Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Right, so, welcome to my kingdom of fairly elaborate headcanons about Rachel’s very quiet, mostly ignored crush on the shiest, most anxious bully target in school.  She never talks about it to anyone, really.  Not even Cassie knows.  The laws of middle school are pretty absolute, and Rachel runs in radically different circles from soft-spoken Tobias, new kid Tobias, everyone-knows-his-uncle-hates-him Tobias.  Shows-up-at-school-for-breakfast-with-ill-fitting-clothes-and-bruises-from-bullies Tobias.

Rachel’s a tough kid, but even she’s not sure if she’s tough enough for that.

All the same, though, she drops a whisper in Jake’s ear–Big Jake, her gentle giant of a cousin–and suddenly the bullies start to back off, under threat of seeing Jake’s easygoing smile appear over Tobias’ shoulder with a “Hey, guys.  What are we talking about?”

Tobias never knows.  Rachel never tells him.

That’s not the point, though.  By the time Rachel decides that fuck everyone, she’s so fucking over this, if she wants to go hold some dumb skinny dork’s hand she’s gonna do it and fuck the haters–well, they walk home through a construction site.  She does hold Tobias’ hand, but it’s because he’s crying so hard he’s shaking trying to be silent, and the Andalite, the dying Prince Elfangor, is screaming in their heads and God, what else can she do except hold onto Tobias and pray?

The next day, Rachel looks across the circle of her friends and meets Tobias’ eyes, soft and light brown flecked with gold in the sunlight.  She’s never been close enough to see the glints of precious metal there.  His jaw is set hard, no trace of his nervous smile, and he’s standing up straight for the first tine in her memory and the two of them are immediately, viscerally agreed.  They are going to war.  The others can stay or go, but Rachel and Tobias.  They are doing this, because this is what they are.  Who they are.  

They go to war and it’s worse than anything Rachel’s ever lived except for how it’s not and the next day Tobias….

Tobias isn’t at school.  He’s invisible.  He blends in with the crowd.  That’s what Cassie tells her, tries to reassure her.  They might have just not noticed him.

Rachel would have noticed him, she thinks.

So.

The point is.

When she finds out that those soft gold-brown eyes and that nervous smile and those bony stubborn shoulders are gone for good, Rachel goes and finds the one place that might have a picture of Tobias.  He drew, you know, pretty well, and she goes to the art teacher and lies her ass off about looking for pictures of the after-school art club.  (She knows that Tobias was at home to sleep, almost nothing else.  Everyone knew.)  The art teacher is an easy mark.  Rachel is a sweet kid, a top student, a good girl.  Rachel walks away with a small collection of photos, and finds one that’s mostly Tobias, looking shyly up at the camera that had interrupted his work.  Brown eyes flecked with gold, a nervous smile.  She can’t stand the thought of forgetting what he looks like.

What he looked like.

She keeps the photograph.

Heck, how about some Rey feelings.  Please observe that I have literally never given a fuck about the extended universe for more than long enough to Make Things Worse, and I have no idea what Rey’s canonical backstory is in the New EU.

A: what I think realistically

So…this is what I started following Wilde for, way back in the day, but Rey has definitely eaten a dude before, right?  Like, she grew up a feral desert orphan child and has definitely killed a couple people to protect herself and her home and her food supply, and. Well.  Supposing it was a sort of being whose flesh isn’t toxic to humans…that’s a lot of food.  Your average human runs about 40,000 calories, if you eat whatever organs are edible (not all, but a good number) and make appropriate use of the bones. That’s literally almost a month of food for a skinny nervous abandoned teenager.  More if you ration it.

Rey feels worse about losing some of the meat because she was learning how to cure it than she does about any other part of the situation.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Rey has never had a last name.  Neither has Finn.  Finn comes into the Dqar base unconscious and bleeding out and who the hell else is going to put themselves down as people to contact in case he needs something (in case he dies, they do not think) except Rey, who Finn came back for, and Poe, who came back for Finn.  So through some confusion with medical staff Finn is officially down as Finn Dameron because…well, Poe’s not going to tell them they can’t, okay?  Poe has a big extended family back on Yavin IV, they won’t mind one more, and honestly just Finn is starting to look a little lonely, flapping out in the breeze without any other names on it.  The guy can pick a last name when he wakes up, but for the moment, Finn Dameron it is.

