Milky Way at Lake Norring, Western Australia

Nikon d810a - 50mm - ISO 6400 - f/3.2 - Foreground: 5 x 30 seconds - Sky: 12 x 30 seconds - iOptron SkyTracker - Hoya Red Intensifier filter

so merlin fell in love and was willing to leave his life in camelot behind to run away with her, but she died, so he's sad. arthur arrives and asks him about it. they look at each other like this and after he leaves merlin smiles to himself with sweet gentle music playing in the background. now they don't do queerbaiting like this anymore do they

"Yo! You got us an umbrella? You're the best!"

Yet another 5-years-later undertale redraw, this time Frisk and Monster Kid (ft Chara).

The Original (for a given value of "original" anyways, it's more like a very vague inspiration but eh)

Close-ups under the cut.

Thinking about Steve and Eddie waiting for the right time to propose to each other and they somehow do it at the same time.

And they don't know that the other wants to propose, nor do they tell the same people. Nancy and Jonathan know that Eddie wants to propose to Steve. Robin and Dustin know that Steve wants to propose to Eddie. The reason why Steve hasn't said anything to Nancy and Jonathan was because it felt a little bit weird to talk about it with your ex and her partner. On the other side Eddie KNEW neither Robin nor Dustin could keep a secret from Steve he didn't trust those two with the secret and Eddie really wanted to be special.

They chose the same place to propose, too - the Lover's Lake because that's where everything began and they wanted to give that day a good connotation. Steve and Dustin and Robin has worked hard for a character sheet for Steve ; it was literally Steve if everything they had gone through was part of a DnD campaign but with the difference that he was married to 'Eddie The Banished' (Steve planned to give the sheet to Eddie and wait until he got to the married part until he asked "If you would have me?" and get out the ring). Meanwhile Eddie and Nancy and Jonathan worked on this album full of photos with the party together over the years (the kids through high school + the graduation photos ; the photos from their trips around the state ; Steve with either Robin or Nancy and Jonathan or Eddie or the kids or the Byers or everyone ; little moments and random photos with caption like 'First time trying pineapple on pizza!!!' or 'First date without the kids around') with the last photo being of Steve and Eddie (the very first photo they took together) with the question "Will you marry me?" under it.

They looked over them at the same time. Stopped to fucking process what was going on. Look at each other like two idiots. They took the ring out at the same time and I don't know if they started laughing or crying or arguing over who would propose but I can guarantee the answer was yes from them both.

BONUS : Meanwhile Robin & Dustin meet with Nancy & Jonathan while hiding near the lake and they all do the Spider-Man meme while questioning each other what they were doing there. Everyone fucking face palmed when they came to the conclusion that those two were going to propose at the same time. Pure gold.

2 x BONUS : Somehow Max knew about it and said nothing because she thought it would be funny (and was 100% right)

sorry this is a bit of a weird ask, but i've always wondered - does your twitter bio (the brightmyth one) have any particular meaning? you don't have to answer if you don't want to, i'm genuinely just curious haha (i like its... vibe? even though i dont know what it's about) but it's totally fine if you don't want to share for any reason of course

oh of course :) it's from the chinese sci-fi movie The Wandering Earth (2019) loosely adapted from the liu cixin short story... the premise is the sun is half a century away from going supernova as it reaches the end of its life stage. humanity constructed giant engines all over the planet to push us of our orbit in hopes of finding eventually finding a habitable star system thousands of years in the future... hence "the wandering earth". everything on the planet has frozen over bc we're out in deep space away from the sun, and the world's oceans and lakes have all become solid blocks of ice.

the line in my bio "I believe you. there will be a day where ice turns into water" is from this scene where a russian cosmonaut gets impacted by debris and dies helping his coworker reach the command module onboard the mission satellite... the hope and wistful humanity of it all

What would a good ending look like for all the marks of your AUs?

Hmmm. i'd say:

Alt AU: Mark finally realizes his mistakes and tries his best to help fix them, even if he can't just reverse all the damage he's done.

Lab au: Mark escapes the lab and tries living a normal life despite his mutations (the canon ending, actually)

HSH: Mark finally lets go of his obsession over the house somehow and never gets trapped in its walls.

