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theseerasures · 3 years

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RWBY V08C14 reaction post

haven’t done something like this for this fandom yet, but the finale was so much all at once that i could not muster any level of critical thinking the first go-around. my thoughts have...settled somewhat with a second rewatch. still nothing conclusive (obviously), but at least coherent enough to be written down.

in rough chronological order:

i am very into it, of course, but i’m still not quite sure what to make of the fact that this finale very explicitly pivots around Winter Schnee, to the extent that the episode (sans prologue and coda) are bookended by her. she begins the episode charging into a fight, and ends it the same way. even putting aside that her in-universe presence has increased by magnitudes, that we end a season where she has mostly been a sparse supporting player with THIS has implications i can’t suss out for her narrative role going forward.

going into the finale i thought that Ironwood vs. Winter would turn out to be another RWBY Flagship Fight (ie long and flashy and indulgent in the best ways), but i pretty much knew that wouldn’t be the case once the fight began in earnest and they immediately started talking to each other.

for what we did get i’m happy to say that the Core Dynamic of the fight was exactly what i predicted: Winter rushing in to melee and not giving Ironwood enough time to fire, Ironwood trying to make room by shoving her away and using his cannon as a makeshift club--even down to breaking the cannon formation BACK to dual wielding to give himself an edge.

i will say that for Winter to have blocked him head-on--this is James Ironwood, who once stopped an Alpha Beowolf cold with one bionic hand, and now he’s got TWO--with her broken noodle arms is...incredibly cool. stupid! but cool.

Ironwood doing the double pistol whip while screaming about how no one is grateful has i wouldn’t have to be doing this if you just behaved all over it.

in retrospect i’m not sure why i expected a RWBY Flagship Fight when just about every fight this season has been extremely different. the camera work is always fucking frantic, we’re often cross-cutting between different simultaneous fights, and there are far fewer shots where both combatants are clearly shown and evenly matched. about the only fight we’ve had resembling that is AceOps vs Penny waaaaaaay back in Strings--even the low-stakes triumphant JNPER + Winter vs. Ironwood fight in Creation was extremely short and crosscut with BRA vs. AceOps.

case in point: the showdown in Grand Central takes up pretty much the entire episode, but combatants are continuously entering and exiting, the setting’s physical dimensions feel wonky and surreal, and the fact that half of the people fighting have flight capabilities means we’re relying on wide shots and oners to figure out what the fuck is going on. it’s a war now, and even though we follow only a handful of characters in it the fights carry that grander and more desperate tone.

Cinder relies twice this episode on just fucking nova-ing herself to overwhelm her Maiden opponents. it’s different from how she usually fights, which is still fireballs and conjured swords/projectiles--she’s learning to use her Maiden powers to wreak havoc on a larger scale, which a) reinforces what we already know of Cinder, but b) complements her recent relearning of subtlety and manipulation. still a tenuous balance of extremes that can and will shatter, though.

Weiss got to save everyone during the fight, and none of it mattered in the end.

the thing about priority one is that they all planned for this. they all went in planning for the contingency where they don’t make it out, where they have to watch others not make it out.

Weiss plucking Penny out of the air and Penny pleading to make the sacrifice play is an EXACT recreation of what happened in Enemy of Trust, down to the saved looking up at the savior while the savior is looking onward. she’s just swapped places with the Schnee in question, and...they are the priority targets this time, unfortunately.

Cinder smugly flipping her hair out of...her eyepatch...she really is living her best life and she knows it

Blake made the right choice, and it didn’t matter at all.

Qrow ending the last episode with a berserker charge at Harriet and then immediately pulling back here and trying to talk her down really got to me, as did him trying to block the bomb with his body. the man is so desperately trying to be better than he was, and it doesn’t take a lot anymore for him to realize the right path.

Elm and Vine--

the thing about Elm and Vine is that both their powers boil down to getting attached. so watching Elm hold Vine in place while Vine holds the two airships together, everyone in this little world, it’s...everything i could ever want, out of how the story of the AceOps would end.

Anairis Quinones for dark horse MVP. why can’t you just let me do my job, delivered in the way that it was, is the perfect encapsulation of Harriet Bree desperately trying to outrun her personal feelings and the grief it has given her.

Elm tells Harriet that she’s their friend, to stop her from killing a part of herself as she tries to kill others. it’s the first time this happens in the episode, but not the only time.

Penny saved Blake so they could save Ruby together, and it didn’t matter at all.

our heroes have GOT to stop falling for the “watch the thing flying in the air! OH WAIT I STILL HAVE A WEAPON IN MY HAND WALLOP WALLOP” trick. it happens multiple times in this one episode.

Harriet, who has the fastest Speed Semblance known, says there’s no time to make it out of the blast range. she doesn’t try to outrun it. she just...stays put, and admits that she brought them all here, to this. i’m sorry.

here’s the thing: they’re soldiers. they were prepared for this eventuality, where they don’t make it out. that’s why Elm let Vine go grab Harriet; because she thought they were all going to die, and if that happened she wanted Harriet close enough to reach.

but--just like with Team Hero--some of them do make it out. they just have to watch.

Vine and Hazel sacrificed themselves in the same way in the end: pulling their loved ones close wasn’t working, so they threw themselves around the thing trying to kill them instead.

Ruby was clever, and pragmatic, and brave. it didn’t matter in the end.

Cinder letting Neo fall as soon as she gets a chance proves that she still lacks patience, and that’s going to bite her in the ass.

the Penny-Blake fastball special and the fall; Penny crying tears for the first time, but not moving immediately to rage, as she had last episode, when Yang fell.

Weiss’ shaking hands around Gambol Shroud, crying berserker tears as she tries, desperately, to pull off another miracle. it’s another role reversal in a way: her sister’s the Riza Hawkeye, but she’s the one emptying useless clip after useless clip into an enemy she can’t kill, because her heart has been ripped in two.

the last time Nora Valkyrie saw Jaune Arc, they clasped hands, and their eyes met with determination, and hope.

it figures that a Schnee would be the last one standing, letting all her friends die first. she was right, but again: wrong Schnee.

Weiss diving past Cinder’s blind spot to slice the Grimm Arm, to save Penny--the same script, but the wrong player. and too late.

at Haven, Jaune went from trying to do harm to unlocking his Semblance, and realizing that he was meant to heal. here, he goes from trying to do what he is meant to do, what he has made peace with, to...

it will take a long time, i think, for him to learn to live with himself, even with Penny reassuring him that this is what she wants. to go from wanting to harm to being the one who does no harm, to being forced to acknowledge a person’s right to die, and carry out the deed himself. it’s a new variation on what he’s always had to wrestle with since Pyrrha’s sacrifice.

Weiss managed to outlast Cinder Fall without an Aura WITHOUT getting her entire body broken, Winter

the boundary between material worlds is made of darkness. the boundary between souls is made of light, and there is no danger of falling.

where...what is this? of course Winter doesn’t know. she never would have, even if she had gotten the powers, because she would have used the Transfer machine.

i thought of you, and here we are. that was all it took. the last time Penny saw Winter, Winter was still loyal to Ironwood. she’s only known abstractly, secondhand from Weiss, that Winter was on their side again and trying to help save Mantle, for about an hour. and yet: i thought of you.

and in the face of this thought that is love, Winter averts her eyes. tries in vain to hide her face, because she knows she is unworthy. she doesn’t deserve this.

but here’s the thing: no one deserves this. Penny. are you...the one? even Penny herself wasn’t sure.

you were my friend. the second time it happens this episode. friends save friends from themselves. friends transform what would have been murder into sacrifice.

remember what Penny said to Cinder, shortly before Cinder killed her? you wouldn’t know anything about friends. she’s right. it wasn’t Cinder’s choice, but she’s right. and now Cinder has learned how to use that.

i’ll be part of you. it is, of course, something that’s been brought up repeatedly this whole season. but it’s also what Winter said to Penny after Fria died: she’s a part of you now.

and i do love this yoking together of arc words. Winter is of course the firstborn Schnee, but Winter is, more broadly, The Firstborn in this new generation. so here we have something similar to the chain that begins with Winter letting her sisters go, through Penny letting Emerald go, through Emerald helping Oscar escape, to Atlas’ however ephemeral victory over Salem. what Winter begins--haltingly and with resentment--becomes transformed into radiant grace in the hands of her younger siblings. and she gets to be the direct benefactor this time. the prodigal daughter returns to her family.

during Enemy of Trust we watched from the outside as Oscar fell and Penny rose, as one set of eyes closed as another opened. during The Final Word, we watch from the inside: one set of eyes close. another opens.

Winter’s leitmotif plays on the piano for the first time since the previous season as she comes back to the world. it makes sense. the piano version is for her sisters, and she just left one of them.

here is the apotheosis of Winter Schnee: she gets back up. she falters and sways but she gets back up, and then she, the person who once managed to convince herself that so long as she could make peace with someone else’s choice it meant she too was choosing, tells the man who has been choosing for her for years: you chose nothing. and she rises.

in the end James Ironwood was finished by his petard thrice over. Atlas had defected against him. his greatest creation had become the Maiden and unshackled herself from him. and there is of course, the cannon: a literal petard, in the other words, which he fires at Winter, and Winter reflects back upon him.

Jaune Arc used the heirloom that his family has held for generations to kill a defenseless girl. he took the blade and sunk it in deep, because Penny trusted him and he had to be sure.

and then it shattered in his hands.

there’s something here in the second fight between Maidens, about Cinder having a named weapon and forsaking it for what she can make on the fly, and Winter insistent on using a weapon with no name at all, but i still can’t put my finger on it.

Winter never got to see Weiss try to Summon her Nevermore.

the thing that gets me about how it turns out is: Winter was winning. she’d managed to get her hands on the Staff, and even with Cinder’s immediate counterattack she managed to get the Staff away from Cinder. but then Cinder saw Jaune and Weiss, and she remembered a few days ago, when Penny saved Winter instead of going after Cinder, when Winter attacked Cinder to save Penny.

so Cinder attacks Weiss and Jaune instead of racing for the Staff. and Winter--

this is Winter Schnee. she saves people despite herself. she runs toward them, despite herself. and it has always, always been what saves her.

not anymore.

last time it had been Winter who was in mortal danger, and Weiss who, with Ruby’s help, drove Cinder off. same script, wrong player. and too late.

Weiss falls and for a moment, the camera makes it seem like Winter is falling too.

she wants to. no one deserves this.

the thing you have to ask when characters leap for the exit and fall just short is: is it about faith, or friendship? in Jaune’s case it’s both. his faith broke with Crocea Mors. and the portal is one-way, so he had no friends to grab him from the other side.

but Nora was still trying. they clasped hands. she promised.

the first time Winter sees her family--really sees them, after years of separation--she averts her eyes. she hides her face from them, because how can she tell them that Weiss is gone? how can she tell Penny’s friends that Penny is a part of her now, when Penny is just a part, now?

there are people all around her looking to her. there are voices within her. she has never been more alone.

(Winter Schnee has never met Pyrrha Nikos, and Pyrrha Nikos never became Maiden. because Pyrrha Nikos never became Maiden. Cinder Fall did that, too.)

this is what Winter Schnee thinks, as she screams and charges, as she kills Grimm faster than they are drawn in by her despair: in the fairy tales, eldest siblings never win.

i failed you again, master. master, but not queen.

Cinder won this. the heroes tried and tried and tried and none of it mattered, and she won this. but here’s the thing: Cinder won because she was LUCKY, and because she made her own luck. that she was able to pin things on Neo and Team Hero depended on things going exactly as planned, and some things going better than planned. and the reason she’d even made it that far was because she cheated, with the last use of a divine relic. it doesn’t take away her from her victory, but what i do know is this: this is her finest moment. she will never win as completely ever again, and she will fall farther than she has ever feared. (and that will save her, in the end.)

and that’s checkmate. i said that i wanted Atlas to fall the same way that Amity rose, but of course they did it like this. of course it would horrific yet unspectacular, with its General slumped in defeat, unable to fire a single shot from his gun. with the city in the sky falling onto Mantle, in Mantle’s palette. from the Dust from which it arose into Dust again.

as below, so above.

#rwby #helen writes meta

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davidmann95 · 3 years

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So… that Superman and the Authority preview. Thoughts?

Grant Morrison: Superman's genuinely made the world a little better, right?

Grant Morrison, writing Superman and The Authority: lol as fuckin' if you chump

Grant Morrison, continuing to write Superman and The Authority: ...okay but what if he COULD still tho

* First note past the OOF of that caption: Ben Day dots! The typically most cliché signifier of 'hey this is like old comics' transformed by being made so near-invisibly small by Jordie Bellaire that they're texturing the page.

* Clearly a product of the original 5G plans, I'd assumed the new explanation for Superman meeting with Kennedy would be the post-Death Metal "everyone remembers everything, it all counts!" idea, but between Superman maybe operating in secret in 1963 depending on how you read that first line and the moon landing seemingly happening earlier this looks to be a full on alt-history. Between that and Superman on October's cover of Action rocking his conventional look alongside the Authority this does seem to be an alternate version of Superman after all rather than the mainline even if it'll tie directly in; I'm fine with that since it'll help this stand on its own as a perennial. Oh god though, is this the Linearverse? Was that Generations book one last mediocre Morrison tie-in setup?

* The both earnest and tragic connotations are clear but I'm simply happy for Superman's good nickname to see some use.

* Anonymous asked: So, I'm NOT an American, but seeing the preview for SatA, I kinda roll my eyes at JFK there. I understand in America there is this mythology about him being so radical and going bring better tomorrow until he was denied to you, which doesn't really match the reality, where he was a cold warrior with reportedly little interest in domestic policy who's sucessor was actually very similar and consistent with his politics (more civil rights, more troops Vietnam). What do you think?

Fair, but besides Morrison's comments in the interview and the ways the Cold War shaped their childhood (as a non-American) as evidence that we're not meant to take this at face value as 'Aw, everything would've been perfect if not for that one thing going wrong', that comment on the JSA is charged. The President waxing rhapsodic about "mak(ing) a difference where the law couldn't" feels just as pointed as "Those poor, poor rich people" in their and Burnham's Detective #26.

* "I want you to stand tall, to end war itself and take us to the stars." "I'll see what I can do, sir." MORRISON PLEASE IGNORE YOUR BEST INSTINCTS AND NEVER STOP WRITING CAPE COMICS

* That this so effortlessly and profoundly captures everything Jupiter's Legacy tried and failed to in three pages - the great patriotic caped champion seemingly on the edge of a new Camelot when we know better, the story from there going into how they deal with the fallout of their failures - would be so embarrassing if it wasn't hilarious to see Morrison outclass the old kid sidekick yet again. Speaking of some Millar-ness, kudos to Janin for pulling off a celebrity likeness that doesn't look like a horrifying other-dimensional freak next to the other characters, that's not something that can always be said for his peers.

* While Janin draws his regular Superman face here, the red-and-yellow S shield on the cape, the pronounced barrel chest, and even the hair a bit (and then seeing him on TV in black and white) make me wonder if Superman's supposed to be visually evoking George Reeves just a bit here. An American golden boy with a tumultuous private life who died on the cusp of the 60s of a gunshot wound to the head, with a quick and tidy official explanation but conspiracy theories haunting his memory forever after, the Kennedy comparisons are obvious; I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it and this is all deliberate, or if this is an inadvertent synchronicity of the sort Morrison would conceive of in magical terms.

* Janin killing it with the assassination page, real Department of Truth vibes and managing to make it sudden and horrific without the gloriously obscene detail Quitely got into with the similar scene in Pax Americana.

* The astronauts doing hurdles on the moon is actually a reference to Superman's Mission for President Kennedy! as he gets kids interested in JFK's physical fitness program in the most roundabout fashions available to him, 'roundabout' being his foremost guiding principle at the time:

* The New Frontier and DKR parallels/evocations are obvious, but to me the big point of comparison is Pax Americana with the Hero-King President marshalling the capes in name of a better tomorrow for his nation only to find death and social impotence, the dream exposed as naïve PR in the end.

* Not exactly new information, but seeing this laid out does reinforce to me how much this book covers the sweep of the development of the superheroic idea through the lens of Superman, from the vigilantes (both the JSA and Superman returning to short sleeves) to the triumphant American science royalty to the post-traumatic superfolks trying to make good on all those lost promises and, at the beginning of this, a generation that has essentially failed (not only Superman, but clearly in his half of the preview Manchester Black isn't exactly the force he once was, and apparently Midnighter and Apollo at the beginning of this are semi-retired and think they've wasted their lives after the original Authority failed to make a difference) and what comes now after that failure. That Morrison can tackle this directly with Superman is probably corporately allowed with Jon being there as a more 'ideal' iconic model, and for Morrison personally because they can do their own purified take on the archetype with Klaus, so they can get into the muck of things here in a way they couldn't when trying to do a platonic vision or a new-and-improved model.

#Superman and The Authority #Superman #Grant Morrison #Mikel Janin #Jordie Bellaire #Opinion

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matthewtkachuk · 4 years

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aviophobia - rafe cameron

a rough flight provokes your fear of flying, luckily your cute seat mate is willing to hold your hand and help you through it

warnings: mentions of anxiety, fluuuuff

pairing: rafe cameron x reader

word count: 1.6k

a/n: wrote this on the plane this afternoon, lowkey inspired by own anxiety today (sans the rafe cameron comfort) - planes aren’t supposed to be quiet!! i didn’t proofread so sorry in advance hehe

Flying wasn’t your favorite thing in the world. In all honesty, you might have a little airplane phobia. You could keep it together when everything went according to plan: when checking into your flight went smoothly, TSA was a breeze and you had an hour extra to spare as you sat at your gate.

Of course, this was not one of those times. There had been a mixup with your uber, causing you to lose half of your relax buffer time. then, there had been an issue checking in and you briefly thought you wouldn’t be allowed on the plane, but the nice customer service rep behind the desk was kind enough to explain they had accidentally let you choose a seat already occupied and simply moved your seat assignment. The real bummer was losing out on the window seat - one of the ways you were able to get over (well not quite over but through for sure) your fear was to face it, quite literally forcing yourself to look out the window as the plane took off and landed. For some reason watching the position of the airplane relative to the ground was grounding for you.

Even going through TSA had gone wrong, you’d forgotten to take your novelty bottle opener off your key ring and ended up getting pulled to the side and patted down. (It was a joke gift from your dad in the shape of a spent shotgun shell - something about a warning to any boys who might want to approach you? Who knows, you just liked it because you always had a bottle opener on you, getting you to a beer quickly when the occasion called for it).

You didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse when you arrived at your newly assigned seat to find a tall and handsome twenty-something man in the window seat. You gulped, briefly wondering if you could pretend like you had a different assigned seat but you knew the plane was full and didn’t want that embarrassment. He must have took this as you needing help, as he stood up, mumbled a respectful ‘ma’am’ and lifted your very heavy carryon like it wasn’t full of your makeup and toiletries, a weeks worth of clothes and three pairs of shoes.

“Thanks,” you replied quietly, cheeks warming with embarrassment. He just smiled in response before sitting back down.

“Sorry if I encroach in your space a little,” he preemptively apologized, knowing his six foot three frame would likely brush against yours at the very least if not press against you directly.

“Don’t worry about it!” you smiled before putting in your headphones and putting on your relaxing playlist. You were able to close your eyes and grip the outside armrest to get through the takeoff, and the beginning of the flight passed by as you focused on the smooth rhythm of what was playing through your headphones.

Based on the way the today was going you shouldn’t have been as surprised as you were when the plane hit a patch of rough turbulence. You softly gasped and gripped both your armrest and the arm of the poor, hot stranger beside you. Your hands stayed locked in place for approximately two minutes, as the plane rocked and waved, before he gently pried your fingers from his arm. You were about to apologize when another shake of the aircraft had you gasping, he grabbed your hand, letting your fingers connect. you rode out the turbulence, comforted by the strangers warm hand as you tried to steady your breathing.

Cheeks warm with embarrassment again, you let go of his hand and carefully clasped your hands together in your lap. You avoided looking at him for the rest of the flight, embarrassed and honestly a little turned on which embarrassed you more. Clearly you needed to get laid if a little hand holding was getting you all hot and bothered. Though if you thought about it, it was more about the gentle and sweet way he held your hand without hesitation more than the actual physical contact.

When you neared your destination, you had another moment of pure panic as the plane quieted around you. You’d never experienced that level of quiet while traveling in a metal death trap before and so you frantically turned to your handsome seat mate for reassurance. Relaxing the slightest bit at his soft smile before he placed his hand on your knee, palm facing up. You gladly clutched his hand with both of yours, fingers laced together. It helped calm your racing thoughts and heartbeat. You noticed he was exaggerating the way he breathed - in and out, in and out - and realized he wanted you to mimic him. Focusing on the way his chest rose and fell, you found yourself calming down as your breathing evened.

“We’re just taxi-ing, waiting for the okay to start our descent and land,” he told you softly, trying to reassure you further. Your mouth felt dry and you didn’t trust yourself to find the words so you simply nodded.

“If you hate flying so much why torture yourself?” he asked a minute later, unable to stop himself from asking, curious about the beautiful girl so full of anxiety beside him.

“Well, driving across the country to head home doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m not usually this bad,” you admitted shyly, moving to unlace your fingers, embarrassed at yourself for clinging to a stranger like a life line but your stomach dropped as you felt the plane begin its descent and gripped him more tightly.

“How do you usually get through a flight?” he asked curiously.

“Well it helps to look out the window... I don’t know why but it does. I had booked a window seat but there was a mix up and they double booked it so I ended up here.” you shrugged as you spoke, chewing nervously on your bottom lip.

Upon your words he leant back as far as he could and gestured for you to look out the window. Still holding his hand, you leant over his lap and watched the descent feeling a lot calmer than you had before. Your shoulder and arm were pressed against his chest and you felt relaxed with the heat of his body. Rocking with the movement of the plane, your teeth clenched as the plane hit the runway. His other hand lifted up to steady you against the momentum.

