#beetle!!

side note: im obsessed with how much imposter syndrome aaron probs has when he first gets there (sobbing)

this au is everything to me now.

hiii so yes i have considered it and firstly i must say this will require a Lot of suspension of disbelief on everybody's part ok i am going into this entirely pretending that i understand all the logistics of international sporting competitions

now the olympics aaron goes to is Paris 2024, and this is important. for those olympics, all the country's teams were put on boats and paraded down the Seine as part of the opening ceremony right. well. andrew and neil (and kevin, seth, matt, allison, jeremy, laila, etc) they are all on team USA exy, and aaron (and sebastian!) are team USA for skateboarding. aaron purposefully ignores any and all olympic news unless its necessary information leading up to him going to Paris– he's already scared shitless about doing it at all and doesn't want to know anything else about anybody else there. this means he pays 0 attention to the announcement of the Exy team. andrew, similarly, couldn't care less about the rest of team USA, probably doesn't even know skateboarding was made an olympic sport in 2020, and so neither of them are aware of the other's presence on the team. aaron flies to paris with the rest of the skateboarders a couple days before opening as is standard, while the exy team is significantly larger and flies earlier. all this means that neither of them meet or are even aware of each other until they're getting on the boat for the opening ceremony with the rest of team USA and they look up and boom. guy with your face is STARING at you. fucked up right.

so they meet then, but there's not time for a joyous(?) reunion, because they gotta do this fucking parade. so aaron barely even remembers to smile at the crowd or wave or anything, his entire world just got ripped to shreds before his eyes and he's losing his mind. i don't know what happens after the opening ceremony again my research for this fic was reading 1 yahoo answers page a few months ago. but essentially he catches up to andrew after a while and is like hey. what the fuck.

(important to note that aaron was the only one to ever live with tilda, so he's Aaron Minyard, whilst andrew is Andrew Doe, because he grew up in the system. he was paraded around a lot as something of a rags-to-riches story when he made a pro team, there was a great narrative in troubled-foster-kid-plays-sport-in-juvie-and-rises-to-national-fame that a lot of people are very keen on. andrew is a lot better at managing being in the public eye than aaron is, which becomes relevant later on)

neil & aaron are antagonistic as ever, but neil does feel a tiny bit bad that aaron got thrown into the Olympics of all places when two weeks ago he was like. a barista. neil is reluctantly tolerant of him because of the whole long-lost-brother thing but he still likes andrew better

i ALSO want to touch on the impostor syndrome thing you mentioned: yes, definitely, absolutely. this is where i bend the rules of international sport a tiny bit: basically, aaron is a wild card entry in the olympics– an athlete that shows 'exceptional potential' despite not meeting all the requirements to make the team. they're rare but not unheard of, but Team USA has never had one before. theyre usually not an underrepresented country, but they didnt have enough skateboarders and so picked one of the most talented people nationally who had been winning consistently for multiple years running, and that was aaron. there's a second wild card on the swim team, an oc of mine i'm excited about, but basically, aaron's presence on the team stirs up a Narrative that the media can use to get more people invested in watching the olympics. some random kid from California who's never done anything notable in his life suddenly gets picked for an olympic team? that's a movie plot basically. aaron suddenly has all of these eyes on him, all of these people waiting to see if he can pull any of this off and he's trying to remind himself that all he has to do is skate but it's like. its paris. its the fucking olympics. how do you not snap under that kind of pressure?

*ahem*

excuse me? Are you British?

…

oh no

oh no no no no no

Hatsune miku does NOT TALK to British people!

SEKAAAAA

no u, ur the coolest 😎 and ilyttt

OH MY GOSH, WHAT A CUTE LIL FRIEND theyre so rad 🥰🥰

yayyyy myadrian

ask game

12. What is the worst thing that has happened to your OC? How has it affected their behavior, their health, and their life in general?

ooooo wow. how much time do you have

the worst worst answer is probably his dad's suicide a few days before he turned eighteen, coupled with his mom's arrest about two weeks earlier, and a spring/early summer spent fighting his grandparents for legal guardianship of his sisters. that whole experience, and the year out from school he took afterward, kind of wrecked his whole world. like when he was in high school he had this whole thing planned out, he knew exactly where he was going for university, what he was studying, when he was going to graduate and what he'd do if he went to grad school or if he went straight into work, it was this perfect clear line of his future he could See it he could just about hold it, he was ready. more ready than he thought he'd ever been for anything.

