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shortythescreen · 4 years

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Personally.

Pairing(s): Revenant/Reader.

Warning(s): Gun violence, fighting, descriptions of robotic injuries.

Author’s Note(s): A commission for @kopperknots! I’m so honored you reached out to me for this and I can’t wait to work with you again, lovey <3 My first ever commission! So fun to write! I hope y’all enjoy!

You’re not sure if the Apex Execs have noticed Revenant’s been spending more time with you or if they’re just hoping you’ll kick his ass on the field, but during this week’s match, you two aren’t on the same squad.

Your team isn’t a bad one – Bangalore is a great offensive Legend and Crypto is the definition of recon. Still, you can’t help but glance over at the simulacrum. He isn’t looking at you, optics trained on the screen displaying his team – Caustic and Mirage, poor Elliot. When his gaze finally cuts to yours around the bustling squads, taking their place on the dropship’s hissing floors, you know he’s thinking the same thing as you.

If we’re ever on opposite teams in the arena, we’ll let everyone else die first, so we can fight it out.

You like Anita, and even though Kim doesn’t talk too much, he seems like a nice guy. It almost makes you regret making that deal with Revenant. Your eyes cut his way again. He’s still looking at you. Then, he raises his thumb, dragging it across his throat and pointing directly at you.

Almost.

You huff loudly, whipping around so your back faces him. Kim glances your way, hands stuffed in his pockets, and his little nod over your head tells you he’s noticed your change in demeanor.

“You alright, kid?” Anita asks.

“Better than alright,” you mumble, “where are we dropping?”

Kim never has much an opinion on where to drop. He seems to like the city most, in part because there’s a smaller chance of his little drone getting shot.

In the end, Anita pushes for Sorting Factory. With how large it is, and far enough away from the dropship’s path, you’re certain you’ll be able to scrounge up some decent loot for the three of you. At least enough to defend yourselves with if another team has a similar idea.

You glance over your shoulder one time, snow whistling past your body as the floors lower. Revenant is leaning over Mirage, his long, skeletal body looming over the poor guy. You whistle once, loud, sharp, and the noise draws the attention of several others nearby. Revenant’s the slowest to react, his head turning like the ominous twist of a doll’s head in a horror movie. Those ocher eyes meet yours and you smirk at him before reaching up and slowly, deliberately, dragging your thumb across your throat.

You swear before you fall that he smirks.

Your squad faces off with not one but two others the second you drop. You slam your first into the face of an opponent, sending them tumbling back long enough for you to sweep a P2020 so generously left for you in one of the outside buildings of the factory. Just when they make to run at you again, you unload the clip into their chest, putting an extra bullet between their eyes for good measure.

It might not have been a good enough to waste all your ammunition but you’re frustrated, uncertain of just how many have chosen to drop with the rest of your team, who happen to be in the next building over. You broke off, thinking it wouldn’t be too busy an area with hot zone being in Overlook.

You were wrong. You’re crouched low, fitting an evo shield over your body, grabbing the L-Star placed next to it. For those who can control the damn thing, it does a hell of a lot of damage. For you? Well.

You’re just remembering how the hell to wrap your hands around the behemoth of a weapon when you feel it. Eyes, resting on your back, watching, sizing you up. You don’t even have to look up. You know it’s him.

You duck back into the building as the sound of gunfire ricochets near you – a Triple Take, you’re positive, three holes piercing the shabby metal of the building you’re inside. Low on ammo, with a gun you’re not entirely sure of how to use, you decide to book it – you can’t give him the satisfaction of hurting you this early.

“Jump tower! Get to the jump tower!” You yell into your comms as you leap out the opposite door, skittering out of the way of a grenade launched in your direction. “There’s another squad! We’re outnumbered.”

“Fuck me,” you hear Anita hiss. You barrel around, your body barely able to keep up with the sharp turn without sliding. Another shot fires and you growl, twisting around. He’s on top of the building you were just in, pointing his stupid fucking Triple Take down at you. He doesn’t fire right away, head cocking as he watches you.

“Poppin’ smoke!” You hear Anita, and suddenly you’re encased in it. “Make it two!”

You take the cover, sprinting to the jump tower, your boots pounding against the road beneath you. You leap for the rope, hanging on as the moving cord propels you upwards, towards the hot air balloon at the top. As you emerge from the smoke, your eyes cut to where he was. His expression comes harder to see the higher you go – but you do see the way he raises a hand, twiddling his fingers, then suddenly starts firing at Crypto, sliding down the building’s back to catch up to you and Anita.

Fuck.

You’re not able to retrieve Crypto. By the time you two double back to Sorting Factory, he’s timed out, and you make a note to apologize him to later. You and Anita press on but you can tell she’s distracted, bothered by having to leave a soldier behind.