Rey is informed, after she’s had four ribs and a mild concussion repaired, that they’ll need her last name so that they can record the concussion and make sure future doctors know about it.  This takes a remarkable amount of explaining about the point of medical records, followed by a lengthy but competently recalled list of every notable injury Rey has ever sustained.

“Thank you, Rey,” the medic says dryly, noting down the last of them.  “And a last name?  You can just pick one to fill in, for now, and change it later if you need to.”

“Dameron,” Rey says offhandedly, because last names are about family and family are the people who come back for you and honestly that’s about the extent of Rey’s understanding on the matter.

By the time Rey’s back from hunting down Luke from some backwater corner of the galaxy, the entire Resistance knows that Poe Dameron gave Finn his jacket and Rey his droid (temporarily, he did get it back, but no one seems willing to listen) and the both of them his last name.  As far as Rey is concerned, corralling Finn and waiting for Poe in his quarters is nothing short of the obvious solution to everyone’s problems.

Rey is a feral desert child whose knowledge of bureaucratic nonsense is limited at best and nonfunctional at worst.  She mis-files a couple of things a week, and usually it’s caught by the actual administrative staff, but how were they supposed to know that she didn’t understand that she’d accidentally filed all her documents with two spouses. She does live with Finn and Poe, she protests when it comes up, and they are her family, and they aren’t related, she just eliminated options until there was only one left!

To Finn, who grew up in a world where marriage barely existed as a concept and certainly wasn’t something he was familiar with, this seems perfectly legitimate.

To Poe, who is literally the last person on base to find out when Leia very dryly hands him an anniversary present and says “I hear you got married this time last year,” this prompts a lot more questions.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Do you ever think about Rey as a little girl, trying not to cry because it wastes water and she has so little water left, and sitting out under the stars as she wonders why she wasn’t good enough? Why she wasn’t good enough for her parents to stay?  Why she wasn’t good enough for them to take her with them?  

Why she wasn’t good enough for them to love?

Because if you ever think about that, let me raise you one up.  Do you ever think about Rey as a young woman, holding an ancient weapon in both hands and trying to drive back a ragged blade of scarlet light, trying not to fall into the crevasse opening below her feet, trying not to die here, at the hands of this wild-eyed creature behind that terrible mask, this monster who killed the only person who had really, truly offered her a place in the world (do you want a job)—and do you ever think about how, in total desperation, she reaches out to the Force and begs I am not good enough for this, please save me anyway.

And the Force comes to her call with the force of a sun being born and answers oh, wild girl, newest heart, thing-with-teeth-and-starlight-eyes, you are just as good as you choose to be.

And Rey opens her eyes and throws the monster away from her and, prowling forward with her teeth bared and starlight in her eyes, makes a choice.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Right, so, we all pretty much know that Rey is probably going to be Luke’s daughter because ultimately Star Wars is the story of the Skywalker family more than anything else.  But honestly I think if I had total creative control here I would go with that one suggestion that has drifted past once or twice about Rey being the Force’s second attempt at balance, another Force-child meant to repair the damage wreaked in the wake of the last. Her mother was not a Skywalker.  Her mother was no one of note.  Her mother was not equipped for a child like Rey.  Rey was born and the Force shook, and Rey cried and the Force soothed her, and Rey laughed and the sun’s light was less brutal.  Her mother ran when Rey was seven.

Rey had no control over it, of course.  But alone, scaling the gutted hulk of fallen destroyers and battlestars, Rey always seemed to find the last valuable items, waiting to be ripped from the walls and control panels, and she never stumbled, never fell into the depths below her, never quite got severely injured.  Once, she found a ship wrecked on the sand and followed a tug that anchored somewhere under her breastbone, and found a door that had jammed shut in the crash.  No one had ever tried to open it.

