#i find it hard to imagine he never mentioned it to edwin

[bookshelfdreams]

hey do y'all ever think about the fact that Charles probably has told Edwin about being beaten as a child at some point during their 34 years of friendship? And that Edwin likely never found it remarkable enough to ask further questions because back when he was alive, beating children was completely normal

[infinite-beginnings]

The line when Charles said, "Edwin's told me loads of stories about Hell," and him seeming to know he'd find a map in Edwin's book always hits me hard.

Now I acknowledge Charles might’ve been posturing to reassure the Night Nurse he could navigate Hell, but let's assume this fact was real.

Because that means that Edwin felt comfortable enough to talk about all of his trauma to Charles. He mentions Hell a lot in passing in front of the girls, but he never goes into specifics. However, it seems as if he actively told Charles quite a few details about Hell. I also noticed that Charles is very calm when he's going to find Edwin. Yes, he's studying the book a lot, but he is also navigating the space with a certain amount of confidence. I'm sure it's partially due to Charles' tendency to do things without thinking and project confidence. But also, it seems as if he might have at least a very basic level of knowledge or familiarity with the levels of Hell based on the stories Edwin told.

I think this is probably another reason why Edwin struggled to believe the fact that Charles had faced abuse in his past and never shared it with Edwin. Because Edwin was always up front and honest with Charles. He told him the very first time they'd met that he had just escaped Hell. I'm sure Edwin did not want to relive his memories of Hell, and maybe it took him decades to feel like he could share. But I bet when he started talking about it with Charles, he felt relief. Because sharing your trauma with someone who accepts you and loves you no matter what is always a relief after holding it in and pushing it down.

So I just imagine Edwin feeling that relief after sharing his stories from Hell and feeling closer and more bonded with Charles because of it...and then he finds out that Charles has this huge amount of trauma from his past that he has been keeping inside. It probably breaks Edwin's heart that he hadn't been able to offer Charles the same relief he'd felt.

And yes, Crystal mentioned that Charles was probably denying the trauma even to himself. We all know that Edwin knew something was off with Charles and that he was probably frustrated in himself because he hadn't been able to figure it out, but Crystal apparently had.

But I also think there might be another level to it. The boys have been solving cases for 30 years. I find it hard to believe that they never had another case involving abuse or at least someone with a controlling personality that would've reminded Charles of his father. Maybe Edwin thinks back to a couple of those cases and how Charles was acting strange and withdrawn during them and realized he'd missed a huge clue about how his friend was feeling.

All those years of sharing his stories from Hell and being comforted by Charles and Edwin hadn't been able to do the same. Edwin is definitely hurt that Charles didn't feel like he could confide in him and heartbroken to think about how much pain his friend was going through alone.

[greyskyflowers]

I like the idea that, I've seen mentioned a few times and love it, the boys turn into those little orb things when they're like completely, if they were human they would have passed out, exhausted.

I imagine a soft glow, warm to hold, about the size of an orange, a little weight to it and it doesn't float but drops to the floor and rolls like a ball ~

⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️

It really isn't surprising after everything with hell, Esther, and Niko, that Edwin shifts.

He looks exhausted, and Charles still sees him terrifed and bloody in Hell when he closes his eyes, swaying a little bit where he stands listening to Crystal, and Charles knows what's going to happen before it happens.

The softly glowing orb doesn't even have a chance to drop before Charles snatches it, carefully tucking it away in his coat. It's a warm, little weight against his side.

He loves Crystal, Edwin does too even though he huffs about it, but she doesn't need to see Edwin like this. No one needs to see Edwin like this. The thought of it feels like calling attention to an open wound, advertising a vulnerable spot for someone to exploit or further hurt.

Thankfully, they're all finally free to go home. He doesn't like the idea of leaving Crystal but there's a growing itch to get back home and she shoves him towards the mirror and tells him she's meet up with them later.

Neither Charles or Edwin like being out when one of them is like this.

The first few time it happened, Charles hadn't really thought about it too much. And it happened a lot those first years after his death. He often overdid it, everything going fuzzy before going dark, and then he'd wake up, usually pressed against Edwin's side on the little couch. He always woke up on or next to Edwin and it'd been startling the first few times but he always wakes up comfortable now, no rush to get up.

The first time Edwin shifted in front of Charles, he panicked. Refused to let go of him until, after what seemed like days, Edwin shifted back. Still relaxed enough that he hadn't immediately shoved himself off Charle's lap and he hadn't fought the hug too hard either.

He's only see Edwin like that a few times but to be on the other side of it, he understands why Edwin always relaxes when Charles shifts back. It's a powerful and terrifying feeling, to hold something so small and vulnerable and know it's the most important person in the world to you.

As he got to know Edwin more, Charles had the horrible realization that Edwin had been in Hell for over 70 years and surely he must have been exhausted plenty of times when down there. What happened to him when he shifted?

Charles didn't know what Hell looked like or what really happened down there but he pictured the little orb rolling around on the floor, being kicked, or someone finding other ways to hurt it. He had finally asked, so worked up he hadn't even thought about if Edwin would want to talk about, because he needed to know.

He'd gotten a gentle look from Edwin and an answer.

While he was absolutely exhausted in hell, he never shifted. Hell takes a lot of things away and the relief of sleep or unconsciousness is one of them.

So, honestly, Edwin had lasted longer than Charles thought he would. He half expected that he'd have to lunge for the orb as soon as they fell back through the door from Hell.

Thinking too much about Hell and Esther makes him a nasty mix of furious and terrified, so he forces himself to focus on the present.

He holds Edwin closer his chest as he sinks onto the couch. He's emotionally exhausted and in the silence of everything, finally has a moment to think about the love confession on the stairs of hell.

He doesn't know what to do with that liar but he was right when he told Edwin they had forever to figure it out.

He lays out on the couch, feet hanging off the far end and his head on the armrest, the orb on his chest and his hands almost petting at it. Holding it like this means that when Edwin shifts back he'll be sprawled over Charles, something that will probably have him flustered and immediately trying to get up and off.

Charles hopes he's sleepy and comfortable when he changes back though, that he just settles there without over thinking it.

Just the two of them existing together in the same space.

[alltimefail]

I wrote a ridiculously long response that turned into basically a fic outline for this question from the Save The Dead Boys Twitter account, and I'm sharing it here so I can link the alt text for people who may want or need it (because Twitter's alt-text limits characters for some reason??? very annoying).

(Source)

Without further ado, The Dead Boy Detectives Zoo episode no one asked for is under the cut 😂

I think a day at the London Zoo would make an incredibly interesting backdrop for an episode!

Edwin has more than likely never been to the zoo, as the London Zoo itself did not open until 1928, years after he died. Charles and Crystal, however, have most certainly been to the London Zoo. Niko has been to a zoo before too, just not the one in London quite yet.

I imagine it happens like this: a ghost client who worked at the London Zoo and died due to being attacked by one of the animals comes in distraught. At first, no one understands the unfinished business or mystery of it; they just feel bad for the person because that's a horrifying way to die obviously, but they know HOW they died/where they died/when they died so it seems pretty cut and dry. That's when the ghost tells them that they'd worked there for years, specifically in the exhibit they died in, and the animals had never so much as bitten the workers in malice, nonetheless had bouts of uncontrollable rage. The only thing they remember before the attack is the animal spasming and acting in pain - that's why the worker intervened, to help - and then everything is muddy from there. The eyes of the animal, however, were the strange part... they had almost a sparkling sheen over them... and that's when the boys realize something is afoot.

They take the case and the client leaves, Charles goes pattering on about how it had been "Literally forever" since he went to a proper zoo, just waxing nostalgic and excited as he does, and the girls are bantering along with him because Niko says she's never been to London's zoo, and that's when Edwin pipes up, nonchalantly like, "Ah yes, I suppose I've never been either, now that you mention it." Charles is just... flabbergasted at this, he's like "MATE, you've never been to London Zoo?" and Edwin good-naturedly rolls his eyes and is like, "I have not been to any zoo, Charles, as the very concept was not even around when I was alive," and he'd probably say more but the look on Charles' face is kind of sad and sheepish because he should have known that, shouldn't of he? Edwin immediately goes to reassure him before Niko breaks the tension (observative as she is) and she's like, "OMG guys, this is perfect! We all get to experience it together, it'll be so perfect!" and Crystal is like, "Yeah, unlike you two who can just waltz right in, Niko and I will have to buy tickets. Might as well get our money's worth and stick around after."

The day starts all fun and nothing really seems amiss until another person is nearly attacked while they're there, and this time it's a child: like the animal is literally beating at the enclosure divider so hard they crack it trying to attack, and fortunately no one ends up hurt but Charles and Edwin do their little signature look at each other because they know SOMETHING is going on.

The case becomes time-sensitive then, and high stakes, so they regroup somewhere quiet where the girls won't get weird looks and that's when they're approached by a shapeshifter deity who has been skulking about the zoo for years (maybe they used to be a God or something before being reborn) and they give good intel, and it'd be funny because you KNOW Charles' hackles are up after Port Townsend and the whole Cat King and Monty debacle, and he's misinterpreting everything this animal shifter does as flirting to the point that eventually the deity calls Charles out for it in a "I don't want your man" kind of way. That's like the B-Plot going on and it would be hilarious, and even Edwin would find that part a little funny/gratifying because he's not dumb and he's SEEN Charles' change in behavior lmao.

Anyway this is now turning into an outline for a fic jfc the TLDR of the rest is that they realize some asshole kid came into possession of some dark magic materials and has been coming to the zoo and practicing the spells on the animals, just being a mischievous shit who thought animals would be easier to start with than humans and wanting to see what they would do. The gang has to fight the little shit, but they're eventually able to get the book away from him and Crystal, the godsend that she is, wipes his memory.

Afterward, they DO actually explore the zoo for fun, and Edwin is transfixed and telling everyone all the facts he knows about the animals. When he doesn't know anything off the top of his head, he reads the displays out loud and jots down the best bits. Charles is absolutely delighted and apologizes for not bringing Edwin sooner, but Edwin is having none of that and they have one of their sweet "Edwin and Charles" domestic moments. They're interrupted by Crystal clearing her throat and Niko giggling, one eyebrow raised because the girls KNOW, okay? But they don't say anything and Charles just steps back (when did they get so close??) and he wraps an arm around Edwin's shoulders and leads the way to the next exhibit. The girls share a lunch of various little junk foods one would only indulge in at a place like the zoo, and all of them leave with a little souvenir (Niko's idea) that they picked out for each other (it ends up working out that Niko picks Crystal's, Charles picks Niko's, Crystal picks Edwin's, and Edwin picks Charles').

From that day forward the group decides to take the time to do at least 1 "Fun" day a month that isn't inspired by casework!

[onpointedfeetandbrokendreams]

Day 5 - DBDA Week

Day 5 of Dead Boy Detectives Appreciation Week: 10th-16th June by @dbdcentral

Prompt: Dreams

Relationships: Edwin Payne/Charles Rowland, Edwin Payne&Niko Sasaki

Tags:  Alternative Universe - Inception (sort of)

TW: Mentions of canon-typical violence

--

As far as the eye could see, the corridor never seemed to end. It kept going, and going, the same sickening green light, the same splashes of blood and broken doll pieces scattered on the floor. It was dizzying. Edwin wasn’t sure if it was actually expanding before him or if he was running in circles, but he couldn’t stop to take notes, or to leave a mark behind to orient himself. He just had to keep going and going, as fast as he could, as quiet as he could. The raw terror the sound of the creature produced enough to make adrenaline pump in his body and make his muscles strain harder, his breathing shorter.

Then he rounded a corner and before he could understand what was happening, the creature was on him, slashing his head from forehead to chin. He couldn’t see, the eerie light was reddened by the drops of blood covering his eye.

