#their not from the Specter Spider universe

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

My submission to the second @spidersociety-rejects zine!

I’ve always struggled with making a Spider-sona since I’m a boring person and don’t particularly love how I look. Figuring out a Spidersona that actually represents me and that I like was an interesting challenge and confidence builder.

[book--brackets]

The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine (2001)

Twelve-year-old Addie admires her older sister Meryl, who aspires to rid the kingdom of Bamarre of gryphons, specters, and ogres. Addie, on the other hand, is fearful even of spiders and depends on Meryl for courage and protection. Waving her sword Bloodbiter, the older girl declaims in the garden from the heroic epic of Drualt to a thrilled audience of Addie, their governess, and the young sorcerer Rhys. 

But when Meryl falls ill with the dreaded Gray Death, Addie must gather her courage and set off alone on a quest to find the cure and save her beloved sister. Addie takes the seven-league boots and magic spyglass left to her by her mother and the enchanted tablecloth and cloak given to her by Rhys - along with a shy declaration of his love. She prevails in encounters with tricky specters (spiders too) and outwits a wickedly personable dragon in adventures touched with romance and a bittersweet ending.

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams (1988-1992)

A war fueled by the powers of dark sorcery is about to engulf the peaceful land of Osten Ard—for Prester John, the High King, lies dying. And with his death, the Storm King, the undead ruler of the elf-like Sithi, seizes the chance to regain his lost realm through a pact with the newly ascended king. Knowing the consequences of this bargain, the king’s younger brother joins with a small, scattered group of scholars, the League of the Scroll, to confront the true danger threatening Osten Ard.

Simon, a kitchen boy from the royal castle unknowingly apprenticed to a member of this League, will be sent on a quest that offers the only hope of salvation, a deadly riddle concerning long-lost swords of power. Compelled by fate and perilous magics, he must leave the only home he’s ever known and face enemies more terrifying than Osten Ard has ever seen, even as the land itself begins to die.

Starbound by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (2013-2015)

It's a night like any other on board the Icarus. Then, catastrophe strikes: the massive luxury spaceliner is yanked out of hyperspace and plummets into the nearest planet. Lilac LaRoux and Tarver Merendsen survive. And they seem to be alone. 

Lilac is the daughter of the richest man in the universe. Tarver comes from nothing, a young war hero who learned long ago that girls like Lilac are more trouble than they're worth. But with only each other to rely on, Lilac and Tarver must work together, making a tortuous journey across the eerie, deserted terrain to seek help. 

Then, against all odds, Lilac and Tarver find a strange blessing in the tragedy that has thrown them into each other's arms. Without the hope of a future together in their own world, they begin to wonder-would they be better off staying here forever? 

Everything changes when they uncover the truth behind the chilling whispers that haunt their every step. Lilac and Tarver may find a way off this planet. But they won't be the same people who landed on it.

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (2004-2024)

Meet the great Skulduggery Pleasant: wise-cracking detective, powerful magician, master of dirty tricks and burglary (in the name of the greater good, of course). Oh yeah. And dead.

Then there's his sidekick, Stephanie. She's… well, she's a twelve-year-old girl. With a pair like this on the case, evil had better watch out…

Stephanie's uncle Gordon is a writer of horror fiction. But when he dies and leaves her his estate, Stephanie learns that while he may have written horror, it certainly wasn't fiction. Pursued by evil forces intent on recovering a mysterious key, Stephanie finds help from an unusual source – the wisecracking skeleton of a dead wizard.

When all hell breaks loose, it's lucky for Skulduggery that he's already dead. Though he's about to discover that being a skeleton doesn't stop you from being tortured, if the torturer is determined enough. And if there's anything Skulduggery hates, it's torture… Will evil win the day? Will Stephanie and Skulduggery stop bickering long enough to stop it? One thing's for sure: evil won't know what's hit it.

Fairest by Gail Carson Levine (2006)

Once upon a time, there was a girl who wanted to be pretty . . .

Aza's singing is the fairest in all the land, and the most unusual. She can throw her voice so it seems to come from anywhere. But singing is only one of the two qualities prized in the Kingdom of Ayortha. Aza doesn't possess the other: beauty. Not even close. She's hidden in the shadows in her parents' inn, but when she becomes lady-in-waiting to the new queen, she has to step into the light--especially when the queen demands a dangerous favor. A magic mirror, a charming prince, a jealous queen, palace intrigue, and an injured king twine into a maze that Aza must penetrate to save herself and her beloved kingdom.

Trickster's Duology by Tamora Pierce (2003-2004)

Alianne is the teenage daughter of the famed Alanna, the first lady knight in Tortall. Young Aly follows in the quieter footsteps of her father, however, delighting in the art of spying. When she is captured and sold as a slave to an exiled royal family in the faraway Copper Islands, it is this skill that makes a difference in a world filled with political intrigue, murderous conspiracy, and warring gods. This is the first of two books featuring Alianne.

Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu (2015-present)

Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers.

Lockwood & Co by Jonathan Stroud (2013-2017)

When the dead come back to haunt the living, Lockwood & Co. step in . . .

For more than fifty years, the country has been affected by a horrifying epidemic of ghosts. A number of Psychic Investigations Agencies have sprung up to destroy the dangerous apparitions.

Lucy Carlyle, a talented young agent, arrives in London hoping for a notable career. Instead she finds herself joining the smallest, most ramshackle agency in the city, run by the charismatic Anthony Lockwood. When one of their cases goes horribly wrong, Lockwood & Co. have one last chance of redemption. Unfortunately this involves spending the night in one of the most haunted houses in England, and trying to escape alive.

Protector of the Small by Tamora Pierce (1999-2002)

Keladry of Mindelan is the first girl who dares to take advantage of a new rule in Tortall—one that allows females to train for knighthood. After years in the Yamani Islands, she knows that women can be warriors, and now that she’s returned home, Kel is determined to achieve her goal. She believes she is ready for the traditional hazing and grueling schedule of a page. But standing in Kel’s way is Lord Wyldon. The training master is dead set against girls becoming knights. He says she must pass a one-year trial that no male page has ever had to endure. It’s just one more way to separate Kel from her fellow trainees. But she is not to be underestimated. She will fight to succeed, even when the test is unfair.

Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes (2012-2018)

Princess Cleo of Mytica confronts violence for the first time in her life when a shocking murder sets her kingdom on a path to collapse. Once a privileged royal, Cleo must now summon the strength to survive in this new world and fight for her rightful place as Queen. 

 The King of Limeros's son, Magnus, must plan each footstep with shrewd, sharp guile if he is to earn his powerful father's trust, while his sister, Lucia, discovers a terrifying secret about her heritage that will change everything. 

 Rebellious Jonas lashes out against the forces of oppression that have kept his country cruelly impoverished--and finds himself the leader of a people's revolution centuries in the making. 

 Witches, if found, are put to death, and Watchers, immortal beings who take the shape of hawks to visit the human world, have been almost entirely forgotten. A vicious power struggle quickly escalates to war, and these four young people collide against each other and the rise of elementia, the magic that can topple kingdoms and crown a ruler in the same day.

[nanamimizz]

Ohhhh what's your spidersona like? 👀👀👀 Hobie is so so so cool <3

prepare to be sick of me. btw guys i will tag this spiderman talk just so you guys can block this tag on my blog if u are not interested. my spidersona is both an oc and my self-insert and oz is a real one for listening to me create her. it's all here under the cut !

 SPIDER FROST - EARTH; 1106 YEAR; 2077 AGE; 20 NAME; MELANIA DANTE(ANIMAL VER MELAMBIA) PRONOUNS; SHE/HER SEXUALITY; BISEXUAL

A child genius she was orphaned at a young age as her mother died in childbirth and her father died in a construction accident ( he was an architect) when it was revealed that she had much more potential than her peers she was sent to higher-end academies and universities as a ward of the state and soon met the current leader of biological studies Dr.Faith at the young age of 13-14. From then to the age of 19 Melania was a huge addition to the team that focused on altering the genetics of species to get them to replace extinct species in different biomes in the world. When working on creating a species of spider to deal with an evolved species of bark beetles that have no natural predators and are invasive to the countries in the arctic circle is when she was bitten.

At age 18, on her birthday Melania was bitten by the then-dubbed Frost Weaving Spider known for creating web fluid far much more sturdy than any other spider on the planet, and that mimicked the properties of ice. She wasn’t all that thrilled with the powers, Melania has no desire to be the hero and only wants to dedicate her life to research and helping the balance of life and is passive in the face of crime and injustice in the city of New Angeles (A mix of New York and Los Angeles) despite all her capabilities to stand up to it until a rising all right wave comes knocking at her door.

The all-right party comes with a challenge, with politicians eager to go back to things such as oil drilling to make millions of political groups aim to target any and all environmental scientists to send a political message. Dr. Faith’s labs are one of them and in an act of terrorism, the lab - Melania’s one and only home is blown up. Among the rubble, due to her stronger constitution, Melania finds Dr.Faith’s body near death and can only listen to her mentor’s final words.

“With great power, comes great consequences.”

There is a line within the comedy, Dante’s Inferno where Dante walks through the earth of limbo - “he who disrupts the earth that he walks” and it’s meant to illustrate how Dante, unlike all the spirits and specters of limbo, moves with human weight through the rings of hell. There is a consequence to the power of his steps and that is what the lesson that Melania is to learn. Whichever path Melania chose, there is a consequence - in this case, her passivity led to the death of the closest thing she had to a family figure. If Melania had risen to the mantle of Spider Frost, could she have saved Dr. Faith? Who knows, but the possibility will always be there and so will the grief and the regret.

Those who have been handed power can not be passive, they must use it - lest the consequences of their inaction come knocking on their doorstep.

This is her canon event and the spark that leads her to rise to the mantle and by the events of Across the Spider-Verse she has been Spider Frost for 2 years. She was brought into the Spider Society after defeating the same Prowler(Donald Glover) that fellow Spiderman - Spiderpunk brought in after he appeared in her universe. She left a lasting impression on Hobie Brown despite her withdrawn nature both due to her skills and her strong desire to fight off corrupt politics in her own universe which is something they bond over. With her genius, Melania is well versed in other things outside of environmental studies - with a keen mind anything is possible and her knowledge of technology, quantum physics, and the like are proven many times. It is because of this that she does not exactly follow Miguel O’hara’s canon event theory and is quick to sit with Miles during the great chase scene. She appears alongside Gwen, Peter B.Parker, Penni, Spidernoir, Spiderham, SpiderByte, Spiderman India, etc to save Miles when he is sent to Earth 42. 

Melania is an extremely shy and quiet person, from childhood to now she often goes unnoticed by the people around her until she speaks - it’s a running gag that not even others with spidey sense can sense her presence. Melania after losing her family at a young age had a hard time connecting with her peers and adults, finding comfort in academics and later on in Dr. Fath. In some ways she is quite immature, thinking that she will always be the quiet bookworm genius despite the new path her powers open. A huge part of her journey comes from her maturing that she can not be the same person forever, she must change and she must grow. However, despite her enduring silent nature, she did experience her first love with the Black Cat variant of her universe, Felicia Hardy who only used Melania’s researcher identity to steal valuable silkworm breeds that are said to produce golden silk to sell on the black market.

Felicia Hardy was apprehended by Spider Frost that same night, and Felicia Hardy is the only one on Earth 1106 to piece together that Spider Frost and Researcher Melania are one and the same. This experience was quite harrowing, and now Melania lives in the same research lab she uses to try to recreate all the knowledge that was lost in Dr. Faith’s own lab that was destroyed due to the grants she has, Melania lives in one of the most technologically advanced buildings in New Angeles. 

Melania’s suit is very similar to SpiderGwen’s suit being primarily white, blue and black rather than the common red and blue. With the body being white, one can see the patterns of light blue snowflakes instead of the web designs that pattern most Spidepeople suits, and even the pronounced spider that rests on her chest sits on a blue snowflake. She wears a hood lined with fur and the cuffs of the suit are fur lined as well. Because of the time period, like Miguel, she too has access to nanotech which is apparent in her mask. The suit and hood are fabric but the mask is nanotech that comes from two devices placed in her ears. In order for the lenses to zoom in they turn into slits - inspired by the snow-glasses Inuit people created to avoid snow blindness in the arctic circle.

Her abilities are as follows, the typical strength and agility of spider people paired with the spidey sense. The only differences are her webs as they turn from liquid to solid at a record speed and mimic the properties of ice in appearance and touch. Like Miles Morales, she can also camouflage as most creatures in the arctic circle depend on that survival skill too. As many different spider people have a specific way of moving - for example, Gwen takes inspiration from ballet and Pavitir moves with the style of Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial style Melania moves with the speed and grace of an ice skater. Another way that Melania differs from spider people is like Tobey Maguire’s iteration of Spiderman: she shoots webs out organically rather than from a handheld device like many other modern iterations of the hero. Because of this, she will often spray her webs onto her legs and arms, letting them harden and shaping them with her movements to create protective wear or weapons for more offensive potential. Because of her funds, Melania has access to other technology that other spider people don’t have and in some ways, this parallels her to the character Batman, especially in the 2022 movie rendition where he uses eye contacts that record everything she sees. Melania actually uses prescription glasses and her eyes are often sore at the end of the day.

