#Jack is a Beanstalk

[goonlalagoon]

Like firewood burning bright || Leagues and Legends

Read on Ao3

When the barrier comes down and they’re left to pick up the pieces, victorious and exhausted, Grey wants to sleep for a week.

Instead, he trails after Jack and Rue, pouring golden fire into the injured, soothing pain and burning out infection. If this was something he was trained to he would be able to be more efficient about it, but the only thing Grey’s trained himself to do with his magic is hide it, so he settles for being a battery. Laney twists hanks of gold in her fingers, weaves it into neat spellwork and hastily shared hedgewitch tricks, and Grey watches out of the corner of his eye, fingers aching. He runs a thumb over the place an ink splatter should be, except that in the midst of a siege he hasn’t been burying himself in gleeful scholarship.

He grumbles, automatic and thoughtless, about how he may as well help out. Not like there’s anything better to do, he mutters as sweat trickles beneath his collar, heart racing like a rabbit’s as the Elsewhere twists at his bones, a storm of fire the drop of a hand away. If I don’t help you with this now, you’ll just wake me up on your way to bed at some awful time of the morning…excuses, excuses, excuses. Grey had never wanted anyone to look to him for help with anything other than, perhaps, obscure academic debate. The location of a book in the reference section of the library, maybe; grudgingly aware that working in the Archives would likely involve a certain amount of customer service.

But Sez turns to him with the faintest quirk of an eyebrow, in the wake of a report about broken wards and unsafe conditions. She wouldn’t say anything to name him: Sez, with her rotating cast of informants and helpers understood anonymity.

Sez turns to him, flicks an eyebrow up just enough for him to know there was a question, a request, if he wanted to answer it - Sez had asked him across the room if he could help, and he found himself reaching for ink and paper, the splatter of diagrams and suggestions for improvement. Something lights up warm in his chest when he sinks power into the first carefully written ward, hidden spell-fire wrapping around a bakery’s beams to prevent any fires from getting out of control. He’d been told all the years of his childhood that mages were selfish, had to be forced to share their wonderful power, had thought on guilty, sleepless nights of the unspoken power pooling at the tips of his brittle fingers - and all it took, in the end, was someone saying please.

Some days, it’s all too much - too many people, too many expectations, too many things twisting him in different directions. Some days he buries himself in books.

This is nothing new; Grey loves reading for many reasons, will lose himself in books and treatsies and journals for the love of studying, for all the fascinating doors it opens even if just in his own head, but sometimes he reads like it’s running away - pages flicking under frantic fingers, each another shield, another fragile skin between Grey and the world.

On bad days, curled in a chair by a mountain view, focusing on every word and tearing through pages as though it was a race, Grey had been able to feel it looming behind him - a father’s pride, a sister’s fear, the knowledge that one slip was all it would take for the world to burn to dust around him.

He feels it less, now, but it echoes through him still. He flicks globs of gold at the nearest wall for light without thinking and freezes, panic turning his brain to static, before rembembering that it’s okay. He’s allowed to be a mage, to call on the Elsewhere, to use every tool at his fingertips to defend himself. He traces blueprints and scribbles down numbers for Laney and George to pour over, and for a moment expects it to be his father leaning on the other side of the workbench. He sees a woman with dark hair out the corner of his eye and turns, frantic, a name caught in his throat - and she turns to speak to someone behind her, and he’s not sure if he’s hurt or relieved that the shape of her face is all wrong.

He doesn’t know where Sandry is, and he won’t unless she wants to tell him. It hurts, to know that she could just leave. It hurts, that he doesn’t quite know if he would have wanted her to stay. He misses his sister, her cool hands and tentative smile, but to everyone other than Rupert she was a monster, and he can’t quite blame them.

(Rupert wouldn’t find this a helpful statement: Sez told him once, pointed, to call her monster not non-human, because she’d rather be known as what she is than what she’s not. Rupert didn’t think it mattered, because what was important was that she was a person. Cassandra Graves had done terrible things, but he wasn’t her judge or jury, and they hadn’t been standing in a court of law. She had been a lab-rat prisoner too, and it hadn’t been because of any of the crimes laid at her feet)

On bad days, the spectres leaning over his shoulder sometimes have different voices, now. His father is gone and Sandry’s fear is unfounded, these days, but there are still so many ways he can see everything precious to him shattering in his hands.

But Jack will gently nudge his shoulder and chivvy him into putting the book aside to eat something, will slide a bookmark between pages and tuck a blanket over his sleeping shoulders. Laney drops new books on his desk and picks his brain on diagrams and plans, suggests gleeful experiments they should find the time for. Rupert sits in peaceful silence with him, the click of knitting needles and the rustle of pages the only sound for hours.

