#attention to how much of his agency was removed from him bc of that whole arc | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

keilemlucent · 4 years ago

Text

lavender latte: iii

(T (for now!))

hawks | takami keigo x reader

ao3

chapter 1 || chapter 2 || chapter 4

word count: 4.2k

a cheeky drink and some mutual sabotage.

warnings: oh no, they say s*x, fluff, pining, the usual, and a wittle angst on the side, reader smokes cigs bc its a salem trademarked fic thing

enjoy folks ;^) the whole of this piece is gonna be about? ten chapters. so. hold on tight!!!

beta read by @keiqos, heart EYES

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“Let that sit for a second or you’ll burn yourself—”

“Don’t need to tell me twice, angel. I know the drill.” Hawks replied with a wink.

You weren’t ever going to get tired of that.

You really expected Hawks to disappear out of your life. You really, truly expected him to run off for good. How many bigger, better, and more important things did he have to do? Even if you managed to speak to him and regard him like any other customer (or, perhaps acquaintance, and more recently, friend �� ), your mind swam with insecurities that only seemed to get worse over time.

You were waiting for the metaphorical thread to snap.

You waited for the day Hawks simply would stop texting you flirty bullshit on a somewhat regular basis.

But, holy fuck, the dude didn’t.

You couldn’t think of why. You weren’t complaining about the attention, but you also were terrified of getting too used to it. Hawks was a part... bird (?) right? He was flighty by nature.

Despite this, Hawks continued to not only text you but also stopped by the shop fairly frequently for his special, quirk-fueled beverage fix. Politely, he’d text you the day before he planned to make an appearance to check and see if you were working, and then show up the next day like it was nothing.

He usually wouldn’t stay for long; the hero was ungodly busy and always on the move. But, he always took the time to flirt and get a full description of his drink before dashing out to save the world once more.

Most days he visited were his ‘hero work’ days. He’d appear in his costume, done up and dashing for a sip and a quick talk before disappearing once more into the skies. Every once in a while, Hawks had an ‘office’ day where he’d be confined to his agency to catch up on his insane backlog of paperwork. On these occasions, Hawks would talk (stall) at the tea shop for as long as possible. You talked and joked with him as long as he would let you. Sure, it put you behind on work, but no one at the shop was going to tell you off for fraternizing with the number two hero (whose repeated presence was drawing more customers anyways). You both reveled in each other's attention, drinking in the other’s slowly softening smiles and quick wit.

On this day, Keigo’s wings were the shittiest they had been in a while. Plucked and almost barren with how much he’d been working lately. Total exhaustion seemed like it was constantly on the horizon, tugging as his eyelids and weighing down his chest each morning.

It was easier to get out of bed when he got to think about seeing you.

Sure, your drinks were a perk. Very much so. He was getting so used to the artisan beverages you crafted that the taste of his normal canned coffee was starting to bother him.

But, what his real thrill in visiting the tea shop was that he got to see you, and that made his heart pound.

He sat across from you, looking down into your newest drink. It swirled between dark and milky, a heady, rich aroma billowing up with the steam it produced. He had requested something ‘surprising, new, and horribly caffeinated’ as deep fatigue was the worst villain he’d likely see that day. You had just nodded, cheekily starting to prepare his drink with a bounce in your step, pupils going wide.

“I feel like you’re gonna start running out of ideas one of these days,” Keigo laughed, adjusting himself on his stool, gloves and jacket removed. He almost looked like a normal patron.

You grinned to yourself, idly cleaning around you as you often did, “I dunno, I’ve got a lot.”

Hawks raised an eyebrow, “Tell me about them.”

“Nope, top-secret,” You shook your head, digging into your apron to flash him the small notepad you carried on you.

Scrawled in nasty handwriting, you carried your many ‘feeling’ ideas around with you. Different concepts and abstractions all scribbled down, a nice long list to look back on whenever Hawks would make his appearances and his own vague requests. Your backlog of ideas made it easy to find something more than suitable to make for him.

When Hawks saw your notepad his eyes widened, tilting his head and a devious smirk coming to his lips.

Your expression fell, and you stuffed the papers back into your pocket, hiding your hot face by idly cleaning some more.

You left yourself very open for teasing, it seemed.

(Not that you or Keigo minded.)

“You keep a little list of all of your ideas! I’m beyond flattered,” Hawks ran a hand through his hair, flashing a cocky smile for you.

“I have to stay prepared, can’t be disappointing my celebrity sugar daddy,” You winked as Hawks’s eyes went wide, half-hearing a choke get caught in his throat. (You loved it when you were able to get him visibly flustered. What a treat.) You nodded down to the drink, “Should be good to try now.”

Keigo really liked spending time with you. He knew it was always fleeting and short and consistently he wanted to find reasons to stay with you at the tea shop counter for longer and longer. Your quips and chides continued to get quicker and more clever and he was having an increasingly difficult time keeping his cool around you. Most of the time he smoothed himself easily, not showing a trace other than that which he neurologically couldn’t control.

