#which is ''what the—i was in the middle of saving orphans!''

[boopjuice]

They all break their rules. Within about 6 weeks.

Wes, obviously, meets Red Robin and charms him with his word vomit. He's also charmed by Red Robin because damn, that suit does wonders for him, and because Red Robin is intentionally flirting at the adorable idiot he just saved.

Next is Tuck. They haven't been able to find the book in the private library but they know Tim has the book. They know because Tucker found signs of hidden doors. And, well, they really need to get Danny back in Amity Park, so he figures Sam will forgive him for a little hacking.

Que then using Wes to distract Tim, who gets an alert halfway through the conversation that someone's hacking into his home security system to try and gain access to his Nest. And unfortunately, he can't find a way to excuse himself to defend his own system.

Tuck gets to duke it out with Oracle. He loses, and hightails it back to where they were staying. With the laptop he was just hacking with.

That Oracle is definitely tracking now.

Then Danny. Sam find out about Tuck breaking his rule and goes on a very long rant before they realize the laptop Tuck was using? Yeah, that's probably compromised. Good thing it didn't have any personal information on it, we'll just leave it here and go find another spot to stay!

Cut to four teens dragging luggage behind them in the middle of Gotham, all trying to find a place to stay. They looks like tourists. They look like easy targets.

So a gang jumps them, and while none of the team are slouches in a fight, there's just too many to reasonably take on. So Danny, while Sam is screaming about "Not you too!", becomes Phantom just long enough to knock out and tie up the gang.

Sam gives him the biggest earful when he's done. AND they still need to find a hotel while they look for another apartment.

The Bats are searching. They find the first apartment, trace it back to the teens, and are now actively hunting them down because why are four teens trying to hack into the Bat systems?

They manage to track them back to their hotel, which was pretty hard with Tucker covering their tracks, but not impossible. They find them right as Ivy decides to attack this block because it was originally contracted to be a green space for the city for at least another 50 years, but someone did some shady shit and broke the contract.

Sam? Is so tired. Wes broke his rule. Tucker broke his rule. Even Danny, who was the one to suggest having rules in the first place, broke his rule. AND HE'D COME UP WITH THAT ONE!

So Sam figures it's about time that she gets to break her rule too.

And in the middle of a fight between Poison Ivy, Batman, Red Hood, Red Robin, and Orphan, Sam Manson marches out onto the battlefield and rips Ivy a new one. What good is she doing, harming innocent people and reducing the amount of places they could stay? Fixing the coral reefs would have significantly more positive impact on the world, so would fighting deforestation, which seems much more up Ivy's alley. But no, she's actively harming her cause by destroying people's lives, in the process making activism harder for other people, like Sam, who also want a greener planet.

Ivy tries to attack Sam, but she's Undergrowth's student. That's not about to happen. The plants can like Ivy all they want for her ties with the Green, they aren't going to attack someone personally tied to the Grey (I saw a head canon somewhere that instead of Sam being associated with plants, she should be associated with the Grey, which feeds into decay and reintroducing nutrients through that decay and I'm sticking with it).

Once the fight is over and the dust settles, all four Bats corner the teens, ignoring the stars in their eyes, because they really need to know why four high school juniors decided to try and break into their systems.

To which Tucker says, very helpfully, "We weren't? We just needed to get into Tim Drake's private library so we could find a ritual to help our friend."

The Bats have many, many more questions.

DCxDP Fic idea: What's the Rule again?

It starts with Wes Weston accidentally banishing Danny from his haunt. He didn't mean to, and he panicked along side Sam and Tucker when Danny was effectively evicted Danny from Amity Park.

See the four have become tight-knited friends every since the trio started talking to Wes back during the summer between freshman and sophomore year.

During that time, Wes's other friends had drifted apart once Wes' attention moved from basketball to ghosts- specifically Phantom. Danny had felt at fault that he was left a loner because of his secret identity and had invited Wes to sit with them at the Nasty Burger the second week of Summer break.

Wes was suprise to find out that Sam, Tucker and Danny were much better friends then the ones he hanged out with since third grade. He was used to people only speaking to him in class or the few times they hang out on breaks but the trio would message him about every single thought or meme they had. They could laugh togther until tears fell from thier eyes and they couldn't breath over the silliest of topics.

Wes also found out that the trio was supportive of all their interests. Sure, his old teammates and friends didn't make fun of him for crocheting or painting, but they wouldn't accompany him to an art market. Nor would they actually wear the scarves and gloves he made them.

They sure as hell didn't volunteer to help him run a booth to sell his own crocheting pieces after encouraging him to get a table. And they wouldn't cheer loudly when he made his first sale.

Wes also wouldn't have happily gone with them to an observatory, a Dark Poem Night, or even a tech expo. But he found that he had the time of his life watching Danny, Sam, and Tucker nerd out at the events much as much as he did at his own.

He also never had anyone he knew would be down to do him favors or even take notes for him when he was out sick.

So he became close friends with them, passing sophomore year with far more enjoyment than any other grade, then Junior year came and went just as fast and as fun. It was their last summer as high school students, so Wes wanted to do as many new activities as the four could together before Senior year.

Who knew what would happen to their little group after graduation? He wants to think they would all remain best friends but he's heard so many stories of people drifting apart that Wes was afraid of risking it.

That's why he researched urban myths and legends around the world regarding ghosts- more then any research paper he's ever done- and jokingly asked Danny to partake in some of them as a halfa.

They joked and laughed- throwing salt in a circle around Danny, lighting a candle for him to use Morse code with- but it wasn't until Wes got to the one where he tried smoking Danny out with a banishing spell he found in an old book that things turned from funny to horrible.

It worked

Danny was flung from his haunt- effectively banishing him from the area he was haunting. Dann just happens to be haunting all of Amity Park, so he ends up on the outskirts of town, unable to cross the invisible line.

Wes practically choked on his tears as he apologized for Danny not being able to cross back in, but the other three quickly informed him that they, too, took part in it, and it was no one's fault. Danny just had to find a way to reverse the banishing spell.

The only problem was that the book pages Wes found online were only on the banish spell itself and nothing else. He couldn't even find the whole book since it belonged in a private family library.

The family library was located in the most dangerous city in America. Gotham.

The library also belongs to a very wealthy family that had recently all but perished except for their lone heir- Timothy Drake.

Now Wes attempted to contact Timothy Drake in hopes of having the other teenager send him copies of the book, but he never got a reply. He thinks it was due to not explaining why he needed the book and ending up sounding like a bot or a scam.

With each passing day of Drake not responding Danny's situation grew worse. Jazz luckily covered for them, claiming to have signed Danny up for some camp so his parents wouldn't think he was missing.

That would only work until school started, which was a time limit that was weighing on all their shoulders as they tried to find a counterspell.

Jazz, Tucker, Sam, and Wes each took turns driving out of town to bring him food and a change of clothes so Danny could figure out his situation, having to do it in shifts to not alert any of their parents.

However, without his haunt to pick up natural exoplasm, Danny was growing weaker and weaker by the day, looking half stave out in the little motel room Sam rented for him as they tried to get him back into the town.

Danny needed to either make his way back to his haunt or go somewhere that was so infected with ectoplasm that it actually felt cursed.

Tucker found the solution to all their problems with a few hacking skills that he learned to fight off Technus' invasive attempts of his personal tech.

"A full ride to Gotham Academy?" Wes' mom gasped staring at the acceptance letter her son eagerly showed her. "With a promised full ride to any university in America?!"

"Yeah, Tucker, Sam, Danny, and I all got accepted for our work on clean energy generators. We sent it in for the Wayne scholarship, and we won! The only thing is that it's a requirement to graduate from high school in Gotham. I have to go!" Wes gasped, eyeing both his dad's and Kyle's doubtful frowns. He couldn't afford for them to say no when Tucker had worked so hard to bump them up as Winners. Bruce Wayne's computer security is no joke. "This is the once in a life time opportunity!"

"But where would you live?" His dad asks, shaking the letter. "Wes, this is clear across states, and it only covers school expenses."

"Sam's parents bought her a house. She's going to rent us some of the extra rooms." It was a lie; her parents would never let four boys- especially these boys- rent from their daughter. She told them that the school provided co-dorm rooms "I can get a job at the local library- I already sent them my resume and got a call for a interview."

"What will you do for food?" Kyle asks. "We both know you can't cook."

"I can't, but Danny does. He's amazing in the kitchen."

Here, his parents share a loaded look. "So you'll be living with the Fenton boy....."

"Well. Yeah? I already said that?" He returns, confused, and Kuule coughs to cover a laugh. Confused he stares at his older brother, who quirks a grin at him.

"Don't worry about it." Kyle laughs, but his wiggling eyebrows tell Wes he should worry a lot about it. He would inisit a little more to find out what Kyle knew, but he needed to convince his parents more.

Eventually, after five days of attempting, Wes got their permission and could tell his friends, who all shared the same results. The remainder of the summer is spent preparing for their move- finding the house, getting it furnished, packing their things, transferring schools- it's a lot, and he's never been so grateful for Sam's wealth.

She hires people to get it all done for her-including hiring a trailer to take their four cars-, so he only has to worry about his packing. The four meet up at the airport on the day they live, flying first class thanks to Sam's grandmother.

Tearful goodbyes and good luck from their families leave them all a bit down but they board the plane and take off without too much trouble.

While on the plane, Sam turns to the boys. "Does everyone remember the phases of the plan?"

"Phase one: Blend into Gotham until we find Timothy Drake" Tucker states, pushing up his glasses

"Phase two: Get Drake to invite us over to his house and find the book," Danny tacks on, tapping his foot on the ground.

"Phase three: Find all the pieces for the counterspell- usually scattered around the magical family's ancestral home- and get Danny home!" Wes shouts, raising a fist in the air.

Sam nods, looking satisfied. "And what are we not allowed to do? Danny?"

"Become a vigilante when my ectoplasm is on a limited intake" Danny grumbles, sinking into his chair. "Let it to the Bats and keep my head low."

"Good. Tucker?"

"I'm not allowed to hack into anything because it can gain the attention of the Bats or Mr.Wayne, and then we'll be on a wanted list" Tucker sighs "No matter how much fun it would be to battle it out with the legendary Oracle."

"That's right. I'm not allowed to go anywhere near Poison Ivy no matter how much I want to yell at her to go fix the coal riffs and cut down forests instead of wasting her powers on the stupid heist." Same all but bites, and then she turns her attention to Wes, who startles.

"Wes?"

"Wait, I have a rule?"

"Course, man," Tucker laughs. "We all have rules."

"But I'm not interesrted in anything in Gotham besides the Drake grimoire!"

"Wes," Danny says gently, his soft baby blue eyes making him a little hot under the collar as they stare into his soul. "You're not allowed to fall in love with any of the Bats."

Wes mind blanks, then reboots, "Excuse me!?"

"We know you had a crush on all of us here Wes and Val" Sam laughs when he turns wide eyes at her. "It's cute but you really shouldn't try for the Bats. They're the violent sort"

"What?!"

"Yeah, you have a type, and it's a hero or hero adjacent." Tucker shrugs "It's cool."

Wes can only gape at them, no matter how much he tries to convince them; otherwise, the three refuse to remove his rule. He is highly offended by it.

Yes, he's never really gone out with Team Phantom, just because when he joined the group, most of Danny's rouges were long gone leaving behind the tiny ones that he could handle on his own, but he wasn't into heroes!

And okay- maybe, maybe at one point or another he may have had slight crushes on his friends but they were quick and gone before the first school year together!

So the rule is utterly ridiculous!

At least, he thinks so until five days later when he's trying to find his way around the new neighborhood and gets caught up in a mugging. He could have quickly taken the mugger- humans had nothing on ghosts- but he attempted to talk the young adult out of it when Red Robin swooped in like a knight in shining armor.

He may have just stared at the hero's tight-skin outfit instead of letting the hero know that he could handle it, and he may have made a fool of himself when Red Robin asked if he was right.

"Yeah tots fine" He babbles. Ugh, who says tots?! He wants to stop talking but when Wes gets nervous he tends to just word vomit and he could hear himself doing it now. "You know who else is fine?"

Red Robbin raises a brow, likely knowing the pickup line. Cowering, Wes changes the answer in a panic. "Timothy Drake!"

Red Robin stills. "Come again?"

"Timothy Drake, a boy in my class! He's fine that you think he was part siren or something. You've seen him, right? I mean you have eyes!" He repeats with a squeal "I want to get into his private liberty!"

"Do you?" Red Robin tilts his head, a slight smirk forming on his mouth. "You should try flirting with him then. Maybe he can give you a tour."

"Oh, I want more than a tour!"

Why did he say that?!

At least the hero in front of him laughs until a shout has them both looking away.

Danny is running down the street screaming his name, thank the Ancients. When Wes turns around to wave at him, Red Robin vanishes without a sound or trace.

Like a ghost.

Oh no, that's hot.

"Danny, I broke the rule"

"For Ancient's sake, it hasn't even been a month."

[tastycitrus]

the standard reaction to seeing cass in any comic

[evilminji]

*Gasp of joy* Brain, you shouldn't have!

You know how the Wayne's have basicly been the ONLY Good And Uncorrupt Wealthy Family in Gotham? And probably fuckin curse resistant AF because otherwise, HOW!? (No, seriously, the local magical population is baffled but impressed!)

....you....you wanna bet at least a few of those suckers died thinking "but I haven't completed my orphan hospital for sickly waifish puppy's and sad eyed children, yet! I... must... save... THE CHILDREN! *le dies (×.× ) * " to the tune of their beautiful (and somehow bizarrely benevolent and well adjusted) families weeping at their bedsides.

Whoop! There's a ghost! Hello, Mr. Wayne.

(Why does this Keep Happening? Please have LESS unfinished bussiness. You're supposed to be rich. Stop trying to help people ON YOUR DEATH BEDS! FFS.)

I say all this? Beeeecause~?

( >.>)(<.< )

Allright! Time to come clean, folks! Which side of the family lead to our descendant dressing up in a Kevlar BAT SUIT!!? Throwing himself off buildings in the middle of the night. Cavorting around with Amazons!

We aren't even mad about the last one! We're actually deeply and respectfully impressed! But who pulled THAT off? Angela? That yours? (*shrug* I mean... probably? It DOES seem like something my daughter would do...)

So like?

Imagine Danny~.

Trying to eat his generic brand cereal. IN HIS Underwear. When? All these Fancy Ghosts show up to his A College Kid's, Baby's First, Crap Apartment(TM). He's eating on a pillow on the floor for God's sake. It's too early for this! C'mon guys...

But, no.

They want permission to go Haunt their Descendant.

Danny sighs. He can already FEEL his cereal going soggy. This is gonna take a while, ain't it? Okay... okay, WHO is you offspring, what did they do, and for how long? You know the rules, guys.

Then they hit him with the oh so casual "BTW he's Fuckin Batman".

YOU WANT TO WHAT!?

(They convince him. How? He couldn't tell you. It's... is? Is this what It's like meeting a Fenton? For other people? Huh. He always thought people were exaggerating...)

Which? Is how a dead Victorian Old Man has arrived to ABSOLUTELY tear this Trouble Making Youngster a new one, in front of his little friends! Just full on full names him. Oh, OH! The broken BONES! The BRUISES! Have you no regard for your poor ancestors health! Their fragile hearts! Trying to put us in the grave AGAIN, are you?! Why in MY DAY-!!!

(Nightwing? Recording this for Alfred. It's gonna be an early birthday present~)

@hypewinter @hdgnj @the-witchhunter @ailithnight @mutable-manifestation @nerdpoe

[sundrop-writes]

Your First Kiss With Dick Grayson

Dick Grayson x Gender Neutral Reader

Summary:

The Titans have faced a lot together, but never something quite as troubling as the possible return of an inter-dimensional demon that shreds apart worlds and leaves nothing standing in its wake.

You hate to admit it, but even standing with your team - you're afraid. Dick tries his best to comfort you, but for once during his career as noble, selfless team leader - he takes a moment to be selfish, and does something that he has been avoiding doing for years.

Dick Grayson x Gender Neutral Reader. Childhood Friends to Lovers. Angst and Fluff. Set during Season 4, Episode 6.

Word Count: 2,900

DC Titans Masterlist | AO3 Link

Detailed warnings and author's notes below the cut.

Warnings: this one is a bit more on the angsty side; this fic features major spoilers for season 4 (and for the majority of the show) - so if you're watching it for the first time or you haven't seen it yet and you want to watch it spoiler free, then avoid this fic for now; the reader character is completely gender neutral - the only pronouns used for the reader are you/yours; the reader is one of the original Titans; the reader and Dick are childhood friends through the Justice League - the reader is the adoptive child of Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (the reader is a talented marksman and trained in combat); the reader is mentioned to be an orphan (again, aren't all good superheroes); major pining from Dick - he has had a crush on the reader since they were kids (most of this is from his POV, so it's not specified if the reader has returned his feelings for just as long); mentions of canon character deaths; a lot of this is from Dick's POV so - warnings for Dick being emotionally constipated and referring to romantic feelings as a 'disease'; this is an AU where Dickkory never happened; mentions of canon violence - not described in graphic detail; mentions of the apocalypse/the world ending (and the anxiety this can cause); the reader is feeling extreme fear/anxiety due to the possible end of the world; technically - unresolved pining. I believe that's it.

