a between-scenes ficlet for 3.10: International Break | roy x jamie | roy x keeley
i’d been saving this bit for later on in my series but since it doesn’t work for my plans post-3.10, please enjoy it cleaned up and contained in this ficlet. :) let’s place this while roy is working on his apology chicken scratch letter, but before he gives it to her.
“Do you…want to come inside?”
Roy leans heavily on his good leg, hands at his hips, and scuffs his foot against the pavement. He shakes his head, mouth tightly pressed closed. The sky is a milky early morning blue; a post-dawn sort of blank slate that casts the shadows of Jamie’s face in a strange greyscale.
Jamie frowns, stepping outside as he closes the door behind him. “You sure? Because you look like you’re about to throw up.”
idk it’s just the way that unless they’re a bat, characters are just completely disposable. the way everything outside of batcomics is seen as so worthless, everything about a character will be erased not for any particular reason or with any real goal but seemingly just because the writer couldn’t be bothered to even google them and not a single editor had a problem with them replacing their entire history with some random bullshit they just made up on the spot
can you imagine if a writer had dick make a passing comment about how bruce took him in as a baby after finding him in the dumpster his real parents had thrown him in shortly after he was born
and instead of just ignoring it because what the fuck are you talking about, future writers who also couldn’t care less about him just rolled with it and suddenly, the entire history of this character was just GONE in favor of this one random line about him being a trash can baby
the actual core reason why people will hand-wring and fearmonger over kink, and to a lesser extent body modification, and to a lesser extent than that extreme sports, then contact sports, etc. is because capitalism preserves the christian ideal of external ownership of the body (i.e. being “made in his image” and an extension of god) but offloads the divine onto labor and the production of capital, which is why you’ll never see these people putting 1/100th the effort into spreading awareness about the fatality rates in logging, oil rigging, garbage collection, or any other inherently dangerous field. the sin isn’t the destruction of one’s own body, but instead the leisurely and “senseless” destruction of property and potential labor rightfully owned by capital. it’s only self-destruction if you do it in your freetime. sorry i went off theme, boyhole girlspit dying bird motif etc
whenever someone’s like “can we normalize not having casual sex?” “can we normalize not drinking alcohol?” I’m just like….you realize you can live a fulfilling life where you don’t do those things without expecting a bunch of strangers to start abstaining from things you don’t like en masse, right? I’m sorry if you’ve been in situations where someone made you feel inadequate for not wanting to hook up with people and binge drink but I think you can opt out and do your own thing without making a point of looking down on people who have a different idea of fun than you do.
so you’re anthony j. crowley, long-time exile from heaven and recent exile from hell, and you’ve finally figured out that the mess of overwhelming and infuriating and intoxicating feelings you’ve been harboring for the only being in the universe you’ve ever been able to rely on might, whoopsies, be something a little bit like love. but not love the way you remember heaven loved you, or the way they told you god loved you (they lied), but love like the humans do it: messy, and awkward, and incongruously infinite, and so, so fragile.
and, well. okay, you think. this’ll be horrible. embarrassing for both of us, probably. but i’ll tell him. you’ve never been a coward, no matter what the other demons might say. screw your courage to the sticking place, or whatever. macbeth. aziraphale loved that one.
so you talk yourself into it, you gather every scrap of courage and honesty you’ve got left, and you say, all right, angel, i’ve got something to say, only aziraphale’s got something to say, too, and–
aziraphale doesn’t love you back.
or. he does, but he loves the ghost of the angel you used to be, not the person you’ve made yourself since. he loves you, but he loves you like god did–loves you good, and quiet, and dull. he loves you without your grief, or your anger, without even that first bite of the apple. he wants you like that again, he says. defanged, like the Antichrist’s domesticated hellhound.
(you worked for hell for a long time, and for god for a long time before that. you’re intimately familiar with what it is to offer someone everything they’ve ever wanted, and then to twist it, to mutilate it, into an unrecognizable hell of their own choosing. you’re not sure why it surprises you anymore. you’re not sure why you keep letting the surprises hurt.)
and so you do the thing you’ve done since the beginning, because you’ve never been able to stop yourself: you push. you push hard, and you grab him, and he’s so angry and you kiss him and you don’t think about it, don’t think about it, this is the most important temptation of your life, the only one that’s ever mattered–
and he forgives you.
so you leave. at least that way you can do it before he does. you’ve always been a step ahead and to the left; stupid to think this would ever be different. stupid to think he might choose you, with all of heaven and earth spread out in front of him. nothing lasts forever, not even the stars.
in general i would say that “it’s not fun if they’re totally unrecognisable” is my fandom thesis. like the point of fanfic etc is putting your favourite little guys in situations. where’s the appeal if they’ve been through so many fanon spin cycles that they’re barely even your guys anymore
loads of people are reblogging this like “this is why i don’t like AUs” and honestly this is not an anti AU post by any stretch of the imagination. if you think “alternate universe fic” = “completely unrecognisable characters” then love and light but you need to read some better AUs!! putting your little guys in a completely different setting or time period or making them baristas or racing drivers or pop stars or whatever doesn’t inherently render them unrecognisable and in fact the APPEAL of a well done AU fic is seeing how your favourite guys deal with a completely different set of circumstances. support your local wacky AU today x
truth is if you can’t respect weird people who you don’t know/aren’t autistic then you don’t actually respect autistic people. yeah, sure, you can have your autism site or whatever but are you nice to the person on the bus who’s moving around weirdly? are you nice to the middle aged man in the grocery store wearing chunky noise cancelling headphones? do you think that the little kid who just will not stop talking about her odd stamp collecting obsession is weird and annoying? you don’t just get to be nice to freaks and weirdos once they tell you they’re autistic. you still have to be fucking nice to people and that includes the ones that you don’t want to be kind towards
