#but they deserved to both get off the island and be a family with aaron | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lacrimosathedark · 3 years

Text

Hamilton Inaccuracies/Corrections (because why not?)

Okay so, I saw a post on reddit that was like, “what’s some inaccuracies in Hamilton off the top of your head?” and I got a whole bunch...and then I had to double check to make sure if I was right...and I’m pretty long-winded...and now I have this 5,000ish word monstrosity. And apparently you can only post 1000 characters at a time on reddit. Laaaaame. So here’s some Hamilton facts I’ve gathered in my brain. Since it was kinda off the top of my head despite being so long, it’s kinda vague in some places, so if anyone wants to expand on anything (or correct me if I oopsed somewhere) please do! Though nicely please.

Also I am also awful at citing things, but I know I learned some of this from @john-laurens and @ciceroprofacto so thank you.

LET’S BEGIN!

Act 1

Rachel Faucette was not a prostitute, but she was a “whore” in the sense that she did what she fucking wanted with her body. During her first marriage she may or may not have been sleeping around, but she refused to stay with John Lavien, her husband, anymore. So he had her arrested. And he could do that. Because patriarchy and theocracy. And she was essentially put in solitary confinement. You can see why she tried to leave, right? She tried to get their marriage annulled or get a divorce. I forget what the issue was but she couldn’t and eventually she just moved to another island where she met James Hamilton.

The intro song makes it seem like Alexander was an only child. He actually had an older brother, James Jr., but he kinda fucked off after their mother died, working and taking care of himself. They also had an older half-brother Peter Lavien, but I don’t think they really knew him other than as the son of their mother’s abusive ex who took everything from them when she died. John Lavien was able to do that because when Rachel was with James Hamilton, she had not been able to get legally divorced from him so she wasn’t really married to James Hamilton, so James Jr. and Alexander were illegitimate ie bastards. He was an asshole. I don't think Peter had anything against the Hamiltons, but I think he grew up to be a Loyalist so. He actually made some trouble in South Carolina for Henry Laurens, John's dad! But I think I read somewhere he also left money for Alex and James Jr. In his will, which is sweet.

This is more visual since it’s not specified in the song, but in the show, Hamilton’s cousin mimes hanging himself. Peter Lytton’s cause of death if I recall was inconclusive, but he was in his bed and there was a lot of blood. So, yeah, he didn’t hang himself.

Alexander did not punch the bursar. However he did return to Princeton later during the war and blew a canon through the school and apparently decapitated a painting of King George lololol. He was under orders, but yknow. Probably felt pretty good after he was rejected for accelerated courses. He wasn’t the only bastard rejected, though! Ben Franklin’s bastard son was too. The guy in charge of admissions, Witherspoon, hated bastards as a concept and Princeton was a very religious school at the time I believe.

It may have been the plan by Aaron and Esther Burr for Aaron Jr to graduate Princeton, but like, he couldn’t really be sure of that? He was like 2 years old when they died, and his older sister Sally was 4 I believe, maybe 5.

Hercules Mulligan met Alex in 1772. His older brother Hugh knew Alex’s old employer in St. Croix and helped him get to mainland America. Alex and Hercules lived together for a long while, and Hercules is actually who got him interested in the revolution.

John Laurens was in England in 1776. He wouldn’t meet Hamilton and Lafayette until he accepted his post as Washington’s aide-de-camp upon his return in August of 1777.

Lafayette couldn’t have met Hamilton before August 1777 because that’s when he met Washington, and he was appointed as a volunteer to the Continental Army only a week prior, and before that he had been in France. But Lafayette later declared their relationship to be like that of brothers, Alexander his closest connection in the states besides Washington.

Lafayette admired and absolutely adored Laurens and they were besties, but neither of them knew Mulligan. They may have met in passing, or heard about him from Hamilton, but nothing more.

“Lafayette” was actually a nickname based on his title of “Marquis de la Fayette”. In his autobiography, he wrote: “It’s not my fault I was baptized like a Spaniard, with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle.” I’m glad he thought it was funny at least. His name is Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de la Fayette.

Hercules Mulligan is not known to fuck horses.

The Revolution had already sorta started. Actually, Hercules and Alexander had been part of local militias before 1776.

This is more of a miscommunication since the actors are close in age, though the lyrics try to get it across. There’s a reason Mulligan says he’s got the others “in loco parentis”. In 1776 Hamilton and Lafayette would have been 19, Laurens would have been 22, and Mulligan would have been 36.

I think we all know “Laurens, I like you a lot” does not cover the scope of their relationship but that’s rather self explanatory so unless someone asks I’ll leave it at that. And for other clarifications. But at the very least I’ll share this: Anyone who saw them knew they were like attached at the hip (without knowing how attached *winkwonk*) and you could almost always contact one through the other. Laurens was notoriously bad at answering letters, to Hamilton too (and Alex did bitch about it because he is insecure and needs love), but it became quickly known he got back to Hamilton fastest so people would be like “Tell Laurens I said hi!” or “Hey, I need to get these to Laurens, you send them to him.” Which is hilarious. I just imagine Alexander going, “Why me?”

While all of them are Revolutionaries, Laurens is the only one you could solidly call an abolitionist, and Mulligan’s even shaky on the manumission part. He was supposedly part of the Manumission Society Hamilton helped start, but Mulligan also personally owned slaves and was never known to have freed them (One helped him with spy shit. His name was Cato!). In fairness, Hamilton and Lafayette wholeheartedly agreed with Laurens, and Hamilton was the biggest supporter of his battalion plan, and both of them did try to continue working towards equality after the war, but it was never the top priority for either of them and their lives kinda went to hell, so it fell to the wayside. Lafayette actually did some nifty stuff worth looking at, and Hamilton might have tried to keep one of John Lauren’s freed men from Henry Laurens! But as slavery stuck around for a while, it clearly wasn’t anything significant.

Angelica would meet and befriend Thomas Jefferson in Europe, but she would never manage to convince him to put women in a sequel because he’s a huge misogynist and told her in multiple letters that politics isn’t for women and I think he deserves a shoe up his southern backside. Side note, it always bothered me that Lin played up the misogyny in the musical. I mean, yeah, all of them would be misogynists compared to us, but for their time, Hamilton wasn’t so bad. If there was anyone to play up misogyny with, it was Jefferson, because he would tell Angelica for years and years that politics could never make women happy, and that the women in France were foolish for trying etc.. Hamilton would actually discuss politics with Angelica frequently and openly. And there’s a proto-feminist in the cast that was never recognized—Aaron Burr! He respected Theodosia Sr. as an equal and she was his most valuable political ally, and he made sure Theodosia Jr. got the same education any boy of her time would have. He actually respected women to a decent degree. Not to say he wasn't as much of a ho as Hamilton cuz yeah that's accurate (but they were both disaster bisexuals more on Burr's sexuality later)

Farmer Refuted was an essay Hamilton wrote arguing against Samuel Seabury's posts. They weren't shouting in the public square(but Lin got the sass right. I love his face when Hamilton and Seabury are fighting over the podium). Seabury was also really really old, not young and cute like Thayne, hence the line about "mange". Blech.

General Montgomery didn’t take a bullet in the neck, it was a grapeshot from a canon in his head (and his thighs), but close enough I guess. Side note: Burr actually served a short interim on Washington’s staff, but only for like 10 days because they hated each other lolol.

Alexander didn’t bring Laurens, Mulligan, or Lafayette to Washington. Lafayette joined up with the Continental Army in 1777 and quickly convinced them he wasn’t like the other French nobles; he was a glory-seeking kid with a boner for America (for some reason???). Laurens was requested by Washington to join his military family and he arrived also in August 1777 just after Lafayette. Like previously stated, Mulligan was doing shit even before Hamilton did.

Alexander would not have been in charge of spy shit (though may have been somewhat involved). Washington had people like Mulligan for that, who actually saved Washington a few times. But also, the "King’s men who might let some things slide" was the tactic Mulligan used. He was actually very charming, and his wife was very high in British society and he was a skilled tailor, so they were thought of well among the redcoats, and he got a lot of information through chatting with his customers. He also could usually smooth-talk his way out of trouble. Actually, Mulligan blended in so well, when the war was over, people in the city wanted him out cuz they thought he was a Loyalist. So George fucking Washington paid him a visit and commissioned I think a coat from him, and that cleared that up. He got a LOT of business after that.

Alexander would not be Washington’s right hand man, or at least, not his only one if Lin was using that to mean aide-de-camp. In that case, Laurens would also be Washington’s right hand man, along with many men not named in the musical.

John Laurens may have been reliable with the ladies (comes with the territory of being hot, rich, and a perfect gentleman), but he most certainly didn’t want to be. His father noted, rather proudly at the time, that as a young teenager he expressed no interest in girls. John was also married by 1780, and at least Alexander knew. (he told John he'd found out in the well-known April 1779 letter. You know... “Cold in my professions...find me a wife...the length of my nose...” That one.) Because John apparently didn't tell people he was married. Laurens. Sweetheart. Get. Your. Shit. Together.

John also would not be at this ball. February 1779 to March 1780 he is fighting down south, and this ball was early 1780.

The tomcat thing may be half true. Martha Washington did supposedly name a cat Hamilton, but it was an affectionate thing. The slang tomcat meaning ho wasn’t a thing at that time, so it couldn’t be named to tease Alex for his promiscuity. I believe this was one of the many things John Adams made up to slander Hamilton.

Hamilton and Eliza had met before 1780. They had met once two years prior at a dinner her father had hosted. Also, Hamilton had been courting her friend Kitty Livingston, and his friend and fellow aide Tench Tilghman had been attempting to court Eliza, and they’d actually done at least one sort-of double date (which is adorable). So this shouldn’t have been the first time they’d seen each other. Could still be when they fell in love, though, since they started courting after this. Which is cute to think about.

Speaking of Tench and Eliza! I don't remember when this took place but Tilghman journaled it, he went out on something of a hike with a few ladies and they got to a cliff. Of course, he had to help the girls climb up. Except Eliza who started climbing by herself like a natural to the bewilderment and likely horror of the other ladies. Elizabeth Schuyler was a bamf okay?

Of course everyone knows by now, Angelica was married before Eliza. During the Winter’s Ball, she’d already eloped with Jack Carter aka John Barker Church and run away to Boston.

Their courtship was not that fast. Not like, weeks. More like months. Fun fact, Eliza is the only of the five (yes FIVE) Schuyler sisters who didn’t elope and actually got her parents permission! But here’s a heartbreaking fun fact: while Alex was courting Eliza, Laurens was taken prisoner and then on probation. He wasn’t allowed to leave the state of Pennsylvania. He was mentally in a very dark place. Alex kind of procrastinated telling Laurens about Eliza, didn’t say he was courting anyone until they were already engaged.

I can't leave this alone if I'm sad you have to be too. Alex was hella depressed during this time too. Of course he was a soldier so he couldn't see Eliza as much as he'd have liked. On top of that, he kept pushing for an exchange for John and kept getting rejected because they couldn't show preference for him. And then Laurens was sending him very few letters, of course, and the ones he did send were very depressed, even suicidal sounding. He had to work while dealing with that. He had to keep begging Eliza to write to him to be reassured that she still liked him.

No one could show up for Hamilton for the wedding. Some sources say fellow aide James McHenry showed up, but he’s the only one. Alexander even invited his deadbeat dad, offered to pay all his travel expenses and everything, guess how that turned out. So Eliza’s side of the hall was packed and his was empty. God, can you imagine how sad that is?

Another heartbreaking fun fact! John Laurens was out of probation and could have made it to the wedding, was invited (Hamilton, I kid you not, jokingly invited him to a threesome with his new wife in a letter: “I wish you were at liberty to transgress the bounds of Pensylvania. I would invite you after the fall to Albany to be witness to the final consummation.” (emphasis is original to Hamilton. As is the misspelling of Pennsylvania. Yes, seriously.)) and John did not go. Instead he went back to work trying to talk his way out of getting sent as an envoy to France and suggesting Alexander to take his place. You know. His boyfriend who just got married. Sure, he was right that Hamilton was better equipped for the job, but yknow. Another fun fact, one of the guys who voted for John to be the one to go to France was John’s ex-boyfriend Francis Kinloch. Who was a turncoat, and had been a royalist when he and Laurens split. How’s that for some twisty bullshit.

Sorry, this one isn’t about the musical, it’s a tangent, I just got excited about that quote. Both that style of innuendo and the misspelling of Pennsylvania are consistent in Hamilton’s writing. Listening to john-lauren’s podcast about the April 1779 letter can really help you understand how Hammy uses innuendo but also I just love listening to it it’s insightful and hilarious and I love John Laurens but y u do this and my heart hurts for Hamilton but he is also a ho but aNYWAY. As for Pensylvania...well, he kinda made that mistake on an important document. ...It’s The Constitution. He misspelled Pennsylvania on The Constitution. No big deal. Not like something that could haunt his legacy forever. Oh my god I’m so sorry.

Philip Schuyler did have sons. Five in fact. Two of them died pretty young though I think, considering there are three kids in a row named John Bradstreet Schuyler. The other two were named Philip Jeremiah and Rensselaer.

Laurens, Lafayette, and Mulligan were all married before Hamilton. Hercules Mulligan married Elizabeth Sanders in 1773. Lafayette married his beloved Adrienne in 1774. John Laurens was regretfully obliged to marry Martha Manning in 1776.

Sigh. Again with the misogyny. Anyway, I wanted to comment on the marriage as a loss of freedom. From what I can tell, Elizabeth helped Hercules with his spy work at home. John was literally fighting a war across the ocean from his wife, and probably having an illegal affair with Alexander (though to be fair to him, he was kind of running away from Martha because he didn't marry her for love, gosh, there are no winners here). Lafayette absolutely adored his wife but still was also fighting a war an ocean away, and had multiple affairs, at least one with his wife’s blessing. So yeah, losing your freedom with marriage? Bullshit.

Despite where it is in the musical and Eliza singing the beginning, Stay Alive is roughly about Valley Forge, which would be December of 1777 through June of 78. So before the ball and wedding. (Fun fact! A lot of people theorize Valley Forge as when Hamilton and Laurens’ relationship may have escalated into romantic and/or sexual territory. They may have had more privacy, as small temporary buildings were being made to better withstand the cold, and Hamilton was sick a lot during that time and did need tending a lot. West Indian boi did not like Northern winter.) But yeah, Congress being stupid and the army resorting to eating their horses sometimes and not being able to buy food and equipment? All true. It was a real bad winter.

Mulligan wouldn’t have to go back to New York, he never would have left. He remained there as a tailor and a spy throughout the war. He wouldn’t have been traveling with Washington.

Hamilton and Laurens didn't write essays so much as start working out John's battalion plan and writing letters trying to push for it.

This duel happened in 1778, so like. This timeline is so fucky.

Stay Alive makes it seem like Hamilton was the one who wanted to duel Lee, but it was 100% Laurens from the start. The off-Broadway version demonstrates it a bit better. Hamilton was Lauren's second to save his ass. Hamilton had a rough relationship with Washington, but Laurens admired him greatly and would have willingly defended his commander’s honor. John was a Good Boy who always bowed his head to his asshole father, even at first for his battalion plan, but John wouldn’t let even his father talk shit about Washington. Fun fact about this duel, Alex and John were late to the duel because they “got lost in the woods”. Oooookay. Suuuuuuure. And Baron von Steuben was straight. (Fact: Steuben was very gay and pretty much pushed out of Europe for it. And he actually also had challenged Lee! They talked things out before this.)

Aaron Burr was not Charles Lee’s second. His second was a Major Evan Edwards. Lin wanted a parallel with the final duel. To be fair, that was a really cool way to do it and I like it better that way.

Alexander Hamilton could NOT agree that duels are dumb and immature. He was in 10 duel challenges as a participant in his lifetime, 9 of which he was the challenger. One time he challenged two people at once. One time he challenged an entire politcal party apparently. No, I am not kidding. He had a bad day. And I think you know the one time he wasn’t the challenger.

Lee did not yield on the first shot, nor was Laurens satisfied. Lee was pretty much like, “It’s just a flesh wound!” and wanted to go another round and Laurens agreed, but Hamilton and Edwards managed to talk them down. Yes he was shot in the side. But that wasn’t all because Laurens absolutely roasted Lee at his court martial.

Lee: Were you ever in an action before?

Laurens: I have been in several actions; I did not call that an action, as there was no action previous to the retreat.

I love this man. So much. The sass of this man.

We don’t know if Washington was angry about the duel with Lee. We do know that Laurens, and probably Hamilton, had Christmas dinner with him two days later. When Hamilton left, it was because Washington had snapped over a misunderstanding (caused by Lafayette actually, and he really tried to make it better because Lafayette is a sweetheart), and then continued to deny Hamilton the command he requested, and he resigned. It was entirely unrelated to the duel and Laurens. However, the daddy issues are real.

I don’t know if Lafayette went to France for more funds and came back with more guns, but Laurens certainly did! Ben Franklin told him to chill, but he actually got super impatient and ended up supposedly disrespecting and maybe kinda threatening the court, demanding what he needed, and walking out. They were were kind of shocked and impressed into giving more than had been requested. Any existing deities bless John Laurens. I love him.

Lafayette actually nominated his own aide to lead the charge and Hamilton appealed for himself and Washington finally gave in to Hamilton.

Laurens was not in South Carolina. When he finally got back from France, he was sent to Yorktown. He actually was commanding the group Alexander led. (Power couple lol) He also helped with negotiations after the battle. Also, supposedly making the British play ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ on their way out was Laurens’ idea because boy is made of sass and spite.

Henry Laurens would not have sent a letter to Hamilton about John’s death. Even if he would have, he couldn’t. At that time, he’d been locked up in the Tower of London as a prisoner. We have no idea when or how Alexander found out, or who might have told him. We know he wrote to Nathanael Greene on October 25 and Lafayette on November 3 (literally 2 months after Laurens' death), and the mentions of Laurens were very short. It’s thought that he really couldn’t talk about Laurens. People have compared it to the stories of how Benjamin Tallmadge apparently couldn’t hear Nathan Hale’s name without crying.

After Yorktown Alexander resigned and John went down south to flush British troops out of the southern states. His group was ambushed at Combahee River and he decided to charge instead of wait for backup and he died. Many people think it was a combination of his usual recklessness, suicidality, and glory-seeking mixed with a desperation with the war coming to an end. It was such a small skirmish. He deserved better. He left his daughter, Frances, whom he had never met, orphaned, as her mother had died months earlier from sickness. She was adopted by John’s oldest younger sister, also coincidentally Martha Laurens (though married was Martha Laurens Ramsay).

The Levi Weeks case was years later than that, in 1800, though it was alongside Burr. Hamilton actually lost his first trial as a defense lawyer and was not with Burr.

The whole conversation where Hamilton proposes Burr help him write the Federalist Papers is fake. Lin made that up entirely.

John Church’s wealth kinda...varies. He was a gambler. At first, he was actually in quite a bit of debt. He did make it big eventually and he and Angelica moved to Europe. He really didn’t seem to be a lot of fun to most people, but Angelica eloped with him. She chose him against her father’s wishes. I don’t get why Lin kept writing lines saying she didn’t love him, at least at first. He also does this in the cut song Congratulations where she says “I languished in a loveless marriage” bish you eloped wat She also lived as a socialite and was adored by anyone who met her apparently, so like???? da fuq Lin. Didja really do Laurens dirty for these lies or at the very least uncertanties? Could you not prop up that romance without making her say she hates her husband?

Act 2

More of a personality miscommunication. Irl Thomas Jefferson was shy, quiet, and hypersensitive, nothing like how Daveed plays him. If you knew a guy like the real Jefferson in real life you might be endeared to him out of pity or because he seems sweet, but in the short time of a musical that would immediately be read as cold and unlikable. So the best way to portray “this guy is a likable asshole” is to make him loud and made of sass which is what Daveed does magnificently. So, not at all accurate to real Jefferson, but gets the concept of him across.

Thomas was not off getting high with the French. Probably. He was making negotiations for the Revolution. And abusing Sally Hemings (his, at the time, 14 year old slave, who was also his sister-in-law, and 30 years his junior, and was brought along to entertain his daughter). And actually probably chatting up with Angelica!

By the time Philip was 9, he had two sisters, Angelica (7) and his foster/adopted sister Frances Antill (6), but he also had two brothers already, Alexander Jr. (5) and James Alexander (3), with maybe another one on the way since William Stephen would be born next year.

The whole comma thing is backwards. It was Angelica who made the initial mistake. Hamilton pointedly and flirtatiously teased her about it before closing it with “Adieu ma chere, soeur” French for “Goodbye my dear, sister”. So it’s more playful and less lovey dovey in context, so the tone is all wrong. It’s not romantic, it’s teasing and snarky.

Say No To This feels like it’s over quick. The affair lasted a year, not just the summer Eliza was away.

Clermont Street wasn’t renamed until many years later.

I don’t know that Alex has always considered Burr a friend. Irl they weren’t as close, and Hamilton was keenly aware of how slimy Burr could be.

Lafayette was NOT fine. He was imprisoned a lot during the French Revolution, the poor man, and many members of his wife’s family were killed. HOWEVER! Hamilton was not just sitting by. Angelica and her husband did make an attempt to rescue Lafayette, and the Hamiltons fostered Lafayette’s son Georges Washington Lafayette (yes that was his actual name). So Hamilton also did not forget Lafayette.

Not all his defendants got acquitted, obviously. Stop being cocky, Ham.