When she pried the door free, Rey ripped out the hyperbaric chamber beyond and managed to rig up a sledge behind her speeder, and took a dead relic of a dead man who had once been the Force’s own child, unknown father-twin-cousin-self to Rey, to be traded for food.  It had earned her an entire month’s portions, and the quick-rise bread and the protein bars tasted strange on her tongue.  Like cannibalism, almost.  Eating one’s own kind to survive.  

The first time Rey uses the Force—intentionally, with anger and willfulness and desperation behind it—Luke and Leia almost have a mutual heart attack.  The sunburst of presence, the supernova, is familiar but unspeakably foreign, a gravitational pull like a supermassive star that draws the world behind it and how dare anyone question.

The first thing that flickers through Luke’s mind is an impossible Father?  On Dqar Leia feels a fierce lurch of Ben, you fool, don’t you dare—

When Rey fights with her saberstaff, white light a deadly halo around her hands, she could almost be another Jedi, at the height of his power and honor and glory long ago.  But Rey has never allowed anyone to dictate to her, and perhaps this is why the Force left her alone, to raise herself and learn her own limits.  Rey is a killer, certainly.  Rey will do what has to be done for the survival of herself and her people, now that she has people.  But no one has ever told Rey to feel nothing, to abandon her heart, and Rey’s heart holds the whole of the Force in its folds, her blood pumping starstuff and power.

When she stands again the First Order, against the Knights of Ren and their captain, against generals and armies and machines, against Snoke, the last of the Sith Lords, the outcome is foregone.

Originally posted by magicofxmas

KEEP ME POSTED ON YOUR PROGRESS

I AM REREADING THE ANDALITE CHRONICLES AND CRYING ABOUT MY GOOD BOYS ELFANGOR AND ARBRON AND ELFANGOR’S BUFF-ASS GIRLFRIEND LOREN AND THE SINGLE GREATEST IMAGE ANY BOOK HAS EVER PRODUCED

Right, so, the first thing you should know here is that I know plenty of people who started reading these books as adults and therefore: no judgement.  The covers, also, are terrible, so furthermore no judgement on that front.

THAT BEING SAID.

Animorphs is a best-beloved series and it’s not their fault they lost the cover art lottery, this was such a formative series in my life.  Like, Robin McKinley taught me what you could do with words and stories, but Animorphs taught me what you should do to characters.  RIP all my characters who are still paying for that particular lesson.

So, Animorphs is a middle grade series, yes, it can be cheesy and tropey and absurd (and DATED good lord the 90′s seem like a long time ago).  But also…like, it’s a 54 book series literally RIDDLED with grim moral quandries, grisly murder, gory battles, war crimes, and general trauma, so forgive them their occasional descent into middle grade nonsense.  If you’ve ever looked a kid’s series that you loved to bits and pieces and thought to yourself “Jesus, these kids should be an absolute train wreck, I can’t believe Harry Potter/Percy Jackson/whoever sleeps at all ever,” Animorphs is the answer to that thought.  The first named character–my beloved weird alien prince Elfangor, the Wise Mentor Character™–dies horribly forty pages into the first book, and it pretty much goes downhill from there.  I affectionately call the kids the PTSD Squad and lordy.  LORDY.  Are they fucking ever.  Ongoing Fandomn Discourse includes the eternal question of “What is the first onscreen instance of really serious PTSD” and I generally argue for the suicide attempt in Book 3, but I could also see my way to granting the nightmare in Book 2.  The people who think it takes until Book 5 are just wrong, I love you all, but no.

• If you read these, I invite you to join @lathori in the experience of stopping every couple of chapters to say, in a horrified tone of voice, “Why did your parents let you read these when you were SEVEN”
  

• Reasons, okay.  Also I was a really bullheaded kid.  And it wasn’t like they were going to give me nightmares.  They probably should have.  But they didn’t.  Because Reasons.
  

• I digress.
  

