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murderslugs · 3 years

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Getting To Know Them || Slasher x Reader Bf/Gf Scenarios Pt 2

Jason Voorhees

When you woke, you were lying in a dim living room. The windows were boarded with thick, rotting oak planks and the doors were bolted shut. The only light left to illuminate the room was a small lamp on the old, rustic coffee table in front of you. Beneath you was a somewhat scratchy couch, clearly taken off of someone's front line with a paper labeled "free to take" on it, or from some dump. However, you were thankful that it at least wasn't the creaky wooden floor instead. You scratched at the rope around your wrists, loosened from being wriggled around and messed with.

You sat up and allowed your vision to re-adjust, and saw the same man in flannel and ski-mask in an arm-chair on the other side of the coffee table. He didn't seem to notice your awakening, or he at least didn't acknowledge it. He was reading a book with a maroon cover, and you couldn't make out the small copper-shaded title. You studied his movement. He was calm and showed little emotion in his body language, simply reading in peace.

In a split second, you decided to break the peace and silence. "Who are you?" The man put down the book in his lap, but only looked up at you for a moment, silent. You could see him think, then make a few hand gestures. You came to the realization that it was ASL, but you never really learned the language, despite your interest in it. You saw him take a deep breath and get up, grabbing a pen and a notebook off a table to the side. He slid the items onto the coffee table before you and slowly unbound your wrists. You wrote your question out again, "Who are you?" and slid it around for him to see. He read it, and wrote quickly, in slightly messy handwriting, "Jason. any more questions?" and slid the items back.

From here, you two went on for hours, listing out questions on the notebook and answering them for each other. You filled out pages and pages, ranging from basic questions to things like "what was your childhood like?" Certain things like that, he would pause and then write that he didn't want to talk about it. Through the night or day (due to the lack of natural light, it was hard to tell,) this game went on.

Michael Myers

Though you tried your best and struggled and squirmed, the man who had taken you still had gotten you tied to a chair; where you sat with a belt tying your wrists to the wooden beams, thankfully with a cushion underneath your rear. You shut your eyes for a second and groaned, throwing your head back. You always thought of yourself as strong and independent, a fighter who didn't need help from anyone. Alas, this was one ass you couldn't kick, and you hated yourself for it.

Across the kitchen, the bright lights shined on the tiled floor, and a tea kettle whistled ceaselessly. The sound of running water stopped as the man who had taken you walked from the bathroom and into the kitchen. The man dried his hands on his pants and took the kettle off the burner, shutting the flames off. You observed him take two random mugs from the cabinets above, and place them on the white countertop. He carefully poured the tea into the two cups, and a light herbal smell filled the air. After a moment, you recognized the smell of hibiscus tea. This was a familiar smell, something your aunt made every morning when you spent the night at her house in the summers between school years.

The man walked over and brought the two cups with him. A low, slightly muffled, silky voice came from behind the mask as he slid a mug across the table to you. "Careful, it's scolding." The tall, built man walked across and unbuckled one of your arms from the chair for you to pick up the mug with. "Drink." He said, before taking a seat before you. This is when he slid the mask off, to reveal a face beneath that you never would have expected. Dark brown, shaggy, messy, wavy hair fell over his forehead, and he blew it out of his grey eyes. His face was scarred and his lips were chapped, but it somehow wasn't unappealing or revolting.

"What's your name? Who the fuck are you?" You asked, leaning as far as you could with your restraints still intact. The man pushed his hair back and sighed heavily, sipping the near boiling tea. "Michael. 24. Libra." He said in a monotone voice. You rolled your eyes. "This is an introduction to your victim, not The Dating Game." You told him harshly. "Well, is there something specific you wanna know? It's not like your giving me anything to go off of, sugar cube." 'Michael' replied with the same energy in return. "Fine. I'm (Y/N). What else is there to say?"

Carrie White

Like the pale girl suggested, Carrie if you remembered correctly, you came back to the public library next Sunday, around noon. You had finished the book you had most recently checked out, so you had to return it anyways. Walking down the pavement, you saw here in a light sundress, walking up the few steps and into the library. You ran to catch up and followed her, careful not to startle the girl. As soon as you got inside, you carried yourself to just behind her, and tapped on her shoulder.

The girl turned around, and a look of confusion appeared on her features. "(Y/N). We met here last week? I suggested you check out Narnia." You reminded her, an eager smile painted on your face. A spark formed in her eyes, and she returned your smile. "Oh! Yes, yes, I remember. I'm sorry, my mind is awfully clouded lately." You assured her that it was alright, and you two went along.

The two of you walked down the aisles of bookshelves, and she looked for something new to try out. Maybe she would check out a cook-book and try a new recipe, or read up on WW1. Although, you DID notice that she avoided the religious aisle. However, you didn't comment on this, out of respect. You two checked out a few books, and on the paved outdoor steps, you stopped her. "Would you like to go for coffee or tea? Even a pastry? There's a little shop down the street, I'll buy. I'd just like to talk a bit.

Carrie obliged happily, and the two of you took your books and walked down to the small cafe. It had a dim, rustic theme, and brought peace to anyone who entered it's walls. There was a faint vanilla sent in the air, welcoming you two. For about an hour, Carrie sat down with you and talked about your life, your week, basic things. It was nice to get to know her. She seemed kind, and gentle. Everything about her was graceful, from the way she sipped her latte to the way she tucked her strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. As you two finished up your chats, you grabbed your things and greeted each other farewell, agreeing to meet again next week.

Jennifer Check

The pair of you had become half-decent lab partners over the last few weeks, but she didn't seem to be doing well with the subject. As a result, you decided that you would volunteer to tutor her in the subject after school. So, there you were, on your way to her house after school to hang out and help her study up on the subject and with the homework. It was a cloudy day, and you could tell that a storm was brewing in those clouds above your head. Because of this, you decided to walk a bit faster to avoid being soaked.

As you arrived at Jennifer's house, you knocked gently on the door. When you received no answer, you hesitantly knocked harder. Very suddenly, a slightly older woman answered the door, assumingly Jennifer's mom. The woman looked you up and down, then quickly turned to yell over her shoulder, "Jenny! Your new friend is here!" She then quickly invited you in and brought you a small tray of white-chocolate macadamia nut cookies, offering you to take one or two ((If you have an allergy to nuts, then M&M cookies.)) "I made these for you two while you were studying. There's also sodas in the fridge in case you need a drink." Jennifer's mom said joyfully, before scooping the strap of a purse onto her shoulder. "I'll be off now, I have a job interview to get to. Jen's room is upstairs, first door on the right. Have fun you two!" She informed you before heading out the door.

You walked up the stairs until you found an oak door, and knocked before coming in. "Uh, hi, it's (Y/N), I'm here to help you study..?" You said as you slowly walked in and shut the door behind you. Jennifer was standing, looking in the mirror and smearing concealer under her eyes. She sighed and looked over to you. "Sit on the bed. You know, I was gonna gut you like a fish and drink your blood like a Slurpee, but my mom seems to like you, and I don't think you're too bad. Shame, would have been a great opportunity." She said nonchalantly. As she turned to you, you saw that her face was pale and broken out in acne.

Your heart skipped a beat and the color drained from your face. "I'm sorry, w-what...?" You tried to gulp down the fear in your words. "I'm a succubus, idiot. Don't think that I didn't notice you staring at the blood on my shoes the first day we met. I feed on people's bodies and sexual energy so I can feel good and look good. But I've decided you're worth keeping around, so I'll save that for the next chump. So, shall we get to know each other?" She said calmly as she sat down beside you on the bed.

Billy Loomis

You were home alone yet again, but this time it was mid day. You were watching horror movies out of boredom on your couch, when you got a call. You hesitantly answered, to hear a familiar voice on the other side of the phone. "I'm here, come let me in." You carried the phone with you. You figured one of your friends had stopped by to say hi, and their voice just sounded messed up due to shitty reception. You went to your front door, and looked through the peephole to see someone in a shitty costume, probably from Walmart, as it was October, and stores were starting to sell Halloween costumes and decorations. You hung up the phone and stuck it in your pocket, opening the door slightly with the chain lock still intact.

"Cut it out, prankster. That's not a very creepy costume. Ooo! I'm so scared!! Listen, I've seen the original Japanese film The Ring a million times, I'm not too scared of much." You heard the person sigh and push the door forward aggressively, breaking the lock. You jumped back in shock. "Hey! You're paying for that, asshole!" You yelled only for a quick response. "No, I don't think I will, beautiful. The man said, taking off his mask. To your shock, it was someone that you went to school with, Billy Loomis. You remember him graduating just the year before you, and were a bit shocked at his sudden appearance. You two had talked a bit, and you could consider yourselves acquaintances, but never really close friends.

Billy took a step forward, and in turn, you took one back. He put his hands up, showing he had no weapons in his hands. "Look, I'm not gonna hurt, that's not what I came to do. I just want to...get to know you. Look, you can pat me down, if you really feel the need. I don't have any weapons on me." You lowered your defenses a bit, but still kept them up. "Why would you want to know me so bad?" You asked hesitantly. "Well, I looked through your window and realized I'd found you again. And I wanted to get to know the pretty (girl/boy/person) I used to look at in the hallways every day." He said in a smooth tone. And that's where your night started.

Thomas Hewitt

It was a lovely Texas summer day. A warm breeze carried through the semi-tall grass in the fields, and the smell of fresh bread filled the small wooden house. On this fine afternoon, you happened to be listening to some old music, from the 50s-60s, and baking. When you least expected it, you heard a loud knock on the door. You figured it might have been one of your new neighbors looking to get to know you, or ask to borrow something. You strolled to the door and opened it, to see a rather large man in a butcher's apron, curly dark hair, and a rather scarred face on the other side. Though he had somewhat of a threatening aura, you knew that there was more behind his appearance.

You saw him open his mouth, but then stop and think for a moment. He hesitantly put his hands up and made a few broken and hand signals. You realized quickly that it was sign language, as you had an uncle growing up that happened to be deaf, so you learned it so that you two could talk. "I'm not deaf, I just don't like to speak." You watched him sign apprehensively, and responded allowed. "That's okay, hun. What can I do for you?" You asked, and he thought for a moment. "Do you have some salt I can use? Papa shot a..." He stopped for a moment, then looked back up to meet your eyes. "Papa shot a deer, and we ran out of salt to dry out the hide and season the meat." He asked, and you replied. "Of course! Come right in, I keep a few bags in the cupboard, I have a half-full one you can take home." You told him as you allowed him to come in and shut the door behind him.

Your bread sat warm in the window-sill, cooling down. As you handed him the salt, he pointed over to it. "Oh, do you want a piece?" He nodded aggressively, and you smiled. You grabbed the metal baking sheet and put it on the counter, slicing a few pieces. "Here, you can have more than one. I make it all the time, and it's just me here to eat it anyways." You told him. "Would you like to sit down and chat for a moment? I can make you tea or coffee too if you like? You can tell me about yourself. That is, if you don't have to be home right quick." The man nodded again, and set the salt down on the counter. "My name's Thomas. I'd like some...Peppermint tea, if you have it." The man signed to you, his guard down as he clearly felt welcomed in the household. "Okay, Thomas, right on it." You smiled warmly and handed him a thick slice of warm bread with butter and mulberry jam smeared over the top. "Take a seat, dear."

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~Author's Note~

Hi guys, I'm so sorry it took so long to get this second part out :( I've just been really stressed and not in a great mental place, plus the factor of writer's block and being scared to burn myself out. But thank you for those who have stayed through the hiatus to continue reading!! Please comment below if you have any character or scenario requests. Goodbye for now, loves!

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sh1tbird-shantytown · 3 years

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Just had an idea, what if s2 was Billy figuring out about the three teens that no one will talk about. And why the prettiest boy he's ever met has gigantic claw marks on his shoulders.

Tommy noticed them, Billy saw him side glance the marks a few times but never bring it up. It was concern and confusion that made Billy’s gut churn, unprecedented emotions based on how roughly they’d been treating Harrington for the last four days, but worry nonetheless.

Billy wanted to reach out and touch them. The almost jagged lines. Like a large cat had jumped him from behind and tore up his shoulders by trying to bring him down. Scars that were mostly healed, leading all the way down just past his shoulder blades.

Tommy set his soap back and didn’t meet Billy’s eyes, “Thought you ditched boy scouts, Harrington?” Billy clenched his fists and tried not to reach over and sucker punch the idiot in the gut.

Steve was all dewy eyed to the point that Billy felt the need to…touch. He lifted a finger. Steve refocused on the two around him and chuckled humorlessly. But gave no other response. Billy made sure to narrow his eyes enough that when Tommy reopened his mouth, it immediately shut again.

Steve wasn’t at school the next day. In english, Billy couldn’t help but blame Tommy’s thoughtlessness. Nancy sat next to him with a medical gauze around her forearm and bags under her eyes. Billy didn’t waver when she caught him staring.

“What do you want, Hargrove?” her voice didn’t steel as much as it usually did.

“Where’s Harrington?” he demanded, almost asked to leave the room after hearing how obvious he sounded.

Nancy raised one of her brows and set her book down, “He’s—” she looked down at her papers. “Just keep to yourself, Hargrove.” He checked the teacher talking to a girl in the front of the room and leaned toward Nancy more so he could speak lower.

“Either you tell me now or I find out sooner or later.” Nancy didn’t lift her chin. “Was it a fight? Did Harrington try to get friendly with the wrong sort again?” He didn’t miss the way Nancy’s fists clenched. “I heard you messed him up a bit last year. Your new boyfriend get too rough or somethin’ again?”

She hunched her shoulders and Billy tilted his ear towards her, “Don’t you dare bring Jonathan into this.”

Billy smirked, “Touchy subject. So,” he looked between her scowl and her brimming tears, “Who was it then? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure Steve has perfect attendance. He wouldn’t just skip unless something was wrong, his language grade is bad enough.”

“Don’t talk about him like that.”

“I’m just stating a fact.”

Nancy pointed her thin finger at him, “And stop talking like you know him. You don’t know shit. You don’t know what he’s been through or about the monsters that hurt—” She abruptly cut herself off and looked down. Like her mess up was nothing.

But Billy got the gist.

Neil went to bed at exactly 10:30 PM every night. That gave Billy approximately nine hours to leave and return.

He left and prayed in curses as he rolled down the street in the dark. Drove all the way to the Harrington house and tried to ignore the shadows as he ran to the front door.

“Open up, Steve!” The door opened less than a minute later. “Why don’t you tell me about anything? Nancy is really bad at giving information and she’s also really bad at keeping her mouth shut, so we’re never telling her about whatever this is for sure.”

“What are you saying, Billy?”

Billy didn’t have an exact answer to Steve’s question. All he knew was that Steve had a nasty cut along his jaw and he limped as he walked through the foyer.

“Was it the shadow things that did this to you?” Steve was brighter than he was perceived, he knew people. And he knew Billy just as much as Billy knew him, maybe even better. He didn’t have to explain things to Harrington.

“When did you see?”

Billy hesitated and then leaned down to pull up his pant leg, revealing the fresh scar by his ankle, “Something grabbed me the other night. Figured the police wouldn’t know what the fuck to do. So…” he shrugged and quieted as he saw Steve nodding.

Harrington started pulling up the hem of his shirt, “We’ve somehow managed to keep this crap under the wraps, it’d be a shit show if we lost it now. Hopper would have our heads.”

Billy followed the shirt as it was strewn over an accent table. He closed his eyes and looked away. Steve’s shoulders were dark, raw pink. Reflections of the old lines were re-etched, something out of a horror movie. He caught more in the mirror above the table by accident and pressed his lips together. The pretty, pale expansion of Steve’s mole spotted back was ruined by even longer rips. Some were badly covered in band-aids while others looked haphazardly stitched together.

“Nancy’s hands shake a lot when she’s under pressure.”

Billy sucked in a breath and straightened up, Steve looked unsurprised at his reaction. He could see him trying to offer a consoling smile, but it landed flat as he shivered in the cold draft of the house.

Billy panicked a little and stepped forward to finally touch, “Common, I’m gonna take care of you, Princess.”

#tw scars #thank you for the ask!#billy hargrove #steve harrington #harringrove #billy/steve #stranger things #tommy hagan #nancy wheeler

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steviespanties · 4 years

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Since Steve’s parents are out of town so often, he and Billy have a habit of hooking up at Steve’s place. Steve’s room is nice and all, but Billy has a thing for fucking Steve in his mom’s bed;; ((HI I LOVE YOUR ACCOUNT AND YOUR STORIES THANK YOU FOR CREATING SUCH MASTERPIECES💖💖))

THANK YOU SO SO MUCH AND ALSO SORRY FOR TAKING SO LONG TO ANSWER THIS!!! (This sent me down an interior decorating rabbit hole trying to figure out what Steve’s mom’s bed- and then her own room might look like😅😂 Please imagine a layout similar to this, but with another window on the other side of the bed for more light. The ‘sofa’ and bed look a lot more like this, but the colors and style are more similar to this and this room.) 2.2k words, rated E. Steve POV, some manhandling, some frottage, some rimming and dirty talk. Anal sex. Ya know. My usual.

Steve’s parents have a big enough house (and are rich enough) that his mom has an entire bedroom for herself. She calls it her boudoir, because it’s where her walk-in closet is and where she keeps all her fancy makeup, lesser used jewelry and perfumes. There’s a massive four-poster bed with floor-length drapes matching the curtains, a chaise lounge, a vanity, all in creamy white and bathed in warm lamp light.

Before he gets together with Billy, Steve doesn’t even think about it’s existence. It’s just another empty room, after all. The most he sees of the house are the entrance, kitchen, living room and the walk upstairs to his bedroom with his own bathroom. Hell, sometimes it slips his mind that he technically lives in what counts in Hawkins as a mansion.

Billy, however, becomes obsessed with the ‘boudoir’ in particular.

The first time he's supposed to really stay over, not just crash in Steve’s room and fuck him into his bed at 3am, he steps through the front entrance, whistles after a survey of the hallway and goes “Aren’t you gonna show me around?”

“Yeah, sure. Just take a pair of house shoes from over there.” Steve gestures towards the shoe rack in question and Billy’s expression goes from amused to disbelieving.

“Seriously?”

Steve glares at him. “Yeah. Seriously. My parents put in new flooring over the summer and now everything has to look pristine for the two times a year they have visitors over.”

It's such an unnecessary, stupid rule to enforce all of a sudden when Steve has rarely worn shoes around the house anyways.

He’s barefoot when it’s warm outside and leaves his shoes by the front door to change into thick wool socks during the cold months. And somehow, his parents still have found a new way to make him feel like he’s walking on eggshells in his own home.

Still, he watches Billy sullenly take off his shoes with growing amusement that gradually lightens the bad mood Steve’s gotten into just thinking about it. He figures he can give Billy a quick tour of the house and then order pizza. Watch a movie, fuck in an actual bed instead of getting each other off in the cramped backseats of their cars.

What happens instead is that Billy spends a ridiculous amount of time dragging Steve through his own home. He looks into guest rooms. Shoves his nose into cabinets. Looks out of windows like he’s staking out the neighborhood. (Woods. The neighborhood is mostly woods.)

“What are you, a spy?” Steve jokingly asks when Billy lifts up a painting to peek behind, like he’s looking for a safe. Billy scoffs, all mock-offended. But Steve can see a hint of a blush form on his cheeks. Gotcha. It’s kinda sweet how curious he is about the place, even if his main complaint is that it “feels like a show house.” Steve doesn’t have the heart to point out that he’s not too far off.

It’s when they step into his mom’s room that a predatory glint enters Billy’s eyes. “Ohh, is this where Mama Harrington sleeps?”

“Yeah. Sometimes. She wanted a room to get ready ‘in peace’. I’m pretty sure she just wants to drink prosecco in peace.” He watches Billy’s fingers trail over the fabric of one of the creamy white curtains framing the window. They part and his rings glint in the sunlight he’s suddenly bathed in. When he turns back around his hair is lit up gold and frames his head like a halo. Steve licks his lips. The fun thing about dating Billy is that he not only matches Steve in terms of libido, but seems to have a sixth sense for the moment Steve’s thoughts get distracted by his gorgeous everything.

Or maybe Steve just isn’t very subtle.

That glint in Billy’s eyes turns into hungry laser focus. Sets him into motion until he’s all pressed against Steve, a hot line of unrelenting muscle pushing him closer to the bed until they tip over and onto the mattress. Half hidden by more curtains hanging from the canopy. Sunlight follows them.

White teeth flash in an easy grin, quick and sweet, and then Billy’s lips are on Steve’s. His body weight pushes Steve into the creamy white bed cover and the air out of his lungs in a huffed laugh. Underneath him the texture of the blanket- distinct raised ribbing- digs into his skin. Billy’s hands dig into his hair.

The slick heat of Billy’s mouth and his thigh shoved between Steve’s legs is intoxicating. Makes it impossible to form a coherent thought when his focus narrows down on Billy on top of him, curls just long enough to fall down and tickle Steve’s face. He makes the most delicious sound when Steve grabs his ass and pulls him closer, till their hips are lined up just right. Steve pulls. Billy pushes. Like a conversation in a language purely made of heat and pressure, hitching breaths and choked moans. Against his own growing erection, painfully trapped in his jeans, he can feel Billy fill out as well. The pleasure is maddening. Enough to make Steve feel a burst of wetness pulse from his dick into his underwear. Enough to make him roll his hips up, searching for a better angle.

“Billy,” he sighs, not sure what he wanted to say afterwards. Just enjoys saying his name.

“We’re wearing too many clothes,” Billy complains in response, like he picked up whatever thought Steve dropped in the minuscule space between them. They break out into a familiar flurry of limbs and discarded clothes. A condom packet and a small bottle of lube make it from Billy’s discarded jacket onto the comforter next to Steve’s head. He snorts.

“You sure you weren’t a boy scout at some point? Feels like you’re always prepared to get your dick wet.”

Billy rolls his eyes, fond smile belying his annoyance. “Shut up. Turn around.” His voice has taken on that deep, rough tone indicating how much he’s turned on. Steve leans back instead, takes his dick in hand. Enjoys the rough drag of his dry palm when he drags it up in a loose grip. Just enough to tease. Billy raptly follows the movement. “Maybe I will if you ask me nicely.”

Oh, he loves this game. Put up a token bit of protest when Billy gets bossy, until he gets impatient and starts dragging Steve around until he’s nothing but putty underneath his hands.

“Show me your pretty hole, babe. I won’t ask again.”

Steve’s dick pulses in his hand. He watches Billy with half-lidded eyes. The way his muscles shift, getting ready to move. Hungry and powerful, like a big wildcat.

In the next second, he’s on Steve. Makes him gasp out an involuntary yelp when he easily flips him and drags him up by his hips. Until he’s on his knees, face buried in the bed cover and hot breath suddenly ghosts over his hole. There’s barely enough time to reorient himself before the scratch of Billy’s mustache and the slick warmth of his tongue press into his crack.

“Ah, fuck yes.”

He’s never done this before Billy. Not with any of the girls he fucked or dated. Not with Tommy, who he’s traded sloppy, shameful handjobs and blowjobs with. He doesn’t think he can ever get enough of feeling Billy’s tongue on his rim, swirling around until he’s dripping with saliva. Pushing inside where he’s sensitive, pressure and stretch of his hole making him squirm and push his hips back immediately.

It’s almost embarrassing how greedy he is for Billy’s mouth on him. His lips wrapped around his dick. His tongue shoved deep into his hole, held in place by those warm hands on his asscheeks. Holding him open so Billy can get even deeper, making him moan and drool into the blanket beneath him. It’s like a pulse, curls into him till his dick pushes out another spurt of precome and he can feel himself twitch, heavy and aching between his legs.

A slicked up finger joins Billy’s tongue. Makes the stretch just a bit more intense, but still so, so good. Billy only comes up for air when he adds a second finger. Steve can feel him rest his cheek on his ass, probably watching the movement of his fingers up close. He seems to have a thing for the sight of Steve’s rim stretched, his hole filled up and glistening.

“Gonna make you a complete mess in your mom’s bed,” Billy huffs into his skin. “Gonna make you cry and cream yourself all over her sheets.” He thrusts deeper and stretches his fingers until they tug at Steve’s hole and he groans with the ache. “Better get going then,” he tries to taunt. It falls flat with all that desperation laced through his words. The thing is, provoking Billy only gets you so far. Steve can tease him into impatience, but once he’s fully grasped control, he revels in it. Basks in Steve’s frenzied, futile attempts at irritating him. Like he’s had his chance, but the game is already won.

Steve doesn’t mind losing that much anyways.

“Just you wait,” Billy says fondly.

All Steve can focus on for a while is that glorious, slick movement of Billy’s fingers. The way he pushes in and out of him, stretches his rim and his insides, rubs over that spot inside of him that makes him frantically claw at the textured bed cover underneath him. Just long enough to make him whine and push back, pulse around a third finger that stretches him even wider.

At some point, when he’s reduced to a sweat-slick line of tightly wound pleasure, he finds himself empty. Barely registers the sound of a ripped open condom wrapper. Warm, humid breath over his spine that wanders up up up until there’s lips and teeth on his shoulder and Billy’s cock slowly pushes inside.

There’s a growing spot of drool-wet fabric his face presses into that swallows some of his moans. When Billy moves, satisfied sighs and barely coherent praises tumbling from his lips, Steve grasps the bed cover tight.

Billy’s hips find a rolling, unrelenting rhythm. The drag of his cock is a drug Steve can’t get enough of. Dreams about, just as much as he dreams about the tight heat of Billy around his dick.

He wishes he could turn around and admire Billy’s flushed face. Hold him between his spread legs. Get lost in his eyes and dizzy from his freckles. But Billy’s weight on his back and his mouth sucking hickeys into the back of his neck isn’t bad either. He tries to hold himself up, tries to concentrate on carrying that weight on his back, but with each thrust inside it’s like his knees spread wider and his elbows sink down until he’s pressed flat onto the bed. And then his dick makes contact with the bed cover and gets pushed right into it right along Billy’s thrusts.

“Ah!” The moan is embarrassingly loud. Louder than any other noise he’s made so far. Of course, Billy picks up on it.

“You gonna be a good boy and blow your load all over your mommy’s sheets?”

“Shut- shut up, fuck.” Billy just laughs, voice shot to hell.

Even if Steve wanted to, he can’t escape that mouthwatering pleasure the additional drag of rough fabric against his dick provides. Because even if he wanted to try, he can’t pull away from Billy’s weight on top of him. His heavy, thick cock inside of him that holds him open and fills him up.

He comes with a sob. Pushes his face harder into wet fabric. Pushes his dick through his own mess. Pushes his hips back to meet Billy’s thrusts, even when it becomes just a bit too much.

