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mrleopard25 · 2 years ago

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Doctor Who Regeneration Series Revisited: The Tenth Regeneration

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Rose: “You’re not making sense.” The Ninth Doctor: “I might never make sense again. I might have two heads, or no head. Imagine me with no head – and don’t say that’s an improvement. It’s a bit dodgy, this process. You never know what you’ll end up with." Rose: “Doctor!” The Ninth Doctor: “Stay away!” Rose: “Doctor, tell me what’s going on.” The Ninth Doctor: “I absorbed all the energy of the time vortex and no one’s meant to do that. Every cell in my body’s dying.” Rose: “Can’t you do something?” The Ninth Doctor: “Yeah, I’m doing it now. Time Lords have this little trick; sort of a way of cheating death.”

Story (from “Bad Wolf”, “The Parting of the Ways”, the 2005 Children In Need special, and “The Christmas Invasion”):

The Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack are kidnapped from the TARDIS and forced to play reality game shows in the far future, where the penalty for losing is death. The Doctor breaks out and discovers that the whole network of game shows are situated in a space station, and that the network controller kidnapped him in the hopes of using him to defeat her masters, who are revealed to be the Daleks.

The Doctor is astounded that the Daleks survived the Time War, and the Emperor Dalek reveals himself. His ship was the lone survivor of a cataclysmic event (The Moment, as stated in the last entry), and fell through time to the outer reaches of Earth’s solar system. Over several hundred years the Emperor harvested humans to slowly rebuild his Dalek army and was driven mad by his isolation, deluding himself to believe he was a god.

The Daleks now intend to invade Earth, totally complacent in its mindless entertainment, and from there build the empire up to conquer the galaxy. The Doctor realizes the only way he can stop them is to build a Delta wave emitter using the transmitter of the station, but there’s not enough time to refine it. As such any Delta wave emitted would not just kill the Daleks but the population of the Earth as well.

The Doctor tricks Rose into staying in the TARDIS, and he remotely sends it back to her own time, locking the controls. Rose is furious and while back in her own time sees the words “Bad Wolf” all around her, which she had seen all through her adventures with the Doctor as if the words were following her through time. She realizes that it is a message and breaks into the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits. The TARDIS console opens and floods her mind with the energy of the time vortex.

The Daleks confront the Doctor and he admits that he can not bring himself to commit genocide (again). Just as the Daleks approach to exterminate him, the TARDIS arrives. Rose steps out, teeming with the energy of the time vortex, now omnipotent. She annihilates the Dalek fleet with a wave of her hand and resurrects Captain Jack, who had been killed earlier. But the Doctor pleads with her that not only is it wrong for her to stay like this but the energies will destroy her. She can not give up the power she now has, so the Doctor kisses her and absorbs all the energy into himself, before quickly breathing it back into the TARDIS.

After setting off into flight Rose awakens with amnesia of the events and the Doctor warns her of his impending regeneration due to the burn out caused by the energies. After a paranoid rambling he regenerates and immediately notices new teeth. Inspecting himself he notices all the changes in the regeneration and wants Rose’s opinion.

She denies that he could be the Doctor, instead suspecting a plot of some kind. He tries to convince her he’s the same man but she’s still suspicious. He asks her if she wants to leave and she’s undecided. The Doctor sets the TARDIS controls back to her home at Christmas time but then succumbs to the effects of post-regeneration trauma, lapsing into a manic craze.

The TARDIS crashes onto the street and the Doctor wishes Rose’s mom Jackie and Mickey a Merry Christmas before collapsing into a coma. While recuperating the Doctor becomes a target for robots dressed in Santa costumes. Meanwhile the invading force of the Sycorax has arrived, and Rose finds she may be Earth’s only hope.

Production:

As stated in the seventh regeneration article the viewing figures for the 1996 Doctor Who tv movie were very high in the UK. While the audio dramas and novels were in full swing it was also apparent the audience for the program never really left. Producer Mel Young approached the then-current BBC One Controller Peter Salmon about relaunching the series and through them writer and Doctor Who enthusiast Russell T Davies was brought on board for contributions. However this fell through and Davies went on to work on a little unknown series called “Queer as Folk”.

By 2003 Davies had attracted enough attention as a writer to be brought back to the new Doctor Who project. By this point the new BBC One Controller Lorraine Heggessey had completely cleared up any rights issues – as remember with the television movie, Universal, Fox, and BBC Worldwide had all been on the production. But by now BBC television had the authority to pursue a series with no difficulty, opting to produce it with BBC Wales and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the CBC).

Davies was to be not only the head writer but the executive producer as well. Also producing were Phil Collinson and BBC Wales Head of Drama Julie Gardner. Those principal three would be the main creative driving force behind the new series. Casting calls were held for who would play the Doctor and the team settled with Christopher Eccleston, a man who had never been a fan of the series in the past. In fact Eccleston would criticize the old series for its “wobbly sets”, although admitted he found the concept of regeneration fascinating.

No one was sure if the series would even take off, so they settled on making one season before committing any further. However when ratings pulled in 10.5 million viewers for the first episode “Rose” a second season was commissioned, and everyone signed up.

Except Chris Eccleston. He wasn’t too keen on the atmosphere of the set and had fears of being typecast, so he wished to go after the first season. It was originally intended to be a surprise to the audience, since they were announced for another season, but the BBC accidentally released this information early against Eccleston’s contract. Everyone was a little incensed and to this day Eccleston isn’t happy with how the BBC handled his departure. Nevertheless Eccleston still to this day is proud of his time in the role and adores the fans of the series.

Casted to replace him was 30 year old Doctor Who fan David Tennant. Tennant had already done roles in many of the radio dramas and was thrilled at the opportunity to play his childhood hero.

You may have noticed the citing of many episodes for the story. That’s because even though the new series format was to have standalone episodes, unlike the multi-episode story arcs of the past, Davies enjoys having plot points work their way through an entire season. In this case Davies had written in references to the “Bad Wolf” in almost every episode, some of which barely noticeable. The Children In Need special listed above was a seven minute charity piece that was a short dialogue scene as the Doctor feels his new body out before going manic.

As for the regeneration scene, a straight video morph effect with lights and energy were used. Relatively simple but flashy enough to inspire those who had never seen a regeneration before. And by setting it up with dialogue beforehand, the hope was that audiences wouldn’t feel alienated.

Analysis:

First off, I love Eccleston’s portrayal of the Doctor. He’s a quirky guy totally unlike anyone else he’s every played in the past. But he also shows a pain and a rage beneath that humour. And as much as I loved Tennant’s performance I really do wish Eccleston would have hung around for one more season.

Nevertheless I was still pretty psyched at seeing a new regeneration. After the effects of the last series, which were inconsistent, I was eager to see how much better this one would be. The budget was significantly better and we as an audience were far more emotionally invested in the event.

Okay so in regards to this “Bad Wolf” entity Rose becomes, it’s an interesting plot device and it would have seemed like a cop-out, if not for the how we’ve been seeing its effects through almost the whole season. So I’m okay with it. One might be wondering why Rose didn’t die from absorbing it while the Doctor did. To this I say that it makes sense that while the Doctor was imbued with its energies he reversed any damage to Rose before putting the energy back into the heart of the TARDIS. One wonders about those continents the Daleks fried before they were stopped. Rose brought Captain Jack back, what about all those people? Who knows.

Back to the heart of the TARDIS, this was a concept that has been around a long time. The first reference goes back to the First Doctor in a 1964 story arc that has been retroactively titled “The Edge of Destruction.” The TARDIS is being plunged back to Event One and will be destroyed. However the Doctor and his companions don’t realize this so the TARDIS tries to warn them. From that point on in the series it is explicitly understood that the TARDIS has a degree of sentience.

We even saw the TARDIS use these energies to revive Grace and Chang Lee in the TV movie, based on sentimentality. And then in “Boom Town” when Blaine is trying to commandeer the TARDIS by holding Rose hostage she is exposed to the heart which rejuvenates her until she is an egg, giving her a second chance at life. So undoubtedly when Rose and the TARDIS communicated, it gave her the power it needed to resolve the situation because of compassion for the Doctor.

For most of the Tenth Doctor’s first story “The Christmas Invasion,” the Doctor is near comatose, expressing the regeneration had gone wrong. So no Zero Room this time? I’m actually of the opinion that it’s another example of the post-regeneration trauma manifesting itself as paranoia. I honestly enjoyed how it was the smell of herbal tea that healed his stressed synapses and allowed him to recover. I also enjoyed the scene in which the Sycorax suddenly seem to be speaking English as soon as it’s apparent the Doctor has recuperated. From that point on Tennant owns the episode, silencing those who doubted if he had the character to pull off the role.

No too much to say on this one, other than I really enjoyed Doctor Who coming back and the regeneration was very well done. And with David Tennant taking over the reins, the series would see even greater ratings and an entirely new audience.

And Another Thing...

I really wish they’d go somewhere else besides Earth. They’ve got the whole universe to explore!

The Tenth Doctor: “Now then, what do I look like? No no no no no no no no no – don’t tell me. Let’s see. Two legs, two arms, two hands, slight weakness in the dorsal tendon. Hair! I’m not bald! Ooooh, big hair. Sideburns, I’ve got sideburns! Or really bad skin. Little bit thinner, that’s weird, give me time and I’ll get used to it. I have got a mole. I can feel it. Between the shoulder blades is a mole. That’s all right. Love the mole. Go ahead, tell me, what do you think?” Rose: “Who are you?” The Tenth Doctor: “I’m the Doctor!”

#doctor who #christopher eccleston #david tennant #Regeneration #review #TARDIS #the christmas invasion #the parting of the ways #bad wolf

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enby-hawke · 2 years ago

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Alright settle in for a story ya'll cause it's a long one.

At the beginning of the week I was dancing, singing, being helpful, just smiling. But you see I just needed to recover after my family kind of took my medicine in a forced detox and almost killed me. (previous legal post if you're curious) Now today I'm screaming at everyone and wanting to end my life over a lost tablet pen.

I got into a fight with my bf and it just was the last straw. I was like I don't want to go but take me to the mental hospital. If I get into one more fight something bad will happen.

I checked myself into the hospital and agreed to do a 5150 on the agreement they wouldn't send me to Merced California's Mary Greens. The head nurse bitch there told me if I ever came back there she would never let me leave. (My wife had to fight to get me out for 3 months).

They sent me to Santa Rose Behavioral Health Clinic. At first, the place seemed nice. I even got a pamphlet of my rights. Like the nerd I am I read it.

And realized that they were breaking the law left and right.

At the beginning, I asked for a space to worship and they led me around until they straight up told me they wouldn't. I asked every nurse I could and no one would work with me. I am a filipino pagan, and my religion was destroyed by Catholics so there are no clergy or Bibles I am just trying to recreate what I can by my research of the Gods of Visaya.

I even asked legal, a woman named Dory, and she straight up told me the facility couldn't provide it and with a straight face tried to convince me that was okay. I realized she was in the pockets of the company and ended my interview with her.

I didn't get to worship until the day I was released because my pagan case manager bought the supplies herself.

I wasn't trying to find dirt. I swear. I was just trying to get through my stay. I was supposed to be there 3 days but it turned into 5? 6? I don't know. The drugs they gave me made me so foggy and I am having a lot of pain and trouble since I went there.

I explained to them I wanted as little drugs as possible. I kept a journal that was supposed to be my medical journal too (I know nerd) and I started on 600mg of gabapentin but by the end of my stay without my consent I was upped to 1200mg of gabapentin. My wife gets seizures and the most they ever put her on was 900mg. A nurse there who eavesdropped on my conversation with my wife (also illegal) tried to convince me that it was okay for me to be on as much as 1800mg of gabapentin and they put the kids on more than me. I told him that didn't sound safe.

And worst of all nurse Allon. I thought he was cool. We were having a great conversation and his wife was a gender studies major and I was excited to know more. But then the first night with him I was able to write in the hallway. The next night I wasn't even allowed to write with a crayon in my room.

You see I have bipolar which gives me an energy bunny in my soul. I usually only need 4-6 hours of sleep. They kept trying to give me trazodone which I kept telling them would interact with my latuda and give me a manic episode but they didn't even switch it to another sleeping med.

I also told them I didn't want sleeping meds. As an Asian I would prefer preventative measures such as exercise, diet, herbs, and coping skills rather than just shoving medications down my throat. Well, guess what they did.

It is illegal for the staff to medicate a patient for their own convenience.

Nurse Allon 2 nights ago decided it wasn't okay for me to write in the hallway for whatever reason. I was upset as it was 3:30 and they expected me to do nothing but read study books (with no highlighter or anything to take notes with) for 4 hours or just sit and 'think'. I demanded my usual coping mechanism because it wasn't an unreasonable request. They refused. I asked for something to go back to sleep with. They refused. They sent me to my room.

So I cried. And then that turned into praying. And then that's when things got super shitty.

Nurse Allon called my episode a tantrum. I tried to call the patients advocate line or 988 but the phones were off. They coerced me into taking a drug to go to sleep. They claim it was seroquel. But that's not what I remember. They didn't release my information in a printed sheet they gave it to me on a sticky note. But I don't remember it sounding anything like seroquel.

I did my own research and tracked it down to two possible drugs. Clonazepen or clorazepate. I'm leaning towards clorazepate because I remember a 'cl' and 'r'.

Other things in my journal from my interviews.

They do not attend to the elderly. I had to harass them into doing their jobs. They were so understaffed and overworked that they just couldn't get their breaks in or do the basics. A woman I interviewed said she came from unit 500 and an elderly woman wasn't bathed and basically sat in her shit for 3 days and no one cared.

A homeless woman who wants to remain anonymous and is my friend is trapped there. She has been held there for 2 weeks without justifiable cause. A nurse named Nikki agreed and told us both that. This facility gets $2000 every day we stay there and more money for each drug.

That woman's drug chart is a fucking mess. She's on 1200mg of lithium. They're going to kill her or break her brain.

My dudes what do I do? What steps do I take?

My current plan is to gather more evidence. I want to go to each of the individuals that left bad reviews and explain to them I want to do a class action lawsuit not for money for myself (though I need to cover the cost of my lawyer) but that I want to sue that corporation into properly investing its funds so that we don't have paper thin blankets and the cheapest art supplies that never get updated.

I'm suing the hospital not for personal money, but to make sure the funds go back into the facility so it is properly run. the staff is properly paid and that there is enough of them for the patients care, that they do not use the cheapest materials, are not retaliatory to mentally ill episodes and are properly trained, and that everyone has the right to worship as they please. I want the rules to reflect fairness and kindness. I don't want this hierarchy of 'good patients' versus 'bad patients' and so much more. For the Gods sakes. We didn't even have windows to look outside. Why is sunshine a priviliege?

I don't really know...how to make this happen???? Any advice tumblr?

#help needed #advice needed #american politics #reddit #legal advice #tumblr I know ya'll just like dickpussy but can you spread this please?

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redemptioninchaos · 2 years ago

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fantasycorrupted

Although for now Fíann could spectate, that, too, was satisfying. Not that she could wait out the pain, of course. And neither could she let Aurora have all the fun. The more she watched the succubus move, the more the warm feeling inside her chest swelled. She was covered with cuts and bruises and bleeding… but damn, she felt alive. And this, too, was thanks to Aurora.

By the time Aurora had started speaking to one of Merric’s men, Fíann was back on her feet. Her walk was wobbly, the soreness still present through her entire body. But it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. She had pushed back against her ex’s attempts to hurt her and her friends, and her friends had helped her fight.

It was time for revenge. When her journey had started, she had had no clue either about who she was, or what she wanted. All she had known was that she wanted to have an adventure. She had had not one, but two - by now perhaps many more than that. Bit by bit, as she had rediscovered herself, Fíann had realised things. She was only a little bit bad. Evil, kind of; she could be hell when she wanted it.

She was a good friend, despite everything. A loving daughter who would never forget where she hailed from. A brave enough woman to become a pirate, and a kind enough heart to still have mercy. A loyal crewmate. A friend who would never betray. Perhaps, someday she would be a lover as well, who knew. But deep down inside, Fíann was also a bitch. Merric had been right.

And he would get to experience that. Turning around, she found Merric. In a swish, she had him by the hair, giving it a rough tug, drawing him to herself. “Whose ass got kicked and handed to them, huh?” she mocked him, raising him by the hair, forcing him to look at her. “When will you stop being an asshole?” Her voice had turned serious now, once more as cold as ice. She eyed Aurora. “We took you down. I wouldn’t kill your guards… but I am not so sure about Aurora there. If you want them alive, I want your word.”

“Never,” came a croak in response. Fíann readied her hands for a freezing spell. If Aurora were to glance at her now, she’d come across a truly rare sight (despite how short the mermaid’s temper could be) - Fíann’s eyes were completely dark, as black as ink. “Is that so?” she mused. “I’d kill you here and now. I shouldn’t… unlike you, I am not cruel… but by the gods, it would be fun.”

Once Aurora knew Murchadh’s henchmen were out of commission, she focused entirely on him, walking towards him and Fiann. Her grin never went away as she thought of ways to maximize her own ecstasy and his torment. The chains that had bound her to Bescevius were now viable weapons with which she could defend herself from aggressors. Even though the chains would only bind them for a fraction of the time Aurora was bound, the sheer horror, and ecstasy, of being in her control could make time go more slowly for her opponents.

She pointed a hand towards him and chanted in Infernal, more fiery chains restricting Murchadh’s wrists, a sinister laugh escaping her. She didn’t think about how uncomfortable Fiann would feel about being near burning chains; she just knew that she wouldn’t let Murchadh escape if she could help it. “Would you fancy a kiss, O child of Umberlee?” She sounded a bit like Colette, a bit of her manic energy manifesting in Aurora’s voice.

open rp

“If a part of you is... not human,” now, Fíann isn’t just going to give away her mermaid origins - but upon careful observation from a nearer distance, one can notice sparkly little scales on her skin - but she has started thinking out loud anyway, “but you were born in a family or village of humans... What does that make you?”