He collapsed on the floor, crying, he didn’t even have the energy left to scream. He knew the creature wouldn’t kill him immediately, it wanted to play, wanted the chase to last.

“Edwin, is that you?”

A far-away voice brought him back to the present, he raised his eyes and immediately the tears returned, mixing with the dirt and blood on his face. How he wished Charles had never had to see him like that.

“What are you doing here, Charles?” He asked between sobs.

“I came to rescue you,” Charles replied easily, like it was the most obvious truth of the universe. In a way, it was. Edwin had been hoping that he would come and dreaded it at the same time. It took him seventy years to escape the first time, seventy years of being chased by the creature, torn apart and eaten. He couldn’t bear the thought of Charles having to go through the same because of him.

“Please leave, I’ll distract it…” He whispered, even knowing his plea would fall on deaf ears.

“Mate, there is no way I’m leaving this place without you.”

Charles was towering over his still crouched form now, offering his hand for him to take and help him up. He extended his own hand, but just a moment before their fingers could so much as brush against each other, the creature was on them, and everything went black.

–

When he opened his eyes, Edwin was not in the corridor anymore. There was no trace of the creature, no sound of dolls giggling or screaming from behind him. He took in the place and realised he was in his office. The desk was in its usual place, and it was covered in books and notes in his own hand-writing. The second thing he noticed was that there was also no sign of Charles.

“Hey Edwin, what do you think of the Museum Haunting for our next case? The History Museum is my third favourite public building to visit.”

He knew that voice. His eyes started to fill with tears for a very different reason, as he ran into Niko’s arms.

“Niko! What are you doing here? Also, what Museum Haunting?”

Niko returned the hug, then she took a step back and gave him a quizzical look. “What do you mean? I work here. Is everything okay?”

Edwin’s head was spinning so hard he was barely able to find his voice to ask:

“Where is Charles?”

“Who?” Niko asked, still looking at him in confusion.

Despite technically not needing to breathe, Edwin was gasping for air, because no, absolutely, this could not be happening. 

He saw Niko’s hand reach out to him and caress his arm to comfort him, but he could feel it even less than he normally would. He imagined that was the feeling astronauts had in Space when they had no gravity to keep them anchored. It was an even worse kind of nightmare than Hell.

Then, an idea hit him. Sudden, like lighting. Nightmare.

He focused on how he had died in Hell and reappeared here and he remembered reading a book about this. He fumbled drunkenly towards the bookshelf on the other corner of the office, sending an apologetic look at Niko for slipping away from her.

He turned the pages, but it seemed like nothing on those books was where it was supposed to be. The information was wrong, different, the bookmarks on completely useless places. The books looked like his own, but they were not the same.

After an eternity, or maybe a couple of hours, he finally found what he was looking for. At some point, Niko had renounced trying to talk to him and went outside. Scanning the words on the page, he finally dared to stop and take a proper breath.

“Dream Worlds,” he said, to no one in particular. “When you die in the dream, you are transported back to another dream, or you wake up.”

He didn’t remember how he had managed to fall asleep, he had always thought that it was not something available to ghosts.

There was only one problem: this was not Hell, he was already dead in this World.

He scrambled his brain, trying to figure out what it could mean for a ghost to die in the dream, because their energy could be consumed, but it sounded a bit different from ‘dying’. In the end, he could think only of one thing. The one he had run away from for more than thirty years.

“Niko?” He called, phasing through the wall to the apartment on the other side.

She was laying on her bed, studying the architectural plan of the museum. For a moment, Edwin smiled, looking at the image in front of him with fondness, and longing. He would have liked to show Niko their office, and maybe work cases with her in London.

Niko put down her pen and turned to him, to let him know she was listening.

“I’m sorry, I needed a moment. I am ready for the museum haunting now.”

She beamed, explaining everything she had learned as she led the way out of the building.

The case was simple enough, especially because Edwin had solved it before. A ghost from the Great War with a cursed mask. He caressed the purple volume in his hand and cast a caging spell for the ghost, then set the mask on fire to destroy it. When the blue light came, Niko started yelling at him to run, to hide, she tried desperately to grab his hand and drag him away, but saying a soft “sorry Niko”, he made his arm incorporeal to her, and waited.

“Edwin Payne,” Death’s voice called him. She didn’t seem surprised. “I see you are finally ready to go back to your Afterlife.”

“Yes,” he lied. It still made him shiver to say the words, even if he knew he was not actually going back to Hell.

He heard Niko yell “No!!” as he took Death’s hand, and he couldn’t help the pang of regret at saying goodbye to her. But this was not real, an existence without Charles could not be real.

–

Edwin’s eyes opened on the most beautiful view he had ever seen in his life, and in his death. A phantom flutter on his chest reminded him of the heart that once used to beat there.

“Mate, finally you’re awake! I was so worried, you just collapsed, you’ve been out for days.” Charles said, offering him a hand to help him up. The sense of deja vu sent a new wave of fear through his entire body. He remembered the moment in his vision of Hell, when their fingers were about to touch before the creature ate them both.

Seeing him remain still, Charles moved both of his hands to Edwin’s shoulders and let them slide behind his back to encapsulate him in a hug, and pull him up towards his chest.

Edwin melted into it. “You’re real?” He asked, the smile threatening to split his lips.

“Of course I am real, what happened?” 

There would be time to explain everything later, and to understand. For now, he just let the feeling of Charles’ embrace encompass him, washing away every moment of fear and torture. He didn’t even care if it was the real world or not.

[zivazivc]

Yesterday I watched Help! I'm A Fish and I had a good time! Chuck's seriousness and Fly's upbeat attitude made me think of Eddy M and Ravin respectively.

That movie is SO bizarre. I showed it to a friend a couple of weeks ago, so I watched it twice now, and we both kept screaming at all the emotional whiplash scenes jfksjhfdjh

I think I see what you mean about Eddy M and Ravin being like Chuck and Fly. Especially in the context of your headcanon where they had a rough childhood. They're not much like those characters in my version though.

Eddy M is a rude moody teen who is very matter-of-fact and headstrong - he's a 13-year-old who thinks he knows everything, and he will let you know that with sassy remarks and comebacks.

Ravin is definitely upbeat and more positive but I wouldn't call her Eddy's opposite because she is equally a smartass. She is just very jokey, self-aware nerd face emoji about it. She'll go "errrrmm, ACTually ☝" whenever she thinks she's right about something or when she just wants to annoy you. That's a good descriptor actually; instead of being rude the normal teenage way like Eddy, she is annoying - intentionally. It's a bit and she fully commits.

Dunno how to better describe them lol

Since I know you'll appreciate, I'm sharing a small chunk of my "Floyd runs into the techno troll and their kids" wip under the cut. It's been sitting and collecting dust for a while now because I have no idea how to finish it, but you can get a bit of an idea of what I imagine these two kids being like:

(for context, Floyd is helping Bruce at the bar and guess who happens to visit? And Floyd goes to take an order from them because he is a dumbass and needs too long to realize who he's talking to... The techno troll and Floyd have a private talk, it goes poorly and the techno troll lets him know that he doesn't want him to meet the kids or let them know who he is, and then Floyd hides behind the bar going full blown emo mode... (Also this is an unfinished draft so there might be some klunky parts, idk, I don't feel like editing it rn but I'm also very self conscious about my writing in general so I need to point this out 😬))

. . .

Floyd felt an intense misery wash over him. He really was a fuck up.

He stared at his feet for who knows how long (Maybe he had begun to dissociate?) when the faint sound of light feet stopping nearby made him look up.

Couldn’t this family gathering end already???

He nearly choked on his saliva while standing up in a desperate attempt to find something to busy himself with and not deal with this.

“Uh, h-hi, random kids I don’t know.”

He gave up at the sight of the empty sink with nothing to wash, and carefully looked at the two kids like they were going to bite him from any sudden movements. He probably shouldn’t stare too hard but that was what he ended up doing while taking in their appearance.

“How dumb do you think we are?” the boy—Edwin said with the distinct attitude and mannerism of a brash teen.

“From one to ten,” Ravin added quickly after and much more cheerily, while she pulled a small journal from her hair. She clicked her gel pen and pressed it against the paper in preparation. “Be honest.”

Floyd was a bit dumbfounded to be honest. “... What?” He straightened a little where he was still leaning against the sink and not facing them fully.

“Is on the slower side…” Ravin said out loud while scribbling the words down.

“We have to do this fast,” Edwin explained impatiently and with uncanny matter-of-fact-ness. “Dads think we went to the bathroom.”

“Uh… Do what fast?”

Ravin spoke up while staring at her journal: “How would you describe yourself?”

“What’s your favorite song?” asked Edwin.

"Would you say your hair is white and pink or white and red? And since when is it white? Dad never mentioned that."

“Do you think the words ‘drug addict hobo’ accurately describe you?”

“What’s better, hardcore or emo?”

“I told you it’s not emo!”

"Do you have any health history we should be aware of?" 

“If you were a bug, what type of bug would you be?

"Do we have any other siblings?" 

Floyd’s eyes grew wide from the onslaught of questions. “Whoa, whoa, slow down!” Then reluctantly he added “One at a time, please.” without even realizing he invited them into a conversation.

Edwin looked at his sister. “What was the first one?”

“How would you describe yourself? Three words.”

Floyd didn’t like the first question.

He should probably try thinking of positives…

“Uh…”

“Uhm…”

Panic.

“I’m a good singer. Well, I used to be…”

“That’s your personality?" Edwin deadpanned. "Singing?”

“I’ll just write down: bad self-image, bad under pressure, bad at understanding questions.”

"Those aren't personality traits either, sis."

"Fine! Unconfident, anti-equanimous, intelligently-impaired. There."

"Next question?"

“What’s your favorite song?”

Floyd's mouth was hanging open. He was pretty sure he just got called an insecure some-big-word idiot.

"Hello? We have a time limit. What's your favorite song?" 

“...T-That’s a hard question," he fumbled for words, "there’s so many songs, it would be impossible to choose.”

Ravin looked into her notepad with a sigh and jotted down: “Indecisive. Gives flakey vibes.”

Floyd didn’t know how to respond to that either. Would it be weird if he got upset? Because he was definitely offended. But then again maybe he deserved this. Like some kind of delayed karma.

“If you were a bug, what type of bug would you be?”

Floyd thought about it, trying to come up with some type of direct answer at least for this question. “Hmm… A grig, maybe?”

Edwin made a face. “What the heck is a grig?”

Ravin seemed to have an idea. She wrote down: “An old soul. Depressed.”

“That’s the opposite of a grig!”

“Have you heard of reverse self-awareness?”

“No…?”

“Probably ‘cause I just made it up. But the term kinda suits you." She scratched her scalp with the dull end of her pen."I think?”

Floyd, still feeling absolutely lost in the whole situation, continued to stare mutely.

Edwin was watching him judgingly. "You think there's any awareness there at all?"

Ravin gave a vague hum before getting back on track. "What do you do for a living?" 

"Rae, don't waste our time with stupid questions. It's obvious what he does."

Maybe, Floyd thought, he could finally impress them with something. "I'm a musician, actually."

"Yeah okay, music boy." Edwin replied without missing a beat. "Is the apron a new fashion accessory I don't know about?" 

Floyd’s mouth hung open (if it ever even stopped hanging). These kids were savage…

[thetarttfuldickhead]

If Jamie's call up is in doubt, it seems like Sam's also should be, since he had a character threaten that he would never play for the Nigerian national team, and that character returns in this episode coming up. Jamie's expression looks like someone who just found out or who just told someone he got called up, so it seems particularly cruel for him as a character to maybe assume he is being called up in this scene, and then get the rug pulled out from under him in front of *everyone*, like some kind of punishment for being too confident. The whole season has been working toward this moment, and so I can't believe they would knock him back down in this regard so close to the end. They've repeatedly made sure the audience knows he's been training extra and that he's exceeding what's being asked from him. Plus this is a great reason for his father angst to return the next episode, and a reason why his dad didn't go to the Man City game at home. Jamie's star is rising again, so he wants to attach himself.

