Miss_Kitty

A place for teasers, snippets, and ideas. The more interactions an idea gets, the more likely it is that I'll turn it into a full fic!

[misskittywrites]

This is what it means to be Canvas Verso:

You're Verso, but you're not and you never were except that you remember everything he did. You were born ten years before your little sister. You were born a big brother. You were born loving your little sister because you died loving her.

It's your fault.

Your mother is alive but she is dead because you can't reach her. If she tried to see you again it would kill her. You're the reason she almost died. You nearly killed her in your creation and you spent your life trying to kill her. You spent your life trying to save her. She can't let you go. You can't pass through the barrier to see her. She is dying. She is dying and won't save herself so it falls to you to kill her. Your killing her saved her and now you will never see her again. This is more permanent than the impenetrable barrier.

It has always been your fault.

Your father is dead. He loved you to destruction and he died. He killed your little sister's big brother for his love of you and her. He killed so easily, but he only raised a hand against you when you hit him first. You hate him. He is your father. He loves you. His love hurts you. Hurts your little sister. Your father is a rock. A monolith. He cannot be killed, only slowed. Your mother's husband kills your father through your little sister's hand.

You were born at fault.

You had an older sister. Your little sister didn't. Your little sister had an older sister. You didn't know her. Your older sister is gone, Painted over by your little sister's older sister. You can't visit her anyway. This is still a loss.

You're innocent.

Your little sister was not taught to kill by any member of your family, but her big brother taught her how to kill and your father taught her the killing rage. Your little sister killed your father. She didn't know what she was doing. Her father was guiding her hands. Your little sister killed your mother with her bare hands. She knew what she was doing. Your little sister killed herself with those same hands. She won't kill you. You have to kill your little sister so that you can die.

You have always been innocent.

You die alone. You die holding your own hand. You die and you are mourned but it's not you that's being mourned. It's the hand you hold and the hand you hold is that of your childhood self. You were never that little boy and he will never be you. You die last. You died first. You were born a dead man and died a man who had never been born.

You were born at fault and earn your innocence in death.

[misskittywrites]

In the past-future, Cheryl and Julian mourn Jason. Cheryl grieves for a brother that was never born but whom she loved dearly; Julian for a brother he never met, the man he might (and perhaps should) have been. He remembers Jason, because he was there when Angel Tabitha showed them the happy memories, but since he wasn't born in the future-past, he remembers everything like a story told to you so many times you forget it isn't your own.

Julian asks Cheryl, once and only once, if she ever wishes he were Jason.

It's 1987, and they're fifty-one years old, sharing a glass of maple whiskey the night before Julian launches his presidential campaign.

He's running as a red-blooded Republican because if he set foot in the DNC, everyone would think he's following in the footsteps of his Soviet mother and traitor father. He doesn't have high hopes of becoming president even if he wins the nomination, but the good he could do with the office and his knowledge of the future make the gamble worth it.

He doesn't know it yet, but he will win, and the media will call it divine intervention, and they will be right, in a roundabout sort of way.

Cheryl has a streak of white in her hair that appeared in their twenties after Nana Rose died. She looks distinguished. Appropriately powerful for the power-broker she's become in DC. She looks at him and sees not-Jason, he believes, and it kills him.

He shouldn't ask, but he does, and he waits for his twin sister to crush him beneath the custom red-bottomed heels she was too impatient to wait for Louboutin to invent in the 90s.

"Do you ever wish I were Jason?" Julian asks, tasting maple in his mouth like blood.

"No," Cheryl says. She doesn't think about her answer, which means she has thought about the question a lot. It's been thirty-two years since Angel Tabitha showed them their past future in the Babylonium. Thirty-two years is a lot of time to think. To fester. "Do you ever wish you were?"

"I think so," Julian whispers.

"Well, don't." Cheryl fixes him with eyes that don't so much reflect the fire beside them as gobble it up. She used to have phoenix fire running through her veins, and the body remembers. She was always cold when they were children, and their parents could never figure out why. "He left me."

