#i can't begin to tell you how happy it makes me that jesse is canonically a sonic fan

[jesse-cosay]

pls share no exit au i want to cry

The no exit au is exactly what it sounds like. Jesse gets his first exit and Lake can't come with. There are not return trips on the train, not for impossible/unsolvable problems at least, and Jesse can't get back to them.

This was partly inspired by Weevilo's fic, which really got me thinking abt the possibilities of what would happen if Jesse hadn't come back!

In this au they didn't run into the apex, and were on the train a little longer because there was no Big Confrontation to push Jesse's number over the edge.

Jesse gets off the train and still tells Nate everything, Nate believes him to some extent, but his parents don't. Because really, who would? It sounds crazy and Jesse has been a missing person for months.

Eventually, he goes through some therapy (real therapy) once things settle down, but it's a struggle because everyone and everything is telling him to let go of Lake. To move on.

But Lake is still alive. Still out there. And it's a lot harder to move on from something (someone) when you know that they don't want you to.

Without any real support (because while his family loves him, they can't truly believe the stories Jesse tells them without proof), Jesse gets a bit depressed. He hangs out with Nate a lot more too, since Nate says he believes him.

Nate, consequently, feels a bit of responsibility towards Jesse. He sees how his parents not believing him hurts Jesse, he sees how distressed Jesse can be after a particularly bad day, and he sees just how sad Jesse is when he talks about Lake or the train. Like he misses it.

With Nate as Jesse's only confident, it takes a toll for him, too. And after a few years of the two of them stewing the train does come back.

But it comes for Nate.

Who (though not immediately) soon stumbled across Lake. A shiny metal person, just like his brother had described to him. Except different. Older and taller- not as warm and friendly as he'd pictured.

It doesn't take long for Lake to make the connection, to see the resemblance. Nate and Jesse looked so similar. They promise to help him off the train because Nate is a connection to Jesse they never thought they'd have again.

Nate gives Lake hope. He tells them stories, he's silly and happy to explore the train- something that Lake hasn't been in a long time.

And Lake sees the way Nate tries to take others pain and make it his own. They see the way Jesse's grief has become Nate's. How he feels responsible. And even when Nate is helping them, whether he realizes it or not, Lake reminds him that those problems aren't his. That he can't control other people or how they feel. That it's not his fault.

I should also mention that Nate's number starts out broken, because really his problem is that Lake is on the train (the reason the train picks up Jesse in canon), but once he learns not to make other people's problems his own, it zeros instead. Because Lake being on the train was never his problem to begin with.

Then it's Lake and Nate standing at the exit, with Jesse on the other side.

And it's- they can't touch. They can't go through the door, because it's Nate's exit. But they still talk a little.

"I waited for you. I was always waiting for you. I'm not gonna go anywhere this time."

Nate and Lake argue about his exit, because Lake wants him to go back and Nate has decided that- while Lake being stuck on the train isn't his problem, he doesn't really care. He may have learned his lesson and got his exit, but he isn't going to make the same mistake and leave them there.

So they go to the engine and confront one-one much like in canon, devising a plan before they get there instead of after.

And they all live happily ever after!

[lakesbian]

Train Guys in Worm: Presuming all the train passengers Could Trigger, and presuming that their crossroads moment either IS or is CLOSE TO their Trigger, what powers do you think they'd get?

oh damn i guess there is train/worm crossover! win for me (guy who was obsessed w/ train right before i got Into into worm).

obligatory disclaimer: these are all just what i think are The Coolest Options, not firmly set in one universe or the other. just roll with any discrepancies/take them as they are. this is gonna be long, and i'm not in the mood to concept-edit for internal logic.

