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tacticalhimbo · 1 year

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Hi, I wonder if you have some theory / thoughts about damnatio memoriae ending, losing faith and his (worsen?) mental state.

I'm not Catholic but the connection between mental health and faith is one of my favorite issues to talk about.

Also why Gary tried to make John as the new vessel?

Thanks!

Hey, thank you so much for asking!

I personally see the loss of faith having a few possible explanations! And Gary's focus on John is entirely intentional, both from a mental health standpoint and a general-ish standpoint.

A recap for the general audience (and myself, because I had to look a few things up since it's been a while):

The ending, "A New Vessel" is accompanied by the soundtrack (and text, if I believe) Damnatio Memoriae, which comes to mean a "condemnation of memory", akin to where a person or event is stricken from all official records.

As for the plot of the ending, here's the Wiki's summary -> On the day of the Profane Sabbath, Ward finds his house surrounded by cult members and unlocks the crucifix-riddled door. Inside he confronts Amy, and he begs for the nightmares to end. Amy drags him into her gaping portal, and John finds himself at the abandoned Martin house in complete disrepair, somehow much worse than it was only a month ago. Inside, he discovers that the twins he's been searching for throughout the entire story never existed. Nancy, Amy's mother, miscarried the twins, but was in complete denial of it, going so far as to host a birthday party for them. Eventually, John finds two effigies in their room and succumbs to his despair. Amy and Michael appear and take his hands before a giant demonic hand appears and swallows them up. Then the entire Martin house vanishes.

Please let me know if this needs to be tagged! I also apologize for any grammar errors, I got excited to answer this and I'd just woken up, so my brain isn't all there yet sdjdkdkd—

I'll put my thoughts below the cut, though, because this got more wordy than I'd thought ^^;

In regards to John's deteriorating faith, the explanation for why his faith is so weak/withers so easily is dependent on how the game's plot is interpreted (at least, in my opinion). So, to circle back to some of the points I made in my first solid meta post regarding John [LINK], I'll break down the two primary perceptions.

If assuming everything happening is 100% real and John's perspective is reliable:

It's simply a matter of fighting a losing battle. Seeing your faith be challenged so successfully (re: multiple dead priests, a church taken over by demonic entities, etc) is... a lot!

As someone who's loosely Catholic (vaguely raised, abandoned, and now on the fence of re-converting), the main lesson people are taught is that sin and evil are two very powerful things. They swallow and consume a person. They're what made the world the place it is today, and why humanity could not remain in the Garden of Eden. Of course, the emphasis put on these points and the way they're told is variable on the individual church's belief system (re: the difference between "normal" Catholics and fascist Evangelicals), but that's besides the point.

So John seeing that happen over and over and over, and ultimately failing to save Amy, is just tiring. It's draining. He realizes by the end of Chapter 3 that he's lost, and Gary has won. Gary was right.

However, if assuming that either everything was "in John's head" (lack of better phrasing), or that some things were true but exaggerated by John's mental health:

Then I believe that John's loss of motivation/faith could genuinely be him coming out of an episode and perceiving the gravity of everything.

This is a bit harder to explain given the precursor for this ending is not entering Garyland, and the strongest case could be made by pointing to the fact that, allegedly, John was the one to eviscerate the cultists in the bloodied room... but still. A lot of things happen in Chapter 3 outside of Gary's labyrinth that would weigh heavily on John's consciousness. One of the other most notable circumstances being if he cannot save Lisa from Alu/the cult, and she dies because he (while possessed or in a state of psychosis) ultimately kills her.

That, and there is the idea that John is outright killing the cultists/people he flashes the crucifix to.

Now, before I explain part of that, I just want to say that all cops are shit at their jobs. They protect nobody and often target folk just because they can, and use "self defense" as a way to get out of the repercussions. However, it is interesting that when John raises the crucifix (when exiting the front door of the daycare, opposed to the back entrance), the cops state that he has a gun. Of course, this could be that classic "shoot anything that moves and make a move" mentality, or it could be a genuine observation (after all, they are fictional so there is a chance they have some intelligence).

My disdain for the law aside, the very act of exorcism is a banishment. A damntation of demonic entities back to Hell, where they either are imprisoned (returning to their natural states and unable to re-enter the surface) or executed (if the demon is too weak to presumably recuperate from Christ's intervention/flee to Hell). So, in the assumption that the UNSPEAKABLE really is grasping every cultist's soul... Yeah. They're gone. John has effectively killed the person and, maybe, left behind a husk. A shell of who they were.

And that acts as a segue into the second question:

Why in the hell (pun intended) would Gary want to use a priest as a vessel?

The short answer is that John is, genuinely, the perfect vessel. My understanding of the process is that the victim must be on the younger side, physically healthy, and (most importantly) non-consenting to the process (able to be manipulated and coerced into "consenting").

John is in his early 30s, is pretty healthy minus the achey knee and dormant asthma, and very much non-consenting, seeing as he goes through so much to attempt to stop the UNSPEAKABLE's commanding demon, Gary/Astaroth. Plus him being in active bouts of psychosis makes it so much easier for someone like Gary to affirm the delusions and essentially become the little devil on John's shoulder.

EDIT: I've posted some audio files regarding this! Check it out here [ LINK ]

But aside from that, it comes down to power. Gary wants to demonic rebellion to have influence. To be something that compels people and leaves behind a great legacy.

What better way to do that than take a holy man (assuming John is/was ordained) and make him a tool for the devil?

In context of a cult structure, the move is one of the biggest chess plays Gary can make as a leader.

Cults, especially those with destructive and a religious structure, are hierarchial and authoritative. There is supposed to be no question to what the leader wills. What Gary says should go. That's why he ultimately ended up targeting Lisa. As a failed attempt by Tiffany to make Lisa a vessel (and therefore prove her own worthiness to Gary), she knows too much about the true intentions. She is a flight risk. She's been found to be communicating with John (an extension of the church). People like Lisa are dangerous to the cult's imbalance, as are the ties they have within the greater community.

Which is why, too, John becomes such a pertinent target for Gary (lest we forget one of the Chapter 1 endings has him and his cult confront John on an empty highway).

It all shows that, even if he were not a demon, that he is convincing. That he can wear down at someone with a (presumably) strong conviction and duty to Christ. People would be fools to question him! He must know what he's doing if he can "break" a priest.

TLDR: Gary's entire mentality as a cult leader (and demonic commander) trying to regain control after a critical incident ks

And this, ultimately, is what is referred to with the idea of Damnatio Memoriae! John is so overshadowed and overtaken (whether by the UNSPEAKABLE, the cult, or his own mind) that he's effectively erased from memory. Him, the twins, Michael, Amy, they all mean nothing in the grand scheme of what would come should the cult succeed in its plan. They were all mere cogs in the machine.

#txt #ask #faith the unholy trinity #faith chapter 3 #faith airdorf #john ward #gary miller #mentioned:#lisa pearson #tiffany robinson #the unspeakable #meta post #meta analysis #my writing

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rowanthestrange · 2 years

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So I had this dream where Yaz and 13 were spacey-tethered together, like couldn’t go a meter away from each other. And they were trying to go around and investigate these situations where there was definitely an alien hiding among people sleeper agent style, that had woken up and now doing something and that was probably bad.

And you could see why the Doctor always separates them to do things. Because 13 was being her usual bullish rushing-in self, while Yaz is trying to be methodical and carefully piece things together official-style, and while it should’ve had loads of romantic bits in it (and sort of did - TARDIS flying ‘badly’ and throwing them together, collapsing her internal dimensions so she basically was just a box and sorry no kitchen guess you’ll have to get a takeaway and eat it squashed together while i float you through space) the situation was clearly showing the rift between their two styles, and Yaz getting more and more annoyed that her way that got results is being overruled, and Thirteen getting mad about someone telling her what to do.

Cut ahead to where Thirteen screwed up a bit and didn’t tell Yaz something, and when she does, they simultaneously realise that it’s not Person A they’re following that’s the problem, the alien has been here a decade and a half, so it’s actually his fifteen year-old son-

Just in time for the son’s room to basically explode and something from it to shoot up into the sky.

There’s nothing that they can do now but investigate the remains, and Thirteen frustratedly barges in and starts turning things over, dragging Yaz by the spacey-glowy tether again, who digs in her heels but fails and nearly falls over, both quite literally at the end of their rope, as the Doctor wordlessly yanks at her to get to more stuff, chucking the ‘useless’ bits away.

So Yaz strides forward and actually grabs Thirteen’s arm, forcing her around and snaps:

“Investigating a fresh crime scene, police don’t touch a single thing.”

“I am a single thing,” the Doctor snarls back, shaking her off.

And my brain went ‘ooh god that’s such a good line’ so hard that the dream paused, wouldn’t restart and I woke up. But yeah, no intention of writing anything like that - so consider it free to a good home. Sleeper agent hidden alien who was literally a baby is also fire meta.

#dreams #thasmin #see i’m not really that smart #i’ve just reprogrammed my brain to work in subtext #so subconscious does most of the heavy lifting #don’t ask why i woke up at 12 #my subconscious never sleeps #which also turns out to be a bad thing for actual sleep health #but means you got that though right?

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tiptapricot · 2 years

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10,000 Lightyears Somewhere Out In Space notes and meta!🚀

Heyo!! With the final chapter of my dear old Commander fic up, it’s time for me to nerd out about parallels, character arcs, easter eggs, and some general meta thoughts, because I can💖 Ty for those who checked out my story and I hope you enjoy a peek behind the scenes! This also serves as a lot of my general thoughts surrounding Commander’s development as a whole, as well as how I wanted the story to tie into the Lemire run :-)

Chapter 1.

Based on a flashback from the Lemire run, in the outer world Marc is finding out abt the DID diagnosis and has his first conscious meeting w Khonshu

This causes Commander to form

For Marc, things are scary and uncertain and he doesn’t know how to process it, and in the inner world, Commander’s experience parallels that by him also being introduced to the scary and unknown by seeing the first vestiges of the werewolf virus being spread

The Khonshu stuff is also intense enough to push him briefly to the front bc it’s…. A god. And no matter how they present themselves to humans, gods are never fully meant to be comprehended

This also mildly introduces Commander’s repetitive comfort stim of squeezing or picking at things over and over :-)

Darkwing duck was chosen as the TV show because it would’ve aired in the early 90s, and with MCU ages in mind, could’ve been somth Marc watched, and I think it would’ve been a comfort show :-)

Chapter 2.

Commander has been dormant/unaware and holding the memory of seeing Khonshu, but is brought out of dormancy by the system’s second contact with him: when he reaches out to Marc in the temple

In the outer world, Marc has been betrayed by Bushman, shot, and his life is going upside down

In the inner world, Commander is woken by a red alarm (indicating the degree of extreme distress the brain is under), finding the moon base’s outer perimeter protection has fallen due to a mutiny (mirroring Bushman’s betrayal), and that this has allowed the wolves to attack (khonshu turning their life around)

He is then readied for the beginning of the war AKA his ongoing role of processing the supernatural presence of Khonshu and who they fight on the streets

Lines during Commander’s interaction with Frenchie were pulled directly from the Lemire run, specifically the first thing Frenchie says to Marc, and the last thing he said before leaving him. This is also why Commander feels strangely uncomfortable around Frenchie here, he is feeling Marc’s loneliness and perceived betrayal

All of this is to indicate the closeness of Commander to Marc at this stage (Commander still being more of a fragmented piece of him), as well as the nearness to front that Commander is inhabiting due to Khonshu’s presence, causing stronger emotion and experience bleed over

This is also where I wanted to set up an explanation for his fanon name! Since “Commander” as his name is found nowhere in Lemire run canon, yet fits him super well, I wanted to give my own take on him getting that name (which happens in the next chap) but wanted to start it here with the line: “They planned for [an invasion]. He helped them do it.”

I think Commander starts out inhabiting more of a strategizer role AKA being the base’s Commander, which is close to his initial system role as a processor. He works through problems and figures how to combat them, which more literally is what his actions in the inner world are helping to do for supernatural trauma and experience the system endures

Chapter 3.

More of a general chapter not tied to a single experience, and not directly showing him fronting. It instead shows how Commander processes certain memories of the system fighting various strange and supernatural foes over the years: by his adversaries changing before his eyes

While it’s intentionally not clear, these are not just memories being held by him, I think many of them are him being coconcious or blurry with who’s in front while they fight, but not being aware that his setting has changed

All monsters and villains listed were all either pulled off MK villain lists, or inspired by the show (“amorphous human clay,” for example, is referring to the collective)

The overwhelming level of wolf attacks was also meant to mirror the never ending missions Khonshu is putting Marc through in the real world

I do fudge the timeline here a good amount as well, as I mention cufflinks, indicating Steven has gotten his suit, which can be a bit funky with MCU show canon. Overall this chapter covers a large swath of time, from the beginning of the system’s time as Moon Knight up to the MCU show’s canon. And honestly, MCU canon is likely not exact in this world as I’m fusing a few things together, so I think there may have been more supernatural fighting done sometime between Steven getting the suit and the system getting shot in Cairo (which I’ll talk ab later)

Ch 3 also has Commander’s comrades falling in battle, paralleling the relationships the system has falling apart in the outer world (Marlene, Matt). I hc Marc/Jake had various relationships but had falling outs over time, and this is mirrored in Commander’s experiences

This also indicates the beginning of a bleed of memories unrelated to his original role

Furthermore! This is also when he starts to grow a stronger sense of self and more solidly grow beyond role he formed to take on, realizing his name isn’t Marc (no longer being the same split off facet that he was before) and that he has other desires

However Commander is kept in his unbroken reality despite doubting it by being told the changes in adversaries and the extra monsters are hallucinations. This is a vital reasoning for the brain to make, as he would not be able to process what he has to process with too much exposure to the outer world

It’s the specific scenario he lives out and experiences that lets him perform the role of processing the strange and supernatural that the system’s brain needs him to

This also solidifies where I feel he got his name, taking the title of “Commander Marc Spector” and keeping the one piece of it that he doesn’t feel alienated from, becoming simply Commander

Chapter 4.

Beyond the actual goal of this chapter, there’s a few things at the start

First, I wanted to show that Commander has regular dreams of Khonshu (“…the familiar skull of a creature he can never place when he opens his eyes…”) but I didn’t want him to recognize who he was seeing because I think he only experiences his unfiltered strangeness and not him

Second, this section:

They only get worse when Crawley is shot down—two shots, he fell in two—and the title of Captain is passed to Commander’s shoulders. The guys in charge don’t care that he pushes back against the decision, that he insists he’s unfit to lead. They don’t believe him when he tells them that when Crawley fell, he saw a boat sailing through the stars into golden gates, and swore his cockpit was filling up with sand.

