the roof is not my son... but I will raise it.

[derogatory]

THE HUNGER GAMES: non-katniss shenanigans, catching fire

"I wanted to talk to you," Johanna starts, but Finnick cuts her off, more dismissively than he can be with any client, regardless of how much her escort pays so she can rant at him.

"There's nothing to talk about."

"They do something about the view?" She asks. Beetee came up with a way to ask if the location wasn't secure. Finnick shrugs, he's not as thorough about the bugs as Johanna can be, he doesn't have the time. He hauls out a suitcase from a side closet. "What are you doing?"

"Planning a camping trip," he snaps, breezing past her to get some clothing, the last things he'll wear as a free man, or as much as they can be. "What do you think? I'm going back to District 4 tonight."

"The reaping isn't for another couple days."

"Which is just enough time to talk to Annie."

"There's not enough time in the world to talk to her," Johanna snorts and Finnick's gaze snaps to hers, his knuckles white along the suitcase. She shoots him a warning glance before he opens his mouth. "You really should do something about the view."

He sighs, "Not like it matters now, does it?"

"It could." Finnick is already shaking his head, throwing a few more essentials in the bag.

"You should get back to 7. Ymir says Blight's worse."

"What the fuck would she know," Johanna snarls, arms crossed over her chest. "He never leaves that place."

"She said she visited and he wouldn't open the door."

"He never opens the door, he probably hung himself." Finnick rests his chin on his hand, sitting on the suitcase.

"Did anyone hear a canon?" They both smile.

ROBOHOMOS; nathan meets the robofamily

Nathan is pretty used to fatal dismissals from the other Avengers by now. After all- immortal. Not like he's got to worry about any lasting physical harm. When he dies he's out of the fight, and when they assemble again Natasha gives him shit for not being around when they needed some ghost spotting, and sometimes Capt even looks a little sorry Nathan had to die. But no matter how he gets offed, he wakes up to Victor standing guard.

"What're you doing?" he grumbled once, shoving himself on his elbows, listening the distant shriek of Kree warlords. "Go help fight, I'm fine." It was half true, his spine had almost completely realigned by then.

"Didn't want anything to happen to you," Victor replied, eyes open for any malingering alien assault.

"I can't die!" Nathan countered. "What's the worst that could happen?" Victor glanced back, held out a hand to help him up, to bring him back to a fight where he'll probably just die all over again.

"Let's never find out, okay?" he smiled.

When Nathan wakes up, removing the rebar from his chest and catching his breath, Victor's not keeping watch. He's not there at all, not completely. There's a lot of rubble from the building, lots of beams and flooring, that it takes Nathan a while to realize that Victor is there, but in pieces. Nathan has half the pieces gathered in his arms before Tony knocks one of his teeth loose.

"Calm down," he hisses, pulling Nathan to his feet. "Banner, move that, I think the rest of Victor is still under there."

"There's a lot of him out here," Barton mutters, nudging a scrap Nathan missed.

For the dread dripping down his neck, Nathan still has the semblance of mind to hiss, "Shut the fuck up, Hawkeye."

HANNIBAL/ELEMENTARY: this is an amazing idea and i cant do it justice

"What with the foundations of what you do being inherently flawed and all."

"Foundations of teaching?" Will asks blithely, eyebrows raised by eyes focused with a forced intensity on the papers at this desk.

Sherlock's eyes rake across the other man's shuffling and reshuffling. "Simply that empathy can't be learned, can it?"

"If you make any breakthroughs on that, I'd love to hear them," Joan says with a cringe. "We haven't introduced ourselves."

"I know who you are." Will takes off his glasses, passing them between his hands absently. "There's confidential information in these lectures, people don't just sit in without someone letting me know." Judging from the professor's tenseness, Joan imagines confidentiality isn't the only reason he gets a heads up on visitors.

"You're consulting on the Harbridge case."

"Yes we are," Sherlock chirps. "Clearly rote empathy has its limits."

"Oh," a clear voice echoes through the lecture hall. A young woman steps from the entryway to Graham's elbow in an instant. Joan notes the forced space between them, the strict arms length between two people who can't trust themselves around one another. "I thought I'd catch the end of it."

"I didn't see the point in running the lecture long," Will mumbles, "Considering there's not anything to run long about."