[cracks knuckles]

tulip: too much of a support system, not at enough of a low, can't trigger

lake: escaped case 53. brute 5, thinker 3 - made entirely of an unknown highly-reflective metal. exceedingly high breaking and melting points. weighs approx. 1,000 pounds. is only about as strong as an athletic 13yo girl, but, like...if that athletic 13yo girl couldn't feel pain or physical exertion and was also capable of throwing 1,000 lbs of body weight around. running on "has enough adrenaline to lift a car off a trapped family member" physical capability 24/7. doesn't need to eat, drink, or breathe. - unconscious minor precog presenting itself as particularly strong mental impulses towards decisionmaking which minimizes the chances of harm coming to her. this functions largely as a defensive combat thinking ability--if she could climb up that nearby pipe to dodge containment foam and then land an elbow slam from it, she's gonna get the idea to do it. very good at "coincidentally" stumble-dodging a power she's never seen in use before by an inch. this adds a solid point or two to her brute rating because of how effectively it enables her to throw her weight around and avoid attacks. she occasionally gets impulses towards what the next steps she could take in a plan to avoid large-scale/impending danger are, but there's not necessarily a guarantee the entire plan will work out--it's just a nudge onto the right path. (think the many times she dodges a sander by an inch in canon + her getting the idea to go to the engine despite having no idea what she'll do when she gets there.)

my sweet sweet SWEET darling boy whom i love jesse: pressures his little brother into doing Something dangerous his shithead friends think will be funny. it goes bad, and nate is sent to the hospital with some serious injuries. panicked, guilty, and terrified that he still doesn't feel prepared to drop the masks he puts up, jesse runs away from home. he runs into his shithead friends, makes a poor attempt to stand up to them & tell them off, and that goes bad as well. when they turn on him, it quickly becomes both devastatingly mentally and physically dangerous. the worst part is that, in the moment, he doesn't wish that he had been better at standing up to them. instead, he wishes that he had just been better at pleasing them, better at finding a way to keep everyone happy with him. trigger.

master, threat rating pending. anyone jesse perceives as needing to like him--whether because they're a physical threat, or simply a threat to his deep insecurities--will begin perceiving him as a friend, with the nature of this perceived friendship adjusting to be indiscernible from how it would appear if it had arisen naturally. this is an ironic reflection of what caused him to trigger in the first place: everyone likes him, but no one likes him for him.

the power is uncontrollable and always on. he is not aware of how it functions, and currently retains his typical desperate people-pleasing behavior.

alan dracula: the PRT thought that the weird deer was jesse's master minion. as it turns out, it's not. in fact, nobody has any fucking idea what it is. there are some theories that it's a really fucked up case 53, but...as anyone in-the-know knows, cauldron has no idea what the fuck that thing is, either. in fact, all signs point to it genuinely being a minutely-smarter-than-average regular deer, but with superpowers. the PRT has given it another name, but jesse and lake loudly insist that his name is alan dracula. alan dracula cares about 1. grass and 2. jesse and lake, in that order. jesse and lake do not at any point explain when or how they met alan dracula. attempts to probe into His Deal are met with a very condescending explanation that he's a deer, and also their friend. this is not because he's using any sort of memory or behavior altering power on them--he's just a deer, he has no reason to do all that.

changer 12 (trump 12, blaster 12, stranger 12, brute 12, mover 12). alan dracula could kill an endbringer. alan dracula isn't going to kill an endbringer, because there's no grass involved. alan dracula only ever releases a fraction of his power, and for this, we should all be grateful.

(i maintain that there's literally no possible way to good-faith translate alan dracula into worm without going this route. if you wormify train characters and you don't make alan dracula a weird fucking deer, you're doing it wrong. alan dracula could beat the shit out of contessa, i don't give a fuck. he's alan dracula.)

grace: her life was going great, right up until she met hazel and started changing. reconsidering things. it hurt when tuba died. she feels like she's desperately spinning plates, trying not to drop any, trying to keep simon happy and hazel safe. it starts taking more lies, more manipulation, just to keep the most basic social interaction going smoothly. she almost thinks she has it, thinks she can make room in her life for hazel without having to give up the apex. but then, without really thinking, she lashes out at hazel to keep simon happy. she didn't realize how horrible it would be until the words had already left her mouth. and then, in the midst of her confusion with herself, hazel leaves. she couldn't live up to any of the roles she was playing. she was trying so hard to be what simon expected, but now she's realizing she can't live up to it--and she doesn't want to live up to it. she dropped all the plates, and there's nothing left for her in the shards. she's watching hazel leave, sobbing, feeling simon stare at the back of her head with raw hatred. trigger.

