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corkinavoid · 1 month ago

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DPxDC Alt Rock to the Rescue

[Inspired by this art]

"...Alright, I might have an idea," John Constantine, who was seemingly busy texting someone for the past ten - or twenty, no one really counted - minutes, puts his phone away and snaps his head up.

The room falls silent. Superman blinks in surprise, Diana frowns slightly, and Batman's mouth is pressed into a thin, stubborn line. Flash recovers first.

"You have an idea?" He huffs a short, disbelieving laugh, "No offense, but I'm not sure a magic trick can help us against, you know, an alien fleet." He gestures to one of the screens on the wall, where said fleet is approaching Earth on live.

The rest of the Leaguers present don't exactly agree with him, at least not verbally, but the mood in the room shifts from tense, anxious alarm to an almost palpable annoyance. To be honest, no one was even sure why or how John Constantine of all people ended up in the meeting. It's not like JLD could actually help with an ongoing, massive invasion that was about to happen in less than three- Correction, less than two and a half hours. Besides, it's John Constantine. The man that never shows up unless outright bullied into submission.

The magician winces briefly and starts rummaging through his pockets under the weight of everyone's attention.

"I said I might," he amends gruffly, getting a cigarette out of one of his pockets and sticking it in his mouth but not lighting it. Seems like it wasn't what he was looking for, though, because after that, the man keeps going through the various places on his coat, patting himself down. "I know someone who can deal with it. Granted, I already owe him a great deal, but he won't say no," he pauses and grimaces, "At least I hope he won't."

"I do not think it would be wise to call upon gods in our situation," Diana tries carefully, but John pays her little mind.

"Or demons," Green Arrow adds, crossing his arms on his chest, "I'm not selling my soul to get rid of some rocket ships or whatever they are."

Now, that makes the magician bark a laugh. Or, maybe it's the piece of lime green paper - a sticky note, actually - that he finally finds in the depths of his pockets.

"Oh, your soul's gonna stay where it is."

"Constantine-" Batman starts, but John cuts him off instantly.

"Mine will stay wherever it is as well," he reassures the man, "It's not that kind of entity." And with that, he promptly sets the green note on fire - green fire - and uses it as a lighter for his cigarette.

The next moment after the note is reduced to ash, there's a shift in the air in front of him, and, before any of the heroes have a split second to react, there are two people floating in the middle of the room, backs pressed to each other.

Two teenagers, to be exact. A girl and a boy, both of them so pale that their skin looks gray, and both dressed in grunge, like they just came from a rock concert. Yet, that's where the 'normal' parts of their looks end - the boy's hair is so white it looks blinding, and moves in the air slowly, undeterred by gravity, and the girl's hair is neon blue, her ponytail flickering up like a flaming torch.

The boy nearly topples over as the girl leans her back on him harder and kicks her feet up slightly. The movement is awkward, like both of them were taken by surprise by the sudden relocation, and maybe the guess about the rock concert was not so far from reality; there are drumsticks in the boy's hands, and the girl is holding an electric guitar in her hands.

"The fuck?.." The boy asks no one in particular, as the girl makes an annoyed groan and straightens up, still floating in the air. Her guitar makes an aborted sound. Meanwhile, the boy's eyes land on Constantine, and his whole face scrunches in disgust, "John, for the love of Ancients, I was in the middle of something."

The girl takes a look around while her friend is busy expressing his annoyance and elbows him in the side, "Oi, look, it's the whole Comic Con in the flesh here."

Green Arrow sputters. Flash makes a wordless but very offended sound. The floating boy looks around, taking stock of faces in the room, and the disgust on his face morphs into exasperation.

He turns back to Constantine, "Really? I thought I told you I want no part in your furry parade."

"Alien invasion," the magician decidedly doesn't address any of that, instead pointing his finger to the screen behind him. "Thought you ought to know," he adds, a bit of sarcasm bleeding into his tone.

"Ooh, is it my turn to be your world saving buddy, Phantom?" The girl perks up, turning around and draping herself over the boy's shoulders with a giddy laugh. Her guitar shifts to hang in the air on her side all by itself.

The boy - Phantom - rolls his eyes. Bright green, glowing eyes that definitely don't belong to a human being.

"If I had a nickel every time I had to save the world, I'd probably be able to buy myself my own guitar," he grumbles and looks back to Constantine. "Do I, like, have to? Right now? You know, I don't get paid for this bullshit, and the studio we rented for rehearsal has an hourly rate, so if we can postpone this for about an hour and a half, that'd be real nice."

"The fleet is only two hours away from Earth," Batman supplies suddenly, and, when both floating kids turn to look at him, adds, "I can pay for your next rehearsal. Or a few of them." Evidently, Phantom's comment about nickels struck a nerve. Or, maybe, the man just likes throwing money at any teenager he encounters. Who knows.