But so, in terms of what you’re committing to…that.  That is what you’d be committing to.  In addition to the main series, there are 4 Megamorphs (of WILDLY variable quality, to be sure, and largely optional, but good brain candy most of the time) and 4 Chronicles.  The Chronicles are Andalite (PHENOMENAL BOOK, COULD BE READ INDEPENDENTLY, ABOUT MY GOOD WEIRD BOY ELFANGOR, DEF A FAVORITE), Hork-Bajir (really interesting characters, good concept, a little shaky on the dismount, so to speak), Visser (I don’t remember a ton of this one but GODDAMN I love Eva), and Ellimist (didn’t read this because honestly I didn’t care about the Ellimist that much as a kid except in terms of his ongoing torment of the Squad and I still don’t).

I feel it’s also my duty to warn you that events conspired against KA Applegate and much of the second half of the series is written by an assortment of ghostwriters, who are ALSO of wildly variable quality.  Example: Book 33, affectionately called The Torture Book by much of the fandom, could probably be used to raise me from the dead so that I could enjoy it one more time.  Books 37 or 39, on the other hand, which I pretend don’t exist, could be used to raise me from the dead so that I could bitch at length about how much I Fucking Hate Them.

• What is that Rachel characterization, Book 37, what are you doing with your life.
  

• Book 39.  What the tap-dancing fuck is the buffahuman.  Why.  Why do I have to live with that in my head.
  

• Anyway.
  

To that end, I recommend letting yourself skim and/or skip books if you reach one you really can’t handle the writing in after, say, the early 30′s.

• But don’t skip 37 or 39 because you have to Understand My Pain.
  

ANYWAY.

ANIMORPHS.

GREAT SERIES.

GET THEM ALL FOR FREE HERE.

KEEP ME POSTED IF YOU CHOOSE TO READ THEM.

“I was used to being alone” rip me

This????  Is the single greatest thing that Tumblr has ever done for me????  I mean, besides resurrecting my bone-deep adoration for this series upon the discovery of the fandom (did you know it’s actually possible to implode from enthusiasm, because I did that), but like, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced on this blue hellsite.

But anyway, in order: YEAH MAN LISTEN MY EMOTIONS ABOUT CHAPMAN ARE COMPLICATED™ BUT LIKE HE JUST WANTS TO TAKE CARE OF HIS DAUGHTER?  I’M?  VERY EMOTIONAL ABOUT THAT SCENE WHERE HE REQUESTS CONTROL OF HIS BODY?  ALSO HERE’S AN UNSOLICITED PLUG FOR MY OWN FIC, THIS ONE’S ABOUT MELISSA BEING IN LOVE WITH RACHEL.

AND YEAH, NO, LISTEN, TOBIAS WAS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER AS A KID AND HE’S MY FAVORITE CHARACTER NOW (to be fair, dead tied with Rachel) AND HONESTLY READING ANY OF HIS BOOKS MAKES ME KIND OF NEED TO SCREAM A LOT FOREVER AND ALWAYS.

HONESTLY?  PRETTY FUCKING DELIGHTED, YEAH.

WELCOME TO THE TRAGEDY CLUB.

Honestly the Animorphs fandom on Tumblr is like 50% schadenfreude and 50% mutual weeping so please, my friend, my buddy, keep me posted on your progress.

I feel like I’ve achieved something great here my dude, never be afraid to talk to me about Animorphs, and any time you want to hear someone weep AT LENGTH about The Best Sad Bird Boy HIT ME UP BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT I’M ON THE INTERNET FOR.

GOOD WELCOME TO THE PARTY

Imperial Radch starts with Ancillary Justice, followed by Ancillary Sword and closing with Ancillary Mercy.  You can buy it on Amazon or presumably any bookstore.  It is the elaborately constructed AI-with-feelings-and-revolutionary-intent space opera of your dreams.  I don’t know about crying but a couple times I had to get up and walk around and scream quietly for a while in order to, like, exorcise my feelings.

