#just a few thought following the last episode of wandavision

[gavillain]

Agatha All Along season finale discussion because AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Spoilers on the road ahead!

So a LOT happened in this two parter, so I'm just gonna hit the major points in order...

So despite my thinking that two of the Salem Seven survived because of the number of sword fall sounds last episode, they are apparently all dead. Which, y'know what, I don't mind. They weren't really meant to be actual characters, mostly just Nazgul-esque opponents to add some extra stakes, and having Lilia successful destroy them all with her sacrifice is the most earned ending for them.

When we get to the final trial, it's more or less the three remaining witches stuck in a room having to resolve their purposes on the Road. For Jen, we had her unbinding herself and the reveal that Agatha was the one who bound her. Admittedly, I kinda feel like that reveal was underdone, and it mostly just seemed like a quick asspull to resolve Jen's storyline at the eleventh hour. However, I really felt for Jen and the catharsis of unbinding herself, so I can't complain too terribly much.

Secondly, we resolve Billy's ambitions to restore Tommy, and this one, I was generally more favorable about than Jen's. Billy basically helped put Tommy into the body of another boy who died prematurely, one who was being drowned in an apparently very toxic environment. In the comics, Tommy was in and out of juvie all his life, and the Young Avengers find him in a supermax prison because of his powers. So, I'm assuming Thomas Shepherd, the boy whose body Billy hijacks, is in juvie or some correctional facility, and that's where we're gonna pick up with him in Vision Quest. Also, Agatha's line about "sometimes boys just die" was a fucking ARROW TO THE HEART, especially with the backstory in the following episode.

Then for Agatha, she completes the road's test by growing a sapling that she finds in her locket holding Nicholas's hair and emerges from the road back in Westview, where Rio is waiting for her. And DAMN was the final battle against Rio one of the coolest in Marvel. With Billy going FULL Wiccan mode and Agatha siphoning off his power but not enough to kill him. It was your standard Marvel final battle, but I really enjoyed the spectacle of it and how insurmountable of a foe Rio felt like. Agatha almost betraying Billy so that she can live but then changing her mind and sacrificing her life for his was such a powerful moment of full circle for her. After everything she's done to other witches and to Billy's own mother, for her to finally embrace death (and LITERALLY embrace the kiss of Death) was super powerful and showed how the road genuinely did change her. Personally, I usually hate redemption arcs, but this one, I actually really liked and supported because it wasn't about Agatha giving up her sense of self to be someone else, it was about making a choice out of love in the moment. I thought it was a beautiful way to resolve the story, and I was wondering what the heck else they were going to do with the last episode.

And then we got the reveal that I saw a few people guessing that Billy created the Witches' Road and that Agatha had never been on it, and I think that was a really well deserved reveal that hit for me exactly as it was intended. I loved that Billy created it because he has "the same tell" as Wanda with WandaVision. He made this grand fantasy adventureland, and that's SO cool! He, too, apparently is capable of spontaneous creation like Wanda, and I'm curious how they're going to tie this in with the MCU lore about the Scarlet Witch. In the comics, Billy is the Demiurge, and I'm interested in finding out if Marvel is going to bring in that concept or if they're going to do something new with the prophecy of Scarlet Witch. Maybe a secret hidden verse to the prophecy? We saw Billy's statue in Mount Wundagore in Multiverse of Madness, so maybe old Chthon knew a lil' somethin' else. I also liked the reveal that the Witches Road was a con that Agatha used to lure unsuspecting witches into giving her their powers. That was clever, as was the way that it tied in with her backstory.

SPEAKING OF, that backstory with Nicholas Scratch was the most heartbreaking thing, and I loved every minute of it. Her bond with Nicholas and the way that she showed genuine humanity to him was a side to Agatha we only saw the periphery of in her relationship with Billy, so seeing it fully realized was SO powerful and so well done. Rio giving her a good seven(ish?) extra years with Nicholas also speaks volumes because in Rio's mind, she was doing Agatha a HUGE favor that violated the cosmic order and to some extent, she DID because it showed Agatha a purpose beyond just power. However, it also probably hurt her worse than just taking Nicholas upon birth. She gave Agatha years to love and get attached to her son, and that, I'm sure, made the wound of losing him that much deeper (and Kathryn Hahn's acting with those screams of anguish upon finding Nicky dead were SOUL CRUSHING - she KILLED it). So, yeah, interesting that it was such a double edged sword. I also thought the twist that Nicholas and Agatha wrote the Ballade together as their little song and it eventually spread because of him singing it to other witches was REALLY clever and REALLY powerful.

And, finally, Agatha is back as a ghost, and she's sticking around Billy as his spirit guide/mentor, which I really like. I'm sure some people are going to take umbrage at Marvel cheating death again, but this is a show that racked up bodies of major characters left and right, and Agatha being dead and a spirit I'm sure is going to have big changes for her and her power and characterization going forward. Plus from Evanora Harkness, it's an established part of the lore. So, for me, it works, and I like it. I also like the touch of her looking more like her comics counterpart with gray hair in ghost form, and I'm honestly REALLY excited to see Billy and Agatha as a dynamic duo continue on in future Marvel properties.

Overall, I LOVED Agatha All Along. It was an incredible journey, and it was the most I've enjoyed a Marvel property in awhile. I feel optimistic about the future of this particular corner of the MCU, and I'm so glad I got to go with everyone down the Witches Road :)

[alina-vanille]

Humanity & Superheroes, or The moment I fell in love with Monica Rambeau

I love WandaVision. One of the best things about it, of course, is that it is about my favorite couple in the MCU. Wanda and Vision both are severely underused characters in the movies and I’m like many others was thrilled for them to get their own show.

And what I also dearly love about this show is that it introduced or re-introduced some amazing characters: I didn’t care much about Randall Park’s Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man - he was a great comic relief, but that was it - in this show though I’ve learned to really appreciate his character and looking forward to seeing him again; then there is Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis who was for me one of the (very) few enjoyable elements about the first two Thor movies. I also fell in love with Wanda’s kids - with just a couple episodes these two dudes managed to win us all over. 

But the true revelation in this show for me was Monica.

I have to confess, I didn’t much like the idea of Monica’s character from the moment I learned that the little daughter of Captain Marvel’s best friend Maria is going to become a superhero, much like her idealised aunt Carol. 

I was underwhelmed because I imagined Monica to become just another generic supergirl, much like Captain Marvel herself, who is going to fly around glowing pretty lights, kicking ass while shouting “wooo!” I imagined her to be a characterless fangirl, whose sole purpose in life will be acquiring superpowers just so she could join her boring aunt Carol, so that they could fly and glow together. 

Well, I was wrong in my assumptions. And not just because this grown up Monica we are introduced to in the show doesn’t seem to be all that thrilled about Captain Marvel, but because Monica is a wholesome, independent character with her own story, motivation and agency. And because she is deeply human - something, I felt, Captain Marvel was lacking. 

Monica as a character is first of all established as a human being, not a superhero. 

I quickly saw that and Monica became more likeable with each scene she was in. It was clear she was going to get her superpowers at some point in the show, but it was fine, because there was already a human connection between a character and a viewer, which made waiting for Monica getting her powers and abilities thrilling instead of: “right, here we go again”.

But the moment I think I fell in love with Monica (and loved the story of WandaVision even more) was this scene in episode 6, where Monica tells Jimmy and Darcy that she is going to do whatever it is in her power to help Wanda, because she (Monica) knew exactly how Wanda felt. 

“I know what Wanda is feeling. And I won’t stop until I help her”.

This scene rings even more clear and true after episode 8, where we finally could clearly see for ourselves how alone and desperate Wanda truly felt.

Monica felt that too. And what I absolutely love is that her motivation for going back to the Hex wasn’t to just play the hero and kick a bad guy’s ass, but to save another human being with whom she truly sympathised with. 

More than anything Wanda needed her family, a friend - she felt so completely alone and desperate. And because Monica’s own feelings following the loss of her mother, mirrored Wanda’s own, she decides to go against all odds and help Wanda, because Monica needs that help as well.  

In this light Monica getting her powers feels completely deserved, so instead of exasperation you actually feel justified that such an amazing character is going to be a new superhero in your favorite franchise. Because you first of all love and admire Monica as a human being, her superpowers is just a cool bonus. 

I sincerely hope that following WandaVision Monica and Wanda are going to become great friends and might even share adventures together.

Also, I may be unfair to Captain Marvel, but I can’t help contrasting her with Monica. I couldn’t care less if there was another CM movie, because her character just left me so cold. 

Wanda’s and Monica’s stories in the WV clearly show that connecting with the heroes on a human level is so much more important than them having cool-looking superpowers.

[lokiondisneyplus]

'Loki' takes over: Tom Hiddleston on his new TV series and a decade in the MCU

Ten years after Hiddleston first chose chaos in Thor, Marvel’s fan favorite God of Mischief is going even bigger with his time-bending Disney+ show.

Tom Hiddleston is Loki, and he is burdened with glorious purpose: After playing Thor's puckish brother for over a decade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no one understands the mercurial Asgardian God of Mischief as well as the actor. He can teach an entire seminar on Loki if given the opportunity — which he actually did during pre-production on his forthcoming Disney+ show. In conversation, Hiddleston quotes lines from his MCU debut, 2011's Thor, almost verbatim, and will playfully correct you if you mistakenly refer to Asgard's Rainbow Bridge as the Bifrost, which is the portal that connects Loki and Thor's homeworld to the Nine Realms, including Midgard, a.k.a. Earth. "Well, the Bifrost technically is the energy that runs through the bridge," he says with a smile. "But nine points to Gryffindor!" And when he shows up to the photo shoot for this very digital cover, he hops on a call with our photo editor to pitch ways the concept could be even more Loki, like incorporating the flourish the trickster does whenever magically conjuring something. The lasting impression is that playing Loki isn't just a paycheck.

"Rather than ownership, it's a sense of responsibility I feel to give my best every time and do the best I can because I feel so grateful to be a part of what Marvel Studios has created," the 40-year-old Brit tells EW over Zoom a few days after the shoot and a week out from Thor's 10th anniversary. "I just want to make sure I've honored that responsibility with the best that I can give and the most care and thought and energy."

After appearing in three Thor movies and three Avengers, Hiddleston is bringing that passion to his first solo Marvel project, Loki, the House of Ideas' third Disney+ series following the sitcom pastiche WandaVision and the topical The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Led by head writer Michael Waldron (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Heels), the six-episode drama sees Hiddleston's shapeshifting agent of chaos step out from behind his brother's shadow and into the spotlight for a timey-wimey, sci-fi adventure that aims to get to the bottom of who Loki really is. "I wanted to explore slightly more complex character questions," says Waldron. "It's not just good versus bad. Is anybody all good? Is anybody all bad? What makes a hero, a hero? A villain, a villain?"  

Even though Loki — who loves sowing mayhem with his illusion magic and shapeshifting, all with a major chip on his shoulder — has never been one for introspection, the idea of building an entire show around him was a no-brainer for Marvel. When asked why Loki was one of the studio's first Disney+ shows, Marvel president Kevin Feige replies matter-of-factly, "More Hiddleston, more Loki." First introduced as Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) envious brother in Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki went full Big Bad in 2012's The Avengers. That film cemented the impish rogue as one of the shared universe's fan favorites, thanks to Hiddleston's ability to make him deliciously villainous yet charismatic and, most importantly, empathetic. The character's popularity is one of the reasons he's managed to avoid death many times.

"He's been around for thousands of years. He had all sorts of adventures," says Feige. "Wanting to fill in the blanks and see much more of Loki's story [was] the initial desire [for the series]."

The Loki we meet on the show is not the one who fought the Avengers in 2012 and evolved into an antihero in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok before meeting his demise at the hands of the mad titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) in 2018's Avengers: Infinity War. Instead, we'll be following a Loki from a branched timeline (a variant, if you will) after he stole the Tesseract following his thwarted New York invasion and escaped S.H.I.E.L.D. custody during the time heist featured in Avengers: Endgame. In other words, this Loki hasn't gone through any sort of redemption arc. He's still the charming yet petulant god who firmly believes he's destined to rule and has never gotten his due.

Premiering June 9, Loki begins with the Time Variance Authority — a bureaucratic organization tasked with safeguarding the proper flow of time — arresting the Loki Variant seen in Endgame because they want his help fixing all of the timeline problems he caused while on the run with the Tesseract. So there will be time travel, and a lot more of it than in Endgame. As Loki makes his way through his own procedural, he'll match wits with new characters including Owen Wilson's Agent Mobius, a brilliant TVA analyst, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Judge Renslayer. The question in early episodes is whether Loki will help them or take over.

"One of the things Kevin Feige led on was, 'I think we should find a way of exploring the parts of Loki that are independent of his relationship with Thor,' or see him in a duality or in relationship with others, which I thought was very exciting," says Hiddleston, who also serves as an executive producer on the show. "So the Odinson saga, that trilogy of films, still has its integrity, and we don't have to reopen it and retell it."

Yet, in order to understand where Loki is going, it's important to see where he came from.

Hiddleston can't believe how long he and Loki have been connected. "I've been playing this character for 11 years," he says. "Which is the first time I have said that sentence, I realize, and it [blows] my mind. I don't know what percentage that is exactly of my 40 years of being alive, but it's substantial."

His time as Loki actually goes a bit further back, to 2009 — a year after Robert Downey Jr. big banged the MCU into existence with Iron Man — when he auditioned for Thor. It's no secret that Hiddleston initially went in for the role of the titular God of Thunder, but Feige and director Kenneth Branagh thought his natural charm and flexibility as an actor made him better suited for the movie's damaged antagonist. "Tom gave you an impression that he could be ready for anything, performance-wise," says Branagh, who had previously worked with him on a West End revival of Checkov's Ivanov and the BBC series Wallander. "Tom has a wild imagination, so does Loki. He's got a mischievous sense of humor and he was ready to play. It felt like he had a star personality, but he was a team player."

Hiddleston fully immersed himself in the character. Outside of studying Loki's history in the Marvel Comics, he also researched how Loki and the Trickster God archetype appeared across mythology and different cultures. "He understood that he was already in something special [and] it was a special character in a special part of that early moment in the life of the Marvel universe where [he] also needed to step up in other ways," says Branagh, who was impressed by the emotional depth Hiddleston brought to the part, especially when it came to how isolated Loki felt in the Asgardian royal family.  

There was a lot riding on that first Thor feature. For one, no one knew if audiences would immediately latch onto a Shakespearean superhero movie partially set on an alien planet populated by the Norse Gods of legend. Second, it was integral to Feige's plans for the shared universe. Loki was supposed to be the main villain in The Avengers, which would not only mirror how Earth's mightiest heroes joined forces in 1963's Avengers #1 but also give Thor a believable reason for teaming up with Iron Man, Captain America (Chris Evans), and the rest of the capes. Feige first clued Hiddleston into those larger plans when the actor was in L.A. before Thor started shooting.

"I was like, 'Excuse me?' Because he was already three, four steps ahead," says Hiddleston. "That took me a few minutes to process, because I didn't quite realize how it just suddenly had a scope. And being cast as Loki, I realized, was a very significant moment for me in my life, and was going to remain. The creative journey was going to be so exciting."

Hiddleston relished the opportunity to go full villain in Avengers, like in the scene where Loki ordered a crowd to kneel before him outside a German opera house: "It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation," says the Machiavellian god. "The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

"I just knew that in the structure of that film, I had to lean into his role as a pure antagonist," Hiddleston recalls. "What I always found curious and complex about the way Loki is written in Avengers, is that his status as an antagonist comes from the same well of not belonging and being marginalized and isolated in the first Thor film. Loki now knows he has no place in Asgard."

Loki did find a place within the audience's hearts, though. Feige was "all in" on Hiddleston as his Loki from the beginning, but even he couldn't predict how much fans would love him. Feige recalls the reaction at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con: "Did we know that after he was the villain in two movies, he would be bringing thousands of people to their feet in Hall H, in costume, chanting his name? No, that was above and beyond the plan that we were hoping for and dreaming of." It was a dream Feige first got an inkling of a year earlier during the Avengers press tour when a Russian fan slipped past security, snuck into Mark Ruffalo's car, and asked the Hulk actor to give Hiddleston a piece of fan art she created. "That was one of the early signs there was much more happening with this quote-unquote villain."  

Despite that popularity, the plan was to kill Loki off in 2013's Thor: The Dark World, but the studio reversed course after test audiences refused to believe he actually died fighting the Dark Elves. Alas, he couldn't out-illusion death forever. After returning in Taika Waititi's colorful and idiosyncratic Thor: Ragnarok, Hiddleston's character perished for real in the opening moments of Infinity War. In typical Loki fashion, before Thanos crushed his windpipe, he delivered a defiant speech that indicated he'd finally made peace with the anger he felt toward his family.  

"It felt very, very final, and I thought, 'Okay, that's it. This is Loki's final bow and a conclusive end to the Odinson saga,'" says Hiddleston, who shot that well-earned death scene in 2017.  

But, though he didn't know it yet, the actor's MCU story was far from over.

Credit: Charlie Gray for EW

When Hiddleston returned to film two scenes in Avengers: Endgame in 2017, he had no idea where Loki portaled off to after snatching the Tesseract. "Where'd he go? When does he go? How does he get there? These are all questions I remember asking on the day, and then not being given any answers," Hiddleston recalls. To be fair, it's likely the Powers That Be didn't necessarily have answers then. While Feige can't exactly recall when the writers' room for Endgame first devised Loki's escape sequence, he does know that setting up a future show wasn't the primary goal — because a Loki series wasn't on the horizon just yet.

"[That scene] was really more of a wrinkle so that one of the missions that the Avengers went on in Endgame could get screwed up and not go well, which is what required Cap and Tony to go further back in time to the '70s," says Feige. Soon after that, though, former Disney CEO Bob Iger approached Feige about producing content for the studio's forthcoming streaming service. "I think the notion that we had left this hanging loose end with Loki gave us the in for what a Loki series could be. So by the time [Endgame] came out, we did know where it was going."