The boy blinks, taken aback by the proposition. But the girl grins, sharp and wicked, and shoves her drummer - if the drumsticks are to tell - in the side again.

"Hey, free studio. Better than the last time."

That snaps Phantom out of his stupor, and he groans, "Don't remind me." With a weary sigh, he runs a hand through his hair and leans back in the air, almost like reclining on it. "Okay, fine, sure. Do you want them, like, away from Earth- um, this is Earth, right?" He turns to Superman, surprisingly, looking for confirmation, and the man nods, thrown off guard. The boy nods back and continues, "Or you want them blasted into oblivion, or what?"

"Whatever suits your mood, kid," John waves his hand at the screen as if making a welcoming gesture, "But all the aliens gotta go."

Unexpectedly, that makes the girl's grin even wider, and she reaches for her guitar, floating around Phantom and looking him in the face. The look she gives him speaks of mischief, and the boy seems to understand what she's implying before she as much as opens her mouth.

"Ember, no," he pounts a drumstick at her.

"Ember, yes," she wiggles her eyebrows, "Come on, your wail is boring as fuck as it is, why not spice it up?"

"I'm not wailing," Phantom scrunches his nose, "My throat will hurt for weeks."

Ember runs her fingers over the strings of her guitar, and it makes a comparatively quiet, vibrating sound. A few cords shoot out of the bottom of her instrument, like ones used to plug an electric guitar to an amp. She raises her eyebrows, still looking at Phantom, a silent conversation between them.

Then, the boy huffs and rolls his eyes, twirling a drumstick in his fingers.

"Fine."

The cords fly at him like snakes, aiming at his neck. None of the Leaguers watching the encounter get to say even a word as the metal pins insert themselves into the boy's neck, acting like some twisted kind of collar. Phantom doesn't even flinch.

Ember's guitar, on the other hand, reacts to the connection quite violently: it makes a high-pitched sound all on its own and then changes color from black and blue to white and green, with lightning bolts instead of flames for design. The girl's ponytail flares up higher as she softly murmurs in delight.

Then, she turns to the people around them and smirks, "Which way is the evil alien fleet?"

Flash wordlessly points his finger to the right and up. The girl nods in satisfaction, turning in the air so her guitar is facing that way.

"You might want to cover your ears," Phantom advises, a sly smile on his face and a glimmer of anticipation to his eyes. John Constantine follows that direction immediately, and, taking his move as the best course of action, the other heroes follow as well. Except Batman, who only narrows his eyes and looks at both teens in the air apprehensively. Phantom shrugs, "Or don't, I don't hold any responsibility for your shattered eardrums."

"Pick up where we left off, then," Ember tells him, and the boy blinks:

"Wait, I thought you'd just-"

[For some wholesome experience, put your headphones in and listen to 'KULT' by Jisaiah, grandson, and Steve Aoki]

But the girl has already started a tune, nodding her head to the rhythm of it and slowly picking up the pace. Phantom huffs, but doesn't protest any further, floating up as much as the cords allow him and spinning a drumstick in his hand.

"Maybe I should join a cult

At least they'll tell me it's not my fault

That the world's a fucking circus

That my life feels fucking worthless," he spits the words out with a sneer, slowly rotating in the air until he is hanging upside down. His eyes are closed, and his voice becomes more and more staticky with every new sound. The volume of Ember's guitar gets up, higher and higher, until the walls and the floor of the room around them start to vibrate.

Then, Ember's voice joins Phantom's, and the boy brings his drumsticks down on thin air, mimicking the moves. Only, even with the actual drums not there, the air around him ripples like they are, and they all can hear the beat.

"Maybe I should join a cult

At least they'll tell me it's not my fault

When it all comes crashing down

We'll see who's laughing," both kids pause, just for a beat, and Ember uses that split second to spin the volume knob to the max before strumming her guitar in one wide, sharp move.

"NOW!"

The sound wave is not only palpable, it's visible. A wave of toxic green ripples through the air, knocking everyone present - sans the two kids in the air - to the ground, and goes beyond. The screens on the walls flicker and turn off, sending sparks in the air, and the comms give off loud, screeching noises, and-

The following silence feels almost deafening.

Batman, unsurprisingly, is the first one to stand back on his feet and see a few of the screens come back online.

Just in time to see that same green wave of... sound? energy? power?.. decimate the entire fleet like a wet cloth over a chalkboard. One moment, the spaceships were there, and the next they are gone, wiped out of existence.

Ember laughs, leaning back and almost doing a backflip in the air.

"That was nice, dipshit!" She shoves Phantom in the shoulder, and the boy snorts, plucking the cords out of his skin and grinning.

"Yeah," he agrees with a smile, not even looking at the screens around, "Maybe we should try rehearsing in space next time. Sing to the stars and all that crap."