Hiya, nonny!

Excellent point about Sam and Edwin Akufo – I hadn’t thought about that. Hm. Hmmm. The notion that Sam would get called up still feels very much like a given to me, but now that you’ve mentioned this, I’m starting to ponder the narrative possibilites and implications of Akufo following through on his threat. It’d be an unexpected sort of development for Sam, I feel, and one I’m in two minds about. On the one hand, it would be quite interesting to see him grapple with something directly related to football, but on the other, the very idea of Sam being disappointed! No! Say it isn’t so!  

Moving on to Jamie, I very much agree on the narrative building toward him fulfilling his football potential. We’ve been told repeatedly that if he could just get over his ego “sky’s the limit for [him]” and how he “still could be [the best]”, and given that we’ve seen him work so hard to do just that over the course of several seasons, I’d feel somewhat betrayed if the show didn’t make good on its promise. And by and large Ted Lasso is a show that does keep faith with its viewers; they do deliver on their promises, rather than subverting expectations just for twists and “excitement”. (I don’t mean to say they don’t subvert expectations, because they do that a lot, but not in a ‘ha fooled ya!’ sort of way.)

So you know, I mostly do expect Jamie to end the series on a glorious rise, and getting called up for England would work very well with that – as you say, it’s rather late in the season to knock him back again (unless it’s the final obstacle to overcome before he fully claims his place as the next superstar in the final two episodes). The thing is, though, that I’m an anxious little soul with an eye always towards the many, many possibilities that exists within any given narrative, and so I… just worry. Like, maybe there’s a point to be made about him learning he doesn’t have to be the best, he can be just good enough at football and still matter and be valued and be loved. Maybe there’s a point about him finding out what life might offer him outside of football. (These potentially very wild notions are incidentally born out of me obsessively trying to make sense of vague things Phil has said in interviews; as such, the basis for them is tenuous at best.)

Neither of those possibilites precludes him being called up for England, and I don’t truly believe in either of them anyway, but because I can imagine the possibility, no matter how faint, I do worry. I’m a worrier. That said, I very much like your idea that Jamie playing for England is what piques Tartt Senior’s interest again; it’d make for a beautiful Manchester episode next week. (I’m working on the assumption that tomorrow’s episode is not the Manchester episode, since it seems difficult for the team to both be away on international break and play a match in Manchester.)

(Now, we don’t know that Jamie being called up is even a possibility, because we don’t know what the international break is for. Could be the Africa Cup of Nations, and we’ll see the likes of Sam and Babatunde going home to play for Nigeria? Could be something else entirely. Maybe.)

[boldlyvoid]

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Hi! my name is emily, I'm 23 she/they

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Hypothetically**~ Ao3 | Tumblr -- 27 chapters, complete. 89k

reader and Spencer were friends in kindergarten, she watched him grow up and explore the world while she was still trying to catch up to him. now that they work together, they fall in love incredibly fast.

friends to lovers, case of the week style story

touch me**~ Ao3 | Tumblr 5.8k

Spencer is incredibly touch-starved and hard on himself since coming home from prison. Luckily, the medical examiner in this small town is really good at reading people, and exactly what he needs.

amethyst you so much P1 Ao3 | Tumblr 6.4k

Spencer has had a crush on Y/N since she started working at the bau. She only ever works the night shift after a case, handling all the aftermath gracefully. one night, Spencer stays back and they strike up a conversation about rocks, causing their feelings to dig a little deeper.

of quartz i will P2** Ao3 | Tumblr 6K

after 2 years of dating, Spencer decides it's finally time to get Y/N something to match her Amethyst bracelet.

Amoreena**~ Ao3 | Tumblr Completed 83k

Heaven is a real place and it's located exactly 14.6 miles away from the FBI, Quantico Headquarters. Off behind a small park, under a fantastical willow tree surrounded by wildflowers, in every colour young minds can imagine.

Don't forget, heaven also comes with angels.

Seven* Tumblr WIP

Summary: Spencer’s been married to Y/N for 7 years now, they have 7 children together and each one is going through something different. Spencer’s always wanted to be the best dad, now he gets to figure out how to be.

the guy at the rock show Ao3 | Tumblr 5.6K

Y/N lost their parents when they were 17, finding a new home and solace in Penelope Garcia and taking the Garcia name. They're the top forensic specialist in D.C, in a band and they drive a motorcycle... not to mention they are madly in love with the cute doctor who works with their sister.

journey to Camelot** Ao3 | Tumblr 3.8K

When Penelope introduces Spencer to online games, he expects to be spending his nights alone. Yet, somehow every time he comes back from a bad case, he logs on to chat with the ever so lovely user FairlyGwen and getting a lot more than just a helpful tip from her.

Exploration** Ao3 | Tumblr 4.7K

request: season1/2 spencer walking in on reader while she's watching porn in their shared hotel room

Expedition** Tumblr 1.2K

Summary: there's a first time for everything... including joining the mile high club with your boyfriend on the work jet.

10 Days Ao3 | Tumblr 1.4K

it's spencer's first father's day and he's extremely emotional about the little love of his life that he's only just met. he spends the day with his baby, Edwin, and his wife, crying and happy about how wonderful new little lives are.

ain't it fun?** Ao3 | Tumblr Masterlist 11K

reader just needs an NA meeting before they have a meltdown, they end up with the best friend they could ever make.

I'm not kidding!** Tumblr 6K

Spencer keeps getting little notes from a secret admirer, they're nice and sweet at first as they tease him with their crush until she's sending him notes about all the dirty things she wants to do to him

Perfect Timing** Tumblr 1K

spencer and reader have been spending the last month together in the same hotel room during a pretty brutal case. tension has been rising and she's completely in love with him.

what happens when they both think the other won't be back for a while and they want to shower?

Redamancy** Tumblr 5.4K

the co-op librarian at the FBI Academy has been secretly crushing on the smartest agent in the Bureau, TA, Doctor Spencer Reid, and he's been crushing on her too.

Being Neighbourly** Tumblr 1.9K

Request: reader is Spencers neighbour and she can hear him masturbating every night that he's home how do you have her deal with that?

Professional Hair Dresser (Ph.D)** Tumblr 6.4K

summary: after Spencer's knee injury, he starts visiting a salon every week to get his hair washed

36 Questions to Fall in Love Tumblr 8K

Summary: When Derek bets Spencer that he cant make someone fall in love with him in a week, he doesn’t expect Spencer to marry the girl the next day

New Romantics** Tumblr 23k

Summary: She needs help studying for her Case Exercises at the Academy, He needs a date for the annual Banquet... they just so happen to be neighbours who aren't afraid to lend a helping hand, or in this case, a helping kiss.

Million Dollar Man** | Tumblr WIP 5k so far

summary: Spencer's therapist recommended he branch out and meet new people who don't want to talk about his work... she didn't expect him to sign up for a Sugar Daddy website.

Sugar, Honey, Ice Tea** | Y/N version | 1-4, 5-9, Epilogue 25.6k

Summary: Fix-it-fic: Dr. Y/L/N and Savannah Hayes have been best friends since their medical internship at Bethesda General. When she receives a frantic call that Derek's best friend is being transferred to the prison she works at, an unlikely friendship bubbles.

Eventually falling head over heels for the innocent man.

Warnings: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Prison, Prison Violence, Assault, Blood, Depression, Murder, Self-Hatred, Hurt Spencer Reid, Canon-Typical Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Drug Addiction, References to Drugs, Drug Use, Idiots in Love, Mutual Pining, Romantic Tension, Forbidden Love, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Strangers to Lovers, Requited Love, Falling In Love, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Eventual Smut, past abusive relationship, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault

Spencer x Ethan

Ruin it.** Tumblr 5.4K

Summary: Spencer never had sleepovers as a kid, so now that he's an adult he's always sleeping over at Ethan's house, ad he'll take any excuse to crawl into bed beside him.

Warnings: mutual pining, love concessions, blowjobs, handjobs, anal sex (both top and bottom spencer in this), childhood friends to lovers

400 Celebration fics

Reid Me Tumblr 2.5K

Spencer has noticed a beautiful woman at a spirituality booth at the farmers market every Saturday for almost a whole year now. he finally asks her to give him a reading.

mystery of love Tumblr 700

Spencer surprises his wife with a trip to Italy.

Spy Kids Tumblr 900

Spencer and Y/N's kids think that they are secretly spies and request a mission story before bed.

a father's greatest weakness Tumblr 1K

Princess Y/N is betrothed to the Viking king in an effort by her father to keep the peace between their countries, he doesn't expect her to join in the fight to free Scottland.

Luke x Reader

Best Dad Ever 2.8K

Request: angst with a happy ending, reader and luke have been divorced for a few years but have a child, she tries and tries to fall out of love with him but he's around so often that she can't

Spencer x OC

Sugar Honey Ice Tea** Ao3 | WIP 9/10 chapters complete 25.6K

Fix-it-fic: Dr. Beth Pattinson and Savannah Hayes have been best friends since their medical internship at Bethesda General. When she receives a frantic call that Derek's best friend is being transferred to the prison she works at, an unlikely friendship bubbles.

Eventually falling head over heels for the innocent man.

Intro to Criminal Minds: Why They Did It Ao3 | Tumblr WIP 6K+

Spencer is teaching a 7-week seminar on the most interesting criminal cases, explaining their actions to understand why they took place. Only, not everyone in the audience is a student.

Criminal Minds x Mindhunter AU

Spencer x OC Peggy Carr

Franklin x Reader

Voulez-Vouz** | 3.2k

Summary: in a small town, everyone knows each other… or at least they think they do.

Warnings: porn with plot, smut, Dom reader, Sub!Perv!franklin, making out, teasing, face sitting, oral (female and male), hand jobs, overstimulation, prostate message, multiple orgasms, penetrative sex, unprotected sex, let me know if I forgot anything.

Chip x Reader

forever is the sweetest con** | 6.2K

Summary: Reader’s dad is a carpenter; sometimes he takes on apprentices and sometimes, if they’re lucky, they get his daughter’s number at the end of their training. Chip Taylor, however, hits the jackpot when her father invites him over for one of her homecooked meals.

Warnings: reader’s mom passed away, mentions of parental death, strangers to lovers, random acts of kindness, mutual pining, falling in love, steamy make-outs, oral sex (male and female receiving), fingering, penetrative sex, unprotected sex, creampie, dirty talk, sub!chip, food mentions, praise, love confessions.

Raymond x Reader

Alone Together ** | 2.4K

Summary: Raymond moves into a haunted house and ends up sleeping with the ghost who lives there... only he doesn't know that when you fuck a ghost you also become one.

Warnings: details of suicide and murder, blowjobs, pegging, bottom!raymond, top!reader, becoming a ghost, major character death.

Star Trek Masterlist

Star Wars fix it fic

Supernatural masterlist

thanks for all the love, as always,

-Emily <3

[enchantedlokii]

It’s Okay

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: language

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark

Mentioned: Richard Parker, Mary Parker, Ben Parker, May Parker, Ned Leeds, Michelle Jones, Howard Stark, Maria Stark, Edwin Jarvis

@whumptober2020 Day Eleven: Crying

Peter was used to having bad days. They came often, if he were being completely honest. But he was lucky. Most kids his age who had been through what he had been through would be a lot worse of than he was. After losing his parents and then his uncle. . . He knew that people worried about him. May worried about him. Ned worried about him. Michelle worried about him. Even his teachers seemed to always have an extra eye out for him. Because he was seen as troubled. He was one of the kids they wouldn’t be surprised if he did something horrible to himself or to someone else. Because it would make sense.

The only person who didn’t seem to be so worrisome about him was Mr. Stark. He imagined it was because the man understood. Peter knew about the car accident; that his parents had been killed when he was young. Sure he was older than Peter when it happened, but he still understood in a way that others didn’t.

