#he’s there for the first moments that his kid is actually coherent and not amalgamated with AFO

[smolthealmighty]

[whoknowsbud]

Stand Mutation AU

Warning, this is FILLED with body horror! And somewhat loose but present connections to the recent epidemic! Mainly in part 4...

These are mostly just lists of the designs, and this post will only contain parts 3 & 5. There’s a lot more bulk to what was written to part 4, and there’s a lot more angst written, so that’s going to be a separate post.

(Which is now here!)

The idea here is essentially taking the ‘stand sickness’ Holy and Josuke had and twisting it into overdrive. Rather than gaining stands, the infected mutate (often horrifically, but there are some who look almost unaffected) based on their in-canon stands. The uninfected don’t see the full image; the shapes and colors come through, but not completely. The common headlight-style eyes are a big giveaway (until they’re not).

The mutations here will also commonly hinder most functions, especially rational thought. It’s most often temporary as the infected adjusts to the changes of their body. This can take a number of forms, but what happened to the Nijimura brothers is the worst it gets. The term for this for now is going to be ‘fried’.

The infection is only transferred by the arrow, and genetic relation.

Part 3

Holy has flowers growing on her body. Has a way better handle on it than Jotaro; fully present and coherent, the flowers just need to sap a little of her energy to grow big and bright. So, yeah, she's completely fine.

Jotaro ends up this ethereal star man with so much luscious hair, but also partly fried at the start; ends up being essentially like a big dog for a while (acts on base instinct and can’t articulate).

Joseph’s arms become vines. That’s it, that’s all. Vines for arms.

Avdol is pretty much just fused with Magician’s Red. I say ‘just’, but he’s pretty damn rad.

Kakyoin is basically a bunch of wires, wrapped to make a more human shape. Rather than shooting solid energy bursts, he can send energy through the wires.

Polnareff, like Avdol, is also just fused with his Silver Chariot. The armor and sword are still removable.

Iggy is made of sand. Can shapeshift, often takes the form of a wolf, because he can and he wants to.

Hol Horse has a gun for a hand. Yes, that's all.

Gray Fly... tiny man. Beetle sized old man with beetle wings and dagger tongue. Nasty nasty.

Imposter Captain Tenille is a fish-man, simple as that. Basically take Dark Blue Moon and put it in the mans clothes. This makes it obvious that he’s the enemy the moment he comes out, but Anne is still under some suspicion at first.

Forever is just Strength. Green ship with orangutang face.

Devo basically is Ebony Devil. Imagine making a (somewhat crappy) almost life size doll of Devo, and there you go. Rather than needing a grudge to act, he forms his grudge as he fights, making him stronger.

Rubber Soul is just Yellow Temperance; when he went through stand puberty he just pretty much melted.

J. Geil is just Hanged Man; only seen through reflections. Tied a knife to his hand.

Nena is almost the same as canon; she assimilates a beautiful woman to host her real body (which has no skin covering, so here she needs a host, the looks are just preference), and still leaves parasites on victims through her blood.

ZZ's stand mutation is actually his arm. His arm is the car.

Enya… ghost? Still uses fog for the illusions, still does puppet stuff? But then Jotaro would still have to suck her down so NO, THANKS

Steely Dan, the crab man. Can duplicate himself but at NOWHERE near the same rate. Not as effective either. He's about the size of your average 14 year old.

Arabia Fats is just. On fire. Fire man. Human torch. But more fire. Just fire.

Mannish boy appears with a flat, jester-like face, so the group knows to refuse.

Cameo... genie?

Midler is basically herself with High Priestess's power to become any mineral. Still can shapeshift, but its limited.

N’Doul… could be a water man. Sends his hand out so he can stay safely out of most people’s range.

Anubis... is just the same Anubis as canon. It's a sword, what were you expecting?

Mariah is the magnetizer. It happens through contact, and feels like a small static shock. It does not work on normal people, although they do feel the shock.

Alessi has just become a shadow, his own silhouette, that de-ages those it touches like in canon, with the same eyes and manifesting ability, too. Cannot talk.

The D’arby brothers are a terrible amalgamation of the souls they’ve taken.

Pet Shop is... just its stand I think.

Vanilla Ice is another stand/user mix. As uncomfortable as the v o r e is, it seems like the only sensible thing...

