#I have a passion for weaponizing how much of a political and diplomatic nightmare the Commander would be in times of peace | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

softguarnere · 5 months

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Memories Feel Like Weapons

Edmund Pevensie x gn!reader

Summary: “People can be different. They can change. You’ve changed.” Gently, you use your pointer finger to hook his chin and turn his face towards you, making him look you in the eye. “You’re a good king, Edmund, and an even better man. A good brother. A good boyfriend. Everyone has forgiven you for what you did as a child.” A/N: What's up, y'all?! It's been freezing these past few days and I hate it! 🥴 So this is for all you other lovelies who are currently being plagued by SAD 🫶🏽 Also, in case it's not clear in the fic, for the purposes of the story, we're just gonna assume that reader's parents also sent them off to the country during the war to stay with the professor, that they met the Pevensie's there, and went to Narnia with them. Anyway, I hope you enjoy! ❤️ Warnings: Edmund has SAD but it's Narnia so it's never actually called that, the author is (once again) overusing commas

As interesting and as magical a place as Narnia is, you’re willing to admit that diplomatic negotiations are something that usually bore you to tears.

You try to take an interest, you really do, for Edmund’s sake. Political wheeling and dealing is his bread and butter. You’re not particularly adept at it yourself. Edmund has tried to explain the finer points to you many times, but it’s not something that you can wrap your head around. But maybe that’s just because you get too distracted thinking about how good looking your tutor is. Sometimes you raise a question or a particular point that you know he’ll jump to answer just to see how passionately he talks about his favorite subject. As far as you know, he hasn’t caught on yet.

Today proves to be different, though.

A chill in the air greets you when you awake. A crackling sound from the corner tells you that a servant has crept in at some point and started a fire in the hearth to stave off the cold. Blinking to adjust your eyes to the light, you’re greeted by the type of cold, white sunlight that announces a wintery morning and the season’s signature magical touch that often appears overnight – snow.

You leap out of bed, gasping when your feet kiss the cold floor. Hurrying to put on slippers, you wrap yourself in a fluffy robe and hurry to the door.

Edmund hates the winter. He hates the snow even more. No one can blame him for that. But you’re the only person he’s confessed this to.

Sure, his siblings might suspect as much. Those first few years in Narnia, no one dared suggest that they play in the snow whenever it arrived, for fear of what it might imply, and for fear of inadvertently upsetting the youngest Pevensie brother. After a few more years, he would find excuses to be tucked away in his library on snowy days, and no one would breathe a word of the fun they had without him while he was around. A delicate subject and a fine dance around it, to say the least.

It was only last winter that Edmund confided in you, and only because you had recently become a couple. He said the winter was hard enough on its own, but the snow brought back too many bad memories, ushered in nightmares so vivid that he sometimes woke up questioning what was real and what wasn’t.

This is going to be a rough day for him, to say the least. Which puts a damper on the mood, since ambassadors from a nearby kingdom are arriving to negotiate trade – something he was so looking forward to.

“Edmund?” Your voice seems too loud for the quiet library, and the echo makes you flinch slightly at the loudness of your own voice, at the desperate quality it holds.

Stepping further inside the room, you listen, and tune into the crackling of the fireplace along the far wall. You follow it until you can see the chairs in front of it, and in one of them, Edmund, slumped over a large tome, asleep.

He’ll have a crick in his neck from sleeping that way, you think. If you hadn’t known why he was here, finding him in his favorite place like this would be sweet. It still tugs on your heartstrings, yes, but in a different, heavier way.

“Edmund?” You gently shake his shoulder before stepping back.

The Just King startles awake, his book slipping out of his lap. His eyes are wide and wild as they flick across the room, struggling to make sense of his surroundings. Finally, they land on you and soften. “(Y/N)?”

“Good morning, sleepy head,” you reply, trying to keep your tone light, casual. “If you say that your neck doesn't hurt after sleeping like that, then you’re a liar.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The painful popping noises that echo from his spine say otherwise, but you let it go. Slowly, he rises, stretches, and then takes a step closer to you and plants a kiss on your forehead. He sighs through his nose. “Today is the day.”

You slip your hand into his, intwine your fingers. “How are you feeling?”

Edmund shrugs. His relationship with his siblings has improved leaps and bounds in all the years that they’ve spent in Narnia, but sometimes he still hesitates to show certain emotions around them, to express himself the way he should. Sometimes it’s easier when it’s just the two of you in a space like this where he’s comfortable.

“I’ll manage.”

“If you’re not feeling up to it – “

He squeezes your hand. “I’ll be fine. It’s just a day that I have to get through.”

“Spring will come again,” you assure him, using the mantra that you often whispered to comfort him through last year’s winter season.

“And we will greet it with open arms and grateful hearts,” he finishes. He attempts a smile, but it looks more strained than usual. “Don’t worry, darling. Everything will be fine.”

. . .

It is almost immediately not fine.

The ambassadors arrive in all their splendor. Fine fabrics and shimmering jewels assure that no one can take their eyes off them as they enter the hall and approach the five thrones. They bow to Peter in the center, to Susan and Lucy on his left, then to you and Edmund on his right. Servants carry golden trunks behind them. They have come to these diplomatic negotiations bearing gifts in the most literal sense.

Though you will all retire to a separate chamber for the actual negotiations, the gift giving is a public affair for the whole court to witness. And because it’s so formal, it’s rather slow.

