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libraryofgage · 1 year ago

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The Wish Job (One)

Part of: Steve Deserves Good Parents, Actually

This fic was line jumped! If you'd like to learn more about line jumping (getting to see your favorite fics updated sooner) you can read this post

I had a lot of thoughts for this AU, actually, so I'm really glad it got line jumped so I was forced to put them down into words lol

Steve becomes one of Nana's foster kids, but he spends a majority of this series with the Leverage crew working a job (as the name of this series suggests), and they fill similarly parental role.

As always, if you see any typos, no you didn't ;P

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After his father's arrest, everything is a blur. Steve can remember flashes, sure, but nothing concrete. Nothing more than two FBI agents in the door of his classroom, the cold steel of interrogation room chairs, an agent's ponytail with split ends, a kind smile but clammy hand on his elbow, the broken A/C of the car when he finally left the FBI office, and the slippery feel of the garbage bag he's given to pack 14 years of a life he'll never see again.

Nothing comes back into focus until he's faced with an older black woman, standing outside a two-story house. The man with a kind smile but clammy hands introduces her, but Steve doesn't actually hear the name.

"You can call me Nana," the woman says, looking at the man like she doesn't know why he's still there when his work is obviously done.

"Well, uh, Steve, feel free to call if you need anything. We'll keep in touch," the man says, nodding before half-running down the walk way.

"Never liked him," Nana says, clicking her tongue. "Too damn squirrely for my tastes. Now, Steve, come inside and we'll go over some ground rules."

Steve follows her mechanically, gripping his trash bag tightly and wondering far too late why he wasn't allowed to pack his own suitcases. The house is a cacophony of noises: feet running across wood floors, a TV blaring from the living room, shouts coming from every direction, a microwave beeping while the oven timer rings, a crash from the next room over that makes Steve wince.

Nana stands in the doorway, takes a deep breath, and then shouts at the top of her lungs, "Y'all had better stop all this racket right the fuck now before I cancel pizza night!"

The house goes silent, and Steve feels his shoulders tense even more. He hates the silence. Silence means anger, and anger means punishment. He clenches his jaw, trying to keep himself small as Nana nods and leads the way into a dining room.

A girl appears in the room shortly after, carrying a mug and a soda. She places the mug in front of Nana and the soda in front of an empty seat, gesturing for Steve to sit. "Welcome. I can take your bag, if you want," she offers, looking at the trash bag with bright eyes.

"Don't make trouble, Breanna," Nana says, dismissing her easily.

Steve watches her leave before sitting. He licks his lips, opens the soda as quietly as he can manage, and waits for Nana to take a sip from her mug before saying, "Thank you for taking me in, ma'am."

"I said to call me Nana, none of that ma'am business unless you're in trouble, and you're not in trouble," she says, waving her hand dismissively. "Now, the rules. No complaining about sharing a room. No TV remote access after seven because that's when my shows start. We all eat dinner together on Wednesday night. You go to school every day unless you're sick, and you tell me when you're feeling sick. You got all that?"

"Yes, m....Nana."

"Good. Now, I know you're used to a fancier living than this, but I expect you to adjust without too much complaint. You still get your own bed, and whatever you brought is yours to keep, but money is tight. We save where we can, and I expect you to help with that. Turn off lights, use less water, unplug things when you're not using them."

Steve nods again, inexplicably feeling a little better as Nana speaks. She's not treating him like a spoiled brat, but she's not coddling him, either. She gets another boy (an older one named Hardison) to give him a tour of the house. He shows Steve the mezzuzahs on each door and the Kaaba directional marker in each room---"We're a multi-denominational household, kid, Nana will get whatever you need if she doesn't have it already," Hardison says, grinning widely at him---and makes sure he knows which spots are good for hiding when he needs a few minutes.

He ends the tour at Steve's new room. It has two bunk-beds, three of the bunks with rumpled sheets and one bottom bunk devoid of sheets altogether. Hardison gives Steve blue sheets, welcomes him, and then leaves Steve to unpack by himself.

It's new, it's unfamiliar, it's terrifying. Steve hopes, despite himself, that it's not a temporary stop.

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"I don't care! He can't stay!"

"We're already in London, Hardison. We can hardly send him back on a plane by himself."

