#cyan ficstuff
The under-utilization of the Magic Kaito quartet in DCMK fanfiction saddens me. They have suchamazing potential, like, there’s a genius detective with powerful connections in the police force, one of the world’s flashiest and most renowned thieves (also a disguise master), an exponentially powerful sorceress, and possibly the only person who can sit the former three down for club activities without inciting a riot. Slam them together and launch them into the path of fighting crime – they’ll be SPECTACULAR. (And hilarious, but that goes without saying.) It’ll be like teenage Leverage but against Murderous Syndicates. Canon’s already given a great foundation for these dumbasses; they’re in the same class; the bonding interactions JUST MAKE THEMSELVES. So why can I only find like 1.5 fics with anything near this premise????? Tragiqueeeee.
I want them to be friends in a bickering, vaguely antagonistic sort of way, but with the additional undertone of: “if you mess with them I will track you down and ruin your life.” The former is canon and also pretty much the only way I can see their dynamic going, factoring in Kaito, Akako and Hakuba’s respective and competing egos, their night-jobs on opposite sides of the Law, and their differing priorities and moralities –thus why Aoko is so important as peace-keeper. The latter isalreadyAoko and Kaito’s canonical relationship. And Akako and Kaito’s even, though its slightly one sided. And Fanon-wise Hakuba and Kaito are perpetually played in this light, so I’m not sure why we can’t just go the full circle and make these four be A Squad, pretty much ALL the foundations have already been set, just not explored.
Like, there’s only 2 really major issues/secrets that need to be cleared up.
1. Kaito is Kaito kid. This is BARELY a secret. Akako knows it for sure. Hakuba knows it but hasn’t managed to pry the confession from Kaito’s throat. Aoko knew it but Kaito tricked her into rescinding her extremely accurate suspicion. (Through a plan that was like 30% improv and 30% luck to boot, I love how the DC side of things sees Kaitou as this hyper-competent always suave gentleman when in reality he’s the greatest of teenage disasters).
2. Akako’s magic. Also not really secret. Kaito knows it. Akako isn’t exactly hiding it. She uses it in so much mundane stuff. “That broomstick ain’t flyng by jet propulsion, Hakuba,” is still the perfectest line I will ever write for this fandom in my notes.
So after issues 1 and 2 have been aired–(1 is mainly a Aoko-Kaito conflict because Kaito will deny he’s actually Kid to Hakuba and Akako ‘till his dying day, even when they already know. Meanwhile 2 is mainly a Hakuba-internal conflict because magic)–we’re SET. Although to facilitate/ speed up said conflict resolution there’s probably going to be an: oops we’re GETTING SHOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A KID HEIST situation. It’ll force Hakuba to take Akako’s magic seriously when he’s still on a ??? wavering line of confusion and SCIENCE??? (Akako is going to be the BIGGEST BAMF, pry this theory from my cold dead hands); meanwhile in the aftermath someone’s going to throw the Kid-is-Kaitou theory down for Aoko if they haven’t already.
(Although Aoko’ll probably figure it out earlier. The first thing she’ll think of once Akako’s more impressive magic is revealed is: KAITO USED REAL MAGIC TO PULL THE DUPE HE’S KID. Kaito will deny it and deny it until he can’t.)
….And then I can have my leverage-esque dream squad of dumb bickering kids complete with slice-of-life high-school shenanigans and detective work and heists and witchcraft.
So something I’ve been realizing, (after rereading Law’s flashback for like the 20th time) is that fanon vs canon interpretation of Rocinante is very… different. Like occasionally, are we even talking about the same person kind of different. I feel like a lot of people overplay him as sweet and gentle and clumsy, while at the same time downgrading his competence. Like, yes, Roci can be sweet and gentle (and the clumsiness is ingrained) but 92% of the time he’s not.
Canon Rosi is harsh. He curses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. He has the strength to toss grown men around like toys and he uses it. The first few months of the Find-Law-a-Cure Roadtrip he basically lugged Law around like a sack of misbehaving rice with a exasperated look, through screaming protests and 10 different assassination/escape attempts. If we’re talking about competence: this is the guy who fooled Donquixote Doflamingo for four years. That’s not even counting Minion island, where Rocinante both outwitted AND out-gambitted his older brother, while half dead and with the entire Donquixote Family on his ass. He would have gotten away too, if it weren’t for the extremely inopportune coincidence with Vergo.
So give me this Rocinante. Give me Rocinante who has a mind like a steel trap and a look that can freeze a grown-man cold at thirty paces. Give me Rocinante who was Heart Executive for four years and Doflamingo’s right hand; an executive who more than lived up to his title. Give me Rocinante who is Doflamingo’s younger brother, with that same incendiary temper. That same capacity for whip-crack violence if you shove fast and hard enough at his few (present, specific) triggers. Remember: burning hospitals, the staff cowering in the aftermath. Give me Donquixote Rocinante.