Monster au: He never gets caught by the cult and just tries to live a normal life, now reunited with his sister.

Lake: We haven't gotten to Mark's storyline in that au yet, so. womp womp

Thing au: Escapes the research facility with Sarah and tries to recover from the trauma of what happened there (haven't talked about this one much huh.)

I think I somehow managed to softlock my twilight princess save

In honour of regaining motivation to edit my kaebedo wip, I'd like to reccomend my favourite kaebedo fic I have ever read.

It is called Abyss Mage Lake by pussybedo on ao3, and it is criminally underrated.

Read the tags carefully (it contains a few other ships), but seriously, it is such a banger, and features evryone's favourite event-specific npc, susbedo/fakebedo/dorian. I lobe him.

For your reading pleasure:

I wANTED to go outside and enjoy y'know. The best season of the year before winter comes to drag my soul back down to hell again, but the country is on FIRE, my phone won't stop sending me bzzt bzzt severe air quality warnings, and it smells like campfire but EVIL outside

found this excellent creature going across the lawn

the ducks and geese were curious

i'm not entirely sure where it came from and where it was going

tried to identify it, pretty sure it's a "red eared slider" turtle

took it over to the pond and put it down near the water

after a bit it must've noticed the pond and decided to go for it

[person listening to music] no dude you gotta understand wait hang on its for my college class. im a music major. its for an assignment just trust me no dude listen it's due 7pm

Henry Creel, Vampires, the Consumption of the Soul, and Will Byers with Powers

Oh look it’s time for yet another longwinded s5 Thinking Thoughts post with an off the rails ending. I feel like I’m getting predictable.

Well, anyway, I talked about this in the tags of a post that I reblogged at one point, but it's currently 20 minutes to midnight and I should either be sleeping or working on writing for the campaign I'm DMing in the new year, but instead all I can think about is Henry Creel and Will having powers and the way that Henry talks about his victims/how they appear in his mindscape. And, you know, also the fact that I've read all the currently available The Locked Tomb books and they left me scarred, and also altered my brain chemistry in such a way that once I thought about this possibility I couldn't stop thinking about it..

So, yeah. Time for me to talk about Henry Creel, and the way he talks about his victims, and I know I put this in the Byler tag, and I promise that's not just because of the target demo. I will eventually circle around to talking about Mike and Will in the context of this post in an unnecessarily angsty way.

But for now... Henry.

In s4e7, Henry tells El: "I could not do that. I could not close off my mind and join in the madness. I could not pretend. And I realized, I didn't have to. I could make my own rules. I could restore balance to a broken world. A predator... but for good. […] With each life I took, I grew stronger. More powerful. They were becoming a part of me. But I was still a child, and I did not yet know my limits. And it nearly killed me."

This monologue is, honestly, full of a bunch of really interesting things, and I'm can think of at least three posts that I currently have on the brain that I'm going to pick it apart for, but in terms of this specific post, I've bolded the bits I'll be focused on, and I'll be back to it in a bit.

Later in that scene, El looks to the dead bodies of the other lab kids, and Henry says: "They're not gone, Eleven. They're still with me. In here."

What I think is really important about this whole scene, right off the bat, is that Henry is not immediately hostile upon realizing that El has disobeyed him and left the closet. Regardless of whether you believe he had any amount of genuine affection for her or not, I think it's really important to note that the way in which Henry bonds with El/gains her trust is through teaching her things. He teaches her how to use her emotions in order to harness her powers more effectively. He teaches her to start questioning Brenner's motives. He teaches her about Sotaria (which also ties in with the previous thing). He teaches her how to escape the lab through the sewers (which I believe it's implied is how she got out of the lab in s1, though I'm not going back to check because I'm rewatching s1 for a different analysis and I don't want to lose my place). So the fact that he's still using his gentle voice with El here, and the fact that he's stopping to explain not only his motivations, but the fact that the people he kills are "not gone" and are "in here" [gestures to his head], suggests to me that he's attempting to teach her one last thing. Something that might make her okay with the fact that he just murdered a whole lab full of literally every person she's ever known save Kali and Brenner.

