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destielshippingnews · 2 years

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: Dean Didn't Really Have a Problem with John The Denial of Dean's Abuse

The Cold Open (Wherein My Blood Runneth Cold)

I have made no secret of the fact that I see John as an abusive father. The exact nature of his abuse is up for debate, but surely nobody who has paid attention to the show can deny that abuse of SOME variety happened. There are simply too many references to ‘drunken rages’ and ‘child abuse’, too much evidence of disastrous parenting reflected in Dean and Sam’s behaviour, too much proof of neglect and malicious treatment for anybody to say John was not an abusive father. And certainly nobody who has watched the first twenty episodes with their eyes open can say Dean knew John loved him and did not have any issues with him.

Surely not. Surely!

Said Jensen in a podcast:

‘I always thought John was a ...hard love kind of dad.’

Dear. God. No! Jensen, you must be joking! You cannot seriously have played Dean for fifteen years and have that take. You must be pulling my leg.

Said Jensen in an interview with Variety magazine:

‘With Dean, I don’t think Dean was ever looking, necessarily, for his father’s approval in the way Soldier Boy was. He just idolized his father in a way that was unique, given their circumstances, given the fact that they lived in a world that was much, much different than a relationship would be. Also dealing with the fact that his dad was motivated by revenge and he was John Winchester’s mini-me, essentially. He was his little soldier. I think it was less about his approval, and more, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do because it’s what my father taught me to do.'

...Here comes a 7,500 word essay.

Introduction (Wherein I Pick Myself up off the Floor)

Jensen and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (John) appeared on Richard Speight Jr (The Trickster/Gabriel) and Rob Benedict’s (Chuck)’s Then and Now Supernatural podcast at the beginning of July 2022 to discuss 2x01 In My Time of Dying. As I was preparing to make notes for my analysis of the same episode, I tuned in hoping for some insight. What I got was something else altogether: a complete denial of all the accusations of child abuse levelled at John. I have written before about Jeffrey’s ignorance of the majority of the show and his claim that John loved his children (based on his acting choices and intentions, not John’s actual actions), and have duly dismissed it as not worth my attention. Little did I expect that Jensen – the Jensen, the Dean vessel – would spend a significant chunk of the podcast likewise defending John’s parenting.

As if that were not enough, in a recent interview with Variety magazine, he revealed he believes Dean’s issues with John were not especially deep, and compared them with his character Soldier Boy in The Boys. Soldier Boy’s father is never seen, and while what little the viewer learns of him certainly paints him in an awful light, little suggests he was, in Jensen’s words, ‘the worst father’. Jensen can tell us that, of course, and he might know more of his character’s story than the viewer, but the show has not shown us his father was the worst.

But that is quite beside the point: the point is John’s treatment of his sons is plain for the viewer to see on screen. I have pointed out much of this in my analysis of all the episodes of series 1, as well as the mass amounts of evidence shown in his sons’ behaviour (Dean’s especially). In spite of this, Jensen himself stated (and this is not verbatim) ‘Dean didn’t really have a problem with John’ in the podcast.

To be fair to Jensen, he is likely dissociated from Supernatural after fifteen years portraying Dean and roughly seventeen years of conventions and interviews For this reason, he could just be telling reporters what they want to hear, or – as is highly likely – making talking points his Amazon overlords tell him to. Or even more simply, that could be his honest interpretation. To be fair to him, he stated in his Variety interview that ‘the pedestal Dean put John on could be chipped at all day�� (not verbatim), but this felt like too little, too late, an apology for his apologia.

I take issue with this. I have seen what I have seen, and I can prove I have seen it. John was not a father trying his best and failing, or putting his sons first. If this were so, would he have left Dean to die in 1x12 Faith?

Would he have spent all his sons’ university funds on ammunition and weapons?

Would he have taken them along on his kamikaze mission to get revenge on Azazel?

John was a bad parent. He failed as an adult, a father, and a man, and his actions caused irrevocable damage to the sons he willingly exposed to danger and treated like – ironically enough – soldier boys. This is a part of the text, part of the story Supernatural told and showed. I bear Jensen no ill-will whatsoever, and anybody who has read more than one of my analyses should be well aware that he and Dean are the only reason I watch this show, but his statements show clearly that we have a huge disagreement. Here is a master’s thesis worth of writing to tell you why.

Act 1: Death of the Actor

I discussed in my essay on interpreting Dean as bisexual the concept of ‘death of the author’. Simply put, ‘death of the author’ means that the author’s interpretation and intention with producing a piece of fictional media is no more important than any other detailed reading of a text. Any interpretation which is harmonious with a fictional text and does not contradict it is valid.

This same logic applies to actors in a television show or film, as discussed with the case of Elijah Wood and Frodo: their acting choices, their intentions, and their understanding of a character is to be given no especial weight.

Some people have criticised ‘death of the author’ as unethical (mostly in response to interpreting Frodo and Sam as anything other than heterosexual, which should tell you something about what they find ‘ethical’), but authorial intent – that is, interpreting a fictional text based on what the author intended and says – is flawed. One major flaw is that it presupposes the author understands or remembers everything s/he wrote and is aware of all the connotations of every single character interaction. We are, however, to hold this people to be the authority on their work, even if other people know much more about the mythology or psychology involved, and even if the author does not remember much of the work. To keep this simple, I will stick with actors.

Regarding three of the people in the podcast – Richard Speight Jr, Rob Benedict, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan – many fans would hold them to be the authority on this subject because they were involved in the show. However, the entire point of the podcast is that Richard Speight Jr and Rob Benedict have not watched most of the show, and are watching the whole thing for the first time. They have indeed been involved with Supernatural for well over a decade with Richard first appearing in 2x15 Tall Tales in 2007 and Rob Benedict first appearing in 4x18 The Monster at the End of This Book. However, their presence on the actual show is minimal with each appearing fewer than twenty times over 327 episodes. Jeffrey Dean Morgan appeared in far fewer, and has stated multiple times – in this very podcast, for instance – that he has not watched much of the show, and seems to find the idea of watching ‘twenty years of television’ an insurmountable task (fewer than 218 hours, actually. One episode a night will have you at the end in 11 months). I can safely dismiss anything they have to say as being unauthoritative on anything but their own performance in certain scenes. Jeffrey Dean Morgan portrayed John a handful of times, but my understanding of John goes far beyond his role in the show.

Which leads me to the real reason for writing this: Jensen. One of the reasons so many people identify with and stuck with this frustrating show is the depiction of Dean suffering crippling mental health issues, suicidal ideations and tendencies, his struggle for self-acceptance, and his refusal to give up. Dean is the reason I watched the show, but even given all this character, he would have been less compelling if portrayed by a less talented actor. Elsewhere I have likened Supernatural to Destiny’s Child: Jared is Michelle Williams, Misha is Kelly Rowland, and Jensen is Beyoncé.

It was Jensen’s performance which first got me into the show in 2008, and it was his performance in 2x01 In My Time of Dying which grabbed me by the viscera and refused to let go. He has not released his grip at all in the last 7 ½ years. His portrayal of Dean is so deeply nuanced, rich, and natural that I honestly barely recognise Jensen as Dean, so different are the two. If we stick with the episodes I have analysed so far, his portrayal of Dean’s suicidal, fatalistic malaise in 1x12 Faith was 100% true to life and had me worrying for him. His portrayal of Dean’s abandonment in 1x16 Shadow was portrayed not only with a teary expression, but subtlety in facial expressions and tone of voice.

His switch to Dean’s dissociated state in 1x18 Something Wicked when telling Sam of his John-induced trauma was so good Dean seemed like a different person. His vulnerability at the end of 1x21 Salvation, and his animalistic rage during the exorcism in 1x22 Devil’s Trap.

I get so much from his performances that I have gone and watched almost everything he has done. And I mean everything. I sat through the awkward episode of Wishbone where he had two lines of dialogue because that was where he first appeared. I made myself watch his episode of Sweet Valley High. I endure the low-budget production in 25 year old episodes of Days of Our Lives because I find 19 year old Jensen a joy to watch (and a better performer than a lot of older and more experience actors on that show). I sat through Jessica Alba’s awkward acting in Dark Angel and once again he stole the show as Ben and then Alec.

I tortured myself with Dawson’s Creek series 6 (including the awkward No Doubt episode). I endured Allison Mack’s weird facial expressions and the tepid writing of Smallville series 4. I subjected myself to Devour and Ten Inch Hero and I laugh my arse off through My Bloody Valentine every Valentine’s Day. I watched his Batman films and all of The Boys. I do not even like The Boys, but I watched it. I watched all of it because of him.

So I hope you know that I do not say this lightly: I do not value Jensen’s takes on Dean any more than a random tumblr or twitter blogger. The reason for this is that his statements show that either his understanding of the character he portrayed for 15 years is much shallower than I would have thought, or he is willing to ignore an enormous part of Dean’s story to make the protagonist of his new show The Winchesters more palatable.

I am well aware that I am a grown-ass man approaching his 31st birthday, but this was a hard pill to swallow. One thing which has got me through the last few years is the fact that Dean does not give up. If he can wake up every morning wishing he were dead, but chooses to keep going regardless, then what excuse do I have? Forgive me what might sound like hyperbole, but Dean was there for me in one of the hardest nadirs of my life. To then hear that the man who portrayed him does not even understand him, and worse defends and apologises for the character who was the main reason for Dean’s major malfunction floored me. For a moment, I felt like making my analysis of 1x22 Devil’s Trap my last. I enjoyed doing them, but had I made a fool of myself for seeing what was not there?

Then I saw this, and knew I could not stop:

But Jensen is not Dean, and his analysis of the character is worth no more to me than anybody else’s. He simply does not understand these arguments against John (if we take him at his word), and does not even seem to remember the story all that well, so his dismissal means nothing.

Act 2: Devil’s Advocate (Wherein John is the Devil, and Jensen is the Advocate)

I have made it clear over the course of analyses that I see John’s parenting as abusive. When I say ‘abusive’, I do not mean that John beat his children up every night in a drunken rage, but rather that he ‘misused’ them. The Swedish word for ‘abuse’ is misbruk and can be directly translated as ‘misuse’. The Finnish hyväksikäyttö can be translated as ‘abuse’ in English, but its meaning is more ‘using for one’s benefit’, or ‘exploitation’. I have made some claims in my analyses about the nature of John’s misuse, including neglect and abandonment, parentalisation, shaming and deferral of responsibility among others. Some of these are ones I will defend without hesitation, whereas others are claims I would be willing to cede.

I have also made note of some of the excuses people like to make in order to defend John. I do not believe that people doing so are doing so in order to consciously defend abusers, but perhaps many see John as a father who tried his hardest in unnatural circumstances, but failed spectacularly. This is indeed a point which Jensen and Jeffrey raise in the podcast, but the also try to excuse some of his bad behaviour with the tried and trusted reasoning that he fought in Vietnam and then saw his wife die. They even trotted out the reasoning that Dean and Sam would not have been able to fight monsters were it not for John. I have dismissed these claims elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

a) trauma from war is an explanation, not a justification

b) bereavement is an explanation, not a justification

c) John did not ‘try his hardest’. He raised his children to be weapons in his war and disregarded their autonomy, well-being, and safety. Worse, he knowingly endangered them.

d) without John’s grooming of them, Dean and Sam would indeed not have been able to defend themselves against monsters and demons, or save the world, but the ends do not justify the means. Other people are not tools for us to use, and Dean and Sam are not our scapegoats or sacrificial lamb.

e) parents make mistakes, but John made disasters and catastrophes. I do not believe he deserves forgiveness or understanding for that.

That said, the extent of John’s abuse of his children is up for debate. I have suggested John physically beat his children, specifically Dean, and the show itself implies John coerced Dean into being sexually abused, but these are not hills I will die on. These ones are circumstantial, and the evidence for them is shakey. I will cede these points if good arguments are made against them.

In contrast, I have no compunctions in claiming that John neglected and abandoned his children. I say ‘claiming’, but the evidence of this is clearly seen in 1x18 Something Wicked: John left his sons unattended in a motel room for days with insufficient food and money. In the podcast, Richard Speight Jr refers to this point, but in the fleeting, glancing manner of a person who has not actually read something in any detail, but wants to sound as though he has in order to dismiss it with an air of authority.

This leads to a brief attempt at defending John’s actions, with the apparent misapprehension that John simply left Dean and Sam alone in a hotel (note they said hotel, not motel) for an afternoon with food and money while he ‘took care of business’. Jensen also said a few words about how viewers seem to be judging John’s actions from the perspective of the modern day (presumably referring to a world of mobile phones, internet, and constant surveillance), and that it was perfectly acceptable and expected for children to be left alone a few decades ago. They also try to dismiss claims of abuse with the justification that ‘John was hardly going to take his kids on a hunt’, thereby implying I am either short-sighted for not seeing that, or stupid (note: John taught Dean to fire a gun when he was roughly eight, and had him killing werewolves before he was a teenager).

This is a battle I can fight with the confidence of winning it (although I doubt the actors in question would cede the point). I was born in August 1991, and am therefore 13 ½ years younger than Jensen who was born in March 1978. We technically belong to different generations, with him being a young Gen X and me being an older Millennial, but the difference between us is only slightly bigger than that between my eldest sister (born 1985) and my youngest sister (born 1997). The world of his youth is slightly different than mine, but you are not talking to somebody decades younger than yourself with a wildly different experience of youth. I still remember well how things were before the advent of the internet and mobile phones. It was indeed expected that children go and play for hours by themselves, or to go camping with friends. On holiday, my parents occasionally left me with my older sisters in our chalet room in the late evening while they went to the pub. My three older sisters went into Blackpool by themselves without phones while my parents took me and my younger sisters swimming. All of this was done without mobile phones or the internet.

I remember this, but this is not what John did, not by a long shot. Sure he could not take his sons hunting, but for some unknown reason he did not take them to a responsible adult such as Bobby, Pastor Jim, or Ellen Harvelle. He neglected their basic needs by leaving them with insufficient food and money. He also did not leave them in a ‘hotel’ with a concierge, a bellhop and security in a respectable part of town: John left them in a motel. I have watched enough American telly to know that a motel is a seedy, low-rent establishment of ill-repute. He neglected to make real efforts to keep his vulnerable sons safe from harm, but rather exposed them to it.

Not only did he leave them undefended from the monster he knew was on the prowl, but there is good evidence to suggest he willingly endangered them – used them as ‘bait’ – in order to kill the shtriga. Whether or not he used them as bait is questionable, but the fact he left them undefended is damning evidence enough that he failed in his duties as an adult and a parent. Episode 1x18 is not the only evidence of this: 3x08 A Very Supernatural Christmas shows poco!Dean and poco!Sam once again abandoned is a seedy motel room for days, but worse is to come. 9x07 Bad Boys gives irrefutable evidence that poco!Dean was forced to resort to stealing in order to feed Sam, but on one occasion ended up in police custody. When John found out about this, he told the police to ‘Let him [Dean] rot.’

While Dean bore the brunt of John’s maltreatment, 11x08 Just My Imagination also showed us that eventually John took poco!Dean with him on hunts, and left poco!Sam alone for days. This had such a negative effect on poco!Sam that he got a literal imaginary friend.

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5x16 Dark Side of the Moon also reveals that on at least one occasion Sam ran away and lived with a ‘normal’ family for two weeks. The same episode also tells us that one of Dean’s happiest memories involved John moving out for a few days.

This is a fight I will have, and a hill I will die on.

Another tactic attempted in John’s defence is that he is a father from the 1970s (although he was a father in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but whatever I suppose) and that men back then were different. Whilst it is fantastically refreshing to hear four adult men talking about the experience of being a man for a change, I have to concede I did not find much of value in what they said in John’s defence.

Certainly it is true that men in the western world did not talk about feelings much in the mid to late 1900s. This is largely due to the gay panic and death of ‘romantic’ friendships which came about due to the persecution of Oscar Wilde and the gay panic surrounding male emotions and intimacy: this led men to distance themselves from emotional intimacy with men, including their own sons. In addition to this, most people do not take a man seriously when he talks about his emotions and problems. (One of the reasons for astronomical male suicide rates is not that ‘men need to cry more and talk about their emotions’, but rather the fact that nobody listens or cares when we do).

It is of course true to character and perfectly believable that John not talk about his feelings much, admit his mistakes, or be free in saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m proud of you’ to his sons. Jensen is right to point that out (if indeed it was Jensen who said that: I do not want to subject myself to listening to the podcast again). Jensen’s father was born in 1948, only 7 years before my father in 1955. We both have similar experiences of what fathers from the mid 1900s can be like: taciturn, reticent, tight with displays of affection or pride, themselves the products of men and women’s poisonous expectations of and demands on men. Jensen is not talking to somebody from a different planet to him, and so this attempt at apologia does not work at all on me.

My dad shares some experiences in common with John. He was born in the mid-1950s at the peak of the Baby Boom, and he was deployed in both Cyprus and Northern Ireland with the army. He does not talk about his experiences in the army much, and I do not pry, but I expect he saw some nasty stuff. He is far from perfect, but he would never for a moment have allowed his children to be exposed to anything that could cause them serious harm.

John’s behaviour cannot be dismissed as ‘a father being unable to say he is sorry’. Roughly 17 years after John let Dean take the blame for Sam’s near-death at the hands of the shtriga, he still allowed Dean to believe he was to blame, actively rubbing his face in it by sending him after it.

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This is not to mention the speed and glee wherewith John proceeds to wear Dean’s confidence and independence down as soon as they are united. Mere minutes after John’s reintroduction in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood, he takes his anger at Sam out on Dean by implying Dean is incompetent to keep his own car clean. Sure this is only one throw-away douchebag remark, but the look on Dean’s face afterwards states plainly that this was far from the first time, and that it was not the comment itself which hurt, but the fact that it was part of an endless parade of digs, cuts, and jibes aimed at dissolving Dean’s self-esteem and worth in order to make him – as Jensen so brashly stated – John’s ‘mini me’.

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Act 3 Dean is the Smoking Gun

Jeffrey Dean Morgan played a tiny role on Supernatural, appearing in a handful of episodes at the beginning of its run, and then making one reappearance towards its end. I understand that the way he played John was that John loved his children – Dean especially – and that he did not portray him as abusive. However, actors’ intentions and perspectives while acting are of little interest when analysing a show or a film because these are not themselves part of the final product. We cannot see Jeffrey’s intentions or interpretations, only what he puts into his performance, what the editors choose to show us, and how this performance fits in with everything else.

John was hardly in the show, but as Jensen clearly states, he was. He was in every single episode, and by his own admission read every line of every script. Dean was present in every episode, and he gives us a very clear indication of how one person in particular might have treated him.

In my analysis for 1x12 Faith, I wrote:

We see little direct evidence of John’s mistreatment of his sons, the elder in particular. However, the other side of Dean presented in 1x12 Faith is all the negative image we should need. His facade falls away to reveal a weak, small, broken, and very human man. His eyes are sunken, his skin is grey, his jokes fall flat, he sits like a sick man with breathing problems, and the viewer is forced to look at the man behind the mask. The choice of attire for Dean in this episode is also striking is its divergence from his usual garb: a hoodie and outer coat reminiscent of Tom Hanniger in My Bloody Valentine. This makes him look smaller, younger, and much more vulnerable.

This is the part of Dean he hates other to see. If they see him as weak, they see him as less capable, and less valuable. They see him as disposable. As his entire motivation is centred around being valuable to others, this is incredibly difficult and scary for him. Worse, perhaps, is the fact it was not a monster who did this to him, not really: it was an accident involving electricity. It was a reminder that simply being alive is a risk, and being alive is a threat to Dean’s usefulness.

His resistance to Sam’s offers of help also suggest a certain view of himself: that he truly is worthless and does not deserve to live if he is weak. Thanks, John.

The true evidence for John’s treatment is therefore not in what we see John do, but rather in the effect of his actions. One might be tempted to dismiss what I wrote as simple extrapolation or even projection, and admittedly though what I wrote fits Dean perfectly, it is a deduction based on observation rather than a 100% proof-positive description of Dean.

This fact means that several of my accusations against John do not have conclusive, stable evidence to support them, but rather rely on deduction and circumstance. There is indeed cause to believe John physically abused Dean, but we see no direct evidence of this, only inferences, deductions, and extrapolations. Max in 1x14 Nightmare is suggestive if understood as a Dean mirror, and Dean’s less-than-happy reaction at the end of the episode when Sam says ‘Things turned out alright, considering.’ Dean’s response is so reticent and enigmatic that one cannot help drawing certain conclusions, but this is not hard, direct evidence of anything, only a tantalising suggestion.

There is also textual evidence to support the conclusion that John hit Dean. By ‘hit’, I do not simply mean a smacked bum for crossing the road without looking both ways, but the kind of hitting which involves bruising, severe pain, and blood.

The best piece of evidence for this comes from a statement Dean makes in episode 5x16 Dark Side of the Moon. After a discussion of a time Sam ran away for two weeks and lived with a ‘normal’ family, Dean recounts looking for hours to find Sam, and eventually believing he was dead. ‘And then when Dad came home…’ The look on Dean’s face as he said that last part tells a story. It tells all the story I need to know: Dean was remembering something horrific, terrifying, and likely violent. No 31 year old man wears a look on his face like that remembering a parent merely shouting decades earlier.

It is not likely John hit Dean often, and probably never in front of Sam (at least no more than what could be passed off as socially-acceptable spanking or the like). If he did it in front of Sam, Sam’s treatment of Dean would be different: more compassionate and understanding. Or at least it should be.

I am by no means the first person to think John might have sexually abused his children in some manner, as Viktor Henriksen himself claims this in 3x12 Jus in Bello:

‘HENRIKSEN: Aw. Where’s that smug smile, Dean? I want to see it.

DEAN: (Shakes his head, disbelief) You got the wrong guys.

HENRIKSEN: Oh, yeah. I forgot. You fight monsters. Sorry, Dean. Truth is, your daddy brainwashed you with all that devil talk and no doubt touched you in a bad place. That’s all. That’s reality.

DEAN: Why don’t you shut your mouth?’

I also mentioned in my analysis of 1x18 Something Wicked that the shtriga is a metaphor for John: it drains children of their energy and leaves wounds which last for decades. I also hurried past the fact that it creeps into children’s rooms at night because it was getting too far into the realm of speculation and abstraction. It is a tree without roots, and I do not want to go climbing in it.

That said, evidence suggests Dean’s relation to sex and punishment might be twisted. He sexualises himself in front of authority figures, such as his reference to ‘squealing like a pig’ (i.e. a reference to men being raped in prison) whilst being interrogated in 1x01 Pilot. He is also very flirty with the camera operator whilst having his mug shot taken in 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues, to name just two examples. This could be seen as a Devil May Care attitude, or as evidence of behaviour he learnt to avoid other punishments. This coupled with the very strong evidence that Dean was forced to use himself as bait (involving probable sexual violation) as evidenced in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood and 14x14 Ouroboros suggests some kind of sexual misuse or coercion of Dean by somebody in authority. However, this can be explained satisfactorily in other ways, so I will not die on this hill.

We do not need to pile traumas upon Dean which are not explicitly referenced or heavily implied in the text. Dean’s behaviour and beliefs about himself are enough: his willingness – nay, urge – to sacrifice himself for Sam in 2x21 All Hell Breaks Loose Part I, how closely his statement about being too tired to keep fighting in 2x09 Croatoan resemble that of somebody suicidally exhausted, his fatalism and hopelessness in 1x12 Faith. 2x20 What is and What Should Never Be shows that Dean’s dream life does not involve John, but he still cannot make himself believe anybody really cares about him. 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me (discussed more below) presents the viewer with exactly how low Dean’s self-worth is, and strongly implies he truly hates himself. It fits with his view of himself as not believing he deserves to be saved, as Cas so perceptively saw in 4x01 Lazarus Rising. All this and mountains more. It is in complete harmony with the rest of the text and contradicts nothing, therefore it is a valid reading supported by evidence within the text.

That said, I must also cede that Jensen’s reading of Dean as idolising John, of putting John on a pedestal, and wanting to be like him is also valid. In a sense, Dean was even John’s ‘mini me’. As well as that, John was the man in Dean’s life, and the only male he could rely on in any capacity whatsoever. Of course Dean partially wanted to be like him, but this was not a good state of affairs. Dean had no sense of his own identity due to John’s control, and he wanted to become like John to be worthy of John’s love. The image of John’s hateful glare from 1x18 Something Wicked was burnt into his mind and he longed to feel John loved him and valued him.

I do not believe John ever showed Dean he loved him until 2x01 In My Time of Dying, and regardless of what Jensen said, the suggestion that Dean knew and felt that John loved him simply contradicts far too much in the show for it to be valid. Yes, I said it right here: Jensen’s own take on Dean is an invalid reading because it contradicts too much.

Okay, to be fair to Jensen, he might have been referring specifically to his final scene with John, where indeed John did tell Dean he was proud of him, and where he showed that he loved him. Other than that, Dean’s behaviour cannot be satisfactorily explained as the behaviour of a man who knew his father – the most important person in his life – loved him. Would he value his life so little, and be so willing to embrace death in 1x12 Faith, if he knew this? Would he be so broken and shamed in 1x18 Something Wicked if he felt his dad loved him, as opposed to his dad thinking him a failure and a disgrace, no better than a tool?

Jensen, I love you to bits (or the version of yourself you show the public), but I am afraid I have to dismiss this. It looks like either a weak attempt at damage control before The Winchesters airs, or simply the take of somebody who does not remember most of the show.

This is not to say that John never loved Dean, but a reassessment of their relationship following this travesty of a podcast is that I see it as resembling Denethor and Faramir in The Lord of the Rings. Denethor might have loved Faramir deep down, but he certainly did not act like it, nor did he show it in any way. Boromir was the son he doted on, and Denethor hesitates not at all in saying directly to Faramir’s face that he wishes Faramir had died in Boromir’s stead.

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Faramir rode straight towards certain death – in what might have even been a suicide metaphor – believing his father did not love him in any way and wished he were dead. I have had Gandalf’s words in my head for the last few days, and I believe they fit here: ‘Your father loves you, Faramir. ...He will remember it, before the end.’

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And indeed, Denethor realised he loved his son Faramir upon seeing what he believed was his dead body. As he intended to burn himself and what he believed was his son’s dead body on a pyre, so too does John choose death rather than living without his son. So yes, I can cede that in their final scene Dean might very well have known and felt love from John, but one short conversation followed by dumping an incredible weight and the responsibility of fratricide on Dean does not in any way make up for the lifetime of neglect, mistreatment, mental and emotional abuse, nor does it undo any of the damage wrought on Dean by his father.

I have dismissed Jensen’s claims various times in this piece (and I hope it is clear I do not do it out of dislike for him. In fact, I spent about two hours listening to him singing at conventions yesterday evening. I certainly have no ill will towards him) as being superficial takes from somebody who has a wildly different conception of Dean than I have. One thing I simply cannot understand is how it is possible for Jensen – the man who portrayed Dean – to have had lines of dialogue like the following taken from 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me and to still say Dean had no real issue with John.