Dio is similar to Jotaro. But green & yellow, with more disturbing growths (those... bullet chain suspenders looking things, and the apparent oxygen tanks on the back). He's a bit distorted, rippling in time with the seconds.

Part 5

Haruno becomes a plant creature (Oh you want limbs? Limbs to hold things? Too bad, you get tendrils!), changes his name to Giorno. The human body is still inside, controlling everything. When he’s truly happy, he blooms.

Bruno's body is just zippers. They can all be opened or closed (although if they're all opened he's kind of a mess, and its an awful noise), and what's under them is just a void. He seems to have glowing orbs as eyes, revealed by a single open zipper over where his eyes would be. To resemble a more human form, he has zippers on his head to look like hair. There are a few zippers that hang off his arms and legs almost like fins, and he will whip you with them.

Abbachio is a glitchy creature that looks like someone constantly flipping channels, with a sort of goo coating his body in almost the exact way it does Moody Blues.

Narancia is a ‘cyborg’, fighting logic output to stay ‘human’

Mista basically goes through mitosis, becoming 7 of himself; but it takes time for them to truly separate.

Fugo appears to be normal, but he has this ‘oxygen’ tank & connected mask. The Purple Haze virus is more of a gas here, produced in his lungs, so he has to have a way to contain it when he's around others. Once he starts getting emotional, he sort of melts into a zombie-like form; starts looking like a typical victim of Purple Haze.

(Giorno's able to take in an absurd amount of toxins and pollution and spit out a shit ton of oxygen, so there's much less concern.)

WE RETAIN THE DINOSAUR SPICE GIRL HERE, TRISH IS A STRETCHY & SQUISHY LIZARDWOMAN.

Mr President is a cube, still with the room. He's like a box. A box turtle, you might say.

Polpo is still in prison. His shadow does pretty much everything Black Sabbath does. Permanent poggers face.

Zucchero is a slug. Has spikes on his body that perform Soft Machine’s ability, and they’re barbed to grab the deflated forms.

Sale... maybe he's already dead. Infection stopped his own heart or something. Or hes like.. a landmark. Like Angelo in canon; fully immobile, but sort of immortal. /till you destroy the body I guess...

Formaggio’s size is constantly fluctuating, not always proportionately consistent.

Illuso... doesn't exist outside of mirrors. He can still communicate to those on the other side, and pull them in, but can't leave, himself. He works similarly to Yoshihiro Kira; ig seal the mirror, you seal him.

Prosciutto has so many eyes. Just all over, so so many. Somewhat shriveled up from the waist down.

Pesci has a fishing pole arm I guess...

Melone is some sort of... digital-ish cyborg thing. The Babyface kids are the same though

Ghiaccio is essentially fused with his suit, with the weak spot in the back of his neck frozen over. It’s actually like the mane of a lion, but ice; he can’t turn his head at all, speaking is near impossible, and eating is a struggle as well. The white album fight reveals a lot:

Due to literally being plants, Giorno has to revert back to Haruno or risk serious danger. This is the first time he’s come out; they knew he existed (he was mentioned in passing) but they weren't sure if he was alive or dead. When he can take his plants form again, it’s... kind of horrifying. Roots and vines coming out of his body, wrapping around him...

Risotto is basically a living Metallica colony. Take risotto, make every 5x5 pixels a metallica bean, there you go that’s him.

Squalo... Sharkboy

Tiziano looks fine, but his mouth is all wrong. Tongues like a starfish.

Secco... mud? Mudman?

Cioccolata looks like a zombie, moldy and decomposed an shit.

Diavolo and Doppio are... basically, literally, just King Crimson and Epitaph. They can apparently switch places? Maybe

[dustedmagazine]

Punk’d History: A Series

Photo by Leni Sinclair

This is the first installment in a series of reflections on punk’s emergence and formation, with emphases on American culture and the fraught relations between history and art. Don’t look for chronology or conventional essayistic coherence. History isn’t chronological, and it’s never coherent. It’s by turns tedious and violent. It accumulates in a residue that we can find in ashcans and in the dark corners of wrecked, abandoned buildings.

In those ways, history is sort of punk.

Three Punk’d Moments, 1966-1969

When does punk begin? The canonical account of its origin starts with the Sex Pistols, and there’s good reason for that, if we consider punk to be a pop cultural phenomenon. We might point to the band’s 1 December 1976 appearance on the Bill Grundy Show, which produced two crucial effects: it launched the Pistols and punk into mass cultural awareness, and it presaged Glenn Matlock’s banishment from the band, opening the way for Sid Vicious and his swastika t-shirts, his fashion-victim sneer and his blank caricature of outrage.  

I’d like to supply a different beginning: the beginning of a counternarrative, to supplement and to question the canonical outline. I won’t write about any punks, if by “punk” we mean Dee Dee Ramone or Cheetah Chrome or Penelope Houston. I write about three moments that set something in motion, that began to assemble a disposition—even better, three moments that began to prepare a space into which Dee Dee and Cheetah and Penelope could eventually step. We might think of that space as a stage. Not at CBGB or Mabuhay Gardens. It’s a historical stage, a punk’d space of transformation. We might start here:  

Bob Dylan in Manchester, 17 May 1966

Blonde on Blonde had been released the day before. The album featured Dylan’s most unambiguously American music to date, an idiosyncratic amalgam of country and blues and rock, mostly recorded in Nashville with experienced session men like Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey. But that day in May, Dylan found himself in Northern England, in a city whose biggest rock acts to date were the poppy Herman’s Hermits and the polished, melodic Hollies. Sound, sensibility, and landscape were at odds. If the location didn’t fit, the dissonance surely did. Dylan’s 1966 UK tour is infamous for its intense confrontations between artist and audience. The shows featured an electric second set, with Dylan backed by the Hawks, soon to become more recognizable as the Band. Many ardent listeners of Dylan’s early-1960s records considered his turn to electrical music a sort of apostasy: a rejection of the political austerity and aesthetic purity of folk music, a cynical turn to rock’s populist and unabashedly commercial interests. And many of those listeners waited for him in Manchester. 

In the electric set, whistles, boos and shouting erupted between songs. Dylan baited them. Before playing “I Don’t Believe You,” familiar (if not sacred) to the crowd in its acoustic presentation on Another Side of Bob Dylan, he drawled pranksomely, “It used to go like that, and now it goes like this.” Aggressive energy filled the room. “Ballad of a Thin Man” seemed to address the detractors directly: “Yeah, something’s happening / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” Perhaps sensing the put-down, the audience turned nasty.

Ironies proliferate here—who’s betraying what? Who’s speaking truth? The key moment is in Dylan’s snarl: “Play fucking loud!” Sheer volume negates the critical voices—even stomping and clapping and whistling can’t be heard over the band’s cacophony. Noise gets weaponized, and Dylan’s obscenity inflects it with malign intent. The cancellation of folky decorum establishes a profane space for, of all things, play. Which is to say: there are no stabilities there. What values can dominate in that space? Does it matter that “Like a Rolling Stone” charted for twelve weeks? That it was and is Dylan’s most commercially successful single? Is it his best song? By what measure? Is it the soundtrack to the mid-1960s, culturally and politically adrift? Whose 1960s? And who fucking cares, when the music is pummeling and slashing at you with such abandon? Who cares what the audience wants or expects? Plug in. Give a nasty smile. Play fucking loud. 

 MC5 in Chicago, 25 August 1968

The Yippies booked a bunch of bands to play the Festival of Life, one of many events planned to coincide with (and to parody and disrupt) the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The MC5 were the only act that ignored the months of accumulating warnings from politicians and the threats of police violence and actually showed up for the festival in Lincoln Park. It wasn’t just cops surrounding and circulating that day through the crowd of SDS kids and Black Panthers and beatnik anarchists and MOBE organizers and others just looking to party or gawk. The FBI was there, too, and so was a unit of the Army’s Special Photographic Office (DASPO CONUS, to be precise: Department of the Army Special Photographic Office, Continental United States). The DASPO team shot some footage that day:

It’s uncanny. The silence of the footage deafens, especially given the MC5’s reputation as an overwhelmingly loud live act. The visual markers are all there: Rob Tyner’s blow-out fro waving in the wind, Wayne Kramer’s shimmy and shake, Fred Smith’s red leather pants. You can just about conjure the chords of “Rambling Rose” or “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” maybe even “American Ruse” or “The Human Being Lawnmower.” In the footage’s silence, you can imagine what you want. Do you want to rock out, or do you want politics? The Five wanted to play.  