And this is so easy to dismiss as the ramblings of a mad man, or as him saying something to the effect of "I never forget any of the people that I kill". But I think it's a little dismissive to ignore what Henry says as simply the words of someone entirely disconnected from reality. Obviously, he is deluded. He talks about himself as though he is not also human, and he actively seems to want to kill everyone except possibly El and Will? But having delusions about his importance and identity and ideology is not the same thing as being deluded into believing something untrue about his powers/into falsely believing that his victims are kept alive inside him somehow. Moreover, although this last line in isolation could make sense in the context that he keeps the memories of his victims alive in his own mind, the rest of what he says does not line up with that. Nor does the fact that we see Chrissy's mangled body (and possibly some of the other victims, I'm so sorry I cannot remember-- but definitely at least one of the victims is seen in the mindscape) twisted into his mindscape.

So... now I'm going to go back to the earlier part of his speech and pick apart the bolded parts.

"I could make my own rules." The last time we heard that, it was El was saying it to Mike, in a misquote of Max's "we make our own rules". When Max was saying it, she was reassuring El that respinning the bottle was fine because, as the only two playing the game, they could make their own rules about what to do. However, when El uses it, it's because Mike has realized that she spied on him without his consent, and his offended response is to that "that's against the rules" (from context, it's difficult to know if this is a reference to rules that Hopper set out for her, or rules that she and Mike established together for their relationship-- the former isn't a great look for Mike, and the latter isn't a great look for El). El bites back, saying, "I make my own rules". When she says that, she is essentially saying "I have the ability to spy on you, so if I choose to do so, that's my prerogative" (let me just say: Mike did a lot of things wrong in s3, and he absolutely started the fight between him and El, but this specific action was not great of her). This parallels with Henry saying that he made his own rules, because when he says that, he seems to mean that he had the ability to read peoples' minds (and possibly more than that), and as such, it was his prerogative to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted, at any time. El is not the same as Henry (by any stretch of the imagination)... I just think this parallel is interesting (and also the contrast-- ultimately, El did what she did because she was having fun with a friend, which still isn't great because spying on people when they're supposed to be in private is not a good thing to do, but it's in an entirely different league from what Henry has done with similar power).

"A predator... but for good". So... the word "predator" has a lot of meanings, and I don't want to get too deeply into the conversations about whether Henry is or is not worthy of that title in the entirely too human sense, because it's far outside the scope of this post. However, we do know from the context of his monologue that when Henry talks about predators/apex predators, he's talking about spiders. That gives us context to know that when he calls himself a predator, it's likely that he means in the same way that a spider is a predator. Why are spiders predators? Because they hunt and kill other animals for food. The "for food" part of that is really important, because it's a key, defining factor in whether an animal is acting in a predatory way. However, predators are not inherently good or inherently evil. They are, by their nature as animals, inherently neutral. So, when Henry says that he could be "a predator... but for good", we know that he is essentially saying "a predator, like a spider... but with the human capacity to use that predatory status in order to enact what I believe to be good [which, in the context of Henry, means a complete disruption of "normal" human society] in the world".

