#ive gotten a taste of the forbidden fruit and by god i can't go back to cold turkey

[one-joe-spoopy]

I need someone to bounce ideas off of!

Like specifically headcanons and my obsession with making supernatural creatures out of men.

More specifically making a monster out of a particular man.

Even more specifically making a monster out of a certain thief.

(it's Nureyev. Supernatural creature Peter Nureyev.)

I mean, think of it. Guy's got no official records, history, address, relationships or even a name to go off of, but he's done enough to quote a ridiculous number of crimes and the criminals who carried them out to anyone he wants. No one's ever caught him since two separate incidents like a decade and a half apart, and he has no place anywhere. What else was I supposed to think?

So I think he's like...well, I don't want to say soulless, but something close to soulless. Not alive enough to be too worried about a lot of things, but not dead enough to be completely flippant towards his actions. (I'm not sure what to call him. He's not a shade because he's got too much personality to simply be a shadow of his living self, but at the same time he's not quite lost enough to be a spirit.) I would like to call him a boogeyman seeing as he has a thousand names across dozens of planets and there's no real way to find him, but that feels too...storybook? Fairytale?

I'll stick to spirit for now. He's not entirely there and people don't really remember him unless he wants them to, which is both a blessing and a curse as a thief. (This also causes Vespa to mistrust him even more than she normally does because he can just disappear if someone comes along or looks at him, because Vespa used to do the same, while she's left lost as to whether it was her own mind or actually Ransom there taunting her)

But you may be wondering, if Peter Nureyev can just... disappear, for a lack of a better word, how the hell did Juno remember him enough to recognize him later? Well, the answer's simple: he wanted Juno to remember him. Sure it's difficult to always stay tethered, but it's easier with a facade to cling to, to play-act as until the goal is reached. And the goal was reached, but he didn't want Juno to forget him. Whether he was lonely or just wanted to mess with Juno a little, neither he nor I will know.

And he can scramble screens if he's not careful. Just straight turns them to static and snow, maybe interspersed by someone's voice layered into the noise. He can also tune radios and listening devices to his voice, his own special frequency so to speak, and it's good for a quick way to stall. Also he's hard to catch, because how on earth do you catch something that doesn't even exist on the same plane of reality as you at times?

However, speaking of not catching what doesn't exist in the same reality, shouldn't that mean that he could have escaped Miasma? The answer is, well, not really. He gave her a name and a mask—thief it may have been, but was still his name—and for all that the powers that be are concerned he's essentially bound himself to a form until he stops answering to it (but he won't, for Juno's sake, because he got the detective into this mess and he was going to get them out of there so help him god). The events of the show largely progress as usual, except Peter isn't sure how much Juno actually saw in his head or whether Juno's even telling the truth about the memories. Juno still loses his eye (and the special ability he has in this supernatural world that they're operating in, which I'll talk about in another post) and leaves him and Peter spends the whole of s2 in pain, with a broken heart and wondering just what Juno saw in his head—aside from Mag—that might have driven him away.

He still doubts himself when he joins the CB, but it helps soothe the paranoia about losing his skills as a thief when his resume is accepted (yes I will die on the hill of Buddy actually putting out an ad for a place on her ship and Peter agonizing on just what the hell he should put in order to convince her that yes, I'm a person, a real person, absolutely nothing else I could be haha). Ofc all the soothing goes away when Juno and Rita join and then Peter's waiting for him to call him out, to tell Buddy that he's not what he's claiming to be (although Vespa suspects him, she definitely does, Peter's just the opposite side of the same coin) and that he's a mess, a screw-up, a hazard to them and their goals.

Does Peter still have debts to pay? Yes, yes he does. But I don't want Dark Matters bursting in and ruining everything, so his debts simply loom over his head like a Sword of Damocles, hanging on by a single thread made up of the billions of creds he's paid them over the years of his very, very long life, and will continue paying them until something finally pins him down and kills him, or they die in a blaze (and Peter knows death will come for him far before his creditors). Why does he owe debts? Hm, I'm not sure myself. I just know he owes a lot of money and will continue paying it off until his dying breath.

But anyways, Juno and Rita join the crew and Juno's a changed person now and Peter doesn't know how to reconcile his feelings for the Juno before and the Juno now, and it's eating him alive not knowing.