Billy rests his entire weight on him when he comes with a deeply satisfied groan. Through their aftershocks, he buries his face in Steve’s hair and they rest in companionable silence.

It’s not the last time they end up fucking on that bed, no matter how many times Steve complains about the laundry with flushed cheeks.

...

Steve isn’t enough of an idiot to not understand that Billy likes to fuck him in his mom’s bed because he likes the conquest of a room that’s ‘forbidden’. He’s the same at parties, likes to sneak into rooms he’s not supposed to be in. Likes the thrill of doing something nasty with Steve in a place his mom will walk into and never even suspect what’s happened.

And Billy? Billy doesn’t want to admit it, especially not to Steve’s face, but... the way Steve’s hair looks against the creamy-white sheets in his mom’s bedroom? The soft yellow glow of light, the blush that spreads from his cheeks down to his neck, to his chest faster than it does anywhere else- it’s addictive.

The best part, the one they both like a little too much is what happens afterwards. When the raised ribbing of the bed cover has left indents on Steve’s face where it’s been pressed down. On his arms and knees. On his back, where only Billy can see and trace it for the rest of the night, reverent and sweet.

#asks #OHH my god I'M SO FLATTERED THANK YOU SO MUCH😭💖💖💖#I hope you're having a LOVELY day and you like this!!#saberghatz #(also i'm so sorry this took ages to answer bc i took so long to write this?? jfc!!!)#harringrove #harringrove fic

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platypanthewriter · 3 years

Text

The Tanning Rock

Harringrove April prompt 28, Tanning--Creatures!AU (This one grew to nearly 6k and I’m so sorry) @wasting-time-again HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY, HAVE A MERMAN! XD

The lawyer who summoned Billy—about an inheritance, he said—was...weird. Straight out of a movie, with long incisors and a cravat, and he steepled his fingers as he talked.

Max said he was probably actually a vampire, and Billy agreed—which was weird, because as far as Billy knew, his mom’s family wasn’t exactly old money, and it was hard to imagine a vampire getting on a plane to fly clear to California and summoning him to a crypt full of file cabinets, all just to read a will about his mom’s collection of surfing stickers and pile of old National Geographics.

Billy knew his father had disowned him, so he bit his lips together, waiting to hear that his mother had died.

“I am here about the estate of your grandmother,” said the vampire lawyer, and Billy drew a shaky breath of relief. “Your mother was disowned—” he said, and Billy almost snorted a laugh—like mother, like son, he thought, “—and so her domicile has passed to you.”

“Wait, what,” Billy breathed, wide-eyed.

“It is an unusual case,” said the lawyer—Fangun and Stayk, est. 986, read his card, but Billy wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to Fangun or Stayk, or whether the whole thing was a joke yet, so he kept his mouth shut. “You will take ownership of the house and land, however, you may not live there—that is, not year-round, not unless you are given an invitation by a resident. It is a closed community.”

“...can I sell it?” Billy asked, and the deepset eyes of the lawyer stared back at him, bloodshot and dry.

“At well below market value,” he said, steepling his fingers again. They made a dryish noise. “As I said, they dislike outsiders. And a stranger will be even more of an outsider than you, in whom runs...the blood of the place.”

Billy wondered, dully, whether he’d inherited a haunted graveyard, or a den of werewolves, and groaned into his hands. Maybe he was part zombie somehow. Just his luck. “Where is it,” he sighed.

“It is not on commonly available maps,” said the vampire, and Billy nodded. It figured, he thought, though his ears perked up considerably when his grandmother’s lawyer laid out a map of Hawaii.

They got a ride from the shore on a fishing boat at four o’clock in the morning. “It’s barely tourist season yet,” said the fisherwoman, showing Max how to steer. “There will be a ferry, in a week or two, but I can give you two a ride out the day your visa’s up if the ferry quits sooner.”

“We want enough time to look around,” Max said, glancing at Billy. They’d let their lease run out, and sold most of their things, because a few orange crates of records were a small price to pay for never running into Neil Hargrove around town. “You could get a job on one of the normal islands,” Max had suggested, quietly, over and over. “If they don’t like us enough.”

Billy’d never suggested moving Max so far away, but she’d assumed they were going, and after a while he went along with it. It wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, getting a job in a hotel somewhere after the islanders threw him out. Max would probably love it, in Hawaii.

A fresh start, she had said, and it sounded good.

He and Max were greeted by a woman in a wheelchair, who stamped their passports. “Technically, we’re a different country,” she said, smiling. She had very brown skin, and looked contentedly half-asleep in the sun. “You’re the only visitors on the island, for a week or two,” she said, cocking her head. “We’re not always in a big hurry to scrub up the ferry for the summer. We love the money, but the tourists...” she laughed, shaking her head. “Three-month pleasure trip visa. Have a nice summer,” she said, waving them away.

Her benign lack of interest lessened Billy’s initial fears that he’d inherited membership in some rich, yoga-pants-wearing, white Human Superiority cult.

The house was traditional-ish, with a grass roof and walls, big open windows with no glass, only shutters, and a wide shaded veranda all the way around. It looked over a beach with rolling waves, and Billy couldn’t wait to get his board out there.

“I’m gonna look around the house,” Max said. “See if I can find any neighbors. Maybe I can bring them cookies.” She set her jaw, frowning around at their luggage, and the scattered pillows. “Maybe we can buy some furniture somewhere.”

“...we can always just come here for summers,” Billy told her, breathing it in.

“Yeah, you’re gonna have a great time getting a tourism job where you don’t work summers,” Max said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow, and Billy realized with a sinking feeling in his stomach that she expected him to figure it out. Find someone who wanted him to stay, here, on the island, at his grandmother’s house.

“I’m no good at making friends, Max,” he reminded her, and she snorted.

“Better get out of my hair, then.” She folded her arms, taking another deep breath of the smell of grass in the sun. After a long moment, she looked back at him again. “...we’ve got a little over three months, Billy.”

He suspected it sounded longer to her.

When he wandered down to the beach, Billy could see someone’s tanned shoulders lying across a jutting rock about fifty feet out, and he paddled a ways towards it on his surfboard, getting the lay of the ocean. There was a rip tide, dark and eerily quiet, to his right, but the rest of the beach had shallow, warm, clear waves over white sand and coral until a dark dropoff about fifty feet out where the rolling waves began.

As he paddled closer to the rock, he could see the man on it—asleep, Billy thought, just lying in the sun as the waves lapped at his skin. As Billy drifted closer, paddling with his hands, he could see a long-fingered hand hanging in the water, and he paddled faster, suddenly wondering whether the man wanted to be out on a rock, or whether he was a Dude In Distress, his leg cramped, needing a ride to the beach on Billy’s surfboard and a trip around the boardwalk, and maybe some shaved ice.

As Billy approached, the guy opened his eyes, frowning over at Billy with wide, half-awake brown eyes. He pushed himself up on the rock with his arms like the goddamn Little Mermaid, Billy thought, amused. His throat went dry watching the flex of muscle, and the water droplets where the dude had lifted himself out of the bay.

Billy paddled at random, a little, unable to tear his eyes away. He cleared his throat. “Just, uh, making sure you didn’t need any help,” he said, staring at the tanned arms and swimmer’s chest in front of him, nearly triangular, like a superhero. “I, um. Guess you’re fine.”

The guy raised his eyebrows, starting to smirk, and then his eyes widened, and Billy realized in a flash of blue and foam that he’d drifted right into the fucking rip tide. Right in front of the gorgeous dude on the rock, Billy thought in the back of his mind, trying to hold onto his surfboard and let the rip tide take him wherever it would. Just his luck, he thought, dying because he was so damn gay he saw nice shoulders and his brain switched off. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to breathe before he got sucked down, and his lungs and sinuses were starting to ache worse than the rest of him, even as he was buffeted around against his board, when an arm slid around his waist.

He wanted to yell at the guy—and he did, in an explosion of bubbles—because what the hell good was it gonna do, swimming into a rip tide, but the muscles against his back and butt flexed, and they were moving sideways out of the rip tide, and then Billy’s head was above water. He gasped and choked, coughing up half the sea. The ocean moved soothingly around them, as this dude had no trouble holding Billy up, and Billy tried to clear his throat and eyes.

“Have you seriously never seen a tail before,” the guy groaned, hauling Billy along like he was no more effort to lift than a little kid at the pool. Billy felt rock against his thigh, suddenly, and scrambled onto it, coughing and wiping his eyes to see he was on the jutting rock the dude must have jumped off of, to save him.

“How-how fucking humiliating,” he gasped out loud. “Can’t believe. C-can’t believe I fucking p-paddled into a rip tide.”

“You drifted back into the...yeah,” his hot rescuer said, still in the water, with one hand on the rock to hold him steady as he frowned at Billy. His voice sounded a little odd—Billy was reminded of the Chinese grocery by his house, where their English was perfect, but they had a lilt as they tried to speak an atonal language with a tonal ear. Up close, he was even prettier, with moles Billy wanted to track down his neck and shoulders, and a doubtful, scrunched-up mouth Billy wanted to kiss.

“Sorry,” Billy wheezed, still coughing. “Sorry, I’m such a moron, sorry.” He tried to keep his eyes above the water level, but some part of his brain kept looking for tanned legs kicking under the surface, and he suddenly registered that the moving colors weren’t just fish and anemones. “Holy shit,” he coughed out. “You have a tail.”

His rescuer frowned harder, probably worried Billy had brain damage. “I figured that’s why you swam into the rip tide,” he said slowly, and Billy shook his head, groaning.

“No—fuck, I’m sorry, you—you’re just hot as fuck, I’m just a moron, I’m—damn it,” he sighed. “Sorry, jesus, I’m so fucking rude, sorry, I just didn’t notice, I was like ‘How the hell did he get me out of there? OH!’, sorry,” he muttered, sighing. “...drown me.”

“I am though, right,” the merman said, grinning, “—hotter than you,” and Billy realized he’d found the only person on the island more annoying than he was.

“Yeah, yeah, just laugh at the poor gay moron who nearly drowned staring at you, that’s nice,” he huffed, lying back against the warm rock to catch his breath.

“Was it love at first sight?” asked his rescuer, and Billy opened his eyes to glare.

“Shut up, asshole,” he grunted.

“Just asking,” his tormenter asked. “Are you gonna pine away, sighing over me? Hey, d’you think you’ll always do that? If I swim over in town, you think you’ll fall off the boardwalk?”

“Fuck you,” Billy told him, leaning his face in his arms and laughing. “Yeah, probably, you shithead. Are you gonna...follow me around? So I can look like more of an idiot?”

“Mmm, can you though…” the gorgeous merman asked thoughtfully, and Billy growled into his arms, feeling his whole body warm. He blamed it on the sun. “Why,” his rescuer asked, pulling himself up to laugh against Billy’s ear. “—you want me to follow you someplace?”

“Oh my god,” Billy groaned, laughing harder. “Are you afraid to leave me alone now? What if I try and eat my surfboard?”

“...are you gonna?”

“Maybe?!” Billy told him, then pushed himself up, frowning around to look for it.

“I’ve got it, it’s right here,” the smug asshole told him, waggling the surfboard in the water. “Want me to take you back to shore?”

“No!” Billy laughed, sighing. “I’m going surfing, just because I nearly died making an ass of myself doesn’t mean—”

“Hrm, maybe I should keep an eye on you.”

“Why,” Billy asked, then pitched his voice just a little lower. “You like what you see?”

“I could get used to it,” the merman said, and Billy started to preen, but the dickhead finished with “—kind of a comedy special, kind of thing,” and Billy reached over and smacked a big splash of water at him.

He laughed, his throat arching back, the gills along it thin dark lines that Billy fantasized kissing around.

Just as Billy was considering grabbing the surfboard and using it as a weapon of blunt force trauma, the merman leaned in close, his smirk widening around pointed teeth, and his cool, salty lips pressed firmly against Billy’s. Billy made a weird gulping noise in his throat, and the asshole started to pull away, but Billy leaned in, and fell clean off the rock. His weight dunked them both, and they rose sputtering and laughing, Billy held securely in his merman’s arms as his surfboard floated away. He couldn’t really bring himself to care.

“...my name’s Billy,” he panted.

“...Steve,” the mer-dickhead said, raising his eyebrows, like it was weird to want to know his name.

“...I inherited a house here,” Billy told him in a rush, drunk on kisses. “I’m from California. My mom used to talk about this place when I was a kid. Surfing here. With her mom.”

“...is she here?” Steve asked, steadying them with one hand on the rock, and glancing back at the beach.

Billy laughed, shaking his head. “Fuck, sorry, you don’t need to know my shit. We can make out. You’re short-circuiting my brain.”

“...I should probably get your surfboard,” Steve told him, grinning, but he leaned his head in again, gentle with his sharp teeth, and Billy inhaled shakily as the points grazed his lips and tongue.

“Jesus,” he whispered, once he could talk, and then he licked his lips and wrenched himself away to swim after his surfboard, just so his smug rescuer wouldn’t have to fetch it for him. The waves got bigger as he got out to where the trees weren’t acting as a windbreak, and he clambered up on his board, glaring back as Steve wolf-whistled.

When he let the tides pull him back towards the gorgeous merman on the rock, he lost his mind again, telling him his tail looked like a peacock butt, and Steve cracked up, grinning at him.

“...so, neighbor, you have to win someone over enough to invite you to stay,” he said, cocking his head.

“Yup,” Billy told him, pointing up at the house he’d inherited, built into the hill, the old grass vacation cottage blending in with the trees.

“And your method is to tell me I look like bird ass,” Steve continued, and Billy grimaced, waving his hands.

“No! No, I don’t—I know people have to get to know you. Here. I’ll…” he sighed. “I’ll try for a few months and see what happens. If nothing...clicks, maybe I’ll try again next summer,” he said, grimacing, and wondering what Max would do, if they weren’t allowed to stay. Leave, maybe, he thought—she was seventeen, and she could get a job herself.

He ended up teaching Steve to surf, after showing off his best efforts. When he swam back, panting, Steve looked properly impressed, and even more tanned. “Teach me,” he said, and Billy leaned in to kiss him again, nodding.

“That gonna get you to like me enough to let me stay?” Billy asked, and Steve frowned at him, but Billy laughed, and leaned in for another kiss.

“Tomorrow?” Steve had whispered against his lips, and Billy got no sleep at all that night, he just rolled over every couple hours to check the clock, and see that another two minutes had passed.

Steve was fascinating to watch on the board, his tail trailing as he controlled it with his hands around either side, his abs flexing as he held himself in a kind of plank pose with the support of his tail. Billy watched, and realized he was drooling.

“You like me enough to keep me?” he asked that night, teasing, and Steve laughed.

“Ask me again tomorrow.”

Merpeople—or at least, Steve, Billy corrected mentally, realizing he was dealing with a sample size of one—loved bread. Like a cat, Billy thought, watching Steve eye his croissant, or bagel. He started just bringing one every morning for Steve, and some coffee, and it was hilarious watching the fluffy flesh of a croissant dangling between Steve’s shark-like teeth. He waited every morning, and even though Billy wasn’t sure whether Steve was waiting for Billy or the bread he was carrying, he got heart palpitations every time he came down the ramp to the dock, and he could see the little lump of Steve’s head on his folded arms, the rest of him hanging off into the water.

“A few bagels aren’t enough to win me over,” Steve told him, and Billy’s stomach twisted, a little. He wished he hadn’t brought it up, kind of—the knowledge that he might have to leave hurt, like a sore tooth he couldn’t stop worrying at in his mouth. “Maybe more croissants,” Steve said, smiling, and Billy brought him more croissants.

When they’d arrived, they’d discovered the town was filled with mermaid stuff, and at first, Max and Billy had snickered at it, because surely even if there’d been a merperson or two living near a human town once, they’d died decades ago, or they just traded with fishing boats, far out at sea. They hadn’t considered the amount of people in wheelchairs, or the spray bottles close to hand.

When Billy suggested he bring lunch down from town, Steve swam over to haul himself up—his tail flashing in the light—through the bottom of one of the little sheds on the dock. Moments later, he banged the door open, wheeling out in an old rusty wheelchair. He spun it in a circle, waiting for Billy to climb out of the water, and then zipped ahead up the ramp to the path.

“Wait up, jesus,” Billy yelled after him, and Steve laughed, the muscles in his arms mesmerizing as they spun the wheels. He slowed down eventually, panting, enough for Billy to jog and catch up. “...lemme know if you want me to push,” Billy told him, and Steve snorted.

“Touch my chair and die,” he said.

“Fair enough,” Billy said, holding his hands up, and Steve laughed.

“It makes me…” he squinted, thinking. “...seasick…?” he offered, and Billy nodded, trotting along next to him.

“Motion-sick, probably,” he suggested, and Steve mouthed it as he rolled along.

The lady at the shaved ice stand leaned out and folded her arms on the edge of the little window, laughing at Steve. “You know they make those that work!” she called, and he flipped her off. “They don’t have to be electric! They make ‘em that just move smoothly.”

“It’ll just rust in my shed,” Steve told her, shrugging. “It’s fine.” As they waited for their tacos, Steve pulled up to a table, and his rusty, janky wheels kept rolling backwards, until Steve sighed and bent down to stuff some rocks under there.

“My friend Robin and I went in together on a nicer one,” he said, “—but I can’t park it in the shed. This one’s not so bad,” and Billy’s perception of it shifted a bit—maybe it was more like getting stuck with an old beater car occasionally, instead of something Steve needed help with. “...want to wander around, after?” Billy asked. “I haven’t got any souvenirs yet.”

Steve paused, then licked his lips. “Planning your trip home already?”

“...dunno yet,” Billy said, the invitation unspoken between them. It seemed ridiculous to want to stay so badly just because he’d met a pair of gorgeously tanned shoulders and a teasing smile, but it also wasn’t...hard to imagine, lingering on the island to go snorkeling with Steve, and learning about the reefs—he’d absorbed enough for a few semesters of marine biology, he was fairly sure, but told as stories, just off-handed things Steve had seen—and Billy was already wanting a drysuit, so he could go in the fall. Maybe Billy could get a job on a fishing boat, he thought vaguely, or help out in one of the shops.

If Steve would invite him.

Steve had slid his hands under Billy’s swimsuit a few times, pressing him back on their rock, or on the docks, rocking into him as Billy panted and gasped and fell apart under his hands—but he never said anything, after, and Billy hesitated to ask whether it was...anything, to Steve. Maybe he picks an idiot every summer, he thought, watching Steve smile at the depictions of mermaids on every surface of every shop on the main street.

“You all spend so much time keeping everything dry and dead,” he said, grinning over at Billy, who’d been anticipating a comment on the mermaid’s hourglass-like proportions, not her lack of water damage.

“...oh,” he said.

“I have a figurehead like that, but covered in anemones,” Steve said, cocking his head. “It’s beautiful.”

“I mean...you could...plant a vine on it, maybe?”

Steve nodded. “Put it outside in the rain, let it grow.” The lady behind the counter sighed, rolling her eyes, and Steve laughed.

“There’s a whole movement to ‘preserve’ our art,” he whispered to Billy. “Which mostly means they don’t let it become our art.”

“Huh,” Billy said, wondering whether human houses looked like museums, or mausoleums, to merpeople.

“Not to say that I’d pour water on your television set, or drop your mattress in the bay,” Steve said, grimacing a little, and watching Billy’s face. “I get that much.” He looked kind of uncomfortable with the lady behind the counter glaring at him, ducking his head.

Billy leaned to kiss him. He nearly steadied himself on the chair, and then remembering it would roll, and just held his hands away. Steve grinned up at him, particularly at his outstretched hands, and yanked Billy down on his not very much of a lap, hurriedly curling his tail up and around Billy’s waist as Billy threatened to slide down the smooth scales to the ground. Billy threw his arms around Steve’s neck, wide-eyed, as Steve held the wheels firmly, keeping the chair from rolling backwards under the weight of two grown men.

“Let’s go,” Steve whispered, and Billy nodded, breathing Steve’s sun-and-salt smell, and wondering whether it was okay to ask whether Steve would consider inviting him to stay—just until the next season, Billy thought, as the chair and Steve’s tail moved under him. Until the next summer, when he could ask whether Steve wanted him to stay again, or whether he wanted Billy gone.

After staying a whole year, Billy thought he might not have it in him to ask whether Steve was tired of him yet, but the thought of waking every morning to run down to the docks with coffee and banana bread was addictive, and he tried not to think about the end.

Billy ran into the lady who’d stamped his passport, and caught himself staring at her tanned legs propped up on the railing. “Oh, I’m human,” she said, laughing. “But I love it here. I can even shop in the little bookstore, imagine,” she said, and now that Billy thought about it, he realized it had an elevator in the back, and little lifts for the walkways along the higher shelves. “I’ve never had someone offer to lift me into their cafe, here,” she said, her nose wrinkled, and Billy nodded slowly.

“Shoot that thing!” she yelled, when she saw Steve’s awful old wheelchair, and he flipped her off.

“We can only invite a few people,” Steve told him, as they ate noodle bowls. “It’s for somebody you marry, you know, their family, maybe. Or if you leave the island, and have a kid.”

“Yeah,” Billy said softly, hearing the message clearly—invitations were not to be wasted, and Billy wasn’t special enough to keep. He finished his lunch, trying not to feel all butthurt about it. Max would probably understand.

Steve kissed him again, on the docks, and Billy leaned into it, feeling the familiar pressure of tears in his sinuses, and behind his eyes. He had three weeks left, he told himself. Three more weeks. Steve slid a hand up the back of Billy’s head, humming against his mouth, and Billy let himself go soft in his arms.

When they returned to the docks, Steve dug a big beach blanket out, and they spread it out on the sand, and Billy stayed out that night, losing himself in Steve’s warm hands and mouth, under stars like he’d never seen before.

Steve was watching his face the next morning, with a little frown, and Billy pulled away, sitting up.

“Better than croissants?” Billy asked, smirking a little, and Steve sighed.

“Was that what this was? Fucking me won’t make me give you an invitation,” he said. He didn’t look amused, the way he had over the bagels, and Billy wondered whether it had worked, a little. Billy’d always had a talented mouth.

“I won’t know if I don’t try, will I,” he said, laughing. “Maybe another round will help?”

“...I have to go,” Steve said, and he didn’t even fold up the blanket, just pushed himself off the edge and slid over the wet sand into the water, gone in a flip of tail. Billy watched for long minutes to see whether he’d come back—they’d been spending every day together, but probably Steve had stuff he needed to do, all the things he’d done before Billy had shown up at the island, easy with his body and his affections.

Billy folded up the blanket, and sat it in the shed, looking around. There really wasn’t much in there—it was the size of a small bathroom, with some knives for fishing, and a frayed net, and the beat-up wheelchair.

It smelled like Steve, and Billy stood and breathed, his eyes blurring with tears.

Steve didn’t come back, and after an hour or so Billy walked home, and ran into Max returning. “Billy!” she said, with a wide grin. “Nice night? I was out getting breakfast.” She told him about somebody named El, and somebody else named Lucas, and a Dustin.

Max was making friends too, he realized, which kind of made everything worse—she was doing her best, and Billy was just mooning over some guy who thought he was barely good enough for a fuck on the beach. She’d even met their families, he realized, listening, and registered that he hadn’t met any of Steve’s friends. He groaned into the pillows tossed around on the mat floor, and sighed.

“Should I stop seeing him?” he asked, mostly at the ceiling.

“I dunno why now,” Max said. “You’re not gonna find somebody else in a couple weeks.”

“Shit,” Billy groaned again.

“We can try again next summer,” Max said. “I like it here.”

The idea of returning the next summer, once Steve was bored, was enough to make Billy clench his jaw tight against the pillow he was hugging, squeezing his eyes shut against tears. “...yeah,” he said softly.

“God, you sound tragic,” she sighed, wandering over and dropping to sit on his butt. He grunted. “It’s fine, jesus. Worst case scenario we have a, like, vacation home. The vampire dude said we didn’t have to pay taxes on it.”

“Yeah, just pay for plane fare,” Billy sighed.

“He’s out there, y’know,” she said, “—tanning,” and Billy scrambled up so fast he dumped her with a drum noise on the taut mats.

When he swam out, Steve just stared out to sea, and Billy clung to the edge of the rock, biting his lips.

“I’m not giving you one of my invitations,” Steve said. “So stop trying to manipulate me into it.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, kind of wishing they’d never met. “Yeah, okay. Do—is that all, or are you sticking around?”

“I’ll stay,” Steve said, frowning at him, “—if you still wanna waste your time on somebody who’s not—how do you say it? Putting out?”

“...it’s not a waste of time,” Billy told him, swallowing hard. “I just wanted it to last longer, is all—” and Steve’s eyes narrowed intently. He grabbed Billy around the back of the neck, and yanked him into a kiss.

The remaining weeks, he took Billy snorkeling, and they had sex every night under the stars, Billy panting Steve’s name, and Steve holding him so tightly it almost hurt. Billy took him to meet Max, and she eyed him warily, but Billy fought and succeeded at securing Steve a plate of brownies, and he was vocally appreciative. She softened a little, at that.

Two days before they had to leave, Steve was lying next to Billy on the wet sand, the waves lapping up nearly to their waists. His shoulder was warm under Billy’s head, and smelled like the high ocean waves.

“...d’you think you’ll come back next summer,” Steve asked, and Billy snorted.

“Depends on whether I can afford airfare,” he said, sighing. “Depends on whether I can get a job somewhere that doesn’t need me in the summer.”

“...so I might just never see you again?” Steve asked flatly, and Billy laughed, shrugging.

“I don’t know,” he said, “—do you want to?”

“...fuck you,” Steve sighed, and Billy pushed himself up to frown at Steve’s face.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said, glaring back at Steve’s narrowed brown eyes. “You wanted me to shut up about staying. What am I supposed to say?”

Steve bit his lips together, and looked away. “...you know I’m gonna give you an invitation. You can just tell me.”

“What,” Billy whispered, scrambling to sit up, his heart pounding as Steve flopped over to scrabble around under his wheelchair, his tail flapping around a little in concentration, like a cat’s. He held an envelope out to Billy without even looking over.

“There,” he said. “All yours.”

“What,” Billy breathed, and then he half-crumpled it, opening it clumsily. “You—you’re giving me one?”

“Two,” Steve said, flatly, frowning down at the sand under his hands. “You and Max, right?”

“Holy shit,” Billy whispered, scrambling over to kiss him, once, then twice, relishing the little noise Steve made in the back of his throat when his lip slid between Billy’s teeth. “I have to go tell her,” he said, half laughing, his vision blurring with tears.