changer 5 (stranger 3, master 6). ability to alternate between a silver, highly translucent form w/ a face akin to a tragedy mask and a metallic, solidified golden form w/ a face akin to a comedy mask. - in the silver form, people are simply inclined to find her boring, and this is aided by the fact that she's made near entirely see-through. people looking at her feel like they've been watching paint dry for the last hour. trying to remember her long enough to communicate her location feels similarly uninteresting. this feeling of boredom is also mentally parsed as a completely normal reaction, making it difficult to rationally recognize it as a sign to call her out--people experiencing it have a tendency to simply start paying attention to something else, instead. - in the gold form, she's unreasonably interesting. praise from her feels superhumanly good. it's like you're a little kid and she's your favorite person in the whole world, your biggest idol, compelling you to do just a little favor for a pat on the head. she's gorgeous and sweet and you want to do whatever she asks of you. (this is the weakest one, imo, probably because i just made it up on the spot. i Don't Love It and would appreciate alternate suggestions from anyone else familiar w/ her character. it might count as breaker states instead, but i don't think so? who gives a shit. anyway yeah if anyone has an idea for how best to get smth out of the identity struggles + unwanted attention from simon + isolation/betrayal while stirring a bit of cult leader swag into it Let Me Know. my idea does nooot ironically tragically reinforce her issues enough!)

simon: grace was everything he had. they were a team. they were grace and simon. for ten years, it was them versus the train. and then she starts acting weird. normally, they communicate in effortless, unspoken code--but now she's sending off smoke signals he doesn't know how to read. she keeps telling him to hold off on killing the gorilla null for no good reason, and sometimes he swears it feels like she and the new kid are a team versus him. he watches her memory tape to get to the bottom of it, and--yes. she's been lying to him. throwing away everything they built for a null. trigger.

master 6. has the ability to generate a single, extremely strong, and extremely agile brute minion. it looks like an abstracted ballerina with locs and a golden mask. it is, transparently, a replacement for grace. a regracement, if you will. this is the grace in his head, the grace he's placed on a pedestal, the real grace that would scoff at the void that fell from that pedestal when she lied to him. it doesn't speak, because he never really cared to listen. the important part is that, unlike grace, it can never think to leave him.

ryan & min-gi: not sure! i know they'd both realistically trigger separately, but i do like the idea of a cluster trigger for them. they're assigned soulmates at train via the same numbers, i wanna see them assigned kiss cluster dynamic at worm. my main barrier here is that i'm struggling to think of a compelling cluster trigger event + fun music-themed powers. (are two person clusters even a thing? i have not read ward nor will i read ward.) suggestions welcomed.

amelia: amelia is a very smart, talented engineer. she has been since she was a little girl. and she's still spent her entire life getting fucked over by misogyny. her parents and her teachers trying to coerce her into doing things little girls should be doing, her college professors favoring their male students over her, the men in her workplace feeling threatened by her and discriminating in response. the only thing she has going for her is alrick, her fiance. he's impressed by her, treats her as an equal, he sees her in a way no one else does. he stands up for her. he was awed by her work as a child, stood with her in college, works at the same place as her and does his best to make it better for her. she loves him more than anyone. and then he gets into an awful accident and languishes for days in the hospital. she feels like her heart and head are going to explode, watching him lie there. she needs his support. but he dies anyway, and she realizes she doesn't know how to live without her person. she's about ready to go jump off the roof of their old college, and then--trigger.

