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zukofenty · 4 years ago

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always be my maybe

➜ Summary: The one where Zuko and Katara could never quite get their timing right. Especially when the universe throws a lost condom, thousands of miles, and a baby in their way.

“I will literally french braid my pubic hairs and never open my pussy to anyone ever again if this condom doesn’t kill me. Please don’t let it kill me.”

➜ Genre: Modern!AU, Celebrity Chef!Katara, Doctor!Zuko, Love, Rosie!AU

AO3 @zutaraweek

“Go a couple rounds, leave Zuko’s dick up in a casket!” Toph screams into the microphone, undeterred by the various guests who stare up at her, mouth open and half-chewed, dry-as-fuck chicken spilling out. It wasn’t her fault, really! As soon as Zuko handed the mic off to her, he basically gave her free reign to spit a Megan Thee Stallion verse in his honor. “Sing with me, bitches! Look up the lyrics on Genius.com, Cheryl!”

“Sit down !” Katara squeezes out from clenched teeth, ripping the device out from the girl’s grip.

“I didn’t even get to the chorus, you fucking whore .” A bridesmaid nervously plucks the mic from their table and avoids eye contact with both of them. “What’s going on with you, bitch?” Toph asks quietly. She could tell Katara’s been doing her fake smile for the last twenty minutes. The girl was practically going to break her face open with how hard she was grinding her teeth.

“Just thinking.” Katara wants to smack herself in the face, pinch a nipple and bring herself to reality. Everything felt too real, and Toph could sense it. She’s the type to somehow sense when Katara shifts in her seat a certain way to covertly satisfy a cooch itch, and then buys her Monistat the same day.

She hates that she could never hide any emotion from her. Toph could always figure out the puzzle pieces that were Katara. One of the few to know the real her, besides Zuko.

Sometimes Katara thinks the younger girl knows her better than him. At least now. Especially now.

“About?” Toph takes an experimental sip from the wine glass, and gags. The juice tasted like Gatorade and cum. “Why the fuck would anyone want a dry wedding? Weddings are the only time you get to see your alcoholic uncle vomit all over the bride’s shoes, and then your closeted aunt has to wipe up the puke and her reputation from the floor while thinking of her secret girlfriend at home watching Tiger King .”

“That example was extremely specific and extremely unnecessary.” Katara brushes a crunchy curl, doused in hairspray, from her eyes.

“Sorry, I got distracted. I had dick on the brain, or whatever Rihanna said,” Toph mumbles, risking a bite of the chicken.

Katara turns to see him at the couple’s table in the center of the extravagant wedding, and sighs. “And for your information, I was just thinking when will he penetrate my esophagus? You know, just girly things.”

Toph has the gall to slap the girl on the cheek.

Katara holds her stinging face, eyes narrowed in an unspoken threat for fucking up the parts of her face she didn’t set with powder (she was going for a dewy look, sue her). “Not fair! You were the one who called my throat the baby chute earlier today!”

“Ok, throat goat. One, he’s getting married. Two, you’re sick.”

“My therapist will most likely cosign that,” Katara sighs. Toph holds Katara’s hand and leans her head on her shoulder as they watch Zuko mingle with guests.

This is the happiest day of his life.

Her best friend of twenty odd years was getting married. He looked so handsome, so happy. A suit that looked like it would cost someone’s rent and a half casually hugging his muscular frame. A blinding smile on his face, cheeks flushed from champagne and excitement.

When he turns her way, his smile grows impossibly wider. Toph clinks on a champagne glass with a fork, breaking it a la Princess Diaries , and Katara could feel the stares of nearly everyone in the room, ready for her speech.

It should be the happiest day of my life, too.

Right?

Katara thinks she wants to cry.

Now, how come none of those Judy Blume, coming-of-age books have a chapter on how to write a Best Woman speech for your best friend getting married to another woman, even when you were struggling with the fact that you might have been in love with him for the past two decades?

Bitch, what the fuck do you even start that Google Doc with?

Does she start at 4 years old? When Katara thinks Zuko is an annoying piece of shit?

But, you know, he’s her piece of shit.

Guys have hepatitis, or cooties, or whatever Sokka said, she couldn’t exactly remember. All she remembered was Zuko sucked. He stole her crayons and made fun of her Hello Kitty backpack on the first day of school. He was the stupid one, not Hello Kitty . Never Hello Kitty . She’d shoved his face into the playground’s wood chips, threatened to cut off his peepee for breathing down her neck with his retainer breath, and even stuck his head in between two slices of white bread and lovingly referring to him as an ‘idiot sandwich’ (Sokka let her watch too many Gordon Ramsey hosted shows while their dad was working late).

Zuko and Katara were practically inseparable ever since.

Or 10, when you were asking for trouble if you fucked with Zuko.

He was a tiny kid, glasses too big for his head. Hair shaggy, clothes too oversized for him (just the way he liked it). His dad had tried beating it into him that it showed weakness by not making waves, not being loud and proud. But, he was quiet by nature. For him, it was just easier.

Not stirring the pot, being the observer, looking in from the outside. He was just Zuko , he liked Wonder Woman comics and figuring out what other words besides BOOBIES he could spell with his calculator instead of actually doing his math homework, because he was bad at math. Bad at everything, really. Everything but band class. Even if he did hate that stupid fucking tsungi horn.

His mom would hide his report cards from his dad, especially the ones noting how shy he was (Mrs. Kim had used the exact words ‘very antisocial, very easy to bully’). Even when Ursa would ask him to try, try to make friends outside of Katara, he was always a stubborn little thing. Something you got from your father , she would say, the smile slipping off her face just the slightest.

It was just more fun being by himself, the only exception he made was Katara. He spent his recess scribbling down a plot for a Love Amongst the Dragons Fanfiction and listening to Katara’s iPod he’d steal from her, just because he could , after she snuck it out from her backpack for the 10 minute break they had. It was the iPod she spent the last two Christmases saving up with Sokka for. Zuko insisted he could master Ludacris’s rap in Usher’s “Yeah!” and practiced the Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she had custody of the device.

Some days, Katara would sit beside him in her signature puffy blue jacket, struggling to fold herself to fit on the blacktop beside Zuko. The patented jacket her grandmother forced her to wear every single day obstructing her abilities. He snickers, but keeps quiet, content with plotting out a story that he would hopefully get to type out on the school library’s computers if his mom picked him up late again. She usually did, much to the dismay of the ladies at the front office. They typically hissed at him (which made him cry, to which they would have to offer him a cherry Otter pop so they wouldn’t face a lawsuit) and called his mom words he couldn’t repeat without getting in trouble (“Whore”).

Katara would babble on about her day, sometimes thinking of ways for his characters to die a painful death, or cooking up Fanfic plots for Beyoncé and Britney Spears to find love among the chaos of a zombie infestation. She always insisted she brought the creative range to their friendship. Some days though, Katara forgets all about him and plays handball with all the most popular girls in school.

Zuko’s jealous.

(Sometimes.)

She’s my best friend! He wants to scream in their faces. At the end of the day, he thinks he’s going to lose her. The day she realized she was too good, too cool for the likes of him.

“Chan, stop it!” Zuko squeaked, his notebook snatched from underneath his nose. The boy was always picking a fight. Your dad buys you a Motorola flip phone and suddenly you think you’re the shit.

The boy sneers at Zuko, flipping through the pages. “What do we have here? Are you drawing Shrek with boobies? You’re gonna jack off to that later, freak?”

Before Zuko could get a word in and defend his honor, Chan’s entire body was shoved to the ground, a dainty foot cased in a light up, white Skechers sneaker pressing into his face. Zuko couldn’t help his glee as Katara could barely be peeled off and stopped from repeatedly slamming Chan’s face into the hopscotch chalk court. “It’s all ogre now, bitch!”

She made sure to pin her detention slip to her Bratz backpack with pride. Zuko buys two treats that day from the student store before he walks her home.

“You’re my best friend, forever and ever,” Katara declares, head held up high. Zuko saw through it, though. He knows she’s scared of what Hakoda has to say, what Gran Gran has to say. So, he holds her hand tight, trying to relay his gratitude in the touch.

He licks at his Spongebob popsicle. The eyes had melted off and looked more like someone’s worst nightmare than an icy treat. Katara had wanted his cherry Otter pop, and he happily handed it over. “Pinky promise?” He holds out his finger.

Katara hooks her finger around his, dwarfing his tiny digit. Her outstretched smile stained orange. “I’ll break yours if you ever forget.”

At 15, Katara came to the realization that men have the emotional intelligence of a Souplantation crouton (may Souplantation rest in peace).

Growing up, with their dad and grandma always at work at their store, Katara was always in charge of cooking. No matter how many times she’d try to get Sokka to do it, he always insisted he was far too busy with taking out the trash, killing bugs, hating women. So, she was stuck with it, and honest-to-Rihanna, really liked it. Not that she’d ever let Sokka ever get the satisfaction of knowing it. It was her time to be alone, gave her the space to pop in a Cheetah Girls CD and pretend she won Masterchef with the struggle meal straight out of a Spam can she had to pound on a few times to get it to squeeze out from its gelatinous casing, or a whitewashed recipe she tried replicating whenever she catches a Rachael Ray rerun.

Though, Katara’s favorite time was chopping up the green onions under Ursa’s careful eyes, a hand always just there in realign the knife just in case she’d carelessly cut the green onions too big to garnish. Then, Ursa would then take out scissors because nobody had time for that. When his dad wasn’t home, Zuko’s mom opened up their doors across the street to the siblings, rambling about the next big painting she was planning as they scarfed down a home cooked meal.

Zuko was similar to his mom in that regard. They were the type of people who managed to make everyday moments larger-than-life, made it infectious, too. When it’s nighttime and he’s snuck into and snug in Katara’s room, he’d tell her dreams too big for anyone’s comprehension. Sometimes he dreamed he had tits that would leak chunky chicken noodle soup. Sometimes he’d ramble until her eyes are flitting shut and he’s left talking to himself and measuring his hand with hers, securing the leg she instantly throws over his waist. He’d like to think he was her only exception in the Souplantation crouton narrative.

Her bed is starting to smell like him, too. His favorite Costco brand shampoo and conditioner that he leaves in her bathroom, permeating her nostrils when she pulled him close. She even let him put up a Drake poster right next to her plethora of Rihanna ones, but only after he let her draw a penis on both his and Drake’s face. What he didn’t account for was her using a permanent marker, or the fact he couldn’t scrub it away from his cheeks for the next two days.

It was easy like this, just the two of them.

He’s there for all the birthdays and Halloweens and Christmases that left her not quite feeling whole. When things were hard, when things fucking sucked, when she wanted nothing more but to die. He was there, (stupidly) holding out his hand and willing to be the eye to her hurricane.

At 15, Zuko decides Katara feels home.

At 18, Zuko had already been Katara’s many firsts.

He was her first buffet partner, and brought back his Justin Bieber haircut just to pretend he was 12 so they could qualify for children's rates and a complimentary Oreo cheesecake because they were always celebrating his “birthday.”

Her first clubbing partner the second she turned 18, rubbing her back when any Beyoncé song with a Jay-Z feature came on because the second he cheated on Beyoncé, he cheated on everyone in the Beyhive. The first one to have to hold her as she hurled on his shoes, the first one to have to take her to get her stomach pumped.

The first person she tried to roll a joint with.

“I don’t need to learn that.”

Katara purses her lips. “And why not?”

He gestures to his face. “I’m too pretty. Only ugly bitches know how to do that . ”

Sokka thinks he needs to intervene when he hears Zuko’s tsungi horn case being chucked across the room .

The first person she (almost) fucked.

His family life was, for lack of a better word, fucked up. Katara had been witness to the drinking, the drugs, the crying. The nights where she sometimes didn’t know if the person standing in front of her was Zuko. She just wanted one night away from it all, just one night out on the town.

“That was kind of terrible,” Katara admits easily, wincing because she was sure he spilled Papa John’s garlic dipping sauce in his shitty Corolla’s air filter last Tuesday. He tried positioning his arm naturally underneath her head while their half naked bodies were pressed together, but he ended up smacking off her glasses. He even had the audacity to contently sigh as though he accomplished something, rather than just tangle her hair and give her a tension headache.

She felt lied to! Cheated! Bamboozled! Hoodwinked! All the Shrek and Y/N stories on FF.net could not prepare her for the fact that there weren’t any tongues fighting for dominance, or any mouths that tasted like cinnamon or musk or shit like that. It was just retainer to retainer and smelled distinctly of her awkward friend (cheese). It was sweaty and a lot of weird humping and felt like a visit to the gyno.

“Hey! I thought it was pleasantly average.” He clears his throat. “You know, besides the fact you farted mid-insertion and I started crying after 20 seconds.”

“You mean right after you came, right?” She says matter-of-factly.

He glared. “Is it my fault you have a gorilla grip pussy? Is it?”

“Zuko, you’re so fucking — ”

“What happens when you put a hot dog in the microwave for 2 minutes?” He crosses his hands and folds them over his lap like a professor waiting for a volunteer to answer the equation on the board.

“So in this metaphor, are you calling my pussy a microwave?”

But in true Zuko and Katara fashion, it was clumsy and a mess and could be erased with an emergency Burger King outing where they ate in silence and pinky promised never to speak of it again.

She wonders if Zuko should’ve been her first date to prom, too.

She wants to stop feeling so bothered . She couldn’t quite pin it, but lately everything he did frustrated the shit out of her. How he was taller than her now. How he didn’t need her to fight his battles because he goes to the gym now and wears a fake Gucci belt because he’s just so cool (brooding Asian guy is the trend, and Zuko thinks he’s the blueprint). How he said yes to going to prom with Mai, the prettiest girl in their grade.

“Don’t look in there!” Katara yelps, a blush creeping on her cheeks.

“Why?” Zuko questions, taken aback. He was entirely too comfortable in her room.

“Um. Maybe I don’t want a freak going through my dirty underwear pile!” Her eyebrows are halfway done, and she only has one eyelash glued on. She was stressed, scared her dress might not fit with how many of Sokka’s cookies she stress-ate because she just wanted the night to be perfect .

“Relax, what are a few discharge stains going to do to me, huh? If anything, it gives your pussy some much-needed personality.” Zuko wasn’t going to stop until he found his fake Gucci belt in Katara’s closet.

“Zuko!” Katara screams at the top of her lungs.

“Do I have to remind you about the time you broke our friendship bracelet while masturbating and I dug the bead out of your vagina like the good friend I am?”

She shoves him back from the closet, crowding in his space. That belt was going to remain in its rightful place. “Oh, fuck you! I took the fall for you when you opened your laptop in history class and forgot to exit from your “VIBRATING PANTIES” porn tab!” She pushes him before plopping on her bed.

Katara buries her face in her pillow at that point, too entirely embarrassed and body too hot to continue to look at his nonchalant face. He doesn’t quite remember when exactly Katara became so cute .

Pretty? Definitely. Fearless? For sure.

But blushing Katara, embarrassed Katara, cute Katara?

He thinks it’s because they rarely saw each other now, despite his patented place in her bed. His band, Hello Zuko, was aiming for at least a few dive bar performances to build a reputation, especially with their new title track “Tennis Ball.” Katara was a familiar face at their town’s soup kitchens.

“Where are you going?” he would sleepily mumble as he tried taking his midday nap before late night performances.

Katara’s hands are full with ingredients, swaying side to side and eyes red and drowsy. “Trying to temper chocolate. Why? What’s up?”

She never misses a performance, though. Comes to them with a sparkly poster doused in glitter, and t-shirts with his face on them and everything. He never misses a fundraising event, making sure to bring a steaming thermos filled with tea because Katara was never the type to remember to take care of herself, and always buys out her fundraising goodies (even her overbaked brownies.)

He pulls her up by her ponytail, cupping her face in between his hands.

“You look cute.”

“You look like the human equivalent of toeless socks,” Katara mumbles, face squished in between Zuko’s hands. “Why are you giving my clit piercing a kiss kiss right now? What do you want?”

Zuko shakes her head in between his hands. “Pinky promise me you’ll drop all penises to dance with me if they play any Usher song?” It was like he was in fifth grade all over again. “Call me a Nissan because I just want you Altima-self.”

She lets out a cackle, the sound nearly deafening. “Don’t worry, the DJ will get us falling in love again in no time.”

“Do you have to go with Jet?” He asks, pouting. He lays his head in her lap, too entirely preoccupied with picking at her pilling sweatpants to look at her questioning eyes. They promised they were going to be each others’ dates at the beginning of the school year. It was more fun going to dances with Katara. She knew how to do the worm and every lyric to every Rihanna song out there (but she refuses to sing any with Chris Brown parts).

“What? You know I like my men stupid.” She runs her hands through his locks, undoing the crunchy gel job that Iroh had painstakingly spent time on. Zuko didn’t have the heart to tell him it made him look like a youth pastor.

“You do like your communal meat thermometers.” He wants to keep the hurt out of his voice.

She shoves him off her, getting up to put on the dress hanging off her closet’s door handle. “You’re going with Mai, remember?” She yells through the closed closet door.

“But the thing is, I’m not planning to fuck her afterwards at the shitty hotel like it’s some type of CW show with some old bitches playing teenagers!”

“Just say XOXO, Gossip Girl .”

He still resents her for getting him invested in Blair Waldorf’s headband collection. “It’s not my fault Jet looks old. He looks like he’s at least 27 for fuck’s sake!” His face grows more distressed as he spits out each word. He only said yes to going with Mai after finding out Jet asked Katara using some shitty poster that said “my heart is always running when I see you” with a box of Nike outlet sneakers after English class.

“I think you’re just jealous that I emptied my intestines for someone who is about to be in it within the next three hours. When have I ever done that for you?”

Zuko’s about to retort something until Katara slams open the door, flooding his eyes with a dusty blue, curve hugging dress that did weird things to him. Like make his heart beat out of his chest, and his throat all dry when he’s searching for the words to say. Looking for the right words that say he thinks it’s impossible someone’s smile could make sunsets brighter, make the stars twinkle even more, make the unthinkable just a fingertip’s grasp away.

“Can you see the outline of my underwear and/or desperation from the back?” Her spin has him bumbling like an idiot.

��//

He wishes it was Katara that night. Letting him shyly press his sweaty fingers into her waist as Katy Perry’s “E.T.” pierced their eardrums. He knows she would have pinched his nipples as punishment, all things considered. But the fluorescent lights of the disco ball would’ve highlighted how her pretty flush would dust her cheeks, and he would hold her close to his beating heart despite her complaining her foundation would stain his Target dress shirt, and everything would make sense.

“Did you cum?” Jet was absolutely pretty with an oh-so fat horse cock. Too bad he was like the Justin Timberlakes of the world, and always spoke unprovoked.

Katara scoffs. “Yeah, I came to my senses.” She flicked his forehead. “How would I do that? Tell me. How the fuck would a few thrusts and you panting your Sweet and Sour sauce breath in my ear get me off?” She shoves the sweating boy off her. “Can I say jk and will it make me a virgin again?” The hotel room had scratchy sheets and smelled like a waterpark bathroom.

He groaned. “I’m sorry .” He’s completely unremorseful. “Your tits smell like Cinnabon’s cinnamon rolls and I couldn’t help myself!” Katara is about to cut his dick off for breathing in the same vicinity as her, before a gasp stops her entire world.

“Zuko!” she screeches, opening the hotel door with the same devastation as when Britney Spears discovered Ryan Seacrest wasn’t gay painting her features.

“You know what they say.” Zuko’s smirking, entirely ignoring Katara fuming. “Chlamydia is the powerhouse of the cell.”

“You’re. A. Dick!” She says in between smacks to his head. Jet makes a speedy exit, still pantsless and clutching his suit to his chest, while Zuko mouths a ‘ call me’ to Mai, who amusedly waves goodbye to Katara.

“Oh god, this is exactly like the bead incident all over again.”

“ You’re not helping! ”

“Maybe we’ll find Atlantis up there too,” Zuko murmurs, concentrating on positioning the hotel’s mirror under her legs.

“Please, Rihanna. Have mercy on me.” Katara’s hands are in prayer mode as Zuko turns on his phone’s flashlight. “I will literally french braid my pubic hairs and never open my pussy to anyone ever again if this condom doesn’t kill me. Please don’t let it kill me. All those times I took an extra gummy vitamin were a joke . I never wanted to die, I just wanted to feel a little thrill in my life. Please—”

Zuko screams when the squelch of the condom splatters onto the mirror.

“You’re wearing underwear under there right?” He likes the look of his blazer draping over her, buttoned to look like a chic, oversized dress and not because it was the easiest thing to throw over Katara to run and grab Plan B.

“No, because I would obviously let my fat cooter out, cute and bare and vulnerable in a Walmart.”

“A simple yes would have sufficed.”

She’s reaching for the box and wincing at the price when she feels a gentle nudge on her arm. “Ma’am, your entire pussy is out in a Walmart,” the employee breathes out pathetically.

“I am well aware.” She ekes out.

The employee eyes her up and down with a gaze that practically calls her a whore . “Please put her away.” Zuko’s face grows beet red as he tries holding back a laugh.

It was always easy like this. When the world was just Zuko and Katara, holding hands in her driveway while they watched the sun rise in his shitty Corolla. She’s still wrapped up in his blazer, he’s since loosened his cheap tie and his hair is sticking every which way. She likes his smile, especially now that it comes so easy.

He’s smiling a lot more now that his father is gone. Ozai essentially told Azula and Zuko to fuck off , and ran off to some big city to steer a hospital with too many controversies and too many white guys at the helm. Iroh came back from his meditation sabbatical, enthusiastic to take care of the siblings. Zuko seems a lot happier with Iroh around, and even spends nights sleeping in his actual bed. (Katara’s a little hurt, but keeps that to herself).

She wishes she could bottle up these moments with Zuko up and just hold them in her hands. Moments when they were still young and curious and still had time to wait for life to figure itself out. She wants to find a way to make these a permanent fixture, instead of memories that would fade with age. “Let’s get out of here,” he offers up, eyes starry.

“Yeah?” She folds her knees up to her chest, and he taps her under her chin to level their gazes.

“ Republic City . We can make something out of lives. Medical school, culinary school. Get out of this shithole. Get away from our past.” His smile is contagious. “Best friends, forever and ever, right?”

She’s so pretty, her wide eyes sparkling as they take in the rays of sun. She returns his smile. “Best friends, forever and ever.”

Katara remembers how Ursa would say Zuko always dreamt too big, his heart always wanting so, so much .

“It’s a blessing, but more of a curse,” she would note, with the wisdom only mothers are capable of possessing. Sometimes, Katara selfishly thinks the day Ursa left hurt her more than it hurt Zuko. They were impossibly close, to the point where Zuko even had to intervene when Ursa started siding with Katara during their arguments (he knows in his heart his Mother’s Day macaroni portrait of her was better).

She would wonder how the world could let her live like this, dangling something she’s always wanted right in front of her face, only to snatch it away. Wonder if it was easier to die, than live with a hole in her heart that seemingly doubled in size overnight.

“Zuko, please look at me.”

He’s mad, she could tell. With his pout and the way he was forcibly trying to squeeze his eyes in a glare. He’s been sitting in the same spot in her bed, eyes trained on tutorials on how to convincingly persuade your doctor to give you an adderall prescription and “who bit Beyonce” conspiracy videos.

“Well, what if I just wanted you to respect my privacy! For the first time in 15 years! Maybe I needed space!” She yelps after twenty minutes of the silent treatment.

Zuko sends her a look that has her freezing up on the spot. “Katara, you had a whole baby .”

She felt thoroughly scolded, but she was stubborn. “And? What about it?”

“You had an entire one, and didn’t even bother to tell the godfather? When was I supposed to find out?”

Katara didn’t think that one through, to be honest. It was easy to forget, in between diapers that smelled like a fish sauce and an expired Vagisil smoothie, and balancing work. She lays down beside him, thoroughly exhausted after putting her little girl, Yue, down for a nap. “One, who made you the godfather? And two, I guess we’re just not close like that.”

“Look, I literally have your social security number memorized, and have practically given you a Pap smear. You really want to say ‘ we’re not close like that ?” He sends her a look that has her resolve faltering the slightest. “You did your pregnancy announcement like a Sailor Moon transformation sequence with before and after pictures of you being pregnant, and you didn’t think to fucking tell me?”

Katara gasps. “I had you blocked !”

“Azula’s a snitch!” He also got a glimpse of the photo of Katara in her hoe time dress that barely fit over her belly with the caption: how the mighty have fallen . He pauses, sucking in a breath of air for strength. The hurt flashes in his eyes and the only thing she could think to do was wrap him up in a familiar embrace.

At 19, Katara is so incredibly lost, and just wants her best friend by her side.

He’s busy, the summer before everything Republic City. Everytime she tries their house, Azula answers, rolling her eyes while clad in a Harry Styles shirt, because it’s a girl’s rite of passage to go through a One Direction phase and wear badly made merchandise from Hot Topic. He’s usually busy packing, or fucking Mai until she sounds like a car alarm during Fourth of July fireworks.

“Azula, no . You cannot kidnap Mai’s younger brother and trade him in for concert tickets to send a message.”

“Not even for floor ones?” Katara’s glare summed up her answer. “I used to look up to you,” Azula retorts, returning to her stan Twitter.

She waits, waits, waits. The moans keep coming and she just rolls her eyes. Her stomach churns, mainly because she thinks Mai called Zuko’s dick The Pussy Penetrator every time he hit her g spot (you know what, good for her). But also because her scholarship to the university was less than she expected, and Hakoda didn’t want to cosign on a loan. She just wanted her best friend to be there for her.

She feels sick, sick enough to vomit in one of Iroh’s plants, while Azula rubs small circles into her back.

“You should’ve swallowed,” Toph reminds, bundling Katara’s thick hair into a ponytail as the girl hurled up her California roll. She’s so exhausted, she even leans her head against the Walmart toilet bowl, five positive pregnancy tests tossed carelessly beside her.

“Think it’s too late for that,” Katara grits out. “What are you doing?”

The last thing she expected was Toph’s hands gathering together in prayer formation. “Praying to Rihanna your period comes.”

Like many people her age, having a mental breakdown during a pregnancy scare and praying for a miracle in a public restroom was normal. But for the first time in her life, besides the time Rihanna willingly twerked on Drake at the 2011 Grammys, Ms. Robyn Fenty herself failed her.

“Fetus deletus that bitch! Fuck them kids !” She brings herself eye-level to Katara’s stomach. “Read the womb, bitch!”

“Did you just call my unborn baby a bitch?” Katara’s eyes are bleary from the smell of vomit and her future going down the drain.

“You should’ve kept that bitch-baby in the drafts,” Toph sweeps the stray hairs from Katara’s watery eyes. “My cousin saved up for her abortion by running a pyramid scheme. I can get you her number.”

Katara wanted to die. “I think I’m just going to crawl in this toilet and die. Call my brother if I don’t get flushed down all the way.”

“Again, I’m just a Walmart employee,” Toph snickers, helping the girl up. She’s rarely left her side since then. Their friendship just works, a pair of fuckups. The girl with the accident baby, and the Walmart security guard trying to figure out her own shit after running away from home.

“I should’ve been there!” Zuko reminds, tone heavy with betrayal.

Katara remembered the few moments before he boarded the plane to Republic City. She wanted to be selfish. She wanted to tell him to not get on the flight, to keep holding her like he did at the entrance of the gate. She had a kiss ready on her lips that he wasn’t ready to give, backing away when their faces were too close, when she was too close. He just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving with regrets.

“I should’ve been there holding your hand, letting you call me names, and fighting nurses if they breathed too close to this precious angel,” Yue holds his pinky with her little fingers, almost as though it was a natural reaction. His heart simply seizes up at the gesture, and he holds her tighter to his body. She was wailing after waking from her nap, colic crackling her throat for the last three months and causing her middle of the night wakeups to be painful and frequent. But with Zuko, she’s all calm and perfect and polite and beautiful and angelic.

“Didn’t know you liked kids this much,” Katara shrugs. She leans in, and Zuko throws his free arm around her.

“I’ll have you know I am the resident expert in telling children’s stories,” Zuko insists.

“Like?” Katara quirks up her brow.

