thoughts on villain ranchers? Either villain4villain or villain4some guy....perhaps even both villains but only one embraces it? I wanna hear your thoughts!!
hi thank you for completely breaking my brain open with this concept, I have been furiously rotating it since you sent this ask. please enjoy this superhero au that manifested through me.
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Jimmy is a canary, or at least that's what his mother called him (it's kinder than what other people have called him later in his life). He can sense misfortune and redirect it. Not ever away from himself, but most certainly towards others. Concentrated bad luck, strumming at the strings of fate to nudge a tragedy into the path of another. Maybe he doesn't have control over it always, and anyway it's not exactly like, a good guy's power, so he maybe falls into a bad crowd. He's always gotten Looks, even from his former teammates. He's hurt people before. He's hurt himself before (frequently).
So he's a villain. He has to be, right? With the way he hurts? He's not exactly enthusiastic though, not like the Dungeon Master. He's heard his cackle before, seen the way his eyes light up like fireworks when a contraption of his works (or blows up, but either way what glorious destruction-) and it's almost infectious. Almost makes Jimmy enjoy himself on the jobs they cross paths. Jimmy remembers when he was fighting this guy, and pulling at the potential lurking in bugged code and faulty wiring to make his redstone machinery break down. Now he can't help but nudge a bit of good luck in his direction, almost instinctively pulling the bad outcomes out of the crazy guy's path.
They're working on a job together when Jimmy senses something Off, and there's a problem with a machine that he can't divert, an inevitability that may just kill the Dungeon Master. He pulls him out of the way just in time, and the man looks at him bewildered, flat on his back, with Jimmy hovering over him. Jimmy never forgets the grin that split the man's (very handsome) face in that moment, as he declared Jimmy a good luck charm, and decided that he would keep him.
Jimmy had never been called good luck before.
It's not long before they exchange names (The Coalbird and The Dungeon Master. Tango squints at him as they sit down one night, just Jimmy and Tango in that moment, and asks him what the name means. When Jimmy tells him about the birds the miners took down into the coalmines, Tango interjects that he thought those birds were called canaries. Something hurt in Jimmy settles into place in that moment, an old hurt he didn't know he carried. He hears his mother's laugh as Tango says that's what he's going to call him now, his canary. Jimmy has to hide his smile behind his cup. He doesn't tell Tango no).
There's been some dates too. A lot of dates. Jimmy hangs around his workshop, learning that Tango wasn't really in the villain business to actually hurt people, but after a certain point his department didn't exactly appreciate the mad scientist thing so much any more, and funding was a little thin for experiments that had a 50/50 chance of explodificating. So robbing banks was really just the next logical step after that, if you thought about it.
Maybe at some point down the line there is a breaking point. Maybe there is a moment where they question what it is they're doing exactly, when they have something to lose now. This isn't a safe thing they're doing. Neither of them are the megalomaniac supervillain type, but heroes fight back hard nonetheless. Jimmy's brother doesn't though, even though he sees Grain skirt the edges of battles looking as torn and indecisive as Jimmy's ever seen him (he misses him he misses him he misses him he misses him-). Maybe there's a day when Tango and Jimmy decide enough is enough and run away from it all, buy a ranch in the foothills of the mountains and leave the city behind. Maybe they get that chance. Maybe Grian visits them, and Scar will get over the fact that he used to face them as HotGuy, and Jimmy will have a family again. Maybe.
But being a villain is a dangerous business, and Jimmy can't change his own fate, no matter how much he might try. And Tango and Jimmy, well they're bound now, aren't they. When Jimmy tries to divert the strings of their fate, his grip slips off of Tango's thread. Their fates are one and the same now. And if there's one single thing he knows, it's that Jimmy can't change his own fate.