As for Hiddleston, he didn't find out about the plans for a Loki show until spring 2018, a few weeks before Infinity War hit theaters. "I probably should not have been surprised, but I was," says the actor. "But only because Infinity War had felt so final."

Nevertheless, Hiddleston was excited about returning for his show. He was eager to explore Loki's powers, especially the shapeshifting, and what it meant that this disruptive figure still managed to find a seat beside the gods in mythology. "I love this idea [of] Loki's chaotic energy somehow being something we need. Even though, for all sorts of reasons, you don't know whether you can trust him. You don't know whether he's going to betray you. You don't why he's doing what he's doing," says Hiddleston. "If he's shapeshifting so often, does he even know who he is? And is he even interested in understanding who he is? Underneath all those masks, underneath the charm and the wit, which is kind of a defense anyway, does Loki have an authentic self? Is he introspective enough or brave enough to find out? I think all of those ideas are all in the series — ideas about identity, ideas about self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and the difficulty of it."

“The series will explore Loki's powers in a way they have not yet been explored, which is very, very exciting.”

The thing that truly sold Hiddleston on the show was Marvel's decision to include the Time Variance Authority, a move he describes as "the best idea that anybody had pertaining to the series." Feige and Loki executive producer Stephen Broussard had hoped to find a place for the TVA — an organization that debuted in 1986's Thor #372 and has appeared in She-Hulk and Fantastic Four stories — in the MCU for years, but the right opportunity never presented itself until Loki came along. "Putting Loki into his own procedural series became the eureka moment for the show," says Feige.  

The TVA's perspective on time and reality also tied into the themes that Waldron, Loki's head writer, was hoping to explore. "Loki is a character that's always reckoning with his own identity, and the TVA, by virtue of what they do, is uniquely suited to hold up a mirror to Loki and make him really confront who he is and who he was supposed to be," says Waldron. Hiddleston adds: "[That] was very exciting because in the other films, there was always something about Loki that was very controlled. He seemed to know exactly what the cards in his hand were and how he was going to play them…. And Loki versus the TVA is Loki out of control immediately, and in an environment in which he's completely behind the pace, out of his comfort zone, destabilized, and acting out."

To truly dig into who Loki is, the creative team had to learn from the man who knows him best: Hiddleston. "I got him to do a thing called Loki School when we first started," says director Kate Herron. "I asked him to basically talk through his 10 years of the MCU — from costumes to stunts, to emotionally how he felt in each movie. It was fantastic."

Hiddleston got something out of the Loki school, too. Owen Wilson both attended the class and interviewed Hiddleston afterward so that he could better understand Loki, as his character Mobius is supposed to be an expert on him. During their conversation, Wilson pointedly asked Hiddleston what he loved about playing the character.

"And I said, 'I think it's because he has so much range,'" says Hiddleston. "I remember saying this to him: 'On the 88 keys on the piano, he can play the twinkly light keys at the top. He can keep it witty and light, and he's the God of Mischief, but he can also go down to the other side and play the heavy keys. And he can play some really profound chords down there, which are about grief and betrayal and loss and heartbreak and jealousy and pride.'" Hiddleston recalls Wilson being moved by the description: "He said, 'I think I might say that in the show.' And it was such a brilliant insight for me into how open Owen is as an artist and a performer.'"

Owen Wilson as Mobius and Tom Hiddleston as Loki in 'Loki.'| Credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios

Everyone involved is particularly excited for audiences to see Hiddleston and Wilson's on-screen chemistry. "Mobius is not unlike Owen Wilson in that he's sort of nonplussed by the MCU," says Feige. "[Loki] is used to getting a reaction out of people, whether it's his brother or his father, or the other Avengers. He likes to be very flamboyant and theatrical. Mobius doesn't give him the reaction he's looking for. That leads to a very unique relationship that Loki's not used to."

As for the rest of the series, we know that Loki will be jumping around time and reality, but the creative team isn't keen on revealing when and where. "Every episode, we tried to take inspiration from different things," says Waldron, citing Blade Runner's noir aesthetic as one example.

"Part of the fun of the multiverse and playing with time is seeing other versions of characters, and other versions of the titular character in particular," says Feige, who also declined to confirm if Loki ties into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and/or other upcoming projects.

Making Loki was especially meaningful to Hiddleston because they shot most of it during the pandemic, in late 2020. "It will remain one of the absolute most intense, most rewarding experiences of my life," he says. "It's a series about time, and the value of time, and what time is worth, and I suppose what the experience of being alive is worth. And I don't quite know yet, and maybe I don't have perspective on it, if all the thinking and the reflecting that we did during the lockdown ended up in the series. But in some way, it must have because everything we make is a snapshot of where we were in our lives at that time."

While it remains to be seen what the future holds for Loki beyond this initial season, Hiddleston isn't preparing to put the character to bed yet. "I'm open to everything," he says. "I have said goodbye to the character. I've said hello to the character. I said goodbye to the character [again]. I've learned not to make assumptions, I suppose. I'm just grateful that I'm still here, and there are still new roads to explore."

[biisexualemma]

beating pt.3. bucky barnes

word count: 3.2k

warnings: blood, violence, injury

requested: not really, i just wrote this cuz all i can think about is bucky barnes in tfatws and this is my only way of dealing with all those thoughts

plot: you, sam and bucky take the shield

a/n: ok so this is part 3 to the winter soldier series i've been writing lol this is set in episode 5 with you involved in that insane fight scene with sam, bucky and walker! also! finally watched tfatws finale last night and i was so overwhelmed, i am so grateful to marvel for giving us the masterpiece that was wandavision, and then following it flawlessly with tfatws. i'm just in awe! anyway! hope you like this! i am enjoying writing this series!

pt.1 / pt.2 / pt.4 / masterlist

"walker," sam's voice echoed through the warehouse you had followed walker into, approaching the man with the shield with caution. you were still trying to process everything that had happened in the last few hours, everything you'd seen. you couldn't look at walker the same way after watching him repeatedly plunge steve's shield into that soldiers chest. you could still hear the mans screams for mercy ringing in your ears. you had never taken to walker, but this had shifted your dislike of him into a deep, disgusted hatred. all three of you knew what needed to be done without having to communicate it. you had to take the shield.

"you guys should see a medic, you don't look so good," his eyes trailed over the three of you, meeting you from across the room. his eyes lingered on you, your eyes boring into his, eyebrows slightly furrowed, a crease forming between them. he pulled away, turning his back to you. you gulped, watching him pace around in circles. it was unsettling, he was visibly agitated. you wondered, very briefly, whether he regretted his actions, underneath all that rage. you had seen something when he locked eyes with you, you just weren't sure what it was.

"stop. walker," sam intervened, bringing walkers pacing to a halt.

"what?" suddenly he was defensive, like he had been waiting for the judgement to be thrown at him. his voice raised slightly. "you saw what happened. you know what i had to do."

you shook your head lightly, your eyes locked on the imposter, traipsing around with that shield, dipped in blood. it made you feel sick. he turned his attention to you again, noticing your silent disapproval. he took a step towards you, letting his emotions get the better of him for a split second. "i killed him because i had to! he killed lemar!"

you swallowed the lump in your throat, clenching your fists together at your sides. you didn't take kindly to him taking his anger out on you, you would rather have him just own up to what he did instead of trying to pass the blame.

bucky shifted, unsettled with walker even looking at you for too long after everything that had happened. he wasn't taking any chances with you. his jaw clenched, he took a subtle step closer to you and held out a hand to halt walker from coming any closer.

"he didn't kill lemar, john," bucky's voice was almost the tiniest bit understanding, despite his standoffish manner. walker scoffed, not even taking notice of how much closer bucky was standing to you now, he was too caught up in his own thoughts. he continued pacing back and forth. you proceeded to watch his every move, anticipating a reaction from him. you were waiting for him to explode again. "don't go down that road. believe me, it doesn't end well."

your eyes flickered towards bucky, the last thing you had expected was for him to show any kind of sincerity towards john walker. but, then, there was a lot to bucky that you didn't yet understand. you understood sam was trying to avoid another fight by talking walker down, bucky must've been following his lead by trying to relate to walkers situation.

walker, however, didn't seem the slightest bit comforted by bucky's words, in fact, he almost looked embarrassed by the comparison between bucky and himself.

"i'm not like you," your eyebrows twitched into a frown when he spat the words at bucky. instinctively you took a step forwards, tilting your head slightly, suddenly feeling the urge to hit walker. bucky's hand grazed yours, like he knew exactly what you were thinking, and silently willing you to not hit him. yet, at least. you settled for gritting your teeth and holding your tongue.

"listen, it was the heat of the battle. okay?" sam ignored the sharpness in walkers tone, continuing his attempt to talk him down. if anyone was going to get through to this man, it was sam. he had a knack for that kind of thing. "if you explain what happened, they may consider your record," this felt like bullshit. what happened had happened. you knew, first hand, that the government wasn't exactly forgiving, especially when you kill a man in broad daylight with captain america's shield. "we don't want anyone else to get hurt."

you glanced at the shield in his hand one more time, your stomach twisting as you did. everything about that shield being in that mans arm felt wrong, and the blood coating the lower half of the shield was disturbing, to put it lightly. you often wondered how this whole mission would have gone down if steve were here, instead of walker. walker had managed to make a mess of every aspect of this mission, he had gone out of his way to make your jobs harder, without even realising he was doing it. you couldn't let yourself think about it for too long without your heart aching from the loss of your friend, and the sight in front of you taking his place.

"john," sam spoke again after a brief moment of silence. "you gotta' give me the shield, man," you knew as soon as the words were spoken that this wasn't going to go down well.

walker lifted his head from the shield, his eyes locking with sam's, along to bucky's, and then yours. bucky grabbed your wrist to stop you from jumping walker preemptively. walkers eyes lingered on where bucky clutched onto you, choking out a breathy laugh, with not the slightest hint of amusement. you closed your eyes for a second, taking a deep breath, anticipating the fight that had been long overdue to break out.

"oh," he breathed. "so that's what this is," his stare hardened, his eyes not leaving sam's now. you wanted to snatch the shield out of his hand and run before this became something far too messy. if it wasn't for bucky's grip, you were sure you would have at least tried to. "you almost got me."

"you made a mistake," you wished you could be as forgiving as sam, but you had too much anger, and too much hatred for this man.

"you don't wanna' do this," walker warned, and in someways he was right. none of you wanted to do this. you didn't necessarily want to get into a battle with an unhinged, super soldier with no concern for whether you lived or died. but you couldn't leave without that shield. so it had to happen.

"yeah, we do," you spoke harshly, catching walkers attention, you yanked your wrist out of bucky's grip.

bucky was the first to move, and suddenly everything was moving very quickly. bucky's arm connecting with the vibranium shield, sam kicked back onto the floor with force. you had swung your leg at walker, only to have him duck, catch your ankle and throw you backwards, your back hitting into a metal beam. the impact made you hurl over on the floor with a groan.

with a grunt, bucky continued to fight walker, struggling to snatch the shield out of his arm. walker's elbow collided with bucky's nose, knocking him backwards before throwing another punch and bringing him down to his knees. you scrambled onto all fours, pushing yourself back onto your feet, sam following suit across from you. your eyebrows knitted, as walker heaved the shield over his head, about to strike bucky when you swung another kick to his head, catching him this time. the hit caught him off guard, allowing sam to use his wings to strike another blow.

all three of you were on him now, bucky back to his feet, as each of you threw one blow after the next at this man, and he caught every single one. after beating sam and winding him, and striking bucky in the face so sharply with the shield that he fell back, he caught your wrist and twisted it with an uncomfortable level of ease until something cracked. you let out a loud cry feeling your wrist fall limp, walkers foot immediately slamming into your ribs while you were distracted, knocking you to the ground with a thud.

bucky eyes moved up to where you lay on the floor, walker with his shield ready to take another crack at you while you were down. bucky intervened, his fist slamming into the shield repeatedly, pushing walker further and further back. fists were flung around, the sheer force behind the blows seemed to not make the slightest difference to either of them. walker flung himself at sam, his foot colliding with his face before swinging the shield back and letting to fly out of his hand, his full force behind it, hitting bucky square in the chest.

your breathing hitched in your throat, watching bucky's body fly across the room with the shield and land with a loud crash. your chest tightened, scrambling onto your feet, numb to any pain searing through your body at this point, as sam came up behind you and grabbed your arm to help you up.

"why are you making me do this?!" walkers voice boomed from across the room. your eyes widened with shear panic, your heart in your mouth when walker heaved bucky off the ground and flung his body across the room, slamming into one of the metal beams. you couldn't stop yourself from crying out his name as he collapsed against the hard floor, body limp and his left arm glitching next to him.

you hadn't noticed sam had left your side, soaring across the room to return to his attack on walker. you were solely focused on bucky and the way his body lay unmoving. sam preoccupied walker, allowing you to run over to your boyfriend, dropping to your knees and rolling him onto his back.

"buck," you gulped back the lump in your throat, your hands trembling slightly as they hovered over his face. he wasn't fully conscious, his eyes rolled, arm twitching every couple of seconds. you glanced over your shoulder, sam was manoeuvring around walker, managing to hold him on his own for now. you turned back, your unsteady hands touching his cheek, grazing the skin that was now bruised and bloody. your heart beating out of your chest, you didn't often see bucky like this, it was disturbing. "bucky-- please--"

your words caught in your throat when a hand clasped around your throat, tightening and yanking you away from bucky. you gasped for air as your supply became limited, your feet dragging against the floor. before walker could haul your across the room, sam blocked his path, holding out a cautious hand. your eyes watered the tighter he clenched his fist around your neck, both your hands desperately trying to release his strong grip.

"this isn't you, john," sam spoke with urgency, his eyes darting to where you were struggling desperately.

walker glanced down at you, your face turning pale the longer you tried to catch a breath. he gritted his teeth before letting you drop at his feet. you frantically gasped for air, feeling your lungs fill up again, your chest straining from your deep breaths.

"we could've been a team," he spat harshly.

bucky had regained his consciousness in this time, managing to force himself onto his feet again. he met you at your side, one hand resting against the small of your back, the other grabbing your forearm and helping you up. your vision blurred slightly at the sides, scrunching your eyes closed and reopening them, you saw walker ahead of you, on top of sam, physically restraining him. the deranged look in his eyes sent shivers down your spine.

"i am captain america!" he bellowed, echoing through the empty warehouse. bucky, whose attention had solely been on you up until this point, dragged his eyes over to sam and walker. both of you froze watching as walker ripped sam's wings clean off. your mouth hung open, hesitating for a second in shock. but when you saw him lift that damn shield again, you stumbled out of bucky's grip, as fast as your legs would carry you, snatching the knife out of your holder and flinging it at him. the knife sliced his fingers, he let out a yelp and faltered, giving bucky enough time to tackle walker off of sam.

the pair went flying across the room, both quickly gathering themselves up again. walker looked like hell, his face dirtied and bloodied, his eyes wide and crazed as he and bucky met again. fists flew back and forth as they beat each other with as much force as they had in them, walker was the one in the end to grab a fistful of bucky's hair, pulling the shield back and slamming it into bucky's face. you couldn't stand back and watch, the shield now pushed up against bucky's arms as he desperately tried to stop the shield from coming into contact with him again.

you caught walker off guard, swinging in from his blind side and connecting your fist with his jaw as hard as you could, giving bucky enough leeway to regain himself. he held walkers arm in place and you grabbed the shield. sam came up behind you, gripping the shield and pulling with you as hard as you could. bucky was face to face with walker, their hatred for one another in that moment was unparalleled.

sam switched his thrusters to high, walker let out a torturous cry, his arm breaking out of shape as the shield slipped off, both you and sam flying backwards. you groaned, the shield landing on top of your chest as you lay against the cold floor. your head was pulsating, blood soaking your hair and your shirt. you could feel every wound you'd pushed aside before, now worse than ever. you rolled onto your side, gasping as the pain surged through your chest, blood dripping from your mouth when it fell open.

you winced, using your last bit of strength to push yourself upright onto your hands, letting the shield fall with the clunk beside you. bucky was already back onto his feet, his first instinct was to reach you, but before he could get close enough, walker's voice echoed from over his shoulder.

"it's mine," you heard him spit, his eyes locked onto where you lay, the shield beside you. only bucky stood in between you and walker. this guy really didn't know when to quit.

your eyes shifted up to where sam stood over you now. "it's over, john."

"it's mine," he growled, swinging at bucky who caught his fist before he could get anywhere near you. bucky threw a forceful punch to his jaw and threw walker over his shoulder before he could regain himself. you grabbed the shield, lifting it so sam could take ahold of it. bucky had swung walkers entire body over him like he weighed nothing, letting sam and the shield collide with his body. you cringed watching walkers body fall heavily to the ground, sam and bucky collapsing around the shield.

you let out deep, laboured breaths, your hand now clutched to your ribs that were searing with pain. everything was surging through you all at once, your brows furrowed and your tongue between your teeth. the metallic taste was swimming in your mouth, you felt wounded and entirely exhausted.

bucky dropped the shield next to sam, his eyes boring into his for a split second before his attention was turned to your body hurled on its side. he kneeled beside you, his metal hand touching the side of your face, his fingers running through your hair and tilting your face up so you could meet his stare. his eyes were soft and tired, his eyebrows knitted together tightly as his eyes moved over your bloodied face. his thumb grazed over your bottom lip, dragging it down, blood transferring onto his skin from yours. his expression was hard and unnerving. he didn't have the energy in him to ask if you were okay, he just looked at you, his heart cracked wide open as he did.

you nodded faintly, answering the question he couldn't will himself to ask. you lifted your uninjured hand to where his palm touched your cheek, grazing your fingers over his skin. your eyes shifted to where his skin split open across the bridge of his nose, where walker had ploughed the shield into his face, and over to the bruise growing against his cheekbone. you gulped down on the lump sitting in your throat, and found your eyebrows knitting together. you knew he would heal quicker than most, but he was wounded in more ways than one after this fight, you could tell by the look in his eyes, he couldn't take much more.

this felt like a knock on the chin, everything that had happened felt heavier somehow. you had the shield but at what cost? what did it mean for you guys now? how did you move forward?

bucky gave you a stiff nod, his jaw clenching as he moved his hand away from your face, your own hand falling back to your side. you, unfortunately, did not have super soldier serum running through your veins, so you felt the impact of your injuries a lot more than bucky did. you lifted your right arm with caution, expecting bucky to take it and pull you onto your feet, but he didn't. he pushed himself back onto his feet, his hard stare moving away from yours.

you tilted your head, trying to understand what was going through his head, but that had never been an easy task with bucky. "buck," you mumbled, your voice hoarse. you watched his hand clench into a fist and unclench again.

he sniffed, taking a deep breath before glancing over to sam who was keeled over the shield. their eyes met for a second before bucky spoke. "look after her. i need to take care of something."

your eyebrows knitted tighter together, knowing you couldn't push yourself up and chase after him. he knew that too. "bucky," your tone was harsher this time. you hissed, hand flying to your ribcage where a searing pain worked its way through your abdomen after trying to shift yourself off the ground and over to him. you knew why he didn't want you to go with him, you knew where he was going and you couldn't let him do it. you had done everything on this mission together.