But sometimes, you were bold enough and ballsy enough to get him to gag on his literal words and he was positive that you were the only person to ever have him break composure in such a way.

He covered his weakened poise by sipping the new drink, mindfully letting the taste wash over his tongue.

Increasingly, you’d been changing up the so-called ‘vibe’ of your beverages. It seemed like each time Keigo dropped in, you had something new and vibrant to show him.

This drink was particularly different.

The taste was rich, dark, and smooth, rolling into the back of his throat and down his spine. It coated his insides with a warm, low heat. Peeking through were sweet, light accents, warm but almost... teasing?

His dick twitched.

Hawks’s mouth dropped open, any and all professional veneers dropped as you just beamed so fucking smugly at him.

“What do you think?” You leaned a bit forward, bouncing on your toes with excitement.

“Is... Is this supposed to taste like sex?” Hawks asked, taking another mouthful to confirm. Based on the way his eyes briefly shut and some of the tension rolled from his shoulders, he thoroughly confirmed it.

“Technically, it’s crafted based on like... a late-night rendezvous. I left it fairly up to interpretation beyond that. The rest is on you.” You shrugged, still bouncing as Hawks took another chug.

“What the fuck, (Y/N),” Pleasant shock colored his features, but clear amusement stretched across his lips as he continued to drink.

“You wanted something surprising and horribly caffeinated. That’s a dark chocolate mocha with two extra shots, our in-house raspberry and rhubarb syrup, a bit of white chocolate syrup, and a few of my add-ins as well. It’s pretty different from what I’ve made you before,” You blinked at him, stomach twisting as his expression remained unguarded. “I... I probably should’ve asked before giving you a drink that definitely could’ve been taken as sex. That’s my bad. I can remake you something else if you’d like?”

Keigo shook himself from his stupor, shaking his head and quickly regaining his composure. He took another sip to emphasize his words, “No, nope. It’s okay. Definitely okay. The drink is really good. I’m just now wondering something.”

“And, what’s that?” You asked, reaching behind the counter to grab your own iced beverage.

“Can your quirk be used to manifest bad feelings and concepts, just like good ones?” Keigo asked. Normally, he’d add more nuance, but he was getting impatient and sloppy around you. He’d have to keep that in check.

Especially with the way your shoulders drew up and tensed. You turned a bit away from him, any and all potential for eye contact torn away.

He hit a nerve.

“The type of abstract feeling doesn’t matter, I can emulate it,” You replied, pulling at your nails. Keigo had long picked up that it was one of your habits when your anxiety spiked.

He dropped it, but didn’t forget. There were public files on quirks. Maybe he’d look into it. Maybe. It felt a bit invasive, but considering plenty of that data was freely accessible, it hardly was an invasion of privacy, right?

(Except for the fact that it obviously made you very uncomfortable to discuss the more unsavory potentials of your quirk.)

(He just wouldn’t tell you.)

Keigo switched topics, easily rolling away from the topic, “Any particular... event that inspired this one?”

You pressed your hands into the counter, leaning over it to glare at him, “Are you referring to something with that comment, Hawks?”

He shuddered when you said his name, but you don’t notice.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Keigo shrugged easily, going for another sip.

The drink was inspired by the several day cinematic, wine-bender you went on a week or two prior. An entire weekend with just you, your cats, three entire bottles of wine, and a backlog of movies to catch up on. You tried to consume lots of different types of media, but what had been catching your eye lately had been anything with gushy romance for fairly obvious reasons.

(There was an embarrassing amount of ideas for drinks that were a bit too romantic to properly indulge with your quirk. You’d never tested the limits of how certain feelings could manifest, and you weren’t quite ready to face the reality where you could make people nut from caffeinated milk.)

“It is good though, the drink,” Hawks smacked his lips together as if it would make his coming analysis more credible. “It definitely does taste like sex, but more so complicated. Darker.”

“Deeper.” You smiled. “Your palette is getting more refined. I’m proud.”

“Are you saying it was bad to begin with?” Hawks pouted, flashing you falsely weepy eyes and a puffed out lip.

You rolled your eyes, “Yes, you yourself have admitted this. You drink canned coffee still, so I can’t even call your taste good.”

Hawks gasped, putting a hand to his chest, “I’m hurt, truly wounded.”

“I’m sure you are, tailfeathers.”

“I really thought I had reliably moved up to ‘birdboy’, angel.”

You snorted, covering your mouth with your hand, “Just goes to show how quickly the tables turn, tailfeathers.”

Hawks’s pager suddenly chimed, a familiar sign. He took a quick look at it and sighed, moving to re-robe. You were surprised by the speed at which he did so, and the way he became tense so quickly.

It made you realize that he was always tense.

(Unless he was talking to you.)

“I thought today was an office day?” You asked, a bit of a disappointment clouding your voice.

Hawks just gave a small smile, fully plastering back on his heroic facade, “Duty calls. Lots happening lately.”

He flicked his visor back over his eyes, slid you your normalized wad of cash, and whisked himself out the door, immediately taking to the skies from the streets.

