Anon you must know that when I read this ask I first laughed unhingedly, and then googled "knowyourmeme x with a steel chair." Apparently it has something to do with professional wrestling and Bernie Sanders??? In any case you're very welcome, I'm currently tweaking a Linhardt moment in chapter 10 and hope to make it extra devastating just for you.
...Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning
Bête Noire, aka Dr. Winston Weiss, is a genius and a brilliant supervillain with psychokinesis, something the world is taught very early on when he appears on the British superhero scene in the early 70s.
Bête Noire, aka Dr. Winston Weiss, is not such a brilliant husband, or father, something the world learns very early on after he shocks everyone, forfeiting his membership in the Collective to offer up his identity, and the fact that he has an ordinary family in the mid 80s. It’s marketing, he says, there’s a brand to build and money to be made from it. Why should the heroes be the only ones selling merchandise, writing books, having movies made about them, after all?
Except it doesn’t work like that in the real world.
It’s not the easy money and fame expected when it has the whole of the supervillain world turning on him for the choice. But men like Bête Noire are too stubborn to admit a mistake, and change course when being wrong feels akin to death.
Tiberius Weiss is fairly certain, by the time he’s old enough to realize just how horrifying the path his father put their family on, that it wouldn’t have mattered if he and his brother were born with abilities like their father or not, or if their father had had them himself in the first place, they were royally fucked from the start being born to parents’ like theirs.
Family exists in the sense that they pose for photos together for the not-so-adoring public to gawk over, and have a scheduled Sunday roast at exactly 6pm sharp at their Surrey estate. Besides that, and the stern attempts to draw out any sort of abilities from them as early on in their lives as possible, the Weiss children rarely see their father. Their mother, Karoline Kennedy Weiss, has something of an empty sort of smile, and a penchant for martinis in the morning, that has Tiberius and Claudius Weiss raised side by side mostly by nannies. Their days are scheduled impeccably, private tutors together, violin and piano lessons together, every moment of every day is perfect. Together.
His brother’s abilities show themself before his, and then things aren’t so perfect and together. Control of law, manipulation of it, he remembers the day well, not because of what his brother did to their tutor they hated so much, but because it’s the first time he can remember his mother laughing genuinely when they told her later.
(If asked, Tiberius would insist he doesn’t remember how his own showed up, nearly a year later, despite being the elder child. If honest, he might tell you that he saw a great deal more of his father after the disappointment of one child being without. He might tell you that there were many, many experiments conducted before one day, when he shouted at his father to stop, he did.)
After that, he’s closer with his brother, because that’s what’s expected; they’re forced to spend every moment together, being groomed to be a pair for the rest of their lives, they’ll be the continuation of the brand, names already chosen and everything. Law & Order. He’s close with Claudius, in that they both despise what their father is doing to their lives, and sometimes hate is all you really need to form a bond, neither of them particularly sentimental, thanks to the calculated coldness they were raised with. And they do make quite the pair, even if there’s no real love there, taught so clearly that that would be weakness, that would be expressly against what they both were meant to embody.
Except the reality show that daddy dearest has turned the family’s life into doesn’t go the way he planned, because there’s more going on than the horrorshow of the Weiss childrens’ rise to villainy. Behind the scenes, Bête Noire wanders, and Karoline Kennedy isn’t so forgiving of infidelity, and a Kennedy has access to lawyers who are just as good as supervillains. And in the settlement Law & Order become Law, and Order separated by an ocean instead of an ampersand and no strong attempt made for split custody, the only asset divided equally in the divorce. One child for each.
(Only it’s not equal in actuality, because by the time all the paperwork is finished, Claudius is about to turn eighteen, and hit Dad with an emphatic fuck you by promptly leaving him, too, and Tiberius stays with Mum, who seems to have some life in her eyes for the first time since Claudius’s power showed up.)
They leave, just the two of them, settle in a Cambridge that’s no Cambridge, no Oxford, near his mother’s family that he never knew existed until they were moving to Massachusetts, of all places, to be with them, and so that he can keep going to school, so that he can be normal for the first time in his life. And it’s almost too easy, how he excels, fitting into place as if this is where he should have been the entire time, free from his father, free from an ampersand.
And it’s simple enough to keep the connection from being made, a different surname, a different country, a different gender. Bête Noire has an unnamed daughter who left with his ex-wife, after all, not another son.