“Like Rumpleforeskin, the mythical man who can weave majestic golden fleece from the ends of his pubic hair.”

She smacks him upside the head. “You’re disgusting .” She curls in deeper into his embrace. He had that twinkle in his eye that could mean he was going to masturbate to this moment in the shower later, or he was in love. It renders her breathless every time

She hopes when he looks at her he doesn’t see the eye bags, or the titty milk leaking everywhere, or the permanent crease in her brow. She hopes he could still see her, underneath it all. When she was just Katara .

“I guess, not telling you was just my way of keeping our dream alive.” She pauses, stroking Yue’s barely there hair. “I keep thinking that one day I could find the time to go to Republic City, and I don’t know. Get a chance to just be me .”

“Do you regret it?” Zuko’s rubbing circles into her back until she gets sleepy and her heart feels too full.

“I don’t know.” She tries, quiet, almost ashamed. “I don’t know.”

At 21, Katara feels like she’s at the top of the world.

Not only did she get promoted from girl wearing a dumpling costume outside handing out 15% off coupons that only worked if you left a Yelp review, to a server in a shitty dim sum restaurant, she was also accepted in the culinary program at the local university. It wasn’t Republic City per say, but Yue could attend the nearby preschool and go to the university-run childcare program afterwards while Katara was working.

She even got a hold of Jet, who refused to disclose his location or job. But judging by the copious child support mandated by some judge who hated men as much as Katara did, he was doing well. He sometimes Venmos Katara a few extra dollars on Yue’s birthdays.

Sokka and Hakoda, while hesitant to the little girl’s presence early on, spoil her absolutely rotten. When they think Katara’s passed out after her 14 hour days, they’re red in the face, screaming at Zuko over the phone about who was going to get Yue the Peppa Pig Playhouse (complete with flashing lights) she always talks about.

Hakoda even tries at therapy, wanting to be there for the apple of his eye. Sometimes, Katara’s hurt he never tried for her, tried in her childhood. She’s happy for him, nonetheless.

(Mostly) everything was working out.

“How are both my girls doing?” Zuko would always sing-song during his nightly Facetime calls. Yue would scream and snatch the phone from Katara’s hands, delighted at the sound of her one and only Uncle Zuzu. He’s an extravagant gift giver, regularly sending Yue glittery Hello Kitty and Wonder Woman backpacks. He even buys her a whole iPad for her fourth birthday, already coming with child safe settings on and YouTube loaded with her favorites (namely, Barbie: Fairytopia ). He’s guilty he couldn’t come home, but then again, he rarely ever did. Too consumed with work, grad school applications.

Katara can’t help but feel her heart pulse the slightest bit faster during those calls, even if she shuts it down as quickly as it comes.

He’s so good to her .

She used to cherish those moments he used to tell her secrets, dreams, everything in those hours early in the morning before high school would start. With approximately 3,209 miles between the two of them, she wakes up to texts instead.

Zuko: I dreamed that I was being held at gunpoint by one of those thicc caterpillars from A Bug’s Life , and if I didn’t finish the MCAT in approximately 20 minutes, they would shoot me in the face. The dump truck ass of those ants were the bullets

Katara: Please block my number

Zuko: No. <3

He’s all gentle smiles and eyes squeezing into little half moons just like Yue’s after he plays a game of Facetime patty cake and messes up on the beat just to hear the little girl laugh.

The next month, Zuko had decided enough was enough . He missed his girl.

His hospital, for the first time in a year, was letting him have the weekend off. So he books Katara a ticket straight away, because he thinks he’s going to die if he has to be around people who don’t know who Megan Thee Stallion is.

“Boys only speak two languages. English and emotional manipulation,” Toph reprimands, hugging Katara so tight she could barely get in a word. “Please remember that.”

It was her first time leaving her hometown in her life, her first time on an airplane for God’s sake. She’s jittery though, the cushioned seats Toph somehow upgraded her ticket to (after covertly whispering with the gate attendant) doing nothing to alleviate her nerves.

When she jumps in his arms in baggage claim, he breathes in deep. Her hugs have always warmed his insides, and he didn’t realize how much he craved it until he was greedy, pressing into her and refusing to let go despite her many protests.

“Come here often?” he mumbles, smiling into her shoulder.

Her cheeks grew hot at his touch. “Occasionally.” She whispers back.

He decided there and then in front of Gate 3 they needed to make up for lost time as quickly as possible.

The college party is entirely too sticky, entirely too messy for a proper (extremely) late 21st birthday celebration. Her crop top and big earrings and glittery eyeshadow and endless curves has Zuko wondering how much he’s missed in the last few years. When she hugs him close to her and screams out Nicki Minaj lyrics, he doesn’t remember her being so soft and even prettier. Beautiful. Breathtaking, knocking the wind out his lungs if she as so much blinked.

She looks like any 21 year old, without a care in the world, just figuring out their life. He wonders what this version of Zuko and Katara was.

Maybe they got to go to Republic City together. Maybe they work in the same building, and are just letting steam off from work. Maybe they loved each other. It was dangerous though. He feels as though she’s caging him in, that grip on his heart sparking up again without his permission. Her fake lashes he saw her glue on in the airport bathroom flutter about, hands coming up to accentuate her words every time she tries to scream something in his ear over the pulsating music. He just grips her waist harder between his hands, holding her tight.

In a perfect world, all she saw was him. She wishes it was him. She sometimes thinks she sees Zuko’s eyes in Yue. She sees his smile. She sees his heart.

While they’d spent the entire night stumbling through the city, his girlfriend was home. Barefoot, pregnant. Looking like the cover of some women’s lifestyle magazine, stray curls escaping her bun to frame her face in all its angelic glory. Glowy and flawless and every bit beautiful. Different from the girl Katara caught crying in the kitchen. “You can hate me all you want, you can talk shit about me all you want. But I love him,” Jin insists. “I’m his girlfriend , for fuck’s sake.

Katara has to stop herself from recoiling. She had a specific vision of their future. One that included doing taxes together and matching sweaters and teaching him her new macaroon recipe and Yue balanced on his lap.

But one look at Jin, and it becomes glaringly obvious how little she fit in with his new life.

“I don’t hate you, Jin.” It’s every bit sincere, but the girl doesn’t look convinced.

Jin rolls her eyes. A pointed look freezing Katara in her place.

“Ok, I might’ve complained once or twice about your VSCO filter choice.”

“Yeah, Zuko sent a screenshot of your texts to me instead of you by accident.”

“God, you know he always fucking does that? To be fair though, M05 is too orange and is not a good look on anyone. You can do better, I know you can.” The two girls laugh. It was devoid of any genuine emotion, just meant as an attempt to fill the empty space between them. “If I had known. Fuck, if I had just known, I’m sorry, Jin.” She had no idea Zuko had a kid on the way, that they were still living together and determined to co-parent while their relationship was in a weird limbo. If she was Jin, she would’ve kicked someone’s pussy and made a scene and set something on fire. But Jin wasn’t that type of girl. Jin was soft and pretty and looked like she smelled like an interior designer's perfectly bleached asshole.

“Do you love him?” Jin seemed to shrink into herself, small enough Katara might miss her in a blink of an eye.

Katara couldn’t quite decipher the meaning behind the question. She thinks she’s too scared to.

Katara doesn’t know how to respond. She didn’t trust herself to speak. This Zuko wasn’t the Zuko she knew. She loved the Zuko who would steal people’s Netflix passwords off of 4chan, and cosplay as Todoroki at Anime Con to make a few bucks. Not the one who can afford sky rises in the big city.

He didn’t even tell her that his big internship in the city was for his father’s hospital, and he was next in line to running it. “You’re a lawyer with health insurance and your own Netflix account! You’re good for him, Jin.” Katara falters the slightest. “I just want to see Zuko happy.”

“Me too.” Jin says quietly.

“Whatever, fuck Zuko !” She tries at extending the olive branch. “I can’t believe you’re preggers!” She puts a gentle hand on Jin's belly, and her vagina immediately winces. “You know, your vag will never look the same, and you might grow a third boob in your armpit.”

“You’re lying .”

“Yeah, a lump of breast milk can form there, too!” Katara is about to scroll to the photo in her phone when Jin laughter breaks through the night.

“I hope your dick gets bitten off mid-blowjob!” She whisper-screams, struggling with her suitcase until it smacks all at nearly every corner and edge. She was just making noise for the sake of making noise, but it made her feel better.

He didn’t expect waking up to a charge on his card for a flight booked in the last ten minutes, or Katara shoving his good mixer in her suitcase.

“You hate it don’t you?” He always loved it when Katara went into Hulk mode anytime a bully dared test her protective nature. While it was never entirely directed at him, he now understands exactly why Chan peed his pants. Katara was terrifying .

“What?” Zuko’s confused, rubbing an eye booger away.

“You loved it when I’m crying over Jet, crying over something, fucking something up in my life. Being mad at the world. You hate that I’m better, and making something of myself now!” She’s angry and grasping at straws.

Zuko furrows his brows, not sure where to progress from here. “Ok, run that by me again?”

The air vanishes when her stare cools over to absolutely icy. “There’s nothing else I can give. So what the fuck do you want from me?”

He laughs, all hollow and almost mocking . “You know, I was afraid of you coming here.” He lies.

She stops in her tracks. “What the hell do you mean?”

“I thought...I thought you wouldn’t get this new me, because it’s different!” He protests. “See, this is exactly the reason why! You’re mad I can afford real Gucci !”

Katara recoils, looking embarrassed for him. God, were men so fucking stupid, and so proud of it, too. “Are you fucking serious.”

Zuko’s frustrated, running his hands through his hair. “What the fuck are we doing, Katara?”

“You tell me!” She demands. “I’m not that kind of girl, Zuko! I’m not that kind of girl that is going to break up a fucking engagement, or whatever the fuck you weirdos are doing!”

He throws up his hands. “I’m not happy! We’re not happy.”

“What? You think now that you’ve sold your soul to your piece of shit dad and you can buy jewelry that won’t turn your fingers green that I’m going to fuck you?”

“No! I’m not saying that—”

Katara scoffs. “Then what the fuck are you saying? Grow up, Zuko. Grow the fuck up and just leave me the fuck alone .”

“You’re still Katara.” He throws his hands up in the air, trying to stop her. Even if he felt like his entire world was falling apart, there was one thing he would always be certain about. “I’m still Zuko. The same Zuko who loves you .”

Katara turns her head, not willing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her upset. “The thing is, this isn’t you, Zuko.” Katara says with finality. “It isn’t you .”

When she gets home, she spots it right away. On their dining table, white paper folded neatly, Yue was the type of little girl who looked to both sides of the street before crossing, repeating it two more times to be safe. She always took extra care to make everything even, never a wrinkle in sight on her homework.

The Crayola family portrait that brought to life everything she’d imagined and more. Katara doesn’t have the heart to look for longer than a second.

At 27, Katara’s pretending that it’s the happiest day of her life.

She didn’t think he would listen to her, you know, men rarely did anything right. Zuko, though, heeds her warning and only calls exactly two hours before Yue’s bedtime like clockwork. There weren’t any surprise texts to wake up to anymore, no more evidence of Zuko in her life. She doesn’t even find out about Jin’s affair with one of those Axe commercial guys until months later.

When she goes to unblock his number and text him, to try and talk to him, she gasps. She sees those grey iMessage bubbles, and she’s ashamed her heart splutters, awakening a feeling she thought she’s dampened. She puts her phone down for milliseconds, before checking it again and again and again. She finally threw the damn thing across the room when a week passed.

She thinks it’s for the better, especially when she was sure she finally got things right with Jet.

“ We’ll make this shit work together.” Jet reassures, gathering her close to him she could see every little detail of him. “Like Kanye said, ‘you’re a MILF, and I’m a mother-fucker.”

She covers her ears, pushing him into the restaurant’s glass door. “No thank you. No more non consensual reciting of Kanye verses.”

��“Yeezy, breezy, beautiful, baby. Get into it.” Jet winks, and Katara feels herself gagging again.

Then again, Katara always had a thing for stupid. And for three easy payments of $Penis.99, he had an all access experience to her pussy and her trauma.

“And he bought me those carrot cake cupcakes I always look at when we go to the supermarket but I never want to chance it because it could have raisins instead of nuts and I think I hate raisins more than I hate white men named Nathaniel.”

Toph jabs Katara in the forehead. “Wow, he spared $5 on some dry pastries, and your pussy was suddenly screaming pick me, pick me !”

“They were gluten free, too,” she points out. “Plus, my pussy doesn’t scream!”

“Oh right, my bad! It whispers!”

“ Toph !”

“Last night I heard it go wash me! Wash me!”

It felt good with him, though. It felt good to see him help Yue with math homework, making dinner in their little kitchen, pressing kisses to her in the morning despite her breath smelling like Khloe Kardashian’s earring backing pussy. Someone to come home to.

“Piece of shit, I’ll fucking kill you!” She was punching him over and over again until her knuckles were ripped raw, sitting straight on his throat. Beating him stupid in the middle of her shift. He thought he could get away with it. With Katara now stuck in the kitchen as one of the head cooks, and the fact he had a reservation in one of the private rooms for him and his secretary to go over...numbers, he didn’t think much of it.

Too bad Toph was too invested, and had a friends-to-lovers storyline to live vicariously through.

“Scram, fuglies!” Toph screamed to other customers who had already started chanting “WorldStar!”

Katara lost her job, lost her mans, lost a section of her eyebrow because Toph accidentally tried helping and swung the wrong direction.

“Catch me outside, how ‘bout that!” She yelps triumphantly, despite the fact Katara was cradling her own bloodied face.

And here she was, about to lose her best friend, too.

She accidentally Facetimed his old number, and spent the last hour mulling over her feelings with an executive of a porn studio who picked up mid-shoot. “Just tell him you love him!” The balding man is exhausted.

“What do I even say? Do I tell him, ‘I think I’ve always loved you?’ Is that too cheesy? You know that feeling when your heart just—Oh my fucking god! Is that Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob ?!” She screams, slamming her hands over her eyes. The squirrel’s melons-for-tits would never be erased from her memory.

He only has fear in his eyes when he looks at her. “You didn’t see anything.” Robert bites out, promptly hanging up.

In her post-Jet purge, she realized she wasn’t the type of ex dead set on destroying his things. After all, she was selling his light-up keyboard to pay for Toph’s birthday boob job. Her residual anger was instead, spent hacking away at the drawer he always kept locked. Until she found it.

A letter from him.

“ I’ve always been afraid that our friendship would’ve spilled over until all I could do is categorize it with four simple letters .” Katara whispers, eyes frantically scanning the paper. “And I’m done being afraid .”

“The four letters he’s talking about is D-U-M-B B-I-C-T-H . Dumb bitch. The ‘bitch’ is silent.” Toph insists. “I can’t believe you let a balding bum, whose credit score tanked because he invested his entire savings in Shake Weight Milkshake making machines, knock you up instead of Zuko.”

“It was innovative at the time,” she whispers.

“Fill the void in your heart, not your pussy.”

She's whipping out her shitty MacBook Air, and praying his email still worked. But when she calls all she sees is her.

“You told me to come to Republic City and find him!” Mai exclaims, holding up her hand where a big ring blinding the fuck out of her.

She feels her heart crumble at the same time she crushes the letter in her hand.

“I did do that, didn’t I?” Katara winces. The time the model stopped by in their hometown, Katara was still happy and getting her pussy pounded regularly and let that shit get to her head. She thought it would be a blessing in disguise, and wanted to help Zuko out, too.

"Fuck."

Their wedding looked ripped out of a 2014 Basic Bitch Pinterest board, and she’s definitely sure she couldn’t be happier.

“Why is her name spelled like ‘Mai’ and pronounced ‘May?’ Like, shouldn’t it be spelled like ‘Mei?’”

“Katara, you’re just being a bitch,” Toph reminds while Katara stares at the sign with their wedding hashtag in front of the photobooth with all the ‘YOLO’ signs and 2013 mustaches.

“I am well aware!” She asserts, chin jutting out.

Mai’s New York Fashion Week ready body was gorgeous, perfect in Zuko’s hold.

Katara wished life was like a rom-com. Where she could burst through the doors, declare her love, piss on him in her ugly, big bridesmaid dress and mark her territory once and for all.

But life wasn’t a movie. Life was just this shitty piece of dumpster fire shit and was always fucking her over like the Target self-checkout line camera.

What could she do? Deliver some long-winded speech about how she would go to realign the stars in the heavens if it meant a chance to rewrite their fate? That she hoped she visits his dreams before his mind could settle into reality, the same way he visited hers and overstayed his welcome every single time? Make everyone uncomfortable and wonder if they boned?

Then again, she was never going to be the one to block her best friend’s blessings. Not on the happiest day of his life.

“I think this is the happiest day of my life.” Katara says seamlessly.

Zuko sees it though, sees right through her and has to stop himself from reaching out to her.

“It wasn’t ever easy being Zuko’s best friend. I mean look at him now, getting married to someone perfect . He’s not even in the same ballpark, league, or hell, stadium porta potty as her!”

Zuko ducks his head with a brief pout that breaks Katara’s heart. Everyone laughs in spite of him, until he joins in, too. “You know, it’s easy to pretend that finding love is easy. You could find love in all the little things in your life. All the people, all the details. It’s easy to say you always, completely, truly love someone. Because that’s what we want love to be, right? At the surface, sure.” She folds the flimsy paper she had on hand, nothing was written on it anyways. “You want it to be perfect.”

“But the love everyone works so hard to get, is the love that’s hard . It’s the love that isn’t safe. The love that challenges, excites you, the love that will never have limits. The love that’s messy and beautiful all at the same time.” She looks at him, truly looks at him for the first time in years and all she could do was smile.

“It’s easy to find love, but it’s near impossible to find a soulmate.” She raises her glass. “Join me in a toast to the bride and groom. I wish you a lifetime of happiness.”

And while everyone is gathered out on the dance floor, she’s sobbing pathetically and smearing the winged eyeliner she worked so hard to perfect on the car ride there. Trying to stop any of the pain from consuming her.

She’s out on the rooftop of the venue, the cold air whipping her face as she tries lighting up a blunt.

“Are you getting high at my wedding !” Zuko is incredulous, and shocks Katara enough to drop the joint off the roof.

“On all things Fenty Beauty, bitch what the fuck?” Katara wipes the tears from the corner of her eyes.

“The flower girl wanted to see her mommy.” But Katara sees right through Yue’s little act. Pretending to sleep so she could be held by Zuko (me too, girl. Me too).

It felt dangerous, the way she could toy with his heart, his own personal defibrillator shocking it back to life. She’s pretty even with red-rimmed eyes, with the fake smiles he knew was trying to appease him to leave her alone. If anything, all it does is make him want to kiss her until her troubles are gone.

He wanted to do a lot of things at that moment. He wanted to feel the warmth of her skin, tell her that above all else, he missed his girl the most. But, he had everything on his plate and then some.

“The chicken was dry as fuck.” He blurts, wiping the sweat from his face. Only Katara could send him back a few decades. “I wish you could’ve catered it.”

“Yeah?” She laughs and wants to call him out for stalking her company’s Facebook page. “Remember you tried my new recipe and you vomited all over the front row at your fourth ever Hello Zuko performance?” She misses his messy hair, when he didn’t look so clean cut and rich bitchy.

“I didn’t know you weren’t done cooking it!”

She shoves his head, and he joins her, dangling his feet precariously off the roof.

When she’s here with him, when he has her in his hold for the first time in years, he sees his whole life with just a glimpse in her eyes. And all he wants to do is build a machine and reverse all the time that’s passed them by.

“I made a mistake.” Zuko breathes out, eyes nervously darting around.

As sure as he was that Nicki Minaj deserved a Grammy, he was sure he loved her.

“W-What?” Katara blinks at him.

“I made a mistake, Katara.” He laughs nervously, scratching the back of his neck, carding his hand through his hair. Looking every bit devastatingly handsome. “I realized something. After the speech, after just, everything.”

“I realized I just can’t have my cake and eat it, too.”

Just like that, just with the way he built her up, it comes tumbling down.

“So what are you saying?” Her heart was on the verge of cracking in half and he didn’t even know it. Because all he could pin her with a look she couldn’t read, and she thinks if he was a smarter man he would’ve at least pretended that it hurt him to hurt her.

But it did.

It broke him, ripped him in half to see her face turn to steel right before his eyes.

“What I’m saying is, after all these years.” He doesn’t have it in him to face her. “I think I have to finally let you go, Katara.”

#Zutara #Zuko #Katara #Zutara Week #atla #zutara fanfiction #avatar the last airbender #zutara week 2020

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mst3kproject · 5 years ago

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Blood of Dracula’s Castle

This is another film by Al Adamson of Carnival Magic, starring John Carradine of The Unearthly and the weirdly rectangular Alexander D’Arcy of Horrors of Spider Island. If that weren’t enough, the first thing you see when you start the movie is an opening sequence of badly-shot driving set to an incongruously cheerful theme song, looking like something that should have credits over it, but doesn’t. Because obviously the perfect way to begin your movie is by giving everybody flashbacks to Manos: the Hands of Fate. Oh, boy.

Glen Cannon has just inherited a castle, so he takes his girlfriend Liz out to see the place and to meet the longtime tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Townsend. Unfortunately for Glen, Liz, and a number of short-skirted passers-by, the Townsends are actually vampires! They live in the castle with a menagerie of servants that include George the butler, Johnny the homicidal maniac (not the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, just a guy named Johnny who happens to be a homicidal maniac), and a hunchback named Mango. Not keen on the idea of moving, the undead try to persuade the young couple to either extend their lease or sell them the property outright. And if that fails, well, George does need victims to sacrifice to the moon god…

(Pictured above, three hundred percent more captive women than in Hercules and the Captive Women.)

You’d think a movie called Blood of Dracula’s Castle would be set in some ancient and spooky part of eastern Europe, wouldn’t you? And you’d be wrong, because the castle in this story is in the middle of the Arizona desert. Why is there a castle in the Arizona desert? The movie never explains, but I’m guessing the backstory is similar to that of Shea Castle in California, where much of the movie was shot – some rich asshole just decided he wanted to live in a castle. What I really want to know is why this specific castle has vampires in it. Deserts just don’t seem like good vampire habitat, you know?

Blood of Dracula’s Castle is particularly ridiculous about this, because like Attack of the The Eye Creatures or Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules, it features sun-hating baddies in a movie that is clearly shot in the daytime with a dark filter! And like those other movies, the sunshine is so intense that the filters do just about nothing. Also, why is there a beach nearby? Arizona is not exactly famous for those.

The Townsends are some seriously weaksauce vampires. A lot of movies have vampires with superhuman strength, telepathy, or the power of flight. These two are afraid of being shot, and can’t even escape from being tied up with silk sashes. I would say it undermines their threat, but they never seemed that threatening to begin with. Alexander D’Arcy and Paula Raymond play the characters very low-key and matter-of-fact, and their servants come across as far more dangerous than the masters. I suppose this is why the vampires turn to dust in an anticlimax, while the real movie-ending battle is with Mango the hunchback. He takes a bullet to the gut, an axe to the back, is set on fire, and finally topples over a cliff before he goes down! Even George the aged butler puts up a pretty good fight with a morningstar before breaking his neck in a fall down the stairs.

Johnny, meanwhile, is a very confusing inclusion. He’s been in a mental institution for murdering some unspecified number of people, and he blames his killing spree on the full moon. The movie harps on this at some length, with Johnny himself, the Townsends, and George all referring to it, so by the time the climax approaches we’re pretty sure we’re gonna get a werewolf scene. When George sets out to sacrifice a captive woman to the moon god, I was eagerly hoping this would take the form of wolfman Johnny showing up to tear her apart. But Johnny is present to watch, remains fully human throughout, and does nothing, while George simply sets the woman on fire! Why spend all that time setting it up? Is the point supposed to be that Johnny uses lycanthropy as an excuse for his killings when the truth is he’s just a murderer? If so, the movie misses by a mile.

Glen and Liz are technically the main characters, but they’re very much the type who are only present so this movie will have somebody to happen to. The writers, director, and even the actors are far more interested in their assortment of baddies. Neither of the couple has anything that might be considered a character trait. They are introduced in a montage of Glen taking pictures of Liz at Sea World, which establishes nothing but the fact that she’s hot and he’s recently asked her to marry him. There’s also a really weird bit where they make out under the watchful eyes of a voyeuristic walrus, which sure is a sentence I just wrote.

There are a couple of moments when it looks like Glen’s profession of photography might just be plot relevant. He tries to take a picture of Johnny, but Johnny doesn’t want him to, which could have been a precursor to one of them recognizing the escaped murderer. It goes nowhere. I also wondered if the film might make use of the idea that vampires don’t show up any better in photographs than they do in mirrors, but the idea is completely ignored.

About the only thing in Blood of Dracula’s Castle that works is one joke. Glen and Liz are snooping around the castle basement, where they discover the Townsends sleeping in their coffins. Liz starts to freak out, and Glen tries to reassure her by telling her that there’s a perfectly logical explanation. She demands to know what that is… and rather than offer some ‘rational’ bullshit Glen just straight up says, “they’re vampires, obviously!” The sheer surprise of seeing a trope subverted like that in this stupid movie made me laugh out loud.

Is there anything halfway interesting in this movie? Meh, not really. The closest it comes is when it suggests the Townsends’ distaste for ‘traditional’ vampirism. They don’t go around biting necks and leaving bodies behind – instead they drain blood from a vein and sip it out of genteel wine glasses. Killing Glen and Liz is not Plan A, it is what they’re forced to turn to when all else fails. Lady Townsend even contemplates the idea that someday somebody might invent synthetic blood, allowing vampires to become law-abiding citizens!

This could have been neat, but it fails to go anywhere because the Townsends seem entirely cheerful and blasé about the crimes they do commit. They have no problem keeping young women chained up in their dungeon, draining them of blood and then turning them over to Mango to be raped and murdered. They show no reluctance to sacrifice victims to the moon god. In fact, their performance has almost a Stepford Wives sort of feel, in which they are polite and pleasant about literally everything. Even in private, when they worry about possibly having to kill their guests, they sound cheerful. The fake smile plastered across D’Arcy’s face is downright terrifying, though not for the reasons it ought to be. He looks like being in this movie is causing him physical pain.

Another thread seems to be some commentary, probably unintentional, about the nature of relationships. Glen and Liz argue quite a bit, and I think most of it’s intended to be in fun but Gene O’Shane and Barbara Bishop are not good actors and it sometimes comes across quite bitter. Their disagreements contrast with the behaviour of the Townsends, who are perfectly in harmony in everything they do. Perhaps this is because the Townsends have simply known each other longer, having been married for some three centuries while Glen and Liz have only been together a year or so. The impression one gets, however, is an Addams Family sort of vibe, in which embracing the darkness within seems to lead to better relationships.

Now that I think of it… with the charming, well-dressed, and loving couple, and their cadaverous butler, there is definitely an Addams Family thing going on here. The comics had been around since 1938 and the TV series started in 1964, so it was out there for other creators to draw on.

In comparison to the other Al Adamson movies I’ve seen, Blood of Dracula’s Castle actually strikes me as more similar to Carnival Magic than to Psycho-A-Go-Go. The latter film was very upfront about its dark themes, while the former buries them under a cheerful carnival front. Blood of Dracula’s Castle also looks rather harmless on the surface, as the Addams Family comparison makes clear: the Townsends are very cheerful and friendly vampires, their castle more whimsical than foreboding. They and their strange servants could be characters in a comedy, were the movie not so explicit about their murders.

Blood of Dracula’s Castle is pretty dull. You won’t be missing anything if you skip it. If you do want to watch it, I’d better warn you: the opening sequence is set to an upbeat song called Last Train Out, and once it’s in your brain, it’s not going anywhere for a while.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #blood of dracula's castle #poor john carradine #tw: rape #60s

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unnecessarygayfeelings · 4 years ago

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Finished my Farafey fanficton! Here’s a link to it on ao3, but I know not everyone uses that, so I’ll post it here under the read more. No content warnings (there’s a small mention of alcohol, but no one is intoxicated), just 2k words of fluff. This is for the Farafey micronation especially @aquilamage because she has epic content that inspires me a lot.