Finally landing, you relaxed and sat back in your seat, dramatically dropping your head against the headrest. You looked down at your linked hands and then back up into your saviors eyes, smiling a little awkwardly at him. “You know, i don’t even know your name,” you giggled, “or do you prefer ‘my hero’?”

He laughed, somehow deep and whiny at the same time, as he threw his head back. “I don’t know the name of the damsel in distress either,” his eyes twinkled as he spoke.

“Y/n,” you smiled.

“Rafe,” he answered and you decided it fit him.

“Well Rafe, I sincerely thank you, I think I would have had a heart attack if you hadn’t been there,” you told him truthfully.

“Anytime,” he answered with a small grin, the corner of his mouth upturned. The way he said the word it was more like a promise than a platitude and it sent shockwaves through your system.

“Y’know I think you should give me your number. Just in case I need help flying from California to North Carolina again,” you boldly stated, preening a little as he laughed and pulled out his phone.

“Well I can’t argue with that logic,” he laughed and you swapped phones, inputting your name with several princess emojis after it. A laugh escaped your lips when he handed your phone back with a contact titled ‘rafe aka airplane hero’. You briefly chatted a little longer as you waited for your turn to get off the plane that had given you such trouble, learning that he worked for his dad's company in the outer banks, only an hour from your parents’ house on the mainland. The two of you walked together to baggage claim, and you giggled while he waited with you for your bright pink suitcase to come around the carousel, lifting it by the handle with the only indication it weighed anything - the slight flex of his bicep.

Finally reaching the passenger pick up zone, it was time to separate. It felt strange to feel such a connection with someone you hadn’t known this morning, but leaving didn’t feel right. “Well this is it I guess,” you sighed, knowing your sister was likely waiting right outside.

He pulled you into his arms, “for now.”

“Goodbye, Rafe,” you smiled, pulling away from him and walking towards your sister’s familiar white suv.

“Wait!” he called out your name and you spun around confused to see him making his way to you before his hands were on your face and his lips were on your own. The kiss was sweet and brief and when you pulled apart there was a smile on your face. “Goodbye, y/n”

Crawling into your sisters vehicle, face hot and mouth spread wide in a smile she looked at you in shock, “what was that about?”

“Just a little airplane anxiety,” you giggled, hand on your lips, as your phone lit up with a text from your ‘airplane hero’.

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#rafe cameron x reader #rafe obx #rafe cameron x y/n #rafe cameron x you #rafe x reader #rafe x you #rafe x y/n #rafe cameron #rafe imagine #rafe fanfiction #rafe cameron fanfiction #rafe cameron imagine #rafe fluff #aviophobia #diverdcwn writes

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snorlaxlovesme · 3 years

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wishing for a shadow

Did anyone ask for a fix-it fic that actually addressed how fucked up it was to make a 15 year-old girl fight naked?

We really don’t talk about Hagakure Toru enough. I know that invisibility is a pretty well-used superpower by now, but Toru has been invisible ALL HER LIFE, ALL THE TIME. There’s so much good story potential there and Horikoshi is like, let’s have her do peace signs in the back of class 1-A pictures sometimes or whatever.

So here’s 8k words of Hagakure actually having a personality and searching for a way to have a hero costume. Cheers!

(Content warning for nudity, obviously, and implications of nonconsensual groping due to the invisible nudity. Did I mention that fighting and rescuing people naked as a teenage girl is really fucked up?)

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Toru hated her hero costume.

Or maybe it was fairer to say she hated her quirk. While everyone else had a special power that they could turn on and off at will, Toru had to deal with her quirk all. The. Time. And it was exhausting. Wearing special clothes on the train so she wouldn’t be sat on or shoved against a wall. Flicking on a designated lamp in her parent’s house so they’d know when she was home. Making just enough noise in class so that people remember she existed.

Being invisible had so many unnecessary drawbacks that early on in Toru’s life she decided there must have been a reason she was given this quirk. And maybe the reason was that she was meant to be a hero.

After all, it was the only real way to practically apply her quirk, wasn’t it? The choice was either to use her unique ability for good or fade into the background of her own life. So she chose to stand out, and what better way to do that than to apply to UA, the best hero school in all of Japan?

Newsflash: Hero school was hard. And even though no one could see them, coming back to the dorms every day covered in bruises and scrapes was not how Toru had planned to live out her teenage years.

What Toru really wanted was to be a normal girl. To go to the mall with her girl friends for make-overs and stay up way too late texting each other about which boy would ask them to the next school dance. She wanted to wear her hair in goofy styles and cry about zits and not worry about a building crushing her during her midterm exams. It was a simple dream, but Toru didn’t have a simple life. She’d thought by now she’d be over these silly fantasies, but when she saw her classmates’ modifications to their hero costumes the feeling hit her again before she could stuff it into that part inside of her where she kept her lost dreams.

Midoriya was testing out kicks at Ground Beta with his newly armored boots while Uraraka laughed a few feet in the air, marveling at her lack-of-queasiness from her new electromagnetic helmet. Toru stared forlornly at the new pair of gloves she’d received, with new colorful stitching. Her costume was….

Well, it wasn’t. The whole point of an invisibility quirk meant that she couldn’t wear a costume. It would kind of defeat the whole point then, wouldn’t it? To remain transparent, she couldn’t have any floating garments or gadgets attached to her body. Even the gloves themselves were technically a hindrance, but she needed some object to orient herself with her setting, otherwise her depth perception would suffer. It was a lot easier getting her bearings if she could tell whereabout her body was, and without her gloves she tended to move slower, not entirely sure where the rest of her body was while she moved.

Practically speaking, not having a costume for someone with a quirk like Toru’s made sense. Reasonably speaking—

“Oh! Hagakure-san, is that you?” Iida asked, embarrassed. She was lucky it was him who had run into her. His hero costume was made of bulky armor, so she doubted he felt it when he had brushed his arm against the side of her naked boob. She shrunk away.

“It’s not your fault, Iida-kun,” she said, hoping he could hear the smile in her voice and not the fakeness of it. “I’ll be more careful.”

It was hard, though. To be careful. The students of 1-A were gathered in a loose crowd in front of Aizawa-sensei, ready to hear what their mission was for today’s exercise. Toru was used to standing on the outskirts of groups to avoid being bumped into, but today she had gotten swept up in the middle. She held her gloved hands out at her sides, her default position to show everyone how much space she was taking up, but she still jumped when she felt Ojiro’s tail brush the small of her bare back. He flinched too, and sent an apologetic smile in her general direction, though nowhere near where her face actually was. She apologized again.

She hated her hero costume.

When class 1-A returned to the dorms, Toru made a beeline for her room, not that anyone noticed until her door slammed shut. She dug through her closet frantically until she found her warmest, fluffiest pink robe, and through it over her shivering body. She was so sick of this.

Aizawa-sensei was known as one of the toughest teachers of UA. He was also known for not playing favorites. But would it have killed him to warn her that they were doing underwater exercises today? While everyone else had at least some form of pants and a shirt to do their rescue dives in, Toru had to swim through the freezing-cold pool completely naked. It might have been an advantage if she didn’t have to spend most of her mental energy trying not to touch her rescue victim (Sato) with most of her body.

And coming out of the water? That was a treat. The water droplets that clung to her transparent body made her look like a sex-shop mannequin, perked nipples and all. She had no choice but to leave the training grounds immediately, nothing but wet footprints in the cement to prove she was even there to begin with. Toru waited until she had dried off before returning to class, making up a lie to Aizawa-sensei that she felt sick and hoping no one but Sato saw her dripping wet figure before she’d fled.

How come no one else had to deal with this? She’d tried to talk to Momo about it once, feeling like she of all people would understand Toru’s pain. After all, she had a quirk that required her to show a lot of skin as well. But ironically enough, Momo had responded that her quirk wasn’t so bad. And besides Mineta, all the other boys in their class were very respectful about not looking at her while she pulled back her hero costume to use her Creation quirk. Using it in public was hard, but certainly not impossible. Besides, Momo had pointed out, in the heat of hero-ing she barely had time to think about modesty. She was too focused on saving people.

Toru had left that conversation at that. Any further discussion would make her sound jaded, and that’s not the type of image she liked to project to the world. She didn’t have an actual image, so to others Toru’s attitude was all she had. So she kept quiet about how frustrating it was to have to constantly avoid being sexually harassed while saving people, all while hoping that others didn’t think she was sexually harassing them. Toru, the fifteen year old girl with a very unfortunate quirk, didn’t want to be made out to be a villain for something she simply could not help. But what was the right answer?

Toru searched the floor of her messy dorm room until she found a terry-cloth towel and then began to scrub her head with it, trying to dry off as quickly as possible and maybe just scrub the rest of this awful day off of her. The type of towel she was using would cause her hair to frizz (she watched enough beauty gurus online to know), but it made no difference to someone like Toru. The world didn’t know the incredible condition she normally kept her hair in.

Sometimes it felt like everything about her was a secret.

“Just hot soba again, Toru-chan?” Tsuyu asked her the following week at school as they grabbed their lunch trays. Even though her voice was even as she said it, Toru could tell there was concern in it. Even at lunchtime, Toru could always be found with either bread or a sweet on her tray. It had been quite a while since she’d eaten a red bean bun. She just wasn’t in the mood lately.

“Yeah, I’m just not very hungry today,” Toru told her friend, trying to sound chipper. She didn’t want to concern anyone, not in the least, but it was getting harder and harder to keep up her upbeat attitude when everything about her quirk just seemed to be bothering her lately.

Tsuyu nodded, though she didn’t look convinced. But thankfully she wasn’t the type to pry, so she led them to an empty table in the cafeteria. Toru sat across from Tsuyu and removed her face mask, a plain black one that she had bought online a few months back when she had hay fever. Lately she’d been feeling very self-conscious of people constantly talking to her chest, so she started wearing the mask to give people something on her face to focus on when they spoke to her.

She slurped her soba noodles in silence, not having much to say, when Midoriya and Todoroki passed by.

“Are these seats taken?” Todoroki asked. Toru glanced around to make sure they were talking about actual empty seats, not hers. But there were two vacant seats next to Tsuyu, who gestured to the boys that they could join them when she continued peeling an apple for herself.

“Have they bothered trying to see if Eri’s quirk would work on him?” Todoroki asked, continuing a conversation they must have started while getting their food.

Midoriya shrugged. “I haven’t asked lately. I think they’re still scared that Eri wouldn’t be able to control her quirk and would rewind him too far. She’s still so young.”

“When would be an appropriate age for her to finally use it on him, then?”

“Are you talking about Togata-senpai, ribbet?” Tsuyu asked.

Midoriya nodded, looking pained. “I don’t know, Todoroki-kun. He’s still coming to school, at least, but not full-time. Without his quirk he doesn’t have much use for the hero courses he was taking.”

Toru had vaguely heard about this from Tsuyu and Ochako. Apparently the third-year who had done a fight demonstration for class 1-A after the provisional exam was injured during the Shie Hassaikai raid. He’d been hit by one of the darts manufactured to take away people’s quirks while rescuing a child. Toru, in one of her darker moments, had selfishly wondered what would happen if she had gotten hit by a dart like that. Would all of her problems be solved? If her quirk was erased would she be visible? Could she finally live her life like a normal girl?

But then she had passed by the hospital wing shortly after, to get some bandages for Kaminari. Togata Mirio sat alone in a hospital bed with a bandage wrapped around his waist and the blankest expression she had ever seen on the normally-cheerful upperclassmen’s face. She was thankful for her quirk in the moment, so Togata didn’t have to see the shame written all over her.

The feeling still burned through her at the mention of his name, so Toru kept to herself as she ate her lunch, seamlessly blending with the background as she often did.

“Le Million isn’t gone just because Togata-senpai doesn’t have his quirk,” Tsuyu told the boys insightfully. “He’s still plenty heroic without his Permeation.”

“He could always just be a citizen for a few years until Eri gets older, I suppose,” Todoroki said idly. “Or he could be a police officer. Quirks aren’t required to be a part of the force.”

Midoriya stared off into the distance. “I guess. I just can’t imagine him in a police uniform instead of his hero costume. It’s too hard to think about.”

Toru slurped her noodles a bit too loudly at that, and all at once all eyes were on her. Well, her chopsticks.

“Hagakure-san?” Midoriya said.

Toru cleared her throat delicately before speaking. “Hero costume? I thought that Togata-senpai couldn’t wear clothes while using his quirk.”

“Oh!” Midoriya said cheerfully, understanding her surprise. “The only time you saw him fight was in his P.E. uniform, wasn’t it? No, Le Million’s hero costume is this really awesome full-body suit with a cape and the number one million written across the chest! I think he got the inspiration from—”

“But how does it stay on him?” Toru asked, cutting Midoriya off before he could start rambling.

If Midoriya was put off by her interruption, he was kind enough not to show it. “It’s woven out of some specially-made fabric,” Midoriya said. “The inspiration appears to be from—”

And for the second time that day, Toru cut Midoriya off. But this time it was to abruptly leave the table, leaving the rest of her soba and her friends behind.

Toru hoped all the work she had put in making friends with her classmates for the past few months would make up for her rudeness at lunchtime. But after hearing that there was a specially-woven fabric that could form to quirks, Toru could no longer sit idly by.

This could have been her solution! Not the one she had secretly, selfishly wished for, that her quirk would one day disappear and she would wake up a normal, visible civilian. But the more attainable goal, that she could find a way to make a costume that wasn’t so revealing. Something that gave her more coverage while still allowing her to maintain the one advantage that her quirk gave her in the field.

She had run immediately to the Principal Nezu’s office and requested Togata Mirio’s contact information, saying that it was urgent and related to education. The principal gave it to her with little hesitation, perhaps seeing an outcome to their meeting that she couldn’t fathom with her human brain. But Toru didn’t care, so long as she was able to talk to Togata about the nature of his costume.

Texting him had been a little nerve-wracking, especially since her senpai probably didn’t even know she was alive, but after explaining through text that she was a student from 1-A with some hero questions, Togata seemed perfectly happy to meet her in the courtyard on campus and chat with her.

Feeling better than she had in weeks, Toru made an effort in her appearance. Wearing a form-fitting black turtleneck, checkered skirt, and thigh-high stockings, she was feeling more like herself than she had in a very long time. Another girl would probably style her hair or apply make-up for a meeting with an upperclassmen boy, but Toru didn’t. She brushed her transparent hair and let it hang down straight, not that anyone else would know the difference. She did choose a more stylish mask today, looping a purple one with a bedazzled kitty face on it around her ears before heading away from the dorms to their meeting spot.

She sat on a bench in the courtyard, a few minutes early, and anxiously tapped on her thighs as she waited. Now that she was here, she was starting to get nervous. As excited as she was to talk about hero costumes, it was now occurring to her that her blank-faced senpai might not actually want to talk about hero work now that he had been forcefully relegated to civilian status. He’d gone through a traumatizing ordeal and had his whole life ripped away from him only a few months ago. Was she being incredibly selfish again?

“Hagakure-san?” Toru heard, and leapt to her feet awkwardly as Togata entered the courtyard.

“S-senpai! I’m glad you could come on such short notice!” she squeaked. She shouldn’t have asked him to come, what was she thinking—

“I like your mask,” he said with a sunny smile, coming to sit beside her on the stone bench. He didn’t look upset in the slightest. “I really love cats.”

“Really?” Toru asked stupidly.

“Yeah!” he said enthusiastically. “The way their tails swish back and forth, their rough tongues, their little toe beans? Cats are the best. If I could spend a day in a pile of cats, that would be the best day ever.”

Toru….did not know how to respond to that. The last time she saw him he had looked so depressed. She didn’t think that he would come here to talk to her and look so happy. Togata was sitting beside her, all six-foot-something of him, with his broad shoulders and his perfect hair and he was talking to her about cats. What did she call him here for again?

Thankfully, Togata could not see the way she was gaping at him and just took her silence as a means to continue. He went on a Midoriya-like ramble for the next few minutes or so about his favorite breed (Singapura) before Toru finally found the will to speak.

“Togata-senpai?” she said gently, trying to make up for her earlier rudeness with her friends by at least interrupting this boy kindly. He stopped talking to look at her curiously. “I actually didn’t come here to talk about cats. I was hoping to talk to you about hero work…if that’s okay,” she tacked on lamely, hoping not to offend him.

He looked unbothered, smiling at her kindly. “Sure! I have a lot of experience out in the field, so I’m sure I could offer you some advice if you need it. Is something bothering you?”

“Well,” Toru said, looking down at her lap. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to bare her soul so openly to someone who was basically a stranger to her, so he kept her explanation brief. “Due to my quirk,” she splayed her arms out to gesture to her invisible form, “I don’t have a lot of options, costume-wise. Midoriya told me that your Le Million costume was constructed of a special fabric so that you could wear it while using your Permeation quirk, and I was just wondering if the same material might work for my quirk as well?”

Togata looked on thoughtfully. “Well, you see. My costume was made from my own hair.”

Toru blinked.

“Your hair?”

He nodded. “With Permeation, I phase through every solid object around me when I use my quirk. You saw me fight your class, I could barely keep my P.E. uniform on,” he said with a bashful chuckle. “But if my costume is made from me, I can use my quirk on it so both me and my clothes permeate. You see?”

“Oh,” Toru murmured.

She really didn’t realize how much hope she had in this plan until it was dashed right in front of her eyes. There wasn’t some special all-in-one fabric swatch she could use to make her own full-body suit with a cape. She was Hagakare Toru, and life did not treat her that kindly. She would spend the rest of her hero days either shivering from the cold or being unintentionally (or even worse, intentionally ) groped by every person she attempted to save.

Her vision swam from disappointment, and when the tears started beading in the corners of her eyes, she did nothing to stop them.

“Hagakure-san! What’s wrong?” her senpai asked, flapping his hands wildly in concern when he saw the water drip down the invisible contours of her cheeks.

“I just thought—I just hoped I could have a costume like yours, Senpai,” she sniffed miserably. “I can’t stand doing hero work with no clothes on. I don’t want to want to be a hero if I have to be naked for it.”

Togata seemed to finally understand what she was here for, and the sympathy in his eyes showed it. While the pity was appreciated, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around anyone right now. She stood to leave, but before she could turn away from him Togata touched her very gently at the elbow. She stopped and looked down at his hand, and he immediately took it away.

“Wait, don’t go yet. I understand completely what you mean. I spent so much of my first year at UA forced to laugh it off whenever my clothes would fall off while training with my classmates. I know how it must feel for you, to an extent.”

Toru thought of her classmates, who brushed off her concerns dismissively. “You do?”

That constant smile returned to his face, though there was a sad twist to it. “Embarrassing. Vulnerable. Incredibly lonely.”

She blinked a few more tears away and nodded.

Togata continued. “It’s hard when you have a quirk with such a unique drawback. No one wants to think too much about how hard it might be for you. Especially since you’re so cheery; you can’t possibly be bothered by it. Sound familiar?”

To a tee.

“It sucks having to be the positive one all the time,” she said, brushing her cheeks with the palm of her hand. “It means no one likes you when you act truly unhappy.”

Togata swallowed and nodded. She wondered what it must be like for him now, to have lost his quirk and still keep that sunny smile on his face. She wondered how genuine he was when he first showed up here, or if he was putting on an act just like she did every day.

She thought to ask him. “Togata-senpai—?”

But Togata was already pressing on. “But I do think there’s something we can do for you. While the material for my suit won’t be usable for you, there’s no reason why the same method of costume production won’t work for you, Hagakure-san.”

“My hair?”

Togata shrugged. “If it worked for me, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for you. It’s worth a shot, anyway. How long is your hair?”

Without asking, his hand reached out. Toru never got used to this. It was always worse because of how horrible people were at guessing body position. You’d think that after looking at so many humans on a day-to-day basis that people would be able to reasonably guess where certain body parts were, but Toru was often unpleasantly surprised by where people grabbed her first.

She closed her eyes and waited for it to be over, but his hand never fell. She cracked open one eye and saw Togata’s hand, suspended a few inches above the crown of her head. Her eyes then flicked to his face, where he waited patiently for her.

The saltwater didn’t seem to have fully left her eyes as she reached up her hand and took hold of his own, before guiding it gently down the length of her hair. His fingertips grazed the very ends of the strands for a moment before letting it fall back to her shoulders. He smiled again.

“That should be plenty to start.”

“Shouldn’t we be going to the Costumes Department?” Toru asked as she followed Togata’s lead, walking towards a wing of UA that she’d never needed to enter before today.

“Nah, they’d take too long to make it. They’re always backed up. But the Support Class students are always itching for new projects,” Togata said like the wise senpai he was. “No one is more Plus Ultra than UA students themselves, after all,” he said with a wink.

Toru took this logic in stride as she stood before the Support Class Workshop, but admittedly she was a little nervous. They were still students, after all.

“What if they mess up?” she asked. She’d be foolish to not voice her fears now, before it was too late.

Togata seemed unfazed. “Then we try again. Hair isn’t a finite resource after all. It grows back. And if you can find someone with a helpful quirk, your costume material could grow back faster than you think!”

Toru supposed she couldn’t argue with that, so she steeled herself for whatever was to come and opened the door.

A drone zipped past her head and out the door, so quick Toru didn’t even have time to duck.

“Don’t leave the door open!” a student covered in grime yelled from on top of an incredibly tall ladder. “My babies will escape!”

“Babies?” Toru asked curiously. Togata closed the metal door behind them and caught another drone flying their way before it could smack into the wall. The student who had yelled at them before was already focusing her attention elsewhere, picking up an electric tool that Toru couldn’t identify and hopping inside of the cabin of a giant mech.

“That’s Hatsume Mei,” Togata told her. “She’s a first-year, but she’s already at the top of the Support Class. If anyone can help you, it’s her.”

“Is that praise I hear?” Hatsume Mei called out, poking her head out of the robot and grinning wildly. “Le Millioni! It’s been ages. What can I do for you?