What Peter didn’t realize was the fact that this meant Tony was able to see right through his facade that he had started to adopt whenever he was upset.

“Hey, Mr. Stark,” Peter greeted as he stepped into the workshop. He was quick as he went to his desk, putting his backpack down beside him. Normally, the two would work on separate projects unless they needed an extra set of hands. “What are we working on today?”

“Hey, Kid,” Tony replied, glancing up over his shoulder. “I left you some papers over there. Was hoping you could take a look at them. Something isn’t coming out quite right and I can’t find it.”

Peter nodded and picked up the stack of papers, taking out a different colored pen and starting to work through them. He huffed as he got stuck, struggling to remember how the particular equation worked. He scribbled out a piece of his work and tried again, hoping it would work out this time and he could move on. He wasn’t really up for complex calculus today. Or anything, really, but he knew that he couldn’t just ditch on Tony. Especially not now.

“You alright, Pete?” Tony asked, causing Peter to freeze. He put his pen down and turned around with a small smile he hoped was convincing.

“I’m alright,” he told him. “Just having a bit of trouble figuring this out.”

Tony raised an eyebrow and Peter knew immediately that the man didn’t believe him. “What’s up, Underoos? I know that look.” His voice was gentle, more so than normal, and his tone made Peter want to tell him the truth, but he knew he couldn’t. Because this was the last person who saw past everything that happened to Peter and just saw him for himself.

“I’m fine, Mr. Stark,” he pressed, forcing his voice to stay even. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a terrible liar, you know,” Tony pointed out, standing up and moving his seat to be next to Peter. “I won’t force you to talk about it, but I can tell something’s bothering you. It would make me feel better, and would make you feel better whether you believe it or not, if you didn’t keep whatever it is inside.”

“What makes you think that?” Peter asked. He wasn’t sure exactly if he meant the fact that the man knew something was bothering him or that he would feel better opening up, but he was up for an answer to either.

“Because I used to be the same way,” he said with a small shrug. “Still can be, honestly, but I’m working on that. My dad always said that men aren’t supposed to show emotion and I believed him because everyone loved him. I thought that it would make me weak to tell anyone that I was upset, and it. . .” He trailed off, seeming uncertain whether he should continue or not. He cleared his throat and put a hand on Peter’s knee. “Let’s just say it almost didn’t end well, alright? I don’t want you to have to go through the same sh*t I did because you think you can’t talk to someone.”

Peter felt his breath catch in his chest as he guessed at what the implication might mean. He didn’t dare ask, but he had a good idea. “I don’t want to bother you,” he replied finally. “I’ll be fine, really.”

“You could never bother me, Kid.”

Peter shrugged, uncertain. He could feel tears threaten to spill and didn’t dare try to speak in fear his voice might crack. He felt a hand rest on his back and his lip quivered a bit. “Peter, have I ever told you about Jarvis? The real Jarvis?”

Peter glanced up at the question, a bit confused. He shook his head, still not opening his mouth to form a real answer. He could tell from the look in Tony’s eyes that he knew why, but the man didn’t mention it. Instead, he continued speaking.

“When I was growing up, he was around more than my parents were. He was more like a dad to me than my real dad was, really,” he told him. “Still, I was afraid to talk to him about the things that most kids would talk to their dads about. The yucky stuff. Because I thought that all men must think that made us weak. So, when I was upset about something that had happened at school and Jarvis picked me up, I acted like everything was fine. He saw right through it.”

Peter smiled a bit at that. Because it sounded a lot like the situation he was in right now.

“He asked me what was wrong,” Tony continued. “And at first I wouldn’t tell him, but then he told me something that I have never forgotten. Do you want to know what that was?”

Peter nodded slowly. He had a feeling that whatever it was would be enough to send him over the edge. He knew that’s what Tony wanted, too. He wanted him to break, and not with foul intentions. He wanted to help. Peter knew that. He just wasn’t willing to accept help from him.

“He told me that when people care for you, they’re there for you for the good and the bad,” Tony explained. He moved his hand to Peter’s shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. “I’m not going to make you tell me what’s going on. It’s okay if we’re not there yet, but I hope that you’ll tell someone what’s wrong. And I hope you know that you can always talk to me, okay? I care, Peter.”

Peter took a shaky breath and nodded, unable to keep the tears at bay any longer. He let out a small sob and bent over, his body shaking as he started to cry. He was surprised, even after the conversation, when Tony pulled him close, pressing his head against his own chest and rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Just let it out, Buddy.”

Peter wrapped around him and buried his face into the man’s chest, just above where he knew the arc reactor once was. He found hismelf clinging to his shirt as if he would disappear if he were to let go. “Please don’t leave me,” he whimpered. “Please don’t leave.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Tony promised. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he didn’t. He stayed there until Peter’s sobs died down and he loosened his vice grip on the man’s shirt. “Feel better now?” he asked, one hand still rested at the base of Peter’s neck.

Peter nodded against his chest. “A-a little,” he admitted. “This probably sounds really dumb, but I-I think maybe I just. . . I let it all build too long.”

“It’s not dumb,” Tony assured him. “It happens sometimes, and that’s perfectly okay. It’s perfectly normal. It’s okay to get worked up and need to let it out. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not.”

Peter sighed and slowly pulled away, glancing down at his feet as he clasped his hands together. “You’re going to worry about me all the time now,” he murmured, bringing a hand up to wipe his tears on his sleeve. “Aren’t you?”

“I’ve always worried about you, Pete,” Tony told him. He must have noticed the way Peter deflated, because he moved a hand to the boy’s chin and lifted it until he looked him in the eyes. Peter would have hated it if it weren’t for the soft expression he gave. “People worry about you because they care about you. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“But—”

“No, there’s no buts to it,” Tony interrupted him sternly. “Do you not worry about the people you care about? About May? Your friends?”

“Yeah,” Peter replied quickly. “Of course I do.”

“How is it any different that we worry about you?” he asked gently. When Peter didn’t replied right away, he continued. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’re tired of sympathy.”

Peter blinked in surprise. “How do you know that?”

“Because I get it,” Tony shrugged. “You think that people only worry about you because you’re an orphan. Because you’ve lost people you love. Because you’re different than they are. You’ve had it happen so much that it’s hard to know who really cares and who’s just acting. Trust me, Peter. I understand how that feels. I know it sucks. I know you’re worried that people are going to turn their backs on you when you need them most. And I promise you— I swear on my life that I will never do that to you.”

“This isn’t going to change anything?” Peter asked quietly.

“It’s not going to change anything,” Tony confirmed with a reassuring smile. “Except that now you know that you can come to me for anything. I don’t care if it’s something as trivial as a girl not liking you back, I’ll be here to listen. I’m here for the good and the bad, Pete. If you want me to be that person.”

Peter smiled at the implication of his words. He was willing to be the figure in his life that Jarvis had been to him. He told him that Jarvis was like a father to him more than his own father, and he had just openly admitted that he would be that for Peter. He cared for Peter in the way Jarvis had cared for him. He had even, for the first time, given Peter a real hug. He had broken the invisible barrier that they had been playing jump rope with for months.

Carefully, and a bit uncertain still, Peter leaned forward to wrap Tony in another hug. This time, the few tears that escaped him were happy tears. “Thank you, Mr. Stark.”

“Anytime, Kiddo,” Tony replied, hugging him back. “Anytime.”

[mancalledmxlice]

Honorable Mentions: Somebody to Love- Queen//Fernando- Abba

War Pig: Damien Blackwell Playlist

Option 1: we’re looking to highlight the differences between your canon mythology character and the oc you’ve created and built around them. for side a, include songs that apply to the myth, for side b, songs about your own character

Side A: Deimos

War Pigs- Black Sabbath

Time will tell on their power minds Making war just for fun Treating people just like pawns in chess Wait 'till their judgment day comes, yeah!

Another Way Out- Hollywood Undead

You better run, better run, better run, yeah I'm coming after you When you're sleeping at night, yeah there's nothing you can do There's no place you can hide cause I'm coming after you

Street Fight- Adam Jensen

Try to break me, but I can't break I'm a bad dream, and you can't wake Nothing's gonna kill me, nothing's gonna stand in my way

Everything Black- Unlike Pluto

In a nocturnal state of mind Children of the night But it's the only way alive This black hole's pulling me inside Of this black heart, this black soul Underneath this black, black sky

Brain Damage- Pink Floyd

The lunatic is in my head The lunatic is in my head You raise the blade, you make the change You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane

Look What You’ve Done- Jet

Give me back my point of view 'Cause I just can't think for you I can hardly hear you say What should I do, well you choose

Gladiator- Zayde Wolf

Let me back it up to the start of the climb Faced with an army of vipers and lions I had to keep on reaching up 'cause it was my time To tear down the kingdom and call out the liars

Can’t go to Hell- Sin Shake Sin

Turn that fear into a souvenir The world is waiting and the hour's near So if you need a reason, if you need a sign Open up you're eyes, you'll see they stole your water, turned it into wine

Metal Health (Bang Your Head)- Quiet Riot

Bang your head Wake the dead We're all metal mad It's all you have So bang your head And raise the dead

Ain’t No Grave- Johnny Cash

Well, look way down the river And what do you think I see I see a band of angels And they're coming after me

Wreak Havoc- Skylar Grey

I herd 'em like cattle Cause I'm surrounded by cowards And I don't give a fuck when I walk into battle And that's why I got all the power I'm where you wanna be Ain't no one ahead of me All of my enemies made a decision It's better to follow me

Who Are You, Really- Mikky Eiko

Now you're moving idle and you say you're alone Suspicious that the string is moving your bones We are the fire, we see how they run See how they run, lift me higher, let me look at the sun Look at the sun and once I hear them clearly, say

Bad to the Bone- George Thorogood and the Destroyers

The head nurse spoke up Said "leave this one alone" She could tell right away That I was bad to the bone

For What It’s Worth- Buffalo Springfield

Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line, the man come and take you away

Ohio- Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young

Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago.

God’s Gonna Cut You Down- Johnny Cash

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand Workin' in the dark against your fellow man But as sure as God made black and white What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

Side B: Damien

War- Edwin Starr

Oh, war has shattered many a young man's dreams Made him disabled, bitter and mean Life is much too short and precious to spend fighting wars these days War can't give life, it can only take it away

Hurt- Johnny Cash

I wear this crown of thorns Upon my liar's chair Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair

Pretty Fly For a White Guy- The Offspring

Friends say he's trying too hard And he's not quite hip. But in his own mind He's the—he's the dopest trip.

Funny the Way it is- Dave Matthews Band

The way your mouth feels in your lover's kiss Like a pretty bird on a breeze, or water to a fish The bomb blast brings the building crashing to the floor Hear the laughter while the children play war

For Your Love- The Yardbirds

For your love, for your love I would give the stars above For your love, for your love I would give you all I could

My Mirror Speaks- Death Cab For Cutie

And when my mirror speaks it never minces words 'Cause these eyes don't shine half as bright As they used to do and they haven't for quite a while

Sleep is for the Weak- The Dreadnoughts

Baltic is at your back You'll head towards the Black Where the river's rising high All along the countryside Enter the hyenas

Viva La Vida- Coldplay

Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes Listened as the crowd would sing, "Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!" One minute I held the key Next the walls were closed on me

Wish You Were Here- Pink Floyd

How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.

Rock and Roll- Led Zepplin

It's been a long time since the book of love. I can't count the tears of a life with no love. Carry me back, carry me back, carry me back, baby, where I come from.

