#max and Ingrid

[deluxewhump]

The Scry: chapter II

CW: not a lot. tentative reassurance and comfort. building trust. series warnings for human trafficking, whumpee with exploited powers.

He decided he’d rather bring this Carlo boy home with him than leave him in the building overnight.

It wasn’t just that Ingrid asked to see him. It was a new and sudden sense of responsibility, even if its contours were rough and undefined. All day he felt a tug between the professional aloofness he usually liked to maintain at work and the desire to be a source of comfort for the precog boy they’d given him.

He was clearly abused before. By whom, for how long, and in what ways was not clear. The fact he was so concerned if this business was a fully legal venture or not made Max think for sure he was one of the repossessed precognitives that had been used in day trading and investments, or even the less subtle art of ripping off casinos and lotteries. Who needs risk management when you can see the future?

Which is exactly how he was supposed to use the poor thing, except with the green light from the United States government.

…At least for now. Carlo didn’t belong to him (the thought was jarring anyway, now that he saw the precogs were flesh and blood). He belonged to Spartan, and only because recent legislation had made it possible. It could always go the other way. Spartan could decide they weren’t worth it, sell them to another company. Or the winds could change in Washington (or the state of Maryland? He didn’t know. His mother would know), and the feds could demand the precogs back.

Five o’clock came. He knew it without checking the clock by the shadows on the office wall. The sun dipped behind the neighboring buildings, winter-orange rays cut by symmetrical blocks. He heard people talking in the hallway on the way to the elevators.

Carlo was curled in the armchair by the floor to ceiling window, dozing. He startled awake at the footsteps outside the door, confused for a moment as to where he was. He looked at Max and Max smiled gently to put him at ease.

“Hey.”

Carlo yawned sleepily, trying to stifle it.

“I’m gonna head out in a few minutes. You wanna come with me or stay here?”

Carlo looked at him closely, a quick up and down as if seeing him for the first time.

“My girlfriend is at home,” Max said as he began to gather his things, powering off his computer. “We can make some dinner. Probably watch some TV. She likes these really trashy shows, reality shows and competitions and whatnot. Honestly, I’m really into the one we just started. It’s like the reality show version of Clue. I’ve got a spare bedroom. We can make it up nice and warm for you.”

Carlo watched him slip his laptop into his briefcase. He felt like he was coaxing a wild animal out of a thicket.

“Or you can stay here. They have a spot for you downstairs I guess. I haven’t seen it. I imagine it’s like a dorm or a barrack situation. Who knows, maybe they went all out and it’s the Four Seasons down there.”

Does this kid know what the hell you’re talking about?

He busied himself by checking his smartwatch. It was a weird for him, saying this kind of stuff to this boy he’d just met, handed off to him so absurdly.

“The things I said to you this morning… all that still stands if you come home with me. I’m not gonna hurt you. It’s safe. I promise.”

—

Ingrid was way ahead of him. By the time they got home she’d been home for an hour and started dinner. There was a load of laundry in the wash, and she was talking to her mother on the phone. She saw them in the doorway and blurted a quick gotta go before hanging up.

She only stared for a second, to give her credit. He had too, when Cissy first dropped him off.

“I really don’t know what I was expecting,” she said when he was upstairs. “But it wasn’t that.”

She treated him like a guest, but there was a reservation behind her smile, the same as Cecelia had. It was in the eyes. Carlo held out a hand for her when they met, and she took it gently, giving it a little dip more than a shake. For some reason it made Max’s heart ache to watch.

When dinner was done and cleaned up, they sat on the couch to watch Ingrid’s new reality show. He and Ingrid both thought the best way to go about it was just to continue their normal routine and add him in, not make a big deal out of it.

Carlo was in the wingback chair next to them, his feet tucked underneath him and a blanket tucked up close. He was always cold, Max noticed. When they’d left the office the December wind had seemed to physically pain him, and he had trouble warming up, even inside.

Ingrid lifted her head from Max’s lap, shifting upright into a cross legged position. “Carlo?” She asked. “Can you… can you see your own future?”

Max’s head snapped away from the TV. She was always telling him he was too blunt, too pragmatic and state-your-purpose. And yet he hadn’t dared ask the poor thing something like that yet.