Lavender Lip Gloss

It was new year's eve and Kay was going to be late to the party because her roommate was hogging the bathroom.

Kay should be used to this, really. Ever since she and Sebastian decided to rent an apartment together at the ripe old age of nineteen, she became well aware of her friend's quirks. But she could handle the misplaced pens, loud classical music, and endless pacing at ungodly hours of the night. She would be a hypocrite if she judged him, though. Half of the pens they owned were probably on her desk, and in the early mornings she liked to sing her favourite pop songs in the shower. They argued about who was the cause of their the noise complaints every time they received one.

They've been roommates for years now. Kay was used to Sebastian's habits... except for one.

"Seb, leave the goddamn door open when you're just fixing your hair! I need the hairspray!"

It took a long time for Sebastian to break the habit of placing barriers between them when it wasn't necessary (Kay had grown up in a home with open doors and open hearts; she wants the same for Sebastian), and eventually he stopped locking the door behind him every time he entered a room. Kay respected Sebastian's need for privacy. But she also respected their friendship, and that's why she knew that what she was about to do was not only expected, but acceptable in their tiny apartment. She took a step back, lifted her leg and opened the door with one swift kick.

There was a high-pitched yelp from Sebastian, who had styling gel on his hands, a strand of hair sticking up on his head, and an unimpressed expression on his face as he saw Kay's triumphant smile. "I-I was almost done!"

"You always say that, and then you end up taking another thirty minutes," Kay replied, grabbing her hair spray and securing her high ponytail right there. Sebastian's face scrunched at the smell. She sprayed a little bit of the product in his hair, too. They both laughed, doing the finishing touches on both of their party looks together.

After a final once-over from each of them ("The green button-up was a good choice, right, Kay?" "Yeah, but what about this silver skirt?"), they were ready to go to the new year's party. It was at Miles's house this year, and if they both weren't used to bothering him at every location possible, it might have felt a bit weird to party at the boss's place.

When they arrived at Miles's house, the host himself greets them. Although he does look genuinely pleased to see them, his smile turns strained when Kay tells him to "prepare for trouble, and make it double". While Sebastian is making small talk with Edgeworth, Kay lets her mind trail elsewhere— to the reason she was so eager to get to the party in the first place.

Maya Fey had been in Kura'in for a while now. Despite their friendship being long-distance, they were still very close. Their bond was just as strong as Kay's with Sebastian, although she felt very different about Maya than him. Kay's heart soared every time her phone dinged with a new message. She circled dates on the calendar with a violet marker whenever they planned to video chat. The time difference was brutal, but Kay would gladly stay up late just to hear Maya's voice.

"Waiting for s-someone special?" Sebastian's teasing voice broke Kay out of her thoughts. She hadn't even realized that Miles was long gone. The only one next to her was her best friend, who was looking extra smug. Of course Sebastian knew about her crush. He was the one Kay would go to at one in the morning, bombarding him with texts and asking him if he thought there was a deeper meaning to them. The deeper meaning, he would tell her, is that you both like each other and it's only a matter of time before one of you make a move. He was being ridiculous, of course. Just because Maya called her pretty and laughed a little too loud at her jokes and had a purple heart emoji next to her contact name didn't mean anything.

Okay, it definitely meant something, but Kay wasn't going to take the first step and confess or anything because... she was shy. Ugh. She wasn't used to being shy. Sebastian was the shy one, not her. But Kay hadn't seen Maya in person in what felt like forever (it had been six months), so who knows. Maybe she would make a move.

"Hey, there she is!"

Kay's head shot up, pure enthusiasm with a twinge of anxiousness filling her whole body. She looked to where Sebastian was pointing, and there she was.

Maya Fey was here. Maya Fey was looking around the room. Maya Fey was making eye contact with her. Maya Fey was walking towards her.

"Hey!" Maya Fey's voice sounded so much more real when it wasn't through a speakerphone, all light and chipper. Kay wasn't sure how she'd survive the night, let alone make a move.

"Hi, Maya!" Sebastian greeted, holding out his arms and allowing a brief hug. Maya showed her affection through touch: high fives, hair ruffles, and hand holding. Kay was the same which was one of the reasons why their long distance communication was difficult. You couldn't embrace someone through a screen.

Then Maya turned towards her, arms outstretched, and Kay found herself being pulled in like a magnet. Maya's hugs were warm and welcoming. She didn't miss how they both lingered, the hug lasting many seconds longer than a hug Kay would have with any other friend, even Sebastian. But eventually they had to (slowly) pull away.

"It seems like forever since I've seen you!" Maya exclaimed, looking up at Kay with a big grin. "You look great! I love your skirt!"

Kay's brain seemed to short-circuit. Maya was wearing a cute pink party dress and her long hair was in its usual style, decorated with sparkly hair clips. Her lips were shiny with a purple gloss. It was a light shade, like lavender. Was this weird, just staring at her lips? She needed to respond before it got weird. "Thanks! I love your lip gloss!"

Okay, so now Maya had solid proof that she was staring at her lips. Oops. But Maya just smiled at her. "Haha, thanks! Do you guys want a drink? I saw Miles bought the good champagne."

Had he? Kay didn't even notice. Sebastian nods and then a minute later Maya is offering her a drink. Kay takes the glass, and tries not to think about the brush of Maya's fingers against hers too much.

Conversation is easy. Maya asks what they've been up to since the last time they talked. Kay feels like this question is more for Sebastian, since her and Maya just talked this morning on the phone. Sebastian tells her about his latest case (not a murder, thankfully), and Kay includes details from her perspective as the detective assigned. She's sure she had mentioned this case to Maya before, but Maya seems very interested anyways.

When they ask what news Maya has, she perks up tremendously. "I've finally mastered the bowl without falling on my face!"

Recently, Maya has taken up skateboarding while in Kura'in. Pearl has been the one teaching her; she was very talented, and had a cool skateboard with a flame design on the sides. Kay had been blessed with many cute selfies of Maya in her skating gear (lavender knee and elbow pads, and a florescent pink helmet that could probably blind a person if they stared too long at it) and ten second clips of her skating around in sunglasses, striking poses at the camera. Maya was a beginner but she refused to give up, despite the constant complaining of bumps and bruises from falling all the time.

"Really?" Kay gasps. She's received many texts about the bowl, and according to Maya it was one of the most difficult things to master in her life. ("It's harder than channeling spirits, Kay! Stop laughing, it's the truth!") Kay had never skateboarded before so she felt like she couldn't judge but it certainly didn't look easy.

Maya quickly pulls her phone out of her dress pocket. "Let me show you. Pearly got it on tape! Proof that I'm not making it up to sound cool or anything."

Kay believed her. Maya wouldn't need to make stuff up to sound cool. She unlocked her phone (Kay felt herself blush at the lockscreen— it's a selfie that they had taken the last time Kay was in Kura'in, a trip that was impulsive and expensive but she didn't regret it one bit) and pulled up a video of Maya on top of the bowl. Pearl can be heard off-camera shouting encouragement. Then Maya adjusts her helmet, balances herself on her board, and slides down the bowl in one swift movement. She skids to a stop once she's on the ground. The last thing they hear before the video cuts out is Maya and Pearl screaming with excitement.

"That's so cool!" Kay exclaims, genuinely impressed.

Sebastian's eyes are nearly bugging out of his head. "Whoa! You look like a pro-professional skateboarder!"

"Yeah, this makes all the times I fell down on my butt worth it," Maya says, grinning from ear to ear. They talk some more before Maya goes to mingle with an old friend.

"Hey, do either of you know where Nick is? I want to bug him before the year ends."

Sebastian points Phoenix out across the room, where he is currently distracted by his daughter Trucy pulling an comically long scarf out of the tiny pocket on her blouse. A mischievous smile, a wave of her hand, and Maya's off.

There's a brief silence as they watch Maya leave. Sebastian turns to Kay with the same shit-eating grin he has when he's about to say something clever. "Kay? I diagnose you with gay. Lesbianism, if you want to be specific."

Kay groans. "I know, I know."

"Well, it's clear that she likes you, too, so I don't see what the con-conundrum is."

Kay believed that she was a relatively logical person. Her field of work made use of that trait, tested it. And now she was being presented with more evidence and a restless witness. The pieces fit together perfectly— Maya Fey liked her. The only question was what she going to do with this information.

"Was I... obvious about it?"

Sebastian raises his eyebrow. Takes a long sip of of his drink. "Is that a trick question?"

Not everyone Mr. Edgeworth invited was at the party, but the house is noisy regardless. Friends and acquaintances are talking in groups, there's music coming from an unknown source, the television is playing a new year's special, and Kay's heart is beating up a storm. Despite all of the activity, Kay thinks her heart is the loudest thing in this place.

Sebastian is tapping his fingers against the table next to them. Another noise, although it's muffled by the black gloves he's wearing. "Well, I know you don't like champagne."

Kay looks down at the drink Maya gave her, still full. The condensation from the glass mixes with the sweat on her palm. The feeling of Maya's hand brushing against hers lingers.

In the distance, Maya nudges Phoenix roughly in the side, and his drink splashes on his shirt. Maya laughs and then points at the stain, exclaiming loudly that it kind of looks like the Blue Badger. Phoenix seems to push his annoyance aside to carefully examine his sleeve. Maya calls other people over to look, a light yet determined expression on her face, and Kay can feel herself fall a little more in love.

...

The flashy countdown screen on the TV lights up, signaling the last minute of the year. Kay smiles and swirls the untouched champagne in her glass. She's lost in the way the tiny bubbles cling onto the sides of the cup until something distracts her. Or more accurately, someone.

"Hey," Maya says, placing her own glass on the table in front of them.

"Hey," Kay echoes back intelligently. She places her glass next to Maya's as her friend (she ignores the tightening in her chest when she calls her that; she's not sure there's a single word in this world to describe what Maya is to her) sits down next to her.

There's a moment of silence between them. Maya smells like jasmine and nostalgia. Kay wants to look but she's glowing like the sun, so she decides to play it safe and stare ahead. She sees Sebastian and Klavier talking about something, but she can't concentrate enough on their voices to know the topic.

Maya's voice snaps Kay out of her trance. "Happy new year."

For a split second, Kay thinks she miscounted the seconds, and missed the celebration. She checks the television quickly, and sighs with relief. "You're about thirty seconds too early, but I appreciate your enthusiasm." Then she had to use all of her strength to resist the urge to kick herself for sounding so weird.

"Oh." Cheeks flushed red for sure, Kay risks a glance at Maya. She doesn't regret it. She doesn't think she'll ever get tired of seeing Maya smile. "Happy new year's eve, then?"

She barely pulls herself together before responding in a passably-normal-although-probably-too-eager tone. "Yeah! Happy new year's eve!"

Maya laughs at that, and Kay can physically feel her heart soar. She knows it's bad to look at the sun but she can't help it, and within seconds she's pretty sure she could map out all the freckles on Maya's face. Kay stares too long to pass as normal and she knows it. But Maya is staring, too.

"TEN SECONDS!" Kay doesn't recognizes whose enthusiastic yelling the voice belongs to, but she doesn't even bother tearing her eyes away from Maya.

Ten.

Maya is sitting so close to her that their thighs are touching. How did Kay not notice that until now?

Nine.

Maya hesitantly reaches over and touches Kay's hand with her own.

Eight.

Her hand is shaking slightly. It's sweaty, too. Kay doesn't complain. She's probably the same.

Seven.

Kay curls their fingers together. She can't seem to stop smiling.

Six.

There's no denying it. The walls between them tumble down to reveal something a bit more than friendship, a bit more than just simple attraction.

Five.

Kay wants to say something, anything, but she's been rendered speechless. She's pretty sure she looks ridiculous. Ridiculously lovestruck.

Four.

Maya's other hand reaches over to brush Kay's hair out of her face, and her touch lingers near her cheek.

Three.

There's a line that they haven't neared, trying to maintain their friendship. Maya is standing at the edge of it, threatening to cross over.

Two.

Maya tilts her head, leans in, and closes her eyes. Kay can't hear the music over her heartbeat pounding in her ears.

One.

Kay closes her eyes, leans in, and unconsciously holds her breath.

"HAPPY NEW YEAR!"

Their lips met, and Kay smudges Maya's lavender lip gloss.

#farafey #maya fey #kay faraday #yes aquilamage i was the writing team anon AND playlist anon. sorry for constantly being on anon in your inbox i am unfortunately v shy haha #but i finally have content!!! whoop whoop #ace attorney fanfiction #personal

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leggomylino · 5 years ago

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Riddle Me This | Two (detective!chenle x reader)

✫*. Genre: Romance, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Sns/Text AU (hybrid) ✫*. Pairing(s): Detective!Chenle x Reader ✫*. Word Count: ~4.2k ✫*. Warning(s): Mild language, dark secrets, angst, gang references, mentions of blood and violence ✫*. A/N: Requests are currently open! | Main Masterlist in bio! | I hope you enjoy <3 Sorry this update was a little slow, but it’s almost twice as long as the first! Thanks once again for reading~

“Well, well, well...what have we got here?”

Nobody moved. The air had gone still with an unwelcoming dampness that sent chills down Chenle’s spine.

This was it. They’d loitered around for too long. The sun was now setting over the horizon, elongating the shadows of their terminators.

Now, this wasn’t his first time being cornered by criminals, so Chenle wasn’t entirely in the dark on what to do or how to react. He and Jisung had been cornered and bullied plenty of times over lunch money or failed homework assignments before this unfortunate run-in. The first step was always to remain calm and focused; don’t move a muscle, don’t let your guard down. Assess your opponent, and, in most cases, just give them what they want so you can get back home in time to watch the four o’clock rerun of Spongebob. That had always worked for them... however...

Hyuck looked about as confident as he did facing Mr. Wong’s chicken coop when he was handed the egg basket. Anyone could smell the fear radiating off of him. It was almost overpowering, the levels clearly over nine-thousand.

One of the goons laughed, stepping forward to reveal his face in the late evening sunlight that was quickly slipping away for shelter, not wanting to get dragged into such a scrabble. Chenle couldn’t blame him, he’d be running too if his legs weren’t glued to the concrete and they weren’t incredibly surrounded. The man ran a gloved hand through his grown-out hair, his bare fingers fading and tangling into the dark mess.

“The hell is this?” he slurred, brows arched in an uneven fashion. Each step he took was a hollowed-out death sentence, announcing the soon-to-be arrival of four new tombstones along the foggy hillside of Westwind Cemetery. “This is what the boss is so worried about? A couple o’ scrawny little twerps?”

“Scrawny is right,” another one grumbled, stepping out to reveal himself as well. His thick lean muscles and dark brooding stature made up for his lack of height in the intimidation department. “Except for maybe the comic book geek over here. He could probably stand to lose a few.”

Hyuck winced at the mention of his weight, bowing his head in shame as crimson shades of embarrassment took over his cheeks. While the rest of the men laughed, Jisung lashed out, something Chenle had been lowkey afraid of. Just like old times.

“Shut up! Hyuck isn’t fat at all, he’s just got big cheeks. You’re one to talk, Squirrel Boy.”

That certainly hadn’t gone over well. Normally Jisung was rather quiet and willing to compromise if it meant the two of them could get home to their TV on time, but once he’d already been railed up, there was no stopping him. His sharp mouth took over his sense of judgement.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

A veil of silence fell over the deserted back street before the goons all burst into laughter, minus Squirrel Boy and one other, who only rolled his eyes at his fellow goons-in-arm’s comments.

“Wow Han, they already know your name! Have you been holding out on us? Forget to tell us you made some new friends?”

“This is too cute. I didn’t know you had a couple of runts you snuck out to play detective with.”

“You should invite us to play with you sometime!”

While Squirrely Han stood fuming and yelling insults, the only grunt who had yet to say anything stepped forward, shaking his head in visible disapproval from his previous perch atop a few old box crates down Side Avenue B, adding to the number of goons total and only decreasing their odds of survival.

“This is stupid. You all need to grow up and stick to why we’re here.”

The others all looked at him curiously as he padded over before a bored viel glazed over their faces.

But just as one of them opened his mouth to speak, it was Jaemin who spoke up next. “And just why are you here?” he asked, careful footsteps echoing ‘til they reached Chenle’s right side.

He gulped. The intensity and precision coming off of Jaemin was admirable to say the least...if not possibly stupid for one holding one-half of the braincell.

Then again, Jaemin had always been a smart and calculating guy. A true smooth talker among smooth talkers. Maybe, by some miracle, he could get them out of this slowly escalating mess.

The goon with what appeared to be a surprisingly high maturity level for someone their age only glared a moment from behind a probably stolen pair of fashion lenses, shaking his head again before he scoffed. “That’s the question I’m supposed to be asking you.” He unfolded his arms, placing a steady hand on his hip as he slightly cocked his head to the side. “We know you’ve been snooping around our turf lately under our noses, but now you’ve had the guts to do it right before our eyes. What gives? What do you four want?”

“What we want is to continue our investigation in peace,” Jisung snapped. One of the other gang members made a scrunched-up face.

“Wha? Investigation?” His freckles settled into a smoothed-out frown. “What the fuck are you investigating? You looking for a fight or somethin’?”

“Where were you going?” Glasses cut back in, eyes trained hard on the four of them.

When his eyes fell on Chenle specifically, he gulped again, taking a deep, steady breath to try and calm himself. He could do this. He just had to remember the rules...keep your composure, short simple sentences, give them what they want.

...But of course, Jisung was always there to defend the people he cared about. Mainly just Chenle. “Westwind Bookstore. Not that it’s any of your business,” he added with extra emphasis.

Another awkward silence fell over the crowd, only this time it didn’t end with joyous barbaric laughter. Instead, the five leather-clad delinquents all looked at each other, their faces strangely dark with worry and discomfort.

“What, that place?”

“Oh hell no,” Freckles said, shaking his head. “No way I go anywhere near that place. It’s rumored to be haunted as shit.”

A red-haired hooligan nodded, looking the most distraught next to a suave dark-haired one. “I heard that if you so much as try to talk to the owner, he’ll rip your heart out!”

“Wha? Who?”

“The ghost!”

Freckles blinked. “Who the fuck told you that?”

“...I dunno.” Red boy shrugged. “I heard it a few days ago.”

“...That’s dumb. Then how is anyone s’posed to buy anything?”

“Enough,” the shortest goon with bulging muscles snorted. His voice was raspy and sounded like spitfire when he spoke. “Seungmin is right, this is getting nowhere fast. Look…” He marched over to Jaemin, still standing tall and proud with a look of even confidence on his face. But Chenle could smell the fear lurking beneath his faux composure from a mile away. “You stay off our turf after hours and get a new hobby in your little detective business, or there’s gonna be trouble,” he spat, jabbing Jaemin right in the chest. “Got it?”

Please just say yes. Please just say okay, and we can all move on, Chenle thought. This was a stroke of pure luck honestly, never in Chenle’s history of hold-ups had he been let go with a warning before. The moment Jaemin agreed to back down, they could continue on with their little errand and all would be--

Jaemin smiled. A true, soft, gentlemanly smile. “Why does what we do bother you so much?” he asked. “It sounds to me like someone’s scared.”

A cold wind blew, a lone tumbleweed bouncing by. Nobody moved or said a thing.

Then Spitfire flipped out a blade, grabbing the pink-haired boy by the collar of his striped button-up shirt. “Why you--” He growled, eyes darkening along the horizon. “I’ll show you scared.”

“Let him go!” Jisung yelled, beginning to rush over. His footsteps pounded on the hard concrete until a flash of red and black flew past the corner of Chenle’s vision, holding his best friend back.

“You probably don’t wanna do that,” Red muttered, sounding a bit nervous. His black-haired companion nodded.

“Yeah, once Changbin gets going, it’s best not to--”

“Fuck off,” Jisung spat while struggling, literally...spitting...on the sidewalk. Right on the guy’s shoes.

...Maybe Jeno was right about him needing to take more magnesium supplement after all. Between Jaemin’s triumphant stand and Jisung’s disproportionate behavior, there was no way they were getting out of this alive now. They’d both lost their minds, dooming them all.

“The fuck did you just say?” Squirrely Han spat. There was a lot of spatting going on, but that was the least of their concerns seeing as he flicked open a switchblade in the next second.

Freckles chuckled darkly, brushing his orange hair back from his eyes. “Guess they really are lookin’ for a fight,” he mused, an excited gleam filling his eyes. “I could go for a few rounds.”

“Nobody is fighting anybody,” Glasses said, waving his hands in emphasis. “This is so stupid, just, everyone calm down. The four of you get out of here and stay off our turf before--”

“Our turf, our turf,” Jisung mimicked in a mocking tone. Chenle could feel the hard eyeroll that followed. “This isn’t your anything, we have as much of a right to be here as anyone else does. If you haven’t noticed, this is a crime scene, and we’re very busy investigating this case, so if you don’t mind, maybe the six of you could--”

Whap!

Chenle didn’t need to turn around to see what had happened. He’d seen enough when Squirrely Han rolled his eyes right back, pacing over while Jisung uncharacteristically ran his mouth.

“Jisung!” Hyuck gasped, finally finding his voice. He attempted to run over, but was grabbed by Freckles, Glasses having to help him with yet another eyeroll.

“I guess we’re really doing this then,” he grumbled with a halfhearted shrug. “I’m sorry you guys couldn’t just listen to reason.”

“Shoulda kept his mouth shut,” Han mused, glaring down at an unconscious Jisung. When next he twirled his blade around ringed fingers, flicking it open again, Chenle couldn’t recall exactly what had come over him after that; something in him had just snapped. He remembered lunging forward with no recollection of willing himself to do so, followed by Jaemin shouting something, then a rush of pain plumming along the crown of his skull, a curtain of black signalling the end of the charade and sucking all the life out of him as he collided into a state of numbness.

When next he woke up, he was staring at a blanket of stars, the rough concrete sprinkled in red and the smell of iron drying on his cheek, a cold reminder of what had previously transpired as thoughts slowly crept back to him, a wave of nausea weighing him down alongside a splitting headache…

...That, and the fact that Jisung and Jaemin were missing, Hyuck lying unconscious a few feet away.

You stared at your necklace as you held it above you, lying flat on your bed as it dangled above your face. Your one and only prized possession. Your grandmother’s locket.

You hated that thing.

For starters it gave you nothing but grief. You couldn’t tell someone how many times some schmuck with a beret or a top hat and some sort of monocle or magnifying glass had come marching into your shop searching for it. Doing research, asking you questions. Endless questions. It was annoying. At first you’d made the mistake of telling them yes, you knew what they were talking about and yes, that was your name your grandmother had left in her old-fashioned ink-stained parchment will and yes, you just so happened to have it on you right at that moment.

Then you’d show it to them and they’d all go ballistic. One guy even clonked out right there by the front desk.

The other ones who hadn’t passed out from shock tried to coax it from you, and there were many different arts to this. Most offered you money, a few tried convincing you to just give it to them. But they all ended roughly the same: a big fat no on your part and Mark chasing the ones who refused to leave out the door.

So if you hated it so much, why didn’t you just get rid of it? What (y/age) girl living on her own (sort of) couldn’t use the extra money?

Well for one it was your grandmother’s, and while you hardly knew the old braud you couldn’t shake the feeling that she entrusted you with her locket for a reason. From what you did remember of the stories your mother told you when you were young(er), the woman was always ranting about how it was going to save her one day and she never took it off.

So you did the same...except you never ranted about some ancient hunk of metal being the Key of Salvation and you couldn’t wear the darned thing to bed. It was just too uncomfortable. It felt...heavy. Like a burden pressing the air out of your lungs.

Yet you felt anxious being too far from it, so one day you hammered a nail into the wall by your bed and that became its new resting place. Til death do you part.

You didn’t understand how your grandmother could possibly think this ratty old thing was going to be the key to anyone’s salvation, much less hers. Some luck it’d done her; she was six feet under sleeping with the fishes. All it ever brought you was misery and an endless chain of unwanted attention.

At least it was somewhat pretty.

A knock at the door cast you out of your self-pitying thoughts, a warm presence waiting for you on the other side.

“Come in,” you said, sitting up and putting the necklace to bed. Mark’s usual semi-bored expression met you a moment later as he closed the door behind him.

“It’s getting late. Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I am in bed,” you teased, sticking your tongue out at him. He smirked, crossing the small attic space to settle at your feet, his hands tucked deep into his hoodie pocket.

“I meant why aren’t you asleep.”

You hadn’t meant to, but for a fleeting second your eyes traveled to the stupid locket hanging by your pillow, and that was all the ghost needed to go on.

“The locket?”

Crap. You really didn’t wanna talk about it. In fact…

“I’d be perfectly fine never talking about it again,” you told him, turning your face towards the wall. When you realized the dumb thing was right above your nose again you flinched, letting out a small growl before flopping yourself over like a fish.

Mark just chuckled at your petty antics, setting a hand gently over your right ankle. “Hey, I get it. You hate that thing because you feel it’s what got you into this whole mess. Am I right?”

“What mess?” Your voice is muffled through polyfill and torn cotton pillow sheets. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Y/n…”

You groaned.

“......” Mark sighed, the bed shifting as he leaned back to prop himself up with his elbows, your calves now draped over his leg. You sometimes wondered about that; how he could be a ghost, and yet, at times be as solid and warm as a living, breathing human being. As if that car crash had never even happened. “That’s actually what I came up here to talk to you about.”

Amid the silence you lifted your head from it’s hole in the sand, gazing back at him over your shoulder curiously. “I thought you came up here to send me to bed like a nine-year-old.”

“That too. But since I knew you were up, I was hoping we could talk for a minute.”

His eyes were on you in the next second, and the only thing you could do was blink a few times before you realized he was waiting for your permission to start. “Okay…”

He smiled, small but true, and averted his gaze downward before flicking it toward the Key of Salvation hanging on the wall. “Have you been able to get it open at all? Do you know what’s inside?”

That was the other thing. You knew the necklace was a locket, but you had no earthly idea what the heck was inside the darned thing. Anytime you tried to pry out the truth, it refused to budge an inch. Not even a centimeter. “No idea.”

“Hmm…” After a few moments of staring a hole into both it and the wall Mark gave a low hum under his (breath?), holding out his hand expectantly. “Alright, then. Let me try.”

It suddenly occurred to you in that moment that you’d perhaps never been more dumb in your life. At least not as far back as you could remember. Mark was a ghost; that counted as a supernatural being, right?

If human strength wasn’t enough to bust it open, surely something supernatural or voodoo-y would do the trick. You don’t think you’d ever flung something so fast or with such vigor before. For as much trouble as it caused you, it sure would be nice to know what all the fuss was about, why all these museum coordinators and old-timey scholars were constantly knocking at your door.

Mark just laughed as he caught it, taking a moment to examine and turn it over in his hands a few times before getting to work. The deep rivets along the flower stems, the amount of detail put into each and every petal...

Then another. Then another.

“...What are you doing?” you asked anxiously, nearly jumping up to your knees to hover over his shoulder the way he normally hovered over you any other time of day. “Open it already! Use your superhuman strength to pop the hinges off the darned thing!”

“Hmm…” Mark ignored you at first, almost seeming to be caught someplace far away as he stared good and hard at the piece of craftsmanship wrapped around his fingers, his features almost as set and stone-like as whatever unbreakable material the necklace was made out of.

Unbreakable until today, that is. “Go on! Open it!”

“...Y/n,” Mark suddenly began. When next you looked at his face, you noticed the creases along his forehead beginning to match those carved into the necklace, rigidly cradling beads of sweat. His voice trembled lightly on the nervous side. “Before I try anything, I want you to know how important this necklace is. Not just to your grandmother or all these investors and archaeologists that have been showing up for the past year or so, but...to you as well. To your family.”

“Huh…?” You cocked your head just slightly. “What are you talking about?” You looked down to the locket in Mark’s hands. “I hate this dumb thing. It brings me nothing but trouble.” You sighed, glancing back down at your own bare hands turned face-up in your lap. “Sure would be nice to know what everyone’s after, though…”

“I know you hate it but…” Another sigh. He raised the piece of jewelry to dangle before his face, similar to what you had been doing before, staring it down with precise, curious eyes. “...I still don’t understand everything myself, but all I can say is that it’s definitely important.”

