportunity to make it happen, but like...that’s still a different thing IMO from like...KNOWING that someone literally plotted out and premeditated one of the most disruptive traumas of your life without any care for what it would DO to your life, and you later carrying all the blame for that in everyone else’s eyes without anyone ever acknowledging what it did to YOU....even though MULTIPLE people know and its even affected your overall reputation. With Tarantula....I think that trauma absolutely compounded everything else that happened with Blockbuster but it was hardly limited to just that, but again with Mirage....that one specific act pretty much derailed the entire course of Dick’s life at the time. Because again....while you could absolutely claim that there are other issues Dick and Kory might have broken up because of later, even without Mirage’s actions, like....you have to MAKE the case for those reasons. You can’t just attribute their breakup to rushing into marriage, when again....Mirage was the literal catalyst for Dick proposing when he did.

Which again, to bring it all back to the start.....that’s why it will forever make me channel Gar Logan and turn into a green-hued screeching howler monkey every time people are like I absolutely agree that its not okay to blame Dick for his own rape at Mirage’s hands....but then turn around and be like okay, but Dick and Kory did break up because Dick rushed them into marriage before they were ready.

Cuz.

Like.

THEY’RE THE EXACT SAME THING!

The one is just the other but described from a different vantage point.

faslkfhaklfhaklfhkalfha

I get if people didn’t know that before now, but please please please can we like....push back against the misinformation on this particular topic because omggggg is it unpleasant to repeatedly hear people contradict themselves in the same paragraphs half the time because they literally don’t know that they’re talking about the same events in both cases.

Believe it or not, I actually had a lot more about Mirage and about other ways things could have gone differently for Dick and Kory if he’d had even just a little more support from someone else at the time, whether from Bruce or even just one of the Titans, like all it would have taken was just ONE person to try and view things from Dick’s perspective and be like okay everyone hold up, some bad fucking conclusions have been arrived at here.

BUT I am tired and this is long and literally just...whatever. I’ll do that some other time. LOL. And I bounce.

#first person to try and tell me the wordcount of this is getting blocked I swear to fucking god

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covertblizzard · 2 years ago

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Is it self-deprecation if you unconsciously create sentient beings who insult and bully you?

Round 1: Oblivion’s reveal

Oblivion is basically a part of Kyle created before he knew how to control the lantern ring by ordering the ring to expel all his sorrow, anger, self-doubt, fear, and negative emotions he repressed deep inside of himself after the Alex's death to protect himself.

This little shit decide to reveal himself by first lowkey re-traumatising Kyle with his OWN daddy issues for basically no reason (that Kyle instantly believes this is not something I want to think much about but maybe it also has to do with the asshole that is Zachary Rayner). He laughs at himself for having daddy issues, insult his own grammar skills, insult himself by reminding of being “special” in grade school, and accuse him of not handling his emotions well and creating him (this one is a special self-loathing within self-loathing because it implied Oblivion also thinks the creation of Oblivion is a bad thing lmao).

(Damn Kyle, just go be a yellow or red lantern for a while like everyone else /j)

(This got long so everything else under Read More)

Round 2: (TW suicide) Is it suicidal if you want to kill yourself to get rid of another part of yourself?

I don’t think this scene needs much elaboration, he threatens to let the ring run out of charge (essentially give up being a Green Lantern and a hero) and when Oblivion says it won’t work, he straight up tries to kill himself. Oblivion stops him though, by reminding him that if he does, the Justice League (whom he has trapped away) will die.

(Uh, Oblivion also says “I didn’t think you had it in you...” in reference to Kyle trying to kill himself, which is phrased like it’s meant to be an insult, I suppose in a “I didn’t think you had the courage to” way but uhhh ://)

(Oh, and he calls him a bad liar I suppose)

It is interesting that the only thing that stops him is essentially friends / people around him and that he needs to live in order to save them. It makes a good metaphor for people realising that their family / friends / people around them might need them or be hurt / upset by their deaths. Furthermore, the Justice League is still hurt and trapped by Oblivion though, so there is also the interesting connection to the idea that bottling up and not properly processing your emotions properly to an extreme point can hurt the people around you, even if you don’t mean to.

(Also Oblivion claims he doesn’t need to reconnect with Kyle, he just wants to, and I suppose that could be interpreted as Oblivion doesn’t want to be solely the negative emotions aspect. Perhaps he doesn’t really want to do this, after all he’s essentially not killed anyone despite all the crazy stunts he’s pulled, and reconnecting with Kyle could gives him the ability and access to the more positive emotions and the chance to heal as well.)

Round 3: Catfight with yourself

Well this one is more just Kyle and Oblivion calling each other morons lol. But also the phrase “I am anger and sorrow and everything else that has made you what you are since childhood” is kind of raw and so is Kyle’s response of “Then, I guess I’ll just have to grow up.”

Some of the more minor ones:

Calling himself a third-rate “hero”

Insulting his own visor lol

“I may exaggerate every one and again, but I’m as honest as the next guy.” (This one doesn’t really count, he basically just says he maybe spin tales a little bit sometimes, but I thought it was funny and cute so I included it)

Bonus: A MUCH more normal form of self-deprecating behaviour

Insulting the work he created as a very young kid. Everything about this is too relatable. Who did you share these comics with? “No one! They’re embarassing!”

(Him saying his letters to Santa had a better chance of reaching their destination as opposed to little comic strips he sent his dad, I’m not upset T.T)

(I know Santa is real in DC but that’s irrelevant)

Anyway, my answer is YES! WHAT THE HECK, KYLE?

#kyle rayner #green lantern #aaron rayner #oblivion #mypost #dc thoughts #tw: suicide #suicide #attempted suicide #this whole series makes me feel THINGS #yeah i ripped the pieces of old poems and stories i wrote in kindergarten and grade school #when i accidentally stumbled across them what about it #EMBARASSING #does anyone know what special k means in usa / california?#i tried to google it but it came up empty #it could be some kind programme or were they just calling him a special kid? special kyle?#the implication is obvious anyway but i kind of really want to know exactly what it's referring to

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writingwithcolor · 4 years ago

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Jewish character as adoptive parent/patriarch of a found-family that ostensibly contains children from xtian backgrounds?

@lymanjosh asked:

tl;dr: how to approach Jewish character as adoptive parent/patriarch of a family that ostensibly contains children from xtian backgrounds?

(this is about fandom but i take it fairly seriously and want to do it right!)

so i’m not jewish, and i portray/hc a (relatively important/main) character A as a Jewish man. character A is at the center of a large found-family network, and he has a number of children adopted + otherwise who come from a variety of backgrounds and who are variously headcanoned by other fandom members.

a lot of the time (mostly in a roleplay context, where other people have equal control over the storyline) i’ll be faced with the assumption that the family would operate by the xtian norms dominant in a us context (particularly regarding xmas.)

id like to push back against this, but i hesitate to portray character A as asking his children to share in his own customs; i don’t think it would be in character, since he is very very reserved + rarely speaks about his birth family in the source material, but even if that were something he did i don’t have much interest in writing about it, nor do i think it would be my place.

what’s a realistic way for this kind of family to navigate the holidays? i’ve done some reading about adoption of children from oppressed groups by white/gentile families, in which it’s generally best to preserve the child’s connection with their culture, but i’m not sure if it would be different in this context? i worry about implying that A has to let xtian norms into his home to some degree in order to properly parent his children.

Hi! OK, so when I first read this ask I completely read it as Magneto and was all set to give a complex and thorough Magneto answer, and then I realized I was jumping to conclusions and asked and I was VERY wrong – this is Batman! Which is also awesome. I’m not as familiar with DC but I still enjoy this premise.

So the question becomes: how does Jewish Batman handle the holidays if Robin and whoever those other found-family kids are, are Christian. How do we give them a Christmas without having to “do” Christmas ourselves? If I were in Batman’s Bat Shoes here, I’d ask the kids what it was they wanted. In other words, what part of Christmas would they need in order to feel like they weren’t missing out. And then I’d find a way to make sure they were getting to experience it. If they wanted to go to Midnight Mass, I’d ask if (Christian?) Alfred was okay taking them, or Commissioner Gordon, or some other gentile character. If all they wanted was Christmas cookies and everyone baking as a family, I’d orchestrate that without feeling uncomfortable. If they wanted to watch a movie it would depend on how overtly Christian it was vs. something like A Muppet Christmas Carol. (Note: this is going to be a big “your mileage may vary” here because of our varying discomfort with having to participate in Christmas, so I am definitely not saying all of us are comfy with secular Christmas movies.) If they wanted a Christmas tree, remember this is Wayne Manor so there’s gonna be room for there to be a Christmas tree or even a whole Christmas room that doesn’t have to be my space or my room. If I’m Batman. (Did I really just type that sentence?