tinker 10. amelia can build pockets in reality, and she can build entire worlds-in-miniature in those pockets. every pocket world has an entrance to the outside in the form of a red door w/ a golden handle, indestructible and immovable. she can build denizens for those worlds, and those denizens can reproduce. the only guiding rules for her worlds are: - although they're based on elements from reality, they're easier to build the more divorced from reality are, and significantly more difficult to build the more realistic they are. - attempts to intentionally design a car--particularly a realistic one--vs letting her instincts take the lead inevitably result in elements from her unconscious leaking into it. turtles are particularly common, and it bothers her that she can't figure out what object from her subconscious is causing it. - she cannot build people. the more humanoid a denizen appears, the more difficult it is to make.

despite the above, she has furiously dedicated herself to attempting to rebuild a better version of her old life, alrick included. she's stolen a wealth of tinkertech in the hopes that something will help her overcome her limitations. her violent methods of doing so, and her refusal to stop making self-replicating denizens, quickly landed her a kill order. she doesn't care. she has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

the last anyone heard of her, she'd sealed herself in a pocket world and locked the door behind her. all attempts to open the door from the outside have proved fruitless. it remains under perpetual watch. no one wants to find out what she's been making in there, or what she plans to do if, or when, she emerges.

cape name suggestions also welcome for all of these. will be real i am not very good at coming up w/ cape names. compelled by "Your New Best Friend" for jesse--i love clunky, long-ass cape names--and something w/ 'killed god and took his place' connotations for amelia. just straight up "deicide"? who knows.

[liamgallaghermpreg]

happy wincest wednesday!! what's the best and worst season for sam to knock up his sister?

happy wincest wednesday vicky!!!! omg thank you for this extremely tailored-to-me ask. i've only seen 1-6, so i can only answer for those.

i love all interpretations of when sam & dean(na) give into their feelings for each other, but i'm personally a post-in my time of dying truther, and think they had sex for the first time in wake of john's death.

oh, my god, this got long:

best season: i'll go with season 2 despite the eventual devastation. because lets face it, their lives are always a mess. but in s2, sam's grief over jess has lessened, and i think he'd finally be ready to reconcile his feelings for his sister. almost losing her in the truck accident and losing john is a lot for him to handle – and we know sam is an internalizer; despite deanna's unwillingness to discuss things, she certainly wears her heart on her sleeve – but sex is something that can happen without words.

i think the conception sex happens after 2x04 children shouldnt play with dead things. deanna finally admits she's having trouble dealing with john's death – that she feels it's her fault, even – and apologizes for her recent behavior. and then follows it up with:

[...]You're the most important people in my life. And now … I never should've come back, Sam. It wasn't natural. And now look what's come of it. I was dead. And I should have stayed dead. You wanted to know how I was feeling. Well, that's it. So tell me. What could you possibly say to make that all right?

oh boy that is a prime lead-in to some in the backseat of the impala lovemaking. no time to bother with a condom. they want to feel each other. a couple months later, it's obvious that deanna's pregnant. and tbh, i think her first instinct would be to get rid of it. (side note: it is my personal hc that john and/or others have knocked her up in the past, and she's gotten rid of it every time. it's the most practical thing to do for a hunter. otherwise you end up with situations like john's or the harvelles). but this is sam's baby. and sam's having visions. deanna's rattling around john's "save sam or kill him" instructions in her brain. playthings happens, and deanna is more sure of her brother being it for her than ever (side note – every ask if they're a couple this season gets even better with dee's pregnant belly in the way).

and sam...sam quietly doesn't argue when deanna wants to keep it, because he's scared of what's to come, and wants deanna to have a peace of him when he's gone.

(another side note: what is and what never should be fully includes a domestic fantasy for deanna in this 'verse).

ahbl is devastating of course, but oh god the wack morality of deanna deciding the deal is worth it because now sam will have a peace of deanna with him when she goes to hell. she convinces herself she's doing it for them both.

them having a child would have s3 play out totally differently, imo. sam wouldn't trust ruby so blindly (possibly going so far as to kill her, become king of hell to save deanna and their child). not that sam doesn't fiercely care for dean in canon, as that's his driving force for his actions in s3, but with a kid on the line? they can't do anything for themselves and they need their mom!! sam's mother is his biggest blank in his life, and he doesn't want [child] to have that too. especially because they both would have died to a deal to save their loved one (not that sam knows that yet).

worse: obvious answer is halfway through s3, because the child would not survive the season finale, and lilith would fully taunt sam over this, driving sam even deeper into his demon blood revenge mission. the wedge in the beginning of s5 drives even deeper because they have this unspoken thing between them, and deanna can't hide her emotions but neither will talk about them.

