#sometimes a family is a set of weird little guys and there's no nuclear family roles involved. this is peak to me

[arotechno]

i've only glimpsed this phenomenon through the proverbial glass bottom boat but if "found family" is being restricted by nuclear family roles that is so sinister and people need to start getting aro about it real fast. get relationship anarchist about it, even. we've gotta reinforce the idea of chosen family over these prescriptive roles of parents siblings etc. especially in media and fandom. when you experience truly unrestricted chosen family dynamics in your personal life it frees your mind let me tell you

like i've seen people arguing lately that people overuse the idea of found family in fandom, putting characters forcibly into conflictless nuclear family roles that don't mesh with the source material at all—and while the latter part is true, and i agree, that's not really what found family/chosen family has really ever meant to me, at least not exclusively? everyone's definition of family is different obviously and i think that's where the rub is. all i'm saying is as a society and within fandom we could stand to get weirder with it!

[thegeminisage]

IT ISSSS tng update time. sunday we caught "captain's holiday" and "tin man" and last night we did "hollow pursuits" and "the most toys."

captain's holiday: so, i'd heard ahead of time that this was one of the worst star trek episodes Ever, and admittedly it wasn't great, but it wasn't THAT bad. i could name you 10 worse episodes in tng alone and that's without even getting into tos and the other bad episodes that are surely in my future. actually catherine liked it more than i did which is only the second time this has happened in tng

funniest part of this episode to me was riker setting picard up with the little fuck trinket and then picard coming back and giving riker woodshed vibes. don't text. hilarious to send picard to the fuck planet when he wanted to read a book or whatever but at least he got some in the end. i'll never forget patrick stewart telling that one writer that tng's captain didn't do enough shooting or screwing

second funniest part was that the little device they were all fighting over could have saved romulus. "stop the nuclear reaction in a sun" THEY COULD HAVE SAVED ROMULUS AND PICARD DESTROYED IT. THE KELVIN MOVIES ARE ALL HIS FAULT. i guess romulus wouldn't have been that much better off with NO sun but at least its people could have been evacuated. there would have been a little more time.

that said most of this ep was very boring because i'm not actually invested in picard's sex life or his slutty little outfits and definitely not enough to have a whole episode be about him and none of the extended cast

tin man: i liked the concept of this much better than the execution. most of my problems came from the fact that the guest character (hello mister mayor) is annoying. so i was unable to be invested in whatever happened to him

also, i know it;'s her job, but i am soooo tired of deanna getting stuck with all the weird broken men and having to fix them. she's like star trek's manic pixie dream girl sometimes

that said i LOVED their concept of the new biomechanical life because it's JUST like moya from farscape and i like to think the farscape writers were inspired by it <3

also i like data being a boon to overwhelmed telepath because androids dont broadcast thoughts...i like when people are nice to data

i did like riker being kind of righteously mad in this episode too. i was JUST saying we never got to see that from him...it wasn't enough here and it also wasn't Great but i still enjoyed what we got

hollow pursuits: this was the worst episode this entire seaosn easily. i felt like i was watching s1 tng again

IT IS. MASSIVELY UNETHICAL. TO RECREATE REAL PEOPLE IN THE HOLODECK

first of all i hate despise LOATHE any and all holodeck activities. secondly i know they hadn't had to grapple with AI yet in 1990 but surely SOMEONE in that writer's room had to see that it's a huge infringement on deanna's personal rights safety, and dignity to make a fake version of her to fuck in the holodeck

I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS GUY COMES BACK LIKE 4 MORE TIMES.

i feel like what tng was TRYING to do here was "very special episode about anxiety" but what it actually managed to do was make that guy look autistic but like in a bad way. like charlie from tos. and then everyone bullied him and you have to be like. well making and fucking a fake deanna is bad but bullying is also bad

wait actually you know what this is like. this is like that time when i was in public with my family and a man touched me inappropriately. and so after he was gone my mother, jumping to my defense, made some disparaging remarks about this man's race (he was not white). and then i was put in the position of defending this guy who had just been a huge creep to me because you can attack him for being a creep but not because of his race. and my family was baffled that i would defend someone who'd just done that to me. that's what watching this episode felt like.

like, absolutely nobody had a problem with the actual creepy part (holodeck deanna) and everybody had a problem with him stammering in public and being socially awkward. and bullied him accordingly. DOWN TO THE MEAN NICKNAMES.

anyway, 0/10, one of the worst episodes Ever, it literally made me wish i was back in captain's holiday watching picard slut it up. if this episode had been on "am i the asshole" the judgment would have been "everyone sucks here" except deanna, who literally did nothing wrong and suffered the most anyway

hollow pursuit: THIS ONE POPPED THE FUCK OFFFFFFFFFFFFF

10 out of fucking 10. one ZILLION stars. i would have loved it even if i wasn't a data fan but i am a data fan and i had a WONDERFUL time

you spend this whole episode wanting so so so bad for data to kill this guy. data is kidnapped and debased and coerced into playing his captor's games and you want data to kill him SO BAD. and in your mind you're like, yeah but they won't let him KILL the guy kill the guy, it's gonna be like some disney villain stumbling or having an accident and he winds up dead due to Circumstances. there's no way data is gonna fucking kill a guy

and then there's like 30 perfect seconds where you're like: oh fuck. data is GONNA FUCKING KILL A GUY

let me find the exact moment that sent me over the edge. mister captor: "Go ahead. Fire. If only you could feel rage over Varria's death. If only you could feel the need for revenge, then maybe you could fire. But you're just an android. You can't feel anything, can you?"

AND THE ENTIRE TIME. DATA'S FACE IS TWITCHING. AND I SAID ALOUD TRULY GENUINELY BELIEVING HE HAD FINALLY UNLOCKED EMOTIONS I THINK HE CAN FEEL IT ACTUALLY??? LIKE HE LOOKS LIKE HE IS FEELING IT

anyway it counts. data DID fire, and just because they couldnt have him do that on tv and had to transport him away first, he fired (in spite of his program! it was in defense of other life), he meant to kill that man horribly, it counts it counts it COUNTS

furthermore, his mic drop at the end - why would i come see you just to gloat, after all i'm just an android - made me YELL out loud. data is hard as FUCK

i can't take credit to this thought because it was catherine's thought first but it's so fun that both androids we've seen unlock emotion so far - raina unlocked love and lal unlocked fear - were immediately destroyed by it. and what a fun contrast it would be if raina unlocked her emotions with love and data unlocked his with HATE. and i agree because it contrasts so strongly with data's normal loving nature. it's very "anger of a gentle man" of him if that makes any sense. like he is always so unfailingly polite and considerate and forgiving even to people like maddox but enough is Enough.

also, everyone mourning data was really very good. i simply love when people love him...

anyway, that episode fucked. i'm thinking about making it a must see on my spreadsheet <3

TONIGHT, FINALLY: "sarek." i cannot WWWWAIT to see him

[angelicmichael]

Since you are an angst queen I know you’d make magic out of anything on the list, but how about number 9 with Michael?

A/N: First of all that’s a huge compliment thank you 😭🥺 I hope you like this!! I’m sorry it’s so long for a blurb lol. if u want a song that describes this fic PERFECTLY then listen to flesh without blood by grimes!! Like, I didn’t even mean too but the song matches this fic so perfectly. Anyway enjoy ♥️ Reblogs and likes are greatly appreciated :)

Warnings: breaking up, MAJOR character(s) death - the death isn’t really described but it’s suggested at the end of the fic, Reader burns herself so I guess burning? Lol, it’s not really suicide but Reader knows about her death and accepts it so it could be considered as such? Idk.

You never thought it would come to this.

Even from the beginning you knew he was trouble. He was too beautiful; to perfect.. He had to be corrupt in some way. And he sure was.

However nothing could prepare you to handle the fact that he was the antichrist, satans son. At first you laughed it off and thought he was trying to be funny but it was clear to you it wasn’t a joke when he told you about the bombs.

As fucked up as it sounds, you were okay with it. As long as you were by his side, you would be okay. However; as the date of the nuclear attack grew closer and closer, you started to second thoughts. You had second thoughts about everything but mostly about dating Michael.

He was starting to draw away from you, which was understandable since he was getting so busy. However in the moments when he happened to be free and tried to reach out to you, you found yourself withdrawing from him as well.

Knowing what destruction he was capable of, and what he was planning on doing made you start to withdraw from him.

What the fuck were you even thinking with dating this guy in the first place? How could there ever be a happy ending with the antichrist?

Long story short you now were in a fucking predicament, to say the least.

The bombs went off tommorow. you knew that. Michael knew that, and so did the cooperative. That was everyone who knew and who was okay with the world fucking ending. You couldn’t fucking handle it anymore.

You were tired of feeling like the responsibility of the world was in your hands, and you were tired of tolerating Michaels shit.

You loved him, and him alone. As much as it hurt to admit it, the thing that turned you off so much about Michael was all the fucking baggage he carried. You wanted him, not the cooperative, not his fucking magic powers, not his fucked up family, and espically not his fucking urge to destroy everything he touched. You knew all of that wasn’t truly him, it wasn’t his spirit.

It was the satanists and Satan himself that made Michael so fucking sadistic. And you hated it. You started to hate him for letting this happen, for allowing himself to surrender to such darkness.

You and Michael were due to leave at the crack of dawn to go to the sanctuary, before the bombs hit but you had different ideas. You were leaving tonight. As soon as you finished writing him this damn letter.

It was nighttime and you were alone in you and Michaels shared home. Or.. really just Michaels home now. You knew you had to write this letter soon before he came back, you had already packed everything and you had a hotel set up - waiting for you. You already had all of your belongings in boxes and ready to go by the front door, but right now you were still fucking stumped.

You sat at Michaels desk that he used for work; with a peice of blank paper in front of you with a pen in your hand.

You twiddled the pen nervously; trying to think of what you even wanted to say to him.

You kept the light dim, just enough so that you could see what you wanted to write. Having the light on brightly seemed to just make you sweat and make you even more nervous for some odd reason.

You finally bit the bullet and decided to just fucking do it, you started writing.

‘Dearest Michael,

I hope this letter finds you well. I know you hate unpredictability but I had to do this, this way. I know that if I looked you in the eyes and told you that I had to leave you - that I wouldn’t be able to take it so.. I’m sorry Michael. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s not that I don’t love you, because I do. I love you so fucking much. Too much to see you live the rest of your life like this, controlled by the Cooperative and being manipulated like that. I mean, think about it Michael. REALLY think. Do you really want to live the rest of your life having to manage of all them? Having to be dictated by fucking Satan for ‘probably’ eternity? I don’t want a future like that Michael. I would rather be taken out tommorow quickly by the bombs than live the rest of my life in a fucking wasteland. Understand that I love you but not the situation. I packed everything and I’m leaving tonight; please don’t try to find me. I just want to spend the little remaining hours I have alone please. I know how excited you were for tommorow and I’m sorry that you’ll have to celebrate alone -“.

You stopped writing for a second. You really were a fucking idiot, weren’t you? How god damn naive have you been? Michaels been spending more time at the fucking cooperative than he had at home, of course he wasn’t alone. That made no sense.

You wouldn’t be surprised if he was fucking some random cooperative member; Michael was gorgeous - everyone wanted him. You shook your head, I mean there was no point to not call him out on it. You could basically say whatever you wanted now - you were going to die tommorow anyways. You focused back on the paper in front of you and continued writing.

‘but im sure you’ll just find some bitch to fuck and celebrate that way, won’t you?

Yours truly,

(Y/n)’.

You put the pen back where you had previously found it and took the letter in your hands. You reread your mini speech and you felt odd.

You didn’t feel quite sad, but you weren’t happy either. You supposed you were kind of relieved. Relieved to finally have told Michael what you always wanted too. Relieved you didn’t have to date some sadistic, cruel man forever.

You turned the corner in the house and opened the door that lead to the bedroom. You had made the bed and you put the letter in the middle right below the pillows, no way he could fucking miss it.

You let out a dry laugh - not because anything was funny but out of disbelief. You were actually doing it. You were really leaving Michael.

You turned on your heel and with a snap of your fingers the lights turned off. It was now time to get the fuck out of here.

——————————

It was a beautiful day. The sun shone brightly onto you as you basked in it. It was early morning, the next day and you sat in a metal chair outside of a cafe with a coffee in front of you.

Today was the day.

You didn’t know the exact time the bombs were due to go off but you knew it was sometime before noon, and it was nearing 8 am.

You expected to get hundred of phone calls last night or to even have Michael show up at your hotel but none of that happened.. And you would be lying if you said that didn’t disappoint you a little. You did miss him.

You took a sip of coffee, savoring the taste before swallowing it. You picked up the cup - getting ready to raise it to your lips when you heard the other metal chair that was across the table from you being pulled back. The sound of metal across the concrete was like nails on chalkboard - you jumped and a good portion of your hot coffee slid down your shirt.

You bolted out of the chair - trying to go to the bathroom so you could dry yourself off but instead you felt a firm hand grab your wrist.

“Wait”. The tone of the voice you heard was soft yet demanding; so you listened. Also the voice was way too fucking familiar, you knew it belonged to a male due to the deep tone of it. With a quick look, it confirmed your suspicions. It was fucking Michael.

You stood there shaking, your chest was on fucking fire - stinging. Tears brimmed your eyes as you tried to get your wrist back but Michael held onto it even tighter.

“Michael! I need to go-“ You quickly pleaded.

“No, you don’t”. Michael snarled. You looked into his eyes you noticed how he had tears in his eyes, too. You stood there for a moment, in pain and being insanely uncomfterable in the hot sun that seemed to amplify the pain of your new burn. It was almost as if he enjoyed your suffering, like some kind of subtle revenge for you leaving him last night.

After getting a couple of weird looks, Michael sheepishly let your wrist go and allowed you to move just enough so you could sit across from him at the table.

You sniffled and brushed the tears off of your cheeks with the back of your hand.

“I told you not to find me, Michael”. You said in a deeper tone than of which you normally spoke in. It was because of how emotional you were starting to become, did he really come back for you?

“(Y/n), what’s gotten into you? Do you think I chose you over the Cooperative or something”? Michael spoke, gently shaking his head as he did so.

You were on the edge of your seat (literally) as you quickly replied, speaking so fast you barely even comprehended or really thought about what you were saying.

“You did Michael! These past couple of weeks I’ve barely been able to see you. You won’t talk to me, we don’t communicate anymore”.

You said, screaming. Any care you had of anyone around you hearing you scream at Michael seemed to become nonexistent. Tears fully streamed down your face now - a mix of anger and sadness. Your fingers gripped the table, turning white. You didn’t even flinch when Michael slammed a peice of paper onto the table.

“Is this what you think of me? Is this how low you think of me now? I’ve been beyond busy making plans not just for me but for us, to wipe out the human race and create a clean slate where we can create any kind of world we wish. But.. Instead.. you think I’m out fucking other girls”? Michael spoke harshly, continuing to stare into your eyes.

You sniffled, and tried to pull yourself together before you spoke again and gave a weak smile. You knew your accusation of him cheating was hollow, there really was no proof of him doing so. It was just a product of you being stressed and paranoid. The smile you gave him wasn’t really whole hearted, admittedly but you were done screaming and fighting.

The most important thing was that you had him back, and that the bombs were still due to go off most likely.

“I’m so sorry I said that Michael. I was just emotional. I didn’t mean that, I promise.. but.. today’s.. the day-“

You spoke slowly, not wanting to admit what today’s big event actually was but Michael cut you off anyway.

“You really think I wouldn’t cancel today’s event, Angel? I managed to postpone it. The cooperative wasn’t happy but I needed to see you. This whole thing isn’t worth it if your not by my side”.

You furrowed your eyebrows together, did Michael not get the point of your letter? You didn’t leave just for him to continue on with his plans. The idea was sweet but you didn’t exactly understand his motive and that made you uncomfterable.

You shifted and opened your mouth to speak when your eardrums nearly shattered with the loud noise that seemed to suddenly fill the air. It was fucking sirens. What the fuck??

You didn’t know what to do. You felt adrenaline start to course through your veins and you could only scream,

“What the fuck Michael”?!

You don’t know what scared you more, the sirens or the look on Michaels face. He looked horrified. He leaped out of the metal chair so swiftly you barely even saw him get up, his mouth was open - like he wanted to say something.

You stood up too, nearly shouting at him so that he could hear you through the sirens.

“Michael? ...

Michael?! ..

MICHAEL”!

Finally he seemed to snap out of it and realize you were still there, in front of him. You could see he was breathing hard, he was starting to panic. He came up to you and quickly embraced you.. it was as if he could almost smell your fear.

“Look, there’s nothing to worry about. It was probably just a miscommunication error, I just need to call-“

Michaels voice stayed smooth and steady as he talked but you knew him. You knew by the look in his eyes, the way he was holding onto you (he rarely EVER got clingy) that he was scared as hell.

You also knew you two didn’t have a lot of time. You knew how the nuclear attack was designed that after the alarms went off there would only be a couple minutes before the actual bombs released. You cut him off and started talking.

“-No, Michael. We don’t have time”. You said, your voice cracking. Another tear slid down your cheek as you kissed Michael with more passion than you probably ever had in your history of dating men.

You felt as if your body was on fire with the knowledge of what your future held, as you heard screams and chaos from every angle around you two.

You couldn’t help but selfishly think that atleast you had Michael and that you wouldn’t be alone now.

Taglist: @mina672 @9layerdevilsfoodcake @michaellangdonstanaccount @guiltyfiend @jimmason @langdonsexual

[avengerscompound]

She Sets the City on Fire - Summer’s Day

She Sets the City on Fire: A Bruce Banner Fanfic

MASTERLIST

Buy me a ☕ Square: @brucebannerbingo​ - R5, Summer

Rating:  E

Warning:  Age Gap, Self Doubt, Smut (M|F oral and vaginal sex)

Word Count:  5901

Pairing:  Bruce Banner x OFC (Summer)

Summary:  Bruce is drawn to Summer.  She’s everything he wished he could be.  Carefree, exciting, and she knows exactly who she is.  There are so many reasons a relationship with her wouldn’t work.  So why can’t he stop thinking about her?

A/N: at end of fic

1. Summer’s Day

Bruce followed the group of Professors, Post-Docs and Ph.D. students down West 88th Street.  It was one of those oppressive New York Summer’s days where the streets smelled of garbage and the humidity in the air clung to your skin.  There had been a conference on at Columbia and he had been invited out for drinks with a small group of people.  They’d been treating him like a celebrity, something he didn’t think he’d ever get used to, but he couldn’t pretend wasn’t nice.  It was nice getting recognition for all the work he had done that previously he’d just been hunted for like some kind of animal.

They were just stopping by one of the Post Doc’s place for a few drinks before going to the official dinner tonight.  Aidan was quite excited that he had this group of esteemed scientists to bring back to his home.  Bruce was mostly just happy it had just been about science so far.  No one had brought up the Hulk or the Avengers or even Tony Stark which at least would have been in the realm of the same topic as Nuclear Physics.

Aidan stopped at a brownstone half a block from the park and headed up the stairs.  Bruce and the rest of the group followed after him as he let himself in and then headed down the hall to the first apartment on the left.

Aidan stepped through the door and groaned.  When Bruce followed him through he saw the object of Aidan’s frustration.  A woman was standing in front of an airconditioning unit with headphones on.  She wasn’t facing them and didn’t seem to be aware they had even come into the room.  She was wearing a t-shirt that was so big on her that it was difficult to tell if she was wearing anything underneath it or not because it sat so far down her legs.  Such beautiful legs too.  Long and slender with just the hint of muscle definition.  Her skin was pale like milk and her hair hung loosely down her back in deep red waves.  She bounced around with her hands on her ears singing along to the song only she could hear.

Aidan approached her and tapped her on the head.  She turned and smiled holding the headphones away from her ears.  Bruce nearly audibly gasped.  Her eyes were the palest, brightest blue he’d ever seen.  And so big.  He thought it might be possible to actually drown in those eyes.

“Can you clear out?”  Aidan asked.

“Hey!  I was here first!”  She protested.

“Go on, fuck off,”  Aidan said giving her a little nudge.  There was clear affection in her voice, despite the harsh language.  The kind of familiarity that was built over a long time.

She rolled her eyes and took her headphones off and began walking in the direction of Bruce.  “And stop stealing my clothes!”  Aidan added.

“Fine!  Fuck!”  She snapped and pulled the shirt off and threw it at him, completely uncaring that she was sharing the space with half a dozen middle-aged men.

She was wearing something underneath.  Black hot pants and a white bra with pink polka dots on it.  Bruce’s face flushed and he looked up at the ceiling, feeling extremely awkward.”

“Fucking hell, Summer!”  Aidan yelled.  “Grow up!”

She gave him the finger and headed back towards the door.  She stopped in front of Bruce.  “Hey!  I have a poster of you on my bedroom wall at my parent’s house.”

Bruce shifted his gaze down to her face.  She was smiling at him and it somehow looked both devious and playful.

“Oh… uh… that’s… cool… I guess… Hello.”  Bruce stammered, willing himself not to look down at her chest.

“It is decidedly uncool.”  She said and tapped his arm as she passed him and went outside.  “See ya!”

“Did she just go outside in bare feet and her bra?”  One of the other professors asked.

“She’s probably just going to the courtyard out back,” Aidan answered as he went to the kitchen.  “Who can I get a beer?”

