tenderjock

[tenderjock]

drawing people i see in the city (5/?)

[tenderjock]

Detective Comics #1100 - "Lost & Found" (2025)

written by Tom Taylor art by Mikel Janin

[tenderjock]

favorite kendra young looks -> season 2

[tenderjock]

think my cat has cte

[tenderjock]

[tenderjock]

how the absolute FUCK am i supposed to live long and prosper in these conditions

[tenderjock]

i rewatched tog today in preparation for 2o2g dropping tmrw and i became obsessed with this tiny moment of booker curiously sticking his fingers into his own massive gaping abdominal wound. idiot disaster man

[tenderjock]

rewatching s7 and actually i rly like kennedy at first. especially in showtime. which sorta makes me sad knowing that won't last

[tenderjock]

[tenderjock]

nileweek2025 day 6: powers ->

how my story is supposed to go;

THE SPIDER-WOMAN AU | 1.5ish words, slight andy&nile

: :

Okay, let’s do this one last time.

Her name is Nile Freeman. She was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for, like, six months, she’s been the one and only Spider-Woman. She’s graduated from high school, and she’s saved a bunch of people, and met her college roommates (what’s up, Dizzy! what’s up, Jay!), finally.

She never thought she’d be able to do any of this stuff. It’s pretty great.

But she’s not the only hero. Not by a long shot.

: :

When Andromache the Scythian flies in from out of nowhere, catches Spider-Woman by the waist mid-swing, and throws her down into an empty Chicago parking lot, she panics.

Snaps a bit of web right into the Scythian’s face. While the other hero’s choking on it, Spider-Woman rolls, scrambles to her feet, darts over one parked car and under another.

Something hits her in the shoulder – a dart, but it doesn’t punch through the suit that her mom made for her. Spider-Woman cranes her neck up and around, sees the shape of a sniper on the roof of the next building over. Motherfucker.

The Scythian gets the web out of her mouth, spitting, and then the rest of the Guard has surrounded Spider-Woman. She crouches, flexing her hands, wondering if she’s about to be – she doesn’t know. Brought in for illegal experimentation. Jumped into a gang. Given a firm lecture.

“Please don’t do that,” Andromache says.

“Sorry,” Spider-Woman says. “Uhm. You started it.”

The Punisher laughs. The other two smile, a bit, but he actually snickers, out loud, and when Andromache glares at him, he just snickers louder.

Emboldened, Spider-Woman straightens up to standing.

“So, what is this?” she asks. “You here to give me a participation trophy?”

“Yeah,” Andromache says. “Kind of. We like to keep tabs on the up-and-coming talent, and you’re Chicago’s first real hero. You’ve been doing good work, kid.”

Spider-Woman narrows her eyes. She’s not sure she likes being called kid. But the sentiment is nice, she guesses.

“Okay,” she says. “Great. Are you gonna be leaving Chicago … ?”

Andromache looks at her. Her mouth twitches.

“We will be,” she says. “We’ll give you a number to contact, if you need help.”

“Right,” Spider-Woman says. She’s not gonna be contacting that number.

The three men are grinning under their masks, although they all hide it when the Scythian looks at them. She snorts, and then hands Spider-Woman a business card with nothing but a phone number on it.

Spider-Woman reads the card, commits the number to memory, and then hands it back.

The men are in silent hysterics. Andromache narrows her eyes.

“Good luck, Spider-Woman,” she says, and unfurls her adamantium-edged wings and launches herself in the air.

The men are left staring at Spider-Woman, who stares back at them.

“Uhm,” she says. “’Bye, I guess.”

She swings out of there before any of them can say anything.

: :

Two blocks down, she stops. There’s a tracker, left on the shoulder of her suit by the dart that hit her. She can’t seem to get it off. Luckily, she has a backup. She strips out of her suit and into normal clothes, leaves the suit wedged inside the seat of an L train, and calls it a day.

: :

Nile expects that to be the end of it. Big things don’t really happen in Chicago – like, sure, she loves her city, it’s the best place in the world, but it’s not exactly a hotbed of megalomaniac villain shenanigans, you know? It’s more of normal-crime kind of place. There’s no reason for the Guard to come back here.

: :

Her roommate Dizzy is interning with this lab when she brings something to Nile because she thinks something fishy is going on. Dizzy’s studying chemistry, and Merrick Pharmaceuticals is the highest-tech, most cutting-edge place on the market. But there’s some janky stuff going on in the top floor labs, Dizzy says.

Add into that the fact that last week, Andromache and her Guard publicly got their asses kicked in South Bend, and they haven’t been heard from since. It’s all starting to add up in a way that isn’t sitting right with Nile.

Nile does the one thing she had sworn to herself she would not do. She calls the number.

A voice with an English accent answers. “Hello?” he says.

“Hello?” she says. She’s Spider-Woman now. “I’m – uhm, I’m calling for Andromache?”

There’s a long pause. “She’s not available,” the voice answers. “Who is this?”

“Any of the Guard?” Spider-Woman asks, desperate. “Any of them?”

“They’re not available,” he insists. “Who is calling?”

She takes a breath. “This is Spider-Woman,” she says. “Andromache told me to call this number if I needed her.”

There’s silence for a long moment. “The Guard have been unavailable for several days,” he says. “We’ve been – looking for them.”

“I know,” Spider-Woman says. “I think that I might know where they are. I think I might know how to get them back.”