“Okay,” Steve said, quietly, and Billy hugged him before scrambling up and running back to the house.

Max stared at the two calligraphed invitations on the odd plasticky “paper” the merfolk used, written in Sharpie, and shook her head slowly. “You did it,” she said, and Billy laughed, nodding.

“He wanted me to stay enough,” he said, wiping his eyes, and desperately wanting Max to offer to handle the paperwork, so he could run back and kiss Steve.

There was a knock on the door. Max ran and opened it, and a short-haired woman wheeled in in a rainbow overall dress, and a small, fancy electric wheelchair, her tail the reds and oranges of a sunset. Billy never quite stopped being envious of how pretty the merpeople were.

“Steve gave you his invites, didn’t he,” she said, and Max slid them around her back, her eyes narrowing.

“...yeah,” Billy said, warily.

“Give them back to him,” she ordered, glaring between them. “He’s been saving those a long-ass time. He’s got plans for those, and he doesn’t need guilt-tripping by a pair of manipulative orphans, jesus.”

“I didn’t guilt-trip him,” Billy said, feeling guilty, suddenly, and remembering Steve’s stiffness as he handed them over. “I didn’t,” he said, less certainly. “...he...he just likes me, he wants me to stay—”

“He’s known you three months, and you told him you fucked him to get someplace nice for your sister to live,” she said crisply. “Give them back.”

“He’s not giving them back,” Max hissed, but she was staring at Billy in horror.

“I didn’t say that,” Billy said, waving his hands. “I didn’t! Not...exactly.”

“Fuck you,” the woman said, glaring. “You pressured him.”

“Fuck,” Billy agreed, his eyes tearing up again. “Lemme—lemme go talk to him. Max, give—give ‘em here.”

“No,” she said, sounding choked, but he walked over and grabbed them, and hugged her.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said under his breath, for her ears only, and ran back out.

Steve was perched up on his rock again, and Billy grabbed his surfboard and sat on it to glide out, paddling with his hands. The water was clear under him, his shadow passing over the anemones on the reef, and he watched the fish darting around, swallowing repeatedly.

“Hey,” he said, when he got close enough, and Steve’s head jerked around, glowering warily.

“...you came back,” he said.

“...you want me to stay, right,” Billy said, cutting straight to the chase. “You gave me these because you want me to stay.” Steve frowned back at him, and Billy’s heart sank. “Answer,” he said, his throat closing around the word.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it,” Steve said, reaching out, but he just grabbed Billy’s board before he could drift into the rip tide again. “You wanted to stay.” He was tense, and he wouldn’t meet Billy’s eyes.

“What do you want,” Billy asked again. “...because I think your friend Robin’s in my house, and she says I guilted you into it, talking about Max. Do you...if I didn’t need an invite. Would you want me to stay?”

“...I guess,” Steve sighed, and Billy swung his leg over the board, dumping himself straight down in the water, because he was definitely about to make some kind of awful noise, and the sea felt good on his hot, wet cheeks. Steve couldn’t see him crying underwater, he thought, grabbing a jut of rock to keep himself from floating back up.

He wished he could take a few slow breaths, he thought, closing his eyes, and then something brushed his arm. He opened his eyes on Steve’s wide-eyed face, his hair swirling in the water. Billy bit his lips together harder, his hands clenching on the rock, and Steve shook his head, pointing up.

“Up,” he mouthed. “Come on.”

Billy let himself be hauled upwards, and pushed up on the rock again, like when they’d first met.

“What are you doing,” Steve asked, hanging on to Billy’s surfboard.

“Nothing,” Billy said, keeping his voice level. “I thought you wanted me to stay. For me. You can have your invites back. I didn’t—” he took a deep breath, hearing Steve’s voice say stop trying to manipulate me, and Robin’s guilt-tripping. “I fucking know I’m pathetic, okay, you don’t have to pity me. Sorry I—sorry I fucking tried, jesus, I just—” he shut his eyes tightly again, laughing as he imagined Robin’s disgusted look knowing Billy’d gone out and cried.

“Wait, fuck,” Steve whispered, clambering up next to him, where Billy barely fit by himself, since it was high tide. He was warm from the sun, his tanned skin gleaming with water droplets, and Billy salivated, because his dick obviously hadn’t gotten the message it wasn’t wanted. “Wait,” Steve said, half on top of him, his weight grating Billy’s shoulder blades against the rock. Billy didn’t really mind. “You only want to stay if—if I want you, what—what does that mean—” His brown eyes were huge.

“...don’t really know how to be clearer,” Billy told him, unable to pull his eyes from Steve’s mouth.

“You don’t want to stay unless I’m happy about it,” Steve said, grabbing Billy’s hands.

“Yeah, that’s kinda how it gets, when you fall for somebody,” Billy told him, raising his eyebrows, and Steve took a shuddery breath and kissed him again. He didn’t stop, though, he just kissed Billy and kissed him, laughing shakily, his eyes welling up with tears.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, as Billy clung to him and the rock, trying to keep them from tumbling off. “I want you here, I want you. Stay with me.”

“I’m what you want?” Billy asked, startled, his brain hazy from warm kisses, and the scrape of pointed teeth. “‘M yours then,” he whispered. “All—all of me. S’yours.”

They laid there so long, whispering and giggling, that Billy had tan lines of Steve’s fingers on his shoulder for months.

Here are the other Harringrove April prompts I’ve done!

#Harringrove April #Mermay #Almost #Harringrove #Steve's got a tail #Billy's got a surfboard

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okaybutlikeimagine · 4 years

Text

Come Inside, It’s Ok

Desc: Hop realizes that Billy is a lot like him when he was a teen- based on the song Thirteen by Big Star (bc that’s a Jopper AND a Harringrove anthem, tell me i’m wrong)

TW: referenced past child abuse, referenced homophobia, every dad in Hawkins sounds like an abusive asshole in this fic i didn’t mean it 😞

you can also read this on AO3 right here!! ♥

~*~

James Hopper hated his father more than anyone else hated the man. More than his uncle who had to grow up with the jerk. More than his mother who threatened to divorce the deadbeat seven times. More than anyone.

Hopper’s father was abrasive and loud. He joined the army because he wanted to. He gave up his individuality willingly. He shaved his head and licked the boot of The Man and acted superior for it. He looked down on a young Jimmy Hopper and barked in his face and ordered that he become a man. Quicker. Jim was only 7. He had just broken an arm at football practice. He needed reassurance and comfort. He got condescension and a mother threatening to leave. Loudly.

James Hopper was sure he was the only son in the world who hated his own father. He felt sure as hell about it when he stuck his jaw out and looked past his nose at his father who always seemed to tower over him. Even when the man only had an inch on him, he was larger- always looming. He felt sure as hell about it when he’d narrow his eyes and refuse to listen. He felt sure as hell about it when he talked back to him, and got into yelling matches with him, and slammed the door on him.

He felt even more sure the one night he got hit.

He was more than certain he was the only one. Standing there, staring this horrible bulk of a man down, Jimmy knew no one else had ever felt such a thing before. This wasn’t TV or the movies. This wasn’t a family love you cherish by the fire on a cold Christmas night. This wasn’t a father with kind eyes and a stern voice who comes into the house in the evening with his suit on and his briefcase in hand, kissing his kids and smiling brightly. This was different and he knew it.

And all of that anger and stress and feeling of certainty made him take too long to realize something crucial. Because he didn’t realize you can know something and yet still be so wrong.

That is, until Phil didn’t come to school one day.

Jimmy figured he was sick. A couple days later he figured it was that nasty stomach bug. A week later and he figured his family took a trip. A week and a few days had him itching with worry. He asked his best friend as calmly as he could. That friend looked at him like he was nuts.

“You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“He moved away. His mom took him out of the state last weekend. They just left.”

Jim couldn’t understand the words for a second.

“Why?”

“You didn’t know? His dad has been roughing him up for years now. He got the mom too, I think. Why do you think he was always wearing sweaters all year long?”

Jim’s heart stopped.

“His mom finally got him out. They left.”

“Why did no one say anything about it?”

“Because you don’t talk about that stuff.” Jim’s friend said, hushed and knowing, eyes turned solemn and hiding a world Jim didn’t know lived in there. In his most outspoken, lively friend. In his friend he’d known since they were toddlers.

You don’t talk about that stuff he said like he had a whole world of pain to tell. Jim knew his friends were like him- dads who were tough as nails and grunted more than spoke. It was why they all got along so well. But they never mentioned their fathers being… Jim was so sure he was the only one. Everyone else did things with their family. Everyone else seemed so perfect. At the very least they seemed better. Jim was sure.

Why did no one say anything about it? quickly morphed into Why did I never even ask?

Starting there, Jim kept a critical eye out. He watched his friends and what they were wearing. The way they moved and the changes in those movements. The words they spoke about their parents. He noticed differences and fluctuating emotions. But stil, he was only a young teenager- he never knew what to do. His mouth couldn’t form around the words he felt he should say. His brain could barely provide them. So he did for them what he would have liked- just took them out to empty fields and deep into the woods. He provided them beer and music. Sometimes, when they were splitting at the seams, he’d fight them a bit. He’d egg them on so they could fight it out. Get the anger out. Help, somehow. Inadvertently. Lord knew Jimmy sometimes just needed to punch shit. Turns out, his friends felt the same way, and often.

When his daughter Sarah came, he handled her gently and spoke to her even softer. He got into fights with his now ex-wife over his not being strict enough but Hop couldn’t find it in himself to have any kind of gruffness toward someone so soft and so innocent and so pure. She was the light of his life. She left so quickly. Even his softness and kindness couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t very well beat the shit out of her enemies like he had wished to.

And when he met Billy Hargrove on the side of the road that one dark night, having pulled him over for speeding drunkenly down the lonely streets on the outskirts of town, every red flag flew up. Every worry and fear he found within himself when he was a teen found its place once again inside of him for this boy. For his bruised face and exhausted eyes. For his lightly cut chin and short breath. Hop became young Jimmy yet again, analyzing and fearing for a world of pain he couldn’t see and couldn’t ask about. He searched hard for words this time and found all the wrong ones. He exhausted the poor boy with his inability to articulate his fears and was successful in taking him in only because he had worn him out so badly.

Still, since then, he’s been here. He’s family now. He’s out of there. In all his fumbling Hop did something right.

And yet, things still feel wrong. Billy still walks tentatively around him, like the cabin is going to crash down above him and any relationship they’ve built up is going to shatter.

Hop thinks about it so often. He thinks about Billy and sees his own friends from high school. He sees parts of himself, but sadder, angrier… more helpless. He thinks endlessly on what he can do to fix it.

~Won’t you let me walk you home from school~

A song starts playing through his record player and he’s lost again in the world of Jimmy vs. Billy. He thinks of how life used to feel simple.

This song always whisks him away to high school. The early days when life was confused and wandering and he was just coming into his own with football, not nearly a “star” yet and Joyce… Joyce was young and wide eyed and wandering just the same. By that point she hadn’t even met Lonnie yet. She was awkward and yet still so beautiful. So quiet and so stunning. Her laughter rang through the hallways and he swears he can still hear it.

This song feels like it’s for them. When he first heard it, he saw her face back when they were freshmen and then sophomores, when he used to walk her home. He always used to walk her home, before he got his car and before she got Lonnie. They’d walk so slow, wandering through the streets, lazily strolling past stores and getting slightly distracted by the people zooming past on their bikes.

He sits forward on the couch and he looks down at the tattered carpet and he hears himself as Jimmy.

”C’mon Joyce… we can hit the pool this weekend.”

“I’m busy.”

“Then… then maybe Friday I can get a couple tickets for that dance.”

“What?”

He gave her his biggest, brightest grin, knowing he caught her off guard. He smiles a little now at the thought.

”Yeah, c’mon, Joyce. I’ll take ya. I’ll get a monkey suit and you can wear a dress-”

She had laughed that bright, ringing laugh. It made him smile every time.

“Yeah, I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re gonna pass up a chance to dance with me?”

“Don’t tell me, you’re the best dancer in Hawkins?”

“You’ll never know if you don’t come find out.”

“You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you?”

Hop has a hard time thinking of himself back then. He felt so sure of everything. Of himself and what he was doing, even if he knew he didn’t know anything at all. Still, he chuckles now as he sits here, thinking about Joyce’s smile and her little nod. Thinking about him buying those tickets. Thinking about the night they had together, awkward and fumbling but bright still. His first real kiss that had real feelings to go along with it. The way Joyce walked so quickly as they headed to her home because she was so nervous. The way she never let him walk her up to her house because she was so scared her parents would ground her.

Lord does he remember the fights. The stress and the struggle of dealing with Joyce’s parents. When they came to an after-school event and Jimmy said hi to her and her dad gave her hell for it and her mom worried herself sick for a bit. She got grounded and started avoiding him. He got angry and figured fine because Gloria from his History class had been eyeing him up lately and helping him with a pretty friendly smile so it didn’t even matter.

It wasn’t more than a week that had passed before he cornered her after school and convinced her to let him walk her home again.

They wandered downtown and he guided her behind a store building, the store she now works for if he remembers correctly, and asked about that night. Asked about what he said wrong. Asked about what he did wrong.

She shook her head, said it was just her parents being “crazy, I don’t know”. He couldn’t find it in him to worry that much. When they kissed, it was still with so many feelings attached. Hop can’t remember when those feelings faded.

It wasn’t until a couple years later when a rumor started going around about Joyce’s dad being a grade A asshole like Phil’s was all those years ago that made Jim take her aside very seriously and ask her if she was okay- those couple of years ago and that day. By that point she was with Lonnie and he was getting serious about Diane. He and Joyce hadn’t talked for over a year. Still, he was worried. She insisted that her dad just liked to huff and puff and yell enough to shake her ears, but he never touched her. It wasn’t until years and years later that Hop realized that really isn’t any better. Nowadays she insists she was and is fine and he’s just found it in himself to believe her.

When Hop finally got a car, they would sit in it and listen to the radio and talk music. She was the only person who’d sit with him and actually think about lyrics and feelings and words. She was always so headstrong about… well everything but especially human rights. She wanted equal rights for everyone. She fought so hard it made Jim tired. Maybe it started with her father but it truly never seemed to end. They used to sit and theorize about meanings behind words and the messages of songs.

”Tell your old man what we say about Paint It, Black. That’ll mess him up.”

Joyce hit him with a chuckle. That was the last time in high school they really laughed together. He can still remember her laugh back then- light and free from any weight these years have brought to it.

But now Jimmy is Hopper, and life isn’t the same. It doesn’t wander and linger and hide behind stores for extra kisses that feel electric. He knows life just doesn’t work that way anymore. He feels like life has only continued with all of the bad parts and none of the good.

In the slow guitar interlude of the song, he hears voices where they shouldn’t be- distant and slightly muffled and outside the window that’s opened a bit to let some air in.

“Yeah, he’s home. The cruiser is there.”

“Then I should go-”

“No, wait-”

It’s Billy and another voice Hop thinks he can recognize. Sounds like the same cocky, lilted tone of Steve Harrington. He knows they’ve been fighting for months now. They always seem to be fighting. Hop used to get called into the school because Billy was always shoving him around that one year. Since then there’s been whispers of them causing a ruckus all over the place but Hop never gets called to check it out. He doesn’t like to ask too much about it. He’s still trying to handle Billy gently and there’s so many more things to worry about. He doesn’t have the words to ask about that.

He doesn’t have the words to explain why they’d be here, together and clearly not at each other’s throats. Why bring a fight all the way back home?

“You uh… got anything planned this weekend?”

“Nope, nothing planned.”

A pause.

“There’s uh… a stupid dance or something-”

“Billy-”

“Look I just… we can’t go, obviously but maybe… we can do something on our own?”

There’s another pause. Longer this time. Hop used to be so sure and suddenly he’s realizing yet again maybe things are the same as they were when he was young- because yet again, he doesn’t know anything.

~Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of~

“C’mon Harrington….” there’s the confirmation Hop didn’t need. “Say something at least. Don’t just stand there thinking.”

“Billy we can’t keep running around and hiding.”

“Why not?”

~Would you be an outlaw for my love?~

“What if people find out, that’s why not! What if my dad-”

“Tell your dad to fuck off.”

“And Hop?”

Hop’s heart stops. Everything comes crashing to a halt because suddenly he’s being made to face the very harsh fact that he’s not Jimmy anymore. He hasn’t been for a long while. He’s Chief Hopper and Chief Hopper belongs to the “other” part of these young kids’ minds. Billy’s and Steve’s and El’s and Mike’s. He’s the man they’re meant to rebel against. He’s the one that doesn’t “get it” like they do.

And apparently he’s the one that Steve is worried about.

He doesn’t blame him. He doesn’t even know what to think. He knows people like that exist. He thinks he used to go to school with a few guys who were… well, into other things. He never had much to say or even think about it. Joyce was friends with them. She went out to a protest or something once in their senior year. He saw her in a car with them while he was taking Diane to the movies.

It’s not the fact that they like each other or that they want to spend time together. That’s better than them beating the snot out of each other and getting his guys called on them. It’s the fact that they’re worried about him and the fact that they have every reason to be. Hop is part of “The Man” now, and people around here don’t exactly like differences.

“I’ll figure it out.” Billy says, but Hop almost misses it, it’s so quiet.

“Billy-”

“Are you gonna fight for this, or what? Or is this just a one time thing for you to find yourself or some bullshit?”

Hop hears Jimmy in Billy’s words

”Are you not gonna fight for me?”

“Fight for you?!” Joyce had yelled. Oh, how she yelled. ”Are you serious? I… I pick and choose my fights Jim, okay? I have to.”

“That’s not very fair to me.”

“Not fair? No shit it’s not fair, it’s not fair for me either! And you… you’re not being fair to me, y’know!”

And that was it. They went separate ways. It’s so vivid in Jim’s mind- the way she stormed away and Jim drove himself home. He doesn’t remember how long it took until Lonnie joined Joyce’s picture, but it felt too soon in Hop’s ever bitter mind. He couldn’t look at her for weeks. He shoved Lonnie in the hallway any chance he got. The kid would snarl and sneer at him, but he was as scrappy as a dog and scrawnier than a toothpick- no way did he ever pick a fight. He spat words and Jimmy lunged and that was that. Hop doesn’t remember when the feelings faded, but he knows he never stopped hating Lonnie’s stupid face.

Then he started to date Diane and things were just… over.

“Alright Steve, I see-”

“It’s not that easy for me, Billy.”

“And you think this shit is easy for me?”

Hop feels bad for sitting here, still listening, but he can’t get his muscles or limbs to move him. He feels stuck, somewhere between here and the past, picturing all the ways he’s still the same and yet so wildly different.

“Well it is different for you.”

“Just because my shit’s different doesn’t mean my shit’s better. Shit is still shit, Steve.”

All the times Hop thought he had it the worst anyone could ever possibly have it.

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Try me, Harrington! Just try me.”

All the times Hop thought maybe his friends were exaggerating about Phil’s past. Maybe Joyce was being dramatic about things at home. There was no way a kid could feel so threatened. Not a kid as big as Phil. Not a kid as headstrong as Joyce.

There’s a longer pause from the two outside the window. The voice that comes is quieter now.

“It’s scary Billy.”

“I know it is! I… fuck I know it is.”

Not a kid as big and headstrong as Billy. It took years for Hop to believe it could happen and still, with an example living in his own house, it’s still hard to understand.

“Don’t you think it could be worth it?” That’s Billy’s voice. Hop feels his heart sink even deeper. They’re talking like they’re going to die if they’re caught. How many more times can he tell this boy he’s safe here? What does he have to do to convince him? To convince them both?

“Maybe… I think so.”

“Look, I can’t make you do anything, Steve. But if you wanna try… then let me know, alright?”

Billy sounds so tired. Hop wants to tell him to lay down and take a nap. There’s such a long pause that follows and fills the space between them.

And then suddenly there’s something blocking the sun from the window. Jim gets the wherewithal to turn and see that the two boys have got their hands tangled in the front of each other’s shirts, just like they would if they were gearing for a fight, but instead of fists flying it’s their lips locked- worlds of frustration still heavy on their brows.

Jim wants to protect these kids until the day he dies. They’re here and they’re wandering too, but their walk home is covered in speed bumps and potholes and hell maybe even spikes that he and Joyce never knew. Whatever he can do to give these kids the time and place to wander like the kids they are, he’ll do it.

Then they separate, their breathing clearly labored and mingling. Then they turn and see Jim in the window, caught like two deer in big bright headlights.

A split second later, Steve is running for the hills and Billy is left with his fists grasping at the air. Hop can’t help but laugh.

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yikesharringrove · 4 years

Note

Hey! So think you could do something along the line of Steve finding Billy breaking down (writers choice as to why) somewhere random Billy thought he'd be alone for awhile and Billy is all teeth towards him before Steve coaxes him enough to let him in on why he's so upset. Maybe first kiss? Or just some angst and comfort

Billy was crashing through the woods, didn’t know where he was, where he was going, barely even knew which way was up at this point.

He was driving, trying to find somewhere, anywhere, had gotten out of his car to stumble through the woods.

He heard a branch snap, went still.

“Hello?”

“Jesus Christ.” Steve Harrington, of all people, stepped out from behind a tree, a wooden baseball bat dropping from where he had it, up and ready. It was that fucking nailed bat Max had threatened his dick with.

“What’s with the weapon?” Billy flexed his hands. A fight wouldn’t be so bad right now. He knows he can take Harrington.

“You’re not the worst thing I’ve seen in these woods.” His eyes looked hollow, empty.

“The fuck you goin’ on about?” Billy could feel his skin itching, his arms shaking.

“Nothing that concerns you, Hargrove.” They stared each other down.

And then Steve stepped closer, holding out the bat.

“You’re giving that to me?” Steve nodded. Billy took it, checking the grip.

“Hit that tree.” Billy looked at him.

“What?”

“You obviously want to hit something, and I’d love to not get the shit beaten outta me again, so, tree.” Billy looked at the bat.

“You gonna be pissed if I break it?”

“Nah. I got like, three of ‘em.” Billy adjusted his stance, holding the bat just like Neil had taught him.

He swung, tree bark splitting and flying into the air when he wrenched the nails out.

He hit it again. And again. And again.

He only figured out he was crying when his vision started swimming, didn’t sop hitting the tree.

He didn’t stop as the bat splintered, as the nails bent and chunks of tree flew off.

And then the bat cracked, split entirely in half.

Billy felt the same.

He threw the piece he was still holding to the ground, burying his face in his hands.

And then there was a warm hand on his shoulder.

Billy whipped around, pushing Steve back from him.

His eyes were wide, and he nearly stumbled over a root.

“What the fuck?”

“Stay the fuck away from me, Harrington!” His blood was pounding in his ears.

“You got two options. Option one: you pound my face in like I can tell you want to. You end up feeling shitty about yourself and I move on. Or, option two: You come eat dinner with me.”

Billy deflated.

“Wh-why?”

“’Cause I’m lonely and got more chicken than I could possibly eat. Besides, you’re in my backyard.” He turned, stepping expertly over a few branches, turning to Billy. “Coming?”

Billy’s not entirely sure why he followed.

The woods opened up to the back of a huge house, a fucking in ground pool right there in front of it.

Because of course Harrington had a giant house with a heated pool.

He led Billy inside the sliding glass door, into the immaculate living room, through to the surgically clean kitchen.

“You live in a model home or some shit?” Steve gave him a tight smile.

“Pretty much.” there was a bucket of KFC on the counter. Steve got two plates from the cabinet, a couple forks, the bucket of chicken. He gestured for Billy to grab the back of sides and Billy stole a few cloth napkins from the neat pile.

Steve led him downstairs to a cozy looking rec room, plopping himself in front of the couch.

“Your parents home?” Billy didn’t want to think about crying in front of him earlier.

“What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“Not for a week and six days then.” Steve was building himself a plate.

“Must be nice.”

“Used to be.” Billy didn’t know what that meant.

No parents was always a positive.

“What do you mean?” Steve gave him an odd look.

“If I tell you, will you tell me why you were being angry in the woods?”

“Probably not.” Steve shrugged, picking up the television remote.

He put on Indiana Jones.

“Oh, yes. I love this movie.” He scoot forward in his seat, taking way too big a bite of chicken.

It was cute.

Billy mentally kicked himself, tried to stop staring.

It was quiet as they watched the movie, eating the too much food.

“I didn’t know I was in your yard.” Steve looked up at him, a little dazed from pulling his attention away from Indiana.

“I mean, glad I found you. Before anything else did.”

“Anything?” Steve went pale.

“Bears. There’s bears. Here. I saw one. Once.” Billy nodded slowly, one eyebrow raised.

“Bears?”

“Bears.” He watched the movie for a little while longer.

“I just gotta get out sometimes. Be somewhere not in my house. Used to go to the beach, but, uh, no beaches here.” Steve sat up a little straighter.

“We’ve got beaches!” Billy gave him a look. “Well, obviously not ocean beaches, but we’ve got, just come with me.”

He left the t.v. on as he raced up the stairs, running up them on all fours like a little kid.

Billy very fastidiously did not melt at the sight.

Steve was tugging on a jacket, grabbing his keys, and was out the door as Billy rounded the corner.

He didn’t know where Steve was driving him to, but Steve had obviously been there a lot. All the turns were well practiced, and he slid right into a parking spot, the lines too faded to see in the dark.

Billy squinted when he got out of the car.

There were other cars lined up in the other spots, a few spaces left between each car.

Steve led him down a little hill.

“Absolutely pathetic.” Billy could see the water in the moonlight. “This is not a beach.”

“Closest you’re gonna get in Hawkins.” Steve was smiling, all proud of himself.

“Just another reason to fucking hate it here.” Billy flopped down on the shore.

It wasn’t even proper sand, more like, a bunch of pebbles. Steve sat next to him.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of those.”

“It’s worse when you’ve lived somewhere else.”

“Who says I haven’t?”

“No way. I’d bet my right nut you’ve never even left the state.”

“That’s unfortunate to your right nut then, because I went to Chicago once with my dad.” Billy tossed his head back, let his laugh ring out over the water.

“Real world traveler, over here.” Steve shushed his yells, laughing as he did.

“Billy, be quiet, there’s people fucking.”

“Yeah, I kinda put two and two together there, Steve-o.” Steve rolled his eyes. “So you brought me to make out point, then?”

“Lovers’ Lake.”

“Even worse.” Steve huffed a laugh at him. Billy looked out over the water, up at the stars.

There were a lot out here. He could even see the milky way.

“If my dad knew some boy took me out to a place called Lovers’ Lake,” he trailed off.

“Yeah, mine too.” He put on a deep voice, puffing out his chest. “Harringtons aren’t queers, Steven.” Billy looked at him.