There was a general agreement from the group, though Bruce just asked for iced water.  “Who was she?”  He asked as Aidan handed over the glass.

Aidan groaned and rolled his eyes.  “My sister.  Half-sister technically.  And before any of you ask, I think she’s single, but I never know.  Yes, you’re welcome to try.”

“Welcome to try what?”  Bruce asked.

“Asking her out or whatever you’re all thinking,” Aidan said.

One of the others laughed.  “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting your sister from lecherous old men like us?”

“Well, I once tried that.  When she found out, she punched me in the back of the head and said she was quite capable of policing her own vagina,” he shrugged.  “That’s how she talks.  Anyway, so far almost every guy I’ve brought ‘round has tried.  She’s rejected them all.  So, like I said, go for it if you want.”

The others started milling around and talking about the conference and physics and gossiping about other doctors that were attending.   Bruce walked over to the window and looked out as he ran his finger around the rim of his glass.  Summer had indeed gone out the back.  There was a trampoline out there and she was jumping on it.  She had the purest expression of joy on her face he’d ever seen in an adult.  Occasionally she’d attempt a forward flip.  When she pulled it off her whole face lit up and she’d clap her hands.  When she failed, she’d just let herself fall into a heap laughing hysterically. 

“Go out and talk to her, if you want,” Aidan said.

Bruce turned to him, blinking.  “What?”

“You’re staring at my sister,” Aidan pushed.  “Go talk to her.  She’s actually pretty cool.  Weird.  But cool.  I think you’re probably too old for her, but she’s still interesting and talking is better than staring.”

“Right,” Bruce said, feeling his face heat up a little.  “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Aidan assured him.  “It’s fine.”

Bruce gave a nod and put his glass down, heading outside with his hands in his pockets.  He didn’t exactly know what it was he was doing right now.  He didn’t date and if he did it wouldn’t be women that were half his age.  He just found himself drawn to her.  It was like she was the polar opposite of him.  Free and unthinking and completely out of her head.  It was fascinating.

“Hello again, Bruce Banner.”  She said without pausing in her jumping.  That bra was not exactly built to support such a workout and her breasts looked like they might just escape due to the amount they were bouncing.  Sweat beaded on her skin only making her look more attractive.  He felt a sudden shove forward in the back of his brain from the Hulk.  A little lust but mostly just a shove to stop him from chickening out.

“Uh, hello.  Summer, right?”  Bruce asked.

“That’s right,” she replied.  She attempted another forward flip and only half pulled it off, stumbling on her landing.  She quickly recovered and continued jumping.

Bruce glanced around for a topic of conversation.  He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing out here talking to her and he was already getting to the ‘overthinking it’ point.  “Nice trampoline,” he settled on, and mentally cursed himself.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling.  “It belongs to the family in 4B.  I said they could put it out here if they let me use it.  They laughed and said yes.  I don’t think they thought I was serious.”

“What do you mean, you let them?  Are you guys the landlords?”  Bruce asked.  She looked too young to be in charge of running a whole building.  Aidan was in his mid-thirties, so maybe he was the landlord and she was just making herself in charge by association.

“Oh,” she said.  “The building belongs to my dad.  I’m studying at Columbia  So he bought it and said I could live here if I let Aidan live with me and we had to run it like a business.”  She answered.

Bruce blinked up at her.  “Your dad just bought you a building?  He’s not Tony Stark is he?”

She giggled.  He could fall in love with that sound.  It was so pure and unfiltered and genuine.  It made him feel light just hearing it.  “No, not him,” she said.  “But I mean, he makes money from it.  I know it’s over the top.  I sometimes wonder how messed up my sense of entitlement is.  I don’t really know what it’s like to not just get what I want.”  She gave a small shrug and jumped around in a circle.  “Now, I have a question for you, Bruce Banner.”

Bruce raised his eyebrows at her.  “What is it?”

“Why aren’t you on this trampoline with me?”

Bruce laughed gently.  “I don’t think it’s built to hold two adults.”

She stopped jumping and looked down at him, rolling her eyes.  “Puh-lease.  They had 20 kids on here last weekend.  It’ll be fine.”

Bruce slipped off his loafers and took off his socks before climbing up on the trampoline.  He willed the Hulk to stay back.  He didn’t think the Big Guy would break for this, but he’s also never been on a trampoline before.  She took his hands in hers and they started bouncing.  To begin with, they didn’t leave the mat, they just bobbed up and down in time with each other.  Her hands were warm and soft and she held him with no hesitation or awkwardness.  As if they’d been doing that kind of thing for years.

“Why did your father make Aidan live with you?  Why couldn’t he have his own place?”  Bruce asked.

Summer shrugged.  “It’s kind of shitty really.  He’s a child of dad’s first marriage.  That’s why the age difference is so big and why we don’t look much alike.  I actually didn’t really know Aidan growing up.  Dad just paid out the child support and didn’t have a lot to do with him.  He went off the rails and I made dad feel guilty about it   So he thought if he forced us to live together maybe Aidan might calm down a little.  I don’t know.  Maybe it just made me go off the rails.”  She said and quirked an eyebrow at him.

“Oh?  How did you go off the rails?”  Bruce asked.

Summer started to counter the bouncing so that when he went down, she went up.  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“That’s why I asked.”  Bruce deadpanned.

“Maybe if you play your cards right, I might show you,” She said.  Her voice was tinged with that sexy tease some people were so good at but Bruce had never been able to master.

Bruce shivered a little.  This woman had just gone from ‘you’re someone here to talk’ to ‘I’m going to fuck you later’ in 0 seconds flat.

“Hey, I bet if you jumped really high when you landed, I’d go flying.”  She said, shifting from ‘let’s fuck’ to ‘you’re my new best friend’.

Bruce chuckled and started to jump.  Each time he landed she’d get thrown higher and higher until she was being lifted right above his head.  Each jump would make her squeal with pure delight that rolled off her into him.  It made the Hulk raise his head in interest, but Bruce wasn’t worried.  At least not yet.  He was watching but he was staying back.  They were soon both laughing and she grabbed his arms as she flew up and pulled herself down and into him when she landed.  He stumbled back and they fell to the mat, clinging to each other panting and laughing.

Bruce had that feeling of euphoria that you usually only get when your adrenaline kicks in.  For him, it was usually accompanied by the Hulk.  Right now, he only felt good and he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.  “Okay, okay.  I need to stop… gotta watch the heart rate.”  Bruce said, patting his chest.

“Okay, okay.”  Summer said, patting his chest.  “Did you have fun at least?”

Bruce smiled.  “So much fun.”

She took his hand and started to trace a fingernail over his palm.  “I’d like to give you kudos for not just staring at my tits the entire time we’ve been out here, Bruce Banner.”

“Why do you keep saying my whole name like that?”  He asked.

She took his hand and put his palm against her cheek.  “I just like the way it tastes.”

He ran his thumb over her bottom lips and they parted.  As his thumb slowly dragged across, she closed her eyes and he pushed it into her mouth.  Her tongue brushed over the pad and she took a deep breath that shuddered through her as she exhaled.

He pulled his thumb away but kept his hand on her cheek.  She leaned into it and hummed softly.  “I love when guys do that.  It makes me think about kissing and sucking dick.  Do guys think that when they do it?”  The question sounded rhetorical.  Like she was just musing to herself.  It made Bruce’s cock twitch and once again he started to question what in the hell was he doing with this much younger woman.  “I have another question for you, Bruce Banner.”

“What is it?”  He asked.

“When you first kiss me, do you want it to be here on the trampoline, or in my bedroom?”

Bruce swallowed thickly and let out a breath.  “He - here.”

She leaned in toward him and he bridged the gap.  Their lips touched and in that moment Bruce knew he was done for.

They started slow, her soft lips barely parted.  Their mouths moved only a little.  It gradual deepened.  They sucked on each other’s lips, his hand pushed into her hair and he moved her backward.  She pushed her tongue into his mouth and he met it with his as they tasted each other.  She lay back into the trampoline and he moved between her legs.  It had been so long since he’d allowed himself this.  The thought of the Hulk getting in the way not even passing through his mind.  He felt like a teenager again.  Just making out in the backyard with his cousin’s friend.  Hoping it might lead to sex but knowing it probably wouldn't.  No concerns about big green rage monsters getting in the way.

His hand moved up to her breast and he stroked his thumb over her nipple.  I hardened to his touch and she hummed, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulled him deeper into her.

Someone cleared their throat behind them.  Bruce jumped up, started to see Aidan and a few of the other men standing at the edge of the trampoline.

“We were going to head out again.  Will you be staying here, Doctor Banner?”  One of the other scientists asked.

Bruce flushed a bright red, but Summer didn’t even look up and acknowledge them.  She just nuzzled into his neck and started sucking on his throat.

“Yes… uh.  I’ll stay behind,” Bruce stammered trying to shake off that feeling like he’d just been caught masturbating by a family member.

One of the men laughed and turned back to the Brownstone.  “Have fun, kids.”  He called, waving to them.

“If you fuck my sister, you better be ready to propose to her,” Aidan teased and grabbed Summer’s ankle and shook it.  “And you.  Take it easy on him.  He’s too nice for you.”

Summer didn’t even look up, she just gave Aidan the finger as he walked off. Bruce found it charming that Aidan didn’t seem to know who he wanted to be protective of.  When the men disappeared into the building he turned back to Summer.

She looked up at him with those clear blue eyes of hers.  She took a lock of his hair that hand fallen over his brow and twirled it around her finger.  “So, Bruce Banner.  Would you like to go back inside and have me not take it easy on you?  You can prepare your proposal while I’m going very, very hard on you.”

Bruce swallowed and looked her up and down.  There was a strong push at the back of his head.  The Hulk letting him know he wanted this too.  He nodded slowly and Summer got up and took his hand, leading him back into her apartment.

There was no stopping to offer him a drink or any other pretense that they weren’t now going to have sex.  A very small part of him had hoped that maybe there would be.  That maybe she might decide it was a bad idea because he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been with a woman and he was terrified.  Instead, Summer led him straight to her bedroom.  Bruce had the brief chance to notice how hard she’d tried to pull off the poor college student look in her room with things that were actually really expensive.  There was a king-sized, four-poster bed near the window.  Along with the standard gauze curtain in a purple, paisley print hanging from it, she’d wound a string of fairy lights that also ran around the walls and over the bay windows that looked out over the street.  Where most students would have a cheap metal frame, hers was solid hardwood.  Her duvet was a similar paisley print, but the pillowcases were purple with white spots.  There was a wing-backed chair in the corner of the room and on the bedside table sat an ornate carnival glass lamp.

That was all he could process before she’d pushed him against her door and her mouth was on his.  Her hands went up under his shirt, her nails grazing over his stomach.  He slid his hands up her back and under her bra strap, pulling her hard against him.  She pulled back suddenly and headed to the window, her hips swaying as she walked.  When she pulled the curtains closed she turned to face him.

“Tell me, Bruce Banner,” she asked, trailing her fingers down her stomach and over her pussy.  “What would you like to do to me?”

He took a deep breath and moved toward her unbuttoning his shirt.  When he reached her, he snaked his hands around her waist and pulled her against him.  He leaned down, but she pulled back, avoiding the kiss he was trying to initiate.

“No, no, no.”  She purred putting her hands on his chest.  “You need to talk to me. I want to hear what you want.”

Bruce swallowed hard.  How Summer could switch from innocent and carefree to sexually overt so seamlessly was probably the biggest turn on about her.  “Take off your clothes.”  He said, aiming for a commanding growl, but missing it completely.

She smiled and bit her bottom lip, letting her teeth rake over it as she slowly released it again.  “Ordering me, huh?  I like it.”  She said, unhooking her bra.  She slowly slid it down her arms and tossed it onto the wing-backed chair.  Bruce took her breasts in his hands, palming them and rolling his thumbs over the pale pink peaks of her nipples.  She turned in his arms and one of his hands traveled up to her throat.  He pulled her head back so she was leaning on his shoulder and kissed her.  As he did, she pushed her shorts down and wriggled out of them.

He turned her to face him and wrapped his hand in her hair, holding her head so she was looking up at him.  He ran her thumb over her lips and she nipped at it.  “I do think of you sucking my dick when I do that.”  He said.

“Is that what you want?”  She said breathily.  “You want me on my knees?  You want to fuck my face?”

He moaned and let her go.  She dropped down and unbuckled his pants, pulling them down.  She nuzzled at his crotch, running her nose along the tent his cock was forming in his boxers.  She worked them down and he stepped out of them.  His anxiety was starting to rise again but if Hulk was there he was being quiet.  She took his cock in her hand and pumped it as she swirled her tongue over the head.

She looked up at him and went to say something and then stopped.  His anxiety started to rise and he felt Hulk push on him.  Telling how stupid and weak he was.  That, of course, this beautiful young woman wouldn’t want someone like him.

“It’s okay.  You don’t have to do this if you don’t want.”  He said, stroking her hand through her hair.

She furrowed her brow.  “No… I just… I  know you might have issues with the other guy.  But I like it when my hair gets pulled.  And you can be rough.  It’s okay if you don’t but I can take it.”

Bruce faltered.  He’d expected her to say so many things, but that was not even in the realm of what he’d expected.  He gave a short nod and Hulk backed off again.  She opened her mouth and dropped her head down, taking him deep into the back of her throat and rolled her tongue so it wrapped around the underside of his shaft.  He groaned and closed his eyes and just appreciated that wet warm feeling as she massaged his cock with her tongue.  It had been so long and it felt so good, now what he worried about was not lasting long enough.  He bunched her hair in his hands and started to thrust, opening his eyes again so he could watch her.  She hummed and smiled up at him around his shaft, keeping her eyes locked on his.

He pulled her hair a little harder and picked up his speed, letting himself go a little more.  She seemed to be in complete control of herself even with the fact he was holding her head in place.  If she had trouble catching her breath she would twist slightly and release him only to plunge back down and suck harder than before.  She gripped his ass and pressed her fingers against his asshole.  Her tongue moved expertly against him, rolling and circling his cock.

That control both reassured him that he was safe exploring this and brought him closer and closer to the edge of orgasm. He pulled back as he felt it building and guided her to bend over her bed, pressing his cock against her cunt.

“Bruce, stop,” she moaned.

He pulled back immediately and looked around wildly.  “Sorry.  I’m sorry.  I thought this was what you wanted.”

“It is.  But you gotta wrap it up, pal,” she laughed.

“Oh.  Oh, I’m sorry.  I - uh - I don’t have any protection.  We can do something else if you want.”  Bruce stammered, pulling away.

Summer pointed to the bedside table.  “Don’t worry.  I’ve got you covered.”

Bruce pulled the drawer open and gasped.  Inside were boxes and boxes of condoms.  He had figured Summer must be a little promiscuous.  He’d never had a woman just want to go straight to bed with him before.  Not that he judged that kind of thing.  He was friends with Tony after all.  The way she had kept repeating his whole name had made him think that everything had gone a little faster because there was a little celebrity crush.  Which now he thought about it was probably worse.  He shook his head and looked at her.  “How much sex do you have, Summer?”

She burst out laughing and rolled over onto the bed, crawling up next to him and looking into the drawer.  “Not quite this much,” she giggled.  “I mean, I’m not going to lie, I’m a bit of a slut,” she added at a whisper like she was letting him in on a big secret.  “I just really like novelty condoms and I can’t stop buying them.”  She reached down and started to gently stroke his cock.

Bruce shook himself.  This had all started to feel like a terrible idea and he was starting to get that dull rumble feeling like the Hulk was moving forward.  He’d gotten caught up in the fact that Summer was weird, and unself-conscious, and just stunning, and she wanted him, that he hadn’t stopped to think long enough that he hadn’t slept with anyone since the Hulk and that maybe sleeping with a woman he only just met when he didn’t actually know anything about her, including how old she was, might be a very bad idea.

“How many men have you slept with?”  He asked.

“Men?  Umm… six,” she answered, her fingers still teasing along his shaft.  “Why?  How many men have you slept with?”

“None,” he answered, turning to look at her.  “So you’re bi?”

“I don’t think of myself as anything,”  Summer said.  “Do you not want to do this anymore?  I can make your dick look like a kitty cat.”  She rummaged around in the drawer and pulled out a box of condoms that according to the picture on the box, each one looked like a different animal when it was rolled on.  As she pulled the box free a baggie of pills that had been taped to the inside of the drawer got knocked free and fell down.  Bruce picked them up and looked at them.

“Is this ecstasy?  Are you high, Summer?”  He asked.  It would explain everything really.  Why she was acting the way she was.  Her manner of speech.  The fact she was even attracted to him.  He mentally kicked himself.  He was a stupid old man who got too caught up in some weird fantasy to realize that it was too good to be true.  He got up and went to find his underwear.

She got up and came up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her forehead against his back.  “I’m not high, Bruce.  I use those at raves.  Not like, in the middle of the day on a Tuesday.  This is really just how I am.  If you don’t want to fuck now, that’s okay.  But can you do me the decency of telling me what happened?”

“I don’t even know how old you are.”  He said turning to face her.  She reached up and twirled a lock of his hair around her finger and pulled it forward over his brow.

“Hi, Bruce Banner.  My name is Summer Martin.  I’m 24 years old.  I have an older brother named Aidan, who is 36, and a younger sister named Dakota who is 17.  My dad is wealthy.  Extremely wealthy.  He buys love rather than showing it.  I study Classics at Columbia.  I’m currently doing a Masters.  I have only really had one serious relationship and that was when I was 16.  It lasted for three years.  Then I moved in with Aidan, and I started partying.  I smoke pot and take ecstasy recreationally.  Pot more than E.  E is for special occasions.  Very rarely and when I’m with the right people, I drop acid too.  Even with all that I managed to get straight As at college.  I like to have sex.  But I won’t just do it with anyone.  They need to connect with something in me.  I don’t have a sexual preference other than that need for some connection.  If I meet someone who is interested in me and I genuinely enjoy being in their company in a pure way, I do not go slowly.  I have had sex with 15 people all up.  Six identified as male.  Seven had penises if that matters to you.  I am always careful and I get tested regularly.  My last test was a month ago and it came back clean.  I thought we had that connection.  On the trampoline.  We had genuine, uncomplicated fun.  I thought you might like to continue that in a more adult way.  I’m sorry if you got caught up in the fantasy of who I am or something.  I never meant to lead you into something you didn’t want to do.”

She let him go and stepped back.  He looked her over and let out a breath.  She had just laid herself bare to him and even though some of what she’d just said startled him and maybe even scared him a little - he had no idea how he could keep up with this woman - he wanted her.  Hulk nudged him forward and he picked her up and kissed her passionately as he carried her to the bed.

“Okay, Summer Martin,” Bruce said, dropping her onto the mattress.  “Let’s make my dick look like a kitty cat.”

She started giggling and opened the box, rifling through them until she found the one labeled cat.  She tore the packet open and rolled it on over his length.  The thing looked ridiculous.  It was bright yellow and had a bulbous cartoon cat protruding from the end.  They both looked down at it and broke down into peels of laughter.

“Summer!  You gotta stop laughing at it!”  Bruce teased, as he laughed himself.  The laughter helped to be honest.  It relaxed him and pushed all remaining concerns about the Big Guy right back.

“I’m not!  It’s so cute.  I’ll stroke the cute little kitty,” she said, running her hand up and down his cock.

“Little?  That’s not very nice.”  He teased, rolling her onto her back and kissing down her throat.  He pushed his cock against her cunt, sliding it up and down her folds.  She would take a sudden breath in every time it pressed against her clit.  “Cats really like boxes.  Have you got one this kitty can hide in?”

“Well, I’m not going to call my vagina a box. So no.”  She said breaking down into hysterical laughter.

“You don’t like stupid euphemisms for vaginas?  I can put my meat sword into your velvet purse?”  Bruce said trying to think of the stupid things he’d heard Tony say when he was trying to get Bruce or Steve to blush.

Summer completely lost it.  So was laughing in that hysterical way where you think you’ve stopped only to start up immediately again.  It was like music to his ears.  “Velvet purse!  Oh god, help!”

“Summer Martin, I’m going to put my flesh flute into your pink taco!”  He said.

“Please, no!”  Summer squealed and he entered her.  She moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck.  “Oh, fuck yes.”

Bruce rolled his hips slowly against her, letting her body adjust to him.  Having his cock buried in her heat was some kind of bliss.  He had no idea why he had waited so long.  Maybe it was just the laughter that had allowed this to happen when he had failed so many times before.  He nipped at the skin on her throat and ran the tip of his nose up to her chin.  “My trouser snake just crawled into your love cave,” he said, making his voice breathy, to begin with, but breaking down into giggles by the end.

Summer shook her head, unable to form words, completely consumed by her laughter and her moans brought on by the feeling of his cock inside her.  She brought her knees up and wrapped them around his waist.  Her feet pressed on his ass and pushed him deeper into her.

Bruce started to thrust harder into her.  The heat from her cunt felt like heaven around his cock.  He imagined how she’d feel without the condom.  The moisture of her arousal engulfing him and soaking his dick.  She finally gained control of her laughter and began to dig her nails into her back.  She contracted and released her pelvic floor in a random pattern that was bringing him to climax much too fast.

He kissed her and shifted his body so it was curved more, his cock penetrating her deeper than before.  He flicked at her nipples with the tip of his tongue and she let out such a low and loud curse that it made him blush.