She is musing to herself, nothing more. And she doesn’t live in a village, technically. But those are details. “And vice versa. And, generally... is it a bad thing to be human? To be born, only to last a few decades until the thought that you’re halfway through with your life slaps you in the face?”

“Butterflies don’t think about how short their lives are. For all we know, they might be happy among the flowers. Humans, though...”

#aurora #fiann #riane #merric

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sagamemes · 4 years ago

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the sheridan tapes 📼 part two. here and under the cut, you can find over 130 lines of dialogue from the horror podcast the sheridan tapes, specifically from episodes four to six, edited for roleplay purposes. some of these focus heavily on survival, war, science, and spooky stuff, but a lot can be used by anyone. tw: war, unreality, a mention of cannibalism, implications of manic behaviour.

❝ god, i hate snowstorms like this. not just getting caught in them, but the storms themselves. it feels like the earth’s trying to bury me alive every time it locks in like this. like nature’s rightly pissed off at all of us and doing its level best to crush us to death. ❞

❝ that’s what yom kippur means: the day of atonement. ❞

❝ that wasn’t the first time i’ve caught him in my office, going through my stuff. ❞

❝ normally i’d be annoyed at someone calling me young lady. ❞

❝ thank you… you are so warm�� thank you for letting me in. ❞

❝ suddenly, everything fell into place. i made more progress than i had in about half a year. ❞

❝ the thing i remember most was catching disapproving glances from my father every time i went to the library. ❞

❝ why does time only run forward? why does cause need to precede effect? ❞

❝ no one knows if they can trust me with casework or not. ❞

❝ i didn’t say i was interested. ❞

❝ [he/i] was taken off duty and sent for psychiatric evaluation the next day. ❞

❝ coffee. i was making coffee. ❞

❝ i didn't mean to get stuck out here. ❞

❝ that just goes to show how small humans really are in the grand scheme of things: take away our tools and our toys and our technology, and we’re still just as vulnerable as we ever were. ❞

❝ she was good at that: making you feel like you were safe, like you could open up to her. ❞

❝ i’m just going to cover that one up. no harm in keeping it out of sight for the moment. ❞

❝ maybe there was someone in the stairs. ❞

❝ i think i did the lion’s share of the talking, which almost never happens. ❞

❝ i couldn’t get to sleep... i figured i’d get a head start today. ❞

❝ i’m afraid i don’t have all of the details of your involvement with the… tragic events in [place]. and i don’t think i’m the only one. ❞

❝ i’m still not sure i understand the whole tradition. ❞

❝ whatever it is, it’s chasing me. i can hear it’s footsteps in the snow, i can hear it— ❞

❝ when you work nights here, the less you really think about them, the better. ❞

❝ honestly, i just can’t get it out of my head. ❞

❝ snow is one of nature’s simplest and most effective ways of killing you dead if you aren’t prepared for it. ❞

❝ i wish you’d tell me what you’re doing here. i could lose my job if anything gets broken or if you end up getting hurt in there… ❞

❝ would you say you… considered her a friend? ❞

❝ would you mind saying your name again? for the recording? ❞

❝ if that was true, then there was something—and as a scientist, i hate to say this—supernatural going on in that lab. ❞

❝ most of them didn’t make it. a lot of them died afraid and alone, too. ❞

❝ i know you don’t like listening to these things, so i just wanted to help you out with… ❞

❝ if i could sleep, then trust me, i would. ❞

❝ i’m guessing the new owners are trying to make this place seem less creepy than it already is. ❞

❝ my schooling was expensive and unremarkable. ❞

❝ a lot of them died afraid and alone, too: ideal conditions for the making of poltergeists, in my experience. ❞

❝ look, i’m sorry, but this really isn’t a good time for anything, so if you wouldn’t mind… ❞

❝ basically, i was picturing a slightly creepier morticia addams. i couldn’t have been more wrong. ❞

❝ now i have to deal with [name]’s aspirations to write drama.. ❞

❝ i promise i won’t get you sacked. ❞

❝ i’ve never been very religious, but for some reason… it made me think of hell. ❞

❝ i think it may have been a thank you. ❞

❝ i’m working the graveyard shift and i noticed the lights were on. ❞

❝ i shouldn’t be here. no one asked me to come in this early. ❞

❝ everyone around here looks at me like i’m some kind of leper. ❞

❝ i had to go home for a few hours. i’m already on thin ice around here, and i didn’t want to get in more trouble for screaming obscenities up and down the wall. ❞

❝ it was… darkness. no, that doesn’t do it credit, the whole place was dark. this was just... void. ❞

❝ if i’d seen her anywhere else, i’d think she was an athlete or a backpacker. ❞

❝ better scientists than me have been bashing their heads into that particular wall since 1927. ❞

❝ i just want you to know that… whatever you really are... you’re safe here. ❞

❝ goats being goats, it would just come back the next day looking for food. ❞

❝ i would like you to leave my office now… and i’ll ask you not to tamper with evidence in the future, understood? ❞

❝ no, of course, i don’t have signal out here, so i can’t just call triple-a. ❞

❝ what are you doing in my office—at four goddamn thirty in the morning? ❞

❝ you ever wonder where the line is? you know, between human and not? ❞

❝ the funny thing i’ve noticed about war: no matter how terrible the fighting is, there always seems to be too much waiting. too much quiet. too much sitting around, bored to tears between fits of chaos and violence, lost in routine while waiting for the other shoe to drop. ❞

❝ a lot of people condemn them for that. we’re so sure we’d never resort to that—that we’d rather die than cross that unspoken boundary. ❞

❝ i’ve been at the [workplace/institution] for ten years now. that’s long enough to know that the ones who ask questions are the ones who can’t cut it. ❞

❝ the program blew every fuse in the lab. including the lights. ❞

❝ it was soon after they left that i began to have trouble sleeping. ❞

❝ perhaps we never knew each other as well as most friends do, but… we cared for one another. ❞

❝ most of her questions are a bit above my pay grade. ❞

❝ i’m trying, i’m trying! i can’t get the door open! ❞

❝ i don’t know why she needed my help: i think she had a better grasp of it than most science fiction writers. ❞

❝ we both had places to be afterwards, so we kind of rushed. i really wish i’d taken the time to say goodbye. ❞

❝ i guess some things just… don’t want to stay buried. ❞

❝ it was completely against orders of course, but no one really noticed or cared that far from the front. ❞

❝ i offered to buy him a cup of coffee. ❞

❝ newspapers praised them at the time: saw them as heroes of exploration and paragons of pioneer courage. ❞

❝ i signed a lot of big, scary nda’s during my time there. ❞

❝ i did the only thing that came to mind: i took a grenade from my belt, removed the pin, and threw it. ❞

❝ i doubt this storm will last more than a couple of days, and once it lets up we can sneak out of here and get going again. very, very carefully. ❞

❝ given enough time, everything will rot away to its elementary components, and that, you can’t reverse. ❞

❝ i really can’t see anything from inside the van. ❞

❝ i knew there were a few experiments that dealt with some pretty high-level theoretical concepts, but i wasn’t directly involved with any of them. ❞

❝ it’s a strange choice, but then again, he’s a strange man. ❞

❝ i know, it sounds ridiculous. trust me, i’ve done everything i can think of to make that conclusion go away. ❞

❝ scared the bejeezus out of a bunch of skiers, but they were nice enough to let me in after deciding i probably wasn’t a ghost. ❞

❝ please… it burns my skin… please… ❞

❝ i forgot how fast storms blow in up here. ❞

❝ it’s not like i felt out of control: it felt more natural than breathing. ❞

❝ i didn’t know what i was doing, not at any conscious level. but one step seemed to lead to another, then the next, and then the next. ❞

❝ it’s called a butcher’s shop in some places, but a mortuary in others. as much as i’d love to imply there was some sweeney todd style recycling going on here, i think the place has just been a lot of things over the years. ❞

❝ god, these things are creepy as hell. ❞

❝ if you wouldn’t mind, please, tell us what happened? in your own time, of course. ❞

❝ it took a few long, nerve-wracking days to work up my courage and visit the section again. ❞

❝ it’s not that odd to think that people ate each other out there. ❞

❝ i didn’t think there was a ghost in my room or anything like that, i just kept hearing noises whenever i was about to fall asleep. ❞

❝ i downed half a dozen energy drinks at 6 and called it dinner—i know, i know, it’s a nasty habit i picked up in grad school. ❞

❝ they told me that the cpu and motherboard had somehow been melted into a solid lump of plastic and silicon. ❞

❝ i mean, [name] was a pain in the ass, but at least he didn’t… ❞

❝ my schedule was full, but i had something else fall through at the last minute. i had your number on my desk, so i thought i may as well call. ❞

❝ i wonder if it was afraid, or if it even realized what was going to happen. it probably didn’t. ❞

❝ i need to get more coffee. or punch someone. whichever’s more convenient. ❞

❝ god, if that’s really how i sound… ❞

❝ people think i write horror, but i don’t really think that’s true. i just write fiction with all of the comfortable little lies taken out of it. ❞

❝ i have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night. ❞

❝ i think he felt something about this place… some influence or power that needed to be destroyed, so he tried to do it the only way he knew how. ❞

❝ well, it’s a tricky thing. the more realistic you make them, the more… unreal they start to look. i think it’s something about the eyes. ❞

❝ i offered to stay late, just to smooth things over. ❞

❝ maybe i can get some writing done while i’m stuck here… ❞

❝ no child could grow up in a jewish home surrounded by books and not read at least one story about golems. ❞

❝ i just wasn’t a good student, despite my love of reading. ❞

❝ i have to say, i like your jane doe. ❞

❝ she was a scientist herself. maybe not formally, but her way of thinking, her insight, her methods... they were scientist’s qualities. ❞

❝ seriously, what do i need to do to get a little privacy around here, a little dignity? hang a ‘ do not disturb ’ sign on the door? change all my locks? ❞

❝ maybe it was stupid, but i figured, ‘ hey, early december, not a cloud in the sky—should still be fine, right? ’ ❞

❝ jesus, [name], i wasn’t born yesterday. ❞

❝ maybe doing this while it’s still dark outside isn’t the best idea. ❞

❝ more than a century and a half have passed, and this place is still just as dangerous as it was then. ❞

❝ now, [mr./ms./mx. name], i’m sure you know why you’re here. ❞

❝ the [event] was a bust—only about a dozen people showed up all afternoon. ❞

❝ i never put much stock in the idea of inspiration, but for the first time in my life, it felt like i wasn’t pushing myself through the muck of miscalculation and guesswork towards a solution. i was being pulled towards an answer that already existed. ❞

❝ it felt like i was a few steps from finding out something fundamental. some truth about our universe that no other scientist had ever dared to dream of. ❞

❝ huh. that’s… that’s weird. i could’ve sworn there wasn’t a sculpture back there before. ❞

❝ apparently, no one had told them what i was doing, and i wasn’t actually cleared to leave. ❞

❝ maybe he’s trying to make amends. keeping watch over these half-living things to make sure no harm comes to them. ❞

❝ i expected the building to be wreathed in shadow and overgrown with cobwebs, but it's actually really nice. ❞

❝ sorry, i was trying to get my recorder working, but it froze up on me so i had to find a tape for this old… ❞

❝ okay. just… don’t get me sacked, alright? can’t exactly retire on this salary. ❞

❝ but if it was real—i don’t know if i somehow created it, or if it was feeding me information about itself before it appeared. ❞

❝ i’ve never had a manic episode before, and i was well below the level of caffeine needed to cause intoxication. as far as i can tell, there isn’t a medical explanation for what happened. ❞

❝ i don’t get the appeal of meeting real celebrities. it’s just a cheap shock of recognition, and nothing more. ❞

❝ whatever this… thing was, it sounds pretty dangerous. ❞

❝ are you familiar with temporal asymmetry? ❞

❝ i just want to make that abundantly clear: this /wasn’t/ the plan. ❞

❝ right then, now let’s get started. please state your name and rank for the record. ❞

❝ though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. ❞

❝ a cracker of a book, young lady. ❞

❝ no wonder they’re keeping them in storage. they’d give anyone nightmares. ❞

❝ i was just going to finish out my shift unless… you want me to stick around? ❞

❝ i went to the university, but don’t remember much of the years i spent there. ❞

❝ having to study textbooks and essays day in and day out took all of the joy out of reading for a long time. ❞

❝ we call paradoxes paradoxes for a reason: no matter how plausible they seem, they can never really happen. ❞

❝ i don’t know what happened to me that night. i still don’t even know if what i saw was real. ❞

❝ when we look into the void for too long, we find the monsters instead. ❞

#sentence starters #sentence meme #rp sentence starters #rp sentence meme #rp meme #* sentences.#* meme.#sheridan #trying some minor new things w/ the formatting #especially for these longer #non numbered sentence memes

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pleathewrites · 4 years ago

Text

Candles in the Sun

chapter 1: the one who drives all evil away

When Ryomen Sukuna was born, the ground shook.

A weeping mother cradles her baby in her weak arms. The sweat cools off her skin with the gusts of rain-scented wind pushing past an open window. Her baby’s heart beats - she can feel it through the pads of her fingers - and she sighs.

Her eyes do not betray her.

She looks at her child and begs the Gods for mercy to be given - for this world to treat her child as kindly as she vows to because she cannot feel anything but infinite gratitude as her baby looks up at her with bright, red eyes.

Both sets.

Her child has been born with a gift - the blessing of 4 eyes and 4 arms.

When Itadori Yuuji is born, his first breath matches the last of his mother’s.

A weeping father holds his daughter’s baby to his chest and begs for the Gods to bring her back.

His prayers are futile, as his daughter’s unblinking eyes remain downward towards her belly, awaiting the arrival of a child she never got the chance to hold.

With the tips of his fingers, using the gentlest pressure, he lowers his daughter’s eyelids and lets her rest.

Her baby cries.

He prays for the strength to give this child the same love and protection he had for his own. He feels the ache in his chest, lungs rattling with every inhale.

He begs his body not to give up on him.

It’s an odd feeling, Sukuna’s mouth stretching over his cheek.

He was in the middle of packing up the extra things that had been left behind in his move to Jujutsu High when he had stumbled across the frame that had used to stand upright on his grandfather’s dresser.

“Oh, is that a baby picture? Let me see,” Yuuji feels the words before he hears them.

His knee-jerk reaction is usually to deny the curse, for whatever he’s asking.

“What, no -”

“Let me see or I won’t leave you alone this whole day,” The King of Curses demands, rather childishly.

Yuuji sometimes forgets this guy is supposed to be a thousand years old.

He stares at the picture between his fingers. It’s a capture of one of his earliest memories, a blurry thing that Yuuji only really has random flashes of. He doesn’t remember what the occasion was, but he remembers the exhibit of huge dinosaur fossils and the vibrant green of grass against a rough picnic blanket. He doesn’t remember what they ate for that lunch, but he remembers his grandfather asking an elderly to take a picture of them in front of the museum entrance.

This maybe-five-year-old Yuuji has his mouth open in laughter while his grandfather swings him up to sit on the concrete pillar of a staircase.

His heart mourns.

Sukuna starts to let out whining noises that pull irritatingly at the skin under Yuuji’s eyes. Yuuji grumbles and holds the photo up for the curse’s eye to see.

Sukuna lets out a coo, “You were so cute. Fat,” and just when Yuuji feels the side of his lips tilt up in a smile at the comment, Sukuna continues, “You’re so ugly now.”

Yuuji squawks, “Fuck you!” and slaps his hand over the offending mouth.

The sting against his cheek lingers, though the curse does not.

Sukuna is five years old the first time he levitates.

The boy had stomped into his house with muddy shoes, and his mother had asked him to take a bath. He said he didn’t want to. She told him to take one anyways.

He screamed.

And the next thing they both knew, he was 5 feet above the ground, his feet dangling uselessly beneath him, and the tips of his shoulder-length hair brushing the ceiling of their home.

He sees his mother’s eyes widen, and his own breath stutters in the childish fear that maybe he’s doing something bad, and just when he’s about to try and return to the ground, the expression on his mother’s face changes.

She’s laughing.

The first laugh is blurted shock, the second disbelief, and the rest are consistent peals of happy - proud - laughter.

On that day onward, Sukuna’s mother discovered her son’s curse energy bleeds into his temper tantrums.

Fushiguro Megumi makes Yuuji’s soul wiggle, Sukuna observes.

The first time Sukuna notices, they’re in an abandoned school and the brat is about to get himself killed by a Special Grade curse that Sukuna could pulverize with a flick of his finger.

He tells Yuuji as so, tells the boy that he could easily help him out, but that he won’t hesitate to kill anyone who gets in the way.

Sukuna’s no hero, after all.

When Itadori Yuuji tells Fushiguro Megumi to run away, the energy of Yuuji’s soul seeps into Sukuna’s domain and messes with the physics of the place - and for a split second, Sukuna feels breathless.

Sukuna smiles, ‘Could it be?’

After defeating the Special Grade, Sukuna decides to test something out.

He beats Megumi within an inch of his life, and when he has the boy’s full attention, he rips Itadori Yuuji’s heart straight out of his chest.

Megumi's soul cries.

Sukuna lets out a manic laugh, ‘So it’s true.’

His plan will succeed.

However, when Megumi begins to speak, he foolishly speaks directly to Yuuji about why he had saved him and Sukuna feels the same watery jolt of the brat’s soul and he is immediately sucked back into his Innate Domain.

Sukuna burrows further into his cloak as he rummages through the village market.

He huffs.

He hates the townspeople. They always gasp at the sight of his arms and chase him away with their brooms.

