I mean, you could have gone with “some people like it and others don’t.”
…I could have but we all knew I wasn’t gonna
littlestartopaz asked: Harry, Corlath, and Mathin! For the headcanon meme!
Topaz, coming through with the obscure fandoms! For this ask meme, and Harry, Corlath, and Mathin are from The Blue Sword.
A: what I think realistically
I have said this before, but you can pry the headcanon from my cold dead hands. The Damarians have some tradition in which the family of the bride (and normally the husband, but Corlath is the last of his family and it’s terrible) gives her away at the wedding. Mathin stands in as Harry’s father, a parent from the Hills, and gives her away as the Daughter of the Riders after riding roughshod over Richard’s protestations. Mathin cries a little and Harry cries a little and Corlath cries a little and no one ever says anything about it except in songs and stories where the devotion of them all is hailed as Serious Business.
Corlath very quietly slaps Mathin with a small title, whatever he can get away with, as the father of the new Queen. It takes Mathin a full year to notice.
Alsooooo, Corlath can draw, although paper is expensive and therefore rare in the Hills. He goes to the trouble of getting himself paper and charcoals during the winter rains for something to do with his hands and draws pretty much only Harry, Harry on Sungold, Harry bringing down the mountains, Harry laughing at dinner, Harry smiling at him stretched out on their bed. Harry thinks it’s adorable.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
I think we’ve discussed this but THE RIDERS HAVE TO GET BORED DURING THE WINTER RAINS.
Y’all. My dudes. Hear me out here: the Riders playing pranks on each other. Normally, the way these things shake out is “everyone is afraid of Corlath not because he’s the king but because he’s frankly terrifying between his tactical training and his kelar, but they’re more terrified of Mathin because Mathin is the ultimate Prank Lord.” And then Harry shows up and radically changes the balance of affairs.
Because listen. Harry has a bit of a learning curve to catch up with, so they go easy on her at first. But then she lays a trap for Mathin after a little bit of idle conversation with Corlath and she gets him good. Mathin, for three days, is dyed bright red with the concoction Harry managed to mix up. And it’s war. After a week and a half, Corlath and Harry make a truce of necessity–no pranks allowed in their own chambers–but otherwise Harry is an ally of whoever charms her most at the time. The fact that the servants in the City all adore Harry means that she becomes the unquestioned champion by the end of her first winter. Corlath doesn’t take it personally, honestly he’s kind of thrilled that she kicked his ass so handily–tbh Corlath is eternally that Will Smith picture when it comes to Harry, even when they’re fighting.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Corlath is the last of his family. His mother always had a fragile constitution, and died of a plague sweeping through the City. His father died not long afterward–officially in battle, but everyone agreed that is was from a broken heart. He just couldn’t face the world without her. Corlath rose to power quite young, even by the reckoning of the long-lived Hill Kings, and quite alone. The Riders were all he had left, and for all that they tried to be enough, it made the City ache to see their joyous child prince grow into a serious warrior king. Corlath still smiled, of course, but not as easily, and his bright laughter was hard-earned–it wasn’t that Corlath was depressed, it was that he was controlled, and stiffly so, at all times.
It’s hard to have close friends, let alone anything near family, when you can’t be sure of meeting anyone’s eyes. Both Corlath’s parents had kelar, and he envies them for that security–he, who carries more kelar than anyone in living memory, is always aware of how much damage he can do. He drove a servant mad, once, by accident when he was a young boy, and cried for two days until his mother managed to restore most of the man’s mind. Corlath has had few friends and fewer lovers, as a result.
Beyond all that Harry does to endear herself to the Riders, the thing that truly wins them over is that they haven’t seen so much emotion–anger and joy and frustration and everything in between–on their king’s face in long years.
D: what would never
work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
First of all, canon is not shit and you can fight me.
But seriously, I’ve said this before too but I’m so serious about it, Harry meets Aerin in the flesh at some point. And also Aerin visits Harry in her dreams and at first Harry’s very deferential and nervous, but she lightens up over time, and Aerin gives her advice on being a queen and being a legend and being a mother. (At some point, when Harry is just exhausted of everything and frustrated with everyone and ready to ride off into the desert just to get away, Aerin turns up and tells a story about a very vain girl named Galanna who got her eyelashes shaved off and could have been rolled out a window, she was sleeping so heavily. Harry laughs herself sick in the dream and wakes up smiling for the first time in weeks.)
littlestartopaz replied to your post
Cause you were opinionated on medical equality. I just remember there was a spam of them when Tumblr suggested you. If i never mentioned that.
THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH
littlestartopaz asked: For the fic you'd never write: Diana/Steve Rogers "Running Parallel, but Never Meeting (Until Now)"
(YES GOOD)
AO3 summary: By the time she sits down at his table, Steve thinks he’s aspired to be this woman for his entire life.
Actual summary: As a little boy in New York, Steve hears from his mother, who was a nurse in the Great War, about the people she worked with. A man in a greatcoat, his sleek black hair tied into twin braids, runs into them one day and she hugs him and introduces him (the Chief, Stevie, he kept us all smiling) and he tells Steve fantastic stories about a woman who could charge a trench all on her own.
Steve grows up and remembers her and tries to join the Army and gets the 4F stamp a lot before Erskine finds him. He asks Erskine, curious, about what inspired the super soldier formula, and Erskine tells him about his sister’s daughter, who lived in a little village in Germany and who saw a woman in a black cloak and armor demolish an entire occupying battalion. (Diana hears about the man who saved a child by using a taxi door as a shield–no sharp edges–and she smiles as she lays out a map and tries to decide where to go, where the war needs her most. This…this is a worse war.) Steve thinks about the woman, about the shield the Chief described (the Chief is in his sixties, now, but he still keeps the soldiers smiling), as he breaks into a HYDRA prison with a dinky tin shield, and again when he picks a vibranium disc rather than Howard’s high-tech alternatives. (Diana hears about Captain America and laughs a little–they have started to call her Wonder, the Wonder Woman, so she can’t laugh too much–and wishes that the war didn’t need her so much elsewhere, so that she could meet him.) Steve and the Howlies pass through a little village in Germany one day, and there’s a picture in their tavern, in a place of honor, like a shrine, of a woman in armor looking stern and triumphant, with a much-younger Chief at her shoulder, and it makes Steve smile. (Diana wanders to the States, after the war is over, because she has heard the tragedy of Steve Rogers and she wants to see the place that produced that man, and she meets a woman with sad eyes and dark curls. They talk about their respective Steves and kick some ass and maybe one time Peggy kisses her and maybe Diana kisses her back.)
Diana arrives from her job in London (it’s hideous, but she’s used to it) three days after the Chitauri destroy a huge portion of New York. She works for two weeks straight, moving debris, searching for the missing, reuniting families, doing whatever she can to help, sleeping for as little time as she can manage. The Avengers are out helping too, and she smiles to see them, even when Tony Stark treats her like something of a fool and Dr. Banner mistakes her for a patient.
She goes to an old diner that she remembers from the last time she was here, in Brooklyn (Peggy always said to start in Brooklyn, in New York), and sees a blond head propped on a fist and she smiles, slipping into the booth opposite him.
“Hello, Captain Rogers,” she says, and he startles to attention.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I–oh my God,” he blurts. “You’re her!“
littlestartopaz asked: Parents meme: Alanna the Lioness and Natsume Takashi (from Natsume Yuujincho) Alanna: fighty, heavy sense of justice, does what she wants. Takashi: kind to a fault, accepts (almost) everyone. Takashi is the hands on, quiet parent. Growing up he seems like kind of a push over, but he doesn't humor pushing boundaries in his own quiet way. A parent you know will never be against you. Alanna teaches you how to fight and stand firm. Stand for what you believe and do it even if society is against it.
…this is weirdly accurate.
For @littlestartopaz : Steve
catches Wanda sulking and invites her to Disney Night with Nat and Clint. Wanda teases him, and Vision ends up there
too. Better yet, not MCU so we can also
have her brother. Or just ignore that
part of the MCU.
GOOD. Also, Quicksilver is alive and healthy after a while in a healing coma, as speedsters do. I read a wild AU once where he was shot and died, and the comments were full of complaints about how it didn’t make sense. I am RIGHT THIS MOMENT deciding that this fic and this and this and possibly some others with small tweaks exist in the same universe as this one (I do not have a timeline to speak of) and also I’m disregarding that same wild AU’s belief that Clint lives? On a farm? Rather than a shitty apartment building in NYC and the Tower/Mansion? And that Nat and Clint are not soulmates on a level that makes romance look downright petty, kay-thanks-bye. AND also I’m so glad we all remember how Wanda and Pietro were kids who were pressganged and conned into service of HYDRA rather than being voluntary recruits.
