even the smallest cuts can bleed — aka, i’m going to see now much john walker angst i can condense into shorter snippets (usually <1k words for each prompt / re: whumptober prompts)
celestial john au: i will die your son (it’s not in my hands now)
sentry john au: how much can you stand (what more can you lose)
pre-tfatws aus: i’m fine to wait in line (with all my heavy stuff)
tfatws aus: i’ve lost my patience (where is the karma)
thunderbolts aus: someone tell me why (why i’m all in my head)
•••
ALTERNATIVES
"a smile so bright, he’s the devil in disguise." - ego is certain john has the light within him.
concussion - it's a lovely car ride with lemar and olivia. until it isn't.
viral - john cannot afford to be sick. unfortunately, his body has not received the memo.
suicide - john is the alone in the vault. escape is not on his mind.
yearning - john has a crush. lemar also has a crush.
deal with the devil - valentina promised john a clean slate.
DAY ONE
"please don't cry" - not all of john's ops are successful.
lamb to slaughter - mantis has been alone for a long time.
ceremony - john walker recieves his first medal of honor.
beg for forgiveness - john faces the hoskins after lemar's death.
DAY TWO
"you've got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears." - bob does not cry when his father is brought back after the blip.
DAY THREE
isolation - john is not used to being alone, but ego's planet is devoid of most other life.
found family - bob finds himself in madripoor. he finds acceptance in a common ideal.
DAY FOUR
"don't be scared, i've done this before." - ego tries to draw the light out of john.
non-human whumper - ego considered planting that tumor in meredith as a necessity.
loss of powers - john is entirely mortal again.
DAY FIVE
phobia - valentina has left him to die in an incinerator. it is not the first time john has been abandoned in a fire.
DAY SIX
"no grave can hold my body down" - mantis shows john a secret she'd discovered about ego's other children.
late night talks (flufftober) - john and lemar have been sharing a bed for years.
DAY SEVEN
"tell me that you're okay, and i'm fine" - john lays in the warehouse in the aftermath of lemar's dies.
elevator - john steps forward, towards olivia, towards the fall.
DAY EIGHT
self-inflicted injury - john doesn't see an issue with causing himself harm. if the serum will heal it, then what does it matter?
dissociation - lemar is gone, again. olivia has been gone. it feels like john had left with them.
DAY NINE
"we'll make it alright to come undone" - john contends with being part of a family again.
touch - mantis is unused to affection.
DAY TEN
"there's nothing you can ever say, nothing you can ever do" - john and yelena have a talk on the watchtower rooftop.
secrets - john is realizing that ego has gotten complicit.
DAY ELEVEN
"can you get through all the pain inside you?" - john seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle.
forced reveal - ego learns that the child he'd hired yondu to fetch from earth might be special.
up against the wall kiss (flufftober) - john returns from deployment. olivia is there to greet him.
DAY TWELVE
"it'll be for nothing" - john can't make himself give up the shield. sam talks him through his grief.
withholding medical treatment - ego seeks out peter, and john gets hurt in the crossfire.
DAY THIRTEEN
never enough - john is five-years-old when he’s left behind in a housefire.
DAY FOURTEEN
body bag - the void beckons. john is drawn to its call.
wounded caretaker - peter meets john and mantis.
DAY FIFTEEN
failed rescue attempt - yondu doesn't plan to let ego take peter so easily. unfortunately, it is that easy for ego.
DAY TWENTY
resignation - john knows he needs help. he can't accept it.
DAY TWENTY-ONE
fireman's carry (flufftober) - teenage lemar, olivia, and john have a lovely summer afternoon.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
"is that my hoodie?" "...no?" (flufftober) - lemar can't find his varsity jacket.
DAY TWENTY-NINE
last one standing - bob always ends up alone.
DAY THIRTY-ONE
gunshot wound - lemar gets shot, and john patches him up.
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you yap about time travel?? yap about it please🙏 I'm writing a fic currently based on time travel (mostly) and time travel lit af
heck yeah!! i've yapped before about what draws me to it, but i will 100% yap again bc i adore it sm. there's just something about characters getting a chance to do it all over (or alternatively, forced to do it all over) that's so compelling to me. where did their future start? was it a happy one? did time travel rip away all their hard-earned successes? or maybe their future was one of loss, and time travel gives them a chance to return to the times of their fonder memories. does the past live up to their brighter memories of it? or had it been idealized? maybe the times they so desperately wanted to go back to aren't all that they wished for. or maybe, maybe it is.
also, they're not the same person they had been. not anymore. the people around them are bound to notice something is off, whether the time traveller is trying to fix things or stay out of it. having that perspective from the future changes their outlook and something will be different, even if they might want things to stay the same. lots and lots of potential for angst or fluff or crack depending on where they start and land- do they throw caution into the wind with their knowledge of the future? do they tell others or keep it secret? will they even be believed if they told?