Out of the entire cast, Melania is closest to Hobie Brown due to their age, similar enemies, and years of experience they are often paired with each other on missions from the Spider Society. Hobie is outgoing, sociable, and easy to get along with so he slowly breaks her icy exterior alongside Pav and Gwen. Even going as far as housing Gwen during her time at the Spider Society.

[themculibrary]

Star Wars/Jedi AU Masterlist

Avengers: Infinite Wars (fanfiction.net) - free man writer T, 1M

Summary: The Clone Wars are in full swing with the galaxy divided. The Jedi lead the clone army against the infinite droid army of the Separatists. Yet a wild card enters the fray. The Avengers. From there, newer, more sinister and deadlier threats emerge and The Galaxy, no, the universe, shall never be the same again. Phase 4. Co-written by Jebest4781 and BulletStormX.

Banish The Darkness (ao3) - Sishal jon/bucky T, 2k

Summary: Jon Antilles crashlands on earth and the first person he meets is a Bucky who is in the process of taking down a Hydra compound.

Broken Pieces (ao3) - celeste9 nebula/rey T, 4k

Summary: When Rey brought a droid back to her AT-AT with the intention of repairing it and earning herself more credits than she had ever seen in her life, the last thing she was expecting was for the droid to turn out to be not a droid at all, but a cybernetically modified being called Nebula who didn't take well to being scavenged for parts.

Darling, Let's Take Our Time (While It's Still Ours To Take) (ao3) - Voylitscope_speed steve/bucky E, 6k

Summary: (Or: Steve's a rebel pilot with a target on his back, Bucky runs a bar that's a hub for rebel activity, and the two of them have a long history. It's a Star Wars AU.)

Expectations (ao3) - twizzle loki/tony T, 1k

Summary: Loki is a Sith Lord. Tony Stark is a bounty hunter, ready to serve the Empire.

Protectors of the Nebula (fanfiction.net) - What If Universe G, 20k

Summary: The war is over. But the battle has only begun. The Republic has fallen, and the Jedi were slaughtered but some survived. Peter Parker, Spider-Man, Kate Bishop, Hawkeye. Amber Morgan, a Jedi Padawan, and Captain Rex. They have survived Order 66 and are now out on their own, protecting what's left of the Galaxy from the Empire. But are they going to be enough, or is it all for not?

Rebel Defenders: Emergence of the Spectres (Book 1) (ao3) - NaldMoney matt/claire, kanan/hera N/R, 101k

Summary: (MCU/Star Wars Crossover) Hell's Kitchen/Lothal has been ruled by the Empire for 14 years. The appearance of a Jedi leading a small group of Rebels called the Spectres upsets the status quo in this city.

The emergence of the Spectres sets off a war within the criminal underworld and a masked vigilante known as Daredevil attempts to stop it.

Darth Vader seeks Imperial experiment escapees Jessica Jones and Kilgrave for his own personal ambitions. Can the Spectres, Daredevil and Jessica Jones stop Vader and the Empire?

Star Wars: Civil War - Law & Order (ao3) - Justyce_15 mj/peter, kate/america T, 35k

Summary: What if all of the Empire's and Rebellion's leadership was taken out, and now the galaxy was in chaos? This is the story of Michelle Jones, agent of Rebel Intelligence, trying to navigate this galaxy and do the right thing, when the right thing is the hardest thing to do. Can she find love and happiness? And where does Peter Parker fit in to her future?

survivors (you and me both) (ao3) - SinginInTheRaine nebula/rey G, 600

Summary: Nebula arrived with a group of former slaves, freed by Poe and Han and some of the other Jedi from a life in captivity. But unlike the others, she never left. Rey noticed.

The Iron Mandalorian (fanfiction.net) - Bookworm2950 T, 45k

Summary: While recovering from the betrayal of Captain America, Tony receives a video from his long dead mother, showing him the true legacy of his family. One which stretches across the stars into a galaxy far far away.

The Saughteling (ao3) - Claudia_flies, SD_Ryan, zilia  steve/bucky E, 52k

Summary: James Buchanan Barnes and Steve Grant Rogers arrive at the Jedi Temple just over twelve months apart.

Many years later, a disillusioned Jedi Knight Steve Rogers returns to the Core Worlds at the summoning of the Jedi Council. Instead of following the will of the Council, Steve chooses a different path. His quest will lead Steve to confront a specter from his past and finally open himself up to the will of the Force.

The Will of the Force (ao3) - madasthesea G, 2k

Summary: Tony and Peter end up as mentor and mentee in a different universe. Or, should we say, Master and Padawan.

the world turns upside down (ao3) - andibeth82 clint/natasha T, 10k

Summary: “This is Natasha,” says Clint when they arrive on board, pushing his partner forward as Natasha yanks herself away from Clint’s grip. Rey nods curtly; she’s shed the jacket Clint had seen her in earlier and her staff is resting against the wall of the ship.

“You didn’t tell me she piloted the Millennium Falcon,” Natasha hisses as they fall behind, following Rey towards the cockpit.

OR: the one where Clint and Nat meet Rey and Finn, Poe is one hell of a pilot, and everyone wants to join the Resistance.

(trying to be) less volatile, less violent (ao3) - QueenWithABeeThrone anakin/thor T, 9k

Summary: “Typical,” says Darcy. “Crazy drunk guy’s walking around ranting about hammers and Hi-I’m-Dall or whatever and your first instinct is to take pictures of the fancy circle thingy.”

or: Anakin Skywalker, Darcy Lewis, and the time they hit a guy with their car.

Worshiping the Trickster (ao3) - JadeSabre83 loki/jaina E, 10k

Summary: Loki was silent for a long while, then he smiled. It was one of those lazy sort of smiles, the kind that slowly dragged out across his lips. It was also incredibly sexy, if you liked your sexy with a hint of danger to it.

Loki is broken after the destruction of the bifrost. Jaina is broken after the events of the Dark Nest crisis. When Loki finds himself in a galaxy far, far away it's only natural for them to try to piece their fractured lives together.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Phantoms by Joanna Grisham

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/phantoms-by-joanna-grisham/

In Phantoms we are visited by the #ghosts of the dead, the apparitions of former selves, the specters of what might have been and what should have been, dream-ghosts, even the Holy Ghost – a succession of #spirits moving in and out of shadow and light, sometimes at odds with one another, often converging, and ever present, as the speakers mourn shared and personal tragedies and contend with generational and ephemeral losses.

Joanna Grisham’s work has appeared in Gleam, The Emerson Review, The Write Launch, On the Run, and other places. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College & State University and teaches at Austin Peay State University. Phantoms is her first chapbook.

PRAISE FOR Phantoms by Joanna Grisham

In Phantoms, Joanna Grisham’s debut poetry collection, the world is both Holy Ghost and star-shaped mouth. It is a woman reaching into the nothing-space below her thigh as she remembers a lost limb. It is a voiceless girl in a 1910 Georgia sanitarium who recalls a lost child. It is the poet writing a past she can almost taste, like chocolate and ash. Time, Grisham writes, is a lie we use to shape our own selves into something we can bear. The poems in Phantoms do far more than teach us to bear the world—they remind us that we are not alone.

–Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance (The University Press of Kentucky, 2021)

From phantom limbs to cars named Ghost, Grisham swings open the doors to the past and finds the skeletons smoking Vantages, speaking in tongues, and spidering girls on the swings. She shares their stories like cups of coffee extending a conversation that will last until the shadows of “women who could not / be tamed or comprehended” turn into clouds and coax buttercups from the fields. Whether you anticipate the need or not, these intimacies balm.

–Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert (Sarabande Books, 2021)

Three poems set in one of Georgia’s sanitariums frame the haunting stories in Joanna Grisham’s poetry collection Phantoms. This powerful book explores how we can be held captive by the memories of our pasts, by trauma and by longing. Here the phantoms are what we struggle to let go of and what will not let go of us.

–Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018)

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[romijuli]

utilizing this to ramble abt something cause i saw the new deadpool movie the other day (mr chel and i had tickets for like Months) and i have. feelings.

honestly i thought most of the movie was p good, nice send off to the fox iterations imo, but my biggest nitpick is like

the first scene after the opening takes place in the main marvel universe w/ deadpool applying to the avengers. it's not explained they don't want you to worry about it or at least want you to assume cable's time device did it. i'm worrying about it and think the cable explanation is bullshit. anyway. so he has a whoooole conversation with happy hogan at stark industries about joining the avengers and you can see where this convo is going, right? the lingering shot on "proof that tony has a heart" and the picture of him and pepper and maybe some other people, i forget, i kinda eyerolled through it. i'll give SOME points in that the latter is probably designed to parallel a picture deadpool has with his friends. but here's the thing

personally i think having a similar scene with the xmen would have been better but i guess they felt that would be redundant with stuff from deadpool 2. idk man as i type this some of the beginning kinda falls apart and i'm not entirely sure how logan being canon to the movie fucks with the chronology (according to my fiance the answer is "yes") but bear with me. anyway. does it HAVE to be tony. like steve rogers is functionally dead. black widow is ACTIVELY dead. hawkeye's like retired on a farm or something. i think referencing the now-gone avengers as a whole would have been FINE. there's NO REASON to make it SOLELY about tony.

it's a CONSTANT PROBLEM honestly!!! two out of three spider-man movies in this continuity have had the looming specter of iron man hanging over them, and one was BEFORE he died. and in this it feels like they went OUT OF THEIR WAY to be like "hey remember iron man????? remember how he died?????" like girl!!!!! i would have taken a conversation with fucking HAWKEYE and i don't even really like renner!hawkeye all that much! good lord! it's just TIRING. and the dr doom casting announcement makes it WORSE for me holy shit.

Not to throw logs onto the flaming shitstorm that is Certain Film Franchises but even if you put aside the whitewashing (which to be clear you shouldn’t) this is such a transparent nostalgia bait ploy in the same vein as the 17363626 other different fucking references to one specific character that I cannot possibly FATHOM someone defending it with their entire ass

[honeylikewords]

cubs. (jack russell)

halloween brings all the little monsters out. aka, jack gets baby fever.

(warnings: mentions of pregnancy, planning for children, allusions to sex, descriptions of physical intimacy and making out, and jack smelling his wife, if that counts. nothing technically fully n/s/f//w//, but a bit saucy. word count 2.4k )

Jack’s head tilts sideways before the doorbell even rings, one ear higher than the other to catch something she can’t hear. He turns in his seat on the couch, arm strewn over her shoulder, to look behind them in the direction of the front door, tilts over, kisses her temple, and pops up in the seconds before the slightly-jarring “ding” echoes through the house. He’s already at the door, bowl in hand, beaming down at the gaggle of children and chaperones by the time she’s even stirring on the couch to come to join him.

“Oh, who do we have here?,” Jack coos excitedly, scanning the miniature crowd. “Are you the little one from--”

“Stranger Things!,” yells a small child in a pink dress, blonde wig askew, tendrils of the plastic hair stuck to their face. “I’m Eleven!”

“Yes, sí, can you do the--” --Jack sticks his hand out and makes a face, and the child eagerly matches him, giving him their best furious expression and most powerful psychokinetic pose-- “Yes! That’s so good!”

He quickly glances up at the three adults standing behind and asks if there are any allergies in the group (and there are none, thank goodness) as his wife comes to stand next to him, smiling at the Eleven who is now turning their powers onto their group of friends. Gesturing for the kids to bring their bags closer, Jack begins dropping generous fistfuls of candy into eagerly opened pillowcases and treat sacks, small hands darting out to show off the newest snacks to one another.

“Hey there, Mirabel,” says Mrs. Russell, waving at a young girl in a blue skirt and white t-shirt, sporting a giant pair of glasses and a pink flower in her dense curls. The little one is wrapped up in a purple puffer jacket on this cold October evening, and while it is a truth universally acknowledged that a big coat is the bane of Halloween costumes, the effect of her adorable smile and ‘Encanto’ printed trick-or-treat bag is more than enough to convey the essence of the character. “Is Uncle Bruno with you tonight?” 

The girl shyly shakes her head and wrings the handles of her bag in her fingers but is smiling widely when Jack speaks a few quick words of admiration for her costume in Spanish and passes her a scoop of candy for her bag.

“I’m Ariel!”, adds a small child in a green tube skirt with flared tulle flippers sewn on, a purple strip of cloth tied around their tummy over a slightly off-skin-tone longsleeve tee.

“And I’m Harry Potter!” A wand is brandished at Jack, who puts a hand over his chest in shock.

“I’m Batman!” The petite hero jumps into a pose to show off the padding of his armor, his light-up shoes kicking to life and casting green flashes over the porch.

Jack turns to his wife and grins, gesturing enthusiastically at the crowd of kids. “I think these are the best costumes we’ve seen all night, no?” She nods, and the kids all let out little shrieks and giggles as Jack procures a few extra pieces from the bowl and adds them to their bags. 