"With each life I took, I grew stronger. More powerful. They were becoming a part of me." So... this is the line. This is the line that, to me, solidifies the idea that Henry's power grows specifically through the murders that he enacts. And that the people he kills in some way become part of him after death. It's exactly what he says and, although we have reason to doubt some of the other things that he says, this would be a very weird thing for him to lie about from an in-character POV, because it was never brought up as a possibility by anyone else, and weird for him to lie about from a narrative standpoint, because the characters don’t seem to really do anything with that information in s4 (nobody even suggests that Max could be inside Henry’s mind), so if it’s not literally true… why have him say that at all? Because if it isn’t meant literally… it’s a really odd line, and there would be other ways to phrase it if the implication was supposed to be “killing people made me feel stronger/improved my skills, and I metaphorically hold those I kill with me because remembering them gives me perverse glee”. Like, is it possible that’s what he means? Maybe. But personally I think the literal read makes more sense, because the metaphorical read doesn’t make sense in context of him trying to convince El to understand his perspective. Also, just, from a narrative standpoint, if it’s literally true, that opens up avenues to allow previously killed characters to make a re-appearance and, possibly puppeted or twisted by Henry’s mind, screw with the protagonists. Via the UD, Henry killed/directed to be killed: Barb (Nancy), Bob (Joyce or Will… lord if I have to watch Will face down Bob telling him that he killed him, I don’t know what I’ll do), possibly Max (Lucas and/or El), Eddie (Dustin), and technically also Will in s1 if they want to turn the Harry Potter allusions on their head and do a reverse horcrux situation where a sliver of Will’s soul is still in Henry and that’s what’s keeping them connected in which case hhhhhhh (Jonathan, Joyce, and Will could all have interesting reactions to this, but dear god if I have to watch Mike Wheeler face down a twisted, puppeted fragment of Will’s soul and suffer all the abuse Henry can use it to throw at him, and still look at it like s2 Mike looked at Will in the shed? I don’t even know what to say I’ll simply collapse I think??), and then obv if he kills anyone else that would add to the possible haunts. Like. You’ve got a character who can dip into people’s heads and the implication that he literally keeps his victims souls in his mind in some way… you could totally do some interesting stuff with having people meet their tortured and twisted dead loved ones is all I’m saying. Anyway, that’s a tangent. I just think it’s interesting.

So... anyway, in short, we know that Henry is willing to do whatever he wants in service of his own interests, just because he can, regardless of how others feel about it. We know that he considers himself a predator in the animal way (which implies the use of whatever you kill as food or at least a source of energy in some direct way), and that he believes he can specifically harness this predatory nature for his idea of "good". And we know that the people that Henry kills are, in some way, "part of" him, and that taking their lives makes him somehow "stronger" (presumably in his powers).

And... we also know that Henry has been compared to Dracula (or, more broadly, vampires in general via arguably the most famous vampire).

So... the connections to Dracula are pretty obvious on the surface. Scary undead/less dead than originally anticipated dude who was once human but now very much is not lives far away in a spooky old house, surrounded by spooky animals that Aren't Quite Right. And then there are all of the OTHER connections-- a protagonist named Jonathan who is very far away from the woman he loves, SO many letters (I say, thinking about Max's letters and El and Mike's letters and Mike and Will's copious lack of letters, and.... hhh), and a large group going to kill Dracula, including a young woman/girl who has been "marked" by him and, though they have found a rather simple way to keep him at bay from her, if he gets his way she will be killed and will join him forever... I'm just saying. The parallels are there.

But, also, I want to think about vampire myths more generally. Because vampires have a history which dates back at least as far as Mesopotamia (in various forms/in root forms, not necessarily by the name "vampire"/in any forms that are particularly similar to modern interpretations— being clear because I think vampire history/mythology through time is legitimately interesting and many cultures have vampire-like creatures but very few of them are literally called ‘vampires’ and… ugh I’m sorry I’ll get off topic if I let myself rant about this but these myths are so cool!!), so vampires have been a lot of things over time. But at least today, they're very associated with blood in popular culture (nosebleeds), they don't show up in mirrors (traditionally this was because mirrors had silver in them but something something the UD or at least the Mind Flayer doesn't like water, Henry says he holds up a mirror to everyone else... I don't know just interesting), they're associated with bats and wolves (demobats and demodogs), sometimes they're said to be able to turn into mist (the shadow monster?), and there are potential ties to the more general anxieties about blood born or sexually transmitted diseases/to incubus/succubus mythology (a little more abstract here, but this may tie into the way that Henry often appears in dreams/visions which prey on his victims' anxieties-- not to mention, for a show set in the 80s with a gay teen at the forefront, there are copiously no allusions to the AIDS crisis, despite the fact that we see Will being violently bullied for being gay, so, you know, if you take the UD as a metaphor for that reality— a topic so wildly outside the scope of this post that I cannot say more about it even though I actually think it’s a really interesting metaphor that seems to exist in the show— then, yeah, that's another metaphorical tie to blood born/sexually transmitted disease).