one of my favorite tropes are time travellers from an outsider pov, getting this feeling that something has changed, but they can't quite put their finger on it. ofc, they'll have their suspicions, but none of them will think 'they must have been from the future' (unless time travel is an established thing that can happen, like in umbrella academy). it'll likely be suspected that the time traveller has been through something traumatic, and maybe they try to pry about 'what's wrong', but aren't getting any definitive answers.
and really, what can this outsider do? offer comfort and support, maybe, but only as much as the time traveller lets them. also, how do they react to the person they had known not being that person anymore? is it a "you're always yourself, no matter when your from" situation? or does it feel like loss, because the outsider's friend/family/whatever isn't the person they know, "replaced" by this older version they don't know. judging of the time traveller is "still themself" gets murky, esp depending on how different they act.
anyway, thanks for the ask! :D
(also oooo time travel fic!! what fandom are you writing for, if you don't mind sharing your ideas/wips?)
i am like 7k words into writing out a fic for this livia time loop au that @spiralling-thoughts asked about but the character development is taking too long and i am not patient enough for this- very tempted to just have her break into sejanus’s house and unwillingly drag him into her shenanigans with zero (0) context for why and it is veering into crack territory
i wish i had a cool backstory for that, but i was literally just picking random nouns back when i made my AO3 account. a few ppl that i chatted with in discord a while ago just used ‘backpacks’ since its less of a hassle to type than ‘tumblingbackpacks’ and i just kept it up as a username when i started to use tumblr more consistently.
i was only silently reblogging on here at the time so there were pretty much no people that actually called me that, but after making some mutuals and friends who actually use it, it just felt too late to change it up at this point. if i had known i would be talking with people on the regular, i probably would have put my name to ‘cam’ or something closer to an actual nickname rather than just an object 😅
out of curiosity what draws you to time travel? like what inspired that for you? (i also love the time travel- i definitely need to read more of your stuff, do you have a favorite of yours that you recommend i start with?) 🫶
re: reblog of this post
i love the concept of second chances and do-overs! it's just fun to see how things change when someone is no longer the person they were before - the time they've lived beyond the point they've travelled back to has given them new experiences and different perspective on life, so doing things 'the same as before' is no longer an option.
it opens a ton of what-if scenarios: what would they do differently if they could change how their future turns out? how do they cope with the people around them not being the people they know? especially if they've travelled back to a time before they were born - it puts them in a situation where they technically don't exist yet, so any change is huge change (e.g. thg characters in tbosas times)
(i will manifest sejanus & katniss and/or prim being friends, especially if i have to toss them into tbosas times for it to happen)
i was inspired by other fics that i had read - the very first fic i had read was a time travel oneshot (future loki dropping in on avengers 1) and that author had other time travel fics that got me into fanfiction in general. i didn't write time travel at the start, but i was reading a bunch of mcu time travel fics, and thinking about that trope carried over when i moved onto other fandoms.
also, most of the characters i get attached to end up dying (*cough cough* sejanus plinth, polities from epic the musical, severus snape, mcu loki, the list goes on) and like,, what if dying wasn't the end of their story? what if they got to do it again and do it better?
there's a lot of different ways it could go! maybe the time traveller seizes the second chance and tries to chance the future for the better (the hopeful path). or maybe they didn't want to go back - maybe the future was one they were happy with and are furious with that life being taken away, or maybe they didn't like the future but at least it meant the horrors of their past was over. they don't want to live through what they did again, even if it means a brighter tomorrow (the angsty path).
maybe the time traveller uses that opportunity live life the way they wanted to, without caring about what others think of them (lots of crack potential for this one!). maybe they decide to live their second chance selfishly, maybe they've decided they've suffered enough to deserve it. maybe they try to enjoy living in a time before [tragic incident], or maybe the tragedy is that the people in the past are not the people they know and love (very bittersweet). maybe they save the people who died the first time around, but the people they saved aren't the same as the people they knew.
maybe they fix things. maybe they make things worse. maybe they don't care to change things. maybe they care too much. but regardless of what they think or what they do, their very presence will create change whether they want it or not, and exploring those possibilities is something my brain has latched onto.
also! how do people around the time traveller react? they don't know about the time travel, but they likely will notice that a sudden shift in personality that seemingly happened overnight with no clear explanation. how do their lives change? they don't know how their life was in the future-past, so they're living through the effects of the time traveller's actions without quite knowing that there had ever been a different path for them.
i have a collection on ao3 of all my time travel fics [link: time travel my beloved <3] but my favorites out of the tbosas time travel fics i've written is either for you, at last to comprehend (marcus time travel) or echoes of shadows (sejanus time travel).
(note about echoes of shadows - i wrote that a few days after watching the film and hadn't yet finished the book, so there are details in there that are wrong)
i really meant for this response to be shorter but time travel gets me yapping - thanks for the ask!
(i may or may not be hopping in your ask box later if you don't mind - time travelling persephone is now on my mind)
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