#can't wait to see how thoroughly this is contradicted by canon

[jaynaneeya]

The Headless Criminal

First of all, Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, the next big Shipwrecked Comedy project, is getting very close to its Kickstarter goal, so if you haven’t checked that out yet, and you’re seeing this before July 18, 2021 at 7:00 pm PDT, head to this link, and consider contributing a few bucks if you can.

Second of all, as soon as Ryan Garcia was revealed as one of the heads, I knew I needed to write a sequel to the fic I wrote a few years ago about time traveling Eddie’s ghost. If you want to read it, it’s here, but it’s very long, so in summary: Eddie is brought back as a ghost against his will after the events of Poe Party and is told that he has to either complete his unfinished business or forget about it in order to move on. He learns how to time travel and encounters James and Lily from kitr, who remind him of Edgar and Annabel, so he decides to ruin their lives, which leads to him bringing Lily back in time with him. She keeps meeting and falling for people who remind Eddie of Poe, so he has to keep breaking them up for revenge, and definitely not at all because he’s jealous. When Lily dies as Vivian Nightingale, Eddie realizes that he has to go back and establish her memorial ball so the events of Poe Party will happen the way they’re supposed to, and we left him hoping that this would complete his unfinished business. So here’s what I’m currently imagining happens next:

Eddie was out of ideas. He had gone back in time, established the Vivian Nightingale Memorial Ball, even orchestrated the meeting between his living self and Oscar Wilde just to make sure everything happened the way it was supposed to, and still he could not move on to the other side. Perhaps that psychic had been wrong about unfinished business. Perhaps being summoned as a ghost was permanent.

He went back to the future and haunted Lily’s grave again. Part of him wanted to find a way to bring her back, but to his surprise he found that his biggest reservation was that he didn’t want her to also be stuck with no way to find peace. This made no sense, of course. Eddie reminded himself that he wanted her to be miserable, because she reminded him of Annabel, and well… now that Eddie thought about it, that didn’t make any sense either. “Ugh, what am I even DOING with my afterlife?” he shouted, kicking her headstone in frustration.

Suddenly, the cemetery began to melt away. Had Eddie lost his ability to control his time travel? He felt a peculiar sensation in his neck, and he looked down to find that his body had disappeared. He quickly shut his eyes and begged everything to return to normal, but when he opened them again he found himself in an unfamiliar room, face to face with someone unpleasantly familiar.

“Well, well, well,” Eddie sneered. “Edwin. Allan. Poe.”

The other man furrowed his brow in confusion. “I thought Poe’s first name was Edgar,” said a voice behind Eddie that he thought sounded like Lenore.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Edward?” asked the man who looked like Poe but clearly was not.

“Good thing you’re a science teacher and not an English teacher,” quipped the Lenore double as she wandered into Eddie’s line of sight.

Eddie felt like he’d landed in his own worst nightmare. He wanted to leave, but his limbs seemed reluctant to move when he willed them to. “Where am I?” he demanded. “And who are you? And why can’t I-?” Eddie was interrupted by his own arm, which had finally decided to move, but not the way he’d wanted it to, and he ended up whacking himself in the face. When he glared at the offending arm, he noticed that it bore absolutely no resemblance to the arm he was normally attached to.

“I’m Ichabod Crane, and this is our – well, my – I mean, it’s my house, and it might be yours, too. My roommate doesn’t have a head, you see, and we found yours hidden under some floorboards in a haunted house. Matilda’s a witch and she knows how to attach heads to bodies, so that’s how you got here.”

Ichabod smiled in what he clearly thought was a friendly manner, but all Eddie saw was a smirk. Roommates with Poe’s doppelganger? Even if this had been his body, which it obviously was not, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it. Using all his willpower to remain calm, Eddie began, “I am most certainly not your roommate, and this is not my-”

He was interrupted once again, this time by a scream from the doorway. Eddie was prepared to see someone who reminded him of Annabel, but he was unprepared for the startled look of wide-eyed astonishment on her face. She recognized him.

Ichabod rushed over to her. “Kat, darling – I mean, not darling, that’s awkward, I would never call you that – well, not never, but we don’t know each other well en- sorry, I mean, uh… Kat, what’s wrong?”

For a moment, she looked as though she might faint, but instead she spoke, in the same desperately trying to remain calm tone that Eddie had just been using. “That head looks terrible on Headless’s body. It’s clearly the wrong one.”

“True, it doesn’t seem to fit, but I feel like we should at least give him the same courtesy we gave the others and allow him to tell his story-”

“No!” cried Kat, lunging toward Eddie.

Was this somehow Annabel’s ghost? Or was it, could it possibly be… “Lily?” he whispered as she approached him.

Instead of responding, she put one of her hands under his chin, grabbed his hair with the other, and tried to yank his head off of the body. Eddie hadn’t been able to feel physical pain since his death, but this hurt. “Stop! Let me talk to you!” he protested, but she ignored him.

“Ichabod! Matilda! Help me get this hideous head off!” Kat shouted as Eddie yelped in pain and anger. Hideous?