But his mother grows weaker every harvest, and the walk from the mountain to the village center takes her nearly half a sun cycle, whereas Sukuna can make the trip in a third of that time.

He tries to recall what was written on his mother’s list when he’s pushed roughly from behind, a gust of wind and scrape of cotton breezing through his side. When he regains his balance, he opens his mouth to yell in complaint only to stop when he notices the person who pushed him is another kid, perhaps around his age, sprinting.

He looks behind him to see an older man - horribly familiar, especially with that stick of his - running toward the kid’s direction.

Sukuna sends a small wave of curse energy aimed at the man’s feet and trips him.

When the man falls flat on his face, Sukuna hurries in the direction of where the kid had run.

It only takes him a few seconds to locate the other kid.

One glance around the area with his four eyes confirms their privacy. Sukuna brings two hands to cup near his mouth and yells, “Hey!”

The kid freezes, at both Sukuna’s voice and the fact that they were running into a dead end.

They turn around, and Sukuna swears his chest rattles.

Stone green eyes shine back at him.

Sukuna swallows, “I know a place you can hide, but we have to go now. That old man won’t stay down for too long.”

The kid nods quickly, and Sukuna leads them through several back alleys of the town until they reach a rundown temple on the outside edge of the village. The two climb up jagged rocks that stick out the sides of the temple, and they don’t stop until they reach the highest floor, climbing through the window into the building.

The kid slides down the wall and tips their head back, swallowing the much-needed air back into their lungs.

When their chest stops heaving, they turn their head towards Sukuna and narrow their eyes at him. Their voice cracks when they ask, “Why did you help me?”

“Why were you being chased by the tomato vendor?” Sukuna counters.

Their lips close and tighten in frustration.

A gust of wind pushes through the temple’s window and knocks back the hood of Sukuna’s cloak, revealing the face he forgot he was hiding.

Emerald eyes widen.

Sukuna’s heart jumps to his throat. He knows he should run, but he’s frozen in place, waiting for a reaction. He can’t help it - his mother told him, time and time again, to never care what other people think of him, and, usually, he listens, but something is rooting him down in his place, faint and inaudible whispers behind his ears, telling him to, ‘Wait.’

“So, you are the boy,” are the next words breathed into the air.

Sukuna doesn’t know how to respond. He both knows and doesn’t know what this other kid is talking about - yes, he is the village monster, but the words, ‘the boy,’ have never been uttered like that.

Like sanctity.

“My mother used to speak of you,” the other continues, using their hands and knees to crawl closer, and closer, until they are close enough to block out the evening sun from Sukuna’s view, “But, we thought you were a myth. In the past ten harvests, she’s never seen you, but she always stayed firm. How odd, that only a year after that she - that I…” they leave off, and Sukuna doesn’t even notice the hand inching towards his face until they stop themselves, their shadow-tinted hand hovering in the air.

He startles backward, head thumping painfully on the stone wall.

The kid retracts quickly, “I’m sorry!”

Sukuna rubs his throbbing head, and the motion lifts his cloak, revealing the second arm that rests beneath his primary, “I-It’s ok,” He tells them, watching the way their eyes stare at the two arms on his left side with something that looks like wonder. He continues after another moment of silence, “What - uhm, I mean… What did your mother…?” He doesn’t know how to ask.

When the child looks back up, kind emerald eyes greet him, “A blessed child, birthed eleven harvests ago. Born with a soul four times as bright.”

Sukuna gasps.

(“Why do I look like this, Mama?”

His mother pauses, before setting her threaded needle on the table. She beckons her son with an outstretched arm, and he follows all the way up to her lap. She smiles warmly as Sukuna repositions himself atop her knee to face her. He waits.

“Sukuna, my boy… You are blessed. A child born with a soul four times as bright.”

The ruddy pink of his eyebrows furrow, “... four... times?”

His mother nods and thumbs under his lower left eye, “Four eyes,” the same hand slides down in a quick movement, and when her fingers wriggle into Sukuna's side, he shrieks in laughter, the sight causing his mother to let out a few giggles of her own, “and four arms!”

“M-Mama, s-stop it!”

Her hand stills and she presses a kiss to the crown of her son’s head.

“A soul brighter than four souls put together.”)

The child assumes his surprise to be fear and reaches out to hold the hand of his lower arm.

“Do not worry, I will not hurt you, or decieve you. I… I would like to be your ally.”

Sukuna thinks he would like that, as well.

“What is your name?” He asks. His mother told him once that he could, ‘obtain a glimpse of a person’s soul by the way they wear their name.’

The child beams, a missing tooth mirroring the one he had lost himself earlier that year, “Chiyoko! You can call me Chiyo, though. I think it’s cute.”

Sukuna thinks so, too.

“My name is Sukuna.”

SUKU - NA: The one who drives evil away.

CLICK TO READ REST OF CHAPTER

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mirrorgrets · 4 years ago

Text

i hate you, i hope you die

Warnings: suicidal thoughts, graphic descriptions of violence

Pairings: Pannacotta Fugo/Giorno Giovanna (but like. barely.)

Wordcount: 2,224 words

Summary: Fugo returns to Passione and everything falls back into place. He's sworn his loyalty to Giorno and Giorno trusts him. But he hates the very same boy who saved him.

The thing is Fugo hates Giorno.

No, that's wrong. It's more like he wishes he hates Giorno.

When he sank to his knees, lips barely grazing Giorno's knuckles, he felt a pit in his stomach growing bigger and bigger as he said his vows. He felt like he signed his life away to this angel of death. For what? For guilt? For nothing? For a lack of understanding as to why he was still alive and not them?

Sometimes he stares at Giorno, notices little details that he doesn't think anyone who doesn't stare at Giorno for too long notices. Details like how he has an odd habit of pulling his collar when he's nervous; like he has a single pockmark just where his jaw meets his neck; like he stands a bit straighter when someone raises their voice; like he raises his hand like he wants to cover his mouth when he laughs; like he cycles through certain hair ties and ribbons throughout the week.

It drives him insane that at this point, he might know more about Giorno than he knows about Bucciarati, Abbacchio, and Narancia combined—and that says a lot. Bucciarati found him when he was thirteen and it was just them for a while. It was just the two of them in Bruno’s apartment, careful footsteps turning into comfort and routine somewhere between the shootouts, the blood, and the stitches. Then Abbacchio arrived with wary eyes and a sharp tongue and way too many apologies before he settled into his actual asshole self. At that point, Fugo moved out into his own apartment which was only two blocks away. Then he found Narancia, maybe out of inspiration from Bucciarati or something, and while they tried to keep him away from the life of a Mafioso, he weaseled in somehow, manifesting a stand fair and square.

Fugo wonders what it might be like to murder Giorno. He dreams of it when goes to sleep, which isn't often because he hardly goes to sleep nowadays and most of the time, sleep catches him and not the other way around.

Sometimes Giorno dies by his hands around his neck, sometimes it's Mista's stolen gun, sometimes it's by an ax, sometimes it's with a tie, sometimes an encyclopedia. But it's never Purple Haze Feedback. Never his own stand. And dream Giorno who's dying knows this all the damn time. Dream Giorno will look at him with the widest eyes like he's looking at God Himself, like he's a revelation meant to be worshipped. Sometimes his hands will cup his cheek (sometimes bloody, sometimes shaky); sometimes he'll push his forehead against Fugo's; sometimes he'll hold Fugo tight, sometimes like he's made of glass; and sometimes he'll lean in far too close and apologize to Fugo.

He hates that he always wakes up before Giorno can take his last breath and hates himself even more for feeling that way.

Fugo avoids Giorno when he can.

Somehow it's easy and at the same time, not. He meets him whenever he receives an assignment, and Giorno looks like he wants to speak to him. But he never pushes and Fugo is allowed to leave and fuck off and kill more people with a gun, a knife, or anything. At times, Fugo will stay just a second more and wonder if Giorno will take a step or half a step like he said he would but he never does so he leaves and wonders why he feels like he just woke up from his fucked up dreams.

When Fugo isn't murdering or interrogating someone, he's usually doing the dull administrative tasks of Passione like sorting through the legal jargon to find loopholes and accounting for logistics or whatever the hell he can get his hands on because he wants to stay busy, damn it.

His chest feels empty most of the time. It's not like he doesn't know why. It might be depression but he doesn't care enough to forge a prescription this time round. Or maybe it's because no one is pushing him to forge a prescription, unlike last time. Or well, Sheila E tries to make him forge a prescription and she did steal a bunch for him, orange canisters full and all. But she doesn’t force him to take them. She doesn’t hang around his shoulder unlike Bucciarati did when he… unlike when Bucciarati did with his straightforward stares and the little notes he left around Fugo’s apartment. She doesn’t make snide remarks unlike Abbacchio and doesn’t keep him company in the dead of night when everything is too loud even when it’s just quiet. She doesn’t remind him like Narancia did with all the subtlety of a douchebag riding a Ferrari.

So the canisters stay full but Fugo keeps them by his bedside because maybe one day and well, he likes the reminder that at least someone cares.

(Murolo does his own thing too but when he does, Fugo’s far too gone to even remember what Murolo does and the man never reminds him so he’s grateful for that too)

It's not like Fugo is afraid of dying. He goes into each mission like he might die and when he comes out alive, buzzing with manic energy that makes him want to break down and punch the nearest object in the vicinity, he's always disappointed. Sometimes he looks at the gun he owns in his bathroom and he wonders if he should just pull the trigger and collapse, his head bashing against the toilet, bleeding out to die if he doesn't hit the right spot.

He pulls the trigger every other day but the cartridge is always empty.

Today is no different from other days. Fugo startles awake, eyes blinking rapidly as he realizes that he did not kill Giorno. He stumbles into his bathroom, washes himself, looks at the mirror, looks at the gun, takes it and points it between his eyes, pulls the trigger, and leaves for work.

When he arrives at Passione's headquarters, he heads straight to his office to look over the legal documents Giorno asked him to look over. He doesn't bother to greet anyone since no one bothers to greet him. He's the traitor of Passione and he's fine with that. It keeps people away which means there are fewer people to perform for and fewer people to try to keep away.

The day goes by as usual. Fugo works through his pile until there’s almost nothing there and then some guy he never got to learn the name of drops a bunch of more work for him to do just before lunch. And Fugo won’t eat lunch until he’s burnt out or Sheila E comes to collect him from his office and forces him to eat. Fortunately for him, Sheila E is away on a mission with Murolo so he can do whatever he wants to do without anyone giving him those disappointed stares.

In all honesty, Fugo feels like he’s mellowed down. The six months away from Passione forced him to at least hold back most of his anger and he played piano in some restaurant as a job and he was good at it.

But he didn’t enjoy it. After playing, he would go home, wreck his already shitty apartment and return everything back to how it was before he crashed on his couch. So maybe the reason why he feels like he’s submerged underwater half the time because he feels like he’s playing a piece on the piano before he has to go home, just going through the motions, and pretending.

Fugo stretches his arms and looks at the clock on his desk. 10:45 pm. Time to head home then.

Then it all comes crashing down.

Or more like, Fugo feels like he’s been ripped out of the water, like he’s gone on those stupidly high and fast waterslides that children aren’t allowed on because when you hit the water, you tumble around and experience some kind of vertigo, except it’s in reverse and it feels worse.

Because today is the last day he saw all of them alive. The last day they were all together as a team. The last day before he betrayed them, except he always felt like they betrayed him and not the other way around.

He’s never even visited their graves.

It hits him so hard that he stumbles out of his office and he doesn’t care if there are people around because he just needs to get out, get out, get out.

He’s in the garden before he knows it, and he sinks into the grass and tries to breathe because what the fuck, he feels like he stopped breathing that day and only remembered to breathe now. He feels like crying but he keeps it in and just tries to remember how to properly push air in and out of his lungs even if it stings because in the past, there would always be a warm hand on his back and a soothing voice, and he knows that person will never stand behind him anymore and give comfort because he’s dead.

Minutes pass by and slowly, Fugo can breathe like normal again even if he’s so fucking tired. He collapses on the grass and stares at the night sky, distantly remembering his astronomy lessons when he was still Pannacotta Fugo, child of the wealthy Fugos.

He can hear grass being stepped on and gentle footsteps approaching him and it’s no surprise to see golden curls hanging low and emerald eyes staring back at him.

Fugo hates Giorno so, so much.

"I hate you," Fugo tells his boss. "I wish you were dead. I hope you die the most painful death possible."

Giorno blinks. "Okay. That's fine." He says, slowly. "You're not the only one who wants that."

"When I sleep, I dream that I kill you. I've killed you hundreds of times." Fugo continues, slowly pulling himself up and sitting down beside the most powerful boy in Italy, their knees almost brushing.

Giorno doesn’t shy away, instead, he moves closer to Fugo and their knees are touching. “How do you kill me?” His voice is barely above a whisper and Fugo would laugh if he could but this isn’t the time.

"Different ways. Sometimes I strangle you, sometimes I shoot you, sometimes I hit you with a book, sometimes I stab you."

"No Purple Haze?"

Fugo pauses but shakes his head. "No Purple Haze," he confirms.

Giorno is silent for a minute more and Fugo looks back at the stars, his mind silent for the first time in months.

“I’m sorry. I’m not good at this,” Giorno finally says and he flops down on the grass. “I should’ve let Mista get you.”

Fugo snorts. “Why? Mista doesn’t care,” there’s no malice in his voice, and it’s just a fact.

“No, he does. It’s just… you know, he needs time,” Giorno explains. “Just like you needed time.”

Fugo leans in closer to Giorno and he realizes this is the first time they’ve spoken to each other in months, like, really spoken to each other. It almost feels like a dream when Giorno lifts his hand up and touches Fugo’s cheek like he’s made of glass.

“I hate you,” Fugo says, leaning more into Giorno’s hand. “I wish they were the ones alive and I was the one who died. I wish they were the ones alive and that you never came into our lives.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’m glad you’re alive,” Giorno says, eyes wide and far too bright. Fugo wants to pull away because his mind is starting to catch up and time away from Passione taught him some things academia and murder couldn’t teach him.

“This doesn’t usually work like this either,” Fugo points out.

Giorno uses his other hand to pull Fugo closer and Fugo can see more things he’s sure no one’s never noticed before like the fact that Giorno has the lightest freckles on his face and that his lashes are really long. “I’m sorry. I’ll do better now,” Giorno tells him. “You should go visit a therapist. We can visit the graves together. I’ll make sure you eat lunch somehow.”

Fugo wants to laugh again but all he feels is a year's worth of grief finally burst and he’s crying again like he did in the restaurant except it feels more real rather than that half-assed performance that felt too perfect and picturesque. Giorno pulls him even closer until there’s no space between them and Fugo buries his face into the crook of Giorno’s neck and feels Giorno hold him tighter.

“I thought that giving you space would be better. I’m really sorry, Panna. I felt like I came off as too much when we first met again. Then I didn’t know how to push anymore and really, that’s no excuse but I’ll do better.” Giorno whispers.

“You’re good, don’t worry,” Fugo takes a shaky breath, half lying, half telling the truth. “Don’t worry.”

Fugo peels him away from Giorno and helps his boss up. Their foreheads are touching and Giorno’s holding onto his hand so gently, it makes Fugo feel sick again. But he squeezes back and knows that they’ll be okay one day.

Not today, but one day.

Notes: wrote this last night listening to fiona apple and just thinking abt phf and how fugo is 16 and giorno is 15 and they're probably not as in touch w their feelings like they might think they are :| or something lol

if u have thoughts or anything feel free to tell me in the comments :>

#peace out i will never write anything for this again #i think #fugio #fanfic #jjba #purple haze feedback #jojo's bizzare adventure #vento aureo #golden wind

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heeleys-the-musical · 3 years ago

Text

Ideas for Season 2 of 3rd Life

Happy one month anniversary of the ending of 3rd life season 1! I’ve still got the brainrot hard so please enjoy the thoughts that have been pinging around inside my brain like a DVD screensaver. In this post, I will present and defend changes I would like to see, storylines that could be used, and team-ups that I think would be entertaining.

Addition: Player Head Drops

If you watch Hermitcraft or Empires SMP, you may know of the Player Head Drops addon. For those that don’t know, it is a datapack that drops an item that is textured to look like a player’s head when that player is slain by pvp. This could add a new dimension to both roleplay and gameplay. For a morbid example, someone could mount the head of a slain enemy on a pike outside their base to warn off invaders. For more emotional impact, dead players would now have in-game remains so there’s an actual object to use when you bury your dead husband ally. For those less inclined to roleplay, the heads can be worn in the helmet armor slot and layer the texture over the player’s skin. This wouldn’t fool anyone at close range, but there is a lot of remote observation is 3rd Life. At a long distance, you can’t see a player name or its color, and in armor the only identifying feature would be the player’s head (this becomes more relevant in version 1.17 with the addition of the spyglass). Since helmets are banned, it wouldn’t be out of place to see someone heading out without headgear. Player heads could actually be used as an effective disguise. I think this change would add a fun new dimension to the game.

Plot Idea: Chosen One

In season 1, Martyn introduces the concept of some kind of divine being that is protecting and guiding him. The watchers mysterious voice seems angry that he did not win season 1, so why would they not redouble their efforts for the next try? Martyn is the chosen one, destined by the gods to be the last one standing in season 2. Ren is his head priest and they start a cult together (of course he has to team up with Ren again their dynamic is just *chef’s kiss*). I see Ren having a lot of fun with the ‘evangelizing preacher’ role. To convert people, they convince them of the concept of a shared win--if Martyn is the last one standing, everyone in the cult may consider that a victory. They could bring back Black Heart Altar and do more spooky blood sacrifices. It would also be really funny if they borrowed the ‘BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD’ meme.