Is pretty obvious but is how Commander processed the body dying and going to the Duat (two shots for getting shot twice, the boat sailing through golden gates/the gates of Osiris, his cockpit filling up with sand being a memory of Steven/Marc getting frozen in the Duat)

I don’t think he was conscious while they were there, or if he was doesn’t remember it fully, however it’s enough of a huge change to impact his role

Because the Duat is so much, sooooo so much to process, that Commander is essentially… bumped up. It shakes up his section of the inner world, losing the leading Captain and putting him in the role instead, now fully in control and needing to “captain” the intense processing of seeing an afterlife

This is also meant to explain why he is the Moon Knights’ captain in the Lemire run :-)

As for the rest, the intent here was to show that Commander has grown enough into himself and into existing as himself that he is no longer solely there to process what he formed to process, and so he starts getting triggered to front through positive triggers instead of negative ones (his being space ofc)

He fronts at a space museum, and this is like… Literally the first time this has happened

I think that a mix of Commander becoming more fully formed and the MK system being able to heal more after Ammit led to Marc wanting to connect or humor his childhood love for space again

Because while a good chunk of that interest and the memories/emotions associated with it are more strongly held by Commander, Marc still has them. So he and Layla went on a space museum date :-)

But then it is so strongly similar to some of the positive memories Commander shares with Marc and so strongly like… a positive trigger for Commander that he ends up fronting for the first time for somth not negative

He’s still very fuzzy and I don’t think it’s a full switch, but he’s absolutely there

He meets Layla for the first time, and this causes some recent memories of the system’s fight in Cairo to make up his “dreams” for the night

Chapter 5.

The MK numbers used at the start are Commander’s (MK-1), the year the Lemire run was released (MK-16/2016) and the issue Moon Knight first appeared (MK-32/Werewolf by Night issue #32, 1975)

The mention of a living house was meant to reference the House of Shadows from the Mackay run (my beloved💖) and the people with bleeding eyes the victims of the villain Truth from the comics

I like the idea that the structure of an endless war and an endless fight is what allows Commander to process, because he likes being able to rely on routine (I wanted to include him being autistic but was only able to in small ways like his stims and certain ways of thinking ab things)

This chapter is also meant to show the weight that Commander holds for the other system members, sometimes gaining access to memories after the fact if another member thinks too hard about an experience they’ve had and it has the possibility to impact them too harshly. He’s getting more overwhelmed because I think post Ammit, Marc, Steven, and eventually Jake all have more time to sit down and think about stuff, which is good generally, but there’s still stuff they aren’t really ready to touch

Commander also becomes more aware that “they” exist through this, though he still filters it through his existing worldview and doesn’t recognize them from the perspective of a system member

As for the rest my main idea was basically just… Commander attempts to process the multiverse!!

Now I haven’t seen any of the MCU movies involving the multiverse, but I have seen some clips and screenshots, as well as Spiderverse, so I sort of just put my own twist on things

The thought that sparked wanting to tackle this was that the MK system is still around when that stuff happens in other parts of the world, so they have to deal w it too, but they don’t always know what’s happening. I think the multiverse breaking through dimensions is already scary enough, but like extra scary when you don’t know what’s happening

Also obvs small detail but for ppl that haven’t read it, Lupinar is from the Lemire run and Commander’s main enemy there

The course of the fight also is meant to parallel the outside world, where the other system members likely started seeing news reports of strange happenings (the fight begins), before the universe started breaking apart over London itself (the first tear appears), and the gravity of the situation hits them (second tear forms, throwing everything into chaos and sending Commander spinning)

It’s too much for their brain to comprehend, and so Commander’s usual routine is thrown off a lot

The emotions and processing of the real time events the other system members are experiencing straight shots to Commander because the others can’t dwell on stuff at all if they’re going to help people, so he gets the overwhelm they would experience otherwise

While going out to patrol the city/reign in any threats, Marc (I think, I didn’t have someone in mind while writing but just whoever’s in front) sees people from another universe fading into their own (inspired by Spiderverse, again), and the shock of it causes Commander to be kicked to front in the alleyway

It doesn’t last long, and the others get more of a handle on what’s happening, and Commander is left by himself to just sort of process and be while the other do their thing

The set up for the next section where Commander falls from the sky is… roughly that the guys were fighting various villains bleeding over from other universes and briefly got thrown into/through a rift before coming out the other side, and it was so incomprehensible that, again, it boots Commander to front mid fall, however the others are still fighting to front/rapid switching, and it’s very overwhelming and blurry

Commander hits his head and when he hits the ground is panicked and blurred enough that he gets a flash of his source, which is extremely disorienting and scary in the moment and he doesn’t feel wholly himself for a second

He also internalizes the injury of hitting his head, which becomes the eyebrow split he has in the Lemire run

Marc, Steven, and Jake talking through the pod’s radio was to show that Commander is still extremely close to front, and that’s how he’s perceiving their communication with him

Also I really like the other members being aware of Commander even if they don’t know who he is and caring about him or at least hoping he’s ok :-)

When Jake tells the other two to focus, he’s letting them know of an incoming threat, which Commander them feels them jump and punch before he retreats away from front

Also very small, but wanted to incorporate Commander liking pressure/compression, which is why he hugs himself tight when he’s panicking

The next scene is Commander blurring with Marc, since he’s been close to front for the whole day and stuff is funky

This is post fight, when some group of magic people has come to remedy the rips in reality so the guys are off the hook

Marc is getting ready for bed (with coffee, Steven was going to read fr a bit) when a Randall from another universe briefly flashes into their apartment, likely because Marc is someone he’d be tethered to in their universe

When Commander and Marc talk, they are talking in the headspace, which I headcanon as pretty similar to Steven’s apartment or the original midnight mission from the Mackay run

I also think that not all of the alters perceive themself as being exactly identical to the body, so while similar, Commander and Marc have slightly different faces

Marc does not do well with meeting new headmates because he’s really bad at not feeling like it’s “his” fault that they formed, even tho obvs it’s not related to his choices at all, and he definitely recognizes Commander from his childhood

Commander still views this interaction through his worldview and so again registers it as something else, seeing Marc as some kind of inter dimensional being he has a psychic connection with or something

I also want to be clear that when Commander goes back here, it is not him accepting his role, he still doesn’t really get what’s happening, he’s just a bit more steady, and a certain level of separation/amnesia is also present

Wanted to have Commander switch to calling Frenchie Jean-Paul to show the furthering of their relationship. I think they’ve been dating generally most of this time but it’s been a bit more casual, and this is when it’s like… more serious

Whew ok, ALMOST FINALLY

The little memory orbs Commander receives are how he perceives other times positive space triggers have either pulled him closer to the front, or meant he gets a new memory associated w them

So he’s like aware of these foreign sweeter moments where the other system members interact or engage w space somehow and just… gets to have those memories along with the ones he helps to process

I think Marc still remembers a lot of space facts, because I’ve read so many good fics and takes on that and because I also personally just agree w that! So he still remembers stuff he learned when he was younger, like how the distance between the earth and the moon fluctuates and isn’t always the exact same distance

I think post multiverse, the system takes a little break from Moon Knighting, or at least pulls back from it to recover and chill and let themselves relax a bit, and so the level of attacks Commander deals with lessen a LOT, and he gets to have more of an inner life beyond fighting

The system n Layla absolutely go on camping trips together, which is where the second memory blip comes from (and those s’more marshmallows are kosher/vegan, I did think ab that while writing)

I think after the multiverse incident Khonshu takes more of an active interest in Commander and decides to observe him, which is where we get the scene of Commander meeting him in a dream, which is also another piece I wanted to put in where he’s the only one really consciously aware of how… un-understandable Khonshu is to the human mind

THE MIDNIGHT MISSION AND THE MACKAY RUN GANG IN THE THIRD MEMORY

This was originally Steven getting his job back and being at a museum staff party but I decided I actually hate that job for him and I love the Mackay run guys so now it’s Reese and Soldier and the House of Shadows bc I love them💖

I know it’s not as solid of a +1 moment as some fics, but I really wanted Commander’s acceptance/coming to terms moment to be about like… accepting that he doesn’t have to know, that the unknown is out there and likely will stay unknown, but he can still live and exist and be, and that with everything, knowing that there is so much out there is actually a comfort, therefore allowing him to be happy with his place in the universe

BRIEF last thing ab tying into the Lemire run:

Already mentioned, but I wanted to set Commander up to be in the same place he is in the Lemire run so he becomes captain, he gets his eyebrow scar, and becomes close to Frenchie.

As far as how the canon of this fic fits into the Lemire run plot, the way I see it is that all of the alters are sort of put in simplified versions of their lives and made to forget the more complicated inter system stuff they’ve experienced, so Commander wouldn’t remember interacting with Marc, and may even have been put back to the point of believing he’s Marc, as a lot of other stuff is fucked up.

ADDITIONALLY, being the part of their brain that handles supernatural stuff, Commander’s world is sort of kicked into high overdrive since Khonshu is messing w their brain, which causes the big huge battle w Lupinar and the breach and ensuing loss of the base, as Khonshu has essentially breached their brain and is winning.

Ok…. That’s all! Thanks if you read all this holy shit uhhh I love you :-)💖💖💖

#this is a lot lol I’m sorry #my brain was ON for this fic and im really happy it’s all done so #time to talk ab the fun stuff I put into it!!!#ty all for reading n hanging w me as I published #and feel free to ask questions ab anything here!!!#commander moon knight #moon knight #the fruit is talking again

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austarus · 3 years

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Timeless!Harrison Wells x Reader - White King, Black Queen

*A/N: The picture/edit/gif does not belong to me. It belongs to its rightful owner.

**Please don’t forget to comment, like, and reblog. It means a lot to content creators of all kinds!

***I’d also like to thank @grimtamlain-writes for being my beta reader.

MASTERLIST

Word Count: 2267

You narrowed your eyes as the city continued to bustle, noise from people and cars emitted in the air. Clouds hung sparsely over Central City as the waning moon took the place of the sun high in the sky. The wind blew a light breeze through your hair. You kicked a leg back and forth gently as you sat on the edge of the STAR Labs tower wings. Your other leg was bent close to your body, an arm resting over your knee. The height didn’t scare you so much as it used to. In fact, you didn’t mind being so close to the edge anymore. If you fell, then you fell. Truth be told, your powers would save you whether you willed it to or not. Some would say it’s a curse, others not so much. Your umbrakinesis acted like a defense mechanism at those times. A sigh left your lips as you straightened up your back, cracking it. Relief echoed through your body, but your heart felt heavy. Time is ticking... You knew what was happening downstairs, Gideon had alerted you when someone entered the Time Vault. It wouldn’t be completely wrong to say that you didn’t want to face him – couldn’t get attached since he’d been here. Not again. Staying up here was your way of avoiding that problem until… Until what, though?

The hair at the back of your neck stood up, a chill ran down your spine as your shadows alerted you of a presence a distance behind you. Turning your head slightly, you sent an icy look to the one person you dreaded to see. The face of the man you had seen pass one too many times. Their looks from their final moments imprinted in your mind for this one to come back. He was the last thing you had of them.

Harrison Wells.

A small smile was on his face, his hair tousled with his clear-framed glasses perched on his nose. He knew you’d be up here. The others told him you’d been up here since his reincarnation into the world. Since he’d made contact with Team Flash to help them and explain his predicament of currently living. But really, Harrison would have known if no one had told him. He had sensed it. Seen it – the images flickered past in his brain. The other versions of himself with you up here – the foreign familiarness that he personally did not experience.

But nothing more than a dreadful reminder of what’s past.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” the genius started in a soft voice, wanting to approach you carefully. Your glare bothered him, yet he knows it shouldn’t, for once Harrison leaves, he will be united with Tess, the love of his life. Over and over and over again.

You snorted, turning your gaze to the stars that twinkled away from the clouds. You could see the constellations of Cassiopeia, winking brightly light-years away. “Such a shame, you could have helped them with Godspeed.” A bitter laugh left your lips as you recalled Nash showing you how to recognize the constellations and where to navigate from there. Sherloque would drink his tea up here with you and converse about his cases. HR would read to you his latest ideas and novels while you gave your input. You would drag Harry out of his lab to get some fresh air. And Eobard… he was the one who showed you this view, before Barry had woken up, before the Particle Accelerator had gone online.

“Team Flash is more than capable of handling threats on their own.”

“I take it you think that having a Wells must be a handicap, hm?”

“I never said that.”

“Hmph.”

“I couldn’t leave without telling you good-bye.” You pressed your lips thinly and Harrison continued, pocketing his hands in his dark coat. “It didn’t feel right to go without saying that.” The night was getting colder, yet you remained out here in a thin jacket. Dare he say, he worried a bit? You turned to fully look at him from your seated position. “I… won’t deny the sentiment I feel towards you. The memories of the past Wells. Their thoughts – well, previous thoughts – and feelings are still here.” Harrison had gestured to his head then placed a hand on his heart. Bile rose at the back of your throat as the smiling images of the boys hit your mind. You bit your lip hard as he spoke, “Each one of them felt strongly for you, but I’m not them. They’d want you to move on. To live-”

“No!” Your patience snapped, standing up rapidly with expert footing. Shadows went rampant in the night, wind howling in his ears. “You don’t get to say that!” Darkness immediately consumed the atmosphere and air around you both. Unbridled anger licked up in your heart and soul as you took heavy steps towards him. Harrison couldn’t see, but he could feel the moving darkness as he stood his ground. “You have no right to act all high and mighty towards me.” A hiss left his lips as a dark particle lashed at his arm, burning through his coat and marring his skin just as he heard your anger burn in your next words. “You don’t understand the strings that fate has chained me with! Nor will you ever understand my burden.”

***Flashback***

“What is it that you want?” You glared at the entity. The Monitor had appeared in your kitchen as you were pouring yourself some alcohol to enjoy your quiet night. You had taken some time away from all the heroes and villains running around.

“I came because I require your assistance for the Crisis.”

“Pass, I’m not in the mood to play the hero.”

“The point is not to be a hero or the villain, but to honor fate’s will.”

“Well fate can go hump a stump for all I care,” you sipped on your choice of alcohol, you turned away from the eternal entity only to find him in front of you right as you had exited your kitchen. A deep frown crossed your features. This is such a drag.

“Fate has bound your life to Harrison Wells the moment you first met him years ago.”

“False, that was Eobard masquerading as Wells. So, technically no.”