Batman is so Alone TM that this post makes me lonely for him to have other Jewish characters to do his own holidays with. But. The whole time I was in grad school I was in a situation where I was celebrating all my holidays with all gentiles, and I basically did my own thing and taught them what I was doing and why, and then had movie parties. Like for Passover we had a “deconstructed seder” where I made all the seder foods as party foods and watched Ten Commandments. That way I got to feel like I wasn’t missing out. That would be a sort of secular way that the BatFam could participate in stuff like Passover without having to actually sign up to practice a different religion.

–Shira

I only have a couple minor things to add. Firstly OP, definitely pay attention to the ‘mileage may vary’ point and, as we’ve mentioned before, listen to many Jewish experiences of Christmas from those who engage to those who are neutral to people who have negative associations and memories about Christmas. The examples Shira gave all work, as long as they fit with Batman’s wider Jewish identity and you’re aware that whatever option you go with, many Jews will feel completely differently to your character and that’s OK too.

Similarly, Shira’s suggestions for Jewish holidays like Passover are great, but this would again depend on Batman’s denomination and personal preferences. An Orthodox seder still has plenty of room to make it your own, but with a lot more do’s and don'ts. For example, (this obviously didn’t happen in 2020 but) my dad usually heads down to the local Jewish retirement home on first night Passover and leads a kind of 'highlights of the seder’ for the residents. All the songs they will remember from childhood, but shorter; all the food, but made a bit more palatable, as Shira also said; and all condensed into about 45 minutes. Your Batman might do something similar for his kids if they show interest in Passover. However, when my dad gets home he will still make sure he does seder night, even if he is by himself if the rest of the family are with my mum. It will depend on Batman’s denomination and beliefs as to whether he sees a condensed or modified seder as having fulfilled his religious obligation.

–Shoshi

#Jewish #Adoption #Adoptees #families #Jewish families #batman #fanfiction #holidays #Christmas #Christian #Jewish holidays #asks #submission

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wishingicouldfly · 3 years ago

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Louis Tomlinson World Tour – Washington, DC – February 10, 2022

View from the Ground

(Disclaimer: I am a 50-year-old woman who has been to hundreds of concerts in my life, from small theaters to 10K outdoor free concerts, to stadiums and arenas, but I’ve never been in a concert “pit.”)

If you’ve read this blog at all, you know I can’t keep my mouth shut when I have something to say. I saw Louis Tomlinson in DC on 2/10/22 and I need to vomit words on the page because I can’t keep them in my head. Consider this a one-woman one-show tour diary.

My friend Simone and I flew in from Boston on the 9th. We met up with a few twitter friends and had dinner and a lot of laughs (shout out to Brendan the poor waiter at the Grille at the Wharf who waited on us). We’d scoped out the venue, and sort of had an idea of where the line would form the next day. On the way out, we realized some people were already camping. We were a little annoyed, because let’s face it, we had fantasies of being at the barricade, but none of us were prepared to camp overnight. We had read that it wasn’t allowed and for a second, we hoped those people would be asked to leave, but there’s no way I’d want Louis tarnished with a venue arresting or removing peaceful fans from the area.

I do not at all begrudge those fans who were able to camp overnight. They went for it, and they were permitted to stay.

We arrived back at the venue at 5:45 a.m. and got in line. A couple of girls were numbering people at first to keep the line orderly before staff showed up (we were 189 and 190)—so we know we were in the first 200 people in line. When staff arrived, we were given instructions and told about the Wharf area (when things would open, where to find coffee, where to find the restrooms).

The Wharf had very accessible bathrooms, lots of restaurants, a café, some lunch spots that did takeout, and a CVS. It was VERY easy to get resources. To anyone thinking that the DC crowd was not well hydrated, I think that would be generally untrue. Of course, some people might not have taken advantage of the resources, but water was easily accessible in advance of the show in line.

I was super impressed with how wonderful the crowd was on the ground. People sharing food, people sharing resources, making bracelets, handing out flags and masks they brought. Two of our group had flags they were handing out and so we had a steady stream of visitors to our blanket all day. Mask compliance was excellent—outside most people were wearing masks if they were moving around.

The weather was gorgeous. A balmy 55 degrees Fahrenheit is very unusual for the Northeast in February. It felt more like April.

We were allowed to buy merchandise starting at about 3 p.m. Staff escorted groups into the venue in the order of where you were in line, and then placing people back in the same order. It was a little chaotic because we didn’t know how they were going to keep us in line, but it worked. (We were blessed to hear a clip of sound check while we were inside—he was singing We Made It).

Finally, 6:30 p.m. arrived and doors opened promptly. We were in the doors and through security fast and ended up being about 4 rows deep from the barricade! Super Close. OMG.

(My original spot).

Except.

Here’s what I hadn’t considered AT ALL. And it’s why I wanted to write this post. I had never, not once, thought about what it really meant to be “in the pit.” We were so focused on being at the barricade, we hadn’t really prepared for what would happen if we weren’t. It means you can't really bend your arms. It’s hot. People are on all sides of you. You sort of lose track of your friend really easily. People are touching you because they are TOO CLOSE. I looked up at the stage and thought “he’s going to be right there; pictures are going to be amazing!” and then I looked around again and realized it was still two hours before Louis would be on that stage. I didn’t panic per se, but I felt really uncomfortable.

I wouldn’t say it was a snap decision, but it was probably a 30 second decision. Once I got out, I knew there was no going back. But I knew without a doubt that I’d be happier for the full show if I was out of that position. I told Simone I was going, confirmed the plan for meeting up later, and had to squirm through about 4 or 5 rows of people (because the crowd was filling in behind me).

(View from the balcony).

As soon as I made it into the open floor, I felt better. So maybe it was the beginning of a panic attack. I’m not sure. But another one of our group ended up making the same decision and we made our way to the second level balcony, looking down at an angle to the stage.

We ended up being at ground zero for a Larry historical moment (see link here).

If you’re here, you know that Louis Tomlinson is amazing. The show was superb. He sounded great. The band sounded great. We had a great view of the crowd. From our view from the balcony, we could see how tightly packed the floor got. I was glad I’d made the choice I did (for myself). There were a few people who had medical emergencies and who had to be taken out. Louis, in fact, stopped the show twice to make sure people were safe. Which goes to show what sort of person he is—I’m sure it’s not ideal to stop the show, but he didn’t hesitate for a second to make sure people were safe.

(Picture credit: Simone aka @tomlinson19913 on Twitter)

But here’s the thing, I see a lot of armchair quarterbacks yelling at people from across the country and the world with “make sure you hydrate” and “don’t put Louis in that position” and “be sure to take care of yourself.” The staff at the venue WERE passing back water but asking for water because you’re thirsty isn’t the same as needing water because you’re having an emergency. It’s not possible to pass back a few Dixie cups full of water to 5000 people—if you see someone in peril, best to get them out of the pit, not wait for water to maybe get passed back to them. I do wish the venue had announced what to do if you feel like you’re in trouble—best way to get the word to people is by amplification. Yelling at that size crowd does nothing.

1. People were hydrated. Once someone is having a panic attack or any medical emergency, getting out is the best solution. Get out, and then get water.

2. The people who had camped (I’d say they all made it to barricade) weren’t the people in peril. The people overheating and needing water were those filling in the back who’d arrived later in the day.

3. Mask compliance was near 100%. Masks may help diminish the spread of Covid, but masks don’t keep your core temperature down and could possibly be a factor in people overheating or hyperventilating.

I don’t like reading observations about the crowd and its behavior by people who saw a live feed. People making those observations from looking at a live feed have no idea what it’s really like in the venue. The DC crowd was incredibly well behaved—No mass pushing, no waves, no mosh dancing. Just a crowd of people enjoying the show. Remember when you’re watching a live stream, you’re not seeing the full picture. You don’t know what it was like there all day. Sometimes, even the best hydrated person is going to have a medical emergency. It’s not their fault.

I had a great time. I don’t regret for a second that I got myself into a more comfortable position. I was able to use the bathroom, I was able to get a drink, I had a comfortable place to watch the show.

Louis Tomlinson was worth the whole experience.

#ltwt washington #ltwt dc #Louis Tomlinson World Tour 2022 #Louis Tomlinson #View from the Ground

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nixie-deangel · 3 years ago

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writing tag game

Thank you @rexismycopilot! I’m very bad at answering these!

how many works do you have on AO3?

217

what’s your total A03 word count?

336246

what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Uncovering the Meaning. - Coldflash.

Coming Clean. - Coldflashwave.

Confusion For The Heart, Table One. - Stuckony.

Snuggles and Cuddles. - Coldlfashwave.

