Chaos Magic Dumpster Fire

Some things were easier said than done, wasn’t it? He was bleeding from several places and his head hurt as if a horse had caved his skull in. He could see it—his brains splattered like crushed watermelon on the pavement. But maybe he was only imagining things. His eyes were closed after all, and he was very very cold. Watermelons are summer things. Summer things were balmy days in their squat. Days when it was too hot to even pretend to be all hard and punk. They haven’t had to pretend to be hard or punk for quite a bit now, and they didn’t squat anymore but let’s just say old habits are hard to break, yeah?

Someone grabbed him by his arms and propped him up and he nearly hurled his lunch at him. It was probably Ethan. Most likely to be Ethan given that the man’s perfume was thick and not a little nauseating in his current condition. He opened his eyes to a blurry image of his friend and his lunch threatened to come up again. It said nothing about him, not really.

“Ethan, come back—”

Why’d this always have to happen? Well, not always-always, there were plenty of days and nights that didn’t see Ethan’s friends in various dire situations or grievous injuries, objectively he knew that, but confirmation bias was a hell of a drug and dearest Ripper had a very distressing tendency to get hit in the head really hard by whatever the week’s crisis was and then say things like no, Ethan, don’t test your experimental healing spells on me, I’m not a guinea pig — and don’t you buy a real guinea pig to test it on either! or it’s fine, I’ll just walk it off.

“Ethan, come back—”

... Didn’t seem like he was going to walk this one off, honestly, but the instruction about using one’s friends as test subjects had been codified into a rule since that one incident with the teeth.

“I’ll be right back, mate, hang in there,” Ethan muttered, then did the sensible thing and called an ambulance from the nearest payphone, gave the address, stole a water bottle, and headed back to his friend’s side.

Ripper still looked awfully pale, and there was definitely blood in his hair and the beginnings of a nasty-looking bruise. Probably another scar to add to the collection then, once they were through with this. Weren’t they getting too old for that? Phil had said they were. Oh well, that was a thing to think about when no one was bleeding, probably.

@liminalchaos​ |  are you trying to get yourself killed ?

“Yesss.” Ripper hissed, a manic grin decorating his face. “Then I’d raise meself back from the dead jus’ like I did everyone else!” He made a grand sweeping gesture as he spun in place, his tattered, dirty robe twirling around him. It had been a reddish colour once. Now it was only -ish.

He turned suddenly to the other man, closing their distance with a keenness of a predator. “Why d’you care?”

That everyone else was carrying a lot, Ethan had to say. There were a few ragged corpses, some human, some not -- nothing more than empty things puppeteered by an external force, really. Ethan knew his way around walking corpses, after all, though necromancy had never been his area of expertise.

The man had Ripper’s face and Ripper’s voice and Ripper’s power, that power Ethan’d always envied, but Ripper was always... stronger, somehow. He couldn’t think of what circumstances could have driven any version of his old friend to this sort of state, to something like shattered glass behind bloodshot eyes. He’d be scared of Ripper rounding on him like that, but coming from this broken reflection it was mostly pathetic. Mostly. Was that the truth of the First Evil, really? The horror of despair, rather than of fear?

“Er…”

Call it a professional hazard, but at any given point it’s decently likely that Ethan has, in fact, recently imbibed, injected, or otherwise consumed something experimental, mind-altering, generally magical, or nominally medicinal. Or, well, any or all of the above. The past forty-eight hours are admittedly a bit foggy, but that’s not evidence one way or another, and frankly Ethan thinks his natural charms(?) tend to shine through regardless of the situation. Well, when in doubt…    

“Why? Feel like making up for lost drinks, mate?”

Ok like… If the piece of media you’re making relies entirely on relationships, context, or concluded plot lines from another piece of media for its emotional impact, tension, or resolution, you’re writing fanfic.

Look, I love fanfic. I love fandom. I’ve read some absolutely impeccable fic. I love the feeling of getting excited about Stuff with other people who also love Stuff. I love AU fics that are packed with little shout-outs to the original text. But in a fandom space, the underlying assumption is that if you’re in the Stuff tag you are already familiar with Stuff — and that’s not the case with actual published media. Shoutouts and easter eggs for longterm fans are fun and good, but every longterm fan may well be showing this thing to someone who never ever engaged with Stuff before, and they should both derive enjoyment from it. Even a sequel or a prequel has its own internal plot — someone starting on book/season 3 of a five part series will probably be confused about the characters, setting, and larger context of what’s going on, but should be able to follow the actual in-the-text plot and the actual in-the-text interactions among the characters. (You can start Buffy at 3.1 and have no idea who Buffy is supposed to be or who she was, but the immediate plot — Anne, Lily, demon sweatshop, losing, reclaiming, and creating identity — still makes sense.) A spinoff, a reboot, or (ffs!) a story set in a previously-used ‘verse or setting should be able to carry its own weight no matter who the viewer is — even for the target audience’s mom’s neighbor’s friend who stopped in to pick up sugar and is now vibing in the armchair instead of leaving, or someone who picked up the book third-hand at a garage sale.

Ripper laughed, or tried to. He found he couldn’t smile very widely on account of the bandages covering half of his face and neck. It was hiding what was to become a massive scar of epic proportions. Or, he thought privately, a hideously disfiguring one. Shelving that particular doubt for his future self to worry about, he noticed Ethan may have put some distance between them but he was still holding his arms as if meaning to permanently put him in his place. Rip managed to pull one arm free to put it around Ethan for a proper hug this time, moving his hand up and down his back reassuringly. 

“You’ll figure out how, I’ve no doubt of it. ‘sides, you won’t be alone — make Phillip do it,” he added. “Y’know he likes feelin’ important.” Another warm pat on Ethan’s back and Ripper sighed softly, cheek resting against Ethan’s hair. “I’m fine, I promise.”