Strong weapons forged of foreign metals are gifted, followed by clothes of their country’s latest fashions, and small samplings of food for each of you, a different dish for you each to try based on what the ambassadors have heard about you.

Thank goodness you’re a good actress, because the ambassadors seem to think that you really do seem excited to try the food in the bejeweled silver container that they gift to you. In reality, you’re trying your hardest not to grimace at the unfamiliar looking treats inside of it, and trying hard not to become preoccupied wondering if the taste will be as . . . unique as the smell that emits from them.

“And finally, for King Edmund,” one of the ambassadors says with a bow before presenting a silver container to Edmund with a flourish. “I have heard a rumor that you are quite fond of these.”

Thankful for a distraction from the gift in your own hands, you turn your attention to Edmund. Sitting beside him, you are in full view of the show that his siblings are not. You can see the rosy color, the powdered sugar. The Just King’s smile immediately falters. Strong hands clamp the container shut before anyone else has the chance to see what’s inside – Turkish Delight.

For a moment there is nothing but silence, the labored sound of Edmund drawing a breath. It goes on just long enough that his siblings glance at him. Only then does Edmund seem capable of forcing himself to smile, to nod, to thank the ambassador for such a thoughtful gift. If his siblings sense that something might be wrong, they don’t even know the half of it.

Because what has just happened, really? Is this a slight on behalf of the other country’s rulers? Or do they genuinely have no clue the implications of their actions?

As the exchanging of the gifts comes to a close, Edmund coughs into his fist, clears his throat. Does it again. He thumps the flat of his palm against his chest.

Peter turns to him. “Are you alright?”

“I think I just require a bit of fresh air, if you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Edmund replies. He says it far too quickly, and he uses the excuse to dismiss himself from the hall. The silver container that holds the Turkish Delight has been abandoned, left behind on his throne.

It takes everything in you not to race after him, to follow him, to make sure that he’s okay. Instead, you’re stuck helplessly glancing between the doorway that he’s disappeared through and the ambassadors who won’t seem to shut up.

Finally, the niceties end. The other king and queens of Narnia begin to migrate into a separate chamber with the ambassadors to begin the negotiations.

Quickly, quietly, you catch Lucy by the sleeve of her dress and lean in close to her ear. “I’ve got to go find Edmund,” you whisper. “I’m worried about him.”

Lucy’s eyes go wide, but she holds her composure under the watchful eyes of the court and the visiting representatives. “I’ll cover for you,” she whispers back.

As one of the five Narnian monarchs, you don’t technically need anyone’s permission to leave – except maybe Peter’s, since he’s the High King. Still, you’re the only one who’s not a Pevensie sibling, which can sometimes be a little isolating. Knowing that Lucy has your back boosts your confidence as you slip away, heading for the nearest place that you think Edmund might have disappeared to.

A quick search reveals that he’s not in the library. Or the armory, or any of his usual haunts. As a last resort, you duck into his bedroom, and it’s there that you find him, standing before the hearth, staring into the flames. His hand holds the place on his side where the White Witch stabbed him on the battlefield, though the gesture seems absentminded.

“Ed?” You make your voice soft so as not to startle him.

He looks up, eyes wide, surprised anyway – and hurt.

You don’t waste time asking if he’s okay. Instead, you cross the room to meet him in front of the fire. “Oh, Edmund.”

He doesn’t bother lying and saying that he’s fine. That’s how you know it’s bad. When Edmund Pevensie goes quiet, retreats within himself, it means that he’s truly wounded. This is something deep inside of him that aches, that rots.

Not knowing what to do, you take a seat on the rug in front of the hearth. You’re careful not to touch him, trying to offer him the space if he needs it. But he follows your lead and takes a seat, too, which seems like a good sign.

For a while, neither of you speaks. You just sit near each other, staring into the fire. Edmund looks very numb when he finally says, “I didn’t mean to leave like that. I just . . . panicked.”

“No one blames you.”

“Seeing that stupid Turkish Delight – “ He shudders. “I can’t figure out if it was a poor choice given with good intentions, or if it was a slight on my honor, a reminder of what I did.” He frowns. “I suppose to some people I’ll never be Edmund the Just – I’ll only ever be just Edmund, The Traitor.”

“No,” you protest. Space be damned; you grab his hand in yours and squeeze it, like that gesture can also grab his attention, infuse the meaning of what you’re about to say to him so that he cannot ignore it. “Edmund, you’ve changed. You’re not a traitor.”

“Anymore.”

“People forget that I was there, too,” you remind him. “I tried to follow you to Jadis’ castle.”

“That was different. You were trying to stop me from betraying my family.” His brow furrows at the memory. “So I shoved you into a snowbank and ran off without you. And then you went back to Beaver’s the help the others. (Y/N) the Loyal,” he employs the epithet that Aslan gave you, but you can’t be sure why. Because of what you did then? Because you’re here with him now?

“People can be different. They can change. You’ve changed.” Gently, you use your pointer finger to hook his chin and turn his face towards you, making him look you in the eye. “You’re a good king, Edmund, and an even better man. A good brother. A good boyfriend. Everyone has forgiven you for what you did as a child.”

Edmund shakes his head. “But they haven’t forgotten. And I can’t, either, if I’m being honest.” He doesn’t meet your eye when he confesses, “It haunts me, the memories. Every winter.”