BUT! i think s6 provides another interesting answer. soulless sam knocking up his sister? he has no qualms about fucking raw, and she can just abort it if she gets pregnant! oh, she wants to keep it? fine, her prerogative. he has other things to take care of. this, i think, is devastating for deanna. and OH GOD, when sam comes back. sam's lack of autonomy is already a very sad and very fascinating theme throughout spn, and look what his body did without his knowledge. he's overjoyed for a child with deanna i think, but constantly grappling with the implications.

thanks for the ask!!!!

[awed-frog]

I love your 'love tropes everywhere' tag! And right now something came to my mind (Sorry I can't look it up by myself right now, but) might it be that most of these love tropes aren't recognized as such because of the music? At least I can't remember any "lovely" music in DeanCas-scenes, if you understand what I mean.

Hey! Thank you - that’s one of my most depressing tags, but it also makes it so clear what they’re doing with Destiel, doesn’t it?

(Sigh.)

As for the music - that’s a very interesting theory, but unfortunately, music is something I mostly know nothing about, so I don’t know if I can answer your queston. My opinion on that - and I presume that in this case, you’re wondering specifically about the parallels highlighted by this post - is that music can influence the way you view a scene, because even I know that, but I wonder if it can truly override our collective #NoHomo mindset. As I explained here, even for me, someone who grew up with a borderline hippy family reading weird books and watching weirder movies, both IRL and (often) on screen a gay couple is not a couple until they cross some line - and that line is much higher than it is for a straight couple. It’s unfair, but it’s apparently how brains work. For instance, yesterday a Facebook contact I haven’t seen in forever and ever posted a new picture - you could see these two guys, okay, arms around each other, some kind of beach in the distance - and there you see it again - if my friend had been with a girl, I would have assumed, 100%, that that was a romantic partner - a girlfriend or a wife - because something in the picture was very intimate and soft and that’s not how you pose with friends. But since they were two men, and I’d never heard anything about him being gay or bi, I just - I don’t know. You think best friend, you think jokey picture, like those best men playing bridesmaids and screaming at the ring. And whenever this happens, I’m not happy with myself - I tsk and roll my eyes and everything else - but our brains have this weird way of functioning statistically in how we see the world (in movies, 99% of couples are straight and 99% or bros are just friends, so that’s what you see) and then ignoring statistics as soon as there’s a rational decision to be made (a lot more people are killed in traffic and changing light bulbs than they are in terror attacks, and yet it’s the bombs we fear). So in the case of Dean and Cas I’m not exactly sure that even music can change anything, if simply because everything else really didn’t (all those I need you and breaking mind control spells and mixtapes and the platonic staring - if this had been a man and a woman, everybody to the Moon and beyond would have accepted it as canon asap). 

I mean, Sam and Jess were a couple, and this is the data our brains have been given - they were in love, they lived together, they went to parties and whatever - this means that what they’re doing with them - Sam seeing Jess by the side of the road, Lucifer pretending to be Jess, Sam rushing to save Jess from the fire and everything else - that’s not subtext - it’s text, and it supports the coherent and honest narrative we’ve seen from the very first episode. For those mythological creatures, the ‘casual viewers’, there’s no ambiguity there, no math to do in their heads. They’ve been told straight out that Sam loved Jess in a ‘I want to have babies with you’ way, so when Lucifer slips into her skin the situation is abundantly clear. Dean and Cas, on the other hand - what is missing, and mostly the reason I’m so angry, is that there is absolutely nothing textual there. Everything we have about them are things that can either be read both ways, or are so ‘unimportant’ that a normal viewer wouldn’t even notice them. This means that when Lucifer pretends to be Cas, the situation is very different (maybe not for us, but for a ton of people out there). And, frankly, not even Céline Dion could change this - after seeing the media’s reaction to the mixtape, for instance, it was clear to me that the next season could open with a montage of Dean teaching Cas how to dance with My Heart Will Go On blaring from some jukebox and it still wouldn’t be enough.