A/N: The second part of the First Kiss series! I had a lot of fun with this one. This is the first really romantic fic I have written for Dick, and I enjoyed it so much omg. I was so tempted to write an enemies to lovers version with him, because he annoys me so much in the canon, and I feel like 'kissing in the middle of a heated argument' would work so well with his character - but maybe we'll save that one for Jason (or Hank, idk). instead, I went with emotionally constipated Dick Grayson, because that is sooo canon. he would not admit his feelings for someone if he had a gun to his head. and I had a lot of fun writing this mostly from his POV. I feel like he is such an interesting POV character to work with, so I might do more from him in the future. anyway, please enjoy!!

...

Stress. 

There were few other words to describe the horrible feeling that was dense in the air around them. 

Everyone was looking to Dick for answers, and unfortunately, he had none. Sebastian was missing, likely kidnapped by Mother Mayhem in order to complete a ritual that would likely mean the end of the world. Rachel had lost her powers and the Titans needed her unique form of magic now more than ever. Tim was impatient, annoyed because Dick wasn’t letting him use the minimal training that he had. But of course, Dick was hesitant to let the next would-be Robin off the bench after what had happened to Jason. 

(Dick could barely bring himself to think about Jason these days.) 

Kory was having difficulty controlling her newfound powers, and so was Gar. Which left the team weakened on all sides. Jinx was helpful on the magic front, but she was far from easy to control when it came to executing plans and corralling her rather wild personality. 

And Dick didn’t even want to think about what was happening with Conner. He just had to pray that this whole shaved-head, Lex Luthor impression was part of his mourning for his would-be father, and hopefully - it would be temporary. 

All of the chaos among the team left Dick leaning on you. As usual, you were likely the only person on the team who wasn’t experiencing any extreme drama. You were the only Titan with some true stability. 

And you were the person on the team with the most experience. Even more than Dick himself. Beyond being part of the original Titans team that had helped to found The Tower, you had been trained under Oliver Queen, who was part of the Justice League as Green Arrow. Ollie had taken you on as his own child when your parents died and left him as your carer in their will. Naturally, early into your childhood, he had started training you in the art of combat and marksmanship - so you grew up with intense skill. 

You and Dick met soon after he was adopted by Bruce. And much like Donna, you were a kind face and a wise voice that kept him mentally grounded well into adulthood. But you were also someone mischievous that made him smile; someone he could always turn to for a well timed laugh. 

You always kept him sane. 

And very much unlike Donna - soon after he met you, Dick started to develop feelings for you. 

Of course, back then, it was just a silly crush. When he told Donna about it at the time, she laughed. And when he had hidden his face in embarrassment, she then told him that it was ‘cute’. She told him that you two would be good together when you got older. So naturally, Dick took her words as biblically concrete advice. 

He decided that he should wait for you. That the two of you would be good together when you got older. 

So he waited. 

And he waited. And eventually - life got in the way. 

He had a huge falling out with Bruce, things at the Tower went south. It was never the right time to tell you. How the hell could he tell his best friend that he had those big, terrifying feelings mounting inside of him, worsening each year like a disease? 

It was never the right time to tell you because he was dodging disasters left and right and he needed you more as a friend than as a lover. He needed you as a brick wall to lean on. He needed you as that voice of common sense in his ear - the leader’s loyal first mate, giving him advice behind the curtain and keeping his head on straight. 

He didn’t need to tell you about his awful, festering feelings and have you gone from his life too. 

When Garth died, and then Jericho died and the Tower shuddered, it still didn't feel like the right time. Wounds were tender and even if you were never downright angry at him like everyone else was - you needed your space. Dick respected that. 

That day, you stood at the mouth of the elevator, about to leave for Star City to go and lick your emotional wounds at Ollie’s for a while, and you looked at Dick with tears in your eyes - looked at him like you were waiting for him to say it. But it wasn’t the right time. 

He still thought about you every single day when he was in Detroit. And then - he showed up at your door with a scared little girl, needing more advice, needing that brick wall again. It was only natural that when chaos found him, he needed your help. 

He hated that your advice was to call in Dawn and Hank. He relied on you, and you relied on family. And he hated that they were waiting at your apartment, called against his will once he had left to do some more sleuthing. 

But he found that you were right when he saw how Dawn bonded with Rachel, when Hank put up a vicious fight against those strangers who came to collect her in the name of her father. 

Watching you get thrown off that roof sent Dick’s heart through his stomach. As he clung onto the rooftop with his fingers and the muscles of his arm burned, all he could think about was you. As you sputtered out blood and he cradled your head, unsure of how to help you, terror gripped him in a way that it never had before in his life, because he realized that he might actually lose the most important person in his life. 

As you lay in the hospital, a set of machines barely keeping you alive, with Dawn loyally holding your hand in comfort and Hank seething to get revenge on the people who had hurt you - Dick ached with regret and not having told you. 

Still, when you showed up at that house in Ohio, somehow magically awakened from your near death by Rachel's powers - Dick felt that it just wasn't the right time. He swallowed his regrets like ash in his mouth when he reunited with you, hugged you tight. He didn’t even consider telling you about his feelings to be on the radar of possibility. 

When you came back to the Tower to help bring in Doctor Light - it just wasn't the right time. When you showed up in Gotham to help bring down Red Hood - it just wasn't the right time. 

Even when Dick died and was brought back to life by some strange magical pit, a pool of waters that brought him dreams of a far off life with you - it still wasn’t the right time. 

You were there to Dick's call, loyal and waiting, every single time. You looked at him with as much love and longing in your eyes as he needed (at least, according to Dawn and Donna you did) - but still, it never felt like the right time. 

It never felt like the right time to destabilize his entire life by uprooting the one good friendship he had. It never felt like the right time to truly fuck things up with you. 

Now, because of some cult that Dick believed to be long gone and a stupid blood ritual, the world was ending, and it still didn't feel like the right time. 

He wasn't the son of a demon from another dimension, but he still felt cursed. 

When Dick saw you slip out of the room, clearly trying to sneak away from the group, his stomach twisted with nerves. It was rare that you of all people cracked under the pressure. It was rare that you needed to escape from the madness for a breath. He mumbled an excuse to Kory and then chased after you, knowing that it wouldn't be hard to tell where he was truly going - but truthfully, he didn’t care. 

He easily caught you in one of the late night deserted halls of STAR Labs. 

The many glass walls overlooked the city - a collection of bright lights that made up Metropolis. Thousands of people that you never knew, that you had never met before. People that all seemed too important now as you contemplated their lives; thought about the fact that you might not be able to save them. 

Dick saw the sickly look on your face, the glassy sheen of guilt in your eyes even from far off as you leaned on the polished titanium railing that separated the upper floors from the atrium. His footsteps echoed in the empty hall and you heard him approaching from far off. He made no effort to sneak up on you or conceal himself, not wanting to startle you when you were already in such a distressed state. 

The minute you looked over your shoulder and saw him, your face broke from that dark, doomed frown into a haste smile, and you reached up to wipe away your tears, attempting to be subtle with that motion. You were trying to hide yourself from him. 

Dick came to stand beside you, resisting the urge to pull you into his arms. He desperately wanted to shelter you away from any fear you might be feeling. Maybe it was selfish; wanting to hold you, wanting to protect you from anything in the world that could possibly harm you. Maybe it was downright idiotic - because realistically, he knew that couldn't protect you from this kind of harm. He couldn’t protect you from the world ending. 

“Y/N-” Dick murmured your name gently, clutching a fist tightly by his side to resist the urge to reach out and soothe a hand over the trembling muscles of your jaw. 

You were holding in a sob, and it came out as a harsh, sarcastic laugh instead. 

“I know.” You said. “I know. You're doing that Team Leader Guy Thing.” 

You tried to make it sound playful and joking, but with your voice wet and soaked with worry and fear, it came off as a pathetic bid to deflect. 

Dick wasn’t sure how to reply. Because yes, he was doing that ‘Team Leader Guy Thing’. He was trying his best to, anyway. 

“You're gonna ask ‘are you okay?’ and I'm gonna lie and say ‘I'm fine, boss. All good.’” You continued. 

At least you were being straightforward about it being a lie. 

Dick wished that he had something genuinely helpful to say, but his throat stalled with dryness and his chest ached at seeing you so distraught. It really wasn’t something that he was used to. 

“I mean, it's not like it's the end of the world.” You let out another dry, sarcastic laugh. 

Then, there was a moment of silence - a beat of realization as your chin quivered and more thick tears rimmed your eyes. 

“It's - it's only the end of the world.” You spoke these words heavier, dropping any false laughter in your tone - it truly hit you. Any further jokes you could make left you. 

Dick choked on his own tears when he heard the aborted sob in your chest - something that came out as a whimper when you reached up to clutch at your heart. 

You were genuinely terrified. Terrified that the Titans wouldn’t be able to find a solution in time. Terrified that everyone was going to die. Not just the people you loved, but - everyone. 

“Hey, come on.” Dick said, his leader instincts, his natural caring for you kicking in. “We've been through worse.” 

Working with the Titans, you had been through a lot. Drug busts, battling against costumed psychopaths, the loss of a dear friend to a dangerous assassin. But you weren’t sure that you had been through something worse than this. Everything the Titans had been through had never affected the world on such a large scale. 

“Have we?” You argued gently. 

Perhaps not. Maybe the only time the team had been in such dire straits was the first time Trigon attempted to come to earth. But that had been when Rachel had been armed with her powers and had been prepared to take him down. But Dick wasn't going to voice those thoughts to you. 

You waited in agony for him to say something, and your tears finally breached - rolling down your face in hot tracks, laying marks of the true fear you were feeling, laying it all bare for the first time. Dick knew that his own eyes reflected that same glossy hurt now, if only for the pain he felt in seeing you cry - something that was so incredibly rare over the time he had known you. 

Dick reached out and gently cupped the side of your cheek, running his thumb across your face and wiping some of those tears away. You were so startled by the tenderness of the touch that you couldn't help but to let out a whimper, and you felt frozen as Dick spoke his next words. 

“It's gonna be okay.” He told you, trying his hardest to sound confident in the words. “We're gonna get through this. I know we will.” 

This time, unlike many before, you couldn't be inspired by his confidence. 

“Have you - have you considered what happens if we don't?” Your voice barely reached above a whisper, barely daring to tempt fate with this possibility. 

Honestly, Dick had not. In these kinds of situations, he didn't allow himself to focus too much on the negative. As the team leader, he did have to take all the possibilities into account. It was something he had to do in order to keep everyone safe. But if he focused too much on death and darkness, much like Bruce did, then he knew that paranoia would overtake him and his team would get caught in the crossfire. 

He had to spend his time coming up with solutions to fix the problem rather than spending his time caught up in knots, worrying about what would happen if he fumbled and didn't actually fix things after all. 

The literal end of the world? It just wasn't a possibility in this mind. 

But right now, standing there, staring into your big eyes, glossed over with fear as you looked to him for answers - there was only one thing that Dick could think of. 

And it was so incredibly selfish. It didn’t have anything to do with the team or being a good leader. It didn’t have anything to do with helping the others. 

Dick brushed his thumb over your cheek again, an incredibly tentative touch that had your skin tingling. You let out a small sigh, and the world froze around you when he leaned in - slowly, moving toward you at a pace that more than gave you time to escape if you wanted to. But you found that you didn’t want to. You found his closeness to be an incredible comfort in these moments of mental chaos. 

And so, he gently planted his lips on yours. 

It should have come as a shock - your childhood best friend kissing you. But in that moment, it just felt right. All you could do was shut your eyes and lean into the kiss, reaching up to grip his wrist, keeping him close to you as you leaned into his smothering heat. His lips were surprisingly soft, and he tasted like coffee - using caffeine to keep himself awake for days, trying to marathon a solution against the impending doom. 

His kiss was firm but so giving - a touch that easily swallowed you up with heat from the top of your head all the way down to your toes. It was a sensation that pushed out the rest of the world, smothered any worries about who or what might bring an end to it. 

It was the most tender, but most wonderfully passionate kiss that you had ever experienced in your life. 

When he pulled away, you sucked in a sharp breath, suddenly feeling incomplete without his lips on yours. The shock then began to set in, like pulling the knife from a stab wound and feeling the blood rush out of you freely. It created a dizzying mixture with the heat that was now boiling under your skin. 

Why? Your brain screamed out as you stared at him. When? How long had he wanted to kiss you? How long had you been missing out on Dick Grayson? 

Dick could see all those questions bubbling beneath your surface as the fear in your eyes shifted to confusion, and he finally decided to speak. 

“I'm sorry.” He said quietly. “But if the world does end, I couldn't die without knowing what kissing you is like.” 

“Dick-” You sighed, about to go on a long rant about how he could have done that years ago, about how he should have - and the end of the world was a shitty excuse. 

But you abruptly cut off your own words when more footsteps squeaked down the hall - the rubber soles of sneakers scuffing against the polished floor. 

Dick jumped away from you as though he had been burned, clearly wanting to keep the interaction private. Both of you tuned to see Gar approaching. 

“Dick?” He posed. Gar had a look of confusion, clearly wondering if he should question what was going on between the two of you but swallowing it. 

“Yeah?” Dick replied. 

“Um - Conner's missing.” He announced this in a nervous, meek tone, not wanting to bring the team leader any more bad news. 

“What?” Dick gaped. 

There was no time to further discuss what Dick had said to you. With the end of the world in your hands, it easily fell to the back of your mind. 

...

If you enjoyed this fic, check out my DC Titans Masterlist for more of my other fics!! And please consider reblogging and commenting on this fic to tell me what you liked about it.

[sassypantsjaxon]

Okay, quick disclaimers: 1. I know some people don't like Horikoshi's worldbuilding, would say there's a lack of depth, etc, etc. I'm not one of those people, I just see it as my chance to overanalyze and fill in the gaps myself for these kind of headcanon/theory/whatever you want to call this post. 2. This post will briefly touch on my own personal headcanons of Mic being an orphan and Aizawa being a rich kid.

Okay! all that being said, I'm just going to throw some things at the wall about my own thoughts/headcanons about the world Mic and Aizawa grew up in, and you guys can let me know if anything sticks.

You ever think about how All Might is around 25 years older than Mic and Aizawa?

Given that he left Japan as a teenager and went to college in America, he probably came back and started becoming the Symbol of Peace in Japan in his early-mid twenties.

Mic and Aizawa would have been part of the first generation of kids who have never known a world without All Might

Like. Think about that. They would have grown up in a world that is just beginning to recover from the horrors (as compared to the relatively deceptively safe society we see at the beginning of the series)

Hizashi grows up in an orphanage with a lot of older kids who were orphaned by villain attacks and...not so many kids younger than him. Which is good for them, but kind of lonely for a kid like Zashi

There's a wall around the orphanage that is supposed to be for protecting them, but as villain activity decreases, it just starts to feel like it's keeping the kids in

Hizashi becomes a hero because he knows nobody else is going to save him

Shouta grows up in a high security gated community

He's always wanted to be a hero, and he's always been told it's pointless, because All Might will have eradicated villainy by the time Shouta's an adult this is of course a lie

part of the tragedy of Oboro's death is that they've heard their whole lives how large scale villain attacks like that are a thing of the past

They would have had drills for what to do in case of villain attacks when they were little kids starting school. These would have slowly been phased out by the time they were in middle school

Another thing that's changed since they were kids is the architecture

No more burned down, bombed out buildings that just sit around because there's no point rebuilding something that will just be destroyed again in a few weeks. No more business that are still open, but the windows are boarded up because they can't afford to keep replacing the glass

No more graffitied walls and fences and gates. No more anti-villain spikes on top of buildings and around cities

And all of these things disappeared so slowly that it's like one day when they're in highschool, they just look around and realize they don't exist anymore and wonder where it all went and when it happened

There was probably a population boom as All Might started to cement his place as the Symbol of Peace. People realizing their kids would have a safer world to grow up in and they didn't have to fear dying every other minute

People moving out of the safety of the cities back into more rural areas

actually hang on. that would kind of explain the racism and bigotry we know exists in the rural regions

this was supposed to be more about mic and aizawa and now i'm just spitballing worldbuilding sorry.