“That technicality may be so, but fate saw the speedster as your gateway to the rest of them. Without Thawne you would not have been so tied to Harrison Wells’ existence.” Rolling your eyes, you took another sip, already knowing you’d need a couple of glasses to forget about this interaction. “Your life is bound to his. To them.” The Monitor had you right where he wanted you, pushing images into your mind to allow you to see reason. “You were a lover.” You flinched as the image of Eobard appeared in your mind. “A partner.” Harry. “A friend.” HR. “And a confidante.” Sherloque. “Now this one needs you as well, he is in danger of himself with the Anti-monitor. My opposite entity.” You knew he was referring to Nash, the multiverse explorer with the haughty attitude and snarky comments.

“…”

“You are the anomaly that exists in the multiverse, there is no other in your position.” The entity saw the hesitation flicker in your being. “The time has come for you to be his protector.”

***Time Skip***

Nash panted, on the ground of this desolate land on his hands and knees. His mouth felt dry, tasting iron in his mouth from the blood on his split lip. How much longer can he endure this? The Anti-monitor continued to laugh at him, to mock him, for his weakness. Pariah gripped hard at the dirty snow, blood and mud defiled the pure whiteness. He couldn’t get back up. His body ached. No matter how hard Nash tried to push back, the Anti-monitor was too strong for him even with these temporary powers.

“Humans are such fickle beings,” the anti-entity spoke in a grand manner, “Soon the multiverse will be mine and there shall be no flaws. No humans to corrupt my domain.” The eternal being gathered his divine power into the palm of his hand and fired anti-matter at his appointed Pariah. The one to bear witness of the end of the multiverse. His curse.

Nash shut his eyes; this was the end. This was his end. A breath left him, what he expected to be his final breath. But the final blow never came. Ringing greeted Nash’s ears as he opened his eyes. Standing in front of him, shielding his body was you and your dark powers. For whatever reason it withstood the anti-matter as particles clashed against one another. You stood defiantly and gracefully in your fighting positions, conjuring your dark spectacles from every shaded corner.

“Don’t you dare touch him, you fucking monster.” You growled, your hands working magnificently to bind the Anti-monitor down. Once bound your umbra became spears and swords that pierced through the entity. While it could not kill the Anti-monitor, it slowed him down – meaning it would slow down his assault on Nash. You needed to get him to safety, needed him to have enough strength to teleport you two away from this dimension. And that’s exactly what you convinced him to do when you grabbed him, hugging his injured body to yourself as he fought to stay conscious.

***End Flashback***

“You don’t understand what loss truly is! You don’t get how hard it is to move on from this.” Just as you had moved, so had Harrison. A dagger of darkness at his throat, clenching the front of his cloak as he held a dagger of light to your own throat. Harrison gritted his teeth as he used his powers to light up the area in his green light. “This pain, the misery of losing over and over and over again. To bear the burden of fate’s strings only to watch them all fall.” He flinched at how the veins around your eyes had darkened to a charcoal color. His throat dried as fear hit him. Harry’s memory flashed into his mind – the memory of you in this state, accidentally killing a meta in self-defense. “You’re just a selfish man, running away from what’s in front of him.” Harrison’s light battled against your darkness to keep the physical manifestations of umbra away from harming his body. “I despise people like that.”

“I’m only doing what’s best for me.”

“By what, Harrison? Running to the past? What’s in the past is best left in the past, those who hold on to the past don’t appreciate the present.”

“Such hypocritical words coming from someone who sulks around up here for what once was.”

“You don’t fucking know anything about me. All you have are some second-hand memories, but you don’t truly know me and what I’ve been through. You’re just like Barry.”

“And you’re any different?”

“At least I know the difference between reality and a desperate dream.”

“…” He knew Tess is doomed to die for time to flow, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t cherish every second with her until it was time. Maybe he was a desperate man chasing after a desperate dream, but he would until the bitter end. For Tess.

“A Time Loop is just a miserable notion for you to see Tess when her destiny is already a fixed time point. Just like Barry’s mother. Their deaths are absolute. Even with your Timeless powers you can’t interfere with what’s set in place.”

“That may be so, but I’ve fulfilled my part here – at least I have someone to return home to, even if they are doomed to die. I could be by her side over and over again.”

Harrison’s words pierced your heart, you pushed the tears back. The ache in your heart throbbed at a greater rate. At least… he had the power to return to his someone… The genius saw the haunting dejection in your eyes, the way your shoulders quivered as you tried to keep yourself together. He regretted the words that left his mouth…

“Do as you please,” you whispered, loosening your grip on his jacket to let him go. The darkness dissipated as you walked back to your perch with pocketed hands. “I’m done begging…” You mumbled to yourself so quietly that he didn’t catch your last statement. A tear left your eyes as you stood tall where you once sat.

“Good-bye,” Harrison murmured to the wind drifting in your direction before turning and leaving. A part of him felt torn by the things he had spat at you. What’s done is done. I doubt I’ll be back here any time soon. Clenching and unclenching his hand, Harrison shut his eyes and summoned his powers to pass through time. Tess, I’m coming home.

“Good-bye, Harrison.” Another tear fell, this time you wiped it as the night continued. He was gone. They were gone. You were alone, once again spectacularly alone and cold.

The pieces are all in place. The time has come…

Time still ticked as seconds went bye. A voice whispered at the back of your mind; the presence residing there since his exorcism. The one that kept you company through all this.

“It’s time, my queen.”

Checkmate

#harrison wells x reader #og harrison wells #timeless wells #harrison wells fanfiction #harrison wells #The Flash #the flash cw #the cw #team flash #the flash fanfiction #nash wells #the monitor #Sherloque Wells #harry wells #hr wells

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stagefoureddiediaz · 2 years

Note

I was rewatching Survivors (as one does) and noticed that about ten minutes in, before Eddie's woken up, Buck says "We had no reason to think Eddie would get shot helping a kid either" and the flag patch on his uniform is frayed. It seems like an odd choice for him since, short of briefly trying to join the SEALs, Buck has never had a connection to the military...except through Eddie? Your costume metas are in my brain now, I'm actually considering doing a rewatch solely to look for frayed patches on the team and whether they somehow symbolize how Eddie's doing. We aren't even two weeks into the hiatus! I'm not going to make it!

Hey Nonnie

Thanks for your great ask - its good to hear from you. I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only one who's not going to make it though hiatus - I've got lots of fun little metas etc in the pipeline to try and make it go a bit more easily.

Please feel free to join me in a patch spotting rewatch - I'm currently doing a really in depth look all the seasons to see when there are frayed patches and when they're not for all the characters. Its proving very interesting thus far and I'm hoping to get it finished so I can get a post about it done before we return for 5b so it'd be nice to hear from you and compare notes on what you spot on the patch front!

My current thinking is that I'm going to have to revise my thoughts about the US flag being linked to Eddies military career because the patches of all our mains have been frayed at some point as they all seem to link to a crisis point of some sort. I'm currently leaning towards the idea of the US flag patch representing them as a person - an American, because i've noticed a couple of times when the firefighter badge is frayed as well, and that seems to more obviously represent them as a firefighter specifically.

As always I love getting peoples asks and my inbox is always open for anything costume or otherwise!

#kym answers things #kym’s costume theory #patch theory #flag patch watch #911 on fox #911 fox #911 #911onfox #evan buckley #eddie diaz #buck #eddie #buddie

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yellowocaballero · 3 years

Note

hi i know it's been the hottest of seconds but director's cut for the prophetic spring if you're still doing these? 👀

Sure! I’ve spoken a lot about the prophetic spring, but I’m fairly certain I could give some meta information about my intense life-long obsession with Tim Drake. Dude has been showing up in my fics since I was 14.

But actually, the ficlet I wrote ages ago might be more interesting? So here it is. Exploring a dynamic that was WAY underserved for how important it is: the Steph, Cass, Tim dynamic!

No CW that haven’t appeared in the prophetic spring, but specific mention for drug addiction and drug depiction, as well as references to molestation, abortion, torture, and suicide. Story under the cut.

Tim stared down into the toilet bowl. It was a little yellowed. He needed to clean it.

He stared at the small baggie of pills in his hand.

He visualized dropping it into the bowl, flushing it. Possibly mutating an alligator, or giving the race of mole people that lived in the Gotham sewers a nice surprise.

Tim sighed, and pocketed the drugs. Maybe tomorrow.

A month after the incident with a runaway foster kid and a, in retrospect, kind of embarrassing fake fight with his older brother, Tim got a text from an unknown number. To make matters worse, it was at an insane hour of the day - noon.

Texts from strangers were hardly uncommon. Tim had an extensive contact network, growing larger by the day, but he had set up a Google Voice on his computer so they were all routed through a program there. Being bothered at all hours of the day on his phone was hardly his idea of a good time. The only people who really had his real number were his bullshit ‘friends’ and his asshole ‘family’. He hadn’t even given his number to his ‘friends’ - he had given it to Kon under strict confidentiality, and then Kon had given it to all of Young Justice. Asshole.

405-555-1998: dropping by in three hours so make sure ur presentable :)

As Tim had just woken up, most of his brain was occupied by a single whuh?

Just as his mind swirled in sleepy confusion, his phone buzzed again.

405-555-1998: B1706XQE45

The code checked out. It was an ally, not an unknown or an enemy.

Tim groaned, covering his eyes with an elbow. He needed coffee.

****

The coffee was a new thing - rather, it was something he had drunk plenty of growing up, because there had been nobody around to inform him that coffee was bad for developing brains. Growing up completely unsupervised was probably why Tim was a drug addict now. He could totally blame this on his parents never loving him.

Not a drug addict, Tim thought to himself anxiously as the coffee sputtered into the extra large gallon pot. Just someone who...uses drugs...in an unhealthy way. Substance abu - substance user, who just used it maybe as a bad coping mechanism. Not that Tim had good coping mechanisms, but it was better than sawing off heads or becoming a drug lord. When you thought about it, it was either being a serial killer or doing drugs, so logically it means that he should do more drugs to decrease the amount of fun little murders he does -

Tim made toast.

The coffee was a new thing, because he was trying to use it to replace the drugs. He had cut back. The stupid little sorority that called themselves the Birds of Prey had been talking to him about it. He had agreed to try. It was best to set expectations low, so he couldn’t disappoint. Actually, Tim loved disappointing, maybe he should set them higher. Maybe he could make inspirational speeches about how he was a good guy now? Ha ha.

The three hours had been a deft move. The texter knew noon was his average wake-up time at best, and the three hours gave him enough time to sober up if he had been high or drunk at the time. Tim didn’t like to start popping the minute he woke up, but - well, sometimes he did. Or sometimes he was awake at noon because he had been on an all-nighter drug binge. They hadn’t given their name, either, which meant that it was somebody who he wouldn’t want to see.

He could bounce, escape to some corner of Gotham until they gave up. Except he had the sense that whoever had gone through the effort to get his number wasn’t the type to give up. Almost nobody Tim knew was the type to give up. His ‘friends’ and his ‘family’ never gave up. On anybody but him.

A voice in his head, not quite yet suffocated, sounding altogether too much like the Replacement, echoed in endless attempts to get him to come back. Oh, whatever. Kid was a try-hard. He needed better taste in made up families.

Over the next three hours, he debated his tactics. If he wasn’t escaping and the texter was playing the buddy card, then the situation probably wasn’t dangerous. He strapped in his armor under the baggy pyjamas that he never took off anyway, and spitefully made no effort to control his hair. He did put on make-up, an old hand from keeping CPS off Bruce’s trail - man, he should have pretended Bruce was molesting him, that would have been funny as fuck - to hide the bags under his eyes. No use looking pathetic.

He hid a few more weapons around his apartment. He anxiously checked his phone, staring not at the new texts but at Harley’s offer sent a week ago. He still hadn’t replied. He didn’t know what to do with it.

As if he could ever feel safe sleeping under the same roof as her?

As if he ever felt safe anywhere?

Maybe he had nothing to lose. That was the greatest part about this, the most wonderful aspect of what he had done to everybody in his life. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. That’s freedom, or so Janis had always told him. She knew what she was about. Overdosing on heroin at 27 - that was understanding what it meant, to have nothing. To be free. He was almost jealous.

At two on the dot, a polite knock echoed through the apartment. Tim looked up from where he was relaxing on the couch, with all of the possible entry points in his line of sight. That wasn’t a knock he had memorized, and he had memorized everyone’s knocks.

Nothing for it. He’d have to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Maybe he can pull the insane sociopath schtick again; that had always been effective in ditching his parents. Tim sighed, walked over to the door, swiped his thumb against the keypad, undid the three deadbolts, and opened door only to see -

Stephanie Brown, hands propped on her hips and smiling widely. Cassandra Wayne, standing right behind her, serene as ever.

Tim closed the door - or he tried. Steph had expected the move, and the minute he had opened the door her foot had jutted out and blocked him from closing the door. Effortlessly, she wrenched it back open and stepped into his apartment, forcing him to press against the wall and scowl as insane women infiltrated his space.

“Wow,” Steph said loudly, “this place looks like a wreck!”

Tim groaned.

***

The thing with Steph and Cass was this:

How to describe it?

The sister he had never expected, the best friend he had never thought he would have. Cass was his twin, Robin’s shadow, the other side of his mountain. Bruce had adopted Cass barely five months after he became Robin, and Tim had unabashedly resented her for stealing Bruce’s attention so quickly. He had always liked her more, but Bruce had liked everyone more than Tim, so maybe it was no surprise. She was sweet, kind, gentle, and no trouble. Tim wasn’t any trouble either, but he couldn’t be the rest of it if it bit him in his ass.

Robin was the brain. Cass was the muscle. They were a team so closely linked, conjoined at the hip, that Tim couldn’t remember a patrol ever done without her. Bruce had let them start patrolling alone at fourteen (“You didn’t let me work alone until I was fifteen, and I was an assassin,” Damian had spat), and they had been an unbeatable team. Robin’s hand-to-hand was weak, but nobody ever got through Batgirl. Batgirl struggled with technical knowledge, reading and writing and investigating and chasing down leads, the only area where Tim had ever excelled. Together, they had almost been as good as Batman. Sometimes, Tim had let himself think that they might be better.

They had been so similar. Everyone had always said so. They’re both so quiet, the Justice League had said. Emotionless little freaks, the Rogues had said. Neither of them blink, their schoolmates had said. But there had been nothing to say, not between them: they could have a conversation without words, without even Sign. Cass had known every twitch of Tim’s body, had understood him down to his core. Nobody else ever had. Everybody had always called Tim inscrutable and impossible to understand - but to Cass, Tim had been an open book. She knew every inch of him. And she had loved him anyway.

And Steph! When Steph had found them when they were fourteen veering on fifteen, and from then on it was as if she had always been there. She was so big, so smiling, so much, and she had never apologized for any of it. Nothing scared her. To Tim, that was the perfect vigilante - somebody who was scared of nothing, who never hesitated, who was good.

