#bbm au

fanart for @rachel-berry ‘s fic memories feel like weapons — aka the brokeback mountain au

Happy Malevoversary week!! For the day one prompts Beginnings and Kellin, here’s a preview of the fic I’ve been working on since late last year! This is my Boat Boys Malevolent AU, with Etho as Arthur, Joel as John, and guest starring Pearl as Kellin! Hope y’all like it

Summary:

Immediately as Etho opens the car door, he can smell the cigarette smoke that has seeped into the seats. Most of it isn't from Pearl herself, but she hasn't been able to smell smoke since she was a kid, so she doesn't know how bad it's gotten. She's thinking about how the road is still busy at this time of night, but nowhere near as bad as the day. It'll be empty, where they're going.

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I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it a few times in past anons but yes! This is a BIG worry of Mikey’s, because Raph was 4 and the twins were 9 when their dad passed away, and Mikey had to do everything in his power and then some at the young age of barely 16 in order to keep custody of his brothers so that they wouldn’t be separated. (Which IRL is super hard, but not impossible if you take the right parameters for proving that you’re able to provide and home children that young) Mikey took parenting classes and got his GED that summer and did backflips in order to prove himself to the courts that he could be a capable caretaker. And even though the court and judge took pity on Mikey, he was still 16, and thus had to agree to meet up with a child service agent every couple of months and check-in with how things were going, and if Mikey could really keep up with all the responsibilities of taking care of and raising 3 children under the age of 10, when he was practically a child himself. But Mikey did it proudly and with his head held high, and never considered the responsibility of taking care of his only family as a burden, even when it seemed impossibly hard sometimes. And it was hard. There were times when the child service agent they sent had it out for Mikey and would try to use everything they could to fail Mikey’s evaluation, or send an agent at the worst possible time, sometimes without advance warning. There was the time that Leo got a black eye from a fight he got into at school and was suspended for a week, and April had to take the boys out that day so the agent wouldn’t view and write it off as negligence on Mikey’s part. There were times when the heater in their stupid old apartment would break or they had to get all of their supplies from dollar stores or goodwills and Mikey constantly had to laugh it off and use some excuse to divert the attention.  But Mikey did it, and 3 years after his dads death, he’s still doing it. And it’s still hard, but he’s managing it better than how he was those first couple of awkward months, when he was ignoring the grief of losing his father in exchange for focusing all his attention on the wellbeing and happiness of his baby brothers. He still has nightmares about his brothers being taken from him in the dead of night. And he still worries about whether he’s doing the right thing, and maybe it was a mistake to be as selfish as he was and keep his brothers, as opposed to letting them go and live with people that could probably provide bigger and better lives than stupid useless big brother Mikey ever could. But Donnie is coming home with A+ science projects, and Leo’s absolutely shinning on the baseball team, and Raph’s smile is like the sun on the surface of water, bright and brilliant and blinding, and Mikey definitely thinks he’s being selfish by keeping these boys all to himself. 

(dialogue blurb under cut)