#there may be a chapter 4 actually

[nico-di-genova]

In My Mind, You are Safe

Chapter 3

Alternate link to read on A03 Chapter 1 Chapter 2

“He knows?” Lance manages to ask the night after he wakes up, motioning with his head to his dad who slept snoring deeply on a leather couch in the lounge. “About us?”

“I did a bad job of keeping it secret.”

Lance thinks he maybe had too, what with the ass grabbing played as camaraderie and the way he couldn’t stop staring at Fernando during debriefs. His father wasn’t a dumb man, but rather a very observant one. He’d known Lance was smoking pot at fifteen not because of the bloodshot eyes and the smell, though those would have been the obvious giveaways, but because his reaction time during training took a hit.

‘If you’re going to smoke weed, you better do a damn better job of hiding it,’ He’d demanded.

Lance never touched the stuff again, he knew he’d get caught.

But with Fernando he thought he had maybe been a little better. They had rules about it. No kissing in the paddock, the garage, not even their drivers rooms unless it was a special circumstance – the circumstance always ending up being Fernando was needy and Lance was bored. They didn’t go to each other’s hotel rooms until it was late enough that no sane fucker would be wondering the halls. Nothing obvious could be left above the neckline, because Lance had already gotten looks from his father after the weekend on Fernando’s ugly yacht where they spent half the time naked and the other half sipping champagne. All those rules seem to have been thrown out the window the moment Lance ended up in intensive care.

Intensive Care

The word makes him shudder.

Fernando sees the movement and presses a kiss to Lance’s knuckles, “Cold?”

“Kinda.”

It’s not really a lie, the AC is set on Ice Box and he’s got nothing but a thin sheet, a stiff blanket, and bare legs beneath a hospital gown to protect him.

“Here,” Fernando pulls the Aston Martin sweatshirt from the back of his chair and helps work it over Lance’s head. It takes an extreme amount of maneuvering, and gentle tugging, and he can’t put one arm through the sleeve because of the IV in his hand. It kind of sucks at providing any actual warmth, but it smells like Fernando so that’s a comfort all on its own.

“Thanks,” He rasps.

“Of course, Lancito.”

“I missed you,” Lance blurts out, which doesn’t really make sense because he was just with Fernando in the paddock. Just with him in his driver’s room. But Lance also thinks he maybe remembers the dark. The emptiness. The distant voices that sounded like they were right beside him and yet a world away all at once. He thinks he remembers being scared.

“I missed you too. Stop talking, you will irritate your throat.”

Lance wants to make a joke about Fernando not wanting to hear him speak, but that would take too many words and he already kind of feels like he’s breathing around fire. Instead, he accepts the water Fernando offers him and sips slowly through the straw to draw out the soothing effect. He has to be careful with how much he drinks, and he can’t have solid foods yet, which Lance chalks up to normal post coma recovery, but might also have something to do with the abdomen injury as well.

He knows it’s serious because when he’d asked the doctor how long until he could get back to racing she hadn’t given him an answer. And Fernando couldn’t look him in the eye. They don’t lie to each other, brutal honesty has always been their forte. That, or steadfast avoidance.

“Careful,” Fernando chides when Lance sips too quick and chokes on the liquid, some of it escaping his mouth to dribble in a cool line down his chin.

Lance rolls his eyes. Fernando should be used to the sounds of his choking by now, he’s certainly gagged himself on worse than a few drops of water.

“Brat.”

Lance smiles around the straw, all innocence and fluttering eyelashes.

“You are lucky you’re in a hospital bed.”

Which, he isn’t, far from it, but for the moment things feel almost normal so he ignores the remark.

--------

There is an argument about who Lance will go home with.

Lance’s Switzerland apartment is out of the question, his agency being robbed by the injuries his body is still trying to adjust itself to. His dad knows he can afford better around the clock care, people to help Lance with everything from changing his bandages to holding his dick while he pisses. Fernando knows Lance doesn’t want that, knows the humiliation of it would probably kill him faster than his car in the wall should have. They don’t ask for Lance’s opinion on the matter though as he sits silently in the bed between them. Watching them fight for custody of him, it’s familiar, reminds him of being small and wondering if he was going to have to have two bedrooms after his parent’s divorce.