“No. But you can do something else.” You pause to make sure that you have his full attention when you make your suggestion. “You can forgive yourself.”

Edmund blinks. As smart as he is, it seems like the thought has never occurred to him before now.

“It doesn’t have to be now,” you assure him. “It’s not an instantaneous thing. Just . . . something to work on. A project. An ongoing one.”

Silence falls between you again as he turns back to the fire. It takes a few moments before he nods, the light shining off his dark hair and his crown.

“I’ll work on it,” he says, resolved. He turns back to you, and when he speaks again, his voice is so unsure, so timid, that you have the sudden urge to hold onto him with one arm and use your other to draw your sword and fend off anything or anyone in the world who might come near and cause him harm. “Can you help me do it?”

You nod. “Of course.”

“Thank you,” he clears his throat, shakes his head. “I’m going to need more than my own forgiveness for being late to these negotiations.” He makes no move to get up. His gaze wanders across the room, as if seeing it for the first time, before landing on the window and studying the portal to the frozen, white world beyond it.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t feel up to it.” Then, trying to lighten the mood, you bump your shoulder against his. “I’m sure Susan and Lucy ganging up on the ambassadors will give them a run for their money.”

Edmund chuckles, settles back on the rug. “Good, because I honestly don’t think I can look into the eye of a person who tried to give me Turkish Delight without hitting him over the head with my sword.”

Even though you’re in a relationship, it’s maybe the most vulnerable that Edmund has ever been with you. He places his head in your lap and stares into the hearth as you card your hands through his dark locks.

“Spring is coming soon,” he mutters, his voice heavy with the sleep that’s trying to catch up with him. “Maybe then I can start over . . . Would be nice to not have to worry about freaking out over a bad gift and embarrassing myself in front of the whole court.”

“Spring will come again,” you remind him, voice soft in case he’s already dropped off to sleep. “And we will greet it with open arms and grateful hearts.” Then, for good measure, you add a new line to aid you through your latest challenge. “And it will allow us to start over.”

#Edmund can have SAD - as a treat #edmund pevensie #narnia imagine #narnia fanfiction #narnia x reader #edmund pevensie x reader #my writing