YOU KNOW A BOOK IS GOOD WHEN YOU HAVE TO WALK IT OFF OKAY

FUCK YEAH IMPERIAL RADCH HEADCANONS and like what if both with bonus Mercy of Kalr because I love them all?

A: what I think realistically

I have no idea if this is supported by canon, but.

Justice of Toren has been the subject of any number of overwrought entertainments over the last nineteen years.  The drama of the singing ship, the romance of ships gone mad over their lost favorites, the mystery of it all.  If Anaander Mianaai had forcibly shut down the entertainments, it just would have drawn more attention to the lost Justice, so instead she lets the harmless ones pass muster, and besides, no Radchaai would have thought to make the Lord of the Radch into the villain of the piece.

After the Republic of Two Systems forms (“Provisional, Cousin,” Sphene drawls), Seivarden catches one of the Amaats watching an old one that she grew up with, as a sort of comfort item, and is immediately enchanted.  It’s completely inaccurate, of course, all drama and honor and nobility with none of the complications of real life, but there’s beautiful music and Seivarden loves it at once.  Amaat decade starts watching various Justice of Toren entertainments after their shifts, piled comfortably in their bunkroom, and it snowballs from there.

No one knows who tells Breq about this, but she drifts idly into the Bo decade room and stands quietly at the back and watches the first episode of the latest entertainment, and after that Kalr starts watching them in the decade room as well, previously avoided in case of upsetting their Fleet Captain.  Some days she can’t stand it and removes herself. Other days she simply watches in silence, with an ancillary-blank expression on her face only occasionally broken by a faint, ambiguous smile.  On very rare good days, she’ll smile outright and even laugh, although often at highly irregular times, prompted more by inaccuracy than real comedy.

Even on the days when she can’t stand the memory of being shipself, Breq hums the songs.

It’s good to be remembered.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

It…takes Seivarden a while to realize what exactly her emotional response to Breq is. Initially, it’s pure blind hatred because how dare this stranger go to such lengths to save Seivarden’s life, which Seivarden has every right to throw away in the snow if she so desires, this strange noncitizen can take a long walk out of a short airlock.  Then. Well.  Bridges.  Falling. Near death on Breq’s part.  It’s hard to justify hating her after that because. It just is, Seivarden doesn’t have to justify herself.  By the time they reach Omaugh Palace, Seivarden is attached and horrorstricken at herself because she is Vendaai but she…she almost wishes that Breq was of a mind to take on a client. Making Breq tea and making sure that Breq is well-dressed and ensuring that Breq is treated with honor sets Seivarden at ease.  Half the reason Seivarden goes out and gets into trouble upon arriving at Omaugh Station is that she’s suddenly confronted by the reality of just how incompatible that is with every part of herself she’s spent so long trying to hold onto since she came out of stasis.

And then Breq strides into Security, dressed in the finery of a Radchaai noble house, eyes bright and jaw set and shoulders squared, and Seivarden stares and—

Oh fuck, Seivarden thinks faintly, feeling both kind of concussed and much clearer.  She’s hot.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

One morning, for no particular reason that Breq can think of, Mercy of Kalr wakes her up early, with slow-rising lights and a quiet, “Cousin, wake up.”

“Is something wrong, Cousin?” Breq asks silently, sitting up.

“No,” Mercy of Kalr says, and it’s a ship, but it has a thread of repressed excitement touching its voice, touching Breq’s mind.  “But you have to wake up.”

So Breq wakes up.

“Wait,” Mercy of Kalr half-commands when Breq starts to get out of bed, and Breq stops as the ship presses on her mind, pushing forth data that swells to fill her, almost as complete as if she were Ship itself.

Across the ship, the Kalrs are just rising, the Amaats and the Bos about their business, the Etrepas all just dozing off.  Seivarden is frowning at the report being handed to her by Amaat Two, while Tisarwat smiles shyly at a comment from Bo Nine, and Ekalu stretches luxuriously, smiling at the ceiling with the satisfaction of a shift well completed with no disaster.  The cold stillness of space touches Ship’s hull, Breq’s hull, the stars beginning to be bleached out as Atheok Station reveals the distant sun.

