#2pistols

@2pistols | SYMBOL HC PROMPTS.

so many ways to answer this question. t'challa has a habit of building many masks. i wouldn't consider him "two-faced", as he never intends to stab his loved ones in the back. but... the version of himself presented to strangers is meticulously curated—a potent fusion of diplomatic poise, unreadable stillness, and language, as firm or gentle, as it needs to be. with strangers, i'll say he's approachable, but he does have a disposition about him that lets people know not to get overly familiar with him, unless he allows it. he's not cruel, but his title instills him with boundaries he naturally enforces, and if he needs to remind somebody of his position, then he will do so.

outside that, he purposefully presents as a neutral, until the situation calls for his exact position with the person or the conversation at hand.

but with those he trusts? he does not lower his guard so much as he shifts the posture of it. those closest to him often don't realize how thoroughly he's studied them: their tells, their history. he maps people like explorers maps new terrain. out of love. but love, for t'challa, is often entangled with his penchant for preparation.

because he is the boy who lost his father to a foreigner who should'ven ever been able to breach wakanda's borders. because he remembers betrayal, the sounds of it, those who proudly sided with klaw in his invasion, those who were silent when it happened. because the throne didn't just crown him as the boy-king... it isolated him. and that isolation taught him that even those within your circle could be liabilities if you did not fully understand them.

so he learns people. methodically... psychologically. what makes them waver? what compels them to rise? what unhealed wound still influences their decision-making? which lines not to cross, and which ones must be crossed if that time comes? he learns this secret in conversations or observation; he doesn't ask for them. it all becomes classified information in the safe in his mind.

this often makes his relationships feel uneven ( and he received plenty of critique from his peers from it when they found out ). because he knows people far more intimately than they know him. they share their lives freely. he stores their details behind soft humor, casual, unassuming conversations, and quiet nods. but when they ask him how he feels, he either redirects or offers information that may not prove too harmful. he doesn't do this to manipulate those in his circles. he does it out of fear.

what we should know about t'challa on this matter is this: he's not a cold-hearted man.

he remembers his people's birthdays. he notices when there's a change in your gait. he senses when you're about to be affected by the flu and will help you remedy it. he knows when the antisocials of the group retreat in the back of the meetings, trying to render themselves invisible. if you're close to the edge, he's the friend that'll intervene expeditiously and pull you back before your breaking point puts you in a place of no return. he's a caring man. he's a loyal man. and he is awfully generous. but...

it rarely comes as open emotional availability, even if it presents as such. this mainly pertains to the superpowered community, but generally, having a dynamic with t'challa means there is likely a contigency plans being developed as time goes on. it's for protection.

this means he treats his friends as both beloved people anddddd potential fault lines. because he lacks trust in the world.

so when things are cool, calm... he's warm in subtle, and big ways. but when things start to look chaotic, and he's pushed, t'challa becomes very clinical. he learns people's position on the board. he looks to dive further into the depths of his circumstances, the depth of his internal walls, and go through the files—those he knows, and those he doesn’t. it becomes most visible when necessary.

A PEEK INSIDE     :     jon's cd collection

He's not gambling tonight--he never does, growing up with a father being subjugated and eventually killed by the whims of fixers and their promises of fulfilling bets did everything it possibly could to put him off entirely from the sport. Furthermore, Matt knows he'd make a poor candidate to even attempt to dance with the fall of the dice, it more or less goes without saying that he's one of those people who has been built from the ground up to love risk and to be addicted to the feeling of his own adrenaline...'the man with no fear' is a title that runs deep beneath his skin, far beyond his Daredevil way of living. Indeed, Matt is probably more 'the man without fear' than he is anyone else, and that includes being Matt Murdock.

totally not serious edit of your chara // @2pistols

two hours of sleep makes it easy to want to laugh about that sentence in a way that might be outright cruel. two hours of sleep makes you scrubbed raw, vulnerable, heart flayed open. maybe irascible, to put it kindly. unless you're used to running on three, two, one hours of sleep—or none. bruce is.

still, though. if anyone knows anything about how something can root into you forever, he does. if you rooted out what happened in that alley, all that scar tissue, there'd be nothing left.

but that's not what the prince of gotham would say about any of it. bruce wayne, playboy whose most infamous tabloid headlines are about totaling his car, or the latest woman on his arm who'll be gone the next week? no. you don't let that man be someone grieving, especially not for this long.

years of travel was out of whimsy, of course, and nothing else.

so he smiles instead of letting out a bitter laugh. "guess it happens to everyone, doesn't it?"

it's not hard to dig up history about the countess of abbingdon. about her father's suicide, and disappearance from all of the common places. he knows that story. he was that story, too, in his own way. a few strokes of luck and they might've run into each other.

they both know that about each other. he's just the one who came back to what he calls home, and she's still traveling the world, at least according to the headlines.