and then. suddenly he woke up one day and his mom was gone and then he came home from school and his dad was dead and his sisters were six and eleven and they were scared and confused and there was talk about selling their house and the girls moving in with their grandparents and he couldn't just leave them so. that perfect bright line was suddenly scrubbed over and covered by sleepless night after sleepless night, double and triple shifts on minimum wage, a giant house that'd never felt so small and so big at the same time, stiff white shirt collars rubbing against his neck as his grandmother explained politely to the judge that one eighteen-year-old boy alone just wasn't a suitable household for two growing girls, that children needed parents, needed a family.

adrian thought about being eight years old, listening to his parents fight and wish he could take a time machine back to that christmas eve when he was six and there were only three of them and his mom and dad maybe loved each other, or at least they pretended to when adrian was watching. and every night he's coming home to a quiet house, eating leftovers he sometimes doesn't even bother to reheat hours after his sisters have put themselves to bed, withdrawing almost as much as their parents did before everything ended. the space and time between the christmas before and the christmas after feels like centuries. his grandparents agree to give him four years with the girls, then they'll check in again. they'll settle out of court. pay into their college funds. adrian has to let them, has to accept the help because he knows all three of them will drown without it.

in terms of how it impacts his life, it's a huge factor in his solitary streak. the only person he really talks to regularly outside of his family (and later seth) is his advisor. he spends his free time on campus either working in the labs, the library, or hiding in the music rooms; off campus, working, or at home. he's a very lonely person, because he just has too many things he has to take care of first. treading water constantly. burnout king. he really really struggles to form new relationships and connections, because his trust and his energy reserves are shot to shit because he's never gotten a chance to slow down and recover after his family fell apart. he had to pick up the pieces before he lost them all, and he's still desperately trying to hold together a crashing plane with tape and prayers. by LMR he's realised that, but he can't exactly step back. so he doesn't self-destruct, not in the same way seth does. because he just has to keep moving

7. What is your OC's occupation?

officially, aerospace engineer and later flight director @ nasa

has a phd in flight engineering & a pilot's license

but usually he just tells people rocket scientist because he loves it

5. What is your OC's gender identity and sexual orientation? Is this also what they identify as in canon, or are they not (fully) aware?

so he is in no way aware of this (at least not for a while) but he is what a friend of mine likes to call a Nothingburger. basically if you ask him he will say he's a man, purely because that's just what he's been told his whole life. he discovers gender being a social construct when his sister zarah explains it through a very angry rant at the dinner table one night and kind of brushes it aside as A Thing that doesn't really concern him.

if gender weren't as politicized as it is and it was just for fun he would probably not identify as anything, because it serves no narrative purpose to him. he just doesn't really care. he/him is the simplest pronoun set for him to use, so he uses it, but he probably wouldn't think much of it if someone used they for him, and hell he might not even notice someone calling him she/her. thinking too much about Planes.

sexuality is an interesting one. he's entirely asexual, to the point that he forgets sex is a thing until someone makes a joke about it or it happens in a movie. again, everything is secondary to Planes in this boy's mind. he's had 1 girlfriend and she doesn't really count because he didn't know about it for like a month. poor girl. he experiences aesthetic attraction maybe like 3 times ever, and the only person he's actually had any kind of feelings for, they spent the first five months annoying each other back and forth until they caved simultaneously.

tldr: he won't discover or use labels ever, but he's somewhere on all of the spectrums

yayy twilight my beloved

this is not for a while but its a really early scene with the twins & i really like it

------------------------------------

Tilda stormed into the room before either of them could move, slamming the door open. At the sight of the glass on the floor, she let out a frustrated sound. Andrew flinched, if only slightly, but Aaron was good at staying still.

"What the fuck did you do?" she shouted, glaring between the two of them over the shattered glass on the floor.

"I broke it," Aaron said quickly, the lie slipping out easy as anything. In hus peripheral, he saw Andrew look at him, and Aaron silently prayed he wouldn't say anything, keeping his focus on his mother.

"Sorry, Mom. I wasn't looking."

Tilda groaned again, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly.

"God, you're never fucking looking, are you?"

Aaron didn't say anything else. She flounced back out of the room and Aaron heard the TV unpause not long after.

"That was stupid," Andrew said, when Aaron crouched to collect up the glass.

Aaron looked up.

"What was?"

"Lying."

Aaron shrugged.

"It's nothing."

Andrew held his stare for a couple seconds longer before leaving the room. Aaron waited for his footsteps on the stairs before he began scooping glass into his hands. Some tiny shards lodged in his skin, but nothing serious.

white: YOU KNOW ITTT 👉👉 i can’t imagine living life without fainting at the sight of a pretty lady

red: HAIFJWJFWFI I DONT KNOW ABOUT THE DOG NOISES BUT YES!!! VIOLENCE!!!! 🔥🔥ARSON

purple: okay okay i get you BUTTT