Dear God- XTC

Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel That I should be heard loud and clear We all need a big reduction in amount of tears And all the people that you made in your image, See them fighting in the street 'Cause they can't make opinions meet

When You Were Young- The Killers

He doesn't look a thing like Jesus But he talks like a gentleman Like you imagined When you were young

Train in Vain- The Clash

Now I got a job But it don't pay I need new clothes I need somewhere to stay But without all these things I can do But without your love I won't make it through

Wish I Knew You- The Revivalists

Oh I hope you don't mind We can share my mood Two strangers in the bright lights I wish I knew you I wish I knew you Oh I wish I knew you when I was young

The Weight- The Band

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead I just need some place where I can lay my head "Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?" He just grinned and shook my hand, "no" was all he said

Hard to Handle- The Black Crows

I have got some good old lovin' And I got some more in store When I get through throwin' it on you You gotta come back for more

Honorable Mentions

Somebody to Love- Queen

I work hard (he works hard) every day of my life I work 'til I ache my bones At the end (at the end of the day) I take home (takes home) my hard-earned pay all (goes home on his own) on my own

Fernando- ABBA

In the firelight Fernando You were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar I could hear the distant drums And sounds of bugle calls were coming from afar

[aquadestinyswriting]

Another Ordinary Day

Summary: Just a little short story showcasing a day in the life in the Goodwin-Frigidwake household. I fancied writing something cute and adorable.

words: 722

“Bridget, can you explain how mummy’s scrying mirror ended up covered in jam and cream?” Edwin asked the squirming two-year old, who was sitting on the floor, looking up at her father with wide brown eyes,

“Bha an t-acras air an eun.” the toddler replied simply. Edwin sighed, 

“In Common, please.” he requested, “And what birdy?” Bridget blinked and twirled her fingers in the soft, curly fuzz that was starting to grow on her chin,

“There was a birdy in mirror. Was making lots of noise.” she said, as though her father should already know all of this. Edwin frowned, there weren’t any people that he knew of that both had the ability to contact Selene through her pocket mirror and had a bird as a pet or familiar. He crouched down so he was eye level with the half-dwarflet,

“What colour was the birdy?” he asked. Bridget thought really hard for a few moments, her nose wrinkling in concentration,

“It was reeeeaaaallly shiny.” the toddler stated confidently, “And, and it had lots and lots of teef and speaked in funny words.” Edwin held back a chuckle as his daughter rambled on. Of course the little girl would call what was, presumably, a dragon a bird since she’d never seen one before. He suddenly became aware that Bridget had stopped talking and was looking up at him with an annoyed expression and puffing her cheeks out,

“Daddy! I telling a story.” she whined. Edwin shook his head and patted Bridget on the head,

“I’m sorry Bridget, but daddy has to go and clean mummy’s mirror then tell her that a dragon tried to call.” The toddler pouted some more, her bottom lip quivering. Edwin sighed, “I’ll come back to listen to your story after, alright?” This seemed to mollify the little girl, who nodded, albeit the pout was still firmly in place. Edwin took the opportunity to quickly rinse the mirror in some plain water and went to find Selene.

Edwin knocked on the door to Selene’s study, realising he hadn’t asked Bridget what colour the dragon was, though going by the scant description he had been given he was confident that it was probably metallic. There was a crash and an annoyed squawk from the room, which caused the Cleric to frown a little in worry, but the door burst open before he could move. He moved back a couple of paces as a cloud of some sort of dust billowed out. Selene emerged, coughing and waving her hand while Chrackle flew out overhead and landed on a nearby windowsill, cackling and glaring at the red-haired Wizard. Edwin quirked an eyebrow,

“Dare I even ask what happened?” he asked. Selene dusted herself off,

“Probably best not to.” she admitted lightly, “What’s the matter?” she asked. Edwin simply shook his head and held out the mirror in his hand,

“You left this in the sitting room. Apparently you had a call come through and Bridget thought it was a bird that wanted a drink.” Selene stifled her laugh and took the mirror from the cleric,

“I’ll have a look and see who it actually was.” she said, clearing her throat, “Were you even able to tell who or what it was?” Edwin sighed and leaned against the wall,

“From what I managed to gather from our daughter’s story, it was some sort of dragon. Most likely metallic since she mentioned how shiny the ‘birdy’ was.” Selene frowned slightly,

“I’ll look into who it was, though I can’t imagine why anyone from either the copper or silver flights would want to get a hold of me personally.” Edwin shook his head and stretched,

“Well, while you figure that out, I believe I need to go and listen to the rest of Bridget’s story before we end up with a tantrum.” he sighed, “Lunch will be in about half an hour.” he added pointedly as he started his descent back down the stairs. Selene gave the man a distracted wave as she peered at the mirror and headed back into her study,

“Yes, thank you.” she muttered. Edwin sighed and made his way down the rest of the stairs to find the two year old half-dwarf.

“Never a dull moment.” he muttered, wincing as he heard Bridget screech in frustration and Caitr yell angrily. 

[akathecentimetre]

So here’s the thing.

Of course I love The Old Guard. Like, of COURSE I do. It is everything I like and everything you all have gotten used to knowing I like, from found family to unconditional love to the yummy yummy historical tidbits. It’s going to have a truly Great fandom.

But watching it was not, for me, some huge revelatory experience in media because - well, I’ve written it before. Many times, in scattered pieces, across a lot of my fic. And what made me cry last night when I finally watched it was that it’s the spitting image of an epic vampire story that I wrote, over a decade ago, with Rio (@aumerle-that-was​).

Who is now dead. Recently dead. [I wrote a post about her here.]

The Barrens will most likely never make it to publication. It’s huge, and unwieldy, and full of unnecessary crack because I was an 18-19-20-year-old virgin when we were spending the most time on it. But it’s 232,761 words of memories, of laughter, of love, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, of me learning how to write at all.

I miss her. I wish she was still here, to see The Old Guard and love it (GOD she would have loved it). I wish she was here so she could write the most beautiful, unbearable, Italianate fic of Joe & Nicky that anyone could have ever imagined. They deserve a gifset set to her Coldplay “roman cavalry choirs” singing. 

Here’s some tiny images of what we wrote, focusing on various characters (including one called Rio, of no relation; this epic started, if you can believe, as a football/soccer RPF AU). I’ve picked out some character moments rather than historical bits, but fair warning that there’s mention of some nasty/upsetting stuff.

*

It was the need to eat, and the need to live, and the need to go on, and it was, as the last sliver of sun splintered on the deep blue of Capri's sea, utterly unendurable, because he knew that he would, he would get up, he would go on, he would feed, and he would keep living. He would keep living, and the grief and anguish in his mind would keep on with him, the raw, still-bleeding edges of the severed bond breathing with him, and the new fear and hatred he had learned keeping him company with them.

He would just refuse to think, that was all. That couldn't be so hard.

It couldn't.

*

He closed his eyes, and swallowed, shutting down memories and envy and misery at once, and drew a deep, unnecessary breath before he looked out at the Mouth of Truth again. He walked over to it slowly, and put his hand in. "I don't miss you," he said. "And you needed to die." Robin whined sadly behind him. The Mouth stayed open.

*

Things were shutting down, blowing out like lamps at night, and all he could think was thank God, because he didn't want this anymore, couldn't stand it, and he thought it might be his life that was guttering out like a candle, and it was really too much effort to care, because peace.

...but as bad as dying was, it was nothing compared to waking up again.

Fingers were tapping him sharply on one cheek. "'Ey. 'Ey, come on, wake up."

He opened his eyes. And immediately shouted out in a mix of pain, terror, and absolutely overwhelming confusion, because his head hurt so badly he thought he just might have been brained with an axe, and when he struggled into a sitting position it was to the realization that his clothes were soaked with blood, and that just couldn't be good at all. His hands shot to his throat, but when he found that there was nothing there - no torn flesh, no blood, no wound, no nothing - all he could let out was a horrified sort of squeak.

There was the odd laugh again, and it didn't help at all to realize he could feel it now, as if he was tapped into the other man's amusement like some barrel of watered beer left running.

"Very good," the man's voice rumbled, making him jump again, because he didn't just hear it, it was like it was in his ear. "Now then. Follow these regles" - a piece of crumpled paper was thrust into his bloody palm - "and you shall be just fine, yes? Yes. I think you shall be fine." And then the man stood, stepped over him, and opened the door, pushing Rio's nerveless legs aside as it swung on its hinges. "I think I had better go. Too much - commotion. Bonsoir!"

"And fuck you," Rio managed to croak with some vehemence, feeling the amusement fade out and vanish, as though it had never been there at all. If it weren't for the way his head felt and the state of his hands and clothes, he'd have thought he'd dreamed it - got coshed, maybe, and dreamed it. The crumpled piece of paper was telling him otherwise. The slightly-mangled syntax was bad enough without it apparently being straight out of a child's fairy tale.

Never kill when you drink. Never go out in the sun unless you have strength enough. If it is possible, no churches. NEVER TOUCH SILVER. Run from Hunters, do not fight. Be polite when you use your mind, otherwise it will hurt.

Bonds of love are forever.

*

He had got as far as the steps when the world began to shatter, as though cacophony could be made into feeling, sending him in a kind of sideways fall against the stone balustrade, and wondering how he had never known there was this much pain in the world, because it was worse even than the night he had been left to bleed his life out on a London street, worse than silver, worse than anything he could begin to think of as comparison. It was the utter definition of agony, and all he could think was that he needed it to stop, it had to stop, before his mind fragmented and splintered along with it.

It came to him, distant and heartwrenching, that this was what Cruyff had meant by letting go, that he had to withdraw or risk going irrevocably mad, but - fuck, fuck, how could he let go of everything, Cruyff was everything, it was impossible that he should be - imposs -

He fell against the wall, toppled onto his knees, and screamed.

*

“And if you want immortality for someone, the last thing you want is to find yourself becoming a murderer. Unless you're Marco..."  he trailed off with a sigh, and shook his head. "Marco seduced a girl in Babylon --"

"Babylon --!"  Rio gaped.  Babylon didn't even exist any more, God, what sort of timescale were they talking about here?

"He went with Alexander," Gullit said patiently, "and if you want to know more about that, read a book."

*

Gullit bristled and snarled without actually saying anything, giving Rio the distinct impression that the master vampire was more of a real wolf than Robin would ever be. "Go on then," he snapped. "Tell me to my face that you will be able to wake up tomorrow night and do what you have to do. That is all the time I will allow you - and I will know if you are lying."

Rio swallowed.  He thought of silver, and the way it burned even when it wasn't a knife, thought of how it tainted everything, how the thought even of being there one more second alongside that pain was almost impossible.  He thought of how it was now his knife, how he had earned the pain and the ability both, and owned them by name and by right.

He thought, deliberately, of the scars on Ed's body, of the look in his eyes that first night at Stevie's, as though the world were a place of ash and horror and nothing good could even be imagined.

He thought of Gullit, whose sons were dead and had no-one to lay claim to him or who he could be part of but Marco, and who carried on, scarred and limping and casting his damn spells, trying to earn something Rio thought just might be the forgiveness of the twice-dead.

"Yeah," he said then, looking straight into Gullit's dark, hot eyes.  "I could."

"Could you really," Gullit said thoughtfully.  It wasn't, terrifyingly, anywhere near a question.

*

I can make no predictions, so consider this an indefinite promise: you are not going back.

Rio's mind turned into a perfect, careful blank of pure incomprehension.

Back here? he ventured, because if that was it, he really didn't understand, since how not coming back here was anything but good was absolutely and completely beyond him.  How he was supposed to feel anything but thank-you-God about even the idea of never coming back here was apparently a mental leap he was incapable of making.

There was a snort of derision, the horrid sound failing to arouse even a twitch of amusement from anyone. No, Rio, Gullit whispered. He had to live with the possibility of never - that his pain would never end. And now you’re going to live with it too. You’re going to live with the thought that you might never kill Marco... and, due to the extremes of unpredictability this world - and especially Marco - goes to, you’re going to live with the idea that you might never see, or be able to love, Edwin ever again.