“He needs help Fernando. Doctors, nurses, staff – not just you.”

“I have taken care of him before. I know what he needs.”

Healing from a head wound and a piece of carbon fiber tearing through his body isn’t really the same as a cold, but Lance appreciates Fernando’s commitment. He doesn’t say this of course, because neither one of them seem to really notice he’s there, just continues sipping slowly from the cup in his hands and picking at the starched blanket over his lap. His throat doesn’t hurt anymore, swallowing doesn’t take as much effort.

“You think you know better than me? I’m his father,” his dad states. As if it needs stating. As if Lance wasn’t born with Lawrence’s name over his head and a silver coated thumb in his mouth. As if there were any injury out there that would make him forget who he belongs to, down to the blood and marrow of him, the very making.

“I am his-” Fernando pauses. They never really put a name to it. There hadn’t been much discussion about what he and Lance were before he started bleeding out in Fernando’s arms. Not that he would remember that of course, doesn’t remember much about barreling into the wall at top speed. The doctors say that’s probably for the better.

“Boyfriend?” Lance supplies helpfully around the straw in his mouth. He’s continuing his bad habit of gnawing on the plastic, the taste reminiscent of the tube he had woken up choking on, but also of the bottle he would carry around during race weekends.

Fernando motions at him appreciatively, “Yes. This. I am this.”

His dad’s scowl deepens, “This isn’t a fever and some rest. It’s physical therapy, cognitive therapy. He will need someone 24/7.”

He is sitting right here, and he doesn’t necessarily agree. Lance is needy in the same way a cat is, he craves attention only as long as it is wanted, too much and he will probably begin scratching at you. But there hasn’t been much in his control since he lost the wheel at Silverstone.

“Okay. I will do that.” There’s not a hint of hesitation in Fernando’s tone, when Lance knows there absolutely should be. Whatever unestablished thing is between them, it’s far from stable enough to rest Lance’s entire laundry list of medical issues on, or at least Lance thought it was.

“I can hire someone too, Lawrence,” Fernando pushes, “You are not the only man with money. Lance has not lived with you since he was a child, yes? He needs familiarity. Routine? That is not in your mansion. Let him come home.”

Home.

Is that what Fernando’s place is to him? Most of his memories there are the sort that speak less of a home and more of the flat you wake up in after a one-night stand. Strewn clothes and half-finished bottles of beer on the kitchen counter, The warm press of Fernando’s body along his bare back. Would he be healing on the same sheets they routinely fucked on? Propped up on the pillows that know the shape of his teeth?

Is home where you have a drawer and your PlayStation hooked up in the living room? Or is it the childhood space where you keep a collection of Pokémon cards and karting trophies to collect dust? Lance isn’t sure, mainly because he’s never stayed in one place long enough to really understand the feeling.

His dad throws the last card in his arsenal, the thing they all three have been wondering at.

“And what about the season? You’re done then?”

Fernando bites his lip, thinks on it.

“I go back when he does.”

No one wants to state the obvious, least of all his father. Fernando has played the winning hand, deploying the same dirty tactics he’s fond of utilizing when behind the wheel.

Lance stops chewing on the straw. He stops picking at the blanket. Instead, he just stares blankly at the fabric and tries to tune their bickering out. He’s getting a headache, the kind of stabbing pain that only comes when he tries to think too hard about a memory that has escaped him. It’s easier to blame the pain on the bright fluorescent’s, or the way Fernando’s voice is starting to rise, instead of the crack in his skull.

In the end, he goes with Fernando. He asks to go with Fernando, because as much as he loves his father, he cannot stand the thought of trying to make himself fit in a space that no longer knows the shape of him.

“We did get along, so you know,” Fernando says when Lance is buckled into his passenger seat, groggy from the meds they’d dosed him with. Supposedly, they’re supposed to help Lance with the nausea, manage it during the ride.

“When I was ‘sleep?” Lance slurs, still not calling his coma by its name. He’s got his head resting on the car window even though the nurses had warned him not to do that. He’s supposed to be focusing on stationary things within the car, like the warm weight of Fernando’s hand on his thigh, not watching the trees whip by outside while his skull rattles against the glass.