Engraved In Our Souls. -Superbat.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I don’t get lots, so it’s easy for me to respond to the ones I do get, so I try to, though sometimes it does take me a while to do so.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

That’s pretty much how I try to end all my fics, lol. I’m not into sad or unhappy endings, so I always tend to end either extremely happy or at the very least hopeful.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I think it might have been Tell Me Is It Over Yet?, mostly because it references Order 66 in Star Wars. Like I said, angst just really isn’t my thing, I tend not to pour that into my fics all that often.

Do you write crossovers?

Crossovers as in completely crossing over two fandoms together, with characters from both interacting together? Then not yet, I do have an idea for a Leverage/Marvel one I’d like to write one day.

If by crossover you mean putting characters in another piece of media? Then yep! I have done that before... and will probably do it again. Nixie loves a good AU.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I have. Usually I just delete the comment if I get it, or I block the person if I’m able too.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do. If it’s not a hard no or squick for me, I’m usually game to try writing it. Writing it well, is another story though lol

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t believe so, and if I have, I’ve never found out about it.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! It’s an incredible feeling when someone loves your story so much they want to translate it into, most often, their native language to be able to read it.

Have you ever co-written a fic?

I have not.

What is your all time favorite ship?

It literally varies between Coldflash (Barry Allen/Leonard Snart), Stevetony (Steve Rogers/Tony Stark), Superbat (Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne) and Obikin (Obi-wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker). Please don’t make me try to narrow it down further than that.

What is a WIP that you want to finish, but don’t think you ever will?

I...... don’t know? Maybe, but I’m still in the phase where I’m like I’ll get back to it! One day I’ll finish it :)

What are your writing strengths?

Honestly, I’m very negative about my own writing, so I don’t usually think I’m good at any of it. But maybe dialogue? And trying to convey emotions? Would be my guesses.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Getting myself to write. And actions. Grammar.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

For myself? I try not too. I’ve done it a couple times, but I feel awkward doing it because I have to rely on google for translation, and we all know how trust worthy that can be. But in fics I’m reading? I don’t mind it much.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Going back a ways, but I believe it was for either NCIS or CSI (the one set in Vegas).

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Okay. So I know you want only one fic, but honestly, I’ve got a few of mine I dearly love and go back and reread very often, and I’m going to share and link them all. Because I love them.

The Malfunction. DC/Arrowverse - Coldflash.

To Leave Some Part Of You. Star Wars - Luminara/Gree.

Think Before You Act, Except Just This Once. Marvel - Stevetony.

Media Blitz. Marvel - Stevetony.

Second Chances. Marvel - BuckyNat.

Tagging (and sorry for those that have already done this!) - @willshowerthots, @a-redharlequin, @queerghostie, @betheflame, @tabbytabbytabby, @natiekenobi, @boonki and whoever else wants to do this!

#Nixie Answers #Super late answering this #SO SORRY!#Tag Game #Ask Game #Tag Meme #Ask Meme #Coldflash #Stevetony #Star Wars #Marvel #Buckynat #Lumigree #LuminaraGree #Obikin

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stxleslyds · 3 years ago

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What do you think of Jason’s little story from Robin 80th anniversary?

Anon! Thank you for the ask!

What do I think about that little story? I think that “More Time” is proof that Judd Winick is the best Jason Todd writer that has even existed. He gets Jason, his Robin Jason is ridiculously cute and sweet and I just want to boop his nose.

Amidst Lobdell’s complete destruction of Robin Jason’s characterization we had that little story that was just bright enough to make us all smile.

I love the parallels in this story, I love that it starts with a side by side of Robin Jason and Red Hood Jason and it ends the same way.

This story was both too short and just long enough. It really feels like DC didn’t want to do much with Robin Jason, I mean his story is told from the Red Hood perspective but Winick still gave us the Robin Jason content that we deserved.

I don’t know if you have been reading my posts for some time but not long ago, I made a post in which I talked about how I headcanon Jason getting his memories back. Why am I talking about this you ask? Well, because the story was so short that it really doesn’t give us much context to what happens.

What Winick wrote was short and effective in making us feel all the feels.

But how did Red Hood Jason remember that he had to finish his work on Bruce’s watch? Well, my headcanon is that Jason has to see or be told about something from his past in order for him to recover his memories.

The Red Hood that we see in the issue is obviously UtRH Jason, he is not wearing a bat symbol and he has his red mask over his eyes.

I think that the cover from Batman (1940) #638 was put before the start of the story for a reason, after all, that was the issue in which I believe Bruce started to come to the conclusion that Jason was the man under the hood, he started asking questions about resurrection in the very next issue of that run so yeah. I think that Winick is a smart man and that might have been a clue for us to place this story in the timeline.

But back to my “memory recovery” talk, I think that Jason gifted Bruce the watch because that’s something he promised he would do as Robin. I really don’t think that Jason in the middle of the UtRH situation was like “I better give dad a gift for his b-day”, I think that he went to the cave or the manor back when Batman: Hush was happening and while doing surveillance and all that he came across the watch and snatched it as soon as the memory came back to him.

And that’s why Jason took the time to finish his work on the watch. It was something that he had to do, he does keep his promises, you know?

That’s just what I came up with to give the story more context and I wanted to share it. But the story as it is written is beautiful and it made me tear up when I read it. As I said before in this post Robin Jason was just too adorable and I was really happy we were able to see that Robin Jason again.

I also think that Winick chose some very interesting dialogue, when Robin Jason is talking to Bruce about the watch, he says this, “Yep, it needs to be with you all the time or needs a lot of attention when it isn’t”. Clever, as the reader when I saw that I was thinking that maybe Winick was trying to suggest that what Robin says about the watch can be easily applied to Jason.

Jason needed to be with Bruce “all the time” because he was a kid and Robin had to be with Batman “all the time” so he could be safe in patrol. And even when Jason or Robin were away Bruce and Batman had to pay attention and make sure that everything was still alright.

What do you guys think? Have I gone completely insane or does it make sense to you too?

I just love parallels, and that looked like one. But yeah, enough of my rambling, I hope you have a fantastic day Anon! Here, I left the best panel for last!

#jason todd #red hood #robin jason todd #robin 80 #asksss #under the red hood

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o-avosetta · 2 years ago

Text

Some Lost Wardens geography

Now that Alex is spending time in Zuzu City, I feel like exposing more of my nerdy investment sharing the rough map and geography I made up for my fic.

(edited since posting to add the made-up countries)

This coastline doesn't necessarily correspond to any particular part of the in-game world map. It seems to be a common fanon to place Stardew Valley on the southern coast of the western continent, but that doesn't make sense to me. People have also debated how to read the coordinates we get in-game from Harvey.

I just think the valley should be in some northern subtropical zone, because the tropical Fern Islands are to the south.

Also, this map is only a rough depiction of where things are and is not to any proper scale, just to let me be loose with travel times for the sake of plot. And I didn't include Prairie Island because, um, I forgot.

Canonical geographical places, tweaked

🏘️ Pelican Town, of course.

🏙️ Zuzu City, big central urban center. Place pegs in my head include Kuala Lumpur, New York, Chicago, and Bangkok. The Tunnelers' home stadium would look like Singapore's Esplanade on steroids.

🏫 Grampleton, known for lumber.

In the fic: mid-tier city, home of Alex's minor-league gridball team (the Lumberjacks). Location of nearest big hospital and Grampleton College, where Demetrius teaches. Not yet visited in-story, just imagined. I mostly see a lot of flannel and trees.

🏤 Castle Village, known for artisanal velvet.

In the fic: Southern Ferngill provincial capital — major port city and government/cultural center. Not like Zuzu, but still big. Location of Castle Village College, Alex's dream gridball school. Where [character] lives and works. Place pegs: Washington DC, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and the town where my parents live.

🏨 Oasis, Sandy's store with a secret back room she rents out to Qi.

In the fic: a hotel chain in their shared business empire; the desert location is the flagship with a big casino. Accessible to guests via train or road. Sandy's looks like a regular convenience store near the bus stop but has a secret entrance to the casino for members who don't want to arrive flashy.

Made-up places

🛤️ Averton, small town where Alex's dad moved when he abandoned the family. We don't know where he is now or what he does; we don't really care.

⛰️ Pykewich, small mining town. Made up just to be mentioned in a scene that hasn't made it into the fic, oops. It's mentioned in passing, but it's not important. Big cities IRL have any number of smaller localities in between; Averton and Pykewich simply fill that same purpose in my head.

🏢 Noughton, Ferngill Republic national capital city. Don't know if it'll ever get more than passing mentions, either. But I imagine Elliot is from there.

⛵ Baja Calico. I just needed a place where [character] could fuck off to for a while during the summer, but due to [reasons], it had to be somewhere kind of near the valley and within the scope of [boundaries]. We already had the Calico name, I already imagined Southern Ferngill as somewhat California-esque (California also has green valley and desert just kind of next to each other), and so just adding "Baja" made sense to me at the time.