The chaperones guide the straggling children into a chorus of “thank you”s before shuffling them down from the porch, past the jack o’lanterns, and on to the next house, as Jack and his wife remain in the doorway. She leans her head on his shoulder and listens to him sigh sweetly, his eyes tracing over the sunset-lit streets swarming with seas of children and their families, all screaming and laughing over one another, racing past on the sidewalks, weaving in and out of lawns decorated with tombstones and inflatable specters, plastic skeletons and felted spiders. 

“You know, at the rate you hand it out, we’ll be out of candy before the street lights come on,” she teases, nudging his shoulder. Jack chuckles and puts a hand on the small of her back, shrugging as he steers her back towards the couch. 

“It’s Halloween, bebé; do you want us to be known as the stingy old couple, or the cool couple that gives out extra candy to the little monsters? Besides, that Mirabel, oh my God--”

“Total heart-melter,” she agrees, sitting and cuddling into Jack’s side as he hooks his arm back over her shoulders and pulls her body close. “I think between her and that four-month-old dressed as Grogu, we may have seen the two cutest costumes in all of North America today.”

Jack lets out a groan at the memory of the adorable baby, who he had greeted at the door with a delighted peal of laughter, and squeezes his wife tightly in his arms, as if hugging her in the baby’s stead. The abrupt squish pushes a small squeak out of her, and Jack giggles, bumping the blunt tip of his long nose into her cheek.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “You okay?”

His slight frame conceals a rather intense strength, something that comforts her, even if it still sneaks up on her every now and again that he is, in fact, as strong as he is; Jack’s touch is grounding and warm when so few things in the world are, and she’s glad, especially in the cold months, for the over-active heat of his body and the power of his embrace. 

He traces the tips of his broad, tan fingers along the curve of her upper arm, pale nails leaving wake trails of gooseflesh and pleasant shivers. She realizes he’s waiting for a response before going any further with his affections, and she nods, cupping the square of his chin and running her thumb along his bottom lip. When his olive green eyes fix on hers, and his lips part to reveal the brightness of his smile, crooked to the left by the jut of his snaggletooth, she feels heat wash over her face and down her body, familiar and fluttering as he dips his face close and keeps her gaze.

“You know what I’m thinking?,” Jack purrs, voice dropping low and soft as he begins inching nearer. When he’s this close, his breath falls on her skin like a warm fog, sticking sweetly to her neck and cheeks, and the scent of him gets stronger. 

He smells like their bed, she thinks. Cozy, fuzzy, and tinged with a modicum of not-at-all-unappealing sweat, there is also that distinct canine note that can only be detected in this kind of proximity. His arms are still wrapped around her, and one of his hands is coasting, flat-palmed, up and down the length of her side, following the curves of her ribs and belly, while the other finds itself resting on her shoulder, idly fingering an errant lock of hair. His face is so close to hers that she swears she could count each of his eyelashes, individually, and the hairs that form his growing stubble.

This Halloween, Jack has chosen to go as a vampire, which he thinks is exceedingly funny. Dark makeup rings his eyes and the grey in his hair glows almost blue in the low light of the fading day, lending him an unearthly quality that fits his costume well. The powers of the vampire, too, seem to be his: he has her under his thrall, certainly. His smile is mesmeric, and she can imagine that if a vampire were to look like him, there would be no end to the line of people willing to be bitten by that self-same smile.

“What are you thinking, Puppy?,” she asks, trying to redirect her own wandering thoughts. She scratches lightly at the underside of his chin and, on reflex, his head tilts up, eyes fluttering shut as a contented noise rumbles in the back of his throat. He’s so easy to please.

“I’m, uh--” He seems distracted by the sensation of her scratching at that Just Right spot between the back of his ear and the crook of his jaw, a distraction that only worsens when she begins scratching the hair at the nape of his neck. “I was going to say that I… I was thinking we…”

His hands lie still on her, twitching every now and then when she finds a particularly pleasing spot to scratch, and she relishes the sensation of being the one who now has her beloved under her own thrall; Jack leans his head into her touch and follows the motion of her hands, chasing her attentions. A sigh leaves his lips and he unclenches his shoulders, melting into her as she leans back against the armrest of the couch and Jack follows, laying his head on her chest. 

His weight is surprisingly heavy atop her as he lays himself on her belly, slotting between her knees and positioning himself for ease of scritching. He’s not a big man, by any means, but there’s a density to him, and she’s feeling it now as he presses her into the couch with his body.

She pauses her petting briefly as she adjusts to the new position, and her hands still in his hair, which causes a growl of displeasure to part his lips. At that, she looks down at him and sees one green eye peering up at her (the other still shut and squished into her chest), and sticks her tongue out at him before continuing the strokes to his salt-and-pepper pelt.

It’s rather soothing, playing with his hair like this. There’s a therapeutic element to the combination of his body weight, intense warmth, rhythmic breathing, and the texture of his hair under her fingers, and she lets instinct carry her, as salient thought drifts away into the blissful mist of repetitive motion and familiar feelings. She traces the lines of his scalp, watching his black and grey and still, sometimes, brown hair forest up around her fingers, content to just match the tide of his breaths with her own, their ribs pressed together and expanding in synchronicity. 

After a moment, Jack stirs. Turning, he cranes his face so that he can look at her squarely, and she feels the irresistible magnetism of that green gaze tugging her deeper into his spell.

“I want to try for one of our own,” he says, shattering the stillness like a foul ball through plate glass. “Tonight, if you’re ready.”

It takes her a second to blink away the haze that had settled around her head, and when she does at last manage to, she finds herself staring down into Jack’s face, taking him in with utmost fascination. If she heard him clearly, and she believes she did, he asked her--

“A baby, by the way. In case I wasn’t clear.” He flashes her a smile and a breathy laugh, and he pats her side playfully. “I’m sure you could figure that out, amorcita, but I like to be direct.”

“Oh.” 

It’s all she can think to say: not because she is unhappy, or undesiring of the same things, but simply because the effect of Jack Russell, staring up at her with his big, moss-colored puppy eyes, brazenly stating that he wants to try and conceive with her, is flooring. He pushes up on his forearms, and suddenly he is above her, his face lit starkly by the shadows of the setting sun and the television, marking him out in black and white. His eyes glow, even in the darkness.

The wolf’s smile slips into his features as he stares down at her, watching her reactions with delight. He can hear her heartbeat, she knows, smells the minute shifts that not even she is aware of. He knows her, inside and out, and surely knows which way she is swayed, but he waits patiently for her to give him a sign, a command, an enthusiastic yes or a firm no. He won’t move without her urging.

She cups his face and lets out a shaky, excited breath, one that shivers in her sternum and makes Jack grin. There’s that crooked canine of his, sharply glinting in his smile, and she trembles joyfully at the sight, wondering if their child would have their father’s snaggletooth. She hopes they do.

“Tonight,” she repeats. Jack’s eyes widen.

Gently, she tugs him down and presses his pouty lips to hers, and the dam breaks. Jack lets out an inhuman groan of delight, dropping his center of gravity low to lean into the kiss, and uses his blunt incisors to pull at her bottom lip, nipping and sending the wet, lapping sounds of kissing echoing through the room. He uses one hand to hold her jaw in place, then begins trailing kisses down and around her chin, working his way to her throat.

“Look so pretty in your costume,” he rasps, voice low and clouded. “‘S hard for a man to keep his hands to himself.”

Before she can snidely remark that he, in fact, has not been keeping his hands to himself for almost the entirety of the evening, Jack sinks his teeth into her neck: not hard enough to wound her, but certainly hard enough to make her forget every other thought, her mind now focused completely on the reality that her husband is leaving marks all across her throat.

“You smell,” Jack groans, “So good. And, oh, God, when you have our cubs…”

He pushes his face into the crook of her neck and inhales, a series of Spanish and English curses flowing from his lips as they wander across her skin, and his hands begin rucking up the bottom of her blouse when--

“DING.”

Jack’s head whips up, and the two of them stare with wide eyes at one another. His face is flushed a deep umber and his lips are shiny, hair a fluffed mess, and she can only imagine she looks even more sordid and knocked askew. They exchange a communicative glance before the doorbell rings a second time and Jack, ever the gentleman, kisses her forehead, rapidly apologizing.

“We’ll get back to this, querida, I promise, I swear, I want to--”

She waves him off with a smile, and sees him bolt for the door, candy bowl in hand. He throws it open with gusto, and as she watches, she sees the transformation come over him; the brightness in his eyes, the giddiness of his smile, the sincerity of his sweetness. He’s going to make a magnificent father. And she’s going to have a very, very happy Halloween.

[septembriseur]

I want to come back to this article, which I reblogged a post from (after seeing it reblogged by loads of people on my dash). I recommend reading the article if you haven’t done so. Its central argument revolves around the idea that “modern liberal democracy presents itself as non-ideological beyond ideology,” and that ideology itself is always presented in literature/media as unacceptably violent— villainous. (I would argue that, in fact, any sort of cultural “accretion,” in the sense that culture is perceived as "on top of” and obscuring universalized western ideology,  is tolerated only insofar as it is not really taken specifically or seriously. That’s why even characters who are presented as deeply religious (think of Matt Murdock or Rogue One’s Baze and Chirrut) are portrayed as religious in a way that is broad, universal, flexible, and vague. 

One issue that the article doesn’t really delve into is that supposedly “ideologue” villains are actually profoundly anideological, except insofar as their ideology is, like, anti- modern liberal democracy’s lack of ideology. A really interesting example of this is in Iron Man: Tony Stark gets held hostage by a group of extremists whose extreme belief is... well... even the MCU wiki seems unable to provide any detail on this beyond “destroying world peace.” The film employs a weird move where it obviously relies on the Afghan setting of the villainous Ten Rings to suggest associations with radical Islamism, yet also provides evidence that the Ten Rings are not Islamists. On the one hand, it provides a sort of generic Western specter of radical Islamists— brown men speaking foreign languages and living in Afghan caves— and on the other hand it coyly removes all potential religious, political, or cultural motivation for their actions. These guys aren’t impoverished tribesmen who’ve been subject to tumultuous centuries of imperial warfare, and they’re not religious extremists living out masculine power fantasies. They’re just a group of dudes who kind of look vaguely Middle Eastern and kind of sound vaguely Middle Eastern (since Arabic and Persian are the languages we hear the most). 

Of course, there’s a real-world explanation for this: Marvel wants to be able to tap into that specter of radical Islamism without offending Muslim consumers. But the textual effect is to create a picture of the world in which terrorism in Afghanistan is evacuated of all meaning. Don’t get me wrong: terrorism in Afghanistan is unbelievably destructive and to a large extent nihilistic, in that it benefits no one and spreads only despair and suffering. But at the same time, it arises out of a historical, political, economic, and religious-cultural context, and if you refuse to understand this context, then you will fail to understand why people make the choice to become terrorists (or how to stop them).

That’s the real problem here: the creation of a world in which the only rational choice is modern liberal democracy, and all other choices are nonsensical. 

Marvel is a great site at which to explore this, simply because there’s so much of it. (You could also easily look at Star Wars, as MacQuarrie does in that article— why does the First Order want power? New extended universe writers have fleshed this out more in their web of liminally canonical texts, but on screen the answer seems to be, in the words of the also-manifestly-guilty-of-this-and-guilty-in-other-ways Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible: “the world is a mess, and I just need to rule it.”) 

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a wildly characteristic example of this. It has the thankless task of trying to engage with the effects of the canonically almost effect-free (cf Spider-man: Far From Home) blip, and pieces together a weirdly nonsensical storyline in which the blip enable border-free mass migration, which was revoked when the other half of the world’s population reappeared. The plot revolves around a group of super soldier refugees/displaced persons who want to stop borders from being reimposed on the world. Sam Wilson refers to the refugees as “people who have been welcomed into countries that previously kept them out with barb wire,” and indeed it's hard to imagine any version of this narrative in which the “migration” we’re talking about is the migration of Global South nationals to the Global North. There’s a really plausible specter here: the Global North does source its manual and domestic labor from the Global South while, whenever possible, keeping Global South nationals out with barbed wire. It does make sense that the Global North would import laborers and then attempt to deport them when their presence was no longer convenient. That is, in fact, literally what has happened/is happening in the UK to foreign healthcare workers during the pandemic.

However, as in Iron Man, Marvel wants to mobilize a specter while also evacuating it of all meaning. None of the displaced people we see in TFATWS bear any resemblance to real-world displaced persons. In spite of their United Colors of Benetton racial diversity, they display no marks of culture, religion, nationality, or indeed poverty. They even have British and American accents. They are completely neutral in every way.

This matters for several reasons. First of all, it allows the viewer to differentiate between the migrants on-screen— Western-looking, English-speaking, non-religious— with migrants off-screen: [perceived to be] too religious, non-English-speaking, culturally and racially “other.” Secondly (again as with Iron Man), it removes all context from the act of migration. Why did these people become migrants? Uh... because of the blip, I guess? Beyond some vague references to suffering, it’s never addressed. This allows the viewer to completely detach the question of migrants/displacement from any of its structural context. Why do people migrate in the real world? Because their countries have been completely devastated by warfare, often proxy warfare carried out by imperial states. Because climate change has completely devastated the regions where they live, with or without triggering devastating warfare. Because they belong to ethnic, political, and/or religious groups that are being systematically destroyed by state governments. Because colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have completely devastated the economies of the regions where they live. This is why the stakes of migration are high. 