He wasn't sure if he was being manipulated, or if it was real, but the sense of something that wasn't even grief – that was beyond grief, was nothing as human as grief – was shocking and immediate and all-consuming.  It was the knowledge that the last memories he might ever be able to make that were his own – even now, as his brain stuttered in a void, he knew that what he had seen here was not his for the taking – the last memories he could truly take for himself would be the look of joy in Ed's eyes, and the clean-cut Roman profile of the vampire who had been able to give and be all he had ever wanted.  The last memory he might ever be able to bring out of his mind in all the days that were his to pass from now until the end of some infinite horror was one of loss.  

It was devastation, wilderness, wasteland, the barrens.

It was exile, and eternity, and Christ! Laurent had given him no such thing as a gift of life, he had given him a curse.

Bonds of love are forever.

And without the ability to love, with only the bonds, with only shackles for his heart and soul worse than those that lay open in front of his mind's eye – with the only thing he had always known suddenly ripped from him and held up to the clear light of unforgiving truth, and shown as worthless, forever didn't seem like any kind of promise at all.

*

He had only recently started getting used to the concept of communicating with his mind, and what glimpses he had gotten of Ruud's had only convinced him that there was more in there than he could ever possibly hope to understand - so he didn't try. But he did know that London was important, and that something was going to happen, so he finished packing very carefully before moving on to Ruud's things, which were still scattered carelessly around the room (a rarity, because normally the captain was as neat as a pin). "You don't deserve this," he heard Ruud say quietly, and he shrugged without looking over his shoulder. "Well. I'm alive, sir." "No you're not," Ruud said - not unkindly.

"I'm here?"

"Yes," Ruud said. He sounded exhausted. "You are. Hooray for you."

*

"Give me one solitary fucking reason why I shouldn't throw you through this wall."

Ruud didn't have the energy to come up with something honest. "Goodwill towards your fellow man?"

He ended up flat on his back in the remains of what had been a parked cab instead, but he was pretty sure it hurt the same amount.

"Fellow man? You don't count," Rio said, sounding horrible and raspy from somewhere off to the side, as Ruud blinked away some interestingly-coloured sparkles and waited for his leg to heal up the nerve-endings enough for things to start being excruciating. "I'm not sure you count as a fucking vampire, you shit."

"No," Ruud grunted, swaying up to a seated position just in time to get punched in the face and fall back again with a broken nose, and the sparkles deciding to take up permanent residence behind his eyelids. "I don't. Tell me how he is."

Rio's skull-face didn't look any better in lamplight and through floating small pinpricks of fake stars. "Sorry, was that you asking for something?"

"Yes," he ground out, lifting a weary hand to his mouth and shoving a crooked incisor back into its place. "And you're going to tell me. I don't care if you feel like disembowelling me, though don't get any ideas - you're going to."

"I'm off disembowelling for the next century, don't worry yourself," Rio growled, and that was the nastiest way Ruud had ever got an answer in his life, and knowing he'd deserved it didn't help at all. "Fuck's sake. How do you think? You left." Right, so apparently git stood for Great Incompetent Tosser.

*

"Like you what?" the man said, getting right to the heart of Rio's inadequacy in the same death-warmed-up voice, and put a shaking hand down against the floor to try and pull his rag-covered body out of the bunk. "He said it would save me. Are you saved?"

Maybe he would just use the hook on Laurent, instead. "Um. Not - really, no." He hoped like hell the man wasn't talking about in the sight of God, because that was one can of worms Rio was never going anywhere near. "He made me, though, too. Just like he did you. So we don't die....yet." Life, Laurent had told him, and hadn't that been a terrifyingly unfunny joke? Rio didn't want to have to use the word 'vampire' among all these living corpses, but he was getting a nasty feeling that between necessary obliquity and whatever arsing terrible explanation Laurent had buggered off after giving, he was going to have to.

He straightened up without the help of Rio's hands, and for the first time Rio could put a face to the voice - he was Rio's height, and big, or should have been were it not for the thinness of his limbs, wrists and forearms Rio could have encircled with two fingers end-to-end, and a broad, now-pinched face which spoke of a starvation perhaps beyond all else Rio had seen, because he knew without even asking this man had not known, at least not consciously, to drink, and yet the strength of the vampire would have kept him from expiring even had he begged for it.

Laurent would have fed him, though. Laurent would have let him know at least what it took to keep going - wouldn't he? Perhaps not, any kind of feeding here was a death sentence to the donor, willing or not, and considering Laurent's one and only set of instructions, Rio guessed that the bastard had just been hoping for the best to work itself out - and in the meantime, what the fuck was he going to do? "Means you're my brother," he said at last, because that was what mattered, in the end, wasn't it, that was why he was here, why he'd ended up in a kind of Hell no-one had even thought of until now, not even the living dead. "An' I'm Rio." He'd first introduced himself as who and what he was so many lifetimes ago that he was amazed it still struck a chord of memory inside him, hearing his voice in the little hut as though he were back in the room in London, wondering why he'd saved a vamp who didn't even have the sense not to kill. "It's - we're gonna be all right. Honest."

[takadasaiko]

In Defense of Howard Stark

The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t have a shortage of layered, fascinating characters. It’s always easy to hyper focused on the ones we love most, and that’s the excuse I roll with for why it’s taken me so long to find my fascination with Howard Stark. Up until the last few months I looked at him through the lense of who he was to other characters. He was Tony’s father, Steve’s friend, and co-founder of SHIELD with Peggy Carter. He filled roles, but I didn’t look closer for a long time. I didn’t have any reason to.

Then came the Great MCU Rewatch that happened post-Endgame. It wasn’t until I had Dominic Cooper’s Howard stacked back-to-back with John Slattery’s Howard that I started to dig into him. We meet a young man in Captain America: The First Avenger, the Peggy Carter short, and two seasons of the Agent Carter series on ABC. He’s brilliant and goofy, rarely serious unless he’s discussing his work. It’s a stark contrast with the older Howard we meet through John Slattery’s version. Either there was a catastrophic miscommunication between the writers, the directors, and the actors on who Howard Stark was supposed to be, or something caused that shift. The moment I settled on the latter, Howard went from a supporting character whose only use was to help round out others around him to a truly interesting, layered and even broken man.  I became fascinated with piecing together that journey. I needed to know what took this man

to a man that his own son described as cold and distant.

I had been using Howard to help deepen my understanding of others, and in the same way, taking a look at those that he keeps close to him and how he treats them helps to shed light on who he is.

Who Howard Surrounds Himself With

Howard wasn’t raised with the same economic and social privilege that he was able to provide to his son in later years. In S1 of Agent Carter he tells Peggy that he was raised on the Lower East Side to a father that sold fruit and a mother that was a seamstress in a factory, going on to tell her how he’d learned to lie to break through the ceiling society had placed for someone like him.

Yet as of S2 of Agent Carter Howard was in high demand at a club that wouldn’t have let him within a hundred feet of if he hadn’t made the fortune that he did with Stark Industries. With that background matched with the contacts he would have made after Stark Industries took off, I think it’s safe to say that Howard knew people from every walk of life.  

There were the less savory types:

Joe Manfredi and Howard grew up together and the mobster had no trouble reaching out to Howard years later for help when his kinda crazy girlfriend Whitney Frost went over the edge and into territory even he was uncomfortable with.

And while we may not know how he met Obadiah Stane, the other man wormed his way so deeply into Howard’s life and career that he was poised to manipulate his son after his death.

We don’t know a lot about those other than the fact that Howard wasn’t opposed to shady characters.

There’s something interesting in the more positive friendships that he keeps though.

Edwin Jarvis is a fascinating character. Howard’s butler is that and more. We see him stick with Howard through thick and thin. Through countless girlfriends that he was the bearer of bad news to

through disagreements, and he was with the Stark family long enough that Tony was influenced by him enough that he based his AI system off of him. Jarvis himself tells Peggy the story of how he met and came to work for Howard Stark in S1 of Agent Carter, shedding light on yet another layer of the complicated man:

Jarvis met his wife Ana during the war. She was Hungarian. Moreover, she was Hungarian-Jew in the middle of Europe overrun by nazis. Jarvis fell hard, but the general that he worked for wouldn’t help, even though he could have done so easily. So Jarvis forged his signature. He was found out and would have been tried for treason, but Howard - who had had business dealings with the general - stepped in and used his influence to save not only Edwin, but Ana as well.

There was no indication that Howard expected anything in return, but Jarvis remained loyal and steady.

And then there’s Peggy.

I could go on for days about Howard and Peggy’s friendship. I love it dearly, and feel that we need more friendships like it on television.

He flirts with her, he teases her, but in the end he respects no one quite like he does Margaret Carter.

Howard is a self-admitted liar. He felt that he had to become one in order to break free from the ceiling that society put over him in his youth. He doesn’t trust easily and, even when he does, he still hides behind a quirky, playboy mask meant to obscure anything of any real depth under frivolous layers. To get to the level of success he found himself in at such a young age he had to build up an imperviousness to others’ opinions of him. He flaunts in most cases, but, for better or worse, he does care about how Peggy views him.

She’s the one he turns to to clear his name at the beginning of the first season of Agent Carter and the only one that can talk him out of the mire of his own deepest regrets at the end of the same season.

The funny thing is that, for all his determination that he doesn’t really care how people see him, Howard seems to keep people closest to him that will keep him in check. Jarvis and Peggy, especially. They don’t pull punches and they call him on his shit.

If it’s a conscious choice or even a subconscious one, Howard surrounds himself with people that will hold him accountable. I’d put good money on the fact that Maria did too.

The Way He Treats Others

One of our earlier introductions to Howard is in Iron Man 2 where Tony tells Fury that his father had been cold and distant. He never told Tony that he liked him, much less that he loved him.

Fury indicated that he knew a very different man, and through Dominic’s Howard we (the audience) meet a very different man as well, which leads me to think that Howard struggles with expressing real, honest feelings rather than actually having them. It makes sense, given his explanation at two different points in the first season of Agent Carter that, to break through the barriers society had tried to force on him, he’d learned to hide behind lies and an indifference to what others thought about him. We see that that often leads him to come across as shallow and arrogant. He doesn’t, and seems not to even know how to express those truer feelings except in very rare circumstances, but we see glimpses in the way he treats people.

Edwin and Ana Jarvis are a fantastic example, as mentioned earlier. Here were people that he didn’t really know, people that he owed nothing to, yet he went out of his way to protect them. He used a favour that he could have hoarded away for more selfish purposes and gave it to them to save their lives. In return he was given loyalty, but there was no expectation on that.

Howard holds true to his playboy persona as well as, if not perhaps better than his son would in later years, but despite the flirtation (which he always manages to work into their conversations), Howard shows time and again the respect that he holds for Peggy Carter. While she’s fighting for her colleagues’ respect in the post-war SSR, she’s the one Howard reaches out to to clear his name. She’s the one that he trusts to protect him when his life is on the line. And when she needs help, it’s hers for the taking. A flight that the Army won’t take because it’s too dangerous? All Peggy had to do was ask. Twice when she needed a place to stay, he offered his own home(s) to her, and in S2 he dove straight in to help her on her case without any hesitation.

In S2 of the Agent Carter series we meet Jason Wilkes, a brilliant scientist who works for a company that becomes the center of the season’s investigation. The rarity of being a black man in his position is used against him when his company sets him up as a scapegoat. Not only is Howard eager to help him, work with him to clear his name, and reinstate his corporeal form (long story, but if you haven’t seen the Agent Carter series I highly recommend it!), but he sets him up in Stark Industries after all is said and done to help him run the Malibu labs on a new pet project.

For all of his faults and complications, Howard has a trend of helping to support and even protect those that the society of his time is set against. A Jewish woman and her fiancé facing the nazis, a brilliant female agent fighting enemies as well as men around her that have faith in her failure, and a talented black scientist whose company has used and thrown away when convenient.  We see the kindness in his actions, in the respect that he gives others that society would prefer not to be bothered with.