Not even Bruce could intimidate her. When Tim was fourteen, he had thought that was the most amazing thing in the world. Bruce intimidated everyone, but Steph had just stuck out her tongue and kept badly backflipping off roofs anyway. Through twin convincing, Tim and Cass had convinced Bruce to give her a chance, and Spoiler had slot into their dynamic perfectly. She was their best friend, always.

She wasn’t good at hand-to-hand at first, but Tim had improved by then, and they could cover her. She improved faster than he had, and judging from the reconnaissance footage Tim had frantically consumed after he came back to life, she was amazing now. She was wickedly smart, practical and down to Earth. If Tim was better at hacking into a computer, Steph was the one who found the post-it note with the password stuck under the desk.

But more than any of that, she had brought the social skills. She had brought the calming presence, the sweet hand to victims and civilians, and her good humor was infectious. Steph was good with people. She was a born leader. Resilient. Brave. Everybody liked her. Everybody loved her. Tim had. She had loved him too. She could have done so much better than Tim and Cass, weird little societal rejects, but she had chosen them as her family.

It had been the three of them. For as long as Tim’s life had meaning, for as long as he had been loved, they had loved him. Tim had grown up alone, in a world of one, and they had infiltrated it. They had expanded it, and they dragged his life into more than just Tim. Into Tim-and-Cass-and-Steph. Into Robin-Batgirl-Spoiler. Into meaning, and love.

Tim hated them. And he wanted them to suffer.

“That’s the Stephanie Brown I remember,” Tim sneered, closing the door behind him. Steph had quickly thrown herself onto Tim’s couch, clearly somewhat surprised at how comfortable it was, and Cass had perched daintily on the arm. Cass had always refused to sit like a normal person - she would rather sit on the backs of sofas, or on the arm, or perched on chairs like a bird - “If I had known you were coming I would have jumped cities.”

“We would have chased you down and you know that,” Steph said cheerfully, like she said fucking everything. “Besides, if you had known we were coming you would have gone into witness protection. You’ve been avoiding the fuck outta us.”

“Wonder why,” Tim said, injecting as much mean-spirited sarcasm into his voice as possible. “I need more coffee, don’t go through my shit.”

The apartment was small, and the kitchen had a cut-away wall where he could see through into the living room. Stephanie hated nothing more than being ignored or looked down upon, and if he dismissed her and didn’t react then she’d grow infuriated with him and leave. He couldn’t fight with her, because if it came down to a battle of rhetoric or emotions she’d win single-handedly. She was so good with words. Cass...had no weaknesses.

Which was inconvenient, because it was Cass he absolutely had to get rid of as soon as possible. She was very emotional, and more than a little sensitive. Especially to rejection. If he was cruel enough to her, she’d start crying and leave. There was only one problem with that.

As he jammed more grounds into the machine he watched the girls out of the corner of his eye. They weren’t talking or whispering to each other, both fully aware of how well Tim could read lips. They weren’t even having one of those body language conversations they could only have with each other, aware that Tim could crack that too. Instead Stephanie was casually sprawled on his couch, looking for all the world like a middle aged dad watching the football game, looking around the room. Cass, as usual, was zoning out. Or, of course, looked like she was zoning out - Tim could tell that she was waiting for something to happen, and was preparing herself for it.

Shit. Tim fought the urge to gnaw on his fingernail. Cass was going to be a problem.

He risked another glance backwards. She could see him, so she knew. Fuck. He had never been on the other side of her mind reading. It was fucking inconvenient. Psychics should be shot on sight.

The coffee sloshed into the biggest cup he could find in his kitchen, and Tim began draining it immediately as he leaned over the cutaway. He kept the cup held up to his face, obscuring it. Face covered, everything under the elbows covered - best he could do without preparation.

“This little field trip sanctified by Sgt. Brother?” Tim asked, sipping the scalding hot coffee. Not hot enough. He needed - he needed - they’d see -

“We’re nineteen, we don’t need his permission for everything we do,” Steph said, amused. So she was going to speak for Cass - hardly unusual, as whenever they were all together Steph tended to be the only one who spoke - but seeing as Tim was Tim then it was definitely a strategy.

“He lets his precious baby sisters knock on the door of drug lords for fun?” Tim sneered.

“If they’re incompetent and retired, sure!”

Tim gritted his teeth. Don’t rise to her bait. Don’t. She was the best person in the family at getting a rise out of their enemies. He didn’t stand a chance.

“What do you want?”

“We thought we’d take you roller skating at the rink,” Steph chirped.

Tim stared at her.

“Or the pool,” Steph said, faux-thoughtfully. “Or just the mall?”

Fuck this. Tim headed for the door, ready to walk out of the building barefoot in his pyjamas. He tugged at the doorknob, only to find that it wouldn’t open.

Tim breathed in through his nose, then out through his mouth. There were other exits. He was not trapped. Had his apartment always been so small? He could have sworn that it was bigger.

He turned around slowly. Stephanie was grinning at him, twirling what looked like a small plastic cylinder. Tim recognized it instantly - fancy League tech. Overrides all electronic locks and controls them. They all used it to trap perps and heighten their fear tactics. Tim jammed his thumb on the keypad. Nothing happened.

Cass glanced at Steph, and made a small motion. Tim couldn’t interpret it. Why couldn’t he interpret it? Did they have a new code? It was Cass. When nobody else had understood her, Tim always had. Now they had their own language, one that Tim couldn’t interpret anymore. Tim was lost in translation, always drifting.

“We aren’t bringing you in,” Steph said, just as light as ever. No trace of pity or caution or gentleness in her voice: just relentless cheer. “Literally all we want to do is talk. Play a board game, maybe?”

Tim’s eyes flickered to the hidden panel in the wall next to him where he had stashed a gun and a sword.

“Bro,” Steph said, “you really don’t want to escalate this.”

“Do you think you can take me?” Tim asked curiously, letting his hand drift to his arm. He shook his long pyjama sleeve down to cover his wrist. “That’s pretty cute. Last time I checked, you’re the shittiest at hand-to-hand in your team.”

But Steph just rolled her eyes. Shit, wasn’t he supposed to be ignoring her? He couldn’t, not so long as she kept pushing and pushing. Not so long as she was in his house. “Leave off. Just because Jay and I are the last people in the fam who weren’t trained in Mystical Ninja Arts doesn’t mean I’m incompetent. Hands in the air, by the way.”

Stephanie was overly sentimental. New tactic. He raised his hands slightly in the air, caught reaching for the weapon hidden in his armor. “Incompetent enough to let me die.”

There. Finally. Thank god, Tim thought he was losing his touch. The muscles clenched in Stephanie’s jaw, and just a twitch of her eye - banishing a bad memory. “Everybody’s been saying you’ve turned rude. I guess you’ve just been avoiding us because you don’t want to hurt our feelings, right?”

“I didn’t remember a lot when I was first resurrected,” Tim said casually, despite the fact that he had never told anybody about the first awful six months. Something about Steph and Cass just pried it out of him, like invasive surgery. Or an autopsy. “I remember everything about those six months, though. Homeless. Practically retarded. Brain damage does that to you, you know. I lived on the streets, did you know that? It was a miracle I lived through it.” He gasped, as if he was remembering something. “I slept on 34th street! You lived near there, didn’t you? Maybe you even walked by me.”

Steph went white. Cass’ expression froze. He was pushing hard, but these two wouldn’t react to anything less. Steph could trade barbs better than he could, even now.

“It’s a good thing Talia found me,” Tim continued. “She was the only one who cared.”

That did it. Steph tensed, leaning forward, and even Cass stiffened. “Is that what she told you? How can you believe her?”

Tim just shrugged, walking back to the kitchen and hiding his body language again. He took an extra loud slurp of the coffee, just to be annoying. “Talia never lied to me. She said that nobody cared enough to save me. And guess what!”

Steph’s jaw clenched again. She was a hot head. A fierce temper, an impulsive girl who jumped in feet first and sanity second. Woman, now. When had that happened? “Cut that shit out. We all know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing it to everyone. Did you think Connor didn’t warn us?”

Snitch. Tim slurped his coffee again. “Connor’s been telling everyone to give me space.”

“Yeah, everyone but us.” She stood up now, ignoring the flicker of a frown on Cass’ face, and folded her arms. A challenge against the world. Against Tim. It didn’t matter. “You don’t believe half the shit you’re spewing. You’ve never believed your own bullshit, Tim. You’re just saying it to drive everybody away. It’s not going to work on us.”

“Why?” Tim asked innocently. “You’re too thick?”

“Because we love you!” Steph cried. Tim rolled his eyes. As if he hadn’t heard that one before. “Saving Richie proved it, you aren’t as insane as you keep pretending you are. You know what you’re doing is wrong, you just don’t care.”

“Wow, you caught me.” Tim took another long swig of his coffee. It was making his hands jittery. Good. “Local genius aware of his actions. Call the press. Call Uncle Clark, he needs a scoop.” He arched an eyebrow at Steph. She hated that expression of his - she had always found it so aristocratic and pretentious. Joke’s on her, he was pretentious. “Do you mind if I go do a line? I’m not high enough for this conversation.”

If she had told him who she was, he would have done a line anyway just to spite her, and she knew it. “You don’t want to try,” Steph said stubbornly, “but you’re trying. You don’t want to care, but you care. You don’t want to feel it, but it hurts so much you can’t bear it. You can’t get anything past us, Tim. It’s always just been us. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Doesn’t that mean -

“What that means,” Tim said, and he found the words scraping his throat. He found himself talking a little louder than he meant to. The coffee, you know. Made you jittery. “is that you should have saved me. If you loved me so fucking much, you would have been anything other than useless. You’ve always been the most useless girl in the world, Steph. You couldn’t save your crook of a dad or your junkie of a mom. You couldn’t save your baby and you couldn’t save me. You’re ghetto trash putting on airs, and everyone can smell it on you.”

As soon as he said it, he tensed. He shifted his stance, ready to throw the coffee and spill the scalding liquid on her. Obscure her vision. It would take a second for her to vault the cover, so he could duck down. From there he could get the gun, shoot the window, jump out the window. She couldn’t win. Tim had the most powerful weapon in the world in his disposal and that was his infinite, burning hate. His hate for Steph and Cass burned him to the ground, and his world with it, and he was going to burn them to cinders because he couldn’t do anything else.

But Steph didn’t move. Cass got off the sofa. She walked up to Steph, and gently pressed a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed. Steph exhaled, long and shaking, and nodded at Cass. She walked into Tim’s bedroom - hey! - and shut the door.

Then Cass stared at Tim, and there was no more need for words. Not between them.

Tim vaulted the cut away wall, aiming for her feet first. Cass didn’t dodge - that would imply that she moved like an object moved. She moved like water moved - swift and supple, with such infinite grace and precision that it was like she wasn’t human at all.

But he had gotten better. He didn’t spend two and half years trained by the League of Assassins in crochet. Tim lashed out with a foot, she dodged again. He threw a punch, she moved. He feinted, clearly leaving her an opening, and she didn’t take it.

Bitch.

Cass shoved away his coffee table, sending it skidding across the floor and opening the floor space. The rug became their arena, tight and intimate, no room for maneuverability. Tim acted and she reacted, Tim lashed out a sweep kick and she jumped over it, Tim tried to grapple and she broke his hold. She never threw him to the ground, never pinned him. She just moved.

She was good, but not good enough to toy with him and win completely. The way to win against Cass was to leverage your height - Tim was taller than he once was, although that wasn’t saying much - weight, and strength against her. A couple good hits and she was down.

The issue, of course, was hitting her.

He got a hit in. It was much easier when she wasn’t even fighting back. She rolled with it effortlessly, taking the impact to gain a little space between them. She breathed deeply, sweat rolling down her neck. Tim used to take a cold compress and press it to that neck. She used to smile at him. Thank you.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Cass said.

“Too bad,” Tim said.

Fights weren’t like in television, long and choreographed extended scenes to entertain and thrill. When Ro - Tim was in a fight, a real fight, it was typically finished in less than a minute. The only way that a match can get long is if the other person was deliberately tiring you out - a risky strategy - or if you were of completely equal strengths with similar fighting styles. Or if it was a spar.

As Tim tried to hit her again and again, he realized that it was a spar.

No, not even that. It was a conversation.

Tim grabbed her wrist, and said: I want you to hurt. Cass broke the hold, telling him that he can’t. Tim leveraged the motion and kneed her in the back, telling her that the only goal of this fight was pain. Cass let the impact take her down to the mat, an incredibly disadvantageous position, but rolled out of the way just as Tim tried to exploit the opportunity. I’m not scared of you. Tim hit again, and again, and again, failing every time. I want you gone, Tim said, and this is the only way I know how to do it.

This is what Tim said: as much as I once loved you, I now hate you. The infinite depths of my love, my twin sister, how we moved in perfect sync. I hate it all. As much as I cared, I now hate. Feel this hate. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Cass said.

They moved in perfect sync, even now. Cass couldn’t predict his movements before he made them, like she used to - his training was different now, developed and refined. But Cass knew the League of Assassins too, had been trained by them just as he had, and they were written into her bones when they were only carved into Tim’s. After his third patented Talia move, she adjusted to fit his style, and their fight metamorphosed into more of a dance. Like they used to.

“Why not!” Tim screamed, the stupidest possible thing to do in a fight, but Cass didn’t take advantage of his exhale. He lashed out a fist to cover the opening, but it was lazy and over-extended, and she dodged easily. “I’m going to kill you!”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tim desperately tried to call the green to his vision. It was so easy. All he had to do was tap into that rage. Talia had called it blood lust. Said it was normal, even good. But it wouldn’t come. Where was it? It was his only friend.

Desperately, Tim went in for another punch to the face - Cass’ jaw was the weakest part of her body, an old injury - but he over-extended again, and this time Cass took the opportunity. She grabbed his arm and pulled him forward, dropping him to the mat. She didn’t try to twist him around, instead landing him on his back. Bad move for her.

She kneed him in the chest, putting her full hundred and thirty pounds on him. She twisted his hands behind his back, pinning him, and Tim could do barely more than wheeze.

He looked at her in the eyes for the first time. They were infuriatingly calm. Her hair was tangled and clumped with sweat, but she wasn’t breathing hard. Her expression was placid and serene, as if she was watching one of her stupid fucking nature documentaries instead of pinning her brother to a hard and scratchy rug in a shithole apartment, three years after he was tortured to insanity and shot himself in the head.