“Are Harringtons queers?” His calf was twitching, needed to get his energy out somehow.

“One is.” Steve’s voice was quiet, Billy almost didn’t catch it over the lapping of the water at the shore. “What about the Hargroves?”

“One is.”

Steve smiled at him.

“Maybe they should get together sometime.”

“Yeah, they could go to Lovers’ Lake and make out like a couple a’ dumbasses begging to get caught.” Steve laughed.

“One of ‘em has a big empty house. Gets lonely a lot.”

“The other one doesn’t like bein’ home much.”

“Sounds like they’re a pretty good match.”

“They just might be.” They were leaning into one another, Billy could feel Steve’s breath against his face, could smell his rich boy cologne.

“One of them would really like to be kissed right now,” Steve breathed against his lips.

Billy took his face in both hands, planting a soft kiss to his lips.

It didn’t last long, just something sweet for them to treasure tonight.

“I should probably go home soon.”

“I can drive you to your car, if you want.” Steve stood up, dusting off his ass, holding out a hand for Billy.

They held hands back to Steve’s car. Billy felt like a lovesick idiot.

Maybe he was, just a little bit.

Steve idled next to Billy’s car.

“So, same time tomorrow?”

“Let’s skip the breakdown though, yeah? Don’t think I can do ‘em back to back like that.”

“Then let’s also skip the whole finding you in the scary woods behind my house, too. Just use the front door.”

“You gonna let me pick the movie.” Steve gave him a sharp look.

“You got a problem with Indiana Jones? ‘Cause I don’t think this thing between us can go any further if you do.” Billy laughed. He felt so much fucking lighter after this evening, felt like he could go back, face his dad with a smile.

“No problem, just wanted to watch somethin’ scary.” Steve made a face.

“Not really a scary movie person.” Billy rolled his eyes.

“Then crawl into my lap and be all cute and scared.” Steve’s went all big. “I literally just handed that one to you.”

“Well then you better bring somethin’ horrifying, if this is just a horny ploy.”

“You’ll be scared right outta your pants.” Steve laughed at him, pushing him towards the open door.

“Go away. I don’t like you anymore.”

“See you tomorrow, Stever.”

“Yeah, whatever. See you tomorrow.”

#yikes writes #steve harrington #billy hargrove #steve harrington x billy hargrove #billy hargrove x steve harrington #harringrove #harringrove fic #harringrove ficlet #harringrove drabble

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sanchoyo · 3 years

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danny phantom, season 3 episodes 3-6 thoughts!

see prev episode thoughts in this tag <3

-johnny was actually pretty civil with danny and left when he asked! thats nice. also, SKULKER?? HAD A FRAMED PICTURE OF EMBER?? oooo fuck wait had they established they were a Thing Before?? I dont think so. thats weird. its like that country boy/goth girl meme lmfao. I think i am going to choose to ignore this new info and pretend I didnt hear it. 100% unrelated to the jazz/ember fanart I already drew and posted....😳

-LADIES NIGHT EPISODE THIS IS WHAT ITS ALL ABOUT. wish it didnt really center around the guys or them being pissed at them, but. willing to bet this was written by men lol

-THEY ERASED ALL THE MEN??? meanwhile, jack and danny are fishing at. silent hill or something. im glad jack is trying to read a parenting book and making an Attempt. (theyre at lake erie, but, they made it actually eerie...thats fun)

-the girls alt outfits...cute. EMBER MADE A NEW SONG TOO!!! kinda. jazz being one of the backup singers and being AWFUL. NOOOO

-'how are we going to get kitty to blow a kiss?' 'she'll have to think there are still some males in town!' ...i dont know how to break it to you, but I dont know that a 100% het girl would wish for all men to Begone. I think. I mean im not a het or a girl so I dont really know for sure. she Is probably Bi tho. esp having the other ladies in town chanting NO MEN!!! excitedly............(then again, the kiss is to get Rid of men, so, she probably would have blown it at the ladies only if they were actively trying to attack/stop them, so...I MEAN. THE DRESSING LIKE DANNY BIT WAS SO EXTRA)

-I feel like an all female cast ep couldve been way way way way cooler than that was. like. why was it still somehow all about Men. ...anyway. (where was valerie...)

-next ep opens with the observants, and, way way more of them than I expected...existed? I mean I guess them being a council/jury of some kind is what I expected from their first appearance (bc at that time they were basically TELLING clockwork to kill danny, not asking,, so I figured they had SOME kind of authority) but. there were so many. anyway, here goes vlad! letting his own hubris go brrrr. releasing a weather ghost for political gain! #justvladthings

-okay say what you will about him (he IS an asshole) but having an umbrella with his own face on it and more prepared to share is SUPER FUNNY. and him being fanned by huge wads of money by his bodyguards. SO ineffective but so Dramatic. He UNDERSTANDS that if youre rich you need to be. you know. obnoxious and kinda eccentric about it! fuckign hate when rich people are boring about it. I would trust vlad with nothing except to not be a boring rich asshole who wears...fucking khaki or some shit. man knows his Presentation Skills. and that 'V' chair in his mayoral office. is that fucking embroidered?

-maddie get your MAN PLEEEEASSSE. IM SO EMBARRASSED FOR HER. the way jack stays simping for this man. in FRONT OF HIS WIFE!!!! ...my god its like a love triangle. jack clearly loves vlad, who loves maddie, who loves jack. jack fenton is at the very least bi, right................. this is an OBSESSION . 'THE V MAN COMETH'???? i...my god. (also, on a serious note, to have a friend THIS SUPPORTIVE...and still be SUCH A DICK TO HIM (TRYING TO KILL HIM AND STEAL HIS WIFE??) NOT COOL VLAD. JACK IS YOUR 1 AND /ONLY/ HYPE MAN. if someone loved and supported me THIS HARD...LIKE. CMON DUDE.

-STOMP the fucking GAS, JACK

-this would make a great shirt design, looks like a metal band design! we love The Maelstrom

-oh, so vlad did in fact get a mansion in amity park. and its purple! good color choice! not as flashy as a CASTLE or MURDER CABIN, but still pretty eccentric, which I appreciate.

-...vlad knows the difference between picasso and da vinci? in the ep last post where we were watching him fail at conquering every historical time ever he didnt seem to know history well enough to like. be effective...was vlad taking art history at college?? (was he an art MAJOR??? we never DID KNOW WHAT HE WENT TO SCHOOL FOR. I kinda assumed business because in the masters of time ep he was still rich without ghost powers so he had to have..known something about business or something, right...but also, art and or theater FITS HIS PERSONALITY. possibly also something science-y, I guess, but I always felt like he got roped into that, esp how pessimistic he was about the ghost portal in the flashbacks to college, like, i felt like he was just there for maddie and was uninterested/un-invested at the time...)

-THIS GHOST JUST ELECTROCUTED MADDIE (THE CAT) BITCH!! THATS MY FAVORITE MADDIE!!! vlad going after vortex and being ~shocked~ .....WHEN. WHEN WILL YOU LEARN. THAT YOUR ACTIONS. HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!

-the way this random man with a camera sees the mayor laying in an alley covered in TRASH AND DECIDES TO TAKE A PICTURE HAHAH

*snap* this ones going in my cringe compilation!

-vlad 'if we're going to defeat vortex, we're going to have to do it together!' *immediately dips after dropping danny off in front of vortex* JKASDFHKJHJKN

-DANNY CAN DUPLICATE!!! ...he couldnt even attack with it, but he DID IT!!! INTO (4) OF HIMSELF!!! SO PROUD!!!!!!!!!!

-'THE ROLLER COASTER EMOTIONS OF A TEENAGER THREATEN MY PLANS!' ...0 self awareness of his own dramatic moodiness. incredible, how dumb this man is. its very close to circling around to endearing, if he was less of an asshole. at least its very very funny to see danny shooting him with tiny lightning bolts anytime he's even slightly irritated! vlad you should be nice to danny anyway. this is what you GET

-...making sandwiches and ice cream and playing video games with your nephew is a totally normal thing. WHY is vlad acting like this is the end of the world. if you were a GOOD UNCLE YOU WOULD ALREADY BE DOING THESE THINGS!!! bitch I make my nephew food all the time and dont forget what he does and doesnt like. if u didnt know danny didnt want tomatoes, thats on u. if u, a grown adult, are gonna piss of the 14 yr old by not letting him win, u deserve to have to pay for the arcade machines he ruins because he now has uncontrollable storm powers because YOU THREW HIM INTO A FIGHT WITH THE STORM GHOST. fuck u vlad. paypal me $400,000 while ur at it tho. (also, gamer vlad confirmed)

-VLAD CAN COOK THOUGH???! I assumed he had...people working for him that did that. I mean. billionaires usually dont do that. then again, we've only seen those vultures working for him (and I guess the dairy king was AT his old mansion, but it was never really clarified if he worked there...I think he probably just Hung Out and they Enjoyed Cheeses Together. thats what I think, I dont think a KING would be working for anyone and also the dairy king was nice <3) but then again he would be a private person and we cant have anyone accidentally finding Ghostly Things, so...still, that's hilarious. pour one out for that really cute banana split that got ruined 2 seconds later

-vlad just fucking picking danny up and THROWING HIM AT VORTEX TWICE WITHIN LIKE A MINUTE. JUST ABSOLUTELY LAUNCHING HIM. BITCH THATS MY SON BE CAREFUL!!! HES GOT ORGANS AND THINGS!!!!

-danny seeing those animal commercials and feeling sad is the biggest 2000s throwback so far. i legitimately had to change the channel or walk out of the room when those came on bc id CRY AND BE SAD ABOUT THEM FOR DAYS AFTER. fuck those commercials and fuck that IN THE ARMMMS OF AN ANGELLLL song 😭

-'vlads ego almost got the town destroyed!' yes danny thats the entire episode. the entire series anytime vlad shows up honestly. this episode was just him being really embarrassing the entire time, and, me laughing about it. 10/10 would laugh at him again

-NEXT EP WE HAVE A SHAPESHIFTING GHOST?? I've said it before but shapeshifting is the power I would want when asked those 'what superpower do you want' questions...its the Best power! this guy looks like a homestuck character. ive never read homestuck but thats the vibe

-I love every time we see tuckers family, they are by far the most functional family. and dash has a lil chihuahua!!! named pookie!!! i am crying (I've had 3 chihuahuas, so I am very biased, but...) AND HE WATCHES THE ROMANCE CHANNEL WITH POOKIE. POOKIE I WILL DIE FOR YOU YOU SWEET LITTLE BABY.

-danny can lift a bus! I shouldn't be surprised, but i am proud of my son. hes got lil kid fans. i am going to cry about this

-JAZZ KEEPS A SCRAPBOOK WITH DANNY'S LIL HEROICS AND NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS!!! we've actually seen it on her floor before, but I didnt realize it was a scrapbook!! thats sooo cute.

-...and danny has to stand there listening to his parents saying danny phantom sucks and is a 'filthy ghost' and calling him egotistical...i am once again stealing their kids!

-THIS GHOST RIPPING JAZZ'S SCRAPBOOK!!! ILL KILL YOU. SHE WORKED HARD ON THAT!!! BITCH

-yes, maddie, the one with red eyes is For Sure Actually Your Son. ignore the, red eyes... (CLEARLY she hasnt watched the other 2 eps where danny has been evil, she doesnt know red eyes= evil!!!)

-'billy fenton'.......................

-danny being stuck as phantom in his own house, no way out is a fucking NIGHTMARE. his parents pointing giant weapons against him and SHOOTING AT HIM. THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE.

-NINE INCH NAILS POSTER.

-this is the most screenshot of all time

-amorpho turning into mr. lancer because hes 'someone no one will want to be around' BUT HES WRONG, I WOULD BEFRIEND AND HANG OUT WITH MR LANCER SO FAST.

-tucker dressing as danny, now I have the full Tucker set of him being sam and also being danny. also saying 'the ghost...uh...RIPPED MY FACE OFF.' and then running. SMOOTH. NOT AT ALL CONCERNING TO ANY PARENTS.

-sam accepts the toast from jack. and then 2 seconds later is like 'why am i eating this.' THIS SHOWS HUMOR IS SO UNEXPECTED SOMETIMES ITS REALLY GOOD. and then the scene after, mr lancer running into his ghost doppelganger and being like 'YOURE GORGOUS' THEN FAINTING. I AM CRYING. AND DASH FAINTING TOO.

-sam disguising herself as danny again to help tucker run from the fentons. but leaving him shirtless in the streets. incredible. 'plEASE DOnt NOTice MY FACELessNESS I MUST LIVE IN EXILE' this episode is destroying me the humor in this show is exactly my brand of corny and cheesy

-the impromtu story made up by danny and amorpho to explain stuff to the fentons. my god they are both such bad liars. but amorpho is a good egg. wish danny wouldnt have said he didnt wanna see him in town again!! I want him to be reoccurring. not that thats gonna matter since I'm almost done with the series, but the idea of this being the Only Time We See him is :(

-NEXT EP SAYS STARRING MARK HAMILL??????!!! hello ! mr . joker....mr. star wars.... I feel like I should be. idk. taking off a hat im not wearing in respect. I shouldnt be surprised tho bc hes in a lot of cartoons as a very good voice actor, and dp has already had a lot of talented ones so I've been looking out for ones I might know, but....mr. hamill....

-sam has her own greenhouse, names all the plants, and says thank you to them (in the languages from where the plants are from) whenever she harvests from them. thats SO cute. and her lil gothy lunch box...

-and danny's lil red fuzzy lined jacket!!! ive said it before but every time the characters get alt outfits im like :D

-danny has ice powers now!!! THATS WHAT FROSTBITE MEANT. HE KNEW SOMEHOW WAY BACK THEN

-THIS SHOW NEVER LETS YOU FORGET VLAD IS A BILLIONAIRE, HUH.

-danny's lil 'holy hibiscus!' first off the 50s batman swearing is hilarious. 2nd. my username is from the flower sanchoyo hibiscus, so, shoutout to ME this ep. hi :)

-EURGH UNDERGROWTH MAKING EVERYONE PLANT ZOMBIES. HIVEMIND PLOTS SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF ME. and this dude made the city SO overtaken so quickly like how long was danny asleep?? oh god

-evil fucked up sam! now the whole trio has gone evil at some point! the voice actress did a really, really good job with making her sound like a zombie...

-frostbite's paws are so so so big compared to danny. oh my god. i want to hug the snow dog...

-the far frozen has an advanced medical stuff!!! very cool. very smart snow dogs

-im so glad danny has a friendly ghost snow dad to explain this new power and teach him!!! this is so sweet. DANNY'S GHOST SENSE WAS A PART OF HIS ICE POWER?? OOOH. COOL. we love a training montage!!!

-danny saying if he cant defeat overgrowth, that he'd want to stay with frostbite...oh my god...do you think this is the first real supportive adult figure in his life (I am NOT counting his parents because they threaten him on the daily even if they dont realize it.) I mean mr lancer is a Teacher, but he was also nice but this is different, but this is a GHOST WHO IS WILLING TO HELP HIM with his powers and also will help him when hes injured and is so so nice and comparatively so much more mature than 90% of the adults in this show!!!! god. dad frostbite is my everything.

-the framing and lighting this episode, and all the angles...they went all OUT and it looks really really good. this is my nightmare scenario, tho. like, FUCK zombies and dead city zones and hivemind shit. and using the humans as 'nutrients for the children' i am going to THROW UP.

-MALEFICENT VIBES WITH THE HORNS AND GREEN EYES! this costume kicks so much ass. sam is now mark hamills daughter, I guess.

-danny's ice powers making his eyes blue!!! thats neat. and him going for the roots underground was SO SMART. i will not stand for danny ever thinking hes stupid, hes SO smart.

almost done with the show... :"( thats a sad thought!!!

#sanchoyorambles #dp thoughts #danny phantom

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fictionimitateslife · 4 years

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I had an idea for a possible young avengers’ storyline in the MCU. So I decided to post it here. I know nobody asked for it, and most likely nobody will read it. But I wanted to post it somewhere, so who cares?

This is an idea based on what we already know is gonna happen in the MCU as well as some speculations.

Now these are just a bunch of ideas that I think would be interesting to see happen in the MCU for the YA. I have no idea if anything like this is gonna happen. At all.

First, I would like to point out that I am a huge YA fan. They were my first superhero comic ever. So, I would love for the MCU to adapt them as close to the source as possible. But I know that is not happening. So, let´s move on to the “plot”.

So, for starters, let´s answer the biggest YA question right now. Iron Lad. I think we aren´t getting Nate Richards as Iron Lad. Rather, I believe we are getting Harley Keener as Iron Lad. Now I could be wrong, and all this would be useless, but I don´t think Marvel would do such a complicated time travel storyline like Nate´s. Add to that Harley´s appearance on Tony´s funeral, and I think he will most likely will become Iron Lad.

The other option would be for Ironheart to take his place. And nobody really wants that to happen. It would be dumb and insulting. So, between no Ironheart, and Harley as Iron Lad, (knowing he has no personality yet, and therefore can be given Nate´s personality), the only option to take is the second one.

With that in mind, here is how I would turn Herley into Iron lad:

1) Give him Nate´s personality, trading his obsession with time travel, for science.

2) Make him responsible for the first big YA villain. Which one? Ultron. More specifically, his return with a new body.

How Harley would make that? Well let´s return to infinity war for that. We know Shuri downloaded most of Vision during the movie. I think it would be interesting if Tony salvaged what she did download of him, and rebuild Vision, as an AI, without his emotions. At this point, I think it would be interesting if Harley was on an internship on Stark industries. Like the one Peter said he had, except a real internship. We know Tony pushed himself away from most of the world between IW and Endgame. But what if Harley was the exception? Tony set up his internship so that Harley could have a good future, and kept watch over him. That would explain his presence in the funeral. Even if he was far from Tony, they kept a connection through science.

Now, let´s move to Endgame. If Tony rebuild Vision, why was he using FRIDAY? Simple, he wasn´t done yet. Maybe he had just finished it and didn´t have time to start it. Or maybe he didn´t even finish rebuilding Vision, Harley did it.

Now, where is Vision then? I think it would be interesting to contrast Harley to Peter Parker here. While Peter is Tony´s legacy on superheroics, I think Marvel should make Harley Tony´s legacy in science. And that is why I think Tony could have given Vision to Harley. And contrasting Peter to Harley, gave the latter access to Stark Industries scientific/information resources, while Peter got more access to resources that could be used for superheroics. Now, I know MCU Peter is a scientist too, but differently from comic´s Peter, that is not his big thing. Harley, on the other hand, is much more of a scientist/builder.

If I could touch one both of their storylines, then I would move Harley´s into a hero´s jorney, while I would slowly make Peter more of a scientist/builder. But that is just me.

Anyway, like this, Harley would have both access to Vision, and access to Stark Industries resources, which he could use to build Ultron´s new body. How that happens? After Tony´s death Ultron pretended to be a human, and talking to Harley online, influenced him into helping Ultron create an even better body than Ultron ever could. Then influenced him into creating a prototype, just to prove they could do it. And that was enough for Ultron. He took over the prototype, and flew away from Harley´s lab, went into hiding, and slowly upgraded his prototype body, according to Harley´s project.

Harley, ashamed, hide this and decided to take care of Ultron himself. Now it´s important that I think both Harley and Tony didn´t want the boy to become a superhero. Which means maybe Harley promised Tony he wouldn´t do it. However, he has to break his promise, and for that, creates a new suit of armor, based on Tony´s own armor, and his new Ultron project.

With access to an Iron man type of armor, and an objective, Harley realizes that he can´t defeat Ultron alone. So he uses a hidden file on Vision (left behind with express orders to only be used in extreme emergencies), the avengers fail-safe program. A program made to find youngsters with ties to the avengers who could become new avengers in the future.

Harley finds 3 close candidates: Eli, Billy and Tommy.

Now, moving on to these 3, Tommy and Billy would appear in doctor strange 2, but still end up dying, and being resurrected. Billy is close and Harley recruits him. Tommy is in Juvie, and therefore Harley can´t reach him. How Vision found them? Once Hex!Vision connected to White!Vision, he also connected to AI!Vision. At that point AI!Vision was able to keep tabs on the boys. He learned they had superpowers, as well as the signature energy for those powers. So, once AI!Vision found said energy signatures, he put them on the program.

Eli shows up in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where I would use the Truth storyline. Now, I think Tony (or maybe only JARVIS) could end up finding out the truth about Isaiah, and decided to keep an eye on the Bradley family, even if just to protect them. I would end Eli´s storyline in TFATWS with him getting shot to save Bucky, and getting the blood transfusion from his grandparent. Which would put him in in the program again, since AI!Vision would predict him getting super soldier powers.

Iron Lad, Asgardian and Patriot form the first version of the young avengers. They start training, but not superheroing yet, while Harley looks for Ultron. The other boys don´t know he helped Ultron rebuild his body. Just that he found out Ultron was still alive somehow. Their first adventure happens in secret invasion.

Moving to Captain Marvel 2, we already know the enemy is gonna be the religious skrull. I would also use the movie to introduce Teddy. Basically the movie starts with us fiding out, in a flashback, that Mar-vell had a son, Genis-Vell. He fell in love and had a son with the princess of the skrull. Except he had to abandon them, in order to hide their existence from the kree. When her child was still a baby, the princess´s ship was attacked, and she was killed. She was able to give her son, Dorrek VIII, to her handmaiden, so he could be hidden. The handmaiden went to earth, and sought refuge with Talos´ people, not telling anyone the boy´s real identity. She raises him as a human boy.

At some point in Captain Marvel 2, we find out about a prophecy that tells Dorrek VIII will turn the Skrull into an Empire, and that said Empire will start on earth. Therefore, the new wants to capture earth to ensure that will happen. We are introduced to “alien” magic, which Monica confirms is like earth´s magic. The queen is defeated and then religious skrull decide to go after their prophecised emperor.

They find Teddy on earth, when he starts using his powers for Greg. He fights with Greg tho, and ends up in a bad place. The skrulls appear before him in the middle of a school day, and try to get him to join them, except he refuses. Billy is present for that, and calls for Harley and Eli, so they can help Teddy, thinking it´s a kidnapping. They “rescue” Teddy.

The religious skrulls end up revealing their presence on earth, alongside their violent intentions, and start a takeover of the planet. Secret Invasion starts. The boys help Teddy escape the skrulls, even releasing Tommy out of juvie, in order to have more firepower. Billy and Teddy start a romance. Teddy, at some point, takes the form of his favorite avenger, the Hulk, and discovers his super strength. Secret Invasion ends, and Fury helps hide the boys´ identity, including Teddy´s. He helps close the juvie that made experiments on Tommy. He also promises to keep watch over them.

They become the young avengers.

Hawkeye ends with Kate mentioning her sister´s wedding.

Ant-man 3 ends up with Cassie having a suit build for her, so she can travel through the quantum realm. She is forbidden from using the suit after it, and from becoming a superhero. She steals the suit anyway.

Young Avengers movie starts with Jessica Jones being hired to investigate the boys, who have started superheroing for real after the end of secret invasion.

The boy´s try to stop and attack on Kate´s sister wedding. The attackers have special weapons that incapacitate them. Kate saves the boys.

Close to the place where the wedding happened, Cassie, who was looking for the boys to join them, meets Kate, who also wants to join the team. They also find Jessica, who tries to convince them to give up being superheroes, given her experience. She realizes she can´t convince the girls, and decides to help them find the boys, thinking they will be safer in a bigger number. Jess, being Jess, finds them easily. The boys answer they are busy, since they realized the wedding was a trap. Harley says it was probably a trap from Ultron, who figured out what Harley was doing.

They decide to go after Ultron, since he is probably doing something big at that moment, hence, the trap.

Now, this is where things get fun, since I would mix up the children´s crusade storyline, with the “kang” storyline.

My idea would be for Ultron to have learned about magic, since he was connected to AI!Vision, who learned the truth behind Wanda. Ultron realized he couldn´t do shit alone, so he joins up with whoever is the villain from doctor strange 2. Now, for this, I would use Mephisto as the villain.

Now, I think Wanda won´t go bad, after the multiverse storyline. She will end up in a horrible place, but will remain a superhero. At the start of young avengers, she ends up in NYC.

Ultron and Mephisto set up a trap for her, and joining technology and magic, are able to take control of her. Or at least try to. The boys find them and start trying to free Wanda, who is passed out. The girls show up and join in saving Wanda. However, they still lose, since they had set up traps for the boys in case they appeared.

They disappear. Not before Harley is able to hack into Ultron and find out their plan. They wanted to use Wanda to cast a spell that would kill all humanity (for Ultron) and would give their souls to Mephisto. They came up with the spell together, and kept it inside Ultron´s memory. Harley stole the spell and erased it from Ultron’s memory.

The young avengers go to their hideout, where Harley explains what he found out. He decides to use the spell as bait, in order to save Wanda.

The villains, in control of Wanda, find the young avengers. They start losing, because of Tommy´s speed. Mephisto uses his power´s along with Wanda´s and they resurrect Pietro, another speedster, to fight against Tommy. The young avengers flee.

They decide to find out more about Wanda, and end up in westview, after Harley probs AI!Vision. They find out about what happened in there, at which point AI!Vision finishes explaining the truth about the twins. (This point could be used to have Ralph tell he is actually Simon Williams, and have him turn into Wonder Man in some way, I actually have a whole idea about how this could happen). Ultron and Mephisto find them. The YA runs away.

Cassie leads them to the pym laboratory. They explain what is happening, and Scott berates Cassie. They end up being found again.

At some point, Billy undoes Wanda´s magic control over Pietro, and he joins the kids.

Ultron and Mephisto realize they need to take the kids seriously, and get more violent.

The YA tele-transport again, but are intercepted by Doctor Strange, who noticed the insane amount of magic being used. They explain the situation to him.

Mephisto and Ultron remember they are heroes, and decide to attack New York to make them come out of hiding. Now, I hate the “save New York, save the world” trope. But seeing as most of the YA are from New York, this is one of the few situations where it would fit well. Mephisto releases a horde of demons on New York.

A final battle starts. Ultron steals the spell back from Harley. Wanda starts casting the spell. Agatha says she believes Tommy and Pietro´s powers have some sort of magical nature. They can bend time, and because of it, they can cancel out magic. Therefore, after the spell is activated, they circle Wanda and keep the effect of her spell inside.

The avengers from the D+ shows appear to help.

They divide into 3 teams. One to defeat Ultron. One to Defeat Mephisto. And one to stop Wanda.