'DREAM DEAN

No? What are the things that you want? What are the things that you dream? I mean, your car: That's Dad's. Your favorite leather jacket: Dad's. Your music: Dad's. Do you even have an original thought?

DEAN scoffs, not wanting to admit to anything.

DREAM DEAN No. No, all there is is, "Watch out for Sammy. Look out for your little brother, boy!" You can still hear your Dad's voice in your head, can't you?

He motions with the weapon to his head.

DREAM DEAN

Clear as a bell.

DEAN

(smiling)

Just shut up.

DREAM DEAN lowers the gun.

DREAM DEAN

I mean, think about it …

He begins to walk towards DEAN, whose smile is fading now.

DREAM DEAN

... all he ever did is train you, boss you around.

They're now standing face to face.

DREAM DEAN

But Sam .... Sam he doted on. Sam, he loved.

DEAN

I mean it. I'm getting angry.

DREAM DEAN

Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy's blunt little instrument.

(angry)

Your own father didn't care whether you lived or died. Why should you?

DEAN

(angry)

Son of a bitch!

DEAN pushes DREAM DEAN hard, knocking him into the wall above the desk.

DEAN

(screaming angrily)

My father was an obsessed bastard!

DREAM DEAN tries to get up and DEAN kicks him down on the desk again. DEAN holds the weapon as a bat and hits DREAM DEAN once and then pins him to the wall with it.

DEAN

All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam! That was his crap. He's the one who couldn't protect his family. He-

DEAN steps back and swings the weapon again, hitting DREAM DEAN twice.

DEAN

He's the one who let Mom die.

DEAN pins DREAM DEAN again.

DEAN

– who wasn't there for Sam. I always was! He wasn't fair! I didn't deserve what he put on me.

He backs away from DREAM DEAN.

DEAN

And I don't deserve to go to Hell!

youtube

These do not seem to me like the thoughts of a man who knows his father loves him, or who had no real issue with his father. On the contrary, this entire scene is similar to Shifter!Dean in 1x06 Skin in that it is a way of letting the viewer know exactly what Dean thinks of himself and why. Dean is his own worst enemy, and hates himself because of what his father did to him. This comes – might I remind you – after Dean willingly condemned himself to Hell in order to bring Sam back to life. He did so because John had instilled in him the idea that his only worth was in keeping Sam alive. He even references that here with the ‘Watch out for Sammy. Watch out for your brother, boy!’ Nothing else Dean did mattered to John.

This is just one instance of Dean saying such things. I will not list them all because a) it would take a very long time to find them and b) this is already longer than I intended it. But this coupled with myriad other lines, references, comments, and behavioural traits in the show build up an unmistakable picture of John’s treatment of Dean, and it was not the treatment of a loving father who occasionally had to give his sons a bit of ‘tough love’. As Dean himself said (and Jensen has clearly forgotten), ‘My father was an obsessed bastard!’ Obsessed indeed, destructively so, and Dean is all the evidence we need.

Did Dean love John, though? Almost certainly. One of the things which makes child abuse so hard to recover from is the fact that children are hard-wired to believe that their parents love them, and that everything they do comes from a place of love and care. If the parent does something bad to the child, it is the child’s natural reaction to blame him-/herself and to believe that the fault is what the child has done, or in what the child is. One of the difficult parts of coming to terms with having been abused is accepting that somebody who was supposed to protect, guide, and shelter you in fact mistreated, misused, and exploited you. A child’s default setting is to love his or her parents, and it takes a lot to undo that. Dean loved John, but this in no way means that their relationship was good. Abusers often love the people they abuse, and the abused often love the people who abuse them. Love can be mixed with hate, fear, and resentment, and this is the relationship Dean has with John.

youtube

Conclusion

Jensen did an incomparable job portraying Dean, but his understanding is wildly at odds with my own and indeed seems to contradict the show. This includes many lines he has delivered himself. He is currently producing a show with John as one of the main protagonists, and he believes that John was not so bad and can be redeemed. Perhaps this colours his statement, perhaps not: after all, how could he sell a show with a narcissistic abuser as the main protagonist?

My take on this is that Jensen has forgotten much of Supernatural, and perhaps never really thought about Dean’s relationship with John much at all. It was, after all, a job for him. For sometimes 10-12 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year for 15 years, he went to work to bring Dean to life. He cannot possibly remember every line of dialogue, or have been paying attention to the overall plot or every single character interaction for the whole of that time. He also cannot be expected to watch the whole show several times or read detailed analyses of every single episode, let alone write them. If his take-away from the show is that Dean did not really have any problem with John, then that is his business.

However, as fair as it is for him to hold that view, it quite frankly contradicts far too much in Dean’s own behaviour for me to view it as a valid reading. The sad thing is that as with Castiel’s confession of romantic and sexual love for Dean in 15x18 The Truth, the story as depicted on screen is being misrepresented and denied. I saw John’s treatment of Dean, and I saw the effects it had on Dean over 327 episodes. You cannot tell me that I did not see what I actually saw and expect me to forget it.

The podcast has a far greater reach and influence than my little blog, and far more people will listen to these actors dismissing and denying events as they happened. As most people unfortunately subscribe to the authorial intent school of analysis, they will see these actors’ statements as authoritative, and for them that will be the end of things. But by the actors’ own admission, they do not know or do not remember most of the show, and my man Jensen’s own take is in complete discord with the character he played. If these people are the ‘authority’ rather than people with detailed understandings, analyses, and readings of the show, then ‘authority’ truly means nothing any more, as 15x19-15x20 show that canon is nothing more than the officially accepted version of events.

The actors are therefore metaphorically dead in the same way the author is. I value what Jensen has done in bringing Dean to life, as well as the hundreds of hours of entertainment everything else he has done has given me, but he is not Dean and does not speak for Dean. Only Dean can do that, and he speaks loudly and clearly enough for anybody paying attention to hear.

#Youtube #edvard's supernatural guide #dean winchester #john winchester #sam winchester #child abuse #spn 3x10 #spn 5x16 #spn 9x07 #spn 1x20 #spn 1x18 #death of the author #jensen ackles #jackles <3 #spn meta #meta analysis #john apologism #john fucking winchester

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lonelier-version-of-you · 2 years

Text

Well, Casualty have finally, finally managed it. An episode without Faith The Abuser Cadogan in it. I mean we had to sit through ages of both Paul and Adi but at least Adi’s presumably going now.

I didn’t hate this episode as much as a lot of people did. It was a bit ‘meh’, what with all the focus on the surrogacy storyline. The special effects were way too much and the fight scene was just embarrassing. But thankfully, we had Queen Stevie Nash to carry the episode.

I love Stevie. I know I say that like every week now, but I really do love her, and she just keeps getting better and better. It helps that she reminds me SO much of Henrik - more specifically, Henrik back in the day before Holby stopped calling him out on his shit. What was that anon ask ages back about watching Holby for Henrik because he’s “my poor fucked up little man... I need him to go to therapy... I need to see what he will do wrong next”. That’s how I feel about Stevie. She’s like Henrik - but, ironically, without the sexual harassment. (Although she faced more consequences for false allegations of such than Henrik did for actually harassing Sahira. :/)

Actually, thinking about it, Stevie’s sort of like early Henrik, yeah, but she’s also like a mini Gaskell. To the point I’m tempted to nickname her Mini Gaskell now. To be fair, that’s probably because most of the traits she has in common with Henrik are also ones Henrik has in common with John. Stevie is probably what would happen if Henrik and John somehow produced a kid. But what Jonty called the ‘self-righteous’ “I’m Dr. Nash and I can do no wrong” attitude, it feels more John than Henrik to me, so yeah. Not that her selfish streak isn’t a trait shared by both of them. (Indeed, you could compare Jonty’s rant to Mr. Clarke’s description of Henrik in S19E03: “A terrible old narcissist’s power struggle. [...] Acute lack of empathy. Borderline sociopathic need for immediate and total obedience.”)

Stevie is what John could’ve been if he were written well. Stevie is how you do a villainous mentally ill character right - her mental illness affects her behaviour just like anybody else’s would, but it’s not, at the end of the day, the reason she’s a villain (well, more like antagonist or anti-hero by now, but still). She’s a wonderfully complex character and I cannot praise her enough. Elinor Lawless is brilliant, too, her performances are so fantastic.

I really do think tonight’s episode providing insight into Stevie’s psyche is probably one of the only reasons I enjoyed it. She got a lot of interactions and all of them were fascinating. Despite the Jonty drama, she proved herself ultimately a good doctor in how gentle she was with the woman who was a rape survivor, and how she talked to the pregnant woman trying to decide whether to have an abortion. (Incidentally, this is actually another aspect in which she reminds me of both John and Henrik, but especially John. One of John’s trial patients, Mara, was a domestic violence survivor and he was just lovely with how he treated her.)

I don’t know where I was going with this really. I just love Stevie. I think she’s great. She rescued what otherwise would’ve been a mediocre at best episode for me.

Also, speaking of Jonty, he was throwing stones from his glass house with that rant about Stevie being a bad person. Just saying.

There was really only one other storyline tonight, and it was the Marty/Adi/Paul/Robyn surrogacy stuff. That was... eh. I’m glad Marty’s broken up with Adi and I hope we never hear from Adi again now - he’s outstayed his welcome already.

Speaking of people who have outstayed their welcome, Paul doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. He and Robyn are a thing now, I guess.

Watching Paul yell at Adi was the epitome of that “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point” meme. Like, he wasn’t wrong, but also... he’s Paul. And we’ve seen him being a bit of a misogynistic prat himself.

What the fuck was that fight????? The fact that they tried to play it as comedic when the rest of the storyline was serious made the tone feel seriously off. And the music was SO not needed.

In other news, why are we barely seeing Ethan at the moment when he’s literally leaving the show in a few months? This lack of Ethan scenes is going to be especially frustrating if they go the route of him having a sudden severe Huntington’s decline for his exit story. Just... sigh.

One thing I complained about last week was that, unlike the rest of the series so far, the episode didn’t feel busy enough - thankfully tonight’s episode fixed that, and it felt like a busy, crowded department again. So I did like that.

All in all... meh. Liked the Stevie stuff. Liked that we saw a lot of patients. The rest frustrated me. I wouldn’t mind if we were getting a better episode next week, but unfortunately, there’s no ep on the 15th. It’s that “Casualty gets shifted around the schedules for Strictly” time of year again, I suppose. Next recap will come whenever we get another episode.

#BBC Casualty #Stevie Nash #Casualty spoilers #tw;abuse mention #tw;rape mention #tw;sexual harassment mention

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bluejayblueskies · 3 years

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Please say more abt how Martin fits the closed off trait I'm begging 👁👁

Okay, so I got a bit carried away with this and it got quite lengthy....

I've put a TLDR above the cut and the details, transcripts, and general discussion below the cut!

TLDR: Martin is at his core a closed-off character who keeps his vulnerable feelings hidden and close to his chest. He instead focuses on caring for others and considering their feelings above his own, particularly in the case of Jon, who he cares for (sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice) throughout the podcast. His arc with the Lonely in season four and his interactions with Jon in season five demonstrate this lack of emotional vulnerability, and it's really only during the moments he spends by himself that we get significant insight into Martin's emotional state and inner thoughts.

Martin, to me, is a character who is very used to hiding how he feels. He tends to care for others at the expense of himself, has low self-esteem, and has a predilection towards the Lonely, all of which go hand-in-hand with somebody who is very used to hiding their emotions--particularly the negative ones--because they either think they're not important or that they're inconvenient and inappropriate for the situation. On a textual level, that's probably due to growing up with a sick (and likely unsupportive) mother who he had to take care of, where there was 'no time' for his emotions to get in the way or for him to prioritize himself in any way, shape, or form.

Martin is self-destructive, dislikes moments of emotional vulnerability, and (I would argue) genuinely struggles when he doesn't have somebody else to prioritize over himself. (His mother at first, but as the series goes on, Jon settles comfortably into this role for him.) Additionally, the biggest way that we, the audience, know anything about Martin's emotional state is when he's alone and self-reflecting (such as in MAG 170 and 186 or when talking to the tapes) or when he's forced to talk about something vulnerable (such as when Jon confronted him about his CV).

We don't get much insight into Martin's character between seasons one and three (at least not as much as we get in four and five), but I find myself drawn to this bit in MAG 118, when Martin is talking to Elias:

MARTIN

So what? I don’t get to be angry? I don’t get to burn things? Just, just run around, making tea, while everyone else gets to actually have feelings?

I think two things are important to note here. The first is that Elias is surprised (or least intrigued) that Martin is acting in this way--specifically, acting on his emotions in such a dramatic way. (And given that Martin is doing this as a distraction, rather than actually acting out because of his own emotions, maybe he's right to be surprised.) The second is that this line very much implies that Martin doesn't talk about how he's feeling, not like 'everyone else' does. He doesn't talk about it, doesn't act on it--just 'runs around, making tea.' And when Melanie comes back in after Elias is done, Martin immediately focuses on the plan and whether it succeeded, ignoring Melanie when she asks if he's okay or not. He closes himself off, and as far as we know, doesn't talk about it at all after that.

And then Jon goes into his coma, and we reach season four.

Martin is incredibly closed-off during season four. He's self-isolating, self-sacrificial, and approaching a state of genuine emotional numbness by the time he's cast into the Lonely. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'm going to focus on a few main things, many of which can be drawn from this bit in MAG 158:

MARTIN

It’s not him! It’s not anybody. It’s just me. Always has been. I…

When I first came to you, I thought I had lost everything. Jon was dead, my mother was dead, the job I had put everything into trapped me into spreading evil and I… I really didn’t care what happened to me. I told myself I was trying to protect the others, but… honestly we didn’t even like each other. Maybe I just thought joining up with you would be a good way to get killed.

And then… Jon came back, and… and suddenly I had a reason I had to keep your attention on me. Make you feel in control so you didn’t take it out on him. And if that meant drifting further away, so what? I’d already grieved for him. And if it meant now saving him, it was worth it.

When you started talking about the Extinction, though… you had me actually, then, for a while. But then – (laughs sardonically) then, you tried to make me the hero. Tried to sell me on the idea that I was the only one who could stop it. And that I’ve never sat right with me. I mean, I mean, look – look at me, I’m not exactly a – a chosen one. But by then I was in too deep. So I played along. Waited to see what your end game was, and here we are.

Funny. Looks like I was right the first time. It’s probably still a good way to get killed?

This monologue is a big insight into Martin's thought process during this season, and I'm mostly going to focus on two parts: the self-sacrifice and the prioritization of Jon.

Self-sacrifice

There's quite a bit of discussion about Jon's self-sacrificial tendencies, but less so about Martin's, both in this season and in season five. In my opinion, Jon's self-sacrificial tendencies originate from (among other things) survivor's guilt from his traumatic childhood experience with Mr. Spider, his increasing belief that he's less than human, and the fact that he prioritizes the lives of others over his own. Martin's self-sacrificial tendencies, while very similar, come from the fact that he thinks he only has worth if he can help and care for someone else and the fact that he doesn't think he's important enough to live. (For example, he says in MAG 158 that he's 'not exactly a chosen one' and says in MAG 198 that he's 'not important enough to kill.')

It's a subtle difference between these two things, and I would argue that while Jon's tendencies are more rooted in the 'help' (ie, 'I want to help other people and I will sacrifice myself to do it'), Martin's tendencies are more rooted in the 'hurt' (ie, 'I will sacrifice myself and other people will be helped in the process'). There is, of course, overlap, and it's not a black-and-white distinction between the two, but ultimately, I think Martin is so used to prioritizing others' emotions and needs above his own that when he's left mostly alone as he is at the end of season three, with the only person left to hold onto being in a coma (possibly forever), he falls back into the same patterns of self-destruction and closed-offness, only without the 'help' to go along with the 'hurt' because there is nobody left to help (especially after his mother dies). Ultimately, he joins up with Peter because he thinks it 'would be a good way to get killed.'

Prioritization of Jon

But then Jon wakes up from his coma, and now Martin has justification for his self-sacrifice again, because he can protect Jon by continuing to work with Peter!

... Maybe.

Jon isn't harmed by Peter during season four, sure, but he does climb into the coffin and visits Ny-Ålesund and is tracked down by Julia and Trevor and struggles emotionally and morally with his own humanity and is hurt, in a way, by the distance Martin puts between them. And I hesitate to place blame for the apocalypse on anybody but Jonah, but if we're going to argue in-canon that Jon was responsible for the apocalypse (he wasn't, but that's not the point of this post), then Martin contributed to that blame and responsibility because it was his actions and decisions that ultimately drew Jon into the Lonely and resulted in him getting the 14th and final mark. (Again, I don't think Jon or Martin are at fault for the apocalypse, but if we were to blame Jon, we could blame Martin as well.) It was only after getting that mark that Jonah was able to use Jon to end the world, something that was hugely hurtful for Jon. So did Martin really protect Jon at all by staying away from him and continuing to work with Peter? Or was that just a convenient excuse to keep self-destructing?

Jon and Martin, in my opinion, had very similar arcs in season four. Martin was sinking further into the Lonely and Jon was sinking further into the Eye. We hear a lot more about Jon's emotional struggle with this given that he's the POV character, sure, but Jon also talks about this with other people. He talks about it to Helen (MAG 152):

JON

…

When does it stop?

HELEN

(impatient) What?

JON

The guilt. The misery. All the others I’ve met, they’ve been – cold, cruel. They’ve enjoyed what they do. When does the Eye (inhale) make me monstrous?

And to Daisy (MAG 136):

JON

My – (large sigh) My memories of the coma are not clear, but I know I made a choice; I made a choice to become… something else. Because I was afraid to die. But ever since then, I – I don’t know if I made the right decision; I’m stronger now, tougher, I can – (he cuts himself off) If I do die, now, or get sealed away somewhere forever? I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. And I don’t want to lose anyone else, so if I can maybe – stop that happening, and the only danger is to me, I – I’ll do it in a heartbeat; worst case scenario, the universe loses another monster.

But all we really get from Martin are the things he tells the tapes when he's alone and the monologue he gives in MAG 158. It makes sense that he wouldn't be as open, yes, given the nature of the Lonely, but I can't help but think of (MAG 154):

JON

The Lonely’s really got you, hasn’t it?

MARTIN

(no hesitation) You know, I think it always did.

Jon was always curious and hungry for knowledge; the Eye amplified it. Martin was always closed-off and isolated; the Lonely amplified that as well.

But then Jon pulls Martin out of the Lonely, they flee to the safehouse, and three weeks later, the apocalypse begins. Martin isn't as consumed by the Lonely as he was in season four, he's with Jon--the person he loves--for extended periods of time, and they're in an extremely stressful situation that's sure to be incredibly emotionally charged. There's a lot to be said about Jon's emotional vulnerability during season five and how Martin both pressures him for it and rejects it in different ways, but for the purposes of this post, I won't go too far into detail about the motivations behind how Jon is feeling and acting.

I will say, however, that in season five, Martin still continues to place a lot of focus on asking Jon how he's feeling, encouraging (or pressuring) him to share, and getting frustrated when Jon can't or doesn't (MAG 167):

MARTIN

Okay, so how exactly would you describe your current emotional state regarding all of this?

JON

I –

MARTIN

(overlapping) Go on, I’m all ears.

JON

I feel…

MARTIN

(go on) Mhm.

JON

(sigh) I feel… sad.

[Brief pause.] MARTIN

(flat) Sad.

JON

Very sad.

MARTIN

(*very* flat) Very sad.

[He sighs slightly as he says it. Their bags jangle.]

A few moments prior to this, Martin expresses displeasure that Jon is Knowing things about him, specifically pointing out his emotions (MAG 167):

MARTIN

It’s just – it’s weird knowing that you can know literally everything I think and feel. E-Especially since you’re not exactly the most open of people – emotionally, I mean.

I think Martin is making an effort to open up more to Jon. But I still think it's difficult for him to talk about how he feels so openly, and while he is completely in the right for not wanting Jon to Know things about him without his permission, I think it's interesting that the focus is on his feelings and that he brings up how Jon isn't emotionally open immediately after. It scares Martin to think that Jon could know, at any given moment, how he's feeling, and I think it's partially because he's not used to that level of vulnerability. He turns the focus on Jon, away from himself, and doesn't really make an effort to talk about how he's feeling about all of this, instead prioritizing Jon's feelings and mental state like he's grown comfortable with.

And when Martin bottles up his emotions--of which there are a lot, in such a stressful environment, they can explode out in hurtful ways:

MARTIN

(overlapping) I know! I know, okay, I just – (bracing exhale) Look, I j,just – don’t want to get burned, all right? It’s, it’s like my least favorite pain ever.

JON

Is that – a joke?

MARTIN

(a bit faster, a bit shaky) No, no, okay? I, I legitimately hate burns, alright? They’re, they’re awful, and they scar horribly, and they just – it – it just makes me sick; I, I hate it. Hate it!

I don't think Martin really thought about what he was saying when he told Jon, who has a large burn scar on his hand, that burn scars make him sick, and I don't think he meant it maliciously. But he'd spent the greater portion of the conversation talking around the fact that he didn't like burns and that was why he didn't want to go into the building, and so when it finally ended up coming out, it did so in an explosion of emotion rather than a conscious decision to share. Martin doesn't have a good handle on his emotions, and he doesn't have a good handle on sharing them.

(Is it too much for me to say that Martin was more emotionally vulnerable with himself in MAG 170 than he was with Jon when Jon finally found him?)

Throughout season five, Martin asks Jon questions, he expresses frustrations with Jon, he shows discomfort or fear at times, but for as much as Martin feels frustrated that Jon isn't talking about how he feels about their situation, Martin really isn't doing so either. The most he talks about his feelings is in MAG 170 and MAG 186, when he's by himself, and I remember MAG 186 in particular because before that, we really didn't know what Martin was thinking about for the majority of the season! And in this episode, we find out a lot of very important things about Martin's character. Like (MAG 186):

ALSO MARTIN

Look, I know what you know. Maybe I’m just a bit more… open about it.

Also-Martin acknowledges that Martin often doesn't say what he means and hides what he really feels, telling him that it's 'hard to be vulnerable,' and Martin is initially very resistant to the idea. And then, when Also-Martin suggests that Martin wants to stay so that he can be 'quietly sad,' we get (MAG 186):

MARTIN

We could talk to Jon about it.

ALSO MARTIN

We could. But we both know that loved ones make the worst therapists. They’re too wrapped up in trying to stop you hurting to actually help. But hey, we know all about that, am I right?

MARTIN

There’s nothing wrong with comforting people.

ALSO MARTIN

A cup of tea isn’t a resolution. At best it’s a… a plaster. At worst… a muzzle.

This is very interesting to me, because for all that Martin tries to help other people, he also believes that comfort doesn't always help and that you can't be your loved one's 'therapist.' I think this gives a lot of insight into why Martin doesn't share his emotions with the people he cares about, especially Jon; he doesn't want to put Jon in the position where he'll become his 'therapist,' and he doesn't necessarily think Jon can help. So instead, Martin just chooses not to be vulnerable at all, because he doesn't want to burden the people he cares about. But, when it's just him (MAG 186):

ALSO MARTIN

Don’t lie. You don’t need to. Not here. It’s just us.

He doesn't feel like he needs to pull his emotional punches. He can't accidentally hurt somebody or put them in an awkward position; it's just himself. But what's said to himself remains with himself, and (at least on tape), he doesn't discuss any of this with Jon. Not even the bit about, if it came down to it, Martin would have rather had Jon smite him than continue to rule over a domain. He goes right back to being closed-off around Jon, but now we, the audience, know what lies underneath, and how little of it reaches the surface.

In fact, the thing Martin's probably most vocal about is how Jon's feelings about himself bother him (MAG 199):

MARTIN

I guess that’s why it really bothers me, you know? I try, but I can’t actually imagine ever making a decision that I knew meant losing you.

And it… It hurts to know you can.

And I think he has a tendency to use anger and frustration to cover up hurt, shying away from the admission that something Jon's done has hurt him (an incredibly vulnerable thing) and instead relying on the less-vulnerable and more external anger to cover it. This is more speculation than true analysis, but I think that's a lot of what's happening in MAG 200, when he discovers that Jon has already assumed the position of the pupil and has, in Martin's eyes, broken his promise.

#tma #the magnus archives #martin blackwood #tma meta #jonathan sims #(because i do talk about jon a bit in this too)#i actually think martin isn't good with emotions at all #both his own and others'#i think he doesn't quite know what to do with them so he puts on a mask and defaults to things he knows will work #*thinks about the low empathy autistic martin high empathy autistic jon post with love in my heart*

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lilliagradiewrites · 3 years

Text

go get her, kid. (peter parker)

Summary: Peter Parker is hopelessly in love with Tony Starks’ teenage daughter, and Stark encourages him to shoot his shot.

WC: 7.4k (holy shit)

Warnings: Bad language, , really nothing else. A lot of cute peter and a painful amount fluff. A tiny bit of angst too.

A/N: I found myself watching Tom Holland interview clips today and I just couldn’t help myself. Here we are: my first peter parker/ spiderman one shot! I have some Harry and Jj pieces in the works, so keep eyes out for that!

LET’S DO IT!!!

--------

Peter found himself in this position far too often. Staring at you shamelessly while you worked away at whatever was on your desk, usually a school assignment or some tech project. His crush had been going on for quite some time, but it was getting more and more difficult to hide.

You and Peter had been best friends ever since your dad first recruited him. Something clicked between the two of you, causing an instant friendship. As time went on, you grew closer and closer to the superhero, and he quickly became your best friend. You began surrounding yourself with his friends without even realizing it, becoming close with Ned and MJ almost instantly. They were great people, and you loved being around them, but something about Peter was just different. Your energies matched perfectly for some reason. He got your humour, liked the same things as you, plus he was a great conversationalist and an even better listener. Some of your favorite memories were made with Peter.

Despite knowing practically everything about the boy, you were completely oblivious about his huge crush on you. Ned was the only person who truly knew, though many other people had their suspicions. The Avengers had an idea about it, considering you were what he talked about 90 percent of the time. MJ could tell because of the way he looked at you. When he looked your way, his pupils enlarged, his cheeks went pink, and the look on his face was entirely lovey-dovey. It was so obvious just in the way he gazed at you when you spoke.

He was looking at you in that way now, though you weren’t aware. He was meant to be studying (it was the whole reason he came over to your house, or at least that’s the reason he told you), but he couldn’t bring himself to care about chemistry homework when you looked so damn beautiful. Your hair was pulled back into a low ponytail keeping it away from your face as you worked. Your hands flew across the keyboard on your laptop, typing out something Peter probably wouldn’t understand. He was smart, sure, but you were intelligent in a different way. You were insightful and observant, you got things other people couldn’t begin to process. Your brain understood things in a different capacity than most. Peter assumes you got this trait from your father, who was the exact same way.

“What’re you typing? Something for school?”

You nodded, your attention not wavering from the laptop screen. “Yeah, an assignment for AP Lit.”

“Oh, that one project you told me about? With the essay and the powerpoint?”

You nodded again. “Mhm.”