People comment on how Jefferson whines about Hamilton’s fashion sense while literally dressed in violet velvet. The original plan was to have him in browns, but Daveed is just such a friggin star that they just had to give him something brighter and decided to go with a Prince-inspired look. Originally the browns were going to be representative of his supposed representation of farmers. Though note here: Jefferson’s agricultural representation is much the same as modern Republicans’ rural representation. More for show.

Actually, let's get political for a sec. I've done some research in my hyperfixation and in searches for Hamilton shiz I've ended up stumbling into far-right nonsense and I know how to recognize the degrees of nonsense from years of actually paying attention to it now because this is what I do apparently. Which is weird, right? Lin kinda portrays him like a lefty. Well, here's the thing. Any proud historically educated Republican will tell you that their roots are in the Federalist Party. Which is technically true. What they will neglect to mention is the flip between parties that happened when the Republicans decided to use southerners racism to their advantage in elections. Being subtly racist can get the racists and the non-racists on your side! Yeah, it's gross. Federalists are more like Democrats. The corporatists. They clearly care more about companies and Wall Street, but they put actual action into social progress on rare occasion. Democratic-Republicans are like Republicans, conservatives who don't want social change and rail against it and pretend they aren't for corporate interests while being just as bad as the other guys. But Republicans have a tendency to rewrite history to paint themselves as the good guys, or reclaim things that aren't theirs as their own. Just look at the Civil War! Or...literally just...America I guess. Yikes. But yeah, here's your warning. Don't just go looking at and trusting things labelled Federalist. It likely won't be friendly.

John Adams didn’t fire Hamilton, Hamilton left. Eventually. And this is not the only time this kind of verbal confrontation happens, and not the one that destroys the Federalist Party. That actually happens after the Reynolds Pamphlet. But John Adams hates Alexander Hamilton with the burning passion of a thousand suns and really kinda earns this.

I’m not sure if he specifically called Alex a Creole bastard but I wouldn’t be surprised, there were other similar racist and bastard-related insults. You know the tomcat thing mentioned above. He started the rumor of the affair with Angelica. He accused him of being a rake (male version of whore at the time). He also may have behind closed doors accused him of being a sodomite. His (probably gay) son Charles helped with that one, bringing back rumors from a dinner he had with Hamilton (who he was working for) and John Church because Church joked about Alex being fond of a guy. Adams probably thought working for Hamilton was what made his son gay and alcoholic (Charles was an alcoholic and may have died in part because of that; Hamilton was not an alcoholic, but he supposedly could not hold his drink. He was smol).

Jefferson, Madison, and Burr didn’t accuse Hamilton of speculation. It was James Monroe, Abraham Venable, and Frederick Muhlenberg. Lin wanted to keep consistent representation of the Democratic-Republican party. But anyway, the whole thing went to hell because Monroe sent the letters to Jefferson (or I’ve also heard Monroe gave them to Madison who sent them to Jefferson) who, the spiteful gangly fucker, started spreading rumors because fuck Hamilton, amirite? Hamilton challenged Monroe to a duel over that. And who stopped this duel? Aaron Burr. He gets to be the good guy now and then.

It wasn’t just total strangers that got Alex off the island. He was sponsored by his cousin Ann Lytton and his teacher Reverend Hugh Knox. Also, he was kind of expected to get an education and come back and help out the island...guess what he never did. Oops.

This one I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure. I think Eliza was upstate with her family when the Reynolds Pamphlet was released, away from Alex. I also know she had recently given birth to their son, William Stephen. A lot of people think Alexander had been keeping that in mind. Eliza had had a miscarriage once before, when she was under a lot of stress and alone and with the kids and he had to be away (Whiskey Rebellion), so some people think he made sure she was surrounded by her family and waited until the child was born to drop this on her, and gave her distance from him if she needed it. At least he knew he fucked up, and he really did love her.

Those weren’t Alexander’s guns. They belonged to John Church.

It was quite some time between Philip’s challenge and the actual duel.

Another age miscommunication; Eacker was 27ish and Philip was 19 when the duel happened. There was a whole 8 years between them!

Eacker didn’t shoot early. Actually, both of them stood staring at each other for a really long time doing nothing. But Philip went to make a move and Eacker shot him.

Alex and Eliza had made up from the Reynolds Pamphlet bullshit before Philip died. When he passed, Eliza was already pregnant with the son they would also name Philip in honor of his older brother.

Hamilton wasn’t really the deciding factor in the election of 1800. But he did say that about Burr and it did help swing the vote somewhat. But also, this was before Philip died. Philip died in 1801.

If a vote is that close, you can’t win in a landslide??? That’s not how words work???? Mister Miranda????? You are a writer??????? Sir???????

Burr actually held a term as Jefferson’s Vice President.

The Burr vs Hamilton Duel was in 1804 and was actually about another election and other things Hamilton was saying about him. Burr was running to be governor of New York and lost but heard about Alexander telling people the things he listed Alexander saying in Your Obedient Servant.

Thayne should not have played Alexander’s doctor. Sydney should have played Alexander’s doctor. Do you know why? Philip and Alexander had the same doctor when they died. Alexander took that doctor with him to the duel. His name was David Hosack.

While there’s evidence to suggest Burr experienced immediate regret (he stepped forward as if wanting to see if Hamilton was okay and supposedly asked after him and wished him well before Alexander passed) in the years that followed, until he was on his death bed, he expressed nothing but neutrality or even pride for having shot Hamilton. The ‘the world was wide enough’ comment could plausibly be entirely made up, and even if it were true, it was supposedly said toward the end of Burr’s life. Burr's life was quite a ride after Alex. He tried to make like his own empire out of Texas, and then of course was tried for treason, but he got out of that, but then everyone hated him for that ON TOP OF already hating him for killing Hamilton, so he had some crazy journey around Europe for a while. He kept a journal, writing entries like letters to Theo. The most notable things I think he writes he'd "been amused for an hour with a very handsome young Dane. Don't smile. It is a male!" which implies maybe Theodosia knew her dad was bi and was at least amused by it? And he spent a while living with Jeremy Bentham, who is generally accepted to have been gay (if you want more Burr gayness look into Jonathan Bellamy and Robert Troup. Troup knew Hamilton too!). Unrelated to his sexuality but I find it important, Burr spent, in modern cash, $40 on a coconut, in his own words, "like an ass." He returned to America eventually. I dont remember if it was before or after his foreign adventures, but his beloved grandson (also named Aaron Burr) died, and then not long after, Theodosia was lost at sea on her way to visit her dad. No one knows what happened to her. It's so sad. Anyway he married a wealthy widow named Eliza, spent all her money on charity, and died the day their divorce was finalized. And Eliza Jumel's divorce lawyer was Alexander Hamilton Jr..

Poor Eliza couldn’t go through all of her husband’s papers. Her son, John Church Hamilton, finished the work for her when she no longer could and put together the biography that inspired Chernow’s that inspired Lin’s musical. (He named a son Alexander and a daughter Elizabeth. He even named one of his sons Laurens! Aw.) And we have come full circle.

The End :33

There’s probably more but that’s what I’ve got. Thanks for reading!

317 notes · View notes

loved-lefthaunted · 3 years

Note

What are your thoughts on all the evermore songs?

oh my god. this is such a hard question for me so brace yourself. it’s taken me nearly 2 months to write this out and i still don’t think i’ve managed to encapsulate all my thoughts.

So, I have very strong feelings about evermore. I immediately loved it three times as much as folklore, for a variety of reasons. I can do a song-by-song breakdown alongside my general thoughts of the album below:

Firstly, I want to preface this by saying that I do not disregard the impact that folklore had on me prior to evermore’s release. I am not oblivious to the fact that folklore likely primed me for the sound that evermore had and that my mind was set up for a similar sounding album so was willing to receive it with more open ears.

That being said, I think that evermore is the superior album. The overall emotional range and sonic variety of the album is wider and more thought out. The different songs provide a more well-rounded listen in my opinion and give me much more emotional investment than folklore. Each individual song feels strong and there are far more songs with single potential than folklore.

So let’s get down to it:

1. Willow - iconic. The big sister that cardigan deserves. The song that I wish the Lover album had been. A song so fully devoted in such a soft and sweeet way without feeling sickly. A mature way to dedicate a song to the person that you can’t live without but in a way that doesn’t throw pink confetti at your face and tell single people to fuck off. TAKE MY HAND? OKAY TAYLOR. WRECK MY PLANS? FOR SURE BABES. THAT’S MY MAN? 100% FEEL U GAL.

2. Champagne Problems - LOOK. I AM CLAIMING THE NAME SAMPAGNE PROBLEMS FOR ALL FUTURE CONTENT. I want to be proposed to just so that I can reject them and then get wildly drunk on overpriced alcohol. It’s heartwrenching in a way that Taylor hasn’t been since the likes of Treacherous. It doesn’t throw sadness at you, overwhelm you with tears. It hides heartbreak within a soft piano riff and gorgeous imagery.

3. Gold Rush - a sapphic daydream. i cannot believe this is real. The return of a heart-thumping drumbeat and the most lovely, pure song that just describes the infatuation with someone beautiful and how you can wonder about them and be so happy about them and jealous of them all at once.

4. ‘Tis The Damn Season - this christmas song makes me wish i had a boy next door in my hometown that i could randomly sleep with. why don’t i have a fluffy hallmark holiday film based upon this premise? why isn’t there a christmas music video to show me how their interactions work during the holidays and how it differs so vastly with their normal lives? Why can i feel both the distance and the closeness that these two people feel? the cutest dedication to a very un-cute casual relationship. a bittersweet shout out to the people who make us happy for a few fleeting moments spread out over the long haul.

5. Tolerate It - i have very VERY strong feelings about this one. it feels like it both encapsulates romantic and non-romantic love so perfectly. It pairs perfectly with the likes of Closure (more on that later). We all deserve to be celebrated. In a world of people settling for less than they deserve, we should reach for those who deserve us. We are worth it. Find someone who will show us how worthy we are. It’s aching and slow and painful and just....everything. Just because someone has always been there doesn’t mean they deserve to continue to be there. Tolerating you is not the same as deserving your loyalty.

6. No Body, No Crime (feat. HIAM) - IT TOOK 14 YEARS BUT TAYLOR FINALLY MURDERED A MAN IN COLD BLOOD AND I AM HERE FOR IT. MEN ARE TRASH, LADIES. REMEMBER THIS. ENGRAVE IT INTO YOUR TOMBSTONES. TATTOO IT ON YOUR FOREHEADS. MEN AS AN ENTITY DO NOT DESERVE US. MURDER THEM. A YEEHAW DREAM. (I have no strong feelings about HIAM but the existence of Este’s name is a blessing in itself, their backing vocals are a lovely addition and a true testament to their friendship as we know how protective Taylor is about mixing business and friendship through collaborations)

7. Happiness - this song is HURTFUL. a song about growth, a song about finding yourself amidst the loss of a partner, a friend, a family member. a loss so deep that it will hurt you for years to come and take a piece of you away forever. but a loss that you have to be resigned to and grow from and let go of. the slow build of the backing is something i haven’t heard since Holy Ground. Both songs talk about loss and moving on in such starkly different ways but still encompass the feeling of reminiscing on something good and pure and perfect whilst battling the knowledge that it’s over and trying to be happy for the person now that they’re gone.

8. Dorothea - the sweetest girl in the neighbourhood. a childhood friend that we all miss having. a person we watched grow into something massive and successful and we’re so genuinely happy for them. the song encompasses the feeling of a distanced joy. a joy that has nothing to do with you, everything to do with this person that you’d be happy to accept again with open arms but will be equally as happy to watch succeed from a distance. a bouncy backing track and lovely vocalisations that really build a sense of a warm hug and the feeling of soft morning sun on your skin.

9. Coney Island (feat. The National) - alright. so i’m sat on a bench in the cold, wrapped up in a winter coat and a hat and gloves and a massive scarf that covers half of my face. i can see the air when i breathe out. there’s an empty ferris wheel at a deserted fairground and i can remember when it was alive and bustling and when i was surrounded by all of the people closest to me on a late summer’s day. and i miss them. i yearn for that to be back. the way we yearn for a time before covid, before masks and elbow touches and sanitising everything. a time when you could sit around a table with your friends and welcome someone with a hug and visit your family for the holidays. a time of joy that was so overlooked until it was gone. The presence of The National is also a breathtaking addition and truly deserved after Aaron’s input on both folklore and evermore. I’m glad they saved it for this song.

10. Ivy - this song just radiates GREEN. Am I in a forest? Am I just in a greenhouse, watering the plants? The guitar/banjo sounds make me so horrifically nostalgic for Speak Now era. The male backing vocals remind me that Taylor has evolved so far from the girl we used to exclusively listen in conjunction with Caitlin Bird and Liz Huett.

11. Cowboy Like Me - one of the only songs I don’t really care about? it’s not bad, it’s just not great. it’s yeehaw without the accompanying passion. It’s the end of a sad, sad wild west movie. It’s a backing track in a scene of a TV show when someone is going on a journey alone to find themselves. But it’s nothing special.

12. Long Story Short - DO NOT FUCKING TOUCH ME. THE BEST SONG ON THIS ALBUM IN MY OPINION. THE STRONGEST BEAT, THE NOSTALGIA OF 1989, THE LYRICS OF RED, THE FUCKS GIVEN OF REPUTATION. THE PERFECT IMMERSIVE TAYLOR EXPERIENCE. TRULY A 10/10 ENTITY. I WILL HAVE THIS PLAYING AT MY GRADUATION. I SURVIVED.

13. Marjorie - the loss of a grandparent is always a lot. i’ve lost 2 due to Covid and it’s cut me deeper than I ever imagined. Marjorie is the 50′s sepia toned daydream that sends you flying back to being a child and being taught life’s most important lessons when you were far too young to understand them from someone so much wiser than you. It feels like I’m being taught to live again. Another build up backing track, but in such an uplifting way? A way that makes you think of the sun slowly coming out of the clouds. Of the end of a rainstorm and the start of a new day. Optimism and innocence. Peace and hope.

14. Closure - right, the return of sadness. The use of the clatter and discord in the background. The death of a Big Machine (subtle and perfectly done). She’s doing better. We all are. It reminds me of the friends I’ve lost and crave to have back but know I’m better off without. We have to let go of this. Close the chapter. You don’t even need the epilogue, it’s over. The production makes me so uncomfortable and it’s SO NECESSARY because lack of closure is UNSETTLING. It’s horrifying. It’s devastating. But the lyrics and the power of the song show how strong you can be and how important it is to push through the discomfort and continue to live.

15. Evermore (feat. Bon Iver) - the titular song. The return of Bon Iver’s vocals and the lone piano background are truly something to be commemorated for years to come. Although it lacks the painstaking hurt of Exile, this is one of her most simple pieces of artistry on this album and it’s BEAUTIFUL. Something that feels bare and raw. A song that cuts deep and shows us the true core of what she’s currently feeling right now: that although pain might feel forever, it’s not. all pain, much like joy, is fleeting and we have to feel it but we need to remember that it’s only a piece of our experience and place it into context. The song veers on self-pity and wallowing in hopelessness until the latter third, where suddenly hope rises out of the ashes alongside a slightly padded out production from Bon Iver’s vocals. A strong end to the album. This song sets us up for future albums on a note of optimism. It’s a new dawn.

29 notes · View notes

imagineaworlds · 4 years

Text

I Love You (Part Twenty-Two) -- Aaron Hotchner

Written By: @desperately-bisexual

Request: None.

Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of smut. Mentions of Dom/sub relationship. Talk of murder, kidnapping, shooting-- literally everything Criminal Minds.

Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Greenaway!Reader

Word Count: 14289

Timeline: A month after part twenty-one.

When we got back from the case we had just finished, Hotch and I decided to stop at a diner for dinner. I wasn’t necessarily hungry— especially after that case—but Hotch put the option out there, which meant that he was probably hungry, so I accepted for his sake. I could afford to snack on something, I supposed. But, really, how was I supposed to eat anything after that confession? I mean, Morgan practically ran out of the interrogation room to go throw up in the bathroom. None of us expected what Floyd Feylinn was going to admit to. We thought that, if anything, he was going to tell us that he ate Tracy Lambert, and we were going to call it a day. I don’t think any of us stopped to consider that everyone at the search party two days prior had unknowingly consumed Tracy’s remains in the chili he made. Our team hadn’t taken the offer of anyone’s home cooked meal because we were too busy trying to organize the search and build the profile. It was a good thing that we hadn’t. Despite not actually eating anything, though, I could tell that none of us were too keen on the idea of eating— which was why I was so shocked when Hotch offered. Maybe a milkshake or something wouldn’t hurt. I mean, it was cold that time of year, but a milkshake never killed anyone… Geez. Even thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.

At the diner, there were only a few other couples occupying some of the booths, but since it was so late, most of the dinner rush was gone. Hotch and I could pick anywhere to sit, so he took my hand, and he led me over to a booth away from the window, somewhat towards the back of the dining area. He let go of my hand when we arrived at the seat he wanted. We both sat down simultaneously, scooching into the middle of the booths until we were comfortable. Hotch picked up his menu and started skimming. I picked up my menu, but I hid my face behind it so that he couldn’t see how disinterested I was.

Nothing looked good. Nothing sounded good. All I could think about was that chili and the way he laughed when he told us the truth. He didn’t care that he did that to all those people. He didn’t care that he did that to Tracey Lambert. He was a monster. The worst of the worst. And his wicked laugh was still ringing in my ears. I almost wished that Morgan and Hotch would’ve let the preacher strangle Feylinn then and there. He deserved it, didn’t he?

I put my menu down and sighed quietly, just thinking about how I was ready to go home. I was fine with not eating. I wanted to just lay down in his arms. I wanted to feel how his chest moved slowly against my back every time he breathed, and I wanted to feel how his strong, long arms would hold me tight, and how his breath would be hot on my ear, and how he would take random moments to kiss me. I needed simple. I needed him. I needed home.

Hotch finally looked up at me, reading my face. No. Profiling all of me. I looked up at him and did the same. Neither of us seemed happy or hungry. I originally thought that he wanted dinner, which was why he offered it; but I started realizing that he probably thought that I wanted dinner. It was clear that neither of us wanted to be there. What was the point of staying and spending money on a meal that we weren’t going to eat?

“Do you want to get out of here?” he finally asked me. I nodded immediately. He dug into his pocket, fishing out a ten dollar bill as an apology tip for ditching the waitress, then he reached across the table to take my hand. We both stood simultaneously, and he started pulling me towards the door. When we got settled in the car, Hotch leaned over the armrest between us, grabbed my chin between his fingers, making me look at him, and said, “You know what sounds nice?” I shook my head slightly while still being held by him. “Hot chocolate, blankets, and a movie.”

I hummed an agreement before leaning in to kiss him. After he pecked my lips a few times, he settled in his seat to face forward while starting the car. It wasn’t a long drive home from where we were, but Hotch seemed insistent on holding my hand in his lap while his thumb drew circled around my knuckles. His touch was so relaxing to the point I nearly fell asleep in the car, actually. I had been staring out the window, looking up at the sky and the stars that were above, and we were listening to quiet music over the radio. Together, his touch, the sky, the music, it all gave me a chance to forget for a moment just how horrible that case was. I knew that Morgan probably wasn’t taking it as well, since it had been personal for him, for some reason. But I couldn’t even take a moment to ponder his behavior while I was practically falling backwards into tranquility.

When I was little, Elle used to tell me that we would all turn into stars when we died. Now, of course, I knew that was a lie; but for the longest time, thinking that there was some other physical form waiting for us after life brought me comfort. When the world was quiet and life was peaceful, it was nice to think about that. Even now, I liked to think that Elle’s dad was up there in the sky, watching her and protecting her since I couldn’t. It made me feel better sometimes to think that there were people up there who could watch over me, my family, and my friends. When I couldn’t be there to protect people like Jack and Elle, maybe there was someone out there who was doing it for me.

At home, Hotch waited for me to walk around the car and meet me on the path in front of the house. After noticing how he was holding his hand out for me again, I balanced all of my things in my less dominant hand and intertwined my free fingers with his. As we walked up to the house, Hotch kissed my knuckles again. He had an obsession, I was convinced. I didn’t mind, however. I liked the comfort it brought me. I liked that it was a gentle, caring touch that silently told me that he loved me.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked him.

He nodded.

Hotch put his go-bag down so that he could open the door while still holding my hand. I thought about how Hotch was either going to just tear my clothes off and cuddle me or he’d actually give me the chance to get changed. I really wanted to go upstairs and throw on one of Hotch’s old sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants to go with it. His obsession was kissing my knuckles all the time, and mine was wearing his clothes around. It was nice.

The door opened and Hotch led me inside. We put our go-bags down on the floor and I sighed. “I’ll make the hot chocolate if you pick the movie.” He agreed by grabbing my hips and pulling me in for a passionate kiss that I had to push him away from before we could lose our breaths. “Pick a movie that we’ll actually end up watching.”

“What if I just pick one that we’ve already seen, that way it doesn’t matter if we miss some of it.” He grinned widely in response to the way I squinted at him. “Fine,” he threw his hands up in surrender. “As you wish.”

After I winked at him, I went to the kitchen. I sighed again as I grabbed two mugs from the cupboard, then two of the instant hot chocolate packets from the box next to the fridge. I turned on the electric tea kettle before leaning back against the kitchen island.