"He died." Julian corrected.

She shook her head. "He left me first. Chose Polly over me. Left me alone with Penelope and Clifford in that house of horrors. He died after that."

"He would have come back for you," Julian says, because that's what he would have done. He can't imagine leaving Cheryl behind for anything. "I would have."

"And this is why I don't wish you were Jason." Cheryl leaned forward, resting her wrists on her crossed knees. "Because those are both lies. He wouldn't have come back for me, and you would never have left. I miss Jason. I don't miss him as much as I would miss you."

In the morning, Julian will stand before flashing cameras with his wife beside him, his children beside her - triplets, the first ever Blossom triplets - and deliver the speech the Riverdale High class of 1956 wrote for him. Its thesis is the headline of almost every article written about his candidacy and presidency and is quoted for decades to come.

"Bend towards justice," Senator Julian Blossom says, and the timeline does. Not because he wills it — although he does — but because he works for it. And he is not alone in that.

[misskittywrites]

I have this idea clanging around my head of what could happen after our Riverdale folks graduate with memories of the future and the drive to change the world.

Bend towards justice, Angel Tabitha commanded, and with their task set before them, Riverdale High's class of 1956 goes forth. Equipped with the literal mandate of heaven, memories of a future that could never be allowed to come to pass, and powers that manifested as their memories of Rivervale solidified, they wander out into an unsuspecting world.

The thing about granting these three things to a group of people is that they can have the best of intentions; the cabal will form anyway. Hollywood, DC, newsmedia, academia, the military, in all aspects of American life, they were there. On their radios and television sets, silver screen and newspaper, their footsteps shake the earth.

They're eighteen and forty-three, decades ahead of their peers in every meaning of the phrase. They've made the mistakes of their twenties, passed through the petrifying fear of aging in their thirties, older and wiser yet younger and full of energy.

They're bound by blood spilt and memories shared, Riverdale and Rivervale, fantastical magic and all-too-human power. They stay in touch. Pass around rumours, tips, confidential information.

And once the cabal is in place, well. It'd be a damn shame not to actually use it. It's a different kind of game, played over decades with an altogether nebulous goal, much harder than catching a serial killer or exposing a cult. But it's a worthy endeavour.

In my fantasy, Polly, Alice Cooper, and Mary Andrews are given back their memories too, and are involved in the oops-I-accidentally-started-a-nation-wide-cabal shenanigans. Maybe we bring back FP and JB, and give them their memories too.

[misskittywrites]

I am a little miffed at the lives the Riverdale writers' room gave our gang in ch. 137, because they don't match up with the characters.

You want me to believe that Jughead Jones - our Jughead Jones who remembers everything, every dark, depraved thing that happened in Riverdale - doesn't become an investigative journalist? He knows information gathering techniques from the twenty-first century, practiced them since he was a teen, knows about every government scandal of the twentieth century, and the plight of the Uktena. You think Jughead from seasons 1-6 could sit on his hands with 1960s era racism/sexism/homophobia? Absolutely not.

You're telling me Betty Cooper, who now remembers everything from seasons 1-6, including her 2023 FBI training, doesn't want to use that knowledge to save lives? She should have revolutionized the FBI, taken it by storm, and brought it up to her standard as best she could with the technology available to her. The term "serial killer" only began to be a thing in the 70s, imagine the lives she could save by not waiting for the cishet-white-male FBI to pull their heads out of their asses.

Now Toni I can believe, but I don't think she'd leave Black Athena to be just a high school magazine. Of all the people who became publishers, I think Toni makes the most sense and it just burns that she didn't become what Betty and Jughead apparently did.

Having said all that, I do think they could have done something interesting with the gang's fame and Angel Tabitha's command to bend towards justice.