He sucked her nipple into his mouth and started pounding into her.

“Yes!  Bruce!  Just like that!”  She cried, her body arching up into him.  Her words were like encouragement for him.  He went harder but with an irregular rhythm.  Her hand snaked down between them and she started rubbing her clit.  Her body seized up, contracting around his cock as she came.  She let out a string of curse words and her nails dug into his back.

His hips jerked as her walls milked his cock and he emptied inside her.  He slowed down his movements as his cock pulsed and twitched inside of her before slipping out.

He looked down at his dick and chuckled at the sad-looking slimy condom he had on.  “Aww… kitty looks all sad and disgusting.”   Summer teased.

“Poor kitty.  He had a nice time at least.”  He said making Summer break down into peals of laughter.  She pointed at a wastebasket sitting next to a hardwood desk.

Bruce got up and removed the condom, tying it off and tossing it in the trash.  He returned to the bed and Summer opened her arms out, welcoming him into her embrace.  He nuzzled into her neck and draped his arm over her.

“I know this is really corny and something you’re not supposed to do.  But Summer, that was really fun.  I haven’t… since … the other guy I haven’t been with anyone.  But even before, I never remember having that much fun during sex before.”  He said as Summer carded her fingers through his hair.  “Thank you.”

She smiled.  “I was the first one?”

“Mmm… I mean I’ve tried, but… he was harder to control back then.  I have more control now, but I still …”  He shook his head, not wanting to go into the massive lists of reasons why he kept women at arm’s length thanks to his litany of mental blocks.  She was here for a one-time thing.  She didn’t need that.  “There’s a dinner on for this conference tonight.  Would you like to come?  Aidan will be there.”

She giggled and sat up.  “My brother is not the selling point you think he is.  But sure.  I’ll come.  It will be interesting.”  She sat up on the edge of the bed and looked back at him and trailed her fingers through his chest hair.  “Or we could have a nice cool shower and maybe instead, we can order in some food and do that again?”

Bruce sat up and kissed her shoulder.  “It is pretty hot out there and you do  have air conditioning.”

“If you make a joke about Summer, I’ll kill you.”  Summer laughed getting up and grabbing a satin robe and throwing it to him.

She wrapped a pink robe with flowers all over it around her and headed out of the bathroom.  Bruce got up and put the robe on, watching her ass as she sashayed from the room.  He jogged after her.

“Oh, I’ve got one!”  He said laughing.  “I sure am looking forward to spending this day in Summer.”

// NEXT

A/N:  Back in the days I wrote RPF I invented an OC named Summer.  I was kind of in love with the character but I stopped being able to write her story because the muse for the context I put her in was no longer speaking to me.  I’ve wanted to bring her over to Marvel for a while but I couldn’t think of who to pair her with.  Then I had Summer as a prompt on my Bruce Banner bingo card.  Due to the fact this is Bruce paired with an OC and there’s an age gap, I’m assuming I’ll get almost no one reading it.  So I'm writing it for me.  Some of the chapters are just rewritten from her original fic changed enough to work for the older, much more reserved Bruce.  Some are half rewrite/half new.  Some are totally new.  Unlike most of my fics, I’m not going to keep to a publishing schedule because this is for me.  You might get a lot quickly and then a break while I work on other things.  You might get it regularly for a while.  I might change the days I publish it.  Please if you like it let me know.  It will encourage me to post more regularly and I’ll love you forever for loving my girl.

[wo-wann-was-wer]

WHAT I WAS THINKING: DARK SEASON 3 EDITION

EPISODE 1:

Who are these dudes with the harelip and what do they want

Why did she just take him to a cave and leave that’s kinda rude

So everything in this universe is just gonna be backwards. Love it

Ugh I’ve said this a million times but this show has such Fringe energy and I can’t wait to get a tattoo for this too

This is super freaking me out, i dont like that everyone’s in everyone else’s house.

Ooooh Katharina with glasses yes girl you better work.

I like Michael and this hat he’s rocking

Super into the fact that magnus and fransizka are involved in this universe too

There’s nothing cuter than sex before school. Ahhh the nostalgia

Ten bucks says that Hannah gets out of this bed and is pregnant

Fucking YEP

I am loving Martha in this Jonas journey

I know that all they did was flip the lens of the camera but my brain is breaking at this flipped Winden

Who the fuck is this random dude Martha is with

You know what he kind of looks like Jonas. I wonder if that's relevant or if I'm just grasping at straws

Bartosz looks like he's going to his first grade violin recital

I straight up just did not recognize Charlotte with makeup. She looks hot

There's got to be another person in that picture other than Ulrich because that's a lot of space to rip out for one person

okay hold up Woller looks so good and then when I saw that he was missing an arm I almost lost my fucking mind

Oh shit okay Hannah is living in Katharina's house.

Oh my God are Ulrich and Charlotte having an affair

Is it normal in Germany for kids to just walk into classes that aren't there’s and just sit down

follow up he has a clear noose mark on his neck

Aleksander looks so hot with this beard. universe B is the fucking glow up universe

It's weirding me out that the whole school is black and gray instead of light brown

The look of satisfaction on katharina's face

Wow honestly Louis just broke my heart with his facial expression when he realized his mom didn't know who he was

he looks so scared

Yes yes do it afffffffffair

Oh no you done got found out!!!

Oh the theme of the play here is red and set of gold

Fransizka looks so cute in this little outfit

Oh my God she's deaf!!!!

What the fuck. the fact that this actress can talk is blowing my mind

RIP to Regina a real queen

Peter's a fucking priest

All the fucking weird-ass freaky motherfucking trio is back

The dopplers have the same house That's cool

excuse me sir I think your child is broken

these guys are so creepy What the fuck

I definitely don't like the piano wire

oh this motherfucker is the one who gets lost

I feel like winden in this universe is just a little bit fancier

Well Charlotte and Ulrich just be fucking like crazy

Bartosz is the Jonas of this group and I love it

who was that??????

I cannot get over Aleksander in this beard

I like that things are opposite but they also have things that are different enough.

Like I'm so into the fact that they all went down into the bunker

who in the unholy fuck is that. who is that

Oh shit old Martha

What the fuck is this Tannhaus’ factory we're at

hold up Martha's in 1888

What the fuck. why is Jonas in 1888 and looking SO good

EPISODE 2:

casually sitting over your bed watching you sleep

he's look so good though

yo what the fuck everybody else is there too

Oh no things got really ugly at Mads’ wake

Not for nothing but Tronte is a dick

I kind of don't understand why Claudia would want Regina to live in such pain in this type of universe

Peter is such a good boy

lurking is the freaking national past time of this place

Oh shit we got some spin-off timeline stuff good

who is This is blind guy

I love Katharina so fucking much

I know what she's thinking and it's the same thing I'm thinking which is can I kill a child

why does this picture of Tronte make him look like Jimmy Smits

Katharina looks amazing in this jacket

Also I definitely did not just start yelling GO GET YOUR MAN KATHARINA

Regina just gets more and more badass as time goes on. Also all of the women of the tiedemann family are so fucking badass

I am so excited to watch this fucking relationship develop. they're both too cute

awwww he's using signs!

oh they're writing back and forth

DAMNIT PETER

I always feel like little Noah should do fuckboy sign offs when he leaves rooms because he's so smooth

yesterday Laurel said that this was back to the future but serious and just now Bartosz said it's not super easy to get nuclear fuel in 1888 and now I think that Laurel's right

I will never get over how good he looks JONAAAASSSSSSS

This guy feels like the OG inventor of sic mundus right

Katerina why are you even trying to check in at the front desk bitch Go and get your man

Is this Katarina's mom why does she just recognize that woman's name

everyone on the show is so talented.I spend the whole damn time being like oh my god the performances on the show and it's like yeah we know

Katerina get your man

I literally love them so much look at the look on her face She is a mama bear She is not going to let anybody take her man or her children and I love her

Not a huge fan of people who quote Shakespeare right before they kill other people or am I an enormous fan of people who use Shakespeare right before they kill other people

using a garotte to kill someone is ugly as fuck

I feel so bad for Jana

see this is one of the reasons why I'm like why would you bring Regina back to this world.

wowwwww TRONTE what's up dude

YO WHAT

Oh so how did Charlotte get back there but Elizabeth's still there too. didn't they switch places?

oh the head bump

Not excited for the mother daughter abuse stuff that's about to happen

I love these split sequences that they do at the end

anytime somebody stands and stairs for a lonely at a spot on the ground I assume to somebody died there

Oh shit that guy is a tannhausokkkk I see you

a religious images we love to see it.

This show is a whole series of pause that frame.

No I ruined something for myself!!!!

EPISODE 3

got to love those through and through Ariadne references

okay so Charlotte's great great grandfather has her watch?

who are these horrible traveler human beings

they look like less sexy Francis dolarhydes

I can't get over the fact that wollers missing an arm here I swear

we ARE the glitch BITCH

alternate universe Ulrich is a better person than standard Ulrich

what's this new like zoom-y thing they're doing

I was attracted to Magnus at this jump of the show but he looks better with dark hair

How did they not all die of fucking flu

eternally repeating deja vu

I looked at the production stills and I was like what the fuck is this hair do that Moritz has but he looks amazing

Also everyone on this show deserves an acting award

and Magnus is wearing a skeleton sweater

Hannah does that deep dive detective work any bitch knows the Nose doesn't lie

why doesn't anybody want to fuck wöller

omgggg eat the RICH

also he has that x tattoo on his hand that represents the no future thing

oh the light is rectangular and not circular ooooooh fancy

The show is also a lot of people catching each other's wrists as they walk away

I knew we couldn't trust this bitch

What did he give her

I love the parallels and characters behaviors between universe a and universe b

I want to know how Noah factored into all of this on this side

Martha has a type and her type is iconically Aryan

Oh Aleksander's back with that beard he's back

Hannah is such a snake

Omg that's her!!!!! I thought she was a trans actress.. hm. not super happy bout that :/

What is Helge talking about Ulrich did what??? omg

I would be like SIR DO WE NEED TO FIGHT STOP FOLLOWING ME

I stopped taking notes for the last half of that episode cuz I was really sucked in haha

EPISODE 4

FIRST OF ALL I'D LIKE TO GO ON RECORD THAT I DON'T CARE FOR THESE GENTLEMEN AT ALL

second of all why is this guy being like oh I took your name

why does he have Agnes's bracelet I don't like that

I don't like anything about this guy That's the end of the story

Also hold up a red hot second is Agnes dead cuz if so that's a hate crime

see what did I say

I knew that Hannah was going to get involved with Egon

from the second she walked in that office I was like that bitch has her eye on him and as she should he's handsome as fuck

Also he spoils her so much more than any other man she's ever been with AKA is Egon the only man she ever deserved

Is Hannah going to develop a heart cuz I'm not sure how I feel about that

Also what happens if Hannah gets pregnant

why is Ines a bitch I thought she was mad cool the beginning and now I feel fucking deceived

Also it's such a sweet gig that The kids who are playing kids can now play teenagers

poor Doris. Also he was shitty to her but he was far nicer than I would have been

Doris is so beautiful it's bullshit

older Magnus is so handsome

All I wanted was middle-aged Martha

bitch you have been having unprotected sex with him why do you think that pregnancy was not on the tabl

I'm like who's this guy in the church if it's not Noah I bet it's that little bitch

yeah I fucking knew it

Is this the dude that was married to Agnes I feel like this guy isn't real or something

I'm not surprised he let her go but I don't know why I'm not surprised. I feel like she's important to his timeline and I'm not sure why

look at these relationships forming between these sweet little bab

Hannah looks good in this red. Hannah looks good in all of these styles. 

who is this child

I like that already as a child Bernd had his eye on Claudia as someone who was smart and had a ton of potential

 I keep forgetting that I'm taking notes because I get so invested in episodes

Also I realize the zoomi thing which is going back and forth between the universes

Is Agnes Silja’s mom And if so with whom 

he gave her Agnes’ bracelet that dope All right Tronte

Wow Claudia needs to back off her man

Claudia force him into a relationship with her

I fucking hate Hannah but sometimes she speaks so much sense

ooh I don't need anyone Yes girl that's true You don't need anyone You needing people was what made you act fucking crazy You don't need anybody

This was always my big problem with Hannah was that I initially identified with her because she was such a survivor but then she did such horrible reprehensible things I just couldn't let it go and I absolutely couldn't identify with her anymore

Oh here's my daddy Noah looking so good

I mean okay so I have been in this position before where I was cheating and then my man cheated on me and I was like how dare you but also you cannot be mad if your partner cheats on you when you cheated too. You both fucked up

Is Hannah going to have a redemption arc cuz that's a lot

Oh my God she's not going to get rid of this child is she

Oh my great God I cannot believe that she gave Helene that necklace. 

I knew she was fucking connected to Katharina in the older generation I knew it

Louis and Lisa are a super cute couple and I know that they're not dating in real life but I think that they're very cute together

Oh everybody fucking

yeah they created the Apocalypse yeah

Oh no they have a child outside of worlds that's a mess How does that work so they had they gave birth to that ugly fuck

honestly I hate that he's their child for the most part just because he's ugly as fuck and neither of them are ugly as fuck so it makes me mad.

[kinetic-elaboration]

October 16: 1x19 Tomorrow Is Yesterday

Today, one of the best, most entertaining, and most fun TOS episodes.

This intro is so strange lol. If I were watching this in 1967, I’d be like “Has Star Trek been preempted by something dumb?” It’s also very short.

That is in fact the definition of a UFO--what’s less identified than the Enterprise?

I can’t wait until a space ship of people from the future shows up. It’s 2020 so anything could happen.

Captain’s Log: This is weird!

I love all the shots of the Enterprise through this ep. How clearly it’s cut and pasted against the sky, the weird and jerky way it moves.

So I was confused by the use of the term “black star”--it is in fact a black hole (Spock’s eternal nemesis lol); that term just wasn’t well known or settled on to describe that particular phenomenon in 1967.

The method of time travel reminds me of The Naked Time (wasn’t that also like snapping a rubber band?) and according to the amazon trivia, this was supposed to be The Naked Time part two--which actually would have been pretty cool.

“If Scotty’s not dead” lol. How dark.

Amazed by how efficient this ship is--they get those reports back to Spock really damn fast.

I love how Kirk is so smart and good at history that he can immediately date when they are based on the news about a moon landing. (Although actually this episode pre-dates the actual moon landing so that was just a guess as to when it would happen, which I find AMAZING tbh.)

The drama of the time travel reveal! Close up on Kirk’s face: WHAT??

Sulu’s eye makeup is great. Bones’s is too, later.

“The craft might have nuclear warheads, which would be rather inconvenient for us.”

Kirk doesn’t know his own lady’s strength. Whoops, we accidentally destroyed your ship.

Why does Christopher beam up standing? Because it would be too funny if he beamed up sitting and then immediately fell on his ass?

Kirk immediately checks him out, and then starts flirting. He is so shameless.

“I’m a Captain too! I’m from Iowa!”

“Woman?” / “Crewman” feminist exchange paired with that horn music that usually accompanies Jessica Rabbit. Well A for effort boys.

The Enterprise is one of only 12 in the fleet. Not that that’s really trustworthy since everything in S1 of TOS is seat of the pants random facts and numbers lol. This episode refers to BOTH Starfleet and UESPA--and possibly the Federation? Already can’t remember. I don’t understand any more than Captain Christopher does.

“We’re a combined service.” Combined from what?

Captain Christopher was one of the best guest characters. Love how he’s on this amazing futuristic ship and the only thing he can say about it is “you guys sure fuck up a lot.”

Spock is having tons of fun with the new Earthman like IMMEDIATELY. “I also don’t believe in little green men--by which I mean don’t call me little.”

Another ep in which Spock is referred to as a Lt. Cmdr. while pretty clearly wearing a Commander’s uniform.

“Don’t touch anything.”

“Anything else on your mind, Mr. Spock? A threesome perhaps?”

“Jim, we cannot not exist.”

“That flight suit must be uncomfortable”--so unsubtle in wanting to get him undressed. “Why don’t you slip into something a little more comfortable, Captain?”

“Signet 14 is a planet dominated by women...with a sense of humor.”

“You can’t go home now that you know what the future looks like--damn fine, I mean take a look at us.”

“We’ve no place to go!” Oh Scotty, always coming in to burst some bubbles. They should have just gone on tours everyone’s home towns for fun.

And now Captain Christopher tries to escape. Exactly what Kirk would do in his situation. And yet Kirk is perplexed: “I sent him to his room--and he’s not in his room!”

Bones is so convinced that they have to leave and get back to their own time because they can’t have 435 people just wandering around 20th century Earth changing the timelines and that’s legit--but I think they could have stuck him in 1960s Georgia and he’d do fine. Except for the racism.

“Now you’re sounding like Spock.” Jim! How dare!!

“Could he be reeducated to forget his family” sounds VERY suspicious out of context. Or, really, in context.

Bones identifying that Spock is joking is hilarious and sweet. He pretends he doesn’t know him, but he does.

Kirk’s face when Spock is talking about Christopher Jr. is so MUCH--he looks like he could try.

I love the colors of this episode. I would buy a color tv for this for sure.

“Our tractor beam caught and crushed an Air Force plane.” Well that’s not good. Hard to explain that one.

Sulu gets to go on a one-on-one away mission with the Captain! And he’s obviously having a grand time.

“Look at this cool bulletin board!”

“Look at this primitive computer!” Which Kirk can identify because he likes going to museums because he’s a NERD I rest my case.

I feel like Spock is super alien today. Just giving off a lot of alien vibes. “I am working on my calculations.”

This episode is so hilarious; I love it. This guy’s reactions to Kirk and Sulu and their communicator, and their reactions to him and the whole situation. It’s really pretty cure comedy without much bearing on the plot--just for fun.

“I don’t hear anything.” I mean--you’re officers?? That’s the best you can do?

“Hmmm, you’re not Jim.” “We seem to have another problem.” “An unfortunate accident.” Bones taking the gun and probably keeping it. The absolutely on point score. “Our guest seems quite satisfied to remain where he is.”

Also “A subplot of this episode is that Kirk and Sulu steal government documents from an Air Force base” sounds very fake, but it’s completely true and accurate.

Kirk just straight up LAUNCHING himself at those guys. The ONLY valid fight scenes are in Star Trek TOS and it’s all because of Kirk and his highly choreographed fight moves.

“Three against one? Why don’t you get two more guys and make it a fair fight.”

But then as soon as he’s caught he turns on the charm.

Spock: “Poor photography.” He never knows the right thing to say, does he?

And now the obligatory moment when Bones accuses Spock of not caring about Jim even though he of all people should know better.

This interrogation scene is also hilarious and one of my favorites. How he doesn’t say his middle name is Tiberius. Wincing when they throw the weapon around. “I’m a little green man from Alpha Centuri.” “This little thing? Just something I slipped on.” “Two hundred years? That oughtta be just about right.”

Tbh sometimes I do feel better about the AOS!Kirk characterization because of scenes like this. Like, you could see that mid-20s Kirk turning into this mid-30s Kirk; the sense of humor is similar.

This man in the beret is having a fun time. I think he’d like to stay here. Also, I find the food replicators in the transporter room really random but I guess that was a budget issue.

This is such a good-natured episode. Everyone’s so friendly, so forgiving of light moments of back-stabbery, so generally good-hearted.

You’ve seen the Vulcan nerve pinch, now get ready for the Sulu shoulder chop! And then the Vulcan nerve pinch! And then the  Kirk very-fake-looking punch in the face!

Spock so obviously wants to kiss it better. The camera is away from them for so long, it’s possible there was a lot of hand fondling going on.

And then everything about the rest of the scene--how Spock somehow leaves by one door and comes in by another to get behind Christopher; how he lurks out of focus in the background; the random shots of Sulu’s face; all the opportunities for Kirk to look Fond.

Aw, poor Christopher. Didn’t get into NASA but he still gets to go to space. I wonder if a part of him did remember all this and that’s how he inspired his son to work on the Saturn probe.

Also there is no way for DC Fontana or anyone else to know this but there was a Saturn probe launched in 2004, which is approximately the right timeline to match this ep--if Christopher’s son was born in 1970, he would have been in his mid-30s in 2004.

“You only have 15 years, so you better hurry”--Kirk, hurrying to get his last flirty comment in.

More shaky ship and more people throwing themselves around the set. Never gets old.

Christopher sure learned the ship fast. He’s already pushing buttons to talk to the bridge. Maybe NASA made a mistake.

Scotty is a genius lol--they were SUPER precise in getting both of those guys back to the exact right moment in time.

“Mr. Scott is still with us”--again!

Uhura really likes the lady computer voice.

“The Enterprise is home!”

Amazing ep, as expected. I don’t have deep commentary on it because it wasn’t a deep episode, but it was a rollicking fun time. Next up is Court Martial, primarily memorable for the introduction of Kirk’s ex-girlfriend, The Lawyer.

[nikkzwrites]

Yesterday Once More | Dark Fix-It Fic Series | Chapter 3

A/N: This fic is one that I started with my OC because honestly, I personally didn’t like how season 3 ended. So I am rewriting all of Dark with my OC Annalise Dahlheim. I hope you all like it. Some things will be expanded more on just for more depth to Dark that season 3 kinda skipped over so…. yeah.

CW: Canon Typical Triggers: Smoking, Sex, Language, Drugs, Drinking, Death, Violence, Suicide Mentions, Cutting, Violence.