If, as the show suggests, people just migrate for various personal reasons that really aren’t that important, then the stakes are not high, and we don’t have to feel bad about the behavior of our governments. This is a huge problem at a time when Denmark is shipping Syrian asylum-seekers back to Syria because it’s apparently fine now, Joe Biden is failing to make good on campaign promises about increasing refugee quotas, the UK is housing asylum seekers in situations that violate human rights law, migrant drownings in the Mediterranean Sea have become a regular feature, and the United States has systematically resisted fulfilling its promises to Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives working for US forces in exchange for visas.

But, like, above and beyond the specific political issue of migration: what is the Flag Smasher ideology? “One world, one people.” I accept that there might be some viewers (mostly those with no knowledge or experience of immigration) who oppose this on principle, but it seems pretty obviously... good. So the bad part is... that they’re fighting for it? (According to people in my notes, this is Bad.) It’s possible to read this as another example of what the MacQuarrie article discusses: personal violence good, ideological violence bad. However, once again we have an example of an ideology that is not ideological, an ideology that is a specter cleaned out of any possible substance. The nonsensical choice here (the one beside which modern liberal democratic norms are obvious) is the choice to commit violence when there is no urgency that justifies this— none of the urgency that, in fact, exists in the real world, and explains why people regularly sacrifice their lives in desperate attempts to escape their homes. 

This is a really good example of how capitalism— a force with no real agency or subject, no evil committee planning its deeds— ends up enacting a project that systematically enforces its ideology. Attempts to render narratives apolitical are themselves profoundly political, even when justified in terms of appeal to the consumer. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of media, IMHO. 

[sailforvalinor]

Everyone, the blog’s just hit 200 followers—thank you so much!!!! I never thought this many people would find my nonsense so entertaining, lol.

I’m writing a follow-up fic to that snippet I wrote about Midna a month or two back to celebrate, but it’s not quite finished yet, but I do have this Marink fic snippet that I started awhile back and then couldn’t figure out where to go with. Not my best writing, but you know, it exists, hehe.

—

Legend didn’t know why he loved Marin.

It was a stupid thing not to know, he supposed, but he wondered all the same. It was a mystery to him why she had even existed—after all, everything in Koholint, while partially his dream, had all sprung from the Wind Fish’s imagination.

Everything but her.

He couldn’t believe that she was merely something of his own creation—no, she was far too complex, tangible, so real in the glory of all of her flaws for that. She was something he could never make up. The dreams he had of her now were proof enough, distant and ephemeral, haunted by specters of a voice he could never quite hear—nothing like the freckle-riddled girl with laughter like wind chimes teasing him about his sunburn, begging for stories about his adventures, ever-searching for a world to belong to.

Marin was far too much for the world she was created for—but why, then, had she been made? Did the Wind Fish perhaps sense a void in him it thought it could fill?

If that was the case, then the Wind Fish was a worse fool than he had thought. Legend had long scoffed at the idea of people “completing” each other—the universe just creating people to fit together like puzzle pieces was far too simplistic a notion to satisfy him. But really, before Koholint, he had never really given such ideas much thought. Legend had never let himself be defined by his love. He had defined himself by what he defended—his uncle, Fable, the people of Hyrule, any who found themselves threatened by the careless wrath of Ganon. He had been defined by his duty—to his family, his friends, the world, the legacy of heroes who came before and would continue after him, even his own peace of mind. Duty, obligation, these were things he knew, safe things. He supposed that, subconsciously, he’d considered love far too dangerous a motivator—powerful for certain, but unpredictable. And it made one vulnerable.

That, he knew, was the real kicker. Even as a child, he’d always fled from weakness like spiders skitter away from light. He remembered that once, at six years old, he had fallen off of a garden fence, unknowingly cracked a rib, and was in an immense amount of pain, but had stubbornly refused to tell his uncle until he had fainted at the dinner table that night.

“Hiding your pain doesn’t make you strong, Link,” he remembered his uncle saying when he came to. “You see what happens—it gets worse, festers up inside until it overwhelms you.” He brushed back his hair from his forehead. “Learning to accept help is hard for all of us, but I think it will be harder still for you, my boy. And yet, you must learn.” Suddenly, his eyes had grown distant. “Pretending to be invulnerable is one of the most foolish things you can do—everyone knows it’s a lie.”

His uncle’s words had proven prophetic.

[sugar-plump-gal]

Go on do it, tell us about the ocs >:D

I've got so many of the fuckers I don't even know where to start so! Hey how about the setting, that's basically an oc right?

Basically, I was making a shit ton of troll ocs but Alternia isn't a great setting for that. The oldest people around are like 19 in human years which isn't great, and everything has a constant specter of death which, although admittedly great for vore, isn't as good for stuffing and the like.

Obviously there's Earth C, but it hasn't got the same weird alien shit Alternia has. You haven't got buses walking around on spider legs, y'know?

So I went 'hey what if Universe C had a new, less shitty Alternia as well' and named it Externia bc duh.

At first it was pretty much just an excuse to have trolls be horny and not exiled into a space empire but then I accidentally gave it actual lore and backstory about how it was actually created and how it works and woops now I have an entire setting with just HEAPS of lore. A lot of it carries over into my hcs for Earth C but the jist of it is

-They just sorta had a god bring an empty Alternia/Beforus from a dead timeline. Nobody's sure who exactly did it or why

-A combination of them living in a universe with knowledge of sburb, the fact the sessions that made their universe were So Broken, and their planet having never used remnants of a previous game means they all have more or less free access to a decent bit of sburb shit, namely alchemy and like. Basically resurrection pods like in bioshock or something

-At some point someone figured out that a full battery was worth way more grist than an empty one, so by making an empty battery and charging it w solar panels or something you can basically generate infinite grist. Pretty much everyone just has infinite money and resources. Specifically food. It's really fucking easy to be a fat fuck.

-They don't have mandatory cum buckets, so instead new trolls are just cloned w ectobiology. Since culling isn't a thing and ectobiology is weird there's LOT of mutations. Usually horny.

-Trolls are still raised by lusii and kept separate from adults, but instead of having their own planet and getting kicked into space empire hell they just sorta. Have their own neighborhoods and internet and then once everyone is grown up it just gets added to the wider city.

-They've got drones and shit but they're less bioweapons and more like. Imagine if you just replaced all the spikes and weapons with the aesthetic of baymax from big hero 6. They're mostly just there to do menial labor and/or detect and help with any emergencies.

-Since pretty much all labor is handled by drones and resources are infinite, more or less everyone is free to do what they please, with the only 'jobs' being ones people Want to have for their own sake. Sometimes that means writing or making music or blogging, but usually it means porn. LOTS of porn. Of the trolls I have, like FOUR are pornstars. Everyone fucks incessantly.

-Between that and the fact that anyone under like twenty lives in their own separate communities it's entirely socially accepted to just give sloppy to someone on the bus.

None of that is even TOUCHING the actual Plot or anything. I haven't mentioned a single fucking OC yet and already have a dash filling wall of text. Fuckin warned yall

[iamstartraveller776]

The Nightwalker Chronicles: Sealed by Blood 1/?

IT’S THE 31st IN MY TIMEZONE, SO I’M POSTING!! WOOHOO!!

Summary: On the heels of learning that the monster lurking in the darkness is real, P.I. Emma Swan is thrust into an investigation that takes her through a dangerous underground rife with powerful creatures. Can she find the culprit behind the the murder she witness two weeks ago before more bodies drop? Can she trust the handsome, enigmatic Killian Jones when he, too, is the stuff of nightmares? Especially when the vampire looks at her as if she's his favorite flavor. Sequel to the short one-shot, What Goes Bump in the Night (AO3).

Genre: Supernatural AU, Mystery, Drama, and some UST for good measure.

Rating: T/PG-13

WARNING: This story contains violence that is equivalent to its rating. I don’t consider this tale particularly gritty or dark, but just in case.

Also on AO3 & FFN

A/N: Lots of thanks to @kmomof4​ who coaxed me out of quasi-retirement to write another installment in this universe for @cssns​. Not only that, but she made the beautiful edit above! She’s seriously the best. (I won’t mention that I’m totally blaming her for the fact that this story is NOT another one-shot as I hoped it would be.)

CHAPTER ONE A Lurid Fate

Emma stands in a clearing, circled by tall trees desaturated by the wan twilight. A cold fog weaves between the gnarled and twisted trunks, curling toward her in thin tendrils, and she steels herself with a breath of wintry air.

She hates this dream.

Her thrumming heartbeat keeps time as she awaits what comes next. One beat. Two. Three. And then they appear, living shadows that peel out of the mist, faceless in their deep cowls made from the same dark, swirling vapor that bore them. Soft, rasping voices converge in an unintelligible whisper as they flow toward her in a single, liquid movement. Her own feet are rooted to the frost-bitten earth, and though chills start a slow trail across her flesh, she’s not as frightened by her paralysis as she used to be.

“Come on,” she mutters through gritted teeth. “Let’s get this over with.”

One of the specters draws a hand up, pointing with a gauzy finger toward the space they’ve left in front of her, and the others follow suit, their indecipherable murmurs tapering to an opaque silence.

That part is always the same, but what follows never is.

A vision lurches up from the ground like a stiff-limbed creature rising from the grave. Grainy images superimpose over one another, flickering in rapid succession before settling on a woman with long, dark hair. Arms stretched in front of her, hands clasped, she seems to be pleading with Emma, but her voice is muted, inaudible. The woman phases out, replaced by a blinking sequence of others in desperate supplication.

Emma wants to squeeze her eyes shut against the unsettling apparition, but that, too, she has no control over.

The woman is dominant again, this time stepping backward, graceful features contorting with mounting fear. There’s something familiar about her, but Emma can’t remember where—

She sucks in a shocked gasp when a malignant presence erupts from her, leaving oily fingerprints on her soul in its wake. Beyond, the woman scrambles back, fracturing, shifting between overlapping men and women, all in a panicked retreat. The murky thing that came from Emma—came through her—coalesces into a being similarly obscured as the surrounding watchers. It advances on the alternating victims, looming over them, and her pulse drums in gelid anticipation as it raises an arm. With unnatural speed, it thrusts its hand into the chest of its prey.

And then Emma is the prey, falling to her knees as the phantom rips something out of her. An involuntary scream claws up her throat in answer to the sudden agony. She crumples to the ground, gulping futilely for air to fill her burning lungs. The being crouches near her, pulling back its hood to reveal a face covered in squirming, crawling insects. Beetles, moths, worms, spiders, centipedes, and countless others. Emma flinches as it leans closer, its head tilted, empty eye sockets studying her, blackened maw exhaling rancid decay.

In the next croaking breath, the terrifying sight winks out, replaced by striking azure eyes beneath raven brows.

Killian Jones bares his teeth in a merciless grin, savage fangs lengthening as black tar pools in his irises. Horror claws at her when he lifts his hand, revealing her still-pumping heart. Crimson blood drips down his wrist in thick, winding rivulets.

“Still want to know what goes bump in the night, love?”

He opens his mouth wide, bringing the quivering organ to his lips, and—

Emma wakes up with a hoarse cry, strangled by her sweat-soaked sheets as she sits bolt upright. It’s a minute before she can shed the vestiges of her nightmare. Every dusky corner of her bedroom seems to have a pair of eyes, staring, hunting. She presses a hand to her sternum, both to confirm that skin, bone, and sinew are intact and to quell the erratic banging of her heart.

“It was a dream,” she whispers. “Just a dream.”

Sometimes dreams come true.

She ignores the foreboding thought, folds it up and tucks it away in a cobwebbed corner of her mind. It was only the night before that she discovered that the monster under the bed was real. Of course she would have a nightmare about the first vampire she’s ever crossed paths with. Well, crossed paths with and known about it. And the grey-men? The hazy beings that have plagued her dreams since she was a little girl? They’re only the manifestations of her subconscious meant to represent whatever “trauma” she’s recently experienced. At least, that’s what the therapist said they were—when Emma finally landed a foster parent who actually cared enough to get her help.

She hates that word, though. Trauma. Using it makes her feel like a victim, and she’s worked hard to never be one. Never again. Not even when faced with what lurks in the darkness.

With a sigh, she wipes at the dampness on her face. By the tawny glow filtering in from the edge of her curtains, the streetlights are still on outside. She’s not sure she wants to know what time it is—in the off-chance she can settle down enough to catch a little more sleep—but no. There’s too much adrenaline rattling through her veins.

She thinks of the man—the vampire—at the center of her dream. Killian had given her his number in case she had more questions, and she’s got one right now. Does he eat hearts? Then again, is she ready to hear the answer if it’s yes? She shakes her head. Probably not. But she’s going to find out anyway.

A missed-call notification pops up when she unlocks her phone. Her pulse jumps when she sees the name: Whale. There’s only one reason why the city’s medical examiner would be trying to get a hold of her at an ungodly hour. She taps on his number, not bothering with the voicemail he left.

Doctor Whale answers on the third ring. “Hello, Swan,” he greets her with a smile in his voice, and she lets out the breath she was holding. He’s a bit of a douche, but he wouldn’t have sounded so chipper if something had happened to David, her foster brother.