He’s in a bit of a hurry.

He... didn’t even say goodbye.

Wonder what’s happening?

Truthfully, Keigo was a bit startled by the notice on his pager. The whole reason he’d started patrolling the particular neighborhood the tea shop was in was because there was word of a villain syndicate working nearby. It hardly seemed right for the neighborhood, but Keigo knew that villains hid anywhere. Whatever they were planning was still relatively shrouded, but it was clear that it needed to be treated delicately. That particular neighborhood was rife with pedestrians, businesses, and homes and any sort of villainous activity had the possibility of reaping a heavy amount of collateral damage. Keigo and the Commission had been on their guards about it, but things had been steadily becoming more intense over the past few weeks.

Plopping himself on a rooftop, Keigo took up residence to stake out his newest lead, watching figures and silhouettes in a nearby office building.

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Funnily enough, the rest of your week went horribly. Just downright shitty. You figured at some point, things would let up, brighten, but they didn’t. Each day brought some new, personal calamity.

The first was a trip to the emergency vet with one of your cats after she swallowed a hair tie. An expensive vet bill later, she was perfectly healthy, but you remained wracked with anxiety.

Another day, the owner of the tea shop paid a visit to chew you out for your newest tea blends not fulfilling his picky seasonal requests. You were relieved it had nothing to do with how Hawks monopolized your time. Still, getting yelled at easily within earshot of both coworkers and customers made your insides twists.

The final small disaster was when a particularly asshole-ish customer chucked a hot drink all over you and your cute white sweater. One of the younger openers had been dealing with a difficult patron and an incorrect order, nothing out of the ordinary. When you tried to step in and de-escalate the situation, the man ripped the lid from his cup and splashed you with the burning liquid. You held back any sounds of pain even as your skin stung like hell when you offered to remake his drink.

One of your managers luckily allowed you to go home early. Thank god.

By the end of your shitty week, you fell into your apartment and just cried. White sweater stained and day feeling fairly ruined, you let yourself have a good, solid sobbing session to just release how terrible things had been.

It would pass, you knew. But it sucked at the moment.

It also didn’t help that Hawks had been particularly absent after running out the last time he came around. He’d still managed to shoot you a funny text or two, but mostly, it was silence from him. You rationalized it by reminding yourself of how quickly he flew off at the end of his last visit, hero business forever more pertinent than you and the shop.

You reminded yourself to keep yourself grounded in Hawks obvious impermanence, even if you were starting to get used to (and really like) having the hero around.

You decided that your Friday evening would be good. You treated yourself to a hot shower, noting with a hiss the pink scalded skin that covered your chest from your collar bones to just below your breasts. You threw on a facemask and uncorked a bottle of wine you had been saving for a rainy day.

You clicked on one of your favorite shows, an older cartoon that brought you consistent comfort in times like those. Curled up with a knit throw blanket and your healthy cats, it did help soothe the burns, mental and physical.

That is until you got a bit too drunk on red wine and it turned into sad drunk.

So, you made your way to the roof.

You weren’t fucked up beyond belief, despite the fact that you were towing an open bottle of red in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the left. The cold would sober you up, along with the nicotine. You hoped it would force you out of your head.

Upon throwing open the door to your apartment complex’s rooftop, you were made very aware of its wintertime disuse. The gardens that grew during the summer were snowcovered. The chairs and tables for lounging were in a similar state. You didn’t mind.

The view was still nice.

You set down your bottle and zipped up your coat. Quickly, you brushed off the flurries from a rickety lawn chair and plopped yourself down. You threw on some music from your phone, playing some sweet, old songs that made your chest ache when you needed it to.

The city stretched in front of you, beyond the rooftop. You didn’t live in a particularly wealthy district, but there was no shortage of dazzling neon and bright street lights dotting the ground below. You watched how the rest of the city stretched far beyond your little pocket, still gleaming with multi-hued lighting and dazzling in the wash of the crescent moon.

You took a swig, fishing for your self-dubbed ‘sad cigarettes’ and lit up. With your exhale, you watched as smoke lazily swirled away, carried by the soft winter wind. If you were any less drunk, you’d be freezing.

A shadow, winged, fell across the snow.

“You know, I get nervous when I see pretty girls on rooftops with bottles in their hands,” You jumped at the voice, whipping your head to the source.

Hawks stood, scarlet wings fanned outwards, on the lip of the rooftop.

Your eyes widened.

You took another sip.

He gave an affectionate laugh, jumping down into the area where you were seated.

Keigo had just been out on his normal, nightly patrol. The leak had been correct and he’d been stealthily tracking the villains while completing the rest of his hero duties. He was able to laugh off his exhaustion, but it was starting to eat him. Several cans of coffee a day was hardly doing it for him. He hid his sleepiness and aches well, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult. All the same, his typical roles had to be fulfilled.

He was surprised to see you, all alone on a rooftop with a lit cigarette between your fingers. Keigo let himself be surprised before noting that ‘ yes, you definitely probably live in this apartment building and you’re just outside to smoke’, but the sudden jolt of panic he felt was crushingly unbearable.