"would that be zemo you're taking care of?" sam voiced exactly what you were thinking, his tone cold.

he turned his back on sam, his eyes trailing over you. "go with sam," he spoke through gritted teeth. "i won't be gone long."

your frown deepened, you shook your head faintly. "buck-- don't," his eyes locked with yours for second, his eyelids fluttering like they did when he was tired. you wanted to be enough to stop him, but his mind was set.

"i have to," he muttered under his breath, forcing himself to walk away from you before you could talk him out of it.

[aparticularbandit]

Fragments of Color Chapter One: A Kiss Hello (A Kiss Goodbye)

Summary: If the world is black and white, Agnes sticks out like a thorn-pricked thumb, blood dripping scarlet from skin otherwise drained of life, and Wanda aches to suck the venom from her veins, unaware that it would be useless to try.

AKA I wanted to write fluff and kisses and thought about kiss prompts and how they could be employed within a Westview setting.  Each chapter should hopefully have a kiss prompt of some sort.  (MAYBE.)

AO3

In a monochromatic world, Agnes is technicolor.

Wanda notices this the first time she sees her – the charcoal of her hair streaked with an elderly gray twists with a chocolate underbite swirled with caramel, the smoke of her skin belies tinges of palest rose, the ash of her painted lips shields a poisoned apple tempting to taste.  She blinks and just misses it, cannot quite grasp it, this brilliant flaw in a creation she never intended.  If the world is black and white, Agnes sticks out like a thorn-pricked thumb, blood dripping scarlet from skin otherwise drained of life, and Wanda aches to suck the venom from her veins, unaware that it would be useless to try.

 ~

The world repeats, a sitcom set on its reruns, episodes still being written, but the audience always wants a laugh, so the old shows replay to create hype for the next season.  WandaVision airs back-to-back – last week’s episode followed by a new one, double up the new before going into another, because maybe this time, somewhere in the repetition, they will stick the landing.

Who is she kidding?  They always stick the landing.

But Wanda finds herself returning to the same episodes again and again, reliving them in an effort to tell herself this is the way it has always been and it isn’t wrong for this to be the way that it always will be.

This, too, is a dream, and when she wakes up, everyone will be okay.  It will all have been just a dream.

Sometimes, Wanda isn’t sure which parts are dream and which parts are waking.

The script never changes, and neither do the characters.  Players off-screen, in the background, pass by without words – or with words, but only to each other – and Wanda never wonders why, sometimes, it all sounds like static, white noise, not really words at all, just something to fill out the background sound the same way their bodies fill out the background space, not to be noticed, but to add texture.

Agnes walks by with a scarf threaded with singular threads so lavender light they shimmer silver against the startling obsidian darkness.  It catches her eye, and—

Wanda gives her head a little shake.  She sees nothing.  Silver and sable and obsidian and onyx and ash and smoke – no true black, devoid of all color, and no true white, full of it all – only shades and shades and shades. She turns just enough to envision that soft, unmuted thing, but Agnes has already moved on, heels leaving nothing but ash colored dust behind.

 ~

It isn’t a conscious thing.  It isn’t as though there was some sort of mental auditioning process that the citizens of Westview went through when this world was created.  Wanda didn’t – doesn’t – choose who has which role.  Agnes didn’t flit across her mind one day, charming and flirtatious, and her mind didn’t say you, you will be my best friend, my next door neighbor, my closest confidante.  It doesn’t work like that.  For all that Geraldine – Monica Rambeau – will later say that somewhere, in her subconscious, Wanda must have known that she was someone she could trust—

This is not how the Hex works.

Agnes becomes Wanda’s next door neighbor quite by accident.  She lives in the house next to the vacant lot that—

There is no Hex.

There is no Westview Anomaly.

There is only Westview and the life within its borders.

~

How many episodes did WandaVision run before Agnes?

Wanda tries to remember them, sometimes, when she lies awake in bed while Vision slumbers in another bed a few feet away.  Agnes couldn’t have existed in the pilot; in her first appearance, she’d mentioned being somewhere else, arriving with a house warming gift far too late for such things, but wanting to meet with her anyway.  There had to have been episodes before Agnes.

Her brow furrows.

She doesn’t remember them.

—no, no, that’s wrong wording.  There’s no pilot; there are no episodes; there’s only Westview.  There was a time in Westview before Agnes.  There was, wasn’t there?  But she can’t…she can’t remember it.

Her subconscious mind picks up on her wonderings; the next day should be a repeat of the first Agnes episode.

But it isn’t.

 ~

Agnes breezes into the kitchen like a breath of fresh air, and she clasps Wanda’s hands before kissing her cheeks simply, chastely, like dear friends in some of those old movies do.  When she strides away, heels making those darling little clicks on the hardwood floor, Wanda’s face flushes a dark ashen shade.  She glances over her shoulder at the woman chattering away in a voice both brash and alluring and wonders, not for the first time, what happens off set when the camera shutters closed.

Then she gives her head another little shake – there are no cameras, and there are no actors – Agnes isn’t a role, she’s a person who just happens to live next door to her, who sees a young woman trying desperately to fit into a brand new quiet little town and decides, through no fault of her own, to take her under her wing.  That’s all. It isn’t like anyone is forcing her to be Wanda’s friend.

Wanda rests her chin on her hands, lets her head lilt to one side with her lower lip tugged between her teeth as Agnes walks away, hips swaying; as Agnes pauses, not just stopping in motion but stopping her enchanting speech; as Agnes turns back and stares at her blankly.

“Wanda—”

Her name sounds different on her lips, surround sound on technicolor in widescreen format, not stereo on black-and-white in the little box shaped television she’d—

Agnes gives her a look as though confused, but this time her eyes spark the barest flash of color, veins of faded violet threading through them, gone in the blink of an eye, so quick she could be convinced they weren’t even there in the first place.  The confusion remains.  “Is there something wrong with my dress?”  Her gaze falls, and her hands move to her plaid skirt, flaring it out to examine it. Before Wanda can say anything, she smooths the skirt out –  “No, no, it’s perfect like always.” – and crosses the distance between them, placing a comforting hand on Wanda’s shoulder and, head tilting, glancing up into her eyes. “Are you sick, hon?  I make the most wonderful chicken noodle soup.  My mother passed down the recipe.  We even make our own chicken stock!”  She places a hand on Wanda’s forehead.

“No, no, I’m fine—”

“Wanda, you’re positively flushed.”  Agnes pulls her hand away and shakes it once, the same motion she’d made when she’d brushed against a hot stove in an episode last week.  “Go upstairs right now, and I’ll—”

“No, Agnes.”  Wanda takes her friend’s – her neighbor’s – hands in her own, surprised at how soft, how warm they feel against her rougher, colder skin.  “Honestly, I’m…I’m fine.  Vis has just been at work so long, and I’ve been doing everything, and I’m honestly a little worried about him.”

It isn’t all a lie.  At least, comparatively.

Everything in Westview is, after all, what’s one more on top of it?  The cherry on top of a banana cream fudge sundae of falsities?

Agnes holds Wanda’s hands.  She rubs her fingers along her knuckles.  “Well, if you say so.”  Her gaze lowers, and she knocks their hands together, swinging them back and forth a few times.  “Say,” she starts, “why don’t we go on a picnic, just you and me?  Vis spends all that time at work, and Ralph – well, I’m lucky if he remembers there’s a home cooked meal waiting for him.”  She smiles – that flash of ruby red under her onyx painted lips, there and then gone in an instant – and the color drips with an ache Wanda cannot name.  “Two gals like us, out on the prowl?  It’d be a gas.”

“Out on the—” Wanda echoes her words, brow furrowing.  “Oh, Agnes, I can’t! We’re married.  You’re married!”  She drops Agnes’s hands and turns away, flinging her hands in the air before bringing them to her hips.  “But a picnic….”  Facing away from the cameras, she licks her lips, tugs her bottom lip between her teeth again, and then re-turns to the cameras, arms crossed, face a picture of careful consideration.  “Why, I don’t see how a picnic could be any harm.”

Agnes beams so bright that her eyes almost shut.  “Oh, it’ll just be the bees knees.”

It’s the wrong phrase – it’s the wrong time period – but Wanda doesn’t realize this, not until after Agnes has patted her shoulder – “We’ll go tomorrow! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about anything; Agnes will take care of everything.” – not until after Wanda has carefully guided her out the back door, not until after Vis has returned and she sits on the couch next to him, head leaning on his shoulder as the credits roll – a lot of names that she doesn’t know, that in all honesty she may have made up, that may have been taken from sitcoms when she was younger—

No, no, there are no credits, Westview is real, and this is not a show—

Wanda lies awake in her bed again, considering a picnic with Agnes, thinking about that wrong phrase, and forgetting it in the thought of the way Agnes had technically kissed her four times – once on each cheek when she’d arrived, and again on each cheek when she’d left.

She thinks, and the cameras are off, and the credits have rolled, so the film doesn’t catch the ashen flush returning or the way it highlights the dark freckles like pencil stains across her cheeks.

[annie-mit-ie]

Glimpses: Part 8 (Kathryn Hahn x Fem!Reader)

Part 1 // previous chapter <<< >>> next chapter

Summary: Babysteps are taken.

Word Count: 1,8k

A/N: Hey y’all! I am really sorry it took me a while to get to this but tbh life hasn't been the easiest since I’ve last posted. I hope you all enjoy this chapter, even though it turned out completely different than I had anticipated. Definitely plan to throw another chapter your way this week. We’ll see :)

_____________________________________________________________________________

Her soft lips move against yours as Kathryn’s hand finds her way into your hair. She pulls you closer and it seems like she wants to deepen the kiss, but before she gets any chance to do so, you break the contact.

“Kathryn…“, both of you are panting and you have to hold on to her upper thigh to steady yourself. You take in a deep breath as she looks at you with widened eyes, while a worried look is creeping onto her face. She immediately lets go of your neck. Still panting, she tries to form words.

“Sweetheart, I… I am so sorry! I… Oh my god!“ Her eyes widen and she removes herself completely from you and puts a few more inches in between the two of you. “Is this…? Did we…? Are you okay?“

You nod, slowly, because you need time to process. What struck you and made you speechless wasn’t the fact that she kissed you in the first place, no, you are absolutely confused by her harsh reaction to the occurring situation. You look at her, eyes wide open, as she is sitting way too far away from you and looks at you like something horrible has happened.

“Kathryn, hey, I AM okay. Very much so, stop worrying. All is good!“ You take her hand in yours. “I… I loved this. This is everything I have ever dreamed of…“ “But?…“, she impatiently interrupts you and you give her the look that a mother gives her children when they repeatedly reach for a toy they are not allowed to have. 

“But… This is not how I want this to go. Let me take you out on a date or something?  Let’s go eat somewhere or read or talk or just sit… But not in the back of a car in the middle of the night as we are both very much not sober, hm?“ She nods and the hiccup, that escapes her throat right after you take her hand into yours again, just tells you that you’re right.

The rest of the ride is calm and quiet as Kathryn clearly is tired and overwhelmed with all the love she has gotten all night. You opt to just sit with her in silence, noticing how her body slowly falls against yours until her head lands on her shoulder. She is asleep.

You move a strand of hair behind her ear - prompting a small smile to form on her lips and it makes you feel proud that you did the grown up thing and resisted the urge to take a step further, the urge to see how far she would go, not that you could sneakily slip your hand anywhere anyway, considering she was still wearing that one-piece that was hugging her in all the right places.

Shaking your head to get rid of the thoughts that are flooding your tipsy brain right now, you realize you’ve reached your neighborhood right as the car slows down on the side walk. Peter opens the window to look at you “Do you want me to take you directly to your house or do you want to walk the rest of the way?“

You really appreciate how considerate he is, but you have to tell your mom eventually anyway, so you opt for the safer option. “Take me directly home, please.“ He nods and his eyes wander to Kathryn, who is still asleep on your shoulder. “You’re good for her, I hope you know that.“, Peter says before closing the window again.

“YOU DID WHAT?“ You haven’t seen your best friend enraged like that ever before. “YOUR./NAME… YOU DID WHAT NOW?

Telling her that you were the one who broke off a kiss with Kathryn was probably not your smartest idea in a while. When you got home last night, you went straight to bed, but texted Alex that you were gonna call her as soon as you woke up to give her all the tea.

“I… I broke the kiss?“ You repeat and look at her, scared she will yell at you again.

“Honey! How??? Why? This could’ve very well been a one in a lifetime chance!“ She is not mad or anything, more shocked because she knows how much you’ve wanted this.

You look at her and both of you become serious for a moment. “It wasn’t right. We had too much to drink. I know she wanted it. We’ve had moments before, but… I just didn’t feel right, Alex. I don't know how to explain. Don’t get me wrong, I was into it, very much so, but I want the real deal. Not a car fling, you know?“ “You really are the most amazing person I’ve ever met. I hope she knows how fortunate she is to know someone as respectful as you.“ It still felt unusual to talk about Kathryn that way. Even to your best friend. Even though you know you share everything with Alex that is there to share. Kathryn was Kathryn and you were… just you. But somehow, when the two of you are together, that doesn't matter at all. You don’t think about who she is when you are with Kathryn.

Right as you think about her, your phone lights up and you receive a message.

„Sweetheart, I really enjoyed having you around last night! Can’t wait to do it again. Packed week ahead, sadly, but would like to invite you to my garden again by the end of it? xxx K.“

For a moment, you smile and already want to text back, but you had read the message out to Alex as well and she doesn’t want you to text back just yet. “Can’t wait to do it again?“, she says. “Like as in the kiss or as in the night, well I mean the day, in general? DUDE. That’s huge!“ You hadn’t thought about it that way. Alex was wild sometimes. She would come up with things that you haven’t considered yet, but not always in a good way. Sometimes, she drops knowledge on you until your anxiety kicks in and she doesn’t even notice. Not this time, though.

This time, Alex’ remark only makes your chest swell with pride because, either way, it was a huge compliment. You let Kathryn know that you feel the same and you would love to visit her again.

The following week seems to be endless but somehow you make your way through it, especially with a Q&A that was announced Sunday night and would happen today. Kathryn is booked to watch an episode of her latest show Wandavision with some cast members on something like Zoom, where they can be seen by fans around the globe to promote upcoming shows and increase streams.

She had texted you a selfie earlier, and captioned it with how she was missing your compliments while getting ready, with a wink, of course, and you that made you even more excited to see her later. 

The event itself is cute, hundreds of fans are online and even though you can’t see the other fans, you all can feel the unity and love towards the cast. You’re sitting on your desk, laptop propped up in front of you with the stream, while you are FaceTiming Alex who stayed awake for the event like she always does.

“Kathryn is just soooo beautiful tonight.“ Alex swoons, as you watch her staring at the stream. Kathryn does look great. Her blue eyes are highlighted by the blue button up shirt she is wearing and her hair is loosely hanging down one side. Ben really outdid himself with tonight’s look. She smiles at something Lizzie says and they both laugh as they watch the scene where Agatha and Wanda are in the kitchen together.

“Many mouths make good gossip.“ Alex laughs and you can see Kathryn grin in the corner of your eyes as you look at her best friend. “Have you told her she looks beautiful yet?“

It was a logical question. Shooting her a message would be so easy and yet, you haven’t thought of it yet. You shake your head.

“Gurl! Take your phone and text her, NOW! Let’s gooooooo.“ She was right. You had the perfect chance right there and you were sure Kathryn would not be looking at her phone anytime soon. Most likely, she would only see your message after the event, so you decide to go for it after all.

“Looking really good tonight, Ms Hahn. ;)“ you finally type. It took you a couple tries and you reworded the message several times, trying to figure out what tone would fit best. After deleting the previous ideas, you just want to not send anything at all, but as you reread your final words , you feel satisfaction and that makes you decide to shoot your shot after all.  

Ales notices our internal struggle “Y/N! Send that freaking message NOW.“ You know she would take your phone and just press send if she was with you and you want this friendship to feel a little less distant tonight, so you immediately press send.

Immediately, the both of you keep your eyes on the stream to not miss any possible reactions and you were wrong. Kathryn actually does have her phone with her and you can tell she notices a message because she looses attention for a second and looks to her left.

You can tell she rethinks if she should pick up her phone or not, but before you can worry about the whole situation more, she reaches out for her phone and reads. The smile on her face is telling. She tries to tone the smile down but it still creeps onto her face on one side. You’re not sure, but you would also say that there is a little blush around her nose that you think is adorable and makes a warm feeling bubble up in your body. OH NO.

Shortly, she looks directly at the camera with the softest smile, before putting the phone back aside and giving her attention back to the cast and episode.

“JACKPOT!“ Alex celebrates an early win. „She loved it! See! Aaaaargh, I am SO GOOD AT THIS.“

 You roll your eyes. “You have a wife, honey, OBVIOUSLY you are.“

And while the two of you laugh about your antics and virtually high five because messaging Kathryn was a success,  the other fans on twitter are already freaking out about the mysterious message Kathryn has gotten and who it might've been from.