“We’re actually here for Hagakure-san today.” Togata explained the situation to her while she worked, undeterred when Hatsume climbed back in her machine and continued working on her invention. He told her of Toru’s unique problem as impersonally as possible, only telling her the necessary details, which Toru was grateful for. Her fingers fiddled with the hem of her skirt as she waited until Togata ended his explanation, wondering if Hatsume could fashion a costume for her out of her own hair.

“So you said it was mid-back, right?” Hatsume Mei yelled over the sound of a drill. She was back inside the robot and sparks were shooting out of it at rapid intervals. Toru and Togata ducked their heads in tandem as some shot their way.

“Closer to my lower back, actually!” Toru shouted back.

Toru had always been incredibly proud of her hair. It was a personal thing, obviously, since no one could see it, but that didn’t stop Toru from meticulously maintaining it from a young age. Even if it wasn’t visible, Toru could still feel it, so she’d always gone out of her way to treat her hair properly so she could at least revel in the sleek texture of it. She’d followed beauty influencers online for years to discover the perfect balance of shampoos, conditioners, leave-ins, and other miracle products to keep her hair in perfect condition. Hair length like hers could only be achieved through proper care of healthy hair.

The drilling noise cut off suddenly and Hatsume pulled herself out of the robot and climbed down the ladder. She flipped up her grease-smudged goggles to eye Toru curiously. Toru, used to this reaction, let herself be scrutinized.

“I can work with that,” she said finally. “Though there is the caveat of it being invisible. I need to be able to see my materials in order to make a beautiful baby out of them.”

There was always something, wasn’t there? Every time Toru thought she was taking a step in the right direction, the rug was pulled right out from under her—

“That’s an easy fix, though,” Togata said. “Temporary hair dye will help you cut it off of her and work it into usable fabric. Then you can wash the dye out when you’re all done.”

And just like that, there was hope again. Toru looked at Togata in amazement.

Hatsume smiled grandly at Togata. “Look at that! Beauty and brains. What don’t you have, Le Million?”

A quirk , Toru thought glumly. But Togata didn’t miss a beat. “Time to waste, Hatsume. Toru needs this costume done as soon as possible, okay?”

“Don’t they all,” Hatsume said flippantly, tossing her tool on a desk behind her. “Alright, cutie,” she said, addressing Toru this time. “If you want support gear from me ASAP then I’m going to need you to come back to me as quick as you can with dyed hair, got it? Then I’ll get to work on turning it into something usable for you.”

“Do you really think you can do it?” Toru asked. All of this hoping was exhausting her.

“Ye of little faith. I perform miracles in this workshop every day!” she shouted, extending her arms out widely to gesture to the room of junked parts. “Now, begone until you’ve returned with dyed hair. I have schematics to work up.”

And just like that, they were kicked out of Hatsume Mei’s workshop of miracles, something Toru believed in for the first time in a long while.

Two days later, Toru walked out of the Workshop of Miracles feeling lighter than she had in all the time she’d been a student at UA. Most of that was due to the 13 inches of hair cut from her head, but she couldn’t deny that optimism had something to do with it too.

“I like the haircut,” Togata told her as he met up with her outside of the workshop. He was smiling that same sunny smile, but Toru didn’t have it in her to question it after feeling so high.

She shook her head from side to side, reveling in the feeling of the tips of her hair hitting her face. The other night she had approached the girls of 1-A with a proposition: make-over night. Thrilled beyond all belief, they were incredibly eager to follow her to the drugstore for a night of fun, picking out nail polish and facial masks and of course, hair dye. After mixing it with care, Ochako had taken a specially purchased paintbrush to apply the dye evenly and consistently to her hair, making sure every strand was fully coated. The morning after, she had sent an email to Aizawa-sensei saying she wouldn’t be able to participate in Stealth training for a week and then took the day to bask in the feeling of being truly seen.

“It’s a shame I didn’t get to see it while it was still long,” he said as he walked beside her, matching his pace with hers as they made their way to the cafeteria. Despite the fact that she had a freshly-cut, lilac-colored bob swishing on her head, he still made the effort to focus his gaze on the space between her hairline and her mask, a white one with rainbow-colored cat whiskers. Toru smiled widely.

“It’s alright, Senpai. You didn’t miss anything,” she said genuinely.

What he wouldn’t want to miss was still yet to come.

This was, perhaps, the one time Toru truly allowed herself to be manhandled. Even the word “allow” felt a little strong, for Hatsume Mei had come to her with an eagerness that couldn’t be denied, but with Toru being just as ecstatic as the engineer was, she didn’t push back too much when Hatsume insisted that she blindfold Toru for the reveal of her new costume. So after tying a UA uniform-standard tie around her eyes, Hatsume set to work dressing Toru, making easy work of her and not once misplacing where certain body parts might be.

“Are you guys almost done in there?” Togata asked from outside of the crudely-made fitting room. It wasn’t more than some strategically placed Support Pieces and a curtain draped between the stacks, but it was more privacy than Toru usually got when she undressed, so she was grateful.

“Al-moooooost,” Hatsume sang, in an extraordinary mood, which only made Toru’s spirits climb higher. After the rustling of fabric and a few tugs later, Toru felt herself being spun in a circle and led to the outside of the fitting room. Togata remained quiet as Hatsume untied the tie and pulled it from Toru’s eyes in a grand flourish.

Before Toru was a large full-length mirror, with Togata off to the side, watching with quiet awe. She almost couldn’t understand his expression at first, until she turned her body slightly and saw her hair catch the light, a purple shimmer still tinting parts of it even after she’d washed it several times.

But that’s all she saw.

Toru walked forward and touched her hand to the mirror before pulling it away. The glass felt cool and smooth beneath her palm, but she had not seen her approach the entire time she’d walked towards it. Only Togata and Hatsume’s giant smiles as they stood behind her.

Togata’s expression started to dip when he saw the tears rolling down Toru’s cheeks, a similar sight to what he had seen the day he first met her, except now they were suspended alone in midair.

“Oh, no. Hagakure-san, if you don’t like it—”

A little laugh bubbled out of her before she could stop herself, then another, until Toru found herself crying and laughing in equal parts.

Togata looked confused until Hatsume, who had never stopped grinning, handed over her goggles to him.

“Click the right button twice for thermal imaging, Beauty,” she whispered to him.

And then Togata was able to see Toru as she truly stood, a smile practically splitting her face in two as her hands roved up and down her body. Just her 13 inches of hair had made enough material for a shirt the length of a crop top, with spaghetti straps crossed behind her back. Her bikini-cut bottoms covered her front and backside completely, and there was even a tiny bit of material left over to make a tie for Toru’s hair, so the longer strands of her bob could be pulled back into a small ponytail at the back of her head. She was invisible, but she was covered , for the first time in her life, and Toru couldn’t stop crying as she clung to the feeling of security around all her most intimate parts.

“Now once your hair grows back, I’ll be able to add more to it, of course. This is just the prototype stage. If you take your vitamins or, if you’re like our senpai over here, you find someone with a hair-growth quirk, we’ll be able to add all sorts of pieces to it, such as—”

Hatsume couldn’t get any more words out, crushed as she was in Toru’s vice grip embrace.

“Thank you,” she cried into the engineer’s neck. “Thank you so much.”

Hatsume hummed and patted her back. “All in a day’s work. Glad I could help.” She rubbed Toru’s bare shoulder for a moment before jumping back. “Oh! Wait, I didn’t show you the best part.”

She extracted herself from Toru to head back to the makeshift dressing room, where she brought out the briefcase that all UA students carried their costumes in. Toru’s had previously only contained her white striped gloves. But when Hatsume opened it up, she saw much more.

It almost looked like a miniaturized closet, a rod going across the top of it and a tech-y looking hanger dangling from the middle. On the bottom of the velvet-lined case were a bunch of black discs the size of silver dollars, each with a blinking red light.

“This—” Hatsume said as she pointed to the hanger “—is where you put your costume after you’re done wearing it. The hanger is weight sensitive, so when your costume is on it, it will light up green so you know that it’s there even if you can’t see it. Should it not be in your case and you need to try and locate it—” Hatsume picked up one of the small discs “—use one of these sensors to track it. Your costume gives off a signal that can be registered on one of these from up to 500 meters away. There’s a tiny twist of wires in both pieces that act as a homing beacon. I made them as small as possible so they’re barely visible to the human eye unless you’re dancing in front of a stark white background. Otherwise you should be good.”

Toru twisted and turned about, patting down her sides, unable to even feel the wires Hatsume was talking about. The engineer was good.

“Why are there so many sensors?” she asked.

“Ah, yes. These also double as tools to be given to your team when you go out on assignment for hero work. Now your teammates can locate you even if you can’t respond to them aloud. Helps with rescue ops and things like that.”

Toru didn’t know what to say.

“You put a tracking device in my suit so my friends can find me?”

“Yes, essentially.”

Toru swallowed, the emotion in her throat coming close to clawing out of her. How did Hatsume know? How could she have known that Toru was terrified of getting lost or injured during her hero work? Of no one knowing where to look? She’d never told anyone that. She was Hagakure Toru, the upbeat attitude of 1-A, the comic relief when everyone else was feeling overwhelmed. How did she know Toru was petrified that a stealth operation would turn into a mission where she’d be lost forever?

“I can’t take the credit for that idea,” Hatsume continued good-naturedly. “Brains here came up with that one.”

Toru turned to her senpai, who had been standing back the entire time and staying out of the girls’ way as they discussed the details of the costume. He was still wearing Hatsume’s ridiculous-looking goggles, which meant he could still see Toru, though it seemed like he didn’t need the goggles at all for that to be possible. Maybe he’d been the one person truly seeing her this whole time.

She stepped toward him, not at all feeling self-conscious for perhaps the first time in her life and took his hands in hers.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Togata-senpai,” she said, her voice packed with sincerity.

She’d seen so many smiles from him in these past two weeks, but the crooked one that climbed up his face now felt the most genuine out of all of them.

“I’m always here to help,” he told her.

No, this was the most genuine smile she’d seen him wear in weeks.

“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”

She laughed good-naturedly as the former-hero Le Million lay on the floor of a cat café, covered in kittens. He’d been shrieking with joy for the past half hour while she sipped her coffee and watched him. This was the least she could do for her upperclassmen after all he’d done for her lately. A small orange kitten crawled over his chest and flicked its tail at Togata’s nose, and he looked like he just won the lottery.

“This is the best day,” he said happily, his hands patting at the floor while an older striped cat batted at his fingers. “I feel like now I owe you something, Hagakure-san. You didn’t have to do this.”

“I absolutely did,” she said, setting down her cup. A cat sitting on the chair across from her scurried away at the noise, not being able to comprehend how the cup had seemingly moved on its own. “And frankly I owe you about a thousand more cat cafés after all you’ve done for me.”

Togata sat up, holding the striped cat up to his face to give her forehead a kiss before setting her down to run away. He looked at Toru, eyes still full of light. “Now that’s just silly.”

Maybe so, but Toru felt he deserved it nonetheless. She wouldn’t be feeling as happy, as safe, as she felt now without his help. And the trackers…she really couldn’t thank him enough. He’d done so much for her despite barely knowing her.

She wished she had been able to do the same when she saw him in that hospital bed all those months ago. When he was feeling lost, who had helped out Le Million? Back then, Toru had seen the pain on his face and had only thought of herself. Toru felt the venomous shame coursing through her veins again. Underneath all the smiles and child-like exuberance was a boy who was suffering without his quirk. The fact that she’d envied someone who’d been hurt so deeply still made her stomach twist. The cat café could provide him temporary happiness, but she could see that saving people was the thing that caused him real joy.

“Togata-senpai?”

Togata, who’d been dangling a feathered toy in front of an uninterested black cat’s face, looked up.

She was going to ruin his good mood, but she felt like she had to say it.

“I’m sorry you lost your quirk.”

For once, Togata didn’t plaster an automatic smile to his face. “Why do you say that?”

Toru fiddled with the hem of her uniform skirt awkwardly, unable to look him in the eye. “You seem like a really kind person. I know that you would have made an amazing hero.” She cleared her throat awkwardly. “The fact that you lost your quirk is really unfair.”

Togata remained quiet. Toru did as well, not knowing if she should continue or change the subject to lighten the mood. Hagakure Toru, known for her cheery attitude, was not known for her grace when it came to serious topics. She probably shouldn’t have brought it up. It was out of her own guilt that she felt the need to mention it, and now she was forcing Togata to think about it—

Togata stood up, leaving the bell toy in front of the cat, and sat at the table with her. His voice was uncharacteristically somber when he spoke.

“I won’t lie to you. When I lost my quirk, I thought it was unfair too. I’ve worked hard my entire life to be able to turn my quirk into something useful, and having all that hard work taken from me so suddenly felt like a slap in the face. Like a part of me was taken, you know?”

Toru nodded sympathetically.

“But you know what?” Togata said. “After a while I began to realize that no one can control what is or isn’t fair in their lives. We can only control how we react to it.”

There was truth in the simplicity of his statement. Toru felt it in her bones every time she’d been dismissed, ignored by people who often forgot about her if she didn’t work so hard to take up space. Life was unfair, and the bitterness she felt in her heart about her own quirk probably wouldn’t go away for a long time. But stewing in hate wasn’t going to help her move forward either.

Togata continued, “I lost my quirk, maybe permanently, but that doesn’t change my purpose. Le Million’s goal is to save a million people. I don’t need to be a hero to do that. Every day that I help someone in need is another person saved, and I use that reminder to stay focused on the future.”

Toru thought about that. “Does that mean I’m another person you saved?”

Togata hummed pensively. “Maybe. But I think that asking for help means that you already did half the work for me. And now that you can do hero work more comfortably, you can save lots of people too!”

The smile forming on his face was infectious. She felt the corners of her lips turning up, hope lighting a fire in her heart that hadn’t been there a month ago.

Toru put her hands on her hips, but kept a teasing edge to her voice.. “Don’t think that you can use my rescues towards your count, Le Million!” Toru retorted playfully. “If you want to save a million people you need to do it fair and square!”

Togata laughed at her joke—a full, exuberant sound that Toru found she quite liked. The conversation tapered off from there as her senpai located a lone Singapura cat basking in the sunlight a few tables down, but Toru was fine with that. Something told her that this was the beginning of a new chapter for both of them.

The future was looking brighter for her already, and with a new costume and a new friend, she was excited to see the kind of hero she’d turn out to be.

#hagakure toru #hagakure tooru #bnha #my hero adademia #togata mirio #hatsume mei #my writing #bnha fic

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ins0mnia-an0nym0us-au · 4 years

Text

let’s talk about TUA fandom

y’all are hypocritical - let’s just get it out there.

before you start typing out some angry comments or coming in my ask-box lemme explain my reasoning here.

LUTHER HARGREEVES

Luther is one of the most hated characters in this fandom for some unknown reason to me. He is just another victim in all of this and as much as all of you want to blame everything on his actions, he simply acted in what he thought were the best interests of everyone. Luther showed his trauma in the same way the rest did.

In my opinion, Luther is one of the most underrated characters in The Umbrella Academy because all of you are too busy with your thirsting after Diego or uWu-ing over Klaus to notice him.

So here is Luther’s trauma broken down for all of you.

Luther was doomed from the moment he was chosen to be Number One, it’s that simple. From the very moment Reginald chose him, he had no chance, because he had the expectation of being the best put on his shoulders by a man who was never going to see any of them as anything less than worthless.

But Luther was determined to live up to his name, to be what his father wanted him to be – to be Number One.

Because for Luther he was sure everything that Reginald was doing was out of love. But I think Luther deep down knew that their father didn’t love them, but he needed to believe it was out of love, he couldn’t stand the thought of it being anything but love, because if it wasn’t love then it wasn’t worth it. He needed it to be worth it.

We got a glimpse of that in season one when he found all the packages he sent to Reginald. He never had any friends, he never left the house, he gave up his entire life for his father and the mission he believed in. Because he needed to believe it was worth it and when he found out it wasn’t – well, he had thrown his entire life away for what? It wasn’t because their father loved them or believed in them. So what was it?

Just to prove to all of you that Luther is more like his siblings than you all want to admit, here are some comparisons -

LUTHER: needed the moon to have a reason behind it, so much so that his obsession put others in danger. He also couldn’t face it when it turned out his mission was for nothing - so he regressed to his old behavior of thinking his father was right.

DIEGO: needed to be the hero, even though I’m almost positive Diego isn’t a complete idiot and knows that dramatically changing history would be bad - aka saving JFK could make the timeline explode, he needed to save him. So much so he was willing to put all of his siblings in jeopardy.

LUTHER: was told from the beginning he was the leader and that being Number One meant that he had to be the best. Because of this he had an inflated sense of importance. It just meant he had a higher distance to fall when he finally realized that it all meant nothing. He also doesn’t take their opinions or plans seriously because he’s Number One and his plans are superior.

FIVE: is a cocky little shit, who is insistent he is the smartest person around and he might be. But he views everyone around him as lesser, that includes his siblings. He has spent his entire time in the apocalypse trying to get back to save his siblings but still treats them like garbage. He also never lets his siblings in on anything that’s happening, he never sits them down and explains anything, and when they try to contribute with a plan or a theory he looks at them like they are stupid.

LUTHER: was sent to the moon, alone, with no one to talk to. Before that he had no friends his age, his only companions were Grace, his father, and Pogo. He’s been alone for a long time.

VANYA: has been alone for a lot longer than Luther - but trauma is not a competition and they both have dealt with it differently. I just wanted to point out these two similarities between the two characters.

LUTHER: is desperate for love and affection from his father. Everything he has done has been to get Reginalds approval and love but none of it has ever worked. He got small glimpses of things, like his dad’s favorite spot under a tree, so maybe he got a bit closer than the others but it was not real love.

ALLISON: is desperate for love and affection in general - hence her stardom. She needs attention, she feeds on it. It isn’t until she has Claire that I think she truly understands that everything until then has been fake. The unconditional love of a child made her realize that all of that fake love and affection is no match for real love.

LUTHER: has probably felt like a monster since before his transformation - having super-strength means having to be very careful with your own body. But after the transformation must’ve been so much worse.

BEN: literally has a monster inside of him and has always felt like a monster. The difference is he has openly spoken about feeling like a monster.

LUTHER: has always been in control of himself. He is the exact opposite of Klaus in how he uses control to deal with trauma. Luther needs control in order to deal with trauma.

KLAUS: has no control and he does not want it. To deal with trauma Klaus loses control by using drugs and alcohol but he also uses it to control his powers.

So now that I’ve gotten through the siblings a bit, let’s talk about another topic that has a bit of hypocrisy behind it -

ALLISON X LUTHER

For some reason this ship is very despised in the fandom, I don’t know if it’s because of the fact that one part of it is Luther but a lot of the reasons I see are just - ‘ew, they’re siblings’.

Yet, most of the ships in TUA fandom are of the siblings being paired together.

Five x Vanya [fics on ao3 - 372]

Diego x Klaus [fics on ao3 - 687]

Ben x Klaus [fics on ao3 - 311]

The only other ships that top these are -

Dave x Klaus [fics on ao3 - 1409]

Diego x Patch [fics on ao3 - 434]

And let’s be really honest for a second here - them being in any romantic relationship with each other, is not weird. None of them are biologically related to one another. They were just raised in the same household as one another and told to treat each other as siblings. If they had never been adopted by Reginald Hargreeves and met randomly on the side of the road, this discussion would be moot.

I find the Five x Vanya ship much more disturbing if I’m being honest, simply because most of the fics ship a fully grown Vanya, in the body of a 31-ish year old, with Five - who while mentally is like in his 60s or whatever, is back in his 13 year old body. If Vanya did ever get with Five before his body turned 18, it would be statutory rape.

Let’s also just for a second list some other fandom pairings that are pretty popular that people ship that have the same ‘we grew up as siblings but we aren’t biologically related’ trope.

Thor x Loki [fics on ao3 - 10894]

Eren x Mikasa [fics on ao3 - 1221]

John Marston x Arthur Morgan [fics on ao3 - 651]

Max x Alec [fics on ao3 - 357]

Iris x Barry [fics on ao3 - 3689]

It’s incredibly strange to me how unpopular Allison x Luther is - especially since it’s actually canon in the comics. Granted, some things from the comics of course should change or be adapted, but the chemistry between Tom Hopper and Emmy Raver-Lampman is just spectacular, especially during the dance scene in The Day That Wasn't.

I absolutely loved that scene (still mad it’s nowhere on youtube). I felt like we got to see Luther both as how Allison sees him and for a moment he was out of his head with Allison, relaxed and just himself.

If you just don’t ship it, just say you don’t ship it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Alright. I think my duty as a member of the Luther-Protection squad is finished. If you can’t see your hypocrisy after this post, I really don’t know what to tell you. If you would like to have a calm discussion about why you think I’m wrong or right, I’m willing to talk about it. However, anyone who comes at me just spewing vitriol or that I’m so stupid will not be taken seriously, if you can’t have a calm discussion about things then I won’t take you seriously.

I do want to say though - I understand having favorite characters, I’m a sucker for characters that are only held back from destroying the world by a hug (Vanya). But I’m also someone who loves to look at the entire picture and appreciate the depth of each character in a series, even the ones I hate. In fact - some of my favorite characters were ones I hated and the actors/actresses soon became my favorite because it takes a lot of talent to make people hate you.

So for a moment, really think if you hate Luther Hargreeves or if you dislike his actions and if it’s his actions, who you really should hate is Reginald Hargreeves because all Luther has ever done has been a reaction to trauma - exactly like the rest of his siblings.

#the umbrella academy fandom #the umbrella academy #the umbrella academy season 2 #tua2 #tua #spoilers #i'm calling y'all out #luther hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #ben hargreeves #diego hargreeves #allison hargreeves #five hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #trauma #reginald hargreeves #luther x allison #dumbasses being dumbasses #they are all stupid

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stellaluna33 · 3 years

Text

The Phone Call

A preview of what’s coming next in my Gilmore fic The Long And Winding Road, as a phone conversation between Jess and Luke. (You now know more than Rory will in the next chapter... No one knows this except Jess and Luke... and you.)