“Mark…” You scrunched your brow. “What are you talking about? Why are you bringing this up now?”

A long pause. The two of you just sat there in silence for a few dragged out moments before he finally got to work.

“...Nothing. I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just think you should take better care of it, is all.”

“What?” You frowned. “You didn’t scare me. I’m not scared, I just--”

There was a crack. Something had snapped.

Oh my gosh, it was working!

“Keep going!” You urged, hands balled up into tight fists. You bit your lip, watching with anxious, pleading eyes.

Oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please--

...Sadly, after four and a half minutes of this, that was all he was able to pull off. The crack wasn’t even visible, if it was even there at all. Heck, maybe you’d just imagined it.

“You mean to tell me you can walk through walls and manifest places at will but you can’t break open a stupid necklace?” you huffed, dropping your hands to sit atop your legs. “Can’t you just reach through it and pull it out? Whatever’s in there?”

Mark shook his head, looking just as defeated and maybe even a little...conscious. Like he knew something you didn’t. “It doesn’t work like that, y/n.”

Huh? “Why not?”

Mark paused. Again. Staring off into space for a little while, then back down at the topic of discussion. “It just...doesn’t.”

The air grew stiff and silent once more. A cold breeze went by, rattling a fall branch against the small circular window of your room facing Summers Street, where the three-quarters moon hung precariously among a blanket of stars.

You stood, ruining the tense silence abruptly. Whatever he was hiding, it was coming out here and now. Mark may have been able to hide secrets from you in the past, but once he’d entered the spirit world he’d become a pretty lousy liar.

You distinctly crossed your arms, a suspicious quirk to your brow. “What aren’t you telling me, Mark? Why have you never brought this up before?” A pause. “What’s going on? Why are you acting so…”

Your voice trailed off at a faint rapping from downstairs. You were about to brush it off as a couple of raccoons or maybe one of the older bookshelves having given out, since they were getting ancient beyond their years and in desperate need of replacement, but the knocking only intensified until it sounded like life or death.

Worn bookshelves didn’t knock so eagerly. They didn’t knock at all. Raccoons didn’t either.

Then you heard the door burst open, the usually pleasant bellchime crackling like roaring fire.

You didn’t move, your breath hitching. Were you seriously being robbed right now? Why had you not heard anything from the daily newspaper? But wait. Robbers didn’t knock repeatedly to see if you were home. If anything, they may knock once or twice, like dipping a few toes into the water before diving right in. Whoever had just broken into your store was obviously looking for someone.

A horrible thought entered your mind. Oh gosh, it’s the architects. The history majors. They’re growing desperate, resorting to a life of crime if it means having that stupid necklace.

While you stood frozen in place, wondering whether or not your should be arming yourself or diving under the bed, Mark quickly vanished, manifesting at you side a moment to grip your shoulders for assurance and make certain you weren’t about to have a panic attack before venturing off to investigate.

“Stay here,” he whispered through airwaves. “Don’t leave this room until I come back for you.”

He turned out the light and was gone the next second, leaving you with a flickering candle atop your small work desk, where you usually filed insurance forms and much hated taxes.

Time was frozen still while you waited for his return. You didn’t budge an inch, not a muscle, as you stood on a mountain of sand beside your bed, dangerously close to toppling over as you felt your blood circulation begin to numb.

You couldn’t just stand around like a bump on a log all night. This was your store, your apartment. You had to know what was going on.

So you did exactly what Mark told you not to do. What else was new.

As you crept on cat’s feet to give the flickering candle a gentle goodnight kiss, you made sure to snag gran’s locket where Mark had left it lying on the desk, fastening it firmly around your neck. No way were you leaving it sprawled out alone or invitingly hanging on the wall for any old thief to grab. You wandered quietly towards the door, stopping only a moment to tuck the accursed thing beneath your pjs.

The touch of cold metal against your skin sent shivers down your spine, a few drops of wax nearly burning your skin from where--

...Hold on. Hadn’t it been lying close to the candle? And you had the small heater set up in the corner going on almost full blast. So how was it that the metal was so…

...Later, y/n, later. Right now you had more pressing matters to worry about.

Cringing rather late for someone nearly burned by hot wax, you fanned the strangely cool necklace away from your skin a moment before swallowing down a dose of Big Girl pills and crawling out the door.

Yes. Crawling. You shuffled silently as you could on hands and knees, pausing yet again halfway towards the stairs to curse your stupidity of forgetting to bring a weapon, only to remember your only weapon was Mark, then carried on until you reached the wooden decline into Westwind’s only bookstore.

You took a deep breath. You were ready. ...No, wait. One more. In, out...there we are. Okay. You could do this. If anything happened Mark could bail you out, he always had and surely always would.

Carefully, you peeked between the railing, eyes fixated on the opened front entryway…

Where a young boy was lying unconscious.

»»————-　♡　————-««

✫*.Riddle Me This | Toil and Trouble - Two | detective!chenle x reader

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whosmorales · 6 years ago

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Kiss the girl - Spider Noir x reader

A/N: there’s no where near enough spider noir fanfics so I decided to take a crack at it. I’ve never written one before though so I sincerely apologize if this stinks.

Warnings: swearing, fluff I guess?? General bad writing

“I need you to fake date me” you said to Peter (Peter Noir to be specific, not the pig or the old, sad man, as much as you loved the two.)

Peter sighed and took of his thick, round glasses to clean them off on his sweater as he supported himself by leaning one arm on the kitchen counter. “And what is this for exactly?” He inquired, his dark eyes locking with yours before he pushed his glasses back up his nose.

You felt yourself get flustered when you realized how stupid you must sound to him right now. “Weeeelllllll..I may or may not have made a bet with Miles. We agreed that whoever could get someone from the spider crew to go out with them first would get twenty dollars from the other one.” You said, avoiding his gaze slightly.

“And why me?” He asked in a slightly soft voice.

“Well, dating a pig would just be weird, Peter B is almost twice my age and is just patching things up with MJ, Penni is like my little sister, and Miles is totally pining over Gwen, I’m trying to win a bet, not break the kids heart.” You rambled, casually deciding not to mention that you wouldn’t mind dating him for real, instead of just for twenty dollars.

He sighed softly in response before making eye contact with you once again, his deep black eyes stared into yours in a way that was almost intense. “Fine...” he muttered, breaking eye contact after what felt like an eternity. “But you owe me one” his features softened and his face flushed a little, but you barely noticed considering his skin only got a slightly darker gray color.

You gave him a cheeky smile. “Thanks, Love.” You said in a sarcastic way. I mean, if you guys were gonna fake date, you might as well make the most of it, right? You grabbed his hand in yours, catching him off guard, and marched down to Aunt May’s basement, where everyone was hanging out.

You proudly walked up to Miles, Peters hand still in yours. “Cough it up Morales!” You said with a wide grin on your face.

“Are you mcfreaking serious?!” He said, avoiding using a certain word in front of Penni. You nodded happily and looked up at Peter, who you saw was nodding as well, his face calm and his mouth forming a soft, almost indistinguishable smile.

Miles let out an over dramatic sigh before pulling a crisp 20 out of his back pocket and putting it in your hand, or more like tossed it over to you, refusing to give you the satisfaction of winning by giving it to you so delicately. You giggled delightedly and gave Miles a hug, which he ignored like the little drama queen he is. After that, you turned around to face Noir. Should you hug him? No, you had to keep up the impression that he was most definitely your boyfriend, but without freaking him out or anything. You put your hand in his and squeezed it softly, which caught him off guard, he was hoping expecting so much as a kiss on the cheek, but at least he could remain cool and calm this way.

“Alright I’m gonna go get a new book, with my new TWENTY DOLLARS” you said, dragging out the last few words and making sure to rub it in Miles’ face.

“Slow down darling, you’ll freeze out there.” You heard Peter say before spinning around to see him wrap his seemingly giant trench coat around you. You felt a light blush sprinkle your cheeks.

“Thanks” You said rather quietly before you spun back around on your heel to go to the book store about a block from Aunt May’s house.

“Be back in time for movie night! 9 o’clock, you can choose the movie.” Peter B yelled as you walked away. You smiled to yourself and wrapped the coat tighter around yourself and putting on a pair of boots over your fuzzy socks. You checked the time, 7:30 pm. Cool.

As soon as Miles heard the door close upstairs, he turned around in his chair to look at Peter Noir, who could already feel himself getting flustered.

“Sooooo...you and (Y/N) huh?” He said, almost in an interrogation voice.

“Y-Yeah” Peter replied awkwardly, tugging at the collar of his turtleneck and fumbling over his words.

“Cute.” Gwen said out of nowhere. “What’s your favorite thing about her?” Gwen was like an overprotective sister to you, even if she was younger, and she wanted to know everything about you, your friends, and your partners, which now included Peter.

“Uhm..well, my favorite thing about her can’t be boiled down to just one thing” he said, not even realizing it was all fake. “I like the little smiles she does when she gets complimented, how her nose scrunches up, I like how she puts other people before herself, especially when she’s saving people, when there’s stray glitter on her face from who knows where, it just looks angelic, I like when she’s having a lazy day and just lounges around in Spider-Man pajama pants and a big old tee shirt, and she still looks gorgeous.” He continued to ramble on before he realized.

Fuck.

He has it really bad for you.

A little bit more time passed of him gushing over you like a girl with her first crush to the other members of the spider crew before you came downstairs, already having changed into a big, comfy Disney world tee shirt and the Spider-Man pajama pants that Peter adored you in oh so much.

“I got a Spider-Man comic book!” You said happily, showing it to Penni, who you knew would be beyond excited to read it with you before she went to bed every night. That was another thing Peter loved about you, you were always elated to hang out with any member of the crew, and you had special activities you did with all of them. With the two of you, you loved to show him music from different decades, your favorite being the 80s, you just loved dancing like an idiot to the voices of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury with your friend. Yeah, that’s all he was. Your friend who you just so happened to be fake dating.

Peter B clapped like a teacher trying to get a class to listen up. “Okay kiddos it’s movie night! Since porker got to choose last week, that means it’s (Y/N)’s turn today!” You smiled to yourself, already knowing which movie I’d choose.

You fished out a CD of the little mermaid (nice pun). You knew everyone, as much as some would hate to admit it, enjoyed it. Porker and Penni enjoyed any cartoons, Peter Noir loved watching anything ahead of his time, especially colorful movies like this one, as much as Miles and Peter B would hate to admit it, they were both suckers for the under the sea song, and Gwen had a soft spot for Ariel, she loved that Ariel was smart and knew what she wanted, unlike most of the princesses before her. And you? Well, this movie was just your favorite, you couldn’t explain it really, but watching it felt like being a giddy little kid all over again, it gave you a sense of wonder.

You smiled like a little kid seeing fireworks for the first time as the bright blue screen flashed with a picture of the Disney castle. You were snuggled up under a soft pink blanket (that you totally didn’t steal from Penni) with Noir by your side, the two of you separated by his hand. You sighed internally, why couldn’t it be like this all the time? you thought to yourself, why couldn’t you always be by Noirs side, be able to call him your boyfriend, borrowing his trench coat, even though everyone besides him couldn’t pull it off the same was he did, calling him cheesy nickna-

Your thoughts were cut off midway through when you felt a strong, but gentle arm wrap around your shoulders over the couch. You jerked your head rather quickly to see Peter, who looked all embarrassed and flustered, but his arm didn’t move, though you weren’t complaining. You melted into his touch pretty instantly and you felt his fingers lazily trace patterns of swirls and circles on your arm. God you were so glad he wasn’t aware of what colors meant, because the blush across your nose and cheeks was growing, and fast.

You felt yourself smile into Peter’s shoulder, which you rested your head against, when you heard your favorite song of the movie, kiss the girl, come on. Something about the song was just so magical and sweet, and listening to it while snuggling with Peter “Noir” Parker made you feel beyond lucky.

“And you don't know why, but you're dying to try. You wanna kiss the girl” you sang along softly. Peter was surprised he didn’t swoon right then and there at the sound of your gentle voice.

Without realizing what he was doing, Peter put 2 fingers under your chin to face you towards him, gently and calmly. He stared into your eyes for a breif moment, though it felt like everything else had disappeared in that moment, no one but you and Peter. He looked down, letting out a small exhale that released just enough anxious thoughts for him to kiss you. It was gentle and calm, but it felt so real.

After a moment, you pulled away from him and stared into his eyes, searching to see how sincere he was, almost not believing what had just happened.

Had he done this because the others were around? Or did he do that because he really wanted to?

You smiled at him softly before sinking back into him. He was almost in disbelief from how calm you were, because god knows he was absolutely freaking out internally and probably over analyzing everything.

There was a good hour left in the movie, although it felt like it went by in just seconds of cuddling under Peter’s arm while your hands grabbed his free one and to rubbing in circles on his hand. As the end credits started to roll, you noticed everyone besides you and Peter had passed out. For a second, you felt shy and vulnerable, even though you’d kissed what felt like moments ago.

“I like fake dating you” Peter said as he rubbed the back of his neck and spoke quietly as to not wake the others up.

You smiled shyly, though you felt kind of heartbroken, with the word fake being added to that sentence . “I like fake dating you too.”

“Alright Doll, I’ll see you in the morning.” He said, in that warm 30s voice of his you loved to hear so much.

“Goodnight Love.” You said softly, pressing a kiss to his lips, which he didn’t seem to think much of. That made you realize something: I want to actually date this nerd! Fuck I’m a dumbass!

“Wait!” You whisper shouted as he walked away. He turned around to you with a goofy smile.

“I want to date you...but for real this time.” You said, or more accurately declared.

He smiled softly and nodded. “Me too, I guess I’ll see you in the morning Love”

He called you love

Holy shit

God this man made you melt like Ariel did for prince Eric.

A/N: sorry if this is like really bad but let me know what you guys think!

#spider noir x reader #x reader #spider man noir #into the spider verse #marvel #marvel x reader #spider noir #spider man #spiderverse

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years ago

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Spider-Geddon #4 Thoughts

Oh dear how quickly we can fall.

So the good news is Molina is back on art and Barberi’s art complimenting his work makes for a mostly smooth transition between the two.

Other good news, we FINALLY take advantage of getting to see these Spider-Heroes interact. We see PS4 Spidey react to seeing an advanced Miles Morales and to seeing versions of himself and MJ married, not to mention learning other Peters ask RYV Pete and MJ how they wound up together. We also get to have a Peter Parker react to the presence of a Norman Osborn.

It is simply put the best scene of the entire comic and maybe the event over all, definitely the main book.

Yes indeed it sure was a great...page.

One page. Out of five issues. The penultimate one in fact.

Sigh...other good stuff...

· Getting to see other people react with justifiable suspicion against Norman.

· Norman being a sneaky bastard.

· One or two funny lines, the crown jewel of which is Ben Reilly saying he’s never met a Norman Osborn who didn’t want to stab him in the back. Because of course...this is exactly what Norman did at the end of the Clone Saga

· Seeing and acknowledging Spider-Cop!!!!!!!!!!!!!

· Dinosaur Spider-Man exists!

· Dissing the Other as a Deus Ex Machina.

Now that last one is a contestable point because I dunno for sure if the Other would be regarded as a dues ex machina.

And part of that is that it depends upon whether we are referring to it in the context of Spider-Verse alone or it’s initial story.

To me it didn’t just show up at the end of Spider-Verse and kill Solus therefore it doesn’t meet the requirement, and it was already established the Other has the ability to wipe out Inheritors way back in the original Other storyline. But was that a dues ex machina unto itself? You tell me.

What’s interesting is if that line came from Slott or Gage, I’d suspect the latter at which point gloriously it’d be Gage throwing shade at Slott.

Now he should still be wary of what he throws around because when you look at this issue he lives in a glass house. A smaller glass house than Slott perhaps but a glass house nevertheless.

Now some of these my problems might be born of ignorance because I haven’t read or can’t remember every single Spider-Man/Marvel comic.

But...for just one problem among many with the issue...you telling me Norman Osborn fucking with the Web of Life and Destiny means that there is 0 ways to travel between dimensions?

Like...even Doctor Strange or Reed Richards can’t help you (and the Spiders can tell even though they’ve not even left the room)?????????

Regarding Ben Reilly he’s seemingly willing to kill. Now of course Clone Saga era Ben Reilly really wasn’t. Or at least his attitude was the same as Peter’s was on the topic. I dunno what happened between Clone Conspiracy and this comic so set me straight but it seems like he’s back to normal now and as such...wouldn’t his attitude be the same as back in the 1990s? Now last time I covered this series I mentioned how it doesn’t make sense for the Spiders to not kill the Inheritors so on one level this does make sense, but it’s nevertheless internally inconsistent because Peter and the other softer heroes aren’t willing to do that. So what’s Ben’s deal.

Again that’s all debatable as a criticism because I don’t have all the info.

But there are plenty of other problems the biggest being the thing at the heart of this whole event, poor timing.

I spoke before about the headfuck that was the tie-ins happening during or after issue #2 despite being released earlier and placed earlier in the reading list.

The same thing happens again because if you, like me, were reading Spider-Force guess what a massive plot point from that gets spoiled as Jessica Drew makes it back to Earth 616 with Solus’ crystal...and runs right into the Inheritors. Nice to know however the final issue plays out their overall mission was a total and utter failure. At least with Scarlet Spiders back in Spider-Verse it served a purpose.

There is another headfuck moment of dumb in that scene too as the Inheritors try and fail to feed off of Jessica Drew, failing because she’s radioactive.

Now she’s wearing her radiation suit and, if you’ve been reading Spider-Force (it helps because this issue barely tries to explain) you’ll know she’s just got back from a radioactive Earth. So one would think the Inheritors’ inability to feed off of her is due to her recent trip there right?

Wrong, it’s because her powers are connected to radiation apparently.

Now I’m no Jessica Drew expert so I consulted the marvel.wiki and am taking their word as gospel for the sake of this post. It reads as follows:

“When Jessica Drew was about a year old, her parents moved from England to a small cottage in the outskirts of Wundagore Mountainin Transia. Her father, Jonathan Drew, geneticist and research partner to the man who would later become the High Evolutionary, found large amounts of uranium in their property, which gave them the financial resources to build a research facility to keep working on their controversial studies of evolution, genetics and cell regeneration

In the course of the next three years, life was good, until little Jessica became ill, poisoned by her long-time exposure to the Uranium that was so prevalent in their land. Jonathan, being an expert on the regenerative and immunological properties of arachnids' blood, injected Jessica with an untested serum made with the blood of several uncommon species of spiders, in the hopes of stopping the tissue damage and immunizing the girl from the Uranium radiation in her blood. Then, he sealed her in a genetic accelerator created by Herbert Wyndham a.k.a. the High Evolutionary to speed the process, but it only seemed to work at a very slow rate. In stasis for decades, her aging greatly slowed, until the treatments finally finished in recent years.”

Can you spot any words or phrases in that remotely similar to ‘radiation blast’ as used in this issue? Let me know if you can because I can’t.

It’s not even like the radiation played a factor in actually granting her powers according to this. Whilst Spider-Man got his powers from a radioactive spider, for Spider Woman radiation was the disease the spider science was curing. The untested serum her Dad gave her is what gave her powers, the radiation had nothing to do with that. Basically unlike Peter, Jessica’s powers are not derived at all from radiation itself.

So yeah...Gage seems to have seriously contradicted Jessica Drew’s you know...origin story...

That would be bad enough but it gets worse.

For the sake of argument let us pretend that Gage’s ‘revised origin’ for Jessica was true. The implication of the comic is then that because of that the Inheritors can’t feed off of her life essence because radiation is poison to their kind.

Now let’s ignore for the moment that they somehow lived off of giant radioactive spiders for at least over a year, and how radiation is poisonous to most things so phrasing it that way is rather redundant (it’s like saying ‘Oh wait you are vulnerable to fire aren’t you!’). Instead let’s focus on this headscratcher. Jessica’s powers coming from radiation makes her inedible to the Inheritors...buuuuuuut...Peter Parker isn’t...nor are any of the other people who got powers from radioactive spider bites...

*head desk*

Were the editors drunk when they failed to catch that obvious inconsistency?

I mean Spider-Man literally has radioactive blood! That’s a line in the 1960s theme song!

How do you screw this up so badly?

It’s especially incompetent when the fact Jessica just walked out of a radioactive planet and is wearing a radiation suit could easily be used as an alternative explanation. Say she is at the moment contaminated with radiation but is herself not adversely affected by it thanks to her powers. This would actually be more in line with the original Morlun story because Morlun could feed off Spider-Man no problem up until he injected himself with radiation and became temporarily radioactive. So okay they can feed on the life force of totems with low levels of radiation in their blood but not when they are seriously cranking up the dial on a Geiger counter.

There are other inconsistencies though, albeit not as idiotic as that one.

The comic can’t quite decide whether or not Solus got killed last time because he battled the Other or if any sufficiently powerful sharp object could kill him. Doc Ock brings up Leopardon then Miles dismisses that option because Solus beat Leopardon in Spider-Verse an event Doc Ock knows about. So Doc Ock, who states he knows the wisdom of avoiding past mistakes, is suggesting they try the same thing that failed before a second time.

Now of course Otto is not mentally stable, oh no wait maybe he is because Gage paints him as in the right so often (and implies being in a new body fixed his insanity in a way later comic but that’s neither here nor there). It just doesn’t make sense on his part, nor does his dismissal of the Other as superstitious mumbo jumbo.

Ignoring how anyone in the Marvel Universe disregarding magic is fundamentally stupid, Doc Ock is fighting other dimensional totem vampires wrapped up with a cosmic web that enables travel between universes and is connected to a form of danger precognition for everyone associated with a spider.

Why the fuck would the idea of a specific cosmic entity who’s specifically able to kill Solus superstition from his POV, especially when he knows for a fact it did what an obviously more powerful giant robot couldn’t do?

Another minor inconsistency is the Otto implying on one page that he brought the Spiders to Earth-13 in order to analyze the Enigma Force and then locate it in Earth 616...but then on literally the next page Miles claims it was his idea.

Which is it? It’s somewhat important as it defines the power dynamics between the two would be leaders.

Speaking of the Enigma Force that’s another big problem.

In Spider-Verse the Enigma Force was essentially useless against the Solus because it’s pure life force and he feeds off of that. Ridiculously overpowered, overselling of the villain to cheaply build him up?

Most definitely.

But as a sequel to that story shouldn’t Spider-Geddon try to be consistent? Because suddenly we’re claiming that Solus didn’t actually eat the Enigma Force but simply...killed Captain Universe Spidey (????????????????) and the Enigma Force is still on Earth-13. And as mentioned above the plan is for them to analyse it on Earth-13 and hopefully then use that to track down the 616 Enigma Force.

My question upon hearing that plan was....so?

So they find the Enigma Force and/or the new Captain Universe. Then they either have someone bond with it or ask the new Cap for help.

And...what?

Then go punch the Inheritors?

They already know Captain Universe is a massive food source for the Inheritors. Yeah sure, in Spider-Verse Solus claims it’d be too much for any of his kids to handle but surely between all of them they could eat him?

Then again both Spider-Verse and Spider-Geddon have been hugely inconsistent with how the Inheritors feed. Not only did we get Verna draining any given person’s life force in Spider-Force #2 but I double checked the original Morlun story. He states clearly feasting off of Spider-Man alone would sustain him for about 100 years.

But between Spider-Verse and this story the Inheritors have all chowed down enough for like a millennia a piece then.*

Oy vey, yet another inconsistency I just realized from the previous issue is...weren’t they going to blow up the New U labs? SP/dr was ready to remotely detonate the charges and kill everyone in the process but then Leopardon intervened allowing everyone to escape...couldn’t they detonate the charges remote at that point? There is no reason the New U labs should still be standing.

One final inconsistency I’ll bring up is that Spider-Man PS4 claims that Miles is a good leader because he’s not lost anyone yet. I guess screw Spidey UK and Noir, but in fairness you could argue Miles wasn’t in charge at that point so they don’t count. What is more confusing is that on the very next page Osborn complains that the Inheritors numbers are growing as theirs are shrinking. Again which is it, are the Spiders losing or maintaining their numbers?????

Let’s move on from inconsistencies to a different variety of bad and dumb shit.

First of all Otto and Ben Reilly apparently hatched this whole other plan behind everyone’s backs making a bargain with the Inheritors.

When?

When could that possibly have happened?

I’m not even saying it’s not possible but it’s never explained it comes totally out of nowhere.

Otto didn’t even know Ben was around until last issue when he mounted his raid on New U and surprise attacked the Inheritors so if this plan was set n motion before that how and when could Ben have been integrated into it?????

Before issue #3 is actually the only time I can think of when Otto could’ve done this but it makes just so little sense. He didn’t know the Inheritors were having trouble with the New U tech (again, that seems unlikely given the tech Jennix was used to working with) before issue #3 to my recollection. So there was no reason for him to offer to help him understand that tech (and yes it’s clear Otto made the offer, the Inheritors didn’t make the first offer to him) and the Inheritors clearly attacked him and his group in issue #3. Meaning the offer must’ve been made during issue #3, between issues #3-4 or during issue #4 but there wouldn’t have been any time or any chance for Otto to get away and talk to the Inheritors.

I also don’t get what Ben Reilly has to do with any of this.

Finally, and most insultingly, is Gage continuing to wank off Otto.

Now even Miles is holding his hands up and saying Otto is superior, Otto is the smartest, Otto is the leader. On the one hand this slightly helps balance out Miles being framed as a better leader than Peter was in Spider-Verse (more Slott’s fault for Peter’s shitty characetrization) and no one else considered for leadership (like RYV Peter). On the other wasn’t this event supposed to serve Miles? Wasn’t it promoted somewhat like that?

Why are both this story and it’s predecessor so intent upon making Otto writer’s pet?

One final thing which is I guess more a problem for me is that this issue blew the promise last issue made regarding Norman.

It had the opportunity for some intrigue and Machiavellian shenanigans with Norman Osborn forming a secret third faction within the Spider Army. But then it amounted to him and Spiders-Man being kicked out of the group and wrecking the Web of Life & Destiny. When you consider how he was utterly not built up in the main book at all until the end of the last issue. Like he comes out of nowhere unless you read his debut but nothing conveyed to us that that was a must-read issue to get the main book.

Yeah so overall we crash back hard into the low quality of the prior issues of this series.

Oh well...just one more comic to go...of the main book. Still got another Spec issue, Spdier-Force issue, Ghost Spider issue and 2 Spider-Girls issues to go...sigh...

*Also pretty sure at one point in either story they ate Spider-Hulk. If Jessica Drew is inedible due to radiation how is Spider-Hulk edible?

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meowloudly15 · 5 years ago

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Stranded: Day 8 - SOMETHING OLD SOMETHING NEW

WARNING: LONG RANT INCOMING

I got two very nice comments from The Evil Author on FFN and wanted to reply but couldn't cuz he's got the PM feature turned off. So, here are my replies. They contain info that you all would probably like to see.

First of all, thank you for reading and reviewing!

Second, yes, there are discrepancies between the canon and this fic, and I won't claim that this fic is set in canon. I misremembered some information from Spiderverse when writing this fic, before Netflix posted it. Three major differences come to mind:

1. In the movie, Miles was at Visions Academy for at least a couple months before Gwen showed up. In this fic, he shows up at roughly the same time that she does. Changing this element to make it canon would affect little to none of the plot.

2. In the movie, Kingpin's collider is at the basement of his penthouse, and the Alchemax facility is located a considerable distance away. It doesn't hold a collider. In this fic, the Alchemax facility is where the original collider is, and it's considerably closer, only about twenty minutes away as the spider swings. (The new one will be at Kingpin's penthouse.) Changing this element to make it canon would affect the plot pretty significantly. (E.g. how would Gwen know to be at Alchemax at the time at which Miles and Peter B. are there?)

3. In the movie, the spiders recognise each other upon first glance, or even when they are near each other, like when Gwen is at her locker and Miles passes behind her. (This is, however, not incredibly consistent, as the B-Team doesn't recognise the others until after their introductions are over.) In this fic, Spider-Pete doesn't recognise Gwen as a fellow spider when they meet face-to-face. Changing this element to canon would probably affect the plot.