“Yes,” Fernando says, focused on the road with an intensity Lance has only ever seen him possess when behind the wheel, and therefore does not realize the implication of his answer. That he and Lance’s father could only get along as long as Lance was the unconscious white flag waving between them. He tries to backpedal. “No, that is not-.”

Lance shrugs, lethargic, “S’okay. Go back to sleep for you then.”

“Querido no, that is not what I meant,” Fernando actually sounds pained, the nickname rolling of his tongue with an ease Lance did not realize could be familiar to them. Lance just feels exhausted. Consciousness actually takes a conscious effort these days.

“Lance?”

“Hmm?”

“I did not mean that. You know I did not mean that, yes?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

He’ll probably forget the conversation by the time he wakes up anyway, memories leak out of him now the same way his blood had.

--------

Surprisingly, Lance has more at Fernando’s UK home than he remembers. Or, unsurprisingly, depending on how much you take his brain injury into account.

He’s got half a bottle of shampoo in the shower, a razor and toothbrush at the sink, most of his hoodies and a good chunk of his sweatpants. Somehow, his favorite pair of socks has even ended up here, thrown in with Fernando’s dirty clothes and discovered by the cleaners. He takes to padding around the place in the loungewear, hood pulled over his head and keeping his hands tucked into the hoodie pocket – subconsciously splaying a palm along his stomach as he always has, but now pressing at his healing abdomen with newfound curiosity.

Fernando will catch him doing it sometimes, grab him by the arm and then the wrist until he can pull Lance’s probing fingers away from the tender skin and entwine them in his own.

“It won’t heal if you pick at it.”

“Feels weird. Itchy.”

It also sometimes hurts so much that Lance finds himself crying silently into the pillow while Fernando sleeps soundly beside him. The phantom pain of an injury he does not remember. When Fernando checks that the healing is coming along nicely, Lance deliberately does not watch. He hasn’t actually seen the incision since he accidentally looked while a nurse at the hospital was cleaning the wound, and nearly lost his light lunch of applesauce and pudding at the sight. It’s ugly, disgusting, and Fernando seems completely unphased by it.

Fernando squeezes his hand, raises it so he can press a kiss to Lance’s knuckles, a quickly forming new habit for him, “I’m sorry, cariño.”

Apologies flow from him easily now. He apologizes for splashing Lance with water when they’re washing dishes. Apologizes for grabbing Lance when he slips in the shower. Apologizes for the simple way the words seem to flow off his tongue now. It’s strange to Lance, stranger than waking up choking on a plastic tube with your dad on one side and your long-term fuck buddy/partner/boyfriend/mentor on the other. Stranger even that it’s coming from Fernando Alonso of all people, who notoriously does not apologize.

Lance is used to arguments between them ending in mutual silence on either end of the couch, not Fernando pressing a kiss to the furrow between his brow and asking for forgiveness.

“Stop doing that,” Lance grumbles, for what must be the hundredth time.

“Sorry.”

“Fernando.”

“Sor- okay,” and then he kisses Lance’s cheek with the gentleness of atonement anyway. Lance misses when Fernando would just slam him against a wall, crowd him against the marble of the kitchen counters, and talk Lance into sinking to his knees. Not that it ever really took much talking to begin with.

Fernando doesn’t fuck him anymore, which he thinks is maybe the biggest travesty to come out of all of this. Instead, he trails careful fingers down Lance’s side, presses kisses to his neck, his shoulder, his jaw with a tenderness that should be considered foreplay. Then he pulls away, leaves Lance half-hard in his sweatpants, and pretends he doesn’t notice the pout on Lance’s lips. Lance doesn’t beg, at least not before Fernando has gotten him undressed, and he’s not going to ask Fernando to suck his dick while the man is on his knees making sure Lance’s abdomen is still healing properly. So it becomes another thing they just don’t talk about. Lance is worried he’s picked up his father’s habit for avoidance.