Mic and Aizawa are kind of in this weird inbetween of the fourth generation of quirk users, who grew up fully in the horrors of quirk wars, and the fifth generation, who grew up in the era of All Might and it's all just the past to them

Because even though they didn't exactly live it themselves, they did still see the direct effects of it

And that's the horror of this new war, because their students had been living the peace Mic and Aizawa were promised as children

[mephistopheleswasrobbed]

We've entered into the secon half of the series and an end to the torture is nowhere in sight. What is in sight however is gay shit so let's talk about it.

1

Let's get the biggest thing out of the way first. The show was very clearly asking us to draw a parallel between Home and Peach, and Phoom and Vicha. You know, actual, explicitly in gay love couple Phoom and Vicha.

Their story obviously resonates a lot for our boys. Here is Dr. Phoom, a man who - is kind of responsible for the death of the man he loved - had somewhat moved on with his life only to find out later that said man he loved had died because of him - is here now, even later still, to apologise for that to the man who died. If that's not something Home can relate to, I don't know what is. On the other side we have Vicha, who - was abandoned and left to die by the man he loved - was unable to hear that mans explanation because of his interfering family, that was more worried about reputation than his happiness, and because he was in the moment too overwhelmed by the betrayal to give him a chance to explain. Which clearly mirrors Peach's story. (Thers's also the parallel of the class difference as Phoom seems to be at least middle, likely upper middle class by birth while Vicha seems to have lived at the dance school which would imply him to be the instructor's son or an orphan/otherwise family-less kid the instructer took in. Either way he was certainly not rich.) (And I guess Vicha knowing more about cooking than Phoom is also a parallel and also another indication of their different economic backgrounds.)

Dr. Phoom apologises for not being brave enough to tell Vicha what he wanted to tell him (which was also Home's problem)

And then Dr. Phoom finds out Vicha finally heard his apology but he's still sticking around and he says that's enough for him which prompts Home to look at Peach (again) because that is kind of what he hopes for. That he gets to properly apologise to Peach and that Peach will still be around afterwards.

Just like Dr. Poom he doesn't want to exocise his ghost, he wants to talk to him.

2

Home fully acknowledges Pangpang as his baby sister (in law) in his contacts.

3

Pangpang's viewers are devastated at their ship having sunk.

4

They're being annoying talking by way of Pangpang even though they stand right next to each other. Which is also a classic trope for fighting couples (though it does admittedly also get used for friends sometimes)

5

Fully adult man Dr. Phoom knows a lover's quarrel when he sees one.

6

Peach knows that to facilitate communication between two lovers he needs to at least somewhat communicate with his own.

7

For some reason their solution is to cosplay as dance students. And then they, of course, proceed to look at each other while making the "love" gesture.

We had previously seen Vicha do the same.

Looking at them doing that prompted Dr. Phoom to think of his own young love. He has definitely clocked what's going on here (though obviously he has more important things to worry about than some strangers relationship problems)

8

Now this is certainly not something you'd say if the end goal was friendship

9

Peach is using the same pic for Home's contact as Home is using for his, just zoomed in on a different place. And he has Home saved as DANGER DO NOT ANSWER! They're so annoying.

10

Pangpang is very happy her parents might be getting back together

11

Meanwhile Home is sitting at a bar, crying about calling Peach like he got dumped. (Which he did. For good reason.)

12

We've seen so far that the ghosts are very limited. They are not fully concious and aware beings, rather they are "caught" in their desires at the moment of their death, they pretty much move solely with the goal of fulfilling their last wish. More like a broken record stuck in a loop than a living being that has multiple options to act and react to whatever happens around it.

It is noteworthy therefore that Home's ghost continued his journey to Peach as that makes this his biggest desire at the moment he fell into a coma.

Unfortunately it seems that he can't speak. Although Peach wouldn't be able to hear him anyway, so maybe all he wanted was to see Peach one more time. We'll see next episode how similar or not Home's ghost is to the others since Home is not completely dead. For now the biggest difference is that he still looks normal.

No Lesbian Corner this week because they didn't interact. Kan was gone being shady for most of the episode.

[chuuyrr]

your latest work got me crying bro :') it hit right in the feels </3 i also want dazai to know that baby scarlet doesnt like him JUST BECAUSE he reminds her of gojo, but rather because he himself has fatherly vibes and that she likes him because he is simply just as he is :))

what if... baby scarlet reader IS actually his biological daughter, but in another universe?

dazai osamu with scarlet witch! baby! reader as his biological child

bungou stray dogs x reader

masterlist of the series

╰➤ CW(s): spoilers for bungo stray dogs, single father! dazai osamu and headcanons + scenario of fluff/comfort content

╰➤ PAIRING(s): platonic! bungo stray dogs x child! reader

╰➤ SYNOPSIS: in which dazai osamu has a biological child who happens to be the scarlet witch, and you get to read his adventure as a single father from holding you for the first time, getting scared when you pop up at random places, and most importantly, when he cannot nullify nullify your ability.

headcanons !

a new beginning . . .

dazai osamu being a single father is something that no one expected of him. even he couldn't believe it. he would never have guessed that the woman he met when he defected from the port mafia bore you.

unfortunately, your mother was targeted and left with no choice but to contact dazai again to tell him about you, desperate to give her baby a good life even if it meant giving up her own to the hands of her killer.

dazai was barely nineteen as he was laying low after defecting from the mafia, but as soon as he heard the news, he went looking for you. curious of having a child.

dazai was hesitant as he stared down the little bundle of sunshine before him.

there was no doubt that you were his child, and DNA testing confirmed it.

but him, a father? how is this possible? dazai wasn't ready. he was a bad person. dazai genuinely believes he doesn't deserve you, but when you extended your tiny hand towards him, making adorable baby sounds, all of his thoughts were silenced.

a single tear rolled down his cheek as he remembered odasaku's last words as he extended his finger towards you and you wrapped it in your tiny hands with the sound of your coos and happy noises.

save the weak and protect the orphans.

reaching for you and holding you for the first time triggered emotions in his chest, leaving him with a fuzzy and warm feeling.

it felt strange to dazai because it was a sensation he had never experienced before, but it was comforting and something he could grow accustomed to.

the struggle of a single father . . .

dazai considers it a challenge. not only was he laying low from the port mafia, but he also has a baby girl to look after.

dazai always finds ways to buy your necessities and eventually get you both a place to live because you guys moved around a lot when he first met you.

dazai keeps a close eye on you, making sure you're safe. given his suicidal tendencies, it was unusual for him to babyproof his residence, but that all changed when he met you. he can't get you harmed :(

now, it's not too bad caring for you, except that you frequently wake up crying in the middle of the night because dazai is drinking and having another one of his tendencies instead of sleeping with you.

dazai did, however, gradually grow out of that habit just for you. (*´︶`*).

papa dazai thinks it's really cute how you loved to sleep all snuggled up against his chest and that you couldn't sleep unless he was with you. you were such a cute and clingy baby. how could he ever resist you?

and you know how dazai can control his heartbeat? dazai manipulates his own heart into a calm and soothing beat that helps you sleep while you snuggle up against his chest as he holds you closely.

on the other hand, dazai almost gets a heart attack everytime he finds you in the most unexpected places.

he leaves you on the bed one minute, and the next thing he knows, you're in the kitchen, on top of the fridge, or suddenly inside the cabinet. there was even a time when dazai found you on top of a tree.🧍

dazai genuinely believes he will die from a heart attack one day, and he's also quick to assume it's because of your ability, and boy, was he right, just not in the way he expected.

dazai thought for sure your ability had to do something with teleportation, but he learned that was just one of your abilities when he came back after preparing your baby bottle to find you floating and giggling in mid-air surrounded by a red glow.

i'm sorry, but dazai's reaction was literally, "OH NO, YOU CAN’T BE LIKE CHUUYA 💀."

dazai scrambles to grab you from mid-air, using his no longer human ability to nullify whatever your ability was, but he was taken aback when you continued to glow with red psionics even while he held you.

dazai eventually grew accustomed to caring for a child and landed a job at the armed detective agency, where he could earn enough money for you while also fulfilling odasaku's wish for him.

dazai is surprisingly responsible in raising you to be a well-mannered toddler who is very much a daddy's girl, which surprises kunikida, who had become your very protective caring uncle when dazai first brought you to the agency.

however, there are definitely times when kunikida questions and scolds dazai for teaching you silly things like pranks and such, or, more importantly, dazai teaching you how to punch someone's eyes out ...

the fears of a single father . . .

dazai used to be completely fearless. he didn't even fear death. instead, dazai welcomed it instead with open arms but when he you came to his life, that was when he developed many fears.

starting with you getting hurt. dazai is a very protective papa. he can't stand it when he sees you in pain, especially when he sees tears in your eyes.

as soon as dazai learns that you have been harmed or taken hostage by bad people, he returns to his old mafia black blood ways. dazai's coming for them, and he won't hesitate to kill just to make sure you're safe in his arms again.

another fear that dazai has is you liking his old mafia partner, nakahara chuuya.

dazai thought it was funny at first when you met chuuya and called him your mama because you actually believed he was your mama. *cue chuuya blushing madly and screaming with rolls of r's while he carries you in his arms 💀*

however, dazai was quickly humbled when you began clinging to chuuya and refusing to return to him because you had grown real fond of the chibi he despises.

chuuya is smug about being your favorite and he uses that to tease dazai. even though it irritates dazai, he trusts chuuya enough to care for you because he knows chuuya has a soft spot for children and treats you kindly and sweetly.

chuuya spoils you, you know? maybe a little more than dazai expected, because chuuya frequently buys you lots of dollhouses, stuffies, and expensive luxury branded baby clothes, but he eventually uses that to his advantage by telling you to ask chuuya for specific things that he would buy for you.

"oi, mackerel! i know you're the one making [name] ask me to buy her wagyu steak. just so you know, i know damn well that your kid likes omurice, not steak!"

putting aside all the silly fears he have, what dazai truly fears the most is you being taken away from him, and that fear worsens when he discovers your prophecy as the scarlet witch, the very reason why you possessed such a special ability called chaos magic that he cannot nullify at all.

dazai will protect you at all costs. he cannot afford to lose his precious baby girl :(

so, if you start displaying your chaos magic, especially in public, dazai will strongly advise you not to use it unless absolutely necessary, given that he cannot nullify it.

sure, it's difficult for you not to use your wiggly-woos because you don't have complete control over them yet, but you can't blame your papa.

dazai is afraid that you will attract unwanted attention, particularly from bad people who would want to exploit your abilities, and he simply wishes to keep you, his baby, safe.

scenario !

dazai was nineteen years old when he returned home after buying you your baby necessities from a konbini near where you and him were currently staying.

he found you, his precious bundle of joy, sitting on the floor, playing with the toy blocks he got you in the small living room of the apartment as soon as he closed and locked the door and slipped off his shoes.

"a-ah! ah!" you exclaimed, ignoring your toys and tapping the floor with your tiny hands while starinf happily at dazai.

"why, hello there, my little darling!" dazai greeted you, placing the plastic bag of items he had purchased on the ground and smiling down at you, "did you miss me already? sorry had to leave you, [name]-chan! papa had to buy milk."

dazai extended his arms towards you to pick you up when you suddenly placed both of your hands on the floor. as you began to push yourself up to stand on two feet, stumbling even, his eyes widened in surprise, realizing what you were doing.

"[name]-chan?" dazai muttered, blinking and unable to say anything more as you stood up on your own, something he had never seen you do before.

"ah.. ahh!" you made cute baby noises as you slowly approached him, wobbling and nearly stumbling to your side, prompting dazai to prepare himself to catch you if you fell.

dazai's lips eventually formed a smile, a genuine and pure smile. his eyes lighting up at sight of you making your way towards him, "that's it, [name]-chan! you can do it, my little one!"

you were making your first steps.

"just a bit more, [name]-chan! come to papa!" dazai happily cheered you on, opening his arms out wide for you as he sat down on his knees.

with that, you approached him, squealing as you heard him call your name and saw him open his arms for you. you briskly walked straight into his embrace, and as soon as you did, dazai enveloped you in his arms.

"you did it, [name]-chan!" exclaimed dazai as he tightened his hug, holding you ever so close to his chest, kissing your forehead and nose, looking at you proudly, "that's my baby!"

you gave him a gummy smile, squealing and cooing as your tiny hands wrapped around him, and that's when dazai noticed a single tear rolling down his own cheek.

"dada!" was what you said to him.

dazai's lips trembled as he saw and felt his vision blur from the fresh and hot tears he couldn't stop as he stared down at you, watching you cling and happily smile at him.

"dada! dada!" you repeated again, cooing.

dazai quickly wiped his tears away and picked you up, tightly embracing you as he swayed you side to side ever so slightly in his grasp.

"that's right! i'm your dada, [name]-chan!" said dazai, but he cried even more tear. he was crying again, but was incredibly happy. his heart was racing with a warm and fuzzy sensation.

hearing you call him your dad was something was going to cherish forever. dazai kissed your face after that, widening his smile before pressing his forehead against yours as you giggled and cupped his face in your tiny hands.

dazai said lovingly as he nuzzled his nose against yours, "i love you, [name]-chan, and dada's proud of you, always.

your papa had a difficult childhood, and most importantly, he had an empty black void in his heart, but it was all clear to him now. death and a life of violence was not the answer he had been looking for in his entire life.

dazai now found a reason to live, and it was you.

[ author's notes ! you have no idea how much i enjoyed writing this. i made it extra fluffy and wholesome. thank you so much for requesting, hope you enjoyed reading this <3 ]

[star-centric]

Hello! 😊 How are you? Can I request some platonic!Eraserhead headcanons? 😁

Maybe about him adopting a little girl he saved during a mission he went right after officially becoming a hero? I don’t think he'd normally keep a random kid like that, but he got attached to her! 🤗

CHARACTERS: Eraserhead (Aizawa Shota) and Child!Female!Reader (platonic)

NOTE: any scenario that makes Aizawa soft is my favorite <33

CW: female reader, a small mention of violence (nothing against reader), fluff, platonic/family trope

Aizawa never really thought about his future besides from becoming a pro-hero, and that became his main focus even after he got his hero license. He knew what he was getting himself in to despite being new to it, putting his life in danger countless times to save people. He already knew what to expect-

He however was not expecting you to be so attached to him- and him to be attached to you

It was a rough mission, one where he couldn’t save everyone. He was able to rescue you, but the other heroes sadly shook their head when he asked about your parents

It was the side of being a hero that wasn’t really talked about much- not being able to save everyone. Aizawa didn’t think he would experience it so soon, and his failure ate him up inside. He’ll never forget how he froze when you pulled on his sleeve, teary eyes thanking him, asking where your parents were and when you could see them

When he came to see you at the hospital, it was for atonement at first. It was only right to see after you, especially now that you were an orphan because of him. It wouldn’t be right to leave you alone, but his thoughts of doubt began to gnaw at him if he was making the right choice. Would you want to go with him?

He expected you to be mad at him, to cry and refuse to go with him because he’s the reason your parents are dead-

But instead you ran to him with open arms, smiling with your front tooth missing excited to see him again. That moment solidified that he was doing the right thing

It took a while to adjust to having someone else in the house, specifically a 5-year-old terror like yourself (he found out quick why childproof locks exist), but it was…nice. A bit of a pain but surprisingly nice

It was a bit difficult to take care of you when he had to do patrols some nights or if he was called to a mission early- which is where Uncle Mic (as he insisted you call him) came into play!

Aizawa hoped that he would regret asking him for help but he surprisingly didn’t (until it came down to joining you both playing superheroes or tea parties at home)

He, if ever, rarely got upset with you. He had to remember that if you did something stupid- ie. using actual flowers to try and make him pancakes instead of flour- you were a child and didn’t know any better. He would make sure to discipline you though, making sure that you knew exactly what and why you did something was wrong. He also made sure to keep a closer eye on you (and whatever you had in your hands)

There were nights where it was hard, where you would cry out for your parents in the middle of the night after a nightmare- tears streaming down your face as he held you, reassuring that he was here. Those nights were rare, and Aizawa realized just how close you’ve both gotten when you began to cry out for him. He found himself curled up in the small bed until you went back to sleep- his back would be sore in the morning but he won’t complain

You made his home more colorful (literally and figuratively) instead of the bare necessities that were once there before. It was extra mess to clean up, but it was worth it since you were so happy

Whenever he had a challenging day, you always tried to find a way to cheer him up, and it worked after a while, even if he didn’t smile

Aizawa used to think that maybe you should go to an actual family instead of him- they would be able to provide more for you, wouldn’t they? The thought would cross his mind a lot in the beginning, but as time went on, it faded away. He couldn’t imagine going back to an empty home- it got to a point where he couldn’t wait to see what new thing you would want to show him as soon as he walks in

He would worry that he wasn’t doing a good job in raising you, but as he saw the person you were becoming, his worries would disappear

Anytime those thoughts came back to haunt him, they would be quashed once he saw the Father’s Day card you gifted him, smile as bright as the day he took you home

[tales-of-wocdes]

Hello!

How about a little scenario of treat or trick with little MC.

MC confused about all the idea but happy to taste all this sweet and yummy little things.

Really like the differents scenario you wrote.

I may be too self indulgent :D Oh well, happy Halloween! Possibly a day late, but still.

----------------

It was an odd new trend in Firgrat, this trick or treating thing.

Havard had made a whole thing about the kids dressing up, and going around asking the Protectors and Custodians "trick or treat".

Then it had been decided that the Orpahange would go out into the city to expand the game...

So you were currently dressed in luxurious black robes, and had snow white hair, and a beard. A real, magically grown, beard. You had also gotten a potion that made your eyes glow. You were dressed as something, the Ancient grandpa that had saved you. This was apparently how he dressed most of the time. The best part? You wore your cloak, and it was perfectly aligned with your costume. It had been grandpa's cloak after all.

You didn't really understand the whole thing but Havard and Lexia had really liked the idea. Besides, all of the outfits had been provided by the Ancients at Havard's request. Everyone had wanted to dress up as the Ancients, who had delivered hundreds of authentic costumes of each of them with the necessary enchanted items and potions to really match their look. You don't think something was a very popular choice though...

Though Havard had confiscated some of the delivered stuff. One of your fellow orphans had wanted to be the Havoc Keeper. True to form, the enchanted amulet that would have helped to achieve the wanted effect had summoned and bound three dozen hell-hound puppies. Which were cute, but set stuff of fire far too much, and had left a huge mess. There had also been some talk about some of them possibly growing to the size of a small house... You had been too busy playing with said puppies to pay attention.

"Hey kid! Time to get some more treats! We are approaching some willing victims, right there in that in. Time to look cute." Lexia whispered to your ear from behind.

"Lexia... could you not call them victims." Havard whispered. "We are not cheating people. This is more a game for the children."

"Sure, sure. But the goal is treats." Lexia whispered back. "So kid, you need to do your best. I have a bet with Sandor we can get more stuff than their group."

Havard sighed. "Of course, you have." He muttered. "Teaching MC how to gamble is not...."

"It's a useful life skill!" Lexia protested, loudly enough for people to look over.

Havard sighed. "Just try to have fun MC. Do not worry about anything else." He whispered to you.

You nodded. You already had a bunch of treats but that was from inside the orphanage, but that was easy. This was the city! A true test of your snack gathering prowess!

So you did your best to try and remember what something had acted like, and straightened your back. You marched to the door of the inn, and then inside, head held high.

Lexia and Havard followed you in, as a roomful of patrons turned to look at you.

You did not focus on that fact. Instead you marched to the innkeeper.

"Trick or treat?" You asked as clearly as you could, staring up at the innkeeper.

"The eyes, Remember to do the eyes!" Lexia whispered loudly.

Right, the puppy dog eyes thing... You widened your eyes as much as possible, and stared at the innkeeper... who was already putting together a snack pack. Maybe it was the glowing eyes... you had seen those. You looked cool!

The Ancients had provided each costume with a way to deliver on a "trick" if a treat was not given. In your case, the outfit had come with an enchantment to make the treats float to you no matter what the person said... so you got treats in any case! That worked for you. You sort of wanted to see it in use. You wondered what would happen if you just used it in the middle of a street....

But the innkeeper smiled and handed you a pack of treats.

You took the package and tried to keep your cool... You thought something would have been cool and dignified. So you wanted until you turned your back to sniff the pack and lick your lips. You vaguelly heard Havard thank the innkeeper behind you as you opened the pack and grabbed some kind of a baked pastry... A honey cake? You think it was a honey cake.

Life was so odd sometimes. You did not understand why Havard smiled so softly as he observed you. Nor why Lexia beamed at you. But you had a mouthful of honey cake and a lot more places to visit.

You even got to use your "trick", and somehow managed to call an entire bakery's worth of treats to you when a person told you to run off. Much to Havard's horror and Lexia's delight.

It was a good day. Even if Havard muttered something about "Irresponsible" and "Completely detached from reality."

Lexia just laughed. You were pretty sure, she would win whatever bet she had going.

[deadtiredghost]

i liked mutant apocalypse actually

dont get me wrong it was rushed as hell, and the designs arent my absolute favourite, but it had so much potential (apart from donbot - donbot is perfect and i love him)

i know it's not popular but people should talk about it more i think.

Spoilers ahead of course!

the angst potential tho...

Leo (and Raph??) have memory issues

donnie put his consciousness in metalhead in case of his death???DOES DON HAVE A SOUL OR IS HE JUST AN IMPRINT OF WHO THE REAL DON ONCE WAS???

donnie is gonna outlive all of them as a robot - imprint or not he clearly has feelings (AI?)

Mikey probably lived off bugs, alge and ice cream kitty

Mikey managed to keep ICK alive this entire time in the middle of a desert

Mikey looks so frail omg, i want to pick him up, wrap him in a blanket and cook him some homemade pizza.

Mikey lived in near complete isolation for however many years with only two pets as company - is he sane? probably not.

Leo and Raph both have different bodies now - mutation bomb blast maybe the cause? do their weirdly mutated bodies hurt them? there is no advanced medical suff in the apocalypse - body horror and body dysmorphia potential

(especially if you like the trans-fem Leo headcannon - body dysmorphia angst go burrr)

Raph is a dad now.

Mira is such a good character - from traumatised orphan to a dad and three uncles in the span of a couple of days. good on her.

they all got ptsd of course - maybe some violent outbursts from Leo with his memory problems?

haha, Leo angst cause he is ashamed of what he did as an amnesiac - he became the new Shredder and deffo hurt and killed innocent ppl for his own gain.

cause of amnesia Leo never had time to mourn what he missed: the years without his bros, Karai, April and Casey are probs dead, etc.

do they lead the mass of ppl following them now? are they leaders?

Renet said that one day they would be accepted into society and famous and shit for saving the world. however it's likely that Renet's influence in their lives started the butterfly affect which caused this future to be so fucked. i dont believe that this was the future she was refering to.

renet angst - she can't do anything about it now. (or can she?)

they no longer have to live in the shadows... but at what cost?

[wordsandrobots]

IBO reference notes on . . . the lie of Agnika Kaieru

This is a post about McGillis Fareed.

Originally presented as an antagonist ala the Gundam franchise's 'Char clone' archetype (named after Char Aznable, an expy of the Red Baron by way of the Last of the Romanovs), McGillis turns out to be one of Iron-Blooded Orphans' key protagonists, his initial appearances reframed by an eventual alliance with Martian mercenary group Tekkadan, home to the more obvious lead characters. In large part, it is his story we watch unfold, as he attempts to secure control over Gjallarhorn, the repressive extra-national military in which he serves.

And it's hard to discuss that story without reference to Agnika Kaieru, the man credited with founding Gjallarhorn to counter AI-controlled 'mobile armours' three hundred years earlier. The apocalyptic conflict between humanity and the armours known as the Calamity War is the source of the current social order, not to mention the titular Gundam mecha. Agnika is responsible for leading Gjallarhorn to victory, an achievement for which McGillis idolises him. He is also a non-character, haunting events solely through McGillis' commentary, at once vitally important and entirely absent.

I thought it would be interesting to examine how that works. I ended up writing 7000 words about it. Spoilers for everything and content warnings for mentions of child sexual abuse.

The character who wasn't there

If we take McGillis at his word, his personal philosophy was defined by reading a biography of Gjallarhorn's founder at a young age. More specifically, at a young age, while being sexually abused by his adoptive father, Iznario Fareed, who had extricated him from working at a brothel, a situation he was previously forced into after being abducted while homeless on the streets. The Life of Agnika Kaieru was a light in this darkness, offering a path out of a situation that, though seemingly improved from his original impoverishment, continued to be highly coercive and harmful. McGillis was made heir to a powerful family, yet had to sneak out of his patron's bed in the middle of the night, naked, with visible bruises across his body. He was desperately in need of hope.

The abuse appears to have been baked into this plot-beat from the start, with hints to it provided at multiple points during Season 1. Iznario being accompanied by a blonde boy and blonde young man (echoing the excesses of Carta Issue, a character who surrounds herself with McGillis lookalikes owing to an unrequited crush), McGillis' reluctance to spend the night at the Fareed estate, and the questions of legitimacy surrounding his inheritance all take on darker significance when the truth is revealed in Season 2. We may safely assume he was always planned to be reacting to this form of exploitation.

I suspect Agnika was a later creation. Comparing the outline of the Calamity War provided at the very start of the show to the ways it later becomes relevant suggests a considerable amount of fleshing-out in the interim. There are few outright contradictions, or at least, few we cannot explained by assuming in-fiction ignorance. Nevertheless, the importance of Agnika as a historical figure, the myths surrounding his mobile suit, and the very existence of the mobile armours each enter without previous set-up. This is inelegant, in the manner of much of IBO's exposition: workmanlike additions to propel the plot along, extending exactly as far as required and no more. But we cannot discount their importance to the final result and since McGillis aspires, in a very real sense, to become his hero, it is instructive to consider what the show tells us about Agnika.

Immediately we run into the fact we know nothing at all about him as a person. The only 'canonical' description of his personality was provided by the series' director, who compared him to 'the hero in a shonen manga': a charismatic character who always saves his friends. Apart from reinforcing my belief any spin-off set during the Calamity War would be more typical fare than Iron-Blooded Orphans turned out to be, this tells us little. Within the story as it plays out, Agnika is blank space. Being three hundred years dead, it does not actually matter what he was like – itself a statement about how people can be forgotten even when their names reverberate through history. Indeed, the thematic parallel to the fates of a large chunk of the cast is a potent one. Time has rendered Agnika a cipher, subject to the judgement of distant strangers, his exact morals and intentions long-since stripped away.

What remains are his legacy and beliefs. That we must speak of these separately is telling. The Seven Stars, descendants of Agnika's fellow Gundam pilots and Gjallarhorn's present-day leadership, show little deference to the man who commanded their ancestors. There are no statues memorialising him and though Gundam Bael has its attendant ghost stories, of Agnika's spirit living on inside and how it will only awake for his true inheritor, it is shuttered away, a monument nobody ever goes to see. One gets the strong impression McGillis is the only person to pay him more than lips service in centuries.

Consequently, McGillis' personal interpretation of Agnika's philosophy is the only window we get on his beliefs, and the most thorough explanation of that interpretation is given to his eleven-year-old child-bride, Almiria Bauduin.

Fairy tales told by a pied piper

From what we see on screen, McGillis is never overtly abusive towards Almiria, to whom he becomes engaged as part of a political scheme. He is pushed into the arrangement by Iznario and in the side-story covering its commencement, he goes out of his way to provide Almiria with the choice he lacks – something that spurs Almiria to form a genuine attachment to him. However, the engagement also serves his personal ambitions extremely well and he unquestionably manipulates her over the course of it (hard to think of another term to describe comforting her on the loss of her brother Gaelio, for which McGillis is himself responsible). We could and probably should label his apparent concern for her emotional wellbeing and indulgence of her desire to be seen as a grown-up as an attempt at grooming her, not in the sexual sense, but to make her a more amenable chess-piece. On the other hand, McGillis prevents Almiria from killing herself when the truth comes out, at the cost of an injury that severely disadvantages him in battle shortly thereafter – a notable action when her political utility has just evaporated. On the other other hand, this incident prompts him to describe her, quite disdainfully, as 'troublesome'.

What I'm saying is, the question of whether McGillis sees Almiria as a tool or somebody he truly cares for is thorny, as it is for virtually every single character with whom he has a meaningful relationship. Nevertheless, I think we are meant to believe he is being honest when he talks to Almiria about The Life of Agnika Kaieru. What he says fits his actions elsewhere and there are no on-screen indications he isn't being truthful – at least from his perspective – when he credits Agnika's principles with 'saving him'.

McGillis states Agnika wanted a world where “humans could live as humans”; that is, where humans of all backgrounds could compete fairly to achieve their dreams. To a child of low-birth, abused behind closed doors, this is an enticing prospect. McGillis goes on to entice Almiria in turn with the promise of 'loving whomever you wish' and of neither of them being mocked for the age imbalance between them. He concludes the scene by saying it is time to “pry open the door to that world with my own two hands.”

A few episodes later, in an internal monologue, he refers to Agnika as the “greatest symbol of power the world had ever seen. Authority, vigour, might, capability, vitality, influence, as well as brute force.” Inspired by this man's life story, he is determined to usurp rule over Gjallarhorn and finally address the want of power that had defined his own life since birth.

Like everything to do with Agnika, what this tells us about his principles is somewhat vague. Quite literally the child-friendly version (sort of; McGillis openly tells Almiria he contemplated suicide prior to reading the book and is likely a poor judge of age-appropriateness). Still, the philosophy described combines individualism with egalitarianism. The stated goal is a level playing field, free of artificial advantages like wealth or social status, where everyone can pursue their dreams as far as they are each able. This is implied to be a natural state for humanity, such that achieving it would be a form of reclamation. Further, the kinds of power McGillis lists are personal – physical strength, intelligence, charisma – and he works obsessively to cultivate them. We don't get confirmation that self-improvement is another of Agnika's ideals, but it would fit from what is presented.

If you are anything like me, your brain will have turned to all sorts of weird capitalism fans and their buzzwords for justifying frantic competition between people at every level of society. Phrases like 'personal responsibility', 'rugged individualism', and 'rational self-interest', possibly with a side-helping of – gods help us – libertarianism. You may also be asking, if this is what Gjallarhorn's founder espoused, how did it end up enforcing disparities between different populations, oppressing workers and maintaining social hierarchies, at large and within its own walls?

To which I might reply, have you looked at what all those weird capitalism fans get up to, recently? This is an unsatisfying answer, though, and to properly examine how Agnika's legacy intersects with the dreaded c-word, we need to take a couple of side-steps, starting with why it should be a natural connection to make within the context of this show.

A digression into narratives about capitalism

Iron-Blooded Orphans is one of the few entries in the franchise to directly engage with capitalism as a major source of global problems. That probably sounds a little strange if you're aware of the the reputation Gundam has as a whole, so let me explain.

[Also, let me remind everyone the definition of capitalism is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.” (Wikipedia; emphasis mine). It's worth being exact.]

When the concept of space colonies is introduced in 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam, they are framed as a response to global overpopulation and the consequent ecological decline of the Earth (pause to appreciate the massive fuck-off dog-whistle; we'll come back to that in a second). The war the show depicts is presented as a matter of sovereignty, whereby those offloaded into orbit rise up against rule by an indifferent terrestrial government. The colonies themselves are cities built within artificially landscaped environments inside O'Neil cylinders. They do not appear to serve any commercial purpose in and of themselves; when we see labour happening in space, it is in service to the colonies, rather than something they are for (the Zeon miners in sequel series ZZ; there is also the fuel-collecting Jupiter Fleet but they are a very odd entity and not fleshed out).

Contrast this to IBO where Mars' utility as a source of 'half-metal' is of paramount importance to its political and economic position, and the space colonies are explicitly shown to be factory complexes, company towns, resorts, and prisons. The middle arc of Season 1 is focused on a workers' revolt against the corporation running a particular group of colonies, the Dorts, while the impetus behind spin-off game Urdr Hunt is the lead character's desire to transform his home's fortunes by making it a popular tourist destination. There are also mentions of 'resource satellites' and glimpses of what appear to be colonies built to mine asteroids. And true, it isn't stated whether all the colonies originate as extractive operations and production centres. But those purposes are depicted the reason they are maintained to the present day, removing such dirty businesses far above the 'precious', 'unsullied' Earth (cue 'The Lightship', played with maximum irony).

[Side-note: the Dort Company runs its colonies as a 'public enterprise on behalf of the African Union', implying state ownership. However there are multiple references to 'rich factory owners from Earth', suggesting private control. Best I can figure, the colonies are state-owned while the production facilities inside them belong to private companies? Since everyone appears to work for Dort (every worker we see wears the same green jacket), I'm not certain how that functions. Perhaps the workforce is leased to private factories via the Company? That would be fittingly grim.]

Now to be clear, I am not claiming Gundam as a whole doesn't tackle problems caused or exacerbated by capitalism. The introduction of Anaheim Electronics into the original Gundam timeline marks clear interest in exploring the influence of corporate entities on warfare. We may also – from the outside – interrogate overpopulation concerns as deflecting blame from capital's destructive activities, going hand-in-hand with racism over migration, and obfuscating who exactly gets sent to 'colonise the unknown' (spoilers: it's the poor and vulnerable). I'm unconvinced the original run from Mobile Suit Gundam to Char's Counterattack is intended as commentary in this manner; equally, I don't think it's hard to get there (as Gundam Unicorn somewhat demonstrates).