So how did he miss the mark so badly with his own son? He gave him things, opened doors for Tony that he’d had to force open himself, but (at least according to Tony) he missed expressing any sort of affection for him. Personally, in light of the other relationships that we actually get to see as they’re taking place, I’m inclined to think that he didn’t know how to express his love in a way that an already struggling child could understand. He tinkered on cars with him and he built an organization that would keep the world (and his family) safe. Perhaps to Howard, more importantly, he kept his distance, thus allowing his son the chance to grow into his own man. Someone not quite like him.

The thing is, even if it went against everything he wanted, there was no getting around that. Just as I imagine that Howard inherited a few more traits from his own father than he would have ever admitted to, Tony inherited some from him. Both the good and the bad.

Howard’s Personality Traits

Marvel is a parallel haven. In many ways the universe that they’ve created feels like one long, fantastical TV show with 3+ hour episodes. One of the perks of that is the multiple nods they’ve made and parallels they’ve drawn. It’s through those parallels that I found between Howard and Tony that sunk me deeper and deeper into exploring Howard’s personality. Robert said it best:

(gif made by and borrowed from @erikisright​)

Much in the same way that we meet Tony in Iron Man 1, the Howard of Captain America: The First Avenger and the Agent Carter short and series secures himself behind a mask of indifference to public opinion. He has a good time and doesn’t give a damn who knows it. When focused on work, he’s focused

but as soon as the war’s over he’s living the life of the playboy millionaire. He spends his time gallivanting around as much as inventing. He flaunts it. His money, his success. It’s the mask he hides behind to protect himself from the world, and the one that he feels like he has to hide behind. Afterall…

There’s no question that Howard has his fair share of less-than-desirable traits, but as we’ve discussed, he has some good ones as well. One that I found surprising, personally, is that he takes responsibility. Maybe not in his personal life (sorry, Jarvis, but it’s on you to handle Howard’s breakups apparently), but in his work. If he feels that he’s fallen short, he owns it, repeatedly to the point of putting his own life in danger.

In the first season finale for Agent Carter, after spending eight episodes on the run to clear his name, he waltzes himself into the SSR to give the full story and offer himself up as bait. It’s his fault, he tells them, despite not designing the invention stolen to cause harm, it’s still his, and he’ll own up to his responsibility there, both at the time and the damage it had caused during the war. In S2, after an invention fails, he offers himself up to go in and switch it on manually (putting himself at exceptional risk) because he ‘designed it poorly’. He doesn’t get the chance to do it, but he’s ready and willing to.

On the flip side (and also a trait that took me by surprise) he gives credit where it’s due.

Despite having to lie and possibly claw his way to the top, he’s consistently willing to both offer a hand to those that he can as well as make sure that he’s acknowledging their contribution, despite the fact that he believes that many successful scientists steal other people’s work for themselves. 

Tony must have come by his tendencies to fixate by way of his father. Much like his son, Howard shows time and time again that he leans into his obsessive personality. It ranges from a hyper-focus on work to coffee to a good time by any means he can find it, and even to the guilt that we see him holding onto in those few private, honest moments we catch a glimpse of.

We see it in the way that he held onto the guilt over what happened to the Russian soldiers at Finow when his Midnight Oil was misused and ended up killing hundreds of Allied soldiers. He did everything he could to set the situation as right as it could be set - he faced down the general that had stolen the oil only to get his ass handed to him, forced the general to step down, ended a seven-figure contract with the Army, and created a vault to better protect designs and inventions that could hurt innocent people - yet we see how it still weighs on him years later.

I think it’s the guilt at never being able to find Steve that eventually shifts him from Dominic’s Howard to John’s. That lively, goofy man is broken year after year by the failure of not being able to find or save a man that he holds up on a pedestal. He fixates on it to the point that his own son feels that he cared more about Captain America than him. Really, there’s so much in this theory that I’ve had battering around my head for the last couple of months or so that it deserves its own post. I’ll put it on the writing docket.

All in all, Howard Stark is an easy character to overlook or to flatten out with partial information. The Agent Carter series does wonders to add depth to him by giving us time to get to know him. Time that we don’t get through newsreels and the off story that Tony tells.

Part of an interesting character is their layers, both the good and the bad. Much like Tony, I feel that the more I learn about Howard Stark, the more I come to realize that he was a man trying his best. Sure, maybe his best didn’t match up in a lot of ways, but I think there’s something to be said for each generation of Starks doing just a little bit better than the one that came before them in whatever way that they can.

[greyskyflowers]

I really want something where Crystal and Charles see all of Edwins memories. Maybe Crystal is trying some new stuff with her powers and accidently drags Charles with her into Edwin's memories.

Some of it flashes by quick. His childhood, the years with Charles before they met Crystal, the cat king, Monty, a majority of Port Townsend.

Some of it drags by. His death, hell, meeting Charles, hell again, Esther, Niko.

She knows Charles kind of has an idea of what to expect but knowing and seeing are two different things.

Crystal can't even watch most of it. Crouching down and covering her eyes, crying and occasionally making a sound like she was going to be sick.

They can't make any changes, of course, and they can't talk to anyone. These things have already happened and they're just watching them but Charles breaks her heart.

He bounces between furious and devastated.

He walks around the boys holding Edwin down to sacrifice him like he's looking for an opening, around and around restlessly. He knows, even better than she does, that he can't do anything.

Hell is even worse. Charles is clearly upset but he's not surprised, a grim determination that has him trailing after Edwin like a shadow. He keeps up with Edwin, running with him through the hallways and making himself watch each time it all starts over. He runs back to find the new Edwin and sticks close again, right beside him or behind him. He doesn't get in the way or try to stop it, he can't do anything so he's trying to provide a comfort that Edwin can't feel.

He sits with Edwin when he finds a place to hide, just watching him. Sometimes he talks. She can't hear what he's saying but she can guess.

Sometimes the demon doesn't kill Edwin right away and he isn't hiding so much as trying to find a place to curl up and die. Charles follows, sometimes circling him like he had when they saw the boys who sacrificed him.

She doesn't understand why he's making himself watch it all. How can he watch it when Crystal can barely tolerate just the sounds?

She's never seen him so focused. She thinks he might have forgotten she's even here.

Ghosts bleed here, they can feel and, the last thing Edwin felt as a living being was hands holding him down and the last thing he truely felt while dead would have been the last time the demon ripped him apart before he escaped hell. No wonder he's less bothered by iron than Charles. Iron is nothing compared to this.

She wants to tell Charles to come over to her. Tell him to stop watching, god why is he watching?

She knows why though, because he needs to know. Usually the mind can conjure up things much worse than reality but she thinks that neither of them could have imagined something like this. She knows Charles saw some of it when he went to get Edwin the second time but it wasn't a lot. He and Edwin were both tight-lipped when it came to hell, other than Edwin mentioning it vaguely here and there, usually in arguments.

He passes her again as he follows Edwin, again and again, and she goes to yell at him but she stops. His jaw is clenched the way he does it when he's truely furious, and his mouth is a thin line.

Charles can be scary when he's angry, especially when he's angry because someone has hurt Edwin. He would never hurt her but there's a cautiousness to how she speaks to him when he gets like this. Forget the cricket bat, he looks like he'd throw himself at the demon with just his nails and teeth if he could.

The memories go on and he's just as restless during Edwin's second trip to hell, only relaxing when he appeared in the memory.

Watching Esther is hard, Charles doesn't move during this one, just stands by the table Edwin is stuck on and stares.

This one is different and she thinks it because Charles was here for this one. She knows he's in the kitchen, kept in place with an iron collar and stuck listening to Edwin scream.

Crystal loses track of them as she sees Niko in the corner and sudden she needs to see it. She can feel Charles look over at them as Niko dies on the floor but he stays where he is until Edwin is up and next to Niko too.

More memories slip by until they're suddenly thrown back into the real world.

It's jarring, like something smacked them on the back of their heads. It takes them a minute for the world to stop spinning and their thoughts to reform. It's been seconds, maybe a minute, since they'd been thrown into the memories. Crystal feels like she's aged 10 years.

She does think she understands Charles a lot more now. She knows she's going to be reluctant to let Edwin off somewhere by himself, not that Charles would let him.

Edwin looks nervous, looking at them then the floor and back up to them again. He straightens the ends of his sleeves the way he does when he needs something to do with his hands and then he starts to press against each other. He must have a good idea of what happened and what they probably saw.

She remembers one of the deaths where he had ended up close to where she's been curled up. The way he laid on his side and just stared at the wall, quiet and accepting, the way tears rolled down his face and he just kept bleeding. Until he didn't anymore and Charles took off without a word to go find the new him again.

Niko is beside him and looks at both Charles and her with big eyes. She wonders what they look like, if they look any different to her and Edwin.

Charles makes a vague stangled noise beside her, makes a move towards Edwin, and she takes a deep breath.

Right. Okay, she and Niko need to leave. Like, right now. She has a feeling that the boys need to have a very long talk. And just cling to each other for awhile.

She grabs Niko, who looks at Edwin to see if he wants her to stay but he shakes his head just enough for her to let Crystal get them both out the door and away.

As they're leaving, she wonders what she'd do if someone had shown her Niko's death over and over. She looks at the other girl, who still looks worried but gives Crystal a little smile.

Maybe they need to have a talk too.

🌙🌙🌙🌙🌙

Two side notes:

*Currently living for the idea of Charles and Crystal going feral over Edwin and Niko being hurt. And vice versa.

*You know when dogs/wolves circle something over and over, like they're trying to herd it or just watching from all sides? Idk for some for some reason I just picture that from Charles in certain situations. Especially when he can't do anything. Just circling it over and over like eventually he'll see something, find a way to do something.

[shxwmaster]

anonymous said: I keep rereading the comment from Flynn in the new page preview, and it got my shipper heart thinking: in your expert Shaw opinion, what do you think it would mean for Fairshaw if Edwin were actually still alive? I know it's not a plausible thought, but how would your Shaw and his relationships - romantic or not - be affected if he learned (in some wild turn of events) that Vancleef was alive?

—

I... have no idea.

     There are SO SO many variables to this that it’s hard to really nail down an exact response, but I’m gonna walk through it carefully and see what I can get.

     FOR STARTERS, in my canon, Van/Shaw was 100% a thing. They were a romantic couple, and had intended to spend all their time together as spies. Shaw trained VanCleef personally so that he could join the SI:7 and they’d be together, and all was great!! Side-tangent, in the new page, Shaw writes how he didn’t know Vanessa existed, and that’s the tiny detail I was talking about how I’m ignoring that since that just... doesn’t jive with me. Mathias knew of Vanessa, met her when she was born. It’s important to the story I have that he know her.

     Anyways! Variables.

Scenario 1: VanCleef lived because he did not riot / unionize, and the Defias never exist.

     In this scenario, if the Defias never rose up, if the Stonemasons did not riot for whatever reason, either they were actually paid or they just had to take their losses and move on (like how Baros Alexston simply accepted the role of becoming the city architect), then it’s likely VanCleef would have stayed with Shaw as originally planned and become an SI:7 agent alongside with him. They would have been an official couple.

     Remember how I mentioned Vanessa? See, in this post I go into it briefly, but to rehash that point in its last paragraph, Pathonia expected an heir to the SI:7 and Assassin’s Guild (given that Pathonia passed it down to bloodline rather than to another agent, and given that it’s a powerful empire of sorts she’s built, she’d see herself as a queen in her own right, and thus pass things down that way) so when Vanessa was born, Pathonia full well anticipated that Edwin and Mathias would raise her up to be worthy of taking on that mantle the way Mathias has.

     That would be the plan. Edwin and Mathias live their dangerous happily ever after and Vanessa follows in their footsteps.