There’s a voice in the back of his head telling him to hide, but it gets easier every day to quiet it, to say from what? and listen to the echoing lack of an answer.

He helps Sez when she asks, is given the responsibility of setting up a library for anyone to use - "I didn't mean I should run it!" he tells Sez plaintively, and Sally laughs at him over her shoulder - and wanders home through streets he first learned under siege, familiar now in a patchwork of memories. There, the building Jack insisted on helping to paint until Rue dragged him away; here, the one Grey helped yank the fallen rubble of out of the way so they could rebuild the walls without waiting for enough people to shift it all by hand. He spends his evenings curled up in the corner of their flat with a book, comfortable and content, and calls gentle fire to his unshaking fingertips to read by when it gets dark.

[bricktoygrapher]

Jack and the Beanstalk 🌱

Fee-fi-fo-fum! In my tale, classic and spun, Jack battles the giant, as legends are done. The giant looms, a fearsome sight, But Jack's resolve burns strong and bright.

This is my entry to the Fairy Tales challenge by Stuck in Plastic.

Also, this is another entry to the Toy Photographers Bingo challenge.

Prompt: Based on a Book ✔️

[rustyparable]

(Fairytale)

Jack and the beanstalk just works for them okay

Also Stanley's wife is definitely only expressive because he sets her up to look that way. He's... 78% mentally stable. At most.

[rockybloo]

What's nanas favorite memory with jack?

The moment she realized Jack really loved her

[gtbutterfly]

Y'know, if I had a nickel every time Disney cancelled an animated gt movie that would've been amazing, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird (and sad) that it happened twice

[accio-victuuri]

XIAO ZHAN | Life of Us/Drifting MUSIC VIDEO

[ed13d1]

how far will you go

photo by Brendon Burton

[averagegtenjoyer]

I love that trope where the giant gets tied down like in Gulliver’s Travels. Whether its one tiny or a hundred tinies tying down the giant, whether the giant is afraid or confident, fearplay or not, it always HITS

Giant that gets tied down by the monster-slayer (who’s never killed a humanoid monster before) and looks so sad and eepy that they just cant bring themself to do it, and lets them go.

Giant who pretends to be caught and completely submits to the tinies because its amusing, only to break out and cause havoc moments after the tinies think they’ve won.

Giant who gets tied down and ask if the tinies really, truly think this is going to hold them?

Humans who get tied to the kitchen floor by a group of borrowers (whom they did not know existed) who are tired of them stomping around in the early morning hours all the time.

Giant who tries to be scary and cocky but actually these ropes are very tight and… they cant break out for the life of them, making their threats meaningless.

Giant who gets tied down and keeps trying to tell the tinies they’re not a bad giant, promise! The tinies do not believe this despite the sincerity of the claim. Shocker

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

The other day, I learned (according to Wikipedia)

According to researchers at Durham University and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the tale type (AT 328, The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure) to which the Jack story belongs may have had a Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) origin (the same tale also has Proto-Indo-Iranian variants),[10] and so some think that the story would have originated millennia ago (4500 BC to 2500 BC).[7]

‼‼‼

[katabay]

L'APPEL DU VIDE

okay so. jack! jack. what a collection of guys. the overlap between jack and the beanstalk and jack the giant killer, though. that sure is something! sometimes king arthur is there, which always takes me by surprise.

this. specifically. is an idea I've been kicking around. jack and the beanstalk is not a story I've ever enjoyed, as a kid it was probably my least favorite to read. as an adult, I was INTENSELY fascinated by reading j.g. ballard's the drowned giant. I think about it frequently, and somewhere during a re read of it, I ended up revisiting jack.

combining different versions of jack into one character is not a new concept, but it IS a fun one! the version I've been assembling together plays less with the fun elements of a jack story (and adjacent folklore stories), and focuses more on the potential for tragic elements with the addition of the usual grim and jagged narrative edges that I personally enjoy.

jack with the backstory of the devil and the three golden hairs, only jack doesn't find love, he's TIRED, all he wants to do is go home, but there isn't a home to go back to. what is the point of being born lucky if this is what it gets you? jack the giant killer, only he doesn't want to kill giants, jack who saw a body of a giant when he was a small child and cannot bring himself to do as a king commands. jack, who climbs up the beanstalk and stops halfway to look down. etc.

to go back to the drowned giant real quick, both to set the tone about jack seeing the body of a giant as a youth, and also because I've been haunted and obsessed with this excerpt of it ever since I read it:

J. G. Ballard, The Drowned Giant

anyway! this was originally like, a two illustration concept to get out of my system. however. I'm halfway through outlining a narrative. so. maybe it will also be several illustrations and also comic.