Word Count:  4.9k

[First Chapter] [Previous Chapter] [Next Chapter]

Jana laid on the couch watching a commercial for Mads’s favorite candy bar called Raider. 

Mikkel blinked and decided to walk into the home. There must have been some mistake. This was just Martha and Magnus playing a joke on him with their friends and his family would be there waiting for him to give him a giant hug. Martha would be there apologizing for never paying attention to him. His brother would be there never letting him go. Katharina would be making his favorite sweets while she tended to his wounds. Ulrich finally getting him that magic set he was eyeing for a while...And Annalise would be there smiling and crying thanking everything that he was back home safe pressing her forehead against his.

When he walked in, he was welcomed to no such sight. He walked into the dining and living room and called, “Mom”

Jana looked up from the couch and responded, “Mads?” She desperately looked at the boy before her.

Mikkel shifted uncomfortably, “Who are you? Where are my parents?” He felt so confused. This was his house. Why wasn’t everything making sense?

Pitifully, Jana moved from around the couch and knelt to study the boy standing in her dining room.

“Who are you,” Mikkel repeated.

Jana held onto the boy and asked, “Do you know where he is?” Mikkel tried to pull away from the woman but she held onto the only thing that may be a clue to her own son having gone missing. “Do you know where Mads is?” she clarified for him.

“You’re hurting me,” Mads protested. He kept trying to get away but Jana’s grip was one of a mother still clinging to the hope of finding her child.

“Want are you doing here,” Jana pleaded, “Say something.” She finally allowed the strange boy to go. She fell back to sob to herself not fully believing any of this was real. Mikkel backed himself into the hallway and bolted to the front door to getaway. Jana bawled, “When is he coming back?” She lowered herself into a ball on the floor to cry.

Ines walked into her work. The sounds of her shoes echoed throughout the white hallways. Her uniform was neat and orderly as always. She paced down the hall before a coworker commented, “Ines, can you do the night shift today too? Mrs. Schuttler’s daughter has a fever and I have to take Benni to soccer. Since you have no…”

Ines stopped and turned. She interrupted the lady to confirm, “No family.”

Her coworker sighed and tilted her head, “That’s not what I meant.”

Ines laughed to ease the tension and commented, “It’s not a problem.”

“Thanks. And please, don’t tell Dr. Reimann?” The lady called to her coworker’s leaving form.

Ines stopped and turned once more to pantomime locking her mouth with a key and putting it into her pocket. “Mum’s the word,” she whispered with a small giggle. Her heart remembering the young boy who had taught her to do that. She wondered what he could be doing and where he could be. It had been at least thirty four years since she had last seen him.

“Thanks.”

Ines continued down the hall once more.

Egon sat in his office listening to the radio berate him about Mads’s disappearance. He sat disheveled at his desk staring at all of the mess around him. His phone started to ring. He sighed then answered the phone, “Tiedemann.” He sat and listened before he asked, “Where?” He continued to wait then responded, “I’m on my way.”

Claudia used her rearview mirror to put on her signature red lipstick. “In times like these...One must face one’s own fears.” She quoted to herself, “Because the future…” She looked down at her speech, “the future belongs to the bold. Not to the doubters, those forever stuck in the past.” She looked at her daughter with frizzy hair in the back. She shook her head and criticized, “Would you take a look at yourself? You can’t go to school like this.” Regina sat in the back of her mom’s car just looking out the window to the forest. Claudia continued, “Sometimes I think you have no idea what it is I do. Food, clothes, fencing classes. Who pays for all of that? And you can’t even bother combing your hair.” Claudia shook her head again. “Look at yourself. You look like a limp dishrag.” Fed up with her daughter’s silence she called back, “Hey, Regina, I’m talking to you. This is a huge deal for me, and I won’t let you spoil it. The board’s decision to entrust this post to a woman for the first time...”

Regina just stared out the window wishing she was already at school.

Mikkel walked to the high school hoping to find his mother, his siblings, or Annalise. He looked around. Everyone seemed to be dressed oddly. 

Katharina leaned against the lockers as she handed her friend a tape, “It’s awesome.” She commented then asked, “Know what the song’s about?”

“No,” her friend answered.

“A man who kidnaps a girl and takes her to the forest, just because she’s wearing red lipstick. In the end, he kills her,” The blonde explained.

Hannah raised her brow but stayed silent as their other friend responded, “That’s heavy.”

“My dad says lipstick is only for prostitutes,” Hannah, then, explained, “Anyway, I like Nino D’Angelo way more than Falco.”

Katharina shook her head, “Hannah, you’re as square as they come.”

Hannah smiled awkwardly.

Their friend scolded, “Come on Katharina. Don’t be so nasty.”

Mikkel slowly made his way to the small group of familiar seeming girls. He stared at them awkwardly.

“What are you looking at,” Katharina addressed the boy, “Weren’t you at Ulrich’s place earlier?”

Hannah looked at him and asked gently, “Are you new here?”

Mikkel shook his head quickly. “I..” he started, “I’m looking for my mom.”

Katharina smiled cockily at the boy, “This isn’t kindergarten.”

“She’s the principal here,” Mikkel defended himself.

Katharina’s eyes widened as she asked, “Mr. Hubert?” Hannah laughed as the blonde continued, “he may be a fag, but he’s certainly not a woman.”

Mikkel looked down at the floor then back up at the girl, “Isn’t this Winden?”

Katharina scoffed at him then started to make her way to class. As she passed him, she asked, “Aren’t you a bit young to drop acid?”

Hannah deflected the conversation to ask, “You guys got history now?”

Mikkel stood and watched them leave annoyed. He had no idea what was going on.

Claudia pulled up to the nuclear power plant. She opened her door but stayed sitting in her car to put on her high heeled shoes.

Helge looked up from sweeping the street of paint. He smiled seeing Claudia. He greeted her, “Morning, Claudia.” He had always admired her even as a child.

“Morning,” Claudia tried to rush past him, but when she saw his sweet face she stopped to talk to him. He was just the same as the little boy she used to tutor.

“Your first day as boss,” He happily commented.

Claudia nodded and reaffirmed, “Yes.”

Helge lightly chuckled and swayed with his broom, “My dad told me the board voted unanimously for you.” He sighed and shrugged before continuing, “I wanted… Congratulations.”

Claudia smiled and nodded, “Thanks.”

“I always knew something would become of you,” Helge continued.

“Oh, Helge.” She nervously laughed. He was doing his weird Helge thing again, she thought to herself.

Helge, then, said as he stopped her from leaving. “And I have…” He paused to pull out a nicely wrapped gift, “A present for you.” He smiled proudly at her. Claudia looked down anxiously. The man then explained, “It’s a book.”

Claudia didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t expecting this at all even if it shouldn’t have surprised her that the man would go to such lengths. She just looked up and thanked him for it before looking back down at it. The stood awkwardly for a moment. Helge stared at her expectantly. Claudia smiled again, “Well, I’m running late. I have to get going.”

Helge let the woman pass finally and called after her, “We’re all behind you, Cl..”Helge stopped himself shaking his head knowing that Claudia didn’t much care. The wet rustles of the broom against the pavement started up once more as he tried to remove the painted graffiti of ‘No Future’ from in front of the plant’s gate.

“I came just before six t feed the animals and found this,” the farmer explained to Egon as the men stood in a field surrounded by a flock of unexplainable dead sheep.

Egon asked, “Maybe a wolf?”

The farmer looked up at the chief of police as if he was stupid, “No bite marks. Nothing.”

Perplexed, Egon looked around the field of sheep corpses around him, “Poisoned?” He asked with a shrug.

The man let out a small instinctual shrug and commented, “Yesterday they were lively as can be. First the thing with the boy, and now this. Such things didn’t use to happen here. Who would just kill 33 sheep? ‘Be on guard. Be alert. You do not know when that time will come.’ The Gospel of Mark, 13:33.”

Egon nodded then shook his head, “Didn’t know you were a churchgoer.”

The farmer nodded, “The parish has a new priest. A good man.”

Egon stared at the man for a second then sighed looking down towards one of the sheep. The autumn trees behind them bare and the bright green grass being early the only color in the dreary field.

Claudia stormed into the large building trying to get to her office. 

“Mrs. Tiedemann,” Her mousy secretary called to the woman boss as she rushed to catch up, “Mrs. Tiedemann. Tronte Nielsen from the paper is here, for the interview.” She smiled as Claudia looked back at her. She handed the other lady a binder, “and here are the figures from 1986 and 1985, as you requested.” The secretary watched as Claudia opened it up to examine the information. “They weren’t easy to get a hold of,” The woman admitted proud of her own hard work. When Claudia basically ignored her, she spoke up once more, “And congratulations again. I still can’t believe we have a woman as boss.” The woman cheerfully beamed.

“Are you sure these are the right figures,” Claudia asked concerned with what she was looking at.

Her secretary confirmed with a simple, “Yes.”

Claudia slowly closed the binder and nodded to her secretary to let her know she did a good job and that she could leave her. Once the other lady left confused, Claudia went back to investigate the numbers.

Egon sat in his office typing up his report. He still seemed to be learning how to use the modern typewriter. There was a small shuffle that came from the entrance to his office. Egon looked up to see a small boy in a dirty red puffy jacket over a skeleton costume. He looked at the dazed boy and asked, “What are you doing here?”

Mikkel looked at the man. He blinked several times. Today was just getting weirder and weirder for him. “I…” He stumbled over his words until he got his footing, “I’m looking for my dad.”

Egon smiled gently. He finally felt as if he could have a win in these dark times. His heart leaped happily at the thought of being able to help this boy. He asked, “What’s his name?”

Mikkel took a breath and replied, “Ulrich Nielsen.”

Egon’s brow furrowed. “Ulrich Nielsen?” he asked, “The Ulrich Nielsen?”

Concerned, Mikkel asked, “Doesn’t he work here?”

“No,” Egon replied, “And I’m certain he never will.” He looked at his report then back at Mikkel in disbelief, “Oh, so this is a joke? Was this Ulrich’s dumb idea?” He walked over to the boy and examined his scraped up face, “Did he do this?” Egon would be surprised if the teen would have beaten up a kid to make him go along with a stupid prank. He asked again, “Did Ulrich do this?”

Mikkel shook his head quickly at the officer. He stared up worried. The realization started to hit him that this wasn’t just a joke.

Egon stood up straight once more and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Mikkel,” the small boy choked out.

“Last name,” Egon asked with a shrug.

“Nielsen,” Mikkel anwsered honestly, “I am Ulrich’s son.”

Egon sighed and then asked, “Now tell me your parents’ real names and I’ll take you home.”

Mikkel shook his head and then asked, “What’s the date?”

“The 5th of November,” Egon replied with a shrug.

Mikkel, then, asked, “What year?”

Egon laughed figuring the boy had a sense of humor. He shook his head as he chuckled, “1986.”

Mikkel took a step back. Everything was fully hitting him now. He repeated back the year to Egon. He, then, watched as Egon went to the phone to make a call. He listened as the man described him over the phone and asked for someone to come pick him up.

After hanging up, Egon picked up his coat and explained to the child, “Someone will be coming to pick you up and take care of that.” He motioned to Mikkel’s injuries before continuing, “In the meantime, I’ll take care of Ulrich.” He walked past the boy and vowed, “He won’t hurt you again. I promise.” The man then closed the door behind him leaving Mikkel to sit and wait.

Mikkel walked over to Egon’s desk and started to play with the Rubik’s cube. As soon as he solved it, he gently placed it down so that he could try calling his house. Sadly, he only got the robotic voice telling him that the number was not in service. Mikkel shook as he held back tears. The boy sat back down and tried to look around to find anything else to do. He found a lighter on the desk. He slowly pocketed it after checking if it still worked. Mikkel, then, spied a report on Egon’s desk about his Uncle Mads. He looked at it still processing that he was trapped in 1986. He looked at a picture of Ulrich and Mads that was near the exact one in his house. Hearing someone coming, Mikkel panicked and placed everything back before jogging to the front of the desk.

Ines carefully walked into the room and greeted the boy. She walked a bit closer then explained, “I’m Nurse Ines. But you can just call me Ines.” Mikkel stayed quiet as he stared at the woman. She slowly approached him and knelt down to be eye to eye with him, “I’ll take you to the hospital now. We’ll take a look at your arm, okay? Then I will bring you home safe and sound.” She smiled gently and held out a hand.

Meanwhile, Egon pulled up to the Nielsen’s. He tried the doorbell then knocking. When he got no answer, he slowly made his way inside the house. Rock music blared upstairs from inside the teenaged Ulrich’s room. Ulrich sat in his trashed room playing an old plug and play game when Egon walked in. Egon looked at the turntable and carefully removed the needle to get the boy’s attention.

Ulrich sneered. His eyes looked him up and down before asking, “What are you doing here?” He stood up from his chair.

Egon placed his hands in his pockets and quoted the song in English, “‘My only aim is to take many lives. The more the better I feel.’ Why do you listen to such stuff?” He walked closer to Ulrich, “The boy you sent, do you think that’s funny?”

Confused, Ulrich shrugged, “What boy?”

“Don’t think you’ll get away with this,” Egon threatened.

Ulrich leaned over to sniff the man. He pulled away and commented, “Have you been drinking again?”

Insulted, Egon asked, “Beg your pardon?”

Ulrich repeated, “I asked if you’ve been drinking again?”

“Who do you think you are,” Egon asked growing angry, “I want us to find your brother just as badly as you do.”

Ulrich stood his ground and watched as Egon turned to leave. 

Egon, then, had something catch his eye. He picked it up. There he held a sheep’s hoof in his hand. He turned and showed it to Ulrich, “What’s this?”

Growing annoyed, Ulrich responded, “A hoof. That’s obvious.”

Egon grabbed the shirt of the boy and pulled him closer, “Did you do that on the pasture?”

“What pasture,” Ulrich questioned.

“Did you kill the sheep?”

Ulrich started to raise his voice, “If you’d stop drinking your brain to mush, then Mads might be back by now.”

Jana walked in hearing her elder son had raised his voice. She stood in the doorway with her hands crossed over her chest. She looked at the man surprised and asked, “Mr. Teidemann?”

Egon let go of the teenager and slowly turned. Ulrich snatched the hoof back from the man. Egon tried to explain, “The door was open.”

Jana nodded, “Because of Mads. He forgot his key.”

Just to stir the pot, Ulrich lied, “Chief Inspector Tiedemann wants to update you on the investigation. They’ve got new findings. Hm?” Ulrich, then, sneered, “Exactly. You have nothing. Now kindly piss off!” The boy put away his hoof and turned his music back on before sitting back to continue his game.

Egon carefully moved past Jana and walked downstairs to see himself out. Jana just stared at her older son grateful that she still at least had Ulrich.

At the hospital, the doctor checked Mikkel’s vitals. Ines stood in the corner as the doctor took a look at the boy’s arm. “Everything’s in working order,” He commented. He then asked the boy, “How did this happen?”

Mikkel remained silent in mourning his old life.

“And you still won’t tell us your name,” The doctor asked the boy. A ring of a pager filled the room. The doctor looked down at it then told the boy, “Nurse Ines will bandage you up, okay? Then you can go back home.” He pet the boy’s head to try and comfort him before leaving.

Ines stared down at the empty name and general patient information on the intake report. Her heart ached. She looked back up at the boy and slowly sat in front of him. Mikkel just couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears started to fall from his eyes. He was never going to be able to have his life back. Ines’s heart wrenched. She caressed the boy’s face and comforted, “Don’t cry. Everything will be okay.” She forced a small smile at him.

Claudia knocked on the door of the old director’s office. “Brend,” she called to him after opening the door, “I have to talk to you.” She walked into the office and closed the door behind her. She stormed to the retired man’s desk and slammed the binder she was carrying down. “Were you trying to slip this past me,” she accused. She angrily explained, “I said I need to know if there are skeletons in the closet.”

Bernd sighed, “There are things that are worth knowing and things worth not knowing because you can’t change them anyway.”

“What is this,” Claudia motioned with her hand. She opened up the report, “These are nothing like the reported figures. Here.” She looked up and nodded at him, “And here.” She looked up angrily again, “Everywhere. It’s been like that for three months now!” She motioned for him to speak to defend himself.

The man asked, “Do you know what has changed since Chernobyl? People have lost faith. In us, in nuclear power. They saw the images and they can’t get them out of their heads. But fear is the worst enemy of progress.”

Breathing hard, Claudia tried to piece together what he was trying to say. She shook her head, “So?”

“How many people around here rely on the plant for their livelihood,” Bernd counterpointed.

Claudia swallowed realizing now what he was saying. “We have 612 employees, excluding…”

“Everyone!” Bernd corrected the woman, “And when you take over this job tomorrow, you’ll be taking on responsibility for the nuclear power plant, but you’ll also be taking responsibility for the entire town. And now tell me, was I wrong about you?” 

Claudia sighed. She crossed her arms across her chest then stated, “All the more reason for me to know just what this means.

Egon stood in the morgue with the examiner who was opening up one of the sheep’s heads. The examiner droned on about how exciting and historical it was for Claudia to be taking over the plant. He tried to just focus back on the case, “So were they poisoned?”

“Hardly,” the examiner chuckled, “All signs point to sudden cardiac arrest.”

“Cardiac arrest,” Egon asked surprised.

“Yes.”

“All 33?”

The examiner explained, “It’s common with sheep. They’re very sensitive creatures. If a few start to panic, the entire herd freaks out. It’s a vicious cycle. They just drop dead. Like flies.”

Egon, then, asked, “And what could cause such a panic?”

“All kinds of things,” the other man educated the officer.

“A person,” Egon asked surprised.

The medical examiner asked, “A single person?” He replied back, “Unless he’s Freddy Krueger, he’d have his work cut out for him.”

Egon, still focused on Ulrich, asked, “Did one of the sheep…” He stopped and rephrased his question, “I mean, was one of them missing a hoof?”

The medical examiner shook his head, “No. They are all as God created them.”

The men had a bit of an exchange about if this could be Satanists when the examiner found something. His brow pushed together, “Strange.” He motioned for Egon to come to see, “Look here.” The medical examiner pointed to its eardrum, “The eardrums are ruptured. On both sides. Strange.”

Claudia rolled Bernd into the woods to a place that he instructed. The man held out a yellow key to her and said, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” He then handed her a flashlight.

Claudia opened up the gate that enclosed a natural cave system. She repelled down into it. Leaves rustled out of the way and screamed as her heels punctured them. She turned on the flashlight and tried to look around.

Ines wrapped Mikkel’s hand and asked, “Won’t you tell me your name and where you live?” Mikkel stayed quiet so she asked, “Don’t you want to go home? If something happened at home… You can stay here for now.” 

Mikkel refused to look at her. He was just trying to focus on not crying. Magnus and Martha would have made fun of him for crying. What was it that Annalise used to do that would stop him from crying? Agony struck him while he started to realize he was starting to forget little things. Or was it that he never actually fully appreciated them so he never paid full attention in the first place. He longed for Katharina’s arms to wrap around him. 

Ines finished her work and told the boy, “If you want to talk, I’m here.” She held his hands in hers and gently rubbed his wrists with her thumbs, “I’m on the night shift too.” Seeing the boy not letting up from the ground he stood on, she placed some comics down on the bed for him and explained, “Here, something to read.”

“I’ve come from the future,” Mikkel explained as she walked away.

Surprised, Ines turned and asked, “What did you say?”

Mikkel turned to look at her and repeated, “I come from the future.”

Ines started to fill with fear. Her eyes darted down to the comics she had placed on the bed seeing that they were called, ‘Captain Future.’ She started to sigh thinking that the boy was just familiar with the comics and not actually telling her the absolute truth that he actually came from the year 2019.

Claudia made her way through the dark caves. She kept walking until she found it. Copious amounts of yellow barrels labeled as toxic. Right there, under the city.

Regina walked into her house and dropped her bag down in the hall. She removed her jacket and called her for her mom. When Claudia didn’t respond, Regina walked to the answering machine and listened to the message of her mother telling her just to heat up a pizza. She sighed as she stared at herself in the mirror and lifted the sleeve of her blue sweater to reveal her self inflicted scars. She sniffled as she tried to pull herself together.

Egon pulled up to the pasture to try and investigate more about the sheep incident. He walked around with his flashlight.

A large mechanical boom resonated inside of Winden.

Egon looked towards the noise only to have a bird drop dead right next to him. His light started to flicker as more birds dropped from the sky attacking him and the earth below with their corpses.

Lights all around Winden started to flicker. Everyone started to panic.

Mikkel used this as his opportunity to try and sneak out so that he could get back home. He pulled the curtain and climbed out the large window just as Magnus had once taught him to do.

Ulrich sat at the bus stop. He looked out into the forest as he smoked. He started to come out here more and more hoping that one day he would spot Mads and be able to bring his brother home. The smooth sounds of a bike chain pulled him out of his wandering mind. He smiled and called to the younger girl riding it, “Hey, Hannah!”

Hannah smiled and rode to meet up with Ulrich at the stop, “Hey Ulrich.” She parked her bike and sat down next to her crush. They sat in silence just enjoying each other’s presence for a second. Hannah spoke up and asked the boy, “Is this the Apocalypse?”

Ulrich hummed and then commented, “A bit disappointing.”

