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

cthulhu-with-a-fez asked: like at least when people in the 1800s went to settle things with firearms it was a mutually agreed-upon challenge with actual rules and a doctor on site to handle injuries.

peradii:

………………..do you know how this would go. I THINK YOU KNOW HOW THIS WOULD GO. Our boy gets twitter because no one takes to the modern world of EVERYONE HAS AN OPINION AT ALL TIMES ON EVERYTHING like Alexander Hamilton, gobshite without compare. His handle, for those who want to fight him, is adotham because AlexanderHamilton was taken and JeffersonIsACocklesswonder is both too long and inappropriate (another aspect of modern life Alexander loves: the insults. He swears in the baroque, joyful, incomprehensible fashion of Malcolm Tucker because he is Alexander Hamilton. Bitch.)

(Bitch is not punctuation, Nick Fury will say to him later. Alexander Hamilton begs to differ. Bitch.)

Anyway. Anyway. You know how it happens: some troll tweets him. @adotham come fight me you immigrant cunt and Hamilton tweets back: name a time and place and no one ever replies. 

“They wish to duel me, do they not?” he says, Macbook on his knees, head on one side: quizzical, black-eyed, gorgeous. Captain America blinks.

“Not…precisely,” he says. How does one explain the etiquette of twitter trolling?  Steve doesn’t understand it himself. Hamilton, tiny and quivering with pent up energy, ready to fight the world: be it with quill, blog or gun. He’s got the most magnificent eyes and the most aristocratic nose and –

– Steve has always been confident in his sexuality. He is bi as fuck and happily involved with Bucky, Winter Soldier, World’s Most Deadly Assassin and current ambassador to Wahanda. 

But my God, my God, Hamilton makes people forget that they are committed – 

– almost. Almost. Anyway: he says, “I don’t think they actually want to fight you,” he says. 

“But they challenged my honour,” says Hamilton, hotly. 

He responds to every threat of violence thus: a demand for a time and a place. He gets increasingly frustrated. Not once does a troll respond. Eventually, they stop entirely – mainly  because Hamilton learns a little of Tony’s computer prowess, tracks one down, and shows up outside his house with a pair of pistols. “Guns drawn at dawn,” he pronounces, and the chubby forty year old blinks and stutters and stammers and Hamilton grins, sharp and feral, and says, “Stop writing cheques you can’t fucking cash.”

Anonymous asked: force ghost!Anakin's adventures in being an asshole even while dead. go.

peradii:

• Here is how it does not happen: Anakin Skywalker dies. Fluid mouldering in his lungs, internal organs collapsing into puddles of useless rancid slurry, blood thickening with toxins – but he dies at peace, he dies with his eyes wide open, he dies with his son (his beloved and only boy) crouched over him and he wakes on the other side with softness and light gracing his unscarred brow, his wife at his side, flowers twisted in the starlit curls of her hair.
  
• This is how it does not happen: the ghost of Anakin Skywalker is a thin, flimsy thing, coming to life here and there, always bright blue, always smiling, offering paternal advice to those who would listen.
  
• This is another thing that does not happen: Rey sees a strange man cresting the red dunes and she never sees his face, only the brightness of his eyes, and she is comforted – for she does not know his name, only that he is a kindly force, only that even in the feral iron heart of Jakku she is watched over.
  
• Here is something that does happen: “Listen to me, you bastard, you bastard, you have to listen –” and Kylo Ren does not hear. Rather: he chooses not to hear. He is meditating. Sunmatter dances around him, catching on the flick-curl of his blackened cape. Well. He thinks that it is sunmatter; this is what Snoke has told him it is; and so this is what he believes; and of course it is not sunmatter but the fire-bright venom of Anakin Skywalker’s ghost. He’s not white-blue and delicate. He is burning.
  