[goonlalagoon]

So many lovely questions || Leagues and Legends

After Laney ported her out to deliver a letter and an apology four years in the crafting, Jill sat at a bench in Sally-Anne’s fish shop and realised she didn’t know what to do next. She had been a gleeful scientist, once - still was, in the depths of her heart - and then she’d been weighed down for years, smuggling secrets out in invisible ink and living with a hundred choices haunting her steps. 

But she’d left her job, walked away from Rivertown the moment she let the lab door close behind her and realised that she was remembering, not just cataloging the stolen hours of her life from hidden notes. She had her cats to reclaim, a sister to check into and a few friends to reassure - but there was no soundproof door and labelled lab coat waiting for her. If she picked up a pipette or test tube again, it wouldn’t be on the Bureau’s paycheck, even if they’d been willing to offer her another job. For the first time in years, there wasn’t a promise to keep.

She thought, vaguely, that she should feel light. Unburdened. Her life hadn’t been cold, exactly, but there had always been a weight on her shoulders - when she could remember it. It had been a burden she’d accepted with open eyes but that hadn’t made it easy to carry, and she had thought on sleepless nights that once it was over, somehow, she would be relieved. Lightened, full of potential.

 Mostly, she just felt tired.

Exhaustion dogged her steps, restless sleep and a heavy heart. Her hands shook as she prepared her morning injections, though never enough to be a true problem. She thought idly one afternoon about all the old, half-dreamt plans that were open to her and had to sit down heavily, dread clawing up her throat at the sheer thought of where to start.

George sat down next to her one morning, the fish shop lit with a pale pre-dawn gloom and the golden glint of light through the protective barrier spilling through the propped open door. They sat for a few moments, pressed shoulder to shoulder, cradling steaming mugs in peaceful silence.

“It’s alright to be done,” George said finally. There was a weary note to her voice, like this was an old thought, twisted and beaten into shape. “It’s alright to walk away and say, I’ve done my bit. And maybe you’ll pick it all up again - whatever it is - and maybe you won’t, but it’s alright to walk away and it’s alright to rest.” She hesitated. “It’s - it’s alright not to know who you are, when the job you had to do is done and you’re left with the pieces.”

 Jill doesn’t need to ask to know what George is thinking of: they haven’t talked about it again, but she remembers with a chilling clarity listening to the other woman speaking calmly about her village leaving her out to die, the dragon she’d killed. Jill may not be someone George confides in, quite, but she’s a scientist. She observes, and she can see how desperately George wants to not be someone who’s first instinct is to brutally effective violence. She can see how George carefully doesn’t flinch when anyone other than Jack calls her the Dragon Slayer.

(Jack is careful not to, unless he’s making a point to someone else; he is one of two people who know just how much her title weighs on George, and he’s the only one who has ever stood with her by the graves of the people who’d raised her and left her for dead)

 Jill takes a shaky breath, pressing her hands tight around the mug. They smart with the heat, and she presses them closer still, letting it ground her.

“I - I don’t know where to start. Picking up the pieces.” She laughs wetly. She’s cried more in the past few weeks than in the past few years, and she hates that she can feel a corner of herself judging it, fretting about whether it will be noticed. She doesn’t have to hide anymore: she can talk about how much she hated Thorne and his slimy confidence, about the confusion of half-dating Jerimiah because he was the only person she could really talk to for years with all of her memories intact and he was intelligent and wry enough to be vaguely her type (though she doesn’t particularly want to talk about this to the attractively competent woman sat next to her, for reasons Jill is carefully shying away from contemplating), the way she’d felt like she was haunting her own life for years, spending half of her days with an echoing gap in her head filled only with a few scribbled hints smuggled out under her shirtsleeves.

 She can talk about how many people she’d watched fading under her hands, lab rats to a cause who cared more about recreating what had been done to them than finding a way to help them. She can talk about smuggling them out, not knowing if she was condemning them to a harsher death or giving them a chance, about how she’d ended up volunteering at Wen’s partly because she wanted to do something productive with her evenings that made her talk to a few people and partly because she couldn’t stand sitting at home, dwelling on how many people she hadn’t been able to save. She doesn’t have to meticulously consider her words, ensuring that she doesn’t slip, that she doesn’t say something she shouldn’t be able to recall and tip off the Quiet Branch that maybe their lab rats have broken out of their cage.