Peter furrowed his brows, moving off your bed to come stand near you at your desk in an attempt to get a better look at what you were working so eagerly on. “I thought that project wasn’t due for another month.

“It’s not. I had an idea for the essay, and I figured if I get started early, I have more time to edit and perfect it.”

“You’re such a perfectionist.” Peter says with a light chuckle, looking at the state of your desk. It was both chaotic and organized at the same time. Pens, highlighters, pieces of paper, a book with annotations scribbled in the margins, notebooks with neat class notes printed inside of them in your pretty handwriting. They were all scattered about the surface, but Peter knew you well enough to know that there was always a method to your madness. As you observed longer, he realized that all of the items were in different sections on your desk, based on categories and subjects. He smiled lightly, realizing that this messy but technically neat surface was probably a very accurate representation of what goes on in your mind.

You finished the paragraph you were typing with a flourish, a satisfied smile resting on your lips. “There. I have a basic outline done for the essay portion. Obviously, I’ll have to go back and add a little more and elaborate on the points, but the basics are there.”

Peter glanced up at your laptop screen. His eyes were met with a never ending sea of typed out words. He smiled; this was so you. Your ‘outline’ is another student's essay doubled.

“You’re gonna write more than that?”

You looked back at him, and he saw your face for the first time during the encounter. His cheeks went slightly pink at the sight of you, and he prayed that you didn’t notice.

You didn’t, or perhaps you just didn’t say anything. You continued on with the conversation without skipping a beat, and relief washed over Peter because of this.

“Of course I am.” You stated with furrowed brows, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “This is so boring and basic, and has no detail whatsoever. Anybody who reads the summary of the book online could write this. I want my teacher to know that I thoroughly read and understood the novel, you know? I don’t want to submit some surface-level shit, I want to really pick apart the undertones of and the meaning behind the story.”

Peter nods, pretending to understand what you meant. He’d barely been paying attention to the words you were saying, too encapsulated with your beautiful eyes to do so. You turned back around towards your work, causing your best friend to snap out of his trance-like state.

“Do you wanna watch a movie or something? I’m bored.”

You had now picked up a pencil and a highlighter, working on the chemistry notes he was supposed to be taking. “Don’t you have work to do, Pete?”

“...No.”

You paused your writing to gaze at him skeptically.

“So you did your book report for english?”

“Yes.”

“Your worksheets for pre-calc?”

“Mhm.”

“You read the assigned chapters for Pschycology and finished the quiz you had to take on them?”

A nod was your only answer.

“What about chem? We have notes, essay questions, assigned reading, and a formulas worksheet due next tuesday. Have you done all of that?”

Peter hesitated for a moment. “Yes, I have.” It was a clear lie. “Can we watch a movie now?”

“There’s no way you did all of that. Go finish your work, and then we can watch a movie.”

A groan escapes Peters lips as he turns, resting against your desk. “But that’ll take forever. Your dad kicks me out at 11:00. We’ll never have time to watch one.” He whines.

You smile slightly, unable to fight it. Not replying to your friend, you spin around in your chair, raising your voice slightly, “FRIDAY, connect to dad please.”, the command directed to nowhere in particular.

“Connecting to Mr. Stark.” The familiar robotic voice echoes throughout your room.

“What’s up, Y/N/N?”

“Hey, Dad? Can Peter stay a bit later tonight?”

“Why?” Your dad’s voice replies through a hidden speaker, his tone almost accusatory.

“Because he wants to watch a movie but I won’t let him until we’re done with homework. We won’t have enough time to finish the movie if he leaves at normal curfew? Pleeeaseee, Dad?”

You can hear your father sigh. “Fine, but only because it’s not a school night and I’m feeling generous. He’s gotta be gone by one though, no exceptions.”

Both of you smiled widely, and you erupted in cheers. “Thanks, Dad!”

“Kid, be ready for training at eight. A later curfew doesn’t mean an exception from your early morning saturday sessions.” The statement was directed at Peter, who nodded, despite your father not being able to see him.

“Got it, Mr. Stark.”

“FRIDAY, disconnect.” You heard Tony’s voice from the other side.

“Disconnected.” The sound of the AI confirming the command filled your room, and the space fell into a brief silence once again.

You spun in your chair, turning to face Peter with a smug smile on your face. “There, now we can get our work done, and watch a movie. Satisfied?”

Peter nodded, giving a roll of his eyes and heading back over to his workspace on your bed, plopping down and continuing his assignments.

An hour and half later, Peter gave a heavy sigh, finally closing his textbook with a smile. “All done!” he announced proudly.

“With everything?”

“Yes, everything.”

You closed your notebook you’d been working in, standing up. “Great. I’ve been done for half an hour, I’ve been working on future assignments while I waited for you to finish up. Ready to watch that movie?”

Peter nodded excitedly. He loved watching movies with you, because you always cuddled up close to him on your bed while you watched. Peter loved being in close proximity to you, even though it made him a little nervous.

“What do you wanna watch?” He asked, beginning to clear his things off your bed.

“I don’t know. We can discuss while we go make popcorn.”

Peter’s eyes lit up; he loved popcorn.

“Okay!” He tossed the rest of his things in his school bag, zipping it up quickly and dropping it in the corner of your room. “Lets go!”

You chuckled at his childlike behavior, following him out of your bedroom door towards your kitchen. The entire journey down the stairs, down the hall, and to the kitchen was filled with Peter going on and on about movies he wanted to see.

You grabbed the microwave popcorn from the pantry, unwrapping it and tossing it in, starting up the machine.

You continued to listen to Peter as soft popping sounds filled your kitchen.

“Oh, you guys have Disney plus, right? What if we watched that new star wars show thingy? The mandalorian?”

You smiled at this statement. Though you didn’t see the boy in any way but a friend (at least that’s what you told yourself), you found Peter’s Star Wars obsession very cute.

“I mean, I would watch that, but I don’t think I’d understand it.”

Peter’s brows furrowed. “Why not?”

“Because I’ve never seen the movies.”

You watched in amusement as Peter’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening in shock. “You’ve NEVER seen the Star Wars movies? Are you kidding me, Y/N?”

You laughed at his reaction, moving to fetch the fully popped popcorn from the microwave and transfer it into a bowl. “No, I’m not kidding. I’ve been meaning to watch them forever, but I guess I never got around to it.”

“I can’t believe this!” Peter exclaims in disbelief. “We’ve been friends for a year and a half now, and you’ve never seen the Star Wars movies? This is insane! I talk about them so much… did you just never understand what I was talking about?”

You shook your head, chuckling. “Nope, I never have. I kinda just let you talk about it, because I planned on watching the movies. I figured I’d understand what you meant when I watched them.”

“Holy shit… we’re watching the first one tonight, Y/N. No arguments, we’re doing it.”

You grabbed the now prepared bowl of popcorn, smiling at your friend. “Alright, let’s do it.”

You headed back up the stairs, the sound of your footsteps accompanied with the sound of Peter murmuring in disbelief as you made your way to your room.

Once the two of you arrived at your destination, you closed the door, placing the bowl of popcorn on your still cluttered desk.

Peter climbed into your bed, while you rummaged through your drawers in search of comfy clothes. “I’m gonna change into pj’s before we start, i want to be comfy.”

Peter nodded. “FRIDAY, put Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on Y/N’s TV.” He spoke out in a slightly raised voice. The movie appeared on your screen, waiting to be started as you changed.

A few moments later, you emerged from your bathroom, now wearing a pair of Nike shorts and a slightly oversized t-shirt.

“Y/N, this is about to change your li-” Peter’s voice trailed off as he looked at you. The oversized shirt you were wearing… was his.

He choked on the piece of popcorn he’d been eating. “I-is that my shirt?”

You looked down on what you were wearing, realizing that it was, in fact, Peter's. “Oh shit. Yeah, sorry. You left it at the lab once, dad gave it to me to give to you, and I guess it just got mixed in with my clothes. I’ll wash it and give it back.

Peter shook his head, coughing again. “No, it’s okay. You can keep it. It looks better on you anyway.” his cheeks went pink as he realized what had just left his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say the last part.

Your cheeks went even pinker at the compliment, which you couldn’t deny made your stomach flutter a little bit. “Okay, thanks.” You smiled at your friend, climbing into the bed beside him. You cuddled in close to him, probably closer than need be, but Peter didn’t seem to mind.

“FRIDAY, start the movie.”

---

A few hours later, the credits were rolling, and Peter was red in the face. You had fallen asleep halfway through the movie, and had moved even closer to him in your slumber. You were now full-on cuddling the boy, and he had no idea what to do. Your leg was moved over his, your head lay on his chest. One arm thrown around his waist. He liked having you this close, but his stomach was in a constant state of butterflies, and he was worried that the sound of his heart beating loudly in his chest would wake you.

He didn’t know what time it was, but it must’ve been close to one, because a knock sounded from the other side of your bedroom door.

Without waiting for an answer, Tony entered the room. “Alright, kids, it’s almost curfew, time to wrap it up…”

His eyes landed on you and Peter, cuddled up in your bed.

“Kid, what the hell is going on here?”

“Mr. Stark! Um, Y/N fell asleep while we were watching the movie and she kinda… I don’t know.. Ended up like this? Nothing’s going on, I swear, it’s just… I didn’t want to wake her up…”

Peter’s face was the color of a tomato at this point. Stark still had his suspicions about the boy’s intentions, but had a feeling that Peter was telling the truth. “Alright, then. You’d better get your ass home and get some sleep. Like I said, you don’t get a free pass from training because you were cuddling with my daughter till one am.”

Peter’s eyes went wide. “No, Mr. Stark, I- We weren’t… I Wasn’t…”

Stark chuckled at the boy’s flustered state. “I’m screwing with you, Kid. Now get the hell out of my house. I’ll see you at 8 AM sharp at the compound”

Peter nodded frantically. “Yes, sir. 8 AM. Got it.”

Tony turned and left without another word, leaving Peter slightly panicked. Did Mr. Stark think that something was going on between him and Y/N? Would he be mad if there was? Peter didn’t know what to think, but he knew that he should probably leave before Tony decided to come back.

Peter climbed carefully out from underneath Y/N, setting her head gently on her pillow. He tried his very best not to wake her as he moved out of the bed.

“Goodnight, Y/N. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Love you lots.” Peter whispered to his ‘best friend’, planting a sweet kiss on her forehead. With that, he slid your window open, climbing out of it and swinging his way home.

Peter was completely oblivious to the fact that Tony had been standing quietly outside your door when Peter said his goodbyes, and Tony saw the entire encounter. The ‘goodnight’, the ‘i love you’, the sweet forehead kiss.

Tony had his suspicions, but that night it was confirmed: his newest recruit had it bad for his daughter.

Strangely, Tony didn’t find himself terribly angry over it.

The next morning, you awoke to the sound of your alarm blaring frustratingly loud. You groaned at the noise, picking up your phone to turn it off. The time on your phone screen read 7:00 AM. Groaning again, you pulled yourself reluctantly out of bed. As much as you hated getting up out of bed, you knew you had to if you ever wanted to complete your training. Your father had promised you that you’d get a spot on his team if you trained hard enough, and you were extremely determined. It had been your dream for years to become an Avenger, so you had been training your ass off for months to earn your spot.

This is how all of your Saturdays had begun for many weeks. An alarm going off at seven in the morning, waking you up to get ready for training at eight. It was a normal routine for you at this point, but for some reason the early wake up never got easier.

You moved about your regular morning routine, heading straight for your bathroom to brush your teeth and wash your face. Once your basic hygiene was done, you brushed through your hair, changed into some clothes (your training uniform was at the compound), grabbed your phone, and headed downstairs.

You made a beeline for the kitchen, where your father was already making his morning coffee. When he noticed your presence, he gave you a tired smile.

“Morning, Y/N/N. Sleep well?”

Still half asleep, you gave an exhausted nod. “I shouldn’t have stayed up that late last night. I’ll yell at Peter when I see him. He always manages to convince me to let him stay late.”

For some reason, your father gave a light chuckle at your words. “I bet he does, sweetheart.”

Your brows furrowed at his statement. Something about his tone of voice didn’t sit right with you. “What’s that supposed to mean?” You ask, making your way over to fix yourself a cup of coffee.

Your father smiled smugly at you, passing over the coffee pot and a mug. “Nothing, honey. Be ready in fifteen.”

Still suspicious, your eyes followed him as he placed his coffee mug in the sink and moved from the room. Why was he acting like this? Did Peter do something last night? You remembered falling asleep halfway through the movie, not being able to make it through the whole thing. Had something happened while you were sleeping?

Deciding not to let it bother you, you pushed the interaction from your mind, focusing solely on fixing your coffee. You were barely functional without it, and you knew you needed to be fully aware for training. You had to prove to your father that you could keep up with the Avengers, and that you’d be a useful asset to their team.

You downed the coffee quickly, knowing you had only a few minutes left to get ready. When your father gave you a time warning, he always meant it. And, you knew all too well, he would leave you behind if you were going to make him late.

He’d done it twice before.

Once you had finished chugging the remnants of your coffee, you placed the mug neatly in the sink, right beside where your father had left his. The drink had been an instant pick-me-up, and you automatically felt more awake. You found yourself getting more and more excited for the day ahead of you. Though waking up early on saturday mornings was a pain in the ass, you did enjoy training. You got to exercise, learn about cool technology, and screw around with your best friend. What wasn’t there to like?

Now that your best friend had crossed your mind, you pulled out your phone to text him. You sent him a message every morning, or he sent one to you. It was just a thing the two of you did. Over the past year the two of you had been close, it became some sort of routine.

Y/N/N: morning spidey. u awake?

Within moments, he was typing out a reply. He always answered your messages quickly.

Spidey: yes i am :) ready for training? I’m gonna kick ur ass in sprints today

You chuckled lightly at his response. You and Peter had always been insanely competitive towards each other, and it really jumped out during training. Unfortunately for you, Peter usually won the challenges. You always blamed it on the fact that he had more experience and super strength; he blamed it on the fact that ‘you suck’ and ‘he’s just that awesome’.

Y/N/N: u can try, but idk how that will work out. I’ve beaten u in all of the other sprints for weeks.

Spidey: doesn’t matter. I’m showing out today

Spidey: bring ur a-game, irongirl.

You smiled at the message.

Y/N/N: always do, spiderboy

He started typing back immediately, and you knew exactly why. He called you irongirl to screw with you, so you had begun calling him spiderboy to get on his nerves. It worked every time.

Spidey: Y/N!!! It’s spiderman!!!

Y/N/N: spiderboy!!! It’s nova!!!

Spidey: ugh. Ur impossible.

You grinned widely. Your playful banter with Peter has always been one of your favorite parts of the friendship.

Y/N/N: but u love me anyways :)))) see u soon

Spidey: u better be glad i do. see u soon

You reread the texts, unable to fight the smile on your face. Everytime you interact with Peter, you remember how much you truly love him. Being an avenger, and the daughter of one of the smartest and most famous men on the planet, wasn’t easy. Peter was the only one who had a taste of the madness that was your life. Having him around was having a sense of normalcy, and so were incredibly grateful for him.

Your thoughts were interrupted by the sound of your voice being called from the front door of your house.

“Y/N! Time to leave!” Without hesitation, you locked your phone, slipping it into the pocket of your sweatpants.

You hurried towards the front door, not wanting to be left behind again. When you arrived, your father was already standing there, holding the door open. You gave him a smile and a quick thank you for holding the door, then made your way out. The driver was already waiting patiently in front of your house. This was one of your dad’s six drivers.

“Morning, Bernard.” You say kindly to the driver, climbing into the back seat of the range rover. “How are you today?”

“I’m doing wonderful, Y/N. How are you?” The older man replied. You really liked Bernard, he was one of your favorite drivers. He was an older man, in his mid seventies, and you found him to be the sweetest person in the universe. Sometimes, he’d bring you your favorite candy when he used to pick you up from school, and he was always so considerate and kind.

“I’m good. Tired, but good.”

The man smiled at your reply. By this point, your dad had finished locking up the front door of the house, and he climbed in the backseat beside you.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark.” Bernard said professionally to his new passenger, and your dad nodded as a reply.

“Morning, bernard.”

The conversation ended there between the two men. Your father wasn’t a very social person with people he didn’t know, and Bernard was aware of this fact. He mostly talked to you when you were in the car, and Tony went on his phone and did Lord knows what.

“How is Dorothy doing? Is she feeling better?” You asked the man as he began pulling out of your driveway. Dorothy was Bernard’s wife, and she’d gotten sick the week prior. Given her age, Bernard was very worried about her.

Bernard smiled at your question. “Much, much better. They released her from the hospital yesterday, she’s back home and doing great. Thanks for asking.”

“Of course!” You grinned back. “Did you ever find out what she had?”

“Pneumonia, just a very bad case of it.”

You nodded in understanding. “Well, I’m glad she’s better! I was worried when you first told me.”

The conversation continued, talking about anything and everything as you drove to the compound. He told you about his wife, his four kids and what they’re doing. His granddaughter had a baby a few days before, and he was extremely excited about it.

After a 20 minute drive, you pulled up to the building you knew so well. Bernard went to the normal procedure of getting through the front gates, and then pulled up to the front of the compound.

“Well, here we are.” Bernard announced, parking the vehicle. You and your father began climbing out of the backseat.

“Thank you, bernard. Tell your granddaughter I said congratulations!”

He wished you a kind goodbye, and then you were gone, leaving the car and heading towards the compound.

When you walked into the main section of the building, you spotted your best friend in the kitchen. You had to admit, he looked incredible, standing near an open window in the early morning light. He was already dressed in his sleek, black training uniform. It was tight against his body, showing off his muscled body. Sometimes, you forget how beautiful Peter is.

“You’re staring…” A singsong voice came in your ear. You whipped your head towards the voice to see your father walking away from you, smirking. You stood there, feeling slightly confused. Had you really been staring at Peter?

At times, you forget that Peter is only your best friend. The two of you act like an old married sometimes. You spend all of your time together, and you know each other so well.

Strange feelings you couldn’t understand had crept up on you before, especially recently. You couldn’t deny Peter was attractive, and he was a great person, too. How could you not love him? The issue is, you found yourself loving him in a different way than before…

You shook your head, clearing your thoughts. You couldn’t be thinking about this right now, it’s not the place or time. Peter was standing right in front of you, and you needed to be focused for training.

You could process your feelings and emotions at a later time.

You began walking up to Peter, who was leaning up against the counter holding a cup of coffee.

“Morning, loser.” You said teasingly, greeting your friend. His head snapped in your direction, and he smiled when his eyes found you. (You thought you could see his cheeks go pink, too, but you forced yourself to ignore it.)

“Hey! How’d you sleep?”

“Pretty good.” You replied, leaning against the counter beside him. “I didn’t even notice that you left last night, I was really out. Did my Dad come in and tell you to leave?”

The pink in Peter’s cheeks darkened at your statement. Of course, this was the perfect time for your father to reenter the room. “Yeah, I did. He seemed very comfortable, but I kicked him out at one.”

Peter and your father were making direct eye contact. Your dad had that stupid smirk on his face, and peter was bright red.

You looked between the two of them, not knowing what to think. Before, you were just suspicious, but now it was confirmed: something happened last night between the two of them, and you were determined to find out what.

Hours later, you’re completely exhausted from training. You worked your ass off, and had successfully beat Peter in sprints.

“That’s right! You lost! How amazing is spiderboy now?”

Peter rolled his eyes in mock annoyance. “Whatever, Y/N. I let you win.”

Your jaw dropped. “You did not! I won because I’m better!”

Peter just smiled at you. You took a swig of the water bottle in your hands, turning around to look at your friend as you did.

The sight you were met with was very sweet. Peter stood there, smiling at you with a look you could only describe as adoration. You looked back at him, a small grin resting on your face.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” The brunette boy says cheekily.

“Why are YOU looking at ME like that, Parker?”

You took a step closer to him, his eyes widening slightly at your movement. He said nothing in response to your question (though it felt more like an accusation), and you smiled again.”Got nothing to say?” Your voice was barely a whisper.

“Parker!” You jumped what felt like 20 feet in the air at the sound of Natasha’s voice, breaking up the little moment between you and Peter.

You stepped back away from him, and you couldn’t help but notice the sadness flash across his face before he turned to the other woman in the room.

“Yeah, Nat?”

“Tony needs your help in the lab. I believe his exact words were ‘he needs to be here in five or I’ll kill him.’ A few minutes have already passed, I’d start running if I were you.”

Peter’s eyes widened for the second time. “Oh, shit, okay. Thanks, Nat.” He turned his head quickly in your direction. “I’ll meet you in your room when I’m done, okay?”

You nodded with a smile. Peter planted a quick kiss on your forehead before jetting off in the direction of the lounge.

Grinning to yourself, you turned towards the sink, your back facing Natasha. You begin cleaning out your now empty water bottle, thinking over the previous interaction with Peter. You loved when he kissed your forehead.

“So, how long have you liked him?” You were so deep in thought, Natasha’s voice made you jump once again. When you’d fully processed her words, your cheeks went pink.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Oh, don’t give me that. I know you like him.”

“Like who?” Play dumb. That’ll throw her off your trail… right?

“Peter! Come on, you’re caught. Just admit it, Y/n, you’re making things harder on yourself.”

Finally, you sighed. Drying your hands on a towel, you turned reluctantly back towards Nathasha. “Is it really that obvious?”

The woman broke out into a grin at your words. “Of course it is! You two are hopelessly in love with each other. It’s almost hard to watch.”

Your cheeks went pink at her statement. “With each other? Oh, no. You mean I’m hopelessly in love with him. It’s not mutual. I’m just his best friend.”

Nat rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh, come on! ‘Just his best friend’ my ass. He loves you, Y/N. He’s even more obvious than you are.”

You shook your head quickly. “No, I promise you’re wrong.”

She looked at you pointedly. “I was right about you, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, but…” Your voice trailed off. You couldn’t argue with that. Nat grinned smugly at your reaction.

“That’s what I thought. Please confess to him when he meets you in your room later. It’s painful to watch, I can’t do it any longer.” And with that, Natasha was gone, leaving you alone with your thoughts.

Was it really thought obvious? Could everyone tell how you felt about peter? You could hardly even tell how you felt about him; the line between best friend and crush had been blurred for so long. If everyone could tell that you were hopelessly in love with your best friend, you would be incredibly embarrassed.

Even worse… what if Peter could tell that your in love with him?

You shook your head, as if clearing your thoughts. No. You couldn’t think like that. Of course he didn’t know; he would’ve said something.

Right?

Sighing, you walked off towards your room to take a shower, pretending you weren’t going to think of him while you were in there.

---

While Natasha was exposing your feelings, you were completely oblivious to the fact that Tony was doing the same thing to Peter in the lab.

When the boy walked in, Peter fully expected that he was being called for one of three reasons.

One: Tony had a new mission for Peter.

Two: Tony needed help with an experiment.

Or, three (the scariest option): Tony wanted to scold him for (albeit unintentionally) cuddling with his daughter the night before.

Peter could only be described as apprehensive as he walked carefully into the lab, where Tony was hunched over a table, working on something that Peter couldn’t see.

“Mr. Stark?” Peter spoke nervously, a timid way of letting Tony know of his presence. “Nat said you needed me. Is that true, or was she just trying to get rid of me?”

“No, no, I called for you.” Tony replied. He made a few last touches on whatever he was working on, then turned around towards peter. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Okay, option two is eliminated. Now, the question at hand is: will it be option one or three?

“Oh, okay. What about?” Peter said casually (or at least, that's how he hoped it came across.)

Tony gave a pointed look to the boy before speaking again. “My daughter.”

Peter’s eyes widened slightly.

Shit, shit, shit.

Option three it is.

“Is this about last night sir? I swear I can explain-” Peter was quickly speaking.

But, before he could finish, Tony was cutting him off.

“This isn’t about last night, kid. I mean, it kind of is, but not really.”

Peter’s brow furrowed.

Unknown option number four?

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I saw what happened before you left last night. The forehead kiss, the ‘I love you,’ all of it.”

Peter was bright red in seconds. “Oh…”

“Do you love my daughter, Peter?”

The boy’s cheeks somehow managed to go a darker shade of pink.

“I-I uh.. O-of course I do, she’s, uh, she’s my best friend.” Peter stammered out.

Tony narrowed his eyes. “That’s not what I mean, Peter.” The man says, his tone borderline accusatory. “Do you love her, love her?”

Silence. Peter didn’t know what to say, so he opted for nothing at all.

“I already know the answer, Peter, so you might as well just come out and say it.”

Peter pondered his next move. If he played his cards wrong, this conversation could end in him losing his life. Tony Stark was not one to be messed with, especially when it comes to Y/N.

On the other hand, Tony Stark was not one to be lied to, either.

Peter sighed, accepting his fate. “How did you know?”

Much to Peter’s surprise, Tony gave a small smile. “I see the way you look at her, kid. I’ve looked at many girls like that in my day. That enamoured look. You're in love with my daughter, and I have some questions.”

“Questions?”

“Yes, questions, kid. Keep up.”

Peter nodded. “Alright.”

“How long?” Tony asked.

“How long…?” Peter didn’t understand what Tony was aking.

“How long have you been in love with Y/N! How long have you known?”

Peter looked away, breaking eye contact momentarily out of nerves.

When did he begin loving you? Now that he’s truly thinking about it, he can’t really remember.

Maybe it was the first mission that the two of you did together, back when you still known as irongirl. It was a bank robbery, an easy task that Tony had given for your very first mission.

Maybe it was that one time when you dragged him out of bed at 6 AM so that you could show him your favorite coffee shop.

Perhaps it was when you took that faithful mission to Asgard, when you gained your powers accidentally, earning your new title as Nova.

Or, it could be the time that you and him stayed up late binge watching a show he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t take his eyes off of you that night. You looked so beautiful that night, getting excited as something cool happened in the show. Your hair was tied back, wearing an oversized shirt, your face makeup free. He couldn’t help but smile as you laughed, and didn’t think he’d ever heard a more beautiful sound in the world.

Yeah, he thinks it was that night.

“Um… about ten months ago, I think? That’s when I realized, but I think I’ve loved her for longer. I just forced myself not to acknowledge it, I guess.”

Tony nodded in understanding. “I get that. What is it about her?”

Another question the boy had to think about.

“There’s a lot of things, I think. Like how excited she gets when she talks about things she’s passionate about. Oh, and the way she laughs when something’s funny in a movie or a show or something. And the way she sends me memes or videos that she thinks are funny. They’re usually not very funny, but of course I think it’s hilarious just because she sent it to me. And she always listens to me when I talk, even if I’m talking about something stupid and boring like science stuff I think is interesting. She talks back to me like she cares what I’m saying, and I know she probably doesn’t, but she acts like she does, and that’s enough. She always drags me out to go on adventures, or, at least, that’s what she calls them. Usually it’s just going to get coffee or try out some new restaurant she heard about but it’s still fun. She’s just so amazing, and I think she makes me the best version of myself.”

The rant ended, and for a moment, Peter forgot that Tony was even in the room.

“Damn. I wasn’t expecting that. I’m impressed, kid. To be honest, I expected some shallow answer like ‘she looks hot in her suit’ or something like that.”