"Sing to the stars?" Ember raises her eyebrows mockingly as the rest of the heroes scramble to their feet, bemoaning their ringing ears. "Na-ah," she clicks her tongue and turns to Batman, "You still up for paying for our studio?"

The man just grunts in a semblance of affirmation.

"Sweet," the girl grins and offers Phantom a hand for a high five, which he returns instantly. "Cheers to the world being saved once again!"

The boy just rolls his eyes and turns to Constantine, "Next time, be a dear and text me before summoning, or I'm going to sell your soul to Morpheus, and who knows what he'll do with you."

John Constantine grimaces. "I did," he offers grudgingly.

But both unearthly teenagers are already gone without a trace.

[Edit: I want everyone to know there's ART now!!!]

[Edit 2: There's more art!!!]

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rockwgooglyeyes · 24 days ago

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In and of itself, Nowhere is the prophecy that Ivan has written for himself, one of self destruction. Fitting for one of the most tragic characters in this show, the one whose love was requited but who never let it be anything due to his own stubbornness and blindness. Not only that but the way that he thinks of himself, as a monster who only serves to hurt those who he loves, is something that proves not to be true, necessarily, but it proves to be true through Ivan's twisted worldview as he hurt Sua by making fun of her sacrifice and he hurt Till by kissing him at the worst possible time. This song, Ivan's first solo since Black Sorrow, echoes that in being another self-fulfilling prophecy of Ivan's, another lie that he told himself so many times that he made it come true.

The repetition of musical elements such as the lifting scale of chimes, the swing of the instrumentals, the snare and percussion being pretty much the same every time only adding to the sensation of mounting foreboding up and up, a rising action that continues to rise but never truly reaches a climax, no culmination, no conclusion until death. My friend Zen (@verdantlights) called it eerie, and I agree. The way that the song all comes together, it feels like a tragedy unfolding in front of you, over and over, one that you know will happen and yet you can do nothing to prevent. It's almost like the "tainted history" that Ivan talks of, the repetition of events again and again over time, the way that history seems to be cyclical and we, as humans, never seem to truly learn.

In certain ways, the song is about the way that the perceived reality of the world and the world's actual reality are very, very different things. Considering the line about "a stiff dream dyed in rose-colored hues" that slowly changed to a dream dyed purple, to a dream dyed black, it is the way that when we are children we are able to hope for a better future than the one we think will actually come and how as we age, we are traumatized by the world to the point where we can no longer hope for anything better. Becoming someone who dismisses hope because you've tried hoping before and you only ended up with a kick in the gut and a punch in the face, well, that's a trauma response. We are all slowly traumatized over time into believing that the world can't get better, our rose-colored dreams becoming purple until they finally fade to black, blotted out by the corruption of memory, those times when we dared to dream and we were shot down from out of the sky, our wax wings not even given the chance to melt. We are beaten down by life, over and over again, until we are simply forced to go through the routine that society demands of us and say that we are content (wake up, wake up to the usual routine & wake up, wake up to this beautiful life, is it for real?).

The worst part is that Ivan knows better (a dustlike existence can't open its eyes to look. I close my eyes). The whole reason why Ivan admires Till so much in the first place is his willingness to fight, his hope for a future without slavery for humans, his unadulterated and true love. Ivan knows what hope feels like and he knows that he just can muster it anymore, too exhausted to be anything other than apathetic (the wounds that kept reopening just became numb), but he can still love Till's vivacity and drive for change. Ivan views himself as something dirty, something broken that only serves to break others. He thinks that he's a monster who can only do the people he loves harm, and to a degree, that's true, his belief a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ultimately though, Ivan is an immensely unreliable narrator, someone so biased against himself and towards literally anyone else but someone who is so stubborn that he is unwilling to believe anyone else's opinions on him because they have never met his "true self" only the mask that he wears that he ends up digging a deeper and deeper hole. He thinks of his story as one that's already written, the repetition of the line "this always happens to me" echoing that, especially with the way that eventually that song ends with it repeated again, "yeah, it's always like that, this always happens to me." Ivan isn't trying to fight it because his dream has long since been stained black, despite the fact that he knows that he could break out of this cycle of despair. He knows this prophecy that he is submitting to is one that he wrote himself and yet, where he stands right now? He has no will to change it.

note: My friend Ish (@chevalperd) screenshotted @/ivantill7089 (on twitter)'s english translation of this song for me, which is what I am referencing for the lyrics! I love you Ish thank you again so much :3

#yeah i think. i think that's good for right now. (inhales deeply) okay you can do this rock. as vant said. you're cooking. you're cooking #alnst ivan #alien stage #alnst #ivantill #till is mentioned but he's not like. the subject of this? i'll tag him anyways i guess #alnst till #alnst sua #rocktalks #rockwrites

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