So much time had passed. So much had happened, nasty and festering and putrid, and Tim had let it happen. He had made it happen. There was a rot in Tim, and it had eaten him up until there was nothing inside. If you cut him open, would it spill out? Would it infect her, infect Steph? Could he make them suffer?

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Cass repeated. “So don’t be scared.”

“Scared?! I’m not fucking -” Tim wheezed, cut off by the lack of air as Cass pressed down.

“I’m sorry you’re scared. I didn’t mean to leave you alone. But I did. I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to kill -”

Cass pressed down on his chest again, cutting him off. She had finally done the one thing nobody in Tim’s life had ever figured out: how to make him shut up. “You can be as mean to me as you want. It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll stay.”

Tim wheezed. In that, maybe, Cass heard something, because she continued as if he had spoken. Or maybe she just wanted the chance to talk. It had been stolen from her for thirteen years, and it was valuable to her.

“You do not have to be kind. You do not have to hug me, even if I want you to. You do not have to be my brother. I know it hurts too much. But you are me. I am you. You do not even have to try for that. I do not have to give it to you. You have it.”

Tim couldn’t help it. He cried a little, and then he couldn’t stop.

Cass got off him, but she kept her promise. She didn’t hug him. She just propped him up against the sofa, holding his hand, and didn’t speak. At some point the door creaked, and he felt Stephanie next to him.

This is why, Tim thought hysterically, he had been avoiding them.

He knew this would happen. There was no hiding from Cass. There was no posturing, no pretending. She didn’t want anything from him. She never had. There was nothing he could say that would drive her away, because Cass did not listen to the words people spoke. She spoke only for clarity, when she could not afford for her words to be misconstrued, and for the comfort of others.

Cass knew that he had been lying out of his ass. Cass knew that he wasn’t as insane as he pretended, as cruel as he wanted to be.

He couldn’t make Cass hate him. Shit.

None of them said anything. Nothing needed to be said, not between the three of them. Cass might be having a silent conversation in Sign with Steph, but he didn’t care enough to open his eyes and look. When they had first met, it used to make Steph so mad that Tim and Cass were having ‘secret conversations’. She had poured over her dictionaries, learning as quickly as physically possible so she could keep up. Everything Steph had, she had worked hard for.

Steph was in college now. Premed. She wanted to be an ER doctor. Steph wasn’t a genius, she had to study hard. She wouldn’t be able to superhero in med school, so she was ready to hang up her cape for a few years until she achieved her dream. Steph said that she could do just as much good as a doctor as a superhero. She hadn’t always wanted it. When they were kids and Bruce used to ask her what she wanted to do when she grew up, in his awkward faux-dad way, she had always shrugged and said that she might be a nurse.

“Why not med school?” Bruce had suggested, between sleepy spoonfuls of oatmeal. She used to spend more nights at their place than at her own. Her mom hadn’t noticed.

Steph had just shrugged awkwardly, nibbling her whole-wheat organic toast that she would stare at suspiciously. Rich people, she would say, sighing. “I would never be able to afford it. And no way I’m smart enough.”

“You’re good enough,” Bruce said, which was the closest he ever came to praising somebody. “I’ll pay for it.”

Steph had gaped. Cass had eaten her Lucky Charms smugly. Tim had rolled his eyes. “An in-the-know doctor for the vigilante community would be invaluable,” he had informed her, pretentious and callous. “We could use you.”

“You deserve it,” Cass had signed.

“You have a bright future, Stephanie,” Bruce said, buckling under the panic of being a responsible adult. “I would hate to see you waste it.”

He would hate to see any of them waste their future. He had hated to see what Tim had become. He knew that. The last time he had ever seen Bruce, it was just to disappoint him. Bruce was the only parent he had ever had, and his standards were so sky high it was impossible to do anything other than disappoint.

The fact of the matter was this: he loved Cass and Steph more than he loved Bruce. He could hate Bruce. He could hate himself. But Cass and Steph…

Bruce had ear-marked a lot of money for Steph, both for whatever continuing education she chose and for her future. It had raised a lot of questions among the lawyer team, but ultimately she had been written off as another of his strays. Tim had left her a lot of money too. There probably wasn’t any point: when she married Cass she’d have equal access to the fortune. Rich people, Stephanie used to whisper in awe, looking at organic toast.

Cass was majoring in dance. She wanted to be a ballerina.

Tim’s future...Tim’s future…

“Or we can watch a nature documentary,” Steph said out loud. “If we all promise not to say a fucking word.”

Incredibly, unmistakably, irrevocably, Tim groaned. “Not the fucking bee one again.”

“I like the bees,” Cass said serenely.

“If you aren’t going to get out of my house can I at least smoke up?” Tim asked miserably.

“I brought gummy bears,” Steph said, chipper as ever, “which are way better.”

“I’m going to the fucking bathroom,” Tim grumbled, which everybody knew was as good as a yes.

“If you take anything I’ll know,” Cass said serenely, and also threatened.

“Fuck you, bitch.”

Steph and Cass high-fived, and Tim sulked angrily to the bathroom. He took a second to look at himself in the mirror - looking for Tim Drake, failing, as always - before opening it and grabbing his baggie of pills.

He looked at it. He looked at the toilet. He looked at the baggie.

He didn’t flush them. He put them back in the medicine cabinet. Tomorrow. He’ll do them tomorrow. Not today. He can hold out for 24 hours. It’ll be fine.

For a wild, stupid, insane second, Tim wondered if he could say that tomorrow too. If tomorrow he would look at them and say: maybe tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that…

If there was a future, for a fuck-up like him.

The faint strains of Cass’ stupid fucking bee documentary began playing through the thin walls of his shitty little apartment, and Tim turned out the lights of his bathroom and closed the door, locking it securely behind him.

#i write a lot of shit i don't post and i don't feel the need to post it a lot of the time #but sometimes im like. ah yeah that does exist maybe they'll care #my writing #tim drake #batman #batfam #stephanie brown #cassandra cain #do not FUCKING get met started on tim cass and steph im OBSESSED

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thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years

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Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

TAB is my favourite episode of Sherlock. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here X. I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, Mulholland Drive (2001).

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive, I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about Mulholland Drive is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for Mulholland Drive, skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of Mulholland Drive is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. Mulholland Drive’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike Sherlock, there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a lot more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

Mulholland Drive is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

Emelia as Eurus

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the do not forget me song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for I Want to Break Free, it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of Sherlock. You can watch it here: X

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon Coronation Street, a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain Coronation Street to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement I Want to Break Free as Queen’s most iconic queer number – despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

Nothing new under the sun

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes)

"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or mirror to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! The Six Thatchers appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: X. It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of The Final Problem refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – none of this is real. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then A Study in Scarlet. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from A Study in Scarlet shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem 221B by Vincent Starrett, one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and An Ideal Husband being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always 1895

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed (X) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

Waterfall scene

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious (X), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here (X), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he lands in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

Women

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in Sherlock as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?

#tjlc #emp theory #thewatsonbeekeepers #my meta #meta #mine #chapter four: it is always 1895 #vincent starrett #mofftiss #1895 #bbc sherlock #johnlock #tjlc is real

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hyper-fixate · 4 years

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You wouldn't believe the dream I just had about you and me - Nicolo POV

First part from Yusuf’s POV here.

Chapter 2 now up on AO3.

[I’m not entirely sure how this chapter happened. It wasn’t meant to happen, I had no plans for it to happen, but here we all are. I ended up writing till 1 AM the other night, woke up, hated everything and ended up having to rewrite this. Then had an on going fight with myself to take out the lines that yes, objectively, were really awesome sounding but did not belong here! And now I’ve got about 3000 words of meta that I gotta come up with another soulmate AU to write about, I guess.

A week ago, my husband jokingly told me to write my own fanfic if I’d read everything else and I brushed it off. But I’m so glad these two burrowed into my brain because this fandom has been so welcoming and so lovely. Every person who reads, likes, reblogs or leaves kudos has made me smile ALL WEEK. And special thanks to ever single person who took the time to leave comments. I am honestly so overjoyed that anyone wants to listen to me wax on about these two adorable nerds.]

——

One of his earliest memories of the dreams were not of the dreams themselves, but rather of the talk about them with his sister, Anthonia. He could not have been much older than four. But he remembered waking to the first of the sun’s rays and he felt such a lightness in his chest. When Anthonia came to get him from his bed, he nearly felt as though he was floating.

‘You are excitable today, dear Nico.’ She smoothed down his tousled hair and pressed a kiss to his crown. He had always been a quiet, solemn child and she found the change in him that morning endearing.

‘My dreams were laughing at me Thea.’ He grinned and dutifully held his arms over his head for her to remove his nightshirt. He didn’t catch her biting her lip or glancing towards the door as she tugged it over her head. ‘And such a laugh! So big.’ He held his hands out to mime a pot belly. ‘Like when Father Manuel laughs.’ He went to show her, breathing in deeply, but she placed a hand over his lips to still him.

‘Nico. My dear. This is wonderful. This is something very special.’ She lowered her voice, with another glance at the door. ‘But we do not speak of our dreams.’

‘Why?’ He asked, with all the wide eyed innocence a child could muster.

‘Because the laugh, it belongs to the love of your life. The person who will fill the other half of your soul.’ She touched his hair again, her eyes going wistful. ‘One day, you will hear it from another’s lips and it will be as if all of God’s graces have come at once.’’

‘That sounds wonderful Thea.’ He looked at her so wide eyed. With eyes so like her mother’s. Anthonia sometimes imagined she heard the ghost of Mama’s laughter, and Papa’s too she supposes, when Nicolo turned those eyes to her. Nicolo could not hear it, but one cannot listen for a sound they never got to hear.

‘Yes, my dear one. It is.’ She cupped his face in her hands and rubbed her nose against his. ‘And I am glad it brings you such joy. But here, now, it is not to be discussed. Not in this house, do you understand? Rafael and the twins know this too. We do not talk about the dreams. Especially not to father. Not ever.’ Nicolo nodded, but he didn’t understand. Not really. Not yet.

‘The person who laughs is to make us happy?’ He asked and she nodded. 'Then why?’

'Sometimes this world can be a harsh and unjust place, Nicolo.’ Her hand strayed to a chain on her neck; the locket that held a plait of their mother’s hair. ‘It’s by God’s grace we have our happiness but others may not. And it may be a kindness to them, to keep our happiness here.’ She gently placed her palm on his heart. 'There is so much in this world that is beyond our knowing Nico, so much that is for God alone. But we can choose what we do. And we should always choose to be kind.’

So Nicolo kept his secret. A bright, wondrous secret, that felt so warm in his young heart. And every night he heard the laughter in his dreams and awoke with a smile on his lips.

Nicolo was only six when he began to understand God’s plans did not always match his own. It could be argued the unfortunate coupling of Nicolo’s birth and his mother’s death was a clear sign God and Nicolo’s plans had never properly aligned, but that blasphemous thought did not occur to him until later. Anthonia came rushing home from the beach, her cheeks ruddy and wind chapped. She brimmed with so much energy he felt dazed by the proximity. He felt the warmth in her smile and in her eyes and it hit him as a dizzying blow. His father’s house, like its master, still mourned and this joy felt so out of place here.

She had met a man, Giacomo, and she had made him laugh.

They married in the spring and Anthonia was beautiful, like an angel from scripture. She took Nicolo’s face in her hands and bent down to rub her nose against his. There were glittering tears in her eyes but they did not spill, even as Nicolo’s were rushing down his cheeks. She kissed him goodbye. She promised to return, but he knew that it would never be the same.

Nicolo did not have the heart for much laughter then.

It was Nicolo’s tenth birthday when divine intervention plagued him once again. Anthonia had promised to come, with his nieces, and Nicolo could barely contain his glee. A strange energy seemed to fill the house and everyone felt it. The twins, always a handful, felt whipped into mania and decided to steal the cake from the cook. With great whoops and hollers, they raced through the halls, tossing it between them. Nicolo ran deliriously alongside. As the twins turned a corner, they decided to include Nicolo in the fun. Shrieking, he dove blindly for his prize.

Only to run directly into their father, Offredo, and priest, Father Manuel. Nicolo ended up on the floor. The cake ended up in Manuel’s hair and Offredo’s coat.

Nicolo could not help himself. He laughed. A loud noise that almost seemed to crack the very air in the house.

The two cake-covered men shared a look that instantly cut the laugh from Nicolo’s lungs. Within two months, Offredo di Genova oversaw his youngest child take his vows.

Nicolo found even less reasons for laughter then.

He answered Pope Urban II’s call to retake the Holy Land because he felt called to do God’s will. This, he reasoned, was where he and God could agree. Which would finally, hopefully, be enough to earn his rightful place in the kingdom of heaven. Nicolo never considered that heaven might spit him back out.

When he awoke after his first death, clutching at his stomach, pulling apart his tunic to check for the gaping wound he can reflexively still feel, the one stupidly clear thought he managed to knock together was this: Must I always be born from death?

And then a rather familiar, bloodied blade cut into his vision and everything went dark again.

God, it turned out, didn’t even have the decency to send Nicolo back alone. He spat back out his enemy as well. Nicolo, in his admittedly limited earthly experience, had looked at the events before him and assumed the two events to be linked. So Nicolo killed the Muslim again. And again. And again. Until, woozy from the stench of their combined blood, he looked up to an outstretched hand instead of a blade and, without really understanding why, he took it.

Learning Yusuf spoke Greek was a pleasant surprise, though, admittedly, Nicolo had not used it for many years. The speed at which Yusuf picked up zeneize was also a pleasant enough happenstance, and Nicolo told himself he was not in any way jealous. But the language that Yusuf spoke refused to lie still on Nicolo’s tongue. It slipped and flowed like poetry out of Yusuf’s mouth and seemed to tumble out of Nicolo’s, heavy as mud.

But then everything about his companion was poetic, his mind unhelpfully supplied in the long march through the desert. The darker man’s movements with his sword or on a horse were always measured. The soft words that he whispered as he prayed five times a day soothed something in Nicolo’s worried soul. The easy way Yusuf made friends in the villages they passed. The endless patience in which he repeated any word Nicolo asked.

How that first night, after they had come to the agreement not to murder one another in their sleep, Nicolo had woken to find Yusuf’s cloak draped over his shivering frame while his companion had begun his morning prayers.

But we can choose what we do. And we should always choose to be kind, Anthonia had said, during a life he no longer recognised. Sometimes, when Nicolo looked at the endlessly kind Yusuf, all he could see was the blood he’d drawn from him. And he was ashamed.

This blood was so familiar to him. He imagined he could tell the difference of it’s hot spill across his face, his side, to the bandit’s blood from only moments before. His mind was racing, his body no longer under his command as one hand pressed desperately to Yusuf’s chest and the other gripped the arrow he had just pulled from Yusuf’s throat.