And finally, I shall never abandon this fic. It will be completed, come hell or high water.

Thanks to everybody who has bore (beared? borne? boreded?) with me through these past few months. I hope the schedule slips haven't impeded your enjoyment of the fic. As always, enjoy!

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Gwen looked down at the two startled spidermen, sizing them up.

SOMETHING OLD SOMETHING NEW

That could mean any number of confusing, conflicting things. She decided to judge them only on the basis of what she could see.

The spiderman on the left was dressed in the exact same style of suit that Spider-Pete had worn. However, he was wearing sweatpants and no shoes and otherwise looked considerably less dignified. (Of course, that could have been because he was trussed up like a snared insect.)

The one on the right was smaller and younger-looking. He wore a cheap Spiderman costume and basketball shoes and had dark skin. Could he be Miles?

"Gwanda?"

Yep, definitely Miles.

"It's Gwen, actually."

The guy on the left spoke up. He sounded like Spider-Pete, except his throat sounded like it was filled with sand. "Oh, so you know her. That's cool."

"Long story short, we met in school."

"The long story can wait. Are you gonna let us down?"

Gwen rolled her eyes. "I don't know, would you rather stay here?"

"Okay, enough sarcasm. Let us go."

She obligingly leaped to the higher branches and yanked the weblines free. Anti-Spider-Pete and Miles both plummeted to the ground.

It couldn't hurt to show off a bit more.

She tossed the computer to Miles, then dove backwards out of the treetop, intending to shoot a webline and slowly descend to the snowy surface.

JAMMED FINGERS

Rats. She'd forgotten to repair her webshooters last night.

Of course, both of Gwen's gloves misfired, and she plummeted headfirst to the ground. Served her right for trying to show off.

"You okay, man?" asked Miles, handing the computer back to Anti-Spider-Pete.

"That was completely intentional."

Anti-Spider-Pete nodded. "Sure it was."

Gwen smacked her gloves against her leg and dusted the snow off of her suit. "Let's get going before Alchemax shows up with bigger guns. Where are you guys headed?"

Anti-Spider-Pete shrugged. "Uh, I dunno, someplace where we can make another goober?"

Gwen blinked, then nodded. It was best to just play along. "Okay, I'm coming with."

"I, uh, I like your haircut," said Miles, his eyes looking anywhere but at her haircut.

Gwen furrowed her brow. "You don't get to like it. C'mon, let's go."

She took off, Anti-Spider-Pete hot on her heels.

Miles muttered, "How many other spider-people are there?"

"Save it for Comic-Con." Anti-Spider-Pete webbed the back of Miles' shirt and yanked him along for the ride.

What was Comic-Con? Was it like DashCon?

"Where are we headed?" asked Gwen.

"The bus station. We gotta find a lab or something."

Gwen was not opposed to the idea of taking the bus instead of using her dysfunctional webshooters, but she didn't know why Anti-Spider-Pete would do so.

"Why the bus?"

"'Cuz it's less exhausting. Plus, Miles isn't too good at this spider business."

Miles, still dangling from Anti-Spider-Pete's webline, nodded reluctantly.

Gwen nodded. Her suspicions were correct. Miles had gotten his powers very recently, possibly after she had arrived at Visions Academy. No wonder her spider-sense wasn't triggered as strongly by his presence in the beginning.

Speaking of which, there was a constant faint buzzing at the nape of her neck. Was it just because, as was repeatedly said, Anti-Spider-Pete and Miles were like her? Or was something more sinister at play here?

There was only one way to find out.

The bus station wasn't far from Alchemax. A small concrete terrace with a glass roof stood 80 yards from the parking lot. Anti-Spider-Pete and Miles ran to pick up two coats that had been unceremoniously discarded on the ground not far away.

Darn it. Gwen had left her street clothes in Alchemax. Well, it didn't matter at this point. She still had the school uniform at Visions, at least.

They all pulled off their masks and boarded a bus. Miles dumped a handful of spare change into the farebox. The bus driver muttered something about "nutty cosplayers".

Serendipitously, the bus was nearly empty, aside for the bus driver and a half-asleep middle-aged man at the front.

Was Anti-Spider-Pete actually named Peter? He looked enough like him, except he was older. Much older. Definitely a lot worse for wear. His nose looked like it had been broken and re-healed at least a dozen times. He also had a fading black eye and a five-o-clock shadow. At least his hair was brown. That was normal.

"What's your name?" Gwen asked.

"I'm Miles," said Miles.

"I know your name. I don't know his." Gwen gestured to Anti-Spider-Pete.

"My name's Peter B. Parker."

"Specifically with the B?"

Anti-Spider-Pete shrugged. "Yeah. The B stands for B-"

"You know what, it doesn't matter," Gwen interrupted. "Nice to meet you."

"You too. What's your full name again?"

"Gwen Stacy."

Peter B. blinked, and his smirk vanished. Coincidentally, the bus passed into a tunnel.

Why had her name turned his countenance so sour? Was it… wait. That was the same reaction that she had had upon seeing Spider-Pete for the first time.

Gwen decided to lighten the mood. "Or, if you're my dad when he's angry, it's GWENDOLYN MAXINE STACY, GET DOWN HERE THIS INSTANT AND EXPLAIN WHY YOU WALKED IN HERE AT MIDNIGHT WITH TWO BLACK EYES AND A LIMP!" Gwen switched to the best impersonation of her dad that she could manage.

Miles laughed. Peter B. cracked a grin, though he still seemed uneasy, even wistful.

"What was it like?" asked Miles. "I mean, like, what was it like back in your dimension?"

"Well, uh, I've been Spider-Woman for the past 2 years."

Gwen mentally facepalmed. She was Ghost Spider now. Old habits were hard to break.

"And yeah, normal superhero stuff happened. Saved my dad. Joined a band. I don't know if that's normal, but still. But…"

Gwen hesitated. She needed to mention the really important moment, the moment that had truly kicked off her superhero career. But she couldn't bring herself to talk about it. She was supposed to forget about it! She couldn't just… tell people about it!

"... I couldn't save… my best friend. So, now I save everyone else. And I don't do friends anymore. You know, to avoid distractions."

Gwen parenthetically wondered if "everyone else" included herself. No, she was too far gone. She was a ghost. But back to the story.

"Then I got sucked into this portal, and it sent me here. I got blown into last week. Literally.

"Long story short, I got arrested, broke out of jail, beat up a gang, found my way to Visions Academy, impersonated a Russian, stole government files, broke into Alchemax, got sedated by Doc Ock, broke out of Alchemax, got a new haircut, broke into Alchemax again, broke in a third time, and now I'm here."

Miles and Peter B. stared at her.

"Could you say that again, but slower?" asked Miles.

Gwen facepalmed. "Okay, long story even shorter, my spider-sense told me to go to Visions Academy. Then I met you there."

"Oh. That's cool."

"So, uh, Peter, how 'bout you?"

She was genuinely interested in hearing about Peter B.'s experiences. Maybe he would hint at why her name made him so sad.

Peter B. sighed, as though he was sick of telling his origin story. "Where I'm from, for the past 22 years, I've been the one and only Spiderman. Pretty sure you know the rest. I saved the city, fell in love, saved it again, got married, saved it some more, maybe too much. Had some marital issues, made a couple dicey money choices. Never invest in a spider-themed restaurant.

"Then you know, typical superhero stuff over the next few years, kept saving the city, broke my back, a drone flew into my face. I buried Aunt May. My wife and I split up… but I handled it like a champ."

Peter B. started blinking hard to suppress his tears.

"Did you know that seahorses mate for life? I mean, can you just imagine being a seahorse and seeing another seahorse and making it work?

"She wanted kids. I… It scared me.

"Well, all of a sudden, I got pulled through this real weird portal thing one day. And weird things happen to me a lot, but this was really weird. Like, really. What was even weirder was that here, I was dead. And blond. Dunno why. Maybe I should dye my hair."

Miles chuckled a little. "Hey, wait a minute. What if Spiderman from here had dyed hair? I mean, think about it. He dyed, and then he died. You know?"

Gwen and Peter B. blinked.

"Yeah, that wasn't funny," said Peter B. He leaned back and rested his feet on the seats on the other side of the aisle.

"Okay, maybe a little. Good try," countered Gwen. "So, uh, what's your plan now?"

"We're gonna make another one of these," said Miles. He lifted a broken flash drive out of his pocket and held it out. "It's an override key, for the collider."

"A goober," corrected Peter B.

A what?

"Yeah, a goober, whatever. But Peter broke it."

Gwen examined the flash drive. "He did?"

"Yeah, but keep that between you and me." Miles switched to a confidential whisper. "He's embarrassed about it."

Gwen could have heard Peter B.'s eye roll from three counties over. She chuckled.

RELATIVE CHAOS

"Hang on, I think I know a place where we might be able to get help." She handed the "goober" back to Miles, who stowed it away.

"To make another goober?"

"Yeah. I hope so. Probably."

Gwen pulled out her notebook and flipped through it until she found Mrs. Parker's address. She tore out the page and handed it to Peter B. "This is the place."

"Neat. Then here's where we'll go."

After a minute of slightly awkward silence, Miles said, "Uh, I'm... sorry about your friend."

"Don't worry about it," Gwen replied. "But thanks."

That was nice of him. Miles seemed like a nice kid. Awkward and goofy, perhaps, but nice. Confused and weirded out by his powers, for sure, but nice nevertheless. Quite the opposite of herself. At least he had help. The poor kid deserved help.

"I know how hard it is, having to figure all this stuff out on your own," she said.

"Yeah, it's nice not being the only spider-person around."

"Definitely."

Miles hesitated before continuing. "You… wanna take a selfie or something? You know, two spider-people from different dimensions chilling together? In the same dimension?"

Gwen grinned. "Yeah, why not?"

She lifted her phone. She and Miles smiled for the camera.

"Wait, can I-" Peter B. started to say.

The camera clicked.

"C'mon! I wanted to be in it!" groaned Peter B.

"I mean, you're in the selfie. Just not your face. And, you know," Gwen smirked. "That might be a good thing."

Peter B. heaved a sigh. "Teenagers are the worst," he muttered under his breath.

"So now, like, how are you gonna get the picture to me?" asked Miles. "Can… uh… can I have your number?"

"Uh, I dunno if that'll work. You know, this phone's from another dimension and all that. So… huh." Gwen pressed her hand to her forehead and thought.

"Just air-drop it to each other," said Peter B.

Miles and Gwen exchanged a look. "What's air-drop?" they asked simultaneously.

"You're Gen-Z-ers, and you don't know what air… right. Different universe. Here." Peter B. sighed and sat upright. "I'll show you how it works."

Gwen hadn't realised how embarrassing it was to be taught how to use technology by a guy who was probably old enough to be her dad. Spoiler alert: it was very embarrassing.

Miles hesitated for a moment, looking back and forth between the photo on his phone and Gwen. "Uh, if you ever want to do friends again, I'll keep a slot open."

Gwen froze.

She wasn't going to open up to Miles. Not so soon. Not here. Not now. Not yet.

At the same time, she did get lonely. Not that she would ever admit it.

He was a nice guy. He wouldn't make a bad friend.

No. Not a chance. Gwen wasn't going to open up just so she could get hurt again. Or hurt someone else again.

"I'll... keep you posted."

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#spidergwen #spider gwen #spider-gwen #gwen stacy #ghost spider #spiderverse #into the spiderverse #spiderman into the spiderverse #fanfiction #fic #fanfic #stranded #stranded fanfic #long post #marvel #writers on tumblr

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stedes-black-bonnet · 6 years ago

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My Baby Does Me: Chapter 25

POV: John Deacon x Reader; this is our very first Brian May chapter!

Notes: Masterlist.

Warnings: profanity and anxiety?

Abstract: Brian tries to get Roger ready and out of the house.

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Adapted from the observational notes of Brian May dated 8th of June, 1981. Time: 18:47. Location: Roger Taylor’s London townhouse “The Painted Lady”:

“Accessorizing,” Roger responded. He put a pair of sunglasses down; he was still holding a pair and had one on his face. There was something funny about his voice Brian May didn’t like. Misdirection, Brian thought. It was a half-truth, it was the explicit “what” of the question but not the implicit “why,” and it was clear Roger didn’t want anyone to know the “why.”

Roger took his piercing gaze away from the mirror, away from himself, and turned to look at Brian. He said, indignantly, “What does it look like I’m doing?” It wouldn’t be the first time Roger Taylor had used a one-liner to cover something up.

“Like you’re trying to make us late for the meeting.” Brian said, attempting to level with his best and oldest friend.

“Never.” Roger turned back to the mirror, removing one pair and trying another.

“The meeting you don’t want to go to.”

“You don’t want to go to it either; stop acting all high and mighty; it isn’t like this a secret dick-sucking meeting.”

Brian rolled his eyes behind Roger.

“I saw that.”

“Yeah, genius; I meant for you to; I do know how mirrors work.”

Roger held up two fingers behind him; it wasn’t a peace sign. “If it were a dick-sucking meeting, I’d be ready posthaste.”

“Depends on who's doing the sucking.”

Roger paused his cycle of trying on glasses and said, pensively, “not sure in this situation who’s giving and who’s receiving, hey mate?”

“Not at all.”

Roger sighed, “Nor am I.” He resumed his task most diligently.

“This whole ordeal is a mess.” Brian wasn’t sure if he was talking about the meeting or Roger.

“Yep.” Roger tried another pair, “And I’m in no rush to get there to see who I have to suck off.”

“Look,” Brian exhaled, “Just pick a pair and let’s go.” Examining his friend closer, he made an observation he didn’t like one bit. Brian slowly sat down on the bed, hands on his knees of his burgundy corduroys. “Are you wearing the same clothes as last night?”

“Oh.” Roger said, looking down at his white shirt and black tuxedo pants. It was the crestfallen nature of the “oh” that Brian didn’t like. He didn’t like it one iota. Roger should have been ready for this meeting hours ago. Sure, they had all had their fair share of alcohol at last night’s party, but something as insignificant as a hangover had never stopped Roger from managing his obligations, or spectacularly rising to the occasion.

“Oh,” he repeated, “So I am.”

“Are you alright?” Brian wasn’t sure his friend had even noticed what he was wearing. Roger not noticing what he was wearing would have been like a leopard not recognizing the spots of her children, or a model not recognizing a designer’s new collection. It would have been sacrilegiously embarrassing.

“What?” Roger asked, distractedly. He was still looking at his pants, feeling the tuxedo stripe with his nimble fingers.

Did he hear me? Or did he just not want to answer? Brian couldn’t decide. Roger had seemed defensive, to say the least, since arriving. Something was afoot, and Roger was doing his level best to keep it from him. Brian was troubled by this; they told each other everything. Had since they were kids. What was going on?

Brian clapped his hands above his head.

Roger turned around at the sound. The image of him holding two more pairs of sunglasses would have been amazingly comical if it hadn’t been deeply peculiar and disturbing in an off-handed way that was almost nonchalant; Roger was a bit too keyed up to pass for nonchalant even on his best days. There was nothing good about this situation. God, Brian thought; this on top of the record meeting. He knew he was being tested, though to what purpose, he wasn’t sure. His patience was wearing quite thin.

“What are you doing, mate?” Roger asked, trying to make Brian sound like he was the crazy one; mate was a nice word Roger used to intimidate people. He used it to butter people up. He used it to get his way. To charm.

“Just testing.”

“You know,” they said in unison, “just science stuff.” It was said in the tones of two people who had been making the same joke for most of their lives. Small smiles played across their faces, but were quickly replaced by slight frowns; it was hard to fool someone who knew you better than anyone else on the planet.

“Well?” Brian said, serious once more, “Are you gonna pick out something to wear so we can press on, or are you gonna walk in looking like yesterday’s newspaper?”

Roger didn’t respond. He just looked at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from himself.

His eyes were a white-grey.

They used to be blue. A blue so disarming it stopped people in their tracks. Quite literally stopped people in their tracks. Women and men--it didn’t matter; he was utterly disarming, entirely charming. Those eyes, he thought, are they mine? They can’t be. I had blue eyes. Had blue eyes. He sounded insane. Eye color doesn’t just change. He put on another pair of glasses and ran a hand through his once blond hair.

His hair was now a mousy grey that didn’t do him justice. Naturally a blond, and now entirely silver at 32. Life, it seemed, wasn’t fair.

His eyes, however, bothered him the most. When you look in the mirror and see yourself, what you see should be known, familiar, and safe. And it should be all these things instantly. It is like an instinctual check and balance automatically confirming yes this is me. You look in the mirror and know what you’re going to see every time you do it. You shouldn’t look in the mirror and see someone you don’t recognize. Your appearance shouldn’t be strange, mystifying, and forgotten.

When you look in the mirror, you know your eye color. You know you are yourself because of your eyes. Roger might as well have been looking at an alien in the mirror. He was foreign to himself. A stranger in a land that was all his own, full of his possessions and people he knew, and places he should recognize. Everything here was knowable to him, and yet it was all suddenly unrecognizable, like discovering a brave new world that wasn’t new, and he certainly didn’t feel brave. Where had the color gone? Where are my blue eyes? What is blue?

Brian was talking.

“...I can see it now, the Great Roger Taylor walking in like yesterday’s trash.”

“Why don’t you pick out something for me, Bri?” Roger asked somewhat shyly, but there was a twist in it; a hidden barb that was attempting to obscure his true desire. Brian knew Roger well, and he could spot a mile away the slathering of his old charm spreading thickly over that innocent-seeming question.

“What are you playing at?” Brian asked, genuinely curious, if not entirely concerned. According to memory, Roger had never on any one single occasion ever asked someone else to pick out his clothes for him.

“What? Don’t you want to arrive on time?”

“Yes--”

“Well, we both know it’ll take me ages to pick anything out at this rate.”

“Are you drunk?” Brian asked, truly confused at his friend’s behavior.

“Is that a trick question?”

“Is that?” Brian retorted. “Oh, wait--they all are from you.”

They stared each other down. Roger looked normal, per se. His hair was a bit more haphazard than usual; had he just woken up? It was well past mid-day, and into the evening. His clothes were wrinkled in the very specific way that happens when you’ve slept in them. Nothing about this made any sense; Roger didn’t sleep one off in his bed, he slept one off in his car, or in the backs of bars. And what about when he had walked in? What had it been, Brian questioned. The broken lamp. There had been a broken lamp on the floor. Brian had been friends with Roger long enough to have witnessed his temper a great many times. It was all flash and very little substance; the opposite of Roger on the daily. You didn’t need to bring the flash out when you glowed by default.

And the glasses. Well, this wasn’t strictly abnormal behavior, the desire to accessorize perfectly matched Roger’s history and personality absolutely. What was bizarre was Roger’s hesitancy; he wasn’t the kind of man who couldn’t make up his mind. He wasn’t indecisive about where to go for dinner, about his favorite sports team, about what song was bad or what band was garbage. Roger was so good at making up his mind he’d help you make up your own mind too, whether by charm or demand.

“Well?” Roger said, spreading his arms wide, bending them slightly at the elbow. It was a signature move. It said, simultaneously, go ahead--challenge me, are you a fool, and don’t you love me.

“I’m not playing games with you today, Rog.” Brain sighed and laid down on the bed. “The dinner meeting is going to be hard enough without you speaking in riddles.”

“Fuck the dinner.”

“You know we have to go; Miami will be there.”

“Fuck him, too.”

“That’s a lot of fucking you’re doing.”

“Watch it.”

“Ooh strike a nerve?” Brian mock-whined. “My most ardent apologies.”

“Yeah, mate, I don’t believe you as far as I could throw you.”

“Ditto.”

Roger took off his sunglasses that used to be green. He walked slowly over to the closet, nearly ready to admit defeat; his least favorite thing to do. He had never been less excited to look in his closet; and that included the time Freddie had filled it with origami cats on a lark. Those had been all sorts of colors, too. Took him ages to get rid of them. Roger kept one, though; it hung on his refrigerator downstairs. Would it still be orange? He didn’t know. It was too sad to be considered. Too sad to confront. Too sad to think about.

Roger thought he was going to be sick. Throwing up in the closet couldn’t make it much worse? Maybe it would add some color? That the thought of throwing up in his closet, his actual favorite room in any of his homes, caused him such skyrocketing hope made him feel substantially worse. Roger held the doorknob without turning it. Something was wrong. And then, on the periphery, he saw it. He saw them. He reached for one.

“Need some help with your knob?”

Roger had frozen.

He looked at the modernistic floor-to-ceiling bookshelves ensconcing this side of his bedroom’s wall. The longest wall of the entire room, in fact. It was a lengthy wall that was carried like theme throughout the rest of the first floor. The entire bedroom was very long, and not wide at all--almost cramped. With the vanity at the end of the bed, and the closet perpendicular to that, and the master bathroom across from that, the length was the winner of the room; every architectural choice in the home had been Roger’s, and he enjoyed exaggeration above common sense, especially in art. And above all else, he considered his home art.

The shelves had been built around his closet door. The closet itself was quite cavernous, “lovely, dark, and deep” he’d quip, and larger than any of the guest bedrooms. Roger’s home in London wasn’t as large as Jim and Freddie’s--it was honestly hard to be larger than their home--but Roger’s was full of exacting details he had hand-picked and planned all on his own. He genuinely needed his homes to be aesthetically pleasing in all aspects, and, as an artist who appreciated beauty and color as he did, he had a very particular level of taste he found second to none and entirely his own. His home was designed around one simple principle: what was beauty and how could it translate into color and light.

Roger also loved to read. He had a vast collection of books he had actually read that wasn’t just for show. Reading, as much as women and art, were his main sources of inspiration. Every world, anywhere anytime was accessible from a book; words painted pictures across his mind from them, and those paintings were made of color. To him, this was magic. Words being able to make someone feel something, to see something, to visualize, to empathize, that was magic and that was power. It was why he wrote songs; to touch people.

So, when Roger had reached for a book at random to toss at Brian for implying he needed help with his dick, he had finally put himself in a position to really look at his collection of books. That’s when he had frozen, hand on book, unmoving, yet silently panicking within. His heart rate had doubled, and he knew he was hyperventilating. He knew he was going faint.

His books, as you would have guessed, were organized by color.

They were organized. By color.

This made the wall, quite literally, art within art. The books themselves were each a work of art, and yet organized just so made the wall aesthetically pleasing to a level that it could have been installed in a museum, especially on the scale and height of his walls. Art in all aspects of life.

Though, naturally, when he had noticed his wall-long installation, usually singing with color, he saw with a most agonizing confusion and head-spinning sorrow that it had turned to greys, blacks, and whites.

And he hadn’t been able to move. He hadn’t been able to think. He could barely breathe.

He wondered, is this what dying feels like? For his world had closed in entirely and collapsed in a whirlwind of colorless torture. None of it made any sense. He was sweating, so not dying, he figured. Maybe he wanted to die? He laughed, then.

Roger finally moved, bringing some momentary relief to Brain, who was growing more and more worried by the second. Though, what Roger did next dashed those hopes away.

Roger turned from the closet, and proceeded to vomit all over his vanity.

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spinach-productions · 6 years ago

Text

Miami Vices (TF2), part 1/2

Wordcount: 12,726

Summary:

"Our contact in Miami wants to speak with someone from the organization. Spy, that’s where you come in.”

“Naturally,” Spy says neutrally.

“Aaand,” Miss Pauling draws out the word, “He specifically asked to speak with a real person, not a mask.”

“Ah,” Spy says less neutrally.

“Which is where you come in.” She beams at Scout, whose face is anything but neutral. “Spy might need backup and you’re the only one who’s already seen him without a mask.”

In which Scout and Spy take an involuntary cross-country road trip. Includes bad clothing and unexpected family bonding.

Warnings: cannon-typical violence, internalized homophobia, personal headcannon about ScoutMa.

part 2

NOTES:

Is this fandom still alive? I love this fandom, whether it's alive or not.

This was based off of @sugarandmemories‘ comic about Spy and Scout having to go on a mission together in Miami (here) which I planned to make a short fic for and instead made this because I have apparently never done a thing half-way in my life.

Thanks to @tired-pinetree for being a fantastic beta-reader and editor, and for sitting me down and going "these parts aren't working". Without you, I'd just have a mess of words on the page <3

Enjoy!

“Thank you for coming,” Miss Pauling says. She is cleanly dressed and holding one of her many clipboards in one hand. Scout waves at her when he enters the room; Spy rolls his eyes skyward and steps silently into the space just behind Scout’s shoulder.

“Hi,” Scout says, “What’s up?”

“I have an assignment for you,” she says brightly, “Now that you’re both here—”

“Both—?”

Scout actually jumps when he registers Spy in his peripheral vision. It’s very satisfying. Spy catches the elbow aimed at his throat before it can make contact.

“Bon matin,” he says smugly.

Scout shakes Spy’s hand away and growls something obscene under his breath.

Miss Pauling clears her throat. “Yes, hello.” She gestures to two chairs set up between a projector screen and a Kodak Carousel, “If you would?”

Spy takes a seat. Scout, still glaring, flops into the remaining seat.

Miss Pauling dims the lights and brings the carousel to life. A picture of the RED team logo appears on the screen. “As you know, I occasionally ask people to do a little ‘extracurricular’ projects for the company,” she says, her air quotes silhouetted in the light of the projector. “And today I’m tapping you two.”

Spy arches an eyebrow but doesn’t comment.

The carousel clicks to its next slide, showing a loaf of bread. “As you know, one of our subsidiaries is Red Bread.”

“I thought that was a front,” Scout says.

“The Administrator doesn’t like to use words like ‘front’,” Miss Pauling says with more air quotes, “And besides, Red Bread is a real company servicing the real community of Miami, Florida. We’re bringing baked goods to other underprivileged ‘subsidiaries’ at affordable prices.” She clicks forward to a picture of a blond man ducking out of a suspicious-looking pizza parlor. “This is Mikhail Vasechkin, one of our local connections. Apparently there’s been some new development he can’t communicate through writing or phone and he’ll only speak with a RED agent in person. Spy, that’s where you come in.”

“Naturally,” Spy says neutrally.

“Aaand,” Miss Pauling draws out the word, “He specifically asked to speak with a real person, not a mask.”

“Ah,” Spy says less neutrally.

“Which is where you come in.” She beams at Scout, whose face is anything but neutral. “Spy might need backup and you’re the only one who’s already seen him without a mask.”

“He’s ugly,” Scout says. It comes out like a reflex, as though his mouth has fallen back on instinct while the hamster wheel in his head works on something else. “It’s just a there-and-back, ain’t it? If Spy’s so good he can do it alone.”

“We don’t want to risk it. This could be a new development about the subsidiary underbelly, or it could be an attempt to capture one of our best agents. The Administrator and I are in agreement that this is a two-man job.”

Scout looks sharply at Spy. “In a car, all the way to Miami. With Spy.”

Spy pointedly does not look away from the projector screen, even as he agrees with the sentiment. “Well summarized,” he says, “Details?”

“Estimated time: one week. We’ve already loaded a souped-up car with supplies, maps, and disguises. Your first destination is written down in an envelope in the glovebox, you’ll get further instructions from there. No weapons, and no contact until you get back to base. This should be a simple operation, but you’ll be way out of respawn range so make sure you don't die. You have an hour to pack any personal items before you leave. Then you’re off on a road trip vacation!” Miss Pauling sheepishly tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m a little jealous.”

“You could come wi—”

“Thank you, Miss Pauling,” Spy interrupts. “We’ll be ready. Come along, Scout.”

“But—”

Spy grabs him by the back of the neck and forcibly steers him out of the room. “ Come along. ”

Miss Pauling either doesn’t notice or politely ignores the struggle. Scout starts shoving in earnest once they’re back out in the desert heat. “Let go , what the fuck?”

“She obviously cannot take a week off from work and asking would only make her feel worse,” Spy says.

Scout finally yanks himself free and rubs his reddened skin where Spy’s fingers dug in, mumbling, “You don’t have to be a dick about it,” which is as close to ‘thank you for not letting me make a bigger ass of myself than usual’ as he’ll ever get.