Which begs the question: “Why’d you call?”

Whale chuckles. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you didn’t listen to the message.” He doesn’t wait for her reply. “Typical Swan. Some things never change.”

Some things do. But she leaves that unsaid. “You haven’t answered my question.”

He sighs on the other end of the line. “Straight to the point, then,” he says. “You asked me to keep an eye out for a body with a specific set of injuries.”

Emma straightens, skin pebbling with goosebumps. “A couple of weeks ago, yeah. You have something for me?”

“It’s something alright,” he says. “I think you need to come down and see for yourself.”

She almost tells him that she’ll be there in twenty, but another thought stops her. “Who caught the case?”

“Cassidy and Booth,” Whale says, and Emma curses under her breath. Why is she surprised that it’s Neal? He’s the eternal thorn in her side. “They were here for the preliminary, but I don’t expect them back until the autopsy is done. If you hurry, you might get here in time for the best part. I’ll text you the access code.”

She scrunches her nose at the thought of attending the slice and dice, but since she’s no longer with the PD, she has to take the bone Whale’s throwing her. Beggars can’t be choosers. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

Before he can respond, Emma disconnects the call. She knows how the rest of the conversation will go. He’ll try to ask her out for drinks or dinner or coffee; she’ll counter with courtside tickets to the next game. After putting on a show of being wounded by her continued rebuffs, he’ll graciously accept his consolation prize.

Five minutes is all it takes for her to throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and she chooses not to think about the fact that, in the process, she’s turned on every light in her modest one-bedroom apartment. She’s not afraid of the dark. She’s not. But a little brightness never hurts.

As she pulls her hair back in a hasty ponytail, her reflection stares back at her in the bathroom mirror, pallid complexion, a hint of deep plum under her eyes. Nice. Not that she cares about her appearance all that much, not at—what time is it?

She glances at the phone teetering on the corner of the sink. 4:17 am according to the “always on display” feature that she never bothered turning off when she bought the thing a year ago. An hour or so before sunrise.

Sunrise. Just enough time for—

But can she see him? So soon after that vivid image of him bent over her, holding her twitching heart in his hand? Flexing her jaw, she shoves the unwanted memory away and locks eyes with her reflection. “Get it together, Emma,” she says. “It was a dream.”

She dials his number in defiance of the unsteady wobble in her chest. “Hey,” she says when Killian picks up. “Are you free right now? I could use your help.”

~

He’s waiting for her in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of a classic Jaguar convertible, arms crossed, head down. Shadows and light caress his handsome features, bringing them into sharper relief. His attire is as starless as the paint job on his vehicle. When she pulls into the spot next to his, he looks up, pale eyes meeting hers, and the air in her old Volkswagen Beetle suddenly becomes unbreathable. She wants to believe she imagines the otherness in that brief glance—but it is there, isn’t it?

Her door creaks open before she has her seatbelt unbuckled. He rests his arm on the frame—an arm that ends with a metallic pincer that gleams dully beneath the anemic streetlamps. Not the silver hook she remembers from the night he rescued her.

“This is quite a vessel you’ve got, love,” he says with a half-grin, brow ticked upward.

Emma doesn’t like the answering flutter in her middle. “It gets me where I need to be.” Her tone is a little more gruff than she intends.

She climbs out of the car, careful to avoid getting too close to him. His presence is on the thin edge of oppressive—especially in the wake of her nightmare—but it’s also beguiling. A whispered promise of unimaginable bliss if only she wouldn’t mind drowning forever. He watches her with a hooded gaze, and she glances at his ride to break the unnerving connection.

The pristine leather interior is deep red. Blood red. Prickles rise at the nape of her neck. “Isn’t that a little on the nose, love?” she asks, refusing to be knocked off-kilter. Never a victim. Never again.

Killian breathes a soft, rasping laugh and closes her door. “Perhaps,” he agrees. “But a dash of good humor helps to mitigate the oppressive monotony of an eternal curse. Shall we?” He indicates the large, austere building that houses the police headquarters, crime lab, and the morgue.

Emma nods, leading the way. Curse. That’s what he said the creatures that lived in the shadows preferred to be called: the Maledicti. The Accursed. “Just how long has that ‘oppressive monotony’ been?”

Eyes cutting toward her, his smile turns plastic at the edges. “Ah, lass,” he replies, “it’s bad form to ask a Nightwalker how long he’s wandered in purgatory. But if you must know—” he pauses to push open the door for her, his expression sobering, “—it’s been far too long.”

For a beat, she sees it, the weight of fathomless years in that gaze—brutal years. But it’s gone just as quickly, replaced with a cheeky upturn of his lips. A mask slipped into place with practiced ease. Something she understands all too well. He wore the same impenetrable look last night as he gave her a brief introduction to his world. Not dishonest—she’s a savant at spotting lies—but not entirely forthcoming, either.

Inside, she unconsciously glances at the pair of doors to the right, wired glass painted with the department’s logo. Next month would have been her tenth anniversary with the force, and this place is tainted with ghosts she’d rather forget. Killian raises a brow in question, but says nothing when she marches in the other direction toward the service elevators.

Fortunately the lift is waiting on the first floor, and in short order she’s inside the large, steel box with Killian, her hip against the wall as it takes them to the second floor. He sucks in a breath, and she watches him. His eyes are closed, lips parted in a thready exhale. It’s not quite human—the way his chin tilts just a hair upward, the way his shoulders settle back a millimeter or two. Would she have noticed if she didn’t know what he was?

Still want to know what goes bump in the night?

As if sensing her gaze, he explains, “Death, love. It’s fairly potent in here.”

Emma takes a tentative whiff, but the only scent that she can detect is the tang of some ammonia-based cleaner. “Is this going to be a problem for you? You’re not going to vamp out on me if there’s a lot of blood.”

Killian opens his eyes, shoots her a sardonic look. “I’m not newly turned, lass. I am quite adept at self-mastery.” Tongue pressing against the corner of his mouth as he moves toward her, his gaze dips and takes a languid tour before returning to hers. “Besides, the blood of the dead lacks a certain—” he gestures with his hand, “—allure. You, however, are a far more tempting feast.” His gaze drops briefly again, this time to the hollow of her neck.

Her mouth goes dry when he leans in close. Too close. “And yet,” he murmurs, “I’ve managed to keep my wits about me.”

The elevator dings, and he draws back with a wink.

Emma resists the urge sag against the wall with a tremor of relief. Never a victim. Instead, she levels a glower at him. “Good,” she says, glad that her voice doesn’t betray the warm twinge in her stomach. “Keep it that way.”

With each step they take toward the double doors at the end of the hallway, sensored lights flicker on with a quavering buzz, then shut off again behind them. They were installed during one of the city’s green initiatives a couple of years ago. Tonight, though, the effect feels more like a scene out of a slasher flick.

On the other side of the doors, the morgue is uncomfortably bright, chilly air a mix of disinfectant and the bare hint of putrefaction. Soft classical music comes from a bluetooth speaker on the desk in the corner. Doctor Whale stands with his back to the door, bent over one of the two autopsy tables, his black lab coat and matching scrub cap in stark contrast to the disheveled blond hair peeking out from beneath. The scene is a familiar one, etched into her memory from dozens of visits over the years, but it feels foreign now without a badge clipped to her belt.

She clears her throat, and Whale turns around, simultaneously pushing up the surgical loupes he wears and yanking down his face mask.

“Perfect timing, Swan!” His enthusiasm is short-lived, though, waning when his gaze lands on Killian. “And you brought a friend with you, I see.”

She ignores the unveiled disappointment in his voice. “This is…” she trails off, not sure how to introduce the man next to her. She hadn’t thought to ask beforehand.

“Jones,” Killian fills in. “Consider me an associate of Miss Swan.”

“Another P.I.?” Whale gives him a measuring gaze, and it’s less mistrust, more like sizing up his competition.

Emma narrowly avoids rolling her eyes. One of these days he’ll finally figure out that he’s never been in the running. “A consultant,” she clarifies. “The body? You wanted to show me something?”

“Right.” Whale gives Killian another sidelong glance before nodding toward the back of the room. “Let’s start with the scans.”

He directs them to the large monitor on the far wall. That wasn’t here when she last visited a year ago. Abruptly, an uninvited memory superimposes her vision—a pair of bodies laid out, both looking far too small for the sterile tables they rested on. She blinks away the image, stuffs down the helplessness, the rage that resurrected with it.

Whale pulls off his gloves, chucking them into a nearby bin, and then, using the touchscreen, pulls up a set of CT scans. “First,” he says, “our John Doe has all the fractures you described—almost like he was shoved into a trash compactor, but whatever it was, it somehow missed doing major damage to his vital organs. Interestingly, that’s not the cause of death.”

Emma hums in distracted acknowledgement as she studies the scans. Echoes of that terrible scream ring briefly inside of her, churning the bile in her stomach. “John Doe? No ID on the victim?”

Whale shakes his head. “I’ve sent the usual—dentals, fingerprints, DNA samples—upstairs. But you know how long that takes,” he says with an exaggerated grimace. “Anyway, I haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet.” He enlarges one of the scans, one of the femurs. “I don’t know what this guy did for business or pleasure, but it was clearly dangerous. You see these thin jagged lines all over the bone?”

She steps closer, but it still takes a second before she can make out the faint details. “Yeah?”

“Remodeled partial fractures,” Whale explains. “Dozens of them on top of one another. And something else strange.” He points to the ends of the femur. “Somehow, he still has his growth plates. From my preliminary examination, I estimate him to be in his late twenties to mid-thirties. There’s no indication that he’s grown since adolescence, and at 180 centimeters, or about five foot eleven, I wouldn’t diagnose him with something like gigantism. I can’t explain why the plates haven’t ossified.”

“I can,” Killian whispers close to Emma, startling her. She glances at him, but he gives her a subtle head shake. Not here.

Whale changes the screen to another scan, thankfully oblivious to the quiet exchange. “Now, this is where things get really freaky.” He glances back at them. “I give you the cause of death. Notice anything missing?”

This image is of the torso, and Emma’s uncertain what she’s supposed to be looking for until— “Someone cut out his heart?”

Whale smiles at her. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But, here’s the thing, there wasn’t a single laceration on his body.”

Her hand goes unconsciously to her chest. It’s a second or two before she can find her voice. “Was it an injection of hydrochloric acid or some kind of directed radiation?”

“You mean like a ray gun?” Whale asks with a tinge of sarcasm. “I’m sorry to say that technology isn’t that advanced. Especially something that could target only the heart without at least some residual damage to the surrounding organs and tissue. Same problem with your acid theory.” He picks up a box of gloves from a nearby counter, offers it to her and Killian. “Let me show you what I found when I opened him up.”

For the first time, Emma looks at the corpse, and she’s surprised by its condition. After two weeks, it should be further along in decomposition—a bloater, as they called them in the homicide department. John Doe has the usual pale, mottled complexion, but otherwise appears to be newly dead. Maybe he’s not her guy. She almost says as much, but decides against it. Her gut tells her this body is related to her investigation.

Bringing the operating light closer to the thoracic cavity, Whale begins to describe how all the veins and arteries that feed the heart are cauterized, but his voice is suddenly lost to the viscid roar of blood in her ears. Because she’s close enough now to see John Doe’s face. A face she can put a name to. He didn’t have a beard back then, didn’t have the kiss of lines between his brows and framing his mouth, but she knows these features. She memorized them with her fingertips each time he lay next to her in bed—before, without warning, he decided that his private demons were a burden she didn’t deserve to carry.

She would have, though.

“Are you alright, love?” Killian asks at the same time Whale says, “Swan?” The two men look at her with twin expressions of concern.

The world is tipping, turning in the wrong direction, and she wants a second to catch her breath, to get her bearings. This can’t be real. It can’t.

But it is.

She squares her shoulders, tucks the thread of panic behind her impenetrable walls—like always. “I’m fine. Just… That’s Graham Humbert. We were at the police academy together.” They were so much more than that, a voice inside her screams, and she balls her hands into fists as she staves off another tide of shock and grief.

Whale shrugs as if her revelation is nothing more than a useful tidbit. “I’ll let the lab rats upstairs know. His prints are probably on file.”

Killian, however, continues to stare at her, his gaze like a lance piercing through her iron veneer. “Is there anything else noteworthy?” he asks Whale.

“He’s got a brand of some kind on his palm,” the other man says, lifting up Graham’s hand. “I don’t recognize the symbol, but that’s not my area of expertise.”

Emma has to force herself to move step by lead-filled step closer to Graham. The body, she corrects, grasping hopelessly for some modicum detachment. The brand looks recent, the skin shinier, pinker. It’s a stylized Y or trident with two horizontal bars crossing its base.

“Recognize it?” Whale asks.

“Nope,” Emma says, retreating. The air has become thick, a glacier inching down her throat. “Jones?”

“It is quite unusual,” is Killian’s vague reply.

She’s hardly aware of yanking off her gloves, of Whale promising that he’ll let her know if anything else comes up during his examination. She has to get out. Now. Before she suffocates on the clinical dissection of a man she knew so intimately, though she won’t be able to escape the thorny vine of guilt winding through her ribcage, cinching tight. She let him go. Refused to chase after him. Lost contact with him years ago. And now he’s gone.