🌃 Port Rora, port city in the Gotoro Empire where [character] went after [event]. Not on the map above. Place pegs: you know how in movies/TV, characters wander around some dimly lit container port just to get ambushed? This is basically the city attached to that port.

I actually avoided having specific place pegs on purpose, because I didn't want to end up demonizing any RL countries by association. The description of the food that [characters] order is from Scandinavian cuisine, purely because it was a cuisine I hadn't mentioned in the fic yet, I wanted to mention something they ate, and the description is just enough that you might think of any number of places with similar combinations of protein and carbs. (Sorry, Scandinavians.)

(Also, sorry, raccoons.)

Made-up countries

🎣 Cerisa. Location relative to Pelican Town undetermined. I made it up as the origin country of Grandpa Farmer in my Seb/FFarmer fic, and the cultural bits there lean on the Hispanic side of the Philippines and Latin America.

🦀 The Straits Federation, or just the Straits. I lived in Singapore for several years and was kind of missing it when I first started working on Wardens. Among other things, I wanted a reason to write Singaporean food into some of the scenes. That's how I decided Grandpa Farmer this round would hail from a place like the Straits of Malacca, where Singapore and Malaysia are found.

🛳️ Isabelinas. A somewhat more obvious Philippines stand-in. 😅

I think I also have to credit Fire Walk with Me by HibiscusTea9, mods like @diversestardewvalley, and #diverse stardew valley in general for depicting a more multicultural Pelican Town than I'm used to seeing in the fandom. Just the existence of works like these encouraged me to write my farmers as people a bit closer to home for me than the typical North-American-esque protagonist. (I think I'm Americanized myself, but in an "America colonized my country for 50 years and has this death grip on global culture 🥴" way, and not in an "I was born there and it's my culture" way.)

Also, of course, thanks to @flowerandthesongstress for affirming my take on different cultures in SDV as well, and you readers who enjoy it so far. 💝

#writing #maps #world building #fanfiction #fanfic #sdv fanfic #stardew valley fanfic #the lost wardens #screenshots #fictional geography

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sisterspooky1013 · 3 years ago

Text

As Ethan Sees It

Author:SisterSpooky1013

Rating: Mature

Words: 3698

Read it on AO3 Here

Tagging @today-in-fic

The first thing I’d noticed about her was how self-assured she was, particularly in contrast to her diminutive stature. I’d been grabbing lunch at a local deli between classes and some high school kids were picking on a third boy who may have been a classmate. Everyone in line was just ignoring it, looking away, when this tiny redhead steps out of line and walks up to the tallest, bulkiest guy in the group and tells him to fuck off, in so many words. She barely reached his shoulder and was probably 100lbs soaking wet, but she had no problem standing up for the little guy. After I picked up my order, I noticed her sitting alone at a table near the window and asked if I could join her. She was hesitant, but agreed and listened politely while I told her how impressed I was by her bravado with those kids. That’s when I noticed the second thing about her; her incredible smile. It was like the first burst of sunlight over the horizon in the morning, blinding in its beauty. I introduced myself and learned that her name was Dana, and she had just moved to DC to accept a job with the FBI. We talked for so long I missed my class, but I didn’t care. I was fascinated by her. Aside from being strikingly beautiful with rich auburn hair and porcelain skin, her blue eyes some intoxicating shade of blue I had never seen before, she was also wickedly smart. She seemed to know about everything, any topic that came up she could speak to, and I learned more during that 90 minute conversation than I probably would have if I’d made it to class. She was a doctor, and a scientist, and even the way her voice sounded was enchanting to me, the S’s softly sibilant as they poured from her pouty pink lips. She had realized the time and stood suddenly to leave, and I was so flustered by our impromptu date ending so abruptly that I stupidly forgot to get her phone number. The sinking feeling in my gut when I realized this fact, right about the time her cab disappeared into a sea of other cabs, still ranks as one of the worst moments of my life.

I thought about her every single day for two weeks. I talked about her every single day for two weeks, until my roommates begged me to either figure out a way to get in touch with her, or shut the hell up. All I knew about her was her first name, that she had recently graduated from Stanford, and that she works at the FBI. First I tried calling the FBI and asking for Dana, but they had more than one Dana who worked there and were unwilling to let me try them one by one. Next I contacted Stanford and was able to have a list of the last two classes of graduates faxed to me. Thankfully, there was only one Dana on that list; Dana Scully. I called back to FBI headquarters and asked for Dana Scully, and the next thing I knew she was on the line, her sing-song voice saying “This is Dana Scully.” My mouth went dry, I forgot how to speak, how to breathe.

“Uh, um, hi, hello.”

“…Who is this?” Her tone was the one I’d heard her use with the high school bullies

“Uh, this is Ethan? From the deli, a couple weeks ago?”

“Ethan from the deli? The guy who’s getting his masters in journalism?”

“Yep, that’s the one.”

“Oh! Hi! How…how did you get this number?”

“Well, I hope this isn’t too weird but I forgot to ask for your number and I remembered you said you worked at the FBI, so I kind of tracked you down.”

“Oh. That’s kind of sweet.”

I let out huge breath of relief.

“I’d really like to see you again, if you’re interested. It’s alright if not, I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least ask.”

She was quiet for a moment but he had a feeling she was smiling.

“I’d love to, Ethan. Do you have something to write with? I’ll give you my number.”

**********************************

The first real date we had, I took her to a fancy Italian place that my buddies said was sufficiently romantic. She let me pick her up at her apartment in Georgetown and when she answered the door, I nearly passed out. She had on a strapless blue cocktail dress and tall black heels, her hair down and soft around her face. Her lips were red and plump and I wanted to kiss her right then, but I knew it was too soon. I held doors for her and watched closely for her reaction, unsure if she was the kind of woman who found chivalry insulting, but she seemed to appreciate it. She was so petite and delicate, like a beautiful bird, but also had this incredible air of confidence that made her so captivating. I was careful not to outright stare at her, so I didn’t make her uncomfortable. She told me more about herself as we ate, what she had studied in school and the things she was doing now at the FBI academy, working in forensics. She asked me about my school and my plans for after graduation, and she really listened when I talked, asking thoughtful questions and wanting to learn more about journalism and broadcasting, so eager to know as much as possible about everything she could. I told some stupid joke, and she laughed, and I think that’s when I fell in love with her. That laugh worked its way into my bones, vibrated in my blood stream and sent a shiver down my spine. I had to imagine that the only reason she was single was that she was so new to the area, because a woman like this was never single for long. I didn’t want the night to end, so I asked her out to drinks afterward and to my delighted surprise she suggested that we have them back at her place. I didn’t want to assume anything, so I didn’t make a move, just talked with her more on her sofa, learned about her family and her childhood as an army brat, her love of reading and bubble baths, her fondness for children and animals. When she leaned in and kissed me, I thought that I may be hallucinating. Maybe I was having an intensely long, lucid dream. How did someone like Dana Scully cross my path of all the places on earth she might have been, and how did I have the nerve to approach her, and how was she interested in me, and how was it possible that right then she had her tongue in my mouth on her sofa?

We didn’t have sex that first night, but it wasn’t too long before we did. And it wasn’t too long after that that we decided to be exclusive, and 6 months later that I told her that I loved her. Two weeks after that, she said it back, and for two years, we were happy. It’s typically the case that when you’re newly in love with someone you have that divine infatuation that makes you see everything about them as perfect, but over time it wears off and the things that were once cute become annoying. That never happened with Dana. I was obsessed with her, everything she did was the most incredible thing a human could accomplish or be. Aside from the megawatt smile and musical laugh, she had this sweet little beauty mark on her lip that I loved to kiss. She was witty and skilled at debate, and we’d spend evenings arguing over something like the moon landing conspiracy before fucking like animals over the back of the couch. And the sex. Oh my god the sex. She was an absolute vixen in the way she played, teased, and ultimately delivered on every promise she made, and she would smile in this self-satisfied way when she came, looking me right in the eye like she’d tricked me out of my last dollar. She could be dominant, or dismissive, sometimes one then the other in the same night. She could be anything and everything, and she was.

I loved to hear her talk about her work and new assignments she was getting, and I was so proud of her and her goals and dreams. I wanted to be right beside her as she climbed the ranks at the bureau, and knew that she would be anything she set her mind to. She was equally supportive of me as I graduated and then worked my way up at a local broadcasting company with dreams of being a news anchor. She made me feel important and worthy, showed interest in the things that I cared about and was so loyal to me that she cussed out one of my friends for making jokes at my expense. We never moved in together technically (her choice) but we slept together at one or the other’s apartment every night, rented a movie every Friday, had dinner with her parents every Sunday. Her sister, who she was close to, seemed to like me okay, and her friend Ellen confided in me that she thought I should propose soon, that Dana was ready for that step. I picked out a ring, a slender gold band with a princess cut solitaire, only half a karat because I knew she didn’t like to be flashy, and hid it in my sock drawer. Our anniversary was coming up on March 23 and I decided to do it then, which was a little ways away, but I wanted it to be perfect.