"Hello?"

"Hey, Luke."

"Jess. How's it going?"

"Oh, you know. Just fine. You still in Nantucket?"

"Yeah. Rory and Richie came with, as you probably know. But we also have a, let's say, 'surprise' visitor up here today."

"Reeeeally. Who's that?"

"Oh, none other than the great Logan Huntzberger himself, who finally deigned to see his son because he could pass it off as a polite visit to a family friend while he was 'in the area.'"

"Jeez. He still hasn't told anyone, has he?"

"Apparently not. Claims he's 'waiting for the right moment,' or some kinda bullsh**."

"Bastard."

"You're tellin' me. But why'd you call? You don't usually call this time of day."

"Yeah. Well, I, uh… I got some news today."

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

"So, I don't know if you remember me talking about that writer's residency program in Argentina last year?"

"Oh yeah, weren't you thinking about applying for that?"

"Yeah. I did apply for it, actually. There was a pretty long waiting list, though."

"Oh, I see. So, d'you hear something about that?"

"Yeah. Today, actually. I, uh… I got in."

"Jess, that is fantastic news! Good for you. That's a really great opportunity for you."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is. I, uh… just… I'm not sure if I wanna take it."

"What?!! Jess, you can't be serious! You've been wanting to do something like this for God knows how long! And now you've got this opportunity and you're just going to let it pass you by?"

"I don't know, it's just… I don't know if it's a good time for me to be leaving the country right now."

"What, you got something goin' on at work?"

"No... No, it's not that, it's… I don't know."

"Well? What is it? What's stopping you?"

"I just… part of me thinks that I should be here, right now. In case… you know, in case a... friend might need me."

"In case a friend might- Oh jeez. Jess. Tell me you're not talking about Rory."

Jess took a deep breath and then exhaled heavily through his nose.

"Are you serious?! Jess! You told me you were over that! Long over, if I remember it correctly."

"Yeah, well, I was over it! At least, I thought I was…"

"Oh, Jess."

"I know! I know. I'm pathetic. I swore I would never end up like you, and yet here I am."

"Hey! Things didn't turn out so bad for me in the end, you know."

"I know. You're right. I'm worse. I already had my chance with Rory, and I screwed it up so badly that she wishes our entire relationship had never happened."

"Jess, you were just a kid. I'm sure that's not true."

"Oh no? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that's exactly the way she remembers it."

"Ah jeez. She put that in that book she's writing?"

"Yup."

"And you've been reading over it, right?"

"Yup."

"Well, sh**. I'm sorry, Jess."

"Yeah, well, it is what it is, and it's my own damned fault, so I don't really have the right to be put out about it."

"Well, ok, but… that being the case, don't you think it's time to let this go?"

"Past time. But that's the worst part… I've tried. G-d, I've tried. And I thought I was mostly ok with it, you know? There's been occasional relapses of… regret or… moments when I've wished things could've turned out differently, but… I haven't been hoping for anything. I've been trying to move on. I've had relationships."

"You only went on, like, two dates with that last girl, what was her name?"

"Sylvia?"

"Yes, Sylvia! But two dates, Jess! You give up that quickly and you call that trying?"

"That's what I'm getting to, though. This year has been… different. It wasn't so bad when I only saw her for a few minutes every couple years or so, but between the wedding and the book and everything that's been going on with her lately, Rory and I have been talking all the time, and I just… I still like her more than any other woman I've ever met, Luke. And I told myself that she hasn't wanted me for over a decade now. She made her feelings abundantly clear, and I have offered myself up like an idiot over and over and over again, just on the off chance that she might have changed her mind, and she has turned me down every single time. I mean, how many times does she need to say it before I get a clue? 'No means no,' right? I'm done. I'm not doing that again. So, I guess we're friends now. She really likes me as a friend, she says, so I'll be her friend and be grateful I get to spend time with her at all. And I'm doing my best to be ok with that. So I finally asked Sylvia out, and it was nice. She's beautiful and interesting, and maybe it coulda gone somewhere… but then you had to go and tell Rory about it. And she got weird, man. She called me up, and she was comparing me to Mr. Darcy, and-"

"Am I supposed to know who the hell that is?"

"Are you serious? You've lived with Lorelai for, what, ten years now, and she hasn't tied you down and made you watch all six f***ing hours of that BBC monstrosity? Pride and Prejudice? Jane Austen? Lorelai going on and on about Colin Firth emerging from a lake in a wet shirt and breeches? Ring any bells?"

"Ah, maybe. I think I fell asleep about five minutes in."

"Of course you did. Well, all you need to know is that he's the romantic hero of the story, but he's a complete ass for like, two thirds of the book, which is obviously where the resemblance lies. So she's on a roll with that, and hey, I deserve it, but then she throws in the fact that he changes and fixes everything and the heroine can't help falling in love with him in the end. And what the hell am I supposed to do with that? Because last I knew, we were talking about me, and that would imply that… I don't know. All I know is that she got all flustered and started grilling me about my date with Sylvia, that you told her about, thanks so much, and then she starts going on about how she hopes I'll be very happy and how I deserve to be happy and I deserve to be with 'someone who has her life together.' And then she started crying and frickin' hung up on me!"

"Huh."

"Yeah! So, that whole thing kinda threw me, and all of a sudden, I'm not so sure where I stand anymore. I mean, am I crazy? Is that a normal reaction to hearing that a friend is seeing someone?"

"I don't know, Jess. It's weird, I'll give you that… but who knows, with pregnant women…"

"Well, yeah, there's that, too… But I went out with Sylvia again, because I was trying, you know? I owed it to myself and to her to give it an honest shot, but… I couldn't… I couldn't stop thinking about that phone call, Luke. I couldn't stop thinking about her. Because what if this was finally, finally a chance after all these years, and could I really just let that slip away? Could I start a relationship with someone else, knowing that I might be throwing away a shot with Rory? And I've been saying that there wasn't any chemistry with Sylvia and me, but the truth is, I know that's all on me. It was awkward because of me, because I was distracted and I was distant and I wasn't sure I wanted to be there. And Sylvia deserves better than that. It was better to end it before anybody got hurt."

"Ah, jeez, Jess."

"It's true. I'll go ahead and say it: I sabotaged my own attempt at having a happy relationship because I'm still hung up on my highschool girlfriend. And there it is. I'm such a pathetic loser."

"You're not a loser, Jess. You've come a long way. But she's got a baby now."

"I know that. And even if she has changed her mind about me, the timing is so bad... She needs me to be a friend she can depend on right now. The last thing she needs is the stress of fending off yet more unwanted advances from her crazy ex-boyfriend who can't take no for an answer. And I can't go there again, I just can't. So, I'm stuck in this no-man's-land."

"So how is all this stopping you from going to Argentina? Maybe a few months away from all this would be good for you."

"Maybe… maybe. But I just… I broke her trust before by leaving. I made a lot of mistakes, but that? That was the one she couldn't forgive me for. And I want to be there for her, I want her to know that she can count on me now, that if she needs me, I am there. But I can't do that if I'm halfway across the world. I'd be of no more use to her than Logan is, and I… God help me, I want her to think of me as someone who can give her something that he can't. And if I go, I can't do that. And I have this feeling that if I go now, that'll be it for her. The end. Three strikes, I'm out. For good this time."

"Were you planning on leaving without telling her?"

"Well, no, of course I wasn't..."

"'Cause I think that was a big part of the problem last time…"

"Yeah. I get that. But what if she doesn't see it that way?"

"Jess, all I can say is maybe you should talk to Rory about it. See how she feels about it."

"I guess I'll have to."

"For my part, I think you should go. And she won't be alone, Jess. She's got Lorelai, and me, and Lane..."

"You're right. Who'm I kidding? She doesn't need me anyway."

"That wasn't what I meant."

"Yeah, well, it's probably true anyway. But it's good to know that she's got you looking out for her. I'd need you to promise me that, if I'm gonna even consider this."

"You got it."

"Well… thanks for listening. I guess I'd better go. I'm gonna call Rory, like you said."

"I think that'd be a good idea."

"Yeah. Well, talk to you later, Uncle Luke."

"Later, kid. You… you take care of yourself, alright?"

"I always do. But thanks."

Thank you for reading. Please, PLEASE share any comments or ask any questions you’re wondering about! I crave your opinion. What do you think of this? My muse is in desperate need of encouragement so I can finish writing Chapter 9 sooner rather than later!

#Gilmore Girls #Fanfiction #Literati #seriously please talk to me #The Long and Winding Road #this is an exclusive!#It won't be in the next chapter #and I haven't posted this anywhere else!#@tinygothgoblindaydreaming #@lily-of-the-vallies #@blueforest7

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 4 years

Note

So: what ARE all the various things Quentin Coldwater visibly has not processed or unpacked or come to terms with by the end of season 4? Have you made a list?

sure, let’s give this a whirl, shall we?

1. quentin’s death itself - kind of cheating since technically quentin does not come back to life in the show, but the obvious starting point in any post-s4 fic about him. i feel like dying and coming back to life on its own has gotta be messed up in even the best circumstances, possibly unless you do it like penny where you never really have a moment of feeling like you have died. in the softest interpretation of quentin’s death, it was still a violent sudden untimely death, which feels like it adds to that. which is not getting into —

2. the fact that quentin’s death was self-inflicted - i think there’s definite room for ambiguity in considering, like, how suicidal his suicide was, so to speak, all the way from “he walked into the mirror realm planning or at least hoping to die” to, sure, “he sacrificed himself for the greater good and was sorry to die.” that is a reading that fits with the text. my own headcanon-ish take on it, or the reading that makes most sense to me in terms of quentin’s characterization across the show (which to be clear is NOT what the show wants us to think about it), setting aside whatever angle i might find most dramatically useful or interesting explore in a particular story, is somewhere between these two. i think if everett hadn’t shown up, quentin would have walked out of there alive, and when he decided to cast, some part of him felt a real deep sense of relief. i actually read the moment as emotionally pretty analogous to alice niffin-ing out — when niffin!alice says she did it on purpose, i think that’s true, but does that mean she wanted to, exactly, in all the parts of her that didn’t make it to niffinhood? i don’t know, and i don’t think alice really knows, then or ever, which is how i feel about some future quentin looking back and trying to answer for himself the question he asks penny: yes, no, both, kind of, not really, yes but just for a second, no but not strongly enough... and that kind of uncertainty about your own desires and beliefs and motivations at such a crucial juncture is itself something to process. like i said, that’s my own take on it, and the reality of it (despite the show’s protests to the contrary) is ambiguous; what’s not ambiguous is that, uh, quentin made a choice he knew would kill him, and everything we know about quentin suggests that having this information about himself would really fuck him up (and also that some dumb hot chocolate feelings chat in the underworld would not actually be enough to ease his mind on the issue). which leads me to —

3. quentin’s mental health shit, part the first - so, there’s the fact of quentin’s depression which predates the show by ages and which he has now spent four years basically ignoring while getting traumatized repeatedly, and he needs....... something regarding that. meds/therapy convo is for a lot of people the obvious Something, it’s a good Something. i don’t like to be prescriptivist about what Something is, i think a lot about leonard cohen in his 70s being like “yes it turned out that the thing i needed to finally address my lifelong depression was to go through the process of getting ordained as a buddhist monk.” maybe what quentin needs is to get ordained as a buddhist monk. i could buy that. but Something regarding his like everyday ability to be a person in the world, especially considering that he died at what could charitably be described as a low point re: that, he needs. and, also —

4. quentin’s mental health shit, part the second - he needs to process and deal with his own feelings about his fucked up brain and the things that he’s done as a result of it, because there’s the brain stuff, but then there’s also the shame and self-concept and identity issues that have developed around and with the brain stuff, you know? i mean, there is a reason i have written now two stories spanning well over a hundred thousand words in which therapy is suggested to quentin and his response is “hmm. no thanks,” and it’s because the first time we ever meet him, he is in the process of refusing further treatment against a psychiatric professional’s advice! he goes off his meds like 18 hours later and never once in the show shows any inclination of being like, “hm maybe that was a bad idea,” including when magic gets turned off and he picks up smoking as a fun summer hobby instead. we know from the mind palace that quentin’s deepest fears involve his own brain, and there’s a lot of different ways you can read the fact that the cherry on top of the nightmare sunday is the dream-revelation that his illness led him to attack his dad but IMO one of the more obvious ones is that he already thinks of his illness as something that has hurt his dad. he has some real dark feelings about his own mind.

5. quentin’s dad - quentin barely deals at all with his dad’s death before he himself dies, and like — similarly to his death, losing his father in his mid-twenties is something that would be difficult for a long long time in the least-bad situation. for quentin, i think there’s a ton of unresolved shit in the distance between them as two people who loved each other deeply, and knew the other loved him deeply, but didn’t always know how to communicate; i think there’s a lot of internalized shame around making his father’s life difficult by having the mental health problems he did that he hasn’t unpacked; i think that ahead of him there’s like, a lot of unexpressed anger about what his father couldn’t give him & a lot of guilt about that because his father did do his best and is now dead & a lot of grief about the fact that his father will never be around for quentin to heal his side of their relationship. also there’s the fact that, uh, quentin’s dad died because he chose to turn magic back on, and we know from his conversation with julia that he feels conflicted about having made that choice.

6. quentin’s experiences with the monster - almost everything that happens to quentin on the magicians is some degree of traumatizing, but being constantly tormented by an evil demigod wearing the body of your ex-boyfriend who keeps murdering people partly (after 4x05 at least) because you decided you wanted to take on the absolute inevitability of further carnage for the extremely slim chance of somehow saving your rex-boyfriend - that really takes it to the next level, and we can see that this is true in his affect, in the way quentin in season 4 just totally shuts down, in his reckless behavior and even lower instinct for self-preservation.

7. quentin’s experiences on the quest - i’ve said this before, but if you watch season 3 from the mosaic episode on with a focus on tracking quentin’s inner state, the show becomes a grim story of a guy who came face to face with his depression and never really recovered. that’s... a lot, on its own. it’s more when you consider the fact that as far as he knows, he only survived his initial encounter with the depression monster by, uh, fulfilling its darkest ideas about himself, i.e. passing on his pain to someone else (benedict) who died because quentin wasn’t strong enough to handle his shit on his own. that’s not my read of that episode, but i honestly feel like if quentin ever has 5 seconds to think about it that’s gotta be how he feels about it, right? and you can see briefly in season 3 how his anxiety starts ratcheting up about his sense of responsibility towards others on the quest once penny and benedict are both dead. and there’s also the whole thing about how the quest wants him to be cold, which as i have said 9 million times is a very sad thing for him to believe that he never gets to unlearn! all culminating in his decision to stay at blackspire, which —

8. quentin’s hero thing - of all the really baffling choices the show makes, one that i keep coming back to is how they told quite beautifully the story of quentin letting go of his desire to be a hero, culminating in handing alice the leo blade (or... whatever i’m not gonna fact check that. you know what the fuck i mean), and then they uhhhh. i don’t even know what to call it. walked it back? decided he hadn’t actually learned that in a generally applicable way? the season 2 finale is interesting because he does A Hero Thing (stabs a god with a sword), but it happens very unglamorously and feels very much like a decision born out of necessity, but then it leads to magic ending, so... i don’t know what to do with that. but his decision to stay at blackspire is... clearly quentin wanting to be a hero! like, he’s managed to step away from the idea of heroic glory, but veered over instead to heroic martyrdom, which is not really... better. and which eliot saves him from (See Below), only for him to... double down on it a season later by sacrificing his life for real. all of which is A Lot, not even getting into the fact that, like, at some point he’s gotta come up with some justification for being alive other than this, and the show strongly suggests he... hasn’t, yet.

9. yeah, like, eliot? - HOO boy. listen. the act of turning quentin down in and of itself is not morally wrong. if eliot sincerely hadn’t wanted a relationship with quentin after the mosaic, that would be his right, and his rejection doesn’t become a crime just because we know that it actually came from his own issues. i also honestly think eliot thought in the moment that he was shutting this down for the good of both of them and as kindly as he could. he was very wrong about this, but that’s my take. HOWEVER. there are a lot of reasons you can read that conversation in 4x05 as being unintentionally crafted to be particularly hurtful to quentin specifically, the biggest and most obvious one being, uh, “fifty years that were real for you were not real for me” (hurtful in any case but particularly for someone like quentin who has such a sense that one of his problems is he Cares Too Much), and my personal favorite being that the logical implication of “that’s not you,” for quentin, is “the version of yourself that learned to be content with your life as it happened to unfold is not real.” excruciating to hear those things, while also trying to figure out how to emotionally process the memories of a dead wife you never married and a son that was never born! extra excruciating to then have the person who told you “you didn’t matter enough to me to take a chance on” shoot a god because apparently you do matter enough for him to override your life choices, and then get possessed. one of my favorite moments in 4x05 is when quentin tells alice “i loved you, and you couldn’t trust that,” because it’s clearly in there to draw a parallel to the throne room scene for Writing Points, but it’s so wildly inapplicable to any of their 900 break-ups (right before blackspire SHE was the one saying “i know i don’t always seem like it but you’re the one i love”!), that the only plausible in-universe reading of it is that quentin has been stewing miserably on the eliot thing this entire time, only now he can’t even be properly mad at eliot because eliot is possessed by a demigod, so he’s just projecting onto the nearest available screen. i’m obsessed with that. it’s horrible and very sexy and Needs To Be Unpacked

10. see, like all the way down here at the bottom we get to quentin’s mom - idk, his mom is a very critical person (i don’t love using the word “critical” because it often gets used misogynistically but it is the only personality trait we really have for her) who never seems to contact or wonder about her adult son with a longterm history of mental illness, who certainly doesn’t seem to have the same skepticism his father has about the brakebills cover story that he’s studying finance, and who unlike his father is not mentioned when quentin recounts his first hospitalization. like, that can’t be great for him, right? that can’t have nothing to do with him being the way he is. for most people that would rank as a pretty major thing to process. but compared to everything else on the list? idk, man!

that’s... i mean this is not so much my thinking for fic-related reasons, this is just me lying down and trying to get out all my screaming about quentin coldwater, which i honestly feel like is still missing some things. like i kinda think he has not gotten over being an unpopular nerd for what is chronologically still most of his life??? i feel like he has some weird stuff around sex which explains why his reaction to poppy macking on him is basically “i guess this is happening now” which is not, like, an ideal relationship or lack thereof to have with your own body? he doesn’t have a single close friend who does not play a major role in his psychosexual development, and he has no male friends he’s never slept with. i couldn’t even go down the road of residual guilt over being the guy who got magic turned off and therefore in his brain probably responsible for everything that happened after that. the dude’s a mess!!!!!!!!!! i love him more than anything on this stupid earth but his mind is a fucking horrorshow!!!!!!!!!!!!

#the magicians #askbox #i slept poorly the past several nights and my brain decided it's all coming down Today #so this seemed like the right time for this lmao

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currentfandomkick · 4 years

Text

Marinette did not sign up for this part 9

so not as polished but it wouldn't shut up. enjoy!

first part here previous part here ao3 here

Ladybug focused on talking to Bunnix first. Why? Bunnix would get the information she needed—one way or another. Perks of time traveler family on your side—a few questions and you get a lot of answers quickly.

“Bunnix, you saw what was happening to Chat’s suit, right?”

“Yeah, and uh… might want to restrain him or something until your threat level goes down.”

Ladybug froze at that. “Explain—now.”

Bunnix rubbed the back of her neck, looking away from the screen and Ladybug’s gaze. “okay, so long story short, Chat isn’t working with all his abilities.”

Ladybug sighed as she knew where this was going. “Just like how my suit is too similar to Bridgette’s to be mine, not hers.”

Bunnix nodded. “I’m not sure if it’s a holdover from the old timeline, or just a Black Cat miraculous thing—family was out of the loop for a gen or two before Grand-père—but if his stories are right, then this won’t calm down until after you’re safe from whatever life-and-death thing sent him off AND he believes it…”

“Bunnix.” She needed more than that. “What’s happening?”

“Uh, you know how he’s the only one with a color as part of his name?”

Ladybug nodded.

“There’s a reason for it. I don’t know how, timeline hopping side effects and all, but I’m pretty sure that he’s controlling condensed destruction for his Cataclysm, and it’s either leaking—which is bad—or he has some shadow ability. The Chat Noir from Grand-père’s timeline was after his Ladybug to free him from a curse his shadows… well Grandpère changed the timeline a lot for a reason. Whatever happened, haunted him.”

Ladybug took a deep breath. High threat coming from her partner… “Chat Blanc bad?”

“Honestly? Chat Blanc is a walk in the park by comparison.”

Ladybug felt sick.

“Got it. So what set him off—Murder Robin situation escalating?”

Bunnix sighed. “Probably when the guy showed up.”

The building rocked.

“Gotta go, Bug out!”

Ladybug snapped her compact shut and ran to where she could feel Chat—another perk of being Ladybug. Always knowing where your other half is when transformed—and sighed in relief when she saw he was hit by Miss Sting before he got anyone.

Murder Robin was not doing good. Probably. She couldn’t read him.

“Get him back to Paris and leave him at the museum—secret passage.”

Miss Sting nodded, grabbing Chat Noir and throwing his frozen form over her shoulder as she ran.

Green Lantern ran to the room only to see a paralyzed Chat Noir carried by Miss Sting.

“Should I be worried?’

Ladybug rubbed her temples.

“Voyage!”

“Stay in the library, I’ll fix this.”

“But—”

“Please.” Ladybug wanted to scream or cry or something because this is more than too much and overwhelmed would be a welcome change from how she felt at the moment. She was far beyond overwhelmed, in over her head, and whatever other way someone could think up to describe her current situation.

Green Lantern closed the door for her, walking off.

“Lucky charm.”

Why was she given knitting needles? (she missed how Damian’s eyes went wide at the sight of them, something clicking.)

“Miraculous Ladybug!”

Ladybugs filled the room, undoing whatever Chat’s cataclysm did to it. it was an old training room, one she hadn’t fixed all the way before…

A series of training dummies, wooden ‘blades’ (swords, knifes, spear staffs) and a few staffs appeared.

Ladybug didn’t even say spots off before her timer ran out. Tikki blinked curiously at where they were.

“Marinette…”

“Not now Tikki, just, please?”

Marinette took out a macron from her purse and gave it to the tiny goddess. Tikki took it with a sigh. “Do you want me here for this?”

Marinette glanced at Murder Robin. Who was tied up, and she could feel had words to say but was going to butcher probably.

“Private conversation this time. He came after me as me, not Ladybug.”

Tikki nodded, finishing her cookie in one go.

“You know how to call me if you want,” Tikki said before phasing through the floor. She likes to check on the plants on the lower levels.

Marinette took a deep breath. “So, I get the whole rival heir thing and how off-ing rivals is a big thing in history, but uh…” and she forgot where she was going with this. Great.

“Is it safe to say the flowers were not an adequate apology?”

Marinette blinked. “What.”

That was what those were for? Really?

“The flowers, my teachers said the language of flowers was an important consideration when apologizing, and given your residence I assumed you were not familiar with Arabic, and I doubted your intelligence in English given your grades…”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “You try being the main hero on-call 24-7 and see how well you do learning your non-sense language. Why didn’t you just say it in French?”

“That is…” she had a feeling this had backstory he wasn’t wiling to share. “A fair judgment.”

Marinette took a deep breath, trying to incorporate this tid-bit. Murder Robin was apologizing with the flowers. Which… many levels of ‘who raised this kid?’ and ‘I am assuming child custody’ warring in the back of her mind. He did try to kill her once…

“And given your lack of defensive abilities, I assumed you would require weapons more suited to your frame, stature, activity level given your social media—”

“Are you social media stalking me too?”

“And your boutique. But that’s not the point—I wanted to ensure your safety once better understood that certain things taught to me were wrong. That I was wrong, and I needed to apologize for it.”

Marinette was seriously debating if this kid was from another timeline. She wouldn’t put it past one of the Kubdels to do it either—the whole family could randomly have a ‘cousin’ appear for a bit to fix something later down the road and no one would be able to tell the difference…

“So why the daggers?”

“Mother favored them, I assumed it would be a good weapon of choice for you. I misunderstood your preferences… I hope the rapier is making a fine decoration to your liking at least.”

“Used it in a few akuma attacks at home actually, so good call there, awkward explanation to Maman and Papa as to why I had one and why I was hiding it.”

Robin’s face soured a bit. “Yes, Agreste’s… gift.”

Marinette decided that was a sore spot to examine another time.

“Yeah, big weapons aren’t my thing.”

“My mistake. I hope the knives and throwing stars have been to your liking at least.”

Marinette felt awkward about her (very reasonable) reaction as the (still foreign) information began to shift the picture. Insecure kid with a questionable home life that is in desperate need of socialization… “The ball point pen was a good call—had to add a few decorations to it so I stopped mixing it up. The Swiss army knife is really useful on the days I knew there was going to be too much going on to remember where I put my backup tiny tool kits.”

Robin nodded at that. “And the throwing stars?”

“Uh, may have turned a one or two into hair accessories, but haven’t really had the time to test them out with everything.”

Robin nodded, mulling something over. “Okhti Al Kobra?”

Marinette looked at him when he spoke, trying to get his meaning(s) and not just the surface. If Alya was there, she’d use her gut. But Marinette’s gut is an overacting jerkface that she refuses to trust at the moment…

She might ask to borrow Wonder Woman’s lasso later.

Or see if Alya has leveled up as a Fox enough yet to sense what Marinette needs her to. Maybe she could just borrow Trixx?

“I haven’t told the others who you are.”

Marinette paused at that. “But it’s the Ghosts of Gotham, you guys kind of know everything.” And are unofficially the ‘check’ to the superhero community if anyone goes rogue. At least for who the bats met. Crap—is there a file on her too? Maybe she’d ask the LoS if they could destroy hers…

“I assumed the same. Apparently Father didn’t know about you until Aquaman confronted him on the matter.”

Oh… oh. Oh! She… she outted herself. great. Wonderful.

Marinette sighed. “That’s… good. I think.”

“I doubt they’ve realized who you are yet. If my memory serves, Grandfather said only those most trusted by the God-touched could figure out their secret identities.”

Marinette was grateful for Trixx’s twist to all miraculous magic, she really is.

“So safe on that front, for now.”

“Correct.”

Marinette had a feeling he had more to say on the matter, and let him find what he had to say.

“I know your identity, and that compromises you… You may compromise my own. I am Damian Al-Ghul Wayne.”

Marinette’s brain shorted for a moment and needed time to reboot. And proof… and time to understand what just happened (and get the urge to kidnap this child out of her system. That was. No. Bad. She thinks. Maybe… he’s tiny and doesn’t even have magic protecting him! probably.)

“Do you mind if I…”

Robin—Damian. Damian lifted his head and nodded quickly.

Marinette took off the mask and memorized his face. Shape is congruent with what she remembers of the latest Wayne Heir in a picture when Adrien and Kagami got at the Wayne Galas last year. It was the first time either family was invited.

She had a feeling Ro—Damian. Damian was behind that… He could have been gathering information, but why? to learn about her, or Kagami who she knows he’s fenced against.

Kagami who might have put things together and she needs to damage control there next. Great. (What is she the guardian of again? Lately its felt like miraculous wielders and not the kwami.)

Marinette could sense Rena getting close.

She put Robin’s mask back on and transformed wordlessly. Tikki must have returned at some point.

“Can I come in?”

Ladybug and Robin were in place then. both behind more comfortable masks.

Ladybug went to the door and slipped into Gaurdian. The chances anyone besides her team knew it were slim… and she’d rather not ask Wonder Woman for her lasso… just in case.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Yeah girl, what do you need?”

“Just… let me know how you feel about his next answer.”

At Rena’s nod, Ladybug turned to Robin as she let Rena in.

“Have you answered my questions truthfully?”

“Yes.”

“Did you withhold information you believe to be important?”

“Not consciously.”

Ladybug looked at Rena.

“I…” Rena kept scanning him, looking for something. “Why the…” she trailed off as her eyes went wide. “oh. Oh That happened.”

Ladybug raised an eyebrow. “Uh, those were very loud whoosh with a bell. I think that means truth, just, wow.”

And Rena’s ability to sense lies has a new manifestation, good. Downside—Alya will probably have it too and she may have been trying to delay this…Trixx will be happy at least, and no need for lasso of truth.

“Well, I’ll be back in a bit. Rena, feel free to go home for a bit and rest up.”

Marinette almost screamed when she got home. She’d only be in her room for fifteen minutes tops—but still.

Maman and Papa told her they’d be at a catering gig tonight, so she didn’t have to worry about them checking up on her once they left.

No, she had to worry about the pics she was checking from her feed a year ago… which included Damian’s face for the Wayne Gala.

She could have been a Wayne.

She’s not, and she’s not mad just… wow. (Gotham/bullet dodged?)

Which meant Bruce Wayne is likely Batman, and by order of appearance… Nightwing must be Dick Grayson-Wayne, Red Hood (who makes zombie jokes, like, a lot according to Gotham’s #Batwatch #OnlyinGotham twitter accounts) is probably Jason Todd, who died. Timelines match and she has questions. Many. But then there are more horrible realizations to make. Like Red Robin is probably Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne (does he have a not-first name anywhere in his name?) who she consulted as Marinette and designed a suit for two days ago. And his blonde friend (who was in her bakery. She debated her. just. Fuck.) was probably Spoiler who is the current Batgirl, and if she bothered to check his friends’ list, she’d probably find the girl’s real name. Cass was obviously black bat (only one who doesn’t mouth off in every fight, gave very short responses during their debate but agreed with Marinette so is probably smarter than the rest). Oracle is a mystery (thankfully. She’s certain she’d lose her tech forever if she found out who the woman was and it wasn’t on said woman’s terms).

Just… a lot to take in.

Once her parents were gone and Marinette had her brain (mostly) back, she texted Adrien that “latest situation was handled, talk tomorrow.” In response to him trying to make her phone explode with the sheer volume of texts he sent her.

Not even five minutes later Chat made his way into her room, shadows still rolling. “What happened?”

“I… long story short? I’m pretty sure he’s been brainwashed or something and Fox’s seal of approval on him telling the truth—he was leaving flowers and weapons as apologies and ‘here, to protect yourself’ things which is kind of sweet in a really, really messed up way that I do not have the capacity to process. He won’t be a problem—I have his secret identity and he has mine—apparently the other Bats haven’t figured it out, and didn’t know about me until I blew up.”

Chat’s shadows settled on his suit. Returning to the familiar leather pattern. “Really?”

Marinette nodded. “Really. Its to the point I have to remind myself not to adopt him—he needs help, and I doubt letting tiny child fight is a good thing.”

“Anything on Bat-threat?”

A smile twitched on Marinette��s face. “We both know you already checked.”

Chat grinned at that. “Yeah. Wonder Woman took out four bodies and threw them into those tube thing-ies.”

Marinette shook her head. “Oh, and you have a new thing that I have to watch for.”

“Oh, I do?” Chat looked around, examining himself.

Marinette shook her head at him fondly. “Shadow suit.” Once she had Chat’s attention, she continued. “You were a little…”

“I’m going to guess not me?”

“Miss Sting said paranoid in her messages, extra aggressive and then you almost killed brainwashed murder bird.”

“Are we changing the nickname now?”

“… honestly I’m debating just calling him a crow at this point. Maybe fix his suit to match so there’s less awful traffic light.”

“It would be a great public service,” Chat added as he wrinkled his nose. “who makes a child a traffic light.”

“Apparently the donor.”

“Donor needs fashion advice.”

“Can’t, he’d try to ruin mine with a god-awful color scheme, and I refuse.”

Chat snorted at that. “So, these guys… where do we stand?”

Marinette hummed. “Sent the ‘not trusting them at all’ back already… I say we keep Robin for now and figure out what the hell made him think murder is okay and if its still encouraged then…”

“Then we do a ‘this is my many times removed relative who lives here now?’”

“No. I tell Gina, she gets the documents ready, and then I introduce him as my bio mom’s cousin’s kid and tell them he’s staying in paris and wants to connect.”

“You do realize his mother probably has a stance on this.”

“Shhh, cousins.”

“Shhh, someone is bound to notice.” Chat countered, shaking his head.

Okay, would gotham notice a Wayne missing? Probably. Would they really try to look for him is the question… and how easy would it be to fool them if they did find him? Maybe have Trixx help with Markov?

“I doubt he uses social media, so low chance there. He thought everyone knew the language of flowers… I think either he was taken from a cult, the bats are a cult, or both.”

“I’m leaning to both, why else would he be that level of offensive to fashion?”

Marinette snorted at that. She has met many fashion disasters that never needed a cult as an excuse.

Batman was… nervous.

Wonder Woman was giving him and his kids (minus Damian. Who has not made contact with them yet…) a series of looks that he knew meant trouble.

“In our defense,” Dick began.

“There is a baby bat in danger, what were you expecting?” Stephanie continued.

“And you were the one that thought we should be ready for any contingency,” Tim added while clinging to some unholy combination of energy drinks.

“Little sister. Needs help.” Cass tacked on. “We help.”

When eyes turned to Jason, he only gave one explanation: “Kid facing city-wide drownings regularly, brainwashed buddies daily, and superpowers, and extra overt terrorist targeting the kid. What were you expecting?”

Tim snorted at that. “Me thinks he forgets he taught us how to bend and break rules.”

Stephanie nodded from her location. “We weren’t told it was no bats, just no Batman.”

Diana glared at Bruce.

“By the time I checked their trackers, they were turned off and no longer responding to their communicators.” he had a feeling Agent A or Oracle may have helped them… but no proof.

Jason rolled his eyes. as they did have a ‘Bat-free’ set of comms—a set of phones they changed just enough that Bruce couldn’t keep track of them and relented to a ‘civilian only’ cells that he would not track, tap, or try to under threat of Babs.

“We are very independent,” Tim added as he drank his questionable concoction. Bruce didn’t even ask where he got it from at this point.

Wonder Woman narrowed her eyes. “I am making this clear now—you are not to approach, contact, or even look into Ladybug, her identity or her city’s issues without her explicit permission. Am I clear?”

There was grumbling from his kids.

“Crystal,” Batman answered. Once Diana seemed satisfied for the moment, he decided to ask. “Have you heard anything about Robin?”

Diana paused. “Not yet. When Ladybug has what she needs, she will likely send him back, or ask to keep him in a location she deems secure until this matter has blown over.”

Bruce didn’t like that. At all.

His kids didn’t either, each readying for a fight.

Diana could tell what they were thinking. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Given Ladybug’s age, and that now two of you,” she cast a glare at Jason, “Have threatened her and her team in the mask, I doubt she will be very trusting. Nearly being killed by fellow heroes is not something one gets over very quickly.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “She’s a bat, give her like, two, three weeks tops. You get over it.”

Diana shot Bruce, not Batman, but Bruce a look.

“I was lost in the time stream when that happened.”

Diana rolled her eyes.

“To be fair,” Dick added, “Damian has tried to kill most of us at first, me included, but you get used to him.” At Diana’s eyes getting wider, he backtracked. “He’s gotten a lot better since we worked on the Robin code and he’s working on his own. Top of his list was apologizing to those he wronged just… didn’t do it the best way.”

Tim snorted. “Speak for yourself.” He got a lot of photography equipment and Redbird back… plus a few other things as Damian’s form of apology. The only one he wasn’t that big on was the ‘I will invade your hideout to ensure you are resting properly’ no matter how many times he said he was on black out. It didn’t help that Dick encouraged it and Jason had already been doing that. The only ones who gave him breathing room was Stephanie and Cass, which is why they are his favorites.

Dick sighed. “He used flowers and weapons on the girl for two years.”

Diana twitched at that. Ladybug had been twitchy because she thought she was being watched. That… didn’t bode well.

Bruce made a pained sound. “Please tell me he left a note.”

“He didn’t.”

The bats did what they have a habit of doing during these situations. Look at each other, sigh, and maybe drop their head into their hands in shame. Mentally of course. Externally they can’t—gotta keep up appearances and all.

Jason broke the silence. “So, who’s turn is it to fix it, because not it.”

“You were disqualified before this started.”

“Not it!” Stephanie said quicklying.

“Not it,” Cass agreed.

“I got it the last time, not it.” Tim added.

“Batman you were already disqualified,” Diana stated before Dick could avoid being it.

“Why is it always me?” Dick wanted someone to explain why he’s in charge of every other Bat’s problems. He loves them, he loves helping them, and Damian is his Robin (Bruce can fight him on that, he knows that was Bruce is for himself, he is to Damian). But it would be great if someone else did this too. “Can’t Babs help?”

“Who’s taking care of Gotham again?” A voice said over the intercom. “My birds.”

Dick sighed. “I get it. But I can’t do much from this end.”

Diana whistled to get the bats to stop. “He will handle this himself.”

The group shot each other looks. In theory he could, in practice… they wanted their contingencies, okay?

Marinette transformed and went into the portal, this time with Chat at her side. she noticed the shadows started to move once they got in the temple… she’d need more information on that another time.

“Behave.”

Chat rolled his eyes. “Don’t I always?”

Marinette narrowed her eyes.

Chat looked away and went into the room from before. Green Lantern had taken to checking up on Robin while they were gone.

“Should I be worried?” Green Lantern asked.

Ladybug raised an eyebrow at Chat. “Probably not.”

She could feel Green Lantern look at her.

“This isn’t going to stop until he thinks the threat is gone…”

“Ah.”

Ladybug glanced between Chat and Mur—Damian. Damian. Damian who had the worst murder apology tactic in history. (Seriously, flowers and weapons. What the hell?)

Chat walked up to him. “Not going to apologize for protecting my Lady.”

Robin didn’t seem insulted. “I would have to remove you as her partner if you did.”

Ladybug almost choked. Shadows were moving more.

Green Lantern sighed.

Chat glared. “Well you can’t.”

“I will not as you have proved to at least have a functional brain. Your skills leave much to be desired, but you are at least capable of adequately protecting my sister.”

The shadows were settled at least… for now.

“Why you little!”

“Robin!”

“Chat!”

“What—he started this!”

Ladybug sighed. She had a feeling these two weren’t going to get along anytime soon.

“Is that enough for you to get he doesn’t want me dead or anything?” Ladybug asked Chat, keeping an eye on the shadows.

“For now.”

“Chat.”

“Well we don’t have any leverage.”

“She knows who I am.”

“What.”

“I checked.” Ladybug admitted. “He is who he said and I’m sticking with ignoring the implications for another time.” Robin was smiling a bit. and not the murder-y one that haunted her nightmares sometimes. Good. What was she saying? “Oh, and I may have figured out Hawkmoth, but uh, consequences to that reveal would hurt a lot of people if we go in how we wanted to initially. So, I need to work out that plot since telling you may set off the shadows.”

Chat crossed his arms. “And who is it?”

Ladybug wanted to rub her temples. But Professional Time. “We both know you and Bunnix have your own things you don’t tell me about things that would be good to know but not good for me specifically. And that’s fine, it keeps Paris safe and our team from having internal issues. So trust me on this kitty. I’ll tell you before it happens. But it will be a lot closer to it happening than you’d like. Just like our usual.”

Chat… wasn’t happy about that.

“…fine.”

Robin watched the exchange. He wasn’t sure if it was a good thing to offer at the moment, but…

“Would it be acceptable if my family offered to help?”

Green Lantern gave him a look.

“You have seen our credentials.”

Ladybug wanted to scream again. just a bit.

“I have a way, probably, and am not in the mood for American take-overs.”

Robin thought for a moment. “I could ask mother. She won’t tell father if I ask.”

“And we trust that why?” Chat asked, shadows not dancing off his suit... but not still either. Interesting… she’d really have to look into this with the scrolls when she gets a chance.

“Mother and Father have… fundamental disagreements.”

Chat and her looked at each other, then Damian. They had a feeling he wasn’t telling the whole truth.

“And how do we,” Chat gestured at himself and Ladybug, “know we can trust her. I barely trust you.”

Robin was quiet.

Ladybug was tired. “Look, I can see if maybe the League is a good fit for this.”

Green Lantern looked up at that. “Batman would find a way to access it.”

Ladybug took a deep breath. “Not that one, uh, League of Shadows. Old branch that went rogue, but leader is an immortal and was supposedly a top choice for Black Cat for a while.” Until his partner got caught in a trap on a mission and sort of ended up becoming some death cheat. Ladybugs and Black cats are always trained in pairs. One is unfit, the other can’t continue with training. Not that the Green Lanterns needed to know that…

Robin was staring at her, and seemed… no felt nervous. Not showing it though. “Then you’d be meeting mother or Grandfather then... They go by the League of Assassins now.”

What even is her luck at this point? (Probably his first cult, and ancient overzealous ally of the Order… she was beginning to think it’s a good thing its going to be rebuilt from the ground up as yikes.)

“Is it acceptable if I accompany you? They’re not,” Robin was struggling to find the right word. “good with heroes or non-adults.”

Ladybug sighed. Chat narrowed his eyes, but his shadows were staying put.

“You can stay until after the meeting and plan is hashed out, but no passing it on to Batman, okay?”

“Understood.”

Why did it feel like she had a million things to do still? This would be much easier if she had her team, well, whole, instead of missing two miraculous. One of which she still had to fix… she hopes Sparrow is okay with helping on that still…

And she has a damn test tomorrow… Maybe Mandeliev will give her extra time since she was made news as Marinette being stalked by Robin?

---

DONE! This was a long update, and Damian and Marinette are awkwardly trying but uh, understandably, Marinette still has a lot going on and no time to process since her life is a mess with or without the Bats invading. Lets not forget, she still has tests at school because life on top of the crazy that’s been tacked on recently.

Oh. And apparently Talia wants to be involved, so that’s a Thing. Rah may or may not want to show up, I kind of just roll with it. feel free to add to insanity as always, since the group decided to tie up somethings... but not everything.

Marinette may know, but batfam doesn't. only damian does. who is still not back.

Also, thanks to those noticing plot hole fixes and tags are basically open until its a wall of tags.

again, if anyone find out how to insert/add a readmore, feel free to message or leave a comment.

TAGS: @heldtogetherbysafetypins @laurcad123 @raisuke06 @chaosace@jeminiikrystal @toodaloo-kangaroo @kris-pines04 @bisha43rbs @izang @dreamykitty25 @emu-lumberjack

#maribat #marinette did not sign up for this #part 9 #my writing #my fic #long post #bio!dad bruce #ml au

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beevean · 3 years

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How about a top 5 (or 10 if you prefer) best and worst bosses in video games? :D

I’m not very well versed in videogames, but anyway...

WORST

10) Chaos 4 (Sonic Adventure): Not a big fan of bosses who waste so much time - ooh, look at that, trying to hit me with very slow, very telegraphed attacks, and taking more and more time to becomes vulnerable the more the fight progresses. Also not a big fan of Tactical Suicide Bosses (excuse me Chaos, why is your strategy “stay in the water for increasingly amounts of time and then decide to raise my head to breathe”? In this form you’re a fish!). Even less of a fan of bosses that you have to fight three times to complete the game.

9) Sonic and Diablon (Shadow the Hedgehog): They couldn’t have come up with a more boring boss if they tried. Shoot the shield, shoot the cannon, avoid the hand, run away when you hear the word “anti-matter”, kick Sonic in the head, slowly chip at the large energy bar, rinse and repeat. The G.U.N. Fortress version is particularly painful, too, as the arena only offers those piss poor pistols with 10 bullets and minimal damage. And much like Chaos 4, you have to fight this lovely boss three times to get to the Last Story, except you don’t even get a different character with different abilities. Also, poor Sonic, from protagonist of the series reduced to nothing more than a footstep.