Mostly because it was personally protective and not heroically instinctual and he couldn’t start acknowledging that aspect of his feelings for you. Not yet.

Keigo walked towards you, asking, watching you blink blearily at him “You doing alright?”

Eyes downcast, you shrugged, “We all feel shitty sometimes. Just depends on how you cope, ‘ya know?”

“And how do you cope, (Y/N)?” Keigo asked, pausing before brushing off a chair. “Mind if I join you for a bit? I could use a second to rest my wings.”

You nodded, almost offering him the bottle, but quickly pulling it back to your chest before taking another inhale. Offering a pro hero alcohol while he was pretty obviously working seemed like a bad move, even in your tipsy state.

“Most of the time, I watch nice stuff and distract myself, like most people, ya’ know?” You exhaled as you smoked, relishing the nicotine buzz. “Sometimes, though, I just feel extra shitty and need to extra cope.”

Hawks hummed in agreement, sitting back in the chair. His wings were folded up and over its back, the longest feathers trailing in the small snowdrift behind him.

“Do you get cold, being in the sky all the time?” You asked, eyes going cloudy as you stared up at the lights of the city and higher into the sky.

“Most of the time,” Hawks chuckled, throwing his arms behind his head, “I’ve told you this, angel. It was one of our first conversations.”

Your eyes widened at the realization, mouth open with a hearty laugh.

It made Keigo’s eyes water a little. He blamed it on the wind.

“I’m silly, I can’t believe I forgot,” You nestled back into your chair, tracing the lines between constellations. “It’s the whole reason you came to the teashop in the first place.”

Your voice resonated, focus foggy. Somewhere else, old memories played in your mind, recounting your first few meetings with Hawks.

A warm, small smile stretched across your face as you traced the stars.

Keigo watched, enraptured. You were cute, especially like this. All bundled up in your winter coat, half-zipped. There was a lot less stress in your shoulders than he normally saw at the shop, especially as your thoughts were so far away.

He wanted nothing more than to commit the contours and shadows of your face in the white moonlight to memory, never forgotten in the blissful cold.

You interrupted his thoughts so beautifully.

“Thanks for talking to me.” You took a sip from your bottle just after speaking, half-drowning your words, but Keigo caught each one. “I appreciate you.”

“P-pardon?” Keigo couldn’t tell if you caught his stutter, but even if you did, you didn’t show it. The comment felt like a jab to his jaw, half-knocking the wind of him and turning him into a filthy masochist. He’d take any whiplash if it meant you saying such kindnesses to him.

How could you just say shit like that?

What exactly did you mean by that?

Why did your attention make his legs tremble?

You turned your attention from the night sky to Hawks, something like uncertainty bubbling in your chest, “I appreciate you, ya’ know? Coming by the tea shop still, teasing each other and shit, you humoring me—”

Hawks interrupted you, feathers tensing at his back.

“I’m not humoring you.” Hawks deadpanned, staring at you oddly seriously. The yolks of his eyes seemed even more intense in the neon and night light.

“You’re... not?”

There was utter disbelief in your voice, accented by the way your jaw was half-opened.

Hawks shook his head, standing in emphasis, feathers fluttering as he did, “ No, angel. Not at all. I visit because...”

I like you.

“Because I like your drinks.”

Because you make me feel good in a way I’ve never felt.

“You’re fun to talk to, too. Added perk.”

Because I want to hear your voice when I breathe and when I die.

“I enjoy it, you know? You're fun.”

Some feeling in your chest, something full of hope, crushed itself and compacted to the point of pain. You sniffled at his admission, blaming it on the cold. In a fucked up, sad way, part of you was so relieved.

He likes the shop. He likes your drinks.

He’s around because he wants to be.

But not because you’re special to him.

His words reminded you of your insignificance in Hawks’s life. No matter how much you craved his attention and words, and more recently found yourself staring at the plumpness of his lips and the curve of his cupids bow and daydreaming about how much you wanted to lean over the tea shop's counter and kiss the constant, teasing smile off his face—

But.

You don’t matter that much to him.

Sure, he likes you, but he’ll never feel the same way about you.

You made the decision then to make the most out of Hawk’s affections and sweet words. You’d take what you could get, even if it was fleeting and probably eventually heartbreaking. It seemed smart, to refuse to get your hopes up for someone so unattainable.

You let out a shaking sigh, “Thank you, Hawks. I appreciate you coming around. You really light up my day.”

Keigo saw the fall of your face and bottled himself up. Shoved down everything. Fuck his feeling, fuck how he felt about you, this was all fucking terrifying. It was getting to be too much and he had to try and control himself.

Just like he’d been taught so well.

He was just so happy to be around you. He could squash his feelings, even if they were fairly obviously somewhat mutual. God knows that he didn’t know how to handle anything like that.

On the gods, his pager beeped.

“Duty calls?” You said, standing up yourself and brushing off the stray snowflakes.