"Isn't that how he got here in the first place? He's 17, not seven."

Steve moves his gaze from Hardison to Sophie to Eliot, feeling like he's watching a tennis match. He's sandwiched between Nate and Parker, a hand on his shoulder holding him back from trying to defend himself. Not that he's upset about it. Keeping everyone from turning their frustration on him sounds like a great idea.

"Yeah, and how did he get here?" Parker asks, dashing Steve's hopes right as they're forming.

He shifts uncomfortably as everyone looks at him, ducking his head and staring at the floor. A small part of him is frustrated, angrily protesting the familiar move when its usual target has long been absent.

"Hey, give him some room," Hardison says, moving forward to push Nate and Parker back a few steps. He stands at an angle to Steve, leaving him plenty of room to move away if he wants. "Nobody's angry, kid. Well, I'm a little mad, but only because you could be putting yourself in danger. So, how'd you catch up to us?"

Steve wonders for a brief moment about whose wrath he'd rather endure. In the end, he decides Breanna is scarier than Hardison, so he lies. "Nana and I overheard you on the phone with Parker at Hannukah dinner, and then Nana said she gets worried about you sometimes," he says, meeting Hardison's eyes before glancing away. He makes himself small again, but it's on purpose this time, broadcasting shame as he adds, "I still have, um, access to my savings account...from my....from them. Enough for a plane ticket and cab ride, at least."

"Aww, Nana worries about us," Parker says, smiling brightly as she nudges Eliot with her elbow. "That's sweet."

"If it weren't a lie," Sophie says, her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised slightly as she walks closer to Steve. She taps his shoulder, his temple, and his hand. "Lowered head but not as low as before. Shoulders drawn in but tense to hold them there. Fingers twitching just slightly. Impressive, I will admit, but I'm a professional, darling."

Steve sighs and lifts his head, his shoulders relaxing some as he frowns. "You didn't have to call me out on it," he mumbles.

"Breanna got you here, didn't she? Ain't no way you'd lie to protect anyone else."

"She could ruin me, Hardison."

"I can ruin you, too, did you forget about that?"

Steve considers him for a moment before shrugging.

"Well," Nate says, clapping his hands together and pulling everyone's attention to him. "Steve is here now, we might as well use him. Sophie, give him an Italian accent and some suede shoes."

"I can already speak Italian," Steve says, "and I have my own suede shoes to match a Cesare Attolini suit." He feels something like guilt twinge in his stomach when Hardison glances at him. Steve's mother may have forfeited custody of him, but she still sends gifts every now and then. Steve usually sells them, slips the cash into drawers and wallets and couch cushions so they can be discovered by Nana and his foster siblings.

The suit and shoes, though? Steve couldn't bring himself to sell them. If there was one thing he missed about life before Nana's foster home, it was the clothes. It was the way his clothes made him feel like a better version of himself, a version everyone would admire and approve of. So, yeah, he'd kept the clothes and shoes his mother sent him two months ago, and he'd packed them for this trip just because.

He'd glad they seem to be coming in handy.

After processing his words, Nate blinks, a smile growing on his face like he's discovered a treasure he won't be letting go of any time soon.

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Tag List

Please let me know if you'd like to be tagged!

#my writing #steve harrington #steve deserves good parents actually #leverage #alec hardison #parker #sophie devereaux #nate ford #eliot spencer #the wish job #nana leverage #this was a lotta fun to write actually #i love leverage so much you don't even know #anyway hope you had fun reading lol #thanks again for line jumping! i hope you liked it ^_^

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planckstorytime · 1 year ago

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Three)

III. A Pervert’s Guide to Mortality

Look, I can make juvenile jokes about the massive swords, or the recurrent use of flower imagery, or Sephiroth’s Oedipus complex, or how Cloud riding the dolphin is secretly foreshadowing him having sex with Tifa at the end of disc two1 – but the fact is, Final Fantasy VII basks in Freudian and Jungian ideas. Traumatic repression, unconscious compulsions, personas and shadows, displaced affection, psychological projection – all of these play important roles in the story. That isn’t to say that a psychoanalytic reading supersedes all others, or even that the creators specifically intended it. Concepts related to Mahayana Buddhism obviously permeate the text, and likely carry with them their own baggage that can impact someone’s analysis. But I am not knowledgeable on that subject, and so I hope to offer an interpretation based on my own limited frame of reference.

With its additions to the Final Fantasy VII mythos, Rebirth emphasizes a core tension (and I mean, like, planetary core) between the two predominant drives that motivate human behavior in the Freudian model: the pleasure principle (libido) and the death drive. One governs our desires, survival instincts, goals, and relationships, while the other dictates aggression, self-destructive behavior, repetition, trauma, and ultimately, death itself. Keeping in mind the franchise’s preexisting focus on complex, recursive trauma, let’s look into some of the new scenes that this title added.

Midway through the game, Cloud briefly succumbs to Sephiroth’s influence and, in his psychosis, knocks Tifa into a mako reactor. An infant weapon subsequently swallows her whole and submerges into the lifestream. Tifa awakens, floating in the fetal position inside a bulging orb of materia distending from the belly of the Weapon. According to Hojo, the Weapons are themselves born from these magical wombs, which they recursively absorb. The scenario evokes a fantasy of inverted birth, which could not be truer to the title of the game. In Japanese, Rebirth uses the same kana (リバース)as “reverse” – the double entendre alluding to a regression to an earlier state upon which any “rebirth” is contingent. It’s both the push of gestation and life as it is the pull of nonexistence and oblivion. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud identifies “an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”(43). From this, he concludes that “the aim of all life is death” – or as Sephiroth might put it, a “homecoming” – since “inanimate things existed before living ones” (46).

As the Weapon carries the uterine Tifa through a valley of repressed memories, a swarm of white Whispers flank it. That’s right, this version of the wispy-tailed, cephalic-hooded pests no longer appear to represent puristfans. They instead embody the polar opposite of them: sex! Swirling around the innards of the planet, which is repeatedly referred to as the “Great Mother”, the sperm-like Whispers clash with their black cousins, now servants of Sephiroth. Considering that Remake taught us to think of the Whispers, textually, as the will of the planet, then the opposing forces here represent the instincts of creation and life against the paradoxical allure of corruption and death. Tifa emerges from the Weapon, born anew with transcendental wisdom and reconstituted memories. Her trial of regression fails to subsume her, and instead reinvigorates her life force and commitment to defend the planet. The thematic conflict, as exemplified here, extends to all manners of attraction, nurturing, survival, and future purpose versus sorrow, anger, fatalism, and past trauma.

The Freudian model intrinsically associates the positive, exciting energies of the libido with sexual desire. It’s little wonder why Rebirth is so horny. We get an entire titillating beach episode with Cloud’s shirtless twunk body and Tifa’s bikini-clad figure clearly captivating one another. Romance mechanics have been expanded, and random NPCs can’t help but thirst for the crew as they pass by. Every few minutes, it seems like Cloud’s adventure gets interrupted by some new homoerotic rival figure who helps him grow through their challenges. Chief among them is Roche, whose unsubtle mastery of the red hot rocket between his legs powers his every impulse. And God, does he love it; that is, until he succumbs to Sephiroth’s influence, after which he crashes and destroys his phallic hog. His loss of self accompanies his symbolic castration.

But beyond the realm of sexy people doing sexy things, libidinal energies influence all manner of life-preserving behaviors. Several quests involve the party acting as surrogate parents or protectors to baby animals. Yuffie affectionately names a baby bird “Cloud Jr.”, and the group defends the fledgling from predators. Upon returning to Nibelheim, Tifa locates her old cat, Fluffy, and protects her and her seven kittens from encroaching monsters. And rounding out this pattern, Cloud even has to play babysitter in that godforsaken Mooglet roundup minigame.

Death instincts, by contrast, manifest most acutely as traumatic repetition – that is, the unconscious return to a source of pain, or reenactment of its circumstances, against all life-preserving logic. Barret’s misery stems from the detonation of a faulty mako reactor, which Shinra used as a pretext to destroy his hometown. Ironically, he retaliates against the company by orchestrating his own reactor bombings. However, his death instincts do not consume him, as his fatherly care for Marlene and goal of saving the environment keeps these suicidal impulses in check. Dyne lacks this lifeline; without Marlene in his life, left to grieve alone for her and his wife, he turns to self-destructive violence. He kills with no provocation or goal, channeling his desire for death along a “circuitous path” through which he projects it (literally) onto others (Freud, 45).

“All the lives I took, just to fill the hole in my heart. Just to fill the void they left… I wanna see them again, and I know what I need to do… but I can’t. I just can’t… Eleanor and Marlene are waiting for me, but… but I can’t bring myself to join ‘em.”

With an insufficient drive toward pleasure and love, Dyne invites his own demise. He looms as Barret’s shadow, a grim what-could-have-been.

Both Cloud and Tifa experience PTSD flashbacks, especially in areas near their hometown massacre – a self-destructive behavior beyond their control, triggered by unconscious mechanisms. Disturbingly, we witness Cloud mimicking the source of his trauma several times, like when he adopts Sephiroth’s sword stance in the Gongaga reactor, or when repeating his words verbatim at the Mount Nibel lifespring. Through the use of Jenova’s cellular magnetism, Sephiroth can manipulate his past victims as puppets and proxies. They become signal boosters to perpetuate his evil. True to his nature as the son of an interstellar parasite, he aims to influence the compulsion toward death as a means to his eternal survival and satisfaction: first via the sacrifice of the black robes, inexorably marching to their Reunion at their mother’s call; then by expediting the life cycle of the planet, returning souls to the lifestream en masse. During the final battle, he generates a form akin to the Weapons, “Reborn” with a gibbous protuberance on his abdomen. In other words, the game climaxes with the party whacking his giant mpreg belly to halt his autogenetic apotheosis.

The visual metaphor is downright insane, and I feel like I should be locked up for parsing it this way.

Zack’s intermissions take place in a world of despair, an apparent dream-turned-nightmare, where the apocalypse seems inevitable. Most inhabitants have lost the will to live positively or with purpose. It is from worlds like these that Sephiroth intends to harvest negative energy, perhaps to spur the planet along on its self-destructive course. Back in the real world, he stokes war between Midgar and Wutai. Aggression, hatred, memetic trauma, and the welcoming of death seem to empower Sephiroth and further his designs. And nowhere does a desire for death manifest stronger than among the Gi.

Revealed in Rebirth to be aliens confined to spectral forms, the Gi tribe endures an existence bereft of pleasureful purpose, with their only desire – death – forever out of reach. The lifestream has rejected them, and so they languish in limbo.

“Our ultimate salvation is cessation – it is nothingness. Our wish is not “to exist”, but rather, to no longer exist.”

Their drive for nonexistence leads them to seize the “greatest of materia” and imbue it with their “desire for freedom.” Thus did they create the Black Materia, the ultimate instrument of death and key to Sephiroth’s plans. Through the Gi’s suicidal aspirations, the entire planet might perish in flame. The only spell that can combat this comes from the White Materia, which Aerith fills with a wish to preserve her friends and the world itself. Nobody finds more joy in the pleasures of life, big or small, than Aerith. Again, we see the competing impulses of the pleasure principle and death drive shake the foundations of the world. Both follow the same “dominating tendency of mental life” that Freud describes as “the effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension due to stimuli” (67). Alleviation of pain, anxiety, and the inherent suffering of existence is the natural, shared goal of both libidinal and death instincts.

Odd as they may be, these readings of Rebirth helped me to appreciate much of its subtext. It roused me from my detached stupor and challenged me to use more than my Lizard Brain. The Gi’s folly, in particular, echoed in my mind. Had I not repeatedly returned to these disappointing games in my head, soaking in that unpleasant aura, spiraling through the same enraged patterns of thought? Did I not wish for Rebirth to be disgustingly alienating for me, spurning all sparks of hope that I might enjoy it? Could I not compel this love-hate relationship toward its death – its simple, conclusive cessation?

It’s hard not to laugh at such a cathexis with a video game – doubly so when my irrational investment in hostility somehow alerted me to the subliminal activation of frightening primal mechanisms. Well, good to recognize the problem, I suppose. At least I’ve got some level of self-awareness.

But unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the epiphany I wanted it to be. Frustration and anger at several creative decisions would continue to seep through the cracks.

It is, though.

FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/

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