“No, sir. Of course, she’s beautiful, but Y/N is just so much more than that.”

Tony gave another sweet smile to the boy in front of him.

“She likes you, too, you know.”

Peter’s head snapped toward Tony again.

What the hell did he just say?

“What?”

“Y/N. She likes you.”

“No way. She just sees me as her best friend. I’m probably like a brother to her. She doesn’t like me like that.”

“But she does, kid. I know my daughter better than I know myself. She is head over heels for you, spidey. Which is why you should tell her how you feel.”

“Tell her how I feel? Why would I do that?”

“Because she likes you, too, and then you two will be stupid kids in love.”

“Are you serious?”

“Aren’t I always?”

Peter paused for a moment. “I thought you’d kill me when you found out I liked your daughter, not convince me to go talk to her about it.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you, kid. I brought you in here with the intention of killing you, or just telling you to stay away from my daughter. But after you went on that little rant about why you loved her, I just couldn’t tell you to keep away from her. You really love her, kid, I can tell. So go talk to her.”

“You’re sure you won’t be mad if I ask her out?”

Tony shook his head and smiled.

“Go get her, kid.”

-------

Freshly clean and feeling a significant amount better, you sat on your bed scrolling on your phone. Thoughts of Peter had begun to fade (mainly because you forced them out of your mind) and that helped to keep you from stressing about what’s to come.

You had decided to confess how you feel to Peter.

True, this plan could ruin everything. Today could be the day you lost your best friend, and that thought made you want to cry.

But today could also be the day you finally get to kiss the boy you’ve loved forever, and that thought also made you want to cry.

You didn't have much time to think about it further, however, because Peter was knocking on your bedroom door.

“Y/N? It’s me. Can I come in?”

You paused immediately, your heart rating speeding up.

Oh, shit. This is it. This could be the beginning or the end of you and Peter Parker.

You took a deep breath, steadying yourself. It was now or never.

“Yeah, Petey, come on in.”

The door opened, and the boy you loved so much walked in. His cheeks were pink, you noticed. His cheeks only went pink when he’s nervous. Why was he nervous?

You could tell by his damp hair that he had also showered before coming to your room.

“I need to talk to you about something.” He rushes out.

Oh.

“Same.” is your reply. What else are you meant to say?

“Oh, really? Well, uh, you can go first. I’ll wait.”

You shook your head frantically. “No, you first. You said it first, so it’s only right that you go.”

Peter’s hand went to the back of his neck, rubbing it. Another nervous habit of his.

“Can I sit down?”

You nodded. Why was he even asking? Usually he’d just plop down whenever he pleased, no questions asked. This behavior was very out of character for the boy you knew so well.

The boy sat down on the edge of your bed, and then took a deep breath. “Okay. I don’t know how to tell you this, but I just have to. I don’t want you to hate me, and I really hope this doesn’t affect our friendship, but…”

Peter paused for a moment, and looked into your eyes. They were brimming with concern, and he just couldn’t hold it back anymore. He broke the eye contact you’d been maintaining, mustered up all the courage he could, and then blurted it out.

“I’m in love with you. I have been for I don’t know how long. I wasn’t planning on telling you, because I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, but it was starting to get physically painful and I just- I can’t hide it anymore. I love you and I’m sorry.”

Peter clenched his eyes shut, unable to look at your face. He waited (very anxiously) for a reaction, but it never came. Eventually, he opened his eyes, gaining the burst of bravery it took to look at you.

Your jaw was dropped, the expression on your face unreadable.

Oh, no. No no no no no. He’d fucked up. He fucked everything up and now you were never going to speak to him again. He’d lost you. Damn you, Tony Stark.

“Y/N…” He began his apology solemnly. “I’m-”

But he never got to finish his sentence.

Because you were pouncing on him before he had the chance to.

You were on him within seconds, kissing him with so much intensity that he fell back on the bed. He was taken aback for a moment, but quickly kissed you back.

For a moment, the two of you just lay there, wrapped in one another, kissing like there was no tomorrow.

A kiss that made up for all the ones both of you had longed to have in the months before.

You pulled away gently, looking into Peter’s eyes.

“I have loved you for so fucking long, Peter. I was going to tell you that I loved you today.”

“Are you serious?”

You laughed lightly. “Of course I’m serious, you dumbass.”

“Hey!” Peter feigned offense.

You pecked his lips. “You’re a cute dumbass, though.” And then you were kissing him again, and it’s all you could’ve asked for.

----

After a while, the two of you had finally tired each other out, and now you sat cuddled against each other on your bed. No movie or show was playing; it was just you and Peter, listening to each other’s breathing and the sound of your heartbeats.

You looked up at the beautiful boy you were cuddling with, only to find he was already looking down at you.

“Aren’t you going to ask me out, Parker?”

Peter’s eyes widened, and his cheeks went red (for the millionth time that day.)

“Oh, yeah, I- I just thought- nevermind, uh- Y/N, will-”

“Yes, of course I’ll be your girlfriend, Petey.” You cut him off, saving him a few extra minutes of nervous stammering.

He smiled sheepishly at you, then leaned down to bring you into a kiss.

You cuddled back down into his chest, smiling warmly.

You can confidently say that right now, in this moment, you are the happiest you’ve ever been.

#peter parker #peter parker one shot #peter parker fluff #peter parker smut #peter parker angst peter parker fanfiction #peter parker x reader #marvel fanfiction #mcu

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you-show-me-love · 3 years

Note

i would honestly love to hear to talk about these characters all day long! you have such insight & your formatting is so sick. so i'm sending you more <3 (if you so desire): mandy and/or fiona

Tbh I am honored and ilysm for indulging me ❤

Mandy "Medusa" Milkovich

How I feel about this character: Mandy Mandy Mandy. She's a tragedy in a sea of tragic characters and manages to stand out. She has similar characteristics to Mickey: loyal and loving with a tendency to put a Gallagher on a pedistal, but where Mickey overcame a lot of his tragic beginnings with the support of Ian (or at least the illusion of Ian's support but thats a whole other thing) Mandy didn't have anybody in the end. I feel a bit too much for Mandy if I'm honest.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: As weird as it is I'd say Ian. And this would be an entirely one sided romance obviously like it was in season one but he was the closest thing to a good fit for her. If Ian's story had him stuck deep in the closet for more of the show this would have been the best pairing.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: Mandy and Debbie! Young Debbie looking up to Mandy because she acts like an actual sister where as her actual sister has taken the role of her mother. I adore the way Debbie looked up to her but also how Mandy never seemed annoyed by Debbie's problems or questions about life. I think they both needed a sister.

My unpopular opinion about this character: Lip and Mandy was never good. I think Mandy globbed onto Lip because her and Ian could never have a true romantic relationship. She chose the next best thing and just like Mandy and Mickey, Ian and Lip do share some similar qualities that attract Mandy to them, but in the end Mandy was a placeholder for Karen and no matter what she did for Lip she was never going to rise above that. So yeah sorry MandyxLip shippers its not for me.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.: that she was there for Mickey and Ian's wedding! I wanted her there to see her best friend and brother get married not only because she would be so happy but because I think she'd be a little sad it wasn't her. I'd also want her to see Lip and Tami and Fred and understand her vision of his future wasn't ever in the cards. The episode was already emotional yeah but Mandy added to the mix would have been the perfect angst.

Fiona "Fight Me" Gallagher

How I feel about this character: Fiona carried so much of the show. She manages to rise and fall so often during the series and yet you still feel for her time after time. The fact that she remains sympathetic and you still root for her to crawl back out of the hole she's fallen in speaks to how much she deserves. I think she's a great example of struggle and how its not always in your face but its there in the background of every choice you make. When she fell she fell hard, but Fiona's never down for long.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: JimmySteve deserves some recognition for getting down in the trenches with her for the sake of their relationship. He's no saint and he himself ultimately couldn't adjust but he was willing to try. Everyone else (and actually also JimmySteve) can fuck off for trying to pull her off her life path because they thought they knew better.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: V and Kev both together and separate. I loved the sibling vibe Kev and Fiona had. It was a sibling relationship where she didn't have to take care of the person. V and Fiona is one of the few relationships we see that were simply friends with nothing holding them together but themselves. And the fact we got to seen them drift apart as their lives changed and their efforts to stay close weren't their priority, it was so organic that even though it was sad I appreciated it.

My unpopular opinion about this character: okay Fiona is great we all agree but the girl could have settled down just a bit. She's ambitious to a fault and the gambling she did with those ambitions put the whole family at risk. If homegirl could have just set herself a realistic goal of a full time job with benefits (even if it was just selling cups) there would have been a ripple affect of positive outcomes. I love that she never settled and always wanted more but I hated it at the same time.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.: Okay this one maybe could go under unpopular opinion but I wish Fiona had had the baby instead of an abortion. I think it would have been an interesting turn for the character. How would she treat her own child in comparison to her siblings? What would she prioritize? How would she handle the responsibility of another 18 years of putting herself to the side? It would have been an interesting shift in her life that I would have loved to see play out.

#shameless #mandy milkovich #fiona gallagher #ask #I'm in deep #i love character deep dives

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whoistheasshole · 3 years

Text

How do I get out of this unsatisfying life I’m living?

Anonymous asks: So the thing is that I feel incredibly stuck - I have all the basics of life which I'm grateful for but also that was my BIG dream as a kid, to get tf out of my parents' house - but now I have that and idk what to do for the rest of my life. Like, if I try those "visualize your future" things I'm just like, "I'd like to sleep for a month, maybe longer" & it feels like I don't really WANT anything so I can't plan, you know? Just flailing here honestly. Pretty tired of it.

I wrote back: I got your question. To pinpoint my answer a little better, can you tell me about your current situation, like how long has it been since you moved out? Which are the things you have in order to your satisfaction? Some vague idea of your age range would also be helpful, but I can work without it too if you’d rather not share.

Anonymous answered: Ah, sorry. I was trying to fit in the character limit & also whenever I think about this my mind just goes flbbbbth. It's been about 5 years? That's about the only thing I'm truly HAPPY about, I'm not thrilled with my social/love life, career, etc & have pretty much been just coasting tbh. I'm almost 30. Thanks for entertaining this.

Alright, thanks for adding some background. I will come at this from different angles and you can pretty much pick and choose what sounds helpful and leave the rest, okay?

First, while there are people who have it all figured out, methodically planning their next career step or fully certain that there is no greater joy than raising a child, there are tons of other people who just, to quote, go „ flbbbbth“ when asked about their next steps or, god forbid, their life plan. I would say I fall in the latter camp, but I don’t mind because I think there is nothing wrong with that. I let myself be guided by the things I need to be happy (more on that later) and by current necessities – if my job becomes shit, I need to find a new job. If a friendship goes sour, I need to end it respectfully. But I couldn’t tell you specific career or personal goals, except...

... let’s talk about the „later“ now.

I’m an organizer, maybe even a worrier, and therefore I like lists. And for that reason I made a list a while ago that I still have and expect to keep for a long time. It is a list of everything that I need to be satisfied with my life. It consists of 29 entries and has three of them checked, though several others could be counted as half-checked. I wrote down everything that came to mind, paying no attention whether it was reasonable or feasible to want. That wasn’t the question.

It covers stuff like a clean flat (not checked), restful sleep (not checked), friends that I see regularly (checked) or a job with purpose (not checked). This list is my guide. Well, generally my needs are my guide, but it can be hard to be aware of your needs sometimes, so I got this list. And if I wonder what I need or want to focus on, I can turn to it and choose one of the entries and see what I can do about it. I can also look over the list every few years and see if things have developed in the right direction. Little progress is no reason to chastise myself, but helpful information to see whether I need to re-direct my focus.

Please note that I wrote „satisfied“, not „happy“. Being happy is a passing emotional state. It is completely normal and okay not to be happy all the time. But quiet satisfaction with where you are or where you are going, that is pretty achievable. It certainly is a process, but an enjoyable one.

This list is not a race and it is not really a to-do list because most of the things I wrote down aren’t easy to accomplish with a single action. They take months and years and, for some items, I can only try and hope it works out some day (see anybody who ever purposely looked for a partner).

So maybe this kind of list could be an exercise for you. Maybe it provides you with some insight, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s not the right point in your life. But if you sit down and the only thing you can come up with is „cry forever“ or „sleep forever“ then, you know, that’s a sign.

Which brings me to my next point: Journaling or automatic writing. This method is especially helpful for those „I feel some kind of way and I couldn’t even tell you how“ moments – so maybe exactly where you are right now. Captain Akward has introduced me to a website called „750 words“ and I’ve used the principle of „morning pages“, though not the website, since then whenever I felt like some emotions were starting to boil over.

I sit down, ideally in the morning, and just barf it all on the (digital) page. There are only two rules: 1) Don’t edit or judge yourself, write everything as it comes to mind (that’s the automatic writing part) and 2) Don’t stop before you’ve reached 750 words. You are not looking to write anything readable or clever or lyrical, you’re looking to get all the weirdness out so you can move on. Repeat this as many days as you feel queasy or weird or confused or angry or sad. Each day, as soon as you’ve reached the 750 words, you can walk away. Heck, you could even delete/burn the document if that feels right. It’s just about giving your thoughts the room they need so you can continue with your day, hopefully feeling somewhat relieved.

While we’re at writing, I also have a question for you: Where is the pressure coming from to „do something with your life“? Is it truly coming from inside you or are there outside factors? Are people in your life asking you when you’ll have kids? Do you live in a culture where it’s expected that everybody does something of note, works certain prestigious jobs? Do you compare yourself to the people around you and feel like you’re „late“?

Maybe mull this over on a leisurely walk or write about it, using the method above. No matter where it’s coming from, the feeling of pressure won’t go away just by knowing its origin, but the knowledge can help you keep it under control. And if you find it is truly your own wish, you will have tools to shape your life according to your needs.

So, next, sleep: Maybe do that?

You wrote "I'd like to sleep for a month, maybe longer". I understand this was half a joke, but also … it was probably more than a joke.

How are your energy levels? How does life feel? Are you trying to jog through jello most of these days?

If we’ve been overachievers or had a tough home life or needed to take care of ourselves pretty early, we can become accustomed to everything being difficult. This feeling and behavior can become a way of life, even when circumstances change and we have a chance to act differently.

Do you feel rested? Do you have regular moments of quiet in your life that let you breathe? If not, this is where I would start. Forget about lists, though morning pages might be a helpful accompanying tool (if they don’t become a task to punish yourself with if you don’t find the energy).

Take some weeks or months, maybe even a year to make rest your priority. You will have to find a way that works for you. Yes there is a lot of clinically proven stuff out there, but you will not see me do yoga or meditate. Though feel free if that’s up your alley. If you love cycling or taking photos or drawing or just plain lying on your bed and staring at the wall, see where you can add more of that to your day. Whatever brings you closer to yourself and makes you feel like you can exhale and stand still for a moment, that’s the way to go. Do this as long as sleeping seems like a fine choice. And for good measure maybe a month longer. You are ready to stop when you cannot wait to do something else goddamnit I’m bored!!! (you might say)

If you are in this picture, please start here. Any kind of life plan, next steps, strategizing, solving of riddles would set you back and perpetuate your exhaustion. Rest is not time wasted, rest is how you get your life back.

If you are in this picture, you will likely find that if you really pull through, if you truly rest, as long and boring or even scary as it may be, the other questions will probably have an intuitive answer afterwards. Not like „this is my 20-year career plan“, but „I feel like doing x this week“. And that is enough. Because you won’t need to strain to hear your needs through the fog of exhaustion anymore.

Finally, some practical information and links for when you do have the energy and inclination to tackle your job and social life. I am not saying you need to change anything if that’s not what you want to focus on. These are just some tips, in case they become relevant.

For your social life, I recommend what others have recommended before me: Pick an activity that you do with other people and stick with it long enough to become a familiar face, see also here and here (yes, meeting gay people is similar to meeting other people). If you try out new stuff, go there at least 5 or 6 times before you decide it’s not for you – of course assuming nothing bad is coming up like racist or abusive people in the group. Shop around if the first group/activity doesn’t work for you until you find something that you’d like to do permanently. Maybe you’ll gain some friends, maybe you’ll find a romantic opportunity. In any case, if it’s something fun that you like to do anyway, you will have found an outlet with a social group attached. It is absolutely not as easy right now, with Covid and all, but if nothing outdoors-y comes to mind, you could also use this time to brainstorm what sounds like fun for when things are safer again.

Of course you can also look at opportunities online, like Discord servers, online interest groups etc but I do understand if that’s just not appealing right now. I am certainly over sitting in front of a screen.

To round this up, don’t sneeze at contacts that you already have. Are there acquaintances, friends of friends, colleagues, family members who you would like to get to know better? Then go do that! Suggest a time and place to meet up and see how they react. Say yes to the potential friends.

Speaking of which...

The Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes might also be interesting. Sure, it’s a little pop culture positive thinking kinda stuff, but I did like the impulse it gave me to consider when I say no to opportunities out of anxiety or worry. It made me accept some social invitations from colleagues (… in the before times) that I would not have otherwise considered. I did not gain life-long friends, but I did learn another valuable info: That my FOMO wasn’t justified for these events ;)

It also lead me to the decision to do one new thing every month – visit a new place or try a new activity or cook a new food. If the concept sounds appealing, just think about what sounds interesting and achievable to you.

And finally, the advice blog recommendations that I’ll always have. For social life, love life, and general life planning turmoil: Captain Awkward. For everything job-related, including how to write a good cover letter or interview well and, of course, how to get out of the dreaded current job you have: Ask A Manager.

To sum it up:

1) Figure out if you even have the energy to tackle any of this right now.

2) Figure out your pillars for a satisfying life – nothing big and shiny, just … basic needs, wishes, social needs.

3) When you feel like it, pick what you want to tackle next and see where it leads you.

4) Stay flexible. This is your life and it’s okay to go where it takes you, even if it doesn’t look „cool“ or „impressive“ from the outside. All you need is to make it your own.

And if you want to, let me know how it goes some time. :)

#post #questions #advice #WHO IS THE ASSHOLE #life advice #rest #recovery

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fellulahh · 3 years

Text

The Point of No Return, Part 4/???

Read Parts 1-3 here!

—

“Until tomorrow, my dear.” He smiled, “I thank you again for coming.”

“The pleasure is all mine, my Lord.” MC answered.

“Mm.” He smirked at her before turning away again, leaving the room.

—

By the time MC had returned to the House of Lamentation, night had drawn. She’d completely lost track of time while at the palace. If it hadn’t have been for Mammon texting her, she probably would have been even later.

When she made her way through the door, she wasn’t surprised to find the entranceway completely empty. It was quite normal for every brother to disappear to their rooms at this time.

Shutting the door behind her, MC hung up her coat on the nearby coatrack before feeling a small rumble in her stomach. It’d been hours since she’d eaten and it’d gotten to the point where she couldn’t ignore her body’s cry for food.

Despite how late it was, MC made her way to the kitchen to prepare some food as she’d missed dinner. She had promised Mammon she’d meet him in his room but on this occasion her cravings came first.

Entering the kitchen, she began pottering around the room searching for various bits she could use to cook up something to eat. But in the end, after realising Beel had already raided the kitchen, she settled for some toast.

Pulling some slices of bread out of the packet, she dropped them into the toaster before pushing down the button. While MC waited, she rested against the kitchen counter, scrolling through her D.D.D.

So engrossed in the various posts she was viewing on social media, MC hadn’t heard the footsteps that were approaching the room.

Having heard the front door open from his study, Lucifer soon left his desk after realising MC had returned home.

The eldest demon had a stern look on his face having spent the whole evening worrying about the human’s whereabouts. Yes, he knew she was going to the palace but he hadn’t thought it’d be for the whole evening!

For hours Lucifer had been assuming the worst, fearing that something had happened to MC. But with the looming work that was stacked on his desk, he attempted to shift the human from his mind while he worked.

Although angry, Lucifer had never felt more relief when he realised she’d returned home.

Appearing in the doorway of the kitchen, Lucifer examined MC and the various cutlery and food that surrounded her.

“Toast?” He questioned, immediately getting her attention as he left her startled.

“Lucifer,” MC breathed, surprised to be seeing him out of his study, “Are you alright?”

“I am now that I know you’re safe.” He answered, stepping into the room with that permanent serious look on his face, “I hadn’t expected you back so late.” As he approached MC, his eyes narrowed at her choice of food again. “I hope this isn’t your dinner, MC.”

“There’s nothing else in the kitchen.” She shrugged, “It looks like Beel has swept the place empty.”

“You can’t just have toast though. When was the last time you ate?” He questioned.

“Since when did you mother me?” She laughed at his concern.

Although MC found the situation funny, Lucifer didn’t so much. “I am merely looking out for your well-being, MC.”

Tilting her head, the human narrowed her eyes at Lucifer. She was used to his usual serious tone but even this was a little bit much for him. Knitting her eyebrows, she continued to study his expression; soon catching his attention.

“What?” He asked her.

“You seem stressed.” She analysed.

“Well that’s very observant of you to notice.” He spoke back sarcastically, placing a hand over his chest.

“Alright.” MC answered simply, knowing she wasn’t going to get a proper conversation out of the stubborn demon.

Turning around, she grabbed the toast that had just popped up and reached for the butter. Losing her attention, Lucifer suddenly felt his body want to lurch toward MC.

“Wait,” he spoke up before clearing his throat, “I apologise for my behaviour. Yes I am stressed - you’re right. I hadn’t intended to take it out on you. But I insist you can’t just eat toast for dinner.”

Turning around slowly, MC stared at him as she took a bite out of her food. “Like I said, there’s nothing else.”

“Come with me.” He spoke in a much softer tone as his expression eased, “I still have my plate of dinner left untouched in my study. I’ll warm that up for you and we can talk there.”

“Are you not going to eat?” MC questioned him, raising her eyebrows.

“No.” He shook his head.

“Well I don’t know if I should take advice from a hypocrite!” MC remarked, causing Lucifer to roll his eyes.

“I am a demon, not a weak human like yourself.” He smirked. “I’m sure I can survive without one meal.”

MC scowled playfully at Lucifer but deep down she was entirely grateful that he was beginning to relax and lose the cold attitude he’d had.

Completely forgetting about her plans to meet with Mammon, she left the kitchen with Lucifer close by.

“Come on then, oh-so-powerful-demon.” MC spoke as she turned down the hallway, “your weak human is hungry!”

Although she was merely joking, hearing MC refer to herself as his human caused Lucifer’s expression to turn serious again.

“Hm.” He huffed to himself as he followed MC’s footsteps.

The pair soon entered Lucifer’s study and as MC walked through the door, she was met with a very welcoming warmth from the fireplace nearby.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Lucifer insisted as he brushed past her, making his way to his desk to grab the plate of food from it, “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Thank you.” She spoke softly as she plopped herself into one of the armchairs situated in front of the fire.

If it hadn’t have been for her grumbling stomach, MC could have easily fallen asleep right there in that moment. She’d always found comfort in Lucifer’s study. Perhaps it was because it was the only room in the house that actually reminded her of home.

Despite Lucifer being one of the most powerful demons in all of Devildom, his study felt humane. There were no remanence of anything demonic anywhere. But perhaps that’s because Lucifer didn’t want to remind himself of what he’d become.

Hearing footsteps returning to the room, MC glanced up at the door as Lucifer re-entered. She smiled softly at him as he brought over a tray with the food on it. A small chuckle left her throat after noticing the cup of tea he’d also made.

“Now how did you know i fancied a brew?” She questioned as he placed the tray on the table in front of her.

“Oh please.” He remarked, “you make yourself a cup of tea every night before you go up to bed.”

MC felt silly for questioning him. Of course Lucifer knew that fact about her - how wouldn’t the most observant demon she ever met not know?

“Now eat that up.” He demanded, “I’m not letting you leave this room until it’s gone.”

“This is a little drastic, don’t you think?” She laughed, beginning to cut up a piece of meat with a knife and fork.

“Ensuring your well-being is never drastic to me.” Lucifer insisted in a very serious tone.

The pair locked eyes momentarily with MC taken aback by his sudden intense attitude.

“Sorry.” She spoke quietly, “I should probably stop joking and thank you for even caring.”

Lucifer didn’t answer MC. He simply made his way back to his desk, took a seat on his chair and resumed where he’d left off with his paperwork.

As he worked, he never looked up at the human. Whereas MC on the other hand was the opposite. Every now and then she’d steal glances at Lucifer.

Perhaps one day she’ll be able to understand the mysterious demon and get an insight into that troubled mind of his.

It wasn’t long before MC finished her food and she was left sat in the chair with her cup of tea clutched firmly in her hands as she admired the warmth of the fire.

She was so content in her position that she didn’t want to leave and go up to bed.

Leaning forward to place her now empty cup on the table, she sat back in her seat and began tracing her mind back to earlier that evening. A smile appeared on her lips as Diavolo entered her thoughts.

It was so refreshing getting to know the Prince and having the chance to witness his personality when he doesn’t have the eyes of all of his people on him.

MC was left wondering what the next day would bring.

An hour had passed since Lucifer returned to his desk; although to him it felt much longer. Frustration was beginning to grow throughout his body as he stared at the words in front of him. It was growing so late in the evening that every paper looked the same to him.

Letting out a deep sigh, he glanced up from his desk as he prepared to turn in for the night. However, as his sight focused on the other side of the room, he was surprised to see MC still there. Only now she was fast asleep.

Lucifer blinked momentarily as a tiny blush appeared on his cheeks. His eyebrows knitted as he got up from his position and walked closer to the human.

With lips parted and eyes shut, MC breathed softly as she hugged herself in her slumber.

The sight of her caused Lucifer’s heart to turn soft. How could it be that a sleeping human could make him feel such awe?

Lucifer knew deep down that he had a soft spot for MC whether he wanted to admit it or not. And seeing her fall asleep in front of him was the proof that he needed to support that.

Shaking his head, he reached for a blanket that was draped over the back of another armchair before sweeping it gently across MC’s body. As he was tucking the edges underneath her body, he was surprised when he heard her voice mutter something softly.

“Are you going to tell me off for falling asleep here too?” She mumbled, not opening her eyes.

Knowing she couldn’t see him, Lucifer smirked to himself. “No, MC.” He breathed. “I won’t tell you off.”

—

A/N: okay so now we’ve seen some fluff with both Diavolo and Lucifer! How do you feel about this chapter and are you routing for anybody yet?

I always appreciate your feedback and love reading it!

#obey me #obey me shall we date

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somerpmemes · 3 years

Text

Killing Eve S3 Starters

Change as needed

“If you want to be a winner you have to sacrifice everything.”

“I am so much happier now she’s dead.”

“Bureaucracy in all its glory.”

“I’m back now, with bells on.”

“We’re always like this, aren’t we?”

“We’re gonna make a fabulous team.”

“You’re not easy to replace.”

“What’s in it for you, hmm?”

“Whatever you want, I will do it.”

“Power is there for the taking, ___. You just have to be smart about how.”

“You have friends?”

“You realize to fit in here you have to be socially inept like the rest of us.”

“You know, a normal person would flake on their friend when something better turns up.”