“Seems so.” Hawks sighed, nodding, “Thanks for letting me rest here. It was good to see you, (Y/N). I’ll see you soon, okay?”

You waved goodbye as Hawks disappeared as quickly as he came, launching himself from the roof with the heavy sound of wing beats.

Soaring away, Keigo risked a final look at you. He swore he saw tears in your eyes.

He forcibly repressed his feelings, reminding himself that your company, words, and quirk-made beverages were more than enough. The flutter in his chest when he thought of you wouldn’t rest, but he could learn to ignore it.

On the roof of your apartment, you felt fatigue in your bones and wetness on your cheeks. You ignored both in favor of smoking another cigarette, soft, melancholy music being your only constant, reliable companion.

You reminded yourself that he, Hawks, was a temporary fixture, more flighty than most and liked you just enough and for surface-level reasons. You could take that. You’d do anything to be around him more, even if it never amounted to anything.

You, just as Keigo did, pressed down any larger feelings.

(The thing about feelings, though, that neither of you was very good at remembering, was that they don’t go away. Sure, you can let them go, but that takes time or a practiced mind!)

(When you take feelings, big, aching, soaking feelings and shove them down into the deepest parts of you, they just tend to make you bleed. The ‘hidden’ feelings color your blood as it spills, even if you don’t notice when it falls and its change in hue.)

(One can only hope that both Keigo and you listened instead of lied.)

Both of your hearts ached, and neither of you fully understood why.

#salem writes #hawks x reader #mha hawks #bnha hawks #takami keigo x reader #keigo takami x reader #reader insert #mha x reader #keigo x reader #hawks x y/n #takami keigo x y/n #lavender latte #bnha x reader

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queen-mabs-revenge · 6 years ago

Note

I apologize if this comes off as a rude question to a Killian fan, but I think you’d be the best person to answer in a real and logical way: Do you think, given what we know of how the series went, Killian’s character arc might have ended better had he either died from the Excalibur wound or if he had been allowed to maintain his heroic sacrifice at the end of the Dark Swan arc? Not necessarily ‘would he be better off dead than married’, just whether those would’ve been more Him.

Woo boy nonny, you’re out for my life today, aren’t you? xD

OK arggggk ok this is complicated for me bc those two ‘death points’ are very different imo, and also have different implications depending on how close to the story you’re zooming in. For the purposes of this, I’m going to focus on the Camelot death from the Excalibur wound.

On the purely ~*~i’m love him~*~ level, of course I’m rather dang pleased that he didn’t die…permanently in either of those scenarios. I’m always pleased to get more of Killian on my screen. Even if the situations leave me feeling frustrated, I think that he’s a character that’s complexly written enough and well acted enough to be someone I can enjoy picking apart in any scenario.

So OK dealing with both of these scenarios I think you can tackle this from a few different viewpoints (and I hate to always go back to this, but it’s literally like the fundamental way my brain works, so I’m gonna kind of be flirting with those ideas the whole time). Looking at the situations as if I were imagining all the characters in the story to be real people? I think it’s clear what the characters wanted: in the case of the Excalibur wound, Killian would rather have died while helping free his friends than Emma turn him into the dark one, and expressed that clearly. In the case of his death at the end of the Dark Arc, he chose death in part as a way to free everyone from the fate he’d doomed them to, but also to eradicate the darkness once and for all. Because of Rumple’s failsafe, that choice was predicated on false circumstances, and so the idea of Emma going to bring him back, and him not wanting to stay dead as long as everyone else was safe, makes more character sense and is more of a plot point to get everyone to The Underworld. Because the first is more character based and the latter more plot based, I’m gonna focus my attention on the first.

If we’re talking about the character arcs? It’s hard. Basically the way that I would approach that would be “how fruitful were these events in catalysing character progression and growth” and as I’ve said in other posts, I don’t think they—especially the Camelot death—were fruitful at all, and in fact were regressive. This is going to focus mainly on CS in 4-6 as that’s pretty much what I see those events and their value enmeshed with (and, as I’ve stated before, IMO nearly all of Killian’s S4-6 interactions are filtered through CS anyway, so I think it’s appropriate to talk mostly about CS here) and bc I’m a lengthy ho it’s going below the cut.

The thing I had loved about CS was that during the S3 build up to their actually entering a relationship, the relationship was set up to challenge both of their character weaknesses. For Killian, his weakness centres around his desire for freedom and agency (for himself or others), when challenged, leading him to close himself off and/or make pretty shitty and harmful decisions. For Emma, you have the fear from the trauma of abandonment leading her to isolate herself, or sometimes not even enter decisions as to not present the opportunity for abandonment.

So the S3 push-and-pull of Killian giving the reins of the relationship to Emma—stepping in as support when her life or familial relationships were at risk, yes, but in their interpersonal relationship, letting her evaluate him and move at her own pace—addressed both of their weaknesses. Killian explored the vulnerability of willingly giving up control of a situation, and Emma, by going at her own pace, was able to evaluate his steadfastness and begin to trust him for it.