8) Collision Chaos boss (Sonic CD): Try to play a boss that relies on wonky pinball physics, that shoots projectiles with the only purpose of changing your already precarious trajectory, in the Bad Future that adds slightly more bumpers to destroy, with the American music (I linked the extended version to properly depict the experience). Pain is real.

7) Egg Pinball (Sonic Advance 3): Surprise! I find this boss worse than the more famous Egg Chaser. Yes, the Egg Chaser is very anxiety-inducing with its bottomless pit and the ball chain sending you into it, but once you learn the pattern of the platforms and that Amy as a partner makes it a joke it’s not that bad. This one, though? Even with Amy/Sonic, which is the only team where your partner is useless but you aren’t, this boss relies too much on luck, expecially by the end when way too many balls are flying across the screen. It’s almost funny, in a “screw you” way, that this is one of the two bosses in the game that can’t be hit by Cheese, in the stage where you finally unlock Cream. Pinball and Sonic don’t mix as well as Sonic Team thinks, apparently.

6) Boost Guardian (Metroid Prime 2, Gamecube): This boss’ strategy isn’t even that bad, it’s just that it hits you like a truck in an environment that is already sipping you of health. If being hit was less punishing, guessing the correct timing to jump over it would be fun. Too overkill for its placement in the game.

5) Mother Brain (Metroid Zero Mission): MB in the original Metroid 1 was... there, with the difficulty of the final boss coming from those stupid Rinkas pushing you into the lava below. In the remake, which otherwise is much easier than the original game, you have to think about the Rinkas, the lava, and MB who shots you fireballs! And if you fall into the lava (and you will spend half of the time in the lava)? She closes her eye and protects her only weak spot, forcing you to wait at the mercy of the Rinkas hitting you all over again. Asshole.

4) Dark Gaia (Sonic Unleashed): Dark Gaia, as a whole, is a stain on an otherwise beautiful game. Setting aside his “character” for a while: this boss is way, WAY too long (the first time I clocked at 11 minutes, like hell I’m trying again), the Gaia Colossus phase is frustrating for how slow it is and for having a nigh-unavoidable attack, the running phase requires pitch-perfect timing otherwise say bye bye to your life, and the Super Sonic phase is essentially “slipping down the shield to run over a bunch of snakes, then QTE up your ass”. Riveting. At least it has some banging music...

3) Egg Saucer (Sonic Advance 2): The bosses in SAd2 are already questionable with their “wind pushing you backwards” physics, but this one flings you enough bullshit to make you ragequit. Whoisthisgit made an excellent video explaining everything that makes this boss such a miserable experience. I am so sorry, Knuckles, that you had to be associated with this tragedy.

2) Antlion Mecha (Sonic 2, Game Gear): So let me get this straight devs, you take a boss that is already a little too had as the first boss in the game, you put it in a console with a much smaller screen, you screw up the slope physics making it just a little too easy to slide into the antlion’s jaws (and of course you don’t have any Rings), and on top of that you make the trajectory of the projectiles random when in the Master System they were consistent? Great game design there, guys :V

1) Spider Guardian (Metroid Prime 2, Gamecube): I was never as close as bestemmiare ogni santo e pure il padre eterno as I was when I was trying to beat this abomination. I love the Ing theme, but FUCK if I wasn’t hating every single sound of it while playing, OH MY GOD I envy the people who played it on the Wii so damn much

BEST

10) Robot Carnival/Storm (Sonic Heroes): Yes! Yes, I do like this boss! I’m probably the only one, I don’t care, I find these fights cathartic, especially with Team Chaotix <3

9) Jet Drill (Sonic 3 & Knuckles): The strategy may be simple, but I love the setup of Eggman destroying an ancient garden just to kill Sonic and I love how it emphasizes how much of a reliable bro Tails is. (let’s just ignore the fact that with Tails alone this boss is a pain...)

8) Doomsday Zone (Sonic 3 & Knuckles): The series had its fair share of Super Sonic bosses, but so far no one has beaten the original. It has excellent music, you can feel the tension as you smartly redirect Eggman’s missiles to him and as you chase him down through space, and Eggman in this game is really ready to do anything to win, I love it

7) Beta mk. II (Sonic Adventure): This is probably the best part of Gamma’s campaign. 90% of it is kindergarten-easy, and then Hot Shelter and the final boss are a sudden, but welcome spike in difficulty. Beta mk. II is a far cry from any other E-series robot you’ve faced, being almost completely invulnerable, hitting you with straight up nukes, and the time is still ticking in the corner. Then you add the context of having to kill your brother, and the deceptively upbeat theme, and it becomes a memorable experience.

6) Cykka (Metroid Prime 2): The first phase is fairly boring, but Adult Cykka is really fun to fight for some reason. Not only it has a cool design, but it’s a fast-paced battle (due to having to use the Grapple Beam to swing from platform to platform) where you have to go ham on the boss at certain points (when it becomes Dark Cykka), my two favorite styles for a boss.

5) Nightmare (Metroid Fusion): A name, a certainty. This boss looks, sounds and attacks in a way that makes you feel confused and powerless. Even at it becomes a game of “climb the stairs, shoot at its ungodly face, jump around to avoid it”, it’s still tense.

4) Ridley (Super Metroid): SM isn’t famous for having great bosses, but they put all of their effort into Ridley and it shows. There’s no strategy here, it’s simply “kill him before he kills you”. At this point you’re pretty much at the peak of your strength, you went through literal Hell to get The Baby back, you’re not going to be stopped by the asshole who killed your parents.

3) Shibusawa Keiji (Yakuza 0): What a beast of a final boss. The first Dragon of Dojima is the perfect foil to Kiryu, having all of his strength and style but none of his compassion, and beating him up to a bloody pulp, especially as you see him become sloppier and sloppier, is so, so cathartic. Also, Two Dragons, what more can I say?

2) Egg Dragoon (Sonic Unleashed): Best boss in the series? I don’t know but it’s surely in the top 10, and it’s ironic that you play as the hated Werehog. Not only it has some delicious music (that generations ruined), but it’s such a fun climax after the hell and a half that is Eggmanland! On one hand, Eggman sounds seriously angry and he is ready to kill Sonic (and if you take too much time, which admittedly is hard if you’re not doing it on purpose, he is positively gleeful while he sends you into a fiery death); on the other, Sonic just rips this giant robot apart like tissue paper, and even if it’s done through QTEs, it looks awesome.

1) Kuze Daisaku (Yakuza 0): I’ll let this say it all. If I had to pick a favorite version, the fifth one was my favorite to fight (by that point you have likely upgraded Kiryu’s abilities to the point of making him a juggernaut), but the second one is iconic for a reason... multiple, in fact. “DIE, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”

Special mention to Majima in Y1, YK and YK2 because he looks really fun, but I have never faced him myself so yeah.

#sonic the hedgehog #metroid #yakuza #sorry for the random italian #not my fault you guys don't have a word for insulting god himself #spinningbuster98

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calzona-ga · 3 years

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[Spoiler's] departure marks only the fifth time (and first since Patrick Dempsey) that the ABC medical drama has said farewell to a series regular via character death.

[This story contains spoilers from the March 11, "Helplessly Hoping," episode of Grey's Anatomy.]

Grey's Anatomy said parted ways with a beloved member of its cast during Thursday's midseason premiere and it did so in a relatively rare fashion for the ABC medical drama: with a character death.

Giacomo Gianniotti's Dr. Andrew DeLuca was killed off following a heroic battle to stop a sex trafficker in a storyline that stretched back to last season and ultimately capped the actor's seven-season run on the Shondaland favorite. DeLuca, who was stabbed and ultimately died in surgery, became only the fifth series regular in Grey's Anatomy history to have their storyline end in a fatality and the first since Patrick Dempsey's shocking exit nearly six years ago.

In a fitting end to his storyline, DeLuca winds up on Meredith's (Ellen Pompeo) magical beach and is able to have a farewell with his former love interest before walking into the sunset. DeLuca joins George (T.R. Knight), Derek (Dempsey), Mark (Eric Dane) and Lexie (Chyler Leigh) as series regulars (per Wikipedia) to leave the show in death. Of the 33 total series regulars in 17 seasons of Grey's, 13 characters have left alive. And it's of course worth noting that several other characters have been killed off of Grey's, though those actors have either been guest stars or recurring players.

Below, showrunner Krista Vernoff and star Gianniotti talk with The Hollywood Reporter about how DeLuca's death factors into a season that has put COVID-19 at the top of the show's call sheet and what's next.

Meredith is on a vent and that was the last beat until the show's return tonight. Why was it important for that to be the image viewers had of this iconic character for three months? She's still on the vent in the midseason return.

Vernoff: That happened to be the midseason finale. Sometimes stories tell themselves and things happen in very powerful ways. As an image, that works on people's psyche and helps them understand that this pandemic is ongoing and profound and impacting communities in really painful ways. It's a powerful image to help people remember why staying they're home. If this thing can hit Meredith Grey, it can hit anybody.

This season has put COVID-19 at the top of the call sheet, with realistic portrayals of everything from infected doctors, others struggling with the emotional gravity and, in the midseason finale, hospitals reached capacity. When it aired, that episode was sadly prescient. How does the rest of the season play out in terms of how close it has been to what's happening in the world now?

Vernoff: What's so interesting about it being prescient is that we were telling the truth in that episode of what was happening in May 2020 in Washington state and it was happening again in Los Angeles in December, when the episode aired. We weren't prescient; we were telling a story that happened in the early stage of the pandemic. It's been amazing how when we thought when we were breaking the show, we thought we were going home for two weeks and now it's a year later and we're looking at this in this way. It's still staggering to me. We are not jumping forward to some imaginary future where covid is a thing of the past. We are still set in the past in the back half of the season. That was one of the decisions when we decided that Meredith has covid and that that would span a fair amount of the season. We didn't want Meredith in a bed with covid for 11 months. We are still in like May/June of 2020 creatively. We're not jumping forward so we don't have to try and keep up with what's happening now; we're looking at what was happening then.

In a season exploring covid, why was the first major character death of the season unrelated? Was this supposed to be the season finale last year?

Vernoff: There was no plan to kill him at the end of last season. I very much did not want to kill DeLuca last season because he'd been through a mental health crisis and he'd come through it. I wanted to show that a person can go through a mental health crisis and come out the other side and be a functional, contributing member of the hospital staff. This story of DeLuca seeing that sex trafficker again and following her out of the hospital and refusing to let up and it becoming a part of Station 19 and following it and right when you think he's got her, somebody punches him. You think he's been punched but you come back and realize he's been stabbed and then he's on the beach with Meredith. My reaction to [the story idea] was, What?! Fuck! No! Really!? This is what I'm doing?! No! Many times after I pitched it to the writers and we designed the season around this story, I started to chicken out and second-guess myself. Can we save him?! Can he live?! He can't. We've done a lot of near-deaths and saved them since I took over the show. So now people are expecting that. This was the story. It was as shocking to me as it was to you.

Giacomo, what was your reaction when you got the call that Andrew was being killed off?

Gianniotti: Krista and Debbie Allen, our exec producer, called me into an office said they've tried it different ways and keep coming back to the trafficking storyline from last season. The storyline was so highly received, and because of that, they knew they had to continue to explore it. They saw an opportunity to tell a beautiful story that highlighted human trafficking and for DeLuca to go down as a hero and make this really noble act to stop this perpetrator but would unfortunately cost him his life. I've been on the show for seven seasons thought it was a great way to exit. Krista running Station 19 as well had the idea to make it a crossover so we could tell it over two episodes and spend time with DeLuca. I'm a storyteller and the best story always wins and I thought this was the best story.

What was the larger point you wanted to make with DeLuca's storyline? He dies a hero, which is a bit of the ultimate for a Grey's death.

Vernoff: I was processing [grief] myself when this story came. As we were going through this shared trauma of covid together and quarantine and being away from the people we loved, I wanted all the other tragedies in the world to just stop. It didn't seem fair. The Alexandria House, a charity I support in L.A. that shelters battered women and their children — so people who have already been traumatized — the first week of the shutdown, the Alexandria House caught on fire. It was like, What?! Isn't covid enough? But everything else didn't stop because of covid and we were all having to process other things, too, and horrible tragedies that come with life. That's part of where this story was born. All these people are going to die of covid but also sometimes other people just die. And it's f—ing awful. Part of DeLuca dying in this way … watching this episode, watching his mom greet him on the beach and feeling that grief, I cried harder watching this episode than I cried since George O'Malley died. I thank Giacomo for playing this character so beautifully and powerfully that through the death of DeLuca I believe there is an opportunity for us all to release our collective grief.

Will DeLuca re-appear on that beach again this season?

Vernoff: No. I thought him walking away with his mom was the most powerful closure for that character. But you will see him again, just not on the beach.

Gianniotti: Even though his life has come to an end, there's many ways to show our characters who have passed. I look forward to tell some other stories in those ways. Maybe there's flashbacks or other scenarios where we can see DeLuca. That's about all I can say. But it's not a drill; he's definitely died.

What was filming on that beach like given how much those scenes have meant to viewers?

Gianniotti: Ellen and I kept pinching ourselves. To be able to shoot on a beach was amazing. It was nice to be a part of that and have DeLuca have his moment and say his piece with Meredith. There was a lot of unfinished business between them. Maybe if Meredith hadn't gotten covid, the first part of this season could have been them picking up the pieces of where they left off in their romances. But circumstances didn't allow for that. It was nice that DeLuca got to at least thank her for everything she'd given him.

How do you think Meredith will respond to DeLuca's death?

Gianniotti: It's tough to say because you think of the dream and what happened at the end of the episode and wonder if Meredith would correlate that with the metaphor: if he's joining his mother that must mean he's leaving me and passing on. Maybe that would translate to her waking up? Who knows? Or it will be a massive surprise when she wakes up. There is a very obvious, glaring comparison with reality in that so many health care professionals have lost their own due to covid. It's a direct representation and reflection of that. It's helping people in the industry feel seen as well. It hits different and it's going to send a shockwave through all the characters at the hospital — and maybe Meredith the most.

Knowing Meredith is battling covid, it feels like there's one of two outcomes there. How does the covid story that you're telling impact the different finales that you're crafting considering the show's uncertain future?

Vernoff: More will be revealed as you watch the show. (Laughs)

Without spoiling anything, how would you describe who else will visit Meredith on that magical beach?

Vernoff: There are some really fun surprises coming up. It's one of the things that I have enjoyed as rays of light in the darkness of the storytelling necessitated by covid. That beach is a ray of light and the surprises of who you see there are rays of light. And I don't want to take that away.

Can you confirm there will be others who appear on that beach who viewers haven't seen there yet this season?

Vernoff: Yes.

Giacomo, you got to make your directorial debut on Grey's this season. After seven seasons, was there anything you wanted to do on the show but never had the chance?

Gianniotti: This felt like a gift. They rolled everything I wanted to do into two episodes, they wrote my dream exit storyline. I got to have an action movie told on Station 19 chasing a perpetrator and not wearing scrubs. That was fun and not something I'd gotten to do on Grey's for obvious reasons. All the scenes where we got to take our time and be together with Ellen and Meredith on the beach was a good way to tie up the loose ends. As far as the mental health storyline, it was an honor and privilege to tell that story. Ultimately, it's about representation and for people to see someone who is bipolar can be an attending and command a whole department at a hospital is huge.

Did you keep anything from set?

Gianniotti: I didn't! Maybe I'll go steal my stethoscope next time I'm there!

What's next for you? Any plans on returning to Grey's as a director?

Gianniotti: Definitely investing a ton of time in directing and hoping to continue to do that here and abroad. I'm seeking a lot of opportunities in Italy and Canada as a director and actor and have a few things coming on the horizon that I'm excited to share

#grey's anatomy #krista vernoff #17x07 #andrew deluca #giacomo gianniotti #spoilers #THR

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masterofmagnetism · 3 years

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they put me in the ground (but i’m back from the dead)

They took my life but it isn't the end They put me in the ground but I'm back from the dead

Oh, I'm the World Ender baby and I'm coming for you

WHO: Erik Lehnsherr, Scott Summers @firstxman, Jean Grey-Summers @jeaniegreysummers, Bruce Banner @hulkout. Mention of @mistressxfmagnetism WHERE: Stark Tower’s CRADLE lab. WHEN: February 21, 2021 WHAT: Jean and Scott get Bruce’s help resurrecting Erik. Erik comes back and is Not Happy. WARNINGS: Reference to past major character death, abuse, murder, assorted mental health issues, grief, ptsd. WORDS: 11k

JEAN: Erik crossed a line. No matter how she cried over his body, no matter how empty she felt when he was lowered into that grave (and she felt it, the shift in the earth, felt the ripple of emotion that came from the funeral even as she curled up in the rain under a tree in the park, even as she flicked through annotated poetry anthologies, a German dictionary propped open beside her), she knew they’d made the right decision. The only decision. Because Genosha was meant to be a place of safety, of respite, somewhere to escape from centuries of persecution and war. They’d already declared their strength with the siege. Anything after that was nothing more than malicious.

More than malicious. Genocidal.

Jean tried to tell herself it was the Phoenix. She told herself that if she could wake up in the morning with moon dust on her knees and blood under her nails and not remember any of it, that maybe the same thing was happening to Erik. Maybe he was overcome like she was on that lawn. But Erik didn’t ask for help. Erik didn’t hesitate, didn’t have a moment of outward remorse, didn’t let her into his head to see if there was an instance of it even internally.

Didn’t trust her, at the end of the day, despite his promises, despite his love. Despite everything they’d been to each other for all these years, Jean still wasn’t enough to break through. Her other father made that same mistake, out on that beach all those years ago. He made the same mistake every time he sent children to fight an old friend he wasn’t entirely sure would pull his punches

But that still didn’t give her the right to kill him.

After all, it was Jean who put the Phoenix into him. It was Jean who split the Raft, Jean who helped orchestrate the siege, Jean who encouraged the alliance between Erik and Scott. It was Jean who was fundamental in the unlocking of Lorna’s memories, Jean who indirectly led to the assault on Julio Richter.

Jean at the epicentre, as always, for once a driving force in her own narrative and hating every goddamn minute.

She killed Erik Lehnsherr, and it was the right thing to do, but him staying dead was a decision she couldn’t swallow. Asking the Phoenix for help was impossible. There were forces at play there she could never understand. Science was the only way forward, and there was something there when they exhumed the grave (Lorna would kill her, if this didn’t work. Jean would let her). Erik didn’t feel dead. He didn’t feel gone. He felt like he was … frozen. Waiting.

Stasis. A pause, rather than a full stop.

Jean chewed at the inside of her cheek, arms folded against the white of her lab coat. “We’ve run the preliminary tests more times than I can count,” she said. Scott would recommend, no doubt, that she slept before they tried this -- but she hadn’t slept properly in weeks. She couldn’t, until this was resolved. “We don’t know what frame of mind he might be in when he comes out, so we need to be prepared for anything.” Including killing him again, if necessary. This time, it would be her dealing the final blow. Marriage was all about equality.

SCOTT: When Scott was a child, his father was a retreating back. He always seemed to walk out of the door more often than he walked in it, always seemed happier leaving than staying. Scott remembered carrying a child’s anger in tiny fists, remembered a heart pounding against a ribcage in a way he wasn’t yet familiar with, remembered asking his mother on the days when she felt well enough to leave her bedroom why his father never seemed to want to stay. ’This is supposed to be his home,’ he’d said, ’and people are supposed to want to be home.’ And his mother went quiet, looked down at her hands, tried to think of something to say, some way to explain away anger too big to fit inside a body so small. ’People do things sometimes,’ she told him, ’Not because they want to. Because they have to. Because some things need doing. Your father does important work, Scotty. He does what he has to do.’

He learned to hate that phrase over the years. He does what he has to do. Even after his father died doing what he had to do, even after he took Scott’s mother with him, the phrase lingered. It was one Sinister used in that basement lab, one he hummed as he poked needles into veins and pulled memories from an already fractured mind. It was one Winters sneered when he kicked Scott in the ribs so hard he heard something crack. It was one Erik clung to with missiles pointed at a city full of people Scott loved.

And it was one Scott used when he took off his glasses and painted the whole world red.

Erik wasn’t very different from the rest of the fathers who’d let him down over the years. Scott knew that now. He wasn’t entirely separate from Christopher Summers, from Nathaniel Essex, from Jack Winters. They all clung to the same excuse, all hurt people and offered themselves an easy out in the process. Erik wasn’t very different from them at all. But neither was Scott.

If he voiced the concern to her, Jean would reassure him. Scott was sure of as much. She’d tell him that he’d saved lives doing what he did, remind him that Erik hadn’t offered much of a choice. She’d tell him everything he needed to hear, and she’d make him feel better in the process. That was exactly why Scott hadn’t told her his thoughts aloud. Jean would comfort him, and Scott wasn’t sure he deserved comfort. He wasn’t sure he deserved forgiveness. And redemption, he knew, wasn’t an option at all. You couldn’t be redeemed from a thing like this. Once that blood was on your hands, it stayed there. You could never get it out from beneath your nails.

But… Jean was offering him a chance to come as close to fixing things as was possible. Bringing Erik back sans Phoenix wouldn’t undo the damage that had been done. Scott knew from experience that raising the dead didn’t heal the wounds they’d left behind, but it was something. And god, he couldn’t keep doing nothing. Anything was better than that.

So he was here. In a lab he felt fundamentally uncomfortable in, with a man he hardly knew, planning on doing the impossible for someone he’d killed himself. His palms itched and his chest ached and his eyes were heavy with all the sleep he’d missed since Erik’s death, but he was here. And he hoped that could count for something.

“Can you restrain him, if necessary?” He looked to Jean, nervous energy flittering in his chest. “He may need time to… calm down.” There was every chance he’d be angry, when he came back. Scott certainly had been, and there was a letter in the Bugle to prove it. And Erik…

Erik had always done anger better than anyone.