It wasn’t like Wanda had expected her relationship with Pietro to be all roses after he came out of his coma, but her worry had also done a spectacular job of blurring out some of his less desirable qualities as a brother. Like, just for example, his overwhelming, pointless, overprotective bullshit. She muttered a bitter Sokovian curse under her breath and stripped off her jacket, dropping it on the bed without a care for the soot that would certainly stain her sheets. The rest of her uniform was given the same careless treatment, abandoned on the floor as she yanked on a pair of leggings and a soft shirt two sizes too big.
She wasn’t even sure who she was more frustrated with—Pietro, for yanking her out of the way of a spider ‘bot that she could have taken care of, or herself, for losing focus for long enough to let him take the hit for her. Someday, he was going to suddenly realize that his fragile twin sister had gone and turned into an adult while he was busy fending off the world. She hoped it was sooner rather than later, or she might have to beat it into him. Assuming he even lived that long, which was beginning to look increasingly unlikely.
“Stupid nervous bastard,” she muttered in English, and flopped down on her bed, flat on her back with her fingers laced over her face. “Martyr.”
“Hazard of the profession,” Steve’s voice said, amused. Wanda turned her head, untangling her fingers to look toward the door, where Steve was leaning against her doorjamb. He was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, standard fare for any of them after showering upon returning from a mission. His hair was a rumpled mess and he had a nasty purple and blue bruise marbling over one cheek, where Bruce had diagnosed a cracked zygomatic. In combination with the blood that had been leaking from a split in his lip, Natasha had cheerfully commented that he was looking very patriotic indeed.
“Put ice on your face,” she said, frowning at him across the landscape of her comforter. Steve grinned at her, and winced, raising the cold pack in his hand back to his cheek.
“Like I said,” Steve said. His voice was muffled, but his eyes were bright and wild with adrenaline, like blue fire. “We’re all fucking martyrs, or so I’m told. Your brother just wants to keep you safe.”
“Well, I just spent months at his bedside because he took eight bullets to the chest and severed his spine,” Wanda said, sitting up sharply. “So he can get over it.”
littlestartopaz asked: So that makes Steve Patro.... Patty. And Bucky is Achilles? (I can't spell. :x)
Yeah, Patroclus would be default-Steve and Achilles is the unfortunate victim of getting a bit mindwiped. Which incidentally is not how I would assign those roles if, say for example, I was going to do some kind of reincarnation plot. Because literally the entire post-CA:TWS plotline can be summed up as “sing, o muse, of the wrath of Steven Grant Rogers when you fuck with Bucky Barnes,” which means that obviously Steve is the golden god-born hero of legend and Bucky is his anchor to mortal life and the cause for great ruin of their many-armed enemy upon his death at their hands. Complete with Pyrrhic victory.
For @littlestartopaz: 34 - Vision/Wanda
When you’re around I don’t know how to hide my feelings. I count in binary, in my head. zero one one zero one one and you count clouds. (while you count clouds)
So it was going to be a stand-alone Vision/Wanda thing but then I started it after eight hours of researching WWI and??? Instead it’s an immediate prequel to the first Vision/Wanda fic I ever wrote, it’s mostly Natasha being smug, and Wanda doesn’t even appear, I don’t know what happened.
Natasha prided herself on being difficult to sneak up on. It had served her well for their brief stint in Wakanda, but now they were in America again, scattered up the East Coast, and she was sitting on the roof of one of her less secret safehouses, watching the sun go down. And any dense half-blind idiot could see a six-foot bright red robot in a cape descending onto a roof in Middle of Nowhere, Appalachia.
The only reason she didn’t immediately yank out the gun she’d tucked away under the corner of her blanket was because Stark, Banner, and Rhodes were all about as subtle as…well, a six-foot bright red robot in a cape. She was confident that she’d notice them coming, and if she didn’t they deserved to cuff her.
the power goes out in the fray
For @littlestartopaz: What would have happened if Leia was sent to Tatooine and Luke to Alderaan?
This sounds like an excuse for my very favorite thing: blatantly strong-in-the-Force Jedi Leia. I was gonna do headcanons but instead HERE is the first scene of Leia Skywalker of Tatooine finding some old asshole in a brown robe. *backflips out*
Leia scowled at the old man—Ben Kenobi, her ass—and the droid at her knee warbled happily.