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flowerflamestars · 6 years

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Shovels and Roses

Elucien, SO NOT CANON, Post- ACOTAR, in the months before ACOMAF Lucien couldn’t stop walking. It was a gods damned stupid thing to do, but he kept walking, shaking off the shudder of repulsive magic as he passed under the wall and into mortal land. It was earlier spring here than the artificial season in Tamlin’s home, if Lucien closed his eyes and breathed in the crisp air, he could almost expect to open them and see endless trees with leaves like jewels. He didn’t want to go home, but he didn’t want to go anywhere else either. So many things had felt hollow since the endless years after Jesmindas death. But that this- this victory, this time for rebuilding felt that way, was an ache he couldn’t shake. Mother help him with her healing hands; for Lucien, having Amarantha to hate, having Tamin’s curse to break, had given him purpose. And now? What was there? Tam looking for enemies all over again, Feyre’s fake smile like knife to the gut, the Spring Court full again with vipers. A healing land, but every bit had rot hiding in the shadows. He wondered if the humans would kill him if they found him. String him up on a oak, red ties for binding, ash to take his immortal heart. The sentries knew better than the follow him, they’d only report his absence the next day. Tam would think he was hunting, probably. But Feyre- his first friend in a century, who he had no idea how to be a companion to, she would notice. Out from under the old trees, larger than he’d imagine they usually grew here, fed with the ambient magic of the wall bleeding out, there were flowers. Grass and blossoms, manicured fruit trees just starting to awaken for the year. They were apple trees, tall and proud, like a blow to the heart. Like an idiot, he followed them, the neat rows curving as they crested down a hill, until there before him was a human estate, green roofs bright under the clear sky. Someone had planted a riot of wildflowers along the path, mixed and sprinkled them together so that they grew as a beautiful tangle. It was so unlike the tamed, static plants of Spring, so much more like his beautiful and vicious home. Down Lucien went, resigned to follow his legs, to see this garden planted by passionate and unbridled hands. The first thing he saw was the foxglove- every color from blackest purple to pale blousey parchment, grown tall and crowning beds from the middle. It was healthy and happy, the poison of it stinging at his nose. Peonies like sugar, just starting to loose into shape, tangled with lavender just barely awake. And roses- unmanicured at all, climbing and crossing one another somehow both the wild delicate blooms and their larger sturdier cousins. Lucien traced a single, bloody blossom, thinking of how they used to float in the tea of his mothers sitting room. “Oh, don’t touch that!” A female voice roused him, sweet as summer rain. “It’s just about to open- Oh.” He’d turned to her voice, and she’d frozen, dark eyes so wide they were swallowing her face. The human girl, young woman, he thought, rocked back a step, hands white knuckled on a shovel nearly as tall as she was. Lucien realized what he must look like to her. Dressed for the hunt bristling with knives, a bow at his back. The metal eye and terrible scars, even the his long hair, minuscule braids pulling it back from his pointed ears. To this beautiful girl, Lucien was a nightmare. Easily, he snapped on a courtiers smile. “Hello,” he breathed, pitching his voice soft. Lucien bowed, the last thing he noticed were her silken blue shoes, uselessly lovely for a garden. He was thinking about the delicate color, that this girl must be a noble, before he was hit hard on the side of the head and the world went dark. — The girl had hit him with her shovel. Lucien groaned low in his throat, opening his eyes to sky and roses. He couldn’t have been out long, he could smell the girl nearby, her nerves tinging the air. She smelled like honeysuckle and oak leaves, like roaring campfires, like the warmth of the sun- and fear. He sat up and there she was, just out of arms reach, clutching that shovel in front of her body like a ward. “Look,” she started, voice high and fast, “I apologize for the impulse, my lord. My sister was taken by faeries. My name is Elain, and I’ll go with you wherever you want, as long as you promise that only I’ll be punished, that the staff and the estate will be left alone.” “Take you?” Lucien echoed. Maybe he was concussed. A faery warrior and diplomat centuries old, brought down by a human girls gardening implements. But there was something about her face, something that kept snagging his attention. Freckles and lovely creamy skin, flushed with both fear and temper he could smell. Big brown eyes, shot with gold, a full mouth and- and her mouth. Those were Feyre’s lips, her chin too. Cauldron boil him and mother take him. “You are Elain Archeron?” He didn’t want to give her time to be afraid, didn’t want to scare her anymore. Not just because Feyre would kick his ass if she found out, but because- because it felt wrong, that this beautiful girl should ever have anything to fear from him. “My name is Lucien, I live in the Spring Court with your sister Feyre.” He’d expected smiles, hoped for them. Not for the pink flush to take over her skin entirely, for her face to crumple into tears. “Feyre?” Elain breathed, the shovel clanging to ground. “Feyre is alive?” “Alive and safe and happy,” Lucien assured too fast. Instead of replying Elain let out a sob, and buried her face in her hands. Could he not speak to mortals at all? Did the beautiful girl, did Elain hate faeries that much? Carefully, Lucien slid to his feet, moving slow in case she looked up. More carefully still, he reached out to bump her arm, handkerchief an offering in his hand. She took it, chocolate eyes roaming his face and shakily wiped at her tears. “Perhaps,” Lucien began, painfully aware of how tall he was, how quick and strong towering over her, “you could write Feyre a letter? I’ll carry it back with my own hands.” Elain squared her delicate shoulders and pushed back her curling hair, gracefully pulling together her tearstained face. “Yes,” she said, the girl who’d hit him with a shovel disappearing into genteel tones. “Tea, I think? With this chill in the air. I can write while you refresh yourself.” Lucien found himself blinking at the transition. Had he ever sat and had tea time, in his entire adult life? Elain was still speaking, “I have a solarium this way,” She pointed toward the southeast end of the estate, down a path lined with herb gardens just starting to sprout. “The maids don’t even come in, so no one will see you there. Miss Hilfridge, our cook, has been baking these darling little cakes with dried flowers from last summer, you’ll love them.” And so Lucien followed Elain, her bright speech filing the air, a less than pleasant contrast to his pounding head. The solarium was as elegant as anything that existed in Spring, potted orchids and palms and citrus trees filling the space with the smell of earth and life. Elain directed him to a silk covered chaise, every bit the consummate hostess as she ensured he was comfortable there and took his weapons. Took his weapons and left the room, still chattering brightly. Mother damn him, she’d plucked the wicked knife from his boot with a tinkling laugh. He’d been too distracted by the sound- like joy condensed, the emerald brooks of home- to even object. When she bustled back, a laden tea tray in her hands, she’d changed into a deeply burgundy gown, the painfully charming sunhat removed to reveal barely tamed deep blond curls. She was all pale gold, flushing again as he jumped to his feet and took the tray from her, unable to watch her try to carry the burden. Was she blushing? Lucien shouldn’t care a whit if she were, this young, delicate woman. She perched across from him and poured, her hands steady as passed him a rosebud cup, a bone china plate piled with miniature scones. “I’ll write while you eat?” Elain asked, smiling at him. This one, Lucien thought, so much more than Feyre, would have been a lethal courtier. He inclined his head in return, smiling his Spring Court smile. Elain was the very picture of feminine grace as she wrote, filling pages with looping elegant penmanship, teacup delicate in her other hand. She was beautiful hitting him on the head with a shovel, now, she was confounding. She sipped and looked up, smiling to him sweetly, politely. Lucien had always been told human food was ash in immortal mouths, the truth wasn’t far from it. The scones were odd, tasteless, the berries inside them had a strange firm crunch that was honestly unpleasant. The tea, at least, tasted like tea, if tea had been brewed from hard water, a strange tinge of earth and metal to it. Fae senses were nothing like human, he reminded himself, continuing to eat and sip mechanically, politely. He’d been trying to focus instead on the bright smell of the blooming citrus trees, so intent on that and not offending Elain further that it took him until the dregs of his teacup to notice.

