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dwaynepride · 4 years

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the unfortunate case of nonchalance

PART I - WHERE TO START

summary: jethro and his gang arrive to a new town, and they’re surrounded by rich folk. but then, he meets somebody unexpected.

words: 1,855

warnings: female reader

tags: @fairytale07 @jrenn10 @f4nboi @purplestarsr5 @ladyzombiielove @littlemiss3ma @minikate--24-05 @consultingdoctorwholock @dressed-up-just-like-z1ggy @ms-allenbrown @ikbenplant @dylpickles1267 @diaryofafan17 @specialagentlokitty @pageofultron @stanathanxoox

author’s note: part 1 of a new series. this is actually a part of @thranduilsperkybutt‘s writing challenge. my prompt was cowboy au + secret relationship trope.

PART II

February 16th, 1889

Well, this is the first opportunity where I’m able to sit and write.

Moving East out of the plains has been damn hard - nobody likes being this close to civilization.

Hell, I hate it. Seen more people on the trail the past two days than we used to see in a whole week, back West. It’s necessary; we all know that. Still, I hear Anthony kickin’ up a fuss whenever we see another caravan.

It ain’t so bad, now that we got a place to settle down. For now, anyway. It’s well-hidden, at least. It’ll do the job until our problems in the West die down, and we can move back.

If we’re lucky, Anthony might take a bullet while we’re out here. Save us all the trouble of keepin’ him reigned in, this time.

Dr. Mallard told me there’s a town nearby. From what I gather, it’s mostly aristocrats and artisans and rich folk who live there. Not the kinda folk we run into often, but the law won’t think to look for us here. Not for a while, at least.

So I’m gonna head into the town tomorrow. Have a look around, see what we’re up against. Anthony wants to come along. Says he wants to start sniffing around, despite my warnings that we’ve got to act like upstanding citizens of the law. It’s too risky to start making trouble.

He says he understands, but I’ll keep my eye on him, just the same.

Tim and Abigail will go along with him. They’re much less rambunctious, so I don’t fear they’ll get into much mischief.

All in all, despite the money that no doubt comes through this town, I predict it will be a very dull place to lie low.

But maybe that’s what we need, right now. There’s been too much excitement, lately.

February 17th, 1889

Just as I thought - this town is full of men and women too concerned with stories and the arts to pay attention to much else. I counted five clothing shops on the way in. And only a single gun store.

I’m not even sure the saloon sells proper bourbon.

Though, Anthony seems to be fitting in, well enough. He can keep a pleasant conversation with any rich man he meets - a skill I scarcely care enough to learn. But I suppose it was a good choice to bring him along-

The journal is knocked from Jethro’s hands as someone slams against his shoulder from behind. It falls to the dirt, as does the bags of the person who’d knocked into Jethro. And even though his journal was knocked clean out of his hands, Jethro himself wasn’t much bothered. Because the collision barely moved him and it seems like whoever just bumped into him is suffering more of the consequences.

“I’m very sorry!” A voice says hurriedly. A womanly voice that wasn’t so prim and proper as the other women of this high-end town.

Jethro bends over to collect her bags - brand new, apart from the new dirt stains received from the collision. And the woman picks up his leather-bound journal; thankfully, it had landed shut.

They both straighten up, and Jethro instantly meets your eyes for the first time. Very pretty, he notices, if a little guilty for all the trouble you’ve caused. Dainty little strands of hair fall into your face, and the dress you wear is much too expensive for Jethro to ever be able to buy. And yet, you wears it so simply. He can’t tell if you’re just so rich that this dress is meaningless, or if you purely don’t care.

You speak, and Jethro’s eyes blink once. “Pardon me?”

A small laugh comes from you; light and nervous. “I said I was sorry. For bumping into you, like I did. I suppose I wasn’t watching where I was going. I can be a real clutz, you see.”

You still hold his journal with two hands. Fingers drum against the leather. He huffs and shakes his head. “No, ma’am. The fault is mine for not anticipating your arrival,” Jethro says simply.

And he hadn’t meant it as a joke. It was a simple fact, told in his deadpan way. Still, the nervous look on your face shifts into a wide smile. You’re laughing; light and happy and in a way Jethro wasn’t quite expecting. “Perhaps you’re right,” you say. And when Jethro hands your bags over, you gives him the journal back.

“Are you a writer?”

He’s dusting off the leather, barely listening to your question. “A writer?” He echoes.

“You know, a storyteller.” When Jethro glances back up, you motion to the journal. “I do enjoy a good story. And you seemed rather lost in whatever you were writing.”

Your eyes....your eyes held a sort of enraptured curiosity that Jethro himself hasn’t had in a long time. The type of curiosity that has you questioning a stranger with a journal because they may be a fascinating person. But he was just a man; just Jethro. And your words prompts a light smirk to his face. “Do I strike you as the type to entertain others, ma’am?”