“It seems to be the only language you understand,” Spy replies, lighting a cigarette, “I’ll meet you at the car. I am driving.”

“Asshole’s the only language you understand,” Scout snaps, jogging ahead to the barracks to, presumably, fill a suitcase with dirty laundry and baseball cards. Spy exhales a nicotine cloud. His disguise kit can hold up to ten cigarettes, but he’s going to need at least double that to make it through the week.

“Minnesota!”

Spy grunts and almost drops his cigarette when Scout's fist connects with his shoulder. He’s certainly made up this ‘license plate game’ with the sole intent of punching Spy while he can’t retaliate, and while he’ll never admit it, Spy’s arm is getting sore. Luckily, the cars on the road are precious few; by the rules of his own game Scout has only been able to hit him six or seven times. Spy subtly rolls his shoulder. He can see Scout grinning in the corner of his eye.

He adjusts the cigarette in his mouth. “If I were not driving, I would kill you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Scout says as he begins to play with the radio. He’s wearing the red-tinted glasses they’d found in the glovebox next to their instructions, which turned out to be nothing more than an address several miles outside of Miami.

“I’m no school boy but I know what I like, you should have heard them just around midnight,” a singer croons.

“You cannot honestly think you could beat me in a fight.”

“You think you’ve lost your love, well I saw her yesterday-yi-yay. It’s you she’s thinking of and she told me what to say-yi-yay--”

“Oh man, I’m so scared right now.” Scout holds up his free hand and wiggles his fingers. “Look at them shakes. So scared.”

“Hope you’ve got your things together, hope you are quite prepared to die--”

“If you do not pick a station,” Spy says calmly, “I’m putting a knife through the speaker.”

“You said you didn’t care what we listened to.” Scout continues to flip through the jumble of radio waves. It’s a miracle he can hear anything over the noise of the car traveling at 150 mph (courtesy of Engineer’s tinkering and Spy’s impeccable driving), let alone identify the sounds coming through the speakers well enough to decide to look for something else. “And anyway, you don’t have a knife.”

“There are almost a dozen within reach,” Spy mutters.

“You brought a weapon on this mission? Spy, I’m hurt! Miss Pauling specifically said--”

“I saw you put your bat in the trunk.”

“For batting practice! Can’t afford to slack off.”

“I saw you put your gun in the trunk.”

“For shooting practice! Can’t afford to--”

“You know what,” Spy says abruptly, “There is something I’d like to listen to. Have you ever played the quiet game? ”

Scout’s incredulity is so strong, Spy can see the expression without turning his head. “Are you kidding. Are you kidding me right now? You’re seriously treating me like a kid?”

“If the shoe fits--”

“No freakin’ way. If you felt like being a parent, you missed the boat like twenty years ago.”

Spy sighs slowly through his nose. “Are we going to have a problem, Scout?”

“No problems from me.” Scout props his feet up on the dashboard and shoves a piece of gum into his mouth. He idly spins the radio dial with his toes. A million stations fill the cabin, accompanied by the sound of the most obnoxious open-mouthed chewing Spy has ever had the misfortune to experience. Scout’s toothy grin tells him none of this is accidental. “How’s about you, Spy? You got anything you’d like to air out?”

Spy takes a deep breath. His has worked in international espionage since the age of fourteen. He once spent three years undercover in a maximum security hair salon. He once escaped a Boxing Day party using nothing but his wits, a pen cartridge, and two sprigs of rosemary. Surely he can endure one cross-country road trip without killing his remarkably irritating son.

Scout sticks out his gum-covered tongue. He must have added three more pieces to the one he was chewing because dear god the resulting bubble is going to kill them both. Spy grabs one of the three knives taped behind the steering wheel and bursts the thing in self defence. He gets his quiet when the splatter engulfs Scout’s entire head, gluing his mouth shut for three blissful minutes until Spy’s conscience kicks in and he cuts Scout an air hole.

“If you say anything,” Spy says as Scout gasps and sputters back to life, “I will let you suffocate in your own idiocy.”

His gummy passenger probably glares, but the effect is lost under the bright pink candy. Scout spends the next half hour silently clawing gum off his face. Spy magnanimously doesn’t count his deeply disgusted noises as talking.

Scout, who doesn’t seem to handle idleness well at the best of times and began fidgeting in his seat several hours ago, throws himself out the passenger-side door as soon as Spy backs into their designated motel parking space.

“No, don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of our things,” Spy deadpans. He slings his suit jacket over his shoulder and walks around behind the car before it becomes apparent Scout isn’t coming back.

A quick glance at their room confirms it: the door is open. Perhaps they’ve chosen a poorly secured placed to stay, but Spy has been driving for ten hours and doesn’t care to search for another. He collects his case, locks the trunk, and enters their room.

Scout has already claimed the bed farthest from the door. He sits cross-legged with his attention fixed rapturously on the TV. Spy assumes there is some kind of baseball game going on.

“Did you at least check the room before you zoned out?” He asks, closing the door behind him.

“Bathroom’s clear, nothing under the beds,” Scout says.

“Perfunctory. You realize anyone could have come in here before us?”

“It’s fine.”

“You assume everything is fine,” Spy says, “You have no idea what kind of dangers there are in our line of work.”

“Uh, yeah I do, I get killed like twenty times a day. Besides, the door was locked and the window in the bathroom ain’t been picked, so.” He waves his hand in a shushing gesture without looking away from the game.

“Clearly it wasn’t if you could get in,” Spy says, but his finely-honed sense of misplacement is going off. “Did you steal keys from the manager?”

“Nah,” Scout says with a smirk.

Spy checks his pockets. He checks them again. He checks his jacket pockets. He even pats down the twin knife holsters under his shirt because there is no possibility that Scout picked his pocket.

“Check your gloves?” Scout asks sarcastically. Sure enough, he’s spinning their keys on his finger.

“You little brat,” Spy hisses.

“What about your fake molars? Maybe they’re in there.” When Spy storms towards him, Scout flicks the key ring away. It pings across the room with unerring accuracy and disappear down the floor vent. “Whoops, clumsy me.”

It takes several very long moments for Spy to master himself. When he can speak without grinding his teeth, he calmly crosses the room to the TV. “If you are going to act like a child.”

“Hey--”

“Then you are,” he snaps an antenna, “Grounded.”

The screen immediately flips to static. Scout lets out a cry of horror and shoves Spy aside, but the damage has already been done: reception is well and truly lost. He fruitlessly beats the side of the box with his palm. “Nonono no .”

“Do you know how to fix a broken receiver?” Spy twirls the severed metal between his fingers. “I do, but I seem to have forgotten. If only I could go for a walk to jog my memory without leaving the door unlocked.”

Scout scowls murderously.

“Alas, the keys are misplaced--”

“You're a bastard, you know that?” Scout says as he stomps into his shoes.

“Ah-ah, I believe 'grounded’ means you are to stay here.” Spy moves to lean his shoulders back against the door, “And I want those keys.”

“First, fuck you. Second, I got nothing to get them out, so get the fuck out of my way,” Scout says, roughly shoving Spy’s arm.

Spy continues to block the door. He wonders how long Scout’s tenuous sense of self-preservation will keep him from attacking. “Let me be more clear: get the keys, or I will call your mother.”

As it turns out, Scout is even less concerned with his own well being than predicted. He throws his full weight behind a forearm against Spy’s chest and, when Spy doesn’t yield, moves the arm to his neck. “Listen, asshole,” Scout growls, “I’m not even gonna pretend to get your relationship with my Ma, but for some reason you make her happy enough to forgive you for running off when she got pregnant. You and me got shit, sure, whatever, but you do anything to make her even remotely upset,” he grinds his arm into Spy’s throat, presumably for emphasis, “I will fuckin’ kill you.”

Spy grabs Scout’s opposite wrist and bends it the wrong way. To his surprise Scout rolls his arm with the motion and smashes his elbow into Spy’s side. Spy counters with a sharp knee to Scout’s gut. They stagger apart in opposite directions.

After a nice long string of curses, Spy uses a bed as leverage to get to his feet. He manages to grunt, “The feeling is mutual. ”

“Fuck,” Scout wheezes from where he’s clutching his stomach and swearing into the carpet. “I mean good. ”

Spy ignores his spasming diaphragm to straighten his tie. “It is truly a mystery how a woman as lovely as your mother raised a monster like you . I am going to take a shower,” he says, turning towards the bathroom where he can catch his breath away from Scout’s spiteful gaze.

Just as the door closes behind him, he hears Scout mutter, “Probably because she had to do it alone.”

After more than thirty years of intelligence work involving lies, betrayal, and the occasional murder, Spy thought there was nothing anyone could say to hurt him. He turns on the water and ignores everything he’s thinking.

When he exits the bathroom an hour later, Scout has already passed out on the bed by the defunct TV. Predictably, he tosses in his sleep, mumbling and kicking and shoving the bedclothes away only to frown and throw a searching hand onto the floor when he can’t find them. Spy watches him feel half-consciously across the carpet for his missing blankets.

“Snipes,” Scout mutters, “Can’tcha just...”

Even unconscious, he is too loud and too energetic. Spy is probably supposed to feel ‘fondness’ or perhaps ‘contentment’, but all he finds a muted version of his usual annoyance.

After finding Scout’s name just after his own on RED’s roster (and hadn’t that been a nasty shock), Spy had expected watching his deaths to be unpleasant. Braced himself for it, even. Instead he found the same irritation he’d feel towards any coworker’s incompetence; watching Scout meet his end in enemy fire felt the same as watching a receptionist load their typewriter backwards. Spy supposes he never was the sentimental type, but to feel nothing at the repeated deaths of his own child is… disappointing.

Spy removes his tie and shuts off the light. He listens to Scout shuffle across the mattress until sleep comes for him.

Spy is only a morning person through discipline. It took years of training to get himself out of bed before noon, so he’s surprised to see Scout awake only ten minutes after Spy has made is morning espresso.

“Where the hell did you get coffee?” He grumbles, hair sticking up in all directions.

“I brought it with me,” Spy says coolly.

Scout blearily smudges the heel of his hand across his eyes. “Lemme guess, you only brought enough for one.”

“I could be convinced to make another cup, if you--”

“Get the keys, yeah, I get it.” Scout yawns and shuffles across the room, leaving blankets trailed across the floor in his wake. “You're such a bastard.”

Spy eyes the blankets with distaste. “You are twenty-seven years old, not a teenager. Perhaps consider acting your age.”

Scout flips him off as he disappears into the bathroom. He even slams the door for effect. It reopens a moment later. “The fuck are you wearing?”

Spy sips his espresso and refuses to feel any embarrassment. “The disguise Miss Pauling chose for me. Yours is hanging in the shower.”

“Is that floral print? Why the fuck are you wearing sunglasses inside?”

“You know, I somehow thought your vulgar word choice was to appeal to our teammates.” Spy sets down his tiny cup. “How foolish of me to think of you as anything but an uncouth man child.”

Scout rolls his eyes and slams the bathroom door a second time.

The truth is that after years wearing a mask, Spy isn’t comfortable with his own uncovered face. He’d rather deaden his eyesight than be exposed.

By the time Scout emerges from the bathroom, Spy has washed his tiny cup and saucer and set them on the windowsill to dry. Scout is still wearing his pajamas, but has bent the clothes hanger into some approximation of a hook.

“You don’t really expect that to work,” Spy sneers.

“Chill, asshole.” Scout peers into the vent, “You’re lucky I’m doing this at all.”

Spy watches as he studies the grating. Scout looks at it from all angles, adjusts his makeshift fishing tool, and slowly lowers it into the vents. The wire taps against the metal duct a few times. Scout actually sticks his tongue out in concentration.

“It isn’t possible to—”

“Got it.” Scout carefully draws the wire back. Sure enough, the keys dangle off the end. “Time to put your coffee maker where your mouth is, jackass.”

Spy cocks an impassive eyebrow. “Can you handle espresso?”

“After the stuff Medic makes for me, I’m gonna need at least three of those before we hit the road,” Scout says dismissively.

“No wonder you’re so short.”

Scout chucks the keys at Spy’s head. “Asshole,” he grumbles, wandering back into the bathroom. The shower sputters to life a moment later.

Despite his best efforts, Spy is both mildly impressed at the boy’s dexterity and mildly concerned that Medic is feeding him questionable energy drinks. He shelves both thoughts and flips the coffeemaker on. It gurgles. The shower rattles. Spy looks out the window on the off-chance something interesting happens outside. On a whim he rummages through his suitcase for a tube of welding glue and uses it to reattach the TV antennae. It flickers to life when he turns the knob. He turns it to a local news station and attends the espresso.

The shower squeaks back off. Scout makes a terrible racket of thumping and swearing, finally emerging in the clothes Pauling picked for him. The hat is only slightly different from his uniform, but the enormous black and white tracksuit is quite the departure from his uniform. “What the fuck is wrong with Miami?”

Spy has similar feelings on the matter. If this clothing selection is accurate, Florida has done something terrible to these people.

“Hey, you fixed the TV. I figured you didn’t know how,” Scout says as he picks up his coffee. To Spy’s disgust, he tosses back the espresso like shot. “Ugh, this stuff tastes like shit.”

“And that is why I only brought cheap coffee.” He plucks the empty cup from Scout’s hands before he can do something stupid with it. “I will be leaving in ten minutes. Be in the car or I will leave you behind.”

Scout mutters something like “asshole” under his breath, but collects his things all the same.

“ Louisiana! ” Scout slams his fist into Spy’s arm. It’s the third poignantly forceful punch since they began driving this morning.

Spy takes a deep breath. “You said the plates only counted if they are from another state. We are still in Louisiana.”

“Whoops, my bad,” Scout says in a tone that convey zero apology. Another car drives by and he shouts, “ Louisiana!” again.

Spy catches his fist this time. “If you hit me one more time , I will drive this car back to Teufort and tell Miss Pauling it is because you failed. ”

He means to sound threatening. To his immense irritation, Scout bursts out laughing. “That’s such a freakin’ dad thing to say.”

“It is not,” Spy says through gritted teeth, “It’s something adults say to children who cannot behave.”

“You tried to play the ‘quiet game’,” he says, making air-quotes the way Miss Pauling might, “You ‘grounded’ me, and now you’ve pulled ‘don’t make me turn this car around’. Sure you don’t have kids running around somewhere? Oh, wait.”

Spy grits his teeth. They will be at their first destination in eight hours. Surely he can refrain from doing anything rash for that long.

“There’s another one! I think the license plate starts with an ‘L’--”

Thanks to Engineer's ridiculous turbo-boosters (as he calls them), they arrive in Tampa by nightfall. Spy finds an independent motel a few short miles from center city. The motel owner is a professional who offers a copy of the evening paper without asking why Spy is wearing sunglasses at night, or why his car is making repeated banging noises. Spy smiles politely, pulls up to their room, and smugly lets Scout out of the trunk.

“I fuckin’ hate you,” Scout grumbles, massaging bloodflow back into his limbs.

“The feeling is mutual,” Spy replies, shoving Scout’s suitcase into his arms. “Behave and you get to ride in the car tomorrow.”

Scout glares, but keeps his mouth shut and keeps the TV to a reasonable volume for this evening’s game. For a while, Spy pretends not to notice the furtive staring he does between pitches, but he’d be a poor intelligence agent if he couldn’t recognize someone psyching themselves up to speak. “Do you have something to say?” He asks without looking up from the paper.

Scout makes a face that suggests he’s thinking about something dangerous. “Nah,” he says, “But uh. Do you wanna watch?”

“I do not follow baseball,” Spy says.

Scout looks away. His face hardens and his shoulder hunch. “Right. Probably not a thing in Europe or wherever.”

Spy studies him in his peripheral vision. “No.”

Scout turns back to his program, but no longer seems to be paying attention. He doesn’t say anything through the evening continues to hold his peace after the lights go out.

They leave early the next morning. Scout, who has been quiet and, dare Spy say, polite , gets to sit in the passenger seat. He stares out the window and keeps the fidgeting to a minimum. Even the radio remains untouched. It’s heavenly, better than Spy could have hoped.

It’s also suspicious.

“Scout.”

“What?” Scout says, breathing on the window to doodle in the condensation.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You are always doing something, what is it?”

Scout throws his hands in the air. “I’m not doing anything! I’m not doing any of the shit you were complaining about: I’m not making noise, I’m not moving around, I don’t even have any gum.”

Spy’s eyes narrow. “You are always doing something.”

“For fuck’s sake, Spy, there’s nothing else for me to not do! Do you want me to stop breathing, is that it? Am I breathing too loud?”

“You are certainly complaining too loudly now,” Spy snaps.

Scout makes a frustrated noise and a strangling gesture, then dives headfirst over the center console into the back seat.

“What are you doing?!” Spy yells, holding the gearshift so Scout can’t kick it out of place.

“Fuck you,” Scout says as he squirms beneath their clothing and into the foot space, “Wake me up when we get wherever.”

“Oh yes very mature, hide in the backseat like a child. ”

Scout throws up a one-fingered salute in the rear view mirror.

“Good riddance,” Spy hisses, settling himself back into the driver’s seat.

The miles rack up in silence. The sun creeps up over the horizon ahead of him, chasing off the night with pink and orange ombre. It’s beautiful in a cliche sort of way, and as if he could not be more of a French stereotype, reminds him of the night he met Scout’s mother.

The second of Don Genarro’s five children, Minerva had wrenched the throne from her older brother who cited a sudden desire to become a painter in Canada and hasn’t been seen since, leaving her as mob boss of the greater New England area. Spy met her one night at a bar, long after her (mostly peaceful) takeover. She had recently performed a (mostly peaceful) restructuring of her nuclear family, and was taking a rare night on the town before rolling up her sleeves and diving into single motherhood; Spy was paid by a rival gang to watch her for weaknesses. She had seven (seven!) children, was six years his senior and wore her hair in a beehive and swore like it was going out of style and snorted when she laughed.

“Gonna stare all day,” she’d asked, “Or are you gonna buy me a drink?”

Her dress was a similar pink to today’s sky. Upon taking the seat next to her, he’d found himself on the business end of a stiletto blade that, to this day, she will not tell him where she hid. It hovered just over his femoral artery while the the bartender made her drink.

“Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to tell me what Donnie Mareto thinks he’s going to accomplish by ruining my fucking night off, then you’re going to pay my tab and just maybe I won’t have to ruin my new Ava Gardner dress with your arterial spray.”

He never had a chance.

“Are you going to sulk back there all day?” He asks the back seat.

Scout doesn’t reply. He seems intent on sleeping, or possibly on ignoring Spy.

Spy knows Scout’s mother wants him to get along with their son. It isn’t reasonable, there’s too much time and too many difficult emotions between them to ever be a ‘real family’ (her words, not his), but still he grits his teeth and asks, “What do you want for breakfast?”

The backseat yields no answer.

“I understand a traditional American breakfast involves pancakes.”

“Fuck off,” Scout mutters from under a sweater.

When Spy sees a diner advertised on the next exit board, he makes the executive decision to pull over for food. He enters the establishment alone and orders a breakfast special and coffee. Scout, who is always less stubborn than hungry, shuffles in ten minutes later to a plate of eggs and bacon.

They don’t talk, but they don’t argue either. Spy sips his coffee. The diner seems to be some kind of neutral ground between the arguing.

“You already eat yours?” Scout asks.

“I ate in the motel.”

“Was it one of those weird-ass tiny dinners you keep in your teeth?”

“If you must know, it was fruit. I managed to find some at a gas station yesterday.”

“Yeah, I didn’t see that part because I was locked in a trunk.”

“Hmm,” Spy says, pointedly not meeting Scout’s glare, “I remember you being insufferable and then much better behaved.”

Scout snorts, but doesn’t stop shoveling food into his mouth. Breakfast seems to have mollified him. “You can never call Ma on me now, y’know. I got the last word on everything because you locked me in a trunk. ”

Spy had considered this at the time, and ultimately decided a full eight hours of silence was worth the potential backlash. “It seems our problem must stay between us.”

“No shit.” Scout folds a pancake in half and starts loading eggs onto it like a tortilla. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Oh?” Spy asks, watching breakfast foods pile into the makeshift tortilla. It’s horrifying, yet fascinating to see what Scout will try to eat next.

“You like to keep your hands clean, I figured you’d be a wuss in an actual fight.”

“Just because I wash my hands--”

Scout makes a stop gesture with the hand holding his breakfast wrap, splashing a drop of syrup on the table. “Not like that, jackass. You always do things sneaky-like, all disappearing and backstabs and ‘right behind you’ . You never take a guy head-on. I didn’t think you’d be any good at it.”

Spy leans back in his seat and cocks an eyebrow. He’s actually curious to see where this conversation goes. “You have seen me kill enemies with my bare hands on multiple occasions. What on Earth made you think I wouldn’t be able to fight you?”

Scout shrugs and bites off half the pancake concoction. He mercifully does not try to talk around it until he’s finished. “Mick says you’re a wuss.”

That gives Spy pause. “I wasn’t aware you two were on first-name basis.”

“ Sniper says your a wuss,” Scout says with an eye-roll.

“That man lives in a car and engages enemies by running five miles away and looking at them through a tube. What does he know?”

“He’s got long arms,” Scout points out.

“That he uses to hold two tubes glued together.”

“Got a big knife.”

“Compensation,” Spy says.

Scout chokes on his food.

Spy studies Scout’s face to make sure the sunglasses aren’t distorting his vision. “Surely you are not--”

“No.” Scout bangs on his own chest to clear it, glaring at Spy through the endeavor. Given the short duration of the choking, his face is redder than it should be. “Fuck no, and fuck you. I don’t think of anyone like that.”

“Good god, you are prude. You are so American, you can’t stand even the thought of another man’s body.”

Scout grabs the remains of his breakfast off the plate. “And that’s it for me.”

“How have you survived in the locker room for this long? Everyone gets changed at the same time, surely you’ve seen--”

“Nope.” Scout crosses the diner toward the door, pancakes in hand. “Not talking about this.”

Spy sips his coffee as Scout makes his red-faced exit. He spares a moment to imagine the pairing (what would Scout and the busman even do? Go camping? The idea is laughable) and takes his time flagging down a waitress for the bill. He is… not amused, but not completely irritated either. He muses on this as he leaves change on the table.

The address leads them off the highway, down a small side alley, then onto a wide road running parallel to the Tampa’s main street. It clearly has no problems being less prestigious than the city center, with its more sedate traffic and fewer neon lights. It appeals to Spy’s sense of décor until they pull up to their destination.

“Non,” he says, helplessly staring up at the billboard.

“Hell yeah! ” Scout says, already vaulting out of the car and over the hood.

MATINEE DOUBLE FEATURE, the theater sign announces proudly, PSYCHO and BILLY THE KID V. DRACULA.

“Why would anyone put those things together,” Spy asks the empty car, as though it can save him.

The marquee is done up in dozens of lights. Large, well-lit letters over the billboard proclaim that this mockery of an theater is called The Danvers, and the front window is lined with tacky second-hand movie memorabilia. Spy reluctantly parks the car and approaches the ticket counter, where Scout is somehow already causing a commotion.

“And then it’s like eeek-eeek-eeek! And she’s like ‘ahhh!’ ,” he says, dramatically miming what appears to be a woman being murdered with a knife.

“Did you know they used chocolate sauce for the blood,” the ticket taker asks excitedly. She can’t be older than sixteen, which puts her mental age a few years ahead of Scout’s. No wonder they’re getting along.

“Psh, yeah, everybody knows that ,” Scout replies, sniffing in a way that communicates his complete lack of knowledge on the subject, “S’not like they could’ve used real blood or anything.”

“Two, please,” Spy interrupts unenthusiastically.

She takes his money (a complete waste of a dollar, they could have used that to buy so much coffee ) and stamps their tickets. “You’re in for a real treat, mister! It’s a double feature, Psycho and—”

“I saw the sign.”

His deadpan doesn’t seem to dampen her mood. “Real good, both of ‘em. Enjoy!”

“I will not,” he says, grabbing the back of Scout’s jacket to drag him away from the counter before he can re-engage with the ticket taker.

“Fuck off ,” Scout jabs an elbow into Spy’s ribs to make him let go. “What’s your problem now?”

“I have to spend the next four hours watching terrible American films,” Spy replies testily as they approach the gaudy front doors, “I will not spend one moment longer than necessary in this god forsaken excuse of an entertainment house.”

“Shoulda guessed you’d be a killjoy,” Scout says.

Spy is more than happy to have a target for his ire. “And I should have guessed you’d like this kind of tasteless drivel. Of course you would enjoy watching a deranged man kill naked women in showers, and whatever the second monstrosity is.”

“Billy the Kid fights Dracula the Vampire. It ain’t that deep, dumbass.”

Spy responds by shoving Scout into the doorframe. It makes him feel a little better, and better still when Scout retaliates by tackling him into the popcorn stand and starting a short brawl in the wreckage. Unfortunately they seem to have found the East Coast’s most tolerant theater, as the fight only earns them an escort to their seats and a stern warning that further destruction of property will earn them a fine.

“Fuck,” Scout gripes after the usher leaves, “I wanted a coffee, you asshole.”

“I was hoping we'd be thrown out,” Spy says gloomily.

“You were willing to throw the whole freakin’ mission just so you wouldn’t have to sit through a movie? ”

“Two movies,” Spy corrects, crossing his arms and sliding down in his chair. It sticks to the back of his jacket, as though to really, truly emphasize how badly his day has been ruined.

The lights dim, and Spy switches his sunglasses for the tinted pair provided by Miss Pauling. To his disgust, they’re still sticky from Scout’s gummy brush with death. He picks at the residue through the opening credits before sliding them on, bathing the black-and-white movie in shades of pink. Despite the color change, Psycho doesn’t deviate from its usual story: man and woman cannot be together due to financial problems so woman steals money from her employer in the name of love (or something, he doesn’t really care).

“The costuming in this movie is terrible,” Spy grumbles, “And why must we see every errant thought that runs through her head? It ruins the pacing.”

“Shut up,” Scout says without looking away from the screen.

The movie drags on. Spy watches half-heartedly.

“They could have cut half of this so-called plot and had the same film. This could have been a commercial between segments of a soap opera.”

“If you’re so freakin’ miserable, give me the glasses and go do something else,” Scout hisses.

It’s a tempting offer, but Spy has seen Scout become distracted by his own shoelaces while pinned down by enemy fire. There’s no guarantee he’ll be able to watch a movie and keep an eye for the film’s encoded messages at the same time. He explains this to Scout, who has some creative ideas about what Spy can do with his ‘shitty fuck-ass opinions on other people’s fuckin’ attention problems’.

“You do not have ‘attention problems’,” Spy says, disdainfully eyeing Scout’s bouncing leg, “You have a problem paying attention.”

Scout snorts. “Oh yeah, I’m gonna take your word for it.”

Something about the way Scout emphasizes ‘your’ in ‘your word’ sticks in Spy’s head. He picks at it until the thread unravels into clarity. “Medic has been focusing your attention with the energy drinks. That’s why the caffeine content is so high.”

“Duh,” Scout says.

It’s painfully obvious in hindsight. Spy watches him for another moment, reexamining all the fidgeting and chattering in this new light. He pulls a balisong from one of the many hidden pockets he’d sewn into his ridiculous disguise. “Give me your hand.”

This finally draws Scout’s eyes from the screen. “Uh,” he says, eyeing the knife, “No.”

Spy flips it open in the simple three-step clockwise rotation. He does this again more slowly, then puts the knife in Scout’s hand. “Do you understand?”

“What the fuck,” Scout says, which probably also means ‘no’.

Spy walks him through the steps again. Scout’s eyes keep darting between Spy’s face and the knife in his hands until he finally tries to open it himself. He immediately nicks his palm, but the cut is shallow and Spy trusts Scout to be undeterred by a little blood. With uncharacteristic patience, he guides Scout’s hands through the motions until he can replicate them on his own.

“Good.” Spy watches until he is satisfied Scout won’t cut off his fingers, then returns his attention to the movie. “Do that.”

“Why?” Scout asks as he continues flips the blade open and closed.

“Having your hands occupied will help you concentrate.” He glances to where Scout is playing with the knife. “It is something your mother used to do.”

Scout moves the balisong through open and closed a few more times. “I guess so. She messes with hair pins, though.” He curses when he misses a catch and has to close the handles manually.

Spy’s knife continues to click in Scout’s hands as the movie ponderously waddles on. He receives a few cuts, but his fingers remain firmly attached and his leg stops bouncing so Spy considers this a success.

Because Mikhail is a bastard, their secret message doesn’t turn up until the end of the movie. He’s somehow managed to highlight specific letters in the credits. Spy jots them down to spell out a second address and flees the theater. Surprisingly, Scout follows him with minimal complaints, still fiddling with the knife as they walk back to the parking lot. It would be satisfying to put him down for playing with a knife in public, you ridiculous child . The insult rises easily on Spy’s tongue, but he finds that he cares less about public opinion than Scout’s ability to focus. Besides, he’s gaining fluidity with the motions, and can now talk and flip at the same time.

“You owe me a movie,” Scout says as Spy pops the trunk.

“I taught you how to open a knife without killing yourself,” Spy replies, locating a map and shoving their luggage aside to spread it out, “Surely that’s time better spent than watching a movie about cowmen and vampires.”

“I bet Pyro can get the Billy the Kid movie when we get back to base.” Scout leans back against the car, spinning the knife around his finger in a trick Spy did not teach him, as Spy runs his finger across the roads. “So what’s the place?”

The address is a small dawn-to-dusk park in the heart of Miami. Spy memorizes the location and briefly considers slamming the trunk closed on Scout’s jacket. “Apparently we are going to walk in a park,” he says, shooing Scout away from the car to close the trunk instead.

“Now?”

“There was no time indicated, so I can only assume we are meant to attend now.”

part 2

#tf2 #Yoo writes!#Scout #Spy #Scout Ma #Miss Pauling #other characters in passing #fanfics

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theveryworstthing · 8 years ago

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Downtrodden Answers: Lots O’ Bugs Edition

here are a bunch of answers for the staggering pile of downtrodden questions that have built up.

god, there are so many. this isn’t even a fraction of them. more coming soon.

@terminallytwisted

they’re uncommon to rare since they have such small clutches of eggs (for insects) and they’re not really the best parasites around. in fact, without breeding programs they would all be gone by now. like awful bug pandas.

there are specific breeders tasked with recreating ideal habitats and situations for the best results. these people train under other veteran breeders for years before they have the documentation and references to start managing their own clutches. of course, if you have a Walking Worm and the guy down the street has a Walking Worm you can breed them but the failure rate is high without a breeder’s counsel and if things aren’t handled correctly the worms can get defensive and aggressive. they’re intelligent social creatures and trying to mate them with a worm they don’t like or in a place they feel unsafe might get that other worm’s dick ripped off and you accidentally stepped on. not a good look. not worth the items or money saved on that counseling fee.

if your worms do manage to impregnate each other and lay clutches, congrats! no one lost a limb this time! you may now sell or trade those eggs to the highest bidder because those are some precious precious babies.

yup. they usually really excel at one or the other but there are shady places where you want to keep your pet close and most boat bodied worms get lonely if their owners are up on land for too long :(

@bleatingbico

there’s no really ‘taming’ snails. they just kind of do what they want. some people have them as pets though, and their mucus can be harvested for different healing and cosmetic uses. rabbits don’t really breed them because their populations can get out of hand fast.

what do you think Wolves that never turn look like?

@sinezona

that’s such a cute idea! i decree it cannon. its probably more of a dark green though since it has to have as much contrast with the paper as possible for better low light reading. that or mixed in with glow in the dark liquids. as for newspapers, they’re not daily but there is an island-wide paper distributed by the postal workers covering general island news, predator sightings, deaths, that sort of thing. local news is covered by guilds who collect interesting findings and goings on in the surrounding area and then send what are essentially anchor rabbits to individual warrens to report them to the gathered crowds. these reports may also come by radio if the radio signals work there (owls do a number on radio signals).

@fignan

there are mines on the island, usually connected to special tunnels that connect to different warrens so that large groups of workers can get to work safely. what metalworkers do really depends on if its an area with other metalworkers present of if they’re the only one for miles. more crafters means more specialization. less means you’re kind of thrust into being the jack of all trades unless you order from other metalworkers. you might have to do this anyway though if you’re like great at cups but royally suck at daggers. in a wolf attack people will use your janky daggers but they’ll also come back and try to beat your ass with their remaining limbs. better to just get in contact with an outside source.

jesus.

1:yes

2: i’m totally using the bog iron idea thank you, also digging is more for home expansion/ underground transportation. its mostly done by hand with some shovel work to remove excess dirt and a few other tools to smooth walls and floors. mining is more intense and careful work. digging is about hollowing out the area, mining is actually searching for stuff. the two sometimes collide if interesting deposits are found while constructing burrows or warrens but rabbits try to keep mining operations away from their homes and water supplies just in case of disaster.

3: fungi, greens, squash, cabbages, bell peppers, seaweed, kiwi, coconuts, melons, peaches, almonds, and wheat. there are many more and there’s a lot of variety on the island between areas or just warrens. crops might also depend on how close to the Center you are. you can get a peach as big as a watermelon if your farm is far enough inland. they are prone to both dropping on unlucky people and producing the finest jams known to sapient life. you can barely taste the murder.

4: a lot of plant fibers like cotton and various woven items made of shed rabbit fur and the found pelts of larger creatures. rabbits like to use spider silk for durable items as well as sturdy wings and carapaces of certain bugs. it is important to note that many rabbits think wearing things from bugs commonly classified as pets is super gross unless its from your actual pet as a remembrance item. you’re not going to make any friends in a Walking Worm skin suit.

5: rabbits make 99% of their day to day items. they like mainland rice and a few other food items but if they import anything its usually luxury items like furniture or machines that were never commonly used on the island like cameras. when you can talk to the dead, keeping pictures around seems a lot less important. rabbits have really warmed up to photos though. despite the occasional flubbs like the shine of strange eyes hovering above nests of sleeping kits and shadowy figures sitting in on a family portraits, cameras are getting popular among those that can afford them.

6: rabbits have been obsessed with textiles since the dawn of their civilization. you know they know their way around a loom.

@crackingdrywall

warrens have a pretty tribal/family atmosphere. there is usually an ‘elder’ or ‘elders’ which are akin to the head of the warren who try to keep everyone from shanking each other, and then there are leaders for different facets of warren life. classically these were mated couples but these days its just two people who work well together and essentially act as managers for their specific responsibilities. its always two just in case something happens to someone and the next qualified person doesn’t have time to settle into the position, and its become more common for these managers to be comprised of one seasoned older person and one enterprising younger person. the common positions for management are:

kitchen (they handle food inventory, cooking, and food farming)

medicine (medical and rescue services, only led by midwives and doctors)

spiritual (priests and doctors who focus more on mental illness)

communication (necromancers, postal workers, journalists)

home (they handle the building, cleaning and upkeep of the warren. gotta make sure that the cranky old people are happy and that the bugs aren’t pooping everywhere)

entertainment (they handle the books, games, festivals, ect. diversions from the Bad Times)

and guards (the peeps who prevent the other peeps from being eaten by horror monsters)

of course these positions change and expand depending on what size your warren is, what the age demographic is, what the area is like, what predators are in that area, what the death rate is like, if you specialize in crafting or trading for certain things, if you’re made of family groups or guild workers who’ll just be there for parts of the year, if you’re a secret street fighting ring, ect. there’s a lot to keep in mind.

also those position names are boring and will probably be revised later but the fact that they’re basically just what they say they are is so Rabbit i don’t know if i should change it.

@joysweeper

not really. vultures are hard to catch and kind of gross to eat so they don’t have any real natural predators on the island. i mean, things only got after rabbits because they’re delicious and they can catch them. and some things, like foxes, won’t even bother with that if there are enough bugs and berries around.

there are still plenty of creatures that will fuck them up if they DO get caught but they can usually avoid them. its why they keep their meals short and don’t bring their children down to eat.

@balaur-of-four-toes

i really Feel that comic.

and those other creature thoughts are spot on. the fennecs would be a little bigger though. maybe the size of a real life wolf since Downtrodden foxes and rabbits are equivalent in scale to real life foxes and rabbits.

maybe when i’m done with the island and the mainland and the holy city, we can go to some far off places and meet some other weird talking critters.

i’m not sure if i answered this one but i have talked about house boats. as for pure underwater dens, there is a huge system of hot springs and fresh water underground rivers that rabbits take advantage of. a lot of rabbits like to make their homes near them. there are also the seaside glass caves where the tides and general proximity to the ocean can lead to warrens or burrows surrounded by cliff side waterfalls or aquarium-like glass walls.

@stanzicapparatireplayers

see above friendo :)

wellllll. you’re half right about what went down.

rabbits sort of used it to their advantage when they could. see, they have very little sexual dismorphia just like the mainlanders, and since the mainlanders were used to using social and visual cues to pick out the minute differences in reproductive roles they could call a rabbit maybe 60% of the time if they’re alone with them. but the fact that rabbits don’t really follow a super strict design template for body shape and height and they don’t have larger boobs unless they’re pregnant, currently nursing, or the mother of a bunch of kits, make a group of rabbits look like ten million different species with no discernible gender to the mainlander eye. at least in the olden days. so, the rabbits would use gendered pronouns to go places and exhibit behaviors that were seen as contrary to their gender roles. and the mainlanders would be so relived that they had a gender to go on that they didn’t really question it for quite a while. of course, then there were a few scandals over revealed homosexual relationships, obscenity charges slapped on people in places they shouldn’t be, ect, and the mainland got very strict about your gender matching your reproductive role. most rabbits stepped in line but the paranoia was already there. it was only ten years ago that most jobs required full body physicals before hiring rabbits.

it was kind of a sucky thing!

@adeterminedloser

they’ve had enough of my shit and i can’t blame them.

and the idea was very simple to me. life is hard. its weird and scary and awesome and everything is always changing. there are so many things that go wrong and so much danger. life is hard to control, even if that life is a little bean sprout.

meanwhile, death is pretty chill. you’re already dead dude! what more is gonna happen to you?

it also plays off something my mom and grandmothers told me about ghosts when i was little so i wouldn’t be scared.

you’ve got way more to fear from the living than the dead.

#rabbits of downtrodden #talkin #worldbuilding for days ya'll

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falcon6 · 8 years ago

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Turnabout Design: Franziska and the von Karma Legacy

Hello, and welcome back to Turnabout Design, a novice’s look at character design using the Ace Attorney series as a base. I am the foppish fool Falcon who flounders and fawns for fictional females, and let us begin. Spoiler Warning: This is going to be covering a character specifically, so there will be story points gone over, mostly from Justice for All.

Even though there’s still a few points I could talk about regarding the first game, I feel it’d be better to go ahead and continue on with the second game of the Ace Attorney series: Justice for All. Considered by some people to be the weaker entry of the trilogy, with a fairly meh first case (Phoenix gets amnesia, whoaaaa) and a - in my humble opinion - lukewarm third case, it still etches itself up to good quality with a pretty good second case and one of the most memorable final cases in the entire series.

And part of that is due to the main characters and their arcs continuing. New characters pop up, old characters get new tidbits to them (Gumshoe having a crush on Maggey while also being a big hero...I should probably get to him at some point), and our main lead has a veritable moral crisis on his hands at the end.

But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today.

So I elected to put off on talking about Manfred von Karma, the first game’s final antagonist (aside from Rise from the Ashes) because, aside from his terrifying presence, he’s actually not a very grand design. To me, at least. I am aware that his design is actually an adaptation of the original design idea for “the rival prosecutor” (Edgeworth), but he never struck me as a very memorable design. A memorable character, yes, but his actual design layout didn’t strike me.

Not to mention, a lot of the deal with Manfred is that his actual character, in a lot of facets, is used to fuel motivations of other characters. He’s the opposing force for Gregory Edgeworth in the past which was needed for his murder, his involvement with DL-6 caused Miles Edgeworth to live with him and eventually set himself down the road to becoming a prosecutor. His involvement with DL-6 is what eventually (non-intentionally) led Mia Fey into law. His role as a prosecutor is used to be the “final boss” for Phoenix for the fourth case. The man’s actions reverberate throughout the original trilogy and beyond, in a lot of respects, but there’s not much to him beyond the need for a perfect record and a calculating, cold megalomaniac.

His child, on the other hand, bears a few of those characteristics along with a lot of time to grow beyond them into her own staple of the series. I’m talking, of course, of Franziska von Karma.

You ever wonder if she ever intends to....draw blood? No? Just me?

You liars.

The Design

So I’ve spent the last few times talking less and less about the actual facets of her design, so I think it’d do to try and fix that. First off, let’s see her silhouette.

A lot of the best parts about Franziska’s design is the lively actions she is able to produce in court. This is mostly due to including the whip into the picture. The whip is one of the most important parts of her design, both due to her character and due to the added action poses it can create. If a character can be defined by the tool they use, that’s a very good thing to consider when designing their poses. You can tell that, when you take the whip out of the equation, you’re still able to tell who she is in a list of Ace Attorney characters, but it’s not as clear if you throw other franchises in.

A lot of times, an external item like a weapon is almost as integral as a piece of clothing for a character. Of course, relying entirely on that for a character’s design isn’t prudent, as the weapon needs to be integral to the design. For example, if Link from the Legend of Zelda series were to not have a sword available, the clothing is still very distinctly him. The hood in particular is almost instantly recognizable, even with every other feature blacked out. And, forgive me, but even the Master Sword is still just a sword to a silhouette.

However, we look at Samus from the Metroid series, we end up having two ‘states’ of Samus. One with her Power Suit on and one without. (I count the Power Suit as a weapon, fight me) With her Power Suit, she is the same Samus we know, who is able to go into the unknown and fight whatever comes her way but without it, not only does the silhouette change but the actual gameplay changes. She can’t go in and fight aliens the same way without her weapon. The lack of her suit makes the encounters she faces more aligned on the side of cautionary, because she can’t deal with space pirates and monsters the same way as if she did have her suit.

Lot of talk to amount to “her whip is important”, huh? It’s a very distinct trait for her design that speaks of her character. She’s aggressive and wishes to dominate her opponent with nothing short of perfection in her case. She uses it to force her will through the court. She uses it for “reward” once with Detective Gumshoe, too. (poor Gumshoe)

When you look at her design, you can see that there are elements of Manfred in her. Compared to Phoenix, her design is more regal looking with a nice big bow and a stylish suit. Her gray hair masks her actual age, to the point that you’d have to hear it from her to find out that she’s actually a young prodigy. Her posture intimidates in court, with animations ripped from her father, yet her fragile ego causes her to lose her cool very fast, which includes a few distraught emotions in her sprites.

She builds up a cool facade with her whip and her dressed-to-impress confidence that she attempts to exude. To her, the impression she leaves is most important, which makes sense because have you ever gotten hit by a whip? She cares about the mark that’s made and aims to make sure her presence is known. And to a passerby, that is exactly what happens, because outside of context she looks like a very scary lady who will absolutely dominate you, in court.

Franziska is obsessed with perfection and control, even moreso than her father was. This is due to having not one, but two individuals she has to live up to. She lives up to her father in terms of name, but she must also live up to her “little brother” Edgeworth in terms of legacy.

Legacy

Now obviously when I say “legacy”, I bet you would say “but wouldn’t she get that from her father, as well?” Well, only tangentially. I personally believe that Edgeworth left a more lasting impression on her character than her father, and it’s mostly due to Mr. Phoenix Wright.

See, Franziska grew up with her father’s shadow looming overhead. To be anything short of the genius prosecutor that Manfred was would be considered a blight to her name. So she focused her energies on doing so, even though she personally admitted to herself that she’d never get to the same level of genius as her father. Still she studied and persisted, earning herself the title of “the Prodigy”.

Soon enough she heard of her father’s defeat at the hands of Phoenix Wright, but that alone did not set her off. In fact, she couldn’t care less about her father’s defeat. It was learning that the defendant was Edgeworth, then finding out that Phoenix had already beaten him twice before despite HIS perfect record, and then learning of Edgeworth’s disappearance (Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth chooses death) that set her off on her travels to Japanifornia.

Because she wasn’t facing against Wright for revenge of her father. She was going to prove herself against someone that Edgeworth lost to.

When I think of a “legacy” character, I consider a character that has a torch passed down to them, much like a family line of superheroes. In some ways they retain the same spirit as those who came before them, but they have their own spirit about them. Take, for example, DC Comics icon - and man with most elaborate basement under parents’ house - Batman. A few years back when Bruce Wayne had “died”, Dick Grayson took up the mantle of Batman. While Bruce was more stoic and cold in his style, Dick was more loose in his demeanor. He cracked more smiles and was more talkative. More relaxed. He couldn’t replicate Batman himself, despite how many years he studied under him as Robin, because he realized that he couldn’t do so. He instead took his own take and, depending on who you ask, succeeded in doing the role justice. He lacked confidence as Batman but was more than able to fulfill the role as Gotham City’s protector regardless.

Why I find legacy characters fascinating is the little bits of what is brought from the past into the role of the present and how that can mix well, can clash with other elements, and even be forgotten. Even Edgeworth did this, to an extent, when he was the antagonist of the first game. You didn’t know it until the fourth case, but everything that Edgeworth did was due to what was displayed to him by his teacher, Manfred. Winning at any cost. He sets that aside after the first game and finds his own path as a prosecutor, yet he still retains some elements of his mentor, such as his outfit’s similarities to Manfred’s and his posture when at the bench. Naturally, some elements would have to stay because of his iconic design, but even 7 years later in Dual Destinies, Edgeworth is still using the same posture, and his big change is that he also has an unbuttoned coat and wears glasses out of court.

So going back to Franziska, her main motivator for Justice for All is to “defeat Phoenix Wright”. She goes through the same methods as her father before her, but also took in Edgeworth’s forwardness in understanding the entire case, no matter the absurdity. She studied the Kurain Channeling Technique and even introduced it in the second case in order to prove that, even with something supernatural like channeling spirits which is beyond normal law, Maya would have still done the deed and is still guilty under law. She puts up a potentially damaging photo for her prosecution just to back Phoenix in a corner. In the third case she focused her energies on making sure Phoenix wasn’t getting any evidence she didn’t know about, which ended up costing her the case when she forced Acro out of the room before he could dispose of the murder weapon. And in the time she was involved in prosecuting the final case, she made explicitly sure that Adrian Andrews knew that she didn’t have to testify.

All of this was to defeat Phoenix Wright, who had inadvertently brought himself up as a target for all of her ire. The one who defeated her father and adoptive brother before her. All to stoke her ego.

But, of course, she didn’t.

Try as she did, she wasn’t able to defeat Phoenix. She got shot on the way to court to the fourth case and had to let Edgeworth do the job for her. Even then, she took it upon herself to get the decisive evidence to court just in time to give Edgeworth the win. Finally, Phoenix lost and it was because of her!

And yet, when Phoenix was so happy even after losing his first case (for a reason she didn’t know), she broke. She didn’t understand why he was so happy about it. She tossed her whip aside and left for the airport, to fly far away.

But then Edgeworth came to her with her whip. He spoke to her about what he found out on his trip. About how win records were meaningless. About how Manfred was wrong, and how a prosecutor’s job is to find the truth. She was still a prosecutor, but if she wanted to give up, then he would continue forward and leave her behind.

Handing the whip back to her was an important gesture, because as mentioned, the whip is a symbol of control. When she had it, she had always felt like she was in control of her situation. It was much like a security blanket for her. Handing it back after she tried to toss it away signifies that Edgeworth understands that prosecution is important to her and she needs to find her own path forward like he did.

Telling her that she’d be left behind is also important. It may have been cruel, but Franziska is a character who went through all that effort to overcome her own faults in order to try and surpass those who came before her. She was obsessed with it, in order to stoke her own ego, but she wouldn’t be able to do so if she gave up. Edgeworth knew she didn’t want to do that. She still needed someone to fight against, and being the doting little brother that he is (still like 7 years older), he took it upon himself to stoke that fire again.

And she vowed, in a show of sobbing emotion, that she would return and defeat Phoenix Wright and to become a better prosecutor than he.

Franziska is a great character even though her role as a prosecutor was done because the designers didn’t want to have Edgeworth continue to lose fights due to his popularity. She was brought in as a flawed and fixated prosecutor to further the prosecutor’s role as an antagonist while solidifying that which Edgeworth had proven before; that the prosecution is merely an antagonist, not a villain.

Her emotional weight is believable and sympathetic. Her personality in court is perfect for the role of making you detest her because of how many times she’s able to one-up Phoenix (you) as you go through the cases. And yet her overall character is someone you can’t help but feel for once it’s all over. She’s in a dogged pursuit of proving herself as better than those before her, and Phoenix (you) proves to be an obstacle she can’t overcome.

After Justice for All, she learns to pursue her goals for herself and not for any legacy she was supposed to inherit. She works with Interpol and assists Edgeworth in his own games, but she hasn’t seen much action since. Now that we know what Maya’s been up to in Spirit of Justice, I really want to see what Franziska has been up to in the years since next.

I want to know if she sued Larry for the use of her likeness in his children’s book, “Franzy's Whippity-Whip Trip“.

Conclusion

Wow, she’s tipping Gumshoe $5. That’s probably the nicest thing she’s ever done for him.

Even though her inclusion was the designer’s intent to keep Edgeworth from losing all the time, Franziska was a worthy entry in this series as an antagonist. Her flaws helped elevate her as an egomaniac that eventually made you empathize with where she’s coming from. She’s not perfect and can’t be the same level as what her father was, but that’s exactly what makes her such a good character.

Because true perfection doesn’t exis-

Okay, stop that. Get outta here.

Thank you very much for reading. It was fun to look more into Franziska and remind myself why I really like her. Most of these thoughts are just my thoughts, of course, so if you have any thoughts about her yourself, let me know!

Until next time...

You foolish fools.

#Turnabout Design #Ace Attorney #Franziska von Karma #Blog #Ace Attorney: Justice for All #Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All

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ellen-reincarnated1967 · 8 years ago

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Memento Hurley

Summary: Choice phrases from Hugo “Hurley” Reyes from the show LOST and his inner dialogue.

A/N: I have written 7 seasons of LOST with an OFC including roughly 4 original characters to add to the already complicated series. My OFC is “Elizabeth ‘Elle’ Grecco with a crazy past, present, future, and whatever it was that LOST led us to believe. Sawyer and Hurley were my favorite characters and while Juliet was seen as the “enemy” I soon grew to love her as well. She and Elle become best friends. If anyone is interested in my LOST stories, they can be found on fanfiction.net or you can message me for the links. Now, onto Hurley.

"I have no food, alright? And for the record, I'm down a notch in my belt. I'm a big guy, it's going to be a while before you're going to want to give me a piggy back ride, okay?"

Seriously, he thought to himself, you'd think after all these years, people would stop using the fat card. Oh sure, the big guy's got all this hidden food, well, that's sorta true-brain fart- but it's a secret stash for a reason- he strums on his guitar because he's sad or freakin' out, Locke hunts boar, surprisingly, that man scares the be Jesus out of me…sorry Ma, but he does. I secretly hide food in the man cave for that reason- it's a safety net. Instead of shooting up people like the A-team does so almost every other minute, I snack. It's comfort food for a reason. Just because I'm not dropping down three sizes, even though everything I eat, and I mean everything has gone through me like a case of the bends, I'm still, quite, pleasantly, plump. That's right, Charlie- while you got your rocker good looks, and Sawyer's got his southern drawl, and Jack's got the whole I'm your hero, insert Superman's theme music here, I'm Hugo Reyes. Hurley's my nickname and no, dude, I'm not tellin'.

"I wanna do a cannonball. I've been walking up and down this beach every day and looking out at this water. And I wanna do a cannonball."

So this is it, he thought to himself, Charlie's out saving the world and here I am, ambling, nah, that's a word they'd use for the token fat guy and I'm not the token fatty. I'm like you know, pleasantly plump…but here I am, we've been stuck on this island with no sign of normalcy, the golf games ended a long time ago, Michael went Commander Nutso and well, if this is it, I'm doin' this. Bernard, still can't get over the fact that he's white, but he's a pretty cool dude, for you know, being up there in the age brackets, he told me to go for it. The water, its crisp and it bites at my skin, I do not float immediately to the top and I think, great, sure, so this is how I go out? I sink? Token fat guy my plump butt! But I let out the breath I was holding since I started to run, comically towards the blue abyss and my body's weightless. I weigh nothing. Dude, I could be a space man. I surface and I no longer want to be in space. I want to see Charlie. Desmond's back, I can see him now. Just why can't I see Charlie?

"Look, I don't know about you, but things have really sucked for me lately, and I could really use a victory. So let's get one, dude! Let's get this car started. Let's look death in the face and say: "Whatever, man!""

It took a couple turns of the key but I got it to work. Dude, I can't believe it! Something from flashback to the 80s came on the radio but I didn't care. We were free fallin', coastin' down the valley, and that's when I realized it; we were coasting. The brakes weren't working. I kept slamming on them but they just pressed to the floor like the weight of Kong had come upon them. Kong, he laughed to himself, Sawyer would have loved that. Speakin' of the red…neck…man…I can't believe we got him out here. I mean, sure the skunked beer, was like a worm to a fish, but seriously, the dude helped. He also freaked out when he saw Roger. You'd think after shooting a polar bear in the middle of the jungle, he'd be used to seeing crazy stuff like that. Pansy. I mean, it's an old VW van, with older than dirt beer, and tea stained papers with numbers and names and stuff. Why wouldn't there be a dead guy in the back seat? Stranger things have happened. Take, the French Chick. She's just out there. Totally out there, like Mork- Na*nu Na*nu. Charlie's in the passenger seat and he's got this look of pure adrenaline on his face. 100 percent pure this rocks my socks off excitement. He's awesome. Too bad you'll never get to meet him. Lucky for us, well, we did. And while some may have seen him as some VH1 has been, others saw him as spry, comical, and down to earth. I mean, if you consider black nail polish on a dude, down to earth, than yeah, that's Charlie-my best friend.

"Did either of you see a guy run through here... in a bathrobe... with a coconut?"

So I had a break down? Big deal. So Jumbotron had a mental slip up. The hick takes all his crap out on everyone else; Kate, while she's all pretty hot and tempting, she's like, you know a fugitive. Just give it some time; she'll crack up too. And Jack, while his bed side manner sucks, royally, well, I've seen him coming 'thisclose' to breaking and let me tell you, I wouldn't want him operating on me when he's freakin' out. Keep all shiny, sharp objects from the doctor. Funny, they use to say that around me, back at St. Anna's. Take your pills Hugo. Dave's not real, Hugo. If he's not real, then why's he here? Why am I standing at the edge of this cliff, staring at him, falling to his demise? She took my hand that day. She kissed me. Libby. She's you know, some sort of head shrink, Dr. Feel Good, and boy does she make me feel good. She believes in me. P.S. takin' down Sawyer was like all the years I saved up holding back the anger, the hate for myself, the guilt…the dude had it coming.

"There you go! Life's not so bad right? I mean sure the others are coming like to eat us all and every once in a while someone blows up all over you but you do get to sleep in every morning..."

Jack's a piece of work. He's a good guy, don't get me wrong. But he obviously has the hots for Kate and he spends half his time watchin' her from his medical tent. Like no one notices? Everyone knows, dude. Just man up, I want to tell him, grow a set, Sawyer would say. You only live once. I mean there's the risk she'll shoot you in the back, but behind those crazy eyes of hers, she's got a thing for the doctor too. I mean, everyone does. No, uh, that came out wrong. I personally don't have a 'thing' for Jack. That's just not me. But who's to say Scott or Steve do or don't? Seriously, I'm the only one here who can tell them apart. Who's to say, dude? Who's…to…say?

"You just totally scooby-doo'd me didn't you?"

She's a tricky one, that fugitive. Using her feminine wiles to get what she wants. I mean, she could use all of them if she wanted, but she doesn't even have to. The dude's got this knack for getting what she wants. When Kate wants something, well, let's just say, step aside. She kicks ass. And when she's not kicking ass, she's takin' names, or in this case, a food tray that Locke specifically told me I had to deliver to Miles. Damn, he's going to be so pissed. Why me?