“Well, remind me not to rely on you for anything.”

“You can hide from it, but it won’t hide from you.”

“Are you crying? Don’t be a wimp.”

“Nothing good comes fast.”

“My work remains totally untouchable.”

“You know, you really shouldn’t leave your front door open considering the amount of people that have tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well it’s not my problem anymore.”

“You just don’t seem very happy, that’s all.”

“Who says I want to be happy?”

“You see this and you’re transported to a time of happiness?”

“Are you ever going to apologize?”

“You really don’t think you did anything wrong at all, do you?”

“Life is just a series of trade-offs, ___.”

“This isn’t something you can fix, ___.”

“Our entire relationship has had you at the center of it.”

“She’s lying, okay?”

“You’re crying because you feel stupid. Because you WERE stupid.”

“Hey, these drinks don’t involve games or organized fun, do they?”

“I hear you’re a walking miracle.”

“You know, when a bullet has been through you, it leaves something behind.”

“And then you taught me how to swear in Russian.”

“It’s about acknowledging the sad together.”

“Couldn’t we be sad and listen to good music?”

“It’s push by the way.”

“Why would I want to look ten years younger?”

“It’s good to have many lovers. Keeps you limber.”

“Winners win alone.”

“You can’t go down that path anymore.”

“So you don’t think about her anymore?”

“So, shall we just dive right in?”

“I don’t believe in distractions.”

“I’m fully capable of doing my job without any approval from you.”

“I know you think I’m a self-serving prick.”

“Some things are bigger than the job and this is one of them.”

“You have to start taking care of yourself right now or it’s going to catch up with you.”

“How long do I have to stay?”

“Anybody can fight. It takes a special person to kill.”

“Just so you know, I’m kinda a big deal in this industry.”

“You do everything I say exactly when I say it.”

“If you make me look bad I will kill you.”

“You did all that for a boyfriend?”

“You only know a country once you know it’s drink.”

“It’s good to know he was getting some before he died.”

“Being hard on someone is sometimes what they need.”

“Don’t be embarrassed will you?”

“Why don’t you go and do your thing where you close your eyes and breathe?”

“You do not get to come here without an invitation anymore!”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m moving up in the world.”

“If I killed everybody who betrayed me there would be nobody left.”

“You have to know, you’re not safe.”

“You think you’re in control but you’re not.”

“Really, I’m fine. You should go.”

“You know I care about you?”

“You really like that baby, huh?”

“It would be really unsettling if he actually got something right.”

“I have all my best thoughts in the bath.”

“I haven’t looked up in ten minutes.”

“Meetings have biscuits.”

“That is literally the most parenting this household has ever seen.”

“You have been unfocused and manic for days.”

“I’m just having some fun.”

“It’s not my fault he was an idiot.”

“You want to amuse yourself, go crazy.”

“I’m the one doing all the work.”

“You think handling you isn’t work?”

“You should get your act together.”

“I’m not ready!”

“Once I pop, I just can’t stop.”

“I don’t have any self-control.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Did you take this job thinking it’d be easier?”

“You really should have some kind of protection, you know that right?”

“Have you ever locked and popped, ___?”

“I want to smell powerful.”

“Pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones is how we grow.”

“I adore a coincidence, it makes me feel I’m in the right place.”

“I just had the novel experience of being stood up.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll have him killed.”

“A terrible lifestyle suits me, huh?”

“Do you believe a word of that?”

“This place is psychopathic.”

“I should have shot you in the head.”

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“I’m not here for you!”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Who doesn’t answer their phone on a stake-out?”

“Everyone, look innocent.”

“Don’t wait for me in the dark like that!”

“Don’t you want to know why I’m in your bed?”

“They own every little bit of you.”

“What kind of baby do you think I was?”

“I’m wearing power. And to keep power, you need knowledge.”

“This is where you belong!”

“So you’re saying this is it?”

“You do realize that’s my desk?”

“What is that smell?”

“You’re supposed to share the cake!”

“You’re like a sad teenager, waiting for a like on Instagram.”

“Don’t you like having fun?”

“You don’t know what it’s like when you’ve chosen to destroy your own life.”

“I promise you, whatever you’ve done is not half as bad as the stuff in my checkered past.”

“I stabbed someone.”

“Do not think that you are the only self-loathing as whole in the room, ever.”

“Choices, ___. It’s all about choices.”

“Can I stay with you tonight?”

“But it’s my job to do terrible things.”

“I want you to have a plan.”

“So not over me.”

“Ah. You made me cake.”

“It really doesn’t look like the picture.”

“Wait, wait, just because it looks bad doesn’t mean it tastes bad.”

“You don’t deserve nice things if you don’t look after them.”

“Why are you lying to me?”

“I gained valuable insight into Victorian gender politics.”

“You’re so close to getting what you want. But you have to play by the rules.”

“You are so annoying today.”

“I am just trying to save you from yourself!”

“You know, you really don’t have to be so dramatic.”

“This would be a really bad way to go!”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be my favorite.”

“What got you in such a good mood?”

“I really hate it when you do that.”

“You’re free now. You can be whoever you want.”

“But I don’t want to be free.”

“You have the hiccups?”

“I’ve been ordered to stay away from all of this.”

“What are you doing home at this hour of the day?”

“It is a bit odd being here in the daytime, isn’t it?”

“I get up to all sorts of stuff.”

“You barely even look at me.”

“I’m trying to tell you that I’m worried about you, ___!”

“You have hat hair.”

“You said you have everything under control.”

“Not getting any, huh?”

“Did they air bnb my room again?”

“I know a killer when I see a killer and she’s a killer.”

“You were mean.”

“I beat the crap out of the sofa so I don’t beat the crap out of people.”

“You’ll have lots of fun, I promise.”

“Being strong is a choice.”

“That looks like shit.”

“You don’t want to dance?”

“Eat this. Be quiet.”

“Come on, it used to make you laugh.”

“You always laugh at things that aren’t funny.”

“You do not belong here.”

“I was not a happy person.”

“You were never a happy person.”

“You were bad from the beginning.”

“Oh, I think I need to kill you.”

“It’s so good to see your eyes.”

“Do you want to put ice on it?”

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“This is the same stuff I was doing before.”

“You know that would be okay... if you’re not okay, that is.”

“Sometimes you just need to let it win.”

“You can’t watch sports without a hot dog.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Where are we going? It better be someplace hot.”

“You should run away.”

“I don’t think you really want this.”

“Don’t let them see something’s up.”

“The plan only works if nobody knows there is one.”

“Should I… trust you?”

“None of us are to be trusted, that’s why we work here.”

“Don’t be a grump.”

“Stop or I’ll scream.”

“You know how annoying it is when you have to be around two people in love?”

“You’re a real role model, you know that?”

“You don’t have to do this. I already know you are scary.”

“___, are you comparing yourself to a carrot?”

“I don’t love being here either.”

“It would be so much better if we could have this conversation after I’ve eaten.”

“To you, I am harsh and cold and, to me, you are disappointed and expectant.”

“You don’t talk to people when they are bowling.”

“You can’t beat us, you understand?”

“Oh, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“That guy was really staring at me.”

“Do you know why I love you, ___? Because you’re an agent of chaos. And I love chaos.”

“You’re a beautiful monster, ___.”

“Thank you for the inappropriate touching. It was actually pretty nice.”

“You’re a child. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“It’s just standard white person stuff.”

“Jokes are for people who do their job correctly, ___.”

“Do you ever think of anything else?”

“Heroes only get the girl in Hollywood.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Is this one of those moments we pretend never happened?”

“Look what someone just gave me. It’s a shank made out of a toothbrush.”

“Tone all this down a little. It’s too much.”

“So you’re actually leaving me here?”

“Why are you making this difficult?”

“You can’t get raided twice in a day. It’s a rule.”

“You look ridiculous.”

“Germans don’t wear kilts.”

“Russia has vegans now.”

“There is no such thing as a nice surprise.”

“Just once I want to make a scene and not be told to “be quiet” or to “pull myself together” or that I’m being ridiculous!”

“What kind of person does that?”

“I hope you die.”

“He’s crying out to be killed.”

“You have lost it, haven’t you?”

“Okay, I’m gonna make myself an omelette to celebrate.”

“That random guy now wants to kill me.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Wherever I go, someone wants to murder me.”

“I probably deserve it.”

“Let’s face it, ___, I’m a prick.”

“Don’t argue with me we’re celebrating.”

“You’re not really okay, are you?”

“I fear the walls may be closing in on me.”

“It’s starting to feel personal.”

“What is wrong with you?! You’re an emotional iceberg!”

“I’m not coming at you, I’m trying to hug you.”

“This isn’t healthy.”

“You can’t just refuse to feel anything for the rest of your life.”

“A little overdramatic, don’t you think?”

“Is this really necessary?”

“You’re going to die in this room.”

“We are both to blame.”

“Do you ever think about the past?”

“They seem happy. Carefree.”

“I want to feel like that.”

“Dancing’s not my thing.”

“Are you leading or am I?”

“We’d consume each other before we got old.”

“Talk me through your outfit.”

“Comfortable is what you make people with a terminal illness.”

“I was trained to look devastating.”

“You know, you almost have no sense of humor.”

“What am I supposed to do? Applaud or…?”

“What is this really about?”

“You’ve not tried to bribe someone before, have you?”

“I expected you to look more like a stripper.”

“You know your problem? You don’t know what’s good for you.”

“Well, this is something new.”

“You’re going to burn for this.”

“I wish I could believe you.”

“You never loved me. Not even close.”

“You can be pretty athletic when you choose.”

“I don’t want to do it anymore. Any of it.”

“You were never like them. You only thought you were.”

“When I try to think of my future I just see your face over and over again.”

“Did I ruin your life?”

“Do you think I’m a monster?”

“I think we all have monsters inside of us, it’s just that most people have managed to keep theirs hidden.”

“Help me make it stop.”

#killing eve #ask meme #rp #rp meme #rp starters #starters #sentence starters #sentence starter meme #long post

21 notes · View notes

felassan · 3 years

Text

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 6

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1-5. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one. LE will be uploading the previous streams to YouTube at some point as they are now gone from Twitch, before the end of the year. It’s on his to-do list! Do note that they’ll be taking a break from their weekly/fortnightly streaming schedule over the holiday period.

For the first chunk of this stream they discussed the BioWare news of Mark and Casey’s departure, and that in relation to DA4.

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DG on Mark Darrah and Casey Hudson’s departures: “The big news.” He knows a lot of people were pointing at his surprise on Twitter (second from the top) as if that makes their departures somehow more significant, but “honestly, don’t look at that as anything but the fact that David Gaider is out of the loop”. He still has friends at BW but no longer lives with someone who works at BW, so it’s not a day to day thing, and of course currently the pandemic means that he’s not going to casually come into contact with them either. “So my surprise is only just, I had no idea that that was gonna happen and I reacted to it on Twitter, the same as anyone else and that’s it.” He also knows that a lot of people were like “Oh nooo!! Dragon Age, Dragon Age...” (worried about what the departures mean for the franchise and the upcoming game) and he can speak relatively freely as he no longer works for BW and hasn’t done so for 5 years now: “I have nothing to fear so what you’re hearing now is not corporate speak.” He says he would say that people should take the “omg this is the end of DA” stuff with a big grain of salt.

Some people have said that Executives don’t make games, and that is true. On one hand, Mark was the project director of DA which is a very powerful position as you set the overall tone for the game. In that position you don’t make the game but you make a lot of important decisions. Mark always had a really light hand with DA in that he liked to give a lot of authority and ownership to his leads, for good or bad. “The fact that he’s moved on and is going to be replaced by someone I don’t know, the fact that I don’t know him doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to be bad. People forget, when I left, I left DA a year before I left BW. It wasn’t because I didn’t love BW it’s because I was done. That’s what happens sometimes with people, they get done and they move on because they think ‘you know what, it’s probably better if I go’. And that’s how I thought.” At the time DG felt that if he kept working on DA he wasn’t going to produce good stuff. It was feeling like he was repeating himself and he didn’t feel like he had any stories left for the world, “so somebody else [should] come in with a fresh take and do much better”. It doesn’t mean that the new person will automatically do better of course, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what his goals are”. But DA is an established thing. “He was the EP on Anthem, and whatever he was doing on Anthem it was to make Anthem a better Anthem”. But that doesn’t mean he is automatically going to bring Anthem stuff over to DA (as again, DA is pretty established).

If he does, well, that would be different, but sometimes it’s time for a fresh voice. “Maybe it was that in this case. Maybe something went on. I honestly couldn’t tell you. Gaider is out of the loop. And nobody who currently works at BW would give you a straight answer in either case, because that’s just, you just don’t do that. You don’t give the goss on the inside, that doesn’t happen, you’re never gonna get it. Unless of course Mark or Casey decide to speak for themselves, and they certainly can.” He imagines that a lot of people inside of the company don’t actually know what happened - this often happens. Inside you’d hear the rumor mill, but the rumor mill inside a company the size of BioWare and EA is pretty inaccurate. “You’d hear things that people would swear were true, and then later on when you talked to the people actually involved they’d be like ‘no, that isn’t what happened at all’.” So, “I wouldn’t read too much into it. The writing team that I assembled is still there. PW is still there. John Epler is still there. Karin is still there. Matt Goldman is still there.”

DG didn’t always get along with Matt Goldman, but he believed that he [Matt] knew what DA was about and that he held its best interests at heart. They just had occasional differences of opinion in terms of how exactly that would be relayed [in the art direction], but he knew that deep down Matt believed in the same DA that he did. “So these are the people that will be making DA. So don’t lose hope just yet. I mean if anybody would have reason, I mean listen, if anybody would have reason to start crying into their beer and to start worrying that DA might not be awesome, it’s kinda me ok. This is my baby, I want to see it do well, if I was really worried - for the sake of the people I worked with before I might say nothing, I’d hedge my bets, but I certainly wouldn’t lie to you [us the listeners] and say positive things. So don’t go gloom and doom just yet, that’s my suggestion. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen between now and release.”

At this point LE chimed in: He thinks it’s really important to remember to give everyone a chance and remember that everyone is generally trying their best. We should give everyone who is coming into the new leadership a chance to do their best work. That work might be different from what has come before, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. In fact, he’d argue that often, trying to repeat the same thing as before is often what makes games terrible. He’s excited to see what happens and what this brings to DA. Remember that a lot of the core team is still there. The project is unlikely to suddenly rapidly shift gears.

DG: “Unless that was their marching orders, like unless say EA came to Mark and/or Casey. Although Casey is [was] the studio director, I don’t think they’d be involved in day to day, and that he’d be that involved, but who knows, who knows. Maybe they came and said ‘we’d like to change DA to [this or that]’ and Mark/Casey were like ‘fuck that, I’m out’. That’s possible but I really have my doubts that EA would reboot DA yet again, that would be really strange. But I guess we’ll see. We have this new guy, maybe he’s like ‘awesome I get to work on DA’, maybe he loves DA, I dunno. I guess it’ll be interesting to see.” New leadership! “Although I say a lot of the team is still there, they will have to do what they’re told. When DG was on DA a lot of people assumed ‘DG is in charge of everything relating to the setting and can do whatever he wants’ and “that was never true. I always had people over me.”

The higher you go up in the hierarchy or food chain at BioWare (at BioWare, not talking about EA), the more of your time is taken up dealing with EA (this is DG’s understanding). Someone at the Aaryn Flynn or Casey Hudson level is spending all of their time in meetings with EA doing very high-level stuff. So like, for example, if Aaryn Flynn had something to say that would affect the game project they were working on, that was probably being filtered down from above. He would never say it directly, he’d say it to their leads, people like Mark. Then Mark would meet with the project leads and he’d say “this is coming down the pipe and we have to do this.” And by the time someone at DG’s level or below got the info they’d have no idea that it had even come from Aaryn.

LE: “There is some anti-EA sentiment in the chat and I wanna - publishing is very complex. The relationship between a studio and a publishing arm is often very complex and it’s rarely as simple as saying that the publisher is always the bad influence.” It’s always complex, sometimes it is the publisher saying that they have certain expectations, but often it’s also the studio. If a publisher sets a series of expectations, the studio then makes decisions in order to try and meet those expectations. So it’s not like there’s always one party is at fault. “That is so rarely the case.”

DG: “In my experience the publisher is always willing to absorb, you know like, be the bad cop. They’re like whatever, it’s fine. And I find that a lot of times the problems were happening at the studio level. By the time EA gets involved, those problems were already sorta existing. I mean I think that in the past, and maybe there’s an element of this to BW too, I dunno, but in the past EA took on a troubled studio. They bring them on and those problems still exist, but from the outside it looks like they only existed once EA bought them and that’s generally not true.” There’s a bit of corporatization where EA do what seems natural to them, where they want to make the policies and the pipelines at the studio match that of EA. So they’re like ‘we need to change the way your management structure works to follow the way we do things’. That’s when the changes start and there is an element of “Now people whose time is taken up dealing with EA become sort’ve, as insulated from the reality of the project as the people at EA.” This insulation is where DG thinks a lot of those decisions get made. In his experience the people at EA all mean well and are all just trying to do their best. “I really don’t think, in my opinion, that EA deserves the bad rep they’ve gotten, and I worked for them for 5 years. The kinds of things that people lay on their shoulders are the kinds of things that happen in all big companies just by virtue of them being giant behemoths where the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. But they get extra visceral hate for it because the corporate stuff that affects companies happens to affect companies that gamers love and attach a lot of feelings and ownership towards. Often those gamers weren’t even aware that there were problems at a studio before EA took it over so they’re like ‘big bad EA came in and destroyed everything’.”

LE: It’s also the job of the publisher to cop the flak and be the bad guy, because someone has to be and often it’s easier and better for the publisher to take responsibility for that.

Regular dev commentary

LE and DG have a rule that they won’t talk about DeepLore (tm) on these streams. Anything that’s not public knowledge DG won’t say. DG knows what the DeepLore was when he left but that was 5 years ago. Stuff that hasn’t been made public yet the current devs are pretty okay with changing if they need to. DG recalls that when he was there they didn’t change it very much as he had a fairly firm vision, but his is not that vision anymore, so they may have decided to go in a different direction, he has no idea. If he told all the deep dark secrets his old friends would hate him and they’d change it all immediately anyway (due to the need to come up with new surprises). And that could be extremely expensive. Or they may have decided to do another story since then and “then I would literally be talking out of my ass and lying to you”. He is no longer subject to an NDA anymore though.

When Matt Goldman started on DA2 as Art Director after the DAO Art Director moved over to be the head of BW Montreal, they had maybe 1.5 years to produce all-new art assets OR they could just go ahead and use the accumulated library of assets that they had accumulated in DAO, even though some of the stuff didn’t look that great. “Imagine his conundrum” - if he used the existing library that meant they would have a lot more variety, but it would also mean that everything new they produced would have to follow the same look, feel and color scheme of the original or else it would look out of place. “Also original art meant a lot less art.”

Sheryl Chee always wrote the best lines for Purple Hawke. When they play through DA2, DG will point them out. Sometimes they’d be wondering ‘hm what do we do for the sarcastic option here’ and SC would just quietly pipe up in the background with her idea and they’d all die lol. DG recalls people asking on the forum at the time if they could romance Teagan. Jowan was almost a party member. Narrative designers are halfway between an animator and level/story designer, straddling both sides - the narrative and the art. In a conversation they’re the ones doing camera shifting and animations etc. At its height DAI’s team had about 120 people. Throughout the middle parts it was 70-80.

For a long time during DAO dev they didn’t think they’d be able to get enough models on-screen at once. That was always an issue with that engine. DG would be like “I need to do a city” and they’d be like “well, we can fit maaaybe 10 people on-screen at one time”. DG: “And it’s like what the fuck engine is this? That was always my comment but I have no idea honestly how this stuff works.” They kept telling him this is as many as they could fit, “and I’d bitch and bitch and go home and play a PS3 game where you’re a photographer stuck in a mall and fought giant hordes of zombies. And I’d be like ‘omg how is this even possible’. But it’s not like I know. And I will say it’s not that people weren’t trying really hard. The programmers were doing everything they possibly could and there’s a difference between engines designed to have massive crowds and ones designed for something else.” It’s never simple and there’s always so many things to weigh up. A big part of the tradeoff is the fact that we have parties in these games. In DA the parties take up so much processing, it’s the most intensive thing on screen and has the most different pieces that it could be. Every armor variation etc kind of all exists at once, and the fact that you have a party means that this part of the game is basically 4x in terms of all the requirements.

There’s a pretty big difference between writing for dialogue lines that won’t be voiced and ones that will. You [the writer] get to rely on the voice acting a lot more in the case of the latter, like you no longer have to have the character say “I am angry”, because the VA can deliver a line angrily. This actually took them a little while to get the hang of. In DAO they were still getting the hang of this. It wasn’t really until DA2 that they really grasped that they could rely on the VA to impart what they were trying to express. They also had to learn to read their lines out loud as they wrote them, otherwise they ran the risk of getting to review and reading it and realizing it doesn’t sound as good out loud as it did in their heads when they wrote it.

It’s a mistake that Zevran couldn’t pick locks when recruited. Not until DAI did they think ‘we should try to align the abilities that the characters have with what they talk about’. At some point they thought all rogues should be able to pick locks and at some point someone was like ‘we have [should have?] rogues that are more pick-locky types and ones that aren’t.’ “Nobody told me and it was just one of those things that sort’ve fell off the radar.”

The HoF didn’t appear in DAI because giving them a voice is just asking for trouble. For about half of development they tried to have the HoF be the Warden across from Hawke in that DAI plot, but it was just too weird. “We were like, everybody is going to be really upset at this. We can’t make them look like they did in DAO, we have to give them a voice, everyone is going to be upset. Late in the day we had to cut it and boy did that require some fancy writing on PW’s part to write around that.” The thing they had for the longest time was that right at the point where the HoF would come out from the back, the player would be popped over to CC and be made to recreate their Warden, which kind of ruined the surprise. That was so heavy on the GUI requirements and they were so worried that it would be really strange, and then how do you account for people who never played the previous games or the fact that the Warden is from years and 2 games ago by then?

LE highly doubts that any of the previous PCs are going to appear again in any future games. It’s so incredibly complex and just not worth the effort most of the time, especially with CC. CC is so difficult to replicate because the art style changes completely between games. It’s very difficult to make the new system automatically replicate your char’s face from the old system, then you’ve got the VAs potentially to bring in - like 8 different VAs potentially [in the HoF’s case], just for one or two scenes. It’s a huge investment and then everyone will still be like “that’s not my character”. [Hawke’s reception in DAI is kind of an example this.]

At one point they were actually torn between Richard Madden and GDL for Solas, and then finally GDL was available. They were torn because originally Solas was going to be funnier and Richard did the funnier bits better. And then they were like “Why don’t we just rewrite Solas?” So Solas was originally meant to be a low-key, funny type character but was rewritten for GDL, who speaks with gravitas. PW heard GDL and was like “I wanna make him more serious now”. DG: “So it changed. And I can’t even imagine now what it would be like if Solas was funny.” Solas’ iambic pentameter was PW’s idea. PW is very good at verse. The fact that PW was able to write so much of Solas like that is a remarkable achievement, DG at the time didn’t realize that they had done that. “For the longest time I was like ‘Solas has a particular lilt to the way he talks, it’s so odd, is that because he’s Welsh?’” The editors were not particularly pleased with PW for this lol. Editor Cori May was very good with voice as a voice editor, chars with very specific voices could be given to her. She’d softly read lines over and over again to make sure they had the right sound and number of beats etc. “I gotta hand it to the editors, KW, Cori, Ben Gelinas, for all the fact that writers do good work it’s editors that make it shine.”

DG can’t take sole credit for Dorian. The writers rely on each other for writing assists and there’s a lot of people who will touch their characters. Also the VA brings a lot to the equation too, giving life to the char that isn’t in the writing. The person who did the visual language for Dorian, from his Mercury mustache to the asymmetry of his garments - if he looked different he’d be a different char. All those things come together. But he understands that the words are what players experience so that’s what people tend attach the importance to.

There was an initial draft where Cassandra was very sanctimonious. It wasn’t very appealing so DG went to rewrite her and was trying to figure out ways to have her have some more humanity. He saw online a little comic where Cass was reading smutty literature and he laughed and was like “What if... she was a fangirl?” This is how Cass’s smutty literature/secret fangirl side came about.

2 of the DA2 basegame romances are bi for sure, 2 you could argue are “playersexual”. DG doesn’t really like that word but it’s fair. A lot of times bi chars weren’t real bi rep but a matter of convenience. When they went into DAI they had a long discussion: “do we want to do the all-bi thing again?” There was a pro and con list there, for each option. They felt that them having their own orientations gave them more agency, that they had desires and existences that existed separate from the player. He understands that some players just want to be able to romance whoever they want and gets that, but that’s not what they (the dev team) are here to provide with these games.

You can tell that a narrative designer had a lot of time to work on the “HoF reaches Connor and Isolde in Redcliffe” scene. There was some simple/rudimentary mocap done for DAO but not much. There was no performance capture for DAO though, which is a kind of different thing. Isolde did wrong but there were extenuating circumstances. DG was disappointed by how this plot turned out and feels that he made a mistake by giving the player the possibility to have an optimal ending. After he was done the plot initially, he doesn't remember how it came up exactly but it was like ‘What if you could go to the Circle and get their help and this was a way you could avoid making the terrible decision?’ At the time he thought this sounded interesting and he thought of it as something like an Easter egg, as in if players did things in the ‘right’ order they could get this option. But the way it worked out in the fanbase is that it’s the only route people take usually because it’s optimal, naturally - you get everything while risking nothing. This destroyed the actual requirement to make a choice, which was the whole point of the plot. “So I allowed you an out which actually destroyed all the emotional fallout.” “In the end I undercut the effectiveness of my own plot.” He believes in happy endings but they should be earned and you should have to give up something to get them (not necessarily a literal blood sacrifice though lol).

DG was asked in the chat about the things EA are reported to have forced BW to do, like forcing them to work on Anthem, the crunch time and forcing them to work on a complicated engine etc. He responded that the person was mixing up a lot of what EA was doing vs what the internal BW folks were doing. There’s a lot of layers of responsibility when it comes to things like that, broken schedules, bad management etc. It’s a complicated question and you can’t really shuffle all that stuff to the publisher. There’s shared responsibility. It’s safe to say that a lot of people meant well. What he heard was that as time went on there was a lot of pressure on the team that became extraordinary, there were a lot of what’s called ‘stress casualties’ (people going on stress leave and getting ulcers and stuff). This is something that gets pretty bad and is a problem across the industry that needs to change, it’s not just specific to BioWare. EA is a public company so they don’t have traditional-style investors who can really influence what goes on, at least not in the same sense that a private company would. Instead their goals are largely driven by money. LE: “If you wanna blame something, essentially, blame capitalism.”