Once inside the elevator, Emma rests her back on the cool, metal wall, head tipped up as she counts out a troubled breath.

“I take it the lad was more than just a fellow cadet,” Killian says.

Wetness stings in the rims of her eyes, but she blinks it back. She leaves his comment unanswered. This is not a conversation she’s going to have with a virtual stranger. It’s not a conversation she ever wants to have, but once Graham’s ID is confirmed, she’ll eventually be interviewed.

Please let it be David, though as captain, her brother generally doesn’t do legwork anymore. She could even endure August’s questioning. But Neal? She’d be too tempted to punch him in his smug face.

“Love?”

The elevator doors are open. Emma pushes off the wall, strides out of the building as if her joints haven’t become spongy. “You said you could explain why he still has growth plates,” she says without glancing at Killian. He saw more than she wanted him to, sees more than he should.

“Aye.” He doesn’t expound yet, though. Not until they’re between her yellow Beetle and his obsidian Jaguar. She finds the disparity oddly appropriate. Day and night. Light and dark. Heaven and hell.

Good and evil?

Heart trembling in the palm of his hand. Scarlet snaking down his wrist.

“Your friend was a lycanthrope.” Killian’s statement snaps her back into the moment. When she raises her brows, he adds, “You might call him a werewolf.”

Emma stares at him. That…can’t be. “That’s impossible.”

“Not only possible,” Killian counters, “but a fact.”

“But we were—” She stops before she can say we were together. “I knew him for several months. There wasn’t anything…” She fumbles for the right words. “He didn’t disappear whenever there was a full moon, and he sure as hell didn’t turn into a wolf in front of me.”

Killian spreads his hands. “He might not have been then. Lycanthropy can be inherited or, shall we say, gifted.”

“Gifted?” The ground is shifting again beneath her feet, and she puts a hand on her car in an unconscious need to anchor herself. “You’re saying he wanted to become a werewolf?”

Killian lets out a quiet, mirthless laugh. “I can’t speak for him, but usually the gift is...unwelcome.”

The tension between her shoulder blades eases a hairsbreadth. It’s little comfort he’s offering her, but she’ll take it. “Was your ‘gift’ forced on you?”

“No.” There’s a period heavy in his tone. Full stop. But for a second, she sees it again: the gravity of unspoken experiences written in his eyes.

“As for that symbol,” he says, switching tracks, “there’s a tingling in the deep recesses of my mind from long ago.” He taps a finger against his temple. “I can pore over my rather extensive collection of books on the occult.”

She shakes her head. That’ll take too long. “Or try the internet?”

The look he gives her reminds her of an adult indulging a naive child. “Oh, yes. We certainly post all our secrets on the world wide web. It’s miraculous that we’ve been able to do so and continue to live under your noses for so long.”

“Okay, okay. You’ve made your point.” Emma rolls her eyes. “What about the heart?”

He waves his hand, dismissing that riddle. “Any manner of Maledicti could be responsible for that.”

She wets her lips and asks the question that’s been plaguing her for the last hour: “Including vampires?”

He raises a brow. “As I told you last night, we’re a dying breed. There are no others in this city, or I would know about it. We tend to steer clear of each other.” He closes the short distance between them. “My villainous appetite can only be sated by blood, love. When it comes to the flesh, well,” he pauses, gaze falling in another lazy perusal, tongue teasing at the seam of his mouth, “there are far more enjoyable activities I prefer to engage in.”

It’s an invitation, a dare—maybe a test—but she won’t be baited, despite the electricity dancing lightly across her nerves. “I’ll bet.”

He grins as if he likes that she’s not easily swayed by his charms. Like it’s a game. But in the next beat, the Lothario is gone, replaced with a solemn expression. “You can walk away, Swan,” he says with uncharacteristic sincerity. “You can return to your blithe ignorance and get on with a happy, normal life.”

She’s tempted for a second. Everything has gotten breathtakingly complex and disturbing since she knocked on his door. But she can’t go back. For Graham’s sake. For the sake of the next victim. Because she doesn’t doubt there will be one. Besides— “My life has never been normal,” she says. “I’m seeing this through to the end, wherever it leads.”

Killian searches her face. The corner of his mouth curves up when he finds whatever he’s looking for. “I do like a tough lass.” He starts to say more, but glances eastward instead. The first pale blush of sunrise is on the velvet horizon. “Pity. It would appear that I’m out of time. Tomorrow, then?”

“I’ll be there.” Emma hesitates before including, “And…thanks.” Because she is grateful to have an ally in this madness, even one as disquieting as whatever it is they’re chasing.

Killian gives her a flourishing bow with a smirk, and she almost cracks a smile at his retreating back. Almost.

She waits until she’s home before she slumps behind her door, tears marking a hot path down her cheeks, fist against her teeth, as she mourns the man who should have been her first love.

TO BE CONTINUED

A/N: Thank you so much for reading! If you’d like to be tagged in future updates, please let me know!

[berryblu-arts]

Propaganda for the bench trio/spectrum AU

Enderchest can be a shadow creature that follows ranboo around and ocasionally inconveniences him

Tommy can have a mini version of shroud in the form of a spider shaped light creature :D, henry is also canon, he's cow shaped but not cow sized (small <3)

Actually since specters can take just about any form, all of their pets can be canon, they are safe and cannot be killed <3<3

Spectrum!tubbo with a bunch of bees following him around? Canon :D!

Beeduo and clingyduo childhood friends :DD (like, individually, also only tommy remembers he and tubbo were friends cause r e a s o n s)

Clingy duo bandanas are CANON :DD (actually, interesting fact is i didnt even have to change this from the original spectrum canon, except with my OCs they're scarfs)

Spooky stuffs but without literal demons (as in no altars, rituals and sacrifices and stuff, dunno about yall but they personally unsettle me, so trying to find supernatural AUs without them is HARD)

Spectrum!Tommy gets lightning and size shifting powers and is kinda fairy-trickster themed cause i said so (also can fly but ONLY if he's smol)

Spectrum!Ranboo gets shadow powers and can teleport :D (he is unaware of this last one)

Ranboo's memory still sucks, and theres an in universe explaination for it??? Wack

Ranboo is prone to getting posessed :D (again, this is canon to the original spectrum concept, idk how it fits so well???)

Keeping c!ranboo's heterocromia (the character he's taking the place of has it anyway lol)

Also, Spectrum!tubbo is a regular human who just so happens to be able to see specters, however that doesn't stop him from being the scariest of the 3 :)

[hoodoo12]

The Ties That Bind (And How to Follow Them) 3/?

@bunnys-beetlejuice-blog @werwulfy @mel-time @rainingpaint @infptarius @monsterlovinghours @turtlepated @strange-n-unbluusual @heresathreebee @sweetcat-666 @genderless-cryptid @fireflower1015 @go-whovian-universe

Monday at the archives went by uneventfully, though Pate did have some difficulty staying awake. She actually ended up going out to her car for her lunch hour and took a nap, the result being that she didn’t eat anything.

Pate was never quite sure these days what she might walk into when she opened her apartment door, but it was unusually quiet when she arrived home. “Beej?” she called out. He’d taken off once or twice before, taking care of she didn’t know what business she didn’t know where, but he’d usually be back before bedtime. Feeling a little more energized thanks to her nap but famished from her skipped meal, Pate changed into loungewear, scrubbed off her makeup, and started preparations for dinner. It didn’t take long, and she would ordinarily wait for Beetlejuice to return from his roaming but she was starved and quickly scarfed down her portion, keeping Beej’s helping warm with a foil tent over the plate.

Unsure what to do with herself with the specter gone, Pate curled up on the couch and put on an animal documentary to wait for him.

⁂

He worked it down to a system.

Find a crack, enlarge it enough to send a tentacle or two to start searching for the next one while he forced the rest of himself through. A few times he was slowed when the scouting tendrils took longer to find the next exit point, and once he was stymied because a crack was above the ‘window’. He had no idea if anyone on the other side of that mirror saw him, or what they thought as he shimmied up the inside of the glass like a striped spider right out of a nightmare.

As Beetlejuice expected, there was no rhyme or reason to any of this, and no way to determine where he was. He could have been halfway around the world or in the apartment next door to Pate’s. Nothing he saw when he looked out--and he looked out of every window--was familiar. Undeterred because he had nothing but time, he kept at it.

Just because he had time, though, didn’t mean he didn’t ache. He’d never worked his tentacles so long that they were sore, and his fingers felt more numb than not. He had no fingernails left and he could feel the scrapes on his face, left after he’d pushed through a hole that wasn’t quite large enough for him to get through.

Hours had to have passed. If he got to Pate’s mirror before she came home, Beej promised himself a rest. Till then, he pressed on.

It seemed a Sisyphean task, this endless clawing into the white space behind mirrors. Evilly, his brain started asking questions like, “how many mirrors were there in the world? What if he was going in a circle? What if Lillian had forced the illusion that he was making progress, when he was still just trapped in her one special mirror?” If he gave into those thoughts or despair, he’d be lost for good. Then, all at once, as he pressed his forehead to the inside of yet another pane of glass to look out, a piece of paper on the outside caught his eye. He’d been through plenty of mirrors that had photos stuck to them, but very few in a bathroom--with the same black and white striped shower curtain as in Pate’s! The photo had curled from the humidity. Around it was a smear of lipstick in the shape of a lopsided heart. She’d been so angry he’d used her favorite shade to add the decoration--with his finger, no less!--but she’d never wiped it away.

He couldn’t see the front of it, of course, but knew the photo: a spontaneous Polaroid shot on her balcony one evening during the golden hour, an old-school selfie taken just because. They’d both been laughing because it had taken time to line it up correctly and not just get hair or half of someone’s face. They’d wasted so much film trying to get a good one. The final shot was the two of them slightly turned towards each other, Pate’s forehead against his temple, her eyes closed and a wide grin on her face. His mouth was slightly open because he’d been caught mid-laugh, but he was smiling too. Both their arms were outstretched because they figured both of them holding the camera might work better. The tips of his hair were pink.

He was home.

Beetlejuice would have cried in relief if he wasn’t so tired. Now all he had to do was wait till Pate came into the bathroom, probably inadvertently scare the crap out of her, and get her to let him out.

⁂

She must have nodded off there on the couch because the next thing Pate knew she was startling awake, heart thumping in her throat. She’d been on the colorful road again in the foggy wood, running from she didn’t know what and towards she didn’t know where.

Pate rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands and sighed, swinging her legs to the floor. What she needed was a splash of cold water in her face. Rising to her feet, Pate stretched and squinted at the time on the cable box, noting that Beetlejuice still appeared to be absent. She frowned, slightly unsettled that he had yet to return home.

She padded to the bedroom and on to the bathroom, flipping on the lights. In the sudden brightness she was instantly aware of a figure in the medicine cabinet mirror that was not her own. The initial shock made her jump, but the oh-too-familiar green hair and striped suit made her huff a relenting half smile.

“Okay, Beej, that was a good one. You totally got me,” she said, turning to face him behind her only to find that the room was empty except for her. Brow furrowed, Pate took another moment to look around in case he was hiding and hoping for another shock but there was no sign of him. Turning back to the mirror, where his disembodied reflection still stood with a strange expression on his face, she flashed him a questioning look.

“What’s goin on, Bug?”

Looking more closely at him, Pate noticed that his already mussed hair looked even more awry than normal, and there were marks on his face. Growing concerned, Pate took a step closer, pressed against the counter to lean closer to the cabinet and the mirror with the growing suspicion that something was wrong.

⁂

Time still had no meaning here. He tried the same things on Pate’s mirror that he had in Lillian’s, pounding on the glass with fists and tentacles, to the same zero effect. He even did his best to simply wrench the glass from the wall, but unlike the odd cracks he’d found that was seamless, like it was one solid piece of material. Eventually he gave up and just waited. It was like being in a tomb. He’d had plenty of practice with that, although this was unending light and he could see a portion of the bathroom. That was almost worse torture than just laying in the dark. Pate had to enter here sometime, however. When she did, looking a little like she’d just woken up, it actually startled him. The light was blinding for a moment and he jumped. Pate did too, when she saw him there, and then tiredly derided him for the scare.

He shook his head and said, “No--Pate, baby, you gotta let me out!”

She didn’t see it. She had turned to look behind her as if expecting him to be there.

When she turned back around to face him, she looked confused. She asked him what was going on.

“Pate! Pate!” he shouted, the volume in his voice increasing. “I’m stuck here! I can’t get out, you’ve gotta let me out! I went to see Lillian and she trapped me in her mirror, and then I kept moving from mirror to mirror until I found yours--how long have I been gone? Let me out!” Beej watched her gaze shift from his eyes to his mouth, and realized with growing panic that one, she couldn’t hear him, and two, he just word vomited so much so quickly there was no way she was able to lip-read everything that spilled out of his mouth. He put one hand flat on the glass towards her and licked his lips to try again. Enunciating as best he could, voice still just one notch below yelling, Beetlejuice said, “Pate. I’m stuck. Stuck! Help me get out, baby!” He put his forehead on the glass. The fingers on his outstretched hand, the one pressed palm side to the interior of the glass, trembled as well. The specter lifted his eyes back to her. “Please,” he pleaded.