What I'm trying to articulate is a distinction between 'being about a problem' and 'naming capitalism as the cause'. Most Gundam series tend to depict capital as part of an amorphous blob of 'Earth-sphere corruption' or 'greedy elites'. Even Anaheim acts as a third party in the Earth/space conflict, taking advantage of the war rather than shaping the fault-lines along which it occurs. Additionally, actual money very rarely tends to be a factor in the plot. Groups like Celestial Being from Gundam 00 appear to possess near-infinite budget; Gundam Wing's itinerant teenage terrorists have only erratic and arbitrary issues obtaining supplies (where are you getting the damn ammo, Trowa?!); and even in The Witch From Mercury, where you'd really expect expenditure to matter, it… doesn't. G-Witch toys with access to funds and the requirement to be profitable early on, but overall is more a courtly drama in business drag, unconcerned with why corporations work the way they do. Issues such as the exploitation of vulnerable populations for the sake of driving down costs are gestured to without becoming strictly plot-relevant.

Meanwhile over in IBO, the poverty of the Martian characters is an ever-present threat and come the denouement, whether they have any money left is of paramount importance. The show tells us bullets have a price-tag, using this to drive actions inside a world run for the sake of profit. It is mentioned that productivity in the African Union's colonies is expected to drop following the Dort labourers wining better working conditions, a boon to the competing economic blocs that leads to one of them sheltering Tekkadan in gratitude for helping bring this change about. The reason co-main character Orga Itsuka does not survive episode 48 is because arms-dealer Nobliss Gordon thinks it will be financially advantageous to have him killed. That fellow businessman McMurdo Barriston extends limited aid to Tekkadan after publicly cutting them loose for the sake of the Teiwaz conglomerate's reputation and revenue is highly relevant to his characterisation. And Teiwaz itself is run like a mafia, a riff on yakuza practices that erases the line between big business and organised crime – a hell of claim to make in a story where another of the leads' entire goal is uplifting Mars by playing the economic system.

Now, in my reading the major theme running through Iron-Blooded Orphans is exploitation. An acute depiction of how capitalist societies operate – the amorality of the profit motive, the colonial underpinnings, the sheer, monstrous cost – is a subset of this. I don't feel it's any surprise that an attempt to realistically depict child soldiers and other exploited groups should lead to a detailed rendering of the gears in which the world is currently caught. Equally, I don't think it fair to reduce IBO to being about capitalism, full-stop. Patriarchy, slavery and repressive class structures all have older roots and there is an argument to be made that where it touches those things, the show cares less about them as artefacts of modern economic arrangements than as evils in their own right.

It still manages to say stuff about the functioning of capitalism with more bluntness than most pieces of fiction I've encountered and, speaking as an Englishman, the thing that strikes me most is the decision to make the lynchpin of its world an aristocratically-led military force.

A further digression into aristocratic fables

Aristocracy means 'government by a hereditary elite'. It is sustained via wealth passed down through generations of a small group of families and was one of the key mechanisms by which the feudal system operated, prior to the slow capitalist revolution of the 16th to 18th Centuries. It is often treated as obsolete, having been superseded by more modern forms of 'being rich'. Certainly it seems quaint in these days of tech billionaires and oligarchs to talk of descendents of feudal lords who prize family trees traced back to William the Conqueror.

What you have to understand about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (official name used with illustrative intent) is that this country never properly rid itself of its aristocracy. We are a monarchy. Our parliament includes a House of Lords. And while these are both vestiges of earlier systems, they are neither of them ceremonial. The Lords and the Crown possess actual power that can affect decisions made by the House of Commons, our democratically-elected governing body. The Lords (who are not elected and include those appointed for life alongside ninety-two hereditary positions [this was a compromise]) can review and send back certain types of bills passed in the Commons, delaying their introduction into law. Meanwhile the Crown technically still holds an absolute veto at the end of the legislative process, which only by convention do they not use (royal assent is required for any bill to become law; apparently the last time it was withheld was 1708, but the threat remains and the Crown continues to interfere in proposals affecting their interests).

As you might expect, there have been murmurings for years about replacing the Lords with elected officials and we all like to pretend the King just exists for show. Regardless, these institutions – hundreds of years old and holdovers from a completely different social and economic order – persist because the aristocracy remains a useful tool of the modern British state. The Royal Family can be said to be its advertising wing, not in the sense of attracting tourism but of going around shoring up foreign relations, to help keep Britain the fifth richest country in the world. These diplomatic efforts are a key reason why they are worth the maintenance costs (and the noxious scandals). However it goes deeper than that.

Kings and queens don't make sense without the idea of hereditary superiority, and even with its overt political power reduced by changing times, the British aristocracy continues to shape our upper classes. We have an entire parallel school system preparing the children of the wealthy for life running the country. Our public schools (fee-paying schools open to all who can afford them; we call the free ones 'state schools') have been educating the sons of the 'best families' for centuries. They were the source of the officers and administrators who maintained the British Empire and they continue to be where a massive proportion of our diplomats, politicians, journalists, civil servants, and military leadership receive their education.

This system, funnelling kids through schools like Eaton and Harrow to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, is a factory for class solidarity. It allows students to network and, just as importantly, instils in them the signifiers of being 'the proper kind of person'. Ways of speaking. Ways of dressing. An awareness of who they should defer to and who they can look down on, so that they can be recognised by other alumni as 'correct'. Trustworthy. Reliable.

Above all, it reinforces the notion they have both a right and a responsibility to lead.

Because that's the heart of the lie nobility tells: 'there is something about us that means we must rule over them.' If Britain no longer entirely subscribes to this quality being inborn, it can at least be taught to those of the right stock, bringing them a little closer to the true aristocracy. They can elevate themselves above the plebs, as diligent servants of the Crown, who remains the untouchable pinnacle of quality. [Translation note: 'the Crown' refers to both the reigning monarch and the state. They are functionally the same thing. That's what being a monarchy means.]

Thus, the Empire was able to send its younger, weirder sons out to plunder far-off lands, and produced many an honourable sort to lead thousands against machine guns in Europe, and, in a post-imperial age, Britain can still present an impeccably polite face to the world, to negotiate better deals. Diminished as it is, the aristocracy's shambling husk continues on, manufacturing not the capitalists per se (although the successors to the original land-lords are hardly above enriching themselves and plenty of our lifetime peers are people who've run successful businesses), but the supporting apparatus for capitalist operations. The grease on the wheels and a permanent roadblock along the road to meaningful social change.

You literally cannot have equality if there's a guy at the top who gets a stupid hat and ungodly amounts of influence just for who his parents were.

The wrong story, at the right time

It isn't hard to imagine about how it happened.

Gjallarhorn is the only significant military force left standing after a quarter of a solar-system-spanning human race has been exterminated. Faced with the task of reconstructing civilisation, it splits the world into four blocs for easier administration, abolishing the old national borders. At those blocs' request, it then applies the same reorganisation to Mars and Jupiter, the better to funnel resources towards restoring the Earth. Throughout, it maintains the position of a neutral arbiter; Gjallarhorn was formed to stop the War; now it must ensure there will never be another.

To this end, the tools that allowed it to triumph – the Alaya-Vijnana augmentation technology and the Gundam frames that meant flesh and blood could out-compete tireless machinery – are buried. Victory is instead attributed to the resilience of pure, unadulterated humanity. The pilots slew the monsters not thanks to their equipment but their innate ability. The greatest among them are heralded as champions and natural leaders.

It is a small step to decreeing that their children will inherit their positions. Innate qualities can be passed down and heirs, raised in the image of their parents. Maybe this is an extension of those traditions from which sprang duellists bearing red flags. Maybe it is merely a result of the new-born legends. What matters is, Gjallarhorn endures, guided by its seven stars.

Over the following centuries, the system embeds. The ethos of human purity takes hold, measured by distance from the homeworld. Unfortunates born to space or on distant, dusty worlds posses utility for digging up half-metal or labouring in orbital factories but have no place inside Earth's atmosphere. They would make the place untidy, now the scars of the War are scrubbed away. Those who seek to upset this situation are dissuaded. Those subjected to augmentation, dismissed as subhuman. The peace is kept.

Sadly, new generations of the ennobled families lack the moral fibre of their forebears, accepting bribes, pushing the boundaries of Gjallarhorn's neutrality. There are rules and those tasked with enforcing the rules and yet still the rot spreads. These younger generations lack the moral fibre of their vaunted forebears. A sad decline.

Or perhaps that is bullshit and they are exactly the same: people come into power, who will justify anything for the sake of never giving it up and ensuring that all things flow towards the centre.

Gjallarhorn is the armed wing of the Earth super-state, operating for the benefit of the whole despite competition between the individual blocs. That is to say, it is the army of a capitalist state writ large, in the usual manner of sci-fi magnifying things across time and space. Broadly, a state's purpose under capitalism is to facilitate the smooth running of private enterprise by maintaining infrastructure, providing a workforce, and destroying anything that gets in the way of expansion. Tradition, upper-class solidarity and ideological frameworks all help hold the arrangement together. It is useful, after all, to train people to believe they're supporting a grand cause when they are in fact facilitating exploitation and theft for the benefit of someone else.

And it is here we must turn our attention back to The Life of Agnika Kaieru. Above, I glibly compared the things McGillis says Agnika stood for to capitalistic propaganda. What I mean is that it reads as the ideology surrounding free-market capitalism, where companies are released from all restraint and allowed to compete irrespective of consequence. This is often said to fuel innovation and create a healthy market that will – somehow – benefit everyone, despite observably driving owners to increase profits at the expense of large numbers of people, including their customers.

In that context, claiming you want to ensure everyone competes 'fairly' is disingenuous, since it entails the removal of both limitations and safety nets. No artificial advantages and reliance solely on personal strengths means those who are old, disabled, or otherwise lacking Agnika's stated virtues will automatically be left behind. This is not hypothetical; I see it around me everyday, as a result of policies predicated on exactly this basis, just as we see it represented in IBO by a wide-scale absence of social support and characters too vulnerable to survive a free-for-all (Atra, Builth, the Turbines, in flashback). But the ideological statement elides such problems.

Given the title of the biography, I assume it dates from after Agnika died. Any impression derived from it must therefore be suspected of being what Gjallarhorn required him to have believed. Historically, both aristocracy and capitalism alike have benefited from this kind of distortion, so it would be no great surprise if the book turned out to be more PR than honest report. While Agnika's principles are incompatible with the hereditary advantages enjoyed by the Seven Stars, there are ways to read them as being aligned with the wider social and economic arrangements. As such, it is entirely plausible the way he is remembered was designed to support those arrangements.

The right story, at the wrong time

The rhetoric of McGillis' attempted coup centres Gjallarhorn's failure to adhere to its original values, citing unwarranted attacks against civilians and inference in Earth politics. The Seven Stars must be replaced with sincere believers to correct a drift away from what Agnika intended. McGillis outright proclaims his 'revolutionaries' have the truth of Gjallarhorn on their side.

Even if this is a calculated stance designed to rile younger officers into being the army he requires, McGillis' internal monologues reveal a commitment to the ideal of the individual seizing their dreams through sheer personal strength. He seeks not only to prove this is possible, but also to inspire those who cower because “they don't know how to use their fangs” into following his example. From what we see, he has taken Agnika's words – as they were relayed to him – as gospel.

Is his interpretation correct? And if it is, was it what Agnika believed, or simply what it was useful for him to say? McGillis is manipulative, spinning tales to make others do what he wants. Was his idol the same, pre-empting biographical distortions by espousing a finely-tuned message that would reassure the masses while he built a system geared toward curtailing the power of all but a few?

Trick question. There's no answer in the text. As I said, Agnika isn't a character; what he really intended is irrelevant and therefore not present. Yet a distinction must be drawn between what is said publicly and what is said behind the scenes. This is a layering IBO captures via Rustal Elion, McGillis' rival for control of Gjallarhorn, who out-manoeuvres and defeats him. Rustal is a pragmatist unencumbered by quasi-mystic belief in Agnika or some 'true purpose' to Gjallarhorn. He does whatever it takes to best McGillis, casually breaking centuries-old weaponry restrictions and even provoking a fresh war to undermine his opponent's plans – all while presenting as a bastion of lawful rule. Privately, he admits to being 'shady', willing to deal with whomsoever furthers his goals (e.g. Nobliss Gordon, who starts violent uprisings to spur sales of his merchandise). It is this capacity for realpolitik that means Rustal comes out on top.

The narrative does gesture at motivations beyond self-interest. When Rustal reforms Gjallarhorn in the wake of the Seven Stars decimation at McGillis' hand, he abolishes the aristocratic council (of which he is also a member) and replaces it with a more democratic form of governance. That he is immediately elected to the role of supreme commander gives us some reason to doubt his sincerity. Offsetting this, he is also shown to be working towards the abolishment of slavery in his society.

Regardless of his exact degree of progressiveness, however, Rustal appears entirely uninterested in changing what Gjallarhorn is for. See, institutions and social structures have specific purposes, which need not be the ones they claim, via statements or appearances. A capitalist business may claim to exist to provide a product or service, but its actual purpose is the generation of profit. The police may claim to be an institution of citizen protection, but their purpose is the enforcement of the law, which can be detrimental to some or all of those selfsame citizens.

Gjallarhorn's purpose is to control the colonial holdings of the Earth and maintain the current division of the world. They administrate the extraction of resources, quash attempts at social change, and crush resistance to exploitative business practices. Moreover, Rustal is certainly well-aware this is what his job entails. It is his fleet that carries out a calculated massacre of the Dort workers' unions when they push for better conditions and he personally orders an orbital strike on defeated child-soldiers as an exercise in image management. His reforms thus smack more than a little of an army or a weapons manufacturer improving its hiring policies: sure, they now employ women and members of minority groups; they still exist to kill people.

For these kinds of entities, purpose is all-important. You can dress them up however you want, so long as their function continues to be carried out. I bet, when I described my country's persisting aristocratic elements, you immediately went, “that sounds like [mechanics of regional upper class and attendant justifications for social division].” Yes. Precisely. We don't have feudal system holdovers at the centre of our society because they're the most efficient or only means of fulfilling those roles. They're simply the ones that make the most sense at this point in our history. A different environment would necessitate a different form, but the function would remain.

[I am glossing over the mutability of function here – the power of the king has reduced greatly via political and economic shifts, so he's no longer performing quite the same role as his ancestors – but hopefully you get what I mean.]

Rustal's reforms are an illustration of purpose superseding form. At the end of the show, the narration informs us trust in Gjallarhorn has been restored, indicating an end to meaningful opposition to what we have seen it do. Similarly, when Rustal states that the organisation's history matters more than its mythology, he is saying it has largely been operating correctly and should continue to do so in the future. The public claims can be altered, the set-dressing reworked. The function remains.

Poor delusions

Like the British state and its equivalents, Gjallarhorn is draped in heroic, mythological imagery. From uniforms to equipment naming conventions, it presents as grand and noble, even possessing heraldry, as if originating in a gathering of brave knights. We, the audience, know that this is a veneer plastered atop the material reality. Scenes of its foundation are comparatively mundane: sober men wearing drab suits, shaping the future with the stroke of a pen. The dress-up played since is pure embellishment.

McGillis, however, takes the imagery seriously.

His plan hinges on 'awakening' Gundam Bael and being 'accepted' as its new pilot, fulfilling an old rule/tradition whereby whoever possesses this particular mobile suit is the undisputed leader of Gjallarhorn. By taking a disgraced Iznario's place among the Seven Stars, augmenting himself with an Alaya-Vijnana system, and capturing the facility containing Bael, McGillis intends to anoint himself the new Agnika. At a stroke, he believes he will gain the loyalty of all Gjallarhorn forces on Earth and thus the military strength necessary to defeat Rustal's Moon-based Arianrhod Fleet.

For reasons I'll detail another time, I don't think his strategy is necessarily ridiculous. But it doesn't work. The other Seven Stars do not automatically bow down to Bael's new pilot, instead adopting a neutral position awaiting the outcome of the impending battle, and there is no mass uprising among the ranks below them. Since Rustal otherwise commands an overwhelming number of troops, this turns the conclusion into a foregone one. The few who do join McGillis' cause are annihilated and he is forced to retreat, eventually dying in a one-man attack on the Arianrhod flagship.

It must be stressed that McGillis isn't stupid. He is a canny political operator who correctly identifies the biggest obstacles to success, and while his analysis of Gjallarhorn's corruption is deployed principally as a rhetorical tool, he's not wrong. The leadership are complicit in a lot of extremely shady activity, including experimentation with Alaya-Vijnana technology, contravening the taboo against augmentation their ancestors propagated. They do act against their publicly-stated values, to the detriment of ordinary people and in the interests of those who benefit from a hideously exploitative system.

His mistake is to treat this as a bug, rather than the feature we might more correctly diagnose it to be. Within The Life of Agnika Kaieru, McGillis believes he has discovered the hidden truth about Gjallarhorn. He imagines by setting Agnika aside, the Seven Stars obfuscated mechanisms to curtail their authority and an ethos more welcoming to people like him. (There is a lot we could discuss about the ways McGillis is immunised against some forms of bigotry by his station, despite his illegitimate status, and how he exploits more disadvantaged soldiers like Ein Dalton and Isurugi Camice for his own ends. It's just, that'd be another two thousand words and I really need to wrap this up.)