     Which means there’d be no room for Mathias to fall in love with Flynn, unless if for whatever reason Mathias was widowed prior to BFA, then Flynn would serve a parallel purpose as he does in current, which is becoming the symbol of learning to love again. But Mathias would be a dad in this case, and that love story would come from a different but very interesting walk of life. I kind of dig it? But again RIP Edwin if that were to happen LMAO

Scenario 2: Everything happens as normal EXCEPT adventurers don’t kill him (but it’s common knowledge that VanCleef is still Out There)

     This is a sad scenario because I think it’s a lifelong hunt for Mathias to try to find him and constantly have to hunt him down. There’d be a lot more guilt in him falling in love with Flynn in this case because VanCleef is just. still out there — and here’s Mathias living his normal life while Edwin’s on the run and then he dares eye someone else while hunting down the other man he was ready to commit to? He’d hold Flynn at a much further distance.

     Well, at least, that’s under the assumption SI:7′s still hunting Edwin. They probably still have to since he’d caused a lot of problems like killing Tiffin for example but what if Mathias helps him disappear by pulling some strings and then just vaguely going “idk he’s out there. defias was defeated anyways it’s not like it’s a problem we don’t know where he is” so he spared his life? Him and Edwin would probably never really make up since they’re on opposite sides, so it’s just a very complicated ex. FairShaw still possible in this setting.

Scenario 3: Everything happens as normal EXCEPT adventurers don’t kill him (but no one finds out until years later / modern day)

     Okay this is probably what you meant to BEGIN WITH but I like to ramble LOL so

     This gets... very complicated.

     Assuming everything happens as normal and Mathias enters his relationship, then WHAM hey buddy your ex is alive and well and also he’s pissed

UHH

     Mathias would desperately need that closure. I think he would genuinely take the time to explain to Flynn everything, leave no stone unturned because it just wouldn’t be fair to Flynn if he didn’t do that. Flynn would have to become aware of Mathias’ history, and why it’s important that he go find Edwin and get some answers and well needed closure, but it could potentially put a strain on the fairshaw side of things because man, Mathias loved Edwin so dearly, and did not and will never forgive himself for aiding in Edwin’s “death”. I can’t imagine it’d feel nice for your bf to explain to you that their ex is alive and they need to go find them and like ugh that’s just. such a sticky situation.

     But it’s not like the vanshaw will get back together — that damage is irreparable, and there’s no WAY Edwin wouldn’t view Mathias as anything but a traitor (especially if he’s like “so you just?? left vanessa too???”) it’s ugly, it’s painful, it’s angry, and Mathias will be LUCKY if he survives at all LOL. Mathias is likely to just try to get answers and do what he can to undo some of the damage he’d done as an apology and just tell Edwin a few things he never got to tell him.

     Slightly different if he finds out Edwin’s alive before he gets together with Flynn because then that new wave of guilt comes in, scars become fresh wounds and he’s feeling everything all at once and he’d feel WAY too guilty to try to pursue Flynn again when he still has this loose end he needs to amend. But I think he’d probably just disappear for a while while he tries to deal with Edwin (again, he’d try to undo some of the damage he’d done or make up for it) and once he at least gets that closure and gets this off his consciousness, he’d be, if anything, a little more ready to enter a relationship since that’s some baggage removed. Easier to date again when you know your last ex definitely didn’t die violently LOL

—

But yeah it seems like, basically, no matter what, if Edwin was alive it’d put some manner of strain on making FairShaw work but definitely not like, impossible you know? Just with a little more baggage and complications and of course the chance that Edwin probably tries to just murder Mathias outright LOL

The timing of when Shaw would learn Edwin is still alive affects a whole lot, and Edwin being alive changes a whole lot because there’s the after effects of the Defias and where they end up when the kingpin is downed, there’s the question of “What about Vanessa” re: cataclysm resurgence of Defias, there’s whether or not we should make the House of Nobles different, whether to change aspects of the Stonemasons or not like there’s a LOT to think about that all I can say is: shit’s complicated

But you know what’d be funny? If, in the situation where Edwin’s alive and Mathias finds out after getting with Flynn and he resolves the bad blood as best he can, the mental image of Edwin and Flynn quietly and awkwardly talking about Mathias or each other and this weird incredibly tense yet not necessarily hostile relationship they’d end up with and god that’s just so goddamn funny could you imagine

edwin, looking over flynn: “smh i knew mat had a type but this is just embarrassing”

BUT YEAH THANKS FOR THE ASK this was really interesting to think about!

[nightsonights]

sfw alphabet- z.k.

masterlist

author’s note: HUGE shoutout to the absolute queen @reveriekuwonu for this idea. her work is so so amazing and she’s so credibly talented. she did this for both nick and edwin so please please go check those out!!

also, this is not 100% reflective of the boys, zion in particular. i (obviously) don’t know them personally so these are all based on the assumptions/vibes that i get off them.

•••

A= Affection (how affectionate are they? how do they show affection?)

zion is moderately affectionate. he isn’t serenading you constantly or bringing you gift baskets and chocolates but from time to time, he’ll get you your favourite meal or perfume. you guys are practically best friends who are in love and in a relationship. he shows his affection through constantly spending time with you or just by simply telling you that he appreciates and loves you.

B= Best friend (what would they be like as a best friend? how would the friendship start?)

HE IS YOUR NUMBER ONE SUPPORTER. zion is down for anything and everything. smoke a joint? down. turn up? down. late night run to mcdonald’s? down. you’d start being friends with him through meeting at parties hosted at the pm house or through mutual friends. you both share the spotlight when it comes to getting lit so overtime, you learned to share it.

C= Cuddles (do they like to cuddle? how would they cuddle?)

zion is a meaningful cuddler. he likes to cuddle in silence and enjoy your presence. he would enjoy cuddling after a long day with something playing on the TV. the vibe is overall reflective. he is reflecting over his life or his goals or even being with you. his favourite cuddling spot would be resting his head on your stomach or your thighs.

D= Domestic (do they want to settle down? how are they at cooking and cleaning?)

one day. zion can imagine himself one day with a wife and kids and like five simba’s running around but that’s very far down the line for him. he can cook and be clean when he wants to but often times finds himself slacking. however, when he puts his mind to a recipe or making a place look decent, he does an amazing job.

E= Ending (if they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

zion isn’t totally immature about it. he’s not gonna go around spreading details or be butthurt about it. maybe make some unpointed ig story remarks but he’ll get over it. good with hanging around ex(s) after splitting just cause he doesn’t fuck with the negativity. but i do see him hooking up with one for old times sake.

F= Fiance(e) (how do they feel about commitment? how quick would they want to get married?)

marriage is something that zion can see in his life, just not anytime soon. isn’t very scared of setting down per say but he’s not at the stage of his life where he wants to fully be (and legally) accountable for someone else.

G= Gentle (how gentle are they, both physically and emotionally)

LITERALLY THE SOFTEST PERSON YOU’LL EVER MEET. under that hard exterior, he’s a soft, giant teddy bear. he is emotionally gentle when he knows that he can trust you and vice versa. physically he’s the same. IN BED THO... girl. we won’t talk about that ;).

H= Hugs (do they like hugs? how often do they do it? what are their hugs like?)

zion’s hugs are overwhelming to anyone. he literally engulfs you into his chest and towers over you with his height. being in his embrace feels like another world; your own personal shelter. he doesn’t mind being hugged but he finds it quite awkward if the person isn’t the same height as him. these types of hugs come forth when you’re feeling down or if he feels like he hasn’t held you in a while.

I= I love you (how fast do they say the l-word?)

zion isn’t one to just say ”i love you” to anything or anyone. he will definitely feel like he’s in love for a long time before he actually says it out loud.

J= Jealousy (how jealous do they get? what do they do when they’re jealous?)

zion is definitely a petty jealous. he will just hit you with those passive aggressive remarks like “go hit up your mans” or “tell your man he’s staring too hard.” he doesn’t take it too seriously though cause he knows you’re his girl and he trusts you.

K= Kisses (what are their kisses like? where do they like to kiss you? where do they like to be kissed?)

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MANS LIPS? LORD. zion’s kisses are always passionate and sexy. tongue, biting of the lips, etc. make out sessions are very common between the two of you. he loves to kiss your lips and loves to receive neck/jaw kisses.

L= Little ones (how are they around children?)

zion’s really shy around kids. the soft side of his personality comes out when he encounters a child. definitely nervous about making them upset or doing the wrong thing so he tries to avoid doing too much. he’d be an excellent dad once he stops tip toeing around his kid.

M= Mornings (how are mornings spent with them?)

mornings with zion are usually spent with puffs of smoke and tangled limbs under sheets. this is zion’s time of reflection and appreciation. whether that be because of his joint or not.

N= Night (how are nights spent with them?)

if the night isn’t spent partying or mixing beats in the studio, they are spent cuddling while watching reruns of old shows or cartoons. lots of inappropriate gripping and touching but overall pretty chill.

O= Open (when would they start revealing things about themselves? do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

zion is definitely one to have you piece together his biography slowly but surely. he’s not afraid to be vulnerable but it will take him a while to open up to someone. he needs to feel like he’s not being judged or ridiculed of the things that mean a lot to him in order to talk truthfully about them.

P= Patience (how easily angered are they?)

believe it or not, zion is very patient. he often holds his tongue to avoid unnecessary conflict. however, he will let things accumulate untill he’s reached his breaking point and feels like he needs to get shit off his chest. and when zion talks his shit- it’s over for y’all hoes.

Q= Quizzes (how much would they remember about you? do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

zion’s a good in between. he won’t remember the name of your first goldfish but he will remember your common phrases or actions. zion remembers things that are relevant to you and your relationship, not random fun facts.

R= Remember (what is their favourite moment in your relationship?)

your first time meeting his family or the moment where you both admitted you had feelings for each other.

S= Security (how protective are they? how would they protect you? how would they like to be protected?)

zion is super protective. he will throw hands for you, no questions asked. when it comes to protecting his family and friends, he doesnt care who was in the wrong or who it is. zion doesn’t so much need to be protected physically (although he wouldn’t mind you throwing hands for him ) but he likes to feel emotionally protected and valued. he appreciates someone he can express his hardships to and not worry that they will repeat it to someone else.

T = Try (how much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

because he’s very spontaneous and down for anything, every activity feels like a date. zion will remember something that you mentioned in passing and say let’s go do it. Because all your dates are very informal and chill, he would take anniversaries and special occasions really seriously. even going as far to make them extra cheesy and heartfelt :).

U= Ugly (what would be some bad habits of theirs?)

zion is a silent angry. he doesn’t feel the need to mention every little thing that makes him angry so he expresses his anger in silent and passive aggressive ways. when you try to help him or fix it the problem, he brushes it off just cause he would rather avoid the unnecessary argument. when zion gets in these types of moods, he can be very grumpy and agitated which doesn’t help either of you.

V= Vanity (how concerned are they with their looks?)

coming from a chubby childhood, zion often is self conscious about his weight. people might take it as him being cocky or fuckboy-ish when he shows off his abs but really he’s just proud of his progress/workout regiment.

W= Whole (would they feel incomplete without you?)

definitely. you and zion do some much together that if you were ever to leave for some reason he would definitely feel like he’s missing his better half.

X= Xtra (a random headcanon for them)

will never ask for it but loves when you take control in the bedroom. loves the feeling of your hands in his hair. is a whore for neck/jaw kisses. especially when hickies are involved.

Y= Yuck (what are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)

someone who is boring or doesn’t want to take risks. as mentioned before, he’s a very energetic and spontaneous so if his partner isn’t as equally as adventurous it’s a major turn off. zion also isn’t keen of someone who is always calling him out for smoking weed or being high. his fans already do that so much already, he doesn’t need his significant other doing the same.

Z= Zzz (what is a sleep habit(s) of theirs?)

zion definitely likes being the small spoon. his ideal sleeping position is his head resting on your stomach, thighs or chest.