"Dr. Alana Bloom," says the woman, extending a hand to the newcomers. "Hoping you can help improve some of the lecture notes."

"Are you like Dr. Lecter?" Joan asks.

ROBOHOMOS: klara spends a weekend with the robobros and is fine as hell

And suddenly it feels like Nathan is the one intruding and he wishes he had some urgent away mission to get to, or that Klara didn't grow up fit, or that Victor didn't so obviously hope the family he had without Nathan would finally take him back.

THE HUNGER GAMES: five games the mentors play in the lounge

One of the Careers has a baby.

It's not new or anything, Careers take to the Games easier than most, so finding someone to spend the rest of their hard-won lives with isn't as difficult as it is for the outlying regions. They just usually don't coach other kids to kill when they're bouncing one of their own on their knee.

It's like looking at an alien, passing the picture of a baby between them while Devon brags to the air about the boy's weight, his firm grip.

"He'll be in here with us in no time, huh?" someone says, someone who ends up with no teeth for the rest of the night. They were lucky, Devon crushed skulls in his Games, and teeth are easier to replace than brain matter. Still, the messages is clear; Even for a Career, this isn't the honor you go to night hoping to bestow on your children.

Cecelia is pregnant, but there weren't any other female champions in 11 to mentor in her place. The other mentors give her a couch to herself, let her put her feet up. It's naturally more foreign to them than the photo of the baby, that there is a live person in her belly, that in twelve short years the kid could be in front of them on that screen. It's a threat nobody raises, not just to save their teeth. You can't let the kids from another district be real, they can't be flesh and blood to you when you're not the one spilling it.

ROBOHOMOS: I don't know what this was for??? shadow victor?? ok

Nathan cuts Victorious off-

"I'm so fucking sick of seeing your face, you know that?" That's the end of it, of looking at that arsewipe, and Nathan turns his attention elsewhere. "All right, yeah?"

"Nathan," the real Victor breathes. He looks like shite, like he's spent the last two weeks crammed inside a television so small Nathan caught his belt buckle on the edge of it on their way inside. He looks decidedly not all right.

Turns out the shadow isn't even Victorious, not the evil one anyway. He's the same smug bastard minus the sociopathic tendencies. He's a super hero, he's an Avenger, he's good. He wants nothing to do with moral ambiguities, with doubt and uncertainty in the face of being good. When you're a living contradiction, the reflection of yourself, the thing within you're afraid of isn't evil but perfection. It's such a nerd thing to be afraid of. It wants nothing to do with humans, with flawed things, with Nathan.

He doesn't get how somebody else's shadow can cut this fucking deep without killing him, but the professionals handle it.

THE HUNGER GAMES: johanna visits 3 and 4

Mrs. Latir presses the quilt into Johanna's arms and tells her to keep it. Johanna drops it in the mud outside the front steps and stands at the edge of the train platform, eyes burning.

"Oh, I liked 3," Finnick says over lunch. "Mrs. Latir is a great cook."

"She's an idiot," Johanna mumbles. "Nothing special about that." She doesn't touch her food. The stew here is overseasoned. Finnick watches her fists clench at the edge of the table and amends his earlier point.

"Yeah, nothing special about 3," he says, all affected smiles through his teeth. "You hate everything, right?" She nods stiffly. They both have roles to play.




When she digs too deep at the walking wound that's Annie, Mags reaches out and pinches her. Johanna jumps at the motion, batting the older woman aside, but keeps her mouth shut the next time Annie rocks on her heels.

They cook their dinner on hot stones and Johanna spends hours at the shoreline, watching the bugs claw up from the sand. Finnick watches her over the halo of firelight in Annie's hair. They don't get visitors, nobody in 4 has any questions about the ocean because they were born between its waves. He has trouble explaining a horseshoe crab.

The bugs chase them inside, and he lingers at Mags' place after Annie disappears next door. At the top of the steps Johanna has one lamp lit and swings it towards Finnick when he enters.

"Did Mags win her Games by pinching, or what?" she cries, showing off her arm under the light as Finnick walks closer. "Look, there's a bruise." The shadows and the laughter on her face make her almost unrecognizable.

"You look happy. I told you 4 was beter than 7," Finnick says triumphantly.