They realize Wanda´s spell can´t be stopped, since only the caster can stop their spell. However, Billy can undo Wanda´s spell (when he released Pietro from her control), maybe because his powers come from hers.

He doesn´t know how to do it tho. Strange tells him to release his magic, and the other spellcasters will mold it to undo Wanda´s spell. Billy does so, but ends up losing control. We have the iconic YA vol. 2 scene, where Teddy helps Billy control his magic (in a perfect world, they would end up kissing in this scene).

The spellcasters use his power to undo Wanda´s magic. That also undoes the control over her. They all converse on Ultron and Mephisto.

Hawkeye realizes Mephisto has messenger demons. Teddy turns into one and takes him down by surprise.

Ultron builds a shield around himself, and tells the heroes he still has a second plan. He has control over the nuclear nukes on the world, and he will activate them. Eli tells him they have a Cassie. She appears inside the shield and stomps on Ultron, winning the day.

Of course, I also have many other ideas for specific character storylines. But I am tired of writing, and might add them on another day.

IDEK why I wrote this actually. I guess I just wanted to share it somewhere.

#young avengers #marvel #MCU #billy kaplan #wiccan #Teddy altman #hulkling #tommy shepherd #speed #harley keener #Kate Bishop #hawkeye #Cassie Lang #stature #jessica jones #ultron #mephisto

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ziracona · 3 years

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[The Kid (Fgo AU fic) pt. 1, ... 7, 8, 9, ?]

He was completely alone.

That was the first thing I thought when I saw his face for an instant through an open doorway: that I had never ever seen anyone who looked so completely alone.

I’ve been alone; I’ve been lonely. Not too bad, not most of my life anyway. My brother and I are close, and we’ve spent a lot of time together. For most of my life, it’s been like having a built-in best friend. But. We’re different from each other too.

Sometimes he’s interested in something I’m not, or doing stuff for school or a sport, or I am, and we don’t see each other so much. There have been times when we fought, or he didn’t want to hang around so much with his sister, or I didn’t, and we were further apart. Then there have been times where we were in different places—different schools, different programs. That’s most recently, and it’s been really hard. We still see each other a lot, because we try to, but having a twin was like having a part of me almost—a best friend I saw every single day. High school, I was lonely a lot. I had a hard time making friends, and got teased a lot—I mean, I wasn’t like, really unfortunate—I-I had friends. Sort of, anyway—I wasn’t an outcast. But I was lonely.

I’ve been lonely a lot, and for a whole lot of reasons, no matter how hard I try to find people, or be able to see the ones I have.

But never anything like that.

Being lonely, it’s one of the worst feelings in the world, I think. One of the worst ones I’ve ever felt. But I knew, looking at him, that he was experiencing it in a way I couldn’t even imagine feeling alone.

I wasn’t sure how old he was. Maybe 19, or 20, 21, 22. Older than me, but not old. Short, small. On his knees, hanging limply from his arms, head bowed, and eyes only half open. He was sweating, and there was blood running down his shirt and vest. He looked like he was dying, and everyone was just walking past and looking at him like he was an art piece.

I’d never seen people look at another person like that before.

He knew it, though. I saw him move his eyes to follow them when they moved through the room, even turn his head up once or twice to see them a little, then give up again. He looked so weak, and beaten, and hurt. Nobody cared, though. I knew they were talking about him, but it was like watching people look at a new car they might buy at a street event. I couldn’t understand it.

The boy wasn’t Japanese. I thought he was maybe American, o-or maybe European—I wasn’t sure. He was dressed a little bit like a cowboy, though, and he was blonde with blue eyes that looked cloudy, like a haze had lowered over what used to be a big open sky. It made me think American. I hadn’t ever seen an American in person before—only in movies. It made him look even more alone. Surrounded by a room full of people who were speaking my language and looked like me, and not him. It made me feel worse somehow, even than I would have felt anyway, seeing anyone like that.

I don’t think I’d ever seen somebody look hopeless before. But. He looked like he knew he was going to suffer, and suffer, and slowly die. And nobody was coming to save him, and he wasn’t going to be able to save himself this time. He looked like he hated it, but he knew it. He looked afraid. And sad.

And alone.

Alone in ways I couldn’t describe then and still couldn’t now, even after being able to think of almost nothing else for a whole week and a half.

He looked up at me, for just a moment, while I was watching him through that doorway. I had seen the way he looked at the other people in the room—like he despised them, and I knew I would have felt the same if I was hanging there on my knees, bleeding and being talked about like a car. I had no idea who he was, or what he was, or why he was there, not at all, but I was scared, when he looked at me, that he had seen me. I was scared he would look at me like he’d looked at everyone else, because somehow that would have made me responsible, like they were, for what was being done to him.

He didn’t, though.

He looked at me, and he was a little bit surprised, like I was a strange thing to see, and then he’d almost looked happy for a moment. Maybe not happy. … Appreciative. Instead of hating me, for some reason he had looked at me like he was a little bit glad he’d seen me. I had no idea why. But I couldn’t forget it. I watched him lower his head again, slowly, and pass out. I watched him to see if he would wake up. And I asked about him, as soon as I got a chance.

I think I knew as soon as I saw him that I was going to do something. But I knew when he looked at me how much I wanted to.

And I did.

I…I still can’t really get over that part. It’s been so much, just the last few hours. Honestly I was terrified planning all this, and now that it’s happened, I’m just kind of in shock. I’m excited too, but I have no idea what I’m doing.

It’ll be okay, I promise myself, coming back out of my head a little and trying hard to feel more confident, I mean, it’s gone really well so far!

That’s true, and I do feel a little better.

Man, I’ve been super lucky. That’s really good, because now that I think about it all the way, I was kind of counting on luck a lot.

I mean, my plan was good—I think anyway. I worked really hard on it. But still. Billy contracted with me, and I did okay getting him here and patching him up, and I was actually able to summon a heroic spirit with his help, and he’s been a really nice one too! I was a little bit afraid I might get hurt. I mean, Billy’s been stuck in that building for months, with so many people hurting him, it really wouldn’t be surprising if he’d woken up and just assumed I was one of them, and shot me before realizing I wasn’t. I tried to dress in definitely civilian clothes in case that would help, but I was still nervous about it. I’m really glad things went so okay…

Mind still on Billy, I glance over at him. I’m sitting on the bed, getting ready to try some magic work to open up circuits with Emiya’s help, but he’s vanished to go make sure no one seems to have followed us from Ur-shanabi first. Billy’s sitting back in one of the big comfortable soft chairs, resting. He’s not asleep, though. Just kind of staring off at nothing, thinking about something.

His wound must be hurting a little less, for him to sit up like that, and I smile at the sight. I’m so glad he looks better. I felt really awful I couldn’t heal him right, but at least I was able to do something. And he really does look a lot better now. He’s got more color in his skin, and his hair is starting to dry and look fluffy now. His eyes look clear too, but they’ve looked like that for a while now. Bright and sharp, but kind too. Open like a clear sky. He’s really pretty. I guess he picked a good nickname for himself.

He senses me looking at him and glances over and offers me a smile, and I return it.

“You feelin’ ready?” he asks.

I nod. “I think so. I’m really glad Emiya seems to know his stuff so well.”

“Me too!” agrees Billy, “He seems awful capable, and that’s gonna help us a lot.” He pauses then and looks thoughtful. “Got absolutely no clue who he is though. You know any historical Emiyas? Famous figures?”

Oh yeah. I guess that is weird. I mean, there’s a lot of heroic spirits on the throne, and of course I wouldn’t know all of them, but it is a little weird neither of us has ever heard of him. I shake my head. “Maybe he’s a really old heroic spirit,” I suggest, because that makes sense, “One from so long ago, we lost a lot of records.”

Billy gives a nod of agreement, “Probably that, or one you haven’t got to in time yet.”

“Wait, you guys can come from the future??” I ask, totally thrown out of my headspace by that.

“Sure,” says Billy with a grin, “Throne is outside of time, so we get summoned to all kinds of times and places. Mages tend to shoot for spirits they know of, when they summon us, and of course you can’t have a catalyst for someone from the future—won’t exist yet—and I think Alaya doesn’t like sendin’ ones from the future as much because of timestream things I don’t really understand, so, summoning one you haven’t got to in time is a lot rarer, but I know it can happen.”

“Huh.” I think about that. “W-would it be rude, like—among heroic spirits, is it considered rude if I ask him something about that—if he’s from the future?”

Billy shrugs. “Not really. Lots of us won’t answer if we don’t want to and don’t have to, but I don’t think he’d take any offense. Don’t see why he would.”

Huh.

“…’Alaya’?” I ask, remembering what he said before.

“That’s just another name for the whole Counter-Force, World, God—whatever you want to call it,” says Billy, gesturing vaguely with his right hand and then wincing and sucking in a pained breath on the last word.

“Sorry,” I say, reaching out impulsively like I might be able to help, “Does it hurt?”

“Not a lot,” he promises, “It’s a lot better than it was, and it keeps gettin’ better. I just need to learn to be careful until it’s done healin’, like I should.”

I relax a little. “Okay. Good—I mean, that it’s healing.”

He gives me another smile.

I sense energy in the room then, and realize it’s my connection to Emiya, and then he materializes back from his spirit form and into his physical one by the bed.

“Anything?” asks Billy, sitting up a little.

Emiya gives his head a single shake. “She did well covering her tracks,” he says, glancing at me approvingly, “And more importantly, I think bombing their second story took them completely by surprise. There’s a whole lot going on at the building I was able to see even at a distance, but they haven’t sent people out very far to investigate. They’re still mostly trying to make sure they’re not under attack.”

That’s such a huge relief—I’ve been so worried about my mom and dad. I feel like a car has been lifted off my shoulders.

I did it. I…I actually did a good job.

“So,” says Emiya then, turning to look at me, “That being the case, and this spot being safe for at least a little while longer and time being of the essence, I suggest you and I go ahead and get started.”

“Alright, just take a deep breath. Keep your eyes shut, and try to relax. Then I want you to concentrate hard on what you’re feeling.”

“Okay.”

I try my best to. Take a big breath and loosen my shoulders, working very hard to keep calm and open. Try to focus on the sound of my own heart beating like he told me. Emiya said to do this I have to ‘feel how my body connects to my soul’, and I don’t know at all how that works, but I try hard to imagine it.

Soul. That’s me, that’s the me inside my body. If I think of myself like a heroic spirit, then bodies are a vessel, and the soul is the thing inside them that has a personality. My soul could be put into a doll, or another body, or a really sick mecha using magecraft, and it would still be me. Because I’m the soul. It exists here, just like they do, but it also exists somewhere else at the same time—like they do on the throne—somewhere I’m always connected to. By energy, the way they’re connected to me right now.

That all makes a lot of sense when I think of it that way, and it helps. I picture that. picture threads connecting the me inside my body to the rest of me somewhere else.

“Good,” says Emiya. His voice is reassuring and strong, and I feel my adrenaline pick up with excitement. I hope that means I’m doing it right! If I’m honest I’m super scared that I’m gonna mess up and I have been since the second I realized I was going to have to do any magic. I-I just. I’ve never been good at being a mage. Maybe it’s just because I never got real training, like they seem to think, but… I’ve known a lot of mages, or, I’ve run into them, and they have all pretty much told me I’m a loser, and a bad mage, and un-gifted, and just don’t have any talent. I don’t want to believe that—I don’t, but,…it’s not like I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to teach myself on my own! I have, over and over and over—reading books, doing research, watching other mages when I got the chance, and I just…it’s like—like I’m trying to ride a bike. And supposedly I could learn, if I just try long and hard enough, but every time I try, I keep falling off the bike the moment I get on, and then climbing back up with bruised knees, only to fall off before I can even turn the pedal again. And again and again and again. I’ve tried so hard for so long, the best I know how, and I’ve barely been able to learn anything.

And now? Now that I’ve got so much these two spirits who trusted me need me for? And they’re watching me? TWO Heroic Spirits, famous heroes with all kinds of power and skill who were so important they got inscribed on the throne of heroes, are watching me?

I am…beyond terrified I’m gonna fail absolutely and make an idiot of myself under the pressure. And worse that I just…won’t be able to help them. That I’ll be too weak, and too bad at things, and I’ll disappoint them. Fail them…

It isn’t fair—I’m trying so hard! And I want to do something really good, and it barely takes any skill to do this! If I was anybody else, I would be able to do it! But I’m not; I’m me, and I’m bad at magic, and—and. No, I can’t give up—I have to do this, I have to. I’ve only just met these two and both of them trusted me enough to form a contract, and there’s so much at stake--I can’t afford to mess up this time. I can’t! So I have to do better, I have to be better, because if I can’t figure this out, if I fail them then-

“I said relax,” chides Emiya.

Crap.

“S-sorry,” I say nervously, cracking an eye open for a second to see him, and then shutting it again. I clear my throat and try to re-center. Just breathe. It’s okay. You can do this. Stop freaking out. You know that doesn’t help. You’re not bad at everything. I mean, you made a really good bomb! You did. And you stitched up a wound pretty good, and you did a summon! So maybe you can do this. Emiya’s going to help you, so it’ll be okay. It’ll work.

I hope.

“Better,” comes Emiya’s voice approvingly, “Now, I’m going to run some of my energy along the magic circuits that you have physically—try to focus on that—the layout, how they feel in your body. They aren’t your true circuits, just a manifestation of them, but they’ll help you find the ones in your soul’s energy. Try and visualize it if you can, and follow the connection back to your soul.”

That’s so much I don’t know how to do, or even really understand. I’m being asked to something that’s really overwhelming, but I buckle down and focus hard as I feel his palm set down on my shoulder and try my hardest, and I feel a little ripple of energy. It’s like a gentle wave lapping over your foot at a lakeside, the way it feels to me, only it runs along my body from my shoulder out to my fingertips. And—and I feel it. A little geometric pattern in my arms and legs and back and stomach, my shoulders, my chest, my head. Like I can feel my nervous system, but a little different. I think it’s working! I’m so excited I totally forget to even think about following it back until I realize he’s about to stop, and I hurry, find the circuits in my chest, because to me it seems like that should be my core, by my heart, right? And I follow them in my head, visualizing what I’m trying to do. I think about the invisible connection I have to myself, just like the ones I have to Billy and Emiya now.

It’s…hard to imagine, but. There’s something. I don’t even really know how to describe it, but I hang onto it, and I feel suddenly like I’m somewhere else: a sky. But I’m not. I am, and I’m not. I’m looking down at myself and everything around and below me, and it’s so big and blue, and calm—wonderous. I feel like I’m looking down at earth from above, but space isn’t big and empty and black—it’s cool and alive and welcoming. And then suddenly that mental image is gone and it’s over and I’m back in my body, and I suck in a breath and open my eyes.

Emiya is watching me from where he’s seated opposite me on the bed, and he looks pleased. “Not bad at all. You felt it?”

“I…I think so,” I say, not totally sure what I saw. I think about it again though, and feel more sure. I think it was. Whatever it was, it was beautiful, and it was something. “Is that…my…is that place my soul?”

He gives me ‘kind of’ sort of gesture and says, “Yes and no. But it is where your magic circuits are, and for practical purposes, yes is a close enough answer. Seeing it should have helped you have a little bit better idea of how your magic is laid out.”

I consider that the best I can, working to remember everything I saw. Yeah. I think so. Okay. Sitting up, I place my hand on my shoulder and try to do what he did, just run a little magic through my body. I try really hard—even move my hand to the exact same spot, but. I can’t.

My heart sinks. I feel my face heat up with shame and disappointment. Why am I so bad at this! It shouldn’t be so hard!

Emiya still has his eyes fixed on me, studying, head a little tilted. I glance over at the chair beside us, at Billy, because I’m very aware he’s seeing me fail this again too. He’s watching, like I expected, but when I look over he gives me a ‘you can do it!’ kind of smile, and I feel a little better because it’s so genuine. I have no idea why he’s got so much faith in my ability to do magic when all I’ve done with him around is fail to heal him 18 times, but I really, really don’t want to disappoint him—either of them. I’ll just have to try again, I decide firmly, Nothing else for it. As many times as it takes, and I’ll get it eventually. I have to, right?

“What am I doing wrong?” I ask, turning back to Emiya. “I saw—or—I felt, what you did, but I can’t do it. Do we just try again?”

“Magic is a very mental and internal process,” says Emiya, surprisingly nonplussed by me making absolutely no progress, which also makes me feel quite a bit better. If he’s not worried, it’s probably okay, right? “Have you used a spell before?”

“Not really,” I say, thinking back. I’ve tried, and I’ve done some little stuff, but like—a real spell? Any magic I’d have to do much to…work for it? I’ve never been able to. “No,” I finish, “I don’t think so.”

Billy coughs.

Huh? OH CRAP.

My entire face feels like it’s on fire as I remember what I did last night and am engulfed in another big wave of regret. I’m sorry I’m sorry I never meant to.

“Oh—I-I used a command spell, last night,” I choke out, “—does that count?”

Our new Archer ally tilts his head and glances down at the faded mark on my hand beside the two unused ones, then meets my gaze. “It might very well.” He glances over at Billy. “Was it a powerful one?”

“Oh—yeah, it uh, it packed a pretty solid punch,” says Billy.

I hunch over a little and try not to look at him, still overwhelmed I did that. I didn’t mean to! I never would have done anything like that to you on purpose.

I can feel him looking at me, so I give up and glance over after a few seconds, and see he’s still smiling like it doesn’t bother him at all anymore, and I feel better and smile hesitantly back. I relax my shoulders and turn back to Emiya.

“Well,” he says, crossing his arms, “Talk me through it, then Ritsuka. –Mages use mental triggers to activate magic circuits once they’ve already used them, and to open even more, once they have an established trigger,” he adds before I can ask what he means, “So if you used some of your own already for a spell, you might have created a mental trigger without realizing it. When you used the command spell, did you visualize anything happening within or to yourself, along with whatever you were trying to do?”

Uhm. I think hard. It was so dark, and I was so scared last night.

Honestly, I’m still pretty overwhelmed. Excited too, I think, but, I also feel like I might throw up. Better than I felt last night though—that’s for sure.

“I’m not sure. I’m trying to remember,” I say once it’s been a few seconds, and I’m starting to feel awkward.

“Take your time,” says Emiya patiently, “Try to walk through what lead up to it in your head, and focus hard on what you were thinking about at the time.”

Okay. Walk through it.

We’d made it out of Ur-shanabi, and Billy the Kid had agreed to form a contract, so he wasn’t vanishing anymore, but I was really scared. There had been alarms blaring the whole time we were inside the building, and I could still hear them and people shouting when I’d made it back outside to the car. Lights were flashing. I was afraid someone would see us any second and shoot us both, but they didn’t. I used the delivery entrance because I knew it was full of boxes from a shipment that morning, and I made it out.

It had been hard to get him to the hotel without being seen—I’d had to drive, and this was only the third time I’d ever driven a car, and technically I do not have a license even a little bit, or a good fake one, so I’d gone pretty slow, and I was afraid the whole time I’d take too long getting there and people from Ur-shanabi would figure out what I did and catch up, or a policeman would notice I was driving really slow and stop me, and we’d go to jail, or be turned over to Ur-shanabi and die again, or I’d just arrive so late at the hotel he’d bleed to death in the car.

I was connected, so I could feel him, even when I wasn’t looking over—I could feel him fading, and fading, and I kept trying and trying to give him more magical energy, and failing. He looked dead already when I looked over at him, so much blood gone his skin had gone from ghostly white to grey and his lips had turned blue. He was breathing so shallow sometimes I thought he’d stopped completely, and he was hurt so bad and so helpless and in so much pain and I just couldn’t help him like I wanted, like I was trying. I couldn’t. I should have been able, but I couldn’t. And I cried, and it made it hard to see out the windshield, and I got scared I would wreck, so I made myself stop. I bit my tongue the whole next twenty minutes, to not cry and to focus. And I made it, and I got the car parked, and got him in the hotel without being noticed—which was really, really hard, even using the back entrance and late at night, and knowing where I was going.

I remember he was unconscious, and shorter than me and not that heavy, which was good, but he was so pale and sick looking and his breathing was raggedly fast and sounded painful by then; it was awful. His skin had seemed almost translucent to me, like he had no blood left. So much of it was soaking into my shirt by then I could have believed it, and I remember his hair was matted to his head with sweat, and his face was all scrunched up in pain, and sometimes when I would move him he’d moan or cry out a little, and his voice was so weak—I wanted to help him so bad and I was so scared he was going to die before I could even get him into the room and try to save him. He’d already bled completely through the bandages I put on him before getting him into the car—like—soaked through. They were sopping wet, and it was horrible to feel under my fingertips. I could smell it. I hadn’t really thought much about how blood smelled before that, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It smells like rust, but worse. Like rust and death.

I had tried so hard, and risked so much, and I was afraid people would find me any minute, even though I had worked so hard to be careful. I had practiced and planned and worked and worked and worked, and I just, I wanted so badly to do it—to keep him alive, and help him—I had since that first moment I’d seen him. But I was terrified he would just vanish and they’d summon him back, and I wouldn’t be able to try again. He felt so faint—the connection I had to him…it felt like it was coming apart and vanishing into the air like smoke. I remember so intensely how I stumbled walking down the last hall, and I was just sure he was going to vanish in my arms and it would all be for nothing, and I wouldn’t know what to do ever again after it happened. But it didn’t.

I made it. I made it to the room, and got him on the bed, and I started to dig the bullet out, because I’m a rotten mage with no skill and no practice, and I couldn’t do what I was meant to, so I had to try and do it like a doctor instead. But it was okay, because I’d prepped for that, and I’d gotten so far, father than I thought I would in the car, and I had been thinking, hoping, because he’d held on so long, maybe I wouldn’t be too late, maybe I’d got it in time. He looked so sick and weak and hurt, but he’d looked just a little bit better once I’d gotten him on the bed and gotten the bloody shirt off. It had felt so good, seeing his lips a little less blue. Seeing him a little more alive, and I’d been full of energy and hopeful and fear all at once, focus more razor-sharp than I think it had ever been my whole life.

And then he’d woken up and started to move. While I was trying to dig a bullet out from just above his heard.

I was scared he’d hurt himself, or move and I would miss my aim and stab him on accident, and kill him, so the second I’d realized he was moving, I’d told him to stop. And the spell had gone off.

What was I thinking, when I said that? Was I thinking anything other than that he needed not to move?

I try to remember, dragging in everything else still fresh in my head from that night, and it works. I remember.

I remember seeing his face, all pale and ashy, and him groaning and moving a little. I had been looking at his face every so often, to check on how he was, while I got the bullet out. And this time he had opened his eyes. They had been unfocused, like he wasn’t really awake and was looking at the ceiling without seeing it, but then he’d looked at me, and I had known he was seeing me. I could tell he was about to move, then, and I had medical pliers in his chest, so I’d thought “Oh no this is bad—I need to keep him down so I can help him and he won’t get hurt”. I’d thought…I’d thought…. in my head, I had thought about…reaching out. Because I’d wanted to do that too—that’s right! That’s right! I remember! Because he’d looked scared too. I’d thought, “I’ll tell him to hold still, and I’ll pat his shoulder so he knows it’s okay,” because my mom always used to do that when I was sick and feverish, and it always made me calm down again. I’d forgotten, because I didn’t do it, but I had been planning to. If I hadn’t hurt him like that on accident, I would have.

“I thought about reaching out,” I say out loud, finally looking back up at Emiya.

“Reaching out?” asks Billy curiously from over in the chair.

“I-I guess that doesn’t make sense,” I say, glancing at him and flushing. I know it doesn’t—it-it sounds dumb, now that I’m thinking about it. Who pats someone who’s getting surgery on the shoulder? If you’re a good doctor, you used anesthetic to knock them out, and they don’t have to wake up at all. I did like, a whole whole lot of things pretty wrong. And it was probably a stupid idea anyway, because he didn’t really know me, and my hand was sopping with blood, and that would have felt pretty gross I think. I look nervously from one to the other of the spirits, hoping they don’t think about it as much as I just did. “Because I told you to hold still, so why would I also be thinking about that? But, I was thinking that it’d pat your shoulder, so you knew it was me, and you were okay, since you’d been through a really bad night.” Mmmmmnggg why did I say that stupid too. Oh well I guess at least it’s true…

Billy blinks at me and kind of stares at nothing for a second, and then slowly smiles to himself and meets my eyes again and gives a little nod. “Well thank you. That was thoughtful.”

Really? “I-It wasn’t though,” I protest, “—I accidentally used a command spell on you.” I glance down miserably at the faded spell seal on my hand.

“Yeah, but it was okay,” promises Billy like he means it. I glance over at him and he looks almost worried about me, which kind of makes me feel worse for worrying him, but also better at the same time. “You didn’t mean to. And all you were tryin’ to do was help.”

“If it’s any consolation to you, it’s a lot easier to accidentally use one of those than it should be, if you haven’t been properly trained,” says Emiya very matter-of-factly, and when I look over, he truly doesn’t look like he judges me at all for this. Really??

“Really?” I ask out loud.

He gives a nod. “So. Reaching out?”

I think again, making sure I’m right, and I am, so I nod.

“Then if you activated your own circuits doing this, that might be your mental trigger now. Think hard on that mental image—do it even, if you want, while visualizing it, and think about opening your circuits and letting mana into them with the gesture,” says Emiya, “Try to picture reaching out, and passing magic through your body, and on to Billy. Like you’re going to tap his shoulder.”

That sounds so simple. I hope it is.

Only one way to find out, I guess.

I glance at Billy, then give Emiya a nod and shut my eyes.

Come on, you can do this. I know you can.

I scrunch up my face and think really, really hard, imagining that. I hold out my left hand and imagine the circuits I’ve seen now filling with magic and letting it out through my fingertips, so I can reach out and touch something with it—so I can heal him, like I’ve been trying so hard to do. I focus on that, and then I simplify—I focus just on the image of holding out my hand, of reaching out, of trying to connect. To myself, to other people, to everything. To that big blue sky I saw for an instant, to Billy. To—

There’s a feeling somewhere between electricity and the tug of a strained muscle, and it starts in my chest where I imagined following my circuits back to the pool of mana I’m connected to, and up to my shoulder, then down along my left arm and to my fingers. It almost hurts; it kind of scares me, but I’m way too thrilled to really care about that. It feels like it leaves me, which is so thrilling I feel my stomach drop, and I open my eyes immediately and look at Billy.

—Okay, I’m a goof—I don’t know what I expected to see, since he’s got a bandage on, but. He’s looking down at his chest, and he holds a hand up in front of the wound, and gently places his palm on it, then slowly looks over at me and grins.

“Nice work, partner,” he says, almost as excited as I am.