 This was something she had realised early: they might have been the scientists in the lab, but they were an experiment too. Thorne had been monitoring them for safety, for effectiveness, for their use of the (generous) research budget - but he’d been watching the long term effects of a forgetting field, too. He’d dangled offers over their heads that he’d calculated they couldn’t refuse, and it hadn’t just been because they were the right people for the job. If he’d had to make two scientists conveniently disappear…

 …well. Better not to axe the ones who’ve had enough time to build up a network, whose sudden loss might raise question, the ones you’ve already invested resources into.

 Jill helps in Rue’s infirmary, mixing remedies she learned at Annie’s side and giving as good as she gets on the snide commentary. Jack is there too, more days than not, whenever he has a snatch of time between shifts and the first time they overlap she ends up berating him into sitting down, Farris, because he’s working himself to the bone and that’s one thing, they all are, but there’s no need to be foolish about it and on an inured leg besides.

Rue looks grudgingly impressed.

On the second day he brings her down a mug of coffee, carefully balancing a tray as he hurries down the stairs. She takes a sip and frowns at him, wondering how he’d known exactly how much milk she liked (not to mention the dusting of chocolate powder stirred in). He shrugged, lopsided smile and a nervous hunch to the shoulders.

“I asked Rupe. He’s - he notices that kind of thing, so I asked.” She wonders what else Rupert has told them, what stories he’s shared, but she doesn’t ask. They’re friends, and Rupert understands the dangerous game she was playing - she knows none of them hold it against her, but sometimes she wonders if they should. If she’d told Jack the first time they met where to find his missing friend, would they have escaped without notice? Would he have taken a bullet to the leg, a curse digging in barbed hooks and refusing to let go?

 Jill has always been curious, asking question after question. She’s grown to hate questions that start with what if; she has too many keeping her awake and no way to answer them.

 Rupert tells her one evening how he’d guessed that she had a way to get a message out, and she has a panic attack, clutching the table and gasping for air. Jack talks her through it, Rupert fretting beside him, and she spends most of the night in a haze of retrospective terror. She hadn’t realised how sloppy she’d gotten; the danger is past, now, but the realisation of how close she’d been to being caught out keeps her awake. She can envision in perfect clarity how Thorne would have handled the matter. She suspects she would have been wiped, like George was; neater than a death, which would need explaining and Bureau records. Perhaps she would have been turned loose, or perhaps she would have been locked away in her own little lab, a test subject and prisoner. 

Perhaps he would have used it as an experiment all of its own - if you execute someone whilst they’re forgotten, does it break the spell? Would her sister have recalled Jill’s name the moment she was snuffed out, or would it have been permanent. She has another panic attack at the fleeting thought of what would have happened to the cats?, because she knows they’re safe, she knows, but she can imagine so clearly how they wouldn’t have been. When it passes she stares at the ceiling and laughs to herself, horrible choked up sobs, because how is that the thought that undoes her? She can imagine her own death, her own erasing from history, but the thought of her poor cats waiting at the door for someone to come home who doesn’t know to do so is what drives her to frantic despair.

 It gets easier, they tell her - bluntly from George, who has long since decided to ignore anyone who might question her right to be injured, and warily from Jack, who is still painfully working his way through old guilts and new challenges, and quietly from Rupert, who has spent months with missing spaces in his memory and had to trust the coded notes he’d left himself to tell him what to do, who has a taste for what she had lived with for years, who has been the one to stand in front of a rift and say close it, close it now because no matter how deep it cuts he can’t save one person at the cost of the rest.

 It will get easier, she tells herself firmly, factually, but it will take time, and that is okay. Some days she believes it; some days she doesn’t.

 There had been a girl living on the other side of a buried laboratory door for years, reading smuggled reports from a version of herself she didn’t know, and Jill is mourning her now - she had felt that blow every day, walking back through a door and feeling memory slot into place. Jill on the outside had never promised to save a life and failed, seen the light leaving someone’s eyes and known I can’t even tell your family to grieve, and that was an innocence she’d regained every evening, shattered every morning. She’s grieving for a part of herself she’d lost years before, all over again and for the last time.

 She mixes remedies under Rue’s watchful eye and browses the stalls of Rivertown, pauses to pet a stray cat and to buy a cup of spiced milky tea from a stall, and is easily tempted into trying buttery cookies flecked with cumin. She balances a tray of them back to Sally-Anne’s and the council of war taking place, doling them out to delighted grins, and lets that be enough for the day. She reminds herself sternly that she’s allowed to take it a day at a time, and sleeps in until the sun is streaming through the window in the cramped room she’s sharing with George, bedrolls tucked into opposite corners and a pile of shared books between them. 