But there is also a potential connection between vampires as blood drinkers and the concept of blood as some sort of physical representation of life force/soul. They're not necessarily 1:1 on a spiritual/religious level, depending on your tradition, but it's pretty common to associate blood in some way with the soul. So, when a vampire drinks the blood of their victim, they are, on at least a metaphorical level, essentially consuming the soul of their victims (which gets into some interesting stuff with the common idea that a vampire does not have a soul, or that to become a vampire, one must not only have their blood consumed by a vampire, but must also consume that vampire's blood as well). So, if Henry is allegorically a vampire, and vampires drink something that is metaphorically like soul, and Henry's a predator whose victims make him stronger... hm.

All of which is to say, I think the show is telling us, through the vampire allusions and through the implications of everything he's said, that Henry in some way consumes the souls (or minds or life forces or potential futures or whatever) of his victims (thus making him a true predator who not only kills but also eats what he kills).

This seems to be what he's trying to teach El in that final conversation before she banishes him to the Upside Down, and the fact that she could not (or would not) understand what he was saying seems to have been the thing that turned him from trying to keep her on his side to deciding to attempt to kill her (or to simply make her watch as he kills and presumably consumes Max). And we know that El doesn't learn it, because we can clearly see that killing doesn't make her stronger, so she's clearly not consuming any of the people she's killing. She can mimic Henry's methods of killing people physically (we see this in s1, and that's highlighted when the military suspects that El's doing the murders in s4 because Henry's style is so similar to her own), but she can't or won't do whatever it is that he does to consume souls.

But this poses a problem, though.

Because, El's already had her training montage. She became stronger and went off to face the big bad, and she lost. Max died and Hawkins fell. That's a failure of the "love confession saves the world" trope, as people have discussed, but it's also a failure of the training montage trope! El is at her strongest, and she still cannot defeat Henry alone.

Which brings me to Will. I'm not going to get into all of the details which suggest that Will has powers of some sort, beyond his Henry-sensing abilities. Other people have done that, and there really isn't room for it here. However, what I would wonder is, even if Will discovers his powers at some point before the potential time skip... how is he going to be strong enough to (in tandem with El) defeat Henry, when an entire lab full of trained and superpowered kids weren't able to? Because Will is still a child, himself, and at best, he won't even know about his powers for more than about three years, presumably WITHOUT the intense level of training that El received from birth?

And... here's where I'm going to bring things back to something I've said in another post which is... this late in the game, if they're going to introduce any established protagonists besides El having powers, those powers are going to have to feel like a loss when they first appear/quickly after they appear. The character who has them has to be hurt by them, so they don't feel like a cheap win for the characters. Would it be sudden for Will to develop powers? No, not really. The clues have been there from s1. But they're also subtle enough that if you're not into ST analysis or prone to regularly rewatching the show, they're easy to miss, so a fair bit of s5 would have to be devoted to showing Will realizing that he has them and growing into using them in order for any use of them against Henry to feel earned. Incidentally, these are all the same things which are equally true for the establishment/on-screen development of Byler, so I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a connection there.

And this is where I'm about to go wildly off the rails, but... what if Will has powers and gets a power boost in the absolute worst way possible? Because, depending on how Henry consumes his victims (obviously just killing them isn't it, because that does nothing for El)... I mean. Mike has all those death flags going on (even though I highly doubt he'll end the show dead). I don't know.

I'm just saying... Mike's prone to self-sacrifice, if he thinks it will help the people he loves. I'm just saying, if he were already dying, and if they already knew that Henry has the advantage because he's consuming the souls of the people he kills(/absorbing them into his mindscape in some capacity that allows him to use them to fuel his own abilities), and if they knew that Will had similar powers but with less strength because he only had his own self to draw upon... I'm just saying, would Mike Wheeler do anything else, except beg Will to make his death mean something? Would he honestly trust anyone else enough to literally give everything that he is to them?

I'm just saying, it would be an absolute gut punch of a scene, it would tie back into Mike's s1 character issues of self-sacrifice, it would give narrative weight to what seems to be the fact that Henry in some way keeps or draws power from the people that he's killed. And it would be incredibly easy to write it in such a way that there's more power in a willing sacrifice/in a soul that is willingly with you/willing to work with your own than in a plethora of souls that you have trapped in your mental "web" in order to feast on. Something something gay love saves the day (plus, El's almost certainly going to figure out a way to put Max back into her own body at some point in s5, so it's not even like there wouldn't be a way for Mike to come back to life, as long as they managed to keep his body alive-- also because, as I said in the notes of the post where I first commented on this concept, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that they're ending the show with Will as Mike's devastated living mausoleum, like, it's just not happening that way).

So, uh. Yeah, that’s the thought that keeps spinning in circles around my head, and I hate it so much. I’m aware that this is an out there idea and almost certainly won’t come to pass, and frankly, I’m glad for that.

But the fact that it’s far fetched doesn’t mean that I can unsee the mental image of Mike/Will in a HtN Gideon/Harrow style situation where Mike and Will are both in Will’s head, and Mike, whenever he’s lucid, is begging Will to just finish the job, to consume him properly so Will and El/the Party can be even a step closer to defeating Henry, and meanwhile Will’s doing everything he can to avoid dousing the last bit of Mike he has left, especially when he still hopes to put Mike back in his body. Like. I know this won’t happen, but even the thought that there’s a 0.01% chance that it could has me shaking in my boots.

came up w another c♡c character </3

So, a couple of days ago I watched The Man from Toronto, and of course, just like pretty much anything else at this point, it made me think of the potential for a napollya AU.

Picture: Napoleon is a thief, and because he can’t seem to be able to stay out of trouble he ends up in a bigger mess than he bargained for, specifically he ends up being mistaken for “the Man from Moscow”. He isn’t sure who the guy is, but considering that these people seem to expect him to torture a guy he can take an educated guess.

Fortunately for him, he is good at bluffing, he can even write off their questions about how he doesn’t really sound like he’s from Moscow (by claiming that it would be stupid to call himself that and actually be Russian, right? Must be secretive and everything), and he managed to get the guy he was supposed to torture to talk by bluffing his way through it, no torture necessary.

The problem is that these people apparently want him for something else too, so they get him on a plane for the second part of his assignment.

On the plane they are ambushed by the actual Man from Moscow, who is tall, handsome and actually very Russian (Napoleon maintains that that’s stupid), and who doesn’t seem very pleased by the fact that a random American is impersonating him. In fact, he frowns at Napoleon and goes: “This is just little cowboy. What is this”

Now, common sense would have Napoleon shut up and try to explain that this was a misunderstanding and that he’s more than happy to leave the torturing to him, thank you very much, or to try and talk his way into not being killed somehow. Instead, what gets out is: “HEY, who are you calling LITTLE, I’m six feet tall!”

So yeah, their relationship starts on a bit of rocky ground, to be precise it starts with what blows into a full fight on a plane, with everybody eventually killed except the two of them, and that’s just because Mr Moscow Man managed to keep the plane from crashing at the last minute. Napoleon is very impressed but also terrified out of his mind, which means that he gets extremely annoying and obnoxious about everything.

It still doesn’t get him shot, because Peril - the guy won’t give him his name, Napoleon refuses to call him Man from Moscow, and he needs to match the “Cowboy” nickname somehow - decides that he needs him to impersonate him a little more. The guys that first mistook him for their hired assassin, in fact, have a picture of him, so they are expecting him to show up to the next part of the assignment, and, well... Napoleon doesn’t want this to come back to bite him in the ass, so he decides to help on the condition that Peril helps him get rid of that picture.

That is how he finds himself shopping with an assassin, busy coaching him on how to dress and act like an assassin who knows what he’s doing. Napoleon is a great bluffer, if he can say so himself, so he doesn’t really think he needs all of this, but he can admit that when Illya shows him a ridiculous amount of different knives his brain bluescreens a little. So maybe he’ll let him do some coaching LOL

Napoleon keeps repeating that he’ll be fine, that he’s a great liar, just watch and learn Peril, and, to be fair, he pulls it off, he gets the information needed and there are only a couple of missteps, due to the fact there was some blood spilled, though most of it not by his hand. Afterwards, though, he’s a bundle of nerves, he’s freaking out, and not in an outlandish and dramatic way that would have Illya roll his eyes and flip him off, like after the plane incident, he actually seems pretty shaken. Which Illya takes a lot harder than he probably should, and he ends up attempting to comfort him.