“I did it?” I ask ecstatically. I look from him, to Emiya. “I did it?”

Billy gives a nod.

“You did it,” confirms Emiya.

“Yes! Yes! HAH!” I shout to the ceiling, snagging a pillow and throwing it in the air in excitement before even thinking about what I’m doing, HELL YEAH! I’m the BEST! He’s the best! We’re gonna save everybody! We DID it! YEAH! “Thank you!” I say, turning my attention to Emiya. I throw myself forward and hug him, and he jolts back a little, then I hear him sigh and he moves an arm to pat my back stiffly twice.

“Sure thing. It’s what you summoned me for, isn’t it?”

“Well yeah, but,” I say, moving back so I can look up at him, “Still! Thank you! Thank you so much! This is amazing!”

It is! AH! He’s so nice and so good at teaching magic! Oh! And—now? There’s so much stuff for me to try now! I want to do more—I want to learn so many spells, and—

“Careful,” says Emiya, smiling a little and holding up a cautioning hand, “Don’t go overboard here—I taught you how to activate your circuits, but you’re still untrained, and your precision and stamina will be weak. For now, try not to tire yourself out—you’re going to need whatever magic you can manage to do once we go into Ur-shanabi, so don’t waste it or overtax yourself now.”

“Oh, right,” I say, giving him a serious nod. Makes sense. We’ve got to go back, and I’m probably going to have to heal more heroic spirits. Honestly, healing Billy just now—I didn’t feel it through the adrenaline at all, but now that I’m calming down a little to be serious again, I’m realizing it really took something out of me—I’m tired. Not super tired, and to be fair, I’ve lifted a lot of weight and kinda run myself pretty ragged today, so maybe I’m just…normal tired. But my arm sort of aches now too, so I think some of it has got to be the magic. Curious, I hold my arm up and make a fist, then open and close it, seeing how that feels.

“Does it hurt?” asks Emiya.

“Not really,” I answer, glancing back up at him, “Just a little, but not like real pain—like the kind you get being sore after running.”

He gives a nod. “Good, then you didn’t over-exert yourself or open them wrong.” He gets up from the bed then, and I turn on it to follow him with my gaze. “You should be proud.”

“Do I need to do anything else?” I ask, “To practice? Or get ready?”

“Eat something, and then rest,” he answers, picking up one of the teacups I set out, and pouring himself some, then one for me, which he holds out. I take it. “You can focus on the mission details of what we’re doing in the meantime. Magically speaking, try to do as little as possible now—that is assuming you’ve now healed your Gunner all the way.”

We both look over at Billy, and I realize he’s stood up and taken the bandage off. He’s looking down and studying his chest where he was shot. It’s a little hard for me to tell if he’s hurt anymore myself, because there’s a lot of blood from when he was bleeding still all over there, but he touches the wound and pushes down a little, which makes me a little sick to see, but he seems okay.

I did it. I smile. He looks happy, and he looks so much better. I’m realizing suddenly this is the best I’ve ever seen him. Even before I moved him, he has only ever been half-dead in Ur-shanabi. He looks different like this. Alive, vibrant almost, and really happy. Good. I’m so glad. It’s so different from how he looked the first time I saw him, it makes me really happy too.

Billy takes two steps and stretches his arms out then and rolls his left shoulder and winces, and I feel my smile fade.

Crap—I still did it wrong, then? I…

“That’s amazing,” says Billy, whipping around to beam at me. Oh wow he’s really pretty and he’s covered in blood and doesn’t have his shirt on and his hair is dry now and fluffy and I’m overwhelmed by how happy and friendly he is and feel my face heat up again and have to turn my head away for a second because I feel overwhelmed.

“A-are you sure?” I ask, making myself glance back up at him, “It looked like moving your shoulder hurt.”

“Yeah, of course!” he says, turning to show me where the wound was, “I’m a little sore still, and kind of beat to hell energy-wise, but I’m pretty much good as new.” He lowers his arm then and flashes me another smile, blue eyes bright and welcoming and open like the sky. He’s so nice, and he’s got so much energy. I wonder if this is kind of an American thing in general, or if it’s just him who’s really cool and bubbly. I’m way too nervous to ask him anything like that though—p-probably it would be a really stupid thing to say too. And…

I stop thinking about that because he comes over then, and takes a knee by the bed. “Thank you,” he says sincerely, giving a little bow of his head for a moment before looking up at me again, “For this, and for everything. I’m real lucky you found me.”

I don’t know what to say, because I’m not remotely used to being complimented, and I totally freeze up, but it’s turns out okay because he keeps going.

“Not bad at all for your first proper spell, huh?” Billy gives a little wink, then gets to his feet again.

“Y-yeah.” I answer, and I realize I mean it and smile back. I am proud. “Thank you. I guess it was pretty good.”

“It was exactly what we needed,” says Billy.

“Alright then. Now that we’ve got that sorted, shall we move on to the planning stage?” says Emiya. He’s taken a seat in one of the hotel chairs and has a leg propped over the other and his cup in in one hand, my building schematic in the other.

“Absolutely!” I agree readily, hopping off the bed and snagging another chair, pulling it close to finish a sort of chair-circle for us three, “What do we need first?”

“First,” says Emiya as Billy takes a seat in the third chair, glancing up from the schematics for a moment to meet my gaze, “We need to know if they’ve summoned any other servants, who if possible, and most importantly, where to find them.”

#finally exposition is done and I can get back to the fun stuff to write next time. ACTION. HELLS YEAH #fate go #fate grand order #fate go AU #the kid (fic)#the kid #fgo fic #fate go fic #fate grand order fic #fgo AU #fate grand order AU #Billy the Kid #Ritsuka Fujimaru #Archer Emiya #heroic spirit Emiya #writing #also wrote my daughter's pov finally! yeee

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holyhellpod · 3 years

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Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving.

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold.

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show.

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit.

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins.

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art.

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural, he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag.

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living.

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism.

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to.

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it.

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light.

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line.

Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence.

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade.

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome. I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else.

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half.

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves.

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome.

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight.

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer.

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it.

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace.

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar.

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says:

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean.

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to.

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas. Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna.

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life.

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs.

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.”

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it.

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do.

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another.

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it.

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours.

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay?

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas.

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure.

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar!

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.”

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

#transcripts #supernatural #supernatural podcast #<60mins #this is first and foremost a podcast about cas and misha collins

12 notes · View notes

clumsyclifford · 3 years

Note

hello bella’s ask box it’s been a min damn.

so the vibes are fucking everywhere w the music in the lab today so i’ve mostly been ignoring it but then unforgettable by thomas rhett started playing and my brain was immediately like This Is a Fic Song

more importantly it is a Bella Fic Song

last time you not so subtly wanted me to prompt u w w thomas rhett song you told me to do that here so i am back again w another song from ur boy

okay i def snuck out just to send this so i gotta go now but this felt important laksdjdld

ok ily bye 💛

hi sam :)

so.................... i was stuck on what to write you for your birthday fic. you sent me this ask prompting me with a thomas rhett song that i had literally been meaning to write a fic based on for almost a full year. the puzzle pieces just aligned REALLY nicely on this one.

happy birthday, my love. there's gonna be a LOT more sappy shit in the ao3 notes, but please know that my life is irreversibly changed for the better because i met you. i am dangerous close to sounding like glinda from wicked and i really want you to get to READ this fic so please see ao3 for more schmaltz. i love you so much.

tw for alcohol

read here on ao3

Every life has a moment that imprints on memory like ink on a fresh page. The kind of moment that permanently alters the trajectory of that life, that marks the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another. Some people are lucky enough to have more than one. Some people’s minds are laden with crystallized memories. But there’s always at least one. One completely unforgettable moment.

For Jack, this moment happens twenty-four minutes after he enters the club.

Twenty-three minutes after he enters the club, Zack returns with his and Jack's second beers and says, "There's some guy at the bar who's totally your type."

"Yeah?" Jack cranes his neck, but he can't quite see the bar from where he is. "My type how? Not just 'lonely and drunk,' right? My standards have gotten higher, you know."

Zack hands Jack his beer. "He's cute and he's wearing a One Direction shirt, and I'm pretty sure he's drinking a margarita.”

"Oh shit," Jack says. "That checks all my boxes."

"I know it does," says Zack, winner of the Wingman Of The Decade award. He claps Jack on the shoulder. Jack sidesteps people until he gets eyes on the bar and scans for a cute guy in a One Direction shirt drinking a margarita.

Twenty-four minutes after Jack enters the bar, he sees Alex.

And everything changes forever.

"Woah," Jack says. His gut is feeling weird and it’s probably unrelated to the beer and a half under his belt.

"What?"

"The guy at the bar," Jack says, grabbing Zack's arm. "Zack. You grossly undersold my future husband to me."

"Your future husband?" Zack sounds amused, but Jack isn't kidding.

"Remember this moment," he says seriously, giving Zack a sloppy pat on the bicep before moving away from him, towards the bar, towards the cute guy with the One Direction shirt who's making Jack understand clairvoyance. "Remember this so you can tell the story at our wedding!"

"Your wedding," Zack repeats.

"Our fucking wedding!" Jack insists, more loudly as space and drunk people fill the growing gap between him and Zack. Zack just gives him a good-luck-and-godspeed wave.

Seconds later, Jack is at the bar.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

The cute guy in question looks up, surprised. Jack practically reels. It's a miracle people aren't flocking to this guy; he's not just cute, he's gorgeous. Bleach-blond hair — clearly from a bottle, which somehow Jack finds more attractive — flops over his forehead in a stubborn commitment to the emo fringe that died out a decade ago, and long lashes frame brown eyes that rival the glossy chestnut color of the bar. Add the five o'clock shadow and the sharply angled jaw and Jack's speechless.

Fortunately it's not his turn to speak. "I have a drink," says the guy, who is rapidly progressing from Cute Guy At Bar to Possible Soulmate At Bar. He quirks a smile. Jack's done for. "I'll buy you a drink, though."

Jack sets his partially-drunk beer on the bar top and slides it as far as he can reach. "Okay," he says.

Possible Soulmate laughs. He slides his margarita away from him, too, pushing it into the space of another person sitting down the bar. "Touché. Okay, you can buy me a drink."

"Well, hey, I don't want you to waste yours," Jack says reasonably. He retrieves his beer and then Possible Soulmate's drink. "I'll get the next one."

Possible Soulmate smiles. Jack is going to need his name eventually. "I appreciate your commitment to environmentally-friendly consumption of alcohol."

Jack blinks. "Yeah," he says. "That was a lot of big words, but sure. No problem. I'm Jack, by the way."

"Alex." Alex. Jack can see the wedding invites now.

"Nice to meet you," Jack says. "I like your shirt."

Alex glances down out of instinct as the wide collar of the shirt slips over his shoulder. "Thanks," he says with a chuckle, and looks up at Jack. "I like yours."

With great effort, Jack tears his gaze from Alex's shoulder and the hint of collarbone peeking out, but he would like it on the record that it is tremendously difficult. Fortunately he already knows what shirt he's wearing because he'd agonized over it for several minutes longer than Zack's patience ran, shortly before going out.

"Yeah, Kurt Cobain," he says, nodding with probably too much enthusiasm. "I'm a lead singer guy."

"Really?" Alex tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. "Meaning what?"

"I go for the lead singer types," Jack explains. "Kurt Cobain, Billie Joe Armstrong, you know." He nods at Alex's shirt. "Harry Styles."

"Harry Styles wasn't—" Alex breaks off and snorts. "Eh, whatever. Who cares."

"Wait," Jack says. "Hold the phone. Did you fucking cross out Zayn's face?"

Alex looks down at his shirt again like maybe he'll have forgotten what it looks like. "Oh, my friend did that. But now the shirt is factually accurate."

"If you wanted an accurate shirt you'd have to cross them all out since none of them are in the band anymore," Jack observes.

Alex slowly smiles. "I guess."

"I always liked Zayn," Jack says wistfully. "His solo shit is so good, though."

"It's good," Alex says, kind of in the tone of voice of someone who doesn't really agree but doesn't want to get into it, so Jack leaves it be. They can poll their wedding guests. "I'm really digging Niall's solo shit."

"That's an extremely acceptable answer," Jack says, nodding vigorously. In the moment it slips his mind that he's holding a beer and the liquid begins to slosh out of its container. "Oh shit, fuck, sorry."

"Didn't get me," Alex says, passing Jack a napkin. "Couple too many, I get it."

"What?" Jack is very focused on drying his hands so they don't get sticky and gross. "I'm not drunk."

Alex laughs. "Yeah, right."

"I'm not!"

"Okay," Alex says lightly, but it's clear he doesn't believe Jack. On the bright side, he doesn't seem bothered by it.

"I am acceptably drunk for a guy in his mid-twenties at a club,” Jack amends. "And you owe me a drink anyway."

"Hey, I intend to buy you that drink," Alex says earnestly. "Another beer?"

Jack shakes his head. "Vodka soda," he says. "It's a special occasion."

"Really! You celebrating something?"

"I am now," Jack says. "Celebrating meeting my future husband."

"Your future husband?"

"You," Jack says, in case it wasn't clear. "It's not every day you meet the man you're gonna marry. I think it calls for a celebratory vodka soda."

Alex stares, obviously expecting Jack to say sike! When Jack does no such thing, he gives a small, incredulous laugh.

"Fair enough," he says. He sounds like he's humoring Jack. That's okay. Jack is serious, but Alex will figure that out on his own time. "I guess you're not wrong. That doesn't happen every day."

A large shadow materializes on Alex's other side, blocking light like some very cliché movie villain. It's not Doc Ock, but it is some tall, burly guy, a leer affixed to his face that's probably been there since Alex's haircut went out of style.

"Hey, baby," he says in an unnervingly deep voice. The part of Jack that isn't super skeezed out is a little jealous. But Burly Guy isn't talking to Jack; Jack may as well be invisible. To Alex, Burly Guy says, "Saw you across the bar and I just had to come over."

Didn't have to, Jack thinks grumpily to himself. You could have stayed across the bar. If you walk away now we’ll pretend we never saw you.

"Can I get you a drink?" Burly Guy asks, and honestly, Jack has no idea what Alex is going to say.

Big Burly Guy with a deep voice a la Morgan Freeman vs. resident beanstalk Jack whose voice sounds like a rejected cartoon character design. What a tough choice.

Jack is just preparing to cut his losses when Alex grabs Jack's wrist, turns to him, and says, "Honey? What do you think?"

Jack's tipsy, but Alex is definitely communicating something with his eyes, and between that and the pet name Jack is pretty sure he's on the same page.

"You want to buy my boyfriend a drink?" Jack asks Big Burly Guy, cranking up the Bitchy energy because he doesn't get to do it a lot and it's kinda fun. His voice has definitely gone vaguely southern-auntie, but he's rolling with it. "Sorry, sugar, this seat's taken. Must be this guy" — he points at himself — "to ride."

"This guy?" Burly Guy echoes, furrowing his eyebrows at Jack and then looking at Alex with profound confusion, like he just doesn't get it. "You're with this guy?"

"Happily," Alex says, glancing back at Jack, who offers him what is definitely a convincingly enamored smile because Jack is legitimately enamored. Alex laces their fingers together and Jack's not delusional, can't be, not when they fit this well together. No way. "So I'm gonna pass on that drink. Sorry, man. No hard feelings."

Burly Guy seems to have some hard feelings. Maybe he didn't get the memo. "Whatever," he says gruffly. "Your loss."

Jack can't resist countering, "Actually it's your loss, sweetums," as Burly Guy retreats. If he dies tonight, he knows who’s responsible.

As soon as he's gone, Alex breaks down laughing, and Jack quickly follows suit. Alex's hand slips from Jack's and begins to tug at the ends of his own hair instead.

"Sugar?"

"I don't know what happened," Jack says/wheezes. "I became possessed by Blanche from Golden Girls.”

"You have to be" — Alex prods Jack's chest — "this guy to ride." He dissolves into giggles and Jack is laughing too but mostly because Alex's laugh is incredibly contagious.

"Look, I don't blame him," Jack says, feeling exhilarated. "You are the best-looking guy in this establishment. He just happened to have creepo vibes."

"I am not the best-looking guy in this establishment," Alex says, grinning at Jack. "Nice of you to say, though."

"Hey, I'm serious!"

"I thought you were Jack."

Jack stares at Alex and Alex doesn't even last a second before he's breaking down laughing yet again.

I'm going to marry you, Jack thinks, and it almost scares him how serious he is about that. He opens his mouth and says, "That wasn't even— that's not even one of the good dad jokes! That's the most boring one!"

"There is no such thing as a boring dad joke."

"You should go into stand-up," Jack says dryly. "You'd tear down the house with this set. I can see it now." He waves a grandiose hand in the air as if painting the marquee into existence, but when he goes to introduce the act he realizes he's missing most of the crucial information. "Alex…something…something. Austin, Texas, one night only."

"Gaskarth," Alex says. "That's my last name."

"Alex Something Gaskarth," Jack loyally amends, and gives Alex a look like, well?

Except Alex is giving Jack that same look. "I only know your first name and you expect me to tell you my full one?"

"Jack Bassam Barakat," Jack says, gesturing impatiently. "Come on, I'm trying to introduce your act here."

"Guess," Alex says.

"Guess?"

"It's a pretty basic middle name," Alex says. "I'll buy you your vodka soda when you guess it."

"Alex," Jack says. "I am not going to guess your middle name. I am so bad at these games and I'm fucking drunk."

"Quitter," Alex says. "Do you want your drink?"

Jack scowls, trying to channel Blanche again, but Alex is apparently immune.

"Give me a hint," he finally concedes.

"It's a British name," Alex says. “Pretty standard British.”

"Are you British?”

Alex nods. "Born and raised. Moved here when I was about…eight? But I'm not an American citizen. I have a green card."

Yet another reason they should be married. Jack could extend his citizenship to Alex. Plus he'd gain British citizenship, which would probably be useful for, like, travel or One Direction stalking or whatever.

"That's sick," Jack says. "I was born in Lebanon. We moved when I was a baby."

"That's so cool," Alex says, sounding genuinely interested. He props his chin on his hand and gives Jack a cheeky smile. "Now guess."

Jack sighs. "Uh, Charles."

"No."

"Darcy."

"Darcy?"

"Margaret."

"Jack."

"You said it's a British name!"

"A British man's name," Alex says, rolling his eyes in fond exasperation.

Jack takes a long pull from his beer, swallows, and says, "Harry."

"No."

They're going to be here awhile. Jack pulls out the seat next to Alex and settles in while he racks his brain for British names.

“Alfred.”

“Nope.”

“John.”

“No.”

“Paul.”

“No.”

“George.” Alex shakes his head. “Ringo.”

“Yup, you finally got it,” Alex says. Jack is over the moon for a split second before it sinks in that Alex is fucking with him. “Alex Ringo Gaskarth. Well done.”

“Fuck off, I’m doing my best here,” Jack says.

“You’re missing one incredibly obvious name,” Alex says. “It’s not that hard.”

“For you,” Jack says. “Because you already know it.” Alex is grinning. Jack likes that he’s enjoying himself. It makes this guessing game fun. Under any other circumstances, this guessing game would not be fun, but Alex makes it fun.

Alex has also finished his mango margarita by now, and Jack’s beer is long since empty. He’s itching for another drink, mainly for something to do with his hands.

As if reading his mind, Alex flags down the bartender, who sidles up with a small smile and says, “What can I get you boys?”

Jack blinks at her. Mostly at her accent, which is not American.

“Vodka soda,” Alex says. To Jack, “I think you’ve earned it.” Jack smiles.

“And a mango margarita,” he puts in to the bartender, “and are you British?”

The bartender looks amused. “I am British,” she says.

“Please help me,” Jack says. “Alex says his middle name is a British name and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it fucking is.”

“Jack, the nice bartender lady has other things to do,” Alex says with a laugh. The nice bartender lady probably does have other things to do, but she shifts her weight and gives Alex an appraising look instead.

“Harry?”

“Tried that,” Jack says, realizing at once that this is a pointless endeavor. The nice bartender lady is going to guess everything Jack’s already guessed and he’ll just have wasted her time. “I’ve tried every member of One Direction, every member of the Beatles, every member of Oasis, every Harry Potter character, every member of the Royal Family—”

At this, Alex coughs conspicuously.

Jack rounds on him. “I have.”

“Edward,” the bartender offers. Alex’s lips are pressed together in a smile and he shakes his head. “Meghan. Kate. Richard. Dick. Philip.”

A lightbulb goes off as the bartender is listing Royal Family names. Jack wants to kick himself. “Oh my— William?”

“Yeahhhh, there you go! See, it was easy,” Alex says, grinning widely.

“William,” the bartender repeats with a charming little laugh. Her lipstick is bright with clean lines, an impressive feat considering Jack has seen her bustling around this bar for almost an hour now. “I had an ex called William.”

“Oh no,” Alex says. “I hope he didn’t ruin the name for you.”

“Please,” the bartender says, waving him off. “The only thing he ruined for me was a few meters of drywall.” Jack and Alex must have twin looks of concern, because she explains, “Anger issues. No worries, boys, I sent him packing, and a vodka soda for you, and a mango marg for you.”

She slides their drinks into waiting hands and starts to turn away. “Wait a sec,” Jack says.

The bartender turns back to him with wide Bambi eyes. “Did I fuck up the drink? I’ve made it a million—”

“No no no,” Jack assures her. “I just wanted to know your name. You rescued me from an eternal guessing game, you’re my hero.”

The bartender smiles and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Maisie,” she says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, Maisie,” Alex says. “Thank you for the alcohol.”

Maisie laughs again as she moves to the other side of the bar.

“William,” Jack says, swirling his drink with the miniature straw. “God damn. I can’t believe I missed William.”

“You got close,” Alex says. “You guessed Liam twice. And thanks for the drink.”

“Same to you,” Jack says. “It’s a good drink. Yours, I mean. You know what offends me, though? Why aren’t mango margaritas orange?”

Alex furrows his brow. “Why the fuck would they be orange?”

“Mangos are orange! Fruity drinks should be the same color as their fruit.”

“Mangos are not fucking orange,” Alex says with an incredulous laugh. “They’re straight-up yellow.”

“They’re orange with yellow tendencies,” Jack says, “but mostly orange.”

“They are entirely yellow,” Alex says. “Coldplay even wrote a song about them. They were all yellow.”

“They’re orange,” Jack insists, but now Alex has moved on completely and is loudly singing Coldplay.

“I came along! I wrote a song foooor youuuuu! And all the things you do!”

“You’re ignoring the truth!”

“And it was called ‘Yellow’!” Alex shouts.

“Okay, I surrender! Sheesh. You win.”

“Thank you,” Alex says placidly, like he hasn’t just been yelling obnoxiously over the (worse, but much louder) club music. “I’m going to enjoy my yellow mango marg very much.”

“And I will enjoy my victory drink,” Jack says, lifting his glass. Alex lifts his. It smells like mango and tequila. They clink the rims together. “To William.”

“To William,” Alex agrees, laughing.

The DJ plays a song Jack loves to hate from hearing it on the radio so many times and Alex is out of his seat before Jack’s managed to put down his drink.

“What are—”

“I love this song, I want to dance,” Alex insists. The implication is clearly that he wants Jack to dance with him, which is like. What is Jack gonna do, say no?

Alex must anticipate some kind of argument, though, because with a glint in his eye he adds lightly, “These are the kinds of things you’ll have to do if we’re married.”

On the one hand, he’s clearly making fun. But on the other hand, the fact that Alex was a stranger an hour ago and is still comfortable teasing Jack about suggesting they’re going to get married speaks volumes. Alex is smiling. They’ve known each other for less than an hour — a drink and a half each — and Alex is smiling at his own joke about marrying Jack. Like he likes that Jack said it first. Like he likes Jack.

“Just wait ‘til you learn all the weird shit you’ll have to do when we’re married,” Jack says, sliding out of his stool.

Any sane person would have run away by now. Even Jack knows when he’s coming on too strong.

But Alex does the opposite; Alex grabs his wrist and pulls him towards the dance floor.

“Fair warning,” Alex says. “I don’t actually know how to dance.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Jack says, and then eats his words not two seconds later when Alex demonstrates how very much he doesn’t know how to dance. All of his limbs seem to move as their own entities, zero synchronization. A couple surrounding people take various minor assaults before taking the hint and giving Alex some space, but this does not stop him. “Okay,” Jack says loudly over the music. “You were right. But luckily neither do I.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Alex says.

Jack does the sprinkler. Alex snorts. He does the wave, very poorly, and Alex continues it, also very poorly.

“Mr. Moves,” Alex says. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah? Check this one out.” Jack does the running man with extreme focus. Alex laughs, leaning towards Jack as he does. Jack stops dancing so he doesn’t accidentally hit Alex, who is suddenly much closer and who somehow smells like pine and flannel and fall and winter in one and is the best-looking person in blue jeans and checkered Vans on this dance floor. Far from the only person, but without question the prettiest.

Fuck.

“I don’t think I can do that one,” says Alex, grinning. Jack nods at him like, try it, so Alex does, proving himself right. He almost takes Jack’s eye out.

“Yeesh, okay, you’re— alright, take it easy,” Jack says, swatting Alex’s wayward hand away and laughing. “Well, we all have our strengths.”

Surrendering the running man, Alex starts up with some bizarre hand-wavey foot-kicky thing, singing along to the music.

“Do you seriously like this song?” Jack asks, attempting to imitate Alex’s dance. “Dance,” heavy quote marks implied.

Alex shoots Jack a look. “Hell yeah. What, you don’t?”

“It’s just…always on,” Jack says. “Everywhere. How are you not sick of it?”

“Because it fuckin’ slaps!” Alex looks incensed.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised you’re a pop music person when you’re literally in a One Direction shirt.”

“I’m a lots of music person,” Alex counters. “Including pop music, yeah. You don’t like pop music?”

“I sometimes do,” Jack says. “I like Taylor Swift. Britney Spears.”

“Okay, well, you’d have to be insane not to like them.”

“Yeah, and I’m obviously sane.”

Alex barks a laugh. “Drunk but sane.”

“I am not drunk!” That’s probably a lie by now.

“You’re not convincing me otherwise,” Alex says. “I’m confident you’ve been drunk this whole time.”

“You haven’t exactly been an innocent bystander,” Jack says. “You bought me a drink, and you’re gonna buy us shots in a minute.”

“I did— I what?”

“Yeah,” Jack says, and this time he drags Alex off the dance floor, back to the bar. “I can see the future, I forgot to tell you.”

“You—” Alex laughs again and leans on the bar, trapping both his elbows between his stomach and the bartop. “You’re buying the next round.”