They usually go for authentic accents but DG thinks that in Isolde’s case it wasn’t. For Zevran they tried for the longest time to get an actual Spanish speaker, they went through so many auditions. They struggled to find one with the tone they wanted and one that would suit the genre. They tried people from Spain but the sound was different from the one they wanted, so they thought ‘let’s just throw open the casting and see what we get’. “I was honestly trying to find a legitimately Spanish person. And then one day it was like oh, this guy sounds like Antonia Banderas, kinda sexy, quite clear, and then I went to LA to meet him as part of the initial rundown, and I walk in, knowing nothing about him at all, and he’s this 6 ft 2 kind of Scandinavian looking motherfucker. God, you played yourself David.” At this point in time Freddie Prinze Junior wasn’t doing this kind of VAing yet, to his knowledge anyway. But had they known he was an option back in DAO he’s sure they would have tried to reach out to him, because they were trying to find the authentic thing and not a mimic. As time went on there became more importance attached to finding the authentic thing, so that the actor could concentrate more on the acting and less on doing the particular kind of voice that they wanted.

This was initially a problem for Morrigan, in a sense. When she was first cast the guy they had at the time had an image in his head where she was 18 years old and so initially Claudia had to pitch up her voice to sound younger. This blunted her because she had to constantly think about it, and it affected her performance, so 2 sessions in Caroline was like “fuck it, at this point they [the overseeing people] won’t be listening anymore”. So this is why when you first meet Morrigan she sounds higher-pitched than she does later on. Her later deeper register is Claudia’s natural voice. “When you first meet her she is doing the customer service voice and then she just can’t be bothered anymore” [this was a joke]. Claudia had never done VAing before so on the first session she wore a really loud shirt - a rookie mistake.

There were a lot of quests that didn’t make it into DAO, which he regrets, although it’s always the case. One of the biggest for him here is the one in Denerim where the player went to the Orlesians and it involved the Queen and we learned a lot more about Loghain. The cutting of this plot is why he ended up writing the first novel. “You don’t learn this stuff anymore in there so I wanted to put all this lore that you would have learned in that plot into a book.” Talking about cut stuff is always funny because fans sometimes take what’s said the wrong way: “In their mind the cut thing was this perfect, perfectly-working beautiful plot and that we must have just suddenly taken and thrown out for no good reason like ‘What?! Why would you do that?!’ And I guarantee you that this is almost never the case.”

DG feels that Isolde’s performance at the “Filthy murderer! He is an innocent boy!” bit is actually quite heartbreaking. (This is the killing Connor route). It broke his heart when she did the “Don’t kill my baby, I beg you” part in the soundbooth. DG remembers the awkward moment when they had to have a conversation with the artists where it was like, “Ok, Connor has been brought to this point because of his desires, his desire to help his father, so it is a Desire demon. And then one day they got the models and they were like ‘oh’. Well... I hope you know that this is the demon that has taken over Connor... And there was just this sort of blank look.. Ok, that’s how we’ll write it.” (Context: Desire demons were supposed to be gender-neutral Sandman-style, not overly sexualized.) He saw the scene where Connor flails around and the Desire demon comes out before the PC fights them when he was having that talk, and was like “Alright, well ok, let’s do it.”

At one point Fiona was on the list of potential DAI companions. “I remember talking about Fiona as the Grand Enchanter.”

Mary Kirby wrote Merrill as having a stop-start, stuttering way of talking. “I remember when I read that, that kind of writing is great to read but it’s basically death for VAs, as they have to very naturally try to replicate the stuttering, which can be very difficult for actors to do. It usually means we have to do a lot of takes for each line until the actor figures out how they want to do it.” Eve Myles though, she came in and was like “I read the character and I understand, I get how she feels, let’s go for it” and launched into it and was amazing at it from the get-go, “wow”. Eve is on DG’s [very short] list of “chars for whom I got my number one pick of VA”. When people do dream-casts of actors it’s usually a lot of A-List actors/unrealistic choices that they could never afford. Caroline for each char would sit down with DG at the outset and be like “If you could have anyone for the part, anything you wanted at all, who would you have?” DG would never go for A-List names but when watching shows and stuff, if someone had an interesting voice he’d be like ‘oh they sound really cool’ and would tuck it away in the back of his mind. When they switched elf accents over in DA2 to Irish and Welsh, they included the Welsh specifically because DG had 2 Welsh actors he really wanted to see in a role. One was Eve Myles and the other GDL. They couldn’t get GDL for DA2 but he obviously came on for DAI.

BW sometimes committed the cardinal sin of combat design of having a boss battle which introduces mechanics that aren’t used anywhere else, “that we haven’t actually trained you to deal with or for which the current tactics which you used to play the entire game suddenly don’t work. I hate those.”

There’s no golems in DAI because they didn’t have time to make a model.

Caroline is very good at getting VAs to the emotionally sad places they need to be in to record such lines, but after they’re done she gets all quiet and is like “ok, let’s take a break everyone”.

The level designers kept putting cemeteries everywhere in DAO and DG was like “No, why, they don’t bury people.” “Maybe they burn them the bury the ashes?” “No, why would you do that?!”

There’s a whole bunch of elements from Arthurian legends sprinkled throughout DAO. “They’ve been significantly filtered but if you look carefully it’s like ‘oh you lifted this right out of Arthurian legend didn’t you. Morrigan, Morgan le Fay, sleeping with her brother, the Holy Grail. Not all that clever David. You’re just a thief’.” Initially when DG talked about the world before release, he had a lot of trouble realizing how many people equate inspiration with copying. “I don’t know if it’s because they don’t know how inspiration works, I don’t think that’s true, but it’s like. They say ‘where did you draw inspiration from?’ and you’d say ‘Well I drew it from X, Y and Z’ and they’re like ‘Oh, so it’s JUST like X?’ No, it’s inspired by X. It’s a starting point.” “Some of the things if I told you where the inspiration came from you’d be like but they have nothing in common. Well, maybe nothing you consider important but there would have been this one aspect that I liked that came from there, and that’s it.” He eventually had to stop talking about it because people would say, for example, that an in-game culture was inspired by a real-world culture and be like “therefore they are exactly the same. It’s like, no, that’s not what I meant. That’s a difficult conversation to have.” So some of the DAO elements were originally inspired by Arthurian legend, but it changed from the original point on a daily basis to the point where in cases it’s not recognizable at all, “that’s how we roll”. [source]

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #video games #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #anthem #solas #cassandra pentaghast #my lady paladin #lgbtq #morrigan #queen of my heart #next mass effect

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there-must-be-a-lock · 4 years

Text

Spitting Venom (Supernatural x Criminal Minds)

Word Count: ~10,300 yikes

Warnings: Non-explicit violence, nothing more than you’d see on either show. More cursing though. Don’t even try to tell me Emily Prentiss doesn’t swear like a sailor.

A/N: This is for @stunudo and her “Lie To Me” Challenge! My prompt was the Modest Mouse song “Spitting Venom.” Thanks to @fookinghelljensensthighs for reading and exclaiming and also just loving Sam and Spencer with me.

This is part of the “Coffee & Psychopaths” series. It follows the events of Quitting, but you don’t need to read that to understand anything that happens here.

This centers around (and steals dialogue from) the events of “Slash Fiction” (SPN) and “Proof” (CM). In order to smoosh the timelines together right, I had to do some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, so don’t think about it too hard. You should be able to tell from context clues, but for reference, the flashbacks (in order of appearance) correspond to “Shut Up, Dr Phil” (SPN) / “It Takes A Village” (CM), “To Hell... And Back” (CM), “My Bloody Valentine” (SPN), “Amplification” (CM), “With Friends Like These” (CM) / “Unforgiven” (SPN), “Appointment In Samarra” (SPN), and “Memoriam” (CM). Seriously, wibbly-wobbly. So much canon juggling. Just go with it.

“Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.”

― Chuck Palahniuk

“Strap in, folks, we’ve got a weird one,” Garcia says cheerily, handing Spencer a paper folder as everybody else opens their tablets.

“I thought the Winchesters were dead,” Hotch says.

“That is part of the aforementioned weird, yes. Okay, for those of you who weren’t paying attention four years ago…”

Spencer opens his file, and Garcia’s words stop making sense, because that’s Sam in the mugshot.

His first instinct is to shout, This is a mistake.

Spencer’s stomach churns. He’s cold all over.

This feeling (betrayal, his brain supplies helpfully) is becoming a little too familiar, lately.

Garcia is showing a video: a bank, a group of people scared and screaming, two men opening fire. That’s Sam. His expression is stone-cold, maybe even satisfied, as he empties the clip into the crowd.

That’s Sam.

Garcia’s talking about M.O. now, or the total lack of a consistent one, and Spencer can’t listen. He forces his features into the bland, neutral expression that has made people underestimate him for years, and he takes slow breaths, trying to calm his racing heartbeat.

“Spence?” he hears, and when he looks around the table he realizes that it wasn’t the first time somebody said his name. They’re all staring.

“You okay, kid?” Morgan asks, brow furrowed.

“I’m fine,” Spencer insists, with a shrug.

“No you’re not, I know that face. Are you feeling okay?” Emily prods, and Spencer hates her for a moment, hates that she can still read him.

He tries to force a smile, but it feels stiff on his face.

“I know him,” Spencer blurts out. “Sam. Sam Winchester. He’s… he was my friend. Or I thought he was.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence all around the table. Spencer looks down at his hands, twirling a pen idly, instead of looking any of them in the eyes.

“Reid,” Hotch says quietly.

“We met at a… meeting,” Spencer says. He looks up at Hotch to make sure he understands, and Hotch nods. “About two years ago. He was only here for a couple weeks. We got along, though. We… he left. We kept in touch.”

“When did you last speak to him?” Hotch asks, frowning.

Spencer swallows around the lump in his throat. It’s taking his best effort to maintain his mask of composure.

“It was eight days ago.”

Hotch nods. “I’m assuming he’s already using a new number, but just in case, we’ll need you to give Garcia any contact information you have.”

Spencer tries to smile. “Of course.”

Emily asks, “And he didn’t say anything that would…”

“That would, what, tip me off that he was planning a massive murder spree?” Spencer says. His voice cracks.

“Anything that might be helpful,” Morgan interjects diplomatically. “Locations, names.”

Spencer shakes his head. “No, it was… we didn’t talk about that sort of thing. It was random, mostly. When something was on my mind that I couldn’t… couldn’t talk to you about, or - when I couldn’t sleep. But there wasn’t much small talk.”

“And you never suspected?” Garcia asks, wide-eyed.

“Do you really think that if I suspected -”

“We know that if there were any hints, you would’ve seen them. Nobody is suggesting that you should’ve known,” Hotch says firmly.

“I should’ve, though,” Spencer insists, with a hysterical edge in his voice. “There were so many things that he just… avoided talking about. He looked familiar, even! I kept wondering where I recognized him from!”

“Enough, kid,” Rossi interrupts. “Getting angry at yourself doesn’t help anybody. It was before you joined the Bureau, there was no reason for you to remember his face.”

“This is a good thing, right?” Emily points out. “The better you know him, the easier it’s going to be for us to catch him.”

“Apparently I didn’t know him, though,” Spencer says hoarsely. “I didn’t know him at all.”

“Are you going to be able to work this case objectively?” Hotch asks. “We’ll all understand if you want to sit this one out.”

Spencer stares at him helplessly. He’s not sure he knows the answer to that question.

“I remember Gideon talking about the Winchester case,” Rossi muses. “Couldn’t make head or tail of it, no apparent connection between victims, witnesses who kept changing their stories…”

“Your insight will undoubtedly be useful,” Hotch adds quietly.

Spencer grits his teeth, shock turning quickly to anger.

“I want to find him,” he says. He wants to know. He wants to hear the confession.

Hotch gives him one more steely, appraising look before nodding.

“Very well. Let’s talk victimology.”

* * * * * * * * *

September 2011 (eight days earlier)

“I don’t understand how she could do that,” Spencer says bitterly. “If I saw one of my friends hurting like that, and I knew something that would stop them hurting…”

“Shit,” Sam mutters. “I’m sorry.”

“Did they not trust me to keep the secret? Did they not think I could handle it? We’re a team. We’re not supposed to keep things from each other. Not important things, not like that.”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

Sam leans against the kitchen counter, watching Dean through the window. Baby’s hood is open and Dean’s wrestling with something inside, and Sam wonders, for the thousandth time, whether he’s imagining the wariness in Dean’s face whenever they talk these days. He can’t shake the feeling there’s something Dean’s not saying.

“I don’t know what to do,” Spencer says quietly, and his voice cracks on the last word.

“I don’t know if there’s anything you can do, except give it time.”

“I hate that answer,” Spencer says flatly, and Sam laughs.

“Yeah. But… I think hearing the truth is the hard part, sometimes. Or saying it. Right? It hurts like hell, and it’s going to hurt for a while, but now that it’s all out in the open… now it’ll start getting better. It has to.”

“I guess.”

“She thought she was doing the right thing,” Sam repeats. “Do you really think she’d do that, if she didn’t feel like she had a choice?”

Spencer sighs in a rush of static. “No,” he says begrudgingly. “But I think she had a choice. And now it’s my choice whether to trust her or not.”

“You’ll get there.”

“How do you know?”

“A very smart man once told me that’s what friends do,” Sam says wryly. “They trust each other.”

“Quoting me back to me doesn’t seem fair,” Spencer grumbles.

“Doesn’t make it wrong,” Sam retorts with a grin.

Sam watches Dean slam the hood shut, and he wonders why his brother has such a hard time trusting him.

* * * * * * * * *

“Are you kidding me right now?” Dean snaps, and the sneer in his voice makes Sam feel all of six years old again.

“No, Dean, I’m not kidding,” Sam says stubbornly. He leans against the doorframe and watches Dean pace back and forth, like a wild animal on a too-short leash in the tiny living room of Rufus’s cabin.

“Dead or alive, Sam. We’re wanted dead or alive. You try to talk to a Fed, which one d’you think it’ll be? They’ll have you pumped full of bullets before you can blink.”

“He’s got a point, Sam,” Bobby says quietly.

Sam rubs his eyes, feeling a headache building. “I trust him.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t,” Dean retorts. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway? When’d you make a friend I don’t know about?”

“Is that what this is about?” Sam asks bitterly. “You’re pissed there’s something about me that you don’t get to control?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, you don’t have a great track record here,” Dean spits, and Sam’s throat clogs with anger even before Dean says, “Whenever you’ve made a friend on your own, how’s that gone for you, huh? Meg, Ruby, Amy… two demons, a monster, and now a fucking Fed?”

Sam balls his hands into fists to fight the urge to start swinging. “Why can’t you just trust me? You don’t know Frank, either.”

“I trust Bobby,” Dean says. The I don’t trust you goes unspoken.

Sam clenches his jaw, breathing until he knows he can talk without shouting.

“Just go, then, Dean,” he says, quiet and venomous. “Go ahead. Do whatever you want. I’m going to call Spencer.”

Dean’s frozen for a moment, stone-faced. Then he whirls around and heads for the door. “Fine. I’ll check in when I get to Frank’s.”

Sam sits down on the couch, resting his head in his hands for a moment. He hears the dim rumble of the engine starting outside.

“I’m gonna use the landline, if that’s okay,” Sam says quietly.

“I sure hope you’re right about this, boy,” Bobby growls.

“So do I.”

He finds Spencer’s number on the worn slip of paper in his wallet, written down with the five or so others that he doesn’t want to lose, and holds his breath as he dials. He has a feeling Spencer might not pick up on the first try, if he picks up at all. For all he knows, Spencer’s on the job already, in Colorado with his team looking for clues that aren’t there.

He closes his eyes and thinks, please, and then Spencer picks up.

“Hi, Sam.” His voice is icy.

“Hey,” Sam says. There’s a long, weighted pause before he continues, “It’s not me.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” It’s clipped and robotic and forceful.

“No, look, I - it’s not me, okay? That’s why I’m calling. I’ll turn myself in.” Another weighted pause. Sam clears his throat. “Not to the police, ‘cause I’m pretty sure they’ll shoot me on sight, but. To you. It’s hard to explain, but I’m innocent, it’s someone else pretending to be me, so if you can get to Montana -”

“Montana?” Spencer interrupts incredulously.

“Montana,” Sam repeats. He hesitates. “I figured you’d be tracking the call, I used a landline to make it easy for you.”

“She’s working on it,” Spencer admits begrudgingly.

Sam feels a twist of guilt, wondering how Spencer’s coworkers are reacting to this… even worse than Dean, probably.

He hears a faint female voice in the background, too quiet to make out more than, “...not sure how, but…”

“Fine, then,” Spencer says quietly. “Montana.”

“Wherever you want, okay? I - I won’t put up a fight. Just…” Sam can’t help but laugh. “Don’t let them shoot me, okay?”

There’s a crackle of static as Spencer sighs. “We’ll call you with details when we land.”

A voice in the back of his head that sounds like Dean is shouting, this is a terrible idea.

Sam ignores it.

“I trust you,” he says. “And Spencer?”

“Mmhmm?”

“Thanks for picking up.”

* * * * * * * * *

May 2010

Spencer feels like he’s choking on the thick stink in the air. He looks around the packed dirt yard of the farmhouse and can’t find any relief; he’s surrounded by ugly raw grief, and he can’t stand it. Emily is consoling the crying girl. Hotch is talking to the locals, tying up loose ends. Morgan is staring numbly at the rows and rows of muddy shoes on the ground.

He knows he’s not the only one dealing with the weight of what they saw today. He should find Penelope, give her a hug, face this together, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Sharing this would make it a little too real.

Maybe it’s all the practice he’s had at being alone; his first instinct is to hide, when things start to get overwhelming, and to maintain a certain level of clinical detachment until he can make sense of what he’s feeling. He can dissect his own feelings. When his friends are hurting, though… that’s a different story. When he sees his friends hurting, he hurts too, hurts in a way that chokes him, hurts in a way that crowds everything else out, and all he wants to do is fix it. Even when it’s not something that can be fixed. It’s illogical.

Love doesn’t leave any room for logic, he’s learning.

He slips away, into the barn.

Dust motes and chaff drift in the scattered beams of light that cut through the empty space, swirling around him as he climbs the ladder to the dark drafty loft. Spencer sits down on the floor in front of the wall of drawings. He hugs his knees to his chest and looks, committing the clumsy crayon strokes to memory, because it doesn’t seem right to let all those empty shoes live on without also remembering this: bright color, crushing loneliness, constant fear.

The loneliness is too much, after a few minutes. He pulls out his phone and closes his eyes.

“Hey, Sam,” he says. His voice cracks and wobbles.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“I’m just not having a great day,” Spencer says, aiming for casual, falling short.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Not really,” Spencer says. His voice is thin and scratchy and small in the darkness of the barn, lost immediately in the blanketing silence.

Sam hesitates, and Spencer waits, hoping he’ll understand.

“If you could have one object from a fictional universe, what would you want? Has to fit in your pocket.”

Spencer lets out a grateful little huff of a sigh. “Obviously the -”

“TARDIS doesn’t count,” Sam interrupts, laughing. “It has to be portable in its normal everyday form, not just temporarily shrinkable.”

“Sonic screwdriver, then. Obviously.”

“Right? That’s what I said.”

“What else would there be?”

“Dean would go with a lightsaber,” Sam says, and Spencer can practically hear him rolling his eyes.

It’s the first time Spencer’s really smiled all day. “Based on what you’ve told me about your brother, that doesn’t actually surprise me.”

“Yeah. That’s Dean…”

* * * * * * * * *

There’s a dial tone. Spencer closes his phone and tries to breathe.

“Do you believe him?” Hotch asks quietly.

Spencer looks down at his hands, twirling his pen again, feeling claustrophobic with all their concerned gazes pinning him in place. There’s too much going on in his head, too many things trapped and buzzing inside him with nowhere to go, and he wants to start running but all he can do is shrug.

“I don’t know,” he says, voice strained.

“Even if he is telling the truth, there are parts of this case that just don’t make any sense,” Morgan says.

JJ adds, “If it’s a ruse, it’s a bizarre one.”

“Gut feeling, kid,” Rossi says softly. “Are we walking into a trap?”

Spencer wants to scream. Instead he says, “I don’t think he’d hurt me, but…”

“If you trust him, that’s good enough for us,” Emily says fiercely.

Spencer can’t help it; he looks at JJ before staring stubbornly down at the table again. The words burn on their way out: “This wouldn’t be the first time I trusted the wrong person, though.”

“We need to make sure we’re prepared for all eventualities, but I think it’s worth the risk,” Hotch says. “We can discuss it more on the jet. Wheels up in thirty.”

Spencer refuses to meet any of their eyes as he gathers up his folder and his bag. He gets out of the conference room before anyone can try to talk to him. His cheeks are burning, and his hands are shaking, and he’s already jittery but he really needs coffee; beyond that singular thought, his brain is stuck between stations, all white noise and useless static.

The coffee pot in the break room is empty. He’s glad; it’s good to have something to do with his hands, a ritual, a tiny piece of his life that he can still count on. Filter, measure grounds, fresh water…

“Spence.” It’s JJ, of course, and Spencer’s first petulant instinct is to ignore her. “Spence. Look, we gotta talk about this.”

“About what? The fact that one of the few people I still trusted turns out to be a serial killer?” Spencer says sharply. “It’s becoming a pattern, me trusting the wrong people. I’m getting used to it.”

“You know what I mean.” Her voice is low and soothing, like she’s talking to a victim’s family.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“I get it, okay?” she says, still in that calm, professional voice. Spencer wishes she’d scream instead. He wants to scream. “You're disappointed with the way we handled Emily.”

He breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, focusing on the steady drip of coffee into the pot.

“Listen, I have a lot going on, all right?” he says coolly.

“You know what I think it is?” He doesn’t look at her, but she continues anyway: “You're mad that Hotch and I controlled our micro-expressions at the hospital and you weren't able to detect our deception.”

It hurts. Her words bite down somewhere deep, venomous needle-sharp fangs that sink in and sting, and the toxic ache spreads through his system before he can take a breath.

“You think it's about my profiling skills?” he spits back. “Jennifer, listen, the only reason you were able to manage my perceptions is because I trusted you. I came to your house for ten weeks in a row crying over losing a friend, and not once did you have the decency to tell me the truth.”

Her expression is hurt, confused, and she says quietly, “I couldn't.”

“You couldn't? Or you wouldn't?” he snaps.

“No, I couldn't,” she insists. Her eyes are brimming with tears now, and Spencer feels a sick rush of satisfaction.

He knows it’s cruel, but he lashes out anyway: “What if I started taking Dilaudid again? Would you have let me?”

She recoils. “You didn't.”

“Yeah, but I thought about it.” It’s petty and it’s unfair and it’s vicious, and he doesn’t care, not even a little bit.

It stuns her into silence for a moment, and he turns to pour coffee into his travel cup, hands shaking so badly he almost spills.

“Spence,” she whispers. “I'm sorry.”

He whirls on her, almost shouts: “It's too late, all right?”

“Reid,” she says, but he’s already brushing past her, and he doesn’t stop.

* * * * * * * * *

February 2010

He’ll never forget the look on Dean’s face. He knows it a little too well, by now: disappointment, disgust. I expected better. This isn’t who I raised you to be. You’re not the person I thought you were.

“You know I couldn’t have gotten out of that bathroom on my own,” Sam says. “You know I wouldn’t have - I wouldn’t have done that. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to.”

Dean doesn’t trust him, though. He’s not sure Dean will ever trust him again.

Sam lets Dean lock him in the panic room. He doesn’t protest; he goes without complaint, head down, like a dog with its tail between its legs as it waits for a kick that never comes. Detox will hurt. It always does. He feels like he deserves that, though.

Dean almost says something, before he closes the door. The words catch on his lips and die on his throat, and he just shakes his head as he slides the deadbolts into place.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, but Dean’s already walking away, and the hallucinations are already creeping in around the edges of his vision: his mother sighing sadly, his younger self shaking his head in contempt.

Sam sits down, curls up, and looks around at the bare walls and the locked door. The floor is cold under him, and he can already feel the chill sinking into his skin, down to his bones. He leans back against the wall and tries to breathe through the panic.

“I’m sorry,” he says, over and over again, but he’s not really sure who he’s talking to any more.

The hallucinations fade. The bloodstains won’t, not really. Dean will see those forever.

He can barely look at Sam when he finally unlocks the door.

Sam’s still itchy and wired, that night, even though the worst of it is over. Dean’s not even trying to pretend he’s doing anything other than keeping watch outside. He’s sitting in the hallway with a bottle of whiskey for company. Sam can’t leave, and he sure as hell can’t sleep, so he calls Spencer, and he doesn’t realize until it starts ringing that it’s two in the morning.

“Hi, Sam,” Spencer says, staticky and distant.

“Hey.”

“You okay?”

Sam sighs, stammers, stops, tries to start again. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Not really,” he manages. There’s another long pause before he can admit, “I fucked up. I keep fucking up.”

“Oh,” Spencer says softly. “Okay.”

Sam exhales. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know. I believe you.”

“You’re the only one who does.”

“I trust you,” Spencer says. It’s so matter-of-fact, so easy, and it’s been a long time since someone trusted Sam like that. He didn’t realize how much he missed it.

“Why?” Sam asks. He tries to laugh, but it comes out wet and choked.

“That’s what friends do, right?”

Sam takes a deep, shaky breath and swallows down the lump in his throat, trying not to wonder if Dean’s still standing guard outside his door.

“Thanks for picking up,” Sam says, barely a whisper.

“Any time.”

* * * * * * * * *

They cuff his hands behind the back of the uncomfortable metal chair. Sam didn’t expect anything less, but he still hates it. They had the entire team except for Spencer there to take him in, and that was a few too many guns trained on him for comfort, but he’s alone now. It’s cold, and the walls are blank, and he shivers.

He’s spent too much of his life locked in cages of one sort or another.

When Spencer finally opens the door, Sam can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief, even as his stomach twists with nerves. He’d worried they would insist on sending someone else in.

“Hey, Spencer,” he says quietly.

Spencer doesn’t answer. He avoids eye contact as he sits down, settling in with his posture stiff and his hands clasped on the table in front of him. He looks like a different person from the one Sam first met; the jittery, fidgety, chattering Spencer is gone, and there’s an actual Fed in his place. Even when he meets Sam’s eyes, his expression doesn’t give anything away. He’s ice-cold and completely closed-off.

Sam tries to breathe.

“Where’s Dean?” Spencer asks bluntly.

“He’s at a friend’s, trying to figure out how to clear our names.”

“Why isn’t he here with you?”

“He didn’t think this was a good idea,” Sam says. “We haven’t had great experiences with law enforcement, but… him even more than me. I trust you. He doesn’t.”

Spencer’s eyes narrow. “You trust me.”

Sam shrugs helplessly. “That’s what friends do, right?”

Spencer’s face goes stormy immediately, and he leans closer, glaring at Sam with startling intensity. “Let’s get one thing straight. You and I are not friends. You’re a murderer, and the only reason I’m here is that I want to see what you look like when you’re telling the truth… because apparently you’ve been lying to me since we met.”

It’s not unexpected, but it still hurts. Sam hesitates for a moment before saying softly, “I’m not a murderer, and I haven’t been lying to you.”

“There’s video.”

“It’s not me.”