“You lied,” Leia said. The sweet-faced boy draped in white robes on the recording had asked for an Obi-wan, but Kenobi’s aren’t exactly a dime a dozen since the old homestead was annihilated by the Tuskens. She can do the math.
“From a certain point of view,” Kenobi said with a shrug, smiling down at the droid.
“The boy on the recording–”
[Prince Luke Organa of Alderaan] the droid offered.
“—very helpful, thanks, Prince Luke said you were his only hope,” Leia said, prowling forward. “What exactly qualifies you for that, old man?”
Kenobi looked up at her with a start at that, blinking pale blue eyes at her, and gave a brittle half-laugh. “You’re very much like your father, when I knew him,” he said distantly. And then he launched into an epic tale about Jedi and her father and Leia stood, feeling shock shiver through her. She had known that her father was a general, but a Jedi?
@littlestartopaz asked for A, G, and P from this fandom ask meme!
A: Your current OTP (Topaz specified ATLA)
…I’m not very interesting and I actually really like Aang/Katara, but my favorite ship is Zuko/Mai and I’m perpetually really cranky that she’s apparently??? Not his Queen/Empress/Lady Wife/whatever you call it???? They’re a really devoted and incredibly salty pairing and that speaks to me. And also I like watching Mai wreck people while Zuko stands back and smirks.
G: What was your first fandom?
X-Men. Since I was seven. I wanted to be a mutant and go to Xavier’s about 10000000x more than I wanted to go to Hogwarts.
P: Invent a random AU for any fandom
The AU in which the Animorphs manage to drive off the Yeerks and still keep their shit pretty much 100% under wraps because the BPRD from Hellboy catches on before the general populace and makes all the ex-Controllers sign more nondisclosure agreements than anyone ever because they’re kind of like “…we don’t…have an aliens department…but we’re usually responsible for this kind of shit?” And they get kind of high-key glomped by the BPRD for the brand-spanking new BARD (Bureau of Alien Research and Defense), which is comprised of like five squeaky new agents, an ex-Marine captain who lasts about two and a half seconds before he quits, and an archivist who almost bawls her eyes out when she’s shown the stack of paperwork she has to do. Plus four sixteen-year-old humans, an Andalite who opts to stick around and play galactic liason for his best friends, and a talking hawk.
Some headcanons:
- The BARD has a truly astounding agent overturn rate, because people come in, and about 75% of them leave when they suddenly realize that they’re expected to take Jake’s lead. It’s a problem. It’s more of a problem because Marco, Tobias, and Rachel gleefully (and unsubtly) take bets. Tobias, for the first time literally ever, has money, because he has an uncanny knack for picking out the ones who will make it. He buys the others stuff because what the fuck else is he going to do with it.
- Hellboy thinks they’re the greatest. He worries because they are Very Young, but also: Rachel morphed elephant and cleaned his clock, he thinks they’re the greatest. And he gets being hurled into a war you don’t want to or aren’t ready to fight. Hellboy comes to visit the BARD all the time, especially since it’s an Approved Outing according to the BPRD. Also he and Tobias are weirdly good friends, which confuses a lot of people.
- Abe Sapien speaks fluent thoughtspeech and Ax finds him fascinating, they’re good friends. The first time he has a conversation with the others, Rachel punches him in the face for reading her mind. Jake comes pretty close too. Fortunately, Abe believes in the principle of ‘forgive and forget’ and is perfectly willing to not read their minds, so the lot of them get along okay after that.
- Rachel and Liz actually don’t match ideologies very well, they prickle off each other too much–being unable to control herself is Rachel’s greatest anxiety, and relishing the destruction is Liz’s greatest fear, and they scare each other. Liz and Cassie match up worse, though, because Liz is still the sort of woman who will ruthlessly immolate an entire room in order to save Hellboy. That’s not to say the Animorphs don’t like Liz, though, they like her just fine and she immediately installs herself as their de facto big sister. Her self-assumed duties include:
- making sure Jake remembers to eat
- listening to Marco complain about how fucking stupid bureaucracy is and how much easier when it was, quote, “just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am and blow up a McDonalds”
- providing Tobias with a slightly more useful sounding board regarding Rachel than, well, Marco
- teaching Cassie to meditate
- explaining colloquialisms to Ax (she’s gotten weirdly good at this from hanging around Hellboy and Abe so much)
- letting Rachel rage when Rachel needs it, because if there’s one thing she gets, it’s the occasional need to scream yourself hoarse just because everything is so unfair