BRUCE: Assumptions disappointed and killed more people than anything else in the world. When Bruce was young, he thought it was because disappointed weighed you down like boulders tied to your ankles in quicksand, but as the scientist had aged, he found that it wasn’t because the feeling was so heavy - it was because assumptions were akin to hope. Hope spread like a disease: clogged your arteries, confused the mind, and chased happiness down like catfish in a barrel.

Hope, on its own, could save lives. Could bring a dead man back to life under the skilled hands of a mutant and a man who belonged nowhere - could salvage what little tenderness resided in a heart made of stone. And in the very next second, it could slit the wrists of the person wielding it. It starts as a small trickle of blood that eventually bleeds you dry without you knowing, Bruce thought, large hands pulling open a gaudy blue menu, full of numbers and operations that, with hope, man could understand.

Bruce didn’t know the X-Men very well. Knew Logan from the few times they were forced to cross paths in laboratories just like this one, but not much else. Knew what he’d read in the papers and knew how Erik Lehnsherr should probably stay dead.

In his apparent all-mighty knowing (that he’d likely adapted from Tony), he also knew what assumptions did to good people who were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

While he hadn’t seen Scott and Jean very often, Bruce couldn’t imagine they looked this exhausted all of the time. While hero-ing and saving and destroying often took a toll on your mental and physical health, the look that they carried said ‘I’m pleading for hope, and this is the last place I have left to look.’ Bruce thought, for just a moment as he booted up the core CRADLE systems, that he’d probably worn that look too many times in his life too. Half-naked in the streets of Harlem, showing up in the rain on Tony Stark’s doorstep, visiting his mother’s grave with a clenched fist and flowers she would never get to see, or on the faces of the other monks at the Phuktal monastery in Zanskar when they finally learned of his story, who Bruce Banner really was.

Yet, he continued to hope that somehow things would change. That someone would bandage his wrists and tell him he could stop bleeding for the sins of others - do the right things because they felt right, sleep at night because it was OK if he stopped to rest, eat because it was alright to have something in his stomach other than regret.

People always assumed Bruce Banner was always battling for control, hoped that he wouldn’t let go of himself. Bruce always wondered if tomorrow would finally be the day he wouldn’t wake up again.

Staring down at Erik’s lifeless, bio-illuminated face inside of the CRADLE vault, Bruce wanted Erik to wake up. Whether it was for the right reasons or not, he wanted Erik to wake up. Licking his lips, Bruce gave Scott a somewhat sad smile, brows furrowed, “I think if things get out of control, I’ve got it covered.” We have it covered, his ridiculously sardonic brain reminded him unhelpfully. Even his mind and body were not his own - out of his control.

The stillness within the lab seemed almost clinical, if it weren’t for the fact that they were about to scientifically reconstitute living cells in an organically preserved carcass of someone they all considered a friend. “To be fair to Erik, I’d probably be pretty -“ Happy, “- mad if someone I trusted off’d me too.” The joke fell flat between them, and the chemical hiss of the CRADLE as it began to pre-register every input that he had settled into the machine filled in the silence for him. “I would say ‘ready when you are’ but I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready, so. It’s more ‘ready when you go because I have to be ready,’ haha.”

JEAN: Everything about this was a bad idea. Jean had fought between her head and her heart for as long as she could remember, and right now her stomach was squirming and her mind was screaming at her to stop, to leave well enough alone, to leave because Banner was a master scientist, but he needed their energy levels to make this work. She wrung her hands together as she looked down at the CRADLE and thought about that night, the couple of minutes that changed their lives completely. Erik stood there, argued with them that genocide could be an option. He turned into the very monster he’d been fighting since he was a child, and he saw nothing wrong with it.

Some people may say that was just Magneto. Jean knew better -- she had to know better. If she loved that man as much as she had, if she trusted him, then that meant there was something good in him, something worth protecting. That meant it was the Phoenix that caused him to stand there, thumb hovering over the metaphorical trigger. It was the Phoenix that almost had him killing her friends, her former students, even mutants who still resided on the other side of the bay.

He wasn’t thinking straight. He wasn’t thinking like himself. And when he came back, just as when she came back from Zatanna taking her out on the lawn of her childhood home, he would understand that. He would thank them, for doing what was necessary -- because he was the one who taught her how to do that.

Sentimentality had no place in war, Jean knew that, but she did what she did for him. She wouldn’t have his legacy tarnished by one final decision made in the heat of a cosmic flame.

“I can hold him,” she said. She was confident in that much. There was a reason why she wasn’t taking the risk of using the Phoenix, even if it was a tried and true method. She would stop it from fracturing into him again -- or anyone again -- if she could help it at all. “No,” Jean countered, turning around to Bruce. Softening her voice, she repeated, “No. You’re here as a scientist -- to help. If he’s going to lash out at anyone, it’ll be us.” Me, she thought to herself. If anyone touched a hair on Scott’s head, she’d never forgive herself … and chances were it would go a lot more south than she intended when she was trying to repair bridges.

She touched against the top of the CRADLE, ran her eyes quickly over the calculations flying across the screen. “There’s a reason I asked you, you know,” she said to Bruce. “Because I knew you’d understand it was more than just offing someone who was inconvenient. It was…” Mercy? The word itself seemed like an insult. “I thought of all people,” she continued, “you’d understand why we needed a Plan B.”

It wasn’t a personal secret. It had been broadcast over the TV, radio, newspapers. The self loathing that followed after Banner and the Hulk was comparable to that of Scott and Jean themselves. They’d never had pride in what they were unless they were trained to -- conditioned to. And from what Jean read in Stark’s mind, she knew Banner had contingency plans. The Hulkbuster armor, a series of arrows, certain poisons that would at least slow him down if not kill him if push came to shove.

“Erik didn’t know what she was doing,” Jean said, and her voice was far firmer on account of looking at Scott when she said it than she thought herself capable. “He doesn’t deserve to die for someone else’s mistakes.” A beat passed, a breath taken, and Jean nodded. “Start the process.”

SCOTT: Even without the Phoenix, paranoia ate at Scott’s gut like a disease. He’d never been a trusting man, not after a childhood wracked by grief and betrayal, and after everything that had happened since… Without a little doubt clinging to his fractured mind, he wouldn’t have made it as long as he had. He wouldn’t be alive now if not for his healthy dose of uncertainty.

(But was he alive at all? Did this count as living? He was clay and bone, an inanimate thing Jean had breathed life into, a body the Phoenix had claimed. Was living the proper word for what he was doing, or was it one assigned to him because no one knew any better term? How many times could a dead thing die? Maybe they were about to find out.)

This paranoia made him tense at Banner’s presence, made him uncertain and uneasy, made him shift and tighten at the reminder that the room was not occupied by his family alone. It was Scott, it was Jean, it was the empty shell of the man they had loved and killed, and it was Banner. It was them, and it was an Avenger. And they needed him, Scott knew. They needed him to ensure that this wasn’t a repeat of Jean standing over Scott’s grave on Valentine’s Day, needed an outside influence to ensure they wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes and call it a solution, but Scott was uneasy all the same. .

Banner swore he could handle it if Erik got out of control… but Scott looked to Jean anyways, didn’t relax until she confirmed that she would be able to hold him if she had to. The ease of tension didn’t last long before Banner spoke again and Scott tightened all over, wound tighter than a spring ready to take off. “If you’d rather have let him kill eight million people…” His voice was tight and sharp and unnecessary. It had been a joke, Scott knew, a poorly timed one, perhaps a tasteless one, but still a joke. But Scott Summers wasn’t known for his sense of humor.

(Scott Summers wasn’t known for anything decent at all. He hadn’t been for a long time now, and he was aware that it was a perception that predated the Phoenix’s reign of his body. He’d never been a good person. The things the Phoenix talked him in to doing only cemented a fact everyone else had always already known.)

Glancing to Jean, Scott let his lungs deflate, let the breath that was caught there escape in a quiet sigh. Erik didn’t know what he was doing. She sounded so sure of it, so positive, but… Scott had known what he was doing, with the bird ravaging his mind. He had known every step he took, been aware of every word he said. And maybe he wouldn’t have said them without the firebird insisting they needed to be said, but he would have thought them all the same. Maybe he wouldn’t have written a letter to the Bugle or killed police officers who stood in his way or participated in an insurrection against the government of a country he’d only ever wanted to belong to, but he wasn’t sure he would have thought those things were wrong, either.

It wasn’t entirely fair to say that Erik hadn’t been himself, but Scott wouldn’t argue it, either. He wouldn’t tell Jean that he wasn’t sure the bird absolved Erik of his sins, wouldn’t admit that he didn’t believe it absolved him of his, because doing so would mean saying that Jean wasn’t free of hers, either. And Scott loved her far too much to breathe that sentence to life, even if it might have been true.

“He deserves a second chance,” he said, because he believed that, if nothing else. Erik deserved a second chance because everyone did, because Scott had gotten more than his fair share and this was what he’d done with them, because Erik had suffered so much and worked so hard and he’d deserved a better end than the one Scott gave him. “So let’s give him one.”

BRUCE: It took a lot, for someone like Bruce to keep their comments to themselves. Even with the thought of his father barreling him down with a glass whiskey bottle, Bruce still piped up when it was not his place. He’d watched plenty of curses take the lives of people who didn’t necessarily deserve it - but Bruce knew from personal experience, just like the other people in that room, that Erik knew what he was doing. Likely deserved to pay some sort of penance for his actions. But Bruce also thought, calibrating the machine, that maybe knowing what kind of monster lurked beneath the skin was enough of a punishment in itself.

“I won’t say I understand,” The scientist started, initiating launch sequence, a loud hiss coming from the chamber beside them, hearing an echo of Tony’s voice in his head. Yeah, buddy. I’ll strike you down in cold blood if need be. Tony waving him off a moment later to talk about some sport neither of them gave a damn about. How hard had it been for Jean and Scott to make the decision to put Erik down? “But I get it. How much you want it, I mean.” How much you want the monster to be imaginary, he thought.

The hissing grew louder, echoing off of the metal room within the lab, numbers flying across Bruce’s panel and a loading bar appearing for the sequence duration. The ominous glowing green had Bruce shutting his eyes tightly for a moment, remembering the day the bomb went off. The gamma seeping into every fibre of his being - the excruciating pain he felt the first time Hulk entered his mind. Bruce wondered if maybe a piece of Erik would be missing too, when it was all over. If the Phoenix would gauge a hole in him that nothing could ever fill again.

“Go, Jean.”

ERIK: He’d been fifteen when Shaw had conducted the experiment that changed his life. Strapped to a table in the middle of the man’s lab in Auschwitz, leather strap between his teeth, Erik had been terrified by the manic look in the doctor’s eyes as he readied a syringe. The other doctor had been there, too, the one everyone in the camp knew only as Nosferatu, the one who never had his subjects come back to their bunks. Erik was scared of Shaw, but that one had his adrenaline pounding extra hard, noxious fear making his mind spin as he struggled to watch the two men out of the corner of his eyes.

He hadn’t realized he’d been shaking the metal table beneath him until Shaw turned to him and clicked his tongue, and Erik made a concerted effort to rein his powers back in—from the table, from the needle, from everything, because the last time he’d lost control, Shaw had pinned him down and broken his arm in two places.

Shaw finished his prep work and rolled over to the side of the table, the other man at his shoulder, watching with a detached gaze that made Erik feel like a butterfly pinned to a board. Shaw had brushed his hand through Erik’s hair as if he were trying to calm a spooked horse, shushing him as he readied the needle.

“This is my gift to you, Max,” he’d smiled. ”So you can be like me. Like us.” And then he’d slid the needle into his arm and pressed the plunger, and everything felt like it was on fire. He’d discovered later what the man meant, what ‘gift’ he’d bestowed on him in those labs.

Life. Too much of it. He’d been 93 years old, facing off against his children in the silo, and he’d scarcely looked into his forties. His cells aged slowly the way Shaw’s had, and he’d hated it, hated that the man couldn’t simply be relegated to memory.

When Scott had flipped the visor, Erik had died. But his cells hadn’t quite done the same—had sat in stasis through his burial, through his exhumation, through his settling into the Cradle and the tests that led up to the flood of energy that finally sparked his neurons back to life.

His heart beat once. Twice. His chest heaved as he dragged air into his lungs for the first time since the silo.

They tell you that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. They don’t tell you that it does the same thing when you come back.

Over the years, Erik had carefully constructed mental walls to keep unwanted memories at bay. Charles had once remarked that his mind was one of the most organized he’d ever been in, neatly linear and uncluttered by anything except The Goal and The Plan.

You wouldn’t know it, now.

The first thing he was aware of was that his mind felt empty, somehow, like he was missing a limb. He’d had a cosmic force that devoured worlds tucked in alongside his own consciousness for so long that its absence was jarring. Almost as jarring as the realization that all those walls were so much rubble.

Erik opened his eyes, saw a lab, and those memories of Shaw that should’ve been locked away assaulted him all at once. Terror, not helped by the realization that he was contained.

Get out get out get out get out.

The top of the Cradle slammed open, and Erik sat up, powers already stretching around the room, wrapping around whatever metal was in reach. Natural, unbidden, just reaching, leaving pens and tools hovering in the air above where they’d been resting. Defensive instincts long-honed seizing on anything that could be a weapon before he could even identify the threat.

And then he saw them.

“I love you, but I can’t love this.” Jean’s face, stone cold.

“You’ll be grateful I stopped you, later.” Scott’s fingers, perfectly steady on his glasses.

Betrayal from two of the people he loved and trusted most. ( But he should have expected that, shouldn’t he? Shaw’s voice, warning him that “sentiment will be the death of you if you let it, my boy.” Magda running away, Charles turning on him, sending an army of children after him—He should have known, always, and yet. )

Fury reared its head, as it always did, and Erik felt the beginning brushes of Jean’s mind against his and realized that those walls were gone, too, and no. No, no, no, no no.

<<Get OUT.>>

The sentiment was punctuated by the hovering metal around the room all flying toward the couple at once as Erik hauled himself out of the Cradle.

Jean didn’t even need to interfere, because the second his feet his the floor, a wall of exhaustion slammed into him. The Phoenix had been able to keep him going through almost no sleep for months, but without its energy in his mind, all that time putting off his body’s needs crashed into him at once.

His legs gave out from under him, and the airborne metal hit the floor at the same time he did.

Someone else was at his side, moving to help, and Erik snarled before he even realized who it was. “Don’t touch me.” Banner—it was Banner, and he was safe-ish, wasn’t he? Erik didn’t know if anyone was, couldn’t relax—stopped, hand halfway to his shoulder, and Erik curled his fists and shook his head as he tried to get the flood of memories clamoring for attention to settle.

“Make them leave. Get them out.” He was in no condition to be dealing with them—mind too loud, powers too weak. Maybe once, that wouldn’t have been a problem.

But he didn’t trust either of them. Not. One. Bit.

JEAN: Bruce wasn’t going to forgive them. He could say he understood a part of it, while distancing himself from the darkest aspects of what they had done -- the darkest aspects of the forces they were playing with now. The Phoenix remained silent in the back of her mind, though it was never true silence. That would imply some degree of calm, and Jean hadn’t known what that felt like since … God, since she was ten years old, maybe before. The Phoenix’s absence from this occasion said all it needed to about her stance. She thought Jean should’ve asked her. She thought they could’ve worked together, that Jean would turn to her and beg, that she’d regret what she’d done.

Regret that Erik was dead, perhaps. Regret over the actions she had taken to prevent something worse … not exactly. Charles drummed into her since she was fourteen years old that to be truly useful in this world, you needed to protect the downtrodden. To be truly good, you had to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves, defend those who would never forgive you for making yourself bleed on their behalf. The city of New York had done nothing for Jean Grey but rip her apart and refuse to put her back together again. The people hated her, splashed her husband’s face in graffiti, treated her father like a lunatic in the press.

But that didn’t mean she’d let them die. It was the same principle she extended here, standing over the CRADLE, watching the mechanisms begin to shift. (Did Stark know they were here, she wondered? He trusted Banner, she’d picked up on that much -- but from what she understood of Iron Man, he was a pragmatist. A logistician, at his core. He would say this was a terrible idea. Jean understood where that impression could come from.)

Everyone deserved forgiveness. The Phoenix had hurt, had ripped them apart, made them commit so many atrocities -- but this was the first step in giving a second chance, in piecing together the things Jean had broken.

But, again, that didn’t mean Jean was blindly trusting. Her intelligence wasn’t the first thing people thought of, when they thought of her (and she knew, of course, courtesy of hearing every goddamn ‘compliment’ that went through every person’s head), but it was something that only grew with experience. The CRADLE burst open, and Jean already had protective shields formed around Scott, around Bruce, and a split second later, around herself.

The metal dropped, though. The invisible shields remained in place, even if she knew Erik would assume their presence. The CRADLE hissed, smoke still rising from the chamber. The lights flickered, the walls shook, electricity in the air made her hair go static—

And Erik was standing in front of her. Erik was standing in front of her, eyebrows furrowed, jaw clenched, hands curled into fists by his side. Chest moving, breaths heaving. He was angry, always angry, angrier than she’d ever seen him -- but he was alive.

(Was that all that mattered? Rictor said, once, she over-simplified it. Breathing alone wasn’t enough to keep a person alive, but it was the first step. It was the foundations. Jean always had faith that could lead to something else.)

There was a beat of relief, a wash that went through her chest and relieved the tension that had curled into it (she could tell Lorna she brought her dad back), and then a moment where she realised it wasn’t dad she thought when she looked at this man. It was something else, something foreign, like looking at a stranger.

She’d mourned him, Jean reminded herself. She’d sat, curled in his seat, looking around at the books in his office. She’d taken a blanket from his home during the funeral, tried to find his smell under whiskey and cigar smoke. She’d mourned him, she’d loved him, and the first words that left his mouth…

Well, she had expected it. She had expected it, but there was a part of Jean that hoped, against all odds, just as there had always been.

“Last time we left,” she replied, coolly, keeping her hands stiff by her sides and her feet firmly on the ground, “you almost caused the Third World War. I’d like to make sure that’s not going to happen again.” If that meant Bruce and Scott remained wrapped in a telekinetic shield, if it meant she took the brunt of the flames, so be it.

Jean was used to the fire.

SCOTT: The process, once it happened, wasn’t a slow one. It was strange, watching it play out. Scott had never been present for this part before. He’d watched people he loved die so many times that the images were etched on the back of his eyelids, playing out like a movie projected on a sheet. He could rewind, pause, fast forward, take it from the top. Those moments were a part of him. And he’d had people come back to him, too, of course. Jean walking up to the Institute doors with her hands clasped together so tightly her knuckles were white, like a prayer and an answer all at once. Illyana showing up again years after she’d died, breathing and wild-eyed. He watched people die and saw them lowered into their graves, watched them walk back through the door after the dirt had settled, but this? The only resurrection Scott had ever been present for was his own, and there had been nothing miraculous about that. Nothing good, nothing incredible.

This was different. This wasn’t the Phoenix, wasn’t a cosmic force that described a curse as a blessing. This was some hodgepodge mix of science and telepathy that Scott doubted he’d ever entirely understand. Part of him hadn’t expected it to work at all, had thought the most they’d do was desecrate the corpse of a man who’d more than earned his right to rest, but he’d gone along anyway because Jean had asked him to and Scott had been bad at saying no to her since she took his hand on that park bench decades ago and asked him to stay. The Phoenix was like playing with fire, but this? This was more akin to trying to shape water into something tangible. Scott’s expectations hadn’t been high.

But they should have been. He should have understood that Jean Grey (Jean Summers) never failed at something she’d put her mind and heart into, should have remembered that she was the same girl who’d convinced a sullen, quiet boy that he was a thing worth loving, should have understood that she would move heaven and earth for the people she loved and that Erik, for all his faults, was one of them.

The Cradle slammed open. The metal in the room began to hum, hovering free of gravity. A familiar shield engulfed him, invisible and protective. And Erik Lehnsherr was revived the same way he had died --- suddenly, violently, and with a love so great that there was room for little else besides it.

There was a moment where the world stood still. Everything hung motionless. Scott held his breath, swore that his heart stopped beating for an instant, swore that the blood stopped pumping through his veins as the world waited to right itself again. And then it did, and everything came crashing back down in an instant. The anger slammed into the room like a train obliterating everything left on the tracks, like a car crash of rage and betrayal and grief and defeat. Erik was alive, and he was angry. Scott couldn’t blame him for that, couldn’t fault it. If not for Jean, he would have accepted whatever punishment felt necessary, would have let himself be skewered for his sins.

(“You don’t have to be a martyr,” Warren told him once. ”You don’t have to shoulder every mistake. You’re allowed to forgive yourself, Scott. You’re allowed to move on.” And he might have tried that if anyone had ever told him how. He might have done it if it hadn’t seemed so impossible, so unreal. How could you get out from under something that stretched the length of the whole sky above you? How could you get away from something that was a part of you? It only sounded easy if you’d never felt it before.)

But Jean was there, was shielding him, was protecting him no matter how little he deserved it. The metal dropped to the ground, and the shields stayed up. The anger remained. And with it, the guilt. The grief. The betrayal.

Scott stayed quiet, eyes darting away from Erik and back to Jean. She was hurt. He could feel it through the bond, see it in her posture. She wasn’t surprised, but she was hurt, and he ached with her. He’d wanted a happier resolution to this, a better end, but it had been a fool’s dream. Jean forgave Zatanna when she took the Phoenix down, just as Scott forgave Logan when he ended his suffering on that grassy knoll in Central Park. There were people, he knew that were easy to forgive. There were people good enough, decent enough, that forgiving them came as simply as breathing, as blinking, as turning your head. There were people who were easy to forgive because they were easy to love, because you wanted them in your life no matter the cost.

Scott had never been one of them.

BRUCE: Bruce wasn’t sure what he had been expecting. If there was one well-known thing about Erik Lehnsherr, at least to the public, it was that he was very focused. For good, for bad, he had the insight of an owl and the determination of a bull. Apparently, even in death, in exhaustion, he was equally so. He wondered if he would ever get to feel death. If it would always elude him like many other things in life; happiness, a home, a family, somewhere he felt safe.