“I imagined it being louder,” Hannah affirmed with Ulrich, “More glaring.”

Mikkel ran through the trees making his way to the caves. Desperate to make it back home into the loving arms of his family. He bolted to the cave in which he came to this world then stopped to take a breath. He took out his stolen lighter and started his way into the caves hoping to find his way home.

“If the world ended today and the world started anew, what would you wish for,” Hannah asked Ulrich.

“Easy,” the teenager replied, “A world without Winden.” The boy watched as the lights flickered in the bus stop.

Hannah paused and thought for a second before proposing a cheer, “To a world without Winden.”

“To a world without Winden,” Ulrich agreed. He took one last puff of his cigarette before tossing it away onto the street. Just then the flickering stopped. Everything seemed to have gone back to normal.

Hannah smiled, “I don’t think Winden is going to give up that easily.”

Ulrich chuckled back and shrugged, “Well, maybe next time.”

Little did Winden realize all of this mirrored the exact feelings all of the town would be feeling 33 years from now. This feeling of hopelessness, confusion, hurt. Claudia slowly opened Helge’s present to reveal a book titled, ‘A Journey Through Time’ by H.G. Tannhaus. Regina looked at her body unsatisfied and selfconsciously. Charlotte still investigating what was making all of these birds die in such a strange fashion. Tronte still coming home late to a disappointed and worried Jana. Ulrich still mourning the loss of a little boy he held so dear to him.

Ulrich, sick of this feeling, drove down to the caves with a crowbar. He crossed the police line and stormed inside trying to find his son.

Mikkel, 33 years in the past, climbed his way through the caves only to get take a slid. His body slid down the rocky floor and only stopped when his leg hit a hard rock at the bottom injuring it.

Ulrich, in 2019, walked up to the metal locked door with his flashlight. He placed his light down so that he could have light as he worked and approached the door. He shoved his crowbar into the door.

In 1986, Mikkel heard the noise coming from all around him. He looked down at his bloody injured leg. He winced and grit his teeth through the pain. He just wanted to make it move again so he could go back to trying to make it home. Hearing the banging noise again, he called to it, “Hello?!” His voice was raspy and desperate, “HELLO? Help!”

Ulrich turned hearing the ghostly echoed voice of his son calling for help. Ulrich stopped banging on the metal door and asked, “Hello?” He repeated himself in a whispered tone, “Hello? Anyone there?” He started to pant and repeated his son’s name in the hope that he would hear him, “Mikkel? Mikkel?”

Mikkel pushed his way up and limped over to his still lit Zippo lighter.

Both ended up struggling out of the cave alone and sitting right at its cursed entrance in torment. Both wishing they were with the other as a lone Tannhaus worked in his office on a new invention. 

[artyrogue]

Blind Date Gaming: Konami GB Collection Vol. 3

Boy, I am WIPED after my date last night. It all started out as it usually does -- a quick visit to PRANG for an introduction to my next potential video game suitor. Who could have guessed that I would served up 4 dates! They all came together at once under the guise of Konami GB Collection Vol. 3.

I was greeted at first by an anime schoolgirl with a huge hand and quite possibly a contender for the weirdest hairstyles I've seen in a while. What is that, a grass-inspired mohawk laid over top a normal haircut?

Is this what the cows that make cowlicks eat?

What happened next was an eventful set of speed dates. This onslaught left me with no down time, thus the exhaustion. However, I did end up meeting some nice games. I'll speed through them each quick-like to keep this from being overly long. Luckily each of the games are pretty short (as expected from Game Boy games)!

First up is Gradius II! Now, I've never actually played a Gradius game, so I can't say if this is a port, some reconfigured version of Gradius II, or what. What I CAN say is that it has tight controls, beautiful graphics, interesting bosses, and some fun gameplay.

Looks like a rocky magic 8 ball

You start off hangin' out with what I assume are your dad and mom starships. Aww, family time! Soon, however, someone decks your old man and blasts your momma fulla lasers. Obviously disturbed, you fly forward and get chased by the perpetrator through a buncha rocks until you escape.

Good thing this guy doesn't feel like firing at me for whatever reason

...Except you kind of don't? You end up going through a bunch of planetary landscapes, shootin' dudes and grabbin' powerups that let you fire lasers and stuff. Pew pew! You eventually get captured, break out, and summarily fly through a ship, an asteroid belt, and I think some alien's guts? I'm not sure; I never went to med school for interplanetary digestive systems. Bosses fight you at every turn, and they are so sweet. Like, I don't always know what I'm attacking, but it just looks so cool that I really don't care!

Ever want to fight a kneeling, fanged alien stuck in a wall with detachable mouthy-brains? Yeah, well now you do, obviously!

In the end you find the enemy ship that assassinated your nuclear family with nuclear weapons, commit your own brand of galactic revenge, and I assume go on with your day in a half-arsed way, never addressing the journey you just went through for fear of sparking up some majorly weird PTSD.

Next up is some Castlevania game! It claims to be Castlevania II, but don't think it's Simon's Quest since it doesn't have slow-scrolling text boxes telling me that night is a poor time to explore the world when suffering from a magical adversary's angry sentiments. Instead, you just go about whippin' junk. Alright, I can be a lion tamer for the undead.

Why do cultists always gotta wear hoods? Can't they wear like a polo and some comfy slacks?

So in this installment, you can apparently shoot fireballs from a fully-upgraded whip, so it's instantly MUCH easier than most Castelvania games. The list of enemies is kind of lacking, but it was enough to feel competent. The level design was pretty spot-on, which is par for the course, though for some reason this game has a love affair with ropes? They're EVERYWHERE, but there's enough variation in the levels to give them pass. For example, some areas have auto-directional-pulling ropes, some ropes are spider webs made by enemies, some require quick sliding to avoid obstacles, etc.

You gotta wonder, does the guy living here have to go through all these traps every day just to get his mail? And how does he carry groceries back to his (probably rope-decorated) kitchen?

The boss fights were definitely memorable. Some of their designs were flat-out brilliant, and they were all pretty fun! Your sub-weapons weren't really that useful here, but that's fine. The bosses, too, were made a little easier with the projectile whip, but the designers struck a good balance between fun and hard.

These guys shoot out vertebrae in an arc, transferring them from one head to the other. I don't have a quip here, it was just a stupidly awesome designed boss that I wanted to gush about for a bit!

Well, perhaps I spoke too soon. The bosses were all fun except for the last 3 in the game. Allow me to whine and complain about them for a bit, if you will! The first was a tunneling snake on a forced scrolling screen that made you take damage unless you memorized where he was going to surface next (I HATE memorization-by-death gameplay). The next was a fellow Belmont who would relentlessly whip the crap outta you, throw swords all over the screen, and would probably be nigh impossible if I didn't have Holy Water. The final was Dracula, who I suppose gets a pass for being hard since he was the final boss...but he, too, was pretty much a memorization-by-death fight, too. The dude has 6 orbs revolving around him that spread out, essentially making 85% of the screen unsafe. Unless you know the specific spot to crouch down for the given position he's in, you get hurt, and you get hurt pretty badly. Oh, and you can really only hit him once per attack, so you'd better learn the safe spots for all 8 of his attack spots and hope you can hurt him and get into your safe position before taking damage.

ouch ouch ouch OUCH

In the end, it was overall a pretty fun time. Konami definitely knows how to make a good sidescrolling action game, which is probably why they're half of the name of the 'Metroidvania' genre. Go team Belmont!

Next up: Yie Ar Kung~Fu! What is this? I've never heard of it. It's a simple fighting game where you face off against 5 fighters, each with their own weapons and special moves. You play as a normal weaponless guy who can only kick and punch, because that's fair? Regardless, you must persevere through 4 rounds of these 5 fights, each time with your foes getting slightly harder.

Mmyep, this is fair.

My trademark fighting game strategy of sweeping seems to work for the most part, though as the difficulty ramps up, the other fighters move with ridiculous speed between attacks. Eventually, the game just becomes 100% about approaching a foe with more range than you, which obviously is the main focus of fighting games. What's that? Combos? Pffft, those are lame, just have the enemies fly across the ring like a sugar-high Jack Russel Terrier.

So this guy's power is to propel himself like a missile and look like an absolute goon while doing so

There's also a mini-game where you hit things thrown at you, but like they show up so quickly and your animation speed is so slow that it's impossible to do very well. It was an okay game overall, though, but I can sort of see why it isn't as well-known as Gradius or Castlevania.

Last game: Antarctic Adventure! It's a penguin-based racing game! I think? Does this count as a racing game? Well, you race against the clock, so sure. You gotta move at top speed through an icy wasteland, avoiding sea lions and holes in the ice.

I like how this sea lion looks after getting plastered in the face by a penguin moving at ~120 km/hr. Is he in shock? Is he alive? Should I notify his next of kin?

The lore is actually pretty deep in this game. The world has fallen into ruin due to global warming, and the glacier sheets on Antarctica are slowly melting away. As a penguin trained in espionage and terrorism, you must travel to the different embassies that many countries have propped up in an attempt to stake a claim in possibly the only livable area in the near future.

The french are planning to build replicas of their famous landmarks here, like the Ice-full Tower and Arctic de Triomphe.

You're not exactly racing as much as you are keeping ahead of the authorities pursuing you for planting bombs in the embassies. If you successfully plant your payloads in all of the embassies across all of Antarctica, you destroy their chances of bringing cultural imperialism to the local wildlife. Your customs are at stake! You must cast your empathy aside for the greater good of penguin-kind!

Also, you can sometimes turn into a helicopter? Not sure what that was about.

Okay, okay, yeah, I may have embellished a bit there. No, it's not as cool as that. You just run from one place to the next and heck if I'll ever find out why miscellaneous countries happen to have little castles in a barren arctic wasteland. People's taxes at work, I guess!

Oh right, there's also a fifth option on the main menu. It's Ms. O.C. Anime Girl explaining things about the games to you. I can't read anything she's saying, though, so I can only imagine the shady koala statue in the back has some relevance to her dialogue.

So that ends an exhausting series of dates. Whew! Glad you toughed it out with me. As I've completed all of the games this time, I didn't think another date was warranted. However, Gradius and Castlevania were fun enough to say that sure, I guess, it's worth going on another date in the future. Maybe it'd be better to find the original games, though, instead of this particular port. I can only assume the extra screen real estate, better sound effects, and greater ROM size would only enhance their experiences. And speaking of experiences, grab a Sprite of Passage from the jar over there on your way out! It's mint-flavored and can double as a water purification tab if you're ever stuck somewhere in the wilderness!

Man, I would kill to watch a skeleton ballet

[lovelyirony]

You said to remind you to write something with Vanilla Twilight and Tony

Tony was never much of a child for the science side of space. He didn’t get over the moon excited learning about black holes and interesting facts about planets, but what he did love was Anna’s explanation of the stars and the moons and everything. She told him every story she could, some even made up ones. 

She told him during the silent nights, when the only thing that broke the sanctity of it all was nightmares, was that the stars were there for every happy thought you had. Every happy one you had? Another star added up. Tony would try to think happy thoughts, and Anna laughed as he said he was trying to make another constellation, one that isn’t as lame as Cygnus. 

“You will one day,” she says. 

She tells him about how when she was younger, she wanted to live in the stars. Anna touches her arms lightly, remembering something that Tony would never hear from her. He tells her that he thinks they should remake the constellations with their own stories. 

They make one involving Anna and Tony having a picnic. She laughs silently as they look up. He orders a telescope so they can look at the planets to truly decide what name they should have. (The only one they don’t change is Jupiter, but that’s because Tony doesn’t like that one.) 

He looks up to the sky and thinks of Anna always. The way her hair barrettes would be decorated in stars. She had a small picture of when Hedy Lamarr was in that movie, the one with her fancy gown. 

“She was the best in that movie,” Anna says. “Edwin was fond of Judy Garland, but that’s okay. He’s allowed to have a less refined palette sometimes.” 

“I heard that,” Jarvis calls from the kitchen. Anna looks at Tony and giggles. 

As he gets older in life, there is less time to look at the stars. People like facts, and Tony has to learn more things about business and economy and stock and he really just doesn’t want to. But that’s the way of the world sometimes, isn’t it? There are many things one does not want to do, but there are many things the world has to do. 

But he still remembers their talks of stars. For her birthday, Anna receives a beautifully embroidered pair of gloves, laughing as their “rose” constellation is designed on the tops of the hands. 

“Thank you, Anthony,” she says softly. “I love them.” 

They keep in touch, even through all the countless schools Howard sends Tony to. Anna will send him her delicious recipes for scones and soup and everything else, Tony carefully setting the notecards in their own separate box. He can’t let the other boys know about it, but he cherishes them deeply. 

(And surprises many later with his culinary skills.) 

When he’s seventeen, he comes home. There’s the Christmas break at MIT, and he’s supposed to be having a family holiday or what have you. Maria said he needed to be present for a picture show and then that was basically it. 

Tony comes home with three separate bags, one laden with presents for Edwin and Anna Jarvis. 

He forgets sometimes that they’re older than he’s always thought. Anna isn’t moving around too much anymore. But he embraces her fully and asks her to sit while he gets the tea. Usually, she would protest. But not this time. 

They talk about his college days, Rhodey, and what they’ve been up to. Anna will be retiring in a month, which is news to Tony. But he’s glad. 

“More time to stargaze,” Anna says, smiling over her mint tea. “Maybe I’ll make some more constellations.” Tony smiles, and says he’ll join her. 

They share Christmas/Hanukkah gifts together. Tony feels the warm candlelight on his face as Jarvis puts on the Tchaikovsky record that is his favorite for the holidays. 

Anna dies in her sleep one month later. January 24th. Tony can feel the stars dimming, the constellations reshaping now that their favorite is gone. He can’t look to the planets with their silly names that he used to. 

Jarvis grieves heavily. He loved his wife dearly, so much that he would move a country for her. 

“In time, there is always healing,” the words say. But Tony hates that phrase. He hates that there has to be time, hates that he still feels so torn. And you don’t get over a death. 

Her starry gloves are still resting on her nightstand. Her rose water perfume to the left, right by the first necklace Edwin had ever bought her. There is a picture of her sisters and mothers when they lived in Austria. 

When he can’t sleep, Tony goes up. He makes sure Anna’s seat is right by him as he talks. He tells her about how much full of it that time travel movies are. (He never cursed in front of her, and will continue not to.) 

When he can’t sleep, he’s looking out at the stars. He buys some, to name them after Anna and her sisters. 

As time continues, it’s easier to talk to her without feeling an overwhelming sense of loss surround him. He talks to her about how much he hates that man of the board, but at least he has a personal assistant now. He nicknamed her Pepper, and he’s sure she’ll be the one to stick around for the job. 

Rhodey knows about his talks, advises Pepper over a quiet breakfast. 

“He’s not crazy, but he’s talking with someone he lost,” Rhodey says. “Leave him be, he’ll be fine. He’s not one to jump over the roof or shit like that.” 

“Got it,” Pepper says. She’s curious. 

He has a little trellis and garden at the top of the roof, and two faded sun chairs. One has been repainted, taken care of. He talks to a woman named Anna, who Pepper finds out is his oldest friend and one of his most-loved people in the world. 

Tony thinks about the stars in Afghanistan. Remaking his own star. He had wanted to grasp at them when he was younger, bring one down for Anna to see. She had laughed, and told him that if anyone could do it, it’d be him. 

Well, damn. He was making the fucking star. 

He remembers her warm hands on his skin as they talked outside, remembered that he would do anything for her and her memory. He wasn’t going to die in darkness, and he was going to do everything he could to make sure he at least saw stars. 

There is another person lost. But Tony makes sure that he is cared for, laid to rest where none can disturb him. 

“You’ll see her in the stars,” Tony promises to him, after the talking is all done and he can barely move. “Anna will greet you in the stars.” 

He looks up, and hopes to whoever listens to this sort of thing that he gets out of it alive. 

As it turns out, Rhodey’s odd fondness for geocashing has its uses. He finds a giant shiny thing, and grins. 

“How do we know it’s Tony?” one of the younger lieutenants asks. Rhodey turns. 

“No one else has such a stupidly brilliant plan as Tony,” he says. “Let’s bring him home, guys.” 

Tony stays on the roof. He doesn’t meet Obie, refuses to. All he tells anyone is that he saw things that have changed him, and the weapons department was shutting down immediately. He saw something in Obie’s eyes, much more than surprise. 

“Anna, you’ll never believe the star I have for you,” he says to the empty space. He feels a breeze ruffle his hair as a response. Perhaps a I know, love. I know. 

He has to guard his heart, his star. He reforges it, makes it a better star. He builds an iron suit, like the one Jarvis used to tell him about in stories of brave knights and people who needed rescuing. 

He remembers all of Anna’s stories about heroes who would go to the stars for their loves, for their worlds. It’s always at the back of his mind. 

And then he finds out it’s the main damned role as he falls from space, nuclear warhead exploding in front of stars. He could’ve sworn he left a new constellation afterwards. 

Heroes would go to the stars. He really wish he couldn’t be one. 

It’s fine, until he’s fighting in cold conditions and he’s thinking at the end so this is what a star feels like. Endlessly cold. He’s thinking about stars as he looks at kids who have all the hope in the world, all the happy endings possible. He sees stars when he looks at Peter Parker, the kid who is so brilliant but so naive. 

“Remind you of anyone?” Rhodey teases him over breakfast one morning. “He’s an awful lot like you, Tones.” 

“I resent that implication,” Tony scoffs. Because Peter? Oh, he can be better than Tony. He can be the true hero, the hero who gets the happy endings and the families and the retirement. 

Then the stars bring Tony something. Or rather, someone. Thanos. The guy who takes everyone away. 

Mr. Stark please I don’t want to go I don’t want to go I don’t want to go–

He stops using an alarm clock. He can’t anyway, when he’s stuck in space. Near death. But at least he has Nebula. 

He tells her about the stars. About how if you were lucky, you could swing on the moon and get star dust on your clothing. Nebula says nothing as he rambles about Anna and stars. 

They’re running out of food. And water. And everything. 

The stars, apparently, think Tony isn’t done being the hero yet. Or rather, being alive. There’s a woman outside the window, looking at him strangely. 

Her name is Carol Danvers. According to Rhodey, she’s the biggest legend of the Air Force. Tony just thinks she’s okay, she just has weird nineties music taste. 

(4 Non-Blondes? Seriously?) 

But he gets home to Pepper and her fancy perfume, her loving arms, and Rhodey crying because “holy shit, you’re here.” 

But then Steve. Steve, who was never there, who always likes to play pretend until he claims it was a reality. 

I needed you. 

He leaves. He needs to. He and Pepper buy a cabin that’s rundown. It needs a ton of work. Luckily, Tony can do this after a while. Pepper decorates the whole space. 

She’s the one who frames the picture of Tony and Peter, the one of Howard gets dragged out. A reminder of time changing. 

Pepper and him have a small, very very unofficial wedding. Pepper wears her favorite white dress, Tony says that she’s his wife, and they go to bed. 

Two months later, Pepper comes yelling into the house with 

“Holy shit, we’re having a baby!” Tony laughs as she nearly trips over her own foot, then immediately worries. 

“You’re not allowed to be a clutz anymore, we grew a human.” Pepper’s eyes widen. 

“Oh god, what if we can’t do this?” 

“We can,” Tony says. “Baby, if you want to, we can. I know we can do this.” 

So they prepare. They think about names. At first, Pepper doesn’t want Morgan to be a name. But then they hate everything else. And Morgan seems like a good fit. 

Morgan Anna Stark-Potts. 

“Welcome to the world, little star,” Tony whispers. 

When she cries, he takes her to the roof and tells her the planets’ names and the constellations. He tells her about roses and stars and heroes. She’ll fall asleep again, but he’ll be there. He talks to Anna while she sleeps. 

“Bet you never thought of this one,” he murmurs. “Me living in the forest with my wife and a kid. You told me I’d probably end up being a cyborg with my fascination for robots.” He laughs as he remembers. “I still miss you.” 

He looks up, and for a split second, the center of the rose constellation they had made up just sparks a bit brighter. 

And at the end of everything. 

At the end. 

He’ll be in the stars too. 

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

Grand Titans Rewatch: 1.02

Grand Titans Rewatch: 1.02

it’s been literal months since i started this project and neither this nor the fic series that’s supposed to go alongside it has garnered much attention, if any, but damn it, i made a commitment and this time, i’m going to follow through.

for reference, episode 1’s recap here, and its corresponding fic tag is here.

SPOILERS ahead for pretty much the entire series.

1. the recap portion of the episode leans very heavily on the type of horror genre that rachel’s character brings to the show, and honestly, i love it. the superhero genre can feel very… sterile at times, with bright, clean colours and costumes and standard team-ups ending in a climactic punch-fest. the insidious horror of rachel discovering something huge and dangerous inside of her and trying—and largely failing—to control it bleeds into the rest of the show; each of the team has an inner demon to battle, but the lesson isn’t triumph over the beast as much as it is acceptance. it’s unfortunate that the dc live action universe in general has developed a reputation for being gratuitously grimdark; i love the thematic consistency that the tone brings to the show, and it is honestly the freshest take on these characters that i’ve seen so far.

1.5. there’s something to be said, too, about this muddy-window perspective we get into these established superheroes’ lives—the intriguing, sometimes downright opaque scenes of them trying to re-build from wreckage. i love that this is how they choose to distinguish themselves in a very, very crowded arena: the origin story here is not for the superheroes or even the team themselves, but the bonds they form and the family that they become.

