rokhal

Title: Helping Hand

Fandom/original: All-New Ghost Rider (Marvel Comics)

Characters: Mr. Wakefield

Rating/Warnings: PG, discussions of violence

Word count: 404

Paul Wakefield had two years' substitute teaching experience under his belt and a talent for pissing off administrators. It was what landed him in East L.A.. He doubted the administrator who'd sent him there had intended it as an attempt on his life, but it felt that way much of the time.

He only had two years' teaching experience, but his dad and brother were combat vets and his older sister had five kids of her own, and both those experiences served him well at “Hellrock High,” where he taught English lit to grades 9 through 12. The kids were...kids, growing, trying things out, some good, some bad, just all finding their way. They were also, to various degrees, twitchy, distractible, short-tempered, aloof, and short-sighted. 

He figured it out one afternoon teaching Robert Burns to a bunch of bilingual ninth-graders, trying to hook them with how Burns' poetry had two voices, one in Scottish and one in English, when someone in the next room threw a chair at the wall. Half the class ducked and covered.

Okay, Paul told himself. I'm teaching high-school English in a war zone. No wonder these kids aren't engaged.

The whole world untwisted and fell into focus, a new, horrible, order. He wasn't a failure, the kids weren't all antisocial neglect cases with ADHD and no motivation who hated literature; he just had nothing to offer them. Teaching them to appreciate literature would do nothing to slow the rain of bullets. They couldn't well appreciate dead poets musing about roses while they were worried about getting shot by a stray bullet on their way home from school. He called his brother. Randy sympathized, but couldn't come up with concrete ideas, either.

Paul fell back, with no other recourse, on Aristotle: the ethic of performing every act excellently, no matter how meaningless. He taught as well as he could. He offered acknowledgement at any hint of interest or comprehension, and gradually, in the weeks between new candle-shrines popping up on the street corners, his students began to respond, offer their own opinions. He made himself available after class, even though the few students who approached his office treated him as a bit of a joke. He reached out.

He felt lost at sea, waving helplessly to those he had come to lift up out of the water. He was a joke. The least he could do was share the laugh.

(Prompt: image of an arm reaching up out of open water in fog)
 

Title: Little Wings

Fandom/original: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)

Characters: Robbie Reyes, Eli Morrow, OCs

Rating/Warnings: PG, implied violence

Word count: 400ish

prompt

Go, go, go! Kid, we got 'em! Pedal to the metal, let's pour on the pain!

A burning car jetted through dark streets, swerving around late-night truckers, its tires leaving comet-trails of flame. The engine growled and whined, revving up and down through the gearbox as it negotiated tight turns, sharp bursts of brake and acceleration, and the supercharger shrieked.

Takes a couple minutes at least to get a plane in the air. We got this. Go!

The driver downshifted around a street corner, the RPM shot up, the car howled leaned back off its front shocks. Ahead of them waited a long dock, and at the end of the dock, two men and a cooler and a little float-plane. The car swerved, caught a pedestrian ramp up to the waterfront, crashed up a foot of concrete with a scrape and a snarl. Slowed, and picked its way down the wooden pier, past yachts and cigarrette boats, toward the plane.

The men threw the cooler into the float plane, dived in, and cast off. The car picked up speed, lighting up the boards beneath its wheels, and the plane's motor kicked on and set up a little wind, enough to ease the plane a few feet away from the dock. Then a few car-lengths, then a dozen yards.

They're getting away.

That's quitter talk. Punch it.

The driver stomped on the accelerator, and the car flew off the pier, hitting the water hard and fast. Steam boiled up under its wheels. As the supercharger screamed to ventilate the engine, the car kept moving, faster and faster over the bay, bouyed by exploding steam. 

The plane was picking up speed. The car hit ninety, the plane hit seventy, but it had had a head start. They raced for the bay, the plane aiming for that magic moment when the surface tension broke and the floats leapt free of the sucking water.

The driver stood up in its seat and melted through the roof, howling the song of its engine and lashing out at the plane's fragile wings with an endless steel chain. Not today, bastards.

Title: Green Door

Fandom/original: All-New Ghost Rider (Marvel Comics)

Characters: Ramon Cordova

Rating/Warnings: PG

Vicky DaSilva lived in a clay-roofed ranch house, identical to the twenty other clay-roofed ranch houses that made up each block of her East Los Angeles suburb, but for the fragrant jasmine bush below the window, and the bright green door. A tall man, dressed in a clean dress shirt buttoned tight to the throat and wrists to hide most of his tattoos, stood paralyzed under the eaves.

Ramon Cordova was not in the habit of second-guessing himself. Not in front of his father's rage, not on the streets, not behind a gun, not in prison. When he knew what he meant to do, he committed. When he was young, and stupid, he'd committed violence. He'd defended his gang's territory and avenged his brothers' losses with a calculating and bloody-minded fervor that had gouged indelible marks on the souls of his neighbors and the skulls of the interlopers. When he chose, in the dark of his cell in his seventh year of incarceration, to abandon the gang and honor his parole terms from the moment he was released, that choice was not an idealistic fantasy but a methodical five-year plan: throw himself on the favor of his remaining family and their friends, repel with small words and extreme prejudice the recruitment overtures of the insulted carnals and captains he would abandon, keep his head down, and if a vengeful bullet lodged in his head, so be it.

But he hesitated now.

A dog barked within. Then more dogs. A whole pack of little yap-dogs pattering to the door. Finding his choice made for him, Ramon rang the doorbell.

A woman answered it: dark hair showing white at the roots, lined face, red floral blouse. She was taller than he'd pictured her, from her voice on the phone.

"Thank-you so much for agreeing to meet with me," Ramon started, and then his voice caught, and he had to swallow before he could start again. "They showed me pictures of--of your--please believe me. I am so sorry."

(Prompt: "forgive")