And that was the dynamic that each needed in that moment, and why early CS is still in ways compelling for me — if I ignore the follow through. Because the problem with the two “deaths”, as far as I see, is that they follow this pattern of taking that previous dynamic, and digging in the heels and exaggerating it to an unhealthy level, instead of exploring how the two characters heal together and adopt a new dynamic. The important thing in that push-and-pull exchange is the agency both characters have in it — however, you start to see what, in my opinion, is Emma assuming Killian’s willingness to follow her lead is given, which removes his agency from the exchange…and the narrative starts to romanticise it.

I think you start seeing it from the beginning of S4 with Emma getting angry at Hook when he doesn’t do as she says and stay put with Elsa in 4x03. We get insight into both of their mindsets during the confrontation at the end – Emma is terrified that she’ll lose him and that’s the reason she orders him earlier; he, used to being dynamic, struck out on his own in response. But the point we got by the end of the episode wasn’t that she was right, but that she was expressing her valid fears irrationally by trying to tell Killian to do what she said, no questions asked. And he was wrong in that he didn’t counter a demand he didn’t agree with right away and directly, but took back his agency behind her back when he should have communicated that he had a problem with what she was asking. So you have the unhealthy level of the dynamic being played out, handled poorly, and a set up for forward motion into healthiness being presented.

Except it never really followed through—oh it did in dribs and drabs, which makes this so much more frustrating (their conflict over his holding back information about Ursula, and then the resolution they come to together being one positive move I can think of where they’re venturing more into equal partner territory), but overall the idea of Killian’s capitulating to Emma being a given instead of a choice is the theme that continued—to its unhealthiest apex in S5, with the Dark One arc being the dramatic climax of Emma assuming Killian’s eventual compliance and overriding his agency with her own desires, and Killian, when confronted with being controlled, going to harmful extremes.

And, what that should have done, and what I thought it was doing at the time, was to drag that increasingly issue-laden agency problem out into the harshest light, to the most extreme situation of life or death, and create maximum drama over it so that it could reach a resolution both through character interaction and plot resolution. So that going forward, you would have the two entering into a more communicative partnership and presenting a united front (and negotiating how to navigate what that means) against whatever conflict showed up next (insert forever bitter I NEVER GOT MY FUCKING BATTLE COUPLE face here), or deciding to step back and change their dynamic by moving away from presenting a romantic unit.

But what happened was more of the same, except this time it was treated by the narrative as being just part of their relationship’s standard operating procedure, part of the new ‘normal’ after the major conflict of S5, and not as a problem to be solved. It was romanticised. So you end up with S6 which makes me just want to fling myself into the sun with rage. Lies about the saviour premonitions are Emma taking agency away from not only Killian but everyone around her — it’s the same story all over again, ***walls*** so it’s OK, but no one has the agency to react and to help her because she doesn’t allow it. And as it relates to CS, you don’t get Killian’s reaction to this at all except in sad looks (and That Fucking Cut Scene That Shouldn’t Have Been Cut).

You get a redux of 4x03 with Killian hiding the shears as a way to try to reclaim some agency behind Emma’s back, because she’s shut him out of any solution they could have reached together as partners. But the narrative focuses on what he does as the only grave error of the situation. You have the agency problem embedded in the first proposal – from going through his private things that trusted as a safe hiding place, to her instigating the proposal over his coming to her for help — but this time, unlike in the Camelot situation, her actions aren’t called into question by the narrative, but his immediately very much are both by her at the character level, and at the narrative by isolating him on the realm-hopping extravaganza. Her taking away his agency is very literally romanticised in a proposal.

You have it again right before the wedding with yet another lie to cut Killian off from being able to actively step back to or to step in and help her as her supposed partner — and again, this time the narrative frames this not only as the act of a hero, culminating in her solo take-down of the Black Fairy (with her family literally frozen out of supporting her), but it actually intersperses her actions of lying to him to force him act as she alone thinks is right in with the build up to their actual wedding. Not only does the narrative not call her actions into question, they’re literally put into the most romantic of contexts. The question at that point is never whether or not Killian will follow Emma’s lead, because the relationship never moved past the S5 conflict of Emma assuming he would and acting on his behalf, except unlike in S5, this isn’t portrayed as a relationship weakness, but as Emma’s strength of character, and their romantic apex.

So that comes back to the death question. And my returning question: narratively what was the payoff?

It’s not that from a story standpoint I think that Killian’s character arc was finished when he was dying from the Excalibur wound — for me it’s that, if that moment is a pivotal moment crafted to show the height of agency imbalance in the only real relationship he has on the show in S4-6, then it should have been addressed and resolved with a pivot in dynamic after the dramatic fallout — with the characters either moving together or apart.