The laugh that burst from his chest was too big for the quiet room, foreign to his ears. When was the last time he’d really laughed? “Are there iron filings in my tea?” Lucien choked out, trying not to guffaw. Elain’s smile had gone clever, and very real. If not for the pulse of fear behind it, he’d thought she liked that he’d noticed her ploy. “Only to make sure you don’t decide to go after the staff.” He set down the cup and picked up a scone, examining the bursts of red fruit baked inside with careful eyes. “And rowan berries in the scones?” Clever girl. Clever, beautiful girl- whose knowledge was woefully wrong. How had she survived this long? This close to the wall, and only fairytales to guard her against the very real monsters his people could be. Lucien could not allow that to go on. “Elain,” he began, fighting to keep the delighted laughter far from his voice. “Iron doesn’t weaken faeries.” She gone still at his tone, was watching him with those careful, sweet eyes. Was Feyre’s entire family this stupidly, wonderfully brave? “Not salt in your pockets or blessed metal, not hawthorn or rowan or oak, not red thread and not hiding your face.” Curls were sliding down her neck as she tilted her head, thinking. “What does work?” Elain asked, voice quiet. “Only ash wood,” Lucien promised. “Carve it into weapons, or burn it and use the ash. Even the smoke will work somewhat.” She was looking past him, out the glass wall, to her field of a garden. Out into the trees beyond, like she could see the wall itself, that poor safeguard. “Elain,” he started again, how did he comfort her? This beautiful, brave girl. Who’d hit him over the head and tried to poison him, who’d offered herself up to keep her servants and their families safe. Slowly, so that she could pull away, so that he wouldn’t startle her, Lucien reached for her hand. “Promise me, if any other faeries come here, you use ash or run. You run to the wall, you get through to Spring. Feyre and I will keep you safe, no matter what.” Elain blinked, and then again, dark eyes wide enough to swallow worlds. Her hand in his was as fragile as glass, even the callouses soft, her pulse under his fingers like a sparrow. “Okay.” Elain said, finally looking back at him. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll come to Feyre.” Lucien wasn’t hurt to be left out of the offer, but it twanged the yawning emptiness that lived in his chest. Elain was staring at his tan skin against hers, a wrinkle forming between her brows. Had he broken some mortal convention he didn’t know? Feyre touched people- faeries- all the time, but then again, she also didn’t give a damn about rules. Carefully, like she didn’t understand what he might do, Elain squeezed his hand and let go. In quick assured movements she folded the letter into a neat square, binding it with bright ribbon. She stood, those soft skirts that begged to be touched flowing around her. The letter was clutched in both her hands, like treasure. “You’ll take it to her?” “No one else will touch it,” Lucien assured. Elain smiled again, that real one, her cheeks dimpling. Silently, he followed her back out into the sunshine. Lucien couldn’t think of a single thing to say as she fearlessly walked right along side him, her hair a riot in the light, her skin nearly faery fine. She smelled like warmth itself, and sounded like to too, her wordless happy sigh as she stoked a hand down the plants they passed. Even with Lucien slowing his long gait as much as possible to meet hers, they reached the edge of the estate, the last of the apples trees too quickly. Elain paused to look up him, dark eyes a serious that he wanted to know more about. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, “please tell Feyre we’re all doing well, that if she can ever get away, we’re here.” Lucien wondered if that love would still extend if Elain knew her sister was no longer human. Like an arrow to the heart, he was sure it would. The girl who had been brave enough to attack him in her garden had a fierce and unyielding spirit. “It’s nothing,” he said, bowing once more to her. He made it three steps away, just into the thick forest shade before she stopped him. “Lucien,” Elain called, her voice a caress on the syllables. She waited for him to turn, still smiling that dimpled, intriguing smile. “You’re welcome to come to tea again.” Elain didn’t wait for an answer but curtsied and turned away, her skirt tangling in soft grass as she headed for home. Lucien watched her go, frozen. He was watching to make sure she made it, to make sure she was safe, he told himself. But that bright, very real smile stayed with him. An ember in the dark, tucked away under his ribs. When he breathed, he smelled honeysuckle and thought of her audacity to try to poison him. Elain Archeron. It wasn’t until he was nearly home, crossing to the estate grounds, that he realized she’d never returned his weapons.

#not coming home #flower and embers #Elain Archeron #Lucien #acotar #acomar #yes I know NONE of those plants actually flower at the same time #badass elain #lucien is SO SO CHARMED #elucien #one-shot #acomaf

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?

By John F. Harris and Bryan Bender, Politico, January 06, 2017

At this naked moment in the American experiment, when many people perceive civilization on the verge of blowing up in some metaphorical sense, there is an elderly man in California hoping to seize your attention about another possibility.

It is that civilization is on the verge of blowing up in a non-metaphorical sense.

William J. Perry is 89 now, at the tail end of one of his generation’s most illustrious careers in national security. By all rights, the former U.S. secretary of Defense, a trained mathematician who served or advised nearly every administration since Eisenhower, should be filling out the remainder of his years in quiet reflection on his achievements. Instead, he has set out on an urgent pilgrimage.

Bill Perry has become, he says with a rueful smile, “a prophet of doom.”

His life’s work, most of it highly classified, was nuclear weapons--how to maximize the fearsome deterrent power of the U.S. arsenal, how to minimize the possibility that the old Soviet arsenal would obliterate the United States and much of the planet along the way. Perry played a supporting role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which he went back to his Washington hotel room each night, fearing he had only hours left to live. He later founded his own successful defense firm, helped revolutionize the American way of high-tech war, and honed his diplomatic skills seeking common ground on security issues with the Soviets and Chinese--all culminating as head of the Pentagon in the early years after the end of the Cold War.