Jughead's Madhouse Magazine, Bend Your Mind She Says Magazine, Towards the Future Black Athena, Justice in Technicolour

(Justice in Technicolour could also be for Veronica's movie studio, but the film industry moved on from technicolour in the 60s, so it would be less fitting.)

[misskittywrites]

Hear me out...Riverdale. Years after season 7. Sometime in the 70s, when our folks are in their 30s, the 80s when they're in their 40s, maybe even the 90s when they're 50-plus. They have families, careers, whole new lives that don't intersect yet, because high school friends are the people who grew up with you and forget you until they read your obituary.

But then something happens. Something big, something supernatural, something that requires their presence. Their knowledge of a time that never happened, battles never fought, wars never won. Maybe there's a man named Pickens or Cypher, maybe there's an old Soviet enemy of the Blossoms or Lodges, maybe their children get involved in something the government is trying to hide, a la Stranger Things.

And we need to call in the big guns.

I think we would start with Archie's kids learning about their grandfather, listening to their dad's stories about him, and realizing they don't line up. There were more stories than there was time to live them. So they look into their family's history. They start asking questions, and the questions lead to problems, as they always do in stories.

Imagine Archie's kids going to their father - a real salt-of-the-earth man who writes poems in his spare time without a violent bone in his body - and saying you're never going to believe me, but I need help.

Archie doesn't remember juvie, or starting vigilante gangs, or Hal forcing Betty to bury him alive, but he does remember that there are Bad Things that happened in the gaps between the happy things, gaps that get larger and larger as he got older. He remembers what invulnerable skin feels like, what phoenix fire tastes like, what the Sweet Hereafter looked like. So he calls for help.

And help descends upon them in the form of household names that know their construction worker dad personally.

Tabitha Tate, the famous civil rights attorney who represented MLK's suit against the CIA for their attempted assassination of him, and not only won but lived. Cheryl Blossom, the artist-activist who partially funded the suit and put herself bodily between the Black lawyers and white protesters every day of the trial. Toni Topaz, who founded Black Athena as a high school literary club newsletter and turned it into the must-read for civil rights protesters from coast to coast. Betty Cooper, bestselling author and editor-in-chief of She Says Magazine, the go-to source for feminist and progressive causes.

Kevin Keller, whose theatre company is as close as you can get to Broadway without being on Broadway. Clay Walker, a widely-known tenured literature professor at Columbia, who has a standing column in Black Athena. Fangs Fogarty, Elvis before Elvis, who is still alive because fuck you Riverdale writers' room. Reggie "The Blur" Mantle, the Lakers player everyone knows, even if they don't follow basketball at all. Veronica Lodge, the woman to know in Hollywood, who just won an Oscar and seems to produce every movie you've ever heard of. Jughead Jones of Jughead's Madhouse Magazine, which they and their friends read religiously.

All around the Andrews kitchen table, all turning their full attention and vast financial and social capital to solving whatever problem Archie's kids got themselves into.

[werewolfetone]

It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider

[werewolfetone]

Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal

[angel-derangement]

I hate it too tbh

[sunlightbuck]

“that show is bad” to YOU. i personally understand it on a level that’s only accessible to gay people and eldest daughters.

[misskittywrites]

but i WILL explain it to you in excruciating detail

[misskittywrites]

God, the Dessendre siblings.

Your big sister doesn't recognize you. Your mother's eldest daughter Painted her over. She attacks you if you go near her. You miss her. She doesn't know to miss you.

Your little sister can't speak and hides her face and you love her. She is beautiful behind the mask your mother forces her to wear. She hides her face in your father's chest.

Your little sister is hell-bent on killing your father because he killed her brother, but he didn't kill you. She doesn't know you. She knew you before you were created. You know her. You have never met her. You would die for her. You have died for her. She would die for you. You have to stop her from dying for you.