He thought, for a moment, maybe he had been a little jealous of Erik. That Jean didn’t have the right to take that away from him, no matter how much he would be missed.

Jean’s protective barrier didn’t seem to move him. Emotionally of course, because her raw power was enough to match Erik’s, and he could take the static in the air like the Kansas plains right before a tornado came through. How many people would he stand beside who were more convicted than him? What kind of hurts did they hold, and why did they hurt enough to bring Erik back? ( Why did he bring Erik back? )

“Hey, buddy - it’s — hey. Let’s not do anything drastic,” Like accidentally murder someone else, haha — “I know you’re angry. Totally get it,” Bruce slowly approached with scuffed dress shoes, each click of their rubber soles sounding like a gunshot in the suddenly too-quiet room. He couldn’t imagine having that kind of power - to make everyone notice when he was there and also when he wasn’t. “But you’re going to be really dehydrated in a hot minute if you don’t let me help you up, okay?”

Bruce spared a look for his two companions, and maybe Jean was right. Maybe he was someone who could understand what they’d been through. That if someone had to save Bruce from himself, he would at least want it to be someone he cared about. Clint, Tony, Steve. He would never ask Nat to do it - she’d been made enough times to be a stone-hearted killer, Bruce wouldn’t add to that.

Although he didn’t really know either of them well enough, he could tell when somebody cared enough to still be there after you’d disappointed them. Jean thought Erik would be disappointed, stayed anyway. Would anyone care enough to stick around for him too?

Gently, as if approaching a spooked animal, Bruce placed calloused fingers on an expensive funeral suit, surprised when he electricity in the room didn’t shock him on contact. The ever-present scientist in him placed that interesting tidbit of knowledge in a file for future examination. Maybe because Hulk’s skin was like reinforced rubber? Was he a grounding material? Could that be something helpful in the future, like making schools safer during storms, or for severe weather shelters for the homeless—

“If you want them to leave, they’ll leave,” Bruce promised, not looking back at the couple again. He supposed the situation really wasn’t about them.

ERIK: Everything was too much. His mind felt like it had been ransacked, left in tatters as his previous cohabitant had rifled through memories and motivations alike to trim down only to what was useful. Tweaking perceptions, ramping up the paranoia.

Not paranoid enough, some part of him noted wryly.

Bruce's fingers wrapped gently around his shoulder, tone and stance reminiscent of the way they used to handle shell-shocked soldiers. He stiffened under the touch, knuckles going white against the floor, but he didn't shake him off. Reached up and dragged himself to his feet again, even if he swayed, even if the room spun a bit around him and wavered black at the edges. He needed food, he needed water, he needed sleep.

More importantly, he needed to get out of the presence of the two people who had murdered him before he lost control entirely. Scott was standing there in silence, expression torn between surprise and guilt, and there was none of Erik that had the capacity to feel anything but disgust for the man right now. It didn't take a genius to put together who had led the charge in the silo, who'd been calling the shots. Scott was a good little soldier. A good little husband. "Bird got your tongue?" Scott didn't have the Phoenix anymore, that much was clear--guilt wouldn't be anywhere in his face if it was. But the point stood regardless, and Erik didn't care that Jean always got tetchy when he so much as breathed a negative word in Scott's direction.

(Somewhat hysterically, he wondered if he'd make her mad enough to kill him again. Maybe he should--the time between his death and now was rapidly flitting away from his mind, but he remembered warmth, remembered family, and part of him wanted to claw it back.)

Jean's words had him choking on a laugh, and Erik nearly snarled at her across the Cradle, fingers pressing dents into the metal. "If that's what you're worried about, why am I back?" he hissed. And oh, there were other questions that came crashing on him, then.

"FRIDAY," he said, because he wasn't sure he could trust anyone in this room except the machine he could feel thrumming in the walls around them. "What's today's date?"

"February 21, 2021, Mr. Lehnsherr."

February. Two months. Two months.

Scott Summers had been resurrected a week to the day from his death. Jean had been so grief-stricken, so heartbroken, that she had moved heaven and earth and death itself to bring him back after just a week without him.

Two months. He hated that there was a part of him that was wounded by that fact almost more than the murder itself. There had always been two reasons that he was kept around, two reasons that people kept him close: love or use. She hadn't brought him back because she missed him or because Lorna did, which meant she must need him to do something—

Lorna.

The world constricted once again, because Lorna wasn't here. Her father was being resurrected, and she wasn't here. Erik knew his powers could scarcely reach across the room let alone the bay, but g-d if he didn't try anyway, breath caught in his throat. He felt the room tip at the exertion before he stopped, kept upright only by the tight grip on the Cradle and Bruce's hand at his back.

"Where is Lorna? Where is my daughter?!"

If she was dead, and they'd brought him back to a world without her, he would drag them all back to the grave with him.

JEAN: She’d never been the kind of woman who lived on an island. Her mind was tattered, splintered into pieces that could cut intruders like knives, ever since the Phoenix rushed into her body so many years ago and refused to leave. Jean never made sense, she knew, to the people around her. She burned too bright or not at all. She went hot or far too cold. She was capable of almost pathological compartmentalisation, or she saw everything at once so the picture was too damn big for anyone else to understand. She loved and loathed in equal measure, and she was, above all else, not the kind of woman who was easy to digest. Easy to adore, perhaps, but so many people desired to get close to the fire before they truly knew what it meant to be burned. There were so few who saw the worst of her and stayed.

Scott was one of them. If anyone touched a hair on his head -- even someone she considered family, someone who was more blood than anyone else on the planet -- she would rip them into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind without hesitation, without guilt, without grief. But there was another person who looked at her in all her chaos, in her fear, in her self hatred and mania, and who said, this girl is worth trusting. There was another person who approached her in the wreckage of other people’s lives and said it wasn’t her fault, that she held a great gift inside of her, and the only way to control it was to refuse to control it, to embrace it instead.

Erik had been that person. Erik knelt down in front of a child and he reached to her even when the rest of the world was pulling back. He gave her a safe place to rest, gave her logic, pragmatism, gave her a path that she followed long after he was gone. And then he was on the other side of a battlefield, throwing buses at her friends and threatening everything the X-Men were fighting for, and she was told to defeat him at any cost.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps there could only ever be Jean alive or Erik. Maybe having them both here at once, occupying the same space, defied some kind of cosic deity -- defied the Phoenix. Because as Jean looked at Erik, her chest tightening and her throat burning, the Phoenix was conspicuously silent. Conspicuously void of opinion, for one of the first times in living history.

Then Bruce opened his mouth, and the bird came back to life. We could kill him next, she offered.

“We’re not killing anyone.” It took a breath, just a second, for Jean to realise she said those words out loud, that she’d turned her head to the side as if a friend was standing right there -- as if Maddie was beside her (why was she thinking of Maddie, now, as if she was a shadow? As if she was someone lingering, constantly, even when she wasn’t here physically? Was it because they’d done it together, the three of them, and so it made sense to picture her now?) Jean collected herself, levelled a look at Erik as her eyes burned, too.

She wouldn’t cry. She refused to. But God, it would be so easy to let those tears spill, to fall to her knees, to run towards him like she was an eleven year old girl who’d lost everything that mattered to her in the world and he had all the answers.

But he was insulting her husband. He’d threatened the safety, the peace, of their entire people. He messed with Kara’s head, threatened Rictor, almost started another World War. She couldn’t forget that.

“I didn’t want you dead, Erik,” she said, as simply as she could. There were a hundred other things she could say. She could tell him how she knew the Phoenix felt in him, how it twisted everything, how it made things so simple and so complicated all at the same time. She could vindicate him, could say this wasn’t his fault -- but the way he was looking at her now…

(Maybe there was always meant to be one, in the end.)

She knew where his mind went, when he asked for the date. “I didn’t want to use her,” she said, because he deserved something of an explanation. “I couldn’t.”

You could have. Haven’t I helped you before? Haven’t I made things so beautiful—

“We needed you back,” Jean said, “not someone else. I found another way. It took some time, but …” It worked, clearly. It worked so far as there was breath in his lungs now and color in his cheeks. If that was the definition of life, they’d succeeded -- but Jean knew it was far more complicated than that. “Lorna’s alive,” she continued. “She’s safe, and she knows we’re here. I wanted to make sure we were … that she stayed that way.”

The Erik she knew would’ve wanted her paranoid, if it came to Lorna. He would’ve wanted her to take every precaution when dealing with something as unpredictable as life and death. Yet, as she stood there looking at someone who felt as much like a stranger as he had on that very first day they faced off in the middle of New York City, she wasn’t entirely sure he would see it like that now.

SCOTT: Banner’s voice was like radio static, something there-and-not-there in a way Scott had grown accustomed to as a teenager when the world became like a television with no static and he began to understand why his mother locked herself in her room for days at a time, why she spent so many afternoons in bed. It shut out the world sometimes, made him his thoughts and nothing else. Banner was there. Erik was there. Jean was there. And Scott wasn’t. Scott was in a silo, in a hospital waiting room, in a grave. Banner was promising he’d leave as if he knew how, Jean was throwing a shield around him as if there was something left to protect, Erik was---

---Erik was speaking to him. The realization dawned slowly, like a wave lapping your feet on a beach, covering them with sand slowly and quickly all at once in a way you didn’t realize until the pressure was there cementing you to the ground. It took Scott’s mind a moment to catch up with his ears, a moment for the words to register. It always did, when he got like this. When the world was radio static and his mind hopped from one place to the next like Kurt’s teleportation, like a superpower that took him to every place he’d never wanted to be.

Bird got your tongue? The words came to him, slow and deliberate, and for a moment he felt like he was twelve years old, like he was standing in Essex’s lab with his arms stiff at his side and his eyes locked to his feet, like fingers would come in at any moment to grip his chin and force it upwards, force eye contact. (Essex was the last person he’d looked in the eyes before the world went red and a pair of lenses separated him from everything he saw. He thought of that sometimes, what it meant. What it said.) For a moment, there was an echo of another man’s voice, decades ago but just as cold, just as disgusted. Come on, Scott. You’re so much prettier when you smile.

He flinched. He didn’t mean to, but he did. And it wasn’t fair, he knew. Scott was not a victim here. (And maybe he hadn’t been a victim back then, either. Maybe Essex had never done anything he didn’t have coming. Maybe if he were better, smarter, easier to love, things could have been different. Maybe - ) Scott had killed Erik, had opened his eyes and turned the whole world red, and maybe Erik was angry now but he had a right to be. Scott Summers was not Zatanna Zatara. He was not Logan. He was not a person who had done a favor for a friend, not someone who was only doing what his would-be victim asked him to do. What he did was his choice, his decision. No one forced him. No one made him. And maybe he’d only damned himself to save Erik from the same fate, but that didn’t make him any less damned. Did it?

Scott stayed silent, and the world kept moving around him. Time went slower, he’d found, without the Phoenix coloring it. The loss of immortality made every moment a mountain, every second a marathon. He watched realization dawn in Erik’s eyes in slow motion, watched anger turn to grief turn to fear. And Jean spoke, but it wasn’t---

It wasn’t to Erik. It wasn’t to Banner, it wasn’t to Scott. It was to someone else. Scott could almost feel her in the room, like a phantom limb. The Phoenix. Had Jean ever spoken to her aloud before? (He had, towards the end. He remembered it. Pacing in his room, muttering to himself. It was one of the things that made him realize the line had been crossed, one of the things that made him realize he was going, going, gone. His heart dropped into his stomach and his chest felt tight. Jean had a handle on this. She had to. She had to.)

He tuned back in to the conversation, listened as Jean insisted that they’d done what they’d done to ensure they resurrected Erik and not something else. A strangled sound escaped from the back of Scott’s throat at that, and he cursed himself for drawing the attention back to him. Given the opportunity, Scott had always preferred to exist in the peripheral. To be seen and not heard, the way he’d been taught by his father, Essex, Winters. “If we’d taken shortcuts,” he said, because the attention was on him and if he didn’t make it seem like he had something to say then it might stay that way, “we wouldn’t have solved any problems. Take it from me, that isn’t… It’s not how you want to come back.” An apologetic glance to Jean, the echo of a statement he didn’t dare repeat. Maybe we were better off dead. “Lorna’s safe. You’re safe. Genosha, New York… It’s all safe. We just wanted to keep it that way. That’s all.”

BRUCE: Every word Scott breathed made Bruce’s chest feel tighter and tighter. Safe, like Erik wasn’t capable of controlling himself. Safe, as if something really got out of control, they couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t handle him.

If Erik had needed to be put down because he was a danger to society and he hadn’t even hurt anyone yet, then what did that make Bruce?

Unbeknownst to him, lost in his thoughts, Bruce’s skin under his lab-coat began to turn an eerie shade of green, spiderwebbing out from under his sleeve and onto the fist that gripped Erik’s suit, holding the man up like he was Bruce’s lifeline. “Don’t talk to him like that.” The words sounded echo-y and far-away, like someone had smashed pots and pans together beside his ears and just let them ring. His throat felt full, like he’d been drooling for days and had forgotten to swallow. If they loved him so much, then they wouldn’t have killed him when it became inconvenient.

Would they have?

Hulk roared in the pit of his stomach, startling him into a barely noticeable jump. Gripping Erik tighter, green creeping into the corners of his vision, Bruce managed a not-so-controlled, “I’ve got it from here. You guys’ve done enough, right?” He hated, how much like his father he sounded when his ridiculous Dayton-Ohio-accent came out with his words.

Hated feeling like a monster, in front of judgmental eyes. Bruce may not have known Jean or Scott very well, but he couldn’t trust them any farther than he could throw them. As Banner, anyway. “I’ll make sure he ‘stays out of trouble.’” The words dripped with poorly hidden malice, maybe some misguided hurt, and he couldn’t hold eye contact with either of them anymore. Instead, he focused on Erik. Fed off of his exhaustion and hoped that maybe they could trade places. That maybe the next person that came knocking could put him down instead.

“FRIDAY? Can you make sure my floor is set to 75 degrees? He’s probably going to be a little cold, as tired as he is.” Licking his lips, Bruce cocked an eyebrow, still staring at the ground as if to say ‘Anything else?’

ERIK: Lorna's alive. It was buried in their responses, between excuses and explanations and lies he didn't care to hear, but it was there, nonetheless. Lorna was alive, and some of the panic that had filled his lungs like cement dissipated. Lorna was alive.

With that assurance, it was easier to focus on the rest of what they said. Safe, safe, safe, safe, safe....

(Alles ist gut, alles ist gut--)

And that was funny, wasn't it--absolutely hysterical, and the laughter bubbled up out of his chest before he realized it was coming.

We needed you back. Not someone else. (And it was needed, wasn't it, not wanted--)

It's not how you want to come back. The metal groaned under his fingers, lights flickering for as his voice rose. "What made you think that I wanted to come back?" he snapped, voice cracking for a moment. Just a moment.

Get it together. He cleared his throat, shook off the edges of black tinting his vision, marshalled his focus into staying on his feet. Don't show weakness. (Too late, too late, too late--)

"It doesn't really matter, does it? Because you needed me. And here. I. Am. My life was a problem. My death was a problem. How long do I get the floor this time, Jean?"

He stared across the Cradle at Scott, expression stuck in a strange space between anger and pity. "It was all for keeping everyone safe, hm? Is that what she told you to help you sleep at night, Scott? That you were making the world safe? No, no, no. You stopped me to keep everyone safe--fair enough. Can't begrudge you that. But that's not why you killed me. You killed me because you were angry. Because your chest was burning over Ric, over Kara, over Lorna, over all the failures of your fathers, and because you could take something in recompense. And because she told you to. Good soldier, good husband."

And then, for a moment, some of that anger edged back, some more of the pity filtering in, because Erik knew what it was like to love someone enough to do anything. "Did you realize you said almost the same thing she did, just now, hm? Did she notice?" A brief glance at Jean, before he looked back at Scott. They'd been sharing minds for years. Might be doing so now, even, and that had been the reason he'd never quite let Charles do the same--the fear of not knowing where your thoughts ended and theirs began.

"You and I both held the Phoenix, Scott. You know what it does, what it's like. How long has she been talking to it out loud? Do you feel safe, right now?" His head was starting to swim, the room growing more distant through the tunnel that was starting to settle in front of his vision, and Erik reflected absently that perhaps it wasn't the wisest of choices to be using so much oxygen on talking when his legs were barely keeping under him.

(You don't know when to quit-- oh, he owed Ric so much...)

He felt Banner's shift starting behind him, felt the radiation in the room spike, even through the dim grip he had on his powers at the moment. The man's voice, when it came, was strained, his grip tightening at Erik's back, and he would be lying if he didn't say it wasn't more than a little vindicating to hear the disdain with which the Avenger spoke to Jean and Scott.

He didn't quite get to express that, before the black won out.

JEAN: Jean had been angry her entire life. She’d been angry at what she wasn’t allowed to do, what she was, how she could go against the natural order of things and nothing ever seemed to come of it -- not until later, at least -- not until the sum of all her mistakes came crashing down in one fell swoop and she was left drowning at the deep end. But there was always someone who dove in, whether it was a backyard pool or the ocean during a raging storm, and that was Scott. Scott, who changed the world for her. Scott, who she changed the world for. Scott who killed a man when Jean asked him to, who would live and die for her, who promised to spend his life by her side regardless of whether she was beside him at the breakfast table or six foot under in a cemetery.

“Don’t speak to my husband like that,” Jean said, taking a step in front of Scott when Bruce shot him a glare. She didn’t come to the other scientist to be judged. She didn’t come here to be treated as the villain when she knew, deeply and instinctively, what the Phoenix was capable of -- how it changed people, twisted them up inside, changed them. She came here for one reason and one reason only, and he was standing in front of her now.

He was standing in front of her angry, but Jean knew him far too well to expect anything else, even if there was still a sickening disappointment swirling in her gut. “Because I always did,” she said, her voice quiet. Because she always would want to come back, regardless of what horrors were awaiting her the second air filled her lungs once more. Life would forever, constantly, be preferable to the lingering emptiness on the other side. “Because I thought--”

You didn’t deserve this. She wasn’t sure if he would hear it, if she was broadcasting it, if the feelings were leaking out of her like water from a cracked dam. “Because I’ve always needed you.”

Because it was her fault. The Phoenix wouldn’t be a part of their lives if it wasn’t for her decision on the shuttle at eighteen years old, a stupid child playing at being a god, a woman so desperate for approval from anywhere that she’d take sycophancy whispering in her head and preach it like gospel. “It wasn’t you, Erik. It wasn’t you any more than it was me on that lawn.”

He didn’t see that now. Maybe he never would. But Jean knew there was no other option, no other choice. Erik would admit himself there was nothing that could stop him from accomplishing his mission unless it was death. He was a man forged by soldiers’ cruelty, but he shared their pragmatism, their single-minded focus.

And then he kept talking, and the Phoenix roared to life in her mind -- almost laughing. Yes, it was laughing. It was bitter and cruel, but it was laughter, genuine amusement.

Oh look, she whispered, you brought him back insane.

“We were angry,” Jean said. “Of course we were angry. You violated the very principles we founded Genosha on when you threatened one of our own in a public place, for all to see. We were meant to be peaceful, a sanctuary. We were meant to be safety, and you turned it into your own personal battleground where you were judge, jury and executioner. You ripped apart the sanctity of a woman’s mind who is good and kind and honest in more ways than we could ever be, and you pointed a gun at the head of every citizen in New York and tried to justify it in a way that didn’t make you sound like Shaw.”

Because yes, that was in the notes she’d collected. Yes, that was in the memories he’d shared with her. Yes, she knew all about it -- and she knew that, if it came down to it, Erik would never become the monster that had ripped him apart and put him back together different than was ever intended. He wouldn’t wanted her to stop him. Her father would’ve wanted that.

Maybe this man wasn’t her father.

Bruce spoke again, and this time Jean let out a bitter huff of almost laughter. “Right,” she said, “because the Avengers are such a safe place for mutants, always have been. Remind me of all you did for our kind while you were parading the streets after your great victories and we were still hiding in backalleys, getting murdered for how we were born.”

(Jean never had a personal problem with the Avengers. She never understood why Scott burned with resentment towards what they represented, even if the people themselves weren’t to blame. She did now. Bruce stood there, on a pedestal despite his mistakes, looking down on them as if they were to pity. Like they were the monsters.)

“Erik, you belong at home. You belong in the place you helped to build. You belong in your own paradise. Come home, and we can be there or we can leave, but don’t--”

Don’t push us away. Not just Scott and Jean, which was inevitable, but the entirety of mutantkind that resided in the streets he’d pieced together. Everything he’d worked for, everything he’d sacrificed, and the Phoenix had torn it apart.

And then Erik hit the ground, and Jean was beside him in an instant, fingers going to the pulse on his neck as her other hand squeezed his arm.

Breathing? the Phoenix enquired. Jean nodded. How unfortunate. I thought we’d get to work together, again.

Jean looked back up at Bruce, at Scott, and slowly rose to her feet. Reluctant to leave him when the experiment was so new, so uncertain, and reluctant to leave him because everything within her screamed that was her family hurting, on the floor, aching.

“Take care of him,” Jean said to Bruce, reaching for Scott’s hand to intertwine their fingers together. Flames flickered, orange and purple at the tips, and formed a circle -- a circle she could see through, right back to their sofa and fireplace back in Genosha, right back to home where Rachel would no doubt be making cocoa in the kitchen. She’d never done that before.

Cosmic travel? Of course we have. You just forget. The human mind can only bend so far.

Jean squeezed Scott’s hand once more, knuckles white, and past the burning in her chest and throat she took a step into the portal, unsure whether she’d just healed a wound or created a new one.

#( adding a little bit of spicy doom tones at the beginning for *drama* )#f: discord #d: back from the dead #c: scott summers #c: jean grey #c: bruce banner #tw: murder mention #tw: abuse mention #tw: grief #tw: ptsd #tw: mental health issues

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