#like .. .mabel didn't but LISTEN don't be shocked if Alma and David do as well!!!

[rotzaprachim]

hey! any headcanons for my boy mr henry dubois (for that "four headcannons" post thing?)

Headcannon A:  realistic

 Henry and David end up making a small fortune after a few of their songs are bought by an up-and-coming animator from California. It doesn’t mean much at first, but within a few years or so (butchered, heavily edited) versions of their songs are accompanying animated chipmunks and mice. They use the cash to pay for Memphis and Ling’s, and then Isaiah and Sam’s, student debt, and then a nice brownstone out in Brooklyn for David’s family, and then a really classy apartment for themselves, and then the down payment on Memphis and Theta’s first house, and then they become the primary investors in Ling’s engineering firm. 

(Not that any of this is anything but exceptionally fortuitous for the Diviners, considering the Great Depression.)

The only downside is that Henry drags Ling to see every one of Walt Disney’s new movies, and Ling always responds by throwing popcorn at the screen and snarking. (And saying exactly what he’d been thinking all along, and god damn, he loves her for it.)

Headcannon B: while it may not be realistic it is hilarious

Henry’s favourite t-shirt is one he picked up at New Orleans Pride. It has two rainbow beignets and is labelled BEIGNGAY.  He thinks it’s the height of Punny Humour and Ling pretends not to know him. 

(Anyone want to join the fried-desert themed LGBT+ t-shirt business with me? My other ideas include sufGAYniyot, malACEada, and BIaly. The last one, of course, not being fried or a desert but it was TOO GOOD not to include.)

Headcannon C: heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends

There’s a day when Ling’s walks through the dream world take her somewhere she hasn’t been before, a massive white mansion crawling with ivy, amidst a garden so virulently alive and green it takes her breath away, the damp rustle of leaves and the smell of dirt and chlorophyll almost too much for a girl who’s farthest trip in her life was the schlep out to Jake Marlow’s fucking House of Horrors. It’s a garden that makes her heart twinge, in a strange way, from what the city has denied her. 

There’s a woman in the garden with a massive pile of softly curling blonde hair and a white night gown, sitting in a whicker chair and idly stirring the ice of an emptied glass of tea, and it takes her a moment to notice Ling. (Sometimes the dead don’t see her at all.)

“Have you come to take me to Saint Peter?” 

She had a sweet smile, gestured for Ling to sit down next to her. “Have a sazerac first. I’ve never had a cocktail with a angel, you know.” 

There were two frosty glasses on the delicate carved wooden table next to her chair, as if they’d been there the whole time. 

Ling picked one up, the immediate burn of alcohol a level above the pint her mother would indulgently let her have at the pub on the corner with her, after they’d closed up shop on Sundays. 

“I think I shall be sad to move on. I like house though, this garden. Life without the rotten parts of it.” She gave a slight shudder that became a tinkling laugh. “And I have my boy Henry to meet after I’ve moved on.”

“Your boy Henry?” 

“Didn’t you hear of it? He ran away, and then he drowned in a river. Raymond made such a fuss over it! You should have seen the funeral! The priest, the brass band, the mourner, every important member of local so-” 

“Your boy Henry?”

“There wasn’t much point to my living after he’s passed on, now, was there?” 

“What’s your name, ma’am?” 

“Micaela Celestine Isabelle LaLiberte DuBois. She shook Ling’s hand and kissed kissed it with another tinkling laugh. “A pleasure to meet ya.” 

After Ling wakes up, after she schleps out of the apartment to the bus stop and rides all the way up to the Bennington and flips off the security guard who tries to block her entrance, this isn’t that kind of establishment, after she rides the elevator and pounds on Henry and Theta’s door and collapses on their couch, she breaks down, the sorrow and the shame and even the anger at what Henry did, the world and it’s unintended consequences, burning through her body and soaking her face with hot, stinging tears. 

And then she tells Henry. 

Headcannon D: unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own. 

“So you can  .… lucid dream.” 

“Yes. Sort of. Only I can find things, see things. People, too, sometimes. And when I’m with Ling she can lead me to the dead” Henry’s always had a bit of an issue with explaining how his power works to other people, how it’s not quite as straightforward as healing or becoming invisible or creating flames in the palms of your hands. 

“Alrighty then.” David seems to be taking this better than Henry was expecting. “Is this the part when I mention that I can bend metal with my mind?”