2. i kinda love the clash between the goofy costume and the grimdark torture scene. it’s never immediately obvious, but this show is remarkably committed to its comic book roots—so much so that it’s kind of jarring. usually in the journey from the comic to the screen there is an ironing-out of genre and tone, but this show will show you its spandex clad hero with the plastic-feather cape being threatened with torture and castration because that’s how it goes in the comics, goddammit!

2.25. it’s pretty impressive that they’re able to afford such a big place in washington dc

2.5. hank and dawn’s easy intimacy is lovely to watch. i remember not being fond of this long detour to introduce these two relatively obscure characters right after all that juicy set-up in the first episode the first time i watched this, but now i can enjoy the languid way their story unravels, the little glimpses we get into the life they’ve led and the marks that it has left behind.

2.8. a delightfully cheesy moment with the giant bird cage immediately followed by a quietly devastating depiction of sexual impotence and a possible addiction to multiple painkillers! see what i mean?

oh! and before i forget:

MIRRORS, MIRRORS, EVERYWHERE: 9

3. flashback time! can’t say that i’m terribly impressed with the fight choreography; there appears to be hardly any contact between the heroes’ kicks and lunges and the thugs they’re supposed to be fighting, and a lot of slow-motion and editing trickery needs to be employed to make this look kinetic. i don’t really blame them much, though—those capes look awfully cumbersome to be just walking around in, leave alone fight. and i’m glad that the show is making a point of showing that robin’s style of fighting in flippier and more acrobatic than the others’.

3.65. aaaand we get our first hint of History between dick and dawn. to be honest, given what i remember of the rest of s1 and what we know of s2, it does seem like they’re making it so that the original titans did exist, swapping out roy and wally for hank and dawn. i’m not super-enthusiastic about this decision, but we’ll see how it plays out.

4. dick and rachel!

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS INTERACTION:

a) rachel desperately trying to hide how scared and vulnerable she feels behind brittle defiance

b) dick bemused and concerned and casting around for ways to connect with her but giving up too easily

c) “for the lady” – oh, dick. i love you.

d) rachel warily checking her reflection

e) dick making false promises of safety to rachel in order to get her to come with him to washington—a manipulative little ploy that i’m sure was par-for-the-course during his time with batman

f) “but sometimes there’s no time to be scared” is that what kid!dick told himself when he was starting out as robin oh my heart hurts

g) dick just dropping out of his job for an indefinite time without notice because why in the world would bruce wayne’s ward ever have to worry about keeping down a steady job? he’s utterly unconscious of this, which makes it hilarious

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 10

5. i’m already really fond of rohrbach and charlie the m.e. i know s2’s slate is already really crowded, but i wouldn’t mind seeing a resurrected rohrbach make an appearance, and for bit more of a spotlight on dick’s day job.

6. OH MAN i honestly didn’t remember that dick phoned alfred this episode! and that he considered—for a second—calling bruce! poor guy’s genuinely scared. for all his ‘fuck batman’s, dick’s anger and fear is more internally directed than he realises. this boy needs therapy.

6.5. dick going “… obviously” at rachel telling him not to get pineapple on their pizza makes me think he was definitely setting out to get pineapple on their pizza at that moment.

6.75. oh fuck. i knew it was coming, but that dead guy screaming at rachel through the photo was still terrifying. man i wish they’d stuck a little longer with the horror/mystery vibe they’ve got going here.

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 11

6.8. dick immediately reaching out to hold rachel and comfort her as she sobs, terrified, in the bathtub shouldn’t feel particularly special or heartwarming—it’s a very natural, human instinct, after all—but for this particular version of dick grayson to automatically show this compassion when he’s half convinced himself that his lifetime as a vigilante has left him an amoral husk of his previous self… is significant.

7. it’s an interesting choice to go with the nuclear family as the first major villains featured on this show, but fits totally with the tone so far—the dark, despairing and dank things that hide underneath a cracking veneer of cheery suburban normality. pretty standard horror genre stuff—with an added twist that these people aren’t actually androids, but regular people horrifically tortured and brainwashed to act as murder machines.

7.5. aside from that, it’s a neat contrast to the found family that’s actually starting to evolve, with all of its rough edges and imperfect but raw displays of love.

8. i really like that, for all that rachel and dick have in common, their interaction is weird, start-stop in nature, each dancing around answering the others’ questions with any kind of honesty. rachel has clearly picked up on dick’s caginess around her and dick, for all that he’s been trained in subterfuge and basically been living a lie to most of his friends and co-workers, is unable to keep acting like he knows what he’s doing. he hasn’t had to really live a double life in a while—and he’s rusty when it comes to doing anything that’s not detective or vigilante work.

8.5. dick’s interactions in general through the series contrast with the easy and intimate ways the others talk with each other; he’s just so isolated and so friggin rusty at this.

9. you’d think rachel would’ve figured out by now not to shake random people’s hands.

9.25. i’m so happy about this show’s commitment to showing just how much of a hot mess dick is.

9.35. i’ve certainly warmed up to the icy, washed-out way this show looks, and the general sense of… space, both in terms of physical space as well as the way each scene is allowed to unfold and just breathe. you don’t get that a lot in superhero media these days.

9.45. an update to the dick grayson timeline! dawn says she hasn’t seen dick in four years and seems genuinely surprised to learn that he’s working with the police now. so how do you go from zero to detective in just four years? is that even possible? the timeframe becomes even shorter if you assume that he only decided to join law enforcement after leaving batman. maybe that’s just another thing that dick kept hidden from his friends, even when they were, you know, friends.

anyway, dick continues to be a hot mess, and i am glad that is consistent over every on-screen iteration.

9.5. i am genuinely unsure why this dick/dawn history exists other than to create some weird conflict between hank and dick. i’d much rather that conflict come from dick being an asshole generally and dropping all contact with his friends when it all became just Too Much To Deal With.

10. OH MAN so him contacting alfred was to arrange a big sum of money to pay off hank and dawn?? yep, dick is 100 percent bruce wayne’s protégé. i’m sure he also thinks of this as a way to help hank recover and for hank and dawn to rebuild their post-vigilantism life. this is a terrible way to deal with your guilt, my friend.

and i love that all of this—the mistakes he’s making with rachel despite his genuine concern for and desire to help her, the way he’s unable to really talk to her instead of at her, his false platitudes when he thinks he has nothing to say—is a plausible reflection of the ways bruce floundered with him when he first took dick in. dick has spent so, so long as bruce’s sole heir; though i’m sure they learned to communicate better, the core dysfunction of his relationship with bruce is embedded in his bones.

but the show is clearly setting up the dick-rachel relationship to evolve—and in doing so, have dick come to terms with his own relationship with bruce, instead of spinning increasingly bitter and dark memories of it in his head.

all said, tho: what a dick move. in every sense of the word.

11. aaand here’s why i never understand criticism of this show that says dick is too dark: it’s just so typical of him to hold himself to insane standards and just cut loose and run whenever he feels he’s failed those standards. it’s why he’s always among the first choices to lead a team but his leadership almost never sustains very long. it’s why he’s everybody’s friend but so desperately, desperately alone, especially when it’s his turn to spiral and need help. it’s why when he is spiralling, he adopts spectacularly self-destructive methods to do so. standing aside while zucco died is essentially his (infamous) blockbuster moment, when he so egregiously compromised his moral code that he was forced to re-evaluate the very core of what he’d identified as for decades. he hates himself, but he splits the blame, recognising the very real damage being robin did to him but pinning everything that’s wrong with him on it.

this tracks with every version of dick grayson that i can think of, bar the golden age/silver age comics, more contemporary nightwing runs—especially after his stint as batman with damian as robin—where he’s matured a bit and more level-headed, and, of course, fanon.

11.5. but while dick is wrestling with himself, actual people do get hurt and lost on the wayside. i’m glad that this show is not shying away from showing that.

12. maaan you really, really didn’t have to do this to anyone, leave alone someone as prominent in nightwing’s history as amy rohrbach. still holding out hope that she’ll return somehow next season.

13. rachel using dick’s own words to get him to help hank and dawn… oh fuck yes.

13.5. to be perfectly honest, i quite enjoyed robin as this menace in the shadows, taking thugs down brutally when they can’t even see him. you never see hyper-competent robin on-screen anymore.

13.75. also? hank and dawn’s genuine horror at his brutality is another giant indicator that this is not a dick grayson who’s functioning optimally, by any standard. he needs a place to start growing from, and this is it.

14. dick getting called out on his bullshit is pretty satisfying to watch, no lie.

14.5. i’d forgotten just how brutally the nuclear family defeat hank, dawn, and dick. yikes.

14.8. that last shot of dick desperately trying to save dawn’s life while having flashbacks to his own parents falling to their deaths is so fucking haunting, holy shit.

15. that was… honestly so good, you guys! i remember seeing this episode for the first time and feeling a little irritated with the languid pacing and the way it seemed sort of like filler. but there’s so much great stuff that stands out to me on re-watch—this show genuinely rewards multiple viewings, even when you know what’s coming next.

[jflashandclash]

Traitors of Olympus IV: Fall of the Sun

Forty-Seven: Ajax

Two Out of Ten Stars on the Monologue

             Before Eris could set him down, something took her completely by surprise.

           A tree exploded out of the ground beside Eris and slapped her across the face. She lost her grip on him.

           Pax toppled away into someone else’s feet.

           This certain someone sprinkled another powder over his face.

           By this point, Pax’s instinct should have said Foreign Powder: Bad, but he didn’t have much choice in breathing. His mother’s concoction had left him gasping so heavily, all he could do was gulp up the flowery-scented air.

           Breathing became a lot easier. The fuzziness erased, so the world became a lot less weeeeee! and a lot more Oh, right, I’m in immense amounts of pain.

           When Pax looked up to see who he had to thank for this revelation, he remembered that he was a bit blind from the flashbang.

           Everything was still too bright. The flashbang should have warn off by now. Could it really be—

           “I LOVE LOW-CUT SHIRTS!” someone shouted from far above. The voice was so distant, Pax wasn’t sure if he’d imagined the spectral perv and wondered if demigods heard spectral pervs before they died instead of God. That seemed to fit Greek mythology to a T.

           When Pax blinked a few times, he could see the curtains of Nyx’s cape parting in the sky. As he’d been told not to many times before, Pax stared straight into the sun.

           While his eyes weren’t super fond of this decision, his brain was throwing a party: someone was driving the sun chariot.

           Pax had to wonder if Apollo had been released, but wasn’t so sure when he heard a figure from far above shout, “Looking good, Daughter of Demeter!”

           Apollo was creepy. But, usually, he was a bit more subtle.            

           However, Pax had to admit, Euna did look pretty awesome and terrifying.

           She stood over Pax, strawberry plants and grass growing wild around them, curling around Pax like a protective shield. She held Kronos’ scythe to one side. Her hand rested on it more like a hand on a friend’s shoulder than a hand holding a weapon that would sever Pax in half if her finger slipped.

           Black tar dripped off her arms and smeared her shirt.

           “Ew,” Pax said, “Is that Phobetor goo? Did you turn him into costume supplies? Oh titans, that’s not the powder you dumped on me, is it?”

           Real questions with disturbing answers.

           Pax tilted his head to glance at the camp. Sure enough, there was a weird sheen forming around the barriers. Normally, Pax couldn’t see the Mist at work, but apparently Mist repair was a bit more visible.

           The God of Nightmares had been keeping the Mist shield down. Euna must have defeated him. And then made motor oil out of him.

           A roar sounded in the distance. With Phobetor’s sleep magic gone, Pax had to wonder if a very confused dragon, Peleus, realized he’d been teepeed by campers during his nap.

           In the background, ghosts and ghouls screamed along with the roar. There was probably a massive Thriller retreat back to their graveyards with all this sunshine.

           Hope lifted his core and made it feel all feathery until Euna took a step towards his mom.

           Eris clapped her hands together, the flat edge of her knife pressed between her fingers. She tilted her head to the side and leaned her cheek against her hands like a giddy school girl. Eris didn’t look right in full daylight. In it, he could see the amount of damage that he and Axel had done to his mother: the way she could barely balance on her shredded ankle, how her torso curled towards the ichor spilling out of her side. The injuries didn’t match her expression as she said, “Oh, this is wonderful—it’s beautiful and perfect.”

           “You lost,” Axel wheezed out from somewhere nearby.[1]

           “But, I never had an objective to lose,” Eris giggled. Her round, dark eyes analyzed Euna gleefully. “Remember, I don’t really plan. I just set bombs and watch them go off. And you, my lovely darling, are a nuclear missile without a honing device.”

           Euna twisted the scythe in her hands. “I’m killing you now,” she decided.

           Before Euna could step out of his reach, Pax managed to grab her ankle. Upon registering Jack’s head—still mumbling angrily into a flower gag—Pax remembered last time he frantically grabbed Jack’s ankle to prevent Jack from killing Will Solace. That time, he epically failed in the preventative killing measure. “Please don’t make me an orphan,” Pax begged. Despite all of this, his stomach twisted at the thought. “I know those are the first steps to becoming a Disney princess, but I’ll give up that dream if it means you won’t kill someone else in my family.”

           Underneath his grip, he could feel Euna violently shaking. Regardless of her resolve, Pax wasn’t sure if she would have the strength to live through fighting his mom. Yea, they were both injured, but Pax imagined killing one god a day would earn a powernap. Killing two..?

           “We didn’t get to kill my sister, Hemera, and that’s a bummer,” Eris said, her gaze surveying the carnage around Camp Half-Blood, seeming satisfied. “But we got something much more fun: we get to find out whether parents really appreciate their children more when they’re gone—” Pax assumed she meant the dead demigods in camp, but Eris gestured to the black gunk on Euna. Huh. Hypnos baby. Gross. “We got a godly assassin that wants to murder all the gods. We got the seeds—” Pax wanted to giggle as his mother nodded to Euna again, but he felt a little too queasy. “—to make a third demigod group that neither of the others will trust. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you three sometime soon.”

           She winked at Axel, Pax, and Euna.

           And with that, Eris slowly stalked off down Farm Road. She didn’t even use a flash bomb or laugh manically. Pax gave her a zero out of ten for dramatic exits or proper villain monologues—a major let down since she and her gang had been doing so well.

           Euna’s shakes, meanwhile, became worse. She collapsed backwards. Her butt crushed the air out of Pax’s diaphragm, making pain explode in his shoulder. Jack made a mumble of protest through his gag.

           Pax squeaked when Kronos’ scythe sliced into the ground right beside his head.

           This felt suspiciously easy and anticlimactic. And he didn’t like his mother’s “this isn’t over” type speech. When Pax squirmed, the pain in his shoulder intensified. His opposite hand wouldn’t respond. He wanted to complain to Euna, but a loud snore signaled how thoroughly she’d listen.

           While taking a massive, mid-day nap sounded appealing—

           Panic seized him when he remembered Eris’ knife digging into the avatar’s chest. Axel was lying somewhere close, potentially dying, and he was concerned about his mom’s proper villain etiquette. Pax didn’t even know where his brother was.

“Axel, help. I’m being crushed by a beautiful, hot woman,” Pax said, figuring that was the best way to gauge how Axel felt.

           In the moment of silence that followed afterwards, Pax assigned an Axel rating system.

“Don’t objectify her” would be somewhere between 8 to 10.

“Ajax, shut up” would be a between 4 to 10.

A grunt: 2 to 4.

No response…

           “You’re a sore sight for tired eyes, Leonis Caput,” someone said before Axel could.

           Pax released a massive sigh of relief, something he never thought he’d do around a Roman.

           Reyna strode towards them. With that hint of amusement in Reyna’s tone as she approached, she couldn’t think Axel was too hurt, and Pax knew that comment wasn’t for him.

           Pax squirmed to look around when he heard Axel’s weak, slow response, “I take it it’s time to party?”

           Pax immediately stopped squirming when Reyna said, much more serious, “I think it’s time to finally arrest you.”

***

 Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed! I know this battle sequence might feel a little anticlimactic, but Mel and I agreed that if felt proper for Pax. Stay tuned next week for Calex’s chapter, A Punch of Home.

***

Footnote:

[1] Mel beta, “I just imagine him popping up with leaves in his hair and looking all frazzled and confused like a guy just popped out of the forest.”

[elcorhamletlive]

MCU Rewatch: Age of Ultron

Those first few moments at the beggining of the battle are kind of dull, but I do love the shot of all the original six together.

I like the “language” line. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but to me it works because of how obviously shocked Tony is by it and how Steve himself recognizes he’s kind of playing into his own stereotype when he goes “...I know”. I think it’s fun banter.

I also love that he throws his motorcycle at a car just before he says “it just slipped” lol.

There’s a very weird “people outside the U.S. resent the Avengers” subtext going on in this movie that is just too shallow for the theme it’s serving. It’s something that I see in fandom sometimes too, and it always rings kind of hollow because it’s like people trying to be “woke” without actually understanding what imperialism is and how it works (that’s also where a lot of Bad Takes about CW come from, but I digress). I feel like the movie just kind of puts it in the middle of the larger “are we monsters?” theme, but it really doesn’t work if it’s not properly explored.

I love that Steve lands on his feet after Pietro throws him up in the air LOL. Acrobat Steve is very present in Avengers movies in general, which I appreciate.

I looove the move of Thor slamming the shield with his hammer. It’s so clever and so cool.

“Please be a secret door, please be a secret door... yay!” So cuuute.

The emphasis Tony’s vision places on Steve is downright amazing. Tony straight to him, checks his pulse and no one else’s. Hears his voice talking. I live.

Wanda definitely sees the vision she gave Tony, but I don’t think she necessarily crafted it. This is an important detail for no one but myself and my endless wip-creating mind that still wants to write a fic of these two.

It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but Steve is helping Clint on the quinjet when they’re going home. 

Thor’s report on the Hulk is amazing.

“How is he doing?”/”Unfortunately, he’s still Barton” LOL.

Everyone’s outfit in the party scene is so on point, and then there’s Natasha with that weird skirt.

Also, that kind of goes without saying, but I love everything about the party scene. So many small and fun interactions, and the seeds to Steve’s home arc are laid out. It’s nice.

I love everything about Steve’s characterization in this movie, in fact. Him talking to Bruce is so sweet, and he’s also helping Nat as well by doing it. I love.

Everyone attempting to lift Mjolnir is the best part of this movie. Rhodey and Tony trying together. Steve managing to move it. Thor by the end with his “you’re not worthy” line. It’s perfect.

I love that Hill just has a gun on her at all times.

Oh my god Bruce falling with his face in Natasha’s cleavage is so cringe-worthy.

Aside from that I love the fight with the Iron Legion scene. Steve using the table as a shield, Tony using the fondue fork to attack a robot. Very good.

I’m sorry I’m not trying to get into Discourse but in the scene right after the fight? Tony is completely in the wrong and I literally can’t fathom someone watching that scene and thinking he’s a poor misunderstood baby in need of protection.

I do GET the complaint about how Whedon wrote Tony here, though, because the whole laughing and pretending it was funny was just a very, very dick moment that did feel a little forced. I feel like maybe if we had gotten one extra scene exploring how the vision played with his ptsd and anxiety (or even him just dwelling a little on the vision itself) it would’ve worked better, because then we’d see Tony’s emotions at play a little clearer.

Hnnnnng and there’s it is. “Together”. The moment I turned into absolute certified garbage. Tony’s FACE.

I do like that the Maximoffs interactions with Ultron kind of set up how they’re in over their heads with this whole thing. It’s also shown when they try and epically fail to intimidate Klaue.

Ultron’s whole “I’m not like Tony” thing while also saying things Tony would say is another weird element that never really pays off. It’s just... there.

I will forever love the “pretending you can live without a war” line, and how it ties with Steve’s vision. How the camera flashes sound like shots and wine stains look like blood. How Peggy asks him to “imagine” going home and then the room goes empty because he CAN’T. I really love it.

I feel like Clint’s family is kind of a weird plot point and it plays into some tropes that I don’t really like (like, we don’t know anything about these characters, but we’re supposed to care because they’re the stereotypical Nuclear Family and this makes them important), but Tony’s “these are.. smaller agents” line almost makes it worth it. lol

Clint staring out at Steve and Tony thoughtfully while saying “maybe they’re my mess” is the most relatable moment of the entire MCU.

I feel like BruceNat could have worked a little better if Ruffalo had made Bruce seem actually attracted to her, as opposed to incredibly uncomfortable every time she comes on to him. And she comes on so strongly, it eventually gets awkward because of how one-sided it feels.

And hoo boy there’s the “I’m sterile” talk. I really don’t think Whedon meant to equate infertile women with monsters here, but the way the dialogue is written, it’s kind of the impression that gives off. It’s uncomfortable.

LOG-RIPPING SCENE, YES!! I have a lot of Feelings about how Tony deliberately pokes at Steve because he thinks Steve seems to be doing okay (because Steve is hard to read for him), and how he doesn’t seem to notice that the whole “go home” thing hits Steve really hard. And he is being honest and trying to communicate, he just... can’t see it, and Steve doesn’t know about the vision, so it can’t really get anywhere. 

I will say that this movie is definitely missing a scene where Tony TELLS the others (or even just Steve) about his vision. Like, it feels that the resolution can’t be complete without it, because Tony’s fear can’t be fully addressed if it’s never out in the open. I enjoy Tony’s scene with Fury (and I love him calling the tractor “dear”) but I feel like this moment was necessary.