Nuclear bombs are an area of expertise Perry had assumed would be largely obsolete by now, seven decades after Hiroshima, a quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the flickering light of his own life. Instead, nukes are suddenly--insanely, by Perry’s estimate--once again a contemporary nightmare, and an emphatically ascendant one. At the dawn of 2017, there is a Russian president making bellicose boasts about his modernized arsenal. There is an American president-elect who breezily free-associates on Twitter about starting a new nuclear arms race. Decades of cooperation between the two nations on arms control is nearly at a standstill. And, unlike the original Cold War, this time there is a world of busy fanatics excited by the prospect of a planet with more bombs--people who have already demonstrated the desire to slaughter many thousands of people in an instant, and are zealously pursuing ever more deadly means to do so.

And there’s one other difference from the Cold War: Americans no longer think about the threat every day.

Nuclear war isn’t the subtext of popular movies, or novels; disarmament has fallen far from the top of the policy priority list. The largest upcoming generation, the millennials, were raised in a time when the problem felt largely solved, and it’s easy for them to imagine it’s still quietly fading into history. The problem is, it’s no longer fading. “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said in an interview in his Stanford office, “and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

It is a turn of events that has an old man newly obsessed with a question: Why isn’t everyone as terrified as he is?

Perry’s hypothesis for the disconnect is that much of the population, especially that rising portion with no clear memories of the first Cold War, is suffering from a deficit of comprehension. Even a single nuclear explosion in a major city would represent an abrupt and possibly irreversible turn in modern life, upending the global economy, forcing every open society to suspend traditional liberties and remake itself into a security state. “The political, economic and social consequences are beyond what people understand,” Perry says. And yet many people place this scenario in roughly the same category as the meteor strike that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs--frightening, to be sure, but something of an abstraction.

So Perry regards his last great contribution of a 65-year career as a crusade to stimulate the public imagination--to share the vivid details of his own nightmares. He is doing so in a recent memoir, in a busy public speaking schedule, in half-empty hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, and increasingly with an online presence aimed especially at young people. He has enlisted the help of his 28-year-old granddaughter to figure out how to engage a new generation, including through a series of virtual lectures known as a MOOC, or massive open online course.

He is eagerly signing up for “Ask Me Anything” chats on Reddit, in which some people still confuse him with William “The Refrigerator” Perry of NFL fame. He posts his ruminations on YouTube, where they give Katy Perry no run for her money, even as the most popular are closing in on 100,000 views.

One of the nightmare scenarios Perry invokes most often is designed to roust policymakers who live and work in the nation’s capital. The terrorists would need enriched uranium. Due to the elaborate and highly industrial nature of production, hard to conceal from surveillance, fissile material is still hard to come by--but, alas, far from impossible. Once it is procured, with help from conspirators in a poorly secured overseas commercial power centrifuge facility, the rest of the plot as Perry imagines it is no great technological or logistical feat. The mechanics of building a crude nuclear device are easily within the reach of well-educated and well-funded militants. The crate would arrive at Dulles International Airport, disguised as agricultural freight. The truck bomb that detonates on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol instantly kills the president, vice president, House speaker, and 80,000 others.

Where exactly is your office? Your house? And then, as Perry spins it forward, how credible would you find the warnings, soon delivered to news networks, that five more bombs are set to explode in unnamed U.S. cities, once a week for the next month, unless all U.S. military personnel overseas are withdrawn immediately?

If this particular scenario does not resonate with you, Perry can easily rattle off a long roster of others--a regional war that escalates into a nuclear exchange, a miscalculation between Moscow and Washington, a computer glitch at the exact wrong moment. They are all ilks of the same theme--the dimly understood threat that the science of the 20th century is set to collide with the destructive passions of the 21st.

“We’re going back to the kind of dangers we had during the Cold War,” Perry said. “I really thought in 1990, 1991, 1992, that we left those behind us. We’re starting to re-invent them. We and the Russians and others don’t understand that what we’re doing is re-creating those dangers--or maybe they don’t remember the dangers. For younger people, they didn’t live through those dangers. But when you live through a Cuban Missile Crisis up close and you live through a false alarm up close, you do understand how dangerous it is, and you believe you should do everything you could possibly do to [avoid] going back.”

For people who follow the national security priesthood, the dire scenarios are all the more alarming for who is delivering them. Through his long years in government Perry invariably impressed colleagues as the calmest person in the room, relentlessly rational, such that people who did not know him well--his love of music and literature and travel--regarded his as a purely analytical mind, emotion subordinated to logic and duty.

Starting in the 1950s as a technology executive and entrepreneur in some of the most secretive precincts of the defense industry, he gradually took on a series of high-level government assignments that gave him one of the most quietly influential careers of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Fifteen years before serving as Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Perry was the Pentagon official in charge of weapons research during the Carter administration. It was from this perch that he may have had his most far-reaching impact, and left him in some circles as a legendary figure. He used his office to give an essential push to two ideas that transformed warfare over the next generation decisively to American advantage. One idea was stealth technology, which allowed U.S. warplanes to fly over enemy territory undetected. The other was precision-guided munitions, which allowed U.S. bombs to land with near-perfect accuracy.

During the Clinton years, Perry so prized his privacy that he initially turned down the job of Defense secretary--changing his mind only after Clinton and Al Gore pleaded with him that the news media scrutiny wouldn’t be so bad.

The reputation he built over a life in the public sphere is starkly at odds with this latest highly impassioned chapter of Perry’s career. Harold Brown, who also is 89, first recruited Perry into government, and was Perry’s boss while serving as Defense secretary in the Carter years. “No one would have thought of Bill Perry as a crusader,” he says. “But he is on a crusade.”