‘Please wake up, my friend. Please Yusuf.’ He saw his hand moving, touching Yusuf’s neck, his cheek, the rough curve of his beard. He did not remember telling his hand to move. ‘You cannot leave me here alone.’

Yusuf awoke with a violent gasp. Nicolo felt his own heart thump widely. His breath seemed to rush from him, leaving him dizzy. ‘What happened?’ Yusuf asked, his voice rough from pain, but strong. Nicolo sat back on his feet. He had been on his knees, bending over Yusuf as if in prayer. He could not remember the last time he had prayed.

‘Bandits.’ Nicolo willed his voice to be even, but he didn’t think he managed it. He indicated towards the bodies he knew would be there, but didn’t look. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Yusuf. ‘They shot you with an arrow.’ He held up the arrow, still clutching it so hard he thought it might snap. ‘You did not wake up. Not until I pulled out the arrow. I had thought-’ He was babbling now. A sharp pain in his chest cut him off. Nicolo had a sudden vision of himself sitting there, bowed in prayer, as the night passed and the sun rose. Waiting for a breath that would not come. ‘I was wondering if your stubborn refusal to die was just at my hand.’

Nicolo had not meant to say that out loud. He had not meant for the fear he had felt to force itself from his lips. But the way Yusuf looked at him now, the softening of the other man’s eyes, made him feel naked as a babe.

‘Are you well?’ Yusuf reached out, as if to touch him. Nicolo felt the tension in every inch of his skin. Would he know that touch, as he knew the other man’s blood? ‘Did they hurt you?’ Yusuf asked softly, pulling his hand back.

‘This is mostly yours.’ Nicolo said, still feeling the sticky heat across his skin. ‘It sprouted out of you like a fountain when I pulled this out.’ He threw the arrow from his hands then, unable to bear the weight of it any longer. He rubbed a hand across his cheek and felt the smear of blood. He grimaced ‘How bad is it?’

‘For you? It’s an improvement.’ Yusuf said in absolutely perfect zeneize, completely seriously. The adrenaline and fear shimmered out of Nicolo’s blood. He felt almost drunk with relief and he couldn’t help himself.

He laughed.

The next moments were so sudden, so unexpected, Nicolo’s brain took almost a full thirty seconds to catch up to the reality of what was happening. Yusuf was in his lap. Nicolo was painfully trapped with his arse half on his feet and half his pack. Yusuf’s hands bracketed his face. His mind spun. His hands grasped instinctively for a weapon that he knew was out of reach. He wondered if Yusuf would rub his nose to Nicolo’s as Anthonia used to do. He unhelpfully acknowledged that he did know the feeling of Yusuf’s skin just as intimately as his blood. And then he wondered why he was thinking about that at this exact moment.

Yusuf was shushing him, softly, gently. He pressed Nicolo’s hair away from his face with trembling fingers and stared into his eyes as if he could divine Nicolo’s very thoughts. Nicolo wished to blink. Looking at Yusuf’s eyes like this was as if staring into the endless night sky.

‘What are you doing?’ Nicolo wanted to moan at the dismal way the Arabic toppled from his tongue. His mind was writing poetry and his mouth refused to bring the words to fruition. He huffed out a small laugh at his own absurdity.

And with that small sound, Yusuf seemed to find what he was looking for. He smiled and Nicolo re-evaluated his previous reflection. Having the full enormity of Yusuf al-Kaysani’s smile turned upon you, that was as if being blinded by the sun.

Yusuf threw his head back and laughed.

Nicolo’s entire mind seemed to narrow to one point. One bright, flashing moment of understanding. Energy sizzled in his veins and for a moment he felt as he had done at first death, trapped between two worlds. The one that had been, and the one that would be.

‘Mio Dio.’ Nicolo gasped. Yusuf laughed again.

And Nicolo finally knew, in that moment, what it meant to be born from joy, not death.

Prologue (kinda)

‘After my first death, when I did not dream of any laughter for those many months. I worried my death meant my soul was no longer bound to the same man.’ Nicky says slowly, sipping his coffee

‘Ha, as if you could get rid of me, hayati.’ Joe leans back in his chair and nudges Nicky with his foot.

‘I would never have tried.’ Nicky replies easily. ‘I used to rush to bed after Compline so I could get to sleep, just to hear your laugh. It was the best part of my day.’ Nicky reaches across the table, offering his hand palm up. Joe takes it.

‘Okay, come on Nile.’ Andy screws the lid back onto her liquor and shrugs into her jacket. ‘We’re off.’

‘Why?’ Nile asks, standing up as Andy pulls her t-shirt and moves her towards the door. Behind her, she hears the sound of a chair scraping across the floor and a low voice.

‘And now, tesoro? Is being in bed still your favourite part of the day?’

Nile speeds up and practically throws herself out the door as Andy laughs.

#joe x nicky #the old guard #nicolo di genova #yusuf al-kaysani #kaysanova #immortal husbands #my fanfic #soulmate au #I just love them #okay?#togpositivity #beans writes fanfic

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baldrambo · 4 years

Note

Someone made a post on Reddit calling Bob Will’s father figure. I think that discounts Hopper and Jonathan. What are your thoughts on that subject?

Anonymous #2: Do you think that if Bob were alive, Jopper would never happen? If no, then how do you think Joyce and Bob would split?

I got both asks almost back-to-back and figured it would be a lot easier to just handle them together. I sort of turned this into a Bob meta (apologies to the two Anons for the length, lol). There’s been a lot of Bob discussion cropping up lately and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to discuss the character (and why I’m troubled by the recent discourse in general) while answering the asks as I go.

I’ll start with a gutsy statement: Bob has achieved God-like status in this fandom. Similar treatment has been extended to Benny, Alexei, and in some cases, Barb: all inherently decent secondary characters. Bob was probably the most fleshed out of all of them because he was around the longest, which made his death even harder to watch.

But what do we know about Bob besides being inherently decent? We know he hates scary movies and likes Kenny Rogers. He went to high school with Joyce and Hopper and everyone called him Bob the Brain because he’s so smart. He founded Hawkins AV Club! He was also bullied mercilessly as a kid in part because he didn’t fight back. That’s about it. What are Bob’s hopes and dreams? Has he ever suffered any traumas prior to the events of S2? What are his weaknesses? Has he ever been in any other serious relationships? Does he have any vices? No one is perfect, not even Bob, he just wasn’t around long enough for us to learn about any of that. So, it’s easy to look back on him as this Perfect Guy™ when he just had the tactical advantage of being a secondary character. We will never know the answers to any of these questions, nor do we know the answers for Barb, Benny, or Alexei because they all served a limited purpose within the narrative.

In my opinion, Bob’s limited purpose was to jump start Joyce’s character arc beyond “protect Will!” What Joyce wants to find is her soulmate, a parental figure for her boys, someone who makes her feel safe. Bob was the beginning of her search for this. He planted the seed in her mind about moving away, about having a “normal family.” And it drove her entire arc in S3. At the end of S3, yes she picked up and ran because Hawkins was dangerous and she wanted to protect her kids, but also because of this idea that had taken hold of her: maybe if she physically fled the trauma and the death, maybe she could find that feeling of hope again that Bob made her feel.

But planting the idea isn’t the same as fulfilling it. An ideal isn’t reality BECAUSE we as humans are not perfect, and nor are relationships, or life. So, if Bob had lived, would he have been the right one for her? Would they have stayed together? No and no. And that’s the point. It takes more for a relationship to work than just “this guy is really nice and wants to parent my kids with me.” Relationships involve a TON of work. It involves being vulnerable with someone, opening up to them. They require romantic chemistry and sexual compatibility. They require mutual understanding and compassion and working through things as a team. Sometimes it involves fighting and saying hurtful things and apologizing. You need to love them and fall IN love with them, over and over again. Two people just being inherently decent isn’t going to cut it.

Joyce is a fierce, independent, headstrong woman. She needs a man who challenges her, who she can bounce off of, not steamroll. She’s also a bit neurotic and anxious and needs someone who understands what she’s been through, knows how to help her tackle it, and listens to her but doesn’t coddle her. She needs someone who makes her feel safe, but also feel passion. She needs someone she can be vulnerable with most of all. And that wasn’t Bob, it was never supposed to be Bob. The Duffers have gone on record about why they killed him off: because he would have interfered with the Duffers intended endgame. The endgame being that Joyce find this partner/parental figure for her boys, with someone else.

In my opinion, even IF Bob had lived, even IF given that opportunity, the two of them wouldn’t have made it. Joyce probably would have moved with him to Maine. But then she would have woken up one day, looked over at him, and realized that she was only with him because he was a good guy and helped her with her boys, not because she was in love with him. And it would have been over. Jonathan saw it, and it’s why he didn’t approve of the relationship. And I think it’s why Joyce is carrying his death so hard: she didn’t *really* love him, the way she thinks she should have, the way he loved her, and the guilt of that, of him dying for her and the Party, of the helplessness she felt watching him die (and that hope he represented for her crumbling away), is crushing her.

Unfortunately, Bob’s purpose has kind of gotten lost in the weeds after s3. By allowing him to achieve this God-like status, it’s like an expectation has been created that no one can live up to: the Perfect Guy.™ I’ve been seeing, more and more, certain parts of the fandom turning Bob into a battering ram used against Jopper as a ship, and particularly Hopper as a character. Using Bob as a juxtaposition to try to promote a narrative of Hopper being an awful guy and/or as a partner for Joyce is (besides being passive aggressive) a false comparison. Hopper is at the inherent disadvantage of being a primary character. We know what all his faults, vices, weaknesses, and traumas are. And he isn’t just carrying his own trauma. He carries El’s and he carries Will and Joyce’s without complaint, because he loves them. The casualties of this are his peace of mind and his emotional stability. Bob didn’t have to carry any of that, grapple with any of that (as far as we know) and we don’t know what his faults are. IF placed in Hopper’s shoes, would Bob be a different guy, too?

So, to the first Anon, the post on Reddit saying Bob is Will’s father figure is a prime example of this: it does discount Hopper and is intended to do so specifically to try to paint Hopper in a bad light. Jonathan just ends up as collateral damage within the confines of the false comparison being drawn. Bob did act as a temporary father figure to Will, he gave him advice, he tried to be a support system for him. But so has Hop. Hopper traded El’s life for Will’s. Brought him back to life in TUD. Went to the appointments at HNL for nearly a year to be a support for Will and Joyce. Carried him out of HNL in S2 and helped El close the gate, in part, to save him. The comparison turns all of this into a zero-sum game when it isn’t one and when they are two different characters with two different roles to serve.

So, I think Jopper was always going to happen. The reason why is that Hopper DOES fulfill what Joyce needs, he just does so imperfectly. But that’s the beautiful thing about it, and it’s realistic. It’s a journey for the two of them, a journey that involves Joyce putting Bob’s ghost to rest (by saving Hop when she couldn’t save Bob) and Hopper finding a way to cope with his past and atone for some of his wrongs. Even IF Bob had lived, I still think Jopper would eventually have found their way to each other. It started with Bob, it just isn’t supposed to end with him and treating Bob as if he is something he’s not doesn’t change the narrative.

Tldr Bob is easily placed on a pedestal because we don’t know much about him. I don’t think he was right for Joyce, nor was he intended to be, and his death was inevitable as a result. Comparing him to Hopper defeats the limited purpose he served within Joyce’s arc and using him to create fandom drama bothers me.

Thank you for the asks!

#bob newby #jopper #joyce byers #jim hopper #stranger things meta #meta #asks #anonymous

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skylarmoon71 · 3 years

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Nick x Reader- Chapter 16 -Final Chapter

~Central City~

“Is everything back to normal?” Caitlin held out the papers for you to see at the question. You stared at it blankly.

“Ummm?” She smiled. “It means you're healthy (Y/N). Your body has returned to homeostasis. However..”

How did you know she was going to say that.

“Your brain is, it seems like it’s working on a higher level.” Her hands held a scan of your brain.

Harry, Barry, Cisco and Iris were in the cortex as Caitlin briefed everyone. You’d only woken up yesterday. So despite your protests, they insisted that you spend a few days in S.T.A.R. Labs to ensure you were a hundred percent. You sat on the bed, waiting for her to fill you in.

“The last time you had a checkup you said your brain was working at eighty percent. That’s changed. It’s now functioning at ninety percent.” The many colored areas on your brain scan made you a little weary. You weren’t a scientist, but that could not have been exactly great.

“Is there, will there be some kind of negative reaction?”

“I honestly have no idea. We’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. I think it’s best that you hold off using your abilities, just to be sure. You’ve come out of a coma. My guess is this has something to do with your perception of time. For us it’s only been weeks, but to you months. It’s possible your brain has been developing this entire time. Up until yesterday you’ve been utilizing your mental structure. In short your brain activity was growing extensively because of your constant use of it. “

Her theory wasn’t that far fetched. It wasn’t the craziest thing to happen.

“Well okay. So I just have to take a little break from the meta side of things. I think I can do that. For now though, I have a job I need to get back to.” you jumped off the bed, about to walk off. Harry grabbed your arm. “I don’t think it wise you return yet.” you looked at him lost.

“What do you mean, I have to get back. I’ve been gone for almost a month. I’ll be lucky if they don’t fire me.”

Barry was the next one to speak. “They all think you're on leave. Even your superiors.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, who told them that. Surely they would have needed to check with me. “

Cisco shook his head. “(Y/N), we think you were the one who gave them that idea. “ you laughed nervously. “T-That’s crazy I've been unconscious for weeks how would I..” your words trailed off. The looks they gave you made you a bit uneasy. Harry finally let go. “This is why we need to observe you more. The fact that you unconsciously altered the minds of an entire chain of command is truly amazing. That being said, it proves we have absolutely no idea what you're capable of. It would be very unwise to let you out without having a better idea of everything. “

Caitlin could see the growing worry in your eyes. “Let’s run a few more exams. If everything checks out, you can go back to your day job. Cisco can create something that’ll monitor your brain activity, just so we can stay in tune with your development. “

“ I will?” Caitlin sent him a look.

“I-I guess I will. “ He left to start working on it and Iris laughed. “You’ll be just fine, don’t worry.”

“Yeah..”

Somehow you weren’t so sure.

~New York City~

“How do you think she’s doing?” Amanda wasn’t the only one wondering. Weeks passed. Barry called to give updates a few times every week, but for the most part it was always the same. Nick looked at his phone, hoping to see maybe a notification, or any indication that you were okay. It tore him on the inside.

“Nothing so far.” Came Nick’s reply. He couldn’t offer anything else. Amanda nodded.