Carlo looked at Ingrid with those big doe eyes of his, bruises like shadows on his face. “No ma’am,” he whispered. Max read his lips more than actually heard him. He cleared his throat. “Sometimes it happens, but it’s not good.”

Max could understand her curiosity. They didn’t know anything about these things. There was almost nothing on the internet. It’s like they’d been kept in Area 51.

“Why isn’t it good?” she asked cautiously. Her copper-red hair was pulled into a bun, her eyeliner smudged from laying on a pillow over Max’s lap.

“It’ll hurt me,” he shrugged, like that was something not entirely unexpected. “It’s not supposed to be used for that. It’s against the code of conduct.”

Ingrid’s eyebrows knit for a millisecond before she relaxed her face again, cool neutral. “Whose code of conduct?”

Max pinched her calf where Carlo couldn’t see. Her knee twitched towards him a centimeter, but she didn’t bat an eye in acknowledgment.

Carlo looked from Ingrid to him, unsure if he should say. A commercial for dish soap ended and their show came back on, the cliffhanger middle of a reality show challenge.

“Hey,” she said, picking the remote off Maxs thigh and turning up the volume on the tv. “Shelly’s gonna win this one again, look at her.”

—

He brought Carlo extra blankets from the linen closet. One was an old family quilt, hand sewn by his great grandmother or something, he couldn’t remember exactly, but his mother always mentioned it.

The spare room was a little dusty, and there were some cardboard boxes in one corner— things of his fathers he hadn’t gone through yet. His parents divorced when he was in college. It had been coming for a decade, the spaces between sentences and looks growing wider by the year until they were more like roommates, strangers with a grown child who shared their DNA.

His father lived out in Phoenix now. He had a girlfriend Max and Ingrid’s age. His mother lived downtown, closer to the true love of her life, the law practice she and her business partner ran. Sometimes, even now, he would feel a twinge of annoyance at his mothers seemingly bottomless devotion to her practice.

She’s like one of those German Shepherds that carries rocks around in its mouth til it bleeds, he’d said to Ingrid in a particularly ungenerous moment. She’d been too kind to point out it was maybe a twinge of jealousy, but he felt it in her sympathetic little downturned mouth.

That possibility was too immature and borderline Oedipal for him to want to contemplate. After the divorce finalized, he inherited the old family Victorian at twenty four, and had lived in it these seven years since until it felt like his house and no longer his parents’.

Carlo got gingerly into the single bed, made up with fresh sheets earlier in the afternoon by Ingrid.

Max laid the heavy extra quilt at his feet. “It's a little chilly upstairs at night,” he admitted. “Can I get you some socks or something?”

“I’m okay,” Carlo said politely. Max went to the dresser anyway, pulling out a thick pair of socks folded into a ball.

“Just in case,” he said, and set them on the bedside table.

“Max?”

He paused in the doorway.

“Are we going to start tomorrow?”

Something in the tender innocence of the question stung. He couldn’t tell if it had been asked out of fear or curiosity, though he sensed both on the boy almost constantly.

“Yeah,” he answered truthfully. “We should take a shot at it, if you’re ready.”

“Okay.”

“You think you can get some sleep?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Just let him keep doing it, if that’s what he wants to call you. Maybe it’s a way to keep it professional, keep some distance. Let him have that.

“We’re right down the hall if you need us. Ok? Anything at all.”

In the dark of his bedroom, Ingrid turned to him restlessly. He could feel her eyes on him, the blue glow of the digital clock just enough to see the outline of her shoulder.

“I’m sorry I asked him that.”

“It’s fine.”

Ingrid could be impulsive, but her regret and introspection later was always twofold. She’d drink a few glasses of wine at dinner with their friends and worry for a week she’d been too candid, laughed too loud. She thought she’d been accidentally rude to their waiter once and asked Max to turn the truck around so she could go back and explain her mistake. He didn’t turn the truck around, of course. He told her she was way in her own head, to learn to let it go.

He felt for her arm in the dark, followed it down to her hand and held it loosely. She turned her palm up to reciprocate.

“I wonder, too,” he told her. “I wanna know who hurt him like that, for one. And the elephant in the room— could he see our futures, if he tried?”

“I don’t think I wanna know my future.”

“Me either. And if you do know it, could you inadvertently change it? Is it set in stone? Does him having precognitive sight mean free will is an illusion after all?”

