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queenretcon · 3 years

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the way the story ends

i dont usually post fic, but I finished this scene from that one jli story that’s always rattling around in my head

characters: ted kord, beatriz da costa, mentions of the JLI esp max

summary: Ted and Bea have an overdue talk.

words: 2k

It starts on the back steps of Ted’s El Paso home.

Maybe more accurately, it starts when Blue & Gold show up at Fire & Ice’s Malibu apartment, holding take out and talking about a new Justice League International. It’s a long string of events, of saying yes, that lead to everything led to.

But really, it starts on those brick steps, Bea nursing a blue cocktail Booster made and leaning one elbow haphazardly on Ted’s knee. Most of Ted’s worst ideas have come from a drunken Beatriz Bonilla Da Costa, but he’s never been one for good decisions.

The problem is that he’s still figuring out how to talk about it.

The dying, that is.

The being murdered. The vague memories of crawling from the dirt, brainfucked by a Black Lantern ring, reaching for his best friend’s throat. The coming back too late, after everyone had moved on into whoever they were without Ted dragging them back down.

Booster pays a very nice woman named Courtney a lot of Ted’s money every month so that he can sit on her comfy couch and dissect the whole lot of it.

But Ted’s never been good at therapy. He tried it, after his mom died, but he can’t make himself do it right. He cracks jokes at all the right moments—where he should be laying out all his easily exploitable vulnerabilities—and, well, therapists can’t work with the whole lot of nothing he gives them.

And he’s always been even worse at the heart-on-your-sleeve late night talks with Booster.

It’s easier with Bea though. He’s not sure why. Maybe it’s the older sister energy—he’d always wanted one as a kid—or maybe it’s that Bea’s like him. She knows the right moment to make a joke or play the right part, to leave Ted’s last guarded wall standing.

“It sucked,” she says, swirling around the drink in her hands. “Obviously.”

“Is it weird that hearing that makes part of me, y’know, horribly guilty and part of me, uh,” he pauses, staring out into sparse greenery of his yard, “flattered?”

Bea cackles, throwing her head back. Ted snickers under his breath as she almost empties her drink on her lap. “God! I’d feel the same way.”

“You’re invulnerable, I’m pretty sure,” he says. “So I’ll have to take your word for it.”

He watches the humor drain from her face.

“Me, Booster, and Guy. The leftovers.”

Ted reaches behind him for his drink, like more liquor will have magically appeared since he drained it. “Irony is you guys would have enjoyed seeing people miss you the most.”

That brings back the grin to her face. He wonders how many people have seen her like this: hair messy, lipstick smeared, thousand-watt smile coming out at the idea of being mourned. How many people know the brilliant, morbid survivor buried behind false bravado and push-up bras.

“What’s it like?” she asks, locking onto him with eyes too wide. “Being adored?”

Ted huffs under his breath.

Lonely.

“I don’t know how many people are actually mourning me, y’know?” he asks, like she could possibly know what it’s like to hold the completed biography of your life in your hands. Like she could know what it’s like to be the unwanted sequel to a damn good movie. “I don’t think the, like, uh.”

He pauses, and she sits patiently.

Bea used to be an interrogator. Is she using any of those hard-won skills without him knowing? Why can she pull things out of him even his best friend, soulmate, other half never could?

“Their perfect angel genius martyr,” he says, eyes fixed away from her. “I don’t think I’m him.”

“Of course not,” she says quietly. “Tora wasn’t either. There’s no room for nuance with the dead.”

He hadn’t thought about that.

“Huh.”

“It was weird, listening to people talk about her after,” Bea says, absently tilting her glass back and forth to watch the liquid drain this way and that. “All these people who’d never had a conversation with her, suddenly talking at me about my girl. Like they needed to mythologize her to mourn her or something. She couldn’t just be somebody who died young in a shitty way; she had to be this perfect, infallible angel ripped from us too soon.” She taps her purple nails against the glass, a staccato beat. “It felt like they were taking her away from me, a little bit, turning her into somebody else. Somebody easier for them to cry about.”

Does Booster feel this way? Ted doesn’t know. He knows he broke Booster a little bit, that the person Ted left in that hospital bed was different from the person who showed up all those months ago at Ted’s door, eyes red, heart clutched in his hands. But the specifics of it has been a burden too big to bear. He owes Booster to carry it, but he’s been writing Booster checks he can’t cash for a long time now.

“I wasn’t there for you,” Ted says, “when she died.”

“I know,” Bea says, mildly, like he’s reminding her of something previously discussed.

A long pause stretches taut between them. Ted tries to find the words, for a proper apology, for the way to fix the relationships he’s always kicking down.

“I forgave your corpse,” she says. “For a lot of things.” There’s another pause, then: “Dickbag.”

Ted snorts, then before he can consider if this is the time, he’s cackling, head thrown back, bwa-ha-ha, and Bea’s laughing, too, digging her nails into his knee, choking out, “Stop, shut up, I hate you, that wasn’t even funny, you are a dickbag.”

When their drunken giggle-fit subsides, her head is on his knee, “You can’t die again. It’s not allowed. I have like three friends.”

