Fandom: Hacks (TV 2021)
Rating: Mature
Relationships: Ava Daniels/Deborah Vance
Summary:
“We only bought one bottle of anti-wrinkle cream, honey, remember…?”
Ava gives a wet chuckle and nuzzles into Deborah’s neck. “We’ll buy more…we have time…”
“Yeah, sweetie, we do…”
Or, What happens directly after Deborah changes her mind at the train station and the next morning when Ava bites her lip after her call with Jimmy.
A Hacks collaboration with the lovely @streepytime
I am once again promoting my Designing Women Discord server! I am the sole moderator but @frenchtwistresistance is my unofficial collaborator.
1. What is Pride of Sugarbakers?
The membership we envision on this server is queer women and non-binary people over the age of eighteen who are fans of the show.
Beyond that we're open to see this server grow in whatever direction it does organically.
2. What do you talk about on the server?
Recently we have had conversations about
Julia and Suzanne's different flavors of compulsory heterosexuality
Mary Jo acting butch after half a drink
Suzanne's affinity for begging
3. How can I join the server?
✨ Use this invite link to apply: https://discord.gg/G55T26STC ✨
The purpose of the application is to make sure the people joining are not bots and trolls. We don't plan on screening anyone out.
This server is age-restricted, so to make sure that you can access the server on iOS you need to sign in to the Discord app on desktop and make sure the "Allow access to age restricted servers on iOS" option under Content & Social in User Settings is on. (My apologies to those in the UK, Australia, and Brazil who will have to go through an age verification process due to recently passed digital safety laws.)
4. I'm already a member. Now what?
Reblog this post so we can reach more people who might be interested in joining the server!
Cross-post to other social media networks or servers to spread the word even further! Just copy and paste the invite link, which won't expire for another month. (If this post reaches you over a month from now, you can always DM me or reply to this post and I will send you a new invite link.)
This little notion has been tumbling* around in my head these last few days, and I have a lot of feelings about it, so I'm gonna share those with you!
tl;dr what if Ava and Deborah returned from Singapore to find out that DJ and Nina had become besties after being left behind by their mother and daughter respectively?
This idea came out of me having so many feelings about DJ over the last couple of episodes. How did she feel watching her mom give up the biggest dream she'd ever had, stepping off the peak of a career that had always, always come before DJ, for someone else? For Ava, specifically—Ava, who just appeared a couple of years ago and upended everything, Ava, who DJ had just shown such tremendous grace towards in naming her AJ's godmother? How does this hit her? What is she feeling? And then, just a couple of months after she has her first child, her mom—who, for the first time ever, has nothing else to prioritize over DJ and her grandson—fucks off to Singapore (with Ava!) for eight months and misses basically AJ's entire first year?
And then, on the other hand, there's Nina—Nina, who's alone and floundering, who feels replaced by Deborah (let her and her alone think that Deborah's a mother figure to Ava, the truth is so much worse), who's never going to be a grandma, and who's never met a scam she doesn't want to invest her entire personality into. Nina, losing her mind over the fact that Ava's doesn't have a job anymore and has been kidnapped and will apparently be in Singapore indefinitely?
So like...imagine Nina shows up at DJ's house, freaking out. (DJ doesn't know how she found her address or why Nina, who she's met like twice and whose name she definitely doesn't remember, is acting like DJ's her best and only friend.) DJ's having big feelings herself, but—the crucial but!—DJ's been to therapy and has coping skills. Lots of them.
"Um, okay," she says, trying to peel Nina off of her. "Let's, uh, let's get you a drink."
And Nina's a little nuts, yeah, but Nina also lights up when she sees AJ, cries a little when she holds him, and within twenty minutes has committed all of her lawsuit winnings to his college fund despite DJ's many assurances that that's not necessary and is in fact kind of weird. Nina has like six different tinctures of suspicious natures in her suitcase and when Aidan comes home with a split lip, it turns out one of them actually really helps. (The other turns his tongue a little blue, but she assures him that's normal.) Nina LOVES jewelry, actually, she can't believe she didn't pack any, but she buys everything DJ thinks works for her with the money left over from AJ's short-lived college fund.