And, despite this, inspite of this, because of this, give me Rocinante who has a moral compass that points unshakeably north; give me Rocinante with a conviction of bedrock, a patience deep and steely and unshakable as a seabed. (there is no room for anything less, see, when you grow up with Doffy at two points and have Garp as one of three primary adult figures in the interim.) Give me Rocinante who gives up his career, his mission, his loyalties, his life for the sake of one angry dying boy. Give me the Roci who crawled from the wreck and ruin of his childhood with his empathy burning, even when the rest of him was nothing but skin and bones and heartache.
(Give me the Roci who loves too much. He does not know how to forget, even when he should, even when it would have been a kindness. This is a truth: he never could have pulled that trigger, on Minion. Roci can learn to hate his older brother but he can never unlearn what it means to love him, and he definitely does not know how to bury him. So give me Roci who cries for the caustic little boy who’s done nothing but give him grief over the past months and months, the Roci who’s last actions are used to oversee that Law will be safe and free and beholden to no one.)
And they’re the same person. And that’s the point. That’s what makes him such a powerful character. Roci is harsh edges and whip-smarts and military training, the smoke to his brother’s fire. He can be brutally cold; he can be explosively irritated; he can out-stubborn a D. That’s why his overwhelming empathy and compassion is so powerful. It’s the juxtaposition: between both his exterior countenance and his inner capacity for kindness, between him and Doflamingo, whom he both mirrors and diametrically counters.
TLDR: give me DONQUIXOTE ROCINANTE YOU COWARDS. Oda gifted this guy eighty layers in eight chapters and NO ONE’S USING HIM TO HIS CANON POTENTIAL WHY??
Among other things I am displeased about when it comes to Spn angel lore: Lucifer’s cage as a fucking physical C A G E I mean come on guys have a little more imagination.
This is how I imagine Lucifer’s Cage.
Lucifer’s Cage is made of silence and void and nothingness. Its purpose is punishment, and isolation, and the latter translates into the former. It mimics conditions prior to Creation, when the Darkness still roamed and the edges of space were speckled with the bombshell carcasses of broken realities.
The Cage is cold, although simply cold is a drastic understatement. In empty, interstellar space the average temperature is 3 kelvins, -270 Celsius. Absolute zero, where atoms sigh and halt in their motion, is three degrees lower. The Cage is colder than that. The Cage mimics conditions at the Beginning, where matter did not yet exist and Time was nothing but a facsimile and the dimensions that make up current reality was swallowed continuously by the Darkness even as they were spun into being. It is a void and it is a black hole singularity: existence is possible in its confines, cessation is not.
And above all, it is ruinously, achingly lonely. Standstill time and flat dimensional existence and negative absolute zero temperature are all things Lucifer has withstood before and not as a punishment, for Lucifer too predates time and space, and the void was the cradle he was born in. But even in the empty ether of the Beginning there was always the constant of his Father’s Presence. Father, and Michael (who is the fire to Lucifer’s Ice, the supernova to Lucifer’s cool bright starlight, Michael, the first face Lucifer ever saw just as God’s was the first voice he ever heard) and afterwards, Gabriel and Raphael. When the Darkness was locked away all the choirs of creation sprung into being: galactic star song and the sigh of nebulae coalescing: the humm of matter, the murmurs of the newly created Host, past and present and the coalition of a thousand senses in synthesia born on the input of wings.
Angels are not solitary creatures. They were created for service, and in hivemind, and even during the earliest emptiest days of the Beginning Lucifer had God, had Michael (hadMichaelhadMichael). But in the nothingness of the Cage he is cut off from the voice of the Host, from the brightness of souls, from starlight and starsong, a thousand eyes and a thousand senses giving negative feedback. In humans extreme sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations short term, identity loss long term. Lucifer is far more resilient by nature, but the Cage is still the most isolated place Creation, and he is so lonely and so bitter and so furious heburns.
The Cage is isolation and punishment and his holding cell until the end of times, punishment for not bowing and scraping to lesser creatures, and Lucifer despises it. When the last seal is broken it will be a triumph: because that is when humanity will face their rightful retribution upon his wrath, when all of Heaven and Hell and Creation will see them as the wretched creatures they are.
(And when the last seal is broken it will be a tragedy, because it will cost him Michael. Because to get to humanity the cost will be Michael, So It Is Written, and in the void nothingness of his Cage, during the moments when his frigid freezing rage temporarily recedes, all Lucifer can feel at the thought of the lock finally breaking is overwhelming trepidation. Because the cost will be either himself or Michael, and so in those moments when the future stands in crystal clarity, he hopes, very quietly, in a small and subconscious part of himself, that the day the Cage opens never comes.)