“Oh, happily,” Jack says. “I’m actively trying to get you drunk.”

“Why’s that?”

“Studies show I am 75% more attractive to people when they’re drunk,” says Jack.

Alex turns to him. Without missing a beat, he says smoothly, “I don’t think it’s possible for you to get any more attractive.”

Fuck. Actually, fuck. Seriously. Fuck.

“You must be drunk already, then,” Jack says.

Alex smiles serenely. “I feel pretty sober.”

“Exactly what a drunk person would say,” Jack says. “J’accuse, William.”

Alex laughs. “In that case, your studies are right.”

Jack’s probably blushing. He does that in extreme cases only, but this is nothing if not an extreme case. Alex is fucking relentless.

Maisie the bartender is back, and Alex orders them shots of tequila. Somewhere in the recesses of Jack’s mind, this unlocks a memory, and he snaps his fingers. “I should hunt down my friend, he loves tequila.”

“Friend?” Alex looks around while Maisie pours their shots. “You ditched your friend?”

“He told me to,” Jack says. “He’s probably gonna pick up some girl. Actually, he probably already has.”

“Really,” Alex says, sounding amused.

“Zack’s a strong silent type,” Jack explains. “Emphasis on strong. We’re single guys in our mid-twenties, Alex. We’re not going to clubs for the atmosphere.”

“Admit it,” Alex says. “You a little bit are.”

Jack bites his lip. “Fine, I like the atmosphere,” he admits, more affected than he should be that Alex seems to have picked up on this about him. “And the alcohol. And the chances I’ll meet my future husband, which clearly paid off. Zack will never admit it, but I’m pretty sure he likes trying to set me up with random people in clubs.”

Alex laughs. “He set you up with me?”

“Oh yeah,” Jack says. “He wingmanned me hard. You can thank him in your vows.”

This only serves to make Alex laugh harder. “I’ll thank him now,” he says with a grin. Taking his cue, Jack grabs his shot glass. Alex does the same. “To Zack.”

“To Zack!” Jack cheers, and they both down their shots.

“Me?”

Jack whirls around and trips straight into Zack. “Zack!” he says brightly. “We toasted you.”

“I heard,” Zack says. “Why, exactly?”

“I’m Alex,” says Alex, holding out a hand. Zack shakes it. “Apparently you set us up?”

“Oh,” Zack says. “I wouldn’t really say that. I just kind of pointed Jack in this direction. If you can put up with him, that’s all you.”

“I was gonna come find you anyway,” Jack says. “We’re doing tequila shots. Next round on me.”

“Oh, hell yeah,” Zack says. “Count me in.”

They can’t come up with a toast for their second round so they just knock it back with an ambiguous cheer; then Zack offers to buy another, and Jack’s not about to refuse. It’s starting to hit just right, so he’s buzzed but not incoherent. All his most brilliant ideas come in this state.

Case in point: as Maisie is pouring them their third round, Jack suddenly says, “Maisie! Do a shot with us!”

Maisie looks up and laughs. “I’m not supposed to drink on the job,” she says.

“It’s not drinking, it’s bonding,” Jack insists.

“Yeah, we’re forming lasting friendships,” Alex jumps in.

Zack looks entertained. “You guys know each other?”

“As of half an hour ago, yes,” Maisie says.

“Maisie here helped me guess Alex’s middle name,” Jack explains. “Which is William. Like the prince.”

“I feel like I missed so much,” Zack says, half to himself. He shrugs and nods at Maisie. “One shot. On me. For Jack. We won’t tell.”

Maybe it’s because Zack is buff and has cool tattoos or just has good vibes or whatever, but Maisie hesitates only a second before inclining her head. “Just one, and no blabbing,” she says, meeting all of their eyes in turn. Everyone nods solemnly, and Maisie discreetly pours herself a fourth shot.

“Hell yes!” Jack whoops as they all take a shot glass. “To Maisie!”

“To Maisie!” Everyone echoes, including Maisie with a wry grin.

The third shot goes down smoother than the first two. Jack swallows his easily, as does Alex. Maisie puckers her face a bit. Zack has zero reaction, because Zack’s just kinda like that.

“While I’m here, I was hoping to get another beer,” Zack says.

“On it,” Maisie says immediately, giggling. “Thanks for the shot, boys. You’ve kept me far more entertained tonight than my usual shift provides.”

“You can give a toast at our wedding,” Jack says to her. Zack’s eyes widen a little, Alex snorts, and Maisie laughs.

“I’d be honored,” she says. “Back to work now. You need anything, let me know.”

“Seriously, Jack?”

“What?” Jack gives Zack an innocent smile. He pats Zack on the cheek. “Don’t worry, sugar, you can give a toast too.”

Alex laughs. Zack stares at him and shakes his head. “You’re insane,” he says, but he says that roughly twice a day so he’s still below his quota. “I’ll leave you two alone. Come find me when you wanna go. If…” He eyes Alex. “...Just…yeah.”

And with these eloquent words, he disappears with his beer into the crowd.

“I like him,” Alex announces.

“Me too,” Jack says. He turns back to Alex. “Back to the dance floor?”

“Get out of my brain,” Alex says. “I’d like to see your drunken running man.”

“It is gonna blow your fucking mind,” Jack promises, and Alex laughs again.

They’re not even being gross like everyone else. Alex has pulled Jack into an exaggerated tango performed mostly with missteps when it happens: someone shoves them aside as they walk past, and Alex loses his balance and falls into Jack, who just barely manages to catch them both. He doesn’t manage to stop his arm from winding around Alex’s waist. To be fair, he doesn’t try very hard.

Jack’s first thought is homophobe, but then he spots the offender, lumbering off with heavy footfalls, and it’s Burly Guy from earlier. The guy who tried and failed to pick Alex up.

All of this registers as Alex slowly regains his footing. “Damn, who pissed in that dude’s Cheerios?”

“It’s the guy from before who tried to buy you a drink,” Jack says, pointing at his back.

Alex whips his head around. “Seriously? Asshole.”

Jack chooses not to observe that from his vantage point, being shoved close together is hardly a dick move. In intent, sure, but not in actuality; Jack’s enjoying the proximity a great deal. Like, a lot.

Like, his hand is still on Alex’s hip, subtly keeping Alex close, and Alex has his arm around Jack’s shoulders from their dance and he’s not moving, either.

“Yeah,” Jack says. They’d already been on the outskirts and now they’re off to the side of everyone, wallflowers.

Alex breathes a laugh and looks back at Jack. He doesn’t step back or even lean away, even though their faces are too close to be friendly now. Jack hadn’t really been expecting friendly, but they’ve been tightrope-walking between sides, and if neither of them breaks this up then they’ll be irreversibly left on one end.

Jack has no intention of moving away. He likes this end of the tightrope. For all he cares, they could cut the tightrope and free-fall together.

“You’re pretty good at bad tango-ing,” Alex says, reaching up to brush away the sweaty fringe that’s clinging to his forehead.

Jack grins. “Well, you know what they say. It takes two.”

Alex kisses him so suddenly that Jack almost loses his balance.

He tastes like tequila. That’s all Jack gets before they’re not kissing anymore. The room feels quiet and then unforgivably loud the next second, and Alex is flushed and smiling nervously, and Jack is smiling too, not nervous at all.

“Did I tell you I’m in a band?” Alex asks in a rush.

Jack’s brain struggles to keep up. He can’t remember Alex mentioning a band, but he’s also distracted by wanting to kiss Alex again. There’s no understating the power of wanting to kiss someone over failing to clock anything they say. “What?”

“I’m in a band,” Alex says. “Not as a job, just like, for fun.”

“Oh,” says Jack.

“I’m the lead singer,” Alex says, with a flickering look down at Jack’s shirt.

“Oh,” says Jack, because, like, oh. “Can I kiss you again?”

“What, here?” Alex meets his eyes. “With all these people around?”

“You kissed me first,” Jack says. “Let me kiss you and then we can call it even.”

“Okay,” Alex says, and Jack’s kissing him before the word’s really out of his mouth.

And he tastes like tequila and mango and sugar and the color yellow and the sweat of the dance floor and God, it’s good. It’s like kissing a memory, except this memory is still here, not frozen in time, not trapped in an ornate frame. He’s creating a memory that he knows he’ll relive for the rest of his life.

Somehow, though he doesn’t know the end of this chapter, he knows the end of the book.

Alex’s warm palm cradling Jack’s cheek to hold him steady, fingers splayed out like a star; Alex’s other hand grazing skin over the collar of Jack’s shirt. Alex singing Coldplay in Jack’s ear. Alex’s blue jeans and his checkered Vans and his ridiculous One Direction tank top. Alex holding Jack’s hand and calling him honey to get Burly Guy to leave him alone. Grinning as he shoots down guess after guess for the elusive middle name. Laughing at Jack’s stupid dance moves. Knocking back a shot like it’s nothing. Smiling when Jack says they’re going to get married, never moving away, only ever closer.

Alex sitting undisturbed at the bar, ankles crossed, and Jack seeing him from across the room like something out of a goddamn Hallmark movie and just knowing.

He tugs Alex closer but Alex is already pulling away with a smile. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. He smoothes a hand over a crease in Alex’s shirt and nods. “Taxi’s on me if we go back to your place.”

“Sucker, I was gonna suggest that anyway,” Alex says with a quiet laugh. “You should tell Zack. Don’t wanna just leave him.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack says. “He knows.”

“He knows?”

“Zack and I are brothers in clairvoyance,” Jack says. “How many times do I have to tell you this?”

“I knew you could see the future,” Alex says. “You never told me Zack could, too.”

“Zack can see everyone’s future,” says Jack. “I can only see mine.”

“Yeah? What’s your future look like now?”

Jack filters out several inappropriate comments. It’s hard when Alex is smirking, clearly baiting him. “I told you,” he says. “You, me, vows, rings, the works.”

“Not that future,” Alex says. “I’m talking about the immediate one.”

It takes everything in Jack not to get down on one knee and say so was I. There’s a tilt in Alex’s head, like a dog listening carefully for a familiar sound.

“Honestly?” Jack says, and Alex nods. “I think it’s more fun if we find out together.”

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starkzam · 4 years

Note

I have a prompt, if you're interested: "Completely ordinary" Metropolis reporter Clark Kent is in Fawcett to do more research on a recent Superman & Captain Marvel team up to fight Dr. Sivana that took place in Fawcett. He runs in to an amnesiac orphan who can only remember his name: Billy. He ends up taking in Billy & is trying to be a good parent. Unrelated, the Justice League is scouring Fawcett for Marvel, as he went missing after he was shot with a mysterious ray gun that Sivana had built.

OH, MY GODS. THIS. THIS IS EXACTLY MY CUP OF TEA RIGHT HERE. Something that feels somewhat convoluted with hijinks and identity porn thrown in there--

YESSSSS I LOVE THIS IDEA. I also love that it’s reminiscent of the Shazam/Superman movie.... :3

Might post a longer vers. on my Ao3 But for now...

Clark thumped the pen between his fingers rhythmically on the table in front of him, chewing the inside of his cheek in thought.

After practically begging Perry White to let him do a story on Superman and Captain Marvel’s fight against Dr. Sivanna in Fawcett, he’d come to the quaint town, checked in to a hotel, and set to work.

It’s just too bad he’d come up with nothing so far.

Not the story, no, that was going just fine- he had more than enough information, as well as witness accounts and data (not that Perry needed to know that just yet).

No, what Clark was struggling with was something else entirely. The reason he’d begged Perry to assign him this story in the first place, allowing him to focus his attention on Fawcett City- that was what was giving him trouble.

Captain Marvel was missing.

The battle that he and the Captain had partnered on had gone somewhat smoothly, all things considered-- Sivana was a cackling lunatic that easily slid into the classic ‘mad scientist’ archetype, and had built some kind of death ray or something.

To be honest, Clark hadn’t really been paying attention to what the man was saying, especially since half of the things that came out of his mouth made no sense to him and sounded more like an inside joke between the bald man and Captain Marvel.

Not to mention he’d been busy trying to fight off a giant, mutated octopus- which, really, gave him so many questions. Where had he been keeping this? How was it just fine to walk-or, uh, suction-cup around the city? Why did it spit acid of all things?

The reporter rubbed a spot just below his shoulder at the thought, wincing in pain as his fingers grazed sensitive skin. That acid had hurt. He really wished Arthur had been with them, it would have made things much easier- but the truth of the matter was that he hadn't been, and the creature had found Superman a wonderful target.

Regardless, while he was busy with Octo-zilla, Captain Marvel had taken on the mad scientist. Sivana had set up shop atop a radio tower, cackling and ranting on about something or other before taking aim at Captain Marvel when the man cracked a joke about his plan.

The demigod had redirected a lightning bolt from the sky towards the ray-gun and destroyed it- but not before Sivana was able to shoot him, launching him backward through the sky and sailing through the air as his lightning blew up Sivana's device.

Superman had managed to get the mutated calamari to submit after while and had detained Sivana quickly there-after- but Captain Marvel never returned.

At first, Clark thought the man would catch up with him at the Watchtower when he went in to give a report. When Captain Marvel never showed, he got worried. Bruce told him to give the guy a day or two, so he did- no word ever came.

The Justice League held a meeting, hoping the man would show and explain what had happened to him.

Captain Marvel hadn’t shown up.

To quell the worry running through his teammates’ heads, Clark had volunteered himself to look for the demigod- he'd wanted to help clean up from the battle anyways, and trying to find their missing demigod would help to silence the worry in his own mind as well.

So now, here he was, in Fawcett City as Clark Kent, trying to find his missing teammate.

The raven-haired reporter sighed, rubbing the skin between his eyebrows in frustration as he continued to thump his pen against the table. The diner was small, plain and quiet, run by an old woman and her daughter- the coffee was fresh and warm, and the people were nice.

Clark had always preferred mom-and-pop places like this to chain-brand places- there was a certain personal touch to a diner like this.

"Need a refill, sir?" a voice asked, pulling the man from his thoughts and causing him to glance up at the woman holding a coffee pot out for him. The daughter, he thought off-handedly, blinking at the soft curls in her hair that reminded her of Lois when she got dolled up.

"Oh, uh, yes, please. Thank you," he said, sliding his half-empty mug toward the woman with a small smile.

She poured the dark liquid into his mug and he gave her a smile, lifting it to his mouth before sudden movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. He furrowed his brow, glancing out the large window of the diner as a small boy with a mop of black hair ran past him, eyes wide and full of fear as he stumbled over his own feet, crashing onto the sidewalk.

Clark furrowed his brow at the boy, tensing and standing up as the boy clambered clumsily to his feet, ignoring the scrapes on his skin and continuing to run like his life depended on it.

A few moments later, a pair of teenagers came running past the window.

Clark didn't need to see anymore- he could tell when someone was in danger. He shuffled out of the booth, slipping a couple of dollars from his wallet before pocketing it, his note pad, and his pen, grabbing his jacket, and taking off out of the diner.

He ran in the direction the children had gone, eyes sharp, and looking for any sign of danger. He didn't slow down until he heard soft, almost inaudible sobs coming from an alley. Clark slowed to a walk, glancing around to see if anyone else was in the area before ducking into the alley.

He moved slowly, vision suddenly cutting through the various objects in the alleyway- he saw through dumpsters and abandoned boxes, large, plastic trashcans and-

A small bit of movement caught his eye from the opposite side of a dumpster. He saw a small skeleton sitting on the ground, legs pulled up to its chest, and shaking like a leaf. Clark's hand curled into a fist at the sight of a fractured rib. The Kryptonian closed his eyes and shook the X-Ray vision away, blinking and crouching down slightly as he walked.

"Hello...?" he said slowly, hearing the small figure's heart skip a beat.

Clark came a bit closer, leaning forward to look around the dumpster. The small boy with a mop of black hair he'd seen before sat on the ground in front of him, trembling against the wall and staring up at him with terrified, icy blue eyes. "Are you okay, son?" Clark asked gently, putting his hands out placatingly and crouching down further. He made no move to get closer to the boy, and the child just stared at him silently.

"Do you need help?"

The boy just continued to water at him with wide eyes and a fear that he'd be attacked- or worse. Clark let out a short breath, looking around the alley. They were the only ones there- those teenagers must have taken off after hurting the boy.

"Are you hurt?" he asked gently, even though he knew the answer.

The boy reacted to that, bringing his knees in a little closer and hugging himself- something that made him wince in pain. "Careful-" Clark said, reaching out a hand. "Don't- don't hurt yourself worse."

"Look, i'm not gonna hurt you, I promise," the Kryptonian said slowly, scooting a bit closer to the boy. "My name's Clark. Can you speak?"

The boy nodded slowly.

Good- good. So he wasn't mute, just scared.

"Can you tell me your name?"

The small raven stared at him for a moment before chewing on his bottom lip- an action that, surprisingly, felt familiar to the Man of Steel. He furrowed his brow slightly at the thought but shoved it away. This kid was more important right now.

"...Billy."

"Okay...well it's nice to meet you, Billy. Do you have a last name to go with that?" he asked. Maybe Bruce could look the kid up and he could get him home to his parents. When the boy began to tear up, Clark felt like he'd said something wrong somehow.

Billy was shaking his head, tears beading in the corners of his eyes.

"You- you don't have a last name?" Clark asked in confusion.

"I- I don' remember..." the boy mumbled, tears falling down his cheeks.

Clark felt a cold chill go up his spine. Amnesia. That in itself would be trouble enough, but this was a kid with amnesia- it made things much harder. It had to be retrograde since the boy couldn't remember his last name- he'd have to get him to Bruce so he could run a facial scan.

"Well, Billy..." he said, coming a bit closer. "Do you mind if I take you to get help? You're hurt, and I wanna help you- but I can't if you don't let me," he said, holding out a hand to the boy. "Will you let me help you?" he asked, looking into the child's icy blue eyes.

Billy stared at the man's hand, and Clark could almost see the cogs spinning in his mind. He furrowed his brow, meeting Clark's gaze before letting out a shaky breath and nodding. "O-okay," he said, reaching a hand out to grab the reporter's.

Clark gave the boy a soft smile, coming closer to lift the boy into his arms. Billy was tense at first, but he slowly settled into the man’s arms. “Okay, I think I have a friend that can help us with your injury,” he said, glancing towards the entrance of the alley.

Things just got a tad bit more complicated.

#shazam #captain marvel #billy batson #starkvenger #prompt #prompt fill #dc #dc comics #justice league #clark kent #superman

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platypanthewriter · 3 years

Text

The Devil Looks After His Own Ch.4

Chapters One | Two | Three

Little Steve Harrington is so lonely he tries summoning a demon with a ritual advertised on TV–but luckily, it doesn’t work, and a buff, non-human nanny hired by his mom shows up minutes later. Years later, they’re best friends, and Steve still doesn’t know the truth. For @magniloquent-raven!

Since Steve’s mom and dad had basically stopped doing anything around the house, Steve helped Billy with things like scrubbing the bathroom, and doing laundry, and vacuuming. They listened to music very loud if Steve’s dad wasn’t working, and if he was, they played charades with each other as they worked. That meant Steve sometimes got the parmesan cheese when he wanted the Ajax cleanser, and Billy got Steve yelling and climbing up the furniture, looking for a huge cockroach rat hybrid, when all he wanted Steve to do was move so he could pick up the rug, but it was pretty funny.

“They are paying you, right,” Steve asked one day, as he and Billy laid on the floor of his room, exhausted from scrubbing the entire kitchen after Billy accidentally boiled a pan of chili over the whole stove and proceeded to drop it on the kitchen floor. Steve’s stomach growled—it’d actually smelled pretty good, for something Billy cooked, and he rolled to bury his face in Billy’s shoulder, groaning.

“...I don’t have a lot of use for money,” Billy said thoughtfully. “They’re giving me some, though, yeah.”

“Let’s order pizza,” Steve moaned, stretching. “I mean, if—can you get the money? Do you know how?”

“I have a bank account,” Billy muttered, but from the red his ears had turned, Steve suspected it hadn’t been that easy, at first.

“...do you have a card?” Steve asked, holding his fingers up in a rectangle, and Billy rolled onto his side to tickle him.

“Yes, you little jerk, I have a debit card, and I can get us pizza,” he told Steve, as he giggled and kicked the air.

“You should use it to do things you want,” Steve told him, relaxing into the hug, once he smacked Billy enough times that the tickling stopped. “Buy—things. Things you want. Or—or go somewhere.”

“Where would I wanna go without you?” Billy asked him, laughing, and Steve’s face heated.

He snaked his arms around more of Billy, and squeezed him, sighing contentedly. “...we could go together,” he mumbled. “To—to the, um, like, the water park. Or somewhere. They have slides.”

“Oooo,” Billy said, but it felt like he was laughing.

“They’re really cool,” Steve huffed, and Billy noogied his head.

“What about, like...Disneyland,” he whispered, and Steve’s heart thudded in his chest. “Or like...Hawaii? Is that a thing kids like? Go snorkeling?”

“Holy shit,” Steve muttered, because it seemed like the situation deserved a swear. “C-can you pay for that?! That’s—that’s a plane ticket, Billy—”

“Two of them,” Billy said, and Steve nodded, his heart pounding with excitement, because vacations would be completely different with Billy—Billy wouldn’t leave Steve in the hotel room all day, or expect him to just sit on a bench for hours at the mall.

“I-if you, um, if you want,” he squeaked, and Billy rolled on top of him, squishing him, and being annoying, and saying things like ‘Oh no, gross, did I roll onto a bug?’ “Get off!” Steve yelled, kicking and laughing.

“Too tired,” Billy groaned. “I’m just gonna lay here on this gross bug.”

“I’m not a bug!” Steve yelled back, cackling helplessly, until Billy finally took mercy, scooped him up, and let Steve order pizza with anything he wanted.

It turned out kinda gross, actually, because Steve had ordered everything he hadn’t tried before, but they picked off the fruit and the weird fish. The fried eggs and sunflower seeds were actually pretty good.

“I didn’t know you were such a good cook,” Billy told him, and Steve kicked his leg, snorting a laugh, as Billy flipped through channels.

He paused on a news show, the news person holding the microphone out to a being that was mostly fire and horns. “What do you think of this talk of requiring a license from both sides to summon demons?”

“It’s ridiculous,” said the guttural voice in flames, and Billy shivered, his face weirdly blank, like he got at the beginning, when Steve ordered him around. “Expecting my people to agree not to tear anyone’s face off, or steal their soul, when they’ve been summoned and enslaved for millenia? Don’t make me laugh.”

Steve slid his hand into Billy’s as the news person interrupted. “Well, it’s supposed to end that—”

“My own son has been missing for nearly a year,” said the harsh voice, and Billy trembled again, lowering his slice of pizza to the plate. “Are you suggesting I report the summoner to the authorities, instead of punishing them for my son’s captivity myself? How would a slap on the wrist help us more?”

“...fuck,” Billy whispered, rubbing his face, and Steve squeezed his hand.

“It stands to reason that if there was oversight on who could summon demons—” the news person persisted, but the fire demon slammed a flaming appendage against the table, and ey jerked back.

“I will burn them from the bones out until their skin cracks off in lumps of char,” said the demon, “—and then I will reclaim my son,” and then the TV clicked off, and Billy was sweating and shaking, tears welling up in his eyes.

Steve dropped his pizza on his plate, sat it aside, and stood up to hug Billy, petting his hair like he was the neighbor’s cat as Billy laughed and shuddered against him. “Billy,” Steve whispered. “Are you a demon?”

“You think I’m like him?” Billy gasped out, his fists tight in Steve’s shirt. “You see him and you—you’re like—that’s Billy,” he choked off, crying, and Steve petted his hair some more, biting his lips, and trying to figure it out.

Before Billy, he’d never thought of teenagers as being just another kind of kid—they’d always seemed basically like grownups—but he was wondering more and more whether teenagers were just children who could drive. Steve wasn’t sure how he felt about that idea, it sounded kind of...bad.

“Do—did you used to summon demons,” he asked, cautiously. “Is—is that why you—is that why you’re magic—is—is—do you know a demon,” he tried, wondering what could have made Billy cry.

“Doesn’t matter,” Billy mumbled, and Steve raised his eyebrows.

“It matters,” he said, but then he felt Billy start to pull away, and hugged him tighter. “But, um. You—you don’t have to...tell me. Okay?”

“...are you serious,” Billy whispered, and Steve nodded, running his fingers through Billy’s curls. Billy sighed, squeezing him back.

“If, um, if you don’t...want to talk about it,” Steve told him, “—um, you—you don’t have to...tell me.”

“...sorry,” Billy sighed. He sounded exhausted. “I just...it’s, um. It’s sort of...safer. If you don’t know.”

“Okay,” Steve told him, wondering. Billy was right, he thought—even if he did have horns, the Billy that swung him around in the air, played LEGO, and bought him weird pizza was nothing like the fire demon that had threatened the news person, which he thought he should probably tell Billy. “You’re not like that,” he said quickly. “He was scary. He wanted to be scary. He wanted to hurt somebody. He...I know you’re not like that. I didn’t—I didn’t mean you were like that.”

Billy nodded, sighing. “I don’t want to be like that.”

“Who would,” Steve wondered, making a face. “What a jerk.”

“...yeah,” Billy said, laughing softly.

“Do you...know him...somehow?” Steve couldn’t help asking. “Is—is that why you yelled at me about demons? When you first came?”

“Demons are dangerous,” Billy bit out, “—and they will kill you. Don’t you fucking dare try that summoning shit again—”

“I wasn’t going to,” Steve said, shaking his head, and trying not to smile, because Billy’d turned to glower at him, wiping his eyes. “I mean it, I won’t—”

“You better not,” Billy growled, his mouth quirking as he slid his hand along the back of the couch to tickle Steve’s side, and Steve yelped.

“I won’t! I won’t, I promise, I won’t!” he yelled, squawking and giggling, and Billy yanked him in close for a hug.

“You’ll get eaten,” Billy said quietly, frowning like he was still worried, and Steve flicked his earring.

“I won’t do it,” he said again. “I won’t. I promise.”

“...okay,” Billy sighed, resting his face against Steve’s hair.

It started to get hot and uncomfortable in Billy’s arms—he was squeezing really tight, and they were both sweaty from cleaning, and Steve was hungry— but he waited, petting Billy’s hair until he let go on his own.

“I promise not to kidnap anyone and get eaten,” Steve muttered into Billy’s curls, sighing, and Billy started snickering, and blew a raspberry on his neck with a loud farty noise. Steve’s dad stomped out of his office and yelled at them to be quiet, and they snuck the pizza into Steve’s room, and had a picnic on the floor.