The fight goes on and you and Anita take down an impressive number of teams for it only being the two of you. You’re able to pluck up purple shields from some of the death boxes left behind, and Anita finds a gold helmet, which you let her take to help charge up that heavy artillery of hers.

You two come across several of Caustic’s traps as you hurry to catch up with the closing rings. You tell yourself you’re not seeking them out.

“Enemy trap,” you say, pointing it out as Anita picks up some extra ammo. She nods her affirmation but is otherwise silent. You’re not looking for him. You’re not.

It’s down to this – three squads. You know in your bones he’s still in the fight, can feel it. You can’t tell how many there is left but the ring has closed you all into the Geyser. You and Anita are perched up on the building adjacent to the tunnel between here and the city.

“Enemy spotted, far,” Anita says. You lift your Hemlok, the 3X bruiser allowing you to see in less detail the enemy she’s talking about. Pathfinder. He’s sliding down the slope from that little gray area between sorting factory and here, grappling the ground to pull himself along. It’s then that you hear gunfire and you swivel up, finding Caustic and Revenant in hot pursuit.

Pathfinder must be alone. You watch, Pathfinder twisting, throwing a thermite at the two deadly Legends chasing him down. The thermite bursts beneath their feet and Caustic is caught in it, stumbling away from the flames. Revenant darts around. They disappear beneath the top of a building and a few tense moments pass. You glance Anita’s way. She’s watching too.

Your communicator beeps and you look down at it, the holographic screen appearing.

“Only two squads left,” you murmur, your wrist falling, the screen disappearing with it.

The fourth ring appears, and you groan in frustration as you realize that your squad is not inside of it. Which means you’ll have to get closer. Anita points two fingers to the building on your right-hand side and you nod, hopping down from the edge of your perch, landing light as a feather. You’re running, trying to keep your head low, when suddenly:

“Oscar Mike! I’m spotted!” Fuck, shit! You look up, watching three bullets sail over your head. You hiss, sliding around the side of the building and into a crate next to it. In the distance, you spot them: Revenant and Caustic, at the other end of Geyser. You switch your Hemlok into single fire, aiming down your sight, and start shooting.

You graze Caustic, inside the building, and he ducks. He and Revenant aren’t made for distance, which means you can press your advantage. “I’m going over there!”

“Wait, kid!” Anita cries into the com but you sprint over to the geyser, hopping into it. You hear the gunfire beneath you, the sound of Anita throwing her smoke grenades and trying to escape the hailstorm coming at her. “Heads up, droppin’ the pain!”

You launch yourself through the dropping of Bangalore’s rolling thunder, the earth shaking, splitting from each missile that hits. You land between two, a door on each side of you. One is thrown open and suddenly, you’re face to face with Caustic. Before he has the chance to react, to pull the trigger of his gun, you slam your gauntlets together, activating the electromagnetic force of your tactical. Caustic flies backwards, surged into one of his traps at the back of the room, sickly green gas sprouting from it. When you realize Anita’s bombs are about to go off, you bring him closer – directly into the line of fire.

The explosion sends you stumbling back, unable to hurt you, but definitely dazing you. You blink through the fog, the smoke, your wrists hissing with the remnants of their charge. Caustic is down, bleeding out, but instead of crawling away from you, he’s crawling closer. You cough, shaking your head back and forth, trying to raise your gun to end him when another whistling shot goes off overhead.

“Damnit! I’m down!” Anita hollers into your ear and you whip around, blinking your glazed vision as you realize that she tried to follow your path into the geyser. Whether it was by her own artillery or the shot that had gone off, she falls through the air, body landing with a hard thump onto the roof of the building.

You turn to go for her, to try and get her back up.

“So much for a professional soldier,” hisses a dark voice and you freeze. Your gaze turns to the enemy, the simulacrum you knew had marked you for death.

If we’re ever opposite in the field, we’ll let everyone die first…

There he stands, shouldering his triple take. Revenant’s golden optics whirl at you as he retrieves a prowler from his back instead. He hums an off tune, made worse by his static voice.

“Help!” Cries Caustic. He sounds indignant and as you briefly look in his direction, you realize he’s crawling towards Revenant. The simulacrum begins to sway his head from left to right, right to left, humming quietly. “Revenant-”

Revenant suddenly raises his prowler and he fires a single bullet between Caustic’s eyes. His teammate falls limp to the ground, heavy body thunking before he becomes a death box. Revenant places one foot on top of it, lifting himself up, and over, Caustic’s death box.

…Then we can fight it out. Personally.

“You’re disrespectful,” you say.

Revenant smirks. Quick as lightening he’s pulling his gun into position and you fire three shots, one ripping a hole in the side of his armor, another lodging in his shoulder, and the third? He moves entirely out of the way, upper body crashing to the side, creating a U shape. He looks like a contortionist at a twisted circus, putting on a performance.