Tony gives a cute smile at Steve’s silly “craziest thing science ever made was me” line :D

Okay, the Thor subplot is completely unnecessary. I know it sets up the Infinity Stones, but it could have been waaay shorter. And the second fight before they create Vision is so dumb. There’s no reason for Tony to just jump into creating Vision AGAIN without even TALKING to everyone else. I’m on board with pretty much everything Stony-related in this movie, but this is unnecessary, dumb conflict that didn’t need to be there.

All the pseudo-philosophy that comes out of Ulton’s mouth is just so weird and artificial. It doesn’t fit with the quippiness he’s supposed to have inherited from Tony, and the result is that when he needs to seem scary he just sounds kind of stupid.

I do love Clint’s speech to Wanda, though. And Natasha talking about the view. These are nice moments.

Awww the “captain’s orders” guy from TWS is at the helicarrier! I had never noticed that.

The fact that Tony echoes the “together” warms my heart, and I do feel it provides some resolution for his argument with Steve - as in, he gets his point, they should work as a team. But I still wish there had been an actual turning point where we could see Tony understanding that, instead of just jumping from point A to point B.

Pietro’s death is so hollow because we just don’t spend enough time with him to truly care, but I like Wanda’s scream destroying all the bots around her. And also her ripping off Ultron’s heart.

I do like the last talk between Ultron and Vision, too. Paul Bettany just sells it to me.

Steve and Tony and their dumb bantering because of Mjolnir is too cute.

ALSO: When Tony says “I’m gonna miss him. And you’re gonna miss me”, like... It feels like he kind of throws it out as a joke, and then immediately adds the “manful tears” comment. And then Steve says “I will miss you, Tony”, and you can see for a second the little look he gives, like, “yeah?” like he can’t really believe it at first. And then when he asks if Steve is okay... I feel like this is a rare moment where they actually manage to understand each other a litte more, through these small glimpses, but it’s all still very tentative, very hesitant but still very sincere. I love this scene to bits, especially the last line.

“It’s a very nice wall” is the WEAKEST snark ever omg Steve. Nat absolutely drags him by calling him and Tony out in response lol

I actually do like this movie. It has many flaws, it’s not as tight as the first Avengers by any means, but ultimately I enjoy it and I think the hate it gets is a little unfair, even if I get where it comes from.

[lettersfromn0where]

OC Interview Tag

Rules: Pick a character from your WIP and have them answer these fifteen questions, then tag people. Thanks to @leonajasmin-writeblr for the tag! These characters are from my original WIP, The Radiant, which is about a group of teenagers who developed strange abilities as a result of growing up next to a nuclear waste dump. (Don’t buy a house near a nuclear waste disposal site, kids.) I’m going to use three because they’re beans and I love them and also can’t choose. Meg is regular text, Gigi is italics, Diya is bolded italics.

1. What is your full name?

Margaret Mai Lien Pham. Margaret is...an elegant old lady name my parents liked, Mai Lien is a nod to my Vietnamese heritage, and Pham is one of the most common Vietnamese surnames (and my father’s).

Genesis Chantal Cappellini (if you call me Genesis, I will murder you in cold blood), because I have strange parents. Chantal was chosen because not very many names sound nice with “Genesis,” and Cappellini is a super obscure last name that happens to be my family’s.

Diya Sunita Patel. Not sure why I was named that, but it’s nice, I suppose. 

2. What does your full name mean?

Margaret means “pearl,” Mai means “cherry blossom,” Lien means “lotus,” and Pham means “extensive.” Two flowers and a gem...hmm, I wonder what my parents were trying to get at there. (More likely than not it was chosen just because it sounded nice - I doubt they would’ve named me “cherry blossom lotus” if they were going for meaning.) 

Genesis means “origin” and is a book of the Bible, Chantal means “stone,” and Cappellini is - I kid you not - a type of pasta. Yup, I’m named after a book of the Bible and a pasta shape. WHY, MOTHER? WHYYYYY? 

Diya means “gift,” Sunita means “one of good character,” and Patel means something roughly like “village chief.” That sets a pretty lofty standard...

3. What are your nicknames/other names?

Meg! I don’t mind being called Margaret, but no one really does. Sometimes my best friend calls me other random nicknames for Margaret - I think I’ve been Maggie, Daisy, even Maisie once - but to everyone else, it’s just Meg. 

Gigi. No one outside of my family and one person I’ve known since I was four even knows what my real first name is, so yeah, it’s always Gigi. Which is as it should be. A very select group of people can call me Gen, but again, 99% of the time I’m just Gigi.

I don’t really have one. 

4. What’s your gender?

Author here: not going to bother with the fancy writing because they’re all female. 

5. What’s your sexuality?

Author here: Gigi is straight, but the other two girls’ sexualities are totally irrelevant to the story.

6. Where are you from?

Phoenix, Arizona. 

Originally from Chicago, but moved to Phoenix when I was so young that I’ve never thought of myself as being from anywhere else. 

Also Phoenix. Thing to look forward to about going away to college: not being in Phoenix.

7. How old are you?

Turning seventeen in two weeks and a junior in high school.

Sixteen - I’m a sophomore.

Seventeen and a junior, like Meg, but at different schools.

8. What is your magic form/what species are you?

Human, but genetically enhanced (by accident, not experiment) - I can instantaneously predict the outcomes of situations, mathematically, when I see them. 

Enhanced human - I shatter glass when I sing or raise my voice.

Human with powers - I “disappear”/turn invisible in direct sunlight.

9. What does your human form look like?

Average height, fairly thin but not tiny, very straight black hair. I’m naturally quite pale but tan easily, which I hate.

I’m very, uh...fun-sized. As in: 4′ 11.” I’m pretty petite in general but sorta curvy; I have olive skin, suuuuuper curly brown hair (VERY ANNOYING TO MANAGE), and green eyes. People have told me I’m cute but I would prefer to strike fear into the hearts of mankind...maaaybe. ;) 

I’m 5′ 10″ - that’s what people usually notice about me first. That, and that I always wear my hair waist-length and in a braid. Otherwise, I have brown eyes, bronze skin, and black hair.

10. What’s your aesthetic?

I don’t know if I have one, honestly. I like things to be neat and organized, though, so I guess it would be kind of minimalistic? I really like floral things, too.

Is chaos an aesthetic? I guess not. But if I had to choose...backstage in a theater on show night. That’s my place, my home, and I suppose my aesthetic too.

Orange. Anything and everything orange. Bright colors. Fruit. You get the idea.

11. Who’s your best friend?

Phoebe Vu. She’s the daughter of my parents’ oldest friends, so we grew up together - same school, same church, same everything for as long as we can remember. We’re both very nerdy, but in different ways - she does my computer science homework, I do her biology - and we’ve been doing everything together for so long that I couldn’t imagine my life without her.

Uh...maybe Cassidy Donnelly? She’s my best friend from theater. And I’ll never admit this, but I’ve got a soft spot for Alex Allende, a guy I’ve gone to school with for eleven years and pretend to hate but very obviously don’t, too. We don’t even really get along, but he knows me better than almost anyone. 

At school, I have only one friend, Jeremy Waller - he, like I, doesn’t really fit into any other groups, so we hang out a lot. But in truth, it would really be my brother, Deb (short for Debaditya, which no one calls him because most people can’t pronounce it). He’s a year older and we try to bash each other’s heads in from time to time, because siblings, but we’re extremely close. No one matters more to me than he does.

12. Would you ever get a piercing/tattoo?

Nope. Not my thing.

Uh, maybe if I had to for a role? My ears are pierced, but otherwise no.

Sure, why not? I’d get, like, one of those cute miniature tattoos, but a piercing sounds painful. 

13. When are you happiest?

My family and Phoebe’s used to go to a lake house somewhere up north together every summer, and we’d always take out a boat and go tubing and shove each other off the dock and night-swim - I miss those days. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I was at the lake. Other than that, when I finally grasp a difficult math concept - I’m pretty good at it, but I struggle sometimes, and finally getting a concept is one of the best feelings in the world. 

When I’m performing. Musical theater has been my life since I was a little kid and I never feel quite the same as I do when I’m onstage, whether I’m in the chorus or belting out a solo - it’s where I feel most at home and alive.

When I’m trying something new. I’m very adventurous, and I hate monotony, so I’m always happiest when I’m doing something I’ve never tried before. Routine bores me - I need my dose of adventure.

14. What’s your biggest secret?

My ability (power? Do I have powers? I guess I do). I haven’t told anyone except Phoebe - I’m terrified of how my family would react if they knew. 

The fact that I might be in love with Alex, my true first name, and the real reason I had to drop out of the Spring musical - not because I ‘didn’t have time,’ but because I’d shatter all the windows if I ever sang again.

I don’t have a lot of secrets...maybe that I’m realizing, after saying I’d be a doctor all my life, that I actually hate biology with every fiber of my being? 

15. What was your first impression of [each other]?

Author here: this is set a week after the rest of the things, after they’ve all met at a support group for enhanced kids. 

Meg: I was a little taken aback by Diya’s enthusiasm - I’m kind of introverted, and she can be A LOT. I was impressed by Gigi’s confidence but a *little* weirded out by how blunt she could be. 

Gigi: I thought Meg needed a hug (I was right) and admired that Diya could eat an entire box of Pop Tarts by herself - which was what she was doing when I first met her. Not very deep.

Diya: You know that meme where it’s, like, “I’ve only had (name) for a day, but if anything happened to her, I’d kill everyone in this room and then myself” (I’m paraphrasing here, so those aren’t the exact words)? That was me as soon as I met Meg. She is a PRECIOUS TRAUMATIZED BEAN (her parents kicked her out shortly before we met). My first impression of Gigi was “yup, she’s definitely in love with that Alex kid,” and I also noticed how extroverted and theatrical she was right away. 

Thanks for the tag! I don’t have a lot of writeblrs on my radar, so anyone who wants to do this is heretofore tagged. :) 

[some-rfa-imagines]

A Big List Of Prompts

i thought ‘why not?’ and made one of these for myself. I wandered around the internet for a while and shoved together a bunch of prompts I thought were interesting. Pick a character and a number (pls specify) and I’ll write you a thing!

Most of these are not mine!!!

hhhhh lets hope i know what i’m doing

Dialogue:

“I don’t think this is the biggest mistake you’ve made. It’s probably like… third worst.”

“Shouting at each other across the room doesn’t count as having a proper conversation about your feelings you know. Wouldn’t you rather all of this be private, anyway?”

“No pressure, honest. It’s not like the world is depending on you or anything.”

“But if they think we’re a couple, we'll get the couples discount!”

“Are you always this prone to bad luck and violence? If so, that’s kind of sad.”

“Can I just whoop your ass… like… right now?”

“Rules? Nope, not listening. I’m not following them. Never have, never will.”

“Did operation steal the cat and return the nuclear codes get completed yet?"

“I call it 'the plan that will save the world and also remove minions for good'."

“what the hell are you doing with (other character)'s dog locked in your garden?!"

“Yeah!, heh, I just uh remembered that, uhm- I have- uh.. I have a few places to see and uh *ahem*, people to go- I mEAN- uhm, yeah,,, I-I’ll- I’ll be right back— oh! Uh, completely unrelated to that, uh, ngh, wheres the nearest cliff?”

“Shut up [name], just because you have the grace and social skills of a drunken ferret, does not mean I must.”

“You’re so convinced that I’ll hurt them that you haven’t considered it’s the last thing I’d ever want to do.”

“What have I told you about listening to your gut more? It’s smart. Do it.”

“Pal, I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m a good person, but if you want to keep it. Leave now.”

“I can be sweet. Sometimes. To certain people. It happens!”

“Stop laughing!”

“Call me [blank] - not that that's my name.”

“So I suppose you want to ask me how I pulled it off.”

“Didn’t you know darling? The key to getting away with a crime is making people think you are peaceful.”

"I hope that what I've said hasn't hurt you too much."

"Move away from the door and let me at him."

"You embarrassed me this evening."

"I want to turn back the clock to before..."

"Try focusing more on your life and less on mine!"

"There's something I need to get off my chest."

"I did a pregnancy test."

"If you get me his phone, I might reconsider."

"I knew you wouldn't be able to see it through."

"You were meant to be watching him!"

"How dare you look down your nose at me like that."

“It’s not my fault you’re short.”

“Tell me right now or I swear on my life you’ll regret everything.”

“You’re back!”

“I missed you.”

“I did my best, okay?!”

“Kiss me right this second.”

“Just do it!”

“I believe you’ll come back to us. I just know it.”

“You’re not a bad person… You… You wouldn’t…”

“I can’t trust you… Not anymore.”

“Don’t leave me!”

“You promised we were in this together…”

“Wait a minute, are you flirting with me?”

“You’re even more stunning.”

“As many as the stars in the sky.”

“CAN YOU EVEN READ?!”

“You’re actually the most insufferable person I’ve ever had the pleasure meeting.”

“I risked everything for you.”

“I… I love you, okay?”

“Who the hell are you and why is my favourite book in a puddle of orange juice.”

“This is a lot harder than it looks and I don’t think you realise that.”

“That’s the lamest pickup line I’ve ever heard of.” “Damn. Well, it was just plan A.” “And what’s plan B…?” “To take you hostage.”

“What the fuck did they do to you in that lab?”

“Ehhh, needles, comas, that deep freeze thing in the first room, shoving these onto my back. Oh also they forced me to eat soggy bread.”

“Love, you underestimate how much food I can shove in my mouth before I need to be stopped.”

“Okay so why did you have to smash that vase again” “I DIDN’T MEAN TO, IT GOT IN THE WAY”

“Welcome to my treasure trove.” “There’s a sword.” “Yeah.” “wHY DO YOU HAVE A SWORD.” “...” “caaaaaan i touch it?”

“Love, I’ve done this before. Every hundred years. For seventeen millenniums.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO (NAME)?!”

“Are… Who are these people? They- They look like me…”

“So, what do you want for dinner?” “I’m thinking Italian. Like, Italian.” “BABE.”

“Oooh, look at the detail on that mirror.”

“Okay now you’re just messing with me and you need to stop.”

“Okay, I know I’m idiotic to get lost in a corn maze but who the fuck are you and why are you apparently as idiotic as I am.”

“I was on my way to buy that soul for Satan, who do you think you are. You can’t do that.”

“I’m sure you know who I am.”

“Huh…? Oh, fuck.”

“I swear to god, my little sister will kill me when I get home.”

“Bit rude to swear to God right now, don’t you think?”

“Fuck. I’m going to die. Damn.”

“YOU DEFINITELY WILL IF YOU DRINK THAT.”

“You know you can’t bring (them), Your Highness, (they’ll) be used against you.”

“Don’t hold me responsible, I wasn’t even there.” “Yeah, but you gave me the idea.”

“You know what, fuck you.”

“The fuck did you say they put on my gravestone?!”

“Honey, I don’t care if you’re the fucking queen or an uncooperative cat, get off your ass and live your life you trash bag.”

“Hey, calm down, please, oh god okay, calm aura, calm aura, please stop freaking out, calm down, it’s okay, you can do this.”

“So that’s it? We’re done?”

“Please, just… hold me. Just for a moment.”

“I think I’m just gonna sleep outside and let the snow bury me until I die.”

“So… what are we?”

“Don’t you dare take another step out that door!”

“This better be good.”

“That… was the worst excuse I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“I’m saying you don’t have a rulebook.”

“These kinds of things don’t just come with an instruction manual, [name]!”

“Why, that’s absurd!”

“I would never.”

“It makes me so uncomfortable when people ask me, ‘Where do you see yourself in 'x’ years?’ Like… I see myself cold in the ground, my guy, but that’s not the answer you want to hear so this is an awkward predicament we’re in, huh.”

“Listen up fucker.”

“Let me tell you all the reasons why I won’t do that.”

“HAVE YOU HEARD OF A TURN SIGNAL EVER IN YOUR LIFE”

“I am already the family disappointment, what more do you want from me”

“Do you?”

“Get. Out.”

“If people are watching, we might as well make this entertaining!”

“I’ve absolutely never seen you in my entire life so if you’ll just excuse me now, have a good day!”

“Okay, stop going to sleep at 4am, it makes you philosophical and sentimental and that’s weird.”

“Make me.”

Setting:

The night sky lit up for a second and what followed sounded a lot like the end of the world.

It's not always the case of 'these guys are foolish to only send one guy' sometimes it's 'we should be terrified they only sent one guy.’

Dear reader, I wish I could tell you that you're going to like this story.

Without meaning to, they’d arranged two dates for the same evening.

Everything about [name] was a lie.

They'd only been apart for a week and already he had a new lover hanging off his arm.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

You guys were taking forever and I was hungry so I baked cookies who wants some?

First Lines:

[Character] had enjoyed ten years of being totally irresponsible.

The pencil had NOT been worth stealing.

[Character] wasn't happy about it, but [pronoun]’d been recalled to life for one reason or another.

If [Character] could change one thing, it would be carrying that gun.

It was enchanting. Either that or [name] was incredibly wasted.

AUs: (many from this blog! Complete credit to them)

Masquerade Ball AU: Person A and Person B can’t recognise each other

Frustrated Customer and Tired Employee AU

Hitman AU: Person A and Person B are hired to take each other out

Assassin AU: After watching B for so long, A has begun to fall for them

Pirate/Mermaid AU

Coffee Shop AU: Why’d you have to smile at me like that, I couldn’t even concentrate on your order oh god I’m blushing why am I so fLUSTERED

Overthrown Royalty AU: Okay so I love you and all, but why the fuck did you have to start a war they’re going to kill you - you’re a dead (queen/king) walking and I hope you know that.

Blood dripped down B’s chin. A knew B was a vampire. A knew they needed blood. But it was a little offensive when B drank from others!Vampire AU

my little sister really looks up to you because she’s going through that phase so she’ll probably kill me again when i get home!Idol AU

Fantasy AU: A is suspicious of the legends. You know, those legends. Everyone knew about them. The ones about the dragons in the hills.

Spy AU: “Fuck, why did you have to be the one to join me on this mission you do realise that it’s dangerous and they don’t care whether we die or not.”

I know my cupcakes are better than your blueberry muffins and that’s what matters and wait holy shit these are actually pretty good!Baking AU

Medieval AU

(Alt) Modern AU

We were both stood up by our dates at this fancy restaurant and they have an ‘at least two to a table’ policy so you need to have dinner with me AU

I know shit all about music theory but I’ve already written and composed hit songs while you’ve been taking lessons for years and struggle with melody please don’t kill me!Musician AU

I answered your weirdly specific craigslist roommate ad as a joke and now we’re living together!Roommates AU

You’re really short and cute and you buy a cup of black coffee every morning but you make weird faces as you sip it and you never finish your drink are you trying to look mature or something!coffee shop AU

reincarnation AU: person A meets their favourite band/singer and realises they were friends in a past life

Hello I’m your boss and you’re the new employee who just saw me shove an entire cupcake into my mouth!Office AU

We’re neighbours and you work at a flower shop and your place is always filled with flowers. I’m too self-conscious to say anything, but I’m allergic af and I look like I’ve been crying every time we meet. Now you probably think I’m in an abusive relationship or something omg

I don’t really know you but we’ve shared a bus stop for years and I just got my first car and I hope this isn’t weird but what I’m trying to say is do you want to carpool with me from now on? Like, to save the environment, I mean.

I can’t give you what you want, why didn’t I leave before we go too emotionally involved AU

I came up to the roof of our apartment building at 2 AM to see this asteroid go by and just as I stepped out you came running at me screaming so naturally I froze and you’re screaming at me so loud I can’t understand what you’re - oh the door locks behind you. Well now we’re both locked out here gdi

someone in the dorms makes amazing cookies and you’re trying to figure it out and walk in on me baking at four in the morning!College AU

I found you duct-taped to a telephone pole thirty feet off the ground

Just to be polite, I held the door open for you but now we’re both insisting that the other go first and we’re seriously about to get into an argument about it and cAN YOU JUST WALK THROUGH THE DOOR P L E A S E

I’m in this museum for a school project, but you are apparently here for fun and good lord you are good looking, so I’m totally going to pretend I know anything at all about the life and works of this random artist…Rembrandt, you say?

IKEA AU: I’m a cashier and when you looked for your wallet about a hundred of our pencils dropped out of your pocket, that’s actually pretty impressive where did you even hide them?

I was rehearsing lines for the romantic lead and I didn’t see you through that window, I had no idea that YOU were playing my romantic interest and now I can’t remember a single line

I tried my hand at this thing called cooking but I ended up making enough to feed a small army. You’re my next door neighbour, so like, are you hungry? You can bring the beer

Soulmates:

Looking around, A tried to spot their best friend when they saw it. Their own handwriting, on someone else’s arm.

A sees B in their mirror every night. They’ve never met in real life.

You can see colours but realise that recently, with each passing day, your world of colours is becoming a little duller and you’re panicking because you don’t know what’s going on, or what it means, or if your soulmate is okay.

We’re having our first argument as a married couple: do we explore this island, or do we stay in bed all day

I can’t give you what you want, why didn’t I leave before we go too emotionally involved AU

You’re not sure if the other half of your tattoo should end with this person’s words, or that one’s—wait, I think it might end with the phrase of that other person too. It’s just a very open-ended sentence…

You’re an Angel and I’m a Demon and we met while hiding in human form and I love you

Author:

Write an apology letter to the character you hurt the most.