There’s still a fight to win, a golden barrier around the town and a people declaring that they have a right to their lives, their homes, that the people who live in the shanty towns are still people. Jill has never been a fighter - rather, she has fought, plenty, with her hands steady on pippettes and diligent notes, blithe smiles and a sharp brain, but never with a weapon held in calloused hands - but she won’t sit back and watch these people die, so she goes out as a field medic.

 She helps to drag Red home, and thinks what if I hadn’t been there? She tries not to dwell on the answer, but Jill has always been keen on answering questions.

 That night she sits up late again, hands scrubbed clean. She had so many dreams, discoveries she wanted to make, a vision of shelves of research and publications. She thinks she’ll want that again, but not yet. She’s considered going home, but the thought of those familiar streets and walls is horrifying; this is the first time in years that she’s been able to be all of herself outside of a hidden lab, and Saint John’s Port holds a lot of memories, many of them unkind. She thinks about tilting her head back to the breeze when Laney ported them out for supplies, for allies, for finding all of Jill’s scattered dead to put to rest, new horizons opening up under her feet.

 “I think I’m going to take a vacation,” she says, dropping down next to George. It’s another early morning, though the light this time is the soft glow of sunlight not the rippling gold of the Elsewhere. “It’s been four years, I think I’m owed one.” George grins.

“Yeah? Where you going to go?” Jill shrugs, pressing her hands around a steaming mug.

“Anywhere. I’ll rattle back to Saint John’s Port eventually - got to visit my sister and reclaim my cats - but for now…I just want to see what I can find.” There’s a pause, peaceful. There are questions brimming in Jill’s throat, and she glances sideways. “I - would it be okay if I wrote?” George knocks their shoulders together.

“Sure. Send ‘em care of Marian, she’ll make sure I get them without anyone else taking a look. Try to leave a forwarding address when you can.” She grins again. “After I’m done with my degree maybe I’ll take a vacation too, so you’ll have to send me all your recommendations.” Jill laughs.

“Let me know when you plan to go, and I’ll tag along as a tour guide.”

 She sticks around a few more days, until the wounded are either healed or stable, back to manageable levels for Rue and the Academy Nurse with their cast of assistants. Sally-Anne and Rupert pack her bag full of supplies and gifts, a tube of sunblock and a carefully wrapped loaf of bread, two new notebooks and three different maps. George wakes early to wave her off, and the others crowd in over her shoulder too, blinking blearily and murmuring their best wishes before peeling off to whatever is on their list for the day.

 Jill hitches a ride on a truck heading out towards the Forest and spends her first three nights getting rained on. It’s cold, damp, and miserable, and she feels a lightness rising in her lungs. She has a brief crisis, curled up in a room in the Waypost, guilt tight around her throat at the realisation she’d gone a whole afternoon without thinking of her losses, those lives going still under her fingertips. She lazes by a lowland river for two days until the midges get too annoying, meanders her way on to find a new place to stay. She sits on a fallen log by a bend in the river and weeps for the years lost, and another on a different day to watch a heron stalk its prey just because she can, because its something new and fascinating.  She sleeps as long as she wants, lets herself dawdle over meals and sit for lazy afternoons reading. It gets easier, they’d promised, and it does.

 What if, she thinks peacefully one morning, sketching an unfamiliar flower to look up and write to George about, I could be this happy for the rest of my life?

 She knows the answer: she can’t be, that there will be bad days and mishaps, anger and tears. But it feels like something that’s within her reach, now, warm on her fingertips. So many lovely questions in the world, and this just one more - one more experiment to plan, trial and error, her old ghosts laid to rest and the rest of her life spread out ahead.

 What if I could, she thinks, and turns the page.

[letstalkabot]

I love Jack being the one to break the mirror at the end. Like the one who is seen being the most obsessed with his appearance and beauty being the one to break a bigger version of the thing he used as a weapon the first time he and snow/red shoes meet is so cool.

[madcat-world]

Rapunzel & Jack and the Beanstalk - Sija Hong

[rockybloo]

Nana: You might get more than just a kiss when this is over~

Jack: ...

Jack: TWO kisses?!

I remixed it a bit --

Very accurate prompt

[apibizz]

The award to sweetest couple in all of lore go to these two!

Thank you @rockybloo for letting me draw them!!

[wronghands1]