It was late, and I was somewhat tired, but a movie and a night with Hotch was the perfect way to wind down. In the morning, we’d probably call Haley to see if we could have Jack for a few days, and she’d probably say yes. She was good to us like that. She knew that with our unreliable schedules, every moment with Jack was practically borrowed time. She wanted to make sure that Jack got to see his dad as much as possible, and if that included giving him up and taking him in on random days without warning, then she was going to make it work. I liked that about her. It made her strong. It made her a good role model for Jack. It made her a good mom. In a way, I kind of envied her, actually. She had years with Hotch, and she had this connection with Jack that I would never have or be able to understand. If Hotch and I ever had kids, I just hoped that Haley would still be understanding with us. I somewhat hoped that she would actually be able to help. Her and Jessica were practically there at our every beck and call— which was a horrible way to put it, honestly… But I always wondered how they could do it. If Hotch and I got serious like that, I hoped that she could help me understand how to navigate it all.

When the water was hot, I poured equal amounts of water into our two mugs, then sifted in the hot chocolate powder. Hotch liked his hot chocolate scalding, unlike me. If it were too hot, I couldn’t drink it until it was practically room temperature. The way to find the right heat after practically boiling was to throw in a hidden ice cube with the marshmallows. Perfection.

I stepped back into the living room, carefully juggling the mugs while making sure that none of the marshmallows would hop out over the edge. “Alright, one order of hot chocolate for you— hold the ice cubes— and one hot chocolate for me with extra marshmallows and an ice cube.” I slowed my speed as I noticed that Hotch was getting off the phone. I prayed that it wasn’t work. We had just gotten back from that case, and I wasn’t too excited about jumping back into a new case yet. I just wanted to have a night to ourselves for once…

Hotch sniffled away a cry before turning to me with red eyes.

“Aaron?” I questioned worriedly, racing to put the mugs down. “Baby, what is it?” I sat down next to him and ran my fingers through his hair.

He cleared his throat as he found the bravery to say what was on his mind. “Penelope…” He hesitated. He never called her Penelope. Ever. More importantly, however, was the question running through my mind of why was he talking about her right now? What happened while I was gone in the kitchen? “She was shot,” he finally answered the question running through my mind before I could even ask.

I stopped petting his hair for a moment. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s on her way to St. Sebastian’s right now.”

“I—” I hesitated as I pushed myself to my feet, feeling how my head started spinning and my knees felt weak.

Garcia… How did this happen? Why her? When? Of all people, Garcia didn’t deserve to be hurt. Ever. She was the most innocent, precious being I had ever met. She would never hurt a soul. Why would someone shoot her? Our Penelope Garcia. This all felt so unfair. It all felt unreal. We needed to do something. We needed to be there for her. We needed the team to find out what happened—

Morgan.

Hotch reached out for my hand as I tried to stumble onto my feet. “I need to call Morgan,” I croaked, escaping Hotch’s grasp so that I could search for my phone. “Emily, JJ, and Reid went out for drinks, I think. You could, uh…” I brought my free palm up to my forehead while searching for Morgan’s number in my phone. “You can… You can call them—”

“Y/N,” he tried to catch my attention.

I brought the phone to my ear and listened as it rang a few times. Hotch was still trying to make me pay attention to him, but I had my back turned to him, my eyes trained on the floor, my hearing focused precisely on waiting to hear Morgan’s voice. How was I supposed to tell him this? Garcia meant the world to him. I knew that no matter how close Morgan and I would ever be, his connection with Garcia would remain ten times that. That was fine by me. I loved Morgan, and I loved Garcia. Morgan was my partner in the field, and my best friend in the entire world, if we were being honest. Having to tell him that the most important woman in his life had just been shot… It reminded me of when I got that call from Hotch after Elle was shot by Randall Garner.

Morgan and I had similar coping mechanisms. We connected through our traumatic pasts, and we grew close because of how we dealt with it, and how our platonic chemistry made us special. It was fine to work with him, to tease him, to have his back. But it was also a comfort to know that he was always there, no matter what. I knew that he would always understand me, and I would always understand him. When I found out about Elle, I practically shut down until I could hold someone I loved— Hotch, specifically— in my arms; at which point, I broke into pieces. I didn’t understand why it happened. Why Elle? Why us? I remembered feeling so desperate for answers, but there was nothing I could do. When Morgan would inevitably find out about Garcia, I knew that he would have the same reaction. I knew that this call was going to shut him down, turn him into a zombie of worry. I knew that he wouldn’t feel anything until he got to hold someone close, and then all of the questions and desperation would flood in. Why Penelope? Why us? Yet, no one would have any answers.

Morgan’s phone went straight to voicemail.

I cursed under my breath and tried again. Hotch stood from the couch, realizing that he wasn’t going to get me to talk to him yet. My mind was too far into thinking about Elle, Garcia, and Morgan to talk about if I was alright or not. I’d be fine when Garcia was okay. I’d be fine when Morgan would finally just pick up the damn phone. Maybe then I’d be willing to talk about how my head was spinning and I was fearing the worst. But until then, I just needed Hotch to call the rest of the team so that they could meet us at the hospital.

“Reid, Emily, and JJ are going to sober up and catch a taxi to the hospital,” Hotch said quietly from behind me.

I slowly turned on my heels, threw my arms up slightly on my sides in defeat, then whispered, “Morgan isn’t picking up.”

Hotch finally reached out to put a hand on my hip and practically drag me over to him. I reluctantly let him pull me, my feet stumbling under my mindless steps. His fingers dug into my hip slightly. When Elle was shot, Hotch immediately pulled me into a hug, even though our relationship had just gone public (unwillingly), and Gideon wasn’t too happy about it all. But Hotch still did it. He did it because he loved me, and he wanted to comfort a family member who had been put in harm’s way because of the job. But now we had another family member in the hospital, and neither of us were sure what to do. There shouldn’t have been a difference between Elle and Garcia, but there was, somehow. Hotch was paralyzed this time with me. He didn’t know what to do or what to say. But being able to touch me, to hold me, to grab me like he was on my hip, it brought him enough comfort to let his mind sort out all of his racing thoughts.

When we got home from the Feylinn case, we did what we normally did: tried to relax. Home was where we felt safe. Virginia and D.C. were supposed to feel safe, if we really wanted to broaden the area, but… Garcia was home. Garcia was in D.C. and she was hurt when she let her guard down, too. Why? Why couldn’t our team ever catch a break? Why did it seem like the world was always working against us? Why did the world have to go after the most innocent out of all of us?

“There are moments like this…” he whispered, “where I… I just don’t know what to say.” His other hand shook as he brought it to my hand and squeezed. “I—” he hesitated again. His eyes softened before he pressed his forehead to mine. “I love you.”

My free hand wrapped around his bicep. “She’s going to be okay.”

Hotch was always the one to give that reassurance, even if it was sometimes false. But there were times when someone just needed to hold him and tell him that it was going to be alright. With all of the burdens he carried around every day, there probably weren’t even a handful of instances where someone was able to ease his suffering. There were a million times where Hotch put everyone else before himself, but who else was there but me who could recognize his pain in his actions and his voice and understand that he needed comfort, even if he wasn’t going to admit it. Hotch was a stubborn man who had troubles with expressing how he really felt. It took him a long time to accept that it’s important to tell his loved ones every day how much they meant to him because time with them was never guaranteed, but he still struggled to come to terms with everything else. Confessing that he was worried about Garcia wasn’t going to happen, but I knew what he was thinking without him having to say it. I always knew it.

I kissed the end of his nose since our foreheads were still pressed together. “I love you, Aaron.”

Hotch’s hold on my hip tightened like he couldn’t find a better way to express how grateful he was for me. I understood the feeling. Sometimes there weren’t enough words— sometimes the words didn’t exist. “I love you” was a strong affirmation, but even then, it didn’t really convey what we meant. For me, at least, there was this strong urge in the pit of my stomach to constantly be by his side. It felt like this pull towards him that I could never ignore, no matter how hard I tried. That urge in return made his touches electric against my skin, which only made me yearn for him more. I felt like no matter how many times I could touch him or kiss him or tell him that I love him, it was never enough. Sometimes I asked myself if Hotch felt the same way, but then we’d have moments like this, and I knew that he actually felt it twice as hard, yet it pained him that he couldn’t show it as much.

“I’m worried about her, too…” I finally flung my arms around his neck and hugged him. His arms snaked around my waist and he pulled me as close to him as he possibly could. That urge had returned, and it wasn’t going away, especially not now. There was a tug in my heart when he kissed my neck. “Aaron.” I played with the ends of his hair. “Listen to me.” He nodded somewhat against my shoulder. “It’ll be alright. She’s at the hospital. She’ll be okay. I swear it. It’s okay to break, if you need to.” He shook his head. “Okay.” I knew that it wasn’t my place to push him. “I’m going to keep calling Morgan until he finally picks up.”

“We should go to the hospital,” he insisted, trying to part from our hug, but I held on tight.

“I love you, Aaron.” I wasn’t sure why the sudden urge to tell him that washed over me, but it did. We should have been spending all of our time and energy worrying about Garcia, of course, but there was a part of me that needed to stop and appreciate Hotch for a moment.

“I love you, too, Y/N.”

As we pulled up to the hospital, Hotch and I practically jumped out of the car before it was even off. We ran inside, racing around to find the emergency room. St. Sebastian was a huge hospital—bigger than the one that Elle had been taken to when she was shot. It was the hospital closest to our house, which was nice for getting there as soon as possible in situations like this, but finding anything or anyone within it was damn near impossible. You could ask twenty people where something was, and they wouldn’t even know, or they’d keep sending you around the hospital to find someone who did know because they were too scared to admit that they didn’t know.

Hotch searched around frantically, trying to find someone who could help. I turned to my left to look towards the O.R. and spotted a bloodied paramedic walking towards us. My brows furrowed and I ran up to him.

“’Scuse me,” I stopped him in his tracks. He looked up at me with shocked eyes. “Did you just bring in a gunshot victim?”

The paramedic glanced over his shoulder briefly. “I can’t disclose that information—”

“FBI,” Hotch said, flashing his credentials. “I’m her supervisor. What happened?”

The paramedic sighed. “It’s not looking good, if I’m being honest. We got her here just before she bled out, and the wound on her shoulder won’t stop bleeding. We can’t get the slug out until we get the bleeding under control— if we get the bleeding under control.”

I put my palm over my mouth to cover my shock and turned away from them. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. It was like finding out about Elle all over again, only this time there was no reassurance that everything was going to be okay. Instead, we were hit with the worst kind of odds. I hated it. I hated the asshole who did this to Garcia, and I hoped that he would eventually suffer for what he had done. It didn’t matter who he was. He shot an FBI tech analyst— he shot our family; and we weren’t going to just let that slide.

“I’ve gotta go,” the EMT insisted before running past myself and Hotch.

I heard Hotch step away from the hallway, probably to go think to himself. I didn’t blame him. We both needed some space— just for a moment, nothing too serious. My mind was wrapped around Garcia, Morgan, and Elle all at once. This was going to kill Morgan. I mean, rip his heart out of his chest, kill him. How was I supposed to tell him the truth? Maybe it was a good thing that he wasn’t picking up the phone.

I felt a comforting hand grab my shoulder, then the next thing I knew, Hotch was spinning me around and pulling me into his arms. My fingers curled around the back of his suit jacket. “I just talked to the local PD,” he whispered. I pulled back slightly to look at him. “They think it was a botched robbery.” I put my head back on his chest. “There aren’t any leads. As soon as the team gets here, I’ll head there to see how I can help.”

“No—” I begged. I didn’t want him to go anywhere.

This was all too similar to the Fisher King, and I wasn’t sure if I could survive it on my own. I needed Hotch there as a reassurance that he was safe. If he left, I wouldn’t be able to protect him. We were already one teammate short; I didn’t need Hotch to end up in the hospital, too. Even if this were just a one off, robbery gone wrong case, I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t lose him when things were falling apart.

“Hotch!” Reid called out from the elevator. We tore ourselves off of each other and looked down the hallway to see Reid, JJ, and Emily all running towards us. “Any news?”

“She’s still in surgery. We won’t know anything for another few hours.”

My eyes snapped to Hotch’s cheek, trying to understand why the hell he was holding back on telling them the whole truth. Garcia wasn’t doing well. Things weren’t looking good. The team deserved to know the truth, to prepare for the worst, didn’t they?

“Any word from Morgan?” Emily asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve been calling and calling, to no avail.”

“I’ll try for a bit, just to give you a break.”

“Thanks,” I croaked, smiling shortly.

“Let’s take a seat in the waiting room maybe?” Emily offered up to everyone.

We all silently nodded and followed her to the waiting room just down the hallway. On our way, we saw Rossi come out of the elevator next. He went directly to Hotch for answers while the rest of us went to sit down. Emily and JJ took a seat beside each other, working on trying to get ahold of Morgan, and Reid sat across from them, just watching and listening. I saw on the opposite side of the room, right next to the window. I looked out and up. I took notice of the stars again, thinking about how they were luminating the night just a little dimmer now. It almost felt like they were waiting for a new bright star to join them, and I prayed that it wouldn’t be Garcia. We weren’t ready to lose her yet. The sky wasn’t ready for her.

Hotch and Rossi came in a few minutes later, refusing to take a seat. They stood in their own corner, still whispering between each other. They liked to whisper. The two of them were thick as thieves, and I knew that was bad news for me. I mean, I liked that Rossi and I could exchange stories about Hotch, and it made him red with embarrassment and anger. But I also liked how they were just two friends who had been reunited after years apart, and they had so much to discuss. I didn’t mind that they whispered about things. I especially didn’t mind that they whispered about me. But in times like these, when we were all searching for answers and comfort, their whispers seemed unsettling.

Morgan came running out of the elevator, eyes searching down both ends of the hallway to see if he could spot us. When he found us, he stopped for a moment to register that this was really happening. I stood from my seat and let him stare at me for a moment as he still tried to understand. When I found out about Elle, I felt paralyzed for the longest time. Even when racing around the hospital, I remembered not being able to think about anything. I couldn’t even remember how I got from the parking lot where Hotch gave me the call to the hospital where he held me in his arms. But once I had him, once I heard him tell me that everything was going to be alright, I knew that I was going to be fine. Morgan needed that same comfort. He knew it.

His arms opened slightly as he started running up to me. I caught him in a tight hug, letting him hide his face in the crook of my neck. He was taller than me, but he was fine with leaning down to nuzzle slightly. I told him what he needed to hear, that he was okay, she was going to be okay, and that it was going to be okay.

“Are there any leads?” Morgan asked, forcing himself out of our embrace. He looked over my shoulder for a response from Hotch. There was silence, which meant that Hotch probably told him the truth: we knew absolutely nothing. “Is she going to be alright?”

“The nurses said that we could be hearing from the doctors any minute now,” Hotch answered.

“Speaking of which,” JJ said, nodding to the door.

A surgeon walked in just on time. He was still in his scrubs, his mask on his chin, his cap still tied to his head. We all stood at attention for him, and I grabbed Morgan’s hand while preparing for the worst. He looked around at all of us, taking in our worry, debating on how he should proceed. I wished that he would just spit it out. It was either good or bad news. Just rip the fucking band aid off. Please.

“She’s alive,” he finally admitted. Everyone sighed with relief. Morgan dropped my hand so that he could wipe his face with his palms. “She was shot in the lower shoulder, and the bullet ricocheted into her abdomen, but we were able to stop the bleeding, seal up the wounds, and make sure that there was no damage from the internal bleeding.”

“Will she be okay?” Morgan asked.

The doctor nodded. “Yeah. She’ll be able to leave the hospital in a few days. She’s still in a medically induced coma, but you’ll be able to see her in the morning.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Hotch said with a forced smile, his arms still crossed over his chest.

He nodded politely with the smallest of sealed lip smiles before leaving the waiting room. We all turned to Hotch. The room felt so much lighter now. With relief having washed over us, we could focus on the next part of all of this: finding the son of a bitch who shot Penelope Garcia. We were ready to work.

“You should all stay here for when she wakes up,” Hotch began, taking note of how we were all waiting for our assignments. “I’ll go with Dave to the crime scene. The lead detective on the case doesn’t think there’ll be anything to find, but we’re still going to try. I don’t care about protocol; I don’t care about whether or not we have new cases to work on. We’re not doing anything until we solve this.”

Everyone agreed silently, taking their seats again in the break room. Rossi gestured to Hotch, and they made a step towards the exit, but I caught Hotch’s sleeve first. He turned slightly to look at me. I know I appeared desperate, my pleading eyes trying to make him stay. We didn’t know if this was a robbery, or a target on Garcia, or a target on the team. He could have potentially been putting himself in harm’s way by leaving the hospital. I didn’t want him to be the next person brought in on a stretcher.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he whispered, pressing his palm to my cheek. I lovingly nuzzled against his touch. “Morgan needs you.”

“I know. But I need you.”

“You were the one who told me that it would be alright. Do you still believe that?” he asked while tilting his head. I nodded. “Okay. Keep that faith. It’ll be alright. I love you.”

I kissed his palm before taking his hand in mine, then kissing his knuckles. He loved doing that with me, and I was simply curious as to why. I realized that it was so… intimate. So special. It was one thing to kiss someone on their lips, cheeks, neck, face, body; but kissing their knuckles was so humbling in the oddest of ways. It actually made me feel closer to him.

Hotch’s thumb caressed my hand lightly before he carefully pulled away and went with Rossi. He seemed driven, like he was trying to stop himself from coming back and staying with me. Honestly, I wasn’t going to stop him from doing either. I wanted him to stay, but I also wanted him to find who did this. I was just… confused. He probably was, too. I saw how broken he was back at the house, and now he had to bottle all of that up for the team. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like in his position. It was easy for any of us to break, but Hotch always seemed like an immovable, emotionless force at work. While I obviously knew that wasn’t the truth, and I knew that he was suffering inside every time something happened to our team or every time we had a case with kids; no one else knew the truth. I had to share the burden of his silent struggle. I could see with my own eyes that it was killing him, yet no one else, even with all of their profiling skills, could seem to figure it out. To them, Hotch was an enigma, and they were fine with not solving him.

I sighed quietly to myself as I sat down next to Morgan. His head was in his hands, his elbows propped up on his knees. Just as I expected, he was a mess. He had probably put his emotions on pause while racing to the hospital, then when he finally saw that this was all really happening, he didn’t know how to cope. Garcia was his everything. He couldn’t bear to lose her in the way that I couldn’t bear to lose him.

“I miss Elle every day,” I spoke up in a hushed tone. Morgan did move or say anything. “I don’t think Hotch knows how painful it is to go through every second of every day knowing that he was the last person she spoke to before disappearing. He doesn’t tell me anything about her leaving and I don’t ask, but… I still think about her all the time.” I leaned back slightly. “Tonight, when we got home from the Feylinn case, we were in the car, and I looked up at the stars, and I thought about her again. For the first time in decades, I was reminded of a tale she told me where we all turn into stars when we die. I actually thought to myself that we have all of our loved ones up there, looking after us, protecting us, and I thought that nothing bad could happen. And then we got the call… No one was looking after Garcia, no one was protecting her. Something terrible happened and we weren’t there to stop it. I hate Elle for putting that dumb star idea in my head, but even more so because I thought I was over it, and the one time I stop to think that maybe she was right, the whole world seems to come crashing down.”

“Y/N…” he croaked quietly. “I can’t lose her.”

“I know.” I linked my arm with his slowly, somewhat forcing him out of the hunched position he was in. “But they said that she’s going to be fine.”

“I feel like this is my fault,” he finally admitted.

“You can’t believe that—”

“I do. After Feylinn, I’ve been thinking long and hard about God and religion… I prayed for the first time last night, Y/N. For the first time since my dad made me when I was a little kid. What are the odds that I do that, and it ends with Penelope on the table?”

“Derek,” I whispered, snaking my hand down to intertwine our fingers, “this is not your fault. I need you to hear me. No one could have stopped this.”

“I could’ve!” he said a little too loudly. “If I didn’t make her mad, she wouldn’t have blown me off, and I would have been there to save her!”

“Shh…” I cooed, squeezing his hand. I rested my cheek on his shoulder. “I promise it’s not your fault. The guy who did this is the only one responsible.”

“When am I supposed to start believing that?”

I paused and thought for a beat. “When we catch him.”

The sun started peeking over the buildings outside of the hospital when a nurse approached us. The stars that had been taunting us all night were finally gone, and so was the fear that Garcia would be joining them. There was another wave of relief in the room when the nurse came to collect us. We were all eager to see Garcia and to make sure that she was alright.

“Hi, my loves,” Garcia cooed before any of us could say anything. JJ walked up and took her hand. “No tears…” She reached up and wiped JJ’s cheek with her thumb. “I’m glad you guys are here. Thank you.”

We all smiled lightly at her. Her voice was so quiet and raspy, not at all like the Penelope Garcia we knew. Usually, she was loud, bubbly, and optimistic, but the surgery and the drugs had worn her down. I didn’t blame her for not being normal Penelope. In fact, I was glad that she was getting a break for once. After what happened, she just needed to rest. We would ask for our Garcia back when she was better.

“How are you feeling?” Morgan asked worriedly.

Garcia nodded vaguely. “I’m okay. I mean, I’ve been better… but… I’ll be okay.”

I hesitated as I looked around the room. I knew that we needed to ask her about the incident and about the Unsub in order to help Hotch and Rossi at the crime scene, but I didn’t want to push her either. There was a chance that she couldn’t be ready to talk about it, or maybe she couldn’t even remember anything. Either way, we needed to try. As much as it pained me to do it, I had to ask as quickly as possible.

I stepped forward slightly. “Are you up for answering some questions?” Garcia looked at me and nodded again. “Do you remember what happened?”

She cleared her throat, then said, “Yeah… I…” She chuckled to herself shortly. “I never saw it coming. He seemed so… nice.”

“You know him?”

“Mhm.” She looked up at Morgan, “You were right. I should have trusted my gut. I knew that there was something wrong about that guy from the coffee shop, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it, so I tried to ignore it. I just wanted to believe that he was into me.”