Complete the sentence for [character]: “I think the most important thing in the world is…”

You see someone being hit in the street. What superpower would you like to have in this situation?

Write a scenario where you meet your characters.

Would your characters like you? As a person or as an author?

Have a philosophical conversation with your characters.

I would love if you added your own prompts to this! I’ll probably go back and add more later. in the meantime, i’ll go hunt down all the necessary credits! byee~

[avengers-nextgen]

Prometheus XV

The others were busy preparing for bed. They’d handle the clean up tomorrow and prayed that none of the Asgardians decided to kill each other.

Piper had managed to clean up her mess from working on a new project and was lounging in bed scrolling aimlessly through her phone. Part of her wondered what the others were up to but at the same time she figured it couldn’t be too important.

Time ran into hours of unintentional time wasting until a little green notification sprung up.

Meet me outside. I have a delivery.

The vagueness of the text was all Piper needed to scramble out of bed. Having broken focus on her phone she finally heard the thrum of rain and the gentle roll of thunder. How was Gen outside during a storm like this? The girl hated the New York streets when they were full of nasty water and smelling of sewage.

Whatever it was Piper figured it had to have been important. Pulling on a jacket she slunk soundlessly down the hallway to the lift. The heavy duty elevator carried her down to the main floor.

Hardly anyone was still awake and a closed sign hung in the large glass doorway. Outside Piper saw Gen soaked to the bone bouncing up and down trying to stay warm. Mumbling a curse, the youngest Stark drew up her hood and stepped outside.

Rain hammered on the sidewalk and the gentle noise was now a roar in her ears. Droplets attacked her jacket with a vengeance and lightning overhead ignited the sky. Piper wondered if it had to do with the conversation going on upstairs.

“You were awake!” Gen smiled. A backpack was slung snugly on her back, and her jacket hood was down. She must have given up on trying to stay dry.

“You know my schedule is shit,” Piper laughed, “but that doesn’t explain why you’re out here.”

“I...uh-well I brought these.” Piper watched the other girl struggle to take off the backpack. With an amused sigh Piper helped her out of it. Gen plopped it down onto the wet pavement drawing out a clear cylinder tube. “Blueprints.”

“You could have dropped them off tomorrow morning,” Piper rolled her eyes. “These must be important. What is it? A nuclear toaster?”

“No.” Gen shook her head. “It’s all of my recent work.”

Standing up once more Gen held out the container like a peace offering. Piper arched a brow taking the cylinder and examining it carefully. It was sealed alright. No water damage. “Why do I need all of this? If it’s for projects we can just compare notes.”

“That’s the thing...” Gen awkwardly brushed her hair behind her ear, “...I can’t do anymore projects with you.”

Piper’s eyes went wide with surprise before her expression morphed into a frown, “What? Why? Is it your parents being anal about your science again?”

“No!” Gen hurriedly interrupted before Piper could ask anymore questions. “I’m going to school in Europe Piper. I got a scholarship that literally no one gets. It’s a once in a lifetime thing.”

“Still, you have time to finish these.” Piper went to hand back the cylinder but Gen tucked her hands into her pockets.

“That’s the other thing...I leave in three hours.”

“What?” Piper gaped at the other girl looking very much like a fish. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“You were busy with hero stuff. I didn’t want to burden you. Not to mention you needed my help for the mission. I couldn’t afford distracting you.” Gen explained, kicking half heartedly at a small puddle.

“Gen, I’m only a hero second to being normal Piper Stark.” Piper felt her chest deflate at the idea of Gen being all the way across the world. “You should have told me.”

“I know that. And I feel like shit.” Gen sighed, “but that’s why I’m here now. I was going to just go but-I don’t know. It didn’t seem right.”

“Yeah. I’d have been pissed. I’d have flown my ass all the way over there just to kill you.” Piper snorted, crossing her arms. “I always pegged you as a New York girl, you know.”

“I am.” Gen assured, “it’s only temporary.”

“Things are going to be weird.” Piper mumbled. “Is there no way to get you to stay?”

“I don’t know Pipes....”

“What if I hired you?”

“You have before.” Gen reminded,

“No. I mean permanently. Full time.” Piper decided.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I decided it just now.” Piper nodded firmly, “full time. Right here and now. It’s up for grabs.”

“Piper.” Gen gave her an incredulous look but when Piper didn’t move she knew that the Stark wasn’t joking.

“You could go anywhere. No school needed. You could learn anything and everything you wanted. Make anything. Do whatever you wanted. I can fund it all too.” Piper’s eyes glinted with a childish light, “all you have to do is say yes.”

Piper watched anxiously as Gen pursed her lips getting lost in thought. She could practically see gears turning in the other girl’s head.

“Okay,” Gen replied hesitantly, “you want to hire me full time? Okay.”

Piper’s smile was the widest one she’d ever worn. She tackled Gen in a tight hug and cheered in triumph. “I knew my methods of persuasion were impeccable.”

“You give yourself a lot of credit.” Gen snorted.

— — —

“You know sitting and staring at that isn’t going to make it any better.” Alex jumped in surprise and glanced over her shoulder to find Sage leaning in the bathroom doorway with a bandaged hand.

“Yeah.” Alex nodded, turning her attention back to the bathtub. It’s warm water was most likely cold now. She’d been looking forward to washing up but then the memories came back. “What’re you doing here? I thought the storm would have driven you off to hide in Bianca’s room.”

“It’s not so bad in here,” Sage shrugged, “it’s quiet.”

“Did the family meeting go well?” Alex asked.

“Not exactly.” Sage admitted.

“You know you’re going to have to forgive them one day. The only person being hurt by your anger is yourself.”

“Hurt people, hurt people.” Sage sighed, “I know. I just can’t bring myself to do it. It’s hard.”

“That’s the point,” Alex snorted. Sage rolled her eyes and plopped down onto the ground next to Alex.

“You gonna drain the tub or still stare at it?”

“I was hoping to actual wash up.” Alex mumbled, “but I can’t- I can’t do it. I just keep picturing the water again and the burning of my lungs and the helplessness...”

“Is showering any different?”

“It’s better but still-“ Alex shook her head, “it’s hard.”

“I’d imagine.”

“You know, I didn’t have any nightmares like everyone else did. But now everyone’s fine and I can hardly sleep. When I close my eyes that stupid masked face is still there and I’m underwater again.” Alex’s hands played nervously with the hem of her shirt. “He said he’d never really go away and I thought that was stupid-“

“But as long as he exists to one person he’s not dead.” Sage concluded.

“Yeah.” Alex nodded. “Something like that.”

“Guess we both have tough things to work out.” Sage frowned.

“I guess.”

A long pause settled between them all the while the bath water grew colder. It was Sage who finally broke the silence with a question Alex never thought she’d hear.

“How do you forgive someone?”

— — —

Bianca was attempting to give Arthur a pep talk along with Enzo. The two were failing miserably.

“And if she says no then it’s okay. I mean most girls reject people but that’s alright.” Enzo assured the older boy.

“And we’re here if you want to cry about it.” Bianca promised, patting Arthur on the shoulder.

“You guys really know how to make a guy feel like crap.” Arthur shook his hands out nervously.

“Okay, I don’t normally get into business I find stupid but these idiots are idiots.” Fox glowered poking her head into the room having over heard the conversation. “Ask her out. Be honest about it. All of it. If you’re awkward just say ‘I’m sorry if I’m a bit awkward about this. I’ve never asked a girl out before. Anyways I think you’re cute and blah blah blah.’ It’s endearing rather than awkwardly stammering.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Arthur nodded. “Thanks.”

“You stole my job.” Enzo glowered at Fox.

“Oops.” She smirked before leaving the trio behind.

Arthur straightened his shoulders and after a few nervous breaths he headed down the hall to pause at his sister’s doorway. His knuckles tapped against the frame and Chloe opened the door a few seconds later. “Hey.”

“Hey, is Penny there?” Arthur asked, feeling his throat go dry.

“Yeah, one second.” Chloe stepped aside and collected the other girl from her bed where she’d been attempting to teach Chloe Smash Bros.

“Hey Arthur, what’s up?” Penny grinned setting the controller aside. “Dude your sister is actually really good at this game. It’s freaking crazy! She’s already memorized the combos! I don’t understand!”

“That’s great!” Arthur laughed. “Hey I was wondering something and you don’t have to answer right away. I also don’t want you to feel pressured into a response. But would you maybe like to go out sometime? Like to lunch or something? It can be a date or a hang out or whatever you want. I just haven’t really asked anyone like you to hang out before.”

Arthur held his breath in anticipation and watched as Penny pursed her lips. “That depends on where we’re going. Does the place have bacon?”

“It can!” Arthur replied hurriedly.

“Then I’m sold.” Penny smiled. “Also ice cream is good too. Unless you’re lactose intolerant. Then you can forget about the ice cream.”

“You’re rambling Pen.” Chloe called from deeper inside the room. “Focus.”

“Right. Yes. Lunch is good.” Penny decided.

“Great. Twelve tomorrow?” Arthur asked, feeling like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Twelve tomorrow.” Penny agreed.

— — —

“You just did a nice thing.” James grinned.

“Shut up.”

“You just helped Arthur get a date.”

“Not a word.” For huffed.

“I am proud.” James sighed, mirroring his mother’s look of pride.

“I will castrate you.” Fox’s threat seemed to do the trick and James stopped talking. “That’s what I thought.”

“I knew you were a good person.”

“Okay mister you have three seconds to run and hide.” James took off laughing like a maniac before Fox could finish her threat. He’d learned all of the best hiding spots from Scout. The boy found the craziest places to read.

— — —

“Listen to this one.” Orion suggested passing over the head phones. He was trying to create a Playlist for his boyfriend. One that was soothing and relaxing since he worried so much. “Like it? Thumbs up or down?”

“Like it.” Scout decided. Orion nodded and added it to the label ‘Scouty’s’.

“Next one.”

The two went back and forth for nearly an hour until Orion was satisfied with the list.

“How’s it look?”

“Great.” Orion smiled, scooting over on his bed to show Scout his phone screen. “Now you can favorite ones you like and unfavorite them when you get bored. You can also add other songs to the playlist and this is where the software recommends other choices you might like based off of what you listen to.”

“I’ve never thought about doing this. It’s really cool. But are you sure you won’t mind if I have your phone on me most of the time?” Scout worried. “I know you like your own music.”

“I go old school babe.” Orion reminded him. “I have my cassette player. As long as I have that I’m all set. And you of course.”

“Suck up.” Scout teased, but he didn’t mind. Orion really was better than most of his books. Not all of them but most of them. He was certainly entertaining and more loveable than any of the characters. “But at least you’re a cute suck up.”

[joemerl]

“A Swiftly Tilting Planet” is Awful and I Hate It

I don’t know if anybody cares about my opinions, but I built up a lot of bile reading this book and I have to get rid of it somehow.

Background

For those who don’t know, this is the third book in Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet, aka “A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels that you’ve never heard of before.” The series involves a family that goes on Science Fantasy-type adventures with beings sent from a vaguely-defined, vaguely Christian bureaucracy of magical aliens. I’ll discuss the previous books a bit, but the series is pretty episodic so we don’t really need to recap them. 

In this story, the world is about to end because a South American dictator has a nuke. Our protagonist, the psychic teenager Charles Wallace, must work with a time-traveling winged unicorn from space to prevent this catastrophe by entering the minds of people from the past. It is much less interesting than it sounds.

Spoilers to follow.

These One-Dimensional Characters Keep Giving Birth to Themselves Like a Flock of Infuriatingly Dull Phoenixes 

The main plot has Charles Wallace travel to ca. 1170, ca. 1693 (Salem Witch Trials), ca. 1865 and ca. 1930s (or whenever Mrs. O’Keefe would have been a kid), plus the then-present day of 1978. Along the way, he chronicles the histories of several families, which include, by my count, about 30 characters who have only half a dozen different names and two personalities between them. 

The Maddox-Llawcaes: Technically two families, but they keep intermarrying each other to the point where I’m seriously questioning how inbred their modern descendants must be. This family was founded by a bunch of cliché Native Americans (stoic, wise, and otherwise devoid of personality) who married some woke Welshmen, repeatedly over multiple generations. They’re good. 

Gwydyr and his descendants: Distant relatives of the above, but descended from their patriarch’s ~evil~ brother. They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The Mortmains: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The O’Keefes: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women. Also, they seem to hate disabled people. 

This is arguably a sex-linked trait; the one female character from an “evil” family seems relatively alright, but when she marries a Maddox-Llawcae she still passes evil on to their descendants. This turns out to be the driving crux of this story: Charles Wallace learns that the dictator is descended from that couple and was corrupted by his ancestress’ ~evil~ genes. To avert the apocalypse, Charles Wallace has to change history so that the Maddox-Llawcae man marries a Maddox-Llawcae woman instead. 

It’s pretty much impossible to interpret this as being about upbringing; it’s about blood. "Gwydyr’s line is tainted,” Charles Wallace says near the end. “There is nothing left but pride and greed for power and revenge.” At another point, a Maddox-Llawcae immediately writes off his unborn half-brother as evil because he has a Mortmain father. And he’s right---Unnamed Mortmain Sibling grows up to be a criminal and dies in jail. Hopefully without managing to pass on his dirty, inferior genes first, amirite? 

It doesn’t help that, even separated by centuries, relatives are often described as looking alike and/or having variations of the same names. Of those 30ish characters in these families we have three Mad(d)o(c)(k)/Madogs, two Gwydyrs, five Rich/Ritchie/Richards, three Bran(don)s, two Matt(hew)s, two Duthbert Mortmains (yeah, because that’s a name you want to keep in circulation for 300 years), and most egregiously of all, four of the main female characters are Zyll, Zylle, Zillah and Zillie. (Technically there are three Zillahs, if you count middle names.)

Obviously, genetic determinism is a questionable moral. It’s also really annoying, because each time period has the same basic characters just going through a variant of the same plot. There is hardly any character development across 800 years of history, and no permanent change from good to bad or vice versa.

In a way, this even ruins the previous books---Calvin O’Keefe became a good guy despite his dysfunctional family, but now I get the feeling that this isn’t supposed to be a testament to his strength as a person, it was just his mom’s Good Maddox Genes breaking through the Evil O’Keefe Heritage. But hey, the focus on Mom O’Keefe was nice in this book, since she’s practically the only one who has an actual character arc. 

Though, as you’ll see below, she was not actually needed for this story at all.

This Universe Has No God, Just a Tyrannical Plot Outline

Charles Wallace is the protagonist of this story, but probably gets mentioned on fewer than half of its pages. Mostly, he’s just psychically possessing people, during which time he does not control them so much as see their lives and...vaguely influence them, sometimes. What I’m saying is, he doesn’t really do much in this story. His grand moment, in the penultimate chapter, is to vaguely influence Matthew Maddox #1 to vaguely influence Rich Llawcae #3 to not to get stabbed by Gwydyr #2. This saves the world, but seems somewhat anticlimactic after 287 pages of build-up.

What’s worse: he actually tried to make this story shorter, and save me so much suffering. Unfortunately, “God” wouldn’t let him. At least, for a certain sense of the word. 

The Time Quintet is sort of like Chronicles of Narnia in that it’s a Christian story, but you have to dig a little beneath the surface to realize that. L’Engle’s beliefs were also more liberal than Lewis’, and in this book they seem almost pantheistic: Charles Wallace’s help seems to come less from a personal deity and more from a sort of implied sentience of the universe itself. This usually comes in the form of “the wind,” which blows him and the unicorn to different time periods at its own whim. 

Charles Wallace’s arc is that he is apparently a control freak, and needs to trust God/the universe to lead him, or something. He figures out early on that the key to everything is in 1865, but the unicorn says that no, we have to let the wind blow us where it wants. Twice he tries to fast-track things, and each time he and the unicorn almost die as a result; thus he learns that no, he should not be relying on his own intelligence or logic, he should just ~go with the flow~ and assume that things will work out. 

So basically, Charles Wallace has been tasked by Vague God to prevent the apocalypse, but he’s not allowed to do anything to actually try to prevent it---he’s basically just pushed into random corners and told to stay quiet, with the hope that his presence will change history through osmosis. I find myself comparing this to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While I have some criticisms of this subplot, in that book Harry is presented with a choice: do what he thinks will save the world (looking into the Deathly Hallows), or what the Omniscient God Stand-In says will work (finding Voldemort’s Horcruxes). That works well enough, but here, Charles Wallace is given the choice between his own ideas and no actual instructions. He’s told to save the world, and then criticized for trying. 

There’s a part where the Echthroi (demons who want the nuclear apocalypse to happen) try to trick Charles Wallace by preying on his ego. This involves telling him he was selected to save the world because he’s intelligent and psychic and is a generally moral person, all of which is true. He rejects this, as he is supposed to, and at the end of the book notes that the mission did not succeed “because I was intelligent, or brave, or in control,” but because he let the wind guide him. Which just leads me to wonder why he was the one chosen to save humanity, when Vague God could have sent anyone else, or just cut out the middle-man and had a unicorn tell Bran Maddox #3 whom he was supposed to marry. 

But what really makes this intolerable? Charles Wallace was right. The key to everything is in 1865, he eventually gets blown there anyway, and it’s the only place where he concretely needed to do anything. So why the hell did we need 40 awful pages set during the Salem Witch Trials?! To teach us that the Salem Witch Trials were bad? Even the whole part in ca. 1930s was pointless---the only plot-relevant thing that we got there were hints about 1865′s importance, which Charles Wallace had already figured out but was scolded for suggesting. Other than that, these sections were just used to hammer in the idea that Maddox-Llawcaes are always good and the other families are always evil. 

So, my rewrite: Charles Wallace goes to 1170 and sees Madoc and Gwydyr. Then he either a.) figures out the importance of 1865 with his family’s help, as he does in the book, or b.) goes to the 1930s and figures things out from the clues there, while also learning the fairly-interesting-but-technically-irrelevant backstory about Mrs. O’Keefe. Either way, he decides to go to 1865, thus justifying his role as protagonist, and the fact that he is actively trying to save the world is not treated as a moral failing. 

Comparisons to the Previous Books, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love at Bombs

This is my third Madeline L’Engle book, and really, these problems were present in the first two, even if they were less pronounced. Both ended with the protagonist (Charles Wallace’s older sister Meg, who arguably is more important than him in this book, too) saving the day with the Power of Love---meaning that she didn’t so much do anything as feel a certain way. Here, Charles Wallace does even less, just watching other people fall in love while his own character arc is in opposition to the actual plot. 

L’Engle’s strength does not seem to be coherent stories or complex characterization so much as weird, cool ideas---for example, a time-traveling space unicorn. But compared to previous books, this one is pretty down-to-earth; after hitching a ride on said unicorn, Charles Wallace mostly just watches people live fairly typical lives. While A Wrinkle in Time’s villain, a demonic alien brain, could theoretically wither at the approach of a sibling’s love, it’s harder to imagine a nuclear war being averted by nothing more than some shoehorned character development. 

For the record, I bought the fourth Time Quintet book at the same time as this one. I really, really hope that it’s better, but it will probably be a while before I get to it. 

Other Nitpicks

The whole clue leading to 1865 involves a book written by Matthew Maddox #1, who’s from that time. It’s about time-traveling unicorns and family feuds and the like, the basic idea being that he witnesses Charles Wallace and all the supernatural happenings and writes it down as a novel. Fine, okay, but people who talk about this novel keep emphasizing how revolutionary and amazing it was, which kind of feels like L’Engle just patting herself on the back for this awful, awful story.

At the end of the book, the time-traveling unicorn erases the memories of Charles Wallace and his sister Meg, for...some reason? I honestly don’t know why he did this; the pair knew about supernatural creatures even before this book, and they can still half-remember what happened anyway, so this seems pretty pointless. 

This line, from the 1865 arc: “When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil.” Not a bad point, but juxtaposed to the characters’ passivity I can’t help but snark: “Yeah, why can’t people just love at each other and magically fix everything, right?”

I’m Tough But Fair: Some Good Points

There are time-traveling winged unicorns from space. They eat moonlight, drink starlight, and hatch from eggs, as we see on a brief trip to their home planet. So yeah, L’Engle is pretty good at Science Fantasy weirdness.

Honestly, the other filler chapters were pretty good too, if only because they distract from the annoying main story. Even the purple prose about “the harmonies of the universe” are alright sometimes. 

Like I said, Mrs. O’Keefe could have been cut, but her arc, going from innocent little girl to crotchety old lady to redeemed old lady, was a good one. And her brother being named “Chuck,” like Charles Wallace, actually felt like it meant something instead of being yet another case of Generation Xerox. 

Along those lines, I like that the Murrays didn’t turn out to be some distant cousins of the Maddox-Llawcaes. That would have been annoying.

The 1865 arc was easily the best in the book. Even with the blood-based moral alignments, the characters still had actual arcs about overcoming disabilities, PTSD...like, expand this and cut out the stupid Salem Witch Trial arc, which was so, so bad. Also, was I just imagining it, or was Matthew #1 in love with Zillah #1? ‘Cause him arranging for her to marry Bran #3 is even more touching if he did. 

Conclusion

Um...the book sucked. 

I wrote this over three days, and it wound up being more than 2,200 words. Wow.