"Dudes... listen. Our lives suck! Everyone's nerves are stretched to the max! I mean, we're lost on an island, running from boars, and monsters... freakin' polar bears!"

So yeah, we were stretched to our limits. Everyone is going crazy with the boars, the polar bears, which, sorry, dude, I didn't know Michael had no idea about the bears. But whatever man. Some man eating giraffe is tearing down trees for fun and we just sit around, on the beach, or in the caves. My CD player died. I'd ask Sawyer for some batteries, but all I'd get from him is a 'screw off' or another nickname, and well, seriously, I'm not down with that. I want to have fun. So I made our own little golf course. Michael's freaking out. So I shove a golf club into his hands and tell him to take it out on the ball. No one wants to hear him screaming anymore. So he does. He swings at the golf ball and it goes soaring- I mean, the dude's got some form. He can't control himself; he's actually trying to hold back a smile. He's trying to be all smokin' cool Joe, but deep down, he's thrilled. And I gave him that. Too bad, later on, he takes all that goodness, that I started to get back into my life, away. He takes it away and says it was an accident. The dude's got issues.

"Dude! Looks like someone steam-rolled Harry Potter!"

It's about time someone put him in his place. Jack had a blast playin' up Sawyer's medical condition. I overheard him asking his about his past conquests. Dude, I'm bettin' Sawyer comes with his own Instruction Manual- that guy's got VD written all over his face. God knows where else. Forgive me, Madre, but, if you met him, you'd be crossing yourself and prayin' to Saint Fiacre for the man's soul. Bet you didn't know there was a saint for venereal diseases. Then again, he's also the saint for taxi drivers. Whatever. Mi madre says there's a saint for everything. I believe her. So, back to Sawyer. The guy's so transparent, you can see when a new one liner is comin' before he even opens his mouth. He gets this look in his eyes; my mother would call it los ojos del Diablo, this tiny speck of sin and before you know it, you're no longer Kate, you're She-ra. You're no longer Jack, you're Dr. Giggles. You're no longer Hugo Reyes, you're Stay Puft. The dude's not even that clever. Along with the instruction manual, he secretly holds this letter, and I swear to you, dude, that letter is nothin' but nicknames and one liners. He should be a stand up comedian. We don't have tomatoes on this island, but, hey, whatever, we can always throw mangoes. He's got 'my tapioca' or something. Whatever it's called. The dude needed reading glasses. You should have seen the pair Sayid made with his bond like training. Strange thing is though, after I said that to him, there was this split second he smiled. He's such an attention whore. I have to go to confession. Too bad Eko wasn't around yet.

"So, Rose's husband's white. Didn't see that one coming."

Bernard. The guy's got class. And his wife, Rose, she's the sweetest lady, ever. Aside from mi madre and the Virgin Mary of course. Of course, you echo. There were days where she'd sit at the shoreline, watching the water ebb and flow, yeah, man, I said ebb and flow. I'm calling this out right now- I may stutter and say 'dude' a lot, but deep down, underneath all of this (I just grabbed my belly and jiggled it for effect) I'm pretty prolific. That means, I'm wordy. I think. Goes to show that just when you think you know someone, well you don't. I mean we just assumed Bernard, Rose's husband would be Black. Then again, on this island, what you assume and what you get are quite left field. The Dark Territory though, uh, that was spot on. Rose prayed and prayed and I swear, my mother would have loved to have her over for dinner. They could sit around our Golden Jesus and talk about their love for God. She knew, deep down, that her husband was alive. It took 48 days, but she never gave up. She prayed with Charlie when Claire was taken by that creepy guy Ethan-who, thank you very much, I found out wasn't on the plane. Does anyone say, way to go Hurley? No. They just arm themselves with guns and go barreling through the jungle on some rescue mission, while I sit back and dry my shirts over a fire pit. Rose would have patted me on the back. If she wasn't too busy praying. She's cool people. She's just got this grandmother like orb that flows around her. I mean, everyone loves a Hugo Reyes hug, but those are nothing compared to Rose's. Whatever, don't think less of me, because I have feelings and I express them. I'm not Sawyer.

"Dude, you got some... Arnzt on you."

Leslie. That dude, seriously, I don't know where he came from. Yeah, some school teacher form somewhere not interesting. But he just showed up and decided, yeah, I'm going to tag along, and be part of the A-team. Sorry dude, but all the roles were taken. I'm still strugglin' tryin' to figure out just who was Mr. T. My money's on Kate. She's one tough chick. The Others, were comin' to eat us, or kill us, because we crossed a line, and I use 'we' lightly here, because, well, I didn't cross any lines. Any lines drawn on the sand clearly wash away with the tide. But whatever, the Others, and no, Sawyer didn't name them. Come to think of it, if he did, they'd be something catchy like, 'podpeople' or 'stranger danger'…but, whatever. They were coming and we had nowhere to hide. I mean, they knew all the hot spots. So the French Chick, she took us to the Black Rock. Here, I bet you're thinking, what's so cool about some large stone. But you'd be wrong; it's this ancient slave ship; it's name, rightfully so-The Black Rock. Mind you, it capsized in the middle of the jungle. I'd ask you how something like that happens, but Rousseau, already gave me the whole, 'are you on the same island as I am' line. You think she and Sawyer knew one another in a past life or something. So Arnzt. Leslie, again, a bitchin' name. He hears we're going for dynamite to blow up this hatch, that Locke found, instead of protein in the shape of a hairy boar, bygones. He travels with and he's complaining and complaining. I never thought I'd say I was happy to see that smokey thing, but it sent him running for the hills. But yeah, then he came back. He's there, handling the dynamite like it's a baby chick, telling us we 'have to be careful', 'we shouldn't hover', yadda yadda yadda, and what happens? The dude blew up right in front of my face. Seriously. Like this piñata that was stuffed with a stick of dynamite, his guts were everywhere. Jack had some of Leslie on his face. Just picturing that makes me wanna chuckle…and hurl.

#LOST one shot #LOST original fanfiction #LOST #Hurley Hugo Reyes

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Here’s What Being a Witch Really Means

You could say I was primed to be a witch from an early age.

My grandma Trudy used to tell us that she had “healing hands.” According to family lore, she once saved the life of a dying horse that, after she pressed her palms to its flank, stood up and trotted happily away. While I can’t vouch for the veracity of that tale, I do know that a touch on the forehead from her would always make my headaches vanish.

Trudy was a librarian at a library in central New Jersey, where I spent many a childhood afternoon pawing through the low end of the Dewey Decimal System, where books on the paranormal and other oddities are kept. I’d thrill as I read about the alleged mystical energy of the Egyptian pyramids and swoon over the entries on witchcraft in “Man, Myth, and Magic,” a 24-volume “Encyclopedia of the Supernatural.”

My favorite novel was “Wise Child” by Monica Furlong, a story about an orphan girl who gets taken in by a kind witch named Juniper, who teaches her magic and loves her like a mother might. The villagers come to them in secret whenever they need healing, but in public, Juniper and Wise Child are shunned.

Witches, I learned from the book, are complicated creatures: sources of great comfort and great terror.

As I approached my teen years, I was beginning to feel like a complicated creature myself. I’d developed an affinity for poetry and purple eye shadow — my own special brand of popularity repellent.

But my interest in magic remained a largely private, solitary pursuit. I wasn’t ashamed of it, exactly. My discretion arose from an urge to protect one of the few things that was mine alone. When you’re a weird kid, you learn to put guardrails around the things you love.

Still I followed the trail of literary bread crumbs further into the witch’s wood. It led me to a place where magic was something that could be done, not just read about.

I would often coax my parents to drive me to towns many miles away, where there were shops with names like Red Bank’s Magical Rocks or Mystickal Tymes. This was where I could find precious artifacts like old “Sandman” comics and bootleg CDs of my musical holy trinity, Tori Amos, Björk, and PJ Harvey — artists who wove references to goddesses and Pagan rites throughout howling hymns to female sexuality.

I scored my first set of tarot cards there, called the Sacred Rose deck, which contained mysterious symbols that were drawn to look like medieval stained glass.

Most of my early spells were focused on boys I had crushes on, desperately hoping to make them love me back. (These spells usually called for ingredients like rose petals or fresh cinnamon, but I’d often improvise with whatever I found around the house, such as Sweet’N Low.)

I eventually started doing occasional castings (that’s witch shorthand for casting a spell) for a few trusted friends who were pining for people who may or may not have been pining for them too.

There was the spell I did for Rebecca, my older sister’s friend, who was hiding in my room during a house party, lusting after some guy who was downstairs. I lit some candles and did some incantations: “Oh kindle the fire of his heart!” I chanted, while trying not to kindle the fire of my suburban bedroom.

Then I sprinkled her with some “love powder” that I’d bought at a New Age shop and sent her on her way. They made out an hour later.

There was the time that my best friend Molly was going to be hanging out alone with a boy she liked. She was pretty nervous, and I was nervous for her. She and Tom were both on the shy side, so it was anyone’s guess who would make the first move, if it happened at all. She was going to need magical intervention.

I did a spell.

I started by trying to telepathically send Molly a message of bravery and held an image in my mind of them kissing. I paced the upstairs hallway of my house, back and forth, back and forth, chanting, gathering energy, feeling a sort of furry electricity running up and down my arms and threw my hands, until — astonishingly — there was a shudder of lightning and a loud crack of thunder.

I couldn’t believe it. Was it a coincidence? Or had I somehow summoned it? I still don’t know.

A phone call from Molly later that night confirmed what I thought must be true: yes, they had kissed. We compared notes on the times, and they lined up. The spell had worked.

As I got older, my witchcraft became less about trying to cause specific outcomes and more focused on helping me become a more purposeful and compassionate person. And while I still do rituals of the more traditional sort, my magic has become something I carry with me in all facets of my life.

I was doing magic at the day job I had for 14 years, where I got to oversee photography projects, and placed a figure of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon and female independence, in my cubicle.

On my altar at home, I keep a copy of the United States Constitution next to my candles and talismans, as a way of asking Spirit to protect our country from nefarious forces.

I’m doing magic when I march in the streets for causes I believe in. (The proliferation of “HEX THE PATRIARCHY” placards fills me with particularly witchly glee).

“Witch” is one of the words I now use to describe myself, but its meaning varies depending on context. At any given time, it can signify that I am a feminist; someone who celebrates freedom for all and who will fight against injustice; a person who values intuition and self-expression; or a kindred spirit with other people who favor the unconventional, the underground and the uncanny.

I use the word “witch” to signify both my Pagan spiritual beliefs — that nature is holy, thus the planet we live on and the bodies we live in are all sacred — and my role as a complex woman who speaks her mind, behavior that is still often met by society with judgment or disdain.

I’m a witch when I’m celebrating the change of the seasons with my coven sisters, as well as when I stand against the destruction of the environment. I’m a witch when I’m giving thanks to the sun, moon and stars, and when I’m working to subvert the corrosive narrative of sexism, racism, queer-phobia and xenophobia.

Like many such epithets, the word “witch” is loaded and coded. I’m thoughtful about how I use it because it is a word that carries weight, even as it liberates. Whether we’re speaking of literal witch hunts or metaphorical smears (just Google any female politician’s name alongside the word “witch” and you’ll see what I mean), it is a word that has been linked to centuries of misogyny and oppression.

In occult-speak, there is a term for a type of magic that I love: apotropaic. It describes workings or magical items that are administered to ward off evil. Sometimes specific jewelry is worn, like a piece of obsidian or other black stone; other times, reflective objects like mirrors are hung in home windows to reflect bad energies back out and away.

More often than not, the protective devices use aspects of the very terrors they are averting as part of their design, which is why gargoyles are often on the facades of buildings and Halloween masks are worn to scare off spooky spirits.

By embodying the things we think will hurt us, somehow we feel safer: a creepy costume, a scary statue, intentionally dreadful décor. Sometimes all it takes is an utterance, like addressing yourself with a monstrous name.

I may not be able to lay my hands on every suffering being and take away their pain the way my grandma Trudy seemed to. But by calling myself and my heroes witches, I’m shape-shifting a fearsome word into one that signifies strength, stewardship and a fierce, open heart.

And that is a love spell in itself.

Pam Grossman is the host of “The Witch Wave” podcast and the author of “Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power,” from which this essay is adapted.

Rites of Passage is a weekly-ish column from Styles and The Times Gender Initiative. For information on how to submit an essay, click here. To read past essays, check out this page.

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studentsofshield · 8 years ago

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2015 Comics Holiday Gift Guide Part 2 - All the Rest

By Vincent Faust

(This was originally published on December 14, 2015)

Everyone loves Marvel and DC’s movies and television shows. But maybe you’re looking for something different. Not simply some source material (all the sources are better though, just like novel to film adaptations), but something wholly original that you can’t get anywhere else.

Comics are a singular medium with its own advantages and disadvantages in conveying art and telling a story, just like prose, music, film, video games, etc. If you ask a creator or fan of comics, the motto is that this is the medium with an infinite budget. On a surface level, the only constraints are an artist’s illustration abilities. The special effects are free. Superheroes can fight aliens in space. Dragons can romp around a battlefield of thousands of soldiers. There are no bounds, only as far as imagination can push us.

Here are some more colorful suggestions to show off how comic books work, the heights they can reach, imaginative independent books and some low key Marvel gems.

10. Understanding Comics

You love the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Nolan’s Batman films. You would love to get into comic books. The only problem is you don’t fully understand how to read these weird picture books. What do you do with double-stacked left side panels? Are Bendis’ dozen speech bubbles confusing you? Are you always hung up on figuring out the progression of time in comics storytelling? I don’t fault you. Comics can be incredibly intimidating, even putting aside the “volume 6 issue 21” and crossover/tie-in messes that plague superhero books.

You need to pick up Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Think of the most fun and informative textbook you’ve ever used in school. Then add character to it and make it about a topic you give a shit about. That is Understanding Comics. McCloud’s book is the go to for both industry newcomers and veteran academics. It belongs on everyone’s shelf.

McCloud wrote two sequels, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. They’re just as informative and interesting as the original. However, they are less of a 101 and delve into the specific advances of their respective times. Reinventing attempts to cover digital comics, but from the perspective of 2000 when it was written. Some of it doesn’t hold up as well.

11. All-Star Superman

Do you think Superman is boring? He’s an alien that we can’t even relate to. He has dozens of powers that would be sufficient by themselves on any other superhero. He wears underwear over his tights. His secret identity concealing glasses are dumb. He reversed time by flying around the planet. He’s in a shitty Zach Snyder movie. Not even Bryan Singer could make him work. He belongs in the past where he comes from. He isn’t cool like Batman and Spider-Man. Right?

Well, guess what? You are objectively wrong. Superman is the forefather to all modern superheroes. He was the big leap (literally) that fused Greek mythic heroes and early 1900s pulp heroes. Hercules and Odysseus meets The Shadow and The Phantom. And he isn’t an archaic idea that should have been left in the 1940s.

One of the greatest comic writers of all time, Grant Morrison, said this about the big blue boy scout,

“Because it all derived from Superman. I mean, I love all the characters, but Superman is just this perfect human pop-culture distillation of a really basic idea. He’s a good guy. He loves us. He will not stop in defending us. How beautiful is that? He’s like a sci-fi Jesus. He’ll never let you down. And only in fiction can that guy actually exist, because real guys will always let you down one way or another. We actually made up an idea that beautiful. That’s just cool to me. We made a little paper universe where all of the above is true.”

Supes is about our idealism, everything we can and should be. He’s an alien stronger than all of us, but he chooses to serve us and desperately wants to be one of us.

Morrison wrote a twelve issue deconstruction of The Man of Steel called All-Star Superman. Each issue covers another part of his character, whether it’s his love life or his villains. It is a nearly immaculate piece of comic book storytelling. Morrison’s meta writing is complimented perfectly by Frank Quitely’s pencils. If you read this book and still think Superman is dumb, fine.

The sad thing is that for whatever reason, DC has struggled with putting out solid Superman stories in his ongoing titles for the past fifteen or twenty years. I attribute it to them not understanding the essence of their own character. They’re constantly trying to make him edgy or tear him down. He is currently missing his powers in one book. Why?

12. Multiversity

Whaaaaaaaat?

All-Star Superman is actually one of Grant Morrison’s more approachable works. He is more known for metafictional stories that make your mind hurt. He does a lot of drugs. Allegedly he was abducted by aliens. Or contacted by a spiritual force. I don’t really know and neither does he. His art is usually better for it though.

In 1990, he had Animal Man acknowledge the readers and freak out. The readers freaked the hell out too. I almost wish I had not said that and spoiled the moment. But I kind of don’t care. It’s also a “I am your father” kind of moment that everyone in comics knows about whether they’ve read it.

His most recent big metafictional piece is called The Multiversity. Here’s the concept: each issue is an individual done-in-one story presenting a different alternate dimension, all drawn by different artists. The issues are book ended by The Multiversity #1 and 2, connecting the story. At some point in one issue, a character will be reading a comic book that showcases the adventures of the previous issue.

The Just is about a generation of spoiled superhero grandchildren obsessed with fame. Pax Americana is Morrison’s take on Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which is to say a deconstruction of the Charlton Comics characters DC bought in the 80s. Mastermen is an alternate history Earth where Superman (now called Overman) lands in Nazi Germany and is raised by Hitler. Ultra Comics is the most meta of them all, covering a fictional superhero created by “memesmiths” to defeat a “Hostile Independent Thought-Form.” Yes. It is that weird. It all works though. And by the end, an inter-dimensional team of heroes defends the entire multiverse.

13. Batman: Noel

Not much to say here. Batman: Noel is fitting for the season. Something with a theme to actually fit the Christmas spirit for those who are Christian or enjoy the celebration and aesthetic regardless.

Lee Bermejo writes and draws this story loosely based on Charles Dickens’ evergreen novel A Christmas Carol. Catwoman, Superman, and the Joker all play the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future respectively. Bermejo’s art is really pretty. He’s otherwise known for original graphic novels on the Joker and Lex Luthor. Both worth looking into if you like Noel.

14. Saga

Brian K. Vaughan already got a spot earlier in the list for Doctor Strange: The Oath. Here is his mega hit Saga, mentioned in that entry as well. Saga just hit a magic vein in the industry that catapulted it to stardom. All the pieces are fabulous.

Brian K. Vaughan is a gifted writer that can flesh out worlds as seen in Y, Ex Machina and Lost. Fiona Staples came from relative obscurity and turned into a top three artist overnight on the book (and she colors it too!).

It’s ultimately a love story. Alana and Marko are from opposing races that have been at war forever. To complicate things further, they have a baby they have to take care of. Part of its appeal is the crazy shit they get into. A race of aliens have televisions for heads. There is an infamous splash page of a dragon fellating itself.

You can get the first trade here. There is an oversized hardcover that collects the first 18 issues (three trades). It’s worth it for Fiona’s beautiful art alone. However, you are going to want to keep reading the series as soon as you finish it and the second hardcover probably won’t drop for a while. So here are volumes 2, 3, 4, and 5.

15. Ms. Marvel

Media representation and diversity have increasingly become a focus in media studies and the discussion has become an increasingly mainstream topic every day. Comic books have unfortunately been pretty lackluster on these fronts for decades.

In the 1930s through mid 1950s, there was some diversity in comics. Girls read Supergirl as much as boys read Superman. Romance comics were popular with women, while Archie, Betty and Veronica were a co-ed teenage sensation. There were some problems from the start, like most things in the naive post-war era. A lot of the different genres, books, etc were explicitly gendered. The audience was there though.

Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent hysteria not only drastically shrunk the market. It also censored entire genres and pushed entire demographics out of the medium. For comparison, Japanese comics never experienced this censorship rallying cry and people of all genders, ages, etc read a wide array of manga.

The lack of a significant female audience and the infatilization of the medium (no drugs, no sex, no suicide, no race issues, no vampires, etc) led to a “young male” stigma in the medium. Comics were “for boys.” The late 1980s and 1990s was probably the worst point of this, when artists ruled the industry and just wanted to draw scantily clad women.

The late 2000s/early 2010s second (or third? 1. Cerebus, Usagi 2. 90s Image) explosion of independent comics has led to a diversification on both sides of the dollar. Marvel and DC have been trying to catch up in the past few years. Marvel particularly has made major strides with characters like Miles Morales. Sam Wilson, Jessica Drew and Carol Danvers have also exploded in popularity and exposure.

The breakout new character of this trend by far is Kamala Khan. When Carol Danvers gave up her Ms. Marvel moniker to become Captain Marvel, the Muslim, Pakistani-American, Jersey City fangirl Kamala took up her idol’s old title after being exposed to the terrigen mists.

Her writer, G. Willow Wilson, is a Muslim herself who has been praised for her believable teenage dialogue. Kamala’s signature artist, Adrian Alphona, made his name doing BKV’s teenage superhero book Runaways. Marvel and DC have introduced fairly few long term successful characters in the past decade or two. New superheroes cropped up every week in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Kamala may be the biggest recent breakout for Marvel.

You can read her series across, four, trade, paperbacks. There are also two oversized hardcovers collecting the same material. Her series has continued post-Secret Wars and hopefully will for a long time.

16. Noir Comics

Ed Brubaker wrote Captain America for years (as detailed in this list). He also did other work for Marvel and DC on Iron Fist, Batman, etc. All of those stories are great and I’m sure he enjoyed doing them.

However, Brubaker’s true calling is independent noir comics. Hollywood doesn’t make many noir movies anymore. There are some neo-noir films that capture similar tones and aesthetics – a personal favorite of mine being Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. However, if you want sultry broads, men in suits and that dark, expressionist look, you’ll need to turn to comic books for your fix. That’s not a bad thing though because Brubaker and a small circle of artist buddies have pumped out a healthy library of noir comics.

I’m going to highlight Velvet because it reunites Brubaker with Steve Epting, the primary artist from his early Cap work. Velvet is a simple secretary on the surface. But she’s secretly the most dangerous woman alive. Isn’t that a juicy premise?

There are two volumes of Velvet out. Brubaker’s usual collaborator on these books is Sean Phillips. The pair have produced straight classics together. The Fade Out is a highlight of their oeuvre. It covers the seedy side of Golden Age Hollywood.

17. Hawkguy

Hawkeye is a character with a deep history in the Marvel Universe. He started off as a villain of Iron Man’s under the influence of Black Widow. He later joined the Avengers as part of the famous “Quirky Quartet” when Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man and Wasp ditched the team, leaving Cap with the responsibility of drafting a squad from scratch.

Clint Barton for many years was seen (and saw himself) as a B-rate Captain America, always under his shadow. In the 1980s, Barton split off and led the West Coast Avengers brand extension. Around this time he interrupted his serial bachelor streak and got married to Bobbi Morse aka Mockingbird. This pairing is basically a parody/homage of Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance (aka Green Arrow and Black Canary). Hawkeye led the Thunderbolts in the late 1990s for a while.

In the revolutionary Avengers Disassembled storyline, Scarlet Witch goes cuckoo and in the process Hawkeye sacrifices his life to save others. He comes back to life, but audiences aren’t aware of this for a while. He flips back and forth between the aliases of Echo and Ronin. Oh, and while he was dead a teenage hero named Kate Bishop takes on the Hawkeye mantle as a Young Avenger.

In 2012, Matt Fraction and David Aja start a Hawkeye solo title. But, it’s not a solo book. The story tracks the street level adventures of Clint and Kate as the Hawkeyes. Mostly due to Aja’s simplistic art, their tenure is already a classic and the best thing to come out of Marvel in years. Issue 11, Pizza is My Business, is one of the greatest single issues of all time. It is entirely silent and told through the perspective of Lucky, Clint and Kate’s dog.

For whatever reason, Marvel is offering a bunch of different formats to read the book in. You can get four trade paperbacks, two hardcovers or one omnibus.

18. Bitch Planet

With Ms. Marvel, I talked about media representation. Kamala tackles these problems by simply existing. Young Muslim girls, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the typical cookie cut out of “comic fan,” can see people that look like them in comics and feel more welcome in the community. There are scientific studies that show that representation affects ones self-esteem and other factors.

However, some of the best media directly critiques and tears down these kinds of problems. In comic books, an example of this is Kelly Sue Deconnick’s Bitch Planet.

Deconnick is the writer responsible for evolving Carol Danvers from Ms. Marvel to Captain Marvel. Carol’s getting a MCU film with her new moniker, so something worked there. Her stint on Captain Marvel gave rise to the Carol Corps, what Deconnick and Danvers’ new fans call themselves.

Part of Deconnick’s success is her extensive self promotion and audience interaction on Tumblr. By the way, she’s married to Matt Fraction. Just like her husband, KSD has left Marvel behind to work on more personal endeavors (and ones she gets to actually make quality money from).

Her other series, Pretty Deadly, has also been well received. It’s Bitch Planet though which has people getting tattoos inspired by it. It’s set in a dystopian future where misogyny is rampant and ingrained in the laws. “Noncompliant” women get sent to a giant prison in space. Deconnick uses this send-up of 1970s women in prison exploitation films to examine and critique issues of gender, sexuality, race, body image, etc.

19. Silver Surfer

#BasedMikeAllred.

Mike Allred is known for his 1960s pop art style comic art. Here he is doing his thing on Silver Surfer, a character that complements the style well. He gets to draw Galactus’ funky helmet, aliens and weird intergalactic tidbits.

Dan Slott, the longtime writer of Amazing Spider-Man, handles the writing and essentially does his spin on the Doctor Who formula. Norin Radd serves as the good Doctor, while he gets Dawn Greenwood as his companion. They explore space together.

It’s a great little series. There are fifteen issues and three trades. You can fine them here, here and here. This series is also continuing with the same team in the new Marvel relaunch.

20. Fun Home

Most everything on this list was superheroes or “genre” fiction. What if I want something based in reality? Something autobiographical? Something that will make me feel empty inside?

Then you are looking for Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Independent comics have a long history with personal stories. “Autobio” books exploded in the late 1980s in the first boom of indie comics interest. Names like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar stand out from this era. Hell, Paul Giamatti played Pekar in the Oscar nominated American Splendor biopic. There’s something about someone letting you into their life that is so captivating. Especially if their life fucking sucks. These are often told in black and white, with deceivingly simple cartooning. Art Spiegelman, Eddie Campbell, Phoebe Gloeckner, David B, Marjane Satrapi, Jeffrey Brown, Craig Thompson and others have all made their livings telling their peculiar personal tales.

Alison Bechdel started her career doing a strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. It was a mix of soap drama and topical commentary featuring a bunch of lesbians (as the name implies). Bechdel’s strip has been overshadowed by the “Bechdel test” A proposed test to test gender biases in media, particularly film. The test asks whether a work has at least two women who talk about something together other than a man. Theoretically, whether a film passes or fails has a judgment on whether it is in a way sexist. Unfortunately, the test has been broadly applied to label works as sexist or even make value/quality judgments.

Bechdel has transitioned from strip cartooning to an author of autobio graphic novels. Fun Home parallels her coming of age and coming out story with her father’s homosexuality, pedophilia and suicide. It sounds tragic and twisted. It is. And it is one of the best graphic novels of all time. It has also been adapted as a Broadway musical, which is currently running.

Bechdel has put out a sequel of sorts, Are You My Mother?, which covers her mother instead of her father. It’s still her work and spectacular, but doesn’t stand up to Fun Home.

I highly recommend www.instocktrades.com. They will offer almost all of these books cheaper than Amazon or brick and mortar stores will. Some of them might not be in stock on Amazon, or more obscure and harder to find in stores, and IST will also be more likely to have them available. Over fifty bucks, free shipping.

10. Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics 11. All-Star Superman 12. Multiversity 13. Batman: Noel 14. Saga – Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 / HC Vol 1 15. Ms. Marvel – Vol 1, 2, 3, 4 / HC Vol 1, 2 16. Noir Comics – Velvet Vol 1, 2, The Fade Out Vol 1, 2, 3 17. Hawkeye Vol 1, 2, 3, 4 / HC Vol 1, 2 / Omnibus 18. Bitch Planet, Pretty Deadly 19. Silver Surfer – Vol 1, 2, 3 20. Fun Home, Are You My Mother?

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