--------

Nearly three months after his crash, Lance’s morbid curiosity gets the better of him. His therapy is going well, all three of them. The physical therapy for his legs, because they’d gotten fucked up too, though on a much smaller scale, and for his hands and for – well, for every part of him, is almost familiar. He’d done a few rounds of physio for his wrists after his bike accident, though those had been high intensity because Lance actually had a deadline. The cognitive therapy is more of a challenge, because his memory is still shot to shit, but he can remember Chloe’s birthday again so at least there’s that. The therapy therapy is kind of annoying, only because Lance has never really seen the value of shrinks picking apart his mental state to begin with, but it’s easy. Sometimes they play Jenga, sometimes they talk about how Lance is scared he’ll never be the same again, sometimes Lance excuses himself to the bathroom and screams until his voice is as hoarse as it had been once the intubation tube was removed. It’s all a process.

But he still doesn’t remember the crash.

He can see the reflection of it in Fernando’s eyes sometimes, the fear, the shame. The guilt is the worst, usually brought on when Lance jerks awake from a dream he cannot remember and finds Fernando watching him in the dark with eyes shining.

“You okay?” He will ask, propped up on an elbow and tracing a finger along Lance’s spine. The touch sends shivers through Lance, want and need all bundled up in the foggy confusion as his brain tries to reorient itself.

“Fine.”

“You are sure?”

“Definitely.”

Talking was never their strong suit. But Lance has always been able to read people, an ability fine-tuned after years of rejection. He likes to know when people are planning to turn on him before it happens, doesn’t want to be blindsided by a journalist asking him some probing question only to see if they can get a response. He can see Fernando’s guilt, and eventually he caves and searches for the why.

F1 TV, or his father, or maybe the FIA have made a herculean effort to scrub the full footage of the crash from the internet. But Lance has grown up in the age of the digital, so it doesn’t take him long to find it on YouTube, under a video titled “Canadian Buries it in Wall – ’24”. Inventive.

What he remembers is this, sitting beside Fernando in the pre-race briefing. Both of them trying to listen to Mike explain the stacked pit strategy again, but also occupying themselves with each other. Lance, dick still aching from being teased in his driver’s room, was feeling particularly vindictive. He’d been inching his foot slowly up Fernando’s pants leg, his hand up the inside of Fernando’s clothed thigh.

Fernando hadn’t responded. Sat ramrod straight in his seat and kept his eyes glued ahead. Until Lance just barely brushed his knuckles along the bulge in Fernando’s pants and received a sharp pinch to his own thigh in response.

“Ow!” Lance had yelped, loud enough that a few engineers turned to look at him.

Lance had blushed, “Hit my- hit my knee, sorry.”

And then he’d woken up in the hospital. The irritation to his thigh replaced by the throbbing pain that occupied his entire body.

He wants to remember, and so he hits play. He watches himself drive like he’s analyzing onboards for where he can maybe improve, with the same detached feeling. There’s Fernando behind him, and Russel ahead, and Lance in the middle of it all holding his ground. Fernando’s given the order to back-off, told not to fight because Lance’s tire management has been better, and he’s got the speed and clean air for now. Their fight is with Russel, except that Russel was six ahead and Fernando wanted to play sooner rather than later.

The commentators say Lance is driving surprisingly well, he tries not to grind his teeth.

And then Fernando pulls out of the slipstream, makes a charge to overtake in the straight, and Lance sees himself move. Just a twitch of the car, a fraction of movement in an effort to defend, before Fernando’s front right tire clips his back left and Lance spins. He can see himself try to overcorrect, but then the car goes sideways, the tires leave the track when he skitters across marbles, and he’s flipping until there’s only the wall to stop him.

The red flag is immediate, so is Fernando’s stop when he pulls into the gravel and doesn’t even hesitate to book it to Lance’s on fire car.

“Lance. Lance are you alright? Lance. Respond. Confirm you’re alright,” Andrew’s voice comes through the broadcast, but Lance’s own response does not. It’s eerily quiet, especially in the empty space of Fernando’s house when the man isn’t there to bring life to it.

