Stan Lee, Marvel Comics’ Real-Life Superhero, Dies at 95
The feisty writer, editor and publisher was responsible for such iconic characters as Spider-Man, X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther and The Fantastic Four — ‘nuff said.
Stan Lee, the legendary writer, editor and publisher of Marvel Comics whose fantabulous but flawed creations made him a real-life superhero to comic-book lovers everywhere, has died. He was 95.
Lee, who began in the business in 1939 and created or co-created Black Panther, Spider-Man, X-Men, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Ant-Man and other characters, died early Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a source told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lee’s final few years were tumultuous. After Joan, his wife of 69 years, died in July 2017, he sued executives at POW! Entertainment — a company he founded in 2001 to develop film, TV and video game properties — for $1 billion for fraud, then abruptly dropped the suit weeks later.
Tag: death cw
‘Oh, I won’t get used to these lodgings at all.’ the young female said crossing her arms and stretching herself to her full height. ‘But until I leave, I shall not disturb you, I shall keep myself in the shadows.’ and with these words the…
Victoria nodded and sat back down by the window, ‘I took note indeed!’ she said with wonder, impressed with Loki’s action. ‘But I don’t feel well about that beast going that way.’ she thought as she watched the fighting outside of the cell.
A few hours past and the bright day had turned into the cool, dark night. Victoria sat curled up by the window, half asleep, half awake. She woke up out of her light slumber when she heard the boots of a guard near the cell. The guard stepped up in front of the cell, taking off his helmet. ‘M’lord, your mother, the queen, is dead.’
◣♛◢ —- –
Loki perched at the corner of his cell nearest the enchanted
glass wall, with its web of golden forcefields, three hours after
the skirmish, when one of the Einherjar dared infract his sanctified
personal space. The banished prince only deigned to look up
from reading the codex that his mother had gifted him after a long
moment.
It was not merely by power play that he did so, but also, because
the text was genuinely riveting. And that was Frigga’s doing.
Her handwriting frequently salted the printed words with
amusingly scathing critique of the magical theories within, and
obviously in order to amuse and commiserate with her equally
cerebral son.
Mama. When next I see you I shall apologize. I have no
other mother than you. And if that is contingent upon
accepting Odin as my father … .
… well. I’m a good liar, am I not?
Yet Loki was compelled to glance the guard’s way because something
thickened the air with dread. A knowing. An awful knowing, in
advance of a confirming word, or nod, or glance. A sickness, a
chill, a tingling of the extremities. The last moment. The phone
call: “she’s not breathing, we’re so sorry and we offer our condolences.”
The police officer at the door, the doctor outside the patient’s room,
politely, so i n f u r i a t i n g l y blandly, touching the wrung hands of
the bereaved.
“My lord … “
No.
“Your mother, the queen … “
Continue and I shall cut you, I shall slice you, myself.
“ … is dead.”
No. She’s not.
No she’s not no she’s not no she’s not the last words
from my lips to her face can not have been poison no she’s not.
Loki felt nothing, and was in darkness, in howling silence; he was
not himself, and he was not in himself. He was distant, he was
hovering above his cell, in a darkness luridly illuminated by
drifting meteorites and a steep path to an enormous bruise-colored
man’s throne.
He felt his head, such a shell of a vessel now, bobbing up and
down once in stolid confirmation, through the static. The urge
to giggle hysterically nearly overpowered him; not yet, not
yet. They cannot see. They cannot see your greatest shame
and tragedy.
( Y O U M I G H T W A N T T O T A K E T H E S T A I R S
T O T H E L E F T … . . . . )
The direction left, and the color blue, are poison, because
they come from me.
———— FROM { ME ! ! ! ! } ———————
It was more of an eruption than a predetermination: the
whole of the cell exploded–wood and glass and books and decor
tore apart as if by merciless claws. It was a tiny nuclear fallout,
as debris struck the forcefield and sizzled to cinders, and all from
a single synchronized flick of both his wrists.
Loki’s face was perversely twisted; his eyes blazed acid green,
the pupils wide and hungry and so very l o s t .
Another twitch of both hands and a beautifully tidy illusion of
the cell before his outburst flung up into existence.
Thusly concealed, Loki ran mad.
He screamed, and screamed, and screamed, like a
forlorn infant, a wild nocturnal beast, a thing voracious
for a love denied by his own miscalculations.
A child burned and too blind to avoid the stove again.
A devolving creature unsalvageable,
{ for who in their
right mind, given the opportunity to love something that
was whole, and unproblematic, and healthy, would love
something so wounded and diseased? }
No one, but she who was now
gone.
Loki tossed his mirror against a wall; it shattered with his
psyche, and he stepped right over the shards without a care.
Red trailed him like the breadcrumbs of his own guilt, and he
picked up the book in which Frigga had written, and, with a
strange and sudden composure, tore out and shredded every
single page.
It was a warm remnant of a person whose love he had never
deserved to begin with.
◣♛◢ —- –
{ Tell me how to s t o p i t. }
{ Mama. }
{ Tell me how to cling to the meager remains
of you. }
It was a little under two years today that he had lost her.