[fatbottombucky]

Marvel Series Are Weird... Right?

SPOILERS FOR HAWKEYE SERIES+ MORE

I find it so odd that Marvel has given A LOT of their characters massive character overhauls for their series... just to possibly never use them ever again (AKA them dying)

Hawkeye, for instance, I never really liked him- a better term would be 'cared for', especially MCU Clint- I just never found him that interesting and I thought adding his family in Ultron seemed weird, rather pushed upon us as some weird character development by Joss.

The show... is amazing. I went in for Kate Bishop, I'm now walking away from episode 4 with a newfound love for Clint (I fell in love with him in episode 1 tbh).

We see Clint having to deal with Endgame, a year on. So it's been a full year since the death of Natasha, which is STILL prevalent for him. Honestly, Natasha plays such a key role in his series, I thought she'd be referenced once or twice, but it's been multiple times with a few past shots of her. It's clear Clint has survivors guilt.

Clint is partially deaf and uses a hearing aid. This is from being around explosions and made worse from Endgame during the last fight. Clint told his wife about Ronin and she actively helps him (from home) with trying to get rid of his Ronin past.

Clint isn't a great father, but he's trying very hard to be present which is very difficult and can emotionally affect men because their relationship with their children is strained- I love that his series is touching on this, where he makes promises and REALLY struggles to follow through and leaves him feeling guilty about letting his family down.

SO... we get all this emotional development, plus some character development. We see him secretly enjoy Kate Bishop's questions and her excitedness over... him. The show pokes fun at the fact Clint doesn't have great branding and actually, people forget about him- which he finds nice cause his job is to be discreet.

Someone on TikTok called Clint the 'Passive Avenger', he didn't want or sign up to be one, but Loki making him passive in Avengers and having to watch as he had no control over himself made him become an Avenger.

The ending theory of Hawkeye is that Yelena (Natasha's sister from the movie Black Widow) is going to assassinate Clint, due to the fact, someone has put a Black Widow hit on him (she was chosen because Valentina Allegra de Fontaine told Yelena Clint killed Natasha).

We go through all this development with Clint, we find out so much about him, and his relationship with Natasha. Only to have him die?

What is it with Marvel and giving characters extreme character overhauls only to kill them, we had done to us with Loki, which I still haven't forgiven them for (despite getting a Loki series). The whole ten years with Loki and him being a villain, to passive and then, finally, redemption to only be killed by Thanos. I went on a journey with that character only... to have him die.

Same with Vision, I never really cared for him. The WandaVision series was AMAZING!!!! I learnt so much about him through Wanda and he taught her to let him go; to grieve. I think that series was emotionally beautiful but they did it again. They gave Vision a lot of development only to basically kill off the Vision we came to like.

Am I the only one slightly miffed by this?

IDK the thought of seeing Clint struggle to be a father, to being an unwilling mentor to Kate and dealing with his grief over his best friend... if they kill him off it's gonna suck. I think, at least, one original Avenger should get a chance at retirement (not accounting for Steve cause he had to go back in time to do his retirement) but also still be in this world.

I also think Clint should be the one to have a proper happy ending in the current MCU cause of Nat's sacrifice, she willingly gave up her life so he could see his kids (plus millions of others) again. She did that for him cause she knew, despite who he had become, Laura and his family will make him be Clint Barton again.

The whole killing characters off just so you don't have to mention them in future phases is just weird to me. Killing characters off for shock endings and twists is boring. Killing characters off because the actors are moving on is also lame, i mean, they never have to actually appear again they can just be named.

[talesofafangirlwithadvr]

April 2021 Picks

And we’re back with the end to another month. April! Wow! Lots more great picks to talk about this time. Lots of new ones to the list too. So, let’s dive in!

Spoiler territory ahead!

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER

or should I say Captain America and the Winter Soldier

I just finished the finale last night, so it felt right to start off with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I really enjoyed it and I feel the episodes got stronger as the series went on. Each one felt like a mini-movie and I was upset it was over and had to wait another week for another one. I think the finale was my favorite. Especially the reveal of Sam as Captain America. I love his suit, his speech and the montage of everyone watching him. The last part of the episode was definitely my favorite and one I can watch on repeat. I loved seeing happy Bucky and him goofing off with the kids in Louisiana. He deserves so much happiness as he has now accepted he’s no longer who he once was. Bucky and Sam’s relationship is fantastic and I can’t wait to see it more. I know there’s a possibility of a second season and they have to be in a future MCU movie. Regarding the villain, I feel I was confused for most of the show as to what their objective was. I’m curious if this is because they had to reshoot parts during the pandemic. I also am mad with Sharon. Like what happened with her? She is definitely the true villain of the show. I also don’t love that we haven’t seen the end of Walker (but Wyatt Russell did a fantastic job). I also loved Torres and I hope he becomes the next Falcon. Definitely so different vibes from Wandavision, but just as good!

THE IRREGULARS

This is a show that more people need to be talking about! It was SO GOOD! I feel like I heard some buzz about it when it first came out, but not much after. It follows the teens featured about who live on the streets during Victorian London. The leader of their group, Bea gets approached by Dr. John Watson (that’s right...as in Sherlock and Watson) to take on a case that has more supernatural qualities. The story takes off from there. I think the group dynamic was fantastic. There wasn’t a character I didn’t like and each one brought something else important to the group (which they even bring up towards the end of the show). [I’ve watched a few cast interviews since finishing the finale and they seem like they get along really well in real life too.] There is a kind of love triangle, but it didn’t bother me and was over fast. I did like both combinations though. Lots of twists and turns along the journey. I have no idea if there will be another season, but there should be. It didn’t end on a major cliffhanger, but definitely ended in a way where it could continue nicely. Come on Netflix. 

HBO’S THE NEVERS

From one show set in Victorian times to the next. The Nevers just premiered on HBO and HBO Max earlier this month. It follows an ensemble of characters, similar to other HBO shows, ranging from characters who are called “the touched” to men in government who are against them. Being “touched” means they have a special talent or power, which can range from healing to speaking other languages, being extremely tall, or being an expectational inventor (I seriously love Penance. I just don’t know how to explain her ability). Amalia True and Penance Adair are two of the main characters and they help bring in others who are touched to a remodeled orphanage that is a safe haven for people like them. Of course there are those who are against them existing. This seems to be at least two groups as someone is abducting and experimenting on some of the touched, but we don’t know who they are...yet. I love the fusion of a historical setting with a fantasy element. I am very excited to see where the show is headed. I also love seeing so many of my favorite British actors on the screen together.      

ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND

Time for a throw back. Fans of ABC’s Once Upon a Time might remember the short lived spin off following Alice in Wonderland (and some of Aladdin). It only lasted for one season of 13 episodes, but I remember loving it and I am so happy I can rewatch it on Disney Plus. It reminds me of why I enjoyed OUAT so much and I think this show deserved another season or more crossover with the original show. (Luckily the Knave got that opportunity.) I think it should have aired as a summer show or when OUAT was on hiatus, this way more fans would have tuned in. It is something I’ll believe forever. 

Anyway, I’ll stop ranting now... I love Alice. I think she’s a badass and a fierce warrior. If you follow some of my posts on my other blog, Lydia-yougowith-Stiles, you’ll know that I love a warrior romance and Cyrus and Alice fit that perfectly (even if they are apart for much of the series). I also love Alice’s hair and outfits. Everything about her is cool. Her relationship with the Knave is one of my favorite friendships ever. I think they balance each other out so well and how they spend most of the journey together. Back in the day, I totally shipped them, but now I definitely don’t. (Even though I don’t love Anastasia.) This is definitely worth the watch if you’ve ever heard of Once Upon a Time or not. There is very cheesy CGI especially for 2013, but once you get pass that you’ll love it. 

ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST

It was on a longer break than I expected, and I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would (which I know doesn’t sound good for a show), but I am still loving all the episodes this season. It feels like there are more musical numbers, which I love. Mandy Moore is killing it with the choreography. There are so many amazing moments. I also was a big fan of the newest glitch episode. Everyone is so talented and I also like that we’ve started to hear from more like Jenna and Tobin. Leif has become one of my favorites. I don’t love the new neighbor next door, but I think we’re done with his storyline. I’m not loving the Zoey love triangle, but I do like her with either Simon or Max. She seems really happy with Simon now. (FYI: I haven’t watched the most recent episode yet. The glitch one was my latest.) Can’t wait for more!    

KUNG FU

CW’s newest show this month was Kung Fu, which I just learned was a reboot. It follows Nicky who returns after 3 years to her home in San Francisco. Her family has mixed feelings as she has had no contact with them for the last 3 years. She is now a Kung Fu master and warrior, out to avenge her mentor’s death and stop a villain from acquiring mythical weapons. The show gives me Arrow vibes every time I watch it. It has similar flashbacks each episode to an earlier time in Nicky’s life. While Nicky’s mission is different, the style just gives me early seasons of Arrow vibes, which I am not complaining about. It stars Legacies’ Alyssa Chen, who I didn’t love on Legacies, but instantly fell in love with Nicky. I think she’s a bad ass character and love how she’s fighting for the underdogs on the streets of San Fran, while also taking down a bigger evil. The love triangle is heating up and I’m definitely team Henry (even though there’s some mystery there). I think he’s great and once again we have an awesome warrior romance. They balance each other so well and it’s only been like 3 episodes. Now they’ve also been sleuthing together and it’s just amazing. 

NANCY DREW

Are you sick of hearing me talk about CW’s Nancy Drew? I hope not because I’m going to fangirl again. I LOVE THIS SHOW SO MUCH! I can’t wait till Wednesday comes and I tune in a little after it starts, so then I can fast forward on my DVR. Then when the episode is over I basically start it all over again and watch select scenes that were awesome. (More specifically, they tend to be Nancy and Ace scenes because I love them and we’re entering so much angst I don’t know if my heart will be able to handle it!!!) 

I’ll say it a thousand times: THIS CAST IS EVERYTHING! Their dynamic is amazing. You can have any match ups and it’ll be a great time. There is not one person I don’t like. I was so upset that there wasn’t a new episode last week (especially because it was my birthday). I loved the last one with the Hardy Boys and that Nace reveal! OMG! I’m so sad that Grant has left again because we barely had him, but I feel he’ll eventually come back. He has to. I loved the ending when he spoke to Thom by signing to him. (My heart!) I seriously can’t say enough great things about this show. It is not your typical CW show and deserves more love and views. So happy a third season has already been confirmed!! 

LAST NOTES

Just started Shadow and Bone on Netflix and am loving it! I’m sure I’ll have an entire post dedicated to it when I’m done. (Currently going to start episode 6.) I have no background on the universe or the books (just what my sister is filling me in with as we watch). I definitely plan on reading Six of Crows after this!

So what are you enjoying? Let me know. I’m always looking for more shows to add to the list! Can never have enough. 

[hawkwhore]

Rebound - Hawk X Female!Reader

taking place some time after his breakup with moon, (probably end of S3 era after his redemption) he starts to develop feelings for y/n, but he isn’t sure if he’s ready for another relationship after what happened with moon. this results in constant disguised flirting to avoid commitment, leaving y/n confused on if he likes her, or is just joking around.

p.s. thank you guys so much for 100 followers!! :) i decided that im gonna make a hawk imagine as a thank you since i’ve been thinking about doing it for awhile. im so scared to post this bye.

words; 2,444

includes; light swearing, angst, fluff

It had gotten to a point, that it was almost bothersome. Bothersome, the way he would talk to you, and pretend like it was nothing.

“Hey gorgeous,” he greeted you as you sat down at Hawk’s lunch table. Your friends smirked and you rolled your eyes, trying to repress a smile. He did this all too often, making comments that shouldn’t be made unless it meant something more.

“Hi.” You sat down awkwardly, never knowing how to respond to his uncomfortable remarks. Not that you exactly minded them, you’d be lying if you said you didn’t have a bit of a thing for Hawk. But what you didn’t like, however, was not being able to tell if his comments were serious, or just another way to amuse himself over your reactions.

“So, we were just talking about the next All Valley. You’re coming to watch, right?” Hawk asked you as he bit into his food. You were never really into actually taking these karate classes, but you were a supportive friend to the group and always came to watch them fight. “Yeah, of course.”

“I still think you should join the dojo and fight with us, Y/N.” Miguel said hopefully and you smiled at him, preparing to reject the idea again. “Yeah, plus, you’d look pretty hot in the uniform, right guys?” Hawk joked, looking to the table for agreement. You let out a sigh of disappointment at the comment, laughing it off as the rest of the group agreed.

“Yeah, not happening.” You said while grinning, shutting the idea down for the millionth time. Hawk frowned. “You’re lame.” He stuck out a finger from behind the sandwich he was holding to point a finger at you. “Oh well. Looks like you guys will have to find another way to spend more time with me.” You joked, and gave a shrug of your shoulders to your friends.

You had thought, this would have been a good opening for Hawk to say something like ‘You’re right, do you wanna go out with me this weekend?’ but of course, he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything, really. The conversation just went on.

It made no sense to you why he acted the way he did, but never made a move. It was truly infuriating at times. Eventually the bell rang, and you all parted for the second half of your classes. You wouldn’t see Hawk again until your last period, which was both upsetting and a relief for you at the same time. He’s just so unpredictable.

There had even been times you’d called him out on his behavior, like when you all went out to Golf N’ Stuff and he practically acted like you two were a couple the whole night. He was complimenting you, putting his arm around you, and it prompted you to quite literally say, ‘If you actually like me that much why haven’t you asked me out?’ In a taunting tone towards him, wanting to see what he’d do.

For the first time in a long time, he’d seemed intimidated. He retracted his arm from you even, and after a moment’s silence regained his usual composure to spout a “You wish,” and laugh it off. It hurt your feelings a little, honestly. Was he just using you for the comfort without the obligation? Could it have easily been anyone else besides you? You were determined to find out, but you’ve just been stuck playing the long game.

It was later that day when you reached your final class that more unsurprising events from Hawk occurred. You had been sitting in the general center area of the classroom when Hawk walked in, and he shot a wink your way as he took his usual seat behind you.

“Hey,” he greeted. You turned around to face him, noticing once again how cute he looked in his red hoodie that you wish was yours, and replied nonchalantly. “Hey, how was bio?” You asked him. The teacher wasn’t here yet, so you were thankfully able to converse without being yelled at.

“It was wild,” he started, and his eyes lit up while his mouth curled into a devious smile. “We actually dissected some shit today. Just completely ripped the frog’s guts apart.” He spoke, feeling accomplished. “Totally badass.”

You mimicked the way a person would vomit, exclaiming how disgusting that story was. “And that is exactly why I am not taking biology.” You said while giggling.

He rolled his eyes playfully, but watched you intently as you laughed. He didn’t say anything at first, just smiled softly. “I love your laugh, it’s so cute.” There it is. Except this time it seemed a little more sincere than a harmless flirtation. Too bad that you know that’s all it really is, though.

You furrowed your eyebrows at him in a confused look at his compliment like you always do, and turned back to the front of the class when you realized the teacher had just arrived.

It can’t be that he’s scared to ask you out in some sort of fear of rejection, because you’ve made it pretty clear how you feel many times before. When it first started, you tried to reciprocate the things he did and said. But every time you tried, he brushed you off and made you feel like he didn’t want that. So, what, he could flirt with you, but you couldn’t flirt with him? How is that fair?

You considered these thoughts throughout class, and it was starting to frustrate you. Seriously, how is that fair?

You had become so focused on these thoughts, in fact, that you didn’t notice when the teacher had called on you. “Y/N,” Hawk shook your arm from behind you trying to get your attention back onto the class, and you whipped your head up. “Yeah, sorry.”

When class was over and you headed out of the room, Hawk was close to follow behind and pull you to the side before you got too far. “Hey are we still on for tonight?” He asked confidently, referring to your plan to watch the new WandaVision episode together at his house after school. You would’ve been nervous about this, but luckily Demetri was coming, so it shouldn’t be too awful.

“Yeah, duh,” you said while walking towards the exit with him. When you reached his car, you looked around. “Where’s Demetri?” You questioned, as Hawk started getting in the drivers’ seat. “He didn’t tell you he wasn’t coming?” He said boredly. Suddenly you felt tense, but you masked that with a look of annoyance. Figures.

“Ugh, what? No? He’s annoying. Why not?” You complained as you got in the car, no longer waiting for Demetri to show up. “Family dinner, I think?” He responded, while you buckled in your seatbelt and checked your makeup in the little mirror.

“Okay, well, his loss I guess.” You tried to hide your anxiousness about the fact you two were now going to be alone together at his house, with continued annoyance about Demetri’s cancellation.

“Yeah definitely, what loser would pass up an entire hour of sitting next to you?” He commented smugly, trying to lighten the mood. “Half-hour.” You corrected, turning your head away and ignoring the flirtatious intention of the comment.

You shook off the unexpected change of plan and suggested some music, to which Hawk agreed. You both terribly sang along to a few songs while chatting about WandaVision theories until you got to his house, and went inside.

“So what was that in class today?” As you two were walking upstairs to his room, he asked you this almost through a bit of laughter. “What do you mean?” You looked for clarification, hoping he didn’t mean what you thought he did. “You never lose focus in class.” He confirmed.

“Yeah I don’t know! Just zoned out I guess.” You tried to explain without giving him the details on the thoughts that caused your zoning out, thankful for not having to be in direct eye contact with him as you answered while walking inside his room.

Unfortunately, this answer was not good enough for Hawk. “Bullshit! What were you thinking about?” He encouraged lightheartedly, assuming this topic of conversation wouldn’t be anything deep. How wrong he was.

You sat down on his bed and he did the same, and you tried to think of what to say next. At your silence he continued, “You were probably thinking about how hot I am, huh?” You lightly smacked his arm and let out a breath of defeat.

“I don’t wanna kill the vibe by talking about this. I just wanna see Evan Peters in the next episode.” You tried changing the topic by making a joke, but he didn’t budge.