Spencer stares at him incredulously. “All that stuff you never wanted to talk about. All those times you talked about… being scared of yourself, worrying what you could do. What was that, then?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Sam says. He feels exhausted, suddenly.

“You’ve never even told me what you do for a living!”

“I can’t.”

“How am I supposed to believe you?” Spencer asks. He’s starting to lose his composure, an agitated edge creeping into his voice.

“Look, remember when you called me, and told me you might be dying?”

“How is that relevant?” Spencer hisses.

“I figured it out, afterward. Anthrax. Right?”

“How did you…”

“And you told me that you couldn’t give me details, and the details weren’t important anyway.”

“That’s right.”

“And I accepted that, because I trust you, and I trust that if you’re not telling me something, it’s for a damn good reason,” Sam says determinedly. “They tried to keep it out of the news, but later, once I knew you were okay, I did some digging, and I figured it out. Why didn’t you alert the public?”

Spencer looks utterly baffled. “Because people would panic. There’d be mass hysteria.”

“There you go. It’s the same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Spencer exclaims. “I work for the federal government!”

“Look, I know you, okay?” Sam says desperately. “I know that your job is to notice the details that don’t make sense. Even when something seems obvious, you and your team pay attention, and you make sure everything fits, and you figure out the truth, not just whatever bullshit explanation seems easiest.”

Spencer nods slowly.

“That’s why you’re here, and that’s why your team didn’t shoot me on sight,” Sam continues. “And I know you’re good at your job, so I know you’ve noticed that there are things about this case that don’t add up. Okay? Why would I be here talking to you, if I was guilty? Did you ask yourself how I got to Montana so quickly? Did you talk to any of the witnesses from the old cases? Diana Ballard? Rebecca Warren? Did you try to profile us? Find any similarities in m.o. between all those murders? No. None of it made any sense then, and none of it makes any sense now. You know why? Because it wasn’t us,” he finishes.

“Sam. Maybe there are details from the old cases that don’t make sense, but…” Spencer trails off, shaking his head, like he doesn’t even know where to start. Then he stops himself, sets his jaw, refocuses, and when he looks at Sam again, there’s nothing but pure clear anger in his face. “Look me in the eye, right now, and tell me you’ve never killed anyone.”

Sam instinctively goes to tuck his hair behind his ears, but the cuffs cut the movement short. Spencer sees it. His face falls, bitter and disappointed.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he mutters.

“I’ve never killed anything that didn’t deserve it,” Sam insists.

“Any thing? Really? Or any person?” Spencer asks. Sam doesn’t answer, and Spencer continues, rushing, like he can’t stop the words from coming out: “Do you know how many times I’ve heard a serial killer say that? Everybody thinks they have a reason, Sam, whether angels told him the guy was guilty, or… Satan was possessing them, or… a talking dog told them the meaning of life.”

Sam lets out a borderline hysterical laugh, and Spencer just stares like he’s completely crazy. Sam can’t blame him. He’s starting to feel crazy.

“Okay, here, look,” he says, in a sudden burst of inspiration. “Go through the old case files, look at the dates. Every one, I guarantee you, people were dying before we got to town. There’s gotta be a way to prove it, right? The murders started happening before we got there. Everything you’ve told me about Penelope, I bet she can do it, easy.”

“What, so now you’re telling me you’re some sort of vigilante?” Spencer half-shouts.

“Not exactly, no.” Sam’s starting to run out of ideas.

The door opens abruptly, and a stern-faced agent says, “Reid. A word?”

Spencer gives Sam one last look before he gets up. It’s a familiar expression: disgust, disappointment, you’re not the person I thought you were. Then he turns his back, and the door slams shut behind him. Sam can hear the click of the lock.

* * * * * * * * *

April 2010

He writes to her every day, pages and pages of words. He hopes she realizes that they all boil down to “I love you,” because right now, he doesn’t know what else to say.

“Hi, Mom, this is Spencer,” he says, “I just… I just really want you to know that I love you. And -” when he blinks away tears he can practically see her, her smile swimmy through the salt water, same as it looked when he was small and crying over a scraped knee, and if he keeps thinking like that he’ll never make it through this message. He pauses, gulps for air, steadies himself. “I need you to know that I spend every day of my life proud to be your son.”

She hasn’t taken care of him since he was small. Right now, though, he feels small and scared, and all he wants is for his mom to tell him that she loves him, and that it’s going to be alright.

“Reid?” Penelope whispers, and then he hears Dr. Kimura, and he doesn’t get to be a child right now; there’s nobody there to take care of him.

“I gotta go,” he says, and hangs up before Garcia can ask questions.

“Doctor Reid?”

“You look nice,” he jokes, with a watery laugh, and she smiles. “How are the patients doing?”

“Let’s worry about you,” she says smoothly.

Spencer forces a smile and shakes his head. “I actually… I feel fine.” It’s one of the most obvious lies he’s ever told.

“If you feel any pain, I could give you something,” she offers.

“No, I’d rather not take any pain medication.” His hands are shaking, but at least his voice sounds strong.

She looks concerned. “We can at least make you feel more comfortable.”

“I am comfortable, and I don’t want to take any narcotics,” he says fiercely. It’s not easy to say the words, but he feels better once he does; he feels proud.

There’s someone else he needs to call, Spencer realizes.

“Tell me how I can help,” Dr. Kimura says, and Spencer nods. First things first: if the poison is here, so is the antidote.

“I think the cure for this strain is in here somewhere,” he says, ignoring the way his chest aches.

“Well, shall I start here?”

“Yes, just… I just need a moment.”

Spencer looks down at his phone. He could call Garcia, again, have her save the message as a contingency plan, but he’s not sure he could handle her questions right now, and he can trust Sam not to push for details; he’s always been good about that.

“Hey, Spencer.”

“Hey, so, I can’t explain, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it out of this,” he says, stumbling over the words. “Don’t interrupt, I can’t - I just wanted to say thank you. In case I don’t get to say it again. Recovery was… I don’t… you helped. Thanks for always picking up the phone when I needed you.”

“Right back at you,” Sam says quietly.

It’s getting harder to breathe, and the panicked hammering of his heartbeat isn’t helping.

“Thanks,” he says again, and closes the phone without saying goodbye.

* * * * * * * * *

“Reid, you need to calm down,” Hotch says, as soon as the lock clicks behind them.

“I know,” Spencer says, rubbing his eyes, agitated. “There’s just… there’s so much that doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s more than that.” Hotch gives him one of those piercing glares he’s so good at. “You’re allowing your anger with JJ to cloud what you’re seeing in Sam.”

Spencer can’t really argue with that. He just nods.

“When this is over, I want you to take a couple days,” Hotch says. “You need some time to process.”

Spencer’s instinct is to argue, but one look at Hotch’s face tells him it’s pointless. He nods again, reluctantly.

“Garcia is checking into the pattern that he talked about,” Hotch says, as he leads Spencer back into the observation room. “She may be able to pin the Winchesters’ locations at the times of the original murders. JJ’s talking to old witnesses. There has to be something Henricksen missed.”

Emily, Morgan, and Rossi are clustered in the small, spare room, watching Sam through the one-way glass. Emily cuts herself off mid-sentence as Spencer and Hotch walk in.

“You okay, kid?” Morgan asks again, looking at Spencer like he’s a bomb about to go off, and Spencer tries to smile for him.

“All my time in the Bureau, I’ve never seen a case that made less sense,” Rossi comments.

They all look at Sam, who’s frowning down at the table, deep in thought.

Spencer clears his throat and asks, “Do you believe him?”

“I believe that he’s telling part of the truth,” Hotch says. “It’s what he’s not saying that concerns me.”

Inside the interrogation room, Sam starts, eyes wide, and looks from the door to the one-way mirror.

“Hey,” he barks. “Hey, I know you’re listening! It’s St. Louis. I figured out the pattern, and they’re going to St. Louis next.” He tugs at the cuffs, clearly agitated. “Come on. Can anybody hear me?”

“He’s genuinely distressed,” Emily says, frowning.

“If it’s a delusion, it’s a complex one,” Morgan adds.

The door swings open, and JJ starts talking before any of them can ask: “That was Diana Ballard. She swears up and down that it’s all a big misunderstanding, but she’s not clear on any of the details; she just said that she’d trust the Winchesters with her life. Rebecca Warren said the same. There was someone impersonating the Winchesters, back then, and she swears up and down that someone’s got it out for them now.”

“How did Henricksen not have that statement in his file?” Morgan asks.

“Maybe Sam’s right, as much as I hate to admit it,” Emily says. “Maybe this is a case of agents just wanting the easy explanation.”

“You guys are gonna want to see this,” Penelope interrupts, hurrying through the door as fast as her hot pink heels will allow, holding out her tablet.

“Another one?” JJ asks.

“Unfortunately, yes, and it’s a doozy. This just came in from -”

“St. Louis,” Hotch fills in grimly.

“How did you know?” Penelope asks, but she presses play without waiting for an answer, and they all cluster together to watch the grainy cell phone footage: Sam, leaning in close, giving the camera a smug smile before he opens fire.

“Is that really…” Spencer says numbly, looking from the screen to the window, where Sam is tapping his foot, impatient, undeniably solid and real.

“It’s real,” she confirms. “And to top it off, I found a call that the local brass dismissed, but I just talked to him a couple minutes ago and it sounds like the genuine article. A guy thinks he saw the older Winchester just a couple hours after Sam originally called us. He was at a gas station in, you guessed it, Montana.”

There’s a stunned pause, while everybody tries to digest that news, until Emily breaks the silence with a succinct, “What in the ever-loving fuck is happening.”

“I’m going to talk to Sam,” Hotch says.

Spencer’s acutely aware of everyones’ eyes on him again as he moves closer to the window. His reflection in the glass looks masklike and composed, but he doesn’t feel anything of the sort.

He’s kind of starting to believe Sam. That’s his first instinct, at least. Something deep in his gut is telling him to trust, but it’s being strangled by the suspicion and twisted fear that have been poisoning him slowly since Emily came back. Now that it’s in his system, Spencer’s not sure how to flush it out; it’s just in him now, like some sort of chronic infection.

* * * * * * * * *

March 2011

“I hate how often we see it,” Spencer says quietly. “It’s the first thing everybody thought of, with this kid, even though it wasn’t just schizophrenia, but… what’s the difference, between him and my mom?”

“Your mom has you,” Sam points out. He can hear the murmur of Dean and Bobby’s voices downstairs, constant and comforting.

“The headaches haven’t stopped.”

Sam grimaces. “No answers, still?”

“They all say there’s nothing wrong with me, physically.”

“Yeah,” Sam sighs. “That’s… kinda harder, isn’t it?”

“I hate not knowing,” Spencer fumes. “I hate that there’s no test for it. Even if it was a positive diagnosis, I’d rather have that, you know? I mean, that’d be awful, obviously, but… ”

“At least you’d know,” Sam finishes. “Yeah.”

“It’s like my brain may or may not be a ticking bomb. No way of knowing what’s hiding up there,” Spencer bites out, with a warped attempt at a laugh.

Sam can’t help but think of his flashback: coming back to reality with Dean pale and wide-eyed above him, the disorientation of feeling the solid floor under his back, the way his skin still burned. It felt so real.

He pushes those thoughts away.

“Like you can’t even trust yourself,” Sam says softly.

“Exactly.” Spencer’s voice is small and thin, and he sounds very young, suddenly. “My mom’s counting on me. What if… if something happened - I don’t know who would take care of her. Of us.”

“Your family,” Sam says, without hesitating.

“My team? Yeah, I… I guess so.”

“Your family,” Sam repeats. “Even if you can’t trust yourself, you’ll be able to trust your family.”

* * * * * * * * *

Sam’s heart leaps at the sound of the door opening again.

“They’re going to St. Louis,” he says, all in a rush, before the stern-faced agent from earlier can even sit down. The guy doesn’t bat an eye, just sits down calmly, pinning Sam with a stare that could strip paint.

“Sam, I’m Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner.” Sam’s heard Spencer talk about “Hotch,” and it all makes sense now. “What makes you think St Louis is next?”

“They’re retracing our steps,” Sam answers. “Dean and I, when we started working together. They’re hitting each town we stopped in. Jericho, Black Water Ridge, Manitoc. St. Louis is next.”

Sam holds his breath, hoping he won’t be pressed on his definition of working. He can see the moment Hotch comes to a decision with an infinitesimal nod.

“We’re too late,” he says. “We just got the news.”

“Shit,” Sam can’t help but mutter, and he tugs instinctively at the handcuffs, frustrated, done with sitting still.

“This means you’re innocent,” Hotch points out, clearly watching Sam’s reaction.

Sam can’t help but roll his eyes. “Yeah, but I already knew that. It’s… Iowa next, then. Ankeny, Iowa.”

“Very well,” Hotch says flatly, giving Sam a critical, evaluating look. “It’s very clear that you’re not what we thought you were, and you may be able to help us end this. Are you still interested in accompanying us?”

“Yes,” Sam replies impatiently.

“First, I’m going to give you one last chance to tell me the truth about what’s going on here,” Hotch says, in such a low, dangerous voice that Sam’s almost intimidated. “Otherwise, if one of my agents gets hurt because you withheld information, or if there’s even a hint that you’re leading us into a trap, I will shoot you without hesitation. Do I make myself clear?”

Jesus. But if the FBI can help him get to Iowa in time, with enough firepower to put a dent in the Leviathans, this’ll all be worth it.

Sam leans forward, as much as his cuffs will allow, meeting Hotch’s impenetrable glare with a determined stare of his own.

“Look, I could tell you more, but you’re not going to believe some of it until you see for yourself,” he snaps. “So as far as I’m concerned, the only truth that matters is this: people are dying, and we both want to put a stop to it. Now, are you going to waste time asking for irrelevant details, or are you going to choose to trust me?”

Hotch holds his gaze for a moment before nodding tersely. “Let’s get going, then. I’ll go get the keys.”

He gets up and Sam grimaces at his retreating back, twisting his wrist uncomfortably to get the bobby pin at the right angle. Then the cuffs fall to the ground with a metallic clatter, and Hotch looks back at him in disbelief. Sam smiles at him, equal parts sheepish and smug.

“I told you, full cooperation,” he explains, and Hotch shakes his head like he might just be a tiny bit impressed.

The rest of the team is waiting out in the hallway, some looking skeptical (tall, dark, handsome, eyebrows; Morgan, if Sam's guessing right), others nervous (pink pom-poms in her hair; that’ll be Penelope), but almost all with some degree of confusion written across their faces. Sam can’t exactly blame them. Spencer’s staring at his shoes, avoiding eye contact.

They’re a very clean, professional-looking bunch, and it’s making Sam incredibly uncomfortable, even aside from the obvious awkwardness inherent in the situation.

“I’m Sam,” he blurts out, and then winces. “Um. You knew that.”

“Yep,” Penelope squeaks. “This is weird.”

“Emily Prentiss, Derek Morgan, David Rossi,” Hotch says brusquely, pointing to each in turn. “Jennfer Jareau, Penelope Garcia, and you know Spencer. There’ll be time to talk more on the jet. Everyone, grab your things, meet outside in five.” He’s already pulling out a cell phone and striding away as the team scatters, and Sam feels sort of windswept in his wake; the guy’s intense.

Sam and Spencer are alone in the hallway. Sam’s stomach twists. This is familiar. This is another person he’s let down, and the bitter voice in the back of his head whispering you fucked up again is familiar too.

“I’m sorry,” Sam blurts out. “I know it doesn’t change anything, but… I’m sorry.”

Spencer looks up at him with a quizzical frown, head tilted. “I was going to apologize to you.”

Sam blinks. “Why?”

Spencer presses his lips together in a funny little grimace. Sam had forgotten that face, the weird things he does with his mouth when he’s not sure what to say.

“For not trusting you.” His voice is scratchy and uneven and honest, now that there isn’t any anger keeping it strong and sure. “I wanted to believe that you… that it couldn’t be you. When I saw the first video, that was my instinct. But my instincts haven’t been great, lately.”

Sam shakes his head. “No, you have nothing to apologize for.”

“I think maybe I don’t trust myself right now?” Spencer barrels on. “But there’s video, and... I trust Hotch. If Hotch believes you... yeah. I’m sorry.”

Sam’s not used to being forgiven so easily. It takes him a moment to remember how to speak.

“You gave me a chance,” he says. “Most people wouldn’t have even picked up the phone. And there’s still… I still haven’t told you everything, why would you -”

“There are a lot of things going on that I don’t understand, and I want answers, don’t get me wrong.” Spencer looks frustrated for a moment. “But… knowing that you’re not a murderer goes a long way. The details can wait.”

“When I start sharing details is when most people start running in the opposite direction,” Sam admits.

“I think that’s sort of a universal human experience,” Spencer offers. He looks like he’s trying not to laugh, now. “Or at least, the fear is. Nobody likes telling the full truth. It’s uncomfortable at best, painful at worst.”

Sam huffs out a laugh and swipes a hand over his face. “Yeah, okay. Got me there.”

“I’ll trust that you’re not lying if you trust that I won’t run,” Spencer says, and he’s not smiling now. He’s dead serious, determined, maybe a little scared.

“Okay,” Sam says hoarsely. “Deal.”

There’s an awkward moment where they both just look at each other, but then Spencer jerks his head in the direction of the front doors. “C’mon, we should go.”

Sam nods and lets him lead the way. “Should we - do you know where my phone is? I need to call my brother.”

“Garcia will have it.”

They walk out into the bullpen, where the team is bustling around, collecting their things, and Sam’s reminded again of how much they’re risking on his word. It’s overwhelming. His throat feels too tight.

“So, that handcuff thing,” says Rossi, tossing his bag over his shoulder and falling into step next to Sam.

Sam laughs. “Yeah, I can teach you. It’s just a bobby pin.”

“Might help next time I get kidnapped,” Spencer says, with alarming nonchalance.

“Would’ve come in handy a few times during college,” Rossi comments.

“You mean as a party trick?” Spencer asks him.

“Yeah. Sure, kid. A party trick.”

“...oh.”

* * * * * * * * *

November 2010

“Spencer?”

“I… is that you?” Spencer asks, so shocked he feels dizzy. It’s been six months.

Spencer’s first thought had been, ‘Weird, that's the second “just in case” call in a month,’ when he got the voicemail. He’d almost laughed.

Spencer had called Sam from the hospital, though, after the anthrax thing, when the antidote worked and he woke up.

Sam never called. Spencer assumed he never woke up.

“It’s me,” Sam says. “I’m so sorry, I -”

“What happened?”

“I was… sick,” Sam stammers. “Really… really sick. I’m sorry.”

Spencer has to pause for a moment to digest that. His head is spinning.

“What -” he starts, but he cuts himself off. He has some idea of what kind of sickness might cause someone to go away for six months, and it’s not physical. “Oh,” he says softly.

“Sorry,” Sam says again. He sounds miserable.

“No, don’t apologize,” Spencer protests. “You shouldn’t - it’s not your fault. I’m just glad you’re okay. I thought…”

“Yeah.”

All Spencer can say is, “I’m really glad you’re alive.”

“Me too,” Sam says quietly.

Spencer’s been wanting to talk to him for six months, but now he can’t think of anything to say. Eventually he just goes with the first thing that comes into his head: “You missed some really good episodes of Doctor Who.”

Sam laughs. “Yeah, I’ve got some catching up to do.”

Spencer closes his eyes and reminds himself to breathe. He’s never been so happy to be wrong.

* * * * * * * * *

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Emily says flatly, as Spencer brandishes the Super Soaker in her direction. “Of all the stupid fucking ideas.”

“Yup,” he says, popping the p and maybe kinda enjoying the way her eyes have gone all buggy. In a low voice, he adds, “Play along, remember?”

She casts a glance over to where Sam is busying himself with the rest of the water guns and a box of Borax. “As long as he doesn’t try to take my fucking Glock.”

“Nobody is taking your Glock, Emily,” Spencer says dryly. She shakes her head and goes over to join Morgan, Hotch, and JJ, who have already been outfitted and are standing at the other side of the parking lot. Garcia is sneakily taking a picture of them.

Admittedly, when Sam insisted that they make an emergency stop between the airstrip and the police precinct, Spencer wasn’t expecting Toys R Us, but he was also pretty gobsmacked when Sam started talking about monsters. He’d waited until they were in the jet to do so, which was probably a smart move. This isn’t the first time they’ve played along with a delusion in order to get answers, but it’s definitely the strangest.

Funniest, also. Spencer hopes Garcia got a lot of pictures.

Sam will definitely be headed to an institution, when all of this is over, and Spencer’s having trouble processing that, but… well, it’s not like Spencer’s unfamiliar with that sort of facility. Spencer’s just glad Sam’s not a murderer, and he’s ready to get Dean, arrest whoever’s framing them, and get some answers. He can deal with the rest later; there’s only so much he can handle right now.

It’s been a weird day.

“Okay, we’re ready,” Sam announces, passing the last Super Soaker to Spencer. “Bobby didn’t know where they’re keeping Dean, but I’m guessing the cells. I’ll lead the way. Don’t trust anyone, we have to assume the local cops are Leviathans, at this point. Stick together, don’t let them touch you. Clear?”

“And I’ll be right here with the emergency radio,” Garcia chimes in cheerily. “Thank God.”

Sam tucks his own water gun into the back of his jeans, hefting the fire axe he’d somehow stolen from the cockpit of the jet without anyone noticing. “Let’s go,” he says authoritatively.

“We’re right behind you,” JJ says, in her warmest, most soothing “placate the crazy man” voice.

Sam leads them around the corner and through the front door of the station, easing the door open without a sound, and they follow, entering the oddly quiet precinct quickly and efficiently.

Spencer can see his teammates starting to draw their real weapons; luckily, Sam’s too focused on what’s in front of him to notice what everyone is doing behind him. Spencer hooks a finger on the Super Soaker and lets it dangle from his left hand, drawing his gun with his right, and most of the team is doing the same, for the sake of appearances. Emily and Morgan just set their water guns on the floor.

“Dean?” Sam calls out.

“Sammy!”

Dean walks jauntily out into the bullpen like it’s a very normal thing to find a team of federal agents aiming their guns at him, but he does a double take, disconcerted, frowning for a moment at all the neon plastic toys on display. Then he recovers and turns a wide grin on Sam, who’s hanging back, wary.

“You brought backup,” Dean says, laughing. “Good, I’m hungry. I’m very glad you made it.”

“You’re not Dean,” Sam says, low and certain.

“No, I am not,” the man says, almost gleeful. “Close enough, though! I have all his memories, and I wanted to chat for a moment, before I eat you. I like my meat a little bitter.”

“What the almighty shitfire,” Emily breathes, but neither Sam or Dean pay any attention to her. Spencer has a hysterical urge to laugh, but he swallows it, heart pounding, not daring to look away from the insanity that’s unfolding in front of them.

“Dean thinks you’re nuts, you know.” The man’s eyes flick behind Sam, taking in the team fanned out behind him. “So do your new friends.”

Sam reaches behind his back to grab the handle of his water gun, but he holds it out of sight, still. Spencer keeps his finger firmly on the trigger of his real gun.

“Where’s my brother?” Sam snaps.

“Okay, okay, I’ll get to the point.” He’s wearing a smug, nasty smile, and this isn’t going the way Spencer expected at all. “Dean killed Amy.”

Sam seems frozen, completely paralyzed.

“There it is,” the man who isn’t Dean says, laughing. “Now I can eat you.”

Sam draws his water gun so quickly it’s just a blur of neon orange, and then the man (thing, Spencer corrects himself frantically) is smoking. He’s smoking and sizzling wherever the water touches, and he’s screaming, looking just as stunned as Spencer feels in the split-second before Sam swings the fire axe and chops off his head with one powerful blow.

There’s a moment where everything seems to slow down, like Spencer’s moving underwater, as he takes in the black goo pouring from the stump where the creature’s head used to be.

“What in the almighty motherfucking shitfire,” Emily says again, into the momentary silence.

“More incoming,” Sam snaps. “Heads up.”

Then everything speeds up, too fast for Spencer to process, and it all blurs together: he’s holstering his gun, spraying water at something that’s wearing Sam’s face, as someone screams. Glass shatters, somewhere. Out of the corner of his eye Spencer sees Morgan pulling the station’s fire axe out of its case, whirling around without hesitation in a spray of black goo, and he keeps getting caught in the water pistol jets but it’s better than all those goddamn teeth, what the hell, in the massive mouth that just appeared, so he shoots, what, how, and then -

And then it’s over as suddenly as it began.

It’s over.

Spencer’s heart is racing. He’s surrounded by puddles of water and puddles of oozing black, Morgan’s clutching an axe like it’s a life raft, and everyone is okay. Spencer looks around frantically, double-checking, but everyone is okay; they’re still standing, at least, although JJ, greenish-pale, looks like she’s seconds away from keeling over in shock.

“Back here, Sammy!” comes a muffled voice from the back of the station. Sam casually wipes the blade of his axe on the side of his pants, expression unreadable. Spencer watches him clench his jaw and take a deep breath.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Rossi mumbles.

Sam’s face is blank as he looks around, taking in the mess and the team.

“I told you so,” he says mildly. Then he steps over the headless remains of a monster and goes to get his brother.

* * * * * * * * *

November 2009

He doesn’t bother trying to go back to sleep after the second nightmare. He goes outside instead, sits on the curb in the parking lot, looks up. The stars are barely visible with the Vegas light pollution, but it still helps to be outside. He can breathe a little easier.

There’s this tightly-knotted mess of rage in his chest, sitting on his ribcage like a tumor, poisoning him slowly.

It’s almost four in the morning, and he has no idea where Sam might be, or what time it is there. He takes out his phone anyway and fires off a text.

You awake?

The phone rings less than a minute later.

“What’s up?” Sam asks. He doesn’t sound like he was sleeping.

“I’m in Vegas,” Spencer says softly, and then realizes that doesn’t mean anything to Sam. “It’s where I grew up.”

“Win big on the slot machines?”

“I guess. I won two thousand dollars today, actually. I… I gave it to a prostitute,” Spencer admits. He adds hastily, “Not for sex.”

Sam laughs. “Right.”

There’s a moment of silence. Spencer could make small talk, now; he could pretend he called for no reason in particular. Sam wouldn’t believe him, but he wouldn’t question it, either.

He takes a deep breath and spits the words out fast, before he can regret letting them loose. “Apparently my dad lived really close by my entire life, even after he left my mom and me. I didn’t know. He never told me.”

“Shit,” Sam says.

“He was keeping tabs on me my whole life,” he says. His voice gives him away, breaking and rasping, and it hurts to keep forcing the words out. “He read all my articles, my dissertation, everything I ever had published. My friends seem to think I should be happy about that.”

“That’s bull,” Sam says firmly.

“Why wasn’t it enough?” Spencer whispers. He’s been holding that question in all day, and it’s been choking him.

His lower lip is wobbling. He’s glad Sam can’t see him. This is the sort of honesty that’s much easier from a distance; Sam might hang up right now, but at least Spencer won’t have to watch him walk away.

“Do you think they know?” Sam asks. “How badly they messed us up, I mean.”