A couple weeks later, Steve and Billy were leaving the LEGO store at the mall—Steve with his head stuffed with ideas and his hands on the Jungle Raider vehicle he’d finally picked up for his Ninjago set, Billy with the new bonsai tree set, because he and Steve had decided to add it to his house—when they heard screams. Steve was still looking at the cover of the box when he registered Billy shoving him behind Billy’s back, and a woman ran by yelling “Run, get out of here, there’s a man with a gun!”

Steve froze, clutching his Ninjago set, and Billy scooped him up, and frowned back atinto the LEGO store, and then down the corridor of the mall. More people were running by, and some of them were making phone calls, which was good, Steve thought dazedly. He should have thought of that, calling 911, like in a movie.

“Kiddo,” Billy said softly, “—those sets you gave me. They really mine?”

“There’s a man with a gun,” Steve said shakily. “Billy.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, sitting him back down. “And I don’t know where he is, or what’s going on, but if you—” he bit his lip, thinking.

“Billy, can you help?” Steve hissed, wide-eyed. “Don’t get hurt—”

“Pick a set to really never play with again,” Billy said, glancing back into the mall. “You have to—to throw it away, or break it, so nobody can use it again. Can you do that?”

“I can’t break it from here,” Steve whimpered, starting to panic. “I can’t—this one’s too small and dumb, isn’t it, it was only ten dollars—” he held up the Jungle Raider vehicle, his eyes blurring with tears.

“That would work,” Billy said. “You’ve never even gotten to play with it. You can’t just buy it again, though.”

“O-okay,” Steve said, nodding. He lowered it slowly towards the ground, and then jumped and dropped it as they heard a gunshot. He stomped on it a few times. There was a crunch, he flinched, and Billy yanked him into a quick hug, kissing his cheek, and then went all... pretty.

He grew, it seemed like, even from the tall horned man he’d been when he’d come to work naked that first day, and he had muscles everywhere, and Steve tried not to giggle nervously, because Billy was naked again, and Steve could see everything.

“Go hide behind the counter, or in the back, as far back and low as you can get,” Billy told him, and Steve nodded, grabbing Billy’s hands.

“Don’t get hurt, Billy,” he whispered, trying to let go, but he’d started to cry, and he couldn’t make his fingers let go of Billy’s.

Billy yanked free to squeeze him close, but they heard another scream, and Steve pushed him away and ran into the store, trying to cry quietly. He found the nice counter person hiding behind the counter, and yanked them into the back like Billy had said, then crouched with his arms over his head like in an earthquake because he didn’t know what else to do.

The counter person had a glittery they/them pin that caught the light from the front of the store as they panted, staring over his shoulder, and Steve watched it, remembering how genius he’d thought it was back when they first started working. One of the centaur twins in his class used ey/em like their art teacher did, but the other one used fae/faer, and they were identical palominos—and Steve had been so grateful when one of them started painting faer hooves and he could get it right.

He hoped he got to see them again. He hoped Billy got to see them again, and started to cry harder, thinking about Billy dead somewhere, full of bullets. The counter person yelped as Steve started to crawl away, asking him where he was going, but Steve couldn’t help it, he scrambled out of the store, and hid under a bench in the corridor, listening.

There were a bunch of gunshots, at least five, and Steve shuddered, covering his mouth so he didn’t make a noise, but then everything went quiet. He waited, tears dripping down his cheeks, until Billy stumbled back around the corner of the corridor, leaning heavily against the wall.

There was blood, smoking as it dripped over his jewelry. Steve scrambled out with a yell and ran to him, gathering him into a hug as Billy slid down the wall to curl up with his head in Steve’s lap. “I-I’ll call 911,” Steve sobbed, wiping his tears away to try and see, and Billy shushed him.

“S’fine,” he mumbled. “S’okay, mmm...m’fixin’ it. Need...need you…”

“What,” Steve asked him, petting his flamey hair, and patting his horns nervously.

“Talk to me,” Billy breathed, with a noise like he had snot or tears in his throat, and Steve realized it was probably blood, the blood soaking into his jeans from Billy’s chest.

Steve bit his lips together to keep from making a noise as his lungs jerked with sobs. “Y-you’re gonna be okay,” he whined unconvincingly, then yelped as he realized Billy was smoking a little all over, and he felt a little smoky, too soft under Steve’s fingers on his shoulder, and not nearly heavy enough leaning against him.

“Tell me about the picture, that first night,” Billy whispered. “How’d it go. Dis-distract me.” He reached out and ran his finger through his blood on the floor, drawing some of a circle, and Steve pulled Billy’s hand back.

“Don’t move,” Billy growled, pretty certain that made things worse. He drew what he could remember—the castle, and the horse—trying not to think about the sticky chill of Billy’s blood on his fingers. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and kept drawing, as Billy asked questions like ‘Wasn’t it in a circle?’ and ‘I thought there were symbols or something.’ Steve would have stopped, but it sounded like it was helping, as Billy got heavier.

His voice sounded stronger. “...what are you drawing?” he asked, sounding like he wanted to laugh, and Steve felt a strong temptation to do something annoying, like lick his ear.

“I don’t remember the symbols!” Steve hissed, guiltily, trying not to sob. “Hearts are good,” he sniffled. “I-it’s the Eu-Eurovision logo! And I love you.”

“...yeah,” Billy whispered, staring at the picture, as Steve added some clouds, trying not to think about how much of Billy’s blood there was on the ground to draw with. “...save me with the Eurovision logo, kiddo.”

Steve sniffled hard, wiping his nose again, and used his clean hand to stroke Billy’s hair at the base of his horns.

“Tell me why you drew that,” Billy whispered, and Steve hugged him, trying not to get snot in his pretty hair. “The—the first time. That first night.”

Steve could hear sirens. “W-wanted a friend,” he whispered, his lungs juddering so he kind of gasped it.

“Wanted me?” Billy asked, whispering, and Steve nodded, hugging him tighter, and drew another circle around the one Billy had started, and wrote some stuff in there, ‘I’ and a heart and ‘Billy’, and Billy snorted a laugh, relaxing into him. He felt more solid, less like Steve’s fingers were going to press through him, and Steve dropped a kiss on his shoulder, his tears coming even faster in relief. Billy’s wound was smoking still, but he pushed himself upright—as Steve waved his hands in panic—and took a deep, slow breath, and shrank a little back into grown-up nanny Billy, in a t-shirt and jeans, still clutching at his stomach. The blood on the ground was smoking away. Billy took another slow breath, closing his eyes, and the blood on his shirt smoked away too.

Steve reached over—gently—and tugged Billy’s shirt up to see smooth unbroken skin, and wondered whether it was real. “Is—is it gone? Or are you hiding it?” he asked, around the lump in his throat, and Billy leaned in to kiss his head.

“I’m okay,” he whispered, as the sounds of shouting got closer.

“How did you get hurt,” Steve asked, rubbing his eyes again as they spilled over. “You’re magic, how—how did you get hurt, Billy, you—you promised—”

“I didn’t promise I’d never get hurt,” Billy laughed, and Steve punched his shoulder, and Billy grunted, wincing.

Steve scrambled closer, patting at him more gently. “It’s still there,” he realized, crying harder. “You’re still hurt, Billy, you’re hurt— we have to go to the hospital—”

“No, no, kiddo,” Billy laughed, gritting his teeth. “I’ll be okay. I’m just...hungry.”

“How did you get hurt,” Steve breathed again, his brain stuck on the memory of blood on the floor, and on his fingers. He clenched them, clean now, but he could still feel the stickiness.

“Well, he was human,” Billy said slowly, trying to push himself to his feet, “—and I’m not, so I was trying not to hurt him.”

“He had a gun,” Steve squeaked, stumbling to his feet to try and help Billy heave himself to his feet. “He had a gun, Billy—”

“But he’s human,” Billy said softly, glancing up with the smile he put on when he didn’t want to smile. “Like you. I can’t go around hurting humans.”

“You can if they have a gun,” Steve growled, steadying Billy as he stood, finally, staggering.

“Naaah,” Billy said, hugging his head. “You might stop and think twice about being my friend, seeing me do something like that.”

“I would not,” Steve insisted, huffing. “Not if they’re shooting at you—”

As they walked out, around the EMTs and a man in cuffs, screaming about demons, Billy flinched. Steve turned on his heel to go yell, because Billy was nice, and pretty, and he’d gotten shot, but Billy grabbed him up around the waist and kept walking, telling everyone that stopped him that they hadn’t seen anything, and they were fine.

“I hope they put him in jail forever,” Steve muttered, squirming to get down, because he was starting to get why parents got mad when they were worried. He wanted to shake Billy for not understanding he was important. Steve couldn’t stop snapping at him, either, even when he tried to be nice, stopping for a milkshake on the way home—Billy asked what kind Steve wanted, and tried to suggest vanilla when Steve paused, and then Steve went and said strawberry, just to prove him wrong, and he didn’t even like strawberry. Billy’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he drove, and Steve tried not to cry over his gross strawberry milkshake, and the remembered feeling of Billy’s blood dripping between his fingers and soaking into his jeans.

“Okay, I’m gonna need you to keep quiet about this, okay?” Billy told him, and Steve laughed, wetly, because it wasn’t like he could tell anyone anyway. Steve’s parents would have questions if Steve told them Billy had been naked.

“I won’t tell,” Steve said thickly, and Billy grinned at him, like everything was fine.

It was weird, being really, really mad at Billy. Steve wasn’t used to being so angry at somebody he loved, and it spilled out, everywhere, at his parents, his teacher, at his friends—and particularly at Billy, who glared in confusion as Steve stomped past when he offered a hug, or ignored Billy saving him a seat in the cafeteria, or refused to eat the awful food Billy cooked for dinner.

It was worse that he couldn’t even tell anyone—there was nobody he trusted enough, except Billy. It seemed so obvious, now, that Billy could be hurt— everyone could, Steve told himself, and it had been stupid to think Billy couldn’t be hurt just because he could do magic.

He wanted to scream because Billy would hurt himself to save Steve, or that he almost died, and acted like that was normal, and he yelled into his pillow until he cried.

“Don’t be pissed,” Billy hissed, yanking Steve around the back of the gym during recess, after Steve had picked Tommy first for his soccer team. “You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“I know,” Steve muttered, his eyes stinging, because being angry all the time made him want to cry all the time, which made him angrier.

“You are fine,” Billy whispered, sighing, like Steve was being a brat.

Steve figured he probably was being a brat, if Billy thought so, and kind of wished he could just say thank you, but it stuck in his throat, and he shoved Billy away.

“I protected you, you’re fine, I’ll always protect you,” Billy groaned, like Steve was stupid, and Steve pushed him again.

“What about you,” he yelled back, too loud, and started to cry again. The shouting of three classes at recess pretty much drowned him out, but it was still embarrassing. “Y-you keep saying I’m fine, what about you?!”

“I’m fine too,” Billy told him, rolling his eyes. “I healed, I’m okay, Stevie.”

“Don’t call me Stevie,” Steve said, and Billy blinked, probably because Steve had always kind of liked having nicknames, just like normal kids.

“...Steve,” Billy corrected, watching his face, and Steve realized he’d given Billy an order, and felt worse.

“Y-you keep saying it’s fine and it’s not fine,” Steve shouted at him, and Billy frowned harder. “It’s not fine if you get hurt,” Steve tried to yell, but his throat closed, and he kind of choked it out.

“It’s okay if I’m helping you,” Billy said, smiling like Steve was being funny, and Steve wanted to hit him.

“No,” he rasped out, and Billy cocked his head. “If,” Steve started, not sure how he was going to finish, “—i-if—if you keep saying—if you keep saying you don’t matter,” he forced out, swallowing hard, “—I—I’ll—”

“You’ll what,” Billy laughed, raising his eyebrows, and Steve set his jaw.

“I’ll believe you,” he threatened, lying, and Billy went still. “I—I’ll believe you. That you don’t matter. L-losing you doesn’t matter. M-my best friend doesn’t matter. If I—” he sniffled hard, wiping his face, “—if I don’t like you anymore, it won’t be so scary—”

“No,” Billy interrupted, wide-eyed, grabbing Steve’s arm. “No, no, no— Steve —”

“It’s fine if s-some—if something...happens to you! R-right?!” Steve insisted, crying too hard to pretend he wasn’t, and pushing Billy, who staggered back. “If you’re just gonna die I—” he cut off as his lungs seized at the idea of Billy dead, Billy in a pool of blood, still on the floor, Billy gone. “I-if you’re gonna die,” he started again, miserably, “I don’t wanna be your friend, I—I can’t—”

“Fucking hell,” Billy muttered, his hands twitching towards Steve, and then flinching back. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry, please—please don’t—”

“Wh-what if you die and it’s my fault,” Steve moaned, hiccuping sobs, and trying to wipe his face, and Billy stepped in close again, grimacing uncertainly, wiping Steve’s face with his sleeves. He smelled like smoke, a little, like he did when something scary was happening, and the laundry detergent from when Steve helped him out at the laundromat, and Billy had chased him around and tickled him on one of the dryers. “What if you’re gone,” Steve wailed.

“No, no, no, c’mon, no, no—” Billy muttered, pulling him into a hug. Steve tried to pull away again, but Billy held on, warm and strong, and Steve finally just bawled into his shoulder, sobbing so loud everybody came to look, two different teachers, and all three of the classes at recess. Steve buried his face in Billy’s shoulder, and Billy hugged his whole head as Steve’s new favorite teacher squeezed both their shoulders, and whispered that she was glad they’d made up, and then ushered everyone away, even Tommy, who looked torn between triumph and worry.

“I’m s-still mad at y-you,” Steve told Billy, gulping for air. “I-I’m so mad at you—I—I’m so mad—” he wheezed out, his breath gone from crying, and Billy squeezed him tighter.

“Sssh, ssh, ssh, I’m sorry, I was wrong, I was wrong,” he whispered, and Steve relaxed, a tiny bit, wondering if Billy got it, finally.

“You c-can’t do that again,” Steve told him, feeling a sick guilt for ordering Billy around, but pushing on, because it had to be okay to not let Billy get shot.

“I don’t think there’s probably gonna be that many shooters at the mall, kiddo,” Billy whispered back, laughing, and Steve stomped on his foot.

“You have to promise,” he hissed, and Billy laughed again, but when Steve shoved away to glare at him, Billy was crying too, his eyes red and wet. “...you promise?” Steve asked, softening a little, and reaching up to wipe Billy’s tears off his round, freckled cheeks. Billy nodded, smirking a little, and Steve frowned. “You can’t just—get hurt. Not for me.”

“Because I’m so important,” Billy said, his smile widening a little as his eyes spilled over again. “And you’d be super sad.”

“Yeah,” Steve told him, narrowing his eyes, because he wasn’t sure Billy was really getting it, yet. “I’d probably cry for— forever.”

Billy made a weird noise in his throat as he laughed, leaning in and kissing Steve on his cheek, and his ear, clumsily, and squeezing him tight again until his fingers hurt against Steve’s arms and sides, but Steve didn’t care, because he was hugging back just as hard. “I—I’ll be more...careful,” Billy mumbled, sniffling. “Since I’m...important. So you don’t have to get so scared.” He took a shaky breath, burying his face in Steve’s shoulder. “...just...because of me.”

“You’re the most important person I know,” Steve told him, his breath going shaky again. “Just—just you, you have to—you have to be okay—”

“I gotta make sure I’m okay so you’re okay,” Billy whispered, nodding a little, and Steve groaned, but it was close enough, he figured, so he sighed a ‘yeah’. “Because I’m important,” Billy said, laughing a little, like he didn’t believe it, and Steve growled into his neck.

“I’m not lying,” Steve growled.

“No, no, yeah, I know,” Billy told him, giggling, and Steve pulled back to stare at him. He was laughing and crying, pink-cheeked. “I-I know. I’m—I’m important.”

#harringrove #eventually #Steve accidentally summons a demon #Billy was horrified to be summoned by an unattended child #they're BFFs now #Sorry if anything's weird formatting-wise #kitten kept walking across the keyboard trying to keep an eye on the roomba

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alagalaska · 4 years

Text

It’s Only Hair, Right?

Summary: A Billy Hargrove imagine based on my experience of having Alopecia.

Pairing: Billy Hargrove x Fem! Reader (first person narrative)

A/N: I was having a bad day and this is something that just came out. I understand this may not be for everyone but I feel Alopecia (hair loss) is something that a lot of people have but never talk about, so I still wanted to post this even if no one reads it. If you do read it, please let me know what you think! P.S. there's a little gift from me to you at the end ;)

Warnings: Hair loss and the issues that come with it. There will be swearing, talk of negative self-image, brief non-graphic mention of needles (for the purpose of steroid injections which are given to try and stimulate hair regrowth), angst, fluff and Billy being very impulsive.

Disclaimer: I acknowledge that not everyone will experience or be affected by Alopecia in the same ways, so please note that this is purely based on my own experience of having it. Please do not steal or copy my work in part or in whole.

Word count: 2,137

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“Stupid, fucking…” I grumbled frustratedly, around a mouthful of bobby pins, adjusting the small floral scarf I’d put in my hair to try and cover the back of my head.

I had been standing in front of the bathroom mirror for about fifteen minutes, attempting to put my hair up for work.

Billy came into the room, smiling that lopsided grin of his; swaggered up behind me and placed his hands on my hips. He dipped his head to kiss the side of my neck, blonde curls tickling my shoulder. He hummed against my skin as I continued jamming pins into my hair.

His eyes caught mine in the mirror, seemed to gauge my mood, then flicked up to the scarf in my hair.

“This is nice,” he said, tugging gently at the bow I’d tied clumsily at the front of the scarf.

“Don’t pull it, you’ll mess it up,” I snapped, jerking away from him. It came out a lot harsher than I’d meant it to.

He dropped his hand, frowning.

I sighed, placing the unused bobby pins down on the side of the sink, and turned to him.

“Sorry, I just can’t get it to sit right. It’s pissing me off,” I said, gesturing at the back of my head frustratedly.

He smirked at that.

“Never would have guessed,” he teased. His smile dropped again when he saw the obvious lack of amusement on my face.

I untied the scarf and started yanking it from my hair; grasping at the pins I had so carefully placed, removing them one by one. I scattered them carelessly onto the rim of the sink with the others. One slid into the basin, stopping at the edge of the plughole where it balanced precariously.

Billy’s hands came up to rest over mine, stilling them. He turned me to him.

“Hey,” he said. My eyes had fallen to the tiled floor, so he gently placed one hand under my chin, tilting my face until I was looking at him again. “You look beautiful.”

I considered his words for a moment.

“Well, I don’t feel it,” I said, pulling away from him.

Billy’s jaw tensed. He didn’t say anything.

“Don’t know why they insist on hair up anyway,” I grumbled, turning back to face the mirror again.

I turned my head to the side, taking in the state of my hair without the scarf covering it.

A large section behind my left ear was almost completely bald, save for a few strands here and there. My fingers poked at the skin, which felt smooth and waxy to the touch.

There was a large patch behind my right ear too, which extended round to the back of my head and one final area at the back, towards the middle, which was clearly visible with my hair up.

Unfortunately, with my work having a ‘hair up’ policy for female staff, it meant I couldn’t just hide it under the rest of my hair or throw on my favourite beanie hat, like I usually would when I wasn’t working.

It was getting harder and harder to disguise it, the more my hair fell out. The patches were gradually getting bigger and, according to my dermatologist, could get a whole lot worse before they started getting better.

I picked up the hand-held shaving mirror that was sat at the back of the sink and held it out behind me, angling it so that I could see the back of my head reflected in the larger mirror in front of me.

Billy leaned up against the wall, watching me with a crease in his brow. Chewed on the inside of his cheek as I inspected the patches of scalp.

“Any regrowth?” he eventually asked.

I sighed.

“No.” I tried not to sound too disappointed. It was probably too soon to tell anyway.

My last visit to the dermatologist had been a few days prior, for my final round of steroid injections. If it didn’t work this time, that was it; I’d just have to wait for the hair to grow back on it’s own, which could take anything up to two years. If it was even going to grow back at all, that is.

Billy had gone with me, of course. Had sat quietly in the corner, trying to maintain his supportive role as best he could, as he’d watched the discomfort on my face; powerless to help me. Had held me afterwards as I’d cried into the shoulder of his leather jacket.

My eyes were starting to sting now as I stared at the ugly patches of visible flesh.

I generally tried not to brood about it too often, but sometimes it was hard not to be outwardly fed up; especially after enduring the unpleasant ordeal that was having numerous injections straight to the scalp, only for them to not work.

Billy pushed away from the wall and stood behind me again. He prised the mirror from my hand.

“Come on, you better finish getting ready for work,” he said. He paused, then added, “Unless you wanna call in sick? We can order some takeout, watch a movie?”

The offer was tempting, but we really needed the money for rent; and although my pay was crap, the tips were definitely worth it.

“No, I should go,” I said regretfully. “Thanks though.” I glanced over my shoulder at him. Threw him a small smile, feeling bad for having been moody.

“I liked the scarf,” he said, gesturing to where I’d abandoned it. He smiled encouragingly, holding the mirror up at the back of my head. “I’ll hold this so you can see what you’re doing.”

It was easier to do this time, with Billy’s help. Only took me a couple more minutes to get the scarf positioned right and pinned in so that it was secure.

I smoothed my palm over the scarf, checking it one last time in the mirror. I turned to Billy, chewing my lip.

“What happens when it gets too bad to cover up?” I asked.

“I dunno, shave it off?” he answered, shrugging. He put his hands on my hips, pulled me in closer. Slid his hands into the back pockets of my work trousers. “You don’t need hair to be beautiful.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead then one to my lips; lingered there as he said, “Could shave the whole lot off and you’d still look smoking hot.”

I laughed, despite myself.

“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say,” I retorted. I took hold of one of his perfect curls, gently teasing it out straight between my fingers and let it go. Watched it bounce.

“I’m serious,” he said, leaning back to look at me from arms’ length, with a frown. “It’s only hair, right?” He slowly cracked a smile, trying to encourage me to join in. When I didn’t, he quirked an eyebrow at me, “Right?” he prompted again.

I let out an exasperated sigh, rolled my eyes, but indulged him by replying anyway.

“Right.”

That had inadvertently become our motto regarding my hair. When it had originally started falling out, people would say that to me all the time, ‘It's only hair.’ As if that would make me feel better.

It used to really annoy me, but then Billy had started saying it as a joke, and it had kind of stuck. He insisted that if he said it enough times, I actually might start to believe it. Unfortunately, that theory still had yet to be proved.

“Ok, I gotta go or I’m gonna be late,” I said. I wandered through to the bedroom, Billy following behind me, and gathered up my purse and keys. “Bye,” I said, then gave him a kiss on the lips.

He watched me thoughtfully as I left.

------

When I got home from work, Billy was nowhere to be seen. Granted, it was late, but he normally never went to bed until I’d come back from my shift.

“Babe?” The living room was empty, the TV murmuring away to itself. I wandered over to it, turning it off.

That’s when I heard a faint buzzing sound. Followed it through the flat until I was standing outside of the bathroom door. I pushed my ear to the wood.

“Billy?” I asked, knocking on the door.

The buzzing cut off abruptly, followed by a short silence and then what sounded like something being knocked over. I heard Billy curse sharply, under his breath.

“Babe? What are you doing in there?” I went to open the door.

“Er, hang on a sec,” he said, then hurriedly added, “don’t come in.” I could hear him scrabbling to pick up whatever he’d dropped.

The buzzing started up again. I figured he must be trimming his pubes. No big deal. I’d seen him do that before, a bunch of times, so I didn’t get what all the fuss was about.

I tried the handle. It wasn’t locked.

“Why can’t I-?”

I froze in the doorway, the words dying in my throat.

Billy was stood, shirtless, in front of the bathroom mirror; an electric razor in his hand.

“Y/N,” he said, exasperated, “I told you not to come in. I’m not done yet, it was meant to be a surprise.”

Well, it certainly was just that.

“Oh my God, Billy,” I breathed, walking into the room.

My eyes fell to the basin at his hips, full of familiar dark blonde curls, lying limply against the white porcelain.

The remaining hair on his head was shaved short, save for a small section at the back, near his neck, which he’d obviously missed and the left side of his head, which he was in the process of shaving before I interrupted him.

I looked him over. Somehow, he still managed to take my breath away, even with a poorly shaved head.

He put the razor down on the edge of the sink. Rubbed his hand over the stubble on his head, surveying his handy work in the mirror.

“What d’you think?” He flashed me that smile of his, in the reflection. Faltered slightly when he saw the way my eyes were welling up. “You hate it?” he asked, sounding unsure; disappointed, even. He turned to me.

“No, of course I don’t hate it,” I said, sniffling. Attempted a smile.

“Then what’s wrong?” he asked. He put his hands on my upper arms, stroking them soothingly.

“It’s just... I feel like this is because of what I said earlier…” I sighed, knowing full well that he’d taken what I said to heart and that’s not what I had intended.

“Well, yeah, it is,” he said, shrugging. He looked like he was going to say something else but I cut in.

“I just don’t want you to regret the decision.”

He laughed.

“Bit late for that now,” he said jokingly. But I didn’t find it funny.

“This is a huge deal, Billy,” I continued, as if I hadn’t heard him. “You love your hair.”

He barely seemed to think about his response.

“Yeah, but I love you more,” he said easily.

I didn’t know what to say. My eyes were welling up again.

“I figured that if you did decide to shave your head, it might be easier if I shaved mine too,” he explained, still gently rubbing my arms. “And besides, no one’s even gonna notice your hair now, with all this going on,” he said, gesturing to his lack of hair.

I sputtered a laugh. That was true, it was a state.

“God Billy, I wish you’d just waited until I got home to start this,” I laughed again, wiping at my face with the sleeve of my work shirt.

“At least it got you laughing,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah, and now I’ll laugh every time I see you,” I joked, picking up the razor. “Let me try and fix this.”

I started carefully shaving the hair at the back of his head then continued the section at the side which he hadn’t finished.

When I was done, I stared into the sink, filled with his beautiful hair.

Billy noticed and turned to me.

“Hey, it’s only hair, right?” he said, placing a kiss on the end of my nose.

I hummed a laugh. Thought about it for a moment.

“Right,” I replied.

As Billy started cleaning up the remains of his mullet, I took off my head scarf, pulling it free of the pins. I folded the fabric in my hands and looked up at myself in the mirror. Suddenly, what I saw didn’t seem so bad.

Billy was watching me from behind.

I smiled back at my gorgeous boyfriend, and for the first time ever, I really did feel like maybe it was only hair.

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For those of you that made it this far, here’s some Billy with his head shaved ;)

My taglist is always open, please let me know if you would like to be added!

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