“Dude, what is it? Seriously you can talk to me.” He looked at you sincerely and moved a little closer, detecting this might be more serious than he thought. As annoyed as you were that he wouldn’t give this up, your heart melted a bit at this action.

Then, that heart started beating incredibly fast when you realized what you were now going to have to admit to him. It’s fine, you told yourself, you’ve been wanting to get this off your chest for ages, so just do it.

“Do you like me?” You blurted out.

That is not how you intended to start this conversation at all.

The smirk that was always planted on Hawk’s face immediately fell, and he suddenly looked nervous. “What?” He asked, trying to avoid answering.

Lucky for him, you had more to say.

“All you do, every time I see you, is make flirtatious comments towards me, and it’s weird. It wouldn’t be weird if you actually meant them, but you had plenty of chances to act on it and you haven’t, so at this point I’m wondering if you’re just using me as some sort of fun rebound to mess with and you don’t even like me at all, especially since whenever I tried to flirt back you brushed it off and acted like I was an idiot for doing that, so if you don’t actually like me I’d appreciate if you stopped doing what you’re doing because it’s confusing and I don’t know how to act around you anymore.”

You hesitated for a moment after your very passionate speech, and finished with, “That.. is what I was thinking about during class.”

You looked up at him anxiously and saw an expression of hurt and guilt on his face, and he gulped harshly at the realization that it was his turn to talk.

“You’re not a rebound.” He spoke softly, avoiding eye contact, almost reverting back to his Eli persona. You felt a glimpse of hope at this, but waited for him to continue, fidgeting with the ends of your shirt’s sleeves in impatience.

“And I’m sorry I made you feel like that was even a possibility.” He said louder, slowly regaining his confidence in his words. “I’ve been nervous, after Moon, about getting into another relationship.” He admitted to you, finally looking into your eyes.

Now that he wasn’t as nervous anymore to explain himself, suddenly you were. Where was this going?

“I didn’t want to commit to anything, I was..” He took a breath, as if ashamed to say it, “Scared.” He looked down, avoiding your gaze again, but continued. “I just didn’t want to screw up the same way I did before, and grow a relationship like that just for it to end so soon.”

“So you thought you’d just flirt with whoever was around to compensate your need for love?” You interrupted harshly. You felt a little bad, but you were still angry, and insecure.. and it still sounded like a rebound.

But all your thoughts of self-doubt went out the window when he took your hands in his. “No!” Hawk said, almost shouting in disbelief at you. “I like you a lot, Y/N. I just didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t want to make things serious and get hurt again, or even worse I do something stupid and hurt you. But I guess my attempt at ‘liking you from a distance’—“ He put emphasis on those words, as though making fun of his own phrasing. “—ended up being stupid and hurt you anyways. And I’m really sorry for that.”

Hawk poured his heart out to you, and you were in shock. You don’t think you’d ever seen him so vulnerable before. You couldn’t think of anything else to say, so you did something you thought you’d never do.

You kissed him.

His short look of confusion as you leaned in quickly faded when he realized, and he happily accepted the kiss. He moved his hand to hold your face, his other one on your waist, and you lightly rested your hands on his chest. A sense of relief washed over you, finally understanding what was going through his head all this time. Before the kiss could deepen, you parted from him to say something.

“I understand,” You moved your arms up a little, wrapping them around his neck while talking, and he held your waist loosely. “But I hope you know that we don’t have to be like you and Moon. You’ve changed so much since then. And I believe in us. I want to be with you.”

You stared into his eyes intensely, hoping he would say exactly what you’ve been wanting him to say to you for months.

His puppy dog expression broke into a huge smile, and he nodded. “Yeah, I want to be with you too.” He leaned in again, much more confidently this time, and kissed you deeply.

He kept his hold on your waist tight, and your lips continued to move together as your hands grasped onto the back of his neck. He leaned forwards slightly and moved his hand to hold your jaw, but accidentally broke the kiss from a smile he couldn’t manage to suppress.

You giggled at this, giving him another quick peck on the lips before turning yourself towards the TV. “So, WandaVision?” You reminded him, laughing to yourself a bit at how things escalated.

“Oh, right,” Hawk hesitated, looking at you for another second. “Fine.” He gave up the idea of kissing you more, and searched for the remote.

“I guess we should be glad Demetri didn’t come after all.” Hawk smiled slyly as he picked up the remote, and cuddled up next to you on the bed.

You laughed, and curled up close to him as he turned on the show. “Yeah, definitely.”

———————————————————————

ok hi i hope this wasn’t terrible i’ve basically never written a fanfic before but if y’all liked it you can send me requests??

also random thought i got uncomfy just writing them kissing even though i read intensely nsfw fanfics on the daily so idk why that happened but anyways. LMFAOOO

bye thank u for 100 followers excuse me while i hibernate because this post is embarrassing

[jadoue1999]

The X-Men and the member they lost (sequel to Wanda and the life she deserved)

Summary: *Important to have read "Wanda and the life she deserved (She'll make sure of it)" at least until chapter 4 or 7 (Though until the end is the best) Sister fic, it goes before, during and after "Wanda and the life she deserved (She'll make sure of it)"* Peter is missing and all they can find is a transmission of a Wanda Maximoff. The team will do what they can to bring their missing member back from whatever this place is. Though someone needs to do the difficult thing and tell Erik that he once again lost his family.

Next parts: chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, 

Chapter 1: Missing

Peter was fiddling with his Walkman, switching between songs, he wasn’t sure what he was in the mood for. He finally settled on a random one, not really caring about his choice. He was thinking way too quickly to concentrate on a song anyway. Erik was back at the mansion, he had showed up, unannounced and walked in like he owned the place. Maybe he did, who knew what was going on between him and Charles. He didn’t stay with the students, preferring the company of the professor. The speedster had no idea where he could have gone, it’s not like he could rent a room or a house without immediately being recognized, but the last year seemed to prove the contrary. Though, Peter now faced a dilemma, he could pull off a reverse Darth Vader and tell him he was his son (hopefully without the hand chopping and the rejection) or he could just let it be and not bring it up? Raven would certainly give him death glares if he did nothing. But for now, he was alone and unsure of what to do.

I had a brother

Peter removed his headphones in confusion, what was that voice? It almost felt... familiar?

His name was Pietro

The speedster froze as he heard his name, his birth name. One he hadn’t used since he was a child and his mom decided that having an Americanised name would be easier. The only person that knew it was his mom and-

No, it couldn’t be her, she had died years ago, Wendy couldn’t possibly be calling him. Just as he pushed away his hope, his room was suddenly bathed in a red glow. The very same color of his twin’s magic, or wiggly woos as he liked to call them, had been. He slowly saw a flicker of red light materializing in the middle of his floor. The flicker grew bigger and bigger, and he watched it, entranced by the magic he hadn’t seen in nearly 15 years. He couldn’t look away and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

‘Be with me...’ The voice called out to him again, sounding more desperate. He put his Walkman at his side and stepped out of his bed. On the contrary to the two other times, it hadn’t felt like someone had spoken. It was more of an involuntarily projected thought. Like his sister had sometimes done when she made a nightmare and accidentally projected it to the whole neighborhood. The portal grew bigger, and Peter felt drawn to it. He took a breath, should he follow the voice? No, definitely not. Could it kill him or harm him in any way? Most definitely. Would he let that stop him if it gave him a chance to see Wendy again? No, he had to try.

He took a step forward and was greeted by red lights wrapping over him and dragging him in the portal. He was vaguely aware of the feeling of free falling into an endless void and then Peter knew no more.

...

“Has anyone seen Peter?” Kurt asked as he walked into the cafeteria. He had expected the speedster to be eating his weight in food like he usually did in the morning, but he was nowhere to be found.

“Not sure,” answered Scott, between two bites, “but knowing the guy, he probably took a casual stroll to Europe because he wanted real crepes.”

Jean nodded in agreement and Kurt felt his worries subdue as the teen spoke. It was logical, Peter had done it quite a few times before. He would probably be back in the afternoon with stuff he had liberated and stories about whatever shenanigans he had gotten himself into. He let it go as he sat down next to Ororo and ate his own food, they talked about training and different strategies they could use for the next time they were in the danger room. Once their meal was done, Kurt went to the library, he had some reading to do. He spent the next few hours glossing through various books and accidentally scaring students when he teleported unexpectedly next to them to get a new novel. Diner time was approaching, and the mutant realized that Peter still wasn’t back. Fearing for the safety of his friend, he teleported himself in the main hall, where the professor usually was around that time. As expected, he was talking to Raven. He walked up to him as the professor turned around.

“Are you alright? I can hear your worry without any effort on my part.”

“It’s Peter, I think he’s missing,” declared Kurt with a grave look. The professor shared a glance with Raven before turning his wheelchair around and motioning forward.

“Come with me.”

...

Charles, like any sane human, was very concerned when Kurt shared his worries. He telepathically called the rest of the team to the briefing room, perhaps together they’d be able to solve this mystery. Once everyone had arrived, he filled them in and asked each of them when was the last time they had seen the speedster. Both Ororo and Kurt had seen him at diner the day before and Scott had seen his silver blur when he found himself suddenly covered in silly string and Jean laughing at him. No one had seen or sensed anything anormal about his behavior. Charles had then concluded that Cerebro should be used to try and locate him. Concentrating on the different mutants, he found no trace of him, no one had seen or heard him. No report of unexplainable disappearance of twinkies or records either. He removed the helmet with a sigh and exited the room. His disappointment must have been obvious because everyone suddenly started worrying, their thoughts all meddling in and all about their missing teammate.

“What if we went to check his room? Suggested Raven. “If that’s the last place he was, there might be clues there that might help.”

They all agreed, all hopeful that a logical and harmless reason was behind his sudden disappearance. The walk was a short one and the tension in the air was almost palpable, as if they were all expecting Peter to be sitting on his bed, laughing at them for worrying so much. When Scott opened the door, no such pleasure took place, it was unbearably empty. After combing his room for clues, the only positive thing they could think of was that there were no runaway notes, and the Walkman wasn’t there. That meant that Peter probably left willingly. Charles brought a hand to his face, deep in thoughts, he didn’t notice Jean stepping forward.

“Professor,” she said absently, “there’s this... strange energy.” She walked to the very middle of the room with her eyes closed and her palm stretched open. “Here. Something happened right here.”

The professor wheeled himself to his student and closed his eyes in concentration, trying to feel what Jean was perceiving. He frowned when he sensed nothing, “Are you sure?”

The redhead nodded, “yes, I can almost make out... voices? It’s hard to see.”

The room was quiet, no one seemed to know what to do. That is, until the white-haired teen spoke up. “Cerebro,” Ororo declared. She sighed when everyone looked at her confusedly, “she could show us what she sees with the machine. As far as I know, it amplifies powers.”

The professor looked at Raven, feeling ridiculous for not thinking about it before. He ordered Jean to make sure to keep the connection as everyone walked back to the room that kept Cerebro. They held their breath in anticipation as she put on the helmet and concentrated even harder. For a few seconds, nothing happened. They were about to admit defeat when piano was suddenly heard throughout the room, followed by, what seemed to be a 1950s sitcom. They all watched in silence as the footage unfolded in front of them.

‘Oh, a newlywed couple just moved to town

A regular husband and wife’

Scott snorted at that remark, “sure, a normal couple where the husband needs to hide his face from the neighbors.” Ororo smiled at his joke before focusing on the screen once again.

‘Who left the big city to find a quiet life’

The team froze as the woman made a ‘sold’ sticker appear on the sign at the front of their house. They continued watching as the husband walked through the door, without his bride. He opened it and took her in his arms again, passing through the sofa as the lyrics chanted.

‘WandaVision!

She’s a magical gal in a small-town locale

He’s a hubby who’s part machine

How will this duo fit in and pull through?

By sharing a love like you’ve never seen

WandaVision!’

The song ended with them sharing a kiss and then the episode started. But the group didn’t focus on it, instead, they all looked at Charles for answers as the woman was identified as Wanda Maximoff. Jean paused the transmission, seemingly in control of the broadcast.

“What does this mean? Is she a mutant?”

If he was honest with himself, the professor had no clue, it did look like a normal sitcom, complete with practical effect, but it didn’t make sense. How could the energy responsible for Peter’s disappearance lead to this? The woman couldn’t simply be a normal actress, the very concept of the show was too strange for it to be a coincidence. And then there was her name: Wanda Maximoff. It had to mean something.

“Does...” started Raven, looking as confused as everyone else. “Does Peter have a sister named Wanda?”

Jean got up from the chair as she removed the helmet. “He did mention a sister, but she’s about ten years younger, her name was Lorna, I think?”

Ororo and Kurt nodded in agreement. Still, that didn’t answer the question. Who was this Wanda and what role had she played in Peter’s disappearance? Or did she have nothing to do with it and she was a victim as well? They decided to continue the broadcast, perhaps playing it would reveal some answers.

They quickly learned that it truly was a stereotypical 1950s sitcom, minus all the magic. The classic misinterpreted conversation gag was the main plot point, which lead to a strange encounter with the husband’s boss. It also turned out that the android, Vision as he called himself, could change his appearance to look human. They all felt uneasy as the couple was questioned about their past, the boss getting angrier and angrier. Suddenly, he began to choke on something, and the camera plans became all wrong and the wife kept telling her husband to stop being silly, but he continued choking. Nobody seemed to be able to do anything. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the robot saved his boss, which apparently marked the end of scene for these two characters. They left quickly which both Wanda and Vision were relived about. Interestingly, they constructed their past and the episode ended.

As the credit rolled, the team was meet with a thousand questions and not many answers. Everyone was silent, but Charles could feel their thoughts racing through their heads, they were all confused.

“So... they’re all trapped?” Intervened Ororo. “Because it was obvious that neither Wanda or Vision had any idea what they were doing there and what their past was.”

The professor let his eyes examine the credits, it truly made no sense. They were only credited as their character names, did that meant that they were playing themselves? They didn’t seem forced to love one another, but they did seem on the run from something. Perhaps the creepy commercial had something to do with whatever danger they were escaping.

Kurt’s voice was what broke him from his thoughts. “Are there any other episodes?”

Jean sat down again and put the helmet back on, clearly exhausted from the previous episode. She concentrated for a few seconds before shaking her head.

“I can’t see anything, but I might just be tired.”

She removed the helmet and Scott held out a hand to help her up. Everyone walked back to their own room, promising to start searching for solutions in the morning.

...

It had been a few days since the first episode had been discovered. Hank had made adjustments to the machine so it could be broadcasted at any time and without the need for Jean to be there. He also made sure that they would be alerted if another episode were shown. The scientist had also been the one to suggest that they should be tracking the signal to its source. Perhaps this Wanda woman could lead them to their missing teammate. The only downside was that he needed Jean to work with him since she could feel the energy and determine if it was the right frequency.

That’s what the pair were doing, under Charles supervision, when the screen surrounding Cerebro suddenly light up. He mentally called the others, and they were in the room just as the episode started. Nothing much happened other than the magic show, and a bad cut when the radio glitched. There were also the creepy cultish way people kept repeating “for the children” but it might have been 60s idea of humor. Other than that, everything seemed fine. They were now back at their house when the woman got up and was suddenly pregnant.

“I might be behind on the human body,” interrupted Kurt, clearly lost, “but doesn’t it take longer than a few minutes for a baby to grow that size?”

Charles kept looking at the screen, he was now convinced that this woman wasn’t just a normal human. A banging outside the couple’s house frightened them and they ran outside. The X-Men watched in astonishment as a beekeeper slowly emerged out of the sewers under the scared eyes of the pair. When the unknown man suddenly turned his head, the professor watched in stunned silence as the camera was once again in the woman’s face, who seemed more determined than ever.

“No,” Wanda said.

There was a rewind effect, and the couple was back in their living room, acting as if nothing happened. Then the screen changed from black and white to full color. The team was surprised to see the man was bright red and the woman had hair a similar shade to Jean. The episode ended with them watching tv. Nobody talked for awhile, they weren’t sure what they just witnessed. Was the woman aware of what was happening? If she was trapped, it was obvious she had a certain control over her environment. Could it be a prison that she was kept in for everyone’s safety? How was Peter involved with this woman?

“What are your theories?” Asked the professor to his surrounding students.

“I think she’s the one controlling it,” intervened Scott. “The rewind showed us that much.”

“Yeah, but she was just as lost last episode, what if she got trapped there by accident and acts on instinct to protect herself?” Raven argued.

“I don’t think it’s just a show,” interrupted Hank, walking forward to the commands. He was looking over the part where the radio had glitched, playing the part just before the bad cut. “There’s someone calling to her. I think we might be viewing a parallel universe.”

Scott stepped in closer to Jean and took her hand, making sure she was alright before turning to Hank. “A parallel universe? Is that even possible?”

Charles sighed, “we don’t know the extent of this woman’s power, perhaps she is able to broadcast her life without knowing it.”

A sudden gasp from Jean made everyone turn to her. She was grasping her head in pain, using Scott as a way to stabilize herself. “There’s another transmission!” She screamed as the screens lit up once again.

They were now in the 70s, both of the couple’s hair had changed to fit the era. They watched as the pregnancy took all but one day to get to full term. The inconveniences of being pregnant were covered up by silly jokes and puns, such as showing that her water broke by the sprinklers activating. As Vision was off to get the doctor, Wanda was distracted by the doorbell and the woman she had met last episode came in. She was, of course, oblivious to the pregnancy. It went by quickly, Wanda tried to hide her belly as she could but then she went into labor. Geraldine helped her deliver the first child as Vision came back. The X-Men all frowned as it was revealed that she still had another child on the way.

‘Twins, a clever way to fix the name discourse,’ thought Charles to himself.

Wanda was now watching over the twins, her friend walked over, congratulating her on the sudden birth of not one but two babies.

“I’m a twin”

A quiet “what” was heard from Scott, Charles saw him look around, probably wondering if he had heard right.

“I had a brother. His name was... Pietro,” the redhead seemed lost in thoughts as she began to sing to her boys in a language they couldn’t understand. The group was stunned as they watched her rock her babies. The professor was feeling all kinds of weird; did she mean Peter? Had she killed him for the sake of a plot point?