You pauses. Shrug your shoulders as your emboldened smile softens into a smirk. You must smile a lot, he thinks. “Perhaps. I’ve only known you a minute, and you’re already more interesting than many of the men in this town. That’s quite an achievement, Mr....”

Jethro hesitates. He knew coming into this town that he didn’t want to give out his name very willingly. Maybe the law will recognize it and that would cause more trouble than he wants to deal with.

And yet, what harm could this woman do? A woman so soft and sheltered, she mistakes this rough cowboy for a city-dwelling storyteller.

“Gibbs,” he finally answers.

He sticks out his hand, and you smile while taking it. Jethro hears, loud and clear, when you tells him your name. And he hasn’t the mind to notice how soft the skin of your palm is. Your last name - it’s so familiar.

Familiar, as he’s seen it printed over almost every store and shop in this town.

So he gives a slow nod, releasing your hand. “I did not realize I was talking with a celebrity,” Jethro teases. And he expects some pushback from that little jab - women always seem to dislike his brand of sarcasm. They call him rude, and they may be right.

Instead, you grips your bags tighter. Jethro catches a bit of pink in your cheeks, and it makes his stomach tight with no good reason. “My father owns many of the stores in this town. It’s not a fact I share with others, Mr. Gibbs. I feel as though it causes people to treat me different - as though my opinion of them may sway them to my father’s favor.”

Seems like a hard life, Jethro jokingly thinks to himself.

Seems easier to have fake friends than government agents following you across three states.

Jethro stuffs his journal into his coat pocket before looking back to you, bobbing his head with a smirk. “Trust me, ma’am; I will treat you no different than I would any other woman,” he vows. And he’s mostly serious.

You smile again. And even giggle, this time. It’s a nice sound and even after Jethro tells himself to be polite to the daughter of the town’s most powerful man, he finds he doesn’t have to try very hard. You’re nothing like the other people Jethro has encountered in this god-forsaken town.

Maybe because when you look at him, Jethro doesn’t feel like the dirty old cowboy he knows he looks like to everyone else.

His thoughts are cut short by your cross little sigh. “I’m afraid I must go now. I’m expected back home soon,” you tell him regretfully.

Your reluctance was painfully visible, and Jethro is determined not to show his own. Besides, he wasn’t here to make a friend or charm a lady; no matter how pretty she may be. “Then I’ll save you the burden of a long-winded goodbye. I hope you have a good day,” Jethro tells her.

After giving you a single nod, he turns away. Takes several steps toward the saloon - that’s where Jethro reckons Anthony might be, anyway. Following some poor rich bastard in there to get him drunk and pick his pockets. And he thinks he’s about to make a clean getaway.

But your voice calls out. Calls his name in a way that makes Jethro’s feet freeze in their tracks. He almost doesn’t turn, but his head is arching over his shoulder anyway. Watching as you smile and waves him goodbye. “I hope to see you around! Perhaps one day, you’ll let me read the story you’re writing.”

That makes Jethro scoff, but he says nothing as you continue on your way. That expensive dress of yours even has some mud stains from where your shoes kick it up, but your don’t really seem to care.

And as you disappear around the corner, he shakes his head. Such an unforeseen encounter in a town where Jethro only expected to find uppity, rich men and women. And for the daughter of the town’s patriarch, no less, to completely shatter his expectations - well, Jethro found himself wondering if he really would see you again.

His thoughts are broken when Jethro hears a familiar voice calling out. Shaking out of his reverie, his head swivels around until finding the voice’s owner. Anthony’s hand waves in the air, and he starts jogging over.

Jethro can’t help but glance back to where you disappeared from.

But the Italian stops beside Jethro, wearing a big grin that usually gave him a bad feeling. “Afternoon, boss,” Anthony greets.

Jethro only grunts, and as he starts walking, his friend falls into step beside him. “Have fun screwing around?”

“Believe it or not, I wasn’t screwing around. Just the opposite, in fact.” Anthony suddenly steps closer, shoulder to shoulder with Jethro. Aware of the prying eyes and nosy aristocrats eager for gossip. “I think I figured out a way to rustle up some money,” Anthony says lowly.

Jethro scoffs, face forming a frown that Anthony can hardly see under the brim of his hat. Though, he’s already well acquainted with his leader’s sourest faces. “This idea of yours legal, Anthony?”

“Strictly speaking? Not really.”

Great.

“That’s never stopped us before, though.”

No, Jethro answers reluctantly. It hasn’t. And that’s what pushed them away from the West and everything they’ve worked for. Because of those less-than-legal schemes.