For her birthday, I took her out to dinner and she had exciting news to share. She’d been offered an assignment with an obscure unit at the FBI, requested specifically by Section Chief Blevins for her background as a scientist. I didn’t fully understand what the unit did or why they’d want Dana for it, but it was something about unsolved mysteries, by the sound of it. She was so happy and felt like this was a great sign, her big break, the fact that Blevins even knew she existed and wanted her on this team was an indication of the reputation she was building for herself there. I bought a bottle of champagne, told her how proud I was and that I couldn’t wait to hear more about it. She let me know there would be travel, it was a field agent role, and that she’d be on the road sometimes. As much as I didn’t look forward to being away from her, I couldn’t help but share her excitement at this new step in her career. That night we had the most incredible birthday/promotion sex you could imagine. I made her come three times before she finally tapped out and told me how much she loved me, and how excited she was for the rest of our lives together, how much she appreciated that I understood that her career was important, and that I supported her. If we would have been at my place, I would have grabbed the ring and proposed to her right then, but we were at hers. So I just kissed her and told her that I was the luckiest man on earth because I had the opportunity to be her partner in life.

The first day of her new assignment, she was nervous. She’d heard some stories about the agent she was going to be working with, her partner, a guy named Mulder. He sounded like somewhat of an oddball, and a ladies man to boot. I made a joke about him staying away from my woman and she rolled her eyes, had me help her choose between the plaid suit or the maroon one, kissed me goodbye and told me that she loved me and I didn’t need to worry about this or any other male agent, or male person for that matter, stealing her away. That afternoon at the station I got a message from her saying that she had to fly out to Oregon for a case they were investigating, which caught me by surprise. She had said she’d be on the road, but I didn’t expect it to happen that fast. I heard from her only once in the three days she was gone, and when she came back, she was different.

It’s hard to explain in what way she changed. She was distracted, spacey, staring into nothing when we watched TV in the evening, not really listening to what I was saying when I told her about my day. She told me a little bit about the work she was doing, but she was suddenly guarded and defensive about what she did all day, most of her sentences starting with “Mulder says...” The phone would ring at odd times, she worked late or was out of town almost constantly. I felt her slipping away. I did all I could to make things easy for her when she was home. I did all the cleaning, all her laundry. I cooked her dinner each night, though half the time she would say that she had already eaten with Mulder. She didn’t seem as interested in kissing or sex, but she would let me go down on her and I did, every night, trying to hold on to her attention and her affection with my tongue on her clit. I tried to talk to her, to ask her what was wrong, if I should be doing anything differently, and she’d say “no, of course not. Everything’s fine, I’m just tired.”

Then it was our anniversary, and I made a reservation at the same place we’d gone to that very first time. I picked up flowers for her, dahlias which I knew she loved. I went by her apartment at the agreed upon time, but she didn’t answer the door. I used my key to enter and it was quiet and cold, no sign she’d been there anytime recently. I called her office at work and Mulder answered, said she was up at Quantico performing an autopsy and could he take a message. I just hung up the phone. I went to bed at her place, and when she finally crawled in at 3am she was startled to find me there. The way she looked at me made me feel like she’d forgotten I existed, and I didn’t even bother to remind her that it was our anniversary. I decided to start fresh the next morning, with a new plan. Maybe I was being too demanding, expecting too much. Maybe this Mulder was difficult to work with and she didn’t want to bother me with horror stories. I would just have to be the most supportive, accommodating, wonderful boyfriend possible, and we could come through this together. When I woke up, she was still snoring softly beside me. I slipped my head under the covers and pushed her legs open gently, sliding her nightgown up over her hips. She stirred and moaned as I pressed my lips to her clit, kissing her there before beginning to lap at her labia, two fingers sliding inside just how she liked it. She responded readily, flexing her hips and pushing her hands into my hair, and I flipped the blankets off my head so I could see her face. I loved the way she liked to watch me, to hold my eye as she went over the edge, so intensely intimate. To my disappointment, her eyes were closed, head back against the pillow. When she came, she didn’t look at me, didn’t say anything. I crawled back up to lie beside her and when her eyes met mine they were so full of sadness it sent me into a panic.

“Dana, what’s wrong?” I implored, seeing tears welling under her blue irises.

She shook her head and scooted up so that she was sitting with her back against the headboard.

“Ethan-“ her voice caught under a sob that she quickly swallowed down.

My stomach dropped. No, this can not be happening.

“Ethan” she began again. “I care about you so much.” Tears were falling now, trailing down her alabaster cheeks and dripping off of her angular chin. “I just don’t think I can give you what you need right now.”

My mind was racing, I looked around the room like there might be something, or someone, who could help me.

“I think it might be best if we took a break for a bit. Took some space from each other.”

I sat up on my knees and grabbed her arm, suddenly regretful that I had chosen to sleep naked.

“Dana, what are you talking about? We don’t need space. I don’t need space from you!”

She closed her eyes. “Ethan, it’s not fair to you. I can’t be available to you right now. My new assignment, I’m just so busy-“

“No, it’s okay, Dana. I know you work more now but I don’t mind, I’ll always be here when you come home. I support you, I support your work, you know that.”

Pulling her arm from my grasp, she stood and went to her dresser. Pulled on panties and then jeans before stripping off her nightgown and putting on a bra and sweater. “Ethan. Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be. It’s just not a good time for me, right now.”

“Is it that Mulder guy? Is he making moves on you?” I hated how desperate my voice sounded.

“No, Ethan. This has nothing to do with Mulder, he’s been nothing but professional. This is about me, and what I need right now. What I’m capable of. And I’m just not in a good place for a relationship, I’m sorry. I need some time.”

She was standing near her bedroom door, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She was ready to walk out.

“How much time? How much time do you need?”

She looked at the floor and whispered “I don’t know.”

I slid off the bed and went to her, dropped to my knees on the floor, wrapping my arms around her hips as I pressed the side of my head into her belly.

“Please don’t do this. We can work through it. I love you, I love you so much. I’ll do whatever you need, just tell me.” The humiliation of begging on my knees while nude makes my skin crawl to this day.

She put her hand on my head, petting my hair as she often did. I felt hot tears drip from her eyes and fall against my scalp. “What I need is for you to let me go” she finally said, and she sounded very sad but also very resolute.

“I’m going to go to my mothers for the day, and I’d like you to pack up the things you have here. You can leave your key on the table. I’ll call you soon, to see how you’re doing, okay?”

“Dana, no, I won’t let you go. Please let me try to make this better.” I clung to her like a child, physically keeping her from leaving me. She crouched down and kneeled in front of me, taking my face in her hands. She kissed me softly on the lips, once.

“You have been a wonderful boyfriend, Ethan. You have loved me so well. I don’t want you to think that this is your fault, okay? You are the best. I just can’t be with someone right now. I know you’ll be okay.”

She stood and walked out of her apartment, pausing once at the door to look back at me, naked and destroyed on the floor in her bedroom doorway, and then she was gone.

She didn’t call me, not in a day or a week or a month. She deleted me from her life like a file she no longer needed. I didn’t know how to explain to my friends what had happened, because I didn’t really know myself. I thought about her every day, ate at restaurants around her work and apartment hoping to catch sight of her, so we could chance a meeting and maybe she’d be willing to talk. When I finally did see her, it was at a sandwich shop a few blocks from the Hoover building. She walked in looking like…well an FBI agent. Now in a black, tailored skirt suit that fit her perfectly, her hair cut shorter and more styled, her heels tall and her posture confident. A man was with her, and my stomach turned at his hand on her back, the familiar way they stood close as they waited in line. He was remarkably tall with dark features, handsome in a kind of mysterious way. I wondered if that was Mulder, assumed that it was. They sat down and I watched her face, the intensity in her eyes and the curl at her lip, recognized the way her features danced as she talked about something she found interesting, the rapturous way she listened while her male counterpart spoke. I remembered when she used to look at me that way. She must have felt my eyes on her because she looked at me suddenly, registering surprise and then sadness, offering me a tiny wave as the man turned to see who she was looking at. I gathered the rest of my sandwich and chucked it in the trash can as I stalked out, suddenly having lost my appetite. I wanted to hate her, to be angry at her betrayal, her abandonment. I wanted to hate him, for taking her from me. All I could muster was the same hallow acceptance that I had my chance, and somehow let it slip away. I just hope that he appreciates her smile as much as I do.