(Ugh.)

And the thing is, part of me understands this reluctance or obliviousness we’re seeing about realizing Destiel is a thing, because there is no reason, none, not to insert it in the text. If they want to preserve some UST and general misery, which is always a good idea, they could still have Dean talk to Jody - they had the perfect opening this season in her You can tell me anything speech - or, whatever, they could have filmed the magnificent episode someone (sorry, I never remember who) wrote here on tumblr about a case featuring some ex boyfriend of Dean’s. Seriously, it’s not that difficult.

(But, yeah.)

So, I’m sorry - the only thing I can offer here is that I checked out the first parallel (because I can’t bear to rewatch that last episode, and I do remember Casifer talking to Dean wasn’t framed in any particularly romantic way).

When Sam sees Jess in Bloody Mary, the background music is The Rolling Stones’ Laugh I Nearly Died, which starts well before that scene and seems to be more about Sam’s feelings of guilt and ‘unmooredness’ than his everlasting love for Jess. Jess appears during the guitar solo and disappears over the last refrain - I’m so sick and tired / Trying to turn the tide, yeah / So I’ll say my goodbye / Laugh, laugh / I nearly died. As for the Destiel scene that was heavily paralleled to that one, well - it’s neatly done, isn’t it, because in this case, Dean sees Cas right at the beginning of the episode (Sam and Jess, that was the very last scene) and, again, the scene is framed by a classic rock song, The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Now, the interesting thing is that the Destiel scene is played in a much more insistent way - that song is way more romantic, for starters (‘Cause girl, there’s a better life for me and you), and when Dean sees Cas, the lyrics go Now my girl you’re so young and pretty / And one thing I know is true, yeah / You’ll be dead before your time is due, I know it. The second thing is that Dean, unlike Sam, acts upon this vision - he stops the car, drives back, gets out, and looks around, whereas Sam simply stared in awed desperation at Jess before the screen went black. And, third point: when we saw Jess, that was filmed from Sam’s point of view, but when we saw Cas, that wasn’t Dean’s point of view - it was the external narrator’s (so to speak), and that generally means what we’re seeing is objective reality. Now, I’m not saying that’s yet another indication that Dean loves Cas (or maybe a little bit) - I think what’s happening here is that Cas, unlike Jess, was not dead, and that Dean actually had a glimpse of him walking along some road - maybe not the one he was driving on, but that scene - and this is confirmed by how it was filmed - was real. Dean saw Cas, and Cas saw Dean. That wasn’t a vision. As to what it means, subtextually, if anything - I am reminded of that Fanfiction thing where the two girls playing Dean and Cas were a couple in real life. External narrators and objective reality outside the theatre’s stage usually means, this is actually true, pay attention - but, again, it’s subtext, so, whatever.  

Anyway, if you’re interested in this I can recommend TV Tropes, which is devouring Supernatural with a vengeance (see for instance their Ho Yay! page, which features many examples of barely subtextual homoerotic moments).

(By the way - I rewatched bits of Bloody Mary to find that Jess scene and there he was, baby Dean waking Sam up from a nightmare and saying, ‘Sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about this’ - and that’s another example of viewer bias, isn’t it, because when I first started to watch the show, I didn’t really like Dean and mostly saw him as some insensitive fuckboy - and yet I bet there were plenty of little moments like that one which already contradicted this alpha male façade Dean was trying to cling on to. I guess I just didn’t see them, not until later, because I’d already decided in my mind what this character was like. 

Brains are funny things, aren’t they?)