“What happened, Garcia?”

“He was dropping me off at home after our date. We were standing just outside, and he went to kiss me… I thought… I thought he was just nervous when he walked away suddenly. And then he turned around, and he shot me.”

“Do you have any idea why he would have done this?” Emily inquired.

“No. I just thought he liked me.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked, taking control of the situation again.

Garcia hesitated. After a moment of looking around at all of us, she nodded, a tear falling down her cheek. “James Colby Baylor.”

As I made eye contact with Morgan, I grabbed my phone from my back pocket. “I’ll call Hotch to let him know.” I stepped out of Garcia’s hospital room and quietly entered the hallway. I leaned up against the wall and dialed Hotch’s number quickly, praying that he would pick up. I didn’t want to chase him around like I had to with Morgan, and I didn’t want to worry about him like I was with Garcia. Thankfully, though, Hotch answered the phone fairly fast. “Hotch?”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve got an I.D. on the guy. He went on a date with her, then when he went to wish her goodnight at her place, he shot her.”

Hotch sighed on the other end. “Makes sense. We weren’t sure why he did it in the courtyard, but that answers that. There’s not much else to find here, unfortunately. He used a revolver, so there’s no—”

“No bullet casing for evidence,” I finished, my shoulders falling in defeat. “If he’s smart enough to clean the crime scene, then the name he gave her is probably just an alias.”

“I know. I’m going to get in contact with another tech analyst back at the office and see if they can start digging around. Send me the name Garcia gave you. For now, just stay at the hospital with Garcia and Morgan. They both need you.”

Someone tapped my shoulder from behind me. I turned, the phone still pressed to my ear, to find that it was Reid. He whispered that Garcia wanted to see me and Morgan, but I shook my head at him. “I’ve gotta go, Hotch.” I hung up the call before he could say anything else and dug it into my pocket. “I can’t go back in there, Reid,” I told him quietly. He cocked a brow. “It reminds me too much of Elle.”

Reid’s face softened. “You know, I heard what you told Morgan last night about the stars…” I bit the inside of my cheek and turned my gaze to the floor. Of course, of all people, the great Dr. Spencer Reid had to hear me talking about stars and afterlife. He was probably preparing himself to give me a whole speech about what actually happens to us when we die and the science of stars and whatnot— “I liked it.”

My attention snapped back up to him. “What?”

“I mean, it’s not realistic, and I think we all know that, but… in times like these, when we need a little hope, it’s nice to hear. So, I just… I wanted to thank you.”

“Reid—” I didn’t know what to say.

The two of us were never close, which was why we never really talked or paired up in the field. It was always me and Morgan— and sometimes Emily— against the world. Reid did his own smart thing elsewhere while we went to go talk to witnesses or look at crime scenes. The two of us never sat around to get to know one another, but we never even got a chance to talk like this, which was so weird considering how I did still consider him as family. Our family included everyone on the team, even the people I didn’t get to chat with too often, like Reid and JJ. Their pain, what they were going through right now, was just as valid as the rest of us. Hell, they had been on the team longer than me, so of course it mattered. I was glad that I could help Reid somehow, even though I didn’t initially realize that was the case.

“I’ll stay with Morgan while they talk,” Reid offered, changing the subject quickly.

“Thank you, Reid.” I searched his eyes for a moment so that he knew I meant it. He smiled and gave a short nod before turning to go back to Garcia’s hospital room while I returned to the waiting room with Emily and JJ. “You guys okay?” I asked them, taking a seat beside them.

“I will be once we find this guy,” Emily answered.

“Same,” JJ agreed.

I stayed silent for a moment, then offered, “We could head back to the office and start building a profile…” They both looked at me. “I’m just saying.”

“You’re right,” Emily said as she stood, “Garcia wouldn’t want us to just sit around and mope. If she could, she’d be in her office right now, searching for who did this.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have any evidence,” JJ scoffed.

“That’s never stopped us before.”

We all looked at each other. We had an alias, we had the kind of gun he used, we knew what happened at the crime scene, Morgan and Reid could do a cognitive with Penelope to build a behavioral profile. To be honest, we actually had more than JJ was leading on. If we looked at this like it was any other case, and we started with victimology, we could make our way from there. And with Hotch and Rossi heading back to the office to meet with another tech analyst for help, we could honestly find the son of a bitch that did this to Garcia. If we just put our mind to it, we could do this. So we left.

Hotch and Rossi were already holed up in Garcia’s office with the new technical analyst that was going to help us by the time Emily, JJ, and I made it back to the office. We snuck by undetected, and we made our way into the boardroom where we started setting up shop. It was like Hotch expected that we would come back to start working the case because evidence photos were spread around the roundtable, and what little physical evidence and files they had were piled in a brown confidential box. I silently thanked Hotch for knowing us all well enough to have this ready for when we got there so that we could just dive right in.

I started by hanging up all of the photos on our board, using string to connect any similarities or clues that I spotted. Garcia lived in an apartment building that was built in the shape of a U around a simple courtyard with a cheap, rip-off, hadn’t-been-turned-on-in-a-decade fountain. Garcia had been led through that courtyard with her date, this James Colby Baylor guy, and all the way up to the front steps of her building. He got her comfortable, made her feel like she could let her guard down for just a moment while he complimented her and nearly made a move to kiss her. When she wasn’t prepared for it, he stepped towards the fountain like he was about to leave, then he turned around and shot her. Thinking that he had done what he needed, he ran away, leaving her to bleed out on the steps.

Emily froze when she saw me hang up the photo of the pool of Garcia’s blood that had still been on the steps when the cops started casing the scene.

“Just remember she’s okay,” I said. She nodded and turned back to keep looking through the files. “Hopefully Hotch and Rossi can find something about James Colby Baylor soon because that’s our only lead so far.”

“How could a random mugger plan to use a revolver and leave no fingerprints at the scene? This all feels premeditated,” Emily said.

I agreed with her. Things weren’t adding up. I mean, we knew that he wasn’t a mugger because he went on a date with Garcia, but Emily brought up a good point. This wasn’t a date gone wrong or something like that. Whoever did this, whatever his name really was, he chose Garcia on purpose. There was something else that was really going on with this guy and Garcia. Hopefully Morgan and Reid would be able to find out more while talking to her as the morphine wore off.

“Um…” JJ mumbled, staring out the windows of the board room. Emily and I looked up from the evidence. “What’s wrong with Hotch?”

I raised a brow before walking around the table to see what was going on. Hotch had just left Garcia’s office from the left, and he was storming out to the elevators in the hallway. His face was sour and stern as he pressed the floor level button and tried to avoid making eye contact with the three of us in the boardroom as we watched him. Something must have happened when they were in Garcia’s office, but I wasn’t sure what. I had never seen Hotch that angry with a teammate, or with anything at work, before. Whenever I made him really mad, he’d get like that, but I always knew that I had done it and he’d calm down after punishing me. But with someone at work? Especially Garcia? Something had to be very, very wrong.

“Internal Affairs just ended our involvement with the case,” Rossi explained as he entered the room through the back entrance from the break room. We all turned to face him. “Hotch had to alert them about a protected file that Garcia has on her computer.”

“What the hell?” Emily inquired.

“They think that Garcia could be a security risk?” I asked.

Rossi shrugged. “Hotch is headed to the hospital now to ask her about it, but… now that Internal Affairs is involved, we’ve been taken off the case and she’s been suspended.”

“That’s bullshit. Garcia would never—”

“I know,” Rossi nodded, “but we have our orders. When they come to take everything, you need to let them.”

“No way,” JJ insisted. “This is ours.”

“Not anymore.”

We all looked out the windows again to see an agent from Internal Affairs walking up the boardroom. I cringed as he made eye contact with us and actually tried to smile at us. They couldn’t actually believe that Penelope Garcia was a security risk. She was an imperative piece of our unit— and even more so with the Bureau. She loved her job; she loved the agency. Garcia wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our family. She knew better. And Internal Affairs shouldn’t have been getting involved. I knew that Hotch had to call it in, but he should have waited until he could talk to us or Garcia.

When he came in, he got right to work with tearing down all of the photos I had practically just finished hanging up. As he did so, he explained who he was, why he was there, and how we could help. He instructed JJ and Emily to pack up all of the files and evidence that they had been looking through, and hand it over to him. I watched them hesitate, and they looked to Rossi for the order to not listen to I.A., but he wasn’t giving in. So Emily and JJ started doing as they were told— reluctantly, but they still ended up doing it.

“Is this really necessary?” Emily bit at him quietly.

The I.A. agent let out a disappointed sigh, “Yes, this is necessary.”

“A federal agent was just shot, and you’re choosing to investigate her rather than find the guy who nearly killed her,” JJ said as equally sour as Emily was.

With how things were going with Strauss and the close eye she was keeping on mine and Hotch’s behavior, I couldn’t afford to start an argument with Internal Affairs. As much as I would have loved to have given that guy a piece of my mind, if I overstepped in any way, he could have gone to Strauss, and I would get in trouble again. Strauss told me to be careful because she wouldn’t give me another chance again. While I usually wouldn’t listen to Strauss, she literally held my fate in her hands. For now, Emily and JJ would have to pick this fight alone, unfortunately.

“Look,” the agent gave in, “I am sorry that this has to happen like this, but it is happening. The best thing you can do is just cooperate.”

“We should at least be able to keep working on the case—”

“This is part of the case, Agent Prentiss. We need to know what it is that she’s involved in and if it has to do with why she was shot.”

“She’s not involved in anything,” JJ rolled her eyes.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes,” all three of us responded.

The I.A. agent chuckled to himself. “Do you know why it is that the FBI hired her?” We all exchanged a glance of confusion, which he took note of, so he smugly continued. “She tried to hack the FBI, but she was on our radar long before that. The Bureau keeps track of potential problems, and we dictate what to do with them once we have them. Sometimes it’s safer to utilize them rather than lock them in a box and throw away the key.”

“So she was hired because she was dangerous?” I laughed. Garcia wasn’t a danger. She was the furthest thing from that. Garcia couldn’t even hurt a fly, I was convinced. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not. There’s a lot you don’t know about your friend, Agent Greenaway. My suggestion is that you let the people who do know the whole truth do their jobs. It’ll make everything much easier.” He picked up the box of evidence that we had unpacked, and he repacked, and before we could argue anything else, he left.

I looked at Rossi, who was standing to the side, still silent, still trying to blend into the wall. JJ and Emily sat down at the roundtable, left with nothing to do. We had made our way to the office in the hopes of getting to help Garcia, but, of course, the Bureau wasn’t going to make things easy for us. They never made things easy. But now we had nothing to do, and we weren’t even at the hospital to pass time while waiting with Garcia.

Four days after we got that call about Garcia and we still had no new leads. We thought it would be an easy open and shut case because our witness was alive— thankfully— and we had the Unsub’s name. Yet, we were still falling short of finding any actual real answers, and being taken off of the case by Internal Affairs wasn’t exactly helping matters. Any information we did have, and any theories we had built since then were all based around memory, and would all be inadmissible in any case or court.

Garcia had since been released from the hospital, and Morgan was about to take her home to keep an eye on her. After being sent home early from the office because we were taken off the case and our work hours were over at around four, Hotch and I took the evening to make up for the movies and hot chocolate night we didn’t get after the Feylinn case. I snuggled into Hotch’s clothes, and he got into a pair of pajama pants and a tight t-shirt— which really wasn’t doing any favors for me because I genuinely wanted to stay focused on the movie and not his arms and chest. I made hot chocolate again, this time we actually got around to drinking it, and Hotch just held me in his arms.

By the time we had gone through two movies (one of his choosing and one of mine), we were both exhausted. I thought about just sleeping on the couch, but he complained about being too cold and uncomfortable, so we slowly and groggily made our way upstairs to our room to fall asleep. As we got into bed, Hotch pulled the sheets and comforter up all the way to our chins, then he pulled me close to him so that we were spooning. I smiled to myself and kissed the inside of his left elbow because that was the one trapped under me.

And then his damn phone started ringing.

Hotch sighed in my ear, his arms releasing their hold around me as he turned over to grab his phone. I whined, trying to push my back up against his chest again to coax him back into cuddling me, but he ignored me long enough to answer the call. When I heard him hum a listening tone, he rested his chin on my shoulder and held me in his arms again. We didn’t have any ongoing cases, and with Internal Affairs all up in our business, we weren’t likely to get a new case. So it definitely wasn’t work. The real question was, who was calling so late?

“Morgan, you better have a damn good reason—” Hotch stopped in his tracks, and I could vaguely hear Morgan ranting about something on the other end. Within a startling instant, Hotch sat up, practically lifting me with him. After yawning and wiping the sleep out of my eyes, I pulled the sheet over my chest. “Okay, okay, okay,” Hotch said quickly, yet calmly, like he was trying to get Morgan to slow down. “We’ll be there in a few minutes. Call the rest of the team.” Hotch hung up the phone, and I looked at him. “Someone tried to get into Garcia’s place.”

I pushed the bedding off my body and raced to the closet. “What about the officer outside? And Morgan? Did he catch him?” I asked while throwing on some clothes.

Hotch joined me in the closet and started getting ready, too. “The officer on duty outside her apartment is dead, and Morgan couldn’t catch him in time.”

“Did he get a good look at the Unsub?”

“He says it’s definitely the guy who tried to kill Garcia.”

“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath. “They’re both okay?”

“They sound pretty shaken up, but I think they’ll be fine.”

I went back to the bedroom and grabbed my gun and credentials. Hotch came out of the closet, handing me a pair of shoes, and I thanked him quickly. He grabbed his things, too, and by the time I had my shoes on, we were ready to go. He held his hand out for me, waiting by the door for me to catch up. I took his hand, and he started pulling me downstairs, to the alarm— which I set— and then all the way out to the car. For the brief minute where we settled in our seats, got buckled, and Hotch started the car, we weren’t touching each other, but the moment he started backing out of the driveway, Hotch was holding my hand again.

I lifted his hand to my mouth and kissed his knuckles again. “I love you.”

I could tell that he needed the reassurance while navigating his way to Garcia’s apartment. She had only just gotten home, and we had finally decided to get some rest, and things went to shit again. I was sure that he felt somewhat responsible considering he turned her into I.A., which meant that she couldn’t go back to the office, so her only option was her apartment. But it wasn’t his fault. He had to know that. He didn’t do this. He couldn’t control this anymore than he could have controlled what happened the other night.

This was just another fluke. Our jobs were dangerous, and our lives could get crazy sometimes, but this was just one of those times where it seemed like things kept piling on and we couldn’t stop it. The good news, however, was that we could stop it. There was no way in hell now that we would let I.A. walk all over us and take us off this case. Even if it put mine and Hotch’s jobs in jeopardy again, we were going to find the guy who was doing this to Garcia, and we were going to put an end to it. Hotch just had to keep that in mind and keep his eye on the prize. This wasn’t his fault, and instead of blaming himself, he needed to put his focus into helping Garcia.

When we arrived at Garcia’s place, cops were already barricading off the street to make sure that only officials could get through. Hotch had to roll down his window as we approached and flash his badge at the officer standing by, and then we had to wait for them to move the barricade. Up ahead, it looked like Emily, Reid, JJ, and Rossi were already there, but Rossi was the only one still outside. Hotch parked us in the middle of the road, just in front of Garcia’s building, and Rossi came over to open my door like a true gentleman.

“They’re still barring us from the case,” he told us both as we got out of the car.

The three of us headed towards the courtyard where the lead detective was waiting. We passed the coroners who were bagging up the body of the cop who was killed by the Unsub while he was on duty to protect Garcia. I tried not to look over and think about how that could have been Morgan and Garcia, too.

“The Bureau says they don’t want you here,” the detective said.

“We’re just here to comfort a friend,” Hotch insisted, though we all saw through the lie.

“I don’t care what they say,” he admitted to us. “This guy killed one of us. Any help you can offer, I’ll take it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m sick of being behind this guy,” Rossi ranted. “We gotta end this.”

We all nodded and continued into the building so that we could see Garcia, and potentially talk to her and Morgan about what happened. When we entered her apartment, everyone was surrounding her, comforting her, trying to talk her through it. She was very clearly shaken. Between hugging her pillow close to her chest, resting her head on Morgan’s shoulder, and listening to everyone’s kind words, she looked like she was trying to calm down, but it would certainly take a while. Hotch immediately interrupted everyone by insisting that we take Garcia back to the hospital because that was where she would be safest, but she, of course, had to argue it.

“No, I want to stay here,” she insisted. “I’m starting to remember more. Maybe if I stay here, I’ll be able to remember all of it, and that can help you guys.”

I looked at Hotch. She was right. If her cognitives were finally starting to work at her house, in a familiar setting, then it might benefit us to keep her at home. As long as the whole team was with her, she’d be safe. We wanted to help her, right? Well, this was the best way to do it. There was no denying it. So Hotch gave in with a nod and let the team continue their questioning.

“Tell us about his car,” Reid encouraged, leaning forward in his seat. “You said it was a white, 4-door, American. What else?”

Garcia closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “His seatbelt was buckled behind his back.”

My eyes widened slightly. Hotch and I exchanged a worried glance. There were only two kinds of people who sat with their seatbelts behind them: reckless people or police. For the most part, Hotch and I were pretty good about using our seatbelts, but if we were in the field and needed to jump out quickly, then we wouldn’t bother with them. If Garcia’s memory was correct, then there was a very good chance that the man who did this to her was a fed.

“Garcia,” Rossi said, sitting down in front of her, “You need to be straight with us right now.” He sounded angry and demanding—not at all as how I had seen him before. I figured that Hotch would be the one to finally snap at her because his fuse was always short, but Rossi surprised me. Garcia seemed taken aback, too, because she looked around to us for help. Rossi caught her with, “Don’t look at them, look at me.”

“I’m not hiding anything,” she said confidently and defensively.

“You got shot. Most people get shot for a reason. You’ve got a room full of people here who love you and are willing to believe that an FBI agent is trying to kill you. Now, I don’t know you all that well yet, so I’m going to need a little more convincing. We need to know everything you do on company time—which includes whatever the hell was on that file you secured.

“I—” Garcia hesitated, trying to look at Morgan, but Rossi wouldn’t let her. “It’s—It’s nothing—”

“Spit it out!”

“Rossi!” I yelled at him, but he held a silencing hand up at me.

“Tell us!”

“It’s nothing bad!” Garcia raised her voice, too, but out of fear rather than anger like the rest of us. “I counsel families of unsolved cases, and sometimes I’ll mark cases as imperative so they get reviewed faster.”

Hotch crossed his arms over his chest and said, “You’re not authorized to do that, Penelope.”

“I know,” she agreed while nodding and her voice shaking, “but I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah, but whoever was working those cases thinks you’re watching them now.”

“I just wanted to put pressure on them so that they don’t slide!”

“How many cases are we talking about?”

“I don’t know… Seven or eight, maybe? I would have to get into my system to know.”

“You can’t. You’re still suspended.”

“Wait a minute,” Morgan interrupted. “Garcia, you said that on your date, this guy was pressing you for information about your job—specifically if you were working murder cases.” Garcia nodded along. “Hotch, we’ve gotta look at those files. Whatever connecting piece there is in them, it has to be our Unsub.”

“We can’t do anything while Internal Affairs is watching us all at the office.”

“Yeah, but if we do it from here…”

Hotch sucked in a breath through his teeth while looking over at Rossi for a hint about what our next play should be. Honestly, it wasn’t a good idea and it probably wasn’t legal, but if Garcia could get into the system at home, find who the Unsub was, then get out before anyone could notice, it would do us some good. The only downside to all of this was that if Garcia did get caught, and considering Strauss’s tunnel vision on him and getting rid of him, she’d fire Hotch without hesitation. But, then again, it was still our best shot. Weighing the options, it could save Penelope’s life vs. Hotch losing his job. Unfortunately, the answer was fairly obvious.

Hotch released his crossed arms. “Alright. Dave, Y/N, JJ, and I will all go back to the office to maintain face and to keep I.A.’s focus on us. In the meantime, Morgan, Reid, and Prentiss, stay with Garcia. Don’t forget to log out of the damn system, understand?” Everyone nodded. He looked to me and Rossi, “Let’s go.”

When we walked into the BAU’s office, I spotted the Internal Affairs agent sitting at the table in the break area. He had cleared off everyone’s stuff, including the donuts Anderson brought in since everyone was going to have a late night, obviously; and he set up all of his work for his investigation into Garcia. It wasn’t right that he was there. I mean, they shouldn’t have launched an investigation into Garcia’s integrity while still searching for the person who shot her. There had to be priorities, right? Why was Internal Affairs taking a sealed file more seriously than an agent getting shot? It made my blood boil.

That being said, we knew we had to keep our cool. If we were going to buy Garcia and the others time, then we needed to proceed as usual. Hotch and Rossi went up to their offices on the balcony, while I stopped at my desk to grab some files. In the car, Hotch and I discussed potentially “reviewing some old cases” in his office, which really just meant that we were going to pretend like we were doing work while anxiously awaiting a call from the team with some news. If we just played this smart, we’d find the Unsub soon— since we were clearly the only ones who cared— and all would be forgiven. The investigation into Garcia and her work with the Bureau would ultimately turn out to be useless. She’d be reinstated soon, and things could just… go back to normal. But first we had to play this torturously long waiting game.

As I took my files from my desk in the bullpen up to Hotch’s office, I saw that the Internal Affairs agent stood from his seat in the break area to meet an officer at the front doors of the BAU. I furrowed my brows. They shook hands, greeted each other professionally, then headed over to Anderson’s desk where the tech analyst helping I.A. was sitting. I rolled my eyes, figuring it probably had to do with burying Penelope’s career rather than actually trying to save her. Assholes.