“Aw, you’ve got like five,” he assures her, patting her curls haphazardly.

“Barely,” she sighs, “and they keep turning into weird homoerotic will-they-wont-theys, like I need one person who’s always going to have ken doll anatomy in my head.”

“That’s a horrifying way to phrase that,” he informs her. She makes an attempt to reach back and pat his face. It’s not a very good attempt.

She’s always been easier to him than other people. Maybe it’s the shared, terrible sense of humor, or the fact she’s never going to be fake-nice to him, is always going to let him know when he’s getting on her nerves.

It occurs to him he could tell her. She wants to know, right? Everyone does, the nitty-gritty of his untimely murder. Alcohol buzzing in his head, the warm weight of her against his knee, he feels some key unlock in the vault of Ted’s Repressed Bullshit™.

“I’ve never, uh,” Ted pauses, trying to find the words. He’s been pulling absently on his hands without realizing. “I’ve never told anybody about this, but, uh, Max told me some stuff. Before, uh.”

Bea sits up, eyes wide for a quick flash, before they narrow darkly. “Like what?”

Booster doesn’t want to talk about Max, can’t handle hearing his name. Ted’s struggled with it, a little. There was this person—who Ted trusted, who Ted cared about, who Ted has gone to a million times when he needed help or advice or anything really—and then it was that person who fucked everything up forever. Who took everything from Ted.

And he still hasn’t processed it; not really.

But Bea’s different. Max and her—they’d been close. He was the only one she let still call her B.B.. On slow days, sometimes Ted would walk past Max’s office and find Bea with her feet propped up on Max’s antique wooden desk, looking smug while Max laughed over whatever witty thing she’d said this time.

Maybe she’s been waiting, just like Ted, for someone to say his name again the way they used to. Without the hard edge. Without the barely restrained fury. Like Max was the guy who gave them their big break and not just another in a long line of cardboard cut-out supervillains.

“About, uh,” he almost stutters out, still avoiding Bea’s gaze when he speaks, “us, I guess. I mean, the JLI. Like he talked about, y’know, he was the reason we kind of, uh, sucked I guess? Why we weren’t ever, y’know, great the way a Justice League was supposed to be. That it was him, fucking us over. Holding us back.”

When he turns to see her face, she looks—

Mad.

“And you believed that?” she asks. There’s a little bit of a bite to it, but it’s not the hot rage she aims at Guy. Ted feels suddenly that how he answers this question is very important.

“I guess. Yeah.”

Bea takes a long, long drink of her cocktail, draining the last of the blue out of her glass.

“We fought Despero. Twice. Survived the Joker. Protected this stupid fucking unappreciative world from Manga Khan and that Nebula bitch. Vampires. Manhunters. Lobo. More alien invasions. Killg%re.” Bea turns, green curls falling into her face, eyes hard. “Need me to keep fucking going?”

“I was there,” Ted says.

She sits up, throwing out her arms. “Then why are you talking about it like one of them?! We were great, Ted! We protected people! We saved the day! We just, just—

“We just didn’t do it the way they did,” she spits out, lips pulled back to show her canines as she does. He feels oddly detached, listening to her. She’s thought this before; she’s lined her mental ducks in a row; she’s—

Taken the brunt of it, hasn’t she?

The longest serving member of the JLI, as she reminds them often. The one who went down with the ship. The one who’s never had a statue in her honor or the invite to a more respectable team. Who was a decorated agent and Global Guardian before them and was the punchline to a joke about slutty Latinas after them.

After all of it, still loyal to the end.

He feels abashed, just a little.

“So what?” Ted asks. “You’re saying Max lied?”

“What I’m saying,” she says, like she’s been saying anything and not just unleashing years of pent-up aggressions, “is that J’onn spent literal years buddied up with Max. They were like, actual friends. They talked about J’onn’s family. Do you know anything about J’onn’s family?”

“No,” Ted admits. J’onn has a family?

“Right!” Bea says, gesturing excitedly at him. “He doesn’t talk about them! But he talked about them to Max. And like, look, we all knew Max was sketchy, right? Not a surprise. Fuck, we all thought he was a supervillain from the jump, but he wasn’t back then. I’d swear my fucking life, no, no,” she pauses, waving her hands and then pointing aggressively at Ted, “Kord, I’d swear all of our fucking lives he wasn’t back then. Because J’onn checked. He put aside all those sexy Martian morals—” God, she is drunk. “—to read Max’s mind.”

That’s compelling, actually.

But it also means he spent what he thought were his last moments letting some asshole lie to him and he bought it—even after spending months refusing to buy the lies he was getting from everyone else. So he puts up a token defense. “He could’ve been wrong, Bea. He’s only hu—uh, only Martian.”

Bea locks eyes with him, face suddenly serious where it was practically manic moments before. “I believe in J’onn J’onnz.”

And, y’know, yeah. So does Ted. He always has. Always will.

“So what’s more likely, Beetle? That J’onn failed to protect to us when he could have, or that Max Lord lied?”

When she says it like that, it’s so easy. The obvious truth.