His champion. His mentor. His solace.
His mother.
And, cruel and fitting punishment, it was Midgard’s sacrament
of motherhood, come dawn. Suited, that the planet he had
once sought to abuse, in order to prove a shrill and bitter
point to the man he’d once called father, would remind him
of his greatest mistake, regret, and l o s s .
{ She is not here … she is not a n y w h e r e , anymore. }
{ S H U T U P ! ! !
I CAN DO ANYTHING!!!!
I CAN FIX ANYTHING!!!!!!!!
I CAN LIE MY MOTHER BACK TO LIFE … ! ! ! }
{ Just as I lied her to death. }
Had he known when she faded into damnable, sterile,
Jotun s n o w white of his cell, the abysmal loneliness
of knowing that he was so insufficient a person that he
drew tears from aqua eyes if only to safeguard the shards
of his pride … had he known, he would have declared
Odin his father, a matched set with she his mother,
a thousand times, until his voice went hoarse and he
fell on his knees screaming to her, “Don’t take the
stairs to the left–don’t go where that BEAST will
go … where I will SEND it … !”
But here Loki sat, a wilted crane, a lame wolf, slouched
on the bed she had once inhabited. Her reflecting pool drizzled
with the water that had been her soul’s kin: yielding but strong
in that very adaptability, shrewd, gentle, ferocious, and beautiful.
Her scent of apples and clean things, warm bread and honeysuckle,
lingered on the air, ineffable and immutable, a quiet moon in the
night sky of her baby boy’s tormented mind.
Loki could not see through tears he guarded carefully from shedding,
but he smiled; if he squinted he could imagine he saw her standing
there in her turquoises and her bronzes, an eyebrow wryly arched,
awaiting him to cease his self-indulgent behavior. And that inspired
a wet hiccup of laughter.
He stood and limped to her loom. Here she had told him so
many richly layered stories, weaving them as she wove her
fabrics, a true noblewoman, a true witch, whose craft was
after all much like sewing a tapestry of illusive threads.
One such immense wall of cloth hung forever unfinished; it was
a portait of a lion on whose head perched a cunning magpie.
She had begun the project when Loki had been dragged home
from Earth, covered in blood, bruises and defeat, muzzled like
a common animal. When all had declared Loki lost, and stuffed
him into the corners of vague memory, to diminish the sting of
their own perceived betrayal, Frigga had said nothing, but
retreated to her room, to begin visiting Loki in secret through
her magic, and to begin weaving a clandestine portrait of her
sons reunited.
Loki had not found it until he had secretly usurped the throne …
days after her death. And no one had though to question the
“Allfather” when “Odin” had spent obsessively long hours
perched on a simple wooden stool in front of the tapestry,
staring at the lion and the magpie, wringing his hands,
and murmuring, “You were, you were, yes, you were … !”
Today something guided his hands to the loom. He ventured,
frail and lost inside such an ordinarily charismatic and wiry frame,
to the back of the artwork: the place from which customarily
a weaver composed the image. The Trickster God knew little
about weaving, but he knew much about the Seidhrs, and it
was the Seidhrs that Frigga had taught him in full. So he took
some gold-flecked turquoise thread, and he found a thick
embroidery needle, and he began to sew a ribbon onto the
incomplete tapestry, to tie together the lion and the magpie.
“Every time that I can bear myself at all, mama,” Loki murmured,
with a tremulous smile, “I will know that is you within me.”
{ And is this, then, how I stop you from fading?
Perhaps so. }
{ Perhaps so. }
ღ: Emotionally scar them: leaving a torn portrait or a destroyed statue of Frigga for all to see. (I’MSORRYI’MSORRYI’MSORRY!!!)
ღ: Emotionally scar them
Loki knelt before the effigy of his mother because he did not
deserve her, and never had.
He caressed the gentle long face and the apple cheeks–the half
of the portrait bust that remained undamaged. The other half
was scorched, and hammered, away, leaving a brutalized edifice.
Loki’s throat closed and his heart hemorrhaged as he thought
on her funeral pyre, that which he, and only he, had not been
permitted to witness: had this been the appearance of her face,
when her still, clammy corpse burned? Why could he not have
joined her, simply climbed into the fjord and fallen over its edge
at her side? Certainly he would have fallen, and not ascended
with her to Valhalla–certainly he knew that even in death ,he
would not see her again, or he would have long since taken his
life already. But at least she would not have gone over the ledge
alone, and after all, Loki had already fallen off that waterfall
and into the open expanse of space before. Into nothingless,
weightless and icy cold.
Was this, then, a sign from her, of his insufficiency as a son,
that even in death he had failed her? Had she sent these
witchcraft-loathing radicals to the palace, these iconoclasts
who took pickaxes to every female statue in the palace, to remind Loki
forever of his separateness from the family he yet inexplicably
loved?
Loki quaked violently, picked up the statue and carried
it singlehandedly into the Throne Room, and commanded
that no one disturb him for the ensuing hour, in which,
while a storm brewed out on the palace grounds, he
clung to it and wept her name, and begged that she might
know she was and had ever been his mother.