And hearing Anthony suggest a whole new one, in a town where nobody knows their checkered past...well, Jethro has a pretty wide pit in his stomach. Deep, aching; familiar in a way that has him thinking about the past. Has him thinking about what led to Shannon’s death, all those years ago.

Glancing to Anthony, and seeing how excited he looks about his dangerous plan, Jethro just starts thinking about the girl who thought him a storyteller.

#ncis x reader #leroy jethro gibbs x reader #leroy jethro gibbs imagine #ncis reader insert #thranduilsperkybutt #megs11kchallenge

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anarchomoop · 6 years

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So in today’s pointless writing thought exercises: I started scripting in my head and writing dialogue for key storybeats for a Superman reboot while I was at work. I wound up incorporating a lot of... tumblr-popular Superman meta I guess you could say into the ideas for the overall story. The story features:

An inversion of the Lex Luthor/Superman dynamic, while it appears that Superman is “gifted,” he actually struggles to live up to his own ideals, in his own words “some days, I look in the mirror and I see superman. Other days, I look in the mirror and just see me. On the best days, I see both.” Likewise, while Lex appears to be a self-made man, he definitely had a lot of invisible advantages over others, and while he rhetorically claims to have gotten where he was from hard work, he actually believes everything he has is a result of being fundamentally better than everyone else. In his own words (in this reboot, Lex is the head of “Luthorcom” a company that started as a google-like internet based tech firm but expanded further into “horizontal” tech markets to the point where it’s now doing a little bit of everything STEM related, including weapons manufacture) “I kept looking at the world and seeing these basic things, these things where something was missing or could be better and I’d just go and I’d do it. We had the internet and it was huge, full of information and products and people but with nothing to link them, no way to find them, like a library with n directory. So I made LuthorLibrarian.com, later Luthorcom. And it was simple. Anyone could’ve done it. And every time I took a step forward that’s what I said to myself. ‘it was so easy, anyone could have done it. I’m nothing special.’ Until one day, I looked out the window from the top of Luthorcom tower and I realized. Nobody else did it. Not a single person. What I do, it’s not easy. It’s not something ‘anyone can do.’ I can do it. I do it. Only me.”

The Daily Planet is now “Planet Media,” no longer a newspaper, it’s now a news website with both articles and videos. Clark and Lois work both as article writers as well as personalities in front of the camera for video reports. Jimmy takes both photo and video.

Superman’s costume is originally designed by Ma Kent to use to hide his identity and incorporates the red S, blue background, and a mask. The costume is later redisigned by Jerome Green, an aids-positive black man who was selling knock-off superman goods to help himself and his grandma afford rent in their rapidly gentrifying Metropolis neighborhood, who makes the iconic red and yellow s-shield on a solid blue spandex outfit look. Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane’s role is somewhat reprised as Jimmy (a sophomore at Metropolis U in their photo journalism program and interning at the Planet Media.com as a photographer and sometimes cameraman) trying to impress Lucy Lane (Senior at Met U just about to finish their commercial aviation program to be a pilot) who he met through working with Lois at the Planet This leads to Jimmy’s older sister Emily (recently finished undergraduate studies in Gotham U’s film studies program, now enrolled in Met U’s graduate program for film to learn how to direct and operate a camera, hoping to direct, write, and film her own micro-budgeted movies) meeting Lucy and sticking up for her younger brother, saying it’s wrong of Lucy to lead him along getting him to buy her things. Lucy, by way of apology, tries to include Jimmy and Emily in her life, eventually leading to Emily and Lucy dating after Jimmy notices the two’s conspicuous and obvious crushes and pushes them to act on it. This is... this is like the major B plot of the entire first arc but, like, super-abridged.

One of Lex Luthor’s telecom sats becomes damaged after colliding with some space debris -- an escape pod containing a human-looking girl in her late teens/early 20s (in this, Superman joins the planet after going through a journalism grad school program). After she quickly develops the same powers Superman displays (she gets them on a faster time-table as a result of absorbing solar rays form space without the interference of earth’s atmosphere), Luthor uses her to his own ends by creating a SuperGirl loyal to Luthorcom.

Lois investigate’s Luthorcom’s weapons dealings, finding evidence that, in order to spur demand for domestic use of the product by police/military, Luthor orchestrated leaks/break-ins to get “criminal elements” access to Luthor weapons tech, creating the appearance of an arms race that the government must turn to Luthor to stop (this is the reason Clark becomes Superman, and part of why Luthor comes to hate him, because Superman is foiling his plans without even knowing it). She eventually reveals this evidence with the help of staff intern Jimmy Olsen and new reporter Clark Kent, but Luthor manages to avoid implication This is what puts Lois/Clark/Jimmmy on his radar.