But what it actually does is making everything wildly, wildly complicated. Despite the hot mess of pain it made his personal life, the event of his death was a straightforward sequence, a puzzle already done. Ted was killed by a threat always at his neck. Ted was killed because he was too stupid to understand that he’d let the devil into his living room. That was the final irony of his life: Ted Kord—the wunderkind, the child prodigy, the next great mind—died because there was someone smarter.

Ted Kord has held the biography of his life in his hands. Booster’s copy, with the little 50% off sticker hurriedly scratched off, sticky residue remaining, before it was pushed into Ted’s grasp. He’s seen the totality of his time on Earth wrapped up in 263 measly pages.

But it was time to rewrite the ending.

“Hey, Bea,” he says, suddenly grinning even when he knows he shouldn’t. “Do you want to help me solve my murder?”

#talk tag #my fic tag #which will never be used again probably lmao #ted kord #beatriz da costa #this is Gen not ship fic for the record #that’s probably assumed because it’s me w/ these two

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giogio1998 · 10 months

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Ok nerds, hear me the fuck out !!

This is my fancast for the JLI, but before we all lose it I need a quick disclaimer: this fancast is what I think the JLI could look like in a live action movie, this isn’t serious and I think if this movies were to exist it would be a comedy movie bc it’s the JLI, they’re not supposed to be taken seriously by anyone!!!!

With that in mind this is my fancast and I’ll walk you through it, let’s go:

Blue Beetle (Ted Kord):

Logan Lerman, off to a great start, i know (lol). Based on Logan’s roles throughout his career I think he would be a great Ted Kord bc he can play a nice, wholesome guy and I think he looks like the character as well. Like Ted, you would wanna put him in a jar and protect him from the world. Also he hasn’t been in many movies recently and I miss him, he deserves better.

Booster Gold (Michael J. Carter):

Lucas Till, just look at him !!! You cannot tell me he doesn’t look exactly like booster, you can’t !!! Besides Lucas has been in many action productions from movies to tv shows BUT he was also the love interest in the Hannah Montana movie THATS RANGE, he can play a the super hero and the goof we all know and love. And again, look at him !!!!

Green lantern (Guy Gardner):

Dacre Montgomery. Ok, Guy is a hard one to cast bc he is the biggest asshole in the world but we also love him bc he’s part of the JLI, we need someone that can play a jerk but can also have a redeeming plot bc again, we love him. And in my opinion dacre is the guy (get it ? Guy ?) I mean, u saw him as Billy in stranger things, he’s a great actor, he is perfect for this role.

Now comes the exciting part, the gurls.

Ice (tora olafsdotter):

Sophie Turner. Do I even have to say anything at this point? Look at her she IS Tora. You’ve seen Sophie in GOT you know she can play the baddest bitch on the planet while playing a sweet girly girl and that’s Tora right there. She can carry this role easily and I think she looks just like Tora she’s also very tall wich is great considering she’s playing a Norwegian woman.

Ok, now we need to have a talk about this next one, HEAR ME OUT.

Fire (Beatriz Bonilla da Costa):

Selena Gomez. I know what you’re gonna say: “she’s not Brazilian”. Yeah I know (I’m Brazilian myself) but let’s be realistic, it’s Hollywood, they don’t care, they don’t even know the difference between Latinos and frankly, so doesn’t the rest of the world. So if we’re gonna have a Latina play Fire it would be great to have one the most loved latinas in the world playing her. I love Selena Gomez, she’s a great actress and she can play a bad bitch and a lovely girl just like Bea. And I even got this photo to help you visualize (you’re welcome btw) and I think she looks amazing, I would add green eye contacts to the mix but I think she would nail it. And also, as a Brazilian myself she has my blessing to play fire U.U

Martian Manhunter (J’onn J’onzz):

Terry Crews, remember when I said that this movie has to be a comedy?? I always thought that Martian Manhunter would be a great comic relief bc of the breach of expectation considering he’s supposed to be a very serious character and to me Terry Crews would be PERFECT for this role, not only he can play a very intimidating character he is also one of the funniest actors out there, also with Martian’s ability to shape shift I would love to see terry play a range of things martian can turn into. I love him.

Max Lord:

Zac Efron, here’s what I’m thinking for this one: Max has to be played by someone that we really love so when it’s reveled that he’s the villain we feel even more betrayed and I think Zac is our guy. Bc everybody loves Zac efron, if you don’t you’re dead on the inside, and Zac had shown us that he can play a villain role, the man played Ted B*ndy for fuck sake’s !! He can carry this role easily.

And last but not least

Batman (Bruce Wayne):

I have no idea, this is the only one I can’t think of, bc although I love BatPat I don’t think Robert is a great fit for this particular fictional project lol, this would be a comedy movie and Robert’s version of the Batman is super serious, besides I wanted the main JLI and Batman and Martian to have a bit of an age gap to show how immature the JLI is compared to household name super heroes like the Batman you know ? So if you have a suggestion let me know bc I can’t think of anyone.

That’s it nerds, this is my fancast for the fictional JLI movie. James Gunn if you’re seeing this give me a call, I have some ideas LOL. Let me know what you think in the comments, bye ✌🏻

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