I stepped into Hotch’s office and closed the door behind me. He nodded towards one of the seats at his desk across from him, a silent gesture for me to get comfortable. As I sat down and put the files on his desk, Hotch tried to grab the top one, but I stopped him by putting my hand over his. We glared at each other shortly, a challenge to see who would let up first. Hotch wanted to work on some of my reports. Of course he did. But he already had a stack of his own, and we didn’t need a repeat of the Mulford case report. So he needed to work on his files, and I needed to work on mine. I get that he was just trying to help since he still felt somewhat responsible for my suspension, and me sub dropping the other day, and he felt like shit for going behind my back; but I wasn’t going to let him make it up to me by doing my work. Hell, he technically already made it up to me. How could he forget my reward the other day? Idiot.

“Come on,” he encouraged, trying to tug the file away from me. I narrowed my eyes and pulled against him. “Y/N.”

“Aaron.”

His glare strengthened. “I don’t want to look at my reports anymore. I’ve hit a wall with all of mine. Let me help you.”

I smacked his hand away playfully, managing to get a better grip on the file after he was caught off guard. I snatched the file and dropped it in my lap. “No.”

“No?”

I gulped. “We’re at work. Rules, Agent Hotchner. Remember our rules?”

He licked his teeth, a sign that he was getting angry and frustrated. “At some point, when this is over, and we’re back at home— where there are no rules, Agent Greenaway— I’m going to put you over my knee and show you what ‘no’ gets you.” He grabbed the next file on the top of my pile. “Don’t ever ask me about the rules again.” I cleared my throat as I looked down at the report I was holding. “What do you say?”

“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

“Good girl.”

“I’ve gotta stop locking that door behind me…” I whispered under my breath.

“What was that?”

My eyes shot wide. I hadn’t realized that I said it aloud. I had been thinking about how every time I closed his office door behind me, leaving the two of us to speak privately, Hotch always seemed to forget that we were at work, and he let his dominant personality take over. It wasn’t like I didn’t enjoy it. I loved it. But he was literally the one who made the rules in the first place, and yet he seemed to be the worst about upholding them. I tried my best because I didn’t want the professional or personal consequences that would come with talking out of turn, but Hotch seemed to lose his filter when we were alone. It might’ve been due to the superior aspect that came with his job. Hotch liked having control over me. He liked telling me what to do in the bedroom, around the house, in the field, and in moments like these when we were alone and could speak freely. Being my boss probably allowed him to maintain that excitement of controlling me without being obvious. But being alone with me while at work, it was like a big stirring pot of all the things he loved about our relationship, and he just couldn’t seem to hold himself back.

That was why closing the door was always a bad idea. It gave him the privacy to demand things of me, to talk dirty to me, to tease me endlessly because he knew we were at work, and he knew that we had our rules. Every time he toyed with me like this, it made me want him to the point that I’d jump on him if the blinds on his windows overseeing the bullpen weren’t open. He knew that about me. He knew that I’d get on my knees for him under his desk if he asked me to. But he also knew that the two of us were being extremely cautious since Strauss was watching us like a hawk. He knew that he could torture me privately like this, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That was the fun of the game. That was what excited him most.

But if I just left the door open… What could he do? Nothing. That was why I thought it, but I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. When Hotch caught me, he knew what I meant, and I knew that I was digging myself into a hole that I could only escape once he punished me for it. He had been playing around with the “no” thing because I practically baited him, but my little slip up wasn’t a game. When he once had enough self-restraint to not flat out start sliding into dom space yet, he was now entirely Sir. I was screwed. Once this case was over, I was sure that I wasn’t going to be let off the bed for… well… until the next case would call us in.

“Sir—”

“Not another word from you,” he said gruffly, looking down at the file he grabbed.

The self-discipline it took to not go over to the windows, close the blinds, then punish me then and there was killing him, I could see it. He had practically involuntarily slid into dom space, and it was going to take him forever to calm down. I almost wanted to apologize, but I had been given my command. With how deep into it I already was, there was no point in pushing back. While I would’ve been bratty about it in the past, just because I could, I knew that we really needed to focus on Penelope. It was fun to forget about reality from time to time. We liked spending a few minutes forgetting about everything going on around us. It was hard being in our field without taking a moment to remember who we were and how much we loved each other. People probably wouldn’t understand our dynamic. They would look down on it and turn their noses up at how we could act like this between talking about work and focusing on cases. But it was hard to take everything seriously all the time. If we didn’t appreciate who we were when things got too dark, then we’d lose our minds.

My phone started ringing. Talk about saved by the bell. I scrambled for it nervously, acutely aware that Hotch was paying attention to my floundering, despite how his eyes were focused on the report. I took a look at the caller ID, Morgan, before answering quickly.

“Sunshine, I need you to listen very carefully,” he said in a panic before we could greet one another. I continued to stay silent, waiting for what he had to say. “The Unsub’s in the BAU. He’s the deputy sheriff that’s standing next to the I.A. agent at Anderson’s desk.” My eyes shot wide. “Stop— Stop reacting.” My face fell flat. “Do you see him?”

I didn’t have to look over to see who Morgan was talking about. When I had been walking up to Hotch’s office, I saw the officer, and originally thought nothing of it. But now he was in the middle of the FBI. “I got him,” I answered calmly. Hotch looked up at me. He was trying to get a read on what was happening. “What do you want us to do?”

“Don’t approach him. Don’t let him know we’re onto him. We profiled him, and he’s a classic narcissist with a hero homicide complex—”

“And he’s spiraling?”

Morgan hummed an agreement. I swallowed hard, still trying to keep my cool.

If he was spiraling, that meant that he was going to go down shooting. The profile of Unsubs with hero homicide complexes included that they were sociopaths that didn’t even care about their own wellbeing if they knew that they were approaching the end. If Morgan was right— which, I trusted that he was— then our Unsub was going to take as many people as possible down with him if he even got a whiff of us closing in on him. Taking him down was going to be hard, especially since he was an armed, trained officer. It didn’t matter that nearly everyone down in the bullpen had guns. If he took even one person hostage, we were screwed.

“I’ll tell Hotch. Thanks.”

“Be careful.”

“Yeah.” I hung up the phone and cautiously put it in my pocket. “Deputy in the bullpen,” I told Hotch.

He glanced out of the corner of his eye, clocking who I was referencing. “They’re sure?” I nodded. “What’s the profile?”

“Hero homicide.”

Hotch let out a quiet breath. “Okay. I’ll get Dave. I want you to go down the ramp just out front, not the one to the side. Go through the bullpen to get to your desk, grab your things, and try to make your way to the doors like you’re waiting for us to join you there. We’re going to surround him quietly and carefully. Understood?” I nodded again. “Go.”

I pushed myself out of my seat and started calmly walking out of Hotch’s office. He was just behind me, opening the door for me like a true gentleman. As I stepped down the ramp just ahead, Hotch took a sharp turn to the left to walk on the balcony. The deputy in the bullpen, along with the Internal Affairs agent and tech analyst, were focused on the computer in front of them. They were too busy to even notice how the office was moving around them… How I was watching them out the corner of my eye.

As I grabbed my purse from under my desk, Rossi opened his office door in response to Hotch knocking politely. They exchanged a few whispers, glancing down in the bullpen to look at the deputy and me. I nodded vaguely, a signal that I knew the plan and I was going to make my move. After taking note of Hotch’s lingering stare, I nervously bit my lip and took a brave step towards the doors. My eyes shifted to the deputy instinctively. When we made eye contact by accident, I cursed under my breath, and kept trying to move, my hands free and ready to reach for my weapon on my hip whenever.

I glanced over my shoulder quickly, noting that Rossi and Hotch had split up to take opposite corners of the room. My eyes met Hotch’s again, and I tried to look for a signal, knowing that I couldn’t make it any further without raising suspicions. The plan was for me to head to the doors, but he already knew. If I stepped any closer, the deputy would probably take the I.A. agent or the analyst hostage, or he would just start shooting without warning. But the signal I needed from Hotch didn’t come. He couldn’t give it yet. The three of us still needed to move into a better position.

“Well, thank you for coming in, Deputy,” the Internal Affairs agent smiled up at the officer.

Whatever it was they had been doing on Anderson’s computer, they were done. Maybe this would work itself out. If the deputy left, we could arrest him down in the parking lot where there weren’t innocent agents Hotch was responsible for in harm’s way. This could actually go well. All of our fretting could have possibly been for nothing, if we were lucky.

“Thank you for hearing me out. I’m sorry about all of this,” the deputy responded in kind.

“Oh, that’s no worries. We’re just happy to help—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Before we knew it, the deputy reached out, locking the I.A. agent in a choke hold. Just as Hotch, Rossi, and I unholstered our weapons, the deputy pointed the barrel of his gun at the agent’s head. Everyone, including the analyst sitting just in front of them, fell to the ground, trying to find cover under the desks. He got smart, pressing his back against the corner by the glass doors before I could get there. From where Hotch, Rossi, and I were all standing around the office, none of us could get a clear shot. I mean, if we wanted to take the I.A. agent down with the deputy, then, sure, we could make the shot. But we weren’t going to do that. Our only plan of action now was to diffuse the tension— though, it was probably going to be useless if we were relying on the team’s profile. However, we still had to try.

Out of all of us, Rossi was the best negotiator. Hell, he wrote the interrogation and negotiation how-to books for the FBI. In the Academy, we studied his tactics, and we studied his reports. If anyone could get through to the deputy, our best shot was Rossi. We all knew it.

“Don’t do it,” Rossi shook his head. I adjusted my grip on my gun as the deputy wavered. “You’re a cop. You know how this is going to go down unless you drop the gun.”

“I’ll take my chances,” the deputy spat.

“You’re standing in the middle of the FBI… What chances do you have?”

“You think that I’m afraid of the FBI?”

“No,” Rossi shook his head. “You’re afraid of being forgotten, and afraid of being remembered as the villain. You want to be the hero; I know you do. But if you kill that man there, you won’t be the hero. If you kill him, you’ll be locked away and forgotten. It’s your choice. You write the ending. You decide if you’re the hero or villain tonight.”

The deputy chuckled. “They told me you guys were the best minds in the FBI; But that’s the best you have? Pathetic.”

Hotch looked over at me, then to the door over my shoulder, before looking back at me. I raised a brow, wondering what he was thinking. His eyes shifted to my other shoulder, almost like he was telling me to move that way, away from the doors. I took the hint and slowly started backing up. The deputy took notice of my retreat, but he still didn’t make a move or say anything about it.

The thing I knew, a gunshot rang. The glass doors to the BAU shattered as a bullet penetrated them and fired right into the deputy’s head. Since he had been caught off guard by the shot to the back of his head, he didn’t have a chance to press his finger down on the trigger. As his body fell to the ground, his gun flew over by my feet. I quickly knelt down, picked up the weapon, and tucked it in the back of my pants waistband for safe keeping.

JJ stepped in through the doorway of broken glass. Her hands were shaking as she holstered her weapon, the same one she used to shoot the deputy in the back of the head. Everyone started slowly getting up off the floor while Hotch and Rossi moved in. We knew that there was no chance that the deputy was alive, but we all wanted to see it with our own eyes. This was the guy who killed our Penelope Garcia, after all. We needed the reassurance that he was really gone.

“You okay?” I asked JJ, holstering my own weapon, too. She nodded shortly, still staring down at the body. “You sure?” She nodded again, but this time more vaguely, like she was unsure of her answer. “You did good.” I patted her shoulder.

“It’s what he gets for shooting Penelope…” she whispered under her breath. “No one hurts the people we love and gets away with it.”

I nodded and looked over at Hotch. He was staring at me while talking to Rossi. My forehead creased slightly as my eyes softened into a pout. His did the same for the slightest moment. “I love you,” I mouthed to him.

“I love you, too,” he mouthed back when no one was looking.

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds fanfic #Criminal Minds Fanfiction #criminal minds smut #criminal minds imagine #aaron hotchner #Aaron Hotch Hotchner #aaron hotchner fanfic #aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotchner imagine

38 notes · View notes

itmighthavebeenintentional · 4 years

Text

Shackled - Chapter 8

Summary: After nearly ten years, Sam Winchester calls Miriam Bard to collect on a life debt. Unfortunately for Miriam, Sam leaves out a few important details.

WARNINGS CHANGE EACH CHAPTER, PLEASE CHECK EACH TIME.

Warning: Show level violence, implied loss of family, blood, grieving, depression, cursing, Demon!Dean, emotional manipulation, mind fuckery, psychological manipulation, questioning one’s sanity, emotional exhaustion, depression, blood, consuming blood, Was it just a dream?, sexual content, biting

Word Count: 1567

Author’s Note: @cracksinthewalls had very little to correct in this chapter, which made me pretty damned happy. Thanks to @thoughtslikeaminefield , who went through all this more than once and kept pushing me to make it even better. Thanks to @fangirlxwritesx67 for all the flailing. Me too, girl, me too. Please read/heed the warnings. 18+ ONLY.

In case you missed it:

Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5 | Ch 6 | Ch 7

Masterlist

Chapter 8

Unnaturally strong fingers slid up her sides, hooking under her arms and pulling her upright. She spun around only to find a knifepoint pressed under her chin, and her head tilted back so sharply she could only just see the void staring back at her from the demon’s eyes.

She reached instinctively for the back of her waistband, but Dean pressed the tip of his knife upwards, and she scrabbled at his arms to keep from overbalancing.

She felt a sting under her chin, followed by a trickle of warmth that cooled as it slid down her throat.

“Think this’s what you’re looking for,” he said, flexing his grip on the blade as he drank in her tense, terrified expression. He nodded at the island behind her. “Hop up.”

Miriam hesitated, frozen, but a little extra pressure from the knife had her moving backward, stepping up to awkwardly sit on the edge of the metal prep table.

Pots and pans swung crazily around her head until Dean shifted, his face tightening for a split second. A wave of concussive force sent the cookware flying into the wall with a deafening metallic clang.

“Comfy?” he murmured, crowding her space, invading her senses.

He smelled of sulfur and musk, smokey and dizzying as if his close proximity was sucking the oxygen straight from her lungs. His nose dragged up the scar tissue on the side of her neck, inhaling deeply, and she fought against the urge to moan at the contact.

“Good,” he rasped, not waiting for a response. “We’re gonna be here a while.”

He jerked the dagger from her neck and flung it away without looking. The knife buried itself to the hilt in the wall, but before Miriam could react, the demon pulled her face to his until they were nose to nose.

“You’re not here; you can’t get out of the dungeon,” she choked, fingers clenched around his wrists, failing to budge his grip even an inch. “This is a dream. I’m dreaming-”

“I’m flattered,” he said, ignoring her panicked struggles as he tilted her head to the side. Satisfied with the angle, Dean pressed the tip of his tongue to the base of her throat, tracing the line of blood upwards until he reached the tiny cut. He fastened plush lips to the wound, sucking fiercely, and Miriam lost all pretense of defiance.

Something clenched hot and desperate in the pit of her belly, and her legs wrapped around the demon’s waist, locking him in place. She tangled her fingers in his hair, her hiss of pleasure turning to a strangled curse as his teeth dug in, pain searing across her throat.

“You can make this stop anytime you want to,” he breathed. His voice was hypnotic, his presence an intoxicating fog that clouded her mind against logical thought. She stared at him hazily, taking in his endless, ebony eyes, the smear of her own blood around his mouth, the shine of his teeth in the harsh lighting.

All at once, the uncertainty, the pain, the grief, just... stopped.

“What I want is for you to shut your goddamned mouth,” she snarled, fisting the hair at the crown of his head.

She yanked his head back, closing her lips on his chin, tasting blood, feeling the stubble scraping over her tongue and the rumble of his growl ticklish against her hypersensitive nerves. Her legs contracted, pulling him closer, and his fingers dug into her ass, dragging her forward until nothing could fit between them.

“What do you want me to shut it on?” he asked, his voice grinding at her resolve even as his hips ground against hers.

Her fingers jerked reflexively in his hair, and his eyes snapped shut as he exhaled with an expression just short of reverence. When he lowered his gaze again, her lungs locked at the depth of his hunger.

“I’m gonna bleed you dry.”

He lunged forward, and his teeth latched onto her neck once more, sinking into the flesh with decisive finality.

Miriam’s eyes snapped open as her knees buckled.

She found herself sprawled on the kitchen floor, hand clasped to her scarred but intact throat. She snatched at her lower back, fingers closing around the handle of the demon blade, and her jaw clenched as she fought to get her breathing under control.

Metal cookware swung cheerfully above the island in the empty kitchen, and she swore as she stood on shaky legs. Miriam clutched hard at the metal table as rage flooded her senses, tingeing her vision red.

“Son of a bitch,” she swore.

Strength surged through her trembling limbs as her adrenaline spiked, steadying her. She straightened and stalked from the room. She needed to vent this crazed energy, to tear something apart or smash it to pieces.

Her first thought was the pretty face in the dungeon just a few rooms over. And though she currently felt equal to the task, even in her heightened emotional state, she realized very quickly just how bad an idea that was.

“No matter how much he deserves it,” she seethed as she passed the door to the dungeon.

Her feet found their way to her temporary bedroom, and she paced furiously, muttering under her breath.

Maybe there was a gym around somewhere; this place had obviously housed a lot of people at one point, folks who were comfortable living underground. There was bound to be somewhere for them to get some sort of exercise. She swapped out her t-shirt for a tank top, switched jeans for leggings, and grabbed her gun and the demon blade before setting out.

Since she had no idea what she was looking for, Miriam resorted to checking every room she came across. After five empty bedrooms identical to her own, she wondered if this were simply some sort of bizarre motel or dorm. Then she came across something different.

Structurally, this room matched the others, with its outdated furniture and machines, but someone had settled here more recently and taken the time to make it an actual home.

Weapons and souvenirs lined shelves around the room and above the bed, a basket of laundry perched on a chair, and there were even some highly questionable magazines tossed aside for future perusal. On a small phone table next to the wall, notebooks were heaped haphazardly where someone had been called away in the middle of research.

“And a snack,” she said softly, noting the half-eaten piece of pie that seemed to be partially mummified.

The table was littered with scribbled notes circling a very old-fashioned telephone, and a spiral notebook sat beneath the desiccated pastry. Miriam began to turn away but stopped, some hunter’s instinct tugging at the corner of her mind.

She looked back to the container of pie, shook her head, and looked at the notebook beneath it again. Tucked inside was a small stack of pictures. She set her weapons down, pulled out the photographs, and began flipping through them.

Family pictures, she realized. A young boy and a smiling blonde woman, the same woman in the second picture with a dark-haired man, still smiling. John and Mary Winchester, she realized. Most people in the hunting world knew the Winchesters’ story; it had been one of the reasons Miriam steered herself and Aaron clear of the few demonic cases that came their way.

Miriam paused, then glanced back at the first picture again. Her finger stroked down the little boy’s face.

“Dean.”

She wondered how long after that photo had been taken that his mother had died. Miriam was potentially looking at the last photographic evidence of Dean Winchester with a carefree smile.

The next picture showed Dean and Sam together with a familiar face. If most hunters knew the Winchesters’ story, then damn near everyone in the hunting world knew Bobby Singer. Hell, there had been a point in time when she and Aaron had Bobby as number one on their speed dial.

She smiled faintly, shuffling the pictures around.

The last two were both of Sam and Dean together, right around the time when she and Aaron had met the brothers, and she realized her assumption about the first picture wasn’t accurate.

The freeness in Dean’s posture, the open happiness on his face when he was next to his brother, despite everything he’d already been through up to that point in his life, stole her breath.

Miriam felt stinging behind her eyes as she studied his genuine joy, his relaxation, his unlined face.

This is what Sam is fighting for, she thought, and sniffled, catching herself off guard.

She cleared her throat, tilting her head back as the tears began to fall. The anger bled out of her in trickles and drips of saltwater.

What lie wouldn’t she tell, what atrocity wouldn’t she commit to save Aaron? Yes, Sam owed her a hell of a lot of answers, but could she honestly blame him?

I knew you’d understand, he’d said.

Still sniffling, she carefully replaced the photographs in their original order and stuffed them between the pages of the spiral notebook. She collected her weapons, then glanced down at the decomposing dessert, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

In the end, she shrugged and left it where it was.

She might be a glorified babysitter but damned if she was going to clean up after two grown men.

...

Chapter 9

49 notes · View notes

addictedtostorytelling · 4 years

Note

Part 1- Hi! (Feel free to ignore I don’t want to bother you) your lost answer to anon got me thinking about an old headcanon I could never get str8 (Jate’s my lost otp & I love suliet to pieces). In “LaFleur”, sawyer says Kate’s face is gone from his memory, 3y’s enough to get over someone. But as soon as she’s back, he keeps glancing @ her as to figure out if he believes his own words. Except from the obvious writers’ ambiguous trick to keep the “square” alive for a bit longer,

Part 2- I thought it was some sort of leftover tenderness they shared toward each other (that Jack/Juliet didn’t get) cause despite their incompatibility, I believe they genuinely loved each other. So my question really is: do you think, post “the end” S & K find à way to accept that they care about each other, help each other get over their losses, learn to belong even if it’s just in each other’s lives (as friends or more) ? Sorry for this novel and thanks.

hey @clarissemcc!

so my headcanon for how things turn out with kate and sawyer post-island is definitely on the angsty side.

i’ll tuck it after the “keep reading,” just to be safe.