A List of Potential Team-Ups

Grian and Etho: Etho is a lot more wholesome than we think. I know we were all psyched for a villian Etho arc after his tree burned, but it turns out he’s just a big softie. He constantly teased Bdubs and while he did fire missiles at the Crastle, killing was not his intention. Even when they were enemies, he never went too hard. Etho engaged in audio warfare and even says he doesn’t want Bdubs to die. He was loyal to the Red Army, but I think his heart was always with the Crastle. GRIAN, on the other hand, is a bloodthirsty gremlin who loves chaos. Scar may have guided the Sand Alliance, but Grian was the driving force. He got 5 kills while on his green life! I’m sure he would have gotten way more if he knew how to make working traps. Guess what Etho can do? These two would be a good team-up because they mutually simp respect each other and could play to each other’s strengths and weaknesses (and by that I mean Grain could lure Etho to the dark side). This would be a frightening team. Potential downsides: this may lead to Grian winning again. Counterpoint: the other players may recognize how powerful this team is and and take them out early.

Skizzleman and BdoubleO100: while these two didn’t interact much in season 1, they both have a level of voice control and manic energy that I think would play really well off each other. Could you imagine them in a yelling match? I would also add Joel to this mix, simply to encourage him to go crazy. His delivery of “THE RED KING DIES TONIGHT, FELLAS!” was in my opinion, the peak of his series, and the energy of this team could lead to more. As a counterweight, I would add Bigb to this team. He’s like a capybara; he just exudes chill. He could keep the team focused and prevent them from turning on each other. Someone has to be the responsible mom friend here.

Cleo and Scott: The Gays Star-Crossed Widows Alliance. I don’t know if these two have collaborated before, but It seems like these two get along really well. Cleo and the flower husbands had a secret alliance because they trusted each other, they had the widows alliance that never happened, and Scott even intended to put flowers on Cleo’s grave after she died. Plus, their dynamic is really fun. Imagine them running around heckling the roleplayers.

Jimmy and Scar: The Himbo Alliance. This one is kind of a joke but please just imagine this for a minute. Scar’s charisma stat is through the roof, and Jimmy is a trained MCC champion. Similar to how Scar performed in season 1, they could come off as so dumb and harmless that no one would expect them to come in from behind and sweep the competition. Honorable mention to Bdubs.

That’s all for now! I probably have more ideas but I just can’t put them into meaningful words yet. Signing off, this is a grown-ass adult who needs a hobby.

#3rd life smp #third life smp #haha hyperfixation go brrrr

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chiafett-moved · 4 years ago

Note

Using all the clones from ur high school au, what kind of civ clothing do you think they'd wear?

Okay okay okay I took some time and went to TOWN on this one so clone clothes below the cut

Fox:

First and foremost, Fox has his own pinterest board. There’s not much in the way of clothes there, but yeah.

Lots of red and black

Hoodies and jeans. Jeans and hoodies. Hoodies and Jeans

If you saw the shape of my body No You Didn’t 😁

Someone help him

Always dressed as though it’s approximately 20C. Sort of like a comic character who wears variations of the same outfit.

For someone who hates being perceived, he does wear some tight clothes

Overall, sort of unintentionally punk/emo and tired

Lip, tongue, and ear piercings

Hunter:

Also has two pinterest boards (butch AU and normal)

Cottagecore farmer. Lots of neutral tones and loose, soft fabrics

Loves knit things

Very picky about texture and fit. If it’s tight, it gets donated

Wears things until they fall apart. This does not take long

Soft, waterproof, ankle-high hiking boots that he wears everywhere

L a y e r s

Constantly putting his hair up or taking it down

Very concerned with taking care of his curls (and for good reason; they’re gorgeous)

Farmer’s tan n freckles

Tech:

Business casual some days, absolute trash others. There is no rhyme or reason.

If Hunter’s all about consistency, Tech is the opposite (autism vs ADHD in a nutshell lmfao)

Pockets are a must

He has a messenger bag a la Spencer Reid

Big ol’ glasses with a thick enough lens that you can see behind him if you look at the right angle

Converse

Has these awful graphic tees from the time he went to Goodwill with Hunter

Wrecker:

Big comfy sweaters like those ones they sell at Old Navy

Walking hug with steel-toed boots

He has trouble finding XXL Tall clothes that aren’t Barbecue Dad™ so he takes what he can get

Rips the knees of pants first

Rips the tags out of everything

Cannot match colors to save his life and hasn’t yet figured out the Hunter tactic of just owning neutral things

He has a lot of fun hats

Carhartt short sleeve shirts and jeans with sharpie and paint on them

If he can’t move in it, he doesn’t want it

Big fan of open short-sleeve button downs over tees

Constantly asking Tech to hold things for him (they get lost in the Bottomless Messenger Bag)

Crosshair:

Typical teenage boy with a side of edgy

You know those joggers with the puffy knees or the cargo pockets? Big wearer of those

Sneaker Snob

Once he dressed up for a school event and he looked so good but pretended not to notice

Big City Gay energy

Constantly has a pack of cigarettes on him, so he’s got to have a pocket for them. He’s got to have a pocket, right? I just can’t see it from here. There must be a pocket because otherwise where is he getting those he’s pulling them out of nowhere send reinforcements—

Steals Hunter’s worn-out, oversized flannels but he’s a tall bitch so they’re pretty normal on him. How is he making them look so edgy?

Dogma:

Wears the same outfit a concerning amount. Like, you don’t notice anything and then all the sudden he’s been wearing the same thing for two weeks. Doesn’t smell bad or anything, though, so ?????

Always put together, but in that way that’s kind of fraying around the edges

I don’t really know how to describe his clothes beyond a sort of vibe? Idk

He’s a really skinny guy and he loves clothes with angular shapes and hard edges, so he kind of looks like a stick figure with really cool geometric designs

He tries to look sort of formal and aloof, but it doesn’t work

His Manic Art Kid vibe is visible from space, though

He looks cute but in a freshman kind of way. Like, “aww, look at him!”

But also radiates the kind of energy that makes people highly concerned

Many ear piercings and one eyebrow piercing

Tall gangly and intimidating

Always carrying his backpack

Tup:

Basically Dogma but with softer edges and rounder shapes

The Ridiculously Well-Adjusted Art Kid

Always has paint somewhere

Looks like a mess but makes it work

Messy buns

Big fan of overalls and colorful shirts

Likes long sleeves

Converse out the ass, but in a ton of different colors

Big sweaters

People forget he’s tall and Stronk because the way he dresses makes him look small (oversized things do that)

Got his ears pierced when Dogma got his third helix, but let them close

Stacked bracelets

Echo:

Somehow soft punk meets varsity kid? He makes it work

Khaki pants but cool

Open zip-up hoodies and comfy, well-fitting tee shirts

Sneakers only, unless he has to be fancy

Sometimes wears fingerless gloves and refuses to explain why

Undercut

No I lied sometimes he wears stompy boots just because they’re at odds with the rest of his aesthetic

Basically big calm comfy vibes without looking sloppy or informal

Will wear button downs as normal shirts with jeans

Likes to do the graphic tee over thermal shirt thing

Joggers

SKATER BOY. That’s the word I was thinking of. Soft skater boy (he and Fives both skate)

Fives:

Band tees and jeans

Not a fan of shorts. Has anyone ever seen his legs?

Constantly has this big-ass set of headphones around his neck

Beanies

Also a graphic tee and thermal shirt layerer

Rarely not wearing jeans

Sometimes wears pajamas to school specifically to piss off teachers

Snapbacks

Paints his nails a variety of colors, but mostly black. Somehow the polish is always chipped

Big wearer of Vans, actually is a skater

Tears through the elbows of his jeans jackets falling

Cody:

Gay smart kid. Debate team captain. Soccer captain. Looks better than you. Looks better than the teachers. Could kill you.

He wears a lot of half-zips and khakis, but makes it look less nerdy than usual

Sports paraphernalia helps. Hard to look nerdy when the zip-up you’re wearing is from wrestling Nationals

When he wears tee-shirts, they’re always tight? Does he buy them a size small on purpose? (yes, yes he does)

Collector of those really nice zip-up hoodies with the geometric designs that make them look really nice and neat

Actually wears sunglasses when it’s sunny

Has never been seen in a hat

Neyo:

Oh god oh fuck DIY punk? He’s oh god he’s

Neyo my dear that sweatshirt is falling apart

Neyo is. Troubled and in a Bad home. His clothing choices reflect this.

He does not want to touch or be touched and he wants to look cool doing it

Stoner kid but Spiky

And also he doesn’t actually smoke

Wears combat boots that look like they’ve seen blood

Skinny jeans bc he’s edgy and cool

Patch pants/vest

Also has a pinterest board

Bacara:

Bland depressed kid. Jeans and dark hoodies

Seriously he’s just trying to vibe. He wants to be comfy and he doesn’t want to draw a ton of attention

Black converse

Constantly has a farmer’s tan

Not a fan of short sleeves

Thinks Neyo looks ridiculous

Has never been dress coded in his life

Seriously Bacara’s idea of spicing up an outfit is wearing like. A polo.

#anon #ask tag #bacara #neyo #tech #wrecker #echo #fives #hunter #crosshair #cody #dogma #tup #fox #star wars #my headcanons #mikey's headcanons #high school au

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trojc-rewrite · 4 years ago

Text

The Rise of Jimmy Casket Rewrite, Chapter 6

TW - grotesque imagery, gore

——————————————————————————

The morning had gone pretty smoothly, downing eggs and water early in the morning so Ghost could rent a car and bring Toast to the nearest walk-in clinic, and then brought him to a nearby hospital for stitches. The wound needed at least 4, and Toast was grossed out by how the stitches looked in his skin, the way his wound felt tight whenever he moved his leg. It made his face wrinkle in grimace.

Toast sat in the car on the way back from the hospital, still recovering from the anasthasia, everything felt light and yet so heavy, his eye lids threatened to fall, and he was sure he was making absolutely no sense whatsoever cause Ghost chuckled at everything he said.

Some weird pop song played on the radio, filling a silence that Toast didn’t even register was there. It wasn’t until Ghost started talking that he realized the quiet.

“Hey, Toast.” Toast turned to him, his head felt weird when he moved, like instead of a brain he had a bowl of cold soup in his head. But he forced himself to look serious, he was starting to calm down from the anasthasia anyways, so he could manage something of the nature.

“Yes, sir?” He mumbled out, it took a lot to form an articulated sentence, one that actually made sense.

Ghost parked in the hotel parking lot, sighing a small bit.

“Toast, I just want to apologize again. I am so sorry for leaving you to deal with P.I.E, it was such a shitty move on my part.” Ghost said.

“No, no sir, it's all right.” He managed. Ghost shook his head.

“No, it’s not.” He said, frustrated. He grabbed Toasts hands in his own, sighing. “Look, let me apologize because we both know this never happens. I’m sorry, for being such a shitty friend and boss. You, whether I like or not, are now kinda the leader. And I’ve been feeling like shit for leaving you to deal with it. I’m sorry.”

Toast blinked, kind of shocked. He blinked, not really knowing what to say.

“I accept your apology sir. But now that we’re all together, we need to start working as a team. And, if I may add this in, you might want to apologize to Spooker and especially Colon for leaving sir.” Toast said quietly.

Ghost raised his brow, staring at him with his green eye.

Toast nodded, “They were very hurt when you left. They look up to you. Colon was just telling me about his frustrations with you just the other night. “

Ghost looked lost, “But what would I say?”

Toast smiled at him. “You’ll know when the time comes. It will be genuine.”

Ghost licked his teeth nervously, before nodding. “Okay, lets go get Colon and Spooker. A walk will do us good.”

Ghost helped Toast up to the hotel room, getting ready for the walk. It had been a while where Toast could just relax, and he was hyped for a nice walk.

They walked late into the night, watching the sun go down behind the trees as the sky melted from blue, to purple and gold. The moon hung high over head, so clear and bright. It casted silver shadows across the forest floor, leaves dappling the light.

Toast was walking with Colon, the tall man helping him support himself. He also took a few times to point out an animal or two.

One time, a doe had crossed their path with a fawn in toe and they all had to pretend they weren’t there. Afterwards, Spooker had almost melted into the ground, crying about how cute it was.

The leaves above them ruffled, a cold gasp of air rolling over them. Toast smiled, feeling refreshed.

A small stream trickled near them, a few leaves following the current. Frogs hopped over the rocks, moonlight reflecting off the cloudy water.

Spooker turned to the stream, his eyes round in awe. “Oh my God! Frogs!” He whispered excitedly. He knelt down, his knees squelching in mud. He held out his hand, reaching out for a frog. The frog jumped into the water before he could catch it.

He turned to another, and another, until finally. “Aha! I got one!” He whispered, picking up the frog gently. The green amphibian let out a small ribbit, hopping around in his palms.

“I’m gonna name you, Fredrick.” He cooed, petting the amphibians back. Ghost made a disgusted face.

“Ew- you’re naming it after yourself?” He said, raising a brow. Spooker stuck out his tongue, gently putting the frog back in the grass.

“No. My name is Fred.” He emphasized, “The frog's name is Fredrick.”

Ghost rolled his eye jokingly, a smile cracking onto his face ever so slightly.

“Well I for one, love Fredrick.” Toast said with a smile, watching the frog hop away.

“Thank you T-“

Spooker was cut off by a loud rustling noise, coming from far ahead. Toast snapped his head up, glaring into the dark. His fight of flight senses kicked in, his only instinct to protect his friends.

He limped forwards, being careful not to step on any twigs, or anything else that would cause a loud noise. Moss squished under his feet, splashing quietly.

Ghost hissed from behind him, “No, Toast!” He whispered. Toast ignored him, pulling out his gun from his side holster.

He entered a thicket, wet leaves pointed at him. He felt uneasy, and jumped as a bug flew past his face.

Then, with the speed of a snake, something lunged from the bushes with a wide, yellowed smile.

He was pushed to the ground, his gun knocking out of his hand. He rolled over, pain blasting throughout his body.

He grabbed it, sitting up and fired. The shot rang out, Toast’s ears rang with silence, the world going quiet.

The shadowy figure stood in mist that seemed to come from nowhere, eyes staring at him from the fog.

It loomed over him, walking forward.

“Hey Toaster. It’s been a while!” It whispered excitedly, it’s red eyes wide.

It leaned forward, it’s face close to his. It smelled like rotting flesh; the acrid smell hitting him in the face. Sour and rotten.

It’s skin was pale, cheek bones exposed. It had matted, dark brown hair. Dirt covered it’s cheeks, a thin lipped smile crossed it’s face.

Toast blinked, shuffling away from it.

“Who- what?” He asked. Confusion clouded Toast’s gaze. ‘Who is this?’

The figure frowned. “I can’t believe you don’t remember me! But, it’s been a while since I’ve been in this form. So allow me to introduce myself.”

He stuck out his pale hand, long bloody fingernails pointed at him.

“Jimmy Casket. World renowned murderer.”

Toast let out a long, shuddering breath. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Jimmy’s frame was thin, long arms covered in bandages. He wore an unzipped blue hoodie, tattered at the edges, sleeves rolled up. Under the hoodie was a red shirt. His clothes were all bloodstained and crusty, hardened from dried fluids.

His eyes had yellow and red around the outsides, sunken in with deep eye bags. A long, sickly scar crossed the side of his face. It pulled up his lip, exposing his reddened gums and teeth base. They were blackened at the roots. Stringy saliva webbed between his teeth as he opened his mouth.

He laughed, blood splattering on Toast’s clothes. Toast gagged, fighting off the urge to vomit.

“What do you want from me?” He asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Jimmy smiled wider, his sunken eyes growing wide with manic. His breath stank like carrion, blood bubbling from the back of his throat.

“To watch you suffer, until you die!” He cackled.

Suddenly Jimmy’s body jerked to the side, blood splattering on the side of his head. He staggered to the side, trying to catch his balance. His eyes grew empty.

Ghost jumped through the bushes, charging for the spirit. Colon came out with his gun drawn, Spooker rushing to Toast’s side.

“I’m okay!” Toast said urgently. Spooker helped him up as Colon shot at Jimmy, blood splattering on his outfit.

The spirit fell to the ground, his eyes empty. The two investigators breathed heavily, blood on their outfits.

Colon and Ghost turned to Toast, eyes round and horrified. “You dumbass!” Ghost yelled.

Colon rolled his eyes, putting his gun back in his holster.

“I’ll be okay don- COLON LOOK OUT!” Toast screamed.

Jimmy lunged onto Colon, grappling him from the back. His long nails digging into his face. Ghost turned, grabbing Colon's hand and ripping him from the ghost. Toast pulled out his gun again.

“Get away from us you bastard!” Toast cried, aiming the gun at him.

Jimmy laughed, raising his hands. He gave him a sly look.

“Didn’t you guys just ‘kill’ me, do you think a gun is going to do anything to me?” He said slyly.

Ghost bared his teeth. “What do you want you ugly fucker?” He said, pulling out his pocket knife.

Jimmy gave him a semi injured look.

“Look, you guys can’t kill me.” He said, with somewhat of a suave energy.

“You can’t kill a highly leveled ghost with puny human weapons. The only way to kill me is to be a ghost yourselves.” He laughed, his head rearing back in estaticsm.

“The only way to get rid of me is for me to be inside one of your minds again! Or else I’ll be here forever, picking all of you off one by one.” He said with an evil grin.

Ghost faltered, his angry expression twitching to hopelessness.

Jimmy loomed closer to Ghost, his face inches away from his. He looked angry, but betrayal lingered in the ghost’s red eyes.

“Until none of you are left.” He whispered angrily.

Ghost stared at him, cowering under his gaze. His eye was wide, eyebrows furrowed. Jimmy looked angry, yet sly.

Ghost stammered. “I- I-“

Toast took his arm, “Let’s go!” He yelled.

Colon shot at Jimmy again, hitting him with a bullet in the eye. Jimmy staggered backwards, letting out a cry of pain as red hot blood squirted from his face. He grabbed his face, anger filling his face.

Toast grabbed Spooker by the arm and they ran through the forest. Leaves got in his way, he narrowly dodged them.

Jimmy yowled from yards behind them, sprinting after them. Toast's feet barely hit the ground as he ran. Ghost ran beside him, panting wildly.

Colon ran behind them, his gun trained on Jimmy, occasionally shooting. Spooker looked hopeless, wanting to help Colon.

They reached the hotel room, slamming the door behind them. They all waited in tense silence, everyone keeping their eyes on the door.

After about 20 minutes of staring, Toast let out a sigh and fell onto the bed. “I think we’re okay.” He said.

Ghost screwed his eye shut, a sob escaping his throat.

“What are we going to do?!” He yelled, throwing a pillow at the wall.

For once, Toast did not have an answer.

——————————————————————————

FINALLY, we get to see the dude in the NAME OF THE FUCKING STORY!!!

#paranormal investigators extraordinaire #venturiantale #p.i.e #johnny ghost #johnny toast #jimmy casket #venturiantale pie #colon ghostie #fred spooker

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boop-le-snoot · 4 years ago

Text

PARTY FAVOURS I CHAPTER 9

As promised, two chapters in one day! HBD to this trash rabbit. I just get thirstier with age.

Rating: Explicit.

‼️TW: Reader is EIGHTEEN! Recreational drug use, smoking and alcohol consumption, deeply internalised self-loathing, very questionable moral standards. Daddy kink taken half-seriously. BDSM themes in later chapters - explicit content will come with it's own TWs. FIRST PERSON POV. DRUG USE IN THIS CHAPTER. Just generally an uncomfortable vibe, thread carefully.

Summary: You're Peter's classmate, a child of rich and famous but uncaring parents. Getting paired up for a lengthy project with the boy was an interesting turn of events and you don't know whether to feel blessed or cursed when you develop, seemingly, a perfectly normal, harmless crush on Tony Stark. Fueled by feelings of inadequacy and boredom, your life spirals out of control - and you're lucky your newfound friends are there to pick up the pieces even if you cannot find it in yourself to believe these amazing human (and not so human) beings voluntarily give you more than a fleeting glance and an offhanded thought. And they brought cake!

A/N: Ooh, boy. This is a whole mess. Angst. [insert drugs owl meme]. Steve doesn't pass the vibe check yet again, stupid old man. Bruce + Tony be like: I CAN'T GET NO SLEEP CUZ OF Y'ALL.

My beta, whomst I love more than cake - @miscmarvelwritings . She's so beautiful though. And so smart. Wow.

The strobe lights pulsated to the rhythm of the music, bodies swaying, gyrating to the tune. The club was banging this time of night, people were living it up like there was no tomorrow. For me, in the VIP zone it was quieter, calmer, but no less exciting. The atmosphere here was distinctly different from the one on the main floor.

It was hard to wallow in misery even if it only took me an hour to stop resisting the gratuitous amounts of white powder on the silver platters. "It's better when you're there to watch them, they'll do it anyway but at least you can know that they're getting the good stuff!" My idiot father proudly announced, looking at me snorting a line through a rolled up hundred dollar bill.

Whiskey and vodka wasn't doing it for me. It made me feel low and Dad, being Dad, of course noticed it and immediately called a guy who knew a guy and suddenly all of his friends and their baby-faced companions had white under their noses. Cash flew like autumn leaves.

As I went out to the main dance floor to get a closer look at Billie Eilish in all of her edgy, beautiful self, the drug hit me like an avalanche. No trace of the grogginess or the mortification that had hitched a ride on me from Stark tower. I danced and sang and saw dad smiling at me in approval, his equally high and important friends all wearing identically predatory smirks. They were good at spotting the obvious - beauty, talent, money. I had no qualms about the fact that dad was off bragging about my close relationship with Tony. If my father was feeling particularly bold, he'd be telling them he knew and encouraged it all along, his buddies pretending to believe the white lie in turn.

I had exchanged my pants and sneakers in favour of a skirt and fishnets with high heels combo, a decidedly inappropriate attire for a daughter having a family night with her father but he insisted I dress trendy. I loved my dad, I really did, and I knew he meant well - I'd definitely be out of place amongst these TVscreen worthy people in my jeans and sneakers but...Tony was one of those people, and he had never ever said anything bad about the way I dress. Even when I obviously and purposely put on obscene clothing just to get a rise out of someone.Tony just smiled and played along.

Tony Stark was the heartless asshole here? Really, press? Really, haters?

"Standing there, killing time, can't commit to anything but a crime..." I sang along quietly as I hurried back to the VIP area. My dad was standing up and so were a couple of his buddies. "Where's ya goin'?" I asked, taking a seat.

"Be right back baby girl, if you find better company then go on without us," Dad winked, throwing a totally nasty glance at one of the girls. She was not much older than me but her body was stick thin and bolt-ons and Botox were her two best friends. She gave me a dirty look and I returned it, extending a waiting hand towards my dad. He chuckled, depositing a neatly rolled stack of hundreds into my palm.

"Dad, I want a new purse," I whined, just a tad. Just to see the girl's eyes go wide with acrid envy. Dutifully, another couple of stacks landed in my palm without any objections and the company retreated towards the back door.

I sighed.

Fiddled with the straw of my drink a bit, contemplating my options. I could always ditch this party and go somewhere more active, somewhere with better music and kinder people.

"Ay, baby girl, you wanna party with us?" A tall, handsome man from dad's previous company approached me. "We'll have some fun." He maintained a respectful distance but the intentions were clear.

"Nope," I popped the sound, not even sparing him a glance. A few lines of cocaine stared at me from the table beckoning with a better high, a stronger sense of euphoria, confidence and energy to dance, to sing, to be happy. I picked up one of the discarded banknotes, quickly rolling it by a sheer force of habit and cleaning up the tray. One line.

"Holy shit, is that..."

Two lines.

"The fuck?!" I recognised that voice. I have been hearing it every day in the labs, I've been hearing it in my dreams.

Tony was gaping at me, in front of me.

"Hey, Tony. Fancy seeing you here." Any other time, I'd be cringing at my lame greeting but I was feeling way too good to care about trivial things like being clever or being appropriate.

"I was looking...for you," He slowly said, putting a single finger on the tray with the last line of coke and pulling it out of my reach.

"That's funny," I snorted, hastily wiping at my nose to cover the tracks of my very bad, very immoral, very illegal activities.

"It's not, Princess, it's not funny at all," He frowned. "C'mon, we're leaving." And extended his hand. I decided to follow along - there was nothing for me to do at this club anyway, the music was lame and the people were stuck-up.

"I look like a prostitute, Tony, I'll take the back door," I attempted to pull him towards the aforementioned but he didn't budge, just stared straight ahead and towed me along like he was wearing one of his iron suits under the stylish jeans and tee get-up.

He stopped in front of the exit, giving me a critical once over. Wiped my face, again, brushed my hair back. Gave me his shades - I dutifully put them on, figuring the manic look in my eyes was anything but attractive right now. "Jesus Christ, Princess," He sounded desperate. "You're beautiful, don't you fucking worry."

And we made our exit, arm in arm, me trying not to stumble in my high heels, Tony being my rock, my solid foundation. In other words, I was hanging onto him for dear life trying not to fall over and give a reason for a sneaking paparazzi to make a scandalous headline.

"You're doing great, Princess," Tony helped me into his Tesla, slamming the door behind me and hurrying towards the driver's door. I managed to unclasp and kick off my shoes, curling up comfortably into the passenger's seat.

I watched the man as he started the engine and watched him wrestle with whatever personal demons that tormented him as he peeled off and raced into the Friday night city.

"What in the everlasting fuck..." He started, stopping abruptly mid-sentence. "How did you even get in there?"

"I came with dad. He literally ditched me to fuck some whore, like, twenty minutes before you showed up." I shrugged, eyeing the modified panel of the car. It was very obviously Tony's own design. I wondered if he could introduce me to Elon Musk someday.

"What the fuck? And correct me if I didn't hear you clearly," Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. "Your father took it upon himself to drag you to a club, get you drunk, gave you cocaine and fucked off with some groupies?"

"Yah, that's about it. My dad is all about cocaine and whores, the more the better," I replied, leaning in to take a closer look at the car's panel. "Hey, could, like, introduce me to Elon Musk someday? That would be fuckin' awesome."

Tony went eerily quiet, I saw his knuckles on the steering wheel go white. Vague expletives were muttered under his breath. "I'm guessing you're good on sleep?" He finally asked through gritted teeth.

"Sleep? Don't know her," I laughed. "I wanna dance, Tony."

"Of course you do, Princess." His smile was tired and forced and full of pity. "You know, I don't think I'll be able to sleep now, either," He admitted, taking a sharp left. "How about we get some McDonald's and camp out in my lab?"

"Sure, whatever," Not like I had much choice in the matter. What I really craved was a good, long, hard fuck (by Tony himself preferably) but if science calls... I have no choice but to comply. "Get me two Big Macs," I demanded least he try to joke and get me a Happy Meal or some shit.

He did get me the food without any usual grumbling. I didn't like this Tony. Tired Tony, sad Tony, angry Tony. Wrong Tony.

"Huh?" He said and I realized I'd said the last part out loud.

"I don't like a sad Tony,” I said. "It's the wrong kind. Sassy, snarky and perpetually caffeinated Tony is the best Tony. The only proper kind, in fact." I stated with seriousness, shoes dangling from one hand and my McDonald's in the other. Man, I have been seeing more and more of this god-damned elevator recently.

"You're high as a kite, darling," He chuckled then, a real laugh.

"Who's high?" Bruce's voice came from the kitchen.

In a state of blind panic, I jumped behind Tony. "Not me."

Tony palmed his face.

Steve came over from the fridge, leaving the rummaging to Bucky. He took one look at me and suddenly I felt small, insignificant like an ant. I didn't like it much. "Holy hell, the fuck happened? Tony, explain." The Captain demanded, giving me the world's biggest stink eye.

"It's her piece of shit of a father, dragged her off to some night club and left her hanging with his buddies, fucking off god knows where. It's not her fault so lay the fuck off, Rogers, with your self-righteousness," Tony exploded all over Steve, the pent up frustration rearing it's ugly head.

I mustered enough courage to tiptoe around the dick measuring contest to sit at the counter. My appetite was gone and my burgers were turning colder and soggier with every passing second. Just like my life.

"Hey, Princess," Bruce's gentle voice halted my train of thought. He approached me carefully, ignoring the men behind me in favour of simply wrapping me up in a quiet, comfortable hug. "You feel alright? Want some water?"

"Nu-uh," I mumbled, unwilling to part ways with the warmth of this embrace.

"... Steve, I found her snorting miles of coke all by herself while an some jackass was waiting for her to be even more out of it. It's rare that I say this but I had literally zero words." Tony punctuated his words by tapping his fist against the wall multiple times.

Bruce tightened his hold on me, a sudden influx of strength accompanied by a quiet, low growl in his throat.

I felt the sudden need to clarify the situation. "Tony, chill. It takes me a lot more to be out of it, I'm fucking coherent and I'm talking sensibly. It's not my first rodeo."

Apparently I'd gone and said the wrong thing because all the men in the room were suddenly growling. I even totally forgot about Bucky who had the uncanny ability to exist in a room without making absolutely any sort of noise.

"The fuck do you even mean by that, Princess?" Tony screeched, probably already knowing that answer.

"From one rich kid to another, you should damn well fuckin' know," I spat, unwilling to admit my misery.

He sighed, audibly deflating behind me. I refused to listen to him, refused to be humiliated and exposed like that for my perfectly human desire to be happy. To not be a disappointment, to not be disappointed in everything and everyone. Bruce was nice and kind and warm and selfless but even he couldn't love me the way I wanted to be loved. Cherished, taken care of. All that mushy stuff. I was selfish, so I snuggled in closer to him, muting the world around me, replacing it with the smell and feel of him.

Cocaine made it a whole lot easier to imagine. Maybe that's why it was so addictive.

"Guys, calm down, you're stressing everyone out," Bruce rumbled quietly. I loved the way his deep voice seemed to reverb throughout his chest.

"Get me a cup of coffee, would you, Buckaroo?" Tony sighed again. I heard the sound of him slurping at his coffee. I heard Bucky's metal arm clunk against something equally metallic before the supersoldiers bid everyone good night and walked off.

Only then I removed my face from Bruce enough to take a good look at Tony. He was eyeing me, too.

"We have a caffeinated Tony," I said, softly. "Now we just need some science to have a happy Tony."

He smiled but it came out watery. He wanted to say something but choked on his words. "C'mere," He finally said, turning in his chair and opening his arms.

I unashamedly made grabby hands, the universal gesture for ‘I want, gimme’, and Bruce delightfully deposited me into Tony's waiting arms. It was like my birthday and Christmas came out all at once. Tony's embrace was warm, like Bruce's, but tinted with an unexpected familiarity. He smelled like motor oil and fancy cologne. It was heavenly.

"You keeping tabs on me, huh? Coffee, science and sass? That's your recipe for happiness?" The engineer asked me, a seriousness that didn't match the joking tone of the conversation at all.

"I think I got you figured out. Peter, too, is important for happiness. But in controlled amounts," I said, giving it a careful thought.

Tony chuckled, sounding a little bit shocked. "What about you?" He said after a brief moment of silence passed, interrupted only by Bruce's tea kettle coming to a slow boil.

"I don't think you need me for happiness," I said, meaning it. "But let's be honest, I'm a nice addition."

He stilled under me, briefly. Bruce cleared his throat.

"Brucie needs me, I think. He's lonely," I told Tony with a sudden influx of desire to be completely honest and 100% transparent. "And it makes me happy, because I need Bruce too. He's the best," I finished.

"Is that so?" Tony sounded vaguely tearful so I attempted to pull back to take a good look at his face. He didn't let me though, gently but firmly pressing my face back into his chest. "And me?"

"I do need you, Tones," I admitted without spilling any unnecessary details.

There was a child within me, small and scared and lonely, like Bruce. I hated her, hated being so soft and needy when everybody else obviously (and understandably) was busy with figuring out their own lives. I wished, desperately so, to just boom-boom-whoosh her away like Doctor Strange magicked away unwanted visitors.

Tony said nothing but his hands betrayed him. They shook and they held onto the skimpy see-through fabric of my top like he was a drowning man and I was his only floatie. For the moment, I closed my eyes and let myself believe he needed me, too.

"I'll catch a wink or two, wake me up if you need something," Bruce broke the silence, having finished off his tea. I didn't notice the time pass so quickly, too lost somewhere between here and there and Tony. In short, I was being lovesick all over the billionaire.

"Bwucie," I leaned backwards, pushing until Tony caved and let me rest my back against the counter, elbows on top of it, legs dangling freely on the sides of his legs. It put a lot of me on display. Tony had called me beautiful earlier so none of my usual habits of being appropriate around the man concerned me. He thought I was pretty!

"Princess," Banner came over to wrap me in a hug that was quite awkward, considering the fact I was sitting on Tony. It took some maneuvering to get it right.

"Night night," I said the usual and got a brief kiss on the cheek before Bruce shuffled off, yawning.

Tony was watching us with an unreadable expression. As soon as I turned my head to look at his face instead, something in him changed. His eyes grew big and round, the crease between his eyebrows disappeared. The corners of his mouth tilted up.

On a sudden impulse, I reached over to run my palm gently over the neatly trimmed line of his beard, following from his chin to his jawline, to his soft tousled hair. His eyelashes shook, fluttered, as the engineer leaned into my touch with the grace of a cat. "Kiss him, kiss him" my brain chanted. I knew I was a coward, I wouldn't do that. "Pretty," I said instead, the word coming out in a whisper.

He gulped, audibly. "Princess, you have no idea..." Shaking his head, as if he was surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes, Tony briefly looked away. "You have no idea what you're doing."

"Nope," I agreed solemnly. "But at least it feels good. It feels right."

"God," He frowned, one of his hands coming to nervously card through his hair. "Nothing about this is right."

My face fell. Just like I thought, Tony wanted exactly nothing to do with a clueless little teenager. It stung and tears pooled in the corners of my eyes where I stubbornly refused to let them escape and make me into a crybaby. "Whatever you say, Tony." I was ready to agree with anything he said, really, if he would just keet holding me like that.

"Don't," He raised a palm. "Don't close yourself off like that."

Now I was genuinely confused. What exactly did he expect from me? I shrugged.

"You're clever, brilliant and beautiful, you can and should do so much better than all of this," He vaguely gestured towards me, towards himself, towards us and the whole damn city.

I contemplated my answer, briefly. "A lot of people tell me what I should and shouldn't be doing. Don't I get a say?" The bitterness had fought its way out and won. "I just want to be happy for a bit. All the usual bullshit."

He looked taken aback, really. Like he hadn't even considered the option. Typical.

Meanwhile, I continued my word vomit. "I want someone to give a damn about what I want and what makes me happier. Until then, I have no other choice but to take care of myself the best way I know how. Like everybody else does," The weight of his arm landed on my waist, pulling me close to his chest yet again. I didn't resist. No fight left in me. The tiredness seeped deep in my bones, chilly.

The sudden change of altitude startled me. The engineer had picked me up and started walking off towards the elevator, directing it to the lab. His personal lab. The tiles felt cold under my feet where he put me down to make his own beeline for the bar. I would've joined if not the drug in my system - the last thing I wanted was to land in a hospital yet again.

I took the moment to browse my social media, untag myself from all the unflattering pictures, post my usual shitpost. A tiny skirt, equally tiny top and fishnets - I felt out of place in his lab although I've worn more outrageous things previously. I was raw, torn open, bleeding my misery all over the room. That was not in my plan, but then again, when did ever life go as you planned it?

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @another-stark-sub @mostly-marvel-musings @vozit @littlegasps @pilloclock @shereadsinquiet @downeyreads @hermione-grangers-wife @individualistfem @as-i-layhereinyourbed @sleep-i-ness @gigglyfox01

please check your blog settings before tag request or, alternatively, follow the "party favours" tag itself if Tumblr doesn't let me tag you - it does that for some reason. love you all 3000.

#party favours #bun writes #stephen strange x you #stephen strange x reader #Stephen Strange x y/n #bruce banner x you #bruce banner x y/n #bruce banner x reader #tony stark x y/n #tony stark x reader #tony stark x you

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that-bi-bitch-writes · 3 years ago

Text

P S Y C H (ch.4)

We’re getting to the good parts my beloveds. Enjoyyy

Previous // Next

“UA is known for its ‘freestyle’ education system.” Aizawa began “That applies to us teachers too. Soft ball throwing, the standing long jump, the 50 meter dash, endurance running, grip strength, side-to-side stepping. Upper body training. This country still insists on prohibiting quirks when calculating the averages of those records. It’s not rational.

The class stood in shocked silence. [Name] who had read Aizawa’s mind before he began his rant, started sweating anxiously. He had a massively powerful quirk but still lacked confidence in himself. He could not just decide to show off for the class and unlock the full capabilities of his quirk. He was someone motivated by spite and emotions. And it could’ve been his proximity to the successor of OFA but the only emotion he felt in the moment was anxiety.

[Name] had gone so far off the deep end getting lost in his own thoughts that the sound of Aizawa calling his name made him realize he had zoned out for what felt like a few minutes and hadn’t had enough time to talk himself out of the corner he’d been backed into. “[L.Name]. How far could you throw in middle school?”

“50 meters I think”

“Great. Now try it with your quirk. Do whatever you need to. Just don’t leave the circle. Give it all you’ve got”

‘HA! I could throw 67 meters in middle school. This shitty extra only beat me on the practical exam because he focused on saving the other extras while I took down villains. His achievements don’t matter.’

[Name]’ eyes glowed gold immediately grabbing the attention of a few of his classmates, especially a certain blond and green haired duo. [name] began tossing the ball up in the air and catching it, wondering if he was gonna just levitate the ball from a standing position. It would be an awesome feat to just make it seem like the ball was doing the work. But then he decided he was gonna keep his classmates on their toes. He widened his stance, left foot in front of the right kind of like a baseball player up to bat, took a deep breath and lightly flicked his wrist.

“It’s important for us to know our limits.” Aizawa said as he turned the device he was holding up for the class to see ‘That’s the first rational step to figuring out what kind of heroes you’ll be”

“Wow this is awesome” “800 METERS???” “He flicked his wrist like he was skipping rocks!!??”

[Name] took pleasure in his classmates' shock. He could of course feel insulted at the implication he would be weak and useless. But their awe not only stroked his ego but eased his anxiety of constantly being one step behind everyone else. He had huge shoes to fill, being one of God’s chosen.

“Awesome.. You say? You’re hoping to become heroes after three years??! And you think it’ll be all fun and games?”

A pin dropped.

“Right. The one with the lowest score across all eight events will be judged HOPELESS and will be expelled.”

‘Aizawa uh…’

“Where the fuck is that voice coming from” [Name] whispered to himself as he whipped around

“Your fates are in our hands” the homeroom teacher continued with a manic look on his face “Welcome. This is… The Hero Course at U.A High!”

‘I’m a little scared’ [Name] thought ‘But loving the drama’

“The lowest score will be expelled,” a student said “It’s only the first day! I mean even if it weren’t that’s totally unfair!!”

“Natural disasters… Highway pileups, rampaging villains, calamity is always right around the corner. I’d say Japan is full of unfair things. Heroes are the ones who correct all that unfairness. If you were hoping to spend your evenings hanging out at McDonald’s... I'm Sorry to tell you that for the next three years U.A will run you through the ringer”

“I think he reached his word limit for today”

“That’s plus Ultra. Use your strength to overcome it all. So bring it”

“Nope I was wrong he’s still going.”

[Name] did not feel motivated by Aizawa’s speech. He knew there was no way with the way his class reacted to his softball pitch that he would be in last place, so he wasn’t exactly worried about being expelled, but instead he was trying to think of a way to avoid doing too much exercise. Fear of failure vs a deep hate of exercise round one was about to begin. THe exercise? Running.

When it was his turn [Name] made his eyes glow as he focused his telekinesis in his feet, making them lighter just as he picked his feet up. Sort of like another girl in his class. People can call him a copycat all they want but he considered learning from others’ failures and successes a necessary skill for all heroes in training.

He pretty much did the same thing for all the tests, using his kinetic blasts for more force when necessary like the standing long jump. The slide stepping event was in his opinion lame and unnecessary so he actually got a pretty average score for that one. His grip without using his quirk was 60kg but when using his quirk he crushed the device easily.

When it came time to the throwing event [Name] paid close attention to his classmates. He was the one to beat and so, he felt less like some creep and more like… an opponent scouting out the competition. There were three people he decided were dangerous should they develop their quirks more aggressively. The ash blond who (bakugou he reminded his inner monologue) who scored 705.2 using his explosion quirk, the cute brunette with the gravity quirk and the man of the hour, Izuku Midoriya.

When Midoriya first threw the ball he scored a measly 46 meters and froze in shock. Apparently that’s when he realized who exactly their homeroom teacher was. [Name] might’ve done a little… digging but it still isn’t like he knew who “The Erasure Hero: Eraser Head” was. Said underground hero seemed in [Name]’s terms “smart enough” and immediately made a connection between Midoriya and All Might but failed to grasp just how deep the connection grew. Through a little tough love Aizawa had the OFA successor draw out the limits of his quirk without serious injury, shocking everyone, including All Might and Aizawa himself.

“!!!”

“Oh no please no fighting someone please stop this” [name] sarcastically drawled as Bakugou launched himself at Midoriya.”What the hell? Explain yourself DEKU!”

“Wahh”

‘?’

[Name]’s fun was spoiled as Aizawa quickly restrained Bakugou. “What is this??” “It’s a capture weapon made of carbon fibers and a special alloy wire. Stop using your quirk already.. I’m getting dry eye over here”

“Okay I think I like this teacher” [Name] though aloud

“Shota Aizawa!”

‘A voiceover???’

“He can nullify the quirk of anyone he looks at! But the effect wears off if he blinks”

“What a waste of time” Aizawa continued “Prepare for the next event.”

When the events were over everyone gathered to see their ranking. [Name] tried to subtly wipe his sweat in order to keep up the air of his achievements being effortless. Unfortunately he was also mouth breathing so sweat or no sweat everyone knew he was at least a little winded.

“Moving along. Time for the results. Our total scores simply reflect your performance in each of the events. Explaining the process would be a waste of time, so all you get are the final rankings”

‘He’s totally gonna be my favorite teacher. If anything bad happens to him I will kill everyone and then myself’[Name] thought to himself a little too honestly

“Also I was lying about expelling someone”

“?????”

“That was a rational deception meant to bring out the best in all of you”

“Well of course it was a lie” Ponytail said confidently “Didn’t take much to figure that out”

Aizawa, who didn’t want to admit that it wasn’t a TOTAL lie, just excused himself and gave Midoriya a pass to the nurse to heal his finger. [Name] unconcerned for the green haired boy went to take a look at his ranking to find out he was once again first among the students who took the general admittance exams and third out of the total class

‘It was totally the sidestep thing wasn’t it’ he thought to himself before trailing after Aizawa to ask him an important question. He noticed All Might and Aizawa talking and stayed a couple steps behind knowing that he could stay out of sight, keep an eye on Aizawa and eavesdrop using his telepathy. Once they were finished [Name] appeared behind Aizawa and gave All might a polite greeting, shocking the two pros

“[L.Name] go home”

“Just a moment sir I had a question for you. The telepath said before looking at All Might. The giant hero didn’t get the memo “Privately”

“Ah! Yes. I must be on my way. Good day Aizawa! [L.Name]-kun”

“What is it?”

“I noticed that some teachers had… favorites”

“And you think you’re mine?”

“No but I think you’ll be my favorite so I was hoping to get a little ahead of the curve. I was wondering if you could teach me some hand to hand that I could incorporate into my quirk”

“Incorporate?”

“I’m telekinetic amongst other things and I can’t just rely on throwing random objects at an opponent, so I want to reinforce my blows with kinetic energy, that way they pack a bigger punch”

“...I’ll let you know [L.Name]. Go home”

“Thank you sir”

“Yeah”

#bnha x male reader #mha x male #x male reader #mha x male reader #male reader #male reader insert #P S Y C H #that bi bitch writes #that-bi-bitch-writes

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davidmann95 · 4 years ago

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sooo... the snyder cut's out

I liked the Snyder Cut. This sucks.

Me thinking about this movie, apparently

Do I think it has revolutionized superhero cinema forever? Nah, if nothing else it mostly plays it too unexpectedly safe for that. But this was evidently always going to be his version of a straight take superhero teamup adventure after BvS, and as it turns out, he’s really good at that? There’s a better version of this that trims at least half an hour of pure bloat - and I don’t mean ‘inessential’ character beats, strictly redundant exposition - but by and large this is a terrific meat-and-potatoes superhero flick realized with the sweep and style Snyder brings to his work. There’s a ton of stuff I could nitpick, and its biggest sin is it loses momentum over time because Snyder clearly used literally every single thing he had filmed regardless of utility, but by and large this was a fun time. Assorted notes (where I get into spoiler territory) below:

* Why wasn’t the weird Motherbox opening credits sequence kept? They showed it off just a few weeks ago!

* This is very Morrison JLA in that only the junior members of the group get character arcs, and fairly bare-bones at that, but everyone gets their Big Iconic Stuff. Except oddly Batman, who shockingly gets short shift here while Superman in his minimal screentime is as much a sudden 180 “hey here’s just regular ‘ol Superman now” as what we saw in 2017.

* Flash’s opening setpiece was the best of the movie by miles, a jaw-dropping realization of that power and the necessary delicateness that comes with it that’s one of my favorite moments in any superhero media period. His big time travel moment was nothing to sneeze at either. They never explain where his powers come from though?

* Steppenwolf is actually pretty damn fun in here as a guy who’s in-universe a fake final boss who’s really a put-upon self-loathing failed lackey.

* (Darkseid meanwhile sucks and is nothing but that isn’t surprising.)

* This looks better all around, obviously the action and composition is gorgeous and even Flash and Cyborg’s dopey looks are considerably more tolerable, while Superman’s black suit helps cover a bunch of the noodly nonsense.

* Yes, this is better than Whedon’s version. Not exponentially so, at least for my tastes - Batman of all characters felt like he had a lot more going on in that - but I’m loathe to give it much credit, and I think a lot of relative strengths it had were purely due to it keeping leaner.

* I’m not clear at all why WB felt the need to damn near remake the thing when this was so very much Snyder playing nice, other than maybe no one could figure out how to wrangle down the runtime comprehensibly? I certainly can’t fathom how the assembly cut was reportedly declared ‘unwatchable’ by producers.

* No, the Martian Manhunter stuff makes no fucking sense whatsoever, but it’s worth it because his presence means that the last words in Zack Snyder’s Justice League are Martian Manhunter, which is incredible.

* At heart it’s no more a sequel to MOS or BVS than what Whedon did beyond the raw fact of progressing the plot: this isn’t a meditation on power or politics or duty or vengeance beyond the thinnest of notes with some of the side characters, it’s a bunch of cool superfolks putting aside their personal problems and learning to believe in themselves/each other to save the world from a big bad thing, even if it still operates in the broad thematic realm of “life snatched from death” prevalent in both versions.

* It’s consistently at its best when it’s Snyder getting to go buckwild with the powers, imagery, and pure vibes; the character work is fine and the actors all do well enough, but the point here is this is Snyder setting up Space Superhero Lord of the Rings with impossible beings operating on a grand scale.

* I kind of wish it had the manic unselfaware energy throughout of the opening Wonder Woman sequence where she saves the kids as in the theatrical cut, but the head terrorist says fuck, Wonder Woman’s clearly killing them all...and at the end she smiles and gives an earnest girl power line to one of the hostage kids right after disintegrating a fool in front of them. It would be a worse movie, but an even more entertaining one.

* The Batman/Joker scene is perfectly fine, and while it would have been better for this movie unto itself if the reshoots had been used to tighten some stuff up instead I don’t begrudge Snyder for going that extra mile to ensure folks absolutely fucking demand he get his sequel (I know he says that’s not why he did it; he is transparently lying). Affleck sells his f-bomb.

That’s pretty much that! I think the purpose of this movie as Snyder conceived it was to win over rubes like me without alienating the true believers to get the leeway to do JL 2&3 however the fuck he wanted. And god help me, especially with the worst possible avenues closed off to him I do want to see what those would be, all the absurd operatic bombast of BvS as applied to a big cosmic superhero epic functioning from what we’ve heard in the more straightforward mode of operation established here. The fandom force of will both joyful and horrific will be there in spades, so I guess it’s a question of what kind of numbers this does.

#Justice League #Snyder Cut #DCEU #Worlds of DC #Opinion

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anthropwashere · 4 years ago

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deadfic: Get Out, Get Gone

Yet more deadfic for @goodintentionswipfest! And also another giftfic I never finished, because that’s just who I am as a person! \o/

@ghostfiish did this truly excellent art of Danny’s transformation rings as a galaxy way back when that I promptly lost my whole entire shit over, and also took it as an opportunity to get some kind of manic with the writing style. That, combined with my sort-of accidental, sort-of intentional smashing yet more rad headcanons into it until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Still, I remain very fond of this one and what I was trying to do back in 2014, so here we are. 8.7k’s nothing to sneeze at, at least.

Oh, and! While we're at it, have an old Danny playlist I never got around to sharing that fits the mood this fic is going for. Title comes from To Kill a King's "Bloody Shirt (Bastille Remix)," which is unfortunately not included on the Spotify playlist.

There’s a weight to you now that wasn’t there before. You’d think with your powers—

(and doesn’t it feel strange to call them that, when you shake and shiver at the sight of your bones under your meat, when you walk down the stairs and your feet don’t touch anything at all)

—you’d weigh less, be less. A thing of smoke, and ectoplasm, and all that awful electricity arcing through your nerves. But that's not what happened.

You remember that day with a surreal nightmare quality, memories fuzzing and skittering like white noise in your skull. Pain and green light and being so, so certain that had been it. Zap! That’s all she wrote. But it wasn't, and here you are, hovering three inches off the grass and praying no one will see, that no one will know.

You aren’t less for all that’s changed, for all that’s changed in you. Tucker and Sam haven’t said anything about it, and it’s clear they don’t have a clue. Your first—

(disastrous, embarrassing)

—fight against the Lunch Lady knocked you right out. They had to carry you all the way home from school after you failed to stop her. It’s a wonder nobody stopped them, dragging your sorry carcass across town. If either of them had noticed, if either of them could have noticed, they would have told you. Or worse, they wouldn’t have managed to get you home at all.

You noticed it when you changed. Not the first time, in the shadowed, silver throat of the Portal—

(electricity cooking you from the inside out, the Portal writhing, burning, tearing itself into existence, a physical hole ripped so cleanly between realities even your parents don’t understand it and they built the damn framework, boiling ectoplasm splashing on you, over you, inside you, changing you forever)

—but after. Changing back and forth without any control, cringing behind dumpsters and hedges, tossing desperate prayers skyward that nobody had seen the light, that nobody had seen you change from kid to freak. So much of you changes when this strange, alien light stretches across you, not just your clothes and eyes and hair, no, you’re different now down to your cells, down to the very structure of your DNA. You know, you’ve checked. So much of you is different, it’s a wonder you didn’t figure it out sooner.

When you change, you’re heavier. Heavier. Not like ten pounds or something any normal kid might stress over. You become the kind of heavy that leaves brushstroke smears in asphalt, reduces sturdy brick walls to dusty rubble, punches craters through solid ground. It hurts when you fall, god does it hurt. But your bones never shatter. Your guts never liquefy. Your brain never dribbles out your ears. How? How can you possibly survive the beatings every new ghost is so eager to give you?

Ah, but there's never any time to think about it though, not really. No time for anything but a raw, thready panic and clumsily scrawled homework copied five minutes before the bell. Your chance to tell your parents came and went, and now there’s always another ghost attacking the city.

Mom and Dad are so happy now. You’ve never seen them happier than this, with the stuff of your grade school nightmares on the rampage. It’s proof they aren’t crazy, proof they haven’t wasted their whole lives on a pipe dream, proof that everybody who ever called them quacks were wrong. Good for them, you guess. Meanwhile you’re picking yourself out of the wreckage of another storefront, glass needled all down your spine, and you can’t help but marvel at the damage your body has done. Can do. Will do.

Because you’re stronger, you’re getting stronger every day. The weight in you that your Sam and Tucker don’t—

(can’t)

—notice grows more noticeable, and after a few fights you're quicker, too. And perhaps you're changing still, perhaps the accident isn't done with you yet, because one day there’s sickly green light at your fingertips, and in no time at all you can manipulate the energy buzzing inside you—

(the electricity and hot ectoplasm from the accident screaming through you, out from your palms and striking down the things that used to scare you as a little kid, back when door knobs and faucets were out of reach of your tiny fingers and there was so much dark in your big big house, and now your hands trail light like after images from staring at the sun too long, now you can patch your hurts up by the light of your own blood, now you're learning that you don’t need to be afraid of what hides in the dark anymore)

—in ways you never thought possible. Sure, lots of what you do is learned the hard way, mid-battle against sizzling green things with teeth like hunting knives, running on instinct and adrenaline and terror all tangled up in your throat. Lots more is later, when it’s quiet and safe again, practicing things you’ve seen other ghosts do again and again and again until you can mimic it, improve it, make it yours.