“Do you think they care?” It comes out more bitter than he intended. Spencer makes a face and looks down at his feet in their mismatched socks. “I think that’s the important part. If he cared, I could probably forgive him, but… I don’t think he does. Not really.”

“Yeah.”

Spencer takes a breath. The anger is gone now. He doesn’t like how hollow he feels in its wake, but he does feel lighter. He feels better.

“Thanks for listening,” he says. “It helps.”

There’s a long pause, and Spencer thinks maybe he should hang up, now, try to rest even if he can’t sleep.

“Want to hear a joke?” Sam asks. “I tried to tell Dean, but... I don’t think he got it.”

“Sure.”

“How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Two. One to change the light bulb and one to to observe how it symbolizes an incandescent beacon of subjectivity in a netherworld of cosmic nothingness.”

Spencer laughs, grinning up at the stars. “That’s good. I’m gonna steal that.”

* * * * * * * * *

Sam sighs as he closes the door of the precinct behind himself. They’re not totally done with cleanup, but all Hotch’s wild-eyed muttering about paperwork is starting to make him anxious.

Also, every time he looks at Dean, he feels sick.

He sits down on the bench that’s out front, under a little awning. The sky is dark with clouds, and the air is thick, threatening rain, so humid it seems hard to breathe… but maybe that’s the shock setting in.

He barely gets a minute of peace before Dean comes out to find him.

“Hey,” Dean says cheerfully. “Ready to go? I’m starving, and I don’t want to be here when that bunch starts asking questions. Pretty cool, though, having an in with the FBI. Definitely makes life easier, bein’ dead again.”

He’s standing there on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, grinning like it’s just another day. Sam’s chest hurts.

“Don’t,” he says quietly.

“What’s up?” Dean asks, frowning.

“You killed Amy,” Sam says, and he watches Dean’s face as he realizes, the way he shifts his weight uncomfortably.

“Listen, Sam...” he says.

“No, you know what, don’t,” Sam spits. He knows the drill. Dean thought he was doing the right thing, he made a choice, he had to take responsibility if Sam couldn’t. Sam looks at his feet and says, “I don’t think I can be around you right now.”

“So… what, you -”

“You should go,” Sam says. He looks up and searches Dean’s face for some sign of guilt, remorse, empathy, but Dean just looks resigned. Sam wishes he would just start screaming, or throw a punch so Sam could hit him back. It’s not fair that Sam’s the only one in pain right now.

“Okay, Sam,” Dean says, and he turns to go. Sam watches him walk away.

He’s not sure how long he sits on the bench, watching people pass. The sky is getting darker by the minute.

Spencer doesn’t announce his presence when he comes outside, just sits on the bench next to Sam and waits quietly.

“He killed my friend,” Sam mumbles, without looking at him. “She was a monster, but she didn’t… she didn’t mean to. She didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

“Let me guess, he thought he was doing the right thing?” Spencer says wryly.

The lack of pity in his voice makes it easier for Sam to keep talking, and sarcasm feels better than grief. “Shocking, right?” he says. There’s a low rumble of thunder overhead, and they both look up at the sky. “I didn’t have many friends, but… I liked her.” The grief seems to be creeping in whether he wants it or not.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” Sam’s throat feels tight. “He’s my brother, I just… I’ve fucked up in the past, I know I have. But I always feel like I have to earn his forgiveness. It feels like I’m always asking him to give me another chance, to trust me again, and… and he still doesn’t really look at me the same way. Then he pulls something like this, and I know, one way or the other, he just doesn’t trust me. He thinks it’s okay to lie to me, because I don’t deserve the truth.”

Spencer doesn’t say anything, just makes an unhappy, understanding sort of sound. The first fat raindrops start to fall on the concrete in front of them, and they’re both quiet for a moment.

Sam smiles in spite of himself, remembering. “She changed her name, since I met her. Her name was always Amy, but she changed her last name to Pond.”

“Cool,” Spencer says.

“Yeah. I mean, no, she wasn’t cool, neither of us were, but… yeah.”

Sam can breathe a little easier, now.

“What are you going to do?” Spencer asks.

Sam looks sideways at him and sees the way his mouth is twitching. “Don’t.”

“Nothing you can do, is what I seem to remember you saying,” Spencer says innocently. “Give it time. Right? Does that make you feel any better?”

Sam laughs, burying his face in his hands. “That was fucking useless advice. Fuck, don’t ever listen to me.” He wipes his eyes. “This just sucks.”

“Yeah, it really does,” Spencer agrees. It’s pouring steadily now, rain streaming off the sides of their little awning. “Apparently Hotch thinks I should run away from my problems for a little while, give myself time to process, so I’ve been ordered to take a couple days off.”

“JJ, still?”

“Yeah. I think maybe he’s right. But… I was going to rent a car and drive back to DC, instead of taking the jet. Make a couple detours. Get some space. Give it time. You could come, if you want.”

Sam turns to him, surprised, but Spencer looks sincere; he’s giving Sam one of his trademark anxious not-quite-smiles.

“I was just going to hotwire a car,” Sam blurts out, and then winces. “That might be a better idea.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“I guess you probably have some questions,” Sam says reluctantly.

Spencer grins. “Harder for me to run away if we’re in a moving vehicle, right?”

Sam laughs, tucking his hair behind his ears. “Yeah, guess so.”

“After today, I’m not actually sure I want to know all the details,” Spencer says, wrinkling his nose. “But I do have some questions.”

“Anything you want to know,” Sam promises. “The truth. I promise. I should’ve… I should’ve told you sooner.”

Spencer shrugs. “No, I’m pretty sure you were right, I would’ve run away screaming.”

Sam laughs and rolls his eyes, and they sit there in silence for a moment, watching the rain start to slow. The clouds are already starting to blow over.

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

― Mark Twain

You can now read about the road trip right here!

#criminal minds fic #spn fic #supernatural x criminal minds #sam winchester #spencer reid #spn #cm #crossover

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authornina · 3 years

Text

I don’t have a title for this one. It’s simply a mess...

***THIS HAS NOT BEEN THROUGH A TYPICAL EDITING PROCESS; ALL SHORTS ARE ROUGH DRAFTS***

Sav and Dem were on their way to pick Savannah up from Anne. Chi was still in bed sleep when he left. They partied until four in the morning and didn’t stop once they got home. It was almost three in the afternoon now. Sav was the happiest he’d ever been, and Chi seemed like it too. At the beginning of their marriage, he didn’t think they would make it. There was a lot of arguing and past mistakes being thrown towards each other. They went to therapy for a short while and it helped a lot. Mostly Chi, because Sav had done things to her that he knew fucked her up emotionally and some mentally. Her forgiveness was vital for their relationship to succeed. Dr. Pie continually told Sav he needed to stop dismissing his wife’s feelings and own up to all of his mistakes.

Over time her advice proved true. Sav realized when he held himself accountable then apologized, Chi would almost immediately become more submissive. That was a big problem in their relationship too. She didn’t want to let him lead the household and responded to him aggressively all the time. However, after talking to Lake, his brother gave him so great insight as well. Do you ever see Avery talking to me like she a nigga? She’s submissive because I give her the space to be a woman, without making her feel less than in her moments. Chi get extra masculine when you not doing what she need or talkin’ down to her. They nigga mentality kick in and it’s versus you instead of y’all verse the problem. Stop trying to put her beneath you. That ain’t no bitch you fuckin’, it’s your wife.

Lake and Avery set the tone for what Sav thought husband and wife should be because they were just so in sync with one another. They did their own thing, in their own little world. In the first half of marriage, every time him and Chi did something the other didn’t like, they compared. Sav wanted what his big brother had, and Chi wanted what she saw Avery fall in love with over and over again. Avery and Lake told them both to find their own couple style and stop jacking their shit.

“Remind me to go get Poppy some more of them surprise egg jawns.”

“Them things ain’t nothing but expensive easter eggs filled with dollar store shit, bro.”

“I know but my princess love them. She be so surprised when she opening them, happy about all the bullshit inside.”

“How Melody?”

“She ard,” Dem shrugged. “Nicole back on her bullshit…but I’m movin’ on it different this time. Something in my spirit just not sittin’ right no more.”

“For real?”

“Mhm, I need to see what I’m missin’. I can’t be everywhere no more. Got all these fuckin’ kids.”

“I ain’t wanna say nothing but you is wylin bro,” Sav laughed. “You a good dad though, Dem. Can’t nobody take that from you, Ion care what your past look like.”

“Seem like everybody else do,” Dem mumbled but Sav heard him clearly.

“Who? Fuck them! Ain’t nobody perfect out this bitch. I still don’t believe what that hoe sayin’. A muhfucka gon’ have to come with video evidence on you to convince me and even then, I be like ehhh, that ain’t my brother.”

“Sound like Lake when he clearly seen Wreck on tape and told the cops, nah, that ain’t my brother. I don’t know who that crazy nigga is.” Dem couldn’t even get it all out fully before cracking up right along with Sav.

“That’s how you stand with your family. Fuck what anybody else say and I’ma keep it a bean with you, even if it was what it was…” Sav shrugged. Nobody should’ve expected anything else when it came to Dem.

For the past year, Sav and Dem did their best to focus on what they had going on individually instead of turning back to the world they liked to live in with just the two of them. It had to change for the sake of Dem’s mental health and who Sav needed to be as his own man. They leaned on each other way too much. Lake was proud of them for doing their best at putting other things than each other first. Sav however still didn’t give anyone else room to say shit on Dem and he didn’t want to hear anything either. He and Chi had it out one good time, he even let her express some foul shit she felt about his brother then they put Dem as an issue in their relationship to rest.

“Why Wreck car here?” Dem pointed to their brother parked in the driveway with no shame.

“This nigga been shackin’ up with Anne, bro. I ain’t say shit cause he tryna be quiet about it. Ion know what this nigga got goin’ on with her ass.”

“Bro, he really into it with this old ass lady?” Dem laughed, getting out the car.

“He was here the last few times I came, like real lovey dovey.”

“Lovey dovey?” Dem scrunched his face up. “Nah, not my brother.”

“See for yourself.” Sav used his key unlock the door and Savannah was in her walker moving a mile a minute. That gave him hope she’d eventually walk on her own. “Look at my Banana! Go momma, go!”

Savannah smiled big crashing into them, reversing into the dining room, going around the table and then back to her daddy and uncle at high speed.

“I keep tellin’ you, y’all be worried for nothing,” Dem said, picking his niece up, kissing her chubby cheeks making her blush. “Just gotta be patient, she perfect, bro.”

“Mm…it’s just you,” Anne said, coming out of the kitchen with a robe on looking freshly fucked. “Hey Dem baby, how are you?”

“I’m good, wassup?”

“Nothing, making your crazy brother some lunch,” Anne responded sounding like a proud girlfriend. Sav turned to Dem with the I told you so face.

“She thick as fuck though,” Dem took another glance when she walked back to the kitchen. “For a hoe her age, you gotta give her points for the body alone. Damn!”

Sav went up the steps flagging Dem to follow him. They held in their laughter, creeping towards Anne’s bedroom. Savannah was right along with them not knowing what the heck going on. Sav opened the door to find Wreck sleep, stretched out like he lived there. He had an empty breakfast tray next to him and everything.

“Bro…” Dem whispered. “This nigga not serious. Here, hold Banny.” He gave his niece to Sav then hopped on top of their brother. Sav was hyperventilating.

“What the fuck!” Wreck started whooping his ass. He didn’t know what was going on, his first reflex was to fight. Dem was windmilling to get free. His brother was strong as shit.

“So you wasn’t you gon’ help me?” Dem finally got away, staring at Sav’s dumbass holding onto the wall with Savannah on his side silently dying.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe yo,” Sav had tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. “Bro, why the fuck you jump on him? He fucked you up.”

“Y’all niggas play too much!” Wreck said, getting up in the nude. “What the fuck if I woulda shot your stupid ass?!”

“Aye nigga!” “Sav covered Savannah eyes. “You don’t see my baby?”

“Oh shit, my fault Banny.” Wreck put the cover over him. “Go take her to her room.”

“Look at you sounding like her uncle step grandpop,” Sav said loud as hell and Dem hollered. “Wreck what the fuck is you doin’ my nigga? Why are you up in here like you pay the bills?”

“I’m mindin’ my fuckin’ business that’s what I’m doin’.”

“He’s pays for more than my bills. Why are y’all in my bedroom?” Anne appeared at the door with her arms crossed.

“Because our brother in here. What you doin’ to him? Ain’t no way that pussy…Daddy sorry baby,” Sav kissed his Banana’s forehead. “It ain’t still juicy like it was in seventies to have him like this. She puttin’ period blood in your food, bro.”

“Sav, what?” Dem ain’t never heard nothing like that before.

“Yea, I know all the bitch tricks. You had spaghetti in the last few months Wreck? That’s usually how they disguise it.”

“Nigga you trippin’,” Wreck laughed. “For real, get the fuck out.”

“So this your house now too? You gon’ let him put me and your granddaughter out Anne?” Sav would not stop and Dem was cracking up.

“Why don’t you just tell them?” Anne directed towards Wreck. “It’s not like it can be hidden forever.”

“Tell us what?” Dem asked, looking between his brother and Anne.

“I’m pregnant.”

“See…” Sav pointed at Dem then Wreck. “See! What the fuck I say?! I been tellin’ you!”

“Nigga, you ain’t tellin’ me shit! Both y’all get the fuck out!”

“Come on, Sav,” Dem pulled him out the room. He could tell their brother wasn’t happy about that news at all and Sav would’ve kept on going.

They both sat downstairs dumbfounded. Wreck didn’t move like this or hadn’t in a very long time, so it was surprising.

“You think Lake know?” Dem turned to Sav.

“I got a better question, why would Wreck get her old ass pregnant?”

“The fuck do we really care for though? I can’t say shit in the matter, I’m fucked up too. If he like it, I love it.”

Anne and Wreck’s arguing could be heard clear as day. She was yelling at him about always trying to hide their relationship while Wreck kept saying it wasn’t one.

“But you always the fuck up in my house when it’s convenient for you!”

“I ain’t gotta be in this shit! Who be callin’ who?”

“You are not going to stress this baby out of me! I know that’s what you want!”

“That’s some fucked up some shit to say!”

“Banana,” Sav turned his daughter around facing him. “They always be arguing like this when you here?” he asked her, and Savannah just stared at her dad.

“Now y’all got this bitch started,” Wreck said coming down the steps. “You think I wanna hear this shit?”

“Well you gonna hear it!” Anne shouted from upstairs. “Call me a bitch again!”

“Bitch!” Wreck tried his luck. Dem and Sav were inconsolable. “See, I’m that type of nigga, you sure you wanna have a baby with me?”

“I don’t need you for shit! Thank you for my miracle baby, you can go! If you think I’ma put up with the bullshit at my big age you are sadly mistaken!”

“Yea, ard, say that now then be sending me thousands of texts and crying on my voicemail like you always do.”

They continued going back and forth which told Dem and Sav one thing. No man stayed, continuing to argue with a woman they were only fucking. This obviously wasn’t the first time either.

“But you come running, don’t you? Please stop acting like this is one way!”

“Anne, get the fuck out my face with this stupid shit.”

“Come upstairs, Wreck, you showing off in front of your lil brothers like this shit cute! I’m not no young bitch you gon’ do anything with!”

“What? Ain’t nobody gotta put on for them but you! You gon’ use this muhfuckin baby to make you think you more than what you are to me.”

“What am I then?”

“My lil mature ass freak.”

“Fuck you, Wreck! Disrespecting me like this while my grandbaby is here!” Anne’s voice cracked a little. “Get the fuck out my house!”

Sav and Dem waited for what they knew was coming. Wreck looked at them then blew his breath going back upstairs.

“I knew it, I knew it.” Sav shook his head getting up. “Let’s go nigga.”

By the time Sav strapped Savannah in the car and prepared to leave, Wreck was coming out the house followed by Anne who stopped at the door. She said something to him, and he had the ard, shut the fuck up now look. When they watched him kiss her, they knew their brother was about to have a baby with his niece’s grandmother.

#on us #authornina #nina

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tarotchariot · 3 years

Text

Return with past pick a card

Pick a card reading: Dealing with the hurt

“

This is a free pick a card reading for those going through a challenging or hurtful situation. I’m not certain how these will turn out, but I hope they bring some kind of clarity, peace or comfort to any of you. I understand that some may feel lost and almost begging silently for some help, yet not seeing anything to get advice or a sense of stability from again.

I will use 6 groups to choose from, believe it or not - simply because to me, 6 symbolises harmony and reciprocity. Please know that you are not alone, and something will find you in a wonderful moment.”

So moving on, please take a quiet moment and use your intuition (for example taking 3 deep breaths and clearing your mind, or envisioning a number perhaps)

And choose between the numbers 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , or 6

____________________________________________________

Group 1 :

Knight of water, The dreamer, Unity, 3 of air, synchronicity

Alright you guys, you had quite a few cards here. At first glance, it’s appearing like a new start is necessary. Maybe something didn’t go well at work or school, or what you thought was a solid and stable place has become uncomfortable due to someone in your vicinity.

It’s odd, it’s looking like someone wasn’t entirely truthful. The angels want to point out that there will always be light and dark.

Getting the vibe of feeling left out, not part of the group anymore. Or at least not feeling like you are. Maybe someone has literally excluded you or pushed you out because of something they see as “bad” in accordance to the groups beliefs or interests. I’m seeing a crisis of faith here.

There’s quite a few possibilities. I’m seeing, maybe for just one singular person that they have lost someone that mattered very much to them. I get such a playful and light hearted energy about the person. Whether you believe in life after death or not, if it were for certain a thing I could say one thing they would be saying to you, even now: Please laugh, have fun.There are so many things to be happy about.

There is a deep loneliness, and for that I feel for you, so much. Your Angel(s) are right next to you.

For others, feeling left out or excluded, most likely undeservedly. However, I’m getting the message that you are being guided to a new way of thinking and being, and to acknowledge that there is good and bad in everyone. No one is perfect, we each have our shadow. Please try not to take their treatment of you personally. It’s more to do with them, and not you. It is projection. It’s likely you have witnessed and seen who can be trusted and cannot. Run with that fact and hold the lovely one(s) close.

Those in this group are being guided extremely in the form of synchronicity. Please be on the look out for further advice, and insight through the following forms, and even more:

Music that really resonates Conversations you over hear Signs out and about Seeing a similar image many times Hearing the same kind of message similar times An idea keeps popping up in your mind Some of you may want to move forward with a creative project. It’s encourages as it will aid you in positively letting out your emotions. Not only that, it may be simple and overlooked, but simply by just spending time and being around any loved one or friend (not even talking directly about your situation) will give a small bit of peace and gratitude.

This is a signal of a new chapter, and you are guided to have the fun you are meant to have.

Hope that did somethin’.

-------------------------------------------------------------

GROUP 2:

Queen of earth, Page of air, Ace of earth, The miracle of forgiveness

There seems to be an issue surrounding give and take. Queen of earth talks about kindness, practicality and nurturing. It could also symbolise a mother, or someone who has motherly energy.

With the theme of pentacles, the material, and page of air here who seems to have a wolf around them, I wonder if you have been taken advantage of in the material sense (financially, physically). And it seems you are very aware of this, since forgiveness is the crux, and the advice. It’s like the more you get, the more they take.

I’m seeing there might be debt as well. I’m seeing someone here who has had to uphold a whole lot. You’re the kind that can make things happen. I’m also seeing great resentment, and that doesn’t happen from just anything. Yes, I can’t help but see someone else having a hand in your finances and do whatever they like, or did that in the past. Wasteful. Basically - it’s not fair and it’s cruel, because there’s something here that I see that you want to do, but this is getting in your way.

I’m seeing a talent in you that is not to be wasted. Know that it cannot be taken away - it is yours, and god given, No one can truly take what matters. The comment I receive from the angels is that the abundance for you will always come. What is truly yours and needed will always find its way to you. I feel a very powerful solidarity, independence and ambitious feeling.

Your future is yours, not theirs. Not anybodies.

I would like to also say, that despite this, there really is actually love still there. Whether you want anything to do with them in the future is another thing. You’re asked to (in whatever tiny way you can) try and understand them. Understanding is the first step to forgiveness. And forgiveness opens up doors and new energy for you personally.

I recommend that you try and understand the truth of forgiveness, and not just what you hear or see on tv, This could become something that actually drives you further.

I really see you as such an inspirational and strong person.

That’s what I see for you, thank you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

GROUP 3:

Page of earth, six of earth, awakening, eight of air, take time to breathe

So here there are themes of feeling trapped, having to wait, unemployment/difficulty finding a job or career and possibly even being taken advantage of as a student or in a low level job as a trainee. Off the top of my head.

Patience is a big note here. Something is not happening as fast as you would like here, and I can understand how scary/stressful that can be. You might be scared about your security or future here. I’m seeing that you have put a lot of effort into this situation. I’m also seeing that maybe you have felt alone as well, hints of valentines keep coming up.

I’m seeing that you might be under a lot of scrutiny/judgement, so I’m wondering if you guys have been suffering in terms of anxiety or being just plain down, or more. If you have been struggling with confidence or motivation or anxiety, I encourage you see a professional or join a support group/forum online. Even talking things out in a journal can release a lot of that pent up energy,

I’m sensing a lot of pressure that you may be placing on yourself, and I hear the angels want me to say “Darling” withsuch love and care. Please give your worries to the angels. They say they will take care of them. And will take care of some issues.

Oooh, I am truly seeing so many pent up emotions that they encourage you get out - if you have to scream at the ocean, or in a car, do it.

Get it all out, empty your mind for some quiet time, and just be.

You will see the appropriate solutions at the right time, and as a result of taking your mind away from its current habits, you will be so much more capable of seeing them.

Please, give yourself a break. The angels want you to see just how good things are in some ways, and how much you may be focusing too much on others.

Take some time and be willing to see things differently, things can change just that much. The angels want to say how much they love you and adore you, feeling much love for you here. I hope you can feel the peace they want to send you in this writing. And you are capable of so much.

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GROUP 4:

King of water, The magician, Live your joy

With the king of water here, it’s showing you may be finding it difficult to trust people or life. What feels difficult here is that you may not be receiving the help or advice that you deserve and should be receiving as a default.

It might be showing that a paternal figure in your life is withholding themselves or even being manipulative. Basically, not being the role model they should be.

More than anything though, I’m seeing that you want to create something, something that really gives you joy, that truly speaks for you and is your honest expression. Which makes me think: perhaps there is someone who doesn’t like that. There is certainly an abrasiveness there.

For whatever reason, perhaps someone here doesn’t accept you, or your self expression, or whatever it is that makes you feel right.

When it comes to this, the answer is very simple. Choose to release those binds.

How, you ask.

2 things. simply practice this self expression or take part in whatever it is that you want - that will set the energy up. 2. raise your vibration. Do not involve yourself in the negativity, refuse to take notice of anyone elses expectations or judgements. in general have more fun, express gratitude, see the positive

Truly embrace whatever this is. If it has to be, let it be at night when others are asleep, and build your confidence. Change things bit by bit.

a few of you here may be psychic, or have a spiritual hobby or talent. Embrace this role, you are meant to be someone who spreads higher knowledge and support.

There’s someone I see that plain just doesn’t like change. But hey, since when did it have everything to do with them? never. This is you. The message I’m getting for you guys is: be proud. Be so darn proud of you. No one will ever be big enough to diminish you. You, in spirit, the divine part of you, will always be such a special and wonderful thing to behold. When you live your joy and your truth, you shine like no one else. Let this change you, shape you and gravitate towards joy no matter what this person, or people say. You can create the life you want.

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GROUP 5:

Three of fire, ten of earth, express your creativity

I’m seeing some distance with loved ones here. perhaps there has been a quarrel, a falling out. Or perhaps a family member has moved a fair bit away. I’m feeling a family or community that was once warm, has experienced some kind of change that has left you feeling quiet, humble and retrospective.

if this is not family, it could be a group of friends that felt like family, or a job where you felt like a family with the team.

I’m seeing for sure for some, that there was a blow up and the effects are still rolling. You may feel as if the effects won’t end, but it appears you will be left alone in that way for the time being. It seems very much on your mind.

It is really looking like the aftermath of a big storm here, a sweeping change or an eruption from an argument that has separated two or more people. For a couple of you it might have been triggered by something very small. I’m seeing a lot of hurt here, true heartbreak. Please know that there will be peace. Things always calm after a storm.

No one seemed to be necessarily right or wrong, it appears to have been something that simmered in the distance for a long time.

All I can say is now, you are on solid ground and it’s time to calm down from it all. Something the angels want to put forward is that the strangest things happen, and we may not understand for the longest time, but it triggers the right change for us, or sets us on a certain route for our most divine path.

I’m seeing the universe, and its connections and paths that we all take, that as humans we couldn’t understand. I do see that one day, when you are comfortable and feeling at home, safe (which I promise you will be) - you will get the zap of a vision. How things worked out. Why. What it led to.

Moving forward I can see the suggestion of working as a co creator and envisioning how you want things to go. What do you want for yourself, or you and your family. What kind of connections do you want. Be as creative and imaginative, and extreme as you want.

The message I get from the angels, again and again, is calm. Take time to be calm, cool down from it all, take a rest, and feel your angel/guide next to you, supporting you and shielding you.

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GROUP 6:

seven of water, renewal, knight of earth, the inner voice

For some, I’m seeing being worried about the loyalty/faithfulness of another - the recommendation seems to be to look at the dedicated actions of the person. Do they display through action and practical means that you are their priority? (other than their purpose or work of course). Use this as an opportunity to both review if you feel you are receiving the level of dedication and care that you deserve and need.

Perhaps your person has been unfaithful in the past and you decided to give them another chance, but again, there is worry. There are too many factors that you may be holding onto from the past that have no part of the thought process you should be taking, or judging with currently.

So either way, it appears to be a time when you need to judge for yourself, are you able to trust the other or if this gives you what you need. Are you willing to go forward with it? Not just recklessly, not for the sake of it, but after great thought and deliberation.

For others, I’m seeing feeling at a loss as to what to do next in their life/career.I know all too well that this can feel scary and like a major crisis. Straight up, I can say from experience that the answers come gradually, and in a relaxed way in the right timing.

The guidance in both cases is to listen to your inner voice, your higher self.

I know, it sounds a bit annoying, or like it might not give you fast answers but it’s the way that you can feel confident in your own conclusion. It won’t come from anyone elses judgements, words or coercion.

Come to a point where you know you, you know what you want and need, and you only accept the right things.

When it comes to making your decision or conclusion, you may need to discern whether this comes from the angels or higher self, vs the ego. If it comes from the ego, it will speak in terms of winning, of gaining something, or appearing a certain way. If it’s from spirit, it’s often for the highest good of everyone involved, is sympathetic, loving and understanding. It does not judge, only seeks to help.

I would like to affirm for everyone here, that there is much love for you here. And let everything you do, be because of love. Of yourself, and others.

Thank you.

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“Wowwwww that was a lot. Guys, I hope that helped in some tiny way.

I do this simply out of love. I wish you all the best.”

(A copy of an old pick a card reading by myself, not shown on this account until now)

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