Ingrid groaned. Both as a lapsed Baptist and devout atheist, she didn’t like that.

“Sorry, kid,” he grinned in the dark. “We don’t need to worry about free will before bed.”

“Tell me how it goes tomorrow. I don’t wanna know my own future, but I wanna know what he can do. What it’s like.”

“I will,” he promised, squeezing her cool hand. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Scry taglist;

@whumpsday @distinctlywhumpthing @pumpkin-spice-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi

[salemahn]

Masterlist

(None of these works are mine, they are just some of my favourite reads) Contents: WoSo, F1, Doctor Who, House of The Dragon, Bridgerton, Ted Lasso

WoSo

❅ Leah Williamson | Part 2 | Part 3

❅ Alexia Putellas | Part 2

❅ Kyra Cooney-Cross

❅ Ona Batlle

❅ Aitana Bonmati

❅ Sam Kerr

❅ Katie McCabe

❅ Mapi Leon

❅ Ingrid Engen

❅ MapIngrid

❅ Arsenal

❅ Lionesses

❅ Barcelona

F1

❅ Alex Albon

❅ Charles Leclerc

❅ Max Verstappen

❅ Oscar Piastri

❅ Carlos Sainz

❅ Sebastian Vettel

❅ Lance Stroll

❅ Mick Schumacher

❅ George Russell

❅ Franco Colapinto

❅ Liam Lawson

❅ Jenson Button

❅ Polygamous

❅ Lando Norris *no longer read*

Doctor Who

❅ Nine

❅ Ten

❅ Eleven

❅ Twelve

❅ Thirteen

❅ Fourteen

❅ Clara Oswald

House Of The Dragon

❅ Aemond Targaryen

❅ Jacaerys Velaryon

❅ Daemon Targaryen

❅ Rhaenyra Targaryen

❅ Aegon Targaryen

❅ Cregan Stark

❅ Polygamous

Others

Bridgerton

❅ Benedict Bridgerton

Ted Lasso

❅ Sam Obisanya

❅ Jamie Tartt

❅ Dani Rojas

[kitsunetsuki]

Barry Lategan - Max Factor Ad (Vogue UK 1970)

[call-me-chips]

Some random Renegades incorrect quotes

Enjoy!

[mikodrawnnarratives]

FEAST MY FELLOW RENEGADES FANS

Maggie is sooooooo Annie coded it drives me INSANE

There are some details that I kNOW are inaccurate i just.. really don't wanna go back and redraw some of these kjfdkj I've been working on this on and off again for a while and I REALLY want to get this done b4 finishing a different creative project that.... hasn't even taken a month to finish god i cannot focus on anything can i lkjfdklds

I can't get all the characters tagged below so heres a list of everyone in order:

David & tala artino(s graves), Narcissa cronin & Maggie, thunderbird & tsunami, max, simon and hugh, danna oscar and adrian, leroy, callum, ingrid honey winston and ace anarchy with nova, the sentinel and frostbite's team by hawthorne, nova and maggie again, gene cronin, millie, ruby tucker and her brothers, thunderbird again, and from there its just nova and maggie!

[albaandbatty]

Most Underrated Actress Alive

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[puppetmaker40]

Since I posted Peter and People, today I am posting me and people I know some are acquaints and some dear friends.

[tsuki-sennin-creations]

SHE CAME BACK??????

Fuck yeah

[eaktionsshaytan]

Il settimo sigillo

Det sjunde inseglet

[thebrownees]

Casablanca (1942-1943) Here's Looking at you Kid! A+

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship Humphrey Bogart to Claude Rains in “Casablanca” DIRECTOR: Michael Curtiz BOTTOM LINE: After Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Victor (Paul Henreid) are safely away on their plane and Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) is dead, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) walk away together into the mist as Rick recites one of the movie’s…

[gatutor]

Ingrid Thulin-Max Von Sydow "La hora del lobo" (Vargtimmen) 1968, de Ingmar Bergman.

[deluxewhump]

Would Carlo ever talk to Max about the memories of his mother? Lamenting the life he could have had with her and wondering what she would think of him now…

Ahh that depends! In the original series I have mentioned how little he does remember. We do know she is deceased, or else Carlo never would’ve been in state care. In Erik’s Journals (sorry to reference something not posted on tumblr, I feel like that’s probably bad form) I mention Erik knows Carlo’s mothers name, though he makes little effort to find anything out about her when she was alive that wasn’t already in the state file.