___________

as the final on-screen events of the original timeline in the series finale take place, jack has made the decision to remain behind on the island (where he soon dies), and juliet is already dead, meaning that both kate and sawyer return to civilization faced with the prospect of going through the rest of their lives bereft of their respective soulmates.

both of them undoubtedly mourn.

both of them undoubtedly suffer.

but, ultimately, kate is better equipped to cope with her loss than sawyer is his.

that’s not to say that things are easy for kate, of course.

when she is finally reunited with jack in the flash-sideways universe, the sheer yearning in her “i’ve missed you so much” admission implies that she has likely spent years on years---a full lifetime---in the ot grieving him.

losing jack after just having reconciled with him for the first time since their falling out in the wake of their broken engagement and after everything that they had been through together both on and off of the island most certainly leaves her heartbroken and reeling.

she probably never really gets over mourning him and wondering “what if---?”

i honestly don’t see her ever getting in another long-term relationship or marrying after him; if she was going to “settle down” in that way, he was the one person she was going to do so with.

that said, i do think that, overall, she is able to face that grief (however long she has to) because she has a sense of purpose in leaving the island.

she’s going to help claire raise aaron.

and i tend to believe that having someplace to go and something important to do helps her endure a life without jack.

that’s where she encounters whatever healing is available to her and “learns to belong,” like you talk about.

before crashing on the island, she is a fugitive runaway with nothing good or lasting in her life, but afterward she has two people who are looking to her to provide stability for them; she has a family, a home, and, most significantly, a reason to stick around.

not so with sawyer.

before the island, he is placeless---a traveling con man, in and out of prison, lacking a solid identity, much less a sense of purpose.

on the island, and particularly during the 70s in dharmaville, he finally gains grounding, becoming a super competent leader under the guise of jim lafleur and finding a partner---in every sense of the word---in juliet.

and had he been able to leave the island with juliet and marry her, as per his plan, i think he would have continued in the upward trajectory we see from him in s5 and s6. he would have listened to his better angels.

but in the wake of losing juliet, i’m not sure he can---and not just because she’s gone but because he blames himself for her death.

for as gut-wrenching as leaving jack behind on the island is for kate---and particularly knowing that he is badly wounded and possibly close to death---she can at least take solace in the fact that jack makes a choice for himself, and she can honor his willing sacrifice by taking care of his sister and nephew.

sawyer knows no such comfort.

he blames himself for juliet’s death on multiple levels: because he asked juliet to stay with him on the island for “two weeks” which turned into three years (see episode 05x08 “lafleur”); because his behavior around kate after she returned to the island eventually prompted juliet to sign on for jack’s plan to blow up the jughead (see episode 05x16 “the incident” pt. i); and because he literally couldn’t hold onto juliet and dropped her down the shaft (see episode 05x17 “the incident” pt. ii).

though one could try to argue with him that juliet exercised personal agency both in remaining on the island with him AND detonating the bomb, his guilt and self-loathing would never accept such appeals.

in his mind, he killed the only person he ever truly loved.

and without her, not only does he have nowhere to go and nothing to do post-island, but he also carries with him the sense that he doesn’t deserve to get to go anywhere or do anything.

he doesn’t want to carry on in her absence.

he wants to suffer for his sins.

he wants to experience every moment of agony rightly owed him for his actions.

filled with guilt, pain, and the impulse to self-castigate, i just can’t imagine him faring well.

though kate might try to convince him to not give up, i don’t think he’d listen to her or accept any attempts by her to take care of him---and particularly not because he knows that part of what persuaded juliet to blow up the warhead was her assumption, however erroneous, that he would eventually choose kate over her (“i changed my mind when i saw you look at her”).

even just being around kate as a friend would trigger his guilt in the extreme.

and while he wouldn’t blame kate---as he says he doesn’t, per the scene on the pier---he would still blame himself.

he would always blame himself.

hate himself, even.

and a self-hating sawyer is a dangerous one.

i mean, self-hatred is what underlies his jerky, bullying, posturing behavior during the early seasons of the show, right? and, by comparison, that self-hatred is of a more “garden variety,” rooted in his sense that he has become someone despicable, rather than an extremely personal sense of loss (and fault).

so much more extreme will be his bent over juliet---and so much the worse his self-sabotaging behavior as a consequence.

the pre-show sawyer is an outlaw who lives dangerously, but he ultimately possesses a self-preservative instinct; he is a consummate survivor.

that’s part of what makes him and kate so similar.

and him and juliet, for that matter.

but this sawyer---the one who feels responsible for getting the woman he loves killed---won’t care what happens to him anymore.

so he won’t do himself in all at once---not when he has a very strong sense that he deserves to suffer for what he has done for as long as possible---but he will drink and smoke himself sick and pick barfights with guys twice his size and run cons where he’s almost sure to get caught and then pull his gun on the cops who show up to arrest him; he’ll be a fucking mess, the likes of which would make even bearded, pill-popping, oceanic-six, los angeles jack go, “oh shit.”

and without any sense of grander purpose, i don’t know that sawyer would be able to pull himself out of the spiral.

kate might try to argue that he has an obligation to take care of himself if not for his own sake than for clementine’s, but he’d probably say that his daughter’s only interaction with him being by way of the trust fund he left for her is for the best.

honestly, i don’t think his story in the ot has any kind of happy ending.

and i don’t think he lasts as long as kate does.

just based on the way i understand his character, i doubt that sawyer allows himself to find any sort of refuge with kate post-island in the ot, either friendly or romantic, even if she tries to offer it to him. he also probably eschews company of any kind from anyone, including their other friends from the island.

for my money, there is just too much hurt and guilt in him, for which he cannot permit himself any sort of peace, so he strikes out on his own (“some of us are meant to be alone”) to disastrous effect.

while kate undoubtedly worries about him, i think that at some point, probably sooner rather than later, she makes the conscious decision to focus her energies on claire and aaron, resigning herself to the fact that sawyer doesn’t want to be saved, and particularly not by her.

ultimately, i think their paths diverge.

she learns to live again after the island, and he doesn’t.

all of this postulation given, i’m certainly not harshing on your headcanon! it’s way happier than mine and, frankly, a whole lot nicer to think about.

lest i end on a super negative note here, i’ll finish up by saying that i find it highly significant that in the flash-sideways, kate once again finds purpose in helping claire with aaron, while sawyer is searching---not only as a detective for his parents’ killer but literally walking around with a big, yellow sunflower (his bloom of choice for juliet), trying to find where (or rather to whom) he belongs, hopeful for the life he has always wanted to lead with her.

though he doesn’t get any kind of happy ending in the ot, at least by my estimation, he does eventually find what he’s looking for in the flash-sideways, and that reunion with juliet is so healing for him.

anyway, i’m rambling here.

thanks for the question! feel welcome to send another any time.

#answered #clarissemcc #asks: lost #**#my meta #meta: lost #lost #kate austen #james ford #let's talk shop

1 note · View note

massmurdera · 4 years

Text

2019 & 2010s Best/Worst

Because I like lists and cataloguing the dumb shit I cared about. As my brother once said after seeing and reviewing NOW YOU SEE ME on a lazy Sunday, ‘Some would say it was a waste of time, others might say it was a colossal waste of time.’

I’ll admit, it’s a bit over-the-top. Particularly including the Pats, but yeah, in the Tom Brady era that started when I was 14 as a Freshman in high school to 33 years old now and wrapping up soon-ish (?), there’s not a chance in hell I’ll care as intimately about this shit. I grew up with it at just the right time.

2019 MOVIES TOP TIER 1) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2) Uncut Gems 2nd TIER 3) Knives Out 4) Parasite 5) Little Women 6) Midsommer 3rd TIER 7) John Wick III 8) Ready or Not 9) Marriage Story 10) Joker 11) Irishman 12) Shazam! 13) Us UNDERRATED Ready or Not TOO LONG John Wick III; Irishman SOLID El Camino GOOD BAD 6 Underground OK 21 Bridges; Avengers: Endgame; Dolemite is my Name; Dragged Across Concrete; Fighting With My Family; Hustlers; Knock Down the House; Longshot; the Report; Two Popes MEH Always Be My Maybe; Death of Dick Long; High Flying Bird; Spiderman: Far From Home; Standoff at Sparrow Creek DISAPPOINTING Hobbs & Shaw; Toy Story 4; Triple Frontier SUCK Laundromat; Under the Silver Lake OVERRATED Ad Astra; Booksmart; the Farewell FUNNIEST SCENE Dicaprio flipping out in movie trailer BEST CLIMAX/ENDING Once Upon a Time; Uncut Gems HAVEN’T SEEN 1917; Apollo 11; Beach Bum; Dark Waters; Ford vs Ferrari; Honey Boy; Jojo Rabbit; the Lighthouse; Star Wars 2019 TV TOP TIER 1) Succession 2) Fleabag 3) Watchmen 2nd TIER 4) When They See Us 5) Barry 6) Unbelievable 7) Chernobyl 8) Sex Education DAMN GOOD Big Mouth; the Boys; Brockmire; Derry Girls; Euphoria; Loudest Voice; Mindhunter; Pen15; Righteous Gemstones; Veep WATCHABLE Atypical; Bosch; Dark; Goliath; Karate Kid; Kominsky Method; Mandalorian; Mr Robot; Mrs Fletcher; Russian Doll; Warrior HIGH/LOW I Think You Should Leave SHIT END FOR ALL-TIME GREAT Game of Thrones HALF-WATCH Living With Yourself; Raising Dion; the Society NOT UP TO STANDARD Stranger Things; GLOW; Killing Eve; True Detective BAD Luther; Shameless; Silicon Valley; SNL SUCK 13 Reasons Why; Big Little Lies; the Witcher FUNNIEST Desus & Mero DOCS 1) Fyre: both 2) Ted Bundy Tapes 3) American Factory 4) Leaving Neverland STAND-UP SPECIALS 1) Burr 2) Chappelle 3) Jeselnik 4) Birbiglia 5) Gulman BEHIND ON SHOWS I DIG Brooklyn 99; Catastrophe; Corporate; Expanse; Good Place; It’s Always Sunny; Letterkenny 2010s TV DRAMA 1) Breaking Bad 2) Game of Thrones 3) Justified 4) Mad Men 5) Hannibal 6) Banshee ANTHOLOGY/LIMITED SERIES 1) Fargo SII 2) True Detective SI 3) When They See Us 4) People Vs OJ Simpson 5) Chernobyl 6) Show Me a Hero 7) the Night Of 8) Honorable Woman COMEDY 1) Atlanta 2) Fleabag 3) Veep 4) Big Mouth 5) Parks & Rec 6) Rick & Morty 7) Nathan for You 8) Review 9) American Vandal HIT/MISS Black Mirror OVERRATED Boardwalk Empire; House of Cards; Peaky Blinders; Westworld UNDERRATED Banshee; Brockmire; Hannibal FUN HATE-WATCH Newsroom DOWNHILL Homeland; How I Met Your Mother; Legion; Sons of Anarchy HATED Girls; Leftovers; Rectify UNWATCHABLE Twin Peaks BEST ENDINGS Breaking Bad; Justified; Fleabag; Parks & Rec DUMBEST ENDING Dexter; Sons of Anarchy LATE NIGHT Desus & Mero POLITICAL John Oliver 2010s MOVIES 2010 Social Network Animal Kingdom; the Fighter; Four Lions; Inside Job; Jackass 3; MacGruber; Shutter Island; Toy Story 3; True Grit; Winter’s Bone 2011 the Raid Descendents; Drive; Fast Five; the Guard; Mission Impossible 4; Take This Waltz; Warrior 2012 Magic Mike 21 Jump Street; Argo; Cabin in the Woods; Chronicle; Django Unchained; Goon; Looper; Queen of Versailles; Silver Linings Playbook; Skyfall 2013 Wolf of Wall Street Before Midnight; the Conjuring; Gravity; Her; Inside Llewyn Davis; Prisoners; Short-Term 12 2014 John Wick the Drop; Edge of Tomorrow; Gone Girl; the Guest; Lego Movie; Nightcrawler; the Raid 2; Whiplash 2015 Mad Max 7 Days in Hell; Big Short; Brooklyn; Creed; Ex Machina; Fast 7; It Follows; Logan; Magic Mike XXL; the Martian; Me and Earl and the Dying Girl; Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation; Sicario 2016 the Nice Guys Deadpool; Edge of Seventeen; Everybody Wants Some!; Green Room; La La Land; Manchester By the Sea; Moonlight; OJ: Made in America; Popstar; Sing Street; Weiner 2017 Get Out Blade Runner 2049; Coco; Dunkirk; Lady Bird; Logan; Thor Ragnorak; Tour de Pharmacy 2018 Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse BlacKKKlansman; Den of Thieves; Hereditary; If Beale Street Could Talk; Minding the Gap; Sorry to Bother You

THE BEST Mad Max BEST DOC OJ: Made in America FUNNIEST DOC Tickled UNDERRATED DOC Weiner HORROR Hereditary FAVORITE/FUNNIEST PERFORMANCE Ryan Gosling (Nice Guys) DESERVED 5 SEQUELS the Nice Guys SUPERHERO Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse WAR Dunkirk BEST FIGHT SCENES the Raid UNDERRATED any Lonely Island project NICE TRY Dark Knight Rises; Inception; Interstellar; Widows STAND-UP 2010s FAVORITE Bill Burr NEXT BEST Ali Wong; Anthony Jeselnik; Kyle Kinane; Bert Kreischer; Marc Maron; John Mulaney; Patton Oswalt; Rory Scovel; Tom Segura COMEBACK Chappelle DOWNFALL Louis CK DIED BEFORE PRIME Patrice O’Neal, Greg Giraldo UNDERRATED Joe Derosa MUST-SEE LIVE Robert Kelly PODCASTS 2010s BEST/FUNNIEST/UNDERRATED Walking the Room RUNNER-UP 600 Dollar Podcast ONE-MAN RANT Bill Burr Monday Morning Podcast SPORTS Pardon My Take RIFFING Bodega Boys HISTORY/COMEDY Dollop HISTORY DEEP DIVE Hardcore History MOVIES Rewatchables HATE-WATCH CRITICISM West Wing Thing POP CULTURE/FILM Frotcast MIXED Revisionist History GOOD/BAD Joe Rogan: GOOD: propping up comic friends; BAD: useful idiot for propping up bad faith fascists who should be put out to pasture INTERNET CURIOSITY Reply All LEFTIST POLITICS Chapo Trap House TRUE CRIME In the Dark ADVICE Don’t Take Bullshit From Fuckers LAME Pod Save America OVERRATED Missing Richard Simmons DIDN’T LIKE S-Town SERIAL Season 3>Season 1 TRUMP Trump, Inc SPORTS SCHAUDENFREUDE Fuck the Chargers OKAY Bill Simmons WTF WITH MARON good when he talks to comics MURDER My Favorite Murder OTHER GOOD ONES Hound Tall; Press Box

2010s MUSIC FAVORITE anything Brian Fallon ROCK BAND Menzingers SONG Robyn-‘Dancing On My Own’ POP-PUNK BAND Wonder Years LIVE ALBUM Horrible Crowes-‘Elsie’ HEAVY BAND Every Time I Die ELECTRONIC Chvrches SOLO Rihanna COVER ALBUM Dustin Kensrue-‘Thoughts on a Different Blood’ GO-TO AT GYM Story So Far OFF THE INEVITABLE & IRRECOVERABLE DEEP END Kanye KIND OF LIKE THE MUSIC/HATE THE PERSON: LIKE KANYE Taylor Swift, Bieber THOUGHT I’D HATE BUT DOES NOT SUCK Lana Del Rey; Post Malone OTHER FAVES 1975; Arctic Monkeys; Beach Slang; Black Keys; Bon Iver; Carly Rae Jepsen; the National; Thrice MIXED Chance the Rapper; Kendrick Lamar I’ll be honest I spent far more time listening to podcasts nearly all the time and just listened to mostly the same couple of things I liked. 2010s PATRIOTS 2010s BEST GAMES 1) Seahawks Super Bowl 2) Falcons Super Bowl 3) Ravens 2015 Divisional 4) Chiefs 2019 AFCCG UNDERRATED CLASSIC Ravens 2015 Divisional BRADY/GRONK GO DOWN LIKE CHAMPS 1) 2018 Eagles Super Bowl 2) Broncos 2015 AFCCG: Brady’ offensive line was a sieve EITHER WAY Giants Super Bowl: game changed when Brady’s shoulder got fucked up by Tuck FAVORITE PLAYER TB12 MOST FUN/DOMINANT Gronk HEART OF TEAM Edelman BELOVED Wilfork ROCK SOLID 1) Hightower 2) McCourty 3) James White 1st BALLOT HALL OF FAMERS 1) Brady 2) Gronk 3) Revis LATER BALLOT 1) Edelman 2) Scarnecchia 3) Welker 4) Wilfork 5) Slater MAKING AN ARGUMENT Gilmore PATS HALL ONLY 1) McCourty 2) Hightower 3) Mankins 4) White 5) Gostkowski 6) Mayo 7) Chung UNDERRATED/GOOD VALUE 1) Amendola 2) Vollmer 3) Ninkovich 4) Chung 5) Woodhead DESERVED BETTER Welker UNSUNG Slater OVERRATED 1) Solder 2) Brandin Cooks NO-SHOWS Dolphins (Dec ’19); Jets Divisional (Jan ‘11) BEST REGULAR SEASON WINS 1) 2013 Broncos 2) 2017 Steelers 3) 2013 Saints BEST REGULAR SEASON LOSSES 1) 2012 49ers 2) 2016 Seahawks 3) 2014 Packers 4) 2015 Broncos LOL Miami Miracle: saved by winning Super Bowl LEAST TALENTED TEAM 1) 2013 by a mile 2) 2010 3) 2011 4) 2018 BEST TEAM 1) 2014 2) 2016 BEST PLAYS (NON-GRONK) 1) Butler INT Seahawks 2) Edelman TD pass vs Ravens 3) Buttfumble Jets 4) Edelman catch vs Falcons 5) Walk-off TD vs Falcons 6) Dan Connolly kick return 7) Brady TD pass to LaFell 2015 Divisional POUNDED TABLE TO DRAFT 1) Lamar Jackson 2) Kittle 3) AJ Brown 4) Honey Badger 5) Stefon Diggs WANTED BUT OUT OF REACH 1) Aaron Donald 2) Quenton Nelson 3) Derwin James 4) Hopkins 5) TJ Watt 6) Saquon 7) Keenan Allen 8) McCaffrey 9) Gurley WOULD’VE WON IT ALL IF NOT FOR INJURIES 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017. That’s football HEALTHIEST SEASON 2018 ROPE-A-DOPED/GOT BY ON VETERAN GUILE 2018: Belichick’s best coaching FAVORITE PICKS AT THE TIME OF GUYS I WANTED 1) Gronk 2) Hightower/Chandler Jones 3) Shaq Mason MOVES I HATED THAT I WAS WRONG ABOUT 1) Stephon Gilmore 2) trading Jamie Collins MOST IMPROVED Marcus Cannon BEST FIND Kyle Van Noy MOVE I LOVED getting Blount back the 2nd time IF BUTLER WASN’T BENCHED, DO THEY BEAT THE EAGLES? Yes 100%. If only because, if nothing else, he can tackle BUTLER’s INT KILLED THE ‘LEGION OF BOOM’ SEAHAWKS WOULD-BE DYNASTY Yes DRAFT REACH THAT MADE NO SENSE Jordan Richards: Tavon Wilson 2.0 BAD DRAFT MOVES 1) Dominique Easley 2) Cyrus Jones 3) Dobson 4) Mallett DIRTY SECRET Belichick sucks at drafting in 2nd round WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD IF HE STAYED HEALTHY Malcolm Mitchell HATE TO SEE WALK BUT COULDN’T AFFORD 1) Trey Flowers 2) Chandler Jones 3) Jimmy G 4) Talib 5) Akiem Hicks DEFLATEGATE fraud/power trip job by Goodell/owners BRADY OR BELICHICK MORE VALUABLE Brady 100% DISAPPOINTING/GAMBLES 1) Ochocinco 2) Michael Bennett: got him 2 years too late 3) Fanene signing 4) Haynesworth BEST SHORT-TERM 1) Martellus Bennett 2) Chris Long 3) Revis 4) Brian Waters SUSPECT CHARACTERS/EDGY PERSONALITY MACHINES Brandon Spikes; Brandon Browner…SERIAL KILLER Aaron Hernandez PERSONALITY DISORDER DISASTER Antonio Brown: bad signing/unexpected HOW THE FUCK DID WE LOSE TO THAT GUY? Eli Manning/Nick Foles LIFESAVER Scarnecchia MCDANIELS Frustrating—but continuity matters REFS FUCKED OVER Gronk MISCELANNEOUS 2010s GOOD/ENJOY Bernie Sanders/AOC: people who actually want to get good done that’s long overdue…Lebron James; Stephen Curry; Kawhi; Zion Williamson; Luka Doncic...Lamar Jackson; Pat Mahomes; JJ Watt; Marshawn Lynch…Coach Ed Orgeron...David Ortiz…2011 Bruins…memes…Don Winslow crime novels…David Roth writing on Trump…David Grann non-fiction…’Book of Mormon’ DID NOT ENJOY Kyrie Irving…Deflategate…LeBron on the Heat…Bobby Valentine DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE LIKE ‘Between the World and Me’…Elon Musk…Lin Manuel-Miranda/’Hamilton’ INDEFENSIBLY AND INFURIATINGLY BAD THE MORE YOU LOOK AT IT Facebook…Obama Presidency/Democratic Party Leadership EVERYDAY DISASTER Media: CNN; Fox; MSNBC; NY Times Op-Ed…Trump/Republicans: Trump presidency was basically 2010s 9/11 for inevitable disastrous fallout & consequences my generation will never recover from…Grifters Trojan horsing way in shamelessly (Trump administration; Ben Shapiro; Alex Jones; Milo; Jordan Peterson, Tomi Lahren, etc.) and no repercussions...Republican Party basically one goal: to troll libs even with shitty ideas that suck FAVORITES WHO DIED Bourdain; Elmore Leonard; Garry Shandling; Muhammad Ali; Robin Williams; Tom Petty BEST TALENT CUT SHORT Philip Seymour Hoffman SHITTIEST PEOPLE WHO DIED Antonin Scalia; George HW Bush; John McCain; Osama; Steve Jobs; Whitey Bulger I FORGOT THAT SHIT HAPPENED Charlie Sheen loses it JEFFREY EPSTEIN did not kill himself WHAT DEFINES 2010s Amazon/Bezos…Climate Change/Gun Violence inaction…Journalism being taken over by Bane Capital-esque vultures/local places dying...one-sided Class War by the uber-rich…#MeToo…Netflix…Opioids…Outrage/Cancel culture…Police Injustice…Silicon Valley…Social Media…Superhero shit…Your mom