But no ghost you fight has the same heaviness as you do. No improbable weight that defies the logical mass of their ectoplasm. If it’s big, it’s heavy. If it’s small, it’s light. Unexpected logic from creatures that defy logic in every other way.

There’s a lesson you learn the hard way, testing the strength of these invaders against your bruised and splitting knuckles. You learn caution. You learn restraint. If you punch them hard enough, some ghosts, the little formless ones your parents have captured once or twice now, burst like water balloons—a hard pop of searing green, an overwhelming smell-taste of citrus and hot pennies. Too much of your supernatural strength pressed into the soft hide of a monster and the end result is a glowing puddle where someone used to be.

You learn this lesson quickly. You learn that even when you’re fighting for your life, you’ve got to hold back. You defend, you protect. Death scares you too much to risk killing—

(is it killing when it’s already dead, where does a ghost go when it dies, is there something more to the Ghost Zone than what you’ve glimpsed with your own eyes or is that it, is that all, have you erased someone from reality forever, these are the questions that make your stomach hurt, that make it hard to breathe, that make it hard to fake a smile when Jazz asks if something’s wrong)

—something so much like yourself. Even if it’s got teeth like hunting knives.

You think you’re an anomaly, a freak, the only one stupid enough to walk into a Ghost Portal and zap yourself full of juice that by rights should have killed you—

(and a little part of you wonders if that isn’t just what happened, if you’re just a dead thing walking around in your body, wearing it like a meatsuit and waiting for the rot to show, but it’s been a month, it’s been months, and you eat more and you sleep less, not because you don’t need it but because there’s never any time, and you’ve grown another inch and there’s new definition to your muscles, and that all must mean you’ll be okay, that you are okay, it has to)

—until Wisconsin. Until Vlad.

He’s in the same boat as you, plus twenty years of experience and enough self-made loneliness to turn him bitter and crazy and dangerous. He wants Dad dead and Mom his, like she’s some kind of carnival prize he can win if he throws his weight around enough. Swing the mallet, hit the bell, and congratulations! The woman you haven't spoken to in twenty years who has made her own life without you is now yours to take home! Ugh.

But god, he can hit hard. Lightning, real lightning, nothing like the weak little zaps of electricity inside you, rattles at his fingertips like a living thing, furious burning strikes of pain, and he knocks you aside like he’s bored. You have a thousand questions, but he won't give you a single answer unless you concede defeat or whatever he wants, so it looks like you’ll just have to beat the answers out of him instead. Who cares if he’s got twenty years on you? He’s not out most nights pummeling wayward ghosts back into the Ghost Zone. He’s not out most days saving people from ghosts with bloodthirsty, power-hungry vendettas. What you lack for in time and experience you make up in rooftop fistfights and stolen first-aid kits.

Sure you managed to outwit him—

(barely, hardly at all, he just wanted to save face in front of Mom, if he hadn’t cared about that, if he’d just tried overshadowing Mom instead it all could have turned out so differently, and doesn’t that thought make it hard to sleep the first few nights back home)

—but you can’t stop thinking of what it had been like to fight him, of what it was like to see another person do all that you can and so much more. You remember every second of each fight, like it’s been burned across your eyelids. You replay it all every time you blink for days, for weeks. It’s easy as thought to recall the light arcing around his waist as he’d transformed. Just like yours, and yet nothing like yours. The color, sure, that had been the obvious difference. When you change it’s a white light, sharp and searing enough to leave stars in your eyes if you look at it. His transformation—

(black like cave darkness, black like a power outage, black like the vastness between stars, sucking in light like a hungry thing, like it’d swallow you whole if it had had the chance)

—had been like a punch to the gut even before he’d buried his fist in your gut. You’d known without words, known in some primitive bit of brain that still looked up at the night sky and thought magic before science, you had known. You and Vlad were made out of the same mess, but maybe, just maybe, those twenty years were stacked against him.

Trouble is, the transformation is so quick you can’t make much out but the light/non-light of yours and his, and luckily—

(unluckily?)

—he’s all the way in Wisconsin so you don’t have many opportunities for a closer look at his. You ask Sam and Tucker to take pictures and videos, change back and forth so often you almost forget which side of you is which, but the quality is never good enough to see what you know is there—

(but can’t explain, not with words, even though you try for the benefit of your friends because they’re the ones there for you when everything else has gone topsy-turvy, but you’re just a kid who leaks green when dead people hit you too hard, just a kid with bad grades and a lot of questions to evade, and what you’re trying to pinpoint frame by frame is something so beyond your vocabulary you can only shrug, can only say you want to know more about your powers and hope this is one of those white lies nobody catches you in the act of)

—so you stop.

Do you give up? No, but there are more important things to focus on. It isn’t shelving your questions so much as putting them on the backburner. There are ghosts to deal with. Ghosts that want to hurt you, ghosts that want to hurt humans, more and more ghosts with strange and terrifying abilities pouring out from the Portal all the time. Closing the Portal doesn’t slow them any, which doesn’t make any sense to you. Then again, Dad was up to his elbows in most of the Portal’s guts and wiring, so applying logic to any inch of it is pretty pointless. You’ve learned not to ask too many questions about anything with a Fenton sticker slapped on it.

You’re busy now, busy all the time, bruised and burned and even stitched up all the time. Super strength is only so good when you’re fighting things with teeth like hunting knives. But it’s whatever, it’s no big deal, really. Because you’re keeping people safe. You’re learning more about the Ghost Zone and the things that inhabit it. You’re learning more about yourself; your powers, your weaknesses, how quick you can be with a snarky quip. Yeah, your parents are aiming guns and questions at you. Yeah, teachers with red pens and detention slips are hounding after you. And yeah, you’re fourteen years old bare-knuckle fighting monsters and no one ever says thanks because they think you’re just like every other ghost out there or maybe that you’re some human-loving freak—

(and when you think of your life like this, in lists of who wants answers and who wants to see you bleed, it sounds so bad, it sounds like you should be one inch away from a complete breakdown, but is it weird to say you’re happy, is it weird to say you couldn’t imagine your life any other way)

—yet you grin through a mouthful of red-and-green and keep going. Elated? Maybe, sometimes. Scared? Absolutely, sometimes. You’re just a kid with eyes that flare like headlights when somebody’s pissed you off.

It’s only right to be scared, sometimes.

Still, it’s the weight of you that keeps you grounded, keeps you human when you need to be. Sit in a chair, walk across a bridge, it all makes the same creak under you as it would for Sam and Tucker. But take one of Skulker’s shoulder rockets to the face, you leave a crater in Central Park so big they decide to just turn it into another duck pond. A permanent new addition to the park, and all your face gets is a nasty bruise Dash takes the credit for. You let him, because Lancer overhears. Dash is the one getting detention for once, and there’s a nasty satisfaction to be found there.

You and Jazz share a bathroom, and she’s got a scale she keeps in the towel cupboard. Curious, you take it out one day after school and try to weigh yourself. Last time you checked, you were somewhere near 120, puberty stretching you faster than your appetite can keep up. This time, the numbers whirl past 280 pounds before the scale makes a metallic groan and crumples like tissue paper under your sneakers. Sheer reflex launches you into the air, and you bounce off the ceiling with your knees hugged so tight to your chest you can hear tendons creak, your heart a thundering jackhammer in your chest. Thank god you’re home alone, because you hover there for who-knows how long, too scared the floor will crack under your illogical, impossible weight, too scared you’ll plummet straight down to the hard steel of the lab if you try to stand, too scared you might plummet even further.

When you finally do scrounge up the courage to touch down, an air bubble in the old linoleum crackles under your heel and you damn near jump out of your skin. After that, all you can do is laugh and laugh until your sides hurt. You throw Jazz’s scale out in a dumpster a block away and never tell her what happened to it.

What does this mean? Is the weight of you optional? If you think about it too hard, does it become real? What about when you’re fighting, causing all that property damage the city hates you for? You’re not thinking of the strangeness of your mass during a brawl, you’re thinking in terms of survivability. Punch this hard to win, get punched this hard to lose. What about when you’re thinking about it at school? Why don’t you break your desk, or the floor, or the stairs?

You don’t know. Your parents might be able to figure it out if you told them, but you don’t. Knowing about you, about what you really are—

(a freak, a monster, an accident, an anomaly bleeding out energy with every burst of green light you bury into the spiny hides of other monsters, who knows how long until your white rings burn black, if one day you’ll look in the mirror and be no different than Vlad, not because you didn’t try your hardest but because there was never any biological choice, what kind of choice can a species of two even make)

—would just scare them. It’s easier, keeping them in the dark, even if it means they’re trying to hunt you down and take you apart molecule by molecule any time you’ve got white hair.

But it’s not just flying and invisibility and energy you can summon with a thought—

(ray or bolt or fire, you don’t know what to call your power, you never really did pay attention when your parents got going even before you had to worry about all their blinking tech going nuts around you, but sometimes your green light is cool and wispy and other times it's hot and sizzling, sometimes you know which one will bloom between your fingers and sometimes it’s a surprise, sometimes it’s almost like your body knows what to do in a fight better than you, sometimes it’s easier to stop thinking and just let it happen, to just be the freak that you are, to burn white-hot and damn the consequences)

—you have to worry about. You’re stronger every day, stranger everyday too. You feel a little bit more at ease as a ghost as time goes on. It stops being a strain and starts being an ease, even a comfort, and some days you dread the thought of going to school because a ghost might not attack and you’ll be stuck as a human all day.

That kind of thinking should worry you, probably.

But so what? You could sneak into your parents’ lab in the middle of the night and try more tests, more experiments, but really, what would that do? You’re a freak, plain and simple. You and Vlad poked your noses in places you shouldn’t have and paid the price, and that’s that.

Eventually you get sick of worrying and just let it be. You’re a freak who can walk through walls, disappear, and fly. You’re the freak protecting a town full of people who pretty much hate you. Really, what can you do? The same old same old, that’s what. Try and get a little more sleep outside the classroom, maybe. As for the townsfolk? Well, you can’t always avoid the property damages, but you can at least save a few lives along the way.

People even start to say thank you, even if it’s from a distance, even if they think you're some crazed vigilante ghost, and doesn’t that make this whole superhero thing worth it?

But then of course something has to come along and ruin even that much, ruin this budding chance at gratitude, at finally feeling like a real life superhero. And it isn’t a ghost this time. It’s a human. You hadn't ever considered humans to be dangerous the way a ghost can be.

Freakshow happens, and all that hard work is undone in just a few short days. Days you can’t remember with any clarity, just blurs of color and noise, your hands full of stolen money and no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t let go, you couldn’t stop. Attacking the cops when they pursued, terrorizing any humans that got too close, puppeted by that grinning, painted maniac who treated you and the other ghosts like animals, like slaves—

(minions, he’d called you all, and he didn’t even bother to learn your name before he sunk his fingers into your brain, and you never did find out who any of those other ghosts were, what their names were or who they had been before that crystal ball had pulled them under, and they were gone before there was a chance to even ask)

—and tanked Invis-o-Bill’s reputation to a whole new low. Trashing nearly every car the Amity Park Police Department has and robbing the city blind at the behest of a psychotic ringmaster would have done that even if you’d been considered the hero you try so hard to be. Oh well. At least nobody was hurt in all that, unless you bothered counting Mr. Lancer getting left in the custodial closet for a weekend. You mostly don’t feel guilty about that. Mostly.

Sam says you ought to count yourself too, but you try not to think about any of what happened—

(all that time spent exhausted and hungry, he never let you rest, not once, because ghosts don’t need sleep, ghosts don’t get tired, ghosts don’t need friends, but it’s over, it’s all over now, you don’t have to hear yourself laugh as the little humans scream below, you’ll never have to watch Sam fall and wonder if your body will listen to you in time, you’re yourself again, you’re in control again, everything’s alright, you’re alright, you’re safe, you’re home, you’re yourself again)

—and try to pass yourself off as fine afterwards instead, just confused, just tired, just sorry for everything that’s happened.

For weeks after the police shoved Freakshow into the back of a car, your dreams are red. Not with blood, thank god for that. No, it’s like a filter. A stain. Strawberry candy red, saturated fire engine red, the color Sam said your eyes were when you were under his control. It doesn’t matter if you’re having nightmares—

(more common than you’d like, but you’ve never been one to shout after a bad dream and you don’t intend to start now)

—or regular old brain dump dreams. It doesn’t matter if you’re dreaming of broken bones and monsters or forgetting to study for a test; it’s all filtered through that darkroom shade of red.

What does it mean? You don’t know. You don’t bring it up to Sam or Tucker. They’d just worry, and they worry about you enough as it is. Besides, you’re fine. The Circus Gothica billboard is up for two weeks after Freakshow’s arrest, and it doesn’t do anything to you, not like before. You don’t lose time, you don’t say anything creepy. Your eyes stay blue or green, depending on whether or not there’s a ghost in need of wrangling nearby.

It’s just a weird, harmless after effect, that’s your best conclusion. Then you do your best to stop thinking about it. Who you were under Freakshow’s control wasn’t you. It wasn’t. You tell yourself that until you almost believe it. Eventually, you dreams return to their factory settings. Huzzah.

Meanwhile everywhere you go, people badmouth Invis-o-Bill like they’re getting paid to do it. They call him—

(you)

—thief and monster and dangerous, they call him—

(you)

—a menace and a bad influence on the children. A liar. Traitor. Conspiring with other ghosts to earn the trust of humans to terrorize Amity Park all the better. Kids at school spread awful stories about Invis-o-Bill, say he—

(you)

—was probably the ghost of a troubled teen who got in too deep with bad people and paid the price, and now he—

(you)

—spends his afterlife seeking revenge on humans and ghosts alike. They say a lot of bad things about you, for a while. You try not to pay much attention. You’re getting pretty good at that.

After Freakshow, there’s a lull. That doesn’t mean ghosts don’t stop attacking or causing havoc, it just means that, for a handful of weeks, it’s just the little ones. Hungry animals and disoriented blobs and the Box Ghost. Easy stuff. You actually have time to unwind, time to let the tension bleed from your bones, time to catch up on all your late homework and even squeak your grades up to passable. It’s nice. You’d almost call it relaxing.

Of course, the lulls never last. You know this, you’ve learned this, they made you understand this from your very first—

(disastrous, embarrassing)

—fight with the Lunch Lady. You have one fight with Sam the wrong ghost overhears, and everything that’s happened is wished away. You are wished away. For a couple of days, you never walked into your parents’ ghost portal. You were never torn apart and melted back together by heat and light and pain. You were never Phantom at all. Worse still, you have no memory of your erased past, not so much as the slightest disquiet to niggle in the back of your brain when Sam walks up to your locker and starts going on about imaginary monsters like they're real.

Sam Manson—

(a stranger, a total stranger, just a bottle-black pretty girl you stare at because you’re fourteen and desperate for a connection you’ve never had and don’t understand, she’s nobody else, she’s nothing else to you but a chance at your first kiss and later you will hate yourself for thinking of her like that, not as a girl because of course she is that, but as a prize you might earn, and who cared if she was crazy because she just might have kissed you for some unfathomable reason, and Sam is so much more than the sum of her body, Sam is worth so much more than that, Sam is worth so much)

—is the vehement Goth girl who's in half your classes and is [unfinished]

In those stumbling, halting days of dismissal followed by doubt followed by a desperate curiosity to believe that there might be more to life than growing up and settling for less, that movies haven’t lied and there really is something beyond the disappointment growing up has been for you so far. Sam’s purple mouth is a thin, grim line of—

(worry, guilt, fear, shame, envy, panic, uncertainty)

—complicated emotions you can’t parse as you zip up the jumpsuit your parents got you for your birthday. You’ve never worn it before, the fabric stiff and reluctant to bend at your joints. You don’t know how they’re comfortable wearing theirs all the time [unfinished]

Sometimes after a fight wears you out, leaves you bruised and smeared with shining green, you don’t fight the transformation. Not because you can’t, but because it feels good to have that fake pulse vanish, to hear real blood pounding in your ears. The weight of you shifts too, and even though you’re so much weaker when you’re human, it’s easier to sink your fingers into the dirt, to haul your meat out of the mess your ghost left behind, easier to duck out of sight before the news vans and curious bystanders get too close. Nobody ever sees you. Nobody ever puts your bruises and Band-Aids and the trashed Dunkin’ Donuts together. It helps that nobody’s ever heard of a half-ghost, that Vlad was cunning enough to hide his powers. Everybody’s heard of the Wisconsin Ghost, but Wisconsin is a big damn state and unlike you, Vlad and Plasmius hardly look like the same man.

Everybody at school just thinks you’re the football team’s personal punching bag, which is definitely true. Thing is, after spending a couple months fighting ghosts, a gut-punch from a junior is kind of a joke. You’re getting ganged up by a bunch of guys in letter jackets behind the auto shop and you have to mime pain to get them to leave you alone.

Is this real life? Yup, and it’s hilarious.

Time passes, as it does. You get stronger, faster, heavier. You hone your powers. You stop losing control, mostly. New ghosts terrorize the streets. Old ghosts do too, they’re just smarter about it. They all know who you are by now. Hell, a whole other plane of reality knows your name by this point, knows who Danny Fenton really is. Funny though, none of them ever spill the beans to any humans. What better way to take down the one person standing in their way of world domination or an army of hypnotized teens or whatever they’re trying to score than to oust his secret identity?

You don’t ask. Maybe they haven’t caught on that humans have no idea you’re trying to keep a secret. Maybe there’s some kind of code among ghosts; don’t spill a guy’s weakness, even if you hate his ectoplasm. Maybe especially if you hate his ectoplasm?