“He was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he?”

Charles felt slight relief, perhaps it didn’t have anything to do with the speedster, because he was alive and well as far as he knew. Perhaps the brother’s name was a simple coincidence.

They watched in muted horror as Wanda turned to her friend, asking her to explain herself. Geraldine played dumb, but it was obvious that it was just a cover up. The woman was aware of the sitcom world. The confrontation escalated to a point where both were hostile to each other. Both trying to get answers. The tension was immense and when it seemed like something horrible would actually happen- Nothing did. There was another cut and then Wanda was once again watching the twins, alone this time.

After the strange talk Vision had with their neighbor, he ran back in, asking his wife about Geraldine’s whereabouts.

“Oh, she left, honey,” Wanda said in a sing song voice, “she had to rush home.”

The camera focused on her face, showing her eyes that had a slight glint of determination. It was no doubt she had gotten rid of her neighbor. They briefly talked about leaving, something Wanda didn’t seem keen on and the episode ended with them watching television with their children in their arms.

“What... the... hell?” Came Raven’s voice. The others had to agree, it was by far the most unsettling episode they had seen. Charles was asking himself the same question as everyone else in the room. Was Wanda the true villain?

[cursestothemoon]

The Peters

G.W. X FEM!READER BLURB

warnings: mention of the word boner

from this request :)

OKAY, I SEE THAT U’RE WRITING SOME HEADCANONS RN BUT GEORGE DATING A READER WHO’S A MARVEL FANGIRL AND SHE’S GUSHING OVER PETER MAXIMOFF // PETER PARKER WHILE HAVING A MARVEL MOVIE MARATHON.

definitely not describing myself, yk? a lot of people could simp over peter maximoff and parker ;

The popcorn was made, the movies all set and ready to go- all you had to do was press play. Press play and wait for George to finally sit down on the couch.

You two were at your house Christmas holiday and today was a movie marathon you had been planning for weeks now. George had asked about the 'muggle movies about the people with powers' and that was all it took for you to all but jump for joy. Except now that it was happening George was taking his sweet time showering and getting dressed.

"George! I'm starting without you." You called to him just as his footsteps were heard coming into the room.

He rolled his eyes at your sass and plopped down next to you, "I'm here, I'm here."

Wordlessly you brought your knees up to your chest getting comfortable before starting the first movie, Iron Man, with a giddy smile. But George's burning gaze made you pause the movie and look over at him expectantly.

"Kiss?" He pouted making you quickly grab his face to place a hasty peck on his lips before going back to your spot and starting the movie again.

George mumbled, "That'll work for now." Then turned his attention to the movie making you shake your head, a small smile playing on your lips.

***

The Ant-Man end credit scene had just ended and you were beyond excited to start Civil War. George had gotten really invested by the end of Iron Man, already telling you his theories as you tried not to spoil anything.

Civil war started and you tried to keep your love for the dorky teenager at bay, really you did, and it was easy during this particular movie seeing as his scenes were limited.

"Underoos." You whispered to yourself knowing it was coming.

George didn't pay much mind to that, too invested in the storyline. Then Blitzkrieg Bop started to play and you were nearly bouncing in your seat with excitement.

At the first sight of Peter Parker you wouldn't help but swoon, and when he bared his torso for viewing pleasure as he changed into the spider-man suit you couldn't hold back.

"He's so cute." You giggled, watching as Spider-man was now swinging from building to building.

George heard the comment and turned his head to you in lightning speed but decided against saying anything just yet.

But then little comments and giggling kept coming.

"Aw baby..."

"I love him so much."

"If that ugly bird bitch hurts him one more time..."

Just as you hit the middle of the movie, George had wiggled his way over to you and placed his head in your lap. Once he was comfortable he grabbed your hand and put it on his head subtly telling you to start running your fingers through his hair. Your attention was still on the movie however, making George pout in your lap as he followed the storyline.

It was during Infinity War when you made a giggly remark about a certain...asset of Peter's.

"He has such a cute butt."

George shot out of your lap, hair frazzled and eyes wide.

"I thought you only looked at my butt!"

You laughed at his remark making him continue.

"He's wearing tights Y/n! Tights aren't very manly." He grumbled as he jutted out his bottom lip and narrowed his eyes.

Your laughs couldn't be contained at this point as you paused the movie and grabbed his face in your hands, squishing his cheeks. Leaning in, you tried to place a peck on his lips but he turned his head- as much as he could while you still held his cheeks.

Your voice was soft as you cooed, "Aw, Georgie..."

"No. Why don't you go kiss Peter Parker?" He sassed.

"Someone's jealous."

He huffed at your accusation but said nothing to argue against it. You shook your head at his ridiculous antics before starting to shower him in quick little kisses all over his face.

Eventually you broke through his indifferent demeanor, a smile stretching across his face with each kiss.

That was how you finished the rest of the movies, going well into the night watching battle after battle and placing kisses onto your boyfriend's cheeks, nose, and lips.

A few days later you decided to introduce him to WandaVision, and he was beyond excited to see Wanda again. George had a bit of a connection with the red headed witch for...obvious reasons.

Binging the show was going well until Peter Maximoff showed up, his appearance making you let out an excited squeal.

"Not him..." He grimaced.

You gave him a look before turning back to the t.v., "Oh, you just watch the show."

His silence only lasted for so long before he made a sound of realization and turned to you.

"What is it with you and boys named Peter? Should I be worried?"

You chuckled, never having noticed that both of your favorite characters names were, in fact, Peter.

"I never noticed," You admitted before smirking at George, "But boys named George have a special place in my heart."

"You say that like my name is unique, there are at least five George's in the neighborhood!"

You pulled him into a kiss before pulling away and placing a peck onto the tip of his nose.

"You're the only one I want, now please be quiet and let's watch."

George stayed quiet for the next few episodes, and now the season finally was starting and had the both od you on your seats. He almost forgot about Peter Maximoff and his 'stupid silver hair' until the name reveal he thought was just brilliant.

"Ralph Bohner!" He howled, eyes tearing up as he laughed.

His face was nearly beet red with how hard he was laughing, "You fancied a bloke named Bohner, boner, babe."

He'd never let that one go.

tags:

@georgeweasleysbabe

@amourtentiaa

@vsawyer1989​

@lifeofkaze

@siriusement

[thisisarcanereverie]

Should’ve Known  Chapter 4.

Hey, so originally I was planning on skipping this episode in WandaVision and get straight into the 70′s, however, after re-watching the episode I thought to myself, maybe this episode would be useful in what I have planned for that chapter. Also again, thank you for all the love and support you show when I post. It really helps me write, especially when you leave a reply one what you liked or suspect from this chapter or other chapters. It really makes my day and it makes it easier to write knowing others are willing to read it. 

I’m trying my best to write as much as I can while i’m still motivated, updates really could be anywhere from a day or a few hours apart at this point. Honestly I only started writing fanfiction again to help me start writing in general since I’ve been writing a book for the past few months and I’ve hit a road block. Writing this helps and plus it’s fun for me to write fanfiction like this. 

Also I did write this based loosely on what I imagined the residents of Westview must have felt like living day upon day. Also a little on Doctor Who, specifically the “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” When Donna was trapped and sort of lived like she was in a show. 

DISCLAIMER: I don’t own Wanda or Steve they are owned by Marvel, I don’t own the gif either I just got it from Pinterest, also I’m really tired so any mistakes or stuff that doesn’t make sense that’s on me. 

WARNINGS:Angst, Swearing, the stages of grief, loss, dark themes, 18 + from here on out.

WORDS : 2,040

SUMMARY: Feelings of unease continue to rise as you begin to know Wanda and start to be wary of Agnes....and of Steve. 

You could have sworn you and Steve were just having dinner, the thought of food caused your stomach to turn. You wished for the life of you to know what was ailing you so you could take some medicine. You would have to make an appointment with the doctor but for now you had to continue the day. You gently rose from the bed so as to not disturb your sleeping husband. 

Husband.

Something about that felt wrong to you. 

You shook off the feeling before finally getting ready for the day. 

When the thought of what to wear came to mind you suddenly found yourself all ready dressed with your hair and makeup done. 

You wore a cardigan sweater over your short sleeved blouse and plain skirt. Your hair was neatly done, curling slightly around the edges with a flower barrette in your hair. You looked good, however, how good you looked was the last thing on your mind. You instantly became confused and your head began to ache. How did you get dressed so quickly? Where did the clothes come from? 

As soon as all those thoughts appeared, they vanished upon hearing your husband's voice calling your name. Suddenly you wondered what you were even thinking about. 

“Doll are you ready to rehearse?” Steve’s voice carried out, seemingly echoing off the walls. 

“What are we rehearsing for again honey?” you asked, your heels clicked against the wooden stairs as you made your way down. 

It was only when you saw Steve did you realize something was seriously off. 

It looked as though someone had renovated your house as you had slept, there was new furniture and wallpaper. The kitchen was now at the opposite side of the house. Even the stairs were new, from bannister to the steps themselves. You don’t know why you hadn’t noticed before.

“Doll don’t tell me you forgot,” he teased you, you rolled your eyes refusing to admit that you may or may not have forgotten something. 

“Of course I haven’t forgotten,” you lied, “I’m making sure you remember.” 

“So you remember then, is that correct.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me what we’re rehearsing for then.”

“No.” 

You could feel his eye roll as you made your way to the kitchen, you were suddenly starving. Steve had followed you to the kitchen where you quickly made yourself a sandwich. 

“It’s the Annual Talent Show Fundraiser for the local school,” Steve said “it’s your favorite event in the season.” His eyes searched you in concern. You don’t remember there ever being an Annual Talent Show Fundraiser in Westview. Thinking about it you don’t really remember anything abou-

-

-

-

“Of course it is honey,” you smiled at him, “I was just keeping you on your toes.” you brought your pointer finger to his nose and bopped him lightly, you and him smiling all the while you both leaned on opposite sides of the kitchen counters.

“Are we still going for that strength test this year?” 

You nodded excitedly, you were never one for muscles, however, when your husband lifts hundreds of pounds over his head (or yourself for that matter) it had you all giddy with excitement. 

“Anything for me to bring out the big guns huh.” Steve teased face leaning closer to yours, you leaned in closer noses touching. “Naturally.” you replied, finally closing the gap and kissing him. 

-

-

You suddenly find yourself with Dottie and the rest of her Ladies in Hating sitting by the pool. When you realized you were seated next to Agnes you stiffened. You barely heard a word Bev was saying, it took most of your control not to switch seats with someone, anyone, so long as it got you away from Agnes. You pretended to listen to Bev talk about her store when you noticed Agnes looking at you through the side of her eye. It nearly made you jump out of your skin. 

You quickly tore your gaze from Agnes and to the person on her right, Wanda. 

You were greeted with Wanda looking at Dotty instantly, seemingly trying to mimic Dotty in how she presented herself, which you thought silly. 

Wanda was far more charming than Dotty anyways. 

Why were you so sure about that?

You switched back and forth between watching Dotty and watching Wanda who seemed to have made a new friend with Geraldine next to her. 

There was something off about her as well. 

-

-

You find yourself helping Dotty and Wanda with cleaning up after the meeting. Wanda was picking up the trays of the barely eaten cookies and desserts that Dotty had ordered, while you were busy stacking plates and cups. The radio was playing something light, which was more than you could say for Dotty. She was just “supervising” to make sure things went accordingly. 

Both you and Wanda made faces behind her back and tried your best to keep your laughter among yourselves. Although you have only known Wanda for a few months (although it feels like you met her only yesterday but it also feels like you’ve known her for longer.) you immediately became fast friends. 

“Thank you Dotty for choosing (Y/n) and I to help you clean up today we feel so lucky.” Wanda thanked Dotty, a kind smile adorned on her face. 

“You are.” 

As you and Wanda turned your backs to Dotty you both stuck out your tongues at each other. Playfulness in each other's eyes. You both turned back to Dotty you had adjusted herself in her seat. 

“I can’t help but wonder if you and I haven’t gotten off on the wrong foot Dotty and I would like to correct that if I can.” Wanda said, her smile a little forced but still pretty. 

“And how would you do that.” Dotty stated, her eyes glaring holes into Wanda. It was almost like you weren’t there. Wanda fidgeted with her hands and brushed away a stray hair that had fallen out of place. 

Dotty stood up from her chair and made her way to where you and her stood. 

“I’ve heard things about you,” she stated her eyes then darted your way, “and about you too, don’t think I’ve forgotten that you’re here.” 

Dotty’s heels clicked as she advanced, almost like a tiger stalking their prey, and you had the feeling you and Wanda were two very unfortunate monkeys. 

“You and your husbands.” 

That word still felt wrong to you. 

You weren’t even focusing on Wanda or Dotty anymore as you began to notice how the radio had stopped it’s tune, the crackling of the device overcoming the music and then you hear it. 

“Wanda, (Y/n) do you read me over.” it was a male voice, crackling, breaking in and out. 

Why was he calling for you and Wanda?

“Who is that?” You heard Dotty’s voice shake, you tore your eyes away from the gray radio and to the light haired lady in front of you. Her eyes were wide with confusion, all tiger energy faded and what was left was a frightened woman. 

She was trembling. 

Her eyes went from the radio to look at you and Wanda, her eyes widened. 

“Who are you?” her voice shakes. 

The man speaks again and you immediately tear your focus away from Dotty and to the radio again. 

“Wanda....(Y/n).....Who’s doing this to you Wanda....(Y/n).....Wanda....(Y/n).....Wanda” then as if a spell had been broken the radio blew up, shocking Wanda and Dotty, Dotty shattering the glass in her hand. 

Red

You had forgotten what other colors had looked like so seeing red was a change that left you speechless. After stuttering for a few seconds Wanda went to grab Dotty a washcloth. 

You kinda block the rest of it out, instead you stare off into the distance. 

Where Agnes stood watching. 

-

-

You paced backstage with Wanda, frantically waiting for your husbands to arrive. You and Steve were to go after Wanda and Vision. You tried your best to calm your erratic heart. Wanda looked breathtaking in her magician's assistant outfit and your eyes kept wandering back to her...Now wasn’t the time to question any of the thoughts running through your mind. 

Steve and Vision were late, Steve was a part of the neighborhood watch and went to the meeting today, apparently Wanda’s husband had done the same. Geraldine was backstage with you trying her best to keep the both of you calm, which even on a good day was nearly impossible. 

Finally you spotted your husbands together, one of Visions arms around Steve’s shoulders seemingly leaning on him for support while your husband seemed to be helping him walk. 

“Steve honey what happened,” you ask immediately, upon dashing to your husband Wanda instantly went to check on Vision. 

“I don’t know doll but I don’t think Vision is able to perform.” He answered, gesturing to the flampent behavior of the otherwise reserved man. Wanda looked at Steve and it broke your heart to see her eyes well up with a disappointed expression. 

You had a feeling you were going to regret what you were about to do. 

You immediately turned to Wanda, grabbing her hands out of what felt like instinct and grabbed her attention. 

“Wanda how do you feel about doing the Talent Show with me?” You asked, hopeful. You could tell she wanted to, her eyes lighting up at the mention of doing the Talent Show afterall, but immediately looked at Vision with concern. 

“Who would take care of Vision?” 

‘I would,” Steve answered, Wanda looked at him with apprehension, 

“Are you sure?” 

“Absolutely you girls kick ass out there.” 

You and her immediately looked at each other in excitement. You two immediately went to figure out whose routine you were going to perform, quickly settling on Wanda and Vision magic act. 

Instead of the magicians assistant she would take place as the magician while you took her place. Next was to figure out your stage name, once again Wanda quickly settling on her keeping Glamour and you sticking with Mirage. Finally she ran the whole act with you and by the time you were done planning the previous act was up and now it was your turn. 

“And now for our final act I give you, Wanda and (Y/n)” After Dotty’s introduction your performance ran overall smoothly, Wanda being shockingly good at close up magic and illusions. 

That was until suddenly Senior Scratchy decided to turn the magic act into an escape act. A powerful gust had knocked Wanda’s magicians hat off her head and you felt the terrible pit in your gut worsen. Looking to the crowd you thought you had seen something colorful, like the red you saw before. 

Before what?

Wait....how could you forget that?

Your eyes immediately darted to Dotty and saw her seemingly unfazed of what happened prior to the Talent Show. How could she be fine? She didn’t know who you were, how could she not have known who you were?

You turn to Agnes, her eyes narrowing on your figure. 

-

-

You and Wanda won the best magic show award at the Talent Show, you insisted Wanda keep it since it was her act, you had merely assisted her. You and Wanda immediately made plans for you to host that dinner you were talking about months ago, tomorrow. 

Steve congratulated you on a show well done and that if you ever felt the need to get magical in the bedroom he wouldn’t mind being your assistant there either. 

Upon returning home Steve immediately booked it for the shower, claiming that taking care of Vision was no easy feat. You laughed him off and went upstairs to your shared bedroom to get ready for the night. There was no need to cook dinner since you and him ate out. 

You were so tired that you almost didn’t notice the world around you changing colors. 

Or a familiar leather bound notebook on the bed. 

Almost.

After getting used to the newly found colors around you, you immediately opened the notebook noticing how old it was, and in semi faded ink on the first page read. 

“Property of Captain Steven G. Rodgers (Captain America).”

[celebritytgcaptions]

Requests (5/23/2021)

Hi lovelies! I’ve been getting so many requests & I’m working hard to get all of them in the queue. Thanks for sending them my way! I’m writing to let you know that the queue is now full until the end of June. I was able to get every requests from my May 8th post in there except for a few. Requests from May 8th for captions featuring Katy Perry, Jenna Fischer, Marisol Nichols, Addison Rae, Ariana Grande, Erin Kellyman, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Jhene Aiko, & Kirstin Maldonado will be posted in early July.