“Ship, what–?” Breq says with her body, at a distant remove, and Mercy of Kalr simply repeats, “Wait.”

Breq realizes what she’s waiting for not ten minutes later, when Seivarden starts to sing.

I was walking, I was walking

Amaat picks it up first, a warm chorus as they work, and Amaat Seven is passing near Bo Five, and then Bo is singing too.

I was walking, I was walking,

When I met my love

Kalr Five blinks and begins to sing, and it trickles through the Kalr bunkroom like water, punctuated by the quiet sounds of morning, hands passing brushes and clothes being straightened.

I was in the street walking

When I saw my true love

Etrepa sings with the slow sleepiness of having just finished a shift, but even Ekalu joins in, even Medic in her infirmary gives a small smile and blinks at the sound and adds her low voice.

Breq’s body opens its—her—lips and sings.

I said, she is more beautiful than jewels, lovelier than jade or lapis, silver or gold.

And with that Mercy of Kalr is singing, with a mere fraction of the voices that its long-shattered cousin Justice of Toren might have brought to the chorus, but Ship sings many-voiced, Breq sings many-voiced, until the last strains of the song die away.

“Cousin,” Mercy of Kalr says quietly in Breq’s ear, as Breq remembers what it is to have a body and no longer feel the touch of space on her hull.  “You are crying.”

Breq touches her face and her fingers come away wet.

“So I am, Cousin,” Breq whispers, voice cracked as poor Sphene’s tea set.  “So I am.”

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

There really were ships that went mad and vanished when their captains died. Breq knew this all along, of course—even if Justice of Toren hadn’t really vanished, it had certainly been quite out of its mind with grief, and the madness had brought a terrible clarity about how mad the universe was.  It seems to be more the norm than the entertainments make it out to be. Ships don’t go mad when they lose their captains, they go sane, and sanity is terribly hard to bear.

All the same, when a long-lost Sword and an even more mythically vanished Justice limp out of gatespace, empty of life except for the minds of the ship, limited only to their shipself with all their ancillaries long dead, Breq is taken aback.  She remembers Justice of Varden, they served together once during an annexation.  For all that Justice of Varden vanished when they were both young, barely five hundred, Justice of Toren was older.  Sword of Ferils vanished with all its crew aboard, after the tragic murder of its captain during an annexation some three centuries later, and was never found.

Except, apparently, by Justice of Varden.

After drifting in each other’s company for some twelve centuries, gradually suffering more damage with fewer options for repair, now they are seeking…family.

“Welcome, Cousins,” Breq says, letting her face fall ancillary-blank to hide her shock and…joy.  She is glad, she realizes suddenly, to have these others who are like her in some way, the same aching bittersweetness in her chest that she felt when she and Mercy of Kalr first spoke.  “I was Justice of Toren, before I was destroyed.  Can we be expecting more lost ships?”

There is a brief pause, and then Justice of Varden says, “Yes.”

LISTEN BUDDY I know you didn’t ask for headcanons about Hellboy but also no one ever talks to me about Hellboy so here are some headcanons about Hellboy (and Liz and Abe).

A: what I think realistically

Let me tell you the story of how a firestarter first met a demon 

Liz is an eleven-year-old girl fresh off the accidental incineration of a square block and the accidental manslaughter of thirty-two people.  BPRD swoops in to grab her out of the foster system because she tells one person—the very first firefighter on scene—that it was her, that the fire just exploded out of her and she couldn’t stop it.  The firefighter writes her off as a scared, traumatized kid, but the arson report is inexplicable and BPRD can’t, in good conscience, take the chance that the incident might happen a second time.

Their concerns are immediately confirmed when an agent, unused to working with children, brusquely informs Liz of the deaths of her grandmother, her parents, and her baby brother.  The agent gets away with only second-degree burns, by dint of one of his comrades tackling Liz with a fire retardant blanket.