Yet if we follow Rustal's advice and heed history, the timeline shown in Season 1 has Gjallarhorn dolling out sections of Mars to the blocs a mere three years after the Calamity War ended. Among the many things we don't know about Agnika is if he survived the War, but whether he did or not, his organisation pretty instantly became a tool of social division and exploitation. The most we may allow is that its original purpose was truly noble. Its actions once the apocalypse had been averted speak for themselves.

This has been long walk, I suppose, for the fairly succinct summary of McGillis as a character who rejects private truth in favour of embracing a public, propagandising lie. I am compelled by the idea even so. Capitalism is far from the only system to have claimed universal virtue while benefitting merely a select few, but it has gone uniquely hard on the idea 'you can make it too'. Given IBO's uncluttered depictions of a world run for profit (with the complicity of ostensibly non-capitalistic institutions), taking a cynical read on Agnika's supposed ideology is trivial. Human triumphalism and Gjallarhorn conceptualised as the arbiter of fair competition dovetail into the show's unjust present in a manner too neat to discount. More than anything else, the choice McGillis makes is a common one in real life.

Sometimes, that's a positive thing, pushing people to insist on making promises come true to the detriment of the swindler proffering them. Others, it is a source of profound disorientation, leading in very dark directions as blame for the dissonance is attributed to anything but the root cause.

[This seems is as good a juncture as any to remark that McGillis is not a proponent of anything we can easily label fascistic. He focuses on individual freedom irrespective of national identity; he is attacking people genuinely perpetuating his world's ills; and he definitely doesn't bother courting a disaffected public by playing to middle-class anxieties. He doesn't need to. His plan is to enact a coup from high up inside a military hierarchy, while promising to lessen the force exerted against society. Though there are links to be traced between his ideology and fascist rhetoric, it isn't the avenue his circumstances compel him to go down.]

[I am 100% certain he would've gone in that direction if they had, but that's a counterfactual, not what the show actually presents.]

How McGillis got to where he did is another of IBO's many examples of adaptations to extremis that look utterly bonkers when seen at a remove. An outsider, thrust into the realm of a vicious upper class, he accurately declared the whole thing a nest of lies and hypocrisy. He could never buy the pretences it sold, to others and to itself. His very existence was damning disproof. Then, at his lowest ebb, he found a story about what it should be and that – that he bought, hook, line and sinker.

Already primed to consider power the be-all and end-all of life, he took Agnika's story as a guide to gaining the upper-hand, going so far as to tell Rustal (then a young adult) that the only thing he now desired was Bael. Though it seems he lapsed into a wait-and-see approach between prepubescence and his mid-twenties, witnessing children from Mars fighting using Gundams makes him believe destiny is taking a hand in events and the time has come to act. He betrays Carta and Gaelio, his two closest friends, both heirs to other Seven Star families, for the sake of clearing his path forwards. These were the first people to treat him like a normal child and he admits with his dying breath that he reciprocated their affection. This was part of why he killed/attempted to kill them: in their company, he started losing the will to pursue his dream, put off guard by finally having something positive in his life. So he chose to violently reject them, unable to give up on what he'd started.

That could easily be McGillis' epitaph. He is characterised by an overwhelming commitment to seeing through his power-grab, even if it means fighting an entire fleet to go personally kill Rustal. This is very far from a sane response and we might say likewise about everything he does prior. From his gleeful divinations at the sight of ancient relics, to his rapturous exultation on activating a machine he knows just required the appropriate brain/computer interface, the personality lurking beneath his habitually polite mask is little short of unhinged.

Which is of a piece with a group of teenage orphans clinging tight to the idea a good life lies just beyond the next battle, having internalised that proving their strength is the only way to survive. McGillis has to think taking on Agnika's mantle will bring him what he wishes, because otherwise his actions have been for nought, nothing can be changed, and the misery he endured is inescapable. It's the same self-reinforcing spiral, turned up to eleven.

(Re)imagining the world

In the final outcome, Iron-Blooded Orphans refutes McGillis' individualism, albeit not without caveat. Destabilising the Seven Stars creates space for incremental change and self-interestedly assisting independence activists lays the groundwork for Mars' eventual freedom from Earth. McGillis does create a “storm in this stagnant world,” with lasting consequences regardless of how swiftly it subsides. Nonetheless, his death is a futile one compared to the other causalities during the finale, who all manage to make their last acts count for something. Where Tekkadan share a mutually-supporting community – they are a 'pack of wolves' – he stands alone and saves nothing of what mattered to him.

As I said above, I don't want to treat IBO as a story solely and absolutely about capitalism. In a similar vein, I'm not trying to position an interpretation of Agnika as a vector for capitalist propaganda as the intended one. There are multiple moving parts here, spinning out from that serious consideration of child-soldiers as more than just a trope in fiction aimed at teenagers. My read on those parts is contextualised by my cultural background (I do now want to look into how Japan's own aristocracy mutated with their forced induction into global capitalism).

At the same time, McGillis indisputably misapprehends how a structure within a capitalist environment works because he wants to believe a version of what says about itself. And The Life of Agnika Kaieru is an artefact of that environment. Even without knowing more about its authorship, publication or veracity, and setting aside what McGillis brings to the table (his desire for power was set years before he'd heard of Agnika), the fact he finds it in Iznario's library speaks volumes. Biographies are not neutral objects. As alluded to above, the act of public remembrance shapes culture and hence society. I think it both reasonable and interesting to look at McGillis' arc with the assumption the book is ultimately commensurate with everything he was reacting against.

What would have happened had McGillis won is another moot question when the narrative hinges specifically on his failure. But a land of competition, overseen by the supreme authority of Gjallarhorn, where the only moral law derives from the dreams of the strong?

Perhaps the most damning thing to be said of McGillis' principles – of Agnika's principles – is that they would produce a world functionally identical to the one we started with.

———

Postscript:

For the sake of absolute clarity, I do not believe whether a story is about capitalism or not has any bearing on its quality. My discussion of the other Gundam shows is intended purely to highlight what I see as a fundamental difference between what they are doing and what IBO is. I don't think it is a problem that G-Witch is a personal/courtly drama, or that Wing is focused on fighting in a more philosophical than material sense, or that the franchise has overall tended towards addressing conflict per se, without any serious interrogation from an economic angle.

Stories can only fail at what they attempt, not at what they don't.

I nevertheless stand by what I said. A piece of fiction concerned merely with some generalised notion of 'human greed' is not about capitalism in any meaningful sense, and I fear that's where most Gundam shows land, one way or another, when they touch on corporate interests.

[Index of other writing]

[aeligsido]

[WM — September 2024] Prompt 6 — Time-Turner.

Rating: G.

TW: none.

Characters: Remus Lupin, Seren Lupin (OC), Mary Macdonald, Sirius Black (in the haunting-the-narrative kind of way).

Additional Tags: actor Sirius Black; celebrity Sirius Black; trans Remus Lupin; past trans male pregnancy; Mary and Peter are great friends I just need to say it; modern au; actress Seren Lupin but she’s just starting; Seren as a wolfstar baby except Sirius doesn’t know she’s his (or Remus’s for that matter).

Summary: Seren Lupin gets the lead role for upcoming coming-of-age movie Time-Turner.

Words count: 975.

A/N: Heya! I dropped this au in @impishtubist askbox some time ago and since it refused to leave my brain I'm now forced to write about it idk. I’ll write Sirius and Remus’ first meeting (in twelve years) for a later microfic I think lmao. Hope you like it! 💕

@wolfstarmicrofic

read on ao3.

-

Remus is worrying himself sick, pacing alone in the kitchen, opening and closing the fridge to make sure the cake is still here, getting the glasses out, putting them back in, starting making tea, forgetting it halfway through the process. He should have joined them after work, but he was too stressed and too scared of somehow destroying Seren’s chances.

It’s her last audition today. Some sort of chemistry test? To see if she gets along with the other actors? It all made sense when she was excitedly telling him about it yesterday again, but it’s like his brain is mush now.

The door opens, cutting him down from his own spiral, and Remus perks up, more stressed out by the whole affair than his daughter ever was.

“Dad! Dad! I got it!”

Seren appears in the kitchen, grinning like the little gremlin she is, teeth out and her brown curls slipping free from the careful braid Mary pushed them into this morning. Her eyes, a circle of dark brown cascading into a warm grey, are shining with delight and joy, and Remus finds himself breathless with love — just like almost twelve years ago, when they put this small, red, squealing baby on his chest with a congratulation.

His daughter jumps into his arms and he laughs in tandem with her. “That’s amazing! I knew you could do it!” He lets her free, just enough to put his hands on her cheeks and look at her in the eyes. “I’m so proud of you.”

She beams with the force of a thousand suns.

“Thanks! It was so cool, and, oh, you’ll never guess who’s gonna play my dad in the film! And Mister Dumbledore said that we could get a TV show too!”

Albus Dumbledore, one of the most acclaimed film directors still alive, with so many successes behind him — yet so eccentric you could never guess what he will go for next. After a blockbuster about a young crowds of vigilantes saving their world from tyranny, a rather depressing story about a young orphan in the middle of WWII becoming the oppressor, and a passionate but tragic gay romance at the end of the 19th century, a coming-of-age children story is right on par for the course. Time-Turner, as it’s called, will follow a young girl — played by Seren, his own daughter! — discovering her time travel power, while dealing with her mother’s recent demise.

Which makes the father of the heroine the other lead of the film, and someone Seren will have to spend a lot of time with. Remus hopes he’s a good person. Someone nice, who wouldn’t be put-out by her unlimited energy and her never-ending supply of questions.

“So?” he asks as Seren stops talking to take a breath. “Who will play your dad?”

She grins, more excited even than before. She has always looked more like him, in general, with more elegance in her traits and grace in her body than he ever possessed. But like that — oh, like that, she looks just like…

“Sirius Black!” she yells, bouncing on her feet, and she can’t help but do a little, victorious dance.

“That’s great,” he says, croaks out more than anything, and smiles as wide as he can, drowning the drumming of his heart and fear as much as he can. “Why don’t you call your grandparents to tell them the news?” He checks the time. “And your uncle Peter? He should be out of work by now.”

Seren nods and babbles some more and disappears toward her room. Mary, who was standing silently near the door the whole time, finally comes around.

Remus starts busying himself with tea. It’s easier than thinking through his rising panic.

“So,” says Mary, because of course she cannot not say anything. For a brief second, Remus wishes Peter had been the one disponible today — he would have judged silently but not said anything, him. “You never told us Sirius Black is Seren’s father.”

He groans. His face hits the table and he considers staying here forever.

“No one knows,” he finally mumbles. “How did you even guess?”

“He was here today.” She ponders her words an instant. “They’re a lot alike.”

“But he doesn’t—” He stops himself, but Mary has known him since they were kids. She can read him too easily.

“I don't think he does.”

Remus sighs. It’s not ideal; it was already not great when Sirius Black was Seren’s idol, but it will be worse now that they’re in contact. Now that he will be in her life.

“Do I ask how it happened, since you didn’t tell me at the time, or are we doing that later when you can get drunk?”

“Second option,” Remus immediately answers. He can still remember, after all those years, how Sirius kissed him like he was important, the warmth of his hands on his body, the softness of his hair— But they had basically been strangers to each other, several hook-ups to escape boring parties resulting in Remus's panic at his sudden pregnancy and a total loss of contact. And now— Now he has so much to lose.

“I’ll call Peter,” Mary nods sagely. Then, after a beat of silence, “it will come out at some point, you know.”

“I doubt it,” he mutters, prays. “It’s not like he’ll remember me, anyway.”

How could an acclaimed actor, known all around the world, remember a random waiter he slept with twelve years ago? Remus didn’t impact his life the way Sirius impacted his. He’ll never regret it, of course — Seren is the most precious thing in his life, and all the moments preceding her existence were pretty great too — but it's not like Sirius would want to have anything to do with them, anyway.

Remus can at least try to speak it into existence.

[zuko-always-lies]

What exactly were everyone's character arcs supposed to be?

This is an interesting question for ATLA, and one sometimes without a clear answer. Some characters have reasonably complete character arcs, and others simply don't, to a degree which is often not acknowledged today. A few are in-between. This not necessarily a function of screen time. Jet and Yue have reasonably complete character arcs despite only briefly appearing, while others with far more screen time do not.

Without further ado, I'll go through the characters one by one and try to give an answer:

Yue, as I said, has a story which feels complete with a beginning, middle, and end. She's a very duty bound person committed a political marriage to help her tribe, a person who was saved by the holy symbols of it in the first place. Then she falls in love with Sokka but refuses to break off her engagement out of duty. And finally she sacrifices her life out of duty to save everyone.

Jet also feels like he has an arc. You can take issue with how it was written and how it plays out, since he really got the short straw, but it's an arc. From being orphaned by the Iroh-aligned Rough Rhinos, to fighting the Fire Nation and going "too far," to trying to make a new start in Ba Sing Se, to correctly getting suspicious about Zuko and Iroh, to being brainwashed by the Dai Li, to dying fighting against Long Feng. It's not nearly as coherent as Yue's arc, but it's something.

Suki, by contrast, doesn't have much of an arc. I've heard before the concept of "character arc" being defined as "either the character changes or the audience's perception of them changes." Neither of those things ever happen with Suki. She remains unchanged, and we learn nothing really about her. The only meaningful character change which happens is that she and Sokka fall in love.

Aang quite obviously has an arc: grow into the position of Avatar, defeat the Firelord, befriend Zuko, and the end the war. And, of course, get together with Katara.

Zuko also has an arc, which the show probably spends more time on than with anyone else: change sides, become friends with the Gaang(although that bit was very poorly written), and reject his abusive father and instead start worshipping his uncle. And I suppose grow strong enough to beat the crap out of his sister, like he's always wanted to do.

Iroh, by contrast, couldn't have less of an arc. Any attempt to read an arc into the mess of extremely incoherent writing he was would require extreme charity. In the end, we're supposed to both accept he "changed" offscreen before the show(that his arc was already mostly complete?) but also that he was "always good" anyways.

Toph doesn't have an arc. 90% of her character development, such as it was, is confined to her first two appearances. After that, she's merely a hanger on to the Gaang. As much as people love her, there is so little to her story. Her character is better defined than Suki, but her story isn't.

Azula is supposed to have an arc. It's supposed to be about falling apart, going insane, and being lain low. But it was extremely rushed and shoved unconvincingly into the last few episodes, and the writers were uninterested in explaining what actually happened to make her fall apart, so I struggle to say she has anything resembling a coherent arc.

Ty Lee also doesn't have an arc. Her arc, such as it was imagined, was supposed to "betray Azula." Yet none of the character development she gets over the series leads in that direction, and we have every reason to believe she would have acted the same at the beginning of the series as she did at the end. And of course there was no "redemption" aside from switching sides for her.

Mai has slightly more of an arc than Ty Lee, but that's only because it involves her getting together with Zuko and eventually sacrificing herself to protect him. Otherwise, it's about as coherent as Ty Lee's arc.

Sokka's arc is an interesting one. I would say that there are four things they experiment with as the basis for his arc. First, there is his distrust for Aang, which is rapidly resolved. Second is his sexism, which is equally rapidly resolved. Third is unease over being a nonbender, but that's only rarely referenced over the course of the series, and is fully "resolved" in the truly awful episode "Sokka's Master" early in Book 3. Finally, there is the issue of his daddy issues and his desire to prove himself as a warrior. That is something his story keeps coming back to over and over again. However, it is almost entirely resolved in the Day of Black Sun episodes, where Sokka leads the SWT in battle, despite a couple weird later references in the Boiling Rock episodes. Thus, I would Sokka has an arc, but it's resolved well before the series ends.

Finally, we reach Katara. I don't think Katara really has much of a coherent arc in the series. In Book 1, it was all about her trying to become a master waterbender, but she achieves that by the end of the Book. After that, her character lacks clear direction. What's her story supposed to be about after that? Getting together with Aang? "Forgiving Zuko"? The daddy issues which show up for exactly one episode? The conflict with Toph which shows up for two? "Accepting that ordinary Fire Nation people are people too," even though she was always shown to be compassionate to ordinary Fire Nation people not actively engaged in genocide? The "mommy issues" which she often brings up but which are rarely taken seriously by the show, and are ultimately used to get her to forgive Zuko (two separate times!)? All of these seem completely unworthy of hanging her arc on, and I have to say, I don't think Katara has much of a coherent arc past Book 1.

If we had to order these characters in terms of coherence of arc from most to least, it would probably go something like: Aang, Zuko, Yue, Jet, Sokka, Katara, Azula, Mai, Ty Lee, Iroh, Toph, Suki.

[thethirdromana]

Mina's class conundrum

For some of the characters in Dracula, it's very clear-cut which class they belong to - e.g. Arthur, who is 100% a member of the upper class. With Mina, however, it's less clear:

She was a childhood friend of Lucy, who is upper-class or upper-middle class (from a high enough class background to marry a nobleman).

She is engaged to marry Jonathan, a newly qualified solicitor (a middle-class profession) who was recently only a clerk (one of the worst-paid white-collar jobs in Victorian England).

Mina expects to be short of money in their married life, and "shall have to try to make both ends meet".

Lucy considers her to be a suitable match for Jack, a man who is "well off" and "of good birth".

She has to work for a living as an assistant schoolmistress.

She's a orphan who has never known her parents.

Some of this (the friendship with Lucy, the idea of marriage to Jack) points towards an upper-middle class background. But the rest (marrying Jonathan, working for a living) is less consistent with that.

So I thought it might be interesting to tease out what the options are. Dropping the rest of this under a cut because it's long.

Quick disclaimer: whatever the finer details of her background, Mina is still in the top 15% of 1890s society. She's not working-class; she's an educated professional who's probably earning 50% more than the average full-time salary.

But there's still a big gulf between the entry level of the Victorian middle class (household income around £150/year, employing one servant) and the top end of the upper-middle classes (four-figure household income, large numbers of servants, potentially enough passive income for no one to need to work).

Mina's job

I realised in writing this that we don't know a huge amount about what Mina's job actually is. She's an assistant schoolmistress, and she says:

you can't go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit

but that doesn't imply that etiquette is all she teaches. She could equally have said "you can't go on for some years teaching other girls to keep their shoes shiny and in good order without becoming self-conscious when your own shoes are scuffed", without it implying that her teaching career is all about shoes.

The Dracula Daily fandom has also generally assumed that Mina was a pupil of the school, before becoming a pupil-teacher, then a full-time teacher; I think that's a reasonable assumption from Mina teaching "for some years". We've also generally assumed that Mina and Lucy attended the same school where Mina then became a teacher. That's implied here:

It was my privilege to be your friend and guide when you came from the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life.

I think there could be other ways of interpreting that sentence, but most of them are a bit of a stretch.

There were a variety of different schools for girls in Victorian England: chiefly board schools, private schools, and a small number of academic schools that aimed to give girls an equal education to that received by boys, targeting university entrance. I'm going to leave out the latter, because I don't think Mina works for one of the academic schools; there just weren't that many of them.

Board schools were primary schools for the general population, run by the state though funded partly by fees. Working at a board school would be stressful, with huge class sizes. Board school teachers were generally middle-class: for instance, Margaret McCallum, the daughter of a shopkeeper (a lower-middle class occupation), who became a pupil-teacher at her local elementary school in her early teens, then went to college for further qualifications, eventually becoming a headteacher.

Board school teaching was promoted as a career for upper-class women, but very few of them did it: Eglantyne Jebb, who went on to found Save the Children and drafted the document that became the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, was a rare exception.

There's also no way that Lucy attended a board school. Her education was much more likely to have been at a private school, which were run by women from a genteel background. Fees for pupils ranged from £3 to over £150 (bearing in mind £56 as the average male full-time salary).

This made it a difficult way to earn a living: women who ran and taught at these schools had to keep up the appearance of a genteel lifestyle while not usually making enough profit to support it. They were often not well-qualified; their qualification was coming from the correct social background, which meant upper-middle class or upper-class ("gentlewomen", broadly), though by definition they were also poor enough to need to work for a living. (Source, p139-141)

Possible options for Mina's class

Putting my cards on the table, I would strongly prefer Mina to be of a distinctly lower class than Lucy (who is upper-class or upper-middle class). That would mean that the Crew of Light spans different genders, different ages, different faiths, different nationalities and different classes (rather than just upper-middle and upper, which is a difference, but a small one), which really appeals to me. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't really go my way.

Mina as upper-middle class I think this has to be the more likely option, however much I don't like it.

Mina's parents could have been upper-middle class, potentially connections of the Westenras, but their untimely deaths meant that they didn't have as much by way of savings to pass on to their daughter as they would have liked. They might have left Mina enough to be educated at a good school (with Lucy) and to care for her needs as a child, but not so much that she could afford not to work as an adult. At the same time, being from established upper-middle class background would give Mina the standing that she would need to work as a teacher in a private girls' school.

This could suggest that Mina is marrying down, at least a little, in her engagement to Jonathan, leading to this line in Lucy's letter:

We met some time ago a man that would just do for you, if you were not already engaged to Jonathan.

I don't much like this reading. But it does seem to be the one that fits best with the facts we have.

Mina as lower-middle class OK, now let's see if I can make my preferred reading work.

This puts Mina in a class that would naturally marry a solicitor's clerk. She would work in a board school or potentially one of the cheapest private day schools. How she came to be childhood friends with Lucy is harder to figure out, but if Lucy is from new money (possible!) then the connection might go back to before the Westenras became wealthy.

Suggesting Jack as a match for Mina, "good birth" and all, could simply be the relatively innocent Lucy thinking that if Mina and Jack met, love would conquer all regardless of a class barrier. (Which is plausible given how much Jack admires Mina when they do meet).

This reading does fit better with Mina's dedication to autodidacticism and her interest in supporting Jonathan through his work, not just by being a better housewife. This would be consistent with coming from a background where women routinely worked before marriage, and I would guess might work alongside their husbands more as well (e.g. a shop-keeper's wife working in the shop).

As for being Lucy's "friend and guide" when she came from the schoolroom... well, being her teacher is the most logical way to read it, but she could arguably have been guided by an older friend, especially if the age gap between them is more like 3-5 years rather than 1-2 years.

Yeah, it's a stretch. But I think either option is possible, just about. I'd be keen to hear what other people think!

[ryuzakemo128]

Behold A Pale Horse

Pairing: Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick x female reader/ you

Content Warning: Kyle Gaz Garrick the son of a billionaire from generations of old money, mental health issues touched on and briefly explored, philosophy explored to an extent, therapist and therapy session briefly inserted. Y/N is not metioned. Reader is called nicknames like: Firecracker.

Words: 5374

Masterlist

Credit for Dividers: @strangergraphics

Note: Italic writing are your thoughts are. In the case, I might need to tell you before you go ahead and decide to read this.

Note 2: Listening to Moonlight Sonata 1st movement is reccommended in my opinion. But any kind of classical music will fit as well.

Summary: You drape the black shirt over your body like a satin cloak owned by the angel of death and cut from the wings of the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, named Death.

You frowned as you looked at your paycheck, you didn’t know what to think of it. You weren’t used to having a large amount of money. Seventeen thousand pounds for the past month. It wasn’t something you felt like you could get used to anytime soon. You didn’t want to receive the pity of others.

You would rather die than receive the pity of others. Trust no one. Not even the people who call themselves your friend.

Do not mistake their kindness for affection. Show them nothing. Give them nothing.

You drape the black shirt over your body like a satin cloak owned by the angel of death and cut from the wings of the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, named Death.

A loud voice said, come and see. Behold a pale horse. The man that sat upon his steed was death, and hell followed him like a strong stench.

You had seen enough of death to know that the voice was a mere echo of your own thoughts. Taken the name of the Grim Reaper as it was yours to keep close to your heart and soul.

You didn’t care if it was never yours to have in the same sense of those of ‘the faith’. But what they wanted didn’t matter to you.

What you needed was far more substantial, in terms of ‘soul-searching’ and finding yourself all over again. What the fuck does finding ‘your truth’ mean, anyway? It sounds more like an excuse to spend frivolous amounts of money on a useless life coach they don’t need.

You had seen the horrors of war. The screams of the innocent, the smell of burning flesh, the cold touch of death, it all clung to you like a second skin. A reminder of what you had done. What you have been a part of and still work in, manners of death.

You might as well become the fourth horseman of the apocalypse at this stage of your life with all the lives you have taken by your own hand or by the hand of fate, which you had a say in.

The voice, it was, persistent, whispering sweet nothings of destruction into your ears, guiding you through the fog of war like a siren's call leading sailors to their watery graves.

My hands are covered in a sea of blood I will never wash away. Some nights I wake screaming, thinking I’m back there in the middle of the bodies of the people I have given the death sentence to.

I do not wish to be there again.

Ever.

Yet every night I am all the way back.

Over and over again. I see each of their faces painted, tattooed into my subconscious.

I want them to leave. Not only that, but I tell them to leave.

Yet they never seem to listen to me.

As if all I say is empowering them to remain in my mind.

Religion cannot save me.

Therapy is the route I have not taken seriously as of late. It is a sign.

I will go upon this path. Before hell itself consumes my soul.

Father, have I done the right thing?

Mother, are you ashamed of what I have unleashed?

I have created many men and women widows.

Created many children into a mass of orphans.

Yet the superiors of mine clap my shoulder and congratulate me as if I had done the greatest deed man could ever accomplish.

To me? It is the greatest burden I have dealt with.

The weight of their lives on my shoulders, a heavy crown of thorns digging deep into my skin. But I wear it, for the sake of what? The country? The queen? Or the fear that I might just be a monster in the eyes of society.

Yet nothing I could have done while you were alive would have been good enough for either of you.

The push to succeed, much like my older brothers before me. You neglected what I wanted in service to your own needs.

To your own wants and desires. Inside layers of a play written by William Shakespeare.

One where everyone has their part but me. One where everyone knows what their part entails and the consequences that come with it.

But I don't. I am the puppeteer whose strings are tangled, and the puppet is dancing to a tune I never knew.

But you can’t force people to like you. To love you. To adore you.

You cannot force people to do anything.

A dance where everyone expects you to know all the steps of once you have reached a certain point in your life.

“Dr. Stone. I was sincere in hoping therapy might unearth a lot of my….emotional baggage.” You told your doctor.

Your black skirt feeling more like a twisted contraption you were dying to take off by the time you were done in the doctor's office.

Her eyes were kind, understanding, a tad bit pitying. The kind of pity which always seem to make you want to scream. She nodded gently, her long platinum blonde hair brushing past her shoulders.

“It’s okay. Your feelings are valid. The first step is acknowledging that you need help.”

You always had ADHD, but your father didn’t believe it was a cause for alarm. Telling you, it was a hoax from ‘big pharma’ to get people to spend more on medication than to actually help people.

You felt like a burden. A failure. Especially when you were diagnosed with it at seven years old. He would yell at you, scream at you, tell you that you were just being lazy and that you needed to pay more attention.

How could you when everything was a blur of colours and sounds and words didn’t make sense?

When you were diagnosed with psychosis depression, in conjuncture of Synaesthesia and sensory processing disorder, it was like a sledgehammer to your already fragile sense of self. You felt like you were drowning in a sea of emotions and stimuli, with no one to throw you a lifeline.

Your father's dismissal of your struggles only served to fuel the fire of your isolation. You had always felt like an outsider in your own family, and now you had scientific evidence to prove it.

What good was evidence when the people who were supposed to support you didn’t believe in it?

A support system that couldn’t be bothered to support you. So, you learn to pickpocket from wealthy strangers in order to get the money you need for school supplies and food to eat during the school day. Lest your parents get a phone call from the school’s administrator to the child protective services.

The last thing you needed was to be taken from your home and placed somewhere else.

Keeping a sharp knife in your hoodie’s pocket, a silent reminder of what you were capable of unleashing unto others if you were given no other choice but to defend yourself.

“Cos I'm th' one gettin' in'a more fights than thee.” You reminded him with an eyebrow raised at him.

He chuckled before his expression grew serious. “Remember, it’s not for fights. It’s for when things get really bad. You're smarter than me, you’re smarter than all of us. Use it wisely.”

“Ta.” you muttered sheepishly in a bashful thanks.

It’s a long memory from years ago. Now, he is a married man with three daughters of his own, still living back in Yorkshire. After your father decided it was for the best that your brother, Caiden, had taken over the family farm. Leaving you to fend for yourself in the city with an alcoholic of a father who couldn’t even bother to remember your birthday.

You didn’t want to think what kind of desperation your mother would have needed to go through to leave you behind and cheat on your father repeatedly. Though, you know for a fact she didn’t care much about you or your older siblings, either. At least it was what your father drilled into you since you were sent off into the military at sixteen years old.

This is the least of your worries now.

The military charity dinner held by those in a level of wealth you were given the privilege to gawk at. Gaze upon in a hopeless wonder of knowing you were deemed less than in the grand scheme of the capitalist agenda.

“I don't know whether to be insulted at the gesture or wonder why they couldn't get someone else to attend in my place.” You told her as you stared at the window past her into the light grey cloudy sky.

“I could, no, I would be back there on the coastal shores in a heartbeat if they said they found someone else.” You continued to stare past her.

“I could be fishing for hours out there, and I wouldn’t have a care in the world.” You mentioned your diet of fresh fish, crab and the odd catfish if you were lucky enough to catch one.

Dr Stone nodded, scribbling notes on her clipboard, her pen moving swiftly, gliding across the page like an ice skater. As she processed your words.

“It’s important to find healthy ways to cope with your past traumas and the stress of your current job. Is there something you’ve always wanted to do, a hobby perhaps, that could help you find some peace?”

“I do MMA, Kickboxing, Axe-throwing, Javelin. I’m always studying anything to do with Electrical engineering. Even though I have doctorate now.”

“I haven’t found a reason to do much else other than fish as soon as I’m on leave. I leave out crab nets to catch crabs overnight. Primrose Valley is peaceful enough for someone who doesn't need much of anything.”

The doctor nodded, her gaze never leaving yours. “But what about something more…social? Something that doesn’t involve you being alone with your thoughts?”

“I don’t venture out much. I visit London for a two week vacation every three months. I come out more often if I need to get more clothes, shoes and tech for my workstation in my office.” You answered.

“My older brother said this military function was likely an excuse to parade around a poster child of a poor sod, a poverty-stricken soul who crawled her way to Colonel without wealth to back her up.” You mentioned.

Dr. Stone put her clipboard down and leaned slightly forward, her eyes searching yours. “And how does that make you feel?”

“One. It feels too convenient for him to say it. Two. I don’t know what to feel about it. Suspicious at the timing. But grateful for the opportunity at the same time.” You answered.

“I’m sorry for being so blunt, but I need to know where you’re coming from to help you better. How do you feel when you’re around others at these events?” She asked gently.

“I would have been offended if you weren’t blunt. It feels convenient they chose this time of year to do it. They could have chosen any other time of the year. But for some reason now felt like the ‘right time’. I feel like a zoo animal on display for them to gawk at and whisper about. Like they’re all expecting me to break down and show them the horrors of war. Like that’s what they want to see. That’s what makes them feel alive. That’s what makes them feel like they’re doing something noble by pitying me. Though, what is the use of pity now?”

You sigh heavily, feeling the weight of your words. “I feel like a fraud. Like I’m wearing a mask. A mask of success, of bravery, of strength. But underneath, I’m just a scared little girl who doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing in a room full of lions dressed as sheep.”

Dr. Stone nods thoughtfully. “It’s normal to feel out of place in such situations. The military has its own culture, and transitioning to civilian life can be challenging, especially when you’re thrust into the spotlight like this. But remember, you earned your rank through hard work and sacrifice. You’re not just a story for them to tell. You’re a person with feelings and experiences that have shaped you into who you are today. It’s okay to set boundaries and to choose how much you wish to share with them. They may not understand, but that’s their problem, not yours.”

“Progress without work is not real progress.” you responded remembering the first session with her.

“How about trying to find someone to talk to at the dinner tonight? Maybe someone who you can connect with on a deeper level, someone who won’t see you as a charity case or a trophy, but as a human being with a story to tell.” Dr. Stone suggested, her voice a gentle nudge towards the social horizon you had long avoided.

“Only one way to find out right?” you sighed thinking of it.

The military charity dinner was held in a grand ballroom, the kind you only saw in movies. Chandeliers sparkled like diamonds hanging from the ceiling, casting a warm, golden light on the marble floor.

The walls were lined with portraits of important figures, their stern faces watching over the event like guardians of the past. The air was thick with the scent of expensive cologne and the murmur of polite conversations.

You felt more like you were going through an outer body experience than actually attending the dinner. The room was filled with the who's who of society.

All dressed in their finest attire. The clinking of silverware and the soft laughter echoed around you.

A stark contrast to the chaos you were used to in the battlefield. You wore a sleek black dress that hugged your toned body. The fabric whispering against your skin as you moved.

It was a stark reminder of the armor you once wore. The one that actually kept you safe.

Looking for a seat painted. Coated. Dyed. Twisted inside the depths of both darkness and shadow.

The dinner was a masquerade ball of sorts, the kind where everyone wore their masks of charity and compassion while their true faces remained hidden behind a veil of wealth and privilege.

You walked through the crowd, the heels of your black stilettos clicking against the marble like the ticking of a time bomb, drawing glances that ranged from curious to pitying.

You felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing, armed with your sharp wit and the stories no one genuinely wanted to hear.

You were sipping on a potent amber liquid in the corner out of the view of those who would rather pity you from afar than muster the courage to speak to you.

The gentle tapping upon your shoulder you were determined to ignore. Yet as you pretended to ignore them as if they were not quite there. A deep voice, the accent of the queen’s English breaking through his lips as if they parted in gentle parting waves rather than words.

“Excuse me, colonel, if I may, your presence here is quite the talking point.”

“I suppose it would be. Most oddities of the norm are spoken of. Are they not? Those who do not fit within usually stand out as clear as daylight or a black sheep born from white.” You responded fixing the leather gloves enclosing your hands from view.

He chuckled, a rich, warm sound that seemed to fill the empty spaces in the room. “I suppose that’s true. But you, Colonel, you’re more like a diamond in the rough, aren’t you? Shimmering brilliantly amidst the coal of our mundane existence.”

“I find the apt description of a black sheep more befitting. A black sheep need not take dye to turn into a different colour, it is simply born that way. Wool worth more because it doesn't need to change into a different shade. It is just as it is meant to be but is often discarded for not fitting in with the flock.” You replied, a hint of a smile playing at the corner of your lips.

“I’m Kyle Garrick. But you can call me Gaz. I’ve heard quite the tales of your valour, Colonel.” He extended a hand, his grip firm but not overpowering, a sign of respect.

“Of that I have no doubt.” You took his hand and shook it firmly, looking into his eyes without blinking, as if to prove that you were not intimidated by his status. “Tales are often exaggerated to suit the teller’s needs. And I suspect that in this room, the truth is as elusive as a mirage in the desert of deception.”

Gaz chuckled again, his smile genuine. “Fair point. But I’ve seen enough of the world to know that true grit isn’t something that can be faked. So, tell me, Colonel, what brings a diamond in the rough to an event like this?”

“Other than being invited to it?” You questioned the young man.

He nodded in understanding, his eyes never leaving yours. “Indeed. Besides that, I mean. Is there something you’re hoping to get out of tonight?”

“I suppose I don't know. London is nosier than Primrose Valley. Lacks the sea air I have become accustomed to.” you answered.

Gaz leaned against the wall beside you, his eyes scanning the room as if he were assessing the situation. “I can understand that. The city can be...overwhelming at times. But there’s also something to be said for the energy here. The constant movement, the stories hiding in every corner. It’s like a battlefield in a different way, isn’t it? Just with less danger and more champagne.”

“You are just as likely to drown in it as to swim inside it.” you quipped. “Also, I don't know what battlefield you've been on. Most of mine have been as hectic as the daylight savings.”

Gaz’s eyes searched yours, a hint of curiosity in his gaze. “You’ve seen a lot, haven’t you?”

“One would certainly hope so. I started at sixteen at the behest of my father. My mother left one night, and she hadn't come home back since.” you answered.

Gaz’s eyes widened slightly, and his smile faltered. “That’s...young. Too young, really. But I suppose necessity is the mother of all invention, isn’t it?”

“Necessity breeds innovation. Innovation breathes in the soul of the desperate.” You said, taking a sip of your drink, your eyes never leaving his. The liquid burned down your throat like a trail of fire, a comforting pain, a familiar one. “Mr. Garrick, why do you find yourself here this evening, you do not strike me as a charitable soul.”

He chuckled, a sound that seemed to resonate with the very walls of the ballroom. “You’re right, Colonel. I’m not exactly the charity type.

But, my father’s a high-ranking general, and he believes in supporting our troops.

Plus, it’s a good way to network, keep an eye on the new recruits, and maybe, just maybe, find a bit of the excitement I’ve missed since leaving active duty.

And you? What’s your reason for being here?”

“Do I require one?” you answered.

“No, I suppose not. But it’s always interesting to know what brings people together in a place like this. Besides, I find that the most intriguing people often have the most intriguing stories to tell. And I’d wager yours is quite the tale.” Gaz said, his eyes still holding yours, a challenge in his gaze.

“Not quite for those who cannot stomach the taste copper.” you responded.

“I see. Then tell me, what do you do in your free time?” Gaz asked, his gaze never leaving yours.

“MMA, Kickboxing, Axe-throwing, Javelin. I’m always studying anything to do with Electrical engineering. I haven’t found a reason to do much else other than fish as soon as I’m on leave. I leave out crab nets to catch crabs overnight. Primrose Valley is peaceful enough for someone who doesn't need much of anything.” you answered looking at the ornate fork on the table.

Gaz’s eyes lit up at the mention of MMA and kickboxing. “Now that’s a side of you I wasn’t expecting. Most women in the military I know prefer the more…traditional forms of relaxation. How did you get into that?”

“I'm a close combat specialist as well as a sniper. Best of both. A combination of two deadly worlds. I enjoy the rush and the discipline it brings. It keeps my mind sharp and my body in check. Plus, it’s a good way to let off steam. As for electrical engineering, it’s always been a passion of mine. Something about the chaos of circuits and wires makes sense to me when nothing else does. It’s like a puzzle, but instead of a picture, you get to build something that actually works.” You replied, your eyes never leaving the fork.

“Fascinating. You're a woman of many talents, Colonel.” Gaz said, his voice filled with genuine interest.

“You have to be. To survive and thrive in this type of world you need it. You require it. You must find yourself utterly complete inside and out.” you replied with a shrug of your shoulders.

“Ah, I see. So, tell me, what’s the most thrilling part of your job?” Gaz asked, his gaze still on you, as if he was trying to piece together the puzzle of your life.

“The technology. It adapts faster than we can ever learn to use it. Delightful to see the older generations scramble around as they shriek, 'How do I use this?' in different words. But the question always remain the same.” you snorted.

“But the most thrilling part would be when you can outsmart it. When you can use it in ways it wasn’t intended to be used. That’s when you know you’re truly ahead of the game. Like using a smartphone as an explosive device or a simple USB stick to bring down a network. The simplicity is the best part. It’s like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit is a bomb and the hat is your enemy’s security system.”

Gaz’s eyes widened, a spark of intrigue lighting up his expression. “Remarkable. It’s not often you find someone who can appreciate the beauty in chaos quite like that.”

“Chaos is everywhere. From the sea, to the sky and the creatures just below the ground. To the very sciences. We know less of our ocean than we do about our moon.”

“Indeed. But chaos is predictable if you know the patterns. And when it comes to technology, I’ve found that the patterns are quite…beautiful, in their own destructive way. Like a tornado, you see it coming, you know the path of destruction, but there’s a certain…elegance to it, isn’t there?” Gaz replied, his voice low and intense.

“Not quite. It is safe to assume we know because of what we already do know.” you pointed out. “A fool assumes he has all the answers. A fool denies truths revealed later to writhe in his 'limitless' ignorance. A smart man knows he does not know everything. A smarter one knows the right questions to ask to find the answers he does not know yet. And the smartest knows when not to ask at all, for fear of what he might find out.”

Gaz nodded thoughtfully, his gaze still locked with yours. “A philosopher and a warrior, Colonel. Quite the combination. I can see why they picked you as the face of this event. You have a way with words that could charm the birds from the trees.”

“My therapist recommended most of the books I have read on Existentialism Absurdist philosophy. It made life seem to look like it had more sense than it truly does. Like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing, or a goldfish than happens to be koi fish. It's all in how you look at it.” you said with a shrug.

As the dinner came to a close, you were left with your thoughts and memories stirred up. As you walked over to your car, the cool London night air slapped you with reality. You were still the Grim Reaper, haunted by the ghosts of your past. You looked at you car, a 1966 black dodge charger, a symbol of your old life.

As you placed your vinyl leather handbag, until you heard your name, your heart skipped a beat. You turned around to see a man in a sharp navy blue tuxedo with a crimson tie walking towards you, a smile playing on his lips.

“Colonel, I hope I’m not interrupting your quiet moment.”

“If you call heading back to a hotel room as a 'quiet moment' then I would hate to see what you define as a party.” you replied dryly.

The man chuckled, his eyes twinkling with mirth. “Fair enough. But I must admit, I found your company quite refreshing tonight. A breath of fresh, if not salty, sea air.” He extended his hand once again. “John Price, at your service. And before you ask, no, I'm not related to the hotel chain.”

“I was thinking of of a tinned fish brand than a hotel chain.” You said as you took his hand. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Price.”

Price's grip was firm, but not overpowering. His smile remained, but his eyes searched yours, as if looking for something hidden beneath the surface. “Please, call me John. And the pleasure is all mine, Colonel. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation with Gaz. Quite insightful, really. Rare to find someone who understands the complexities of our line of work.”

“I would hope so getting shot at at the ripe age of 17 is not something I would have wanted my own children to go through.”

“Indeed, it’s a path that shapes us, whether we wish it or not. Tell me, Colonel, are you ever haunted by the ghosts of your past?” John Price asked, his voice carrying a weight that suggested he was all too familiar with such hauntings.

“John. No one can kill someone and come back the same as they were. It’s like trying to walk through a forest fire unscathed. The heat changes you, the smoke fills your lungs and alters your breathing forever. You’re never quite the same.” You replied, your voice a mix of honesty and resignation.

John’s smile remained, but his eyes grew serious. “Wise words, Colonel. And I suspect you speak from experience. I’ve seen enough of those fires to know that you can’t escape them untouched. But sometimes, those ghosts can be…useful. They can drive us to do things we never thought possible, push us to be better than we ever imagined we could be. And sometimes, just sometimes, they give us the strength to keep walking when we feel like we can’t go on anymore. Have you ever felt that way?”

“On and off. Most days yes. On others I want to be on my boat and fish for two hours.” you answered.

John's eyes searched yours, a silent understanding passing between the two of you. “Fishing, huh? I’ve always found there’s something peaceful about being out on the water, just you and the fish. It’s a stark contrast to the chaos we deal with in our line of work, isn’t it?”

“Nothing like catching a fish, cutting it up and eating for dinner later.” you smirked.

John chuckled, the sound echoing in the emptying ballroom. “Indeed. But tell me, do you ever find that the quiet of the water gets too…quiet? That you miss the rush?”

“Covert ops. Those ones are the ones I liked most of all. Its the combination of the James Bond spy feeling and the reality of it all. You get to save the world and look good doing it, minus the fancy cars and the women of course. Just me and my trusty boat, a fishing pole, and a whole lot of patience.” you said, a ghost of a smile playing on your lips.

John’s eyes lit up, a spark of shared experience in his gaze. “Ah, the quiet before the storm. The thrill of the hunt, the anticipation of the catch.

It’s quite a rush, isn’t it? The adrenaline pumping through your veins as you wait for the right moment to strike, knowing that one wrong move could mean the end of the mission. And yet, when you succeed, it’s like nothing else in the world.”

You ended up giving him your number to him. You don't know why you did. You felt compelled to do it. It was a choice you have decided to do in the heat of the moment.

Thinking nothing of it. As you drove to the hotel you booked to stay in for the duration of your stay in London. It wasn’t as nearly draped in luxury expenditures as one of the wealthy would have.

However, it wasn’t the cheapest either. It was the perfect kind of ‘safe’ middle ground you could find. It was enough to satisfy your needs without making you feel guilty for spending your hard-earned savings.

You decided to text your friend to check on your home along the coast. You weren't sure what to feel about this London trip. It was a new thing for you. A time for just yourself. And your mind. Everything else is extra.

[purple-crusader]

Stephcass Week day 2 guys!!! That's the prompt that I wrote about re-writing some time ago. I pivoted from an Earth 3 story to, let's say, medieval setting? A Tangled-like story where Steph has to save her assassin princess from a tower 😙 Hope you guys enjoy this one.

STEPHCASS WEEK Day 2: Alternate Universes

Word count: 1,135

@stephcassweek

Stephanie Brown wanted to do something good for once. She was raised by her single father, Arthur Brown, an important man in the criminal underground of Kingdom of Gothamia, among some of the biggest, filthiest and deadliest men in this corner of the country. Yet, she did not grow up to step into her father's shoes, as much as he wanted her to, she saw how much pain he caused by contacting and helping various rogues and assassins. One day she had enough.

She found out about a hit, that his two loyal men were assigned to do, of retrieving a girl trapped in a secluded tower and taking her to David Cain, "The Orphan-Maker", the deadliest assassin she ever heard of. She knew immediately he would up to no good, so she stolen one of the horses, her father's gear and under the cover of the night, rode to save the girl herself.

She didn't know what to expect, when she heard about a "girl" she thought she'd have to save someone young, maybe a child, which would simplify her plan - get her out of the tower and leave her in an orphanage. It wasn't the most well-thought out plan, but it was at least a good start.

She finally stopped before the tower, after almost a day of non-stop riding. The men who were sent her through her father should get here tommorow, long after she's gone. "Stay here, Spoiler." Steph said to the horse. She walked around the tower, but there was no entrance. Guess she had to climb.

Climbing was an incredible chore, but her training included that, so it wasn't as bad as if she had to do it without being mentally prepared. She finally jumped through the window and looked around the bedroom she got into. A bunch of books were scattered on a bed, there was a a single wardrobe and two doors in here too. She decided to walk towards one of the doors and found herself in a small library. It was pretty lovely, as she observed at first. She didn't have much time for more thinking, as she was soon knocked over in her head, as if someone kicked her... from up above her? As it turned out later, the person who knocked her out hid herself on the top of one of the bookshelves.

Stephanie finally woke up, tied up to a chair. The "little girl" she was supposted to save was looking at her with curiosity. She looked to be around her age, so at least 22 years old. She was Asian, dark hair, thin. Steph couldn't brush off the thought that the woman was also really pretty.

"Soo..." Stephanie begun to talk, "I'm... here to... Save you?" The woman looked at her like she just said it in a different language. "From... David Cain."

The woman's eyes opened up fast, as if the name brought bad memories to her. She started looking around the room, before she picked up one of the books. She opened it and took a little knife from outside. She held it under Steph's throat.

"How do you know about him." She said slowly. Steph begun sweating a bit.

"I- M-my father, A-Arthur B-Brown, he is l-like a m-middle-man who h-hires r-rogues and stuff, if you need some. D-David Ca-ain wanted some guys to get you out of this tower and right t-to him." Steph said as carefully as she could, to not get her throat cut. The dark-haired woman moved away the knife and begun walking around the room (Steph noticed they were in her bedroom now). She moved to the window and looked outside of it. Steph's rope was still hanging. She already sat on the window, ready to slide down with it, when Stephanie screamed, "WAIT!" and the other woman turned at her.

"You can't leave me here! Not after I basically already helped you escape, right? It's my rope you're using now!"

The other woman looked at the rope again and then at Steph. "Yes, it is." She begun to slowly walk down on it, as Stephanie continued her screams.

"YOU'RE NOT GONNA- STOP RIGHT THERE! HAVE SOME DIGNITY! AT LEAST TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS HEPPENING HERE!" Cass stopped and got into the room again. She took the knife out and cut the rope she used to tie her hands up. This rope was pretty short and probably the only one she had here, which is why she couldn't escape the tower herself. The dark-haired woman turned to the window yet again and started walking down the rope for the second time, Steph behind her.

She was much faster and way more graceful as she went down, incredibly weird that she had these skills, considering she was just sitting in that tower. Well, she didn't really know how long she was there.

"So how long have you been here?" Stephanie asked. The woman looked down, in thought. "Year, two. Maybe more." She said calmly. "What?! How did you even manage?!"

"I was brought food and water. And books." She said, as she was looking at Spoiler.

"So what's the deal with you? Like you're some kidnapped princess or some?" The woman looked at Steph this time. She started walking towards the woman, before she stood like a feet from her. Their eyes locked.

"I'm Cassandra, David Cain's daughter. He trained me since a child to be a living weapon." Well, Steph could relate to a part of that. Cass got sad now though. "He locked me here to wait before he came back from some important crusade." She turned her back to Stephanie and went to the horse. "I'm not coming back to him." She said as she jumped on the horse. Steph had to stop her there.

"OKAY, OKAY, I see that you really are a loner type!! But don't leave me there!"

"You can walk."

"Haha, you're so funny." Steph said annoyed, as Cass smirked. "At least let me go to the nearest city. It's not like I can go back to my dad now anyway. I disobeyed his orders, going here to save you, give me some credit for that." Cass seemed to understand where she was going from. She shifted a bit to the front in the big saddle, giving Steph a little bit of place. The blonde woman got up there and sat herself behind the dark-haired woman.

"Can you even ride this thing?" Steph said jokingly, as Cass set out and rode twice as fast as she did earlier. She clutched to Cassandra, as they were riding through the meadow, that was near the tower. The wind blew through their hair. It was the first time in quite a while both of the women felt free.