“I know it’s been tough, if you need someone to talk to I’m right here.” Nick didn’t respond, but she knew he heard. He wasn’t the best at asking for help. She just wanted him to know he didn’t have to do it alone. Every once in a while he’d stop by your apartment, just hoping you’d be on the other side when he knocked.

There wasn’t any reply. The same all the time. It had only been three weeks, but to him it felt like months. Nick was starting to realize he came to rely a lot on you. Of course he knew that from the beginning, you were his partner. It was understandable. But, this was on a different level. He just wanted to see your eyes again. That’s all he wanted. Just a chance to- Nick eyes widened. He blinked a few times, wondering if he was imagining the woman who just walked into the precinct. A couple officers turned at the detective that walked down the hall.

When she was standing at Nick’s desk she stopped, a smile present on her face. Nick stood slowly, unsure of what was really going on. He must have been daydreaming because Barry gave no confirmation that you were healed. Yet, here you stood, perfectly fine.

“Nick..” the sound of your voice made him tense. It was real, it had to be. His hand reached out slowly, touching your cheek. You leaned into his hand, loving the warmth it provided.

“Is it really you..” you nod, leaning up and giving him a soft kiss. Nick’s other hand came down automatically, hooking around your neck as he pulled you in. His arms wrapped around your waist and he lifted you off the ground. A couple of whistles echoed and you could hear a few of them clapping at your return. Carisi and Amanda smiled, standing and clapping with some of the other officers.

Olivia could see the commotion behind her blinds, she stepped out of her office. A relieved expression on her face when she saw you were alright. She pressed a hand over her heart, letting out a sigh.

Nick was still kissing you earnestly. He stepped away from the desk, spinning you around. You giggled between your kisses. He was smiling too, the biggest you’d ever seen.

“I’m never letting you out of my sight again.” he whispered. You pressed your forehead to his.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He grinned, littering your face with kisses.

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hetyra · 4 years

Text

So I’ve been concocting a NG+/time travel P5 story idea where both Akira and Goro remember the original timeline in my head for like the past week, and since I’m terrible about finishing multi-chapter fics I’m just gonna ramble about it in a very long post instead lol

The reset doesn’t apply equally to them.

Akira goes to sleep one night weeks or months after the events of the game and wakes up after what feels like only minutes later on the train bound for Shibuya just like he does at the beginning of the game.

Goro on the other hand goes from exchanging bullets with the cognitive version of himself in Shido’s palace to waking up in bed in the blink of an eye. It takes a few minutes, but he realizes he’s 14 again and it’s the first day of his last year of middle school – which is also the day the meta-nav appeared on his phone.

He winds up not using the app at all. Nor does he approach Shido and offer his “services”. He’s extremely shaken up by all the memories or dreams or whatever the hell they are. He decides he doesn’t care, but he’d rather avoid becoming that kind of person and meeting that fate.

By pure happenstance, he eventually ends up meeting Wakaba. Feeling guilt for being the original cause of her death, Goro feels the want to help her this time around and ends up expressing an interest in cognitive psience (which isn’t a total lie) that results in them making a sort of confidant deal.

Through Wakaba he also meets and gets to know both Sojiro and Futaba.

Realizing that his lack of involvement with Shido could have potentially prevented Akira’s original arrest, Goro chooses to attend Shujin for high school; intent on forming the PTs himself if need be.

It’s right around this time that Sojiro suddenly offers to adopt him.

He starts attending high school as Sakura Goro, and everything is going great. Until it’s not.

Wakaba dies. In the same exact manner as when he had been the one behind it.

Up to this point in time, Goro occasionally had PTSD symptoms when things reminding him of his actions in the previous timeline came up. Wakaba’s death affects him terribly, and all his symptoms get worse from there on out.

Sojiro moves them out to Yongen and eventually gets custody of Futaba, and Goro not wanting to deal with or think about what’s going on or what happened before, instead focusses on preventing Futaba from developing a palace. He succeeds.

Around this time, Sojiro starts worrying a lot about Goro. He knows he’s been… off ever since Wakaba’s death. Even now it seems like her death is weighing heavier on him than it is Futaba.

Right about the time Futaba passes her entrance exams to get into Shujin, Sojiro is asked to take in Akira for his probation. Goro, who was helping out at Leblanc at the time of the conversation, practically bullies Sojiro into accepting.

Back to Akira now.

His arrival in Tokyo goes exactly as it did before. The next day goes much the same, up until they’re in the car on their way back to Leblanc. For the hell of it, Akira asks Sojiro again why he took him in. Sojiro’s answer is the same, except instead of saying “I was already paid for it too.” He says “My son was rather insistent I do, too.”

Akira in shock and confusion asks “Son?” to which Sojiro explains: “Oh right. I have two kids; adopted both of them and they happen to go to Shujin too. My son, Goro, is a 3rd year while my daughter, Futaba, is a 1st year. Hopefully they’ll be a good influence on you instead of the other way around.”

Cue Akira’s brain short-circuiting at the mention of Goro.

Upon arriving back at Leblanc, Futaba and Goro are there waiting for them. Futaba wastes no time commenting on how Akira doesn’t look all that tough while Goro is standing behind the counter making everyone coffee – and wearing jeans and a hoodie to Akira’s continued shock.

Sojiro doesn’t let them talk long after he feeds them, saying they should all go to bed since they have school in the morning. Futaba leaves fairly quickly but Sojiro stops Goro to ask if he’s alright, having noted the bags under his eyes. When Goro says it’s nothing to worry about and leaves, Sojiro sighs and mumbles just loud enough for Akira to hear “Is it because there was another subway accident?”

That night, Akira’s dreams put him in the velvet room. He’s happy to see Lavenza and the real Igor but surprised when he hears Goro in the cell next to his.

Lavenza explains who she and Igor are to Goro and that despite their collective freedom from Yaldabitch, he does in fact still exist in this timeline and must be dealt with. Akira helps fill in Goro on how they dealt with him before but that’s all they have time to discuss before they’re being woken up by their respective alarm clocks.

Futaba goes to school ahead of them with the excuse that she doesn’t want to be seen with her dorky older brother and the guy with a criminal record, giving the two of them time to talk.

Akira is quick to demand answers regarding the mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns, which elicits a rather desperate denial out of Goro. He insists it’s not him causing them and he doesn’t know who is, and Akira realizes quickly that Goro isn’t lying and is legitimately anxious about it.

The knowledge that someone else seems to have entered the “game” makes Akira uneasy, but assures Goro that things will be fine. They’ll stop whoever it is, Shido, and Yaldabitch. But first they need the Phantom Thieves.

This is when Goro admits he has yet to use the nav, despite having had it for 3 years at this point. Before Akira can comment on that, they exit the station to the rain and he instead opens the app and maneuvers them both so that they encounter Ann, Kamoshida, and Ryuji.

When they arrive at the castle instead of the school, Goro levels a look at him but simply sighs and goes with it when Akira tells him to trust him.

Everything goes the same as before, awakening and all, even with Goro there. That is up until Morgana just walks up to them. He’s not in a cell.

It turns out Morgana also remembers everything and it takes some improv acting on both Morgana and Goro’s parts to cover for Akira’s stupidity when Ryuji asks “Wait, you know this monster-cat?!”

When they get home that night, Goro tries to take the blame for them being late but Sojiro doesn’t bite – turning to Akira and telling him that his son is a good kid and he won’t have Akira influencing him into bad behavior. Sojiro isn’t quite as angry a few minutes later when he comes upstairs to find Morgana chilling on Akira’s bed.

Goro asks Akira the next morning to text him when Ryuji asks to go back to the palace, to which Akira agrees with the full intention on not doing that.

The day of the volleyball rally, Akira is on his way to the next abuse victim he needs to question when he‘s suddenly yanked around a corner by a very miffed looking Goro. Akira apologizes and explains why he left him out, receives a grumpy “Ok, I forgive you” and continues on his mission.

Akira again does not tell Goro they’re going into the palace the day Ann follows them in and awakens to her own persona, despite Ryuji and Morgana both telling him he should.

It’s later when they’re exchanging their contact info with Ann that Goro appears looking very pissed off at certain someone. After that, the group chat is established with Goro in it so he will in fact know when they’re going to the palace.

Goro sticks to back up and surveillance due to still not having awakened to his persona yet, but throughout their infiltration he notes Joker’s watchful eye on him and the constant reminders to stay safe.

Come the gym-turned-church Goro decides he’s had enough of the other tricksters incessant worrying over him. The two of them start to argue, Akira never quite saying it’s because he doesn’t want to witness Goro die again, when the angel shadow appears and interrupts them. Akira quickly turns his attention to it and tells Goro to get to a safe distance, which cause the latter to yell back angrily.

Cue Loki’s voice and Goro ripping off a mask.

Goro’s has a new outfit, though it’s sort of a mix between his two previous outfits and Jokers

He discovers he still has Robin Hood as well.

And that’s about as far as I’ve figured out.

I haven’t decided whether the events of the new semester in Royal happened in the original timeline, but I really want to stick with the “from being shot to waking up in bed” thing so if they did I’m rolling with Goro’s memory of the events feeling disjointed and out of place.

There’s one scene I actually animated (because I was bored and in the mood to animate) that takes place later, when they go to the airsoft shop for the first time. Ryuji tells Akira about the shop over the phone, and Akira doesn’t tell Goro what they’re doing, only to meet up with them in Shibuya and that it was important. Akira thought it’d be funny if Ryuji were to ask Goro if he knew anything about guns with absolutely no context – and he does indeed finds Goro’s “overreaction” quite funny. At this point, Akira still isn’t aware that Goro actually has PTSD because of the events in the original timeline, and so thinks it’s just a funny inside joke. Goro’s anxiety meanwhile is through the fucking roof.

Here’s a link to the video of the scene.

#fic idea I will never write #feel free to steal I would 100% read it #p5 #persona 5 #Futaba and Goro aren't half siblings in this but they are adoptive siblings #NG+ story #Things Ai Made

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ckret2 · 4 years

Text

Brain of Veal

Squeezing in at the LAST POSSIBLE MINUTE, for @symbruary Day 29: "favorite official work". I was telling my roomie I needed to do that last day's prompt which was fave canon work and roomie asked "which work is that" and I said "The Hunger" and then I summarized The Hunger and then I spent uhhhh two and a half hours infodumping about Venom to my roomie.

(P.S.: if you wanna read them, I've got the full Costa run sans the Sleeper miniseries in my room, hit me up. Also can refer you to several guides on how best to back read the good 90s shit.)

I'd also like to personally thank lobac for running this event, it's been a delight to participate in and to check out the great stuff coming out of it, and also a delight to constantly have your Venom meta/commentary on my dash. I've been following you since your duck blog (I don't even read duck comics, I just love your posts about them?? i should probably read duck comics tbh) and I was absolutely over the moon when you started up a blog for one of my latent hyperfixations. Your blog is a gem in this fandom. Thank you.

Anyway this one's gonna be not a lot, comparatively, because it's less than an hour til midnight here and I wanna get it done TODAY while it's still February, and also I have given all that I can give and I can't give no more. As mentioned, my favorite official symbiote work is "The Hunger"—although "Maximum Carnage," "The Enemy Within," and everything that has ever flowed from Mike Costa's pen come very close—but like, I don't have the time/energy to write something special about "The Hunger," so I'm just gonna go with some "symby wants to eat brains and so Venom finds a solution that doesn't involve forcing Eddie to participate in cannibalism."

###

Eddie closed his menu, to complete the show of pretending he'd ever needed to consult it in the first place, and offered it to the waiter. "We'll have the cervelle de veau aux câpres." He was very careful to pronounce the words right while pretending he didn't need to be careful. The symbiote was barely conscious of Eddie's showmanship. It was practically running up and down Eddie's esophagus and doing loops through his intestines in eagerness.

At the word "we," the waiter glanced at the empty spot across from Eddie at the table, as if to check whether there was a drink set out for a second guest who was currently absent.

Eddie quickly clarified, "Just one order, please." Although the symbiote quickly told him that if it was good, it might want a second one. Eddie gently informed it that they probably couldn't afford a second one.

"Yes, sir." The waiter nodded and departed to give the order to the kitchen.

The symbiote had seen a late-night travelogue on French cuisine a few months ago. Amidst the other foods singled out as particularly enticing or strange had been cervelle de veau, or brain of veal, and the symbiote had promptly woken Eddie out of a deep sleep at four in the morning to demand they try it as soon as possible. It had taken a few months before Eddie they'd set aside enough money in their date night savings jar to cover a trip to a fancy French restaurant to find out what these legally-authorized acceptable-to-eat actually-made-as-food brains tasted like.

Eddie's mouth watered involuntarily when the plate was set down in front of him, with two very easily-identifiable delicately arranged brain hemispheres surrounded artfully with capers; he swallowed quickly, not wanting to give the waiter a chance to notice that his drool was currently green. It was a smaller brain than the symbiote had expected—but then it came from a baby, didn't it? Baby cow. Smaller head. It would be delicious all the same.

To Eddie's surprise, it was delicious—and not just to the the symbiote's overlapped sense of flavor preferences. Well. Here was to trying new foods.

The symbiote, however, found it rather... bland. Unexpectedly so. Disappointingly so. Something important was missing.

Eddie flagged down the waiter. "Excuse me—how is the brain is prepared?"

"I'm sorry, sir, we don't give out our recipes."

"No, no, that's fine, I just want to know—does the process cook out the phenethylamine?"

The waiter blinked. "I... don't know, sir." From the look of it, he didn't have the slightest idea what phenethylamine was. A concerned look crossed his face. "Are you allergic, sir?"

"No, no. Don't worry about it." Inside him, the symbiote wilted.

At least it tasted good, right? Right?

The symbiote draped in disappointment over his ribs.

Well, after the bill and the tip, they should still have a few bucks left over. Eddie reassured it that they could grab a pint of chocolate ice cream on the way home.

###

Crossposted to AO3, link in my description. If you enjoyed, I'd appreciate a reblog or comment! Thanks for celebrating beautiful alien goo for a month with me! My other 28 fics for this event are on my blog under the #symbruary tag.

#symbiote #venom symbiote #venom #eddie brock #symbrock #symbruary #fanfic #my writing #(it's over!! finished!!!)

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idreamofhazel · 4 years

Text

Dreamless

Requested by @morganas-pendragons. Reader comforts Sam post 15x03. If you wanna smut it, go for it - but I LOVE fics where he deals with his grief and his past because I DO NOT ever see enough of them!!