They play a message from Esteban who drives by, the Frenchman’s voice laced with worry as he asked, pleaded, for Lance to be okay. Lance understands now why Esteban had looked so pale when they’d spoken last. When Lance had been curled up on Fernando’s couch, shrouded in shadow because the lights hurt his head, and Esteban had been sat in the chair across from him. He’d thought it was maybe because they were in Fernando’s house, thought the strangeness of the setting might have just had Esteban on edge. He hadn’t realized it was because his best friend had seen his on fire car and thought for a moment he might not get out.

It's suddenly a little hard to breathe. He blames the tightness in his chest on his ribs, even though those have healed by now.

“Lance?” Fernando’s voice in the doorway, quiet, worried.

Lance jumps, winces when he pulls at something sore, and slams the laptop shut with enough force that he’s a little scared to open it again. His eyes dart to Fernando’s and-

Oh. The guilt. He’s drowning in it.

“Fer, I’m sorry, I- fuck. I just…I didn’t- I’m sorry,” and now he’s the one gushing apologies, wanting so badly to tear his gaze away from the tears building in Fernando’s eyes. He shouldn’t have looked. It was easier when he didn’t know the shape of his body in the wreckage, when he didn’t know it had been Fernando who ran to him, who crashed into him. Pandora’s box and all of its contents are spilling across the mattress.

“I’m sorry,” Lance says again, because Fernando still has not moved from the doorway and he’s not sure what else he could do. He can’t walk to him, his leg is still aching from physio, hence the whole curled up in bed watching his own life-threatening crash while Fernando was supposed to be out picking him up a ridiculously overpriced smoothie from his favorite place down the road.

“No,” Fernando chokes, “No. Lance. No. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry. I-“ Fernando chokes again and then he’s sobbing. Lance’s spirulina, coconut, gold flaked smoothie still clutched in one hand and his free one wrapping around himself as he doubles over in the doorway.

Lance does go to move then, sore muscles be damned.

But when he grabs Fernando, the man only sobs harder. He doesn’t pull away though, he needs Fernando for the support now. His thigh is killing him.

“Fer, Nano, baby, please. It’s okay. I’m okay.” He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, because Fernando doesn’t cry. He bottles everything up, ghosts Lance for a week, and then comes back as if nothing was ever wrong in the first place. Lance doesn’t know how to comfort him, and he doesn’t think that’s something to be blamed on the memory loss, he’s almost certain this is entirely new to them.

Fernando collapses against his chest, Lance stumbles under the weight of them both. His body protests the sudden movement, something sharp and hot spiking it’s way through him, starting in his leg and moving to the incision scar on his stomach.

He gasps, tries to breathe through the pain. It’s kind of like how his wrists were after a race, before he plunged them into a bowl of ice, he can manage.

“I’m okay,” he says, and hopes it doesn’t sound too tense. There’s sweat breaking out along his brow. He kind of wants his smoothie. “I’m okay, Fer. I promise.”

Fernando’s tears are soaking the fabric of his hoodie. Lance cradles the back of his head, and ignores the damp feel of them against his chest, ignores the warm heat of Fernando’s breath as he tries to find air.

“An accident,” he wails, “I swear, Lance, I swear.”

“I know.”

He saw, just now, could clearly see himself moving and see Fernando slamming the brake to try to stop it. He sees Fernando running. Running to him. People who hurt Lance intentionally are hardly ever concerned enough to check on him afterward, some of them think he deserves the knife twisted inside him simply because he can afford the medical bill. He knows Fernando would never try to hurt him, but he also knows nothing he says could absolve the guilt.

“I know, dude. And I love you, but could we maybe move this to the bed? My leg is killing me.” Fernando, thankfully, lets himself be maneuvered until Lance is sitting on the edge of the bed and Fernando resting solidly in his lap, knees bracketed on either side of his thighs. It’s the most contact they’ve had since Lance woke up, it’s making him a little heady.

Fernando rests his cheek against Lance’s shoulder, cries into the crook of his neck, and Lance tries to soothe him as he takes intermittent sips from his smoothie that he’d pulled from Fernando’s grip before it ended up spilled across the sheets. He rubs a hand along Fernando’s back, a pantomime of how his dad used to calm him down when he had a rough race and had to blow off steam in his driver’s room. It’s not working very well. Lance is maybe bad at this.