Before he even rises, he fires at you. You dart out of the way, knowing he’ll need to right himself to chase you. The buildings have enough room beneath them that you can slide underneath, trudge through the water and get to Anita. You slide into a crouch, water arcing around you like a fountain but before you can crawl beneath, find your teammate, he appears.

“Ah, ah, ah,” you hear before your ankles are being grabbed. He yanks you back out and your stomach hits the river with a painful sounding smack, hemlok sinking like a rock in the waves. It knocks the air from your lungs, and you gasp, ingesting water, and sand. You sputter it out, trying to hold your breath at the same time. Revenant flips you around, onto your back. “That’s not the deal we made.”

“Fuck off!” You cough. He starts to lift you by your ankles, thin, sinewy joints metallic and freezing against your soaked pants. The bones of your ankle crackle in protest as all your weight tries to bring you back down to the planet. “Fuck!”

“Where’s your fight?” He grits out. Your upper back leaves the floor and you grit your teeth, letting him pick you up. He hasn’t seen a fight. You arch your back, your hands surging out to grab his ankles and you yank with all your might. The angle he has you at doesn’t help but you must take him off guard because he crashes into the water with you, releasing one of your feet to try and catch himself.

Your back lands with a sickening thud into his hip plate and you groan, rolling off him. Running on adrenaline, on the instinct to go, to move, to survive, you kick him in the chin. You hear the crack before you even see the damage you’ve done, the heel of your boot catching him in the space that isn’t quite protected by his cowl.

“Mother fu-fu-fu-fucking skinsu-ui-ui-” his voice comes out like a scratched CD as you crawl away, trying to fish out an arc star to launch at him, to end this. He doesn’t let you get far though, his cold, metallic fingers grabbing your hip and yanking you back towards him. You hiss, spinning around and slamming your elbow into his face. Pain spiderwebs through you but its worth it to hear how he grunts. His long, spindly fingers stretch across your waist and he uses his iron grip to slam you back onto your back.

You’ve cracked parts of his face, long, deep fissures stretching across the side, towards where his nose would be. His jaw isn’t quite staying together, slightly gaping, slightly open, and you realize it’s moving, as though trying to catch up with what he was saying earlier.

“What’s the matter, Revenant?” You breathe as he wedges himself between your thighs, golden optics flickering, whirring. “Cat got your tongue?”

His eyes narrow at you and he careens down, face mere inches from yours. Your breath hitches as he places his hand on top of your forehead and you realize he means to drown you.

“T-T-T-Time f- y-your end-d-d-d,” he murmurs, his voice hushed, low, like it’s only for you. Like if he whispers softly enough, the cameras won’t pick up how he speaks to you, jaw twitching and cracked, voice crooning and quiet, like a long-lost lover. You shudder beneath him, the chill of the water beginning to close in on you, swim before your eyes.

“Or yours,” you murmur back, whipping that P2020 from your hip. Before he has time to react, you unload the clip into his jaw, shattering his skull. His two-ton body slackens above yours and the whistles of your win sound in your ears. Instead of celebrating, of cheering, you close your eyes, and listen to the racing of your heart. Fuck.

#revenant/reader #revenant x reader #apex legends revenant #apex revenant #apex legends #apex legends imagines #shorty writes #kopperknots #commission

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heeres-suffering · 4 years

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Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?”

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life...

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long.

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t.

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with.

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat.

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad.

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake.

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature)

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theboondogglepub · 5 years

Text

He Trained and Thought of Past Friends.

On a pale day in a snow draped white field a shirtless sweaty man with feline ears swung a large and heavy tree log. The wooden heft over twice the miqo’te in size, easily double his body weight. His body strained as maneuver after maneuver was done with the branch held tight to his chest. The strain on his face displayed the effort needed to brandish it in any form, and yet he still did. Each motion was like a dance done with a profoundly heavy partner, and he swung it near like a weapon. Only where he had walked was the snow distorted, and at the edge of the field a log cabin of tiny design stood, and on the cabin’s deck the thickly robed figure of a lalafell sat on a small chair.

“Tell me about them, Corsa’ir.” She said between soft and relaxed exhales, cooling the tea in her tiny fingers.

“Aren’t I…” He huffed, thick white exhales of frozen breath catching with each audible physical exertion, “- supposed to be concentrating, Faol?” The air hummed with a strange energy around and where the man moved.

She sipped a cup of orange hue tea, pale purples eyes looking out on the hard at work man. “You can do two things at once.” She spoke plainly, curt and without much emotion, her high voice just a bit too saccharine to be tolerated. “To wit, you must do two things at once. Ergo why I’m going to distract you. If you want to do this, you’ll need to manage at least doing two things at the same time. So keep up your exercises, and tell me about them.”

The miqo’te swung the log. “What exactly do you wanna know?”