⁂

Ordinarily after pulling a scare on her, Beetlejuice would be preening like the cat that caught the canary, punctuated with nuzzles and kisses to her forehead and cheeks and statements that he simply couldn’t help himself, she looked so cute when he caught her off guard.

This time, though, he looked positively frantic. His eyes were wide and desperate, his hand pressed flush against the inside of the glass. Pate’s eyes narrowed as his lips moved but she couldn't hear him. She did her best to discern what he was saying by reading his lips, but even then she could only make out a few words.

She thought she caught him say the words “stuck” and “help”. She swallowed, feeling an apprehensive flutter in her stomach. Something was terribly wrong. He was scared, and anything that could scare Beetlejuice was something to be deeply concerned about.

Questions began forming in her mind; how had he gotten himself stuck in her mirror? How could she get him out? The first thought that occurred to her was breaking the mirror, but somehow that didn’t seem like a good plan. What if it hurt him or something?

‘Come on, think!’ she told herself, reaching up to press her hand over the spot where his was in the glass.

Nothing Lillian had taught her seemed to be of any use, it was all about how to keep spirits and specters away, not letting them loose. At that thought she wondered darkly if Lillian might have something to do with this.

“Beej,” she said slowly, in case he couldn’t hear her, too. “Did Lillian do this? Because if she did, I’ll go talk to her right now.”

If the older woman somehow sealed her demon lover away, surely she had the ability to release him, Pate reasoned. And if it meant finally coming clean about having Beetlejuice around, if Lillian refused to teach her anymore because of it, then so be it. She just had to get him out of there.

⁂

Pate putting her hand against his, unable to touch, felt like they were miles apart instead of separated by a layer of glass. He swallowed and ran his free hand through his hair, hoping it wasn’t betraying his rising panic with some odd color. She must have picked up something from his spill of words, because she hit on the person who had done this: her mentor. Beej nodded at her query, but Pate’s announcement that she was going to talk to the older woman right now made him pound a fist on his side of the glass in anger and fear. “Yes it was Lillian! But baby don’t--don’t leave me here!” he shouted. “Pate--!” Frustrated and increasingly worried she was going to follow through with her idea to go to Lillian’s right now, walking away from him after he’d clawed his way and only by chance ended up where he wanted to be, Beetlejuice continued to pound on the mirror. A terrifying thought skipped through his head: What if she went back to Lillian’s and he needed to be in Lillian’s mirror to be let out?!

He’d have to get back to the old woman’s apartment. Frantically he glanced in the direction he’d entered this space and to his ultimate fear, it was once again plain unending white. There was no broken seam, no evidence he’d ever been anywhere but where he was right now. That threw him into a state of even more panic, and without warning Pate, he stepped away from the window.

A tentacle immediately nosed the spot he thought he’d come in, but found nothing. His fingers found nothing. The seam he’d torn apart was nonexistent. He’d have to find another to try and leave this mirror, and who knew where that would take him. Where would he be? Could he find his way back to Lillian’s? A whine that he now knew Pate couldn’t hear escaped his lips. Beej pushed himself back to his feet and went back to the window. “Please don’t leave me,” he whispered.

tbc . . .

[bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher]

The Midnight Hour

Welcome to another installment of A Very Bouncey Halloween! This time we’re in the canon universe and we’re dealing with a wraith/ghost/specter. Are they technically slightly different things? Yes. Do I care? No. This is fanfiction baybee.

Is this story’s plot loosely based on the lyrics to Thriller? Hell yeah. It’s fricken bats. I love Halloween.

tw: ghosts, spooky scenarios, frightening situations

1.4k (ish) words

---

Jaskier screamed in terror and alarm as soon as he was able to rip the dirty gag from between his teeth. Through a series of half-choked sobs and heaving breaths he managed to call out for his best friend, his ever-diligent guardian angel, “G-Geralt! Help m-m-me, Geralt, please!”

He scuttled backwards, sliding against the dirty marble floor as he tried to push himself to standing with his hands still tied in front of him. The oddly masked and costumed villagers had bound him, gagged him, and tossed him rather unceremoniously through the front door of the enormous, half-rotten mansion. They had very quickly shut and locked it behind him. 

“It demands a sacrifice,” they’d insisted. “Or it will not sleep.”

He managed to clamber onto his feet and wipe a little of the dust from his clothes. The house appeared to be totally void of living occupants. He took a few shaky steps forward, his heart jack-rabbiting in his chest like it might burst forth at any second and make a run for it on its own. Still, nothing stirred. The air was calm and heavy, thick with dust and years of stagnancy. 

Jaskier was breathing in terrified, desperate little pants and sobs. He couldn’t help it; he was beyond scared. He wanted Geralt by his side more than anything. Why did I have to mouth off when I did!? Why can’t I just keep my mouth shut when he’s in a bad mood instead of always trying to-

A sudden shadowy movement caught his eye from the direction of the far hallway. He took a slow, deliberate step backwards and held his bound hands in front of him like some kind of useless, trembling shield. “No, please. No, no, no.” 

Another flicker of life from the corner of his periphery.

Another swift, inky shape manifested in the darkness of the abandoned house and teased at the edges of Jaskier’s wavering vision. 

The panicked bard kept his watery eyes as wide and focused as possible while he tried to remember the things Geralt had taught him about ghosts and wraiths. Just as he was about to try for the door again, the specter of a man stepped into the foyer. His translucent body shone dimly in the pale moonlight filtering through the front window and painted him in shades of off-white and grey. Jaskier opened his mouth to scream but found his lungs to be void of air. He was too frightened to make any sound at all.

The bard tried to flee, urging his legs to move and his eyes to look away but quickly discovered that he was trapped; paralyzed by the gaze of whoever this was and frozen in place, Jaskier whimpered.

“You’re rather pretty,” the specter stated. 

“Th-thank you.”

“Because you are so pretty,” the ghost’s face morphed from that of a handsome young nobleman to that of a beast, eyes red and teeth sharp. Jaskier inhaled and nearly tripped over a piece of moth-eaten carpet. “Because you are so pretty, I shall give you the chance to run and hide. I’ll count to fifty and give you the head start. The longer you stay hidden, the longer you get to live. Sound like a deal?”

Maybe Geralt would turn around and come back for him. If he could just entertain the creature for long enough...whatever it was..

“Alright. Agreed.”

The strange monster closed its eyes and began to count, loudly and clearly. “One… Two…”

Jaskier bolted down the first available hallway and arrived in a chamber filled with various forms of statuary. This could be a good place to hide, but it would probably be the first place this creature looked. 

He scampered out of the statuary and down a small, thin passage. This probably leads to the servants’ quarters, he surmised, wiggling his way past a smashed armoire sat wedged in the middle of the hall. Jaskier thrust himself into the first random bedroom he could find and curled up at the bottom of a sturdy steamer trunk. His hands were still tied together and the rope chafed terribly at the skin of his wrists but he couldn’t be asked to give a damn under his current circumstances.

Instead, the bard regulated his breathing as well as he could and waited for the sun to rise.

---

“He’s surely dead by now,” the old woman behind the mask informed Geralt. “The wraith will have gotten him.”

“Fuck.”

---

The furious Witcher didn’t hesitate to kick the front door of the dilapidated mansion down. 

From a short distance within, he could hear a quiet voice entreating another person to cooperate. It was gritty like the grave dirt and soft like the wind through nighttime foliage: “Come out little bard, it’s time to play. Come out, come out, wherever you are.” 

The bone-deep relief Geralt felt at finding out that Jaskier was (for the moment) still alive was overwhelming. If there hadn’t been a monster to kill he would have dropped to his knees where he stood and thanked Melitele for his best friend’s well-being. 

The Witcher flew down the hallway after the wraith and followed its slow, dragging footsteps. It had easily tracked Jaskier through the mansion and Geralt found the creature bent over a trunk, tugging at the lid. The overwhelming stench of fear filled the air around them both and gave the bard’s hiding place dead away. 

“Leave the human alone and I’ll try to make this a fair fight,” Geralt snarled. His enormous shoulders filled the doorway, blocking the monster inside and giving him nowhere to go but through the Witcher. “That’s my best offer.”

“Darling Geralt!” the trunk cheered. “I’m so sorry about earlier! I’m glad you came back for me!”

“Stay put,” the Witcher demanded, lowering himself into a defensive stance as the wraith made ready to attack. “I’ll get you out when everything is safe, alright?”

“Gera-”

The creature sprang at Geralt before Jaskier could get the rest of his words out. It threw itself across the room, knocking the Witcher back out the door and into the cramped hall. Geralt thrust forward with his silver sword and slammed it into the wraith’s ribcage. The monster shuddered and screamed, falling to pieces of ash where it stood.

A quick fight.

A surprisingly easy fight for a wraith that had apparently put the villagers under thrall (or at least scared them into giving up Jaskier). 

Geralt relaxed his posture and sheathed his sword. He strode across the room to the trunk and flung the lid open. Once he was sure the bard was unharmed, he  gathered Jaskier into his arms and buried his nose within the bard’s softly curling hair. “Fuck, Jaskier. You scared me.”

“I’m s-s-s-”

“Jaskier?” 

The bard was shaking like a leaf in his arms. His eyes were red-rimmed and tears flowed endlessly down his splotchy red cheeks. Jaskier couldn’t seem to draw a firm, full breath into his lungs without sobbing it back out only a moment later. Geralt didn’t know what to do; he’d never seen the man so frightened before in his life.  

“Don’tputmedown,” the bard gasped out. “Pleasedon’tputmedown.”

“I won’t,” the Witcher frowned, sitting atop another closed trunk and settling Jaskier onto his lap. He tucked the bard’s head into the side of his neck and started rocking back and forth on instinct. After a minute or two of silence and constant, warm physical contact, Jaskier’s breathing returned to normal and he stopped sniffling. 

“I didn’t think you were going to come back for me this time,” he whispered. “Not after the argument. You’ve left me on my own for less foolish reasons in the past.”

“Can’t leave,” Geralt shrugged. “Not anymore.”

“Nothing stopped you before,” Jaskier huffed. A sharp pang of regret, guilt, and horror struck the Witcher to his very core. All the emotions people said he didn’t have came rushing to the surface as the bard’s tired, accepting tone asked: “What’s so different about this time?”

“Well, bard, this time,” Geralt said, eyes boring down into Jaskier’s. “This time I realized that I love you and I can’t just yell every time I feel like I’m being misunderstood. I need to learn to explain myself better.”

“G-Geralt?”

“I love you, Jaskier, and the thought of losing you is intolerable to me.”

“I love you too, of course, but you already knew that,” the bard laughed in shock. “Of course this is the ghost, right? This is a trick of the light? I’m having a fear-based hallucination and your eyes are about to become spiders, right?”

“I hope not,” Geralt frowned. “That would hurt.”

“Oh my gods,” the bard’s anxious frown transformed into a bright, giddy grin right before Geralt’s eyes. The Witcher wondered how anyone could feel so much so quickly, but Jaskier proved it possible every single day. “Oh, Geralt!”

“I would kiss you now, but I’d rather get out of here, first.”

“Sounds good,” Jaskier nodded. “Also, do you mind untying my hands?”

[aion-rsa]

How Alias Anticipated Modern Superhero Storytelling

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J.J. Abrams’ spy drama Alias, which turns 20 this week, was a lot of things: high-octane action-adventure series, twentysomethings relationship drama, occasional National Treasure homage. It was also, surprisingly, a spiritual predecessor to today’s hyper-saturated superhero movie and TV universes: A preternaturally gifted fighter, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) inhabits comic-book-esque alter egos to infiltrate secret missions related to ancient artifacts and promised immortality, all while ensuring that her nearest and dearest don’t know how many times she’s saved the world—or which side she’s really on.

Like the series’ MacGuffin-generating Nostradamus figure Milo Rambaldi, Alias has proven to be somewhat prophetic itself about what makes for the kinds of superhero stories that land today. With some 20th-anniversary hindsight, let’s look back at what made Sydney’s story so super and what lessons Abrams’ ridiculous(ly fun) series can still impart to the current crop of superhero sagas.

The Secret Identity as Kiss of Death

The highest priority that spies and superheroes share is that they cannot get made—that is, have their identity as a larger-than-life individual linked to their “normal” selves. They must always keep their personal and professional personas separate, lest they risk losing the people who know both sides of them. Alias establishes this difficult lesson in the first half hour of the pilot, when Sydney reveals her true work (she thinks SD-6 is just a covert branch of the CIA) to doctor fiancé Danny, only for him to blab about it later and get bloodily taken out in their bathtub. It’s the first time that SD-6 treats its sweet protégée harshly, making clear the consequences of her actions should she open up to anyone else in her life. And then she defects to the CIA, which will be a death sentence for her if SD-6 ever finds out.

Yet beyond the specter of grisly assassination, what the series really digs into is Syd’s growing ethical dilemma about being a double agent where it concerns the actually good people at SD-6, primarily her longtime partner Dixon (Carl Lumbly) and sweetly awkward Q stand-in Marshall (Kevin Weisman). It would be too easy if the series were only about her getting long-game revenge on SD-6 director Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin); the real conflict comes from Sydney lying to Dixon’s face on every stakeout, knowing that he still thinks he’s working for the good guys and she can’t ruin that fantasy for him without potentially turning him into collateral damage.