13 notes · View notes

eddycurrents · 5 years

Photo

For the week of 28 October 2019

Quick Bits:

Afterlift #1 is a digital original from Chip Zdarsky, Jason Loo, Paris Alleyne, and Aditya Bidikar. Very interesting concept here playing with a character who drives for a Lyft analogue in Cabit, leading to becoming a rather unique courier.

| Published by Jams & Jellies

Batman Annual #4 actually gives us many adventures and stories as we go through almost two months’ of diary entries of Batman’s exploits from Alfred, as told by Tom King, Jorge Fornés, Mike Norton, Dave Stewart, and Clayton Cowles. It’s a nice way to pack a lot of story into this annual in a fairly unique way, while also showcasing just how busy Batman really is.

| Published by DC Comics

Black Panther #17 sets up for the next confrontation with N’Jadaka and his forces, also giving us a rather...awkward but interesting conversation between Storm and Nakia. Gorgeous art from Daniel Acuña.

| Published by Marvel

Bloodshot #2 continues the balls to the wall action as Bloodshot and the Black Bar conflict escalates, from Tim Seeley, Brett Booth, Adelso Corona, Andrew Dalhouse, and Dave Sharpe. It’s a bit of a throwback to a more action-oriented style, but it definitely works for Bloodshot. A nice change of pace to give a variety of storytelling.

| Published by Valiant

Conan the Barbarian #10 spins us the twins’ yarn as they plotted their revenge on Conan, from Jason Aaron, Mahmud Asrar, Matthew Wilson, and Travis Lanham. The art from Asrar and Wilson is gorgeous. The backstory building up to last parts of this story and the fate of Conan is gripping.

| Published by Marvel

Contagion #5 brings an end to this series from Ed Brisson, Adam Gorham, Veronica Gandini, and Cory Petit. Gorgeous and creepy art here from Gorham and Gandini.

| Published by Marvel

DCeased #6 is surprisingly hopefully, even as everything dies and everybody hurts. It appears to be setting up a sequel, though likely to be incredibly bleak. Tom Taylor, Trevor Hairsine, Neil Edwards, Stefano Gaudiano, Rain Beredo, and Saida Temofonte conclude this series in epic fashion as we say goodbye to Earth.

| Published by DC Comics

Death’s Head #4 is another ending to a series this week, from Tini Howard, Kei Zama, Felipe Sobreiro, and Travis Lanham. Some very nice character work here for Death’s Head and Vee.

| Published by Marvel

Doctor Strange Annual #1 gives us a pair of tales. The lead from Tini Howard, Andy MacDonald, Tríona Farrell, and Cory Petit is a fun Halloween story dealing with the spirits haunting the Sanctum Sanctorum. Any art from MacDonald is a treat. The back up is a bit more deadly serious with Pornsak Pichetshote, Lalit Kumar Sharma, Sean Parsons, José Villarrubia, and Petit revealing a failsafe should Strange go rogue.

| Published by Marvel

Ether: The Disappearance of Violet Bell #2 continues to be incredibly inventive as Boone tries to track down the assassin. David Rubín’s art is absolutely amazing. And Boone’s continued inability to really think about anyone other than himself is telling.

| Published by Dark Horse

Excalibur #1 is another tick in the win column for “Dawn of X”. The X-Men dabbling in magic isn’t common, but Tini Howard, Marcus To, Erick Arciniega, and Cory Petit do so with amazing flair, fittingly taking us in through Otherworld, Captain Britain, and Betsy Braddock. Apocalypse’s new incarnation as “ •|A| •” and his newfound interest in magic is fascinating.

| Published by Marvel

Five Years #5 spotlights Zoe’s rather elaborate imagination for coming up with ways to murder people. Granted, the Russian agent may well deserve it, but still... Terry Moore continues to deliver some unexpected twists as the end of the world inches closer.

| Published by Abstract Studio

Giant Days: As Time Goes By #1 is a one-shot finale special from John Allison, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell. It picks up roughly a year from the end of the series, dealing with why Esther has been missing from their reunions. It’s full of all of the humour that we’ve been used to and hammers home the power of friendship. Also, it gets very, very weird.

| Published by Boom Entertainment / BOOM! Box

Harleen #2 works hard to portray Harley’s seduction by the Joker. Stjepan Šejić and Gabriela Downie portray it as an insidious, manipulative thing. It might appear romantic on the surface, but there’s definitely a darkness there. There are ideas of bringing back a monster from the edge of insanity, but the story makes you realize that some may well be beyond hope.

| Published by DC Comics - Black Label

Hellboy and the BPRD: Long Night at Goloski Station might well be the best of these new format tales yet, and both of the previous ones were incredibly strong. Here Mike Mignola, Matt Smith, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robins deliver a single issue story building on Hellboy’s confrontation with Baba Yaga, Sir Edward Grey, and demons.

| Published by Dark Horse

Invisible Kingdom #6 begins the second arc, “Edge of Everything”, as the crew first try to find food and fuel and then run afoul of a salvage ship. G. Willow Wilson, Christian Ward, and Sal Cipriano keep things interesting as we start to see the crew’s life after Lux.

| Published by Dark Horse / Berger Books

Invisible Woman #4 is disturbing, basically everything goes to hell and everyone that Sue was trusting to see this operation through has let her down. Or worse. Mark Waid, Mattia De Iulis, and Joe Caramagna set up a rather horrifying situation in this penultimate chapter. Again, De Iulis’ artwork is stunning.

| Published by Marvel

Joker: Killer Smile #1 is essentially a psychological horror from Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, Jordie Bellaire, and Steve Wands. It comes from the point of view of a psychiatrist, Dr. Ben Arnell, who is trying to get to the heart of Joker’s mental state. It’s not going so well and it appears like the good doctor is losing time, doing strange things, and possibly worse. Very intriguing beginning to this story.

| Published by DC Comics - Black Label

Knights Temporal #4 has some stunning artwork from Fran Galán, particularly during the gangster sequences where colour comes into play as another important storytelling element. There are some very nice twists this issue, making you wonder about a lot of what we thought we knew.

| Published by AfterShock

The Last God #1 is dark fantasy done right by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Riccardo Federici, Sunny Gho, Dean White, Tom Napolitano, Steve Wands, and Jared Blando. It gives us lying kings, heroes who weren’t rightly heroes, and a Lovecraftian terror returned to show the truth. It plays deep on resentment and distrust, and of a complete failure of institutions to uphold a decent society. All with absolutely stunning artwork from Federici, Gho, and White. This is a beautiful, haunting work.

| Published by DC Comics - Black Label

Last Stop on the Red Line #4 is very, very weird. We get a peek behind the masks of the monsters and it’s even stranger. There’s a very interesting mix of symbolism and the supernatural where we’re really not sure where one begins and the other ends. This was a very unique series from Paul Maybury, Sam Lotfi, and Adam Pruett.

| Published by Dark Horse

Mall #3 goes even harder into inter-faction warfare as it seems like all of the groups are at one another’s throats. Great world-building here from Michael Moreci, Gary Dauberman, Zak Hartong, Addison Duke, and Jim Campbell, with some interesting plot developments.

| Published by Vault

Manor Black #4 concludes the series as we see what essentially amounts to order vs. chaos as the old blood takes on wild magic. This doesn’t feel so much as a conclusion as an end to a chapter of a wider arc, leaving much unresolved. Hopefully we see more. The artwork from Tyler Crook is phenomenal.

| Published by Dark Horse

Marvel Zombies: Resurrection #1 is really damn good. Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Leonard Kirk, Guru-eFX, and Travis Lanham kick off this series with a new angle on the Marvel Zombies, playing up more on the horror angle, with a truly terrifying spread of the disease through a new vector. Gorgeous artwork from Kirk and Guru-eFX.

| Published by Marvel

Monster Planet #1 is the kind of thing that you used to see regularly published by Image and Top Cow, the military action comic that throws in horror elements, from Joe Brusha, Marcelo Mueller, Maxflan Araujo, and Taylor Esposito. It’s not bad, setting up a world where humanity has been turned into dinosaur-like beasts and the remnants of society need to turn to classical monsters for help.

| Published by Zenescope

The Necromancer’s Map #3 takes a bit of a different approach, giving us a fair amount of action as Tristan’s Will catch up with Bethany and co. as well as some great character building in between the action. Great stuff from Andrea Fort, Michael Christopher Horn, Sam Beck, Ellie Wright, and AndWorld Design.

| Published by Vault

The Plot #2 is wonderful horror storytelling from Tim Daniel, Michael Moreci, Joshua Hixson, Jordan Boyd, and Jim Campbell. Very creepy build of supernatural events once Chase Blaine and his family arrive back at his ancestral home. Hixson and Boyd’s presentation of the black, gooey masses are also disturbing.

| Published by Vault

Queen of Bad Dreams #5 concludes this excellent series from Danny Lore, Jordi Pérez, Dearbhla Kelly, and AndWorld Design. Rather interesting confrontation with and revelations about Eleanor Chase here.

| Published by Vault

Red Goblin: Red Death #1 is a one-shot featuring three stories set during Norman Osborn’s tenure as the Red Goblin at the end of Dan Slott’s run on Amazing Spider-Man. It’s kind of weird that it doesn’t instead tie-in with current events in Absolute Carnage, but it’s not bad for what it is. The art of the first two stories from Pete Woods is great.

| Published by Marvel

Relics of Youth #2 is even better than the first issue, delving deeper into the mysterious tattoos that the kids have been branded with and their connection to the island that they’ve landed on within the Bermuda Triangle. Matt Nicholas, Chad Rebmann, Skylar Partridge, Vladimir Popov, and AndWorld Design are telling a very compelling adventure here.

| Published by Vault

Roku #1 begins another mini-series focusing on one of the luminary villains in the Valiant Universe, this one from Cullen Bunn, Ramón F. Bachs, Stéphane Paitreau, and Dave Sharpe. It’s full of action and intrigue as Roku is hired by an unknown client to retrieve...someone. Things get more interesting as a new face stands in her way and we find out the unusual nature of the target.

| Published by Valiant

The Sandman Universe Presents: Hellblazer #1 is a homecoming of sorts for John Constantine, back to his old haunts alongside some of the other Vertigo corner of the DC Universe. Si Spurrier, Marcio Takara, Cris Peter, and Aditya Bidikar spin a yarn that reconstitutes John after a massive magic war led by an evil Tim Hunter. How exactly the pieces fit are anyone’s guess, but it’s a brilliant darker take resetting him here.

| Published by DC Comics - Black Label / The Sandman Universe

Savage Avengers Annual #1, though largely a self-contained story, is still integral to Conan’s adventure through the Marvel universe and the overall narrative as he, Hellstorm, and Black Widow stumble across a human trafficking ring that bears the marks of Kulan Gath. Gerry Duggan, Ron Garney, Matt Milla, and Travis Lanham deliver a compelling story.

| Published by Marvel

SFSX #2 does further world and character building, showing us just how much has changed since the Party took over, and how utterly betrayed many of the people from the Dirty Mind felt of Avory abandoning them. Very interesting stuff from Tina Horn, Michael Dowling, Chris O’Halloran, and Steve Wands.

| Published by Image

Silver Surfer: Black #5 concludes what has been a very trippy series from Donny Cates, Tradd Moore, Dave Stewart, and Clayton Cowles. There are some very interesting revelations of the past here, and it really makes you wonder about the Surfer’s new incarnation.

| Published by Marvel

Star Pig #4 concludes the series, kind of, from Delilah S. Dawson, Francesco Gaston, Sebastian Cheng, and Shawn Lee. There’s some rather disturbing tentacles in this one.

| Published by IDW

Star Wars Adventures: Return to Vader’s Castle #5 brings an end to this round of the series. I think it’s a perfect approach for some all ages “ghost stories” within the Star Wars universe. Wonderful resolution for the framing story from Cavan Scott, Francesco Francavilla, and AndWorld Design.

| Published by IDW

Tales from the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman #1 is the second of these one-shots spotlighting DC events gone horribly wrong, this time giving us a much angrier Lois Lane’s grief at the loss of Superman to Doomsday. Jeff Loveness, Brad Walker, Drew Hennessy, Norm Rapmund, John Kalisz, and Clayton Cowles present her as vengeance against a world that didn’t deserve Superman’s grace, raising some of the questions that you’d often see in The Authority. Only, you know, kind of evil. It’s not bad, but definitely dark.

| Published by DC Comics

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #99 is the extra-sized penultimate chapter of “City at War” as all of the pieces begin falling into place for the grand finale. The story here from Kevin Eastman, Bobby Curnow, Tom Waltz, Dave Wachter, Ronda Pattison, and Shawn Lee feels truly epic and that something huge may just happen next issue. As it is, there’s still a ton of action here, some interesting developments with the Rat King, more disappointment when it comes to Raph, and something new with the mutagenic bomb.

| Published by IDW

Test #5 is very strange. Christopher Sebela, Jen Hickman, Harry Saxon, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou end this story as Aleph and Laurel find one another and a new way is planted, but there’s still seeds of something going awry.

| Published by Vault

Venom #19 largely plays out the end bits for the Maker and Dylan’s portions of Absolute Carnage, with some very interesting revelations. It seems like even bigger seeds are being lain for future stories here. Great art from Iban Coello and Rain Beredo.

| Published by Marvel

Witchblade #16 gives us the fight between Alex and Haley, after a few distractions and discursions. The stakes are pretty high here and there are a few rather tense moments as it plays out. Beautiful art from Roberta Ingranata and Bryan Valenza.

| Published by Image / Top Cow

Wonder Woman Annual #3 is largely a flashback tale, set five years ago as Wonder Woman and ARGUS attempt to extract an agent sent to infiltrate Gorilla City to see the legitimacy of Grodd’s rule. What Steve Orlando, V. Ken Marion, Sandu Florea, Hi-Fi, and Pat Brosseau do with is establish a new backstory and interpretation for a very old Wonder Woman foe in a fairly interesting way that even ties in to Event Leviathan. It may strain a bit of credibility for the villainous turn, but that will largely depend on the follow-up.

| Published by DC Comics

Other Highlights: Archie 1955 #2, A Basketful of Heads #1, Batman and the Outsiders Annual #1, Chrononauts: Futureshock #1-4, Dead Man Logan #12, Fantastic Four: Grand Design #1, Fight Club 3 #10, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #13, Ironheart #11, James Bond 007 #12, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance #2, Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - Alliance #4, Jughead’s Time Police #5, Kick-Ass #18, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #44, Rick & Morty #55, The Ride: Burning Desire #5, Runaways #26, Star Trek: Year Five #7, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Annual #3, Star Wars Adventures #27, Superior Spider-Man #2, Tremor Dose, Warlord of Mars Attacks #5

Recommended Collections: Amazing Spider-Man: Red Goblin, Amber Blake - Volume 1, Black Science - Volume 9: No Authority But Yourself, Deadpool - Volume 3: Weasel Goes to Hell, Dept H. Omnibus - Volume 3: Decompressed & Lifeboat, Dick Tracy Forever, Hit-Girl - Volume 5, Jimmy’s Bastards - Volume 1: Year One, Lucifer Omnibus - Volume 1, Marvel Action: Spider-Man - Book 2: Spider-Chase, Punk Mambo, Spider-Gwen: Gwen Stacy, Star Trek: The Q Conflict, Symbiote Spider-Man, Thor - Volume 3: Wars End, Tony Stark: Iron Man - Volume 3: War of the Realms, Vamps: The Complete Collection, War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men, The Wild Storm - Volume 4

d. emerson eddy feels like stale, day old pepperoni pizza.

#This Week in Comics

4 notes · View notes

simptasia · 5 years

Note

Hey! You've probably already made a post for this and if so I'm really sorry, but do you have any LOST post-finale headcannons?

Don’t be sorry! And, yes... yes I do. Including but not limited to:

kate/claire & miles/richard are Things now, my post-finale otps. like, friends to lovers. both pairings eventually married with kids

kate and sawyer stay as friends, I like ‘em better than way

okay All of these friendships and relationships are great and i love them but i have extra delight for miles being besties with kate and claire

i give kate n claire about a year of living together before they get together (time for claire’s recovery, all of kate’s pregnancy (more on that next), an for claire to realise she’s into women, specifically kate. she just had to be exposed to kate’s Bi Aura a while before she got it. and no way was kate gonna make the first move, so claire gotta get the ball rolling with an adorably nervous confession and a tippy toe kiss

ya know that bit when kate and jack bang before they got on the ajira flight? i hc that kate got pregnant from that (the time between that event and the finale is like 2 weeks) and thus kate has jack’s (rip) baby and it’s a boy named david (basically i got that theory that david shephard in limbo was david austen in living life) and kate n claire raise two boys together

claire is also gonna need a lot of therapy/recovery time, she’s not okay

desmond and penny have a daughter and name her danielle in honour of daniel

before miles got on the boat he put a buncha stuff in storage so even with his old place rented out, he’s got something to work with. richard is kinda disorientated by his new life and miles sees that and in a fit of Character Growth induced kindness, offers that he stay with him. hotel rooms at first but its a start. (ken said miles would “take care” of richard post-finale)

i give miles and richard about 3 months of living together before they Smash and also feelings. takes a while for miles to deal with that because he’s not into romantic relationships and love so This Is New For Him. and also richard has his own angst about being in a relationship again AND it’s a guy AND the age difference (150 years). miles legit doesn’t care about that (finds it kinda freaky but is meh) but richard feels weird for some time

i dunno what sawyer and frank are doing (besides being friends to everybody else) but i support them [pops the southern US lads in the corner] y’all be good now ya hear?

oh i mentioned more kids for the next gen, 10 years post finale richard and miles decide to have kids together. claire very kindly offers to be surrogate and they have twin girls, izzie (isabella) and lara alpert-straume

i like to picture kate and miles, post the birth of the twins, having a little bonding moment over how they bother never thought *they’d* become parents. like, miles found the idea of him becoming a dad to be absurd. and kate never thought she’d be a mom. but it happened. fyi all the parents that the post finale entails are great parents because Break The Cycle!!! good parents in lost? it’s more likely than you think!

claire becomes close friends with liam and his family and in turn he considers claire and aaron to be members of the pace family

oh, claire finally listens to driveshaft and she feels really guilty that she thinks their music is awful. but is still fond of it out of love, ya know

claire makes a point of never mentioning thomas. aaron is raised to believe that charlie pace is his biological fatherbecause fuck you thomas nobody likes you. it helps that aaron just looks like claire but a boy (short, blue eyes, blonde) so outsiders wouldn’t be any the wiser. (side note: charlie had asked claire to never tell anybody he’s trans and she’ll keep that promise forever, so outsiders dunno it’s not bio possible). to claire, charlie is aaron’s real dad in spirit due to Love and that’s that

aaron also has a hero worship thing going on with charlie, and david does so with jack too to a lesser degree. this is a result of kate and claire doing a Don’t Speak Ill Of The Dead thing that is common and thus the boys only hear about how great and brave their dads were and never the flaws

hurley, ben, walt and vincent live on the island together but also hurley gives richard powers to ben (by accident, he JUST got his powers) and vincent (on purpose, walt deserves time with his dog)

walt is gonna be the protector after hurley is done

hurley decides he’s done with this once all of his friends have died. he long ago created a mural for All Those We Have Lost and has been adding more and more to it over the years. hurley and ben went to all their funerals too

ji yeon is raised by her grandmother but she’s practically like a daughter to kate and claire

all the kiddos are friends and have known about the crazy magical world they live in all their lives so they’re pretty casual about it

“remember sweethearts, we don’t tell anybody at school about how papa is almost 200 and daddy can talk to ghosts” - richard (later miles and richard have to visit the principal's office because Guess Why)

claire becomes an illustrator for children’s books

penny funds the creation of a scientific education... place called The Daniel Faraday Institute. penny never met her little brother but he saved desmond’s life twice over and was part of bringing her and desmond together so she feels his life deserves honouring (that and i imagine kate and/or miles mentioned That Shit That Went Down with daniel)

eloise visits the opening of this place and needless to say, our squad really doesn’t like her being there. ranging from anger, seething and aching disappointment (last one’s from richard) and miles even tells her to drop dead in his own special way: “i hope i hear from you soon”

i imagine post-finale at lots of points but i like to default to 15 years later (2022) at a party kate n claire decided to throw for the anniversary. hurley, ben, walt and vincent visit (claire drops her plates when she sees that van out front) and it’s like :D :O ???!!!!! and also all the ghosts appear to hurley because now that he’s off island, they wanna see everybody!

fyi i imagine that ghost thing never stopped being a thing for hurley

before hurley finally does die, the last thing he sees is his death bed surrounded by *everybody who has died*. michael thanks him for taking care of walt. libby kisses him on the cheek. i imagine some other words of encouragement, like jack asking hurley to let go (heh). its all very sweet and sad and most the couples of holding hands (also i imagine this and every time i think i have everybody, i remember even more people!). and then, holding walt’s hand, with vincent beside him, hurley dies

(ending Ghost Time and kickstarting Limbo Time. maybe? i dunno)

#on a scale of sawyer to miles how much thought have i put into a character post finale #lost headcanons #not Everything duh but still a fair amount #anything else or any further elaboration - go ahead and ask #talker32332

15 notes · View notes

wazafam · 3 years

Link

The UK has tons of great crime dramas, whether it’s BBC’s Sherlock, which retells the 100-year-old tale for the modern age, or the psychological drama, Luther. British crime shows are completely unique from those in the US. However, the caliber of US crime dramas from HBO and ABC are unrivaled, thanks to the sheer amount of money that goes into them, and that’s no different when it comes to Breaking Bad.