“I shouldn’t have watched the stupid video,” he grumbles. Knowing the how has not brought him any peace, only made him realize the true severity of his injuries. His therapist might have been right in saying to stop pressing at the wound, Fernando too for pulling his hand away.

“I could have killed you,” Fernando cries, “I almost killed you. You- you were-“

“I know, Nando, I know. Please, just- just stop. Please.”

It’s too much too fast. Fernando’s guilt, his own brain trying to process it all, the headache forming at his temples and the exhaustion crashing down on him. He’s tired all of the time now. And not in the lazy way he once was, like a big cat stretching in a patch of sunlight, more like someone who’s been crumpled in their car and extracted without all of the pieces smoothed back out.

He wants to sleep. He maybe wants to cry himself.

“Thought I would lose you,” Fernando mumbles, miserable and quiet, his stubble rough against the soft skin of Lance’s neck when he speaks.

“You didn’t. I’m safe. I’m right here.”

Lance hadn’t realized he was Fernando’s to lose, didn’t really put the pieces together until now that he maybe belonged to someone other than his family. He didn’t think anyone would ever actually want him. It’s a weird feeling, makes something beneath the scarring and the healing wound in his gut twist.

“You have me. I’m right here. I’m safe. I’m here.”

I’m okay, he thinks, and he starts to believe that it will be true.

[rupicoluu]

The fate of a protagonist is a lonely spotlight

[delucadarling]

May Writing Challenge - Day 4

The number today was not intention but is appreciated.

[fezwearingjellybananas]

RULES: Post the last sentence you wrote (fanfic / original / anything) and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence

Tagged by @alittleflashvibe thank you! I am very excited to read your fic from that sentence. I haven't done mountains and mountains of writing for the past few days (having a break after somehow managing to get those other fics done), but I have finally had an idea for the Wally Fic! Still a little bit between what I have and the part I've just written, but I am having Ideas so here's a sentence:

“Time is a gift,” Henry said.

Tagging @goldheartedchaoticdisaster @shrinkthisviolet @angst-is-love-angst-is-life @kitkatt0430 @ftl-faster-than-life @simpledontmeanpeachy if you'd like?

[sleepdepravity]

finished chapter 4 of dangan ronpa v3 by the way. i wanted to mention that i think both case 3 and 4 are real solid, very good line of reasoning and satisfaction of like. going through the logic. i *am* suspicious of the two new rules that they've set up through both of these chapters though. They really need a mass murder to happen. may happen next chapter i suppose.

[deus-ex-mona]

after over 2 years… i can finally see him…

[laugtherhyena]

The visceral urge to add -2+2 to the hatamori tag on Ao3,,

[heikeee]

I got 3 fics that I'm working on (they're nowhere near done ngl) but I'm already feeling anxious anticipating how I'm gonna go about asking someone to beta read them for me, like how do you approach someone with that intention?? How do you know someone's available for that?

So instead of sliding into people's DMs I'm just gonna leave this here in hopes that there's someone out there in the InuFandom willing to reach out lol I'll leave more info in the tags!!

[thatrandombystander]

Kinda whack when you're a huge fan of a longfic fanfic for a media work that you're not that big a fan of because it's just that good.

Am I fan of Fallout 3 or Fallout 4? Not particularly. They're fine but kinda bad, and yet every time this ongoing Fallout fic with 700k+ words (so far) gets a new chapter I go feral and have to restrain myself from installing the games.

[keeps-ache]

ggghhg i hate vehiclessssssss ghghghhghhhhh [dies dies dies forever]

[orcelito]

God, what even is my "reasons this hasn't been updated in 4 and a half months" list anymore hfkshdj

I think we're at: wrote a smut fic, got a new girlfriend, got into bg3, quit my job I had for 8 years, my dad fucking died, got Throat Bleeding Disease, got into crochet, started watching way too much anime, got into Stardew Valley again...

🤔🤔🤔🤔 things sure have been busy, huh?

[cafecitowriter]

Good news: I actually just put down 1.1K in a WIP that I haven't touched in over three years!