But there have been an absolute ton of requests since then too, yay! So I’m listing all the requests that I haven’t gotten to below. If you made a request but don’t see it below that might be for a few reasons. 1) I’ve written it already and it will be posted in June. 2) It’s one of the requests I posted on May 8th so I won’t talk about it here. 3) I considered it a demand not a request (for example, I received two that said “Anything with,” that wasn’t really a request just telling me to do it. Sorry if this bothers some of you but it is an issue with me so make sure you word your requests AS requests). Either way, thanks for the love, lovelies! :D

Anonymous said:

Could you do one with either Kelley O’hara or Alex Morgan from the USWNT about a guy soccer player watching the US win the world cup and then want to be them or something like that?

I actually know who both those are (shockingly enough, I don’t really follow sports) so sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Could you do lorengrey captions? She’s so hot

Sorry sweetie, don’t know who that is. :(

Anonymous said:

Hi I just had an idea for a game you could do. It could be where someone has to say as a boy what they’re like physically in stages. So first stage is hair color for example, second stage could be height, third stage could be body type, etc. An example would be if I was a black hair, short height, thick body type, I would match up with someone like Nicki Minaj. Just an idea which you could extend on. Hopefully it makes sense. I appreciate you!

I actually have a game like this mapped out called “Build a Sissy” where you choose age, hair color, and bra size, but it would take a LOT of work to make so I haven’t written it yet. Maybe some day though. :)

Anonymous said:

I would love to see a Tori Kelly caption. Her hair and body are not typical but beautiful for a white girl. I say that last sentence respectfully. I think having a caption with her would be great

Sure thing! Tori Kelly is a cutie. :)

Anonymous said:

Ok I'm not sure if u'll know these 2 cuz even I had to look them up for the names but anne dudek and maitland ward theyre the 2 blonde sisters from white chicks not sure if uve seen it but if u can could u make a caption for them please?

I DO know who they are! I’ve been thinking about doing a White Chicks caps because there’s a lot of cute looks in that movie (especially for Busy Phillips who I just love) so sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Could u do Yvette nicole brown from community? Id like to see some big girl love

Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

I already know that this request is probably gonna be a No but I still have to ask whats the ruling on GCI enhanced celebrities like Taylor swift from Cats?  Or is that too much like "Furry" stuff. Now I'm Feeling this will be a No for multiple reasons

So it is not an issue with CGI “enhanced” celebrities but for Cats it is because I do not have a Furry fetish and I get uncomfortable thinking about writing caps for it. But I write caps with “manips” all the time (photoshopped images of celebs) so I’m not ruling out CGI enhanced celebs all together.

Anonymous said:

Can you do one of Lindsey stirling? And for the story can it be a guy trying to learn Violin but he cant seem to focus he even tried hot female teachers but it didnt work then he gets a male teacher than he starts focusing and wanting to please the teacher he becomes a sissy sorry its a long request

Sounds fun, sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Hi big fan and I think you’ve been doing amazing work. Is there anyway you could do a story about a guy who loses a bet to sorority girl and is forced to get his nails painted and turned into a girl? I love the idea of having a boys nails painted against his will. I’d love one with Selena Gomez but if you think another celeb would be better I leave that cumpletely to you.

Totally! This sounds fun. :D

Anonymous said:

Can you do thelma and Louise?

I’m assuming you mean Geena Davis & Susan Sarandon from Thelma & Louise so yes. Yes I can. :)

Anonymous said:

Can you do a caption from the movie bridesmaids? Like when theyre all trying on dressess or something?

I haven’t seen Bridesmaids (I know I know) but I can try something. :)

Anonymous said:

it would be super cool if you could do some more games! They’re my fav

Glad you like them! As long as I’m not on hiatus, games will be posted every second Saturday. I’ve already got two set for June. :)

Anonymous said:

Hey huge fan of your recent work and super excited about new caps!! Do you think you could do one about a college guy who drops out in pursuit of being a stand up comedian, but the comedy club needs a female comic so they turn him into a girl? I was thinking maybe Nikki Glaser, she so funny and sexy. Thanks can’t wait to see all your new stuff!!

Oooo, Nikki Glaser is great. Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Can you make a caption about a guy who makes fun of curvy and thicc women, where the women get their revenge and turn the guy into Nia Jax?

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Hi Me again on the topic of the assembly line worker caption sequel if you do it i just an idea for the story like before depicting the sissies "first time"  but you can have it be that the coworker doesnt know and is telling everyone about the chick he slept with last night and the sissy is just thinking "if only they knew"idk i thought it was good anyways thank u again

So this message is in reference to a sequel caption that was requested & that I did write and will be posted in June. I’m sharing it here to let the anon know that I wrote the cap BEFORE I got this second request so there will be a followup but the story will be different. I hope that’s ok.

Anonymous said:

Hi idk if u watch wrestling or not I see u have some captions of wwe womens wrestlers but im not sure have far ur knowledge of it is? Could u do a caption of Rhea Ripley if u know her?

I have never seen a single episode of WWE, I do not watch wrestling, and yet somehow every time someone requests a wrestler I know who she is. Don’t ask me how because I do not know. Anyways, yeah I can do a Rhea Ripley one. :)

Anonymous said:

Could you do a caption about a janitor for sissy co. That finds out the strange goings on at work and tries to blow the whistle on the whole operation but is caught and turned into a sissy maid for the sissy co. Corporate office abit specific I know but ive been thinking on that awhile however u do it will be perfect thanks

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Could you do katheryn Hahn from wandavision specifically the 80s look with the Big hair and aerobics outfit

Oooo, sounds nice. I’ll type that up for sure. :)

Anonymous said:

Hi big fan of your caps!! Do you think you could do a cap where a football player wants to go to the NFL but gets hurt, so they turn him into a female commentator, maybe Lauren Rutledge? If you don’t know her, she’s been a college football reporter for awhile and was also a former Miss Florida. Anyways I just think any guy would be lucky to be turned into her and I love your caps keep up the great work!!

Me: *googles Lauren Rutledge to see if it’s who I’m thinking of* How do I know who this is? Anyways, yes I can write this. :)

...for some reason there are no GIFs of her though so I’m just gonna move on.

Anonymous said:

Hi I'm the one that requested the LONG list of celebs I'm still really sorry about that I didnt realize how many it actually was till I looked back so I wanna retract some for your sake tell ya what if you havent done any already just do the ones that are specifically marked (as in the ones detailed by movie or show theyre in) the ones that are just names you can leave out i knoe its still alot but hopefully that takes some weight off of ya sorry again

You don’t have to be sorry! Like I said, in the future I’d ask that folks limit requests to no more than 3 celebs at a time but you didn’t know that. I’d never said that before. I typed up every celebrity and they’re going to be sprinkled in during June. Hope you like them! :)

Anonymous said:

Hello ^^ I love your work. Can u make a caption with the name "jules" and Ariana Grande please? Thank you

Sure thing!

Anonymous said:

Hey, not really an ask, but something I needed to share

I'm the one that asked for the Stephanie Beatriz caption from a whole back, and I absolutely loved how it turned out. Each time you roll out a new caption is like a small thrill to me and I read them right as they're released.

Now this wouldn't be an ask if I wasn't asking something, right? Well, next month sees the release of the "In the Heights" movie, and there's an opportunity there to do a series of captions using stephanie Beatriz from that same movie.

In conclusion, I love your captions so much, you're amazing!

Awww, this is such a sweet message. Thank you! And YAAASSSSS! Ever since the first trailer for In the Heights dropped I was like, “I must write a caption with her in this!” So you can imagine how fun it’s been waiting this entire time. *eye twitches*. We’ll have to wait until the movie comes out for me to be sure I can find a good image but this IS a caption I want to write. :)

Anonymous said:

Hi I just recently came across your blog and fell in love with it!! The caption with the football player being turned into Bella Thorne is one of my favorites!! I’d love so much if you could do a sequel or something to that cap it was so amazing and I need to know what else happens to “her”. I’m not sure if this is possible or if you even do sequels but this cap was great and I look forward to all the others!!!

Glad you like it! I’m always looking for sequel captions to write on Throwback Thursday so you’ll get this for sure. :)

Anonymous said:

Hey big fan! Do you think you could do a caption where a short guy gets made fun of by all his girl friends for how short he is? Ariana Grande is fairly short and I think a caption of her (of age of course) would be awesome

You got it!

Anonymous said:

Can you do one with the bella twins as two guys who fought over the same girl then the girl turns them both into look alikes of her but then they start fighting over the same guy

Yep!

Anonymous said:

Do you know suzy berhow? Or angie Griffin? If so would love a caption of either of them please

Sorry sweetie, I don’t know who those are. :(

Anonymous said:

Would appreciate more Sia captions please when u get the chance

I will remember that. :)

Anonymous said:

Can make some Winnie Harlow caption please? I adore her style

Sorry lovely, I don’t know who that is. :(

Anonymous said:

How about instead of removing the captions with Demi in them ,the images of Demi were just replaced with another celeb and if Demi is mentioned by name in the caption then that could be edited  to mention a different celeb. I respect Demi's decision I do but lets not lose some well made captions. Also if you could please make a caption where Amy Adams feminises a fan and raises them as her daughter and Kristen Stewart makes you her submissive wife that would be appreciated. I'm a fan of them.

So about the Demi Lovato captions: I understand your feelings but I’m still going to delete the original captions. Because of how my captions are made I can’t just go back in & swap out an image or edit the text, I have to remake it from the ground up. I am hoping to do that with some (maybe all) of the Demi Lovato captions & re-publish them, but I’m still going to delete the originals.

I can do the Kristen Stewart one for sure and I’ll TRY to do the Amy Adams one I just am not 100% sure I can find a pic for that but we’ll see. :)

Anonymous said:

If it’s possible before your summer hiatus could you do a caption with Amanda Crew (silicon valley, sex drive)?

I will do one with Amanda Crew but I can’t commit to doing it before the hiatus.

About the hiatus: I don’t know when it’s going to be. I want to TRY to make it to at least July 18th because I have a specific game in mind I want to post for 5 years of Celebrity TG Captions games, but after that I have no idea. I’ve been writing caps for a longer stretch of time since normal since I’ve switched to a part-time blog so I might burn out at any second but for right now I’ve still got some juice.

[thesaltofcarthage]

Loki takes over: Tom Hiddleston on his new TV series and a decade in the MCU

from Entertainment Weekly

Ten years after Hiddleston first chose chaos in Thor, Marvel’s fan favorite God of Mischief is going even bigger with his time-bending Disney+ show.

By Chancellor Agard May 20, 2021 

Tom Hiddleston is Loki, and he is burdened with glorious purpose: After playing Thor's puckish brother for over a decade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no one understands the mercurial Asgardian God of Mischief as well as the actor. He can teach an entire seminar on Loki if given the opportunity — which he actually did during pre-production on his forthcoming Disney+ show. In conversation, Hiddleston quotes lines from his MCU debut, 2011's Thor, almost verbatim, and will playfully correct you if you mistakenly refer to Asgard's Rainbow Bridge as the Bifrost, which is the portal that connects Loki and Thor's homeworld to the Nine Realms, including Midgard, a.k.a. Earth. "Well, the Bifrost technically is the energy that runs through the bridge," he says with a smile. "But nine points to Gryffindor!" And when he shows up to the photo shoot for this very digital cover, he hops on a call with our photo editor to pitch ways the concept could be even more Loki, like incorporating the flourish the trickster does whenever magically conjuring something. The lasting impression is that playing Loki isn't just a paycheck.

"Rather than ownership, it's a sense of responsibility I feel to give my best every time and do the best I can because I feel so grateful to be a part of what Marvel Studios has created," the 40-year-old Brit tells EW over Zoom a few days after the shoot and a week out from Thor's 10th anniversary. "I just want to make sure I've honored that responsibility with the best that I can give and the most care and thought and energy."

After appearing in three Thor movies and three Avengers, Hiddleston is bringing that passion to his first solo Marvel project, Loki, the House of Ideas' third Disney+ series following the sitcom pastiche WandaVision and the topical The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Led by head writer Michael Waldron (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Heels), the six-episode drama sees Hiddleston's shapeshifting agent of chaos step out from behind his brother's shadow and into the spotlight for a timey-wimey, sci-fi adventure that aims to get to the bottom of who Loki really is. "I wanted to explore slightly more complex character questions," says Waldron. "It's not just good versus bad. Is anybody all good? Is anybody all bad? What makes a hero, a hero? A villain, a villain?"  

Even though Loki — who loves sowing mayhem with his illusion magic and shapeshifting, all with a major chip on his shoulder — has never been one for introspection, the idea of building an entire show around him was a no-brainer for Marvel. When asked why Loki was one of the studio's first Disney+ shows, Marvel president Kevin Feige replies matter-of-factly, "More Hiddleston, more Loki." First introduced as Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) envious brother in Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki went full Big Bad in 2012's The Avengers. That film cemented the impish rogue as one of the shared universe's fan favorites, thanks to Hiddleston's ability to make him deliciously villainous yet charismatic and, most importantly, empathetic. The character's popularity is one of the reasons he's managed to avoid death many times.

"He's been around for thousands of years. He had all sorts of adventures," says Feige. "Wanting to fill in the blanks and see much more of Loki's story [was] the initial desire [for the series]."

The Loki we meet on the show is not the one who fought the Avengers in 2012 and evolved into an antihero in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok before meeting his demise at the hands of the mad titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) in 2018's Avengers: Infinity War. Instead, we'll be following a Loki from a branched timeline (a variant, if you will) after he stole the Tesseract following his thwarted New York invasion and escaped S.H.I.E.L.D. custody during the time heist featured in Avengers: Endgame. In other words, this Loki hasn't gone through any sort of redemption arc. He's still the charming yet petulant god who firmly believes he's destined to rule and has never gotten his due.

Premiering June 9, Loki begins with the Time Variance Authority — a bureaucratic organization tasked with safeguarding the proper flow of time — arresting the Loki Variant seen in Endgame because they want his help fixing all of the timeline problems he caused while on the run with the Tesseract. So there will be time travel, and a lot more of it than in Endgame. As Loki makes his way through his own procedural, he'll match wits with new characters including Owen Wilson's Agent Mobius, a brilliant TVA analyst, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Judge Renslayer. The question in early episodes is whether Loki will help them or take over.

"One of the things Kevin Feige led on was, 'I think we should find a way of exploring the parts of Loki that are independent of his relationship with Thor,' or see him in a duality or in relationship with others, which I thought was very exciting," says Hiddleston, who also serves as an executive producer on the show. "So the Odinson saga, that trilogy of films, still has its integrity, and we don't have to reopen it and retell it."

Yet, in order to understand where Loki is going, it's important to see where he came from.

Hiddleston can't believe how long he and Loki have been connected. "I've been playing this character for 11 years," he says. "Which is the first time I have said that sentence, I realize, and it [blows] my mind. I don't know what percentage that is exactly of my 40 years of being alive, but it's substantial."

His time as Loki actually goes a bit further back, to 2009 — a year after Robert Downey Jr. big banged the MCU into existence with Iron Man — when he auditioned for Thor. It's no secret that Hiddleston initially went in for the role of the titular God of Thunder, but Feige and director Kenneth Branagh thought his natural charm and flexibility as an actor made him better suited for the movie's damaged antagonist. "Tom gave you an impression that he could be ready for anything, performance-wise," says Branagh, who had previously worked with him on a West End revival of Checkov's Ivanov and the BBC series Wallander. "Tom has a wild imagination, so does Loki. He's got a mischievous sense of humor and he was ready to play. It felt like he had a star personality, but he was a team player."

Hiddleston fully immersed himself in the character. Outside of studying Loki's history in the Marvel Comics, he also researched how Loki and the Trickster God archetype appeared across mythology and different cultures. "He understood that he was already in something special [and] it was a special character in a special part of that early moment in the life of the Marvel universe where [he] also needed to step up in other ways," says Branagh, who was impressed by the emotional depth Hiddleston brought to the part, especially when it came to how isolated Loki felt in the Asgardian royal family.  

There was a lot riding on that first Thor feature. For one, no one knew if audiences would immediately latch onto a Shakespearean superhero movie partially set on an alien planet populated by the Norse Gods of legend. Second, it was integral to Feige's plans for the shared universe. Loki was supposed to be the main villain in The Avengers, which would not only mirror how Earth's mightiest heroes joined forces in 1963's Avengers #1 but also give Thor a believable reason for teaming up with Iron Man, Captain America (Chris Evans), and the rest of the capes. Feige first clued Hiddleston into those larger plans when the actor was in L.A. before Thor started shooting.

"I was like, 'Excuse me?' Because he was already three, four steps ahead," says Hiddleston. "That took me a few minutes to process, because I didn't quite realize how it just suddenly had a scope. And being cast as Loki, I realized, was a very significant moment for me in my life, and was going to remain. The creative journey was going to be so exciting."

Hiddleston relished the opportunity to go full villain in Avengers, like in the scene where Loki ordered a crowd to kneel before him outside a German opera house: "It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation," says the Machiavellian god. "The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

"I just knew that in the structure of that film, I had to lean into his role as a pure antagonist," Hiddleston recalls. "What I always found curious and complex about the way Loki is written in Avengers, is that his status as an antagonist comes from the same well of not belonging and being marginalized and isolated in the first Thor film. Loki now knows he has no place in Asgard."

Loki did find a place within the audience's hearts, though. Feige was "all in" on Hiddleston as his Loki from the beginning, but even he couldn't predict how much fans would love him. Feige recalls the reaction at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con: "Did we know that after he was the villain in two movies, he would be bringing thousands of people to their feet in Hall H, in costume, chanting his name? No, that was above and beyond the plan that we were hoping for and dreaming of." It was a dream Feige first got an inkling of a year earlier during the Avengers press tour when a Russian fan slipped past security, snuck into Mark Ruffalo's car, and asked the Hulk actor to give Hiddleston a piece of fan art she created. "That was one of the early signs there was much more happening with this quote-unquote villain."  

