#jmonwip

[harrowbleak]

So I’ve been in the ocean for awhile but anyway Endgame frigging proved my headcanon that the Ebony Maw is involved with Nebula’s cybernetic enhancements so hell yeah. Also the fic I was working on got eaten by my laptop, lost forever except the parts I posted here, which was very sad, and I might have given up, except that I got a couple of glimpses at old Ebony on the silver screen one more time so... Enjoy some fresh hot garbage. This is technically a first draft, but also a rewrite, and it’s ugly but it will improve. I understand there is a small but very enthusiastic collection of people who share my interest in the Ebony Maw and his intense feelings for/about Thanos, so when it’s done, this is for y’all. The fic I’m working on is a kind of origin story/one off, and it won’t align perfectly with comic canon, but frankly 616!Maw and MCU!Maw are pretty different from each other already, so no one can stop me. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:

“He will speak with you privately,” the emissary said with a sneer as the doors wrenched themselves open. The Ebony Maw inclined his head without a word, and pressed on alone, left to his own devices in another bewilderingly large room, like a sacrifice in wait. Light on his feet as he was, his footsteps were nevertheless deafening as he advanced toward the empty throne, the seat of this great titan’s power. Slowly, he sank to his knees at the foot of the dais, an instinct in a place which felt so sacred. “Do you know where you are?” The voice came from somewhat behind the Ebony Maw, and while he didn’t need to be able to see to know that someone was there, it was rare for anyone to get that close before he sensed them. He did not dare to look. “To an extent,” he admitted. He can only feel pressure from the person behind him, an inevitable gravity. “And why have you come to me on your knees?” The Ebony Maw heard the heavy footsteps behind him approaching as Thanos–for surely this was he–circled him. The titan loomed, casting his long shadow over the Maw.“I have not heard of you,” he confessed, “but you have crept up on my home in a peerless warship, and while I cannot be certain… I feel as though you are someone I’ve been waiting for all my life to meet.” Face to face with Thanos, he could barely breathe, craning his neck to look up at him. “Has anyone else detected us?” Thanos asked, a ruthlessness in his eyes. Once again, the Maw could sense that he had hazarded his life, that perhaps this man, this force, would simply kill him. “I can make certain that no one else ever does,” he promised.

[harrowbleak]

I’m still working on that Ebony Maw piece, which I think will probably clock in at about 5-10k words when completed, depending on how deep into it I get (which so far has been ‘pretty deep’ because I have reasonably elaborate headcanons now). Here, look:

“Eb’ny? Are you awake?” It is rest hours on board the Sanctuary II, and the Maw has only just dared to close his eyes when a little voice intrudes into the quiet. “I can’t sleep.” Gamora is… very young. He hasn’t paid much mind to her precise age. Not quite old enough to fight in earnest, but taking well enough to her lessons. She’s fearless, Thanos’ little one, which is why she is here, and not lying in ashes with half of her people. Witless, the lot of them, blind to the glory of their sacrifice… But Gamora has been chosen for something far greater, and this makes her Ebony Maw’s problem just now. He cracks open one eye and beckons her in. He had never expected to become a child-minder, but Thanos’ will is one with his, and so when the great titan’s cosmic undertakings keep him away from Gamora, his herald plays the governess. The Ebony Maw’s own children are long dead, but their lessons remain. He tries not to think of them, the Chime, the Grace, as he studies the small green face peeping at him over the edge of his bed, dark eyes still so trusting. “What keeps you awake, child?” Gamora’s face scrunches at the question. “I’m thirsty,” she lies. The Maw has been a liar since before Thanos found him, and he sees through the child’s frail deception in half a heartbeat. And since he has instructions not to teach the girl to whisper like he can, he merely shrugs it off. “You know where to find water.” “I’m cold.” Another lie, because she does not realize he’s seen through the first. If she’d noticed, he might have asked to teach her better. “No need to bother me with that.” The Maw closes his eyes. “When there’s something you need, you take it. Is that not what Thanos has told you?”

[harrowbleak]

Writing WIP Game

Thanks, @ifridiot for the tag! This was difficult, because my process is messy, messy, messy. Go to your current work in progress and share the following:

The first line of the work: The coming of the great titan Thanos to the silvery planet where the Ebony Maw had been born was as a revelation, and the Maw knew as soon as he detected those new shining lights entering their atmosphere that everything was on the verge of a profound and unalterable change.

The first line of your current chapter (or if it’s a one-shot, the first line of the tenth paragraph): “Yes.”

The last line you wrote: And in the eloquent silence of the void around him, he remembers everything.

A line for a chapter/part you haven’t written yet: "I can give you this planet in half the time, without a fight.”

Tag at least 3 people whose work you wanna see, and if you make a separate post for it, please link back to this one.

[harrowbleak]

Still working on that Black Order/Children of Thanos nonsense when I can find a moment. Behold.

It’s difficult to focus. The ringcraft will go on to Titan without him, but with the stonekeeper free… If there would have been judgment before, the Maw cannot imagine what awaits him now, even if he finds a way to traverse the darkness and return to Thanos’ side. An utter failure, after years of flawless service to the great titan. And it is so, so difficult not to look back on all that he has achieved, and how meaningless it is, if he cannot place the Time Stone in Thanos’ hand. If only he had it now, to fall back through time, to return to the day before this, or another… He is travelling already, in a way, although it is nearly impossible to get his bearings. Surely Proxima and Corvus will fare better. And Cull, has he been retrieved? The Ebony Maw can recall when all of them were newly inducted into the Black Order, the most elite of Thanos’ many children. It smarts to have failed them; to leave them to enact their father’s profound vision alone. They are more than capable, he knows, but there is a fault in him that makes it impossible not to fret. Oh, the Ebony Maw is helpless but to love every Child of Thanos, and it is his delight to shepherd them on the path set out before them, but it’s also this that makes it so keenly painful to be here, where he cannot light the way.