Nina's a mom overflowing with love and desperate for connection. DJ's a daughter who's never had that, and actually, it turns out, really, really likes it. A surprising amount.
Nina moves to Vegas. She does not move in with DJ, despite her initial assumptions that she'd be a live-in grandma. This, she comes to understand, is a boundary that DJ's set. DJ's very good at boundaries. DJ's therapist recommends another therapist who's also very good at boundaries, and helps Nina learn about them. Nina's therapist helps her with a lot.
And sure, she doesn't live with DJ and Aidan and AJ, but she's there every few days for family dinner. She watches AJ all the time, and is absolutely positive that Josefina is only there to keep her company when she's otherwise alone with the baby. (Josefina never tells her otherwise.) Nina learns the art of a good con from DJ, and joins her at church every Sunday to peddle the goods. She calls up some of her friends from her previous MLMs, makes a Youtube video about how to extract .zip files to browse through the full lookbook (cheapest pieces starting at $350 for unique, high-quality, hand-tumbled gems carefully set in rare metals), and sets up a little packing station to mail them across the country, all while raking in alllllll of that sweet, sweet suburban housewife lawsuit settlement cash. DJ even lets her help with the rock tumbling sometimes.
Nina cheers the loudest at Aidan's fights. DJ celebrates with her each time she catches herself spiraling into anxiety and uses her coping skills. Nina cries a lot the first time DJ calls her "Grandma Nina" to AJ, and honestly, DJ gets a little misty too.
"It's just so easy with you," Nina tells her one evening in the back yard, a couple of drinks in. "It was never like this with Ava."
"Nothing was ever easy with my mom," DJ replies. Nina's not exactly a walk in the park (she thinks but doesn't say), but she's so much easier than Deborah ever was. And she's there. She wants to be there. She's trying to get better, and doing the work.
Deborah never did that. Not for her.
Nina's there when the TMZ article drops and DJ's phone starts blowing up. DJ goes strangely calm, calling Aidan and asking him to come home, please, apparently her mom is dead. She picks up her son and sits on the couch, not really there. She holds him, trying to pick out five things she can see, four things she can hear. In the background, Nina starts calling Ava frantically. No answer.
Nina's making tea—she doesn't drink tea, and neither does DJ, but it's what you do, isn't it?—when DJ's phone rings. Nina immediately grabs it.
"Ava! I've been calling you for an hour, I can't believe—are you okay, are you coming home? Josefina's getting the house ready, my apartment is only a one bedroom but things are going really well with d'Jewelry, I was looking at the place that you used to live, actually, you know, the mall? But—no, I'm sorry, Ava, what happened? No one knows anything and DJ—oh honey it's so sad, she's barely moved and she hasn't said a word, though AJ's starting to talk, I think he actually said Aunt Deborah the other day, or, well, I think he was trying to, it didn't quite—but it's almost like he knew, do you think..."
Silence for several stunned seconds, which isn't actually silence because Nina doesn't stop talking, and then:
as in you'll never achieve the perfect daily routine, sleep schedule, coping mechanisms, mannerisms, fashion sense etc. even after years and years of healing and improvement and self-discovery. you will never be so good at life that you manage to utilize every waking moment. its great to be productive and all but sometimes you'll suck ass. sometimes you'll take eight hours to be done with a twenty minute job. you'll prioritize the wrong thing. you'll sleep for 12 hrs just to avoid being awake. you'll relapse. and you'll relapse again. you'll forget to turn in the assignment. you'll order too little food. life is far too large and complex for you to even experience it completely, much less try to make sense of and control it. you can't. please give up on that and be at peace with the hours you lose. they are not separate from your life.
#I thought so much about what to make Deborah say… “I missed you too”? “I'm sorry”? I think she would be more comfortable responding with a joke #"I know" make so much sense #like “of course you missed me” #It's a little thing that would definitely make Ava laugh and relax right away #<3 #because obviously Deborah can't admit that she missed her