Matt likes the snow because it provides a sort of dampening effect on the entire world, one big sonar-thermal blanket of acoustic padding stretched over frozen earth. Matt doesn't like vast temperature changes. The unconscious hiking of his shoulders up around his ears to keep them warm plucks at the sinew of his collarbone, tendons stiffening when only moments ago they had been rather limber and suffused with warmth. He crosses to the balcony and uses the back of his hands to push some of the snow that's gathered on the beams away so he can lean forward, propping his elbows up on the damp metal.

He said the clamor and chatter was washed away: of course that's not fully true, he can still hear plenty--he always hears plenty. But at least it's quieter out here. Matt shakes his head like it might clear his thoughts and draws in a few breaths in the style of an early meditation Stick taught him. His awareness focuses and funnels into the place where his elbows meet the cold ground, and then down into the balls of his feet where his heel bone is cradled by the leather imprint of his oxfords.

rare ooc with gully. | @2pistols

@falsedking been my evil twin for years, and i’ve always appreciated their work. i be on their ass when they get lazy because i’m tryna EAT. they understandably be tired—but when they bless the dash? it’s an entrée. a buffet.

some weird writer jacked a piece of their writing a few months back, and while that was some lame shit to witness, i get why someone would try. kai produces gold—and vibranium spoils—when we’re tossing ideas back and forth. i appreciate their presence, their clarity, and their commentary, especially when i’m trying to push through something or refine a concept.

i’d say kai’s the one who gets closest to the inner gears of my creative mine when i’m building something new—when it’s just sketches, prototypes, or sparks waiting to catch.

outside of that, when you see the “themes/explorations” pinned across my blogs, just know—they’re not filler. i’m genuinely interrogating those avenues, elevating my own consciousness as best as i can to express these characters in a way that means something. knowing where i want to go with a muse helps me grip the tension that lives inside their soul in a specific place. it’s what lets me write from the wound and not just the surface.

same goes for my prose. my style shifts depending on who i’m writing. some traits stay—there’s always a DNA to our voice—but i try to transform my tone, my rhythm, and the weight of my sentences depending on who’s speaking through me. i’m not an actor, but if you want to call that “method writing,” then yeah—i’ll own that.

none of my headcanons or meta are decoration. they’re a live wire. they help me breathe inside the skins of these virtual bodies. the inspiration always begins with my personal interests, and from there, i build a framework that lets the muse move in the world with intention.

as a self-educating student of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, etc. a lot of my process is about layering thought with feeling. i think about how real-life people, revolutionaries, thinkers, outcasts, and survivors might inform a muse. and some of those figures repeat—because a lot of my characters wrestle with similar themes.

for example—

killmonger: tupac, dedan kimathi & the mau mau, fidel castro, black liberation army, dr. khallid muhammad, sam greenlee, shaka zulu, dutty boukman, dr. amos wilson, dr. joy degruy, dessalines, denmark vesey, gabriel prosser, nat turner, ruchell magee, chairman mao, book of job, and lone wolf black veterans like chris dorner, kori ali muhammad, micah xavier johnson.

cyclops: malcolm x, martin luther king, assata shakur, robert f. williams, angela davis, harriet a. washington, yuri kochiyama, achille mbembe, amiri baraka, che guevara, ho chi minh, yahya sinwar, ghassan kanafani, edward said, the dprk (north korea) and their ties with african and diasporic liberation movements, etc.

louis du lac: james baldwin, eartha kitt, richard wright, prince, jimmy hendrix, basquiat, yukio mishima, paul robeson, alexandre dumas, david bowie, saul williams, gordon parks, gil-scott heron, keorapetse kgositsile, nina simone, ntozake shange, audre lorde, william dorsey swann, robert johns jr., etc.

ekko: huey p. newton, george jackson, ethedrige knight, jalil a. muntaqim, claude brown, geronimo pratt, christopher paul, fred hampton, walter dean myers, deacons of defense, black panther party. nation of islam, etc.

billy russo / bucky barnes: antonio gramsci, domenico losurdo, frantz fanon, nietzsche, tolstoy, jeremy scahill, gary webb, niccolò machiavelli, leila khalili, FOIA documents, military manuals, and theorists like kilcullen, porch, nagl. the tacticians, the soldiers, the moral traitors who couldn’t live inside the empire they once served.

t'challa: patrice lumumba, chinua achebe, steve biko, kwame nkrumah, cethshwayo kampande, armando cabral, mansa musa, marcus garvey, winnie mandela, rumi, samora machel, thomas sankara.

this is just a glimpse into the realms i go to when i write. my kindle's got over a thousand books. my pdfs? hundreds of books and articles. I'm usually cracking open something in my arsenal to help inform my writing.

and yeah—some ideas only crystallize when i’m locked in. when the voice gets moving and the emotional arc hits the right beat emotionally, it'll unlock interests and other things inside me i didn't even plan for. I'm a romantic for internal logic. i love narrative architecture, thematic consistency, and seeding frameworks.

and i love when other writers do that with their muses, too. i won’t name everyone because the list is long, I'm exhausted after being out all morning to do this job interview, and i wanna get back to writing (lmao), so, if you ain’t listed it’s no shade (we're mutuals because i obv. fuck with your writing)—but i do want to shout out: