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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Not wanting to be responsible for more hurt, Daisy left everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. and moved to LA to finally put a stop to the Watchdogs. She soon finds a parter in crime in Robbie Reyes aka Ghost Rider. What first started as a partnership quickly turns into more.
Kind of starts out like the beginning of season 4 without the Darkhold storyline and focuses mainly on Daisy and Robbie.
what do you think about Take Two?
Kay, so I finally watched both episodes that have aired and I have mixed feelings. I’ll get it out of the way and say that I thought there were a lot of similarities to Castle (dialogue, situations, etc), especially in the pilot. It felt like a combination of FFYG and Nikki Heat. Only AU. And for what it’s worth, I’d absolutely be cool with affectionate nods to Castle as a show or even hints that it takes place in the same universe - Castle books on shelves, a NY Times on a desk with a story about Caskett or about Captain-turned-Candidate Beckett, maybe even Sam knowing Meredith or Natalie Rhodes from a movie they did together and name dropping,etc - but I don’t want it to feel like a retread with tweaks and the pilot kinda did.
But that said, the second ep sat somewhat better with me and it was cute and both eps made me chuckle in places - Eddie’s non-girlfriend’s total amusement really amused me, no lie. So though I’m not totally sold on it, I’m also not giving up on it yet. I think the show has potential to be something fun and awesome if it develops outside of the “this worked for us before” bubble. I’ll try to catch it as it airs this week and get into a rhythm of watching it live to see if maybe the energy and the excitement of being part of the airing helps to get my own energy up.
Political Rant of the Week
One thing that annoys me to no end is the conservative belief that liberals are not patriotic. I do not wear American flags on my clothing or fly one from the back of my car. I do not shout how great the US is from the rooftops or even believe that to be true. Does this mean I am not patriotic? I don't think so.
I have voted in every election since I was 18, I support our troops and our veterans and I believe that they deserve more than the pitiful excuse of resources the US gives them in helping them adjust to life after serving their country. Is it patriotic to cut funding to programs for people of the armed forces? Is it patriotic to cut public assistance for people who have been fighting the poverty cycle for generations? Is it patriotic to believe that because you have less pigment in your skin or you love someone of the opposite gender that that makes you a superior person? I don't think so.
You know what I do think is patriotism? Believing that my country can do better and refusing to give up until it is better for everyone.
Hypocrisy runs rampant in the US and it is one of the biggest problems this country has. You can't support legislation that would ban abortions and cut access to birth control with the belief that you are pro-life without providing resources so women don't have to face unplanned/unwanted pregnancies or have a child they cannot care for. You can't support a bill that would ban gay marriage on the basis of family values but then have your 5 mistresses and your secret family come out of the woodwork. You can't consider your party financially responsible when you only provide tax cuts for the 1% that results in only making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The people who scream and yell about how they are patriotic are only doing this to draw attention away from the evidence that they are in fact NOT patriotic. Just because they are louder doesn't mean they are right. Just because I don't yell "AMERICA IS GREAT!" every chance I get doesn't mean I'm wrong. I don't have to believe that the US is the best in the world to be patriotic; I just need to believe that we can be better and we will.
Rules: list your 10 favorite female characters from 10 different fandoms.
Tagged by @waynesprince
1) Kate Beckett (Castle)
2) Hermione Granger (Harry Potter)
3) Claire Fraser (Outlander) (Geillis Duncan is a close second, just because she’s so batshit crazy and fun to watch.)
4) Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) (Effie Trinket is a very close second.)
5) Princess General Leia Organa Solo (Star Wars)
6) Evelyn O’Connell (The Mummy)
7) Ellie (Jurassic Park)
8) Jessica Jones (Jessica Jones, The Defenders)
9) Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman)
10) Maddie (Big Little Lies)
For all of you guys who watch Supergirl and are looking for Kara’s sweatshirt, I found it at H&M.
k listen I know you don't write twd but I saw you write that Gleggie fic and I'm desperate here because I'm in the castle fandom and don't even know how to begin looking in the twd fandom for fic. plus I trust you as a writer so idk if you've seen the latest ep yet or if you ship Daryl and Carol, but can you maybe **consider** writing something tiny about them if you do at all? thx in advance if you do :*
A/N: As you mentioned, I don’t write The Walking Dead regularly and writing characters I’m less familiar is a bit intimidating, but I do think Daryl and Carol have an incredible dynamic that is compelling to write. I hope the piece below will suffice. :)
This is set immediately after Daryl leaves Carol’s place.
-
“You could stay, you know.”
He pauses on the edge of the porch, his heart drumming loud in his chest, through his ears. Heavy from the last few weeks, the last few days, hours. From lying to her.
He never fathomed he’d lie to her.
“With me,” she clarifies, the sound of her swallowing soft, uncertain, yet affirming all at once. “You could stay here, at least for tonight.”
“They want me back there. At the Kingdom, for safety.”
“They probably want me back there for the same reasons,” she counters and he catches the end of her shrug as he turns to see her still standing there, waiting. “But it can be safe here too. I mean, the two of us? C’mon, dream team.”
A grunt of laughter breaches his lips, a sound that’s grown almost foreign over time, but of course, it’s her to revive it. It’s always been her.
“Okay,” he murmurs, retracing his steps back to the doorway, pausing for a heartbeat when she drifts to the side to offer him room to enter, but doesn’t move.
Sometimes he wants to be blunt, ask her what they are, what she wants, what she wants from him. But, if he’s being honest with himself, he’s scared of the answer and he thinks she is too.
He and Carol… they’re damaged goods, broken people beat down by those who were supposed to love them, two people who didn’t even consider rebuilding until the rest of the world had fallen apart. There was something unhealthy in that, he’s sure, but something beautiful too.
He told her once that they weren’t ashes.
No, not ashes, no longer even embers. What he felt for her right now were flames.
They were twin flames that could burn so brightly together.
-
It’s not cold outside yet. The air outside still stifling throughout the day, muggy with only a slight chill in the nights, but they still sit in front of the fire together, the warmth of the flames radiating onto the bare skin of his arms, illuminating the tiny hairs that stand straight for her.
She’s cold against him, her shoulder sealed to his, knees crossed, bumping his when she shifts. A casual position for them, but different this time. Meaning more than it should.
“Did you ever consider saying goodbye?”
He doesn’t know where the question comes from, only that it needs out, has needed out since he learned that she left by her own free will. Partially, he’s glad she was gone, glad she was safe, but fuck, he’d missed her.
Glenn’s brutal murder, Abraham’s final gurgle of words, had not been the only torturous thoughts, nightmares, that had haunted him in that god forsaken prison cell of a room. If Carol had been present in that circle… who knows what Negan would have done, if his choice would have been different. Who knows how much self-control he would have maintained over himself at the sight of her in danger.
“I don’t know,” she sighs out, her voice barely above a whisper, so tired.
They’re both so tired.
“You should head to bed. I’ll keep watch,” he assures her, nudging her shoulder, encouraging her up from the floor, but she shakes her head.
“I should have told you.” He trains his eyes on the dance of flames, feels that fragile place in his chest quivering. “The group… they’re my family, our family, but you… you’re more Daryl. It’s why losing you scares me the most.”
He pulls his knees to his chest. “You already know it’s the same.”
“No, it’s not,” she counters softly. “You… you could keep going, if I-”
“Stop it,” he snaps, standing a little too quickly to make it stop, make her stop, because he can’t - he can’t even think it. “You ain’t-”
“You could keep going without me, I couldn’t. I can’t lose someone else,” she argues, her words wet and shaking. “But definitely not you. You - god, you’ve been - I love you, Daryl. You know I do. In a way that would ruin me. Just like it did with Sophia.”
And the mention of her daughter, the girl they’d searched so hard for so long ago, invested so much hope in… it breaks him - slices his heart in half right down the middle.
“Stop,” he rasps, scrubbing at his eyes and heading for the door, slashing his hipbone on the table, adding to the mosaic of cuts and bruises that have barely even started to heal across his body.
The hard, familiar curl of her hand at his shoulder has him jerking to a stop before he can even reach the entryway and ending up in the embrace of her arms in seconds, succumbing to the need for it, breaking apart in the safe haven she provides.
And he cries, buries the broken sounds in the curve of her neck, until his chest is empty and the only thing that resonates is the beat of her heart pounding in rhythm with his, shaking them both.
-
They lie side by side in the twin size bed in the sole bedroom of the house she’s adopted and for hours, they talk, about everything and nothing, their hands occasionally flirting, fingers twining, palms meeting. And it slowly begins to ease the brutalized parts of him she doesn’t know about, the new scars that were so viciously added, so deeply cut.
Of course, she picks up on it rather quickly.
“Things aren’t really fine, are they?”
He takes in a breath through his nose, feels her hand squeeze his, and closes his eyes.
“No.”
He doesn’t have to look to know she’s nodding, the pillow they’re sharing moving ever so slightly.
“You don’t have to tell me. Not right now.”
“I don’t wanna lose you either,” he admits, the greatest fear of it all. Because she’s wrong.
He couldn’t survive that too. Losing Meryl was a kind of trauma he hadn’t been prepared for, but had come back from, losing Beth was… agony, but Carol? No, he didn’t have it in him for that too. He thinks she often forgets that between the two of them, there isn’t one stronger than the other.
They were mirror images, different enough to hold each other up where the other needed, but they were both at their breaking points now more than ever, just trying to survive, and she was one of the only reasons he had left to keep going. Even when they were apart, even when he had no idea where she was, he always knew she was alive. He felt it, just as strongly as he feels the connection between him now as they lie beside each other. Without that… he doesn’t want to feel what it’s like to lose one of the only lifelines he has left.
“You won’t,” she murmurs, bringing their intertwined hands to rest atop her chest, the knot of their fingers rising and falling with her every breath. “I didn’t say goodbye because I won’t. Not to you - I won’t say goodbye to you.”
“That mean you’re done leaving?”
“You’re here,” she shrugs against him. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“But you can’t stay here. This… hiding ain’t you.”
Their hands rise with a slow inhale, fall with the breath that rushes from her parted lips.
“I know. But I was losing what was left of me, fighting, killing, I needed… to breathe for a little while again,” she admits, turning her head on the pillow, and he does too, reads her eyes in the darkness, the sliver of the moon and starlight bleeding through the window.
“Breathing better now?”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “Yeah.”
“Good,” he mumbles, closing his eyes as he shifts on his side, doesn’t think as he maneuvers his arms around her, the two of them tangling - an effortless mess in the moonlight. “Because I wasn’t leaving without you.”
Her lashes tickle the line of his throat and he props his chin atop her head, opens his eyes before the darkness can draw him back to the empty cell, his body curled in on itself, music blaring through his ears, numbing his senses, everything aching-
“Daryl,” she calls softly, one of her hands unfurling at his back, her fingertips grazing the first scars to adorn his body at the kiss of his father’s belt. “I’m with you.”
He doesn’t want to sleep; he’s so desperately exhausted, but far more afraid of what dreams could come for him in the dark, of what he could wake up to. Or without. But throughout the night, he remains tied to her, holding on and being held, anchored. She keeps him out of the trenches of darkness and in the illumination of her flames.
Did you watch episode 3 of Take Two? What did you think? Are you still going to stick with the show? Episode 5 has someone from Castle guest starring. If you don't already know who it is, the promo photos are out. I saw them on the spoilertv website.
Hi Anon! Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I wanted to gather my thoughts and then time got away from me.
I know you asked specifically about episode 3, but since ep 4 has also aired, I figure I’ll mention it too. There were moments of humor and lightness that I enjoyed, but overall I’m still... I think the best way to describe it is I don’t feel a real attachment or connection to the show or the characters. I don’t dislike it, but I’m still not invested in it, if that makes sense. I’ll stick it out, though, to see if maybe something sparks, because I’d love for that to happen. Episode 4 felt like the first one that wasn’t some combination of other Castle episodes with a little twist, or at least I couldn’t place them right off the bat like I had with previous episodes, and I did like that. (Ep 3 reminded me of Little Girl Lost.) Hopefully that bodes well for future episodes, because while I stand by my assertions that I’d love for the show to take place in the Castle universe (seriously, it could be so good), I don’t want it to be Castle, and I think if they stopped trying so hard to replicate Castle (right down to Robert Duncan scoring basically the same music), they would be so much better off.
I did see the pictures of the person in question - I was surprised to see them. For some reason, I didn’t expect them to be the first Castle alum on the show.