• Of course he burns: he’s full of fury and everything I died for you are unmaking and if you want I will tell you how it feels to die drowning in your blood I will tell you and if you lay a hand – a finger – on my children, my darlings, then grandson or not I will show you –
  
• “You tore down every I built!” Padme screamed, when she saw him for the first time. His mouth half-cooked. His body spectral and quivering. And his lovely wife – no longer delicate and pale as a shivering lily but quicksilver and burning, bright as Alderaan falling into dust. Livid spots of colour on her cheeks. “You burned my diplomacy! I loved you but Maker above – I loved the council just as much – my sweet children were torn from my arms – I loved you so much and you destroyed everything I loved –”
  
• My darling –
• I love you –
• You were everything good in my world; the only good thing in my world –
• Skywalker, Skywalker, she had said, that is the – that was the problem –
• So here is the boy Anakin Skywalker, skin full of fire, and his afterlife is anything but easy.
  
• You wouldn’t, his son says to him, slack-jawed with horror, he’s your grandson, he’s –
  
• He’s destroying everything I built. You know I once knew a good woman. And she watched as someone she loved burn all she loved down. And she let him live. And I won’t make her mistake. Do you understand?
  
• You’re not Vader anymore; you don’t have to be so ruthless, Luke says, fretful and old and when did he become so old? Why does he look so much like Kenobi, bent-backed against the assault of the Force?
  
• “This isn’t Vader,” says Anakin Skywalker, “this is all me.” And it is true. He is a soldier. He is the saviour of the known and unknown world. He was torn from his mother’s arms and given a sword to hold instead of a hand. How else could he grow up? How else could he die?
  
• Listen to me listen to me listen to me he snarls in Kylo Ren’s ear and with each day the boy listens less and Anakin tries less. He is dead and he is furious and perhaps this is hell; this irony. He tore down Padme’s love and her lifework and now he must watch a sickly imitation of Vader do the same to his love, to his life.   
  
• Kylo Ren will, one day, lift his lightsabre against his mother – or his uncle. The blow will never fall. Anakin will pour his fury and fire and limitless power into the boy’s skull and burn him from the inside out. One day, the Knight of Ren will attempt to fufill what he thinks is Vader’s legacy. One day, he will learn – too late – that Vader is nothing, nothing, nothing compared to the anger of Anakin Skywalker.  
  

Anonymous asked: Raaaadiiiii, your MCU/Hamilton thing is killing me with how awesome it is, I am so sold on everything about this, my life is so much better with this in it. Do you have any more to say on the matter?

peradii:

OF COURSE I DO. btw i am taking tremendous liberties with mcu canon because i don’t read the comics. i don’t know how infinity stones work. 

• Alright, alright: not the last ever showing of Hamilton but the actors are going their separate ways and it won’t be the same after this night, and oh how bright the lights are and Lin Manuel Miranda’s eyes wet with tears and history has its eyes on you and eleven Tony awards and history made, history in the making, an audience singing along in their hearts and minds, hands tight in laps as if in prayer, thoughts tangled along the same lines: if only there was time – 
  
• Here’s the thing: there is an infinity stone in New York. Left behind by the Chitauri invasion: waiting, waiting, waiting. It pulses red and violet and gold, all the colours from the heart of the universe, shaped from the very stuff of creation, carried in the claws of one of Thanos’s finest warriors, cast aside in panic as the Hulk attacked. And there it has waited – I am not biding my time; I am lying in wait – for something, for an awakening, for the sort of mad passion and love and song that created it in the first place –
• have I done enough? have I told your story?
• Infinity stones are alive – for a given definition of alive. Think insectoid levels of sentience. They don’t understand morality but they understand this: what they need to survive. And beneath New York, buried first under rubble and then under construction, the stone senses the hungry pulse of humanity. It stirs. It vanishes, leaving a nebula of colours that defy human description. And it reappears beneath a Broadway stage. And as the music fades away and the emotion infuses it with heat and life it dissolves into a reaching, grasping thing and – if you only had time – 
• Alexander Hamilton dies. This is written; it cannot be unwritten. But the belief, the tremendous desperate cry from an audience in 2016, coupled with the energy of a dying infinity stone, coupled with a patch of reality thinned by invasion from an other world – 
• He wakes up in a dumpster, somehow twenty again. If I only had time –
• Are you telling me, says Lin Manuel Miranda, wet-eyed and disbelieving, that I resurrected Hamilton through the power of song  – and Stark starts saying something about transdimensional reach and wormholes and Thor laughs mightily, claps a hard hand on his shoulder and says yes great one, that is what you have done.