“Do you know this guy, Kat?” Matilda asked, sounding amused.

“Do you?” Ichabod repeated, sounding anxious.

Kat seemed to suddenly realize what she was doing. She released Eddie’s head. After taking a few steps back and a few deep breaths, she said, “Sorry. No, I don’t know him, but I do know that his head doesn’t belong on that body, and I’m so desperate to help you find the right head. We’ve been trying for so long, I’m starting to get frustrated and impatient. So can we please take this head off and try another one?”

Matilda narrowed her eyes suspiciously, but when Kat met her gaze unflinchingly, she shrugged and said, “Well, I certainly agree that this is not the correct head, so I guess you’re right, might as well move on.” She began chanting a spell.

“No, wait!” Eddie cried, but it was too late; a moment later he found himself back in the cemetery, his head reattached to the rest of his ghost.

Was Lily still alive somehow? Or had she come back as a ghost without telling him? That couldn’t have been Annabel; that girl had never been capable of violence, and if she had somehow developed a taste for it in death and now wanted revenge on him, surely she would have tried to strangle him, not pull his head off. But Lily had been his friend. Why wouldn’t she want to see him? If she’d figured out that he’d been sabotaging her, surely she would have confronted him. He resolved to get to the bottom of this. All he had to do was figure out where and when Ichabod Crane lived, and then he could take his whole ghost self there. She wouldn’t be able to get rid of him as easily that way. If nothing else, she at least owed him an explanation. Whether this was Eddie’s final bit of unfinished business or another wild goose chase, only time would tell.

[princeescaluswords]

"Then look for stories where Isaac is punished for abandoning the Hale Pack and dating that very same hunter, which is a nearly identical action except that Isaac was a willing recruit" first you said that derek manipulated isaac into joining his pack, and that derek bit and preyed on isaac (and boyd and erica) without their consent, and now you contradicts yourself and say that isaac was a willing recruit/victim??? make up your mind dennis! you can't even remember your own delusional fanon lies

You seem to have certain problems with understanding the English language. The meanings behind words like 'consent,' 'responsible adult,' and 'manipulation.' tend to escape you. You also have problems with context. To correct this, I will first direct you to look at the original post you're quoting.

My two statements "Isaac was willing to take the Bite and join the Hale Pack" and "Derek manipulated Isaac and his other betas into taking the Bite and joining the Hale Pack" do not actually contradict each other. The way it worked, as we can see on the screen, is that Derek saves Isaac from the omega in the graveyard and then offeres him the Bite, promising him a way out from his abusive relationship with his father. Derek understood that he was bringing Isaac into a war with the Argents -- as we watched him explain to Scott the same episode in which he bit Isaac -- and he also understood that the Alpha Pack would be coming and try to make him kill all his betas -- as we watched Peter explain in the stinger at the end of the season.

Derek absolutely did prey on Jackson, Isaac, Boyd, and Erica. (Ever notice how Derek-stans conveniently forget to list Jackson among Derek's betas? It's like Derek recognized that Jackson was rejecting the Bite and then abandoned him for five episodes. Oh, wait, that is what happened.) Derek was at least twenty-two years old and he had been a werewolf all his life, a fact that his fans use to trumpet his superiority, so he knew what he was doing. He was aware of multiple threats to those teenagers -- none of which were considered mature enough to drink alcohol or even vote. Hell, they would still have to get permission slips by their parents signed to go on a high school field trip. Yet he involved them in a fight for the death after promising to fix their lives with his Bite.

What Derek did is the equivalent of a gang leader recruiting. It's as if he gave four kids ten thousand dollars each, stuck a lethal weapon in their hands, and said "now you're going to fight with me in a war to the death." Those four may have said yes, but, no one would suggest that Derek didn't manipulate them into it.

And before you say "Derek wanted to give them a family!" he may have but it certainly wasn't his damned top priority. He had them meet in a dirty run-down subway station even though he had enormous resources. He sent them on missions to hurt and even kill their fellow classmates. He focused on combat training rather than basics like control or the ability to take pain.

This attitude reinforces my original point. Derek Hale manipulated these kids into serving him, and Isaac being a willing participant doesn't change that one bit. It doesn't change that Derek disappointed Isaac so thoroughly that Isaac ditched him for the McCall Pack. Yet there are only a handful of stories where the Hale Pack hurts or kills Isaac out of revenge for his abandonment.

On the other hand, there are stories which come out and call Scott a bad friend for not joining the Hale Pack because it somehow blocks a fanon relationship that never happened. There are hundreds of stories where Scott is murdered without regret for the crime of not giving his life over to the Hales, white manipulative monsters whose canon go-to tactic range from murder to attempted murder. I can list them for you.

And the fact that Isaac is not only very, very rarely punished for abandoning Derek and instead gets turned into the 'pack baby' while Scott is considered to blame for the fact that Peter Hale got sent to jail for trying to kill him and not trusting Derek after he lied to him, betrayed to him, and physically beat him down for daring to talk about their issues, must have a motivation in fandom.

BUT IT'S NOT RACISM.