“You can’t have her this time,” he mumbled wetly at the
chill wind gusting in through the chamber, as if the storm
were Thor come to hog their mother’s memory. “It’s my
turn with her. Let me pretend I was as good as you. Just
once, gods damn you.”
Then he apologized for contaminating the statue further with his
poisonous touch. He apologized to its unmoving face. Such a
haunting likeness, but so nonpresent.
Then he caressed that sweet, wise face, cruelly remote in
its marble cast.
Then he strode back out into the courtyard.
“Remove their heads,” he seethed through bared
and grinning fangs, “for the desecration of the memory of
she whose boots they are not fit to lick, and then put their
heads on spikes in the graveyard for Hugin and Munin to
feast upon.”
Do you ever wish you were with your mother when she died?
◣♛◢ —- –
“She smelled of apples and clean water, lilacs, and
that indeterminable aroma of safety. I often wonder, would
she have smelled that way if I had knelt before her, in that
moment, after the BEAST I unwittingly sent to her quarters
IMPALED her … ?
“And when I threw my aching bones and shattered soul across
her unmoving form, and when I howled and wailed like a
mad wolf, voracious in its grief, and greedily
hoarded the last remaining morsels of heat in her caring
hands, and blew hot breath into them, and when
I raised a thousand and one lanterns to the sky for her… .
would her strawberry curls still feel soft, and did she have
T I M E to F E E L the blade P I E R C I N G her organs?
“And W H Y was Thor there with her, and W H Y that V I L E
pretender-king with him, why did THEY get to stand over
her body and weep, why did THEY get to see her on
a burning ship into the infinity of the SAME STARS that
long caught me in THANOS’S JOWLS? Why do the
STARS get to KEEP HER, and NOT ME? Not her boy
who REVERED her great craft, and studied its every intricacy,
her boy who clung on to her every word of praise and
wisdom? I deserved her MOST, why was I the ONLY one
who … ?”
Because you k i l l e d her, Loki.
Because you are willing to disown and deceive
the people who cherish you in order to assert the
newfound voice upon whose music you are DRUNKEN.
You are being p u n i s h e d by the stars that gulped up
your hallowed mother.
“I wondered these things for the first time… in my cell
beneath Asgard … after a guard passed along the information
as monotonously as if he were reporting the weather. And
as I pondered and jealously mourned, I decimated her gifts
to me. They mocked me with a kindness forever lost. They
were poor and pathetic echoes of her living, breathing presence.
So I raged through my cell as if I were the inevitability of a
tempest—aye, brother, I too can conjure storms—and I broke
everything that I had never deserved to begin with, until I
drew my own blood … the libation of atonement.
“All this poesy aside, mortal … .
“What did you expect me to say?
I wish it daily.
I would give my soul for
but a moment with the woman
who raised me,
so that I could simply vow,
‘yes, mama, yes: you are my
mother, you are.
You are.’
“Every night my prayer is to her alone: ‘you were my
mother … you were.’
HIC IACT ET STELLA MARIS, SANCTA SERAPHINA I.
IMPERATRIX MATER ET VIRGO REGIA DE TERRAE.
VAS SANCTUS VIRGINEM MATREM.
( i made a headcanon about seraphina dying i am so sorry. )
( IT’S NOT CANON FOR THIS VERSE MORE OF LIKE A ‘WHAT IF’ )
( because otherwise i couldn’t handle it jesus christ. )
And Loki would take a vow of chastity and clothe himself in high collared black for the rest of his life, consumed by guilt, the idea that he contaminated Seraphina’s life, beloved by her subjects and her father, the moment he insinuated himself inside her and planted a seed that killed her. And he would vow to protect their daughter at all cost, becoming both mother and father, and he would instruct and advice Caecilia, and he would abdicate when she was still young, to become her advisor, just as Kozmotis had been Seraphina’s. He would let her rule, and aid her in doing so, to give the subjects of Terrae cause to rejoice again (not, and never, because of him: all he causes is ruination and death, like his father always told him). His one joy would be Caecilia, and every year on the anniversary of Seraphina’s death, he would take a bouquet of white roses to her monument, and sit before it, and quietly weep.
And Kozmotis. The ordinarily steely, pragmatic one. Not anymore. First of all, he would turn on Loki for impregnating her to begin with. But even more …
No parent should bury their child. It’s unnatural, it’s against every instinct. He would lose his mind, and he would come to believe wholesale the claims that Seraphina was a vessel of the Holy Mother. He would go so far as to believe that they had merged into a single being, and he would guard her tomb viciously, never leaving its side. He would greet skepticism from Loki as to the decomposition of her body with irate screaming fits. He would claw at the tomb until his nails bled, and he would force a company of masons to open it in the middle of the night, and when he saw it half decomposed and covered in maggots he would kiss its forehead and take his starved, exhausted form out to a bluff over the sea and cast himself in to join the Stella Maris.
icyxmischief 