[WIP tag] [Fic Portfolio]

[harrowbleak]

Currently working on some Black Order/Children of Thanos/whatever fanfiction because that’s where my life is right now. Of course, I have things on hold that I should be finishing, but I’m going to follow my heart, and my heart wants the rapturous joy that Ebony Maw feels whenever Thanos is within his line of sight. Behold, some work-in-progress.

In the dead of night, the Ebony Maw took a smallcraft and flitted into the jet-black sky like a spark to head fate off before it arrived. Perhaps it was a foolish thing, a mad thing, to race up and out of the atmosphere, having said no farewells. A ship like the one that approached could atomize his tiny vessel in an instant. This fact saved his life, the Maw learned later, for who would fly towards such danger without weapons? Without a shield? He had hazarded his life, without even a moment’s hesitation. All told, the Ebony Maw would not have regretted going up in a grand conflagration of misplaced intuition. His ambitions had remained too long unrealized, entrusted with leaders unequal to the splendour he dreamt of. Their world was not enough, perhaps nothing was, but the vastness of the universe awaited, and the Maw felt in his bones that this was his chance shape it. And Thanos… Thanos was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

[harrowbleak]

I feel like posting a WIP, so behold. I really like the fate/series, although it has many, many warts. Many, many warts. I’ve been especially interested in the whole Gilles de Rais and Jeanne d’Arc situation, because if I don’t consume garbage, I will almost certainly die. But really what I’m interested in is how the show decided to handle Gilles de Rais as being split between Saber Gilles, who is rational and believes in justice, and Caster Gilles who literally murders children. And so it’s especially interesting to make that virtuous past look directly into its hideous future and know that it’s not just a possibility, but what actually happens. And that he loves the shit out of Jeanne is also of interest, given what he becomes. Fate/Apocrypha kind of got into it, but they didn’t quite get elbows deep into it, and so I’m writing a fic. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall. [WIP tag] [Fic Portfolio] Gilles isn’t sure where he is. Asleep? No, something deeper than that. They’d hanged him in 1440. A beautiful morning in October. He’d been the first to die, although the rope had been just a little short. He remembers the horrible moment when the line went taut, and he began to strangle. Poor Poitou, poor Henriet. They’d have to watch him choke, and realize their necks would not be broken by the fall. In the end, they’d been too afraid to defy him. As much as he could have disdained their tacit compliance in all of his grotesque evil, he knows they were powerless; his victims, too, just as much as all those innocent children.

Was Prelati here? Was he watching? His dear, treacherous Prelati, who had found him in his grief and asked that eminently lethal question:

If Jeanne d’Arc was the holiest of maidens, why did the Lord let her burn?

Much later, that question would lead to others, and pondering them would distort Gilles utterly from what he had been as a man of 26. How much depravity was enough? Why did God, who loved them, allow such heinous evil to be committed against those most faithful? Why was no one punished? Dimly, he remembers. He’d hanged, after nearly a decade of killing, and burned, burned, burned, if only because the boundless greed of his detractors surpassed his desire to fritter his wealth away. Nothing mattered, after the war, and mattered even less after Jeanne, whose name would ring out in his heart forever.

Under threat of torture, Gilles had confessed the grisly account of a hundred, two hundred, six hundred dead children. He’d tormented his own victims just the same, after all, and so he knew how awful, how beautiful such agony could be, and his frail heart feared what an inquisitor would subject him to in order to extract those hideous stories. The little one he’d smothered with his hands after extracting every small scream she could make. The little one he’d dressed in a page’s fine clothes before he ran a knife over their sweet young throat. How he had laughed at the profound ineptitude of God, failing over and over to protect those he should have guarded most jealously. He was sure he could feel Jeanne burning, the heat of her pyre all around him. Her last breath was on the lips of every dying child. Why hadn’t he been there when they set her ablaze? Why can’t he remember that, but remembers kissing every cold brow of every cold child? O Gilles de Montmorency-Laval,

O bloodstained Baron de Rais, Wouldst see again that holy maid? Wouldst speak again her blesséd name? And whatever he is now, it answers. Every fragment of who he was, who he is in this abyss, who the world has imagined him to be now that he has left it, every shattered piece of him calls out in unison. Where must I go?

[harrowbleak]

@ifridiot​ tagged me in the 7-7-7 line thingie, in which you’re meant to post seven lines from the seventh paragraph from the seventh page of a WIP. Embarrassingly few of my WIPs actually get that long (with one exception which is already partially on AO3), mostly because I don’t quite have the time right now to write anything but the shortest of stories. So this is just the first seven lines of a piece I’ve been working on for longer than seven days. If you’re reading this, you’re tagged. Do as you will, and tag me back if you like.

Gilles isn’t sure where he is. Asleep? No, something deeper than that. They’d hanged him in 1440. A beautiful morning in October. He’d been the first to die, although the rope had been just a little short. He remembers the horrible moment when the line went taut, and he began to strangle.