All we have are the images. Cops in riot helmets sit on picnic benches, watching the crowd gather. Most of the crowd sits. They have short hair, they wear button-down shirts. The political kids of 1968 weren’t hippies—hippies were never political. A couple near the front dances, enjoying the groove, the mild afternoon. It’s not a Chicago August scorcher. There are lots of jackets and light sweaters. All the heat and darkness and violence come later, around 11 pm that night, when the cops would form a skirmish line and clear the park. Clark Street and the surrounding area got bloodied, building toward the Battle of Michigan Avenue a few nights later. The whole world would watch.

But on the afternoon of the 25th, the MC5 grinned at the cops and cut through the bad vibes and plugged in their guitars. John Sinclair was still managing the band, but only for a few more months. They were already chafing under his White Panther jive and his 10-point plan for “rock’n’roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” The Five were down with all that, but not as a politics. They covered Sun Ra in their live sets, but after the 1967 Detroit race riots, they’d split to Ann Arbor. The riots were scary. Ann Arbor was crawling with college girls. What would you do? What about it, punk? Do you feel lucky?  

Faces in the crowd, Altamont Speedway, 6 December 1969

Five minutes into the Stones’ rendition of “Sympathy for the Devil,” we see her:

She’s a soft-bodied white woman, naked. She’s obviously, floridly, desperately high. She’s crawling and clawing through the crowd, trying to get somewhere. To Jagger? Onto the stage? Can she schematize the concept of “stage”? In her drugged state, it’s unclear if she understands where she is, let alone what she is. Her sharp features morph, from blank emptiness, to a sort of hilarity, to flashes of determination. She’s nearly there. She slaps a hand on the blonde head of some guy at the very front, getting some leverage. Then two Angels move in, and she disappears under the broad expanses of their black and red leather colors. We don’t see her again.

The Stones are nearly halfway through the song. They’ve already stopped once, Mick imploring and scolding the crowd, “Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters… Everybody just cool out!” Too much acid, too much beer, too many Hell’s Angels and freaks and sweaty kids just wanting to see Mick. There he is, in that black and red jester’s suit. He dances and he insists. They will finish the song—though who knows what they’re hoping to conjure with its sinister shuffle.

Another face: A young man, stage right. He’s lightly bearded, shaggy headed, wearing an Irish driver cap with its beak turned to the back. Mick Taylor’s solo is struggling to find itself. The whole band is in a sort of holding pattern. Jagger boogies stage right and suddenly stops. He sees something. More violence? The kid in the driver cap sees it, too, and then turns back to Jagger. It’s a remarkable moment. The kid shakes his head, but the most striking thing is the look in his eyes. He sees Jagger. He fixes Jagger with the look, razoring out at the biggest rock star in the world. He might be five feet away, at most. He sees Jagger, and there’s contempt. The look’s meaning is clear: What the fuck are you doing? Jagger can’t take it. He breaks into a moronic funky chicken and whirls away, stage left.  

A last face: A young woman, dirty blonde hair and pretty, enormous eyes. The band is cooling its way into Jagger’s vocal patter (“Ah, get on down…Ev’rybody’s got to cool out”) that intersperses Taylor’s usual two solos. “Everybody just cool out.” The young woman is weeping. Her head nods to Watts’s irresistible work on the snare. But the nod’s affirmation is ambiguous, and her tears glimmer in the stage lights. Her lips are rouged. They tremble. Her enormous eyes are empty of anything save sadness. The song runs out, stopping, failing.  

What do we see? What do we hear?  

Altamont is often figured as a sort of counterweight to Woodstock. If Woodstock was the counterculture’s dream of itself, Altamont was its nightmare, and it signaled the symbolic beginning of the end of the 1960s. The historical end point came a few years down the line, in 1974 and the failure of Vietnamization, and six-hour-long gas lines and Nixon’s resignation. Cheetah Chrome was still Gene O’Connor in 1974, gigging in Cleveland with Rocket from the Tombs. Dee Dee had become Dee Dee, but just barely, and Penelope Houston was still in college in Washington state. If something ended at Altamont, something had yet to cohere in New York and San Francisco. A change was afoot.  