#the x files #txf #dana scully #fox mulder #gillovny #msr #sculder #xf fanfic

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bigskydreaming · 3 years ago

Note

You're asked to choose one and only one or DC's future stops existing immediately. your choices:

1. Jason Todd the anti-hero who seldom works with only a couple of the bats he doesn't hate, for example Dick and Cass VS. Jason Todd who came back with healed body but broken spirit, folded back into the Gotham gang and learns to be part of the society again.

2. Tim Drake who makes all of his mistakes as canon but realizes he's been wrong and apologizes to people VS. Tim Drake back in his first iteration, a cute little brother character who is a reader insert and a fun teenager.

3. JayKyle VS DickKyle.

4. Jason Todd with a sword VS. Damian Wayne with a sword.

5. Chris Kent VS. Jon kent.

Okay but which DC future? Its omniversal future? Its hypertime future? Its multiversal future? Its Elseworlds future? Its dark multiverse future? Mwahahaha your threat is useless because the sheer wtf of DC's continuities, timelines and conflicting declarations of what to even call their multiomnihyperverse makes it impossible to target simply A future! DC's overly unnecessarily complicated nature renders it functionally immortal and impossible to ever truly destroy, take that Darkseid.

I mean. But anyway. Whatevs:

1) I honestly do prefer the idea of Jason someday fully reuniting/reintigrating into the Batfam as a whole, because fuck it, the found family I'm here for is the one where they actually act like a family....I just think it takes actual work to get to that point and I get irey when people are like we're here! We found it! And its like meanwhile, abusive dynamics still abound. Mmm. No thank you. But even though I've been on a huge Jason and Dick and Cass kick for like, forever, I do still aim for him having a dynamic of his own with the rest of the family.

Like the thing is, I hate playing the favorites card in families, and I think the emphasis on so and so being Bruce's favorite child or so and so being this kid's favorite sibling, etc, like it really does feel like to the detriment of the whole family, because once you start validating the idea of favorites, ESPECIALLY in a found family that is CONTINUOUSLY growing....I think you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot because you're kinda creating a situation where either no future new additions to the family can EVER be Bruce or one of the kids' 'favorite' or else you're innately positing that said fave status is conditional and even a current fave of Bruce or a sibling can be bumped down the ladder by the addition of a later arrival....

Which is LITERALLY the entire essence of the eternal conflict between Dick and Damian and Tim fans. Its not even that Damian is Dick's favorite, allegedly, its that prior to Damian's very EXISTENCE, fans felt comfortable declaring Tim unilaterally to be Dick's 'favorite'.....and then all it took was the addition of a single family member who had specific NEEDS in regards to Dick's attention and focus, largely because of his age and needing a legal guardian while Tim was old enough to literally jet set around the world on his own.....and like, everything went up in flames in large corners of fandom.

So I'm just like, death to the fave family member myth, its just incredibly counter productive to the idea of found family as a whole especially when it usually only exists to prop up a preferred character as better than others via the proof of see, these other characters say he's their fave or whatever...but also like, its not even necessary?

Because the thing is, you can have Jason reintegrated into the whole family overall, and still prioritize your personal narrative FOCUS on characters you like more than others, like say Dick and Cass.....because of course its natural for even people in the same family to have entirely different DYNAMICS with different family members....and these dynamics don't have to come with a ranking system in order to prioritize which ones you just focus on more in a story. Because its not necessarily that Dick has to be Jason's fave brother, y'know, just for Jason to prefer spending time with Dick simply because he's more comfortable with him due to knowing him longer or being more secure in the idea that Dick doesn't judge him based on their greater shared history.

This doesn't mean that Jason doesn't care for his other siblings, that he can't have strong dynamics with them as well, its just about finding a reason for why these two specifically might be in a story without the others that doesn't demand putting a definitive ranking on which one Jason considers his FAVE. Just like Damian doesn't have to be Dick's FAVE just for them to have the super close canon relationship they have, even relative to the other siblings, because there's everything needed in canon already to establish that the mere fact of Dick essentially RAISING Damian for a year, and being the first one in the family to really take a chance on Damian, like, this lends itself naturally to them maybe more naturally gravitating towards each other than other siblings due to comfort level and familiarity, etc, but it doesn't have to be like....oh but yeah, I just like Damian more than you, Tim, y'know?

So my answer on this one is a total cop out of both, both is good. Jason totally reintegrated back into the family, but with dynamics that still lend themselves fairly easily towards story lineups where its just him running missions with Dick or Duke or any other one or two specific family members even if for no other reason than they gel together best in the field, y'know?

2) Hmm. I honestly really do love and miss 90s Tim Drake and just....don't see him in a lot of what I read these days. I'm like no, why did he have to go, he was doing so well! BUT I'm also on a big accountability kick, and like, I'm so steeped in fics where Dick GROVELS for forgiveness for every little slight he's ever done real or imagined, with every character but Tim in particular, so its like.....I'm not gonna lie, I really have a preference these days for seeing stuff where its literally anyone actually owning up to shit they've done to Dick and apologizing or groveling or making it to HIM, like, completely unconditionally. In the same manner we usually see Dick apologizing, glossing over any reasons he might have had for doing what he did or feeling the way he did, and saying oh it doesn't matter, putting the entirety of his focus on what HE did and why it was wrong no matter what and he's sorry.....that's what I would kill to see from more fics, just in reverse.

Because so often even in the all too rare fics where we DO see other characters apologizing to Dick for shit, its watered down with Dick volunteering that oh he messed up too, it was a two way street, and its like no! This is Pettiness Hours! I want the unconditional apologies! Give me the groveling! From anyone, I don't care at this point, lol, just show me characters actually PUTTING IN THE WORK to make it up to Dick for harm they've caused him, even if completely unintentionally or via neglecting his feelings or considering the repercussions their actions or words would have on him. Aaaaaaand, frankly, Tim's a good place to start there, because of how one sided all the takes on their conflicts have been for so many years. I mean, if people need a place to start, Batman and Robin Eternal gets enough praise it can't be pretended that people in fandom don't know that story exists, so how about some stories where Tim says he's fucking sorry for punching Dick in issue #4 or #5 of that one, and it was uncalled for and he was clearly just looking for an excuse to unleash some more of his resentment and upset for the Spyral/Forever Evil stuff, and family deciding that its totally okay to punch Dick whenever they're mad at him and need to work off some aggression so they can then finally forgive him (for now) is a trend that needs to die in a fire post-haste? I mean just as an example.

But the thing that kills me about fanfic trends is like....the sameness of so much of it. There's SO much room for variety and diverse takes, and like....I don't actually hate Tim! I'm just cranky because of the imbalanced nature of most content out there for literal years at this point. Push the pendulum BACK in the other direction, create some balance by showing the flip side of things.....and that leaves a lot more room for me and others of like minds to then be more amenable to - and even interested in - other stories that don't scratch this particular itch, but don't need to, because other stories are doing the scratching by then, y'know?

And THEN like, at that point, I would be ALL FOR more stories that are just callbacks to classic 90s Tim who I adore, with his skateboarding and his EARNESTNESS and his go-get-em spirit and also the gumption. All the gumption. I like that Tim. I do miss that Tim. But like, for the moment, like, I want accountable Tim because I am tiiiiiiiired of groveling Dick and tbh at this point its not enough for me to just see people move past putting Dick in that position and just have mutually respective and doting brothers Dick and Tim having adventures together......nah, first I want some reciprocation. Ngl. Gimme the apologies for actual mistakes actually made.

3) DickKyle. Easy question, c'mon, you gotta know that. LOL. ;)

But yeah, I've been shipping these two off their like, two shared pages from way back in the Obsidian Age story years before Jason even returned, let alone was in Countdown together with Kyle, so like, its no contest. I don't mind JayKyle, I certainly prefer it to JayRoy tbh, but there's not a ton of appeal in it for me, particularly in how its usually depicted, because like....the entire basis of JayKyle is that they DO have stories together and spent a whole year worth of weekly issues traveling the multiverse together in Countdown.....but there's like, practically no trace of their actual dynamics from that series or any specifics of literally any issue from that entire comic in most fics I’ve read, so its like.....idk, it tends to come across as more generic, not in the sense that it cant still be interesting, but more in the sense that it feels like just someone paired with Jason just because history between them EXISTS without any interest in exploring what that history actually IS....and at that point, its like, well there's no reason TO prioritize that ship over DickKyle for me personally, when like, I have a shit ton of headcanon reasons for why those two in a pairing specifically. *Shrugs* My logic. Its not for everyone, but it works for me.

4) Jason with a sword or Damian with a sword? I don't understand the question. Both. Both is good. All the characters should have swords. Swords are awesome.