RELATED: Breaking Bad Characters, Ranked Least To Most Likely To Win The Hunger Games

The set, costume design, storytelling, and outlandish characters in Breaking Bad are unlike anything seen in a British drama, but that doesn’t mean the island doesn’t have the talent to fill Bryan Cranston and company’s boots.

10 Mike - Tom Wilkinson

Though Mike (Jonathan Banks) has one of the biggest kill counts in Breaking Bad and is ultimately a pretty bad guy, the audience still sympathizes with him. He’s old and clearly regrets most of his actions in his later life, which makes him one of the most conflicted and complex characters in the show.

Tom Wilkinson is a similar age to Banks, and he has the same regretful, melancholy look, not to mention that he can play a bad guy extremely well, as proven in Batman Begins.

9 Marie - Rachel Weisz

There isn’t too much to Marie (Betsy Brandt) besides her equal love of purple and Hank, but she’s one of the funniest characters on the show, especially with the way she gets on Hank’s nerves by collecting minerals. The character is superbly acted by Brandt, and it’d take a lot to match what the actress brought to the table.

However, Rachel Weisz, though she doesn’t do much television work, would kill it as Marie, as her dry humor in movies like The Lobster is exactly the kind of approach that would be perfect to bring Marie to life in a British version of Breaking Bad.

8 Hank - Robert Graves

Easily most familiar for playing Inspector Greg Lestrade in BBC’s Sherlock, the role of Hank (Dean Norris) isn’t too dissimilar of a role to that of Lestrade. They’re both law enforcers, though neither of them is the smartest, but the characters’ similarities aren’t the only reasons why Robert Graves should play Hank.

RELATED: Breaking Bad Meets Mad Men: 5 Couples That Would Work (& 5 That Wouldn't)

Greg Lestrade is a great character, but he was always sidelined and didn’t get much of a story arc in any of the Sherlock seasons. However, by playing Hank, the DEA agent who is tasked with hunting down his own brother-in-law, he’d finally get exactly the story arc he deserves.

7 Kuby - Simon Pegg

There have been some shining examples of stunt casting in TV, and one of them was with Kuby (Bill Burr), one of Saul Goldman’s fixers, as Burr is one of the most world-famous comedians right now.

Keeping up the stunt casting for the same role, though Simon Pegg might not exactly be a comedian, it’d still send fans into a frenzy if the goofball-turned-spy appeared as Kuby. And it isn’t just stunt casting, as Simon Pegg is actually perfect for the role too.

6 Saul Goodman - Damien Lewis

With Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) being the slimiest character on the show, Damien Lewis doesn’t really scream the same vibe, as he was a charmer in Homeland, a billionaire playboy in Billions, and he even portrayed Steve McQueen, the coolest movie star in the world.

However, he’s one of the greatest British actors working today, so he could easily play a down-on-his-luck lawyer. And most of the characters Lewis plays, including the ones mentioned, have some seriously seedy undertones.

5 Gustavo Fring - Charles Dance

With so many credits to Charles Dance’s name over the past 35 years, most are antagonistic roles in some shape or form. And as Giancarlo Esposito has become the go-to actor to play level-headed villains ever since his role of Gustavo Fring, Dance is almost the British version of Esposito, as he starred as the evil Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, Benedict in Last Action Hero, and many others.

Considering how Dance usually plays his characters as well-mannered but totally sinister, he’s the best option to play the best villain of Breaking Bad.

4 Todd - Matt Smith

Todd (Jesse Plemons) is a tough character to play, as he’s the worst Todd in TV history, due to being completely psychotic and having absolutely no social skills whatsoever, but at the same time, he’s kind of goofy and sort of charming.

Being millions of Doctor Who fans’ favorite Doctor, Matt Smith’s bread and butter is goofy and charming. Not only that, but his career post-Doctor Who shows how easily Smith can play a psychopath, as he plays a psychotic criminal in Lost River and the T-5000 in Terminator Genisys.

3 Skyler - Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman isn’t just Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, she’s the queen of British television too. From first featuring in sitcoms such as The Office, Peep Show, and Green Wing, she clearly loves television, as even after having won an Academy Award, she still presses on and stars in several different shows concurrently.

And though Skyler doesn’t exactly have the funniest lines and is actually one of the most serious characters in Breaking Bad, nobody could make the role her own more than Colman, as she can play more serious and dark roles just as well, if not better.

2 Jesse Pinkman - Alfie Allen

Alfie Allen rose to fame from playing Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones, one of the biggest badasses in a show full of badasses. And though Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) isn’t necessarily a badass (far from it in most cases), Alfie has shown he can act a fool too, as he plays Iosef Tarasov in John Wick and spends the whole movie hiding from the Baba Yaga.

RELATED: Breaking Bad: The Main Characters, Ranked By Loyalty

Allen has developed into such an incredible actor, and as Jesse, he seems confident in the first season but slowly becomes derailed the more he gets involved with Walt, finally becoming a giant ball of emotions in the finale, and the Jojo Rabbit actor would be perfect for the role.

1 Walter White - Peter Capaldi

There are two sides to Walter White: there’s family man Walt and then there’s the evil drug-slinging meth-king, Heisenberg. Bryan Cranston perfectly played both sides and remains one of the best depictions of a man turned completely evil. Not only has Capaldi proven he has the warmer Walter side by portraying the Doctor in Doctor Who, but he would also be a killer Heisenberg too.

Peter Capaldi has perfectly shown off how great he is at being wholly evil, as his iconic role as the evil spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, in the political dramedy The Thick Of It (which was the influence for the more famous Veep) is one of the greatest performances of the 21st century. It shows how much power he can have over people, just like Heisenberg.

NEXT: 10 Questionable Parenting Choices In Breaking Bad

What If Breaking Bad Was Made In The UK? (Recasting The Characters) from https://ift.tt/3s73aE2

#Blogger

0 notes

nayladoodles · 7 years

Text

Hamilton Angst Promt #1 (from my other account)

👻= Death

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE, USE OF TERM CREOLE BASTARD also mentions of non consensual sex, SELF HARM and SELF HATRED.

IF THESE THINGS TRIGGER YOU PLEASE AVOID THIS.

Non Canon version of the Reynolds Affair where Hamilton is actually a loyal husband and refuses the affair but maria won't listen. When he runs out of money a fake pamphlet is published with a forged signature. Everyone detests Alexander and he becomes depressed.

All Characters belong to Lin Manuel Miranda except Madilton (ship name but hey), Cattivo and Simon. (who are all senators).

Alexander's POV:

My hand shook as I hastily scrawled my speech for the debate later this afternoon; I don't wish to have all of the angry eyes boring into my back again but alas I am required to attend. As the hours passed I had managed to push the negative thoughts to the back of my mind praying to god that those dark thoughts would not plague me again until after the debate. Once my speech was written I returned to my previous task of preparing the original pamphlet about the Reynolds Affair. I refused her, I did NOT consent to it yet....everyone blindly believes I willingly cheated on Eliza. A man can only take so much hatred before he cracks and I have long since buckled beneath the anger and hatred. My children yelled they'd rather be without me, my wife won't let me explain and my friends are unresponsive. I just want the truth to be told so I can finally escape this personal hell of mine. As I finished fixing the last few smeared letters my office door swung open, "Hamilton." I felt the temperature drop slightly and saw Senator Madilton and his two fellow senators blocking the doorway,"If it is not a dire issue please leave me to my work." I said carefully hiding the pamphlet beneath mt speech. "Hamilton all you do is work." Senator Simon said. "You should rest." I narrowed my eyes, "Don't act like you suddenly care." I spat angrily trying to force the burning tears to hold their position behind my eyes. "Such harsh words." Cattivo purrs. "Leave me be!" I said getting upset not in the mood to deal with their scorn.

"You think that the truth will save you Hamilton? You think you can escape what is already published?" Madilton said coming closer. "I cannot undo what YOU have done no, but I can tell America what REALLY happened... the parts of that affair that you left out." I spat back tears starting to escape down my cheeks. "Look at you crying over nothing! What did Washington see in you?"

I gripped my sleeves my own insecurities rising to the surface once again. "Your wife doesn't want you and neither does your family or your friends. face it you're alone." I trembled shutting my eyes tightly as tears dripped off of my chin. 6 months of endless emotional torture, of endless glares and angry whispers as I walk the streets. "Just leave me be please." I said brokenly. "What authority do you have to make a such a request?" Cattivo jeered. "This is my office." I replied. "You don't sound so certain of that." Simon leered. "Regardless you need to join us for the debate. Do dry your tears Hamilton, you look pitiful." Madilton and the other two left me there to scramble for my speech and follow them to the Congress floor.

"Why is Hamilton here?" "That creole bastard has no place in this room after what he has done." "No one needs his loud opinions anyhow." Washington called order, "Hamilton you first." I read my speech pausing and stuttering as the senators whispered angrily among themselves. I finished my speech and waited for a response, "Jefferson, Madison if you please." Washington said and I sat listening to them both not bothering to correct them as my own dark thought consumed me. The debate faded into the background and their words sounded far away; I truly am alone. I felt tears burn in my eyes as the horrid memories of the past 6 months came to haunt me. Eliza burning all of the love letters that took me hours to write and send, my son and daughter screaming that I'm not their father anymore, being slapped by Angelica…

"What no witty response Hamilton?" Jefferson said.I slowly came back to the present and looked away from him not saying a word.

"Y'all managed to break him?" Jefferson said. "Own up to your infidelity and stop crying about it Hamilton." Simon spat. "Yes and while you're at it leave your position!" Another senator shouted. "We don't need you or your financial systems." I curled into myself tears burning in the corners of my eyes. "That is enough!" Washington spat, "We do NOT bring personal matters onto the Congress floor." I trembled clenching the armrests of my chair tightly my knuckles going white. "Now. Does anyone have anything to say in regards to either side of the argument?" Washington asked. "Hamilton is wrong." Madilton called. "Why so?" Washington pressed. "He can never be correct." Washington sighed rubbing his temples. "If none of you have anything backed by logic about why my secretary is wrong be silent." "But sir-" Madilton said. "Silence." Washington said coldly. I tried to recompose myself but all I could hear was the jeering of the senators. "Hamilton?" Jefferson said. "Son?" Washington's voice echoed slightly. "D-don't call me son..." I replied my head throbbing as tears began to once again slide down my cheeks. "Alexander!" Burr shouted as I gripped the chair tighter. I faintly heard Washington call recess not realizing two hours had passed. I stood mumbling excuse me ignoring the concerned calls of my fellow politicians and father figure. I cannot take another day of this...

I briskly walked to my office pushing the papers off my desk grasping the pamphlet after signing it properly. I walked to the publisher and handed him the money I'd saved saying, "Run it for tomorrow please." He nods and I smile for the first time in months. I go back to the white house sitting in my office pulling out the broken quill I'd hidden earlier in the week. I unbuttoned my cuffs sliding my sleeves up staring at the scars. "What does Washington see in me..?" I whispered pressing the sharp edge of the quill shaft against my arm and slicing the skin watching blood rush to the surface of the cut. I scratched my arms more, "I am useless, loudmouth bother...not worthy of this position...I don’t deserve my wife....or family..." I stopped after five lines were cut on each arm and grabbed the black rag I had to clean myself up not bothering with lunch. Trembling I wrapped my arms and returned to the floor for the remaining hour of the meeting.

Burr caught my shoulder as I walked in, "Alexander?" His tone held barely restrained worry. "I'm fine Aaron." I lied sitting back down. The session ended earlier than usual on account of myself and Jefferson agreeing for a change. As soon as we were dismissed I excused myself wanting to prepare for tomorrow. I went to my office pulling the farewell letters to my friends and father figure. I had already mailed John's and that for my friends in France making sure it would reach them with haste and Burr's awaits him at the front desk of the hotel he was staying in during the summit. I left the letters for Jefferson, Madison and Washington on the desks in their offices. I walked back to my own office going to my bookshelf and pulling a hollowed encyclopedia from 1700. I pulled out the money I'd stashed away from Madeline and Michael to help them return home to their mother and father on Nevis. The money was tied away with a knot only the native island people could untie and the rope is much too thick to cut. I smiled satisfied with my farewell and flagged down a carriage to take me home as I refuse to give the scathing senators the satisfaction.

I arrive home long after my family has gone to bed and quietly slip upstairs to Philip's room. I smile at my son whispering that he'll blow everyone away someday before kissing his forehead watching him smile. I visited Angie next brushing her shirt from her face and kissing her forehead whispering that she will always be my precious flower princess. I tiptoe to Angelica's room and sit beside her, "I know you won't forgive me but know that I respect you so much for sacrificing your happiness for Eliza." I smiled and kissed her cheek gently slipping to my bedroom last. I saw Eliza asleep her eyes red telling me she's been crying. I gently stroke her cheek careful not to wake her up and whisper, "I don't deserve you Eliza...I..I never felt that I earned your heart. Please take good care of yourself and the children. I wish I would have listened to your pleas Betsy. I love you." I pressed a chaste kiss to her lips before slipping back to my study. I pulled the rope necklace from the closet standing on my chair to string it over the exposed eve and trying it off. I climbed down carefully picking up the farewell letters for my wife, sister-in-law and children before climbing back onto my chair pulling to rope around my neck. High ceilings...I never thought I'd be so grateful for them. I paused my feet at the edge of the chair. I laughed softly, "Why am I hesitating..?"

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply feeling tears spring to my eyes as memories came flooding back: The bar where I met my friends on my first night in New York, humiliating Seabury and making the Brit cry while my friends cheered, pulling a prank on Burr while drunk and regretting it later, the accidental kiss that Laurens and I shared during the winter in Valley Forge due to me slipping on ice, becoming Washington's right hand man, meeting Eliza at the ball in 1780...god we were both helpless, writing her letters and asking Peggy for advice also Laf and Hercules laughing at my flustered nature, marrying Eliza and then discovering she is pregnant, winning the war and meeting Philip, becoming Secretary of Treasury, Angie being born, Madison, Jefferson, Burr and I becoming a political quartet that shares lunch at a tiny diner...finding out what Jefferson does in Monticello...that was a fun trip...the engagement of my two best friends... their wedding will be grand I'm sure.

I open my eyes tears running down my cheeks and see that it is getting light out wondering how long I was reminiscing. As the sun peeks over the horizon I smile the good memories warming my broken heart. I think of the good times for a short while longer my smile widening. I take a deep breath and quiet fills my mind for the first time in years. I hear the birds singing and whisper of the breeze outside. I take one last breath reveling in the serenity and then I let myself fall watching the world slowly fade away the letters still clenched in my fist.

Third Person:

Philip woke up when the sun filtered into his bedroom through the gap in the curtains; he swore he heard his father last night but his daddy is in DC for the summit why would he come home? The 10 year old slipped out of bed walking to check on his sister who was also awake. "I had a dream about daddy..." Angie yawned. "me too" Pip said. "Maybe daddy came home?" Angie said hopefully. "I miss him" Pip hugs his sister because he misses their daddy too. "Let's check his study you know how mama feels about them sharing a bed." Angie nods and they run to the study pushing the door open.

Angelica is woken with a start when a loud scream echoes from the study where her brother in law usually hides refusing to come out unless the house is asleep. She jumps out of bed hurrying down the hall tying her robe. She walks in looking at her niece and nephew, "What is all the fuss-" The words die when she looks up following the children's horrified gazes. her brother in law hangs from the ceiling his neck broken at an odd angle a serene smile on his face and tears drying on his cheeks. "Oh dear God..." She pulls the children to her feeling them shaking and crying into her robe. She then notices the letters poking from his fist carefully pulling them out. She tears open the one addressed to her feeling tears sliding down her cheeks as she reads it

My dearest Angelica,

I cannot apologize enough not that it will repair the damage done but I want you to know this: I respect you so much for being a strong woman willing to sacrifice her happiness for her sister's. Thank you for introducing me to Eliza all those years ago. Thank you for trying to reason with this stubborn fool and I deeply regret that our last months together were spent in pain. I hope that someday you will forgive me for being a fool and putting my work first. I always hated living off of others even though one summer would have done me no damage. I will always admire you Angelica, never forget your promise to make Jefferson include women in American rights. Stay strong and keep fighting. take care of Betsy and the kids for me.

with love and regret

A.Hamilton

She wept bitterly for never seeing how much pain he was in. She handed the letters addressed to Pip and Angie to them before shooing them back to their rooms. Using the chair she pulled him down from the noose and threw the wretched rope necklace across the room; she sat beside him her tears falling onto his cooling flesh. "Y-You are forgiven." She walked out and sank against the wall her body shaking with sobs. Eliza finds her this way when she wakes up. "Angelica what ails you so early in the morning?" Eliza looks at her trembling sister concerned. "Oh B-Betsy...." Angelica sobs. "What is it?" Eliza asks so Angelica leads her inside the study watching her eyes go wide. "N-No he can’t b-be..." Angelica nods another sob escaping her as she shakily points to the knotted rope. "Alexander...my poor Alexander..." Eliza sinks to her knees beside her dead husband tears falling onto his face. "He left this for you..." Angelica hands her the golden sealed envelope from the desk. They open it and what they find causes fresh tears to rush down their cheeks. Alexander left a copy of the original pamphlet, money for Pip to further his education and the sweetest letter of apology and farewell Eliza ever read. She grasped his cold hands, " Y-you are always forgiven d-darling..." She wept resting her head on his chest realizing he had come to say goodbye last night, the kiss was not a dream.

In France Hercules was in tears when Lafayette and his grandmother returned from the bakery. "Hercules what ails you mon chou?" he handed the letter to his fiance words escaping his grasp. Laf's eyes widened, "N-non?" Hercules nods showing him the money that had been enclosed for their wedding. "God why!? He h-had so much to live f-for..." Laf sank to his knees sobbing Hercules joining him on the floor holding him as they wept.

In South Carolina John had just returned for the evening when a letter was pressed into his palm by his sister who was crying. he saw the seal wondering why she was so upset. "J-John that's a death s-seal... it means the sender is going to commit suicide. M-my friend sent me a similar letter last year." "Death seal?!" John tore open the letter a small sum of money falling onto his lap along with a locket. he stared at the items for a moment before unfolding the letter with shaking hands.

My dearest Laurens,

I wish the best in your adventure to recruit your regiment. I know you will do well and prove the worth of we people of color. I wish I could have kissed you farewell one last time like that once in Valley Forge. I enjoyed it too much and that feeling still lingers as I write this. I wish you a happy wedding with Martha Manning. She truly is perfect for you. I wish you good life and prosperity. I wish i had the courage to give you this locket sooner...and the money is for your men. The bells and whistles we jokingly discussed months ago. I bid thee adieu dearest.

With love and flourish

A. Hamilton

Laurens wept as he opened the heart shaped locket finding a small music box inside that played his favorite tune. It was engraved ' To my dearest John'

"He'll be here he's j-just..." Jefferson's voice cracked. "He's gone Thomas. I know Alexander would not do this if he were not serious." Burr said tears sliding down his cheeks. "J-Jesus Christ..." Madison sunk onto the couch trembling Thomas sinking down beside him as the trio wept.

Washington re-read the letter from Alexander several times until tears blocked his vision, "Why...son…? There was so m-much more you could have done for this country…"

The next day the original pamphlet appeared on every doorstep across America along with the news that the Secretary of Treasury had committed suicide early the previous morning. The nation was silent as the people realized that the poor man never deserved the harsh treatment. The Reynolds were arrested and jailed for life and the senators had oddly vanished. Madeline and Michael wept the hardest realizing they could finally go home but it felt hollow because the man who gave them the chance was not here to be thanked. The nation mourned the loss of Alexander Hamilton. The one man that proved beyond the shadow of doubt that even orphan immigrants can make a difference.

7 notes · View notes

itmighthavebeenintentional · 4 years

Text

Shackled - Ch 7

Summary: After nearly ten years, Sam Winchester calls Miriam Bard to collect on a life debt. Unfortunately for Miriam, Sam leaves out a few important details.

WARNINGS CHANGE EACH CHAPTER, PLEASE CHECK EACH TIME.

Warning: Show level violence, death of family, blood, grieving, depression, cursing, Demon!Dean, emotional manipulation, mind fuckery, psychological manipulation, questioning one’s sanity, emotional exhaustion, depression,

Word count: 1351

Author’s Note: Short chapter this time, promise I will make up for it next time. Big thanks to @cracksinthewalls , who keeps me sharp, and @thoughtslikeaminefield , who keeps me going. Please read/heed the warnings. 18+ ONLY.