Clark does not actually have access to his escape pod, knowledge about Krypton, Jor-El, or Kryptonite. This is all discovered by Lex Luthor. He learns about Krypton from Supergirl’s escape pod, then scours the areas near Metropolis for something similar that might relate to Superman (eventually finding a pod just outside Smallville where the Kents abandoned it).

Clark’s past and Kryptonian name are revealed to him when Lex “unmasks” him as “Kal El of Krypton” in front of a live TV audience that just watched Lex use Kryptonite to beat both Superman and Supergirl (Kara Zor-El), revealing “Kal El’s plot” to make “humanity weak and dependent” by saving them all from their problems instead of letting humanity sort them out themselves, that way a “Kryptonian fleet” can invade earth with no resistance. Lois, there in attendance, calls bullshit, pointing out that A: if Kryptonians are as powerful as Superman and Supergirl they don’t *need* to weaken humanity and B: Superman wanted people to aspire to be better, that Superman “saw Superman in the people around him more frequently than in himself” and backs it up using a secret recording she took on her smartphone during a “date” with Superman which she was actually using to grill him for info (during the date she hides a tape recorder in her purse, which Superman finds with his X-Ray vision and asks her to take out and turn off, then later after he’s gone she takes out her phone and checks to make sure that the recording she got on it was clear, commenting that Superman was ‘clever, but still a sap’).

During the climax of the arc, Jimmy, Emily and Lucy save Superman by rushing forward to “get a good shot up close,” an excuse for Jimmy to shove his flashbulb right in Lex’s face and take a picture so that Emily and Lucy can get the Kryptonite away from him. This leads to a fight where Superman is trying to protect Lex from a furious Supergirl and the crowd from both Supergirl (whose opinion of humanity is understandably pretty low at that moment) and Lex’s guards. During the fight a stray “Krypton-alloy” bullet hits Kara in the shoulder, causing her to lose her powers and start falling from the top of Luthor tower. She’s saved by Jimmy, who earlier noticed a window-cleaning trolley, so he jumps off the tower to grab her and just barely manages to grasp it and a barely-conscious Kara. Emily and Lucy work together to pull the two fully to safety, initially alone but eventually with the help of the gathered crowd. Important notes -- Superman attempts to save her but can’t, as approaching her causes his powers to weaken from the “krypton-alloy”. This is important to the themes of the first arc, Superman is ultimately not the hero. Lois, Jimmy and Clark (distinguishing Clark from Superman somewhat is also important -- Clark Kent is the real person, Superman is a mask he wears, and someone Clark aspires to be) are ultimately responsible for bringing down Lexcorp’s criminal activities and Emily, Lucy, and Jimmy wind up saving both Superman and Supergirl from Lex.

Kara and Kal-El are given official US citizenship and paperwork (Clark Kent also has official paperwork, although it is forged by someone Ma Kent knows who didn’t really ask any questions about this miracle baby who needed documents). Kara’s life winds up being a lot more public than Kal-El’s as a result of her not being raised normally on earth or having any kind of secret identity. She’s placed under investigation and put on trial, but eventually found not guilty as a result of A: not actually hurting anyone B: her attempts to harm the crowd and her threats against humanity as a whole during the fight with Superman were successfully justified under the “temporary insanity” defense (she was brought to a state of high emotion to the point that she could not be considered fully responsible for her actions, essentially the “yeah, you did kind of break some laws but honestly if I were in your shoes I’dve done the same thing” defense) and C: honestly they are not sure they could do much to prosecute her anyway. After her trial and while she’s still recovering from her gunshot wound (fast healing is not a Kryptonian power in this canon -- when they get actually hurt they stay hurt for a while) Kara meets with Jimmy and thanks him, commenting that “Kal-El is right, about humanity. About people like you.” And then.. leaving it at that because restoration of a similar but different status quo at the end of the arc is important and Jimmy having a crush on a girl who he’s certain is totally out of his league is *very important to the status quo* Yeah, so that’s just... kind of the major story beats? Most of them? There’s flashbacks to Clark’s childhood, him realizing he has powers, how the Kents react. Ma Kent and Pa Kent also act somewhat mysteriously. Ma comes up with the costume idea for Clark suspiciously quickly and occasionally when trying to explain how or why they did/do something to Clark they just say “it’s what has to be/had to be done.” This is a set up to a potential later arc involving time travel, the idea that Clark’s parents know he will become Superman before it actually happen is kind of important to the story as I imagine it. The Kent parents meet Superman, and they realize being Superman is important to their son, and as a result they work to help their son become Superman. Edit: oh, also about the Kents, forgot to add: in this canon they’d be Jewish. That’s actually kind of very important to some of the theming/parallels that the broader narrative is meant to make.

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