Pairing: Sam Winchester x reader

Category: A meta/coda of 15x03; angsty, a bit fluffy; comfort fic

Word count: 1.1k

Warning: PTSD, nightmares, spoilers

A/N: I am two episodes behind currently, so Sam’s reactions/thoughts may not be up to date. This is strictly my take on how Sam might be coping with the events of The Rupture immediately post-episode.

Over the years, Sam’s brain has dreamt up many horrendous nightmares, most of them variations of unfortunate events that have occurred on the job. But one particular nightmare has haunted Sam’s heart and mind repeatedly, the one where Lucifer has invaded his body. He can feel tendrils of a slow-burning fire spreading to the tips of every muscle and nerve in his body; he can feel his willpower fading with each pump of his heart. Then he leaps into hell, his whole body burning with Lucifer’s effort to take back control. But his face steady. If he falters, even a hair, Lucifer incinerates his control and Sam is gone.

He feels the pressure of this moment on his chest as he awakes from this nightmare for the first time in months. The weight of the world is balancing on his sternum.

He lays in bed a moment, breathing deep to release portions of the tension one shaky exhale at a time. As he does this, pieces of the dream return to him. He remembers smelling the wet dirt of Stull Cemetery and feeling a sharp wind on his cheek. And he remembers he wasn’t the one falling this time but he can’t yet picture the face. Images from the dream flash through his mind like pictures from a screen projector, one at a time, each click reminding him of a new detail. He thinks of Rowena and her demise just the day before. It’s then that he realizes who had been in his dream. It wasn’t her -- it was you.

A pang of anxiety grows in his chest and his stomach, a dread he can’t shake. He turns his head over and sees that you’re fast asleep, facing him, legs curled up and hands under the pillow. He looks back up at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and lets out an audible breath. He then turns over on his side to face you, scooting close. Gently, he slips his arm underneath your head. You stir, opening your eyes. Half asleep, you follow his cues, turning over so he can pull you close and spoon you. He pulls you in tight, arm over your chest, his head tucked into your neck, folding his entire body around you.

Sam hopes he hasn’t woken you up completely, but the slight quickening of your breath alerts him to the change in your consciousness.

“Everything ok?” you say sleepily.

Sam sighs. What can he tell you? That he dreamt of you dying in a recurring nightmare? He doesn’t want you to worry, he just wants you close.

You shift under his arm, turning yourself around to face him. Foreheads almost touching, you look directly at his face, figuring out the inner workings of his brain. He can feel his vulnerability growing, his facade crumbling underneath your acute knowledge of his defenses.

You place a hand on his cheek, softly rubbing your thumb across his stubble. “What’s wrong?” you ask.

“Bad dream,” he admits.

You frown. Your hand slides from his face to his chest, resting on the mattress. You gently hook your fingers on his shirt collar.

“It’s ok,” he continues, “Nothing different from before.”

“But Sam…” you begin, more awake now. “Yesterday was not the usual.”

Sam appreciates that you don’t say Rowena’s name out loud, yet he can’t stop himself from thinking about it. “I know,” he says with a sigh.

“Tell me what’s going on,” you say, “I know you’re feeling a hundred emotions about this, but what’s bothering you right now.”

“I--” Sam tries to place a mental finger on which aspect of the dream bothers him the most. “I feel completely powerless.” As he lets that feeling out, most of the tension leaves his body. Pieces of his emotions begin falling into place like a puzzle. “I know I didn’t have a choice,” he continues, repeating what Dean said, what you were most likely to say. “But I’m tired of feeling that way. And even when I do have a choice, it was predetermined anyway.”

When he finishes, Sam can see you struggling to grapple with the weight of what he’s laid on you, understanding that you must be feeling some piece of that, too. The feeling of complete powerlessness -- knowing that the very real and very alive creator of the universe had set your entire life up -- is too much for anyone to grapple with.

“We’re doing the best with what we’ve been given, which is all anyone can do,” you finally say. “I’ve been struggling to believe that myself but… I think we’re going to run ourselves into the ground crazy if we keep trying to figure out what came first, the chicken or the egg, god’s plan or free will, or whatever. We kind of have to fool ourselves to keep from going crazy.”

Sam frowns. He has always believed that choices make a person who they are, but if the choices are orchestrated by an outside force… the core of his beliefs have been shattered. Does it matter when he gives another option to the creatures he hunts? Will it matter when he tries to save you from death?

“Sam,” you say, noticing his mind wandering again. “Look, I’m not asking you to stop wrestling with this idea, it’s going to take ages for us to work it out, maybe the rest of our lives, but can you do one thing for me right now?”

“What is it?”

“Kiss me, then hold me tightly again while we fall asleep, and for the next few minutes, think only about how it feels to be here together. You think you can do that?”

Sam smiles, unable to continue maintaining his defenses. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against yours. He then does exactly what you asked, kissing you deeply until you are all he focuses on. Then, turning you over, he tucks you against him, paying attention to each part of your body that is against his -- feet on his calves, arms underneath his own, your hair tickling his neck -- and you fall asleep together, peaceful and dreamless.

Readers List:

Everything: @lostnliterature @french-the-llama @shamelesslydean @akshi8278 @amanda-teaches @angelus320 @atc74 @authoressskr @bambi95-blog @because-imma-lady-assface @blanketmadeofstarss-blog-blog @brewsthespirit-blog @britney8793 @calaofnoldor @cutedictionary @ellen-reincarnated1967 @emoryhemsworth @feelmyroarrrr @frenchybell @growningupgeek @gryffindorable713 @hanginwithmanerds @holyfuckloueh @impala-dreamer @its-not-candy @jayankles @jesspfly @luciisthebest @megansescape @mereka18 @mjdoc90 @mogaruke @moonlitskinwalker @mrswhozeewhatsis @pizza-boy-cas @sadist-fangirl23 @sea040561 @seenashwrite @serienjunkiegirl @sis-tafics @skybinx-blog @super-not-naturall @tennesseewhiskey-and-pie @there-must-be-a-lock @un-autor-anonim @wingedcatninja @wordstothewisereaders @just-another-busyfangirl @ericaprice2008 @immafangirlmess

Oneshots/Drabbles: @coffee-obsessed-writer @lipstickandwhiskey @namelessflorence @pjofangirl18 @wildfirewinchester @thisismysecrethappyplace

#sam winchester fanfiction #sam winchester angst #15x03 #grief #ptsd #comfort #spn spoilers

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killervibe · 4 years

Text

Puzzles

A really really REALLY fluffy Cisco/Caitlin fic! <3

~.~

There’s a fluttering in her stomach. It’s not morning sickness, and it can’t be her minuscule baby. It’s nerves, excited jittering, little butterflies flapping their wings inside of her. The back of Caitlin’s chair dips as she leans back against it, pensive.

It has to be perfect. It needs to be.

She thinks about Cisco’s smile, imagining the way he’ll beam. How his eyes crinkle in the corners, and his face will light up like the sun. She smoothes the paper in front of her, a thousand scenarios running through her mind.

How will she tell him? That he’s going to be a dad. That he’ll have a tiny baby to hold in his arms in a few months time. A child who will be the perfect mix of him and herself. An infant she already knows their father will love until they both grow old and more.

She thinks about her own father, long gone now, in every way she ever knew him. But it’s the memory that lingers. The early years. She thought about hop scotch and bicycle rides. Birthdays and crossword puzzles. The science they learned. She thought about the games they played.

Tapping her pen against her desk, she brightened. The plan crystallized in her mind. That’s exactly how she’ll do it.

~.~

The sun was beginning to set through the windows of the Speed Lab as Barry raced around the track for the gazillionth time. Caitlin stepped in with a folder tucked neatly under her elbow, her heels clicking down the friction resistant flooring installed in the room as she made her way to Cisco. He sat over the edge of the sideline area, his arms looped around the lower railing as he bit his lip with deep concentration.

Cisco never really bothered watching Barry run anymore unless there was some logistical component he was interested in analyzing. There wasn’t any rush or emergency this week which would warrant such a thing, which could only mean— Caitlin smiled, sidling up to him. “Another suit, really?”

Cisco was crunching some numbers on his tablet, rolling his eyes at her teasing. “There is never an excuse not to be current with the fashion trends. Thought you of all people would understand that.”

Caitlin scooted forward, climbing under the railing to sit with him. He stopped to help smooth out her dress skirt when it got rucked up. His hand glided over her covered thigh affectionately. Caitlin covered his hand there with her own so she could hold it, lacing their fingers together. Cisco adjusted easily, tracking Barry’s speed now by poking at the numbers on the screen with his other hand.

“I understand fashion,” she argued, “but this is his twelfth suit.”

He scoffed. “It’s not the twelfth! I only have eight models saved in my draft history.”

Caitlin huffed. He turned to cock an eyebrow at her. “Why? You want an update too?”

She thought about it. No, she was very happy with her Frost suit. And then, would Caitlin even need a new one any time soon? It may very well be that her crime fighting days were temporarily over. She was about to tell Cisco that when she remembered he wouldn’t get it. Not yet, anyway. This was why she had come to find him here in the first place.

“I’m good,” she promised him, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “Can you open a breach? I’m heading home. How long will you be out here?”

He opened a breach with the careless ease of a flicked finger off his touch screen. “Not long.”

Caitlin crossed her arms, unconvinced. He seemed much too absorbed in what they were doing for that to be true. He sensed her gaze and glanced at her sideways. “Not long,” he promised again. “I’ll have a beautiful girlfriend at home waiting for me.”

Their eyes locked as he gave her one of his lopsided, heart-wrenching grins. The one that made her weak at the knees. So stuffed full with his transparent love for her that Caitlin wasn’t exactly convinced it wouldn’t knock her up if she weren’t pregnant already.

Caitlin reflected his look right back at him, softening like butter. He trailed his eyes down her figure, now that she was stood up in front of him.

He finally noticed the brown office folder in her grasp. “Hey, what’s that?”

She let him take it out of her hands, trying to school her face into a neutral expression. It was hard, she was already fighting off her excited grin. “Oh, this?” She watched him tilt his head at the graph paper and pen scribbles.

“It’s a coded equation. I’ve been trying to crack it for the last hour but I’m tired. I’ll try it again in the morning.” She tried to pull it back, but he held on, falling for her bait like a fish on a hook.

“I can do it,” he offered. She knew he would.

“—Oh, Cisco, no, I wouldn’t ask you—”

“It’s not hard! I love these things. Where did it come from?”

Caitlin shrugged vaguely, neither confirming or denying his theories of where this came from. He already thought its a meta from another dimension. Caitlin turned to stifle a giggle into the palm of her hand. Barry was completely forgotten, as Cisco drew his knees up to place the papers against them like an easel, leaning forward to squint at her fake attempts to ‘crack’ the code. Cisco’s breach was still swirling patiently behind them. He realized she hadn’t left yet, and shooed his hand at her to go into the breach, promising to meet up with her for dinner.

Caitlin gave him a kiss goodbye, then did as she was told, the blue swirling vortex closed behind her as she made it to their bedroom. After brushing her hair and changing out of her stockings to put on something more comfortable, she stood in front of her mirror.

Slowly, her left hand trailed down her neck, past the slope of her shoulders and curve of her breast to land gently on her flat stomach. She slid her hand under her cozy sweater, tapping her skin there, deep in thought. In the mirror, she didn’t look any different. But she felt so.

“Only Iris knows about you,” Caitlin found herself saying to her itty bitty child. “That’ll change soon.” She glanced at the clock. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

Caitlin’s smile in her reflection was unlike any she’d ever seen in any pictures of herself before.

It took a while after the initial shock in the Star Labs basement bathroom to really process that she was going to have a baby with Cisco. Caitlin was in denial for most of the day, locking herself in her Med Bay to keep from seeing Cisco.

She knew Cisco wanted kids. Caitlin wasn’t as sure. She thought there was a feeling she was supposed to get. This gut instinctual one where she wakes up one morning with a green neon sign in her brain blinking on and off that sings You’re Ready! Today You Want to Become A Mom!

Iris laughed when Caitlin described it, and now she understood she didn’t need to have woken up to that neon green mental signal to feel confident that this was a really good idea.

The sense of Good Idea-Ness only intensified as the day grew longer, and Caitlin was fidgeting, trying to keep the news to herself as she planned the surprise. Now she couldn’t wait.

Just as she picked up her cell phone to order in dinner, a breach emerged out of nowhere. Cisco flailed out of it, calling her name as he waved the solved puzzle around the air. With crazed eyes and a frantic bumbling kind of awkwardness, he spun around in a full circle, shouting unintelligibly. He was so out of sorts it took him a few seconds to realize she was standing with a hand on her hip right in front of him. When he did, his eyes widened. He thrusted the solved periodic table of elements sequence at her, as if he wanted her to see for herself.

“Is this true?! Caitlin, is this for real?”

She nodded, light in her eyes as he let out a giddy laugh, pulling her into his arms immediately.

“For real? You’re pregnant?”

"Yes!" Caitlin giggled into the crook of his neck as he spun her around, then pulled herself from there to step back and memorize his reaction.

Tears were dripping down his cheeks. Caitlin’s finger swiped against his face gently, brushing the moisture away. She nodded once again.

He studied her with tenderness, leaning into her touch. “And you’re ready for this? You want to have a baby with me?”

“I want everything with you, Cisco.”

Cisco looked so dumbfounded, like he couldn’t believe his luck. He glanced down at her sweater, his hands jumping in the space between their bodies, hovering over her abdomen.

“Can I…?”

“There’s nothing to see,” she warned him, but lifted the sweater up anyways. His warm hands pressed lightly against her skin on her stomach.

“Wow,” he breathed in awe. “A baby Caitlin.”

Caitlin quirked an eyebrow. “Declaring genders already, are we?”

He grinned up at her sheepishly after crouching down to place a soft wet kiss over her bellybutton. “Baby Snow,” he corrected himself. He carefully tucked her sweater back in place, and rose to kiss Caitlin’s lips happily once, then twice.

“Baby Snow,” she repeated to herself. She wrinkled her nose. “Really?”

“What?” he murmured hot against her cheek.

Caitlin wrapped her arms around his waist, Cisco’s solved puzzle still in hand as they stood in the middle of the kitchen. “I was thinking baby Ramon.”

“Snow-Ramon?” he tried.

“Ramon-Snow sounds better,” she shot back.

Cisco pulled a face. “I don’t know about that.”

Caitlin laughed at their ridiculousness. “Let’s just call it our baby.”

Screw her medical degree; Cisco gazed into her eyes with an intensity she’s certain this time had the power to impregnate. She tucked a strand of his hair behind his ear lovingly. “We have time.”

“I can do that,” he said and kissed her again.

#the flash #fluff #killervibe #cisco x caitlin #the flash fic #tkv fic

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