Lee Perry, his wife of nearly 70 years, is living in an elder care facility, her once buoyant presence now lost to dementia. Perry himself, lucid as ever, has seen his physical frame become frail and stooped. Rather than slowing his schedule, he has accelerated his travels to plead with people to awaken to the danger. A trip to Washington includes a dinner with national security reporters and testimony on Capitol Hill. Back home in California, he’s at the Google campus to prod engineers to contemplate that their world may not last long enough for their dreams of technology riches to come true. He’s created an advocacy group, the William J. Perry project, devoted to public education about nuclear weapons. He’s enlisted both his granddaughter and his 64-year-old daughter, Robin Perry, in the cause.

“I want to be very clear,” he said. “I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.”

Perry really did not expect he would have to write this chapter of his public life. His official career closed with what seemed then an unambiguous sense of mission accomplished. By the time he arrived in the Pentagon’s top job in 1994, the Cold War was over, and the main item on the nuclear agenda seemed to be cleaning up no-longer-needed arsenals. As defense secretary, Perry stood with his Russian counterpart, Pavel Grachev, as they jointly blew up missile silos in the former Soviet Union and tilled sunflower seeds in the dirt.

Now, he sees his grandchildren inheriting a planet possibly more dangerous than it was during his public career. No one could doubt that the Sept. 11 terrorists would have gladly used nuclear bombs instead of airplanes if they had had them, and it seems only a matter of time until they try. Instead of a retreating threat in North Korea, that fanatical regime now possesses as many as eight nuclear bombs, and is just one member of a growing nuclear club. American policymakers talk of spending up to $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear arsenal. And now comes Donald Trump with a long trail of statements effectively shrugging his shoulders about a world newly bristling with bombs and people with reasons to use them.

“We are starting a new Cold War,” Perry says. “We seem to be sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race. … We and the Russians and others don’t understand what we are doing.”

“I am not suggesting that this Cold War and this arms race is identical to the old one,” Perry added. “But in many ways, it is just as bad, just as dangerous. And totally unnecessary.”

Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.

And just how high is the risk? The answer of course is ultimately unknowable. Perry’s point, though, is that it’s a hell of a lot higher than you think.

Perry invites his listeners to consider all the various scenarios that might lead to a nuclear event. “Mathematically speaking, you add those all together in one year it is still just a possibility, not a probability,” he reckons. “But then you go out ten, twenty years and each time this possibility repeats itself, and then it starts to become a probability. How much time we have to get those possibility numbers lower, I don’t know. But sooner or later the odds are going to get us, I am afraid.”

Almost uniquely among living Americans, Bill Perry has actually faced down the prospect of nuclear war before--twice.

In the fall of 1962, Bill Perry was 35, father of five young children, living in the Bay Area and serving as director of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories--driving his station wagon to recitals in between studying missile trajectories and the radius of nuclear detonations.

Where he resided was not then called Silicon Valley, but the exuberance and spirit of creative possibility we now associate with the region was already evident. The giants then were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, men Perry deeply admired and wished to emulate in his own business career. The innovation engine at that time, however, was not consumer technology; it was the government’s appetite for advantage in a mortal struggle against a powerful Soviet foe. Perry was known as a star in the highly complex field of weapons surveillance and interpretation.

So it was not a surprise, one bright October day, for Perry to get a call from Albert “Bud” Wheelon, a friend at the Central Intelligence Agency. Wheelon said he wanted Perry in Washington for a consultation. Perry said he’d juggle his schedule and be there the next week.

“No,” Wheelon responded. “I need to see you right away.”

Perry caught the red-eye from San Francisco, and went straight to the CIA, where he was handed photographs whose meaning was instantly clear to him. They were of Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba. For the next couple weeks, Perry would stay up past midnight each evening poring over the latest reconnaissance photos and help write the analysis that senior officials would present the next morning to President Kennedy.

Perry experienced the crisis partly as ordinary citizen, hearing Kennedy on television draw an unambiguous line against Soviet missiles in this hemisphere and promising that any attack would be met with “a full retaliatory response.” But he possessed context, about the capabilities of weapons and the daily state of play in the crisis, that gave him a vantage point superior to that of all but perhaps a few dozen people.

“I was part of a small team--six or eight people,” he recounted of those days 54 years earlier. “Half of them technical experts, half of them intelligence analysts, or photo interpreters. It was a minor role but I was seeing all the information coming in. I thought every day when I went back to the hotel it was the last day of my life because I knew exactly what nuclear weapons could do. I knew it was not just a lot of people getting killed. It was the end of civilization and I thought it was about to happen.”

It was years later that Perry, like other more senior participants in the crisis, learned how right that appraisal was. Nuclear bombs weren’t only heading toward Cuba on Soviet ships, as Kennedy believed and announced to Americans at the time. Some of them were already there, and local commanders had been given authority to use them if Americans launched a preemptive raid on Cuba, as Kennedy was being urged, goaded even, by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay and other military commanders. At the same time, Soviet submarines were armed and one commander had been on the verge of launching them until other officers on the vessel talked him out of it. Either event would have in turn sent U.S. missiles flying.