Life is uneventful for a while, funnily enough. His ability is a quiet one, when he needs it to be, after all, and he doesn’t need to rest on those laurels to succeed in the average world, learn to back up his order with expert knowledge of American law. The issue is that he realizes all too quickly, horrifyingly, that he doesn’t want an uneventful life. It feels a little ridiculous to feel such power coursing through his veins, knowing how simple it is to use it, and to choose instead to, what, practice law, while he’s constantly bombarded by international headlines of his father’s continued attempts at relevance.
And so he makes the choice to do better than he did.
It’s simple enough to start with connections like his mother’s. She might as well be playing his agent of chaos, a role she seems to revel in, funnily enough, setting him up with high profile, high paying jobs for the political and corporate elite of America. The money doesn’t matter, of course, considering who they are, but it’s a nice thing to see what he earned himself wrack up quickly with every next opposing politician he makes fall in line for senators up for reelection, for every scandal made and quashed. He forces order and peace, makes those who don’t want to respect it do so on bended knee. He revels in the act of it all, realizing only once it’s already happening just how much he does enjoy the spotlight now that it’s his own, not shared with father or brother, playing at being a sort of American anti-hero, despite being neither American nor any sort of hero whatsoever. (No one seems to understand that his chosen name is a cheeky hint about just that.) And it doesn’t take long for him to manage exactly what he set out to do. Tiberius takes what his father gave up for nothing, and is accepted into the Collective.
From there, the path to infamous supervillain is as simple as reciting the Bill of Rights.
(There’s a bit of a hiccup there somewhere in the middle, yes, brought on from something like the trauma of suppressing his emotions to cope with being beholden to his father’s delusions of grandeur for the first eighteen years of his life, if he had to guess, and figuring out how to be his own person after, only to do exactly what his father had wanted from him. Ten years, give or take a few, of what could likely be called alcohol dependency, but he doesn’t like to dwell on that fact.)
The thing that gets him out of it, funnily enough, is an unexpected call from his brother. They exchange pleasant, if not distant, messages with some regularity, a congratulations when one of them appears in international news, see each other for holidays, neither of them with families of their own, their mother still back in Massachusetts, too, but they’re no closer than they were as children, the common thread of hatred for their father lost once neither of them were under his thumb any longer. The irony isn’t lost on him that the thing that sets him straight, and inevitably makes them closer than they ever were, is an elaborate scheme to force their father into retirement.
Because you can’t very well outwit a notorious supervillain, no matter if you’re a supervillain yourself or not, if you’re drunk off your ass half the time, something that his brother seems to enjoy telling him a little too greatly.
It’s not difficult to come up with a way to do just that, two versus one, both of them having had much of their own individual successes since being split up, practicing together now, finding all of the ways high justice and enforced obedience can work together to become something all the more terrifying. But it’s not easy to stop pouring whiskey into his tea in the morning, and the afternoon, not easy not to finish a bottle of wine while he practices violin every night. It’s not easy, but the motivation that knowing this will finally free them both forces him to follow through.
The fight is unnecessarily catastrophic, because nothing that Bête Noire does is anything but, even in his old age. It’s no surprise that he’s found a way to use his own abilities to protect himself against both of theirs, as if he had been waiting for a day such as this one from the moment he learned what his sons could do. But even he never fully understood what the two could do together.
There’s satisfaction in extracting justice, making him bend to their will in a way he so clearly tried to do with them for years, but with much more power behind it now, having chosen to do so together themselves.
It nearly makes him sick, though, the way their father grins at them, when he’s defeated. See, he had said, it happened in the end. I was right. Law & Order.
It’s no surprise that it makes international headlines, no surprise that it skyrockets both him and Claudius to even greater heights in the supervillain game, with too many offers coming through for them to work together, taking the name their father pushed on them, which they don’t. But it doesn’t feel much like a victory, the image of his father’s smile imprinted in his mind, distracting, taunting. After that, it follows him. He sees that grin in the faces of the heroes and civilians he thwarts, he sees it in the flashes of cameras after his victories, sees it at night when he tries to sleep, and can’t, and has to keep himself from falling back into old patterns. He does what he can to distance himself, changes his suit, his style, leans into the peace, a paradox of a supervillain, less commander and more emperor, he likes to think, but it’s not enough, in truth.
(He’s asked his brother, refusing to say the quiet part out loud, if he sees it, too, knowing their father is out there living in his massive amount of wealth, a comfortable retirement, believing that he won.)
All it takes is Claudius saying that he sees it, too, keeps hearing the way he said that ridiculous name he chose for them together, to know what needs to be done.
And he’s certain that he’s going to have to break his own order to find the peace he wants to create for himself at long last.