5) Chris Kent vs Jon Kent - oof. I adore Jon, I really do. I love his dynamic with Damian, I love a lot of their specific stories, the parallels between them as friends and Bruce and Clark as friends....its all very bien. But I gotta give this one to Chris, because I'm always gonna have a soft spot for him because I'm a sucker for all abused kid heroes, and I just miss that funky little dude so much. There's so many stories we didn't get with him and were just ripe for the picking, but nooooo, DC's like lol you can't have nice things, here we just rebooted the entire multiverse and now Clark and Lois never adopted the son of Clark's worst Kryptonian rival and raised him with tender love and care awww does that make you sad, were you invested in him, WELL TOO BAD, HE'S GONE NOW AND BASICALLY NEVER EXISTED, NOW GIVE US YOUR MONEY ANYWAY MWAHAHAHAHAH.

Yeah. I'm still not over that. Probably will never be tbh, so I with great grudge-bearing do affirm that I'm gonna go with Chris on this one and like, he is a Priority for me and I'm still very keen on the idea of him and Duke being besties for random reasons that might not make sense to anyone but me, but eh, whatever.

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spencersawkward · 4 years ago

Text

switchblade faith // spencer reid - chapter 1

summary: one month after joining the BAU, Clea is still settling in. between solving murders and getting acclimated to DC, the only comfortable thing in her life is her friendship with Dr. Spencer Reid.

relationship: fem!OC/Spencer Reid

word count: 3.4k

hi all! welcome to my new story.

I've never written a baby Spence fic before, but I'm gonna try my best. I just wanted to get something out of the way before the book starts:

aside from the fact that it's young Spencer, this book isn't placed in a specific season. I might pull cases from different episodes, but the characters will remain the same. I've included Emily and Rossi as characters because I couldn't bear to have a story without either of them (wouldn't want to subject any of you to a Prentiss-less world).

that's pretty much it. I'm glad you're here. if you wanna read my other stories, my masterlist is here.

happy reading :)

"HA!" I slap my hand down on the pile of cards and slide it towards me, organizing them in a neat pile with a smug expression.

"this game is a sham." Spencer sighs, reaching for his book.

"you're just mad you lost." I raise an eyebrow and shuffle the cards again. "you don't wanna play another round?"

"why would I? the only skill this game requires is fast reflexes." he runs hazel eyes down the page with an alarming quickness. I scoff at his disinterest.

"maybe if you trained those reflexes as much as you trained that big genius brain of yours, you'd get a leg up." Morgan teases from his spot next to me. Spencer glances at him with a frown, his cheeks turning a light pink, before looking to me. I throw up my hands.

"he said it, not me." secretly, I smile at the fact that Derek is backing me up.

"I could beat any of you in poker." Reid defends.

"easily. it helps that I don't even know how to play." I slide the cards back into the holder and cross my arms over my chest with a sigh.

"you don't know how to play poker?" he's shocked.

"I told you, I hate card games like that!" I emphasize. things like poker, blackjack, anything that involves multiple players, I usually don't enjoy much. Emily glances up from her case file with a tiny smirk.

"why?"

"I'm a sore loser." I admit, averting my eyes. there's also the risk factor involved, which includes giving up coins or pretzels or peanuts if I lose. I tend to cling tightly to all three. Prentiss lets out a laugh and Spencer flips the page of his book.

"and winner, apparently."

"you're sassy today, aren't you?" I grin at him, pleasantly surprised.

in the month I've been working here, I haven't spoken to Spencer very much. he's been polite and I've gotten to know his intellect quite well, but he doesn't spend a lot of time with us outside of work. when we go out to get drinks, he either declines or heads home before we can even ask, a bag full of books pressed to his side.

I think he just takes a while to get comfortable around new people-- that's what JJ said when I asked why he seemed to be avoiding me. the fact that he played cards with me today felt like a victory in itself, so I'll take what I can get.

Spencer doesn't reply to my dig, only crosses his long, narrow legs and settles into his book.

"we should start briefing before we land." Hotch and Rossi walk over from their spots at the front of the plane to sit on the couch by our table. I nod eagerly and watch as Emily flips open her laptop to FaceTime Penelope about the case.

the first couple cases were more difficult than I expected because I had never worked in the field before joining the BAU, but I'm starting to get used to flying around constantly and examining actual dead bodies. working sex crimes meant I spent most of my time in front of a computer screen or just staying in the office. this is incredibly different-- which I'm starting to find might not to be a bad thing.

"--the virus killed her hard drive and left that on the screen." Penelope explains, referring to the picture of Heather Woodland's computer.

"'for heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself'." Morgan reads the message aloud from the case file. the words feel familiar in my mind and I try to remember where I've heard them before.

"that's exactly what William Heirens left behind." Spencer sparks the memory. I sit up straighter.

"the Lipstick Killer?" my fingertips trace over the case details. it's a weird aspect of the murder to emulate, especially because he didn't even leave the message in lipstick. I guess he's not really concerned with that; based on the unsub's previous victims, we have just under 36 hours to find her.

"his first victim was Melissa Kirsh, 26," Reid scratches his nose as he reads, frowning so hard that I start to think he'll form permanent wrinkles. he's got such a baby face, it's almost funny. "stab wounds, strangulation."

"so he stabbed her first, and then strangled her to finish the job?" Morgan repeats.

"what's with using a belt for the second murder?" Emily flips through the papers, confused. Spencer stiffens in his spot as he realizes this is the perfect time to share his freakishly expansive forensic knowledge.

"strangulation with your bare hands actually isn't as easy as you would believe. he probably tried it, found that it took too long, then stabbed her. and blood takes a long time to clean, so he decided a belt would be more efficient."

"he's perfecting his method." I can't tear my eyes away from the photos, despite the roiling sensation they put in my stomach. even with the things I've already seen, I don't think I'll ever get over photographs like this.

"we'll be landing soon and then we're meeting up with the Seattle field office. be ready to split up once we hit the ground." Hotch snaps shut his case file and stands up, breaking off to go sit alone. Rossi takes note of the old card deck that sits on the table.

"poker?" he looks between the four of us.

"nope." Emily chuckles.

"this one doesn't know how to play." Morgan gestures to me, causing Rossi to turn to me.

"were you raised in a barn?" he asks in his usual manner of speaking: blunt sarcasm with a hint of mockery. I frown sarcastically.

"something like that."

"at some point this week, we'll sit down and I'll teach you." he gets up, pats my shoulder, and walks over to join Hotch. I lower my voice once he's far enough away.

"is he actually gonna make me do that?"

"you don't know Rossi." Morgan shakes his head slowly, slides his headphones back on, and sinks into his seat.

"I'll join and bring JJ with me." Emily winks at me reassuringly, noting the tapping of my nail against the surface of the table. Rossi is a legend in the field and I've read all of his books, but didn't want to freak him out by telling him so. it was embarrassing enough when I met him and got tongue-tied while shaking his hand. he's got an elusive energy that intimidates me, and I'd prefer not to showcase that by humiliating myself with poker.

instead of dwelling on thoughts of how I'm going to fail in front of my idol, I open up one of my books and try to pass the time.

...

while I'm writing some notes on one of the many white boards scattered throughout the field office, I realize that I'm one of four other women in the room, including Emily. she's talking to Hotch and another agent at the opposite end of the room; Reid is unpacking his signature book bag and seems deep in thought. Rossi is reading a document. everyone around me seems to be in a hurry to do something, and I begin to feel dumb.

"you okay?" Morgan asks me. I realize that I've been standing with my marker hovering over the board. my fingertips press into my temple before I turn to him.

"yeah, definitely. just thinking." my mind travels to the map we've got pasted up and the red marker lines that Spencer has already created with the geographical profile.

"looks like we're getting the classic Seattle treatment." Derek points outside to the rain pelting the windows, streaming down the glass and distorting the glow of the city outside. it's gloomy today, with a slight chill running through the streets. I nod and turn back to my task, suddenly realizing something.

"he's willing to travel with the body." I mutter to myself. Morgan steps up next to me, crosses his arms across his chest.

"he must drive a vehicle that can conceal one, then." he glances over to Hotch to see what the unit chief has to say, but Spencer speaks up first.

"one in seven point four drivers in Seattle owns an SUV." it's like a flip switches at the mention of a statistic, diverting his attention from something nebulous in his mind to the tangible case. he's a little similar to a robot.

"an Explorer with tinted windows?" Morgan speaks again as he looks over the case photos.

"those rate higher among women." Spencer again.

"sure, but how do we know it's his car?" I wonder.

"what about a Jeep Cherokee?" Hotch chimes in, almost startling me with the deep register of his voice. I pull my bottom lip between my teeth as I think on it.

"Jeeps are more masculine." Reid comes close to me in order to examine the picture I'm holding. he smells like clean laundry and some nice soap scent that I can't place. maybe it's the gel he uses to slick back his hair. no cologne or aftershave. I don't think he'd need to shave, what with his smooth baby face.

Spencer has some special quirks that make him a little more interesting. he usually avoids physical contact with other people-- doesn't shake hands-- but at other times, he doesn't seem to have self-awareness. like right now, where the shoulder of his red sweater is just barely touching mine. I hand him the picture and step away.

"unsubs love to assert their masculinity."

Hotch nods along, encouraging me to share more of what I'm thinking. after swallowing down a lingering nervousness, I tap the push pin marking where the last body was dumped. "he dropped her out-of-state, so he probably has a previous knowledge of law enforcement. maybe he's got a criminal record?"

"good, Williams." Hotch praises me. my fist clenches triumphantly at my side as he turns to the agent who has been watching us intently. "when do we meet with your task force?"

"four." the man replies. I balk at this, my posture shifting. the shortest time constraint I've ever had here has been a full day. it's already one in the afternoon.

"you want an accurate profile by four today?" I glance between Morgan and Spencer, but the latter is rocking back and forth on his heels with his eyes glued to the white board. Morgan doesn't seem put off by it.

"we can do that." Hotch scowls, snapping shut the case file with a finality that tells me we're about to split up. "Dave and Morgan, head to the last dump site. Williams, Reid, I want you to talk to Heather's brother and try to find out what you can about her life. Prentiss and I will stay here in case of new developments."

I nod curtly, grab my jacket, and glance over at Spencer. he runs his hand over his hair, although I can't imagine what there is to smooth down, then walks over to me.

"you ready to go?" I ask, brandishing the file. he and I have only done two interviews together; I spent most of my beginning weeks working with Emily to get a feel for the job. both times with the boy genius have been fine, if not a little awkward.

he nods in answer to my question. "would you mind driving?"

"no license?" I tease to lighten the mood, but he doesn't get the joke. instead, he frowns at me with something of a distracted expression, adjusts his bag.

"no, I don't like driving in the rain."

"oh," I recover quickly and put a friendly smile on my face. "no problem."

"thanks." he walks ahead of me and I cringe at my own behavior. he acts so differently from earlier on the jet that I start to wonder if I did something wrong. maybe he's just in his head or something; I know I would be if I had an IQ that enormous.

when we get to the house of Heather Woodland's brother, a gorgeous golden lab greets us in the entryway. she puts her paws up on my legs and I reach down to scratch behind her ears with a smile on my face.

"Sandy, calm down." her owner grabs her collar gently to calm her. "sorry."

"no, it's fine, I love dogs." I wave it off and step inside. Spencer is eyeing Sandy warily, but she seems just as eager to say hi to him as she was to me. when she lets out a singular, enthusiastic bark, he startles.

"Mr. Woodland," I suppress my laugh by changing the subject. "I'm Special Agent Williams and this is Special Agent Dr. Reid."

we shake hands, my colleague giving his usual wave and polite smile. the interviewee takes in Spencer's appearance. I know what's coming.

"you look too young for medical school." Woodland says to Reid. this has happened a couple times since I joined the team, but Spencer never seems to mind. if anything, he lights up at the opportunity to share the reason for his official title.

"they're PhD's. three of them." he gives a little smile as we walk into the house, me shaking a few stray raindrops from my hair.

"so... are you a genius or something?" Heather's brother leads us past the hallway into the living room, which is unkempt and littered with pictures, catalogs, and toys. he must have kids in school right now. that would also explain the breed of dog.

"I don't believe that intelligence can be accurately quantified."

"he's being modest," I glance over at Spencer. "Dr. Reid can read 20,000 words a minute-- he's definitely a genius."

Woodland stares at Spencer for a second as he tries to fathom the speed at which someone's mind would have to turn in order to process all that information. I still can't imagine it. Spencer's eyes avoid Woodland's shyly. instead, he watches me as I pet Sandy.

soon after, we ask him about Heather's personality and tendencies. her brother is more than willing to give us all the information we need. I'm surprised, however, by my partner's ease at wandering around Woodland's house, flipping through the magazines on top of the TV and reading the spines of books on shelves. he's quite conspicuous about it.

about halfway through my mental list of questions, Sandy keeps jumping up and wagging her til.

"I'm gonna take her to the backyard quick," Woodland tells us. "one second."

he ducks out of the room and I wait until I know he's out of earshot before sidling up beside Reid.

"there's an immediate relationship established between a buyer and a seller," he tells me, holding up a Datsun Z catalog. we know that she was in the market for one. "if I want to coax a young woman into my car..."

"offer her a test drive." I finish his sentence. of course, within ten minutes of sifting through this woman's house, Spencer has figured out the ruse used to lure her. Woodland returns a moment later with a smile, but we tell him that we've gotten the information we need before leaving.

in the car, Spencer theorizes about the unsub's mental condition as I try to navigate traffic in the storm. thunder rumbles overhead, occasionally sending a vibration through the car. my knuckles tighten around the wheel a bit. I also hate driving in the rain. his rambles fills the silence, however, and somewhat soothe my nerves.

"he doesn't have the MO of a paranoid psychotic. dumping the bodies out in the open, with a weapon nearby... that doesn't align."

"he covers their eyes with duct tape multiple times over, though. he knows he's going to kill them, but he doesn't want them to see his face?" my fingertips drum over the wheel nervously.

"what's wrong?" Spencer asks suddenly, glancing at my hands and then at my face. I still my movements at the change in subject.

"huh? nothing. I just don't like driving in the rain, either."

"oh. I'm sorry." he straightens a bit in his seat. the apology surprises me a little, but he seems genuinely sympathetic. I guess I really don't know him that well.

"it's cool."

we fall into an awkward silence and I bite my lip. we should get back to talking about the case. heaven knows Spencer has more facts to spew, more theories to share about this unsub. anything is better than the gap in conversation. I open my mouth to say more about what we learned at the house, except Spencer speaks first.

"so... how are you liking working here?" he asks awkwardly. it takes a second for the question to register with me. he sounds uncomfortable whenever we're alone and that makes me uncomfortable in turn. where everyone else was quick to include me in their jokes and discussions, Reid always sounds like talking to me exhausts him. it's obvious that he's socially awkward. there's no judgement from me; I'm just surprised that he's pushing to talk about non work-related subjects.

"I like it," not really an accurate summation. I don't think a heart-to-heart is exactly the right move when talking to him. "a little stressful, though."

"you worked in sex crimes before, right?" he looks out the window. there isn't much to see except for the rain-blurred skyline. I nod.

"yep."

"that sounds... hard." he shifts in his seat as he tries to come up with more points of conversation. it's kind of endearing, honestly. I throw him a bone.

"so is profiling."

"why'd you switch?" his eyes flit over to mine as he quickly adds, "if you don't mind me asking."

I take a second to come up with an answer. of course, there's the classic response: I've always wanted to help people— which isn't wrong— it's also not the whole answer. all through college and the Academy, I had my head focused on one thing. I could interview killers and get inside their heads, but there's something entirely different that you don't get from pure research. and one person inspired that in me before I had finished high school.

"don't tell him I said this, but I really wanted to work with Rossi." I say in a hushed tone. there's a slight smile on my lips because I haven't told anyone on the team in fear of being teased. I don't think Spencer is likely to gossip with Rossi about me, though.

"really?" now he sounds surprised.

"I've read all his books and I've been to a couple lectures. he doesn't remember me, evidently." the thought is more funny than embarrassing. he spoke at my college a few years back and I recall being on the edge of my seat, trying to come up with the courage to ask the questions that filled my head. I was too shy.

"does he know you're a fan?" Spencer loosens up a bit.

"nope," we pull off the freeway as we near the field office. I stop at a red light and look over. "I didn't want to embarrass myself with the whole 'your work changed my life' spiel."

at this, Spencer lets out a short, nervous giggle. it's a nice sound, that laugh. it makes me smile when he seems to relax in his seat.

"that's exactly what I did." he says. I frown.

"you told him his books changed your life?" I blush as I realize I just inadvertently made fun of him.

"I, um... well, I got excited to talk about his research." he averts his gaze again and his cheeks turn a slight pink. there's a dimple in his cheek, I notice, that keeps tugging upward. this is my first time having a non-forced moment with Spencer alone; a wave of satisfaction washes over me as I realize the potential for another friend here.

"trust me, I get it." I laugh. we pull into the parking ramp for the field office and I find a spot by the door. Spencer hoists that bag into his lap and runs his hand through his hair. when I pull the key out of the ignition, he waits for me to get out of the car before we start walking toward the door.

it's small, but I appreciate that he doesn't run off without me. we don't talk as we walk, our footsteps echoing along the cement walls.

oh my god first chapter holy fuck! it's short, but I don't wanna overwhelm. I'm so excited for this book!

#spencer reid #matthew gray gubler #dr. reid #criminal minds #mgg #fanfic #fanfiction #wattpad #friends to lovers #BAU #slow burn

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