#i cannot concentrate on anything else while playing its unreal

[tiny-chubby-bird]

I've seen gay hub videos that had less heated looks than Luis while watching Leon do target practice challenges.

[zestyquetzalcoatl]

Luck is petty.

Like everything else about his luck, Gladstone hates this and loves it in equal turns, often both at once.

It’s pettiness means he always knows that people’s minds are their own (or at least not influenced by him). Once someone has decided he is insufferable and deserving of only a kick in the pants, it cannot make them give him things or put up with him anyway (ignoring the odd encounters he’s had with a chicken in a bright pink cape.*1 He’s pretty certain something entirely different then luck was at play there, though he has no idea what), which is why he mostly gets given free stuff by strangers instead of people who have met him before. It can influence the physical world, and that alone.

He loves this about it because it means he can exert some level of control over it, want and hate and whittle down its options until it’s forced to give him what he actually wants. He loves it because he is terrified of what it could do if it wasn’t petty. How far it could go, how much it could effect, how badly it would twist the world around it, while he would have no control or hope of containing it.

He hates it because petty luck is petty. It cares about riches, wining bets, getting free things, and curtailing talent and hard work. It can’t (and doesn’t) win him friends or happiness or love. It protects his physical health but doesn’t give a damn about his mental, content to let him be abused and taken advantage of (especially if that gives it another chance to win a prize), so long as he isn’t hungry, isn’t homeless, and isn’t injured. (Liu Hai’s was not the first gilded cage he’d been trapped in, just one that was unusually hard to escape.)

Luck is petty but Gladstone is not.

Sometimes (when the chips are down and the stakes are high) this means that his luck has to play by Gladstone’s rules.

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Gladstone had run into Fethry by complete chance earlier in the day, and he’d spent the last several hours cheerfully walking and chatting with his red-hatted cousin as they meandered their way across town. Gladstone’s luck had been in full effect as they walked, guiding their route via construction sites that had blocked roads, flying $20 bills and interesting butterflies that tempted them down back alleys and side streets, and a very memorable dumpster that gave Gladstone a bad jump scare by falling over and releasing about twenty cats into the general area. The path they’d taken had been dictated largely by whatever looked like the least hassle, and had eventually ended up with them down by the docks, getting lost amongst the warehouses and shipping containers of the many trading companies that had operations in Duckburg Harbor.

Gladstone didn’t mind being utterly lost, he never had. His luck meant they’d get where they ought to go without being late, so he was content to simply wander at random while he enjoyed his cousin’s enthusiastic rambling.

Popping out of a particularly out-of-the-way alley, he realized that he and Fethry had ended up at the main road, less then twenty yards from the beginning of the pier. What was more, he could see Donald’s car.

It was pulled just off of the asphalt and onto the concrete, and parked behind a pile of boxes large enough that it likely couldn’t be spotted from anywhere except the small alley they’d just exited. The 313 was old, and in even worse repair then normal, with one of its mirrors duct taped on, and a couple of its fender skirts boasting decently sized dents. Slumped in the driver’s seat was Donald, with blood on his beak.

For a moment Gladstone felt like he had been plunged underwater.

He had seen his unlucky cousin injured before, many times even. Donald, Della, and Scrooge were always finding a way to get themselves into life-or-death danger, and even when they weren’t trouble managed to find Donald anyway. He’d seen his cousin thrown through walls, struck by lightning, almost crushed by falling boulders, and passed out in all sorts of places weirder then his own oddly parked car. But for all that, he’s rarely, if ever, seen his cousin bleed, so he thinks it’s probably the blood that makes everything about his just scream wrong.

The underwater-feeling, the feeling of wrongness, is intense, blurring the edges of the world and muffling all sound. He can just barely hear himself shout through the veil of unreality that, for one long moment, seems to drown him.

“Donald?!”

Beside him Fethry stops talking, then the underwater-feeling shatters to make way for the electrocuting feeling of ice-cold terror, and the next moment he and Fethry are both sprinting for the car.

Donald wakes up when they reach the car, both of them somewhat crashing into it in their panic. The more important thing, is that there are bloody petals in Donald’s lap. Gladstone suddenly feels like there’s something caught in his own throat that he has to force words out past, because he knows what bloody petals mean, but no no No NO—

“Donald, Donald what, w-who—“

Any doubt is swept away when Donald goes to respond and starts choking instead, coughing up not just bloody petals but entire flower heads. Red, Blue, Green, Pink, Gold, and White, all different shapes and kinds. Gladstone feels like every emotion he has has been flicked on at once, a white-hot intensity that burns through him just waiting to explode outward. The world around him is in crystalline clarity, all his senses turned up to eleven and recording in overwhelming detail, and he’s feeling everything at once. He knows what hanahaki is but he doesn’t know his flowers, can’t decipher what’s before him. Can’t know and can’t guess and can’t let Donald die.

Donald finishes hacking up a morbid bouquet and starts trying to tell him and Fethry, voice garbled even worse then normal, about having several hours left and wanting to be next to the ocean. Fethry is listening to Donald. Gladstone is doing anything but.

He hasn’t been Cloverleaf in years, and it’s been just as long since he actively controlled his luck. Focusing in the draining way it takes to Curse or Bless is not something he does outside of the mask, instead just letting Gladstone Gander be blown wherever his luck wishes to take him.

But by god he does it now, pouring everything he can into Blessing Donald more intensely then he’s ever done before, wanting and pushing, making bets against himself with devastating consequences if Donald dies. Deciding, with no hesitation or room for chance, what he’ll do —do to himself— if this goes wrong. Gladstone will never be okay again if Donald dies, making his luck agree is just a matter of making sure it knows that he means physically too.

He stifles and kills the urge to Curse whoever hurt his cousin, because that won’t help Donald now. But eyes are burning red with roiling anger, fear and worry adding fuel to the fire, the temper he shares with Donald on the few occasions he’s well and truly ticked on full display. And he will not release his death grip on his cousin’s arm.

And Gladstone doesn’t know it, but Paperinik has seen Cloverleaf Curse and Bless before, and can very much recognize the light static electricity jumping between his cousin’s feathers and the look of vicious concentration on his cousin’s face, even if he wasn’t expecting it at all.

Several miles across town in McDuck Mansion, six people discover they abruptly need Donald for something all at once. The worry that begins to break out when they can’t find him anywhere bubbles over into full blown panic as one of them trips into a trashcan, and a bunch of bloody petals are flung out as it goes flying.

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Well! That wasn’t how I was expecting to loose my day. @bamboozledeagle this is your fault, I woke up to your Hanahaki post sitting at the top of my Tumblr dash, and spent the whole rest of the day writing it on-and-off. Then when I went to post it the WiFi crashed :/ so I had to wait a day.

This is completely unedited, so sorry about any glaring mistakes. I probably change style several times and I think I even changed tense once on accident. Oops. Also sorry about the formatting, I wrote it on notepad and then just copy-pasted to here, and only bothered fixing the italics.

The Gladstone/Cloverleaf on display here is my own version that I started playing around with after reading this post by @adamarinayu: https://adamarinayu.tumblr.com/post/176467180262/hey-yall asking for a competent version of Cloverleaf, but haven’t actually written anything with prior to this.

Blessing and Cursing is just what he calls manipulating his luck to make good things or bad things happen to other people. It also has the added bonus of helping protect his identity by making Cloverleaf seem magical instead of lucky.

Oh and Bam, the chicken in a pink cape line is also your fault by the way: *1 https://bamboozledeagle.tumblr.com/post/617956657118511104/i-love-how-in-your-and-other-peoples-aus

Sorry if the links don’t work on mobile.