“Well let’s start with the ones you miss and work our way down, shall we Mr. Boon?” The lalafell seemed to chuckle at a passing thought as she tapped her chin. “Unless you’d prefer to begin with your paramours, or are they one in the same?” She quipped.

“No… well some. I guess all’a them.” He spun with the log in his hands, a breath caught in his throat as the effort and strain shook his legs. “I guess… I miss em’ all, yeh? I also can’t stand em’ all too sumtimes. It drives me crazy sumtimes too, loike really stabs at me. They can’t get along, they fight each ovver back n’ forth loike bickerin’ children. An’ I feel it near acutely. An’ then they get all sullen an’ don’t talk tah each ovver cause they’re as balanced as a avalanche of rocks. It… its too much sometimes.”

“They sound like everyday people then, so what makes them any different? Is it because of the echo?” Faol dropped a cube of sugar into her tea and idly stirred.

“Llymlaen save me… not you too.” Boon stopped and rested the log, lungs burning. “Jus’ how did you find out I have th’ echo ennyroad? I don’t go about spoutin’ it off fer a damn reason.” The brief pause was a poor choice, quickly the chill in the air causing Corsa’ir to shiver. “An fer another thing, why is it so cold here? It should be the warm season.”

“You’re changing the subject again.” Faol took a sip of her tea, eyes seemingly both unfocused and trained on her speaking companion. “Is deflection your default setting Mr. Boon?” An exhausted toss of her hair had the lalafell look about the snowy island setting before turning back. “If you must know, the island suffers an unstable combination of nearby elemental crystal deposits. Sailors call it one of the 56 deaths, so named for being one of several reasons ship travel has difficulty reaching the New World. Now, let us get back to you. Is it because of the echo that you can’t stand them? Or are you emotionally stunted and can’t commit to relationships?”

“Wow, pretty harsh don’che think? I ain’t never heard a Lalafell talk as ‘at.” Corsa’ir picked up the log again and began to swing it anew. “I uh… I can’t blame th’ fact that I see emotions on them. People always have ‘em, emotions that is. I jus’ see them an’ feel them a bit more than an empathetic person would.”

“Well, my name is Faol, Mr. Boon.” The lalafell took a sip of her tea. “Which is ironic as you’re really less an empathetic person than me.” Another sip of tea.

“Hey there now. How th’ hell do you know I ain’t a empathetic person?” Another swing of the log.

“Because I’ve observed you for a sennight. You’re entirely selfish, self-absorbed, prone to rash emotion, and averse to common logic when it comes to your own life and situation. You are, in as few words as possible, a narcissist.” Another sip of tea. “So, tell me about them.”

Corsa’ir audibly sighed… loudly. “They’re m’ mates. Chuckaboos as is told, meanin’ good friends. They’re good people, all of them. Maf an’ Cath, smart as can be. Little emotionally neutral, play that whole exhausted learned sort...but good. Eme is… well she’s both great an’ exhausting. Always feel loike she has somethin’ she wants t’ say an’ never does an it drives me crazy.. Mos’ of em’ are jus’ good people tho, plain an’ simple. Ashe, Kayne, Jun, Rei, an that Naih lass. E’en that big elf they added... Z has a habit of sayin th’ wrong thing but is o’erall good.” Boon began to swing the log with earnest, picking up speed and effort to contort and heave the wooden beam more deftly.

“And?”

“And what?” He tripped in the snow, slipping and landing in a pile of upheaved frosty white powder. From his two fulm deep hole a cough came. “Can I be done yet? Been trainin’ loike this fer days now an’ not really seein’ th’ point to it.”

“And what about the rest?” Another stir of her tea. “You can be done after that, I think you’re finally ready for the next stage of the training.”

“Fine.” Boon sat up in the snow and rubbed his reddened back. “They… we had somethin’ and then we didn’t. All there is to it. Th’ second I committed m’self to their whole ‘harem’ thing they started droppin’ loike flies. Not literally droppin’, jus… I guess had more important fings t’ do. Started to feel th’ moment I began lettin’ people into that part of my life, they started leavin’ it. In th’ end it wus jus’ me an Katalin and e’en then I knew I was going to leave for her good. I’m not a one woman sorta guy but that’s what she wants e’en if she’s not willing to admit it. An’ that’s what she should get if I’m honest. Katalin won’t be happy til she gets that, an she deserves it.” Corsa’ir sighed and stood up, dusting off the snow caking his reddened exposed skin and trousers.

“See, isn’t it good to talk Mr. Boon?” Faol hopped down from her chair and began walking across the surface of the snow field, her body so light it failed to depress the snow. “Now you can be done. Feel free to drop the log Mr. Boon, it’s time we moved on to far more difficult training.” Faol raised her hand. “Now I want you to focus on the catalyst I gave you. It’s time to summon a weapon.”

#ffxiv Rp

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