I contend that we can already hear the strains of that change in Dylan’s snarled imprecation to the Hawks. The Manchester audience’s shouted protestations may have been sanctimonious—a hyperbolic consequence of a silly political over-investment in a performer. But they had been schooled in a particular way of interpreting song, that lyrics should mean something, that the relation between word and world should be transparent, and that if the right spell were spoken, the world could be changed. Dylan gave them a curse, and if anything was authentically present in that room, it was the raw shriek and hum of volume.  

These three moments clearly demonstrate increasingly anxious relations between rock music and historical forces, and they suggest an emergent set of transformations. The countercultures of the 1960s were largely driven by utopian ambitions: total peace, total transcendence, total social overthrow. The music partook of those energies, expressed them, grooved with them. Their crushing failure left a lot of wreckage, burned cityscapes, shattered minds, broken bodies. If you look closely, you can see some figures picking through the ruins. They’re crusty and dirty. They’re pissed, and they know the moment for utopian social engineering is gone. They aren’t heroes or crusaders or champions of causes. They’re just a bunch of punks.  

Jonathan Shaw

[fazbearsecuritycrew]

IN WHICH FIGHTING IS ONE OF HIS MANY TALENTS

IN WHICH FIGHTING IS ONE OF HIS MANY TALENTS

NOTICE: Mentions of Blood, Cursing

Mike usually loves fighting.

What he does not like is hearing about Jeremy fighting.

happy birthday, fnaf 2!

WINTER 2003 - Where the hell was he?

Mike looked impatiently to his watch, becoming more and more concerned by the minute.

And, speaking of minutes, Jeremy had less than five to get his ass down here before his shift started.

There were the usual excuses- I overslept, or Traffic was crazy, or even his favorite one- My bike caught a flat.

But at least he was somewhat on time with those. Mike had never witnessed a guard who had worked more than a few days still have the balls to come in late. It usually scared them into arriving an hour early, at the bare minimum. It was like the first day all over again.

Knowing the kid already had a lot to juggle with, Mike usually let it slide (he had yet to die, anyway), but it seemed like he had been too easy on him lately. He’d probably have to chew is ass out for the stunt he was pulling tonight.

The signature bell on that familiar blue bike hollered through the air, and Mike felt the breeze that trailed behind the bicycle as Jeremy pulled up to the rack.

He prepared for this moment, mouth already halfway open and in the middle of his breath-

And he cut him off.

“S-Sorry Mike,” he started with the usual apology, although it lacked its usual haste. “I…h-had a problem today, a-and then I forgot to set m-my alarm, so I t-to hurry over to get h-here. So, u-um, yeah, and a-a-also, um…”

His voice began to trail off long before the words stopped tumbling from his mouth. Mike hadn’t even noticed when he had unlocked the door to the building, pulling his hat low as he stiffly walked inside.

Mike followed after him, sucking his teeth slightly at the lowered temperature on the interior of the establishment. He may have heard the boy wince as well, but it was hard to hear from back here.

Jeremy made sure to be a few quick steps ahead of him the entire walk to the office, not slowing down once to let Mike join him at his side.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was hiding something.

“…Yeah. Try to be early next time. Don’t want them ripping your ass to shreds because you couldn’t bother to clock in.”

He flinched, but otherwise gave a silent, curt nod.

In truth, Jeremy actually hadn’t been acting all that nervous tonight. No, it was more…suspicious than anything.

He had been hellbent on avoiding facing Mike. Anything he did, he did with his head down or his back turned. He had nearly dropped the flashlight trying to get it from Mike without turning around.

The situation with the tablet was a whole lot worse. His nose was practically stuck to the screen, apparently so enthralled by whatever the footage showed despite it being a slow night.

An hour of camera watching passed, and Mike grew even more curious as to what Jeremy had been hiding.

He said he had a problem. Problem? Wonder what it is?

He entertained himself for the next fifteen by thinking of all the possible scenarios that the boy may have gotten himself into.

He was famous for getting knee deep in troublesome shit, and this time proved to be no exception. Traffic jam? Missing uniform? Stubbed toe?

A snicker escaped, and from the corner of his eye could he barely make out the green that cast him a look in the shadows.

Well, fun over. At least it kept him distracted for a good bit. Good, because it was a Tuesday. He groaned. Tuesdays were always the worst.

Smack!

His neck swiveled around just as the sound finished bouncing off the walls. Jeremy flinched, looking around the room.