Max isn’t mega rich by any means, but he’s well off enough that he could hire someone to find out more about her or (possibly) any other relatives if Carlo *wished*. But as far as Carlo just thinking about her, I think Max would totally understand if he just wanted to talk about vague memories of her and wonder out loud to him what it would be like to have a mother now, what she’d think of him. Oh, Max would say after a long time of just quietly listening, she would be so proud of you.

But this would have to be a very late night (perhaps some alcohol involved), or a very early morning on a family camping trip or something out of the ordinary like that. Something to get Carlo’s guard down far enough to talk about his mother.

[letterboxd-loggd]

Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna) (1963) Ingmar Bergman

August 10th 2024

[call-me-chips]

Bored, so ima list what animals I think the Renegades characters are

Nova: Black cat

Adrian: German shepherd

Oscar: Opossum (Idk why, he just is)

Ruby: Bunny

Danna: Monarch butterfly

Callum: Golden retriever

Max: Puppy (prob also a golden retriever)

Honey: Bee

Leroy: Rat

Ingrid: Honey badger

Phobia: Crow or raven

Winston: White poodle, but his fur is dyed in neon colours

Ace: Grey tabby cat, but very sickly and thin

Maggie: Magpie

Hugh: Labrador retriever

Simon: Ragdoll or tabby cat

Ice bitch: Bitchy pure white cat

[lilias42]

Des nouvelles de la BD de Pyrkaïa : l'arrivée à Garreg Mach et des "retrouvailles"

Bon, ça fait pas si longtemps que je n'avais pas mis de mise à jour sur l'avancée des travaux mais, j'étais plutôt fière de ses planches alors, j'avais envie de les partager.

Pas vraiment de précision à apporter, il n'y a pas de vocabulaire un peu spécifique mais, leçon de cette BD : ne pas remettre un symbole sur le front d'un personnage qui descend vers ses yeux ! C'est parfois un enfer sur des petites Pyrkaïa de faire rentrer sa marque sur son front sans lui en faire un énorme ou empiété sur ses yeux ! Heureusement qu'elle n'a pas de frange mais plutôt des "antennes" (qui sont devenu officiellement ma marque de la famille Charon : cette petite mèche ou deux sur le front, elles l'ont toutes de manière plus ou moins prononcé, Dimitri comprit a cette mèche) sinon, j'aurais été bonne pour changer tous son design... alors que j'aime bien cette marque sur sa tête... Enfin, j'essayerai d'améliorer ça une fois que ce sera en noir...

Ah, peut-être un point un peu limite : dès que Pyrkaïa voie... quelqu'un on va dire pour ne pas spoiler les pages d'en dessous, elle déduit tout de suite que cette personne est du même peuple que lui... à la réflexion, c'est un peu limite mais, j'en avais besoin pour le bien du déroulé alors, on va dire "TG, c'est le scénario" et qu'en plus, c'est littéralement la première fois qu'elle rencontre quelqu'un qui dégage la même énergie que lui dans un endroit remplis de symboles de sa culture à lui alors, elle a mis la charrue avant les boeufs.

Et pour le petit personnage en haut de la première page, elle n'est pas encore apparue vu que ces pages ne sont pas encore nettoyées mais, il s'agit d'un clin d'oeil à ma première série de billet sur ce blog, UA "bye !" étant donné que c'est Ariel, l'élève qui remplaçait Félix dont la famille était passée côté Leicester pour diverses raisons. Vu qu'elle n'a pas trop eu d'apparition ailleurs et que je ne l'ai jamais réutilisé dans mes histoires, je voulais au moins l'utiliser ici vu que dans cet UA, elle devait rejoindre la classe avec Ashe après avoir tenté de fuir les troupes de Lonato et de l'Eglise Occidentale pour rejoindre Garreg Mach afin d'arrêter cette folie, étant particulièrement déterminée étant donnée qu'elle est une femme trans qui doit se planquer de la secte occidentale.

Sans plus de circonvoluassions, voici la suite de l'histoire de Pyrkaïa !