You’re her big brother but your little sister is dead. She’s your little sister but her big brother is dead. She killed your little sister. She is your little sister and she killed herself but she also killed a stranger. She didn’t let you say goodbye. You get to yell at her for not letting you say goodbye to her. This is a privilege. She apologizes. It doesn't change anything. She killed herself and you wish you could kill yourself. You’re jealous your little sister got to die. You’re jealous your little sister gets to live. She killed herself and she won't kill you.

You're her big brother and she dies in your arms even though she's not your little sister and you died before her anyway. Her death is slower than your little sister's, so you get to speak to her. You get to tell her everything will be okay. You never got to tell your little sister everthing will be okay before she died. You weren't able to hold your little sister when she died. You held and rocked your little sister when she died.

Your parents had two daughters and one son. Two daughters and one son died in that canvas but their eldest daughter didn't. She wasn't there when you or your sisters died. You're her little brother. She doesn't grieve for you. She grieves for her little brother. Both your little sisters are dead, but your big sister doesn't grieve for them. She has her little sister within arm's reach.

There are seven Dessendre siblings. Three of them are you. One is dead. Two are alive. There are three Dessendre siblings. There were only ever three Dessendre siblings.

[misskittywrites]

AND THE SAYING THAT GAVE THEM THE MOST PEACE, WHAT KEPT THEM GOING EVEN WHEN THEY WANTED TO DIE, EVEN WHEN THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN IMMUTABLE FACT OF THE UNIVERSE, WAS A LIE

[misskittywrites]

Whyyyy is every Hazbin Hotel fic mainly a shipping fic and never one that considers the emotional, angsty, fantasy geopolitical implications of annual acts of genocide as a part of an ongoing genocide that the entire population of Heaven is unaware of

[fallout-lou-begas]

it's finally that time of the year again for the clinically depressed newscaster describing february with disco elysium music

[fallout-lou-begas]

what is the single best line in this video

it's a month that doesn't hold up life any better than it really is

something great happened here but it's over with and that's the way february is

like the desperate flinging off of something that's not true anymore

the expedition is getting desperate. people are throwing things aside

this looks like a place where people who are being punished are sent

nobody is tap dancing or breaking into a rogers and hammerstein song

theyre just barely able to get across the street and hunker over a bowl of chili

most of the birds who can afford it have flown to florida

it's as if there's some awful truth out there in the trees

something that's been bothering you for a long time is out there. what is it?

to hide the bleakness of feb., man invented valentine's day. also mardi gras.

what other month can host a holiday designed to remind us we're all gonna die?

Voting ended onFeb 11

character limit forced me to paraphrase

[craymor1]

yeah,

[misskittywrites]

yeah.

[misskittywrites]

I can't believe I never knew that the pre-slash tag on AO3 meant like, before the ampersand in the "Character A & Character B" relationship tag changed to a slash to become "Character A/Character B"

[misskittywrites]

Please. Please I am begging. Are there any fanfics where stormtroopers get sent to the past and meet clone troopers? Or clone troopers sent to the future who meet stormtroopers?

Clone troopers who see what their legacy has become? How they were the blueprint for unimaginable suffering and indoctrination? How it could happen to natborns too? Stormroopers who see the amazing liberties given to clone troopers - allowed to have nicknames, for example - and whose wonder and awe paints a terrible picture for the clones?

[misskittywrites]

My Heated Rivalry experience was entirely omg who CARES about toxic Ilya and Shane I want my COFFEE SHOP AU BOYS BACK

[misskittywrites]

My Roman Empire is that Jughead is actually a terrible writer. He can only write stories that are transcripts with bungled names of events he lived through. He could do nonfiction, but fiction? He blows

[misskittywrites]

Just rewatched The Princess Bride and can I just say I am terrified for when Disney buys the IP and remakes it. Its the perfect movie as is, but they would ruin her. Thats my mother.

[misskittywrites]

I am, unfortunately, the insufferable kind of (graduated) student who reads a book for an essay and is chemically changed by it to the point of asking for my own copy for Christmas so I can write in it