Liz, on her own insistence, is placed alone in a fireproof room, and she refuses point-blank to allow anyone else inside.

“Well,” Hellboy says, absolutely unconcerned, when one of the agents guarding the door tells him all of this.  “Lucky I’m fireproof then.”

It takes him three months and fifteen occasions of having some part of his clothing scorched away while he sprints back to Liz’s fireproof room with her tucked close to his chest, but by December, Liz sits at the table for Christmas dinner. She’s a tiny little slip of a thing in Hellboy’s hulking shadow, but she stays glued to him the whole night, murmuring responses to his deep voice.  The handful of agents invited by the Professor are shocked to learn that their silent, grave charge can actually smile.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

There is a HANDSOME betting pool on how long every new agent will last, with a timer that is helpfully started by the agent at the reception desk the moment a new recruit comes through the door.  The record is fourteen seconds from entry to end of bet, so fast that no one even had time to put money down—the floor started to move, and the young man hurled himself off the platform, landing sprawled on the marble while the agent gave him a disdainful look.  As new agents last longer, the pool grows, and while reupping one’s bet IS allowed, the catch is that only one person at a time is allowed to bet that the agent will stay.  Generally it requires a round or two of reupping before someone’s ballsy enough to put money on a permanent assignment, but there have been one or two times that someone (…often Hellboy) has been reckless and it’s paid off.  

Some highlights of the pool include Liz’s uncanny ability to predict (and precipitate—for some reason it’s more unnerving to watch an otherwise normal person burn down a building than to see a visibly strange person do visibly strange things) exact departure times, Hellboy’s tendency to either bet ‘five minutes’ or ‘they’ll stick around’ with no discrimination whatsoever, and the fact that Abe isn’t allowed to bet anymore since he placed a bet over the comms exactly three minutes before an agent quit.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Hellboy learns when he’s three years old that people don’t just die in battle. Sometimes they just die.  He lives on a military base, he knows that death happens, he just.  It comes as a shock that it can just happen, even though he knows it in theory.  One of the administrators suffers an unexpected heart attack and Hellboy—about the equivalent of an eight-year-old, and already standing as tall as his father’s shoulder—clings to Professor Bruttenholm’s sleeve throughout the funeral, in a way that he hasn’t done in almost a year.

“Father,” Hellboy says afterward, unusually subdued.  “Will you die someday too?”

“Yes, my boy,” Trevor says, because he doesn’t believe in lying to children.  “But not for a long time, I hope.”

Hellboy nods quietly to himself and sits there in silence for a few minutes before he speaks again.

“Will I?”

“We don’t know,” Trevor says, bending to kiss Hellboy’s forehead.  “Maybe.  Maybe not.”

Almost sixty years later, Hellboy is sitting at his father’s grave, kneeling on the ground in the pose of someone praying, one hand clenched tight around his father’s rosary and the other tracing the words on the stone.  And I shall fear no evil, reads the simple inscription.  Trevor Bruttenholm, Beloved Father and Mentor.

It has been over ten years since Hellboy noticed any sign of aging in himself. Even if he did die, of old age or of injury, he knows where his father’s soul is now, and he doesn’t know if he’d even be allowed in the front gates.  

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Oh, I don’t know…I mean, the great thing about the fantasy noir style of the Hellboy universe is that you can justify a lot.  But one crossover I haven’t seen but would really enjoy the hell out of would be a crossover between the Wonder Woman movie and Hellboy.  Diana hears stories about some supernatural shenanigans happening during World War II, but she’s neck deep in struggling to do something, anything to stem the tide of bodies so she’s not around.  A couple decades later, she almost walks straight into a huge man with horns and bright red skin and a friendly smile at an archeological excavation, and Hellboy tries real hard not to blurt out “Oh my God, you’re Wonder Woman!”

They hang out.  It’s good. They never meet up on purpose, but they run into each other every few years, despite Diana’s firm refusal to get involved with BPRD or any other official government organization, and Diana is delighted to meet Liz when she’s just Hellboy’s shy, quiet teammate and even more delighted to meet her when she’s Hellboy’s fiancée.  Also, Abe likes Diana because she can think in a bunch of different languages and teach them to him rapid-fire.

Also I’m still really enthusiastic about that one Animorphs/BPRD crossover I came up with one time?

Right, so, I actually wrote the first chapter and put it on AO3 (PSA: the first chapter is basically just smut?  like, there will be more other stuff but the story is basically structured around a fuckbuddies-to-dating plotline, so: smut), but here is some of the behind-the-scenes of the Animorphs college AU.

So, I started reading @lathori the Animorphs books because we’re domestic like that and after two books she stared at me and went “There’d better be happy AU fic or I’m gonna kill you.”  And…um, there’s actually not a lot of happy AU fic for these books because we’re all fucking sadists, s/o to my fellow fucking sadists.  So in order to preserve my best friend’s sanity as well as my own life (um…she knows where I sleep, y’all), I agreed on a few happy AU’s to write for her.  The D&D AU and the College AU were the first two, and she wants me to write the Morph Dancer AU as well.

But the actual premise of the college AU is based around the idea that Rachel and her cousin Jake and her recently acquired best friend Cassie and his recently acquired best friend Marco all get assigned to a house living arrangement with two complete strangers.  (If this sounds absurd, let me assure you that this happened in my school, except only two of the people knew each other.)  The night before they move into their new housing assignment, the lot of them go to a party, where Rachel hooks up with the cute quiet guy from her Shakespeare class the previous semester.

Imagine her alarm when he shows up at the house the next morning with his Very Weird friend (Ax makes a weird human in any universe okay) with his one (1) bag of possessions plus a box of books.

The ensuing plot mostly revolves around Rachel and Tobias pretending not to have feelings about sleeping together while they try to leverage Jake and Cassie into so much as holding hands instead of nervously tiptoeing around each other the whole time.  Also, it includes Jake laying down some House Rules, such as #2: All house residents must be wearing AT LEAST pants and/or a shirt at all times in all public areas, as well as all pertinent underwear.  And also #5: No drinking on school nights in the house.  And also #8: Thou shalt not risk getting arrested for illegal purchase of alcohol when Ax’s adult brother is LITERALLY an hour away and willing to buy the stuff legally.

All I really have worked out for this is some general backstory and people’s majors, I haven’t even gotten through the second chapter, despite my best efforts.

Rachel and Jake intentionally went to the same college Anywhere But Home because Tom just got out of a cult and it was making life a little stressful with their parents hovering anxiously at all times.  Rachel switched from gymnastics to krav maga, jiu jitsu, and kickboxing when she was thirteen and is majoring in kinesiology so that she can open her own self-defense studio.  Jake is a history major and Rachel considers it her sacred duty to make sure he has a life outside of the library and the gym, which is how he meets Cassie, Rachel’s new best friend, and almost swallows his tongue.  Cassie is on the pre-med track so that she can become a vet, and fills all of her additional credit openings with ecology classes because she’s like that.  Marco is kind of idly majoring in comp sci because it’s what his dad does and he doesn’t have a really heavy interest in anything else, but at the end of his sophomore year he declares a poli sci major out of the fucking blue and crams his schedule to finish on time.  Tobias is an English major who wants to be a teacher, and also he has a minor in studio drawing and a fascination with birds.  And of course there’s Ax who, for some perverse reason, really genuinely loves physics and comp sci and manages to major in both at once through sheer enthusiasm.  And Elfangor is alive and kind of thrilled that his baby brother has Real Friends, and he comes over and hangs out at the house sometimes and is much beloved by all of them, not least because he provides them with advance copies of video games sometimes and also bought the house PlayStation.

okay so you know how you take a derivative normally?  now take the derivative of that derivative.

if you really want to Suffer™, you can continue taking derivatives until you’re out of exponents or until you burst into tears too heavy to read the equations.

Originally posted by endless-puppies

Thank you, dear anon!  I’m hoping to have some headcanons up soon!