Despite that popularity, the plan was to kill Loki off in 2013's Thor: The Dark World, but the studio reversed course after test audiences refused to believe he actually died fighting the Dark Elves. Alas, he couldn't out-illusion death forever. After returning in Taika Waititi's colorful and idiosyncratic Thor: Ragnarok, Hiddleston's character perished for real in the opening moments of Infinity War. In typical Loki fashion, before Thanos crushed his windpipe, he delivered a defiant speech that indicated he'd finally made peace with the anger he felt toward his family.  

"It felt very, very final, and I thought, 'Okay, that's it. This is Loki's final bow and a conclusive end to the Odinson saga,'" says Hiddleston, who shot that well-earned death scene in 2017.  

But, though he didn't know it yet, the actor's MCU story was far from over.

When Hiddleston returned to film two scenes in Avengers: Endgame in 2017, he had no idea where Loki portaled off to after snatching the Tesseract. "Where'd he go? When does he go? How does he get there? These are all questions I remember asking on the day, and then not being given any answers," Hiddleston recalls. To be fair, it's likely the Powers That Be didn't necessarily have answers then. While Feige can't exactly recall when the writers' room for Endgame first devised Loki's escape sequence, he does know that setting up a future show wasn't the primary goal — because a Loki series wasn't on the horizon just yet.

"[That scene] was really more of a wrinkle so that one of the missions that the Avengers went on in Endgame could get screwed up and not go well, which is what required Cap and Tony to go further back in time to the '70s," says Feige. Soon after that, though, former Disney CEO Bob Iger approached Feige about producing content for the studio's forthcoming streaming service. "I think the notion that we had left this hanging loose end with Loki gave us the in for what a Loki series could be. So by the time [Endgame] came out, we did know where it was going."

As for Hiddleston, he didn't find out about the plans for a Loki show until spring 2018, a few weeks before Infinity War hit theaters. "I probably should not have been surprised, but I was," says the actor. "But only because Infinity War had felt so final."

Nevertheless, Hiddleston was excited about returning for his show. He was eager to explore Loki's powers, especially the shapeshifting, and what it meant that this disruptive figure still managed to find a seat beside the gods in mythology. "I love this idea [of] Loki's chaotic energy somehow being something we need. Even though, for all sorts of reasons, you don't know whether you can trust him. You don't know whether he's going to betray you. You don't why he's doing what he's doing," says Hiddleston. "If he's shapeshifting so often, does he even know who he is? And is he even interested in understanding who he is? Underneath all those masks, underneath the charm and the wit, which is kind of a defense anyway, does Loki have an authentic self? Is he introspective enough or brave enough to find out? I think all of those ideas are all in the series — ideas about identity, ideas about self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and the difficulty of it."

“The series will explore Loki's powers in a way they have not yet been explored, which is very, very exciting.”

The thing that truly sold Hiddleston on the show was Marvel's decision to include the Time Variance Authority, a move he describes as "the best idea that anybody had pertaining to the series." Feige and Loki executive producer Stephen Broussard had hoped to find a place for the TVA — an organization that debuted in 1986's Thor #372 and has appeared in She-Hulk and Fantastic Four stories — in the MCU for years, but the right opportunity never presented itself until Loki came along. "Putting Loki into his own procedural series became the eureka moment for the show," says Feige.  

The TVA's perspective on time and reality also tied into the themes that Waldron, Loki's head writer, was hoping to explore. "Loki is a character that's always reckoning with his own identity, and the TVA, by virtue of what they do, is uniquely suited to hold up a mirror to Loki and make him really confront who he is and who he was supposed to be," says Waldron. Hiddleston adds: "[That] was very exciting because in the other films, there was always something about Loki that was very controlled. He seemed to know exactly what the cards in his hand were and how he was going to play them…. And Loki versus the TVA is Loki out of control immediately, and in an environment in which he's completely behind the pace, out of his comfort zone, destabilized, and acting out."

To truly dig into who Loki is, the creative team had to learn from the man who knows him best: Hiddleston. "I got him to do a thing called Loki School when we first started," says director Kate Herron. "I asked him to basically talk through his 10 years of the MCU — from costumes to stunts, to emotionally how he felt in each movie. It was fantastic."

Hiddleston got something out of the Loki school, too. Owen Wilson both attended the class and interviewed Hiddleston afterward so that he could better understand Loki, as his character Mobius is supposed to be an expert on him. During their conversation, Wilson pointedly asked Hiddleston what he loved about playing the character.

"And I said, 'I think it's because he has so much range,'" says Hiddleston. "I remember saying this to him: 'On the 88 keys on the piano, he can play the twinkly light keys at the top. He can keep it witty and light, and he's the God of Mischief, but he can also go down to the other side and play the heavy keys. And he can play some really profound chords down there, which are about grief and betrayal and loss and heartbreak and jealousy and pride.'" Hiddleston recalls Wilson being moved by the description: "He said, 'I think I might say that in the show.' And it was such a brilliant insight for me into how open Owen is as an artist and a performer.'"

Everyone involved is particularly excited for audiences to see Hiddleston and Wilson's on-screen chemistry. "Mobius is not unlike Owen Wilson in that he's sort of nonplussed by the MCU," says Feige. "[Loki] is used to getting a reaction out of people, whether it's his brother or his father, or the other Avengers. He likes to be very flamboyant and theatrical. Mobius doesn't give him the reaction he's looking for. That leads to a very unique relationship that Loki's not used to."

As for the rest of the series, we know that Loki will be jumping around time and reality, but the creative team isn't keen on revealing when and where. "Every episode, we tried to take inspiration from different things," says Waldron, citing Blade Runner's noir aesthetic as one example.

"Part of the fun of the multiverse and playing with time is seeing other versions of characters, and other versions of the titular character in particular," says Feige, who also declined to confirm if Loki ties into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and/or other upcoming projects.

Making Loki was especially meaningful to Hiddleston because they shot most of it during the pandemic, in late 2020. "It will remain one of the absolute most intense, most rewarding experiences of my life," he says. "It's a series about time, and the value of time, and what time is worth, and I suppose what the experience of being alive is worth. And I don't quite know yet, and maybe I don't have perspective on it, if all the thinking and the reflecting that we did during the lockdown ended up in the series. But in some way, it must have because everything we make is a snapshot of where we were in our lives at that time."

While it remains to be seen what the future holds for Loki beyond this initial season, Hiddleston isn't preparing to put the character to bed yet. "I'm open to everything," he says. "I have said goodbye to the character. I've said hello to the character. I said goodbye to the character [again]. I've learned not to make assumptions, I suppose. I'm just grateful that I'm still here, and there are still new roads to explore."

Additional reporting by Jessica Derschowitz

[im-just-a-random-fandom-girl]

trying to articulate my frustrations with Marvel’s treatment of female characters and characters of color

Hi, hello, hola, bonjour. I've been having a lot of thoughts about Marvel’s lack of diversity and of how they treat minority characters, so I'm taking a page out of Luisa’s (@its-tortle) book and just making a long, rambley post to get it all out.

Please bear with me while I try to encapsulate all of my frustration within the limitations of English language.

(ALSO, I'm white. I’m Spanish-American, but I do not have the ability to speak for fans of color and the other grievances they have. This post is just a combination of my own thoughts and what I've heard other people say on Tumblr, in YouTube videos, in articles etc.)

Now that we've had over week to collect ourselves after the WandaVision finale, because it was such a tearjerker and the end of a true masterpiece of a show, we really need to talk about how Marvel treats their their characters of color and female characters. I'll specifically be looking at Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, and Monica Rambeau.

Let's start with Sam.

Until Monica Rambeau became Photon just a few weeks ago in WandaVision, Sam was THE ONLY Black superhero in the MCU.

He first appeared in Captain America: The Winter Soldier 7 years ago in 2014, and he's been in 4 movies since then (not counting the post-credits of Ant-Man).

Let's see what we know about Sam in the MCU:

He was a pararescue airman in the U.S. Airforce

His wing-man, Riley, died in combat, prompting him to leave active duty

He works at the VA to help other veterans adjust to civilian life

That's it. This is all we know about his backstory, separate from Captain America. However, the MCU decided to include these parts of his backstory, (and exclude others) because they make him a better supporting character to Steve.

Sam's a vet - so is Steve. They have the same, early-morning run routine that alludes to strict military training. Steve is still new to the future and hardly knows or approaches anyone, but Sam is wearing his VA sweatshirt, so there's some sense of connection, one that is furthered when they talk about their beds being too soft. Sam is someone who can understand him, aside from being a super soldier.

Riley, Sam's wingman, died in combat - Hmm, haven't heard that one befo - oh, wait. *Bucky waves from the abyss of the Alps*. Yeah.

I'm not saying that these connections are bad, in fact, I think the opposite. In terms of storyline, these connections are incredibly important for their friendship. Steve is lost and alone in the future. No one he knows cares about him for any reason other than the fact that he's a super soldier, nor can he relate to any of those people on any level. Sam just fits. He's funny and kind and although they are 60 years apart in age, he can, to some extent, understand what Steve is going through in a way they no one else can.

But for the last 7 years in the MCU, all he's been is Steve's supportive friend.

Almost immediately after meeting Steve, Sam is dragged into an end-of-the-world battle. He readily agrees to put his life on the line to fight by Captain America's side. After SHIELD falls, Sam gives up his life for 2 years to help Steve find Bucky. When they find him, Sam, without a second thought, becomes an international fugitive to protect Bucky and Steve.

I mean, he practically says that he lives in Steve's shadow himself: 

"Don't look at me. I do what he does, just slower."

Who does all this? Seriously? Sam is also a recovering vet. He, in theory, has a life, a family, a job, his own mental well-being to consider, but he immediately gives it all up to help Captain America, to follow in his shadow, to be his back-up and support in every battle. Marvel wrote him as a 2D character that lacks his own identity and agency.

Sam deserves his own storyline; he deserves to exist outside the orbit of Steve Rogers.

What Mackie has been able to do with the character is astounding. He took Sam off the page and truly brought him to life, turning him into a beloved character. I'm ecstatic that both Mackie and Sam finally (hopefully) get their time to shine in TFATWS, but it should have happened WAY sooner. Marvel has continuously overlooked Mackie, despite how much he brings to the movies and despite the significance of Sam as the only Black superhero. It's just so clear that they do not care about representation.

(And let's not start with the whole "Bucky should be Captain America" thing, thanks)

Next, let's talk about Natasha.

Nat has been in the MCU for 11 years, starting with Iron Man 2 in 2010. She was heavily featured in an additional 6 MCU movies (not including small cameos/post-credit sequences). She's one of the few female superheroes in the MCU, and the only one that's been there since the beginning. Nat was the only female superhero for 4 years until Gamora appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Let's see what we know about Natasha's history:

She's a former KGB operative and assassin, trained in the Red Room project

When she was a part of the Red Room, she was sterilized

Clint Barton got her out of the Red Room and converted her to a SHIELD agent

THAT'S IT. The second point is actually nauseating because this is what she says to Banner when we learn about her infertility in Age of Ultron:

"They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about, the one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier — even killing. You still think you’re the only monster on the team?"

Like, actually, what the fuck? I remember watching this scene and having to rewind because I thought I mis-heard what she said. In truth, Natasha is probably referring to the terrible things she was forced to do as a KGB operative are what make her a "monster," but why in the world would they include this anecdote here?? It's just so distasteful and disgusting! It makes it seem like her infertility is what makes her a monster, perpetuating the misogynistic belief that the center of a woman's identity and purpose is to have children.

As Vox says in this article, the subject of Nat's infertility 

"rears its head sub-textually when Black Widow sacrifices herself for the Soul Stone. [...] It’s reasonable for Natasha to make the calculation that Clint’s kids deserve to have a dad when they come back to life after the Avengers complete their “time heist.” But because of that Ultron plot, there’s also an insidious implication that Natasha’s infertility renders Black Widow just a little bit more disposable than the rest of her teammates."

Furthermore, Nat's death in Endgame serves for nothing more than motivation for the other characters working in the time heist, WHICH ARE ALL MALE. Even then, the other characters talk about her death briefly (in a mostly unaffected manner), and by the end of the movie, she's been pretty much forgotten about,  completely overshadowed by Tony Stark.

I don't want to say that Nat shouldn't have died in Endgame. It caused me so much heartache and emotional pain, but I truly believe it was a great way to end her arc. CinemaWins on YouTube put it best:

"She needed to save her family, Clint included, finally wiping the red from her ledger. So much of her jouney in the MCU was trying to find her purpose, figure out which side she was on, and she finally feels like she's found it, just in time to die for it. 

"It's not wrong to feel cheated by her death, [but I think] she deserved this moment because of it's importance."

She says it in the movie: 

"I used to have nothing, and then I got this. This family. And I was better because of it."

Nat shouldn't have to die, but it's on her terms, and she is absolutely ready for it. Saving her chosen family... that is her purpose.

But altogether, over the course of the MCU, Natasha was cheated out of getting the storyline she deserved. Like Sam, she was relegated to the position of the supportive friend of Steve, but also of Bruce and Clint. For the audience, her identity is tied to this role that she plays. The identity and motivations she has independent from these other characters, her history, is skimmed over, and treated with immense disrespect.

It took 11 years, but it is thrilling that Scarlett Johansson finally gets to be the start of her own Marvel movie. There is no way that Black Widow will be able to completely make up for her and Natasha's mistreatment by the MCU, but I hope it will at least bring us some closure and allow us to have a better understanding of Nat's history and who she is away from the other Avengers.

Last, but certainly not least (despite what WandaVision may have you believe) is Monica Rambeau.

I spoke about this last week after posting about this review of the show, but it bears repeating.

Monica is a new character. You'd hope that, after 11 years of extremely limited diversity in the MCU, much to the dismay of fans worldwide, and after recognizing this and creating a movie with a cast like The Eternals, Marvel would try to get their shit together across the board.

Nope!

Monica was seriously the token diversity character of the show. It seemed like they would give her more depth after the episode during which they flashed back to the her during and after the snap, losing her mother, and seeing a little bit of what she's done as an adult since Captain Marvel, but that ended up being the most we got.

But why? Monica literally became a SUPERHERO. She became Photon! She deserved a much greater role in the show, especially in the finale, where she instead had maybe 5 lines and just stopped some bullets for about 30 seconds.

As the review I linked says, 

“There are so many black writers, fans, and critics noting how Monica got relegated to a complete lack relegated to meaningless best friend protector lacking in their own self agency and story except for making a shoehorned comparison of grief.”

Marvel made the same, bull-headed mistake that they made with Sam with Monica!

Let's do this again. Monica was snapped away for 5 years, and when she was snapped back, she learned that her mother had died. Losing someone you love and having the whole process of mourning and pain be complicated by the snap? What an interesti- oh wait. *Vision phases his head through the wall with a smile*

The only reason we got this backstory was because it made her a more sympathetic character towards Wanda. Her understanding of what Wanda is going through allows her to be the catalyst in the creation of the ideological fork in the road between herself, Darcy and Woo, who see Wanda as a victim of grief and loss, and Hayward and the rest of SHIELD, who see her as a dangerous threat.

How do you make the same, major mistake that you've been making for the past 7 years again? Guess what? You don't! Maybe it's not intentional, but Marvel, again, clearly doesn’t care enough about their characters of color to consider the roles they relegate them to in the MCU, realize what they've been doing is harmful, and then change it.

Hopefully, they will not continue to treat Monica this way and will remedy this in the next Captain Marvel.

In conclusion: MARVEL GAVE A FUCKING ROBOT AN ACTUAL ORIGIN STORY, A RELATIONSHIP AND MORE INDEPENDENCE THAN ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS.

But in all seriousness, Marvel needs to be help accountable for how they treat women and their characters of color in the MCU. I just looked at 3, but you could also make a similar argument about Rhodey, Hope van Dyne and Valkyrie, as well as Jane Foster, MJ, and Ned, although they are supporting characters and not superheroes. And I'm sure there are many others. Marvel (and Disney!!) has had an awful track-record, and change is long overdue.

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okay general thoughts for the new episode of wandavision:

monica earning (or unlocking) her powers was one of the coolest things in the world- how she needed to confront the voices in her head and embrace it. I literally cannot wait to see how powerful she’s gonna become.

hayward is a dick and my girls (+ jimmy) better beat his ass

i loved the fact that vision’s first question was if the kids are safe, it just made me feel so warm inside :)

on the topic of the kids, wanda cares about them so much it hurts and i feel like someone might try and use them against her (cough, agatha, cough).

agnes being confirmed to be agatha was wonderful. the confirmation that pietro really was an intruder like i thought was a big personal win for me. the thing that is really interesting with agatha’s case is that she is very clearly evil in the sense that she could have stopped wanda (we saw just how powerful she is), but she didn’t. instead she chose to mess with wanda and make everything worse. she let the people around her continue suffer under wanda’s control. also she killed a puppy.

 i loved vision realizing just how much wanda has gone through and that she isn’t necessarily a villain and how he left within seconds when he realized she needed help. i also think it should be interesting to see what he finds when he goes home since agatha pretty much has taken over. also can agatha control him like wanda could?

monica confronting wanda was amazing but damn the “maybe i already am” broke me. it shows what a bad place wanda is mentally. she recognizes how bad everything she’s doing is but is too depressed to bother fixing it. she blames herself, but doesn’t seem to understand that she can undo it, and her not stopping it allows the facade continue, hurting more people, which leads her into a worst depression. it’s a never-ending cycle. 

also billy pointing out that agatha is “quiet“ was such an obvious hint that she also has powers. this might lead to billy realizing that agatha is evil and him and tommy going to save wanda? who knows. 

the whole agatha getting control of wanda really confuses me. in the last few seconds we see hat wanda’s eyes turn purple, just like agatha’s which means that agatha is in her head, right? but wouldn’t everything fall apart the moment wanda lost control? wouldn’t westview disappear? so many questions. the next episode should be interesting. (also the fact that we have seen very minimal clips from the following episodes is quite telling).

hayward, agatha, wanda - the more villains the merrier

finally on the topic of villains, do we know that agatha has anything to do with how all of this started? because to me it feels like she only joined  after the whole thing was built. so. does that mean there’s even more people who are part of this? we know it ties in to Dr. Strange but there are practically no connections yet? there are too many possibilities.

i just want answers :(