As it stands, the dynamic stagnated and regressed so badly into that stagnation that the whole issue that the “death” brought up, with the extreme violation of agency and resulting trauma of S5, was angst for angst sake without resulting growth. Without a complete overhaul of the plot from that point out where CS either grow together or apart due to the consequences of that moment, I tend to view that moment when he’s begging to die in the Middlemist field as just a deeply sad one, now made the sadder for its pointlessness. It’s harbinger of the future unchanging and then utterly romanticised removal of his agency within the relationship continuing through the end of the series. The shower of resulting S5 angst affects his character/relationship arc through S6 about as much as a fridging would have anyway, and it’s really bleeding hard for me to side against the character’s wishes knowing all that in retrospect.

(that said, to reiterate, as a killian fan, i am glad he stuck around? but i’m also glad i get to live in a world where there’s a him that didn’t go through that depressing stagnation? ugh HI YEAH!)

#Anonymous #ouat critical #cs critical #emma swan critical #killian jones #mabsplaining #killian jones meta #I DON'T KNOW LADS #moar tags? pls let me know #lol basically the way i look at it now i'm like -- honestly shit or get off the pot.....or die i guess?#and there was a whole lot of narrative constipation going on there

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jediaretheworst · 8 years ago

Text

Rane + Zaladus Transcend the Force Part 1

The Lightsaber of an old Darth

I’ve been writing this for a while. I’m going to put a semi-finished (not finished at all really if we’re being honest) version of it here.

I’m using two “original characters” as a mechanism to talk about some intricacies in the jedi+ sith philosophies, as well as some real-life ones, specifically nihilism + hedonism and then, of course, how they relate (or don’t relate) to either side of the force. Whoo. I’m setting it safely in the future, long after TFA and all that stuff bc I don’t want to have to interact with canon that is subject to change. Hopefully, Yavin + Moraband/Korriban are nicely like… not blown up…. bc that’s where I’m going, and my characters (in what I’m writing here) will have little influence over galactic events. Unless I get tangential. Which I never do. Cool. Let’s go to Moraband, where I started off.

The floor of the tomb was polished to a shine, remarkably clean for a place so ancient. Rusting droids maintained their duties, unconcerned with the fact that their masters had departed the mortal realm centuries ago. Some of those dutiful servants, however, now lay in pieces, exacting lightsaber wounds tarnishing their sides. Others toiled on, spared after the wielder realized they had no combat capabilities. Harsh, electrical light bounced off the pure black floors, giving the impression of a dark, placid lake. All was silent, save the distant groans of the droids’ ancient gears.

Desert stretched on above for hundreds of miles, concealing the ancient graves of the Sith. Held fast in the desert’s burning arms, ancient lords could do nothing but slumber as the sand began to slowly devour them.

But the hall that lay before Rane seemed to not remember the warmth of the burning world above, nor the honor of the Lords who slept in the sands nearby, those that had led their lives as warriors, without fear, and met death again and again before finally surrendering to death whole-heartedly, like an old companion had been sent to take them home. This hall crept with deception and calculating coldness that had no interest in serving, only gaining what it could for itself and moving on. This aura had met death, used it as an ally, but had never expected to truly succumb to it in the end.

Rane’s boots, caked with flaking blood and the red dirt of the world above, left footprints as stark as the sound they made in the empty tombs. It had been thousands of years since Sith, even if it was just a lowly apprentice, had graced these halls.

Rane was there for one thing- a hateful artifact of a Sith Lord who’s name had been lost to time, much like the nature of the artifact. All Rane knew was that a single Holocron had been left to this Sith’s single apprentice, and his own assassin in the end. Since the death of the Sith Lord, bloodshed had followed his Holocron to the edges of the known universe, and back again. Rane’s master believed that the contents would make him invincible, but Rane thought they would probably kill him. Which, actually, was fine with him.

Most tombs that Rane had entered had numerous booby traps, deceptions, false artifacts, and the descendants of monstrous beasts that Sith created to protect their bodies after death. But so far… Rane felt nothing in the force, no sense that he was in danger, only the ominous, greedy aura of the dead sith but even that wasn’t very strong.

With no other strategy for finding the artifact, he wandered aimlessly, waiting for something to call to him from the force.

The artifact he sought was said to have been returned to Moraband, its presumed birthplace, after causing a great number of violent incidents. It was said to have caused a massacre in the Jedi temple itself when an unassuming Cathar knight read the contents and went berserk, and again when it was used for psychological manipulation of violent criminals at an asteroid-based prison in the outer rim, leading to one of the deadliest prison breaks in galactic history. Reports indicated that the prison break left three Jedi masters dead, six knights, and the entire staff of the prison. Rane thought it served them right for using such a horrible device so lightly. Rane’s master had tracked the artifact from the prison break almost 150 years ago, who had fled the scene of that atrocity and tried to lie low on Tatooine, where he was found murdered in his sleep, according to a reporting agency based on Coruscant, who’d only taken interest because one of the knights murdered at the prison was their main source for information from inside the order. After that point, the Sith Holocron had gone missing from history for some time, making everyone who knew of it both relieved and anxious of its return.

Then about a century ago, it was found with the remains of a Republic Reclamations team on Hoth, who had apparently turned on each other when they had viewed the contents.