Bad news: this big epiphany scene i just wrote actually just made the plot sooo much more deep and i am not a plot girly (NB) on a good day

[fox-guardian]

WAIT YOU'RE WRITING A FIC?!!!

Yes! I haven't posted any of it anywhere, but I am writing a stokerswap fic. I'm currently starting the fifth chapter, and it's the early days. Pre-canon. This is a fix-it that would span at least half of canon if Danny can prevent most stuff with his powerful aura and tits, but we shall see. Danny is vibing. Tim is trying to vibe but he is Stressed. Martin has unintentionally gained a bestie (Danny) and Jon is feeling very smug. Sasha is soon to get some time in the spotlight, I'm excited <3

[delucadarling]

May Writing Challenge - Day 3!

I do appreciate the accountability of posting this daily, though I'm sure I'll resent myself for it later in the month.

[threewaysdivided]

Me over here in my corner thinking about YJDW, and how absolutely ironically sad it would be if after all the huffing and puffing about ghosts and all the hell he gave Danny, that Wally himself came back as a ghost post-Endgame and only Danny could see and talk to him.

I need to rewatch the OG show again but for a happier alternative, what if Danny saved Wally from his original fate?

(Young Justice: Deathly Weapons)

It seems my primary creative contribution to fandom has been the creation of a bespoke, artisanal brain-corner in which people are compelled to sit and think about DW 😅.  It’s nice to know that, while I may have sunk-cost-fallacy-ed myself into this hole, the rest of you are having fun climbing into it with me.

As for an Endgame!AU, that’s kind of complicated by DW’s… let’s say fraught relationship with canon.  I really like YJ Season 1, but as everyone and their dog has been unable to escape me telling them I think lead-showrunner Greg Weisman is an appallingly bad storyteller (in fact I think he writes like a cowardly, exploitative incel) and under his “creative control” the later entries became an infuriating mess. ��Back when there were only two seasons in the mainline canon I used to cut Invasion a lot more slack – allowing it to coast on the uninformed and incorrect assumption that both entries came from the same creative team, and that the seeming disjointedness of Invasion’s narrative was the result of executive meddling or troubled production at a time when a lot of Cartoon Network’s PG animated shows were infamously being put through hell by the network. 

However, after the disappointment of the “revival” I did a little bit more looking into things and realised that what I actually liked was the output of Season 1’s distinct production team – a team which included heavy input from experienced DC creatives like lead-directors Jay Oliva and Michael Chang (previously credited on the Teen Titans 2004 series, which was also praised for good character-storytelling).  It became clear to me that there were actually two separate products:  Season 1 (plus a couple of early tie-in comics by non-Weisman writers)… and everything else.  Turns out that dropping your primary directors results in a directionless story, whodathunk?

Once I took off those rose-coloured glasses, I ran into the problem that it’s actually not possible to get from Season 1 to Invasion without fundamentally breaking the narrative in really unpleasant ways.   Deathly Weapons has since become fully canon-divergent from that break-point.  I want to pay respects to the arcs, themes and characterisation of the Oliva-Chang Season, which means Invasion wouldn’t reasonably happen in the DW!Verse.  Ergo, no timeskips, no character-assassinations, and Wally never gets randomly knifed to “subvert the expectations” of viewers who might be familiar with a prominent Flash-storyline from another unconnected continuity.  I’m not kidding: that is why Endgame ended the way it did, this is what Greg and Brandon think storytelling is, their opinions should not be trusted.

So in a way I guess that problem kind of solved itself.

But that’s not very satisfying, is it?

Looking back at my brainstorming notes from the before-times (when DW was planned with the loose possibility of connecting back into later canon), I had a post-Endgame future-fic idea which focussed more on Dick.  The idea was for Dick to end up at Danny’s apartment while trying to cope with losing Wally.  Once there I had a scene where he wanders aimlessly while Danny is out dealing with some unavoidable adult-life stuff, leading him to find some old photos of Tucker.  The main scene was going to be Dick having a “conversation” with Tucker’s (metaphorical) spirit - speaking to the memory of his foster-brother’s late best friend about his own now-gone best friend, and asking Tucker to look out for Wally wherever they might be now.

