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angryflowergardener · 2 days

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Fundamental Forces (Challengers Fanfic)

Author's Note: Wow! It has been a LONG time since I wrote fanfiction. I can't believe it's Challengers (2024) that got me to do it, but I LIVE for Patrick's chaotic Bi energy, Art's hidden vindictiveness, Tashi's intolerance for bullshit, and a messily drawn triangle where the angles are trying REALLY hard to touch.

This is basically 900 words of character study, but it's got dashes of both Patrick/Tashi and Patrick/Art. I hope it scratches someone's itch.

Patrick knows he’s a fucking irredeemable piece of shit because sometimes he wishes his mother had died of breast cancer. Or that his dad had been a raging alcoholic — the kind that shouted obscenities and backhanded him across the face when he’d pissed him off. Sometimes he wishes that any of the Nannies he had until he was 11 years old had touched him wrong. Or that he’d killed his first high school girlfriend driving tipsy after junior prom.

Instead, Patrick had a perfectly normal childhood.

His mother brought flawless cupcakes to every school bake sale, was punctual for every parent-teacher conference.

His Dad worked a little too much, maybe, drank one scotch too many on hard days. He always knew it and always put himself to bed early when he did.

His parents were together seven years before they had him. Married, in their late twenties. He was part of the plan.

Both come from money. They like each other well enough. They have a stable, comfortable arrangement that suits them. Perfectly normal.

There’s no explanation for why Patrick came out wrong.

&&&

Tennis is all he's good at.

He's no good at school.

Or saying nice things to people.

Or staying in one place for very long.

It's just tennis.

That's his one good trick.

&&&

He’s sitting in a classroom with eighteen other kids and one of the girls has already taken her test up to Ms. Larken’s desk. He knows because he saw her shoes — sparkly green jelly sandals. They glitter in the sunlight that slants through the window.

So, Kelly has already taken her test up and Patrick’s palms begin to sweat. He’s been staring at the same question for 19 minutes. They have 30 minutes to complete the exam.

He doesn’t know the answer. He doesn’t know for sure. He knows the formula. He recognizes the triangles. He’s flipped his paper onto the blank side and redone the calculations over and over, fit the numbers together in every way imaginable. But he still doesn’t know the answer. Not for sure.

He’d sped through the first half — questions one to twenty-two. They were easy. This one should be easy too. It’s all the same section of the textbook he’d memorized. They talked about it in class three days ago. He knows…

He doesn’t know the answer. There’s something hot and sharp squeezing in his chest. The air around him feels so thick, he could choke.

He flicks his eyes up to the clock again and it’s been 23 minutes.

It’s not enough time. He’ll get it wrong. Every question matters.

Dread pools in his belly. Blood pounds in his temples, behind his ears, in the hollow of his throat.

The graphite tip of his pencil snaps beneath his thumb.

At the 30-minute mark, Ms. Larken asks them to bring up their tests.

Patrick rips his in half and stuffs the unanswered questions in his mouth. He stumbles out of class with no direction, chewing the paper until it becomes a mass of wet pulp on his tongue.

He swallows it.

&&&

Patrick’s parents put him in a boarding school that allows personalized curriculums.

He almost never takes tests.

So, he’s almost never terrified of getting it wrong.

&&&

Tashi Duncan is everything Patrick wishes he was for real — confident, irresistible, commanding, magnetic, and more than anything…a winner.

He wants to be her as much as he wants to fuck her. That is some confusing shit right there.

She’s a firecracker. He can’t hold her in his hands for long. She burns too hot, too fast, too bright. Despite himself, he loves feeling the spark and heat of flame bite at his fingertips.

He loves her. Or he thinks he does, in whatever way a 19-year old self-obsessed fuck up can love a person.

Being with her is like jumping feet first off a moving train. She exhilarates and scares him in equal measure.

He knows the likelihood of survival is not great. She may destroy him, but he’ll relish screaming all the way down.

Patrick thinks he remembers feeling something similar when he first met Art. Not nearly as violent, but just as disorienting.

A sense of inevitability, of falling helplessly into whatever they were — no control, no foresight, no time to change a damn thing.

Making Art his best friend felt natural; liking him, wanting to be around him, was innate. He’s never thought about something less than he did the first time he slung an arm around Art’s neck and reeled him in.

His 11-year-old self wouldn’t have described it this way, but in hindsight, Art was immediately necessary to him. Like, the moment they met was the moment Patrick recognized he had always been part of the fabric of his reality.

Tashi feels like centrifugal force — she hurls him away from his center, pushes him off kilter, makes him adjust to find his balance over and over. He likes being kept on his toes. He likes to imagine them balancing on the tightrope together — her as graceful and agile as she is on the court, him scrambling to keep afloat with her — all spit, grit, and dogged determination.

Art, though, Art has always felt like gravity. He grounds Patrick’s flightiness, weighs him down in the here and now. He’s the constant, steady force that keeps Patrick from drifting off into space, floating aimlessly with no direction. It’s easy to take him for granted, to forget how important he is because he is always always there.

Until he isn’t.

Neither of them are.

And Patrick is lost.

#challengers #patrick zweig #art donaldson #tashi duncan #fanfic #i fuckin love this!!!

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angryflowergardener · 2 days

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Little challengers sketch! In my head the movie ended here 🥰😌

#challengers #art donaldson #patrick zweig #tashi duncan #art #what could've been #what SHOULD HAVE been #i will cry over them forever #this is so sweet and good and nice THANK YOU!!!!!!!#i'm in love with this drawing <3

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angryflowergardener · 2 days

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we need to go back to dvds guys. we need to all agree on this and make it happen. we need video stores back NOW

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angryflowergardener · 4 days

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oh this is nothing that chewing my leg off like an animal stuck in a trap cant solve

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angryflowergardener · 4 days

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Touchscreens do not belong in cars

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angryflowergardener · 10 days

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His shitty attitude and grabbable waist have bewitched me

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angryflowergardener · 10 days

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fandom tumblr was another casualty of streaming services. we used to be on here posting about the episodes that were coming out weekly and posting gifs and writing insane shit about the tv shows we liked. now a new season of a show will drop and we’ll talk about it for a week. two weeks tops. and then that show will leave collectively conscious for 1+ year till the next season drops. there’s a reason succession sundays was a blast on here

we used to have real television

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angryflowergardener · 10 days

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