You’ve had a couple more run-ins with Vlad too. Each time he changes, transforms, you breath hitches, because you can almost see it. Whatever makes up the both of you, piecing the mystery together through the differences—

(light and dark and it’s cliché as anything, it’s so transparently Star Wars, but maybe there’s something to clichés, because you might be the one wearing mostly black but he’s the one with a sucking core, a void, something more horrific for its absence, like he used to be full of stark white light too but it’s all been burned up and whatever’s left is just playing through the motions, pretending at being something else, who knows what it means but you know that it scares the hell out of you)

—between you and him. He goes on and on about how you’re more like him every day, but he’s wrong. He’s so wrong. You’ll never be like him, and it isn’t just a matter of morals.

What you are, down to the complex disaster of your DNA, is different than what makes up Vlad, and you don’t need to slide a piece of him under a microscope to see that. You thought differently once, but now you know better. A glance is all you need. What you are and what he is, has become—

(powerful yes, but ugly and hating and cruel, the rings that flash at his waist are just shadows reflecting light, trying to hide a black mouth brimming with hungry teeth)

—well, you might as well be different species.

Vlad’s crazy and Vlad’s a jerk, but he is right about one thing. There’s so much about the Ghost Zone you don’t understand, and it’s this ignorance that just might get you—

(or somebody else, and isn’t that an old favorite in the nightmares)

—killed. You don’t know if it was fate or a simple coincidence that your parents were working on the Ecto-Skeleton when Pariah Dark woke up. You’re fourteen years old and you can shoot lasers out of your fingers; you don’t have the wherewithal for philosophical theology. You’re just glad they got it functioning in time to stop the King of All Ghosts from overrunning the city, even if the stupid thing nearly kills you.

You don’t fret much about the Ecto-Skeleton vanishing after you pass out. You do, however, remember Pariah’s nasty grin—

(having that much power, it’s a burden, isn’t it child)

—when you stumbled under the strain. You don’t know if he meant what the suit enabled you to do or if he meant the power in your own two hands. Either way, you remember those words, like they’re branded onto your brain, and you don’t have a choice but to hear it over and over every time you try to sleep. They rang in your head like bells in the days after you’d pushed him back into that sarcophagus, stuck in bed aching and weaker than you’ve ever felt in your life.

Because it is a burden. Everybody hates and fears you, but at the same time they happily expect you to protect them from hordes of skeletal ghosts. Sometimes you panic, so aware of how young you are, of how little comic books and video games have prepared you for a life like this, hiding bruises and spinning bold-face lies to everybody from your parents to the U.S. government. Teenagers are supposed to rebel, sure, but if you ever come clean you’d be thrown in a cell and they’d never, ever let you go. Not just because you’re a criminal—

(and you are, thanks to Freakshow and thanks to dozens of ghosts, and you’ve left an imprint of your tiny, impossibly heavy body all over the city, and you’ve done your best to protect everybody but you leave rubble and shrapnel wherever you go, ambulance sirens wail through the streets every day, and everybody’s just as scared as you are, just as fascinated as you are, and yet so many students and teachers have left Casper High, so many faces you used to see everyday in the hallways have vanished, so many business and restaurants and homes sit empty, gathering dust and graffiti, and it’s your fault, if you hadn’t walked into the Ghost Portal none of this would be happening, none of this would ever have happened at all, and you’re too much of a coward to show your face, to tell anyone but your best friends what kind of a monster you really are)

—but because you can phase through solid objects, you’re considered a monster with less rights than a dog.

Sometimes you wish Sam wasn’t a budding ghost-rights activist. You’d probably have an easier time studying if she didn’t rattle off all these statistics and news articles, stories of government agents in white suits quarantining whole city blocks to purge the ghosts inhabiting them, of ghost attacks stopping all at once in little towns after strange men with guns and knives and felonies like grave robbing and murder slunk through in the night. Ghosts are dangerous, there’s no questioning that. But so are bears. So are people. Just because something is dangerous doesn’t mean it should be destroyed.

Maybe that’s why the ghosts have never spilled your secret. You’ve never tried to kill them. You just want them to leave Amity Park alone. Who knows for sure though? You don’t have the guts to risk asking any of them.

Still, this whole mess is worth it. It is. You can fly, for god’s sake. If you’re careful you could juggle minivans, mimic all your favorite action movies and outdo even the craziest Hollywood stunts. What kid hasn’t dreamed of doing any of that? But you’re not being selfish. You’re not. It’s like Dad says; you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Progress is a disaster when you’re living it, when it isn’t past tense, when it isn’t all tidied up in a few short paragraphs in a high school history book. What’s happening now is worth it, for the future.

If you ever do tell Mom and Dad—

(you’re not afraid of what they’ll think, you’ve never worried about that, not really, they’re your parents before they’re scientists, and any experiment or test would be to ensure your safety and your health, because that’s what parents do, that’s what good people do, and they’re the best people you’ve ever known)

—you know they’d be able to break down your powers into reams of clinical data in no time. They’d figure out how you survived the accident, how your abilities generate and develop in power, maybe even pinpoint the how of your strange, mutable weight. They’d tell you what that light is, when you change, that light that reminds you so strongly of the stars. After all, just because they’re too oblivious to realize their son is the infamous Ghost Kid doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing. They aren’t known as the leading scientists, engineers and weapon smiths in the paranatural fields for nothing. Mom’s practically got more letters after her name than there are in the alphabet, and while Dad may only have a fraction of that he thinks like nobody else out there. Most Fenton tech are his designs, wild and absurd and covered with stickers of his beaming face, and Mom’s the one who works out the bugs with fond exasperation.

Still, they have to get their knowledge from somewhere, and you’ve seen what they do down in the lab to the formless, red-eyed ghosts, the ones too weak to do much more than snarl wetly. Sometimes they snare something bigger and stronger, something fond of curling prickly tendrils around the nearest human and squeezing. More often than not it’s Dad that’s the unlucky one, always so eager to parse the secrets hidden in each fanged little beastie they’ve fished out of the Ghost Zone. He’s got nearly as many as bruises as you do, some weeks, but he’s never happier than when he’s holding a bag of frozen peas to his head.

After a good wrestle with something that wailed and whistled like a boiling kettle, Dad’ll limp up to the kitchen and settle heavily into a chair, grinning and running his mouth nonstop, talking about how much progress they’ve made today—

(wait ‘til the boys over at the GIW hear about that one, he’ll say with a bray of laughter, makes the piddly little Class Threes look darn near cuddly, didn’t it Mads, why Danny you should’ve seen the fangs on this fella, nearly bit through the exam table in one bite, y’oughta come down to the lab more often, Danny, seeing these spooks up close and personal’d be a great way to help you get over that silly fear of ‘em, and there you are, smiling meekly and holding up your hands and making up any excuse you can think of off the top of your head to keep you out of the lab when your parents have all their equipment up and humming, just in case, aw Dad I dunno, I’ve got this essay due, not today Dad I’ve got like six pages of algebra I haven’t even started yet, sorry Dad I’m sleeping over at Tucker’s tonight and his mom insisted I come early for dinner)

—and every time, Mom will smile indulgently, like she’s falling in love with Dad all over again. She’ll push him back into the seat and tell him to quit fidgeting so she can clean up the nasty cut behind his ear, and every time you smile behind your hand and think, how could Vlad ever hope to break your parents up? They only thing they might love more than each other would be you and Jazz and ghosts, and you’re all so much of their lives they can’t help but love you all completely. How they love each other and their kids and the ghosts they’ve studied all their lives, well, that’s like saying they love breathing. They love each other because without each other, they wouldn’t be themselves. It’s sappy as hell and like any kid you hate seeing your parents get all lovey-dovey, but you can’t help that secret smile as you walk out of the kitchen to give them a little privacy.

Seeing Mom and Dad so hard at work, so happy at work, is why you don’t tell them. They think you’re slacking off, they think you’re getting bullied, and they’re worried about you sure, but better they think their son’s lazy than a freak. If they knew what you did, what you could do, if they knew you were the one facing up against ghosts that made the ones they picked apart in their lab look like kittens, if they knew you’d heard all the awful things they want to do to Phantom once they finally nab him—

(you know they wouldn’t say it if they knew you and him were one and the same, you know you know you know, but sometimes you can’t help but be hurt anyway, to see all that fierce dedication focused on seeing whether or not Danny Phantom has bones, and if he does, how much pressure could they withstand before breaking)

—they wouldn’t know what to do or say or think. They’d be so eaten up with guilt, why hadn’t they known, why hadn’t they realized, what if they’d finally gotten a lucky shot in, what if one of all those cruel ghosts had gotten a luck shot in, what if what if what if—

(and you’ve pictured it a hundred times, it’s so easy to imagine the looks on their faces, the horror the shame the fear, and you know they’d love you all the same, you know this like you know the distance between the Sun and every planet, even little Pluto they just declared wasn’t a planet at all, but you’re young and selfish and definitely some kind of stupid because sometimes you can’t help but feel they’d shun you for the freak you are, turn you over to the GIW because they couldn’t bear to look on the thing their son’s become, and you know that couldn’t ever ever ever happen but still, it’s so easy to imagine)

—and you couldn’t do that to them. You won’t do that to them, no matter how many times Sam or Tucker try to convince you otherwise. How it is now, secrets and lies and detention slips and broken curfews, can’t last forever. You know that. But until then, it’ll have to do, and you’ll have to parse all your growing weirdness without all of Mom and Dad’s knowledge or experience, fingers crossed that their ticking and glowing machines won’t reveal your secret before you’re ready to do it yourself.

But you’re turning out stranger in ways you can’t even recognize, and for all that Sam and Tucker are by your side to help you as you change and burn brighter and hotter and faster and heavier, they don’t see it either. Jazz is the one who points it out, one day not long after the Spectra… thing, all out of the blue. She’s been noticing lots of things lately, and acting so strange, like she might have pieced it together. But she can’t have, of course not, you’re so careful, you are always so careful. Jazz is just clever, Jazz got all the brains and you got the leftovers. Everybody knows that. Even you know that.

She comes into the kitchen one morning with a curious little spin to her step, craning her head around and around like she’s running late for school and can’t find her keys, but it’s a Saturday. You’re there by the fridge, cobbling together something that might resemble an edible breakfast, moving slow because you’ve got a bruise all down your right side that makes it hurt to do more than breathe shallowly or raise your arm more than a couple inches. You sniff the milk and instantly regret this decision, and while you’re pouring the lumpy mess down the sink Jazz asks if the kitchen’s always been on the second floor.

You stare at her, too tired and baffled to give her the proper what the hell a question like that deserves, but she drags you over to the kitchen door and pushes it open, and since when has there been a door to the kitchen and oh my god the kitchen is on the second floor.

She gapes at you and you gape right back, and the rest of that morning is spent going over every inch of the house and seeing what else has changed compared to your shared memories.

Everything has, in some way or another. Doorknobs have shifted, cupboards have lowered, doors moved from one part of a room to another. Even chairs have changed their heights. There’s a whole new door neither of you can remember ever existing before connecting the upstairs bathroom directly to your room. Thinking back—

(staggering through your open window, mouth thick with the hot penny burn of ectoplasm and blood, your right hand pressed against the throb all down your side, and aren’t you grateful for your weight, your sturdiness, because before you finally peeled the faceguard off of Skulker’s exoskeleton and sucked that little jerk into a Thermos he got a good shot in with a rocket that hit you hard right in the ribs, and if you’d been normal there would have just been a dark wet hole where your torso used to be but lucky you, you’re every inch the creepy little freak Spectra called you, so you get to limp home and clean up as best you can on your own since it’s four in the morning and no way are you gonna wake Sam or Tucker up again, and you have to be quiet, you have to be so quiet, biting down pain, you can’t make a sound or Jazz might hear, grabbing the first-aid kid from your underwear drawer and slipping into the bathroom, and for once the hinges didn’t squeak, thank god, you think, thank god)

—you hadn’t even noticed last night or even this morning that a door had sprung up where there’d just been NASA and Nat Geo posters before. And your windows have moved, and your bed has moved, and you and Jazz just stare and stare. Why had neither of you noticed any of this until now? Why haven’t your parents? How long has this been going on?

What could cause something like this?

It takes half an hour to convince your mom that something’s off about the house, and even longer to get your dad to grasp what you both are trying to say. Their eyes just keep glazing over the differences, even something as huge as the kitchen being on the wrong floor. Once they finally do see though, it’s a whole other story. After the initial shock, they drop all their experiments and spend the next week measuring and scanning every inch of the house.

Their conclusion, a week and some change later? The Ghost Portal leaks.

Even with the huge steel door locked up tight, it seems there’s enough residual energy slipping through to warp, literally warp, the house. Somehow. The way your mom’s lips thin as she says all this means she’s not satisfied with this conclusion, but she puts on a wide smile when Jazz asks if you’re all in any danger. A smart question, one you think you might’ve asked yourself. Y’know, if you still needed to worry about something like exposure. Your dad just laughs big and loud and says not to worry about it, says if there were going to be any creepy side effects they would have manifested by now. Everything’s fine, they assure you both, but you look at the crease between your mom’s eyebrows and you wonder.

Later, when they’re out taking readings from the ectoplasm-damp wreck you and the Lunch Lady made of a McDonald’s and Jazz is studying at the library, you creep down to the lab and pull up all their documentation of the house. Most of it is dry as dirt; neatly typed spreadsheets and tidy, color-coded graphs (clearly your mom’s handiwork), but there’s also nearly a gigabyte’s worth of photos. Clicking through them, you can see Dad’s sloppy angles and the occasional square pinkie slipping into the frame. Most of the first hundred photos have been untouched, but the two hundreds have been filtered all to hell, like Mom and Dad went through the house a second time, trying to find something the human eye can’t see. Just shy of 300, the photos turn a dusty black and white, splattered in places with an all-too-familiar starkly glowing green.

No. Not splattered. A few spins of the scroll wheel zooms in on a crooked picture of the kitchen. There’s green all over everything; the fridge, the microwave, the drawers and cupboards, cluttered thickly at the kitchen table. These aren’t splatters. They’re handprints, slapped in layers and layers over themselves, like somebody dipped their hands in neon paint and went to town.

Every photo taken in that black and white filter shows the same thing. Handprints on doorknobs and railings, footprints on tile and carpet, green smeared and stamped everywhere, tracking the movements of something—

(somebody)

—for what must be as long as the Portal’s been active.

Why didn’t Mom and Dad say anything about this? Why haven’t you sensed it? There’s a ghost, an entity, some thing lurking around your house like it has every right to be there! Green gathered on the couch, on every table and sink, even the upstairs shower and your room and—

(the pictures of jazz’s room are nearly clean, the pictures of Mom and Dad’s room are spotless, but your room is practically bathed in green from floor to ceiling, your bed and desk nearly washed out by a poisonous haze, and no wonder Mom had looked so worried and no wonder Dad had laughed so loud, they know something’s wrong with you, they’ve always known you were messed up thanks to the accident but now here’s irrefutable proof, how can you lie your way out of photographic evidence, how can they look at you and not see you for the freak you are)

—oh.

You close the files, power down the computer, and walk quietly out of the lab. That’s… that’s all you can really do. Sooner or later your parents will knock gently on your door and ask you to come downstairs. Just a few tests, they’ll say. It’s for your own good, they’ll say. We’re worried about you, they’ll say.

But they’ll find out. They’ll find out what you are, and it’ll go one of two ways. They’ll either accept you as the freak you are, or hate you for the freak you are. Either way, there will be no more hiding. It’s… it’s almost a relief, to know the other shoe is finally going to drop.

Except it never does.

You wait, quietly, patiently, expectantly. They don’t treat you any different. They never say a word. When they call you down to the lab, it’s just to show off the latest in Fenton ghost hunting technology. Why? Why don’t they ask? Why don’t they administer tests, if not on you than on the house and the Portal? Why does nothing change?

They’re wrong on nearly every count, sure, but you’ve got hurts aplenty to hide. Sam and Tucker have seen the lightning splashed across your skin dozens of times by now, and when they hear the A-listers spreading this bad joke of a ghost story and see you laugh, they laugh too. There wasn’t much chance of hiding it for long from them, after all, when it’s so much easier to patch up the nastier cuts when you’re bleeding sluggish ectoplasm instead of blood pumped by a heart full of adrenaline.

The first time Sam had insisted on unzipping your suit to get a good look at the slash on one shoulder, Tucker cracking a half-hearted attempt at a dirty joke with hands shaking so bad the first aid kit rattled like a live thing, they’d both stopped cold. For ten long seconds, they just stared, pinning you down with matching expressions of horror. It was the longest ten seconds of your life. You’d been scared before, of being found out for the freak you are, of being overwhelmed by powerful ghosts, but this, you’re pretty sure, was the first time you were ever terrified.

But then Sam hugged you, and Tucker had smiled and squeezed your good shoulder, and that had been enough. There wasn’t anything to worry about after all.

They understand now why you gasp when your ghost sense goes off—

(shock like plunging feet first into a frozen lake, shock like drowning with a chest full of dead air, shock like electricity buzzing hot and cold and terrible through your nerves, leaving you breathless and tingling, your fists clenched so tight your knuckles burn white, teeth clenched and grinding as you dart for the nearest lonely corner to gather up your heaviness and summon the starlight in your heart)

—and they know why it took you so long to realize you don’t have a heartbeat when you’re a ghost. The first few times you changed, you’d felt it, felt it like a rush of blood flow to a sleeping limb, but it took weeks to put it together. To realize the stinging, cool pulse radiating from your hand to your chest wasn’t your heart but something else altogether. All that star-bright scar tissue pulses. Involuntary, but without any reaction to how much energy you exert. A constant, steady [unfinished]

Breathing is optional too, when you’re a ghost. You’d found that one out the hard way, choking on mud in that stupid duck pond and tangled in one of Skulker’s nets.

#danny phantom #my writing #deadfic #past me did present me dirty with all these FUCKING italics #you can take my 'danny's got serious anxiety' headcanon from my cold dead hands

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