“T-The, uh, tablet fell.”

Mike walked back over to the desk. “It’s not broken, is it?” he asked, reaching down to pick up the fallen item.

Unfortunately, Jeremy had the same idea.

A sharp pain rang through his head when Mike had realized he had just headbutted the shit out of Jeremy. They fell their separate, each cradling their own sore forehead.

Mike rubbed at the skin while Jeremy scrambled around to look for his missing hat.

Mike looked up.

“Jeremy, what the FUCK?”

There was an unbridled rage screeching in his shout, but it wasn’t directed at the teen. Just directed at the bastard that did that.

Jeremy tried to hide his quivering bottom lip with a nervous grin.

“Wow,” the boy started, surprisingly calm. “Those street lamps sure do know how t-to pick a fight!”

“Fight!”

“Oops,” the guard mused. “Wrong word.”

Mike tilted his chin towards him and turned his head to see him better, earning a yelp from the teen.

“Jeremy, the hell happened to your face?”

While Jeremy had saw it for himself earlier, he truly thought it hadn’t looked that bad. Sure, that black eye was really working wonders for his complexion, and the split lip provided a nice accessory to the many other cuts that littered his face, but he had worse before.

It didn’t look that bad, right?

Clearly not to Mike, who was mostly focused on the fact that the guy’s eye was basically swollen shut. That was already bad enough, but the fact that that ugly amalgamations of blues traveled up to his forehead made it look like he had been slammed into something.

Honestly, it took everything in Mike’s power to not be somewhat impressed that he was still standing. Rather, that he could even see at all. That eye was basically out of order.

“I-It’s kind of a long story…” he paused, hoping the noir would catch the hint.

He did not.

Or maybe he did and chose to ignore it.

He further examined the beaten boy’s face, brushing hair out of the way to reveal a slightly nasty cut on his forehead. Huh. He didn’t even know that one was there.

He started mumbling under his breath. Mike always did that when he was pissed off. “Seriously, how the fuck did this happen?”

Jeremy tried to pull away, but the man made sure he had a secure grasp on the younger as he dragged him over to the desk, sending him a look that said, sit or else.

He pouted. “It’s nothing.”

Mike huffed. “Jeremy, your head is fucking bleeding. It’s something, alright.”

Jeremy made the move to reach for the tablet, lifting the screen in order to wind the music box. He kept the device in his lap.

“I-I’m not joking w-when I say it’s kind of long. Can I tell you a-after we don’t die?”

Mike righted the chair that was lying on the floor, shoving it in Jeremy’s direction. “Fine, smartass,” he huffed. “Tell me after the shift. But if I so much as hear about a fucking finger being laid on you, somebody’s dying tonight. Got it?”

He gave a little roll of his good eye. “Okay, okay.”

It seemed like the rest of the night sped by after that, between Jeremy monitoring the cameras and Mike scaring off any of the animatronics that stopped by the office.

By the time six AM rolled around, Jeremy could barely react when Mike suddenly threw his backpack at him, motioning for him to hurry.

“Go get changed,” he threw his thumb over his shoulder. “And the second you come out, you’re telling me the whole damn story.”

Jeremy gulped. The older man could be scary when he wanted to be.

Mike waited in the main room for the young boy to come out, mind once again wandering. As much as Mike loved the him like a brother, it’s not as if his tiny size and overall fragility didn’t scream Pick me!

His stomach turned, and he found himself dreading all the ideas of what those injuries could mean. Sure, he had been in a fair share of fights in his day, but that was just…brutal. Whoever gave those out had the intetion to seriously hurt or incapacitate someone. The fact that Jeremy played them off like a paper cut didn’t help either, like what he was looking at was something as mundane as a walk through the park.

He didn’t know what his home situation was like, but Jeremy rarely every mentioned his parents positively, if at all. He never mentioned it before, but Mike wasn’t stupid enough to note notice the occasional cut or bruise that appeared on his body.

He didn’t want to pry, but seeing those things alone made him think that someone was hurting him in the worst possible manner.

The creaking of a door echoed down the hall, and Mike looked up to see Jeremy shuffling out the bathroom, awkwardly holding his backpack, half stuffed with the uniform.