I suppose that’s more where my style of angst lands for grief/death arcs.  I like to focus on death arcs as a reflection of the character’s life – the specifics of their personality, the distinct impression their presence left on the people around them and how the unique hole they occupied aches without them.  I’ve mentioned this before in the Jason-ask but my general thesis is that we are haunted by absences more than presences; we project ghosts in attempt to fill the hole(s) left when someone abruptly vanishes from our lives.

Because of that I tend to have very different story approaches for metaphorical ghosts (which explore the internal struggles of living characters coping with a loss) vs literal ghosts (actual tangible creatures who represent an external struggle).  I know it sounds kind of ironic considering that I killed off about 70% of the core Danny Phantom cast for Deathly Weapons, but when I kill a character it’s usually so I can do a retrospective on the value of their life.  So long as they’re mourned well, I don’t personally feel a need to bring most “dead” characters back.

That said, there is a lot of potential angst that could come from someone “becoming a ghost” with the way I’ve been headcanoning it to work in Deathly Weapons.  In Chapter 16, Phantom mentions that ectoplasmic ghosts are formed when the impression of a dying person’s consciousness is preserved in ectoplasm and gives rise to a new entity.  In a best-case scenario you get a complete translation of the same person to a new bio-medium, but in other cases you might get an incomplete or warped impression – missing some pieces and exaggerating others, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.  This is how I like to explain the humanoid DP ghosts being so gimmicky and single-minded: they’re a flanderization built from only the strongest parts of their living personality at the moment of death.  It’s also one of the reasons why Phantom and the others don’t rush to “well, they might be a ghost now” as an easy solution to characters dying or being presumed-dead.  Sure, that character might not be entirely gone… but would the pieces that remain actually be them?

It’s a style of horror that isn’t especially my bag, but I think there’s a lot of potential angst mileage in that specific brand of “came back wrong” – leaving a ghost that is uncannily like you but is missing the specific memories or details needed to actually make you you.  A familiar stranger – unable to be the person they were, having no say or fault in being what they are, but who everyone has to deal with anyway (especially if they retain enough memories to understand that they know you).

That said, there would be no situation in which Wally came back as complete ghost where he wouldn’t be completely pissy about it.  Just, the indignity of it all, really.  

Still, I think it’s worth considering that, while Wally is certainly giving Danny hell with where he is in the story right now (Mission 1 of Arc II at the time of this post), in any five-years-later post-DW scenario the two of them would be a lot more chill with each other.

While some of the YJ cast have ended up with relatively static planned personal arcs throughout DW (for clarity, a static arc is where a character doesn’t experience substantial personal change across a story – they may receive elaboration into their personality, history and/or develop new relationships with others but by the end they are still mostly the same person) I hope people can trust that Wally isn’t one of them.  Him acting like a sulky, stinky jerkass right now isn’t because I’m planning on having him be The Sulky Stinky Jerkass™ for the entire story, but because he’s at the start of his major personal arc.  His flaws are on full display at the moment because he’s going to have to confront those flaws, how they hurt him and others, and make the decision on whether (and how) to be better.

The loose timeline for DW’s planned story is that the main arc (right now comprising 11 planned missions) takes place over 6-ish months from the point where Phantom first joins the Team.  Wally’s personal arc is planned to be part of that.  Add an additional 4-and-a-half years on top of that and they would have had a lot of time to let the water settle under the bridge.

With that being said, we’re heading into the stormiest parts of the water at the moment.  The interpersonal angst is going to get much worse before it gets better.  Not somebody-dies level, but some people are going to hurt each other quite badly before the resolution and a LOT of yelling is going to happen. 

Here’s a teaser for one of the worst lines :

“Better that than some green-wood who gets people hurt because he wanted to play hero!”

Yeah, things are going to get mean.  It may be a different flavour than some expected but I am nonetheless intending to serve 4 chapters of angst, and more than one of the boys is going to get served a lot of crow to eat over that mess.

[ddwcaph-game]

Sooo I just added another achievement. And you better hope you have a high Vigor stat and even higher Grace. 'Cuz I feel like most of you will try to choose this option and fail horribly.

And I mean horribly. Hehe.