: :

His name is Copley. He’s their handler (“their handler,” Jay mouths, giggling), which, as far as Nile can tell, is kind of like being their Mom, in that he also makes their suits and ensures that they are fed and obsesses over them when they’re out fighting crime.

Copley helps Jay and Nile get into Merrick’s lab along with Dizzy, and makes sure they have a secure way out. They make it up to the penthouse lab without much opposition – Nile has to web a few security guards, Dizzy and Jay cheering, but she doesn’t even change into her suit.

All three of them break into the lab successfully, breathless with exhilaration. The four Guard are there, in normal clothes, strapped to four medical cots, staring at them like they have six heads each.

“Watch out!” one of the men says, and Jay clocks the doctor that was about to stab her with a syringe, knocking her down.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Andromache says. She looks rough, dark-eyed and pale and sweaty. “It’s not safe.”

“Shut up,” Nile tells her. “Dizzy, can you swipe and wipe as much of the doctor’s work as you can?”

“On it,” Dizzy says, going to the computer. Jay starts untying the Guard.

“I mean it,” Andromache says, raising her voice. “You don’t know what kind of people you’re dealing with here –”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nile says. “You wanna get out of here or not?”

They get the Guard on their feet, and Dizzy destroys as much of the research that was done on them as possible, and Andromache makes a last-ditch effort to throw herself on a grenade for Nile.

“You girls go,” she says. “We’ll fight it out. We can –”

“God, do you listen to yourself?” Nile says. One of the men, the white guy with the buzzy blue eyes and the unfortunate haircut, is frowning at her thoughtfully. “We’re not leaving. We’ve got an exit, arranged with Copley.”

The Guard stares at her. The guy with the wild dark beard says, voice incredulous, “You’re working with Copley?”

Three security guards take that moment to burst through the door. Everyone startles; Nile reacts quickest, snapping web into their faces and gun hands, wrapping them up like a spider’s dinner.

There’s a heavy moment of silence. Then Andromache says, “Motherfucker.”

“So cool,” Jay says.

“Can we go now?” Spider-Woman says, shrugging off the blazer she’d worn over her suit and pulling up her mask to cover her face.

: :

When Merrick tries to push Andromache, without her wings, out the window of his skyscraper, Spider-Woman grabs him and flips them both off the edge of the building.

She catches them before they fall, of course. She strings him up in a spiderweb, a big fat fly, with a thumbdrive of all the dirty laundry she and Dizzy and Jay had managed to dig up on him stuck to his chest.

Then Spider-Woman watches from the next building over while the Guard and Dizzy and Jay get into Copley’s exit vehicle and drive off. There’s something aching in her chest, but that’s okay. She’s the one and only Spider-Woman, after all.

: :

The week that classes end, as Nile’s packing up to leave the dorms, there’s a knock at her door.

When she answers, there are four people – she guesses she can’t quite call them strangers – standing there. Andromache the Scythian, in jeans and a tank top and sunglasses, is at the front.

“Hey,” Andromache says.

“Hey,” Nile says. She eyes the Guard uncomfortably. “You guys here to try to intimidate me again?”

“No, actually,” Andromache says. “We came to thank you. And to … apologize.”

“Oh,” Nile says.

“It seems like we never really got properly introduced,” Andromache says. She extends a hand to shake.

One last time, from the top: her name is Nile Freeman. She was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for the last year and a half, she’s been the one and only Spider-Woman. She’s just finished her freshman year of college, and she’s saved Chicago, and she’s made some new friends along the way.

It doesn’t seem possible, that a girl like her from the South Side could be a hero. But it’s true. And she’s not the only one; she knows that now.

“I’m Nile,” Nile says. “Nile Freeman.” She reaches out to take the other woman’s hand.

“You can call me Andy,” she says, and squeezes Nile’s hand.

[tenderjock]

Two weddings and a funeral [several years post-canon]

which brings us back to the hero's shoulders [the series]

all of my deleted scenes on ao3 in the we have not touched the stars 'verse [spuffsilla souls au]

I'd paint my nails and pop my gum [sometime in s3 (around lovers walk, maybe?)]

a true picture of something else [s5, post-buffy v. drac]

The moon has already set; the nightingales sing. [s6, pre-older and far away]

conspicuous and relatively abrupt. [s6, post-older and far away]

eaten up by the sun and the wind [post-s7, pre-ats s5]

[tenderjock]

happy hawaiian shirt day!

[tenderjock]

🫵 YOU. STOP WHERE YOU ARE

say something nice about prev!!! find something cool about them!! give their blog a skim!!

compliments are FREE TO GIVE so GIVE THEM OUT. pls. thamnk. (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)

[tenderjock]

working on a collection of little fruit pieces!! They’ll all be available at the end of the month 🍒🍓🍇🍑 you can sign up for my newsletter on my website for early access to the drop

[tenderjock]

The Old Guard 2 (2025)

[tenderjock]

there was almost something very interesting and very beautiful about making nile this "destroyer" in 2o2g, you know? in a series of movies about people who don't die, killing each other brutally and then simply not dying, where you have a main character (nile) who rejects that way of life. who doesn't want to kill. who finds death appalling. whose mentor says, yeah, i know, i feel that way, too. but you have to do it anyway.

making THAT character the character that can kill them all permanently. that can impart a certain kind of weight to their long, long lives - that maybe can show the guard that the way they have been living is unsustainable, and that there was something wrong with it. you know? i didnt like this plotline but i DO think there was something there.

[tenderjock]

A New Hope (1977) dir. George Lucas