From Hoth, it was returned to the hands of the sith, who used it liberally to corrupt and manipulate their enemies.

Rane’s master insisted he had evidence that traced the artifact’s last whereabouts to a noble smuggler who vowed to remove the Holocrons contents from the eyes of the galaxy after it had been used to corrupt one of his close friends during an interrogation. The smuggler quickly realized it was well beyond his capabilities to destroy such a device, and decided to return it to the homeworld of the sith, where it could slumber peacefully alongside its makers. Rane’s master wasn’t sure if it had been created on Moraband or elsewhere in the galaxy, but he believed that it was still resting deep within the tomb where Rane now stood.

He entered the antechamber, inspecting lesser artifacts and pocketing some for himself. He wore a thick black cloak to protect him from the elements, but he had also sewn a number of pockets and sleeves into the interior where he kept novelties and interesting finds from his travels. When he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to his mission or his training, he’d often dig through his cloak and find plenty of interesting items he’d completely forgotten he’d taken, or borrowed.

He knew that stealing sith artifacts was a serious business, but he also knew how to deal with the consequences of sith curses. They were lovely gifts for his enemies at the sith academy, and those that turned out to be harmless, he kept in his collection.

He hummed as he grabbed the artifacts that suited him. He seemed to gravitate towards artifacts that had a certain aesthetic appeal, particularly those that glittered or shimmered, or those of the darkest black.

Suddenly, the force pulled him gently onward. He felt a great power, deeper in the tomb, something that had been concealed before. It had been waiting, Rane could sense it, to see if Rane was someone it knew. A presence, both familiar and alien, like perhaps he’d known it a long time ago.

Rane stepped into a room that lay off on the side as if it was an afterthought. Inscribed in an ancient language even Rane couldn’t understand, were stories of conquest, great treasures, and the great trophy of finding the lightsaber of a Darth… Vader? Rane had heard that name, but it was from a long time ago.

He stopped to read a smaller inscription, his lips moving as he deciphered the words, letter by letter. Rane’s master had intended to hinder him by sending him on treacherous journeys into Sith tombs, instead of having him complete “real” Sith training, but Rane had picked up a number of skills in his time as an apprentice. Eventually, he was able to discern that the inscription was about the owner of the tomb, not Vader, and how the sith that lay dead here believed that he was the descendant of someone called Anakin Skywalker? And he declared, therefore, he was entitled to Vader’s lightsaber. Rane wasn’t sure how that claim progressed logically, but he wasn’t sure he cared what the Sith was talking about, but his face lit up at the idea of finding an ancient lightsaber.

What an interesting collectible that would be, especially one that belonged to Vader! Vader was still studied at the academy, even though details of his life were hard to come by because he lived so long ago. Still, Rane knew he had been a prodigy. Ancient Studies was one of the only classes he bothered to pay attention in because he knew that he, unlike almost all the other apprentices, would have the opportunity to get his sticky fingers on some of the long-dead Darths’ things, and with his knowledge, he could find even more interesting things.

He recalled his lessons on Vader. The instructor was always incredibly vague about his early life, perhaps that knowledge had been lost to time. But when he was older, he became the Emperor’s Enforcer, responsible for many massacres. Rane though he must’ve been a real jerk, even for a Sith. But still, his mind wandered off, leaving his eyes glassy, of how cool it would’ve been to meet him.

From within the chamber, the force tugged Rane gently onward, but it wasn’t the dark side. That confused Rane. He felt he was being led on by a slightly annoyed teenager, rolling their eyes and telling him to hurry up. Rane reached out in the force, trying to learn more about the presence he was feeling. He found darkness, but not as he knew it. And he found light but in a way he didn’t understand.

Inside, the presence he felt relaxed, and dissolved as he approached a dark chest, glimmering with an unnatural light. Rane lamented it seemed too large to take with him. He thought for a moment about coming back after his assignment was completed, but he decided as pretty as it may be, it was probably not worth the trouble.

The chest opened easily, to Rane’s surprise, because there was seemingly a large number of locking mechanisms on it. Perhaps it had been broken into before? But Rane could feel the Force pulsating from inside it…

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the lightsaber was there. Surprisingly simple, it was obviously not crafted by the same Sith who had made himself this obnoxiously glossy tomb. It was gray, black and handmade, but crafted so well it seemed preferable to anything Rane had ever seen before.

He took the saber in his hand, and it was perfectly weighted. He ignited it, and it was a simple, pure red, yet it emanated emotion. Rane could feel the misery of the one who had wielded it, and a clean, acute hatred. The light from its plain but harsh glow reflected off the glossy floor, exposing the sleek blackness for what it really was, a cracked, crumbling, meaningless attempt at art. Unlike the lightsaber he now held, so well constructed it gleamed eternally. Rane thought that the Sith buried in this tomb was lucky to have not encountered a creature such as Vader in life.

#Star wars #star wars original character #star wars fanfiction #Rane and Zaladus #Darth Vader #Sith #the force #creative writing #writing

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