Similarly, the moments in which Sydney’s two (or three) lives begin to collide have other heartbreaking consequences: While the scene in which her best friend Will (Bradley Cooper cast as the friendzoned buddy, amazing) gets kidnapped and sees Syd saving him, is one of the decade’s best laugh-out-loud moments, it also leads to Will going into the Witness Protection Program. His life ends, in a sense, because Sydney couldn’t keep everything compartmentalized. And we haven’t even gotten to the awful fate that befalls her best friend Francie (Merrin Dungey)…

What Alias Predicted: The beating heart (or arc reactor) of many a superhero story is this tension between selves—which means that the big reveal of a secret identity has to be carefully timed and deliberately presented. It’s as emotional as Peter Parker’s (Tobey Maguire) mask getting ripped away when he saves the subway car of people in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, as big as Spider-Man: Far From Home doxxing that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) in a commentary on fake news, or as pure and simple as Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) outing himself as Iron Man in the very first installment of the MCU. You cannot unring that bell, so it better be a memorable moment.

What Superhero Stories Can Still Learn: Rev the secret identity stakes back up! Captain America: Civil War ably took on the game-changing Marvel Comics arc of the same name by having heroes collectively unmask, and movies like Spider-Man: Far From Home are still playing out those ramifications. But mostly we see the dangerous ramifications of heroes doxxing themselves, without really digging into the strain for heroes to constantly have to lie about the things that truly matter to them.

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Campy Disguises and Clever Aliases

If you’ve watched Alias or were even vaguely aware of it, no doubt the first thing you envision is Sydney in black leather and bright red hair, a.k.a. her iconic look from the pilot. Her non-SD-6-sanctioned, under-the-radar disguise (impersonating Will’s sister) displays her ingenuity and establishes the series’ brand: attention-grabbing hair paired with increasingly ridiculous outfits, from chain mail waitress ensembles to rubber dresses. She’s played punks, rich bimbos, alluring businesswomen, escorts, and all manner of female personas upon which her marks would project their assumptions—all of which belied her true strength and cunning.

Even when future episodes riffed on the color wheel with teal, magenta, purple, and good old-fashioned blonde wigs, it was still within a clear spectrum established on that pivotal mission, when she channels a silly girl who cares more about the color of her hair than her safety, only to pin her torturer with the same chair to which she’s bound.

What Alias Predicted: I would hazard a guess that Natasha Romanoff’s first appearance in 2012’s The Avengers—a seemingly helpless redhead tied to a chair, about to be nastily interrogated—was a nod toward Sydney’s triumphant pilot mission. What’s more, despite the first ten years of the MCU leaning toward sleek costumes, later phases (like WandaVision‘s cheeky Halloween callbacks) have realized that they can embrace the bold colors and campy designs of the comic-book source material.

What Superhero Stories Can Still Learn: Better to lean into the bold colors and campy designs of the comic-book source material than to go for more sleek and cool. WandaVision did this, albeit cheekily and using the excuse of Halloween, but the nod toward Scarlet Witch’s original outfit was well received. Because any superhero can look cool in leather, but only the standouts can rock color.

Rambaldi Artifacts, Immortality, and Clones

While replicating the romantic dramas of Felicity, Abrams was also playing with early iterations of his signature “puzzle box” narrative style: The pilot has Sydney chasing after the mysterious Mueller device, which turns out to be… a floating red ball… which bursts into water the moment she tries to remove it. That head-scratcher of a device is only one of many inventions belonging to Milo Rambaldi, a fictional Renaissance-era philosopher whose sketches and writings all pointed toward the ultimate endgame: immortality. You know, just normal spy thriller things.

The series saw Sydney and co. chasing after all manner of Rambaldi MacGuffins, from a clock to a kaleidoscope to a music box to flowers that either demonstrated proof of eternal life (by never wilting) or amped up human aggression. Through all of this, it becomes clear that Sloane helped found SD-6 in order to collect all of Rambaldi’s artifacts and capture immortality for himself—even and especially at the cost of people like his daughter, Sydney’s half-sister Nadia Santos (Mía Maestro).

Before we get more into Rambaldi’s prophecies about the sisters, we can’t forget the parallel fever dream of the series: clones! Or, rather, secret agents genetically modified to look like anyone—which means everyone is a suspect. This constant paranoia quickly got out of hand on the series, but its first reveal was perfect TV drama: There’s not an Alias fan who doesn’t remember “Francie doesn’t like coffee ice cream” and the complete devastation that followed—the knock-down, drag-out fight that destroyed Sydney’s apartment just as badly as Danny’s death, but also Sydney’s heartbreak upon realizing that her best friend was already long dead.

What Alias Predicted: The Infinity Stones themselves are less interesting than in various superheroes’ personal connections to them: Loki (Tom Hiddleston) tempted by the tesseract in Thor: Ragnarok; Star Lord (Chris Pratt) and the Guardians of the Galaxy channeling their friendship to withstand the effects of the Power Stone; Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) stages of grief as she copes with trying to keep the memory of Vision (Paul Bettany) alive even without the Mind Stone. In short: grounding the most out-there plotlines in the personal ensures they will always land.

What Superhero Stories Can Still Learn: Ground the most bonkers of plotlines in the personal, and they’ll always land.

The Chosen One and the Passenger

This is when the Rambaldi business started getting less National Treasure levels of charming and more outright weird. Turns out the team wasn’t just recovering a treasure trove of artifacts, but also Rambaldi’s prophetic writings—including the mysterious “Page 47,” which featured a drawing of a woman known as the Chosen One… who bears quite the resemblance to Sydney herself. That would be easy enough to dismiss as a strange doppelgänger coincidence, but then comes the reveal of “Project Christmas”: When Syd discovers that she didn’t just stumble into the spy life on her own, but was actually trained as a sleeper agent from childhood, it only amplifies her fears that she has no true agency over her life.

Further Rambaldi writings center Sydney and Nadia into predestined roles as the Chosen One and the Passenger: supposed foes who are fated to clash, with one dying. Nadia getting injected with “Rambaldi fluid” in order to tap directly into the long-dead man’s consciousness (contained within another artifact known as the Sphere of Life) only earns her some nasty apocalyptic visions. But despite their genuine friendship that comes from bonding over their fucked-up childhoods, Sydney and Nadia are forced into that preordained confrontation when the latter is injected with a compound that reduces her to a mindless killing machine… all while a giant red ball is hovering over a city in Russia, because why not. Even after Nadia dies, and is brought back to life, then dies again, with her ghost haunting Sloane as he finally attains immortality, she remains a presence on the series.

There are certainly echoes to Black Widow and how it handles Natasha and adoptive sister Yelena’s (Florence Pugh) strained reconciliation after the older sister got out of the Red Room while the younger was still caught in its web. Their bickering banter about vests and poses, their differing memories of their false childhood, and their respective feelings of abandonment are what elevated Black Widow’s standalone outing—and made it even more tragic, on multiple levels, that this was the only time we would see the two of them in a movie together.

What Alias Predicted: Sister stories are gold! The Rambaldi storylines would mean nothing if they didn’t hinge on a tragically preordained confrontation, just as the MCU’s Red Room depiction seemed overdone until it was presented within the context of multiple generations’ differing experiences with its bloody legacy.

What Superhero Stories Can Still Learn: More stories about sisters! With Nat dead not long after she and Yelena had just started to bond again, it’s vital that Yelena’s future MCU appearances show her still grappling with the little time they got together.

After all, the best superhero stories are the ones that can feel just as fresh now as they did 20 years ago.

Alias is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The post How Alias Anticipated Modern Superhero Storytelling appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[inklingofadream]

Prompts?? if you're interested, I would love to see any jon whump (you write it so well) early on in the series, maybe season one with the whole gang? idk maybe him just being super overwhelmed/sick right at the beginning or theres some sort of accident. honestly whatever you want, im so bad at prompts. btw, loving your daisy fics!!

owo s1 jon whump you say?

Read on AO3

Send me prompts

“Oh, Jon!” Martin waved a file around as he half-jogged after Jon. This was what he got for leaving his office. “I’ve just about finished the research on one of the statements that doesn’t record right.”

Jon did his best to banish any visible annoyance before turning to his least useful assistant. “Did you find anything useful?”

Martin shifted under his gaze, shuffling through the pages of the file. “Not much. The people and places are mostly verifiable, although the timeline doesn’t match up at all, but the Leitner book doesn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of this statement, which is odd-”

“The what?”

“Er, the book, Ex Altiora, “From the Library of Jurgen Leitner,” the title doesn’t show up on any list I can find-”

“Give me that!” Jon snatched the file away and stalked into his office.

-

Jon took a wobbly step out of his office, trying not to show how reading over Dominic Swain’s statement had shaken him. It wasn’t some coincidence, or a characteristically-misspoken conversation with Martin twisting into some terrible coincidence. The bookplate Swain had described matched the one Jon himself remembered exactly.

“Sasha.” He didn’t normally leave his office during the day, and even if they couldn’t see how off-center he felt, he could feel Tim and Martin’s gazes on him at the mere oddity of his appearance. “I was wondering if you could double-check the research on this statement for me.”

Sasha accepted the file and started to skim it. “I though Martin was already through with this one.”

Jon huffed, trying to pull his usual persona around him like a protective shell. “I’d appreciate a more discerning eye giving it a second look. Particularly the book- Ex Altiora.”

Sasha’s eyes were still skimming, and she hummed. “Ooh, a Leitner. Can’t just dismiss this one, Jon!”

He stiffened. “I- I beg your pardon?”

Sasha glanced up, hair falling over one eye. “You know I worked in Artefact Storage for a bit? They’ve got a whole shelf of them. Nasty things, but also credible instances of the supernatural,” she adopted a mimicry of his own voice for the last. “Research marks assignments dealing with books or libraries for Storage veterans specifically, since we’ve already learned all the protocols,” she spun her chair slightly, waving a hand at the other two, “You remember Tim? That month I got three different haunted library assignments? It was because they don’t want to risk just anyone tripping over a Leitner.”

“Were any of the libraries…?” Jon thought he did an admirable job hiding the squeak in his voice, under the circumstances.

Tim snorted. “Actually haunted? Pretty sure visiting one of ‘em was where she got that bug she ended up passing to half of Research. Maybe it was a cursed chest cold!” He let his voice waver and wiggled his fingers, eyes bright with mischief.

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Do you want me to round up some of the background on Leitners, Jon? I think Storage has a short history of their collection to go with the handling and authentication packet, though it’s annoyingly vague. Allegedly, there’s supposed to be clarification on “the 1994 incident” somewhere here, but with Gertrude’s filing…”

“That would be much appreciated, Sasha.” Jon turned on his heel and retreated to his office as quickly as he could without arousing suspicion. A whole shelf….

-

He had clearance to go into Artefact Storage, now that he was Head Archivist. He could go look for himself, if he wanted to. The thought was less a comfort than a persistent threat, looming over him. If he went looking for the Institute’s collection of Leitners, no one would stop him. If he picked one up, wandered off looking for a door, would anyone keep him from knocking?

He’d been working with a handful of walls between him and several dozen books just like the one that had ruined his childhood for half a decade and never known. Sasha had given him the list of titles and known effects with her research. Even if they weren’t identical to A Guest for Mr. Spider, they all sounded every bit as destructive.

And the titles were another thing. Scanning them, he’d nearly convinced himself for a moment that he’d somehow picked up the Leitner name and crafted an imaginary encounter to go with it. Maybe the trauma that had defined so much of his personality and the lingering memory of his hands acting without his input or desire were entirely concocted, a symptom of some deeper illness lurking in his own mind. It wasn’t as though he remembered his bully’s name to check, or had any evidence at all aside from his own memories. None of the Leitners in the Institute sounded the least bit like his own. If it weren’t for his own experience, he’d dismiss Dominic Swain’s Leitner for not matching a known text on the arcane, and it at least sounded like a near enough match thematically. As far as Artefact Storage was concerned, Leitner had never collected children’s books.

Around the time he’d entered university, Jon had convinced himself that, while his encounter had been real, there was no real library. Just whatever person or thing had created the book trying to make themselves sound more important. But there were dozens in the Institute alone, and he held evidence of more out there unrestrained in his own hand.

He didn’t leave his office for the rest of the day, alternating between trying to distract himself recording false statements into his laptop and trying not to vomit. His head felt too light for his body, and he was distantly sure that all of the recordings would have to be redone, rendered unusable by the shaking of his voice and the long, nauseous pauses he had to take every few paragraphs. When Martin knocked with tea in the midafternoon, Jon remained silent behind the locked door, afraid of what might come out if he opened his mouth. There were more of them.

He stayed much, much later that night that even he made a habit of, and he didn’t sleep once he did return home, to assured of the specter of long, hairy limbs to risk dreaming.

-

When he recorded Dominic Swain’s statement several days earlier, he counted it as a personal victory that his voice didn’t tremble on the tape, and spent the rest of the day working curled under his desk and flinching every time someone knocked at the door.