The Cuban Missile Crisis recounting is one of the dramatic peaks in “My Journey on the Nuclear Brink,” the memoir Perry published last fall. It is a book laced with other close calls--like November 9, 1979, when Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) reporting that his computers showed 200 Soviet missiles in flight toward the United States. For a frozen moment, Perry thought: This is it--This is how it ends.

The watch officer soon set him at ease. It was a computer error, and he was calling to see whether Perry, the technology expert, had any explanation. It took a couple days to discover the low-tech answer: Someone had carelessly left a crisis-simulation training tape in the computer. All was well. But what if this blunder had happened in the middle of a real crisis, with leaders in Washington and Moscow already on high alert? The inescapable conclusion was the same as it was in 1962: The world skirting nuclear Armageddon as much by good luck as by skilled crisis management.

Perry has been at the forefront of a movement that he considers the sane and only alternative, and he has joined forces with other leading Cold Warriors who in another era would likely have derided their vision as naïve. In January 2007, he was a co-author of a remarkable commentary that ran on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It was signed also by two former secretaries of state, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger and by Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--all leading military hawks and foreign policy realists who came together to argue for something radical: that the goal of U.S. policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, it should be the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons.

This sounded like gauzy utopianism, especially bizarre coming from supremely pragmatic men. But Perry and the others always made clear they were describing a long-term ideal, one that would only be achieved through a series of more incremental steps. The vision was stirring enough that it was endorsed by President Obama in his opening weeks in office, in a March 2009 address in Prague.

In retrospect, Obama’s speech may have been the high point for the vision of abolition. “A huge amount of progress was made,” recalled Shultz, now 93. “Now it is going in the other direction.”

“We have less danger of an all-out war with Russia,” in Nunn’s view. “But we have more danger of some type of accident, miscalculation, cyber interference, a terrorist group getting a nuclear weapon. It requires a lot more attention than world leaders are giving it.” Perry’s goal now is much more defensive than it was just a few years ago--halting what has become inexorable momentum toward reviving Cold War assumptions about the central role of nukes in national security.

More recently he’s added yet another recruit to his cause: California Governor Jerry Brown. Brown, now 78, met Perry a year ago, after deciding that he wanted to devote his remaining time in public service mainly to what he sees as civilization’s two existential issues, climate change and nuclear weapons. Brown said he became fixated on spreading Perry’s message after reading his memoir: He recently gave a copy to President Obama and is trying to bend the ear of others with influence in Washington.

If Bill Perry has a gift for understatement, Brown has a gift for the theatrical. In an interview at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, he wonders why everyone is not paying attention to his new friend and his warnings for mankind.

“He is at the brink! At the brink! Not WAS at the brink--IS at the brink,” Brown exclaimed. “But no one else is.”

A California governor can have more influence, at least indirectly, than one might think, due to the state’s outsized role in policy debates and the fact that the University of California’s Board of Regents helps manage some of the nation’s top weapons laboratories, which study and design nuclear weapons. Brown, who was a vocal critic in the 1980s of what he called America’s “nuclear addiction,” reviewed Perry’s recent memoir in the New York Review of Books, and said he is determined to help his new friend spread his message.

“Everybody is, ‘we are not at the brink,’ and we have this guy Perry who says we are. It is the thesis that is being ignored.”

Even if more influential people wake up to Perry’s message--a nuclear event is more likely and will be more terrible than you realize--a hard questions remains: Now what?

This is where Perry’s pragmatism comes back into play. The smartest move, he thinks, is to eliminate the riskiest part of the system. If we can’t eliminate all nukes, Perry argues, we could at least eliminate one leg of the so-called nuclear triad, intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are especially prone to an accidental nuclear war, if they are launched by accident or due to miscalculation by a leader operating with only minutes to spare. Nuclear weapons carried by submarines beneath the sea or aboard bomber planes, he argues, are logically more than enough to deter Russia.

The problem, he knows, is that logic is not necessarily the prevailing force in political debates. Psychology is, and this seems to be dictating not merely that we deter a Russian military force that is modernizing its weapons but that we have a force that is self-evidently superior to them.

It is an argument that strikes Perry as drearily familiar to the old days. Which leads him the conclusion that the only long-term way out is to persuade a younger generation to make a different choice.

His granddaughter, Lisa Perry, is precisely in the cohort he needs to reach. At first she had some uncomfortable news for her grandfather: Not many in her generation thought much about the issue.

“The more I learned from him about nuclear weapons the more concerned I was that my generation had this massive and dangerous blind spot in our understanding of the world,” she said in an interview. “Nuclear weapons are the biggest public health issue I can think of.”

But she has not lost hope that their efforts can make a difference, and today she has put her graduate studies in public health on hold to work full time for the Perry Project as its social media and web manager. “It can be easy to get discouraged about being able to do anything to change our course,” she said. “But the good news is that nuclear weapons are actually something that we as humans can control...but first we need to start the conversation.”

Einstein said in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

In Perry’s view the only way to avoid it is by directly contemplating catastrophe--and doing so face to face with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia, as he recently did in a forum in Luxembourg with several like-minded Russians he says are brave enough to speak out about nuclear dangers in the era of Putin.

“We could solve it,” he said. “When you’re a prophet of doom, what keeps you going is not just prophesizing doom but saying there are things we do to avoid that doom. That’s where the optimism is.”

#William J. Perry #Bill Perry #nuclear weapons #nuclear war

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