Self-indulgent weary knight's respite Steve doodle! This is probably a year or so after the Casablanca fic, when he decides to do a PhD under Rebecca.
(AU rambling under the cut)
Lots of little details for me here - at this point, they've found a medication to keep a lot of his Veronica symptoms at bay, which includes the self regeneration! So he can get his piercing back that he missed so much. It's a sign that his cheeky/rebellious kick isn't fully buried. Also he has to wear glasses because Veronica's enhanced sight is gone (like father, like son).
Claire jokes that he always used to feud with the strait-laced guys, and now he's gone full academia (but she has to admit, he can pull off the cable knit sweater vibes p well). His dad nagged him all the time about how he should get a career in biomed r&d, it pays the bills, he knows the ropes to get him there, etc., etc. If pre-Rockfort Steve saw him, he'd probably ask who the hell this nerd is. And yeah, Steve never thought he'd end up like this either. But having walked away from absolute hell and almost mutating into a mindless beast in the year after Antarctica, he's still kinda terrified of himself. Learning about the mutation and sating it through research is his way of fighting and contributing to the cause without worrying he'll misstep and leave people dead. Sometimes, he really wishes he was as dependable as Claire or Leon. Part of him wants to be on the front lines of it all. But he can't. He can't risk screwing up, not when there's always so much at stake.
On a meta note, it makes it so much fun to compare end-stage Weary Knight's Respite Steve with my other + my friends' AUs, because a vast majority of them don't walk out of Antarctica freely and become living weapons/monsters. Meanwhile this guy doesn't realize it but he basically ends up the most normie out of them all. For a kid who worried so much about messing up, he figured out his own way to it all ^^
Say what you will about the tragedy of martin's story but there's something so sweet and conforting about how someone aligned with the Lonely's last conversation was him being told he was loved and saying it back in return
I don’t know what the universe is doing or why it needs to be doing it but I wish it would stop.
It has taken everyone I love from me with the start of the off season, my house feeling safe with the living room ceiling caving in, my main pain reliever as my body started to reject it, a lot of my coping mechanisms as I can’t do them without the pain relief, half my safe foods as my body hates them too now, and now my fucking camera has been taken from me too. The most important object I own. The thing I would jump into a fire to save. The thing that allows me to regulate through the things I love so much id otherwise get so overwhelmed I’d end up in shutdown or worse. The thing that was going to be my ticket to seeing my friends in the next few weeks. Yeah. That thing. We don’t have the money for repairs, and I can’t even fathom if we have to replace it.
And this is just my personal life shit!! This isn’t even including the country I live in slowly becoming a place that is no longer safe for me to live!! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!! Anymore!!!!
