Luka Couffaine was a generally level headed person. He was rarely rash in his actions. He was known for being calm in an emergency and the voice of reason. However, all of that went out the preferable window when he saw a spider. He had been terrified of the eight legged monsters since he was child. Juleka had learned pretty much as soon as she could walk that if big brother Luka shrieked, to grab something to squish it with and run to his rescue. HIs friends at school would tease him, but never actually made him be the one to deal with them. Marinette would spend years trying to convince him they were harmless and cute before eventually just quietly taking them outside, unable to ‘put the horrible creatures out of their misery’ as Luka had begged. Sass would happily gobble them up whenever spotted and tease his holder mercilessly.
It wasn’t until Alouette was a toddler and developed a fear of her own that Luka struck up the courage to face his. Marinette was away on a short business trip and Sass was healing in the miraculous box after a particularly nasty akuma the night before that had drained the little kwami to his limit.
Alouette screamed in her room, sending Luka racing down the hall to her side. “Papa, she cried, pointing to the tiny spider crawling on her wooden kitchen. “What do we do? Maman isn’t here. Is Sassy still sleeping?” She looked pitifully up at him.
Luka felt his hand shake and swallowed the lump in his throat. “It’s okay, baby. I’ll get it.”
“You sure, Papa? You ascared of them too.”
“I am,” he nods, grabbing one of her dress up shoes near them on the ground and raising his arm to squish it.
“No, Papa!” Alouette shrieks, grabbing his arm and pulling it out of range of the spider. “We don’t kill things,” she scolds, perfectly mimicking her mother’s stern tone. “You have to put it outside like Maman.”
Luka feels a shiver run up his spine and he takes a deep breath before looking around her room for something to capture the little monster with. He settles on one of the toy cups and little plastic menu, carefully inching his way towards the critter, resisting the urge to gag the entire time. In one swift motion, he traps the spider under the cup, and gently slides the menu under, wiggling it a bit to get the spider to move on top of it. He carries it back down the hall, holding his breath all the while, and nods his head towards the door, motioning to Alouette to open the front door. He practically throws the spider onto the sidewalk and rushes back inside, Alouette hugging his side. “Thanks, Papa. I love you,” she looks up at him with big proud eyes, and a fuzzy warmth takes over the unsettling tingles rushing through him. He places a kiss on top of her head and smiles. “Anytime, baby girl. I love you, too.”
When I get stressed with uni stuff, I tend to draw Scarecrow wondering what Jonathan would do. I can’t throw fear toxin at my classmates, so drawing Crane with his own Jack O'Lantern must do (because I freaking love his logo).
Deke deals with grief in his own way, alone in 1982.
WARNING: not technically major character death, but there is a lot of grief and loss
yes, i cheated on this prompt. happy? i admit it. instead of using the bird as inspiration as the prompt intended, i used edgar allen poe. that being said, this definitely deals with the themes of inability to let go of lost love explored in the famous poem.
“When are we going to go home?”
“If there was an answer to that question, Deke, we would already be there.”
“Yeah, I know, I just... I’ve got a lot of unfinished business, there, you know? I’ve got a company to run, and Trevor and I had Halsey tickets, so I was hoping to repair that bridge before that came up.”
“Deke, about him-“
“Agent Kahn, whatever, I still need to talk to him and he’s still not here, so..."
“And you won’t get to. He’s gone. Agent Kahn fell with the Lighthouse. I’m so sorry.”
The conversation with his grandmother was still ringing in his ears even after two weeks. Granted, those weeks were spent alone in 1982, but the fact that he was still thinking about it, couldn’t get the ache to stop, was far from pleasant. There hadn’t been good circumstances when it came to the end of their friendship, and his shoulders felt heavy whenever he remembered how it ended - it shouldn’t have been like that at all, and now there was no way for him to fix it.
He'd spent whole days of his time in solitude trying to come up with ways to make the grief stop. He was never successful, and eventually, he gave up. There was no point in fighting against the hurt that wouldn't stop, not when the only real solution he could come up with was a hop, skip, and a time jump away.
It was when he gave up fighting it that it finally started to ease. It still hurt, of course, as the months passed, and he still tried to ignore it whenever he could - but Mack was going through his own grief, and he knew that, and if he didn't want to go beyond his comfort level, Deke wouldn't push it. But he was still lonely, and after finding out his closest friend was dead, he was doing his best to not let that loneliness overtake him completely.
Shuffling down the sidewalk on his way back to the Lighthouse, he stopped long enough to look in a store window. It wasn't like he was looking for anything in particular, but something had caught his eye, and it was hard to fight the urge to go inside and get a closer look.
The sweater was thicker than the one his mind had conjured him, and he doubted the material was the same. It wasn't even the same shade of blue. Still, the grief hit him all over again like a wave, like it was trying to drag him under and drown him in the ache of it until he got lost. Until above and below and around him was nothing but the absolute heartbreak he'd felt in the moment he'd heard those words.
He’s gone.
The hurt only grew while he stared at the sweatered mannequin, remembered the feeling of different wool against his arm, his fingers. He would never be able to go back to that, to that sense of peace and happiness that he’d found and settled into like it was a sweater of his own. That opportunity had been taken away as soon as the Chronicoms got themselves involved. And now he was stuck - by the window, in the 80s, in New York... everything he wanted was thousands of miles and decades away.
He's gone. He's gone. He's gone.
He turned away from the window and kept walking.
-
Deke hadn’t learned much in his time, so far, in 1982, but he did know that the movie he wanted to watch hadn’t even been made yet, and he desperately missed his best friend.
A familiar tune had been stuck in his head for days, had been just slightly off due to the passage of time since he’d last listened to it. Most of the words were still there, and the melody, and the ache that came with every thought he had that could even remotely relate to the person he was trying to forget the most.
The only reason he'd even watched that movie in the first place was because Trevor had put it on. Apparently, never watching The Breakfast Club or The Princess Bride was a crime, in the early 21st century, because there had been some poorly veiled threats - playful, always playful - when he'd mentioned that he'd heard of them but never seen them. That night had been fun, and relaxing, and he'd fallen asleep right there on the couch while using the nearby sweatered shoulder as a pillow.
He spent hours at a time humming it on a loop while he roamed the Lighthouse and the town, scribbling a few lyrics when his hands were idle for too long. It was different from the original, he knew that, but not in any particular way he could place besides the potentially altered lyrics. And even the little actions sparked memories - a long drive on their way to a conference, more nights spent on the couch in his old apartment, one particularly good lunch break - all with the same singing voice lingering in the back of his mind.
( for two weeks, he spent most of his free time in the Lighthouse, pointedly avoiding Coulson's digitized face and checking the acoustics of nearly every hallway with the song he couldn't let go of )
That was how Deke found himself on the twenty first floor, in the very room where he'd tried to reestablish his company without one of the people so important to it. He laid on his back in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling while humming just loud enough for the sound to reach his own ears. The grief had hit again, in the way it always did, with the ache that refused to fade and the catch in his throat that made it hard to keep from crying. For a little while, the song was enough to hold onto, a flimsy bandage to temporarily stop the bleeding wound that never seemed to heal.
Sometimes, when he was performing, he'd sing a little louder and encourage the audience to do the same. As if, just by making enough noise, he could block out the grief and drown it for a change, instead of giving in to the pull of the painful tides.