His face had looked a bit more touched up, or maybe that was just the effect of the color he wore on his clothing. But his lip was cleaned off, and there was a little bandage peaking out from under his hair. Still, the black eye was as obvious as ever, and he doubted anything could be done to cover that up.

He pulled a chair out for himself, stiffly sitting down across from the older night guard.

He blinked. “So, what do you w-want to know?”

He narrowed his eyes, that conversation started clearly being the last thing he expected. He couldn’t help but lean forward a bit, the plastic covering on the party table crinkling under his weight. “I wanna know who fucked up your face, obviously!”

“M-Mike,” Jeremy sighed, it clearly being too early in the morning for him to coherently deal with this. “If you th-think I’m being bullied o-or something, it’s not th-that.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of things that it can be, Fitzgerald,” Mike warned, eyebrows furrowing further. Before his very eyes, those murderous intentions behind eyes seemed to melt into something that could only be found in the well-meaning.

“C’mon, Jeremy. I know it probably sucks talking about it, but I’m only asking ‘cause I don’t want anything to happen to you that doesn’t need to happen.”

Tentatively, he leaned forward, placing a hand on his junior’s shoulder. “Seriously, man. I don’t wanna see shit happen to you, because there’s a lot you already have going on, and it breaks my heart to see shit like this. Talk to me, please?”

Jeremy gave a small smile, thought it didn’t quite reach the side with the split. “Mike, t-trust me- I’m fine.”

“But what happened?”

A hesitant pause.

“O-Okay, so maybe there was a fight?”

“Jeremy!”

The named threw his hands up in mock defense. “W-Wait! To be fair, i-it was in self-defense.”

“I’m laying hands on someone if they hit you.”

“No one hit me, okay!” he whined, that familiar pout puffing his cheeks out again. “I-I wasn’t getting teased o-or bullied or anything like that, so chill o-out.”

He bit his lip, leaning back into the cheap metal chairs of the pizzeria.

“It was for a f-friend.”

Mike paused, and suddenly it all made sense. Despite some of the more heroic antics that Jeremy had shown before, it seemed like he held an overall aversion to fighting. There was a type of guilt that shown in his eyes at any suggestions of violence, and Mike

“At first he a-asked me for help because all three of th-these guys were going to gang up on him, and I told him to fight his own battles because i-it was his fault he was in t-trouble,” he looked across the room again, eyes focusing in on nowhere in particular. “But th-then they started wailing on him at the same time, and I had to jump in, Mike. He was getting-”

He took a breather. “He was getting beat, Mike. Everyone just stood th-there while they tossed him over a table, slamming his head into the floor over and over again. And his girlfriend was just watching him get beat to a pulp, and I couldn’t, Mike.”

He sighed, averting his eyes with a hint of shame.

“So yeah. I did get in a fight t-today. I’m sorry.”

That final look up with those honest ass eyes was all it took for Mike to crumble.

The scowl that previously adorned his face had been replaced in place of an understanding smile. Leave it to Fitzgerald to get his eye basically poked out while trying to defend a friend.

Maybe he wasn’t very strong, and he may have still been a child, but damn if the kid didn’t have some serious balls.

A warm chuckle escaped Mike’s mouth as he stood.

“Huh?” He tilted is head, almost disbelieving. “What’s so funny?”

“Just thinking about how you probably looked out there fighting guys twice your size.”

Jeremy grinned, slinging is backpack over his shoulder, right on the man’s heels.

Closer to the entrance doors, Mike spoke up with a, “So?”

“S-So what?”

He turned, hands shoved in his pockets. “Get any good hits in?”

Jeremy nodded his head sheepishly, a red tint dusting his cheeks. “I did,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “I m-may have overdone it a-a bit, though. I hit a guy in his knee with a chair.”

There was a confusing mix of laughter and surprise to Mike’s voice. He slapped his forehead. “Holy shit! You probably blew his knee out!”

“I hope not. I don’t have the money for a lawsuit.”

Mike barked out a laugh again, wiping imaginary tears from his eyes. “Man, I’d hate to get on your bad side. Double cross you and the next thing you know, your knees are getting curb stomped by a sleep deprived kid with multicolored hair!”

The teen gave a light laugh, acting as if he didn’t just talk about bashing a guy’s knee in with a chair.

Mike grinned. “I take it you won?”

Jeremy laughed. “Well, maybe not, but we didn’t go down without trying!”