#sterling things

clocks in at the paper and the boss asks him how he is and he’s like “GREAT! Pretty stoked to report some news!”

something newsworthy happens and he’s writing the article and just mutters to himself, “Aah, it’s such a great day to report news”

I like Sterling, Danny, and Dane a lot too. 

Anyway, before he turned seventeen and jetted out, home was synonymous with oppression for Sterling, naturally, I mean, his parents were constantly trying to beat the witchcraft out of him. For years afterward, home was a crummy apartment and a twin mattress and hard apple cider in the frigidaire and some cheap art on the walls. He never minded working for shitty wages, but the loneliness did get to him. After he married Ilona and finally made it into a rewarding career, home was just warmth and comfort and a family. I like to imagine that they moved into a comfortable but not too snobby suburb and Sterling joined the PTA and you’d have to ask pottersgal71 but maybe ilona coaches kids’ martial arts classes or something. 

Dane is comfortable anywhere where he’s with Kim and their children, they probably had a flat for a while before moving into a house but circa the second war they were definitely living well in an estate that could rival the one he grew up in, with enough stolen art on the walls to buy an island. Growing up, though, home was the underside of a downtown freeway overpass and he was a graffiti artist, to speak metaphorically. He wreaked so much havoc. 

Danny never really had a sense of home, growing up. She was always shunted to the sidelines, hidden from the media, and treated like a nonentity. She found what she thought was her true home in Liesel’s entourage, because Lise treated her well, but that didn’t turn out too well, and by the time she realized she’d fallen in with the wrong side of the war, she’d already taken the Dark Mark. 

Between the wars is when she really develops a sense of what home means. She has her wife and their adopted children and for the first time she feels loved unconditionally. 

For Lise, home is a dirty secret. She doesn’t even let the House Elves in her room, and she’d rather come in through her friends’ windows in the middle of the night to meet them than have them in her own home. She likes all-inclusive suites at the hotels her friend Tara Clark owns. She likes sitting at the bar until close. Hell, at one point she sleeps in the snow because she doesn’t want to go home but there’s nowhere else to go. Even after she and Phillip have their own place with their family, she can’t sit still. She’s got that Sagittarius wanderlust. Rome. Munich. Puerto Vallarta and the random Canadian diner on the beach. Panama; paella. New Orleans and the Cafe du Monde. God, her favorite was New Orleans. (It was her honeymoon. Mardi Gras. It was her favorite city in the world, she wanted to die there.) She drags her family all around the world and she won’t stop buying timeshares. She always says, “I’m a Dolohov, and we’re not afraid of anything,” but to be honest, she doesn’t know how to stop running. 

AAAAAH I AM SO GLAD YOU LIKE THEM AND I’M SORRY FOR THE WAIT, I WAS AT WORK 

(do feel free to send me things while I’m working btw I’ll answer them at home) 

ANYWAY

Sterling is obviously hit hard by the death. He liked Lise. He protected her, or tried to. And even though she kind of seduced him and it was so disastrous on both ends that he decided he needed to install a pull-up bar in his office, he was still her friend. And of course, he had to be there for Billie. He reported at her father’s trial (which was a Big Deal, like Trial of the Century material), because Billie was supposed to do it but she was too broken up about it, and he put her name on the byline. 

Of course, Hedy and Larissa, or at least Larissa, are never going to give Lise any slack, but they’re not the only reporters, and the media’s reaction is mixed. At the trial, it’s widely discussed between witnesses and the press that if anyone was forced to sleep with THAT man for years, they might develop a taste for people as dissimilar as possible, too. So, in the civ world, Lise remains kind of disapproved of, but her death isn’t celebrated or anything, and as far as the whole feedist thing goes, she’s given a ‘just this once’ sort of free pass because of All She’s Been Through. 

In sort of the underground, hedonisty world though, she basically ascends to legendary. Years after her death, young feeder girls are picking up copies of her public-domain diary that ended up mass-produced after it was found in her father’s furnace (but only because she planted it there--she full on gone girl’d herself tbh), hoping to pick up tips and tricks (and skipping the incest bits because gross, and always ending up a little disappointed with how much vague, bible-referencing poetry they end up having to sift through). There are feedee boys well into the 2020s who are still jacking off to that one ‘iconic’ photo of her (she’s in a state of partial disrobe engaged in an intimate act and Phillip’s head is cut irreverently out of the frame--this is actually a photograph Liesel took herself with a tripod and planted in her father’s desk in order to incriminate her. Once more for the people in the back: at some point after 1978, some jackass pilfered a ministry evidence room, procured, among other things, a photograph of a teenage CSA victim used to put her father behind bars, and it went viral as wank-off material.) 

Not exactly the reaction Liesel was hoping for--respect for the dead is a big deal for her. She has all these little nuances about death--like, for example, she can’t look at the dead body of a loved one because she thinks it’s a better honor to their memory to remember them as they were alive, instead of dead, in a suit, in a box, and whenever she really, really wants to stick it to an enemy, she’ll mutilate the corpse after she kills them. So she kinda wishes they’d have left her well enough alone after she ‘died’, but she isn’t even shocked anymore. 

YAY I LOVE GETTING IN STERLING’S HEAD 

And well...he kind of saw it coming. He saw that Liesel’s enemies were dying every year and he put two and two together and thought she had an avenger (probably Phillip but I mean you never know, half the country owed her a favor. He never figured out that she wasn’t dead, but he was pretty damn close.) 

Sterling could never kill anyone himself, but in sort of a guilty way, he thought it was convenient that they were gone...until Larissa’s ghost got her job back in the second war, that is. 

He was happy with their replacements, who ended up being Blanche Kazan (the new cartoonist who also wrote the occasional celebrity article), and Danny Callaghan (who wrote an advice column, and who Sterling actually asked out but she turned him down because she was not only in a committed relationship with another witch, but is 100% gay.) 

you get a drabble go you

Sterling Carter has been beat to the punch enough times in his life. The minute it hits the newsroom that Denise Kutner fainted at King’s Cross after an angry ranting fit, he decides that he’s not going to let this story get the wrong spin. He’s not going to let Hedy Goodyear and Larissa Tate pass Denise off as some concerned, loving mother who’s only looking out for her own. He is a good man, and an honest reporter. 

And haven’t Billie’s sister and her boyfriend suffered enough?