More shit starts happening when another assassin comes after them. They survive and manage not to lose their intel, but afterwards, when Illya calls his handler to explain the situation, Napoleon warns him that Oleg is lying to him, because “Trust me, I’m an expert liar, I can tell”. Trouble is Illya doesn’t believe him, because he’s known Oleg for twenty years and he trusts him.

It was, in fact, Oleg that sent the other assassin after them, because he is unhappy with Illya keeping Napoleon alive (definitely not satisfied by Illya’s explanation as to why he’s useful) and this would be strike two, after another mission when he walked away without killing his target. If he’s getting all merciful and soft, he’s gotta go, hence the assassin.

Since they have some time before they are supposed to drop off the intel, Napoleon manages to convince Peril to spend the night out with him. Specifically, it’s Gaby’s birthday, and he promised her that he’d show up. Though she knows about his absolutely-legal career, and she does figure that this Peril has something to do with it because the guy is just so weird, she decides not to ask too many questions and he doesn’t volunteer that they are dining with an actual assassin (mostly because he doesn’t want her to get that Oh My God You Are So Stupid How Are You Still Alive look).

Napoleon does his best to get Peril to relax a little, even though of course the guy spends half the time keeping an eye on the exists and the cameras and he does not look like someone who is there to have fun, and him and Gaby also drag the poor man into a dance at some point. Illya actually has a lot more fun than he expected.

Eventually Illya figures out that Oleg backstabbed him and literally put a kill notice out on him, and, well---he should technically be skipping town, save his own skin first and everything. Needless to say, he barely even thinks about it before he’s on his way to Napoleon, because apparently he needs to make sure that he comes out of this in one piece too.

Meanwhile, Napoleon is busy trying (and barely managing) not to get killed when some trigger-happy guy comes looking for Peril (the revelation that, while he doesn’t know where he is, he wouldn’t say even if he did is a very unwelcome epiphany with terrible timing). Napoleon is very much not expecting Peril to come out of nowhere and tear the guy off of him, and yet. He 100% thought that he had gone off and that he would never see him again so. uh. “Fancy seeing you here, Peril!” “Shut up, run.”

Well, they manage to not get killed by the frankly appalling amount of agents that come after them (apparently the price tag on Illya’s head is pretty high. Napoleon manages to complain about it while running for his life, somehow), they get rid of the pictures implicating Napoleon and of every trace that they were ever involved in this whole thing, and by end of all this Napoleon is almost tempted to walk the straight and narrow (almost).

Illya is, obviously, supposed to leave never to be seen again, now that he has no job and pretty much no purpose in life. He is left with a substantial amount of money from all his previous assignments, so he should just leave and start anew wherever he wants, right?

Except when Napoleon casually mentions that he has a free guest room if he wants it, that seems pretty appealing, actually.

Which is how Napoleon ends up with an ex-assassin sleeping into his apartment, having to explain to Gaby why he’s all broken and bruised and who Peril actually is. She still thinks he’s a complete idiot, but but she does like the apparently-ex-assassin, so. She’ll support them, but she’ll still give Napoleon plenty of shit about it.

.

Bonus:

The first night that Illya spends at Napoleon’s apartment, he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to get any sleep. Something about how his whole life got turned upside down and how he could be going anywhere and be doing pretty much anything and yet the only thing that he wants to do is keep close to this idiot Cowboy and make sure that he doesn’t get himself killed with that big smartass mouth of his.

He does manage, at some point, to doze off a little, because the bed is really comfortable after all, only to be suddenly woken up by something crashing on his bed, giving him a heart attack. He has a gun on him before he can recognize Napoleon, way too unconcerned by the fact that he has a gun to his head and there’s a literal assassin behind the trigger.

“Peril!” he shouts, in the tone of someone that just had a revelation. “You never told me your name!”

...Illya is going to kill him in a week, tops.

why does my brain want me to make ocs for media properties ive never interacted with